Word: mcdarrah
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...Fred W. McDarrah's collection of his photographs and prose pieces by various authors, Keronac & Friends: A Beat Generation Album, offers us a far more penetrating look into the 1950s Beat movement than the usual dose of Kerouac's On the Road of Ginsberg's "Howl" can afford...
...assembling this album, McDarrah has provided an inside glimpse of the Beat movement and all its facets: staging wild parties, ingesting drugs, trekking to Mexico, ignoring combining poetry readings with jazz and writing in a new unconventional style. McDarrah's book is enlightening because it provides a range of personal perspectives on a movement that critics have so long tried to pigeonhole, embalm, or simply ignore...
...late 1950s, McDarrah was a strange cross between Beat writer and camera buff who once started a successful "Rent a Beatnik" enterprise, charging 5-40 for a Beatnik to appear at cocktail parties. His photographs of his Greenwich village buddies and his selection of commentaries from the time make up an eclectic collage...
...Beats unashamedly took on the role of prophets, that horrified the rest of America. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the owner of San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore, was arrested in 1957 for distributing Allen Ginsberg's allegedly obscene book Howl, Serlinghetti's account of the trial is included in McDarrah's book, and it gives a good idea of how much alarm the Beats caused in some circles...
Sometimes it is hard to tell where the freight-train-hopping, the shouting until down, the whoople-making and hopping end and the holiness begins, Immersion and transcendence become the same thing. The senses of both are blended in McDarrah's photographs, whose refreshing candor suggests living for the moment, and whose hary quality lends, sadly, a touch of nostalgia...