Halloween in San Francisco
Starr, Kevin
Kevin Starr HALLOWEEN IN SAN FRANCISCO The melting pot of America' s deranged Id. To live in San Francisco these days, as I do, is to make one's home in an Ozland of the grotesque. Has any...
...disenfranchised assistant professors of sociology...
...Here arises another source of conflict...
...His San Francisco-set novel, Land's End, has just been issued by McGraw-Hill...
...San Francisco used to say something about the charm of life and the persistence of high urban ambitions in our American civilization...
...The recently enacted provision for the election of supervisors (councilmen) by districts was engineered by this group...
...aspiring rock musicians, a greasy copy of Rolling Stone tucked into the torn pocket of their patched jeans...
...The city's motley population-here in search of instant gratification-turns, of course, to the taxpayer as the court of first resort...
...Another gives a champagne al fresco luncheon for some two dozen of her closest friends in Union Square-which luncheon is soon set upon by a howling mob of plebeians who pelt the proceedings with garbage until the police arrive on the scene...
...term)-an elegant, lovely city, proud of its ramshackle frontier past, tolerant, loving the pleasures of sense, and not unaware of certain finer imperatives of civic existence...
...The second stage is economic consolidation-after which, but not before, the recently arrived Asian community will make its presence felt...
...In the old days, the Frank Norris-Jack London days, the saloons of San Francisco were famous for their sumptuous free lunches, set up for one and all at the far end of the bar: mounds of oysters, shrimp the size of a man's fist, sourdough French bread swabbed in country butter, hard-boiled eggs, sturgeons' eggs from the northern counties-all free for the asking...
...San Francisco, on the other hand, is rushing headlong towards a certain globalization of its corporate/fiscal life...
...Come unto me," says that ghostly Statue of Liberty-like lady, the Spirit of San Francisco, who sits (in drag-she's a trans-vestite) cross-legged in a chemise and black fish-net stockings atop the abandoned hulk of Alcatraz, "come unto me- and act out your deepest desire...
...Despite its spectacular topography, its storied past, its eccentric present, one takes solace these days in everything that is prosaic about San Francisco-normal, that is...
...The public apparatus of the city, therefore, tends to be dominated by ideologues with a taste for intrigue...
...Thus far, the significant and growing Asian sector-Chinese, Filipino, and, of late, Southeast Asian--remains (to use a useful cliche) a sleeping giant...
...For various reasons, San Francisco is now the melting pot of America's deranged Id...
...Middle-class white homosexuals are pushing poor blacks out of their neighborhoods, indeed out of the city...
...Indeed, the Beaux Arts grandeur of San Francisco's public buildings betokens a city that, until recently at least, envisioned itself as a citadel of Euro-American civilization facing the Far East and the Pacific Basin: a colony, if you will, of that persistent Mediterraneanism that has always accounted in the past for the best of the California experiment...
...Hayden is a frequent visitor in town, by the way: here most recently to lead a downtown Secretaries' Liberation rally on the lunch hour...
...All of this should sound familiar to any inner-city resident...
...or they come to establish operations of their own in a city still possessed of its frontier vitality...
...would-be Frantz Fanons, soaked in ethnic studies of various hues...
...Each city of any consequence is possessed of a certain mythic identity...
...The best and the worst of America came here and created a city that, despite all its failings, despite its narcissistic provinciality, yet managed to maintain its position on the roster of the significant cities of the world...
...Signs of their vitality are everywhere...
...At the same time, the DA opens his own investigation into the financial affairs of his arch-rival, a supervisor running for mayor, charging him with receiving $1,000 of laundered cash from an entrepreneur who is under investigation by the City Attorney's office for unduly influencing certain city commissioners to grant him an absurdly favorable lease on a previously unused pier, where he em-placed about a hundred restaurants and fast-food outlets, most of which are losing their shirts...
...Over 100,000 homosexuals, for instance, have arrived over this past decade, turning San Francisco into the international capital of the homosexual subculture...
...A local socialite spends $50,000 on 15 dinner plates...
...This group owes nothing to Downtown, despite the fact that Downtown employs most of its constituents...
...They come in search of employment with the major institutions of medicine, law, engineering, commerce, banking, and insurance headquartered here...
...They act out their every fantasy -elsewhere suppressed in the name of patriotism, good breeding, common sense, or self-respect...
...I hope not...
...Meanwhile, a confrontation is shaping up between the forces of globalization and localization...
...Americans have flocked here in order to give a local habitation and a name to the most obscure prompting of their subconscious, hitherto repressed by the more exacting norms that obtain outside San Francisco...
...District elections allow for the victory, usually by slender margins, of Left-oriented supervisors...
...One luncheon guest, a member of the city's flourishing psychiatric establishment, tries to calm the mob with a Mark Antonyesque speech, in the course of which he points out that he too was once poor, but through hard work made it up the ladder of the free-enterprise system...
...The jury returns a verdict of voluntary manslaughter...
...unpublished poets...
...Members of this older Americanized group are already prominent in business, the professions, and politics...
...street musicians...
...Meanwhile, a grand jury is investigating charges that the District Attorney received $4,000 in cash from a labor leader, who was himself shot in the head some 15 months ago by unknown assailants-most likely connected to the labor movement...
...Extremes of thought, word, and deed are everywhere in evidence...
...con men...
...Foreign investment is high, especially in downtown real estate...
...A city supervisor guns down the Mayor and one of his fellow councilmen in cold blood...
...These sorts envision the city, no doubt correctly, as offering the only possibility in the United States of the governmental/political apparatus of a major American city coming under the control of a united Jane Fonda front...
...Could it be that I am mistaken in my faith in the prosaic, in the ordinary aspiration...
...Asian immigrants are in the main avid in their pursuit of employment and property- especially property, which they are buying, buying, buying with their hard-earned cash and with funds channeled into San Francisco from (so some suggest) Mainland China...
...honky-tonk boys-preternaturally thin, acne-ridden, and red-eyed, a pack of Camel cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of their T-shirts...
...Has any American city of recent memory ever been subjected to such a succession of mad events...
...Jim Jones, former chairman of our Housing Authority-murders some three hundred of its children, then commits the most heinous mass suicide of recorded history...
...the prematurely paroled...
...dopers...
...In Guyana, a colony of San Franciscans -led by the Rev...
...There are many who have come here these past years to do their best to found the People's Republic of San Francisco...
...The District Attorney, for instance, has recently sanctioned homosexual sex clubs-bars, that is, that in between sips of Jack Daniels offer anonymous sex between consenting adults in back rooms or (this being lifted directly from Petronius' Satyricon) in specially constructed booths, so configured (the exact specifications elude me) that lust-eager participants might offer each other erotic satisfaction without benefit of introduction or even visual encounter above the belt...
...Boston, for instance, is Brahmin and bookish...
...Cafe Society, meanwhile, amuses itself with a let-em-eat-cake insouciance...
...Los Angeles is Show Biz...
...joggers in striped jogging suits and Adidas shoes- San Francisco has, of late, offered a haven to them all, wholly, without reservation...
...Trade and commerce" with the Pacific Basin and the Far East are on the increase...
...Thus far, Asian immigrants are disporting themselves, in a classic American pattern of cultural isolation while learning the language and tools of their new environment...
...line...
...The Chinese community of San Francisco, here since the late 1840s, has already in large part gone through this process...
...Aging Aquarians, nourished on a diet of Marxist-Leninist cliche...
...Along with the kooks, young men and women of talent and enterprise are flocking to San Francisco from across the nation...
...the in-and-out habitues of halfway houses for those who, in Evelyn Waugh's phrase, "have long since given up the unequal struggle...
...Like ancient Rome in its decline, San Francisco is a city of bread and circuses, in which interest group after interest group, all self-appointed to voice the guttural demands of vox populi, seeks its share of the city's billion-dollar budget, administered (for want of a better term) by some 30,000 civil servants: some 10,000 more than the entire county of San Diego (the city of San Diego, second largest in the state, included) finds necessary...
...Nevertheless, these excesses and insanities coexist with the larger life of the city, which offers a hope too often obscured by the public lunacy...
...A horde of outraged homosexuals proceeds to sack the city while the police stand idly by, ordered not to interfere...
...The one exception, most obviously, is a certain taste for gang warfare among juveniles, carried over from Hong Kong...
...All in all, the bread-and-butter ambitions of the new Asian immigrants tend to stabilize San Francisco...
...Compared to, say, Cleveland or Detroit, San Francisco is paradise...
...The homosexual community also displays this same rage for real estate...
...What happened...
...community organizers, searching for a community to organize...
...Market Street, the city's main thoroughfare, refurbished in some 30 million dollars' worth of Victorian brick and gas lamps, teems with a madhouse population in search of an off-off-Broadway revival of Marat-Sade...
...members of commedia deWarte troupes devoted to guerrilla theater...
...dropouts...
...Chicago is the Real Thing, the stacker of wheat and the player with railroads...
...A growing sector of the city is composed of technocratic managerial-elite types, having little time for local politics...
...Mrs...
...But then again, the supervisor who slaughtered the Mayor and the councilman came, demo-graphically speaking, from this very same prosaic San Francisco...
...Could it be that San Francisco, as it has in,the past, is once again serving as the testing ground for new varieties of social turmoil and social change-in this case, a very bitter battle to be waged between the ordinary middle class and the radical chic...
...The amenities of life- opera, symphony, ballet, fine cuisine, a flourishing museum culture, a spectacular park system-are all had in abundance...
...Others have also arrived en masse...
...untouched by goofy ideology or murderous rage...
...The Free Lunch has now moved to City Hall...
...It used to be such a nice place, San Francisco: a provincial city, true, but a High Provincial city (to use Josiah Royce's Kevin Starr writes a daily column for the San Francisco Examiner...
...In this case, whole areas are being bought up and renovated by homosexual San Franciscans caught up in the process of ''gentrifica-tion," the return of middle-class residents to the inner city now underway throughout the United States...
...The Mayor at first backs the decision of the police chief in not taking action against the rioters, then reverses herself and fires him- effective after the forthcoming mayoral elections...
...Property, as Alexander Hamilton believed, tends to confer stability, which San Francisco sorely needs...
...The DA hotly denies these charges...
...city planners...
...He does, however, admit to enjoying a $1,300 dinner at the Sans Souci in Washington with said labor leader and assorted cronies...
...runaways...
...macrobiotic diet freaks...
...Great towers of steel and glass now dominate the downtown skyline, attesting the once sleepy city's recent rise to prominence as a headquarters of corporate power...
...and so forth...
...San Francisco is, among other things, the most Asian city in the United States, after Honolulu...
...Jwo summers ago, rival Chinese gangs shot it out in a local restaurant, killing five...
...The police chief is photographed at the annual Hookers' Ball, sharing a smile with Wonder Whore, a transvestite given to parading about in her own version of the comic strip/TV heroine's work costume...
...This is the exception, however, not the rule...
...New York is the Big Time...
Vol. 12 • October 1979 • No. 10
