Latest Update: February 28, 2001

Notes for an upcoming Surfer's Journal piece on Kevin Ancell by Scott Hulet

Caveat Luxor: "Showing versions of works-in-progress is like passing around a goblet of your own sputum at a dinner party." „Vladimir Nabakov

Fresh back from SF. Ripping time with Kevin Ancell, who speaks fluent Mandarin. Conjure if you will the swath we carved through the dim sum hootches. I'm quite sure I have the gout.

A heart-breaking 17ish hooker on Geary offered me "straight for 50, Russian for 80, and Greek or anything else for 100." She was pale, pretty in an angular sort of way, and wearing a slip covered in a floor-length, pilled-up sweater coat. She stood under an overhang, her cheeks rosy...lapidary. I gave her a ten-spot so she could get a porterhouse at Tad's. She took the bill and told me to go fuck myself, both of us knowing the ten would go for rock.

Toured KA's Potrero haunts in Multimedia Gulch and saw postindustrial ersatz lofts being boarded up the tens following .com implosions. For the displaced art community, it's like the liberation of Prague. A few .commies are still death-gripping the last shreds of their VC. They buzz around with 200-buck haircuts on fashionable little Aprilia scooters. Ancell's stories of techno-hicks bitching about the urine smell in their doorways were classique. At the peak, militant painters were nailing every Beemer south of Mission with brake fluid. (As you might know, it eats through Bavarian multi-coats like gingivitus.) In the city proper, I counted over 127 "fuck dot com" stencils.

To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, "The human heart takes pleasure in knocking over anything standing at a cocky angle". SF still has that boss J. Biafra "eat the rich" ethic going, and knocking down cocky shit is their fully vested stock in trade. Seems to be the market's as well. „Scott Hulet