The Marinaissance

Tell me your stories of Marin in that midcentury golden era / Alexis Madrigal

This piece was featured first on Aug 27 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

I’m now deep in a new book by David Perlis, Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast, and it is a delicious read for the lover of Bay Area history.

The thing begins: Some people started to party on an old ferry MC’d by Jean “Yanko” Varda down at the waterfront in Sausalito, and next thing you knew, Marin was a crucial artistic center known around the world. How? Why?

“Because of the fault and the mountain, the moon and the tides. Because for so long there were no bridges, and then there were,” Perlis writes. “Because of the radio and small presses and breathtaking risk, Marin was the future.” Maybe, too, because Eastern art, poetry, and philosophy in many different guises began to diffuse into America from this place. Oakland was the port, but Marin was the portal.

Perlis calls this time period, from about 1950ish to 1980ish the “Marinaissance: a seismic cultural awakening encompassing literature, music, dance, painting, philosophy, religion, architecture, and film.” If that sounds grand, let me assure you that it might even undersell what happened in Marin right under the noses of the rich and mostly conservative people who lived up there.

Perlis’s book contains the characters you expect: Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, the Halprins, Anne Lamott, Stewart Brand, Philip K Dick, Alan Watts… and then honestly the list just goes on and on and on in the best way, as you realize how many characters got woven into the scenes circling the great Mt Tam.

—Oh look, there’s Maya Angelou, some European surrealist, Robert Haas, Frank Herbert, Anaïs Nin (and her diaeresis), Sly Stone, Etel Adnan, George Lucas, Janis Joplin, Walter Murch, and, oh right, Robin Williams and, oh hey, Huey Lewis and a zillion others who were drawn to Marin at this specific point in spacetime. What a trip, man. A psychedelic cornucopia of American creativity. And if some of their number were full of shit, layabouts, dilettantes, drug-addled burnouts, con men, deadbeat-dad libertines… well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

As an East Bay maximalist, Marin always takes me by surprise. Modern-day Mill Valley, for example, drives me slightly insane. It’s all just a little too pretty, too rich, too perfect, too self-satisfied. And then you find yourself down by the water or off on a side street under a giant redwood or on the mesa and something clicks: a trick of the light, a magical twinkle, a trickle of envy. I find myself curling around the little finger of this green county.

Kerouac’s not-really-fictional Gary Snyder character Japhy says, “See up there ahead, as beautiful a mountain as you’ll see anywhere in the world, a beautiful shape to it, I really love Tamalpais.” Me too, Japhy. It’s that simple. Me too.