You know that part in Taxi Driver when Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle character utters those lines about wishing that "Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."  That eerily memorable bit from Martin Scorsese's landmark 1976 movie captured a totally different time in the history of New York City - a time when the city was bankrupt and grimy.  It was a time when the Bronx, which looked like bombed out Berlin (circa WWII), was visited by Ronald Reagan like a state leader visiting a war torn faraway land - except it was one of the five boroughs of America's main city.

It was a distant time that could be a hundred years ago, not just a few decades, considering just how very much New York City has transformed since then.  Today the midtown Times Square area of New York City (along & surrounding 42nd Street on Manhattan's West Side) is a radically different place than the one it was back in the mid-seventies; the area that was so effectively captured in Taxi Driver as Travis Bickle's cab crawled along in slo-mo, taking in every nuance of the rundown, scuzzy and scary area that was rampant with X-rated movie theaters, hookers, junkies, pimps, and street-wise con men lurking on every corner, ready to rip off gullible marks.

Today that same stretch of 42nd Street and Times Square is another world altogether, with the cheap eateries and strip clubs and X rated movie theaters replaced by back to back chain outlets like Starbucks, McDonalds, and of course the Disney stores -- hence the so-called Disneyfication of New York City that has slowly come about since the nineties -- a current trend in the US that is by no means limited to NYC.

Yesterday evening (Friday August 3rd) I attended both the Amoeba Music, San Francisco instore with super skilled turntablists DJs Platurn and Golden Chyld (pictured left) and also the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Best of the Bay soiree at the de Young Museum in nearby Golden Gate Park.

I hadn't been at the de Young Museum since it moved locations to its impressive new state-of-the-art facility in October 2005. Come think of it, I hadn't been in Golden Gate Park for about as long. And after seeing reports about the "homeless problem" in the park on local TV news and reading all the recent newspaper reports, which made it sound like there were homeless people camped out under every bush in the park's confines with dirty syringes poking out of everywhere, I was anticipating stumbling upon a sort of New Jack (tent) City, which didn't happen. Instead I only witnessed a small gathering of poor, unfortunate homeless down by the Stanyan end of the park (not far from Amoeba).   

But anyway, regarding the homeless situation in SF -- I really see both sides. I feel bad for residents (especially those with little kids) who have to endure such things as street people pissing in their doorsteps or leaving dirty needles in their front yards or near playgrounds in the park. But I also feel bad for individuals who have substance abuse problems or who are mentally ill and who have no option but to live on the streets (dating back to Reagan as Governor of Cali). And never do I forget the fact that most of us are just one paycheck away from joining them.