[PREV - KREBS] [TOP]
January 25, 2000
Upon viewing "the Source".
Not tremendously disappointed,
but not amazingly impressed.
Getting Hollywood actors to do
readings of beat poets over
Chronology was screwy in places, canned music wasn't as stupid
lots of little things to complain as that sounds.
about...
One of the biggest little things:
When they get to San Francisco,
they open with a zoom-in on the Back in the days of
Transamerica pyramid. the original beats,
there was no such
building there, it
was a place where
Or how about this one: there were apartments
where a lot of the
"the women were just ornaments" beat-types lived.
"they all looked the same, you
couldn't tell them apart". It was called Monkey Clay
(after the intersection,
Try reading Montgomery & Clay) and
"Women of the many of the beats were
Beat Generation" angry to see it get
and see if you ripped down, and replaced
feel the same way. with this office building.
A Gary Snyder poem
calls the pyramid
"an arrogant
and wasteful building".
One problem is that there
are at least two beats:
(1) a half dozen friends
who met in New York, or
perhaps a few dozen poets
under the wing of Rexroth
in San Francisco;
(2) the mass phenomena,
the post "On the Road"
craze, the icon of the
goatee and beret.
Both of these are real,
but different and only (But it isn't clear to me that
loosely connected. "Neal Cassady" was any less of
a media creation than "Maynard
G. Krebs".)
KREBS
The movie doesn't always make
it clear which period it's
talking about... maybe they
don't know the difference?
The thesis of the movie, based on
some quotations from Burroughs and
Snyder, is that the "beat movement"
is still active, that the various
counter/sub-cultures/undergrounds/scenes
all have their roots in the Beats.
This is not a bad thesis...
but maybe it makes it hard
for them to grasp the kind
of distinction I'm making here.
The usual model for understanding
this is "authentic early pioneers"
vs. "inauthentic latecomer poseurs".
That has it's problems, of course:
If they knew what they were
talking about, they'd know that
there were women who were
definitely part of beat #1, but
they just didn't make it through
the fifties reality filters into
beat #2, so instead you got the
chicks in the black leotards.
(Not that there's
anything wrong
with chicks in And after all, how many of
black leotards.) us today can grasp what
torment the soul of a
teenage girl endured in 1959
before donning the ritual
tights, and strutting the
village?
BEATNIK_59
On the plus side, "The Source" includes:
A little blip of
John Cage doing (offered as evidence that
"Water Music". there was more happening in
the 50s than the beat poets).
A bunch of Ed Sanders
interview clips.
Fair amount of the oft
ignored Gary Snyder. (Who had the poor taste not to
die young like a good bad-boy
hero is supposed to.)
The elder Ken Kesey gushing
about the coolness of Neal
Cassady and The Road.
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