Beatnik

[catswipe]

What do you associate with this style? TIA

I actually think it's a valid style topic (pity it wasn't presented in the first place with a bit of diplomacy) ...

(rolled-up trousers and turtle necks)

I do like the beatnik style. Especially if it means you can smoke Galoises.

Yes, and especially if you can work the centre parting.

Which I no longer can, sadly.

people have busy lives. perhaps the op spent the rest of the evening trying to settle a screaming baby or who knows! no need for judgypants

I do not think it works with a buzzum, sadly. I'd look mono-boobed.
It only works for slinky, elegant types.

but did anyone like my funny face link posted on the first page??....
I searched HARD for that :)

here is a release from the 'tension'

enjoy ladies

Clearly, not everybody can work the look to the max, as it were...

Agggghhhhhh! The orange camel toe! WTF was the lady in the sparkly dress thinking?

Oh, kendalmintcake, that is gooood

Come on, Kittens, tell us more about your mum: she sounds really interesting.

My mum, in her 20s and early 30s, had a very short, Mia Farrow (in "Rosemary's Baby") type haircut - short sharp blunt fringe. She looked great in close-cropped trousers, checked, tight-fitting shirts, flats, dramatic eye-makeup. Is that Beatnik?

Sjue, I was thinking that the orange camel-toe might be quite an accessible interpretation of the style for the large of bork, no?

Nork, gah, bloody autocorrect.

Accessible, should you want to look like a bin man. Them's bin man trousers.

Tecnoprisoner's intervention is rather charming - I think you're delightful, T. And I want to hear more about g's beatnik mother, too.

I wonder if there is a description of (English) Beatniks-or-their-equivalents in Nancy Mitford's "The Blessing". She describes a group of intense young people, concentrating on the appearance and behaviour of the young women, gathered around a (radical-ish) dramatist in post-2ww London. They wear jeans, and have long, unkempt hair - through which they gaze intently, and silently, at the world. They don't think much of the heroine's chic, New Look dresses.

Thought it was interesting, because although there is clearly a "look" to the group - and it's clearly a "counter-cultural" "look" - it's not solidified into the black trousers/turtleneck sartorial short-hand into which cultural hindsight has condensed it. And there is an "attitude" and a locus - but it's English, rather than American.

(Flicks an Audrey high-kick at Animula)

Yes, I think of Beatnik as counter-culture, between the late 50s rockers and before the 60s drop-out culture got into full swing. It's an intellectual statement, isn't it, cafe-society, Gauloise and all.

What would be the counter-culture equivalent of today, and is there one?

i like the look.dont know what todays equivalant would be.

And what is the etymology of "Beatnik"?

(off to bed now - I am aged and need my sleep, but will return.)

Ah, the etymology of beatnik is not quite what I had assumed:

beatnik
coined 1958 by San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen during the heyday of -nik suffixes in the wake of Sputnik. From Beat generation (1952), associated with beat in its meanings "rhythm (especially in jazz)" as well as "worn out, exhausted," but originator Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) in 1958 connected it with beatitude.
The origins of the word beat are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than the feeling of weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of the mind. ["New York Times Magazine," Oct. 2, 1952]

"Beat" is old carny slang. According to Beat Movement legend (and it is a movement with a deep inventory of legend), Ginsberg and Kerouac picked it up from a character named Herbert Huncke, a gay street hustler and drug addict from Chicago who began hanging around Times Square in 1939 (and who introduced William Burroughs to heroin, an important cultural moment). The term has nothing to do with music; it names the condition of being beaten down, poor, exhausted, at the bottom of the world. [Louis Menand, "New Yorker," Oct. 1, 2007]

technoprisoners you are sweet. You're intervention efforts have made me smile.

I'm actually off to the coast now for the weekend and don't have time to post properly I'm afraid. Looks like all the bickering has reignited an interesting discussion though

has anyone seen 'gonks go beat' that's a classic