Californian Cities

I’m back in San Francisco after a road trip all the way down to San Diego. I’m flying back to Europe later today, so it’s time to post some impressions of America.

California is itself quite diverse, and no doubt the rest of the US is even more so. When I arrived here, I was surprised how roughly cut it felt. San Francisco feels most like a Latin American country, curiously the most similar feeling place I’ve been to before is Cuba. Of course, San Francisco is much richer, but it lacks glitz. The road surfaces are imperfectly maintained. There don’t seem to be any shops because their hoardings are so modest. No glaring neon adverts, or bright bold colours advertising their windows.

After going to Burning Man, San Francisco felt much more familiar and homely. It’s a fab city, with endless surprising views down the long crazy roads which shoot over hills. The photo above is of the corner of Mission Dolores park on a Saturday, when many tanned and body-built gays pose in the sun admiring the view.

Los Angeles. Hell on earth. The movie industry is incredibly good at PR, at disguise. They manage to make the city look good! But really it is endless eternal, indistinguishable bleak city blocks. No people walking round, except clumps of latinos lurking (probably waiting for work buses to take them picking in agricultural fields out of town). Empty lots in areas which should be valuable (photo left). Repeated burger chains and cheap superstores. Only the rarest gems of quality, each 20 minutes drive from the last. Even the famous part of Hollywood, with stars on the walkways and the Oscars’ theatre, is a grotty boulevard, beaten by far by the theatre district of every other city that has one.

It’s like a normal city which has been insanely squashed and spread out. There are many parking lots because you have to drive everywhere. You have to drive everywhere because there are so many parking lots to drive past to get to your destination. Next time I find anyone promoting out of town superstores in the UK at the expense of, say, building new town centres, I’m going to kidnap them. Fly them to LA, pick a random street intersection and drop them there with a compass and no money. Make them walk to civilisation, so they can properly see the awful consequences of not planning a town with a civic centre, with structure, with design and art.

Somebody has been planning San Diego (the photo to the right is of downtown skyscrapers taken from across a building lot). Yes, gorgeous Balboa park was made by horticulturist Kate Session in the 1890s. Yes, the happening gaslamp quarter was deliberately redeveloped in the 1980s. They’re both lovely, they feel like places. Even our generic Super 8 motel had spectacular views in San Diego.

OK, maybe I was just happy because we found the Karl Strauss brewery at 10pm on a Saturday. Amazingly, then is happy hour at just $2 for a pint of microbrewed ale. No, it’s not just that. San Diego really is that dreamy Californian paradise on earth. And so much more tasteful than I thought.

What is Burning Man?

It’s clearly an arts festival. Crazy large scale modern art, sitting on the beautiful stark canvas of the Nevada desert. Grant funded mechanical theatre. On the first evening, we were taken to these twenty-odd sculpted divers hanging from a mechanical wheel (photo right). James and I raced round to the powering cycles on the other side, and managed to get it spinning, a strobe light flashing every frame. Not fast enough. A few days later someone had hooked a motorbike up, it rotated smoothly and the diving-man sculptures leapt one after another into the desert. Walking round the playa and the camps, you’d stumble upon things this good everywhere.

Actually it’s for personal art. Improvised theatre, dressing up, experimenting with new rules. Make that social art, a test-tube community. There’s no money at Burning Man (except to buy ice or illegal drugs), which made it the most refreshing holiday I’ve ever had. People give and share and help, making you want to do the same. There’s no “attitude”, no pointless altercations. Sounds like a bunch of hippies? Of course this community is partly an illusion. No money when we’ve all spent thousands in dollars to be there. Kindness, when it’s a yearly festival, we’re on holiday, not working, striving, competing. Yet still the experiment is worthwhile, and you come out instinctively “gifting” more in the real world.

Did I mention drugs? Obviously Burning Man is just a big rave in the desert. Some German newspapers are apparently insistent that it’s an electronic music festival. I’m sure it was a cocktail festival, but that’s circumstances peculiar to my camp. In reality, drugs were there, but frankly unnecessary when it was trippy just looking at peoples costumes. Much as I enjoy trance after having listened to Digitally Imported quite a lot last year, there was a bit too much of it. Much more fun was this person (photo left) from Illumination Village (where I stayed) who played percussion with burning propane.

But also it’s a spritual festival. Quite reasonably accused of paganism, we do build a big wooden statue of a man and burn him on the last day, after all. It’s a festival like any religion has, in the ancient sense of being a yearly holy day, a break from normal life. Some veterans I met there measure there years from the burning of the man, remembering what they did and what happened relative to each festival. Lurking behind it all was a surprisingly coherent philosophy.

You could deduce it from the messages people wrote on the temple (photo right) before it was burnt on the day after the last day. Most of the messages were to help deal with the end of relationships, and the death of parents. But some were more general, reminding each other to live in the now, that everything changes. To deal with life’s difficulties in an accepting way, also strong and resilient through understanding how small we are, how amazing we are. Yes it was a temple of trite phrases, but all true, and together forming something a little bit larger, which needs more description than this paragraph. A calmness.

So that’s where I was last week. That’s Burning Man.