San Francisco

I walked though the Tenderloin last night with happy feet, moving quickly.  With my buddy Nicolas at my side.  Crept up a side street to visit an alley at the end of which an ex-girlfriend used to live.  Herb Caen on my brain.  On the Main Street of Geary, passing a bar where I got absolutely shit faced in 2001 drinking beer and Jack Daniels after winning the San Francisco Class III Amateur Soccer League Championship with the Academy of Art Soccer Team.  Oh beer googles and the mistakes we make that end up being mistakes also when we wake up in the outerrichmond.  Oh to the clarity of good decision making.  Asking the question, what is San Francisco?  A geographic area, 49 square miles, north of San Mateo County and South of the Golden Gate Bridge, yes.  But also the idea, what is San Francisco?  Where does it exist in your imagination?  To simplify, what do you think of when you think of San Francisco?  I've been asking this question a lot, not just of San Francisco, other cities too, like Vegas.  Maps, Tenderloin, poverty, the Fairmont, gold.

A friend of mine refers to men who hit on her (and others) as baseball cards.  Although I don't completely understand her usage of this term, I deem it brilliant.  In the last 20 years, the world has been changed by technology.  You look at screens more than you look at the world.  This was not the case in 1215, the year the Magna Carta was signed into law.  Now our identity is understood, in part, by what we post on facebook.  Our identity is, in part, 2 dimensional, it exists on screens.  I like x movie, this communicates something about my identity.  I watch the San Francisco Giants on a tv screen.  I posted a video of me on youtube.  I'm crying because my Italian cousin was killed in a motorcycle accident.  In the youtube video I'm sobbing.  You will consider this, too, in your brain when you think of me, and if someone asked you to describe me, you would consider this video while you explain who I am.  And so, men that hit on my friend are baseball cards, twitter posts, facebook pages, youtube videos, big-screen-legitimate-$300-million-in-the-first-weekend-movies.   The man takes his family to Disneyworld and walks through Disneyworld looking at a the moveable screen of his video camera, watching his son and daughter get into a tiff and then sort if out, laughing, on the screen of his video camera.

But the topic of this posting is San Francisco.  And I want to know what you know.  What do you know about San Francisco?  Where do the black people live?  Is that a different place than the white people?  Do the rich people live in a different place? than the poor people?  What, if anything, is important about San Francisco?  Can you answer these questions by looking at the same computer screen you are looking at now?  Or do you have to walk through the Tenderloin with Nicolas and happy feet, passing an old apartment that once mattered a great deal and a bar where you ended up doing funny things?  Tonight, in the grand tradition of working your shit out through Opera, I leave you with this:

Puccini

I love all of you,
Anthony