What a book Gordon Ball has
created!
Weaving threads of his personal and
professional lives via compelling photographs (both color and black and white)
and an eye to history, Beat Generation and counter-culture documentarian Ball
creates a multi-tiered narrative that highlights events synchronistic and
serendipitous on his many visits to the City of Hills.
On the front cover of My San
Francisco, he stands with his family in 1950 on an ocean liner in the Bay
headed for Tokyo to rendezvous with his father who got out of Shanghai before
Mao shut it down. So begins Ball’s lifelong love of the city by the bay over
the next half-century in which both his blood and self-selected families play
crucial roles.
He returns to the Bay area with his
girlfriend Candy in 1967, having just edited Allen Ginsberg’s Allen Verbatim,
and having served as manager of East Hills Farm, a retreat for poets in upstate
New York that Ginsberg created (see Taking Giant Steps: Gordon Ball's East Hill
Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg: A Conversation with Jim Cohn & Kirpal
Gordon for more).
In North Beach, he sells the Oracle
on the sidewalk and rooms across the street from the City Lights bookstore. He
meets the manager Shig Murao, who helps him find work and who becomes one of
the major reasons he returns over the years.
The writing is lively, highly
descriptive, brisk and in the Beat Gen tradition. He employs his own
punctuation and builds sentences that stay in the mind long after one closes
the book. Like all of Ball’s work, whether film, photograph or prose, he finds
brilliant strategies to convey his countercultural documentary wizardry.
My San Francisco is that kind of ars poetica!
To purchase, click My San
Francisco: Gordon Ball: 9781937370329: Amazon.com: Books.
