A BEATNIK SIT-COM

"Pull My Daisy" (1959) is truly beat cinema. The film is based on the third act of a Jack Kerouac play, Beat Generation, and features an all-star lineup of 1950s hipsters, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel. The film was directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. Kerouac narrates.

The Beats put their stock in spontaneity and distrusted post-inspiration tampering. They believed art and poetry should spring from the mind fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Sometimes this method delivered inspired work, and other times it produced a half-baked shambling mess. This falls somewhere between the two, but is worth a look.

The story originally came from Neil Cassady, and is supposedly based on an actual event though it sounds more like an episode of a situation comedy. A railway brakemen entertains a respectable bishop. The brakeman's weirdo friends come spilling in the door, ruining everything. You know the type--mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, never saying a commonplace thing. In other words, trouble. I keep expecting Fred and Ethel to drop by with a jug of wine and some bongos. Go, man, go!

quiet on the set: orlovsky, corso, and ginsberg

SEDUCED BY CERAMICS

Charles Krafft, American Artist from Seattle, has used the techniques of the Delft ceramics masters to create stunning porcelain artwork of switchblades, skateboards, and assault rifles. His disasterware series is beautiful fine china commemorating disasters such as the Hindenburg explosion, the sinking of the Andrea Doria, and the bombing of Dresden.


Perhaps his most controversial work involves "Spone," or human bone china--granulated calcified human "cremains" commonly known as mortuary ash -- added to a porcelain "slip" and used in a variety of funerary and commemorative art.

"I've always found the lowbrow fringe of contemporary pop culture infinitely more fertile than the highfalutin academic mainstream -- I prefer the company of criminals, undertakers and blue-haired ladies." - Charles Krafft

An interview in Salon.com can be found here.

NEW DYLAN ART SHOW

Dylan is a busy man. When not writing and performing songs tirelessly, deejaying a popular radio show, or writing his award-winning memoirs, he's busy drawing pictures.

After a successful art show in Germany last year, the songwriter has an art show opening at the Halcyon Gallery in London next week, featuring a collection of over 200 pictures, mostly color variations on the artwork published in "Drawn Blank."



In a rare new interview in the London Times Dylan discussed his art, his memoirs, and Barack Obama.

“Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval,” he says. “Poverty is demoralizing. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up...Barack Obama. He's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.” He offers a parting handshake. “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future,” he notes as the door closes between us."

For more information:
The Halcyon Gallery, London.
Buy "Drawn Blank" at Amazon.com

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG DIES AT 82

Robert Rauschenberg (American artist, 1925-2008) died Monday night at his Florida home. Irrepressible, playful, hard-drinking spirit, he blurred the lines between art, sculpture and photography, and used everything -- print, paint, and assembled found junk -- and made us see the art in it. He threw everything on board, and sidestepped the angst of Abstract Expressionism. Rauschenberg helped open up the possibilities. For the NYTimes obit, click HERE.


-from "Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work"

9 POUND SHOWCASE: THE FUGS

Keeping our promise to offer offbeat, beat, non-conformist, non-commercial, visionary and downright strange acts of creativity to our readers, we bring you this 9 Pound Hammer Showcase highlighting the uncle beat poets from the East Village, The Fugs. Brilliant avant-folk provocateurs, these guys sang truth to power with a wicked sense of humor, satire, irony, high level stuff that could get you arrested (and did) in the Land of the Free.



The Fugs formed back in 1964, when Ed Sanders rented the former Kosher meat store on East 10th, and transformed it into the Peace Eye Bookstore. He met poet Tuli Kupferberg. They named themselves after a Norman Mailer-coined euphemism from "The Naked and the Dead," a wartime novel written when soldiers were free to kill but not say the word "fuck," at least in print. They played in cafes and theaters in the Village, and headlined a cross-country tour opposing the Vietnam war in its early days, playing folk and rock and basically blowing minds in the Heartland.



We drew inspiration for the Fugs from a long and varied tradition, going all the way back to the dances of Dionysus in the ancient Greek plays and the "Theory of the Spectacle" in Aristotle's Poetics, and moving forward to the famous premier performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi in 1896, to the poèmes simultanés of the Dadaists in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, to the jazz-poetry of the Beats, to Charlie Parker's seething sax, to the silence of John Cage, to the calm pushiness of the Happening movement, the songs of the Civil Rights movement, and to our concept that there was oddles of freedom guaranteed by the United States Constitution that was not being used.
- Ed Sanders


They first recorded in 1965, and put their show on vinyl to the delight of far flung fans and connoisseurs of beatnik irreverence. This wasn't the frail, anemic poetry of your timid schoolbooks, but some rough beast vexed to nightmare, it's hour come at last, playing electric guitars and invoking the gods. They freaked the squares out. The grey flannel Chamber of Commerce types didn't dig this crazy pagan humor, and the crewcut cops were notified, but the children -- at least, some of them -- thought it was great to spit in Goliath's eye.

The Fugs became a cult favorite, secretly traded among fans like contraband, passed like a joint between outstretched fingers, popping up all over this great land. Yes, soon the Feds would be pounding at the door, and the FBI would try to crush this communist conspiracy of "free thought," but the damage had been done. Songs like "Kill for Peace" had already gotten out to undermine the war effort and corrupt the youth of Athens, er, I mean America.

You will enjoy this, I'm sure. For those who think the 1960s were all Austin Powers and the Monkees, this is a good antidote. Just don't take it and operate heavy machinery, okay kids?


For more information, check out the official History of the Fugs here. An interview with Ed Sanders is here. For more tales of beatnik glory, check out Ed Sanders' Woodstock Journal here.

POST-APOCALYPTIC CAVE PAINTINGS

Gary Panter is great. Blowing out of Oklahoma like a doomsday twister, this guy knocked down barns and silos and blew up big in the LA punk hardcore scene, in the magazine Slash, and later RAW, contributing an often-imitated raw punk aesthetic to an anesthetic world of design. He later became head designer for the cool and weird Pee Wee's Playhouse. I like Jimbo, his post-apocalyptic comic about a man surviving in the future in a poisoned wasteland of cultural detritus. You know, like all of us.


"I was crazy about dinosaurs and art and robots and forced to read the Bible, in childhood. I didn't really read until the 4th grade. I sat in the car and taught myself to read on the OZ books of Baum. Read Swift, Poe and Twain. At 12 I decided it was time to read an adult book and so I checked out Fowles -- The Magus, because it had a minotaur on the cover and I was into Picasso heavily by then. In college read everything by Phil Dick, J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon and not much else."
-- Gary Panter, from an interview at Reader's Voice

Gary Panter website here. Say hello.