Tuesday October 30, 2018

Face pained joyous, I put some flowers in my hair and go to San Francisco. San Francisco, here I come, a copy of Charles Perry’s The Haight-Ashbury: A History splayed out in my lap. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” leads me back to Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising, an album I’ve only just now learned to appreciate, as it was always in the past, in the shadow, way out in the yonder. As a sculpture I sit beside in Golden Gate Park suggests, we could be like cherubs playing amid a harmless, loving nature, even here in our urban surround. But then I get turned away from the Academy of Science and the Japanese Tea Garden for lack of money. In response, I imagine turning myself on Halloween into Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy.” After the park, Sarah and I catch Juliana Spahr at City Lights Books, reading from a new work called Du Bois’s Telegram. During the talk, she mentions a piece by George Mason Murray of the Black Panthers, written in the midst of the San Francisco State Strike, called “For a Revolutionary Culture.”