325. Library/WPA model tour

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Back to spontaneity

Last night I started re-reading this blog and was reminded that the idea was to do more spontaneous writing. It's a good indication of how un-spontaneous I am that I had forgotten all about that. But I still think it's a good idea, so I will give it another try.

Today I'm sitting in the basement at the Bank Cafe. Not for the greater protection from gamma rays or the convenience to the bathrooms, but because they are finally starting to remodel the inside of this building and this is now where most of the seating is... such as it is.

I was under the impression this was going to be done in phases, but having said that, I can imagine what actually happened. When the architect and contractor presented the plan to the clients -- Capital One 360 and Peet's Coffee -- I'm sure they responded to concerns about interference with their business with assurances that the work could be done in phases so people would hardly even know they were working in the building. Then, as the time approached to start the work, they came back and explained that while they could do the work in phases, that would take much longer and cost much more and the people in corporate who actually write the checks said, screw that. 

So now half the ground floor is blocked off, including the stairs to the mezzanine, and even two walls of the basement are sealed off. We're packed in here like rats in the terminal phase of those over-crowding experiments. I'm trying to keep my back to a wall so I can spot the first signs of cannibalism. And the bean bags never returned to the small area of de rigueur stadium seating, so you can sit there but not comfortably.



Two days ago my friend Cindy and I wrapped up our multi-day expedition to see the WPA model of San Francisco currently on display in our public libraries. (I've violated my tradition of only giving the initial of people I write about because I'm about to give you a link to her blog about the model. HERE.)

This project was fun because of the model, which is both interesting and infuriating -- always a good combination -- but also because we got to visit all the public libraries. Some of my favorites (like the Noe Valley and Golden Gate Valley branches) are Carnegie buildings. Others (like Bayview and Portola) are new buildings that I wish I lived closer to. The Visitation Valley branch, in one of the worst neighborhoods in SF, may have been my favorite just as a venue for reading.

Something that's been ageing in casks 

I still have some things I've written but never gotten round to posting. I'm going to try to get rid of them.

What I don't like about Starbucks is that they put my dead-simple iced tea order in the cue with all the fancy drinks, instead of just doing it first, like they do at Peete's. They do a better job of having electrical outlets and even wireless chargers, but I'm not quite in need of those services. Soon, though.

64. Buffy and beyond

Previous - 63. Hallway

Architecture

A storm is due to arrive in a few hours so I decided to stay closer to home than usual. Instead of my new Peet's, I decided to check out the swarm of closer Starbucks I usually avoid. The one less than two blocks from me I still boycott because it was my favorite local cafe before Starbucks took over and turned it into the most boring of all their locations. The next two (three blocks away) are small and were jammed with tourists. Which brought me to this location, four blocks from my apartment. 

I walk past this location all the time -- in fact I walked past twice this morning on my way to and from the gym -- but I hadn't been inside since they remodeled this summer. They kept the counters looking out over the sidewalk (the reason I used to come here to work), but did a nice job of freshening up the space as a whole. The space, though small, seems to have had a grander past judging by the architectural details up near the ceiling. The souvenirs of that past have been left white -- possibly just a tad off-white -- while the functional Starbucks area below is a sort of black box... though with lots of windows on two sides. 

Still, all the black below means that the white above catches your eye. I certainly never noticed the details before, perhaps there was a false ceiling? Anyway, Starbucks did well by this space, everything they didn't do to that location closer to me.

From where I'm sitting in their window, I can see both the low-rise building -- finished but un-tenanted -- on the next corner...

...and that building's step sister still rising between the little restaurants on Belden and the surviving grand old buildings on Montgomery. 

The reason these buildings are related has to do with the hoops a developer has to jump through to get anything built here. The little building on the corner had to be only four stories tall with the top floor opening onto, and supplementing, St Mary's Park. 

When the yellowish fence is removed the part of the top level of the building will become an extension of the park.

The new tower refuses it's left flank, to borrow a military term I'm very fond of, so that the Russ Building next door doesn't lose its light. The facade of the Chamber of Commerce building has also been incorporated into the south side of the project. 

The "refusing the left flank" aspect is only visible if you walk further down to the right of this photo -- where I would have been blocked by trucks.

Unfortunately, after all that, the tower itself is enveloped in a glass curtain-wall that takes boring to a new level.

I was so pleasantly surprised by the mild asymmetry of the new hospital rising on Van Ness, that I foolishly allowed myself to think that perhaps that was a new fashion -- no such luck, apparently.

The wires and elevator don't make this easy to read, but the curtain-wall units do not repeat exactly, either vertically or horizontally. I would prefer a bolder asymmetry, but this is a nice alternative to the usual blandness.

Now I'm going to have to wait until I take a bunch of photos before posting this. (Done.) I'm not sure if my rediscovering my camera is a good thing or not.

Twitter

Here's what I love about Medium, about a year ago a piece was suggested to me and has been sitting in my  "Read later" folder all this time. It was a piece about the problem with Twitter. I've never used Twitter, but they are a local company and much in the news of late due to their sinking fortunes, so today I finally read it. And it turned out to be far more than I expected when I clicked to check it out. I wish it were better written (I don't think English is the author's native language) but this goes beyond Twitter to the current U.S. election and all the social dysfunction I've been reading and writing about these past few years. Here's the link.

Let me say that, for once, I have no quibbles with this author's take on the situation. I think he is right on the nose. When my little band of Buffy fans deserted the IMDB message boards for a private forum, it was because they were fed up with the trolls and the idiots. I stayed behind at first because I thought it was, to a large degree, the trolls and idiots that brought us together, and that we would be too small and too similar a group to survive long in isolation. I was neither entirely right or entirely wrong about that: Currently we are pretty quiet as most of the interesting people have offended someone and been booted, leaving an even duller collection of people. As it stands, we lack any sort of story or plot to keep things interesting. We are sometimes helpful or supportive of each other -- which is nice -- but there is no drama.

So going beyond what Haque wrote, the problem with a truly democratic Internet is that it forces you to deal with all the troubled idiots you normally can avoid in "real life." But that is more than just an online problem, as society in general needs to find some way to deal with these people. 

Even if you limit the discussion to the Internet (which I don't recommend), if you ban these people, as my Buffy group did, you end up with an inert and boring place people have no need to visit -- just as Haque claims is happening with Twitter. 

Some of my fondest memories from back in our IMDB days were when we would gang up on some troll who wandered onto the board and utterly eviscerate them. Ironically it was our Queen and pit-bull (a gay guy from Calgary who would jump in with both feet and verbally kick the shit out of trolls so that they fled, never to be heard from again) who started the new forum. I finally joined because the old IMDB board was a wasteland without my friends who had left. But of the four people who lead the exit, only one is still active. Ironically, I'm one of the more active members at the moment.

What I'm saying is that, as much as Haque's neo-Burkean analysis pleases me, I have no actual clue as to how you would address this problem. Removing the abuse from social media sounds like a good idea, but the result would drive people away due to the lack of dramatic interest. And it would further isolate the already problematic agressives. Personally, that might be nice but socially it's not a solution.

Next - 65. Confusion

33. Derivatives and TA, again

Previous -  32. Mann + retrofit

Derivatives

One of my more random topics in my previous blogs was about derivatives -- a particularly esoteric aspect of trading in various markets. Well today I was sharing a table at a Starbucks I'm almost never in (in the Fox Plaza complex where I once lived, in fact) with a group of people talking about the crazy dangerous kinds of derivative trading. The kind where if anything goes wrong you will be facing a ruinous margin call. One of the people even recounted an episode in which he was hit by a margin call on the Friday after Brexit and was only saved by their not being able to reach him and waiting until Monday to close out his position -- which had already started to recover by then. And we're talking about a loss of tens of thousands of dollars.

He did this kind of trading for a living while the other couple just dabbled. I couldn't quite tell if he was working some sort of a con on them or not. If you're willing to consider naked puts or naked calls you are almost certainly ripe to be conned. 

TA

While it was curious for me to be over-hearing that conversation, the only reason I recount it is that it got me thinking of Technical Analysis (TA) in general and, with the U.S. Presidential election on everyone's mind, I couldn't help thinking that a TA phrase already applies.

With TA you are always studying stock charts looking for patterns and trends -- and trend changes. There are key prices -- new highs, new lows, various support levels -- that everyone watches and responds to. If a stock price falls past a support level, even if it rebounds later, the damage is done and everyone watching that chart will now be expecting a fall to the next support level or, if there isn't one, a free-fall.

What I was thinking, about the Trump campaign making it past the convention, is that, regardless of the outcome of the election, the damage is already done. There is no longer a commonsense support level in American politics. Reality politics is the new reality. 

California seems to be grooming a new generation of attractive (in both senses of the word) democratic politicians in Gavin Newsom (our ex-Mayor and our current Lieutenant Governor and possibly our future Governor) and Kamala Harris (our former city DA, current state DA, and likely next Senator) for national office. I wish they were options right now. But will even these "fresh" faces be up to the challenge of a political reality version of American President (play on American Idol) four or eight years from now? Maybe the Democratic party should start grooming a Kardashian.

Next - 34. On Republics + Old Navy