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♪

Whereas Allen Ginsberg has made a lasting impact

as a poet and a scholar,

and whereas his candor and scholarship

has served as an inspiration to an entire generation,

now therefore I, mayor of the city of Boulder,

do hereby designate Sunday, July 3rd,

as Allen Ginsberg Day.

[applause, cheering]

♪

"With the coming of Dean Moriarty

began the part of my life

you could call my life on the road.

In the bar I told Dean, 'Hell, man, I know very well

you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer.

And, after all, what do I really know about it

except you gotta stick to it

with the energy of a benny addict.'

Because the only people for me are the mad ones,

the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing

but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles

exploding like spiders across the stars

and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop

and everybody goes, 'Aww.'"

♪

[phone dialing]

♪

Hello, Ed.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're honored to have

on the line from Lawrence, Kansas,

a great American writer whose brilliance

and incomparable satire [unintelligible].

Let's welcome William Burroughs.

[cheering]

How many people are there?

Town Hall is packed.

The Beat goes on, Bill.

I've often been asked if I had some words of advice

to young people.

♪

If you are doing business

with a religious son of a bitch,

get it in writing.

His word isn't worth a shit, not with good Lord

telling him how to fuck you over.

[laughter]

♪

Gregory Corso and I collaborated,

almost inadvertently, in building a--

building a whole mythology of a generation.

-When Sputnik went up-- -Yeah, we did a chain poem.

A chain poem made in Amsterdam.

And we took a rest and went downstairs to the bathroom

and this owner of the hotel, what do you think he thinks?

Two guys, right, four legs,

they're having sex, they're indignant.

And I say, "Hey, we're smoking a joint, man.

We ain't having sex."

[laughter]

♪

"There once was a place,

perhaps, where all was light,

which once was the place, pray tell,

some non-manmade god hung out.

And so tra-la, tra-la,

it's fin de siècle again, my dears,

and the music of the spheres,

some kind of mad, mad laughter."

[applause]

♪

[dog barking]

♪

[distant siren]

Space.

Like, the final frontier, man.

These are the voyages of the hip Starship Enterprise.

Captain, permission to beam Lawrence Ferlinghetti aboard.

Permission, like, granted.

[laughter]

Where are we headed, man?

To, like, the Planet Bongo.

They were the lonely voices of dissent in the 1950s.

Outsiders, and proud of it,

they were the artists who called themselves Beats.

Hear the sound, hear the sound.

Zoom, zoom, zoom.

[muttering]

Oh--zoom, zoom, zoom.

Fallout shelter,

Sputnik,

H-bomb,

explosion, explosion, explosion.

Bang!

[applause, snapping]

♪

There's been a revival of interest

in the Beat Generation.

Poetry readings are back and being performed

at coffee houses straight out of the '50s.

Even MTV now has poetry programs

that would make Jack Kerouac proud.

♪

I feel all dead inside.

♪

Backed up in a dark corner.

♪

And I don't know who's hitting me.

Shorty! Shorty, get me that fight from Quinn.

I want money. Do you understand? Money, money!

I forbid, I forbid. Better buy a guy and shoot yourself.

You need money to buy a gun.

♪

It's my first day in school,

some kids got around me, white kids.

They said, "Hey, who are you?

Is your father a monkey?"

I was dumb, I smiled and said, "No."

Well, they wiped that smile right off my face,

they beat it off.

I had to get beat up a couple of more times

before I found out that if you're colored,

you stink.

♪

♪

In the '40s, the bomb dropped.

The entire planet was threatened biologically.

When suddenly the realization,

"Why are we being intimidated by a bunch of jerks

who don't know anything about life?

Who are they to tell us what we feel

and how we're supposed to behave,

and why take all that bullshit?"

[typing]

We're at Columbia University now,

and the connection here with the Beats

is that this is where Jack Kerouac

and Allen Ginsberg met

and the catalytic reaction began

that became the Beat Movement,

and that was one of the forces that helped create

and I think shaped the movements of the 1960s.

Now, Kerouac comes down from your own fair state

of Massachusetts, from Lowell.

He's a working class guy.

From a very early age is interested in writing.

He is a great football player at Lowell,

and they offered him a football scholarship.

The man who shook up America with the Beat Movement was--

basically began as a jock.

Until he hurts his leg.

And at that point he meets Allen Ginsberg

from Paterson, New Jersey,

father a high school teacher,

poet of minor note.

And they're not talking too much about football.

They were interested in something very corny,

trying to find truth and meaning in life.

We weren't trying to make a social revolution, particularly.

We were just trying to propose our own souls to ourselves.

Were they lovers?

We felt very close to each other just intuitively,

but, uh, you know, without any overt sexual thing,

except that I was in love him.

I had a crush on him, I had a crush on everybody.

♪

They found African American culture fascinating.

They related to weird people like William Burroughs.

Jack and I went out to investigate your soul

because we both really thought you were a religious thing

and dignified and weird but intelligent.

Jack said, uh,

"Bill is the most intelligent man in America."

Did they take a lot of drugs?

Did they take a lot of drugs?

Cannabis, datura, coca...

I had a habit, and that...

♪

...kept me occupied.

They were searching, they were searching.

They knew they weren't satisfied with what was.

And that's why we're here at Columbia

trying to inhale the atmosphere

that once nurtured people who dared to be different.

♪

Burroughs began exploring Times Square.

to sort of see the lumpen population.

He was interested in the different varieties of the bars.

♪

He'd met Herbert Huncke,

and Huncke was living around Times Square,

practically on the street.

They'd come strolling down the street

with books under their arms.

We thought you had some kind of secret knowledge.

It's just good, healthy activity in a funny way.

We'd pick up some grass, smoke,

and observe the phenomena of the red light

over the roof-combs of the buildings

that indicated some kind of apocalyptic,

end of millennium consciousness.

Those were all justifications.

-For what? -For what?

For what? For an interest in the whole thing.

Sometimes you lose sight of the fact

that these were basically college kids,

except for Burroughs, who was a little older.

These were basically young people

who were kind of broken off in public, in a way.

They were out getting loaded and they were just

making a lot of conversation that they could build on.

♪

"Did I tell you my poem about the Empire State Building

that had not doomed the dumb eyes of New York

all the time? 'That was pretty good.'

He says, 'Hey, I've got a new poem too.'

All these poets struggling to be poets.

Same time if they want to,

they turn a little purple moonlight pages

in which their secret naked doodlings do show.

♪

Secret scatological thought.

♪

That's why everybody wants to see it."

"America, I've given you all.

Now I'm nothing.

America, I used to be a communist when I was a kid.

I'm not sorry.

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

Whenever I go to Chinatown, I get drunk and never get laid.

My mind is made up, there's going to be trouble."

I have told you that I will offer my beliefs,

my affiliations, and everything else

for the American public,

and they will know where I stand

as they do from what I have written.

-Stand away from the stand. -I have written

for Americanism for many years and I shall...

Stand away from the stand!

...fight for the Bill of Rights--

Officer, take this man away from the stand.

The country had gotten energized into this--

the war effort of the Second World War.

And, uh, when the men came back, uh,

one thing--there was the G.I. Bill was there,

a lot of people went to school that

never would have gone to school,

went to the universities.

Uh, uh, there was a feeling of, uh,

that--that America was getting a fresh start,

was getting a real start.

Three years or so after the end of the war,

the draft is back, uh, the Korean War then,

the early '50s, uh, the McCarthy hearings,

the House Un-American Activities Committee,

the execution of the Rosenbergs,

the sense of a status quo, business as usual,

a kind of stolid, even comfort.

That it's the fattest civilization around,

the best ever.

And, in reality, there was an incredible provincialism

and a very strong sense of conformity

and a stultifying feeling

that you had to get along with Life Magazine,

as, you know, what Ginsberg says,

"I don't want my emotional life to be read by Time."

Eisenhower's intention was that we should try to settle down

to some nice, quiet, American pursuits

and not rock the boat,

and it was time for us to ease off a bit.

He accomplished that, the country was pretty quiet.

We ask every citizen to immediately report

any information regarding espionage,

sabotage, or un-American activities

to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

♪ That made him such a flop

♪ Was he beeped when he should have bopped ♪

It was such a schizophrenic distinction

between a private world of what everybody knew

and talked about, like black culture

or teahead culture of those years

or just sexual culture or gay culture,

there were all these marginalized cultures

which were never represented in public.

♪

It was friendship, affairs, intermarriage,

and a sense of, uh, a community.

♪

They were the jazz musicians,

and they were related to the abstract expressionists.

♪ Oh, you did it again

But that wasn't the only thing that was going on then.

The poetry scene was important,

but there was also the Living Theater

was going on then.

[rattling]

♪

Good morning, recruits.

John Cage was important.

[high-pitched bubbling]

♪

Happenings were happening then.

♪

There was a joy and an optimism.

♪

The music reflected that.

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie

were breaking down those walls.

It's all insane, then you look back,

you look away, around,

everything is coming in from everywhere

in the sound of the jazz.

"Hi," "Hey."

We were our own audience.

I mean, Kerouac wrote seven books--

or 14 books before they were published.

We were more or less united, I would say,

towards increased awareness.

♪

Increased freedom.

There were little connections that we're making

and they were building.

What you had here, as near as I can tell,

was a collection or a gathering

of very, very great intelligence.

♪

Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground

is the model of a lot of these people,

the guy who--who lives in some kind of hole

and rails at what's going on around him.

Many of us, without knowing Dostoyevsky,

thought that was our role.

To write poetry, to write music,

to paint, to act, to dance,

to dare to dream.

♪

Allen had this vision,

these Blake visions,

and he suddenly said,

"We're taking over the universe."

♪

Well, Beat got the beat-- got the bebop beat

so that you have a sense of timing.

♪

Then there's the Catholic thing of beatitude.

♪

You know, like sacred and holy.

Huncke gave it as the one I would usually give it,

if somebody wants to tell you their problem and all that,

you say, "Not now, man, I'm beat."

When the Sputnik went up and they said,

"Oh, these guys are out of this world,"

Beatniks.

Beatniks, nutniks,

they all act like they was behind the door

when the brains was handed out.

[laughter]

I met Mr. Ginsberg maybe about two months

after I had left prison.

19--what? '49?

♪

You said '50.

♪

It was the beginning of 1950.

Girl, sorry for one fucking little mistake,

stay out of it.

♪

Women were pretty much ornaments

for the men and the Beats,

and they were the caretakers.

They got away with murder

because what they were proselytizing

produced the male artist hero.

Pattycake, pattycake.

Sylvia...

Did you see me wave my zen stick?

♪

And there was a look all the women had,

a certain look.

It was hard to tell them from each other.

♪

I don't think we were particularly machismo.

Actually, Burroughs and I were queer,

very sensitive and literary.

Well, some of my best friends were women.

♪

Most of them were gay except Jack,

now Jack had tough time with women in a way,

and I got in trouble with him

and he got very unhappy that I fucked his girl.

But that was the time when I did not know Jack.

I was just introduced to him.

It wasn't as if I fucked my best friend's girl.

[dog barking]

"It's the Beat Generation, it's beat,

it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart,

it's being beat and down in the world,

and like old time lowdown

and like in ancient civilizations

the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat."

♪

♪ Pull my daisy, tip my cup ♪

We didn't expect to be represented in public.

We just wanted to represent ourselves

and write for heaven, you know,

building up treasures in heaven.

I think Kerouac despaired

of ever having his work published.

I read the book and I was simply stunned.

I said then I believed that it was as perfect an expression

of a generation as Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

Kerouac was a writer.

That is, he wrote.

The difference being a bullfighter who fights a bull

is different from a bullshitter

who makes passes with no bull there.

Truman Capote got jealous I went on The Tonight Show

and said it wasn't writing, it was typing.

Yeah, fuck him.

And now Truman's at the great Tonight Showin the sky

still wearing his white coat while Jack's 15 books

are translated into 11 languages all over the world.

[applause]

Life Magazinecame around to interview us

for an article on the Beat Generation.

And I thought, "Jesus,

if they think that we have anything to say,

they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

They must be pretty desperate."

♪

♪ Now the lesson is over, get on your feet ♪

♪ And go to town and dig the beat ♪

[applause]

Jack, uh, got a couple of square questions,

but I think the answers will be interesting.

How long did it take you to write On the Road?

-Three weeks. -Three weeks.

That's amazing, how long were you on the road itself?

-Seven years. -Seven years.

I was on the road once for three weeks

and it took me seven years to write about it,

sort of the other way around.

I've heard that you write so fast

that you don't like to use regular typing paper

but instead you prefer to use one big long roll of paper.

-Is that true? -Yeah.

When I write narrative novels

and I want to change my narrative thought,

I keep going...

♪

Wonderful part of Jack's On the Roadwas when he said,

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again.

We had longer ways to go, but no matter.

The road is life."

"I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country,

always vaguely planning and never taking off.

I left with my canvas bag

and took off for the Pacific Ocean."

The whole nation was tilting westward.

♪

It was like a drink that had been stirred

with the Second World War and it hadn't settled down yet.

"Somewhere along the line I knew there would be girls,

visions, everything.

Somewhere along the line,

pearl would be handed to me."

♪

There's just nothing like being out, uh,

on an American road.

♪

You get outside, something happens to ya,

and when you're traveling through outside,

the wind goes over the top of your head

and you get a static charge.

You'll see people with their hair standing on end like this

'cause they've been driving a long time,

and their eyes kind of wild.

It's a high.

♪

The center of gravity of our imagination in poetics

moved off the East Coast and came out into these grasslands.

♪

There was the expansion of a heart

to learn and to enjoy all of America.

And that included, as you see in Jack's work and in Allen's work,

the lives and minds of ordinary people.

♪

"We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn.

♪

All winter I'd been reading

the great wagon parties that held council there.

And, of course, now it was only cute suburban cottages

all laid out in a dismal gray dawn.

Then Omaha, and, by God,

the first cowboy I saw

in a ten-gallon hat and Texas boots,

looked like any beat character

of the brickwall dawns of the East

except for the getup."

"America, this is quite serious.

America, this is the impression I get

from looking in a television set.

America, is this correct?

It's true, I don't want to join the Army

or turn lathes in precision parts factories.

I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

♪

And away we go!

"Into the interior,

a vast subdivision,

antennae of television to the meaningless sky.

♪

In lifeproof houses

they hover over the young...

♪

...sop up a little of what they shut out.

Only the young bring anything in,

and they are not young very long."

♪

"Just ahead, over the rolling wheatfields

all golden beneath the distant snows of Estes,

I'd be seeing old Denver at last.

There were smokestacks, smoke, railyards, red-brick buildings,

and the distant downtown gray-stone.

I stumbled along with the most wicked grin of joy in the world,

among the old bums and beat cowboys.

I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way."

"A high tower on a wide plain.

If you climb up one floor

you'll see a thousand miles more."

♪

Right over those knolls over there,

something wonderful is going to be.

Uh, but you found out the more you went

there was just more knolls.

"So in America when the sun goes down

and I sit on the old broken-down river pier

watching the long, long skies over New Jersey

and sense all that raw land that rolls

in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast,

and all that road going...

I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty,

the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

I think of Dean Moriarty."

[applause]

[typing]

Well, I don't think there is any real Neal.

Kerouac's, uh, I think had a--

had a sort of an idealized figure

of Neal as this On the Roadcharacter.

I mean, he's sort of the On the Road,uh,

personified.

But there's such an overwhelming trip...

[laughs]

...Cassady, I don't know,

it's hard to even know what to say about Cassady,

he was so singular.

He was the first person I met who he himself was the art.

♪

A lot of people thought he was crazy, you know,

a lot of people were afraid of him and--

a lot--most people I know didn't understand him at all,

you know, yeah,

but he was like a musician.

He was like Charlie Mingus.

He played the bass line,

whatever else happened

was happening around his bass line,

and he used [unintelligible].

♪ Jack was sittin' poker faced

with bullets backed with bitches ♪

♪ Neal hunched at the wheel, puttin' everyone in stitches ♪

♪ Braggin' 'bout some nurse he screwed

while drivin' through Nebraska ♪

♪ And when she came she honked the horn ♪

Cassady was a sort of self-taught prison boy

who came here to New York to go con Kerouac

into teaching him how to write.

He was a great driver.

And I don't mean a fast driver, I mean a great driver.

His, uh, page was this highway.

And his writing, too, was one of these cars.

All right, here we go, one-handed delight.

Ah, no, no, no, that's masturbating.

No, no, no.

Nothing in the world he liked better

than getting about six scared kids in the car

and bring 'em back about three days later

and their eyes looked like fried bolts.

His special thing was that he could remember

the chain of thought that went before

that led up to a moment of conversation.

Came in here yesterday and, uh,

jumbling and jittery around,

and I sort of looked like I was high,

so I just let people think I was high.

Everybody has forms, and everything's known

and the forms are changing,

there's no life in the forms.

Just his whole body language and everything

was so communicative, it was just amazing.

♪

It's already too late,

the Pentagon is taking care of it all,

we're doing this deliberately as far as that goes.

♪

The Pentagon is doing what deliberately?

Well, I don't know who's running the country, do you?

♪

♪ Look out, California

"We began rolling in the foothills before Oakland

and saw stretched out ahead of us

the fabulous white city of San Francisco.

'No more land,' yelled Dean.

'Can't go no further 'cause there ain't no more land.'"

♪

The war displaced everyone,

and, uh, they didn't go back home.

It was a little like after any war,

and it was certainly like after the Civil War

when people like Mark Twain were displaced

and ended up in San Francisco.

He was a carpetbagger in a way,

just like the East Coast Beats were all carpetbaggers,

including myself.

We're in a tradition of dissidence.

So we started City Lights.

The idea was to create a literary meeting place.

There was already cultivated-- a San Francisco renaissance.

There always way an anarchist, pacifist, anti-Stalinist,

anti-authoritarian, literary, Bohemian, anti-war circle.

People want to be themselves, basically.

People want to remain true to their very being.

People who don't wanna play the game.

People who wanna be whatever they are.

And that manifested itself in literature and painting,

in Bohemian parties, poetry readings.

I would go into a macho bar

and jump on the pool table and read some poems.

Now, either I got beat up or I made $50,

most of the times I made $50.

It was a cold night in the big city

where love is the roar and death is the beat

and I yell like a madman at the top of my voice.

Everybody sing, everybody sing.

Started to sing a song about pretty flowers

and then the men in their white coats came with their jackets

and I told them to sing also.

Let's sing a song, let's sing a song.

And they took me away, away, away

from the roar and the beat,

the beat, the beat,

let's sing a song.

Like, uh,

man, I'm here and, I mean,

I've met a swinging group here.

I like--I like, uh,

I like Frisco the most, man,

because, I mean, the town jumps, you know?

I mean, there are a lot of scenes, man,

and, uh, so, I mean, it's like that, you know?

Uh-huh.

Kenneth Rexroth was sort of, uh,

the philosopher,

the anarchist philosopher

who preceded us in San Francisco,

said that San Francisco was to the artists

as Barcelona was the Spanish anarchists.

I guess it was a haven for thinking and feeling people.

In those days, we were all outlaws.

Anybody who had feelings of their own

or had their hair a little bit too long

or had an idea of their own

or wanted to experience new states of consciousness

or to deepen themselves or to grow a soul

or to feel anything out of the ordinary, uh,

was a renegade.

♪

I'm Steven Ronin, Beat historian.

Here I am at 3119 Fillmore,

location of the former Six Gallery,

where poet Allen Ginsberg debuted his poem Howl,

and history hasn't been the same since.

Rexroth had been invited to organize a reading

at the Six Gallery.

He suggested to McClure or myself that we organize it,

and it fell to me.

And Rexroth gave me Gary Snyder's address.

Snyder was a student studying Chinese, Japanese, and Zen.

♪

Allen and I lined up that space

with the idea of holding a reading

for our various relatively unpublished friends.

♪

What we were interested in was our own writing

and talking with people who were also trying

to write and paint and whatever else.

And, uh, trying to get our way someplace else,

get--get a new start

that would gently replace a lot of this slobber.

And we stepped out on the stage.

With Kerouac in the audience,

with Neal Cassady in the audience.

We didn't know who would be there,

we didn't know who to expect.

"I followed the whole gang of howling poets

to the reading at Gallery Six that night,

which was, among other important things,

the night of the birth

of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance.

♪

Scores of people stood around

in the darkened galleries,

straining to hear every word

of the amazing poetry reading

as I wandered from group to group

urging them to glug a slug from the jug,

or wandered back and sat on the right side of the stage,

giving out little wows and yeses of approval."

"Heaven was only half as far that night,

listening to the burnt phrases,

when I heard the poet have rhyming erection."

When Allen read Howl,uh,

we all knew that a line had been drawn in the sand.

We decided that we would put our foot

on that line that Allen drew.

I was there, and the next morning I sent a telegram

to Allen Ginsberg saying,

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career.

When do we get the manuscript?"

I had a conversation with Rexroth the next day.

I said, "Gee, I'm gonna be famous

in San Francisco, or North Beach."

And he said, "You're gonna be famous from bridge to bridge."

The first edition was printed in England,

but it was seized by the U.S. Customs in San Francisco.

All during the trial, we were still selling it.

We never took the book out of the window.

There were a series of trials in the late '50s that, uh,

liberated the work,

and that meant a whole spiritual liberation after that.

It's really hard to get that kind of publicity.

♪

What I've always loved about Allen

is precisely his bravery.

I once wrote a poem about him.

It went like this,

"Sometimes I think that ugly little queer,

that four-eyed kike is the bravest man in America."

[typing]

"I saw the best minds of my generation

destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked...

-Angelheaded hipsters... -Angelheaded hipsters

burning for the ancient heavenly connection

to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

Who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high

sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness

of cold-water flats

floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz...

♪

Who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,

burning their money in wastebaskets

and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo

with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels

or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death,

or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams,

with drugs, with waking nightmares...

Peyote solidities of halls,

green tree cemetery dawns,

wine drunkenness over the rooftops,

storefront boroughs of teahead joyride

neon blinking traffic light,

sun and moon and tree vibrations

in the roaring winter dusks...

♪

Who talked continuously seventy hours

from park to pad to bar to Bellevue

to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists

jumping down the stoops off fire escapes

off windowsills off the Empire State

out of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts

and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks

and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho

seeking visionary indian angels

who were visionary indian angels,

who howled on their knees in the subway

and were dragged off the roof

waving genitals and manuscripts...

♪

Who wandered around and around at midnight

in the railroad yard wondering where to go,

and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars

racketing through snow toward lonesome farms

in grandfather night,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz

in the goldhorn shadow of the band...

Carl Solomon!

I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am.

♪

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma

by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof

they've come to drop angelic bombs

the hospital illuminates itself

imaginary walls collapse

O skinny legions run outside

O starry-spangled shock of mercy

the eternal war is here

O victory forget your underwear

we're free.

♪

I'm with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey

on the highway across America in tears

to the door of my cottage in the Western night."

♪

[applause]

The poem had an immense effect on me.

And I thought immediately that Ginsberg was

at the least a major poet, and maybe a genius.

I had no idea that it would be famous.

I had no idea that it was of such value to other people.

Apparently it was.

I just had never, uh, read any poetry

that was that charged, that intense, that extraordinary.

And I knew he was gonna make a revolution

in the consciousness of his time.

So the Six Gallery's still there,

it's just in a different place.

[siren wails]

♪

Once a month, we will book a comedian

who will offend everybody.

[laughter]

There are words that offend me, uh,

let's see, "Governor Faubus,"

"segregation" offend me.

Uh, and "night time television" offends me.

Some night time television.

Both rabbis and priests S-H-I-T.

Only one F-U-C-Ks.

Are you, uh, what is loosely called a Beatnik?

No, I am a poet and a painter and sculptor.

Hm, in other words, you're out of work?

That's right.

"Come to be healed, come to be saved.

Screaming and laughing down the beach,

strangling each other,

devouring flesh and gnawing

on fingers broken and bones of splintered.

Voices heard in Venice."

They're dirty, they never clean up,

and then their mode of living

is with their free love

and their free meals and their free, uh,

pads, as they call them.

"You have sometimes done it as if you always knew

how it was properly done.

You knew it was there and you knew that you were there

and that you had done it better, in a way,

than anybody in a long time."

♪

Don't you ever feel tempted

to occasionally write for money

instead of just writing for the news?

Well, I sometimes-- I write home to my father,

he sends me some money.

♪

"Dear Allen:

There is an end-of-the-world feeling in Tangier,

with its glut of nylon shirts,

Swiss watches, scotch, and sex.

The whole town is a trap.

You will see it closing,

but there will be no escape.

No place to go."

♪

♪ The wayward wind

♪ Is restless wind

These are the San Francisco shipyards

at China Basin.

Jack Kerouac worked near here

in the railroad switching yards

and Allen Ginsberg came nearby here

to write his famous Sunflower Sutra.

The Beats didn't just, uh,

continually travel on the road.

Those who could ordered freighters

like American Kestrel down there

to head out on the open ocean and, uh,

give in to their wanderlust internationally.

♪ In a lonely shack by a railroad track ♪

"Dear Allen:

Mexico is home to me and I can't go there."

♪ Make him a slave to his wanderin' ways ♪

"Got a letter from my lawyer.

I am sentenced in absentia."

♪ Is a restless wind

♪

♪ A restless wind

I think she said to Bill,

"Well, shoot that off my head."

♪ To wander

I knew that the ugly spirit,

which is always the worst part of everyone's character,

would take over and that something awful would happen.

Just an absolute piece of insanity.

♪ Wayward wind

It was then that he began writing.

[typing]

♪

♪ Yow

♪

♪ Yow

Who are you?

I'm Bill, who are you?

I'm Tony.

Where are you, Bill?

I'm in a 1920 movie, Tony.

[beeping]

Who are you?

I'm Tony.

Who are you?

I'm Bill.

I was born February 5, 1914,

in St. Louis, Missouri.

♪ I've been around for a long, long year ♪

So I was sort of a WASP washout.

We will not listen to you.

We have had enough of your con and bullshit.

♪

I left the United States, uh,

because of, uh, I was in trouble.

My whole life has been resistance to the ugly spirit.

♪

I live with it day and night.

Uh!

...risk getting in any trouble,

'cause I don't like violence.

There is no thing to fear.

There is no thing.

He's probably the only guy I know

who was really just full-out junkie

who managed to come back, kick it, and is still around.

Very rare.

There's all kinds of addictions.

Power is one of the principal addictions.

Whether they got the power, they look sleek.

Satisfied.

They're getting it. getting it steady.

Thou shalt not blow pot-smoke

into the face of thy pet.

♪

He could punch a typewriter

or he could punch the tape recorder to death

in shorter time than any man than I've never known.

He had such enormous energy in those days

and such enormous intention behind what he was doing.

"Take the enclosed copy of this letter,

cut along the lines, rearrange,

putting section one by section three

and section two by section four.

And you will hear my voice."

Brion had made these cutups of various magazines.

First cutups were very, very funny.

♪

Then it wasn't so funny anymore.

Life is a cutup.

Every time you look out the window

and when you walk down the street,

you're continually being cut by random factors.

This is a fact of human perception,

and the cutup simply made this explicit.

♪

How does it seem to you now?

-How does it seem to you now? -Good.

-Thank you. -Good.

Look at that, thank you.

[screeching]

Surrealism is a kind of automatic writing.

Rimbaud's phrase was a "systematic derangement

of the senses," and the idea being

that the senses are to some extent

ideological formed by external pressure.

Towers, open fire.

[screeching]

And so you shatter that, break it up:

drugs, extreme experiences, kinky sex.

In fact, the official definition of surrealism

is to make a work without any a priori

moral or aesthetic considerations.

"Blast of trumpets:

The man wriggles.

His flesh turns to viscid, transparent jelly

that drips away in green mist,

unveiling a monster black centipede.

Waves of unknown stench fill the room,

searing the lungs, grabbing the stomach."

♪

Over a series of years, from '53 to '57,

Burroughs sent me the letters with all these--

the chapters or routines of Naked Lunch,

and then by '57, there was so much material

that I had and he had that it was time

for me to leave San Francisco and work on it with him

to shape it into a book.

Kerouac had started the typing.

We arrived with all this new material,

shuffled it around, typed it up.

We had about 500 pages of notes,

so Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and I sat down

and assembled this.

A chapter went to the printer,

we said we would figure out the order later,

but when I came back from the printer,

we took one look and said,

"There's no necessity to make any changes."

Burroughs said, "I'm not American Express,"

if the readers ask to take him from Tangier

to Paris in one jump,

he'll have to get there himself.

If you want to be cool, you gotta read, you know...

-Naked Lunch. -Naked Lunch,you know,

'cause, you know, that's a cool book.

They made a movie out of it.

They put it on trial.

It's about drugs.

♪ Woo-hoo

♪ Oh, yeah

♪ Get on down

There's certain requirements.

If someone can't stand hours, years of solitude,

sitting in a chair alone in a room,

he should look for another trade, I think.

I tried to read Naked Lunch and I read halfway through it

and I pitched it, it didn't make too much sense to me.

It just sort of disgusts me.

"Thou shalt not be such a shit,

you don't know you are one."

Mr. Burroughs, do you regret anything in your life?

♪

"I have no precise memory of writing the notes

which have been published under the title Naked Lunch.

The title was suggested by Jack Kerouac.

The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch,

a frozen moment when everyone sees

what is on the end of every fork.

♪

I can feel the heat closing in.

I feel 'em out there making their move,

setting up their devil doll stool pigeons,

crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away

at Washington Square Station,

vault a turnstile,

two flights down the iron stairs,

catch an uptown A train...

Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League,

advertising type fruit holds the door back for me.

I'm evidently his idea of a character.

You know the type: he comes on with bartenders

and cab drivers, talking about right hooks

and the Dodgers,

call the counterman in Nedick's by his first name.

A real asshole.

And right on time, this narcotics dick

in the white trench coat--

now imagine tailing somebody in a white trench coat.

Trying to pass as a fag, I guess.

I can hear the way he would say it,

holding my outfit in his left hand,

right hand on his piece:

'I think you dropped something, fella!"'

But the subway is moving."

"They call me 'the Exterminator.'

At one brief point of intersection

I did exercise that function and witnessed

the belly dance of roaches suffocating

in yellow pyrethrum powder.

My present assignment:

Find the live ones and exterminate.

Not the bodies but the molds, you understand?

But I forget.

You cannot understand.

♪

The Meet Cafe occupies one side of the plaza.

It's a maze of kitchens, restaurants,

sleeping cubicles, perilous iron balconies,

the basements opening into the underground baths.

On stools covered in white satin

sit naked Mugwumps,

sucking translucent-colored syrups

through alabaster straws.

Mugwumps have no liver

and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets.

These creatures secrete an addicting fluid

through their erect penises

which prolongs life by slowing metabolism.

Boat whistle, foghorns,

sky rocket burst over oily lagoons.

Penny arcade open into a maze

of dirty pictures.

Ceremonial cannon boom in the harbor.

A scream shoots down a white hospital corridor

out along a wide, dusty street between palm trees,

whistles out across the desert like a bullet,

a thousand boys come at once in outhouses,

bleak public school toilets, attics, basements,

treehouses, Ferris wheels, deserted houses,

limestone caves, rowboats, garages, barns,

rubbly windy city outskirts behind mud walls,

smell of dried excrement,

black dust blowing over

lean copper bodies.

Coming over a hill of rusty iron

we meet a group of natives.

We throw gasoline on 'em and light it.

White flash!

Mangled insect screams.

♪

I woke up with the taste of metal in my mouth

back from the dead...

...trailing the colorless death smell.

No, no more.

No más.

Tangier, 1959."

♪

"Dear Allen,

Made connection with

the unassuming little witch doctor

who prepared me some yage.

It is the most powerful drug

I have ever experienced,

that is, it produces

the most complete derangement of the senses."

I felt, you know,

pulling together like that.

Horrible feeling, horrible feeling.

Why do you put yourself through all that torture?

What are you talking about?

You want to take yage, you take yage.

Smoking hashish and sniffing cocaine,

it struck me as being a very glamorous and easy life.

Little did I know.

♪

"Clear...

the senses bright,

sitting in the black chair, rocker.

The white walls reflecting the color of clouds

moving over the sun."

I would have never written Cuckoo's Nestwithout LSD.

I think a lot of that stuff that was written

by all of these guys would never have happened

if they'd have just stayed on

the get up early in the morning,

drink a lot of coffee, and do what you can.

"Intimacies.

The rooms not important,

but like divisions of all space,

of all hideousness and beauty.

I hear the music of myself."

What might be a negative experience

for--for someone else

can be a very positive experience for a writer.

The damage to health from addiction is minimal.

But it has done things to your soul.

[chuckles]

It was my protector.

It was something that loved me, and I loved,

and I wanted, and there it was.

"I pass fantasies as they sing to me

with Circe-Voices.

I visit among the peoples of myself

and know all I need to know."

"The ancient goals which we follow

can be defined in modern terms

in the metaphors of the present

as turn on, tune in, and drop out."

I was a psychologist.

I was running a big project at prison.

So, naturally, I used this new chemical,

this new vegetable which gave insight,

and in one minute the prisoner could see,

"Shit, I've been playing that loser game all my life."

We are now in the psychochemical age.

In the future, it's not gonna be,

"What book do you read,"

but, "Which chemical do you use

to open your mind to accelerate learning?"

And they were saying,

you know, LSD would make you jump out of windows.

My answer to the head DA guy was, "The rule there is

never take LSD over the first floor."

"I pass into the room.

There's a golden bed radiating all light."

"If we want to discourage use of LSD

for altering our attitudes, we'll have to encourage

such changes in our society that nobody will need it

to break through the common sympathy."

They were carrying on a tradition,

an American tradition.

It is, in effect, instant insanity.

When the time comes, the wave comes, it happens.

Do they know the difference between right and wrong?

-They do not. -Do not know.

They do not know the difference

between right and wrong.

You've got a much better chance

of walking from--walking from a murder

than a drug charge.

"The air is full of silver hangings and sheathes.

I smile to myself.

I know all there is to know."

I basically believe

that drugs are here to help human evolve,

to help us to grow in intelligence.

I think we're primitive.

We don't even know how to use them.

You can misuse them.

Assholes will always do everything in their power

to fuck everything up, you know?

It's like everything else in life.

I mean, you can overdose on sushi.

But still, they're there for a purpose,

and I think the challenge of an intelligent life

is to learn how to use drugs without abusing them.

Uh...

There are a lot of drugs I don't use

more than once a year, I try to take

every illegal drug once a year.

That's like a Catholic does that,

but no big deal.

♪

[tapping of typewriter keys]

Good evening, fellow members of the Beat Generation.

♪

Well, it's too piercing, man, it's too piercing.

-Well, I got [unintelligible]. -No, man, it's too piercing,

like, I don't dig loud noises.

-Well, you ruin the whole... -Yeah, well, tough.

I'll take my bongos and go, man.

♪

"Only God can make a tree."

[cymbal resonating]

♪ They called you Beat Generation ♪

-I'll buy that. -And I don't want

any of that beatnik stuff during dinner, either.

And, Richard, I don't want to see you smoking

any of those funny cigarettes.

♪

[speaking gibberish]

Man, like how square can you get?

There was a kind of beatnik craze

around the end of the '50s...

Well, the reason we look for love

is to protect ourselves from hate.

...which became parodied and co-opted.

Well, if that's true, then, the reason you look for hate

is to protect yourself from love.

So, Gregory Corso went to Paris.

Burroughs stayed in Tangiers and Paris.

Kerouac became more retired at home after having

a great deal of venom and mockery laid on him.

There's not enough time to read all the books,

to see all the great paintings,

to hear all the music,

to think all the great thoughts

or just meet everybody, but you've got to try.

I've got to try.

You need a girl, Leo.

Peter Orlovsky and I disappeared into India,

basically went around the world

and stayed away for three years

and studied something new.

♪

Buddhism is intellectually

an extraordinary accomplishment,

a strikingly generous, compassionate,

and persistent institution...

So you're like the tree-- the tree sitting there.

...practically speaking,

offering real teachings, meditation...

Your muscles are hanging from the trunk of the tree.

...how to see and understand one's own mind...

Mouth closed.

Shoulders relaxed.

...and in the world, make us remember

that our society includes the non-human people.

So now, why don't we sit doing nothing?

I was never really heavy into Buddhism.

Get Allen Ginsberg to talk about that.

He can go on and on and on.

♪

It's a big picture, it's a big heart.

Do you think the Buddhists see what I see?

Maybe they do see what I see.

Who the fuck knows?

They may just well see what I see.

Thank you for your patience.

That was fucking beautiful.

[applause]

[chanting]

I guess it's like the argument that Allen and I always have.

To me, Buddhism is another form of metaphysics.

I'm a materialist, you know.

My view is that the fundamental thing

that exists is matter in motion.

If I can have your heart,

if I can have your prayers,

if the good Lord is willing,

I will continue to try to lead this nation

and this world to peace.

♪ Lookin' for adventure

♪ And whatever comes our way

By the time I got back in '63,

the war was raging already,

and rather than--America, rather than being

sort of enlightened by the possibility

of some open world, was trying to inflict

a Catholic dictator on--with the Vietnamese.

♪ Heavy metal thunder

♪ Racin' with the wind

-React to what? -React to the greatness

of the march and the day as a victory or what?

You happy with it?

[speaking foreign language]

♪

We were beatniks, we reveled in it.

We never called each other beatniks.

Then, all of a sudden in late 1966, early '67,

Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and others

organized these--this big, huge be-in in San Francisco.

♪ We can fly so high

And right after the be-in, all of a sudden,

you were no longer a beatnik.

You were a hippie.

♪ Born to be wild

♪

So I really didn't have any friends

all through high school and college.

There was nobody I could communicate with

and, yet, I knew

that I couldn't be the only Martian.

♪

♪ I'm always swell

♪ The action is I blow my mind all day ♪

♪ While on Long Island's tennis courts ♪

♪ The blonde suburbans play

♪ Truckin', got my chips cashed in ♪

After the first thing called the "Human Be-In,"

that thing, it was like, yeah, there is a community.

We were all those people who were the weird ones,

you know, and it was all of a sudden,

you discovered all these people who were like you,

influenced by the beatniks.

Don't eat those, Ma.

They're Alice B. Toklas brownies.

Mm, I love you, Alice B. Toklas.

We would all like to be able to live

an uncluttered life, you know,

and, like, think about moving

the whole human race ahead a step.

These young people were looking for a spiritual way

to rebel against the American values,

almost as an extension

of what we'd begun doing in the '50s.

They--they sort of looked on us as the, uh...

...as the elders of the tribe.

What is your whole attitude to life?

When you meet somebody, what is your attitude towards them?

I don't like them.

-You don't? -No.

Sometimes the caring manifests itself as anger

or other feelings

that you might think of as negative.

Anything that has a strong charge

is where your heart is lying.

I think that the Vietnamese War

is nothing but a plot between the North Vietnamese

and the South Vietnamese who are cousins

to get Jeeps in the country.

They're not very good plotters, are they?

Well, they got a lot of Jeeps.

We were rebelling against a kind of rigidity

in the culture, and the Beats seemed to point out

that there were lots of room in the U.S. Constitution

for more freedom.

We are going to Chicago.

About a quarter of a million

of young, energetic love buddies...

...to engage in a Youth International Party,

a sing-in, grope-in, love-in.

[shouting]

♪

...which has really heightened the consciousness

with today's action.

-Are they expecting trouble? -They expect to march.

We expect trouble all the time.

A whole generation was systematically cut off

from outlets to personal meaning.

We could play the game, but what was it about?

No one knew.

The policeman isn't there to create disorder.

The policeman is there to preserve disorder.

So, we went with our more non-conforming impulse.

[chanting]

The Beats were originally non-political.

Others who were political

were really following the Beat movement

to its logical conclusion.

Om, he was wonderful.

He was--he was an honored presence.

They had a vision and the vision was truth,

justice, and the American way.

Just like the guy with the cape,

they were the Supermen and Superwomen of our era.

♪ ...off of my face

[siren wailing]

The ground was really set in the way by the people

who had helped us realize

that we didn't have to follow what our elders told us

if we really didn't think it was right.

I couldn't get naked on somebody's front lawn

and get myself arrested, it wasn't my style,

but I really admired that.

Born of distant dark planet names,

I, woodwoman,

I spell it away!

Mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega, mega,

mega, mega, mega!

[unintelligible shout]

♪ Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door ♪

There's a time when the operation of the machine

becomes so odious,

makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part.

[gunshot]

♪

But I always thought that what we were doing

was a patriotic act.

Who has always been out there?

Old crazy coots that keep out on the edge

of where civilization is going.

I think a lot of this comes from Cassady and from Kerouac.

Cassady was our driver.

He knew that this was going to be the best stage

he was ever gonna have to do his number.

Never mind all that reflection.

Let's see who we are.

Let's turn the thing on as bright as it will go

and then see what kind of shadow we cast.

♪ Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door ♪

"I put my back toward the screen and then spun

and let the momentum carry the panel

through the screen and window with a ripping crash.

The blast splashed out in the moon

like a bright, cold water baptizing the sleeping earth.

♪

I put my hand on the sill and vaulted after the panel

into the moonlight."

[shouting]

♪

Mr. Kesey, do you feel that you have the right

to do what you want, whatever you want,

and still live in this world?

[shouting and laughing]

I feel that man has the right to be as big

as he feels it in him to be.

[laughs]

♪

[indistinct chatter]

This is the death of Neal Cassady

at San Miguel de Allende, where he died

walking along the railroad tracks

after getting stoned and whatever.

And the uppers and downers at the same time.

[indistinct chatter]

♪

He wasn't destined to grow old.

He was always young and he always will be.

A hundred years ago, he would have been on a horse,

but his--his hot rod was his horse.

♪

"Delicate eyes that blinked blue Rockies,

all ash.

Nipples, ribs I touched with my thumb are ash.

Mouth my tongue touched once or twice,

all ash."

♪

Our existence is so brief,

as we understood it, that it becomes more poignant

and more emotionally rich

knowing that it's like a dream

that is already finished, as Kerouac once said.

Life is a dream already over.

♪

Jack, suddenly, one morning, had a hemorrhage,

apparently brought on by, uh...

...years and years of consuming alcohol,

which I guess is the typical alcoholic's death.

The American by his day was sick.

Hard-heartedness had taken over.

So I would say America broke his heart.

♪

You just have to read the reviews

of his books in those days.

He was put down, it was, you know, knifed

and, yet, he was writing about enthusiasm and delight,

and he was being treated like some juvenile delinquent.

♪

Now, Jack, Mr. Kerouac, to what extent do you believe

that the Beat Generation

is related

to the--to the hippies?

What do they have in common?

Was this an evolution from the one to the other?

We're just the older ones.

I'm 46 years old, these kids are 18.

It's the same movement which is apparently

some kind of Dionysian movement

in late civilization,

in which I did not intend any more than I suppose

Dionysus did or whatever his name was.

Ha-ha!

Hey, that was good, wasn't it?

I'm good all the time, boy.

Give that man a drink.

Spent all the night with poets and so on.

He drank and all that.

And, well, I said, "Aren't you afraid of hell?"

He says, "Oh, no," he says, "I'm concerned with heaven,"

he says, "I'm thinking about heaven all the time.

I want to see Gerard, my little brother."

"He'd already scribed a thousand dreams,

a thousand pages of dharma,

a million words that sounded like a million ears.

His heart was tender.

He'd already died and become a recording angel."

Jack Kerouac, the novelist who wrote On the Road,

reached the end of it today.

The 47-year-old spokesman for the Beat Generation

died of a massive hemorrhage

in a St. Petersburg, Florida, hospital.

♪ And what love endures

♪

♪ All my thoughts of you

♪

♪ For I'm so completely yours

♪

All the people that leave this stuff here,

it's their way.

You know, it's their way of coming here,

it's part of their path, you know?

It's like 13-year-old kids, college kids,

guys my age, old-timers.

Wicked spectrum.

♪

So, this what's gonna happen to you?

No, I want to be in an unmarked grave.

♪

What do you think Jack would have felt

about all this--all this?

Yeah, he would have grooved on this stuff

because--because this stuff comes from the heart

and that's where he was coming from.

I believe in order,

tenderness, and piety.

Well, then your point was that a movement

which you conceived as relatively pure

has become ideologized.

No, a movement that was considered what?

Pure.

Yes, it was pure in my heart.

♪ Don't explain

♪

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

by Jack Kerouac.

"List of essentials:

One, scribbled secret notebooks

and wild typewritten pages for your own joy.

Two, submissive to everything, open, listening.

Three, try never get drunk outside your own house.

Four, be in love with your life.

Five, something that you feel will find its own form.

Six, be crazy dumbsaint of the mind.

Seven, blow as deep as you want to blow.

Eight, write what you want

bottomless from bottom of the mind.

Nine, the unspeakable visions of the individual."

"Dean was in a trance.

The tenorman's eyes were fixed straight on him;

he had a madman who not only understood but cared

and wanted to understand more

and much more than there was.

The tenorman wore a tattered suede jacket,

purple shirt, cracked shoes,

and zoot pants without press.

He didn't care.

His big brown eyes were concerned with sadness,

and the singing of songs slowly

and with long, thoughtful pauses.

His mouth quivered.

He looked at us, Dean and me,

with an expression that seemed to say, "Hey, now,

what's this thing we're all doing

in this sad brown world?"

Then it came to the end of his song,

and for this there had to be elaborate preparations,

during which time you could send all the messages

to Garcia around the world 12 times

and what difference did it make to anyone?

Because here, we were dealing with the pit and prune juice

of poor beat life itself

in the god-awful streets of man.

Sat in the corner with a bunch of boys

and paid no attention to them.

He looked down and wept.

He was the greatest.

♪

I had put the light out,

so, in the dark, dancing, I kissed her.

♪

It was giddy, whirling to the dance,

the beginning,

the usual beginning of lovers kissing,

standing up in a dark room,

the room being the woman's the man all designs.

Quick to plunge, bite, put the light out,

hide my face in shame,

make love to her tremendously because of lack of love

for a year almost

and the need pushing me down,

our little agreements in the dark,

the really should-not-be-tolds,

for it was she who later said,

'Men are so crazy.

They want the essence.

The woman is the essence.

There it is right in their hands

but they rush off erecting big abstract constructions.'

But I cannot in this confession

betray the innermosts, the thighs,

what the thighs contain.

The thighs contain the essence,

yet though there I should stay and from there I came

and will eventually return,

still I have to rush off and construct,

construct, for nothing, for Baudelaire poems."

♪

This is just his bones here.

His spirit is around us.

♪

[tapping of typewriter keys]

♪

I'd like an omelet, plain,

and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast.

"Sixteen years ago, we were put down

for being filthy beatnik sex commie dope fiends."

Now, all you have to do is hold the chicken,

bring me the toast, give me a check

for the chicken salad sandwich,

and you haven't broken any rules.

You see that sign, sir?

Do you see this sign?

"Sixteen years later

Allen's the respect of his elders,

the love of his peers."

Do you have nostalgia for the '50s and '60s now?

None at all, it's more interesting now.

I mean, it's the s-- the '50s, '60s, '70s,

same thing as now.

It's eternity all the time,

so there's no point having nostalgia for eternity.

"Bill, Bill is ever Bill,

even though he stopped drugging

and smoking cigarettes."

I'm pleased tonight to introduce a man

who, in my opinion,

is the greatest living writer in America.

"Me? I'm still considered

an unwashed beatnik sex commie dope fiend."

Want a hit? I don't have a light.

"Dear Audience, we early heads of present style

and consciousness are the Daddies of the Age."

The Beats, in standing up,

got laughed at by the civilization.

All the academic-- you don't know how much hatred

there was for these guys and sneers,

and teachers would snicker.

Police, you may as well open.

The moment The Beard first opened in Los Angeles,

every night, city vice squad detectives

arrested the cast and the producer.

When are we gonna get controversial again, Allen?

It's all getting too sedate, don't you think so?

How many years has it been since you've been busted?

I mean, we're in trouble here.

I was busted just three weeks ago.

Of course, of course, there you go.

[shouting]

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!

I'm mad as hell!

I'm not gonna take it anymore!

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it--

I'm not gonna take it anymore!

I'm mad as hell!

Literary Movements for $200.

-Jeopardy, TV program. -Oh.

Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsey are accepted

-in a literary... -On the contrary, Gregory.

-Bullshit. -The point is...

Those three were the big ones

and anybody afterwards is...

-That's all right with me. -But it ain't all right with me

'cause they don't know where to place me.

I had my book published before his.

Yeah, but, Gregory, you seem very bitter,

and your poetry and your work is so joyful and happy.

Bitter? I'm not a bitter man.

Bitter?

I bet my poems top all your shots.

Watch the game, you don't even know what's gonna happen

eighty years from now.

These fuckers may be niente.

[indistinct chatter]

♪

Gregory Corso.

[cheering]

Whereas Lowell-born author Jack Kerouac

is known as one of this century's

most important figures in American literature.

Now everybody says, "Oh, I went to school with him.

Oh, yes, I knew him very well!"

"Dear Daddy Jack, I am your real daughter

that you never found.

Love everlasting, Jan Michelle."

♪

They have totally shat upon the whole premise

of the Beat Generation which is to be free,

and free speech, and it's Kerouacgate.

♪

[tapping of typewriter keys]

♪

[humming]

♪

Ladies and gentlemen, an American hero,

American bard,

American genius.

You can't see on the left,

it says "All proceeds for this image

go to the Jack Kerouac School of Poetics

in Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado."

Oh, that's great, this goes to the--

I got my alibi.

Oh, that's good.

-I, uh... -That's a good cause.

I have my alibi for not selling out.

Not many people do.

No.

♪ Teacher Death

♪ I do thank you

♪ For inspiring me

♪ To sing this blues

♪ Father Breath

"Allen died April 5th, 1997.

He said to me, 'I thought I would be terrified,

but I'm exhilarated.'

His last words to me."

♪ Time will tell

♪

"Larry was another.

I talked till ten the night of his death.

He said, 'Why not?'"

"I saw God in the sky, in the form of huge, gold,

sunburning clouds above the desert.

He seemed to point a finger at me and say,

'Pass here and go on.

You're on the road to heaven.'"

♪

Let us pray.

"Our Father, whose art's in heaven,

hallowed be Thy name

unless things change."

Keep the fire alive.

Keep love alive, brothers.

Keep love alive.

Do you still write poems and things, too?

Me? I never stopped in my life writing poetry.

When I feel like writing a poem,

I write a poem, how can you stop?

Can you give us a line of the newest that you wrote?

A line, a line?

All right, "Death is a rumor spread by life."

How's that?

Come again?

♪

[siren wailing]

♪

It's continuing a tradition.

You know, it's continuing a tradition

and finding our antecedents.

I mean, so we have to look back

before we can look forward.

"You should be putting me out of my misery!

Give me some smack and a case of blackjack,

and I will save us all from a world of shit!"

"His legs were left in Vietnam!

His arms were found in Sing Sing!

His scalp is on Nixon's belt!

His blood paints the streets of the ghetto!

His eyes are still looking for Jesus

to come down from some cloud,

and make everything all right when Jesus died in Attica!"

♪

[siren wailing]

♪

They just stepped right off the edge

and we're--we're on the edge, too.

We need a light right now.

I say, now or never right now.

Give us our sight right now.

Give us our light right now!

Now or never right now!

Yeah!

Talked about the hot sperm seed being spilled on the ground

and how the birds fluttered,

and, you know, I was 16 and I knew what that was about,

and you didn't talk about it, you know.

And it--it let me feel okay, it let me feel okay.

"Bashful beneath her T-shirt,

draped across shoulder blades and collarbones,

pushes straw hair from hollowed eyes and asks,

'Am I beautiful to you?'"

♪

"I could clearly see revealed the connection

of her black-seam stockings and her red garters,

like two deadly circuits fused to activate a device

of total annihilation."

[speaking foreign language]

All the mambo kings and cumbia queens,

Aztec lords, Inca princesses,

every Hernandez and Fernandez.

♪

It's time to make our move.

♪

Don't tell me about it, I don't want to know about

six-year-old black girls getting raped by 12 pigs

in KKK uniforms, carving up her belly

and throwing her out in Staten Island

like some kind of sack of garbage

in a plastic sheet.

"Oh, MTV, you must shine like a beacon,

for I am getting old and my knees are creakin'.

Please give these young people some food for thought.

You really should, you really ought."

I read Kerouac and I feel that what he's saying

is that he's not looking for universal meaning to life,

but he's saying, "Fuck you, I'm gonna make my own meaning,

and if you don't like it, then kiss my ass."

♪

I was mute, tongue-tied,

burdened by shadows and silence.

Now I speak

and my burden is lightened,

lifted free.

♪

"I know this body is impatient,

I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind,

yet I loved.

I love.

I want no sentimentality.

I want no more than home."

♪

A young person will come up to me

and he'll be standing there, maybe he'll have a mohawk,

or maybe he'll have one side of his head shaved

and the other side in, uh,

in dreads, and he and I are sharing

many of the same thoughts, he's anti-war,

believes in the environment,

and that person will say, "Whatever happened to the--

whatever happened to the Beats and to the '60s?

Did they just get run over by the steamroller

of the corporations?"

And it makes me want to laugh

because this kid is so much like what...

...so many people from that period made possible.

He's standing there in his own natural,

much freer body asking me those things,

and it's kind of funny because I think, you know,

"You're us."

♪

'Cause we're the source.

♪

"What is that feeling

when you're driving away from people

and they recede on the plain

till you see their specks dispersing?

It's the too-huge world vaulting us,

and it's goodbye.

But we lean forward to the next crazy venture

beneath the skies."

♪

♪ Hey Jack Kerouac

♪ I think of your mother

♪

♪ And the tears she cried

♪ They were cried for none other ♪

♪ Than her San Francisco beat boys ♪

♪ You were the favorite

♪ Now they sit and rattle their bones

and think of their blood-stoned days ♪

♪ You chose your words from mouths of

babes got lost in the wood ♪

♪ The hip flask slinging madman ♪

♪ Steaming cafe flirts

♪ In Chinatown howling at night ♪

♪

♪ Allen baby

♪ Why so jaded

♪

♪ Have the boys all grown up and their beauty faded ♪

♪

♪ Billy

♪ What a saint they've made you ♪

♪ Just like Mary down in Mexico

on All Souls' Day ♪

♪

♪ You chose your words from mouths of

babes got lost in the wood ♪

♪ Cool junk booting madmen

♪ Street-minded girls

♪ In Harlem howling at night

♪

♪ What a tear-stained

shock of the world ♪

♪ You've gone away without saying,

saying goodbye ♪

♪