Wealthy Beats

While they aren’t dealing with identical thematic choices, the renditions of San Francisco in Tripmaster Monkey and Hollow City actually enjoy a very convenient interaction, in that one serves as a passable microcosm or exemplum of the other. Hollow City establishes a general world, and the problems that plague it, while Tripmaster Monkey supplies a specific character, struggling under the limitations of the world Hollow City has displayed.

If there’s one thing Hollow City condemns, it’s the cost of living in San Francisco. I’m sure there is any number of factors that led to the ridiculously disproportionate cost of living in the City; Hollow City suggests technology money. That is, people that went into tech fields and came out sickeningly well paid and began to idolize and romanticize San Francisco’s urban spaces may be the cause. The sheer funding they can direct toward living in The City would drive up costs anywhere, if such large numbers were to converge at once as they did. Not to say there is anything wrong with the tech industry or its employees, but the economic transformation that they have saddled San Francisco with endangers the artistic, beat, and counter-cultural identity that it historically championed. Quite simply, it’s pretty impossible for an artist to live in The City at today’s rent prices.

It is on that note that Tripmaster Monkey gladly provides an example of the conflict Hollow City broaches. The work’s character is exactly what Hollow City’s San Francisco can no longer support, and the character is shown appropriately suffering for it. Tripmaster Monkey represents a specific story of a character that simply cannot survive in the for-the-rich-only world that The City has become.

So, while these works may not obviously match on the surface, there is plenty to be reconciled between their depictions of San Francisco.