Public Art

I had never heard of samosa soup before I went to San Francisco last weekend, but the smell of the place that makes it, and its name, Burma Superstar, were enough to make me wait over three hours in the chilly bay air to try it. Even then it was touch and go. The waiting list was pages long and among the hipsters and Bay Area veterans gathered outside, there was a growly, animal look being exchanged, like the kind I can imagine hyenas give each while they muscle in behind the cheetahs for a chance at the red innards of the splayed zebra.

The restaurant allowed us to leave a cell phone number for a contact, so Pants and I, his friend R., and our hosts, my college roommate K. and her girlfriend V., wandered around the neighborhood and got beers and poked around in a shop called Park Life, which sold the kinds of design/graffiti/urban snark picture books that melt my nerdy heart. Eventually, though, we ended up back at the restaurant standing in front of their large picture window in a rich cloud of food aroma, watching a malnourished foursome of hipsters leisurely devour their food and give each other frequent obnoxious high fives over the table. I couldn't help but feel they were thumbing their raw, pierced noses at me and my hungry fivesome, and it was all I could do not to bang on the window and say something obscene and confrontational. Such was the quality of this food, and its apparent popularity-- I was willing to fight for it.

Luckily, it didn't come to that, and we spent a perfect weekend taking a huge graffiti walking tour of the Mission District, riding a trolley to Chinatown, and just generally soaking up the ambient culture of one of America's best cities. I feel like you can tell a city's heart in its tolerance of unsanctioned public art, and San Francisco's is vibrant and bright. Even its less than flattering portrayals of cops as cartoonish bullies (one mural had a cartoon dog cop that looked like Bluto from Popeye and another wall was stamped all over with blue stencils of a cop with a prominent billy club) were prominent and undisturbed. The Mission is home to Precita Eyes, which is an artists' collective famous for its murals, many of which reflect the ethnic make-up of the neighborhood with representations of the immigrant's struggle and of famous community leaders like Cesar Chavez.

While the murals were wrenchingly gorgeous-- I'm still amazed outdoor paint can be so vivid and lustrous, and some day, some day I'm going to spend months on end painting big things for free-- my favorite kind of graffiti is the tiny kind. I love tiny stencils fitted to the panels on electric boxes hidden in alleyways. I love the pasted up paper cut-outs that lurk in abandoned doorways and flake away like spider webs in the rain. I love carefully placed, well designed stickers that aren't selling anything, and I love the phrases that catch on and go viral, popping up in all kinds of handwriting in all kinds of cities. My favorite example is the phrase "You are beautiful," which I first noticed in hurricane-flattened Pensacola when I was an off-balance, newly unemployed newly-wed. The phrase did wonders for the city, and I loved hunting it. I've since seen it on the back of a restroom door in Monterey, and I think it's a lovely thing to plan and hide in public spaces.

Seeing K. and V. was also restorative. There's no limit to the value I place on having friends in different cities. It feels like an anchoring web that much stronger for covering vast distances, like if I need to, all I have to do is strum a string of it and a line of thought, a light conversation, or an outpouring of support starts flowing in all directions. Maybe it's something like being a water resource manager for a naturally dry state like California-- there's this huge system of dams and channels and pumps, and even though you may be way out in the middle of nowhere, water comes if you need it. My friends are reservoirs, and they've never let me down.

It's a week until Pants returns. This month-long absence hasn't been as hard as the last one, which had me weeping at Aqualung songs and pulling over in traffic wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. Mostly, I think, this is because school has started and my job has become like a squalling newborn, permanently needy in shocking new ways every day. Last week I had my first 70 hour week in a long time, and the recognition of a weekend as purely for triage was dismaying, but left little room for missing Pants. (I love how the end of that sentence works two ways).

At week's end I also put in an appearance at a bar party at a gay club whose reputation for flamboyance has far preceded it. I was sorely disappointed, but tried not to show it to my classmates, who are devoted to this bi-monthly event. Mostly I just danced and surreptitiously checked my watch (as surreptitiously as one can in strobe lights) and felt very, very old. Maybe it's being married, but I feel absolutely none of the old thrill of simply being seen at a club. Undeniably, one of the main points of clubbing for me used to be the element of display, but now that part is so thoroughly beside the point that I feel like undue weight has shifted over to the side where I expect to see entertaining things. And really all I saw was people being seen, and it was thoroughly boring. Also, I've found that mixed drinks are far less delicious when they have to be enjoyed in heels and around cigarettes in deafening, sub-par music. You almost have to drink to sooth your vocal chords.

Now's the part where I shake my cane at the kids on my lawn.