The War Between the State

By MARTHA SMILGIS /LOS ANGELES

At first you're seduced by the sweeping ocean views, cute Victorian houses, picturesque tangerine bridges and storybook bed-and-breakfasts. But on closer inspection, the sheer volume of scented candles, glass-blown swans and seashell ashtrays sends the mind reeling. Banners that boast I LEFT MY HEART should rightly read MY WALLET, since San Francisco's real raison d'etre is separating tourists from their money. This too-too-precious chilly, hilly city is determined to stupefy you with caramel corn, sourdough bread, chocolate cable cars and painting-by-numbers that goes by the name of sidewalk art. "It's like living in a theme park," says Lee Houskeeper, a local resident.

The town -- the greater Bay Area, for that matter -- is sicklied o'er with restaurants. Culinary czars rule a population where schoolchildren learn the meaning of chanterelle and shiitake before they study the alphabet. Beer can come in a bottle with a champagne cork, and spaghetti automatically means fennel-raspberry pasta. To ask for a glass of ordinary tap water or regular coffee is to admit that you hail from Tulsa. Pretentious readings of bogus poetry have now been supplanted by SF Net, a coffeehouse computer linkup that enables pseudo avant-gardists to cross-chat electronically over their caffe e latte.

The entire culture, for that matter, is derivative. The cramped, dark Victorian houses (going for $2 million) are borrowed from the English, the ivory (mostly opaque plastic) figurines from the Chinese, and the vineyards from northern Italy. There's no homegrown movie business; in fact the town has missed the video age, focused instead on grainy foreign films, which seem to be unreeling in every theater. Although the smug intelligentsia of Stanford and Berkeley blanch at the mention of her name, the area's best-selling author is Danielle Steel. To be sure, Los Angeles is no stranger to mass-market novelists, but that kind of pedestrian vulgarity is increasingly overwhelmed by the energy, quality and variety of the town's truly provocative attractions: a first-class symphony orchestra, lively art galleries and museums, adventurous theater, special events like the biennial L.A. Arts Festival, a good Mexican dinner for 10 bucks.

In the southland people get Pulitzer prizewinning news from the Los Angeles Times. San Franciscans rely on the clubhouse newspaper, the Chronicle ("comical" to locals), whose existence depends almost solely on Herb Caen, 75, America's longest-running columnist (circa 1938), and whose chief function is the nurturing of San Francisco's insatiable narcissism. The Chron's competitor, Hearst's Examiner, is hardly better, specializing in the scandalous activities of local politicians.

Politics, in any case, is monopolized mainly by vociferous gay organizations, gangs of neoprohibitionists and, of course, the ever resentful ecomaniacs, who have forsaken chocolate chip ice cream for Rainforest Crunch and who insist that the city's unspeakable degenerates (cigarette smokers) ask permission before they light up outside. While the city drifts, the board of supervisors issues wacky foreign policy statements. During the gulf war, the board declared the town a nuclear-free haven for draft dodgers. Across the bay in Berkeley it's even daffier: along with Fidel Castro, the city council is all that is left of the communist elite.

The parochial social scene in San Francisco is hardly more engaging, consisting as it does of a few dozen gadflies who spend much of their time phoning each other to discuss who didn't get invited to the New York parties. Everybody else seems to be in the business of resolutely currying the town's status as the capital of the sexually weird. Where else can you join a cross- dressing club? Where else would they be restoring the sign flashing the pulsating neon nipples of aging stripper Carol Doda? At the same time, in such a setting a straight male has a hard time seeking out a pair of shapely legs in thigh-high Lycras. A fashion statement in the Bay Area means pearls and sensible walking shoes or the Birkenstock look. "Down in L.A.," says single lawyer Peter Haley, ruefully, "you've got wicked dames coming in from the night. Here, there are no dangerous women. Too many bird watchers."

As if all this were not enough to make Los Angeles a relative Eden, the weather in the Bay Area is windy, cold and foggy; you can't swim in the ocean; and the earthquake knocked down the freeways, so it's hard to get across town. The smug superiority of northerners is simply a case of shabby gentility. These people who came to California first always looked down at the village in the south, which to their dismay has become a booming megalopolis.