mad men

"Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls. As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and 'how-to-write', etc), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn't care and we got along fine- no pestering, no catering, we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends...And his criminality was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides). Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn't care one way or the other, 'so long's I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy', and 'so long's we can eat, son, y'ear me? I'm hungry, I'm starving, let's eat right now!' - and off we'd rush to eat, whereof, as saith Ecclesiastes, 'It is your portion under the sun.' A western kinsman of the sun, Dean...Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me. " - Jack Kerouac, On the Road

How many people have tasted this 'ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being'? We glorify this paean to bohemian hedonism or the beat generation, and yet few would stray from mainstream values to embrace something else. A spontaneity without conventions. I close my eyes and swing to the rhythm of Sal Paradise's underground America; the fast jazz, the heightened sensation amongst inebriated revelry, and cannot tell if my burning desire is for a life on the road or merely observing others at it. There's safety in watching the first snow through the glass.

Sometimes I would think I was born in the wrong generation. I saw Ai Weiwei's introspective at his Three Shadows Photography Centre a couple of months ago. It was titled New York Photographs 1983-1993, a deluge of prints chosen from over 10,000 that he took in that decade. "At that time, I didn't really have anything to do. I was just hanging out, whiling away my time everyday by taking pictures of the people I met, places I went, my neighborhood, the street and city." I liked him instantly. He was broke, he was aimless, he was revolutionary, he was a fucking genius. And no one saw it except the friends who rolled through his East Village apartment. People like Chen Kaige, an icon in his own right, just another face in the day, immortalized in frozen frame.

It's like the air was electric then. You could disappear to the big city, be faceless and nameless, sit in a studio apartment discussing Joyce and Eliot for hours, sleep at dawn and spend all your time chasing the intensity of an unforgettable exuberance. I found myself wishing I weren't bound by my circumstance of birth that restrains me from hitchhiking across America, picking up beatniks along the way. Even the words of Allen Ginsberg, friend to both Ai Weiwei and Kerouac, and inspiration behind Carlo Marx in On the Road, romanticizes the Beat generation to a certain degree.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high
sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz

It was not until I read parts of Kerouac's biography, that my fascination with the madness started wearing off, when I realized Kerouac's grand aspirations of one-upping Ulysses consistently produced work after work of drunken revelries at some next party, and the pubescent desire to destruct the safety of the known. Another member, George Corso, did a great job of summing up the glory and absurdity of the Beat generation. In his poem 'Marriage', he explores in his mind all the rebellions he would perform against a life of routine and suburbia, summing up all my fears as I sit here now, but playfully mocking the Beatniks for never growing up. I realize there are realities in which I live, but indulging in the poetics of Kerouac's life on the road may just be the next best thing.