Generally speaking,
counter-culture
describes the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group or
subculture in conflict with those of the cultural mainstream of the
day, a visible phenomenon that reaches critical mass and persists for
some time.
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| Jack Micheline & A.D.Winans by Linda Lerner |
The Beat Generation was composed of a group of
American poets and writers who first congregated in New York and later
joined their West Coast brothers and sisters. The movement became
prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. The Beats engaged in spontaneity,
passionate dialogue, open sexuality, and experimentation with drugs.
Their work reflected this and it began to infiltrate the established
literary magazines. The influence of the Beats on postmodern
literature is undeniable. I grew up in the 1950s, in an era in which you
were expected to be a logically thinking, level-headed individual
whose purpose was to work hard, raise a family, and be patriotic to
your country. It was a society of rules, order, and materialism.
There was little if any room for individualistic behavior. As the
Fifties progressed, the Beat movement began to emerge. It had its
roots in New York (Greenwich Village) and San Francisco (North Beach).
The Beats openly challenged and defied the established order. They
spoke out in opposition to what America represented, as they rebelled
against everything the Establishment stood for: the repression of
dissent in the name of militarism, racism, materialism, and
conformity.
Bob Kaufman personifies the true meaning
of the Beat spirit. He was one of the original Beat voices to come out
of the Fifties and is rightfully considered by many to be the most
influential black poet of his era, though his poetry transcends race
identification. Like many of the Beats, he started out in New York
and later found his way to San Francisco's North Beach. While Allen
Ginsberg was reading his poetry to large audiences, Kaufman chose
another path, becoming the undisputed street poet, who frequented the
Co-existence Bagel Shop, located on Grant and Green. His poetic
technique resembles the surreal school of poets, ranging from a
powerful, lyrical vision to the more prophetic tone found in his
political poems. Kaufman considered himself a Buddhist. He believed a
poet had a call to a higher order. He lived a life of spirituality.
He denounced materialism.
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| Allen Ginsberg |
People flocked to the
Co-existence Bagel Shop in the hope of seeing him read. He delighted
the audience by jumping up on one of the tables and reciting a newly
written poem, or by reading poems from the master poets, such as Eliot,
Pound, and Blake. When he read, there was total silence. The
audience hung on his every word. His fate was sealed, however, the day
he wrote on the walls of the Bagel Shop, "Adolph Hitler, growing tired
of fooling around with Eva Braun, and burning Jews, moved to San
Francisco and became a cop." This was the beginning of his regularly
being harassed by the police and frequently receiving beatings at the
old Kearny Street Hall of Justice. By the late Sixties he had fallen
victim to drugs and forced shock treatments at New York's Bellevue
Hospital and was but a shell of what he had been in the Fifties.
The
Beats were among the first to fictionalize and embellish their lives
to readers worldwide who thrived on the experiences of the authors. By
the late Fifties they had cemented their role in the New American
Counterculture but, much to their dismay, it was their "lifestyle,"
rather than their art, that began to take center stage. What
distinguished them from ordinary malcontents was their talent and inner
conviction. They represented a large contingency of restless and
disenchanted young people around the world. But it was also a time when
the media began to mass-produce and market the "ideal" America. The
media began its drum roll to destroy a culture revolution and turn it
into a cultural fad. The word
Beat began to lose its significance
as part of an artistic sub-culture and became instead a label for
anyone choosing to live simply and humbly as a Bohemian, or who acted
rebelliously. In 1958, the word
beatnik was coined by the poet
Bob Kaufman to characterize the physical allure of the Beats, instead of
their social and intellectual radicalism.
When I
returned from Panama in 1958, the Beats were already beginning to move
out of San Francisco's North Beach, migrating to places like Mexico and
Venice Beach, California. The term
beatnik became the brunt of
jokes, rather than representative of a serious revolution. The mass
media depicted the only two things publishers and tycoons wanted to
exploit about the Beats: their image and their lifestyle.
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| Jack Kerouac |
In order to comprehend the creative surge that took
place in North Beach during this time, it is first necessary to
understand the literary tradition of San Francisco. It was only natural
that the Beat movement flourished there, where it blossomed and came
to fruition. But the truth is a literary Bohemia existed in San
Francisco long before Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and other
Beat souls came to the city.
The North Beach
creative hub took place in a six-block radius from lower to upper Grant
Avenue, centered around a large number of bars, cafés and coffee
houses, frequented by poets, artists, and jazz musicians. While Grant
Avenue was the center stage of creativity, the bevy of Beat oriented
cafés and bars actually extended from Broadway and Columbus, and all
the way to the produce district, where the self-proclaimed king of the
Beats, Big Daddy Nord, held court in a large warehouse. Eric's Pad, as
it was known, remained open at all hours. You could walk in any night
of the week and see blacks and whites freely mingling and dancing to
the music of bongo and conga drums. On the upstairs roof there was a
string of mattresses, with couples fornicating in full view of
onlookers, some quite agog, others blasé.
But two
decades earlier, San Francisco was already thriving with creative
energy, during what was known as the "San Francisco Renaissance," a
designation for a range of poetic activity centered throughout the
city. Kenneth Rexroth, often referred to as the "Father of the Beats,"
is also generally considered to be the founding father of the
Renaissance. Rexroth was a prominent second-generation modernist poet
who corresponded with Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. He came
to the city from Chicago, where he had operated a jazz and poetry tea
room known as the Green Mask, which housed an upstairs brothel, right
in line with San Francisco's bawdy history. Rexroth was not only a
poet and writer but also a union organizer. He hung out on San
Francisco's Waterfront encouraging dockworkers to become union members.
Rexroth held regular readings in his apartment,
located over a record store in the Fillmore District. Among the many
poets who frequented the meetings was Philip Whalen, who later appeared
in Kerouac's novels as "Ben Fagin" and "Warren Coughlin." The poets
who attended the meetings represented a wide range of writing styles,
from the ballads of Helen Adams to the bawdy rhymes of poet and
filmmaker James Broughton. The readings were a haven for both young
and old poets as well as visiting luminaries.
If
Rexroth was the father of the Beats, then Madeline Gleason was the
founding mother. During the 1940s, both Rexroth and Gleason befriended
a group of younger Berkeley poets, including Jack Spicer and Robert
Duncan.
In 1952, Dylan Thomas came to the city and
captivated a standing-room audience, which came to see the Welshman
drunkenly read his work. A year later, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter
Martin opened City Lights Bookstore, partly to finance
City Lights Journal, which, at the time, was publishing the surreal poet Philip Lamantia.
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| Young Allen Ginsberg |
When Ginsberg came to the city in the early Fifties
it was only natural he would find his way to Rexroth's weekly
gatherings. In 1954, Ginsberg had not yet acknowledged his
homosexuality, but this same year he met Peter Orlovsky, and the two
became life partners. During this same time, Rexroth was reading his
poetry to jazz accompaniment at a small cellar bar on Green and
Columbus streets, while Jack Spicer presided over the famous
"Blabbermouth Night" at a bar called "The Place" on upper Grant
Avenue. It was around this time that Ginsberg began writing the first
lines of his epic poem
Howl. Encouraged by Kerouac, Ginsberg
began searching for a place to showcase the poem. Rexroth organized a
reading at the Six Gallery, located at Fillmore and Greenwich streets.
The reading featured Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, Michael McClure, and
Philip Lamantia, with Rexroth serving as master of ceremonies.
Kerouac was not on the bill but did attend the event. The reading drew
a large crowd, with Kerouac drunkenly passing large jugs of red wine
through the audience. Ginsberg was the last poet to read and, urged on
by Kerouac, gave a passionate reading, a reading which held the crowd
spellbound and which launched him on his way to fame.
The
most important accomplishment of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady was to
make rebellious young people throughout the land aware that there was
others out there who felt the way they felt. This was expressed by
Diane di Prima, who is quoted as saying that
Howl encouraged her
and others to step forward and make their voices heard. She was in
effect heralding the cause of a new clan of poets who would become known
as the Beat Generation.
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| Photo from The 1957 Howl Trial |
The single most important event that helped the Beats
gain notoriety occurred on March 25, 1957, when agents from the U.S.
Customs Bureau seized the first shipment of
Howl and declared
the book obscene. Ferlinghetti and Shig Muro (the manager of the City
Lights)) were charged with selling obscene literature. The American
Civil Liberties Union intervened, providing free legal assistance.
Writers and critics testified on behalf of City Lights, and Judge
Clayton Horn set a precedent by ruling that if a book has "the
slightest redeeming social importance, it is protected under the First
and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. and California Constitutions and
therefore can not be declared obscene." This legal precedent allowed
D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer to be published by Grove Press.
It's
equally important to note the influence of jazz on the work of the
Beats. Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus were among the many jazz
musicians to whom the Beats were drawn. In the late Fifties and into
the Sixties, Jazz was central to what was happening. Wes Montgomery and
Cal Tjader were very much part of the scene. The Fillmore District, a
largely black community, was known as "Bop City," a hangout for
musician such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
It
was common to see New York jazz musicians visiting San Francisco's
Fillmore District, and it was here that musicians and lovers of jazz
gathered in the early hours of the morning. The Beats and bebop were
like twins. Carter Monroe points out, "When discussing the Bebop
movement in terms of Beat Literature, you are talking about the freedom
it represents."
A great deal of Beat literature in
terms of influence is all about content and challenging social mores.
Bebop challenged the existing parameters of music. You can see this
influence in the work of Jack Kerouac and perhaps even more so in the
work of the poet Bob Kaufman. In North Beach, Kaufman was regarded as
the Bebop poet, and much of his poetry is infused with jazz.
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| William S Burroughs photo by Ginger Eades |
Today both literary critics and academics alike
recognize the Beats as legitimate poets, writers, and artists, but the
legitimacy did not come without a cost. As is often the case, success
comes with a price tag, and so it came for some of the Beats. Many of
the Beat poets were co-opted into the system. Ginsberg applied for and
received not one but three NEA writing grants and he sold his archives
to Stanford University for over a million dollars. William Burroughs
made commercials and had a small role in a movie. Ferlinghetti's once
avant-garde bookstore can't be distinguished today from other
commercial bookstores, and he is second only to Ginsberg in marketing
himself, commanding thousands of dollars for a reading. It was poets
such as Jack Kerouac, Micheline, Kaufman, Corso and Ray Bremser who
remained true to the Beat spirit right up until the time of their
deaths. And while today's youth remain intrigued by, if not directly
influenced by, the Beat Generation, there hasn't been a real
counter-culture revolution in the U.S. since the hippie phenomenon,
which was a youth movement that began in the U.S. during the early
1960s and, as was the case with the Beats, soon spread around the
world.
The word
hippie is said to have derived from the word "hipster" and was initially used to describe
beatniks
who had moved into San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. These
people embraced the counter-culture values of the Beat Generation,
forming their own communities, listening to Psychedelic Rock, embracing
sexual revolution, and experimenting with drugs like LSD, grass, and
peyote in order to explore alternate states of consciousness.
In
1967, a "human be-in" was held, leading to the legendary 1967 Summer
of Love and two years later to the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East
Coast. Hippie fashions and values had a major effect on the broader
culture, influencing popular music, film, literature, and the arts.
The hippie legacy can be observed in contemporary culture in many
forms...from health food to music festivals to today's sexual mores.
I
had the good fortune of experiencing the tail end of the Beat
Generation, the Post-Beat Generation that followed and the birth and the
death of the Hippie Generation.
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| Allen Ginsberg |
POEM FOR GINSBERG by A D Winans
I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by greed, not so starving
hysterical, naked under their fashion designer clothes
driving themselves through congested city streets
looking for non-existent parking spaces
aging hormone-driven biological clock mothers
offering their purple-veined breasts to baby suckling
zombies, in and out of public
Whose stock market-driven and laser vision perception
sipped Starbuck's coffee under protective awnings
while watching street cops shoo off the homeless
who chatted aimlessly on their cell phones
making reservations at trendy restaurants
while whining about the quality of the wine
who fucked only by appointment, dutifully expecting
a climax in sixty seconds or less
who shopped at organic food markets looking
for eternal youth while seeking cash rebates
with no idea what to do with them
who saw the Savior while vacationing in Palm Springs
and God on Turner TV
who taught their children how to use ATM machines
while devising clever tax-evasion schemes
who gave up writing to save a tree
and claimed it as a tax deduction
who drove their cars in the bicycle lane
hoping for some excitement
who pierced their nipples cocks and tongues
wanting to be among the hip and young
who pledged their allegiance to the Almighty Dollar
while writing protest letters to their daily newspaper
Holy is the sock. Holy is Swiss cheese.
Holy is the Bank of America. Holy is cable television.
Holy is the condom. Holy is the U.N.
Holy is pop culture.
Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching is the new
Holy Order
the holy of the unholy
the best minds of my generation
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| Allen and Neal |
