In a city so horizontal, everyone clambers to go up.

History once shifted, justifies a future; who’s to say who belongs where?

One of my first words was blackberry, we’d pick ‘em from hedgerows.

In Hebrew the word Seneh could mean blackberry bush, it is part of the only description of god in a material form, a bush on fire. An ideogram and humble.

Pound’s poem goes:

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

It reminds me of blackberries.

The god Su’en or Sin, is the Semitic lunar god of wisdom, who had a long beard made of lapis lazuli, which is blue.

He travels by flying bull.

The word Sinai comes from combining these dreams. As a mountain Moses received the Ten Commandments at its peak, the cave where this happened is still there, as well as a church and a mosque and a gift-shop.

Mount Sinai is a place to go up for the Israelites in exile; the Sinai Peninsula is a place of geo-politics, but let us set borders aside, or rather we’ll talk beside them.

We can sit in Sinai, the second carriage of Angel’s Flight, which is the shortest train ride in America; but when trying to go home, length is very different than distance.

In one film about another - Thom Andersen bar-talks: “it reveals a city as a place where reality is opaque”.

He’s talking about The Exiles, a film by Kent MacKenzie that starts with Sinai, descending Angels Flight, a repeating shot that becomes a chorus for going down(town).

The Native American Indian family who lead the film live half way up, under the tracks on Clay Street, which was once a slum but an artist community too.

To get home, Yvonne and Homer never seem to ride the train.