Being an old punk rocker Mister Panic sir. I find so many parallels with the beat movement. The whiff of danger, the creativity, the anti establishment stance. The devil may care spirit of now.
The Ivy thing has always just been a bit too upight and button down for me.
Old punks never die, they just become old bohos...

We'd love a picture.  This has all the fascinating old Soho-Boho associations attached to it, doesn't it?  Perhaps Colin M was a bit more of that than a straight-down-the-line modernist.  Or was he just, Jesmond-style, his own cat?  For me, it goes into the mix during the 50s, begins to fade away after 1960, is driven more into hipdom by beach riots and Barnes-captured ruffians.  Very uncool.  Unhip?  Paul, me old son, over to you...

I'm with you there Mister Panic sir.
What I love also about Beat is it's great to grow old with. You really cannot be a old mod or an old punk, but the boho vibe is an attitude that only improves like a fine wine. Many of the cats on this forum who would operate under a banner of 'Ivy' are just old bohos with their wines and jazz and book collections. They just associate the beat thing with bongos a little too much.
Beat has real substance: art, design, literature, film, music, you name it. It's more than just a fashion fad.
How many of us are really the uptight Madison Avenue Real Ivy types?
Not many really...

Last edited by Beatnik's ghost (2010-07-20 15:57:04)

The Beats were pure bebop and benzedrine.  Kerouac was the biggest fucked-up bisexual benny zen-siddharta addict of them all in panoramic be-bop prosody and jazz poetics. He was the only person that Timothy Leary had a bad acid trip with, Kerouac refused to let go of his bar room bravado and beat the LSD with a bottle of Old Grandad.

He had one Brooks Brothers suit, for when he went on the Steve Allen show to read from 'On The Road'. Burroughs had several Brooks Brothers suits, he truly dressed like the enemy, like Miles. Except Ivy was not the enemy after all.

Last edited by fxh (2012-11-16 11:29:59)

Last edited by fxh (2012-11-16 11:46:27)

^Believe it, or not, I was once a English Lit grad student and I actually penned an extended essay on the the Mad magazine parody of the Beats. The whole issue was devoted to the movement and was full of stereotypical caricatures and Lord Buckley style hipster talk.

My conclusion, if one could have understood my dense and purposely florid and unreadable prose that I favored at the time, was that this marked the point of Kerouac's departure with the Beat movement, as it had become overtly commercialised and removed from the bebop spirituality of 52nd street.

It was now the laughable subject of baffoon like cartoons and all one needed to be Beat, was to sport a pair of sandals, grow a beard and wear a beret.

Thank you very much.

I enjoyed this so much at the time that I've bumped it to maybe run alongside the Vetra thread.  Because JS perhaps still has that element about him and pulls off a look I'm uncertain anyone else could do as well.  I know I couldn't - nor, I don't think, would be wise to try.  But I did go through a phase, at nineteen, of reading Camus and puffing my way through lots of Gitanes.