The Dark Tower Bummeth

San Francisco is a living entity, constantly in flux, and being made over by the little worker ants that swarm her body. She is like an actor with hairdressers and makeup artists and cosmetic surgeons fluttering about her, turning her into a vision. But sometimes that vision isn’t so good. Have you seen the older actors with the tight faces, faces that resemble plastic masks more than flesh?

By the Bay Bridge, a looming tower, called One Rincon, greets you as you drive in to the city. I get a dark feeling, much like Browning’s Childe Roland as he approaches the dark tower. San Francisco’s manhattanization began in the seventies and is really taking off lately. On Monday, three proposals were made for a train terminal. None of them are really distinctive. Tall glass buildings are rarely interesting. These buildings will be the tallest buildings on the West coast if built:

The three proposals range in height from 1,200 feet to 1,375 feet - each extending well past the 853-foot Transamerica Pyramid, the tallest tower in San Francisco.

These buildings will be as tall as the Empire State Building. Why do we need such tall buildings here? Their answer:

In the early planning for the new terminal, it was assumed that any tower alongside it would climb no higher than 550 feet. Now, though, public officials say the extra height is merited - not just to boost the land sales, but to show that San Francisco continues to measure itself against other cities of global status that are seeing super tall towers proposed or built.

Yuck. I don’t care to have my city look like Kuala Lumpur or Dallas. But at least there will be a park built along with it. The new buildings show a shrinking of neighborhoods and a growing of condominium canyons. One Rincon, the dark tower, will be very expensive to live in:

One Rincon is not affordable housing -- the minimum price is estimated at $500,000 for a "junior one-bedroom" place, an apartment of only 613 square feet. Top of the line, top of the building will be a dozen three-bedroom deluxe condos, 1,967 square feet with drop-dead views. The estimated price: $2 million.

So you can pay half a million dollars for a view of frustrated commuters trying to get into the city. Of course, the higher paying deluxe condos will have stunning views, while they block out the sun for a whole lot of other people. Not to mention blocking the view of the Bay Bridge. There will be no affordable housing in the behemoth, but they did grease some palms:

"Who is going to live at One Rincon Hill? People who can afford it," Kriozere said. His firm -- Urban West Associates of San Diego -- was required to make a $20 million contribution to the mayor's affordable housing fund and $18 million into a Rincon Hill community improvement fund as a condition for building the project. The cost, of course, is passed on down the line. "Basically it is a tax," Kriozere said. "A tax on the people who buy the condos."

How about a pox on the people who buy the condos? Such bullshit. No doubt the city is giving them tax breaks to build the eyesore. We have a housing crisis, but the very rich have no problem securing housing, so this does not help.

The old San Francisco of middle-class and working-class families is vanishing, replaced in part by a city of more wealthy residents. Some of the new residents are only part-time San Franciscans, who reside elsewhere and have second homes in the city.

So Rincon Hill is going to be the second home to some asshole jetsetter? Great. San Francisco will be the play land for the super wealthy, a place where the elite meet and sleep with each other. We already have bars that have guest lists and velvet ropes. We have Tommy Lee opening a L.A. style lounge so he can spin records. We have spatially-challenged Hummers trying to find parking spaces. We have jerkoff supervisors who barely pretend to live in the neighborhood they represent. We have it all and only at a small cost to you.

Blood 'n Strippers

Jim Mitchell’s funeral was held today. He died of a heart attack, and he was buried next to his brother, Art, whom he shot 16 years ago. Even though San Francisco has a relatively short history compared to London or even New York City, its history is as colorful as a rainbow flag.

The Mitchell Brothers built a pornography empire, including making the famous porno Behind the Green Door. Even though I’ve never been inside their strip club (I’m way too cheap to pay for blue balls), I’ve always found the mural of the whales on the side wall to be pretty funny. I also liked how they battled our ex-mayor Senator Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein is highly respected, although I find her petty and more Republican than Ronald Reagan. But as Noah Cross says in Chinatown, “Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” She became mayor when Mayor Moscone was shot by Dan White, a fact she exploited in her Senate campaign.

Anyhoo, Feinstein tried to close the Mitchell Brother Theater for two decades and lost every time. The brothers knew the nasty art of San Francisco politics:

The battle resulted in the brothers obtaining Feinstein's unlisted phone number and placing it on the theater marquee with the words, "For a Good Time, Call ..."

The brothers entered the rarified air of SF history when Jim shot Art:

It was February 27, 1991. Jim went to see Artie and they got into a bad argument. Even as Artie's girlfriend was screaming to a 911 operator, gunshots could be heard. Officers came and found Jim walking around in a daze and carrying a .22 rifle and a .38 Smith and Wesson Special. Inside Artie's house, they found Artie in the bedroom. He had been shot through the eye, abdomen and right arm by a .22, and he was dead. Eight spent cartridges were picked up in the room.

Jim was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, which is a strange term innit? Does anyone want to volunteer to slaughter this man? He was sentenced to six years. I’m not sure why a man who brings a rifle to a “intervention” and then proceeds to shoot his victim three times (and apparently is a bad shot since he fired eight shots) is not in jail longer than that, but in America if you have money you can kill with impunity.

With Jim’s passing is the passing of a certain San Francisco time period. The seventies in SF were violent, sexual, and insane. Jim Jones was preaching and booking a flight to Guyana. Dan White climbed in a basement window on the capitol building. The Zodiac Killer was taking lethal cab rides. It must have been a hellova time. At least rent was cheaper back then.

So goodbye, Mr. Mitchell. I assume you’re going to hell, where your brother is waiting for you. And, ooh boy, is he going to give you such a pinch!

Slouching Towards Euphoria: Pink Saturday

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence asked for a media blackout about Pink Saturday this year. It didn’t work out, KTVU did a report on the requested black out. I read about it in the Bay Area Reporter, a LGBT newspaper. The Sisters were trying to keep the party from turning into Halloween, in which people tend to get shot or stabbed. The control of the party opens up a hornet’s nest of racial, class and sexual issues—way too complicated to cover in a blog post, especially a Slouching Towards Euphoria post, which is dedicated to bars.

Pink Saturday is not a bar per se, but it is celebration of a kind that you find in bars and clubs. Quick lesson: The Pride Parade, which San Francisco and many other cities throw in remembrance of the Stonewall Inn riots, is usually celebrated on the last Sunday in June. The Saturday night beforehand, the streets of Castro are shut down and people dance and drink and carouse. It’s much wilder than the parade itself.

My roommate and I decided to throw a barbeque and then walk down and enjoy the festivities. The party started out as simple affair, but much like America’s waistline, it grew tremendously. The house was cleaned and washed and dusted, which took the attendees a few hours to reverse. Our place looked like it fell off the rainbow tree and hit every branch; we had rainbow flags, candles, towels, and garlands. I put out a party game of Name the Homo, in which you had to identify the pictures of famous homosexuals throughout history. On the box in which you put your answers in, I taped gay and lesbian porn pictures. That naughty little detail took me a surprisingly long time to put together.

The pièce de résistance was the ice sculpture my roommate had made especially for the party. Basically, it was a naked backside of a man. Running through the ice sculpture was a plastic tube attached to a funnel at the top of the sculpture. You would pour a shot of Jägermeister through the sculpture and the ice cooled the liquid as it ran through it, pouring out into a shot glass at the bottom. We dubbed it the Jägermeister glory hole.

Guests arrived slowly but surely. And as parties usually go, one moment there are a few guests then in an instant the place is packed. Beers are being opened; food is being devoured; the nose level creeps up. We had put together a dance mix on the computer, which we played at loud levels. Had my roommate’s subwoofer been working properly our guests would have felt it in their gut.

Around nine p.m., we decided to see what was happening out on the street. Two blocks of Castro street was closed to traffic. The Sisters were asking for donations to enter the area. The street was packed with people. D.J.s played on different street corners. The bars overflowed with patrons. Our group separated within the crowd. I had a bag of frozen Otter Pops and offered the pops to people walking by. Some folks took them, effusively thanking me. Other folks blanched, as if I was handing out right-wing literature.

On top of a truck people boogied to the beats. One guy stripped in the cold night air. The crowd was by and large people in their twenties. Although there were some straight couples, mostly, it was groups of young gay men and women. The crowd certainly held the rainbow: African-American, Asian, Latino, Caucasian. I assumed a lot of the crowd lived in the suburbs, and this was a chance to hang out with their sexual community. And with the drinking, people puked and pissed in the doorways. I thanked my Irish luck that my doorway was close enough to walk to the Castro but far enough away to avoid the drunkards expelling their toxins.

We danced for a while, then I went back to my place to start the party up again. A younger crowd took the next shift. The stereo was turned up even louder. The living room became a tiny dance club. Bottle and cups sat on every available open space. The ice sculpture crashed to the ground when one wayward youth put his head in the area where the shot glass catches the liquid. The Jägermeister was gone by then, so the loss was trivial. I hid in my room and played acoustic guitar with some new-found friends. Finally rosy Dawn spread her fingertips over the horizon. This meant one thing: get out.

The guest left. The house was in sticky shambles. I laid down and the cool mist of sleep came upon me.

Slouching Towards Euphoria: The Alembic

After seeing a noisy pop rock band, called the Noisettes, at Amoeba Records in the Haight, my friends and I stopped off at a bar called The Alembic. It occupies a space that was a taqueria, now it is a high church to good spirits.

It’s interior resembles a roadhouse, a very clean roadhouse, a roadhouse where the drinks start at six bucks and head up from there. Little alembics line the shelves, along with cocktail books and pictures of pipes and kilns. The ceiling is covered in brass with two fans that languidly rotate. The tables and the floor are distressed wood. I tried to comfort it, but to no avail. They have a chalkboard that is held up by ropes and a pulley. The board lists the extraordinary amount of fine booze they sell. The bathrooms are sparkling clean and they have rolled cloth towels. The place is a mixture of down home and decadent.

I was told that the owners also own the fine hippie brewery, Magnolia’s down the street, so it is no surprise they carry Magnolia’s excellent craft brewed beer on tap. They carry other top notch beer also, including a great Belgium beer selection. Don’t ask for Bud or Coors here, fool. To my pleasure, they carry the most gin I’ve seen anywhere. I tried the Dutch gin called, Boomsma Oude. I had it in a martini, which was a mistake. Boomsma Oude is aged in oak barrels, which gives it a smooth and earthy taste. Smooth is good for martinis, earthy is not. This would be excellent in a highball glass.

The real pleasure in Alembic is the choice of bourbons. Bourbon is very trendy right now, but not in a lemon-flavored way. The Alembic has dozens of aged bourbons. I had a drink, I’ve never tried before: the Mint Julep. Outside the bar, they had a small chalkboard with a quotation of Hunter Thompson regarding the Mint Julep. I wish I wrote down the quotation, but if Hunter recommends it, I’ve got to try it. I assume he has sent many a pious person down the treachery slopes to hell.

A Mint Julep at The Alembic is made with mint, sugar, 12-year old bourbon and "brutally crushed ice." They are not kidding about the brutality. The bartender put the ice in a canvas bag and beat it with a stick. The drink is served in a silver cup. The cup frosted over. It was a hot night, a rare hot night in San Francisco, and I wanted to say in my worst Southern accent, would y’all like ‘nother Julep to fight the vapors with?

I admit it: I love this bar. I highly recommend you check it out.

Slouching Towards Euphoria: Lush Lounge

I tried to hit a bar new to me called Decco, but, alas, it was closed on Tuesday. Everyone needs a day off but Tuesday? Tuesday is the new Friday. Everyone knows that. So my intrepid and, with the exception of me, unemployed group trudged through the Tenderloin looking for a drinking establishment.

We ended up at the Lush Lounge off of Polk and Post. Actually it’s called the Lush Lounge Martini Piano Bar, although in my haze I don’t recall a piano in the place. I feel like I’m in the seventies time period because of all the ferns in the place. There is also a love for classic movies. Pictures of classy movie stars like Audrey Hepburn line the wall. When I was there, Chinatown played on the televisions.

I suppose this place is a gay bar, being that Polk was the major gay area before the rise of Castro Street, but every time I’ve been here, it’s mostly straight folks sipping cocktails and gazing into each other’s eyes. It’s a very romantic place. The lights are low, the music murmurs, and the drinks are sweet.

Normally, I’m not into sweet drinks. I used to be. I used to concoct sweet libations that tasted like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but not anymore. But that night I tried the mango mojito they had for five bucks. Such a deal! And they were tasty. The pretty blonde bartender worked her magic and made quite the tasty concoction. They also offer such sweet boozy treats as Raspberry Truffle and Dreamsicle. You can harvest quite the nasty hangover here if you wanted to.

Outside drug-ravaged locals would walk by and gaze into the bar. The occasional cop siren would blare. It’s a weird neighborhood. Even though the neighborhood is gentrifying, there are still many immigrants and homeless and Charles Bukowski types. Then, a couple of blocks up is Russian Hill, where its well-heeled population of white-collar types live and drink and eat. Even though Russian Hill is a slight incline from here, if the hill reflected social levels, then you be staring up a cliff wall outside of the Lush Lounge. But such is the city.

One of these days I should try a dry martini here. See how they do it. But I think the best use for Lush Lounge is an after-dinner desert drink. If a Lemon Drop doesn’t start the night right, than your night will not take flight.

It's an American Dream...Includes Indians Too

The 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love is upon us, and the retrospective articles are appearing. Joel Selvin is writing a series of articles for the SF Chronicle. Selvin is a good journalist, and although it's hard to capture the zeitgeist of that time within the confines of a newspaper article, he does a good job. The Summer of Love was centered on the Haight neighborhood. It occurred one year before I was born, so all I have is the memory of the folks who were there. But I see what's become of the Haight, and I know modern hippies. Time has not been kind to either.

Of course, the Summer of Love was a media construct that died even before it started. As a rule of thumb, if you are reading about a happening in the media, it's generally dead. Such is the nature of the hip and cool: ethereal wisps that fall apart in your hands. The earlier groovy folks of the pre-67 Haight were replaced by something much more American. Selvin puts it this way:

But they didn't turn out to be the literate beatniks and poetic artists who had come out earlier. These kids were squalid, ragged castoffs and, as they crowded the sidewalks of Haight Street night and day, they came to be known as street people.

Bob Weir of The Grateful Dead says in his own mixed-metaphor way, “We would come together for celebrations and stuff like that, and it was a lot of fun. But starting around June, the creativity of the scene was starting to be piled over by just having to batten down the hatches, bar your doors and windows 'cause there were speed freaks on the street.”

Good old speed. Invented by the Germans and beloved by certain Sci-Fi novelists to marathon sex tweakers. And it’s safe to say those speedy street people are still on the Haight. I’m sure the original tweaks are dead, but young ones take their place. They sit on the sidewalk with their dreadlocks and puppies and ragged army clothes asking for spare change, hitting on the yuppie chicks and generally smelling less than sweet. I can’t say they are hippies. They resemble Mad Max Thunderdome desert rats. None of the ideas of revolution and utopia sweep their minds.

The Haight itself is now one big shopping mall. You won’t find real hippies, but for a steep price you can dress like one. Don’t get me wrong, I like the street. It has nice bars and restaurants, and Milk has some good Hip Hop shows, but there is not much life in the place when the sun goes down and the shoppers leave.

And the hippies that I’ve known in my life don’t really follow the ideals of their elders. They are left-wing, but most of them are not active in politics. They are attracted to pot and music. You would hope for some laid back and passionate guys, literate beatniks and poetic artists, but instead you have neurotic stoners.

Maybe there never was the perfect ideal, only pale shadows, but the general ideas of the counterculture were great. Freedom and equality, love and forgiveness, art and sensuality are all ideals to live up to, but it takes more than a joint and a flowery shirt. If the Summer of Love teaches anything, it teaches that we keep trying for utopias, even if they crash like a tweaker after a three-day binge.

Fab Town

I live in the part of San Francisco called The Castro, named after the main drag of the neighborhood, Castro Street. It is, to paraphrase a Daily Show correspondent, the gayest street in the gayest city. But it’s more than just a label of sexuality; the neighborhood pulses like a heart, or in gay terms, a disco strobe light.

The Castro used to be called Eureka Valley, although it’s really more of a slight decline from the major hills of San Francisco. Castro Street is where the decline levels out. It has the amenities of urban life: coffee shops, movie theater, restaurants, bars, boutiques, book shops, accessible public transportation, and, unlike most places, a plethora of gay porn shops.

And it has plenty of what I like to watch: people, and more than that, eccentric people. Every neighborhood should have an eccentric. San Francisco has had some famous ones, such as Emperor Norton. Now every weekend, The Castro fills up with all sorts of eccentric folks, and with the addition of cheap booze the eccentricity really starts to crackle. The leather boys and the fashionable twinks, the femmes and the butches, the bewildered tourists and the pushy homeless, the cops and the drag queens make for a Mardi Gras every weekend

My neighborhood has a gentleman that I call Otto. Otto is a white male about six feet tall with long brown hair and a beard. He is a bear--that is a hairy gay man. He usually walks around the area with only a leather vest, leather shorts, boots, and sometimes a tail. Yes, he has a tail that sticks out behind his ass and slightly curls upward. I’ve never talked to him, and I don’t know his real name, but I appreciate the color he brings to my street. Just another day in Fab Town.