In my Portland blog I had a rant about hipsters, and admittedly San Francisco also has its fair share of people who are just a little bit too cool for school. In fact I'm concerned that I may unwittingly be turning into a bit of a hipster myself, on the outside at least. I wear a flat cap and I feel that's justified by my advancing years and by me being from the north of England, but when it's combined with the khaki shorts and sandals and - above all - the facial hair, onlookers could be forgiven for making certain assumptions about me.
I do my best to dispel the hipster impression, partly by boycotting all Apple products, and partly by overt mainstream-isms such as walking into a coffee shop and ordering 'black coffee', as opposed to 'grande single shot 4 pumps sugar free peppermint nonfat extra hot no foam light whip stirred white mocha'. Also if I have music on my earphones then I'll turn it up a notch so that people know I'm listening to Guns'n'Roses and not some indie label Bolivian alt-jazz collective. (Or are Guns'n'Roses hip again now? I don't know. I keep seeing T-shirts). My keen interest in craft beer also gives off a whiff of eau de hipster, so if there's baseball on TV in the bar then I can dispel that hipster whiff by joining in with the whoops and fist-pumps whenever the home team scores a touchdown or whatever it's called.
One hipster thing I did do was to take a stroll down to Haight-Ashbury, which was the place to be, back when hippies were hip. It's still a funky street but inevitably it's not what it used to be. Last time, in 2008, there were still lots of independent stores selling random stuff you wouldn't find elsewhere, or at least not in one place. (People of my hometown and generation will know what I mean when I refer to Durham Book Centre). Those shops all seem to have gone now. I can't really complain, because I probably spend as much money on Amazon as anyone else. But it was depressing that I couldn't find a single Sly & The Family Stone T-shirt anywhere in Haight-Ashbury. I'll just have to find one elsewhere. On Amazon, I suppose.
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| Looking back at downtown from the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge |
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| Coit Tower, seen from the top of Lombard St |
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| View from the top of Coit Tower. This is the reverse view from the photo above: Lombard St runs from the bottom middle to near the top left Golden Gate Bridge just visible in the mist, at the top. |
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| Every Dodge convertible needs a cute fluffy polar bear in the back seat. Right? |
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| 1967 novel at the Beat Museum, which is otherwise mostly devoted to Kerouac & Ginsberg. This couldn't have been published before the 60s, and it couldn't be published now. It only goes to show, doesn't it? |
