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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HOWL (2010)

My, how the London Film Festival spoilt us this year with not one, but two, Beat Generation themed films. Following William S. Burroughs: A Man Within came Howl, a celebration of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem.

Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman weave a recreation of the 1955 Six Gallery debut reading (with help from Lawrence Ferlinghetti about how it looked); the obscenity trial court case (with the suave Jon Hamm playing the hip defense lawyer); Ginsberg interviews (nicely underplayed by James Franco); and an animation of the poem (which sounds horrible, well it does to me, but was okay).

All the dialogue is taken verbatim from the original court transcript; Ginsberg’s own interviews and “Howl” itself, which gives a strong documentary feel rather than that of a staged and scripted drama. Without being extremely picky there’s little to fault in it, so I won’t. You might take that for laziness and you might be right but even watching it tired, emotional and more than a little drunk (hence this flimsy - and late - review), I thought it interestingly made and thanks to the different styles and settings moves at a surprisingly brisk pace.

Howl is due for release in cinemas in February 2011.

TALKIN' 'BOUT MY BEAT GENERATION

I was asked a few questions by a glossy Italian style magazine a while back for an article about the Beat Generation. I’m still waiting to be flown to San Francisco for the photo shoot of me sagely thumbing the paperbacks in City Lights or supping a beer in Vesuvio’s with The Subterraneans casually placed on the bar.

Why do you think there’s an ongoing fascination with characters like Ginsberg, Kerouac etc?
They were groundbreaking in their writing; shaking up the staid, conservative, dull and frightened America. They looked it dead in the eye and challenged it. That alone would be enough but when you discover further controversy, court cases, links to the criminal underworld, prostitution, homosexuality, mental illness, lobotomies, murder, suicide, mysterious deaths, firearms, alcohol abuse, drug experimentation and addiction, travel, religion, wife sharing and bigamy, you’ve all the ingredients of a fantastic soap opera that continues to develop with every new publication of their correspondence (see the recent Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters).

Were the Beats perhaps more a cult than anything else?
For me, the Beats were solely Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and their close associates – nothing to do with the cartoonish Beatniks that followed. The Beat Generation term came from a drunken Kerouac which Ginsberg was savvy, passionate and generous enough to use as the means to get his friends published in the aftermath of Howl. There’s little stylistically to link Howl, On The Road and Naked Lunch so it’s difficult to categorize them as a genuine literary movement; really they were/are a media phenomenon – even if they created it themselves.

Do they have a true legacy when it comes to poetry and literature?
They do, but time is dusting over the tracks of that legacy. The obscenity trials of Howl and Naked Lunch paved the way for greater freedom of expression and people like City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti shouldn’t be forgotten in all this. They made poetry and literature exciting, even dangerous. On The Road reads somewhat quaintly these days but the rhythm and phrases in Howl, exploring and questioning the soul of America, could be hip hop lyrics of today and if Naked Lunch was published tomorrow its nightmarish visions could scarcely be any less powerful.

What are you expecting from the Howl film? Do you think Coppola’s On The Road project is a good idea (what I mean is, can you really hope to capture the essence of the book on film etc?).
From the short trailer, I can’t wait to see Howl . Visually looks spot-on, Franco looks convincing, a gripping courtroom drama and the greatest poem of the 20th Century. Looks like a winner to me. On The Road is a harder task to pull off. I can’t see any film doing the book justice but I’m not precious about it; it’ll come out and be forgotten just as quickly whereas Jack’s novel will continue to be read for another fifty years.