Saturday, September 23, 2006

Love Parade

We just had an amazing afternoon at San Francisco's Love Parade, the American counterpart to Berlin's famous techno street party. We followed the techno-pumping floats and the happy happy people down Market Street and into the Civic Center, where tens of thousands of Love Paraders happy hardcore'd the into the early evening. I was especially enamored of the hot, hot drum stud, pictured below the Tutu Of Love. Below Drum Stud is Eddie and Doug, kindly posing with SF City Hall. And at the bottom, JMG readers John, Mike and Dennis, who flagged me down to say hello. Here's a fun video I took in front of one of the floats. Happy happy disco dancers under the impossibly cerulean California sky. Another "only in San Francisco" experience.

Dressing Room


Friday, September 22, 2006

SF In The Sun


We did a long tour around the Golden Gate today, starting out at Cliff House and the Sutro Baths, then over to Fort Miley and Eagle Rock, where we found an elaborate rock maze laid out on the cliff, which drops off about 300 feet at the edge of the maze. Ed was determined to put his feet in the Pacific Ocean, which he accomplished on the rocky beach under Eagle Rock. Lots of rock totems everywhere, so cool. We hit the Marin Headlands, then had lunch in Sausalito before coming back into the city for Coit Tower, which is seen in the bottom picture, from our hotel.

SF: Day 1 Recap

San Francisco seems particularly well-scrubbed these days. I've only been accosted by grimy, raving, lunatic homeless persons twice. That's about 1/3 of the normal nutter-per-block ratio that I recall when I lived here.

We started the trip with a visit to the Castro, of course, lunching in the open windows of Harvey's. I had the Sylvester burger and boy did it make me feel mighty real. Coffee and cruising at Bearbucks afterwards, as required by law. Oh, it was a weird to find this for sale at A Different Light. After the Castro, I toured Ed and Tim around the Upper Market/Twin Peaks area, dropping in at my old roommate Robert's fabulous house in Cole Valley. Last night we hit the Eagle, where the talent was a weird chick playing Anarchy In The UK on her ukelele, and the Powerhouse, which was its usual riot of excessive tattoos and questionable body piercing decisions. Oh, and we've seen a ponyboy already, and the fair is still 3 days away. We've rented a convertible and today I'm showing the NYC boys around the Marin Headlands and Sausalito. I'll try not to bore y'all with too many touristy SF pics like the one below.

Morning View - SOMA


Thursday, September 21, 2006

Morning View - Helmsley Building

Built in 1929 above Grand Central Terminal to serve as the headquarters of the New York Central railroad companies, the Helmsley Building was sold a few months ago to the royal family of Dubai.

Open Thread Thursday

Could you live without your cellphone?
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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The Novice Contestant

The Powerhouse, San Francisco, 1999

I'm at the Powerhouse for the Mr. Powerhouse Leather contest, whose winner will compete in Mr. San Francisco Leather during the Leather Week buildup to Folsom Street Fair. My buddies Doug and Leif are standing with me on our "perch", the little raised platform on front of the second floor of the bar, from which we can survey the entire room. Over six years in SF, I will probably spend at least 200 evenings standing on that very spot.

The leather contest is being emceed by the eternal Mister Marcus, San Francisco's (and indeed all of leatherdom's) grand dame of leather pageantry. As is often the case for these contests, the festive mood of the bar's customers are occasionally drowning out Mister Marcus as he questions the contestants, despite several acidic requests for the crowd to settle down and pay attention. "Gentlemen! Please! This is your Mr. Powerhouse!"

The usual suspects shuffle through their question and answer portions as Mister Marcus grills them about their leather expertise, their kinks, their fetishes. We've seen them all before, these guys. All of them perennial contestants, consistent non-winners. Like the rest of the bar, we're pretty much ignoring the contest.

Suddenly, things liven up a bit. A really hot, really drunk guy has been cajoled into entering the contest. We've never seen him before tonight, although we'd noticed him staggering hotly around the bar before the contest. He clumsily climbs onto the stage and stands there swaying slightly (and hotly) as Mister Marcus peers skeptically over his reading glasses, from behind his podium.

The guy is clearly a novice on the leather scene and Mister Marcus gets annoyed after the contestant gives several clueless answers to some basic leathersex questions. Finally, Mister Marcus shifts to the basics. "Well, can you at least tell us if you're a top or a bottom or switch?"

"Um, a...top?"

"You don't seem too sure of that."

"Top. Definitely."

"OK, now we're getting somewhere. And while you're topping somebody, what scenes do you get into?"

"Scenes?"

Mister Marcus rolls his eyes. "Yes. Scenes. You know, like role playing, kinks, whatever. Do you do any of that?"

The contestant cocks his head, "Um, yeah man, I get dirty and all that."

Mister Marcus' eyes glint. He casts a conspiratorial look towards the audience and leaps on this opening. "Oh?? You get dirty? So you're into scat??" The audience laughs.

The contestant furrows his brow. "Scat?"

"Yes. Scat! You do know what scat IS, don't you?"

The contestant looks at the floor for a second, then snaps his head up. "Oh! Right! I know what that is! That's where you do the dude.....and then you KILL him!"

If anything is said after that, nobody hears it. The screams of laughter from the audience go on and on and on.

Tomorrow: Folsom Bound

Folsom Street
On the way to Polk and Castro
You don't find them finer
Freedom, freedom is in the air, yeah
Searching for what we all treasure : pleasure
Cycles, cycles in the night shining bright
Bright neon nights tell a glory story
Leather!
Leather! Leather! Leather, baby!
Levi's and T's are the best now all right

Dress the way you please, a
nd put your mind at ease
It's a city known for its freedom
Cycles shining bright, b
reak the silence of the night
Inhibitions? No!
You don't need them!
No! No! No!

San Francisco,
San Francisco
City by the Bay, yeah

You've got me

Download: San Francisco - Village People, 1977

Less Protesters. More Cops.

One of the neat little features of my click-tracking program is that it tells me how many times a particular link is clicked or how many times a photo has been embiggened. This morning I'm a little amused to see that of the eight photos of yesterday's Iran/Iraq/Pakistan protest at the UN that I posted, so far 611 of you sick puppies felt the need to enlarge the photo of the motorcycle cops. The next most popular of the eight pics was enlarged only five times. It does help to know what the readers are interested in. Less protesters. More cops.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Bush Closes Down Midtown

Leaders of the world are sitting a few blocks away from me, as George Bush is just about to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. All of Midtown East is locked down. Roads are closed and traffic is gridlocked everywhere. There are thousands of cops in evidence, and I've noticed some "businessmen" wearing sunglasses and earpieces as they stand impassively on the corners. I'm heading out to get some pictures of the big protest march on Dag Hammarskjold Plaza.

UPDATE: While President Bush was at the podium making his perfectly cromulent case to the General Assembly, I found myself caught on the fringes of the very highly secured perimeter of the United Nations, where the NYPD twice singled me out to demand my photo ID on a public street crowded with hundreds of other onlookers, where I was accused of being in the CIA by a woman holding a pro-Iran banner, and where I very nearly got stuck in the middle of a spiraling confrontation between a couple of hundred pro-Musharraf and anti-Musharraf ex-pat Pakistanis.

And They All Meet On Craigslist

An interesting new study from the New York City Health Department revealed that almost 10% of the men who self-identified as straight, also reported having had sex with at least one man in the previous year. Most of those men also reported being married. They were also less likely to have been tested for HIV or to have practiced safe sex. The title of the study is "Discordance Between Sexual Behavior and Self-Reported Sexual Identity."

Morning View - Bleecker Street

How'd you like this staring into your bedroom window all night?

Monday, September 18, 2006

One Week Later

Manhattan, September 18th, 2001

In 2001, I lived in Chelsea on 21st Street near 8th Avenue. My third floor apartment overlooked the playground of P.S. 11, the William T. Harris K-5 School. A few days after the attack, on the outside of the wall around the playground, the school began posting drawings that the children had made, presumably allowing them to express their fears and anxieties about the attack by letting them make paintings.

Every morning and afternoon, I'd pass that wall of the children's drawings. And I'd be forced to slow, then stop, then linger. No pedestrian was able to walk past the drawings and ignore them, not one. We'd stand there silently, shoulder to shoulder, our eyes shifting from one taped-up depiction to the next. The younger children used familiar motifs with arrows pointing to stick-figures of "Mommy" and "Daddy", but with the unfamiliar addition of planes and flames. The older children depicted the towers themselves, often with explosions or people falling from the sky. One repeating theme was a tiny figure in the corner of the picture, with an arrow pointing to it, and the word, "Scared."

On Tuesday, September 18th, one week after the attack, I was heading past the school around 9pm just as a violent rainstorm began. I went around the corner to pick something up from the deli and when I came back past the school, I could see that the rain was ruining all the children's drawings. Some of them had fallen down into puddles, others were turning into runny messes of non-toxic paint.

A woman walking past exclaimed, "Oh, no! All those kids' drawings are being ruined!"

I said, "Yeah, it's a shame. But I guess the school wanted to leave them out here day and night as long as they lasted."

She and I looked at each other for a second, then she said, "Do you think it would be alright if we saved a few of them for ourselves? They're just gonna be piles of goo in a few more minutes."

I agreed, and we both selected two drawings and removed them from the wall. The first one I pulled down was nearly soaked all the way through and I had to be careful not to let it fall apart in my hands. When I got home, I laid it across the radiator in my living room and let it dry for a few days.

The artist, a kid named Jesus, captured all the key elements of that morning. The towers, the two planes, the figures running from the buildings. He even seems to have included one of the jumpers, leaping headfirst from the north tower, indicated by it's rooftop antenna. Note the unhappy sun looking down at the scene.

The other picture I took off that wall still brings tears to my eyes, and I've looked it a hundred times.This picture didn't get as wet as the other one, but it's still a bit hard to pick up that both towers are crying as they clutch each other.

After I brought these pictures home, it rained all night. On my way to work the next morning, I saw a janitor moving down the school wall with a rolling garbage can, picking up all the soggy pictures that lay ruined in the mud puddles and ripping down the few that still clung to the wall.


Morning View - Two Beauties


Jeanine Pirro

During the primary campaign for NY Attorney General, in which Andrew Cuomo earned the Democratic slot over Mark Green and Sean Patrick Maloney, I paid scant attention to the Republican side of the campaign. This morning I saw an interesting campaign ad during the Today Show, from the Republican AG nominee Jeanine Pirro, in which she pledged to "protect gays from gay-bashing". I don't think I've seen that from a Republican before, not on TV at least. The times, they are a-changin'.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Flaccid Focus

At least 15 tries and I didn't get one in-focus shot. So much for the "Me & The ESB" series. And you'd think that a badly unfocused photo would hide somebody's wrinkles. You'd think that, but that would be wrong thinking. Anyway, maybe if you cross your eyes, you can tell that that's the Empire State Building on the far right.