Taoseach and the TransAmerica Tower
Two reasons to love this city:
1. Margaritas at Puerto Alegre, with an electric steel cat purring through candles over your shoulder and a fantastic Gipspy-King-style guitarist clapping his feet against the floor.
2. Bluegrass hung from the rafters at Amnesia, where ties are draped over orange lamps and young men wear suspenders and fedoras and look the way Nina Simone sung.
Four free reasons I am glad to be here:
1. Walking to Dolores Park at sunset. The sky is Frida Kahlo's mind with a hint of mahogany. Dogs everywhere. People musing and reading and pushing their glasses up on their foreheads as they read.
2. Fiesta on the Hill, street dancers that groove on the corner of Grant and Bush in the midafternoon glare of a suprising autumn heat, the sound of Roccapulco salsa as it ripples through Muni windows.
3. The view from Bernal Heights Park, where you can see the TransAmerica Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge, PacBell Park, and thousands of multicolored lights fueling thousands of different lives as they shuttle themselves around their neighborhoods, which are my neighborhoods, and your neighborhoods. Neighborhoods of dogs, cats, squirrels, fog, of A-line rooftops and turquoise green front steps. Neighborhoods that Mr. Rogers made tiny trolleys circumnavigate after he changed his shoes and his sweater. The daily panorama of a layered city - that's where I like to be,.
4. The Good Karma House, our aptly named house on the hill where I live with four friends from college. Sadly rent is no less extravagant than any other neighborhood nearby, but it's the karma that I want to emphasize here, not the building, It's the smell of Michelle making curry, the sound of spirituality clinking on the dinner plate, that yellowness that comes from living with your best friends and not minding the chores, because NPR is usually on, and if it's not, someone is crunching a carrot nearby, and you're giggling.
Just Add Water
This is an exercise of place.
This is walking through five neighborhoods in five minutes. This is men and women in pinstripe slacks passing the young families frying churros by the Bart station at seven-thirty in the morning. This is mohawks and tie dye and your name painted across a grain of rice as you walk along the wharf. This is obese pitbulls named Princess sitting outside the ByRite vegan ice creamery just after sunset, on an evening when the city has turned down its lights and turned up the volume of October-summer energy. This is yams at fifty cents a pound, stir-fried with cinnamon cloves and ground cumin from Rainbow Grocery. This is the clang of Muni, the halting rhythm of inner city trains, the clip of feet against pavement. This is the feeling you get when you pass a mural painted in multiple languages.
This is an exploration of self.
Not me, not you, not him, not her, not the man who just cut health care for poor children, nor the woman running for president, but all of us, thrown together onto a famous peninsula that straddles the Pacific and hugs the West. This is the pupusas your Salvadorean grandmother used to make, the lentil dahl your Indian boyfriend stirs on the stove, the potato latkes that simmer at your Hannukkah party every winter. This is the way we want to look, diminished only by the way we truly are. This is desire, served with cinnamon and raisins.
This is music.
Thursday night blues at Skip's Tavern, Hardly and Strictly Bluegrass at Golden Gate Park, a string quartet serenading the dark Dolores Park at the Lights Out Festival, Mariachi ballads that walk up beside you when you saunter down Mission. This is the competing chords of one-stringed Chinese instruments on Grant St. on a Saturday afternoon, and coins piling up on the street. This is Blackalicious, Ozomatli, Led Zeppelin, Ani DiFranco, Michael Franti and the Power to the Peaceful. This is the young Indian woman wearing a green shirt that reads, "Peace, not Prejudice." This is the sound of one high five.
This is opinion.
News, boiled down to its gritty headline reactions, and the aftershocks of anybody's big decision.
Politics - of power, of conscience, of social responsibility, of race, of religion, of community.
Style, as judged by a thrift store junkie.
Theatre, from the eyes of a playwright and the ears of a patron.
Art, and how people define it.
This is travelogue.
Because observations are keener from a traveler's perspective.
This is memoir, this is memory, this is present tense, this is journaling for the sake of remembering words.
This is a girl.
This is a woman.
This is a city.
This is a universe frozen in street-size ice cubes.
This is yams, fifity cents a pound, sold by a Chinese couple in the Mission.
Bienvenidos.
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