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‘Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast’ comes out on September 1st at Heyday Books.(Courtesy of Heyday Books)<\/p>\nSan Francisco is considered the nucleus of the counterculture movements of the 1950s and 1960s. It\u2019s the place where the Beat Generation, psychedelic rock, and the Summer of Love ignited; the place where Allen Ginsburg and Jerry Garcia blew up the conformity and complicity of post-WWII America.<\/p>\n
What happened in the city, though, was only the brief and intense flame of a larger revolution in literature, poetry, art, music, and philosophy, argues writer Dave Perlis in his new book Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way I look at it, San Francisco was the stage where you could go to perform your ideas, exhibit your ideas, and help them gain national attention,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the place where the inspiration happened, where the love and the magic happened, was Marin. It was a liminal zone where fantasy and reality were able to blur.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, it was in Fairfax that Eastern mysticism found its foothold in the United States; in Mill Valley that Alan Watts introduced a generation to Buddhism; in Point Reyes where Philip K. Dick transformed his disturbing visions into sci-fi masterpieces; in Muir Beach where Ken Kesey launched his acid tests and the Grateful Dead performed its first show on LSD; in Larkspur where Grace Slick began to write the Jefferson Airplane hit \u201cWhite Rabbit\u201d; on a Sausalito houseboat that Shel Silverstein penned his anti-establishment children\u2019s poetry; in San Rafael that Frank Lloyd Wright shaped an architectural masterpiece and George Lucas was inspired to design the royal palace of Naboo in Star Wars.<\/p>\n
All are part of what Perlis calls the Marinaissance, what he describes as \u201ca seismic cultural awakening encompassing literature, music, dance, painting, philosophy, religion, architecture, and film, which in the decades that follow will have an outsized role in shaping the twentieth century\u2019s most enduring culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Morning in Marin, Perlis expertly tells the story of a history that spans more than 50 years, a brilliantly written book with a fast-paced and fascinating narrative full of rich, immersive, and often conspiratorial details. Through painstaking research and more than 60 interviews, he reveals the machinations behind individuals and events whose profound impact on art, music, and writing still resonates today.<\/p>\n
Perlis also explains why Marin\u2019s place at the nexus of America\u2019s mid-20th century countercultural revolution is no mere coincidence. The region\u2019s geography, he says, was instrumental in the development of its identity.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe fact that [Marin County] is almost an island surrounded on three sides by water is a huge influence on the people that it drew. Because the Golden Gate Bridge didn\u2019t exist until 1937, it was sort of preserved as a time capsule\u2014and that really did create a magical atmosphere.\u201d<\/p>\n
Around Mount Tam, Point Reyes, and Tomales Bay, \u201cpeople found a pristine environment that didn\u2019t exist near any other major city,\u201d Perlis continues. Marin felt far away but was, in reality, just a short distance from the major cities of San Francisco and Oakland, and the intellectual centers of Berkeley and Stanford. \u201cPhysically and spiritually facing Asia,\u201d the region also drew those eager to rebel against European ideals and Christian morals.<\/p>\n
Creativity and experimentation are a current that still runs through Marin today\u2014\u201dculturally it is still a vibrant community that\u2019s producing all kinds of things,\u201d says Perlis\u2014but there\u2019s one major difference. As one of the wealthiest counties in the country, these days \u201cyou have to already be from there or have already succeeded in order to make Marin your inspiration. It used to not be like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Morning in Marin, though, isn\u2019t meant to be a commentary on the region in the present day. Instead, it is a \u201ctime capsule and a time machine,\u201d says Perlis. <\/p>\n
\u201cI did my best to preserve our cultural history so that it wouldn\u2019t be lost; I wanted it to be something we could all share in. It\u2019s not my story, it\u2019s our story.\u201d<\/p>\n
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David Perlis, author of the new book ‘Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast'(Jordan Blackman)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco is considered the nucleus of the counterculture movements of the 1950s and 1960s. It\u2019s the place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[97431,172856,172855,67697,647,172858,172860,88886,172854,172857,172861,172859,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-435522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-bay-area-author","tag-bay-area-authors","tag-bay-area-books","tag-beat-generation","tag-books","tag-counterculture-revolution","tag-david-perlis","tag-marin-history","tag-marin-book","tag-marin-county-history","tag-morning-in-marin","tag-morning-in-marin-book","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}