Live from Austin!

On the Monday we went to SFMoMA. Much good stuff. There was a really wonderful Rothko painting; normally I’m not as big on Rothko as, er, sara… but this one had a wonderful ethereal translucency to it. Rather like San Francisco fog.

I learned that Roy Lichtenstein actually painted all those little dots by hand. Later in his career he started using pre-made dots, but he still stuck them on by hand, individually. The mind boggles. Suddenly I admire his work a hell of a lot more.

At this point I had started to realize that all the stereotypes about San Francisco are basically false. It isn’t full of overpaid yuppies—or at least, it’s no more full of overpaid yuppies than Boston or Cambridge. It isn’t full of hippies either. It isn’t very gay at all, unless you head down to Castro. It isn’t perpetually summer. It isn’t full of flakes and freaks.

I’m not sure what it is, even now; I just know what it isn’t. If I’d had expectations, I probably would have been very disappointed.

Tuesday we took BART out to Berkeley. It’s about as you’d expect… very like Cambridge, MA in fact. I noticed that the copies of Socialist Worker actually used the ‘S’ word; ‘round here they rename it Revolutionary Worker. I guess “Socialist” has all the marketing power of the “Fried” in KFC.

The temperature in Berkeley was about 6 degrees warmer than SF, and students were arriving and joining frats and going to sports events. We met up with someone I knew from IRC, and had some lunch. In the afternoon we browsed Moe’s Bookstore. I was pleased to see an extensive selection of titles by Philip K. Dick, one of UCB’s most famous dropouts; there were even some I didn’t have. I bought The Simulacra and The Game Players of Titan. After all, you can’t travel to San Francisco and not get any Dick…

Returning to SF, we actually saw the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time, not shrouded completely in fog.

I’m not sure when I first became aware of California. Maybe I saw it on TV. Or maybe on a box of raisins.

No, I think it was the Beach Boys. I was a young boy at a seaside resort in England, and music was playing. It spoke of a far off world, a mystical place where people stood on polished wooden boards and somehow rode on the waves. I’d never seen waves like that on an English beach—or at least, not on a sunny day. Waves like that ought to mean the gale force winds and torrential rain of an English summer.

Ironically, decades later I learned that Brian Wilson was morbidly afraid of the water, and would never go near the ocean.

Clearly this “California” was a strange and marvellous place. People threw plastic discs at each other through the air, and they sort of hovered. I found one in a seaside shop and tried to interest my family in the idea, but they didn’t seem as inspired by it as I was.

At some point in the 70s I must have seen The Streets of San Francisco. All I remember is the way the cars would drive really fast down a hill, hit a crossroads with a thump, and launch slightly into the air.

I don’t think we’ll be trying that.

My young mind gradually came to understand that California was more than one place. In fact, it was three places: San Francisco; Hollywood, where TV and movies came from; and Disneyland.

Years later I got SubLogic Flight Simulator for the Atari ST. The default start location was a runway at Oakland airport. My first and favorite route was to take off, fly across the Bay Bridge and over Alcatraz, and dive for the Golden Gate Bridge. After New York City, it was the most impressive scenery in the game.

The point of all this is that my strongest associations with San Francisco have always been unreal ones. That’s part of why I wanted to confront them with reality.