“During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, the gentrification of San Francisco’s predominantly working class Mission District led some long-term neighborhood residents to create what they called the “Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.” This group allegedly destroyed property and called for property destruction as part of a strategy to oppose gentrification. Their activities drew hostile responses from the San Francisco Police Department, real estate interests, and “work-within-the-system” housing activists.”

Now we absolutely DO NOT condone violence as a course of political action. However, I’ll leave you with this quote from Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme ;)

Telegraph Hill.

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

Luckily for those of us without cars, a sign like this can be appreciated purely for it’s bold artistic references rather than it’s practicality.

However, my most recent trip proved much more enjoyable, as I was able to spend my time admiring the doodlings of another impatient customer who took advantage of his wait by augmenting the mugshots of the FBI’s criminal posters. It’s juvenile and pedestrian, but hey, all the best things in life usually are. Enjoy!

In addition to the flair of the deliberate and highly stylized lettering that incorporates arrows, inverted crosses and underlined letters to draw attention to certain words and phrases, there are also compositional elements that beg further notice. While the author uses individual boxes for each separate idea, the intentional placement of each geometrical shape and it’s spatial relationship to the others creates a somewhat disjointed flow that reinforces scattered feelings and message of his manifesto.

My favorite passage, however, recounts his early childhood years with the Harlem Globe Trotters and Harry Truman’s prophetic words that the Japanese “started the war, ” ultimately sending him to San Francisco for “Chinese eyes.”

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. . .

However, upon long-overdue closer inspection, it appears that there is much more to the story. Judging from the cryptic Engrish ramblings and buffet of random international celebrity cameos, this guy/girl is either the heavily medicated, low-tech Chinese equivalent of Access Hollywood, or a distant branch of Scientology centered around the worship of a Laotian actress named Ching Lee, Mr. Entertainment Sammy Davis Jr. and some black guy with dreadlocks. My money is riding on door number one, but one can never underestimate the lunacy of religion.

It’s nice to know that crazy is fluent in many languages.

While his mini “best of” pet portrait poster seems targeted at the smaller dogs (and perhaps their owners), we see a hybrid of past ideas and characters amid a virtual font explosion describing the latest prototypes for his patented Under Armour Body Suit for your sick or senile Canine.

As hard working and driven a man as Will appears to be, he makes no waste of time offering construction site security service. Not only is he available immediately, but he’ll even make himself at home and provide “live in” guard service protecting your site from…squatters?! My head hurts.

Anyway, this Sunday, after months of silence I finally got my fix. After catching a fleeting glimpse of a poster taped to the back of a stop sign more than a week ago, this time I mustered up the motivation to hop off the bus along Cortland Ave. to capture one for the archives. Not only did I find a one, I actually discovered two and a quarter previously unseen posters along the sunny, early morning streets of Bernal. While his witty cartoon thought bubbles remain a means for animal-human communication, our artist seems to have abandoned his rough pen sketches in favor of a collage of photo-surrealism. From what I gather the 1980′s advertising campaign of Bud Light must have had a profound impact on Will’s formative years, as he appears to have enlisted the help of the once famed, ever-exuberant party animal Spuds MacKenzie, donning swimming goggles and offering clever one-liners as a spokesman for his master’s artistic services.

Interestingly, in “True Hollywood Stories” fashion, I discovered that Spuds MacKenzie (real name: Honey Tree Evil Eye) had quite the controversial life, complete with meteoric rise to fame followed by an almost immediate free-fall. After becoming an over-night sensation that began with a 1987 Super Bowl commercial, Spuds received a slew of endorsement deals and his face garnered everything from t-shirts to dolls. However, it was soon let loose that the super-macho, ladies’ man Spuds was actually a female! With the frenzied media controversy that ensued, reportedly Anheuser-Bush execs tried to shield her from cameras to conceal her female parts that might become front-page news when she had to go #1.

Like other pop-icons Prince and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister, Spuds was even the target of angry temperance-oriented parent groups, who in 1992 accused her employers of selling the “too-cool-for-monogamy-and-sobriety dog” to America’s children. Even though the FTC ruled in the maligned Bull Terrier’s favor, the ads were dropped and less than a year later Spuds died of Kidney failure at the age of 10.

Anyway, back to Will, who decided the optimal way to advertise his “Adventure Walks” was by showing a little girl being dragged along by an overpowering Alligator. Natalie the dog, with the clear intention of distancing herself from this bizarre spectacle, states she “did not take that picture.” Good to know who’s got your back, eh?

And then there’s this. If you ever leave town, you may have another option to leaving your beloved canine with family or a professional boarding kennel.

It’s nice to have something to look forward to (again).

However, sometimes all it takes to jolt you back into the moment is a song, a smell, or something to prompt a smile and remind you that everything will be ok. For me that epiphany took the form of a cheap xerox poster taped to a local telephone pole. “Fuck Hitler. Learn German.” Direct and provocative with a clear call to action; It’s a marketer’s dream.

While I have about as much interest in learning German as I did in sorting through a small mountain of someone else’s mail, this crude poster is effective. The artist makes excellent use of the Punk Visual Art aesthetic, which according to artist Mark Vallen, is “steeped in shock value and revered what was considered ugly…designed to disturb and disrupt the happy complacency of the wider society.” He clearly understands, as do we, that simply evoking the name Hitler elicits a strong reaction from people. On top of the message, you’ve got a ferocious werewolf, bearing a diamond encrusted grill and a frowning characture of Adolf so simple it couldn’t be anymore perfect. It made me stop and take notice. What impresses me most is fact that a guy named Paco is teaching German.

Somewhere in this city of abject cultural sensitivity and increasingly homogenized thought, there’s someone else who thinks that in spite of the horrific historical associations with the man, the exploitation of Hitler for shock value and humor is still funny.