San Francisco, California. 22 July 2026 (2569!)
Egy jó kis presszókávé.
Here I am, after all these many years, back at Atlas Café on Alabama Street in San Francisco. What tempest, O Fates, has conspired to toss me upon this shore?
Mostly just the humdrum, mundane devil-dog of fiscal duress chewing persistently at what’s left of my feet. Could be worse, of course. If you’re going to be homeless, then Luxury Homeless™ is the way to go.
One thinks, of course, in these moments, of Gerhard Richter and his Atlas – which to many seemed self-indulgent at best, and to me was glorious, not least for its self-indulgence. You know you’ve made it when you can put your scrapbooks in a museum and people will line up to gawk at them. As have I lined up, Gentle Reader, as have I gawked!
What else to say about this place in this moment of its time? SF remains a parody of itself, with its little Anarchist & Communist corners cheek by jowl with the seven-dollar coffees of tomorrow’s paper billionaires. Many just getting by, some sprawled in the ruin of mental illness and Fentanyl, but the visible throng very busy being busy, and inching towards what might be Armageddon, or might just be a pleasant house in Millbrae. They tell themselves they are “building the future” and they spend big on the billboards to make sure you don’t forget it.
Which is not to say it’s lost all its charm: there is the all-ages open-air drug market of Dolores Park, the Fog Named Karl rolling in, the vestiges of community in North Beach currently salivated over by a passel of oligarchs, the flock of parrots: there is much left to love. The views are unbeatable.
And meanwhile, what does a poor cybernaut do?
As the bosses huddle with the cyborgs and plot the End of Employment, I linger with my fellow Credentialed Expert Humans and patiently beg for a seat on the next Mantrip into the salt mines.
The upside of all this is that it’s quite fertile ground for art, and I can even make an argument for San Francisco itself, vacillating between the artistic dullardry of Burning Man and the plastique retrofuture of KAWS, as being so anti-art that you almost have to make some good art if you’re stuck here.
And that is the plan, though alas I must confess it’s not quite turned out that way just yet. I did walk by Artist’s Television Access and recall how once I paid $20 per hour to use their SVHS editing machine, and how it’s pathetic to complain about circumstances when the supercomputer in my pocket could shoot me an Oscar if I only had enough will for the hunt.
Soon, Dear Invisible Audience, I will have more to show for the displacement and the familiar yet uncanny environs. I’ve been a little short of space, and will be for a while, especially in my head, but worry not: the sketchbook is slowly filling with thoughts, the camera is primed to shoot, and the ghost of every 90’s underground artist is staring down at me from the powerlines above ATA saying: “Na und?”
