We finished off my second evening in San Francisco by eating out at Chow's on Church Street. It was reasonable food and it was good to spend time with Chris and Steven but it was another late end to a long, long, day for me.
Saturday began slowly as Chris gradually got going and began packing. We talked and breakfasted as he did things. We compared notes about America as two outside observers. We agreed about the essential capitalism of the place and how it really doesn't pretend to be anything else and how, though there are chances to make ideas happen if you work really hard at it, by and large the chances are there for the few and the favoured.
Chris also pointed out the American psyche seems to thrive on new and fast. New is good. Fast is good. New and fast is great. It's the culture of sixteen year old youths and explains much about the culture of Information Technology.
One other thing he let me know that I hadn't realised was that all my communications with him until recently had talked about visiting Rod and Dale in Seattle but of just coming to San Francisco. He'd taken that to intimate that I was coming over primarily for the city and not specifically for him.
Now, whilst I'll admit that Detroit would be less of an attraction, he's always been the main spur for travelling. San Francisco is simply a good place to visit him in. Still, Grenoble beckoned. I guess I resigned myself to the fact that I was about to have the sort of holiday that Chris thought I wanted. And, maybe, it would be the sort of holiday that the universe wanted me to have also.
With a combination of Chris needing to get himself organised and packed and me full of questions, Chris begged for some time to himself. So, I took myself off. Wandered down Townsend. Found the CAL Train Depot on Third and then the N Line Terminus at Third and King. It took me round to Montgomery where I passed an hour or more in and around shops. It was quiet. Chris later explained that I was in the middle of the tourist area and the tourists weren't around yet.
I got talking to one guy in a record shop. He was being loud and opinionated about a variety of subjects. So, I talked with him a while and quietly it emerged that I knew an awful lot more than he did about Baroque opera in general and castrati in particular. And, sensing danger, he made an excuse to go elsewhere in the store.
San Francisco has the usual grid pattern of roads for a North American city. But they are projected onto a precipitous topography. And let's face it, if you were designing a current Metropolis, you wouldn't set it down on such a lumpy, earthquake-prone piece of geography.
Be that as it may, the straight line roads, the vertiginous hills, the waterfront and Bay make San Francisco what it is. And you get the most astonishing views up and down those long thoroughfares. You see cars crossing and criss-crossing way into the distance. You see little painted clapboard houses clinging to hillsides in the distance in one direction, blue waters in the distance in the other whilst you stand in the middle of tall brash business and hotel structures.
So I wandered. Wandered through a magical cityscape. Like Liverpool, it's worth looking up above the shopfront level for there is much heritage in some of the buildings. There are Hispanic roots not so very far below the surface.
And I wandered a little off track at one point and suddenly the character of my surroundings changed and I was in an area called the Tenderloin which is where many of the homeless of San Francisco congregate. And down those long thoroughfares I could see the wealth apparent on Nob Hill whilst all around me was hunger and disease. Truly this is a land of sometimes appalling contrasts, a land of the free where the freedom is sometimes the freedom to starve. How do you support such an array of choice as is offered here. Only on the back of massive, uncaring exploitation of a sometimes illegal lowly paid workforce.
By the time I arrived back at Bluxome, Chris had heard from his airline that his flight had been delayed by four hours. We changed tack a little. Steven came round and we lunched at Café Flore on Market.
Then they were off and I faced the evening. Well, I branched out and did culture with a performance at the San Francisco Symphony. I got cheap seats behind the orchestra and was able to spread out. The programme was adventurous:- Schoenberg/Chamber Symphony No 2; Britten/Nocturne for Tenor and Chamber Orchestra; Purcell/Chacony; Haydn/Symphony No 97.
Though tired, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time of it. John Mark Ainsley sang the Nocturne which, unlike the Serenade, I knew not at all but took to immediately. The Schoenberg I'd heard on recording and was disconcerted by it. It is an intense and disturbing piece. The Haydn and Purcell were great fun. Jeffrey Tate presided over the evening's music making like a Classics master in a minor public school - a stern glance here, a sorrowing look there and an occasional twinkle.
Home, bed, sleep.