The Problem With Haight Ashbury

Last weekend I went to visit Haight Ashbury for the first time and was shocked by what I saw.

So, Haight Ashbury is supposed to be one of the hearts of the hippie movement. It has so much rich history and deep political and social roots in the summer of love. But what happened?

All I saw when I was there was smoke shops and tie dye t-shirts. One homeless man asked me "hey do you need some dank dank," a hand outreached with a mason jar full of weed. What the hell. Outside of Ben and Jerry's there is a fake Haight Ashbury sign that tourists were selfies with, Cherry Garcia cone cameo of course. There was also a remarkable number of Tibetian and Napali stores. OKAY NO BUT SINCE WHEN ARE TIBETAN SKIRTS HIPPIE? Am I missing something? Please correct me if I am. It was block after block of people just trying to make a buck. Or tourists walking out of a smoke shop with a way overpriced bong with a Haight Ashbury sticker on it. I think we talked a little bit about this in class a while back when talking about Reclaiming San Fransisco.

Does anything else feel like this about anywhere else? I know I read a blog post a while back about Kerouac alley being a bit of a let down. It's pretty depressing, but I suppose times change. But then that makes me think, where did all of the real hippies go? Are they in hiding? Where did all of this tye die come from?

Poetry or Poltics

It's fair to say that when people think of social (even radical social) change, poetry isn't the first thing that comes to mind. The idea that we can change the world through poetry isn't heavily used, or really used at all, when it comes to social change.

After reading another post on An Army of Lovers, I was left with this idea that in order to overthrow the government, defeat capitalism, we must first fall in love and be together with one another, with out community. Is that possible? Maybe not but it's a good start.

In “A Pic­turesque Story About the Bor­der Between Two Cities,” Demented Panda and Koki spend their time sit­ting surrounded by trains and cars and trying to think of a way that a poem would do something, anything, to make any change at all in society. It seems that the poem is doomed from the beginning, until the very end of the story when the story pits destruction and creativity against each other and again, suggests that poetry and the political struggle are interrelated.

The stories themselves, to me anyways, seem to go around and around in this never ending circle of writing"mediocre" poems and really not getting much done at all. It is kind of ironic. The entire book seems to ask the question is it worth getting up and actually doing something joining in the struggle against politics and capitalism, or is it better to stay, lay on our mats and make poems?

The changing aesthetics from beat culture to hippie culture

here

there

The "here & there" between the 1950's and the 1960's in San Francisco entered a void that sucked beatnik culture in one end and spat hippie culture out the other. We know the surface level differences of these two somewhat distinct movements: beats are beat down, humble, political – hippies are energetic, colorful, humorous, freely loving. Many similarities exist between the two cultures, but aesthetically, what happened in this shift?

First, I think of the bebop jazz sounds of the 1950's music fading into the Grateful Dead-dominated jamband craze of the hippie culture. What happened to the hip sports coats and top hats – where did the tie dye shirts and patchouli come in? When did trumpet solos become rock guitar?

I think the popularization of LSD had a lot to do with this aesthetic shift. The beats were experimenting with psychedelics, but in a more intellectual and controlled way. Kerouac and Ginsberg wrote about their experiences with mescaline, Alan Watts and Ram Das gave well-though-out lectures on the effects of psychedelics on the human consciousness. And then, in the 1960's Owlsley and the Grateful Dead culture made LSD free-flowing and widely available. Sitting on straw mats sipping tea and reading books became basking in meadows tripping on LSD. The music became more frantic, the sights became more colorful. The Grateful Dead sparked something that was fun-loving, not beat down. I think of the Further bus and the Band of Merry Pranksters, banging cymbals, tapping tambourines, drinking unknown doses of acid out of water bottles. The aesthetic shift between the beats and hippies is subtle and gradual, yet at either end there is a shift in value from a sad and conservative outlook to a primal unleashing of joy, of possibility, and of art.

The war culture of the 1960's also promoted the shift into hippiedom– being political became hip, it became mainstream. No longer were a select few intellectually writing and conversing about peace and politics, rather the entire nation took hold of the new political ideas and possibilities in the 1960's. Perhaps this rapid acceptance of liberal culture is what turned beats into hippies. Or, maybe it was just the acid.

Ocean Beach Sand Project

Over the past few decades, natural and human-caused factors have resulted in shifting sand levels at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The North end of the beach has grown increasingly deep with sand while the South end has rapidly eroded. The city has been working to equalize the sand levels between the North and South ends of the beach by transporting sand via large bulldozers. The project has been ongoing since 2012.

In the spirit of San Francisco poetics, the shifting sand at Ocean Beach could be said to represent the shifting economic levels of the San Francisco population. With the twenty-first century tech boom, the lower economic class has greatly eroded while the upper and middle class population has seemingly overflowed. The result has been a housing crisis that has topped any market worldwide. The median home price in San Francisco as of early 2015 is $1,300,000 in a city with a minimum wage of $12.50/hour.

A housing market that does not allow affordable opportunities for lower-wage workers is not sustainable over time. In a service-dominated economy, low wage workers are essential in the economic chain, and pushing them out creates problematic erosion effects similar to the ones observed at Ocean Beach since the 1970's.

Perhaps, over the next decade, we will see construction crews bulldozing high the tech-industry workers out to create room for a city with a more even distribution of economic wages, more affordable housing, and a city that continues to cultivate the artists, writers, and revolutionaries that the San Francisco culture is know for.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Retelling

“Instead, they talked about poetry that they liked, the sort that stretches language to reveal its potential for ambiguity, fragmentation, and self-assertion within chaos, the sort that uses open forms and cross-cultural content, the sort that appropriates images from popular culture and the media and refashions them, even if they often also talked about their frustrations with and limitations of these kinds of poetries that they nonetheless liked” (Spahr and Buuck, 12).

This passage stuck out to me because it sums up how I felt about An Army of Lovers. I appreciate the gritty, imprecise realism of the “novel,” but feel as if some of their choices didn’t necessarily add any nuanced commentary. Specifically, I am referring to the chapter entitled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Poetry.” The chapter was a re-working of the Raymond Carver short story called “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” As Rob Wilson mentioned, this is the same story that figures prominently in the film Birdman; Michael Keaton’s character aims to adapt  the short story into a play.

Spahr and Buuck transport the location of the original story from Albuquerque to San Francisco and make Mel a poet instead of a cardiologist. In the Carver story, Mel becomes a figure in touch with the mechanics of the heart, but not the emotional aspects of it. Casting Mel as a poet suggests Spahr and Buuck intended to reappropriate Mel as a character with emotional intelligence, but they do not change his approach to the subject. He remains the mechanical observer of poetry. They trade “love” for “politics” and Mel still understands neither. Carver’s story dealt solely with love whereas Spahr and Buuck conflate poetry with politics, suggesting poetry is always political and those politics displace the “love” from the original story. 

By talking about the different types of poets in this story (the difference between Mel and Ed), Sphar and Buuck invoke the sentiments discussed by Demented Panda and Koki from the quote I included at the beginning of this post. They talk about poetry they like or dislike and why, but the essence of this retelling holds a violent undercurrent. Mel means to harm the poetry Ed creates and detract from Terri's affinity with it. Is this retelling a warning to poets not to discount types of poetry?

Spahr and Buuck associate capitalism with violence when they replace Mel’s line regarding Terri’s affinity for violence in romantic relationships with one saying she likes the “‘‘Give-me-a-bunch-of-lines-about-capitalism-so-I’ll-know-it’s-serious’ school’” (Spahr and Buck, 71).

An Army of Lovers, therefore, suggests that poetry is inherently political and capitalism is the violence in poetry and politics. Using Carver’s story to illustrate this seems like an enticing way to convey such a message, but, ultimately, came off to me as heavy-handed and out of place. By inserting a political message about poetry into a story about the nuance and inexplicable weight of an intangible, complex, and often misunderstood emotion, Saphr and Buuck attempt to place politics and love on the same level of complexity (hence the title of the “novel” itself). However, it comes across as insincere and inorganic. Was this intentional or an oversight in effectively altering the metaphor?

Jazz and Gentrification

I was inspired to look into the history of Jazz in San Francisco, as we've talked about the impact Jazz music has had on people like Kerouac. It also seems fitting to cover it due to the discussions we've had about gentrification. I found this article written by Robert Mailer Anderson while searching the web about the impact Jazz music has had on San Francisco, and it seems to raise a lot of good points, primarily that gentrification is still an issue, and that modern jazz music still draws attention to it, like it did back when Jazz dominated music. Let me know what you guys think.
http://www.7x7.com/music-nightlife/history-jazz-san-francisco
On top of this, I thought it might be fun to outline a popular Jazz club in San Francisco called Yoshi's. It's a Japanese owned club that is considered quite prestigious in the Jazz community. It is located on Fillmore Street, and here today due to the popularity of it's original location in Oakland. It's a pretty special place that I've been to several times, and it's got a lot of great history to it, so check it out!
http://www.yoshis.com/

Environmental Racism in Hunters Point

In lecture we watched a bit of the documentary Straight Outta Hunters Point. At first I was completely confused as to why we were watching this documentary. But then understood that this community in San Francisco suffers fro environmental racism. During the fifteen minutes or so that we watched in class, I was left with a curiosity of why Hunters Point suffered from marginalization and discrimination. I decided to watch the entire documentary in order to get a deeper understanding of the types of issues that Hunters point residents undergo. Through raw footage and personal interviews I got to be inside the community of Hunters Point. 

I decided to some research and found out that Hunters Point has been one of the most neglected and poorest communities since the late nineteenth century.  Bayview- Hunters point, or simply Hunters Point, is referred to as  San Francisco radioactive basement with dirty and dangerous shipyards considering it a industrial wasteland. During the 1860s it was a meatpacking district then after the ban of slaughterhouses in San Francisco shipbuilders then sought Hunters Point bringing African Americas during great migration for cheap labor, thus establishing a black working class. After years passed the U.S. Navy then saw it as a good spot be to decommissioned radioactive ships.

However these decommissioned ships are not the only things that are contributing to the pollution in Hunters Point. There is a PG and E plant that was established in1929, and has proven to be one of the most polluting in the state of California exuding harsh chemicals like nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide contributing to ozone depletion and smog. This polluting has had an effect on respiratory diseases and cancer, and has had negative effect on health and air in bay area.

Extreme poverty and racial discrimination has been deeply enrooted through years of constant oppression. Hunter point is one of the most economically disadvantaged communities in San Francisco. Efforts of cleanup must me done in order to prevent further pollution and health risks. There are efforts of a cleanup in Hunters Point which is  is estimated at 1.1 billion. However these efforts want to be done by the U.S Navy for the sake of their own benefit. 

Prison style Housing

Hunters Point Shipyard