[Photo by Ron English himself, presumably.]
This just went up the other day on the outer wall of the Shooting Gallery, on Larkin facing Myrtle Street. (It’s half a block south of Geary.) Mr. English is a Popagandist, as it were.
Related: the Shooting Gallery has a Shepard Fairey show coming up soon. I’ll keep you posted as I find out more.
[Via Juxtapoz, as usual.]
For over 25 years, dedicated family farmers and independent food purveyors from all over California have arrived at SF’s UN Plaza at dawn on Wednesdays & Sundays, setting up their temporary tents & tables to sell their produce and sundry products til about 5pm. Whether you like the wide array of greens or roasted nuts, dried fruits, dates, baked goods, cheeses, olive oils or even fresh fish & fowl, there’s something for everyone. Unlike the more pretentious and prosperous scene at the fashionable Ferry Building, this inauspicious & authentic farmer’s market is frequented by the denizens of the neighborhood, office workers on lunch break, old Chinese folks and some occasional tourists that find it upon emerging from BART. The prices are often half of what the other fancy farmer’s market might charge, and the scene about as bucolic and community orientated as one can get in “The Heart Of The City”.
If it wasn’t for the farmers & vendors who twice a week make the United Nations Plaza a lively civic gathering spot, the place is generally a desolate, if not dangerous empty expanse populated by sleepy doped up miscreants, drug dealers, ne’er do ‘ells, tweakers, stolen property salesmen and a spectacular variety of shady criminal thugs. The same city and it’s bloated bureaucracy, which had a big hand in letting the UN plaza slip into a symbolic cesspool of urban decay in the first place, now wants to manage the sole successful independently operated revitalizing factor in the area ? How uh, original…
The “Heart Of The City Farmer’s Market” at UN Plaza has long been organized and managed by an independent non-profit that was formed in 1981 starting with just 12 farmers, and some of the same vendors have been there since the inception. John Fernandez and his mother Christine Adams help manage the market that the city now has plans to “take over” after two+ decades, and they are not amused. Neither were at least a half dozen stall operators that I spoke to in an informal survey today, some who’ve been at UN Plaza since the very early days. They already dealt with this threat back in 1995, and here we go again, with a basically bankrupt bureaucracy that’s trying to dip it’s incompetent tentacles into something that isn’t broke, so why bother to fix it?
We have a follow-up to the news about Bourbon and Branch’s Todd Smith stepping down from his management position…
Smith’s successors are Joel Baker and Yanni Kehagiaras (pictured above), a couple of local comptetion-winning bartenders (or as B&B calls them, “Bar Chefs”), both who have been working at B&B for a while now.
As mentioned previously, Smith remains connected with Bourbon and Branch’s Beverage Academy, participating in upcoming classes Cocktails 101 and A Taste of Absinthe.
Rumor has it that Bourbon and Branch is polishing up a new “secret” room dubbed “Russell’s Room”, occupying a space that was formerly J.J. Russell’s cigar shop during prohibition in the 1920’s. Hm, how many secret rooms can a speakeasy have?
Photo courtesy of Bourbon and Branch
Taking place this Saturday night (3/8) at the Ha Ra Club on Geary, the Naughty Librarians Convention!
Librarians are the new nurses and it’s time to break out your bookish booties for the sake of something hot: reading!
Dress as a sexy schoolmarm, a libidinous librarian or prurient professor and meet up at 2 p.m. Saturday for prim and proper cocktails at the Ha Ra club in the Tenderloin.
From there we’ll head to the San Francisco Main Public Library to put our hot nerdy mojo to work.
Hosted by Princess Honeybee. Sponsored by the Hoover Institution, the Mitchell Brothers, Focus on the Family and Good Vibrations.
Let them know your coming on Upcoming, http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/449103/?ps=6
By way of Laughing Squid >>> Cheesebikini.
Planning Issues, A Scarf Drive, Parties, Eats, Openings, Closings, Sales, etc
For an update of local small biz happenings around the bay read on…
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I left the “Town Hall” meeting on the city’s plans for a “Community Justice Center” last night at the library with far more questions and frustrations than when I entered it.
Pitched to the public as a possible solution to solving the spiraling street crimes & homeless situation downtown, I get the feeling no one left anymore reassured that it will actually work, including the organizers sitting on the dais.
For more on the public reaction to the Mayor’s not so “original”, or well thought out concept for community justice, read on…
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Just 24 hours after a troubled 3rd year law student at UC Hastings threatened a suicide leap off the school’s landmark tower, a high ranking diplomat from a “Rogue State”, made a brave appearance in the same potentially contentious academic environment. While not as visually dramatic as the hysterical student with her cellphone in hand being talked down by police negotiators from her 21st floor perch, the ground floor speech by the Syrian Ambassador (and fellow blogger) Imad Moustapha dealt with matters of a far more grave consequence than a student’s bizarrely botched love life.
Mustapha, made an eloquent spokesman for a nation that most Americans can’t fathom, find on a map, and perhaps hear only about when a Fox News correspondent mentions it’s candidacy for the Bush administration’s “Axis of Evil”. Just steps from the plaza named after the United Nations he spoke of some of the inner machinations of that body that left his countrymen a bit more than puzzled.
He spoke of a need for better relations between our two countries, and that the smaller Syria would prefer less bullying & bluster from the current administration. Unlike the reception that awaited Iran’s President Ahmadinejad at Columbia in New York, Imad Moustapaha found a far more colloquial reception at the state’s oldest law school. 
He claimed he turned down speaking at the local Commonwealth Club in favor of appearing before law students, as a deference to his life before international diplomacy took him away from his job teaching computer science in Damascus.
Fluent in four languages, co-author of the UN-sponsored “Human Development Report in the Arab World”, Moustapha holds a Phd he earned in the UK, and was Dean of IT at the University of Damascus before accepting his Ambassadorship in 2004. Equally parts charming, witty and defensive of Syria’s political positions, the Ambassador relayed tales of his transistion from simple academic life driven by science to life on the diplomatic frontlines, and his small country’s larger perspective on world events and relationships. He brought to San Francisco his perspectives from 4000 year old Damascus, the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city, and he referred to Cairo and Baghdad as baby cities , since they are only some 1000 years old.
Moustapha, standing under a rotating slide show of his country’s treasures and sites, gave brief introductory statements, but spent most of his hour with the students engaged in Q&A. Unfortunately, not that many questions came down the pipe because some of these were “big” questions, not easily answered in short soundbites when involving complex and sometimes confrontational geo-political issues.
More after the jump…
Months after I reported here that local blogger Jeff Webb was documenting the dangerous conditions and inept management policies at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, Matt Smith of the SF Weekly has now jumped on the story with a long sordid accusation filled article on the THC’s “Vice Hotel”racket this week.
I first told of the existence of the scary videos I saw in early August being posted on YouTubefrom the life of a tenant under veritable siege at The 204-room Seneca on 6th Street, one of the marquee properties in the THC’s growing chain of SROs, that provide so-called “Supportive Housing”. The poster complained of loud & dangerous dealers roaming the halls, overstuffed needle exchange cans, and thuggish , incompetent and suspiciously in-cahoots behavior from some of the so-called “staff”. The blogger, Jeff Webb was then told he was in violation of the imaginary “privacy policy” of the publicly funded joint, and was advised to take down his tiny door mounted safety camera, or face retaliation.
Paid scribe Matt Smith delves into far greater detail than I had time here to do on the THC’s Mission Hotel, and apparently may have withheld some of the more juicy stuff & accusations that are flying around. Smith follows up on the long and winding saga of “activist” Randy Shaw’s many minions that are supposedly providing “supportive housing” to hundreds of tenants with millions in “Care Not Cash” funds. Some say it gets more “supportive” if you bribe a desk clerk, and are running an all night crack dealership…
As documented here previously in August, the situation had declined to the point where the THC, a politically motivated non profit that runs numerous SRO hotels, filed a restraining order against one of it’s own managers whom they accused of “extortion” and called a Norteno “gang member”. Interestingly, in typical half ass fashion, no one from the agency showed up to testify, endorse or follow through on the restraining order after it’s existence became public via Webb’s ever vigilant blogging. When the matter went to court, and no one appeared to either defend or challenge it, it was thusly thrown out by the judge.
More on the “Vice Hotel” industry, “Handshake Drugs” , Why “Matt Smith is like the President” etc after the jump:
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These reports from last week’s blotter were are noteworthy to me in their total lack of identification. The suspects in the cases are just so run of the mill SF, like how do you ever really find a suspect if the description is: dark clothes, bike messenger bag? Asian girl with short haircut, black shirt and creme pants? Or a tall guy wearing a grey shirt and tan pants. And yet in the last report, the cop was tipped off by earrings made of gun shells. What attention to detail, and what stupidity, yet again, on the part of the criminal element.
Police summary after the jump.
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Today I went to Chinatown in search of Szechuan pepper. My search was successful, and I also got a mortar and pestle with which to grind it. Even better, I got some pictures! More after the jump.
(Also, even though it has nothing to do with what I saw today, a few days ago I heard somebody yell “HEY, PAUL! I’LL TRADE YOU THREE PLAYBOYS FOR A LIGHTER!” over on Hyde, near the library. Gotta love the Tenderloin.)
