INTRODUCING “KAMIYA UNLIMITED”!
Hi. I’m excited to announce that I recently started a Substack, Kamiya Unlimited, which features new pieces about San Francisco history as well as new writing about anything and everything that interests me, from politics to music to theater to literature to travel to personal essays, including selections from my vast archive of previously published pieces. Since I started Kamiya Unlimited in January, I’ve posted pieces on ACT’s wondrous version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a paean of praise to Pottersville, the “bad” town in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, an historical polemic on Israel’s horrendous and self-defeating war on Gaza, several pieces on my beloved 49ers, an Olympics meditation on the meaning of victory and defeat, an interview with my late father Joe Kamiya about his two years in a World War II internment camp, and an ongoing series on the wild and woolly history of the street on Telegraph Hill where I lived for 12 years, among other pieces. I hope you enjoy it! And if you want to support independent writing, subscribe!
The Bayview Boat Club, a wondrous oasis of old-SF funkiness miraculously preserved on the waterfront at the edge of uber-sterile Mission Bay, most of whose architecture looks like a runner-up for a never-constructed Olympic Village in Bulgaria.
Sand ladder to Baker Beach. Intrepid pooch Huck may or may not join the walking tours.
WALKING TOURS AND PUBLIC SPEAKING
For information about and to book me for walking tours and public speaking engagements.
Geographically illogical but extremely creepy house from some 1940s film whose title I forget but which ends with the bad guy being whacked with a chair and falling to his death in an even more illogical location overlooking the Bay Bridge.
In other news, I’ve added a new tour to my popular walking tours! You can now choose between the original Jackson Square-Portsmouth Square-Barbary Coast tour, and the new North Beach-Telegraph Hill tour. (There’s more information and a lengthier description of the tours in the “Walking Tours and Public Speaking” header above.) They last 2:45 to 3 hours, I can take up to 10 people and they cost $500. I schedule them on demand, on a mutually acceptable date. E-mail me at gary.kamiya@gmail.com for more information and to book one. The above imaginary building will only be included if sufficient mind-altering substances are ingested by all participants. And for those who try to “pull a runner,” as we used to say in England (i.e. run out on the bill at a restaurant), this grim fate, which ends the above nameless film, awaits:
Having just been whacked with a chair, or unable to stand this woman’s hat any longer, our hero backslides towards the egress…
…clutches at the robes of God…
…and ends up on the pavement, leaving a nice, bloodless corpse!