Howard K. Smith did a news report on "the Beat revolution" in 1960. Smith intended to be even-handed, although today his commentary and questions (in interviews) will strike us as amazingly condescending. These poor deluded children. Charming, but oh how misguided. My favorite moment in the report is a 56-second segment from what must have been a longer, perhaps much longer discussion with a teenaged girl - who had fled her square suburban parents and had migrated to Venice, CA. Listen to her. I'm entranced by her utterly sincere critique of American conformity, in the high sweet tone that anticipates the classic flower child of seven or eight years later.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
beat girl migrates to Venice
Howard K. Smith did a news report on "the Beat revolution" in 1960. Smith intended to be even-handed, although today his commentary and questions (in interviews) will strike us as amazingly condescending. These poor deluded children. Charming, but oh how misguided. My favorite moment in the report is a 56-second segment from what must have been a longer, perhaps much longer discussion with a teenaged girl - who had fled her square suburban parents and had migrated to Venice, CA. Listen to her. I'm entranced by her utterly sincere critique of American conformity, in the high sweet tone that anticipates the classic flower child of seven or eight years later.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
