Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) Read Online Free

carport. But for me, a subterranean ingestation with a real nasty case of otherness, it was a prison. I’d been framed and sentenced to a long stretch at hard labor in Squaresville.
    The days were filled with whatever a fifth grader’s days are filled with. In the evening, after wolfing down a few servings of fish sticks, I’d fling myself onto the couch in the family room. My dad would sit at the card table doing take-home work on his yellow accounting pad. My mother would be in the kitchen eliminating microscopic particles of food from the counters. My baby sister, Susan, would be flinging wads of Play-Doh at the wall. Of course, the TV would be on. Monday nights at nine, we watched
Peter Gunn
.
    Beatsters! Brothers in the subculture of the Early Resigned! Reminisce with me: after a suspenseful, highly stylized teaser, we’d thrill to the driving boogie ostinato on bass, doubled in the lowest octaves of the piano and tripled by a raunchy surf guitar, the same bar repeated throughout, never changing. The drummer’s on auto-cook. Close-voiced brass plays the angular, blues-based theme. On the screen we see the title animation, a bogus abstract expressionist canvas with cryptic, splattery forms pulsing in the foreground. Even then we may have known it was jive, but who cared? The titles, action-painted on top of all this, told us the show was created by Blake Edwards and that the music was by Henry Mancini.
    During the fifties there had been a number of TV shows that exploited the combination of film noir and jazz-based music, such as
Naked City
and
Richard Diamond
and
M Squad
. But 1958’s
Peter Gunn
was the noirest of them all. Edwards’s update of the Chandleresque detective story, with its tense visual style,demanded a suitably chilled-out sound track, and Mancini, who had scored Orson Welles’s
Touch of Evil
that same year, seemed to understand what this show was all about: style, and nothing much else in particular. “The
Miami Vice
of its time,” a friend of mine remarked. Craig Stevens as Gunn would cruise around a narcotized and vulgarly luxurious Los Angeles like Cary Grant on Miltown, doing his job of detection and occasionally alighting at Mother’s, a nightclub where his main squeeze, Edie, worked as a jazz singer. (The slow make-out scenes between Gunn and Edie, played by Lola Albright, seemed not to belong in the family room, and it was no cinch trying to conceal my erotic dithers from my parents.) Every so often, he’d check in with his pal Lieutenant Jacoby, the good cop. But Gunn may as well have been drifting through a landscape of boomerangs and parallelograms, so little did the plots matter. What counted was the sense that these people had been around the block a few times, had found a way to live amid the stultifying sleaziness of the modern world, keeping their emotions under control except for occasional spasms of sex and violence.
    Of course, these weren’t authentic hipsters, Mailer’s White Negroes or Kerouac’s Beats. Gunn, Edie and Jacoby were supposed to be more like pallies of Sinatra or James Bond, streetwise swingers: they were hip, but they could operate in the straight world with an existential efficiency. And yet, so strong was the pull toward an alternate way of life that, at least to a hyperaesthetic ten-year-old, the show’s whole gestalt made sense. It spoke to my condition. I could identify with Gunn’s outsider stance and admire his improvised lifestyle withoutventuring outside the perimeter of comfort and convenience my parents had provided. To the contrary, Edwards’s camera eye seemed to take a carnal interest in the luxe and leisure objects of the period, focusing on Scandinavian furniture, potted palms, light wood paneling and sleek shark-finned convertibles. It was, in fact, all the same stuff my parents adored, but darkened with a tablespoon of alienation and danger. Sort of like seeing a smiling Pan Am pilot