You bring up a good point about viable venues, and frankly, I don’t know what to make of Oakland’s dearth of rock clubs, I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion. As for SF, when I try to count up the live music clubs, the impression I get is that they’ve all but disappeared. If you consider how many live music clubs were around in the 90s and compare it to now, it’s pretty shocking, even if it is still more than Oakland.

I think this might all have to do with an overall dearth of live bands and people who like them. Let’s face it, being a live band is expensive: you need a rehearsal space (at SF rents) and a large vehicle to transport gear, just for starters. MP3s and garageband software have changed the way people listen to music and even what their concept of music is. I know that clubs like the Stork Club in Oakland actually have trouble booking enough bands…that’s something that seemed really hard to imagine in the 90s, when bands would drop off demo tapes at clubs in the same ratio as prospective tenants drop off applications for a Mission victorian that goes on the market.
To me, that suggests that it isn’t just a dearth of clubs, but a dearth of interest in the music altogether. How much of this is due to rock musicians being priced out of the Bay Area and how much is due to an overall societal shift away from rock music is hard to say. Of course, I’m talking exclusively about rock here, and not other genres, which may be experiencing different results.

It is interesting that you brought up Oakland because I love it over here. When I moved here I was thrilled to be able to hang out at the Stork and see bands while the streets outside were largely empty, there was always parking, and motorcyclists went up and down Telegraph doing wheelies. It reminded me of how the Mission was in the early 90s, and I found that reassuring.

As for restaurant culture, I’m really not a foodie, but I’m always up for new experiences. One of the great things about moving to SF was finding all these cool little inexpensive places and having so many choices, but that referred to everything, not just eateries. I stumbled into taquerias on my own and loved the ability to get a large amount of food inexpensively, with a vegetarian option, and be totally immersed in the culture while I ate. Finding an excellent $5< restaurant then felt like a true score, because there were no guidebooks or foodies around. Nowadays, you have entrepreneurs who come here and concoct new and exotic ways of presenting food to a "professional" dining class. To me, that's not the same thing. Thanks to the new Mission culture, you can get spinach tortilla burritos or taco salads and you can pay with a credit card, and burritos cost $6 and up. I'm old fashioned, I prefer it the way it was; my favorite taqueria now is in San Jose.

I’m sure Ginsberg ate some ice cream in his life.

I think the new obsession with food as “art” is really just hyper-consumer culture figuring out a new way to sell you something for a few bucks more by putting a trendy label on it or serving it in a place with a “hip” ambiance. I don’t really begrudge people who want to spend their money this way, but I do think there is a troubling set of judgments and ethics that often come along with “foodies.” In that they judge what people eat without taking into account the structural economic reasons why people eat “bad” food. Or, in the terms of D. Jon Moutarde, they hate the player and not the game.