Celebrating Jack Kerouac

Last night I attended a 90th birthday celebration for Jack Kerouac, hosted by and held at the Beat Museum in San Francisco. Walking up funky old Broadway in the early evening was frankly surreal: closed restaurants like A3(including the former Enrico's, now the former something else), the same shabby pocket parking lots, and a newcomer: Penthouse Lounge & Steakhouse (yikes) - new but still in the old style of the A-Go-Go's and girlie shows. Whatever. Anyway, back to Jack. Upstairs at the Beat Museum is a room with special exhibits of first-edition Beat books, lots of photographs and posters. Last night, folding chairs were set up so the crowd could listen to the poetry on offer. One of the most interesting performances was by American Storyteller Chris Chandler; I felt he was truly channeling the spirit of the Beats, and I managed to get most of his performance on camera. Other poets I heard included Phil Cousineau, Richard Rodriguez, and Alan Kaufman.

On The Road with Jack Kerouac - and "Bop" Music

I can't believe I haven't read this book already! Way back in the early 1960's, I was reading Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, even William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, anyone? which brings to mind the great Simpsons take on that, when Nelson, the school bully, and his buddies are seen walking out of the movie theatre where the marquee reads "Naked Lunch" and he says, "I can think of two things that are wrong with that title!"). Anyway, so I never read "On The Road", and I'm reading it now. And liking it quite a bit, too. 

The story starts in 1947, quite a bit earlier than I had imagined it would, so that's interesting right off the bat. When Jack (or "Sal Paradise" as he is called in the edited version, more on that later) gets to Chicago, he says, "At this time, 1947, bop was going like mad all over America. The fellows at the Loop blew, but with a tired air, because bop was somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis. And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of all my friends..." It makes me want to learn more about how jazz started out being called "bop" (related to be-bop?) and when it started being known as jazz.

Kerouac's style is ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, plain talk stitched together with beauty and grace, like when he says that Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) "stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every word...." In the "pre-edited" edition, or the "scroll" edition, which a friend of mine bought when I got my own book, all the names are the real people Jack wrote about: Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Cassady - the whole Beat generation from New York to San Francisco (and yes, he calls it 'Frisco' - oh well). The word "beat" by the way, comes up a lot, but seems to mean different things. I've decided to track all the uses of the word "beat" in the book, and see how and if it changes - it may not, it's just an idea I want to follow.

I wish I were about to go across country on a long road trip, but for now I'll read Jack's story.