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

GET YOUR KICKS ON ROUTE 66

All hail the Great American Highway! The Nat King Cole Trio plays "Route 66" in this wonderful clip. I used to sing this one standing on the shoulders of interstates and country roads -- making up the words in the middle -- while I tried to flag a ride.

Did you ever hit the road, Jack? Did you ever hitch-hike? I don't mean short stints -- did you ever thumb a cross country trip? I wouldn't do it now, but I had some great trips back in the day. I thumbed from Seattle to Mexico, up and down the West Coast a few times, around upstate New York when the leaves were changing, even did a run from Portland to Phoenix one hot July, which I don't recommend. I had great rides, and some bad ones. I slept under a bridge in Salt Lake City, got robbed, even got thrown in jail. In the hot Arizona desert, I was a tiny sunburned speck in a landscape out of a western movie, standing for hours in the booming sun, finally getting rescued by Navajos in a tricked-out Camaro on their way to an all-Indian rodeo in Tuba City.


Thumbing was a thrill, a journey, a way to see the country from the ground up. Maybe it was a little dangerous. Still, I wouldn't trade those adventures for anything in the world.

Did you ever get your kicks on Route 66?

To see my drawing of the trio, click here.

NEW BOOK BY KEROUAC AND BURROUGHS

pictured above: Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, 1944

Crazy Beatnik Killers! That would be the title of the 1950s Hollywood cheapo exploitation film, anyway. No surprise that an even better title was cooked up by co-writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. "The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks", a new novel co-written by the two giants of the Beat Generation, is set to be published. The book was written over sixty years ago, was inspired by a murder that led to their arrests, the 1944 stabbing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, a friend of the writers and another Beat.

Carr served two years after pleading guilty to manslaughter, claiming Kammerer had been obsessed with him and had become a violent stalker.

After the killing, Carr confessed to Kerouac and Burroughs, who helped him dispose of the knife but did not go to police. Kerouac was arrested as an accessory to the killing in 1944 and was put in a Bronx jail but he was freed after his girlfriend, Edie Parker, posted bail. Burroughs was also arrested, but escaped incarceration.

The book is an early work, and probably not very good since neither writer was eager to see it published. Of course, Kerouac and Burroughs went on to worldwide fame with the publication of their later works, "On the Road," and "Naked Lunch," respectively. Penguin Classics will publish the new book in November.

Hear Kerouac recite "The Moon in Her Majesty" by clicking here.

HIT THE ROAD, JACK

Like a man possessed, Jack Kerouac wrote "On The Road" on one continuous 120-foot scroll, a furious feat fueled by pharmaceuticals and possibly angels. Like Athena springing fully-formed from the head of Zeus, "Road" was born in one momentous rush, and this is now the stuff of legend. It may be popular in certain circles to dismiss the work as overheated youthful exuberance, but man you just know those cats are too square to swing with it. You dig?

This year, the scroll begins a 13-stop, four year tour. To commemorate "Road" hitting the road, I made a short film combining footage of Jack in the heady days of the Beats with a low-fi recording of him singing a sweet little song called "On The Road."