San Francisco - "Fuck Hate & Go West!"

The oscillating hills of San Francisco mimic the Acid Wave that hit here in the late ’60s. Scattered bodies, like the ocean’s debris, litter the streets, displaced along the hills and highways where the wave hit and rolled back in. Far from the ocean’s mouth opening up across the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco has been afflicted my a very different disaster; namely a human one – addiction and poverty.

The common analysis of a lot of drug counsellors is that drugs do not discriminate. However in America, such a statement is loaded and visually untrue. Take any American city, and one usually only needs to cross the river, transcend the (in)visible line into no-man’s-land and discover hoards of chalked blacks, Latinos; the unwanted yet needed others of the American dynasty. (Why are they needed? Someone has to take the butt for capitalism to work.)

The point is that, in San Francisco, the economics of poverty and the psychology of addiction really don’t discriminate. The bums are of all colours; a union of cultures (which seems appropriate since the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco): the blacks are represented, as too are the whites, the Chinese, the Chicanos, the Latinos… It’s a real pluralist congregation on every street corner. Who would have thought man would find his common bond in the needle and the acid tab? Well, certainly all those hippies did as San Francisco is their (il)legitimate child, their present to the liberal world, their Trojan Horse to the conservatives and patriarchs of the new millennium.

The Beats were here too and they were world travellers, sexual deviants and bug-powder vein pushers. The Beat Museum sits happily on a busy cross street in North Beach, appropriately sandwiched between a sex-shop and a tavern. But the Beats are now dead, gone, forgotten and overused. Literary critics couldn’t rescue much meaning out of their scatology in the end. Very few survived the prowl of academia. The museum is but a flagrant memory, a shrine to a generation of misogynists, drug abusers and perverts, who probably didn’t care nor believe that what they were doing was either right nor decent (except for Ginsberg. He was high and mighty until Burroughs shot him too (he shot and killed his wife)).

San Francisco should annex itself from the United States – the world’s first gay-friendly nation with the pride flag hanging high, mighty and multicoloured. Bill Burroughs’ infamous saying “Fuck Hate” could be the national motto and the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”, the anthem. Who would wage war on the fags and bums, except for maybe America? Homosexuality as a terror upon the American family! San Francisco as a part of the Axis of Evil, led by Speaker of the House, San Franciscan resident, Nancy Peloski. We could restart civilization from Northern California. We have everything we would need in abundance: seafood, drugs, the Napa Valley, City Lights bookstore and Francis Ford Coppola. The bums can even stay too (they’re so friendly anyway). We could even bring Castro back (there’s actually a suburb named after him).

I want to move to San Francisco. I want to ski down its blocks and boulevards. However it doesn’t snow here, which is probably a good thing, as everywhere pedestrians would be tripping and cracking their heels. It is one of the few American cities where you can actually walk in, and the most worthwhile to do so too, as every now and then the climb to the peak of a block pays off as you peer down the backside of a mountainous city (They should line the pavements with T-Bars).

Ah, San Francisco. We’ll always have San Francisco to keep the conservatives at bay, or rather away from it. And if they breach the hills and valleys, we can always head west across the Pacific (China is calling – the future is coming). Right Wing political ferret Bill O’Reilly called San Francisco “a liberalists’ paradise”, like that was supposed to insult. Either way, it is queer-friendly, female-friendly, black-friendly, Latino-friendly, Chinese-friendly; they even let some conservative pigs hang around Nob Hill. They have special visas.

Here’s to the revolution. Fuck hate and go west!

Atlanta - Looking for Blowjobs in Boarders

Atlanta is where the ghost of conservatism confronts the new America. What is that exactly? The emergence of the hip-hop generation? The aspiring black man and woman? The re-resurrection of church and state? The nouveau riche? The old rich? Whatever it is, one hallmark stays the same – a culture of excess.

Huge lots of land extend their reach further and further, converting pastures, forests and streams into the satellite malls and highway restaurants of another urbanized and gentrified generation. Everything converges into concrete: rows and rows of shopping malls, fast-food chains and pump stations. An unconscious council mediates the omnipotence of simulacra. East Berlin had more individualism in Trotsky’s day. Perhaps that is the great irony of capitalism: everything is more of the same.

The lights of downtown hum in the night. Omnipotent black motor-carriages drift listlessly by on Atlanta’s nine lane highways. Downtown actually makes Atlanta a pretty city. Someone got the distribution of highway and high-rise right, or wrong for that matter. There are virtually no busses in Atlanta. The public transport system is reduced to a couple of scattered lines in order to limit the mobility of lower-income earners. The MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rail and Transit Authority) has been disturbingly re-coined to infer the “Moving of Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta”, which is more or less its resulting function.

Like in almost all American cities, segregation farms a disturbing dual personality across the lines of East and West, black and white, rich and poor, possibility and death. East Atlanta is a free-market crack den. However, there is potential here, shunted along by the procession of capitalism. Entrepreneurs are welcome to the grim streets. Gentrification is converting, composing and covering-up. Cross-sections of downtown seem to have been implanted with Walt Disney’s DNA, sprouting legions of designer streets and boulevards. Other parts mimic the old South, the French and the Spanish architecture prettied up for the likes of me.

However culture is still rooted in simulacra. If you want a book in Atlanta, you go to Boarders. If you want a coffee, you go to Starbucks. If you want a blowjob, you go to church. I went to Boarders.