Friday, November 17, 2006The CityI'm sitting at Caffe Trieste in Sausalito and, truly, life doesn't get better than this.You can keep your fancy hunky lovers and your villa in the south of France. I'm sitting here with free wi-fi, granola with fruit and yogurt, people surrounding me with conversation, and San Fransicso hovering across the bay, enshrouded in fog like Janis Joplin in an ostrich boa. I don't know if I've discussed this in these blogs, but I've always felt that cities are primarily masculine or feminine in nature. Los Angeles is complex, multifaceted, difficult to penetrate, and -- if you are tenacious enough to discover enough of them -- greater than the sum of her parts. If you look at any one of her qualities, she's disappointing. If you live there long enough and probe deeply enough, and have enough patience to work through all her issues -- there is a sum there that is greater than her individual attributes. Basically, LA is one of those women who provide a certain amount of surface glamour, give little, and require a lot of work to maintain. There's a word for that kind of woman.... oh yeah, that'd be the word "bitch." New York, on the other hand, is masculine in the extreme. You walk up out of the ground from Penn Station and WHAM, you are walloped over the head with the power of the city. There is no attempt at discretion or coyness. New York is linear, aggressive, filled with phallic testosterone-juiced upward thrusting. From the subways to the skyscrapers to the throbbing atertial flow.... I rest my case. Then there's Paris. Paris is, of course, extremely feminine, but in a different way from LA. Paris is the woman of elegance, all done up for the occasion, coifed and perfumed and gracious. There is no false step to her; every motion is refined and cultured and honed by centuries of being seen in public. Even the word "ettiquette" belongs to her. She is the kind of woman that men (a certain type of man, at least) fears, worships, takes care of, reveres. San Francisco is more my style. Let me rephrase: San Francisco is my style. I come by this equation somewhat honestly; my father was born in his house on Cole Street in 1909, his family settled in the city in the 1800s. I've always run away to this place to find myself. Whether it's DNA or just temperament, when I breathe the air in this place, it's the perfect oxygen for my body. San Fransisco is also feminine, I think. But it's got an unapologetic masculinity about it, too. It's a city with agendas and grace, with purpose and indulgence, with commerce and art. It's a writer's city, a misfit's city, the city where people who don't fit in anywhere else magically fit in. It feels warm without being cloying, it's open without being sappy and vulernable. Like New York, it's filled with magical niches and world-class everything -- from food to opera to art to writing. San Francisco is what would happen if New York and Paris fell in love. Maybe in the early Barbary Coast years, this would've seemed like a tempestuous affair... but by now it's more the marriage of many years. San Francisco has been through her turbulent adolescence, has been pummeled by loss, has weathered some years. She has seen some interesting shit. Am I hopelessly in love with this city? You betcha. Do I often wonder why I chose to leave it to go to grad school in LA? Actually... I don't. That was the road I needed to travel and it was a good road. It gave me a number of years of a good marriage and two kids who enhance the planet in more ways than I can count. In the absence of regret for my choices, I do ache for it when I'm back here, though. I ache that I can't be here more, while at the same time revelling in all the moments I can visit. If and when I move back -- I caution myself -- I won't necessarily be happier and my various items of baggage won't miraculously disappear. On the other hand -- and I know this viscerally -- when the time comes I will, simply, be happier. I may be just as fucked up, but I'll be happier about it. I'll be in the place where the oxygen content more perfectly matches my blood, there won't be so much friction between me and my environment. I love my life in LA. I love roaming streets where I have decades' worth of stories lurking on every corner. I know everyone; the high maintenance bitch thing is an attitude, rather than an actual presence. I adore my friends down there. Our circle is solid and sweet and soulful and creative. I have created and discovered and nurtured a Northern California lifestyle in the midst of the Southern California metropex. It's true: my friends down there are the "my kind of people" I love so much up here. It's not that it's all here and not there. I have found the niches, I have found the moments of true art, I know where the soul is and I love it for its scarcity. Like rare gems, finding the soul in LA is an artform in itself and it's highly gratifying when a moment or a place is uncovered. Maybe being up here... where every radio station is good, where every restaurant is intoxicating, where every conversation is worth unabashed eavesdropping... would get old. Maybe the great thing about LA is that it does take a little work and the good stuff refuses to be taken for granted when it's found. On the other hand... when it comes time to leave... I think I'll be ready. At some point in my life I will have earned the ability to be with my kind of people, in my kind of place and not have to work so hard. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 8:46 AM  
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