Here I continue and elaborate on the North Beach scene from my "About me" page.
1955 - 1960
It was the time of Beat Poetry. I was teen from New York walking North Beach at the time of Beatniks, a painting student at San Francisco School of Art - None of us approved of the term coined by Herb Cain (Beat generation / Spudnik, Russia's rocket) who wrote a famous column for the San Francisco Chronicle.
"Tall girls are grateful." He once wrote. Beats were not known for tallness or for any physical description. Looks were too middle class. Beatniks had looks, sandals and uncombed hair, on the look out for authentic artists to copy.
Only run aways from Iowa were Beatniks - not the bongo playing young special elite men seriously passing gallon jugs of cheap Crabari wine around - and a few artist girlfriends, such as me who sang "Black, black, black is the Color of my true love's hair" a Capella out loud in front of everyone in the circle at someone's pre- earthquake duplex, or at the latest gallery opening in a converted garage.
And such as my friend, the later to be famous and respected neo-realist painter Joan Brown, who was a teenager then, much loved and adored by her father who brought her waggly tailed Cocker Spaniel to Joanie's first gallery opening, at the Delexi, she embarrassed and for a flash infantilized, "OH DAD!" ... and by middle aged mentors, such as the ULTRA famous and respected neo-realist painter of illusive figures Elmer Bishoff, who was not loved, where I saw them in that doorway one night, as much as he desired.
Twenty years later in India, Joan was killed by her own installation when it fell on her head; and there was not friend, the late, moody as hell, Jay DeFeo, who was to kill herself (or did she?)at the peak of her success. For almost half a century she had expressed witchy emotion in multi-layered canvas formed by gobs of heady and romantic smelling canned oil paint. The same wall paint stuff that Joanie used. Joanie laughed about the impermanence of it all. "I'd love to be there when the curators see that cheap paint slip off my painting onto the floor!" Ha ha. I still laugh with her irreverence.
"If it looks like something paint over it." Life as a young witch must have looked like something to Jay. What ever was that something? No answer gave up in her frown. If so, perhaps we could have been friends, for I too was possessed by approaching dark.
Years would pass before Jay stopped painting over and over a single painting before travel to the Whitney, still wet. Her canvasses were twice her height, larger than life.
Life follows fiction.
Many of us erupted in poetry, that unrestrained, untamed, run on words of the Beats. Take a guy named Larry Ferlinghetti. He could be heard shouting dispassionately, reading his stuff from the balcony about cement vaginas, LOUD, to drown out the drunks packed in at the bar below. It was a place in North Beach, called The Place. Now all dead and gone.
It was in that milieu my writing side took hold.
The name, Eric Nord comes to mind, whose dress style was reminiscent of Eric the Nord, the Viking. I think our Eric also wore Viking horns. Our Eric charmingly invaded your walking space to shove into your hands a booklet his poetry, outside the cafe that featured espresso just like in left bank Paris where Dadaists fought each other for position.
And Lenore Kandel comes to mind from those times. Ten years later a jury declared her book of poetry (The Love Book) obscene and lacking in any redeeming social value. She thanked the police by giving 1 percent of all profits to their Retirement Association....
Ginsberg of course. He assumed a leadership position of the North Beach poets, a solemn sort who carried an edge of superior rage. He was not given to being nice to the unenlightened.
These were the days of the "Ivory Tower" mentality when poets and painters were in the exclusive club of "If you don't know now you never will," the statement made by Sophie Tucker (?) about Jazz. Beats loved jazz. If you are not "the best of our generation," walking the "Negro streets," to quote Ginsberg, you were square.
Square was not good. It was infested by Bourgeois. Square meant you had a 9 to 5 job, perhaps in tool and die, that you felt no particular anger about. You were a man who possessed two offspring. Wife kept them in ironed clothes. She saved Blue Stamps.
Squares were unaware that their life was miserable. This was because they lived in a town or the suburbs of a town, or heaven forbid - a farm - instead of attaining true existence in the beat of the BIG city drinking vino and later on, smoking Marijuana cigarettes at parties populated by girls standing along the peripheries who wore black black mascara and no lipstick just to rub shoulders and other things with seated intellectuals who hated intellectualism under pain of disrespect for their recent work that they probably won't show you. Although the Beats were Communists, they eschewed belonging to anything but themselves.
Square or hip, it was a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" existence.
In the North Beach poetry scene, everyone was young. There were no old people. Except grandparents who lived in Davenport. An Anointed artist didn't go to Davenport. He sneaked off to Davenport. He became Jack Kerouac riding the Greyhound to Davenport.
Down time aboard a Greyhound, after all, surrendered up perfect madness. Moreover, Thanksgiving dinner with the simple squares, provided many despicable occasions to immortalize in rhyme free poetry. "Turkey is not a country. It is a state of mind." Thus, the Davenports fueled the engine of sanctimonious anger. The poet returns to North Beach laden with stories from the hinterland.
Say I. Isn't Sanctimony so delicious?
1955 - 1960
It was the time of Beat Poetry. I was teen from New York walking North Beach at the time of Beatniks, a painting student at San Francisco School of Art - None of us approved of the term coined by Herb Cain (Beat generation / Spudnik, Russia's rocket) who wrote a famous column for the San Francisco Chronicle.
"Tall girls are grateful." He once wrote. Beats were not known for tallness or for any physical description. Looks were too middle class. Beatniks had looks, sandals and uncombed hair, on the look out for authentic artists to copy.
Only run aways from Iowa were Beatniks - not the bongo playing young special elite men seriously passing gallon jugs of cheap Crabari wine around - and a few artist girlfriends, such as me who sang "Black, black, black is the Color of my true love's hair" a Capella out loud in front of everyone in the circle at someone's pre- earthquake duplex, or at the latest gallery opening in a converted garage.
And such as my friend, the later to be famous and respected neo-realist painter Joan Brown, who was a teenager then, much loved and adored by her father who brought her waggly tailed Cocker Spaniel to Joanie's first gallery opening, at the Delexi, she embarrassed and for a flash infantilized, "OH DAD!" ... and by middle aged mentors, such as the ULTRA famous and respected neo-realist painter of illusive figures Elmer Bishoff, who was not loved, where I saw them in that doorway one night, as much as he desired.
Twenty years later in India, Joan was killed by her own installation when it fell on her head; and there was not friend, the late, moody as hell, Jay DeFeo, who was to kill herself (or did she?)at the peak of her success. For almost half a century she had expressed witchy emotion in multi-layered canvas formed by gobs of heady and romantic smelling canned oil paint. The same wall paint stuff that Joanie used. Joanie laughed about the impermanence of it all. "I'd love to be there when the curators see that cheap paint slip off my painting onto the floor!" Ha ha. I still laugh with her irreverence.
"If it looks like something paint over it." Life as a young witch must have looked like something to Jay. What ever was that something? No answer gave up in her frown. If so, perhaps we could have been friends, for I too was possessed by approaching dark.
Years would pass before Jay stopped painting over and over a single painting before travel to the Whitney, still wet. Her canvasses were twice her height, larger than life.
Life follows fiction.
Many of us erupted in poetry, that unrestrained, untamed, run on words of the Beats. Take a guy named Larry Ferlinghetti. He could be heard shouting dispassionately, reading his stuff from the balcony about cement vaginas, LOUD, to drown out the drunks packed in at the bar below. It was a place in North Beach, called The Place. Now all dead and gone.
It was in that milieu my writing side took hold.
The name, Eric Nord comes to mind, whose dress style was reminiscent of Eric the Nord, the Viking. I think our Eric also wore Viking horns. Our Eric charmingly invaded your walking space to shove into your hands a booklet his poetry, outside the cafe that featured espresso just like in left bank Paris where Dadaists fought each other for position.
And Lenore Kandel comes to mind from those times. Ten years later a jury declared her book of poetry (The Love Book) obscene and lacking in any redeeming social value. She thanked the police by giving 1 percent of all profits to their Retirement Association....
Ginsberg of course. He assumed a leadership position of the North Beach poets, a solemn sort who carried an edge of superior rage. He was not given to being nice to the unenlightened.
These were the days of the "Ivory Tower" mentality when poets and painters were in the exclusive club of "If you don't know now you never will," the statement made by Sophie Tucker (?) about Jazz. Beats loved jazz. If you are not "the best of our generation," walking the "Negro streets," to quote Ginsberg, you were square.
Square was not good. It was infested by Bourgeois. Square meant you had a 9 to 5 job, perhaps in tool and die, that you felt no particular anger about. You were a man who possessed two offspring. Wife kept them in ironed clothes. She saved Blue Stamps.
Squares were unaware that their life was miserable. This was because they lived in a town or the suburbs of a town, or heaven forbid - a farm - instead of attaining true existence in the beat of the BIG city drinking vino and later on, smoking Marijuana cigarettes at parties populated by girls standing along the peripheries who wore black black mascara and no lipstick just to rub shoulders and other things with seated intellectuals who hated intellectualism under pain of disrespect for their recent work that they probably won't show you. Although the Beats were Communists, they eschewed belonging to anything but themselves.
Square or hip, it was a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" existence.
In the North Beach poetry scene, everyone was young. There were no old people. Except grandparents who lived in Davenport. An Anointed artist didn't go to Davenport. He sneaked off to Davenport. He became Jack Kerouac riding the Greyhound to Davenport.
Down time aboard a Greyhound, after all, surrendered up perfect madness. Moreover, Thanksgiving dinner with the simple squares, provided many despicable occasions to immortalize in rhyme free poetry. "Turkey is not a country. It is a state of mind." Thus, the Davenports fueled the engine of sanctimonious anger. The poet returns to North Beach laden with stories from the hinterland.
Say I. Isn't Sanctimony so delicious?
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