Art Corridors Part 2: Balmy Alley

Granny Wesson's last angry brilliant post on Bluxome Alley got me thinking about the history of public art in San Francisco. In asking myself where it all began I posed a question demanding more research than I ever imagined. So, I specified the question a tiny bit, where and when did the alleys decorated top to bottom with murals originate?


And that takes me to the Mission District's infamous Balmy Alley. Intricately decorated and broadly diverse, the murals reflect the numerous perspectives that make up the neighborhood's rich Latino heritage and new contingency. However, the images do not always find easy peace with each other. Paintings often bleed into contiguous murals, blurring the lines where one ends and another begins, and even confronting one another. Look carefully and you might find remnants of murals from the past -- disappearing ever so slowly with a fight -- flitting in the corners of walls or under chipped wood fences.

The humble origins of Balmy Alley date back to the early 70's, coinciding with the same period that graffiti began to take over New York's subway lines. The first mural was organized by Mia Gonzalez under the tutelage of Susan Cervantes and Carlos Loarca. Youth from the "24th Street Place" program designed the mural, and together with people from the community, painted it during the Mission's first mural painting community event.


In the 1980's Balmy Alley evolved under the direction of Ray Patlan and Patricia Rodriguez. Hoping to call attention to the atrocities and injustices in Central America, Patlan and In 84, Rodriguez helped organized the painting of over 26 murals informed by the theme of "Peace in Central America". Balmy Alley thereby took on a particular political flavor. The walls were coated with direct political messages, expressions of rage, hopeful calls for unity, and personal narratives. It was during this period that Balmy Alley gained worldwide fame (and to this day, you might notice a lot of tourists cruising though the corridor.)


Ever changing and shifting with the community's own development, Balmy Alley now possesses a soothing but vibrant character. New murals appear as weather rains down on garage doors and old wooden posts crumble away piece by piece. The many flower bushes and trees that align the Alley's winding red brick road marks the corridor off from other alleys situated in warehouse districts or along hard cement pavement. It's rare to see mural art in an alley juxtaposed with the greenery, or that nature so well integrated into a somewhat unforgiving urban environment. But Balmy Alleys offers just those anomalies and surprises, if you take the time to look.








Flickr archive coming at the end of the month!!

Art Corridors Part 1: Bluxome Alley

What beats standing in line for an hour at the SFMOMA to see an incredible collection of works by Frida Kahlo - and then waiting in another line that winds up the four levels of stairs before you can view any of the paintings?


And then squirming through a cluster jam of dribbling faced, snot-nose drenched denizens and gawking tourists who pinball bump their way around because they're listening to a guide tour that soundblasts their ears so they can't hear you, and they already weren't looking because they're walking all over the place with their eyes, and that damn audio guide filters their aesthetic experience with average facts about exceptional things, and it just makes you a little depressed and somewhat angry and horribly frustrated with the idiotic experience of moving about through a museum that makes such a fuss about trying to be a dry, sacred place? But then you forget about all that because good god James Brown, those paintings are fucking amazing.

Anyway, what beats it? Well it's probably worth it, but for a change of viewing pace, how about walking through one of the many mural alleys that serve as public art corridors through sun or moon, rain or shine, broken glass or sewage waste? San Francisco has a long history of mural art dating further back than Diego Rivera's famous paintings in the 1930's, and many official muralists or wraith-like graffiti artists continue the legacy to this day.

While many city dwellers are familiar with the Mission art corridors--the likes of Clarion Alley's vibrant path negotiating Mission streetlife and Valencia boutique etiquette, or nearby Balmy Alley's themes on indigenous self-determination and revolution--the SOMA district boasts its own public graffiti wall in the form of a two part Bluxome Alley.

The walls, warehouse windows, pipes, poles, air ducts, staircase banisters, and all other unidentified objects of industrial infrastructure act as canvases for Bluxome's alleys graffiti art. Colorful names stretch across a dingy background wall space of pale tan tone. The letters form complex geometric shapes and sometimes integrate faces into its composition; winding, swiveling, screeching, and bubbling into the third dimension.

Bluxome St. lies within the developer dream neighborhood, Mission Bay, parallel to Townsend and passing through 6th and 5th streets. The tiny two part alleys cross perpendicular to 125 and 145 Bluxome. Enjoy a pleasant day admiring the rising of catastrophic condominium buildings aligning the highway entrance and the concrete lined corridor of beautiful image poems (you know, graffiti). Bask in the absurd clashing of contemporary urban lifestyles right in the thick of it! The threshold lingers on.

And before you let those markers loose, peep the rules, son. However you want to take them.






View the entire flickr set here.

The Spotless Mind Raps of Jay Electronica

If you take a minute to cruise the hiphoposphere, in all its virtual glory, or on the concrete streets, in your favorite dusty record store, or all up in the ink spilled magazines, then you might have heard about this new, Jay Electronica. And I'm not just posting abut him because I can't stop talking about musicians influenced by movies.


There is no doubt that Jay Electronica is breaking down barriers. Trying to define his style leads to a refreshing enigma. He came up in New Orleans but lived all over the country and lost the accent. He flows supremely over clashing Dilla beats but sounds at the top of his game on his own melodic production void of any drum breaks. He spits slick rhymes concocting mystical images of spiritual understanding and at the same time rips bubble gum rappers into atoms without effort.

If you don't believe me, before copping the mixtape which will introduce you to the music--What the F*ck is a Jay Electronica--just listen to "the Pledge." Jay loops the lulling melody that pervades Michel Gondry's widely influential film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), to construct an awe inspiring song. The lack of percussion sounds immediately fresh in a music game ridden with computer generated drum snares and overly produced rhythms. The imaginatively brooding melody repeats nervously in the distance infusing Jay's meditative reflections with a cutting potency. The song generates a feeling of uneasiness and fascination, a dangerous balancing act between hope and desolation.


In the longer version of the song Jay interslices the track with sample vocal cuts from other films, primarily the classic Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, directed by Mel Stuart in 1971. The sonic samples from the film draw the listener in through a nostalgiac attraction to a film that partially shaped the imagination of many American childhoods and a novel wonder produced by the strange context we're hearing it in. The vocals also act as chapter marks in a largely epic song taking on the length of about eight minutes, giving the listener a much needed moment to reflect.

If you're going to Rock the Bells then you will also be seeing Jay Electronica. Give me the word on it! A full length album is due out by the end of the year.

The Sound Image: Quasimoto's "Come on Feet"

Despite my pathologic habit of initiating a concept series and then never following up with a single successive post, the idea of the sound-image is too irresistible. So, a second post is in order, and what better candidate than Madlib's helium voiced alter-ego, Quasimoto, represented cordially by a florescent green puppet animal--slightly resembling a hideous faced possum--in the seminal underground release "Come on Feet". Madlib, born Otis Jackson Jr., dropped the single in 2000 on the original Quas album, "The Unseen", simultaneously rejuvenating and making a cemented name for Stonesthrow Records.

Saturated thoroughly with weed smoke and toad slimed mushrooms, Los Angeles' beat konducta par excellence Madlib ventures into the astrolands of the Hiphoposphere in his psychedelic exploration of the basic anatomical apparatus that keeps us moving around; our two feet.

Before we get to the acid trip puppet show video, let's break down some of the historical elements shaping the track's spacey quality. Giving "Come On Feet" a clamoring, other worldly feel, the running hypnotic melody cut from Alain Goraguer's psych-jazz soundtrack of Laloux's La Planete Sauvage shapes a dissonant, multi-textured soundscape. That's fitting considering Fantastic Planet is an animated epic story of a revolutionary battle between sensitive human and rational alien produced in 1973 but taking place in a temporal dimension far outside of our own. Madlib reaps crackling effects of stumbling footsteps and shadowy figures to construct a nocuous sound array that threatens to stir the most guarded corners of the listener's paranoia.

The vocal edits and samplings take their influence from another film of a more local, but equally mind bending, variety. Distorted clips chopped from Melvin Van Peeble's original 1971 blaxploitation film, Sweetback's Badasssss Song, surround Quas' raps dedicated to the prowess of his running legs. "Come on feet / cruise for me / ... Come on feet / Come on run." The listener is quickly gripped by the wrenching terror that overwhelms a fugitive escaping the authorities.

Surely inspired by the cinematic coherence between La Planete Sauvage's sound and image as well as Sweetback's song and visual landscape, Madlib pieces together the spacey liftedness with the terrestrial density of the urban jungle.

The unusual puppet animation employed (by some unknown art director) for the video of "Come on Feet" synthesizes the brooding sense of unfamiliarity and estrangement--consisting in both its airy and earthy forms--that permeates the sampled films. Sound and image lock together to produce deranged effects in the audience, most likely seated or standing still, interpolating monstrous feet as they loiter.



Just entertain your feet for a couple moments. Wiggle the toes. Slip your consciousness into the outer appendages. Imagine the inner motors of your mind beamed outwards from each protruding appendage. How monstrous and unsettling are they?


Question: Does anyone know the art director for the "Come on Feet" video?

Side note: "Feet" is a standard biblical euphemism for genitalia. Take, for example, Saint Jerome's description of a prostitute as "the harlot who opens her feet to everyone who passes by".