San Francisco has always had a chip on its shoulder about New York. The East Coast snobs think they own the culture game, with the right publishers, galleries, and reputations. But the city by the bay has its own answer: the San Francisco Renaissance, with its poetry readings, mimeographed magazines, improvised galleries, and experimental films.
That pride runs through a new personal essay, “We Never Called It Frisco,” a rambling, affectionate portrait of the city’s literary and artistic scene. The piece, written by a local printer and former bartender, is less a manifesto than a warm, meandering tour of old friends, old rivalries, and the particular texture of life in the Bay Area.
The Rivalry With New York
The essay opens with a familiar San Francisco posture: defiance. “They say we’re a town full of losers,” the author writes. “They say we’re eccentric, eclectic—marginal.” The writer leans into that identity, framing the city as the proud opposition to New York’s cultural dominance.
“Here in San Francisco we’re proud to be the opposition. We’re glad to be living on what New Yorkers regard as the wrong coast, with the wrong publishers, galleries, reputations.”
But the defiance is at least partly a joke. The writer admits as much: “Of course, I’m just kidding around here. Sort of kidding around.” The essay isn’t really an attack on East Coast success. It’s a celebration of the people who make San Francisco’s scene what it is, even those who found recognition back east.
Mike and His Indian Heritage
The essay’s first major figure is Mike, a poet who has won East Coast awards but remains a local fixture. The writer describes Mike as “the real deal,” though he admits some of Mike’s poems are “a little too muffled for my taste.” He’s said as much to Mike, and Mike takes it fine. The writer also considers Mike’s book Partly Cloudy and Cooler a great one.
Mike is half Indian, from the subcontinent. His father was “some kind of import-export guy from Bombay” who met Mike’s mother in San Francisco. They went back to India, then she left. Years later, she appeared at a couple of Mike’s readings, “much taller than Mike, noisily talking to all Mike’s friends, nothing like Mike.”
The essay places Mike at the Silver Spur, a bar where he nurses his vodka with “two rocks, no twist.” He still lives in a Victorian in the Haight that he bought a dozen years ago when they were cheap, with the down payment from his first Guggenheim. He’s proud of a group of small Rajput paintings, bought from Ray Lewis years ago, when Lewis was just starting out, supplying Piranesi etchings to Nob Hill decorators but really into Indian miniatures and Islamic calligraphy.
“My Indian heritage,” Mike says, only half ironically, about those miniatures with their tiny figures bowing to each other.
Marcia, the Leader of the Crew
The essay’s real subject is Marcia, a woman from Berkeley days who also had success back east. The writer describes her with some hesitation: “Marcia, with her dark bangs, was voluptuous or fat, depending on how you saw it. Zaftig is probably the word.”
Marcia was the leader of the college crew. She was bossy, sometimes overbearing, but the writer wonders if they’d have ever had a party without her. She called Mike “the ambassador,” behind his back. She was catty, mean about people she’d tossed out of the club.
The essay draws a line between the dreamers and the straight arrows. Mike was “always the diplomat.” Marcia was the organizer. The writer counts himself among the dreamers.
Jack Johanson and the Museum
Another figure emerges: Jack Johanson, the painter with the moustache and cowboy swagger. Back in college, the look was “a little camp.” Marcia kidded that he’d woken up one morning and decided he was in some old Hollywood Western.
Now that Jack has had paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, people think the moustache looks “old masterish.” Marcia wouldn’t give him an inch. “Those paintings only hung at the Modern for a couple of months, the museum didn’t buy anything, so what’s the big deal?” she said.
The resentment there is Marcia’s alone. Success is fine, in her view, but it doesn’t change the facts on the ground. A few months at the Modern isn’t a purchase. A reputation isn’t a sale.
The Craft of the Broadside
The essay also touches on the writer’s own work. He’s a printer, in town for a few days to work on a broadside for a poetry event in Bolinas. He describes the process in loving detail: setting the type in an old Garamond face, all caps, only to find the A and the E so worn they weren’t printing.
He substituted a stark sans serif for those letters. The result, he says, was “kind of wonderful, the As and Es making a jazzy pattern weaving in and out around the Old World Garamond.”
It’s a small moment, but it captures the essay’s spirit: making do, improvising, finding beauty in imperfection. That’s the San Francisco way, as the writer sees it.
The Bonds of Old Friends
The essay returns to Mike, who reappeared last week at the Silver Spur after a week in New York on an awards panel. He made “cryptic remarks” about how best-selling novelists behave when distributing money among up-and-coming authors. The writer isn’t sure exactly what Mike said. Mike speaks softly, not looking at you when he talks, facing forward on his barstool.
The writer prefers a booth. He was in SF for a couple of days, printing the Bolinas broadside, happy with how it was going. He enjoys coming into the city to work, to hook up with the gang, to sleep on the daybed in his shop.
The essay meanders through memory, uncertain about the boundaries between then and now. “Frankly I’m not always all that clear about the difference between what we were like in college and what we were like a little later—or now, twenty-some-odd years later,” the writer admits.
He wonders if he’s confusing the Jack he knew back then with Jack a few years later. He wonders if Marcia seemed girlish back then, when she actually was a girl. Memory blurs, but the affection holds.
The essay’s key figures each carry a distinct role in the scene:
- Mike, the award-winning poet with the Rajput paintings, still living in the Haight Victorian he bought with his first Guggenheim.
- Marcia, the bossy organizer who called Mike “the ambassador” and dismissed Jack’s museum run as a brief hanging, not a purchase.
- Jack Johanson, the painter whose moustache went from camp to old masterish once the Modern came calling.
The essay is a portrait of a scene, a generation, and a city. It’s not a manifesto. It’s not a rivalry. It’s a reminder that the people who make a place worth living are the ones who stay, who show up at the bar, who argue about paintings and poems and who gets what.
“We are what we are,” the writer says. “And damn the rest of them.”
That’s the San Francisco spirit, as the essay tells it. Not against the East Coast, exactly. Just proud of the wrong coast, the wrong publishers, the wrong galleries. Proud of the worn-out type and the jazzy pattern it makes. Proud of the friends who stayed, and the ones who came back.
Source: lithub.com
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.