San Francisco One Year Later

Wednesday, 6 December 2017

A year ago I was in San Francisco when the US election took place and Donald Trump won. I thought I’d done my bit to save the world by having him cursed – by the cursing grannies – in Hong Kong. I decided that was a clear failure, but perhaps it wasn’t, perhaps becoming president has been his own curse? I’d turned up in San Francisco for that important election after I’d mused on the places where I’d failed to show up on the appropriate day – Berlin for the Wall coming down, Woodstock for that great rock festival, Bamiyan for any day before the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas.

◄ The Salesforce Tower. One year later I was back in San Francisco to find somethings had changes, the almost completed Salesforce Tower is the tallest building in the city and the second tallest west of the Mississippi River, Los Angeles has a taller building. Never heard of Salesforce before? Nor had I, but they hold an annual software conference in San Francisco – Dreamforce – which is the biggest in the world.

▲ Which in turn makes it virtually impossible to find a room in the city, well I found this one at Hotel Vitale, overlooking the Embarcadero and the Oakland Bay Bridge.

▲ Of course some things certainly hadn’t changed, City Lights is still selling books.

▲ And nearby Bruce Lee still rules Chinatown.

▲ I also caught the Walker Evans photography exhibit at SFMOMA – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – it’s on until 4 February 2018. The exhibit is a fascinating insight into the work of a photographer who specialized in documenting everyday life, particularly during the depression.

▲ MOMA also featured Louise Bourgeois’s spiders, for some reason I’ve also encountered her large spiders in England and France during the past couple of years.