Big America

America used to be incomprehensibly large. I've been to both coasts and some besides, but always flown from one part to another: the distances inbetween, the Big West, the 'flyover states' seemed insurmountable any other way. Nevertheless, Amtrak, the US national passenger rail network run four cross country services from the west coast to the midwest, and connecting services on from Chicago to New York, making it possible to get from coast to coast without your feet (or at least your wheels) leaving the ground.

The California Zephyr runs from Emeryville in the Bay Area, to Chicago, in just over two days. For about five hundred dollars you get a 'roomette' (two seats in a little cabin that push down into a bed), showers, three sit-down meals a day in the dining car, and a car attendant who'll give you a shout when the train is about to stop long enough to zip out to the platform for a cigarette.

On Saturday morning, the train rolls into Sacramento fifteen minutes late or so already. Amtrak trains' tardiness comes less from inefficiency in the trains themselves than from running across tracks they don't own, which are, like in New Zealand, primarily a freight network. 'Freight congestion' often keeps us waiting for up to half an hour, as engines pulling a hundred trucks or more slowly rumble past.

We tootle across the central valley, before climbing into the High Sierra, through the Donner Pass. It begins hailing, then snowing, and as we get higher a foot-thick crust of snow is lying on the ground among the pines. The train stops at Reno to let the gamblers off, the rest of us to smoke, and then we're off and onto the High Plains. Devoid of any trees, the vegetation is small and scrubby, with large sandy patches where nothing grows, despite a few rivers and swampy-looking lakes.

This section was part of the first transcontinental railway, the Central Pacific, built by the Big Four, who included Sacramento businessman Leland Stanford. Having made a fortune from regulating and compressing the time between east and west, Stanford sponsored Eadweard Muybridge's experiments in freezing individual moments of time, thus unwittingly sponsoring the invention of cinema.

The next morning, when I wake up, the Wasatch mountains are outside the window, the first installment of Utah's incredible scenery. Salt Lake City has been and gone while I slept, and we're now heading towards the Rockies. The Utah desert, flat and bare with elephantine wrinkly grey mud-mounds, is interrupted by extraordinary flat-topped mountains formed by erosion, piles of shale topped by a thin biscuit of red sandstone. Crossing the border between Colorado and Utah, we pass through the narrow Ruby Canyon, its extraordinary red walls coloured by iron oxide, an impossibly narrow stepladder carved into the canyon wall by Indians. For more than two hundred miles, we snake alongside the Colorado River, then pause for a freight train to pass as we look down onto the plain beyond the hills, and circle down to Denver, still nearly a mile above sea level.

My fellow train riders are without a doubt the friendliest bunch of people I've met on this entire trip. It's impossible to sit opposite someone in the cafe or diner without getting into conversation, and usually a very interesting conversation too. Most people get the accent straight away (I only get one person asking me if I'm English or Australian, which used to happen a lot in California), but unlike in Australasia where we RTWers are ten a penny, taking several months off and travelling round the world seems a strange, exciting and enviable proposition.

Most are travelling for the experience of the railway and the scenery, occasionally to avoid flying, sometimes in combination with other forms of transport. A lot of people are visiting family over the memorial day weekend. Bill, a heavy-duty machine operator who served as an auxilliary in the 1991 Gulf War, got lost and bumped into the killing fields of the Basra Road, has been across Montana on the Empire Builder, and is travelling to Salt Lake City today. Terry and Christy are travelling to Grand Junction to see an an aunt. Lewis has just been disqualified in a bridge-building competition in Salt Lake City and is on his way back to New York. Nathaniel and Deborah have been to Montana and are heading to Denver to drive to Cheyenne. Nathaniel doesn't hunt, he's a peaceful man, but he collects trophy mounts to decorate his home in Philadelphia; he's in the market for a polar bear skin at the right size and price, and also after a Rolls Royce sedan, which he thinks he might buy in England.

At one point I think I hear Yiddish and look up to see a party of Amish, the men sporting bowl-cuts and wispy chin-danglers, the women and girls in starched and spotless wimples, who would indeed be speaking some dialect of German. They sit in the observation lounge playing cards, and I wonder why they're travelling by rail, if there's a sliding curve of technology rejection and whether when teleportation is invented they'll be allowed to travel by plane, just to keep one step behind.

I keep bumping into Wesley, a college professor and novelist, on cigarette breaks, and we arrange to have dinner together. I try to answer his questions about New Zealand's geology, and stumblingly attempt to express what I like about the vitality of American literary culture, but fail to get much further than McSweeney's. He's left New York for the West Coast to teach, and left behind a ten-year relationship in New York. We ride out of Winnemucca as we eat, watching a huge thunderstorm gather like a funnel across the broad plains.

While some of the Amtrak staff rotate at the stations, the dining car and accommodation car staff are on six-day shifts, starting in Chicago, making their way to the west coast and back. The woman working the snack bar below the observation lounge has to get back East to see a sick relative, and they've closed the Amtrak staff base in Philadelphia. Some staff mutter darkly about the government, who subsidise Amtrak, trying to close the cross-country routes altogether.

On Monday morning everything has gone flat and I wake up staring out my window at the Nebraska prairie, the horizon a straight and far line. Inhabitation becomes more or less consistent alongside the tracks, although phone signal isn't. Water-towers, fields and farmsteads fill in the gaps between settlements. Each town we pass, each little replica of Main Street USA, has dozens of American flags on its streets for the Memorial Day public holiday.

As the hills have come down, the temperature has shot up: you can tell from the humid furnace blasts as you pass between the air-conditioned cars. When we stop at Ottumwa for the first official cigarette break of the day, both Geraldine, the car-attendant and Wesley revel in the heat: she's from near Memphis (and has a just-delicious southern drawl), and he's from North Carolina. I can't bear it, and cigarette done I'm back in the air-conditioned cool of the steel behemoth as quickly as possible.

Arriving in Chicago, we've almost kept to the schedule and are less than an hour late, so I have nearly four hours' layover. I bounce out of the station and over a couple of blocks to the Sears Tower, which was the tallest building in the world the last time I went up it, and is now only the tallest in North America. From the top, Lake Michigan is laid out like a flat and waveless sea, and a thunderstorm gathers from the west, thin spears of lightning jabbing out of its funnel. Back on the ground, I make a couple of circumnavigations of the downtown Loop, which is a little dull and empty on a public holiday.

I didn't get a roomette (or, as it turns out, even get there in time to get a seat with a window) on the Lake Shore Limited, which weaves its way through the midwest, Cleveland, along the Erie canal, through upstate New York and along the Hudson River into Penn Station. With frequent jerks across the tracks and the whistling of the oxygen mask strapped across the face of the man opposite me, sleep is impossible, and I find myself in the snack car at six in the morning to try to guzzle enough coffee to stay awake all the way to NYC. Within minutes I'm talking to Jean, who lives in Tribeca, just seven blocks from Ground Zero, and watched and heard it all happen on September 11th. She's unemployed, lives in a rent-stabilised apartment, and says if she were going to Washington she'd like to pour blood on George Bush.

The trains stops for half an hour somewhere between Buffalo and Rochester, and we're suddenly aware of a border patrol guard (though we've crossed no border) quizzing the students behind us about their nationality. He moves on to a young Paraguayan woman, and examines her passport which apparently only bears a six-month visitor visa from 1999. She says an application is being processed, he keeps repeating to her 'you're out of status'. Eventually, he takes her off the train, as she asks worriedly if she'll lose her job in New York. As he passes us he says 'Hi, how're you guys doing' with a look which in only an instant seems to simultaneously say three things: a) I can see you're white so I'm not going to bother you; b) I certainly heard you muttering between yourselves as I was doing this; and c) if there is anything dodgy about you, you know I'm the person with the power to make bad things happen to you. I later discover that three other people have been removed from my carriage by the border police, and that almost every time the train passes this way, someone is removed.

The trains empties drastically at Syracuse, and I move to a window seat and get chatting to the people who were sitting behind me. Joseph and his wife Lillian, in their seventies, are on their way back home to Long Island. Joseph was born in Istanbul in 1927, just four years after the formation of the Turkish Republic by Ataturk (of whom he seems to be a fan), of a family of Sephardic Jews who had settled in Edirne after expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century by Ferdinand and Isabella. He talks about travelling along the Danube when he was nine. He's also a fan of Pamuk, and says Pamuk's memoir of Istanbul has pictures of his Istanbul, the Istanbul of the thirties.

Finally, the train is passing the George Washington Bridge, huddling up to the Hudson, and crawling under the city to Pennsylvania station, warm and muggy. Seventy-seven hours later, I've shrunk America, touched strange new ground all the way, and I'm more than ready to sleep somewhere that stands still. What a big, beautiful country. What amazing Americans.

Sacramento (slight return)

When I was nearly sixteen, my mum, brother and I all moved to Sacramento for a year, and while my mum taught an exchange job at California State University, I went to high school where I learned how to work an analogue switching desk (but never to edit), skipped class a lot (and got brought back to school once in a proper black-and-white police car: I was thrilled), watched 16mm prints of the the classic Drivers' Ed movie Red Asphalt, smoked behind my mum's back (she refused to let me spend my allowance on cigarettes even though they only cost sixty cents a packet), and wrote a column for the school newspaper, The X-Ray, called 'Anarchy from the UK'. We lived in an apartment block on Fair Oaks boulevard, two blocks built around courtyards with swimming pools and palm trees, where the students who lived upstairs used to have loud parties and piss on my mum's car from the balcony.

Sacramento was a gold rush town: gold was discovered in the American River in 1849 near the sawmill of town founder John Sutter, who subsequently lost everything, including his wish to have the town named Sutterville. After various sovereignty issues had been sorted out, the town became the state capital of California in 1855, and the Washington-style wedding-cake capitol building is where Arnold Schwarzenegger hangs out these days. It's not a very interesting or exciting town: clustered around the capitol are various edifices of the state bureaucracy, and there's a legal/wonkish feel to the area around the Capitol Mall, but other than that it's just a small city, quite aware of its own insignificance and uncoolness.

But when I was 16, this was, much more than San Francisco, the Real California. Streets in the city were laid out on a strictly square grid, streets A-Z running east-west and street 1-65 running north-south. Freeways, 99 and I5 quadrasected the downtown area. Where we lived, outside the city boundaries, blocks ran for a mile (walking to the nearest Safeway store was liable to bring on heat exhaustion) and strip malls seemed to run endlessly out into the suburbs of the suburbs: one of the largest and most popular indoor malls, Sunrise, was thirteen miles beyond where we lived. Out there was the only time I've ever experienced sideways vertigo, as I looked from the parking lot to the stores and then back to the road, the parking lot beyond that and the stores beyond the cars: this was suburbia as loosely packed as it gets.

On the intersection where we lived, we watched a new Lucky store go up across the road, and yet more construction begin on a third corner. Though the regeneration of downtown was beginning with the hotel Rachael's dad built, out of town it felt optimistic, happy and new, especially compared to Enfield's A10, and its miles of slowly-closing factories (the sites of which are now deeply unpleasant Californian-style strip malls). With so much space, across the flat and featureless plain of the valley, the freeways and malls were so oblivious to their own ugliness that they were almost beautiful.

The first thing I notice when I get off the train is the sharp, dry heat of the central valley: no sea mist here to take the edge off, but uncharacteristically it mellows, sticks below 80, and there's even a breeze going. The regeneration of downtown is still going on: the bottom end of K Street Mall has become a covered shopping centre. It leads to Old Sacramento, which is just the same, a collection of cheesy boutiques and by-the-barrel candy shops in the restored heart of the old gold rush town, gearing up for yet another 'Jazz Jubilee', a strictly Dixieland affair. The Crest Cinema is still open, and K Street feels less dowdy than twenty years ago, but at night there's nowhere to eat, the streets are a bit too quiet to be comfortabl, and the police ride around on pushbikes.

Vicente Fox is visiting, and fewer than twelve demonstrators are assembled outside the Capitol, shouting 'USA! USA!' and waving placards denouncing illegal immigration. Later on, a rather larger number of demonstrators, with a much larger police presence, are protesting against restrictive immigration laws and the NAFTA agreements that keep Mexicans poor.

I catch the light rail and a bus out to Fair Oaks and Fulton, where I used to live. Almost everything has changed: the Lucky supermarket has been replaced by a Loehmann's Plaza in exactly the same style: wooden tiles and weatherboards, stuck-on brick fascias. Little restaurants and boutiques (Grateful Bread, anyone?) are on all four corners, and the intersection feels leafier, wealthier and less stark than in 1987. But Sierra Fair still stands proud, still offers special move-in rates, and is not, as I temporarily feared, full of guntoting gangstas and crack whores. I take a quick recce to find our old place: the doorway of no. 104, the mail boxes where I collected my O-level results, the swimming pool where Rachael and Fay and I hung out one day when we skipped school. Then I go back across the road, drink a coffee like any other coffee in a Java City like any other Java City, and wait for the bus where I used to wait for the bus to school.

On the way back, when the light rail stalls at 16th Street for fifteen minutes, a guy called Travis starts talking to me. He's carrying a blown-up clear plastic bag of live crickets home to feed to his pet alligator, and tells me the entire history of his family's animal breeding, including, in all-too graphic detail, all about the pitbull who got parvo and died. He's from LA and says he used to "claim the thug life, be a gangbanger, run with the crips" but gave it all up when the Muslims targetted him. Now he lives in the Sacramento projects and just deals a little weed.

There aren't many people left to look up. Carrie, who once wrote me a letter about the Sacramento anti-war movement the last time around which turned up in an anthology called 'Even my dog doesn't want this war' took me boat shopping on Howe Avenue the last time I was here, but I've long lost touch with her. After a bit of googlestalking, I find the law office where Rachael was working until recently and go up to the ninth floor to enquire after her, but, as I suspected, after I buttonhole a former colleague in the lift, she's moved on and back South.

I go back to my old high school, Sacramento High, (the second oldest high school west of the Mississippi) which closed in 2003 and reopened as a semi-privatised charter school, part of the St HOPE group of public schools. The football team is still the Dragons, and like Sierra Fair, the building looks just the same as it did twenty years ago, though there's now a fence all the way around the front lawn. The shady benches where I used to sit and discuss the musical merits of the B-52s and Oingo Boingo with Tracker and Rob are still there. There's a security kid on the gate, who lets me in to take some photos and tells me that he graduated from here last year, and that it's a good school now, that St. Hope's straightened it up. Later, when I meet Priscilla, who's running a stall for the Western Service Workers Association outside Safeway in the R Street market, she tells me that it's all part of the overall privatisation of public services, and that the teachers were sacked and non-union teachers hired. I remember that when our teachers went on strike for a day and non-union substitutes came into babysit us, I spent the English period writing a vitriolic anti-scab poem and handed it to the substitute when the bell rang. The next day, Miss Peterson embarrassingly read it out to the class.

Coming back here, I expected to be overwhelmed by memories good and bad, but I'm not. I notice what a drag it is to get around by public transport; how many poor-looking people there are; the doppler effect of trains blowing their horns as they pass through town; how unexpectedly friendly most people are; how the city just keeps on growing outwards. But after twenty years, the place itself has lost the power to open the floodgates. Though I wouldn't be here now if I hadn't been here then, I doubt I'll be back soon.

Overheard on the streets, on buses and in taquerias

• "And then they just whupped her ass. I dunno if they just said come over here we want to talk to you, but they got her…";
• "Dialysis was the most awful thing I went through… in this country, if you're poor you get treated, if you're rich you get cured."
• "I don't want to go back to prison, Ali!"
• A man asks a girl if he can finish her discarded dinner. "It's OK, I eat a lot of rough food." Then: "You hardly ate anything," indignantly.
• "We're living in a police state. These things wouldn't happen to Caucasian people."
• "I just think that if I just put all my negative energy into smoking dope, then I won't do anything worse than fall asleep."
• "She says she was a non-smoker trapped in a smoker's body… she hated the smell, the taste, everything"

California Über Alles

I am governor Schwarzenegger, pretty soon i'll be dictator
When they make me president, democracy is going away
Hasta la vista, bay-bay, i will command all of you
Kindergarten cop in every school, or i vill terminate you

The best bits of San Francisco are at the edges, where buildings run out and you can see the hills and rocks on which it's built, trace the shape of the city, see the bay and the parched green beyond.

The N streetcar running along Judah terminates at Ocean Beach, the furthest point west in the Sunset neighbourhood. Cross the coastal highway at small zebra crossing, go between two tussocky sand dunes, and suddenly there's an ocean beach, looking out west across the pacific. The sea roars and crashes. A few surfies brave the chaotic breakers coming in all directions: San Francisco's beaches have notoriously cold water, and there are rumours of sharks. The breeze is not too chilly to sit on the edge of a dune and read, watching the sun head for the sea. A guy carrying a brown bottle in a paper bag points to the peaks on the clouds on the horizon and says that means the bad weather's heading north now.

The bus up the Presidio highway stops at the end of the Golden Gate Bridge, where I walk across to Marin and back. The red-painted (the colour of the original primer: San Franciscans liked it so much they never put a white coat on), cables and enormous towers are almost overwhelming: it's like being on a postcard or inside a snowdome . Mist pokes fingers from the ocean into the bay across the latticework of the deck. The walkway has low fences, frighteningly easy to climb over, and no anti-suicide barriers, but all along it are emergency crisis counselling telephones, and signs saying 'There is Hope, Make the Call', an inspiring example of the American free-choice ethic in action. Back at the cafe on the San Francisco side I get chatting to Robert, a corrections officer from a jail in Southern California, who says it looks as if someone jumped off today. He works in a 'three-tier' prison and inmates there try to top themselves by jumping from the top tier, head first. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they just end up in a body cast. At four o'clock today, church bells will ring across San Francisco, on the 69^th anniversary of the bridge's opening, in memory of the more than 1,200 people who have ended their lives by leaping from it.

Even the upper edges of the city are exhilarating. What looks like an easy stroll on the map from the Castro (where the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are out in full force under the rainbow flag: it's the day before Harvey Milk's birthday) to Golden Gate Park goes over Corona Heights where sandstone rocks stick up into the sky and the wind is enough to make the slippery scramble up to the top a bit scary. By the time I come down through Buena Vista park it's pouring down, and carries on all the way along Haight Street, where stragglers from the Bay to Breakers Race are still hanging out in the bars and cafes. When I get to the new De Young museum in the park, I'm absolutely soaked, and not in much of a mood to appreciate the typically angular new Herzog & DeMeuron block clad in copper that will eventually turn green to blend in with the park. In the collection of Oceanic art I find a lonely case of Maori artifacts, tekoteko with their familiar paua eyes, and waka prows looking much lonelier and dustier than when you see them everywhere.

Berkeley is less of a thrill. Now that I'm over tie-dye the shopping is much less exciting, and the university buildings themselves are either pompous neoclassical Edifices of Learning, or grim concrete cubes. The Pacific Film Archive is on a two-week break, and Telegraph Avenue is just grim and dull. In fact, Telegraph is one of a number of the Bay Area's development 'problems', though hardly the most pressing. This side of the bay, the small town of Hercules is taking on Wal-Mart, using Eminent Domain to reclaim land the superstore planned to build on. This may have less to do with taking on the capitalist giant than with the basic middle class aspiration to keep the poor well out of sight: one resident is quoted as saying she doesn't want “anything ghetto” near her $700,000 dollar house. At the other end of the spectrum back in San Francisco, Bay View Hunters Point residents are protesting against the city's all-or-nothing redevelopment plan which they fear is a prelude to ethnic cleansing, a far from uncommon precedent in Californian urban planning: many families moved here from Fillmore when it was redeveloped. Urban planning luminary Jane Jacobs died recently, and the Berkeley Daily Planet is warning against her uses and abuses.

Much more pleasant than Berkeley itself is a ride on the BART all the way down to Fremont. Oakland, its Coliseum and sprawl slowly give way to smaller and smaller towns, and the hills skirting the bay come closer and closer until they look near enough to touch. Turn around and get the other view riding back into the city, skirting a confluence of freeways ribboning through the air towards the Bay Bridge.

Even on the streets of San Francisco it's hard to avoid enormous 4x4s, and I've seen a good number of Hummers too, smug drivers both symbolically and practically lending their support to the oil wars. These things go beyond your everyday Chelsea tractor: their immensity is obscene, and it's no good just fervently wishing they crash because even a brick wall would come out worse in a collision with one of these things. Meanwhile on the sidewalks, almost every cafe offers free wireless. The whiskered and hip sit, lattes in hand, staring intently into the screens of their powerbooks. Working on their thesis, or just surfing YouTube, who can tell?

The Japan Center is not, as I had hoped, an enormous screaming-neon tower block, but a low suburban shopping centre on Geary, full of Japanese shops and restaurants, populated with salarymen-figures and and American-speaking/Japanese-looking teenagers. There's hardly a thriving Japantown here as there once was: most Californian Japantowns were obliterated by the forced internment of ethnic Japanese-Americans during the second world war. A small bronze monument pays tribute to the lost neighbourhoods. I remember a recent article in New Zealand's Listener magazine in which an offended American ambassador found it strange that the rest of the world didn't acknowledge what a force for freedom America had been during WWII. It's a big country: big enough to remember and forget at the same time.

Old brain, new media

The work I did at the Govett-Brewster is now online. Check it out at:

http://www.govettbrewster.com/lenlye/

Cheers, Tyler!

Perfumed Nightmare

The venerable San Francisco Cinematheque, founded by Bruce Ballie and Chick Strand, and running for over forty years, screens films in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SoMa. Tonight they're screening Kidlat Tahimik's Perfumed Nightmare (Mababangong Bangungot, 1977).

The film follows the ingenuous Kidlat from his village in the Philippines to Paris. A keen listener to the Voice of America and president of the local chapter of the Werner von Braun club, he drives a jeepney (a taxi converted from a surplus American jeep), listens to news of the space race and dreams of crossing a bridge larger than the one that connects his village to the outside world: to America and then to space. Falling in with a visiting American, he travels to Paris to work refilling an empire of bubble gum machines in unlikely locations. Travelling to Germany on holiday he sees the last handmade zwiebelturm being installed on a church roof amid dire predictions that in the future plastic zwiebelturms will be turned out five a day from factories. Back in Paris he begins to lose faith in development as an enormous new supermarket (in reality Rogers' and Piano's Centre Pompidou) puts his market trader friend out of business, and news reaches him from home of forests felled around his village to build a highway for tourists. Resigning his membership of the Werner von Braun club, he climbs into one of the plastic zwiebelturms being prepared for the Pompidou and takes off for space under the power of his own breath.

It's a very funny and devastating critique of development. Far from being an innocent, Tahimik studied economics in the US intending to work in development, but after living on a 'video commune' in Munich, meeting Werner Herzog and scoring a bitpart in Kaspar Hauser he got into filmmaking. In his bowl haircut and wispy beard he mugs to the camera, his words spoken in Tagalog and translated in an overdub. The American, pale-skinned and skinny-legged in shorts and sunhat speaks without moving his lips; happy village children cheer and clap for Werner von Braun as Kidlat's little sister carries a box of icecreams nearly half her size.The credits thanking an unnamed 'immigrant worker on the Pompidou Museum' are like the dream of a subaltern fraternity willing to help each other not so much in solemn struggle as in craziness like taking off for space in a fragment of postmodern architecture.

It's beautifully put together from intentionally shot and happily recontextualised material: everything, including the birth of Kidlat's son, is wound into the story. The woman doing the intro at the cinematheque took a class with Tahimik in the 90s and described his filmmaking philosophy as 'gascan' filmmaking, as in you run out of gas, wait for someonr to come along with a gascan and then make a film out of them.

Visual culture in the Mission

After three days without a camera, it’s time to go and take some pictures, so off to the Mission, where the colours are bright and the artists are bursting out of the galleries and onto the streets. Mission Street and Valencia Street run parallel to each other throughout the district, Valencia rather trendier and whiter than Mission: walking just two blocks east to west the difference is very noticeable. It's all part of the same gentrification process , but when Mark and Clare moved to San Francisco and engaged a relocation consultant, it was made very clear to them that they didn't have enough tattoos or piercings to live in the Mission.

Stencil graffiti round here is confined to the public sidewalk. Someone has used a crude letter stencil cut up to paint slogans of yearning love: 'I can hardly wait for you'; 'Love me till me heart stops' 'Your existence gives me hope'. Next to many of them, someone has used a rather better stencil to tell the artist to 'Shut Up Honky'.There are quite a few posters calling for the impeachment of George Bush.

My new camera, a fairly tinny Coolpix L4, has one interesting mode: continuous sports shooting, which takes 16 pictures in about 20 seconds, composing them into a 4×4 grid on a single frame. It’s designed to capture athletic effort, but I try using it to capture every angle of a busy junction, at 20th & Valencia, and 24th & Mission. It's a bit Lomoish, and results are mixed.

Balmy Avenue, just off 24th Street has a superb collection of Hispanic murals, mostly about popular struggle, commemorating popular heroes and people's solidarity. They're in a mixture of styles, and some of them are quite beautiful. I particularly like one of an old woman painted on a fence whose planks are starting to split apart.

A quick dip into 826 Valencia, Dave Eggers' young people's writing centre, fronted by the Bay Area's leading independent pirate supplies store, a whimsical assemblage that feels something like being force-fed two hundred pages of Eggers in five minutes. It's very funny, though. There are pirate flags for sale, crutches for people with wooden legs, genuine pirate flags and glass eyes in a variety of sizes. The walls are covered in short stories, fragments and pirate-related lists in the style of McSweeney's. The woman behind the counter explains that the lard in the large bucket is not for sale, but can only be obtained in exchange for a lock of hair (bring your own container). When I explain that I haven't got much to spare, she suggests 'a wee bit of lard for a wee bit of hair'.

Then it’s time for the Other Cinema's biannual screening of New Experimental Works at Artists’ Television Access on Valencia. ATA has a small screening room in a repurposed shop, whose front window is used for a community radio station on Saturday afternoons. Fittingly, I bump into filmmaker and fellow w1t1lnian Peter Todd for the second time in the day.

The Other Cinema is Craig Baldwin's gig, so it's not too surprising that most of the works (every single one of which comes in at under ten minutes: brevity is definitely the soul of experimental filmmaking) are based around found footage, or what Baldwin calls 'redeemed footage'. It's a very good bunch of films, too. Robbyn Leonard's Limerence explores the meaning of love and art through hula hoops and rollercoasters to the beats of plunderphonicians Negativland. Michelle Silva's China Girls gives tantalising frozen glimpses of models on leader tape. Finally, one blinks: hello Chris Marker. John Rroom's Boyband Mayhem digitally distends the eyes of a crowd of girls waiting for the backstreet boys, disturbingly.

Thad Povey and the Scratch Junkies' direct film To The Beat is almost unbearably Lyeish. In Yin-Ju Chen & James Hong’s Suprematicist Kapital, circles, swastikas, dollars and gas pumps alternate suggestively to Laibach's throbbing 'Kapital'. It's all bang up to date, too: Alfonso Alvarez's Something in the Air replays floods and footage of New Orleans to Led Zep's 'When the Levee Breaks'. And John Gibel's Cremassticparkinator III draws out the hysterical similarities between the contrived theatre of Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3, The Terminator 3 and Jurassic Park 3.

If the content is Luxish, the atmosphere is Exploding Cinema, as the audience (quite a few of whom are the filmmakers) cheer and whoop for each film . Baldwin frantically mans the bar to clear the queue in front of the screen for the second half, which focuses more on pattern and coincidence in observation. Katherin McGinnis' Elevations can't make the abysmal Potsdamerplatz look anything like beautiful, but Ken Paul Rosenthal's Arcs of Texture succeeds in pulling interesting patterns out of San Francisco traffic and the rippling tops of BART trains. The evening finishes up with Semiconductor's video for Mùm's Green Grass of Tunnel, a song that never fails to send shivers down my spine, but probably not Semiconductor's best video work.

Overall, I prefer the redeemed-footage material, which I think has more energy and humour, but it's an outstanding bunch of films overall. Gentrification aside, something's still alive down in the Mission.

Half-remembered city

The last time I arrived in San Francisco, Katherine was so annoyed with me that she forgot to take her handbrake off when we drove to Ocean Beach. That was sixteen years ago. I never heard from her again, and I haven't been back to the west coast since. When I arrive on Wednesday night after a day-shuffling eye-blearing trip across the dateline I'm too tired to start putting the city back together in my head. The shuttle bus zigzags across the city delivering to hotels and hostels. We pass the Tower Records on Jones where Sonic Youth played a free gig in the parking lot and Lee Ranaldo signed my jacket.

Lots has changed. The dotcom boom has breezed and bust through. I try to sort out what wasn't here last time (SFMOMA), what was here and now isn't (the Embarcadero Freeway, last seen propped up on scaffolding after the '89 quake), and what might have been here but forgotten (the underground Muni metro). This is still a city with homelessness and mental health problems… especially around Market and the tenderloin there are street crazies everywhere. One turns up at the Powell and Hyde streetcar terminus every day, wearing a skirt, brandishing a ring binder and shouts 'you didn't expect that, huh?'. Another carefully finishes his food and tucks the plastic fork inside a shop's roller shutter for safekeeping. Everywhere I smoke, people ask me for cigarettes, and handing them out is easier than shuffling around in my wallet and mistaking a fifty for a one.

I try to refamiliarise myself, get in touch with what's always been there, and head straight to City Lights. Delirious to be back in a city overflowing with bookshops I start writing down the titles of books (Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism, Ambient Findability, Kafka Americana) I won't be able to carry home. Mist clings to everything, the top of the Transamerica pyramid wreathed and invisible even from North Beach. In the Upper Haight, I wonder if I might be back in Camden already. Fake punks proliferate and almost every shop has notices asking police to enforce laws preventing sleeping in doorways. But Amoeba music, a cavernous indie music store fashioned out of an old bowling alley, has a fine selection of avant-garde DVD movies and compilations.

Whenever I arrive in the states I'm reminded how old-fashioned it feels to me, down to details as small as the fonts on storefronts and immigration forms. Imperial measurement is still universal. There's no PIN-based eftpos or credit cards. People are also strangely formal in service and commercial situations: polite, but very correct: calling customers sir and ma'am. It's as if an underlying torrent of rage and unhappiness is lurking behind the most everyday of interactions and transactions, held back only by saying the proper words. Marketing appeals to a sense of national identity: 'The pharmacy America trusts'; 'Where America develops its photos'.

I've been in a laid-back country for so long that I can't detect San Francisco's legendary casual atmosphere: everything just seems hectic and intense to me. I can tell that I'm on the left coast: there's a spectrum of reading material from liberal to radical in bookshops, coffeeshops and on newsstands. One of the dozens of cable channels available in my hotel room is called “Democracy Now.” During the afternoon, talk-show guests ask why there's been no move to impeach Bush yet, and late at night a man expounds on the lack of press freedom in front of an upside-down stars and stripes.

I try to do art but SFMOMA's own little fragment of the modernist canon (Matisse, Braque, Pollock, Rothko) only makes me yawn. Their contemporary stuff is a bit better, but the interpretation is riddled with bland curatorial evasions of the "investigates and questions notions of" variety. They're playing a massive three-screen projection of Steve McQueen's Drum roll (Steve rolls a barrel through the streets of Manhattan with a camera on either end and one in the middle, shouting 'excuse me to everybody), which is limned as being all about the connection between the artist's body and his artwork, but I love the way in which the ever-so-slightly anamorphic lens on his cameras causes the world to skew as it also twists.

Much better is the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts across 3rd, which has a fraction of the audience, but a great exhibition on the Black Panthers with contemporary photos and artifacts (big wall of copies of their paper) as well as more recent paintings and movies. Upstairs there's contemporary work, including the Red76 collective's kit for DIY cultural interventions and an exhibition of prisoners' improvised home comforts.

Back near my hotel on Post and Taylor, in a Lori's diner I drink coffee and play a pair of reconditioned Bally/Gottleib 70s pinball machines. There's not much action in the flippers, but you get five balls for a quarter and the score clocks at 99,999… It's funny how inflation affects even pinball, funny how things change.

LAX Limbo

After half a day over the Pacific, land doesn't appear until we're well into our descent. The ground is covered with tessellating rectangles subdivided into smaller and smaller rectangles, regular sections and dwellings in every direction for ever. Ten-lane freeways snake through the blocks, somehow more riverlike than the culverted rivers themselves, no more than flat oily slicks on grey concrete beds.

Getting through security into the homeland is less scary than boring: a long queue, two fingerprints, a photo and a nod at customs on the chocolate fish. There are no luggage lockers, and Alaska won't check my baggage until four hours before my flight, so I hang around in Tom Bradley, drink coffee, smoke, wheel my bags around on a trolley and read Jonathan Lethem. There are no more than four squidgy-Spectrum-keyed internet terminals in the whole airport. Rachel Stevens circulates in my mind's ear. I feel as if I should venture away from the airport, but the helical road linking arrivals and departures makes me suspect there's no there out there. Airports erase their own sense of being anywhere, as if to compensate, shield you from knowledge of the horrible distances you've travelled.

Low cloud clings to the buildings, the light is dim and filtered. Exhaust-battered palms sprout in nooks between the functional concrete. An occasional fresh breeze reminds me that the Pacific is still out there somewhere.

Waiting. Waiting to leave. Waiting to be somewhere else again.

Haere ra Aotearoa

O land of dense bush & slippery vowels; boy racers and Ngati dreads; long blacks and short shorts, blistering wind and waving wands, warm fronts and chilly baches, little blue penguins and big grey mountains, I would like to say thankyou with all my heart to: Megan & Gareth for Mt Roskill, Northland and healthy breakfasts; Megan, for listening to daft theories, Auckland café culture, and putting up with Kelly Tarlton’s; Gareth for an account ready on Grey Lynn, being crazy enough to jump from the top of the Skytower, and keeping my pedantry finely honed… Karen & Alan for Korokoro, NZ culture for Poms 101, and coming all the way to New Plymouth; Karen for weather reports, the Kepler, and dodgy old kiwi movies at The Film Archive; Alan for Bro'Town and explaining how houses work… Mark for the mad dash from New Plymouth to Christchurch, the omelettes, and even the toast… Tyler for a tour of the dungeon, Len’s wands and the stencils, Alejandra, for nights out in New Plymouth, and everyone else at the Govett-Brewster for making me welcome… Lyn & Lex for two nights on the deer farm… Trudi & Eian for nights and meals at the Victoria Railway… Graeme the Guide for knowing the names of everything that lives on Stewart Island… The Skinner Family for making me laugh… Sultana & Aniz for the biriani, the grog, and the huge bags of Munchy Mart goodies, and Aisha for showing me round while they fixed the till… Farman, Mushtaq and Bashir for the rugby… Sarah from Auckland for asking difficult questions on Stewart Island… and Ashish, Franz, Kirsten, Liz and Eric for company along the way.