0:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Last episode, we sat down with Brandon at the beat museum in San Francisco to learn more about the beat movement. 0:16 [SPEAKER_01]: In the way it forever changed the way Americans have thought about not only literature, but life itself. 0:23 [SPEAKER_01]: This episode we're going to be looking specifically at the relationship between this movement and the city of San Francisco, which has been home to so many interesting people and scenes over the years. 0:34 [SPEAKER_02]: This was the epicenter of that particular movement. 0:37 [SPEAKER_02]: Granted, it was a bicostal movement. 0:40 [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of these people came from New York and they're about in these coast and made their way out here eventually. 0:47 [SPEAKER_02]: There were also people that were already here and that were fomenting a counterculture group and a very artistic movements. 0:54 [SPEAKER_02]: But if there's a lot of things about San Francisco that naturally engendered a lot of different artistic and literary movements, I think there's something about 1:05 [SPEAKER_02]: I think there's something about San Francisco being this city on the edge of the world. 1:11 [SPEAKER_01]: In all of our travels, we've noticed the islands and mountains tend to create unusual local culture, the isolation of these places, allow them to develop unique identities, less influence by mainstream culture. 1:25 [SPEAKER_01]: For those of you unfamiliar with a geography of San Francisco, it's right at the edge of the Pacific Rim attached to the mainland by a rather skinny peninsula 1:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Brandon explained some of the way San Francisco's location, made it a focal point for so many counterculture movements in the 20th century. 1:50 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a scene in in in Jack Carolex novel on the road when they reach San Francisco for the first time in there. 1:56 [SPEAKER_02]: They're driving in a car across the Bay Bridge. 1:59 [SPEAKER_02]: A Neil Cassidy says there's no more land. 2:02 [SPEAKER_02]: Can't go no further because there ain't no more land. 2:05 [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that that aspect, whether subtly or overtly was something that's influenced a lot of different people over the years, a lot of literary figures. 2:13 [SPEAKER_02]: I think it was Oscar Wilde that said something about anyone said to have gone missing, is said to have been seen in San Francisco. 2:19 [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's kind of like that last. 2:21 [SPEAKER_02]: City on the West Coast before the wide Pacific Ocean. 2:27 [SPEAKER_02]: I actually had people my age described to me that yeah the reason I'm here is because I can still be in America but I'm like right at the threshold of it. 2:36 [SPEAKER_02]: that it is like this place on the edge and so I think that that was part of why that became popular there's a whole bunch of reasons you could probably write a book and I'm sure someone has at some point about what it is about the nature of this place and what it means and the reason that so many people wound up here and 2:53 [SPEAKER_02]: The reason that it became the epicenter of so many counterculture movements, a lot of that was because of the beat generation and what they were doing here in the 50s, but how do they get here is the big question, and I think a lot of that comes out of World War 2. 3:08 [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's easy to forget that this was the main point of embarkation for soldiers heading off to the Pacific Theater. 3:16 [SPEAKER_02]: The people were boarding troop ships up at the Fort Mason Depot just a few. 3:21 [SPEAKER_02]: just really only a few blocks to the north, and when they were dropped off again, if they survived the war, you get dropped off here in the city and your commanders would be like, hey, thanks for your service, have a nice life. 3:33 [SPEAKER_02]: There's this recurring image of this former sailor standing on a dock at Fort Mason, or thereabouts with his sea bag next to him looking off of the skyline and being like, well, what now? 3:51 [SPEAKER_02]: My own grandfather was born in 1922, the same year as Jack Karawak and you served in the Navy in the South Pacific through the war and we used to have conversations that most people that went off to World War II, whether to the Pacific or in Europe, it was sort of a tacit understanding that you weren't coming home, or at least the odds were really slim. 4:14 [SPEAKER_02]: You lived moment by moment battle by battle and hope for the best, but there really wasn't a whole lot of hope of making it out again as the war drew on and people faced the reality of probably having to invade mainland Japan. 4:28 [SPEAKER_02]: It seemed like survival was a less and less likely 4:32 [SPEAKER_02]: eventuality, but there were a lot of people that did make it back, obviously, and people were clunked down here in San Francisco, and many of them who'd never been here before, and didn't really have any, any real experience with it. 4:45 [SPEAKER_02]: Really, before, honestly, before the counterculture became a thing here, before the beat movement, before 4:52 [SPEAKER_02]: All the things that came after it from the hippies to the adult scene here on Broadway or any of these things that kind of established this city's reputation. 5:01 [SPEAKER_02]: It was just a kind of an unremarkable port city. 5:04 [SPEAKER_02]: If you were in the Midwest, for example, and you're about San Francisco, oh yeah, that's a place in the West Coast, but it wasn't a whole lot of distinction to it. 5:12 [SPEAKER_02]: They're like much of a draw, but all of a sudden these people found themselves here and they were like, this place looks pretty nice. 5:18 [SPEAKER_02]: Let's see if I can make a go of it here. 5:20 [SPEAKER_02]: It's just something that, to pull Lawrence Feral and Gettie talks a lot about is, is that the war just placed a lot of people. 5:26 [SPEAKER_02]: Whether it was people... 5:28 [SPEAKER_02]: migrating throughout the country looking for work in the war industries we've rose to the river museum over enrichment that a lot of people don't know about but that was a big thing women were moving into the workforce and you're working like hardcore industrial jobs and a lot of the 5:44 [SPEAKER_02]: like the descendants of the former slaves were moving up from the south and migrating throughout the country in in many cases for the first time and they ended up here as well and you've probably heard of the film more jazz scene and people started calling that that stretch of film more street like Harlem of the West because it became a huge black arts movement center and that was something that also inspired the beach generation they were super into jazz and that was kind of 6:13 [SPEAKER_02]: their soundtrack, and so what was happening during the war was that all these people were migrating and moving around and finding themselves displaced for, you know, one reason or another, and settling in places that they probably didn't expect, and whenever you do that, one of you, you add that sort of random element, it causes some interesting things to happen. 6:36 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked for an example of how this migration and displacement impacted the beat generation in 6:43 [SPEAKER_02]: Traditionally, in major American cities, that was where you found large enclaves of immigrants from all over the world. 6:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Places like New York City, just like here, you have a little Italy in Chinatown or right next to each other. 6:57 [SPEAKER_02]: You have all these pockets of places where people settle, you'll probably largely because at some point, someone from this country or that country moved to a given place, 7:09 [SPEAKER_02]: And they became the only person that spoke the language and then you're on synuncles or friends and neighbors move once again from the old country and you're the only person that speaks the language it's the other but they're only point of familiarity and so you cluster together and that's always happened in cities traditionally and so cities become this big cross section of cultures 7:37 [SPEAKER_02]: They become a crossroads, much like Constantinople was and the late Roman world or places like Morocco or the south of Spain over the being suing centuries, people move through those places and everyone that moved through those places imprinted upon them a bit of themselves a little bit of their culture, their language rubbed off and so 8:01 [SPEAKER_02]: you found that in cities like for example in New York and in the post war era wouldn't so-called white flight started happening in either rise of suburbia and all that in in the post war years people could afford you know down payment on a house in the suburbs with their GI check a lot of people were like well this is a great chance to you move out of my hell's kitchen tenement and a call the sack and in you know westchester somewhere 8:31 [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of the, a lot of the more middle class people left in mass and cities slowly fell into decay, because cities fund their infrastructure based on property taxes. 8:45 [SPEAKER_02]: And so when all the, the property tax revenue dries up, 8:49 [SPEAKER_02]: things get dicey there's not enough money to run the sanitation or police or fires subway or any of that and so like New York started to decay as many major American cities did but what was interesting was as Urban Decay said in and rents went down if you were willing to put up with some of that 9:10 [SPEAKER_02]: you still could have access to a lot of the things that a city afforded and that was the closeness of community. 9:16 [SPEAKER_02]: That's really the core of that is like why places like New York City places like Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side like that became such incubators of such now well-known art scenes. 9:31 [SPEAKER_02]: All those things that happened there was because people could live there for cheap and that's something that really is the crux of all of that 9:40 [SPEAKER_02]: Here in North Beach since we're talking about San Francisco here and I keep going on about New York, here in North Beach, so much of the housing was actually built for people who were like, I tend to rent workers, like sailors and longshoremen, like above most of these storefronts, including the one we're saying in now, were these these single room occupancy hotels. 10:03 [SPEAKER_02]: Just a tiny, like, practically a cell of 15 by 20 with a sink in the corner and a bathroom down the hall, usually no kitchen. 10:13 [SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that people often ask, a wide-north beach, why did things get? 10:19 [SPEAKER_02]: Why did the poetry seem blow up here, as opposed to, I don't know, the mission district, or the civic heights, or someplace like that? 10:26 [SPEAKER_02]: And I think a lot of that had to do with once again, North Beach was a community of immigrants. 10:32 [SPEAKER_02]: North Beach is just San Francisco's name for Little Italy, that's really it. 10:38 [SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, obviously it included a lot of other people as well, but in back in those days, 10:42 [SPEAKER_02]: It was heavily Italian and by the sea tying quarter of town and because many of the people in the community made their living from the sea, I was in close proximity to the sea. 10:53 [SPEAKER_02]: So many of the Italian immigrants here, they were fishermen, they were long shormon, and they made their living from the port. 10:59 [SPEAKER_02]: This is the first place that when you got off a ship that arrived in San Francisco, this was the first place you came. 11:06 [SPEAKER_02]: and all those connections, that constant sort of infusion of new people and from all sorts of different places. 11:12 [SPEAKER_02]: I think that had a lot to do with it. 11:13 [SPEAKER_02]: One of the earliest incarnations of what would later be called the San Francisco Renaissance, which is the umbrella term that encompasses the beat generation and all the other things that were happening in San 11:32 [SPEAKER_02]: on Fillmore Street. 11:33 [SPEAKER_02]: And this connects a little bit later, but I think I mentioned how the lower Fillmore, like around Fillmore and Geary, where like the, the of Fillmore Auditorium that became famous in the 60s for all the, the rock concerts. 11:45 [SPEAKER_02]: That was... 11:47 [SPEAKER_02]: the old filmora that was, you know, what was called by many people, the Harlem of the West. 11:52 [SPEAKER_02]: It was the jazz district, black art district, just north of that. 11:56 [SPEAKER_02]: In what's now the Marina, there was a small little enclave of art galleries that popped up in the late 40s through the early 50s and a lot of the people that opened those galleries had connections to the art institute. 12:09 [SPEAKER_02]: over here on Chestnut. 12:10 [SPEAKER_02]: And once again, these are people that many of whom were coming out of the armed services following following World War II, the other GI checks, and they were like, look, I've just been shooting at people and getting shot at for the last four years. 12:25 [SPEAKER_02]: I think I'm going to take up painting. 12:27 [SPEAKER_02]: I think one of the things that a lot of people don't really consider about the various different artistic subcultures that popped up after World War II was that a lot of it had to do with the fact that so many Americans went back to school and it seems like such a simple thing but it's true that all of a sudden you had all these people that were going back into not just academia but learning different trades, learning different artistic skills, lots of people went back to art school and 12:54 [SPEAKER_02]: they learned music or they learned painting or they learned theater or they learned writing all these different disciplines and they were also being exposed to new ideas for the first time seen a lot of really awful things in the conduct of of war and as well as seeing a lot of new places and new cultures and new people and so there's this gigantic opening of the American mind as I like to think about it and so in in the late 40s sort of thereabouts 13:20 [SPEAKER_02]: There were all these artists that were gathered around the artists too, and a lot of them were very much aware that they were outside or artists. 13:28 [SPEAKER_02]: They didn't have major reputations or anything like that. 13:31 [SPEAKER_02]: And so, to many of them reasoned that, well, the only way that we're going to be able to show our stuff or make anything from what we're doing is if we do it ourselves. 13:40 [SPEAKER_02]: And so that itself in gender, this do it yourself mentality with regard to self promotion and you know, getting their 13:48 [SPEAKER_02]: In 1947, the poet Madeleine Gleason was instrumental in organizing one of the first festivals of modern poetry, as they called it, at a long since gone art gallery over on Goff Street. 14:02 [SPEAKER_02]: And that's one of the moments that's considered the beginning of the San Francisco Renaissance. 14:07 [SPEAKER_02]: And it included poets like Jack Spicer and Kenneth Rex Roth and Madeleine Gleason herself and... 14:14 [SPEAKER_02]: another one was Robert Duncan, but like a lot of those people were coming over from Berkeley, they were students that you see Berkeley or you know the bad connections to Berkeley, and came over here to the city to do something new, and you flash forward a couple of years, and in 1953, City Lights Books opens. 14:33 [SPEAKER_02]: and city lights had to be unique concept right from the get-go and began actually as a publication before it even had a storefront it was called the city lights magazine and they had film reviews and poetry and a theater write-ups and translations of different things and you know it's kind of an arts and culture magazine and that was begun by a guy named Peter Martin a little bit later on Lawrence Firlingetti who had not 14:57 [SPEAKER_02]: All that long ago arrived from the East Coast after getting out of the service himself, he came to San Francisco and he had submitted some poems, I believe it was, to the city lights magazine, and ran into Peter Martin on the street, and Peter was in the process of trying to open a storefront to become a bookstore, the next logical step for the magazine, and so Firling Gettie basically made him an offer right there on the street and said, 15:25 [SPEAKER_02]: And so, they each went in on the investment for $500 a piece, and city lights books was formed. 15:31 [SPEAKER_02]: And one of the things that they held to some degree of importance was they wanted to get books into the hands of ordinary working-class people. 15:40 [SPEAKER_02]: That was a huge part of their foundation. 15:42 [SPEAKER_02]: And so, they became the first all-paper-back bookstore in the country. 15:47 [SPEAKER_02]: And that was significant because at the time, we were still letter-pressing books. 15:55 [SPEAKER_02]: And so if you were a person of modest means, you really only had the library. 15:59 [SPEAKER_02]: You couldn't afford to buy big hardcover volumes. 16:03 [SPEAKER_02]: And also at the time, most paperback publications weren't very well thought out. 16:07 [SPEAKER_02]: They were the cheesy, sort of, dime store pulp fiction, which also has a place in all this. 16:12 [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of the authors like, for example, 16:14 [SPEAKER_02]: William S. Burrow's published his first book, Junkie, with Ace Books, which was a famous perveyor of pulp fiction. 16:22 [SPEAKER_02]: Very, you know, lured almost comic book covers, and they were great, but everybody knew that it was delightful trash, was the idea. 16:31 [SPEAKER_02]: And Bucity Lights wanted to make paperback books. 16:34 [SPEAKER_02]: a contender in the literary world, and it was a convenient way, an efficient way for new writers, up-and-coming writers to make a name for themselves because paperback books were a lot less expensive. 16:47 [SPEAKER_02]: You could also, with the advent of a Mimi graph machine, people had started self-publishing things. 16:53 [SPEAKER_02]: You could do, you could have a small press with a very small 16:59 [SPEAKER_02]: little pamphlets of poems or treatises or translations of philosophers from France, which had become really popular, and you could do that relatively cheap, and also your audience, we were able to afford them. 17:12 [SPEAKER_02]: And so city lights became the first all paperback bookstore in the country. 17:16 [SPEAKER_02]: They also made a point of keeping later hours so that working class people if you got off five or six o'clock you could come in and read for a while. 17:25 [SPEAKER_02]: There was also a really vibrant scene in the cafes and the bars here and that was a huge part of that community being built up. 17:33 [SPEAKER_02]: Because, as I believe I said before, so much of the housing around here was built up around the idea of a container in people above all these storefronts or these small hotels with these tiny rooms sink in the corner and bathroom down the hall. 17:47 [SPEAKER_02]: Sort of like a European sub-pensionate. 17:50 [SPEAKER_02]: just very kind of bare bones, but if you were an artist, if you were a poet, if you were a writer, that was perfect because there was this lifestyle developing where these people were constantly traveling the country, they were constantly moving around and so they didn't have a lot of possessions, they weren't trying to buy a house and fill it with stuff like other people were doing. 18:10 [SPEAKER_02]: First while in suburbia, having a little cell above a cafe was perfect, but because there was no common space in those buildings If you live in a room in house somewhere, your living room, so to speak, was the cafe downstairs. 18:25 [SPEAKER_02]: It was the bar on the corner. 18:26 [SPEAKER_02]: And that's where you met up with your friends and associates. 18:30 [SPEAKER_02]: And so there was this cafe culture that had developed here. 18:34 [SPEAKER_02]: There's also a story that comes from Papa Johnny, the founder of the Café Trieste in 1956, which also became a popular hangout from the Beats and Mr. Liz for a lot of writers and artists. 18:45 [SPEAKER_02]: And he pointed out at one point that there was something about the Italian community that embraced the Bohemian set in ways that others 18:56 [SPEAKER_02]: Because, I think, a lot of people, they were the first of their family in a new country and struggling to adapt, to living in a new place and dealing with a new language, and all of that, having that familiarity of painters and artists and writers and poets hanging out in the cafes was like a little bit of home. 19:18 [SPEAKER_02]: There was something really familiar about that. 19:20 [SPEAKER_02]: And so, his place became, 19:23 [SPEAKER_02]: Likewise, this Mecca for artists, and I think that had a lot to do with the Italian community. 19:28 [SPEAKER_02]: There was that connection there. 19:30 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked Brandon to share again the meaning of this label, beat generation. 19:36 [SPEAKER_02]: What the beat generation refers to is it was coined in the same mode as the lost generation that came before it, or generation X, or millennials, or there was a bit of overlap between the beat generation and like what Tom Brokaw called the greatest generation in that novel that he wrote about that, the people that grew up during the Depression, survived World War 2 and came back and rebuilt the country. 20:02 [SPEAKER_02]: When the term the beat generation was coined, these were people that were born circa 1920, or thereabouts, and that were coming of age, right as World War II was drawing to a close. 20:15 [SPEAKER_02]: So for example, Jack Kerrwak, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs met one another at Columbia University in 1944. 20:24 [SPEAKER_02]: World War II ended in 1945, so these are people that when they met one another for the first time, Alan was about 18, caroac was 22, and William S. Burrow, who was born in 1914, was about 30. 20:39 [SPEAKER_02]: That was significant because these are people that were right at the threshold of this major change in the culture. 20:47 [SPEAKER_02]: And what the beat generation referred to in the reason that they started using that as a name for not just their circle of friends, but for their generation as a whole, the reason that they started using that term was because it implied a certain exhaustion. 21:09 [SPEAKER_02]: It was a slang term that I believe came out of the African American community at the time. 21:13 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a phrase people would say, oh man, I'm beat to the socks, which meant taking literally that you were so broke, you were so down and out that you were literally walking around without shoes on, and was just an expression of being utterly at the bottom. 21:27 [SPEAKER_02]: So for a lot of people that were struggling to get through life in wartime, it was a perfect, 21:33 [SPEAKER_02]: phrase because it implied that sense of like existential exhaustion. 21:39 [SPEAKER_02]: Nobody knew it was what was going to happen. 21:41 [SPEAKER_02]: There were all these restrictions on everything. 21:43 [SPEAKER_02]: Food was being rationed. 21:44 [SPEAKER_02]: Things were being rationed. 21:45 [SPEAKER_02]: There was the threat of air raids and there was the threat of being conscripted and there was just all this pressure. 21:51 [SPEAKER_02]: and you had to be mindful of your energy and the expenditure of it to make sure that you had enough to keep on keeping on. 21:59 [SPEAKER_02]: And it was actually the writer, Herbert Hunky, I believe, that kind of introduced them to the term because Hunky was a street guy. 22:06 [SPEAKER_02]: He was from Chicago, I believe. 22:08 [SPEAKER_02]: and Mahirai to New York City, and unlike his friends at Columbia that were almost upper class by default, William Burrow's came from a pretty well-to-do family where the airs to the Burrow's corporation. 22:22 [SPEAKER_02]: They were the IBM of the mechanical age. 22:24 [SPEAKER_02]: His grandfather was the inventor of the adding machine. 22:27 [SPEAKER_02]: that company made everything from like the kinds of typewriters that you could put a financial ledger on to adding machines of various different sorts, cash registers, things of that nature. 22:38 [SPEAKER_02]: So the borrows came from a pretty well-to-do family. 22:40 [SPEAKER_02]: Allen Ginsberg's family was, I guess, 22:42 [SPEAKER_02]: can say middle class, his father was a poet and academic and in Patterson New Jersey. 22:47 [SPEAKER_02]: Karawak was actually the more working class of the three. 22:50 [SPEAKER_02]: He came from the old Massachusetts, and his father was a printer and his mother working a shoe factory for a while, and he grew up pretty poor, but also by virtue of having a football scholarship at Columbia University, he was better off, and so, hunky on the other hands arrived in New York City, and he had previously tied on a dope habit. 23:09 [SPEAKER_02]: and was always living at the margins. 23:12 [SPEAKER_02]: He was always on the bomb as he put it and he was always broke and he was always as he said beat to the socks and so when he used the term he meant it quite literally but he would use it around his friends and his friends were like well I guess you could say we're a beat generation. 23:28 [SPEAKER_02]: in the sense that we're all down to our last reserve resources, and so the name's stuck. 23:33 [SPEAKER_02]: And it also brought a lot of other implications, caroact being a pretty devout Catholic. 23:39 [SPEAKER_02]: He decided, no, no, no, it's not necessarily beat isn't down and out, but it's beat as in the sense of the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the Blessed are the Meek. 23:48 [SPEAKER_02]: for they shall inherit the earth, and his narrative, the idea that he was always trying to push was that there was a generation interested in compassion and sympathy and taking pleasure in life and the simple things, and that it wasn't necessarily this sort of dower down and out thing, but that was the thing. 24:09 [SPEAKER_02]: All of these people came together on the basis of, they just really loved 24:16 [SPEAKER_02]: that mattered. 24:18 [SPEAKER_02]: And that was one of them. 24:19 [SPEAKER_02]: I think every 20-something college student be sit around a dorm room, drinking red wine, and puffing a little reaper, being like, well, what are the big questions? 24:30 [SPEAKER_02]: What does it mean to be a part of our generation? 24:32 [SPEAKER_02]: Do we have something collectively that unites us? 24:35 [SPEAKER_02]: What do we share in common? 24:36 [SPEAKER_02]: What are the things that are important to us? 24:38 [SPEAKER_02]: What are our sort of generational values? 24:40 [SPEAKER_02]: How do we define us? 24:42 [SPEAKER_02]: I figured I'd read Ginsburg's America, just because it seemed sort of apropos to what we were talking about. 24:52 [SPEAKER_02]: America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. 24:54 [SPEAKER_02]: America $2.27 January 17th, 1956. 24:58 [SPEAKER_02]: I can't stand my own mind. 25:02 [SPEAKER_02]: America, when will we end the human war? 25:05 [SPEAKER_02]: Go, South of your Adam bomb. 25:07 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't feel good, don't bother me. 25:09 [SPEAKER_02]: I won't write my poems, I'll end my right mind. 25:11 [SPEAKER_02]: America, when will you be at Jellick? 25:13 [SPEAKER_02]: When will you take off your clothes? 25:15 [SPEAKER_02]: When will you look at yourself through the grave? 25:18 [SPEAKER_02]: When will you be worthy of your million trotsky heights? 25:21 [SPEAKER_02]: America, why are your libraries full of tears? 25:24 [SPEAKER_02]: America, when will you send your eggs to India? 25:26 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm sick of your insane demands. 25:29 [SPEAKER_02]: When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? 25:33 [SPEAKER_02]: America, after all, it is you and I who are perfect enough the next world. 25:37 [SPEAKER_02]: Your machinery is too much for me. 25:39 [SPEAKER_02]: You may be want to be a saint. 25:41 [SPEAKER_02]: There must be some way to settle this argument. 25:44 [SPEAKER_02]: Burrows is in Tangiers. 25:46 [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think you'll come back at Sinister. 25:48 [SPEAKER_02]: Are you being Sinister is this some form of practical joke? 25:52 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm trying to come to the point. 25:53 [SPEAKER_02]: I refuse to give up my obsession. 25:55 [SPEAKER_02]: America's top pushing, I know what I'm doing. 25:58 [SPEAKER_02]: America, the plumb blossoms are falling. 26:00 [SPEAKER_02]: I haven't read the newspapers for months. 26:02 [SPEAKER_02]: Every day someone goes on trial for murder. 26:05 [SPEAKER_02]: America, I'm feel sentimental about the wobbleies. 26:08 [SPEAKER_02]: America, I used to be a communist when I was a kid, I'm not sorry, I smoked marijuana ever chance I get. 26:13 [SPEAKER_02]: I sit in the house for days on end and stare at the roses and the closet. 26:17 [SPEAKER_02]: When I go to Chinatown, I get drunk and never get laid. 26:21 [SPEAKER_02]: My mind is made up. 26:22 [SPEAKER_02]: There's going to be trouble. 26:23 [SPEAKER_02]: You've seen me reading marks. 26:25 [SPEAKER_02]: My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. 26:28 [SPEAKER_02]: I won't say the Lord's Prayer, I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. 26:33 [SPEAKER_02]: America, I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. 26:38 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm addressing you. 26:39 [SPEAKER_02]: Are you going to let your emotional life be run by time magazine? 26:43 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm obsessed by time magazine, I read it every week. 26:46 [SPEAKER_02]: It's cover stairs at me every time I slink past the corner candy store. 26:50 [SPEAKER_02]: I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. 26:53 [SPEAKER_02]: It's always telling me about responsibility. 26:57 [SPEAKER_02]: Businessmen are serious, movie producers are serious, everybody's serious, but me. 27:01 [SPEAKER_02]: It occurs to me that I am America. 27:04 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm talking to myself again. 27:06 [SPEAKER_02]: Asia is rising against me. 27:08 [SPEAKER_02]: I haven't got a Chinaman's chance. 27:10 [SPEAKER_02]: I better consider my national resources. 27:13 [SPEAKER_02]: My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana, millions of janitals, an unpublishedable private literature that goes 1,400 miles an hour and 25,000 mental institutions. 27:26 [SPEAKER_02]: I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flower pots under the light of 500 sons. 27:33 [SPEAKER_02]: I have abolished the horror houses of France, 10 years as the next to go. 27:37 [SPEAKER_02]: My ambition is to be president despite the fact that I'm a Catholic. 27:41 [SPEAKER_02]: America, how can I ride a holy lit knee in your silly mood? 27:45 [SPEAKER_02]: I will continue like Henry Ford, my strove, sir as individual as his automobiles, more so they're all different sexes. 27:51 [SPEAKER_02]: America, I will sell you strove's 2,500 piece, 500 down in your old strove. 27:57 [SPEAKER_02]: America Free Tom Mooney, America Save the Spanish Loyalists. 28:01 [SPEAKER_02]: America Socco and Benzetti must not die. 28:03 [SPEAKER_02]: America, I am the Scottsboro Boys. 28:06 [SPEAKER_02]: America, when I was seven, my mama took me to common at cell meetings. 28:10 [SPEAKER_02]: They sold his Garbanzo's a handful, particularly to take a cost of nickel and the speeches were free. 28:15 [SPEAKER_02]: Everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers. 28:18 [SPEAKER_02]: It was all so sincere. 28:19 [SPEAKER_02]: You have no idea what a good thing. 28:20 [SPEAKER_02]: The party was in 1835. 28:22 [SPEAKER_02]: Scott Nearing was a grand old man, a real menched. 28:25 [SPEAKER_02]: Mother Blur made everybody cry. 28:27 [SPEAKER_02]: I once saw a Israel amateur playing. 28:29 [SPEAKER_02]: Everybody must have been a spy. 28:31 [SPEAKER_02]: America you don't really want to go to war, America it's them bad Russians, them Russians, them Russians and them Chinamen and them Russians. 28:39 [SPEAKER_02]: The Russia wants to eat us alive, the Russia's power mad, she wants to take our cars from outer garages, her wants to grab Chicago, her reads a red reader's digest. 28:50 [SPEAKER_02]: Her once our auto plants in Siberia, him big bureaucracy running our filling stations, that no good. 28:57 [SPEAKER_02]: America, this is quite serious. 28:59 [SPEAKER_02]: America, this is the impression I get from looking on the television set, America is correct. 29:04 [SPEAKER_02]: I better get right down to the job. 29:06 [SPEAKER_02]: It's true I don't want to join the army or turn lays in precision parts factories. 29:10 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm near-sighted and psychopathic anyway. 29:13 [SPEAKER_02]: America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
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