North Beach Girl

Finished off a sacripantina (sacred bread? No, 'rogue')) and a good coffee at El Greco, which, like my Main St Bean, also has taken over the adjacent parking spots for coffeeing. Swedish has a verb for having a coffee (fika), high time we did too. Lots of streets here named after 'Gen Beat' writers. Again, we have a few, and we ought to start renaming our piece of the planet too. 'Interior Geographies' was the title of a book at City Lights, surely our crust could care less if we embossed it with value deserved of our artists, writers etc rather than others who barely touched (or, equally, touched by) our city streets?

A female, and Japanese theme emerging in this trip. Under my phone, on which I am tapping tapping tapping, is a used book I picked up, a novel on the brides coming from Japan to be married to Japanese men here in California. It seems that covering one's mouth when giggling is the thing to do. I really can't imagine doing that; surely the last natural thing to do for me. But them were the days. Maybe their teeth were bad? In any case I saw big cuffs in front of mouths, this foreign, other-timely age of feminine shyness, depicted in a geisha exhibit yesterday. Is it seductive to be shy? Probably. But shy architects won't get too far in the love of their life.

In the Beat Museum, there's a healthy section of Playboy magazines, the covers of which were pretty tame as tabbies before the 70s. Market demand (changed since?) or Beat Gen liberation leading towards more of the right kind of flesh on covers? There's a couple of panels on women in the Beat Gen. Women were otherwise burnt at the stake if they were, well, like a Beat poet.

Who knows what it's like to be authentically feminine and Beat. We're 'tired and have had it with' ... gosh where to begin. In the geisha exhibit, there is a video of a man acting as a geisha, in 'The Wisteria [something]', doing the most feminine body moves, with an expressionless, dead-log face. I walk around town like the protagonist in DR/SVT 'Broen', a no-nonsense stride - a strategy for accessing the city, particularly in the dicey areas. For what to do, when asked 'Hey, weren't you on tv the other night?' but simply walk on? Beat women seemed to simply serve as the necessary accessories of complex and/or open relationships.

Certainly the Beat walking tour I was on could have benefited from putting ideas into practice. Let me not know where they lived, and wrote, and played. Give me two hours of feeling what it was like to feel painfully, daringly liberated, like they did, from, say, the constraints of a two-hour set walking tour that I booked and prepaid days ago.

Enjoy the full moon tonight, in libra, in liberation of inbalance.