Sunny Chanel over at Babble hands over the blogging mic to her 6-year-old daughter and lets her judge classic novels by their covers.
Atlas Shrugged:
This is about Daydis (her spelling it’s actually – Daedalus). He is an ancient god guy who prays a lot. This book is about him crying. He is crying because he doesn’t like himself at all, because he hates himself. It looks like a saddy, saddy, saddy bookie.”
Note: she loves Greek Mythology at bedtime hence the Daedalus reference. And really, who doesn’t?
Animal Farm:
It looks like a book for kids. I think it’s about a donkey and a pig that do not like each other and they both live on a farm for animals. The same farm. It looks like it would be a funny book with a good really nice ending.
On the Road:
I think it’s about a car. A car that goes to Mexico, Indonesia and other places. It’s about a car that goes on all sorts of adventures. The guy on the cover is a teen, he likes to drive people places a lot. And he’s French.
Fahrenheit 451:
I think this is about a gigantic robot who goes on fire and he doesn’t like himself. It has a sad ending. It looks like a book for teens. The title means fire, a really really really big fire since the number is 451, that would mean it was really hot. So the robot must get really hot. Maybe that is why he is so sad.
As a child, John Cassavetes chipped his front teeth in a fight. As his parents were too poor to buy him caps, Cassavetes didn’t smile for years. The experience made him aware of how others coped with misfortune. Later, when he started making films, his camera fixed on the facial tics and movements of his actors. These were unlike any other movies - improvised character studies, where the camera relentlessly followed, watched, examined, but rarely interrogated. We are always close-up to the characters. When we see them in wide-shots, they are isolated, the scene only highlighting their alienation: Ben Gazzara having breakfast outside after losing $23,000 at a gaming table inThe Killing of a Chinese Bookie; or Ben Carruthers taking a stroll through the gardens in Shadows; or Gena Rowlands at a loss with the world in A Woman Under the Influence.
His characters are suburban, middle-aged, all on the back slice of life. They may have flourishes of rebellion (a trip to London in Husbands), but nothing changes their direction, all stick blindly to some instinctual role.
Cassavetes’ films may not be that innovative, or offer any new or considered insights, or offer redemption, but they succeed because of the ineffable passions, the inexpressible humanity of the central characters that Cassavetes puts on screen. That’s where his genius lies - in his deep and committed humanity.
Cassavetes once told Cahiers du Cinema:
‘I am more interested in the people who work with me than in the film itself or cinema.’
Cassavetes’ films always remind me of what Jack Kerouac once wrote about literature in Satori in Paris:
“…the tale that’s told for no other reason but companionship, which is another (and my favorite) definition of literature, the tale that’s told for companionship and to teach something religious, of religious reverence, about real life, in this real world which literature should (and here does) reflect.”
Made in 1965, Cinéastes de notre temps - John Cassavetes is a profile of the great director and actor as he edits his second feature Faces in Hollywood, before taking it Paris. Cassavetes openly discusses his views on film-making and cinema, and why he takes certain roles to pay for his movie making.
Strange to think, had he lived, Jack Kerouac would have been 90 this week. It begs the question, what would he have been like? Rabid raving Republican? Drunk demented Democrat? A pairing of the both? A religious nut? Would he have continued writing? Become an éminence grise? Would he still have mattered? Would we have cared?
Ninety. And to think he’s been dead for almost half that time, during which he has gone in-and-out of fashion. And yet, his appeal has somehow always stayed, though arguably that appeal has sometimes been more for what he represented than for his books or writing.
Even so, Kerouac at his best captured a hope, a joyous sense of what life could be - the potential of a moment, of the living of a life, rather than the having of a life-style.
I saw Whatever Happened to Kerouac? on the day it was released, in olde fleapit cinema, southside of Edinburgh. There were around a dozen people in the audience, gathered together in the flickering dark like a secret religious group come to give devotion, as we reverentially watched what is still the best documentary made on the “King of the Beats”. But this film is no hagiography, it captures what was both good and bad about Kerouac, and most of what you need to know, answering some of the questions other bio-pics and documentaries have avoided. The essence of the film is best summed up by William Burroughs when asked, “Whatever happened to Kerouac?” responds, Jack incited:
‘’....a worldwide unprecedented cultural revolution….”
The list of contributors is a who’s who of the Beat Generation: William Burroughs, Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady, Ann Charters, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Diane DiPrima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Joyce Johnson, Michael McClure, Edie Kerouac Parker, and Gary Snyder. Directed by Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdam, this is a must for fans of Kerouac and the Beats.
It’s around this time that the enthusiasm started almost a month ago begins to wane, and the pages of the diary remain blank, as days dissolve into weeks. Keeping a diary is hard work, but it is rewarding work. If you’ve started a diary and want a little encouragement to keep going, or even just to start writing, then here is a personal selection of diary and journal writers, who may inspire.
Sylvia Plath kept a diary throughout her life, which reveals a world beyond her poetry. Here is Sylvia setting out on her adventures as a writer, from November 13th 1949.
As of today I have decided to keep a diary again - just a place where I can write my thoughts and opinions when I have a moment. Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen. Every day is so precious I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older. Now, now is the perfect time of my life.
In reflecting back upon these last sixteen years, I can see tragedies and happiness, all relative - all unimportant now - fit only to smile upon a bit mistily.
I still do not know myself. Perhaps I never will. But I feel free – unbound by responsibility, I still can come up to my own private room, with my drawings hanging on the walls…and pictures pinned up over my bureau. It is a room suited to me – tailored, uncluttered and peaceful…I love the quiet lines of the furniture, the two bookcases filled with poetry books and fairy tales saved from childhood.
At the present moment I am very happy, sitting at my desk, looking out at the bare trees around the house across the street… Always want to be an observer. I want to be affected by life deeply, but never so blinded that I cannot see my share of existence in a wry, humorous light and mock myself as I mock others.
Playwright Joe Orton filled his diaries with his sexual escapades, and vignettes of the strangeness of the world, from January 18th 1967.
On the bus going home I heard a most fascinating conversation between an old man and woman. “What a thing, though,” the old woman said. “You’d hardly credit it.” “She’s always made a fuss of the whole family, but never me,” the old man said. “Does she have a fire when the young people go to see her?” “Fire?” “She won’t get people seeing her without warmth.” “I know why she’s doing it. Don’t think I don’t,” the old man said. “My sister she said to me, ‘I wish I had your easy life.’ Now that upset me. I was upset by the way she phrased herself. ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ I said. ‘I’ve only got to get on the phone and ring a certain number,’ I said, ‘to have you stopped.’” “Yes,” the old woman said, “And you can, can’t you?” “Were they always the same?” she said. “When you was a child? Can you throw yourself back? How was they years ago?” “The same,” the old man said. “Wicked, isn’t it?” the old woman said. “Take care, now” she said, as the old man left her. He didn’t say a word but got off the bus looking disgruntled.
More diaries from Jack Kerouac, Emily Carr, John Cheever, and Andy Warhol, after the jump…
One of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Travel Talks, with “Voice of the Globe” James A Fitzpatrick, who takes the viewer on a trip along Chicago’s Loop, from 1947.
‘Night descends on Chicago, the heart of the city, or the Loop as it is generally known, is brilliantly aglow with the glimmering lights that lure us to its many attractions.’
These include the Bismarck, where we will see Don Julian and Marjorie do “their fantastic cape dance”; and Chez Paree, “where internationally famous artists have entertained the public for a quarter of a century or more”; to the Ambassador Hotel’s “renowned Pump Room, where food and drink are served with all the formalities of a Royal banquet”; and on to the Edgewater Beach Hotel, which served such famous guests as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, and Nat King Cole, and U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The men look old, their hair sleek, their suits formal. The women younger, framed by jackets and skirts in blues and reds, smile, smoke, wear hats. Everyone looks as if they are on show, pretending to have fun. It’s a different landscape, far away, and slightly out of focus, the images seem hand-painted, water-colored.
Hard to imagine this is the same year that began with the murder of Elizabeth Short (aka the Black Dahlia) in Leimert Park, Los Angeles; while Jack Kerouac traveled across country, an experience that formed the basis for On the Road, and worked on The Town and The City; and in Conroe, Texas, Joan Vollmer gave birth to her son named after the father, William S Burroughs; Marilyn Monroe made her film debut as a telephone operator; and back in LA, Kenneth Anger shot his dream-film Fireworks over a weekend, while his parents were away. And all of this happening, bubbling out-of-frame, of these streets fireflied with lights, and Julian and Marjorie cape-danced; gold lame draped girls kicked heels; and a cowboy turned rope tricks on a hay scattered dance floor.
Over at Facsimile Dust Jackets you can find (and purchase) an incredible selection of scans of dust jackets from classic novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K Dick, Doris Lessing, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Agatha Christie, Aleister Crowley, Dennis Wheatley, Robert Bloch, Len Deighton and many, many more. Have a look for yourself here.
Denver-based street artist Theo has only been working since February but already he’s getting a lot of attention. Inspired by his love of beat writer Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road and the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, Theo and other members of the Kerouac Project, have taken to stenciling pensive looking “Kerouacs” around various locations in Denver where the writer was known to have visited or that he mentioned in his book. It’s also a protest of the fact that the upcoming film adaptation of the book is being shot in Canada. From the Denver Westorld:
Sixty years after Jack Kerouac filled a 120-foot scroll in a haze of lust, creative ambition and amphetamines that resulted in the original On the Road, producer Francis Ford Coppola is actually making a movie of the book — his third attempt. But while On the Road is a distinctly American classic, he’s filming the entire movie in Canada.
That snub is particularly egregious considering that Denver factors prominently into the action — in fact, you could argue that our fair city is a main character in the book. While, sure, some of the action takes place on either coast, Denver is like the meat of that literary sandwich, providing the book with a prodigious amount of its soul, not to mention its hands-down best character: one Dean Moriarty, known in real life as Neal Cassady, Denver boy and Beat god.
And in the rabble-rousing spirit of Cassady himself, at least one team of “elite street thugs” is not taking the slight lying down. For the last few months, cloaked in secrecy and carrying a copy of On the Road and a handful of stencils, this group has been visiting known Kerouac hangouts and doing the writer a favor he may or may not have gotten around to himself: tagging them with a likeness and the words “JACK WAS HERE.”
“I got the idea when I heard about the film adaptation coming out,” explains the artist and ringleader, a shadowy figure who calls himself only Theo. “The filmmakers substituted Gatineau, Quebec, for Denver. I’ve been a Kerouac addict for years, and I’ve always wanted to pay tribute to the author in some way, but it only recently hit me just how this could be done: It’s just a simpler reminder that Kerouac was here in Denver and not some small town in Canada that no one’s ever heard of. I think it’s an appropriate gesture to celebrate one counterculture with another.”
There is a very cool Tumblr blog dedicated to the “Jack Was Here” Kerouac Project.
Above, outside of Neal Cassady’s favorite bar at 15th and Platte Street in Denver. Below, Kerouac interviewed in French on Canadian television, 1967.
I was a teenager browsing the shelves of Better Books in Edinburgh where amongst the imported copies of Grove plays—Pinter, Beckett, Behan, Arden, Delaney, and the City Lights’ volumes of Ginsberg and Corso—there was a small collection of Kerouac books. I picked up The Subterraneans and started reading:
Once I was young and had so much orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unselfconfident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won’t do - just start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that’s what I’ll do -. It began on a warm summer night…
I was filled with “nervous intelligence” yet still “unselfconfident” I was hooked. And this is why Kerouac appeals best to the young whose lives are starting out, giddy with living, filled with a growing self-belief yet still filled with agononizing self-doubt—in need of someone to say, “it’s all right.” And here was Kerouac saying just that.
John Antonelli’s 1984 film Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats, tells Kerouac’s story through dramatized sequences, archive footage and interviews with the regular cast of players - William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. At times, it skates across, and avoids those cracks that’d reveal troubled depths, but it is still a reminder as to how and why Kerouac very much matters.
This letter from Jack Kerouac to Marlon Brando in which Kerouac pitches the idea of a movie version for On The Road starring Brando was auctioned by Christies for $36,000 a few years ago. A check Jack can’t cash.
I’m praying that you’ll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it. Don’t worry about the structure, I know to compress and re-arrange the plot a bit to give a perfectly acceptable movie-type structure: making it into one all-inclusive trip instead of the several voyages coast-to-coast in the book, one vast round trip from New York to Denver to Frisco to Mexico to New Orleans to New York again. I visualize the beautiful shots could be made with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak. I wanted you to play the part because Dean (as you know) is no dopey hotrodder but a real intelligent (in fact Jesuit) Irishman. You play Dean and I’ll play Sal (Warner Bros. mentioned I play Sal) and I’ll show you how Dean acts in real life…we can go visit him in Frisco, or have him come down to L.A. still a real frantic cat. All I want out of this is to able to establish myself and my Mother a trust fund for life, so I can really go around roaming around the world…to write what comes out of my head and free to feed my buddies when they’re hungry. What I wanta do is re-do the theater and the cinema in America, give it a spontaneous dash, remove pre-conceptions of “situation” and let people rave on as they do in real life…The French movies of the 30’s are still far superior to ours because the French really let their actors come on and the writers didn’t quibble with some preconceived notion of how intelligent the movie audience is…American theater & Cinema at present is an outmoded dinosaur that ain’t mutated along with the best in American Literature.
Come on now Marlon, put up your dukes and write! ...signed in blue ink Jack Kerouac
Writer, critic and translator, Fernanda Pivano interviews Jack Kerouac on Italian television, 1966. Kerouac is more than a wee bit shitfaced.
Pivano was known for her insightful and freewheeling interviews of American beat writers, including Ginsberg, Corso, Bukowski and Burroughs. She had a knack for getting on the wavelength of writers being one herself. And she enjoyed drinking with them. Her published interviews with Bukowski are worth seeking out. Her longstanding friendship with Hemingway certainly prepared her for dealing with a bunch of drunk poets.
Jack Kerouac reads from Visions of Cody on The Steve Allen Plymouth Show in 1959. This clip is taken from the documentary film, Whatever Happened to Keroauc? It’s often mislabeled as being a reading from On The Road, but it’s not (to add further to the confusion, there is a close up of On The Road’s cover as Steve Allen is speaking).
Ginsberg’s ride on that wave has perhaps ebbed and flowed since his death 13 years ago, but it is cresting once more, with the recent publication of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (Viking) and The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (Free Press), by Ginsberg’s archivist and biographer, Bill Morgan; an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” (with an accompanying catalog, published by Prestel); and the movie Howl, starring indie heartthrob James Franco, about Ginsberg’s most famous poem and the 1957 obscenity trial challenging its publication in the United States. That trial, along with the simultaneous publication of Kerouac’s On the Road, catapulted the Beats into literary and cultural history.
The intense, candid letters that Ginsberg and Kerouac wrote to each other capture the emergence of that literary and cultural moment when America, and American literature, would change irrevocably. The letters are often elated with aspiration, extravagant—even hyperbolic—with language sometimes soaring for its own sake; at other times, they plunge into despair: “God knows what oblivion we’ll wind up in like unpopular Melvilles,” Ginsberg ponders.
The correspondence begins in 1944, when the two young men met in New York City, where Ginsberg was an undergraduate at Columbia University and Kerouac a dropout living nearby, and continues until 1963, six years before Kerouac’s death, in 1969. Although they were greeted by American media as barbarous buffoons at the cultural gates—“I go rewrite Whitman for the entire universe,” Ginsberg boasted—the letters demonstrate a committed literary perspective. Allusions to Melville, Balzac, and Dostoevsky, Pound and Eliot, Joyce and Henry Miller establish the tradition they were committed to continue.
Some of the letters describe the daring literary ambitions they had for their friends, especially Ginsberg’s for William S. Burroughs, whom he regarded as a genius. Others, written from Mexico in the early 1950s, reveal how their views were deepened by living in a country “beyond Darwin’s chain,” as Kerouac put it. Fortified with tequila and peyote, Kerouac praised pastoral Mexico, and both men saw it as a foil to an American obsession with acquisition and consumption. Occasionally the letters crawl with dense Buddhist philosophy; inevitably they race again with reports of the latest recklessness of friends like Neal Cassady and Gregory Corso. Later letters, more ominously, are full of the hysteria that overwhelmed Kerouac after the notoriety of On the Road. As he reported to Ginsberg, with some of the cascading presumption that galvanized his prose—repeating what he had announced in a television interview—“I am waiting for God to show his face.”
Slim Gaillard was a wonderful jazz performer and inventor of his own groovy dialect he called Vout. He was notably immortalized in the following passage from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road:
‘... one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who’s always saying ‘Right-orooni’ and ‘How ‘bout a little bourbon-arooni.’ In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He’ll sing ‘Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti’ and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he’ll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can’t hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, ‘Great-orooni ... fine-ovauti ... hello-orooni ... bourbon-orooni ... all-orooni ... how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni ... orooni ... vauti ... oroonirooni ...” He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can’t hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience.
Dean stands in the back, saying, ‘God! Yes!’—and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. ‘Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.’ Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two C’s, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing ‘C-Jam Blues’ and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages. Finally the set is over; each set takes two hours. Slim Gaillard goes and stands against a post, looking sadly over everybody’s head as people come to talk to him. A bourbon is slipped into his hand. ‘Bourbon-orooni—thank-you-ovauti ...’ Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is. Dean once had a dream that he was having a baby and his belly was all bloated up blue as he lay on the grass of a California hospital. Under a tree, with a group of colored men, sat Slim Gaillard. Dean turned despairing eyes of a mother to him. Slim said, ‘There you go-orooni.’ Now Dean approached him, he approached his God; he thought Slim was God; he shuffled and bowed in front of him and asked him to join us. ‘Right-orooni,’ says Slim; he’ll join anybody but won’t guarantee to be there with you in spirit. Dean got a table, bought drinks, and sat stiffly in front of Slim. Slim dreamed over his head. Every time Slim said, ‘Orooni,’ Dean said ‘Yes!’ I sat there with these two madmen. Nothing happened. To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni.’
So with that in mind here are a handful of clips. He has so many great songs, it was hard to narrow them down !
First a few live clips from his mid-40’s heyday. A young Scatman Crothers on drums:
