beats, jack kerouac - 1989 - Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey

Jack Kerouac's Road: A Franco-American Odyssey
Herménégilde Chiasson
1989
National Film Board of Canada
55 min.

The National Film Board is one of Canada's most important cultural institutions. Important, as far as I'm concerned, because the film board has produced numerous films of relevance to this blog. Several of those films, such as Acts of Defiance and l'Acadie l'Acadie !?! have already been profiled on this blog. Canada as a site of colonial domination and inter-colonial struggle has produced many of the kinds of socio-cultural fractures that countercultures grow from. Herménégilde Chiasson's film about Jack Kerouac's life and family history follows one of those lines of fracture from Quebec into Lowell Massachusetts, an industrial town where many French Canadian's immigrated to in the late 19th century, and it was also the birthplace of seminal Beat author Jack Kerouac, a descendant of those immigrants. The mother of this unabashedly American iconoclast were, in fact, Quebecois.

Chiasson's film is an investigation into the life of Kerouac and his roots in this immigrant Quebecois-American culture, and it is also a look at this community itself. The documentary is a typical mix of interviews with members of the Quebecois community in Lowell and read quotations or old television interview segments from the famous author. Visually, the film shows old photographs juxtaposed against contemporary footage of the city of Lowell during the winter, and this winter aesthetic immediately conjures up ideas of Canadian towns despite the fact that its an American city on display.

This film also goes over many of the known details of Kerouac's life, such as his football scholarship to Columbia, his becoming a writer, and Allen Ginsberg appears to discuss their first meeting. The documentary's main focus however is the connections between its implied subjects, Canadian and American, mother and child, alien and native. Some of the interview subjects talk about growing up in Lowell and developing from their families an intimate knowledge of Canadian/Quebecois politics and society. Many of the Kerouac quotations referred to in the film refer to his mother, and in the context of this film the implication is that to refer to his mother is to refer to Quebec as well.

beats - 2007 - Neal Cassady

Neal Cassady
Noah Buschel
2007
Jean Doumanian Productions
80 min

Neal Cassady is a biographical film focusing on Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty muse for On the Road, Neal Cassady. This film minimizes his friendship with Kerouac, confining their interactions to the first 20 minutes of the film. Most of the movie actually focuses on the second phase of Cassady's career as a behind-the-scenes countercultural protagonist, his relationship to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Cassady is a pivotal figure in American counterculture, first inspiring the beats to write and later befriending one of the best known hippie collectives of the era. His relevance is rooted in his friendships with the era-defining writers of these periods, and some of the scenes in this film use these writers interactions with Cassady as metaphoric markers of the passage of one era to another. In particular tensions are represented between Kesey and Kerouac. Kerouac is shown to reject the hippies who, in return, rejected him as well. Interestingly, Alan Ginsberg, who not only knew Cassady but also enjoyed relevance from one era to another, and was friends with Kesey himself, was not mentioned until 50 minutes into the film. The film is thus two travel narratives, first On the Road and Pranksters On the Bus.

Much of the movie is a simulation of 1960s film footage of the Prankster's cross-country bus trip or of a Ken Kesey party where Kesey pressures a drunken 1960s Keuroac to take acid. This shift in perspective and in media is a technique for conveying a sense of authenticity, and here it also refers to the hours and hours of film the pranksters shot of their voyage, film that was never edited into a proper film but nevertheless has found its way into countless documentaries about the 1960s.

The jazz music soundtrack largely signifies the beat era even if the film's emphasis is on the 1960s and psychedelia.

civil rights movement - 2005 - The Long Walk to Freedom

The Long Walk to Freedom
Tom Weidlinger
2005
Moira Productions
30 min

This documentary shares its title with the much better known Nelson Mandela autobiography and film adaptation, so it's search-engine obscure thanks to this.The Long Walk to Freedom is a short documentary featuring civil rights activists speaking to students at George Washington High School in San Francisco California. The documentary is another addition to the long list of documentaries on the American civil rights movement, but it also demonstrates the ongoing commitment of civil rights activists to educate new generations about a struggle that in many ways continues still.

The documentary shows a racially diverse group of activists speaking to public school students about their experiences. It is broken down into segments organized by themes like music and non-violent resistance. I assume that the documentary's ideal audience are students, and the setting for viewing is a classroom. The division of the film's subject matter into short and easy to comprehend thematic segments is an ideal way of presenting this subject for classroom discussion.

avant-garde, Lettrisme - book - 1985 - Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant Garde 1945-1985

Letterism and Hypergraphics: The Unknown Avant-Garde 1945-1985
Jean-Paul Curtay
Franklin Furnace
1985
78 pages

Letterism (in French, Lettrisme) is one of the forgotten avant-gardes of the 20th century, having been overshadowed by its predecessors, Dada and Surrealism, and its successor, the Situationist International led by Letterist defector, Guy Debord.  The Letterists were originally formed in 1942 with the writing of the Letterist Manifesto by Isidore Isou, a young Romanian poet who, like Tristan Tzara and Constantin Brancusi before him, left his home to make a name for himself in western Europe. Isou was originally focused on creating letter poetry in the tradition of the Dadaist, Raoul Hausmann, who wrote fsmbw (a title which also makes up the bulk of the poem’s content) in 1920. Isou, in his manifesto, put things under headings such as “The destruction of words for letters” and “the order of letters” revealing an interest in reducing language to its basic form, and creating a poetry that is necessarily typographical.  

The original Letterist movement did produce letterist poetry (were they mentioned in a novel I’ve read? I have a vague memory of them being referenced in a scene of a Canadian novelist, either by Mordecai Richler or Robertson Davies). They also became an anarchistic movement that pulled off pranks such as the Easter morning address at Notre Dame in Paris in 1950 where it was declared by Lettrist Michael Mourre that God is dead.  And they produced abstract films.  They were, in essence, a belated Dadaist unit operating during wartime and then the post-war period.  In addition to these films and letter poems produced by Isou, he also developed what he called ‘hypergraphics’, a mode of writing that freely mixes words with images, or even small symbols or signs set into a sequence to convey some kind of meaning. Letterism and Hypergraphics is a kind of small catalog to an exhibition, currated by Jean-Paul Curtay (who wrote the bulk of the text for this small volume), held in 1985, that features a number of hypergraphic works by Isou and his Letterist allies.

This catalog is significant for being one of the few (very few) English texts to discuss the Letterist movement in a sustained fashion.  Elsewhere, the Letterists are referenced largely as a lead-in to a more deeply focused discussion on Guy Debord and the Situationists.  Debord is certainly mentioned in Curtay’s catalog, but only as part of the timeline of Letterist activity, as much of the text focuses on Isou, his work AFTER the split with Debord, and the influence Isou has had elsewhere (one of the pieces in this book is called Hypergraphics and America). In addition to Curtay’s writing about the Letterist’s, their history and their work, the book contains numerous reproductions of hypergraphic drawings as well as still-shots from some of the experimental films produced by these artists. The text and all the images are printed in some kind of violet.  Because this is an exhibition catalog, it focuses pretty closely on the art of the movement, and it does not actually discuss things like the above mentioned Notre Dame fiasco.  

civil rights movement - book - 2010 - At the Dark end of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
Danielle L. McGuire
Alfred A. Knopf
2010
324 pages


The basic foundation for the Jim Crow laws that segregated the races in the American South, according to At the Dark End of the Street author Danielle L. McGuire (and a number of her sources), is a fear of sex.  In particular the driving fear was of the races mixing, of the pure white blood becoming polluted by impurities from inferiors.  This fear was the surging undercurrent to those laws that organized southern society into a racially tiered hierarchy.  Riding that current was the fear of the supersexualized black stereotype, the the black man of the white imagination who is driven by a violent lust for white women and the insatiable black woman with little concern for public morality - such representations of the other served as sufficient grounds for maintaining racial segregation and oppression in the American south.  

The History of Sexuality, a three volume text by French philosopher and cultural theorist Michel Foucault, describes how sexuality has been historically constituted as a domain and a director of social power.  Much of Foucault’s text is focused upon how thinkers of the Classical world discussed sex and its proper conduct with regards to a good life.  Foucault’s analysis described examples of how numerous writers of the past constituted the sexual life of the subject as productive of a good citizen and good societies.  In other words, sexuality and a socially imposed sexual conduct can be the means by which a population is organized, which is, in a sense, what was at play in the American south under Jim Crow.  Danielle L. McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street, describes a weaponized sexuality, where the protection of the chastity of white women became the pretense by which black men were brutalized by whites and the rape of black women by white men was a means of repression against the black population.  I’m not sure if sexuality really was the basis for segregation but McGuire’s text has convinced me that it was a means for the establishment and maintenance of power in southern society.

McGuire’s text approaches the history of the Civil Rights Movement from an angle that was previously unexplored in the civil rights literature.  At the Dark End of the Street contains numerous accounts of black rape, murder and oppression and the hands of southern whites, and the frequent repetition of the crimes (in a sense) as law officials and the courts let white criminals walk free.  Furthermore, the book also contains numerous accounts of black men sentenced to death for crimes against white women when there was often minimal evidence that a crime even occurred.  Rosa Parks, frequently portrayed as the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, and is often remembered as a tired woman on a bus who just couldn’t bear to move all the way to the back, was actually an investigator sent to Abbeville, AL. by the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP to shed light on the matter of the rape of Recy Taylor.  Taylor was kidnapped and raped by four white men and while she could identify her assailants to police, they lived unpunished for their crime.  McGuire asserted the frequency of such occurrences in the south, with rapists often being released after insisting that their victim was a prostitute.  Agents of the freedom movement sought to oppose these crimes in court, but before they could proceed they needed an impeccable example of black womanhood, because black women were assumed to be guilty of immorality, of enticing white men in some way.

While rape was a weapon in the arsenal of white repression against black populations, so was the city transportation system.  Black bus riders in Montgomery and other southern cities were often forced to stand, even if seats were empty, according to the rules of conduct.  Bus drivers were often cruel and verbally abusive to the riders, many of whom were the black women who worked as domestic help in affluent white households, who were forced to pay at the front but board at the middle door.  Drivers would sometimes force black passengers to pay at the front, then quickly close the door and drive off before the patron could board.  Furthermore, passengers who did not comply were arrested, detained, and frequently subject to sexual abuse administered by the police.  The author thus describes a network of oppressive forces made up of the transportation system, white employers, law enforcement, and the courts, all of which are driven by sexual fears whites had of the racialized other.  

Rosa Parks became the mother of the freedom movement because she was already an experienced civil rights activist (she was involved in the movement since the 1940s) and her reputation was beyond reproach, not simply because she chose to resist unfair rules of bus ridership.  She was far from the first woman to disobey the orders of a bus driver, many others entered that realm ahead of her and it was their testimony of the cruel treatment they received by transportation officials and then police and the courts that prompted her to follow.  It was her activist-honed bravery and her impeccable character that made her an icon for a movement that was already gaining in strength.  With the momentum gained by Park’s action (supported by countless southern women who were vocal about their experiences) the Civil Rights Movement entered its best known phase, beginning at the end of 1955 with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  

At the Dark End of the Street is not just about Rosa Parks path from the investigation of unpunished rapes of black women by white men to her arrest on a Montgomery bus, although one of the book’s strengths is that it returns the depth to a woman who has largely been reduced in the popular consciousness to an image and a short anecdote.  The book adds these dimensions to Parks by contextualizing her work as an investigator, and by contextualizing those cases in a society that is steeped in the politics of sadistic and racialized sexuality.  McGuire’s text also recalls how other black activists formed organizations like the Sojourners for Truth and Justice to protect “black womanhood”, and it contains practical reversals of racial stereotypes, describing incident after incident where white men behaved as violent sexual predators of vulnerable black women.  

Ultimately, the text describes the movement as a site where individual women could find pride in their race and gender, and attain a sense of personhood in a society that was structured to deny such status.  Endesha Ida May Holland, for example, went from working as a prostitute to becoming an SNCC activist, stating that “the movement said I was somebody; I was somebody, they said.”  McGuire uses court decisions as markers of progress, as a chapter is devoted to the first trial where white men were given life sentences in the south for the rape of Betty Jean Owens, and the book’s final chapter is about the trial of Joan Little, a woman of poor repute who killed jailer Clarence Alligood in self defense after he threatened her with rape during her detainment.  Little was acquitted at trial and McGuire’s book includes a political cartoon at the end of the chapter that features and illustration of Joan Little standing over a knocked-out allegorical figure of ‘Dixie Racism’ in a boxing ring.

At the Dark end of the Street has received a number of accolades since its publication.  It has won the 2011 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians and the 2011 Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries.  The book contains a detailed index, detailed endnotes, and a bibliography that is subdivided into publication types.  The book also contains many black and white images of the people whose stories populate the text (many of these images also appear on the book website.)

beats, 1960s - book - 1960 - Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society

Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
Paul Goodman
Vintage Books
1960
296 pages

Just before the start of the 1960s, and into the first couple years of the decade, a number of books were published that took a critical eye to American society during one of its most prosperous periods.  Such books included The Organization Man (1956) by American sociologist William H Whyte, that critically analyzed the behavior of American corporate executives, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) by freelance writer and urban critic Jane Jacobs, that critiqued the contemporary design of urban centres and their effect on quality of life, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1960), a book that inspired the environmental movement with its descriptions of the harmful ecological effects of certain industrial practices.  Growing Up Absurd (1956), Paul Goodman’s 300 page discussion of contemporary life and its effects on burgeoning masculinity in mid-century America may be added to this list, especially as it played a role in inspiring the radical 1960s.

Paul Goodman (1911-1972) was a radical leftist intellectual polymath who left behind a large body of literature when he died.  He was a prolific writer who had produced a number of works of fiction, drama and poetry.  Most of his work, however, was critical commentary and cultural analysis, on a myriad of subjects, delivered from a far-left perspective.  Goodman has been mentioned in Andrew Cornell’s article A New Anarchism Emerges as one of the writers who kept American anarchism vital during the mid-century period when far-left politics were at a low ebb in the United States.   Goodman wrote for a number of leftist magazines, publishing articles in which he discusses the mass media, sexuality, politics, social behavior, and the arts.  Out of Goodman’s large bibliography, Growing Up Absurd is probably his best known work, and the text that gave the author his reputation as a first-rate social critic.

In this book, Goodman identified a decline in the possibilities for young men in the United States during the 1950s.  Much of his analysis is focused upon what he considered to be the poor quality of employment positions that were available to young men at that time.  Goodman argued that, while a young man (the author operated under the presumption that masculinity was at stake, young women, according to the author, may still find life satisfaction in motherhood) may have opportunities open to them, the capacity for these opportunities to offer life satisfaction to them is nonexistent.  Many work occupations were/are unskilled or driven by business principles that empty them of their apparent usefulness because they become isolated from   Goodman's thesis for the text is that there were few avenues for an adult male to realize their masculinity in 1950s American society.

Goodman also argues that society has (essentially) become a machine of interactive mechanisms oriented towards production, and this has resulted in a withering of the aspects of life that once gave it meaning including community, education, and democracy.  Because Goodman was primarily focused on the effects of this society upon the quality of life for young men, he determined that delinquency, gang life (cf. Street Corner Society by William H Whyte for more concrete analysis of this social phenomena), and the arts (as represented by the Beats) became the major realms in which young men may find community and self-satisfaction.  That young men would turn to such outlets in order to feel useful is problematic to Goodman, however, who explains his sympathy to the need of youth to feel useful as they become adults, but also argues that such outlets in fact interrupt development and maintain the subject’s adolescent state.  

Goodman’s text basically predicted the youth culture of the 1960s.  Growing Up Absurd analyzed the socio-cultural conditions that gave rise to the Hippies, and what’s more Goodman’s political writings contributed to a body of far-left literature that influenced the New Left.  Goodman calls for a restructuring society oriented away from the technocratic strictures of isolated production towards the building of communities that enhance the experience of living.  It appears that many of the conditions Goodman described have continued, possibly even accelerated, where a division from work and community has lead into crises like the currently ongoing financial meltdown and a Graduate student bubble.  Numerous other crises of youth have emerged with the acceleration of the consumer society as individuals try to construct their identities based on brand associations and through image manipulations via social media.  All of this suggests that Growing Up Absurd can be read as a text that divined the cultural ground for the new social forms of the 1960s, but also that aspects of the text are still relevant as cultural analysis.

zines - zine - 2008 - My Time Annihilator: A Brief History of 1930s Science Fiction Fanzines

My Time Annihilator: A Brief History of 1930’s Science Fiction Fanzines
Christopher Todd
2008

My Time Annihilator is a zine I procured for a dollar from Microcosm Publishing distro.  This zine takes as its focus the phenomena of science fiction fanzines that were published by proto-nerds of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.  These publications were perhaps one of the more immediate ancestors to the practice of zine production of the 1980s and 90s (with radical pamphlets, avant-garde art journals, and the underground press as more distant predecessors in either time or in practice).  
According to the author, Christopher Todd, the science-fiction fanzine emerged as a kind of distributed message post to enable communication between sci-fi fans about their favorite genre of literature when few fellow fans existed in their immediate environs.  

The writing in My Time Annihilator, like the writing in most zines, is far less formal and much more personal than most other forms of published material.  Christopher Todd’s opinions about his subject matter are casually expressed through the zine, letting the reader know that even though he considers sci-fi fanzines to be interesting as a broad topic, he found that the particular content of each publication was boring.  Furthermore, the zine describes Todd’s experience of conducting research into the fanzines, where he gained access to an archive of fanzines held at Temple University in Philidelphia through the using a found student ID.  Todd also gives his opinion on zines in general, and despite his efforts as a zine producer, he primarily sees the amateur publications as disposable and unworthy of widespread attention.

Todd’s zine focuses on three aspects of the fanzines, their content, formats and methods of production.  Of these aspects, content is specifically science-fiction related, which Todd describes in broad generalizations.  According to the author,  fanzines were made up of book and event reviews, letters and responses, and criticism of other fanzines.  Todd claimed to find many zines difficult to read as they developed their own linguistic forms and sets of inside jokes, thus bringing up issues of cultural capital as Todd relates these language issues to analogues found in the jargon deployed in many modern punk zines.  Todd also briefly describes methods of printing production in a pre-xerox era (1930s-1950s), including the spirit duplicator and the more popular mimeograph technologies.  Most interesting was Todd’s discussion of formatting ideas that have been lost in current self-publishing practice, such as the fanzine printed on a single postcard.

Books about zines, such as Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture do mention the science-fiction predecessor to the zine phenomena.  With that being said, Christopher Todd’s short zine about the early fanzines is the most attention that I have seen given, in print, to that material.  Todd also includes in his zine an appendix featuring a number of covers of old fanzines, and some examples of text, to give the reader some idea of the materials he discusses.  Some of his examples look as though they could be contemporary zines rather than 1930s artifacts.