John Geluardi: Reppin' the 510

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I edited Cannabiz, John Geluardi's book on the medical marijuana business. That snappy little read was an eye-opener for me, largely because I was so accustomed to the policy and law enforcement angles on the weed meme. John convinced me that the big story belonged in Forbes and Fortune. Not unlike Indian gaming 15 years ago, medical marijuana is on the glide path to big bucks and mainstream acceptance.

John's back with the cover story in the current issue of the East Bay Express, the alternative weekly based in Oakland. It features my adopted city of Richmond--by coincidence, perhaps, the opening setting in Cannabiz. I moved here a year ago, and my little house stands a couple miles from the El Cerrito neighborhood of my misspent youth.

John's article, "The Man Behind Richmond's Renaissance," is a nice turn of events for this often overlooked city. As the article notes, what little media attention Richmond has attracted is usually related to its violent crime. And now that I think about it, the only bit of popular-culture status Richmond has secured for itself is the (largely negative) portrait in "Coach Carter," the Hollywood film starring Samuel L. Jackson as Richmond High basketball coach Ken Carter. (I played with Kenny on the 1977 Contra Costa County All-Stars; another teammate was Stan Van Gundy, now head coach of the Orlando Magic.)

John's piece indicates that Richmond's fortunes are beginning to improve, and much of the credit is going to city manager Bill Lindsay. Check it out, I say.

David Gans at SF State

A couple weeks ago, David Gans graciously agreed to visit our California Culture class at San Francisco State and talk about the Grateful Dead. David hosts at least three radio programs on the Dead (Sirius XM, KPFA, and his syndicated show) and has been writing about the band for decades.

The course materials and discussions prepared us well for his remarks. We had already covered Kerouac, Kesey, and the San Francisco counterculture generally. But our Q & A followed by David's performance of his original song, "Who Killed Uncle John?" was especially successful this time. You just can't beat live conversation and music, and the student reception was gratifying. Here are some excerpts from their informal responses:

"I felt like David Gans was the best guest speaker ever. He had such a genuine passion for what he was talking about, and he was a true authority."

"David Gans' presentation last week was a lot of fun ... It was satisfying to me to see his success in pursuing a career in an area that he truly felt passionate about."

"I really enjoyed David Gans' visit to our class ... You should definitely continue to invite him to your classes. His song at the end, 'Who Killed Uncle John?' was the perfect way to end the class!"

"That was awesome hearing what David had to say about the band. I really enjoyed it."

"Plus he brought his guitar! Awesome!"

"I thought he was a wonderful guest speaker. It seemed to me he was really connected with music in such a deep way ... He explained how people used to get together and just listen. It made [music] a shared experience instead of an individual one."

"Man, what a really great experience. Having absolutely zero knowledge or interest in the Grateful Dead, Gans' eloquent and insightful expanse of knowledge of the Grateful Dead and the culture and circumstances surrounding them truly opened my eyes to a margin of music history that I never thought I'd be able to relate to or care about."

"I enjoyed hearing about the Grateful Dead, but my favorite thing that happened while he was there was his song. It was so amazing! Thanks for bringing him. :)"

"His discussion was incredibly interesting ... Even David's own music was extremely motivating, and I cannot wait to listen to his radio show on KPFA. Thanks again for having him come speak."

"Meeting David last week was as engaging as it was enthralling. He is literally a link to a very unique and integral part of California history."

"'I served the man who served his art' was a very powerful line in David Gans' song. I enjoyed the sentiment of the line as it symbolized his loyalty to the artist. This loyalty was contradicted by the notion of all the other individuals in Garcia's life who seemed to slowly drain the life out of him."

"David's song, 'Who Killed Uncle John?' was such a great experience. Before last class, I had no idea who David Gans was, but as I told my friends about him, many knew just who he was. He was even on iTunes!"

Grateful Dead Scholarship

I traveled to San Antonio for a popular culture conference last week, but the only sessions I saw were on the Grateful Dead--more than a dozen in all, plus extracurricular activities. We heard presentations from a wide variety of fields: philosophy, psychology, sociology, literary studies, business, and musicology. Extraordinary.

Nick Meriwether, who heads up the Grateful Dead archive at UC Santa Cruz, invited me to submit an abstract when I visited campus last year. I began with Warren Hinckle's 1967 Ramparts article on the hippies, then segued to the utopian impulses that I think help account for the Dead's success, then brought it back to Warren and Rolling Stone. I don't think anyone at the conference was surprised by my utopian stuff, but I suspect they were less familiar with the Ramparts back story.

But what makes such conferences successful are the informal exchanges during and between the presentations, and this conference was very productive in that department. I discovered that Jay Williams of Critical Inquiry had offered a similar analysis but with a bohemian (not utopian) focus last year. Helpful, especially when our conversations turned up many other points of contact.

Nick distributed Dead Studies, which included a transcript of Ralph Gleason's 1967 private communication with historian and musician Frank Kofsky. (The communication is from the Dead archive.) Gleason resigned from Ramparts after the Hinckle article appeared, and later that year he launched Rolling Stone with Jann Wenner. His communication discusses the San Francisco music scene and the differences between the hippies and politicos. He talks at some length about Bob Scheer, who was the managing editor at Ramparts and had almost captured the Democratic nomination in his East Bay congressional district the previous year. (Bob was also a friend of Bill Graham.) That communication was invaluable to me; it grounded my ideas in the firsthand, contemporary observations of a key player.

The musicologists at the conference were awesome. Among other things, they offered guided listenings to some classic Dead jams. And on top of everything else, the Grateful Dead scholars as a whole are a fun group. Not unprecedented in the annals of academia, but very welcome.

Update: John Swansburg of Slate posted a piece on the conference. It looks like he appreciated the possibilities here. I've never been a big believer in reading the comments section, but the presumptions in the batch I saw were striking. I caught several whiffs of what my dissertation director called an intellectual sin: contempt prior to investigation.

Earth Day: The One That Got Away

After the Ramparts book came out, I developed a list of high-profile ways that the magazine changed America, as per my subtitle. The best example is probably the Martin Luther King story; he came out against the Vietnam War for the first time after flipping through Ramparts at an airport. On the radio, you don't want to spend a lot of time on set-up or explanation, so that one's a keeper. Everyone gets it.

The one that got away was Earth Day. I didn't get this story into the book, but as Tim Redmond's piece reminds us, Senator Gaylord Nelson, a liberal Republican from Wisconsin, got the idea for a national teach-in on the environment after reading Ramparts on a flight from Santa Barbara to Oakland. The beaches of Santa Barbara had been soaked by a massive oil spill the year before, so the moment was right. The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970, and 20 million people participated.

The Ramparts editors couldn't quite accept the compliment. Their May 1970 cover showed the Isla Vista Bank of America in flames as a result of student anti-war protests. The caption declared that the incineration of the bank "may have done more for the environment than all the teach-ins put together." That one alienated even some longtime supporters.

The Information Age!

As my little bio says, I teach California Culture at San Francisco State University, and I'm currently reading student essays. It's not as fun as it sounds, especially since the enrollment is sizable (about 70 students), I teach two other courses, and I have no teaching assistants or graders for any of them. In short, almost 2,000 pages of student writing per semester plus other prep, and you don't want to hear about the money.

But the purpose of this post is to report a shift in student norms when it comes to reading and writing. The unspoken assumption seems to be that books are yesterday's news, even in humanities classes. Everything you need is at your fingertips, so why read anything else?

The way this plays out in the essays is instructive. I typically ask students to come up with their own paper topics so they can decide what matters to them. Several chose to focus on Chester Himes's novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go. The protagonist's name is Bob Jones, but two of the essays I read yesterday called him William Clinton. Curious, I googled the book title with that name and found that the Wikipedia page for this novel does indeed list William Jefferson Clinton, our 42nd president, as the novel's hero. Which means that at least two students wrote entire essays about this book without reading or even consulting it.

I'm not in the mood to scold or draw sweeping generalizations from this little sample, but three things come immediately to mind. First, not everything reduces to its information value, and novels are an obvious reminder of this. The whole point is to enter an imaginary world and see what happens in it--and to you. No reading means no reading experience.

Second, attending a state university is like a trip to Yosemite. Both places are public resources that offer potentially rich experiences, but everyone has the right to a shallow one. Taking a humanities class and refusing to read any books--I can only imagine how glancingly these students regarded the books they DIDN'T write about--is a little like going to Yosemite and hanging out by the snack shack.

Third, of course, is the lesson provided by the gag itself. Someone thought it would be funny, I suppose, to place President Clinton's name in that slot, and Wikipedia's editors haven't corrected it yet. I'm sure they will, but there's a larger cultural issue here. Having decided to privilege information over imagination, we also neglect to check the quality of the information. This isn't a shot at Wikipedia, which I often use and have contributed to, but rather a comment on the bargain we've made as a culture.

When the emphasis falls on free, fast, and easy, we often get cheap. Lots of people I know understand this concept when it comes to food, but their digital utopianism is as unexamined as ever. Maybe we should all read You Are Not a Gadget, which considers this question in more depth. I think the author's name is Chester Alan Arthur. (I just used Wikipedia to check the correct spelling.)

Jonathan Rowe RIP

My colleagues and I at the California Studies Association were shocked and saddened to hear that Jonathan Rowe passed away suddenly last week. He was 65.

I met Jon on the CSA steering committee. Our 2007 conference on the crisis of the California commons intersected with his work at the Tomales Bay Institute in Point Reyes, where he also hosted a public affairs program on KWMR.

Over the next few years, I appeared on the program twice to discuss my books. I also guest-hosted when Jon was out of town, joined his local pick-up basketball game, and visited him and his family at their home. He was damn good company.

I'm not familiar with every aspect of Jon's work, but he was extraordinarily productive and versatile. He grew up in Boston, was trained as a lawyer, and worked for Ralph Nader early on. He also served as a congressional staffer and wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, American Prospect, Washington Monthly, and many other publications.

Jon did all of his own thinking, wrote beautifully, and was a shrewd observer of people and politics. "The Language of Strangers," his 2008 piece on community journalism in West Marin, is a minor masterpiece.

You can also see Jon's genius and originality in the Senate testimony he gave a few years ago; some of it appeared in the June 2008 issue of Harper's magazine under the title, "Our Phony Economy."

Jon's friends are putting together a website with more of his work--190 articles now and counting.

Last weekend, Jon went to the gym and came home feeling bad. That night, he had a high fever and went to the hospital. He died the next morning. Frankly, it's hard for me to fathom, but I wanted to make sure I honored Jon by calling attention to his life and work.

87 Harrington

Thanks to the efforts of Nicholas Meriwether, Grateful Dead archivist at UC Santa Cruz, I'm scheduled to deliver a paper on the Dead next month in San Antonio. In addition to working the keyboard, that means reviewing the literature I ingested last year and taking a few informal field trips on the side. This week I visited one of Jerry Garcia's boyhood homes in the Excelsior, a working-class (formerly Irish-Catholic, now largely Asian and Latino) neighborhood that I pass several times a week on my way to San Francisco State University.

Harrington Street is one block long and connects Alemany and Mission on the south side of I-280, which links downtown San Francisco and Daly City. 87 Harrington, which sold for $60,000 in 1994, will never be mistaken for a national historical landmark. But visiting it helps me understand the comment often attributed to Garcia: "San Francisco is San Francisco, the rest of the country is Daly City."

California Women and Politics

I attended the California Studies dinner last night in Berkeley and was treated to the perfect blend of expertise and conviviality that I associate with these monthly events. Bob Cherny and Mary Ann Irwin discussed their new book, California Women and Politics (University of Nebraska), and as usual, I learned a lot in the most pleasant way possible.

The book, a compilation of essays, covers various aspects of women's activism and political participation from the Gold Rush through the 1920s. But many of the essays focus on the Progressive Era, when California women won the right to vote, and the talk last night paid special attention to the ways women put that right to immediate use. The chapters cover, among other topics, the temperance movement, Phoebe Apperson Hearst's philanthropy, settlement work, environmental activism, women's clubs, and trade unionism.

Bob and Mary Ann's presentations were followed by questions and discussion, and this is where these dinners really stand out. Those on hand last night included Bob's colleagues at San Francisco State, Charles Postel and Bill Issel; host and Berkeley City College historian Chuck Wollenberg; author and Berkeley blogger Frances Dinkelspiel; UC Berkeley historian Mark Brilliant; UC Berkeley oral historian Lisa Rubens; and Jewish historian Ava Kahn. Most have presented their own latest work at these dinners, and just listening to their exchanges is a form of higher education.

Kudos to Matt Bokovoy, this book's editor at the University of Nebraska Press. He originally signed the project during his tenure at the University of Oklahoma Press. When he moved to Nebraska, his successors at Oklahoma wavered in their commitment to the book, and he was able to pick it up again.

Ironically, attending the dinner last night meant that I missed two episodes of Saving the Bay, an excellent documentary (narrated by Robert Redford) on Bay Area history. It includes comments from many regulars at these dinners, including Bob, Chuck, Dick Walker, Malcolm Margolin, and Gray Brechin.

Figures of Speech

I just returned from a book event in Oakland for William Bennett Turner's Figures of Speech: First Amendment Heroes and Villains. Superb book, important topic, and an author who blends deep expertise with a clear, personal prose style. Bill not only teaches this material at UC Berkeley, but he also has argued First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court. (Believe me, I'm only scratching the surface of his credentials.)

Bill's event brought out a remarkable cross-section of supporters, including Elizabeth Farnsworth, Carl Pope, Peter Sussman, Wendy Lesser, and Leah Garchik. And probably a dozen more notables that I didn't even know about. Which is one of the reasons I like living in the Bay Area.

Full disclosure: I acquired this book for PoliPointPress, but I didn't do much editing on it. Bill had most of the book ready to go before we even met for coffee across the street from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall.

Southern California

This morning I came upon an adroit piece in the Los Angeles Times on Carey McWilliams's Southern California: An Island on the Land. The article, by Christopher Hawthorne, is part of a Reading L.A. project that began with books by Morrow Mayo and Louis Adamic. (McWilliams knew both men and was especially close to Adamic.)

I left a comment on the L.A. Times' website, but I forgot to add my favorite point about this book, which is that it directly inspired Robert Townes's Oscar-winning original screenplay for Chinatown.