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The Beat Scene
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 RE: The Beat Scene (in reply to SephardRick)
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The so-called "Beat Generation" was originally spearheaded by a group of writers and other more free-spirited individuals in the immediate post-World War II era. The original core--Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and others were in New York hanging around the Columbia University campus. Later, in the mid-'50s, they shifted to San Francisco, where they added others to their band. Jack Kerouac wrote such Beat classics as "On the Road,", "The Dharma Bums," and "The Subterraneans." Allen Ginsberg wrote a very famous poem, "Howel," and Burroughs wrote several books, probably the best known being "The Naked Lunch." All, by the way, are still in print.
In San Francisco, they more or less coalesced around Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet who opened up a bookstore called "City Lights." City Lights became a focal point for writers and other "unconventional" types, including Neal Cassidy, who became one of Jack Kerouac's best friends. City Lights book store still exists, and is located on Columbus Avenue, near North Beach and China Town. There still exists a cafe cum watering hole called "Vesuvio's" that is right next to City Lights. Vesuvio's was a hangout for the Beats as well. The term "Beat" has obscure origins, although it meant "tired" or "beaten down" in the Black community. But Kerouac appropriated it and used it to describe his generation (referring to the "beatitudes" as "beatific" and, musically, to be "on the beat,") or so the story goes. The term "Beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen, of the San Francisco Chronicle, to describe members of the Beat Generation after Sputnik, the Soviet satellite, was launched into orbit.
The Beats basically were non-conformists in a post-World War II America that valued conformity. After all, many of the GIs who returned from the war wanted to go to college on the GI Bill, start families, buy a home, and settle into a profession. Completely understandable. Yet, in my opinion, it is equally understandable that the Beat Generation wanted to reject that conformity, experiment with literary forms, be "on the road," discuss philosophy, and live life on the edge. Some went over the edge. William S. Burroughs was a life-long drug addict. He and his wife Joan lived in Mexico for several years. One night in a bar, after both had been drinking heavily, Burroughs told Joan they should play "William Tell." Joan place a highball glass on her head, Burroughs took out a revolver, shot low, and killed her instantly. Not pretty.
For my part, I enjoyed reading Beat literary works and admired their unconventionality, but I never got completely into it. It was great fun going to coffee houses in the early '60s and listening to folk music and poetry readings. Looking back on that era, though, I have to say that there were a lot of Beat "wannabes" who wrote and read excruciatingly bad poetry. I can still hear some fools pontificating about philosophical concepts that I later determined they knew absolutely nothing about.
Around the mid-'60s the Beat Generation more or less faded out and the "Hippies" came into focus (or maybe I should say "out of focus"). In my opinion, the true Beats (not the "wannabes") at least had some talent. The Hippies, on the other hand, lacked the talent, and in their pursuit of non-conformity and unconventionality, became, within the framework of their own social mores, just as conformist and conventional as those they supposedly were rebelling against.
I still make it a point to go to City Lights book store whenever I find myself in San Francisco. They have a great selection of fiction and non-fiction works. I was last in City Lights in December 2014, overnighting in San Francisco after returning from a consulting gig in Samoa. I was told that Lawrence Ferlinghetti, now 96 years old, still occasionally comes to his office above the book store.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Apr. 28 2015 17:51:56
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: The Beat Scene (in reply to SephardRick)
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My sense is the true Beat scene was more literary than musical. Nevertheless, I think what music scene existed was more into early "cool jazz" than folk music and bongos. The folk music and bongos were more a product of the later Beat "wannabes," the ones who, as an affectation, wore berets and sported goatees as they sat in coffee houses intently listening to really bad poetry (in between folk music sets), affecting a deep "understanding" of the poet's "meaning" in order to impress their girl friends.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Apr. 28 2015 19:51:04
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: The Beat Scene (in reply to SephardRick)
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Moloch!
I am way too young to have been there originally, I was born in the about the year the Beat movement fizzled out four months before Kennedy was shot. When I was in school in San Francisco you could every once in a while see a few of the still living beat poets who were famous in North Beach at one of the coffee places. There they would sit sometimes looking like unkempt bums, gabbing with friends.
The Beat scene also a visual art movement or loose group of SF artists including Wallace Berman, Wally Hedrick, Jay De Feo, Bruce Conner and several others you'll find if you look those people up. Ginsburg gave the first public reading of 'Howl' in a gallery/cafe' in SF in ...1957? or 58' Not sure, could have been 56' - those artists were in that scene. I have spoken to a few people who were at that first reading.
Writers like Richard Brautigan ( who I recommend) and ....err I will think of others are also related to that era and movement. It's really kind of a bowel movement, lots of bad bombastic writing, with some brilliant stars in between poops.
Some other writers central to the Beats are Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and to an extent Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. All three distanced themselves from being pegged as "beat writers" by virtue of the way they evolved as writers and buisnessmen. Ferlinghetti went into publishing and Snyder and McClure into long careers as important academics. Snyder is still active as writer who focuses on environmental concerns in a literary way and McClure, well you should see if there is a Youtube clip of him reciting Chaucer. They all three have a relationship to the central 'Beat Poets' in literary spirit, but were never out of control or self destructively romantic as some of the more centrally associated Beats. Many of the well known figures had severe drug and alcohol problems and that aspect of the culture in many ways obscured some of the more cool sides of the movement.
There have been several museum shows about the Beat Movement which elaborate on the literary to visual art connections and the catalogs are available and highly recommended as source to get background or context on the art and writing.
Here is a link to a video archive, with good readings by the main people. Diane Di Prima and some of the other women are represented which is good, as they are usually cut out of the canonized versions of Beat history, but are very important figures in terms of content. The Beat Movement is couched historically as primarily a male 'search for themselves walk about the country taking drugs having sex generation' but the women of the Beat Generation were strong players who did not go through the motions of inventing themselves as later day Arthur Rimbauds, but stayed rooted and just got on with writing. Show me a generation of American males that did not go out into the "wilderness" to drink and fukc and I'll show you a non existent generation. In other words, history has glorified the "on the 'On the Road' mentality of the Beat Movement, when in actual fact half or more of the poets & painters just stayed home and worked hard on writing and brushing.
http://www.poetspath.com/exhibits/video_exhibit.htm
Also noteworthy, the Wiki entry on the Beat Movement is half crap. Half of it is speculative BS opinion like most Wiki entries .
Lot's of writers are linked with the Beats, some I disagree with being heaped in, but a few others to check out who are associated with the Beat Generation are Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles, and Amiri Baraka. The early writing of Baraka is more in the Beat consciousness, later he develops into a seminal social critic on African American issues and like Snyder and the other non self destructive beats outgrows the movement. His early work is often very descriptive of jazz, and the New York 'Hard Bop' scene that happened in the 1950's, his take on the scene is refreshing in that he's not another upper middle class white guy hitching trains, playing at being a hobo and getting laid. He writes about the Black American condition and its music with accuracy and grace. Jane Bowles has been a long over looked American writer who can really drive a story to a poignant conclusion.
I'd read Snyder, the Bowles', Baraka and Brautigan (& others like them) and let Kesey, Kerowacky & Co. drive on down the road forever as the overrated crap that they are. Ginsburg is just OK, meh. There are some many other writers of that time period who are better than Kesey - Kero etc. at that time I in this day can't justify spending time on those self indulgent loud mouths mouths. One James Baldwin is worth 50 Keruac-Kesey's, seriously.
Burroughs, you ask? Dig yourself a hole and climb on in, yeah but I like little Uncle Bill speaking now and then.
One final admonishment, check out the Englishman Brion Gyson. Fascinating character who should be included to some extent as a Beat, influenced and exchanged ideas with the Beats who made the trans Atlantic trip and traveled North Africa and Europe.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Apr. 28 2015 23:44:57
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runner
Posts: 357
Joined: Dec. 5 2008
From: New Jersey USA
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RE: The Beat Scene (in reply to SephardRick)
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The Beats were just part of a much larger reaction to the wholesale overturning of US society caused by World War 2. Many of the veterans returning from that war had been exposed to new people, new ideas, new (often terrible) experiences, and some decided to strike out in entirely new directions. The ever-fertile social critic Barbara Ehrenreich discusses these trends in detail in her book The Hearts of Men: well worth reading. Another such phenomenon was the appearance of Playboy, and the popularization of Hugh Hefner's self-styled Playboy Philosophy, which itself co-evolved with Robert Heinlein's famous SciFi novel Stranger in a Strange Land. While Stranger is, in part, the fictional quintessence of some of the Playboy Philosophy, the book has not worn well over the years, and made this reader wince upon taking it up again some several decades after my first reading of it.
I think On the Road by Jack Kerouac has held up best of all the Beat oeuvre. My father, who was the soul of quiet, orderly, conscientious dedication to work and family responsibility, told me that he loved the book, which clearly hinted at inner yearnings.....
_____________________________
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
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Date Apr. 29 2015 14:38:28
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SephardRick
Posts: 358
Joined: Apr. 11 2014
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RE: The Beat Scene (in reply to BarkellWH)
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Bill,
The ambiguity of the Beat movement is what fascinates me. Like you, I saw the guys walking down the street wearing French berets, sandles, dark shades, deck pants, striped shirts...They had their own language too. I ask beatnik how he was. He answered something like "Schoo". I was eight at the time and asked my dad what did "schoo" mean. He got real mad. My older brother laughed and later interrupted it as being: "Go screw yourself, kid!" As you mentioned, there was this almost anti-social attitude about them. They were off in their own little world and don't encroach.
This off limits attitude made be curious about their music. I wanted find out more, but with little luck.
I did manage to jam with beatnik looking guys some years latter. They turned out to be cool jazz addicts. They were very technical, like Joe Pass and Oscar Peterson with hours on end of improvisation. I expecting something a little lighter and different along the lines of Herbie Hancock.
Now looking back, I think I was chasing a ghost. It seems music was influenced by the Beat movement, but there wasn't a defined Beat type of music. At least that is what I am beginning to believe.
_____________________________
Rick
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Date Apr. 29 2015 14:38:38
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: The Beat Scene (in reply to SephardRick)
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I guess I'll have to re-read "On the Road." I read it when it came out in 1957. It didn't do much for me.
Thinking back on it, one fiction that comes to mind from that period is Carlos Fuentes's "La región más transparente" (later translated as "Where the Air is Clear), a novel set in Mexico City. Having gone to high school in the Washington DC suburbs, in my mind Mexico City was the only cosmopolitan city within reasonable travel distance from Austin.
Second class train fare from Nuevo Laredo to La Capital was $5.65, a bargain for 890 miles. There were men on the train with iced down beer in longneck bottles. When we pulled into a station you could buy piping hot flautas and tamales through the train car windows from women on the platform, who cooked on charcoal braziers.
I did enjoy the William Burroughs's short stories in Moroccan mystic style, but "Naked Lunch"?. Meh.
I was pretty well occupied with other stuff at the time "On the Road" came out. As a 19-year old, I was in graduate mathematics and physics courses, and teaching freshman math courses at the University of Texas. At Christmas time I went to Paracho, bought my first guitar and started trying to learn flamenco.
There were beatnik style coffee houses in Austin, with poetry readings, people sitting around wearing berets and sandals, smoking pipes, playing chess, half listening to folk music performers. It seemed boring to me, but looking back on it the Beat scene must have been pretty radical for Texas.
Middle class Texas, that is. My view of Texas was formed by spending every summer on a south Texas ranch. The south Texas/Border culture was quite a serious departure from middle class Texas of the 1950s.
Flamenco and scuba diving in deep caves in northeastern Mexico were more my kind of stuff--and girls, of course.
All my relatives who were in WW II, except one, seemed pretty eager to get into mainstream America, settling down, getting married if they weren't already, and pursuing the American Dream.
After my own military experience, I had an outlaw phase for several years--a good deal further outside the law than the Beats. But my war hadn't been as righteous as my WW II relatives' war.
I think I will try "On the Road" again.
RNJ
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Date Apr. 29 2015 16:08:42
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: The Beat Scene (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
I guess I'll have to re-read "On the Road." I read it when it came out in 1957. It didn't do much for me.
That's because it sucks. Your own life is much more interesting. I know so many people who have traveled who could write a much better book. I dislike the self absorbedness of how the beat movements portrayed and remembered. As I said before it just obscured the really interesting stuff from that time.
Many of the people I talked to who were in that art scene and writing at that time did have that aimless bewildered pathos that disturbs me about OTR. I also don't associate folk music or bongos with the Beats. I knew Paul Veregge, he was the stage manager of the Monterey Jazz and Pop Festivals and a producer at ABC San Francisco in the 1950's, he lived across the road from me in Big Sur. I spent many mornings 'till afternoon with him listening to his vast jazz record collection and asking him to tell me about the jazz of the mid 50's to mid 60's when he was working directly with everyone who was current in jazz. Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Eric Dolpy, John Handy, Modern Jazz Quartet. He had great stories, and he knew jazz inside and out. That time in North Beach SF was a great time to see the last of the jazz groups before Miles Davis went electric, which he said really did change the game, besides the rock and pop that pushed jazz out of being a more known music.
Paul seemed to think serious folks into the arts and writing were really keyed into jazz and while full bore folk revival scene did not really hit until the late 50's, it was jazz that artists and writers were aware of. From what research I've done the artists and writers in the beat thing were friends with the jazz players.
A lot of the Beat poets who became expats and were drawn to Europe and North Africa got into music they found where they landed.
I suppose there were a lot of people in coffee shops who were Beat Posers not Beat Poets.
The way the group of poets got the moniker Beat Poets is probably worth noting. It came out of something Ginsburg said, a kind of play on words. The word was 'beatitude' which word play transformed into 'be-attitude' - a one word summing up of Hindu and Buddhist concepts of grace and being present in the moment and stuff like that. These poets in the greater circle around Snyder, Ginsburg et al were steeping themselves in readings outside mainstream American religious tradition and newly translated texts from Asian religious traditions were being published at this time.
DT Suzuki on the West coast of the US was living, lecturing and translating, Alan Watts was translating, and teaching and these poets like a lot of other young artists post WWII were soaking in these translations and studying Buddhism. A lot of Ginsburg's own poetic work had to do with his deep study of American lit. - Melville, of Walt Whitman, and American ascetics ( literary monks) like Thoreau (Walden Pond) and Hindu and Buddhist texts. Through poetic transformation Ginsburg arrived at a style of writing which mined into his home-bred Jewish heritage. He was synthesizing Jewish tradition with American 19th century poet sages and Eastern religious study. The poem 'Howl' was the result, a summing up of Ginsburg's time that was like T.S. Elliot's 'Wasteland' as summing up of Elliot's time.
Ginsnerd the wordsmith cleverly came up with the word play 'Be-Attitude' from beatitude and that settled out in the contracted form as simple 'Beat'. Thus the Beats were named, not because there was musical beat, but because they were interested in a poetry of beatitude.
_______
I should be teaching somewhere in some college, but I've never figured out where that somewhere is. And I've arrived at the conclusion that teaching liberal arts studies is a bigger, badder, nastier racket than guitar making. So ya'll are stuck with my pompous, yet perspicacious tendency to drone on about what ever crosses my mind.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Apr. 30 2015 5:39:27
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: The Beat Scene (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
I also don't associate folk music or bongos with the Beats.
You are correct, Stephen, because the true "Beats," as I stated in my piece above, were more into the early "cool jazz" scene. The folk music and bongos were the product of the later Beat "wannabes," the poseurs who sat around in coffee houses wearing their berets, affecting a faux worldly "sangfroid" while listening to what often were excruciatingly bad poetry recitals.
One can debate the origin of the term "Beat." It often has been attributed to Jack Kerouac appropriating the term and using it as a root of "beatitudes" or "beatific," even musically "on the beat." (Although I tend to doubt the latter.) We probably will never know with certainty whether the term originated with Kerouac or Ginsberg in those early days of the movement. Each influenced the other, as the inner core did among themselves.
As to "On the Road," I liked it when I read it at the age of 16 or 17. It seemed to open up a world I had not yet experienced. I have not read it since, and I suspect I would find it bland and boring today.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Apr. 30 2015 10:50:07
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: The Beat Scene (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
As to "On the Road," I liked it when I read it at the age of 16 or 17. It seemed to open up a world I had not yet experienced. I have not read it since, and I suspect I would find it bland and boring today.
I have not read OTR since my early twenties and I found it boring then. Even Charles Bukowski is better, by a mile. Bukowskis books like Post Office or Ham on Rye are much better.
I think the Beat Poets got moved into academic studies rapidly as subjects. When I was in school in the the early 80's and again in the early 90's the Beats were standard fare in English Depts. as a class on Sub -Cultures - ZEven William Burroughs Naked Lunch was taught at SAn Diego State English dept. mid 1980 when I was living in Point Loma. I had a good Korean roomie from Carmel who liked to get stoned and drink tequila now that he had moved out of his oppressive task master mothers house and lived at the beach. He was supposed to be going to SF State but liked to smoke the bong and play cards.
Never having been a druggie, I asked him for his library card and I became Kwan Park to the SF State librarians, I also used his ID to audit classes for free. The teaches knew I was not the right guy on the roll sheet, but they never seemed to care. I got to go hear all kinds of lectures and use the library, it was quite funny.
The English dept was at that time already teaching Naked Lunch in the sub cultures class along with most of the Beat poets. I had read Naked Lunch o my own so I skipped that stuff, but the end of Naked Lunch is slightly prophetic. Burroughs invented a character who was an Islamic renegade who hid in the hills and wanted to do away with everyone not muslim. He also irrverently called it 'Islam Incorporated', which is pretty brilliant. I'm surprised no imam ever issued a fatwa against his life.
Burroughs is best when he reads it, reading it yourself is not that exciting, but there is something about the way Bill Burroughs intones his own works that is both ridiculous and dark. He was, especially in later years, a kind of parody of himself and I think if you see him as an actor reading lines in that cracked voice bringing about characters he invented it makes more sense. I mean a good reading of Dr. Benway scene always makes me smile for some odd reason.
As far as reading Burroughs, his real book was 'Cities of the Red Night' it reads much better than Naked Lunch, it's more of a straight narrative, but it shifts through different time periods and picks up a story about pirates then goes back into modern times and follows gangster killers...not everyones cup.
The Beat era writing generally turns me off now however, save for a few, Snyder the Bowles' I would reread Brautigan and drink a few beers for laughs, and if I felt holy maybe Amiri Baraka. The Beat stuff makes me feel kinda icky really, like I'm being mummified in old news papers that have headlines about Eisenhower and ads about Chesterfields and Old Spice. And it's ironic too, because that is probably what the Beats did not have in mind for the reader.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Apr. 30 2015 14:24:14
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: The Beat Scene (in reply to estebanana)
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Actually, there was a little more to my parting ways with the Dukes. A friend told me her father had been asking about me. He was the District Attorney.
And there was a little more to the Bop versus West Coast dichotomy. I'm not sure how much has been written about it, but one of the objectives of the original Bop crowd was to keep white people out of it. That was clear to anyone interested in jazz in the early 1950s. Yes, there were a few white men who played with the New York Bop crowd, but they were the exception.
In the late 1920s and on through the 1930s and early 1940s white bands started getting popular and making money, while most Black musicians struggled. Among the big bands Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson were about the only Black bands with much coverage in the mainstream media. Later on Count Basie had a pretty good run, but nothing like the white bands. Meanwhile Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Glenn Miller, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw and others were raking in the cash. A lot of Black musicians felt like they were getting ripped off. After all, they had invented the music the white bands were making money from.
The origins of Bop in the 1940s aimed at an intellectually and technically challenging music that wasn't danceable. All the seminal players in the Bop style were Black, and there was a seemingly intentional reverse discrimination against whites in the personnel of the Bop groups.
Duke Elington's public agenda was to show that "Negro music" as he called it, was as intellectually advanced as that of the dominant white society, during the rigidly segregated era. The Boppers didn't talk that much about it, they just did it.
RNJ
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Date Apr. 30 2015 19:21:43
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