Conflicting Holiday Art

Because of the art I exposed myself to over the holidays, I now find myself feeling conflicted.  And yet I had a very enjoyable holiday, including two weeks off from work.

 

What were these conflicting influences I subjected myself to?

First, I was finishing up listening to “Bebop Spoken Here,” a four-CD collection.  From there, I went on to “Doo Wop Box 2,” another four-CD set.  Meanwhile, I listened to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet, and participated in a “you-sing-it” Handel’s Messiah.

Meanwhile, I was reading The Bell Jar and looking through two biographies of Sylvia Plath; and continuing my study of the “Beat” writers—specifically, I saw the new film “Kill Your Darlings,” about the killing of David Kammerer in 1943.

I suppose it was the Doo Wop and the biographies that made me realize how conflicted I was feeling.

After all, the Bach and the Handel and the Tchaikovsky— that music is such a standard background for the holidays.  It forms the standard background noise of the season—along with the Christmas carols we start hearing in November or even October now.  And I’ve been immersed in the Beat material for years—even “Kill Your Darlings” barely raised an alarm with me.  After all, I’ve played through the audio recording of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (same basic story) several times now.

And I’d read The Bell Jar before, long ago; I knew the basic story.

But I didn’t know very much about Sylvia Plath herself, other than how she ended her life.

To read about her, with the background noise of the Beats—contrasting drastically with the syrupy doo wop—now that was a set of conflicting emotions!

Anticipating “Kill Your Darlings”

(Yes, I've been doing NaNoWriMo -- but I had to post this!)

Perhaps this week, or next weekend, I shall get to see the new film “Kill Your Darlings,” starring Daniel Radcliffe as the young Allen Ginsberg.  This film is based on an incident that shook up New York City in 1944, involving the young college student who had brought together Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs—the three writers who would become known fifteen years later as the core writers of the Beat movement.  Kerouac and Burroughs wrote a novel about it, which was never published and remained hidden away until after their deaths.  The young college student, Lucien Carr, spent some time in prison but eventually became a well-respected editor for the UPI news service—and fervently avoided any further notoriety during his remaining decades of life.

The basic story:  Kerouac had dropped out of Colombia University; Ginsberg was or would soon be expelled.  Burroughs, about ten years older and related to the founder of Burroughs Corporation, had come to lead a fairly seamy existence, the dark-horse of the family.

A friend of Burroughs, also in his thirties, had become infatuated with Lucien Carr when Carr was still in elementary school.  David Kammerer pursued Carr for seven or eight years.  Finally one night, in a park in upper Manhattan…

But that would be a “spoiler.”

In any case, the story provided material for a number of would-be literary works.  Carr worked very hard to persuade his friends not to publish their own works relating to it.  But everyone connected with it, including Carr, is dead—and the story has reached the screen.

I’ve seen mixed reviews—but I’m looking forward to seeing the film myself.  It’s playing now at selected theaters.  I hope to see it before Thanksgiving.

Picano and Me

So I’ve been reading a lot in two areas:  Let’s call them “counter-culture” and “gay.”  By counter-culture I mean of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and maybe ‘70s:  The Beat writers and their offshoots:  Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs…Kesey, Hunter Thompson.  And the gay writers I’m talking about are the people associated with the Violet Quill of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but have been writing ever since; people like Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Felice Picano.

 

I have some mixed feelings about all of them.  The Beats I respect, but they certainly were a bunch of highly individualistic people.  I’m more conflicted about the Violet Quill; is it some kind of latent residual homophobia on my part?

I’m now halfway through Picano’s “memoir in the form of a novel, Ambidextrous.  I wasn’t expecting to like it.  My first attempt to read it ended when I got bored with his descriptions of being able to write with both hands as a child.  It just didn’t seem interesting.  And I seen reviews talking about all the childhood sex he describes in the book.

But I’ve gotten interested in his story, for reasons I hadn’t anticipated.  I’d read the sequel, Men Who Loved Me, first; so I knew about the years of his young adulthood.  He seemed much more freewheeling than I.  In fact we seemed quite different.  But now—

Well, I discover he had a run-in with a teacher in the fifth grade; quite a bit of trouble with that teacher, actually.

I had trouble in the fifth grade.  Whereas Picano’s teacher bullied him, my own teacher merely teased me.  My perception—well, it might as well have been bullying.  Now it might be considered mild psychological bullying.

But I believe my teacher simply liked me and didn’t know how to express it.  I was fairly shy at the time, in a new school and a new environment because of my own circumstances of growing up with the U.S. military.  Anyway, I hadn’t been expecting that Picano and I would have an unpleasant fifth-grade experience in common.

And a bit further on into the story:  Descriptions of model airplanes.  Picano’s friend makes airplanes out of balsa wood.  I myself bought plastic models and assembled them.  Picano describes the different airplanes that were modeled, plus the decals, the paints, etc.; and hanging them from the ceiling.  

As a child, I assembled some airplane models; though I didn’t concentrate on planes.  I made several large ship models; a large model of the Eiffel Tower; cars; etc.  

In short, as far as Picano’s description of himself at the age of eleven or twelve, I could relate to that; in spite of the fact that he was talking about New York City and its suburbs, while I would be talking about the tidewater area of Virginia, about seven years later than he is describing.

Picano’s descriptions have moved me along a bit towards continuing with my own novel based on my early life.  And for that I thank him!

I’ve also been taking another look at Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, another novel dealing with a boy who is eleven or twelve—but that is a totally different type of work!

Review: “Gang of Souls: A Generation of Beat Poets” (1989)

An interesting film—though maybe not particularly for the right reasons.  Possibly first shown on television (non-commercial?), this DVD runs almost exactly one hour—a bit short to show in a theater.  Perhaps it was made for some sort of film festival?

The point of the film is to show how the original Beat writers influenced following generations.  Made twenty years after the death of Jack Kerouac, he obviously isn’t interviewed.  We do, however, hear from Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the other two Beat Writers extraordinaire, as well as from Gregory Corse and Diane Di Prima.  We do not hear from Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who didn’t consider himself a “beat” anyway, but who was friends with the others and famously published Ginsberg’s seminal (!?) poem “Howl.”).  Nor do we hear from John Clellon Holmes, whose novel Go is widely considered the first Beat novel.  Either he died before he could be interviewed (the film appeared the year after his death) or he was consciously excluded.

But we hear from many poets who followed in these writers’ footsteps.  I’d heard of some of them; others were completely new to me.  I recognized Ed Sanders (who appeared on the William F. Buckley show Firing Line along with Jack Kerouac)—I’d thought of him as an activist, not a poet.  I’d heard of Anne Waldman, though wasn’t familiar with her poems.  I knew Marianne Faithfull as a singer but not her connection with the Naropa Institute (and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) in Colorado.  John Giorno looked familiar, though I suspect he reminds me of someone with a similar face.  The others were a complete surprise:  Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, and Jim Carroll.

  I’ve watched this DVD three times now.  That surprises me, because the first time through I found I didn’t know quite what to make of it.  In fact, after the first viewing, I said to my daughter, “I feel a lot more normal and well-adjusted now, after watching these people.”  That was true.  But less true after three viewings.  I do read less extravagantly than the people in this video—but still more extravagantly than most people I know.

And—quotes from this video stick with me now.  “You want to be a writer, shut up and write” (Rollins).  “The opposite of poetry is hypocrisy” (Corso).  “I’m a filling man; I fill in empty space” (Rolliins).  “Everything I have to say, I say in my books” (Burroughs).

Most of all, this DVD is experiential.  I remember the way Corso talks, the way Lunch talks, Giorno’s musical delivery.  I remember Waldman’s spirited delivery.  And I remember the presence; the way Corso speaks and then looks right at you; the way Lydia Lunch smiles and smirks and spits out her truth and then stops and just looks right at you.  

Sanders says that performers have to believe in every word they speak, everything they do.  I’ll remember that now, at open mics (though I think I’ve always known that).  So Corso and Lunch hurl their visions at you then give you this “look” that seems to say:  “Yep, I said that; that’s how I see it.  Don’t like it?  Then take it or leave it.  Yeah.”

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (1 of 2)

This is the large concluding section of Felice Picano’s “Memoir in the Form of a Novel,” Men Who Loved Me.  It describes the life of the narrator “Phil” in the New York of the 1960s, when gays were building their own community in Greenwich Village but weren’t necessarily aware of what they were doing.  In the first large section of the book (“The Most Golden Bulgari”), the narrator described his decision to go to Italy and “become homosexual,” his affair with a Yugoslavian film director in Rome, and his abrupt return to the United States.  A brief interlude links these two main sections of the book.

Returning now to New York, Phil manages to find, within just a few days, both a new job and a new boyfriend, both quite substantial.  The boyfriend lasts for something beyond eight months; the job makes Phil into a highly paid and respected magazine editor.

I continually wonder, reading this section, to what extent Picano is slumming, to what extent he has been pampered.  He’s gotten a good college education, he somehow (though he’s been working as a social worker) got himself off to Italy, he immediately lands a good job almost immediately upon returning to the States.  From whence comes this stunning luck?

At the same time, like the Beat writers, he seems to spend a surprising amount of time socializing and partying.  He takes a fair quantity of drugs (to be fair, I wouldn’t call it “excessive;” if he does it often, and gets considerably “buzzed,” he almost never suffers physically from it; and it those days hallucinogens like LSD were still legal).  And—is he gay?  As before, he begs the question with remarks like “since I seemed destined to become gay”…

In addition to his playwright boyfriend, he assembles a large number of gay Greenwich Village friends.  It’s difficult to tell exactly how “swishy” these acquaintances were; they were not, it appears, queens in anything but behavior.  They don’t seem to have gone in for cross-dressing; they simply went in, some of them, for rather hefty camp.  In these days “before Stonewall,” one definitely watched one’s step amongst the public at large; but these folks were definitely at ease with one another.  The Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village is well-described; we’re treated to not one but two “lease-break parties” (parties featuring behavior guaranteed to get you thrown out of the apartment you desperately wanted to leave but couldn’t because of the lease provisions).