The Innocent Arrives

What I didn't do on my first trip to San Francisco:
  • I didn't ride on a cable car
  • I didn't eat sourdough
  • Didn't find Grace Slick's house and stand outside with my hat in my hand
  • Didn't go to Alcatraz
  • Didn't go to Carmel to worship at the shrine of Edward Weston
  • Didn't go to the Filmore
  • Didn't make it to John Lee Hooker's blues club

Some of what I DID do in San Francisco

  • Stood on the corner of Haight and Ashbury and felt like a tourist.
  • Had two successful exhibitions
  • Crossed the Golden Gate Bridge
  • Watched the 4th July fireworks
  • Met lots of wonderful people including old email friends
  • Wandered all over San Francisco totally fascinated.
  • Ate smoked turkey sandwiches and drank coke at the Atlas Cafe every day.
  • Saw the Magritte exhibition at SFMOMA twice.
  • Got interviewed by Frank Moore on Love Underground Vision Radio
  • Met and photographed Jen at Lands End Beach
  • Stayed with the very hospitable Gio and his eccentric cat Goliath.
  • Went to People's Park...

 

ABOVE: The author meets the dude who built the Golden Gate Bridge after discovering you can buy Snickers in America (click for the full horror).

 

As I wandered through a surprisingly empty airport, so tired I was almost delirious, I listened to a recording of Mayor Brown extolling the tourist attractions of San Francisco. I subsequently discovered that Mayor Brown was of the Afro-American persuasion when I saw him on TV, publicising the parking crisis by riding a scooter for the cameras. I concluded politicians were much the same regardless of nationality or race.

In time I met up with my host Giovanni Moro and his truck after a potentially nasty incident with customs (I had all my pictures in large cardboard boxes and they wanted to know what I was going to do with them - "If you are going to sell them you'll have to pay duty"... "Of course I won't sell them; this is ART!" I replied).

Eventually they concluded I was an idiot with a funny accent and let me through. Gio was big, noisy, generous and hospitable. He, his house and the area where he lives (the Mission District) were my first big breaks in on arrival. The fog was a bit of a shock though.

I finally fell asleep on Gio's bed while trying to watch television. American television is even worse than I expected. Most of it is crap but what really disturbed me was the almost total lack of real news. The citizens of the most powerful nation on Earth have no idea of what is going on in the outside world. America's media is its worst enemy because while it turns its citizens into mushrooms, it creates a totally false image of the US to the outside world.

Downtown San Francisco seems huge. It is a shock to discover that in major city terms it is comparatively small - about the size of Adelaide in South Australia - but it throbs with life and activity. In fact there is music everywhere on every bicycle or scooter and the cars literally throb from the subwoofers in their boots. Public transport overflows, getting a taxi can be a major feat and there appears to be an acute labour shortage.

There was some evidence of homelessness, people lying on the sidewalk with blankets and shopping trolleys, and while begging is pretty tightly controlled it still caused me some culture shock."Why can't they get a job?" was my unspoken middleclass reaction because these guys rattling the cups under my nose all appeared to be fit young men. In Berkely a guy stopped me in the street and asked me to pay him for a joke. It cost a dollar but it was quite amusing (if a little sexist). Another guy on the waterfront was charging tourists a dollar to photograph him so that, the sign said, he could buy dope.

I saw the cops arrest a guy for smoking dope in the street - from the smell in the vicinity I thought they had a strong case.

But I never felt unsafe as I wandered over the city (except the Tenderloin which I was advised to avoid). Some of the bus drivers can be surly and unhelpful (the Mission St bus is an unique experience) but almost everyone else is friendly and charming - for instance I have an ongoing problem with the currency because without my glasses all US paper money looks the same. In every shop and cafe they patiently handed back the $20 bill and told me only one of those with the two on it was required.

Especially at the Atlas Cafe in the Mission (click above to enlarge). Let's face it the Atlas is so cool it almost hurts - but for me, the stranger in a strange land, it was like home only more friendly, like the Retro Cafe in Hobart where the staff are almost too cool to the take your order, or any one of those snooty cafes in Brunswich St. Melbourne or the most PC vegetarian eateries in, say, Christchurch New Zealand. But the Atlas has live music, racks of ideologically sound magazines and local flyers, and clients' dogs and mountain bikes parked outside.

In other words it made me feel part of an international brotherhood of cafe sitters partaking of an international culture. Like the day I sat there listening to a Bauhaus album I hadn't heard since I sold all my vinyl... while quietly lusting after the waitress with the peculiar handles like antennae sticking out of her head. Very fashionable with middleclass ladies in their early twenties I was told.

Or the day I had the window seat in the sun, reading an article explaining how US art galleries had totally failed to come to terms with Postmodernism, when I noticed a brand new Harley-Davidson glinting in the sun right outside the window. Then I noticed the dropdead gorgeous, six foot blonde lady (who probably has her own chat show) at the table opposite. I watched as she unfolded herself from her chair, eased out the door, mounted the Harley and roared off.

I could live here I thought... easily.

More pictures here

 

Comments and Suggestions

Continue on the unauthorised San Francisco tour:

(1) Home - (2)Sanfrancisco.com - (3) Luver and Me - (4)Visit the Tenderloin
(5) Peoples' Park - (6) Land's End Beach - (7) People's Park Today - (8) The Innocent Arrives
(9) The Mural Culture - (10) My exhibitions in SF - (11) The Battle for San Francisco
(12) Victorian Architecture - (13) Return to Travel Page