San Francisco

Prime Minister Julia Gillard was in Singapore yesterday. She got a flower named after her. She fell in love with the place. \

As a matter of fact, she loved it so much that she decided that she might as well move there. Just for the next few months, anyway.

Why wouldn’t you? The shopping is great. It’s clean. There’s a restaurant precinct where you can find almost any national cuisine you could think of. And besides, with Blackberries and Skype and the internet and social media these days, she could easily do her job just as well from the south-east Asian city-state.

Continue reading "Sydney councillor: I left my heartland for San Francisco" »

Matthew Clayfield is a freelance journalist, critic and screenwriter travelling through the US and Mexico. He is filing weekly postcards for The Punch.

I am writing this postcard, my first dispatch as a freelance travel writer, from a bar in San Francisco. Arguably, this is the greatest workplace in the world for an alcoholic typist like myself: the gin is cold, the pianist’s songs are old, and the tips are necessarily low. The San Francisco Chronicler’s Charles McCabe, who died in 1983, was once asked:” If San Francisco is such a great place to live, “why does it have the nation’s highest rates of alcoholism and suicide?” McCabe responded almost instantaneously: “Why, for the simple reason it’s the finest place on earth to drink yourself to death.”

It’s also the finest place on earth to throw yourself into the ocean, as cinephiles everywhere are only too aware. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Kim Novak famously throws herself into San Francisco Bay underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, only to be rescued moments later by Jimmy Stewart, who suffers from the film’s titular affliction. Vertigo contains a number of Hitchcock’s most famous scenes, not to mention some of cinema’s, but this one more than any other has always had an indelible effect on me. For many people’s money, Vertigo is the quintessential San Francisco film. For mine, Novak’s leap into the bay is the quintessential San Francisco scene.

Continue reading "Postcard from San Francisco: cocktails and suicide spots" »