By Elsadorfman – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

I unexpectedly found myself in New York City last week. One of the best things about a creative life is that I can grab my gear and run at an opportunity like this. I had pending writing deadlines and some design work to do, but I just grabbed my phone and my laptop and headed for the airport. The Hilma af Klint and Robert Mapplethorpe exhibitions at the Guggenheim were both great — and a great pairing. Casa Ramen’s pop-up at The Ramen Lab was the best food I ate in a week of great food. Get the pumpkin broth and go for all the spicy options. Amazing bowl. The most New York moment I had was when I grabbed lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Chinatown while I watched this great interview of Lawrence Ferlinghetti in celebration of his 100th birthday. Here’s a bit from the Democracy Now site:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a leading literary figure of the Beat Generation, turned 100 on Sunday. Ferlinghetti is a poet, bookseller, book publisher, artist and activist. In 1953, he co-founded City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the first all-paperback bookshop in the country. Two years later, Lawrence Ferlinghetti launched the City Lights publishing house. Both institutions are still running today. City Lights might be best known as the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl.” It revolutionized American poetry and American consciousness, but it also led to Ferlinghetti and his publishing partner being arrested and put on trial for obscenity.

This is an amazing interview with the great American writer and champion of free speech…

I also wanted to take a second to talk about the evolution of the blog. Insomnia is your spot for all things countercultural. While I haven’t been posting here daily, you might not know that I’ve been expanding the blog’s reach over multiple platforms in an effort to explore creating content on crypto-powered sites like Steemit. I’m also posting on a brand new platform called Narrative. I’m wrangling the Counterculture Niche on the site, and I want to encourage authors to add the niche to all of their scrawlings about sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, the paranormal, the occult — you get the idea.

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Today I came across an article in the Independent celebrating Jack Kerouac’s On the Road at 60. I read Kerouac’s book when I was an undergrad writing my own poems and short stories, and scheming my own cross-country road trip which I actually took in 1992. Kerouac’s book, page-to-page, was both the best and worst book I’d ever read at that time. Years later I found Kerouac’s novel The Subterraneans and felt that by sticking with one location — San Francisco — the author was able to condense the all-over-the-place expressing of On the Road into a love story full of angsty longing.

On the Road may not be the best book of the Beat Generation, but along with Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch it’s one point of the holy trinity of the Beat canon. It’s also a book that continues to inspire young dreamers. Here’s the Independent…

All I really knew was that On the Road absorbed me completely. It was like nothing I’d read before. It didn’t follow any traditional structure of fiction that I’d encountered previously. The language was lyrical and urgent and demanded to be read out loud, under my breath, to appreciate the rhythm. It was poetry and prose all mixed together that bounced along to a head-nodding, foot-tapping cadence.

My copy of On the Road was a Penguin 20th Century Classics edition, with a pale-blue spine. On the front cover was a photograph by Robert Frank, entitled “Teardrops”. It depicted a table in an American diner with its jukebox selector, and the ghost of a wide American car in the background. Somewhat surprisingly, it survived the trip to Pamplona in remarkably good shape; I still have it today.

On the Road is the Jack Kerouac novel everyone has heard of, but it’s only one part of Kerouac’s great literary endeavour; a vast, Proustian tapestry of his life and the others that weave in and out of it. There’s The Dharma Bums,The Subterraneans, Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax… 13 novels in all, which I tracked down and devoured, slowly realising that the recurring characters under fictional names were all real people in what Kerouac dubbed The Duluoz Legend – Duluoz being one of the alter egos he created for himself at the behest of his publishers who feared these tales of drugs, booze and debauchery might bring legal problems on their heads if Kerouac used real names.

Still, is is On the Road that is the pivotal book in the whole series. It is, in a way, Kerouac’s “A New Hope”… just like the seminal film Star Wars began halfway through the sequence, it’s the one beloved of most…

Here’s the second chapter of the excellent Rebels: A Journey Underground series that introduces the Beats…

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Sitting down to get a week of blog posts started I turned to {R}emnants for some ideas and found this doozy that Ezra had left there. It’s an article written by a guy whose grandfather was a gun runner who ran with William S. Burroughs. It’s a great tale about history, genetics, and the people we may not even know who have made us — literally — who we are. Take a look…

Josephine, my mother, is not a sociopath. She just has tendencies. At 69, her capacity for violence has diminished, but I think if she had to tackle a burglar, he would probably end up with a kitchen knife deep in his chest. My mom has gone through life with the kind of ruthless energy usually encountered in gangsters and soldiers of fortune.

I didn’t think about any of this as a child, except knowing that it was a good idea to keep a safe distance if I’d pissed her off. My school friends called her “Don Jo.” The pertinence of the moniker only occurred to me years later, after uncovering a buried family history that spans three continents and includes a once famous criminal, an upcoming murder trial, and a part in one of the 20th Century’s most important and disturbing novels. It is a history that taught me that nurture only goes so far in explaining who a person is. Sometimes, your blood does your thinking for you.

As I got to know my mom as an adult I realized she was capable of calmly making decisions that would cause others to shudder. In 2006, when I was 23 and she was 62, we spent two months backpacking around India. It was something my parents had planned to do when they retired. Tragically, my father took permanent retirement much earlier than we had expected, so I took his place. We had a great time driving up the Himalayas and trekking for elephants in the jungles of Kerala. However, one incident in particular convinced me that she could survive pretty much anything that life could throw at her.

We were walking along a beach in north Goa during monsoon season. It was overcast and windswept. There was a rusted cargo ship wrecked on the shoreline and large waves curled vindictively in on themselves before smashing into surf.

I jumped in.

It was an act of immense stupidity. I swam among the waves for a few minutes and then decided to exit. When I got to the shore and tried to stand, my feet didn’t touch the bottom. I went under and a wave pounded me and pulled me out. I swam hard to get back in.

I got to the shallows again. Except, I hadn’t. One foot down and it was like missing a step; a step into an empty elevator shaft. The current dragged me struggling from the land. As I swam back I could see my mom stood watching. Then she turned her back on me and walked up the beach.

Check out the rest of this illuminating article at the link above and watch this video of William S. Burroughs making paintings with a shotgun to get you in the mood…

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The late great David Bowie made changing his artistic identity look easy by borrowing freely from every creative discipline within his reach — Bowie studied mime, played the saxophone and was well-versed in Beat Generation lit…

Here Bowie demonstrates his own application of Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up” technique…

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It’s Monday morning after a pretty fun weekend. I stayed in on Saturday night to watch the Deontay Wilder fight and to get a good night’s sleep before my show at Mad Donna’s last night. I had a ball at the East Nashville Songwriter’s club, sharing the stage with Rich Mahan and Lauren Farrah. Jean Paul Lilliston and I started the night off with a seven song set including newish additions like “The Wicked” and “Faraway Sound,” and throughout the show everybody kept track of the Blood Moon eclipse which was happening right outside of Mad Donna’s loft’s east side windows. During the day yesterday I was mostly taking it easy, reading lots of articles through Flipboard when I came a across this Beat treasure trove at Open Culture…

Plenty of us get tuned in to the Beats through print — maybe a yellowed copy of Howl, a mass-market Naked Lunch, a fifth- or sixth-hand On the Road — but sometimes the verse or prose that so thrills us on those pages fairly demands to be spoken aloud, preferably by the Beat in question. That may have proven a tricky desire to fulfill in decades past, but now Spotify has made it nearly effortless to hear the Beats whenever we like: you can find over eighteen hours of material on a playlist called, straightforwardly enough, The Beats.

These 249 tracks include not just figures like the previously alluded to Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, but other beloved Beats such as Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky — and Charles Bukowski…

Click the Open Culture link above to access the audio cache. In the meantime, here’s Ginsberg reading an LSD-inspired poem to television host William F. Buckley…

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Hey, Insomniacs! I’m getting a slow start on the week after spending Monday driving back from Asheville, North Carolina. I played a solo singer/songwriter gig there over the weekend and had a real blast bumming around that great little mountain town with my girlfriend. Check out my YouTube channel to see videos from the show.

On the way home through the Smokies we were challenged with intermittent rain and dense fog, and there was plenty of time to think back on the weekend when we were slowed down. I recalled that Jack Kerouac had spent time in the area — Thomas Wolfe, Asheville’s literary saint, was Kerouac’s hero, and Kerouac made a number of trips to North Carolina to visit his sister’s family in Rocky Mount.

I’m a huge fan of the Beat Generation writers and I’m particularly pleased about recent articles, books and other media that continue to give them credit for their culture-changing artistry while also dropping the hero-worship that’s masked their less-savory qualities as naturally-flawed human beings: Kerouac was a deadbeat dad, a conservative reactionary and an alcoholic who drank himself to death; Burroughs murdered his wife in a very sketchy accidental shooting.

We celebrated Burroughs’ Centenary last year and I joined in with plenty of posts about the writer. I think of Burroughs as one of the most important satirists of the last century, but I totally understand why many people find him to be plain creepy. Talking about the beat scene on our trip back to Nashville, my girlfriend reminded me of a recent This American Life episode that found host, Ira Glass, confronting his own resistance to Burroughs by playing an audio documentary presented by Iggy Pop that opened his mind to the author and his work specifically because it didn’t shy away from the dark shadow cast by Burroughs’ often-tragic life and horror-filled writings.

Here’s that episode in honor of Burroughs 101st birthday this February (February 5, 1914).

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Brion Gysin is one of my favorite painters and his writing is an undervalued commodity. A counterculture fixture, Gysin is best known for his cut-up collaborations with William S. Burroughs and his role in creating the Dream Machine. Here is Gysin live in London in 1982, lecturing on the possibilities of teaching creativity. Gysin dives headlong into an existential rant here, evoking his adventures in the Sahara, Islamic assassins, smoking weed, the magician as an outlaw, Jean Genet as a dependable friend, purity through depravity, friends versus enemies, English food and the Beat Hotel. Gysin reads from both his novel The Process as well as his posthumously published novel, The Last Museum, which recalls the Beat Generation’s heyday in Paris. The lecture is accompanied by an edit of William S. Burroughs’ cut-up film experiments.

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British author Barry Miles is a prolific chronicler of the counterculture. He’s authored books about Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and the Ramones. The Beat Hotel is the definitive account of the Beat Generation in Paris and his coffee table volume Hippie captures 60′s flower power in full color.

Miles’ 1993 biography William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible is one of the most important accounts of the writer’s days and now Miles is back with William S. Burroughs: A Life. The book revisits Burroughs’ story and goes on to illuminate the author’s last decades and artistic legacy.

Here is Miles in a conversation about the book at Strand Books in New York…

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With the launch of the new blog design, I wanted to add a fresh new Burroughs post. WSB haunts the entirety of counter-cultural curation like the eminence gris he was often portrayed as, but, it’s important to note that Burroughs rarely portrayed himself this way.

Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs On the Road is  a 1983 documentary that finds the Beat Generation icon touring Scandinavia, signing books and giving readings of works like The Place of Dead Roads in his inimical, laconic snarl. Along the way, he waxes philosophical about cats, Hiroshima, Brion Gysin and the illusion of duality. He’s polite and hilarious throughout.

Watch the full movie at the Snag Films website.

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RE/Search Publishing was founded in 1980 by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. According to the Wiki, the San Fransisco-based company was originally funded by $100 they were given by Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. This is an interesting fact as RE/Search becomes known as a magazine – eventually in book form – that celebrated Western countercultural ancestors while simultaneously seeking out cutting-edge expressions, mixing together content on/by The Slits, Situationism, Burroughs, Ballard, Throbbing Gristle and Brion Gysin.

The Gysin connection is a particularly interesting one as it seems Vale has an archive of original paintings and audio interviews with the artist that he has never shared. In this video, he talks about his relationship with Gysin and the art monograph that never was – but could still be.

Here is Vale discussing his most famous issue: RE/Search #4/5

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