" ... The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones that are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in middle you see the blue light of the outbreak and all are central Ooohhh! "(1)
The French Canadian poet Jack Keruac went mad for jazz and Charlie Parker was his idol. He loved his freedom of expression, his phrasing, but above all the revolutionary nature of the proposed unconventional, spontaneous and fluid. Along with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and many others represented in the 50s and the counterculture, the desire to break the usual patterns. Beat
term coined in 1948 by Keruac assumes the meaning of broken, tired and at the same time swing, button and is pivotal in this new political movement, culture and art born in the late '50s in America in contrast with the ' Establishment, and the false image of a post-war America, where apparently only everyone could have the right to have a job, a house, a car plus a large number of modern appliances.
artists, the visionaries of the time-due to their perceived sensitivity-false, and the temporary nature of this idyllic prosperity. They wanted to live now and not of retirement age, refusing any manipulation by institutions. They loved rather embark on the streets looking for jazz bar where you lose your time ubriacarndosi music, alcohol and poetry, and then spent howling at the moon. What unites
Keruac Ginsberg and the Jazz was the common desire to look around and inside, ask questions and find the courage to speak their voice forcefully trying their uniqueness. The uniqueness of this research was to beat the most authentic consolation against the corruption of the earth, and at the same time represented a powerful means of accusation against the oligarchy and its industrial burocazia. Jazz and Poetry as a revolution, as another state of consciousness in sharp contrast to a dull way of life and manipulated by the interests of that power without a face that was beginning to take more and more ground in those years.
represented a way out, the beginning of an endless journey away from the doldrums of the ordinary and the total lack of confidence in the appearances of a world where few things are as they appear.
Many of them have committed and sacrificed by choosing roads less traveled in politics, art and psychoanalysis and so on., Others were damaged and died, but survivors know for sure, they were part of a noble attempt and glorious.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves to the streets of Negroes at dawn looking for angry fix, angel's head by hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly touch with the din-star love in the machinery of night, who poverty and rags and sunken eyes were on parties to smoke in the dark attic of the supernatural in cold water floating on the tops of cities contemplating jazz, that showed the brains to Heaven under the Elevated and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on the roofs of barracks illuminated who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and tragedies blakiane among scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for like crazy & publishing obscene odes on windows of the skull will lie down in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning money in the trash and listening to the Terror through the wall, who were arrested in their pubic beards returning from Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York ..."( 2)
Perhaps this spirit, this dream seemed lost is coming back, and with it the need to bring together old and new knowledge to arrive at some certainty. In the meantime, if you like, we can revive rincordo of those years and console ourselves with reading of The Last Word, a trip to the Jazz Jack Keruac and always the legendary Howl by Allen Ginsberg, all seasoned by the background of the eternal Parker With Strings.
Antoine Duhamel Iurilli