A Beatnik Wake

a detail of a charcoal drawing at one of the best shows of last season...

A colleague/friend passed through town today enroute to DC. We spent a few hours looking at art, walking the river and drinking coffee and what was once the first integrated restaurant/grill in town. Now it is a very European Bistro and a different place altogether... but there was a time when the long hair, short skirts and left of center lifestyles were radical and this boho hangout contrasted sharply in this sleepy southern town. Now younger parodies of the same ideals are still present... but are countered with high rents, a weak dollar and expensive coffee, wine or microbrew. There is the famous Hemingway quote on the blackboard there:

In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary."

which is quite sad since a glass is Protocolo (a favorite wine of ours) sells for eight dollars at this chic bistro and a bottle can be purchased at almost any wine retailer for less than seven dollars!

After a lovely afternoon with my friend I collected Mr. dd in order to attend the wake of a well known eccentric, beat poet, art collector, etc. It was facinating ... seeing ancient faces representing well lived and occasionally wasted lives... and wondering if we, Mr dd and I, will still LOOK like who we are when we are in our 70th decade. There were all there... historians with books depicting our departed beatnik in photos with Norman Mailer and James Baldwin... faded beauties who read his beat poems lamenting virgins he couldn't have and the same chain-smoking alcoholics who have talked loudly through every poetry reading they've attended over the past fifty years...

His beverage of choice was some sort of high proof red alcohol that burns all the way down... nothing you'd ever find in the Foam's liquore cabinet... but people were passing the bottle like communion! The two sad things I walked away from this festive wake with are:

a. he loved to collect art, he hoarded it, but didn't like to pay for it. He was pronounced a bonafide thief by many painters of that generation who were present... AND

b. he donated his extensive collection of art to a regional university where I was employed for many years... there wasn't a single representative from this institution... and based on my time there I would have been surprised to see anyone bother to show up. Institutions hire scores of people whose job it is to increase their collections, real estate holdings, etc and I find them to be quite sad... circling the ill on their deathbed. It just gives me the ick... yet I've seen families practically give away artwork from extensive artist collections in estate sales... I don't know which is worse. What do we do with all this stuff? Some artists burn their work at some point in their career. Ya can't take it with you and most cities won't let a family pay a loved ones "death tax" with artwork. Picasso and Paris are the rare exception... but back to the wake....

I knew many these youthful if ragged faces from my many days and nights and that bohemian grill I mentioned earlier in this post. It was the first place I felt comfortable in my own skin after moving here from NOLA and I am grateful for the contributions these boho beatniks made to this city. They've saved historic buildings and cherish many European values that are no longer appreciated in 21st C America...

Someone brought up this division for a minute but then they remembered we were there to celebrate a genuine, if flawed, man who knew Ezra Pound, had a fist fight with Mailer and was once a roomate of Tom Robbins.