A flâneur in San Francisco
Scenes from strolls around town.
I visited San Francisco for two nights this week. Caught up with good friends, visited Green Apple Books and Dark Entries Records, did yoga, attended AA. And walked! So much walking. Walking with the kind of patient and curious attention you give to a new crush, or a very old fling, or an enthralling foreign city.
San Francisco feels familiar, with its hazy cool melancholy echoes of Lisbon and Cape Town. A two-and-half hour drive from where I live (and home to the international airport nearest to me), the city feels like home, and like exile, a starting point and an ending, a place of edges and intersections, rebellion, loss, rebirth, recovery (for the lucky) and devastation (for those less fortunate). People from afar who don't know it are tempted to reduce it to insulting put-downs and lurid, catastrophic, decadent caricature but spend some time here (walking, preferably) and I think how you'll soon see that for all of its drawbacks and seemingly intractable issues it's a glittery, many-sided jewel – shard-sharp, hard-edged and brilliant, a beacon.
