Thursday, February 21, 2008

Neighborhood Resource

Ephemera returns!  Yeah like you’ve been waiting but here it is anyway....

My neighborhood’s been getting a face lift of sorts - old eyesores are getting gussied up.  The ratty old grocery was torn down and replaced with a normal nice grocery store.  The burger joint that was so depressing bought the failed veggie place next door and totally remodeled into a normal nice awesome burger place.  Okay, it’s sort of generic-looking for my tastes, but it’s the same great burger in a nice new storefront.  And the musty mid-century sporting goods shop next door has simultaneously burned into a nice fancy sort of dayspa place.  The old vacant upturned eye of the deceased Park Walker liquor store has finally been covered over with paper in a respectful acknowledgment of its demise. The Coronet is now a vacant lot, soon to be a brand-new seniors’ services complex.  With the newish De Young filling out its landscaping quite well and the impending amazitude of the upcoming Academy of Sciences, I’ve got to say that the Richmond District is doing all right for itself. 

Then there’s DC.

I’m calling it DC because I don’t wish to use this site to malign anybody or anything more than absolutely necessary for purposes of narrative integrity, unless there’s a really good laugh in it, which is manifestly not the case here.  There have been a few times I’ve said more about someone here than I should have and I’ve regretted it every time.  I don’t want to name those whom I might describe in a less-than-positive light.  It’s insensitive and it diminishes the other person’s dignity.  So if I’m going to be harsh, or even unstintingly realistic about a subject that could benefit from some flattery, I don’t want to make identities too obvious.  So often the things that I wind up writing about are the things that are broken, don’t fit, don’t work.  I guess they’re easy targets.  Maybe it’s mean-spirited of me; I prefer to think of it as merely lazy.  I make my wine from blemished fruit.  And thus I turn again in my mind to DC, an abbreviation I’ll use to spare this little blemish of a shop any avoidably excessive humiliation.  But if I’m going to make wine, let’s get stomping:

I live on a block on which three sides are residential and one, facing the boulevard, is also partly commercial.  There’s a mattress shop, a little medical supplies store, a prescription herb outlet and a questionable bodywork establishment up a steep flight of stairs.  Additionally, for many years, there was shop where music could be digitized in various ways.  It looked like a decent little space, with a large front window that revealed an open room around which keyboards and drum kits and lots of CPUs were scattered, strung together with thick dark cables.  It was about a year ago that this establishment disestablished itself; subsequently, the large front window opened onto a view of emptiness and gloom for several months. 

Then I started seeing work being done inside the little shopspace.  Walls were patched, carpets were cleaned. A strange temporary sign went up in front, an ungainly geometric shape that spelled out DC’s full name - a name which initially seemed to me rather an over-reach, evoking much more than I thought the shop was likely ultimately to deliver.  Still, I withheld my acid judgments till I could really see what DC had to offer.  Maybe they’d surprise me.  Maybe DC really was the name that fit best.

Redecoration went slowly.  A handful of bracket shelves went up on some walls and one section got painted an outdated mauve.  Then, all of a sudden, DC was open: a large flatscreen had been mounted on a wall adjacent to the front window, playing an endless loop of fluttering asian girl-band videos heavy on CG flowerpetals and adorable coyness.  Butting up against the front window, a display table had been left stranded, covered with hyper-cute alarm clocks and makeup kits and pencil boxes.

Taped inside the window were color ink-jet printouts of specs for a dozen or so MP3 players and phones selling for more than I would have suspected they were worth.  The spartan wall-shelving held a variety of pointless-looking merchandise.  And in the middle of it all, adrift like an iceberg, was a glass counter, behind which sat a slender asian pre-middle-aged man in clumsy squared glasses and a puffy ski jacket.  The shop felt dramatically under-furnished; the temporary sign in front had transfigured itself without any visible enhancements into shoddy permanence.  It looked understocked, cloying, and creepy, and it was open for business.  Signs taped to the window in front, printed out on typing paper in 30-point times roman, proclaimed DC as a hot spot for holiday shopping. 

And then: nothing happened.  I passed that shop every day and i never saw anyone in it.  No one, that is, besides the proprietor in his invariable ski jacket.  He’d sit behind his counter, surrounded by garish toys and off-brand electronics, reading a magazine or watching saccharine videos.  Weeks passed and nothing seemed to change.  Though I lived on his block I never got a flier or circular inviting my patronage.  He started staying open later but it didn’t seem to improve foot traffic.  Maybe he was doing well on-line but on the street he was tanking. 

As I pass I sometimes see him peering out the front windows between the taped-up product listings and signs, eyes obscured by the florescent lights reflecting off his clunky glasses, his face a perfect blank.  I can’t figure what he might be thinking, but I know for sure what he puts in my head: DC is not the hot spot for anything I want.  At best, it is a warehouse of futility.  And goodness knows I’ve got enough of that already.