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THOMAS R. EDWARDS
San Francisco, as it perfectly well knows, has all the equipment to
be a cosmopolitan city except a native artistic life. There are of course
the local rock groups, some -like the Jefferson Airplane and The Grate–
ful Dead - excellent, but this is hardly a native mode, and the "San
Francisco Sound" could as well have been the Omaha Sound
if
Omaha
had chanced to have a warm climate, cheap housing and a tradition
of putting up with odd behavior. "Serious" music means the Opera,
admirable in the way Dr. Johnson said female preaching was, and the
usual routine of second-class symphony orchestra and visiting firemen.
Local art I know nothing about except that one gallery advertises (on
TV, naturally) the works of "the great Cucaro, America's Picasso and
our $50 Million Artist." There seem to be few interesting local writers,
and apart from
Ramparts
and
Sunset
(those glossy counterparts - in
California you either settle in or cut out, and both pay richly) no local
publications of much worth, though devotees of the
Berkeley Barb
may
want to disagree. There's lots of repertory theater, from the commercially
ambitious American Conservatory Theatre ("But how many revivals of
Man and Superman
does one want to see?" asked a witty neighbor of
ours) through a wide range of smaller enterprises which mostly do old
Pinter or Ionesco or, for something new,
America Hurrah.
The only case
I know of a theater sustained by its own creative imagination is the
San Francisco Mime Troupe, a young, high-minded, less than professional
but thoroughly charming company that's quite up to New York stan–
dards of political immediacy and moral license. (At the time of writing
they're either in the East or in jail somewhere en route.) Even the night
life is uninventive, once you tire of bare bosoms and female impersona–
tors. A New York friend, when confronted with the spurious gaiety of
North Beach after dark, could only mutter "But nothing's happening!"
I'm afraid nothing much is, at least nothing that isn't also happening
everywhere else.
Even the hippies are pretty quiet these days. Haight-Ashbury (I
haven't been there) makes the papers for narcotics busts, public health
disasters,' an occasional murder, but George Romney and other tourists
report it to be depressingly like any other slum, and even the hippies are
said to be moving out, seeking in rural communes the peace and stability
that squares seek in suburbs. Oneida Village, Brook Farm, the subsistence
homesteads and Tugwellian green-belt towns of the early New Deal,
Levittown, now hippie nests in the boondocks - the dream breeds true.
One hippie group, panning for gold on the upper Sacramento River, is
embroiled with the State, which wants to run a highway through their
claim and can do so if the stake can be proved economically unprofitable.
