Does this blog still call the Mission “the coolest neighborhood” in San Francisco? I haven’t checked their tagline recently.

I guess to some people conspicuous consumption is cool. That used to be a Beverly Hills thing. Lots of people think Beverly Hills is cool. Melrose Avenue, too. That’s a totally cool street, unless you’re one of those uptight bohemian nostalgists or something.

Valencia is Melrose Avenue with bike paths. It’s so cool, they might even make a prime-time soap opera about it one day.

I remember, on the corner of 17th and Valencia, a discussion of Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” beginning, spontaneously, among three attractive young SFAI students, each of whom lived in her own three-bedroom Victorian (they cost only about $125 a month at the time). They were soon joined by a passel of Berkeley grad students, who only added to the depth of the conversation.

By the end of the night, however, the intersection was informally closed. There were about three hundred artists and people with advanced degrees physically battling over the work’s meaning. That was the depth of our intellectual commitment back then. When the Mission was great.

Did I mention what good shape everyone was in? And how young and attractive? Yes, I remember it well. And this was despite the fact that we were all smoking. Everyone smoked back then, it was beautiful, cinematic, ethereal. No coughs, though, we were immune to coughs.

Yes, I, too, mourn the loss of the magical goddamn perfection of everything then, and grrr, arrgh, everything’s so materialistic now. Consumer culture, blah, blah, blah.

The Mission has had stores and restaurants for awhile.

Thank you.