Vintage Photos of japanese Beatniks
LIFE Mag hat ‘ne ziemlich grandiose Galerie mit Fotos von Michael Rougier, der 1964 die japanischen Beatniks in Tokyo beim Feiern fotografierte.
In 1964, LIFE photographer Michael Rougier (left, on assignment in Tokyo) and correspondent Robert Morse spent time documenting one Japanese generation’s age of revolt, and came away with an astonishingly intimate, frequently unsettling portrait of teenagers hurtling willfully toward oblivion.
In Rougier’s photographs — pictures that seem to breathe, at once, a reckless energy and an acute despair — we don’t merely glimpse kids pushing the boundaries of rebellion. Instead, we’re offered the rare and disquieting gift of complicity: this generation of lost boys and girls, Rougier’s pictures suggest, is trying to tell us something — something reproachful and perplexing — about the world we’ve made. Or rather, the world that we’ve broken.
Teenage Wasteland: Japanese Youth in Revolt, 1964 (via Boing Boing)
Jack Kerouac-Remixblog On the Bro’d is a Book
Vor einer Weile hatte ich ein Posting über das tolle Jack Kerouac-Remixblog On the Bro’d, in dem der Autor Satz für Satz Kerouacs Beatnik-Klassikers in fucking Bro-Speak übersetzt, Satz für Satz. Das Blog ist noch lange nicht fertig, aber im April erscheint das Buch dazu: „the book version of On The Bro’d contains the entirety of Kerouac’s On The Road translated into off-the-chain, crunk-as-hell bro-speak.“
Hier ein Zitat aus dem Posting mit der tollen Headline „MAD SEX VETERAN“:
“Now think about this old hottie—just think about her.” And dude slowed down the car so we could all check out the over-the-hill smokeshow driving along. “Hell yeah, check that out; I bet she has sexperience in that brain that I would give a nut-and-a-half to try out; to get all up on her and find out just what a mad sex veteran she is. Sal, I haven’t told you this shit, but I once hooked up with a fifty year-old in Arkansas for like a summer, when I was like seventeen. She was an awesome lay, but she was totes married. I haven’t been to Arkansas since that Christmas, when her husband chased me and my buddy with a fucking shotgun when he found out I was going deeper than The Core in his wife; I’m telling you this so you know I can fucking party in the South. Like for real—for real, bro, I get wild in the South, I get mad, mad wild—I was stoked when you sent me that Facebook message saying you were in the South. Fuck yeah, Fuck yeah,” he was like, trailing off and checking his phone again, and suddenly blasting he Wrangler back to ninety and smashing the gas.
Amazon-Partnerlink: On the Bro’d: A Parody of Jack Kerouac ‘s on the Road
Doku-Trailer: Magic Trip
Schöner Trailer zur Doku „Magic Trip“ über die Hippie-Tour von Autor Ken Kesey („One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest“) und Neal Cassady (Wikipedia: „Teil der Beatniks, reiste viel zusammen mit Jack Kerouac durch die Vereinigten Staaten, und stand in den nächsten zwei Jahrzehnten auch mit Allen Ginsberg und William S. Burroughs in näherem Kontakt“) in ihrem LSD-Bus einmal quer durch die USA.
In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen.
With MAGIC TRIP, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) and co-director Alison Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY and the UCLA Film Archives to restore over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history.
(Dailymotion Direkttrip, via Ronny)
The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy
Und wo wir grade bei LSD waren: Steve Silberman, ein alter Bekannter von Allen Ginsberg, hat ein superinteressantes Interview mit Peter Conners geführt, der grade ein Buch darüber geschrieben hat, wie der Beatnik-Poet Timothy Leary auf seinen Weg brachte: The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy. (via Dose Nation)
Silberman: Until I read your book, I never realized how much of an influence Allen had on Leary.
Conners: It was massive. That’s really the heart of this book: How Allen Ginsberg enabled Timothy Leary to become Timothy Leary. It goes back to Allen being asked to give a presentation to all these psychiatrists coming in for an annual conference in Boston. Allen gets up there and reads a poem called “Lysergic Acid” and another called “Laughing Gas.” After the conference, Allen hears about Leary’s work and Leary — who was involved in testing psychedelics as “psychotomimetics,” substances that mimic psychosis — hears about Allen. Before then, there wasn’t really any artistic component to Leary’s research.
So in comes Allen, this great networker, this expert at forging connections between people in a very pure and organic way, and he turns Leary onto this idea of getting great artists and intellectuals to take these drugs. They thought that by the time the government caught on to what they were doing, they would have a foundation of prominent intellectuals who supported their work. Leary would later come right out and say, “From the time that Ginsberg showed up on my doorstep, everything changed. After that, the project was different, my life was different, and I was on a different path.”
Amazon-Partnerlink: White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg
Jack Kerouacs „Lucien Midnight“ animated
(Vimeo Direktlucien, via Martin)
Schöne Animation von Sean McClintock zu Jack Kerouacs Gedicht „Lucien Midnight: The Sound of the Universe in My Window“, Soundtrack stammt von DJ Shadow.
Jack Kerouacs „On The Road“, retold for Bros
Sehr schönes Tumblrdings: Every sentence of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, retold for bros. (via Einhorn)
I first met Dean not long after Tryscha and I hooked up. I had just gotten over a wicked fucking hangover that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with a six-foot-five douchebag and a beer bong. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the bro’d.
Zum Vergleich, hier das Original:
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.
Lost William S. Burroughs Graphic Novel
William S. Burroughs hat in den 70ern mit Malcolm McNeill an einem Comic gearbeitet, dafür aber nie einen Verleger gefunden. Fantagraphics wird das Ding jetzt in zwei aufwändigen Bänden nächstes Jahr veröffentlichen. Das Teil ist sowas von gekauft.
Ah Pook Is Here first appeared in 1970 under the title The Unspeakable Mr. Hart as a monthly comic strip written by Burroughs and drawn by the British cartoonist and painter Malcolm McNeil in the English magazine Cyclops. When the publication folded, Burroughs and McNeill decided to develop the project into a full-length, Word/Image novel (the term “graphic novel” had not yet been coined). Burroughs was 56 at the time, McNeill 23.
The book was conceived as a single painting in which text and images were combined in whatever form seemed appropriate to the narrative. It was conceived as 120 continuous pages that would “fold out.” Such a book was, at the time, unprecedented, and no publisher was willing to take a chance and publish a “graphic novel.” Burroughs and McNeill finally abandoned the project after collaborating on it for 7 years.
“It is singularly appropriate that after championing literate comics and the graphic novel form for over 30 years, Fantagraphics Books should bring a literary collaboration between one of America’s most distinctive writers and his exemplary hand-chosen artist to light,” says Fantagraphics Publisher and acquiring editor Gary Groth.
Auf der Website zu Ah Pook gibt’s jede Menge Highres-Artworks, Dangerous Minds hat noch einen Kurzfilm von 1994, hier die Meldung vom Verlag: Fantagraphics to Publish Lost William S. Burroughs Graphic Novel
Williams Burroughs Zeugs-Fotografie
Seit seinem Tod 1997 wird William Burroughs Appartment, in dem er zuletzt wohnte, in genau dem Zustand erhalten, in dem es damals war. Peter Ross hat nun die Gelegenheit bekommen, Burroughs Zeugs (Schuhe mit Löchern, Bücher über die medizinischen Folgen von „Karate Blows“ und sowas, was man eben so im Haus hat) zu fotografieren.
How did you end up photographing William Burroughs’s stuff?
William Burroughs lived for many years in the former locker room of an 1880s YMCA, on the Bowery in New York City. The almost windowless space was known as The Bunker. When he died in 1997, his friend and mine, John Giorno, kept the apartment intact, with many of Burroughs’s possessions sitting as they were. Part of the space is now used for Buddhist teachings, and the apartment is a wonderful mix of Buddhist wall hangings and pillows and carpets and Burroughs’ personal furniture and collections.
Is the room still intact?
His bedroom is as he left it, with all his stuff in place. Giorno looks after it, and occasionally houses visiting artists and friends and Buddhist teachers who come to teach in the main area of the space.
William Burroughs’s Stuff, hier die Fotoserie auf Peter Ross’ Website (via Kottke)
69er Bürgerinitiative „Sex ist mies“ warnt vor Beat und Sex
(Youtube Direktmies, via Electru)
Hier ein kleiner Tipp aus dem Mief der BRD von der Bürherinitiative „Sex ist mies“ (!) aus dem Jahr 1969: Lieber keine satanischen Botschaften in Form von Beatmusik hören, weil man dann miesen Sex hat.
The Beats: A Graphic History
Ich habe grade das Comic „The Beats: A Graphic History“ fertiggelesen, es folgt der Geschichte der klassischen Beatniks Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs und Jack Kerouac, erzählt deren Lebensgeschichte von Geburt bis Tod und spart auch die hässlichen Seiten nicht aus, von Burroughs Mord an seiner Frau während sie betrunken „Wilhelm Tell“ mit einer Knarre spielten oder auch seine Vorliebe für kleine Jungs aus Tangier.
Ich hatte zunächst meine Probleme mit dem Erzählstil des Comics, denn eine echte graphische Narration gibt es nicht, es ist vielmehr eine illustrierte Historie der Hauptfiguren der Beat Generation. Hat man sich daran erstmal gewöhnt, ist das Buch eine wunderbare Lektion in Literaturgeschichte über eine Generation von Autoren, deren Einfluß auf die Beatles, Velvet Underground oder David Cronenberg (der ja auch Burroughs „Naked Lunch“ verfilmte) und überhaupt auf die ganze Hippie-Bewegung unbestreitbar ist.
Nachdem das Buch die Bios der drei Protagonisten behandelt hat, widmet es sich nach der Hälfte den unbekannteren Autoren und Menschen aus der Beat Generation, mir allesamt unbekannt. Bis hierhin ist alles gezeichnet von Ed Piskor mit einem gradlinigen, fast steifen, aber detailierten Strich. Das ändert sich im letzten Drittel des Buchs, wenn andere Zeichner die Feder übernehmen und die Storys sich nicht mehr an Personen festmachen.
So geht es hier vor allem um den Einfluß der Beatniks auf Kunst, es gibt eine Geschichte der „Beatnik Chicks“, mit Abstand am besten ist in diesem Teil die Geschichte von Tuli Kupferberg, der durch seine eigene Biographie führt und dabei immer „in die Kamera“ bzw. immer ins Panel schaut und so die Geschichte der Band The Fugs erzählt. Großartig. „The Beats: A Graphic History“ ist ein zunächst gewöhnungsbedürftiges, dann aber hervorragendes Comic für alle, die sich auch nur am Rande für Kulturgeschichte der USA, für Hippies und die 60er interessieren.
Amazon-Partnerlink: The Beats: A Graphic History
