On A Mission (part one)

Long couple of days here in the Bay. Lots to cram in. Lots crammed.
Saturday morning, and it was impossible to find a place for breakfast that didn’t have a queue out the door. The queue for Sear’s and their tiny pancakes nearly stretched back to the corner of Powell and Sutter. What is it with America and breakfast? I know it’s supposed to be the most important meal of the day, but this is bordering on the obsessive. We make do with a coffee and pastry in the coffee shop at Borders, and head south of Market to find the Cartoon Art Museum. After a false start thanks to my godawful sense of direction, (but which led to Clare getting a photo-op outside the San Francisco Chronicle) we find the place just as it opens. Just as well we weren’t too efficient then.
The place is a little gem celebrating the great ignored art form. The five galleries that make up the exhibition space give a decent chronology of the American development of comics, from the Yellow Kid up to the small press boom. This modern offshoot is especially well represented, with cartoonists in residence and works in progress from some of the best that the Bay Area has to offer. There’s an great retrospective of the cute, sharp and often moving work of Lark Pien currently, and a good overview of US foreign and domestic policy through the eyes of political cartoonists. But it’s the archival work that really does it for me.  Seeing original Tom Palmer pages for The Avengers or even *swoon* a Will Eisner Spirit page from 1963 really brings the grit and the craft that goes into a single page of funnybook is quite something. I won’t say I had to be dragged away. Clare knew full well I was at church, and not to be disturbed. 
Back up to Market, and the F trolley to the Castro. These are great fun, although not in the same wind-in-your-hair, life-in-your-hands way that the cable cars can be. They’re rattly and drafty, but a good way to see the city for a buck fifty. Plus, design classics, or what? Buck Rogers, anyone?
The F terminates at the top of Castro St, and in case you weren’t aware you’re hitting a free-expression zone, there’s a honking great rainbow flag at the entrance. As clear a statement of intent as that evinced from the high concentration of gentlemen in leather shorts and extravagant moustaches.
 
I sneer without reason. Castro Street is chilled, happy and friendly. Loads of good bars and cool shops, and a rock-ass comic store called Whatever that nearly tempts me with the Green Lantern beltbuckle in the window. Yeah, geek pride, baby. Geek pride. 
From Castro St we hook south, and down to the Mission. Valencia St is the place for lunch, with crepes at Ti Cuz, a recommendation from Dr. Jones. Big buckwheat pancakes with intensely savoury stuffings. The couple next to us have a crepe suzette so loaded with alcohol that it nearly takes the waiter’s eyebrows off when he sets light to it. The joint is funky, charming, and the perfect place to let the ache in our feet mellow down to a twang. 
Post lunch is a slow amble round the Mission, the Spanish/Latino quarter of the city. Valencia St is the posh bit, boho and designer, and any tattiness is decidedly on the surface and elaborately hand-crafted. Mission St, one block north, is the real deal. It’s littered with the dead husks of old cinemas, proud but useless, ignored by all but the geeks with cameras who see a photo op and think they can make a point. Mission St is what it is, poor, but vibrant. Real, and therefore a little scary. We move through it quickly, pausing only to snap photos, ignored as we slip on through, taking a taste and moving on. 

Up On The Streets

We caught our second wind today, and perversely got loads done by taking things a little easier. We breakfasted heartily (at the Persimmon Cafe, two doors up from the hotel. Proper sausages and hash browns, finally, none of this patty nonsense), before taking a stroll through Chinatown. This was nice in a Chinatowny kind of way. Sorry to sound blase, but I’ve worked in Soho for nearly fifteen years. Funny pointy hats on phone booths are not a big deal to me. 

That slow stroll up Grant Avenue brought us out into North Beach, the area of the city best known for nurturing the Beat Poets. It’s as shabbily boho as you’d expect. Strip clubs face off against coffee shops, with the odd chichi addition and blow me if we’re not back in Soho again. The Beat Museum on Columbus sports a sign outside which states “the wearing of berets and over-use of the word ‘daddi-o’ is discouraged”, which made me smile. And someone had attempted cutout poetry outside the City Lights bookstore, using masking tape and permanent marker. The end result wasn’t worth the five minutes of work that must have gone into it. 
We stopped for coffee at Cafe Triesste, the oldest coffee shop in SF. They still do a good cup of joe, and there’s a nice line in opera standards on the Wurlitzer in the corner.  The opera’s live there on a Saturday, apparently. Bet they don’t do anything by Philip Glass.
Onwards. We head west, and grab a bus to Union Street. Lots of fun little girly shops and restaurants full of ladies wot lunch, so we’re in Kensington now. But now the sun’s out (spits of rain while we strolled Chinatown) so it’s fine, and we promenade. Clare frowns at the lingerie shops, and decides she needs more Victoria’s Secret stuff. So, back on the bus, then a bare-knuckle straphang hanging out of a cable car back to Union Square. This is the way to commute. The wind in your hair, the smell of hot metal as the gripman hauls on the brakes, the whoosh of traffic inches from your kneecaps. Knocks the tube into a cocked hat, that’s for damn sure.
We split to do more shopping, which is a foolish error on Clare’s part, as she leaves me in the Graphic Novel department of Borders. I’ll draw a discreet curtain over the feeding frenzy that followed. I leave an hour later, heavy of bag, light of wallet with a wild glint in my eye and a slightly sickly grin on my face. Folks, lemme tell ya. When things are half price, don’t necessarily follow that you have license to spend twice as much. 
Got back to the hotel in time for a quick S3, before we trundled out to meet up with Madame X and some more of Clare’s buddies for a night at the movies. The film of choice was Rendition, which has some guy called Jake Gooberballs in it. I can’t think of any other reason why Clare would want to see a film on covert torture.
There is a good film to be made about the dreadful practice of extraordinary rendition, but this isn’t it. On the plus side, it looks suitably gritty in that Syriana/Traffik grainy, heavily coloured mood. There’s a clever time-pull towards the end that reconfigures the plot in quite a neat way. But apart from that, it’s standard Hollywood issue-by-numbers, without ciphers in place of characters, (Meryl Streep as Cruella de Ville again, Reese Witherspoon as the most annoyingly vunerable soccer mom on the planet (tiny, blonde, wide-eyed and fifteen months pregnant furfuxache), and the aforementioned Goofsitall as the CIA analyst who gets a backbone in act 3 for no discernable reason whatsoever) and a dumb revenge motive instead of a credible plotline. We had much more fun bitching about the film afterwards than while we were in the cinema. 
Ooh, and I got a handy tip that will inform tomorrow’s activities. There’s a Cartoon Art Museum in SF. 

Over The Hill

A glorious clear day here on the Bay, not a cloud in the sky. A perfect time for a cable car ride up to Fisherman’s Wharf, to book up for Alcatraz. Cable cars are so very cool. The world’s only mobile National Monument, they are both efficient and beautiful objects. I’m poignently reminded of the Routemaster bus. The perfectly adapted transport for the urban terrain. The brakemen that drive them are courteous, charming and funny. Entertainers in charge of running a cable-driven mechanical wonder up 1-in-4 gradient hills safely. Only one in three applicants for the job will make it. It’s not a job I think I could successfully handle. 

Yeah, let’s talk about the hills. They’re something else. I know SF is famed for the vertiginous quality of it’s landscape, but the sheer comedy value of how steep things can get is actively surprising. It’s like the whole city was designed by someone with a serious thing for rollercoasters. You become very aware of the downside to every upside. 
Here’s a downside. We’re both knackered. Well and truly. I’ve dragged us up and over every hill in SF over the last couple of days, and the exercise has caught us and given us Chinese burns. Not good when you only have a week to squeeze in as much as you can, and all you want to do is splat in your hotel room. 
However. Still a nice day. I’ve got a touch of sunburn to the nose after basking in the unexpected sunshine at Aquatic Park today. We have eaten extraordinarily well for very little money at Nonna Rose’s. And we have been culturally nourished too. We took a trip to the Museum of Modern Art (half price on a Thursday after 6, cheap art fans) and checked out the Olafur Eliasson retrospective. Some extraordinary work in here, playing with ideas of colour and light in ways that left my head spinning. An example. The lift doors to the exhibition open to a flood of yellow light. This is Room For One Colour. The lobby is lit by monochromatic lamps, that shut the spectrum down to yellow and black. It’s like being in a Sin City out-take. Skintone becomes greyscale with bright sunshiney fill. It’s deeply bizarre, and you can’t stand it for long. Well, I couldn’t anyway. Colour’s too important to me for it to be lost so easily. 

Over The Bridge And Into The Trees

Early call this morning. X picked us up from the front of the hotel in her old Range Rover, and whisked us off on a guided tour. Breakfast first, though, in a chic little place off the Presidio, where I fiddled with X’s iPhone and decided that, regardless of the sensible justifications and conclusions I’d come to before I went away, actually, I do rather want one of those cool devices, thanks.

Then, out to Fort Point for photo ops before driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and into Marin County, home of the redwood forests. The Bridge is a bold red slash of colour against cloudy skies, almost unreal in it’s massive assertion of human control over the landscape. It certainly doesn’t slip into the background, anyway…

Marin County is green, fresh, and home to the most absurdly twisty roads I’ve ever seen. I don’t get motion sickness easily, but the multiple 90 degree hairpins X flung the Rover through gave me the queeeze. We drove to Muir Woods, a National Park dedicated to the preservation of these majestic arboreal giants. We walked in silence through the forests, the trees reaching hundreds of feet above us. Deer picked their way fearlessly through the undergrowth around us. The woods were peaceful, dripping gently after morning showers. It was ten miles and a milion years from the busy streets of San Francisco.

We returned to those streets for lunch, then headed south-west into Haight-Ashbury, to soak up some of the old hippy vibe. I’m disappointed to report the area was a little less scuzzy than I was led to expect, with some cool thrift shops and quirky designer stores. There’s a strong smell of incense and weed in the air, though, which doesn’t seem at all localised. It’s as if the scents have been soaked up by the very stones.

On the way, I found Isotope Comics, a very cool comics store that Clare could have quite easily left me in for the rest of the day. I had to settle for spending a measly hundred bucks in there, the majority of that on Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s massive tribute to the Tijuana Bible, Lost Girls. One for under the cover reading, I feel… Isotope is part of a triangle of comic shops in the Haight-Ashbury area, all of which are worth your custom. For friendliness and quirk value they beat the crap out of Forbidden Planet, anyway.

Soundbite on Devisadero Street: “…and they were all totally naked! I didn’t know where to look! It was super awkward!” Delivered at some volume by a camp, skinny chap in a suit into a mobile. Sometimes, you know that the other end of the conversation can’t possibly be as interesting as you picture it. This one? This one could have gone anywhere and I wouldn’t have been surprised…

Tomorrow: North Beach, Chinatown and the Wharfs. And if we’re lucky, Alcatraz.

Venality And Greed

I lasted till half eight, then whoever it was with control over my nervous system jammed a thumb hard on the reset, and that was me cycled out for ten hours.

We rose, blinking, to a cloudy California Tuesday. Breakfast at a cheap diner, then shopping on Union Square and environs. Not a pretty sight, so I won’t elaborate. Suffice it to say we’re all stocked up for the winter now. Bags everywhere in our room.

We’ve found a good place for eats on Powell: Sear’s, which has been there since the 30’s, and gets regular queues outside for breakfasts, which are apparently legendary. I don’t queue for breakfast, so I wouldn’t know, but on the strength of their lunches I could well be tempted. The Pulled Pork Sandwich was possibly the manliest thing I’ve ever eaten. Sloppy barbeque in a bun. Half a dill pickle the only garnish. Deeeelish.

We’re back at the hotel now, chilling amongst our new treasures before venturing out for dinner. X is driving us out to Marin County tomorrow for views back across the Bay. Prepare yourselves for awe-inspiring photos.

…and miles to go before I sleep.

1715 DST 0915 PDT

I hate flying. It’s tedious, uncomfortable, undignified and irritating, and that’s even before you get on the damn plane. You arrive at the airport stupidly early, and get in a queue. You queue to get in a queue, and then to get in another queue. Eventually, you get to put your shoes through an X-Ray machine. You hang around, drink coffee you don’t realy want and buy magazines you’re not that interested in reading until you get the call to go and hang around somewhere else. Frequently, this new place is much less attractive than the one you’ve just left, and now you can’t even buy the magazine you were indifferent towards. There may be free copies of the Daily Mail to flick through. If you’re sensible, you resist the temptation to cook off your blood pressure, and look out of a window at the planes instead.

If I could dose myself into a comatose state, and in that condition be strechered to and from the airport, unconscious and oblivious, then I would be a happy man. Dump me in an overhead locker. Revive me when I get to the hotel. Sweet Lethe, save me from the tedium of modern air travel.

Actually, this isn’t such a bad idea. Apply it on an industry-wide level, and just think of the money the airlines could save in food and entertainment costs. Just get everyone seated on the plane, pump a mild sedative gas into the cabin, and a nice quiet flight can be had by everyone. No jetlag, no air rage. It’s probably the closest we’d ever come to teleportation, at least in my lifetime. I’d sign up to that kind of initiative in a flash.

I couldn’t sleep on a plane if my life depended on it. How anyone manages to get a nano-second of shuteye in a metal tube barrelling above the cloud line at 550MPH is frankly beyond me. Squeezed into a two-by-three seat gap with no room to stretch your legs, with an excess of ambient noise, who could grab even the haziest of dozes? Let alone the full-on kip that Clare, beside me and bundled in an appropriately red blanket seems to be achieving, lucky sexpot.

Hello. Transatlantic Rob here, midway across the Big Blue on the way to Californi-ay. We’re spending the week in San Francisco, a city that’s been on our must-see list for the best part of a decade now. Home of Alcatraz Prison and the Zodiac Killer. And it’s gonna be great. That poor weak dollar’s getting wedgies from us, I tell yer. Once we get there.

For now, I’m on a Virgin 747-400, seriously regretting that second cappuccino and not spending a bit extra for an upgrade to premium economy, bush-baby wide-eyed, and contemplating my second film of the day.

Just watched 300, which had it’s moments, most of them directly cribbed from Frank Miller’s masterful graphic novel. The whole exercise seemed kind of pointless to me, and the over-faithful translation to screen adds nothing to an already spare narrative. An animated version might have been interesting. As it is, even the digital blood that’s flung around with such abandon doesn’t make enough of an impression to stick around. Seriously, check it out. The gore evaporates before it hits the ground. I know the show’s supposed to be stylised, but come on.

However, Lena Headey and Gerard Butler are both suitably charismatic and eye-candyish, and I’m prepared to go along with Leonidas bellowing in broad Glasgae whenever he gets angry. Thing is, it’s the usual argument for me when it comes to film adaptations of graphic novels. They’re never as good as the books. I’m not looking forward to Zac Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation. That’s one book that should stay in the unfilmable category.

It’s 9:21 in the AM in San Fran, twenty past five in the afternoon according to my body clock. A little over half way there. We have a lift from the airport from a friend of Clare’s and a queen-sized room at a hotel just off Union Square and therefore slap in the heart of the action. At the moment of writing, the only action I can contemplate is a hot shower and a catnap.

God, I hate flying.

1945 PDT

Aaaannd here we are. We cleared immigration at 3, a surprisingly painless experience considering the irritations at the Heathrow end. Security was all smiles and chatty, which is unexpected to say the least. Smoothly out to a warm welcome from our San Fran contact, X, who is hospitality itself. She’s warm, chatty and lovely. She chauffeurs us directly to our hotel, and leaves us with a care package containing wine and snackies. Wheeee.

We’re right in the heart of things, based in a quiet boutique place on Sutter St, a minute’s walk from Union Square. It’s chilled, boho and charming. Not flash, but it has everything we need. Big bed. Hot shower. And they do free wine during happy hour. Rehehehesult. We doze over a cheeky merlot in the hotel bar.

Now, at this point we’ve been up for 20 hours, and are making less sense by the ganglion. Food needed as a matter of urgency. We stumble out to refuel, and end up at Lori’s Diner, one of those intentionally kitsch Ed’s Easy Diner type places, just at the bottom of the road. Faux Americana, sure, but faux Americana in America still kinda works on me. Plus, it’s shabby enough to have a bit of charm, and the waitresses have a good line in that tattooed devil’s cheerleader vibe. For added surrealality, with Halloween just around the corner, the joint is encrusted in spray cobweb and cardboard skeletons. Or maybe I just imagined it. It’s possible. We’re both double-exposing at this point in the day/night/whatevs. Blaaargh. Then we just have enough juice left for a stroll round Union Square, before we give up and head back to the hotel to crash.

2010. Clare’s asleep. I’m just awake enough to type, with NBC burbling away in the background.

Tomorrow is another day. With a lot of shopping in it.

Whuffs

For me, the internets have always been about those moments of genuine surprise. Those moments where a slow day’s aimless browsing is suddenly brought to a screaming halt by a phrase, a picture, an image, and everything is just a little different. This can be a good thing, sometimes a very bad thing. There’s always a physical response. My head comes up. My eyebrows lift. There’s frequently a vocalisation. 

I call them Whuffs, after the snorting noise I usually make when I come across them, and for the acronym they most usually bring to mind. 
Here’s today’s whuff. It’s tucked into this Wired article about Open Source Radio, a somewhat whuffy article itself. See if you can guess which sentence sent my eyebrows into my hairline.

Straight8

Thursday night brought me to the Cineworld, Shaftesbury Avenue, for the annual Straight8 night through the Raindance Film Festival. I was there to show support for my mate Nick Scott, whose film “The Other Half” was one of the top ten. As regular readers may know, Clive Sick Puppy and I also submitted a short, which got nowhere in the rankings. We’re quietly proud of it though, and I’ve had some very positive comments back about how it turned out.

The evening was great fun, with the general high quality of material I’ve come to expect from Straight8 fully on display. Intersetingly, the film that seemed most mentioned was a charming bit of whimsy called “Little Cumulus,” about a cloud that is stranded on earth, and only finds it’s way back into the sky with the aid of a hot air balloon. Not bad, considering for the most part it was footage of a guy wandering around dressed in a job lot of cotton wool…

Masses of technical problems on the night though, which surprised me no end. The first couple of films had to be shown twice, due to either being monochrome or mute, which is frankly not on. I know the quality of projection is evaporating in this country at a high rate (at a recent screening of 3.10 To Yuma I had to inform the projectionist he’d left a 1.85 mask in the gate of the projector – reeeeally long, thin pictures!) but it can’t be that hard to hit play on a tape deck, surely.

Here’s Nick’s making of The Other Half, explaining how he achieved the most technically difficult effect ever achieved under the Straight8 rules…

although The Sick Puppies went through their own personal hell in making “The Gourmand”…

Heima

I was lucky enough to be able to sneak into an early screening of the Sigur Ros tour film Heima.
It’s a stunning piece of work and, speaking as a fan, pretty much flawless. It covers the band as they toured their home country, Iceland, last year, playing venues as varied as an abandoned fish factory and a protest camp over a massive new hydroelectric dam. The music is wonderful, the images breathtaking. Widescreen sound and pictures all the way.
If I was to put my critics hat on (the grey fedora with the plaid ribbon and the inky crow quill stuck in it) I would say that it’s charm depends largely on whether you find Icelandic pixie types and their aethereal music annoying. If you do, then this is effectively an ad for the Icelandic Tourist Board, and you’re not gonna like the whimsy on offer.
I thought it was a joy from beginning to end, and the DVD is going straight on my Christmas list. I’m already raving to everyone I can about it, and I recommend that if you can get into a screening, go for it. It’s a whole different animal on the big screen.

Guys, seriously… takk.