Greenwich Village Bohemia: A Winter Wonderland Turns Into An American Renaissance(Part II).© Robert Edward Bell
Nov 1, 2004
Greenwich Village Bohemia: A
Winter Wonderland Truns Into An
American Renaissance (Part II).
As the snow rained downwards upon the meadows
of another New York skyline, there must have
been a feeling in the air in the winter of
that something new was about to happen, and little would the village suspect who was about
to come rolling into town with that early morning fog that seems to hang over the city so serenely
in early morning twilight. 1964 was one of those
years that will always stand out in memory for
New York City. It was the year where attitudes and the way that people view themselves in New
York was about to change. The world of the 1950's was fixing to transform into a new cultural explosion in the arts. The Beatles had
not yet hit the Ed Sullivan show, but they were about to, and the realities of Vietnam had not
hit the city streets in most small towns. The
blanket of snow that seems to cover New York at
this time of the year could have served as a kind
of a curtain foreshadowing the production of some
grand event. Life seems to take us to those
places sometimes. A person may not know what is
coming, but he or she can feel it in the air. Shakespeare stated once that, "All life is a
stage, and that we are merely but players...";
maybe he was thinking of Jack Kerouac on the morning when our then young beat writer, originator of a new genre of writing, and the
eventual King of the literary beat scene came
rolling into Greenwich on the wheels of some beat
up old chrysler, bouncing down that highway
known as freedom, looking for a life that had
long since left him. Of course, he did not know
that then, as he was keeping his first notes on
an autobiographical memoir, that would inherently
turn into a new novel a year later entitled,
"Desolation Angels." Part of the novel experimented with a technique that was popular
with some of the beat writers in those days. Kerouac became involved in an obcession of taping
the conversations of his friends, as they would
drive around the country. Part of this hobby
came from a desire to play with some of the new
technology that was currently becoming available
at the time in America. Tape recording devices
were relatively new, and Kerouac, Burroughs,
and Ginsberg began to have fun taping themselves
at the end of all night parties, or taking down
thoughts and rearranging those thoughts on tape.
Part of these tapes were due in part to self
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