I Walk On

Resuming the story of 2 August 2008, in which I visit San Francisco for an afternoon of diversion...

Coming back to myself, I was standing in the virgin vinyl aisle of Amoeba records on Haight street remembering Joe Strummer there six years on. I had arrived at three for an in-store set of songs and was enduring the final wait with a crowd of young folks who looked smart and sensitive. Then, the always precocious, only occasionally precious, troubadour Conor Oberst and his band men walked out to the general delight. He was in town playing two small sold-out shows at a club starting a tour behind dropping his new joint (to employ the linguistic hype of the jumpy record industry.) The album was recorded in Mexico at some distance from his Wisconsin base and his regular band, Bright Eyes. Like many Americans including myself years ago, he exhibited the telltale sign of having gone native and was seen in photos sporting a shirt from Michoacan.
Appropriately, the opening song reflected this new Kerouacian figure. His singing voice and his band sounded more roots and country than his usual cosmopolitan sound. It was entitled "Moab" presumably after the town in Utah. Kerouac had naturally passed through there himself once or twice and wrote a line in a haiku, "Who's Moab?", trying to recall this lesser known Old Testament figure.
It's refrain was an aphorism, "There's nothing that the road cannot heal." I know what he's driving at: the liberation and responsibility for survival that the road can offer, as well as the distance it imposes, psychic and physical, between ourselves and the situation that made us feel ill. I was feeling somewhat in need of healing myself recently and by that point in the song the music hit me. And as most of us have heard Jah Marley sing:
One good thing about music
when it hits you feel no pain.

In my stonedness and in my not having gone to hear live music much in the last nine months or so, my aesthetic-emotional response was tender and acute. It was a mild struggle to hold down tears. Oddly, in my not profuse recent reading on him since the show, I happened to read that tears are frequently seen at his shows. Who knows why?
I also happened to see an interview with Conor in which he confessed that it was hearing Robert Smith of The Cure as a youngster that made him resolve to be a singer. A certain plaintive, keening quality in Smith's style that is also in Conor's, it's something that can touch the heart of some of whom I am one. My New England upbringing prohibits such displays, however, and I quickly resumed my groove in a composed manner. There is also the matter of having at least twenty years on the next oldest person, so the young scene-makers may already wonder if you're a bit daft.
The show consisted of all new material, as befits a prolific "new Bob Dylan" prodigy. It sounded fairly distinct from the songs of his I had heard before. Truth be told, I'd really only heard his television appearances and some radio play on KALX Berkeley's "college station." I found him quite talented and appealing, but hadn't felt that owning any of his records was essential to my appreciation of him. Meanwhile Conor seems intent on filling a hypothetical record shop with his discography. I was checking him out at this whistle stop in his progress.
Many of the others, it appeared, felt that taking a large number of photographs or phone-videos was essential to their own appreciation of the event. They want to preserve their memories of taking photos at it. I suppose some of the phones being held aloft were for absentees to listen in. It is difficult not to tell them to get a clue and be here now for once in their lives but I try.
That said, the music hit the spot. I did dig the new direction detecting notes of the time-honored music of The Band in the organ, guitar, and deliberately restrained drum sound. When Conor came out, he put on his sunglasses saying, "Just until my eyes adjust." He didn't remove them again until, in vigorous strumming huddle, they flew off. He put them on again immediately. At this summer afternoon gig, he came on like a friend to all, played with passion, waved, and was gone-- no autograph party.
A decent fellow, my hat's off to him.

But in fact my hat was back on as less than an hour after I walked in, I walked out again. A brilliant sunny and moderately warm day transpired out of doors, populated by the colorful cast of characters who are attracted to the area on a Saturday afternoon. My stride led toward the park, the great sprawling heavily-used patch of manufactured greenery we know as Golden Gate park.
Rested up on Hippie hill, where a considerable crows of people radiated out on the lawn arond a group of conga drummers. A guy blew a few bleets, panic notes of the Afrique, over the top of rhythm pulsating agreeably this summer day. Sitting in the grass over them, I devoured my cut-half segment of a bartlett pear. Walking up some tough but restful looking Mexican-Americans had lost control of a soccer ball on their blanket. It rolled downhill past me and I didn't try to kick it back. As I passed hem I said I was afraid I'd fall and hurt my back. they just returned silent serious looks. I kind of noticing them keeping an eye me afterward--might have pegged me for a cop. I understand this is a place where people come to stop and cop, which, of course, attracts cops who'd like it to stop.

I lingered not, I had another goal in mind. So by sidewalk, roadway, and dirt path, I found my way to the concourse to check out the two new buildings for the two old museums there. The Academy of Science is not yet open but I had seen a tour on television. Begun as a Victorian specimen collecting society for area professional and arm-chair scientists it then became a popular museum wildly loved by children. It looked vastly improved from the old funky but kind of cool set-up--most notably in the new deep-water observation tank with scuba-diving fish-wranglers. I'll go a year after it opens on a rainy week-day in mid-Winter, hopefully to won't be over-crowded by then.
As I reached the top of a hillock nearby, I got a great view of the other most remarkable new aspect of the place; the roof is comprised of several hills of earth with a multipicity of plant-life already growing on them. With it many round port-hole-style skylights, it looked both futuristic and like something out of the immemorial past, part Dune planet part Hobbiton. The structure's many complex rippling facets and facades make it plain that this is in a sense a time-machine. It is one that attempts to smuggle biological specimens, preserved and alive, archives of DNA into a menacing and uncertain planetary evolution.

Japanese tourists were snapping photos of an elaborate ceremonial bust in its own ornate marble gazebo which was being refurbished and was partially masked. I have to have it to them, they recognize the de facto surrealism of the West when they see it. Most of the locals walk right by.
And so onto my destination, the new de Young museum with its viewing tower open to all free of admission fee. (Free admission being a quality in many of my entertainments, a faithful reader may glean.) On the way in I passed a decorative pond with a column of blown and twisted yellow glass rising from its middle, a work by glass artist Dale Chihuly who had a big show in progress. Nearly 4:30 by then, I noticed I had just made it and that they began to prevent people from joining the line after me. We were then enclosed in a black-stone chamber with wire scuptures of bio-morphic forms. (Did I mention I once saw King Tut here?) It was mildly amusing to observe the art administration types having to marshal the tourist-like visitors to the tower while preserving their air of sophistication.
One waits in line as successive groups board one of two elevators up. It went quickly enough and as we stepped out an officious docent immediately asked us not to roam around freely but to step into the queue for the elevators back down. I laughed with a woman next me and we generally ignored this bit of social control. Wow and what an experience it was! Surrounded by a ground cloth of the park's tree tops, you look out and suddenly grasp a new, comprehensive perspective on the city of San Francisco.
Facing east, I saw downtown peaking in the Trans-America building with the the distant East bay and a vivid Mount Diablo over its shoulder. Turning west, I could see the miraculously vertiginous ocean hovers over the trees, mercifully spare of fog this day. Most thrilling of all was the section of the straits leading to the Golden Gate abutted by the Marin headlands soaking their feet. The bridge is visible only as two Loch Ness monster humps protruding over an occluding hill. All a heady and happy arrival and long enough after fifteen minutes before the graceful ride back down. The pretty, all-dressed-up docent was back as we boarded and said over-emphatically, "Have a really wonderful evening, all of you." "Yeah, buh-bye," said I as the doors closed.

I waited for a bus out front observing that band shell between the museums was also experiencing a make-over. A young male couple from France were having a discrete spat on the next bench--one walked off. The bus came-- the driver a self-possessed black man wouldn't let me pay to board it. But he did want to chat, literally asking me to stay up front with him, ostensibly so he could tell where my stop was. "Nice day in the park," I remarked. "I don't think about all of that when I'm working.'" He was a kick and he wouldn't stop talking when we got to Irving street and my stop. I was glad to relieve both of our loneliness for the few minutes it took to drive out of the park.
I walked up Irving enjoying it's commercial bustle, but I was tired. I bought a few fat-free whole wheat fig-newtons at a tiny shop--so small a bitty corner shelf held just one bottle of pepto-bismol, nevertheless something a neighborhood person in need would be gratified to find. Then I hopped the lively N-Judah train to the BART train for sleepy trance travel through tunnels toward home.