Category: City by the Bay

Earlier this week, the good people at Beach Blanket Babylon asked a bunch of Bay Area bloggers to come see the show as their guests. BBB publicist Charly Zukow had read about my exploits for the San Francisco International Film Festival and asked me if I might coordinate a similar effort for Beach Blanket. I agreed.

BBB is the longest running musicial revue in the world. Begun one early summer as a variety show in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, it was supposed to run six weeks. That was 32 years ago. Beach Blanket has filled Club Fugazi on Green Street (renamed Beach Blanket Babylon Blvd.) Wednesday through Sunday since 1974.

What is it? Basically a giant stew of old rock n’ roll songs, pop culture references, bad puns, playground innuendo and giant hats. Asking if it’s “good” misses the point. Corny, exaggerated,and loveable, Beach Blanket is simply too content being what it is to criticize. Or dislike. Rationally thinking it through is like trying to explain the appeal of the wind. It’s no longer in question. It’s a force of nature.

BBB is produced by Jo Schuman Silver, the handpicked successor to creator Steve Silver, who died in 1995. Ms. Silver greeted us bloggers with her staff and crew, many of whom have been with the show 20 years or more. Her cast, after a long day of rehearsal and performance answered our questions, posed for pictures and welcomed this little invasion of citizen media (“The bloggers are coming!”) with warmth and kindness.

Ms Silver: Oy, what an angel. Charly had said to me that there are few San Franciscans as nice as Jo which is where my nasty old skepticism creeped in. The women has success the size of an ocean, knows everyone in town and has her work given standing ovations 5 nights a week. How could it not go to her head?

It hasn’t. Jo Schuman Silver is as sweet, as generous and as real as they come. She welcomed us all like family into her living room, eager to learn what we were all about, delighted to talk about the show, its history and how creator Steve Silver still inspires them all.

I drove home that night, through the quiet streets of my adopted home. Steve Silver had found a little spot here for the uncomplicated pursuit of zaniness and making people happy. Friends and loved ones carried on his vision both with respect and an eagerness to always stay current and learn. Us bloggers are part of a later era in this city’s history, one of risk and self-expression fueled by technology and change. Perhaps before tonight I had thought we were part of two different San Franciscans, the freak-filled 60s and the microchipped 90s and onward. Being welcomed into the home of Beach Blanket Babylon made me feel like we were same city, where hard and fun were not mutually exclusive, where joy and silliness were taken seriously and where the williness to learn and grow from one other, instead of blindly defend our own version this “home on the hill” make San Francisco great.

Herb Caen once said “San Francisco isn’t like it used to be and it never was.” How right he was. This city, like myth, spreads, evolves, dies and is reborn. Its wonder is that even the constants–the bridges, the cable cars and yes, Beach Blanket Bablyon–both endure and live with us everyday. Under the eaves of their long history, there is room for each of us, room to be part of that history instead of swallowed by it.

I feel like I made a friend in Ms. Silver and her show tonight. I hope to see them all very soon. And though it may seem hoary to say, I thank Beach Blanket Babylon for reminding me, in the words of Tony Bennett why I live here.

“My love waits there in San Francisco
Above the blue and windy sea
When I come home to you, San Francisco
Your golden sun will shine for me”

Six years ago today, on a brisk, bright day in Austin, TX, I bordered a plane bound for California. The next day, my youngest brother Daniel arrived and met me at the corner of Taylor and Lombard Streets in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. My possessions arrived later that afternoon. We waited for then at the café across the street, eating paninis and drumming our fingers. That evening, we took a break from lifting boxes to take a bike ride down to Crissy Field, where we stopped and ran, fully clothed, in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay. “Kevin, you live here now,” my brother said.

Six years. Longer than I’ve lived anywhere since leaving home at 18. In that time over half of my initial friends have moved away. I’ve changed jobs 4 times and apartments once. I’ve lost favorite places and gained a cat. I’ve had frustration, pain, loneliness, and terrible loss. One day the earth will rumble something terrible here and make me wonder the deepest kind of why. Why am I still here?

And yet I will stay.

I will stay because I have collapsed to my knees and thanked God for the overwhelming natural beauty of this place. I will stay because few places I have been value literature, art, culture and human creative achievement the way this place does. I will stay because I believe there are few cities in the world where the citizens are constantly working towards utopia, knowing it is impossible and yet trying anyway. I will stay because despite the soaring prices, the cramped quarters, the self-importance and the foolish rejection of the future, San Francisco feels like where I belong. It feels like home.

I’m not going to say I’ll be here forever because, if the last few months have shown me anything, I know now that the only constant is change. One day I may awaken and find that my long term relationship with San Francisco has done all it can and that we’ve grown apart. Then I will go.

For now though, I look at the past six years as the best of my life. The people who’ve contributed to that know who they are. The city, well, I hope she knows. I hope she knows, that despite how on somedays I want to rage and kick and scream at her narrow, pigheaded ways, that on most others, when I turn off the lights, feed Faygo and climb into bed, I thank her for bringing me here, for taking care of me and helping me to grow.

So happy anniversary San Francisco, from a blessed adopted son. Us Jews don’t believe in heaven but I sure like what one of this city’s wisest men had to say about it.

“If I go to heaven, I’ll probably do what every San Franciscan does. I’ll look around and say, “‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco..”

—Herb Caen.

1. Used my Saturday morning writing group to start the proposal for my second book.

2. Went to my martial arts training class at Crissy Field and broke a board with my bare hand.

3. Stopped in on my friends Ted and Molly.

4. Browsed at Christopher’s Books, read a magazine at Farley’s and had dinner at Goat Hill Pizza.

5. Saw Akeelah and the Bee, one of the best movies of the year, and left the theatre feeling on top of the world.

6. Slept like a baby.

you’re called an “arrogant asshole” by a panhandler who then quotes a Bible verse.

And a very good morning to you too.

would a headline great you on a Saturday morning asking “Is this the Greenest House in SF?”

I moved into my house. In honor of that, I’m going to spend the whole day cleaning it.

Today is the 100th anniversay of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, still one of the worst natural disasters in United States History. This fire hydrant was one of the few that survived the quake. It’s water put out raging fires throught the Mission District. Every year on April 18th, it gets a fresh coat of gold paint.

Media coverage rains ubiquitous so take your pick.

Since I moved here almost 6 years ago, I’ve been asking myself “Am I ready?” and, really the answer is no. Which is why in the coming weeks, I’m going to spend some time, and money, on these.

I just make a point of checking the Laughing Squid blog each day because my buddy Scott knows everything interesting happening in San Francisco. This Saturday, tax day is not only Lap POP! (hosted my my friend Min Jung) but another showing of the Life Sized Mousetrap and something called Bunny Jamb I’ve never heard of. How to decide?

When I tell people I live in San Francisco, they’ll usually follow up with “Lucky you. That’s one of the world’s most beautiful cities.” I agree. But that’s easier to notice on a weekend nature hike then a Wednesday morning trip to the dry cleaner.

This great column in SFGate makes this point in three elegant ways.

1) San Francisco is a city with stunning views and natural features which makes it all too easy to neglect how things look at street level, where we live our lives.

2) San Francisco can’t market itself as a world class city and look like a decaying also-ran. Cities like Copenhagen are leaving us in the dust.

3) Every dime of this city’s budget is an all-or-nothing battle royal for special interests. Or as the article puts it better…

“Why invest in parks when there are homeless people on the streets? Why fix a plaza when the education system is in tatters? Why spend money on “aesthetics” that could go toward social programs? Or health services?”

Here’s why. If a city doesn’t look nice, people don’t move there. Current residents see less of a reason to stay. No people means less tax money, fewer businesses setting up shop, depressed economies which leads to cuts in social programs anyway.

San Francisco has earmarked funds for the improvement of parks of an major boulvards like Valencia St. I’ll be eager to see how these turn out.

Today, April 3, is Herb Caen’s birthday. Herb Caen wrote the column “It’s News to Me” for the San Francisco Chronicle, from the late 1930s (shortly after the building of the Golden Gate Bridge) until 3 weeks before his death in 1997. He moved it to the competition, the San Francisco Examiner, from 1950-1958 and took time off to serve in WWII. Otherwise, he filed 1,000 a day, six days a week for 58 years. The lobby of the Chronicle keeps Caen’s typewriter on display to this day.

Caen’s column were a blend of local gossip and poetic pap about the city he loved. I say “pap” because Caen admitted he starting writing them as inch filler when he ran out of items. Nontheless, in those musings, he popularized the terms “hippie” and “beatnik” and coined the city’s nickname “Baghdad by the Bay.”

My old insurance man Dean once told me than when his father immigrated to San Francisco from Japan, he learned English by checking the newspaper out of the library and reading Herb Caen.

Sometimes I don’t think much of myself as a journalist or as a San Franciscan. At my worst, I practice both sporatically. On good days I think of Herb Caen, his consistency, his drive and his unending love for a city he wasn’t born into but that embraced him, most because he embraced them first.

Shortly before Caen’s eath, The city of San Francisco renamed a stretch of the Embarcader “Herb Caen Way.” During the dedication Caen said this…

“I think when I go to heaven, I’ll do as all San Franciscan’s do when they die. I’ll say ‘Heaven? It ain’t bad. But it’s no San Francisco.”

So true. I hope I meet Mr. Caen someday so I can say thank you. And tell him how our city is doing (via The Writer’s Almanac).