T 50


he ’50s were greeted as a period of American growth and prosperity. Following World War II, veterans embarked on a boom period of family growth, and with


that came a rather arrogant belief in the benevolence of modern American civilisation. There was, however, a contingent of the American population that viewed this so-called “good life” as not being very good at all. Socialist meetings, juvenile crime, sex magazines, opium dens and occultism were already a part of the anti-social fabric of the ’30s and ’40s. But by the mid-50s, Playboy magazine showed that sex in America could appeal to sophisticated people, The Civil Rights Movement in the South began to gain momentum, rock ’n’ roll music defined the “negro” appeal for the teenage market, and on the West Coast, a fully developed literary subculture had emerged in North Beach (San Francisco), as well as Venice Beach (near Los Angeles). Dubbed The Beat Generation, Allen J. Matusow described these artists in his book The Unraveling Of America:


“The beats possessed deviant tastes in language, literature, music, drugs and religion. Profoundly alienated from dominant American values, practicing voluntary poverty and spade cool, they rejected materialism, competition, the work ethic, hygiene, sexual repression, monogamy and the Faustian quest to subdue nature. There were, to be sure, never more than a few thousand fulltime beats, but thanks to the scandalised media, images of beat penetrated and disconcerted the middle classes.”


1957 was the year that Jack Kerouac’s On The Road was published, and The Beat Generation was enjoying a curious relationship with its own hype, proving once again that rebellion sells. It was into this environment that The Insomniac Café was birthed. Coffeehouse entrepreneur George Nikas remembers: “When I first opened The Rouge Et Noir [coffeehouse] in Seal Beach, it was ’57. At that time, the only coffeehouses here were The Venice West Café and The Bit Of Europe in Hollywood. In Seal Beach, there was nothing, except for this little place called The Argo Gallery on Main Street which


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