BLOG

I've chatted a little bit about Yelp.com in the past, but a recent article in San Francisco magazine really brought a lot of things home. While I'm not a tremendous fan of SF Mag, this article was quite good and a read I would recommend. Basically, the author asks, what is the future of Yelp? The site works somewhat well in San Francisco, but expansion is a problem. I would posit that the problem lies in the fact that the only other annoying hipster population of any merit lies in New York City and that is a territory heavily covered in all things hipster-related, Vice being one of the more amusing ones. So, expanding a lot in NYC is a heavy fight, while any other city doesn't have much of a market worth pursuing. San Francisco happened to be the best mix of everything and they're pretty much the kings here.       But the fact is that Yelp is probably doomed to failure or a buyout. The site is just too cool for school and has no generic merit to it that allows it to spread beyond the "in" crowd of any particular city. It's part of the reason that while I review on it from time to time, it's gotten to be only useful to me as an online 411 directory. Even if an establishment doesn't have a website in SF, they will probably be listed on Yelp. Beyond that, the reviews are nearly worthless to me, unless of course some place gets insanely good reviews all the time, then I know I should stay away as it will be thronged by hipster masses constantly.       I mean, yeah, we get it, Tartine is great. The 1,000 reviews that are there for it are kinda redundant at this point. But that's the problem. To get in to the crowd, you need to review and to be welcomed by the crowd, you need to love what they love and hate what they hate. Step out of line and the "Yelp Elite" will not welcome you unless of course you can out-drink them and I gotta warn everything that there are some severe fishes in that group.       One last point that I've mentioned in passing to people and the author of the SF Mag article picked up is that it seems like a Google buyout would make a lot of sense. Once I saw that Google had put ratings on its business listings, it seemed like a perfect fit. That and the fact that Yelp's revenue comes from premium placements for business (which several owners have told me are a waste of money) and advertisements, which Google does splendidly. What Yelp could do for Google's ratings system could be what YouTube did for Google Video. I'm sure they wouldn't change anything about the front end of Yelp so that they keep the community that drools over it in place, while at the same time, they'd take the backend and make it all Google, hopefully fixing Yelp's very sporadic image server in the process. After all, Yelp's search system sucks to the core and I always use 'blah blah restaurant site:yelp.com' searches on Google to actually find what I'm looking for, so the fit would be more brilliant than a shotgun with a silencer

My mom was visiting last weekend and just about everywhere we went I had to explain to her what a hipster was because she was constantly wondering why in the hell people were dressed like crap. While there is nothing wrong with constantly wearing the finest piece of clothing ever invented (the zip-up hoodie), there is a great deal wrong with skinny jeans and buying new-vintage clothes. Oh, and irony. Irony has never been more intolerable than now.       Thankfully, some folks pulled together and made this all so easy to understand for the lay person. And despite it taking place in NYC, it all applies to San Francisco, because well, hipsters ain't original.

After living in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly a decade, I had never made it down to the Mission to see the Día de los Muertos parade and celebration. I guess my general line of thinking was 1) I'm lazy and 2) It's a Mexican celebration, so I really have no business there, except as an extremely causal observer. Naturally, it wasn't until last night that I finally exercised my ability to be this extremely causal observer.       Popping out of the 24th Street Bart station, I was immediately concerned. Not because of my immediate whiteness, but because of all those around me were very much white with the face paint on that people wear for the celebration. I should probably back up a step or two and explain to those who don't know that Mission used to be a very, very Hispanic neighborhood. Oddly enough, my father grew up at the north end of it by Dolores Park and he also said that yes, it was definitely home mostly to Mexicans. At some point in the 90's, this began to change. Kids who graduated from art school or were in to making music or in to any variety of things that fall in to the more creative way of life started moving to the Mission because it was one of the cheapest places in San Francisco at the time. This had two unfortunate side effects. One was that it chased out a great many Mexican families living there because these (mostly white at the time) kids were mistakenly seen as more upscale and thusly for affluent clientèle for the landlords of the area who could thusly command higher rents. The other issue was that with the people who were actually creative came all the groupies--those with a bachelors degree in Art or English Literature whose only talent was partying with those people who actually did do something in Art of English Literature. Then the dot-com happened and the problem grew exponentially to point where you'll see more "ironic" mullets and people paying $5 for a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon at a bar (because dude, it's sooo White Trash) than you will blue collar, industrious families from Mexico and other Latino countries. Something that I feel is unfortunate because these white kids, who most commonly called hipsters, are just whitewashing out the culture and history that was in the area.       But back to the Día as I was making my way through it with camera and other photo takers around me. As sure as I had figured, there was a flood of white people in the parade. Don't get me wrong, I fully believe that it is a wonderful thing to admire the culture of others, but these folks weren't doing that. Beyond the throngs of hipsters with their "traditional" face paint on, there was the constant smell of beer coming from people, others with "Impeach Bush" and anti-war signs, couples chatting not-so-silently with one another about hooking up later on. So overall, my impression from the procession was that this is just another cultural holiday that white folk have used as an excuse to get drunk and wander about under the guise of some larger cultural awareness. This seemed to be lost on the few Mexican families I did see who were trying to take part only to be beaten back by throngs of very non-Latino hipsters.       There was one silver lining in all of this, which is the only reason I'd see it again next year, and that was the shrines that people had put up at Garfield Square. These were insanely cool, interesting, and something I could respect a great deal. I took a lot less photos than I would have though because, well... the light wasn't so good and also there is something of a transcendent pall that comes over you as the reality of the situation sinks in. You see that you're walking through remembrances of the departed and as opposed to the hard, cold, stone tombstones that are common for we white folk in the large empty fields we call graveyards, these are personal. There were shoes of the departed and toys of children that were lost and any magnitude of personal effigy that made the setting something more. Naturally, it would have been super if some grounds keeper didn't think that watering the field before the weekend was going to be a great idea that quickly transformed the grounds into a muddy soup, but even still, the emotion of the shrines wasn't lost.