This surprisingly-sympathetic mainstream-media CBS News, Sunday Morning” segment (timed to coincide with the 1995 Lisa Phillips-curated “Beat Culture and the New America” show) has Richard Threllkald, CBS correspondent, interviewing Allen alongside Michael McClure. “Beat” is, retrospectively, defined as, “an overflowing of exuberance and good will”. Beat culture “wasn’t so much a rebellion as a proposition how to live”. Of contemporaneous times (1995): “They say the new generation is alienated, slacker, apathetic, deadened of feeling when actually there is an enormous amount of feeling underneath, which needs to be invoked, empowered and appreciated”.
McClure is shown making a pilgrimage to the site of the Six Gallery (“it’s still a gallery, (but) now it’s a gallery for tribal arts”) and to City Lights, and to the spot in San Francisco where he lived in the ‘60’s and where Jay DeFeo painted/constructed her remarkable work, “The Rose”. Only the hawk-eyed will be able to pick out Gregory Corso in this footage (not to mention Ted Joans and Michael Rumaker), only momentary glimpses of them, confessedly, but, we assure you, they’re there.