Visions of SF

Solnit's Hollow City paints a portrait of a San Francisco that is culturally barren. She rages against the stereotypical image of San Francisco as a liberal, artistic enclave. Instead, her image of San Francisco is one of increasing gentrification, dot-com industry takeover, and cultural spaces being razed to make room for hip nightclubs that cater to a white middle-class patronage. Much of her argument is based on interviews of San Francisco working-class residents and anecdotes about her friends' experiences. But according to an October 16, 2008 article from San Francisco's Sun Reporter, "San Francisco became the first American city to make substantial reparations for the racist city policies that were embodied in urban renewal[...when] The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously last week to give housing priority to over 5,000 former residents of Fillmore and Hunters Point that were displaced from the city in the 1950s through the '70s due to San Francisco Redevelopment Agency use of eminent domain" ("SF Supervisors"). You can (probably) read the rest of this article here once you are logged onto the UCSC library system. Perhaps the state of affairs isn't so bleak after all? Also, although she gives accounts of dwindling minority populations, her claims aren't backed up by actual census data ("Numbers"). Her vision certainly carries clout, but I'd like to see her answer the questions she asks in her conclusion about why quality of life is going down and how power and resources ought to be distributed. If you're going to be a cynic, at least have a better idea.

Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey chronicles Whitman's experiences as a Chinese-American in San Francisco. While the diction is rather grim and has an almost palpable texture of grittiness, it is nevertheless not the vision of deadness that Solnit presents. Instead, San Francisco becomes a dynamic space of dialogue and negotiation between seemingly contradictory identities and cultures, the essence of a creative space. This vision of San Francisco speaks to Solnit's vision in that Solnit doesn't have Whitman's dual perspective, half-outsider in two different communities. Instead, Solnit is quite the insider: there is no internal negotiation to mirror the outer negotiation that is the space of San Francisco. The result is that she represents only one element of the negotiation, the starving artist who fears technological advancement. Thus, her vision of the city is necessarily one-sided and "hollow", whereas Tripmaster Monkey's, although also cynical at points, is nevertheless dynamic.


Works Cited

"S.F. Supervisors Award Displaced REsidents Housing Priority." Sun Reporter. San Francisco, CA: Oct. 16, 2008. pp. 1-2.

"Numbers Of African Americans In San Francisco Increasing." Sun Reporter. San Francisco, Calif.: Apr. 10, 2008. Vol. 65, Iss. 15; pg. 1, 2 pgs

Other articles of interest

NAACP To Hear Report On Out-Migration Of Blacks From S.F. Anonymous. Sun Reporter. San Francisco, Calif.: Jan. 24, 2008. Vol. 65, Iss. 4; pg. 2, 1 pgs

The Fight Over New Power Plants In Southeast San Francisco Continues
Anonymous. Sun Reporter. San Francisco, Calif.: May 8, 2008. Vol. 65, Iss. 19; pg 2, 1pgs

Vallejo, Cal-i-forn-I-A

The site of present-day Vallejo, California has been part of the San Francisco military contado since 1844 when it came under the possession of Mexican General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo as part of Rancho Soscol. General Vallejo had close ties to San Francisco, having been Commander of the Presidio of San Francisco and overseeing the military base’s construction, and was a major player in the state’s constitutional convention. Upon California’s induction into statehood, the general donated 156 acres of Rancho Soscol to become the capitol city, the eponymous Vallejo. Located about 25 miles northeast of San Francisco, the view of the city from Vallejo’s Sulfur Springs Mountain is sighted as a major reason for its establishment as capitol between 1851 and 1853.
Shortly after the state legislature and accompanying settlement left the area, the U.S. Navy purchased Mare Island, a peninsula separated from Vallejo by the Napa River, making it the first permanent naval establishment in the west in 1854 and bringing attention back to the area. The shipyard and naval base is a concrete expression of Manifest Destiny, built in response to the 1849 Gold Rush in order to secure US control over the Pacific coastline. It provided both ships and rescue workers for San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake, not to mention military protection to the entire Pacific coastline. The Mare Island Naval Shipyard quickly became the fulcrum of Vallejo’s economy, employing as many as 40,000 people at it’s largest during WWII. Shipbuilding jobs did not necessitate college degrees and also attracted many immigrant workers, so Vallejo is now one of the most ethnically diverse cities in American history, but only 21.1% of those over 25 hold a college degree. The 1996 closing of the shipyard led to a massive financial crisis in the city, eventually leading Vallejo to become the first city of substantial size in California for file for bankruptcy this last March. This financial crisis might have been avoided if Vallejo itself hadn’t been established as nothing more than a military accessory to San Francisco.
This is made clear by reports from city officials who attribute Vallejo’s current financial problems to poor city planning and its primarily residential development. Boasting little more than a Costco, a “store selling the type of hydroponic lighting used in marijuana cultivation” (SFgate), and a Six Flags Marine World, the residents of Vallejo pay their sales tax to neighboring cities, including San Francisco. Perhaps because Vallejo hosts the northernmost terminal for San Francisco-bound ferries (est. 1905) city planners saw little need to reserve land for local industry. Yet in their efforts to revitalize the economically-challenged city, the legislature sites it’s ferry connection to San Francisco as a “measure of hope” (SFgate), along with it’s water supplies.
However, Vallejo’s Rinder Creek watershed has actually been greatly reduced and also contaminated with mercury as a result of cinnabar mining that took place in four separate mines located 3-6 miles north of the city on Sulfur Springs Mountain, most notably Hastings Mine and St. John’s Mine. Mining took place between 1852 and 1953, with the Mercury presumably being used for the hydraulic mining of gold throughout California, further linking it to the San Francisco centered Gold Rush contado. A second factor contributing to the contamination of Vallejo’s watershed is cattle grazing, which leads to erosion. I couldn’t find any conclusive evidence that the cows put to pasture in this area were used to provide meat or diary to San Francisco residents, but since Vallejo itself was established in response to the Gold Rush and San Francisco boom, and since many Vallejo residents commute to San Francisco for work (based on figures that the average commute time for residents is 35.4 minutes), supplying food resources to the residents here is indirectly supporting the city of San Francisco.
Vallejo is also a source of entertainment for San Francisco residents, hosting both the oldest golf course on the West Coast, The Mare Island Golf Club established in 1892, and the Blue Rock Springs Creek Golf Course. The presence of these golf courses has led to contamination of Blue Rock Springs Creek, the other river that flows down Sulfur Springs Mountain, with high levels of now-illegal toxic pesticides. Six Flags Marine World, also located in Vallejo, is an eyesore, and leads to traffic congestion in the area. Demanding large amounts of unskilled labor, Marine World is probably another factor contributing to the lack of college-educated residents, although it does generate extra sales tax for the city.
Vallejo was established in response to San Francisco, especially the Gold Rush and accompanying scramble for military control of the Pacific Rim. Because its residents serve San Francisco’s military and labor needs, also spending the money they make in San Francisco back in the city, Vallejo is now bankrupt and rife with crime and prostitution, boasting the highest homicide rate in the nation. Indeed, one resident who manages an outlet store in the city reports having his store broken into twice in six weeks, saying, "Half the people down here are selling drugs. The other half are walking around, but they're not buying anything” (SFgate). Besides the cultural and industrial hit the area has taken because of San Francisco’s exploitation, its watersheds are polluted by mining and recreational activities that also operate in the service of San Francisco and the rest of its contado.
However, out of this culturally and economically marginalized city have sprung some of the most successful and innovative rap artists of our generation, including B-Legit, Young Lay, Miami, N2Deep, PSD, Turf Talk, Mac Mall, and of course E-40 and Mac Dre. Their role in the underground rap scene has led to a sort of Bay Area rap renaissance, revitalizing the underground rap scene and bringing notoriety to the region. Yet despite the city’s comparatively high output of big-name Bay Area rappers, Vallejo remains an impoverished city that few people have heard of, much less visited, and much of the artistic credit is taken by the more well-known city of San Francisco or the greater Bay Area as a whole.


Bibliography

http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN2352179020080523
A news article about Vallejo's economic crisis

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/07/BACH10HUK6.DTL
Another news article on the same subject

U.S.Bureau of Mines, Mercury Potential in the United States p 87, 24
PDF document produced by the department of the interior. Has detailed information on the different mines in California, their locations, the materials mined, and the dates used.

http://www.solanorcd.org/conservation_planning.htm
Brief information on the Rindler Creek watershed restoration project, including erosion as a result of cattle grazing.

http://www.visitvallejo.com/about-vallejo/index.php?PHPSESSID=0afe9f0b9f1b525849516ea673e256af
General Mare Island history and discussion of Vallejo’s high population diversity as a result of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

http://www.mareislandgolfclub.com/golf/proto/mareislandgolfclub/history/history.htm
History of the Mare Island Golf Course, est. 1892

http://www.vallejomuseum.org/vallejo_history.htm
A more in-depth history of the city, including the reasons behind it's brief tenure as state capitol.

http://www.ci.vallejo.ca.us/GovSite/
History and population information, including per capita income, etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSxySnT1Fds&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xV1GHnNg_I
NBC and KRON 4 news clips on Vallejo's bankruptcy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al3rsFLeA7k&feature=related
KRON 4 interviews Vallejo police about crime and guns seized off the street.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuSsAUIVmP4'
Homemade video about prostituion in Vallejo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jKddV-zR1M&feature=related
KRON 4 news clip about prostitution and "massage" parlours in Vallejo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac6jHE4FDYU
Thizz Nation Block Report Clip from Millersville neighborhood in Vallejo. Rapper Lil Bruce discusses Vallejo neighborhoods, the housing crisis and the loss of his grandparent's house, pimping, and half of his friends being in jail. He also visits a smoke shop and implies that he sells cocaine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp_km_dvkVQ&NR=1
Thizz Nation Block Report Clip from Crestside neighborhood in Vallejo. Mac Mall points out the site of the the first dead body he ever saw and the house a murdered friend and famous DJ.

Trout Fishing in America Mind Games

The effect of Brautigan’s random and nonsensical use of the phrase “trout fishing in America” in this series of discontinuous anecdotes is to destabilize habitual perspectives on both language and reality, perhaps pointing readers toward greater freedom of thought. “Trout fishing in America” is wielded by Brautigan as a foreign word with no analogous term in English, leaving his audience grasping for determinacy. As I began to read the book, I assumed that “trout fishing in America” would quickly show itself to be some thinly-disguised abstract concept, and of course snidely assumed that I would just use my superior brain power to quickly decode the Ultimate Meaning of the book and find it edgy in a quaint sort of way. Not so. My anxiety mounted as I read on, still unsure what the heck Brautigan was trying to say. What is “trout fishing in America” supposed to mean?
In vain I scoured the pages of the book, furiously scribbling notes about motifs or stylistic quirks, anything that might lead me closer to the holy grail of meaning, the common denominator linking this assemblage of “trout fishing in America”s together. Yet despite the quintessential San Franciscan elements—old Italians; beatniks; nods to the “contado” notion with references to Mill Valley, Big Sur, and locations as far as China and Hawaii; et al.--I still have no idea what the phrase is supposed to represent (87, 92, 102-3). I could analyze how this text relates to San Francisco or what it says about San Francisco, but I find it so confounding, uncomfortable, and especially embarrassing that I am not able to pick up on its secret meaning, that all I can do is write about it and comfort myself with theoretical musings as to why it has no meaning . . . thus giving it a meaning.
For example, I’ve decided that rather than making a statement about some concept like “the pastoral,” “sustainability,” or “rugged pioneer individualism,” “trout fishing in America” is actually a didactic process. I mean to say that the phrase itself has no real denotation and instead functions either to mock us or to teach us something. Although it obviously does both, as I gather from the ironic tone of chapters like “The Horse That Had a Flat Tire” where he declares gobbling down apple turnovers like a turkey as “probably a more valid protest than picketing missile bases,” I’m declaring the peculiar repetition of “trout fishing in America” didactic and not mocking for the same reason that I’m insisting the phrase serves a purpose or has any meaning at all: it’s more comfortable. Therefore, this trout fishing semantic experimentation and the feelings of groundlessness it evokes in the reader serve to point out just how uncomfortable humans are with uncertainty.
As I neared the last quarter or so of the “novel”, I eventually eased up and stopped looking for meaning. I repeated to myself the wise words that an old friend once passed on to me: “Just go with it!” Once I let go of grasping for higher meaning, I began to enjoy much more acutely the immense humor and creativity in the stories, as well as recognize the genius behind the mundane/fantastical similes. Comparing the sun to “A huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, ‘Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper’” is definitely genius (6).
“Trout fishing in America” allowed me to experience on a small scale the defamiliarization, reframing of reality, and eventual submission to the unknown that are reported to coincide with the use of hallucinogenic drugs. In a way, the novel made me think like a schizophrenic, feeling sound or “hiding something from the other parts of […my] mind" (57, 69). It was quite effective at illustrating how freeing the mind can turn it into an enormous well of creativity and wonder rather than into a frightening “bad trip”. Brautigan does as the “Negro woman” in room 208 and uses the phrase “to it’s best advantage, when surrounded by no meaning and left alone from other words”(69). In doing this, he gives us the “trout fishing in America nib” secret—people should not “write too hard,” or impress their views upon reality too strongly, because after a while those views become the only possible view, following us around “just like a person’s shadow.” The beauty is that “nobody else can write with it” so it is up to us to write whatever we want (110). Perhaps insanity is not something to fear after all--a San Franciscan idea?

The Hyphy Movement

I'm really interested in the hyphy movement and it's glorification of all things excessive. It became extremely popular and continues to spread, and I'd like to know why. It's pretty much diametrically opposed to the equally popular, and often equally empty/meaningless, "green" movement. What's going on?!

Considering the two lame hyphy puns on my blog, I thought it would be appropriate to explain what Hyphy is for those who may not be familiar with it, and also to tie it in to the idea of the San Francisco "contado". If you have any thoughts, please comment! I'd be really interested to hear what you think about how this relates to the course, especially since I arguably spent way too much time compiling these videos...

A) What is Hyphy?: Some introductory videos to the so-called Hyphy movement

1. Berkeley High students - "We started that shit" vs. "Hyphy is spreadin! I'm up in a suburb of seattle and we're goin stupid, dumb, retarded, mayne.. yadadida?! " Why are people going stupid in the suburbs? Does it carry the same meaning when reiterated in a Seattle suburb?
2. E-40, Vallejo rapper, on the definition of Hyphy. Note that it's explicitly called San Francisco's hyphy movement in the sidebar. Is hyphy the worldwide phenomenon he claims? Can San Francisco claim the hyphy movement?
3. How does hyphy affect society? There's a lot going on here, especially in terms of what was included in and what was left out of this video.
4. CSU Long Beach and Fairfield High (skip to 2:50, everyone gets excited when E-40 is played)
5. The most informative of the videos?

The commentary on all of these videos is also useful, and provides some insight into how people conceptualize locations and why they might come to personally identify with them, i.e. rep' their cities.

It might also be worth comparing Ferlinghetti's portrait of cultural diversity and minority life in San Francisco to those presented in these and other videos. He seems to teeter between (a) depicting the city as previously culturally diverse and accepting but moving toward homogenization and (b) an indictment of it as a hodgepodge of antagonistic racial groups (for example in "Baseball Canto" or "The Great Chinese Dragon").

San Francisco Poems: Clinging to the Past (The Furly-nghetti Ghost)

As I write about San Francisco on this blog, please note that I am not discussing some static notion, definite geographic place, or specific populous. Rather, what I mean to explore is the mythic name “San Francisco”, and what it comes to stand for, suggest, or be associated with in the works we’re engaging. Also, how does San Francisco come to mean or suggest these things, and why? An analysis of both the general process of regional differentiation and of its implications for us as human beings, or perhaps as world citizens, seems particularly relevant to this moment in the evolution of human consciousness. Although locations must be demarcated for obvious practical issues of convenience, there seems to be much at stake in their conceptual formation.
This sense of urgency, this need to defend and cling to a static definition of San Francisco (an abstract notion which is actually collective and fluid) is to me the most striking characteristic of Ferlinghetti’s work in San Francisco Poems. Wrought with schismatic images of struggle and oppression, the overall message is “resist much” (28). And what are the young poet-addressees of this impassioned entreaty to resist? the transformation of San Francisco “from a diverse metropolis that welcomed immigrants and refugees […] to a homogeneous, wealthy enclave” (9).
Beginning with a classic gesture, “A North Beach Scene” depicts San Francisco as some sort of pastoral setting or potential Elysian field, for example with the intoxicating, slightly animal and erotic image of the mammalian female’s naked breasts being amorously caressed by a white sheet. The clean white linen, head-tossing carefree laughter, nakedness, and the concluding phrase “kingdom come”, all function to form this idealistic conceptualization. But wait—the “pure” San Francisco is threatened!
Fifty years later, San Francisco is becoming "just another American city,” or "an artistic theme-park, without artists," where "faceless investors with venture capital" evict Ferlinghetti’s friends (10, 26). This divide is the explicit focus of "Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes," in which two garbage-men are contrasted with a beautiful couple. At the same time, the poems concede to the notion that these opposing image are in fact myths when the Oracle at Delphi is entreated to supply us with, “New myths to live by” in the eponymous poem addressed to her (81). In establishing two opposing fixed images of San Francisco--one as a desirable and endangered culturally diverse artistic fairyland heaven, and the other as an undesirable, heartless specter of industrial conglomerate horribleness—this selection of poetry and prose evokes fear of change and a sense of conflict in the reader, serving to drive the poems forward and even begetting further poems. Indeed, these works recruit the reader into their dichotomous world of strife and disillusionment, directly urging us to refuse to accept impermanence and change, a type of hypocritical anti-conservative conservativeness.
In "Challenges to Young Poets," the reader is encouraged to "reach for the unattainable" and Ferlinghetti is (OK, so it’s problematic to attribute the text to the author; humor me) doing just that in trying to hold onto a fluid and abstract concept of place as if it were absolute, definite, and static. This phenomenon of adopting conservative viewpoints, of idealizing the past in the face of an unstable and changing cultural and economic milieu, and then of calling this viewpoint progressive or liberal must be rather confusing to those who welcome increasing economic prosperity and technological advancement (perhaps what others like Ferlinghetti would characterize as excess). In Ferlingheitti's case, this opposition to economic excess manifests as a clinging to the past rather than a revisioning of the future. It seems to me that this sentimentaility is not only understandable, but is also a part of my own experience. Consider the obsession with all things vintage and analogue, the turn toward ancient and holistic medical paradigms and spiritual practices, the railing against the LRDP, etc.—aren’t these all manifestations of the same kind of fear? Some of us even wax nostalgic about decades that predate us! Taking this into account, I see Ferlinghetti’s prose and poetry as successfully capturing some of the pervasive sentiments of our times, and also as failing to argue it's case for cultural cohesion and economic justice in an effective or practical way.