0:09 [SPEAKER_01]: In high school, I read Jack Kerrawak's novel on the road, like everybody else. 0:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Living in a small town outside Muncing and Diena, Kerrawak's sense of freedom in adventure appeal to me, as it has so many since its publication in 1957. 0:26 [SPEAKER_01]: So when we were in San Francisco this past spring, we stopped at the beat museum downtown, to learn more about the movement Kerrawak helped found a half century ago. 0:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Beat themes of exploration, discovery, sexual liberation, and life on the road continue to speak to young people around the world. 0:48 [SPEAKER_01]: In every couple years, I seem to revisit some of those classics myself. 0:53 [SPEAKER_01]: I spoke with museum guide and poet Brandon about the museum and the beat movement generally. 0:59 [SPEAKER_01]: My name is Brandon and I've been working here for 15 years. 1:03 [SPEAKER_01]: In conversation with Brandon, I learned a lot about post-war America, as well as some of the broader cultural trends that brought the beats into being. 1:12 [SPEAKER_01]: And gave this movement such resonance with young people at that time. 1:17 [SPEAKER_01]: We also talked about the unique relationship of these creatives with the city of San Francisco. 1:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Most of which will appear in the second episode of this conversation, and I should tell you 1:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Brandon is a really good talker in a good teacher. 1:33 [SPEAKER_01]: We cover a lot of ground, but I feel I understand our country better after talking and I hope that you feel the same. 1:40 [SPEAKER_01]: To get us started, I asked for some insight into the specific focus of the beat museum. 1:46 [SPEAKER_00]: The beat museum is dedicated to the beat generation's whole museum about the literary counter culture of the 1950s and beyond. 1:55 [SPEAKER_00]: These were the people that in the post-war era started challenging the status quo and going their own way at a time when the culture was rather stifling. 2:05 [SPEAKER_00]: with the rise of suburbia and kind of the emphasis on white picket fences and suburban cul-de-sax and little boxes made of tic-tic-y-tac-y-ed all look the same. 2:14 [SPEAKER_00]: This was the contention of that generation, folks born circa 1920 or thereabouts, who projected that and went their own way and did their own thing instead and wound up influencing ongoing generations of American popular culture. 2:28 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the first things people noticed when they walked in is the giant 1949 Hudson 2:34 [SPEAKER_00]: sits here in the middle of the space that was the car that famously caroact mentions in on the road that he and Neil drove cross country. 2:43 [SPEAKER_00]: The one that we have is the one from the the 2012 film adaptation by Walter Salas. 2:50 [SPEAKER_00]: When they finished filming the movie, the actor Garrett Heidelandup who played the Neil Cassidy in the film, drove the car back up the coast from Los Angeles and brought it here. 2:59 [SPEAKER_00]: It's been here ever since. 3:00 [SPEAKER_00]: We have a lot of great photography. 3:03 [SPEAKER_00]: There's some interesting shots by people like Fred McDera and CR Snyder. 3:06 [SPEAKER_00]: We have some articles of clothing that belong to Jack and Nelia. 3:11 [SPEAKER_00]: One of Karawax's signature lumberjack shirts CPO jacket. 3:16 [SPEAKER_00]: We have the referee style shirt that done Neil Cassidy war when he drove the further bus with the Mary pranksters. 3:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Lots of the femoral. 3:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Having a literary museum is there is a lot of stuff to read, but a lot of artwork we have Alan Ginsberg's typewriter, Ruth Weiss's typewriter. 3:39 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked Brandon to share some of his favorite items from the collection. 3:51 [SPEAKER_00]: I think I have a lot of favorites for a number of different reasons, but one of my favorites is probably KeralaqCPO jacket. 3:57 [SPEAKER_00]: There's a great story that Joyce Johnson tells where she and Jack were set up on a blind date by Alan Ginsburg. 4:05 [SPEAKER_00]: She had just moved to the village and she was like 20 years old and had just gotten involved with the beat scene and all that and had met Alan and now and the set her up with Jack and so they had never seen each other before. 4:16 [SPEAKER_00]: They had spoken on the phone and said, well, let's meet up at the Howard Johnson's cafeteria in the village, and so Jack says, like, I'll be there at the counter, I've got black hair, and I'm wearing a red and black, checked shirt. 4:30 [SPEAKER_00]: And she says when she walked into that cafe, 4:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Everyone else at the counter and in the restaurant that we're all clad into the uniform of that time, the black or gray Brooks Brothers suit and So she said everybody else seemed like they were in black and white and this guy was immediately the most vivid man I had ever seen Everyone else is in black and white and he's their In-tech and color and I think but so much of that is so symbolic of what the beats were trying to do break America out of that black and white to yesterday 5:03 [SPEAKER_00]: I think one of the things that engendered the values of the B generation was, yeah, as we see them now, was basically just this yearning to escape the strictures of the 1950s, and even really before that. 5:16 [SPEAKER_00]: There was this sort of prevailing sentiment that 5:20 [SPEAKER_00]: You got to understand that when your formative years were spent in the midst of a great depression, which immediately segues into World War II, and all the awful things that came out of that, it's going to lend you a pretty bleak view of the world. 5:35 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that there was this attitude that took America by storm during the post-war years with the Eisenhower era, with the quickly sort of brewing anti-communist sentiment, where anything that was different or alternative was bad. 5:53 [SPEAKER_00]: That was definitely a big part of McCarthyism was this witch hunt and people were afraid of each other. 5:58 [SPEAKER_00]: It's harming someone as a communist was just a convenient general term of abuse. 6:02 [SPEAKER_00]: If you had a rival in business or whatnot, it was very convenient to be able to suggest that, oh well, this person might have some red connections. 6:10 [SPEAKER_00]: I think that wanting to get free of that, of all that repression, the prevailing attitude of the eyes and how our era was that 6:17 [SPEAKER_00]: After the war, the Americans should just settle down to very ordinary pursuits. 6:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Put on your gray flannel suit, go to the office. 6:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Drive home to your suburban house, behind your white pickup fence. 6:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Be a nice little consumer. 6:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Don't rock the boat too much. 6:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Just be just staggeringly ordinary. 6:36 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think for a lot of people that appeal, especially if you were fighting in World War II, and as I said before, if you had spent the last four years shooting at people and getting shot at and sleeping in a fog's hole and being nearly starved, nearly bombed a death, nearly killed on so many different occasions. 6:55 [SPEAKER_00]: I think there were some people that had had enough adventure for one lifetime. 6:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you. 7:00 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm happy to settle down in my nice suburban home and just 7:04 [SPEAKER_00]: have it easy for the rest of my days, but a lot of people that was really deeply unsatisfying. 7:13 [SPEAKER_00]: There were a lot of different elements here that we started to coalesce. 7:16 [SPEAKER_00]: And one of them was, this was the beginning of mass media. 7:20 [SPEAKER_00]: It was also sort of the birth of the American teenager. 7:24 [SPEAKER_00]: And also you had in film the Rise of a Bad Boy trope with James Dean and Marlon Brando, where these big, formative characters, Elvis, read all these sort of figures that represented this youthful rebellion. 7:38 [SPEAKER_00]: But moreover, it was about just throwing off those strictures and doing your own thing. 7:45 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think a big part of that came from jazz that jazz had such a heavy emphasis on improvisation and creativity and having one's own voice. 7:56 [SPEAKER_00]: You didn't show up at a jam session to hear it played just like it was on a record. 8:00 [SPEAKER_00]: You came to watch the musicians just improvise and jam in the moment. 8:06 [SPEAKER_00]: And to diverge from the theme, I'm going to be come back to it later, but you'd see some old standard played in a way that you'd never seen before and we'd probably never be played again that way. 8:16 [SPEAKER_00]: That was the perfect soundtrack for that era because it mirrored what was on the mind of so many young people at the time, just wanted to get free. 8:26 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to say that is because there was such a desire to find something else, to find something different, that I think like the rise of alternative spirituality, people started looking yeast and investigating Taoism and Zen and Buddhism and the Hinduism and just different spiritual traditions to try and fill the void of what 8:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Basically, traditional American Christianity, what they found unfulfilling about that, or what they found to be more of an obligation than something really worth it for its own sake. 9:01 [SPEAKER_00]: Same with the interest in travel. 9:03 [SPEAKER_00]: If you were coming of age during wartime, the idea of jumping in a car or driving off into the sunset with no purpose or destination, just for the sake of the journey, was impossible. 9:16 [SPEAKER_00]: because we were rationing gasoline, we were rationing rubber. 9:19 [SPEAKER_00]: You couldn't buy new parts for your car until the war was over. 9:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Your carburetor failed or whatever. 9:26 [SPEAKER_00]: You had to fix that yourself or figure that it's, let's hurry up and beat Hitler because I got to fix my car. 9:32 [SPEAKER_00]: So the ability to do that, to actually venture out and explore the country, explore the world for the first time, was an amazing revelation for so many people. 9:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Even in mainstream society, you saw just this flurry of new travel brochures and stuff with the, with the Grand Canyon printed on it, saying, bring the family to the Grand Canyon, come see Mount Rushmore, come see all these different things. 9:54 [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a whole genre. 9:55 [SPEAKER_00]: People collect this stuff. 9:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Old travel posters and things like that. 9:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Some of those old pan-am pamphlets are worth quite a bit of money. 10:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Because people were just nerding to get free. 10:05 [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a correlation with with today. 10:07 [SPEAKER_00]: I was just talking to somebody the other day about how I think a lot of people as COVID is hopefully waning. 10:13 [SPEAKER_00]: People that have been stuck inside for two years then haven't been able to go anywhere. 10:18 [SPEAKER_00]: had that same sense of pent-up desire to just go and break free and go somewhere else and get that out of their system basically. 10:24 [SPEAKER_00]: I think there's a lot of emphasis in the 50s amongst the beads about this idea of personal freedom and freedom and identity and all this stuff and it had so much to do with the idea of being forced to go through something like World War II and the sacrifices that that meant for everybody and in a whole debate of different ways. 10:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Pretty much everybody in the world was touched by World War II. 10:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Even if you happen to be in a country that was not a belligerent, you still saw the effects of the war. 10:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Everyone lost people. 10:54 [SPEAKER_00]: People lost, you know, their sense of home. 10:57 [SPEAKER_00]: They lost their sense of place. 10:59 [SPEAKER_00]: They lost their jobs. 11:00 [SPEAKER_00]: They lost their families. 11:01 [SPEAKER_00]: They lost their relatives who were killed overseas. 11:04 [SPEAKER_00]: People lost their sense of innocence. 11:06 [SPEAKER_00]: They were all these things that changed in that period. 11:09 [SPEAKER_00]: And so, byward, 20 something in 11:11 [SPEAKER_00]: 1945, as the war was drawing to an end, what I would find remarkable is how much the world had changed. 11:18 [SPEAKER_00]: I think that a lot of people were became acutely aware of the fact that having gone from seemingly one calamity into another at some point you had to question 11:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, are we really on the right track? 11:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Is this really the direction we want to keep going in? 11:34 [SPEAKER_00]: It's let us from huge economic disaster to world war to the atomic age to this era where everyone distrusts one another because everyone's afraid of communists that people are so hell bent on conformity because they're so afraid of everything. 11:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Is this really what we want for ourselves? 11:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Is this really what we want? 11:57 [SPEAKER_00]: I think, especially a lot of those folks that felt this keen sense of having been given a second chance in the post-war era of thinking that that was going to be the end coming back home. 12:09 [SPEAKER_00]: And there's that sort of bewildering feeling that a lot of a former military have explained to me that you get back home and nothing makes sense. 12:16 [SPEAKER_00]: But you're standing in the grocery store looking at cereal and you're thinking about 12:21 [SPEAKER_00]: what happened over there. 12:23 [SPEAKER_00]: And it's really hard to bring yourself back. 12:25 [SPEAKER_00]: And so amidst that bewildering feeling, it's like, wait a second, I've got this new lease on life, there's got to be something better than this. 12:33 [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's really the crux of what the beat generation was all about finding new ways to live, new ways to think that made sense and that we're fulfilling 12:47 [SPEAKER_00]: whole people, one of Alan Ginsburg's big themes in his poetry, especially in the mid-50s, is that he felt that life, modern life, had become unlivable, or that the circumstances of modern society with wars and its atomic weapons and its crushing conformity had become hostile toward people that just wanted to live. 13:09 [SPEAKER_00]: and he sought to break out of that. 13:12 [SPEAKER_00]: He emphasized very much. 13:15 [SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to be a voice for marginalized cultures. 13:19 [SPEAKER_00]: He himself came out. 13:20 [SPEAKER_00]: It is a gay man in mid-50s and felt that so much 13:24 [SPEAKER_00]: So much pain and had come out of repressing who we are and trying to pretend that we're the leave it to be for family that everything is perfect and everyone has their place What meanwhile there were all these people that weren't seen that didn't have a voice and he wanted to bring those people to the forefront And the same sense is like carawax idea of the Beatitudes and the beat generation being the beatific of the meakin heriting the earth That's what that was all about and 13:52 [SPEAKER_00]: So bringing those voices to the forefront, it sprout a lot of new ideas that had been repressed and silenced any number of different ways and exposed the country to so many new, that there were all these possibilities that you didn't have to just follow this one model of what it means to be a person. 14:11 [SPEAKER_01]: Every new literary movement obviously has some new 14:18 [SPEAKER_01]: It also has influences from the past that have inspired it to take this new direction. 14:24 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked what the major literary influences were for the beat generation. 14:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond just the immediate reactionary aspect to the times they were living in, there was also a big literary influence when Ginsburg and company were at Columbia, for example, and they were reading not only the canon, because at the time, a Columbia offered a classical education, so you would read all the big books in English. 14:53 [SPEAKER_00]: of the classics and all that. 14:54 [SPEAKER_00]: But they were also reading things that were sort of off that beaten track so to speak. 14:59 [SPEAKER_00]: I think a big part of it was cherry picking influences from across the literary world, across literary history that you really can't deny the influence of the American transcendentalists, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, all those kind of mainstays. 15:14 [SPEAKER_00]: They were also the more contemporary influences like, for example, Henry Miller. 15:18 [SPEAKER_00]: He was a little bit older. 15:21 [SPEAKER_00]: but he was writing with its explicitness and its immediacy, but also the poetry of his words was an eye-opening window into what literature could be that it could be raw, visceral, and even growth-esque. 15:35 [SPEAKER_00]: But one of the big books, which I think is hard to find now, is Oswald's 15:41 [SPEAKER_00]: And this sort of, you know, vision that Western civilization was faced with imminent collapse, which was of that idea made sense in the post-war years. 15:50 [SPEAKER_00]: The civilization had just been rocked, you know, to its foundations. 15:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Lots of contemporary philosophers were coming out of France. 15:58 [SPEAKER_00]: They were appropriating literature from Russia, from all over Europe. 16:01 [SPEAKER_00]: And there was a sense that they were mimicking the lost generation that came before them. 16:06 [SPEAKER_00]: There's a 16:06 [SPEAKER_00]: quote, I believe it's from Joyce Johnson where, you know, she says that we were called the silent generation, but we really would have preferred to have been the last one. 16:16 [SPEAKER_00]: She said all the cool kids would when they would go out they would all drink too much gin and pretend to be Scott and Zelda. 16:23 [SPEAKER_00]: And that there was like an nostalgia for the roaring 20s from the jazz age that wasn't really all that long beforehand. 16:31 [SPEAKER_00]: People were also looking east. 16:33 [SPEAKER_00]: I think for a lot of people it was the first that they had ever heard of traditions like Buddhism. 16:37 [SPEAKER_00]: You had poets like Gary Snyder or people like Alan Watts, DT Sukey that were 16:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Really introducing these Buddhist ideas to Americans for the first time, and the people were finding that taking some element of Eastern thought and incorporating that into their own worldview made sense. 16:59 [SPEAKER_00]: But again, it was sort of a cherry-picking of influences. 17:02 [SPEAKER_00]: For example, Alan Watts published a pamphlet with a 17:08 [SPEAKER_00]: And it was almost critique on the lack of orthodoxy in so-called beat spirituality that it was just this loosely connected thing is opposed to the formal spiritual tradition where you work through that entire tradition long form. 17:24 [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of these people were interested in and just taking the parts they wanted. 17:29 [SPEAKER_00]: I guess that later became influential upon the so-called new age movements and things like that, where it was very popular, borrowed, loosely-related elements of different tradition. 17:41 [SPEAKER_01]: After hearing all of that, I asked for one or two of Brandon's favorite selections from the beat movement. 17:49 [SPEAKER_00]: I'll read this little bit of the from the forward to Joyce Johnson's minor characters actually this might be attributed to no, this is our okay When I was at college in the early 1950s we didn't have much liking for the period we were in 18:09 [SPEAKER_00]: We were the silent generation, but would have greatly preferred being the lost one. 18:13 [SPEAKER_00]: The prettiest, most confident girls would do the Charles Senate parties. 18:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Couples went out and drank too much gin and tried to be scott and Zelda. 18:21 [SPEAKER_00]: T.S. 18:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Eliot was the hottest poet. 18:23 [SPEAKER_00]: The 20s were much closer than, almost touchable. 18:27 [SPEAKER_00]: You could still find flapper dresses in your mother's closet. 18:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Periodically, the young revived the beat generation. 18:32 [SPEAKER_00]: 1993 was the year of a beat revival in downtown Manhattan, where a wave of cafe poetry readings made the cover of New York Magazine. 18:41 [SPEAKER_00]: In a gap ad for cackies, I came upon Jack Karoak posed on a warm September night, outside a bar of MacDougal Street called the Kettle of Fish. 18:51 [SPEAKER_00]: part of the original shot had been cropped away. 18:53 [SPEAKER_00]: In it, well, out of the foreground, arms folded, dressed in black, of course, with a look on her face that suggests waiting. 19:01 [SPEAKER_00]: You would have found an anonymous young woman. 19:04 [SPEAKER_00]: It was strange to know everything about that woman who wasn't there, strange to be alive and to be a legend's ghost. 19:12 [SPEAKER_00]: This is from Bob Kaufman, who is a local poet here in North Beach. 19:17 [SPEAKER_00]: This is from the book, a solitude's crowded with loneliness, it's called Bagel Shop Jazz. 19:22 [SPEAKER_00]: It gives you an idea of the general beat scene, and just sort of the minutiae of it. 19:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Shadow people, projected on coffee shop walls, memory formed echoes of a generation past, beating into now. 19:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Nightfall creatures eating each other over a noisy cup of coffee, mulberry-eyed girls and black stalking, smelling vaguely of mint, jelly, and last nice bongo drummer. 19:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Making profound remarks in the shapes of Naples, wondering how the short sunset week became the long grant Avenue night. 19:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Love-tinted, beat angels, doomed to see their coffee dreams crushed on the floors of time as they fling their arrow legs to the heavens, losing their doubts in the beat. 20:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Turtle neck angel guys, black hair dungery guys, Caesar job with synagogue guys, world travelers on the 41 bus, mixing jazz with paint talk, high rent, bartoque, classical murders, the pot shortage in last night's bus, lost in a dream world where time is told with a beat. 20:29 [SPEAKER_00]: The coffee-faced Ivy Leagueers and Cambridge jackets, whose personal Harvard was a film-or-district step, waited down with congregrums, the ancestral cross, the off-hello-laid curse, talking a bird and dizz and miles with the secret terrible hurts, wrapped in cool hipster smiles, telling themselves, under the talk, this shot must be the end, hoping the beat is really the truth. 20:54 [SPEAKER_00]: The guilty police arrive. 20:56 [SPEAKER_00]: brief, beautiful shadows burned on walls of night. 21:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Next episode, we're going to look closer at the relationship between the beat movement and the city of San Francisco, the unofficial hometown of so many counterculture movements over the course of the last 200 years.
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