Posted by ramimac 9 hours ago
In SF though, it’s as if the previous culture of the place has just been overwritten entirely. Hard to believe that it’s the same city which Kerouac, the Beats or Hippies ran around in. Or even the historically wealthy but cultural old money class, like Lewis Lapham’s family, or Michael Douglas’s character in The Game. Nope, all gone, and certainly no one there has ever read On the Road.
I suppose you could probably just blame this on how the people at the top behave: totally uninterested in funding culture, unlike the billionaires of yesteryear that built concert halls and libraries. And so a city which is hyper focused on one economic activity has no space for anything else.
https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_An...
Today's Bay Area has a direct lineage to all of that. Blank Space by W. David Marx does a great job of explaining how the post-2000 parts happened.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXMVK94H
It's all part of the same long, strange trip.
To be fair to Jack Kerouac, I was young when I read it but even at my advanced age I don't think I want to reread it.
Also, the old hippie culture sort of moved out of SF and into the surrounding bay, I think especially toward East Bay.
But if you're immersed in the modern tech world, you're just ignoring all that.
Clueless.
Fat was demonized to push sugar. "Protein" was then pushed because you can just load up stuff like "protein bars" with sugar.
Historical aristocracy were defined by eating meat, while their subjects ate grain. "Beef" for the Normans, "cows" raised and slaughtered by the Anglo-Saxons.
Anyone familiar with what work this is referring to?
In general long meandering semi-factual pieces like this, with odd historical excursions, are one of his things and I don't know anyone else that does it quite the same. (Hmm... oddly enough Scott Alexander, who he cites here, also does some similarly Borgesian stuff, but with a different bent.) One of my favorite writers and I recommend pretty much everything he's done since the early 2010s.
But in general, Sam Kriss tends to weave fiction and nonfiction together in his writing.
https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/numb-at-burning-man