On my most recent trip to the Okanagan I picked up a couple of hard cover books at the Vernon Value Village: a nicely produced film tie-in of John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat (below, with an illustration by Ruth Gannett) and a jacketless first edition of Myra Friedman's biography of Janis Joplin.
I am only on Page 63 of the Joplin book, but am enjoying it. In some ways, the treatment feels ahead of its time; but at its weakest, as if Friedman is trying to catch up to -- and distinguish herself from -- the New Journalism of Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe (without losing sight of the facts). Whatever the case, the emergence of its subject is now at the greyscale stage, and I look forward to an evermore colourful Janis as the decade explodes from its delicious middle.
Below is a paragraph (pp.46-47) that describes San Francisco's shifting North Beach scene:
In the winter of 1963, the North Beach area of San Francisco was in the throes of transition. The weakened remnants of the beat culture remained. Through the steamy windows of the coffeeshops, one could catch a glimpse of a poet or two intertwining a verse with the scale of a saxophone or the muffled thump of a drum. The terrain abounded with painters. The jazz enthusiasts, the artists, and the thriving practitioners of folk music jangled along compatibly. If the beat movement was dying, there was still a surge of excitement in the activity, the early spasms of something about to be born. But because the times were transitional, there was no visible form to any of it, and the media lapsed into the relative silence about American bohemia. Spawned by the civil rights movement, the folk music trend was seen as a music linked to politics, but somehow separate. Rebellion did not appear self-conscious: certainly no putsch was underway. So for the next three years, it was the best of times, with the exception of the two years after, which were even better than the ones before -- or so they nostalgically say.
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