IN #0003 by Velcro Fly
Back now to the world of 'my' doings...
taking my cue from the excellent publication put out
by the fine people at "Oasis for Girls" -
see sfoasis.org for information about the group -
I am adding specific times and locations
to personal occurences.
(See the free material in the front of Adobe Books
at 16th Street and Guerrero for the publication
in question, if there are any copies there by the time
you read this...or you can find other papers of interest instead.)
Now...before I began recording times:
was walking in a BART station and a guitar man
was singing the Beatles song about love being all you need...
that little bit of lyric kept repeating in my head...
it was pushed out at some point by the words
to Al Stewart's "Year of the Cat"...
feeling, me, somewhat cinematic of late...
then I got over to friend b's hotel on 16th,
across from the aforementioned Adobe Books -
say hello for me to Sri Ananda and owner Andrew McKinley
there if you get there...and buy a book...
don't take Abbie Hoffman's advice and steal a book...
so I let myself in to b's place...
my mission in the Mission then was to taste of her port wine...
it's about the only thing she drinks,
and I wanted some myself...
I helped myself, watered the fortified beverage down a bit -
don't like it straight - I water down my Royal Gate as well...
I'd water down my SKYY,
Maurice Kanbar's drink, as well...
so I settled in to the drinking thereof
with a copy of 'While You Were Sleeping'
free from the Macondo Cafe downstairs...
many pages pulled from that fine publication...
they reprinted a Hunter Thompson article
from about thirty years ago, describing the writing of
'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'...
and afterwards, met neighbor Gene, ex-Navy man
with a world of trouble on his mind...
when he's taking his medication he's civil,
at least to me...and when he's not, he's not, quite...
he sees me and mentions Jimmy Cagney
playing Admiral Halsey in some movie from decades ago...
must think I have a military executive vibe or something -
yeah, that's it...for sure, I wouldn't have gone out there
and risked seeing the guy, but I really hadda use the toilet...
and then I began recording times...
at 1:45pm, this on the 28th of January, zero-four,
me at Albion and 16th, waiting on b,
port working in my system...
recommended viewing at that location,
the murals on the auto body shop...
I was in front of the Kilowatt bar
and some Neanderthal on a motorcycle
was creating a lot of noise and fumes...
then at 2:04pm, at Puerto Alegre with b -
she bought shrimp tacos for us,
but wouldn't get sangria -
too costly by far by the glass...
she's been working out lines in iambic pentameter
and I've been typing them out...
her poem (with editorial help from me)
is called 'Stellar Message', for now...
then whatever whatever...I am not always
recording everything...back at my hotel in the Tenderloin
the Foodrunners organization delivered their usual
Wednesday bonanza of food - fresh vegetables,
much good cooked food in aluminum tins,
dried mushrooms, tofu turkey by the two dozen...
have to check Foodrunners.org for information about them...
then a few hours later, 9:35pm, at the Metreon...
was picking b up at her work site on New Montgomery,
one of the Academy of Art College branches.
Had a few minutes to kill and stopped in at the
entertainment mecca...
the only movie I wanted to see was 'Paycheck',
which was on at 10:45pm...
I wandered around a bit on the ground floor,
and stopped in front of a gigantic HDTV set
playing a music video by some woman I didn't know...
sorta like Christina Aguilera but not her...
the set was eleven thousand by itself -
the DVD player was another grand,
and the glass table it was on another similar sum...
a woman stood by me and we began chatting
about things media...she said someone down in San Mateo
she's seen has an even much bigger TV screen
that's visible from the street...
and leaving the Metreon to pick b up,
there was a guy I knew from 16th Street,
Myron, selling the 'Street Sheet'...
probably a good place to sell,
since those leaving probably blew upwards of forty plus
on movies and snacks and whatever and had a dollar to spare...
I had twenty cents and Myron sold me a copy of
the 'Humor Times' he happened to have -
a buncha cartoons...
so I picked b up...buncha art students milling around
outside the school on New Montgomery...
then it was back to 16th Street and her hotel room...
I'd previously brought a lot of the Foodrunners stuff
back there, and we looked it over,
she started cooking...I took down some Internet
information about the companies represented,
including Turtle Island Foodss out of Oregon,
and Fungus Among Us from Washington state -
the last sells wild crafted mushrooms, dried...
and on b's music box, a tape of female rock stars
from a CD set she has...Joan Jett singing about
not giving a damn about her bad reputation,
Carly Simon and Mick Jagger doing "You're So Vain",
like that...and I thought of a line of iambic pentameter,
inspired by that last song:
"The scarf of apricot, not all that vain."
And when Madonna's "Express Yourself" came on,
more inspiration for more poetry:
"'Metropolis' by Lang, Madonna-style
expressing self-realities of love."
(If you don't know it, that very late-80s into
the early-90s video by "The Material One"
was inspired by the Fritz Lang classic
German Expressionist movie 'Metropolis'.
Now you know.)
Then it was this and that...next note I took:
the next day, today, eight minutes after midnight...
I'd left b and was down on 16th, stopped in
briefly at Delirium, at Albion, drawn in by the sound
of Blondie's "Heart of Glass"...there's a different
deejay every night at the place...this morning
I believe it was a two-female team...
and I got a cell call from b...
she was instrumental in getting me the phone
and since I was, in her mind, behaving badly,
she wanted it back...I walked outside the noise
of Delirium to talk, and we had some words for
a few minutes, culminating in me saying that I
was turning off the phone and would get it back
to her, recharger, manual, and all, in the morning...
then it was back to the Tenderloin via Muni -
it was already past midnight and past the time
BART shut down, at least in the downtown direction...
so it was a wait at 16th and Mission for the 14 or 49...
on the bus, I was immersed in
'The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim', a paperback I'd
taken from the San Francisco Public Library,
and some guy was talking with excitement about
some police action on the street nearby
that I was oblivious to...I gathered it was some
young white kids trying to outrun the police
in their fast car...the guy was all for San Francisco,
and began some rant about the style of this city,
in the gangster realm...he was berating Los Angeles
for being too open with their violence -
he figured his style - and San Francisco's -
was to waiting til the next day after some
aggressive encounter and shoot the adversary
when he didn't realize it was coming...
being a San Francisco kind of guy -
tho' I lived in Los Angeles for much of the Nineties -
I felt a kinship with the guy, thinking to myself:
"Yeah! L.A. can kiss our ass!"
Then it was the journey, short, back to the hotel
on Eddy...nicely-run place, quiet,
a relief from the sometime-madness of
the 16th Street Hotel...a woman named Barbara
got into the elevator with me...on the way I'd
picked up a long wooden stick to exercise with,
do sidebends with, and a milk carton, for use
as a table or foot rest...talked with Barbara...
not that I'm an expert but it seemed like she
mighta been a whore...real life-worn,
but nice enough...her floor was the same as mine -
I wished her a good night, and then,
it was into my room.
1:17am, this morning...relaxing in the room
via candlelight, and a Carlos Castaneda audio book
from the library...I also have an unabridged
Robert Heinlein novel, but it's been getting
on my nerves a bit and I'm glad it's almost over...
then it was sleep and whatever - next note,
long past nine this morning, but not quite ten...
nothing I absolutely had to do, except what
I chose...had some of the free Rice Dream
(chocolate flavor) from the Foodrunners...
went down to get the 'Examiner', which is
stacked for free in the lobby...
only two items of interest: the TV schedule,
and news of David Mamet's new play about
Faust being put on by the Magic Theatre here
in San Francisco, the world premiere coming
up soon...ex-Army guy John seen briefly
down there, helping out some other vet -
John's kind-hearted...and, actually, there was
another item of interest in the Bellingham column:
Richard Brautigan's daughter is in town
to interview old-timers in North Beach about
her father for some book...Bellingham says
the author of 'Trout Fishing in America' shot himself
to death in Bolinas, but I thought it was Montana...
and speaking of Brautigan, there's a really nice
framed poem by him at Abandoned Planet Books
on Valencia at 16th...Scott Harrison owns the place...
and John Bryan, Sixties underground journalist,
works there often...and I noted in the article about
Mamet: the Christopher Marlowe play on the same
Faust them mentioned, but the wright's name
was spelled without the final -e - duh...
and I continued sipping on the Rice Dream,
wishing it was a King Cobra...tomorrow I get
forty-eight bucks and fifty cents,
so I can commence to drinking...
and tonight there's Celia's weekly get-together
where the wine is free, so I can have a taste then...
and I planned out my day, as much as I plan it:
thinking about the Celia event,
figuring to e-mail friend Jol and "Oasis for Girls"...
had a big stack of various papers and articles
and such that I got through...
on my music box I listened to various
songs I'd recorded off the FM dial...
from a set of five cassettes totalling
four-hundred-and-twenty minutes -
this for a friend, an unusual soundtrack...
then it was whatever until 12:42pm...
at 16th and Valencia, waiting for the Muni to Martin's
on Potrero and 16th for the noon free soup...
I'd dropped the cell phone off at b's -
she wasn't there - and I'd found a big color photo
of David Bowie related to his show two days ago
in the area...the reviewer thought the audience
was very much mostly interested in his older
material from the Seventies, and was really just
humoring Bowie for his newer songs...
and I was thinking of Celia's, and a young woman,
half-Chinese, half-Russian, that I'd met there
last week...she might be there...
interesting talking to her - two letters of the alphabet
describe this goddess: Q.T.
Overcast day in San Francisco, a gray day,
but the thought of her was bringin' the sun out.
[Hang in there, readers, we are almost at the end of this...
just a few more times and places to cover,
and we are done...having fun yet?]
12:52pm, was heading to Martin's on the 22 -
when we were once stopped a guy was pounding
at the back door, wanting to get on, but it was
a bit of a lost cause - I got up and tried to open
it up, but the light wasn't on to allow this, and,
anyway, the driver woulda seen this happening...
if it's crowded you can get on in the back,
but this woulda been a ridiculous attempt.
The woman sitting next to me had a friendly
enough vibe towards me, and she asked me
why I'd want to do that, get this guy on -
he seemed to be smiling a bit too much, but
he seemed okay...I told her that I just wanted
to help a guy out...the woman and I didn't
exchange any words after that...she looked
just okay, from where I was sitting...but I told
her to have a nice one when I got off at 16th and
Potrero.
12:59pm, Martin's...people from some medical van
were distributing stuff near the entrance -
condoms, bleach, pain killers (just aspirin - I joked
about OxyContin, but that wasn't on the menu)...
I took a plastic bag of multiple vitamins
and chewable Cs...then on to the soup:
a thick mixture of barley and chicken...
and behind me, an altercation related to a blanket -
some guy was apparently touching another guy's
blanket, and the owner, some distance away,
got irate, started talking loudly, told the guy to
get away...one of the Martin's people talked to
the blanket owner and told him that it wasn't
appropriate to go ballistic over a blanket...
had a second bowl of the soup...
and there again was the aforementioned Gene...
hello to him, from Admiral Halsey.
1:26pm, out of Martin's, and there was the 22
back up to 16th...was on the way to the free
computer place at 170 Otis for e-mail checking
and poetry writing.
1:32pm, bus again right there at 16th and Mission -
down to the Otis location...tried to get new bus pass
and the clerk at the window told me my information
wasn't in the computer! Yikes! Got heated over this...
I need that fuckin' pass! Called my worker Sharon
on the free phones there and got it straightened out -
lucked out because it's often hard to get a hold of her...
it was all on her - she had forgotten to change
my records with a few button clicks...got to remind her
next time that that omission could cause
a big hassle...she told me I was good for another
six months...it's to be hoped that I'll have
a good source of income by then...
if only for the sake of my alcohol habits...
2:08pm - still at Otis, e-mailing...
got one from Carson, a guy I know from Celia's...
something about the concept of a billion or trillion
dollars, related to the national budget deficit...
and one from film maker T. Arthur Cottam -
he's got a five-and-a-half minute film showing
at the Women's Building at the upcoming
San Francisco Independent Film Festival...
and he also told me of a party in Los Angeles
soon on Berendo near Melrose...
would be great to go there - free beer and food, yeah!
3:02pm - leaving Otis...got another page
of the long poem I'm doing done -
with ten free copies rolled up in my jeans jacket...
3:25pm, about an hour ago, at 366 Eddy,
here and now, typing away at the
San Francisco Network Ministries Computer Training Center...
so that brings this up to date...
got fifteen minutes left here to get some photo downloading
done...gonna go through galleries of the aforementioned icon...
can get three free color photos printed up per week
at this spot, so that's a boon.
IN #0002 by Velcro Fly
Items of interest from the new issues
of the 'Weekly' and the ' Bay Guardian':
01. The "Free Will Astrology" column
by Rob Brezsny...
02. The schedule for the
San Francisco Independent Film Festival,
happening next month...
if there was just one film out of the many
being shown that I'd want to see,
it's the one about Robert Anton Wilson.
(The Roxie will also soon be showing
a new film about Carlos Castaneda...
and there's a new documentary
about Charles Bukowski out also.)
03. Dan Savage's "Savage Love"
sex ed column.
04. Death Guild ad - dance club
near the Caltrain station - went
there once with a friend.
05. Edinburgh Castle ad -
often go there for beers with a friend...
recently they held their annual night
in honor of Scottish poet Robert Burns...
great woody ambience, dark...
good juke box, and
tasty fish and chips available
from around the corner.
06. Full page ad for 'The Big Bounce' -
movie and ad of interest about 99% or more
because of TV ad featuring the really great ass
of actress Sara Foster...I'm sure it's a fine
enough flick, but in 'my' edited version
I'd delete everything but scenes of Foster
in her bikini...'my' director's cut -
sorry, Morgan Freeman, but when the envelope
is opened her fine chassis gets 'my' Oscar.
07. Review of two books about writing,
'The Midnight Disease' and 'Unstuck'...
the first is about writing considered
as a mental illness, the second is about
writer's block.
08. Permaculture fundamentals to be taught
soon at the Strybing Arboretum in
Golden Gate Park...all about healthy and
natural ecosystems.
09. Kim Addonizio appearance at
A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books
on Van Ness soon...new poetry book due...
heard of her, never read her...
I'm sure she's fun.
(But if I was to buy a book of poetry,
it'd have to be the new one from
Charles Bukowski I saw in the window
at City Lights...
sorry Kim, but Bukowski's the man...)
10. Cover article in the 'Bay Guardian'
about sex workers attempting
to decriminalize prostitution.
11. Editorial in same paper about same topic.
12. Review of band Air's new CD
called 'Talkie Walkie'. Musical friend
in Los Angeles thought much of them
when I was down there in the Nineties.
13. The entire "Lit" pull out section
in the 'Guardian' - a literary supplement -
this bears closer scrutiny than allowed
in this quick survey of the contents
of our local freebie papers.
14. Ad for 'The Dreamers',
new sexy flick from Bernardo Bertolucci.
15. The "Double Team Psychic Dream"
astrology column from Michelle Tea
and Jessica Lanyadoo...again, Brezsny's
the man...tho' these two surely do
a good job...I just like Brezsny's more
poetic take. (Have been meaning to get
a copy of Tea's book about the Mission,
called 'Valencia'...sure to be a good one.)
16. Full page ad of woman in bikini
with laptop computer for The Learning Annex.
17. Four items for someone else, friend b:
two ballet reviews, a review of the new
Charlize Theron movie about serial killer
Aileen Wuornos, and an ad for
"A new Mission Festival!" featuring crab dishes
in abundance at local restaurants there...
including Tannour and Andalu,
where I've been with b.
[So those are 'my' choices for what's
happening soon and now in the area...
back to the regular content of this blog
related particularly to 'my' personal
doings next time, unless something
more significant and interesting comes up...
and I hope it does...not hard to do.]
