Tag: tenderloin

Tenderloin Getting a Documentary

This teaser for an announced forthcoming documentary tags the TL one of the “sketchiest” in the world city, which kind of irks me the way calling it “colorful” or “crackhead-y” does. Yes, there is a lot of down-and-out going on there, and it’s not the “safest” place in San Francisco.

As the teaser also shows, though, there are bold characters living there. Characters doing shit. Crazy shit? Yes, most of the time. But it’s action-packed, as the folks stuck there try to squeeze some amount of pleasure from their daily circumstances.

The documentary follows the creation of an epic mural by renowned local artist Mona Caron celebrating the neighborhood that map makers like to omit and most SFers try to avoid.

UPDATE: Film is screening March 8, 2011, 7 p.m. – Bay Area Women in Film & Media (BAWIFM) Annual Shorts Showcase in celebration of International Women’s Day. Hobart Building, 582 Market St., San Francisco, CA. Get tickets.

Giuliani’s Brain Spanks San Francisco

Giuliani's Brain Attacks San Francisco

The visionaries who saved Times Square have decided to lend their beneficence to our fair city, and show us once and for all how only “the will to enforce common norms of public behavior” can clean up areas like the Haight-Ashbury, ridding it of the gutter-punks and pit bulls.

But in the process, our Doms have to deliver some tough love, especially to those employed by “Homelessness, Inc.” here in the city. Yes, Daddy, we’ve been very bad. Hurt us! Give us what we deserve! We don’t want to hear that the solution to every civic problem is incarceration, but my, we do NEED to hear it.

One of the more precious quotes in the article suggests our reward if we obey:

Police officials and local entrepreneurs speak wistfully of the transformation of New York’s Times Square, and they still hope that it could happen here [in the Tenderloin].

They do prescribe one non-police action to achieve this shopper’s utopia:

Perhaps, too, such public passivity in the face of crime owes to the city’s lack of a tabloid newspaper; in New York, such grisly events, which were common in the early 1990s, sparked widespread outrage in no small part because papers like the New York Post made them front-page news.

Is This Map of San Francisco Racist?

Racist Map of San Francisco?

Tenderblog thinks so:

First off, where are the black neighborhoods? The Loin has been rather ignored. Fillmore is just part of Lower Pacific Heights. Western Addition is non-existent. Then there’s Hunter’s Point which has no “clever” tongue in cheek comment to it and is just colored black in what I assume is some allusion to there being blacks that live there… I realize that 7×7′s audience (if there actually is one) is just poshy, clueless ass clowns, but still, this is pretty blatant and is more than just an oversight, but more reflection of the artist and the magazine’s views of this supposed rainbow city.

Hmm. Also odd is that the Marina District isn’t on the map, which seems to be where a lot of the magazine’s readers would reside.