Psychedelic Car Wash

Last weekend I drove to THREE car washes, ladies and gentlemen, and ALL were out of order. I don't know if that's because everyone and their brother AND sister in this city was as desperate to wash their car as I was - after a winter when it was way to cold to get anywhere near a car wash? But I had no luck.

Finally, my husband found one not too far from our place that was open. And I was delighted to see all the different color soaps - a psychedelic display at a time when there aren't many psychedelics any more (let alone people who know what that means). But the picture above should give you an idea.

All this reminded me of a story about Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet and co-founder of the legendary City Lights, one of the first bookstores to publish Beat Generation poets like Allen Ginsberg and others. 

(Here I am making a pilgrimage a few years back).

This past March, btw, the bookstore celebrated Ferlinghetti's 100th birthday. That made ME remember how much I loved his poetry when I read it in school - and how I bought Ginsberg's poems Howl and Kaddish at City Lights and read them in my hotel room, and how Kaddish moved me. Howl is more famous, but Kaddish, with its story of 12-year-old Ginsberg struggling with his mother's mental illness, made me cry.

But... that wasn't what I was thinking in the car wash. What came to mind instead was how Ferlinghetti is supposed to have written a poem (and I have yet to find it at the moment) about taking a shower in a car wash when the water was turned off at his apartment. I KNOW I read this somewhere - it's either a "legend" or true but I'm pretty sure it's true,? If not, it's still a great legend.

I don't think HIS carwash had all these colors, but that's probably a good thing? Don't the colors look sticky?

In any case, if you want to take a look at Ferlinghetti's more famous poems, go here.

Though I haven't been to San Francisco in a while, I DID go to the Keys last winter with my husband, in a desperate attempt to escape the Polar Vortex. While there, we checked out Hemingway's house, but that's going to have to wait for next week's blog.

Right now, though, I hope you can share some of Ferlinghetti's stories and poems with your family--and let them know how brave he was in publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl poem. In fact, customs officials seized 520 copies of the poem and City Lights' bookstore manager Shing Marao was arrested and put in jail for selling the poem to an undercover police officer. Then Ferlinghetti was arrested for publishing the book, on the grounds that it was "obscene."

At the trial, however, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union and testimony in the book's favor from various authors, Ferlinghetti won the case when California State Superior Court Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was of redeeming social importance.

That's not a good enough reason to share Ferlinghetti's work, though. You need to share it because it's BEAUTIFUL!

And for more information about the Beat Generation... I found these for you:

This is the Beat Generation (excerpt from New York Times article, 1952) by John Clellon Holmes

The Beat Book: edited by Anne Waldman

The Portable Beat Reader by Ann Charters

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