Photo by Amy Stein

Weather, buildings, venues, restaurants, diversity, crowds, mood: these things are not ideals or measures of success, but they're treated that way. They should be kept in the realm of the ordinary. Ecstatic gestures based on them are neglectful, and moving for those things is an ecstatic gesture. San Francisco, Portland, Austin, Brooklyn, Paris, Berlin: leave these places alone. They will be sites of failed domestication; if you are considering them, it is as a destination city and in search of greater things. Those greater things will not appear, and the dissatisfaction is creating ghost towns.

We move, we search, we do not find so we search harder; we've turned to our cultural relics, to kitsch, and reproduced them with playfulness. The manufacture was designed for quick disposal and the subsequent vacuum is apparent. Superlatives replaced loving attention and bred atypical complaints: I do not want to hear how great your daily music blog download is, unicorns are not a conversation piece, shave that goddamn mustache, etc. The core complaint is that nothing is taken seriously except the avoidance of seriousness, and that should be bullshit; of all places, that attack should be bullshit. We in destination cities came here for a reason, some of us for a raison d'etre, the reason, and the defensive jokiness over an idealism that hasn't taken clear form is breeding extreme self consciousness, seclusion, separation. Hordes of people in one place searching for something better have not produced a de facto answer, but momentum exists. An approach exists.

In a San Francisco bathroom

That is why I argue, stay put. These places may treat themselves with irony, but it's a stall tactic, a mass nervous gesture. It does not undermind the basic attentiveness or potential of the people. San Francisco is a special place, even without the presence of a top down concept as it saw in the late 60's -- in fact this is much more interesting, because the chance for organic growth among bright, talented, open minded people exists within a very thin layer of concept holding it all together. Yet right now it's immature. I listen to people in bars and cafes, their truth-talk dips far into the confessional and there's nothing of interest there. I understand why my friends are leaving. The speaker's talk does not match the education or capacity for insight that we know the speaker to have. These are lost souls biding their time with pettiness, but that does not mean the future holds no refinement.

I argue these things to myself, but I should reach out to you. If there is to be no clear answer, no avenue for objective truth, if we're skeptical that money and degrees are the measure of a person's worth, then our subjectivities require a new discourse and our truth-talk needs a radical new openness that treats judgment as fallable but indifference as something far far worse. The image of beauty is fading and the most brilliant people I know are being swallowed by a void in direction. Beauty must be re-imagined, re-articulated, it deserves all of our energy. We should not feel embarrassed or wait for another's lead. The restlessness of my generation needs to plant its feet and use its wanderlust to imagine the horizon, to create it. I mean this especially for those of us here in San Francisco. Our scavenger days are over.

Freedom

"You look like a preacher," the driver said. "That hat looks like a preacher's hat."

"It ain't," Haze said, and leaned forward and gripped the back of the front seat. "It's just a hat."

They stopped in front of a small one-story house between a filling station and a vacant lot. Haze got out and paid his fare through the window.

"It ain't only the hat," the driver said. "It's a look in your face somewheres."

"Listen," Haze said, tilting the hat over one eye, "I'm not a preacher."

"I understand," the driver said. "It ain't anybody perfect on this green earth of God's, preachers nor nobody else. And you can tell people better how terrible sin is if you know from your own personal experience."

Haze put his head in at the window, knocking the hat accidentally straight again. He seemed to have knocked his face straight too for it became completely expressionless. "Listen," he said, "get this: I don't believe in anything."

The driver took the stump of cigar out of his mouth. "Not in nothing at all?" he asked, leaving his mouth open after the question.

"I don't have to say it but once to nobody," Haze said.

The driver closed his mouth and after a second he returned the piece of cigar to it. "That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.

--- Flannery O'Connor

I live near el mar
it's for the birds

I sat next to a little girl and her mother on the plane back from Denver. They spoke Spanish to each other until the girl stretched out across both seats, her feet against my leg and her head on her mother's lap, and slept. I read my book and didn't say much. I never talk on airplanes, and to avoid conversation I don't take off my headphones until it's time to collect my luggage. This flight was an exception. I had listened to enough music for one week during the festival, and as it turns out, the hum of a turbine can be comforting.

When we started our descent into San Francisco, my ears blocked and everything sounded as if I were underwater. That's right when the mother asked what I was reading. It was a collection of articles by a Mexican journalist, Alma Guillermoprieto. It sparked a discussion about Cuba, Columbia, Venezula, freedom, rancor, and for the longest stretch of conversation, religion. With my ears blocked it felt like I was talking to her and to myself at the same time and I kept yawning to undo the condition. It wouldn't go away. That night I fell asleep with blocked ears, and woke up with my hearing restored.

"I am very convinced of my Catholicism," she told me. I respectfully told her I was brought up Catholic, which was all I needed to say. She was a very bright woman, 46, and quite beautiful, a trait her children were fortunate enough to inherit. Besides the girl to my right, she had two boys who would walk the ailse to talk to their mother and kiss her forehead.

When it was time to depart, she said God Bless.

I am considering a move to Marseille
I will learn french

I am considering a move to Marfa
I will make music