The invisible generation: a little fingernail history

Abstract

Charlie Plymell really first defined it for me (Baltimore, winter of 1976): Since Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cage, Cunningham... they've got this Media Hype, keep front-stage center, there is no room for any-one/thing NEW..." So the generation(s) after the Beats/ Black Mountaineers remain(s) invisible, in the Beat Black Mountain shadow. Not that we're not a continuation of the Beat-Black Mountain, we are! It's the same Beatific Quest — perhaps with this twist of a difference, that we have learned (even John Bennett, Charles Potts, Len Fulton, the most explosive of the Clan) to live INSIDE THE INSTITUTIONS. It's as if The Beats beat out SPACE for us, formed a clearing in the skyscraper woods, and we have come into this psychic freespace and inhabited it.q