The long-awaited film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking novel presents the perfect opportunity to re-examine the lives of the Beat Generation, writes Richard Watts. It’s not hyperbole to say that the Beat Generation – a small coterie of writers who met up in New York City in the spring of 1944 – changed the world. Without their individual quests for personal freedoms – a quest for sex and drugs before there was rock and roll; a quest which spawned the western world’s first counter-culture, the beatniks – the hippy movement of the Sixties would never have happened, and punk would have been a quiet snarl rather than a global reaction. Of all the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac, author of the autobiographical beatnik bible, On the Road , is unequivocally the most famous. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, to working class French-Canadian parents, Kerouac aspired to be a writer from a young age, though he was also a keen football player. Indeed, it ...
Finished work last night and went out for a quick Vietnamese meal in the city before embarking on a brief absinthe tour of two Melbourne bars, The Toff in Town and Cookie , which helpfully are in the same building as one another. (As an aside, the links above are to Age reviews of the bars; and really, they should take their photos at night, as the daylight photos on the paper's website are utterly lacking in atmosphere). The Toff had a very limited range of brands on offer; only four, one of which was the utterly vile Green Fairy brand, which all good absintheurs should avoid like the plague. The brand I eventually chose, which I hadn't tried before, was Jacques Senaux Blue , from Spain (80% proof). Because I always drink my absinthe with sugar and water in the traditional fashion (although most places insist on setting the sugar alight, which is flamboyant, whereas actually the water should be slowly dripped onto the sugar until it dissolves - incidentally, the only plac...
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*folds arms and cocks head in a condescending manner*