Sinister: So I said to Dean Moriatry "Lets hit the road"

[Michele Waggner]

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



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