[08] Brilliant Corners |
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Criss Cross
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Thursday, 08 December 2005 10:14 |
brilliant corners
for steve hager & paul krasner
out of the darkness of the second world war before the soldiers came back to turn america
into a vast suburban wasteland dreamed up by real estate developers with huge dollar signs in their eyes & nothing at all in their hearts
out of the darkness of american life in the first half of the '40s when the only rays of light
were cast in nightclubs & after-hours joints illuminated by the music of the most adventurous of americans
thelonious monk at the piano, charlie parker on saxophones, dizzy gillespie on trumpet, kenny clarke at the drums,
brilliant corners of modern civilization flooded with light & intelligence,
a bright beacon ahead through the desolate landscape of post-war america
& sitting in the corner at minton's playhouse in the middle of the night digging the band like crazy,
a hip football player & would-be sportswriter from lowell, massachusetts who also wrote stories
for the school paper, like lester young is 10 years ahead of his time,
so well known at minton's in harlem that the musicians on the set named a song after him,
kerouac, jean-louis known as ti-jean or jack, the great bard of modern america
who would turn the genius rhythms of bebop into dynamite literature on the road,
doctor sax, dharma bums, the subterraneans, mexico city blues, the scripture of the golden eternity
a vast trembling body of visionary writings that re-shaped american life in every possible way,
& allen ginsberg, fellow student at columbia, son of a poet schoolteacher from paterson, new jersey
& a mad red housewife, incipient bard of the future who would see the specter of blake in his dormitory room
& hallucinate a solitary rose on the clothes hanger in his closet & inscribe great visionary odes on the windows of our skulls
howl, america, sunflower sutra, kaddish & hundreds more
kerouac & ginsberg looking for their kicks among the petty criminals & dope fiends of times square
(kerouac was arrested as an accessory to murder, ginsberg went to the nuthouse to beat a stolen property beef)
& they met up with their mentor in this seedy milieu, a street-level philosopher & junkie & queer, a renegade
from the genteel environs of upper middle class life in the city of st. louis, a member of the family
that invented the adding machine & on his mother's side, the man who founded the public-relations industry,
william seward burroughs turned the language around & pointed it back
at the squares who had stripped it of its meaning, & blew up the sky with his revolutionary writings
naked lunch, nova express, the soft machine, the ticket that exploded
kerouac & ginsberg & burroughs in new york city in the years after the war
when bird ruled the music with his magnificent recordings for dial & savoy, & dizzy's big band was playing things to come
& cubana bop, & thelonious monk would make the first recordings of his incredible compositions in the fall of 1947
& a young man from denver blew onto the scene straight off the front range of the rocky mountains
with enormous western energy & fast-talking wit, & the ability to park a car anywhere he wanted
neal cassady drove across the landscape like a metaphor for change, turning literature
inside out, & making life itself a complex work of art, immortalized by kerouac in on the road
& visions of cody, & by ginsberg in howl as 'cocksman & adonis of denver, secret hero of these poems,
author of the first third & a human bridge who connected the '50s with the '60s
from behind the wheel of a bus named furthur, pushing america farther than it had ever gone
before, with a new vision of a new world given life by the practice of its dreamers,
propelled by allen ginsberg, tireless proselytizer for the creations of his friends, who schlepped their manuscripts
from publisher to publisher for 10 years, until on the road & naked lunch were finally brought to press
& howl was arrested & tried for obscenity & the beat generation was in time magazine
& young people in america suddenly wanted to know where they could get some marijuana,
& a road out of the stasis began to open up in front of us & we followed it
& we followed it
new orleans november 15-19, 1999/ amsterdam november 20-22, 1999/
new orleans december 11, 1999/ january 31/february 8, 2000/ january 11 & 14, 2003/
rotterdam january 8, 2004/ amsterdam december 28, 2004 |
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