Judd:
Pronunciation: jŭdd
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English judde, from Old English jwudu; akin to Old High German juti,

A twenty/thirty-something, straight white male San Franciscan, politically liberal, sensitive to feminism, multi-culturalism, and gay rights; employed in a professional setting (usually as something vague like a “consultant” or an “analyst”) but who usually pretends to want to be either a writer, comic book artist, video game designer or a deejay; would seem gay in other cities but is the archetypal straight man in Frisco; well-intentioned, eager to please, and insecure about style and taste but slavishly follows the latest trends. Drinks wine, jogs regularly. Has definitely done yoga at least once. Moved to San Francisco after college, usually during the dot-com era (but definitely does not call it Frisco). Godfather and namesake: Judd Winick, from Real World III.

[click on the image to get a clearer version]

One of my friends moved out to San Francisco right after she graduated college in 2000 and back in the provinces I would get e-mails about her life here, and all the cool things she was seeing or doing. 64% of these e-mails involved seeing ex-Real World people. "Ohmygod, Montana from RW Boston lives on the next block from me, I saw her picture on the wall of my dry cleaners and I followed her to the bus stop the other day!" this would be followed several weeks later by, "I saw Irene the crazy chick with Lyme disease from RW Seattle when I was at a coffee shop the other day" and the next winter, "Jamie from RW New Orleans was driving behind us the entire way back from Tahoe last weekend" and "my friend hooked up with that guy 'Yes' from Road Rules semester at sea." At this point, I was less than enthused. I wanted to shout, "yo those people are not real celebrities, and even if they were, they suck." But my friendship was hanging by a thread at this point so I indulged her. It was kind of fun to make fun of these people, how desperately they tried to exploit and cling to their ephemeral recognition. Eric Nies, bitches. The worst stories my friend related to me were the ones about Judd. Judd Winick, the whiny, overly-sensitive cartoonist from RW San Francisco was fucking everywhere. I would get reports of Judd sightings all over town. "Judd was at Blondie's on Valencia, drinking a martini right out there in those seats by the sidewalk." I'll bet he was. Judd was on Haight street trying on shirts at Kweejibo. Judd was rollerblading in the park with Pam. I got so sick of hearing about Judd. Argghhhh!

Judd was always my least favorite Real Worlder. His interactions with Puck just annoyed the crap out of me, he was just so damn sensitive and politically correct and he couldn't see that Puck was just a dick who was trying to get a rise out of him. Trying, and pretty much always succeeding. Judd just oozed that early nineties Eggersian eager-to-prove-generation-x-isn't-lazy-and-heartless vibe, plus that using-my-overt-and-affected-sensitivity-to-get-with-chicks thing that so many high school losers pull once they arrive at their freshman dorms. Hey, I know that schtick well, and it just pained me to see Judd do it over and over and over in front of a national audience. Was he going to sleep with Cory the insecure/chubby future fag-hag, or would he talk his way into the sultry doe-eyed Latina Republican's bunkbed? The guy was so visibly desperate I don't think he cared which, which is so funny because he ended up marrying Pam, the cute, freckled med student who just kind of floated on a cloud of her own ambition above the heads of the rest of the contestants. I'm sure she saw the truth: Judd was generally a good, earnest, decent guy. But I hope in the years since Pam has scraped away some of that icky straight white male, put-me-through-a-crucifixion-goddamnit-liberal guilt and forced Judd to take himself a little less seriously. I doubt it. I remember being in a bookstore a few years ago and seeing a graphic novel Judd wrote about Pedro. It was titled something hopelessly banal like "Pedro and Me" and contained some of the most insipid, pull-off-my-fingernails-rather-than-force-me-to-read-this-shit dialogue I have ever encountered. I didn't trust Pedro. I just never trust characters who pronounce anglicized Spanish words with unecessarily-excessive Spanish accents when they generally speak English without an accent. Pedro would be talking English without much of an accent and suddenly he would pronounce "San Francisco" or "burrito" like he had just pulled Rachel up from a tango dip with a rose between her teeth in a Havana nightclub. I know, I know, that may be how these things are said in Miami, but a burrito is a burrito. You don't have to roll them Rs. It always stops conversation, makes me uncomfortable. Generally I have no problem with native Spanish speakers doing it, it's the middle-class white folks who spend a semester in Seville or Costa Rica who do it that bug me out the most. Pedro was a smart motherfucker. He was politically savvy and he educated a lot of people. But I still found him kind of annoying (though maybe that was partly due to the seedy glow of Judd's incessant P.C. pandering). Pedro used MTV and the Real World platform to promote his important and timely message almost as well as Judd has used his friendship with Pedro to promote himself and his work over the past decade. Oh well, everybody's got to earn a living. . . Frisco rents aren't cheap.

[note: I realize these are real people. but as seminal figures of reality television, they put themselves in a unique position to be criticized by the likes of me. they volunteered for that shit, they benefited from it, and I'm sure they're thick-skinned as hell after fifteen years of dealing with people who found the way they were portrayed by MTV's editors annoying. I don't pretend to know anything about Judd other than how he portrayed himself for the camera.]

As I see it, Judd is an icon, an archetype. Yes, a stereotype too. Judd himself has been a visible man-about-town and in one season's worth of edited footage he represented in a way the mentality of a lot of the young men who move to Frisco after college and find themselves navigating the social and political waters of this very unique city. Sensitive, liberal, self-deprecating. Eager to please, desperate for true love but frightened of growing old or responsible, filled with vaguely-artistic dying ambitions. The key to Juddness is how ordinary it is out here. Anywhere else in the country they might be extraordinary. Anywhere else they might be interesting. But here they are the default template of emasculated heterosexuality. They have given up life as big fish back in the burbs to dart through our streets like schools of minnows. Frisco has no real working class population; instead we have Judd drones and their female counterparts, working in the financial district, going out in the Mission on the weekends, listening to trendy music on their trendy iPods and watching indie films and e-mailing in coffee shops with WIFI. Many of them came out here for dotcom and stayed. And they're getting old and kind of sad.

One of the reasons I disparage them is because all Judds believe that that Frisco is the greatest city on earth, coupled with complete disdain for the rest of America (except Manhattan), notwithstanding the fact that they all come from that other America. I just have this thing against people who hate where they come from and fail to see that even the bad or annoying things about where they come from helped form and shape their identity, in a way that should reasonably lead towards some level of ambivalence about where they come from. I get uncomfortable around people who talk endless shit about their parents. All of this is a form of self-hatred that I find particularly loathsome, even though I occasionally find myself in its trap.

So I am constantly fighting off my own inner Judd. Even Judds grow up. I recently read that Judd W. and Pam had a baby boy in May. I am sure that one day soon, I will run into him on a sidewalk in Laurel Heights, and we will face each other, black baby bjorn to black baby bjorn. And I will hang my head and walk past him, and think, this is what it comes to. I should just accept it. This is who I am now. We could have coffee. We could talk about the inevitable move to the suburbs. There is no escaping him. To steal a line from Yeats: Judd haunts me. He is always just round the next corner. But goddamnit I need to try to fight him.

First of all, I am going to call it Frisco. Fuck Herb Caen. The vast-majority of non-Chinese, non-Latino "local" people who were born here and still live here a generation later are all cloistered in their $6 million houses in Seacliff or Pacific Heights or Russian Hill and I'm just a shitstain on the sidewalk to those people anyway. I have decided that I am going to start calling all great American cities by their silly nicknames. The Big Apple. The Windy City. Motown. Sin City. I am going to do it in casual conversation just to annoy people. It drives me crazy how all these Judds roll their eyes every time someone says the word "Frisco," as if rolling their eyes is going to change the fact that they themselves grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland or Kansas City and this rolling of the eyes somehow legitimizes them as locals. Shut the fuck up, Judd. Then there's that stupid laundromat in Hayes Valley named after Caen's book. Don't call it Frisco. Why not? Because some jerk in a mumu who owns a laundromat in gentrification central doesn't think I should? The longshoremen we displaced from the city called it Frisco, but just because in 1953 some martini-swilling hack told us not to, now generations of Judds eager to prove that they're exactly what they're not (i.e. locals) can insist on me not calling it Frisco. Bitch, I've lived here three years but I'm still a tourist. There's no way I am ever going to afford a house with a yard and when you have a five-month old daughter that means your days are numbered. And I'm sure as shit never going to move to Contra Costra or Marin. And guess what? EVERYONE ELSE IN THE COUNTRY CALLS IT FRISCO. In honor of my provincial heritage, so will I. Herb Caen grew up in Sacramento and didn't move to Frisco till he was twenty. Just another Judd insecure with his place in the world, I think. So call it what you want. Call it San Fran. If you're a trucker, call it the Gay Bay. You've earned that right, and I don't care.

Everyone who's been in San Francisco for five minutes has seen Frank Chiu, the sloppily/professionally dressed Asian guy with the sign with all kinds of cool made-up words on it. Wood's uncle was a psychiatrist at S.F. General back in the day when Frank Chiu emerged onto the frisco lunatic scene, and heard his story before it was corrupted by Judd folklore. He believes he is a filmmaker from another planet or one of the moons of jupiter whose films are being prevented from being seen on earth by a cadre of semi-obscure politicians and authority figures. Frank's real mission in life seems to be to get on the news as much as possible, so wherever there is a news truck or a camera in downtown frisco you can trust Frank will sniff it out. He also likes crowds and you see him at war protests with his sign among all the freegans and anti-zionist zealots and their signs. They all agree that Tom Ridge is a major asshole. There is a bar south of 14th street that is named after one of the most common phrases on his placard ("12 galaxies"). I've never been there because I refuse to go south of 14th street. A few months before Juniper was born I decided to start designing onesies with pictures of things other than ducks and fuzzy bunnies and cuddly bears on them, and I decided to make her a Frank Chiu onesie with this image on it: Three months after Juniper was born, Wood ran bay-to-breakers (can you believe that? most women three months after giving birth are scarfing down paxil-flavored haagen-dazs and my wife runs seven miles?) Juniper and I went into golden gate park to see her race and lo and behold there was Frank Chiu among all the naked old men with goiters the size of small melons on their testicals and "urban tribes" all wearing the same costumes. I wore a costume, too. I was yuppie dad, motherfucker!!! Bay-to-breakers really depresses me. Not because it smells like beer and sweaty balls, but because you see all of these earnest Judds and Juddettes in costumes they clearly (1) spent a lot of time on; and (2) thought were really "witty" or "creative"; and then ten minutes later you see another group of equally-earnest Judds and Juddettes wearing the exact same conceptual costumes. It really makes me sad for humanity to see such banality on open, drunken display. But among the dozens and dozens of Frank Chiu imitators I spied the real thing, called up Wood to run back a mile and a half after she was done with the race so she could take a picture of Juniper with Frank Chiu.

San Francisco, the city where once or twice a year you can feel comfortable wearing your red bra and panties over a black leotard (pirate hat optional) to the park on a balmy Sunday.

So Wood ran that extra mile and a half back up through the park for these pictures, which we both agreed while walking the miles back to our apartment were totally worth it.