Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac On the Road at the NY Public Library

The exhibition's clever (though garish) layout likens the glass-encased first 60 (of 120) feet of the original typewritten scroll of On The Road to the continuity of a line down the center of a street. The manuscript is displayed in various stages of edits, but I hear the novel itself has finally been published uncut.



The real treasures of the show are in letters and photographs: "papers" (as Kerouac would have called them) and personal artifacts. Ginsberg boasting popularity and the overwhelming reception of his poetry in a letter to Burroughs; charts outlining the code names Kerouac implemented in his novels to protect the guilty; scrapbooks that K compiles and then perversely suggests belonged to his mother; elaborate fantasy baseball constructions; laboured faux newspaper spreads; pulp bookbindings from early editions of major beat works; journals opened to pages that pour over the multiple lives of Jack's most beloved cat...and the flashing green neon KEROUAC sign that leads you into the exhibition, delightfully out of place in the ornate oldschool architecture of the public library. Info on the exhibition here.


The Slouch Hat by Jack Kerouac

The City of San Francisco Oracle

FYI: I'm cleaning off my computer...expect fragmentary posts.

The Dark Side of the Summer of Love

This article in the Playboy July 2007 issue actually delivers what is promised by the title. And the cover illustration is by the incredible Yuko Shimzu (who I studied illustration under at SVA for a year). Click on the pages to be directed to readable scans.












I dug up the flyer, mentioned in the article, that was distributed on Haight. It expresses the same dreary realities created by the mass countercultural migration to the Haight-Ashbury in the latter 60's... in beautiful and hopeless hippie colloquy: