Since 2000, all this fun and creativity has been a DIY labor of love. Keeping the Stencil Archive, and HappyFeet Travels, upgraded, updated, secure, and available has taken my gladly-given time and money. If you would like to support these sites, the stencil work, and future projects, please consider giving what you can.
Other ways to support the projects: The out-of-print “Stencil Nation” book is still available and there are now four San Francisco/Oakland street art tours to choose from.
Went to the Wayback Machine to pull out some early-2000s HappyFt images. IYKYK 😛
Today is Stephen King’s 79th birthday. Many words have been written about the man and his words and stories, but his “holy cow!” birthday post on social media got me thinking about all the hours I have spent inside his imagination. I read King’s works heavily from around 1984 to 1991, then just bought his “Dark Tower” books until 2004. I only started reading his new books, and rereading some classics, when the COVID pandemic hit in 2022. I am by no means a completist like I used to be, but I have probably read tens of thousands of King’s words; more than any other author.
Out of my former collection, this movie theater mobile with a photo of a maniacal Stephen King, controlling a bomb of a movie, is one of my favorites. This was filmed in Wilmington, NC, and I wandered around with my parents looking for locations to photograph in 1986. It was a fun day trip during a high school-era summer vacation.
I’ve been thinking about the kernels of my love for genres King swims in: horror, fantasy, sci-fi. There were not many books in my house growing up, let alone horror and sci-fi fiction. My life was already layered with real and imagined horrors since my dad ran a funeral home and drove an ambulance in the pre-EMS 1970s rural south. I heard about the wrecks, shootings, feuds, violence, and gore at a young age. I knew about death and grief and loss as well, and it was at times difficult for my developing brain to understand what was going on emotionally and physically. This gave me a bit of wisdom about my surroundings, but also a tough skin to deal with it. Back then, I also enjoyed scaring myself. It was easy to imagine witches in shadows, trap doors at the stairs, and giant spiders in carports.
A dream takes me back to the early 1990s, when my family cat Simon was still a virile terror, and he lets me scratch his head. I ask him “how come you don’t talk to me like other cats?” Simon decides to chat me up, wanting to talk about how much he liked a woman I dated just down the block. “How come you don’t date her anymore,” Simon asks me.
We start walking while we chat and enter the back of a restaurant. It is a surprise event for me, maybe my birthday. Simon walks me through a smiling crowd of friends and leaves me at a two-top table. The other seat is empty, but Simon tells me that “your sister is your guest for the meal.” He walks into a warehouse gallery space, and I sit at the table enjoying the scene while I wait on my sister.
A friend who thrifts surprised me last week when he mailed me a copy of the Mad Magazine Card Game. I had this growing up and sold my nice, complete game on Ebay some years back to help fund my plain issue collecting. As I sorted the cards to see if any were missing (one was!), I put the cards in order for each color suit to look at the Jack Davis art. Hmm, these would look great as animated gifs. Has anyone ever made gifs of these?
I looked online and could not find any gifs of the Davis art for this card game. So I figured out how to make them myself for a fun project. Not too hard to do on the iPhone. I didn’t try too hard to get the light just right, or the images lined up correctly. These are rough gif animations to get the idea of how Jack Davis had fun with the running gag(s) on the numbered cards.
What is your favorite? Mine is “throwing garbage at Alfred E. Neuman” for the green suit.
Whatever your favorite is, enjoy the eggs, nudity, disassembly, and space idiocy!
Last year, a construction site in Hayes Valley, SF opened up an awesome portrait mural of the master alien Sun Ra. The Sun Ra Arkestra plays often around the corner at SF Jazz, keeping the interstellar beams alive from the atoms of far away realms. I frequently bike by this spot, and a new second floor is once again blocking the view of our favorite man from outer space.
And the SRA in once again heading into the San Franciscan audial realms, playing The Chapel on Valencia St. at the end of February.
I strongly recommend taking a deep dive into live Sun Ra. There are hours of audio concerts on the YT streams, and my atoms have been rearranged several times by letting the Arkestra flow into to my inner/outer being. See you out there, beyond the sun!
A sickly man, sweaty and feverish, approaches the security check at the gate of a stadium event. He was a ride-hailing driver of mine, and he caught the alien-designed bug that I planted. Unwittingly part of the plan, he passes security with no problem and heads into the stadium.
Inside the stadium, children hear the choral music. Is it real or are they hallucinating the song? The children all appear euphoric, and ready to act. One particular child has already put their thumbs into the eyes of their parent. They are all part of the plan.
A short, pale-white skinned being walks in his spaceship (or a multi-dimensional room) full of alien technology. His skin looks shark-like. I am sitting in this room with another human, who yells to Alex “hurry up and get in here!” Alex is on the other side of a portal that swirls green and blue. He walks through, and I momentarily see that there is a normal looking earth apartment on the other side.
Alex is very excited about his latest idea, which includes a collection of water in different compartments. He’s dropping something on small ropes into the sections of water while the other person looks at the alien, throws his thumb my way, and says something in the alien’s language.
I realize that the alien has been on earth, disguised as a small person. The other guy must be telling him that it is OK that I am here. And it is. I feel cold, calm, collected, and calculating. I have no guilt or second guessing for why I am there. I am totally complicit and in on the plan to destroy humanity.
Over 10 years after CELLspace closed, the huge metal mural from the art warehouse’s facade is celebrated with a gallery at The Midway
By Allie Skalnik, for MissionLocal (Aug. 26, 2025)
When an artists’ warehouse in the Mission closed its doors for the last time in 2012, almost everything was accounted for.
The artists who had made the space at 18th and Bryant streets their safe haven since 1996 hauled out their supplies, equipment and art pieces. All that was left at the end of their slow goodbye was a massive metal installation: A set of eight 10-foot-tall panels covering the facade of the warehouse.
Stitched together photo of the Metal Mural with the Stencilada exhibit, c. 2010 (photo: Jane Verma)
Jane Verma, one of the creators of the piece, calls it a “metal mural.” She said it was important to her that it didn’t gather dust in a storage container because of what it represented.
“Because it was on the facade, it was a signal to anyone walking by that there was something interesting going on here,” said Verma. The metal mural on the former CELLspace building facade. Photo courtesy of Jane Verma.
That warehouse at 2050 Bryant St. was called CELLspace (the prefix stood for Collectively Explorative Learning Labs), and it embodied a dream that’s been dying in San Francisco, said CELLspace co-founder Jonathan Youtt.
CELLspace, he said, was “an open call to anyone and everyone that wanted to come together to create a spot where all arts could exist under one roof.”
In its heyday, the warehouse was a place of boundless creativity. Former CELLspace artists speak of the building reverently. The front entrance led into a gallery before opening up into a 4,000-square-foot main hall. High ceilings and a main stage for performances made it like a “cathedral” for Youtt.
In this grand warehouse, anything could be brought to fruition. More than 50 artists paid a monthly fee of around $75 for unlimited access to glassblowing, sewing machines, metalworking, a wood shop and an audio-visual studio.
Nestled amid studio spaces and machinery was a community kitchen, and a few CELLspace employees rented space to live in the warehouse, in a small loft soundproofed against the din of the active makerspace.
But rather than a siloed artist community, CELLspace was intricately embedded in the community. The warehouse hosted everything from an after-school program to raves. It served as neutral ground between rival Mission gangs, and hosted weekly roller-skating and B-boy/B-girl events.
