"I saw the best
minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked ..." Allen Ginsberg, "Howl",
1956
"Paranoia strikes deep/ into your mind
it will creep/ starts when you're always afraid/ step
out of line/ the Man comes/ and takes you
away." Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's
Worth", 1968
"Freedom is the new F-word."
Beth Lisick, 2004
SAN FRANCISCO - Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, founder of City Lights, beat poet
laureate, his voice trembling, a Statue of Liberty mask
over his head like a prop straight from the commedia
dell'arte, is rambling on stage against the Empire
in a warehouse in the Mission District, and the audience
goes wild: this must be what it felt like to be at the
Six Gallery in 1955 listening to Allen Ginsberg deliver
for the first time his seminal, legendary "Howl".
Ferlinghetti hails "the last beatnik in North Beach with
something to say", "the last cowboy in the last
frontier", "the last innocent American". He denounces
"the beginning of the Third World War, the war against
the Third World", and "the last lament of real
democracy". He fears for "wild poets with wandering
minds, exiles in their own land".
More poetical
Tomahawks follow in what is another trademark San
Francisco display of cultural activism, commemorating
May 1, Worker's Day. "This day is celebrated by workers
all over the world, except in America. But we, in San
Francisco, are the exception," says a Chilean-American
writer. May Day by the Bay is certainly not appropriate
viewing for running-dog lackeys of imperialism.
Afro-American icon Ishmail Reed raps on race relations,
Jewelle Gomez on Vietnam; Afghan-American Tamim Ansary
draws a striking parallel between the bazaars of
Peshawar and the vanishing American lower-middle class,
reduced to sub-proletarian status, spending their
nights, if they can afford it, in a cheap Motel 6.
Thirty local authors have three minutes each to deliver
their declarations against the "logic of rule". The aim
is "to forge a cultural declaration that speaks from the
heart of San Francisco. Our goal is to reinvent
history." Who could have organized this celebration but
City Lights?
City Lights Books, still on 261
Columbus Avenue, in the heart of "little old wooden
North Beach", in the words of Ferlinghetti, is the
embodiment of the beatific half-a-century history of the
beat generation, the head, heart and soul of literary
San Francisco. This cultural crossroads is also
geographically blessed. The back of City Lights faces
Chinatown - the embodiment of the future superpower -
while Columbus Avenue, or Corso Cristoforo Colombo, as
street signs in Italian-American North Beach proclaim
it, faces east, looking out on the far end of the West.
For a select few in the 1950s - poets,
visionaries, dreamers, wanderers, hobos - San Francisco
looked like the last frontier of some temporary lost
Atlantis risen from the sea: their Muse by the Pacific
represented the chance to escape from button-down
conformism, consumerism and a materialistic dead end.
Like Stone Age hippies, the beats then articulated all
the key themes of the 1960s counterculture: pacifism,
Buddhism, ecological consciousness, the
psychedelic-induced expansion of the mind and hedonistic
sex. Now, in an America soaked in hyper-materialism and
hyper-militarism, and with civil liberties under threat,
the addictive beat fix is more crucial than ever,
cloning itself in literature, poetry, cinema, theater,
music and politics.
Close 2 tha
edge San Francisco excels in combating weapons of
mass distraction with a sonically borderless dance
party. "We're close 2 tha edge," as a member of the
Quannum Projects puts it. Quannum Projects has its
headquarters on 5th Street - an independent label
concocting a panoply of styles: underground battle-rap,
afrofuturist hip-hop, hallucinogenic sampled
soundscapes, undiluted socially conscious cultural
criticism. On Illinois Street, the Beta lounge
collective keeps hurling the most incendiary beats all
over the Internet - from DJs in neighboring Oakland or
from beat intellectuals in Hamburg. Every hour or so
99.7 FM, KFRC, plays Edwin Starr's late-1960s hit "War"
("War/ war is good for/absolutely nothing").
At
the Neibaum Coppola Cafe, just two blocks away from City
Lights, amid photos of Oscar winner daughter Sofia
"Lost in Translation" Coppola and a perfect place
to sip the excellent Cabernet Special Reserve of Papa
"Apocalypse Now" Francis, the sound is early
1960s Brazilian bossa nova.
The transition is as
seamless as an ultralounge DJ mix from Mediterranean
North Beach to a Chinatown immersed in a gong hay fat
choy mood, still saluting the Year of the Monkey.
Not far from the bustling Peking Bazaar or the New
Shanghai Enterprises, where wise commercial mandarins
comment with awe on the new economic might of the Middle
Kingdom, Lim, a clever, creative, skillful monkey (born
1980), sipping a Tsing Tao at the Buddha Bar, talks
about Silicon Valley. Twenty percent of the jobs in high
tech have disappeared since 2001, though he managed to
keep his own. He's lived all his life in California - 38
percent of public-school children in San Francisco are
ethnic Chinese. He is a certified ABB (Anybody but
Bush). His motto is "Do no evil."
Only six
meters away from Lim there is a man crouching on the
sidewalk, the contemporary embodiment of Bob Dylan's
"Like a Rolling Stone". Beside him a cardboard sign
reads: "Have AIDS, hungry, homeless. God bless." His
name is Jim and he is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
American. There are 30,000 homeless and 1,000 evictions
a month in San Francisco - certainly nothing compared
with Jakarta, Karachi or Sao Paulo, but all the more
striking because it's happening in California, the
sixth-largest economy in the world, the wealthiest state
of the unique hyperpower. "The logic of the American way
is that if you fall, you go from Porsche owner to
homeless in a month," says Lim.
The Coalition on
Homelessness is trying to organize day laborers to stop
police from citing workers for waiting on a sidewalk for
work, and to establish a minimum wage on the street.
Many Americans don't know - the television networks
simply ignore the problem - that there is a National
Homeless Civil Rights Organizing Project. The Project
aims to fight against both the passage and enforcement
of anti-homeless laws, counter the violations of
homeless people's civil rights, design a national
public-education campaign and denounce the
criminalization of homelessness.
On the other
side of the spectrum - or specter - of homelessness,
there's Silicon Valley. Everyone is still talking about
Google's IPO (initial public offering). Like the
founders of Yahoo, Jerry Yang and David Filo, also
inventors of a technology that changed the world, Larry
Page, 31, and Sergey Brin, 30, founded Google in 1998
when they were still graduate students at Stanford. The
consensus among tech warriors is that Google did it on
its own terms ("Google is not a conventional company"),
not Wall Street's. Problem is, the Masters of the
Universe don't appreciate business as (un)usual. As Alan
Saracevic of the San Francisco Chronicle put it, "Wall
Street bankers like new ideas as much as they like an
Internal Revenue Service audit ... So here come Sergey
Brin and Larry Page, two guys from math-student central
casting, and they tell the suits how to take a tech
company public in a new way."
Steve Brody, a
marketing executive now creating a portal for Adobe,
does not cry for the death of dot-com mania, at a time
when US 101 to San Jose was always fender-to-fender,
including an army of Porsche 911s. Now no one would be
caught dead pronouncing the dreaded words "new economy".
But Brody heartily defends the Google IPO. In Google's
filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC), we read the extraordinary statement: "Don't be
evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will
be better served - as shareholders and in all other ways
- by a company that does good things for the world even
if we forgo some short-term gains." "Do no evil" - the
Google corporate motto - is pure Chinese philosophy.
Silicon Valley still leads the high-tech galaxy.
And that's where the money is - the crucial
venture-capitalism network. But the Bay Area is too
expensive. And the infrastructure is crumbling. The
result is one of the scarecrows of the 2004 election:
outsourcing - to Bangalore, Penang or Prague. Many
startups in Silicon Valley now make their decisions in
their California HQ, and do the engineering in southern
India.
What better place to check the
intersection of the bit world with the beat world than
at a Kraftwerk concert in San Francisco. What better
place to play for the four ubermenschen from
Dusseldorf, avatars of hip-hop and inventors of the
heavy, metallic, pure-electronic-precision 4/4 backbeat.
From "Autobahn" in the early 1970s to "Aerodynamik" in
2004, they have evolved their Man-Machine persona as a
metaphor for futurism now. It's "like a performance of
contemporary art", as an ecstatic tech-meets-music
concert-goer puts it. The audience is an inevitable
cross-section of Silicon Valley techno wizards and
post-hip-hop warriors consumed by weltschmerz.
Howling in the night San Francisco Bay
- a Valhalla of American activism - is booming ahead of
the November presidential election. The Creative
Philosophers Club celebrates "creativity, intelligence
and spirituality". The League of Pissed Off Voters is on
a mission "to engage pissed-off 17-35 year-olds in the
democratic process to build a progressive governing
majority in our lifetime". Code Pink (Women for Peace)
is working to "give [President George W] Bush a pink
slip". The Progressive Voter Project is standing up
"against big-money machine politics". Not in Our Name is
calling for "more than a million to protest when the
Bush team meets at the Republican Convention", from
August 29 to September 2.
In San Francisco,
where people - on a sunny day in Golden Gate Park -
still wear flowers in their hair, Iraq is
Vietnam, and prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib is seen as the
new My Lai. The American not-bound-by-Geneva-Convention
prison guards at the sprawling Baghdad prison, a former
Saddam Hussein mega-gulag, have been depicted around an
outraged Middle East as the Punishing Angels of
Occupation. "They are just plain criminals," say the
people at Black Oak Books. Every week the free,
indispensable San Francisco Bay Guardian publishes the
Iraq death toll.
At the legendary Tosca Cafe in
North Beach or in the Vietnamese restaurants in the
outer suburbs, the talk is of the accumulated lethal
incompetence of the Pentagon in Iraq - now, among other
developments, resorting to a former general of Saddam's
Republican Guard to "pacify" Fallujah. There's a sort of
consensus in San Francisco that the Pentagon cannot
subdue Fallujah and Najaf militarily; there's no
political support left except among the Kurds; the war
is unwinnable; and it can actually end up in total
political defeat.
Late at night, the Jack
Kerouac alley between City Lights and the rambling
Vesuvio Cafe is deserted, except for the odd shadow of a
hobo of the high-tech age. For half a century City
Lights has been a supreme symbol of the American spirit
of intellectual inquiry, fighting for the right to read,
think, write, debate and dissent, and always pursuing
the great American tradition of radical dissent embodied
by Sam Adams, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, James
Baldwin and Gore Vidal. In the words of Ferlinghetti,
"In a time when the dominant TV-driven consumer culture
would seem to result in the 'dumbing down' of America,
City Lights is a finger in the dike holding back the
flood of unknowing."
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote
that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of
mankind". Dedicated, hopeful voices in the warm San
Francisco nights refuse to stop howling, "angelheaded
hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to
the starry dynamo in the machinery of night", as
Ginsberg himself wrote in "Howl". Just like the teenage
poet Josh Begley, a member of Youth Speaks -
self-described as "one of the premier non-profit
presenters of the spoken word in America". He could be a
techno-geek making millions in neighboring Silicon
Valley; instead, he connects words in his lonely
bachelor's apartment. And Begley just can't stop
howling: "The Statue is sleeping. And her nightmare is
no longer a dream."
To read "Totalitarian
Democracy", a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, pleaseclick here.
(Copyright 2004
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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The new beat generation
