The Fake Angeleno

Just arrived in Los Angeles? Check out The Fake Angeleno. (I've also added the link to your starboard.) TFA is documenting the situation on the ground in Lo-Cal. As for the fake part: well, sometimes you have to solve the problem of artifice with more artifice.

Gonzo Redux

Turns out Gonzo was playing in San Rafael, so my daughters and I watched it last night. It's the best film I've seen, feature or doc, on Hunter Thompson.

Two scenes gave me chills. One showed the Chicago police flaying demonstrators at the Democratic convention in 1968 to Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart." According to Thompson's wife, Chicago was one of two experiences that caused him to weep in her presence.

Another moving scene shows an aged George McGovern, a Thompson favorite, lashing out against old men in air-conditioned offices in DC planning the next war. Doesn't sound like Spielberg stuff, I realize, but it got to me. As you might imagine, there are a few laughs, too. Many cluster around Thompson's run for sheriff in Aspen.

Although Thompson was from Kentucky and spent most of his adult life in Colorado, the film identifies San Francisco in the 1960s as his true place and time.

Check it out, I say.

Obscene in the Extreme

I just finished reading Obscene in the Extreme by Rick Wartzman. It's about the furor that followed the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath in 1939.

Rick focuses on the way that dust-up played out in Kern County, where the board of supervisors considered the merits of banning the book. Along the way, he weaves in the stories of major players in California agribusiness, labor, media, and government. That cast includes Carey McWilliams, whom Rick treats perceptively and at some length. But Rick is also very attuned to the stories of particular Kern County residents and families touched by the controversy. Highly recommended.

I have lots more to say, including many adjectives, but I'm leaving it here for now just in case some shrewd editor asks me to review the book. (By the way, check The Nation, July 14, p. 39, for the latest news in this department.)

Obscene in the Extreme isn't out yet--I threw around my ever increasing weight to get an advance copy--but I noticed that the publisher, PublicAffairs, used the jacket as the basis for its Fall catalog cover. That's a good sign, don't you think? We're hoping Rick will talk about the book this fall in Berkeley. More on that soon.

Jules Tygiel

I just learned about the death of Jules Tygiel, the San Francisco State historian.

I interviewed Jules about Carey McWilliams, whose work he taught and understood very well. I also had the good fortune to meet him at a series of SF State lectures devoted to California politics. Jules's work, which focuses on California and baseball, is first-rate.

Here's an article from the Los Angeles Times on him and his work. Jules was only 59.

Gonzo

I haven't seen Gonzo, the Hunter Thompson doc from Alex Gibney, but here's A.O. Scott's review in the International Herald Tribune.

Very happy to see mention of Carey McWilliams, of course, who first suggested that Thompson write about the Hell's Angels. That was a game changer, as Thompson always acknowledged. Throughout his career, he consistently admired and respected only one editor--Carey McWilliams. This according to Douglas Brinkley in Proud Highways, Thompson's edited letters.

And let's not forget the Ramparts connection. Thompson was living on Parnassus Street in San Francisco during the magazine's heyday. After Peter Collier reviewed Hell's Angels, he brought Thompson by the office at 301 Broadway for lunch with Warren Hinckle. Let's just say that the result wasn't healthy for Hinckle's pet monkey, Henry Luce.

Later Thompson hung with the Ramparts cohort at the Democratic convention in Chicago. He also borrowed the magazine's wall poster idea for later use in Aspen. And he eventually wrote the first generally recognized piece of Gonzo journalism, "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," for Hinckle's subsequent magazine, Scanlan's Monthly.

The photograph above is one of my favorites. I wanted to use it in American Prophet, but I couldn't track down a quality image or the rights holder.

The Debs Factor--Option the Screen Rights Now!

Got another book review assignment from the Los Angeles Times, this one for Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, The Great War, and the Right to Dissent. The author is Ernest Freeberg, a historian at the University of Tennessee. Great story, well told. Debs was an extraordinary figure, more than I realized, and the historical parallels with the present are striking. Check it out--or at least read the review and see what you think. The piece runs on Sunday in the book review section.

For those seeking a complete Debs bio, Haymarket Books recently reissued a paperback edition of Ray Ginger's The Bending Cross (1947) with a new introduction by Mike Davis.

Outstanding in the Field

This blog is devoted to California culture, but aside from a few references to farm labor, I've pretty much ignored agri-culture. Mostly I like to eat food, not talk about it, but I recently attended an event that fanatical readers of this blog will want to know about.

The event is called Outstanding in the Field. Jim Denevan, whose cookbook of the same name was recently lauded by the New York Times, convened the event at Route 1 Farms. That's an organic farm run by Jeff Larkey just off Waddell Creek, which is surrounded by state parkland and drains into the Pacific Ocean just south of Pescadero. Jim barnstorms the country in a refurbished 1953 bus to raise awareness about food, sell a few cookbooks, and serve a square meal right there in the fields.

Mission accomplished. We drank some wine and listened to Jeff talk about his land and the challenges of organic farming. One of the things we learned is that wild pigs roam the area. They got into his potatoes one year, so Jeff and his friends decided to stake them out one night. He saw the alpha male first, a 600-pounder that in the darkness he mistook for a pony.

After our little seminar, we settled into a tasty multi-course meal prepared right there: turnip soup, beet salad, sardines, roasted chicken and green beans and squash, and an orange-almond pie with creme fraiche.

It was dark and chilly when we left, the sky was clear, and the stars were out. As Woody Guthrie might say, they hung like grapes on vines that shine, and warmed a lover's glass like a friendly wine.

Book Expo America

Just back from Los Angeles, where I attended Book Expo America. As usual, I assumed it would be an empty experience and then had several serendipitous encounters that redeemed the effort.

One such encounter was with Warren Hinckle, who was there to promote a new book, Who Killed Hunter Thompson? I haven't had much luck cornering him here in the Bay Area to talk about Ramparts, but there he was, big as you please, in the bar of the Los Angeles Convention Center. He's not that keen on rehashing the whole Ramparts experience for posterity, but he was very forthcoming and helpful and good company in every way.

I also met Tom Hayden for the first time. (We've spoken over the telephone about Ramparts). He and Elaine Katzenberger, his editor at City Lights, said hello while I was chatting with Ellen Adler from The New Press.

My only inadvertent celebrity sighting was Alec Baldwin. Unless Vincent Bugliosi counts. And Arianna Huffington. And the guy who plays the Microsoft nerd in the Apple commercials.

Navasky on Buckley

This one goes to my two major preoccupations: Carey McWilliams and Ramparts magazine.

In a recent New York Times book review, Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of The Nation, mentions McWilliams in his remarks on books by or about William F. Buckley. Navasky's book, A Matter of Opinion, also noted the similarity between the two men. Somewhere on this blog I passed along the fact that Lou Cannon, Reagan's biographer, once sent out 40 letters trying to interest people in his first book, on Reagan and Jesse Unruh. He got exactly two replies, from McWilliams and Buckley.

But Buckley had a Ramparts connection, too. On Firing Line, he debated Robert Scheer during the magazine's heyday. In my forthcoming book, I argue that Buckley had at least two reasons for being interested in the San Francisco muckraker. First, it started as a Catholic magazine, and Buckley was a lifelong and very vocal Catholic. Its transition to radical muckraking must have been a source of concern. Second, Ramparts exposed the CIA, for which Buckley had been an agent before starting National Review.

I tried to interview Buckley in what I didn't realize was the last month of his life. His note said he was so far behind on other work that he couldn't spare the time.

Boyarsky on McWilliams and Kerby

Bill Boyarsky's Truthdig article today on citizen journalists gave kudos to Carey McWilliams and Phil Kerby, editor of Frontier, which was finally folded into The Nation. Boyarsky has seen a lot of changes since that era, and I appreciate the historical perspective he brings to old school figures like McWilliams. If you didn't know any better, you might think that bloggers and citizen journalists are the only ones who have escaped the dominion of the dreaded MSM (mainstream media).

Boyarsky is also the author of Big Daddy, the Jess Unruh bio. But you already knew that. You also knew that Truthdig is produced by Robert Scheer, the former editor of Ramparts. Boyarsky and Scheer both teach at USC, as does Marc Cooper, whom Boyarsky mentions in his article. Cooper also writes for The Nation, where Scheer is still a contributing editor. Starting to get it?