Word: lipton
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...singers plunked guitars. Far-out paintings dripped from the walls. Ancient, rump-ruptured couches, rescued from the city dump, decorated the floor, and in the center of the room stood an old claw-legged bathtub that could accommodate a couple of good friends. On some evenings, Beatnik Author Lawrence Lipton, whose book, The Holy Barbarians, heralds "Venice West" as the new home of beatdom, read his cool poetry against a jazz background. It was like crazy...
Prophet ($16,000), a 7½ft. figure of Monel metal covered with nickel-silver by Dentist-turned-Sculptor Seymour Lipton, is both warning and challenge. "I was thinking of Isaiah," Lipton explains. "The work suggests a strident person, a gesture of stepping forward. But the work is also a challenge to the observer to become involved in a whole new language of form belonging to the present age." The U.S.'s new sculpture has indeed developed a provocative new vocabulary if not a language of form. But a vocabulary is not a work...
Needed: Deodorants. Lipton describes the ectoplasmic entrance of one of his pals: "The doorbell rang again, and it was Itchy Gelden, peering in, fidgeting and scratching his crotch. 'Like I don't want to bug you man, if you're busy . . . Are we gonna blow some poetry, maybe?' . . . He shambled in, mumbling his little high-pitched murmurs, half-words, more for sound than meaning. Itchy scratched because he had no skin; he was open to the world as a turtle without a shell, sensitive to all the world's hurt and all the world...
There is a strong scent of social science in Venice West, and Lipton relates that all beatniks possess paperback editions of Margaret Mead. Love among the far out is casual and kaleidosexual, but just as among the savages of Samoa, there is a code. Said one beard, explaining why he rejected a girl's advances: "At the time, I was going with my wife." Beatniks prefer not to work, and when forced to, try to find employment suitable to their talents -such as deodorant testing for cosmetics firms. Shoplifting is only a stopgap...
Wanted: Junior Flips. Not working has always been a reasonable dodge of bohemians, but Lipton has elevated the beatnik's indolence to the dedication of a mendicant order. "Only poverty is holy," he quotes approvingly. "Moneytheism" is the tail-finned dragon that the tattered saints are fighting. All such beatnik absurdities would not matter if their writings and paintings had some value. But most of the art that Lipton's shaggy sufferers turn out is not better, he admits, than the weekend seascape by the vice president of a spark-plug firm...