"...AND MONKEY MUST SCORE."

Like a lumbering centre forward with no goals for a while, I’m suffering from a lack of confidence. Chances are being teed up but instead of smashing them in, I’m bottling it completely or laying off a little sideways pass to a team mate. Just about keeping up with play but the fans are getting twitchy. Let’s think back to those wasted opportunities.

There was the Angelheaded Hipsters morning at the National Theatre where the Beat Generation was discussed by a panel including underground figures Barry Miles and Michael Horovitz; actors read Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady and Corso; and even a trumpeter had a sad horn to play. Horovitz was incredible. He could’ve spoke, given half the chance, for 90 minutes without pausing for breath and kept the audience entertained with his staggering array of anecdotes, quotes, cultural references and razor sharp wit and intelligence. He then popped up last week to wax lyrically on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service show on 6Music (listen on BBC iPlayer).

Also last week I bought, amongst other things, the new LP, Hunger, by Frankie & The Heartstrings and an old LP, Free Jazz, by The Ornette Coleman Double Quartet. The plan was to discuss and contrast the formulaic, backward facing, rattling three minute pop song approach of the Heartstrings to the challenging, groundbreaking, and – let’s be honest - patience testing of one 37 minute piece of jumbled improvised free jazz. It would of course have been like comparing an ear to an eye, and the conclusion being I’d want to keep them both.

A new interpretation of Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock his hit local picturehouses. I must ‘fess up to having not read it but I like the 1947 film version. This new one is set to the backdrop of rioting mods in 1964 and gave me a chuckle spotting mates as extras. Sam Riley as Pinkie, the young upstart attempting to “run” Brighton, was unconvincing (his firm consisted of an elderly Chalky from Quadrophenia and the lanky Wigan Casino dancer from SoulBoy - hardly menacing) and trying to pass Eastbourne off as Brighton was distracting. There was one sequence where Pinkie was sitting in a London café, ran down an Eastbourne street, and then ended up in Brighton, without even breaking into a sweat. Yeah, I know, it’s a film not a documentary. Those things apart it wasn’t the worst way to spend an evening and moved Greene’s book further up the to-read list.

A couple of offshoots from The Horrors should’ve got a mention. Rhys and Joe as part of The Diddlers gave Bo Diddley the full throttle, echo laden, Cramps-rock stomp treatment at the 100 Club, and very entertaining it was too; whilst Faris has turned up to sing at the Vatican (yes, the Vatican) with his new project Cat’s Eyes. The result is as spectacular as it is surprising. See it on YouTube.

Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment has been on DVD before but is out again, in shoddy cheap packaging, with no extras, and at a unjustifiably high price. But, it is a smashing film as the words Vanessa Redgrave, David Warner, 1966, Arthur Mullard, Irene Handl, Karl Marx, monkeys, gorillas, King Kong, sanatorium and John Dankworth testify.

So, no goals but hopefully a boost to the assist column.

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ANGELHEADED HIPSTERS: IMAGES OF THE BEAT GENERATION at the NATIONAL THEATRE

“Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”.

Many of those hipsters who hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in cold-water flats contemplating jazz in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” can now be seen adorning the walls of the National Theatre on London’s Southbank; a far cry from when they were the motley crew of aspiring writers, junkies and madmen (some all three, and always men) the world had yet to discover.

Ginsberg was obsessive in chronicling and championing the lives of himself and his friends in diaries, notebooks, poems and letters, and when he happened upon a second-hand Kodak camera in New York in 1953 he added photography to his arsenal. The pictures he took that year turned out to be the most historically important and thus interesting. The Beat Generation nucleus of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs together again in New York had yet to achieve fame and notoriety and their lives would soon take different paths but here we see them in Allen’s apartment variously larking around, reading, deep in thought or outright posing – most amusingly in the case of a skinny, shirtless Burroughs adopting the improbable stance of a bare knuckle fighter.

For all Kerouac’s good looks - and their rapid disappearance – it’s the Burroughs pictures that are the most revealing. There’s a touching shot of him sitting on a rooftop with Arlene Lee (“Mardou Fox” in Jack’s The Subterraneans): she dressed in archetypal beatnik black with headscarf and looks at him with a cute cheeky face, he in return wears a beatific smile at odds with his persona as a misogynistic cold fish. Mind you, she was typing up his manuscripts of Queer and The Yage Letters.

By 1957, the year of On The Road, it was Kerouac’s turn at the typewriter as he worked through nightmares attempting to fashion readable pages from Burroughs’s notes that would eventually become Naked Lunch. Ginsberg catches him taking a breather in the yard, cuddling a cat in the afternoon sun.

Credit though to the curators for also including the likes of Herbert Huncke, Joan Vollmer, Carl Solomon, Lucien Carr, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky and more. Oh yeah, Neal Cassady.

Not everything in the exhibition was taken by Ginsberg but he was the source for the majority and as years go by it’s noticeable how his photography changes from the quick snapshots in the ‘50s to the studied compositions of the ‘80s and ‘90s, which include Gary Synder, David Hockney, Robert Frank and of course, still, William Burroughs, at home thumbing through a pile of gun magazines.

Their minds may have been destroyed by madness but these hipsters still burn and this collection offers eyeball kicks a-plenty. Allen Ginsberg – I’m with you in London.

Angelheaded Hipsters is in the National Theatre foyer, Southbank, London until 20 March 2011. Admission free.
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