Showing posts with label Beat Generation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beat Generation. Show all posts
This is the land of knee-tremblers and wee bastards
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burned-out acidheads sell Bibles on the street for a living.
The light shows and sounds indicated the influence of dope
on audience and musicians alike. They could no longer be called dances for they
resembled Be-Ins more than the foxtrot shuffles that still predominate in
middle-aged memories. Clubs, like U.F.O. and Middle Earth in London's West End,
used to have all-night sessions, where one could listen, dance, blow bubbles,
eat, sleep, trip, make love or just wander around digging the people. As might
be expected, rip-off club managers began their own enterprises, charging high
prices for music, food and hard liquor. For a time nobody cared, because the
head clubs were community run and one could hear the best in progressive rock
and grin stoned grins at performers who would later be ranked as superstars. A
mixture of police harassment and capitalist economics eventually closed them
down. The political nature of rock music is manifested at a number of levels. Many
groups take explicitly political stands, whilst others make obvious references
in their songs and interviews. The nature of the music industry, however,
sometimes induces an ambivalent stance for, despite the free concerts and the
heavy rhetoric, the record companies are 'only in it for the money'. The M.C.5,
as long as they stayed in Detroit with John Sinclair, were a screaming,
revolutionary band. As soon as they left, they became a teeny bop group with a
mean reputation but without any balls.
Huncke was so heinous cops on Times Square called him The Creep
Paris
itself was an exotic location in those days. It had bars that stayed open later
than the 10 P.M. closing time then in force in England. French cigarettes were
stronger and more fragrant, the Metro had first- and second-class seats. One
listened in astonishment to descriptions of the hole-in-the-floor toilets,
open-air pissoirs, and the ladies who ran the public lavatories. Visitors described
student bistros and casual jazz clubs; London had only one jazz club—Ronnie
Scott’s—and that was prohibitively expensive. They described the easygoing sex
and the freely available drugs, and it sounded a good deal more interesting than life in Britain. Everyone said the
Beat Hotel was the place to stay, but if it was full, or the owner did not like
the look of you, there were plenty of other, equally inexpensive places within
a few blocks.
are we going to license the use of filthy, vulgar, and obscene language?
Q. And I presume you
understand the whole thing, is that right? Well, let's go into
some of this. You have the book there. Will you open to page 133? What are
"angelheaded hipsters?"
A. I would say characters of some kind of
celestial beauty like an angel; "hipsters" is part of the vernacular
today. I'm not sure I can translate it into any literal way, though.
Q. In other words, you
don't have to understand the words to - Skip down a couple
of lines there: "With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol
and cock and endless balls." What significance does that have to you?
A. Well, there are
uprooted people wandering around the United States, dreaming, drugged - that's
clear isn't it? Even their waking hours like nightmares, loaded with liquor and
enjoying, I take it, a variety of indiscriminate sexual experience.
Q. Do you understand
some of these pages where there are just little dots in there?
A. I think I know the
words that were intended.
Q. Let's take page 135.
A. Yes.
Q. Fifth line up:
"Who let themselves be -" one, two, three, four, five, six dots - "in
the -" three dots - "by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with
joy." What does that mean?
mass sex-action brought out the riot squad of the Police Department
The
class war between Villagers and the owners of the eating-place was waged at
Life Cafeteria. Unfortunately the owners of the huge self-service restaurant
and the Villagers differed materially on the meaning of the word
"cafeteria." According to the proprietors of "Life" the
cafeteria was a business venture and not a philanthropic experiment. They had
established a restaurant, not a public meeting place for Villagers to weave
endless carpets of conversation, embroidered with strange designs for living
taken from Sappho, Buddha, Plato, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Tolstoy, the
Marquis de Sade and Spengler. They were serving not manna from heaven, but food
that must be paid for with cash. The rest rooms were built for certain
biological functions, and not for romantic assignations between members of the
third or intermediate sex. Villagers argued that the owners of "Life"
had made a grievous semantic mistake. A cafeteria was primarily a refuge for
talkers, not eaters, and if the talk ended on an erotic note, the rest rooms
were the proper places to celebrate the rites of Venus or Priapus.
Charlie Parker is the squarest thing on the jukebox
epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer
The intersection of
beat and "ethnic" circles can be seen at its warm-weather wildest in the hundreds of people
who on Sunday afternoons gather round the children's wading pool in Washington
Square Park.The inner circle
consists of people who arrive by 1:00 P.M. and thus get seats on the rim of the
pool and on the steps leading down into it; this circle is a mixture of
early-rising square Villagers, many of whom have brought their children to
wade, and beats who get there early because they've been up all night. (The
beats used to get high and roll around in the pool with the kiddies, fully
clothed, until the Park Department enforced the rule restricting the pool's use
to those under 12 years of age.) Surrounding this is a second, standing circle
of clusters of folk and hillbilly performers and their listeners: uptown
tourists and new-style rich Villagers, "ethnic" teenagers, Italians,
a few beats. Around this is a third circle, also quite mixed but consisting
mostly of beats asking each other what's happening, tourists with cameras
trying to elbow their way into the second circle for a good shot, and
tight-trousered Village homosexuals walking their dogs and cruising each other.
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