Telegraph Hill.

Is it the new Mission? Call, press #4, and find out for yourself.

For more great artwork got to: http://highschoolart.blogspot.com/

Except for Nick, who’s got things on his mind, things that would sour anyone’s warm weather plans. In no particular order, these things include: terrorist cells, ceaseless threats from the Russian Consulate and micro radio transmitters implanted in his prostrate. And then there’s the guys behind his woes: Michael, Oleg, Alexander, Alexey, Sergey O. and Sergey G., “Russian commie-criminals” intent on torturing Nick “16 hours a day, non-stop” with a brutal assault of “great stress on [his] nervous system, heart, brain and reproductive abilities,” all in retaliation against Nick’s self-professed anti-Soviet dissidence in the “1990th.”

Nick’s flybills have been spotted for the past two months up and down Geary Boulevard, often accompanied by a smaller explanatory flyer (not pictured due to the multiple phone numbers it lists) in which he offers the full names and ages of his tormentors, as well as his own contact information and a plea to the FCC to help him remove any and all radio transplants.

As excruciating as Nick’s paranoiac plight may be, I’m fascinated by the implicit contradictions his tactics raise. Here’s the Underground Man literally broadcasting his palpable fear and angst in block lettering on a 17” x 11” poster resembling any number of media promotions. It’s raw, loud and taunting in a way that inspires fear for Nick’s safety on the part of the viewer. Inadvertent as this effect may be, the work offers serious commentary on the inherent passivity of the observer and an embedded psychological content that’s a rare achievement within a constructed visual experience.

So enjoy your summer looky-loos, and as the burgers and brats spit over the coals, know that Nick is counting on you. . .

A San Francisco violinist responsible for “over three hundred songs” and “one million chords,” Melvin scorches a bus station unlike any busker freak-out I’ve ever been lucky enough to commute through. His song, ‘What I Wanted to Be by the Time I Turned 53′ is like witnessing the ghosts of Igor Stravinsky, Muddy Waters and Karlheinz Stockhausen all joining hands and jumping the cosmic turnstile of What-the-Fuck? That’s how spooky Marshall can get . . .

*Thanks to Party of the Third Part for the video and the insightful comments.

Given the curvature of the wall and the compact depth of the room, it’s a difficult mural to photograph in its entirety. So if you’re nearby and curious, drive across the bridge or hop MUNI’s #108 from the Transbay Terminal and loiter in front of Building A until security shows up. At that point, though, it’s up to you to decide how you’d like to talk your way inside.

Several years ago I had the pleasure of attending an estate sale in the Broderick Street home of a former Fillmore District gospel diva who chose to carpet every inch of her five-story Queen Anne in neon green Astroturf. Coaxed by the tread-proof, fade-resistant promise of a new indoor Eden, an ivy vine had broken through a basement window and snaked beneath a kitchen door to take to the asbestos-flocked walls and continue across the ceilings of each room on each floor, all the way to the attic. The effect was disorienting and stunning, so much so that I visited the house each day of the three-day sale and never purchased a thing. The brief glimpse into another person’s private eccentricities was ultimately more enticing and rewarding than anything that I might have carried away.

And I may have been able to say the same for the house where the following drawings were found. But to tell the truth, this time I left empty handed because Charles was on the scene an hour before and had walked away with the goods, leaving me little choice but to linger in a dead man’s home and take in the sights.

Despite Charles’ breezy description, the only distinct charm to the house was an incongruously bucolic wishing well planted into the sidewalk where a driveway might have run. The rest was a slouching and soggy Victorian hangover. Inside, a hallway draped with American flags led to a back room filled with thick volumes of military history and brad-bound copies of California Penal Codes stretching back through three decades. After checking out the other rooms, including a kitchen stocked with countless jars of dried legumes (all for sale), I noticed a cardboard box overflowing with an assortment of rubber stamps, each cut in the same heavy, institutional type: ‘ROUTE TO CHAPLIN’, ‘IN VIOLATION’, ‘GUARD STATION’, ‘PAROLE’. Pretty cool, but I had no idea where I’d use stamps like that. So after unsuccessfully haggling with an agent over the price of a switchblade and an ‘I Like Ike’ lapel pin, I left.

A few days later Charles and I were sitting around looking at the drawings he salvaged when things started to add up. Volumes of penal codes, routing stamps and a sheaf of drawings in which the initials Y.G.C. appeared frequently could only mean one thing: crazy-ass juvie art collected and kept by a corrections officer/counselor/teacher, and by all calculations the guy who looked like Wilfred Brimley mad-dogging us from inside a disembodied vagina was our man.

After featuring a random assortment of these drawings in the previous post, I’d like to offer a suite of work that I’m assuming was the result of an assignment based on readings of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which seems like an odd choice for a group of misguided post-Aquarian teens in lockdown; a bit enabling with all that ‘drink me, eat me, smoking caterpillar on a giant mushroom’ noise, no? Kind of like giving a copy of 1984 to a housebound paranoiac. But best to let the artwork speak for itself.

Here you’ve got most of the immediately recognizable iconography from Carroll’s story. Note the White Rabbit contemporized as the Playboy Bunny. And I’ll be damned it that wishing well doesn’t look like the one in front the house where the drawings were found.

Turns out that rabbit holes are everywhere, and well worth falling into. Even if they belong to dead people whose switchblades are way overpriced.

Really, I should have seen this coming.

But allow me to backtrack: a few months ago Will’s Flyers appeared everywhere and almost overnight, for the most part stapled at eye level on bulletin boards in coffee shops and video stores. But the ones that caught my attention were the ones taped to utility poles just above curb level: easy to overlook unless you, the captive two-legged target, happened to be waiting for your dog to finish its business. Base, intuitive, and as calculated as the diaper commercials punctuating educational afternoon cartoon line-ups, this was brilliant advertising, clear and simple. I was immediately attracted to the incongruity of Will’s industrious sense of self-promotion and the aesthetic naiveté of the portrait services being offered at the bargain price of $20 per drawing. So I got it in my head (where most of my life-long regrets tend to originate) to commission Will for a rendering of my cat who was about to undergo long neglected oral surgery, a procedure I hoped would exorcise the flat of the strange, sardine-like stink that crept into bed late every night and curled up to stay. I called the number on the flyers, left a message and waited.

Two weeks pass, the cat has her surgery, and I give up on hearing back from Will. Then I hear back from Will, calling me from a phone booth. I know this because he opens the conversation by telling me that he is in a phone booth and that he doesn’t have much time to talk because he doesn’t have many quarters and his friend outside the phone booth is waiting on him to buy pie for dinner. Traffic tears through his voice while he talks. He asks me about the cat, about her surgery. I’ve forgotten my mention of this in my initial message, and caught off-guard by his concern I confess my surprise. “I don’t forget anything,” Will shouts. His mouth is far away from the receiver, and he sounds like a man accustomed to talking one way and looking another. Ignoring his tone I press for a back-story and Will obliges:

One man, three dogs. They live in a truck and share the front seat to stay warm. One of his dogs, Natalie (the namesake of his business), has a tumor the size of a golf ball on her neck that requires immediate removal, hence the assertive advertising campaign. All proceeds from Will’s dog walking will go directly to the welfare of his animals. As for the twenty dollar price tag on the pet portraits, Will considers this an insult to his talent but is willing to accept it on behalf of his charges. “Twenty dollars buys a lot of dog food,” he assures me, and because I have no idea what it’s like to survive on subsistence level as a struggling artist who happens to share most of his body heat and personal space on any given winter night with multiple kibble-craved dependents, I acquiesce.

Will’s instructions: photos of the cat, along with the money, are to be left in an envelope at a pet store on Stanyan street. The store’s owner, Gordon, will contact Will when everything is in place. “Don’t worry about Gordon,” Will assures me, “he’s the last hippie in the Haight.” But I ignore this red flag for the only reason that makes sense: if I deal with Gordon I don’t have to deal with Will, meaning his dogs. I don’t like dogs, and I hope to keep them as far removed from this experience as possible. “One more thing,” Will adds before we hang up, “how would you like your cat posed in the picture?” Like in the flyers, I tell him, meaning the cartoonish iconography I’d come to love, in which dish-eyed owls leer over leather clad mice popping wheelies on thumb sized (and undeniably sweet-ass) motorcycles. Cheesy Rider rides again, I quote, and Will laughs. “I just made it up,” he says. I tell him that’s why I called in the first place, expecting more laughter. Instead, there’s a long pause. “But I made that shit up,” Will insists. And that’s when I begin to suspect that everything is instantly and unexplainably fucked.

Continue Reading Part 2

Back at Charles’ apartment we find that his cat was way too fat for the harness, so we spend the afternoon taking turns with the leash, dragging her on her side across the kitchen floor to get her used to the sensation of moving when dead-set against it (the feline definition of catastrophe, we assume). Attempting to console Charles in the wake of his failed contingency plan, I point out that the cat’s unwillingness to be moved could mean salvation, given that in the event of a major cataclysm I would be chief among the grief-stricken and hunger-crazed mobs tracking him through the underbrush with the intention of devouring his cat, pink leash and all.

Now that the whole pet-portrait scenario is out of our hands, Charles and I kill time by scouring the city for Will’s flyers, which seem to be plastered everywhere from the Great Highway to the Embarcadero. The cost of dog food aside, Will must be spending a small fortune at Kinko’s for an effort that seems to be going completely unnoticed by most people, except for the two of us and a friend who calls one afternoon to say that he’s just seen Will tacking up a flyer in an Outer Richmond café. But when I ask for a description all my friend can offer is that Will seemed really tall. Which is about as useful as describing a shark as really wet.

Two weeks go by, and while I’m not an impatient man by any means, I often like to know when things are going to happen and exactly how they’re going to go down. After all, it’s not everyday that I walk into a pet store and hand a wad of bills to a man who’s likely to mistake my envelope with his monthly mail-ins to Mr. Kite’s Benefit. So I call Gordon to see if Will has been by. Gordon reports that Will has been in the week before and might have picked up the envelope, but is reticent to offer any more information. I decide to call Will and track the order’s progress.

In my message I’m polite, asking Will if he’s received the photos and the money (you know what they say about the fidelity of hippies), but Will’s beeper service cuts me off mid sentence. I call back and am cut off a second time. After dialing again I get several seconds into my new message and forget my train of thought so I hang up and call back a fourth time.

The following night I come home to a voice mail from Will, one that I’ve saved on my machine and replayed for friends enough times that their immediate look of shock and concern upon hearing it has begun to erode at my initial amusement. The message starts and ends with Will referring to me as “man,” a bit slurred and unmistakably riled. “You’re really starting to irritate me now,” he warns, “and you don’t have to be calling me every day.” Then he insists that if I’m “in such a damn hurry” we can make arrangements for me to pick up the drawings from him “as is.” Hearing this the first time I briefly considered his offer to meet and collect, until I began to imagine the actual transaction: a night scene, most likely under a freeway, with me fumbling my way around pallet fires and mounds of discarded doll parts until I’m suddenly blinded by the high-beams of a camper as somewhere beyond the light the ring of tags and collars begins to close in.

Needless to say, I decide to sit on things at this point, prepared to take a forty dollar loss if need be. But when I play the message for Charles he’s convinced that the whole thing is too hilarious not to pursue, insisting that I call Will back to apologize for my impatience. Admittedly, I give in despite my knowing that every additional phone call I make carries the potential to ramp up Will’s hostility. So I keep it brief, speaking quickly to avoid multiple truncated and rage-inducing messages. I apologize to Will for rushing him, and apologize for wanting to know where the money was. Then I apologize for any past apologies that I may have accidentally offered in any past messages, expressing my regret for anything that may have come across as remotely overly-apologetic, after which I’m cut off. And as I hang up, it’s impossible to ignore the likelihood that all this false humility has done little more than piss Will off, further jeopardizing the chances of seeing any pay off for my troubles. Quite naturally, my thoughts turn to devouring Charles’ cat feet first.

Continue reading Part 3

This time Will answers and I take the opportunity to jump right in and explain that he’s got me confused with someone else. Hell, I tell him, I don’t even know any professional dog walkers. Not in the mood for talk, Will cuts me off. “I’m done with this,” he says, “you can pick up your drawings at the Peet’s Coffee on Van Ness.” And with that it’s over. I’m shut out and cut off, and whatever Will wants to throw my way is what I get for my money. The man has my name, my phone number and my money. He also has a vehicle filled with dogs that may or may not be eager to meet me. Needless to say, this has gone badly. No doubt, Will is in charge, and has been from the outset. Any thoughts I’d entertained of cultivating patronage, of commissioning endless ‘outsider’ masterpieces of my own dictation have been instantly exposed as pure hubris. And to top it all off, I can now add decrepit vehicles boasting ominous ‘Beware of Dog’ signs propped on the dash to my ever-expanding register of indelible phobias.

But I feel like I should end this on a semi-positive note. As promised, Will has delivered the final portraits along with the original photos, and after collecting them midday from a thoroughly confounded employee at the specified Peet’s, Charles and I have spent an evening staring at them spread atop the bend in a neighborhood bar. Tracings. Nothing but tracings:

“Wow,” Charles says, “I mean . . . wow.” Then he buys a round for my troubles.

For further reading and great posters from this infamous artist:

The Way it Could Have Been
Cheesy Rider! Rides Again…
Don’t Let The Tumor Stop Me!
I Love My Cat