>Cool Beat

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[Allen Ginsberg – photo by Art Perry]

Ten years on from the publication of Lewis Macadams’ The Birth of Cool (a cultural history of the term), and over fifty years since the first publication of such seminal Beat texts as Alan Watts’ “Beat Zen, Square Zen, Zen” and Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro”, film-maker, Zen priest, and all-around agent provocateur Noah Buschel sets the cat among the pigeons with his little essay for Hammer to Nail on-line magazine, Obliterate the New Hipster. “True mavericks like Gary Snyder and Phil Whalen and Don Cherry”, he writes, “have been replaced by little bitchy passive aggressive children who cum on their canvases and have absolutely no idea who they are..”…”(the) Williamsburg vampire squad be damned”… “I believe”, he declares, “today’s hipsters have a shitload of talent and could do things no one else has ever done—if they just let down their board game guards for a minute”.

Beat and beatnik. Authenticity and pose. The reflecting surfaces seem never to have gone away. and Buschel – writer and director of the movie Cassady incidentally – if he does nothing else, opens up the always-necessary debate. The Beats are cool. Oh yeah? But what do we actually mean by cool?

At Montreal’s Galerie Rye (from April 1 to May 3) one attempt will be made to answer that question. Vancouver-based photographer Art Perry will be exhibiting – “HIP! – Portraits of Cool by Art Perry – forty years of counterculture icons” (his portrait of Allen shown above, is, naturally, a part of the show). There will be an artist talk on April 1st , followed by a reception, and, on Sunday, the 3rd, a multi-media presentation, “The Hip Aesthetic: Beats, Beatniks, Hipsters & Authentic Cool”. Would Noah Buschel approve? Would Lewis Macadams? What are the odds the great hipster, hip semanticist, Lord Buckley, gets evoked?

>Guru Blues

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Videoheads, an artist’s video collective, now based in Amsterdam, made several video recordings of Allen over the years, in London, Amsterdam, and Paris. This is a snippet from his performance (with Steven Taylor and Peter Orlovsky) at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1979. The spirited rendition of “Guru Blues” is introduced by, (unrelated) Allen, en francais, noting that the children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (Robert and Michael Meeropol) had written a book (We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1975)), about their experience growing up as the children of the famously executed pair. Dark Cold War secrets.

The version of “Guru Blues” is followed by a reading of the poem “On Neal’s Ashes”.

And here, by contrast, is the studio recording.

>Friday’s Weekly Round-Up 11

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[Allen Ginsberg & Neal Cassady, San Francisco 1955. Photo likely snapped by Natalie Jackson, Neal’s girlfriend at the time. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

Neal Cassady

It’s Neal Cassady celebration today, both in San Francisco (at the 6th Annual Birthday Bash at the Beat Museum), and in Denver (Neal’s hometown) at the Mercury Cafe. Al Hinkle (Big Ed Dunkel from On the Road) will be appearing at the San Francisco event, while Neal’s children, John Allen Cassady and Jami Cassady, along with special guest David Amram, will be celebrating their father’s birthday in Denver. The Denver Post has a useful piece on the unlikely local hero. And don’t forget to check out the Beat Generation/Neal Cassady pages at Tom Christopher.com, if you haven’t already, the Neal Cassady Estate, and, for a remarkable visual insight, Jerry Aronson’s rare archival footage of Allen and Neal at City Lights (from The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, also available here through our Streaming Video). Neal Leon Cassady was born February 8 1926 and died February 4 1968 at San Miguel de Allende,Mexico. We’ve spotlighted it before but Peter Ferry’s travel piece about hunting down the ghost of Cassady in that far-off spot is well worth perusing.

Allen Ginsberg photo by Richard Nagler (courtesy George Krevsky Gallery)

“Visual Poetics”

Richard Nagler’s remarkable book Word on the Street has been out a few months now and we’re only just now getting around to commenting on it. Allen was a huge fan of the work and was going to write the preface (as it was he provides a pleasingly accurate blurb – “Everyone of these picture poems brings to my mind a haiku”), Nagler explains:

After two successful books of photography in which I had worked with two extraordinary writers, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ishmael Reed, I thought the WORD photographs would benefit from a collaboration with an extraordinary poet. Allen Ginsberg immediately came to mind. It turned out I knew someone who knew someone who knew Ginsberg. It took two years of correspondence, but I finally got some pictures to Allen. He immediately grasped and “got” the pictures. As a poet and also as a photography-lover, he immediately agreed to write original poetry that would accompany the photographs. We met on several occasions in New York City and San Francisco to discuss the project, but in late 1996 I learned that he had just received a terrible medical diagnosis. He died just a few months later in April 1997. I was saddened and disappointed, but I did keep taking WORD images inspired by the word IMMORTAL in the window of City Lights Bookstore in a memorial to Allen’s passing. It was ten years later that I decided to try again to publish a book of this project.

The complete interview with Nagler can be read here

Further work by the artist can be viewed here

[Eric Drooker and Allen Ginsberg. c. Arne Svenson. for the back cover of Illuminated Poems]

Speaking of the San Francisco Bay Area (Nagler’s from the Bay Area) and Allen-sympatico artists, next Wednesday, February 9, don’t miss Eric Drooker’s free lecture at CounterPulse, Eric Drooker -The Art of Animating Howl – CounterPulse, a lively local performance space, is at 1310 Mission

And finally, Allen as artist himself, there’s an interesting post up on Dharma/Arte neatly titled “An Innocent Moment of Surprise”, about Allen’s signature “AH” doodle. That article sends you (as we do too) to the Museum of American Poetics’ extensive Drawings and Inscriptions Gallery for plenty more doodling (and we should also send you to the Gemini G.E.L site for even more sophisticated work – both sites can be accessed also via our “blogroll” on the right-hand side under the listing “Photography/Illustration”.

>Friday’s Weekly Round-Up 9

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Hommage to Allen in France

For those of you who might find yourself in Paris tonight! – Patti Smith salutes Allen, at La Salle Pleyel, part of a week-long engagement. She’ll be joined, as she has been on several previous such occasions, by Lenny Kaye and Philip Glass.

Their thoughts about the project and about Allen are usefully captured in a series of promotional shorts, shot in conjunction with a 2009 performance at Les Nuits de Fourviere, the festival at Lyon. Patti’s interview can be found here, Lenny Kaye’s here and Philip’s below.

Mention should also perhaps be made of their beautiful evocation of “On The Cremation of Chogyam Trungpa” (taken here from Steven Sebring’s film, Patti Smith: Dream of Life)

Carolyn Cassady

Neal Cassady: Drug Taker, Bigamist. Family Man. Lauren Cochrane’s recent article/interview with Carolyn Cassady, wherein she “explodes a few myths” (and perhaps creates a few more?) is certainly worth reading. It can be found here. Allen’s youthful self-doubt is recalled, rather unflatteringly, it has to be said, by the 87-year-old Cassady:

“Why this sudden interest in Ginsberg?.. I met him when he was 20. He had never got over feeling he was worthless. He’d go out and try to find a job, and he’d come back and he’d say, ‘I’m never gonna amount to anything. I just can’t do anything. Even my finger’s the wrong size”. He’d tried some assembly line or something.”

With a sigh, she says she remembers him as a “poor dear”.

Another recent interview with Carolyn Cassady can be found here

“As she’s telling me about a froideur that grew up between her and Ginsberg she breaks into a typical anecdote…”

Cassady has of course spoken previously of her “difficulties” with Allen. Interviewed here by the website American Legends (on Neal and Allen), and, more extensively, by Victoria Mixon

and yet another Cassady interview can be found here

Allen in Czechoslovakia

Our good friend Josef Rauvolf has passed onto us this link to a recording of Allen performing in April 1990 in Czechoslovakia with the legendary rock band Pulnoc (Midnight), one of the later manifestations of the jailed and persecuted Plastic People of the Universe. (Joseph Yanosik’s account of both the band and its centrality to Czech cultural history is essential reading and can be found here):

“Pulnoc recorded and released their self-titled debut album in Czechoslovakia in 1990. On June 15 1990 when the original Velvet Underground reunited for the first time in Paris for the opening of an Andy Warhol exhibition for the Cartier Foundation, Pulnoc opened for them. The band recorded and released a second album, “City of Hysteria” (featuring liner notes by Vaclav Havel and a new song by Egon Bondy), in the United States in 1991. A year later, Milan Hlavsa (the band’s founding member) published a book in Czechoslovakia telling the story of the Plastics entitled “Bez Ohnu Je Underground”, which coincided with the release of a multi-album box-set of the complete recordings of the Plastic People..”

Josef Rauvolf provides the more immediate context:

The Czech band Půlnoc (Midnight) recently released a live recording of their song Magické noci (Magical Nights) with Allen and Anne Waldman singing and chanting (Allen improvises an early version of “Birdbrain”, he and Anne swap chants). The gig took place in České Budějovice (in the South Bohemian region) when the gang went to see the Temelín nuclear plant. Download it here or buy the complete CD here.

Parody

And to end on a bizarre note – Howl parodies, we’re always tickled by them here.

See Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Shlain’s Yelp, even Oyl Miller’s tongue-in-cheek Tweet – now this from rabidly homophobic anti-gay activist Peter LaBarbara (founder of the sorely mis-titled Americans For Truth).

It’s a satire but we confess for a while there there we were fooled!

>Time for some serious errata: 1963 Neal Cassady photos & Charles Plymell

>We’ve had a few shots of Neal Cassady on the Ginsberg.org website for quite some time with missing details and in some cases flat out wrong information. Not quite sure how we’d had it wrong after all these years, and why Allen hadn’t kept more detailed info on that historic roll of film. At any rate, Charles Plymell took notice, and a good thing too, as he was there when they were shot, and in a few cases even took the photos himself with Allen’s camera. Here some fantastic detailed background to these historic shots from the Summer of 1963.

Neal Cassady sitting in chair at Karen Sexton’s house after arriving in Bolinas with Charles Plymell and Allen. According to Plymell, “Neal had spotted a copy of a Kerouac book and began reading his ‘parts’ to everyone.” Charles may have taken this one, as he’s thinking Allen had stepped outside while Neal was reading. Summer 1963. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate.

Neal Cassady outside Charles Plymell’s 1403 Gough Street house where Allen had met Peter 9 years earlier when Robert LaVigne lived there. According to Plymell, the other people in the photo were a “Hollywood filmmaker & cronies who came to Gough St. to visit.” c. Allen Ginsberg Estate

Neal Cassady and his girlfriend at the time Ann Murphy. Referring to this image, as well as another on that same roll which unfortunately we don’t have on hand, where Neal is looking toward the backseat, Charles Plymell writes:

“I thought for a while the famous headliner photo with Neal and Ann in front seat was mine, because Allen sat in the back behind Ann and the photo is almost in front with Neal turning completely around facing us. I know I told Allen to get the shot of headliner, or I would, but maybe he did. The car was a 39 Pontiac and Neal was speeding and Allen was telling him to slow down especially around curves where we were thrown into each other in back seat. Neal got mad at Allen telling him to slow down because it interfered with his arguing and slapping Ann when he had his hands free. He said the brakes were out anyway and speeded up using the hand brake and gear shift on floor to gear down on the steep hills while manhandling Ann in their eternal argument about who was fucking whom and scoring pills from her Dr. connection, so he sped up on purpose.”

“When we stopped at a convenience store, I asked Allen to borrow his camera to take this shot as if nothing had happened and we went for a roller coaster ride. Neal was all smiles and otherwise had a nice time lying on the hills overlooking the shore at Bolinas. Allen was still in his Whitmanesque/India mode then.” Photo & Caption: Charles Plymell

>Village Voice Clip Job: Allen Ginsberg Explains Timonthy Leary

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[Timothy Leary psychedelic research pioneer and Neal Cassady first meeting at Millbrook N.Y. in Ken Kesey-Merry Pranksters’ “Further” bus which Neal’d driven crosscountry S.F. to N.Y. via Texas before Fall 1964 presidentiad, with “”A vote For Goldwater is a Vote for Fun”” logo painted large across bus side, L.S.D. cool-aid pitcher in icebox. Neal scratching amphetamine itch in his driver’s palm. (Ginsberg Caption) photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate. licensing via Corbis]


Another great one from the Village Voice ‘Clip Jobs’ series:

Clip Job: an excerpt every day from the Voice archives.
December 12, 1968, Vol. XIV, No. 9

[This essay was subsequently published in Allen Ginsberg’s Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan]

Remarks on Leary’s Politics of Ecstasy
by Allen Ginsberg

By the late ’40s of this memory Century the people I knew best and loved the most had already broken through the crust of old Reason & were dowsing for some Supreme Reality, Christmas on Earth Rimbaud said, Second Religiousness according to Spengler’s outline of civilization declining through proliferation of non-human therefore boring technology; Blake had called “O Earth O Earth return!” centuries before, echoing the ancient gnostic prophecy that Whitman spelled out for America specifically demanding that the Steam-engine “be confronted and met by at least equally subtle and tremendous force-infusion for purposes of spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for genuine aesthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and womanliness –” Ezra Pound’s mind jumped to diagnose the dimming of the world’s third Eye: “With Usura the line grows thick.” Continue >>

>Tracing Neal Casady’s last footsteps in San Miguel de Allende

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[San Miguel de Allende (Eneas via Flickr, Creative Commons]

Neal Cassady died in the middle of the night alongside the railroad tracks on the outskirts of San Miguel de Allende after leaving a party. It’s been said that he died of exposure, but the cause of death was never quite determined. Here’s a fun read by Novelist Peter Ferry exploring Neal Cassady’s connection with that central Mexican town long after he passed away.

Searching for Neal Cassady in San Miguel de Allende

Travel Stories: Novelist Peter Ferry hunts down the ghost of the beatnik legend who inspired Kerouac, Ginsberg and so many others.

When I first get here, the only thing I know with certainty about Neal Cassady’s time in San Miguel de Allende is that he died ignominiously just outside of town in 1968. And although that tie is admittedly tenuous, it’s curious to me that people in this artists’ colony who are surely used to outcasts and iconoclasts seem reluctant to claim him. At least at first. Read full story >>

>Interview with Carolyn Cassady

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Thanks to Steve Silberman for catching this unpublished interview by Barnaby Smith, conducted almost three years ago in anticipation of the new edition of Carolyn’s memoirs, Off The Road: Twenty Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. Smith was never able to find a home for the interview and so’s posted it on his blog Bunyip Voodoo:

Last One Standing: Carolyn Cassady Interviewed

“Once every so often something genuinely worthwhile graces these pages, and this is one of them.

Around two-and-a-half years ago I was sent a press release by publishers Black Spring Press, announcing that Carolyn Cassady was re-surfacing from rural Berkshire to promote the new edition of her memoirs, Off The Road: Twenty Years With Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. I asked for an interview, got it, then could find no publications willing to take the feature, for lots of different reasons. In my chaotic life back then I subsequently seemed to lose the confounded interview transcript, only for it to turn up again recently. Here below, therefore, is an edited presentation of the interview. Read interview >>

>Kral Majales

>Allen reading “Kral Majales” at City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, probably early 1966. Neal Cassady sitting by his side. Jerry Aronson had compiled sections of this film for inclusion on his Life & Times of Allen Ginsberg documentary, unfortunately now out of circulation since it’s distributor went belly up earlier this year.