8th Wonder of the World

It is Halloween. It is raining. It's the San Francisco Giant's Champion Homecoming Parade today and Dia de los Muertos tomorrow. The Mission has been tagged over again, my neighbor's house completely demolished, and a closing sign went up on another business (The Empress, too?).

I intended for this to be a resignation letter of sorts. My initial intention was chucked months ago, becoming (subconsciously) a redundant articulation of my everyday angst. I don't like complaining. I don't like watching my beautiful city evolve faster than I can emotionally keep up. I don't like having to tell everyone to shut up and quit bitching. And yet, there's something still so therapeutic about this. Perhaps writing has become my own coping mechanism, a method to preserve some positivity in this sea of change, a tiny buoy of hope.

Besides all that, I quit at quitting. I've never been any good at it. I tried quitting piano when I was twenty-seven and I dream about it almost nightly. I quit painting at 25, snapping my brushes in true, artistic agony, only to develop horrific internal leg itches until I resumed. I quit writing that same year, burning everything, including thirty-seven diaries, because I had decided that all words were lies.

Don't even get me started on romantic relationships.

But, like all things, creative production/intention evolves, bringing us back to places we thought we'd left forever.

Having Monday afternoon cocktails with one of my best friends, we fell into our favorite debate: When do we fully accept change? When do we finally let the past die? How do we let ourselves mourn, purge and then move forward. "Sweetie, you are a dinosaur, you more than anyone I know. You live with the ghosts of everything past. You have to let it burn. You have to murder it with your bare hands. You have to set it free in order to free yourself."

Perhaps he's right. Perhaps he's always been right, like when he walked away from the rigid structure of Berklee College of Music to beat his drums in Oakland, when he switched to electronic instruments. Or perhaps not.

In that fascinating article I mentioned a post or two back, called "A History of San Francisco in 26 Stories: On 140 New Montgomery, the PacBell Building", by Alexis C. Madrigal, she took what had been San Francisco's first skyscraper as the physical structure to outline our changing city and life. 

The building, having first been created for telecommunications in 1927, loomed over the city, unchallenged until 1964. It was the place where Winston Churchill placed one of the first transcontinental, transatlantic phone calls (one month before the stock market crashed). It stood as the city's storm warning station, using a highly sophisticated flag system. The outside base was made from quarried stone from the Sierra Nevada mountain range, while the rest of the facade was made of terra-cotta (a fact I found most intriguing), and was possibly inspired by Yosemite's Devil's Postpile. It was built by the architect Timothy Pflueger, a Mission resident (when the Mission was still a marshland). Diego Rivera painted it in his Pan-American Unity Mural. And now, the building is occupied by Yelp and Facebook, with the average age of its inhabitants being 25.

According to Cathy Simon, the architect in charge of restoring it, "The building subliminally has a great message that is very nuanced. It's an old building that's repurposed with intelligence."

I bring this building up to simply illustrate that what once stood as a monolith to telecommunication and capitalism, a bastion of a booming marketplace, has evolved all on its own. 

Madrigal used the evolution as a further argument for the shift in capitalism as a whole. Where power and wealth moved higher up in the sky, creating a greater physical distance from the working class, the internet has managed to level the playing field (physically only). Until now, we've operated on the ancient Roman grid system in our urban planning, and since the turn of the 20th century, we've moved up. 

"Who knows how precisely the streets we walk shape the way we walk them, but they do."

Humans have always dominated our landscapes. We build around water sources, we build in grids to maximize space, efficiency, control. The internet has no need for these things. 

"...a flatness prevails. There is no sense of decay, of time passing.... At any point in the physical world, there is infinity in all directions, a grid that is not just spatial but temporal."

With the Giant's victory, the Mission was covered in tags all over again. 

In a recent issue of Cabinet magazine (my favorite, btw), there was an article "From A 'Wondrous' Place" about graffiti during the 18th century Romantic period.  According to the author James Trainor, Kaaterskill Falls in New York's Catskill's Mountains, is covered in antiquated graffiti.

A little bit of back story: when I was in school, studying the horrifically boring American Art History, we spent an entire term of the Catskill's Mountains. Thomas Cole, the leading figure in the Hudson River School started his career by painting his sublime depictions of these mountains, a statement which reiterated his allegiance to God and the United States. This, then, became the thing to do.

This is important because "Anthropologists of graffiti - who usually focus on the classical period or study contemporary urban examples - rightly talk about the tension between 'self-fashioning' and the formation of 'group identity'. Visitors to Kaaterskill Falls came to have an encounter with some epiphonic experience of the Sublime that was shaped both individually and culturally, and then chisel their way into it for good."

Though "Die Foodie Scum" as was spray painted on Radish's windows does not speak to the same sentiment, it still acts as an example of continuing practice, of the past still influencing our future.

Trainor goes on, "New York suddenly 'discovered' its own backyard, and developed, thanks to its wandering artists, literati, and intellectuals, a social contract for appreciating and interpreting, for traveling and visiting. Unwittingly or not, the urban 'creative class' became the gentrifiers of the wilderness, the avatars of a runaway cult of nature veneration, and of tourism and outdoor recreation, of which they were both symptom and cause."

Driving my friend's BMW down Mission Street after the World Series, I couldn't help but laugh out loud at my own hypocrisy. As I mentioned, I've been wanting to offer a positive spin. I've been preaching to the choir of the local artists and musicians, demanding we band together, fight harder, produce more, all in celebration of this stunning city. And yet here I was, secretly excited to see (not participate in) the destruction brought on by the overzealous and the out-of-town assholes. 

I went home to research SF's crime rates vs other urban areas in the country, and sadly found that information lacking. What I did discover were a few interesting points: in general, crime in the United States has decreased to such an extent as to match the 1960s. And though in 2010, our homicide rate was one of the highest in the world, it paled compared to the horrific stats of Russia, El Salvador and Honduras. 

Could I not find the information I was seeking simply because San Francisco, proper, is quite small? It hasn't been on the top-ten most populated cities list since 1900. Hell, San Jose made the list in 2010, for the first time ever, at 950,000.

In reading an NPR article about declining crime rates in American cities, Aboubacar Ndiaye wrote, "It's likelier that the end of the burning cities of the 1960s and '70s, the violent crime epidemic of the '80s and early '90s provoked younger generations to move to newly safe central areas. A Brookings Institute study from 2005 showed that the revitalization of downtown areas coincided almost exactly with the end of the crime spikes of the Reagan-Bush era."

Going further, Ndiaye cited Phillip Clay's 4-step gentrification analysis, starting with the number one culprit: the "starving artists", the "marginals", the "urban pioneers", who, as we know and have done, move into low-income areas, making them approachable for the wealthier, seeking a 'hip' experience.

Article after article agrees: there is one simple solution to the majority of San Francisco problems, and that is more housing. But again, with our type of rent control, apparently it's simply easier to tear down our old Victorians and replace them with those hideous box buildings. 

Then there's nature. I'm still looking for a good source for the average financial loss due to fires in the city, which I suspect is quite high. And obviously there's the looming threat of the Big One coming, too.

Speaking of earthquakes, we all have Loma Prieta to thank for ruining the Embarcadero Freeway, thus liberating our beautiful Ferry Building, a building cited for destruction or repurposing directly before 1989, since there were simply no more ferries. According to the Urban Planning Company, SPUR, that earthquake was "one of the greatest urban planning success stories of the past twenty years."

It is our human condition to dominate nature, and yet it is our sentimentality to fear change. The internet has freed us from obsessing on concepts of "authorship", "artistic integrity", and maybe we are just too new to this stage of evolution to fully grasp it. But I guarantee, I'm not the only dinosaur in the room. I think we all find ourselves sometimes digging in a little too deep, hugging our favorite bar before the sledge-hammer smashes it, writing our names onto bathroom walls, seeking the facades of historical buildings for guidance and direction, while never knowing what exactly is coming next. 

I think it is ironic that the building intended for PacBells telecommunication now houses social media, that the Ferry building, having no Ferries to serve, lasted longer than the freeway that ran in front of it. 

This is what I love about San Francisco. We are surrounded by water, by change, nothing is fixed. Jokingly, I wanted to call it the 8th Wonder of the World, until I researched it. Though the Golden Gate Bridge did make it to the top ten list of the Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers, San Francisco is not on any big, magical, global list. On the United State's Seven Wonders of the World, however, the Internet is number 5. Where do we go with that? 

PS: I've started reading The Sun Also Rises, and on the opening page is a fantastic quote:

"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever... The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose... The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits... All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." -Ecclesiastes 

an imposter so hateful, a blockhead so stupid: san francisco's bohemians and other things

Ambrose Bierce: 

"Admiration: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves."

Having spent the last few weeks with my nose deep in Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, and not really understanding what I was supposed to glean from it, I started reading the criticism. I'll spare you all I learned about that book and his intention, as it's not relevant here, but what is is the emphasis on how the Eurocentric world cannot grasp the political gravitas that is given to Latin American poetry and its poets.  For us, as things have changed over time, the role of the poet has evolved from bard and historian to someone able to explain or describe the unexplainable. Language has changed, our roles with the world have changed, and yet, I still hold firm to the belief that we are each effected by our local surroundings. 

What does any of this have to do with San Francisco?

Nancy C. Peters wrote, "San Francisco has always been a breeding ground for bohemian countercultures; its cosmopolitan population, its tolerance of eccentricity, its provincialism and distance from the centers of national culture and political power have long made it an ideal place for nonconformist writers, artists, and utopian dreamers."

I started researching the massive literary history here and some of the individual authors who have called SF home. 

In 1844, Henri Murger wrote Scenes de la Vie Boheme, which "depicted life in the Latin Quarter in Paris, where artists had been renouncing their bourgeois origins since the Revolution of 1830 for love and a more egalitarian society." By 1860, the book had reached San Francisco, inspiring a whole group of creatives. 

According to the OldSF website, "In those days San Francisco was a rapacious society that offered boundless opportunities for the savage exploitation of man and nature." 

San Francisco's earliest literary scene was both democratic and anarchic, "... so that a vaguely Apollonian standard of order and proportion co-existed anachronistically with violent and macabre stories and homespun accounts of daily life."

During the 1880s and 1890s, the artistic hub of the city was Pacific, Washington, Jackson and Montgomery Streets.  Until 1959, when the financial sector pushed them out, this was home to many artists and writers, including Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, George Sterling, Jack London, Sadakichi Hartman, Frank Norris, Yone Noguchi, Margaret Anderson, Kenneth Roxworth, and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, temporarily. 

In 1870, a group of men began spending Sundays together in the living room of James Bowman in Russian Hill. They would spend all day drinking and ranting. "...the tablecloth becoming covered with the inspired doodlings of its guests. According to popular account, the hostess frequently refused to wash the table linens, preserving them as a kind of impromptu guest-book of her Salon."

By 1872, the club had become so popular that they moved locations and started charging fees for the exclusive membership. 

Rudyard Kipling, during a visit, described the scene, "... in this club were no amateurs spoiling canvas because they fancied they could handle oils without knowledge of shadows or anatomy... no gentlemen of leisure ruining the temper of publications or an already ruined market with attempts to write... My hosts were working, or had worked, for their daily bread with pen and paint."

These men started staging "Jinks", events based on the Scottish drinking game of wits. These events were little, one-time theatrics, which gave Kipling "a wicked desire to hide my face in a napkin and grin."

In 1878, the club had gained such popularity, that they decided to start a retreat in Russian River (the first Burning Man?). Intended to level the economic playing field of the Haves and Have Nots, the exact opposite occurred. The place had extensive No Trespassing signs everywhere, it's own railroad extension, and by 1890, had attracted so many wealthy businessmen and politicians, as to include William Randolph Hearst, Herbert Hoover, Ernest Lawrence and later Richard Nixon.

According to Jim Fisher, author of "Bohemian Club", "...it was this co-opting of San Francisco's creative energies that perpetuated the Bohemian club's reputation for culture... The Bohemian jinks represent an endorsement of the properties man's deep convictions about the arts: we could do it, if we wanted to."

Clearly, San Francisco has a love for it's history and its contributors, a fact reiterated by the renaming of streets to commemorate them. We have Bob Kaufman Alley, Daniel Burnham Court, Dashiell Hammet Street, Isadora Duncan Lane, and William Saroyan Place just to name a few. We cannot forget the Beat Movement or the Summer of Love (as much as we'd like), but are we as familiar with the the huge impact the 1970s had on our literature?

"In San Francisco, propelled by the promotional and organzing energies of Roberto Vargas, there began a whole series of readings by Third world writers of Latin, Asian and black origins."

By now, Bolinas, Berkeley and Santa Cruz had become havens for these writers, and readings in the city were so popular, that you could attend three in a night. 

One reading, a benefit for the United Farm Workers, held at the Longshoreman Hall and sponsored by City Lights, included Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Whalen, Ferlinghetti, Thulani Davis, Jessica Hagedorn, Janice Mikihatini, Serafin Syquia, and Roberto Vargas. They had 2000 in attendance.

What was being drawn to attention with the inclusion of the "Third World voice" was the Takers and the Takees, something they felt was prevalent in the Beat literature.

Are we sensing the age-old theme of our fair city?

Yesterday, on an adventure through North Beach and Russian Hill with Miss Isabelle, we learned something shocking.

At Grace Cathedral (I don't know why I always manage to wind up there or reference that place - I really am not obsessed with it, I swear), we were looking at the gold doors. I was pointing our my favorite part of the sculptures, this one dude's bald head, when the custodian came over, offering to explain the biblical stories. I told him we weren't interested in that, but asked about the little head.

Turns out that was a self-portrait of the artist Ghiberti. 

I had remembered that these doors were connected to the famous ones in Florence, but the real connection left me mind-blown.

In case you don't know, here's a brief lesson in art history:

In 1401, there was an art competition to determine who was going to craft the doors, and a 23 year old Lorenzo Ghiberti won, marking the beginning of the Early Renaissance. Obviously, when in Florence, I made a bee-line for them for, as we Americans are sad to experience, seldom do we get to marvel at the first of an era, see the direct line, know from history that this is what started the next several hundred years worth of excessive and exceptional art making.

The doors have stood proudly since, well, that is until Hitler, at the tail end of WWII demanded the doors for himself. Before the Florentines shipped them north, they had molds made. How they ended up in San Francisco, our custodian did not know. Obviously, the war ended and the doors were returned, only to be threatened again in their massive flood of 1966, in which they were washed into the Arno.

Thankfully, the city was able to recover the pieces, but decided it was time to put them behind safe doors. Having heard that San Francisco had made their own copy of it (which is what stands in front of Grace Cathedral), the Florentines asked them if they could have it. "Oh hell no," is what I imagine the priest saying, but what he did do was to lend them the molds back.  

What people from around the world flock to see is a replica of a replica, made from San Francisco molds.

As we wandered, I noticed that some of my favorite old antique stores had closed, being replaced by shitty stores that sell flavored popcorn. That the cute restaurant on the corner, that looks out over Washington Square is demolished. I still find myself holding my breathe, waiting for the last shoe to drop.

In this amazing article, which I'll talk more about later, called "A History of San Francisco in 26 stories" on the PacBell building at 140 New Montgomery (in the area of the old Bohemian scene), the author was citing Tim O'Reilly and his book on Frank Herbert (author of "Dune" and former SF resident). 

"It is a general principle of ecology than an ecosystem is stable not because it is secure and protected, but because it contains such diversity that some of its many types of organisms are bound to survive despite drastic changes in the environment or other adverse conditions. Herbert adds, however, that the effort of civilization to create and maintain security for its individual members 'necessarily creates the condition of crisis because it fails to deal with change.'"

I'll end on a comedic note.

True to San Francisco's character, new blood makes us nervous.

In 1882, Oscar Wilde came for a visit. His arch nemesis, Ambrose Bierce, wrote a scathing commentary. 

"There was never an imposter so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. Therefore is the she-fool enamored of the feel of his tongue in her ear to tickle her understanding."

As long as people are going to create, there is going to be in-house tension. As long as those creatives are producing mind-blowing things, there will be others ready to take it away. But as long as we maintain our history, none of this will ever be forgotten.