On Hippies, Being Artsy, and Being in San Francisco in General

Blogging Live from the Rockin Java café in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco.

It didn’t take me long to find the closest free-wifi, organic/fair-trade café. This could be anywhere really – the selection of soy-based espresso beverages, the bulletin board with ads for roommates and second-hand guitar amps, the green hanging plants, the Decemberists playing in the background, the token cute guy with the iBook G4, it’s all so familiar – except this is San Francisco, and where all things Hippy are in their Platonic perfect form.

I’m spending the next three weeks in the Bay Area, essentially on a working séjour. I’m staying at a fun, roommate-packed apartment, in the neighbourhood that staged the Summer of Love, and that cradled the likes of Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. I’m so happy to be in California – I love this part of the world dearly, and it feels really good to be here. But as I down my organic Americano and vegan granola in the neighbourhood that invented Granolas, I inevitably begin to think about what makes a city feel comfortable and familiar.

This café on Haight street is clearly a community institution. And it’s totes my scene…except, the whole rest of this street is just a bit too much my scene. filled with organic juice bars, Nepalese import stores, tattoo parlors, thrift boutiques, and vegetarian burrito joints. It’s hippy overdrive. As it should be – but I’m only used to this culture in smaller doses. It’s kind of like washing up in Beijing, and thinking to yourself, “wow, I really dig Chinatown…but I wasn’t prepared for China.”

See, for me, hippy-artsy scenes go hand-in-hand with multiculturalism. In the two cities I have lived in, Montreal and TO, this is just how it is. Kensington Market, Toronto’s Hippy Mecca, is an ecstatic orgy of Ethiopian, Latin American, Lebanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Rasta places and faces. Same goes for Montreal. Mile End, the latest hotspot for today’s Hipsters, was (and still is) famous for its incredible diversity of Greek, Portuguese, Italian and Hassidic communities before it became an indie-rock hipster ‘hood. I’ve always assumed that these neighbourhoods’ diversity is what has made them attractive to the Hippies/sters.

So, here I am, just another normal Saturday in a Fair Trade café. I’m thinking about the cousin-cafés of this one back in my hometowns. Moonbean in the Market, Future’s in the Annex, Cagibi or Club Social in Mile End, Shaika in the Deeg…and I gatsta say, the biggest diff between all of those places and this one is that they are planted in the heart of richly diverse neighbourhoods. They may attract a very particular demographic, but step outside and you’ve got Armenian grocery stores, Jewish shmata shops, East Indian dépanneurs, Korean video stores.

What makes an area colourful? The presence of artsies? Or the presence of many nationalities? Until now, I’ve always assumed that the two go hand in hand. This café, this whole area, this is all so my scene…and yet, somehow it doesn’t quite feel right.

I guess I’ll go exploring San Francisco’s Chinatown. I hear it’s pretty darn cool.