This great little article from Vertigo Magazine, a UK-based indie film thing, covers the work of Peter Whitehead, including a bit on Wholly Communion which features pop-poet-of-the-decade Allen Ginsberg at some point in 1965.
Wholly Communion (1965) is an exquisite document of the 11th June 1965, in equal parts both fantastical and shambolic that, if Whitehead hadn’t filmed it, no-one would have.
Captured in all its amateur glory, calamity strikes ten minutes in, when, stumbling with nerves, Harry Fainlight is heckled by a loveable idiot who repeats the words “love, love, love”, getting more applause than the act whilst the camera frantically searches for his close up. When order is restored by the intervening host, Fainlight, hilariously destabilised, digs himself into a deeper hole of humiliation by trying to redress the balance, and is ordered to just read the words. The ever roving lens is as interested in the pretty little polka dot mod girls holding flowers and sipping red wine as it is in the poets themselves. Adrian Mitchell redresses the balance with a poem about Vietnam. Smoking groupies, caught somewhere between beatniks and hippies, look on, wondering why they’re there. The native poets assemble for a penultimate performance of poems about sneezing, all trying to upstage each other, before headline act Ginsberg, like some demented, pot-bellied Christ, trounces them all.
With its spontaneous zooms, coarsely racked exposures and no time to check if there’s a hair in the gate, it is less of a conscious homage to the vérité experiments of Pennebaker and Shirley Clarke, whom the dedicated cinephile Whitehead must surely have been an admirer of, the style undoubtedly dictated by the shooting conditions – its freezes, cutaways and black frames more a necessity than a plan. Whitehead has subsequently pointed out that, the much debated segment of Gregory Corso, partially obscured and framed between the heads of two spectators, was, rather than premeditated mise-en-scene, a result of him being pushed to the floor by a horizontal Ginsberg so that he could see.
(full article)
Posted in Art, Opinion | No Comments »
(photo by Thomas Hawk)
Keeping in mind that this story isn’t exactly “news” anymore, I’m at peace with the fact that it’s still relevant and informative.
Weekend Edition Saturday, September 1, 2007 · Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road was published half a century ago, on Sept. 5, 1957. A seminal work of the Beat Generation, the book helped change both American culture and the literary world. It continues to have far-reaching influence.
NPR: ‘On the Road’ at 50 (download)
(via NPR)
Posted in Opinion | No Comments »
(photo by Frank W. McDarrah)
Clip Job, or daily excerpts from old issues of The Village Voice, remembers the Beat Generation with this piece written by Jerry Hopkins and originally published on January 28, 1959.
The beat smokes marijuana, chews piote, and drives a motorcycle because he wants to live by experience,” the speaker said. “The only way he can define himself in his society is through experience. This proves that he is alive.”
The speaker was David McReynolds, editorial secretary ofLiberation magazine and last November’s Socialist candidate in the 19th Congressional District. He was lecturing January 15 on “Politics and the Beat Generation” at Columbia University.
“The beats are looking for reality and want to relate themselves to it,” he continued. “They are looking for honesty and integrity. But they say: ‘What is the point of being a reasonable person in a world which could cease tomorrow?”
(full article)
Posted in Opinion | No Comments »
(photo by eyeneer)
All Things Considered, October 7, 2005 · Fifty years ago, poet Allen Ginsberg gave the first public reading of “Howl” at a gathering in San Francisco. It was a literary milestone: Many consider that night the birth of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg’s friend and fellow poet, Gary Snyder also read that night and recalls the event.
NPR: 50 Years of Howl (download)
(via NPR)
Posted in Opinion | No Comments »
Louis Menand reminisces about some of the Beat Generation’s heavier hitters fifty years after the original publication of On the Road:
“The social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang,” Allen Ginsberg once observed. It’s a sentiment that Frank Sinatra would have appreciated. The time of “Howl” and “On the Road” was also the time of “Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely” and the original “Ocean’s Eleven,” and although by many measures a taste for the product of North Beach is incompatible with a taste for the product of Las Vegas, the Beat Movement writers and the Rat Pack entertainers were shapers of a similar sensibility.
When “On the Road” came out, in September, 1957, it was praised in the New York Times as the novel of the Beat Generation, equivalent in stature and significance to “The Sun Also Rises,” the novel of the Lost Generation. The book was a best-seller, and it made Jack Kerouac, who had worked on it for ten years, a celebrity. It is sometimes said of Kerouac that fame killed him—that he was driven crazy by being continually addressed as the spokesman for a generation and by endless unwelcome requests to explain the meaning of the term “Beat.” Kerouac was certainly undone by something. After the success of “On the Road,” he continued to write at a manic pace, as he always had, but he became a suicidal alcoholic, and he died, of a hemorrhage caused by acute liver damage, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven. (He had by then written more than twenty-five books.) The notion of the Beat Generation was hardly thrust upon him, though.
(full article)
Posted in Opinion | No Comments »
