A little over three weeks ago police blocked sidewalk access on Larkin and Polk Streets surrounding the Bill Graham Auditorium, and huge air conditioning units were set up on the curbs.
Over the next month, there were a small phalanx of snarly private security guards and bored looking SFPD officers guarding the perimeter of the building, but none of them could say what they were doing. The SF Chronicle City Hall reporter Heather Knight's usual mode of investigative journalism is to play stenographer for official city spokespersons, but they stonewalled her when she asked what was going on, which seemed to arouse some vestigial journalistic curiosity. (Click here for the article.)
Ms. Knight finally printed unofficial rumors that the auditorium was to be closed for a month for a one-day product release by Apple Computer in early September, and wrote a few follow-up articles attempting to create a dust-up, but nobody cared.
At the blog 40 Going on 28, the Bill Graham closure struck the author as a perfect Allegory for the New San Francisco: "The tech industry so thoroughly owns and operates this town now that it can command total secrecy as it reconfigures a PUBLICLY OWNED THEATER and maybe even swaps out the fucking GLASSWORK to its own specs. We are all truly players on Apple's stage."
From every account I've read and trusted on the internet today, there was nothing particularly exciting about today's Apple product releases, but who knows what will emerge from today's showtime down the road? Everything feels anticlimactic after last week's Mr. Robot finale on television where the EVP of Technology for Evil Corp publicly told the truth for a change, then violently left the planet.
2 comments:
So that's what that was ... I've been afflicting City Hall lately, so I noted the disruption. It looked like a lot of people who very much needed the $ were being paid to stand around. I don't mean the cops; I mean the event security types.
Jesus this infuriates me.
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