Foto of Plug2

Foto by Plug2

Doorway protected by criminals of the high seas on California @ 24th Avenue.

Fotos by Plug2

Some old addresses from the north side of Russian Hill.

Fotos by Plug2

I dont agree 100% with Nasty NaS on this one, but I mos def agree that things have changed. Turn on the radio, and it seems the music has indeed been toe tagged. At 30+, my generation is now thought of as irrelevant OGs. I grew up with Hip-Hop, but not in the same way as kids today. Giant record companies have made millions off selling ghetto culture to the masses.

Bomb Hip-Hop has been covering, producing, and distributing Hip-Hop to the Bay Area for 15+ years. Last nite they presented a showcase of some of the illest album covers ever created for us old fogeys to remember on….

“…It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up magazine, Salt’n'Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine. Hangin pictures on my wall….Every Saturday Rap Attack - Mr. Magic & Marley Marl. I let my tape rock til my tape deck popped….Remember Rappin Duke, duh-ha, duh-ha? You never thought that Hip-Hop would take it this far….” — Biggie

“….I remember Mr. Magic, Flash, Grandmaster Caz, LL raisin hell, but that didnt last. Eric B. & Rakim was the ish to me! I flip to see a Doug E. Fresh show, when Ricky D and Red Alert was puttin in work with Chuck Chill….Had my homies on the hill gettin ill, when ish was real. Remember Raw, with Big Daddy Kane? When De La Soul was puttin Potholes in the game? I cant explain how it was, Whodini had me puffin on that buddha gettin buzzed, cause there I was….Through my speaker Queen Latifah, and MC Lyte, listening to Treach & KRS to get me through the night. With T La Rock and Mantronix, to Stetsasonic, remember when “Push It” was the bomb ish?….There aint nuttin like the Old School….” — 2Pac

“What more could I say? I wouldnt be here today if the Old School didnt pave the way.” — Grand Puba

One of the biggest changes is the way the music makes its way from the artist studio to the listeners ears. Kids dont go to the record store anymore to buy records, tapes or CDs. They download it by the gigabyte, legally or otherwise. What gets lost in that ‘point and click’ transaction is the cover art and production credits along with a piece of history.

I used to own 16 crates of records, 200+ tapes, and 400+ CDs….now I own this:

At 2:22pm today, this is what I saw out the window of my office….then at 5:45pm it started hailing.

“All of us are watchers — of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway — but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.” - Peter M. Leschak

“I bet you I can make my house the ugliest on the block!!”

“Ill see you your tiger in the jungle house, and raise you a green menace….”

Since the 1960s, this over sized dachshund in a chefs hat has lurked over the corner of Sloat & 46th Ave in Park Merced. It is the last remaining proof of a once famous Bay Area diner chain. In 2001, 45 mph winds knocked it over into the street. After much debate, The City footed the bill and had it restored. It now lives out on the meridian.

Theres not too many public payphones left in The City. Thanks to Metro PCS, even those with bad credit and no income can get a cell phone.

So when some one takes the time to make one beautiful, its all that more special.

We went out to the SF Zoo yesterday. What a mess. We saw two gorillas beating each other up, a cold giraffe, and a gang of angry peacocks. Im pretty sure the polar bear was crying because he was alone in the fog.

Besides that all the other exhibits were closed:

“When the world had become steeped in greed and desire, in jealousy and anger, in pleasure and pain, the Supreme One (Brahma) was asked by the people to create an entertainment which could be seen and heard by all, for the scriptures were not enjoyed by the masses, being too learned and ambiguous.”

Last fall we went to see Plug2’s friend perform a dance/drama piece at the Sangati Center in Oakland. Bharata Natyam is the oldest of South Indian classical dance.

Fotos by Plug2

BNE is officially at “All-City” status.

In the past year Ive seen this sticker EVERYWHERE from the Sunset to the Richmond, from Lower to Upper Haight, from Cow Hollow to the Tendernob, from The Dirty Thirty to the Excelsior, from Fillmoe to the 3rd street corridor, from SOMA to the Financial District, from Chinatown to Japantown, from Russian Hill to Bernal Heights, from HP to Bayview to The Swamp, and even the baggage claims at SFO and OAK.

Mayor Newsom is offering $2500 for info leading to his arrest.

Not only “All-City”, but “All-Cities” — meaning dude has gone international.

From ABC news:

I heard Paul Wall gettin interviewed on the KMEL last nite and now I cant get that song outta my head.

Fotos by Plug2

Part 6 of a 6 part look at Chinatown and all it has to offer….

The reality of Chinatown is that there are two Chinatowns: one belongs to the locals, the other charms the tourists.

Part 5 of a 6 part look at Chinatown and all it has to offer….

More of an experience than good food is Sam Wo’s on Washington @ Grant. This old building is 10 feet wide and 4 stories high. You enter thru the kitchen, past the cooks and waitstaff. You then climb a narrow stairway up to 5-foot low ceilings with some really old tables and a dumbwaiter.

The menu is basic Hong Kong cuisine and the waitress, Anne, is the rudest funniest Ive ever met. I overheard her telling the boy at the table behind us he was “retarded” for ordering Coke instead of 7-Up.

This pretty much sums it up:

Part 4 of a 6 part look at Chinatown and all it has to offer….

You might think that fortune cookies come from bakeries dating back to the Ming dynasty, made by Confucian elders and ancient scribes. Actually, they were invented in 1909 in GG Park — strangely enough by an immigrant who designed the Japanese Tea Gardens. The story goes that an anti-Japanese mayor had fired him around the turn of the century, but later a new mayor reinstated him. Grateful to those who had stood by him during these hard times, he created a cookie with a thank you note inside.

Production has since moved to Chinatown on Ross Alley:

This lady folds (I kid you not) 10,000 cookies a day:

“You want a sexy fortune?”:

Part 3 of a 6 part look at Chinatown and all it has to offer….

Stockton Street on a Saturday is no joke. Pink plastic bags EVERYWHERE. Fruit, vegetable, and produce marts by the hundreds. From all over The City, folks come here to get it for cheap.

You can buy everything in bulk. Such as:

Bootleg DVDs:

Knock-off designer watches:

Frogs aka Baydooks:

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Slick Willy gettin some Dim Sum:

Part 2 of a 6 part look at Chinatown and all it has to offer….

Today, Chinatown is mostly Southeast Asian and Vietnamese. The population has dropped off in recent years due to newer communities popping up in other parts of town, like lower Clement Street. This shift has left the neighborhood somewhat poor and mostly elderly.

There are No Smoking signs everywhere, yet many smoke:

The illest phone booth in SF, on Grant Avenue:

Air-drying laundry, we saw it everywhere:

Remember dude who owed Will Smith $7 in The Pursuit of Happyness?
He lives here:

Part 1 of a 6 part look at Chinatown and all it has to offer….

Dating back to the 1850s, Chinatown is one of The Citys oldest districts. After the completion of the Transcontinental Railway, many of the people who built it settled here.

(Foto by Plug2)

Most of its original citizens were male, which led to a pretty nasty gambling, opium, and prostitution problem. With massive unemployment and ethnic hating by the non-Chinese, tensions quickly turned into full blown riots. In response to this, the residents formed the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association aka the Chinese Six Companies.

Red flags represent different associations and mean “luck”:

A more sinister version of the associations are Tongs:

I took this in Florida when I was 12, before the blogs, before the internets. Back when it cost $12 to develop a roll of film.

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Editors Note:
This is our 100th post. Thanks to our 8 loyal readers who check in daily and have brought us to #1 of 1,320,000 in Google search:

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Foto courtesy of Jay Dubbz:

Hospitals are creepy and there are quite a few of them here in The City. People go there to die and they smell too sterile, if that makes sense. One day me and Plug2 were walking down Lake near 15th Avenue and saw something spooky up the hill. It was the old and abandoned Public Health Service Hospital of The Presidio I had read about on The Fecal.

Its like a 4-Star hotel for squatters in there:

3 Anne Franks, looking out the window:

We tried to go in and look around, but it was getting dark and the rent-a-cop posted out front wasnt trying to let us do too much.

Plug2:

Tristan Savatier managed to get in once and has a Fickr post on the PHSH here.

The homeless lurkers that lurk Shipley Alley in SOMA enjoy getting drunk and/or high and lighting things on fire. It usually happens between the hours of 1-5 am.

One night, I put this chair out on the curb and this is what it looked like in the morning:

This goes out to the Shipley Crew:

There is a shop on the corner of Grant and Sutter streets that has a clock imprint on the window. At night it beams a shadow onto the sidewalk.

Day:

Night:

Part 3 of 3 in our series “Know Your Public Transit”….

In our obsessive quest to learn all things “public transportation”, we found a very small streetcar museum at the corner of Steuart and Mission streets. The main focus of the exhibit revolves around the streetcar before and after The Great Quake of 1906.

By the 1920s there were 50 operating lines in The City. Over the years services were cut, and in 1982 the remaining 5 lines dropped below the street into the Underground MUNI as we know it today.

One of the remaining 20 streetcars running up and down Market and the EMB:

Old time schedule from the “Filthy Moe” line:

Check out how Divisadero was spelled pre-1906:

Now hiring:

Part 1 of a 2 part look at the history of The Cable Car…

Trolleys are pulled by endless cables going round and round, all day long. The cables run below the surface of the street at about 9 m.p.h. The trolley has a vice grip which the conductor pulls and releases as the car stops and begins moving again.

Vice grip:

The cable is fatter than Slick Rick’s dookie gold ropes:

There is a separate cable system for each of the 3 lines in service:

Playing with the camera settings:

The result of all these rotating wheels and giant cables:

Part 1 of a 2 part look at the history of The Cable Car…

I used to think that cable cars were touristy and people looked silly hanging off the sides with cameras around their necks looking, well, like tourists.

Last weekend, me and Plug2 went to the Cable Car Museum on the edge of Chinatown and I found a new respect for this important part of Our City’s past.

Andrew Hallidie invented the cable rail system that pulls the cars up and down the hills. As the story goes, he came up with the idea after watching some horses get whipped as they struggled their way up the wet and hilly streets. Hallidie had been using cables to haul gold up and down the mountains in Sacramento and wondered if it couldnt work in SF.

Back in the day, circa 1873:

One of the first trolly’s:

Tokens and tokens and more tokens:

Modern day:

I took these right after our fearless leader decided to go on a killing spree in late 2003. Artists are usually the first to express the voice of the people.

This post is dedicated to my homey “Sweet Lou” aka Louis Calderon, serving in the trenches with The US Army.