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Volume 3, Issue 16
Book ReviewsDON'T CALL IT FRISCOby Herb Caen Though I'm about as Denver-to-the-bone as a non-native can be (moved here at the ripe age of 3), I was married in San Francisco, because that's where my in-laws hail from. I couldn't have asked for a better city to marry into (so to speak). One of the highlights of the nuptial weekend was a reception at Moose's, a venerable restaurant in the heart of North Beach, on Washington Square, just a few tai chi moves away from Sts. Peter and Paul, where we said our vows. Moose's fame encompasses the three things San Franciscans have loved about their city for decades: great food, baseball, and Herb Caen. Caen, a columnist for the Examiner, then the Chronicle, died in 1997 after nearly 60 years of writing a daily column about nothing but the city, which he called Baghdad-by-the-Bay. He created the dot-dot-dot column, or if he didn't, he should have, because nobody has done it better yet. He spoke of the wisdom of a city, and its inhabitants, and its legends; he peddled the truth with the caress of a fiction writer, creating a fiction people could literally live in, and his craft, in this post-modern sarcasm 2.0 age, has virtually disappeared, with only Paul Harvey and Garrison Keillor making any attempts to keep such a voice alive. Don't Call It Frisco was Caen's third book-length collection of columns and literary debris, and it's wonderful. Much of it will be over the heads of everyone but citizens of San Francisco, and even Bay Area natives will scratch their heads over the references to certain names, unless they happened to be full grown in the '50s, when the book was written. Still, one has to read such specific history the way a lay person tackles Tom Clancy's military jargon: skip the vocabulary, soak the atmosphere. And the atmosphere will soak you: hymns to the city's unpredictable weather, the invention of the Mickey Finn, the strange and now mostly extinct profession of the B-Girl (though a pal of mine ran into a few ... in Hong Kong), the odd tale of odd characters doing odd jobs in odd ways, the usual list of insane or inept laws (did Caen invent this standby?), the cable cars going dodo, the sea lions and what makes them stink, the secrets of stuck columnists ... all held lovingly together by a well-heeled ellipses and Caen's impeccable sense of timing. The guy's a master of nostalgia. So masterful, in fact, that his odes of nostalgia for the 1800s make the reader nostalgic for the '50s, when newspaper columnists were still allowed to really write, and a few even took advantage of the occasion to create something worth reading in any city or any age, even if it is all about one remarkable place living through one rather unremarkable time. If I learned one thing during my wedding weekend, it was to always respect my lady, and the city that gave her to me, Baghdad-by-the-Bay ... you won't ever catch me calling it Frisco. B+ --Chris J. Magyar 
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