 So Rich and I are racing back to the San Francisco Ferry Building in hopes of catching the early boat home when we are stopped by an old, shaggy curmudgeon who wants to pick a fight with our Waymo driverless taxi. First he stands in its path, glaring furiously at the empty driver’s seat. Strict programming protocols make it impossible for the vehicle to move. I pass the time picturing the ferry pulling away without us. Then the curmudgeon reaches over and dislocates the driver’s side mirror, bangs on the front passenger window, and punches the trunk a few times. So there! I feel lucky he’s not urinating on the tires. When he moves off, our Waymo rolls forward another few yards to the curb, and Rich and I spring out. The curmudgeon yells at us, “You’re old enough to know better!” As if we’d rehearsed it, Rich and I reply in unison, “So are you, sir!” “You’re a disgrace to the human race!” the curmudgeon hollers. Rich tosses out another “So are you, sir!” but I’m too breathless to engage in any more amusing banter as I trot toward the dock. Luckily, the boat is running late, and we make it with minutes to spare.  We made the ferry by the skin of our teeth. As we drop into our seats Rich says, “A disgrace to the human race?” “That nutter is clinging to the past when he’s already living in the future. He feels his world is sliding out of his control.” And don’t we all feel that way sometimes? Shortly before he sold America’s very first gas-powered car in 1898, Alexander Winton was told by his banker, “You’re crazy if you think this fool contraption you’ve been wasting your time on will ever displace the horse.” We’re all struggling to accept a future that’s dizzyingly different than expected. Which is why Rich and I had spent the morning in the headquarters of a group of futurists devoted to thinking about the next 10,000 years. We thought it might lend some perspective.  The leader of this merry band of imaginators is Stewart Brand, creator of the 1960’s iconic Whole Earth Catalog. “It was one of the bibles of my generation,” Steve Jobs said in his 2006 Stanford commencement address. “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” He told the graduates his wish for them was encapsulated in the final sign-off on Whole Earth’s last issue: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”  "Google in paperback form" I imagine those Stanford grads rolling their eyes and wondering how that would help them repay $100,000 in college loans. But I was glad he said it anyway. In the year he likes to call 01996, Brand gathered like-minded visionaries to create The Long Now Foundation, which aims to provide a counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mindset by promoting “slower/better” thinking.  Constructing the Long Now 10,000-year clock in a remote Texas cave They launched all sorts of quirky projects: the 10,000 year clock hidden in a remote West Texas cave; the Rosetta Disk, etched with 13,000 teeny tiny pages of information in 1500 human languages; and a library attempting to address the question, “What books would you want if you had to restart civilization from scratch?” Along with, “Where do you house the collective wisdom of our species?” The answer to this last question is: in a café-bar on an old decommissioned military base on San Francisco’s north coast. The Interval is part of the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture and serves as a library, gathering space, and mothership for the Long Now Foundation.  The Interval's Orrary (at left) is a model of the solar system and prototype for a section of the 10,000 year clock. “Just as Stonehenge and the Pyramids help us imagine our long past, The Clock invites us to image our long future,” says Danny Hillis, who helped design the clock and, in his day job, developed the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers (and please don’t ask me what any of that actually means). Overhead are books about science, technology, art, and the future, including — I was delighted to learn — such banned books as Dune, Brave New World, the Hugh Howley novels that inspired the TV series Silo, and of course, The Time Machine by HG Wells. On lower shelves are a hundred well-thumbed books that we were invited to browse through while enjoying our cappuccinos. “Do you know Stewart Brand?” I asked the young barista. Her whole face lit up. “Yes, he’s like a ball of sunshine. He is so full of life and energy.”  Stewart Brand in 2010. Photo: Snowmanradio How do some people manage to scamper into old age bright-eyed and bushy-tailed? I’ve given the question considerable thought, and I'm not the only one; social scientists are studying clusters of such oldsters, known as the Blue Zones. You may have read Dan Buettner’s books about them or seen the Netflix documentary Live to 100. Long-time readers will remember Rich and I visited the Blue Zone island of Ikaria in 2019, where we attended an all-night party with people in their nineties and hundreds. As we stumbled out the door around two in the morning, a ninety-three-year-old acquaintance — the one who had opened the dancing many hours earlier — was leading yet another laughing young woman out onto the dance floor. Inspiring indeed!  Not only did this 93-year-old Ikarian lead the dancing, he did it with a twinkle in his eye. So you can imagine how excited I was to discover this week that the nearby town of Petaluma has engaged a Blue Zones Project team to help them reconfigure public spaces and social patterns to encourage longer, healthier lives. Projects like this are happening across America. “The results are stunning,” according to Dr. Walter Willet of Harvard’s school of public health. How stunning? According to the Blue Zones website, Beach Cities, California reduced obesity by 25% and smoking by 36%. Albert Lea, Minnesota saw healthcare claims drop 49% and life expectancy rise by three years. (See more results here.) I’ll keep an eye on Petaluma’s effort and let you know how it goes.  Kick-off event for Petaluma's Blue Zones Project One of the cornerstones of the Blue Zone lifestyle is a plant-based diet, and right next door to The Interval is Greens, “the restaurant that brought vegetarian cuisine out from sprout-infested health food stores and established it as a cuisine in America,” according to the NY Times. Little has changed in Greens since it opened 1979; its redwood sculptures, view of the bay, and cuisine all remain spectacular. At $20, my portobello burger with roasted poblano aioli wasn’t exactly cheap eats, but boy, was it worth it. Afterwards, Rich summoned a driverless taxi, and we headed to the ferry building and our encounter with the curmudgeon. And while he's clearly a nutter, the curmudgeon does have a point. Anyone with any sense worries about the profound changes AI will bring in the next decade, let alone the next 10,000 years. So how can we up our chances of survival? Folks in the Blue Zones rely on community, and Stewart Brand says, “It's become clear what is the prime survival tool for hard times: friends. Good friends. Lots of them.” Words to live by.  The Long Now's Interval and Greens are in Fort Mason, San Francisco Subscribers If you don't get a post announcement every week, check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. This post is part of my ongoing series OUT TO LUNCH IN CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO My goal is to discover some of San Francisco's most colorful neighborhoods so I can check out what's really going on in this zany town. Are we in a doom loop? Already on the rebound? Still fabulous? And where should we eat afterwards? These and other questions will be explored in upcoming posts. BROWSE PREVIOUS POSTS HERE DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] And check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.
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 Cop cars and yellow tape block the intersection in front of the library. No matter how often you see it on TV, it’s still shocking to come home IRL (in real life) to find your street blocked off by cop cars and crime scene tape. When it happened to us the other day, I craned my neck searching for clues while Rich drove slowly past our street and tried to turn down the next — only to be stopped a fledgling police officer. “You can’t come this way,” the kid announced importantly. “Why not?” asked Rich. “It’s confidential.” Confidential? Who was he kidding? This is San Anselmo, a town so small that if you sneeze walking out your front door, the first person you see will hand you a Kleenex and the next three will inquire about your allergies. Rich drew breath to protest, but I said, “Let it go. If he tells you, he may have to kill you. Besides, we’ll find out soon enough.” We circled home the back way and discovered, with considerable relief, that our house was not part of the hullaballoo. Neighbors soon filled us in; someone had called in a bomb threat to the nearby public library because of Drag Story Hour.  Notice posted on the town's bulletin board Now, I realize that Drag Story Hour for kids is not standard Saturday morning fare in all public libraries across this great nation. But here in the San Francisco Bay Area (and many other parts of the US), it’s become a tradition during June’s LGBTQ+ Pride Month. “Join us for stories, songs, and laughs,” said my town’s website. “Drag Story Hour is a form of performance art that captures the imagination and play of childhood while giving kids a glamorous and positive view of a person being their authentic self.” For anyone who can’t fully embrace the idea, there’s a simple solution: skip the story hour. But that didn’t satisfy one disgruntled individual, whose sentiments could only be expressed with a bomb threat. Because nothing teaches children about decent behavior like lawless aggression and false statements to the police. No bomb was found, and the crime scene tape and cop cars soon disappeared. Still visible all over town were rainbow flags and store displays celebrating Pride Month. And this was nothing compared to what was happening in San Francisco, currently gearing up for the June 30th extravaganza known as the Pride Parade.  The Pride Parade is always a ripsnorter. That's Mayor London Breed (center) waving the rainbow flag on a float last year. Photo: Kori Suzuki/KQED “Let’s head over to the Castro,” I suggested to Rich. “Show our support.” The Castro is San Francisco’s famous “gayborhood.” It began gathering strength during WWII, when the US military decided to discharge thousands of trained soldiers in the erroneous belief their sexual preferences somehow made them unfit to fight Nazis. Fortunately this attitude no longer prevails, and these days the US Department of Defense officially honors Pride Month. "Pride is a celebration of generations of LGBTQ+ people who have fought bravely to live openly and authentically,” Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden said last month. "This country is stronger and more just when America's leaders reflect the full diversity of our nation." As the Castro lies six miles from the Ferry Terminal, Rich and I hopped on one of the F line’s vintage trollies, bought from other cities, refurbished, and now providing a pleasantly retro ride. We stepped off near the intersection of Market and Castro Streets and found ourselves, as expected, surrounded by rainbows. The rainbow flag, now flying worldwide, was created here thanks to SF Supervisor Harvey Milk. Arriving from New York in 1972, he became the unofficial mayor of Castro Street, rallied the LGBTQ+ community, and in 1977 became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. Knowing the community needed a symbol, Milk asked gay activist and artist Gilbert Baker to dream up something for 1978’s San Francisco Gay Freedom Day. Apparently Gilbert was out on a dance floor when he had an epiphany about a rainbow; historians believe drugs may have been involved, and I’m inclined to believe them. Gilbert’s vision was translated into a 30 x 60 foot flag with eight colors. Later versions eliminated the pink and turquoise because those colors were hard to find in traditional flag fabrics. Go figure. Since then there have been countless permutations of the rainbow flag, and the original, damaged and thought lost for many years, was rediscovered, repaired, and returned home to San Francisco in 2021. You can see it in the small, deeply moving GLBT Historical Society Museum just off Castro Street. Younger readers may not remember the days when same-sex canoodling was a very serious crime throughout America. Vice squads regularly raided LGBTQ+ hangouts, publishing names and photos in the newspaper, destroying careers, families, reputations, and lifelong friendships overnight. And then came jail. Expressing non-conformist sexuality was not for the faint of heart. Thanks to activists, laws began to change (slowly) in the 1960s. One magnificent gesture of defiance came in 1973 after lesbians Mary Ellen Cunha and Peggy Forster took over Twin Peaks Tavern, a 1930s Irish pub on Castro Street. Years earlier, the tavern’s huge windows had been painted black so wives couldn’t peer in to see if their husbands were at the bar drinking away their paycheck. The two lesbians had the paint scraped off, sending a message to the community: it was time to stop hiding. “The bar has come to be a cornerstone within the community,” wrote Petey Barma and Bret Parker, who made the delightful Through the Windows documentary about Twin Peaks Tavern. “A place that changed the face of gay bars in the 70's, a refuge during the AIDS crisis in the 90's, and throughout it all, a gathering place: our very own ‘Cheers for Queers.’" Rich and I promised ourselves beers at Twin Peaks later, but first we visited the museum, which honors the 40 million who died of HIV/AIDS. Then we strolled through the Pink Triangle Memorial, America’s first permanent landmark dedicated to LGBTQ+ Europeans persecuted by the Nazis during the Holocaust.  Pink Triangle Memorial is small in size but packs a powerful message. To refresh our spirits after such sobering reflections, we had a hearty lunch in the whimsical 24-hour diner Orphan Andy’s. When the proprietor set down my giant bowl of soup, I said, “Wow, that’s generous!” They grinned. “It’s because we love you.” Awwww… We got an equally warm welcome at nearby Twin Peaks Tavern. I soon learned it was Mike the bartender’s first day, but everyone else looked like they’d been ensconced there since it opened, gazing contentedly out the windows and chatting with old friends. There and everywhere in the Castro, people were kind and friendly. Nobody seemed to embody the attitude I’d seen on a joking storefront sign, “I don’t mind people being heterosexual as long as they act gay in public.” I felt accepted for who I was. And that’s what the Castro is really all about.  We finally got our beers at Twin Peaks. The whole day provided the perfect antidote to the mean-spirited attack on our public library’s Drag Story Hour. Isolating ourselves from those we view as different is not the answer. As Harvey Milk put it, “How can people change their minds about us if they don’t know who we are?” And underneath it all, how different are we, really? “We’re all born naked,” points out cross-dressing performance artist RuPaul, “and the rest is drag.”  For more, check out: The Ten Best Things to Do in the Castro District Twin Peaks Tavern Documentary: Through the Windows Milk, the story of Harvey Milk's work & assassination Subscribers If you don't get a post announcement every week, check your spam folder. Internet security is in a frenzy these days. This post is part of my ongoing series OUT TO LUNCH IN CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO My goal is to discover some of San Francisco's most colorful neighborhoods so I can check out what's really going on in this zany town. Are we in a doom loop? Already on the rebound? Still fabulous? And where should we eat afterwards? These and other questions will be explored in upcoming posts. BROWSE PREVIOUS POSTS HERE DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] And check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it.  Rich shows off a fresh helping of flash fiction at Café Zoetrope. When I first heard about the Short Story Vending Machine I was horrified. “Is this AI? Are robots plagiarizing published works by legitimate authors to compose cookie-cutter mini-novels while you wait? What fresh hell is this?” But no; I was charmed to be proven completely wrong. It turns out these stories are composed by actual humans. They (the stories, not the humans) are fed into the computerized brains of machines and delivered — for free — at the push of a button. Since 2016 French publisher Short Édition has placed Distributeurs d’Histoires Courtes all over the world to promote budding authors and the joy of reading.  Yes, of course, San Francisco has one. It sits inside Frances Ford Coppola’s cozy, European-style Café Zoetrope on the corner of Kearny and Columbus. Rich and I spotted it a few weeks ago and were so intrigued we rounded up some friends and went back to sample the literature and the food, not necessarily in that order. I should have known that Coppola — the gifted screenwriter of Patton, Apocalypse Now, and, with Mario Puzo, the Godfather films — would make us an offer we couldn’t refuse: great Mediterranean food, generous glasses of wine, and as many extra helpings of short fiction as we wanted. My first was a sweet piece called Six Feet (“The distance between two not-yet lovers…”). The second began with a description of Astrid’s “abject terror” and ended 36 inches later with the words, “At least Astrid would die happy.” I am still trying to summon the nerve to read what lies between. Café Zoetrope is surrounded by icons of San Francisco’s freewheeling literary history: City Lights Bookshop, Jack Kerouac Alley, William Saroyan Place, the Beat Museum, the vintage writers’ bars Vesuvius and Twelve Adler. Nearby Beat poet Herb Gold penned these immortal words: Even well into my eighties I thought I was a young man. I knew I would die someday But the diagnosis would have to be He died of the complications of young age.  Beat poet Herbert Gold died last November of the complications of young age. He was 99. “If free speech and individuality are American characteristics, there is no place more American than San Francisco,” said filmmaker Desi Del Valle. Sadly, her sentiments are not shared by everyone here in the land of the free. I was shocked to read this week that the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom documented 4,240 books targeted for censorship in 2023. In many school districts, a single challenge can require librarians to pull a book off the shelves while an inquiry is conducted. Then everyone gathers for a free and frank exchange of views involving plenty of shouting, table pounding, and name-calling.  What to wear to the meeting about banning books at your kids' school. Photo: Etsy So what are they trying to keep kids from reading — and why? Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: coarse language, uncomfortable commentaries on race Jack London’s Call of the Wild: mistreatment of animals. (His work was also burned by the Nazis for socialist sentiments.) Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon: subversive communist views Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery: causing students “to question their values, traditions, and religious beliefs” Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: “It makes people uncomfortable.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: violence, adultery John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men: anti-business attitude, homosexual overtones Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: sex, violence, homosexuality E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web: They "found the book’s talking animals to be disrespectful to God." Kind of makes you want to re-read the classics, doesn’t it? How did I miss all this exciting subtext when I was in school?  The good news? Kids all over America are sneaking around reading banned books. “It was the first time I had read a book where I saw something that I kind of felt similar to, related to,” said Texas teen Alex Reyes. Now, I don’t mean to brag, but the most frequently banned book in America — for the last two years running! — was written right here in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’re so proud. The book is the graphic (in every sense) memoir Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe, who uses the pronouns e, em and eir. (These gender-neutral Spivak pronouns date back to 1890 and are enjoying newfound popularity.) E started writing to explain to eir family what it means to be non-binary and asexual. Critics went ballistic over drawings providing explicit guidelines for teens navigating complex sexual situations. “It’s pretty worrying that a scene talking about consent is considered inappropriate for young people,” Kobabe said. Seriously, are there any parents out there who think their kids aren’t online — right now, this very minute — watching stuff that would make your hair curl? “Childhood is terrifying. Adults forget this,” says Dave Rudden, who writes for middle school kids. “I used to sandwich Goosebumps between two other books on the way out of the library so my mom couldn’t see the cover. She thought they were teaching me about monsters … except that the news exists, and kids talk to each other. I already knew there were monsters in the world … The series taught me that monsters were beatable. More than anything, it told me that there were other kids facing them too.” When it comes to navigating the world, ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s a blindfold. And for heaven’s sake, what do they expect kids to read? The Wizard of Oz? Harry Potter? Goosebumps? All banned. The Bible? The complaint listed “sexism, sex, violence, genocide, slavery, rape, and bestiality,” although to be fair it was a counterprotest to ultraconservatives.  "What I tell kids is: Don't get mad, get even,” said Stephen King. “Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that's exactly what you need to know.” Last year, this poster inspired me to write Why Isn’t Anyone Banning My Books?  This week, I decided I had to do more. I printed out the ALA’s list of the most frequently challenged books and walked around the corner to Town Books, the second-hand bookshop run by volunteers from the public library in my village. “I want to start a collection of banned books,” I said. “It’s the only way I know to fight back.” The two women staffing the desk poured over the list, exclaiming aloud over the titles. A woman on the far side of the shop called over, “They banned The Kite Runner? Why?” Another shopper pulled out her phone. “Yep. Here it is. ‘Fear that the novel would inspire terrorism and promote Islam.” “Have they even read these books?” someone asked. By now everyone was scanning the shelves and coming up with titles for my new collection. I bought an armful and said I’d be back soon for more. It was the most fun I’ve had in a bookstore in years.  More to come! “We read to know we are not alone,” said C.S. Lewis (whose Narnia books have been banned). I cannot imagine my life without the company of books, without that sudden, glorious start of surprise when I read a line and an idea springs open for me. “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge,” said George R. R. Martin (also banned). Thanks to writers, publishers, librarians, booksellers, and the Short Story Vending Machine, I’ll never run out of reading material to whet my imagination. It’s up to all of us to preserve our intellectual treasures for future generations, so they have something worth writing about in school book reports and worth thinking about for the rest of their lives.  Café Zoetrope and the Short Story Vending Machine can be found at 916 Kearny Street in the 1907 landmark Columbus Tower aka the Sentinel Building. WHY I WON'T BE POSTING NEXT WEEK Rich and I have some family activities that will keep us too busy for excursions to San Francisco this week. But don't worry, I'll be back with all-new stories after that. This post is part of my ongoing series OUT TO LUNCH IN CHEAP & CHEERFUL SAN FRANCISCO My goal is to discover some of San Francisco's most colorful neighborhoods so I can check out what's really going on in this zany town. Are we in a doom loop? Already on the rebound? Still fabulous? And where should we eat afterwards? These and other questions will be explored in upcoming posts. BROWSE PREVIOUS POSTS HERE DON'T MISS OUT! If you haven't already, take a moment to subscribe so I can let you know when I publish my weekly posts. Just send me an email and I'll take it from there. [email protected] And check out my best selling travel memoirs & guide books here. PLANNING A TRIP? Enter any destination or topic, such as packing light or road food, in the search box below. If I've written about it, you'll find it. |
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