It wasn’t major, but it was the first relatively decent snowfall I’ve seen since moving back east two and a half years ago. Which sort of sucks. I remember when I was a kid that we always got a couple of fairly good snowstorms every winter, usually in the 3-4 inch range and very often more than that. Come to think of it, it seems like we even used to get one every time I came home to visit when I was living in San Francisco.
I guess we’re in a bit of a warm phase now. Maybe it will go away soon.
Interesting interview tidbit from a 1981 Hall & Oates syndicated radio interview that was in today’s “to digitize” pile. The subject is music video, and the potential effects of a just-announced music video channel on cable.
And yes, that does mean that I possess several disks full of syndicated shows like “The BBC College Concert” and “Rock Over London” from my radio days, all of which were supposed to be destroyed right after they aired. You wouldn’t begrudge me a moderately rare Lords of the New Church live performance and the occasional interview with a long-forgotten Britpop star, would you?
This post was written upon the launch of an unsuccessful attempt at bring Planet SOMA back to life:
I’ve always been nostalgic about San Francisco.
I don’t mean that I’m nostalgic about it now that I no longer live there, nor that I “miss” it, per se. Actually, I was even nostalgic about San Francisco when I was still a resident. I was nostalgic for a San Francisco I never got to see, one whose existence — assuming it ever existed at all — concluded long before I arrived on the scene. I’m talking about the 1950s San Francisco of Herb Caen, martinis, Trader Vic’s, and little neighborhood Safeway stores in the middle of the block with no parking lots. And maybe even the San Francisco of the 1970s, with the relaxed attitude toward sex and cute shaggy-headed boys running around everywhere.
I moved to San Francisco in October of 1992. The city and the state weren’t in top form; there was a recession, and a string of well-publicized disasters starting with the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and ending with the 1992 LA riots had scared much of the country out of ever wanting to live in California. But not me. After 28 years in North Carolina, I was ready for something a bit more urban. And 1992 was an amazing time for a sodomite with somewhat non-mainstream tastes to move to San Francisco.
It’s that long gone San Francisco of the early 1990s that I sometimes miss these days. I have pretty much no use for the current incarnation of the place, and I’m happy as can be that I no longer live there. That may have as much to do with my own growth and perspective as it does with the actual changes the city itself has experienced. I’m no longer in my twenties, I no longer drink and carry on until all hours of the night, and I’m concerned about than sex, booze, and rock, and roll. In short, I may be missing my own youth more than I’m missing some idealized version of San Francisco in 1992. I grew out of both.
That said, it was a great place to be at that point in my life, and it’s the San Francisco of the 1990s that this new incarnation of Planet SOMA will be all about. I’ll be posting about whatever I’m thinking about on any given day: stories from my own past, music videos, photos, random news stories from the era, memories of sex clubs and bars and places that no longer exist, and even the birth of the internet. You never know what you might find here.
In a sense, it will be like some of the earlier versions of Planet SOMA, dating back to its birth in January of 1996. In case you’re new to the site, here’s a crash course in Planet SOMA History:
Version 1 lasted for roughly two and a half years, from January 1996 to August 1998, and featured commentary on South of Market nightspots, sex clubs, and history, and also included road trip journals and occasional rants on miscellaneous subjects…not to mention the occasional dirty picture. The focus was on my neighborhood, the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, an area dubbed “SOMA” by any number of hipsters and real estate speculators.
Version 2 was launched in August 1998, and added a semi-regular web journal to the mix, which by this time didn’t feature sex clubs or porn anymore. The rants became more prominent and more varied. By late 2000, I’d split most of the personal material (the journal, and all my assorted “bio” pages) into a separate site, Otherstream.com, which eventually resulted in Planet SOMA Version 3, a site which mostly contained rants about my growing impatience with the city by the bay.
Version 4 was finally launched in early 2004, once pretty much all the old content had either been retired or moved to Otherstream. I’d almost given up on the old site, as I was increasingly frustrated with San Francisco (and soon to escape for good) and didn’t quite know what to do with it. I thought this new incarnation as a photo site would inspire me to do regular updates. I did exactly four updates before moving back to North Carolina in 2005 and putting Planet SOMA into a stasis chamber.
Welcome to Version 5. We’ll see where it goes.
Detachable Penis
King Missile, 1992
I vaguely remember meeting one of the members of King Missile on New Year’s Eve, 1993. I think it was at the Lone Star. I’m not sure, because I was exceedingly drunk that night, as was my customary practice at the time.
I’d loved the band ever since the first time I heard “Jesus Was Way Cool” several years before, and I thought it was really cool that they finally had something of a hit. At least on Live 105, back when it used to not suck.
I arrived in San Francisco on a Monday afternoon, a week after I’d left my family and most of my friends back in North Carolina. It was my first cross-country drive, and the first time I’d seen much of anything between the Appalachians and the Sierra Nevada. My friends had been amazed that I would take such a trip completely alone. I responded that I couldn’t have imagined doing it any other way.
I very much regret not keeping a journal nor any real notes on that trip. I’ve forgotten a lot of the specifics, but there are a few things I’ll always remember:
in a thrift store outside Denver, and thinking that was a really good sign.
.I was pretty exhausted upon arrival, especially after driving around in circles trying to park in the Civic Center area. So (of course) we went out drinking on Polk Street that night. I didn’t have to start work until Wednesday, so I think we drank a lot.
As we move farther and farther into the internet age, the idea of a pornography store in general is beginning to sound just a bit anachronistic. Le Salon on Polk Street, though, was the pornography store to end all pornography stores. I’ve never seen anything comparable, before or since.
To start with, there were no booths. Le Salon was strictly a takeout operation. It was obvious that their mission was to concentrate on the actual videos rather than the, ummm, incidentals that come with the standard sodomite porn emporium. In other words, there was no shagging in the back room.
But man, did they concentrate on the video. This place was huge, they had everything, and it was all organized: by fetish, by studio, and even by director. They even had cross-reference cards. It really inspired the future librarian in me, and it also really allowed me to develop my collection of pirated porn on VHS.
Le Salon closed around 1997 or 1998 as I recall. Apparently, the owner of the building had a much purer vision of some proposed Lower Polk renaissance that didn’t include a big, geeky pornography store. I was reduced to using the rather lackluster outlets on Folsom Street near my apartment, and video smut was never quite the same for me again.
What is this obsession Charlotte has with vaguely ridiculous-looking disc-shaped public art projects? First, there was the giant sand dollar thing at Trade and Tryon, then the interlocking onion rings at Wendover and Randolph, and now this new (cough) installation, which can only be described as some sort of cubist primitive version of Stonehenge on South Boulevard: Charlotte’s own mysterious homage to the mythical power of the contact lens.
It’s really bad. There are like eight of these things spaced along two sides of the new light rail line in a particularly ugly stretch of South Boulevard. Suffice to say, they add nothing whatsoever to the aesthetics other than to offer passing commuters a little chuckle thinking of the swindler who got paid for the damned things.
I’d like to think these projects are maybe rooted in some sort of resentment of public art requirements, but I fear that’s not the case. Even more, I fear that someone actually took this merde seriously.
