Day 9: The Invisible Frontier

Downtown Berkeley is like the yuppier, but less corporated, sister to the Haight-Ashbury area. Its stores are larger, its look less bohemian, its street life fewer and farther between. But there's a certain realism that you get from Berkeley which certainly isn't present in the Haight... perhaps I am just biased because I found a load of wonderful bookstores in Berkely which were surprisingly lacking in the Haight (which is largely illiterate, perhaps?). It's a pretty beautiful campus as well.

The Gold N' Gate bridge is the way from San Fransisco to the largely unknown lands of the northern bay area. These lands consist of San Quentin prison, where Johnny Cash once sang and danced, and some fishing villages, parks, and military installments. And of course ex-military installments, which are always a favorite haunt of mine.







I assumed that by taking the north bridge (whatever it is called) into no-name country and then by taking the Gold N' Gate into SF, I could avoid the ridiculous "get out of Oakland" toll that they charge you for crossing the Bay Bridge. I was wrong. Not only did they charge me for crossing the No-Name Bridge, but I also had to pay to use the big red one. In short, the amount of money you have to spend to get into San Fransisco is proportional to the amount you spend trying to get around these checkpoints. So much for being sneaky...

Reading: "The Invisible Frontier" by Francios Schuiten and Benoit Peeters. Schuiten is fast becoming my favorite European illustrator - I believe I like him even more these days then I do Moebius, the god of the European comics scene. This book is part of the "Cities Of The Fantastic" series, which show even more clearly than his other work the fact that Schuiten was raised by a family of architects. His buildings are ridiculously imaginative, and perhaps even more impressive than the works of his kin, in that they can only possibly exist in fantasy. The plot concerns a young cartographer drafted to help design a several-miles-wide scale model of the empire he belongs to. While he seeks to make the model perfect to the tiniest detail, his superiors are more concerned with speed, and constantly introduce innacurate machines to hurry along the project. Politicians become involved as well, re-drawing the imperial borders as to overshadow the neighboring countries.

In the end his obsession with details ends up losing him the woman he loves. History repeats, in fiction just as in life. He wanders off into the wilderness to make a map of his own, by way of the only completely accurate method - seeing the world with his own eyes.