My third day in San Francisco and I'm completely captivated, every time I walk around in this city my imagination is set a flame. The beautiful architecture of the city's buildings is so cosmopolitan, once can walk 5 blocks and they'd flown across 5 countries.
I'm afraid I'm drawn to this lack of knowledge concept yet again, as I feel it here whenever I step out into the street, it's incredible. San Fran is steeped in history and character. Not 2 minutes down the road from where I'm residing for the next 3 weeks is City Lights book store. Which was very influential in exposing and publishing the work of the beat poets. A generation of artists who dared to push boundaries and challenge the status quo - truly very sixties, walking around the store I felt a real sense of history, right here an artistic evolution took place. Surronded by books of such variety, ones you'd never find in the mainstream book store, with the face of Walt Witman pasted on one wall and a smiling photo of Allen Ginsberg on the other, simple messages of politics and philosophy chalked in between shelves, this place really draws me in. The books that surround me let me know "you've got the basics of the beat generation, of poetry, politics, philosophy, but you've simply dipped your toe in an ocean.
This same feeling returned as I got lost in China town.This community consists of many shops which are exclusively Chinese, where the owners speak very little English and all the signage is in Mandarin. Looking through the shops here I was overcome with that sense of wonder I get when watching a Chinese martial arts epic...where everything, and I do mean everything is completely different to what I know. Culture, style, language, history and this didn't serve me well in separating the tat from the valuable items in the China town stores. The toe in the ocean metaphor is most definitely applicable here. When I'm walking around and I find something, an object say, decorated beautifully, crafted with incredible skill, but I have no clue what it does my mind is set racing again and I love this sense of mystery. The whole far east Asian culture is so enigmatic to me and this gives it such awesome appeal.
Today City Lights book store still continues to not only publish and put out great literature but hold events to give a live forum to the artists of alternative schools of thought. So it was that this evening I sat in a small, intimate upstairs area of the book store, where members of the beat generation bared their souls and I listened to some poetry from the politically conscious of today. An event in honour of the release of the artist's journal "Left Curve". Which deals with the artists place and their expression in a post modern, consumerist world, where the vast majority of people would rather watch TV then think about philosophy or politics, even wider society in general. Currently I'm reading HG Wells novel "The Time Machine", I mention this because one of the presenters of this evening made me feel that I had indeed traveled through time, back to the sixties, where a group were threatening to push to boundaries of society's consciousness outwards beyond the institutions and doctrines which had erected walls around them. The room was half dark, an old style projector, click, flick, clicked into life behind us and showed a short black and white film, accompanied by a live reading of poetry and a live musical score on guitar, it was made easy to transcend from this time and place to a space in history we so often wish for.
Out here is very much a literal case of up one hill and down another over and over again. Which leaves you feeling often disorientated, but that ceases to matter every time you reach the top, catch your breath and look at the view that sprawls out in front of you.
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