San Francisco

Never have been one for lavish and well-appointed Sunday brunches, I must admit. OK…I’ve never really been all that impressed by lavish and well appointed meals at any hour of any day, as it happens. Frankly, in most “nice” restaurants, the “ambience” so overwhelms the food that I find it pretty difficult to enjoy either. The good news is that this makes me a really cheap date…

So on this fine Sunday morning, I was feeling very self-satisfied with my decision not to venture out to the neighborhood bars on Saturday night. Maybe it suggests a certain maturity when one realizes that fifteen bucks might better be spent on a good meal and a nice used book than on five beers. Or maybe I’m just leading a boring life these days.

Anyway, I dragged my non-hungover self to Art’s Soul Kitchen on Church near Duboce for a lunch of pork chops, collard greens, and black-eyed peas. This is such a great place. It’s nothing but a hole in the wall with cheap tablecloths, bad art prints, and a hand-painted window sign. There is no “atmosphere” to speak of…only a friendly crowd of people and absolutely incredible food.

I think the people are what makes the place, especially given the neighborhood. It’s almost possible to forget that the Castro is but blocks away. On this particular Sunday, Art’s was filled with well-dressed Western Addition families who just got out of church, a male-male couple who would have looked very out of place at Cafe Flore, and a few tables of completely unremarkable individuals of varying ages, classes, and ethnicities. No one seemed to be looking for a “dining experience”; everyone just seemed to want to eat.

As the small dining room was packed and there was a line, I opted for a takeout. I walked upto Aardvark Books for a few minutes while waiting.

Along the way I passed Boston Market, the ubiquitous franchise which tries to do “home cooking” but ends up with something slightly less enticing than a Banquet Frozen Dinner. There was, as usual, a long line waiting for swill from a tube. Boston market attempts to create images of hearth, heart, and soul through an ad campaign. The attempt is not successful.

I crossed the street and looked in the window at Chow, an lackluster over-priced eatery which offers its own version of “home cooking”, though the average mom wouldn’t recognize most of this fare. Chow attempts to create images of hearth, heart, and soul through pretentious decor and cute entree names and by putting strange and unnecessary ingredients in the peas. Their attempt is even less successful than at Boston Market.

Places like Art’s don’t have to try to create an image. They have something the franchises and soulless trendy bistros can never really have: reality and personality. Of course it helps that the food is simple, unpretentious, and more about flavor than “presentation”. But even if they could master the food, Boston Market and Chow could never match the feeling you get when you take your first bite of a pork chop or salmon croquette at Art’s.

Maybe it’s because you can’t get a latte at Art’s.

Maybe it’s due to the feeling that you’re not contributing to the corporate greed of a Boston Market.

Or maybe it’s because it’s hard to make collard greens look like anything other than collard greens, and Chow just can’t stand this bit of reality.

The McDonald’s at Seventh and Market is really creepy and getting creepier. It’s a strange mix of crackheads, career alcoholics, street people, and very scrubbed but very lost foreign tourists. How so many tourists end up here I don’t know. For some reason I felt extremely paranoid there today; the place usually doesn’t phase me. It got worse when this really scary guy brushed up against me as he got in line behind me. When I reached for my wallet to pay, it wasn’t there. I freaked. It turned out I’d left it at home, but this thought didn’t even occur to me at the time.

Why am I so paranoid lately? Frankly, I usually feel safer in SF than almost anyplace else. But I’ve noticed myself being much more apprehensive lately. I find myself checking my back pocket constatly to make sure the wallet’s till there like I do in New York. I’m afraid every time I go to my car that I’ll be missing a window. I’m more likely to keep the windows rolled up and the doors locked. Muni is getting more and more frightening.

The neighborhood’s getting annoying. Too much construction. Too many noisy, drunk yuppies. Not nearly enough parking, even on my sticker-protected street. More on this soon. But doing any of the following one more time may cause me to snap and go “postal”:

• Standing in line behind one more stoned trendoid who takes ten minutes to decide on one bottle of liquor at the corner store.
• Walking in the middle of Folsom Street because Julie’s Supper Club can’t contain all its loud-mouthed slumming stockbrokers or even make them leave a path on the sidewalk.
• Getting a parking ticket on a street two blocks from my house because the Department of Parking and Traffic can’t seem to control the non-residents parking on my own sticker-protected street which is where I SHOULD have been able to park in the first place.
• Being awakened early in the morning by whatever that pounding sound is at the building they’re renovating up the street, which is no doubt in the process of being converted into yet another zoning-exempt “artist’s loft” which no artist could possibly afford.

E-mail last week:

I’d think a hip cat like you’d be more into their version of things than some tired academics who are just jumping on the caboose of a rapidly leaving bandwagon.

Oh. Woops. You’re in San Francisco.

That explains everything.

Seems to be a common bit of knowledge that San Francisco is pretty well insulated from the realities of the world.The population here tends to be — how should I say it — a tad left of center. Diversity and eccentricity are the norm here. The intelligence, literacy, and education levels are higher here than in most of the country. Queers and other minorities have “nothing to worry about here”.

Of course, anyone who lives here knows that last statement is anything but true, although — at least for some minorities — life is somewhat easier here. Particularly noteworthy is the phenomenon known as the Castro. I’ve written a lot about the Castro. Most of it has not been complimentary. As a matter of fact I’ve often described it as sort of a “reality-free zone”, where the troubles of queers in the hinterland, people on the wrong end of the socio-economic scale, and unfashionable people are no longer a concern.

Could this is true of the whole city?

Well, of course it is. I’d venture to say that a fairly large percentage of the San Francisco transplants moved here to escape the “reality” of the places they came from, be it suburban North Carolina, rural North Dakota, or even the Phillipines or Central America. This collection of backgrounds has produced a wide variety of knowledge and awareness within the city. Unfortunately, it also may have produced a strange sort of insulated cultural vacuum wherein all these individuals fleeing from their own realities have lost touch with large parts of them as well.

I would not disagree with the statement that San Francisco as a whole strongly overestimates its own importance in the world. The things that we believe and hold dear are not the same as those which are important to the rest of the world. Our influence on society is waning, if not close to nonexistent. New York, Los Angeles, even Houston and Atlanta are much more important on a national scale. Contrary to what we may tell ourselves, the world doesn’t generally follow our example, nor does it even particularly care what we think or do.

San Francisco is the capital of muliti-cultural thought, tolerance, and “PC’ (God, I hate that overused term…) Every issue, no matter how inane or trivial is perceived by someone as indicative of society’s oppressive nature. If I get my order ahead of someone else at McDonald’s, it must be because I’m a white male, not because the other order was for a “Big Mac, no salt, light sauce, well done, on a cruelty-free bun”. If I refuse to break the law and reproduce copyrighted material en masse for a customer, it must be because I don’t agree with his politics, not because I fear for my job. Everyone here seems to have an “oppression complex”: gay, straight, male, female, WASP, Latino, Asian, whatever… It gets a bit silly. And people laugh at us, even though many “oppression complexes” may be based in past truths.

The “single issue” politics in San Francisco are astounding and disturbing. Particularly in the “gay community”. This may be our biggest means of forgetting that there is, in fact, a world outside our little peninsula. Most of the world is far more concerned about keeping (or getting) a job which will allow three meals a day and shelter than about whether a school in the Castro is named for Harvey Milk or whether a Lesbian couple is featured in the Valentine’s Day story in the local paper.

We’re creating a city that fewer and fewer people can enjoy. Gentrification has destroyed neighborhoods worldwide, but in San Francisco, we seems to be doing it on a city-wide level. The upper middle class is taking over, raising rents, and pushing out the diversity (musicians, artists, ethnic communities) which attracted them in the first place. Our small mom and pop family restaurants and hardware stores are being replaced with wall-to-wall bistros, Gaps, Starbucks, and Z-Galleries. How livable is a city where it’s easier to buy a $125 framed print or a piece of FiestaWare than it is to find a $4 meal?

And our hypocrisies and inconsistencies are showing:

• We revel in our love of ethic cultures and foods provided and prepared by people who can no longer afford to live here. (San Francisco is the only city of its size and stature in the country where the African American population is actually DECLINING, and with the current rental market, things will get worse.)
• The gay movement was built largely on a platform of freedom of speech and association, but try posting a flyer on a lamppost in the Castro.
• Discount stores like Target or Home Depot face immense opposition from city residents who would prefer to drive to the suburbs and shop there, free of the hassles of anyone who might walk or take transit to them.
• Marin County contains one of the most “liberal” suburban voting blocks in the country. Funny that any form of affordable housing there is consistently voted down, as was the BART rapid transit system many years ago. Shopping centers are OK though, as long as they “look OK” and they’re located in the one predominantly black area of the county. It’s a special bonus if they displace an unsightly flea market or craft fair where “outsiders” can make money in a non-landscaped environment.
• A reviewer fro the Examiner applauds a show which glorifies urban street sensibilities while decrying the real street life — she refers to it as “human garbage” — which surrounds the theater outside.

It all comes down, I guess, to whether we want to live in a real city or a Disneyland-style sanitized version of one. Is it preferable to take the bus to the Western Addition or the fake cable car tour to Fisherman’s Wharf? Is Mission Street or Castro Street what San Francisco is really all about? I must confess to a bias toward the former in all three cases.

And I’ll skip a lengthy discussion of our own version of the costumed “greeters” here in “UrbanLand”: the stockbrokers who dress like gas station attendants on weekends, the trust fund hippies on Haight Street, the artists posing as gangbangers, antuque shop owners posing as longshoremen. However, I must congratulate them for producing an intersting — if not entirely accurate — version of urbanism in safe neighborhoods. Perhaps in a “city of freaks” it is necessary to punctuate one’s identity with an exclamation point.

I must add that I do not claim to be free or above some of the inconsistencies I’ve discussed here. I am also probably no less insulated from reality than anyone else here. The South of Market Area is not really all that high on the “reality index” either (especially given all the drugs down here). Who knows…maybe I’m more insulated than anyone…

All in all, I still love San Francisco and the Bay Area. At least there is an attempt at justice here. In most neighborhoods, it is not necessary to duck immediately after kissing your boyfriend goodnight on the street corner. People here at least feel guilty when they make bigoted comments. Hate-spewing Jesus freaks are regularly challenged when they preach on the streets. And as shallow as it sounds, it’s just pretty here!