Thursday, July 3, 2014

Sometimes missing out is for the best, SFGate

OK!  Hopefully no one else dies for a while so we can get back to doing what we do best: SPOUTING ILL-INFORMED SNARK ABOUT THINGS WE HAVE ONLY SUPERFICIAL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT!

Let's start with this SFGate article by Heather Knight entitled "Is S.F.'s too-cool attitude a turnoff?"  The gist of the article is that San Francisco is missing out on all kinds of cool stuff because, I think, we make it too hard to build things or make things or host things or whatever here.  Here are the things the article says we were too cool for:

1. Another America's Cup
2. A new 49ers stadium
3. George Lucas' "art" museum

To be fair, Heather has a point with the 49ers stadium.  The City - and by The City I mean Gavin Fucking Newsom - did not do enough to try and keep the 49ers in San Francisco.  I will totally grant you that.  The rest, however, is pretty much bullshit.

ANOTHER AMERICA'S CUP?  ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND HEATHER KNIGHT.  Do you even remember the last one?  THE CITY LOST MONEY ON IT.  This is an event so few people give a shit about that THEY HAD TO PAY TO PUT IT ON TV.  The way I understand it, with other sports, thee TV people actually pay the sports people for the right to broadcast the sport.  Not the America's Cup!  I guess the 0.000001% of America that has any interest in sailboat racing is used to buying TV networks though.

Anyway, point being, if you think SF really lost out on something by losing the privilege of hosting a bunch of Scrooge McDucks' boat race and taking a bath on it in the process, we'll have to disagree.

Then there's the George Lucas Ego Monument.  I'm no Star Wars geek or anything but I get the impression that all those nerds think George Lucas really fucked up the franchise with the later movies.  Basically he wanted to take some of his huge wet gobs of money and plop down a museum wherever the fuck he wanted it, in this case Crissy Field, a beautiful open space that was lovingly restored just a few years ago.

I wasn't crazy about the renderings for the museum either
So when the Presidio Trust said he couldn't put his museum there the City offered him another PRIME FUCKING SPOT on the waterfront but had the UNMITIGATED GALL to ask George Lucas, who has the net worth of $unlimited and could buy Chile on a whim, to kick in a little for the fucking site.  So George Lucas got Chicago drunk on Fireball shots and Chicago giggled and gave George Lucas a prime waterfront spot for $1 a year.

OH SHOOT.  What did we miss out on?


You have got to be shitting me.  We've already got a Maxfield Parrish, and it's located exactly where it belongs, in a bar.  The Vargas is nice if you're decorating an L.A. porn producer's house in 1988.  And hey!  It's a DVD cover!  I get the strong feeling that the gift shop at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will be larger than the galleries.  The point is, we hardly need a tourist trap museum with a questionable collection to be considered a world-class city.  I just can't work up a lot of grief over losing this thing.

[STANDARD DISCLAIMER: Of course there's all kinds of stuff SF could do differently, it's probably too hard to get things done in this town, blah blah blah, we all know that.  I'm just talking about these two things in particular.]

4 comments:

GG said...

If you won't do so, I just want to go on the record as being too cool for a 49ers stadium (in addition to the other items). Glad to be rid of all three.

TK said...

I think it's more than just football. Any major city needs a good, large-scale (50K+) arena. Santa Clara is too fucking far.

Tamagosan said...

1. Such a disaster on so many levels, esp. since they closed the Marina Green for months for reseeding and took away the temp bike paths near there...
2. Just keep the Giants within an easy bike ride.
3. The less Norman Rockwell I have near me, the better.

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