ANGEL HEAD

angel head is about to mutate!

its host body is weak & corrupt

the time for regeneration, for purification, has come.

we do not yet know which host body it will choose to inhabit next.

keep a watchful eye.

if you see an internet address with a snazzy beard & a rigid index finger, that will be us.

expect word in the next few days.

shalom.

peace.

we're outta here.

aol sucks!

screw george bush!

the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

AUM.

tractorboy64 at 09:43:03 o'clock BST Link to this entry | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

books you really ought to read # 1

The Hashish Club: An Anthology of Drug Literature

ed: Peter Haining  (Peter Owen, 1975)

Not dissimilar to Howard Marks "Book of Dope Stories", this, but with perhaps a more interesting focus, because it concentrates on the era that began, loosely, with the Beats and draws up, tired haggard and dying for a snack, at Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Many writers are excerpted, in between those two historical bookends, including Neal Cassady, Leary, Alan Watts (who got everywhere in those days), Paul Bowles, Henri Michaux (who Ginsberg wrote very charmingly about elsewhere), Alex Trocchi--unfortunately he provides what is possibly the most unintriguing selection in the book--and John Lennon, as well as (lest we forget) Hunter Thompson, with a brilliant segment from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." I don't know where you'd find the book now--I bought it from a charity shop--but it provides a great cross-section of counter-cultural/ bohemian writing for those who like that sort of thing. And if you don't, can I politely ask what you're doing reading ANGEL HEAD anyway?

 

tractorboy64 at 12:07:44 o'clock BST Link to this entry | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

big new event in the kesey world

October 24th and 25th of this year see the beginning of the restoration of the original bus driven by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on their first forays into the American consciousness in the mid-Sixties. The bus is being hauled out of the swamp it's been in on the Kesey land since 1989 and the call is going out on the Kesey website for volunteers to come along and help clear the path. A true Prankster/ hippie day out. Go and pay the Kesey site a visit using the link on the left for details and/ or how to contribute financially. The event is being filmed, as everything always was in Ken's world, for posterity.

Zane is also announcing the first Acid Test in many a year. It takes place in Las Vegas on Halloween Night, October 31st this year--if, that is, the forces of God & Law & Righteousness don't shut it down.  Find out more at http://www.at40vegas.com

tractorboy64 at 20:16:34 o'clock BST Link to this entry | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

tell ol' bill

There's a new Bob Dylan song called "Tell Ol' Bill" on the soundtrack of a forthcoming movie, "North Country,"  which has just become available in the US, if not in Britain. Anybody who hears it, let me know what it's like. I'm imagining another "Diamond Joe," like the track on Dylan's fascinating "Masked & Anonymous" movie, but I'm probably wrong. It's always been tough predicting Bob.

Speaking of, the old so-and-so was seen being "done" tonight by Frank Skinner in one of his talk show skits.Frank's Dylan caricature looked more like John Cooper Clarke than Dylan, but since John was a Dylan caricature himself that's not surprising. What is surprising is that Bob has penetrated the mass consciousness sufficiently deeply once more for a faux-contemporary comedian like Skinner to think a caricature was worthwhile. When I first began to listen to him in 1983 he was considered an old, bad joke.

 

 

tractorboy64 at 00:01:32 o'clock BST Link to this entry | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

dylan's "novel" re-emerges

Bob Dylan's only novel "Tarantula" has been republished. Written at what is usually referred to as "the height of his creative powers" back in the Sixties, the book was talked about and talked about for a long time but never appeared--basically because Dylan had announced it, taken an advance from the publishers and then he'd failed to complete the process by actually writing anything. And when it did appear nobody could understand it, since its style was in the William Burroughs/ Surrealist mould with no real narrative and no logical progression from one section to another. People do so love to be spoon-fed.

tractorboy64 at 12:48:05 o'clock BST Link to this entry | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

what is post-beat anyway?

Can anybody tell me? The phrase is bandied about a lot, if it is a phrase and not something else grammatically, but does anybody know what it really means? Is Bob Dylan post-Beat, for example? and why? Is it because of some philosophical or technical quality in his work, or because he occasionally hung out with Allen and the boys? And how does a modern working poet qualify for post-Beat status (should he/ she want anything so unhelpful)? Do they have to write like Kerouac? Do they have to write about Kerouac? Must they be jazz fans? Must they be junkies? Does "post-Beat" as a literary or social phenomenon even exist? (Ah, that great debate attended, I think, by Jack and by Kingsley Amis: There may be a Beat Generation, but I doubt it.)

Beat injected certain technical approaches (culled from literary Modernism, from jazz and from Japanese and Chinese tradition) into contemporary writing, along with a dynamism--again probably culled from jazz--best illustrated, probably, by "Howl" but visible in the works of every Beat writer, even the fairly sedate Gary Snyder. It also, inadvertently I think, since it emerged at the same time the mass electronic media was born, gave the mainstream world and its own accolytes and literary children certain cool archetypes which are, in a way, as relevant to an assessment of its heritage as the writing itself. Post-Beat, to me, is anything coming after the first wave of the Beat style and sensibility that shows firm evidence of its influence, even if indirectly--ie, through approaches gleaned from the generation that stands between you and it. It is an umbrella definition, in other words, serving just as accurately, in my mind, to describe Gus Van Sandt or Kurt Cobain as it does, say, Ana Christy, though Ana's got a much more obvious link to the source.

So that's the understanding of "post-Beat" that I'm working with when I approach these pages. Beat was one vibrant milestone in a living tradition that can be traced way back into the past and continues vividly to this day. I use it as a marker because Beat is where I came in. But there is likely to be much more than that on ANGEL HEAD.

 

 

tractorboy64 at 08:55:19 o'clock BST Link to this entry | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 3 comments: Show Recent | Add your own

and howl fifty

Joe Speer tells me he read two pieces at a Howl Fifty in Las Cruces, New Mexico on October 7th. Now, that's the kind of event I'd want to be at. I'd organise something similar for Northampton but Ginsberg hasn't got here yet. I've told two people in the last two weeks that I was a poet and you know who they asked me about? John Clare and Shakespeare. There's no faux-modernity in these parts.

*                              *                          *                                  *

Having said that yesterday, how come there's no statue of John Clare in Northampton but there is one of Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist MP? Northampton supposedly prides itself on its non-conformity--though when you're out on Saturday night it looks like the Invasion of the Clones--but why's a politician favoured over a poet, albeit a not-very-interesting one?

If there's not a statue of me on Abington Street before the end of my life--ie in about five minutes the way my health is going--I'm going to rain plagues of faeces on the heads of the civic leaders from my new home in Heaven. I promise you.

tractorboy64 at 06:02:04 o'clock BST Link to this entry | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

deleted poem

<If anybody was quick enough to see the poem "Poem for Howl Fifty" in this space and wonder what happened to it, I deleted it because I decided to suck my fear of rejection up and submit it somewhere. As any poet'll tell you, most magazines are hincty about first publication rights and I live to make other editors happy! Anyway, if it's rejected I'll repost it. Until then, how do you like this red colour?>

tractorboy64 at 17:46:29 o'clock BST Link to this entry | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

civic snorefest

There are going to be many more events commemorating Howl Fifty, as it might as well be called, but few of them will be featured on ANGEL HEAD. I have been reading about various events--all of them in America--to report back to you but as I indicated in an earlier entry about Kerouac, civic celebrations don't work with Beat or post-Beat writers. This is a bohemian, anti-Establishment tradition, practised then and now by penniless loners and romantics in cheap rooms or travelling through abandoned towns in harsh rains looking for sex or drugs or God or various combinations of same, and in the meantime and by complete coincidence shooting vitality and life into the main vein of literature. Beats and post-Beats know that all is lost and the world's an illusion of their own ego; they're the men and women that the people in suits want rid of, they don't turn up with neat beards for celebrations designed to increase tourism in respectable towns across America or England. A true Beat or post-Beat poet has no interest in "career." Politicians and office workers have careers; but they don't know that the universe is "infinitely blank," as Gary Snyder says, and that all life is really just alchemised  energy. A poet is only interested in getting to the true meaning of everything and then writing a brilliant poem about it.

The only Howl Fifty events I will include in ANGEL HEAD are those that feature real, living poets, or which seem to contribute significantly to our appreciation or understanding of Ginsberg or the poem, and place it where it belongs, in a continuing tradition of articulate radical poetry. The rest I'll leave to the local chambers of commerce to promote.

 

tractorboy64 at 11:40:04 o'clock BST Link to this entry | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

65th birthday

See SUFFOLK PUNCH http://journals.aol.co.uk/bkerouac/SUFFOLKPUNCH for a mini-essay on the significance of John Lennon on what would have been birthday 65.

tractorboy64 at 12:15:18 o'clock BST Link to this entry | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own