"No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown ... Therefore there has been great exaltation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide, secrecy, and public gaiety among the poets of the city."

How contemporary, how relevant. Except it was written by Allen Ginsberg in the Village Voice 50 years ago. The Ginsberg quote is cited in New York Magazine's feature, "1959: Sex, Jazz and Datsuns."

Being only 8 at the time, I wasn't purchasing Miles Davis' Kind of Blue or worried about Fidel or reading Lady Chatterly's Lover. But the story is an interesting look at a year in the life of our Boomer experience.