Space—like the final frontier, man.
These are the voyages of the hip Starship Enterprise.
Captain. Permission to beam Lawrence Ferlinghetti aboard.
Permission, like, granted.
Where we headed, man?
Dude, like, the planet Bongo.
They were the lonely voices of dissent in the 1950's—outsiders, and proud of it.
They were the artists who called themselves 'beats'.
[Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live in 1976] "Hear the sound—hear the sound! Zoom, ZOOM, ZOOOM!"
"oh... ZOOM!"
"ZOOM! ZOOM!"
"Bomb shelter! Sputnik! H-bomb! Explosion, explosion, explosion! BANG!"
There's been a revival of interest in the beat generation—poetry readings are back, being performed at coffeehouses straight out of the fifties.
Even MTV now has poetry programs that would make Jack Kerouac proud.
I feel all dead inside—backed up in a dark corner, and I don't know who's hitting me.
"Shorty! Shorty, get me that fight from Quinn—I want money, do you understand? Money, money!"
"I forbid, I forbid. Better buy a gun and shoot yourself." "You need MONEY to buy a gun!"
It's my first day in school, some kids got around me, white kids, they said, "Hey, hey you, is your father a monkey?"
I was dumb, I smiled and said no. Well, they wiped that smile right off my face—they beat it off. I had to get beat up a couple of more times before I found out that if you're "colored", you stink.
In the forties, the bomb dropped. The entire planet was threatened biologically.
It was suddenly the realization—why are we being intimidated by a bunch of jerks who don't know anything about life?
Who are they to tell us what we feel and how we're supposed to behave, and why take all that bullshit?