700 Weekly Round-Ups! – Here’s the image that accompanied the very first one – Allen Ginsberg and Steven Taylor
Musician, writer, teacher, Steven Taylor spent 20 years as Allen’s guitar accompanist. We profiled him back in 2018 on the Allen Ginsberg Project here and here
see also (for further background) Michael Limnios‘ 2012 interview – here – (and his more recent spotlight from 2020) – here
hear Steven in conversation with the much-missed Ken Jordan on the 2020 Evolver podcast – here
see Simon Warner‘s 2021 interview with him for Rock and The Beat Generation – here
This week in Rock and the Beat Generation Steven Taylor reviews “A Complete Unknown” –“Beat twists spied in Dylan bio flick“
“When I first heard about the film, my initial skepticism was relieved somewhat when I learned that Dylan had been involved in the project (his right-hand man Jeff Rosen is listed, with (James) Mangold, as co-producer). I dreaded having to endure lip-sync or an actor singing, but (Timothée) Chalamet does a great job. He’s not a great singer, but neither is your man. The overwhelming takeaway is how amazing those songs are. They still astonish.”
Substacks – we were speaking last week of Substacks – it’s there you’ll find Maeve O’Brien’s provocative notes on the Beats and cultural appropriation, Liam James’ Jungian reading (“Transforming Shame Into Art”), and Jan Cornall’s memories of encountering Allen in Australia, and… and doubtless a whole lot more.
Clearly, as we pointed out, this is an arena to attend to, an increasingly valuable forum.
January 10th – two singular American artists passed away on this day – the poet Charles Olson
and blues performer, Chester Arthur Burnett (Howlin’ Wolf)
…Those horrible racist, sexist,classist Beatniks!And not only didn’t they participate in social & cultural change to the extent that O’Brien ,and many in today’s academic world demand.
The one point at which O’Brien engages the art -not the lives- of the Beats she points to the famous Kerouac passage in which he says basically that he wishes he were Black and wants to escape from the white world & uses that to show Kerouac is an observer/appropriator racist – disregarding the artistic value of that exploration of the narrator’s mind and how it advances the reader’s knowledge of the character’s psyche ,and O’Brien ignores that at the time Kerouac wrote
racism-actual Jim Crow laws – were in effect & Kerouac himself would have been beaten nearly to death for expressing those views in public in most places . O’Brien claims to be illuminating the social context /background of Beat art -but she actually doesn’t do that at all -she reduces the Beat social context to today’s social context as it exists in many parts of the Academic world -not the whole world -and finds the Beats don’t live up to today’s classroom/seminar standards .********************************************************************************8
Kerouac hated hippies, supported American involvement in the Vietnam War .
Burroughs killed his wife-got off scott free.Burroughs flirted with Fascism (Spengler),named his retreat “The Bunker”-after Hitler?- Carr murdered a Gay stalker-basically got away with it –
I too am opposed to hagiographical accounts of the Beats -but not of this conformist nature.