I guess the throng over at Riverbed has that thought more often than the rest of us, as even the drizzly rain didnt stop a police escorted gang of orange t-shirt clad, arm-pumping revellers trekking from their outgrown old digs to their new space in the Rincon neighborhood of SoMa.

The cause for celebration? Being announced the Best-Performing IPO of 2006, for starters, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Mayor Newsom.

Well, it’s nice to see a SF technology company taking the lead and forging their own path, although I find it ironic that a company touted as ‘smoothing the flow of data traffic’ should choose to disrupt SF traffic by their against-the-flow shuffle east-bound on Howard Street.

And I don’t even own a car in this city anymore – but I remember, ohhhh, I remember….

We arrive at Vima in time for the Intermediate/Advanced Tango class, and I immediately park myself solidly on a side bench in the tidy, well-lit dance studio. Apparently the beginning classes get a fair sampling of students, but by the time the Intermediate class has convened, the beginners have taken off, and the 12-15 remaining students are NOT beginners, clearly, and they each have the aplomb and acumen of seasoned performers. I sit meekly to the side.

I can’t help but mentally run a 4-8 count in my head, as the paired-off couples glide past me. But Tango is not necessarily that way. As opposed to a rigidly defined beat-count, Tango is a very fluid dance. The music sets the pace, clearly, but the man sets the course. Er, or not.

I watch the skilled instructor, Marcelo, demonstrate segments and expertly perform the segeway between what the class had been repeatedly engraving, and a new twist, complete with cross-steps and weight-shifts. Again, I am happy to be ensconced on the side. But this is not meant to be.

After the 45 minute class has wrapped up, the music continues for the students to linger on, practicing their basic steps with the lesson’s more advanced combos. And I am pulled up by one of the intermediate students. You ought to try, he says.

My basic salsa background kicks in, thankfully, and I am not uncomfortable with the partnered-stance. I don’t get the least bit of actual lesson before the tango strains propel us across the floor. I keep the beat – thank goodness! – but find my Franco Sartos dragin’ and my fluidity, well, not fluid. A pause in the music brings a welcome reprieve and a quick 1-8 count lesson on how NOT to trip your partner and send them reeling, head-first, towards the full-wall-mirror. And I succeed in that department. But just barely.

Another brave intermediate student requests my hand, and the whirl around the floor continues. These guys are good, there is no doubt, and a few turns along the floor later, I learn why.

Marcelo, their instructor, is VERY GOOD. In his firm clasp the gliding step comes to me almost naturally (almost!). He talked me through the steps, clearly and succinctly, and his smooth, suave (in a good way) accent relaxes me. By evening’s end, I’d joined the ranks, and we’d slid, cross-stepped, and (in my case) death-gripped* our way in slow, sensuous circles around the ballroom.

::

* my apologies to the gentleman who’s hand I crushed while getting used to the cross-ankle, weight-shift move. Your personal sacrifice of future manual dexterity to keep me upright was greatly appreciated!

btw, Vima holds a wide range of dance classes, including Ballroom, Tango, Rumba, Salsa and Rueda.

My favorite aspect, though, is that she peeks out towards a swankish ‘private club’-type venue across the street, where livery cabs – the all-black elongated kind – are often dropping off the polished elite of the city for fundraisers and secret-handshake events.

Care to guess where she is?

A few weeks ago I snapped a photo of a stunning wall mural along the Market Street corridor. The image of a man dressed in flannel and jeans walking a menacing, snarling pit bull. The artwork was well crafted – rich in color and dimension – and viewed through the chainlink fence of the open parking lot that the graffiti mural faced, was appropos commentary on the artworks immediate setting.

I passed that same lot this morning, and looked up to find that the graffiti MURAL had been painted over – erased via housepaint, and the newly ‘blanked’ surface had already been tagged.

It stopped me in my tracks. As an advocate for public art, I rejoice at seeing artistic works across the otherwise blank canvases of our city. As an advocate for public ART, I am disheartened by the prolification of graffiti tags – the repeatative signature scrawl that serves the purpose of dog ‘marking’ urination – simply to mark a spot, to document one’s passing through.

Graffiti IS a problem – a $22 million problem, according to a Civil Grand Jury’s findings. Combined with litter and vandelism, graffiti is a contributor to the danger and degradation of many neighborhoods.

But some graffiti IS art. Undeniably. Who defines it as such, and what can be done to identify graffiti MURAL sites that add aesthetic VALUE to a streetscape are all political issues that have yet to be determined, but as a public citizen whose tax dollars go in part to the city’s mitigation measures to eradicate ALL graffiti, I see value in setting those parameters. The graffiti mural of the man and his pit bull had a positive impact on that stretch of Market Street it once graced – whereas the “clean” wall that it purportedly is now is MORE of a magnet to the type of graffiti that does NOT address it’s setting, does NOT provide a visual focal point, does NOT prompt a dialogue of what it depicts.

I stopped to ask two men who were sitting at the edge of the chainlink fence if they remembered the graffiti mural, and what they thought of the change. They told me that the SF police had given the property owner a notice and that the owner would be fined (the rumor was $50 per day) for the lenght of time that the graffiti mural remained. The owner had no choice but to paint over it.

The irony to ME is: Mayor Newsom is pushing hard to curb graffiti in the city. At the same time, he is also promoting “temporary public art” throughout the city.

My question is, what can be done to “officially” classify certain works of graffiti artwork as “art” and allow them to remain in situ for designated periods of time – 3 months? 6 months? – and to be documented for posterity as contributors to the rich artistic fabric of our city? Wouldn’t this possibly be an enticing incentive for street vandals artists to produce works that ARE art, and evolve into pseudo-sanctioned zones of the city where blank walls are transformed (at very little relative cost to the city, I’d like to point out) into PROPONENTS of the Mayor’s Temporary Public Art program, and become a ‘middle-ground’ between the low- and high-arts?

This is what I want to see. Less of the “clean” blank walls filled with tagger’s scrawl, and more celebrated, ‘organically grown’ graffiti mural art.

If this is something YOU want to see too, the Graffiti Advisory Board meets the second thursday of each month – tonight! – and is open for public commentary. I feel strongly enough about this issue to want to garner some support for this concept – granting temporary permits for graffiti determined to be of artistic value to the communities they reside in – so I want to prepare a developed point of discussion before I attend one of these meetings. If anyone else is interested in joining me and working to outline a proposal for such a plan, please contact me directly: nmcclure[at]gmail.com

I was pleased to see the Chron’s overview article citing the growing acceptance of car-sharing programs in SF – I’ve been a member of City CarShare for going on two years, more than one year of which I still owned my trusty Mazda sedan, which I just sold last May.

During the year that I owned AND shared, people often asked me why I did both.

I’m an admittedly over-analytical person, and I wanted to test the system against my private vehicle use to really see if it would work with my lifestyle. For several months, I randomly reserved and utilized the CCS vehicles, testing to see whether they were readily available, convienent to use at various locations, and the “true” cost – after all, the hourly fee + miles breakdown doesn’t become “real” until you start applying it. For several MORE months, I utilized the CCS vehicles exclusively – while still doing the street-cleaning shuffle of my own vehicle – to finally be assured that I *could* make car sharing a viable system for me. And then, I sold my car without hesitation, and haven’t looked back.

Now, I’m not saying that car sharing is a perfect system – it requires more diligent planning and implementation of time-limits to some activities that I’d rather leave open-ended – but as a whole, it has definately improved my city-dwelling quality of life. I no longer have heart-failure when I wake up mornings, wondering where I’d left my car parked last, and was it a Monday or Tuesday cleaning street? I’d had my car broken into twice in the 5 years I’ve lived in the city proper, and both times it had cost me plenty, both monetarily and in the raging emotional tirade that followed. Giving up the car gave me back a lot of peace of mind.

Granted, my current lifestyle affords me to make such a decision. My daily commute is from Lower Pac Hts to SoMa, which is ambitiously walkable, and serviced by several forms of public transit. There are several car-sharing lots available within blocks of my office, for the times I need to visit clients or travel to job sites. My boyfriend lives along a BART route, and my land-locked neighborhood fringes on several adjacent ‘hoods that quench my thirst for a full range of city scenes. For weekend camping trips, we take his car, which has all-wheel-drive.

And I DO use my membership regularly. On average 2-3 times each week. And to date, my monthly bill has yet to top what my monthly insurance rate was on my privately owned car, whether I used it or not. I use the Toyota Prius’ as often as I can, for obvious reasons. I’ve utilized CCS’s truck to help a friend transport a large potted palm. I fit 4 dining chairs into the ScionXB to supplement my boyfriend’s dining set for Thanksgiving. I take out the ScionXA when I know I’m heading to areas where parking between garage doors is all there is to be had. I whizzed visitors around town in the CooperMini (convertable!) and had a blast. NOT owning a vehicle has afforded me the ability to access the kinds of vehicles I need for the various kinds of activites that I do – and that beats the heck out of dealing with an SUV year-round for it’s “perfect” application just twice a year.

I’m a CCS member, but am seriously considering joining FlexCar as well – they have cars in Portland, where I visit often enough that having access to vehicles there makes a lot of sense. I’d be happy to sign up for ZipCar’s ‘occasional use only’ plan, which doesn’t charge a monthly rate, but offers a better rate when logging many miles than CCS’s plan. I can see myself being a supporter (financially as well as philosophically) of all three outfits.

Because it makes sense. Financially and philosophically.

This morning, rising out of the Oakland 12th Street station onto Broadway, I glanced into the storefront of an adjacent Burger King and saw 5-6 uniformed officers standing just inside the glass – all intently focused on the escalator I had just riden up on.

Kind of an odd feeling – being glad that there’s some active patroling going on, and being accutely aware that someone warranting THAT much focused attention might have been riding up just behind me.

Whew.

The layout was of an actual blue whale skeleton, from the whale the washed up at Fort Funston back in 1988. The decaying carcass was buried at the beach by scientists, 10 feet under the ground for 10 years, and in 1999 the insect-cleaned bones were brought to Marin and reassembled into this exhibit. The bones resembled bleached coral reef – chalky white and somewhat porously textured. A dried bundle of bleen – the fiberous ‘screen’ through which the whales filter out their krill lunch – was bundled beside the skull, like coconut husk fibers.

An amazing thing to see. And you can see it from Google Earth, too! look up 37°49’58.57″N, 122°31’57.68″W. After reading Liz’s post, I added a comment to wikimapia, too!

(upper left image from Headlands Institute display)