Eighteen years ago, I came to San Francisco looking for adventure and new horizons. Including a
brief summer tour of Europe in 1999, I've spent those eighteen years
discovering interesting people and ideas I would never otherwise have
known.
Engaging in the successful rent-control battle of 2000,
and the unsuccessful fight to save New College in 2007, I got to know
the
City of Love in ways perhaps most new-comers don't. Watching
the
massive march against war in 2003 from the steps of City Hall--where in
2006 four thousand gay and lesbian marriages were performed by Mayor
Gavin Newsom--stirred my imagination in ways that only San Francisco
can.
Dining
in a French restaurant with my new friends from Hong Kong and
Shanghai in 2008, I listened to a native San Franciscan recount growing up in The Mission in the 1930s, when the district was
home to mostly Irish-Americans. Whatever one might say about
Fog City,
it's never boring, and it's the place I consider home.
One of the interesting people I discovered in 2002 is San Francisco artist and photographer
Mark Gould,
who was the internet portal developer at New College of California when
I was attending graduate school there. Mark had a long career in
broadcast news and journalism, and spends his time helping writers like
myself understand such esoteric knowledge as semiotics and typography,
which are fundamental to comprehending the art of media.
Over the thirteen years I lived in Marin (on the north side of
the Golden Gate Bridge), Mark and I met at cafes in The Mission,
Haight-Ashbury, Marina, and Russian Hill to discuss developments in
communication, consciousness and social engineering in the US. Now that
we are both retired, we manage to keep our hand in with projects like
Medium and
INSiGHT Journal.
