oh woe to go? mebbe not 'frisco

When The City Eats Your Soul

Where do you go when you've had enough of the urban grind but still crave it like heroin?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Then come those times, like when you walk out your front door on a calm sunny Sunday morn and find your shiny new car has been smashed by a hit-and-run driver to the tune of 14 grand's worth of repairs and your heart sinks and your normally Zenlike ennui boils over and you look around your grungy metropolitan neighborhood with a sudden mix of resignation and revulsion and an uncontrollable hissing sigh, that you realize how fed up you are with life in the city.

It happens, now and then, like a wave of nausea and heaving frustration, all aimed at the congestion and the traffic and the parking woes, the spitting lunatic homelessness and the lack of space and the lack of quiet and the random urban demons careening around the 'hood smashing windows and exchanging gunfire and peeing on your stoop when you say to yourself, You know what? I've loved and endured the city in equal turns for nearly 10 years now, and maybe that's enough, and isn't it about time I found some quiet and green and a yard and a dog and a parking space to call my own?

It's a question, I'm sure, asked by every city dweller past the age of, say, 32, the age where your hip grungy stained "artist's" apartment with the peeling vinyl flooring and limp water pressure and the horde of twentysomething partyers who live behind you and who smoke like factories and stay up 'til 5 a.m. snorting coke and playing acoustic guitar very very badly, it all switches from being funky and charming and urban to utterly obnoxious and tiring, and don't these people have jobs?

It is the time, in other words, wherein you hit that very special crossroads where you decide either to suck it up and accept the trade-off of calm energy for urban sophistication, or you think about getting the hell out. Or, better yet, you dream of doing both.

I am at this point. I have a lovely and well-maintained and relatively enormous flat in San Francisco and I love it to death, but I've been here a very long time and it can exhaust and frustrate and I've had two cars smashed and endured endless sirens and homeless screams in the night. There is not enough green. There is far too much gray. You cannot rent forever. Or can you?

If you live in the Bay Area, it is a question both complicated and unbearable. After all, where the hell can you go? Where can you still buy a home in this region that's even reasonably city-adjacent and urban-accessible that has its own delicious non-uptight community that will still clock in at well under half a million dollars for something more than 900 square feet of cheaply built, cracked-foundation bliss?

This is the real conundrum: where to obtain city-like charms with cabin-in-the-woods quiet and space for under the cost of selling the ovum of a blue-eyed geisha on the Japanese black market? After all, the Bay Area real estate market is nothing if not a hellbitch of investment discouragement. You take a deep breath and make a few Web site clicks and take one look at prices around the region and you go, Oh holy hell, I guess I'll just stay in my sad rent-controlled limbo a while longer and besides what's a little gunfire and urine when a small fixer-upper in Sausalito is 800K, without windows?

Of course, the ripest bohemian dream is to have, well, both: the hip urban pad and a weekend woodsy getaway, maybe Calistoga or Occidental or Bodega or Russian River or Sebastopol, something up in the rolling pristine fogless green, a place to escape the urban grind, a writing-sex-hot-tub-meditation-bring-some-friends-up-for-the-weekend retreat where you can go and plant some lavender and work on the deck and think about the meaning of single-malt scotch.

I have visited these regions. I have felt the calm verdant hum. When there, it is impossible not to fantasize about sticking around, about buying my own private quarter acre near the organic farmlands and the neohippies and the winemakers, the artist communes and the spiritual renegades and the slightly mad alt-millionaire geniuses who live well off the grid, all while still somehow maintaining a link to the beloved city.

Is such a dual existence possible? Check that: Is such an existence possible on a columnist's salary? Does Bush speak with nuanced polysyllabic intelligence?

Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe there is a way and I just don't know it, a way to live the dual urban/pastoral dream without going into 30 years of runaway debt, without cashing in every nest-egg stock you ever owned and without borrowing three-quarters of a million dollars from the bank even as you stock up on tuna and water and canned beans for when the Big One hits and wipes it all off the map anyway.

This, then, is the big conundrum. Because a city like San Francisco, well, it gets in the blood. It is difficult to shake. I want to get out, but I don't want to leave. San Francisco remains one of the most desirable places to live in the world, one of the most electric and accessible and radiant and walkable urban jungles still without a Wal-Mart in its city limits, all resulting in the eternal S.F. lament, ongoing for the past decade: Relatively young? Make a decent salary (even two, combined)? Love the city? Want to lay down some roots and maybe buy a nice house? Good for you. Now get the hell out, because you can't possibly afford it.

So then, like countless city dwellers, I wait. I long. For the lottery win, for the market to implode (ha), for miracles and magic and time to heal all ridiculously inflated prices. I read the stories that claim the Bay Area housing market is cooling off -- which, around here, is a bit like saying the sun has dropped eight degrees from its recent high of 59 billion Fahrenheit. I dwell in schizophrenia, longing to stay in the city but getting hit by massive cravings to flee to calmer regions whenever the drug dealers four blocks away look at me like they're the hammer and I'm the nail.

Meantime, the yellowish vinyl tile in my rent-controlled kitchen is from 1974. I shall convince myself it is full of urban personality and charm. I shall pretend that I have enormous storage space and a closet larger than a gym locker and that my car will be protected by a magic force field generated by fierce German angels sent me by the Audi corporation. I shall buy more plants, ignore the broken glass in the street, turn up the Supergrass and the BRMC and the Thievery Corporation to drown out the sirens and the screams. It is, perhaps, for the time being, the only way.

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a roaring good time

A roaring good time: Vancouver finally puts on a bash to remember

The Vancouver Sun
Mon Nov 28 2005
Page: A1 / Front
By Pete McMartin

From the vantage point of her 50th Grey Cup, Ethel Wilson of Hamilton looked down Beatty Street and saw that it was good.

The sun had come out, the music was loud and thousands of happy people clogged the street.

The improbable had happened.

No Fun City had finally thrown a good Grey Cup party.

"We've been here since Wednesday morning," Ethel said, "and we've had a great time. This was a good Grey Cup this year, unlike the last one here [in 1999]. Then you didn't even have a parade."

Ethel was the size of a canary, and with the same plumage. She was in Ticat colours, swaddled in a yellow wool ankle-length coat, black pants and shiny yellow boots.

With her was her buddy, Pat Schlegel, a 40-year Grey Cup veteran, who wore what looked like a cross between a tiger skin and a pimp's coat. She had accessorized her outfit with yellow sparkly sunglasses, circa Lucille Ball.

While we talked, people would stop and ask the two of them if they could take their picture.

"Party-wise," Schlegel said, "this year has been fabulous. Last time in '99, it was garbage. There was nothing, no parade, no excitement. People didn't even know or care there was a Grey Cup on. But this has been great."

Surprisingly, she was right. Even among the veterans, the consensus was, Vancouver had finally embraced Grey Cup Week as it should be.

The booster-club parties were jammed with thousands of revellers all week. The revived Grey Cup parade brought 100,000 people downtown, and Pamela Anderson. The Beatty Street Block Party in particular had been a success. When Vancouver last played host to the Grey Cup in 1999, organizers made the mistake of dispersing events throughout the city. The party had no focus. Closing off the two blocks of Beatty Street to traffic concentrated party-goers and gave the festivities real energy.

It was also a godsend for downtown hotels and eateries. On Friday night, my wife and I tried five restaurants in Yaletown before we found one with a table available, and all the nearby bars were jammed. The booster party we landed in was packed, with several hundred people waiting outside to get in. For all the partying, we didn't see one fight or drunk out of control.

"This," said Rick Bone, manager of the Beatty Street Bar & Grill, "has been the busiest weekend we have had since ... well, I don't know when. It may have been our busiest weekend ever."

There were long lines, too, at the CFL merchandise tent on Terry Fox Plaza in front of B.C. Place. The football-helmet chip-and-dip holders were going for $60, and the throwback-style B.C. Lions jerseys were hot sellers at $135. "Grey Cup Week is always busy," said Brent Rurka, the merchandise manager, "but this has been crazy."

It was an opportunity for the crazies to appear, too. There was Steve Shepherd, the Nanaimo school-bus driver dressed as the Cowardly Lion. ("I'm still looking for Kansas," he said.) There was the group of Edmonton Eskimo fans -- a dozen big Alberta guys wearing, of all things, Moroccan skullcaps -- walking down Beatty Street with each of them hanging onto a length of propylene rope because, one said, they didn't want to get separated from each other in case they were drunk. There was Trevor Stoddard, a Saskatchewan Roughrider fan from Saskatoon, in white and green face paint, carrying a Rider flag and a sign that read:

"Tickets: $150

"Trip to Vancouver: $450

"Being Rider/CFL Fan: Priceless."

Another crazy taking in the Beatty Street scene Sunday was Senator Larry Campbell. He looked pleased.

"I've been wandering around here talking to people," Campbell said, "and there's a great spirit. Last time in '99 ... I just couldn't get into it but last night, it was really rocking. The [2,500-square-foot-foot] party tent on Georgia] was jammed with people. Everybody I talked to said it was a great time.

"And thank gawd, the sun came out for the parade."

The success of the week was notable for two other reasons:

One, the crowds turned out despite the absence of the hometown Lions in the Grey Cup. (Note to Wally Buono: there were still Lions fans in the Beatty Street crowd Sunday who were angry with your handling of the quarterbacks).

Two, it was primarily a young crowd that I saw partying through the week.

In a hockey-mad town such as Vancouver, this bodes well for the CFL. There seemed to be an emerging appreciation of the unique cultural niche the Grey Cup celebration inhabits, because it was ours, it was a little funky and weird, and it was for the average fan.

Ironically, the best expression of that I heard on Sunday was from an American. Joe Short was from Baltimore, one of the dozen or so die-hard fans who come for every Grey Cup to honour the memory of the defunct Baltimore Stallions. This was Short's 12th Grey Cup.

"This has been a lot of fun," Short said. He was a beefy guy dressed in a white stetson and a blue Stallions jacket. "Of the three Grey Cups I've been to here, this has been the best. In '99, too many people were dressed like empty seats."

Short and his Stallion colleagues walked in Saturday's parade, and the welcome they received, he said, brought a few of them to tears.

"You see," he said, "the average fan is somebody up here. At a Super Bowl, you couldn't do this. The Super Bowl is a corporate affair: here, this is a family reunion, a place to meet old friends. I mean, this is the kind of event where sometimes, even the players are buying the fans drinks, and they don't make anywhere near the kind of money the guys in the States make. Down there, if you want to talk to a player, it's 'See my agent.'

"Here, it's a whole different ball game."

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please these leather pants

Lot 328: a pair of embarrassing trousers

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

The Guardian Unlimited

A recent auction on eBay ended with a pair of leather trousers being sold for $102.50 (£58) after 22 bids. Buyers may have been attracted by the following short essay written by the owner:

You are bidding on a mistake. We all make mistakes. We date the wrong people for too long. We chew gum with our mouths open. We say inappropriate things in front of grandma.

And we buy leather pants.

I can explain these pants and why they are in my possession. I bought them many, many years ago under the spell of a woman whom I believed to have taste. She suggested I try them on. I did. She said they looked good. I wanted to have a relationship of sorts with her. I'm stupid and prone to impulsive decisions. I bought the pants.

The relationship, probably for better, never materialised. The girl, whose name I can't even recall, is a distant memory. I think she was short.

Ultimately, the pants were placed in the closet where they have remained, unworn, for nearly a decade. I would like to emphasise that aside from trying these pants on, they have never, ever been worn. In public or private.

I have not worn these leather pants for the following reasons:

I am not a member of Queen.

I do not like motorcycles.

I am not Rod Stewart.

I am not French.

I do not cruise for transvestites in an expensive sports car.

These were not cheap leather pants. They are Donna Karan leather pants. They're for men. Brave men, I would think. Perhaps tattooed, pierced men. In fact, I'll go so far as to say you either have to be very tough, very gay, or very famous to wear these pants and get away with it.

Again, they're men's pants, but they'd probably look great on the right lady. Ladies can get away with leather pants much more often than men can. It's a sad fact that men who own leather pants will have to come to terms with.

They are size 34x34. I am no longer size 34x34, so even were I to suddenly decide I was a famous gay biker I would not be able to wear these pants. These pants are destined for someone else. For reasons unknown - perhaps to keep my options open, in case I wanted to become a pirate - I have shuffled these unworn pants from house to house, closet to closet. Alas, it is now time to part ways so that I may use the extra room for any rhinestone-studded jeans I may purchase in the future.

These pants are in excellent condition. They were never taken on pirate expeditions. They weren't worn onstage. They didn't straddle a Harley, or a guy named Harley. They just hung there, sad and ignored, for a few presidencies.

Someone, somewhere, will look great in these pants. I'm hoping that someone is you, or that you can be suckered into buying them by a girl you're trying to bed. Please buy these leather pants.

-30-


Pirates are back - and we're not talking DVDs

Tuesday November 8, 2005

The Guardian

Tim Dowling

A pirate attack on a luxury cruise liner at the weekend raised the tantalising possibility that buccaneering is making a comeback. For most of today's lazy, telly-numbed children, the word pirate describes a type of DVD in which the coughing of a cinema audience is clearly audible. While many young people still want to be pirates when they grow up, we are in danger of leading them to believe that piracy involves nothing more than strapping on an eye patch and settling down to watch an unlicensed copy of Madagascar.

This isn't their fault. It's like those children who were berated in yesterday's papers for not knowing that chips were made from potatoes. We tell our children that chips are full of oil and salt, and when we ask them what they're made of, they naturally answer oil and salt. And apples, for some reason. I don't have an excuse for apples.

So it should come as no surprise if our children believe that, these days, pirates are chiefly engaged in downloading Madonna's album before it hits the shops. Before Saturday they had no other pirate role models.

International maritime authorities would have you believe that piratical incidents are on the rise, but in fact they've been fairly steady of late. There were 325 pirate attacks in 2004, which isn't so many when you consider how much of the Earth's surface is covered by water.

Despite the romance of it all, being a modern pirate must be pretty thankless. International freight companies have increased ship security and introduced measures such as high-voltage fencing. It's one thing to loot some gold from a Spanish galleon in the name of queen and country, and quite another to board a gigantic container vessel from a speedboat in order to gain possession of 100,000 sets of unsafe Christmas lights and six tonnes of inferior lawn furniture. On a good day it might be flat-screen TVs, on a bad day three-quarters of a million Happy Meal toys.

This is not to say, however, that our children must give up their dreams of becoming pirates. The idea of targeting cruise ships - essentially giant, floating shopping malls - is inspired, and may give piracy the shot in the arm it needs. It's not just ironic but tremendously fitting that people who seek to holiday in the exclusive sequestration of an ocean-going hotel should be subject to such an elemental threat. One hesitates to suggest they deserve it, but maybe the excitement is good for them. I don't know about you, but if I had to spend six weeks on a cruise ship, the pirate attack would constitute a bit of a highlight. Perhaps in future a spot of pre-arranged privateering could be incorporated into the itinerary.

The young people of today could do worse than consider a career in piracy.

In a world run by fanatical ideologues, freebooting is a refreshingly self-serving pursuit, but it's still not an easy life. As I tell my kids: real pirates don't sit inside watching fuzzy copies of The Incredibles left here by the plasterer. They're out in the fresh sea air all day, harassing shipping.

-30-