17 Reasons Why It's Okay To Call It Frisco

San Fran is still strictly forbidden.

1. It has buy in from these kittens and the City of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, or at least one of them.

2. Allen Ginsberg called it Frisco

Have you read Sunflower Sutra? It's great. We'll wait here a minute while you go read it. Or, check it out, these are the relevant passages.

The poem opens with these evocative lines:

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.

And closes on this haunting note:

We're not our skin of grime, we're not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we're golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

3. E40

4. You know who calls it San Fran? Chipotle.

@Andrew_Freedman We like to think it's authentic. At least in the San Fran Mission District style... - Colin

Not content with ripping off our burritos, Chipotle also mistakenly refers to Frisco as San Fran. Not just once, either. Chipotle is a serial offender. This is just gross, and exactly why you should call it Frisco.

5. Jack London called it Frisco - vehemently

And look at Jack London!

6. Janis Joplin called it Frisco.

View this video on YouTube

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I mean, it's Janis.

7. It's great for haiku

That Frisco cadence

It's short form San Francisco

Fog is cold tonight

8. The cover of Big Brother & The Holding Company's classic album Cheap Thrills.

9. Speaking of which. These guys

10. Herb Caen's old paper supports the event!

11. Admit it, you enjoy chanting Frisco when you hear this song

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

Stop it, you lie. You lie!

12. Jack Kerouac called it Frisco

Like, repeatedly. Constantly. Here's a passage from On the Road:

I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm palmy air---air you can kiss---and palms. Along the storied Sacramento river on a superhighway; into the hills again; up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of bay---it was just before dawn---with the sleepy lights of Frisco festooned across. Crossing the Oakland Bay Bridge I slept for the first time since Denver soundly; so that I was rudely jolted in the bus station at Market and Third into the memory of the fact that I was in San Francisco three thousand two hundred miles from my mother's house in Ozone Park, Long Island. I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was Frisco, long bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled about a few blocks. Weird bums (it was Mission st.) asked me for dimes in the dawn. I heard music somewhere.

13. As Techmeme's Gabe Rivera points out, Zappa.

View this video on YouTube

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Thanks, Gabe!

14. Sailors called it Frisco!

@mat @darth if you insist just stop yelling at me I've never been here before

And clearly, so too does the National Park Service. Why do you hate America?

15. Herb Caen begged people to call it Frisco

It's true! As he wrote in an incredibly self-aware piece from 1977:

It's okay, you may call it 'Frisco' now. The gray-beards, the ones who objected so strenuously and endlessly to the 'irreverent' sailor-spawned nickname for San Francsico, are mostly gone now — and so, it must be added is a large part of the city they loved and helped to build, the city that spawned world legends and legions of worshippers.

Old "Frisco" was the seaman's and adventurer's delight, the gaudy, lusty, gusty town that grew up overnight in floods of gold and silver, much of it to be squandered in the infamous deadfalls of the Barbary Coast or among the opium-smokers of Chinatown's dark corners. That was Frisco, it's waterfront jammed and noisy and alive with ships from the seven seas, its harbor big enough to embrace all the natives of the world.

Small wonder that a newspaper columnist who once wrote a book titled "Don't Call It Frisco" was heard to implore one recent day, as he recalled these vanished glories, "PLEASE call us Frisco!"

Doesn't that make you want to live in Frisco?

16. The Mayor calls it Frisco

At City College for 2nd annual FRISCO Day - working to ensure our youth has every opportunity to succeed in #SF http://t.co/cGZKGhc9

Sure, sure, I know. Ed Lee. But, hey, he's technically mayor of San Francisco for now. That's a pretty big deal for him.

17. Because we have ~fashion~ for you!

Come meet us at 5 pm January 29 and we can all forget the intolerance and small-minded ways of the recent post-Caen years, hold hands, and call it Frisco together. In matching t-shirts and hats.

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