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LOST_GUIDE
May 25, 2014
There was a time when I put a lot
of time into working on a guide to
San Francisco, with a particular A common technique with
angle to it: me: sling a lot of words
at a concept that doesn't
"a guide for the goth-geek-freak-hipster-nerd" quite have a name.
goth: the original impetus was a tie-in Verbal sketching.
for the 3rd Gothic Convergence
...and the early-90s seemed like
the first gothic revial to me. But then, goth has a way
of dying eternally.
geek/nerd: for the net early-adopters of
alt.gothic, at the beginning of Maybe:
the www.
Nerds know things,
freak: a term of approbation from the but geeks do things.
60s long since reclaimed--
associations include mutation,
abnormality, "alternative",
difference, non-conformity.
hipster:
my preferred catch-all at the time
for the boho descendents of beat It has little to do with the
and punk. neo-hipsters of the late-Naughts.
BURNT_COFFEE
I had a particular rationale for working on
this, and continuing to update it over the
years: it seemed to me that San Francisco
needed a better quality of tourist.
There were large amounts of bland and
boring businesses set up to rake in money
from visitors, but the more interesting
things in the city always seemed to be And keeping the guide
struggling, always on the verge of death. updated has been a
seriously depressing
affair-- for every one
cool place that opens,
five go out of business.
Roughly, my emphasis was:
Exploratorium/Wave Organ/Cliff House
Baker Beach
SOMA
Haight Street
North Beach/Chinatown
The Mission
plus a little on:
Berkeley
Noe Valley
And there I stopped. I tacked on that bit about Noe
Valley as a kind of in-joke
My mental model for the original because I lived there at time,
target audience was only going to and I was trying to direct the
be in town for a few weeks, which alt.gothic crowd to show up at
put a constraint on the amount of Alice's Restaurant across the
stuff I should reasonably cover-- street from my apartment.
I was continually thinking about But then, Noe Valley had (and to
adding sections on Japantown and some extent still has) some
Clement Street, but they never virtues, despite it's rep as a
quite made the cut, despite the halfway-house for suburbanites:
fact that they were the places I bookstores, Lovejoy's Tea, the
would actually hang out most often. Global Exchange outlet...
There were even some good record
stores up there, once upon a time.
(And Alice's was genuinely
a great place when it first
opened).
One of the more unique features of my
guide, I later realized, is that I was
willing to warn people about the
"bad neigborhoods" where they might
feel uncomfortble:
SCUMZOIDS
Your average tourist guide likes to
skip these things-- you don't want
to scare off the marks.
Since those days, it's become
clear that the San Francisco
dynamic has shifted to something
already familiar to denizens of
New York and Los Angeles: you want And if a neighborhood develops a
to keep quiet about the cool reputation as cool and artsy,
places, because they may get that's the kiss-of-death: it
over-exposed. Once a place is attracts people who seem to
discovered by the outsiders, it think they belong there and
can lose the things that made it sends real estate values way up,
worthwhile. which chokes off the things that
made it attractive.
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