It was Wes’ day off today and he was kind enough, not to mention a good egg, to take me around this afternoon. On my to see/to do list of things was the Beat Museum, located on 540 broadway at Columbus.
Anyone who’s been interested in Beat literature and culture can not possibly resist the allure of this Beat Museum church in North Beach. Finally! A space dedicated solely to the preservation of this cultural movement; a Beat bookstore in front and the museum behind and a floor up.
At the entrance to the museum collection is an homage to Neal Cassady, the link between the Beats and the hippies. Cassady is undisputedly the single individual that so greatly influenced 2 major social movements. Behind the glass case includes such personal relics as the black-and-white striped referee style jersey worn throughout most of the infamous Merry Prankster gang’s cross-country bus trip to New York.
Venturing reverently upstairs, the top floor opened up with a tribute to the man himself, Jack Kerouac: books in all printings, including first-editions and dust jackets, as well as personal photos.
Further in, there’s a section featuring the women of the Beat era, including Cassady’s wife, Carolyn, Kerouac’s daughter, Jan, Edie Parker (whom Kerouac fell in love with and later married to get out of jail), Diane di Palma, Jane Haverty and many others.
Rounding out the characters is Lawrence Ferlinghetti (owner of City Lights book store), Allen Ginsberg (who named Cassady the “secret hero” of his groundbreaking poem, Howl), Naked Lunch and William Tell wannabe’s William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Lucian Carr, amongst many notable others.
Other kitsch items and reminders of the era included old typewriters and furniture. The museum is not the Met or The Tate. It’s not pretty, but that would go against the grain that is Beat. Nevertheless, it’s informative and you get a sense of all the personalities behind the era and the legacy they all leave behind.
Course, after the Beat museum, it would not be complete if I did not re-visit City Lights Books and Vesuvio Cafe; separated by Jack Kerouac Alley.
Here’s a verbatim excerpt from Good Blond and Others by Jack Kerouac that resonates for me:
Belief and Technique for Modern Prose
List of Essentials:
01. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
02. Submissive to everything, open, listening
03. Try never to get drunk outside your own house
04. Be in love with your life
05. Something that you feel will find its own form
06. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
07. Blow as deep as your want to blow
08. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind
09. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Wisionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like proust, be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monologue
16. The jewel centre of interest if the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of character in the bleak inhuman loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a genius all the time
30. Writer-director of earthly movies, sponsored & angeled in heaven
After my day of “beatitude”, I have even more and re-invigorated respect for the movement. These “angel headed hipsters” or “beatniks” were not out to start a counter-culture or a movement. They were merely free-thinkers who loved art of all kinds.
As someone who has an boundless love for words, music and art, I can’t possibly think what the world would’ve been without these contributors. Each and every one of them has shaped me into the person I am and want to be.
I think I shall go re-read On the Road and Dharma Bums.
View more photos of my trip on my Flickr album.
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San Francisco, CA 94133
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