BrnToEnd says,
Why...oh why? is my life is dull and boring. It just consists of School Work, listening to music, dreaming and thinking I'm the next Jack Kerouac or John Lennon. Why can't I be On The Road with Dean Moriatry? or
on
a bus with The Merry Pranksters?
but I really want to write a book that redfines the beatnik-60s "american dream" books like On The Road because I am bored bored with my life and school isn't much good either.
This made me think about the Beats, and what was happening then... and it made me think of today and things how they are, and why it looks like some periods of time are more "intense" or "exciting" than others. Then I thought, maybe we all just miss what's going on around us and if we just took a closer look, or looked from a different angle... So I got down a book and looked up what Jack Kerouac thought about his times and what happened (It's a good book, "Good Blonde & Others") Jack Kerouac wrote: "The Beat Generation, that was a vision... of a generation of crazy illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, curious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way ---... 'beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction." "We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped-up horn bringing the secret message ... like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade." "But as to the actual existance of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds. We'd stay up twenty-four hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record... talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets....We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them... celebrating the new "angels" of the American underground. In actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mighty swiftly ... maybe the result of the universalization of television ... but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses or were shamed into silent conformity." "suddenly... postwar youth emerged cool and beat, had picked up the gestures and the style; soon it was everywhere, the new look... bop arrangements that were once the secret ecstasy music of beat contemplatives began to appear in every pit... the bop visions became common property of the commerical, popular, cultural world... and the Beat Generation, though dead, was resurrected and justified. Even in this late stage of civilization when money is the only thing that really matters to everybody... all inspired and fervent and free of Bourgeois-Bohemian Materialism." "Beat doesn't mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means 'beato,' the Italian for beatific... like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere... cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of mulitplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself one in a while... You may be withdrawn but you don't have to be mean about it... Beatness is ... a form of spontaneous affirmation. What kinda culture you gonna have with everybody's gray faces saying, "I don't think that's quite correct?" "My favorite beat buddies were all kind, good kids, eager, sincere ("Now lend me five minutes of your time and listen to every word I'm going to say!")... such tender concern! Such a pathetic human hope that all will be communicated and received, and all made well by this mysterious union of minds." "As to sex, why not? One... asked me if I thought sexual passion was messy, I said, "No, it's the gateway to paradise." I started thinking (it's so dangerous when I think, I know) that a lot of this reminded me of Sinister, sounded pretty damn "B&S." People getting so excited over their mystic Scottish "angels", and CREATING things because of it -- having the DRIVE to -- writing things: stories about people on buses, stories about lives, look at the Sinister Midnight Library, look at the "Things We Made" pages, look at Tigermilking and such things -- communicating, filling up mailboxes but still, "give me 5 minutes and let me TELL you..." Sinisterines writing, talking, flying across the ocean to meet and talk more... sharing music they seem to have in common... tweeness perhaps as the new beatness... maybe I overstate it, I tend to do that... and I am trapped in the house by snow, so indulge me a bit or just hit delete :) Back in the early days of Sinister (and I am NOT saying "good old days" here, really)... there was a feeling of something "happening," of a community in but outside the "modern world," sort of that spontaneous affirmation, like YES this is GREAT!! (sic:) Now maybe we've gotten a bit like the "postwar" thing, maybe a bit of commercialism (box set jab)(when have jeepster ever steered us wrong, eh?) is creeping in... but that is not to say it HAS to be that way, a paler second-generation sort of style. People are STILL being completely captured by the music, the feelings it engenders... not just putting it on like this season's newest frock. I suppose what I'm saying is, things that happen NOW can indeed be as intense or exciting as other things we've seen in the past... we just have to look at what we have NOW and make it ours, put it on, not like a fashion, but like Life. Sometimes maybe it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Yeah, I know a lot of people here think Kerouac et al were shit... I'm not holding him or his times up as a paragon, just pointing out that in any given space in time there is maybe something to drive creation and excitement, it all HASN'T been done already. It would be a bit anachronistic to be a 50's Beat in 2000, and precious few opportunities to jump on boxcars and go across the country burning like an angelheaded hipster. Not that it's bad to want to, it would be great (sic) to. But you can look around, be captured and ... ummm... sit in your room like a cardie-wearing saddoe nibbling biscuits and cultivating joy, which you communicate in electrons or some other modern medium. Or save your pennies and fly to something like Bowlie, the modern version of setting off on a tramp steamer to see the smoky cafes of the jazz age. Just different forms of the same pilgrimage. Being in school rather than on the road, but doing something there, creating, being in a play... creating yourself according to how you ARE, according to what captures you. Different true, but the same as well... driven by that intensity, that feeling of "something happening" that you are indeed a part of if you give yourself the chance to see it. We might think, "Oh, I've just written some crap about some guy on a bus, or Stuart's silver trousers" but really, isn't it the same as Kerouac writing about some wild jazzman with a taped-up horn?" just 50 years later? Sinister has been that all along, and is, and can be. Ok, I've talked enough shit for one day. This wasn't meant as a criticism of anyone or anything... just the opposite really. I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT THE LIST ON THE LIST, HONESTLY!!! There's a lot of intensity to the lives here, the very act of "give me 5 minutes" when a mail is written is part of the whole thing whether you like that particular mail or not. Ok, not "every" one :) I just think maybe sometimes all of us have to take a look at what we actually ARE doing, and see that it might not be as barren as we think. --michele, ignorant once again +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the undead Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail "sinister@missprint.org". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@missprint.org". WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+