Due to a stray editing question from the Onion's San Francisco local editor last week, I found out he'd solicited A Series Of Unfortunate Events author Daniel Handler into writing a piece about favorite things to do in summer in SF, Handler's hometown. This piece should have appeared in the SF edition of the A.V. Club this week, but since I know some of you (named thefirethorn) are Handler obsessive-completists, and some others of you just don't happen to have immediate access to San Francisco but might be curious what Handler had to say about it, I wheedled an e-copy of the article out of the editor. Here 'tis, for the curious:

Daniel Handler’s guide to summer in San Francisco

He was born in San Francisco and has spent a good chunk of his life here, so it’s not surprising that author Daniel Handler knows his way around the Bay Area during the summer. It also makes sense that the man who has penned all those A Series Of Unfortunate Events books (as Lemony Snicket) thinks that no self-respecting San Franciscan would actually enjoy any of the handful of nice days we get during the summer months.

Daniel Handler on:

Signs that summer is here. Suddenly you’re stopping by the Blue Danube in the middle of the day and there are all these kids there, and you’re like, “Get to school!” And then you realize it’s July, and there’s no excuse for you to make them leave.

His favorite summer pastime. It’s so weather-dependant. I feel like a real San Francisco summer is spent sitting around with blankets on friends’ couches watching old black-and-white movies while the wind howls outside. I have a certain San Francisco ethic, and many other San Franciscans I know have a San Francisco ethic, that pleasant weather is so antithetical to what this city stands for, that when it’s a beautiful day you should spend all of it in the darkest circumstances possible. One summer activity that we do pretty often is meet at Café Tosca and have a few rounds of cocktails, and then go across the street to City Lights Books and do some drunken book shopping, and then head down the hill to Kokkari and eat fried smelt at the bar. All of those are pretty dark.

Giving in to the occasional sunshine. If you actually want to take advantage of nice weather — which, again, I think is sort of wrong — but nevertheless, I give into temptation, and so we’ll wake up pretty early in the morning and take a road trip to Hog Island and buy a bunch of oysters and throw them in a cooler in the back of the car and drive back to San Francisco and call people on the way back and say, “We just bought a whole bunch of oysters, so you have to bring the champagne.” You throw the oysters on the barbecue so that they get slightly cooked and they open by themselves, and then you don’t have to worry about cutting your drunken hands on shards of oyster shells. And then you’ve got a party for cheap. The trick is to remember to take all the oyster shells and put them in your garbage can, no matter how drunk you’ve become over the course of the day, because in the morning, if you haven’t done that, your entire dwelling smells of rank oysters.

Other places to visit outside of the city. There’s sort of the traditional day trip that we take where we go to Muir Woods, and for a while we’re having a wonderful hike, and then the sun starts to set and it gets cold, and it turns out that the way back is longer than you remember, and you get crankier and crankier and crankier. And then you get caught in traffic going back to the city. I sort of love that, because it teaches you that you don’t want to go out to the wilderness, which is a sound lesson. I do it every year — just because it turns into a horrible day doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. You can also drive up to Mt. Tam and see the musicals. They’re somewhat amateurish, but nonetheless charming outdoor productions of classic musicals. [This year they’re doing] a fully clothed version of Hair. I put that right next to decaf espresso. But I guess there are people who read Playboy for the articles.



The best summer ever. Many years ago, I lived with my now wife, but then only girlfriend and two other people—it was the summer that GoldenEye came out, so I guess it was a while ago. We snuck a Thermos of martinis into the Regency Theatre—that was sort of the beginning of the summer, and it became a tradition to sneak a Thermos full of cocktails and appropriate glassware into the movie theater. We would often have an afternoon of oysters and then an evening of seeing the summer blockbusters.

Summer reading. I always read a big book every summer — I’m going to read The Aeneid this summer, so I’m excited about that. I don’t know why I chose it. Last year was War And Peace and the year before that was The New Testament ,and the year before that was Don Quixote. It’s a nice, sort of braggy thing to carry with you all over the summer. My wife prefers short books, but I like one big book because I’ve always found the idea of summer reading to be kind of wacky, that when summertime comes there are all these articles that suggest really lightweight books for the summertime. It implies that for the rest of the year you’re reading all this super-intense stuff, which I just don’t think is really that common. I don’t think there are a lot of people who are like, “Thank God summer’s here. I’ve been reading Henry James all year long, and now I’m ready for a thriller.” Summer reading should be more challenging. And I think if you read a long book, then you begin to feel that your summer is mimicking that long book, and that’s pretty powerful. If you have a Moby Dick summer, that’s great. And The Aeneid is sort of an Odyssey-like story, so I hope that will shape my summer. Last summer I read War And Peace, and my summer was definitely full of high points and low points, so that was good.

Where to do your summer reading. Café Flore is a great reading place, because you can have the whole cycle of the day there. You can go down in the morning and have coffee and a scone, and then you can read through lunch and have a salad and iced tea, and then get a martini. I also like to read at The Orbit Room, where they have that crazy, I suspect drug-addled bartender who is always making crazy cocktails with pomegranate seeds and jalapeños and some raspberry liqueur he made himself. I guess I’m sounding like a raving drunk.

Summer with a child. My kid really loves the hippie drummers at the edge of Golden Gate Park. He likes to go down there and dance while I stand there like an awkward yuppie father and get offered drugs over and over and over again. I have a distinct memory of when I grew up here, the first time I smelled pot I was with my parents at a Castro screening of 2001 and I asked them what that smell was, and they told me it was Italian food. For years, I just smelled it and I was like, “That’s Italian food.” The older I got I was like, “But I know what Italian food is, and Italian food doesn’t smell like that.” I look forward to taking him down to the drum circle every summer, and one year he’s going to say, “What’s that smell?” And I’m going to say, “Italian food.”

Stumbling onto live music outdoors. I tend to be walking through the park and then I begin to hear “The Reflex,” and then it turns out that Duran Duran is there. Or that I wish to take what I think will be a quiet, reflective walk in Stern Grove, because it’s usually so deserted, and then we get there and there’s a free concert going on and we end up staying for the Kronos Quartet.

Touristy things worth doing. I think Coit Tower is beautiful. I go down to Ocean Beach and fly kites a lot—I don’t know if that’s really a touristy thing. I like the farmers’ market at Embarcadero, because you can go down there and feel noble and buy all this organic kale, and then you’re like, “Eh, fuck it,” and then you get a pulled-pork barbecue sandwich. What’s really fun is to drive down Powell, and there are always tourists who are crossing in front of your car to get on a cable car, or hanging right off the edge of the cable car like they do. Roll down your window and extend your hand and slap their asses. Part of it is curiosity about homosexual culture that tourists have, and so I feel that that’s the closest thing I can provide to that. I consider it a variation on the game that we play when we drive out to Hog Island and get oysters, which is “Hey Cow,” and its corollary, “Hey Golfer.” You drive by a field of cows, and people take turns rolling down a window and shouting as loud as they can, “Hey cow!” — and then you count how many cows turn around. And you can do it with golfers.

I'm-a feelin': amused