 Good afternoon. I have a note here, because I keep forgetting to read it, about Baron Hausmann, who is mentioned in this poem. And he is the guy, the mayor of Paris under Napoleon III, who attempted to straighten out and, in fact, did many of the streets in Paris. Poet Charles Baudelaire hated him for it. He loved the curvy old village atmosphere of the old city. This was in the 1870s, something like that. And he also put in gas lamps, which I think Baudelaire described as red-eyed monsters. He was basically against progress. So really it was Charles Baudelaire who made Hausmann famous for his partial destruction of the city. So perhaps Mayor Ed Lee might want to think about this in San Francisco. I don't think he's here. I don't think he's here today, though. Yeah. This is called San Francisco Squeezed. Between the boom cars and the creatives, between the techies and the tourists, between Airbnb and Uber, and all the other wannabe disruptors and innovators, San Francisco was getting squeezed on all sides. There was no room for poetry, music, or even a pleasant thought anymore. Only the motion of the card being swiped through the reader and the occasional nostalgic jingle of the cash register. All is, hey, dude, what the fuck? Awesome and cool, which nothing really is in the new economy and city. San Francisco, you have become a sad place. The wind on the bay has gone out of your sails. Your inspiration now replaced by software, integrated circuits, and schemer schemes. The city, or perhaps we had better call it the city now, lowercase, has handed over its soul to money and mediocrity with tours of all its treasures, private parts included. For a price now, San Francisco, better called Francesca and without the saintly suffix, will let you feel her up. In Francesca, once proud of its writers, Jack Kerouac is now a commodity sold at the Beak Museum alongside his old buddy Neil Cassidy. In Yacoubret, Frank Norris and George Sterling are unfortunately long forgotten, but fortunately not peddled by rough hands. The name Farrell and Getty still rings a distant bell with occasional ghost-like sightings of the ancient bard in North Beach. Valen Ginsburg is still remembered for his anger and displeasure with everything under the sun, a popular San Francisco theme to this day. With nearly every alley named for a deceased poet, the city has become a shadowy ghost town, a city of shades, artificial and pumped up by the hospitality industry, out to make as many bucks as possible short of armed robbery and pulling wallets on buses. Hip poets come and go like politicians without qualifications. Metaphor, meter, symbol, similarly, who needs them? Poetry once in art form is now more like the confessions of a prisoner on death row. Kissing her ruby lips and looking into her starry eyes, I told her goodbye then, cut her throat. Moreover, anything hip or cool is taken for a poem, outrageous being the sole measure of quality. Ditto music, loud as the standard of quality, assault on the listener's sensibility, the measure of aesthetic value. The lyric trumpet of Chad Baker is long gone, replaced by the heavy metallic twang of guitar strings, strained to the breaking point in the brutal pummeling of drum heads. Take that, you son of a bitch! The spirit of Baron Houseman, once the bane of Paris per poet, Charles Boulard, roosts now in San Francisco, straightening out not the streets, but the minds and souls of San Franciscans, while putting a cell phone in every new merry prankster's hand in pocket. The electrical magnetic disturbance of the caller is directly routed to the brain of the person called. Houseman would love this, though the brain may not. That is right, and life is wrong. Shout the Baron and his millennial throng. Stain in Ken Casey's bus and taking drugs might have been a better way to lose one's mind than Facebook on androids. Generationally speaking, far fucking out, probably Trump's way cool when it comes to saying that something is good or interests you. Coffee houses and bars, once the intellectual lifeblood of the city, are now on every tourist hit list. Café to Rias Vesuvius, Tosca specs, must see attractions like the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge demanding proof that you were rare. Sir, can you move for a moment? Well, I shoot a picture of the picture on the wall. And who is that odd fellow with a hat? And while Starbucks was made for techies, they don't always stay there. When it comes to discussions of XML or the extensible markup language or monetizing access to medical statistics on cancer research, these darling kids seem to prefer Trieste or Tosca. Remember Dr. Strangelove? Any day now I expect these kids to start striking themselves when drinking their double lattes. Well, why did you do that right hand, dude? As for the Islamic State, I think cell meetings are held at specs on Wednesdays. But don't quote me on that one, okay? But let me stop right here. Between one bad thing and another, there was only bitterness to be found. Soot, grime, ashes, even excrement, which, if swallowed, can make you throw up. I don't want to do that today. But I do ask you, dear reader, to consider this. While some of the above may appear humorous, where is the substance in a city that panders to tourists, relegates many of its solid older citizens to gig laborers exploited by young entrepreneurs, and treats the arts when it acknowledges them at all, like politics, as a personality contest among immature youths trying to appear defiant, disruptive, and outrageous. And what about a city that trades all substantial business to shipping yards across the bay, thereby avoiding all honest labor? With tourists demanding everything, perhaps even your old apartment, with techie entrepreneurs running the show into the ground and with the arts, reduced to children acting out in the backseat of the family car, such a city seriously lacks authenticity. From Nob Hill or Russian Hill, the view is still stunning. But don't look down. You will be appalled at the lack of anything real beneath your feet.