In the spirit of Jack Kerouac's piece, let's write some free-flowing associative explanations of what you understand the "beat generation" to be all about. No arguments necessary, just speak from your heart, you hep cats, you hot hipsters, you bop masters and jive kings...or whatever...what we're seeking here is a genuine exploration of this concept and an attempt at an explanation, but we are also attempting to capture the style and spirit of the movement (think of how Glenn O'Brien wrote his introduction. It wasn't formal and scholarly, though it was certainly intellectual, etc.).
Please remember, as always, this blog is due by 11 pm tonight.
So annoyed right now. Being beat is being up for anything; it could be risky, it could be difficult, and it could be impossible. But being beat means that you are unconventional and spontaneously creative. This way, whatever you tackle you can create new ways. However, being beat does not mean breaking promises and severe laws. Yes you can look for new ways to do something that's hard to do, or maybe you can find innovative ways to avoid that, but you can't promise to do something and then suddenly ditch it. You can't murder someone and say it was out of a spontaneous, creative act. Being beat is saying whatever comes to your mind; being beat is not filtering and being super careful of whatever you write and say. Because a truly beat person almost rarely thinks about random, useless, superficial things; and if they do, that's very beat of them to speak about it and stay true to their words. Try new things, but keep your words.
ReplyDeleteBeat is run-down, poor, exhausted, beaten down, from what? A world with blood under its nails, dripping from its knuckles, war and war and war, death in gas chambers and atom bombs, two-point-five Jack and Jill with a dog and a dishwasher a fridge a car and neighbors who are communist spies and Russians listening in your bedroom door. Nuclear family for a nuclear war, threat of annihilation as constant and comforting. they may kill us but we'll kill them too, and we'll be back in time for our family dinner. And the beat generation is beat. They're tired, they can't do this anymore, they're done. They're gone. They've given you up, America, they don't want your shiny American dream, cause they know what you're about. They're leaving, they're disappearing from your desks and beds but if you really looked, you'd see them out of the corner of your eye, vagabonds you've always stared straight through, poets smoking on the streets, spilling prophecy from their lips, part of something newer, better. They're not yours anymore. The beat generation is not the lost generation—they're not trying to find their way home, they're on the road wandering, not looking back.
ReplyDeleteBeat is doing something at the moment, right away, when you feel like it get the impulse!! go write it right now, it has to be done. Beat is looking back and not regretting, not like #noregrets more like, it's been done, it was a moment of my life, spontaneous creativity outburst, let's go, let it go, move on. Beat is that.
ReplyDeleteBeing beat is being yourself. Not what society and the man want you to be, but what you want you to be. No regrets. Don't be held down by the shackles of society, what's normal and whats abnormal. Just do, don't think. Walk into a gay bar, try some pot, or maybe just listen to some jazz. Miles Davis is cool. Just do what you feel. But Cindy is right on a point. Don't go around killing or stealing or rioting. That may be what newspapers like the Chicago Tribune or NY times classify beat as and blame us beatniks for, but trust me, that's not beat. And I would know cause I'm beat. Being beat is being you, your inner you. The you with compassion. The you that is different. And if you see something bland, put a bird on it.
ReplyDeleteBack home I know this girl, and she knows hip. Big glasses—with the black frames—skinny jeans, floral blouse, pierced nose, fire hair, fire lipstick. She has friends that are mine too. Big glasses—with the black frames—skinny jeans, floral blouse, pierced nose, fire hair, fire lipstick. Is Beat spiritual? Trying the new without looking back? No regrets? I see repetition of brand names etched on white t-shirt labels. What spontaneous soul? There are no abnormalities. Only empty pockets and heavy Pendleton bags. Conformity. Back home I asked this girl what is hip, and she tied her hair in a bun.
ReplyDeleteBeat kids do what they want, when they want, how they want. Why? Who knows. They probably don't even know. In Portland, it's where the dreams of past decades still survive today; it's where having no ambitions, no goals in life was no big deal. Who determines what is cool? Is cool what the media says is cool? If you're hip, cool is exactly the opposite of everything you hear. Too much of an effort to be cool, however, is so uncool that it's just painful to watch. We know when you're trying to hard...and let me tell you, it's ugly.
ReplyDeleteWe, the hep cats, like our clothing because you don't. We like our clothing because you think we look homeless, we look like we time traveled to your grandmother's closet. We embrace the looks we get walking down the street. We say what we want until you start saying it. Then we move on.
And what the hell is up with the media now?! For everything that goes wrong, the Beat Generation is behind it. What's up with that? Now THAT is totally uncool.
Whether you're cool or hot doesn't matter as long as you're walking in a different direction as everyone else. As long as you hum the tune to a different song than everyone else. As long as your clock, your schedule, your life is your own.
You do you, hipsters.
The only thing that Kerouac and O'Brien agree at is the fact that hipsters and the beats are reactions for the cultural atmosphere existing around them. Kerouac explains, how jazz shaped the whole beat movement, acting as a cultural concrete for an ideological mass. The same thing is happening now. Before 2000 hipster groups were using grunge as an idealogical core, but as soon as the bands like Franz Ferdinand,Interpol and Hot Chip came round, hipsters got their new vector --a pure hipster ideology, which was no longer a part of any beat, post punk or grunge movement. Surely, the hipster industry music grew until 2007, when the hippest album of all the time ("Oracular Spectacular" by MGMT) was released. Since then many amazing bands appeared, but "Time To Pretend" still is the song that explains the whole phenomena of modern hip for everyone, who wants to join. Just how Jordan said before in his post "Being beat is being yourself", the music of hipsters and beats and other groups show the freedom of emotion and just like the tribal songs of Native Americans that they used too sing and dance in order to feel themselves as brothers, the modern tunes by XX, Blur, Arctic Monkeys and Arcade Fire are creating this feeling of community.
ReplyDeleteFunky how this evening I was just making the rounds on the interweb and ran into some thought-igniting pieces of intel on hipsters. Answers.com somehow hooked me into reading about the "12 Foods That Are So Hipster", although I gotta say I am struggling with the insufferably slow speed at which Answers.com tends to load. The internet could do with a detox, don't you think? Just a good cleanse. Lemons and molasses do it for me...dumping a few email servers should do it for the internet. To be a true hipster one must make power moves like that, you know? Jumping in feet first to the revolutions of our day, however small they may be. It's all about the different. All about walking upstream, against the current. And yet -here is the mother of the ironies that surround the hipster endeavor- the anti-unity, unified movement of the hipsters can't create a slew of individuals all radically different from anything else. They render their own ambitions impossible by their passionate pursuit.
ReplyDeleteSo I haven't been here for the past couple classes. As such, I have no idea what marvelous and interesting ideas you guys have shared on Beat culture. But you know what? I don't need it. I don't need any of it. And it's that attitude that I think exemplifies Beat culture. Just be yourself. Be who you always wanted to be. And naturally, I think Beat culture would suggest, you will split off from the mainstream, because the mainstream is limiting you. The mainstream is ALL INSIDE YOUR HEAD MAN! This generation fought all that crazy noise, all that direction. It's a generation that started rejecting norms, rejecting conventional wisdom, rejecting rules and regulations. It was a generation that wanted to be trailblazers, only they didn't really know where they were going. They didn't have a map, they didn't have a compass, and they didn't have an iPhone pointing the way. But you know what? That's OK, they didn't need it. They didn't need any of it. And they sure as hell didn't care if you were interested in following them.
ReplyDeleteCool for us really doesn't have to have a definition. That in itself defines us--we're boundless, we're there, we're in the moment, and we might not give a shit. In fact, cool is often only half of it—it’s really a 50/50 mix, hot and cool. But don’t get me wrong, because there are some of us who muddle the balance and lean toward the hot side or the cool side. Beat is not hip, and hip tries to snag our style, but whatever. Beat, when it comes down to it, is poor, deadbeat, sleeping on the streets and in alleyways. But of course the media doesn’t seem to think so. Obviously this is the wave they see the opportunity to ride on, the sudden realization of what our culture in the recent past has been all along. That’s beat. They say carpe diem. Exactly. But they’ve gone and sullied it with the commercialization of what we see now as an attitude and blown it up into something bigger than it actually is, ever was, ever was supposed to be. And that’s not beat. That’s a bloated, convoluted big heaping mess of a blurry-eyed lie. Beat doesn’t mean murder. Beat doesn’t mean, to fuck with everything. There’s a cool purpose. There’s a steady, calm undercurrent that’s raw, unfiltered, and constant. Hope may be lost, and that might be the beat, the loss of the beat, and beatniks know just that. But they’re looking for it. For the honesty. Beat is not a brand. Because beat, is you. And don’t let the TV and the newspapers convince you otherwise, because that’s not beat. They’re not beat. Don’t let people convince you that being beat just means being “different,” whatever the hell that means. Beat, is following the beat of the drum. The beat you hear. And that beat, might be the one some others hear. But that doesn’t matter. Just listen closely, and that beat—that’s your beat. That’s beat.
ReplyDeleteThe beat generation is a movement that celebrates each individual's idiosyncrasies and condemns conformity/uniformity. Like a movie, life is more interesting with a diverse cast. I think that's why it's so hard to define what Beat is; it's easier to describe what it is not. That's why Kerouac had to so many references to describe it. It's something that has to be described, not defined. After WWII, America started to look like a machine that churned out a predictable product, the American. Beat culture was more about handcrafting each person. America was also very narrow-minded; anything that challenged the norm was considered Communist. But how can a nation evolve without some mutation? Beat culture is about individuality. It seems like the modern hipsterism has deviated a lot from its roots. Hipsterism can't be about individuality because we can describe what most hipsters look like and what their interests/opinions/mannerisms are. I think humans have a tendency to try to define things, and as a result, everything is destined to be packaged in a pretty package even if its roots were gritty and amorphous. That's probably what happened to hipsterism.
ReplyDeleteBeat. Beat, Beat. Bop. Beat. Bop and jive. Move. Cant you dig? Then dig deep. Plunge your hands into the the glistening dirt after it rains and then pull them back to see the black filth staining your skin and crawling under your fingernails. See it, take it in, and then plunge them back in. Squeeze, feel, wiggle and glide. Wait. Listen. Look-- look with your third eye and see that for once, you are really into this real, little world. Pull your hands out. Don't wash them. That's Beat.
ReplyDeleteThe beat, the drums ,the hums and the all the instruments. There is a certain feeling in the air when you listen to Otis Redding and the raspy voice of Louis Armstrong. The style of that generation does indeed deserve to be rendered into words despite just how hard it is to convey a feeling. When I think of the bea generation ,I think of it as a feeling. The disillusionment of war and valor mellow down to this wild abandonment of scruffy hair and the contentment of being alive. Despite the flare of it all ,I read an undertone of sadness and a sense of being lost for those who identified themselves with this movement. This is not to say that being lost is a bad thing ,it's just that it occasionally pushes you to the edge and for a moment you become this gaunt wanderer in the garden of civilization,the flowers all wilted and the fence mostly rusted. But later you hear the hum ,the bop and the beat sip some scotch perhaps some grass and all the flowers bloom ,the fence renews.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what Burroughs is saying in terms of his content. But as we said in class, I think he tries to create some type of delirium effect with his prose. It's disconnected and disjointed. At one point he talks about Hassan i Sabbah and at the next he mentions the Garden of Delight and the love in slop buckets. Rather than capture the experience of being high, Bruce summarizes the why part. I especially liked the part involving the glue. The kid doesn't get high because he's trying to escape some unfortunate reality, to step away from common culture and rebel, he does it for the physical stimulus. Although this piece may be more coherent, I think both reach the same conclusion. The drug culture does not have one single goal. You can be a part of it so long as you make it your own.
ReplyDeleteIf we can look past the delinquency and the detrimental effects of drugs then I suppose we can even appreciate the certain culture it forms around those that do it. Kerouac posits that the beat generation are a distinctly different kind of people and have even invented their own language that acts as some sort of conversational fence. The drugs , I might add , also exists as a fence of some sorts. Keeping the tranquil and civil part of reality and the drunk beepiedie bops on one side. Burroughs does a swell job of painting the portrait of what is going in a person in stupor. There's a feeling of melancholy that he has in that incoherent state but then perhaps the reality they were facing then (Possibility of being drafted to Vietnam was more bitter). Therefore they found this little haven of pills ,pot and some more pot. However , there is no denying that there's a sense of euphoria, fun and sometimes even some trendiness to what they're doing. Nonetheless ,despite the ugly beauty of the drug movement I wonder how it felt for them to come back to reality and realize the ground was still below and that true freedom was like smoke,once gone never to be recovered.I bet they lit one more and just gazed.
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