Pause for the Beats

According to the San Francisco Chronicle (link via Bookslut), today is the 50th anniversary of the beat movement, or more specifically, the first performance of "Howl". When a drunk Allen Ginsberg took to the stage and catapulted an entire generation into a frenzy with his lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked...

Imagine what it would have been like to be there, dressed in black, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, hearing Kerouac egg him on, and then hitting on some wonderful blonde woman whose grooving and digging it and thinking about changing the world and loving them and wanting to go home with them and taking a trip, hopping a freight car, sleeping with Henry Miller in Big Sur and then collapsing from laughter after remembering it all only to start from the beginning again.