The Carnaval Children

While walking down Harrison in the Mission during the annual Carnaval festivities today I suspected some foul play as soon as I saw Manuel the Blacksmith. I first spotted him from a good distance dancing to techno music in a slow writhing motion. He was wearing his proudest achievement, a disco ball tunic plate that glittered in the sun like wet fish scales. This discoplate has the magic power of numbing his opponents into a zombie state where they follow his every creepy demand.



Manuel the Blacksmith is part of an iconoclastic crew of role playing gamers that took their marginalized lifestyle into the occult. They developed intricate rituals of virtual prayer and celebration as well as complex public ceremonies that aim towards abducting cultural events for the sake of irony and pity.

I met Manuel over twenty years ago at the California Renaissance Fair, a time when things were as simple as good old lightning bolt fun. But even back then Manuel would show signs of his derision for role playing culture and his need to try out something so daring, so evil, that I just couldn't believe it would ever happen.

Manuel's sparkling discoplate and snakelike riggling attracted many children who wanted to stare and poke. He smiled a hideous grimace and directed the children to sit in some chairs where they would wait for what he called "the most sought after magic balloon show in all of the lands." I figured that witch, Griswalda, high school sweetheart of Manuel, must be behind this magic show.

I watched from afar and documented what I could without being seen. Sure enough Griswalda the Sorceress appeared out of the crowd and started smoothly hypnotizing the children with her balloon stunts and rhyming tricks. Even though Griswalda placed stuffed animals in a circle around her, she did not look amiable, in fact her large blue eyes were wild as ever, so wild and demonic, that my camera could not capture her image until she blinked.



She commenced the magic show by learning each child's name, repeating the monikers incessantly, elongating the syllables and holding her breadth in between the sounds, steadily gaining the trust of the little innocents who stared with mouths hung open. On a loudspeaker she would rap terrible tales about the kids, concocting wicked stories about the children and the balloon beast that she blew up, and neatly folded, and tied up right before our eyes. Some of the poor babes laughed and clapped wildly but a few recognized intuitively the horror of Griswalda and so they cried their little hearts out. Just look at the contrast!



Once each child acquired a magic balloon, ranging from a dragon butterfly to a worm monkey, they were ushered into a so-called "the bouncy ride of a child's most exquisite dreams," named Jurassic Adventure.



But as more and more parents looked around hysterically for lost children, I knew there was something fishy about this adventure. And sure enough, as I walked into a small alley way behind the ride I saw the most horrible thing, small children being caged and churned up and down on a human sized rotisserie!



I screamed but covered my mouth immediately to conserve my clandestine position. It's hard to be an elderly spy. Luckily police were everywhere, but after I told them of these disgusting happenings, they laughed at me and told me to go back to the senile home.



Fucking police. They just sat around giving each other high fives and shooting the shit about busting some kids who dropped ecstasy at a rave called Popsicle.

Some priorities. Look at what happened to the children.


Sold for seven dollars a pop for a "Super Chicken Kebab." Many people enjoyed the barbecued baby meat on a stick.

Sound Lesson 4: Dilla's Donuts

I've been noticing more and more Hiphop artists playing with the concept of art taking on its own life independent from the life of the artist. While Vaughn Bode constructed a self-sustaining world of mystical wizards, lizards, and bodacious women that enchanted bombers worldwide, J Dilla (born James Yancey) produced a resonant universe crafted out of disparate musical histories that aggressively calls the listener to fall deep into his own sonic world.

While struggling to survive in a hospital bed in '05 and '06 with the debilitating immune condition, lupus, J Dilla gathered the courage to leave behind his best album, Donuts. Dilla worked bedside with musical equipment brought by his mother. Each of the 31 tracks he completed do not last much longer than a minute reflecting Dilla's failing endurance yet resilient devotion to tie together his final aesthetic vision.

While listening more carefully to Donuts and unraveling some of its layered mysteries, I realized that Dilla was trying to come to terms with his own death on the approaching horizon. Some of the cryptic code offers itself to us listeners.

As if peacefully saying goodbye to the terrestrial and firmly implanting himself into the everlasting through his art, Donuts begins with the 'outro' and ends with the "Donuts (Intro.)" Adding to the spiritual quality of the album, the finale 'intro' aims towards Dilla's own apotheosis by employing a sample of one-hit wonder Motherlode's 1969 pop hit, "When I die."

The heartfelt soul jam addressed to a distant lover is propelled by serene percussion that drives Motherlode to chant in harmony during the chorus, "When I die / I hope I'll be / The kind of man that you thought I'd be." In the concluding 'intro' Dilla strategically chops up Motherlode's chorus to elevate the self-proclaiming "be," intertwined only twice with the parallel concept "die," which is manipulated into near incomprehension, as Dilla deconstructs the notions of being and death into their pure sonic elements of feeling.

Facing death head on, Dilla elongates Motherlode's vocals into a celestial proclamation, emphasizing not only the beauty of life but even his own oncoming second life, as he dissipates into becoming, and finally being, the music itself. As a last memory, Dilla aligns himself with a long lasting history of musicians who have passed but continue to live on in the hearts of all who remember.

Intro J Dilla.

The Defenestration Building: Part 3

Sometimes while cruising through the streets of San Francisco I stumble upon some glistening, confusing gem that calls me in. And then, I research the hell out of it.

I was lucky enough to have this experience on the north side of the old Hugo Hotel, which now boasts an RIP mural dedicated to the late Barbara Bode Falcon.



I'd say the iconic images of voluptuous women with Venus of Willendorf exaggerated femininity beckoned me in like a prostitute's protective solicitation, but then again, that probably wasn't it, since I never make it into any of the sex shops on Sixth St. So, I decided to dig a little deeper than the clothing on the skin and the paint on the walls and figure out the back story behind these notorious characters.



Barbara has been immortalized in graffiti and tattoo culture through her childhood relationship and later marriage in 1961 with the underground cartoonist Vaughn Bode. They bore a child together two years after, Mark Bode, and remained together for a roller coaster ride of ten years before their divorce in '71.

In his comic strips, Vaughn Bode constructed a fantasy world where jive talkin' lizards and a drunken wizard stroll through enchanted forests dotted with prancing, well-endowed women. The curvaceous figure and resilient spirit of Barbara Bode Falcon inspired the form of these women dressed in myriad revealing costumes. The icons were soon stamped into history with the publication of Vaughn's work, "Bode Broads."

I realize that this depiction of Barbara Bode does not have much to do with her real life. In fact, it only describes the life that Barbara took on in the setting of Vaughn's imaginary world, a world hugely obsessed with hyperbolic femininity. Such is the fate of art. Let's take a look at this world.

Vaughn Bode spent his formative years contributing to the underground Manhattan comic scene with the likes of Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez in the 60's. After joining the staff of the independent publication, the East Village Other, he spearheaded his own all-comics supplement to the newspaper, the Gothic Blimp Works. During this period Bode released his most famous character, Cheech Wizard, which he claimed to have concocted at age 15, 2:30 in the afternoon, many years prior. Bode published Cheech in the National Lampoon for a number of years.

Depicted as a star spangled yellow hat packed tightly over a red leotard, Cheech Wizard never reveals his face to the reader, and when he shows it to a fellow cartoon, his lovers and interpolators go blind or fall into paraplegic spasms. It remains a mystery why Cheech's identity produces such psychic deconstruction in his viewers. But we must expect an intelligible reason, since Cheech does not conjure magic but rather methodically causes it through his effortless antics.

Self-proclaimed as the cartoon messiah, Cheech often discusses metaphysical questions with his disciple, a slower minded yet insightful lizard. However, Cheech spends most of his time in more down to earth affairs. He searches out parties where he can find cold beer, potent weed, and seductively loving women. The characters speak in an urban slang that borders on the incomprehensible to the poetic. The stories often end with Cheech furiously kicking someone of the male species in the testicles.

Bode aimed to breathe a life into his characters in radical ways that extended far beyond the traditional medium of ink splotched paper. He toured a popular show featuring animated impersonations of his characters while their images were projected on a screen behind him.

Late in his career, Vaughn Bode considered his own life just as much as a piece of artwork as the fantastical world he constructed. After moving to San Francisco with Barbara and Mark, Vaughn started to publicly question his sexual identity.

No doubt influenced by the burgeoning transvestite subculture in the City as well as his ongoing exposure to a more experimental youth culture, Bode soon self defined his own gender identity as somewhere between "auto-sexual, heterosexual, omnisexual, masso-sexual, sado-sexual, trans-sexual, uni-sexual, omni-sexual."

He transformed his appearance from a self-described straightedge "Kennedy" into an androgynous glamor queen with billowing curly hair, long manicured nails, and dark eyeliner. Taking his obsession with the feminine form to the next level, Bode looked into surgical reconstruction of his body, but gave up on the idea when hormones killed his libido.

Bode presents his sexual exploration in two autobiographical works, Confessions of a Cartoon Gooroo, written in a formal essay style and Schizophrenia, published as a thoroughly animated comic strip.

On July 18, 1975 Vaughn Bode died in a tragic accident while experimenting with autoerotic asphyxian, the practice of heightening masturbatory pleasure while strangling oneself with the noose. Although he had succeeded in the practice beforehand, this time a necklace got caught in the noose, constraining it from giving out.

Despite Vaughn's unfortunate fate at the young age of 33, his work lives on. Mark Bode dedicates his life to sustaining the precious worlds that his father constructed. He recounts that Vaughn made him believe at a young age that Cheech was a real wizard, living in the urban jungle wilderness.

They would journey to visit the foul mouthed Cheech but alas, he was always fast asleep and unresponsive in some distant crevice or sewer. These experiences forever inculcated Vaughn's fantastical worlds into Mark's own imagination. Now an artist in his own right, Mark tends to channel the energy of his father's work.

The work of Vaughn Bode also touched many early graffiti writers, notably the works of Dondi and Seen who were attracted technically to the bold lines and vibrant colors.

They drew most inspiration, however, from Bode's ambitious artistic project in crafting intricately connected, self-sustaining worlds, an objective that graffiti artists themselves hoped to achieve on New York City's subway cars. Painting a Bode character now takes on the ceremonial weight of a right of passage in much of the graffiti world.



Let the characters of Bode live on!

Peep some of the comics here.

In these videos of the 1974 Comic Con in Toronto, Bode talks about his life as an artist, the comic publication industry, and the development of his character. Bode reminds us artists to stay true to themselves and always try to come up with their own style, their own worlds.

the Defenestration Building: Part 2

Copped some shots of the finished murals on the Defenestration Building. ICP and TMF crews representing hard. Remember the ICP Mac Dre mural on Langton Alley?

The Defenestration Building: Part 1

Passing by Sixth Street's infamous Defenestration Building on the corner of Howard I happily noticed some artists painting the most intricate and colorful pieces that have ever graced the boarded up facade of the Hugo Hotel.

The vibrant aerosol lettering softly laced over years of other names written on the walls, other stories crafted and displayed for the sake of uplifting one of San Francisco's most disregarded and unappreciated neighborhoods. This multi layering of the graffiti, a continuous urban cycle of affirmation, neglect, and reaffirmation, reflects the very history of the Hotel and community itself.


The four-story Hugo Hotel, a mini behemoth of brick masonry, is credited as the first of its kind on Sixth Street. It has been without tenants since a fire burned out a number of the rooms in the 80's.

Inspired by the abandoned building, Brian Goggin transformed the weathered exterior into a public art installation in 1997. He suspended street ravaged furniture in mid air, whirling and shrinking out of the skinny tenement windows and from the roof.

In the staging of the opening defenestration festival, Goggin and his group of artists revealed what they hoped would be a self-determinative gesture of defenestration for the community, a reclamation that "throwing out" or abandonment take on the spiritual act of release. A breadth and an shaking off of frustration.

My eyes dart upwards to catch the bearded grandfather clock in animated suspension, trying desperately to lift up the couches and tables corkscrewing out of the boarded windows, defying gravity, and I cannot help but suspect that the future of this neighborhood no longer holds the promise that it once seemed to have ten years ago. The falling furniture appears more overwhelming than joyful.


As part of the Sixth Street Beautification Project, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) aims for an incremental approach to urban revitalization of the community. This approach includes the construction of modest income housing and commercial revitalization that turns on the ideal of retaining core affordability while encouraging development.

The SFRA admits that the new objective evolved in response to criticism of their redevelopment projects of both the Yerba Buena and Fillmore districts that displaced thousands of low-income residents with the razing of buildings and new construction of malls, condominiums, and recreation centers.

Included in the body of powers of the incremental approach is the use of eminent domain, which means, the agency can seize private property at what it deems to be fair market value if the property is seen as a blight to the community.

After years of disagreement with the owner of the Hugo Hotel, Varsha Patel, who has been asking for a selling price of four million dollars, the SFRA initiated in January the process of seizing the property by eminent domain. Considering that Patel has refused to compromise for the past twenty years with interested buyers as well as the agency, allowing the burnt out building to deteriorate further, it surely seems that the SFRA fairly employed eminent domain.

We can add on top of Patel's refusal to sell her outspoken contempt for the community "They can put the low-income people somewhere. . . you can be homeless somewhere in Idaho."

Despite the redefined objectives of the SFRA, what lies in the future for the Hugo Hotel and for Sixth Street? Will they raze the building completely and construct an affordable income housing unit with benefits for the locals? Or will it be a high density condominium unity that marks a new era of displacement for Sixth Street?

Lowering my eyes to the bright, twisting colors of the murals on the ground level, the furiously beautiful letters that slowly emerge from the boarded walls, reclaiming the dilapidated behemoth for ourselves, I realize that at least a sliver of that future is up to us.

Bandaged Buses

O bandaged buses! The wounds of time have taken their toll on your hard metal exoskeleton, leaving the gutted remains of an abysmal inside pilfered by the wind and carried far from home, the carcass abandoned to rot yet placed neatly into organized lines for the sake of careful observation by blue costumed workers, closured tightly within high sparkling barbed fences, waiting and decaying.

Graveyard of another era, preserve what you can, for as long as you can, until your eventual recycling into the next species to come, the new centipede like wheeled animals, wind themselves sinuously through our glistening paved streets into the promise of the future!


Decay quietly old vehicle of burden; the time of youth yearns desperately to sing its own swan song.

Hiphop in the Park 08

I hit up the 12th annual Hiphop in the Park on Saturday in Berkeley's cozy historic green lands, People's Park. The festival is consistent in showcasing up and coming local artists who wield a variety of weapons from the aerosol can to the mic, and this year proved no different than the past twelve.


Featuring an impressive balancing act of musicians, the heavy hustling flow of Clyde Carson matched by the empowering melodies of Mystic, or Kiwi and Geologic's potent lyricism blending seamlessly with Talia's soothing brand of self-determinism, Hiphop in the Park offered a diversity of sounds to the listener. And let's not forget the impeccable hosting skill of Do DAT from the Attik crew.

Sponsored by UC Berkeley's Students for Hiphop, the festival holds its own as one of the very few free, all age celebrations of Hiphop culture in the entire Bay Area. Where else can one spot the youngins gettin' down on the linoleum with seasoned breakdance veterans? Or an entire park speckled with gravitating freestyle ciphers, revolving like celestial systems around the massive crowd choppin' it up on a beautiful, sunny afternoon? Where else does Hiphop breathe so freely than a park that welcomes the whole community to celebrate together?


Hiphop in the Park proudly showcases the original four elements of Hiphop but goes far beyond graffiti art, breaking, djing, and mcing in reppin' the culture to the fullest. The entire afternoon resounds with the vibrancy of a generation, the thumping fist of a community standing up, and the joyful sing and dance of a people that reap the sweet juices out of life. Now that is Hiphop.


If you missed it, then well, there will always be next year.