Downtown San Francisco

Mi hanno sempre dato fastidio le briciole nelle lenzuola, mi alzo
sempre per scuoterle via, e anche se ho l’abitudine di mangiare di
tutto e di più nel mio letto la sera, io alle briciole ci sto sempre un
casino attenta e le faccio sempre cadere a terra. Ma ogni volta che
mi alzo e mi rinfilo sotto le coperte, le briciole stanno li. Mi sono
sempre chiesta perché e stasera finalmente ho capito che non dovrei
camminare scalza. (Ah, ah, ah. Che ridere. Che brava, ma come sono
brava)

Viaggiooooooo, ho voglia di un viaggiooooooooo.!
Sudamerica, l’ultima carità di un’altra rumba! Sudamerica, stelle
uruguaiane! Sudamerica. Patagonia, Messico, Guatemala. Nicaragua, rum e
ron, Cuba, Cuba Cuba e que viva Fidel! Io ci devo andare in mezzo ai
colori cubani, e prima che a Fidel se lo porti via Iddio che io, di
sinistra molto a sinistra ho sempre detto che Cuba è l’ultima perla al
mondo e anche Jamilé, ingegnera cubana tutta curve dice agli italiani
scemi e controrivoluzionari che gli danno dello stronzo che Fidel "E’
solo stronzino".
Ah Sudamerica, Sudamerica, Sudamericaaaaa!
Il giorno tropicale era un sudario
davanti ai grattacieli era un sipario
campa decentemente e intanto spera
di essere prossimamente milionario
Ma, solita sfiga, non sono tempi giusti, mi aspettano un sacco di
responsabilità di qui a breve. Bella, non ho mica vent’anni. Un viaggio
ora, proprio non posso. E allora, fra gli schiaffi di queste mura
torinesi, leggo invidio piango e sanguino dei viaggi altrui.

Il
viaggio raccontato è quello di Pete, un amico conosciuto nei
miei sei mesi mancuniani. Di Manchester ho un ricordo soffusamente
malinconico, lirico nonché onirico, che non so descrivere, se non citando la splendida
"Hallelujah" di Leonard Cohen. Gli inglesi sono più avanti di noi, che
arriviamo sempre un passo dopo, anche nella tristezza e nella
depressione.

California, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, il mito è sempre il mito. L’America è grandiosa ed è potente, tutto e niente il bene e il male. Città coi grattacieli e con gli slang e nostalgia di un grande ieri. Kerouak, Ginsberg. We’re older now, but still runnin’ against the wind. Ecchecazzo.

Per chi ha voglia, e soprattutto mastica l’inglese.

These
two things seem to share something, a thread runs through them though
on the surface they seem distinct. One answers the other. One
compliments the other and so here I am in ample position for me now,
feeling empty but with my ticket in hand on the escalator to
fulfillment, lead character in this unfolding story of emancipation.

Arriving in San Francisco
You get off the plane knowing what the landscape contains for a thousand
miles north west of here. snow, ice, rock, an enormous lake. which makes
landing here in summer even greater. I was so relieved to step off the
plane into summer. Max and Ashley met me in Ashley’s pickup and whisked me
home along a wide busy freeway. we went up on the hill beside their house
in the sun in sandals. From green lucious grass with the dog we looked out
over a swathe of criss crossed streets with small houses across to
downtown san francisco rising North American City fist-like high into the
sky, bits and pieces of ocean in all directions and so many bridges – the
familiar golden gates.
So relaxed to land amidst summer coming from cold greay Manchester.

We went to Max’s old house, Station 40. My dad had said everywhere in SF
was safe apart from the Mission district. This place was precisely at the
most intensely deprivated point of Mission. I hadn’t expected to see the
ugly poverty of America in SF but here I was straight in from England and
walking along a street of poor black and hispanic people crazy mumbling,
living out of shopping trolleys, hanging out on the street looking mean or
just looking. All these creeds and casts I know from movies. So
realistically recreated enactment of a gazillion films over my lifetime.
Station 40 is another of those huge shared anarchist spaces Max seems to
keep finding, full of spaciousness and full of loads of lovely people
living in it. organised. friendly. part of the network. I’m jealous again
before I even begin.

I was amazed to be walking about witrnessing America, somewhere for so
long been on the edge of reality, so seen but not experienced. here it was
afterall and why have I not been here more often? It seems alien and yet
familiar I can;t settle on either because at one moment it seems different
but at the same moment as though I’ve never been away and I’ve arrived
home or something. I have been here before, so long ago, so perhaps I
remember more than I realised, or it’s just having been brainwashed with
US culture since birth. Interesting that you can come so far and it be so
easy because everyone speaks English (tho yeah, a lot of Spanish spoken
too). I signed out a bike for 2 weeks from Station 40.

We went to Rainbow an amazing wholefood supermarket bigger and probably
better than Unicorn; we went to Max and Ashley’s artists studio; we rode
the tram, putting our bikes in a cage at the front we had to pull down and
strap them in. Just a few hours and already I’m gutted I don’t live in
vibrant places where young people walk streets crammed with decent places
to eat, organic supermarkets full of quirky alternative and anarchist
types. I’ve only been out for a few hours and not even been downtown yet.

I had a half hour nap but other than that stayed up so as to beat the jet
lag. So I experienced yesterday in this great flu-like daze awake and
relaxed but yet not awake.

I want to write to people to express my experiences and that seems really
important seeing as they’ve known me before I cam here and would want to
know how I’m experiencing this but there are maybe seven people and
writing to them individually would take all this time I feel would be
better spent actually being here whilst I’m here, leaving behind homely
ties and really experiencing here.

Big Sur

On tuesday afternoon I drove out of the city, down the freeway toward
Monteray in the hot sun. A few hours driving and the soft golden sandy
dunes of Monterey appear. I sat on the beach for a while watching people
walk their dogs along a long beach that stretched on toward distant
empty dunes; long billed waders hopping at the edge of the surf; then
drove on.
Stopped at Safeway for essential frugal foods. Everything’s a learning
experience in a different country. You learn a scenario then you’re done
and you don’t notice it the same from then on. But first the delights
and confusion. Bread, cheese, beer, tomatoes, peppers, apples, avocados,
bananas, orange juice, yogurt and water, before heading toward Big Sur
and an uncertain night.
I stopped on a beach for a sandwich in the last light. Watched a gaggle
of condors swirling slowly together in an updraft, turning over upon and
around one another.

Driving down Highway 1, the Coast Road. In the dark. Just enjoying
driving in the American Night. At last, after so much Kerouac so much
Ginsberg all those years of lapping up American literature of the road
and all the films the romanticism of big American cars balling along
great distances. I lapped it all up and here I am, going down Highway 1
with the window open at night the cool wind blowing in, listening to the
radio, trying to see if I can feel American music now in a way I’ve not
been able to before. Felt as tho I could have driven on and on thru this
vast country, this welcoming night.
What I could see of the landscape started to look fantastic so I figured
I should find a campsite. Ashley had said I’d get a ticket for sure
sleeping in the van around here. There were no campgrounds I could see
so I pulled off the highway at Bixby Creek Bridge, up a dirt track up a
hill. Just a little way along I parked up. A myriad of stars throbbed in
the sky; light from the occasional house dotted around the valley, just
a hint of habitation; the evocative smell of woodsmoke drifted up; the
clunk-clunk clunk-clunk of cars driving slowly over the paved bridge
below, the ocean beyond. I drank a beer and wrote, fearing a poor
night’s sleep woken by a cop with a torch and an attitude.
I slept badly on the mattress in the back, woken not by cops but an
occasional car coming up the track and continuing to twist on down
following the track into the valley below to one of the twee clusters of
lights nestled between banks of trees, clasped in hand by the valley.

I woke to the spectacular view I’d hoped would be revealed. So many
trees. hillsides rising and falling.
I drove on and straight into magnificant views of landscape crashing
into the sea, jagged edges of cliff and cove, rocks sprouting out of
water. The radio said today would be wet and tomorrow back to the
regular programme of clear weather. It was so beautiful because of the
sultry drama of the weather. I stopped at one viewing point after
another. Ocean swell rolled in, rising to crests, buoyed on the wind,
then crashing in on themselves. Sea lions twisted and rolled in the
water. Tourists on the cliff edge pointed their video cameras down at
them. Behind the ocean, forests clung to hillsides.
At Sur Point the waves carved up into peaks, then tubes, before crashing
with a white flurry into golden sand. The beach strecthed out away from
the land to a huge bulbous outcrop.
From there the road came up into the woods. Big Sur. Following my dad’s
itinerary. Monterey, Big Sur, Carmel, I have a childhood of place names
he brought back from this coastline and cherished.
Up higher now into the woods. Really enjoying the peace, away from the
claustrophobia of the city, the mania of the Mission district; being out
on my own and at peace, amidst the beauty of the forest, the coast, the
dense smell of greenery after rainfall. This was Big Sur. Occasional log
cabin guest houses and roadhouses appeared. In re-enactment of my
internal Twin Peaks movie I stopped at one looking for black coffee and
apple pie. No pie but coffee. Looking out on the rain falling against
the backdrop of trees, gas station attendant in long-groin skater pants
sheltering; woman at the counter engaging everyone in happy dialog, so
many options with every food order in this country, making up coffees
for people who want half full-fat and half redcued-fat milk she says "as
long as you’re happy". In America I find it hard to be in a public place
like this without being engaged by someone in conversation. Everyone’s
so polite and friendly. Maybe it’s just a Califnornia thing.

Having been up at first light there was so much day ahead for me. I
drove back, eager to meet with Max who’d be at Station 40 for my
introduction to ease me into moving there.
Back up Highway 1, a band of cloud half way up the cliffs clinging to
the jutting chaotic headlands all along the coastline.
Driving a car is so much easier than my van. you just cruise along in
total ease. I really got the American driving enthusiasm. Just driving
for the love of the movement, the road. listening to some fantastic talk
radio. There’s so much understanding of a culture to be gotten from
listening to radio. And I’m definitely  looking for authentic American
experience. Scanning and rescanning the dial, looking for people
talking, looking for native rock’n’roll, blues, things I could get a new
grasp of now here in California on a misty drizzly afternoon driving
North. Getting out at viewing points and beaches just to marvel at the
scenery the waves building then blowing out. At one beach a guy in an
insanely over-sized pickup, surf board in the back, pondered the waves
that were getting up. At the next beach a clutch of black suited bodies
waited in the water, occasionally pushing off, kicking hard then
standind up and riding a wave in to shore, ripping it up this way and
that then plunging into the water as it broke up into a fizzling boiling
flurry. Sometimes the waves really rose up higher and held themselves,
then their tips clawed their way over into a tube to eventually crash in
on themselves with such a huge sound I’ve never appreciated such weight
of waves before.

I took the slow coast road all the way back to San Francisco rather than
the direct freeway because it hugs the shoreline most of its way.
Mistaking Ashley’s directions for the route in to Mission I ended up
missing my familiar way points. I had a window to meet Max in that was
going to allow me to move out of her’s and into station 40 then go out
for tea with her and Emily and now I didn’t know where I was and
everything was messed up. I was going way out of my way north out over
the Bay Bridge out of town so I headed back. Then I was going back and
forth through Daly City south of San Francisco not knowing which
direction was the right one. In a panic attack not seeing any familiar
land marks, hating driving in cities, hating coming into a city without
a plan, hating myself, almost giving up and driving on out to Bolinas up
the coast instead; going back and forth across the city at different
angles never finding a signpost for Mission. In too much of a state to
want to talk on the phone to anyone to ask directions that I didn’t know
well. Emily rang Max’s phone, which I had, wondering about our
appointment and recommended I get to 101 then take the Cesar Chavez
turnoff. In heading back toward that I soon came upon a ‘Mission St’
and, far easier, followed that, hoping it was _the_ Mission St that I
knew. It went and went and went and I followed it clinging to the hope
of it and eventually I saw downtown San Francisco quite where it should
have been in the right direction in the distance, then familiar places
and it _was_ the right road and it took me all the way in to Mission
district and I was able to park up on Shotwell just like they told me I
could and get over to Station 40 and there was Max and my introduction
to people and a bed in the rafters and the chance to sit down and chat
in the kitchen before going out for food.