April 2013 – Page 2 – Baghdad By The Bay

April 5, 2013December 18, 2021

Defenestration To Be Demolished?

I’ve always loved the word defenestration. My fourth grade teacher Ms. Hallacker used to say it when kids in the class didn’t behave the way she wanted them to but since we were fourth graders we didn’t know that defenestration meant being thrown out of a window. Since it was only boys she would yell, I’m going to defenestrate you! and the word rhymed with castration we all assumed the worst. Every boy understands castration for some reason.

This memory leads me to a building at 6th and Howard that has been an art project since 1997. This date surprised me since I felt like it had been there much longer than that. Brian Goggin created the work and now the city is having talks about demolishing the abandon building with furniture and appliances stuck all over the outside. It’s a sparse minimalistic work that unfortunately [in my mind] doesn’t live up to it’s potential. The best way to see it is from the street which means that you have to drive by it or get hit by cars and that only gives you a few seconds to take in the bizarreness of the place.

Your other option is to stand across the street or right underneath some of hangings, but then you can’t really take it all in at it’s best. The objects stuck onto the side of the large building are rather small and appear at times to get lost in the wash of despair of the emptiness of the abandon building. Geez, I’m beginning to sound like an art critic now. I suppose college did pay off for me.

The city is debating whether or not to demolish the building possibly to replace it with mid-market condos. No one’s saying what might go there yet, but the sad story is that to many destroying public artwork will bring the area up. Not so much for the artwork, but the fact that it’s art on a decaying building that could get more use than being an empty shell. If you think about it, it’s probably one of the most expensive artwork installations in the world given what San Francisco real estate goes for even in the bad parts of town.

I tried to do some digging to get more information on the piece, but other than a sparse website, like the artwork itself it’s tough to find anything. I was hoping that Herb Caen had something to say about it, but he died just before the piece was finished, though I won’t make any correlations between the two events. Overall I think it is a piece of art that has outlived its time in San Francisco and if it were to reappear then I think they should find a smaller place where you could add more stuff falling out of windows and better viewing angles to encourage people to be able to appreciate it more.

April 3, 2013December 18, 2021

The House On Telegraph Hill

It’s time to look at some more San Francisco movies and I did a little searching for some other than Bullitt and I found one I had never heard of called, The House on Telegraph Hill. It’s a 1951 movie so it doesn’t have the campiness of the 60’s movies, but there’s still a good car scene the type that you can only make in San Francisco.

If you want to read a synopsis of the movie I suggest you check out the write up at Wikipedia.org since that’s pretty accurate. Let’s just say in the cliff notes version it has Nazis, poison and car brake failure.

OK, Nazis, poison, car brakes fail…Wait, car brakes fail? Must be a good time to introduce the car scene. It seems like there was a time when if you filmed a movie in San Francisco that you had to have a car scene. This was the car driving around all crazy on the verge of crashing and if you were lucky they would drive out of Golden Gate Park and drive off the piers at the Wharf. Geography was always an after thought in movies filmed in SF and that’s usually the fun part when you can tell that Golden Gate Park does not exit onto Fisherman’s Wharf or some other strange place.

Car scenes like this are for the die hard residents who know San Francisco backwards and forwards. Just looking at the clip below I saw streets that several of my friends have lived on now or in the past. For me at least, the car scenes are why I like watching movies or TV shows filmed in SF.

April 1, 2013December 18, 2021

Juniper-Serra Or How To Talk Like A San Franciscan

People have debated as to whether or not there is such a thing as a San Francisco accent and I wasn’t sure myself until I started announcing class in College. I was introduced to Henry Leff our teacher who showed us that there is definitely a San Francisco accent.

More so than the accent is what people talk about. If you’re from here or want to sound like you’re from here there are two questions you need to know:

1. Where are you from?

If you’re asked this it’s probably that you told a native you’re from San Francisco which comes with the follow up question, where are you from? It’s not that they didn’t hear you the first time, but that they want to know what district or area you live in. That used to tell people a lot about you, but things have changed over the years. It used to be when some one would find out my family is Italian they’d ask, are you from the Marina? Not so much anymore [yes, my family did live in the Marina before buying their house and after moving out of North Beach.] The Mission used to mean you were hispanic and not a hipster. The Sunset and Richmond meant you were a closet suburbanite with one foot in the city and one foot out. Sea Cliff, Nob Hill and Lake Street meant you had money. The next question you’ll get asked is:

2. What school did you go to?

This is important as it refers to your High School. Again, it used to mean more about who you were than it does today, but it’s still asked. It’s more important if you went to a Catholic school, but public schools told you a lot about the type of person you were. It also tells about the people you would hang out with.

3. Never call it Frisco.

This should have been first, but it’s pretty much a given. You can call it SF, you can call it the City, but you never call it Frisco. I don’t care who you are.

Now, how do San Franciscans speak? This was the tricky part. We kind of smash words together in an supercalifragilisticexpealidocious kind of way. It’s a bit of a lag and a slurring of words so that you’re not sure where one ends and the other starts. San Jose becomes san-osay and Santa Clara becomes sanna-clerah. Very little emphasis on the hyphen.

Then there is the mangling of words. You can tell how long someone has been in San Francisco by the lack of street identifiers in directions. While we have streets and avenues that are numbered, most places you leave it out because there’s no what telling someone to go to 2nd and Howard would mean 2nd Avenue. Street number always comes before the name as well.

As for mangling names, Junipero Serra Boulevard wasn’t pronounced like it was two Spanish words until I met someone who was Hispanic that actually spoke Spanish [I’ve been here along time, can you tell?]. We always called it Juniper-serra like it was one word smashed together and no boulevard either. This comes from people who’ve been in San Francisco for many years just like the old military base is called the Persidio, not Presidio. In general Hispanic street names are fairly anglicized unless you’re Hispanic and speak Spanish on a regular basis. Taraval Street sounds Terror-vel and Quintara Street is Quin-terror not keen-tah-rah. I guess you could say we kind of talk like we’ve got marbles in our mouths a bit, but then people throw street names at us like Gough Street which is Goff, not Go.

You’ll have to find people who are at least second generation and then ask their parents to talk to experience it. Once you hear it you’ll realize that it is a kind of strange accent, but it’s just another way to tell who the true San Franciscans are.