NanoBeat: What Would Kerouac Think?
Posted on June 19, 2007
When I was much younger than now, my image of a beatnik was the bongo-playing Maynard G. Krebs, a 1950s TV sitcom character who went apoplectic at the mere utterance of the word “work.†To my parents, beatniks were lazy, laughable bums who didn’t understand that life was all about battling crabgrass and the acquisition of a new Nash Rambler.
My writing heroes came after the beats: Wolfe, Capote, even the drug-addled Hunter Thompson…in fact almost anyone who wrote for Rolling Stone in the 70s including travel writer Jan Morris. Kerouac and Thompson tried to grow synapses between their brains and the page. For Kerouac it was marathon streams of consciousness on rolls of teletype paper. For “The Duke†it was buying the newest, fastest electric typewriter so he could barrel into his prose as he did across the Nevada desert with his stoned Samoan attorney. I was a news drone in the 70s, pounding out stories on deadline about fires, politics and garbage strikes in “inverted pyramid†style, a god awful journalistic convention which jammed the important stuff in the beginning so an editor could chop off the fun stuff like a butcher trims a string of baloney. I was nicknamed “thunder thumbs†because I typed so hard it angered my desk mates. It was not a place for someone with “On The Road†aspirations, but at least I remained sober.
I didn’t think about this much until a friend and one of my wife Pat’s clients came to town. Richard Brown is the senior marketing executive at VIA Technologies Inc., the Taiwan-based computer chip company. He was introducing something quite revolutionary, an inexpensive computer about the size of a woman’s clutch purse that is Kerouac’s stream of teletype paper and Thompson’s typewriter on speed all in one, with the addition of computery things like connectivity for research, email and video and photo capabilities. Many newspaper reporters, by the way, now carry camcorders and are responsible for videos and podcasts as well as print media stories.
So, we wandered down to San Francisco’s North Beach, the crucible of the beat generation, where Richard went on a shopping spree for all things “beat.†I have lived in or near San Francisco a good part of my life, but I had never explored it from the beat perspective. I should play tourist in my own town more often. We paid a visit to the Beat Museum, wandered Kerouac Alley, browsed the stacks at City Lights and settled down Vesuvio, where Richard showed us this new device. I had a bit of fun putting together this video which you can find here or on YouTube.
NanoBeat [3:03m]: » Filed Under Video, California, Culture, Misc., Tech & Science
