Okay, who's doing Frisco?

[ragandbone]

In the 16 years I lived in the City, I never heard anyone local call it "Frisco" (without a reprimand,) but you know, the Beat poets sometimes did call it by that name. Jack Kerouac, a sometimes resident (and SF likes to claim him as one) called it "Frisco" all the time, and it shows up in Ginsburg poems.

Herb Caen, the clumnist had a book called Don't Call It Frisco and I think he pointed out that tourists and newcomers were more likely to use that name, than locals. It's a class thing, "Frisco" was used by sailors and dockworkers, and I think that is why the Beats picked it up.
Don't call Divisadero by its full name, either, call it "Divis", and you will sound local, if you care to.

Here is something from Kerouac's Lonesome Traveler

But it was that beautiful cut of clouds I could always see above the little S.P. alley, puffs floating by from Oakland or the Gate of Marin to the north or San Jose south, the clarity of Cal to break your heart. It was the fantastic drowse and drum of hum of lum mum afternoon nathin' to do, ole Frisco with end of land sadness -- the people -- the alley full of trucks and cars of business nearabouts and nobody knew or far from cared who I was all my like three thousand five hundred miles from birth-O opened up and at last belonged to me in Great America.

Now it's night in Third Street the keen little neons and also yellow bulblights of impossible-to-believe flops with dark ruined shadows moving back of torn yellow shades like a degenerate China with no money -- the cats in Annie's Alley, the flop comes on, moans, rolls, the street is loaded with darkness. Blue sky above with stars hanging high over old hotel roofs and blowers of hotels moaning out dusts of interior, the grime inside the word in mouths falling out tooth by tooth, the reading rooms tick tock bigclock with creak chair and slantboards and old faces looking up over rimless spectacles bought in some West Virginia or Florida or Liverpool England pawnshop long before I was born and across rains they've come to the end of the land sadness
end of the world gladness all your San Franciscos will have to fall eventually and burn again.