A television commercial with rather gentle falling chord sequences on orchestral instruments, in long held notes: very like the wistful Northern California minimalism of the 1980s.
I wonder sometimes why it was so necessary for me to leave San Francisco, with no apparent way of getting back. I know why everyone died, of course – I landed in The City such a short time before AIDS began – but I remain confused about my own story: why did my first academic job take me to the other side of the planet, and then why did the Sydney disaster leave me so much poorer, with so few choices left? And here in northern England – it was kind of them to give me a job when I had been out of work for a year, especially in such a small and unimportant academic discipline where so many don't find jobs at all; but this city has never been home, not for a moment.
The shimmering, falling gentleness of certain musical phrases is so bound up with San Francisco, as it was not only characteristic of much of its music from the late seventies to the mid-nineties, but was also just right in invoking the clear air, the gentle, intelligent, idiosyncratic people, the small houses climbing the hills....
Twelve years since I lived there: and I still don't really understand what went so wrong, that I can't seem to find my way back.
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