What IS San Francisco?
What IS San Francisco? I've lived here for 40 years, and suddenly I've lost its thread. I wrote a book about the city's tumultuous history -- Season of the Witch -- when it underwent a bloody civil war to define its "San Francisco values." More recently, my son Joe Talbot and my "honorary" son Jimmie Fails (the honor is all mine) collaborated on the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, which took a more tragic view of how they lost the city they grew up in. But still, none of us can quit SF. Jimmie still lives here, and just made a heartfelt video about the city for the San Francisco Giants that evoked the beautiful melancholy of the film. Joe resides mostly in LA these days but dreams of returning to a Victorian castle, like the one in his movie. Our youngest son Nat still lives in our basement, where he cooks up cool street fashion ideas while pursuing a college degree. A longtime friend of his quit his boring tech sales job and is about to move in with us so he can pursue his promising rap career with more diligence. And my wife Camille Peri is completing a book about the suffering -- but loving and creative -- marriage of bohemians Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, a subject she knows something about.
Camille and I will live in SF until the day we die. And we will continue to preside over the ramshackle, chipped-paint Bernal Heights bungalow that has been a creative hothouse for the making of books, music and movies for many years. In fact, our family has even bigger plans. Last week, ten of my extended family (all vaxxed) crowded into our Bernal digs for a kind of vacation/summit meeting. We decided to find a big pile somewhere in the city and collectively buy it (no small task). This future bastion will be our family studio, where two generations of family members, friends and lovers will take our communal creativity to new heights.
My sister Margaret Talbot and I, and her husband Arthur Allen, just collaborated on By the Light of Burning Dreams -- a Season of the Witch-type history about the revolutionary heroes of the 1960s and '70s who tried to liberate America. Now Margaret (who has a day job as a New Yorker magazine writer) and I are mulling over working together on a novel -- our first foray into fiction -- based on a true story from our father Lyle Talbot's wild life in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
So my family has a stake in this lost paradise by the Bay.
Our San Francisco creative factory would also be a haven from a city that has grown increasingly cold and soulless. This gets us back to my opening question. What IS San Francisco these days?
In recent years, the "city of love" seemed to be overrun by tech robots and billionaires -- and by the homeless people they pushed onto the streets and stepped over while talking loudly on their Bluetooths. Then the pandemic hit and SF became a ghost town, with many techies fleeing to the suburbs or wherever else they felt safer. And now? We seem to hover in a twilight mist, somewhere between Covid catastrophe and boomtown 3.0. The odd bubble effect seems reinforced by the climate-crazy weather. Here we are, shivering in the wind and fog while the rest of our Golden State is ablaze. At least the skies aren't fiery orange like last wildfire season. Like I said, strange times.
Still, there is no better time for San Francisco to redefine itself. To reclaim its soul.
Once upon a time, SF grew its identity from city leaders, activists, rock musicians and impresarios, poets, eccentrics, newspaper columnists and community crusaders. There are no giants anymore on the city scene. So it's up to all of us to begin having the conversations about our civic future. What kind of city do we want to live in?
Let's start that public conversation here. I'm especially interested in hearing from public school teachers (the ones who haven't abandoned the SFUSD), healthcare workers, restaurant and bar employees, small retailers and all those "frontline" people who put their lives on the line for the city.
Let's take back our city. It begins by talking amongst ourselves.
