DATE=10-24-03

TYPE=English Feature

NUMBER=7-37976

TITLE=City Lights Bookstore's Fiftieth Year

BYLINE=Adam Phillips

TELEPHONE=212-264-2148

DATELINE=San Francisco California

EDITOR=Rob Sivak 202-619-2023

CONTENT=

(ATTN: AMERICANA, LITERATURE)

MUSIC: "NOW'S THE TIME" by CHARLIE PARKER [ESTABLISH AND UNDER. OUT BY END OF HOST INTRO]

HOST: That's "bebop" jazz from the "Beat Era" of the 1950s -- a time when some Americans began to rebel against what they saw as the buttoned-down repressiveness of mainstream culture. Places such as New York's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's North Beach neighborhoods became magnets for new forms of self-expression, especially in the arts. [MUSIC UP, THEN FADE OUT]

In San Francisco, the undisputed center for Beat literature was a tiny bookstore and poetry press called City Lights. Today, City Lights is still going strong. VOAs Adam Phillips has a report on how this cultural landmark is observing its fiftieth anniversary. [MUSIC OUT]

TEXT: It has been half a century since Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his friend Peter Martin started City Lights in the very same creaky wooden building in North Beach where you will find it still. Today, the bookstore sprawls through all five of the building's large rooms. But Mr. Ferlinghetti, now 84 years old, described in an interview some years ago how the entire operation was once underground -- both literally and symbolically.

TAPE CUT ONE FERLINGHETTI (:31)

"We started as a little, tiny bookstore in the basement, which was once a meeting place for Italian anarchists. And so we generally had this anarchist political slant in the bookstore, right from the beginning. And I don't mean 'anarchist' in the sense of looking like Walt Whitman with a homemade bomb in his pocket at all times. I mean a philosophical anarchism, more libertarian left… pacifist. So that's been a background bias of City Lights from the beginning -- both in the publishing and the bookstore."

TEXT: Artistic and political expression formed a continuum for the Beat writers and poets who made City Lights their meeting place and literary home. Besides Mr. Ferlinghetti himself, the group included Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg and others. When City Lights published Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl" in 1956, Mr. Ferlinghetti and Mr. Ginsberg were arrested for obscenity. They were eventually acquitted, after a landmark trial.

The Beat legacy still inspires 20 year old Sarah Baumgartner, a City Lights customer barely visible behind a pile of books she is absorbing at a badly nicked café table in the store's poetry room.

TAPE CUT TWO BAUMGARTNER / PHILLIPS (:29)

SB: I've read all the Beat novels. I read them way back when I was in high school and beginning of college. AP: Now you weren't going to be born for, like, thirty-five years when the Beats were doing things. Why would you feel an affinity for them? SB: Just something rebellious and a scene we didn't really have in my generation. Just people all together doing something different than the mainstream. [That's] definitely what attracted me in the first place. [LAUGHS]

TEXT: But for many San Franciscans, City Lights is more than a symbol of the Bohemian past. It's one of the few independent bookstores still around. North Beach resident Suzy Starke [STAR' kee] has been a regular at the bookstore's continuing fiftieth anniversary celebrations. She says that, unlike many of America's huge bookstore chains, City Lights has its heart in the community, not in the corporate boardroom.

TAPE CUT THREE STARKE (:29)

"It's just the type of bookstore that you know that if you go up to the front counter and ask for some obscure title, that they'll spend a half hour researching it for you and they'll find it for you and they'll have it sent. And so it's a resource. City Lights means so much to everyone. Just knowing it's there, knowing it's three blocks away from my house and I can go down there at ten o' clock any night of the week and just browse all the wonderful books… That's a wonderful feeling."

TEXT: Many bookstores devote their prime shelf space to trendy bestsellers, but City Lights' staff of 19 employees tries to stock books that are interesting or unusual - even if they don't sell quickly. Head buyer Paul Yamazaki has worked at City Lights for thirty-three years. He says many customers come to the store simply to be surprised.

TAPE CUT FOUR YAMAZAKI (:23)

"Myself and the staff here, try to select the best of what is being published and try to present that to our audience in a way that that makes sense to them and has a sense of discovery. One of the things we try to teach here to the staff is 'it's not just your personal interest, but what your idealized personal interests might be if you could read everything and just be a little bigger person than we [you] actually are.'"

TEXT: There have been changes at City Lights. In terms of subject matter, there is far more diversity on the shelves today than there once was, and more literature from abroad especially Latin America, Africa and Asia.

There have also been changes on the publishing side. City Lights achieved its early fame as a poetry press. In 2003, only two of its twelve offerings were poetry. City Lights' founder, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, welcomes all of this -- so long as City Lights' abiding principles remain intact.

MUSIC: JAZZ [SNEAK UP HERE, THEN UP IN CLEAR AFTER SIGN-OFF, PLAY TO POST AND FADE]

TAPE CUT FIVE FERLINGHETTI (:16)

"The idea is to get high. And it doesn't matter what the medium is. I don't mean blowing your brain with psychedelics. I mean having high thoughts or, in poetry, 'elevated speech.' Having a sharp consciousness, piercing thoughts -- not being asleep!"

TEXT: Find out more about City Lights and its fiftieth year celebrations on the Internet at w-w-w dot citylights that's one word dot com. In the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, this is Adam Phillips reporting. [MUSIC UP PLAY TO POST AND FADE]

VOA/ap/rms