2 posts tagged “gratuitous sf lovin”

In middle school a few of us had the opportunity to go to Oakland with our then 8th Grade Language Arts/Social Studies teacher (mind you we were in bilingual ed so the class was in Spanish) to see Benjamin Bratt in his brother's movie, Follow Me Home, I had no idea that they were natives of SFC.

A year later Peter Bratt would bring the film to a special screening for folks at my high school and speak with us a bit about the film. One homey in particular would as him about his use of the song Rapper's Delight in a sceen where a little girl is jump roping while singing the following lyrics:

Peter answerd the question saying that he'd chosen the song namely thinking of the first time he'd heard it, when he was in middle school at a dance. That middle school was MY middle school and for whatever reason our extreme pride in our SF upbringing brought us all to applause. Maybe it was that hometown boys and girls never amount to anything exciting. Maybe its because hometown boys and girls who did make it big weren't like us. So here stood a brown brother, a brown Latino brother, who went to the same ghetto ass middle school many of us did, saying look I'm sorta successful, my brother is definitely successful, I am a reflection of you.

Fast forward. 2004. In college we had this amazing TV in our apartment. Living with 4 other people (the arty co-comedian, the literary tolkenfan punk rocker, the techy walking pharmaceutical rep & the techy indie film-maker) proved to be great for a few things. Our house was full of random tech apparatuses and toys, something to entertain you.

Our TV though. Rivaled everyone else's. While we girls felt it was completely frivilous and unecessary the boys felt that the bargain indie film-maker got for our HD tv was too good to pass and within a few days of moving in we had cable, high-def and all the premium channels. Which was good and bad of course. But short of the fact that it kept me entertained while working on my thesis alone in the apartment and during black history month (oh blacksploitation movies how you kept me sane that year) I rarely felt that TV.

And then Showtime aired Spike Lee's Sucka Free City... a supposed gritty look at my home town via examining the lives of 3 dudes, one white, one black, one asian. I was psyched.

But it did nothing for me. It was only in part my SF. But not really SFC. Movies never depict us right. They depict small pockets of our city... The Palace of Fine Arts where Sean Connery meets his daughter in The Rock and Mike Meyers strolls in So I Married an Axe Murderer... street chases, the Castro... all the same crap. Sucka Free City shot in spots of SF rarely seen, but did it leave the taste of SFC in your system? No.

But today after catching a piece in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle I realize that there may indeed be a change on the horizon. MY SF may be reflected sooner rather than later and it is my hope that distributors will pick up Peter Bratt's latest film from Sundance and maybe everyone will taste an SF closer to the one I've lived.

Peter Bratt's La Mission is apparently going to depict only the neighborhood in which I spent a lot of my life, but also a

side of the city, in my opinion, rarely depicted in film. And don't get me wrong what excites me about this is less about my dire love for my city, but the fact that for once people will see it from another angle. We ain't just the city by the bay. We are way more. We're more than the warf, the Castro and Hunter's point. Everyone know's were a diverse hot bed for anything goes, any day of the week is perfect to be naked and now a hipster mecca. But its about time that shit was reflected on screen.

I hope he does it right. Because if not, I may have to step it up some day and show my hometown's many sides.  

The area of San Francisco that I live in was an area inhabited by working class families from all over the globe. WAS: as in it was that way until I left for college. We had seen the number of school age kids decreasing as I moved further and further away from being that age, but by the same token there were always families like mine in the area.

Then, as expected, Gentrification hit my area as it did most others in San Francisco. It was happening while I still lived at home, before I ever ventured east for college but even still, it was always a weird thing to come home and realize, we were one of a few brown families in the area, and one of even fewer “original” residents in our hood.

Somehow in the years after adolescence I developed certain, aversions to different parts of the city. At one point I

found Chinatown so incredibly difficult to deal with because I worked there for 3 summers while home and grew sick of the hustle and bustle, the atmosphere and general attitude. Similarly I started to hate certain parts of the Mission district, which I began to correlate with memories of middle school, that painful time I don’t really think anyone wants to remember, now inhabited by tight jean wearing, Pabst Blue Ribbon swigging, anorexic hipsters/scenesters and recovering emo kids who make me feel like an alien in my own land.

My own neighborhood now inhabited by upper middle class white families, white/Asian families pushing babies with classically Asian eyes, but that are blue or with moppy blond heads, provokes similar feelings of estrangement. I get eyed at sometimes like, “who’s she?”  It was frustrating at first. Why did I feel disconnected from this place that I so desperately needed when I was out east? Why did I feel this strong need to be here after living elsewhere, to return, but feel so far from it all?

I guess I didn’t expect the change, I guess I didn’t know how to reintegrate myself back into this community. How hypocritical of me. I had changed, expected people to understand was my city not allowed to do the same? Granted, it was a different kind of change, sometimes for the worst, but still, I was this city, this city was me.

But recently, on my way to the bank before work, I suddenly felt a strong appreciation for this place again. I don’t know if it was that I was walking a path, where things hadn’t changed much. Al’s Diner was still there, something about the sidewalk it self seemed unchanged. In classic San Francisco fashion we still had our Donut/Burger/Chinese Food joints, as much as some things change, some things stay the same. I can count on the Joe’s scramble at Al’s, or Vietnamese sandwiches at Little Paris in Chinatown and the awful smell of Durian fruit at the corner of Pacific and Stockton there.

On my way home, I passed the home my father first lived in when he came from the Philippines, just a block or two from where we live now. His cousins all stood outside as it’s still their family home, waiting for a limo to take them to a funeral for one of their siblings. Not as sad of a moment as one might expect, she lived a good long life. There they stood, my extended family, still in that building after all these years, still the church going folk they’ve always been. I felt a moment of awe. They were still there, we were all still here. The aunties and uncles still dressed to the nine’s carrying rosaries, a few with canes now. The teenage girls, still acting like any event is a fashion show wearing completely matched outfits of black and white, even down to the sunglasses and purses. I wouldn’t be attending the funeral, as I was just 10 minutes away from a shift at work. Dad would go, and I would tell him what I’d seen and he’d laugh because indeed nothing had changed. I’d walk up the stairs into the living room where he sat, waiting for his brothers to arrive as the church where services would take place is around the corner from our house. I’d enter a usual Magtonic style rant about the teens and their materialistic weird Filipino-ness I’d just passed. He laughed, said, “You’re that way too sometimes,” I guffawed. “You’re wearing an adidas Philippines track jacket Nic,” he said. And that, I could not deny.

And while it’s true there’s this eclectic mix of change and past in my life I have to say I’ve become grateful for it all.