High Flying, Space Traveling Futuristic Hipsters

Perhaps we all lose our true companions," Sam Kashner ponders towards 
the end of When I Was Cool, his sometimes-sad, sometimes-funny, 
sometimes-too-cute-for-its-own-good, but still emotionally-honest, 
almost everything-(except one thing)-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-
the-Beats memoir.

Back in 1976, right after he graduated from Merrick L.I. High School,
Kashner talked his parents into allowing him to enroll as a poetry 
student at the Naropa Institute's brand new Jack Kerouac School of 
Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, instead of going to a 
"normal" college like everyone else he knew. To his surprise, but with 
a major boost to his under-esteemed yet gargantuan teenage poet's ego, 
he turned out to be not only the first poetry student at the new 
Beatnik division of the then not-yet-accredited only Buddhist 
University in America, but the only student, period. Thus, by 
extension, he became the real life sorcerer's apprentice and 
Buddhish-primie to almost every beatnik of note–Ginsberg, Corso, 
Burroughs, Waldman–outside the poor disembodied Kerouac and legendary
Neal Cassady, though he wasn't lucky enough to escape Dean Ginzy's 
romantic obsession with Cassady's long gone schlong, since the first 
assignment he was given upon arriving was to finish Allen's poem for 
him about blowing Neal.

Though the author's voice is too loosely compared in the book's
blurbs to "the youthful intensity of Holden Caulfield", forgetting perhaps 
that that "youthful intensity" was responsible for assassinating John 
Lennon, Kashner doesn't assassinate the Beats, though alternately his 
love and fear of them does provide plenty of dish and dis alike.

While all Dean Ginz seemingly wanted to do (other than nourish his, 
the school's and the Beats' fame) was get Kashner (and any other pretty
boy student) in bed with him, Gregory Corso took it upon himself to 
become Kashner's real teacher, by continually scaring the shit out of 
all the middle class bourgeois fears lodged in his programming.

Corso couldn't get over how respectable the Beats had become, 
particularly Ginsberg's success; the acceptance of Allen's work by the 
academy was a source of wonder and irritation to him. When Kashner 
asked why he couldn't just sit down and think of writing poems as his 
job, the way Allen did, Corso told him, "because Allen writes a lot of 
bad poems. . .When I am good — I am great. Allen writes because he's 
afraid to die. I don't write because I want to live."

Kashner thought that only Corso, of all the Beats, didn't care about 
wanting to be a rock star." While Ginsberg and Ann Waldman were gaga 
about Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Jim Carroll, Corso loved opera. 
Burroughs, as usual, had his own take. "The goddamn Rolling Stones," he
snarled one afternoon at a faculty garden party. "Mick Jagger pretends 
to be sinister. . .You could bring most of (the Stones) home to 
mother." When asked if that included Keith Richards, Uncle Bill 
explained, "Keith Richards made one mistake about heroin. It doesn't 
make you immortal, it makes you improbable." Kashner noted that this 
was "the first time I ever heard Burroughs say something about heroin 
that didn't sound like a travel brochure to some exotic island." But 
even Burroughs was said to be impressed that Donald Fagan had named his
band Steely Dan after the dildo in Naked Lunch.

While Kashner saw Ginsberg, in spite of his adoption of Buddhism and 
all his European influences, as purely "an American poet, a JAP: a 
Jewish American Poet," and even lovingly referred to him as "a whiner 
who howled," it was the Trustifarrian Burroughs, despite publicly 
coming across like a mutant W.C. Fields obsessed by cowboys, aliens, 
gangsters and the CIA, who culturally and heritage-wise was the most 
All-American of all the Beats (including the working and lower class 
Jack and Neal). His heroin use, unlike Corso's proclivity for 
self-demolition, comes across more like an eccentric old Aunt's 
fascination with macramé than drug abuse. Only when dealing, or being 
unable to deal with his son Bill Junior's addictions and problems, is 
the failure of his genius blatantly illuminated, for as much as Senior 
wanted to have a father-son relationship with the chronically depressed
toxed-out Junior, he was incapable of emotionally generating the one 
thing his son needed most in order for his sweet-funny-brilliant soul 
to fund a will to live. For instance, instead, of simply taking him to 
a doctor when the junior was obviously physically sick, senior blindly 
took him to a psychic healer in Denver whom he'd heard about through 
underground channels. This almost did young Billy in before his (very 
short) time was up. Like some cosmic general unable to see the map in 
front of him was not the territory, Burroughs fed the reigning paranoia
both he and his son shared about the topography of the world. And while
that point of view may not have been very good for either one of them, 
there's no denying the genius of Uncle Bill's antenna; he was 
absolutely certain there was a mole at Naropa spying on the Beats, and 
even enlisted young Kashner to go undercover and report anything 
suspicious back to him. At one point he even theorized the culprit 
might be Ginz himself who was unconsciously doing them in with his 
gluttonous hunger for unfettered publicity. But indeed there was a real
scandal and cover-up brewing at Naropa, almost as far-fetching and 
close-to-the-bone at the same time as a prophecy script written by 
Burroughs' alter ego Dr. W.S. Benway.

Allen's teacher, the partially paralyzed Tibetan lama playboy founder
of Naropa, Trungpa Rinpoche, was a man who liked the juice and action 
from the opposite sex as perks to go along with his meditative 
teachings and love of poetry. He was constantly on top of Dean Ginz, 
for instance, to reign in his monster ego, and at one point even 
coerced him into shaving off his (security blanket) beard. One night, 
at his lodge high in the mountains above Boulder, the juiced lama 
pressured the respected (non-beat) poet W.S. Merwin and his girlfriend 
into stripping naked against their wills in front of a group of faculty
and friends. Poet Tom Clarke got wind of the humiliating circumstances 
and reported the scandal in The Boulder Monthly, a local alternative 
rag he was the Editor of at the time (and later in his book The Great 
Naropa Poetry Wars). From that point on there was a great fear moving 
throughout Naropa that if what supposedly happened to Merwin proved 
true it could prevent the college from becoming accredited. Since it 
obviously did happen, the only defense was for the college itself to 
investigate it. This strategy brought co-founding Fug Ed Sanders 
(riding the fumes of his Charlie Manson Best Seller The Family) out to 
Naropa to teach a course in Investigative Poetics that would serve as 
not only an internal investigation of the scandal, and a book of the 
same name published along with the class' findings (The Party / A 
Chronological Perspective On A Confrontation At A Buddhist Seminary), 
that became a primer for the investigative form Sanders would continue 
to develop (with his America in-verse series) into the next century. 
Though Kashner was in the class, Sanders, like Waldman, scared him, so 
while this investigation could be considered the book's "inciting 
incident," as the screenwriting gu-gus would label it, it becomes very 
secondary background to Kashner's personal relationships with Ginsberg,
Corso and Burroughs.

Being their only student, all three utilized him, as well as his 
father Seymour's Diner's Club card, at will, for almost anything that 
came into their minds. He was even accorded the rare honor of being 
invited to sit-in on a Ginsberg-Burroughs weekly dream lunch (where the
twosome exchanged and interpreted their dreams for each other). In the 
one dream Kashner remembered from that day, Allen filled a steamer 
trunk with all Jack's books, then carted them down to the harbor and 
threw them in. When he got back home, Kerouac was waiting for him, and 
asked, "Why did you do that? I thought you loved me. That was my life's
work." Ginz told him, "But now that you're dead you don't need to make 
any dust. Books just gather dust." "A Freudian to the last," Burroughs 
said to Ginsberg as he analyzed his dream, "Maybe you just needed to 
get Jack's work out of the way to make room on the shelf for you."

Starting in 1957 with the high voltage literary trial validation of 
Howl as a major work of art, the spotlight fell almost immediately on 
the publication of On the Road.  But Kerouac was never able to handle 
fame anywhere near the way Ginsberg utilized it, and gradually sunk 
deeper and deeper into himself. By the time Grove's publication and 
victorious legal battle in support of Naked Lunch officially added 
Burroughs to the public's hipster Trifecta, Kerouac was in an active 
retreat that, by the end of his alcohol addled life, had him 
repudiating almost everything in the Beat mythology that Ginsberg had 
created around him.

Ironically, the strongest pull the Beats had on Kashner (and almost 
everyone else who was influenced by them) was not the individual work 
of the three super novas, but the mythos of their so-called group 
ethos. By the time Kashner decided "I wanted to burn like a roman 
candle," some of the Beats had known each other for almost 30 years, 
even if they weren't exactly on the best of terms. Corso, for instance,
was always broke, but even while he used it to his full advantage, he 
resented being financially dependent on Ginzy and the Beat brand to 
cover his nut in the crunch. While Kashner's memoir doesn't ignore the 
in-bred jealousies that festered among them, like most wannabeats, who 
in reality wanted, as he says, the "Naked Brunch" version of the life 
as opposed to the real thing, he, without saying it, remained 
steadfastly attached to the idea that the rootless bohemian aesthetics 
of a small group of powerless young poets & writers bonding together 
could challenge the existing LCD dogma of the ruling mainstream 
Moloch's toxic mediocrity, and actually change the world into a cooler,
if not a better place. It was the romantic belief in that false 
impression of togetherness that had a resounding pull on not just 
Kashner, but on the most creative young people of their generations, 
throughout the 60s-70s-80s and 90s, right up to the present time, in 
spite of the fact that the only real alternative to the Beat proclaimed
"Queer-Junkie" alternative to the mainstream buy-sell shuck & jive has 
been the clichéd, but much cooler image created by the Hollywood-Mad 
Avenue version. Call it "the Brando-Dean bad boy in ripped Levis on a 
Harley syndrome," which is not about rocking the smug boat of 
conformism, but about selling brands with a recognizable faux antihero 
style in order to eradicate any genuine substantive resistance which 
might challenge the status quo.

As Kerouac used to say, "nobody believes there's nothing to believe 
in," so obviously everybody believes in and ignobles whatever gets them
off to the point of testimonial, as evidenced when Johnny Depp 
reputedly paid $50,000 for Kerouac's raincoat.  Ginsberg, the original
anti-establishment hipster in the gray flannel beret, obviously 
couldn't stand being left out of the commercial loop after Max Blagg 
(http://poetry.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa030700a.htm) broke the 
hipster barrier in the early 90s, reading his poetry in a televised Gap
commercial, and had to do a series of print testimonials for khakis, of
all prepster threads, proffering the question to many of his admirers, 
Which came first, The Ginz or Maynard G. Krebs? Not that Ginz was alone
in selling out his image; even Uncle Bill became an IBM huckster, 
though when he did it, it looked like–just from the fact of them 
acknowledging him–they were selling out their corporate image, instead 
of the other way around.

For awhile it seemed like Bukowski would do beer commercials next. It
was a fair assumption to make, though Buk couldn't stand the Beats, and
usually became outraged when he was lumped in with them in collections.
 
Though he certainly ran with more than his share of dogs, Bukowski 
didn't need a pack to build his legend. Though it's conjecture at this 
point, in the long run his writing may have more influence world wide 
than the whole Beat cannon, and certainly, if like Jack, you subtract 
your  gosh-gee-in-America-when-the-sun-goes-down innocence from that 
Beat equation.

Outside of The First Third, there's little of Neal Cassady's writing 
available, though he was probably the most influential of all the 
Beats, because just like scissors cuts paper, rock breaks scissors and 
paper covers rock, action trumps intellect in almost every 
manifestation moving through time. Though Neal might have been the most
profound thinker of all the Beats, he was recognized more as the model 
for, among others, On the Road's Dean Moriarity, and in real life as 
the bridge between the beats and the hippies because he drove the bus 
for Kesey's Merry Pranksters. Though in fact, it was the writing style 
in Cassady's letters that Kerouac copped to get his own voice out from 
under the stagnant cloud of Thomas Wolfe's influence and find the 
zeitgeist of the times he lived in before they actually exploded into 
the counterculture he died denouncing. Without much doubt, it's 
Cassady, not Kerouac, Ginz, Gregory or Uncle Bill, who'll live on 
between fiction and faction in the Paul Bunyon, Babe Ruth, Pecos Bill, 
Jack London pantheon of gods, because when all is said and done, his 
foot-to-the-pedal, baddest-cat-of-'em-all legend, permanently stamps 
him as the one-and-only Godfather of "the Brando-Dean bad boy in ripped
Levis on a Harley syndrome", whether he actually used the brands 
himself.

Though even the original Memory Babe probably would've agreed 
Kashner's reconstructed memories of Naropa seem impeccable, outside of 
sentimentality for his own spent youth, Kashner never seems to grok the
overall impact the work of the Beats had on him anymore than he got the
difference between Spaceman Bill Lee and comix guru Stan Lee (the only 
factual mistake I spotted in the book). While the writing of the 
individuals lumped under the Beat umbrella barely had anything in 
common with each other, other than, like Jack's writing, they used each
other as characters, Kashner was so caught up in the individuals, he 
never really explores the influence of the group aesthetic (Not too 
long ago, a copy of Dharma Bums autographed by all the characters with 
both their fictional and real names, was sold on the collectors' market
for $10,000).

Once Kashner left Beatnik U., outside of a few visits over the years 
with Ginz, he barely looked back, and not only couldn't, but ultimately
didn't want to live up (or down) to these dirty old hipsters' 
standards. By the end of the memoir he tells us he's even given up his 
dream of becoming a poet, in order to make a real living writing. 
Perhaps the correct meditation here is, We all rail against what we 
want but don't think we can get, until everyone realizes our koan has 
been crying wolf all along. But since Kashner marries a poet, he never 
really turns his back on his first love. Or on his heroes either, for 
that matter. At least not emotionally, as he takes us through how he 
feels about each of them as one after another finally passes from the 
scene.

Which brings us back to the one thing we always wanted to know about 
the Beats that is patently missing from When I Was Cool; the reason no 
other alternative to mainstream culture other than the Beats ever 
captured and held the public imagination long enough to become two 
different sides to the same universal cliché; one side, half full, the
other, half empty. . . Burroughs naturally found both sides of the 
conceit distasteful. As Kashner observed, Bill "thought it bad manners 
to complain about society. Stoicism was a vestige of his patrician 
upbringing." His philosophy, very simply, was, "You don't fight City 
Hall, you just approach it on all fours, lift your leg, and pee on it. 
And when it doubt, book passage on a transatlantic ocean liner."

As for those alternatives that came closest to emulating the staying 
power of the Beats, neither of the most recent attempts lasted much 
longer than a decade in the spotlight, even in the minds of those who 
got caught up in the put-on and started taking the very thing they were
making fun of, seriously. Like (and unlike) the Beats (but even more 
like the so-called black humorists), both groups came out of a 
putting-on-the-squares essence. The first, The Church of the Subgenius,
was an early '80s phenomenon that was right down Neal Cassady's 
reincarnation alley, and incorporated a conceit that was true comic 
genius, tapping into and twisting the so-called New Age hidden 
knowledge of the Adepts, whose secret order, no matter what name it was
known by - The Illuminati, The Great White Brotherhood - supposedly 
rules the world on a much higher (etheric) level than the aristocratic 
low level Shill & Bones money grubbers of the material world. Snatched 
right out of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus  trilogy
and Wilson's follow-up non-fiction Cosmic Trigger, presumably by the 
Dealy Lama, in the opium dens and romper rooms of Dallas, their leader 
was a fictional pipe smoking Father Knows Best super salesman, comic 
book caricature named J.R. Bob Dobbs. Bob eventually became so all 
powerful, the inner hierarchy of The Church decided he had to be rubbed
out, and staged a live faux assassination, eerily reminiscent in 
performance art impact of that terrible 63-68 trifecta that all of us 
who lived through it still carry around as appendages to our souls. 
Splinter groups all over the country broke away from the Church after 
that, accusing the founding father Reverend Ivan Stang, of doing away 
with their beloved (nonexistent) leader. I haven't followed the 
Subgenies since the early 90s, but obviously the hoax took on a life 
form of its own, since the Church and their magazine The Stark Fist of 
Removal are still active today (http://www.subgenius.com). The second 
group, The Unbearables,  was much more connected to the literary world 
in general and the Beats in particular. Originally dubbed The 
Unbearables (http://www.thinicepress.com/mikegolden1.html) in a 
satirical story read in front of the then un-group at a reading in the 
East Village at The Life Café, the moniker was quickly adopted, and in
just over a decade, this un-group grew from the original four 
malcontents hanging out together in the old midtown radical bar Tin Pan
Alley, to over a hundred different writers and artists, who barely knew
each other, much less knew each other's work, but were all drawn 
together by the idea of being part of something bigger than themselves.
 
Unfortunately, the creation of a fictional founder (Rollo Whitehead) as
the original Beat was such a blatant ripoff of the Subgenies it became 
the first straw that busted the hump of the core un, even before it 
fully became a fully realized ungroup. In an almost self-conscious 
desire to create the kind of group history the Beats had built for 
themselves over half a century, without ever experiencing any of it as 
a group themselves, they staged a series of (more successful than 
anyone had the right to expect) publicity generating media events that 
went right for the comic jugular. The most notable two of those were 
strokes of pure comic genius on par with anything the Subgenies had 
pulled off; first picketing and storming the respectable gates of the 
New Yorker over the magazine's lifelong crime of publishing mediocre 
poetry, and continuing to do so until the august weekly agreed to 
accept and publish poems from Sparrow, the most righteously un of all 
the Unbearables. The second went right after the source of their own 
creation, as they picketed a week-long Beat celebration being held 
downtown at NYU to honor the Beats, that culminated with readings at 
Town Hall. Outside the Hall, a couple hundred protesters (including 
Jack's estranged daughter, the late Jan Kerouac) were chanting and 
marching, brandishing placards and signs that read "NO NOBLE PRIZE FOR 
GINSBERG!" "STOP KEROUACGATE NOW!" and "GINSBERG IS THE REAL MAYNARD G.
KREBS!" A story in the New York Times the next day reported the 
protest, and showed a picture of the master hypester who materialized 
the transcendental Beat illusion to the world, stretched out on a couch
in the dressing room of Town Hall, with his hands on his forehead, 
moaning (into the indelible comic book bubble above his head), "Who the
hell is Maynard G. Krebs?"

If you said, "A code name for a watered down version of cool," you're 
ready to go on Jeopardy. A game show reality which one day may pose the
answer to the question that poached in young Kashner's mind the day he 
was invited to observe the Ginz-Burroughs dream lunch, when he looked 
at the two hipster icons and wondered, If they thought they had won a 
victory against the squares? Or was this a war they had lost, that the 
squares had in fact won?

In all likelihood, the legend of the Beats will live long after the 
majority of the old world of 20th century culture has evaporated from 
memory into the ether. Until some other group of high flying, space 
traveling, futuristic hipsters decides to imprint the legend of their 
brand into the record of their times. But perhaps Burroughs summed it 
up best, when he wrote, "Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold 
a million Levis. . .(but) Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only 
real thing about a writer is what he's written, and not his life. We 
will all die and the stars will go out one after another. . ." 
Rightfully bringing the material world back to the transcendental, 
where the stars never really die, just go to sleep until it's time for 
them to come out and play again.