Some Kind of Dharma: Photographs

“to just start at the beginning and let the truth seep out”

Grant Street, San Francisco, 2009

You can quite intentionally make a Beat pilgrimage in San Francisco, soaking in the aura, the coffee, the Bohemian spirit in North Beach nooks, bars and alleys. I did not do that. I chanced upon this sidewalk marker on Grant Street, Chinatown’s main drag, and it held me for a while. Capturing this series of moments, of daily life occurring just above this gritty and subtly textured literary memorial, seemed to say something about the passage of time, memory, contingency and impermanence. The title quotation comes from the opening of Kerouac’s novel, The Subterraneans (1958).