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.