Letter to Alien SETI Programmes, etc, II

San Francisco: Berkeley, Bjork, Bay to Breakers, Bookstore, Bars, Bridge

I went for a tour of Berekey (campus/hills) with Sarah Sorsby's Austro-Germanic-Polish friend Hania on Saturday – a PhD candidate in neuroscience (yawn) – and she was a delight. We saw two metallic dragonflies in the hills: one was a vivid metal blue, the other, sheriff's star silver; both featured in Pan's Labyrinth.

Scultpure and Sather Tower, UC Berkeley

That night we went to see Björk and Joanna Newsom at an outdoor amphitheatre in Mountainview, near Stanford and directly opposite Google. The Silicon Valley circlejerkers had blue, red, yellow and green cones in the driveway entering their massive complex to discourage concert-goers from parking there. A few adult-sized children’s bikes – ones with small triangular flags in the Google colours – were leant against the buildings, unlocked.

Self satisfaction is rife in SF, of course. The Bay to Breakers was a case in point, a massive, largely drunken run/keg push from the Embarcadero to Ocean Beach (7 miles) feat. plain hippy girls with painted tits and strolling old men with their dongs out. Still, there were some creative keg-pushing vehicles on display: bulls, ships, wheelchairs. Each year, a bunch of people dress as Salmon, have sex at the breakers and then run the race back to front, upstream, and very slowly. When they reach the bay nine months later they give birth to babies with foetal alcohol syndrome.

The concert. Despite her practically summering in Wgtn, she's there so often, it was the first time I'd seen J Newsom, lit with pale smurf-blue light that coloured everything but her red lips, cheeks and dress. She has the most amazingly theatrical expressions as she sings. Someone compared the way she pulled her face in all directions to a stroke victim, a Sly Stallone, but I think it worked for her. Björk was historic (pagan poetry was epic) and danst up a storm. She had a fine Icelandic brass section with ridiculous bobbing headplumes and two guys on 'electronics' - one of whom was 'playing' a touch screen, manipulating planets to help the audience visualise his contribution to the music. But her set was a little short: tut tut Björk!

I saw Miranda "You and Me and Everyone We Know" July (see short: http://www.wholphindvd.com/issues/issue_1.html) on Valencia street last week. The place was so packed that she had to climb a ladder in high heels (plus purple socks and a lime green skirt) to read where everyone could see her, atop a bookshelf. She was as absurd and hilariously self-aware as the characters in her stories.

Quotes:

'My boyfriend and I both fantasise about other people during sex, but he likes to tell me who he’s fantasizing about, and I don't.'

'I thought these were just my starter friends.'

Tourism.

NZ Marianna turned up for a bit and we hit Haight St, Amoeba Records and the Painted Ladies, the houses behind the lawn where Mary Kate and Ashley Olson were toileted on Full House. There were seven ladies, as if one had formed each time Marianna sang the theme to Full House on the way there: 'Whatever happened to predict-a-bility?' Irrelevantly, irreverently, I had the theme to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air in my head the whole time.

We also visited the Grateful Dead’s digs. It was a purple Victorian house, indistinguishable from the other houses in the neighbourhood but for an embarrassed looking family – two baby boomers and their teenage kids – standing outside and wondering if the landmark warranted photographs.

Alcatraz was beautiful as the day’s last rays of yolky sun poured through the bars.

The Golden Gate bridge causes more suicides than any other landmark, but it seemed nice enough to me.

On average, someone jumps from the bridge every fifteen days. The 67 metre fall lasts four seconds and jumpers hit the water at about 120 kilometres per hour. Ninety-eight percent of those who jump die. In 2006 the California Highway Patrol removed 70 apparently suicidal people from the bridge.

At four feet tall, the fence alongside the bridge is barely over waist height but, moronically, costs and public opposition have thwarted attempts to have suicide barriers erected. Crisis counselling phone lines have however been installed on the bridge and walkers are not permitted to cross after dark. In an effort to cull the seething plague of cyclists in San Francisco, people with bicycles are buzzed through security gates and allowed to cross at night.

Intuitively, the best argument against erecting a barrier is that it would do no good, people would find another way to end their lives. This is untrue. In 1978, Richard Seiden, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, released the results of a study of over 500 people who had been prevented from jumping off the bridge between 1937 and 1971. Only about 6 percent had gone on to commit suicide in some other way.

Engineering and environmental tests to establish the feasibility of a prevention fence are due for completion in early 2008. Then ‘next steps’, or the lack thereof, will be decided.

Mel Blaustein MD, President of the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California, wrote the following in 2005:

It only took New York 16 deaths to erect a barrier on the Empire State Building. The French waited until 352 had jumped from the Eiffel Tower before erecting a barrier. We are approaching 1,300 deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge and the time has certainly arrived.