1. The Literary Kicks Summer Poetry Happening at the Bitter End in New York City turned out to be an amazing night — read all about it and check out some pictures here.
Also, Bob Holman was nice enough to remember the event by putting up the words spoken by Charles Plymell here.
2. Speaking of the Bitter End event (no, I can’t seem to stop speaking of it), one of the reasons I’d thought to invite Lee
Ranaldo to participate in it was that he’s been working with Jim Sampas and Rykodisc to collect some of Jack Kerouac’s best unreleased recordings onto a CD. The CD is a revelatory collection that anybody who is interested in understanding Kerouac will want to hear. While Kerouac’s existing poetry albums are sometimes hard to listen to (I always found them somewhat stiff and difficult to enjoy compared to his written work), these newfound recordings of Jack’s are charming, musically adventurous and surprisingly
satisfying. Highlights include a plaintive version of the pop standard ‘Rain or Shine’, some complex verbal blues choruses set to music by David Amram, a 28-minute prose reading from ‘On The Road’ and, to top it all off, a rocker by Tom Waits with
Primus (yeah!). This CD will be released in early September.
3. ‘The Source‘, a well-researched and intelligent new documentary full-length film about the origins of the Beat Generation and its main players, is coming out in a couple of weeks. Directed by
Chuck Workman (who also directed a movie about the Andy Warhol scene, ‘Superstar‘), the film focuses heavily on Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, and tries hard to fairly represent many other writers. It adds up to an informative and breezily entertaining introduction to this literary movement. Among the good points: the facts are accurate (though the chronology gets confused), and there are no boring talking-head shots of men in sweaters sitting in front of bookcases (thank God). At the same time I didn’t find the film completely different enough — much of the footage was familiar, and the summary style was pretty much the same as that of all those $35 coffeetable books about the Beat Generation that keep popping up in bookstores, whereas I wished to be taken somewhere new, to see some challenging connections made, either politically, spiritually, aesthetically or in any other way. A captivating filmed scene of actor John Turturro
screaming the hell out of the great poem ‘Howl‘ in an urban schoolyard is probably as “out there” as the movie ever gets, and this was for me the most memorable moment in the film. But even if ‘The Source’ sticks basically to the middle of the road, the movie is well worth watching, and nobody will regret the time spent soaking in the familiar footage of our lovable literary stooges, one more time.
4. And one lovable literary stooge who never played it safe was underground poet d. a. levy. I was happy to walk into Barnes and Noble recently and
see, next to all those coffeetable books, the first trade edition collection of his works: ‘ The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail: The Art and Poetry of d. a. levy,’ edited by Mike Golden. This guy was weird and a true original — check this shit out.
