A hometown friend of mine and I were joking that we should start up a company called, Human Safaris™ to take packs of over privileged white hipsters from the Mission up to our crappy hick hometown in Northern California so that they could taste how the other half lives. See what a real dive bar smells like! (Nobody drinks PBR there by the way). Experience the inside of a double wide in a trailer park! Try and buy non-Chinese Organic foods at a Walmart! Be able to walk under lifted 4x4s! Watch the 1st of the month “Parade”! We meant it all as a joke, but it appears someone took the idea, flipped it around and ran with it in the Loin.
The big buzz about Blog Land has been the LoinTours being proposed. From what I recall, the idea has been around for some time, but naturally, it was in the New York Times so suddenly it gets called news despite the fact that they continue to allow Nicholas Kristof to write his wickedly inaccurate and moronic articles there. So it goes.
There is so much swirling around about this that I don’t really know which side/angle/drink to take. At first I thought I was going to hate the Times article, but that was okay. It was just reporting what had been said. Then I thought I’d go after what Bronstein said. I mean, after all, in my one and only encounter with him at a party, he was a serious ass (surprisingly Sharon was nice), so I thought it’d be easy to hate what he wrote about the Loin. Sadly, I agree with it and can’t really be at fault with anything. Maybe Ms. Stone made him the tough guy in the relationship. He is quite muscly.
But then evarels fed me this Broke-Ass Stuart article. Fantastic… So, let’s get one thing straight, I don’t like Stuart. I think he’s banal, overblown, and just a general ass as most hipsters in the Mission are wont to be. In short, his article is garbage and it’s the reason that we started this blog because basically, the fact that his Mission on/off facial hair relationship is pulling a “my rough inner city ghetto that gives me my supposed street cred is so much better than your rough inner city ghetto” crap annoys me to no end.
There is nothing new said in his article and it’s just a series of cheap, very generic potshots at my neighborhood*. I will not say that these don’t exist by any means, but the fact stands that there is a lot of history in this district and it’s more than just good Asian restaurants. Oh, those good Asian restaurants are due to the fact that Asian families live in the area and it’s one of the few areas with actual kids in it and it feels a lot more real than say Pacific Heights which looks abandoned after sundown. Oh yeah, there’s also the Asian Art Museum there as well as the main SF Public Library. Sure, you can say those are Civic Center, but to me, it’s really all the Loin given that a great many of the residents sleep at Civic Center at night.
But back to the actual idea of the tours because if you’ve read this far you must have some kind of vested interest (or all your Facebook/Twitter friends are at lunch). It sorta seems like a decent idea at first, but then there’s that cringe factor that creeps up my leg in response to it. It’s a lot like the Township tours in Johannesburg or a German guidebook to a Roma camp in Belgrade. Tours of poverty (rephrased as “grittiness” in some attempt at being politically correct) are scummy. There’s a reason that aspects of them are big in South Africa and Germany as it seems that in places where white supremacists were/are big, they love that shit. It’s like going to a human zoo for them. This of course fits in line with how they view anyone not white. Rather shocking that it’d be tried in San Francisco.
And no, it will do little for business. Same thing unintentionally happened before with tour buses stopping to show folks [probably named] Pam & Tom Wooster from Iowa just how gay things were in the Castro by parking at the top of the district for a couple of quick, pandering Pride Flag photos and thus confirming that they did indeed had to vote McCain/Palin in 2008. I mean, while we’re on the topic, why not have MarinaTours? People could go up to the Marina on a Sunday afternoon and observe drunken yuppies (whether from the North Bay or still in SF.) They could watch as the guys in polo shirts hit on the waitresses and the women with fake tits and showing roots hit on the waiters. No, it’s always gotta be what’s considered the fringe elements of a society. There’s something wrong with us if we really think these kinds of things are in any way good.
* That pic under “People Passed out in Very Uncomfortable Positions” isn’t even from the US let alone the Loin. It’s kinda obvious given that the license plates aren’t US plates. Sure, on the rare chance I have a car, I drive in the middle lane up Leavenworth because these kinds of things can happen, but at least find a pic from the US to illustrate it, Stuart.
5 Comments until now
yep, that broke-ass article is pretty bad, mostly because it’s just flat ignorant.
i live in the Mission now, but i lived in the TL for a year, ’04-’05, and though i found it depressing in many ways, i just want to say this:
the Loin ain’t nearly as bad as most people think it is.
i saw tons of illegal shit going down all the time, including prostitution and drug smoking/injecting, but i never had any violence directed at me. i lived in an art space where we threw underground events, and there was a break-in once, but nothing was stolen.
i had a window that faced the street but i found that it got pretty quiet after 10pm, probably because of all the available residential hotels for all-night drug sessions.
it was a great year for me, even though i was under-employed. i met my future wife at one of our events.
but it was very difficult seeing the endless displays of human collapse on the sidewalks every time i left or came home. that’s the main reason i moved away once i was making better money.
i wish i knew how things have changed since i left, and am going to drag my crew there on a more regular basis.
keep truckin’.
It’s not really clear what your problem is with tours. No, I’m not personally interested in guided tours, but what is this “cringe factor” you’re complaining about? You just make an offhanded comparison of people touring the Tenderloin to South African white supremacists and German Nazis. Is it your intention to imply that people going on TL tours are racists? This is kind of a weak argument. What is this “human zoo” business? Is it suddenly wrong to look at people? I mean obviously nobody wants tourists taunting and insulting residents like caged tigers, but there aren’t any cages here and we saw how that worked at the SF Zoo.
Yeah, it’s cringeworthy, but is that so terrible? One of the big problems with Joe and Marge from west bumfuck is that they don’t necessarily see how a chunk of society lives. I’d prefer if they saw it in their own neighborhoods, because hey, we’re all people and there should be all sorts of people everywhere, but they don’t. So come here and see people in bad shape! Great! At least you’re seeing ‘em.
And I disagree about the Castro tours. Sure, they were mocking at the time, but when Joe & Marge’s daughter moved to Bernal Heights and picked up an early morning baker’s shift at Liberty, then hey, at least they had a reference point.
At the risk of bludgeoning the point to death, this is San Francisco. It’s like Bay to Breakers. We display it all baby! The cute, the tasty, the wrinkled and the gnarly. Bring it on, it’s who we are.
Dear Tenderoni-
For someone who doesn’t like me, you sure pay a lot of attention to my facial hair.
Sincerely,
Broke-Ass Stuart
Doesn’t your username, “tenderblogois” sort of speak to the exact kind of people you say you despise? I don’t really understand what your problem is with Broke-Ass Stuart. It’s one thing to decide you don’t like a person for whatever reason, but it seems like the only reason you wrote this disorganized mess of a blog post was to attack someone on the internet.
If you read the comments on his post, you’ll find that many others who have lived or currently live in the TL have had similar experiences, and felt the same sort of “Yeah, we love the TL, but we can’t deny what’s going on” kind of feelings. My roommate was a social worker in the TL for years, and the stories she could tell would fill books. Sometimes you have to just shake your head and laugh at that stuff, because it’s a tough reality of the neighborhood, but it’s not something that can easily change either. I live in West Oakland now. I do a lot of head shaking, and then I laugh, because sometimes it’s all one can do.
And yeah, you’re right, there are museums and families and great restaurants, but quite frankly, those are not the reasons the Loin tours idea has circled. People don’t go to East LA to take the infamous Gang tours because there also happens to be really good Mexican food there.
I don’t know what crappy hick Northern California town you’re talking about, but every one I’ve been to (we’re talking Paradise, Oroville, Willows, oh lordy) has proudly served the Blue Ribbon. They serve it in the REAL dives on the East Coast too, like in Baltimore (home of the Wire). They just call it Natty Bo there.
Clearly, you had an overwhelming desire to find someone to beat up on via the internet, but when I read this, all I could think was, “Jesus, what is this person’s problem with everyone?” You know, if you think everyone else is an ass – maybe it’s just you.