Photodump, odds and bits I’ve picked up with a particular feel to them. That’s all.

 

“Much of Beat culture represented a negative stance rather than a positive one. It was animated more by a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning, than by a specific purpose or program. San Francisco columnist Herb Caen coined the word (which by sarcastically punning on the recently launched Russian Sputnik was apparently intended to cast doubt on the beatnik’s red-white-and-blue-blooded all-Americanness). And the mass media popularized the concept. Dobie Gillis, Life magazine, Charles Kuralt, and a host of other entertainers and journalists reduced Beatness to a set of superficial, silly externals which have stayed with us ever since: goatees, sunglasses, poetry readings, coffeehouses, slouches and “cool, man, cool” jargon. The only problem is there never were any beatniks in this sense (except, perhaps, for the media-influenced imitators who came along late in the history of the movement). Beat culture was a state of mind, not a matter of how you dressed or talked or where you lived. In fact, Beat culture was far from monolithic. It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind.” – Carney, Ray. “Program Notes,” Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. 

“If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they
will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass
communication which continue to brainwash man.”- Allen Ginsberg