November 10, 1995

TO paraphrase William S. Burroughs, it was the movement that launched a million Gaps. The beats are cool again, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, an institution that is forever surfing the nation's Zeitgeist, has caught the latest wave. "Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965" is a tribute to the days before Starbucks, when cats and chicks wore black turtlenecks and sandals, drank espresso and read confessional poetry by the light of candles stuck in Chianti bottles. It has been 50 years since Jack Kerouac met Allen Ginsberg, and 40 since Mr. Ginsberg read "Howl" to a cheering, wine-drinking crowd at the 6 Gallery in San Francisco. A couple of years later, "On the Road" was a pop sensation, and one generation after another since then has rediscovered the beats for itself.

Mexico's central bank stepped in today to stop the plunge of the peso, signaling that it would not allow a speculative frenzy to erode the currency further. Officials confirmed that the bank had made a peso purchase in the final hour of trading, but did not specify the amount. Traders estimated its value at $200 million, large enough to halt the peso's downward momentum and to turn it around, amid very low volume on the market. The central bank intervened after the peso plunged early in the session below 8 to the dollar, another record low and a psychological threshold.

In tiny White Hall, Ala. (pop. 814), Mayor John Jackson printed $45.9 billion in bogus municipal bonds, intending, the Securities and Exchange Commission says, to line his own pockets. Mr. Jackson is now facing securities fraud charges in Federal court. In Oklahoma, Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, a Midwestern regional broker, just paid $1.4 million to settle S.E.C. charges that three of its employees were involved in a scheme in which millions of dollars flowed to Stifel from brokers wanting a piece of lucrative municipal-finance deals.

THE plan was impeccable. On a weekend in late October, my wife and I would spend a weekend in tony Litchfield County in Connecticut, where the country homes of the rich and powerful sit alongside apple orchards on tree-lined country roads. It's a place where overt ostentation is just not done; the esthetic calls for old-money understatement and decorum. Litchfield County offers a storybook New England countryside of rolling hills and white frame houses, green-gray brooks and old stone walls, all of it preserved through assiduous zoning. For a weekend, we would live like the landed gentry, staying at the Boulders Inn, a country lodge on Lake Waramaug in New Preston. According to plan, we'd make the 95-mile trip to the town of Litchfield. We would revisit its boulevard (Route 63 North) of stately white New England mansions and its fastidious green. Then we'd settle in at the Boulders. Perhaps we'd take one of the inn's canoes out for a paddle on the lake; perhaps we'd stroll the private trail up Pinnacle Mountain.

Moving to counter growing dissatisfaction with the legal profession, a committee assembled by New York State's highest court recommended major changes yesterday to improve lawyers' treatment of their clients and subject their behavior to closer public scrutiny. Key proposals by the Committee on the Profession and the Courts were aimed at holding New York lawyers more accountable to clients, by subjecting fee disputes to binding arbitration and by opening up some long-secret disciplinary hearings.