Beat Culture of the 60s

[Melooon]

Not really sure if we have a category this suits; but I found this clip today.. it's a bit of a weird one because it's actually made for the Salvation Army, but it shows a very real view of teen beat culture which is fascinating!

Also for those of you who don't know; Beat culture is/was one of the counter-culture movements that emerged in the 50s-60s - it was mainly centred in New York downtown coffee houses (they were sketchy places back then) and gets its name from Beat poetry; it was also the root of the modern folk revival (also if you're wearing denim jeans, you can thank beat culture fashion for popularising that!)

If you feel like watching a not-so-great but interesting movie -  The Greenwich Village Story captures a lot of it and is free on YouTube!

There's also the more recent Choen Brothers movie - Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) which is a semi-fictionalised story about a singer in this era.

Beyond that; I dunno why I find this era and culture so consistently fascinating; somehow I always seem to be able to find something meaningful in it - not sure if anyone else on here shares that, but Id love to know 

[Melooon]

Not exactly beat culture, but some great footage of hippie culture that's very closely related 

Im not sure what to say about hippies.. did they fail? Did they just not succeed enough? What can we (as people running our own little counterculture) learn from them? These are all things I think about!

[doubleincision]

Not exactly beat culture, but some great footage of hippie culture that's very closely related 

Im not sure what to say about hippies.. did they fail? Did they just not succeed enough? What can we (as people running our own little counterculture) learn from them? These are all things I think about!

i know very little about beat culture outside of that cool poetry girl from An Extremely Goofy Movie but in the case of hippies i think it was a generally well-intentioned subculture that got too big for its own good, so whatever larger goals they may have had simply became diluted to the point of ineffectiveness. whatever message the movement stood for was dead as soon as it was turned into a corporate aesthetic! i'm not sure if people here have heard of CARI (the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute) but on their website they have a great gallery of what they've dubbed the "Corporate Hippie" style of design. it's a great example of capitalism taking something considered "dangerous", at the time, and sucking the soul out of it until it's safe enough to sell cosmetics and blue jeans.

[Guest]

I learned about Beat literature and poetry from its creation and its early years during my American literature 2 class. I've always enjoyed more underground and or obscure works of literature (novels, poems, (web)comics, fan fiction, etc) since they have more passion and personality put into them, not to mention they tend to offer interesting views that might not be talked about in the mainstream. I just wish that I had more time to find and read them.