June 21, 2005
In which a bicycle is locked up
This sequence of still photographs assembled into a Flash movie and set to Vivaldi's Four Seasons (witty, that) illustrates a phenomenon similar to the one John Glassie documents in his recently-published photo-study, Bicycles Locked to Poles.
In which I need a camera
UPDATE: Anna snapped the sculpture on Steiner.
This morning outside the café, an unsurprising Lower Haight tableau of faeces, -- canine, but I wouldn't make any assumptions -- was dressed-up with pictures of a smiling W, neatly pinned to the poop with toothpicks. I tried to photograph with my point-and-shoot, but it reported "Memory Card Error", and then I pulled out the cameraphone, but it crashed and restarted when I pushed the "Capture" button.
On the subject of outsider art, the neighbours are marshalling to stem the tide of awful, amateurish graffiti tags. Despite semi-polite pleas (such as the posters placed on several Haight St. business windows asking to "Please stop tagging our windows") and the grotesquely-defaced murals (a few years ago, we lost the colourful mural on the retaining wall where Divisadero crosses Duboce to taggers: now ditto for the less-appealing, but still a carefully-considered piece of public art, on the side of the New Santa Clara Market at Scott and Haight), the taggers do not stop. There seems little rhyme or reason for the tagging: it recurs on some buildings, but almost never on others. Typically, buildings with large expanses of a single, light color suffer the most (with the exception of the Horse Love): Jack's Records, the large Victorian apartment building that houses Maire Rua, and the forlorn '50s cinderblock atrocity at Pierce and Haight.
Someone tucked a flyer into the grate of my building last night, encouraging residents to appeal to our Supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi.