Arlo, John and y'all: This is one more reason I feel so lucky to live in Denver. Neal Cassady grew up here, although, sadly, he grew up on skid row with an alcoholic father. The city offers a tour of all the beat hangouts that still exist. One of those places is a sleazy little piano bar called Charlie Browne's. My friends and I used to get drunk and sing Frank Sinatra tunes there on a regular basis, although my friends were much better singers and could drink far more than I ever could. Allen Ginsberg helped to found the Naropa Institute, now called Naropa University, where they teach Buddhism and poetics, just up the road in Boulder. He used to hang around there a lot and about 20 years ago, shortly after I moved here, some of us went up to see him do a reading. It was like a rock concert. Jam packed, standing room only. More thrilling than any roller coaster I've ever been on. I'll never forget it.
Tonight I'll be going to one of the local museums because they have an exhibition of the Beats in Denver, the program for which was written by my friend who knew some of them and is himself a poet and storyteller. He used to pal around with Billy Bouroughs, the famous poet's son. I mean, this place has a rock solid bohemian culture that goes way back and it's far from dead now. You don't see black berets or bongo drums or any cliched media depictions like that. It has a different shape now, thanks to the gods of moving on, but it lives all the same. Thrives, even. Leaving aside my friends, who are all more or less chosen as friends, and just counting the parents of my 9 year old son's friends, the people who live in my neighborhood are artsy even in their day jobs. There is a painter and a theater director, a potter and a house builder who employs artists as his crew, a writer of plays, a media critic and political activist, an architect and a nurse, a pastry chef and a glassblower, an actor and an historian. And these are the people I didn't even try to meet. These are just people who also happen to have children the same age as our boy. The potter, who shows her work in galleries all over town, recently graduated from the interdisciplinary Humanities program I'm presently doing. As you can imagine, she and I have lots to talk about. If the banalities of suburban life are getting you down, or if you find yourself surrounded by rednecks, you might want to bust a move in this direction. This place also has more sunshine than Miami. It's the kind of place where a guy can love the "dark" arts and still get a tan. Tom Wolfe is a bit of a Victorian, though. I'm gonna disagree about lumping him in with the poets and pranksters. dmb > [Arlo said] > Yes, for sure. And this is where I think going back to Wolfe, Kesey, > Kerouac, Lennon, Thompson, and others who rode this early wave is very > valuable. > > John said: > Very Much Agree. Especially Kerouac - Kerouac the all american boy. > Kerouac the normal. > > The entire movement demonstrates the process of a genuine values evolution. > The Beats were extremely intellectual. They'd drink wine and smoke pot and > discuss Proust for days on end. They analyzed the thoughts of western > civilization and offered valuable insights. The hippy thing was a following > development - which is what happens when your intellectual ideas are deemed > socially useful by enough people that ideas become a movement of force. > > So that shift from an intellectual revolution to a social one is ripe for > consideration from this forum. I find the whole intellectual/social > discussion very complicated sometimes. Interesting, but complicated. As if > the metaphysically analytical knife has made a jagged cut on that particular > divide. > > > > > > > [DMB said] > > In the next moral revolution, if it is to be successful, there will be > > spirituality where there once was hedonism because the confusion between > > Dynamic Quality and biological static quality will be gone. > > > > > John said: > > One can but try. > _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ SkyDrive™: Get 25 GB of free online storage. http://windowslive.com/online/skydrive?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_SD_25GB_062009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
