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Monday January 16, 12:31 AMBeat movement honored at new San Francisco museumSAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The Beat Museum, a tribute to the literary generation that helped inspire the 1960s counterculture, has opened in the San Francisco neighborhood where the movement took off 50 years ago.At just 1,000 square feet, the museum brings together aging manuscripts, letters, artwork, posters and first editions in the North Beach neighborhood where writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg lived, socialized and gave poetry readings. A rare second edition of Ginsberg's poem "Howl," which ignited the Beat movement when the author gave a public reading of it at the Six Gallery in the city's Cow Hollow district in 1955, is on display in a glass case. "This is Beat central," said museum founder Jerry Cimino, a former IBM computer salesman who promotes the Beat mystique on his Web site, www.kerouac.com, and spent a year traveling the United States in his "Beatmobile," a 1987 Airstream trailer filled with Beat memorabilia. "North Beach is where it belongs." The museum was formerly housed in Monterey, California. It opened on Friday with a tribute to Carolyn Cassady, the 82-year-old widow of Neal Cassady, whose travels with Kerouac inspired "On the Road," Kerouac's classic Beat novel published in 1957. Kerouac died in 1969. 'NOTHING WAS EVER BORN. NOTHING WILL EVER DIE' Visitors crowded into the Grant Avenue museum on Saturday, discovering, or rediscovering, the groundbreaking free-form style that challenged literary conventions, helped spur the 1960s counterculture movement and influenced artists, musicians and such groups as the hippies. "This was a generation that cared about something," said Jessica Variz, 24, who traveled 400 miles from Los Angeles to see the museum. "They were my age, traveling across the country, writing on napkins. Nobody does that anymore." John Donovan and his wife, Mary Jo, stumbled across the museum after lunching at a nearby restaurant. "Kerouac and the others really changed my life, my direction," said John Donovan, 62, of San Mateo, California, as his wife headed for the cash register to buy a copy of Kerouac's "The Scripture of the Golden Eternity." "He's talking to me here," Mary Jo Donovan, 59, said of a passage in the text that reads: "Nothing was ever born. Nothing will ever die." Cimino, 51, said he caught the Beat bug in 1968 as an eighth-grader at a suburban Baltimore Roman Catholic school when an English teacher gave a reading of an untitled Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem that used a loose, conversational and irreverent tone to tell the story of Jesus Christ. "For somebody to talk about Christ in that fashion, it just knocked me out, it just blew me away," Cimino said. The museum's opening weekend also featured a display of a 36-foot (11-meter) portion of Kerouac's 120-foot (37-meter)- long scrolled manuscript for "On the Road" at the San Francisco Public Library. |
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