Word: beatnik
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Dates: during 1958-1958
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Neither in San Francisco beatnik saloons nor Manhattan dives could this inspired narrative have been heard last week, but it echoed through Munich jazz cellars. U.S.-style rock 'n' roll, with its clog-shoe tempo and its far-out jargon, is sweeping Germany and leaving the language in Teutonic tatters.* Along with the new lingo, a new generation of singers (or shouters) have appeared, all of them alarmingly young. Where U.S. rock 'n' rollers are well along in years (19-25), Germany's top practitioners are in their early teens, and at least one solid...
...handy Beat Generation label, a device more literary than lifelike that has been applied to everything from Godot* to Bardot, was formally pinned on Brando. But the experts disagreed violently about whether the actor with the sweatshirt and the lyric lunkishness really could boast the credentials of a true beatnik. Certain habits are in his favor: he has been known to greet visitors in his underwear, date hash-house waitresses, play the bongo drums. In Beatnik Kerouac's phrase, he seems to want everything at the same time. On the other hand, he has been living in a pleasant...
...news of Godot's creator and another avant-garde beatnik, see BOOKS...
Author MacInnes (a Jumble himself) appears to know and like his Spades, manages to write of them without condescension-and without condescension's obverse, the kind of Negro-worship shown by U.S. Beatnik Jack Kerouac. The book's slight plot sags a little, but the gaiety and moroseness of wild, roiled lives are well told, and the reader gets a Spadeful of irony as the dark minstrel Lord Alexander sings...