Just a Little Proposition.

a) For my final project, I will be creating a zine with two other students. The zine will include our own art work, photography, creative writing pieces, analytical essays, and commentary centered around the theme of "re-imagining" San Francisco. We are planning on taking some themes from the course such as the Beat generation, San Francisco architecture, and San Francisco street art and examining them through a modern lens, tracing the progress of the city and comparing the idealized San Francisco to the real, urban experience.

b) The evolution of San Francisco as a city and an eclectic mixture of people has been a key theme from this course, whether this is seen through fiction and poetry or through non-fiction books and articles. The texts that we will primarily be incorporating are Hollow City and Reclaiming San Francisco because we will be taking a similar stance on our view of San Francisco as a city of progress and constant reconfiguration. However, the theme looking back to the past in order to find identity also radiates through the work of Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. 

c) To begin the process of creating our zine, we headed straight to the source: San Francisco. It was important for us to go back to the city after studying some of the literature that was produced there and explore it with our project in mind. We smelled all the dried sea food and roots in Chinatown, photographed Jack Kerouac Alley, browsed through some poetry books at City Lights, ate Italian food in George Washington Park, and joined up with the Prop 8 Protest March and rallied down to Fisherman's Wharf. Other than physically experiencing the city as research, we each broke down the broad topic of re-imagining San Francisco into about 8 smaller subtopics. I will be writing about my first trip to San Francisco and the San Francisco street art scene (probably one more topic to come- maybe something to do with community activism in San Francisco or environmental issues). I will also be interviewing someone my age from San Francisco. For research, I'm planning on talking to friends who live in the city to learn more about street art and doing some reading to compare contemporary popular San Francisco art to past generations. This week I'm planning on doing most of the research for all my topics.

d) Through the work that we have studied and the ideas that we have explored in this course, it is clear that San Francisco is a city of constant evolution and progress, continually building on its colorful past to shape the present. After studying San Francisco's historical and literary past, our goal is to re-imagine San Francisco by comparing our previous idealistic views of the city to the raw, urban experience using the knowledge that we've gained from this course, from outside sources, and from the city itself. 

e) I am worried that our topic might be too broad. We broke it down into things we were interested in, and I hope it comes through in our project that there are so many ways that San Francisco continually reshapes itself and grows as a city, not just the areas we chose to focus on in our zine. I think it will help once I begin my research and choose very specific areas of interest to write about.