FundamentallySound Blog

San Francisco is a provincial city with a surprisingly international flavor. But its internationalism is quaint, based on old notions of what the city is about. People don't come here for cutting-edge architecture or visual art, it just doesn't exist. People here are disinterested in anything that is too new, preferring social warmth to a challenging aesthetic. The electronic music scene might be an exception to this.

LA couldn't be more different, it's rooted firmly in southern California style and unafraid to push ahead with the work of architects like Thom Mayne. The city planners seem determined to make the metropolis a distinctly world-class model of urbanism, one that might put off Europeans or those from the northeastern US, but still a well-defined version of urbanity that challenges the rest of the world into reconsidering what a city means. Comparatively, San Francisco is shockingly timid and aggressively conservative in its urban planning and metropolitan aesthetic. This is not to say that its quasi-civilized air is not without attractiveness, in fact it is very easy to be lured into the coziness of the city, seduced by the fog, convinced that the rest of the world can just go its own way without our concern, we have good views, tasty food, and pretty parks. And chances are good that the guy sitting next to you on the train actually would enjoy a conversation about the WG Sebald novel you're reading.

A friend once described the three big American cities this way: If you're tragically ambitious and smart you move to New York. If you're tragically ambitious you move to Los Angeles. If you're just tragically smart you move to San Francisco. That describes my friends in this little village, they're too smart to be ambitious. Or maybe just lazy...