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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
adding sections on Japantown and But then, Noe Valley had (and to
Clement Street, but they never some extent still has) some
quite made the cut, despite the virtues, despite it's rep as a
fact that they were the places I halfway-house for suburbanites:
would actually hang out most often. bookstores, Lovejoy's Tea, the
Global Exchange outlet...
There were even some good record
stores up there, once upon a time.
(And Alice's Restaurant was
really good place when it
first opened).
One of the more unique features of my
guide, I later realized is, that I was
willing to tell warn people about the
"bad neigborhoods" where they might
feel uncomfortble:
SCUMZOIDS
Your average tourist guide likes to
skip these things-- 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 And if a neighborhood
Los Angeles: you want to keep quiet about the develops a reputation
cool places, because they may get over-exposed. as cool and artsy,
Once a place is discovered by the outsiders, it that's the kiss-of-
can lose the things that made it worthwhile. death-- it sends real
estate values way up,
as it attracts people
who *think* they want
to be somewhere like
that...
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