Key Pages:

Home

So, I think I would have said something different if it wasn't for tuesday's class.  Particularly in thinking about where I grew up, I am reminded that the city to me is much more of an idea than a surrounding; I was not in it. I was in the country outside the city.  The nearest city to me was San Francisco, which, personally, doesn't feel like a metropolitan nest the same way that New York might; it feels like an enormous and bloated neighborhood with disctinct zones and areas.  I know this begs the question: Then what isn't a city?  But, San Francisco feels to me unlike a city, and I think that if I let that idea stand I can learn something more about where I grew up in that city.  Again, though, San Francisco and cities in general were not really a big part of my life when I was 'growing up,' (I am still growing up, I hope) and that is why I refered to the city as an idea.  For me, going into the city was a trip with a purpose, and therefore that purpose can maybe be transposed to mean idea.  With this in mind, San Francisco to Jed when he was 'growing up' = buying records.  The city might have resembled an LP, in reflection, for all I know, if indeed it were in mimetic sympathy with my brain's vision of it.  Also, my idea about what the city was or what its purpose was sincerely influences my definition of the city itself.  I lived in a small neighborhood, and I can now see how I might have just transposed the internal logic of a neighborhood onto the city, like a blanket that looked and felt like my neighborhood.  And then again in reflection, I can see one of two things, either: 1) I have been tricked(!), albeit by myself, into thinking or feeling like San Francisco wasn't a 'city' to me; but it was just a big record with a blanket that had a topographic, cultural, geographic...&c... map over it, -or- 2) The city resembles my own vision, as a simulacrum, of it as a response to the way I used it; and therefore it is a a big record with a blanket that had a topographic, cultural, geographic...&c... map over it.  I think that it is the latter, most likely.