The End Of An Era

It's the End. . .

Geneva Avenue the day of Michael Jackson's death.

Something at the spot where things ended up.

Well folks, it's the end. Two months without blogging here might have told me something. Interest started to wane. The doldrums ran high. But now it's done.

The end of my year-long residence in the Excelsior is in its second day.

Back behind the funeral parlor, the sidewalks get crowded.

I'm sorry to let you down: I really really wanted to like the Excelsior. I might have actually liked it, like oozed with glee about it, if certain things in the house and hearth had gone better.

And maybe in a way I did like it because it was thanks to living there that I grew as a writer, an observer and, mostly as a stilted, flawed piece of humanity like all the rest of us who just tries to get through the day with a minimum of discomfort. Except the discomfort ran high. As did the beefy fumes. The passive-aggressive, socially-antagonistic housemates. The absentee landlord. The broken bathroom. All of which makes for better stories in the long haul.

Places I will go back to in the Excelsior:
Mama's Art Cafe
Broken Record Bar
Boos Voni Tortas
Cayuga Gardens
Even McLaren Park!

Things I forgot to take pictures of:
tons of murals and graffiti
The Neon Funeral Parlor
many colorful back alleys
many colorful abandoned trucks and vans

Places I forgot to go inside of:
the Philippine restaurants
the Nicaraguan restaurant
Pissed Off Pete's
Pass Time Bar
Doc's Bar

Something I ate a lot of:
Pho at the Vietnamese place at the corner next to the Popeye's

In special remembrance of Gustave the Snail: I left him outside and now he is gone.





Anyway now I'm a citizen of Bernal Heights, a very small neighborhood full of babies and mothers and gay couples and dogs and children and old men and old women and fog and views and trees bending in the breeze. Lots of wind. Lots of barking. Lots of hopeful noise in the air.

I will remember you Excelsior.
I will honor you.
I will exploit your lessons faithfully.
I will remember the Revelations of Cayuga Garden and its Promise Of Future Revelries.
I am admittedly glad to be done with you Excelsior but that doesn't mean I'll stop remembering.

R.I.P. Excelsior Blog.
August 2, 2009

Sincerely, Michael L. Berger

Feel free to follow my continued exploits of a more pompous nature over at
Underground Medicine.

Random Saturday Shots

My neighborhood has a Croatian American Cultural Center. Awesome. . .

This is the view opposite the really stellar cafe, Mama Art Cafe, where Fair Trade coffees and delicious pastries abound in a very cozy, sunny spot. Plus there's art and shows and nice regulars who actually talk to each other and don't just stare into their laptops. (Except for me, I do that...)

Walking down Alemany, there are lots of abandoned cars and trucks, shaded by the foliage that serves as a barrier from the sidewalk to the funeral parlor. More on that in a future blog.

Houses kissing on Ellington, my street

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

Katy had introduced me to this interesting alley of colorful houses, each built with a corresponding set of stairs. At the end there is a view of City College and more colorful houses. She said the houses, the view and the general environment reminded her of Istanbul.

There are more pink houses in the Excelsior than anywhere else I've been. There are also more gratings, gates and iron grille-work than most houses I've seen.

Excelsior has many surrounding hills that are strung with houses like Christmas tree lights, sometimes wrapped on top of each other, other times intersecting at odd angles but making the hills seem heavily laden all the same.

The cul-de-sac, Ellington, was shiny and breezy this afternoon, a sick day I spent snapping some shots. Note the colors of the squat little houses, the lack of trees save two or three and the balconies that are seldom used.

Here on Ellington these five, six months, a few things have become consistent:

1. There is a parrot (or two?) across the street from our house that perpetually, on certain days, whines, mocks, bleats, coos and generally engages in shameless baby talk. Sometimes the parrot upsets me to no end. Other times I can deal with it. Last time I walked past it, however, it deliberately tried to provoke me by saying hello in a voice like a castrated clown's.

2. Certain weekend nights, a mysterious, all-consuming odor of grilled pork mixed with fish-oil seeps up into our bedroom and prevents the nose from remembering a field of wildflowers. In fact, this meaty-dripping-old-fish-scale bouquet tyrannizes the nose to such a degree that the only thing the nose remembers is that it wishes it wasn't a nose at all and would have preferred being born an eye, notwithstanding the sadness of the Cyclops.

The dirty beginnings of a photo log.

This is the building on the top of the Geneva hill, adjacent to the Bart Station. I'm not sure what its function is exactly but in the lot behind it is where all the Muni trains come out. The building itself looks unoccupied.
Mixed martial arts are extremely popular in the Excelsior and the studios have the murals to prove it.
If you live in the Excelsior you might have a sweet ride like this one. Reminds me of my Pinewood Derby days making smaller versions of this in my Grandfather's magical basement work room in Washington D.C.

THIS BLOG OR PHLOG (photoblog?) IS GONNA BE PHOTOS and quick notes regarding the strange and compelling and under-explored Excelsior District of San Francisco, the place I have called home for five or six months now. It's pretty diverse, colorful, loud, noisy and dirty, among other things, and I will casually explore its many marvels and banalities while I still remain its humble if ambivalent citizen.

This is, above all, an experiment. Enjoy.