IN EXCELSIS, IN EXTREMIS
San Francisco is almost finished. Soon you won't be
able to make it any more charming, cleaned-up, tree-planted, historically
accurate, re-painted, rebuilt, sculpture and water fountain full. O Hosanna,
sing San Francisco in excelsis!!!!
Perhaps the very best thing about modern San Francisco, for both tourist and Bay Area resident, is to look at it from some place else. There are probably more mind-bogglingly beautiful views of San Francisco than any other great city of the world. You can see it from Alameda, Oakland, Emeryville, and the end of Emeryville's Powell Street, Berkeley, Richmond, Potrero Point, bits of it from the Richmond Bridge, from the Bay Bridge, from the Golden Gate Bridge, from Sausalito, from Tiburon, Belvedere, from the Headlands, from the Bay, from the Ocean, from the air, from the ferry, from Angel Island, Brooks Island, Treasure Island, Alcatraz, from the north, from the south, from the east, from the west, and from the Oakland International Airport, as well as in the fog, in the wind, in the sun, in the rain, the heat and in the bone chilling cold -- all on one day if its a fairly average day in The City. I'm sure you've heard a San Franciscan's favorite comment on the weather: "You don't like the weather? Well, wait five minutes."
The City -- other cities have their nick names, San Francisco's only sobriquet is The City. If you say, "I'm going into the city," No one from the Bay Area, no one who knows the first thing about San Francisco would ever, for one instant, think you meant Oakland, or Berkeley, or San Rafael, or any of the other two dozen, and rather marvelous, cities around the Bay. If you say "the city," in the Bay Area it means The City, and The City means San Francisco.
And, it used to be, and a more strictly enforced unspoken law, that only low life, hicks, illiterates, degenerates, the soft-brained, slobs, know- nothings, outlanders, Martians, New Yorkers, and perhaps Los Angelinos ever called it "Frisco."
Personally, I like "Frisco." It has a frisky sound, and I even think it has a slightly different meaning: To me it refers to San Franciso's pioneer, shoot 'em up, rough house, gaudy, glorious, frontier days. So if you mean that, that aspect that still exists in minute pockets in almost hidden places in the city, I don't mind if you call it Frisco, even though I once lived there and should know better.
None of the other Bay Area cities that I have ever heard of even resents the designation, the distinction, the elitism of such a nick name. For The City is justly famous, it is the queen of all American cities. Ask any foreigner traveling in the U.S.A. which city they like best, want to see most, wouldn't miss if they didn't have to. Almost invariably San Francisco tops the list.
For instance, I never heard of any controversy over the fact that the East Bay was assigned the lower floor of the Bay Bridge, beneath the girders and the ramps and the noise with no view as you go toward Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, and The City was assigned the top floor, where you have a glorious view as you come flying in on that amazing, now permanently outlined-at-night-in-white-lights bridge, Long and graceful, it sweeps you, with incredible views, into the arms of the ultimate in modern, laced with Victorian, urban beauty, glittering in the night or shimmering white in the sun or veiled in the fog, the wedding cake of all cities. Nor have I ever heard any objection to the fact that you are charged coming into The City - - kind of like an admission fee to the Czar's palace, and rather steep if you're commuting via the Golden Gate -- but no fee when you go out to its poor cousins hanging out in less glamorous inlets and outlets of San Francisco Bay, though the Army Corps of Engineer's model of the Bay is housed in Sausalito.
At Christmas time they have taken to outlining the buildings in the city, the entire height of their corners from ground to whatever, 20 floors, 40 floors, 61,floors and their roofs, making them look, from across the bay in Sausalito or approaching on the Bay Bridge, like bejeweled, glittering, star-defined cubes and rectangles of darkness or if the windows are lit, like outlines for suspended square codes of light communicating with others in the night. San Francisco begins to dispute Varanasi in deserving to be called "The City of Light." For not only do they have Edison's invention, all over everywhere, its a well lit city, but here, too, spiritual revolution, efforts toward enlightenment occupy great lumps of the city's esoteric studies and art prone population. And, though they recently instituted a program to make it mandatory for the homeless to levitate at night -- they are forbidden to sleep upon the ground in the parks or on any part of the public earth -- they have not yet began burning bodies on the ghats -- but give them time. San Francisco, the city, is after all less than 250 years old, though some 10,000 Ohlones, they say, hung out between the Peninsula and Monterey for several thousand years, whereas Varanasi is perhaps the oldest city in the world. The Matrix program it is called, and was probably urged on to disembarrass the city, which aside from beauty, suffers great financial and authoritarian distress, from the presence of a "real hell of a homeless campground," as a friend of mine puts it, in the park in front of City Hall.
Nonetheless, I never take my car into San Francisco if I can avoid it because, one, there's no place to park; two, as an ex Los Angelino, I go mad trying to drive on Frisco's narrow, hilly, as potted-holed as New York's, no-left-turn-for-miles streets; and three, they steal things, most especially cars and the contents thereof.
I had my car stolen off California Street. A heart stopping experience, let me tell you. I couldn't stop looking for it along the curb where I had left it the night before, kicking aside leaves and bits of paper, a dirty handkerchief, I kept thinking I might find sitting there still, unviolated, mine, my transportation in the world. They found it in the Potrero, stripped of everything, wheels, tires, brakes, gas tank, etc. Another time I had everything in my car stolen, and there here happen to be a lot. It was in the locked truck, nothing visible in the back or front seat, of my 1974 Riviera in a metered and patrolled garage at Polk and Bush upon the entrance of which my friend and I happened to be looking, from his fourth story window out over his gorgeous window box full of hyacinths and daffodils, fresias, and ranuncules, several years before he died of AIDS. I was waiting to run to put another dime in the meter before the meter maid got there. The thieves were obviously after the car, but somehow -- I guess they saw the dime was running out -- in the middle of the day, they didn't have enough time to do anything more then rip out the ignition switch and open the trunk from a lever in the glove box. The trunk was full of all the last paraphernalia of my executive life in Los Angeles, $300 skirts, costly blouses of silk, sweaters of cashmere, suits from Hermes, my passport, credit cards in one of my extra purses, a borrowed TV, new running shoes, etc. etc.. The only item, the loss of which truly broke my heart, was an unfinished needlepoint that I had been working on in Japan and China. It was designed for one of the few pieces I had intended to keep, a 17th century Chinese domestic chair. The loss of it broke my heart because I make up my designs as I go along, and since it wasn't finished, and no one but me could ever finish it, who knows what they did, would do with a bag of wool and a partly finished canvas of the oddest shape imaginable. Somehow, if it had been finished, mode, done, like all the other stuff, I could have let it go. Let it have its life in the world, bless the thief, as I eventually came to do, for relieving me of all that useless junk of a former life. They took about $10,000 worth of uninsured worldly goods. They left nothing but my financial papers -- thank God! they can't sell those yet for drugs or drink. For that moment in addition to my papers, I had only the sweat suit I stood in, and a black Greta Garbo hat I had bought years before in the market place in Florence.
However, after I stopped shaking from outrage, violation and fear, I came to bless that thief, all except for the missing needlepoint, for he gave me a marvelous send off into my life of voluntary simplicity, and saved me from carrying useless junk from a former life around with me for the next decade. For the few remaining executive clothes I had left, sent beforehand with my sister to Seattle, clung to me like the gown Medea prepared for ______ her husband's new wife, Creon's daughter. In fact it was only recently I released to a rummage sale the last fabulously expensive red silk blouse with huge pirates sleeves, that I hadn't worn in eleven years. The only thing the San Francisco police -- dealing with them was like dealing with their cartoons on TV -- ever retrieved was my passport. It turned up a long time later -- in the Portrero.
Besides being no place to park, and not much good at doing anything about thievery, the police are ruthless and relentless in their pursuit of the poor unfortunate, who after driving around for an hour, decides to take a chance on the cusp of the curve at the end of a block, or even that fortunate who, having found a legit place on a hill, fails to turn his wheels into the curb. They must have a meter maid for every other driver entering San Francisco. I recently met a woman in Marin who wanted to go to a party in The City. She got caught in traffic on the Golden Gate, which you have to live to see if you want to know that there is worse traffic in the world than in Bangkok. She finally got to pay her $3 toll, got caught in the traffic in the city, then drove around for an hour and a half looking for a parking place, gave up the idea of the party, but did live to come to the meeting she had decided to miss, poorer only by gas, toll, and nerves stretched to the hysteria point.
And Bart? the underground, doesn't go to Marin. You can catch a ride on a fairly efficient bus system, except, it won't let you off where you want to get off. It will whisk you to a central terminal where you have to take a bus or MUNI back to where you wanted to get off on the way in. Ah municipal reasoning!
But you can take the ferry from Marin and see the setting of San Francisco among the jeweled coves and islands. Or visit a friend in Pacific Heights and look out to the most incredible setting in the world.
But back to the views. Come across the Golden Gate, it's free to escape to Marin County (through $3 to go back in to The City via the Golden Gate, though admittedly only $1 if you want to make the whole loop and go around the Richmond Bridge, free into Berkeley, and $1 on the Bay Bridge back into The City -- you see they treat it like the Kohinoor diamond, encased in its velvet fog, it costs you just to look at it.), and look at San Francisco from Sausalito's water front, from its hills, from the bike paths, from the walks out south of the city. From this one time logging camp, which now costs more than the city to live in, you can see a hundred views of San Francisco, sometimes in sun, glistening like the wedding cake it is, sometimes in fog. The fog has a hundred forms, sometimes it makes the tall buildings float on the air, sometimes it truncates their tops, sometimes, as the fog blows in through the Golden Gate, you can watch the city disappear block by block behind the rolling, or sometime slithering clouds of the earth. You can see it ethereal from the Headlands. From Oakland you can often see it through the smog, or from Berkeley, sometimes it shines in shafts of light when the East Bay is in gloom.
Some, on the other hand, call San Francisco The Cool Grey City Of
Love. For despite no parking places and the possible loss of all your
worldly goods, there is hardly a more beautiful city in the world. It's all
been cleaned up, gentrified, trees planted, painted, civilized, and the few
bits the outside tinsel hasn't reached are fabulous places within. There are
more people doing more odd and interesting things per square inch inside
then probably any other city in the world. People who make interesting
instruments out of tin cans and bailing wire, people who paint bicycles in
odd shades of mauve, and sew the clothes to go with them, people who
dance all night, drag queens who are more gorgeous than anything created
by Hollywood, and who not only love to party but will invite you, too, if
you happen to meet them.
Once when I was looking for books about peacocks in the Main Library at Civic Center where they even had quite a few, though peacock books are a fairly rare species, but in every one I found, all the pictures had been cut out. It was my opinion the incredible gay peacocks, the same who put on the fantastic parades and have made so much of the city a hidden Xanadu, probably clipped out their brother's pictures, never mind the books being public owned property.
And, like Thailand, San Francisco is famous for its tolerance, nay, even encouragement of all the wonders of human sexuality. In The City you can visit and/or taste of almost any kind of hetero, homo or any other kind of sexuality you might be able to dream up. As for gay life in San Francisco, the friend I mentioned above who sat with me gazing at the entrance to the garage where they were stealing my former life, who looked like a patrician out of the Raj, and who had been a great patron of "the baths" in their hey-day, had a vast and vulgar sense of humor. Not long before he died, he said: "I moved to San Francisco to f--- myself to death, I didn't know I meant it quite so literally."
He lived, as did many San Franciscan's as the price went up and up and up for living in The City, in a tiny, one room apartment that he had fixed up to resemble Kubla Khan's Xanadu, with mirrors and gold, lapis and crystal, velvets and flowers -- always flowers, no matter how poor he was, he always had an immense bouquet of flowers, and an utterly charming way of getting you to take him out to dinner.
In San Francisco there is an endless selection of Museums and galleries, more restaurants than even New York City, and places you can go for concerts, inside and out. If you happened to be around in 1994, you had the unique opportunity to wade through a foot and a half of standing water in a downpour to go into the Palace of Fine Arts on November 5th to hear two of the greatest North Indian classical musicians in the world for a reasonable fee, wet feet and dripping clothes. On drier mornings or nights, you can also walk around among the arches of the Palace's grounds, its lagoon, and its neighbor the Exploritorium. And you have never truly seen the music scene until you have attended one of out of the multi-band bashes sponsored by Peter Gabriel in Golden Gate Park, with 10,000 fanciful humans in attendance and on display, milling about, talking over and around the blare of, admittedly first class, but over amplified music from half a dozen stages.
Speaking of Golden Gate Park, one of the greatest city parks in the world, even years of exploration, ambling, walking, picnicing, bird watch, flower seeking, shady afternoons and foggy mornings, have not exhausted its treasures for me. There are also many vast outcropping of rocks secreted all over the city, buried behind foliage and brick work, many designated city parks, there are sheer rock cliffs high and rugged enough to delight the heart of a climber.
When I lived in The City many years ago, it was my odd fate to live with Allen Ginsberg at 1010 Montgomery in North Beach just before the publication of Howl, which incited the trial which started the Beat Generation, which culimated in the hippies, flower children, drug scene in the Haight Ashbury, which can now be afforded only by the yuppies. Allen, at that time, was just a nice Jewish boy who didn't like to work and had a lot of odd friends. Peter Dupuru, for instance, who visited often and had a washing fetish. He washed everything, from tea bags, to my towel, with potatoes, vaseline jars, pan lids You might find most anything in the tub when you came up to take a bath. He also like to cook eggs in the middle of the gas ring, I mean a real gas, ring, not like on modern stoves. Of course most fell through, bursting and filling all of 1010 with a sulphurous smell.
Allen showed me a sheaf of poems and recited some on the way, God knows where, to the Dented Can Market one day. We didn't often go anywhere together, we just happened to rent rooms in the same house. I had the only phone in the house so he and his friends used to come down and call unemployment while lying on my bed smoking a bit of weed from time to time while I, in my pink and white candy stripped Florence Nightingale house coat that my grandmother had made for me, ironed. (I still ironed in those days.) Marijuana. I knew nothing about marijuana then except that Robert Mitchum had been arrested for smoking it. But O, it was such a small, obscure, $20 room, way down in back, near the school yard, who would ever look in here to find illegality. I was so sweet, so new to the world at 21, so innocent, and I kept on ironing as they talked, when not on the phone, telling me stories I've forgotten, because I probably didn't believe them even then. But one day a friend loaned Allen a car. He didn't have a driver's license, and I didn't know how to drive a shift car, but he did. So he told me how to shift and we negotiated our way across town to the Dented Can Market, doing fine -- there weren't so many no left turn signs then, and we had simply coasted down off the Montgomery hill -- until I knocked a parking meter askew trying to park. The police weren't so much in evidence then, so I still owe the city of San Francisco the straightening of one '50s parking meter.
Or you can take the ferry out of San Francisco, cheapest excursion you can take, just get on at one end, and off and back on at the other, a two hour excursion. If you're into speeches about what you're seeing, just ask any of your ferry companions. People around San Francisco can enlighten you for a full two hours on almost any subject or all of them: places to eat, places to visit, places to see the cultures of all nations, tribes, sexes, nationalities -- they love to talk, and they have strong opinions about politics and religion.
When you've stopped gazing at the pearl of all cities from across the water, you can turn your eyes to the earth whereon you stand. As San Francisco is the queen of all cities, Marin County is Goddess of all counties, justly famed for her beauty and her price. A Marin County dentist told me, with some show of pride, that yes, they were the most expensive in the world. (I went to Sacramento to get the tooth filled.) Marin shares a nasty climate with San Francisco, that is if you hate rain and never knowing what to wear for the next ten minutes, if you hate cold nights, like I do, and long for the balminess of the warm winds of the desert. But having paid your dues with fog and furious storms, you get some of the lushest temperate landscape available anywhere in the urbanized world, some of the most beautiful bay shore ever conceived by God in his green and marshland creating days. Egrets by the dozen, white and long-legged, tiptoeing or flying out over the salt marshes, which, once discovered, became one of my favorite places to walk. Birds singing, no humans, walking in the spring through wild flowers, shoulder high. Take the Lucky Drive exit and find your way to the end of a road on the Bay side (there are several) where you'll find paths that look like they lead to San Quentin, but they actually lead among the birds, and the wild grasses, pampas grass like in the Argentine, varicolored salt marsh plants that change with the seasons.
You might ask, Why is it always referred to as Marin County, instead of by the names of the particular cities. Well, because there are actually dozens of tiny towns, many of them stops on the old interurbans, too many towns, to small for anyone to identify with, besides, it acts like one big community, a bit like, Marin County may protest, but a bit like the city of Los Angeles with all her satellite towns only separated by forests and water inlets.
San Francisco is or will soon be like Venice, a "finished" city. So intricately and beautifully wrought in each corner that people will go there to visit it for its architecture, as a work of art, forgetting that other people still live there, that it is a living city and not a monument. I remember visiting a friend of a friend once upon a time in Venice, and highly insulting her because I went on and on about the history, the glory, the work of artishness of Venice, and she was adamant that it was a "living" city, that I was missing the point by only seeing the old architecture and the rennaisance beauty. But pointless though it might be, that is my impression of not only Venice but great parts of San Francisco, so exquisitely beautiful, finished, with flowers and shrubs and trees, and cornices and dadoes, architaves, and columns etc. etc. etc., that there is in many neighborhoods already no room for scruff. Scruff.
I happen to like the scruff of the natural unfinished world, but it's not too easy to come by in Venice, Italy or San Francisco, CA. And one day, if we keep going like we are now, it will be impossible. I mean, after all, how indecent to want to stroll among the weeds, or sleep, or eat, or pee, in a work of art. Stand back and gawk, look, admire, but don't touch. Already it is like that. It will get more so. For only the affluent can afford to park and pay the parking tickets, pay the bridge tolls, pay the rents.
I've never been to Singapore, the cleanest city in the world, they say, but I can well imagine the next law they might institute in San Francisco is to forbid gum chewing, at least around such places as Pacific Heights, Union Street/ Cow Hollow, Russian Hill, Nob Hill, the Marina, Fisherman's Wharf, the Embarcadaro development, Telegraph Hill, North Beach/the old Italian settlement, what used to be called the International strip? Settlement?, Financial District, China Town, Union Square downtown area, Civic Center area, Japan Town, Western Addition, South of Market, Potrero, Mission, Bernal Heights, Fillmore, the Castro, Noe Valley, Twin Peaks, Sunset, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Richmond, Sutro Heights, Sea Cliff, the Presidio, etc. some of the Mission, South San Francisco, Hunter's Point, and bits of the Potrero would still probably be exempted from a gum chewing law.
In various corners there is still some grunge and some grime, but there's almost no scruff, no scruff even in the Presidio which is so exquisitely gardened and treed, that even the gardeners of Babylon would be envious. The whole town is a boutiquerrie, odd and interesting, New Age and old age curiosities in every corner you might care to peer into. San Francisco is heightened, like a dream, everything is a little more-so, more intense, more as if manifested by the illuminates than by nature or the mundane laws of the universe that hold true for other cities.
Where else in the world would anyone want to build a pyramid, sixty-one stories tall. It's like really wanting a child with a head that comes to a point. The earth has almost all been built over, done to, the plants coerced and made to grow here and not there, San Francisco is a pile of masonery now, and trained, domesticated flora. Most of the fauna, no doubt, has crossed the Golden Gate, late at night, escaping into Marin County, the fish probably have an internet that warns them away from Fisherman's Wharf. The squirrels undoubtedly take off their grey suits and go coffee barring in the late night hours to drink cappuchino, and discuss the cultural disintergration of the nut culture on this once glorious peninsula of nature, not an inspired block of masonery, as intricate and extravagant and seemingly temporary as a wedding cake.
San Francisco has sold itself out for beauty. The price for beauty may be too high. San Francisco in extremis. O Hosanna, sing San Francisco in excelsis, in extremis!!!!
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
Other travel stories by Jan Haag include HOW I FELL IN LOVE WITH INDIA, TERROR, ZEN WALKING, SPAIN, and MISSION WALK which was first published in Travelers' Tales, A Woman's World
Jan Haag is a writer, poet, painter, textile artist, and former Director of National Production Programs for the American Film Institute.
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