Recently surfaced, Allen Ginsberg and the Clash - Ghetto Defendant - an extended version which originally appeared on the bootleg "Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg"
[Allen Ginsberg with Mick Jones, and withJoe Strummer, of The Clash at Electric Lady Studios in New York, December 1981 at the recording sessions for Combat Rock - Photographs by Bob Gruen]
Yet another of Michael Limnios' extraordinary Beat-related interviews - this time Ginsberg biographer, Michael Schumacher:
Michael Limnios (Blues & Greece): What does "Beat" mean to you?
Michael Schumacher:John Clellon Holmes, the novelist and essayist and close friend of Jack Kerouac, probably gave me the best definition of "beat" I've ever heard. "Beat", he told me "is when you've sunk so low that you're willing to wager all your resources on a single number." This was what Kerouac meant when he first talked about a "Beat Generation" in a conversation he had with Holmes in 1948. Kerouac refined the definition to include "beatific" - angelic in a way. Herbert Huncke, the Times Square hustler Kerouac and Company met and befriended, meant "beat" to mean thoroughly tired and wasted. To answer your question, I suppose, "beat," to me means all of the above.
For more of Michael's revealing interview, see here.
[Allen Ginsberg and Michael Schumacher (via Michael Schumacher Archives/All Rights Reserved)]
Back in 2012 we featured this classic Corso-subverts-a-Ginsberg reading
- David Kirby re-visits and comments on it - here
- and Andrew Epstein comments on David Kirby's comments - here
Great news! - our good friend Colin Still and his exemplary, not to say essential, video/production company, Optic Nerve(named in hommage to the great William Blake, incidentally) has a new web-site. For more information on his continuing on-going energies - see here.
Here's an example of a classic Optic Nerve video: