Corrosion of Culture?

          Rebecca Solnit's Hollow City presents to us a perspective of San Francisco that shows that it has suffered from gentrification, experiencing a corrosion of its unique culture that inspired the Beat poets and other progressive individuals in the 60’s. As a result of this phenomenon, yuppies now inhabit the city that was once friendly and welcoming to many impoverished lifestyles decades ago. Similar to what our friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti critiques about the city, new inflated real-estate prices have driven out aspiring artists and replaced them with privileged, white families with no generational connection to the city’s history. Without the status as an underdog-friendly setting, San Francisco’s culture has recently transformed into a monogamous one, practically eradicating multiculturalism. Slowly, San Francisco, "mutating from a blue-collar port city of manual labor and material goods to a white-collar center of finance,” abandons the welcoming, natural characteristic of St. Francis, whom the city is named after (33).
         Maxine Hung Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey offers a perspective of San Francisco that seems much more credible to me because it is one from the inside out, as opposed to Solnit’s outside in perspective. In this work, Solnit's Wittman Ah-Singh, struggling to find an identity that encompasses both his Chinese and American-ness, manages to find identity in San Francisco’s literary culture. Through his immersion with the city, Wittman comes to understand that identity, particularly his (because of his hybridity), cannot necessarily be reduced to represent one idea. This book shows that although San Francisco’s old culture may be fading, there are many remnants of it that can be used not only to identify and indulge one’s self with, but also to advance old concepts of culture to create new ones.

Berkeley: An Asset of the SF Contado

For this contado assignment I chose a very popular city just the next freeway exit over from Orinda, my home town.

Having acquired an attitude of a left activist city—especially because of its own University of California—Berkeley’s contribution to San Francisco’s contado is most strongly rooted in its political influence, but also provides essential educational and economic resources for San Francisco.

Berkeley’s status as a major Bay Area city was surprisingly first sparked by the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, seeing as it was one of the few towns in the area to remain predominantly unaffected. During this time, thousands fled to the East Bay from San Francisco and other affected areas to settle in Berkeley. After the massive influx of civilians, Berkeley changed its status from the Town of Berkeley to the City of Berkeley. World War II brought on the next major surge of attention to Berkeley, when many Americans moved to the Bay Area in general to work for the major companies of the war industry, such as Kaiser Shipyards in nearby Richmond.

Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue is part of the most populated area of Berkeley (mostly due to the high concentration of UC Berkeley students) and has emerged as the focal point of the hippie movement in this city, which leaked through the bay from San Francisco in the 60s. Today, Berkeley remains one of the most overwhelmingly Democratic cities in the United States. Because of Berkeley’s UC, the city saw a recognizable growth of activism in the 1960’s. The University’s centralized campus has historically proven it to serve as a place of collaboration amongst outraged students demanding change, which still holds to be true today. One of the most controversial issues of this time was in 1964, when students protested the banning of political literature on campus, popularly known as the Free Speech Movement. A recent example of Berkeley’s student activism was a tree sit-in started in 2006, which ended unsuccessfully in September of this year. The protest was to protect a grove of oak trees where the University planned to build a new sports center.

This link to a video shows the arrest of a Berkeley student after he opts to climb down the tree he had sat in as part of the 600+ day sit-in. I actually happened to be in the area in September earlier this year and watched dozens of people crowd around the site of the tree as the rest of the sitters refused to come down.  Many police officials surrounded the area.

Berkeley’s history of transportation services into San Francisco marks it as a suburb that is home to the many businessmen and women of San Francisco who commute into the City. The rise of housing costs and sudden development of upscale housing in the “Berkeley Hills”, first sparked in the 1980s, has left Berkeley with some of the most expensive homes in the nation, ideal for many successful businesspeople of the Bay Area. The first transportation service from Berkeley into San Francisco was the Central Pacific’s Berkeley Branch Railroad, constructed in 1876. Nearly thirty years later, Key System provided the first electric commuter system into San Francisco from Berkeley. Today, thousands commute daily amongst the areas of the entire Bay Area, including Berkeley and San Francisco, by the majorly utilized BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). Since it first began operation in 1972, BART has proven to be a necessary tool for tourists and bay area locals alike, and is now the fifth busiest rapid transit system in the US.

http://www.bart.gov/

This link to the official BART website includes information regarding routes, BART news, and a “rider guide” for anybody who wishes to explore the Bay Area via BART (I highly recommend it!). Below is a map of all the BART routes. As you can see, there are several trains connecting the cities of Berkeley and San Francisco.

Overall, Berkeley is a truly unique city in that its culture has been fairly preserved over the decades. It has remained nearly unscathed by the phenomenon of industrialization that Ferlinghetti and Brautigan blame for the destruction of San Francisco’s independent culture. If one walks the streets of the famous Telegraph Avenue, independent shops and boutiques can be found flourishing. Although Safeways and Andronicos markets are established in the area, so are independent marketplaces such as the popular Berkeley Bowl.  Furthermore, unlike San Francisco, Berkeley is still heavily thought of as a hippie citadel (and deservedly so), whereas San Francisco is rapidly transforming into a habitat for affluent folk.

Here are some other helpful links if you want to know more about what was or was not said above:

http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/Home.aspx

The official website of the City of Berkeley.  Provides historical information as well as practical information for your future visit.

http://berkeley.edu

The official UC Berkeley website.  Learn about the renowned programs of the university that many San Francisco natives attend.  The Public service and community section provides a lot of useful information regarding the university's interaction with its Bay Area community.

Taking pride in its reputation, UC Berkeley's website features a section dedicated to informing individuals of its activist history.

The FSM-A website provides information on the Free Speech Movement sparked by the students of UC Berkeley in 1964.  It provides information about contributing individuals of this movement as well as background information on the movement, including what started it and what resulted from it.  Pictures and videos can also be found throughout the site.

Spoiled Trout

In what appears to be a novel, but in fact is a critique of a hybrid world in the company between insdustrialism and nature, Richard Brautigan writes of a world caught between its natural form and urbanization. In the most natural form of the world there is trout fishing in America, but this leisurely past time of mankind has been hampered, even replaced, by industrial growth and the expansion of capitalism. Brautigan introduces this replacement as a phenomenon that is unrealized by mankind in his piece “Knock on Wood: (Part Two),” where he places himself in the shoes of a young, naieve boy determined to go trout fishing. Today’s generation is comprised of these naieve children, born into a world compromised by our forefathers’ destruction of nature. We are naieve because the tales of America’s natural fruit—trout—have deceived us into believing it’s still there and we can “almost feel [the] cold spray” of the troutstream (4). Some of us can even enjoy the beauty of these waterfalls via our deception: “[h]ow beautiful the field looked and the creek that came pouring down in a waterfall off the hill” (5). For many, this distanced enjoyment of life is satisfying, but the only way to discover the true composition of America is to personally search for it, which only a few (children in this case) set out to do. Brautigan recalls when he himself made this realization: when he mistook a woman for a stream of trout.

Trout Fishing in America represents a world where the nullification of mankind has become the norm, a process that harldy anybody seeks to reverse. Many people are indifferent to nature’s beauty by being blinded by their success in a material world, such as the rich man in “Sea, Sea Rider.” “These things make no difference to him. He’s rich. He has 3,859 Rolls Royces,” says a woman to the young boy when explaining the man’s indifference to sex (23). This man’s satisfaction from his economic success has left him disinterested in sex—one of the many trout in America. The man’s materialism has consumed him, leaving him desensitized to emotion, neither looking happy or sad. Emotions are the essence of humanity. This desensification shows that not only is the world becoming more unnatural, but man is becoming less human. The boy and woman represent the antithesis of the man, having had enjoyed the fruits of nature, “neither...[having] performed like millionaires in bed” (25). Ultimately, Brautigan is advocating that what results from materialism is a truly selfish being, interested only in self-pleasure, disabling the procreation of man.

America must stop this destructive trend now, Brautigan implies, because it cannot be reversed. The belly-up fish in “The Last Year the Trout Came up Hayman Creek” are the non-replenishable fruits of America. Once all the lonely old men (those free of urbanization) who appreciate the fish are gone, the trout will disappear and will not come back. The new wave of mankind may try to artifically instill these precious trout into the world, and to distanced people it may look like the fish are swimming, like the stairway in “Knock on Wood,” but up close the river is lifeless. America must realize the disappearance of its nation’s fruit and learn to appreciate it before it has all been rotted away.

Two Scavengers...Two Beauties

Ferlinghetti’s poem “Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes” depicts San Francisco as a place of economic opportunity and daily interaction among its socially divided classes.

One of the most easily noticeable elements of the poem is how it is visually organized. The lines alternate from the left to the right side of the page, creating a visual representation of the opposition of the “Scavengers” and the “Beautiful People.” Like the two cars at the stop sign, the opposing lines of the text pull together, making it hard to distinguish which is which. For the time they are stopped at the red light, these two very different types of San Franciscans come into contact with each other and for a second their realities seem impermanent.  While the cars are together at the red light, the scavengers gaze at a "odorless TV ad" for what Ferlinghetti makes out to be the perfect lifestyle.  Clearly the men want to transcend their scavenger status and live life as one of the “beautiful people.” No longer would the men have to scavenge around together, wearing red plastic blazers; they could leisurely ride with whom they choose, in real blazers.  The poem ends with a bit of uncertainty, and left me wondering when and how the cars left--who pulled away first and who got ahead?  I suppose he wants us to choose our own destiny.

Despite the distance between the two couples in this poem, it seems like Ferlinghetti is trying to promote San Francisco as the land that the many envision America to be—a place of freedom and economic opportunity. As he mentions in the last lines of the text, it is the “high seas/of this democracy” that enables fluidity between classes that make it seem as though “anything at all [is] possible” (60).  Wasn't he just complaining in the earlier pages about the new, yuppie lifestyle San Francisco has grown into?