She hadn’t written, much less published, anything since college, and for this she partly blamed San Francisco, this little ukulele-strumming cuddle party. A They Might Be Giants song set in concrete. Its last influential artists were the godawful Beats, and now it was nothing but a collapsed soufflé of sex kitsch and performance readings, book clubs, writing workshops. Haight-Ashbury radicalism had been flushed out in a thunderous enema of tourist cash; the Mission was annexed by Silicon Valley. City Lights was a good name for something that obscured stars. The little journals and bookstores
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She hadn’t written, much less published, anything since college, and for this she partly blamed San Francisco, this little ukulele-strumming cuddle party. A They Might Be Giants song set in concrete. Its last influential artists were the godawful Beats, and now it was nothing but a collapsed soufflé of sex kitsch and performance readings, book clubs, writing workshops. Haight-Ashbury radicalism had been flushed out in a thunderous enema of tourist cash; the Mission was annexed by Silicon Valley. City Lights was a good name for something that obscured stars. The little journals and bookstores were on a drip-feed of pledge drives, and the only thing to say about the McSweeney’s tweehouse of interns was that they had nice packaging.
