freaks on drugs
Good summary. It should be added that much of the Port Huron group sprouted from children of communist immigrants who had found homes in academia.
Maynard G. Krebbs: “WORK!!?? Who said ‘work’?”
Interesting history. Thanks, eh?
Way too long for most to read, but, yes, the ‘60s counter-culture was invented by a previous generation, most of whom seem to have managed to avoid military service in WWII. Hippies were not young people who invented themselves, as boomers now want us to believe.
Who were the Beatnicks?
Buncha’ gays looking for a context in which to be gay and yet not feel so queer. Sex was ALWAYS bubbling around close by with these “free spirits”.
Jazz.....if you try to improvise without regard to theme, beat and chord, you wind up with garbage. Just like much of what the hippies had.
In 1972, when I turned 21, I hitch-hiked out to San Francisco and spent time in beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore and read the days away in those decrepit chairs. Kerouac was a central figure, but I always felt he saw himself as a writer much more than a beatnick. He wrote some extraordinarily beautiful passages, and spent the end of his life in the Catholic faith of his youth.
I'm not much on blaming generations for our problems. I've seen quite enough Boomer-bashing to be sure of that. In the end, individuals act -- not generations.
MAD Magazine had a good take on their lingo:
Friends, Romans, hipsters,
Let me clue you in;
I come to put down Caesar, not to groove him.
The square kicks some cats are on stay with them;
The hip bits, like, go down under;
So let it lay with Caesar. The dude Brutus
Gave you the message Caesar had big eyes;
If that’s the sound, someone’s copping a plea,
And, like, old Caesar really set them straight.
Here, copacetic with Brutus and the studs,—
For Brutus is a real cool cat;
So are they all, all cool cats,—
Come I to make this gig at Caesar’s lay down.
He was my boy, the most and real gone to me;
But, like, Brutus pegs him as having big eyes;
And old Brutus is a real cool cat.
He copped a lot of swinging heads for home,
Which put us way out with that loot;
Does this give Caesar big eyes?
When the square cats bawled, Caesar flipped;
Big eyes should be made of more solid megillah;
Yet Brutus pegs him as having big eyes;
And Brutus is a real cool cat.
You all dug that bit at the Lupercal scene
Three times I bugged him with the King’s lid,
And three times he hung me up; was this big eyes?
Yet Brutus pegs him with big eyes;
And, sure, he is a real cool cat.
I don’t want to double-O what Brutus gummed,
But, like, I only dig what comes on straight
You all got a charge out of him once,
So how come you don’t cry the blues for him?
Man! You are real nowhere,
You don’t make it anymore. Don’t cut out on me;
My guts are in the pad there with Caesar,
And I gotta stop swinging till they round-trip.
I think the word Beatnik was derived from Sputnik — the first earth satellite launched by Russia in 1957. Sputnik’s surprise launch shocked the Western World almost as much as 9/11 and caused a lot of people to question the validity of American military, poltical, and academic excellence.
Since the “Beats” were already accustomed to hanging out in coffee houses and poetry bars with the Bohemians questioning everything in contemporary culture, they quickly latched on to the idea of how great the Soviet Union was and how lame the US was. It was a natural progression.
I was in school at UC Berkeley at the time. We paid little attention to the Bohemians, and less to the Beats, looking upon them as oddities. But, then came the Hippies, as the Viet Nam War heated up, and they overwhelmed the culture.
As the Draft became an inconvenient fact of life, more and more young folks decided to attend college and to apply for student deferments. College was expensive — even in those years — and students from the eastern US flocked to Caliifornia (where in-state tuition was incredibly cheap) to wait for their state’s residence.
They had to live there for a year before they could get into school at the in-state price, and they basically had nothing to do, except cause trouble, while they waited to be admitted.
One of their favorite targets was the newly elected Governor Reagan and the Board of Regents of the University of California. They launched the Free Speech Movement, followed by the Filthy Speech Movement, follwed by the bra-less movement, followed by the braless in a sheer blouse movement, followed by the nude movement. And on, and on, and on.
The Mummy--Bob McFadden & Dor (Dor is the poet Rod McKuen)
Like, cosmic, man.
In the article there is a reference to “the destructive forces of McCarthyism”.
McCarthy was right, and was excoriated for it by the Left of the time. The Venona Papers showed from the opposing Soviet side how right he was.
Interesting article just the same.
I remember as a youth reading “Howl” and thinking “What a twit.” That was the end of any interest I might have had in the unwashed masses. Later I read Ayn Rand and thought “Yep, I know the twits she’s talking about.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4PKzz81m5c
Chet Baker - Almost blue
I read On the Road many years ago and observed that the Beatnik culture is almost identical to most spoiled adolescents in college: Road trips, drugs, sloth, casual sex, a disdain for work and an air of moral superiority.
These things were extremely taboo in the early sixties. Today not so much...
Wonder where Lawrence Ferlinghetti fits in. He wrote “Coney Island of the Mind” I think. There was also a trumpet or sax player whose name I can’t remember who was very important to the boyfriend of a friend of mine. This brings back a lot of memories.... Incidentally, their apartments were , in general, pig pens or worse. Blech.