Goin' Short!

I realized I needed a change before I came back to to New York - here's what I decided to change:

Before...



...After!



And again!

Thoughts about home (and Beat San Francisco)

This past weekend, Jillian and took a great walk around the city. We took the MUNI to the Ferry Building and got breakfast, walked up the Embarcadero to Fisherman's Wharf, down through North Beach, and back to downtown, where we grabbed the MUNI back home to Potrero Hill. In a sense, we were celebrating our choice to come back to NY early. Ever since we made that decision, we've both felt re-energized about exploring the city. It's nothing against San Francisco, but knowing we're going back to NY in less than a month lightens our spirits tremendously, and it also injects an urgency into our appreciation of California. We'll be flying back to New York on November 20, two days before our sublease on the San Francisco place runs out. Instead of finding another place here in SF, we decided to go with our home sickness and be in New York for Thanksgiving. Our place in Brooklyn is still sublet through the end of the year, but our good friend Jackie has been been kind enough to let us stay in one of the bedrooms of her Upper West Side apartment for the end of November and December. So, really, it's all worked out for the best -- we're getting a great taste of SF, we'll get a better taste of Manhattan (we haven't lived there since college), and, best of all, we'll be back home in Bay Ridge in no time at all!

So back to our day. North Beach is a pretty famous San Francisco neighborhood. In addition to being being San Francisco's Little Italy, it was also the epicenter of the Beat Movement, the 1950s/1960s U.S. artistic explosion led by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti opened the City Lights Bookstore in 1953 on Columbus Avenue, which, in addition to being a cutting-edge bookstore and cultural landmark for the Beats, was also a book publisher. Most famously, City Lights published Allen Ginsberg's famous, controversial, and influential Howl and Other Poems.

In addition to being a pretty cool bookstore, the building is a very important cultural landmark, especially for me. The Beats, and specifically Allen Ginsberg, were what got me into creativity and writing. Reading them and learning about their achievements opened up to me a whole world of possibility and change. They were really where I learned about being cool. Just standing in front of the City Lights Bookstore feels special. Just to think that very important events took place here, to just be there, is very humbling. Here's a picture I took of the store's facade:



There's a another thread of connection with me and Ferlinghetti. Even though he opened his store in North Beach, he made his permanent San Francisco home in Potrero Hill, where Jill and I are living right now. And it's also rumored that Allen Ginsberg probably wrote most of "Howl" while staying in Potrero Hill with another Beat figure living in the neighborhood, his partner, Peter Orlovsky. To have all these connections and associations with these towering figures of my imagination, oh, it's just great.

I was able to find some video of Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the 1960s in Potrero Hill. It's got some nice footage of the neighborhood back then, and you hear him reading a neat poem about San Francisco. Enjoy!



And lastly, this afternoon, while standing on our porch, making some phone calls, I was struck by how beautiful the neighborhood looked. In the blazing afternoon sun, the rolling hills, with houses upon houses cascading toward the horizon, oh my goodness, it was just wonderful. Jillian and I don't regret our decision to leave, but we definitely will miss this place. Check it out:



See you soon, New York!

-Niko

We Heart New York

Okay guys, guess what? Our sublet is up on November 22nd, and instead of searching for a new place to stay in the second greatest city in the US, we've decided to spend December in our number one, firstest, bestest, favoritest city - NYC, baby!

That's right - we're coming back early. We're having a blast on the west coast, we really are, but we miss you all, and we miss our city, and we couldn't imagine spending the holiday season anywhere else.

More details to come - for now, we miss you and we love you and we'll see you soon!

California Burritos & Sunsets

Last week, Jillian and I had such a great experience. Ken, our friend and one of Jill's work colleagues, happened to be in San Francisco and wound up staying with us for a few days. He had gone to Stanford and had lived in San Francisco for a few months, so he knew the area very well. First of all, Ken introduced us a bunch of his favorite places in the city, little out-of-the-way spots we wouldn't have known about otherwise. The most impressive of these was his favorite burrito place in the Mission, El Farolito, at Mission & 24th. Seriously, if you ever come to San Francisco, make this your first stop. It doesn't look like much (it's a bit dingy inside!), but when you bite into that thick, moist, mushy, flat-out heavenly burrito, you'll have really learned not to judge a book by it's cover!

As if that weren't enough, he also took us on a car trip! Through another friend of his in the city, he happened to have access to a car, and he offered to take us driving so that we could see the area south of the city. We drove down to Palo Alto and checked out the Stanford campus, checked out Ken's favorite Stanford-area burrito place (are you noticing a pattern here?), and, most impressively, drove up this ridiculously tall mountain, which afforded spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. It was really spellbinding. Yes, living in New York, we're around the ocean all the time, but this was different. In New York, you're rarely looking at the ocean itself -- you're usually on a river, a bay, a sound, a harbor, something. I've been out to Montauk, all the way on the eastern tip of Long Island, and there, yes, you're just staring out at the big wide ocean, and it's incredible. Well, that was the case here, except that we were on a huge mountain, and it was sunset, and there were all these swirly clouds coming in off the coast, and we could see the fog creeping its way through the hills and mountains, making its way toward the city, and oh my goodness, it was just superb! The pictures below don't do the experience justice at all, but really, it was quite special. It made me feel very small, in a very good way -- just taking in that huge ocean, that huge vista, that open space.

So, Ken, here's to you -- thanks for the burritos, the sunsets, and the memories!

Music for Two Pianos

Last night Niko and I visited the Herbst Theater to see Music for Two Pianos (listen to excerpts by following the link). It was a very classy evening indeed, as it involved both of us getting dressed up, a dinner that included ceviche and steak, and a cab ride home. Here's what I wore:

Here's what Niko wore:

Plus I think we were the youngest people at the performance - boy those society geriatrics come out of the woodwork for things like this. Standing with the intellectual oldies on the will-call line might've been enough entertainment for me. Guys, seriously, it's not hard to form a straight line, NOT stray from it and then wander back when you feel like it. Take a step forward when the line shifts up a person . . . and please, please, after you've picked up your tickets could you not form a small cluster right in the line with your other oldie friends so that I think you're still waiting when you're really you're just taking up space and making me look like a fool when the person inside the will-call box says, "Next!" and I don't step forward?

The Music

The event showcased several established and emerging composers. We were there because the music of Philip Glass was being featured - he's debuting he's newest opera, about Civil War heroes, in San Francisco so there are a lot of events around it featuring some of his older works. We walked in a few minutes late (which I consider an achievement - me and Niko are usually too worried about getting in trouble to be late for anything - who we'd be in trouble with, I couldn't tell you. It's just a thing we both have. Anyway at dinner we realized we could either rush to leave and get to the performance on time or actually savor our steak and get there ten minutes late - we chose late. And we left the performance early, too - what has San Francisco done to us? Heathens are we!) but were able to take our seats because the show wasn't sold out at all. Glass's pieces were up first, and they were just mesmerizing - he's such a great cinematic composer, his music puts you in a trance and you can't help but imagine scenes of cold autumn mornings, people longing for other people, sadness, mystery, what have you. It was just wonderful.

And it was made even more wonderful after the next two works by emerging composers sucked it up big time. It was like anti-music. The sounds were reminiscent of family gatherings in my house, when the small children would get at the piano and some would bang on the low end and some would bang on the high end, and then the rowdiest of the children would eventually sit on the middle keys. Seriously, not good, at all.

After the intermission we heard some Bach music arranged for four-handed piano - man, he is the s#%&. He put the rest of the composers to shame, even Philip Glass. We decided to skip out right after his piece was finished, so that we left with a good taste in our mouths - more emerging composer work was set to finish off the evening.

After the Music

So after we got back home Niko and I talked for quite some time about the anti-music we'd heard. Niko started off by saying that music may be the most objective of all art forms - in other words, there are some sounds that are universally awful. That was a pretty bold statement, so we chipped away at that for a while. In the end, yes, it's a matter of taste, someone's gotta like it (i.e. the composer), it's just not for us, or for most. But man that's a hard thing to admit.

I decided that the only way I would deem the emerging works a success is if they were supposed to be jarring, annoying, and poorly written so that we'd be forced to go home and talk about music and aesthetics and subjectivity. Then the pieces totally worked; the composers, geniuses. That totally wasn't their aim, though - in fact, the program notes contained many paragraphs of explanation for each of the works, written by the composers, and they were pretty cheesy if you ask me. One was supposed to represent the way the sun moves across the sky . . . are you kidding me? Because all I heard was droning, repetitive, low notes that wished they were part of a Philip Glass piece gnashing against endlessly upward-moving and increasingly annoying right-hand banging.

The Conclusion

Niko and I agreed that all art has the opportunity to tell a story, and, for us at least, good artists are the ones who tell the story well. Not every artist wants to tell a story, I guess, but I don't think that's the kind of art we're drawn to. We like a good story. Philip Glass? Great stories. Bach? You bet your sweet bippy. The other guys? Not so much.

Final note: The two pianists were AMAZING. I'm so blown away by technical skill

In San Francisco, at last!

So we're here, we're here, we're here! Oh goodness, we are having such a great time. In fact, we're having so much fun that we haven't been bored enough to sit down and blog! :-)

The city is great, our house is great, and perhaps the best thing about the whole trip are the great things Jillian and I are learning about ourselves and the world around us.

To give you a small inkling of how things are going, check out our Flickr SF photo set.

And if you have any reason or excuse to be on the west coast, please visit us here in lovely Potrero Hill!

Gotta run -- dinner with friends in Noe Valley. More to come . . .