SF DAY 8 – be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

Haight, the birthplace of flower power, the hippie movement, peace and love, tie-dye and bell bottoms… At the legendary corner of Haight and Ashbury, a Ben & Jerry’s store… Peace and love and gentrification. 

Nevertheless, a few brave hippies remain. How these guys survived the eighties, I will never know. Music stores, thrift shops, upper-scale skating shops, bookstores, tattoo parlors, pizza places, “Tibetan artifacts” shops, … Most of what’s left of the hippie times are beautiful murals, the pungent smell of weed, rude homeless people yelling at tourists who seem too engrossed in their phones and a dedicated hill full of bongo-playing dumbasses in Golden Gate Park.

Nonetheless, it’s a pretty sweet place to hang out at for an afternoon, if you’re not deadass invested in the hippie movement and don’t really care about witnessing its complete recuperation by corporate America and pathetic few attempts at persisting. Oh yeah, for a sympathetic approach to hippy-ism, please contact 18-yo me, that chick was a hardass flower power believer. I am not.

There are a few curiosities to check out: in the same street, the former houses of the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin, queen of the lost girls. A house Jimi Hendrix stayed at once in the middle of his Purple Haze phase, which is now a very ugly smoke shop. I buy a book on anarchism from a disapproving clerk at the Bound Together Anarchist Book Collective

Just as I was leaving, a tune catches my ear. In front of the music shop, a dude with a guitar is singing. In French.

C’est pas qu’on s’sent différent bien que des fois un peu si, on comprend pas bien les gens, alors on s’exclut de la partie. Un sentiment bizarre que le monde est peuplé de crétins, mais nous c’est pas pareil on dit pas qu’on regarde TF1.

Ghost of Mandooks’ past, are you there? I gave him serious thumbs up and a fiver before I hopped on the N Line back toward Downtown.

SONG CREDITS: Pas Pareil – Tryo

SF DAY 8 – Black cloud

I woke up this morning with a black cloud hanging over my head. How black? I didn’t even bother to put my contacts on today. That’s how black. I am a fiery ball of rage, except tired. I put on an outfit of ripped jeans, a grey tank top, red and black plaid & a maroon hoodie. I call that outfit the Exhausted Hipster, which might be a pleonasm.

I just want to bury myself in my book and not deal with people or myself or the outside for a while.

I work on the blog in the morning. That fucks with both my patience and my expectations. Around 1pm I take the N line (again) with a bunch of skaters to Buena Vista Park. I climb a hill, then another one, then some wooden steps, then some more climbing. At the top of the hill, I sit my out of breath ass on a fallen tree. It’s quiet here, only nature, people who don’t want to be bothered and the sounds of the city around us. I couldn’t do Twin Peaks but this, I’ll do.

Ok, you know why I’m so mad? I can see myself living here so clearly. If I had a job with a salary that could support it, I could so live here. I would come to Buena Vista Park on weekends to read instead of just once for twenty to thirty minutes. I could take Muni to go to work every day. I could meet people at Mission for brunch. I could get involved in local projects to help the people who need help. I could learn to say “Have a good one” like it’s a sentence that totally makes sense. I could be here, indefinitely, instead of being a tourist. Fuck.

A butterfly just landed on my bag, everybody be cool.

SF DAY 7 – It’s all about the gays

“Look how she rocks that hair! ”

“I know, honey! You go, babycakes.”

Okay, this is my favorite place in the universe. It might also be the gayest. Literally.

The Castro is a historic LGBT neighborhood in San Francisco. Everything is rainbow-colored and sex-punned. A nail salon called The Hand Job, a restaurant named The Sausage Factory. Fact: gays love puns. Doing a little research, I am told the Castro is considered the stronghold of the Old Gays, while Mission is home to the young and queer.

The GLBT museum situates the start of San Francisco’s reputation for sexual liberation at the Gold Rush, bringing hundreds of thousand of young men to the city, who didn’t really care what society wanted of them as long as they could satisfy their urges. The tradition of non-conformism continued on the the end of WWII, when non-cooperative (read: gay, communist, generally rebel) soldiers coming back from the war were unceremoniously unloaded on the coast of SF as a punishment. Oh what a punishment indeed to find yourself in a place that will harbor and accept your way of life.

Anyway, the community more or less doubled and flourished, invested itself in activism and social change (see: Harvey Milk, first openly gay man to be elected to public office). When AIDS started to appear, the LGBT community of San Francisco was one of the first to rally around HIV positive people and organize protests against the government’ s failure to react and communicate properly, as well as the profiting pharmaceutical companies. ACT UP/San Francisco became so big at one point that it had to split between different factions with differing but complementary missions.

Anyway: LGBT is big in SF. Who in the world doesn’t know that?

It’s a pleasure and a comfort just taking in the sun-soaked, rainbow-colored streets and the people lurking about. It’s a nice neighborhood, pretty pastel houses and large stoops people sit on to catch up on gossip. I learn that Kaylee fell off her high heels last night. Poor Kaylee. I hang out at Human Rights Campaign Action Center for a while, as the owner tells me about his time in Belgium during the Vietnam war. He’s now happily married and living in the Castro. How many lives are inside one man?

This is pretty cool, but where are my queers at? I take the M line to 18th St. I don’t let myself be distracted: I’ll definitely come back here to check out Dolores Park. I take a million pictures of the Women’s Building and its paintings of diverse goddesses of womanhood and fertility, and the ever-changing murals of Clarion Alley

Most are a critique of the current political climate or an exhortation to unite against capitalism, which floats my boat just fine.

Valencia and Mission Streets: taquerias, smoke shops and hipster barbershops. Historically, a harbor for lesbians of all horizons. I stop at Dolores Park Cafe for a latte and an egg sandwich, which I don’t eat because I’m not a fan of eggs. Yeah, it doesn’t make sense, I know. Before I leave this place, I shop at Bi-Rite, a community store slash deli that specializes in local, organic produces. Honestly, it’s a haven of wonderful local food. I want to eat the whole store. I leave the store with mac and cheese, roasted carrots, a southern spices cupcake, a bottle of hard cider and stars in my eyes.

Tonight I’m spending time buried in a comfy armchair with my organic food and the saints of Bicho Raro.

BOOK CREDITS: All the Crooked Saints – Maggie Stiefvater

SF DAY 6 – Everything is art

SFMOMA, take two. It’s not that I like modern art, per se, it’s that I like the idea of me appreciating stuff that does not necessarily come with superheroes, space fights or an SNL cast member (preferably Kate McKinnon, amirite ladies?) The thing about modern art, though, is that really challenges and confronts your ideas and understanding of art. It asks constantly: what is art, to you?

To me, one of the powers of art is that it is open to interpretation. It evokes as many feelings as there are people experiencing it. There are a thousand ways to experience art. So, maybe art is only art when it has an audience? But then, what if I were to paint some truly beautiful pieces, like Manet-levels of good, then never show them to anybody, keep them under lock in a closet forever. Would they be less art then?

Or is it intent that makes art? I feel like, when I learn more about the artist’s intent for a piece, as well as his process and/or the context in which the piece was created, I find the piece more interesting, it becomes more open to me, like it’s revealing its secrets. But I could also disregard context, intent and process, reject them entirely, and just focus on my own interpretation of a piece, how it makes me feel, and it would be just as valid.

So yeah, art is really fucking complicated.

In the abstract section, just as my heart is soaring in front of a grey canvas filled to the brim with white loops, a bored kid asks his mom: “Why is it art? It’s just nonsense.”

I learn that in the 70’s, the polluted air was so acid in LA, that it exacerbated the color of the sky, particularly at dawn and dusk, and it pushed the local artists to up their game in their representation of colors. That’s how a tradition of saturated sunsets was born into Californian art. I learn about the minimalists fascination with shape and near-identical shades of color, and all of a sudden these things fascinate me too. I learn about this dude’s (Walker Evans) mighty need to document everything about his period of time, to take hyper-realist, direct pictures of people, buildings, signs, to collect photographs and papers to preserve the time he lived in, as on the other side of the ocean everyone was lost in the meanderings of surrealism, dadaism and cubism.

I don’t understand everything I see. A lot of stuff bores me. But some of it stays with me, days later. Is that art? After I leave the museum, I see things in a different light, under different angles. Images are sharper. I think: I could make art of this, of life. Is that the mark of good art? Inspiring people to make art themselves?

Okay, too much thinking. Food, now.

I buy some Indian food from a cart at Market St, and walk to the Embarcadero to eat it on a bench next to the water.

The sun is out, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and so are you, dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play?

The Embarcadero is a succession of local, organic shops and food stands and it’s packed full of tourist and rich locals. I get cheesecake and look through the books for a while, before the sun tells me that it’s time to go.

I take the N Judah line all the way to Ocean Beach, walk onto sand and put my booted feet right into the ocean. The motherfucking Pacific ocean, baby. It’s pretty cold, but the view, oh my god. I keep having to remember to pick up my jaw off the ground. I let the music and the wind overtake me. Since it’ s a theme apparently, Neil Young is the man for the job.

Old man look at my life, twenty four and there’s so much more. Live alone in a paradise that makes me think of two. Love lost, such a cost. Give me things that don’t get lost. Like a coin that won’t get tossed rolling home to you. 

As the sun drowns into the waves, I let the salt baptize my Docs. 

I take the N Line back to Embarcadero, get some empanadas to eat at the hostel. It’s a good day.

SONG CREDITS: Dear Prudence – The Beatles + Old Man – Neil Young – Harvest

SF DAY 5 – Now that might just be too much excitement for one day

Back at Fisherman’s Wharf, I am ravenous, so I go on the hunt for food. But first, I wander through le Musée Mécanique and its creepy robots, spend a couple quarters on the worst game of flipper anyone’s ever seen. I head to Boudin for some much deserved warm food. Boudin is known for using some sort of bacteria you only find in San Francisco to bake their sourdough? I didn’t follow everything, but the point is: their bread is amazing. As is their chili. Like wow. 

My belly full and happy, I walk the crowded, store-filled yards of Pier 39, toying with the setting sun, the bay and some seagulls, til I get to the honking, napping sea lions. It seems silly to just stand there and watch about fifty water dogs nap, but I gotta admit, it’s fun. 

After that, I have the immense pleasure to live a typical American experience I’ve always, always wondered about: I get a hot pretzel. I eat the entire thing while doing a little dance because I’m eating a pretzel!!! Full disclosure: it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I buy a ticket for the Bay Aquarium. It is much smaller than the one at the Academy, but still! Big fishes! Jellies! Rays! Sharks! Otters! 

When I get out of there and into the fresh, too fresh, goddam cold air, night has fallen around me. I walk the whole coast to the Embarcadero, and stumble on a pier just like the one in La La Land as I’m listening to City of stars. It’s fate. I scream Emma Stone’ s name into the void, but only seagulls answer me. People on the pier give me a wide birth, though.

Who knows? Is this is the start of something wonderful and new? Or one more dream that I cannot make true.

I hitch a ride with BART, get to Powell just in time for a showing of Star Wars. Star!!! Wars!!! Space gals and lightsabers!!! The Force!!! Carrie Fisher!!! Finn and Poe’s incredible love story!!! Oscar Isaac’s fake hair!!! I’m not going to spoil the new movie for you, but let me just say I totally saw Rey and Ben being twins coming, I mean come on!

SONG CREDITS: City of stars – La La Land OST