Ned Buskirk says, “I thought you could help spread the word for this guy and help corral some support for the good work he’s doing in the Beat world.”

Here I go – begging for money. Please help in any way you can.

Folks – three years ago The Beat Museum opened its doors at the beginning of probably the worst economic time in most of our lives. We’ve been able to hang on by our fingernails – barely.  And I’ll admit to you it has not been easy.  In fact, truth be told, there have been a few occasions when money was so tight I came very close to simply shutting the doors and walking away.

And frankly, the reason I haven’t done it is because every other day it seems I have someone say to me – “Thank you for doing this.  Thank you for keeping this spirit alive.” And I’ll admit that kind of feedback buoys me. But it doesn’t pay any of  the many overdue bills and it doesn’t keep our creditors from calling demanding payment.

So, I’m turning to you – the core group of people who have helped make The Beat Museum possible from the very beginning. I’m asking for your immediate financial assistance to help us get through the next few months until the tourists start to return to San Francisco in the Spring.

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

1). DO YOUR CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY SHOPPING AT KEROUAC.COM
Even if you’re scaling back for Christmas, you’re still probably going to be buying some gifts for friends and family – do it at Kerouac.com. I know you may be tempted to buy from Amazon or some other discounter to save some money, but I’d ask you to remember that Amazon does not have a Beat Museum for you to come visit the next time you’re in San Francisco.

And if you’re a student, ask your parents to check out our new Stocking Stuffers on the front page of Kerouac.com. Parents LOVE to buy books and educational stuff for their kids – it makes them feel they’re raising you right!

2). MAKE A TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION TO OUR NON-PROFIT PUBLIC CHARITY
You may or may not be aware that we have our own non-profit organization that supports The Beat Museum called The Foundation for Creative Expression (FFCE.org). The sole mission of this non-profit is to support various projects and programs of The Beat Museum. Every time we have an event, the non-profit sponsors it financially and every time we build a new exhibit the FFCE accepts donations and transfers it to The Beat Museum.

If you’re one of the fortunate ones who could use a tax deduction this year, why not make the choice to give a tax-deductible donation to The Foundation for Creative Expression. And if you work for a major corporation they’ll often match that donation to a 501(C)3 public charity (which is what FFCE is). Our IRS tax ID is 74-3198671. You can write a check, use a credit card or even Paypal. You can even do it by phone by calling 1-800-KER-OUAC.

THREE WAYS TO DONATE TO THE FFCE.org

A).  WRITE A CHECK to the FFCE and mail to:

The Foundation for Creative Expression
540 Broadway
San Francisco, CA  94133

B).   CALL WITH A CREDIT CARD to The Beat Museum at 415-399-9626 or 1-800-KER-OUAC to make a credit card donation.  Please call between the hours of 10 AM and 7 PM Pacific Time and have you’re credit card handy.

C).  DONATE VIA PAYPAL You can make a donation to FFCE or learn more at  http://ffce.org/donate.html.

3). PASS THE WORD

Even if YOU can’t do any of the above, please spread the word by asking your family and friends to either make a donation to the FFCE or make a purchase from Kerouac.com. It’s crunch time, folks, and the bottom line is The Beat Museum can only continue to spread the Spirit of The Beats if we’re in a financial position to do so. We’re all making some tough choices these days, but we ARE still making choices. Please do what you can.

Thanks!

Jerry Cimino
The Beat Museum
540 Broadway (at Columbus)
San Francisco, CA 94133
1-800-KER-OUAC
www.kerouac.com

There’s news floating all around the Internet that Kill Your Darlings, a film about Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the beginning of the Beat Generation, is finally coming together.

It sems like Ginsberg will be played by Jesse Eisenberg, Kerouac by Chris Evans and Carr by Ben Whishaw. The strangest part, though, is that not one of these sources even mentions David Kammerer. Kammerer, of course, was killed by Lucien Carr and would ostensibly have a part in a film that uses his death as its jumping-off point.

Jesse Eisenberg will play poet Allen Ginsberg in “Kill Your Darlings,” an ensemble about the murder that helped spawn the Beat Generation.Chris Evans and Ben Whishaw will also star in the pic, which is helmed by tyro John Krokidas, who penned the script with his onetime Yale roommate Austin Bunn.

Whishaw will play Lucien Carr, the Columbia U. undergrad who brought together Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac (Evans) and William S. Burroughs.

Maybe the part of David Kammerer just hasn’t been filled yet.

Eisenberg to star in Ginsberg film [Variety]

Denis Berry, Trustee of Timothy Leary’s estate, is seeking donations to help with the digitalization of his archives, which could turn out to be great for the future.

We need a significant amount of money to digitize the entire archive. This includes paying for the digitization of the photos, videos, audio, and documents, and also paying staff to research and add the proper metadata to the collection, so it can be searched and accessed for research purposes. (This is a huge task. Remember there are 500,000 documents alone.) 

If you would like to help preserve one of the most controversial periods in recent history and make it available to the public, please donate now!

Send donations by mail to:

The Futique Trust

PO Box 3561

Santa Cruz, CA 95063

For further information on how you may participate or to do an e-bank check, or money transfer contact Denis Berry at 831-566-0325 or by e-mail at denis@timothyleary.org.

Donate to the Timothy Leary Archives [Timothy Leary Estate]

Over at the Irish TImes, they’re talking about Kerouac and the genesis of the story:

The extended circle of friends also included Burroughs, a 30-year-old Harvard graduate who lived in Greenwich Village, and David Kammerer, a homosexual book editor who had developed a fixation on Carr and followed him to New York.

In August of 1944, following an evening of drinking in Riverside Park, Carr stabbed Kammerer in the chest with a pocket knife. Believing him dead, he tied his arms together with shoelaces and rolled him into the Hudson River, where, an autopsy subsequently confirmed, he drowned.

Carr eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter. (Kerouac, to whom he had confessed the crime, was briefly jailed as an accomplice.) The salacious details of “the Columbia murder” remained on the front pages of the New York tabloids for weeks, and proved the fodder for a fictional treatment by two unpublished authors.

Alternating chapters, Kerouac and Burroughs produced And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which made the rounds of publishing houses in 1945 and was summarily rejected at each stop. (The title reflected Burroughs’s amused reaction to a radio report of a circus fire.) “It wasn’t a very good piece of work,” Burroughs would later candidly admit. “No publisher was interested, and in hindsight, I don’t see why they should have been.”

Whereas Barbara Hoffert of The Phoenix gave it only a semi-blurbial, cursory mention:

Speaking of fictionalized lives: who knew that WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS and JACK KEROUAC got together to re-create friend Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer? The novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Grove; November 1), is appearing only now.

Myself?  I’ve always been partial to the excerpts that were published in Word Virus.

You can add Alan Alda, Jeff Daniels and Mary Louise Parker to the list of actors and actresses that will be appearing in the upcoming movie version of Howl. As previously expected, James Franco will be playing Ginsberg. The film, which will cover the obscenity trials that surrounded the poem at the time of its publication, will be directed by Gus Van Sant after all.

This is starting to sound promising in all the right ways. More on this film as it develops.

Full story over at CBC News.

Related:

• Howl under development, obscenity imminent

(photo by Thomas Hawk)

This must be the week for the movies. The Independent is reporting that On the Road may finally—after more than fifty years—see its coming of age to the big screen as early as sometime next year. And who’s behind it? Walter Salles, who directed The Motorcycle Diaries and who seems quialified, and Francis Ford Coppola, who has seen this project die in his arms more than a few times over the last thirty years.

For now, I’m leaning towards this one having a decent (at least) shot at being successful. It seems to me that everyone involved with the project has done his homework, potentially working to create something that we’ll all like and—more importantly—approve of.

From The Independent:

It’s a considerable irony that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks: its screen adaptation has been almost 30 years in the works. Rather at odds with Kerouac’s so-called “spontaneous prose” style, attempts to film this defining novel of the Beat Generation have been mired in development hell ever since Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights in 1979. Since then, the book that William Burroughs said “sent countless kids on the road” has been left stranded at the side of Hollywood’s highway. Still, with a tentative release date of 2009, it finally seems that 52 years after its publication, On the Road , the movie, will finally be motoring.

For the past three years, the Brazilian-born Walter Salles, whose new film, Linha de Passe, is released this month, has been working on a version that he hopes to “be shooting either at the end of this year or the beginning of the next”. But will it happen? The story of two drifters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty – thinly veiled portrayals of the author and his friend, Beat icon Neal Cassady – Kerouac’s episodic account of his seven-year span of road trips across America has defied attempts to bring it to the big screen. “It doesn’t have a plot,” says poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “It was a road novel – a picaresque, like Don Quixote.”

(photo by jurek d.)

I’m personally on the fence about whether or not anyone will ever try to make another movie about the Beat Generation. But today two blogs are reporting that Howl, a movie about the life and obscene times of Allen Ginsberg, is currently underway.

From the Orlando Sentinel:

Howl won’t really be “about” the classic Allen Ginsberg poem, but a bio-pic of Ginsberg himself, the obscenity trial that the poem and poet were subjected to, and that whole Beat Generation milieu. James Franco is slated to star as Ginsberg (a bold choice, but a savvy one), with Mary-Louise Parker, Alan Alda, Paul Rudd, David Strathairn and Jeff Daniels on board. If they’re not “the best minds of my generation,” they’re close.

Gus Van Sant will produce, with a couple of documentarians currently on tap to direct the film about the 50 year old poem that sort of launched the 1960s.

Jeff Daniels and Gus Van Sant, really? I just don’t think so.

Devin Faraci, over at Chud, is reporting similar news:

Howl started life when the Allen Ginsberg Trust approached Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, directors of the documentary The Celluloid Closet, to make a film honoring the poem’s fiftieth birthday. This will be their first narrative feature.

So if the movie is about the trail surrounding Ginsberg’s obscenity charges, what about the poem itself? In a cool move, the filmmakers have hired Eric Drooker (who has illustrated Ginsberg poems before. He also designed the cover of Faith No More’s King For a Day… Fool For a Lifetime and got some acclaim with his wordless graphic novel FLOOD! A Novel In Pictures) to create an animated interpretation of the poem.

For my money this is the kind of movie news people should be getting excited about, not the most insane rumors of who will play Captain America.

He seems to have the idea that Howl will focus more on the obscenity trials surrounding the poem. And if so, I think that there is something—enough, at least—to make a decent movie out of. But maybe I’m just keeping my fingers crossed and being blindly optimistic.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

From Time:

Oregon State Hospital, the mental institution where the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed, is making way for a new complex. Most of the dilapidated, 125-year-old main building will be torn down and replaced starting this fall.

Although mean Nurse Ratched was pure fiction, the Oregon State Hospital has struggled with some very real troubles over the years, including overcrowding, crumbling floors and ceilings, outbreaks of scabies and stomach flu, sexual abuse of children by staff members, and patient-on-patient assaults.

Politicians had been talking for years about the need to replace the hospital, but didn’t get serious about it until a group of legislators made a grim discovery during a 2004 tour: the cremated remains of 3,600 mental patients in corroding copper canisters in a storage room. The lawmakers were stunned.

“Nobody said anything to anybody,” said Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, who dubbed the chamber “the room of lost souls.”

(full article)

Prolific Beat era artist Bruce Conner dies Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Bruce Conner, a San Francisco artist renowned for working fluently across media, died at his home of natural causes on Monday. He was 74.

Mr. Conner was one of the last survivors of the Bay Area Beat era art scene that included Jay DeFeo (1929-1989), Wallace Berman (1926-1976), and Wally Hedrick (1928-2003).

“We were all anonymous artists here in the ’50s,” Mr. Conner told The Chronicle in 2000, shortly before the opening of his retrospective “2000: BC The Bruce Conner Story, Part II,” at the de Young Museum.

Despite an enviably long record of gallery and museum exhibitions, Mr. Conner met with little recognition outside the worlds of contemporary art and independent film.

Born in McPherson, Kan., in 1933, Mr. Conner arrived in San Francisco in 1957. Schooled in art at Wichita University, the University of Nebraska and Brooklyn Art School, Mr. Conner first got noticed for the short films he assembled from scavenged documentary and B-movie footage. Several of his films, including “A Movie” (1958), a sort of paean to human failure, and “Crossroads” (1977), are regarded as classics of independent filmmaking, even though Mr. Conner shot no original footage for them.

“Crossroads” replays, at ever slower speeds, official footage of a hydrogen bomb detonation on Bikini Atoll, until repetition – 27 times – and slow motion transfigure its colossal destructiveness into something hypnotically beautiful.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Conner made grotesque assemblages out of common household objects that ridicule consumer society’s attachment to personal possession, including more precious sorts of artwork. They remain some of the most powerful inventions of their kind in American art.

He went on to make obsessively detailed abstract drawings, large-scale photograms (with the help of Edmund Shea) in which his figure appears made of light, and collages of old wood engravings in the manner of Surrealist Max Ernst.

Mr. Conner never stayed with one medium for long, resisting the art world’s inclination to identify every artist with a style and a biographical myth.

Asked once by a critic to mention some artists who influenced him, Mr. Conner said, “I typed out about 250 names,” and instructed the writer to add that “limited space prevents us from printing the remaining 50,003 names on Mr. Conner’s list of influences.”

Mr. Conner announced his own death erroneously on two occasions, once sending an obituary to a national art magazine, and later writing a self-description for the biographical encyclopedia Who Was Who in America.

Mr. Conner is survived by Jean Conner, his wife of more than 50 years, and a son, Robert.

No memorial event is planned as yet.