A Brief Note on Beatniks

 

Nedward and Agnes Flanders

Ned's freaky beatnik parents in The Simpsons [1]

 

 

Did anyone ever actually describe themselves as a beatnik? 

 

Or was the term purely a media invention [2]: a way of reducing members of the Beat Generation to a cool but cartoonish stereotype? Black turtleneck sweater ☑ Black beret ☑ Dark glasses ☑ Sandals ☑ Striped top ☑ Jazz album, bongo drums, or a book of poetry under the arm ☑

 

Amusingly, Allen Ginsberg wrote to The New York Times in 1959, deploring the use of the word beatnik [3]. And his pal Jack Kerouac wasn't pleased either to see their philosophy become just another fad. Both authors feared that a generation of illuminated hipsters, would be replaced by brainwashed fashionistas interested only in looking the part. 

 

Indeed, so exasperated was Kerouac by the popularity of the term that he declared to a reporter in 1969 (shortly before his death in October of that year): I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic [4].

 

Personally, however, I'm more interested in the way the stereotype of the beatnik became part of popular culture, changing the latter and being changed by it, rather than Kerouac's spiritual convictions, or his quest for religious salvation.

 

And if, eventually, the term beatnik was used by all kinds of people in all kinds of ways and some of those people were frauds and some of those ways were false, well, it doesn't really matter and one gets tired of puritans demanding authenticity. 

 

I mean, is there anything squarer than wanting to keep things real? [5]                          

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See The Simpsons episode entitled 'Hurricane Neddy' [S8/E8] (1996), written by Steve Young and directed by Bob Anderson, in which it was revealed that religiously uptight Ned Flanders is the son of anti-disciplinarian, freaky beatnik parents (Nedward and Agnes). Click here for a short (but hilarious) clip on YouTube.    

 

[2] The term beatnik is usually credited to Herb Caen, writing in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle, in April 1958.

 

[3] See The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Bill Morgan, (Da Capo Press, 2008), p. 221. Commenting upon and quoting from this letter, James Campbell writes:

      "The Beats dislikes the appropriation of 'beat', and its melding into 'beatnik'. 'The foul word is used several times', wrote Ginsberg in a letter to the New York Times Book Review [...] in response to an uncomplimentary article about Kerouac:

 

'But the 'beatnik' of mad critics is a piece of their own ignoble poetry. And if 'beatniks', and not illuminated Beat poets, overrun the country they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash Man ...'"

      In other words, Beat was a state of being or an identity; beatnik was just posing and dressing up. See 'The Birth of the Beatnik', in This is the Beat Generation, by James Campbell, (University of California Press, 1999), chapter 10, pp. 245-271. Lines quoted are from pp. 245-46.

      Amusingly, I remember a similar discussion around the term punk in the 1970s, with Johnny Rotten rejecting the term as just another lazy label and form of media shorthand: click here to see what he says in a 1976 TV interview (go to 3.04). Punk was an attitude and not a fixed way of looking and thinking and real punks - who, like Rotten, often refused the term - were scornful and contemptuous of so-called plastic (or part-time) punks hanging around Kings Road trying to look trendy and pogoing in their bedrooms in front of the mirror (but only when their mothers had gone out). 

      For a fascinating discussion of the etymology and history of the word punk, see the essay by J. P. Robinson on medium.com: click here. 

 

[4] This interview with Kerouac by Jack McClintock from 1969 was republished in the Tampa Bay Times (20 March 2013) and can be read online by clicking here. 

 

[5] Amazingly, there are still some cats who get het up about the manner in which Beat became absorbed into the culture industry and commodified as a lifestyle or look. Denise Enck, for example, founder and editor of the arts and literature site Empty Mirror, published an article in July 2013 entitled 'The Beat Generation vs. "Beatniks"', in which she accuses the latter of being shallow and writes: 

      "The Beats were looking for real meaning, authenticity and a deeply personal self-expression in their lives and work, not conformity in a black turtleneck and a cheesy beret. [...]  The truth of it is that certain details associated with the Beat Generation writers were picked up, twisted, and amplified, almost beyond recognition and wildly embellished by the media and the marketing departments, into the 'beatnik' stereotype".

      To read the article in full, click here. Readers interested in this topic might also like to see a piece by Matthew Wills on JSTOR Daily entitled 'How the Beat Generation Became "Beatniks"' (5 May 2019): click here. This is a reading of the longer essay by Stephen Petrus, 'Rumblings of Discontent: American Popular Culture and its Response to the Beat Generation, 1957-1960', in Studies in Popular Culture, Vol. 20, No. 1 (October 1997), pp. 1-17, which, conveniently, can also be found on JSTOR: click here. 

 

 

Musical bonus: 'Beat-Nik' by Jimmy Van Eaton (Rita Records, 1960): click here Daddy-O!

Forever Dead and Lovely: Notes on Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes

Melanie Pullen: Untitled (ELLE), 2014 

From the series High Fashion Crime Scenes (2003-17)

melaniepullen.com

If, like me, you love Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse for their drop dead gorgeousness and thanatological interest, then you're also gonna love the work of Melanie Pullen in her photographic series High Fashion Crime Scenes ...


Born in 1975, in New York, but currently living and working in Los Angeles, Pullen grew up in the West Village in a family home regularly visited by poets and painters, including Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. She acquired her first camera as a teen and began shooting images of rock bands for various publications and record labels.     

Pullen is most noted, however, for her extensive series of  pictures based on vintage crime scene images taken from the files of the NY and LAPD. Inspired by cinematic images and photojournalism, she employed not only well-known actresses and models, but the services of a huge technical crew so that her photo shoots often resembled elaborate movie sets. Each of her pictures could take up to a month to create and the High Fashion Crime Scenes series used millions of dollars worth of designer clothing and accessories. 

Surprisingly - or perhaps not - Pullen claims to dislike violence. She is curious, however, about the role that violence plays within the arts and wider culture, as well as the response that people have to violent images. Her work might therefore be described not as an attempt to make violent crime seem glamorous or stylish by dressing up bodies in haute couture, but a critical examination of the way in which the horror and traumatic effect of murder, rape and suicide can be diminished via its aesthetic interpretation and/or portrayal in the media.  
 

Pullen herself has expressed concern with the way that images and descriptions of female corpses - often naked or semi-naked - are used to titilate or add sleazy sensational interest to a narrative; be it a film, a play, a news story, a coroners report ... or even a blog post.

See: Melanie Pullen, High Fashion Crime Scenes, with an introduction by Luke Crissell and essays by Robert Enright and Colin Westerbech, (Nazraelie Press, 2005), 128 pages.  

To read a sister post to this one - Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse - please click here.

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom: On the Genealogy of Hippie Morals

Pippa McManus: Crazy Daisy Dreams (2017)

Flower Child Group Exhibition (12 Aug - 2 Sept 2017)

Modern Eden Gallery (San Francisco)

I. Summers of Love and Hate

As a punk rocker, the symbolism of the zip and safety pin means more to me than that of the groovy floral designs so beloved of the hippie generation. However, as the Summer of Hate is now as much part of ancient cultural history as the Summer of Love, it's easier to view both events with critical perspective and concede that wearing flowers in one's hair is probably preferable to having to remove spittle.

And, of course, as a floraphile, I very much approve of intimate relationships between plants and people and can see how one might wish to develop a green neo-pagan politics upon a love of flora - although, personally, I've no desire for universal peace and love and refuse to accept that flowers can only symbolise such benevolent (and naive) idealism.    


II. If You're Going to San Francisco ...

Back in '67, San Francisco was the epicentre of the hippie counterculture, a movement mostly composed of privileged white youths who temporarily dropped out and experimented with drugs, sex, and alternative lifestyles, before moderating their views and dropping back in again as corporate yuppies in the 1980s à la Jerry Rubin.           

Thanks to a strong economy, the hippies were able to spend their time getting stoned, listening to psychedelic music, reading Allen Ginsberg,* protesting against the Man, dreaming of revolution and generally indulging their narcissism. Some formed communes and attempted to live as far outside mainstream society as possible. It's easy to mock and tempting to despise these idealists with flowers in their hair, but they have had (for better or for worse) a wide and lasting impact and many of their ideas and values are now part of the liberal orthodoxy.

Interestingly, the American author Robert Anton Wilson suggests that the hippies can be characterised as unearthly angels whose psychology manifests friendly weakness. Such people are kind, passive, generous and trusting. But they are also easily led and secretly in search of authority (which might explain the obsession with gurus and, indeed, why Charles Manson was able to wield such control over his extended Family of followers).  


III. On the Genealogy of Hippie Morals

I say their values, but, as the sociologist Bennett Berger pointed out at the time, there's nothing very new or uniquely hippie about the morality of the flower children. Their movement was merely another expression of the 19th-century bohemianism that the literary critic Malcolm Cowley had reduced to a relatively formal doctrine with several key ideas, some of which we might (briefly) summarise as follows:

(i) Only a Child Can Save Us

This first point, found in Christianity and Romanticism as well as flower power philosophy, continues to resonate today; thus the astonishing rise to global fame of Greta Thunberg, for example. The idea is that the innocent child is born with special potentialities which are systematically repressed by society. If they could only be left to blossom naturally and develop their personalities, then the world might yet be saved and humanity redeemed. 

(ii) Express Yourself (Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey)

When hippies claim the right to do their own thing, they are, of course, simply reviving the idea that the moral duty of each person is to express themselves and realise their full potential as individuals via some form of creative activity. Or smoking weed. Madonna was still churning out such bullshit twenty years after the Summer of Love.       

(iii) Paganism Good / Christianity Bad

The idea that paganism is a happy, innocent worship of the natural world that regards the body as a temple in which there is nothing unclean, whilst Christianity, in contrast, is a morally repressive and anti-sexual religion is one that I used to subscribe to myself. But then I read Michel Foucault on power, pleasure, and Christian ascesis and realised that things aren't so simple; that the difference between Graeco-Roman (i.e. pagan) and early Christian forms of self-disciplining cannot be established in terms of a fundamental distinction or dialectic. Ultimately, even the Nietzschean binary of Dionysus versus the Crucified has to be deconstructed.    

(iv) Seize the Day, Man

The idea of living spontaneously and for the moment is crucial to hippie philosophy; the immediacy of the present or the nowness of the Now is where it's at; the past and future are just abstractions and what D. H. Lawrence calls the quick of time is contained only in the instant. We have the Roman poet Horace to thank for this: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero ...  But whether it's ever very wise listening to a poet (or Robin Williams) is debatable; doesn't it all just end in the sanctioned hedonism of consumer society and a Nike slogan?

(v) Free Love

Ah, the so-called sexual revolution of the sixties ... Again, part of a long tradition carried on by individuals who objected to the state having any say over matters such as marriage, contraception, sexual orientation, etc. What an individual chose to do with his or her body was, they argued, entirely up to them. The great hope was that sexual liberation would lead to greater freedom in all spheres of life and bring about profound social, political, and cultural change. Again, I used to subscribe to this, but then I read Foucault and realised that the politics of desire involves a naive and mistaken understanding of sex, power, and subjectivity thanks to our unquestioning belief in what he terms the repressive hypothesis.   

(vi) Romantic Primitivism and Exotic Otherness 

Finally, the hippies were of course anti-Western and believed that spiritual enlightenment either lay in Asia (and involved transcendental meditation and taking lots of drugs), or with native Americans who combined tribal wisdom with noble savagery. Embarrassingly, I also used to buy into this in my Kings of the Wild Frontier/Nostalgia of Mud period. But now, I'm wise to the culture cult and refuse the tyranny of guilt identified by Pascal Buckner.

Indeed, now, not only would I never trust a hippie, I'd never trust a punk, pagan, or poet either (even though I used to self-identify as a combination of all three during the 1980s).

* Note: In an essay written in 1965, Ginsberg advocated that anti-war rallies should become non-violent spectacles and that hippie protesters should be provided with masses of flowers to be handed out to political opponents, police, press, and members of the public. Thanks to activists like Abbie Hoffman, this idea of flower power quickly spread and became an important expression of hippie ideology. It also led to some iconic images, as flower-wielding protesters were confronted by armed force.

See: 

Bennett M. Berger, 'Hippie morality - more old than new', Society, Vol. 5, Issue 2 (December, 1967), pp. 19-27. Note that Society was entitled Transaction at this time.

Malcolm Cowley, Exiles Return, (W. W. Norton, 1934). The Penguin edition (1994), ed. Donald W. Faulkner, is perhaps more readily available.

Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising, (Falcon Press, 1983), p. 55. 

Play: San Francisco, sung by Scott McKenzie, written by John Phillips, (Ode Records, May 1967), the unofficial anthem of the flower power generation: click here. It's a pleasant enough tune, but like Sid Vicious I was busy playing with my Action Man whilst all this was going on.

    

Ali Baba Comes Today: Notes on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures

Participants in Jack Smith's queer-oriental fantasy demonstrate 

how all sexes can be transformed via savage splendour 

and erotic intensity into Flaming Creatures

I.

Flaming Creatures (1963) is an experimental short black-and-white film directed by Jack Smith and famously described by Susan Sontag as a rare modern work of art, full of Dionysian joy and innocence. Other critics weren't quite so generous and dismissed it as a disturbing and unpleasant work full of limp genitalia and limp art which defiled sex and cinema in equal measure; not so much a vision of paradise, as a glimpse of hell.

It premiered in all its avant-garde excess at midnight on April 29, at the Bleecker Street Cinema in Manhattan. Interested readers can now view it on YouTube by simply clicking here.


II.

Flaming Creatures is composed of several disconnected scenes or provocative vignettes, including an orgy, an earthquake, and a mock commercial for a heart-shaped lipstick that doesn't smudge when performing fellatio. The sexually ambiguous and heavily made-up actors are dressed in elaborate costume as if attending a Scheherazade party; i.e., an exotically camp soiree based on the Arabian Nights.

Unsurprisingly, due to its graphic and illicit sexual content - not to mention the elements of queer gothic horror, including vampirism - even some underground venues refused to show it and, in March 1964, police interrupted a screening and seized a print of the film on the grounds that it was in violation of New York's obscenity laws.

Various intellectuals and artists jumped to the film's defence, including Jonas Mekas, Allen Ginsberg, and Susan Sontag. Nevertheless, the defendants in the case were convicted and given suspended sentences. On appeal, however, the Supreme Court reversed the guilty verdict and quashed the convictions. Despite this, the film continued to be banned and screenings continued to attract police attention throughout the sixties.

Indeed, it was only after Smith's death in 1989 that art institutions and film festivals started to regularly screen Flaming Creatures, Smith's unconventional approach to cinema - no fixed narrative, unashamedly cheap sets, bizarre rather than special effects, the use of non-professional actors, peculiar camera angles and close-ups, etc. - having finally been recognised as seminal (no pun intended).  

Smith himself, however, always regarded Flaming Creatures as a comedy which contained not only all the most amusing things he could think of, but also his idiosyncratic ideas of what constituted glamour (ideas inspired in part by Hollywood and in part by flamboyant forms of performance art, such as burlesque).  

Notes

Susan Sontag, 'Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures', in Against Interpretation (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966), pp. 226-31. This essay originally appeared as 'A Feast for Open Eyes', in The Nation (13 April 1964) and can be read online by clicking here. 

Interestingly, Michael Moon challenges Sontag's reading of Flaming Creatures, arguing that she theorizes urban gay male social and artistic practice under the "extremely reductive rubric of 'camp'". His main criticism is that Sontag depoliticizes Smith's film by understanding it purely as an aesthetic exercise. I don't think that's entirely fair or accurate, however, and it seems to me that Moon misunderstands how Sontag uses the term innocence in its Nietzschean sense; she is not at all suggesting the film lacks sophistication or an understanding of how gender and sexuality are political issues. Indeed, she repeatedly stresses that art is always the sphere of freedom and not just about beauty and pleasure. 

See: Michael Moon, 'Flaming Closets', A Small Boy and Others, (Duke University Press, 1998), pp.67-93. The line quoted is on p. 76.