THE BEATS AND HARDY

by Don Ed Hardy

I grew up in a small, ultra-conservative Orange County beach town and was determined to be an artist from a very early age. In my early teens I began to be aware of other cultural currents beyond my home context. These were most dramatically embodied by Beat culture. A few coffee houses existed in adjacent communities and in one, I bought a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl , Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind, and Corso’s Bomb—the latter a long vertical broadsheet with the poem typeset in the shape of a mushroom cloud. These made me realize the revolutionary power of the “beatniks” who were currently being lampooned in populist American media and consciousness.

The soundtrack for this was cool West Coast jazz. About 1959-60 my friends and I discovered Sketches of Spain, Mulligan Meets Monk, and Kenneth Patchen reading to a chamber jazz ensemble accompaniment. I also began to be aware of 20th century art history and visited galleries and museums in L.A. Work from both L.A. and San Francisco by people loosely affiliated with the Beat movement made a huge impression, and I was very conscious of S.F. as a center of Beat culture via City Lights Books, etc. Finishing high school, I became serious about developing my art and in 1962, visited S.F. for the first time to stay with friends attending the S.F. Art Institute. That brief trip was a revelation and I knew San Francisco was the place to be, an escape from small-town SoCal mentality. That same year, Naked Lunch was published. Burroughs’ obsessions with social control mechanisms and surreal black humor were a revelation, and I devoured all his other works over the next few years. His stance of being an anonymous observant outsider, moving through various levels of society, strongly influenced my life’s course when leaving academia.

Beat culture’s embrace of Asian philosophy and aesthetics resonated strongly with me and I began to learn more about that from my mentors at SFAI. When I began learning to tattoo, as I finished my undergraduate studies, the Japanese tradition of the (then) little-known art form was the model I followed and wanted to adapt to the folk art of tattooing in America. I had a strong connection with Japan from a very early age, when my father worked for the Occupation in Tokyo and sent home countless souvenirs from that mysterious land. My obsession with tattooing started a few years later, at the age of ten. As my life progressed, all the threads tied together: living and working in Japan, transforming tattooing as a medium, and being San Francisco-centric for the majority of my adult life.

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