One Day in the Life of Richard Ramos

"Wanna meet some office chicks man?" he said.

San Francisco at the end of the '70s still had about it something of the easygoing atmosphere left over from the '60s. AIDS hadn't yet loomed on the horizon, though in retrospect, you knew it was gathering its forces, going about its work unsuspected, especially in that city. (I fled Auckland at the close of 1978.) You had a lot of women living alone, "independent" women, who took what was on offer, snaffling up pleasure whenever it came within reach—like at the local wine bar or 24-hour Safeway supermarket—a great place for an involuntary pickup, as I discovered, way after midnight. For straight guys, women were a matter of multiple choice. This city was an energy grid of "freedoms" and many tributaries fed into it. Given that most of the new social movements started out, or ended up in San Francisco—from the gold rush days to Dashiell Hammett, from the Grateful Dead to the Beats—and that just about every social experiment of one kind or another had been played out on the west coast—you could understand without effort the plasticity and independence of the place with its attractive alternatives that made this city so vibrant. Yet, when I saw that great progenitor of the Beats—Allen Ginsberg—I was somehow less than impressed. Maybe the Age had gone stale or I had other things on my mind. Ginsberg may have lamented and howled at San Francisco's Six Gallery in 1955, flanked by other poets of his generation, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Rexroth, Ed Sanders, and if Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman didn't make the audience they weren't too far away for what was to come by way of "the movement." "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," (Howl), etc, but I have always suspected that statement (heresy!) to be several degrees short on honesty as truth distorted by sensationalism (maybe I don't understand America in an entirely different way?) a statement upon which the rest of the poem rests without which it would be mere hollow rhetoric. Or is it merely the atmosphere he picked up on—the mood of his time—a mixture of the genuine and declamatory? For sure, the poem bewails—mourns the failure of the Great Democratic Experiment caught in the maw of Moloch. Many an immigrant family promised the New Jerusalem found themselves struck down by poverty and will always be grist to the satanic mills. To me the statement without question is overblown and mock-prophetic/heroic in tone, relying as it does on a kind of Blakean, biblical rhetoric—but in Ginsberg's case, the sentiment is little more than a sordid brand of American Puritanism, tailor-made for a bland age of post-war American consumerism that craved some sort of pick-me-up.

Today it is sobering to observe that we hear any number of catch phrases and musical refrains, once heavily freighted with youthful idealism, blowing through numberless television commercials and jingles. Copyright doesn't so much protect one's rights as create market value. A lyric once seen as valued social comment now endorses a brand, and in so doing transforms whatever may have remained of honorable or ethical value into product. Anyway, so the Beat movement was born, and I suppose, like God (a real cool cat) beat means different things to different people—beatific/synaptic/syncopated or as defined by Kerouac in a television interview, "sympathetic." Regardless of all the validity, huff and puffing against the "establishment" through drugs, particularly during this time, LSD, protest marches, and the whole freedom trip—such idealism inevitably opened the door to all manner of literary and artistic charlatans and shysters, no-talent opportunists, who would stake ego-fuelled claims on that very thing "freedom" in the '60s, an era from which we have not yet fully recovered—any number of whom would maneuvre themselves into positions of respectability and power in the literary, publishing, and artistic stakes. Thirty years further...