ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
City Beyond the Plain
By JOHN TAYLOR
M ALL, beautiful, rich girls from Vassar, with I the dew still clinging to their BAs, often select San Fancisco rather than New York City for their pre-marital hunting grounds. None of their friends are surprised, as they would be if the choice were anywhere between—Detroit, St. Louis, or even Chicago—for they suppose that San Francisco is a sort of eastern city on the west coast, more intimate than New York, more colourful than Boston. The trip is across the desert to the oasis at the other end. Waiting there, as the story goes, are a culture that pre-dates by a generation the post-war boom that has caused every large town in America to proclaim itself a `cultural centre,' a miraculous climate in which it is possible to wear one's new fall wardrobe, even the most elegant items, all year round, shops to replenish it, collectors of Orientalia, con- noisseurs, gourmets, a charming bohemia, a fine orchestra under Josef Krips, grand opera and a grande bourgeoisie, its patrons, of almost Milanese splendour, an international colony, and an international set. Our beauties arrive, take their picturesque flats, go to the opera, buy some jade, meet an Englishman along with the Ivy League boys, and discover, although the big- name bohemians have all gone to Los Angeles or Paris, a schoolmate wearing sandals, sun- glasses and a Mexican dress in the basement of the City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, foun- tain Arethuse of beat poetry. Perhaps the school- mate makes up for the fact that North Beach, old stamping-ground of Allen Ginsberg and company, is now best known for its expensive strip joints, in the most notorious of which Miss Carol Doda reveals to the visiting firemen a bosom whose impossible magnitude is attributed to silicone injections or, as they are otherwise called, 'interior falsies.'
If our girls have only arrived in the last few months they find no theatre to speak of, since the Actors' Workshop, the only resident com- pany of any merit and probably the best reper- tory company in America (a small claim), recently tired of playing to half-empty houses and allowed itself to be kidnapped by the. Lin- coln Centre in New York. But they come from a generation of cineastes anyway and, despite the belated hand-wringing going on around them, they adjust easily. Similarly, they find no museum
worth a second visit, but they discover Cost-Plus, an enormous discount house dealing chiefly in Oriental imports (nothing from mainland China) of every conceivable sort, from lovely Japanese screens to Victorian wickerwork bitd cages made in Hong Kong, where the prices are so cheap, the turnover so quick, and the buyers so unpre- dictable, that a monthly visit will come to seem an equally pleasant duty. The city, with its roller-coaster hills, queer houses and sublime bay, is the loveliest they will see till their next summer in Italy, and they meet many others like themselves. All in all, it is enough; they send the good word back east, and the myth of San Francisco is perpetuated.
But the elaborate cake has a hole in the middle: it is all spice and icing. America is too big and 'various to have national newspapers, so we are left, shame of the city, with our pathetic local ones, a fact New Yorkers correctly take
as evidence for a larger judgment. Just what San Francisco lacks, one of them told- me, is a substantial group of the sort of people who, in New York, read the New York Times. Since a west coast edition of the Times recently failed for lack of subscribers after a short trial run, she knew of what she spoke. That Sort of People, she implied, can be counted on for regular attendance at the concerts, museums and theatres. In London they would read the weeklies, though not the little magazines. Book reviewers in the Spectator would address them, hopefully, as `Serious General Reader.' No one doubts that the arts in San Francisco have their patrons, in boxes on opening night, their wild-eyed practi- tioners and partisans, and their butterflies. But, despite the munitions makers, advance guard and camp followers, our lack of a decent news- paper is one of several signs that we have no army. The camp followers, in their houses over- looking the Bay, with their solid-state stereos, paperbacks and driftwood, think they are the army and the advance guard is theirs. But it is all guerrilla warfare.
The guerrillas, appropriately enough, occupy the, surrounding hills, in Sausalito, Berkeley, where the bookshops stay open as late at night as the cafes and other enclaves around the Bay. What with the freeway and the bridges, they are no farther from San Fancisco than Hamp- stead is from the West End by tube. The whole Bay area has no weeklies or serious monthlies, but from the presses and mimeograph machines of these outposts come a swarm of little maga-- zines, most of them in the nature of one-sting manifestoes aimed at such conventional pieties as the narcotics laws, private property and the iambic line. Most of the poetry in them is a gesture of such mass and crudity or such Orien- tal indirection as to be unreadable, but some small proportion of it is excellent. Gary Snyder, the best poet of the lot and a very fine one, has recently returned from residence in a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, and tries to cap- ture in his poems, he says, the rhythms of the five-and-seven-character lines of Chinese verse, `which work like sharp blows on the mind.' We are a long way from England and Eng. Lit., and only in the English departments of the Bay area universities (the critical opinions of Sir
Philip Sidney are matters of serious controversy among the graduate students at Berkeley) are the old torches much burnt. Except for Thom Gunn, who lives here, contemporary British poets seem to be unread and virtually unheard
of. All the big book publishers arc in New York and Boston, but the local poets, by and large, find small local publishers for , their volumes;,
some of the books, with drawings by sympathetic local artists, are as beautiful as any modern books I have seen. There seems to be an inverse ratio between the beauty of the book and the quality of the verse.
There are many painters and sculptors in the Bay area and in colonies up and down the coast,, some of them good ones, and several galleries, but' none of the sort of public excite- ment generated, in New York, by pop and op.
The last real event on the visual art scene took place a year ago, when the San Francisco police closed the Vorpal Gallery during a showing of Ron Boise's spirited and explicit junk-sculpture scenes from the Kama Sutra. Leaving aside the films, we seem to be more listeners than viewers here, partly because the guerrillas have their own radio station, KPFA in Berkeley. Constantly in debt, constantly in danger of losing its broad- casting licence because of the radicalism of some of its political commentators (the John Birch Society is said to have members, with their tape' recorders ready, listening-in around the clock), it is the Phoenix of the area. Between harsh, aggressive-defensive demands for more moneY from its invisible audience, whose 8,000 sub- scriptions are its only source of funds, and who constantly succumb to the temptation to listen without paying, it broadcasts plays, excellent jazz, thorough, first-rate reviews of the arts, poetry readings and contemporary music. Last month there were interviews with Jean Renoir and LeRoi Jones. A KPFA reporter sat in with the Berkeley students in Sproul Hall, the univer- sity administration building they captured last December, and broadcast the arrests, although the press were barred. Somehow KPFA obtained recordings of the old Goon Show, and they plaY them, by popular demand, over and over again.
And so it goes. The Royal Ballet arrived in San Francisco a short while ago, and because of a cunning reticence about which evenings Fonteyn and Nureyev would, dance, the whole run was sold out in advance; but a travelling company scheduled to arrive a week later with The Knack threatened not to come unless there were more advance sales. In Sausalito, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, with a mixed black and white cast all in powder-blue tailcoats and black-face make-up, are performing an Anti- Minstrel Show. KPFA has just staged a concert devoted to a single, three-hour composition M. John Cage, at which the musical `instruments surrounded the audience, and you received a chair at the door along with instructions to place it in the path of any sound wave that suited you. At The Cinema in Berkeley, Inagakis Chushingura, a wonderful three-and-a-half-hour film version of Japan's national epic, is return- ing after a brief interruption in its ten-month run forced by a contingent of student pickets who, presumably, had already seen it. The local wine starts at $1.20 a gallon, and Los Angeles. sprawling southward, is a perpetual reminder of how much worse things could be. All in all, it is enough.
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