The San Francisco Experience

I try to avoid the vanity pieces as much as I can, but we all fall from grace now and then. If you want to get past the photographs of me as a freshman and what not and get to the meat of the entry just skip ahead to the part starting after the slide show.

"This is where you live?"
"What kind of sexual favors did you have to perform to find this place?"
"You're a bastard."

Those are a sampling of the responses intoned by a few of my friends upon seeing my new place. About 3 weeks ago I moved to the City, but not just anywhere in the City, to Baker Beach in the Presidio. One of my neighbors recently informed me that our apartments were built for married officers, the first such accommodations built by the army anywhere in the US. The room is good sized, great housemates, rent is reasonable, but, good-god, Baker Beach. There are no structures between me and the ocean (with the possible exception of some turn-of-the-century gun/canon bunkers). At night I hear fog horns and waves, in the morning I hear birds and waves. I walk down to the ocean at night and see Mile Rocks Light and Point Bonita flash in the darkness and feel the end of the continent.

I remember my grandmother telling me how she'd play hooky here. I did the same during a very memorable walk along much of the city's coastline on the centennial of the 1906 earthquake with my fellow Californiac, Breeanna.


Nice socks, huh? Also one of the few photographs ever taken of me in shorts.

As if the raptures of living in one of my favorite places weren't enough, let us not forget that I am also living in San Francisco, that great Baghdad-by-the-Bay with which I have been in love for so long. Much as I'd expected, living in the City is quite different than visiting. I've been visiting my whole life, though often serving as tour guide, attempting to show my friends and acquaintances just what makes this place so special.

SLIDE SHOW OF TOUR-GUIDING


Of course the answer is simple, it's part of where I'm from, but is it just that? My instincts tell me that as with any lover of any particular thing, I would be best advised to avoid too close an examination. Love it for what I love.

But what is it? What makes San Francisco what it is?

I don't expect to find any single answer, but there has been one kicking around in my head lately which may begin to approach this subject. Namely, it's my current theory explaining the San Franciscan experience, and it goes like this.

Historically, outsiders have praised San Francisco for its cosmopolitan feel. The dictionary most readily available to me at the moment gives one definition of the word as "having an exciting and glamorous character associated with travel and a mixture of cultures." Of course it is the cultural Disneyland side of things that the city has so deftly capitalized on. Have an espresso on Columbus, buy trinkets on Grant (not Stockton of course) and enjoy the fresh catch down on Fisherman's Wharf.

The other joy of the City afforded by outsiders are the views. The hills, the cable cars, the Bridge; each San Francisco tour-book icon is, in the end, about seeing the views, and what a city for it. Even on days when the fog rolls in the tourists hearts are collectively warmed by that perfect shot of a sunset-lit wisp of mist clinging to the Marin Headlands. Apparently those San Francisco sweatshirts just don't cut it. Is it always this cold in June?

Easy shots at sourdough and cracked crab aside (I'm making myself hungry, I guess stereotypes are based in some fact), I think that much of the San Francisco experience is captured by these two ideas; the neighborhoods and the views. San Francisco wouldn't be all that exciting by the mere fact that one could buy a damned-fine burrito on Valencia alone, rather it's the fact that said hypothetical taquería is just blocks from the Beaux-Arts playground of civic center which is just blocks from the "painted ladies" of Alamo Square which are just blocks from the headshops of Haight which are just blocks from the De Young and Steinhart in the Park.

As one travels through the city, or simply, whenever one visits any part of it, that trip entails any number of departures, transitions and arrivals to and from so many distinct areas. As a friend of mine intoned at this point during one of my recent un-asked-for lectures, the most exciting part of any journey is the initial arrival. "When I see a place for the first time, I notice everything - the color of the paper, the sky, the way people walk, doorknobs, every detail," says David Byrne of the Talking Heads at the end of True Stories. In San Francisco one is constantly arriving, constantly experiencing the ecstasy of the new.

The visual drama of the City heightens this feeling of arrival. Each time one's car comes to the crest of a hill there is a breathless moment, not in the least due to the suspense of wondering what stopped car, pedestrian or bicyclist is eclipsed by the summit. This moment is, for the most part, the excitement of discovery, of having one's field of vision dominated by the vast sky only to have it quickly replaced by some magnificent sweep of the city or bay.

(Photo courtesy of the fabulous SF photo blog, www.whatimseeing.com)

The Sunset seems to be the City's favorite neighborhood to look down on. It seems to be some strange transplant from the Peninsula, the least San Franciscan part of San Francisco. Would it feel this way if it weren't so large, if it weren't so gently rolling a landscape? If the Sunset had views or wasn't so homogeneous in appearance perhaps it would feel better incorporated into the City's imagined 49-square-miles. There really isn't anything all that wrong with the Sunset, after all, but does there have to be so much of it?

It is my theory, then, that the heart of the San Francisco experience may have nothing to do with any particular place, but rather the feeling of passing between places. It is the pastiche of transitions that keeps the visitor enthralled and the resident devoted. It is a well-preserved buzz which neither withers to hang-over nor spikes to confused excess. It is that most marvelous city perched on the end of the continent. It's the City.

LA Disaster Land

As with before, a New York Times article got me thinking again today. The terrible reality of the financial woes of journalism is becoming much more tangible to me. For over a century and a half the papers have kept America bickering, worrying, warring, investigating and reflecting. Above all, though, they've kept us thinking and talking about the world we live in and the communities that we are a part of. Other media have taken over many of these roles and the nature of how we interpret and inhabit our world is changing; this we know, it is the understood background hum to these "death of print" tirades and eulogies. Still, I can't help but believe that the more places we have to experience and inhabit public space (albeit here in mental rather than physical space) and that the more tools we have with which to examine our community, we are so much the better for it.

So, as I was saying, the Times got me to thinking. The headline on the homepage read: "In Parched City, Streets Suddenly Run Wet." Georgia may have grabbed some national attention for water shortages over the past few years, but only the irrigated cities of the West get to be called something as dramatic as "Parched City." Would it be one of the rapidly-expanding sun-belt cities? Las Vegas, that "dry" city on the shores of Lake Powell? LA, the legendary water-predator?

Then came the punch-line, "To the various natural threats that give Los Angeles an air of impending collapse, add a multitude of recent damaging water main breaks."

Lest, we forget, LA is not only that great thirsty desert at the end of the American real-estate dream, it is also that terrifying disaster world perched at the end of the continent. No matter to what heights of gleefully-inflated rhetoric Northern Californians up the ante of defining themselves as "not Southern California," LA is, after-all, America's favorite city to hate.

I can't decide where the loving hatred really lies in this article. It may be the simple nonchalance with which the Times bestows upon the city a perpetual "air of impending collapse."


Maybe its the bizarrely disconcerting photograph of the fire engine being swallowed by the earth against that most LA of backdrops, a tree-lined, bungalow and iron-fence suburbia. I can't help but think of Joel Sternfeld's ultra-detailed, large-format photograph "After a flash flood, Rancho Mirage, California" (1979).



Then again, it could just be the general, banal dread attributed to the Los Angelenos, Twittering over the patch-work destruction of their uneasy home. Throughout, the bursting water mains seem to be portrayed as natural disasters, as though the earth were exacting revenge on this water-selfish cancer. Yes, it is clearly an engineering issue: pipes fail after a century, especially when they are asked to do much more than they were designed to and they were hurriedly laid to keep up with the demands of hordes of Mid Westerners, clamoring to trade their earned and inherited land for a slice of paradise. But the author of this piece gives the water a haunting, predatory demeanor; it becomes a terrifyingly indiscriminate phenomenon of the gods if not nature itself that, it is insinuated, is eating the city alive.

Growing up in the land of "Not Southern California" I never understood just how universal this need to scorn and demonize Los Angeles was. It's as though Americans feel a direct threat to our national identity and ideals through the city's very existence. We are delighted by its products yet disgusted by it's presence. We hold it at arms length and even then wonder what even holding such a thing must say about us.

What is it about this place that so excites our passions? Is it the shameless glamor of the eternal spectacle grating against our Protestant plainness? Is it our inability to read the built environment of the sprawling metropolis? Is it the number of newcomers, foreigners and non-native English speakers lending it a flavor perhaps more complex though less well balanced than San Francisco's supposed cosmopolitan flair? What is it that so scares us? Do we fear that our country's dissolution will be wrought by the expansion of In-N-Out Burgers and Sam's Clubs?

Between 1909 and 1998, according to geographer and historian Mike Davis' "Ecology of Fear," Los Angeles was destroyed in major works of fiction and film a startling 138 times. 28 times by earthquakes, 7 from gangs, 49 from nuclear weapons, 10 by monsters, 6 by plagues and once (my favorite) by "Everything," to name a few.

This is not entirely alright. In fact, this may be fairly problematic. Replace LA here with some city that Americans are invested in. Some other unique urban landscape, unlike any other place in the world, where American culture and economics are invented and propagated. Oh, I don't know, let's say New York. Close to a decade after the 2001 terrorist attacks and a good fictional destruction of New York still leaves a bad taste in our mouths and a dirty feeling in our conscience.

Perhaps the fictional destruction of the city is a poor measure of our collective care for Los Angeles. Godzilla has made a play ground of Tokyo enough times to pay for as many miniature cityscapes as anyone would ever care to trample in a rubber suit, and do we love the Japanese any less? But it feels different in LA; maybe I am too close for objectivity. The destruction of LA, fictional, desired reality or projected future, seems too personal, too much like a vendetta against America's anti-city. Somewhere between our distance from LA and the process of reconciling the place of metropolis in nature (or nature in metropolis) we must confront the reality of the present, attempt some expression of empathy and create a joint vision of a better future. In short, we don't have to love LA as it is but I do think that we owe it to our idea of a national community to wish it well.

But, of course, these posts are all part of a process for me in which I wrestle with the Californian and Western questions that I feel I need to confront. They're for me, no matter what sweeping proclamations about society I may offer.