Thoughts on San Fransisco

I am nothing but a walking pretense;

In French, to set the context or background of a setting, you must create an entirely new verb tense. Opposed to the English grammatical structure that constructs two separate words to articulate the context, (e.g. [was going, was eating]) French chooses to use an entirely separate verb tense. With no distinct beginning or end it's seemingly undefined and imperfect—the imparfait.

I suppose that is why I find it necessary that I provide the context from where I am feeling envious. I feel envious of the artists and writers of the 60's and 70's who were able to experience San Fransisco in its golden age of creative cultivation. While Joan Didion and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha were able to live in a city that was staked as the Jerusalem of self-expression, I live to see its remains as an increasingly barren city. Technically, I can walk down Haight-Ashbury and find remains of the hippie counterculture movement within psychedelia murals and bong smoke, but still, these things are simply dismembered, recycled corpses of its true significance. Even the vintage consignment stores on Haight that I guiltily frequent are a disrespect to the radicality of self-expression the street previously represented. Even the definition of individual self-expression within San Fransisco fashion has been completely dismembered within a digital age of constant consumption and cursory media trends. Nowadays, vintage is not appreciated for its valance of age and ability to encapsulate history, it has simply become a commodification for a corporatization of style that the youth utilize as a stratified badge. 

Some might find strong comparisons between San Fransisco in the 70's and its current state. One might argue that the hippie radicalist movement inflated a use of crack and black tar heroin, inciting a violent spark in crime rates, quite similar to the fentanyl crisis San Fransisco currently suffers from. There are certainly parallels regarding citizen policing and ineffectual enforcement in both past and current decades, but something starkly contrasts the origins of instability. True, the normalization of drug use and exponential tolerance against former societal barriers inevitably snowballed into criminality rates--but it stemmed from resistance against commercialism and mainstream values. The rise of Silicone Valley's tech culture in the 1980's immediately crushed spiraling crime rates with hopes of opportunity. Its saving grace became California's Manifest Destiny with promises of class mobility and a chance to consciously define a near future. Its pragmatism most likely appealed to the San Fransiscan masses who were sick of weed and the liberal hippies, but in a sense, it crushed all moral radicalism. It crushed a critical counterculture's disregard for blatant materialism to replace it with the exact corrupt dominant entity it was formed to resist. How ironic is it that the rise of Silicone Valley built off of hopes of diminishing unemployment has come to be a critical factor in San Fransisco's sloping downfall? Obviously, there are a myriad of institutional failures that also account for its skyrocketing rates of crime and homelessness, but where do the institutions come from? They come from a system of American politics that simply functions to exist within itself, to maintain its meaninglessness and absence of true connection with the standard citizen. 

Perhaps I have a tendency to overromanticize the past and yearn to live in an institution that dedicates the financial means to support the creative community. But as an avid consumer of works from artists like Ruth Asawa or writers like Joan Didion who lived in San Fransisco during a different time, it feels fragmentizing to witness the ghost of a city within a horror of disorder. It's quite harder to see the end of things rather than the beginning, and the beginning of my envy exists within the realization of the meaninglessness of experience. You aren't aware unless you refuse to partake in the paranoia of the time.