Wednesday Jun 12, 2024
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
Set against the backdrop of a generation awakening from its countercultural dreams to the realities of a materialistic society, WannaBeat (subtitled Hanging Out … and Hanging on … in Baby Beat San Francisco) is an incisive and provocative story about yearning for authenticity in the face of an increasingly artificial reality.
Living in San Francisco in the late 1970s, Philip Polarov is a writer scraping by on a series of odd jobs while attempting to turn his self-described “stream of drivel” into an Important Novel. As the last soldiers of the Beat Generation become ghosts in the North Beach neighborhood they put on the map and the Baby Beats, a new clique of their acolytes, take over the bars and coffeehouses, Philip searches for meaning, sex, drugs … and an affordable place to crash.
Clinging to his idealism in a world of upward mobility and status seeking while worrying about his accomplished brother’s life-threatening illness, Philip scribbles his way across San Francisco bohemia in search of collaborators in a new Beat movement as he tries to win the heart of the cocaine-fueled hostess at the trendy restaurant where he is a dishwasher. Failing that, Philip throws himself into the SF punk rock scene, joining the crowds pogoing at the Mabuhay and befriending some of the infamous bands that play there.
Yet even this newfound comradeship in rebelliousness cannot thwart his economic reality: on the verge of eviction from his writer’s garret, Philip must decide if his struggle to “resist the system” is a heroic quest … or a ruse to avoid facing his inescapable place within it.
About the Author.
David Polonoff is a writer and chronicler of bohemia, having participated in most of the countercultural movements of the last50years, from Haight-Ashbury to Punk to Dimes Square, while earning degrees in philosophy from Yale and NYU. His satirical writing on culture and politics appeared regularly in the Village Voice ,East Village Eye and New York Newsday in the 1980s/early’90s and was later collected in the book Down the Yup Staircase. He blogged for many years about dotcom and IT culture, while working as a quality assurance engineer, designing test suites for financial systems. In 2014 he started the YouTube channel Big Bad Boris, writing and performing in comedy videos that garnered over 100k views. Born in New Haven, Connecticut and spending his formative years in Portland and San Francisco, he is adept in the culture of both coasts, though he currently prefers to live in New York. WannaBeat is his first novel.