in defense of san francisco's art scene

it's actually very easy to solve alienation, anomie, and the loneliness epidemic…just fund the arts more (and go to events more) ✦

In 2023, when I was living in San Francisco, I often heard people complain that there was nothing to do in the city. No culture, no community, no one going out. I’d just moved back after four years in London, and I was afraid that they were right—that my life would feel small, stiflingly lonely, and banal.

But a few months after moving, I didn’t feel that way at all—thanks to places like The Lab, an experimental arts and music space next to the 16th St. Mission station. The organization was founded in 1984 and has exhibited artists like Barbara Kruger, Nan Goldin, and David Wojnarowicz, but I didn’t know this history when I first began going to events. I showed up alone to whatever seemed interesting, whenever I had a free evening. The Lab’s events were always varied and always exciting: In the two years I lived in the neighbourhood, I got to see designer-technologist-archivists like Mindy Seu and Chia Amisola speak about their work; writers like Geoffrey Mak and McKenzie Wark discuss techno and raving; I saw the Copenhagen-based musician Croatian Amor perform; I saw the poet and novelist Renee Gladman read (and wrote about it here).

I wrote that I showed up alone, but I was never lonely once I arrived. The Lab brought together the people I wanted to meet but couldn’t quite figure out how to. It was actually surreal how often I’d run into people I recognized from other places, like poetry readings or occasional web meetups. At The Lab, that mutual recognition could turn into a conversation, and the conversation could turn into a friendship.

The Lab was, essentially, my third space. I never felt that there was a loneliness epidemic in my life, among my people, when I was there. I had this sense of limitless artistic and social possibility—that there would always be a new artist, writer, musician I could discover there, and I would always be able to meet old and new friends. The Lab is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in the Bay Area’s arts community, and why I think San Francisco is still a special place for art and literature. (More on this below.)

But facilitating an artistic community and a social community like The Lab requires work. It requires people and labor and money: for rent, for wages, for events and other programming. And in the US, The Lab—along with thousands of arts nonprofits—relies on money from the National Endowment of the Arts.

On May 2, The Lab was notified that the $85,000 they expected to receive from the NEA would be cancelled. KQED has an excellent article, with data compiled by Sarah Hotchkiss, of all the Bay Area nonprofits that are NEA-funded. (The list includes the Oakland-based Transit Books, one of the best independent publishers in America, which has just lost $40,000 in funding. They publish books like the Nobel laureate Jon Fosse’s Septology and Jacqueline Harpman’s uncanny, dystopian I Who Have Never Known Men.) And the Trump administration’s latest budget involves dismantling the NEA entirely.

This is distressing both politically and personally. But I’d like to focus on the personal aspect for now. Everything I write, everyone I speak to, everyone who has come into my life and shaped it in the past few years, has in some obscure way been connected to the arts organizations that make life in America so fulfilling. I want everyone to have that experience—more than that: I believe that everyone deserves to have it. Funding the arts is, to me, about facilitating spaces where people can meet and gather and experience that thing called community—people who facilitate your intellectual and social and artistic growth. I had that in San Francisco and I’m immensely grateful for it! But making that possible, again, requires money…

This newsletter is free, and I’m committed to keeping it free in the near future. But if you’ve found my writing valuable (maybe research as leisure activity, the divine discontent, how to begin, or in praise of writing on the internet)…then please consider donating $5 or more to The Lab! I’ll be donating $300.

The Lab is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so your donations will be tax-deductible. It’s also eligible for matched donations, if you work at one of the many Bay Area tech companies that offer this. (And after you’ve donated, consider sharing this post to your company Slack in case others would like to join!)

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The newsletter below, in defense of san francisco, was first published on February 14, 2024 and sent to 257 subscribers. I’m sending it today to over 18,000 people—thank you for reading!

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Last week, I was in NYC for work. Being there reminded me of the distinct pleasures of being in one of the great cultural centers of the world. After work, I: met with a writing group, saw a film at the Lincoln Center (with a director Q&A after), saw a friend DJ, and had vegan dim sum.

But at the end of the week I was genuinely happy to fly back to San Francisco—a city that everyone agrees is dying, dead, culturally deprived, and generally bad.

This is my second time living in San Francisco. The first time was before COVID, 2016 to 2019. This second round began last spring, when I left London—where I’d been living for 4 years—to return to San Francisco. Everyone I spoke to about the move was instantly and immediately sorry for me. Which was very understandable: I was leaving this a city full of art, culture, literature—to live somewhere that was supposedly overrun with tech, incredibly unsafe, and aesthetically soulless.

I felt sorry for myself, too. For like, four weeks. Then I texted a friend back in the UK to say, essentially: the vibes in SF are actually really good right now…I think I’m actually happy here??

Today is Valentine’s day, and I am going to use this occasion to talk about what I love about San Francisco—and, because hatred and love are such entangled emotions—what I hate!!! about how people talk about San Francisco. (I believe this is what is known as cultural criticism.)

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A 1991 poster for the SF MOMA’s design lecture series, by the renowned (and San Francisco–based!) graphic designer Jennifer Morla, via the Letterform Archive

When people complain why San Francisco is a terrible place to live, they usually bring up the following 3 problems:

1. It’s overrun by tech

2. It’s unsafe

3. It’s artistically and culturally dead

In this essay, I will—go through each of these points and explain why everyone is WRONG about San Francisco! Well, sort of. Let’s start with:

It’s overrun by tech

I’ll confess that, as a tech person myself (I prefer the phrase “gainfully employed at a San Francisco–based tech startup”), I can’t really disagree with this one. San Francisco is dominated by the tech industry, economically and culturally.

But the story behind SF’s stiflingly tech-centric culture is worth digging into, however, because when people complain about it, there’s this sense of vague historical inevitability to it all. It seems as if tech just happened to take over the city, slowly but steadily. In reality, the tech industry was invited in—through a tax break that had immense consequences.

In 2011, San Francisco’s city government—led by Ed Lee, “the self-anointed ‘tech mayor’” of the city—passed a tax credit that allowed companies to avoid the city’s 1.5% payroll tax, as long as they moved into offices along Market Street. The tax credit was officially known as the Central Market/Tenderloin Payroll Tax Exclusion, but colloquially known as the “Twitter tax break”, because it was in direct response to the social media company threatening to leave SF and move to bigger offices in the south bay. At the time, basically all the big tech companies, including Google and Facebook, were headquartered in the south bay. And startups set up shop in downtown Palo Alto, in close proximity to the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road.

Lee’s argument for the tax break was that it would benefit San Francisco and benefit Market Street in particular. I’ve seen people blame Market Street’s strangely empty sidewalks and overall unpleasant vibes on recent events—like Chesa Boudin’s election as district attorney and subsequent criminal justice reforms, which are, supposedly, the reason crime is out of control!!! in San Francisco. (More on this later.) But the truth is that Market Street has struggled for years—when the Twitter tax break was passed in 2011, half of the office space and about ⅓ of the retail space was vacant.

Ed Lee believed that tech was the solution to Market Street’s problems. Three years later, he was telling TIME that the “vacant and dark, unattractive and blighted” storefronts had been replaced with “people walking along Market Street, wanting to be here, live here, work here, play here.” I’m not so sure about that. A friend memorably described the vibe of Market Street, circa 2017, as “tech worker barracks”: grim, unappealing, barely livable. And at an SF supervisors meeting in 2019, Gordon Mar said:

This policy was poor policy that was poorly implemented by the city…It really just resulted in a handout to the tune of $70 million to a small number of corporations.

The whole idea was that, in exchange for the tax break, tech companies would do…something for the community. But as the TIME article reports (bolding mine):

…the consensus from supervisors…as they heard reports from several city departments on the tax break's impacts, was that the tech companies did not deliver those benefits, in part because the legislation that created the credit did not specifically outline what those benefits should be.

"They got to decide what was important and how they were going to benefit the community," said Supervisor Vallie Brown of the companies that took advantage of the tax break.

The tax break filled offices with tech workers, but not the retail spaces—eight years after the tax break passed, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that retail spaces remained empty and often unprofitable. Part of the problem was that many tech companies, in the frenzied rush to hire talent, set up their own cafeterias, negatively impacting restaurants in San Francisco and in Palo Alto. More office workers, and more foot traffic, didn’t help local businesses at all. “You can't compete with free,” the director of a local restaurant association noted. “Free food is a wonderful amenity for those companies that can afford it but it doesn't do anything to extend the community around it.”

The story behind the tax break is instructive, to say the least. More broadly, Lee’s tenure as a mayor reshaped San Francisco. The median cost of a home went from $1 million (when Lee first assumed office) to $1.5 million. In approximately the same time period, the city added just a little over 10,000 housing units (don’t ask how many of them were affordable).

So, yes: the city is overrun with tech. But that didn’t just happen, and it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that a city once known for things like:

• A longstanding and historically significant Chinese immigrant community (SF’s Chinatown was founded in 1848)

• The Castro, one of the earliest and most well-known gay neighborhoods in the US, and a center for LGBTQ community and activism, especially during the AIDS crisis

• Countercultural movements and anti-war activism during the 1960s (not to steal valor from the east bay and Berkeley!)

• The iconic City Lights Bookstore, who published Allen Ginsberg’s poetry book Howl, which kicked off an enormous controversy for Ginsberg’s frank depictions of homosexuality and drug use—leading to a police raid and a court trial that set an important precedent for First Amendment protection of so-called obscene literature

—is now seen as just a tech city.

That said, the perception of SF as purely full of tech workers is not quite the reality. Yes, the city contains massive economic inequalities between tech workers and non–tech residents; yes, there a housing shortage and a tenants’ rights crisis (I use that term deliberately, instead of calling it a “housing crisis”). All these things mean that people who don’t work in tech are increasingly shut out of the city, forced away from SF’s center, or even forced to move away from the San Francisco Bay Area entirely.

But when I hear tech people specifically complaining about how the city is full of people like them (and how cringe it is!) I sometimes wonder—do they go anywhere except work? Do they meet people who aren’t coworkers? Do they think the city is full of tech people because they exclusively circulate in tech circles? Are they texting their friends going ugh, everyone here works in tech! while taking an Uber from their AI hackathon to a restaurant that’s $150 per person?

Here’s where I shift into anecdotes and pretend that they’re data. In the last few months, I’ve met one artist who moved to San Francisco after a decade in Mexico City, and a poet who left NYC (was glad to leave NYC!) to come here. To be fair, both have something in common: they grew up here. As did I.

But meeting them was just so nice, because they reminded me that there is a whole community of artists and art workers and poets and writers in San Francisco. They still live here; you just don’t read about them in the news, which has been stuck in the same news cycle about San Francisco for years now: it’s all tech, only tech, art is dead, culture is dead, all that remains is unfettered surveillance capitalism.

Meanwhile, some of my favorite living writers live in the SF Bay Area! Like Rebecca Solnit (whose recent LRB essay, analyzing the causes and consequences of San Francisco’s tech-centric economy, will be discussed below)…Jenny Odell…and Wendy Liu (whose book, I should add, is titled Abolish Silicon Valley, not Abolish the SF Bay Area Because the Vibes are Off).

The dominance of the tech industry has undeniably strangled some of the political radicalism and artistic energy of the city. But those other aspects of San Francisco aren’t gone! And I think there is something especially…funny? gauche? intensely annoying? about being a tech person complaining about how many tech people there are in the city—without having any interest or attachment or engagement in the non–tech aspects of San Francisco.

One part of San Francisco’s past and present that I’m obsessed with is the influence of the ILWU Local 10, the San Francisco local of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union:

• In the 1960s, they built a 299-unit housing project for working-class city residents that centered racial integration and inclusivity (no small thing during the ‘60s!)

• In the 1970s, while the activist Angela Davis was incarcerated for over a year (without bail and before her trial), the ILWU national union passed a resolution advocating for her release. In the resolution, they argued that there was “a concentrated and relentless crusade” against Davis. “The same device has always been used against labor when the powers of big business and government decide that organized workers are ‘getting out of line’ in their struggle for a better life.”

• In 2020, at the height of the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, the ILWU shut down 29 ports along the west coast for Juneteenth. In doing so, they connected the struggle for worker’s rights to the struggle against police brutality and anti-Blackness in America. Angela Davis was there and gave a very moving speech; she said that if she hadn’t become a college professor, she would have wanted to become a member of the ILWU.

We could be talking about the institutions and organizations that existed in San Francisco before tech—and the actions they’re taking now to shape the city for the better. But instead the conversation has been co-opted about how the vibes are off—because tech workers keep on going to house parties with too many people like them.

It’s unsafe

Something that continually fascinates me is how strongly people believe that San Francisco is unsafe. Not just unsafe, but unusually unsafe, worse than other major metropolitan areas in the US. The reasons for this depend substantially on where someone sits in the political spectrum, but liberal to right-wing commentators especially are convinced that the problem is homeless people (they are definitely saying “homeless”, btw, not “unhoused”).

This perception is so strong that—in a demographic that prides itself on data-driven, logical, and rational thinking—people will coerce any crime to fit into this narrative. This became especially obvious in April, a mere three days after I moved to the city, and a prominent tech executive was fatally stabbed.

As Rebecca Solnit reflected in a recent essay for the London Review of Books (bolding mine):

[T]he idea that San Francisco is in the grip of lawlessness has become something everyone thinks they know. When the well-known tech executive Bob Lee (Google, Square, MobileCoin) was found fatally stabbed on the street in the early hours of 4 April 2023, many claimed that his murder was part of a crime wave by an out-of-control underclass. Elon Musk tweeted that ‘violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately,’ implying that the culprit was a habitual criminal benefiting from lenient policies. The tech venture capitalist Matt Ocko raged: ‘Chesa Boudin [the former San Francisco district attorney] & the criminal-loving city council that enabled him and a lawless SF for years have Bob’s literal blood on their hands.’

But it turned out that the man charged with Lee’s murder, Nima Momeni, was a fellow tech entrepreneur who had been with Lee that evening.

The histrionics and even hysteria about Lee’s death—and the instinctive response to blame it on homeless people—was fascinating to me! In the 9 days between Lee’s death and Momeni’s arrest, so many people were ready to believe that the death was due to some homeless guy. Even though Lee was killed in a very safe, very bougie neighborhood with relatively few unhoused people.

It’s just continually fascinating to me: the perception of SF safety versus my own lived experience, which is so completely different. So different that I have to wonder if the various internet commentators and political take generators furthering this narrative of YOU’LL BE STABBED TO DEATH BY A HOMELESS PERSON IF YOU LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO! actually, well…live here? Walk around here? At all? Or look at the facts? Because as Nathan Heller reported in the New Yorker last year:

By many measures, San Francisco is the safest it has ever been. Violent crime is a third of what it was in 1985, and currently twenty per cent below the average of twenty-one major American cities.

I’m a young woman. I spend at least 40 minutes a day walking around San Francisco, mostly in the Mission, where homelessness is an extremely visible and noticeable problem. I’ve walked around the city between 10pm–2am at night. I’ve taken the BART close to midnight. Prior to COVID, I even walked through the Tenderloin to get brunch with a friend at Brenda’s French Soul Food. No one has killed me yet.

The assumption is that that visible homelessness = greater danger, particularly for women. I have not found that to be true. I personally think the average inebriated bro at Bar Part Time is more likely to sexually assault me than an unhoused guy on the street. Some dude who’s probably living in a nice house…with his vaguely midcentury modern Wayfair/Article/Design Within Reach furniture…

Solnit writes about this, too—how crimes by white-collar professionals are treated as exceptional circumstances, whereas any crime that seems to be committed by a poor or unhoused person is a sign of endemic criminality. In 2013, a tech exec was recorded hitting his then-girlfriend 117 times and threatening to kill her. Was this used as an example of SF’s decline into a crime-ridden hellscape? No, obviously not.

It seems to me as if the concept of safety is always being weaponized for political purposes. And women’s safety especially: the threat of sexual assault and rape is used to reinforce carceral systems; the threat of queer and lesbian women being marginalized is used to power transphobic policy.

But that’s “out of scope” for this post, as a tech person would say. What’s in scope is discussing how the concept of safety is used in fear-mongering conversations about San Francisco. I tend to see it used in 2 ways:

1. The world is unsafe—so let’s crack down on lawlessness (but not Sam Bankman-Fried style lawlessness, unwashed-people-sleeping-on-the-streets lawlessness!), get tough on crime, establish more punitive policies…

2. The world is unsafe—so let’s stay inside and order 10pm Doordash through an app, take Lyfts and Ubers everywhere instead of public transit, order Instacart instead of walking to the grocery store…

P.E. Moskowitz

described the second as an “internet isolation loop”:

When people discourse over delivery apps and our addiction to the internet, a common refrain is: well we can’t go outside because outside is too dangerous/disconnected/suburbanized.

There’s some truth to this, but I think we shouldn’t see these phenomena as unrelated. The internet-ification of our lives is not a response to the hostility of the built environment to communal life but a continuation and intensification of that hostility.

I ultimately think that the people who are histrionic about safety in San Francisco—they just hate cities! They hate the fact that they have to interact with other people, people who are visibly poorer than them and different from them, when they go out into the world. They hate the fact that homeless people exist and that they have to see them, in a city and a country with a massive inequality problem. They hate the fact that they are being asked to care about other people, that they do not have exclusive dominion over the city they reside in, that they are being asked to see other people as neighbours instead of extraneous entities that deserve to be decluttered into nonexistence.

You know who’s actually unsafe in San Francisco? It’s the people who are living on the streets, not the people who walk by them on the way to their white-collar office job.

It’s artistically and culturally dead

It’s funny how the people who have complained about this the most (in my experience) are SF-based tech workers who shuttle between the office, their overpriced luxury apartment building, and the Michelin-starred restaurant du jour—and basically nowhere else. Eventually they get sick of the monotonous, deadened experience of living in SF and and move to NYC for “the culture”.

And when I ask them how their new life in NYC is going, “the culture” turns out to be: eating at Tiktok-famous restaurants and going to the same 5 clubs in Bushwick. In a city replete with cultural opportunities, they make dining out their personality and go on a Korg shopping spree.

This is going to make me sound like full-blown NYC hater—I actually think it’s a great city! Some of my best friends live in NYC! But I just think it’s so phenomenally overrated right now. Meanwhile, SF is underrated, and unfairly maligned by people who lived boring lives in San Francisco and got bored of them. Fine. They can move and raise the rent in Ridgewood.

I’m indicting myself here, by the way. When I lived in San Francisco from 2016–2019 I did not like it. I decided the city was the problem and escaped to London (NYC was also an option, but frankly less intriguing). That decision changed my life for the better, and I have no complaints—but I was also unhappy for extremely banal reasons that had nothing to do with SF! Like being extremely bad at texting people back and making plans, and then sitting at home feeling distressed and lonely.

Here’s some extremely obvious advice for anyone living in San Francisco (or any city, really) that feels lonely: go outside, strike up conversations with strangers, and accept every invitation someone extends to you until you become BFFs and/or your social calendar is full for the next 3 months.

When I moved back to San Francisco, I was determined to not repeat the mistakes of my early twenties. It turns out that there is so much to do in San Francisco, if only you look:

• In April 2024, right after I moved, I went to a City Lights event where Mircea Cărtărescu (my favorite Romanian novelist, although I don’t really know any other ones…) was speaking, as part of his north American book tour. Cărtărescu’s novel Solenoid was one of my favorite books last year (I wrote about it in best books of 2023), and the conversation was so moving, so remarkably revivifying, and I left feeling so incredibly happy to be in San Francisco.

• In June 2024, I went to an event at The Lab, a nonprofit space for experimental music, sound art, installations, and events. I was there for an event where Mindy Seu (one of my favorite academics and a true inspiration to me) spoke about her book Cyberfeminism Index, and did a fascinating augmented-reality style reading from the book. The event also included a live performance from the sound artist Victoria Shen, aka Evicshen, which was just—how do I even describe it? Unbelievably good, unbelievably fascinating; at one point, she put on fake nails with record needles embedded in them, and then elegantly scraped her nails on a record (suspended above a DIY record player) to play music.

• In July 2024, I went to the SF Art Book Fair and ran into two people who, it turns out, had been to the same Cărtărescu event as me! (We might have been the only non-Romanians there.) I honestly think that the conversations I had with both of them (later that day) and separately (over the next few months) were a major, major influence in me taking my writing so seriously last year.

• In October 2024, I went to a ZYZZYVA reading as part of San Francisco’s literary pub crawl evening and started a conversation with a woman there, who turned out to be the poet Hua Xi, who told me about a poetry reading happening in a few weeks…

• In November 2024, I went to the poetry reading at Left Margin Lit, where Hua Xi was reading, along with 2 other poets: Claire Wahmanholm and Sarah Ghazal Ali. I also went to the inaugural meeting of an in-person writing group I found out about through Twitter (thank you to my friend Chandler, who I reconnected with after we ran into each other at another event at The Lab, for sending me the tweet!)

• In November or December (I can’t remember!) I went to see a friend, Lessa Millet, do a kurinuki ceramics…workshop? making session? at a new-ish gallery in the Mission, Climate Control. I was so excited by the group show installed there, and ended up having a lovely conversation with the artist who runs the gallery, Nico. He recommended I check out the bookstore and gallery next door, Et al, that I wrote about on my very first Substack post.

• In December 2024, I went to an experimental fashion show titled The Wedding, organized by Two Two and jane galerie. KQED has a lovely writeup and some photos from the event, so I’ll simply say that it was so visually and sartorially and aesthetically energizing, the kind of event that makes you feel thrilled to be alive and witnessing the things other people are doing and making and passionate about. While I was there, I ran into, like, 10 different people that I’d met over the course of my 9 months living in San Francisco.

Everyone is always posting about how third spaces are dead, and that we’re living in an era of unprecedented social isolation and anomie. Well, in SF we have a third space, and it’s called Dolores Park. If you live in a city with at least one bookstore and one music venue, they probably host these things called events? Where you can meet people? And talk to them? It turns out anomie and isolation are ameliorated by things like leaving the house as much as possible.

A few days before Lessa moved to NYC (which, I admit, undercuts the entire thesis of this post somewhat…) we had a conversation where they observed that there are other American cities that have way less going on than San Francisco! But the residents of those cities often have an immense, quiet pride in their artistic and cultural life, whereas San Francisco seems suffused with an apologetic aura.

What’s missing, Lessa suggested, is some kind of narrative for people to hold onto, some sense that things are happening here, that they can start projects and support other people’s projects and feel like there is a shared energy and investment around the city.¹

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Late last year, someone on Twitter observed:

it's kinda wild that so many tech people hate SF and would rather move the tech capital of the US to another city but they just can't

A woman quoted the tweet and added:

the bravest thing a woman in her 20s can do is love san francisco unrelentingly

I keep on thinking about this, about how facile and easy it’s become to complain about San Francisco, and how rare it is for people to say that they actually enjoy living here.

I’d feel more sympathetic if the complaints about SF were coming from people most economically impacted by the tech industry, while benefitting from it the least. But when it comes from other tech people?

In those situations, I just think there’s something so fundamentally gauche about being part of the class of people who can afford to live in the premium mediocre pseudo-luxury apartment complexes in the city; who are not art or cultural workers; who seem to believe art and cultural workers don’t exist in the city; who have no investment in San Francisco’s history and culture prior to—and separate from—tech.

And I think there is something more positive, more active, about interacting with a city not just in terms of what it can give you—but what you can contribute back to it. What communities, and what commitments, you want to make.

I’m still figuring out what that means for me, beyond writing a 5,000 word manifesto on Substack. But on Valentine’s day, I’m just posting to say that the vibes are actually great in this city—and literature and art and culture are alive in the Bay Area—and you are not going to get stabbed to death if you walk around the city—and if you, for professional or familial reasons, are tied to this area, you might as well find a way to enjoy it.

Sorry to the SF haters, but I’m having a great time here!!!

With love,
Celine

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Favorite things about San Francisco

Activism ✦

• The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a collective that produces critical cartography and data visualizations to help people understand patterns of eviction and gentrification in the SF Bay Area (and NYC and LA). They’ve also published a book titled Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance

• Okay, this is actually in the east bay but I really want to talk about it! The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is an organization that facilitates the return and rematriation of unceded land in the SF Bay Area back to Ohlone people. Sogorea Te’ currently has a garden, a park, and several acres in the east bay. One approach they’ve taken is to advocate for a voluntary Shuumi land tax, so non-Indigenous people can support their efforts.

I was thinking about Sogorea Te’ quite a bit in 2021, when I was living in London and missing the Bay Area, and so the interactive short story I published that year, “Logging Off”, is my attempt to put the idea of decolonization into practice—by writing about the Bay Area, and donating my writer’s…fee? compensation? whatever! to Sogorea Te’.

Literature ✦

• The previously mentioned City Lights Bookstore in North Beach (of great historical significance to SF and American literary culture) has a phenomenally good selection of books and regularly hosts interesting literary events

• Dog Eared Books, in the Mission, basically gave me the political education I missed out on by being a prototypical STEM student in college (stressed about problem sets all the time, no room in my schedule for humanities classes). Also, if you live in the Mission and are ordering books off of Amazon: stop. You can ask Dog Eared to order a book for you and then pick it up in store!

• Green Apple Books also has a great selection of books, also hosts amazing events—including Sarah Ghazal Ali’s poetry book launch and reading, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. Also—Kar Johnson, who works there, is an incredibly warm facilitator, makes every event a joy, etc., and is also a really great writer?

• City Arts & Lectures is a nonprofit that invites “leading figures in arts and ideas” to lecture in San Francisco. Upcoming speakers include Angela Davis, Matthew Desmond (an incredible sociologist and writer on poverty in America; his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is great), Anne Lamott (whose book Bird by Bird always, always comes up when people talk about the best books of writing advice), Maggie Nelson (I’m convinced that her book Bluets is 90% of the reason contemporary writers are so obsessed with writing lists!) and Yotam Ottolenghi (cooking an elaborate Ottolenghi recipe for the love of your life is a rite of passage!)

Art ✦

• The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, affiliated with the California College of the Arts, has interesting art exhibitions

• Et al., near the 24th Street Mission BART station, seems like a very petite, compact bookstore when you first walk in. But when you go through the doorway at the end there’s another room of books. And then you go through the doorway there and there’s a full room of art. And then you go through another doorway and narrow hallway and there’s another room of art!

• Climate Control, already mentioned, is right next door to Et al., so you can do an extremely lazy gallery crawl from one to the next. I really have only felt energetic and interested and excited to be alive whenever I’ve gone.

• Minnesota Street Project, in Potrero, is usually the venue for the SF Art Book Fair and has a number of small gallery spaces!

• 500 Capp Street, in the Mission, is the former house of the artist David Ireland, and now houses Ireland’s conceptual art (often grounded in everyday life and domestic spaces) and exhibitions by artists-in-residence

Design ✦

• The Letterform Archive has an incredible online and in-person archive of typography and graphic design

• Heath Newsstand has an exceptionally good magazine selection

Film ✦

• The Roxie Theater is the oldest theater in San Francisco—and one of the oldest in America—and has really great programming. I went a few weeks ago to watch Bi Gan’s oneiric Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which I wrote about at the end of this Substack post.

Music ✦

• The Lab is right next to the 16th Street Mission BART station andalways has fascinating/strange/interesting sound art and experimental music

• Underground SF, if you want to stay up late and have a little dance…

1. The one hesitation I have about my argument here is that it might seem, well, detached from reality and deeply insensitive—the overtly positive perspective of someone who gets to work in tech and pretend to be a writer on the side.

After all, in Rebecca Solnit’s LRB essay, she writes:

The desire of tech workers to live in this dense, diverse place while their products create its opposite is an ongoing conundrum. Many tech workers think of themselves as edgy, as outsiders, as countercultural, even as they’re part of immense corporations that dominate culture, politics and the economy.

In the end, I’m choosing to read this in the most generous, ego-preserving way possible (isn’t that often we always read critiques of our own positionality?). There is probably something authentically obnoxious about positioning myself as the cooler, more culturally engaged tech worker. But navigating that uneasy tension—of genuinely liking this industry, while feeling personally implicated and guilty about some of its impacts—is my own “ongoing conundrum”, my own conflicted desire.