FOOD AND WINE

Essays and Articles

'One-track minds' (The Weekend Australian Magazine, 18 July 2010)

FILM

Interviews

'Fighting for Adventurous Documentary Making: An Interview with Tom Zubrycki and Richard Harris' (RealTime, Iss. 97, June/July 2010)

PERFORMING ARTS

Essays and Articles

'Still Not There: Dylan on Stage and Film' (RealTime, Iss. 97, June/July 2010)

TRAVEL

Essays and Articles

'Postcard from San Francisco: Cocktails and Suicide Spots' (The Punch, 15 June 2010)

There are a lot of churches in San Francisco—the city leaves Adelaide in its religious architectural wake—but only one of them held any interest for me when I was there last week. Uncharacteristic though it may be for me to actively seek out a house of worship, this one seemed a worthy exception: Mission San Francisco de Asís, the oldest surviving structure in the city, was founded on June 29, 1776, and has survived fire, war, the 1906 earthquake, and even secularisation. It has stood on Spanish, Mexican and American soil and continues to hold services to this day.

I went looking for the mission quite late in the afternoon: I had spent my day wandering aimlessly around Golden Gate Park, where bands played impromptu music and teenagers weaved around cones on rollerblades, and through the de Young Museum. There, in a travelling exhibition of Impressionist paintings from the Musée d'Orsay, I unexpectedly came across James Abbott McNeil Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother, which is arguably the greatest painting ever executed by an American artist. Better known by its colloquial name, Whistler's Mother, the painting is currently in San Francisco for only the second time in its history. (I could have spent half an hour or more in front of the thing, as I did last year in front of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon at MoMA. But it was one of those keep-'em-moving, exit-through-the-giftshop-type exhibitions, and I felt I was getting in the way of those who wanted to have their requisite three seconds with the image and move on. So I allowed myself only fifteen minutes.) My visit to Mission San Francisco de Asís was to serve as a grace-note to that experience.

I did a lot of walking in San Francisco, covering some ten miles on the first day and about six on the second. After leaving the de Young and Golden Gate Park, I wandered up Haight Street. The Haight, as it is popularly known, became famous in the Sixties as the unofficial birthplace of the Summer of Love, and with it of the counterculture's drug-addled side, and indeed the smell of pot remains a common one throughout the city. Back then the area was known as Haight-Ashbury, named for the intersection of the two streets at its centre. I always thought it was pronounced "Height," or at least "Hay-eet," but everyone in San Francisco pronounces it "Hate," so that when you hear them talking about its various sub-segments you hear mention of places like Upper and Lower "Hate". (I can't help but be reminded of Britain's Upper and Lower Slaughter, which are villages in the Cotswolds. Upper Slaughter, despite its name, was one of the few villages in England not to lose any men in World War One.) At the end of Haight Street, I crossed over into the Mission District. Eventually the turrets of the mission's adjacent basilica appeared over the tops of the buildings, and then the mission, too, modestly situated down a side-street, came into view. It was all shut up by this time: the tours had ended an hour or so before, and the door was locked. But I wasn't disappointed. The idea of going on a tour of the building and exiting, as I had the de Young's exhibition, through the giftshop, seemed vulgar compared to what I actually did do, which was sit and look at the building for a while before touching one its adobe walls and walking away. I didn't get a chance to visit the Muir Woods or its giant, old-growth redwoods on this trip. (No "Here I was born, and there I died" for me, I'm afraid.) But this enduring product of human labour was really just as impressive. As with Whistler's Mother, I could have stood in front of the mission for half an or more, and for many of the same reasons.

But I was getting hungry and so started making my way back to the Haight. It didn't take me long to realise that the path I had chosen ran straight through the Castro, which I knew only vaguely from Gus Van Sant's Milk. The first thing that alerted me to this fact was the sudden, near total absence of women on the streets; the second was the fact that the men I was passing were all very well-groomed indeed. I was looking pretty well-groomed myself and by time I noticed the third thing—that every second building seemed to house a gym or fitness store—I had started to become aware that I was drawing quite a few curious, even slightly impressed, looks. Even men who were walking hand in hand seemed to be checking me out through the corners of their eyes. It briefly occurred to me that I might have been imagining all this—big-dealing and deluding myself with the idea that I was the best-looking person on the street—but I wasn't sure so assumed that I wasn't. I began adjusting my behaviour accordingly, meeting my admirers' eyes over the rim of my sunglasses and smirking ever-so-slightly in the knowledge that I possessed power over all sexes and persuasions. I might even have started strutting a little. But then, without precisely knowing when, I crossed the Castro's invisible northern border, started up Market Street, and was suddenly meeting the eyes of straight men, who probably thought I was the one checking them out. And logically so, I realised, if only because, for whatever self-absorbed reason, I actually kind of was. This made me feel less powerful than before, and much weirder, so I stopped.

Then you get on the plane. The pilot's always got to come on the PA system. Give you his whole thing of what he's gonna do. "And here's how I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna take it up to twenty thousand. Then I'm gonna make a left by Chicago. Then I'm gonna go south by…" And we're all back there going: "Yeah, fine. It's…you know, just do whatever the hell you gotta do. I don't know what the hell is going on. Just end up where it says on the ticket, okay? Can you do that ?"

– Jerry Seinfeld

I really wish I'd booked that direct flight. On Wednesday morning I commented flippantly: "The next seven hours will take twenty-one." In fact, the next fourteen took closer to thirty. I made that comment at four-thirty in the morning and was due to arrive in San Francisco, on the other side of the International Date Line, at eleven-twenty the same day. By the time I finally got to the place I was staying, a couple of blocks from Golden Gate Park on Third Avenue, it was half past six in the evening.

My troubles started in Sydney, where Qantas started boarding my flight, stopped boarding my flight, kicked the already-boarded off the plane, forced me to read The Daily Telegraph for twenty minutes while we waited to hear what the hell was going on, put us on another plane, and then finally got us off the ground about an hour-and-a-half later than they were supposed to. Only to find, upon our arrival in Brisbane, that there was no one present at the gate to operate the aerowalk for us, leaving us stranded on the plane for fifteen minutes while the pilots embarrassedly messaged for help. On my international flight, I was tactfully reminded by a flight attendant about Qantas's RSA guidelines after I finished off most of the Australian sparkling on-board and started having a particularly nice steward bring up glasses of proper Champagne from First Class.

But at least that flight took off and arrived when advertised, not to mention where. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of my American Airlines flight, which was due to take off from Los Angeles at five-to-ten and arrive in San Francisco about ninety minutes later, and which failed to meet any one of those criteria, except for the one about taking off from Los Angeles. First they told us that our flight was to be delayed by roughly fifty minutes. Which would have been fine had they not then boarded us at the rescheduled time, made sure we were all in our seats, and then told us that wouldn't be able to take off for at least another forty-five minutes. And even that might not have been too bad—people were at least able to get off the plane and walk around while we were still on the ground, after all—had we not then finally reached San Francisco, circled it for a good twenty minutes, and then flown across San Francisco Bay to San Jose, where we were told that we hadn't been able to land in San Francisco due to fog. Which, by the way, was the only thing they seemed to know about what was happening at that point: that we couldn't land due to fog. They certainly didn't know—and certainly weren't willing to estimate—when we'd be able to take off again.

A small but perhaps understandable revolution broke out among the passengers at this point, with many of those travelling without checked luggage opting out of the cursed endeavour altogether and choosing instead to try their luck with buses and trains to Oakland or Berkeley. With Rogan Josh tucked tightly away, however, I had no choice but to stick around—the bags, the airline's people were adamant, were not coming off the plane until the damned thing had landed where our tickets said it should have—and so finally disembarked at San Francisco International Airport with fewer hours remaining in the day that I would perhaps have liked.

After arriving at San Francisco's Civic Centre on the BART at around half past four, I wandered around trying to find Third Avenue. I didn't have a map on me, but was vaguely aware of where I was going. Unfortunately, my awareness was a little too vague, and by the time I finally reached the house—an airy Italianate place with a decidedly frat-house feel—it was around six-thirty and my body was beginning to give way. But the sun was still relatively high in the sky—it doesn't begin to go down until about quarter past seven in these parts—and my host was keen to go eat something. "Remaining debonair," Irwin Shaw once wrote, "means that one must always be ready to go to the next bar or the next war, no matter how late the hour or how unattractive the war." I took a much-needed shower and threw on a jacket. I didn't wake up the next morning until late.

Today I finished reading Christopher Hitchens's memoir, Hitch-22, and in about seven hours I will be boarding a plane bound for San Francisco. (Actually, I will be boarding a plane bound for Brisbane, and much to my chagrin, too. A week before I booked my flights, there were still a number of direct services available between Sydney and San Francisco; a week later, when I actually had the money to book them, this was no longer the case, so now I'm flying to Queensland, then to Los Angeles, then to San Francisco, the three flights crudely punctuated by a total of nearly seven hours of layovers. Timing, as the cliché goes, is everything.)

I started Hitch-22 in Port MacDonnell, where I read about half of it. (This was after I devoured Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer, which only helped to confirm the feeling that resigning from The Australian was the right thing to do.) Then it was back to Sydney, where the city's film festival was in full swing, and where there were personal matters to attend to, and where there was an international voyage of indeterminate length to plan for. (It's been an expensive week, to be sure, what with travel insurance and luggage to buy, haircuts to have, and movies to see.) It was only in the last two days that I endeavoured to actually finish the book: with a newly-purchased goat-leather duffle bag (which my vegan girlfriend has derisively christened Rogan Josh) filled with several volumes of Hemingway, and with Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March in my shoulder bag in anticipation of a month making my way across the Midwest, the last thing I wanted was to be lugging Hitchens's book across the Pacific with only twenty or thirty pages of it to go.

Without saying too much about what I thought Hitch-22 (I liked it a lot, for what it's worth, though thought some of its sections seemed hastily written), I would like to quote the one sentence that, while perhaps not especially striking to others, rather caught my eye when I read it. "If ever I was going," Hitchens writes, "it was time for me to go."

This is more or less exactly how I'm feeling this evening. My emotional nerve endings may be exposed—I have nearly burst into tears several times, including once in front of my girlfriend, who cooked me a marvellous farewell dinner, and again on the phone to my parents—but my resolve and commitment to what I'm doing has never been as great. There's nothing quite as fortifying, it occurs to me, as a heady cocktail of nerves and ambition.

Hitchens's line—the last sentence of a chapter about his early international reporting assignments and a nice introduction to the one that follows it about his moving to the United States—reminded me of similar passages from the memoirs of Alan Moorehead and Robert Hughes. As those I have shared them with already will know, these extracts have long inspired me, and I quote the latter of them here because, this evening, I can't get it out of my head.

Robert Hughes, Things I Didn't Know, p.214:

Alan [Moorehead] and I had arrived at a compact. I would have to leave Australia, just as he had done, if my work was ever to go anywhere. "If you stay here another ten years," Alan pronounced, looking at me rather owlishly, "Australia will still be a very interesting place. But you will have become a bore, a village explainer." Luckily, I had the sense to realise that he was right. But then, it was what I had been wanting to hear.

Hitchens's sentiments are somewhat shorter than Hughes's, but nevertheless manage to capture something of the latter's flavour despite their seeming economy. Or maybe I am just responding favourably to the idea that it is time for me to go, too. After all, it is what I have been wanting to hear—and waiting to hear—for a while myself.