My walk to work (part 1)
Jan. 27th, 2004 08:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gordonzolaIn a post that should have been copied by more people, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anarqueso detailed her walk to work. I started working on my version almost immediately but got caught up and distracted by one of my favorite urban pastimes, using the strorefronts and streets as a way of remebering the history of unimportant things. Well, unimportant when taken individually, but taken as a whole, the type of things that present a view of times that pass frightenly quickly in an easily gentrifiable city going through an economic boom.
A friend once described me as the most nostalgic person she knew, but acknowledged that I can get just as easily nostalgic for last week as for last decade. In a city like this, where knowing what store occupied a building five years ago makes people treat you like an old-timer, writing down my own unimportant memories feels like something I need to do. It doesn’t really matter that few people remember what I remember, and that no one will have the exact same triggers.
But I guess that’s what makes me nostalgic person, eh?
I’ve written a lot about 13th St. so I decided to detail my walk down 14th for a little change of pace.
My most hated new urban architectural features are the anti-pigeon spikes. Slowly most of the houses near mine have started installing these anti-avian lines of razor-sharp knitting needles on all their moldings and below their windows.. They stick straight up and make every home look like a military institution or like it’s filled with valuables to protect.
And that’s the thing. While I know they’re sold in order to keep bird shit and pigeon lice from ruining people’s homes and investments, they almost certainly have a dual purpose. Instead of putting bars up which block the occupant’s view, installing these thin spikes prevents break-ins and only pedestrians and neighbors have to see them. Well, until all one’s neighbors install them too. In the old days, and there are some holdovers, people used to just make their own irregular, but functional, versions with nails. The traditional nail method gets all rusty too, adding possible tetnus to the is-it-worth-it factor for a would-be burglar. The new mass-produced spikes have been going up so fast that the first thing I look for when I leave the house is any new converts.
At the end of my block, there’s a large apartment building that is sinking. The pigeon spikes glisten off the sun, when it’s sunny, and make the lack of level lines even more apparent. The shining metal make the moldings look like mini roller coasters. It’s the kind of house you look at and think, "Well, that’s going down in the next earthquake. Glad I don’t live there."
The union hall at the end of my street is a strange place. It’s the most conservative union in the city and I keep running into people I knew in high school there. One I worked with at the photo lab while he was trying to make it as a male model and had the hokiest stage name ever. At first it was just "Tor" but when people always laughed at his one-name, craggy rock pretentiousness, he started using his real first name with it. Paul Tor, Male model. He did get some gigs and was used a couple of times as the basis for illustrations in some old-west romance novels. He nearly got fired when he told a customer to fuck off when she called to make sure our free-photo, x-mas Santa wasn’t Black.
Another union member and ex-classmate was one of the CMP* skate punk clique. They were all working class kids who grew up together rightfully resentful amidst the wealth of our county. One year, someone’s cousin visited from England and over the Summer they all became Mods instead of skaters. This ended, and I may have written about this before, when a bunch of them saved up their money to go to England. They got really drunk and when the pubs closed they started singing, "We are the Mods, We are the Mods …"** really loud until they were set upon by real Mods who kicked the crap out of them. The next fall they were punks again.
Every weekend the same street vendor has been having an open air junk sale on the benches in front of the hall. The merchandise doesn’t change much. So I sometimes wonder how profitable it is for him. Mostly he sells bad artwork thrown out by thrift stores and books and clothes that were left on the street. But people are always there haggling. And since the cops started rousting everyone of Church St., it’s the only regular street sale around these days.
(To be continued, I haven’t even gone a block yet.)
*Corte Madera Punks! Isn’t that intimidating?
**You know, like in "Quadrephenia".
anarqueso detailed her walk to work. I started working on my version almost immediately but got caught up and distracted by one of my favorite urban pastimes, using the strorefronts and streets as a way of remebering the history of unimportant things. Well, unimportant when taken individually, but taken as a whole, the type of things that present a view of times that pass frightenly quickly in an easily gentrifiable city going through an economic boom. A friend once described me as the most nostalgic person she knew, but acknowledged that I can get just as easily nostalgic for last week as for last decade. In a city like this, where knowing what store occupied a building five years ago makes people treat you like an old-timer, writing down my own unimportant memories feels like something I need to do. It doesn’t really matter that few people remember what I remember, and that no one will have the exact same triggers.
But I guess that’s what makes me nostalgic person, eh?
I’ve written a lot about 13th St. so I decided to detail my walk down 14th for a little change of pace.
My most hated new urban architectural features are the anti-pigeon spikes. Slowly most of the houses near mine have started installing these anti-avian lines of razor-sharp knitting needles on all their moldings and below their windows.. They stick straight up and make every home look like a military institution or like it’s filled with valuables to protect.
And that’s the thing. While I know they’re sold in order to keep bird shit and pigeon lice from ruining people’s homes and investments, they almost certainly have a dual purpose. Instead of putting bars up which block the occupant’s view, installing these thin spikes prevents break-ins and only pedestrians and neighbors have to see them. Well, until all one’s neighbors install them too. In the old days, and there are some holdovers, people used to just make their own irregular, but functional, versions with nails. The traditional nail method gets all rusty too, adding possible tetnus to the is-it-worth-it factor for a would-be burglar. The new mass-produced spikes have been going up so fast that the first thing I look for when I leave the house is any new converts.
At the end of my block, there’s a large apartment building that is sinking. The pigeon spikes glisten off the sun, when it’s sunny, and make the lack of level lines even more apparent. The shining metal make the moldings look like mini roller coasters. It’s the kind of house you look at and think, "Well, that’s going down in the next earthquake. Glad I don’t live there."
The union hall at the end of my street is a strange place. It’s the most conservative union in the city and I keep running into people I knew in high school there. One I worked with at the photo lab while he was trying to make it as a male model and had the hokiest stage name ever. At first it was just "Tor" but when people always laughed at his one-name, craggy rock pretentiousness, he started using his real first name with it. Paul Tor, Male model. He did get some gigs and was used a couple of times as the basis for illustrations in some old-west romance novels. He nearly got fired when he told a customer to fuck off when she called to make sure our free-photo, x-mas Santa wasn’t Black.
Another union member and ex-classmate was one of the CMP* skate punk clique. They were all working class kids who grew up together rightfully resentful amidst the wealth of our county. One year, someone’s cousin visited from England and over the Summer they all became Mods instead of skaters. This ended, and I may have written about this before, when a bunch of them saved up their money to go to England. They got really drunk and when the pubs closed they started singing, "We are the Mods, We are the Mods …"** really loud until they were set upon by real Mods who kicked the crap out of them. The next fall they were punks again.
Every weekend the same street vendor has been having an open air junk sale on the benches in front of the hall. The merchandise doesn’t change much. So I sometimes wonder how profitable it is for him. Mostly he sells bad artwork thrown out by thrift stores and books and clothes that were left on the street. But people are always there haggling. And since the cops started rousting everyone of Church St., it’s the only regular street sale around these days.
(To be continued, I haven’t even gone a block yet.)
*Corte Madera Punks! Isn’t that intimidating?
**You know, like in "Quadrephenia".
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 08:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 09:44 am (UTC)Anarqueso, your flowery pirate language will never be trumped by anyone, so I don't know what you're complaining about.
Sigh.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 09:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 10:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-28 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 09:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 09:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 11:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 09:30 am (UTC)See, I've been wondering lately if this is something that comes with age. Or were you just born like that?
Hahaha!
I've spent a lot nights sleeping in union hall parking lots. I'll have to write about that sometime.
Lucky you, there are no thought police to keep you from loitering.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-28 04:00 pm (UTC)walking to work
Date: 2004-01-27 10:04 am (UTC)Maybe when there isn't 4 inches of ice and snow all over everything. It's a little far in office clothes, though--almost 4 miles.
Re: walking to work
Date: 2004-01-28 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 10:05 am (UTC)I recently noticed a weird anti-personnel architectural feature outside a nice condo apartment complex here in the ghetto. In front of their windows in the lobby, the ground is covered with cobblestones. Separated by one inch gaps. Sticking up six inches out of the cement.
It's just designed to make the ground uncomfortable and difficult to stand on so they don't get homeless people leaned up in the alcoves in front of the windows where the tenants have to look at them. BRILLIANT! Make the spikes PRETTY!
no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 10:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-28 04:06 pm (UTC)walk to work?
Date: 2004-01-27 10:40 am (UTC)I do have a 15 minute walk to work though ...whoops I am taking up to much room here go to obliviot to read the rest
no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 01:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 02:04 pm (UTC)i sleep where i work. but i cruise the alleys daily with acey amapola tompkins, off leash. i will set her to work on an account of our alley rambles.
i'm so interested in streetwalking. there's a whole literature about it (well i guess that's what walter benjamin etc is all about). and dickens used to do it all night long through london. there's a wonderful really wonderful book called streetwalking by....deborah parsons, highly recommended. and others of that ilk.
it's wonderful to encounter walkers. thank you both.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-28 04:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 09:34 pm (UTC)the caustic gels and the spikes are major culprits in causing crippled birds - im sure youve all seen pigeons with club feet and things of that ilk - well, its a disease, its called clubfoot, and its basically an infection - bird gets foot injury, spends life walking around in filth... well, you get the picture. itll happen even without the gels of spikes, really, cause pigeons as a family of birds are notoriously sloppy nest-builders, and rock doves (the flying rat pigeons familiar to every city dweller) are not only crappy nest builders, but completely neglectful housekeepers who seem to relish wallowing in their own filth.
anyhoo, the idea of putting up deterrents that maim, sicken, or otherwise slowly kill pigeons is offensive to me - not so much because of the harm to the pigeons, but because a) they arent selective to pigeons - other birds are affected (the peregrine falcons that sometimes are seen in downtown sf, for instance - if they eat a pigeon with that gel crap on its feathers, they can die from ingesting it) and b) they dont cause instant death in pigeons, which is what i would really want (which has its own set of issues, of course, mainly involving things like dead pigeons falling from tall buildings and hitting pedestrians, and general dead pigeon cleanup...)
i will freely admit to attempting to destroy pigeons at any opportunity (though no, i was not the person who spread the poisoned grain over by 15th and harrison a few years back - whoever that was, your heart was in the right place, but poisoned grain isnt selective enough a killing method), but im all about the immediate death part. slow agonizing death (at least of animals, no matter how much i despise them) aint my bag.
oh whoops. there i go ranting again...
no subject
Date: 2004-01-28 08:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-28 11:08 am (UTC)NIMBY
Date: 2004-01-28 09:17 am (UTC)What really needs to happen is a squab rennaisance. City birds may be nasty, but I'm sure they could be captured, isolated and most of the poisons the ingest purged with a nice diet of rock dove meal a la the treatment our common garden snails get on the way to becoming escargot.
Re: NIMBY
Date: 2004-01-28 11:13 am (UTC)my friend
unfortunately, while i think of destroying pigeons as an ecological responsibility, its a losing battle - theyre too adaptable, and were introduced far too long ago. the solution im looking for at this point is a time machine...
NIMBY
Date: 2004-01-28 11:46 am (UTC)Try as I might, I can't find anything to support the idea that feral populations are any more dangerous than captive populations or even captive parrots for that matter. You can certainly find a long list of diseases communicable between poultry (of various sorts) and humans but I can't find anything to indicate a higher incidence in wild birds or a greater danger of transmission. Some of them are probably even worse in farm bred populations where overcrowding may be much worse than in the wild (that's pure speculation on my part).
And where do you shop that fresh squab is cheap? I can get cheap frozen squab in chinatown, but all the fresh poultry dealers charge a pretty penny.
That said, I agree we'll never get rid of them. But if we made them a bit more useful the annoyance factor would at least go down.
Re: NIMBY
Date: 2004-01-28 07:09 pm (UTC)i dont doubt that incidence of disease in factory-farmed pigeons (assuming they were to exist) would be likely quite high - but considering that pigeon populations in major cities are most likely way over normal carrying capacity for the same space in normal, open space habitat - its probably quite similar conditions! except that in cities, the pigeons would be there willingly :)
im pretty sure ive seen documentation of higher than average disease rates in urban pigeons, but i cant quote a reference. my brother, who is a falconer, and regularly traps quantities of pigeons for food for his falcons, definitely reports much higher mortality rates in those birds as opposed to the captive-bred pigeons he also keeps. (sample size over the last 10 years, probably several thousand pigeons) theyre certainly dirtier in cities than they are in more rural environments, which would suggest wider possibilities as disease vectors...
regardless, i want them dead. i want their families dead. i want their nests burnt to the ground. i want to go there in the middle of the night and piss on the ashes.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-27 09:39 pm (UTC)bring it on. i can almost smell the city...
no subject
Date: 2004-01-28 10:19 am (UTC)About 4 years ago,I had this inside joke running with a friend where we'd be somewhere talking and having a good time, then drop back into reading our books or just sitting there and one of us would say "hey, do you remember that time we were sitting [here] and were talking about [what we were just talking about]? Those were good times".
That was self-mockery over our tendency to become nostalgic.