Category: City by the Bay

Had a memorable Pride Weekend which, even though I’m straight, I find reason to celebrate the great things San Francisco has accomplished. Gay rights is something we can all be proud of.

My friend Lucia invited a bunch of us to come watch The Parade (which included Dykes on Bikes, The Mayor, Gay Cheerleaders and Straights for Gay Rights) and hear music from my new favorite band Simon Stinger and my friend Tim’m’s band, Deep Dickollective. Chaka Khan was the headliner but by then we were sunbaked and tired and all headed home.

That night, Suzan and I went round and around about what movie we wanted to watch (after suffering through 15 overwraught minutes of Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy and turning it off) and finally settled on And The Band Played On which we had Tivoed. Although it will never have the same place in my heart that the book has, the last 10 minutes, a montage of AIDS related news and casualties set to Elton John’s “The Last Song.” Suzan and I both sobbed, over all that had died, over all the ghosts that now walk the streets of our city, over innocence lost and painful lessons learned. It reminded both of us that, despite how far we’ve come, as a city, as a nation, there is much work left, much heavy lifting, repeated reasoning and shoe leather to get us all to believe that the lives of each of us, no matter whom we choose to love, are equal and deserving of our respect.

I don’t know where I found it but I dig this essay Michael Chabon wrote about his adopted home of Berkeley. It’s almost like a a biography (or an obituary, gasp!) of a city which I think is a fine idea. I might do one about Ann Arbor someday.

So I only managed to do one of the activities I had in my sights this weekend and took in Nextfest with my buddy Bradley. 6 huge pavilions were packed rather snuggly into Fort Mason where I usually go to buy used books or the occassional piece of craft. Each exhibit section made a bold pronouncement: The Future of Design, The Future of Transportation, The Future of Health. After an hour of being wowed, Bradley and I came to the same conclusion…

The future is not for people like us.

Oh sure, we gawked at what NASA has in mind for the inexpensive robot explorer and were appropriately reverent at advances being made in heart transplants. But ya know what really got us?

Dodgeball.

On a far wall of the hall, some company had set up a wall which two teams stand on either side of. A projector allows you to see the other team on your side of the wall with a series of digitized glass panels over them. The object is to throw or kick a ball at those glass panels and “break” through to the other side. Whoever shatters more panels wins. It’s dodgeball where the target is pixels instead of flesh and bone.

What a wonderous place the future will be.

Three of my favorite things in the whole wide world are hiphop culture, documentary film and promulgating about the future. It stands to reason then that Nexthetics, The San Francisco Documentary Film Festival and NextFest are all this weekend and, last I looked, I can only be in one place at a time.

We should all have such problems.

With Senor Benton in town, Jane’s BBQ this evening, the San Francisco International Film Festival in full swing, a Virtual Book Tour starting on Monday (shhh!), my piece for The Believer due at the end of the month and me leaving for New York a week for Monday, I think it’s time to start hiring a personal staff of Umpa Loompas to keep track of my wheelings and dealings.

Suzan thinks its easy if I make lists and use a calendar. I prefer to crawl under the bed and weep. Or run headfirst into a bank vault door.

“San Francisco itself is art. Above all, literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.”

“If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.”

—William Saroyan

Peterme offers up a neat photographic study of why colleges landscape and lay their campuses the way they do. Anybody who remembers being on their own campus and walking circuitiously (sp?) over barriers, around hedges, and through breezeways that some trustee 100 years ago thought were pretty will relate.

I’ve heard from people who’ve lived here longer than I that the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco used to be a dump. My office is seven of eight blocks from there and half a world away, next to a questionable greek lunchery and across the street from a methadone clinic.

What do I mean? A recent walking trip to the neighborhood confirms that Hayes Valley is like a crash course in urban with-it-ness. Some examples…

Urban Knitting Studio: Located below a former porn studio, UKS sees itself as half-knitting store, half-singles bar, where you can sit, knit, and hopefully meet someone. This is a bright idea because, even though knitting has been bleeding edge hip for a few years now, it hasn’t quite spread enough to include men.

Fritz Fries: I’ve been to a Belgian fry joint in New York whose name I’ve forgotton. It looked like a soccer hooligan’s pub, low lighting, dark woods, and the faint smell of grease. Take that same cuisine and make the decor Japanese school girl and you’ve got Fritz, right down to the DJ spinning next to the soda refrigerator and the bathroom with a day-glo toilet seat. Fries were good though.

Gravis: Some footwear company I’ve never heard of is now in the ultra trendy luggage business. I saw a backpack of theirs I liked, available at the fashion-is-pain price of $98.

Phillipe Starck Chair: I sat in this while Suzan poked through the overpriced luggage at the overpriced luggage store. When I asked a clerk where one could get a chair like this, she haughtily informed me that they got it from MOMA but I could get it through Design Within Reach. Thanks.

This is all way over my head. I mean yeah, I have a sense of style but taking it out for a spin just wierds be out. Makes me long for a bowl of cottage cheese and a Neil Diamond album back home.

It was a beautiful day in San Francisco today and Suzan and I decided to take a long drive with no destination in mind. I can’t recommend doing this enough if your curiosity is deep and your afternoon leisurely.

We headed over the Golden Gate Bridge and snaked along the Pacific Coast Highway, stopping in whatever little Marin County town suited our fancy. After respites in Dogtown, Olema, Inverness and a few others, we ended the day in Point Reyes Station an little tourist town that still manages to feel like an artists outpost in the mountains.

When in Point Reyes Station, the staff of Where’s There’s Smoke recommend a visit to Gallery Route One, an arist-run cooperative space doing excellent work in sculpture, painting and installation as well as a stop by Point Reyes Books, a solid neighborhood bookstore with the most comfortable seating area my butt has seen in quite some time.

See, the thing that sucks about new friends is that just as ya start to get to know each other, they leave. I know it’s not personal. It’s just that good-bye always makes me so sad.

I hate to see people leave this place that I’ve grown to love so much and some irrational part of me wants to keep it under glass, the same unsmudged jewel-like city I moved to nearly 3 years ago. But San Francisco, from the outragous cost of living to the frenetic pace of life, to the earth rumbling beneath our feet, is not an easy place to lay down roots. I’m going to try but seeing people I know leave makes me, even for a silly moment, question that decision.

It’s so beautiful here today. I really can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else. And thank God for a while at least, I don’t have to.