Archive — Jamie Lyons
The City (n.) / San Francisco Photography early 13c., in medieval usage a cathedral town, but originally "any settlement," regardless of size (distinction from town is 14c., though in English it always seems to have ranked above borough), from Old French cite (10c., Modern French cité), from earlier citet, from Latin civitatem (nominative civitas; in Late Latin sometimes citatem) originally "citizenship, condition or rights of a citizen, membership in the community," later "community of citizens, state, commonwealth" (used, for instance of the Gaulish tribes), from civis "townsman," from PIE root (kei- "to lie; bed, couch; homestead; beloved, dear”). The sense has been transferred from the inhabitants to the place. The Latin word was urbs, but a resident was civis. Civitas replaced urbs as Rome (the ultimate urbs) lost its prestige. San Francisco is The City from 1850s. When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City”. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is “city”. Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris. I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me. San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold---rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flat-land places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge over the entrance from the sea that led to her. Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city. I’ve never seen her more lovely. When I was a child and we were going to the City, I couldn’t sleep for several nights before, out of busting excitement. She leaves a mark. San Francisco Photography: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Minor White...
The City 2025
There’s a particular kind of light that only exists in cities that have already seen their best days and don’t give a damn. San Francisco has it. Had it. Whatever. The point is, you stand on Saroyan Place (they renamed it from Adler, because this town can’t stop mythologizing itself) and you look up at […]
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The City 2017
Museums are incredible places to fall in love. Or maybe just to realize you already have. Lindsey and I are at the Legion of Honor, standing in front of Klimt and Rodin, two guys who understood that the body is both temple and ruin, that desire is inseparable from decay, that gold leaf can’t hide […]
ReadThe City 2016
Look at these pictures. This is where Anderson & Cristofani built ships, real goddamn ships, wooden scows for San Francisco Bay. From the early 1870s to the mid-1930s, right here along Innes Avenue in the India Basin at Hunter’s Point. A row of yards where men who actually knew what the hell they were doing […]
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The City 2015
I’m not going to pretend this makes sense. I didn’t drive Elena’s stuffed animal to a maximum-security prison because I was thinking clearly. I did it because sometimes the only honest response to the world is to lean into the absurdity until it cracks open and shows something true. San Quentin sits there on the […]
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The City 2015
Civil War Reenactors at Fort Point Here’s the thing about these dudes buttoning themselves into wool and brass at Fort Point: they’re chasing something that never existed in the first place. The contact sheet doesn’t lie the way memory does; every frame captures another angle of the same desperate authenticity, the same hunger to touch […]
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The City 2015
Mid-June on the Bay and the wind’s barely showing up for work. We’re drifting more than sailing, which is fine. Perfect, actually. The kind of lazy afternoon where doing nothing becomes an art form, where the only ambition is another Pacifico and maybe, if you’re feeling industriative, pointing your phone through the empty bottle at […]
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The City 2014
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be […]
ReadThe City 2013
Small.. unnerving occurrences.. keep coming up one after the other: haphazard dumb accidents of freakish chance- the tiring tasks that are part of our routine and the sundry other ever-recurring annoyances– all these inevitable small defeats and sorrows rub and push continually up against the moments the days the years until one almost wishes almost […]
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The City 2013
This whole intelligent design hustle, this super natural con job, it’s the kind of beautiful lie that only works if you never actually open your eyes and look at what’s sitting right in front of you. These witches want you to believe that some all powerful, all knowing force had infinite time and infinite juice […]
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The City 2013
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. Thornton Wilder Look at this thing. Just look at it. Fort Point. 1861. Built to protect San Francisco Bay from Confederate ironclads that never came. Brick and mortar, cannon emplacements, the […]
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The City 2013
San Francisco does this thing, this cruel, beautiful thing, where it gives you the Golden Gate Bridge and then takes it away. Not entirely. Just enough. The fog rolls in like it has somewhere better to be but decided to fuck with you first, wrapping that iconic span in gray wool, turning one of the […]
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Individualism / The City 2013
Look at Brian Yarish. Six-foot-five in his stockings, but he’s not wearing stockings tonight, he’s wearing five, maybe six inches of platform heel that would break my ankle in three places just looking at them. He’s working his way down Franconia like he owns the concrete, like he invented concrete, and you know what? Maybe […]
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When William Pereira drew this thing up in 1969, San Francisco lost its mind. Too tall. Too weird. Too much. Which is exactly what great art does, it pisses off everyone who thought they had the world figured out. The pyramid slouched toward completion in ’72, all brutal concrete and aluminum skin, a monument to […]
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The City 2013
Here’s this billboard in Hunters Point advertising postcards. “Pick up US Postcards. available 24/7. 101 Hall by PT. Office.” Not even proper grammar, just this broken commercial poetry. Postcards… that weird artifact of tourism and displacement, that thing you send to prove you were somewhere else, somewhere better, somewhere worth documenting. “Wish you were here”, […]
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Absolute Solipsism / The City 2012
So here’s the deal: I’m early. Not fashionably early, not strategically early. Just early. Standing on the steps of San Francisco City Hall like some kind of ceremonial parking cone, waiting for Dan and Ciara to show up and get married in a way that doesn’t count except that it counts more than anything that’s […]
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The City 2012
It is true that we learned our trade because there were no better offers but we learned it in the magic heaped on the hills of San Francisco. And you know what it is? It’s a golden handcuff with the key thrown away. Ask anyone about San Francisco and the odds are that he’ll tell […]
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The City / Wanderlust 2012
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince You don’t stick hundreds of roses in the sand at dawn on New Year’s Day because you’re well-adjusted. You do it because something broke open inside you, or because you needed to make […]
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