(From February 2021.)
With the passing of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a significant guardian of San Francisco's post-war bloom has left us. For me, like so many others, his City Lights bookstore was on my list when I arrived in 1971 as one of the first places to visit. I saw him there on several occasions in those days. He even rang me up once.
Over the years, I'd meet up with writers whose pieces I was editing at City Lights and we would migrate to one of the nearby cafes -- Vesuvio or Trieste -- to work over coffee. It made us feel cool. The spirit of the Beats from the 50s permeated everything we did as our version of an alternative culture made up of the hippies of the Haight and the radicals of Berkeley went seriously viral.
In 2001, I edited an interview of Ferlinghetti conducted by my friend, the journalist Ken Kelley. The poet was in a nostalgic, unhappy mood, as he watched gentrification drive high rents that made the lifestyles of poets, artists, freelance journalists and the rest of us so much more difficult than it had been in his younger years.
His spirit was generous -- he wanted us to have the experiences that had inspired him.
By 2015, I was at KQED when we interviewed him again, and he expressed his ongoing disappointment with how the city had seemingly abandoned its old spirit to become an elite playground for rich people.
But change is inevitable and the good old days were never quite as good as our memories suggest. There was a lot of poverty in San Francisco, especially among minorities back then and there still is, and I'm afraid that all of us who identified with the beatniks, hippies and radicals haven't collectively been able to change that in any lasting way.
None of that is to disparage the spirit of Ferlinghetti. He probably accomplished more than he realized by remaining a symbol of an alternative way to live life and also by simply living so long. Until Monday he was still among us, although most current residents of his city probably didn't know that. Now he is gone, everybody knows that.
Death is funny that way. You don't know what you had missed until it is gone.
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