Jack Kerouac Francophone interview.

Discusses the Beat Generation, how Beatnik is a derogatory term, as well as how the generations evolved around Beat. His style of humor is very much a Franco-Canadian one. He doesn't discuss marijuana, but he does discuss the black jazz musicians as well as the LSD generation of the Sixties.

(1957) Jack Kerouac - On The Road (written in 1951)

What the Beats understood and identified with in jazz, was protest against the white middle-class world. As Sal Paradise observes in part one of the novel, "Every single one of us was blushing. This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do." Kerouac intuitively understood that you can't have jazz without protest, and along with his Beat friends regarded jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk as true American geniuses, heroes, and rebels. Just as Sal later thinks Dean "look(s) like God," while high on marijuana bumping along the back roads of Mexico, those jazz musicians who can really "blow" are the "prophets" and "shepherds" come to lead the straying but faithful back to "the golden world that Jesus came from. Source


(1959) Jack Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show

(1963) Lenny Bruce - How to Talk Dirty and Influence People

Lenny tells in his unreliable autobiography, How To Talk Dirty And Influence People, how he was introduced to hashish by a Turkish shipmate when he was a merchant seaman in the late 1940s. In the 1950s, he hung out with the hip, pot-smoking clique that congregated at 'The Castle', the stately home in Topanga Canyon of the 'Hollywood hep-cat in residence' and tongue dancer extraordinaire, Lord Buckley.

http://www.ukcia.org/potculture

(1954) The Five Keys - Ling Ting Tong

An R & B vocal group that helped shape the rhythm and blues revolution of the 50's, The Five Keys' first hit for Capitol was this novelty pop jump with a nonsense lyric, allegedly influenced by marijuana: "'Taisk ko mo bom da yay', or something like that..."

Source

(1959) Pickup Alley AKA (1957) Interpol

U.S. narcotics agent Charles Sturgis trails international dope smuggler Frank McNally by following his reluctant accomplice, Gina Broger, through the "pickup alleys" of New York, London, Lisbon, Rome, Naples and Athens. When Gina is finally arrested by Interpol, she helps Sturgis trace McNally and his $3,000,000 consignment back to New York.Source

(1958) The Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac

The Subterraneans is a 1958 novella by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. It is a semi-fictional account of his short romance with an African American woman named Alene Lee (1931-1991) in San Francisco in 1953.[1] In the novel she is renamed "Mardou Fox," and described as a carefree spirit who frequents the jazz clubs and bars of the budding Beat scene of San Francisco. Other well-known personalities and friends from the author's life also appear thinly disguised in the novel. The character Frank Carmody is based on William Burroughs, and Adam Moorad on Allen Ginsberg. Even Gore Vidal appears as successful novelist Arial Lavalina. Kerouac's alter ego is named Leo Percepied, and his long-time friend Neal Cassady is mentioned only in passing as Leroy.Source

This book contains cannabis use. Lingo: "tea", "pot", and "marijuana".



(1960) The Subterraneans

A 1960 film adaptation changed the African American character Mardou Fox, Kerouac's love interest, to a young French girl (played by Leslie Caron) to better fit both social and Hollywood palates. While it has been derided and vehemently criticized by Allen Ginsberg among others for its two-dimensional characters, it illustrates the way the film industry attempted to exploit the emerging popularity of this culture as it grew in San Francisco and Greenwich Village, New York. A Greenwich Village beatnik bar setting had been used to good effect in Richard Quine's 1958 film Bell, Book and Candle, but Ranald MacDougall's adaptation of Kerouac's novel, scripted by Robert Thom, was less successful. Comedian Arte Johnson, for example, plays the Gore Vidal character, here named Arial Lavalerra.

The Subterraneans was one of the final MGM films produced by Arthur Freed, and features a score by Andre Previn and brief appearances by jazz singer Carmen McRae singing "Coffee Time," Gerry Mulligan as a street priest, and Art Pepper.Source


Contains no actual drug consumption except for lots of booze and cigarette smoking. This is likely due to the MPAA's tight control on culture post-Hayes and certainly post-WWII, which had the US Gov't in total control of hollywood.

(1951) Walt Disney's Donald Duck in Old California

Donald and the boys consume peyote

Plot
Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie are on vacation in California, heading to Los Angeles. They take a small narrow road that seems deserted and discuss California's history as they travel. Donald Duck opines that the turning point in California's history was the California gold rush. Donald is momentarily distracted from his driving and the car crashes on a rock besides the road.

When Donald Duck and his three nephews regain consciousness, they find they are visitors of a local tribe of Native Americans. The tribe kindly offer to help the foursome recover. The exhausted Ducks are offered a drink, and they fall sleep. When they wake, they find themselves in Alta California, 1848. They quickly manage to befriend a local Spanish-speaking family of Californios, owners of a cattle ranch, together with the ranch workers. As visitors, Donald Duck and his nephews are privileged to observe the family's life and moreover, they attempt to help with the family problems. They visit San Francisco and acquire land cheaply, but soon are swindled out of them by American settlers. Afterwards, the Ducks become involved in the Gold Rush and as goldminers partner with a friend from the ranch. The Ducks do the digging, and their partner's fists and guns make sure that nobody swindles them out of their gold.

After their friend departs, the Ducks start to experience an odd fading of their environment. It seems to them that all their acquaintances from this era are now only distant memories. It is at this point that the Duck family truly regain consciousness to discover the truth. They were in a coma in a hospital bed for weeks. The drink they had accepted had kept them sleeping for this long. The Ducks all have the same memory of their apparent experiences in time travel. Despite this, the Ducks believe themselves fully recovered, take possession of their car (which has been completely repaired) and continue on their way as if nothing had happened. However, the Ducks do make a stop first at an abandoned old house where they had stayed as visitors in 1848. They admit that they don't know if it was all a dream or if they really experienced the events they recall from 1848, but nevertheless they choose to keep the memory of Old California.Source

Info from a vintage art and comics auctioneering website
Four Color #328 Donald Duck (Dell, 1951) CGC NM 9.4 Off-white pages. An absolutely gorgeous copy of the book that stars Donald Duck in the Carl Barks story "Old California," which actually mentions the use of the hallucinogenic cactus peyote. The books is considered to be Donald Duck #2. Only one copy has been able to surpass this offering on CGC's current census. Overstreet 2010 NM- 9.2 value = $985. CGC census 1/11: 3 in 9.4, 1 higher.Source

(1951) White Wing Squad Eradicates Brooklyn's Wild Marijuana

In the summer of 1951, the Department of Sanitation uprooted and destroyed more than 17,000 pounds of marijuana growing in Brooklyn lots. At the time, the entire city was a "marijuana jungle," Ben Gocker wrote on the Brooklyn Public Library's Brooklynology blog in January, with plants as tall as Christmas trees sprouting from the borough's "marijuana plantations," amounting to millions of dollars worth of the drug. Brooklyn had the city's second largest haul, just slightly behind Queens.



Responsible for all this destruction was General Inspector of the city's Sanitation Department, John E. Gleason, who headed up a special "White Wing Squad" charged with harvesting and incinerating the dubious crop. Here we see him standing in a cornfield, arms akimbo, as his men lay the prized narcotic at his feet. The Eagle reported that the "drug plant" was growing here in "lush impudence."



Anyway, back to the naughty plants at hand. In our photo collection we have a number of photographs showing these White Wings (though now their outfits are a rather darker shade of drab) out picking plants as tall as Christmas trees, carting plants away, and burning great piles of prohibited plants. It was an epic battle of Man v. Nature and Man was showing Nature -- in this case, not Everest or the Atlantic but rather a scrawny weed -- who was boss.



The New Yorker magazine accompanied Department of Sanitation Chief Inspector John E. Gleason on one of his Brooklyn sweeps for an article in its August 11, 1951 issue.

“We can’t hope to wipe it out entirely,” Gleason told the magazine’s reporter. “A lot of it is planted, but the weed grows freely here, and most of the marijuana in the city is probably in the back yards of people who don’t know what it is, and therefore don’t report it. Each plant bears clusters of seeds that are blown away by the wind and sprout elsewhere.”

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(1955) Allen Ginsberg - Howl (Part 1)

The year 2006 marked the 50th anniversary of "Howl," the Allen Ginsberg poem that ignited the Beat movement when Lawrence Ferlingetti of the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco published it. In the spring of 1957, U.S. Customs intercepted a shipment of a second edition of the book printed in England, declaring it obscene and arresting Ferlingetti and his clerk. They were cleared of charges but the incident put the beats on the map. For the 30th anniversary of Howl in 1986, VIP Christopher Buckley and Paul Slansky published "Yowl" in the New Republic, parodying the poem and adding yuppie references. In 2000, Howl.com, another iteration, touched on internet technology.

Most know the first two lines of "Howl":

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked Dragging themselves through negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix

But it gets more interesting at line 3:

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammadean angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war. . . who got busted in their public beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York. . . Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn. . .

Ginsberg was inspired to write Part II of "Howl" when he saw a hotel as the biblical monster Moloch during a peyote vision, and much of the section itself was written while under the influence of peyote. It begins:
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! . . . Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! . . .Moloch whose fingers are ten armies. . .Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! . . . They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Source: VeryImportantPotheads.com