Still a bit unsure about SF. But given that I have no idea where I'm going, it may well be that I'm going to all the wrong places. The equivalent of someone on a trip to London wondering around Oxford Street and thinking that it must be representative, perhaps...

Incidentally, I have a question about American money, as increasingly worthless as it is - how the hell do blind people tell the difference between notes? As far as I can work out they're all the same size, which makes it pretty hard, if not impossible, to differentiate between a 1 and a 50. British currency ascends in size from the 5 to the 50, presumably so that the visually-impaired can differentiate between notes - America, what's your excuse? I dunno, you don't look after your sick, your disturbed, your elderly or your blind citizens - it's like the whole place is run purely for the benefit of a small minority of rich folk or something! (And perhaps also those who like doughnuts. They may be the same people). Pah!

SF has lots of dogs and lots of 'counter-cultural' types, be they neo-beatniks, ex-hippies, new agey-types or whathaveyou. In this regard it's quite a bit like Kreuzberg in Berlin, the kind of let-it-all-hang-out type place where anything might happen, but whatever does it's unlikely to be interesting.

Something faintly entertaining did occur last night, however, as we accidentally encountered a book reading in a bar. Turned out it was Neil Strauss, that blokey who wrote The Game, whose concept of 'negging' has amused some of us in the past - like a kind of slick Adorno, you go up to a woman in a bar and say something like 'your hair is great, but that dress really doesn't suit you'. She is then supposed to be drawn to you because you've 'dared' to criticise her, or something. Anyway, this Strauss chap is pretty influential, apparently - the bar was filled with guys, mostly in their 20s, looking a bit slick, and clearly desperate to know what it was about this diminutive, shaven-headed little man that made him such a hit with the ladies. Unfortunately for his rather unsubtle, macho audience, it was blatantly obvious that Neil Strauss was such a success because he has a real way with words, is rather charming and basically rather humanitarian, as well as looking quite sweet in a girlish kind of way. All very curious, though, as man after man asked him why 'the game' wasn't working for them. It wasn't at all clear, in the end, whether the strategy is just to get laid as many times as possible, or to actually get a girlfriend (at which point you might have to come clean about all the 'techniques' you've been using on her, one assumes).

Anyway, whilst I have been wondering around, I've also been writing a piece about mannequins in Iran for Cabinet, which should be out in the summer. It'll be accompanied by photos taken by the superb Kristen Alvanson.

Back to the infinite tour!


Downtown SF has some monstrous architecture. This Hyatt hotel is extremely, erm, early 20th-century.

Some of the skyscrapers look like cardboard pop-ups in children's books about modernism (are there any? Owen?)

Dubuffet sculpture meets the sky.

Vertiginous indeed. The US is indeed the menace of Hitchcock wrapped in a warm embrace with the tightrope horror of economic uncertainty. Or something.

Apart from Wurlitzer-guy at the Castro Theatre, Chinatown and Japantown are the best things about SF. Here we encountered a protest against the CCP. They were advertising these 9 commentaries, which is a kind of Falun Gong-affiliated tract, as far as I can make out.

One Commentary on the USA. Also in Chinatown.

Me too! The writing underneath the slogan is like a line from Mallarmé: 'function made itself gest'.

This picture is SO Radical Philosophy it hurts. From City Lights bookshop. You suspected I might go there, didn't you? Now I have to buy a bigger suitcase. Green Apple Books somewhere near Richmond also fantastic.

Iconic!

Some interesting American socialist realism (can one say that? New Deal art anyway). From Coit Tower, built by some fruity cross-dressing lady who used to chase fire engines, apparently. She sounds fun.

He's about to read Marx! Call Homeland Security!

Love the fact that one of the newspapers has a headline about the destruction of Rivera's fresco.

I found another one. The following is from Roger:

'No nation has ever treated the pig as cruelly, as barbarously, as diabolically as the U.S. But you will never find a pig sign or sculpture where the pig isn’t smiling. So the question is – is this unanimous smile the successful result of the big lie? Or, examined a little closer, aren’t those smiles more in the nature of grimaces? Aren’t the mass of happy cartoon pigs really like the damned in Memlinc’s paintings, except that they are denied even the faculty of frowning or crying out as the demons poke them with their tridents – or, the case of the poor American pig, stun them with their tasers? There’s an interesting connection to be made to feminism – Ellen Willis, in the eighties, suggested the idea of a smile strike by women. The idea never really got off the ground, but I think that the omni-depicted smiling pig is, perhaps, engaged in something like it – such exaggerated smiles are put on the pig, so happy is the cavorting pig, that I suspect a strike-like aspect, a sort of kabuki piggism in which the smiles are coded, in their exaggeration, to mean the opposite. Charlotte’s Pig, Wilbur, was, in a sense, a last, romantic feudal pig before the meat corporations took over the pig’s life – perhaps, indeed, the Wilbur, or the Empress of Blandings, stands to pigdom as Robinson Crusoe stood to the ideology of the classical economists. Marx would immediately understand the smiling pig for what it was.'

I think that says it all, really.

At the beach. We walked round the edge to the Golden Gate Bridge, which is obviously great. Especially as it's painted in international orange. International orange! Surely the best name for a colour, sorry, color, ever invented.

The camera obscura was closed, sadly.

I don't know what they want, but they even have their own roads.

Must go and have a blueberry pancake. Again. I have a theory about Kant and America which I'll be sharing in due course...heh heh heh...