.JPG)
Yet to have hardcore progressives combatting do-gooding young “Don’t Be Evil”-ites is a “fortunate problem”, as Californians might put it; the most searching look at the sometimes unnerving idealism of Google – the recent novel The Circle – came from another San Franciscan utopian, one who has fashioned his own idealistic communications empire, Dave Eggers. In any case, it was ever thus: after gold was discovered not far from what is now San Francisco, a settlement of 812 people turned, within two years, into a city of almost 25,000, best-known for its gambling joints and bordellos. Why should the second gold rush be any different? It was in San Francisco that I first encountered the word “microclimate”, speaking for a city of such variegated moods that foghorns sound under radiant summer skies and the temperature can vary by as many as nine degrees from block to block. Quite often, as I watched thick summer fog remaking the high-rises and church towers every few minutes during my first morning in the Tomo, I didn’t know whether I was in grey, shivery Europe or cloudless California; then I drove away from the pea-souper enshrouding Japantown and, a few minutes later, was looking down on pretty houseboats in Sausalito’s sunlit harbour (and, the next day, lost in the blue-skied wilderness of Berkeley’s Tilden Park). When Mark Twain said the coldest winter he experienced was summer in San Francisco, he neglected to point out that you can enjoy summer in mid-December in Marin County, over the Golden Gate bridge, or across the Bay bridge to the east.
Social Profiles     
|
.JPG)
.jpg)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
0 comments:
Post a Comment