a visit to san francisco

vacations, photography, and the spirit of cities

part 1: vacations

I visited San Francisco this weekend. I flew down Friday afternoon and stayed with some friends down in the Mission: on Saturday, we went to the SFMoMA and then I hung out with another group of friends from the afternoon into the evening; on Sunday, we went climbing and then I biked into San Francisco along the waterfront, all the way from Dogpatch up to the Presidio, stopping along the way to grab food and take photos of whatever I found interesting. I flew back to Seattle in the evening, exhausted but with a sense of fullness, or a sense of relief.

chinatown!

Growing up, I always expected myself to be the itinerary kind of traveller, with a concrete plan for each day, every location planned out and scheduled so that I could make the most of my time. Over the past few years, though, I’ve found that tendency fading, as my detailed Google Docs pass into casual outlines into vague notions of things that “might be fun to do.” More than anything, I think it’s a change in my sense of what trips are for; a chance to get away from work and see friends for a while and to relax, than to really dive into something and end up more exhausted than you left—not to say I ended this trip particularly physically well-rested, either.

Perhaps the pessimistic way to say this is that I have been too tired of late to really put together anything too complicated. Certainly, I have a sense that I haven’t really been pulling my weight in planning my recent group trips, which I am always a little ashamed of. I don’t think that exhaustion is the whole of it though; it does just seem like there is something about these trips that seem more casual, like we’re all slowly learning that rigor itself is not necessary or sufficient to make a trip enjoyable.

Still, I suspect that things will regress towards the mean eventually. I’ll take longer trips to more exotic locations that will require more time to plan, probably. The list-making will return, perhaps not in the same force it’s had previously, but in some form, as I try my best to drink in the wonders that this life has to offer. There are so many years left, and we will try to make the best use of them, whether that be a break, an adventure, or both.

part 2: photography

I bought a camera from a co-worker recently, who had gotten a newer camera and was therefore selling it at a discount. I’ve always been kind of curious about photography; there’s something about the way people think about composition, how everything comes together into one, temporary gestalt, that calls to me. Of course, ever since I’ve owned a phone, I’ve been using it to take photos, but I’ve always been curious about what a real camera can do.

So, I bought the camera. I’ve brought it on two trips so far; first on a trip to Boston, and then on this visit to SF. It’s been really interesting, actually. There’s something about finding the right image that feels like poetry to me—capturing this singular moment and all its beauty and feeling, embedding it in amber, the process of keen observation and turning that observation over for others to see. I think this similarity is interesting to me, because my poems are often so internal—so focused on the way I feel—whereas photography is almost by definition external, yet they have this same core, this tenderness of observation and this demand to be open to the world to capture it.

There’s another part of the photography which feels like music to me, which is to say, the technical aspects. Maybe this says more about my strengths than anything else, but I’ve always found technique to be much more important in music than in writing; in writing, the execution comes to me naturally—yes, there are tricks and tools that I like more than others, but when I am writing, it feels more like pure expression than anything. In music, the rhythm, the dynamics, the tone all matter so much and require such delicate coordination; the technical drives the artistic, creates the mood, the atmosphere. Photography here feels a little more like music than like poetry, as I spin dials around the exposure triangle and try to get the right kind of motion blur or just avoid blowing out my image, etc.; the composition, the angles, everything feels much more precise.

More than anything, it’s interesting to me how much I’ve developed this sense of artistic practice. I certainly don’t expect to be “good” at photography anytime soon, but it has instantly become part of this theory of art, rather than its own, disparate, random hobby. That, I think, is something new to me, and it’s a feeling I want to continue to cultivate and explore as I do, well, whatever I do next in the world of “art.”

I am still learning things about what this camera is good at, how to capture the moments I want or to do things I couldn’t do with the phone. One thing I’m particularly excited by right now is the way the camera captures liveness; for a long time, I tried my best to avoid people in my photos and just take photos of still moments, a pretty sunset, or a nice skyline. Yet there’s something about the way the bokeh of a camera keeps a person’s face lively, or the way the blur of a car against a still background evokes motion, that sparks a certain kind of joy. Maybe it’s just that I’m becoming less anti-social as I age, but, if that’s it, well, so be it.

part 3: cities

I’ll be honest—I really expected to hate San Francisco. I’m not particularly sure why; I think that, in my head, I had imagined it as a combination of the things I hate the most about the West Coast—big, spread out cities designed for cars rather than people—and the things I hate most about really big cities—the sort of general sense of uncleanliness and unease. I don’t really know why I expected to have this kind of reaction: after all, I’ve been to SF at least three times before and it’s been pleasant, but I also feel like I hadn’t really seen the city beforehand; I’d merely been around it, from Berkeley to Palo Alto to wherever else.

I really, really liked SF this weekend. Biking around the city, it reminded me of everything I missed about Boston—this sense that things were close together, where I could walk from my friends’ apartment near the SFMoMa all the way down to the Mission, or bike along the waterfront and get all the way around it in a matter of an hour or two… it was nice. It was so much smaller than I expected, and there was so much beauty in it; there was a sense of history and culture everywhere, and, of course, some excellent food. And, sure, maybe I was blessed by some particularly gracious hosts and getting to see my good friends, but it really did feel like a summer day in the midst of a rainy winter.

When I left Cambridge, I really did not think there would be any place I would care about like New England. There was just something about it that nobody else would be able to replicate, this quintessence that could not be captured by any other place because of the history, or the closeness, or just the ocean air. Leaving SF, I still think there are things about New England I will romanticize—the Commuter Rail trips to Rockport, the brownstones and wooden houses and salt-filled ocean air—but I leave with an understanding that there’s something else I’m looking for in a place, smallness, a connectedness, a sense of culture. More than anything, I’m looking for a place I can explore—that feels worth exploring.

This, naturally, made me quite sad about Seattle in comparison. I really do think there’s something about the way Seattle is Balkanized between thirty-minute commute suburbs and its ahistoricalness that makes it a perfect kind of tech-worker Hell. I feel this way already, even though it hasn’t even started raining, which I am constantly reminded it will do “any day now.” I’m reminded of how little I liked the Seattle Art Museum when I visited, how garish I found the Museum of Pop Culture, and I’m wondering if I might have seen the warning signs earlier if I’d thought about these things.

But, of course, this is the kind of negative thought spiral that it is easy to slip down, and, honestly, I don’t think I’m giving Seattle a fair chance either. It really is beautiful out here; I’ve taken so many pictures of magnificent sunsets and wind-swept clouds and trees dyed with fall colors that are hard to find even in Boston. I’m wondering if I need to buy a car to engage with the city as it is meant to be engaged with, even if owning a car is expensive and annoying. I’m wondering if, perhaps, I’m just lonely, and I’ll enjoy the place more if I just make some friends.

So, I guess, much to think about. As always, time will tell, and I’d like to give Seattle a few more months, or maybe a year or two, before I firm up my judgement—after all, I did really enjoy my summers here, and I do really like my job. Still, it’s nice to have a sense of another place that it might be worth considering, and a better sense of what, exactly, makes a place home-y to me.