Category: diaries

SFGate has a very spirited discussion of whether moms should be required to fold up babystrollers on Muni. Some seemed to have turned this into a gender issue but really this is an etiquette issue. Muni requires moms to fold up strollers for safety of passengers and children alike, but some have balked at the regulation.

There are over 110 comments on the original Chronicle story, “SF: Strollers must be folded up on Muni.” I, for one, think the rule is fantastic and wish Muni would add a couple more etiquette rules like, bring a couple of extra pacifiers to put in your child’s mouth if he starts crying. Please don’t pretend you don’t hear it because the rest of us certainly can hear the wailing all the way from the back of the bus. I would like the parents with monster strollers to fold up their baby SUVs on the sidewalks of Noe Valley and Pac Heights as well, just my personal request.

What do you think, should people be required to fold up their baby strollers on Muni?

I came across a beautiful, ethereal short movie called Muni Daze by Nick Culp, who filmed the entire movie on Muni bus rides. We might gripe about the unsanitary habits of our fellow riders or the frequent lack of etiquette on the bus, but Nick’s movie reminded me that at the end of the day, Muni is the one place where we are in close proximity with fellow San Franciscans who we may never otherwise see. And on the bus we are afforded a few minutes in our day to just sit and consider the people around us.

Muni Daze by Nick Culp

Nick also wrote the music in Muni Daze, which in my opinion, really steals the show. “The sound inspired the movie more than anything visual,” he told me. I got in touch with Nick and he had this to say:

I live in the excelsior (outer mission) area, so the 49 and 14 buses are like like wallpaper to me. I was waiting at the 24th and mission stop (which is the first shot of the movie). It was a particularly hazy, moody day. I just got a new phone for the first time in years.

The first experiment was loading my own custom ring tones of sounds I make as a computer musician the night before. One of the sounds I kept pulling out my phone to listen to, because it just seems to capture the mood of what I felt like being there that day (this is that dreamy sparkly sound that runs through the whole movie). It brought with it the thought that I should be doing some soundtrack work, which is a common notion I entertain, but I had no immediate people come to mind for the source of the visuals.

I then remembered that my phone also had a small camera, so I took it out and began what would become a week of shooting small shots on the bus everyday I edited together using Imovie. This is my first film in a series that I hope will take on many different themes.

Tuesday morning in North Beach. I have a bad vibe that the 45-Stockton is gonna be sardine city. A big crowd is already waiting at Columbus and Stockton for the morning commute down Stockton, over Market, along Fourth and to Brannan and beyond.

It was sardine city alright. Some joker standing near me, carrying a Barack Obama doll, is starting to lose it as local Asians along the Chinatown route squeeze into the matriculated bus and loudly speak in dialects unrecognizable to me. The racist white dude on 45 utters for all to hear: “That’s why I support birth control and nuclear war.” I was thinking: What a racist jackass. I kept my mouth shut, so as not to create a nuclear incident on a packed bus. However, I wanted to ask the guy, “If everybody practiced birth control, who would you kill with nuclear arms?”

– David