San Francisco (last post) --- Neighborhood eatery

We discussed this before, the Riverside Café in two of its emanations,

(1) as a proper river-side café and
(2) as a hill-top café in Phuket town in Thailand,

"river-side" here being code for the hex value #00703C == Dartmouth Green == upmarket conversations in clipped voices at neighboring tables about Muffy who did not make partner at Overy & Allen == Chardonnay as default wine == chicken breast fillets served with sauce Hollandaise == checks that do or do not carry remarks to the effect that a 17% tip would be obligatory == and so on.

Now we're on our last day in San Francisco, we have a writer's blog after a productive morning, we hit the Castro District where old-fashioned in-your-face homosexuality is still en vogue, HIV and all, and we are on our way back home. The idea is to have dinner at the Chinese restaurant we've frequented so frequently during the last 2 months. But yesterday, on the way back to our apartment on Potrero Hill we walked past an outfit with a wooden sign saying "Neighborhood Eatery"---we were on 24th Street, between Mission an Potrero (street), a peek through the window convinced Michael that this is, in fact, a neighborhood café, and there's a person outside smoking and interrupting his cell-phone conversation and assuring us that the place is "great."

Neighborhood Eatery, interior

So, today, now, we walk along 24th Street again and I raise the subject of this "eatery" as an alternative to the Chinese restaurant. Chang, still mellow after my birthday yesterday doesn't really object but insists on studying the menu first. There's no menu outside to study, we have to enter the place---bistro layout, open kitchen, glasses, bottles, international semi-upmarket---to have a look at the menu.

__________________

"I would venture, folks, practically everywhere else in the world you eat better than in France."

__________________

The menu is incomprehensible to anybody living in France where dishes come in six or seven varieties (Steak frites, Magret de canard, Loup grillé, and so on), and (where dishes) are always accompanied by rice/potatoes/aïoli (don't ask). While we are at it: It's a well know fact that the French are the best cooks in the world, so they cook well BY DEFINITION, which means they have to make no-effort-what-so-ever-to-serve-drab-and-overpriced-fare-through-jaded-garçons-or-garçonettes who have more important things on their minds than to help their customers. I would venture, folks, practically everywhere else in the world you eat better than in France. It's Obama's fault, of course, because he's not only from Kenya, he's also French, as has been recently shown in a lengthy study from the Heritage Foundation.

San Francisco (15) The Warhol factory

Our title is misleading, as usual. And unfair to Warhol.

Anyhow, while we are at it: somewhere around 1966, the term Pop Art made it to Europe, and the name of its inventor, Andy Warhol. There were also pictures of the guy, and from the first picture I saw I fell in love with him, especially with his hair. Great, I thought, great, that's the hair I want. Blond, ebullient, expansive (the hair sticking out), extraneous even, subversive, inspired.

Andy Warhol: Self portrait

Andy Warhol died in 1987, in tabula, i.e., not the way you would have expected him to die after having watched too many clips of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground (one of the productions of his factory), or of Joe Dallesandro, the hunkiest hunk ever, another one of his productions, no, he died on the operating table.

San Francisco (14) --- Connubial bliss, Nordstrom, and so on

Nordstrom on Market Street, San Francisco

Michael A. to Nick Ch. (02 May 2014 07:25:14):

...just great to be in the US...so many ideas...this one came from some billboard for some San Francisco Law School...

“Certainly,” he says, “that’s why we are in the business of writing, isn’t it, to feel inspired, and by feeling inspired getting inspired, and by getting inspired feeling more inspired, and so on.”

“You sound like an expensive graduate course of something,” I say.

________________

Nick Ch. to Michael A.  (02 May 2014 07:26:50 -0700):

Are you still here?

________________

Michael A.. to Nick Ch. ( 02 May 2014 07:29:44 ):

...until May 10...

...Chang sits on the bed next to me (as we speak) and tells me he doesn't want to go back to Nordstrom (the department store) on Market Street, because he went to the toilet there which turned out to be cruising territory, and he fears the police will come next time and arrest him...

San Francisco (12) --- Bullit

While Chang and I were strolling through San Francisco yesterday, the conversation turned to the peculiarities of the street layout here, each street being its own turnpike, as it were, connecting A and B like Alpha Romeos would in the old days, no, wrong, we mean via the shortest route afforded by Euclidean geometry, straight, that is, straight, regardless of the third dimension---and the opportunities this affords to the cinematography of car chases. So here it is---you've certainly seen it a hundred times already---the car chase scene from Bullit, the 1968 movie with Steve McQueen:

San Francisco (11) --- Camp Meeker(2)

More from Redwooood Country north of the Bay Area where we are staying during the weekend, thanks to an invite of Karen, our landlady in San Francisco, to her cabin in Camp Meeker.

Karen's cabin in Camp Meeker

Connubial bliss inside Karen's cabin

San Francisco (10) --- Camp Meeker

À la recherche du temps perdu...along those lines: how does one manage to arrive in San Francisco? We apparently can't make it stick. So we're now in Camp Meeker, 1:30 hours north of SF, in serious Redwood country.

Easy

The view from the terrace

We already had dinner at the Bistrot des Garçon in nearby Occidental. 

San Francisco (9)

Harvey Milk, former (and assasinated) gay mayor of San Francisco

(Another picture from the superb artist Tony de Carlo, whom we discovered lately)

Go here for the previous San Francisco post

San Francisco (8) --- Lufthansa flight 454 (reposted)

We posted this once before, a year ago, in a post "not about erotic writing," and in blissful ignorance of our future. So here it is again, and this time it is about erotic writing, at least in the sense that it is about us, and our flight into the world capital of erotic writing:



It appears to be difficult to arrive in San Francisco once and for all, this is our 8th post already, but anyhow. Watch the clip, it's fascinating.

Go here for the previous SF post, and there for the next.

San Francisco (7) --- Pitch-O-rama (1)

We arrive at San Francisco SFO (San Francisco International Airport, why SFO?) and the international press, the paparazzi ("paps"), the adolescent girls and boys, all of them, there's a riot. A blogger with 390,000 page views comes all the way from Europe and there's a riot. Well, no, sorry, that was Seoul, Korea, the airport, when we got mixed up with a charismatic baseball player.

So we feel un-famous and under-appreciated and seek consolation on the internet and find a page belonging to the San Francisco Writer's Conference. We send them a message about feeling un-famous and under-appreciated and get a prompt reply pointing us to an upcoming pitchfest of the Women's National Book Association San Francisco Chapter on Saturday in the Women's building around the corner from where we reside. It would be an opportunity to "connect." We procrastinate, then sign up via Paypal.

Spoiler alert: a pitchfest is about pitching manuscripts to agents and publishers, and we're in possession of such a manuscript, the Green Eyes, gay romance/erotica, easily the most topical subject when it comes to Women's Lib. We're not, however, in possession of  a printer here in our temporary abode, and the battery of the laptop won't live for longer than a minute when unplugged. So we don't have any material to take to the event, not even a calling card or anything that could get agents and publishers interested in our work. Plus, one of the participating agents, Andy Ross, has a post on his blog about this: he, Andy, would never go to a pitchfest, not as a pitcher at least, since he wouldn't survive the humiliation of being turned down by his colleagues. That decides the case. We will go, but not pitch. Perhaps there's enough in it for another short story. That's what failed writers do, they write about failed writers. Do your research.

We're apprehensive nonetheless, and it starts early, at 8 AM, and it rains, and we overtip the taxi driver out of sheer apprehension. We expect a crowd of young women, multi-faceted, multi-racial, done up in neo-Afro-look, i.e., all looking like Angela Davis waiving Angela-Davis-inspired manuscripts---waiving their manuscripts at us, balding, aging, failed writers of gay porn---think of a wind farm during a hurricane.

Angela Davis

San Francisco (5) Potrero Hill

Potrero Hill, that's where we reside, on 1229 de Haro Street. "Potrero" means paddock in English, and the place probably was a paddock before the city took over. The neighborhood is still Spanish (mostly).

1229, de Haro Street --- we're on the second floor, left (Chang in the left corner) 

Opposite side of the street

San Francisco (4) Telegraph Avenue

We're in San Francisco now, which means that the first thing in the morning would be a trip to Telegraph Road, Oakland, CA, where Morning Glory is located, the KP-Asian Supermarket, where they sell Korean food.

The Korean supermarket on Telegraph Avenue

Oakland---you will possibly agree with us---has---or at least had---a notoriously bad reputation---because bad reputations are always notorious---especially next to San Francisco, the reputation---and now we know why.

What we didn't know at that point---or, more precisely, didn't remember---Michael Chabon's latest novel is set on Telegraph Road there---or Avenue---something about a record store and race etc.

Michael Chabon

And then we had a little connubial bliss with Chang---in the afternoon---who abruptly changed directions during a walk through the Mission District after a very brief verbal exchange (the bliss), and departed in the other direction, yelling a departing "f@@k you,  f@@k you," at us, so we went to the Castro district to find a new lover, and went into a bookstore to buy a new York Times, and the Staff's Choice of Book was Michael Chabon's new novel, and since Chabon is one of the new American authors we in fact did read---quite extensively by our standards---we picked up his new book and re-discovered---we had read a review---that it was set on Telegraph Avenue, whence the title of the book---spoiler alert---Telegraph Avenue. We feel---spoiler alert---part of new literary history now. Not yet Chang though, because I didn't tell him yet; we have, however---spoiler alert---reconciled.

Previous SF-post here.

San Francisco (3) Flight 370

Lets start with a picture:

 Malaysia Airline advertisement (as found on Facebook; perhaps you can explain to us why a normal Boing 777 has only two engines, instead of four)

Flight 370, that would be Malaysian Air, the missing plane. Not Flight 545 to San Francisco though, because that would be Lufthansa, our flight from Frankfurt.

You guessed right, our conspiracy theories would revolve around sex and crime, and our departure would be supposedly a real story (I mean, we would start with a real story), told by a stewardess (female flight attendant) who enters the cockpit---spoiler alert---never thought about this, no word is safe in English---and finds the autopilot on, and---spoiler alert---pilot and copilot in the nude, and in a significant embrace. They got fired, supposedly, the---no spoiler alert---fucking pilots. Perhaps they went on to work for Malaysian Air, and---spoiler alert (in the sense that the remainder of this sentence is real silly)---and had it in their contract that they would have to fly Flight 69 only. No, that's not what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that one fine day, namely on March 7---spoiler alert---that they forgot to switch the autopilot on.

Along those lines. In the meantime, let's marvel at the brilliance of our colleagues from the Huffpost blog, who use the following picture---spoiler alert

"I wonder where they are."

---to illustrate a post about the search for the missing plane.

Next SF post here. Previous SF post here.

San Francisco (2) ("Sex im Zeitalter seiner technischer Reproduzierbarkeit")

Right. "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter..." Even readers of The New Yorker will know, this was Walter Benjamin. What they don't know, what even I didn't know at the time, I went to school with Walter Benjamin, sort of, in the sense that the house of his (Walter's) parents was located right opposite to my primary school in Grunewald, Berlin, Germany. He was born there. I didn't know since I didn't know about Benjamin at the age of 6 through 11, and because the plaque that informs post-nazi Germany about his birthplace had not been in place so soon after the war.

Walter Benjamin

Reader's of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung will certainly know (about Benjamin), Germany's newspaper of record, although a bit less than the New York Times (the record), because they (the Frankfurters) had been leaning a bit too far to the right (then). They sound more balanced now (the FAZ), (are you still there?) (nice, isn't it, running your own blog, no anal copy editor to deal with), the layout has changed (the FAZ's), and square miles of its tree-based newspaper space are now dedicated to large, pictogrammatical pieces of artwork so that Germany's post-intellectual elite doesn't have to read so much. The German sounds different, too, a bit more modern. What sounds surprisingly old-fashioned is an article in the last weekend edition of the FAZ about sex and the internet. I didn't keep the copy of the paper, so this is from memory (stupid). (See below for more about Ampersant's hyper-parenthesization).

Not about gay erotic writing (Tony)

We know, we know, we should focus more; this has nothing to do with the mission of this blog. Anyhow, here it is, a Lufthansa Airbus 380 landing on San Francisco International.  And it doesn't blow up, the Airbus, there are no glitches, the pilots don't have sex (as they do in an anecdote we've heard from a credible source, the pilots flying together for the first time, and they really like each other, really, and then the flight attendant forgets to knock on the cockpit door (we are not making this up)), anyhow:




Did you watch it till the end? Pilots not having sex, right?

Update: When we posted this we had no idea that one day later we would go to San Francisco with this flight, LH 454, and we survived. Go here to see what happened.