san francisco

[Ian Livingston]

Certainly things have flattened. Pervasive suburbia, the omni-mall of the
new cities, makes one place so like another that none is ever home and yet
you can't get away when you travel. But memory remains a quirky phenomenon.
I hear that people in the US are warming again to Bush, for instance,
seeing him as not so bad after all, just as they did with Nixon a few years
after he was safely removed to obscurity. I am not the only one to notice
that the currently maturing generation, I mean those entering and exiting
university age right now, seem to have a strong motivation to change the
way things get done, and to redefine what constitutes desirable aims.
Rather than seeing a flattening of progress, I see a plateau dropping off
behind, an end of decades of stagnation in the values of the industrial
revolution. The ground is shifting even as we gaze out over the fruitless
plains. I am, however, an optimist, so I won't try to forecast where the
new groundswell may lead, or whether it might survive the cynicism of the
boomers and the scorn of the xers.


On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 5:45 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>wrote:

> I think it's still there, the mystery. Perhaps more for us, the old ones.
> The smell of cabbage in the staircase of an apartment building, and the
> pictures it can conjure up ... not for you growing up in the suburbs or the
> country. There was an entire Uncle-Scrooge-Story about the smell of
> cabbage, really great, one of the first of Carl Barks, if I remember
> correctly. The Beagle Boys and an island were involved. Books without
> pictures can do it as well, of course, if not better. The medium should not
> be too hot. The cooler the better.
>
>
> 2013/7/24 Rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
>
>> With instant video, all consuming digital documentation, we are killing
>> off our eventual and much needed longing for the past since we have such
>> easy access to it.
>>
>> Can anyone tell the difference between recent years? Everything is
>> leveled. All those mysteries have become certainties, our despair.
>>
>>
>> On Jul 24, 2013, at 3:42 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Nearly everything.
>>
>>
>> 2013/7/23 Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com>
>>
>>> Nostalgia was better then.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 5:22 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Stumbling over a short passage in a polit thriller from more than 40
>>>> years ago, I remembered a short thread here about the gentrification of SF
>>>> (mildly put as memories like to do). Here is the paragraph:
>>>>
>>>> I signed the bill, adding a 20 percent tip, which made the bellhop
>>>> happy or at least less morose. After he left I mixed a drink and stood by
>>>> the window gazing out over the city with its bridge in the background. It
>>>> was one of those spectacularly fine days that San Francisco manages to come
>>>> up with sometimes in early September: a few quiet clouds, an indulgent sun,
>>>> and air so sparkling that you know somebody 's eventually going to bottle
>>>> it. I stood there in my room on the seventeenth floor and sipped the scotch
>>>> and stared out at what was once touted as America's favorite city. Maybe it
>>>> still is.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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