"It Had a Certain Poetry to It"

"By this time, Schiller was a photojournalist of some renown, and with a batch of good-quality LSD finding its way into counterculture circles and talk of so-called Acid Tests–musical events fuelled by Kool-Aid laced with psychedelics–taking place along the west coast, he set out to document the new scene. Through acid guru Timothy Leary, Schiller made contact with Kesey, who told him the Pranksters were due to hold an Acid Test on Sunset Boulevard. Mid-trip, they skipped down the block to pose for portraits. 'Cassady was there,' Schiller recalls. 'At one point I went over, and he started dancing with his silhouette.'"

Louis Pattison in a 2011 Guardian article tells the backstory of the cover of the Flaming Lips album The Soft Bulletin.

"What It's Done to His City"

" A new brand of dot-com millionaires and generally Silicon Valley money have moved into San Francisco with bags full of cash and no manners."


Jeffrey Brown at the PBS Newshour interviews Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

"Where Columbus Avenue Meets Jack Kerouac Alley"

"Yes, the shop's contents are divided into sections, but they aren't the ones you'd expect to find in Barnes & Noble: One is titled Anarchy, another Muckraking. One is denominated Stolen Continents. An entire large bookshelf is devoted to banned books (and impishly contains 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Madame Bovary'). And one set of shelves, reaching from floor to ceiling, contains books put out by the bookshop's imprint. In an age when publishing is said to be dying, City Lights is busy bringing out short stories by Ry Cooder; fiction by the undying hero of small presses, Charles Bukowski; and works by such graying revolutionaries as Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky."


In the Los Angeles Times, Pico Iyer visits San Francisco's best bookstore.

Omni Rum Punch Man

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for writer Albert Murray, concert promoter Sid Bernstein, writer Elmore Leonard, actress Julie Harris, poet Seamus Heaney, record-store owner and actor Murray Gershenz, Kerouac muse Bea Kozera, and broadcaster David Frost.