Last Thursday and Friday of 2012

Chor Boogie

Chor Boogie’s great mural at the entrance to Clarion Alley at Valencia Street frightens me. The level of raw emotional content on display is too much for this cubicle warrior with a part-time camera and a hankering for “meaning…”

And yet every time I walk past “Opium Horizons” I can’t take my eyes off it… I’m hypnotized… the creepy isolation of the opium scenes in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” pops into my mind and gets the imagination going (even though it’s been over twenty years since I’ve seen the film)… and it’s all downhill from there. And yet I’ve already taken several hundred photos of this mural under every type of light and weather (although I never have and never would use a flash on it)… I’ve also noticed more than a few visitors to Clarion photographing themselves and their friends in front of it.

I tend to be less frightened by Chor Boogie’s mural on Market Street near 6^th Street, though the huge eyes might suggest the ease by which modern technology fits into the criteria of law-enforcement types who must crawl all over everyone’s business to make sure we’re all “safe,” as in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

SF Mural Arts lists five existing murals for Chor Boogie, and I can’t wait for others to appear.  Somehow this number seems rather low for someone with his talent. In fact, it’s almost a crime that there aren’t more in The City.

Unfortunately some Boogie murals have “disappeared” as if in disagreement with a faceless ruling class that fears art “not boxed” and without entrance fees… wiped out before I could stand before them with my camera… a great loss.

Go West on 24th & Mission Young (& Old) Street Art Lovers

Balmy Street probably get 60% of the big media attention focused on street art in San Francisco, and perhaps justifiably so. Clarion Alley possibly gets 38%, leaving about 2% to divide among the rest of a city often described as the Mural capital of the modern world.

These are my own perceptions and not a scientific study, but so many good locations for street art remain hidden that I thought I’d reveal an obvious one that even hardcore street art lovers may not have explored.

Just west of the BART Station on 24^th Street and Mission, you’ll find 3 “art alleys” worth exploring; Poplar, Osage and Orange. While these small streets are not quite as packed as Balmy or Clarion, what you find here (between 24^th and 26^th Street) will surprise you and may even put a smile on your face.

The handshake between formal mural and legal graffiti is carefully explored, though less intensely than at Lilac or Clarion… but pieces like Chris Makanna’s “In Dog We Trust” at Poplar makes this little walk well worth your time and shoe leather.

Osage features the A.G.Oner classic below, as well as the sexiest girl with a camera you’ll ever see on an alley.

This triumvirate of public art walls are also a safe enough walk for the older street art lovers that are concerned with the many sidewalk cracks and mini-pot-holes that have plagued The City of late.

By comparison to Balmy and Lilac (on the other side of Mission Street) there isn’t as much work at these locations, but you’ll also find the great Zio Ziegler piece on Bartlett near 24^th Street, which is required viewing… and a feast.

I’m not suggesting that you skip the obvious (Balmy & Lilac) but that you also take the road less… well, you know, traveled by the media.