Mom's Diner

Mom's Diner, originally uploaded by Bob Jagendorf.

I just joined a group named Vanishing Beauty on Flickr. The name is great. It is all about photos of things, icons that are becoming relics of the past. The attachment to such things is a deeper longing for permanence and also for a Platonic truth or reality (that which is not fleeting):

When the mind's eye rests on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and comprehends them, and functions intelligently; but when it turns to the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its beliefs shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence. (Plato, 380BC)

While being aware of that which changes, we are also aware of that which does not.

I love to become aware of those institutions that are just on the verge of extinction. Noticing the present turn into the past and disappear causes me to feel - I admit, in one moment, a melancholy longing - but at the same time, a feeling of interconnected deep presence, of being a part of this mysterious movement of events and lives - history - which makes time feel so linear.

notes on being creative

So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to change the world.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.

9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

13. Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside.

14. Dying young is overrated.

15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.

16. The world is changing.

17. Merit can be bought. Passion can't.

18. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.

19. Sing in your own voice.

20. The choice of media is irrelevant.

21. Selling out is harder than it looks.

22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.

23. Worrying about "Commercial vs. Artistic" is a complete waste of time.

24. Don?t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.

25. You have to find your own schtick.

26. Write from the heart.

27. The best way to get approval is not to need it.

28. Power is never given. Power is taken.

29. Whatever choice you make, The Devil gets his due eventually.

30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.

31. Remain frugal.

from Gaping Void. this rocks. thx Luc.
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html

stein-like

A straight girl is a straight girl is a straight girl.

urban exploration

- otherwise known as infiltration. I read an article about this last night. People break into abandoned buildings, silos, tunnels, churches, just to explore and get some thrills. if you are into this feel free to let me know. it reminds me of when i was a punk teenager, and my friend Jen Cobb and I used to explore south of market in San Francisco, which used to be much more abandoned. there was an abandoned brewery and we used to take pictures there and it was all very exciting. i am going to see if i can dig any up. here is an article about the abandoned buffalo central terminal. it's so f'in batman! how cool is that? for photos, and entire website, click on link Exploring Buffalo Central Terminal. It looks much cooler than the cut and paste job on this blog.
The Buffalo Central Terminal
by Ninjalicious and Liz
Buffalo, New York, is a lucky city. True, the weather is terrible, crime is high, the economy is dead and the suburbs are usually on fire, but Buffalo still has a lot going for it.
The city's main attraction is a tall, dark tower that bursts forth from otherwise flat land in the middle of a residential subdivision and soars 20 storeys up into the air. The looming, monolithic tower and the vast, art deco train station to which it is attached were constructed in 1929 and served the New York Central railway, the Penn-Central railway and later Amtrak until being abandoned in 1979. In its heyday, the giant Buffalo Central Terminal was a focal point of the industrial and social life of one of the largest cities in the United States, where the marble floors were kept glistening and immaculate and people dressed in their Sunday best. Today, the relic sits abandoned and empty, largely neglected by all but some local friends of the station and a few appreciative explorers. It remains quite possibly the most beautiful building in the world.

The BCT. The Way In

The BCT is a very big building with a hell of a lot of holes in it. While the powers that be occasionally make entering the building a slightly more challenging puzzle (blocking up doors, sealing useful indoor passageways and erecting a wire fence around much of the perimeter), they have never succeeded in building barricades that would thwart a determined explorer. Breaking in is not necessary — do a thorough perimeter check and you'll find a way in, though you'll probably have to start with a side building rather than the Great Hall.

While the BCT's side buildings are outshined by the tower, the Great Hall and the basements next door, they are quite interesting in their own right.

While the side building isn't the main attraction, it is a very interesting place. The basement is usually flooded, and can only be explored during the coldest part of the year, when one can crawl around on top of six-foot-thick (you hope) ice. Several junk-filled stairwells lead up to the higher levels. The upper hallways are interesting, though many are filled with dust (particularly in areas where the roof has collapsed), water or ice, and in some you will be visible from outside the building. There are several interesting old rooms on the upper levels, including a telephone operators room, a fan room and an old, flooded library, still stocked with soggy or frozen books and typewriters. You can also get out onto a lower rooftop from here.
Stairs down
Inside the window
One route from the side building into the Great Hall involves climbing through the remnants of a glass hallway.
Though someone occasionally seals up some of the passageways between the side building and the Great Hall, most astute explorers will usually be able to find and navigate their way into the more interesting part of the station without causing any damage to the building. This may involve crossing the remnants of one of the several old glass hallways, the floors of which are now mostly destroyed. Wherever you come out, you should be able to easily make your way to the ground floor of the Great Hall.

The Great Hall
The BCT's Great Hall is an incredible sight; though decades of neglect and abuse have had an effect, scraping one's shoe through the caked-on muck on the ground reveals the marble floor underneath, and the tall, arcing ceiling of the Great Hall looks as fantastic as ever. In spite of being flooded and burned and spray painted and having every other window in the place smashed, the BCT is still the most magnificent and dignified building for miles around.
A look around the room reveals the details of another time: carefully etched street names cut into stone. Ticket kiosks done in gold leaf paint. Marble is everywhere — though not for lack of scavengers' trying — and is often sculpted into ornamental scrolls and the like. There is plenty to explore here, but the primary appeal of the Great Hall is its emptiness itself, in which you can see the sheer beauty of its past, and the magnitude of its abandonment. How could something that was ever this beautiful be discarded to time and decay like this?
The room is both stirring in its stillness and oppressive with the presence of ghosts. Dandily dressed travellers from New York City bustle by in the mind's eye, dutifully trailed by young porters — and of course, everyone has a jaunty hat. The Great Hall is a fine memorial to travel, in fact: it recalls both the excitement and the sadness of travel, becoming a real-life monument to that which we failed to appreciate in the rush of life, and that which we fail to preserve now in a society embarrassed to confront its ghosts.
To stand in the Great Hall is to truly feel part of a lost time, and there is little doubt that being there will take your breath away.


The Way Up
One must wade through the station's history in order to scale the tower, as large sections of the second and third floor are covered in old records and train schedules, and one of the stairways up is clogged with old paperwork up to two feet high. There are many places to explore on the way up. When I first toured the building in 1999, everything was open and accessible. Later, between 2000 and 2001, the tower's four clock faces were repaired, and solid new doors were installed to prevent any potential troublemakers from getting anywhere near the clocks on the 12th floor. More recently people have reported that loud alarms have been installed above the fourth floor and possibly in other locations.
No one has yet managed a good look at the alarms, and no one is yet completely clear on what causes them to go off. One point all reports have agreed upon is that they are extremely loud and usually inspire one to run from the building as quickly as possible. While setting off an alarm will never be a pleasant thing, potential explorers of the BCT can take some comfort in the knowledge that one could easily hide in the gigantic station for weeks without being found by the police, who aren't likely to ever try to bring dogs into the building. While it isn't likely that anyone who sets off the alarm will actually have to face any consequences, setting off the alarm is obviously a very nasty thing to do with potentially nasty consequences for future explorers, so please don't do it.

There is lots to see on the way up, including catwalks over top of the Great Hall.

The view from the roof is spectacular.
Those who do get further up will be rewarded; the floors near the top are full of interesting spots. Towards the top, the building narrows and begins to slope inward, and small holes in the walls admit enough outside sunlight to illuminate the dust that fills the air, so that it feels as if one is climbing up the inside of a pyramid. A narrow iron staircase leads up from the upper mechanical rooms out to the small, octagonal rooftop, where the walls are all thoroughly coated in graffiti. The view from the roof of the station is spectacular.

An old reception hall in the basement.
The Basement and Beyond
From the Great Hall, the most direct route into the station's very interesting basements is through the employee corridors at the back of the kitchen. These extremely narrow hallways and staircases lead down to corridors featuring a bizarre three-level maze of larger rooms, hallways, semi-flooded steam tunnels, ladders and ornate staircases, some of which were bricked up at some stage in the building's lifetime. While one will find occasional mechanical rooms, shops, a corridor containing a car stripped bare, vacated apartments used by houseless people and the occasional very attractive landing, the vast majority of the spaces down here are completely empty rooms. There are a few hours' worth of stuff to see in the station's basements alone, and it would be easy to get lost if one didn't pay attention.
From the basement, it's a pretty simple matter to navigate one's way across a little fenced-in courtyard (once a driveway underneath the hallway connecting the tower and the Great Hall to the train loading platforms) to another side building, where there are plenty of further architectural and archaelogical oddities to be found, including strange empty rooms, large unused pits, old scales and other souvenirs of the station's industrial past.
Buffalo Central Terminal
Please note: if you damage, deface or remove anything from the BCT, I will hunt you down and kill you. This is nothing personal. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

see ya amsterdam

I will miss the people i left behind. who i will see again. and they will come here. or we might meet somewhere new. because we can. move around. so why not.

Can still hear the bells of the thousands of bicycles and the Westerkerk church. A constant ringing - life saying come on! let's go! tots ziens Amsterdam.

staring at the bright San Francisco sky, watching it cut shadows like modern architecture had sliced through old Europe.The windyness is getting in my ears, gonna take this town by rainbow titanium lightning bolts - splicing and fusing, mutageneticizing anything i come across - making things that would otherwise not exist in nature. And then again - i will also just watch, nature unfolds, I'll take its picture, I'll take it easy, feeling that California home-soil, smell the ocean air. can't freakin' wait.

worked on this ad for Nike Plus, but love the new one i worked on even better, which we just finished and when its done it will be up here too.

yosemite june 2006

My friend Janine is visiting from Amsterdam so we got on the highways and carefully wound through the wooded roads into the wilderness. We made it over and down the ridges and emerged into Yosemite, into the secret garden, as if we were just born. It feels like home, it feels strange, it feels like God, it feels secret, it feels like love, it feels hidden, it feels like the middle of the earth. I just still want to be there now.

Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge. - John Muir.
I'm grateful to this great preservationist for saving Yosemite Valley, the first national park.

17 reasons

I remember this sign being part of my subconscious awareness while growing up in the city. I stumbled across the sign again while looking up some old punk music. Some bands based in the Mission in the 90's put out a compilation bearing the sign and the name.


I suddenly became aware of that old sign in a way I never had before, though I could remember it being a part of growing up, a part of my environment, a part of me in a funny way. I found out they tore the sign down in 2002. It made me a bit sad, but mostly because I felt like I had always taken it for granted, even though on some basic level, I knew it was a very unique and strangely beautiful icon. I then looked up some info on the sign, and interestingly enough, it has a lot of stories behind it. The "17 reasons" stood out to people as some kind of mystic meaning. I always just thought it said "7 reasons" and thought it was for seagram's 7! no mystical interpretation, but I always did think it was special anyway.
I realized today why I wrote this blog. It's about being aware of my surroundings - a reminder to take it all in, and remember it, and notice how special the world and everyday life is - to not go through oblivious, but to really see it, and feel, and touch and hear.



Sign of the times; There's only one real story behind '17 Reasons': Decrepit sign has existential message, mundane history

September 15, 2000, Friday
FIRST EDITION

Copyright 2000 The Hearst Corporation
The San Francisco Examiner

SECTION: THE CITY; Pg. CT-A-1
BYLINE: VICTORIA COLLIVER


The "17 Reasons Why" sign "minus the Why" on top of the Thrift Town Building at 2102 Mission. The old sign, a landmark since it advertised the old Redlicks store, is getting a little worn out; The real reason for the "17 Reasons" sign is that the store is at the intersection of Mission and 17th streets. There were never any "reasons."



IT LOOMS over the corner of Mission and 17th streets, pretending to answer yet posing the largest question in The City.

"17 Reasons."

The dilapidated metal sign, which stands on the roof of Thrift Town, used to say "17 Reasons Why," but that hardly clarifies matters.

Seventeen reasons to do what? And why 17 reasons? Why not five, or 12 or 358? Why tell us 17 reasons exist, but not share what they are?


Along with being a curiosity, the sign has been a source of inspiration. It's the name behind a rap compilation called 17 Reasons and a now defunct Noe Valley arts-and-crafts shop also called 17 Reasons. A former San Francisco resident named her band after the sign, even after moving to the Portland area. "I liked the enigma of it. Nobody seems to know what the sign stood for, what 17 Reasons meant," said Sattie Clark, lead singer of the pop-rock band, 17 Reasons Why, which disbanded last year. "People would come up with things, but nobody would give me a reason that satisfied me."

Clark, an Oakland native who lived in SoMa from 1987 to 1990, had been strangely captivated by the sign.

"I would see it every time I got to that intersection - I thought it spoke to me personally," she said. "Nobody seems to look at it. It seemed like it was almost invisible, but it was so big."

Many people have lived or worked in the Mission for years without looking up at the roof of the four-story building at 2101 Mission St. Even if they have noticed it, very few have any idea what it means.

'A piece of art' Alex Orszulak, a self-described "non-dot-commer" who has lived in the Mission for more than 20 years, often wondered what the sign meant, but not often enough to ask.

"It's always been sort of mystical," said Orszulak, 31, who uses the sign as a compass because it is visible from many parts of The City. "You're not supposed to ask why."

Enrique Mendoza used to work in the building next door to the sign but still has no idea now what the 17 reasons are.

"I've noticed it since I lived here," said Mendoza, who moved to the Mission in 1986. "I think it has something to do with soda pop - 7-Up, a drink."

Pleas Braxton, who sweeps the streets for San Francisco's League of UrbanGardeners, said whatever the reason, the sign should stay: "It's a piece of art."

Longtime residents will remember - and this is where the curious will learn much of the mystery - that the sign was a slogan for what was one of the largest furniture stores in The City, the Redlick-Newman Co., later simply Redlicks.

But the sign's history is clouded. For example, some people believe erroneously that the 17 stands for the store's 17 showrooms. And if you ask people why the "Why" fell off, many say it was blown off during fierce wind storms a couple of years ago.

Nothing but the truth

To get the real story, you have to go straight to the source: 86-year-old Charles Redlick, who not only is alive and well in San Mateo, but still going to the gym.

Redlick ran the store from 1945 - when his father Abraham, known as "A.L.," died - until he closed the store's doors in 1975.

What was eventually to become Redlicks was founded by the Redlick brothers, including A.L., on 18th and Mission streets in 1906 to help people refurnish their homes after the earthquake, Charles Redlick explained. The store, later Redlick-Newman, moved to the corner of 17th and Mission after that building was finished, around 1913.

The sign, however, did not appear until the 1930s. Redlick said it was erected by the Occidental Stove Co. and said "Occidental Stoves," a brand of gas ranges Redlicks sold.

Still in the '30s, Redlicks decided to remove the ad in favor of replacing it with a slogan for the store. The partnership with the Newmans, who were related to the Redlicks by marriage, ended due to a feud and the company became known simply as Redlicks.

"We were looking for some message to bridge over the fact we were changing the name," Redlick said.

And the reason?

The 17 Reasons was his father's idea.

"My father developed this slogan after much study, asking everybody and their cousin," he said. "He'd gotten the idea from Heinz 57 years back. They had 57 brands of food or pickles, whatever."

The 17 did refer to the fact the store stood on the corner of 17th Street. But what were the reasons?

"People would ask what the 17 reasons were, and we would guff it off. There were no 17 reasons," he said.

Redlick said he closed the store in 1975 because it was no longer profitable. He said the construction of BART along Mission Street, changes in the neighborhood and the growing popularity of indoor malls contributed to Redlicks' demise.

But the sign, which was visible from many parts of The City, remained lit until the bitter end: "When the business closed, we turned the lights out."

As for why the "Why" fell off, the storm myth is dispelled by the building's manager, Comrado Amador, one of few others who knows anything about the sign.

Amador said he took the "Why" down himself in 1995 because of safety concerns.

Impossible to get rid of

"The pigeons got inside, and it got all rusted," he said. Age as well as the bird droppings were the culprit. "We were afraid the wind would come, and the pieces would fly around and hurt somebody."

Why the 17 Reasons sign, which is now covered in graffiti, continues to stand is hardly sentimental: No one has been able tear it down.

Steve Moore, vice president of Thrift Town's parent company, Norquist Salvage Corp., said the building's previous owner, Alexander M. Maisin, looked into removing the sign but found his options - which involved either a helicopter or welding torches - prohibitively expensive.

"The only reason Maisin was interested in taking it down is because he thought it would fall down," Moore said.

Norquist looked into leasing the sign to a billboard company. The company was in negotiations with San Francisco's Infinity Outdoor Inc., which planned to wrap the sign with vinyl and sell the space for advertising, but that deal fell apart because Infinity wanted various safety improvements made.

Thrift Town has been the building's main tenant since 1979 and now shares it with a smattering of dot-com companies, sewing factories and other small businesses.

Promotion bombed

After Maisin died in 1998, Norquist bought the building to keep it from turning into a Rite Aid. But the Burlington, Vt., company was only able to hang on to it for a year before selling it last year to San Francisco's Adare Properties, retaining a 10-year lease.

When Thrift Town first moved into the building, Moore said he tried to use the sign to promote the opening by offering 17 giveaways to new shoppers. "I tried to make a promotion out of it, but it bombed. Nobody knew what the hell I was talking about," said Moore, who considers the sign a "wasted asset." "I don't think anyone pays any attention to it."

Try telling that to Sattie Clark, who still seems attached to the sign even though her band no longer exists and she lives in a different state.

Clark admits learning the sign advertised a furniture store is a bit of a letdown. But, she explained, her attachment is to the physical sign itself.

"If I had a million dollars, I would buy that sign and restore it," she said. "It has suffered so much, even in past 10 years. Someone needs to declare it a landmark and do something to restore it in the very near future, or it's going to be too late."

BOB MCLEOD, EXAMINER PHOTO
LOAD-DATE: September 18, 2000

Cuz MySpace doesn't archive

I love MySpace. But I really don't like that my little blogs get deleted and I can't look at my old posts or refer others to them. So I'm going for the real stuff now. Hello blog, hello world.