Category Archive: The 60’s
Beatniks, unite!
Back when I was a little shaver, there emerged a cultural archetype: the beatnik. Pre-hippie, the beatnik was the American follow-up to the cabaret culture of Europe from a half-generation earlier, and was famously and ingloriously portrayed as Maynard G. Krebbs on the Dobie Gillis Show (a harmless, goateed, shaggy work-shirker); as beret-wearing, poetry-spewing, finger-snapping, bongo-playing preachers of “cool”; as philosophy-reading, coffee-swilling, deep thinkers who hung out in dim-lit cafes and acted dark and mysterious; as jazz-loving, commercialism-eschewing, denizens of the counterculture; and as comic stereotypes on sitcoms and even in cartoons.