In loud

LAST WEEK A Famous Local Chef and I traded some restaurant intel, a central theme of which turned out to be noise – as in, bad noise. Have you been here, have you been there, yes, unbearably loud, deafening, I couldn't hear myself think, me neither, dreadful, would never go back.

It is always reassuring, of course, to find someone who independently corroborates one's sense of reality: Fears of going mad subside, etc. (perhaps only briefly, but still), and, yes, one is not alone in suspecting that the city has grown ever more polluted by noise, a largely unacknowledged environmental contaminant that degrades the quality of urban life even as it escapes regulation or even notice. I speak of gasoline-fired leaf blowers, of course – a suburban blight that, like some terrible plague, has been carried into the crowded city by thoughtless ex-suburbanites who hire gardening services because they cannot be bothered to rake their own leaves – and of the innumerable saws buzzing all around town in a discordant symphony of endless construction.

All this din is bad enough, but when one finds interior settings as ear-shattering as the great outdoors, one knows a certain sort of despair. It is not, for me, an unusual experience these days to step inside a restaurant and feel as though I've walked into a wall of sound; the roar – a cocktail of voices and thumping music intensified by the cold, hard surfaces so characteristic of "industrial" design – is a physical fact, a push against the chest. In these moments I accept with resignation that conversation is going to be difficult at best, and why, after all, go to a restaurant if not to talk to somebody?

I leave for another day the consideration of industrial chic – a perverse yet perfectly predictable tendency within our soulless industrial culture. The inability to converse while sharing food would seem to be a grievous loss, but the FLC suggested that for many of today's young adults, who've grown up staring at pixilated computer screens, the loss of conversation is no loss at all because the art of talking with other people was not cultivated in them, and noise thus becomes an acceptable and exciting substitute.

These observations made depressing and conclusive sense, and after a few more minutes of conversation, the FLC and I said our good-byes. Yet I found myself wondering, as I walked away, what sort of city we are building if noise succeeds conversation. Although the Latin word civitas is the root not only of "city" but of "civility" and "civilization," the speakers of that ancient tongue could not have imagined a town as loud as ours.

Paul Reidinger

paulr@sfbg.com