Beating Around the Bush
It is a foggy day in North Beach when I set out towards the Beat Museum. School had let out early, which was indeed a blessing for this interview. On my way, I pass City Lights, the beacon of free speech and counterculture, still standing strong 66 years later. The interior of the museum looks dilapidated in all the right ways: Next to the shelves of old records, there is a frayed reading chair surrounded by books. Further in, old movie theater seats populate a hodge-podge of a room where there is a documentary playing on loop. The museum truly is “beatific:” It storyis reduced to the bedrock of the building, naked and unabashedly honest about itself.
The museum curator, Brandon Loberg, is a young guy, probably in his 30s, with a clean-shaven beard and kempt hair. Interestingly enough, his path to the beats was quite different from mine. While I discovered them as a teenager, he was well into college before he had his first encounter with counterculture: [My friend and I] were walking up Columbus, and he turns his head and says, ‘Holy shit; that’s City Lights!’ I love a good bookstore. Don’t get me wrong, but I asked him, ‘Why is this special?’ His jaw hit the floor.” From there, he says, it was history.
When I asked him to pick his favorite piece of Beat writing, he was understandably indecisive. After some deliberation, he came up with “October in the Railroad Earth,” a Jack Kerouac piece documenting an aimless night in San Francisco. The story reads like a stream of consciousness, documenting the conversations he has and the people he sees. Brandon, however, doesn’t believe this to be of particular importance: “The content is not what matters. It’s the way it’s written. All these years later, it’s this piece of nostalgia where even now, you can see and feel what he is talking about.”
The piece indeed reads like Kerouac, in that frantically scrawled, breathless style, which has become so closely linked to his name. Although it was published so long ago, I agree with Brandon. You can still feel the essence of the city within it; that hysteric, cluttered sense of not enough time that everyone who has lived here long enough seems to have: “Here’s all these Millbrae and San Carlos neat-necktied producers and commuters of America and Steel civilization rushing by with San Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough time to be disdainful, they’ve got to catch 130, 132, 134, 136 all the way up to 146 till the time of evening supper in homes of the railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hotshot freight trains–it’s all in California.”
For all its glory, though, the city has certainly changed. Brandon is quick to say that change is a part of the natural order: “Cities are always in flux.” Just because it is inevitable, though, does not mean it is positive: “I had a guy interview me when I was living just up the street in North Beach, and he asked me if a movement like the Beat Generation could happen in San Francisco today. My answer was no. Part of what lets an artistic movement thrive is quite simply that people have the time and leeway to be artists.” Brandon is, of course, referring to the drastic increase in housing cost that San Francisco has undergone in the 21st century. This is no lie: The price of a two-bedroom home in San Francisco has risen from $420,000 in 2000 to $1.38 million in 2019, and the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is now $3,690, almost seven hundred dollars higher than New York City. Someone like Kerouac working odd jobs on the dock and the railroad would make nowhere near enough to sustain themselves, let alone have free time to write or create art.
White Flight began in the 1950s when affluent families, afraid of the supposed “death” of cities due to minorities moving in, began to flock to the suburbs. Because of this, suburbs took on a particular status symbol, and cities were thought of as centers of poverty and moral decay. Recently, this trend has been happening in reverse: More and more people are moving to cities, desperate to reap the benefits of the vibrant culture they used to fear. Brandon understands this and sees its irony: “We were all brought up with the idea that diversity enriches our lives. Cities offer us that, so more people are flooding cities. And pretty paradoxically, cities are becoming less diverse as that trend continues. The communities that I moved here to be a part of are being displaced, and I think it’s a shame.”
Despite this, Brandon cherishes the fact that more people are becoming interested in counterculture. Just yesterday, he says, a class of 30 8th graders came in and toured the museum. He loves the idea of people “tracing the cord back to the wall,” as he did with his first love of punk rock. And he thinks the message of the beats is still relevant today, more so recently than ever. He believes that is part of the magic of the Beats. After so long, they still have so much to say, and their spirits live on through places such as this museum and City Lights. “Do we ever learn from our mistakes? Not really. But if we look to [the Beats] we can try our best to break the cycle.”
