The Press: All that Jazz

In an idle hour, Jazz Columnist Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle staged a tongue-in-cheek interview with a fictional hipster named Shorty Pederstein. His old friend, he reported, had deserted the beard-and-sandal set of the Beat Generation, now boasted a Nob Hill address, clean shaves and tennis togs.

Said Shorty of the new Up-Beat Generation: "We eschew the verbal shorthand popularly supposed to be the language of this ingroup, and we reject the death-wish symbolism of the dark shirt and black stockings. The square has come full circle, so to speak. The hipster today is exactly what the tourist doesn't see. What he sees are the other-directed camp followers making themselves over in the image of an in-group they never knew."

Last week Gleason was gleefully passing around a story sent out by the local bureau of United Press International, which had bought the fake interview as the cool truth, and forthwith dispatched it without credit to Gleason's column. Said the U.P.I, story: "San Francisco's famed 'beatsters' are shaving off their beards, Jazz Musician Shorty Pederstein explains, 'The beard has lost its effect and is now respectable. To wear a beard is no distinction. Not to wear a beard is the strongest pattern of nonconformity.' "