Usenix/San Francisco

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We returned to San Francisco from Pacific Grove for the week of June 20-25 for the Usenix conference which was held in the Hilton Union Square. It's a huge luxury hotel just on the edge of the Tenderloin District. The accommodations were much better than the UCB student residence earlier on our visit and much nicer, of course, than the Caribbean Motor Hotel of Pacific Grove.

The conference hotel has a restaurant near the top where we had lunch one day and enjoyed the views of the city. The conference itself was quite large with workshops the first few days and technical papers on the last few. Those days I was quite the "Unix Bigot" having worked several years on BSD Unix (from Berkeley), Ultrix (from Digital), and at Western we had an ETA computer from CDC which promised to run Unix System V some day. The conference took pictures of all participants. Somehow I got a "Groucho Marx" disguise (glasses, furry eye-brows and a big nose) and wore it for my picture shown at left. The photographer got a laugh out of that. Unix guys, at that time, were a crazy bunch of nerdy geeks. I wonder if that's changed.

The Tenderloin District leaves a lot to be desired with strip clubs, nude girls and "all male live nude sex shows" at the nearby Nob Hill Theatre. But you're a short walk to Nob Hill and the Mark Hopkins at the top where we again visited the "Top of the Mark" for, on this visit, night-time views of the city.

One evening, we went to see the "Greater Tuna" play at the Mason Street Theatre not too far from our hotel. The story is set in a mythical Texas town  — "Tuna" the third smallest town in Texas. We went entirely on speculation, this looks like it might be fun. One of the authors, Jaston Williams, we saw several times in Austin in later years.

We went to a couple of concerts while in the area. 

We saw the Pixies fronting for Throwing Muses at the I-Beam in the Haight Ashbury district. I was really impressed by the Pixies, their music was uniquely jarring and there was nothing like it at the time (apparently there would never have been a Nirvana if it weren't for the Pixies). I collected the Pixies and Francis Black (their lead) music as their career continued. Many years later, on a visit to Melbourne Australia, I caught the Pixies on tour. Our friend Paul Dietz got the tickets for us. At that concert they wouldn't let me bring in my camera! So these pictures of the Pixies are what I have. The Throwing Muses didn't impress me as much but they are still releasing music (1986-2020). See the Pixies and Throwing Muses on Wikipedia.

At the I-Beam South, we saw Sister Double Happiness fronting for the Butthole Surfers. Again, this was entirely on speculation — it looked interesting. The Butthole Surfers, it turns out, were an outrageous somewhat psychedelic Texas band from San Antonio/Austin area. I recall one of them setting fire to lighter fluid on his hands. There was also a young woman with them who stripped naked and danced on the stage during the show. For all of that they weren't a band we ever followed.

Sister Double Happiness was more traditional punk, and we enjoyed them much more. We recognized the chunky intense fellow singing and fronting for the band. Isn't that guy "The Big Dick" (Gary Floyd) from "The Dicks" show we saw when we were in Cincinnati 1984? Well it turns out it was! And there's another Texas connection — The Dicks and Gary Floyd were also from Austin! No wonder they were touring with the Butthole Surfers. See The Dicks (Band), Sister Double Happiness and Butthole Surfers on Wikipedia.

The I-Beam South was quite a large venue, in a warehouse area, and we were far from the stage so I have no pictures of the bands at that event. I do have a poster from the event in the photo album.

While not at the conference, and not out with the punks, we did our fair share of touring about in the city. We climbed the Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill for views of North Beach, the Financial District and bay. North Beach just down the hill from the tower is oddly named as there is no water nearby — apparently much of San Francisco is reclaimed land. Chinatown and the Financial District with the iconic Trans America Pyramid are nearby. While tramping around Chinatown we bumped into the bronze plaque for Sam Spade (Kate is fan of those mysteries).

Another day we crossed the Golden Gate bridge (we must have taken a bus) and ended up in the pretty town of Sausilito. We took a ferry back to the city; there are some pictures of Alcatraz taken from the ferry. As a prison it had been closed for quite some time (1963); there was a period where natives had occupied the island (1969-71); these days it's a tourist day-trip.

There's a couple of car stories I should tell. I've already mentioned our fuel filter problem that had us laid up briefly in Green River Idaho. There's more to tell...

Our little 1984 Hyundai Pony struggled to get up and over some of the mountains on our trip west. Within San Francisco navigating some of the very steep hills with a manual transmission was quite the challenge. I recall trying to "feather the clutch" on a steep hill intersection in the Haight-Ashbury area — the clutch was all the way out and we weren't going anywhere! I thought, damn that's going to be a problem but fortunately I dumped the clutch, tried again, and away we went. Fortunately I hadn't burned out the clutch, that would have been difficult to repair.

The poor little car also over heated when fighting mountains, strong headwinds and when we were pushing it hard to make time. While in San Francisco I got an oil change and had the mechanic remove the thermostat so the coolant would circulate at full force all the time. That helped.

After the conference, we hurried back home. There's another blog on that.

Photos scanned and blog created April 2022 during the BadAss.II Covid wave and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.