Alemany Bus Graveyard

I went to the Alemany Bazaar this past weekend looking for some galoshes. You never know when the next rain is going to hit in this city, and my old bones can't take another embarrassing fall to the street, all these fuckers darting around looking all scared and worried, thinking that I broke my spine in half. I wouldn't feel so ashamed if they didn't look so damn pitiful about it. Anyway, my old galoshes just got too muddy. Sooner or later my old ass is going to drop dead, and I better be wearing some clean galoshes to match my clean underwear.

After finding my perfect pair at the far corner of the bazaar, I was attracted to these rusted buses over by a shed that were painted with all these bright pinks, blues, and greens. Wow, what memories they brought back of my Grateful dead acid trip days! I haven't thought about those times in a long while. I got closer and realized the colors were more like pale rusted over colors. I suppose the sunlight and my distance had given the hues an iridescent aura.


Just look at these slumbering beasts! Huge hunks of metal, rubber, and glass all mashed together to form some kind of four wheeled centipede creature that used to wind around pavement streets, up hills and through valleys. Now they look like they're in hibernation, preparing for a metamorphosis into something extraordinary, some strange animal with wings and new colors, fluttering around looking all soft and light despite their size.


Or maybe they'll just waste away in this graveyard, penetrated by the toll the elements take on them, occasionally decorated by wistful paint.

Imagine if an organic creature was born with wheels instead of legs.


I'd really love to steal one of these and drive it around for a bit.

The Stakes of Warm Water Cove

Cyrus' piece on Warm Water Cove, Sun Sludge, reminded me of a ridiculous graffiti cleanup event that occurred in August 2007 at that very location. Considering six months have passed by since the ballistic whitewashing festival of a district that was once considered a bombing oasis, I find myself at an opportune moment to measure the projected success of these operations.


Taking a trip to the Cove, I noticed that the same industrial junk still litters the grass and the waters. The old port is still crumbling, barbed wire placed haphazardly throughout the environs, as if the very sight of glistening steel spikes is supposed to intimidate park goers from entering hidden obscene locations. Stay away from this part of the park, it's not gentrified yet!

When the tides are low, the towering truck tires still rise to the rocky shore, covered in a drippy brown grease, pushing out into the horizon of Oakland's purple skyline.

Despite all the ruckus, Warm Water Cove is still unabashedly beautiful.

While a good portion of the walls are plastered with a glowering greenish gray paint, the graffiti placed at more difficult to reach locations still remain blazing strong. New aerosol puffs and lines spiral out of the cracking buff paint with the vigor of the weeds that spring forth from the ground.

Graffiti art always prospers in the areas most neglected by burgeoning commercial interests, untainted by a neutral taste for cleanliness and strictly rigid geometry, unafraid of man's submission to the forces of nature, boldly accepting our ephemeral destiny with a bright name on a wall, fading away day by day, the wall itself eventually decaying into the Earth's crust from where it once came.

Some remnants of the homeless that took refuge in these lands remain; shopping carts, discarded tent posts, and shaggy wool blankets. Occasional needles shine in the sunlight between the rocks. Discarded machine parts coalesce in the thick waters, congregating together with the plastic trash and decomposing sea life that washes up to the shore.

So it seems that the proposed cleanup project of Warm Water Cove in preparation for dense residential development of the Central Waterfront has not completely taken its course. Community groups chose to wash away the artistic life of the abandoned seaport, strip the cove of its active human elements, while they threw a blind eye to the myriad pieces of toxic waste and industrial junk that still thrive in the Cove.


It seems that the murals of graffiti artists are more threatening to San Francisco's redevelopment projects than the factories that continue to deposit pollutants into the Bay. Even though the industry causes the predominance of environmental destruction to the Cove, these businesses still have the sort of economic interests for which the San Francisco Planning Department can accommodate.

On the other hand, the City does not know how to accommodate graffiti artists. Gripped by the theory that unofficial murals plastered on walls lead to a neighborhood's downward turn to the worst kind of blight, the City has adopted a rigorous city-wide graffiti cleanup policy that requires private homeowners and businesses to whitewash defaced property within 30 days of the surface marking or face harsh penalties. These policies exist on top of a huge tax payer budget for public graffiti removal as well as California's three strike policy that locks up many writers for years.

The argument is that graffiti is a quality of life crime that depreciates a typical citizen's style of living. However, under what guidelines do we determine the interests of the typical citizen and how do we judge this concept of normalcy? If graffiti alienates and intimidates the typical San Franciscan then how does residential redevelopment of the waterfront projected by The Blue Greenway, from the China Basin to the Souther Border, effect the San Franciscans that already live there? Will it not alienate them from the world with which they are familiar?

Who will be displaced and pushed out of San Francisco by these "community" redevelopment projects that transform historic working class neighborhoods into bustling commercial districts, which play into the developers' vision of what this city should become? Is it not absurd that the redevelopment of a neighborhood for the sake of that very community first requires a whitewashing of the artistic expression of those people who live in and contribute to the existing vibrancy of that community?


Silencing the people opens up the space to quietly push those people completely out of the equation. The concept of neutral public space, baptized by the washing over of painted names on the walls, an acidic purification of the organically expressed old to prepare for the regulated construction of the dazzling new, is determined by the narrow interests of those with the money to develop the city. No matter one's opinion of graffiti as vandalism or art or anything in-between, the math simply does not add up. To the quote the seminal De La Soul album, Stakes is High.

Electric Claustrophobia

Even though this city rests nestled along the lightness of the bay, where the morning fog typically burns up by high noon allowing the sun to grace us with its shining rays of heat, heralding the dusky pollutants out of the air, while the buildings rise just tall enough to not be too imposing, at the exact height to inspire awe without intimidation, as I shift my glance to the many hilltop roofs, I wonder what extraordinary lives take place in the softly set windows, peering through the coalescing triangles and rectangles of Muni's electric power lines that drops like a pocked canopy over the distant sky, capturing me wholly in its grasp like a spider's finely spun web, O the homely ceiling of the streets, cementing my saunter thickly into the cracked pavement, pushing a hustling tension into my sardine packed veins, as I shoot my eyes around, astounded at how flawlessly these contradictory elements fit together to form such wildly delicate beauty.

Sound Lesson 3: ESG

Before we get on to the very important lesson of the week, I'd like to welcome to Crooks and Grannies a new addition to the team, Cyrus the Humble, but as far as I'm concerned, I'll call him Cyrus the Magnificent... Humble the Magnificent? I think Edan already beat me to that. So, it seems that the trinity is complete, Cyrus will be taking care of writing imagery and recording some sounds, and that will hopefully turn into a cohesive exploratory project of San Francisco.

And yo, Granny Wesson where you at? Besides that, if D-Rock ever gets his act together, then he can join the team for an occasional punch to the face. Get off your turntables and start writing! Or at least throw me a mix, son. Enough of that, let's get to the program.


The saga of the art-funk ensemble ESG (Emerald Sapphire Gold) begins with a healthy dose of South Bronx mythology that necessarily gives birth to anything seminal in the world of Hiphop. So the story goes, streetwise Mother Scroggins figured that she could keep her four daughters out of the mean BX streets by hooking them up with some instruments to jam with. Does this not sound like an Afrika Bambaataa remedy for street violence? Maria took the congas and negotiated the vocals, Renee handled the guitar, Valerie beat on the drums, and their friend Leroy Grover strummed the bass until the youngest sister Deborah took over.

The Scroggins sisters swooped into the downtown NY scene where they found a medley of influences in Hiphop, post-punk, new wave, and house during a time in music history when the boundaries of the genres weren't so cemented into place. Inspired by the evolving sonic zeitgeist the band developed an enigmatic sound boasting complex poly-rhythms laced together with pop guitar hooks that waft breezily over a resounding bass line.

Their first single was produced by the legendary Martin Hannett of Joy Division allure in 1981, the self-titled debut EP released in America on 99 Records (the same label as Liquid Liquid) and Factory Records in England. Hannett's keen ear for body wrenching rhythms emphasized by steady abysmal voids informed ESG's distinctive sound for the rest of their 30 year career.

So who sampled ESG? Their original Hannett produced single "UFO", a sweaty groove fitting its name due to the works of an ominous fast pasted guitar pluck that sounds like an extraterrestrial police siren cut over a clamoring drum break, reaches toward Funky Drummer notoriety in the sample game. Big Daddy Kane, The Beastie Boys, EPMD, Madlib, 3rd Bass, Pete Rock, Public Enemy, even indie rockers The Liars - and in fact, any list that claims to cover the definitive archive eventually admits defeat by adding a new track that escaped everyone's aural grasp. So I won't even try it.

This one resonating cut may serve as the defining element of the brand of aggressive, strong headed Hiphop that slices your eardrums into pieces. Just peep the recent additions of Dilla's "Geek Down" off the Donuts LP or Edan's "The Science of the Two" with Insight off Beauty and the Beat.

So why does ESG not get the James Brown love, you know that credited and compensated love, that they deserve? The group addressed this issue with their 1992 EP Sample Credits Don't Pay Our Bills. They recently called it quits while Renee Scroggins hopes to take more seriously her production of other artists.


Soul Jazz's Universal Sound revisited the band's illustrious career with the release of the powerhouse compilation, ESG: A South Bronx Story. Don't forget to help pay ESG's bills by copping the second chapter of the Story, Rarities, released in Nov. 2007.

The Sun Sludge

A smoldering San Francisco sun hardens the slushy waste into a cement paste, bubbling thick with mutant moss and oily rubber scraps. These chunky waters never expected a sun so sweltering, the microwaved air sticking to my skin like hot molasses, absorbed heavily into my dusty bones. Typically a cool wind sways over the gray sludge, washing away the sweating aroma of caked combustion and lingering sewage, allowing the fog to refreshingly bathe your body in its soft mist.

But today, the horizontal rays of the white sun beam down onto the egg yoke interior of the sludge, boiling up the forgotten junk to its surface, heralding in the sad ascension of industrial waste and foreboding weaponry. The seconds stretch like rubber bands, bound to give in and break at any moment. An auspicious beginning and a lonely end.

A rusty shopping cart lies on its side floating atop the water’s brownish puss slightly higher than its brother showing the wrinkled age of the elements, sinking into the slime like a juiced up needle into bumpy flesh, its plastic melting away, drying hard, and then melting once again in a trudging cycle. They surely belonged to wandering nomads, pitching tented homes in the near vicinity, and then pushed out to continue their eternal odyssey by the patrolling authorities, hardly marred by the nauseating stink of this place, a perfume that tells stories of the distant land known as home.

A sinuous aorta cuts across the land, trickling lightly with an oily grin, splitting off into narrower tributaries by a sun bleached construction cone that still wears the pinkish remnants of its loud orange past. Even the barbed wire and chain fence constructed to ward off visitors have decayed and fallen into the pit, catching greasy feathers and blackened twigs in their iron spikes, decomposing calmly under the pitiless sun and screeching herons.

The seagulls sit on the sun pocked boulders that form the boundaries of the cove – cradling the corroded timber columns that once held up a bustling pier ushering in cargo ships to the bursting industry, the glorious Port of San Francisco – then waft over the crumbling concrete land buttressed by eroding steel platforms dripping with its liquid rust, only to make a hungry return to the cascading rocks.

They call it Warm Water Cove, a land where bright graffiti murals painted with swirling letters once littered the warehouse walls and the cement factory fences, now buffed over by a long abandoned feces grey that mirrors the mossy sewage of the sludge waters. The waters hardly resemble the substance of H20, while the cove is nothing but a dank abyss underneath the crumbling concrete, serving as shelter for some of the more feral life of these lands. Newly installed surveillance cameras mark the territory, patrolled from some unseen headquarters, ensuring the territory only for the lives of animals and waste. The specter of human activity lingers annoyingly in the mud.

They also call it Tire Park, baptized with good reason by the uncanny sight during low tide of a truck tire cemetery on the southern side of the bay. Soaked in the gooey paste, the tires clamor towards the shimmering asphalt rocks, planted by the rippling tides into the beach like gravestones of some mysterious sea creatures, or a foreign ritual, an industrial sacrifice in hopes of a moment of serenity.

What will come forth out of this oily sludge, concocting what sort of potion out of scrap metal, discarded rubber tires, the stilling ammonia of feces and slime? Will the heat of the sun give birth to a modern Aphrodite out of this castrated port, floating towards shore atop a rotating tire spinning vigorously like a dervish, inspired by a crazed mission of urban redemption? Or will the slithery serpentine paint spread its draconic fingertips across the totality of the cove, slathering narrow concrete paths and weedy flowers with a smudged layer of cultivated dullness?

The Digger

As a music lover with a knack for history, I love to dig. Unfortunately, when I dig into my pockets all I come up with is lint, which makes my visits to the expensive record collections in the Bay nearly null. Maybe one day I will get paid in full, or perhaps I will find a second hand record shop in San Francisco that rivals this one I stumbled upon in Brooklyn.


I typically experience an acute sense of shame that racks my whole body whenever I make a monetary transaction. I feel ridiculous receiving a service from a stranger for the exchange of some printed rectangular paper and stamped metal coins. What the hell do I need these things for, and why do these official papers give me such strange powers of commanding? Maybe I should go back home, anonymously buy some music on my internet, and hide my shame in a neatly swept corner of my bedroom. But alas, I am drawn into the labyrinth.


The caked on layers of history on a record sleeve lighten the load on my shoulders. They bring to mind mystical stories of previous owners - discarding Minnie Ripperton's crooning love joints after a horrible break up, letting go that Demon Fuzz funky psych in hopes of becoming a more 'serious' professional, or trading in that James Brown "Funky Drummer" making those last couple bones for another kind of music, crack - somehow the object gains a pummeling spiritual intensity.


My shame levels off into a muted ache in my stomach - I suddenly don't feel so alienated anymore. The imaginative journey applies its medicative ointments to my pathetic capitalist woes.


And so deep within the dusty tombs loom the many hallways and caverns of towering records, toppling over their sarcophagi milk crates, edging in on me from all sides. The ghostly stories grow louder and louder, shouting in my ears, booming with the energy of lives past and memories forgotten, waiting impatiently to be resurrected by the godly hands of the digger. The digger undertakes the responsibility of becoming the overtaker. We do not dig to bury but rather for the overpowering joy of bringing back! Will they find their final funeral oration through the swift shifting of my fingertips or be given a second chance at life by a sweeping grab?


Such is what is at stake for the digger.

Sound Lesson: 2

Pharcyde dropped their second critically acclaimed album in 1995, Labcabincalifornia, celebrating a uniquely West Coast sound that that continues to be unrivaled. Pharcyde managed to drop playful, compassionately driven joint after joint during a tense period of Los Angeles history where the homicide rate rose to over 400 per year. The group found solace in school yard crushes, failed love stories, and the growing pains of post high school life rather than the aggressive pulp fiction of LA's gangsta' rap.


Most notably, Pharcyde released the infinitely nostalgic, Runnin', a motivational anthem that seems to never grow old even though you've heard it over five hundred times. One might owe this replay value to Pharcyde's smooth soul crooning interlaced with captivating tales of trying to find some self respect after being bullied on the basketball courts. Everyone can connect with the sentiment of "can't keep runnin' away" from something or other. Although it's hard to imagine the real potency of this track without the hypnotic drums, the chopped up echo "Run," and rhythmic saxophone brought to you by the mesmerizing production of the late J Dilla.

Dilla found the perfect instrumental combinations to match the cadence of Pharcyde's melodic flow - Stan Getz's saxophone and Luiz Bonfa's guitar. Aided by the strings and compositions of Bonfa, Getz released the Bossa Nova classic, Jazz Samba Encore! in 1963. While listening to Saudade Vem Correndo, one feels the serene vigor of Getz's sax channeling the oceanic Brazilian breeze and then the throbbing sax right before the soothing vocals of Maria Toledo. Bonfa draws the sweaty equanimity of the track together with his wistful guitar plucking, reaching towards its rising zenith between 2:04 - 2:09.


I am absolutely amazed at Dilla's ability to take such small musical elements and turn them into the most memorable sounds (that blood rushing beginning!) as well as the entrancing momentum of Runnin'. Jdilla shows once again why sampling is a serious art form that both layers history and reconfigures new music.

A Feral Life

I've been meaning to lay down my thoughts on the "Feral" installation at the Luggage Store Gallery, a collaboration by wheat paste aficionado SWOON and local found object hustler Canilao, but a whimsical decision to take a plane for New York has delayed my writings.
Fortunately for me, the intimate "feral" environment encapsulating the tales of the suggested but not required subtitle, "wicked women and wildish girls," lend itself to both the dreamy rumination and rigorous urban exploration of my own spring trip.

The dank, crawling staircase of the Luggage Gallery, completely tattered with tags and stickers, took on the life of a gateway to the mystical world of "Feral." (And yes, that is Good Life Cafe's finest Medusa repping a blue Dickie's jumpsuit and a plastic cup of wine at the top of the stairs.) The walls of the actual gallery space complemented the many stories told by the staircase, being plastered themselves with SWOON's wood print pastes and stencil cuts of fleeting people, trees, ghosts, and animals. Each print arose from its layering on top of other pastes, some peeling from the edges while some already showing signs of decay, giving an elaborate texture to the walls.

In the center of the space two shanty town shacks stood crisscrossing each other, inviting visitors to search their interiors and catch a glimpse of some quiet, majestic world against the background of so much vibrant noise. Pulled by this aura, I stumbled underneath one shack to find an eerie grandmother approaching death in what looked like the interior of a human sized birdhouse adorned with foreign ritualistic objects constructed out of found pieces of urban junk. The claustrophobic restrictions of the hidden spaces forced strangers to become intimate not only with the art but also with each other.

Canilao and SWOON meticulously constructed an interactive environment where each object, from the splintery wood to the patchwork stuffed tentacles, demanded my consistent visual and tactical indulgence. I was happy not to be restricted by the puritan etiquette of museum no touching rules, but nonetheless I did not feel comfortable enough to climb onto the roofs of the houses as one might do in the streets.

SWOON's first love is graffiti art, so the gallery scene always poses the dangerous possibility that the work will lose its vitality within the sterile white walls of a dead, closed building. However, much to my surprise, SWOON and Camilao seem to be genuinely applying some of the more fascinating concepts reaped from graffiti art into an engaging, if not quite feral, gallery space.

One finds more to be explored and felt than immediately apparent, but only those who venture into the secret crevices and run the risk of really touching this world will grasp a personal view of this whirling world. For that reason I will end my teetering analysis and suggest that you go experience Feral yourself before the cacophony of the funeral bells!


The Luggage Store is located on 1007 Market St. near 6th St.
The exhibit continues thru April 26.
Check out some photos of the artists building Feral at Fecal Face.