Cafe International

Cafe International is a large cafe in the Lower Haight in an interesting area that has seen a flowering of cafes, saloons, and experimental business in the last few years. They featured a two-day poetry jubilee in October packed with poets, song-writers, and some appreciative listeners.  

Sacred Grounds

Sacred Grounds is in a residential district on Hayes across the Panhandle from Haight-Ashbury. Jehanah Wedgewood hosts and Zuhair Sinada is the proprietor of the cafe.  They serve good home=cooked food as well as an assortment of pastries.  

YakketyYak

The YakketyYak is in the lower Snob Hill on Sutter Street, a couple of blocks west of the Stockton street garage, near several small stages and art galleries. April Ipock, K.L. Hill, Vernon Small and Gaya Jenkins host the show.  It's also a radical art gallery. 

La Calaca

La Calaca is at 4754 Mission Street near Ocean Avenue in the Excelsior District, not far from City College. Poets that frequent La Calaca tend to be younger and more radical. Some familiarity with Spanglais is helpful. Janice and Daniel O’Sullivan are the proprietors.  It's also an art gallery.  

Notes from Underground

 This series has taken over from the Someplace Else series.  Jeanne Powell hosts and can be emailed at meridienjp1@juno.com

This Czech cafe is in North Beach and features beer and wine as well as coffee. Mark Schwarz MC’s.  

Paradise Lounge

The Paradise is South of Market and features a full bar and often music downstairs. There is pool, poetry, and a small bar upstairs.  If there are stars in the San Francisco poetry scene, they are likely to be featured readers at the Paradise.  

Our staff quickly scribbled notes as the spoken words swirled and flew. Here’s what we found.

Diction

Most poets read from the page. Some of the poets appear to have some professional training as actors or speakers while other mumble quietly. Some have been doing this for years and have made progress in presentation and composition.

Steve Wood recites from memorized versions while Keith Savage, Dakota, and Chicano-Stoner-Taco-Shop-Owner improvise on a theme.  We’ve seen Chicano Stoner at La Calaca. He improvises long, ironic, and interesting Poet in the City narratives. His catalog of encountered personalities typically include a girlfriend, shop keepers, drug buyers, drug sellers, workers, hustlers, borrowers, and stealers. When someone asks him what he does for a living he replied "I don’t understand things for a living."

The Inflection, that rising pitch at the end of a sentence designed to turn a statement into a request for validation, has nearly fallen out of fashion. It was much more common in cafes in San Francisco a few years ago. Gaya Jenkins continues to maintain the tradition. Poets maintain intermittent reflective pauses to allow the listener to contemplate the preceding line.

Teddy Weiler lengthens some syllables, particularly at the end of lines and sentences, adding emphasis. Vlad the Impalor Kurgolof lengthens his ‘r’s and long ‘o’s for an interesting effect.  

Literary Education

Poets rarely show their literary education. With few exceptions, allusions to ancient and modern poets are either not apparent or uninteresting. Many of the allusions are actually in the preamble rather than the poem itself. Most of the allusions found in the poems are attempts at name- or –place or time-dropping and are often distracting.

Some poets appear to pledge rhythmic allegiance to the Beats.

Formal poetry is unusual and we suspect that it comes from song-forms rather than the traditional forms such as the sonnet, although a villanelle was read at the YakketyYak. Tarin Towers writes what she calls sonnets but are really 14-line poems with an ironic flavor similar to the poems that she does not call sonnets. Rhyming is unusual and good rhyming exceptional and well-received.

With respect to technique, poets do not appear to school in any way. Not only do they appear to eschew the styles of ancients but also each others. Each appears to work his own mine, diligently expecting the discovery of the utterly unique and wonderful.

The Preamble

There is some discussion about the worth of the sometimes distracting paragraphs with which some poets introduce their work. If the preamble is short, clever, and informative, it is at least tolerated and sometimes appreciated. However, some are none of the above and sound more like the introductory ramblings of someone about to give a speech, designed to put the audience at ease with a joke before a serious sermon. 

We have heard one excellent preamble that was much longer and more interesting than the poem to follow. Rules are few and poets rejoice in breaking them.

We suspected that most poems we encountered could be regarded as writing from a central emotional issue and so we set out to identify the issues. By sentiment, we mean an evocation of an emotional principle, presumably used to interest the listener. We found that many poems could be classified using a short list of sentiments. Some poems defied analysis.

We examined 131 poems from several readings and from the Sacred Grounds Anthology #3. The following catalogs the sentiments we identified in roughly the order of their frequency of use.

He and She

The most commonly expressed sentiment was that of the male and female relationship, recounted in positive or negative terms. When written by a woman, it could improvise on the theme of What a Bastard He Was. In that case, the poem became a Them and Us poem, presumably calling on the support of other women and male feminists in a battle against that class of males.

Some men read relationship poems and mostly they missed their lost love romantically in tender tones. We suppose that not a few of these were the same men who so villainously appeared in the women’s What a Bastard He Was poems.

Injustice

In frequency, injustice ranked highand the complaints included homelessness, poverty, gender or disability or racial prejudice, rape, war, child abuse, in short the entire catalogue of atrocities that mankind inflicts upon his kind. If we would gauge the intensity of these reactions to injustice, it also rivaled that of the relationship-poem.

Nature

Nature was praised or mourned and seldom feared. Nature was most often good, sometimes dangerous, and civilization usually bad. Natural objects included trees, birds, cats, and universal love.

Parent and Child

This class of poems were often deeply emotional. Sometimes they concerned loss, especially the loss of a child. In one mother/daughter poems, the poet complained that her mother had ‘tied her up in lies’. This class also includes poems that mention grandparents.  Fathers were generally to be feared.  

Name, Place, and Time Dropping

Poets sometimes alluded to people or places or times. we suppose this could be very effective, almost a kind of intellectual shorthand, if everyone shared the same knowledge of the same events.

However, in our time when we celebrate our individual points of view, it seems completely unlikely that any two people could share the same knowledge about a person, place, or time unless we had the same experience. Nevertheless, some poets recite nothing more than a list of times and places, expecting that each member of the audience will express the same awe, in direction if not intensity, to a jazz singer, a city, or a decade. That’s asking a lot.

Some poets try to show off their classical knowledge by dropping the names of mythical figures. This is almost as problematical, because neither most poets nor most audience members display much acquaintance with those god-like figures of old. We suspect that members of the audience would be willing to acquire some education in history or in the classics if it were sufficiently disguised as entertainment.

Virtues

The catalog of virtues included altruism, generosity, and conscience. Keith Savage promotes the virtues of generosity, advising us to act locally and to help one another.  We suppose that the virtues extolled complimented the injustices.  

She

The She poem extolled the greatness or strength of a woman. When written by a man, she was a former lover deeply missed.

Many of the She poems praised a mother or grandmother, becoming also a Parent and Child poem.

By contrast, He poems hardly showed, A musician and a father or two were all that seemed worth mentioning in a positive sense. Fathers are generally far out of fashion as heroes and recognizably in as demons.

Death

Death was noted frequently, particularly a parent or child. When successfully combined with an injustice, the poem had much energy.

Them Vs Us

The division between the good guys and the bad guys is still in vogue. The poems consisted of at least a satirical identification of the bad guys and a short list of their crimes. Some of the bad guys that have been identified include Dot-Com invaders, large corporations, Christians, materialists, and many men. When combined with an injustice, the energy increased.

The Supernatural

Keith Savage and Dakota, who read at Sacred Grounds, recited poems that suggest a Christian influence. These tend to be prophetic and often allude to virtues, rather like a good sermon. Most sermonizers tend to leave Jesus and his dad out of the poems.

However not all prophecies and virtues were restricted to Christian poets. Admonitions and warnings sprang from every corner. The failure to heed free advice and the threats of apocalypse are compatible with the entire spectrum of belief.

Many poets derided Christian stereotypes in apparent attempt to convert the work into a Them Vs Us poem. This effort raised a cheer and the poet followed by musing on what a comedian God must be. He then catalogued examples, ridiculing everyone in turn, eventually getting around to himself, with excellent applause.

Some poets attempted to arouse within the audience a fear of the unknown. We suppose this might work on some folks but that it takes hundreds of millions of dollars in special effects to pull this off believably. Perhaps it’s better to express this premise satirically, as if there really are people who would fall for that. Perhaps, incidentally, someone would.

Poet in the City

We encountered several poems that portrayed the poet as wandering through, assessing, praising, celebrating, decrying, or being oppressed by a city. Chicano Stoner improvises long Odysseys through the Mission where he meets a series of people, encountering and mentally noting a series of sentiments. Allen Cohen walks through a past and present Haight-Ashbury. Tarin Towers works this rich vein of ore.  

Reality and Surreality

Mark Schwarz made a poem out of the amazement of waiting for the possibility that something might happen. A few examples of surrealistic poetry were offered whereby the ordinary was made extraordinary. Kristyan Panzica's musical renditions of his perceptions approached reality from an aesthetic perspective.

The Will to be Unique

Vlad the Ukrainian Impaler Kurgolof sought to outrage the audience. His poetry flirted with prostitutes, frank misogyny, references to body fluids and functions, and sadistic images. Some of his flirtations became He and She poems while others merely meandered around a naked lunch.

Ray Wood said at the Cafe Prague that ‘poetry is life criticized’, which is a wonderful thing to say. Also at the Prague, Tony Vaughn sang a song Someone Offers to Buy Your Shadow and the Geometry of Smoke is Impossible to Calculate on the theme that it is futile and self-destructive to attempt to predict experience. The song was a determined and successful and interesting attempt to be utterly original and unclassifiable.

We collected a sampling of chap books and individual poems in our tour. Separated from the oral presentations and the reactions of the audience, we visit here the verse in detail, using the sentiments identified in the spoken word section of this article.

Allen Cohen

Allen writes poetic travelogues set in San Francisco. He walks through the Haight-Ashbury, an area with which he has been familiar since the 60’s. He populates his verse with characters on the street and infuses his current experience with his memories. In Haight Street – September 1998

He’s in Golden Gate Park in Instead of Selling Pretzels

Camincha

Camincha’s story fragment As Time Goes By is a Parent and Child narrative that deals frankly and plainly with the romantic and realistic family issues of love, marriage, old age, and death.

Camincha is the poetess of Why I think of Dead People at Poetry Readings.

Edward Mycue

Ed’s Sugarstrands is a Parent and Child piece and also a She poem. A mother attempts to teach her children.

Some of the metaphors obscure each other but what shines through the cracks is the battle between romanticism and realism, the former as nutritious as cotton candy and the latter a hope as distant as an ideal.

If the Numbers is barely sentimental, unless the intellect betrays an emotional origin. The poem achieves a high density, featuring closely-packed qualifiers reminiscent of Gerard Manly Hopkins.

Ed’s encounters with reality continue in I am Working My Way Through Reality.

The lines are interesting but the meaning is obscured by the convolved voices and statements. Just a guess, but, in I am Working My Way Through Reality, it seems that a woman is dismissing her romantic illusions and some part of the man who represents them. Ed goes on to gather support from Aristotle in the poem and issue statements on the nature of love and America. His rhyming puns tend to add coherence to the poem. We suspect that his work is meant to be pondered on the page. When read to an audience, it’s likely to be misunderstood unless by hydroplaning across the images we can gestalt a furtive meaning.  .

His grammatically-fractured Reality, Realities features six characters, including an advising oboe, as well as a bridge and a stream in nine lines.  

Ed Mycue reads at Sacred Grounds.

Gaya Jenkins

Gaya composes social satires. Her She poem Hypatia has classical allusions that contribute to its very contemporary irony and is quoted in full. The poem is lean and economical. No empty words distract us from the images.

The last four lines make it utterly modern and meaningful and also an excellent usage of a classical reference. We didn’t know Hypatia at first but sufficient information was given without making it into a lecture and the poem inspired us to look up the reference.

Gaya also writes He and She erotica, reads at Sacred Grounds, and co-hosts YakketyYak.

J. Tarin Towers

Tarin’s chapbook, Sorry We’re Close, published by Manic D Press, is a collection of satires in which she aims her sharp wit toward civil society.

She primarily uses the Poet in the City theme, but Tarin amplifies the form: Me Against the World and Sometimes Looking for Allies. This theme is useful for her longer poems in constructing a kind of emotional, if not a geographical, Odyssey.

She often begins her poem as a He and She poem but quickly dispenses with him and turns the work into a Poet in the City poem. She then sets about a tour of characters, sometimes including herself, who willingly deceive themselves into chasing after sex and money and other typical objects of desire, and sometimes threatening murder or suicide, becoming a woman as dangerous as some men hope to be.

Her social satires revolve around willing self-deception and materialism, which she reveals with surprise and creative originality. She frequently wakes the reader with half-comic threats, as in Good Listener.  

Her Discount Pulse Rate is one of the sharpest of her He and She poems. Every line turns over a new game in the newly-coupling foreplay and foretells its bitter end.

Tarin has a bag of poetic tricks with which to catch the reader’s attention. She plays on internal rhymes and puns. Her verse is at least interesting, especially when read aloud, and sometimes revolutionary. It is fast-paced in its turn-over of images, running hot and then ice cold, sometimes in one line. Reading her poetry plows up the field, exposing things we unconsciously suspect but avoid noticing. Hearing her read on stage is an adventure. She works.

Beneath the satire, Tarin’s verse is romantic. She knows how it ends, the details, the artifacts left in the apartment after the disaster, and what is asked and what is said, and even a line or two about how it started. But the fantastic clutter of her poetry is the residue of people who continue to try while the clock continues to tick, who hold out hope, however tacitly, for the possibility of romance and try to avoid expressing a profound sense of loss when the hope is not realized. Her poetry is a thorough, comedic veneer covering the deeper pathos that is romance in the modern American big city and could become a serious and poetic theme.

Tarin can be reached via her website  http://www.tarin.com

Jehanah Wedgwood

Jehanah Wedgewood’s Mother of Winter chapbook is largely a reference to nature. Jehanah says that we have forgotten that we are natural creatures. In Trashed Earth, her father has returned to nature:

Her relationship with nature is romantic in that she is separate from it and yearns for reunification. She advises that the way to remember is through rituals typically involving trees, flames, rivers and other natural objects. She also invokes ancient Irish and Egyptians legendary names.

She is anti-patriarchal and anti-imperial in a time that is possibly becoming less patriarchal but more imperial. In the autobiographical Patriarchy Unmanned

In the same poem, words become the instrument of empire

Her strongest sentiments are reserved for her father and mother and it’s clear that she has been effected by them.

Jim Watson-Gove

Jim’s poem Fiona, Jamie, and the Silkies spans generations as a Parent and Child poem and settles on a lost child. Set in Ireland, a young girl muses on the dangerous sea and her lost brother, who she imagines returning as a seal.

Jim comments that politics are as destructive as nature.

The people supplicate the sea as giver and taker of life.

Julia Vinograd

Her poems do not fall easily into the classes we have identified. Her book is only partly an Odyssey of the city.  IT is entirely an Odyssey of despair. Characters try to avoid each others gaze; people hide behind masks and accordions and offices and heroin; they flee from powerful and pitiless political forces. The world is cold and apocalyptic and she is its observer, chronicler, portrait artist, victim, and seer. She writes from her observations of life on the street.

In Young Junkies Hustling

Her poetry is often political in that her characters are victims of the forces that make war and the rules.

Her images flow one into another so seamlessly that it is difficult to excise them. In People with Nowhere to Go

Julia’s poetry is some of the most serious work we’ve seen. She expresses a deep emotional commitment to her characters drawn from real life. Without distracting the reader or calling attention to herself, she is artful in her expression, using many flavors of irony, puns, and personifications to reinforce the visual imagery of her world. She uses few empty words. Nearly everything in her verse is solidly believable. Her premise is the actual people in the portraits she paints.

K. L. Hill

K. L. writes strong character-based short stories involving a sensitive person beset by injustice. In Getting It Right, a father gives his young son to work responsibility at work. The listener supposes that the boy will make a mistake and be punished. That the father is generous is a relief but by portraying the boy as sensitive and observant, K. L. creates a menacing background.

In the Company of Old Men, a retired man seeks solitude on the fringe of society but is pushed away. 

In The Sharks and the Galley Rat, a young man fails to compete. The story is frankly Them Vs Us.

And they would poke at him with their sticks until he flinched and then poke at him again for flinching.

We suppose that the story could be improved.  The mess cook’s description could take more of the story and then he wouldn’t need to suffer so much. The character is strong enough to bear more of the story.

K. L.'s style makes him an ironist, as he poses sensitive characters in an insensitive world. 

K. L. co-hosts the YakketyYak readings.

Kristyan Panzica

Kristyan’s word jazz is a juxtaposition of images, producing a kaleidoscopic idea that is at least musical. We think we caught these phrases in a reading:

He does more than his share of place-, name-, and decade-dropping, but it excused by his celebratory style.

Leonard Irving

Leonard Irving’s book Farewell Dundrennan displays strong imagery against a profound and universal loneliness. Many of his poems foreground a warm and observant character contrasted with a cold and aging background. Aesthetically, this is an irresistible combination.

He drops places that are active characters, as in Birthplace

His phrases of a kind are grouped together and show sharply against the cold statements that follow, as in Ghost-Drawn

His view of nature is complex, partly composed of a fleeting set of creatures too busy or too distant or too quick to be examined. In The Phantom Deer of Inverness

His beautiful poems on horses focus on the wild, almost chaotic strength of the animals. We’ve seen a condor in solitude and humans pursuing their dreams, all crying out their terrible fate.

He does not advise an ethic or a politic but simply describes what he sees and his profound reaction to it. In Preoccupation

His phrases are economical in that he uses few words that do not strongly reinforce his point, creating lines packed with meaning, hitting hard with its sharply contrasting imagery. This prevents his stanzas from becoming morbid and transforms the verse into an exciting exploration over the treacherous trails above the chasm we all traverse.

Leonard’s verse is often romantic, in that it mourns lost innocence, optimism, and youth. The beautiful melancholy adds color and depth and personality and meaning to the narrative. His talents with the language and his deep appreciation of the largest issues in life make his poetry interesting to read and a pleasure to hear.

Leonard was born in Dundrennan, Scotland and lives in Oakland, California.

In another poem he awaits the unnamed, which does not occur, and ends by saying that someday death will happen, but that it is not happening now. He is sometimes prophetic and faintly advisory in tone but what is prophesied and advised is left blank. His irony is that of expectation versus reality.

Mark is a Cornell graduate and has written over 2000 poems, almost all of which have been lost. He reads at Sacred Grounds and the YakketyYak and hosts the Cafe Prague Sunday night reading.

It’s about injustice without turning into a Them Versus Us poem . It’s eventually a He and She poem with perhaps another She in the far background, but we believe this fine and touching poem transcends genre.

Stephen Kopel

Steven writes quietly powerful poetry. His Overbite is ostensibly about his cat but works well as a She poem that meditates on the dangerous woman.

His Singer is a Parent and Child as well as a She poem, a form that we’ve seen achieving strength.

Steve has written on the loss of the American buffalo and reads at Sacred Grounds and the Yakity Yak.

Steve Norwood

Unladen Swallow Press has published Steve’s because I love you so much I’d wait for you and Helen Could Waste Away. He’s from Lewisville Texas and we met him one evening at the Paradise Lounge in San Francisco.

He begins Helen Would Waste Away with a tribute to Charles Bukowski, a raw and sarcastic poet, but Steve writes tender He and She poems, using the boy-meets-girl story as the basis of a narrative form upon which he improvises throughout both of his books. Sometimes he spices his lines with explicit sex. Generally each poem ends with a reflection on what was he has lost.

In little green demon, he’s filled with dread in the beginning of the poem, which ends like this:

later

in bed

I stroke

every part of her

until she whines

like an old 45

through a broken

stereo speaker

and all is forgotten.

A burst of excellent description can be found in bleed burn and curse

In the title poem, Helen Could Waste Away, Steve drops some Homeric names. If he were Paris and his lady were Oenone, he would pick Oenone over Helen and let the latter waste away, presumably in the Spartan house of her boring husband Menelaus. The poem’s lines flow easily.

However, if Paris did not elope with Helen, then Steve’s mention of a fallen Troy is a puzzle. But we appreciated his references to one of our favorite stories and he made us look up Oenone.

His characters do not risk much. One exception is the dangerous woman in erin

Steve’s second book is another collection of He and She poems with occasional good phrasing but lacking shock appeal or revelation or evolution or revolution or even much in the way of a new expression. Although some might consider them erotic, and developing ironies can be detected, the relationships are far too casual for writer, characters, or readers to take seriously. 

However, he writes with a sense of boldness and is at his best with fast-paced encounters as in blind date.

Steve Wood

Steve’s frankly romantic poetry is devoted to his love. However, his exuberance is expressed generically. For realism’s sake, I’d suggest he take more of his sensual cues from actual life. For example, in This Morning

is quite good. The contrast between cooler places and warmer places is interesting and effective, especially given the circumstances.

But further in the poem

I wonder why her fingers are sweet, except that the poet feels obliged to say so. I don’t dispute that the smile calls everlastingly for Steve’s service but it is not evident in the poem except that the poet claims so.

By this time, the modern reader has seen everything. He’s been to hundreds of movies and seen thousands of sit-coms and cop-dramas and read best-selling books and, maybe, some pretty good poetry. To be willing to see it again, the reader expects a fresh expression or he’s in danger of boredom and the poet’s in danger of rejection.

Generic poetry cries out for detail. I’m convinced that Steve has plenty of positive energy but it could use a footing in the specific detail that makes his telling of his experiences an interesting story. Is her smile the same fabled smile that all fabled women wear? Is she dangerous? Why is she smiling? Is she really smiling at him?

Because tragedy dares not show its disagreeable head in Steve’s verse, all is sweetness and light. This makes the cynic rather suspicious and prevents a full-dimensional expression of Steve’s poetic life. If everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful because there is no contrast. If a poet wants to put real beauty in a poem, he should never use any form of the word ‘beautiful’ and ought to consider putting beauty’s antithesis into the poem for contrast and relief from the responsibility of finding beauty everywhere.

Poets might add interest by back-grounding their feel-good stories with a deep loneliness, which, when contrasted with the thrill of proximity to love's object, provides the aesthetic basis for a scenic event. However, everything is foreground in Steve’s verse and so we don’t see where he’s coming from.

We admire Steve’s enthusiasm for poetry and desire to entertain and inform his audience. His energy will find its way.

Teddy Weiler

Teddy’s distinctive reading style reinforces his bitter social criticism. The world is too full of machine-like people who are stingy with respect to justice, livelihood, and letting him sleep.

In his ATM Machine blues, his character is trapped near an ATM, waiting for his monthly check, and assaulted by the building, the traffic, the noise, his hunger, the bad booze, his impatient landlord, his grandmother, a welfare-department computer operator, the hot and humorless sun, and the knife in his pocket.

Teddy’s 3:30 Machine wakes him nightly with its own complaint and in his Frankenstein poem he elevates the inarticulate primal cry to the status of a word that must be heard. He reads at Sacred Grounds and the YakketyYak.

Vlad Kurgolof

Vlad seeks to outrage his audience with explicit sado-masochistic images and in some cases works the fruitful ironiy of a man’s romantic expectations against the actual behavior of women. Some of his best work reminds us of the theme of Fellini’s City of Women where the character’s ideal is the virgin whore, a difficult and increasingly uninteresting ideal for women. This is a rich vein of poetic ore to mine, having much contemporary interest as our culture tries to become more realistic with respect to gender roles. The refrain from one of Vlad’s spoken words:

Vlad has also written a poignant and mournful piece on a pigeon living in a beer box.

Trash collectors will sing your funeral song

Vlad reads at the YakketyYak.

This article depends in part upon our ability to classify poems. We view this problematic adventure as a way to talk about poetry. We admit that no two poems are alike, that many poems express more than one sentiment, and that some poems appear to express no identifiable sentiment. Nevertheless, we press on. The real issue for us is what, specifically, the poet does with the sentiment, and how it is delivered.

Many of the poets have invented their own experiment.  They repeat the experiment, varying the ingredients or the temperature or the pressure. The effect of this experimentation is often interesting but we suppose that many are finding themselves gradually discovering the advantage of the round  wheel.   We further suppose that by even a little study, they'd find some better examples and perhaps an entire vehicle and a map to go with it.  

We expected that political correctness would stifle poetic art in San Francisco but we have seen no evidence for this. Poets are generally free to explore any direction, although in some cases they feel obliged to issue an apologetic preamble before launching into work that might appear misogynistic or racist or Republican.  

The old forms of expression continue to show. We’ve seen sermon, complaint, elegy, song, prophecy, confession, and celebration. The romance in its multitude of possibilities is still with us. There is a strong emotional motion toward ever newer freedoms, one that criticizes and attempts to exceed even our successfully permissive and increasingly hedonistic times. 

The spirit of poetic creativity has been kept alive in the city and has been transmitted to a new generation.  Many of the younger poets are bold,  radical, surprising, and well-received.  San Francisco continues to bring people in from around the country and around the globe, due, in part, to its reputation as a center for creative arts.