Posted on 09/14/2006 8:09:29 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
I don't know why but I think Warhol's Mao in Chicago is pretty cool. And I like Pollack too.
.
SquealI saw the best minds of my generation
DestroyedMarvin
Who spat out poems; Potrzebie
Who coagulated a new bop literature in fifteen novels; Alvin
Who in his as yet unwritten autobiography
Gave Brooklyn an original lex loci.
They came from all over, from the pool room,
The bargain basement, the rod,
From Whitman, from Parkersburg, from Rimbaud
New Mexico, but mostly
They came from colleges, ejected
For drawing obscene diagrams of the Future.They came here to L.A.,
Flexing their members, growing hair,
Planning immense unlimited poems,
More novels, more poems, more autobiographies.Its love Im talking about, you dirty bastards!
Love in the bushes, love in the freight car!
I saw them fornicating and being fornicated,
Saying to Hell with you!America.
America is full of Babbitts.
America is run by money.What is it Walt said? Go West!
But the important thing is the return ticket.
The road to publicity runs by Monterey.
I saw the best minds of my generation
Reading their poems to Vassar girls,
Being interviewed by Mademoiselle.
Having their publicity handled by professionals.
When can I go into an editorial office
And have my stuff published because Im weird?
I could go on writing like this forever . . ..
Louis Simpson.
I don't dislike Pollack. Warhol strikes me as a pretentious buffoon, although I agree that some of his stuff is amusing. I just don't think either of them represents great art.
'Money isn't everything,' they say.
Okay, so what is? Sex?
Did you ever make love to a pauper?
Pee-yoo!
Revolution?
It takes money to overthrow the government, you know.
Art?
The more it costs, the better it is.
And that's the bottom line!
Yes, there's a lot of energy in the Pollacks. And I can see why people like them in their strange fashion. But I find myself increasingly impatient with the whole modernist gang, especially in music and art. In literature, I like Joyce and Eliot, though they both have problems, and I love Yeats and Stevens.
But Schoenberg? Music went to the dogs with the modernists.
Picasso was one of the most talented modernists. He was a great artist in some ways. But his work is cruel, brutal, and artistically immoral. Great talent put to destructive use.
Cicero --
I agree with your tastes pretty much down the line. Classical music seems stuck in a dead end and can't find its way out. Contemporary operas -- Corigliano, Bolcom -- are just high-toned pastiche or else minimalism best appreciated after a hit of acid. I like Darius Milhaud and Dave Brubeck, though.
Howl had the same problem. Like it or hate it, it was a dead end.
So much of modernism and post modernism is about telling us that there is no God and the universe has has no meaning. Once that message is delivered and accepted, where do you go? Not to concert halls, museums and libraries.
Everyone knows (or should) that his father was the real poet in the family, right up there with that other guy from NJ, William Carlos Williams. The kid, was bright, but a beatnik. Which, at any rate, is better than being a hippy.
BTW, Alan really was very dirty, in a bus station men's room sort of way. Don't let that stop you from reading Dad, though.
"City Lights in North Beach?
"
Next door for me, at Vesuvio. I ran into him and Ferlinghetti there once. Very odd people for an 18-year-old kid to meet. It made a big impression on me.
Yea, I remember the Vesuvio. We used to get Irish coffee there for some reason. City Lights was a pretty cool place in the early 70's. I remember meeting a writer named Richard Brautigan there. He had a big hit with "Trout Fishing in America", which was about anything but. I gave North Beach a miss the last time I was in SF. I know it has run down, so I'll just remember it the way it was.
Atonality was inevitable. Don't blame Schonberg blame Wagner if not Chopin.
There's atonality in Bach. But he knew how to do it.
Yipes you got me.
Sounds like you lived up in 6A at 400 RSD
I ran into Dolores Capece at a Starbucks in Northern VA last fall. She has two sons in high school. One is getting ready for college. He's interested in going to columbia. I told him the same thing dolores did. If you go to columbia you have to be prepared to lose ten years -- at least-- in some bizarre time warp. In fact, that boy tapped into anger I didn't know I had. Not at him mind you -- though the way he talked reminded me of the way I talked when I was his age.
Dolores said she and alison knopf had been up to NYC recently to see bob campbell. She said he hadn't changed a bit. I expect he's still living at 400 RSD.
I've become a lot more conservative.
If you're posting here--you've followed a similiar trajectory. In fact, there's a CU ping list on FR somewhere. A lot of guys are still pissed at the hopelessly stupid stuff they picked up at CU.
I don't recall what happened to Jordan. He could be still living at 400 RSD for all I know. From time to time in my dreams I'm still there.
I'm glad/relieved to wake up in Virginia.
No, Old Friend, I never lived in that apartment with you guys. I do remember some really good parties there, though.
I know what you mean about the time warp. But I look back more in sadness than anger.
Does sound like you've changed a bit. I think I was basically conservative even then, listening to Rush Limbaugh, starting the first morning he was broadcasting on WABC, and regularly after that. Just didn't advertise my political views back then--didn't need the hassle and probable ostracism. Had a different agenda in those days, and "White Harlem"/CU were so full of rabid left-wingers in those days that I kept a low profile. Nor into earning a living and young man's games than activism.
Got out of the neighborhood a few years after you did, I guess. Now I rarely go back to NYC...and most of my dreams of that place have been triggered by 9-11.
will continue in a Freep-mail....
New Criterion bump.
I saw the best minds of my generation
Destroyed - pot and alcohol and body lice
Scouring their health, emptying their eyes, turning their brains to pickle-flavored Jello,
Their radiant, youthful bodies carved by age into wrinkled escresences,
Stripped back to their bare essences of orifices and genitalia,
Their politics frozen in the icy grip of arrested adolescence,
Their minds - what were we talking about? Pass the Cheetos
I always vote Democratic. How 'bout you?
See? It's easy! Now if you damn bourgeoisie would send me a paycheck I could get back to partying and boinking coeds...
Quick joey small went over the wall
with a ball and a chain behind him.
Quick joey small went over the wall
and the hounds set out to find him.
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