The Mission

"So where are we going first?" - "I don't know," I looked to the first person I saw walking by, a blonde young adult with dreads wheeling a bike toward the escalator in BART, "Hey, what's your favorite place on The Mission?" She looked surprised, laughed, looked at her friend and said, "I don't know, The Mission!"

Pretty good answer.

I enlisted my friend Ryan to walk around with me. Being a part of the street art movement (as it's referred to now, after Banksy started selling his graffiti for obscene amounts of money), Ryan has a unique perspective.

As soon as we crossed the street heading toward 15th street, he started pointing at stickers with what I thought was nonsense scrawled all over them, and geeking out about the "signatures." "That guy's from LA! I've seen his work, he's one of me heroes!" He said this over and over again, listing different names and locations, and I started to really look at the jumbles of letters and paint on the walls, and stickers left on parking meters. He especially took notice to the style of the letters saying they indicated where the person was from. "This is a San Francisco style writing." He said pointing to a jumble of letters that seemed to curl flawlessly into the next. "It's hard to read sometimes, but you can always tell where it's from."

We walked down alleys that smelled pungently of piss and rot, but the graffiti art was meticulously detailed, and really - just beautiful.

We walked down Mission and then turned right toward Church St. Ryan wanted to show me the wall that Banksy had claimed. There are koi fish graffitied on the sidewalk (not Banksy), and inside a fenced parking lot next to a bar is a simple lined tree that extends flawlessly up from two black poles. Perched on a branch is a bird with a speech bubble. Other artists have put work up next to Banksy's, and it really makes the wall look ritzy.

We crossed back through The Mission and headed through an ally to Valencia. Up ahead I saw a camera crew and ran to catch up with them.

"Hey are you here to look at the murals?" I asked the guy with the camera. He smiled, "Yeah, I'm actually in the process of filming a documentary about it!" He was thrilled that I was interested. He introduced me to his colleague and then to his dog, gave me his business card and walked on.

We walked along Valencia and went into several shops, including 826 Valencia, the tutoring center pretending to be a shop of piratey goods, and I talked to the girl at the counter for a while.

We walked along the street and looked through Paxton Gates (a bizarre store of taxidermy and botanical oddities), book stores, art galleries, shoe stores, and pretty much 'everything' stores.

It was an exciting five hours. I found myself talking to a lot of different people. I'm excited to explore more on my own now that I have a better idea of the layout, but I think it was a good first experience.