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Spectral city: San Francisco as Pacific Rim city and counter‐cultural contado

2008; Routledge; Volume: 9; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14649370802386503

1469-8447

Rob Wilson,

Cultural Industries and Urban Development

Abstract Abstract San Francisco, since its global takeoff in the Gold Rush Days and long‐standing trafficking in Bohemian, socialist, queer, and left‐leaning energies in and beyond the Beat era of the 1960s, has a complicated global/local history of trying to disentangle its city‐space and urban imaginary from the Greco‐Roman will‐to‐supremacy that would turn California into a frontier settlement of Asian/Pacific domination and US‐framed empire. Forces of social becoming like the Beats and post‐Beat hippies as well as more experimental authors like Jack Spicer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, and Bob Kaufman helped to forge a different literary‐social vision of San Francisco and the Pacific Rim city as a porous community of transnational innovation and outer‐national becoming. This paper will invoke some literary and film texts from Howl and Tripmaster Monkey to Vertigo to Margaret Cho stand‐up performances as well as some geopolitical studies, such as Gray Brechin's Imperial San Francisco and City Light Press's Reclaiming San Francisco to substantiate this double vision of San Francisco as global/local US site of (a) imperial ratification and (b) counter‐orientalist deformation. Keywords: global cityworld citycounter‐culturalPacific RimSan FranciscoBeat literatureimperialismpostcolonialCalifornia Notes 1. On non‐Puritan offspring of literary San Francisco leading to Beat culture and beyond, see Peters and Ferlinghetti (1980 Peters, Nancy C. and Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. 1980. Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History From its Beginnings to the Present Day, San Francisco: City Lights Books and Harper & Row. [Google Scholar]). On the life‐experimental dimensions of 'becoming California' as cultural fate by residents either born in, or 'born‐again' in, this left‐coast trans‐Pacific state, see the overview by native San Franciscan James D. Houston (1992 Houston, James D. 1992. Californians: Searching for the Golden State, Santa Cruz, CA: Otter B. Books. [Google Scholar]). For an array of works in various genres that claim to represent San Francisco, past and present, see also Miller (1990 Miller, John, ed. 1990. San Francisco Stories: Great Writers on the City, San Francisco: Chronicle Books. [Google Scholar]), Chappell (2002 Chappell, Alexandra, ed. 2002. City by the bay: San Francisco in art and literature, San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. [Google Scholar]), and Rathmell (1998 Rathmell, George. 1998. Realms of Gold: The Colorful Writers of San Francisco 1850–1950, Berkeley: Creative Arts. [Google Scholar]) as well as Ferlinghetti (2001 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. 2001. San Francisco Poems, San Francisco: City Lights Foundation. [Google Scholar]) and Gregory Corso's splendid hymn to urban excess and ecstatic community, 'Ode to Coit Tower', in Ferlinghetti (1995 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, ed. 1995. City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, San Francisco: City Lights Press. [Google Scholar]: 34). On the ties of Big Sur to San Francisco literary culture and psycho‐social experimentation on body and soul and place, see Kripal (2007 Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2007. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); and on San Francisco as part of a Shasta 'bioregion' and Sierras watershed, see Snyder (1995 Snyder, Gary. 1995. A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint. [Google Scholar]: 233). 2. Poesis and the mnemonic power of the humanities help to empower Dynes' claim to California creativity and will to regional cum national exceptionality, although he centers his corporatist‐aligned claim to super‐creativity in the techno‐sciences, bio‐genetic research, and business culture of Silicon Valley capitalism. 3. In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, William Randolph Hearst proclaimed, 'The Pacific Ocean is the white man's ocean' and that Anglo‐Saxon forces of imperialist supremacy based in San Francisco and at UC Berkeley and Stanford, 'must keep these lands and seas clean and clear for Occidental progress and civilization' (Brechin 1999 Brechin, Gray. 1999. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]: 230). Powerfully historicized and de‐centering in its portrayal of imperialist dialectics from Gold Rush to Atomic energy formations, Brechin's geo‐material vision of San Francisco as vast 'contado' of center/periphery interaction and hinterlands, does not claim to outline a counter‐imperial poetics nor turn (except in rare moments) to San Francisco literature, performance culture, or experimental poetics as such for the makings of a counter‐vision or spectral critique of this 'imperial Pacific' and its Beat counter‐cultural contado, as I will try to do here. 4. On such large‐scale shifts towards a cybernetic‐driven transnationalization in the post‐Fordist 'posteconomy' and the pro‐globalist boosterism needed to connect such urban transformations, suburban build‐ups, and inner‐city population displacements and down‐sizing, see Kotkin (2005 Kotkin, Joel. 2005. The City: A Global History, New York: Modern Library. [Google Scholar]), Hartman (2002 Hartman, Chester and Carnochan, Sarah. 2002. City For Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and Solomon (2003 Solomon, Daniel. 2003. Global City Blues, Washington, DC: Island Press. [Google Scholar]), who calls for a Heideggerean place‐based urban constructionism (a 'New Urbanism' [Solomon 2003 Solomon, Daniel. 2003. Global City Blues, Washington, DC: Island Press. [Google Scholar]: 209–219] in San Francisco) against 'the global city blues' of hegemonic mallification and freeway mania (Solomon 2003 Solomon, Daniel. 2003. Global City Blues, Washington, DC: Island Press. [Google Scholar]: 13), displacement visions of a kinetic elite like Rem Koolhaus devouring Pacific Rim sites into generic bland sameness (Solomon 2003 Solomon, Daniel. 2003. Global City Blues, Washington, DC: Island Press. [Google Scholar]: 7). Reclaiming San Francisco (Brook et al. 1998 Brook, James, Chris, Carlsson and Nancy, Peters, eds. 1998. Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, San Francisco: City Lights Books. [Google Scholar]) is a collection dedicated to the excavation, preservation, and contestation of such cultural political forces aligned to the 'New Urbanism' of a place‐based poetics and vision. 5. 'Spectral City' will try to elaborate the critical dimensions and visionary powers of these literary‐aesthetic and political specters surging up from local San Francisco sites and traditions to oppose the hollowing out and ephemerality that urban cultural workers like Rebecca Solnit and proponents of such global capitalism disruption like Joel Kotkin have noted to be all too characteristic of today's Silicon‐Valley dominated San Francisco. 6. During the mass demonstrations and web‐rallying that took place in San Francisco to prevent the blind march into another US war in Iraq in spring 2003, this Situationist slogan came down to our era from Vietnam War protests and rallies. 7. Michael Davidson makes the case that 'the local' circulation pattern generated around Jack Spicer's vision of San Francisco did not mean seeking Beat celebrity nor academic ratification, but performing crazed poetry in a bar like The Place in San Francisco (Davidson 1991 Davidson, Michael. 1991. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid‐Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]: 156‐167). 8. For Everson, Bob Dylan was exactly such a prophetic and shamanistic poet of vision in the US ecumene, extending the protest of Guthrie into the prophesy of Jeremiah and becoming thus 'a figure of confrontation than of prescience' (Everson 1982 Everson, William. 1982. The Birth of a Poet: The Santa Cruz Meditations, Edited by: Bartlett, Lee. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press. [Google Scholar]: 130). 9. The lyric is relegated to a condition of irrelevance to the US war‐machine verging on what Santayana called in First World War contexts, 'the genteel tradition': this is what Ron Silliman blasts as the US School of Lyric Quietude on his blog site defending language and post‐language poetics. 10. 'Invisible Republic' would allude to the prophetic leftist America evoked by Greil Marcus around the popular‐vernacular culture work in the music of protest poets such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, The Band, Joan Baez, Ma Rainey, and Robert Johnson et al. See Marcus (1997 Marcus, Greil. 1997. The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, New York: Picador. [Google Scholar]), and for a spectral updating of the American vernacular airwaves 1965 to the present (Marcus 2005 Marcus, Greil. 2005. Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, New York: PublicAffairs. [Google Scholar]: 5–10). 11. On the material and visionary claim to San Francisco's being 'the hub of it' and nexus of 'the new regionalism' of California‐based vision, see Everson (1982 Everson, William. 1982. The Birth of a Poet: The Santa Cruz Meditations, Edited by: Bartlett, Lee. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press. [Google Scholar]: 162–163), who makes grim contrasts with the Fresno County of his birth and the postwar Los Angeles of de‐racinated mythlessness, wealth, and spectacular postmodernity. 12. The cultishness, phobias, and exclusionary tactics of Spicer's poetry circle are outlined by Michael Davidson in Guys Like Us who concludes again that 'Spicer is forging a link between Dante's projection of Florence into the civitas dei of Divine Comedy by imagining a redeemed San Francisco formed out of the poet's North Beach milieu', a milieu of gender and genre experimentation Davidson would now and again relate to the west‐coast Language Poets his own poetry is affiliated to (Davidson 2004 Davidson, Michael. 2004. Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]: 41–42). 13. In some ways the text forms a situated and Asian Americanized archive of every film and literary work done on San Francisco, with works like Vertigo and Dharma Bums fully embedded in the dream‐life and reference system of Wittman Ah Sing, who at times also seems to embody the macho energy not just of Chin but of Earl Kingston, Maxine's actor husband to whom this 'fake book' and exploratory novel is dedicated. 14. Kenzaburo Oe's novel Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! reconfigured his whole interventionist political and poetic vision of 'the imagination' in postwar Japan based on a re‐reading of Blake's poetry, as in Oe's evocation of this line from Milton: 'The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself' (Oe 2002 Oe, Kenzaburo. 2002. Rouse Up o Young Men of the New Age!, Edited by: Nathan, John. New York: Grove Press. [Google Scholar]: 128). Capital, as such, is 'a fallen world of illusion' (Oe 2002 Oe, Kenzaburo. 2002. Rouse Up o Young Men of the New Age!, Edited by: Nathan, John. New York: Grove Press. [Google Scholar]: 129). Oe, the father‐novelist, preaches to Hikari the post‐Hiroshima musician‐son, that poets and artists are relentlessly urged to set their revolutionary vision of imagination and body 'against the Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, and the University' who would prolong Corporeal War and murderously negate global peace and poetic vision (Oe 2002 Oe, Kenzaburo. 2002. Rouse Up o Young Men of the New Age!, Edited by: Nathan, John. New York: Grove Press. [Google Scholar]: 249). 15. See Gray Brechin's Imperial San Francisco (1999 Brechin, Gray. 1999. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]) as well as euphoric Gold Rush‐era passages from Bayard Taylor, Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850): for example, on Santa Cruz and Oregon timber and mills (Taylor 2000 Taylor, Bayard. 2000. Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire, Santa Clara, CA: Santa Clara University Press and Heyday Books. [Google Scholar]: 166; first published in 1850) fueling the growth of the Bay Area city; on San Francisco's booming growth into a worldwide commercial center (Taylor 2000 Taylor, Bayard. 2000. Eldorado: Adventures in the Path of Empire, Santa Clara, CA: Santa Clara University Press and Heyday Books. [Google Scholar]: 240 and 246). See also Henderson (1998 Henderson, George, L. 1998. California and the Fictions of Capital, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [Google Scholar]) for the ties of San Francisco prosperity and power to agri‐business hinterlands and water resources. As alluded to, see also Amy Tan's Chinese immigrant mother looking wryly at little Saint Mary's Church in Chinatown's fringes in The Joy Luck Club (1989 Tan, Amy. 1989. The Joy Luck Club, New York: G. P. Putnam. [Google Scholar]), at the same time she sees the real American church of belief and power is in the skyscrapers, meaning the Bank of America and the San Francisco family dynasties who founded these finance, mining and real estate fortunes in the wake of the Gold Rush. 16. These entropic tropes to describe US Pacific coast culture are used by Lawrence, Lyotard, and Baudrillard in Michaels et al. (1991 Michaels, Leonard, Reid, David and Scheer, Raquel, eds. 1991. West of the West: Imagining California, New York: Harper. [Google Scholar]: xi, 120, 121). 17. Markham's poem appeared in Hearst's rival San Francisco Examiner and supposedly was republished in 10,000 newspapers and magazines at home and abroad in 1899. 18. Gioia's essay was first printed in the Denver Quarterly in Fall 1998 and became the basis for the essays collected by Jack Foley (2001 Foley, Jack, ed. 2001. The 'Fallen Western Star' Wars: A Debate About Literary California, Scarlet Tanager Press. [Google Scholar]). It appears online at: http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ewestern.htm 19. It was not long ago that post‐romantic poets of trans‐American subjecthood (like Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima, Jack Spicer et al.) wrote to offer an expanded counter‐cultural vision of region and a large‐scale improvisational engagement with the un/American drives of history, place, nation, and subject. Add to the bio‐poetics of place the scrupulously gnostic deconstructionism of poets like John Ashbery, Juliana Spahr, and Fanny Howe along with the will‐to‐visionary dimensionality of William Blake, Emerson, and Oe which haunt all my global figurations and lyric quests here.