We’re not our skin of grime,
we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive,
we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed & hairy naked
accomplishment — bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset,
spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad
locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
Allen Ginsberg, Sunflower Sutra
There it is, Columbus Avenue, that greasy artery pumping tourists and nostalgia through what used to be the beating heart of something real, something dangerous, something that mattered before it got freeze-dried and packaged for the bridge crowd clutching their Ferlinghetti paperbacks like permission slips to feel bohemian for an afternoon.
These frames, and understand, this is composition, this is theater in two dimensions, they capture the essential paradox of North Beach as performative space. The Transamerica Pyramid looming like a corporate middle finger to everything Ginsberg howled about, while Big Al’s neon promises the same commodified transgression the Mitchell Brothers sold before capitalism digested even that. Artie and Jim knew something about spectacle, about bodies as sites of contested meaning, about performance that wasn’t performing but was instead some raw excavation of American appetite and shame.
North Beach is now a stage where authenticity comes to die nightly at 8 PM with a two-drink minimum. You can almost see the ghosts in these black-and-whites: Kerouac stumbling past where Starbucks now squats, Cassady rapping his knuckles on hoods of cars that don’t exist anymore, the whole beautiful doomed carnival of Beat consciousness now reduced to a walking tour you can book on TripAdvisor.
City Lights still stands, sure, like a museum to when books could change your fucking life, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti wasn’t a brand but a provocation. But walk that street now and count the selfie sticks, the bachelorette parties slumming it before their Marina apartments, the theater of fake rebellion performed by people who’ll be back at their tech campuses Monday morning.
Ginsberg wrote “Sunflower Sutra” as an act of radical seeing, of finding beauty in industrial grime. What would he make of this sanitized decay, this performance of history? The dirt here now is nostalgic, curated, safe. The locomotive’s gone. Only the tourism remains.