For the last four years I have been teaching writing and journalism at Eugene Lang, part of the New School University, a gig which is now drawing to a close. I have mixed feelings about my departure. Adjunct professors are like the itinerant farm workers of our country’s college system: the schools couldn’t run without us, but that doesn’t mean we have any rights or get a lot of respect. But it has been illuminating to come to better know the current college generation. (My own college-aged son and teenaged daughter are less enlightening, in many ways; they only tell me things on a needs-to-know basis, and as the dad they figure most of what they do I don’t need to know.)

I won’t make generalizations about a whole generation (as my parents were happy to do about mine, mostly along the lines of “spoiled, selfish, self-involved” — does any of this sound familiar?) though the subject of generational divides came up often in our sometimes rambling seminars. A lot of the Lang kids look like my friends did in the early seventies: long hair, grunge clothes, hand-rolled cigarettes, sneering affect. And the New School is proud of its tradition of political discontent, and many there will doubtless look at President Bob Kerrey’s announcement that he is leaving next year as some kind of victory, though their complaints with him remain rather inchoate. And while they can be dismissive of the spoiled, selfish, self-involved grown-ups we (ie, their parents) have become, many look with plain nostalgia to the sixties as the time they should have been born in. 

A little time-travel might be helpful here: I think a day or two or no cell phone or internet, to say nothing of the three channels available on television, might cure them. Most recently the topic of generation gaps came up when my intro to journalism class was discussing “Say Anything,” Emily Nussbaum’s 2007 New York magazine story that considered the phenomenon of online everything and the people who grew up with it. Though the piece is slightly dated in the ever-morphing web world (what was MySpace, again? And how come there is no Twitter?), the class related to the general fear and alienation voiced by the elders in the story. 

For Nussbaum contends that this is the first real generation gap since, well, the sixties, and that it’s not light shows and marijuana that separates the generations but the internet. “Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter,” she quotes Clay Shirkey, a 42 yo NYU professor as saying. “What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.” 

Oh, you had a 7-Eleven parking lot to hang out in! La-di-da. While my life would have been undoubtedly altered by knowing people outside of my immediate community (Auburn, California), I can’t say I’m really stewing with envy over the choices available to youth today. For the underground culture we nibbled at the edges of then was truly underground. My mother may have been curious about what I was off doing with my friends at all hours, and on a few occasions I tried to explain the lure of the counterculture I imagined myself part of. But it’s not like she was going to drop acid and listen to Trout Mask Replica with me, god bless her. 

Which is one problem with the generation gap analogy. I can visit YouTube, Facebook, Twitter et al anytime and while I may not see the charm of the dog-slobber videos or quite understand the desire to let everyone know what I am doing all the time, I can glimpse it. Can the underground exist online? Is it really underground if everyone can see it? Are we romanticizing the counterculture, and our status as The Others of our time? I dunno. My memory is that there was much more of a secret handshake involved then when meeting other members of the tribe, but my memory ain’t what it used to be. Blame it on the drugs. 

Now that Obama’s first 100 days are behind him, he can get back to enjoying the plagues that have been visited upon his administration. It’s always fun to hear what’s left of the GOP talk about his decisive victory of 100+ days ago as if he really got the breaks when the economy started to tank. (I hear the voice of Napoleon Dynamite: “Lucky!”)

“The typical president,” the president said, has “two or three big problems. We’ve got seven or eight big problems.” I don’t know if he was including Pakistan on that list, or today’s GM crisis, or the rearming of North Korea — hey, I said seven or eight! Who slipped me the combo pack when I wasn’t looking?  When asked later about what conservatives see as his latent socialism and the government’s involvement in the private sector, he returned to the shit-sandwich theme:

“If you could tell me right now that, when I walked into this office that the banks were humming, that autos were selling, and that all you had to worry about was Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, getting health care passed, figuring out how to deal with energy independence, deal with Iran, and a pandemic flu, I would take that deal,” he said. But Obama hasn’t had the luxury of choosing his challenges. They have assembled at his door, and ours, like a Moroccan line, each trying to push to the window first. 

With the announcement that Arlen Spector had crossed over to our side, the president could afford to be a little less magnanimous toward the Republicans. It wasn’t quite George Bush style with-us-or-against-us, but with the prospect of a filibuster-proof Democratic majority looming in the senate, he could drop the Mr.-Nice-Guy routine. 

And about time! With the news of Jack Kemp’s death we are reminded of that dying breed — the moderate Republican — at a time when the dinosaurs of the party have retrenched in their future tar-pits to stand up for their principles (ie, the fiscal discipline the forgot under GWB). Kemp’s conservative bonafides were unassailable, as a tax-cut evangelist, but late in his life he saw that the GOP was losing the minority vote (and hence the future). 

Not that the future, with all its complications, is something the Republicans seem eager to embrace. I get the feeling they are just hoping if they don’t evolve, the clock will turn back and it will be the fifties again. You know, soda shops and segregation. A simpler world.

The 1958 Vincent Minnelli film Some Came Running is an oddity of varied genres: a proto Rat Pack film, a soldier’s-homecoming movie, and as weird a tale of writer’s block as Barton Fink. It is also a product of its time, when America watched its hometown fantasy go dark and men like my father wrestled with false dichotomies: drinking or writing? madonna or whore? I wonder how many times David Lynch has seen it. 

Frank Sinatra plays a writer (so we know we’re in Bizarro World) who seems to have spent the years since the war drinking and not writing (though he carries a copy of an “Unfinished Story” in his suitcase, along with Modern Library volumes of Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway and fifths of scotch). He returns to his hometown (Parkman, Indiana) via Greyhound bus in the company of a floozy from Chicago, played by Rat Pack moll and future reincarnation expert Shirley MacLaine. He gives her fifty bucks to go back to from whence she came but she is like gum on his shoe. 

Instead he falls for a creative writing teacher who wears pearls and cashmere sweaters and seems, in general , to have a stick up her ass. Until that Hollywood moment when she removes the pins from her hair and she falls, swooning, into Sinatra’s skinny arms. Mostly she is puzzled by his failure to live up to his potential as a writer, and the company he keeps: his best friend is a professional gambler named Bama (Dino, affecting a kind of Foghorn Leghorn accent) and he runs with MacLaine and some other dames who behave (and seem to like to be treated) like hair-band groupies from the Sunset Strip. The amount of drinking (and suggested sex) that goes on in this story is phenomenal; the quaint little town comes off like Pottersville, aka Bedford Falls if George Bailey had never lived. Every altercation ends with someone breaking a bottle, pulling a knife, going for a gun. Even the nice lady who gave Sinatra licorice when he was a kid is introduced coming out of a bar in the middle of the day. 

Some Came Running was based on a James Jones novel; the film adaptation of his From Here to Eternity helped resurrect Sinatra’s then ailing career and maybe he thought the lightning would strike twice. Jones was one of those novelists of my father’s generation (Styron, Mailer et al) who came back from the war determined to carve America a new asshole with giant, door-stopper novels about men and war. His disenchantment with what he found stateside seems as cold as Henry Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare, at least in this film adaptation. No amount of “Metrocolor” can bring the heat and soften the shadows. The most sympathetic character in the story dies; the rest are condemned to keep on living, and drinking until their livers give out. See you at the fair.

As reported in the NY Times on Monday, Boston is dealing with the threatened loss of the Globe by searching its collective soul and wondering what the closure would say about its city. “Boston’s not a podunk town,” the article quoted one resident saying. “It’s got to have a good paper.” 

The fact that the NY Times company, which owns the Globe, is the one doing the threatening has to add to the insult (kind of like Al Qaeda News running a think piece on 9.11) but what struck me, as a former resident of San Francisco, is why that city has not responded in similar fashion to the threatened demise of its only real news daily, the SF Chronicle?

Local blogs such as Ghost Word have followed the unraveling, as reporters and editors take buyouts and flee, and the Hearst company’s threats to close the paper have received international attention. But I don’t get the feeling that people there are losing much sleep over the potential loss. 

“Nobody reads it,” is the reaction I get when I ask people there about the Chron. (The only other daily is the former Hearst sheet the Examiner, before the rivals switched identities, in a sci-fi scenario few could have imagined, in 1999; today the Ex is the kind of thing you line your birdcage with if you don’t like your bird.) Does that make SF a “podunk town,” in the words of the Boston lady? 

Residents would bristle at the suggestion but it was a long-standing irony of the SF Bay Area that, with a wealthy, literate audience of media mavens, the City That Knows How has never been able to sustain a world-class newspaper, let alone a magazine. In the seventies, I worked at a news kiosk/bookstore there and sold countless copies of — the New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, the New York Times, even the Village Voice. While Focus, SF, the Chronicle et al languished on the floor until we bound them up to return them to the distributor, or throw them in the trash. 

Inferiority complex? Hardly. No one feels more certain about their choice of habitat than San Franciscans (which is probably why so much of the local media is dedicated to reminding people of what a great place they live). And its not lack of creativity. Salon, for just one example, was born out of the newspaper strike of the early nineties and still has a strong local following. It is not, however, a purveyor of local news and does not want to bear the mantle of Great Voice of Northern California (as the Chron called itself when I was a kid). 

No one does, it seems. Why stay inside putting out a quality journal when it’s such a nice day? Let’s go to the beach and have a picnic. I’ll bring the latest New Yorker.