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.

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.