From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Mon Aug 21 2000 - 08:42:43 PDT
I will admit one thing about the Bay Area that's irreplaceable, Planes of Hell
or not: Clark's Burgers on Camino Real in, I think, Mountain View...
absolutely hands down the best hamburger in the world, IMO.
jb
"Meltsner, Kenneth" wrote:
> Oh come on, that's Silicon Valley for you. The Bay Area also include the
> grotty and lovely bits of Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Albany, etc., as
> well as all of San Francisco. Parts of which have strip malls and other
> parts of which have walkable downtowns and public transportation that
> (mostly) works.
>
> And in San Francisco, you have to pay extra if you want a house or apartment
> that's not submerged in fog much of the day.
>
> It's a really big area with great variations -- everything from the
> outlandish architecture in East Oakland/Piedmont (where a fire performed
> instant suburban renewal) to old Arts and Crafts houses in Berkeley and
> "painted lady" Victorians in SF to suburban tract housing in Vallejo.
>
> Take an hour drive (not counting traffic) and you'll be in a different
> world. Not the *real* world, but certainly not soul killing and turbo
> business geek.
>
> And stop by Everett and Jones on San Pablo Ave and University, and have a
> rack of ribs for me.
>
> Ken Meltsner
> (who grew up in Albany and El Cerrito an astonishingly large number of years
> ago)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adam L. Beberg [mailto:beberg@mithral.com]
> Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2000 5:23 AM
> To: Jeff Bone
> Cc: Adam Rifkin; FoRK@XeNT.CoM
> Subject: Re: [NYTimes] Austin, we have a problem
>
> On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Jeff Bone wrote:
>
> > Impressions of the Bay Area, circa 1989-1992: suburban hellhole.
> > Totally homogeneous. Pre-packaged. Synthetic. Isomorphic.
> > Pretensious. Weirdly provencial. Surprisingly racist, under a
> > veneer of hypercorrectness. Inflated sense of its own importance.
> > Land of Strip Malls. Overengineered. Gang-raped by franchises.
> > Crowded. Single-themed. The opposite of laid back. Dry. Car
> > fetishistic. Not user friendly. Hyperexpensive. Basically totally
> > uninteresting. Utter alpha male turbo business geek culture, and
> > *nothing at all but that.* Soul killing.
>
> You ain't kidding, and you left you the bad parts!
>
> I just moved out here, and from the adventuring out I have done I'd
> preaty much have to classify this as around a 6 on the 9 planes of hell
> scale. Too good for a mass murderer, but about right for say your run of
> the mill single murder.
>
> Everything is at least twice as expensive as anywhere in the real world.
> Roads change names and direction at random, with only one name on any
> map. "Valley" north is apparently what the rest of the universe calls
> west, but south isn't alwasy east. European cars that cost more then a
> house are all over the place, but seem to all be parked on the sholder
> of the highways. Just try to park an extended cab truck anywhere. Taxes
> are all higher of course. And when the heck will there be clouds, or
> rain, or ANYTHING, this sunlight thing is downright painful (that's what
> I get for being nocturnal or underground for the last 8 years). The
> water tastes wierd, and I'm not sure where it's coming from. Everyone
> seems to be in denial that there is a thing called reality, and when you
> point this out they just ignore you and talk about their new idea that's
> ancient but hypeable. It's downright scary how disconnected people are.
> Is there a fuckedcompany.com-like site for cities, cause this place
> needs to be on the list...
>
> My hard-core realist, low profile living self just doesn't get it. But
> now my atoms are in the valley, I feel so special.
>
> - Adam L. Beberg
> Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
> The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
> beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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