San Francisco

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.

We arrived at Logan Airport in plenty of time. Given that it was about 35 Celsius, I felt it was justified to hire a cab rather than lug suitcases on the T. I did my usual thing and tried to remove all metal from my person and put it in a pocket of my carry-on bag, in a vain attempt to evade the metal detector. Unfortunately, something set off the doorframe detector, and I was given a severe wanding. As mentioned earlier, the security guy even asked me to unbutton my jeans — the buttons at the front set off his metal detector wand, so I think he suspected I might have shoved sharp knives into the front of my underpants. Hey, the terrorists are mad zealots…

The flight was as pleasant as any six hour plane flight can be. They fed us, they remembered that I’d asked for vegetarian food, and there was coffee. So that’s three points for United, zero for American.

We got a shared van ride to the hotel. We were taken on a delightful tour of south San Francisco. It turns out to bear a startling resemblance to Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 3… in fact, SF in general reminded me of Liberty City, right down to the hilly Italian district, the maze of tunnels and bridges, the subway, and the look of Chinatown. Our hotel even had dubious looking clubs nearby offering “adult” entertainment. (San Francisco Tourist Office may use the above endorsements in advertising.)

Yes, as you can guess, some corners had been cut in the hotel department. We were at a Holiday Inn on the edge of the theater district, which is one of the seedier parts of town. Also, I’m told, one closest to some of the best restaurants. If the bums had been aggressive, like their East coast counterparts, it would have been unpleasant. Fortunately San Francisco’s homeless seem to be a mellow Californian type, and pretty much leave you alone. Anyway, point is, it was the only place near all forms of public transit and less than $100 a night, so I wasn’t complaining.

Public transit in SF is pretty good. There are abundant buses, which run until 01:30 or so, followed by “night owl” services. There are also trams, which are mostly authentic old streetcars that have been repaired and put into service as a tourist attraction as well as a form of transport. Below ground is a network of more trams; and of course, there are the famous cable cars, which climb some of the more picturesque hills. A $15 pass got us unlimited travel on all the preceding. To go further afield involved the subway, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). Aimed at commuters, it heads out to Berkeley and Oakland and the delights of Contra Costa County.

As a Zippy the Pinhead fan, there was something very important I had to do while I was in San Francisco. So we went to a convenience store, and I bought some Ding Dongs. As Zippy fans will know, Ding Dongs are only available in the western part of the USA; in the midwest and on the east coast, they’re known as King Dons. They’re the same thing, just with a different name (for obscure legal reasons, apparently).

I wouldn’t normally eat Hostess baked goods, but I felt a great urge to eat a Ding Dong while admiring the Transamerica Pyramid. I decided to skip the taco sauce, however.

On Sunday we had lunch at Ghirardelli Square. There was a cool frite and crêpe restaurant with DJ-mixed music; afterward I picked up a little chocolate (of course). Next, we headed for Fisherman’s Wharf.

If you’re ever in San Francisco, I can thoroughly recommend staying at least half a kilometer from Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s a tacky, stinky strip of bad seafood restaurants and stores selling crappy souvenirs. At weekends, it’s also crowded with enough noisy obnoxious tourists to make even the most hardened city dweller feel crowd anxiety. We walked through and satisfied ourselves there was nothing worth walking into, and left as quickly as possible.

The one good thing down by Pier 39 was a homeless guy who was providing entertainment to try and earn his bum dollar; Bill Hicks would have loved it. The guy would crouch down behind two pieces of bush, one in each hand. As a bovine tourist passed, he would leap up and rapidly draw aside the disguise, usually startling the tourists. I kinda felt like giving him money.

I didn’t, for the same reasons I didn’t give money to any of the other beggars: call me unfeeling, but I don’t want to fund their drug habits, whether it’s cigarettes, weed, alcohol, or whatever. So instead I send money to charities that feed the homeless nourishing meals. Sure, giving them the choice between drugs and food is fine in principle, but I figure if they were smart enough to make that kind of choice for themselves they wouldn’t be on the street, would they?

“San Francisco… it’s where the voices in your head kept telling you to go!”

Having said that, I feel I can now admit that our restaurant search for the evening took us to a particularly fine place called Indigo. California cuisine, and quite the most incredible meal I could recall eating in years. A delicious explosion of flavors in every bite. Kinda expensive by my standards, at around $35 per head. Sure, I appreciate really good food every now and again, but I’m more of a diner kind of guy.

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.

Wednesday we got a courtesy car pick-up from the rental company. We rented a Toyota Prius. I was intrigued by how well a hybrid gasoline/electric car would work, and this seemed a good chance to give one a thorough test drive. Or rather, for sara to give one a thorough test drive…

What we hadn’t been expecting was that it was a fully tricked-out Prius, complete with GPS satellite navigation system and route finder DVD-ROM for the onboard computer. We told it to take us west to the coast, and then south to the Monterey Bay Aquarium via the coastline route. It verbally directed sara out of the city. What with the directions and having our position shown on a scrolling zoomable map at all times, we were both able to forget about navigation and concentrate on the scenery. (Sand dunes. Surf. People surfing.)

As we arrived at the aquarium, it was otter feeding time. There was an enormous crowd of people around the tank, so we went out onto the deck instead and looked out into the bay. Sure enough, there were wild sea otters floating out in the kelp beds! Four of them. With the aid of the 18x zoom on the camcorder, I got some DV footage of otters at play.

We were hungry on the way back, so we asked the car to find us a nearby Indian restaurant. It turned out we were just off the El Camino Real, probably the world’s largest strip mall, so that wasn’t a problem. Unfortunately the first restaurant was closed, so we had to argue with the car a little to get a route to a different place. Phil Dick would have loved it, walking into a restaurant because our car had recommended it…

We got an average of over 50mpg, both city driving and highways, even with San Francisco’s hills to deal with. We travelled 280 miles total on $10 of gas, which was half a tank full.

I noticed that IBM had a huge ad on the freeway exit that leads to Oracle’s headquarters, saying “Our database software is the #1 seller. Now, who’s got game?” Larry Ellison must be really pissed off.