435 street art, authenticity, and survival


As Mark Twain said, "the difference between the right word, and the almost right word..."

Oh Fnnch. You are an "emigrant." The pass on Highway 80 between the Midwest where you grew up, and San Francisco, where you found success parroting the grass roots street art scene? 

That pass is called "Emigrant Pass."

Whoops.

Authenticity is one of the corner stones of  San Francisco culture. In New York, it's totally ok to reinvent yourself and be a striver. In Los Angeles, it's expected. In San Francisco, that makes you a poser. Here, the goal is to dig deep and be the most you you can be, while at the same time, still just one of the happy humble crowd.

These guys are actual immigrants, and I can't say I've ever seen exactly their style (although maybe it's more known in Mexico City), but they look like they will have absolutely no problem fitting in.

So remember my infectious disease doctor friend who said he read something that made him think the CoV-2 virus escaped that lab in Wuhan?

The other part of my friend's story involved some miners dying after being infected in a cave about 1600km from Wuhan. Keep tuned, let's see if that detail emerges...

So, by the way, if it did escape, that's not really something to get angry about. It was likely an accident. The facility exists to try and prevent this stuff. They probably have prevented more pandemics than they accelerated, right?

In a city that's gone from a wild and free artist's paradise to a buttoned down bunch of wealth hoarders, the Muni fair enforcement officers might just be my least favorite part of recent SF.

So what will all of those newly hired pseudo-cops do instead of busting people for not paying $3 for a ride that's slower than walking?

Oh sweet, they're becoming conductors again.

File under: it gets better

Remember when Sinead O'Connor shocked the world by tearing up a picture of the pope on SNL?

Fucking brilliant. "I don't know no shame, I feel no pain."

While we are saluting rock legends of the '90s...

Yesterday was the anniversary of Bradley Nowell's passing. 

Lou Dog made it several more years.

So, people have lived in the desert southwest of the current USA for ten thousand or more years. Sometimes, highly organized, sometimes less so.

Now scientists are tracking those two states, society versus dispersal, and comparing them to drought. And what they've found is it took both drought and fighting to drive everyone apart. Environmental collapse on it's own didn't do it.


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