Two images, taken on the same winter 1995 evening, on the same corner, where Union Street intersects with Webster, in the Marina District of San Francisco. I can’t remember, but I doubt that this sandwich place is there anymore. Il Fornaio, a well-known group of upmarket restaurants and bakeries across California, whose sign is reflected in the sandwich shop window, is definitely not in this location anymore.
I never did care for this area, it being the heart of San Francisco’s young upwardly mobile professional set, with a healthy supply of meat-market pick-up bars, but I did shoot here often, and made a 16mm film out of footage shot at night here, in part because one could count on it being a reasonably safe place to walk around with a Bolex at 11 at night.
I have no idea what the lone customer of the sandwich shop is looking at. Perhaps he’s just trying to avoid my gaze. In all the years that I passed this shop, which I did often as my bus line the 22 Fillmore made its turn on this corner, I never saw but one or two customers at a time in it.
This really has nothing to do with this post, but i’ve been meaning to tell you about your twin. hehe… A the World A’fair at the Dayton (ohio) convention center last sunday there was a guy who looked almost exactly like you do (in your pictures anyway) with a digital camera around his neck even. If i didn’t know how very far away ohio is from Japan I would have yelled “KURT!” to see if it really was you. But i held my tongue and promised myself to ask you if you really did have a long lost twin who likes to hang out around the ‘bar’ at the Canada booth. ^_^
Interesting that you took this moment to walk down Memory Lane in San Francisco. You are really getting me primed for our trip there next week; we leave tomorrow afternoon–AJM to attend the JAVA Users Conference and I get to kick around doing whatever.