San Francisco Fifty Years Ago
(Kenneth Rexroth’s complete columns for the San Francisco Examiner)
1960
January
31. Here I Am
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
27. In Praise of Amateur Shakespeare
April
03. Two Questions About Modern Life
10. Signs of Change in the South
17. Conversations with Southerners
24. Flagstaff versus Phoenix
May
01. New Orleans versus Pittsburgh
08. Jean Genet and Ornette Coleman
15. The Execution of Caryl Chessman
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?
July
03. Three Poets in the News
10. Kabuki Theater
17. Poetry and Ballet
24. Ballet and Jazz
31. The Royal Danish Ballet
The next column will be posted on August 7, 2010.
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 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. 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
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.
visits to this webpage (since 21 February
2010).