of generals and particulars
in my memory, San Francisco is a montage, the layers piled atop one another in a great sensory heap. if only one could photograph smells, sounds, conversations, the ashen dampness of fog, the stubble of rocks underfoot, heat flaying skin, incredulity, delight, melancholy, the heady redolence of sea-salt and brine, vanishing points, that incredibly geometric feel to downtown SF ... Even the famed topography of the city -- those formidable hill slopes that undulate down into the bay, the majestic vistas and the sprawl of skyline under sky -- is unphotographable. Scale and distance intervene. San Francisco is too dimensional for most pictures, and perhaps for most words.
but there was this bar in the tenderloin, and the view of the city from 20th and sanchez, and burritos in the mission, and that crazy pair of slides up on 19th and seward, and the bareboned xylophone tinkling in the botanical gardens, poetry rooms, peach bread and coffee; that conversation about art and blue distance, with the high wind tousling our hair and the sweetness of strawberries in the sunshine, the harvest-like moon, the alley teeming with street art, bookstores and bookstores, chalked fingers pulling darts out of the board, lemonade in the park, laughter & counterfactuals ...
and so photos like this say very little -- if pictures were on average worth a thousand words, then that picture would be worth about three words, and something like this worth approximately 1997 words. this, I think, says something about the positioning of an individual within the streams of general existence. but I digress. SF is totally cool. now I am off to hawaii, which, as previously mentioned, is likely to also be awesome. it remains to be seen whether this snippet of Polynesia will trump the American west coast. more presently.
[edit] am now thinking about the phrase "to capture a city" in both senses of the term "capture" -- as an act of conquest and as an act of photography or art -- and how, given a city's complexity, the two meanings are convergent rather than parallel.