#14: Alison — Adventures, History, Travel

'Yanking the tablecloth' with an advocate for finding your weird and following your bliss.

Meet the secret agents of taste. Learn what lights them up, where they find inspiration, and what they think we should all be enjoying right now. This edition: Alison Bing, a content and brand strategist currently consulting for Figma and Lonely Planet.

Alison Bing’s written 64 (!) guidebooks for Lonely Planet, mostly focused on Italy, MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and the Western U.S. She’s the very definition of a seasoned traveler and also a fervent advocate for exploring wherever it is that you call home.

For her, that’s San Francisco. Alison’s take on the Bay Area and its history sheds new light and fresh enthusiasm on even well-trodden spots. Her obsession with quirky places extends to sites for scientific experiments, such as the Manhattan Project. She plans to create a podcast on this topic with a friend from NASA. I am praying to the UFOs above that this project makes a landing soon.

Do you consider yourself a tastemaker?

That's a difficult thing to ask a very pragmatic Midwesterner. I remember developing my own style by going to the Salvation Army in my small town in Indiana. My mom's like, “Wow, you've got some really distinctive taste.” And my dad chimed in: “Nobody has ever made a living off of good taste.” [Laughs] 

I consider myself a consumer advocate. I'm trying to help people make the most informed use of their time and money. I’m trying to help people find and follow their bliss.

What makes you qualified to make these recommendations?

My strength as a writer and curator is an acute awareness of how much I don't know, which compels me to do rigorous research. I come from a tiny dot on the map in rural America, at a time before the web-connected dots globally. But I read and traveled widely, so I had a sense of how much I didn't know about the wider world. 

Today I still embrace every new experience with an open mind and a lot of questions. That might make me sound like a rube, but make no mistake: I do my research. My pop was a peace mediator, so we traveled to places where worldviews are often at odds – and I learned the importance of listening to each one closely, and questioning convenient conclusions. I'm not looking for easy answers – I'm looking for rich insights.

When it comes to travel advice, how do you find authentic voices in a sea of sameness?

You’ve got to walk the blocks. You can't believe what you've seen on Instagram; you have to go there and be open to the experience. Find somebody that is both passionate and knowledgeable. I don’t take that person's opinions as my own, but it's a useful starting point. Find people who are not influential but knowledgeable and have firm opinions and will give you advice on what to do and what not to do. 

One of the people in the city of San Francisco whose opinions I consider is Gary Kamiya, who wrote a book called “Cool Grey City of Love.” I've lived in San Francisco for decades, but he has walked every block of the city and written about it. And then, because we don't swim in the same river twice, he’s gone back to those blocks and seen the new block that’s come up in its place.

What tools and systems do you have to then track or catalog or save your ideas?

The same things as everybody else: Notes — the best tool is the one that you have on you all the time, which is often the phone. I take photos, not to share on social media; I keep lots and lots of unvarnished photos. It's funny when Google Photos does have their year in review, I’ve got lots of pictures of opening and closing times. 

Can AI do what you do?

AI actually does the opposite of what I do…it’s a useful tool for me because I can find out what it's doing and then do the opposite. It tells you what most people believe, it collects common wisdom, conventionally held beliefs. AI is laying the table with all the things that you need for a well-set table — you know, salad forks and different size spoons, maybe those plate chargers, all these things that don't actually serve any purpose. And yet society or convention insists that they be there. 

What I'm interested in is grabbing hold of the corner of that tablecloth and yanking it really hard, so that you can actually see what was underneath this whole time. Why did we believe that all the stuff needed to be there anyway? Are we really sad if any of it goes away? What's really important to us to hang on to? What's not visible is what's interesting to me. As somebody who's interested in history, there's a lot of this happening that I'm really excited about right now, like Black maritime history. For example, we're finding out that a lot of our greatest adventurers and most daring pirates were Black seafarers. How does that change our idea of history and the world that we live in? And how does it decolonize our thinking about travel? 

I think there's a fear in looking at history, that it's just going to be nonstop trauma. And that's fair, especially for people whose ancestors were enslaved and for people whose ancestors were colonized. It can also be very painful to come to terms with the fact that your ancestors were the enslavers. But what it gives us a chance to do is to find the throughlines of humanity, courage, and creativity that we need in order to think about our future. 

How can any of us be more like you — yanking that tablecloth?

Take the quote: “The coldest winter I ever I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” AI will probably tell you what most of the web seems to believe, which is that Mark Twain said it. OK, well, why do we assume Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde said all of the clever, funny things in the 19th century? Actually, Mark Twain stole some of his best stories from China Camp from Chinese miners during the Gold Rush. We also know that Ina Coolbrith was his editor. She was incredibly influential in his writing and may have actually written some of his work. 

So just begin to ask the questions about who's not showing up here. How do we reinscribe them and follow their stories? Because there are some wildly exciting and unexpected twists and turns. 

Now let’s get to your recommendations! What do you think everyone should read, watch, do?

📚 Short, incisive, hyper-impactful books

We all are at a place where we have minimal time. For me, some of the greatest books of my lifetime, include Toni Morrison's “The Bluest Eye” and “Maxine Hong Kingston's “Woman Warrior,” or “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,” which was edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. John Hersey's “Hiroshima.” These are 200 pages or less. Each of them packs in so much deep truth that you have to revisit your world around it. Poetry is also great for that: just reading one poem will take you to a different place and make you rethink your day.

✍ Poetry 

 Wislawa Szymborska is one poet I particularly love — I first read her in the stunning Book of Luminous Things, a touchstone anthology by the great Czeslaw Milosz. Or haiku in translation, like Women Poets of Japan, edited by Ikuko Atsumi with San Francisco Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth. Each poem and poet will guide you to another.

🎥 Video art

It has the benefit of not being plot-driven. “It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between”— to quote Diane Ackerman. You can go see a video art piece — Jeffrey Gibson is one person who I love to follow, or Kara Walker has been doing more video, William Kentridge does astounding video pieces, and just to get lost in it to find yourself in a different place, even when you can't travel is really important, I think. And also to get away from this idea of a finite narrative. If you don't like where the story is headed, keep going. Find your own ending.

🌉 City Lights Bookstore

The reason I moved to San Francisco was City Lights. The books in the basement, which is their nonfiction section, are constantly changing. They have a section called stolen continents, another one called commodity aesthetics…Because our ideas are changing and converging, they're constantly reorganizing their books down there. There was also a 1930s cult that used that basement as some sort of worship place. And so there are signs from that cult that are still down there. And one of them says “I am the door.” It’s true! San Francisco is the door: between fact and fiction, here and there, east and west, possible and impossible. There are reasons why specific things happen here that don't happen in other places.

💾 The Internet Archive & The Long Now Foundation

The web actually is a living thing — and it's in the Outer Richmond, in the basement of a former Christian Science church. You can go there and you can volunteer to archive things.

There's also the Interval at the Long Now Foundation, which is a foundation started by Stewart Brand, who brings in thinkers who challenge: if we are in the middle of a 10,000 year period — as opposed to a fiscal quarter, or calendar year 2023 — how does that change our thinking about what we want to be going? They have amazing lectures on YouTube that are free and available to everyone.

🏙 Asking More From Our Cities!

With your rent and/or your taxes, you're paying not just for your home, but you're paying to be in a city that is full of ideas and possibilities and art. So why not use it? It's a public utility available to you and you're already paying for it! Get out there. Make a point of it. You can't expect it to find you or expect curators to always lead you down the right path. You really have to go out and explore for yourself.

---

Mia’s Queue is a free newsletter featuring an ordinary person with extraordinary taste. Subscribe to get posts like this in your inbox every other Thursday.

In case you haven’t noticed, I love people with good taste! In fact, I have a podcast about it for Flipboard. Season 4 just started. Check it out! 

More Mia’s Queue: Alexis • Storey • Meg • Sadia • Kel • Tracy • Theresa • Vasha • Eva • Sarah • James • Adi • Letitia