Aardvark Books is a great bookstore and has a good selection of used books and new magazines. However, my favorite things about the place aren’t really book-related. The store has a friendly cat named Owen who can often be found atop a box near the travel section. It also has some excellent and droll hand-lettered signage. (My favorite being “Never Voted Best Used Bookstore Since 1978″.) And last, but definitely not least, it is the home of The Museum of Looking Closely at Things.
The museum is a small collection of somewhat faded clippings from magazines posted on side of a bookshelf near the counter. The museum has not added to it’s collection in the many years I’ve been visiting Aardvark, but I still get a kick out of it each time I pass by take a look at the amusing images.
When it comes to food, I love novelty almost as much as I love deliciousness. And when it comes to novelty, there is no better place than Lee’s Sandwiches near Larkin and Eddy.
Lee’s is a Vietnamese sandwich chain and their banh mi are alright, but the real reason to check it out is all the other stuff they have. Their massive selection of unfamiliar and fascinating food includes shrimp toast, squishy coconut bread sticks, gelatinous seaweed-colored cylinders, chilled beef cubes with garlic, mounds of shredded orange stuff, and green waffles. Their drink selection is equally impressive in terms of tempting weirdness. I can highly recommend the avocado smoothie and I suggest having the basil seed drink at least once. At some point I’m going to work up the courage to try a can of the white fungus drink.
I would never recommend that anyone go to San Jose, but if you happened to be driving through that wasteland and needed to stop for some grub, there would be no better place to go than La Chosita. This overachieving taqueria has a massive menu (nachos, pork chops, chilaquiles, goat tacos!), but the only thing you should get is the Super Torta. This sandwich of the gods is absolutely delicious and is the size of a marmot.
Now take a moment to prepare for the imminent blowing of your mind; then read the complete ingredient list below.
Uvas Canyon County Park is a fantastic getaway just 90 minutes south of The City. It’s great for camping any time of the year, but really shines in the spring when the park’s many waterfalls are at their fullest and the forest is covered in a lush carpet of moss and ferns.
I also like Uvas Canyon because, unlike many of the Bay Area’s campgrounds, you don’t have to make plans to go there months in advance. This is because Uvas Canyon is not part of the Reserve America system and so it’s just not on as many people’s radar.
The other nice thing about the place is the last 30 minutes of the drive to get there. After you get past all the bullshit around San Jose (make sure to take 280 – not 101), the route goes along some beautiful roads through mercifully undeveloped ranch land and then through stands of redwoods before culminating in a single lane road through the magical world of Sveadal.
I recently discovered a really cool rooftop garden in the Financial District. (Check the video – featuring music by Dr. Kaletronic.) The garden is at 343 Sansome Street. There are a bunch of olive trees, a really colorful flower garden, some tables, and a goofy-looking obelisk. It’s a cool place to eat lunch, hang out, or just chill and check out the unusual view.
This garden is just one of many privately-owned public open spaces (or POPOS) downtown. A few benevolent corporations have always made it a point to included public open spaces in their buildings, but since 1985 the city has required that certain kinds of buildings downtown MUST have these spaces. However, the builders often don’t want to include them and so, out of spite, make them somewhat hidden and tricky to access. In some ways that’s cool because now there are all these semi-secret hang out spots all around the financial district.
The big question: How can someone find these places if they’re sort of secret? As is usual in San Francisco, nerds are on the Interwebs making shit easy for you. You can check out this interactive map or download a guide from this site
One of my video installations is going to be a part of a really cool group show at Climate Theater. Twenty-five artists will be showing their work in Climate’s wonderfully labyrinthine space. The work will be in a variety of forms including sculpture, painting, photography, and musical performance. All the pieces in these disparate media are inspired by hypnotism, dream states, surrealism, and, of course, hypnagogia.
So, if you missed the last showing of my video installations, come down and check out this fascinating show.
WHEN: Saturday, June 27th from 8-midnight
WHERE: Climate Theater
COST: $10
There’s a new ice cream shop in the LoHa called Three Twins. It’s near the corner of Haight and Fillmore and is pretty awesome. It’s awesomeness is due primarily to the following three reasons:
Their cinnamon ice cream is one of the most delicious things I have eaten in recent memory. I highly recommend getting some, but be aware it’s not one of their regular flavors so you might want to call and find out the next day that it’s going to be available.
I had heard the term “The Barbary Coast” bandied about for years and had always had a very vague notion of what it meant. If you had used the term to start a word association game, I would probably have come up with some of the following: sailors, whores, whiskey, gambling, trouble, and fun. All of those could be found in abundance in the fabled neighborhood, but the really interesting things are the details that I didn’t learn until recently.
A couple days ago I came across FoundSF, a cool local history website. Their article on this infamous district is absolutely fascinating. My favorite detail is the following:
Another famous drinking establishment was the Cobweb Palace, run by Abe Warner, a lover of spiders, who let them spin their webs without interference. The webs hung were festooned across the ceiling and down the walls.
Mojo is a café and bike shop near Divisadero and Grove. There’s nothing extraordinary about the food or drink at Mojo, but it’s one of my favorite places because of the wonderful patio they have out back. The café itself is cramped and pretty hectic sometimes, but once you walk through the hallway (past kegs, trash cans, and bicycles) you emerge into a beautiful, quiet, and relaxing cottage garden. The key to enjoying this little refuge is to get there right when they open it up at 10 in the morning. At that time you’ll often have the place to yourself and sunlight will just be starting to push back the shadows and warm up the space.
I’ve put together another urban hike map using google maps. (Here’s my first one.) This one took four “research expeditions” in order to find all the cool shortcuts and staircases that knit all the pieces of the trail together.
The hike starts at Castro Station and ends at Forest Hill Station, but you could do it the other way without much trouble. It goes up and over Twin Peaks, and then down through this weird neighborhood called Midtown Terrace.
I know what you’re thinking; Twin Peaks is crowded with tourists and “Midtown Terrace” sounds like some bullshit chunk of suburbia dropped in the middle of the city. I’ll grant that both of these things are true. However, this route I found bypasses the tour bus parking lot and takes you to a place with a much better view that most visitors never see. Midtown Terrace is filled with typical 50s tract housing, but it also has a one very redeeming feature: a full-on rope swing! So, next sunny (or foggy) day when you don’t have to work, go check out Twin Peaks again.
