When the Lights Go Down in The City

Readers: It's time for me to get real for a second here.

After 13 years of representing Ess Eff to my fullest capabilities, I'm now going to be living in correctional facilities
Berkeley.

That's right, I'm leaving the city.

As you know, we've been homeless for the past three weeks — and we have a second child demanding to be born by mid-January. I had hoped to find a place in San Francisco that would suit our needs.

Mostly we looked in Bernal Heights. But every place we saw in our price range was pretty impractical. The houses/condos/rentals were either too small, or the floorplans were loosely based on "James and the Giant Peach," or one of the bedrooms would require you to go out into an alleyway and wrestle a dwarf for entrance.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the Bernal neighborhoods we could afford had even more drama than FolSoMa (hardly a child-friendly nabe itself). We looked at one house that was directly across from a housing project, and while I'm loath to generalize about the residents therein, the ones we encountered were very coarse in their cell-phone conversations on the front stoop.

So we looked in the East Bay. And even though places in Berkeley weren't cheap, you got a lot more for your money. We found a three-bedroom house with a yard. What's more, it will probably take me less time to commute downtown than from Bernal.

Fear not, I'm still going to spend most of my waking hours in San Francisco. My job pretty much ensures that.

As Dr. Dre famously said in 1999:

"Still, puffing my leafs, still with the beats
Still not loving police
Still rock my khakis with a cuff and a crease
Still got love for the streets."

I too still have love for the streets (not sure about the khakis). And I will still represent the 415, even as a member of the Bridge & Tunnel crowd.
True dat.


UPDATE: I wrote this post last night after a few beers, which probably explains me quoting Dr. Dre. I think Blogger should have a feature that prevents anyone from ending a post with the words "true dat" (since redacted).

The Itinerant San Franciscan: Week Three

After three weeks as transients, we are closing in on a new home (more on that later). But for now, I'm still living out of a suitcase.

Since I'm hoping this is my last week in hotels, I splurged a bit this time around: I'm staying at the Hotel Majestic at Sutter and Gough. It's the oldest continuously operated hotel in the city, and not too pricey considering its Pacific Heights location ($79 a night). The building was constructed in 1902 and barely survived the fires following the 1906 earthquake (the fire breaks were at Van Ness, two blocks away).

As with most old hotels in this town, it doesn't try to hide its age. I was informed upon checking in that the door handles are merely "ornamental" and I shouldn't try to actually turn them.

These brackets over the sink apparently once held a shelf, or maybe they were early 20th century wash-basin stirrups — popular at the time for cleaning your posterior between baths. [Citation needed. -ed.]



Not a bad view...



...a comfy bed...



...and hey, the elevator was inspected in the past year! I guess the inspectors are only dragging their feet on Tenderloin hotels.



Mainly I've enjoyed walking around the neighborhood. I've been through this part of town countless times, but not as often on foot. And in many ways, this is the meat of Old San Francisco: block after undulating block of Victorians, apartment buildings with beautiful beaux-arts lobbies, gothic churches and tidy parks.

There's still enough grit to keep you from getting completely soft, though. On my way to work yesterday, I nearly collided with a homeless couple wrestling over an empty bottle of Rolling Rock. In this town, some things are universal.

BuboBlog Reviews 'The Deathly Hallows: Part 1'

(One of the nice things about our family's exile in Santa Cruz is the baby sitting provided by Elliot's grandparents, also known as "Boma" and "Baba" — his highly corrupted version of their names. That allowed us to see "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1" on Saturday night.)

You may have heard this movie has a slower pace than the other installments, and it's true. Ah, but what a relief. I've complained before that the previous movies feel like a highlight reel: There's so much material crammed into them, it's hard to tell if you're watching a story or just seeing plot points checked off. (Though this was really more a problem with the first five films than the sixth.)

Breaking up the last book into two films gives director David Yates the luxury of taking his time. (He also directs the final sequel.) The characters can sit and talk, have long walks, get lost and find themselves. But the slowness has a downside, which I think would be more evident to someone who never read the books: It spotlights the arbitrary and seemingly random machinations of J.K. Rowling's story.

Every problem is solved by some quirk or deus ex machina: An elf appears, a magical object exhibits some new power, or a patronus limns the way. The uninitiated must just spend the film in a perpetual state of "WTF?" For those familiar with the story, you're willing to accept the most absurd nonsense because it is written — it's in the book. The Harry Potter series inspires a biblical reverence, and in fairness, its stories are far less random than much of the bible. (Imagine if I wrote a screenplay based on Lot. I'm pretty sure the producer would make me change the part where Lot's daughters get him drunk so they can sleep with him.)



I can only speculate because I've never gone into a Harry Potter film "cold" (without reading the source material). I have known nonreaders who love the series, so I guess it works on that level. And the latest movie can't have made $219 million in the U.S. alone by appealing exclusively to fans of the books.

There is plenty to look at. The visual effects are as good as ever (Nagini still doesn't quite seem real to me, but they're getting close). I particularly liked the way they rendered the fable of the Deathly Hallows as an animated sequence — really beautiful and creepy.

Yates also did a good job playing up the irony of the trial scene in the Ministry of Magic, where a woman is hunted and tried for not being a witch. Are you listening, Christine O'Donnell?

You'll be sad to see that the broken-wand scene — the subtext of which was illuminated in this blog back in 2007 — is truncated in the film. What a missed opportunity! And yet, the sexual tension between Harry and Hermione is perhaps overdramatized in another scene. During a fantasy sequence, they're shown embracing in the nude (well, there's a lot of fog so you can't really tell). This elicited laughter from an otherwise-reserved Santa Cruz Regal Cinemas 9 audience.

Ron (played by Rupert Grint) continues to get less attractive, following the opposite trajectory of Emma Watson's Hermione. And yet, we all know they'll wind up together in the end. Perhaps that's the film's greatest implausibility.

BuboBlog Rating: 3 asterisks (out of 4).

Welcome to the Jungle

Elliot enjoys using his Colorforms-style decal set.



Unfortunately, the end result could really only be described as a massive clusterf--k.



I respect his artistic choices, but even animals need personal space — especially if you're a swallow-tailed bee-eater with your beak crammed into a giraffe's crotch.

Ferrari, Santa Cruz-Style

I guess this is as close as anyone's going to get in this economy.



I'm most impressed that it's spelled correctly.

The Itinerant San Franciscan: Week Two

Help! I think I'm stalking my old neighborhood.

This week I stayed in a hotel on Hallam Street, the alleyway behind Langton Street. That gave me a great view of my old life. It feels kind of creepy — like Langton Street broke up with me and now I'm lurking in a hotel watching it through a venetian blind.



I will say, this hotel is a pretty great deal. It's $47 a night (less than the Renoir). The room is perfectly adequate, and Hallam Street has pretty much zero drama (unlike Seventh and Market). The price works out to about $1,400 a month — cheaper than a lot of studio apartments in this part of town.



The awkward part is I've had to use my old bus stop to get to work, which means I run into the old neighbors. "Uh, didn't you move?" they say.

I feel like the 23-year-old guy who still goes to high-school parties.

Seeing Double Again (This Time in 3-D)

As I've discussed before, Hollywood has a habit of simultaneously releasing two movies on the same topic ("Volcano" and "Dante's Peak," "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon," "The Truman Show" and "Ed TV.")

Maybe studios have gotten better at avoiding this pitfall, because I can't think of too many recent examples. "The Illusionist" and "The Prestige" was a doozy, but that was four years ago.

Now I'm wondering if "Megamind" and "Despicable Me" fit the bill.



They're both about bald supervillains with troubled upbringings and henchmen called Minions. They both learn to become good after finding people they care about. Then they ultimately have to defeat a truly evil foe. (Not to mention the fact that the movies are both 3-D animated films.)



Also, the main characters were both voiced by actors from "Anchorman." And Kevin Bacon wasn't in either movie. [You can stop now. -ed.]

UPDATE: I forgot about another more recent example than "The Illusionist"/"The Prestige."

"Paul Blart: Mall Cop" and "Observe and Report" (both in 2009) were about as close as ideas get (even if the execution was different). I even blogged about it here. Maybe studios aren't getting any better at this.