Posted 3 years ago in the late evening by oso
Look at all these people. All waiting for something to happen. And it never will.
That, or something close to it, was reportedly said by one Charles Bukowski as he walked by Caffe Trieste in San Francisco’s North Beach district. And he’s right. The beat generation is six feet deep and was long before Ginsberg, homo and holy, finally reincarnated into some more-karmic being. Both the Bay Area and Big Sur are still laden in yesteryear. Restaurants, cafes, bookstores: their reputations walk well ahead of the small and mediocre establishments they really are.
“Dude, like, what would you say is the beat movement of today.”
It’s a question, or at least a silent reflection, that comes up with each new batch of dissatisfied teenagers. In the early 90’s we said it was the rave scene. We actually convinced ourselves that chewing on meth-amphetamines, calling it ecstasy, and sucking on glow-in-the-dark pacifiers while listening to a maddening monotone thumping noise constituted a counter-culture. For others it was hip-hop, a bonafide movement of new creativity, whose inspired beginning and consumerist fall-out has been well documented and already mythicized. But there was never coherence. No cross-country epic tours of west and east coast factions uniting in Denver’s bohemian mom and pop’s galleries and cafes for spontaneous bursts of legendary prose. In the late 90’s, when Tribe Called Quest had already given way to Warren G, white suburbia flocked to the up and coming jam band scene. Crash was already getting radio play by the time high school seniors started sorting through attic collections of corduroys and leaving their cul-de-sacs in sleeping-bag-stuffed Volvos and Suburus for music festivals xeroxed from the late 60’s. It was sex, drugs, and rock and roll without the civil rights and with plenty of borrowed inspiration and cover songs.
Boogs and I were coming up on the actual “town” of Big Sur. She was sleeping, big surprise, and I was shifting around in my seat, gripping the steering wheel, doing the pee-pee dance. Not knowing how much further up the hill the Nepenthe was from the Henry Miller library, I wheeled into the gravel parking lot, hopped out, and did the pee-pee dance all the way into what is probably the greatest bathroom of any memorial library in the world. That’s about all I could recommend about the “library:” the shitter. And the erotica tiles around the shower. The letter of complaint above a photograph of a poet posing by a woman’s buttocks is also worthwhile. Otherwise, like Bukowski says, it’s a place full of people waiting for something to happen. And it never will.
Bladder relieved, I was flipping through some pages of Rilke and eaves-dropping on the three overweight has-beens, mid-50’s, sitting on stools around a resting acoustic guitar. They all looked like they had tried AA at various times in their life, but realized it wasn’t for them. The one with a stringy pony tail was telling the other two about the time he met David Crosby. On the far end of the porch was a young hippie. A white guy who could pull off dreadlocks. He looked up and smiled big at me when he saw me trying to figure out what he was reading. There was something pleading in his eyes. He looked down at what I was reading, a sort of “Rilke’s Greatest Hits,” and smiled again. I’m sure he was stoned. His eyes said, I want to be Kerouac and I want you to be Neal Cassidy.
I don’t quite have it figured out. I don’t know exactly why we idealize Ginsberg and Co. Or what their rambling, verbose, and alcoholic lives represent. But I do know that we can’t escape their shadows. The entire Bay Area is like that. You can embrace its history. You can buy a book at City Lights. You can drink a cappuccino at Caffe Trieste. You can try the original california cuisine at Chez Panisse. You can listen to jazz at Yoshi’s. Or you can not. But whatever you do, it will be compared to a time more legendary, more mythical, more better.
And it’s not like the Beats were the first ones. Reading their work, you could argue their entire constitution was an emulation of Walt Whitman. Centuries prior, Voltaire and Beethoven were doing exactly what the Beats did in the early 50’s and what I am doing right now: sitting around in a bohemian coffeehouse, drinking too much coffee, and comparing their still undiscovered life’s works and life trajectories with those who came before them. History, the mechanism, is dialectical and distributed, always will be, but every 10 or 20 years we choose our heroes and we emulate them. And secretly, we hope that history will one day choose us.
How you single-handedly made me drop my breakfast this morning–shit, no, you made me drop it and leave it on the floor at the office as I was reading this, is fucking amazing. Reading this post, made me think back at the stuff I was reading a few years ago, and my reactions to say Bukowski, Ginsberg, Kesey, etc. Of all these guys, the most important writer that stuck with me was Bukowski’s writing. It’s raw. It’s fake. It’s crap. It’s hit or miss. and it’s honest and so direct and to me this is what life and art are about. Bukowski once said, I’ll paraphrase: “There’s a time to quit reading and really stop trying to write. There’s a time to kick the sensation of art out on its whore-ass.”
You’re right, every few years we pick our idols and we try to emulate them until someone else comes and replaces them. in music, it’s much easier to do than in literature because the lit culture and business is so closed and elusive. But the overall pattern is set. And you’re right, wouldn’t we just love that someone loved our writing so much that they tried to do as we do.
I picked up Kesey and Kerouac because they’re prime originators of what developed into New Journalism. An aspect and offshoot of one of my favorite forms of writing: creative non-ficiton. They mixed journalism, travel writing, and added those fiction elements to create something different. However, you’re right, you can always point back to who influenced them–as connections, degrees of separation, etc.
Last Wednesday, I went out for a few beers with my buddy, Joel and talked about the connections between musicians and why we like them. I brought you up and mentioned DMB and how people connected to them because as you said it was like sex, drugs and rockn’roll without the civil rights movement,etc. Our generation wanted to emulate an overbloated idea of the 60’s (Woodstock, beats, hippies,etc) without the hard stuff: Like Diet 60’s. We emulate, we mimic, it’s what we do since we were little mugres.
It’s interesting how you bring up your observations of your surroundings. How did these writers influence and alter those areas. You see people, “overweight has-beens,” those lifers, who remain in that menality. Very much like I laugh at the hipsters and artists I meet in Austin who cloak themselves in this fake-ass-I’m-a-starving-artist-I-suffer-and-I’m-in-pain mentality because they read Bukowski and the beats and want to be like them. To that I tell them: Why not learn from Bukowski’s upbrining which was such aesthetic distance that it was fake. The man held a job, was married and hardly did the things he wrote about but stole much of that material from others. I digress…but is it good what these writers did to those areas?
If I ever visited Southern California, I’d think more of writers like Gary Soto who grew up there and illustrated so much of it in his prose. How him and his brother, starving writer and painter, worked the fields in order to sustain themselves and some modest living. Or I’d think of Gilb’s acerbic take on that area and what he thinks of the beats. Gilb’s work has a lot of foundation on the beats but mirrors more of Raymond Carver while still being all his own.
Yet, we must recognize that the West is so rife with literary history it’s hard not to think otherwise.
Oh yeah, I did pick up and eat my breakfast taco. I also like A Tribe Called Quest, yo.
i really don’t have anything of substance to share but just wanted to say that i really enjoyed this post. made me wanna go read some poetry.
emc: diet 60’s. that’s a great way of putting it.
ayyy weeeeyyy, el cuate de arriba te escribio otro post.
oye, ya ponme un post en spañol…… si se ingles, pero mi ingles pocho chicano facil. no al ingles nativo super shido tuyo.
¿ Que onda cuate, que seria la diferencia de mi español a el español de Oso? ¿ Seria porque soy pocho, Mexico-Americano que mi lenguaje se te hace facil? El idioma que yo hablo y escribo es el mero mismo chidismo super que el de Oso. Ambos tenemos el mismo educación en hablando y escribiendo el ingles, que me da de patada tu comento. Que triste, de veras.
Why is it that when I go to SF or up the California coast, I don’t see any of this? Maybe it’s because I go to Sol Luna on a Saturday night and re-discover the fact that the Bay Area and SF is chock full of hip hop loving Filipinos and Filipinas.
I’ve never read any of those authors you mentioned. I guess I just never had the interest, drank enough coffee, smoked enough cigarettes (or something else), and felt angsty enough.
By the way, I don’t think I’ve ever used dialectical in a sentence and still am not sure what it really means. Applause. Very well written.
Thank you, dear oso, for demystifying (while all the same paying tribute to) the Beats. Sure would be nice to have something -ANYTHING- like them in 21st century USA.
I want to go to California now.
EMC,
You’ve absolutely mastered the art of the comment. Y ‘toy de ‘cuerdo con todo. I’ve never read, ni un sentance of Gary Soto. Sad but true.
Irasali,
Thanks. Just saying that alone is kind of you.
Mando,
Te prometo que voy a escribir acerca de Global Voices en español bien pronto. ¿Y como que me envias correos completos en inglés perfecto pero te da pena dejar un comentario en inglés acá?
Cindylu,
I love the bay area Filipino hip-hop scene. Last week Revaz and I were playing some pool with some hip-hop loving Filipinos sportin’ the Fubu gear and cornrows. And the best part was they each had a skinny red-head in Levi’s with them. I love Bay Area diversity. It’s really no wonder there’s so much, I mean “hella” Nor-Cal pride when they come down here. Even if you haven’t read any of the beat authors yourself, I’m sure that a lot of the music, a lot of the authors, and even a good deal of the movies you like have been very much influenced by their writings. I whole-heartedly recommend The Dharma Bums. I have a copy of it, which - if you ever come down and visit me and HP again - I’d be happy to loan you.
swervecurve,
When I was working at Esmeralda Bookstore in Del Mar, Michael McClure came in to do a reading. It was just a couple years after Ginsberg’s death and McClure was probably one of the best known living beat poets at the time. He was such a prick. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to kick him in the shins. Probably shoulda.
CJ,
I would guess that blog friends would happily put you up in San Diego, LA, and the Central Valley (at least). Come on over.