“I feel that everyone has a Hulk inside, and each of our Hulks is both scary and, potentially, pleasurable. That’s the scariest thing about them.” — Ang Lee (Union Square)
VISUAL CITY
What started with a Stormtrooper riding a Dewback on Potrero Hill five years ago has grown into a small phenomenon. San Francisco photographer, artist, and bad-ass punk Jerry Business and I have now taken more than 450 photos of toys using a forced perspective to imagine them larger than life.
We started with written narratives and now often turn to a quotation to connect the toy and the location. It was through social media channels that we attracted the attention of photo-sharing service Smugmug, which is releasing a short film on our work titled “ Little Toys, Big World” on April 26th.
Mr. Business and I also just released a 198-page full-color book, Around the World in 80 Toys, published by Sporadic Press and available on Amazon. Below are 30 selected pictures from the series that highlight our hometown.
Jeremy LaCroix is art director of The Frisc. His previous post detailed his absurd quest for app-delivered food. He and Jerry Business have never been seen in the same room together.
“I like the fog that creeps over the whole city every night about five, and the warm protective feeling it gives… and lights of San Francisco at night, the fog horn, the bay at dusk and the little flower stands where spring flowers appear before anywhere else in the country… But, most of all, I like the view of the ocean from the Cliff House.” — Irene Dunne, who came to town to film I Remember Mama.
“It was a dump, but it was our dump.” — San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Dwight Clark on the now-demolished Candlestick Park, where he made “The Catch” in 1982 that led to the Niners’ first Super Bowl championship.
“We’ve never been in a city with light like this. We sit in our hotel room for hours, watching the fog come in, the light change.” — John Lennon & Yoko Ono
“…red, yellow, chocolate, orange, everything that is loud is in fashion… if the upper stories are not of red or blue… they are painted up into uncouth panels of yellow and brown…” — California Architects and Builders News, April 1885, on the “Painted Ladies” of Alamo Square
“It’s not really about the competition. Your biggest challenge in a race is yourself. You’re often racing against time. You’re frequently running everything through your mind. You’re always competing against preconceived ideas. It’s not really the person next to you that you worry about.” — Olympic swimmer Summer Sanders (Polo Fields, Golden Gate Park)
“If you get separated, make it to the platform at Union Square. That’s where we change trains.” — Swan, the Warriors (Bayshore District)
“Shotgun and a backup man. Professionals.” — Steve McQueen, as “Bullitt” (Guadalupe Canyon Parkway, San Bruno Mountain)
“Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.” — Lauren Bacall (Twin Peaks)
“See how easy it is to get Americans to embrace fascism?” — Jello Biafra, from the spoken-word album “Machine Gun in the Clown’s Hand”
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war…” — Allen Ginsberg (North Beach)
“if NYC is the ‘city that never sleeps,’ then San Francisco is the “city that day-drinks in the park, grabs a burrito on the way home and passes out.”— Karl the Fog (Dolores Park)
“As people get more desperate, history suggests that they’re not going to rise in a mighty proletarian tidal wave and wash away their oppressors. They’re gonna turn on each other.” — Alan Moore (Bernal Heights)
“I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich, and rich is better.” — Bessie Smith (Union Square)
“I was quiet, a loner. I was one of those children where, if you put me in a room and gave me some crayons and a pencils, you wouldn’t hear from me for nine straight hours. And I was always drawing racing cars and rockets and spaceships and planes, things that were very fast that would take me away.” — Gary Oldman (Outer Mission)
“Everything in life is luck.” — Donald Trump (Bayshore District)
“Summer means happy times and good sunshine. It means going to the beach and having fun.” — Brian Wilson (Sunset District)
“You wouldn’t think such a place as San Francisco could exist. The wonderful sunlight here, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes. Beautiful Chinatown. Every race in the world. The sardine fleets sailing out. The little cable-cars whizzing down The City hills… and all the people are open and friendly.” — Dylan Thomas
“On the back cover of their (Whole Earth Catalog) final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself.” — Steve Jobs
“Would you like to hear a joke?” — Joker (Psychiatric ward, Alcatraz)
“A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 A.M. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city.” — Herb Caen (Mission St., Excelsior)
“The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, is true perversion.” — Harvey Milk (Fort Funston)
“Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me, you gather as a snarky New Yorker thinking it’s politically correct, it’s crunchy granola, it’s vegetarian, and it surprises you every time. It’s a two-fisted drinking town, a carnivorous meat-eating town, it’s dirty and nasty and wonderful.” — Anthony Bourdain (Lipo Lounge, Chinatown)
“I’m not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You’re as old as you feel.” — Henri Frederic Ariel (Balboa Park)
“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” — George Eliot (Silver Crest Donut Shop, Bayshore Blvd.)
“It was a magnificently imaginative invention, a form of odyssey in which the lonely heroism of unpaced riders was pitted against relentless competition and elemental nature. The Tour encompassed the territory of France, and Desgrange later claimed that it encouraged a sense of national identity, establishing La Patrie in clear geographic terms.” — Jim McGurn (Twin Peaks)
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” (Potrero Hill)
“May the light shine from the torch of the Goddess of Liberty to inspire our citizens to good and noble deeds for the benefit of mankind.” — Adolph Sutro, at the 1887 dedication of “The Triumph of Light,” a statue he gave as a gift to San Francisco, depicting Lady Liberty victorious over despotism.
“Avoid destructive thinking. Negative thoughts sink people. A ship can sail around the world many, many times, but just let enough water get into the ship and it will sink. Just so with the human mind. Let enough negative thoughts get into the human mind and the person sinks just like a ship.” — Alfred A. Montapert (Dogpatch)
