http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/travel/where-the-beat-goes-on-20100204-nfob.html
February 7, 2010
Forty years after Jack Kerouac's death, Barry Divola tracks down the
landmarks of a generation.
I'm sitting in a bar, staring at a walrus penis. In case you're
wondering, it's 60 centimetres long and shaped a bit like a baseball
bat. The curious wall decoration is part of the cabinet of
curiosities that is Specs' Twelve Adler Museum Cafe, a bar in San
Francisco's North Beach. The owner, Richard "Specs" Simmons, was a
metal-worker, folk singer and political activist before opening the
place in 1968 and filling it with the strange artefacts he'd picked
up on his travels, including various stuffed animals, tribal masks
and a wheel of a ship which some claim was from one of the boats sunk
in Pearl Harbor.
Specs' has been a hang-out for everyone from strippers and sailors to
poets and bohemians over the past 42 years and it is my last port of
call on a long day of walking - and drinking - in the footsteps of
the Beat generation. As the novelist, Jack Kerouac, came to the end
of the road in October, 1969, dying at the age of 47, I'd decided to
commemorate the 40th anniversary of his passing by making my own
pilgrimage to San Francisco's Beat landmarks.
There seemed no better place to start than 29 Russell Street, a neat
little brick house with a gabled roof in the Russian Hill area of the
city. This was where Kerouac lived when he first coined the term "the
Beat generation" in 1948. His freewheeling 1957 book, On the Road,
would come to define that generation.
Then Herb Caen, the columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle who
documented so much of the city's life from the late-'30s until his
death in 1997, popularised the word "beatnik" as a cartoon-ish label
for the bongo-playing, work-avoiding hordes who jumped on the Beat bandwagon.
Russell Street is not far from Lombard Street, renowned as "the
crookedest street in the world", so after paying my respects to
Jack's place, I descended its zig-zag curves on foot and then kept
walking until it hit Columbus Avenue, in the heart of North Beach.
This was Beat-central in the 1950s.
I needed coffee and I knew where I needed to go to get it. Caffe
Trieste was opened in 1956 by Giovanni "Papa Gianni" Giotta, an
Italian immigrant who was an aspiring opera singer. He missed the
cafes of home and decided to introduce west coast Americans to
espresso. At first, fellow Italians flocked to the cafe on the corner
of Vallejo and Grant but it soon became a hang-out for the Beat
writers and jazz musicians who lived in the area. "Nothing has
changed here, neither the furniture nor the weather," wrote Russian
Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky in Cafe Trieste: San
Francisco. Sure enough, the mud-brown ceiling and ancient jukebox
full of Italian love songs remain and the Giotta family, who feature
in the many black-and-white photographs that line the walls, still
hold their traditional concerts here twice a month. At the long,
tiled table up the back, under a mural of fishing boats and Italian
women on the beach, is where Francis Ford Coppola wrote the
screenplay for The Godfather. Today, locals tap away on their
laptops, although one bearded thirtysomething guy is upholding
tradition by wearing a beret and feverishly sketching in his notebook.
Just around the corner is the Beat Museum, which sits on a block of
Broadway known for its strip clubs. It's run by Jerry Cimino, a
one-man cheerleader for the Beat generation in San Francisco. His
vast collection of books, articles, photos and ephemera from the era
is a nice mix of eccentric jumble and obsessive inclusion. The
black-and-white striped shirt worn by Neal Cassady - immortalised as
Dean Moriarty in On the Road - is on display, original flyers from
poetry readings line the walls, the histories of Beat writers such as
Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs
are told in words and pictures, and there's even a section dedicated
to memorabilia associated with the beatnik era, including a Kerouac
bobble-head doll. In the attached store, a huge range of Beat
literature is available, with On The Road and Ginsberg's Howl and
Other Poems being the biggest sellers.
Working behind the counter the day I visited was Stellar Cassidy, a
19-year-old poet. She had a pierced lip, a leather jacket over her
op-shop dress and a tattoo featuring a line of poetry from Lawrence
Ferlinghetti on her arm. Cassidy said she still drew inspiration from
the Beat era and took part in public spoken-word sessions every
Thursday night at the 16th Street/Mission train station in the
Mission district of the city.
"I read Ferlinghetti when I was 15 and immediately decided that I
wanted to move to North Beach," she said. "I met him in Caffe
Trieste. It was a like a dream come true. I still get to see him and
talk to him. He's 90 years old now. Have you been to City Lights yet?"
It happened to be next on my agenda. Ferlinghetti opened the City
Lights bookstore in 1953. A writer and poet himself, his A Coney
Island of the Mind remains one of the best-selling books of poetry
ever published. But Ferlinghetti is perhaps best known for being an
early supporter of the Beats, and for publishing Howl & Other Poems
in 1956, which resulted in his arrest on obscenity charges and his
subsequent acquittal after high-profile literary figures came to his defence.
Today his store still sits on Columbus Avenue near the corner of
Broadway and its three floors are always full of browsers combing
through the big selection of quality fiction and non-fiction, and
perhaps hoping to catch a bit of Beat atmosphere from the store's walls.
I was making my way through the new fiction section when I heard a
guitar being tuned upstairs. I wandered up there, to a part of the
store that is solely devoted to poetry and Beat literature, and a
reading was about to start. Kim Addonizio, a wiry, tattooed,
curly-haired poet from Oakland, was reading from her new book,
Lucifer at the Starlite, accompanied by a guitarist. The crowd winced
and then laughed as she recited a personal poem about a failed love
affair, each line beginning with the words "I love you because ..."
Afterwards she signed books and talked animatedly to audience members
about writing. The Beat tradition appeared to be alive and well at City Lights.
Realising I hadn't eaten lunch even though it was already late
afternoon, I trekked up to Molinari, a classic Italian deli that's
been on the corner of Columbus and Vallejo for more than a century.
And then I took my meatball sandwich a couple of blocks north to
Washington Square. Cimino had told me that this was where a lot of
the Beat writers used to hang out to shoot the breeze, scribble some
poems, or just sleep off a hangover. You can also see it featured
prominently in the 1971 film, Dirty Harry. No Clint Eastwood firing a
Magnum today - on the grassy square surrounded by boutiques, hotels
and restaurants, there were mothers with prams, a guy in a Doors
T-shirt playing an acoustic guitar, and a labrador repeatedly running
after a yellow frisbee thrown by his owner. The sun got low enough in
the sky for me to think that a visit to Vesuvio was in order.
Vesuvio is a bar that is next door to City Lights, separated by a
laneway named Jack Kerouac Alley. Plaques along the alley quote
famous poets and writers - near the Columbus Avenue end is this one
from On the Road: "The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise
of every cobbled alley so great I thought I was in a dream." Amen to
that, I thought, as I walked through Vesuvio's front door. This was
where Cassady stopped on the way to the now historic Six Gallery
poetry reading on October 17, 1955, where Ginsberg would recite Howl
for the first time. It's also where Kerouac ducked in for a drink on
the way to visit novelist Henry Miller down the California coast in
Big Sur. Vesuvio proved too inviting and Jack never hit the road.
Charles Bukowski, Dylan Thomas, Bob Kaufman and many other writers,
poets and artists have downed a few at the joint that is open
6am-2am, every day of the year.
When the beatnik craze hit in the '50s, owner Henri Lenoir reportedly
hired a couple dressed in berets and striped shirts to sit in the
window seats in order to attract tourists. Its stained glass windows,
walls lined with newspaper stories and photos from the '50s and '60s
make it a must for the thirsty Beat historian - happy hour is
actually four hours at Vesuvio, from 3pm.
Indeed, time passes quickly there and with sore feet and one more
place on my list, I finished my beer, crossed the road and walked
into Specs' for a nightcap. And that's how I came to be staring at
that thing on the wall, that my drinking companion, a '60s North
Beach survivor named Jim, informed me was a walrus penis. He asked me
what I was doing in San Francisco and I told him about my all-day
quest to search for Beat landmarks of yesteryear.
"Sounds like a very worthy pastime but let me tell you something," he
said. "Beat is not about a time or a place. It's about a state of
mind. Kerouac said something about Beat coming from the word
beatific. It's a spiritual thing and it's an attitude. You can still
be Beat today."
He raised his glass, and I raised mine, and we drank to that.
--
The writer travelled courtesy of V Australia and the California
Travel & Tourism Commission.
--
TRIP NOTES
GETTING THERE
V Australia flies to Los Angeles daily from Sydney, with connecting
flights to San Francisco with Virgin America. See vaustralia.com.au.
WHERE TO EAT
Caffe Trieste, 601 Vallejo Street, San Francisco, phone +1 415 392
6739, see caffetrieste.com.
Molinari, 373 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, phone +1 415 421 2337,
see molinarisalame.com.
WHERE TO DRINK
Vesuvio, 255 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, phone +1 415 362 3370,
see vesuvio.com.
Specs' Twelve Adler Museum Cafe, 12 Saroyan Place (formerly known as
Adler Street), San Francisco, phone +1 415 421 4112.
TOURING THERE
The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco, phone +1 415 399 9626.
See thebeatmuseum.org.
City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, 261 Columbus Avenue, San
Francisco, phone + 415 362 8193. See citylights.com.
.
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