One Day with ruth weiss
Working on the documentary "ruth weiss, the beat goddess," we filmed in some of the most iconic Beat Generation locations in San Francisco. We started in North Beach, at the Beat Museum in Broadway, dedicated to preserving the memory and works of the Beat Generation, while I shouldered the camera, maintained the mic, and tried not to trip backward while I kept ruth in the frame. Every few feet, we stopped to look at another sign, another window, another shop, ruth full of stories going back half a century.
"This area that we're in now was known as the Bohemian section of San Francisco," ruth told me. "I arrived here long before… well, four years before the whole beatnik thing started. I was walking down the street, and there was a musician I knew in New Orleans two years before… his name was Johnny, and he was a piano player. He said, 'We jam once or twice a week in the boiler room. Why don't you come and join us?' Sometimes I would listen. Sometimes make up words, sounds, or use a real poem. Whatever I felt like."
After an hour and a block full of stories, we sat down on the outside patio for a bottle of beer on Grant Avenue. Nearly everyone who walked by had a moment for ruth, talking memories from different decades, stopping to reminisce about the adventures they'd had and the art they'd made, each woven into the tapestry of ruth's great and storied life. The stories didn't stop there. ruth weiss, her work, and her soul are in the DNA of North Beach.
ruth weiss at Caffe Trieste having a beer. Still image from the documentary “ruth weiss, the beat goddess.”
"I have just always been living the poem,” ruth said, “That is number one. Whatever else happens is part of the structure. But the real core is what I call "the poem." And we all have "the poem" within us.”
I ask her to take me to where it all began. We walk on Grant Avenue towards Green Street, stopping into cafes, bars, galleries, restaurants, filming the whole time. As she spoke, it was like jumping from one era of her life to another, all the while on one street. I tried to keep up with her while I held the camera, loading new memory cards to keep pace with each story.
More friends and acquaintances continued to stream from the streets to stop ruth for a moment. A saxophone player that played with ruth in Berlin jumped out of his car and hugged her, stopping traffic. Drivers honk their horns – then they see who he's talking to, and they leave their vehicles too.
It took us two hours to make it down one block. Finally, on Green Street, we stopped in front of a yellow brick wall and looked at the door to the underground club that once hosted ruth and her merry band of free thinkers and artists many years ago.
"Three of the musicians who lived there opened up the club called the Cellar. They hired me to work a few days as a waitress to serve them, but they said, why don't you pick a night for poetry and jazz? So I took Wednesdays and started performing and did no rehearsals… Sometimes other musicians would come in and jam. So, in a way, I innovated poetry with jazz in San Francisco or even on the west coast. I didn't start it. I didn't invent it. But I innovated it, and that's where all that started.”
The night ended at a nearby pub headlining a rock band. ruth and her partner swayed and twirled to the live music, colorful lights decorating the space above their heads, and I joined them, dancing around the pair with my camera.
Though I spent several years working with ruth on the documentary, that day spent hopping from place to place, person to person, memory to memory, highlighted the interconnected and ageless nature ruth possessed. These places lived with her, well-worn stones of stories that became embedded in the very homes they inhabited.
ruth weiss and Melody Miller embrace after a long day of stories and filming.
Can’t Stop the Beat book signed by ruth weiss to Melody.
