SF has some fantastic bookstores - many of which I've spent cumulative hours of my life in, to date - but one which is always a treat for me in every sense is the famous William Stout architectural bookstore in Jackson Square. The tiny shop is chock-full of fabulous finds, old and new, and half of the fun is extracting one from the jenga-like accumulation that is stacked precariously above it.
As many times as I'd visited the shop, I'd never realized the gem of a mural painted along it's side alley.
The curious spiraling dialogue grabbed my attention (I'm such a sucker for word art!), and I got it on my first Google:
It's excerpted lyrics from David Bowie's 1995 album Outside:
Thru' These Architect's Eyes
Stomping along
on this big Phillip Johnson
Is delay just wasting my time
Looking across at Richard Rogers
Scheming dreams to blow both their minds
It's difficult you see
To give up baby
To leave a job
When you know
You know the money's from day to day
All the majesty of a city landscape
All the soaring days in our lives
All the concrete dreams
in my mind's eye
All the joy I see
Thru these architect's eyes
Cold winter bleeds
on the girders of Babel
This stone boy watching the crawling land
Rings of flesh and the towers of iron
The steaming caves and the rocks and the sand
Stomping along on this big Phillip Johnson
Is delay just wasting my time
It's difficult you see
To give up baby
These summer scumholes
This goddamned starving life
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