Well, just got back to San Francisco, after a week back east at the New York Harvest Festival, and lucked into what seems to be a great living situation near the Panhandle with a couple of older guys that I know via their friendship with the curator of the Institute of Illicit Images.

One of the guys that I’ll be living with had a moment of his “fifteen minutes of fame” when he put flowers in the barrels of guns during a Viet Nam War protest back in the sixties.

The house is a sprawling beautiful Victorian, the sort that made the Haight-Ashbury the hot spot that it was during the mid-to-late Sixties.

the pad

I visited The Haight on my first trip to San Francisco in 1987, the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love. While in town, I bought Charles Perry’s Haight-Ashbury: A History. That book (once again out of print!) sits alongside Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as being, to me, one of two books that best captures the What and Why of San Francisco’s late ’60s art explosion.

Paul Krassner summed up the Haight as a “spiritual revolution that was treated as a temporary fad.” And I think he was pretty spot on in that assessment.

Despite its storied history, I had never thought of wanting to live in or near The Haight. The neighborhood goes through roller-coasters of popularity, but it is also a sad landmark in many respects. Any given block of the upper Haight is heavily populated by drifters begging for change. Many are rude.

So much of the Burning Man “No Spectators” ethos owes more than a passing debt of gratitude to the interactive street theater that groups like the Diggers and the San Francisco MIme Troupe enacted in the Haight. So much of that early “Trip Without A Ticket” art has infiltrated the Burner scene, but you’d be hard-pressed to know this walking down Haight street.

The Upper Haight is both gentrified and ghettoized, at the same time. The street is populated with nice inviting store fronts selling love beads, tie-dyes, incense, bongs and peasant dresses, same as it has for years, and out front there are dozens of dreadlocked young people with dogs asking for change or to “spare-a-juana”…

The Charles Perry Haight-Ashbury book details the promise of the neighborhood as an art movement. The dull pendulum swing from Psychedelic Mall to Beggar Colony only underscores, in my mind, just how tragic the loss of the neighborhood’s artistic spirit really is.

Then again, that same spirit is alive and well elsewhere in San Francisco, a fact that I’m reminded of every time I venture past Gerlach, Nevada out into the Black Rock Desert for the annual designer drug desert orgy.