Tag: History

Notes from a Reading Woman on Inauguration Day

We can study the past but about the present there are times when we can only state our hope and our faith.

  • John Dos Passos, “The Use of the Past” in The Ground We Stand On (1941)

I didn’t watch the inauguration of our 47th president today, nor have I been online at all except to share my brief thoughts on a fabulous book that advocates for the broader use of oral history by architectural historians from a fourth wave feminist perspective. (Neither here nor there here, but it’s called Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research edited by Jannina Gosseye, Naomi Stead, and Deborah van der Plaat and everyone should buy and read it right away). That should give you an idea about where I land on the political spectrum, but perhaps I can elaborate a little bit more.

I was raised Southern California Republican but have never really voted that way. I was briefly registered as an Independent while taking a couple years off of college to “find myself,” but never really voted that way either. I am currently a registered Democrat because it feels like I have to pick one, but I often don’t strictly vote the way a party faithful would appreciate. I can’t say with confidence what I am politically, but I can say with complete confidence that I am, through and through, an American—one who has studied American history and who still reads widely about how Americans feel about being American. I like learning about the past, it gives me context for the present and helps me feel less alone. This form of civic religion has helped me find meaning in…well…just about everything I encounter, but especially in times of transition as inauguration days always are in the best of times and in the worst of times.

So, I hit the books today. One of my new year’s resolutions, aside from miraculously becoming a gym person, is to read more widely and more deeply and to write about it. This is Joan Didion’s fault, as you would imagine if you ever met me and especially if you saw my mother. In a 1976 essay titled “Why I Write” originally published in the New York Times Book Review, she said “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” I, too, figure out what I’m thinking by writing, generally after reading and having longwinded discussions with myself in the shower. I finished out 2024 by finishing an epic look at how we think of ourselves as Americans by Michael Kammen called Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. The book’s title comes from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861, which included the following excerpt:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ it.

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angles of our nature.

Words to hold onto on this, an official holiday to remember the life and sacrifice of Martin Luther King, Jr. which is also the same day we inaugurated our 47th president who was also our 45th president. Lincoln might be the president everyone can get behind, unless you’re still a fervent believer in The Lost Cause and I do believe there are some holdouts down there in ye olde South. My personal favorite is Teddy Roosevelt, although he’s certainly not without his problems, but that’s probably best left for a future post. In any event…

I spent the last day of the 2024 fully enrapt by Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour translated by Emilie Moorhouse. Mansour described poetry as “a scream,” and that is exactly the kind of energy I find useful now, in a new year with new horizons and this shifting terrain. I began 2025 with Sarah Lewis’s The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, which undid me in so many ways and reenergized me, encouraged me to keep looking for connecting threads between unlikely things and weaving them together in ways that find relevance in the present. Reading the work of these women has been incredibly fortifying. There are other people out there who are not like me but are just like me. Onward.

In my active reading pile, I’m working through Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders edited by David B. Allison, which is a little repetitive but has some great takeaways, and Vandover and the Brute by Frank Norris, a fictionalized romp through 1890s San Francisco that does not turn out well; a couple of work reads. Where I go next is still up in the air. Maybe Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz, a Christmas gift from my husband (who has been absolutely on fire in terms of gifting books that change my life) or The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking by Hanneke Grootenboer. I picked up the Grootenboer book from City Lights Bookstore during a staycation day where we wandered around North Beach without agenda. It was the same day I also brought home Kammen and Mansour, a day that will live in infamy, if you will.

While I wait for the next book to pick me, because isn’t that the way it always happens? You buy them, you stash them on a shelf for days, months, sometimes years, and then these books, they find you whenever you’re meant to read them. Anyway, while I wait for the next one to reach out and grab me, I picked up a very old John Dos Passos that came home with me on one of my many Friends of the San Francisco Public Library hauls. In 1941, as American thinkers grappled with the failures of World War I and the legacies of our Founding Fathers in the same year that the United States finally formally entered World War II, John Dos Passos began his book The Ground We Stand On with an essay titled “The Use of the Past.” While this book has an “I drank the koolaid” tinge to it and is overtly chauvinistic (to use a word adored by Kammen), as many patriotic midcentury excursions into Jeffersonian democratic legacies do, I found parts of the introductory essay so very relevant to today. Charming, is it not, since it sought to explain how the 1770s could help his readers understand the 1940s? Here are some extended excerpts that resonated with me today, the day we inaugurated our next president.

EVERY generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today. We need to know what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on. In spite of changing conditions of life they were not very different from ourselves, their thoughts were the grandfathers of our thoughts, they managed to meet situations as difficult as those we have to face, to meet them sometimes lightheartedly, and in some measure to make their hopes prevail. We need to know how they did it.

In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking. This is why, in times like ours, when old institutions not necessarily in accord with most men’s preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards.

In spite of the ritual invocation of the names of the Founding Fathers round election time, Americans as a people notably lack a sense of history…We have wasted and exploited our political heritage with the same childish lack of foresight that has wrecked our forests and eroded our farmlands and ruined the grazing on the great plains. Now that we are caught up short at the edge of the precipice, face to face with the crowded servitude from which our fathers fled to a new world, the question is how much is left; how much of their past achievement is still part of our lives? It is not a question of what we want; it is a question of what is. Our history, the successes and failures of the men who went before us, is only alive in so far as some seeds and shoots of it are still stirring and growing in us today.

The Americans of our time who have put their minds to work in this direction have come late, on the whole, to understanding the actuality of the American past. They had to get a lot of callow debunking off their chests first. Right from the beginning the line of American thinking has been twisted off the straight course by periods of backsliding…

…Election time and the Fourth of July they saw the old bunting brought out and tacked on the political booths the politicians operated with the open and cynical geniality of gamblers getting their shell-games and three-card tricks ready for the yokels at a country fair. It was inevitable that the first impulse of any fresh young intelligence was to throw the whole business overboard lock stock and barrel.

…

While we can’t get away from the fact that most everybody in the world today believes in his heart that life is more worth living for the average man in North America than anywhere else, we still don’t feel secure. Indeed we feel we lack that minimum of security necessary to keep a human institution a going concern. Too many Americans have let in among their basic and secret beliefs the sour postulate that American democracy is rotten. In spite of the ritual phases and the campaign slogans out of our national folklore, like the frogs in Aesop’s fable, many of us are croaking that we are sick of King Log and that we want to be ruled by King Stork…It won’t matter what name we call King Stork by, if we let him in he’ll eat us up just the same. Under the verbal pieties of democratic phraseology the state of. Mind of a good deal of the country is summed up by a man I heard cap a long irate political argument by shouting: ‘This man Roosevelt’s got too much power; what we need’s a dictator.’

How are these doubts answered? I myself believe that we are going to stick to our old King Log, that our peculiar institutions have a future, and that this country is getting to be a better place for men to live in instead of worse; but unfortunately just putting the statement down on paper does not make it true….How are going to reassure the great mob of secret subjects of King Stork? Are we sure that King Log isn’t as rotten as they say?

The answer is not in speeches or in popular songs, but in the nature of our political habits….[Americans] are heirs to the largest heritage of the habits and traditions and skills of selfgovernment [sic] there has ever been in the world. Politics is our whole history. If we fail to cope with the problem of adjusting the industrial machine to human needs it won’t be for lack of the political tradition.

By politics I mean simply the art of inducing people to behave in groups with a minimum of force and bloodshed. That was the purpose of the tribal traditions on which our Common Law is based: the patching up of private and public rows without violence by the opinion of a jury or the county of heads at a meeting.

Under the stresses of the last years we have seen nation after nation sink to its lowest common denominator…The question we have to face is: What is the content of our lowest common denominator?

If, in the bedrock habits of Americans, the selfgoverning tradition is dead or has been too much diluted by the demands of the industrial setup or the diverse habits of the stream of newcomers…, no amount of speechifying of politicians or of breastbeating by men of letters will bring it back to life…

What we can do is give that cantilever bridge into the future that we call hope a firm foundation in wehat has been. We can, without adding to the cloudy masses of unattached verbiage that makes any present moment in political life so difficult to see clear in, at least point out that, so far in our history, the habits of selfgovernment and the use of the art of politics towards increasing rather than decreasing the stature of each individual man, have survived.

Often its been nip and tuck. Our history has been a contest between the selfgoverning habits of the mass and various special groups that have sought to dominate it for their own purposes. So long as that contest continues the nation will remain a growing organism.

On the whole the struggle has been carried on thus far without destroying the fabric of society. In any cross section of our history you can find the political instinct running a binding thread through the welter of interests, inertias, impulses, greeds, fears, and heroisms that make up any event…

When we wake up in the night cold and sweating with nightmare fear for the future of our country we can settle back with the reassuring thought that…It is fairly easy to demonstrate that uncontrolled government of monopolized industry by irresponsible men is headed for ruin, and that that ruin might carry a good deal of the social fabric down with it; but it doesn’t follow that the selfgoverning republic, as a method of enabling people to live together in groups without conking each other on the head every minute, would necessarily go by the board too.

If all the monopolies folded up over night, or if their bosses converged on Washington and seized the government…the next morning we sould still face the problem of politics. Would the men who held power want to induce the others to behave in groups with a minimum rather than a maximum expenditure of force? At the minimum end of the scale would still be selfgovernment and the need to argue, cajole, and bribe their fellowcitizens into doing what they wanted them to…

…the continuance of selfgovernment will always depend on how much the people who exercise that liberty will be willing to sacrifice to retain it. A man in power will push his subjects around just as much as they’ll let him. But even in a riot the members of the mob and the members of the police force will behave as they have been brought up to behave.

We must never forget that men don’t make up much of their own behavior: they behave within limits laid down by their upbringing and group background. That is why individual men feel so helpless in the face of social changes. Modifications in the structure of any organization of men can’t ever really take effect till the next generation. A revolution can keep people from behaving in the old way but it can’t make them behave effectively in the new way. That is why a political system elastic enough to allow drastic changes inside of its fabric is one of the greatest boons any people can possess. Our occasionally selfgoverning republic has proved itself capable of bending without breaking under the terrific strains of the last ten years. The question is whether there is enough will to freedom in the country to make it keep on working. Social machinery, no matter how traditional, left to itself runs down; men have to work it.

Our history is full of answers to the question: How shall we make selfgovernment work? People like ourselves have been making it work with more or less success for centuries. And history is only dead when people think of the present in terms of the past instead of the other way around. The minute we get the idea that the records can be of use to us now, they become alive. They become the basis of a worldpicture into which we can fit our present lives, however painful they may be, and our hopes for the future…

…

In spite of the immense increase in complexity of organization, our problem is not so very different now: again in order to survive in a warring and hostile world we have to induce the weak and the powerful of all sections of our population to drop prejudices and bigotries and to pool their efforts in the common cause…In some ways the problem is more difficult, in some ways easier. What we must have in order to tackle it is…besides the selfgoverning habit: the will.

But will and energy cannot be directed without an aim…

…Our time has in common with theirs the many revolt that is behind the labor movement, the fanaticism of the Marxist and nationalist cults and the sullen hatred that people of property and privilege, who fear that everything they own is slipping out from under their feet, feel towards people without property…We too have seen men and women dying for righteousness’ sake. As they did, we live in a time of danger when life is cheap. Then as now a man who writes has to weigh his words. They had to train themselves not to be afraid of the scaffold and the brandingiron…The men of those times lived through and brought through with them the bundle of notions that is the culture of the western world; what has been done once can be done again.

…

The side they fought and worked and lived for hasn’t won by a long shot. Perhaps it never can win. But to let the other side win we know means death. It has been the struggle between privileged men who have managed to get hold of the levers of power and the people in general with their vague and changing aspirations for equality, for justice, for some kind of gentler brotherhood and peace, which has kept that balance of forces we call our system of government in equilibrium. Sometimes one scale is up and sometimes another. Sometimes the conflict is acute and at other times barely visible under the prosperous surface of eras of good feeling. Now that we feel that the struggle is harp and violent, waged in the difficult and unfamiliar terrain of a new system of production, when we rack our brains for hope and understanding for the future, it does us good, I think, to remind ourselves that in spite of hell and high water men in the past managed to live for and to establish some few liberties.

These are just the bits that jumped out at me and, while I have thoughts about them all, I think I’ll just let them speak for themselves.

One thing I will say, however, is that I kept pushing aside a mental image of Tim Gunn from Project Runway saying “Make it work!” the entire time I read this essay. (I sincerely hope someone is using the internet to sell us “Americans, making it work since 1776” bumper stickers. If not, I hereby grant the three people reading this post permission to make these and sell them on Etsy just…please…send me one if you do.) The thing about living in a Democracy is that we always get what we deserve, even if our individual votes don’t seem to count, because we the people elect a president as a single body. It’s a flawed system—always has been, always will be—but, when it works, the freedom inherent in this system is a thing of beauty. I think John Dos Passos is asking us to have the courage to be hopeful when it isn’t working properly, or the way we want it to, and is encouraging us to stay vigilant, to do the work that will see this gamble of selfgovernance  through to the next hand. And if we can survive the Civil War as a country, theoretically, the country can survive this uniquely violent era in American history, as well. Right?

This is not a thoroughly researched essay on the subject of American governance. Hell, it’s not even one I spent more than a few hours on today, on this day that is inaguration day but is also a holiday that celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. I’m just writing to work through how I feel about things because Joan Didion gave me permission to, and because I’m trying to write more and share what I’m reading. So, you know, how do we appeal to the better angels of our nature in the modern era, how do we find the things we have in common as a country? I think…stay with me here…comedians might show us the way. Over the holidays, my husband and I watched CNN’s History of the Sitcom, which highlighted how the genre tackled heavy subjects that were polarizing the country like women’s rights, gay rights, and civil rights. If you can make people laugh, you allow them to relax, and when people relax, they can listen better and hopefully better understand something that is challenging for them. Comedy is the valve that releases the pressure.

In this spirit, I want to share Dave Chappelle’s SNL monologue that just aired on Saturday, January 18th. It’s 17 minutes long but I hope you’ll stick through the LA wildfire and Puffy jokes to hear him share a story about meeting former President Jimmy Carter in the Middle East, and end with a heartfelt plea to us as Americans. It made me, a woman who has read widely about what it means to be an American, cry. I hope it resonates with you too.

Relevant To My Interests #1

Without the attention span needed for well-crafted, long-form writing right now, I’m trying to do quick roundups of things that catch my attention. So here you have it, the first edition of what may be regular hot takes on things that are Relevant to My Interests.

Streaming. It took me awhile but I am now fully here for The Bear. So here for it that I blew through both seasons in a few short days. Every single character is written so well, it’s impossible not to love them all even when they dysfunctionally fail us at times. Want to best friends with Ayo Edebiri now, and, of course have a big ‘ole crush on Jeremy Allen White in all his young Gene Wilder glory. Plus, soundtrack on point. So many old favorites (Kevin Morby, Pearl Jam, Van Morrison, David Byrne, Radiohead, Andrew Bird, on and on) as well as solid new-to-me’s in the middle.

Eating/Drinking. A midweek meeting had me at Spec’s chatting with the bar’s owner, Maralisa, and longtime bartender, Mike, about history and other sorts of things in preparation for WNP’s second neighborhood trivia night with Fort Point Beer Co. on August 1st. Spec’s is central to my identity. I spent most of my 20s trying to understand my 20s in this bar. They have fancy natural wines now but I’m still partial to the house Cab or a Rye Whiskey. Afterwards, a group of us history gals met for dinner at Sam’s Grill for some solid Clam Chowder and Stuffed Petrale Sole “Marguery,” which is basically a seafood Turducken. We capped of our night in a very Wednesday-night-empty Pagan Idol. Downtown San Francisco is very different now but it most definitely still has its charms.

Wanted to watch the newest season of Endeavour so bad that I paid my boyfriend $8 for the pleasure of watching it via his Amazon Prime account. Only three episodes this season and I have a feeling Morse and Joan aren’t gonna get it together, but Shaun Evans has a great directorial eye and, again, soundtrack on point. Puccini, Verdi, Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff….gangs all here. If you’ve been wanting to get into classical and opera but don’t know where to start, now you do!

You know what really holds up? Castle. Nathan Filion is a national treasure and this is good clean primetime murder comedy fun. Fun that, so far, doesn’t have the cringey aftertaste that can linger after watching some beloved beforetimes shows. And please, let us all stand for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We are now 16 ridiculous seasons in and I love it as much now as I did in 2005. Charlie Day forever. These are my sleepytime shows, lighthearted fare that I use when I’m not awake enough to read but not quite tired enough to go under naturally.

Reading. Tackling California, a Slave State by Jean Pfaelzer in preparation for a California Historical Society (CHS) virtual presentation I’ll be moderating on July 11th. The last book I read that rewrote my entire understanding of history like this was Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States. Before that? Probably Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Not an easy read but, also, it shouldn’t be. A chapter on Spanish priests raping native women as a tool of conquest, another on enslaved African Americans fleeing to freedom in California only to find bondage by a different name here, another on the privatized prisons and extorted prison labor dating back to the 1850s. We’re a long way from the Gold Rush but have we really come that far? I don’t know. A particularly meaningful read in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions this week. I’m not sure where this country is going and, as it turns out, I still have a lot to learn about where it’s been despite working as an historian and archivist for almost 20 years.

Otherwise, am totally obsessed with Adam Frank’s recent article “Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries” for The Atlantic. The Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves thinks we’ve located a cosmic background of ripples in time-space, which means waves from the birth of the universe are echoing back to us. Time is, in fact, not linear and we are, in-fact, on the same wavelength as our ancestors. As Frank writes, “All of a sudden, we know that we are humming in tune with the entire universe, that each of us contains the signature of everything that has ever been.” In other words: everything, everywhere, all at once. I don’t want to say I told you so but also…I told you so. Can’t wait to pick up Leonard Shlain’s masterful Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light back up when I’m done with my CHS homework to explore the origins of all this further.

One final mention for “Pasolini on Caravaggio’s Artificial Light” that was just published in The Paris Review. Pier Paolo Pasolini is one of my favorite poets. An Italian intellectual who did all the things as a novelist, journalist, filmmaker, playwright, actor, visual artist and who died way too early. Chasing, understanding, capturing, and harnessing light is a multi-genre pursuit, inherent in all great works of art, science, and math (see Shlain above). But, simply put, we need light to see. To me, Pasolini is one of the best at describing what he sees and both artists are incredible at showing us things we normally miss in the shadows.

Learning. As they say, I was today years old when I learned that Love Letters, a WRDSMTH print I fell in love with purchased a few years back, is drawn from an iconic photograph called Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville or The Kiss by the Hotel de Ville Robert Doisneau. I have always loved this photo but had never taken the time to understand it. Now I understand both works better.

Thanks to comped NightLife tickets, we got a very entertaining and informative history of the California Academy of Sciences from VERA! during Drag Story Hour. I’m a sucker for existential philosophy jokes and they served and a Hegel and a Kant quip. *heart explodes* But the main event was a panel discussion that made space for badass women in STEM: Dr. Amy Fiedler, a cardiac surgeon and member of the first all-woman heart transplant team; astrophysicist Dr. Nia Imara; Dr. Alex Hanna, director of research for the Distributed AI Research Institute; and my newest professional friend, Cal Academy’s Head Librarian Rebekah Kim were all part of this amazing lineup of inspiring women. Personally, I could have done without the comedian who moderated this panel and made a wild decision to open a discussion on patriarchy with a dick joke, but maybe that’s just me. Also, I’d like to point out that all four panelists spent much of their time talking about the importance of history in their work. So, maybe it’s time we stopped funneling funding in STEM separate from art and history? Just saying…it’s frustrating to be at events where people primarily discuss history but nobody talks about history.

Listening. Albums I’ve returned to on repeat during my walks to work this week are as follows in no particular order: Sonora by Joel P. West; I Love You, Honeybear by Father John Misty; Sun by Cat Power; Young Man in America by Anais Mitchell; Pacific by Roo Panes; New Mythology by Nick Mulvey; and (the real curveball in this mix) Life After Death by The Notorious B.I.G.

Daily Dose: Punch Brothers, “Pride of Man”

Studying history, I’m constantly amazed how the hubris of humankind brings our species to its knees time and time again. Even if it also makes sense when you think about how often we as individuals muck things up. But people pick themselves out of the dust and drag it, our species, forward: after war, after famine, after depressions recessions and other races we do not win.

I’m not sure sure about this round, though. Ukraine. One/Six Committee. Supreme Court. Inflation. Homelessness. Inevitably, someone in my circle will reference the Fall of Rome in discussions of current events like these. Historians always gotta History and this is our version of someone yelling “Mooooo” in a crowd exiting a concert.

But maybe this is how it felt in 1942 when the world was at war and everything was rationed and nothing made sense. I used to think it was some sort of inherent ability to hope for better that allowed folks to keep calm and carry on, an internal compass that believed things had to improve. But now I think it might just be resignation and an ability to adapt. Today is worse than yesterday but I’m still alive and standing firm on my plot of metaphorical land. And I guess that’s the American way, to defend your property against all odds.

The Doors at 50: On the Source of Morrison’s Swagger

50 years ago, The Doors were touring in support of the eponymous album that cemented their position amongst rock royalty. The band’s charismatic frontman, Jim Morrison, was undeniably talented and salaciously unpredictable with sex appeal that translated well beyond his early demise. I was so enthralled with him as a pubescent teen that I hung a gigantic charcoal portrait of the lizard king above my bed. He seemed so serpentine and cool, an erratic artist singularly dedicated to the chaos of craft. Oh, how that attraction foreshadowed so many of my adult choices.

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Jim Morrison by Joel Brodsky from the 1967 series that would give The Doors its iconic album art.

As we, residents of the future, well know that chaos drove him to an early grave yet Jim Morrison is still one of the most recognizable musicians in the world. The Doors made great music that epitomized their era–an era that people love to remember–and Morrison made for quite the photogenic sixties poster child. But the truth is that History remembers zealots best, not necessarily the best in any chose field, because zealots have a higher tendency to burn brightest just before they burn out and everyone remembers an explosion.

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The cool thing about being a student and chronicler of History is getting to re-examine things you’ve always loved under a new lens. Over the last six months, I’ve been curating and creating digital content for the California History Society’s commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love. CHS just rolled out a special website last month in partnership with San Francisco Travel, and this is by far and away the most relevant, trippy, mind-blowing historical commemorative in which I’ve ever had the pleasure to participate. One series of articles I’ve been working on is titled “Who Saw the Summer of Love,” and it seeks to dispel the misunderstanding that San Francisco was inundated by a cohesive hoard of hippies; in fact, there were many different groups with their own, sometimes competing and often paralleling, agendas. There were political activists, psychedelic artists, rock and rollers, Hells Angels outlaws, environmentalists, communally conscious merchants and anarchists, and more.

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Jim Morrison, followed by girlfriend Pam, follows Michael McClure around 1969.

In researching a forthcoming article on the Beat poets that formed a bridge between 1950s bohemianism and 1960s counterculture, I learned something about Jim Morrison that I never saw coming. Jim Morrison learned how to be cool from celebrated Beat poet Michael McClure. McClure was probably a large reason why The Doors attended the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967–the event that set the tone for 1967, and directly led to the Summer of Love. He also encouraged Morrison’s poetry, and even got it published. And if the picture above doesn’t prove to you that Morrison absorbed McClure’s cool, then the photograph below should do it. This shows McClure standing next to Bob Dylan, with Beat messiah Allen Ginsberg to Dylan’s left, outside City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach. Bob Dylan rightfully worshipped the Beats as the elder statesmen of cool, and he emulated their phonetic cadences in song and their style of dress. He’s also the one who staged this photo shoot, hoping to use it as an album cover. While Ginsberg followed Dylan around like a puppy–a puppy hoping to get laid–McClure kept his cool and that dynamic can totally be read in this legendary snapshot.

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Photo by Larry Keenan. McClure, Dylan and Ginsberg outside City Lights Bookstore, 1966.

In November of last year I had the honor of hearing McClure read from a new volume of his poetry, Mephistos and Other Poems, at City Lights Books. He’s in his 80s now and age is most definitely taking its toll. He walked with a cane and the help of his people, and I’m not so sure it registered when I told him he is one of the greatest influences on my life–that he is the reason this San Francisco historian traveled north to become a San Franciscan. However, he was 100% McClure when reading his own poems: cool, calm, effortlessly suave and sensual as only a poet can be. Gives a girl hope for the future of her mind. And as I looked around the audience that night, I caught the eye of a handsome young fellow wearing a shearling-lined denim jacket and an old fisherman’s cap who stood above a sea of graying spectacles.

Gives a girl hope for the future of her generation.

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Michael McClure reading from Mephistos and Other Poems, November 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

The Black Angels Source

Every time I listen to The Black Angels I immediately think of that scene in Apocalypse Now where Willard stares at the ceiling fan and we instantly know it’s a metaphor for helicopter blades, because it always is when talking about Nam. I blame my Undergrad thesis for this.

I was majoring in History, emphasis in 20th-century American, when the new millenium began. While I don’t regret choosing this major, I eventually took issue with the way history is traditionally studied, which is restrictive as opposed to the way students within the Humanities analyze the cause and effect of the world as it’s been given. Hindsight is 20/20. Which brings me back to my thesis and it’s failure.

Well, not failure: I swung a B+, but until that point I had only ever aced papers. You see, I couldn’t restrain myself to mere historical interpretation; I had to explore the Vietnam War in relation to the cultural. This, I believe, is the only responsible way to weigh the scope of history. Studying the historical narrative using only dates and broadly defined movements is insufficient if you cannot view it through a cultural lens. For example, Jackson Pollock’s seemingly incoherent No. 5 or William S. Burroughs’ brazen Naked Lunch speak with more immediacy of a postwar generation attempting to redefine its worldview than consumer trending or presidential elections.  This is not to say the cultural is raised above the historical in importance, they are symbiotic; one cannot exist without the other.

With this in mind, my thesis attempted to explain the impact of the Vietnam War through an analysis of music made both during the conflict and in the years that followed as a way of explaining the lasting effects it had on not just one American generation but on MANY generations to come, generations that had no direct link to the event except to its fallout. Naturally, The Black Angels album Passover was the lynchpin of my argument. I even played the song Young Men Dead during my thesis presentation, which served two purposes: it illustrated my hypothesis in a stimulating way, and shortened the amount of time I had to speak in front of the class. I hate public speaking; I sweat and say inappropriate things when I’m nervous, and public speaking makes me very, very nervous. Although this paper was good, my arguments sound, it did not stay within the confines of traditional historiography: it was a Humanities paper. My professor did not consider Passover a source document, and I did; this is a valid difference of opinion.

If you read this blog regularly (fat chance) you’ll see that I continue to understand American history in the context of music because these are the two great loves of my life. Plus, it makes sense. History is the study of interacting civilizations, which, by definition, are groups of people who have attained a heightened level of cultural and technological development, and feel the need to document their accomplishments through the written word and the maintenance of records. Think of the Romans or Greece, think of the Japanese, think of England. To be civilized is to exude the characteristics of a state of civilization, mainly taste, refinement or restraint–all three of which are vital to the artistic process. Art is created when we fragile beings internalize our surroundings, digest their significance, and give them meaning by reformatting our conclusions in a physical way, manifesting as a movie, a song, a dress, a novel, a photograph, a sculpture, an oil painting, and so on. Since history is an amalgamation of decisions made by people, it’s logical to study it from personal perspectives.

Art, by its very nature, is more emotive than battle plans or congressional hearings. Art exists because we synthesize our surroundings and our surroundings synthesize us; it grabs us, it wants us, it needs us. We emotionally invest in the things to which we can relate, and we relate to things we think pertain to us because vanity is a very real thing. Pertinence happens when something is multilayered and offers the simplistic along with the profound; this is the key to engaging people in the study of history. Using a song by a contemporary band like The Black Angels, who you can see at The Fillmore tonight (5/17/2013), was a way to unconsciously draw my audience into the connectivity of history. Some may have walked away from my presentation liking the music, and may have downloaded it later that night. Hopefully I had planted a seed that perhaps, for a few, precipitated an investigation into the legacy of the music–how it related to the present because it was rooted to the past. It was a devious way of immersing them in the ongoing historical narrative.

Passover could have been released in 1969 just as easily as it was in 2006, the War in Iraq draws certain comparisons with the War in Vietnam, and what does that say about the continuity of history and the relevance of art? Go to The Fillmore tonight and find out for yourselves.

For more commentary on this topic, read these older posts: The Black Angels, Young Men Dead and Not So Tame Impala.

Diary of Lois Elaine Jelin: Entry Thirteen

Entry Thirteen

Monday Sat., January 13                             Weather marked as Clear, and annotated Windy.

Dear Diary,

Mommie & me went downtown today. I got my whole outfit. I got a tangerine Dress, a topper, a purse, shoes, hat, a sweater set, & a blouse. Man what a day. I also slept over Jeanies. Jean’s feet were extremely cold tonight. Burr.

Dark Dark Dark, “Daydreaming”

We are consumed by a treasure hunt of unparalleled proportions on an island that has no name. This is the search for meaning, the journey towards a definition. This is life. The little things, the tragic things.

The sticker on the corner of a medicine cabinet mirror, left there by the daughter of a previous occupant and now a part of your morning narrative. The glasses worn by a woman of Italian heritage, removed from the bridge of her nose by death and sold for a pittance from her garage, now worn proudly by a young man more than half her age to that indie show headlined by that band (you know, the one with the lithe bearded gent at the helm) in a small basement around the corner from a former firehouse. The piano, a wedding present to that bride who secretly despised her groom, now spreading the gospel of tolerance and devotion to hundreds of bodies placed piously in their pews.

These are lives overlapping. The past marking the present as it gets passed by for the future. Nothing without meaning, even if the words have not been said and understood. Every anomaly not really out of place, but merely misunderstood. Layers are interwoven atop foundations poured by people framed in frozen photographs hidden in a drawer. Or maybe, if they’re lucky, gathering dust near the edge of a nightstand. Still remembered, still present.

This is history. Not an archaic subject caked in dust and mummified by dates to be memorized, unanalyzed. History is the story of people chasing dreams, or of dreams chasing people; of stickers, glasses, and pianos; of ephemera, sights and sounds.

History is meaningful. History is you and me, and all the other things I see. History Is.