Anton Rosenberg is known as a forerunner to all of the pervasive modern culture. Because he was hip or cool, he was known best in doing nothing.
Rosenberg also was a student of inaction and detachment and was the embodiment of beat movements ideal of the hipster and was also the model as Julian Alexander in the novel of The Subterraneans (1958) by Jack Kerouac’s.
Another thing is that he was also a painter and he also played the piano with Charlie Parker, Zoot Sims and other popular jazz figures in that time. Another thing is that he remained to be an obscure figure on the beat movement because he was able to find his calling early.
Kerouac recognized Rosenberg as well during his twenties to be unshaven, quiet, thin and likewise a strange young man who have good looks and he was likewise an epitome of aesthetic who deride ambition and also avoided enthusiasm. He also adopted Ginsberg’s title in his book, but then he moved to another location to San Francisco for him to avoid risks of libel by the Greenwich Village regulars who placed on the pages on some fictitious names. This would be the reason why Rosenberg became Julian Alexander who is known as a man who Kerouac called to as “the angel of subterraneans”.
Rosenberg also served a year in the Army and he likewise studied at the University of North Carolina. He spent a year in Paris after being discovered by Ginsberg to where he go to experience the Left Bank bohemian atmosphere of Cafe Flore as well as Cafe Les Deux Magots together with James Baldwin, Terry Southern as well as other figures that engage on the process of perfecting the attitudes and the inflections of cool.
Back in 1950, he went back to New York. He then opened a print shop in Greenwich Village and had lived in a tenement called the Paradise Valley and an industrial loft which was located in a bad neighborhood before this became fashionable.
Drugs were actually the stable of the scene and in one occasion, Rosenberg as well as his friends in San Remo bar had intercepted a shipment of the Hallucinogen peyote coming from Exotic Plant Co of Laredo in Texas and congregated in his loft in an all-night party and jazz jam session. But when marijuana was common to hipsters, it was the opiates which set the subterraneans apart. Rosenberg also became a heroin addict for most of his life and appeared in the book of William Burrough in Junke (1953).
Due to the reason that his habits did not lead him toward a better and productive life, he later on got married with a schoolteacher who was charmed by how he supports his family and still continue painting and playing music.
If You Think You Understand Culture, Then This Might Change Your Mind