ReNude 19’s electronica version of “Howl” – (we mentioned it here a few weeks back).
CJ Thorpe-Tracey reviews it (on its opening night) for Rock and The Beat Generation, and makes an important point:
“ReNude19”, he writes, “can’t help who they are and how they arrived at this project – and of course they have every right to their interpretation of what ‘Howl’ ought to be, ought to mean, from their perspective”. He goes on – “That said, I do come away with a sense that (they) aren’t actively engaged with the inner workings of the poem at all, beyond it being a cool thing to put over their music. Thus, witnessing it, people like me who care for the poem really need to decide for ourselves what we actually want from ‘Howl’ and its sibling Beat works. The nub of the challenge here is, how old fashioned it all feels, and how comfortable.
The ReNude19 rendition, he confesses, left him “struggling with how we are to remember and celebrate a poem as uncompromising and disruptive and important as ‘Howl’, as we rapidly approach the 70th anniversary of its legendary live premiere in San Francisco.”
Their performance “opens up this crucial conversation but cannot resolve it: how do we engage with this work today, in our own era of upheaval? Is it a museum exhibit, some anachronistic trinket, a virtue-signalling badge or a vital template for current and future radical self-expression? I enjoyed this show but its sheer indistinct blobbiness convinces me it’s now pretty urgent to find an answer to those questions.”
Another musical interpretation of “Howl” (next Tuesday in New York City) – Kirk Knuffke and Justin Jay Hines reprise their improvised Howl (for cornet and drums) from this past April
Meantime, here‘s a novel use of Allen (a “mash-up” with The Clash and Hugh MacDiarmid!)
Freedom is Never Really Free – Ai Weiwei (from a recent interview with Hadani Ditmars in Sculpture magazine
HD: Could you tell me about your meeting with Allen Ginsberg in New York City in the 1980s? He was reading poems about your father. What was that like?
AW: Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem about meeting my father. Allen was truly an individual and a poet, very outspoken and kind. He looked at Western culture through the lens of a poet.
HD: What connection do you think there is between art and poetry?
AW: Art is poetry. It’s trying to use a limited common language to extend a complex argument or situation—so, art and poetry do the same thing.
HD: Ginsberg was a symbol of freedom of expression. How has America changed since then?
AW: I think it’s changed in two ways: one, art is not relevant anymore, because it has been destroyed by capitalism and the commodification of education; two, everything has been ruined by this. The treatment of art and culture as profitable products creates a bad environment for self-expression and makes individualism disappear.
“I think freedom of expression in America is an illusion. Freedom is never really free—if you think it’s free, you’ve lost the essential meaning of freedom of expression. It means either your expression isn’t relevant, or the authorities aren’t listening to you—they don’t care. It has become an obvious problem now because you have an authoritarian power—and the structure is from highly technically controlled capitalism where all the power comes from a very small group of people, and the rest aren’t accountable. So, of course, freedom of expression has become more than ever a crucial question for society to maintain its values—internally and globally.”
Stewart Meyer’s The Bunker Diaries, due to be released on November 1st by Beatdom Books. Read an early excerpt from the book – here
Two Beat shows:
Dean Radar reviews Ferlinghetti For San Francisco (currently on show at the de Young Museum, through till July 19, 2026) for Hyperallergic – see here
& did we not mention this? (opened on August 26 and through to December 14, at New York’s Morgan Library) – Mavericks of Malcontent – a show gathered mainly from their Carter Burden collection – Beat Generation Broadsides
As a reader of the site and the curator of Mavericks of Malcontent I am so stoked to see the installation get a shoutout here. Thank you so much. I hope all who get to see it enjoy it; I wish I could hear from every single one.