you are all a lost generation

...or so said Gertrude Stein.

Finding Beauty, by Lance Linder

Do not go in there, do not enter, do not venture.

For venturers have been known never to return.

Who knows what they found,

If they found anything.

If they found beauty, would they tell it?

Would they remember the radiance

When the light broke the fern, splitting the fronds

Into tendrilled rays of green becoming white.

White becoming a sear on the innermost wound.

A wound that had lost love blood much too long.

A long that stretched so far.

So far that the tail became the leading wave

Of a returning tide of light.

With a sketchbook full of chandelier drawings, a mind full of Hemingway and a bag full of champagne flutes, I boarded the plane to take me home. It was a surprise visit for my great friend Christopher's 40th birthday, as well as a celebration of his engagement. A tad nervous to be expanding my social comfort level, not to mention trying to remember what it was like living in a cold, wet climate, I decided to tuck away the fears and to let myself be as open and absorbent as a sponge.

But here I am, getting ahead of myself again. 

If you've had a conversation with me over the past few weeks, you will know that I have found myself completely obsessed with the time of roughly 1880-1930, and how the cultural and artistic responses to such a rapidly changing world seem applicable today. If you've ever had a conversation with me, you will also know that I'm constantly looking for that thread that keeps us all connected, a thread that goes beyond time and place, the human connection.

A little back story. Before 1900, there was the general feeling that the world was ending. Too much was changing too quickly, and instead of fearing the end, these people decided to go out with a bang, or rather in a massive explosion of sparkling lights and peacock feathers. There was a massive pursuit of beauty, of art for art's sake.

According to Wikipedia, the fin de siecle (French concept of the end of the century) was a term used to describe "the closing and onset of an era, as the end of the 19th century was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning. The 'spirit' of fin de siecle often refers to the cultural hallmarks that were recognized as prominent in the 1880s and 1890s, including 'ennui', 'cynicism', 'pessimism', and '...a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence.'"

For me, these sensations are starting to feel redundant. With the massive growing in San Francisco, the old Victorians are being torn down for these quick, cheap and hideous apartment towers. Beautiful places are vanishing and being replaced by homogenized garbage, and the locals are furious. Well, let's get out of our own poopy-pants and look at the bigger picture. This is happening everywhere. As we all talk, culture as we know it, is dying, or, as I am desperate to maintain, changing.  

During the Aesthetic Movement of the same era, Walter Pater stated, "While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or the work of the artist's hands, in the face of one's friend."

But hear me out. I am Whitney Sanford. I was raised in the waste not, want not mentality. Decadence was, at best, unnecessary, and at worse (I'm hearing Papaw's voice right now) disgraceful. And then I lived with the punks, forever, who frowned and shouted at excessive loveliness, at the bourgeois backbone of aesthetics. Then it was art school, and the whole debate that beauty is no longer relevant, that we live in a truly ugly world, that even making an actual object of art was counter-productive and antiquated.

Well, you know what? I'm sick of all of that. Livid, in fact. How have I allowed myself to be subjected to this self-efacing, hope-annihilating view for thirty five years?

"Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything because it expresses nothing. When it shows itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world." -Oscar Wilde

In the Sun Also Rises (Hemingway wasn't a part of the Aesthetic Movement but of the Lost Generation of 1920, another generation I'm equally fascinated by at the moment), he wrote, "I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had."

In the Lost Generation (are you catching onto my theme yet?) the term 'lost' doesn't refer to missing, or vanished, but disoriented, wandering and directionless, "a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the war's survivors in the early post-war years."

Full to the point of overflowing, I followed her headlight carefully down moss covered stairs in the rain, to a cabin without power. Our first night was to be just the three of us. We quickly opened champagne, changed our shoes for cabin slippers, and set a fire.

In my innermost dreams, I hope to find myself living in a pretty land. It is never decadent, by our standards, but decadent in its own right. I'm not sure when the moment happened, but early on I was bit by the modernist bug. I wanted to live the life of Henry Miller (perhaps a bit less perverted), of Fitzgerald. I wanted to linger for hours in the cafe, engaging with the continuously changing tide of visitors. I wanted to be dragged to strange parties in unfamiliar houses with eccentric weirdos nonchalantly blabbing some life-changing truth over a big glass of something. I wanted the halo of smoke, the bare bulb, the lone kitchen table, impossible to access because of the plethora of chairs and the never silent mass of bodies.

When I was leaving Portland, I decided to kind of slip out. I told just a few people about my secret last night. Somehow, though I had managed to have all those aforementioned experiences during my time there, I didn't have this one evening.  I'm not sure how it got the name "Russian drinking circle", as that wasn't the point at all. In my vision, I wanted the table, the bulb, the record player scratching in the background. I hoped some lucky couple would be making out on the crappy sofa covered in a rugged blanket, another couple fighting, someone rushing in long enough to borrow money and disappear again, someone else to crash the party, the unwanted visitor. 

I got all that and more. In fact, the part about it being a "Russian Drinking Circle" confused all those invited. Some came dressed as Russian peasants from the 1700s. My sister wore an evening gown. We drank tequila.

In San Francisco, my friends here are perhaps a bit too busy to play these silly games with me. The Attic was a close alternative, though with a punk spin. I'm also reluctantly coming to terms with that most of my fellow San Franciscans simply can't live the life of leisure like me, resulting in fewer and fewer hours available to read, to argue ideas, to conceptualize. Having resigned myself to spending this other part of my life alone, I was shocked to find the opposite true.

In this cabin by the ZigZag river, I was given one of the two presents I've always wanted, this experience. We were a party of chefs, writers, artists, artist models, and musicians. There was a never ending supply of incredible food and fancy drink, conversation. There was the dance party in the corner, Miles Davis on the stereo, the rain never ceasing. The sound of the river was louder than the traffic on 26th street, without the sirens. And our first night, without power, could easily have been a picture from a century ago.

While contemplating this, the next morning, another thought came to me. Somehow, for me, beauty and love are linked, and perhaps because I've felt pressured to reject beauty, I've been unable to find love. That maybe in me finally letting myself off the hook to produce bigger, think bigger, think newer, I'd find that thread that kept us together. 

When Cerissa woke up, I was telling her all this. The reason the cabin is in their family is because her father is a poet and this is his writer's retreat. In one bookcase, there were ten books, all hand bound, making up a series of work, and next to that was a very small booklet called, Finding Beauty. She said that this was his work relating to exactly what I was feeling. 

Lance LInder,

Wander if you must.

Move in layers if that be your memory.

Come between the seeker and the shore.

Be the cloak that gives the answer its shadow.

Be the beauty of a blanket

On the rune scratched stones.

But the story went further. This cabin was also the location of Hannah and Kai's wedding a year or so prior. Their father had made of the land a love-paradise. A small rock path led you to the river to a cairn (those rock piles you see at the ocean). In fact, there were multiple cairn's and according to the wedding book their father made, each referred to a different kind of love. The heaven cairn, "is built as high as possible. The higher it gets, the more unstable it becomes. It illustrates the futility of seeking heaven by going ever higher."

The path leads you to the wedding hut, a little cave made of twigs and moss where each person is to sit separate and think of the love they have to offer and the love they'd like to take. 

The river rushed and swallowed. The snow fell lightly and the fire raged. 

I have been incapable of love because I have been lying to my own heart. 

In the Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England, Brock Clarke wrote, "I had this unoriginal thought as I walked out the door and toward my van: love changes us, makes us into people whom others then want to love. That's why, to those of us without it, love is the voice asking, what else? what else?  And to those of us who have had love and lost it or thrown it away, then love is the voice that leads us back to love, to see if it might still be ours or if we've lost it for good. For those of us who've lost it, love is also the thing that makes us speak in aphorisms about love, which is why we try to get love back, so we can stop speaking that way. Aphoristically, that is." 

Winter has arrived, and it's time to clean out the cobwebs, to replace the sundresses with sweaters. I'm packing up the cynicism, the superficiality, the nonsensical gaiety for everything more. I'll be the conductor of my own brass band, meant to follow me everywhere. I will lay flowers and ribbons and feathers on the altar of everything worth remembering. I will feed it coconut and dark chocolate. 

Charles Algernon Swinburne:

Behind the veil, forbidden.

Shut up from sight,

Love, is there sorrow hidden,

Is there delight?

I cannot see what pleasures

or what pains were;

What pale new loves and treasures

New years will bear;

What beam will fall, what shower

What grief or joy or dower;

But one thing knows the flower, the flower is fair.

Consider this a call to arms, for all things good. As the world, like sand, keeps falling between our fingers, ungraspable, perhaps we need to learn to hold our hands flat, open, palms up. Maybe something will stick.

"After a fashion, it is no doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end of a great period, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin decadence, an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtlising refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity" Arthur Symons.

As Hemingway continued, "Perhaps that wasn't true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from what it was all about."

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