Rodriguez/Didion response

I thought, in the first few pages of Rodriguez' essay, that I would enjoy it throughout. However, I didn't care for his shift from presenting San Francisco as a location of change and of sadness within the gay rights movement to the emphasis on architectural characteristics. I loved presenting the parade as at first unabashed celebration, and then as a sort of tarnished but still-proud beast, a bird of prey with sharp talons but clipped wings. Rodriguez kept going from spectacular writing to mundane sections for me; I was never fully invested. One place where I thought he connected was the body building, which he describes as "a parody of labor, a useless accumulation of the laborer's bulk and strength...and yet there is something businesslike about habitues, and the gym is filled with the punch-clock logic of the workplace. (764-765)" Overall though, I thought it was a promising writer with tedious subject matter.

Didion seems to present New York as a place for perpetual outsiders; everyone is transient in their own minds, but the city eventually becomes habit, with familiar faces and similar high-minded attitudes abounding. Perhaps that's a lot of the appeal of New York; It's like a bright light for ambitious minds, irresistible to dreamers, they swarm like flies, most getting zapped by the current of the city. The rules of other places just don't seem to matter; you swap keys and pull all-nighters and live without furniture and with billowing gold curtains dancing outside windows. Didion seems to believe that there is a process for New York, the early wide-eyed romanticism of whimsy, followed by settling into possibly peculiar habits, before being disenchanted with the pomp of the city, a claustrophobia of the body and mind. "It is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair," says Didion (687). This was more palatable than Rodriguez' portrait of San Francisco, but I wouldn't say I enjoyed either.