erratic ambulatory patterns

The Odd and Erratic Ambulatory Patterns of Species H. Sapiens; Genus, Homo, Observed Particular to East/West Pedestrian Corridors Formed by the Nexus “Market Street” Bisecting the Urban Core of San Francisco, California, USA - by skirblog.

In other words, people, we don’t know how to even walk down the goddamn street. And before we even try to discuss issues of a larger and more complex nature ie: politics, ethics, science, coffee, we need to take a step back and figure out why the act of walking east to west down a street, god forbid north and south, causes so many of us so much confusion, pain and ultimate failure.

Forget why we drive like we do.  Why the price of gas is $4. Why we elected, then RE-fucking elected Bush; why we let our most holy corporations invade Iraq; sell guns, cigarettes, pollution and drugs?  There’s no way we can know the reasons behind any of these things until we know why we cannot walk down the freaking streets collectively in San Francisco without bumping into each other.

There is a strong disorienting force centered at Market Street from the Embarcadero, West (sup, JP!) toward Powell.  If you traverse this route you will notice mass confusion bordering on anarchy on the sidewalks. There is no logical flow, no agreed upon lanes for walking one way or the other, no passing strategies that don’t create strange ripple effects and whorls of confusion. Abrupt stopping, turning, weaving, pivoting and requisite dynamic cell phone yammering is encouraged and liberally employed.  Erratic maneuvering is not bound by economic or racial profiles.

Oddly the phenomenon dissipates the further south of Market Street you travel.  One block parallel south on Mission St, the mayhem abates slightly, enough that more standard “rights” and “lefts” are adhered to. Breakdowns occur primarily at intersections where the addition of opposing foot traffic crossing streets is enough to throw most H.S. Sapiens subjects into either aggressive non-cooperative patterns or even more randomized scattering.

Each successive block south tends to resolve closer to the established traffic patterns we are familiar with from urban centers like New York or Philadelphia.  By the time you encounter Howard or Folsom Streets, the phenomena has evaporated by factors of 50 or more.  Here you can almost imagine a society where the lowest and most basic levels of civilization can spring forth, where people have agreed to walk together in one direction or another, albeit either wearing leather chaps or pissing themselves, yet finally some progress can be made into higher consciousness areas like:

Coffee.

High consciousness area.  I have written before on my amateurish connoisseurship of beverages: tequila, beer and coffee. I thought I might have even known something about coffee, having visited Seattle during the pre-Starbuck’s golden days; or Peet’s #1 in Berkeley’s famed gourmet ghetto. I have also been in the coffee wastelands, Pittsburgh during the pre-Starbuck invasion of 1996, dark days where Maxwell House and Folgers reigned supreme. I have been through not one, but two Café Illy home espresso machines, trading up recently to the lovely Francis Francis X5. I will cross the street and pay double to get some Peets when Starbucks is offering free lattes right in front of my face. But really, it turns out, I didn’t know nuttin’ (I was gonna say, “beans”) about coffee, until finally, as was promised and prophesized, the mythical Blue Bottle Coffee opened up in the former alley of piss and disgust, across from our poor Kronikle building down there in San Francisco.

The initial buzz (oh, my! I didn’t plan that one!) on this new Blue Bottle Café, was that they somehow cajoled a cabal of secretive, high priest coffee lords in Japan to sell them one of their futuristic, mythical, halogen powered coffee siphon machines, only two of which, according to the New York Fucking Times, EXIST in the USA, the other being, you guessed it, New Fucking York, each one costing something like a billion dollars and performing coffee feats which defy the laws of gravity and thermodynamics. But that’s not what we actually learned about coffee at Blue Bottle. What we learned was we had never tasted coffee before because we ordered a cup of regular, drip, and our buds were blown, our consciousness altered and our definitions of coffee thrown into dissarray.

This drip isn’t coming outta no URN neither.  Nor air-pot, hotpot or carafe. No, it is individually ground when you pay your two dollars (and 17 cents for some reason), for it, then put into a filter and dripped, at its own pace, which is not quick or rushed, and which will be fussed over by a human barista, who oversees the dripping from start to finish, swirling and adding water when necessary. So there will be a wait, but a good wait, since you will have time to watch the various scientists work the mythic Japanese machine; or ponder the glass globules that rise next to it, which turn out to be some kind of iced coffee extractor, or something Eratosthenes used to determine the circumference of the Earth. Ahh, Eratosthenes.  After gaping at this for a spell, your coffee will be presented to you and you will not be prepared, I’m afraid, for the sensory experience you are about to have.

If you’re like me, (and god help you if you are) and love the smell of coffee, but have often been disappointed that it does not actually taste like it smells. Maybe its best that way. Maybe were not supposed to taste something so deep as coffee aroma. We wouldn't be able to handle its siren song, luring one away with wispy mocha tentacles to a perhaps unsafe place. The literal taste of coffee can certainly be wonderful, and often faintly echoes the aroma, or in tragic cases of bad coffee, outright contradicts it. Even the taste of Peets, as rich and wonderful as it can be, cannot seem to fully escape its origins as a charred product. But Blue Bottle has found the magic spot, the stopping point right before Peet’s char, the expression of the word, Mocha, the taste paralleling the smell.  Like wine it is spicy, fruity, alive. When I smell it and taste it I think of the Earth, but an Earth at a time I couldn’t possibly know of. That aint bad for a cup of joe.

Earth…

Is what I emerged from Aquarius Records the other day holding, specifically “Earth 2 - Special Low Frequency Version,” along with Sunn O)))’s “Flight of the Behemoth." This is what happens when you go into a store like Aquarius looking for Glenn Branca’s numbered symphonies and they are fresh out.  But you follow some logical moves down the bins and realize you wanna hear some guitar drone. And the drone is good, crunchy and thick. And s-l-o-w. And performed by dudes clad exclusively in druid like robes (which I hope is playful and ironic but I get the unsettled feeling that it is deadly serious...). You must be patient and listen to these bands in a different way than say, the Kills, not so much an active listening, but  an absorption of sound. The Kills, who’s new release, “Midnight Boom,” is being processed by the skir right now several thousand times in succession, is a keeper.  Oddly, my favorite tune on the thing is the “bonus track” “Midnight Train,” you can only get when you download it from iTunes, so another death knell for ye olde CD shoppe. (Expect Aquarius, where CD’s tend to be about $10 anyway, and you get their famously comprehensive descriptions, miniaturized right there on the covers, so its just like the Internet kids!  Aquarius is not afraid to take chances, we all know that, but shit, when I was browsing for guitar drone, some very nice, solid indie rock was playing in the store, reminded me of Silkworm or the Thermals maybe.  When I was paying for my Dark Metal (also nabbed the new Frank Black release), I was stunned and astounded to see REM’s new disc on the “now playing” stand.  “Has this been playing the whole time?” I asked the dude.  He just nodded sagely.  Dang, you never fucking know, do you? And I don’t even like REM, never did, and own exactly none of their music.) But the Kills bonus track starts off sounding a hell of a lot like the Cramps, which is always a good thing, then gets into a very tight rocking slot. The Kills don’t invite you in necessarily, they put up some walls, but they have some great shit to say about rock!  They are one of the truly successful “post modern” bands I can think of, and we’ll have to leave it at that for now.  Def. going to see them in May over in SF.

Cramps…

Were what I thought I heard the other day on Fourth St in Berkeley. But impossible, I thought. I’m on Fourth Street, home of Z-Gallerie, Anthropologie and lots of other stores that insist on spelling their names with “ie’s,” except our old friends, Down Home Records, where the dude was broadcasting some kind of giant Link Wray 4000 song CD comp on the people walking to and fro, most using Hummer-style, all terrain baby strollers to clear a path to the next scented candle or boutique paper shoppe.  I was stopped in my tracks (ill advised lest you want your toes amputated and your shins removed by the Hummers) and mesmerized by the kind of rockabilly, kind of punk strumming, and thought about how I sadly don’t own any Link Wray.  My only attempt to buy some Link Wray was about 20 years ago at one of Pittsburgh’s infamous used record retailers (Jerry’s, Recycler, Jims, or the one MLV (sup, Babe!) and I can’t remember the name of on Forbes nr. Criag in pre-gentrification Pittsburgh), urged on, as I often am, by Mark E. Smith who sang so earnestly about listening to Link Wray “every Saturday.” So I gets me the vinyl home and pull it out and it’s not Link Wray at all inside. It’s like the Ventures or something else… so wtf?   It only took the mearest mention of this to my long lost friend, again, sup MLV, who burned me a more manageable comp (23 songs should be enough for any sane man) of Link Wray, before I even had Limewire up and running. Thanks Link, Mike and of course Gearhead, who’s various incarnations: magazines, logo shirts and stickers, are now suddenly adorning my life.

Gear not-head.  My workhorse-like ’97 VW Jetta, the poor green one you see around town with all the Godzilla’s glued to the dashboard, and all the empty white Tic Tac cartridges scattered about, yes, the same one that I poured two bottles of brake fluid into its coolant reservoir, has just hit the 100K mile mark, no thanks to me. I’m not exactly a mechanic if you know what I mean, but I do have one of most elegantly designed and threatening looking set ups for playing my ipod over its radio.

Also a source of numeric pride is the skirblog itself, having just surpassed the 35,000th page view, and it only took four years or so. Yes a miniscule number compared to a lot of blogs and sites and free porn, etc., and factoring out Gina and Courtney and now MLV and his gang, and those good souls still in the ‘burgh (sup, Sam!), I can’t fathom who else is reading this. Don’t be afraid to write in to adore, laud, praise or correct, chastise or flame, so I’ll know you’re out there.

Fire.

If you did not like Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited, and many of you did not, you at least have to thank the guy for putting the Stone’s “Playing with Fire” back into our heads and hearts.  I liked the film, didn’t nec. LUV it on first viewing as with his two middle masterpieces, Tenenbaums and Rushmore; but remembered how well Life Aquatic improved on subsequent viewings. For Darjeeling, I watched it again the next day, thanks to my new best friend, Pay Per View. (Here’s a phenomena that needs exploration: Why would a person who enjoys watching movies at home, enjoys the ease and selection of Netflix, REFUSE to go and put a DVD into the gotdamn machine to watch it?  DVDs will be sitting there, while hours are spent flipping through the awful cable channels watching whatever comes on, Ultraviolet for the 11th time (LOVE YOU MILLA!); various halfs and parts of movies you’ve seen over and over again, when three unwatched DVDs sit right there glaring at you from their Netflix envelopes? It can’t be simple laziness can it? I mean, I am lazy, but do get off the couch to go to the bathroom, get iced tea, check my blog numbers, eat pistachio nuts, why wouldn’t I pop in the damn disc? But I won’t. And when I finally admitted this out loud to myself and others, I was happy. I cancelled Netflix because a system exists for people like me, people who only want to watch a movie they happen to find AT THE TIME, not one they’ve pre-planned to see, and that’s Pay Per View. Suddenly I wanted to see Darjeeling, so after I was sure I exhausted all the cable channels of potential Milla Jovavich sightings, I scrolled up to Pay Per View and ordered some Darjeeling even though this entails the use of a totally separate and counter-intuitive remote, that more often than not I have to get up off my ass to get out of the drawer, the same drawer which holds the unwatched DVDs. So any social psychologists out there want to comment on this, please do).

I am an unapologetic Wes Anderson apologist. I can only apologize for not seeing Darjeeling Limited in the theater. I do find things of value in his films, do extra work that I may not do for another filmmaker, as I did with Darjeeling, which Anderson himself calls “probably his least loved film.”  One reason for this “less love” I’ve discovered, is the departure it takes setting most of the action in the “real world” of India.  His other, more loved films are set in imaginary worlds, where whimsy and eccentricity make sense and have emotional weight: the alterno-schools of Rushmore; the alterno-New York of Tenenbaums the alterno-seas of Life Aquatic. But Darjeeling is set in a "real" India, and this seems to cause a disjunction between the quirkiness of the actors, who normally thrive in the alterno-worlds, and their flat connection to the real setting. It just doesn’t have the magic.  Yet Darjeeling leaves real India a few times, and those are its best scenes: the flashback to NY when the brothers try to retrieve their dead father’s car; the Monastery where their mother is hiding; and in the short prequel film, The Hotel Chevalier set in an alterno-French hotel. These are short visions of the characters in their natural habitats, where they thrive. Unfortunately when they’re taken out and put on a real train in real India, there is a noticeable letdown.

There is though a great scene in the monastery where the sons are reunited with their elusive mother. They sit in a circle while the Stones song, “Play With Fire” fires up as the camera pans to each character.  If you watch that scene a few times you start to wonder if the whole movie wasn’t in fact based on the lyrics to this song, and an imagined family that would have sprung from the lyrical one.  Multiple viewings also gives you a jones for the Stones, a jones you haven’t had in many, many years.  This spawned a fairly serious Stones jag that dominated my car and ipod for over a week. The result was the knowledge that right now in my life, my five favorite (apologies to the new, “Mr. Five,” Lavellablog) Stones songs are:

1.    Play with Fire
2.    Jigsaw Puzzle
3.    Monkey Man
4.    Parachute Woman
5.    Stray Cat Blues

That the majority of these come from Beggar’s Banquet says something, but other than that Beggar’s Banquet is my favorite Stones album I couldn’t tell you.

Back in childhood, the list would have read:

1.    Honky Tonk Woman
2.    Sympathy for the Devil
3.    Brown Sugar
4.    Satisfaction
5.    19th Nervous Breakdown / Get off of my Cloud (tie)

So a personal growth/change of character is encoded in the Stones songs, as it is in the film Darjeeling.

As I get up to get more pistachio nuts I realize that while its good to find an already shelled nut, say at the bottom of the bowl, it’s much better to crack one yourself before it. It just tastes better that way, and the reason why, is the answer to all my questions here.

Comments

[jeff t johnson]

well, the meds are working. nice screed, skirb. i tried to watch darjeeling recently, but you're right about jigsaw puzzle. it brings me joy to see that mes has called to you as well in praise of link wray. great line, and i've been meaning to check wray out for years because of it. earth 2 is marvelous and also baffling to house guests, who will ask "what are you doing here" in your own house. is sunn o)))) or whatever named after an earth amp, or vice versa? i will miss the tiny cards at aquarius and it will do me injury to miss the sunday dmv farmers market joint, which features a mobile blue bottle coffee jack station. maybe the best soy latte i've ever had repeatedly, and don't tell me i'm missing out on the drip. i'm sure it's good, but soy foam that tastes like marshmallows is 2 good 2 b tru.

peace out
ray gonne
r--------*

[sam]

besides these 3 (Jigsaw Puzzle, Monkey Man &
Parachute Woman) i'd add sweet black angel and loving cup and call it a day.
viva la'skirblog!

[Morty]

Skirb, how about this:
Sway
Dead Flowers
2000 Lightyears from Home
Jumpin Jack Flash
Gomper

BTW, I would have gone to Fiery Furnaces with you.
two current faves:
Opening Act--Drive by Truckers
Water in the Fuel- Fred Eaglesmith
Morty