The sun burning off the fog on a Sausalito hillside
Fog poem on the beach near the Golden Gate Bridge
Dusty backroad, Sausalito
These are warm hazy memories of my trip to San Francisco, where the fog hid from us during an October heatwave in 2007. The dusty sunshine in Sausalito was idyllic, as we had breakfast with bears in an old wooden cafe and explored the Marina. I really appreciate these pictures as Manchester is lashed by rain for the third month running… and I wonder, where is the sun?
The Marina, Sausalito
Sunset on the Haight
The Palace of Fine Arts
The sun setting behind the trees near the Golden Gate Bridge
If you follow this blog, you probably do it wearing sunglasses. I’d put them on now, if I were you…
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Emerging from the Tube station, the first big surprise is that the street is real. When Eddy Grant sang ‘We gonna rock down to Electric Avenue,’ he was referring to the Brixton riots of 1981. I was only 14 years old, and although I watched Britain burning on the television, I later failed to make a connection with the song, or the widespread hatred for Continue reading →
‘Connie, I’ve found this darling place on Russian Hill on the third floor of the funkiest old building…and I can move in tomorrow,’ said Mary Anne Singleton when she realised she was moving up in the world.
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I travelled 5000 miles to make a pilgrimage to a place that isn’t real. The mythical Barbary Lane is more of a state of mind than an actual place: the heart of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels. The famous wooden steps which lead up to it are real enough, and this is where people from all over the world go to have their picture taken. Standing on those steps I got a feeling of the fantastic history of San Francisco, following in the footsteps of Mary Anne Singleton, the starchy secretary who ran away from Cleveland to live a more colourful life.
The Victorian apartment house should be perched at the top of the Macondray Lane steps on Russian Hill, but all that greets the curious tourist, breathless from the steep incline of Taylor Street, is a dark fern-lined alley between buildings which bear little resemblance to the movie set (which was based on a place on Napier Lane.)
In the movies, the house itself is magical. At night, the garden is lit by Chinese lanterns and fairy lights, ‘the whole fantasia’ as Michael fondly remembers in Michael Tolliver Lives. Marijuana plants nestle next to Azalea bushes as the sound of moaning foghorns drift up from the bay. Maupin had created an iconic place to rival Tara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, but here a new tenant would receive a joint taped to a welcome note on their front door, a gift from Mrs. Madrigal, ‘the mother of us all.’
Not everyone was happy at number 28. “The moon is in ca-ca,” said Mona, the free-wheeling hippy with displacement issues who leaves the warmth and safety of Barbary Lane to forge into the wide blue yonder in search of her roots. ’You can’t hide from the cosmos!’ she says when Mary Anne is shocked by her nudity. It’s Mona who inspired the tagline of my blog, ‘Dreams of a Free Spirit,’ the questing romantic with her Buddhist chants and cosmic consciousness. Of all Maupin’s characters, Mona is the one who really chimes with me. I’ll travel a long way to find a place like Barbary Lane.
Below you can see a clip from the Tales of the City tv series, and Mary Anne’s wide-eyed arrival at the house. The series was funded by Channel Four in Britain because the US networks refused to portray gay people in a positive light. How things have changed…
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Jump to 1.30 to see the where it all began…
I had to ask two taxi drivers and a realtor how to find the steps, so here’s a map…
Armistead Maupin’s new novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal will be published in 2013. Keep an eye on The Vibes for updates.
Update: I think I should mention that this is a sign that I saw in Brixton Market during my recent adventure in London and not the result of my own drunken bawdy mischief. I thought it was so cute I had to take a picture! LOL, as the digital generation are so fond of saying.
I took a Virgin train to London, speeding through the yellow fields of the Home Counties to the West End. Butterflies always start to flutter in my stomach around Watford Junction as the farmland is replaced by proud Edwardian townhouses backing onto the tracks, and in places you can still see the blackened Dickensian underbelly of the old Victorian city. A quick flash of history, and suddenly Euston – the station that welcomes me to my native south. The excitement is instant: the people, the noise, the buzz…
Cool Britannia!
The whole of London is red, white and blue! You would never guess that up until recently, any overt display of national pride in Britain was associated with political extremism. Fortunately we’ve reclaimed our identity with the double whammy of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic games. It’s OK to wave The Union Jack again, and believe me, everyone’s waving them. It’s been called the Union Jack since 1600 and I think the word Jack has a certain swagger to it, representing the British character: a cheeky kind of resilience, a spark of tenacity beneath our famous reserve. You might hear some apologists calling it the Union Flag, but quite why anyone would want to snip away part of our heritage when the Torch has only just arrived is beyond me.
You’re going to be seeing an awful lot of Union Jacks over the next few months, wherever you are in the world.
Below you can see a clip from the Tales of the City tv series, and Mary Anne’s wide-eyed arrival at the house. The series was funded by Channel Four in Britain because the US networks refused to portray gay people in a positive light. How things have changed…
the vibes 