Essentially…
"The 1960s was [sic] essentially a cultural dialogue between San Francisco and London." (from David Talbot's addictively over-heated book, "Season Of The Witch").Surely so, especially if you disregard such frilly ephemera as, oh, say, the Cultural Revolution. Or the Cold War, or the Vietnam War, or other such minor cultural or political detours as the US civil rights struggle, the rise of feminism, or the Prague Spring, or Paris 1968, or the Panthers, to mention a few (meanwhile, a real revolution was happening just down the Peninsula right under the noses of the Deadenders up in the Haight, but they surely never noticed…).
(There's always been something rather touching for me about San Francisco's self-absorbed provincialism, its belief that its treasured "Only In San Francisco" icons and shibboleths really are unique, rather than often just being minor variations on the stuff of many mid-sized American (and even UnAmerican) cities. And there's something really quite weird in Talbot's boosting of Moby Grape as one of the great bands of the 1960's. The band almost defines "mediocre sixties music" for me…).
Labels: books, california, culture, history, local, politics
1 Comments:
have to agree with that Jimmy most of the books about the 60's are so dumb -- they could start by dispensing with the myth that the baby boomers started and fueled it for a start -- those fuckers the 80's and 90's were their period and neo liberalism their headstone -- almost all the leaders of the 60's were born prior to 1945 and if those BB's who were born between 1956 and 1964 were involved they must have been waving their diapers at the revolution -- i could go on suffice to say almost all the books about that period are lacking in almost everything except interesting by the by facts
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