New Yorks bohemian Greenwich Village.

Published on Jun 17, 2015

Beatniks, Counterculture and Bohemian life in the sixties.

In this short compelling documentary from 1961, we’re taken back to the thriving cultural life of New Yorks bohemian Greenwich Village.

From The Prelinger Archives
Greenwich Village Sunday
Producer: Stewart Wilensky
Music: Charles Mills
https://archive.org/details/Greenwic1960

HIWAY AMERICA-GREENWICH VILLAGE WHAT REMAINS OF N.Y. BEAT GENERATION?

Greenwich Village Sunday (1960 Documentary On The Counterculture / Beat

Culture In 1960’s New York)

http://youtu.be/nBfJyGjtxRg

Greenwich Village: what remains of New York’s beat generation haunts?

Inside Llewyn Davis

http://youtu.be/R3v9pcQJZRU

A new Coen brothers film celebrates Greenwich Village in its 60s heyday, but what’s left of Dylan and Kerouac’s New York? Karen McVeigh takes a cycle tour of the area
Inside Llewyn Davis still
A still from the Coen Brothers new film, Inside Llewyn Davis. Photograph: Alison Rosa/Studio Canal
Karen McVeigh
@karenmcveigh1
Sunday 22 December 2013 01.00 EST Last modified on Thursday 22 May 2014 06.51 EDT

Five decades have passed since America’s troubadours and beat poets flocked to Greenwich Village, filling its smoky late-night basement bars and coffee houses with folk songs and influencing some of the most recognisable musicians of the era.

A few landmarks of those bygone bohemian days – most recently portrayed in the Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis, out on 24 January – still exist. The inspiration for the movie’s fictional anti-hero, Davis, was Brooklyn-born Dave Van Ronk, a real- life blues and folk singer with no small talent, who worked with performers such as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, but remained rooted in the village until he died in 2002, declining to leave it for any length of time and refusing to fly for many years. Van Ronk’s posthumously published memoir, the Mayor of MacDougal Street, takes its name from the street that was home to the Gaslight Cafe, and other early 60s folk clubs.

The Village stretches from the Hudson River Park east as far as Broadway, and from West Houston Street in the south up to West 14th Street. Its small scale makes it easy to explore on foot and perfect for a musical pilgrimage, but the arrival last summer of New York’s bike-sharing scheme, Citibike, makes for a more adventurous experience.

CitiBikers in Greenwich Village
CitiBikers in Greenwich Village. Photograph: Alamy
I picked up a bike outside Franklin Street subway station, south of the Village in Tribeca, and headed out to the river, at Pier 45. Looking south you can see One World Trade Center: at 541m, it’s now the tallest building in the western hemisphere. Cycle or walk to the end of the boardwalk that juts out into the Hudson, facing Hoboken, New Jersey, and look to your left and you can see the Statue of Liberty. From there, it’s a short cycle along Christopher Street, up Hudson and along West 10th, to Bleecker Street, where designer boutiques such as Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors and Lulu Guinness mark the area’s steep gentrification.

On MacDougal Street, a jumble of comedy cellars, theatres and cheap eateries have mostly replaced the old, liquorless cafes and basement bars of the folk scene. It is the hub of New York University’s campus and many of the bars, falafel joints and pizza houses are priced for students, with $2 beers thrown in.

But several older venues still exist, including the Bitter End, which staged folk “hootenannies” every Tuesday and now calls itself New York’s oldest rock club”. The White Horse Tavern, built in 1880, still stands on the corner of Hudson Street and 11th. It was used by New York’s literary community in the 1950s – most notably Welsh bard Dylan Thomas. It was here, myth has it, that the writer had been drinking in November 1953, before he was rushed to hospital from his room at the Chelsea Hotel, and died a few days later.

Dave Van Ronk
Folk singer Dave Van Ronk, the inspiration for the Llewyn Davis character. Photograph: Kai Shuman/Getty Images
The original Cafe Wha? remains at 115 MacDougal Street, on the corner of Minetta Lane. In the bitter winter of 1961, when the Coen brothers movie is set, cash-strapped artists similar to Davis would take their chances at the open mic. It was here that Bob Dylan made his New York debut, and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac performed. Cafe Wha? continued to attract artists and musicians long after the Village folk scene gave way to rock’n’roll. A notice on the door catalogues a few of the famous names who played here: Jimi Hendrix, Ritchie Havens, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and the Velvet Underground. It is still a popular music venue, with a house band playing five nights a week.

The real centre of the folk scene back then, however, was Washington Square, where musicians would gather on Sundays to swap ideas, learn new material and play. According to folk singer and historian Elijah Wald, the ballad and blues singers who sat around the fountain in the park created sounds that would influence artists from Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez to folk-rock groups the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas. The hero of the Coens’ film is not Van Ronk, according to Wald, but he does sing some Van Ronk songs and shares his working-class background.

When I visited on a sunny but cold December day, there was only one musician, a saxophonist, playing under Washington Square’s stone arch, but at weekends the park fills with rap and jazz musicians playing to tourists and students. Bikes are not officially allowed inside the square, but there are Citibike stations around it, so it’s easy to park and walk around.

A block north of the park, on West 8th Street, is a historic 107-room property once known as Marlton House and home to many writers and poets, who were attracted by relatively cheap rates and the bohemian neighbourhood. Jack Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans and Tristessa while living here and, in a darker episode, Valerie Solanas was staying in room 214 in 1968, when she became infamous for stalking and then shooting Andy Warhol.

The Marlton Hotel
The new Marlton Hotel
Sean MacPherson, who owns the stylish Bowery and Jane hotels nearby, has just reopened the building as the Parisian-inspired Marlton Hotel (marltonhotel.com). I popped in to its very comfortable lobby for coffee and a flick through its copy of John Strausbaugh’s The Village: 400 years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues. And I caught up with Strausbaugh later, to ask him about the village in the early 1960s, when young idealists were living hand to mouth and sleeping on friends’ couches.

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“In 1961, if you were in any way an artistic person in America, in that vast American landscape, you were a lonely figure,” said Strausbaugh. “You heard about San Francisco, you heard about Greenwich Village, and you went there. You didn’t play there to make money; you went there to be heard. Like Dylan, who played at the Cafe Wha?, then got another entry-level gig, then began playing at the biggest places.”

There were others, Strausbaugh said, like Van Ronk, who were talented, but whose ambitions were more modest than those of Dylan and Baez. The unique thing about the Village, he added, is that it survived so long as a bohemian enclave, from the early 1850s, when it attracted poets such as Walt Whitman, to the beatniks and folk revivalists of the 1950s and later.

“The left bank [in Paris] did not last 100 years, but the Village did,” he said.

Many of the buildings and sometimes entire streets in the Village have been preserved and are now home to some of the most expensive real estate in Manhattan and sought-after for their distinctive, old Greenwich Village look. A struggling folk artist might find a cheap meal in one of the student cafes around MacDougal Street, but they would never be able to afford to live in the area – or anywhere in Manhattan, realistically.

“It has not been completely finished off,” said Strausbaugh. “There are still a lot of theatres. But the people who make the music have not been able to live there for 20 or 30 years.”

Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation Q&A at DOC NYC 2012

http://youtu.be/28cc8qaI748

Bleecker Street: Greenwich Village in the ’60s traces and tributes the bohemian Mecca’s part in the emergence of singer/songwriters and the folk revival during the ’60s. The initial passion and sense of discovery in this music remains undimmed, as politically and emotionally conscious songs by Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Tim Buckley, Judy Collins, and Paul Simon are reinterpreted by contemporary artists like Chrissie Hynde, Ron Sexsmith, Beth Nielsen Chapman, and many others.

Track Listing

	Sample		Title/Composer	Performer	Time	Stream
		1	Bleecker Street Paul Simon	Jonatha Brooke	3:21
		2	My Back Pages Bob Dylan	Marshall Crenshaw	3:50
		3	Morning Glory Tim Buckley	Chrissie Hynde	2:56
		4	No Regrets Tom Rush	Curtis Stigers	3:16
		5	Pack Up Your Sorrows Richard Fariña / Pauline Marden	Iris DeMent /Loudon Wainwright III	2:44
		6	Reason to Believe Tim Hardin	Ron Sexsmith	3:11
		7	Darling Be Home Soon John Sebastian	Jules Shear	3:36
		8	The Love’s Still Growing	Maggie Roche/ Suzzy Roche	3:50
		9	Everybody’s Talkin’ Fred Neil	Patty Larkin	3:38
		10	The Last Thing on My Mind Tom Paxton	Cry Cry Cry	2:53
		11	So Long, Marianne Leonard Cohen	John Cale /Suzanne Vega	4:49
		12	Thirsty Boots Eric Andersen	John Gorka	4:27
		13	I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore Bob Gibson / Phil Ochs	Black 47 / Larry Kirwan	3:12
		14	Since You’ve Asked Judy Collins	Beth Nielsen Chapman	2:40
		15	Let’s Get Together Maurice Dollison / Chester Powers / Chick Webb	Paul Brady	3:43
		16	Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season) Pete Seeger / Traditional

LEGENDS OF FOLK: THE VILLAGE SCENE | Clip | PBS

http://youtu.be/VQjVXeUz7uI

THE VILLAGE MOVEMENT

http://www.nytimes.com/video/movies/100000003523696/this-weeks-movies-feb-20-2015.html?playlistId=1248069018693

 

The Beats: Previously Unpublished Larry Fink Photos

THE BEATS-PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED PHOTOS OF LARRY FINK

• By Erica Schwiegershausen

In 1958, Larry Fink — the photographer best-known today for celebrity portraits in magazines like Vanity Fair and GQ — was an 18-year-old college dropout. He moved from his native Long Island to Greenwich Village, and decided to hitchhike across the country with the second generation of Beat artists. “It was my fate to be aligned with the Beats because of my propensity for drugs, anger, and poetry,” Fink writes in The Beats, a new book of previously unpublished photography from his 1958 and 1959 travels. “Since they were second generation, without the same sense of immortal obsession such as the like of Kerouac and Ginsberg, they had a distinct need to be documented.”

Despite confessing that his traveling companions “did not like me much,” (a fact he attributes to his Marxist upbringing), Fink traveled with artists like Amiri Baraka and Hugh Romney (Wavy Gravy) from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Houston and Mexico, and back to Chicago and Cincinnati. “They desperately needed a photographer to be with them, to give them gravity, record and encode their wary but benighted existence,” he reflects. Click through the slideshow for a look at the intimate, glamorous, and gritty photographs that resulted.

Larry Fink will speak at the Strand in New York on May 21 to celebrate the book’s release.

THE BEATS-PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED PHOTOS OF LARRY FINK

beatniks and beat-flicks

The Beatniks we know and love, with their requisite bongos, berets and turtlenecks, made their big screen debuts in Hollywood films like FUNNY FACE and BELL BOOK AND CANDLE in the late 1950s. They weren’t called beatniks yet, but they were black-clad, modern-dancing, angst-ridden Existentialists—a trés chicFrench export. These early beatnik stereotypes—goateed, bongo-beating espresso drinkers—were then portrayed as quaint and harmless, if somewhat silly.

But in American urban centers like New York and San Francisco, a youth culture that defined themselves as “beat”was forming. These were members of a generation whose spirits were beaten down by World War II and the new fear of atomic weaponry, and responded to the angst by rejecting the materialistic, straight-laced values of the 1950s mainstream. They listened to jazz. They experimented with drugs. They wrote stream-of-consciousness poetry. They danced to the beat of a different bongo, and went pretty much unnoticed. It was only after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Roadin 1957 that the mainstream caught on. And before you could say “Daddy-O,” there was a beatnik backlash.

Hollywood took it upon itself to warn the rest of the nation about just what these crazy kids were up to, throwing in a goodly amount of 50s paranoia and sexploitation for good measure. In movies like HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL and BEAT GIRL, beatniks are portrayed as a bunch of juvenile-delinquent drug pushers who expressed themselves with secret-code-like slang and weird poetry. There isn’t a beret to be found in either of these films; in beatsploitation flicks like THE PRIME TIME, THE REBEL SET, BUCKET OF BLOOD, and THE BLOODY BROOD, however, we get beatniks with all the trimmings: goatees galore, battalions of bongos, jazzed-up java and pathetic poetry. While TV’s “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” gave us a harmless Maynard G. Krebs, it was in these movies that the mainstream’s fear of these new bohemians really rears its square head. If they dig breaking the rules of conventional society, these films seem to ask, where do these cats draw the line? Beatniks give way to bad-nicks, be they homicidal psychopaths out for sadistic kicks or, less bleakly, vulnerable wannabe artists who become lackeys for hardened criminals.

The sexual experimentation of the beats, particularly that of the girls, is especially threatening to the impresarios of squaresville. While these films coyly eye the voluptuous curves of beat-chicks as they “express themselves” to the wild beat of the bongo in skin-tight black pants and sweaters, by the time the credits roll most of these gals end up dead or working in strip clubs.

Eventually, the beats went back to being thought of as a quaint, wacky subculture. In the 1980s, HAIRSPRAY gave us a pair of harmless pot-smoking, beatnik freakazoids; in a bizarre case of life imitating (non-)art, the 1990s saw a rise of neo-beatnik coffee houses and a revived poetry scene, seemingly inspired more by the beat-flicks than the beatniks.

Like, strictly dullsville, man.   </end>

Bucket of Blood, The Bloody Brood, The Rebel Set, and The Prime Time are available from Something Weird Video. For a complete catalog send $3.00 to “S.W.V. Catalog”, Dept. FUN, P.O. Box 33664, Seattle WA 98133. Please state with signature that you are 18 or older.

Illustrations by jorja rucker

Beat-FlickPlot SummaryIdentifying Beatnik TraitsBeatnik HangoutMeaningful Beatnik Philosophical StatementsAtypical Beatnick activitySubstance(s) abused

Funny Face
(1956)

In this Hollywood musical, Greenwich Village bookstore clerk Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn) is discovered by the editor of a fashion magazine and flown off to Paris with photographer Dick Avery (Fred Astaire). Although she disapproves of the world of fashion (“it’s chi-chi and an unrealistic approach to self-impressions as well as economics”), Jo takes the trip so that she can hang out with Parisian intellectuals and meet the father of “Empathicalism.” of which she is a loyal disciple. The philosopher turns out to be a cad (“he’s more man than philosopher”), and Jo ends up falling in love with Dick.

An underground Parisian cafe with live jazz.

“All that is delicious is not nutritious.”

“I feel a hostile vibration.”

Spontaneous song & dance numbers; headstands; tap dancing.

Wine; modern dance; Gershwin tunes.; overuse of the word “pizzazz.”

Bell, Book & Candle
(1958)

Gillian Halroyd (Kim Novak) is an African art dealer and practicing witch who falls for stodgy publisher Sheperd Henderson (Jimmy Stewart). With some help from her witch associates—her aunt Queeny and brother Nicki (Jack Lemmon)—she sets out to win his heart.

While not a movie about beatniks per se, the movie draws some interesting parallels between witches and beatniks: when not casting spells, the three hang out with the witch in-crowd at an underground jazz bar where Nicki plays bongos, and Gillian shows a penchant for wearing black and a dislike for shoes. And, like most witches, they live outside the rules of normal society.

The Zodiac: an underground, brick-walled bar with live jazz for the occult set.

“Don’t you ever wish that you weren’t what we are? That you could just spend Christmas Eve in a little church somewhere, listening to carols, instead of bongo drums?”

“It might be pleasant to be humdrum once in a while.”

“That’s what happens to people like us. We forfeit everything and we end up in a little world of separateness from everyone.”

Witchcraft.

Herbs, potions, spells.

High School Confidential
(1958)

Although the original trailer hypes this movie as the story of “The Beat Generation,” it contains only one conspicuous beatnik scene. Tony Baker (Russ Tamblyn) is the new bad kid in town, a weedhead who wants to be the top “reefers” dealer. Standing in the way of his ambitions is J.I. (John Drew Barrymore) the president of the “Wheelers and Dealers” gang. This classic J.D. extravaganza features an outstanding cameo performance by Phillipa Fallan as the ultra-hip beatnik poetess who performs at the coffee shop, accompanied by Jackie Coogan on piano.

Brick-walled coffee club with live jazz.

“Tomorrow is a drag, pops. The future is a flake.”

“Sleep, man, and you might wake up diggin’ the whole human race.”

“That’s the way the bongo bingos.”

Pool parties; drag racing; drug-dealing; Narc-ing.

Cigarillos; weed; reefers; Mary Jane; “H”; coke; goofballs.

The Bloody Brood
(1959)

A perfect square.
He’s tuned in.
Get with it cats.

Peter Falk plays Nico, a drug dealing gangster who hangs out with beatniks. Nico has a delivery boy killed as an existentialist party trick but the joke’s on him when the delivery boy’s brother traps him with his own secret weapon—a deadly poem.

The Digs: a brick-walled underground jazz bar.

“Fish—all mouth and eyes. They don’t think, they don’t feel, they just go round and round like squares. ”

Murder by hamburger.

Wine; weed; heroin; ground glass.

Bucket of Blood
(1959)

Sour cream of circumstance.
Crazy, what is it called?

In this Roger Corman horror/comedy, Walter (Dick Miller) is the talentless coffee-shop waiter with ambitions to be an artist—they get all the girls! He quickly discovers an easy way to create life-like sculptures: he starts with something dead! His first piece, “Dead Cat,” gains him the acceptance of the beatnik in-crowd, and he follows it up with “Murdered Man” and “Female Nude.”

The Yellow Door: An underground, brick-walled coffee house with live poetry.

“What is not creation is graham crackers; let it all crumble to feed the creator.”

Killing things; covering dead things with clay and calling them sculpture.

Coffee, money, heroin, clay.

The Rebel Set
(1959)

Far-out dancing girl
When in Rome, do the Romans.

Mr. Tucker (Edward Platt), a diabolical coffee bar owner, invites three ambitious but unsuccessful beatniks—an actor, a writer, and the jailbird son of an actress—to help him pull off a million-dollar armored car hold-up. The plan involves a train to New York from Los Angeles with a three hour lay-over in Chicago—just long enough to pull off the job. The robbery comes off without a hitch, but it’s on the train trip back to New York that the fun really begins as Mr. T, now cleanly shaven and posing as a minister, sets out to eliminate his beatnik partners-in-crime.

Mr. T’s Cafe: An underground, brick-walled coffee bar with live jazz and poetry.

“A rose by any other name would still have thorns.”

“When in Rome, do the Romans.”

“I am bugged beyond recall.”

“I don’t dig you. All this chopper music and no tune.”

Armed robbery; murder; jumping from trains.

Bullets.

Beat Girl
(1960)

Dig that crazy saxophone.
Strictly for kicks!

In this British import, teenage bad girl Jenny (Noelle Adams) doesn’t like her new step-mother, so she digs for dirt on her past at the local strip joint. When her folks are asleep, art student Jenny sneaks out of the house to hang out with her “beatnik” pals at the local coffee shop where they talk about alienation and jazz while playing rockabilly.

The Off Beat: a coffee bar with an underground jazz club.

“We don’t wear dresses very often. We’re different.”

“Next week—voom—up goes the world in smoke. So now, while it’s now, we’ll live it up. Do everyting, feel everything—strictly for kicks.”

Stripping; drag racing; being British.

None: “Drinks are for squares!”

The Prime Time
(1960)

Jean (Jo Ann LeCompte) is a teenage hot tamale who’s having an affair with a local investigator. When Jean is stood up by her beau, she retaliates by posing nude for “the beard” (Roy Gronwold) a local beatnik artist. All goes well until she taunts him about his masculinity (she calls him a “shrimp”), thereby forcing him to kill her.

The Golden Goose Lounge: An underground bar with live rockabilly.

“Like I’m there…I’m on the A train.”

“You wanna play quiz games, get on TV.”

“The Beard needs money!”

Murder; ability to paint the backside view of a person while they are posing from the front.

Alcohol; cigarillos; poison; gas; matches

Heart Beat
(1980)

Based on the book by Carolyn Cassady, this movie tells the tale of some real beatniks: Carolyn (Sissy Spacek), Jack Keroac (John Heard) and Neal Cassady (Nick Nolte.) Neal is the irresponsible bad boy and Jack the sincere, struggling novelist. They both fall in love with the same woman: a proper, upper-class art student. Although it is Neal who marries her, he makes for a lousy husband, and Jack comes to live with them as her lover. The three cool cats have a fabulous, anti-establishment time living in the ‘burbs until Jack’s book is published, bringing him sudden fame, and the birth of the media hype surrounding “beatniks.”

Bud’s Bop Shop: an underground brick-walled jazz club; an underground brick-walled poetry club capitalizing on the “beatnik” craze; The Five Spot: another underground brick-walled jazz club.

“All I need to write is a pencil!”

“You wanna know about civilization? Ask any bum on the Bowery after he’s had twelve shots of Sterno. The puke-encrusted scabs on his face are a more eloquent poem than Eliot ever wrote! ”

“This entire generation is a constipated pack of cowering illiterates.”

“Everybody wants to be hip. Even old Jack wishes he was a spade.”

Suburban living; having kids; wife-swapping.

Pot; alcohol; “Bennies”; friendships.

Hairspray
(1988)

This John Waters flick takes place in Baltimore in 1962. Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake) becomes queen of the local dance show, “The Corny Collins Show,” and takes up the cause of racial integration. In an unforgettable scene, Tracy and her friends seek shelter at the apartment of two wacky beatniks (Pia Zadore and Rick Ocasek) while trying to evade “the fuzz.”

Run-down brick-walled pad.

“When I’m high I am Odetta. Let’s get naked and smoke!”

Hair consciousness: hair-ironing.

loco-weed; irons (“I get high, listen to Odetta, and iron my hair!”).

Beat-FlickPlot SummaryIdentifying Beatnik TraitsBeatnik HangoutMeaningful Beatnik Philosophical StatementsAtypical Beatnick activitySubstance(s) abused