Man In A Panic

Merry F**king Xmas

Because San Francisco is America with a pierced tongue and tattoos, you don't always get service with a saccharin smile.  Mostly you do though - pearly white teeth and hollow 'how are yous?'.  Which is why I so enjoyed my trip to Trader Joe's supermarket this morning.

The guy on the check out looked pissed - in both the American and British sense.

"Hello!"  said I.

"Jesus f***king Christ" said he, "they've put the f*ucking Holiday music on.  Rudolph the f**k nosed f*ucking deer.  I need to get a f*cking job man, I need to get outta here".

Now THAT is service with a smile. I was laughing all the way home.

Bum Deal

This all-agency email caught my attention.

Don't forget, this year we're gonna do what we can to help Glide get the S.F. homeless community feeling and looking a lot more bright and shiny.

Believe me, after what I saw this weekend, this is quite a task.  So bring on your toothpaste, lotions, glueguns, shampoo, conditioner, soap, toothbrushes, steelwool, shaving foam, anything that hasn't been used, that will make a homeless person feel fresh as a daisy, and sparkle like they were just hosed down from the tops of the heads to their itty bitty crusty toes.

They are also in bad need of blankets (which by the way can be found at Ross for $5.99 ) So come on, help with what ever you can.  I will be more than happy to come by and collect all items.

Many Thanks,
Steffan

At first I thought this was an attempt to break the world record for 'most tasteless branding opportunity ever'.  I can see the brief now - 'Demonstrate the power of Glide cleaning products by scraping clean the fetid homeless dudes of San Francisco'.

Thankfully, it turns out that Glide is, in fact, a 'benelovent church without walls'.   Still, the thought of steelwool as a 'cleaning product' scares me, even if you're a bearded crack whore with walrus skin.  I wonder though - is this how the gayers get themselves so shiny?

Bullit

So, with Sandra in town, we became mobile figures of fun for the locals, a Go Go Team in matching t-shirts and silver crash helmets.

You'd have had to be quick to catch us though.  The no no part of the Go Go is that they cost 40 bucks an hour.  And the 'guided GPS tour' is supposed to take 3 hours.  That's a lot of dollars to be folded into a petrol-fumed, ear-rippingly loud yellow twat-mobile with Stephen Hawking as a 'local guide'.

Of course, life is never about having fun - it's about saving money - so Sandra was treated to a World Record Go Tour Attempt.  Readers, I burnt the hell out of that baby's 30cc engine.  We were airbourne down Pine Street, on two wheels through China Town and the bird tasted tarmac in Nob Hill. We definitely had the wrong robotic guide...we needed Murray Walker to screech about my vicious cornering and deft overtaking manoeuvres.  In the Panhandle, I sliced up a Porsche and a Mustang V6 in a couple of blocks....

Actually, we did learn something from our GPS friend.  I think he said...

"And to your left...famous....park...OJ Simpson....gay...slow....look up....look down....house on the corner...pilgrims...victorian brick....golf course....Robin Williams...hairy bisons.....wrong way....wrong way.....wrong way"

....but we lost the boring bastard at warp speed down Van Ness.

Oh yeah - and it's my birthday today.  31.  Yikes.  Burning the candle though, eh?!

Wet Dreams

Working at the BBC, I used to have wonderful dreams - there I was, dancing with yellow midgets, swimming naked with Paul Daniels (magic!), a masquerader with good hair.  My REM was a delightful sensory playground.

Now that I'm back in advertising, I dream in flawless Powerpoint logic.  Last night, I drifted off to some Business Objectives, rolled over at some Initial Strategic Offerings, hugged the pillow during Consumer Insights and, when the clip art banana ‘dissolved in’, the nightmares began.

Sometimes advertising is accountancy in silly t-shirts. 

Rifle Trifle

"EUREKA!" he thought "I've spotted a niche....this time next year I'll be a millionaire".

And then he opened a 'US military memorobilia shop' in one of SF's leafier neighbourhoods.

And now his windows are covered in cappuccino sputum, his dog is hanging out with a pink poodle and he sleeps with a gun under the bed, in case the 'loonies' attack him with daffodils.

He sounds angry, doesn't he?

(the pics get bigger if you click on them)

Hair By Fairy

I won't be writing much for the next couple of weeks while I try to find a new apartment in San Francisco.  This is a 24 hour a day dance that requires physical strength, manipulation, wit, bribery and flirtation (and a lot of bullshit).  A lot like advertising then.

However, I thought I should document my first haircut in America.  In words only.  Cameras, quite frankly, can fuck off for at least two weeks.  I look like a twat - not metaphorically....I quite literally look like a twat.  Indeed, I'd be wearing a balaclava if it wasn't so goddam sunny and I didn't think it would scare potential landlords.   

SF is not awash with visibly trendy barbers.  You see the odd hairdressing shop, but they're just for old ladies to sit in, hardwired to giant vibrators.  Bizarrely, even the Castro - the World's Gayest Neighbourhood - seems to be without mincing scissor twirlers.  Instead, individual 'stylists' work at locations throughout the city - usually hidden away in an office block, so you can't judge who the clientele might be.

Well, via the miracle of the world wide interweb, I happened upon Enrique.  I was encouraged by his inability to speak English and his lispy high pitched Spanish - he seemed just gay enough to cope with my unchallenging barnet.  So I made an appointment and set off to see him, downtown...

The next hour was surreal.  He was a little Mexican fella, about as tall as his hair.  Nodding and smiling as I said hair-related words like 'textured' and 'natural' and 'choppy' and 'NOT TOO SHORT', I felt in safe hands.  But then, armed with giant scissors and a razor, those 'safe hands' started visibly shaking.  And then a very strange thing happened.  As he snipped away, a little here and a little there...at random, it seemed....I saw my hair morphing into Enrique's hair.  And as he kept looking in the mirror, I realised that he was using his own locks as a template for mine.  There was magic happening in Enrique's shaky hands.  He was cutting away but my hair was getting BIGGER.  And, when he was done, we smiled at our reflections in the mirror...and as i looked from me to Enrique and Enrique to me, I couldn't work out who was who, what was what, the me from the him.

The spell broken, I asked him to try again.  To make my hair shorter.  And, boy, did he go for it.  But then another strange thing happened.  Having finished the cut, he worked some wax in, enjoying my head with his strokey fingers.  And then, to signal that his artistry was done, he poured two cups of water over my head with a great flourish...and motioned me out of the door. 

So I left with a sodden twat on my head and a soaking wet back and face. 

SEVENTY DOLLARS!   I'm growing a mullet.

Pork Sword

At last, I thought, something to have a good old winge about.  Halloween in San Francisco sucks.

On Monday night (still in Samurai suit), I fell down to the Castro for the 'crazy halloween street party'.  At first it felt very Notting Hill Carnival-esque....too many people, too many police, whoops rather than whistles.  But then it went (fake) tits up.

For starters, you can't drink in the street here, unless you've pre-wrapped a shandy in a brown paper bag.  Absurd.  So, rather than a limitless vat of Red Stripe to fuel your fun, you spend hours fighting your way into bars.  Trust me - if you're dressed in a silk Kimono, you need a few glasses of Dizzyade to get in the groove.

Of course, muggins here had forgotten his ID again, so the best I could hope for was a lemonade sugar rush.  And then the law confiscated my PLASTIC SWORD.  "Hand over the weapon" said Chips, "There's no duellin' to be done tonight".   I think he meant to add that I could have had someone's eye out with that.  From Samurai to man-in-a-gay-dressing-gown in seconds. 

Still, my fancy dress was better than most.  The warehouse stores that spring up all over the city in October ensure hundreds of identikit Supermen, Pirate Girls and Inflatable Sumos.  Listening in, conversational gems included:

"Woah, dude are you Superman?"
"Superman - woah dude - cool!"
"Dude - have you seen that Dude dressed as Superman? Woah!"

Also, I'm not entirely sure a Halloween Costume Party is the best venue for serious political protest.   "Stop the 9/11 cover up!" screamed the placard bearing bald man in a spandex-romper-suit, semi tumescent cock making the kids cry. 

Disheartened, I tried to dance (permitted) but the twirly drag-queen disco house wouldn't lift my leaden legs.  So I headed home, got picked up by a mobile party bus, drove to Treasure Island and spent an hour dancing in the road with awesome views of the city.  Which was ace.

Bugger.

Trick Or Treat

I owe my blog a week’s work.  And I owe my work a week’s blag.  I’m the Man In A Panic.

To sweat myself calm, I thought I’d go to the gym today.  But then I remembered that I wanted to keep my Samurai Halloween costume on until Tuesday.  And that gyms make me want to ritually slaughter innocent people with a big sword. 

Instead, I exercised at home by playing Blue Orchid by The White Stripes thirty times over and alternating air guitar, air drums and air vocals. 

All major muscle groups sorted without risk of a verruca or towel-flicking-incident. 

I’ll do a proper update soon. 

Rather Peculiar

An English accent is like a magic cloak here.  It gives you 20 IQ points and 20 Sex Appeal points.

Consequently, to maximize the effect, the entire English population of SF now sounds like Trevor MacDonald.   

It’s hard to resist hamming it up when even the most appalling clichés win affectionate smiles.  We all collude in the game and it's only embarassing when you realise a bloke from Watford has just heard you blurt out 'Crikey! A perfect googly!  Let's crack open the dompers!'

Here, then, is an evolving list of things-i-would-never-say-in-London that could pop out here at any moment:

“Oh I say!”
“Drat!”
“Blast!”
“Would you care for……?”
“I’m everso sorry”
“Some old bean just called me up….”
“Shall we have a natter about this later?”

What a bloody tosser I am.

Young Art

The De Young museum in Golden Gate Park reopened at the weekend...for 48 hours.  So we nipped down at 2.30am on Sunday morning to find a queue of thousands.  Somehow a friend blagged us in as landscape gardeners, so we didn't have to wait four hours to see exhibits like 'African Headress c.1971' and 'Victorian Vase c. 1876'.

The building is stunning but I'll have to take another look inside when less tired and emotional.  I always prefer the outsides of museums though.

The rest of Sunday was spent on Ocean Beach - sandwiched between a full moon and a candescent Californian sunset.  Aaaaaaaah...!