The Tamesis
any. As musician Amram points out, the historical origins of this look are not the Beats anyway: “The whole look of berets and dark glasses actually comes from Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, who wore them in the early forties to show their loyalty to Sartre and the Europeans.”
The Gap also tried to capitalize on Beats’ success by advertising that both Kerouac and Ginsberg “wore khaki pants.” In fact, both men’s khakis came directly from the Salvation Army. “Jack just wore whatever clothes he could find,” said author Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s ex-girlfriend. “He wore the scariest, most garish Hawaiian shirts.” Robert Frank’s 1959 Mad Movie pull my daisyStarring Kerouac, Ginsberg, Amram, Gregory Corso and Larry Rivers, The Times shows what they really wore: chunky sweaters, worn khakis and flannel shirts. In other words, the Beats invented grunge.
Very cool. But we need Beats to be cooler than we are now, so we make them cooler than they were before. We don’t want to hear that Kerouac spent most of his adult life with his mom, allowed visiting friends to sleep together in his guest room only after marriage, and denounced hippies. Or “Jack would have hated Clinton and Hillary,” as his biographer Ann Charters puts it, “because he disliked women in positions of power and because he supported the Vietnam War. He might have thought Newt Gingrich was an interesting guy.”
The message Kerouac helped write to President Eisenhower while drunk in the mid-1950s—”Dear Eisenhower, we love you—you’re the great white father. We want to fuck you”—was clearly angry, childish, masculine, and more. It’s also very admirable.
What kind of rebellion is this? Where has it taken us?
Allen Ginsberg recalls first hearing beatJack Kerouac captured the term in 1948, which meant “burned out, at the bottom of the world…rejected by society, alone in the streets.” The Beats were a loosely affiliated group of men in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s and early 1960s who valued spontaneity. Zen; weed, cactus, gin and coffee; wild road trips; the low life; the ruthless honesty of turning private feelings into public art; a childlike appreciation for furry words like “peanut butter cockroach” and “fried shoe.” (Try this for yourself: Shadow Juice…Dirty Eggs…Deadly Jam. Kind of fun.)
Beat was built on the borrowed rhythms, long breath lines and rough-and-tumble lifestyles of bebop musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. (Like Elvis, the Beats made black music the basis of a new—one might say diluted—aesthetic.) The Beats began as a literary movement and later embraced new forms such as combos, happenings, and independent films.
What the Beat Generation sought was an America free from Joseph McCarthy, socks, and Levittown. This no-button search scares the mainstream: even playboy To demonize the Beat Generation as “modern nihilists, contempt and denial will suffice, apparently.” The media also undermined the appeal of the Beat Generation by playing up the stereotype of the Beat Generation, typified by Maynard G. Krebs’ television show as a grunting, bongo-playing deadbeat with a fringed beard. Dobie Gillis. By 1959, you could rent a Beat for your party, and Johnny Carson and other comedians were soon joking about “cats” and “chicks” sharing a “mat,” smoking “weed,” and “playing with” all the “squares.”
