This is about beatnik girls. "Why not beatnik guys?" you ask. Well, Beat girls had their own take on Beat culture, and it was a bit different than what the guys were doing. Read on, you'll see.
The amazing thing is that something as esoteric as the beatnik ideal appealed to girls at all. Only a generation before girls were bobbysoxers (above) who liked to giggle and go nuts at Frank Sinatra concerts.
Then rock and roll came along and everybody young bailed into that. Rock had its own culture and beatniks were just a side line. While millions were doing the Twist and having fun, the handfull of Beats were living in poverty and listening to horribly depressing jazz. It seemed like a movement that was destined to fail. How odd then, that in the long run it turned out to be the Beats who changed the world...through the hippies, I mean.
I just looked at a lot of old pictures of beatniks and my favorites are the ones that portray them as jovial Maynard G. Krebs-types, who wear berets and play the bongos. I like that image. It's the way Shag (above) pictures them. That's the way they should have been.
Unfortunately, they were probably weren't like that. In pictures and memoirs they seem like a pretty serious lot: confrontational, smug, very ideological, and very intolerant. A lot of them were actually kind of mean.
In my last year of high school I briefly went out with a beatnik girl and she was hard as nails. It was the hippie era but she preferred to be a beat for some reason. She made it very clear that I was beneath her and she was only seeing me because she had nothing else to do. She had that distant, far away look like Peggy Cummins (above) in "Gun Crazy."
Mostly we just hung out and tried to look cool. What I remember about her is that she was bored all the time, and had terrible disdain for the ordinary people who passed in the street.
She liked to perch somewhere and chain smoke with a pained expression.
She didn't look like she was having much fun.
Beatnik women hardly ever looked like they were having fun. Guys on the other hand, at least looked like they were getting by. Haw! Maybe that's because they had something to look forward to. The beatnik code included free love and the guys were no doubt salivating at the very thought of it.
In the pictures beatnik girls frequently have a look that says, "Life is a drag, Man! Life is a DRAG!" That strikes me as tragic. Only a generation before girls looked effervescent and optimistic...the way young people are supposed to look...and now here are the Beats in the 50s looking neurotic and nihilistic. Yikes! Maybe they were just tired of wearing sunglasses indoors.
You have to wonder how that ennui came about. My guess is that they were copying the world weary look of Hollywood superstars like Dietrich (above) and Garbo.
The cold, icy look had been standard in women's magazines for years.
Maybe girls out on their own for the first time, living the life of rebels, wanted to live the dream...to be icy and aloof like the models they secretly admired in fashion magazines. Maybe beatnik girls were always sneaking peeks at Vogue. Maybe fashion magazines contributed as much to the Beat movement as somebody like Alan Ginsburg or Jack Kerouac.
Well it's possible, isn't it?
Before I sign off I have one more picture to post (above). It's a really neat picture of a beatnik walk. I don't think anyone ever really walked this way but they should have.
For more on the history of Beatniks see the archived 6/4/10 Theory Corner post,
"Who Came Before the Beatniks?"
http://uncleeddiestheorycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/who-came-before-beats.html
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