San Francisco - Alison Bing [17]
The paper fortunes of the dot-com boom disappeared on one nasty NASDAQ-plummeting day, March 10, 2000, leaving service-sector employees and 26-year-old former vice-presidents alike without any immediate job prospects. City dot-com revenues vanished; a 1999 FBI probe revealed that a sizable windfall ended up in the pockets of real-estate developers. Real-estate prices have yet to return to earth, despite the 2008 mortgage crisis.
But true to shape-shifting form, San Francisco has morphed again with Web 2.0 start-ups and social media ventures like San Francisco–based Twitter and Palo Alto’s Facebook. Recession has slowed the flow of venture capital, but in shiny new glass towers in Mission Bay, biotech start-ups are still hanging out their shingles. Biotech is nothing new here: in 1976, an upstart company called Genentech was founded over beer at a San Francisco bar, then got to work cloning human insulin and introducing the hepatitis B vaccine. California voters approved a $3 billion bond measure in 2004 for stem cell research, and by 2008, California had become the biggest funder of stem cell research, with Mission Bay as its designated headquarters. With the US in recession, it seems impossible that San Francisco could initiate another boom – but if history is any indication, the impossible is almost certain to happen in San Francisco.
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ARTS
Logic is insufficient to really understand San Francisco: for that, you’ll need art. This town has plenty of it, and a superabundance of creative friction where tectonic plates collide. Poetry fights the law and wins; new technology rubs up against old-school craftsmanship; and Victoriana, high modernism and California Arts and Crafts clash in the best possible way. You can hardly throw a pebble in this town without hitting a writer, though it might get you cursed in verse. Since 1970, San Francisco has consistently stayed in the top five US cities for the caliber and sheer number of fine artists, musicians, dancers and independent filmmakers – a point of local pride you’ll no doubt hear repeated on your visit.
When San Francisco’s latest creative foray doesn’t quite work, ouch, you’ll know it – but when it all comes together, you’ll swear you feel a tremor underfoot as reality is cut loose from its mundane moorings. In its most shining moments, this town lives up to San Francisco poet laureate Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s words in ‘The Changing Light’: ‘And in that vale of light/the city drifts/anchorless upon the ocean.’
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SAN FRANCISCO REQUIRED READING
Poetry
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg – each line of Ginsberg’s epic title poem is an ecstatic improvised mantra, chronicling the waking dreams of the generation that rejected postwar conformity.
Time and Materials by Robert Hass – these Pulitzer Prize–winning poems by the Berkeley-based US poet laureate don’t seem to have been written so much as released onto the page, where every word takes to the air like a seagull.
A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti – this slim 1958 collection by San Francisco’s poet laureate is an indispensable doorstop for the imagination, letting fresh air and ideas circulate.
Nonfiction & Memoir
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion – like hot sun through San Francisco fog, Didion’s 1968 essays burn through the hippie haze to reveal glassy-eyed teenage revolutionaries adrift in the Summer of Love.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac – the book Kerouac banged out on one long scroll of paper in a San Francisco attic over a couple of sleepless months of 1951 woke up America.
San Francisco Stories: Great Writers on the City edited by John Miller – 150 years of San Francisco impressions. Jack London’s 1906 earthquake reports, Jack Kerouac’s attempts to hold a Downtown day job, Anne Lamott’s send-up of pretentious cafes and more.
Hell’s Angels: A Strange