Advent Sunday in the Hood 1

Christmas has arrived in the Civic Center, and one of the earliest commercial exploitations of the season has been by the San Francisco Symphony, which is sponsoring "Christmas parties" for children at $32 a person.



The program presumably involves music, amongst the face-painting activities and the Henry Moore statue scrambling.



On Hayes Street nearby, the children's parties often repair for more treats...



...on the trendy shopping area between Franklin and Laguna...



...where a store called Scandinavian Details had a window display of Swedish stuffed toys called "Pee & Poo."



At Flipper's outdoor cafe, I met up with Kimo Crossman and James Chaffee, two notorious City Hall good-government gadflies who were enjoying a rare victory after the Rules Committee of the Board of Supervisors had voted last Thursday in their favor (click here to see a video stream of the complete meeting from the San Francisco government TV website).



The dispute was over the city's practice of taking every document, whether it was originally in Word, Excel or whatever software program, and converting it into Adobe PDF documents which were then printed out and handed over. This made for a ridiculous amount of work for city bureaucrats and it also left out a lot of data that is included in certain documents, such as formulas in Excel sheets for coming up with numbers, commentary by interested governmental parties on documents, and so on.



In any case, Gloria Young, the Clerk of the Board had gone to the City Attorney's office who told her that for confidentiality purposes nobody could have original files, which was disputed by commenter Joe Lynn at the meeting with the analogy that it was ridiculous for somebody to go upstream at a campground for a crap to then complain about the water being polluted at his campground when he returned. "Make sure you put all legally confidential information in separate documents, and you won't have a problem."



The commenters at the meeting were a formidable roster of the usual good-government gadflies who one doesn't want to piss off because they show up at meetings, come prepared, are articulate, and are generally relentless. Besides Joe Lynn, Kimo and James, they included Doug Comstock, Richard Knee, Allan Grossman, Marc Solomon and a half dozen others.



We then visited a store on Fell Street between Gough and Octavia that opened a year and a half ago (click here for their wonderful website and be sure to read the "Staff" section).



It's definitely the coolest place in the Hayes Valley...



...and I write that as someone who is completely uninterested in comic books or "graphic novels"...



...even after all the attempts to seduce me with their charms by my Portuguese illustrator friend, Pedro Murteira (click here to get to a website dedicated to his awesome work).



Their are groovy couches to lay around on and hang out...



...and a balcony where their are live artist demonstrations, bands, and fabulous Events.



When artists have an in-store appearance, they are asked to create an illustration on toilet seats with Sharpies, and it's quite a collection.



Check the place out.