Early and Pre-History of San Francisco (The Secret of the Sea Pt.III, Chap.3.)

 

History is a voyage from the real to the imagined

1. Pre-history:

The Origins of Yerba Buena

It is widely accepted that the land mass 

that became San Francisco rose out of the sea 

 a sudden manifestation of tectonic tumescence

Petrified redwood provides us with clues

to what were once coastal forests

Little is known about the earliest animal life

widely presumed to have been very nasty

and to have died off quite a long time ago

It is thought that there were still whales in those days

With the first human inhabitants,

we peer around a rock darkly

In previous eras scholars idealized

noble savages who lived Romantic idyls,

Actually, our understanding of these first people

remains quite primitive

Examples of populations considered extinct

still turn-up on sundry beaches,

Here we observe a prehistoric flower-child

2.

Early History of San Francisco

Historical studies are best compared 

to a Miro-shaped hole in the floor

in which ancient objects of desire persist

The history of Western man is tied to beer,

from its earliest forms in ancient Egypt
to ales top-fermented on backdoor stoops
to the eldritch breweries and taprooms 

to modern-era factory suds and today's microbrews,

Man marches on

In from the sea a sailor could trade

a dazzling tortoise shell
for three bottles of Wunder beer;

Intricate scrimshaw

fetched a bottle of good whiskey

An establishment selling brews on July the Fourth

Hobos of the sea landed here for centuries 

One cannot overstate the importance of beer

 to the opening of the West,
to the founding of this Nation 

Dolls have a great deal to do with it too

Next thing you know you have

many a gay caballero on your hands

Hence the early arrival
of the civilizing influence of religion

3.

The Gold Rush

Tall ship inside of a vitrine,

 a message in a bottle

The message was that the Europeans 

were the new dominant sub-species of primate,

Formal, organized, and technologically adept,

they replaced the local flora and fauna

Those damn Yankee traders showed up,

bringing with them all sorts of confidence men,

the Flaneur here includes himself

 Certain intrepid mercenary types
 roamed the earth as colonial front men
for the arch-capitalists

 

Then, a whirling milky way 

of gold dust 

was discovered upstream

An "instant city" appeared overnight,

coming on like sleepy mushrooms

Today the story is relegated to potted histories,

Steam Punk drive-in movies,
buried gold dental crowns
and dry dusty ghost towns

Gold's glittering legacy
consists of continual financial crime

and a permanent plutocracy

With its burden of struggle and strife,
cramped quarters for most,
a pauper's burial at Land's End

Is that a "C" or is it a "G"?

In the first American Gilded Age,

  the custom was for Robber Barons

to build temples to house their dead souls

A system of justice arose

to protect the property rights of the wealthy,
law and order to maintain the status quo

The infamous Barbary Coast was host
to rough men who did quick work 

with a paintbrush

or with a sailor's knife

Around this time Chinatown was first founded

as a source for cheap labor, florid housewares
and peut-etre a bowl of O.

The opening of the railroads,
A revolution in industry
dead tech too magnetic to discard

Charming and uncanny momentos 

of our race to the bottom

Examination of the historical record:
  souvenirs: coffee cups, matchbooks, 
room keys, and a slender opium pipe

 4. The Military Era

Bringing things up to the present

Ever vigilant in a turbulent world
of rising seas

 

Keeping the peace in our nation-state

Responding to emergency of any kind

Never mind Richard Serra, 

nautical military debris produces

real heavy metal enigmas

As long as there is fuel left to burn

The military you shall always have with you

 4. Epilogue

A solitary room in the dim past

watches the tide roll this way

 Almost check out time,
the tidal clock seems to say

San Francisco,

Alameda, Oakland

Summer 2013-Summer 2014

Torpedo Update

The Flaneur's faithful will no doubt recall the image of a somewhat weathered torpedo appearing in a recent post. Well, grab hold of your furbelows and dig the refurbished and greatly enhanced new memorial to underwater stealth warfare.

 Where the previous model was proudly prodigious,

this baby is outstandingly protuberant. 

The engraved tablet and the Pampanito illustration are also new.

The whole thing moved me to an atavistic state 

of nationalist militaristic aggression.

I felt I had a lot in common with the passing crowds

13 August 2014

Next Stop Nowheresville

Remember like bees? They were hella scary. But today's technologies of industrial farming, pesticide chemistry, genetically engineered crops, robo-bees, super-highways, refineries, and radical new fracking forms of energy exploration, will soon solve that pest problem of old.

August 2014

Washington Street Addendum

Another side of Washington street is seen here in these images of the weekly farmer's market. The Flaneur passes through with a coffee and a burning ember under the nearest great tree.

 This is Suzanne Holland, 

who sings folk songs from America and the Isles,

I listen to those styles a lot, on radio, on record, in person,

and I regard her as unusally gifted

 It was a sparse day with a brilliant and scalding sun, 

neither a lot of farmers nor gleaners had showed up,

I pulled a chair up close to listen

Lovely folksinging with deep soul running through it, 

if you see Suzanne playing, stop and listen,

 and, who's gonna throw that minstrel girl a coin?

June 2014

Washington Street (P.O.O. #2)

The Psychogeography of Old Oakland #2

The Flaneur walks on the occasionally wild side of a truncated street. As always, sturdy shoes are recommended.

1.

Washington Street by Night

 This is Washington street where it begins

the old Swan's marketplace

 

 It's a part of the City

where darkness can fall rather quickly

out of nowhere

 In its brief passage Winter sunlight elongates the dusk

Chinese bric-a-brac jumble shop

never seems to be open for business,

in sepia gloom existence itself seems frangible

 It's often a puzzling place,
perhaps even a transporting place

Entirely in the mind of the beholder

When days are the shortest

Kris Kringle appears

hand-carved hand-painted

 

 Some see Buddha's skull 

in the window of the old Bodhisattva Club

 Come as you are, 

as you were, as you want me to be

 You may need those reading glasses
 with headlights on them

After midnight

 civilization's maze-work

always a bit haunted

 The Rooster awaits the morning people,
as the children of the night evanesce

In the shadows of the control towers,

  tonight we shoot out the cameras

December 2013- 2014

 2.

Washington Street in the Sober Light of Day

 Summer 2013

Temescal Dig

 A primordial glade.

The Flaneur interprets some occult findings in a section of Oakland undergoing metamorphosis.

1. 

I haven't driven a car in the last ten years. It's also been ten years since I had to go the DMV to get a new driver's license. One likes to keep one's options open, however, for whatever emergency may arise in the always soon-to-arrive end times.
They thumbprint everyone now. In the name of the security state, everyone who wants to drive now has to have his or her fingerprint print available to the FBI data base. Nice.

Afterward I ambled across the street to entered a zone where no cars go.

An ancient mortar and pestle 

Melded into the rock for evermore.

Eucalyptus are an introduced species in California. 

This specimen with its multiple-personalities 

appears to have been an early arrival 

A right of passage for local youth. 

Dig the Warholian rendition of the 7-UP logo.

Newspaper reports say that it's going away
 like the old porn palace next door--
demolished decades ago

for fenced-off vacant lot vacuousness,
with the ghosts of Soul Brothers Kitchen 

Under the spreading chestnut tree,
something mediaeval about a blade shop

Nature and its double,
some see a crow in this image

15 July 2014

2.

Cultural Archaeology

Temescal and me go way back. That's where a place called Ollie's used to be. Ollie was an old-fashioned bull-dyke who ran a bar for ladies with its entrance on Telegraph. She rented out the back room to a group I was associated with calling itself CAVAN (Commitee Against Visual and Audio Numbness, I think it was.) All our bands performed there--Negativland, Fake Stone Age, and my own duo at the time the (original) Red Aunts (name later used by an all-girl Drag-strip Punk rock band). As well as the likes of Ian Underwood, Pell Mell, and, memorably, The Meat Puppets. We had trouble getting people to show up and the night the Meat Puppets were to play it poured and they were late. Most of the small audience had fled but nonetheless they played a scorching 45 minute set for those of us still there.

Had friends who lived in an artists-only house nearby on Rich street. And the Negativland studio/ apartment of my old colleague Don Joyce is right there on Telegraph,; his building newly festooned whimsical murals. Have recorded and brainstormed there many a night in its nicotined precincts.

 I recall when all this quaint roadside Americana
was still open for business

Amazing how old signage can survive
long after a business has closed down

 Well, this place is still in business
get all the carbon you can out of those old fossil fuel burners

July 2013