two years in san francisco
It was almost two years ago that I moved back to the US from Holland, not exactly a high point in my life. It was one of the hardest geocultural transitions I have ever made. What I really mean to say is, I was kicking and screaming when I figured out that I had to move back to the US. It was too difficult to get the right papers to stay in Holland. And I was completely broke.
Now I have more perspective on San Francisco, and can see (a few) things that I do like about this city. But at the same time, I still harbor plans to get back to Europe at some point, I see San Francisco as a temporary stop on the way to, well, somewhere... Antwerp, maybe? Berlin?
Sometimes I wonder if I could settle in New York. That city has been calling me for years, and I'm always happy to visit. I have friends there and it at least has pretensions to European cultural models, with new music events at small spaces in Williamsburg called Darmstadt Night, is home to the Neue Gallery and so on.
But America still makes me nervous. Anytime I'm around a TV that is turned on in this country, I start feeling jumpy and neurotic. All those crazed voices and intensely serious faces uttering the most insane rhetoric, stating it as fact. I hope that this is the storm before the quiet, the last throes of a culture veering towards an extreme form of Darwinism, right before it remembers some of its friendlier tendencies of the past and moves back toward its better nature. Watching television that was made in the 70's or early 80's, I notice how people talk about living in New York on a part-time job, making art the rest of the time. It seems that wages were high enough and the costs of living stabilized to a degree where people could focus on things besides survival. There was a liberalism to the culture at large, with Jim Henson (a Mississippi native) promoting his vision of love through his Muppet characters and Dan Rather (a national television news anchor who was recently abruptly fired) questioning and mocking Nixon on live television. It was a time when the ideals of the 60's were in some ways becoming manifest in real power. Conservatives had to take cover. Those days seem like centuries ago.
But I still feel some degree of hopefulness. Like when I am teaching a digital arts class to kids and for their collaborative online 'zine, one of the students, a 12 year old girl, writes an opinion piece on how wrongheaded Bush's stance on gay marriage is. Or when another student makes a Flash movie about Apple computer destroying Microsoft. I have to say, based on firsthand experience with people a little less than half my age, I'm feeling pretty good about the future of this country. But do we really have to wait for them to grow up before we see change?
