Countercultures offer an irresistible narrative opportunity, with a colorful cast of characters and the seductive themes of transgression, exile, and utopia. The beat story, set in San Francisco, New York, and the long American highway in between, is part fiction, part autobiography -- a narrative in the counterpoint voices of author and media. With a nice blend of condescension and malice, Chronicle columnist Herb Caen coined the word "beatnik" after the 1957 launch of the Russian satellite sputnik, conferring on the writers just a hint of anti-Americanism.
Press coverage finally brought young people to North Beach from all over the country; they dressed as hipsters and tried to be beats; they were followed by tourists who came to see beatniks; and finally, commodities were created to sell to both beatniks and tourists. This commercial appropriation would be replicated a decade later in the Haight-Ashbury, with the hippies.
By the time the Coppolas began working on their definitive film of On the Road in the early nineties, the beat writers had become subjects of doctoral dissertations and as iconic as the city that claimed them for itself. A San Francisco Examiner story, "Icons" (Nov. 1996), noted "the cultural detritus" being exhibited at museums: art works featuring Elvis, Marilyn, Lucy, and "Beat Culture and the New America: 1950 -- 1965," which had shown the year before at the Whitney in New York. "Whether it's Dennis Hopper's photos of alienated youths, Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg gathering in hip colloquy or a slouching Jack Kerouac, the Beat attitude is integral to the Bay Area's identity." Billboards of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in Gap khaki have loomed over the downtown freeway, while William Burroughs was pictured in Vanity Fair in Nikes. Major corporations regularly solicit the City Lights Bookstore for location shots against which to display their products. In efforts to turn the neighborhood into a theme park, the North Beach Chamber of Commerce modified its logo to "Little Italy and the Home of the Beat Generation." A recent float in the Italian Heritage Parade (formerly the Columbus Day Parade until Native American protesters motivated a name change) revives the stereotypical image of the "beatnik" with beret and bongos. In fact, a steady exodus of Italians from North Beach to the Marina, the Mission, and the Excelsior has been going on since the 1906 earthquake, making "Little Italy" a misnomer today. And although a bohemian community established itself in North Beach, with coffee houses, galleries, and the City Lights bookstore as pivot points, the brief period of close collaboration of beat writers and artists was over by 1956, when Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, and others left San Francisco, just as North Beach was moving center stage in the public mind.
The beats succeeded surprisingly well, however, in sidestepping mainstream appropriation. For one thing, they were not a school; formal stylistic agenda was something they avoided. For another, they were more a historical moment than a cohesive literary movement in which Ferlinghetti's Chaplinesque populism could coexist with William Burroughs's paranoid dystopia or Philip Lamantia's urban surrealism with Gary Snyder's bedrock common sense. Moreover, most of the Western writers never identified themselves as "beats" at all. We see over the years that a succession of independent press publications and loosely organized readings and other events brought together writers who were distinctly individual in aesthetic sensibility, subject matter, and personal interests. The beats marked a point of transition between the old bohemian utopias and the postmodern era of decentralization and "difference."
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