San Francisco Fifty Years Ago

(Kenneth Rexroth’s complete columns for the San Francisco Examiner)

Introduction

1960
January
31. Here I Am [including remarks on James Huneker and Dave Brubeck]
February
07. New Forms of Art and Culture?
14. New Forms of Politics?
21. A Night Out in the City
28. Merits and Faults of the San Francisco Ballet
March
06. Beckett and Ionesco
13. Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and the Modern Jazz Quartet
20. Drama and Community [on the oratorio Queen Esther]
27. In Praise of Amateur Shakespeare [including an unorthodox interpretation of Hamlet]
April
03. Two Questions About Modern Life
10. Signs of Change in the South [on the civil rights movement]
17. Conversations with Southerners [ditto]
24. Flagstaff versus Phoenix
May
01. New Orleans versus Pittsburgh
08. Jean Genet and Ornette Coleman
15. The Execution of Caryl Chessman [denunciation of capital punishment]
22. The HUAC Riot
29. Signs of a New Youth Revolt
June
05. New American Poetry and Jazz
12. San Francisco Theater and Chicago Architecture
19. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author
26. Slum Clearance? [critique of “urban renewal”]
July
03. Three Poets in the News [Pasternak, Frost, Supervielle]
10. Kabuki Theater
17. Poetry and Ballet
24. Ballet and Jazz
31. The Royal Danish Ballet
August
07. The Tao of Fishing
14. Riding in the Mountains
21. Upheavals in Cuba and the Congo
28. More on the Third World
September
04. The Circus
11. Lack of Imagination and Common Sense [plus remarks on Brecht and African sculpture]
18. Japanese Art of Grace and Modesty
25. Why I Like Opera [including remarks on Carmen and The Threepenny Opera]
October
02. Why I Don’t Like Jazz Festivals [plus remarks on Japanese sculpture]
09. Aida and Ornette Coleman
16. Governmental Clowning
23. An Astonishing Painting Prodigy [in a show of Japanese children’s paintings]
30. La Traviata and La Bohème
November
06. Style versus Pretension
13. Bruce Conner and the Royal Ballet
20. Matters of Taste
27. Mathematical Elegance and Classic Fiction
December
04. The Cost of Taking a Grant from the Ford Foundation [plus remarks on Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist]
11. Robert Duncan
18. An Appeal for Kenneth Patchen [plus remarks on race relations]
25. Christmas

1961
January
01. Man at the End of His Tether
08. Little Theater [plus remarks on Lionel Abel]
15. Theater in San Francisco, Art in Chicago
22. Controversy About Cuba
29. The Attempted Assassination of Thomas Parkinson
February
05. Night Clubs and Jazz
12. Pacifica Radio KPFA [plus remarks on Pablo Casals and the Budapest String Quartet]
19. The Assassination of Lumumba
26. The Chicago Opera Ballet
March
05. The Peace Corps
12. More on the Peace Corps
19. Journalism and Talk Shows
26. The Black Muslims
April
02. More on the Black Muslims
09. King Lear
16. A Few Days in New York
23. New York Jazz Clubs and Genet’s The Blacks
30. Ionesco’s Rhinoceros
May
03. The Bay of Pigs
07. Mediocrity in Art
10. Atoms and Irresponsibility
14. A Delightful Spring Opera Season
17. The Population Explosion
21. A Marvelous Magic Flute
24. The Attacks on the Freedom Riders
28. Courage and Cowardice in the South
31. Summit Meeting
June
04. Urban Uglification
07. The Celebrity Elite
11. Nurturing Student Creativity
14. American Provinciality
18. Another Investigation of Campus “Subversion”
21. Interracial Casting
25. The Moiseyev Dancers
28. Government Is Not Business
July
02. The Meaning of Conservation
05. Morality Crisis
09. Hemingway
12. Sierra Camps
16. Sausalito Cuisine and Camus’s Caligula
19. The Berlin Crisis
23. Dangerous Bluster over Berlin
26. The Bizerte Crisis
30. The New York Ballet

August
02. Remembering the Spanish Civil War
06. Ballet and Opera
09. Who for Mayor?
13. Needed: A Master Plan for the City
16. A World of Refugees
20. The Two Cultures
23. A Geopolitical Easement [more on the Berlin crisis]
27. H.G. Wells’s “Open Conspiracy” [Aspen Humanities Conference]
30. Breadth of Vision versus Narrowness of Interest

September
03. Gracious Music at Aspen
06. The Russians’ Real Goal
10. Comments on Cuisine
13. Anachronistic Geopolitics
17. An International Business Conference
20. Negroes and Classical Music
24. An Atrocious New Opera [Blood Moon]
27. Boris Godunov

October
01. Odds and Ends
04. Fine Opera with Shoddy Decor
08. Rigoletto and Coltrane
11. Thoughts While Watching Fidelio and Nabucco
15. More on the Above
18. More Opera
22. Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance
25. Letters from New York and Florence
29. The Russian H-Bomb Test

November
01. Public Opinion
05. The Sick Comedians
09. The Fallout Shelter Craze
12. Henry Miller
15. The Kirov Ballet
19. Pablo Casals at the White House
22. The Kirov’s Shostakovich Piece
26. Milhaud and Chekhov

December
03. The Age of Inoffensiveness
06. Postcolonial Problems
10. Personal and Municipal Responsibility
13. Mandarin Ethics
17. Patronage, Personal or Governmental
20. General Strike for Peace?
24. Christmas Events
27. “Don’t Do as I Do . . .”
31. The Holidays We Need

1962
January
03. My Choice for Man of the Year
07. The French Crisis
10. Urban Deterioration
14. Some Excellent Plays in New York
17. The Bail System
21. Drawbacks of New York
24. Proposal for an Arts Council
28. Better Theater at Home
31. The Disoriented

February
04. Jazz and Longhair
07. Back to Big Sur
11. Chinese Opera

The next column will be posted on February 14, 2012.
 

Introduction

In January 1960 the San Francisco Examiner (a Hearst newspaper) offered Kenneth Rexroth a job writing a weekly column. He accepted. By May 1961 the column had proved popular enough that he was asked to do two and sometimes even three per week.

The association was an odd one. Although Rexroth was by that time a well-known figure in the Bay Area, he was known primarily as a political and cultural radical, and even (somewhat misleadingly) as “the godfather of the Beat Generation.” But he was willing to work for the Examiner as long as they gave him complete freedom to write whatever he wanted. They did so until July 1967, when they fired him after he wrote a particularly scathing article about the American police.

All told, Rexroth wrote approximately 700 columns for the Examiner. I am tentatively planning to post all of them fifty years after their original appearance. If all goes well and I don’t get OD’d with the project, it will be completed on June 22, 2017.

Normally I plan to post each column on the exact 50th anniversary of its original appearance. This means that during the upcoming year you can expect to find a new column here every Saturday. (Occasionally, depending on my schedule, I may post it a few days early or late.)

Needless to say, the columns vary widely in topic and interest. Some offer incisive commentary that remains astonishingly relevant on all sorts of general issues, social, political, cultural, urbanistic or ecological. Others are more dated, such as reviews of particular musical or theatrical performances. I think you will find, however, that his remarks about even the most ephemeral topics are full of amusing observations and perceptive insights, and that the ensemble constitutes a unique and fascinating chronicle of those eventful years.

I have silently corrected obvious typos, added an occasional comma that seems to be necessary to make the sense clear, and taken the liberty of composing new titles (the original titles were composed by Examiner editors and often do not give a very good idea of what Rexroth is actually talking about).

The contents are listed above. (In a few cases I have added additional information in brackets.) As a preview of things to come, you can also explore my earlier selection of some of the more interesting columns: Rexroth’s San Francisco.

Ken Knabb
February 2010

May 2011: In May 1961 Rexroth began doing two columns per week. So from this point on, you can expect to find a new column uploaded each Saturday and each Tuesday (give or take a day or two, depending on my schedule).

Table of Contents for “San Francisco Fifty Years Ago,” an ongoing project of posting all of Kenneth Rexroth’s columns for the San Francisco Examiner (1960-1967). Each of the columns is being posted on the 50th anniversary of its original appearance. Copyright 1960-1967 Kenneth Rexroth. Reproduced here by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.

[Rexroth Archive]

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