I just got back from San Francisco on Saturday. I’d flown out Thursday to attend screenings of Always In Season at the San Francisco Film Festival that evening and Friday night. It was my first visit not just to the city but to the Left Coast.
A few snaps I and others took.
When I was an adolescent, I got a great deal of sustenance from City Lights’ Pocket Poets series of books. They introduced me to such Beat luminaries as Allen Ginzberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, et al. So there was no way I could I visit SF without making the pilgrimage to the City Lights Bookstore. I passed on a visit to George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch to do so. Got to spend half a day soaking up the city’s ambience.
San Francisco is a fascinating place. A melange of cultures and history intersecting on its streets and byways. North Beach was home to China Town and an Italian enclave long before the Beats arrived. Now leavened with an Irish presence.
It’s the location of Telegraph Hill where the fabled Coit Tower rises over the city and San Francisco Bay, Providing exceptional views of the Bay Bridge and Alcatraz island.
It inspired an ode by Gregory Corso published in the collection Gasoline:
O anti-verdurous phallic weren’t not for your pouring height looming
in tears like a sick tree or your ever-gaudy-comfort jabbing
your city’s much wrinkled sky you’d seem an absurd Babel squatting
before mortal millions
Because I filled your dull sockets with my New York City eyes
vibrations that hadn’t doomed dumb Empire State did
not doom thee
Enough my eyes made you see phantasmal at night mad children
of soda caps laying down their abundant blond verse
on the gridiron of each other’s eucharaistic feet
like distant kings laying down treasures from camels
Illuminations hinged to masculine limbs fresh with the
labor sweat of cablecar & Genoa papa pushcart
To quote Allen Ginzberg, “But what is he saying? Who cares?! It’s said!”
Everything they say about the steepness of the hills is true. Atlanta is known to be quite hilly but it’s nothing in comparison. It took several pauses before I got to the top of Telegraph Hill but it was well worth the effort.
Fortunately, while walking can be arduous because of the topography, the city has an excellent public transit system. So it’s possible to get about without risking cardiac arrest.
Really an amazing, stimulating place.
It is, unfortunately, not a city for those with little or no money. Homelessness is a real problem. It’s not at all unusual to find people sleeping on the streets.
In contrast it is a dog’s paradise, with canines allowed on public transit and in restaurants. The only place outside the UK where I’ve seen the like. Cultural riches and a love of animals cheek by jowl with the depths of human misery.
We had a screening on Friday in Oakland so I was able see a bit of that town as well. The showing was in fabulously renovated movie palace dating from the 1920’s.
There were good crowds at both screenings with lively Q and A’s afterward.
The film continues to draw attention and stimulate fruitful discussion everywhere it is screened, San Francisco and Oakland being no exceptions.
In addition to the Special Jury award for Moral Urgency it garnered at the Sundance Festival, it has received the Human Rights award at the River Run Festival in Winston-Salem, NC., taken top prize at the Indie Grits Festival in Columbia, SC. and won Best Documentary at the Omaha Film Festival.
The most exciting news is that Always In Season has been slated to air on PBS early next year. The schedule will be announced at the website as it becomes available.
This is a consummation that’s been ten years in the making. One that I never dreamed of when I first began doing anti-Klan work nor when I became involved in the Moore’s Ford re-enactment. It’s both humbling and heartening to have been allowed to collaborate with such fantastic, creative and committed people as Cassandra Green and my fellow re-enactors of the Moore’s Ford lynching as well as Director Jacqueline Olive and her amazing crew.
To meet and be befriended by such profoundly impressive people as Claudia Lacy and her son Pierre who have never ceased to struggle for justice for the memory of her son Lennon Lacy.
I can scarcely believe that I have been so blessed.
It’s a wonderful thing to know than one’s work will continue to have an impact and leave a legacy for the future long after one’s gone.
I can’t imagine a greater gift.