Review: HOWL

“There is no Beat Generation,” poet Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) tells an anonymous interviewer in 1957. “Just a bunch of guys trying to get published.”

The original Beats, including Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs were indeed all writers, whose biographical and self-mythologising works directly inspired a countercultural movement that scandalised the USA in the staid 1950s.

The publication of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957 was a key moment in Beat history, but the catalysing event which rocketed the Beats, Sputnik-like, to fame across the USA was the publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems by San Francisco’s City Lights Press in 1956; and the court case the following year which saw its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, charged with obscenity.

The trial was widely covered by the press, with articles appearing in both Time and Life magazine; and the decision by Judge Clayton W. Horn that ‘Howl’ was of “redeeming social importance” and was therefore “not obscene” was a significant landmark for freedom of artistic expression.

As writer Fred Kaplan noted in Slate, the court case was ‘serious business':

'If Ferlinghetti had been found guilty, Capt. William Hanrahan, the juvie chief who arrested him, was going to send his cops to sweep the filth from every bookstore in the city – he'd drawn up a long list of titles – and San Francisco, which was just emerging as an avant-garde haven, would have retreated into backwater provincialism for years, if not decades.’

In the hands of Academy Award-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, The Celluloid Closet), the obscenity trial becomes the dramatic centrepiece of a new docu-drama that explores Ginsberg’s creation of ‘Howl’ and the poem’s lasting cultural impact as a transcendent work of 20th century literature.

Based on court transcripts and a 1957 interview given by Ginsberg, the film uses carefully orchestrated re-enactments and archival footage to capture the spirit of the times, and vivid animation to convey the poem’s dramatic imagery. Also interwoven throughout the film is a vivid recreation of Ginsberg’s first dramatic reading of ‘Howl’ at San Francisco’s Six Gallery on October 7, 1955; a night which Kerouac would later immortalise in his novel The Dharma Bums.

Set in 1957, both the trial – featuring Jon Hamm (Mad Men) as defence attorney J.W ‘Jake the Master’ Ehrlich and David Strathairn as the prosecutor, Ralph McIntosh – and the extended interview with a strikingly frank Ginsberg are shot in colour. Flashback sequences showing the creation of the poem and other key episodes from Ginsberg’s life are shot in crisp black and white.

The film leaps back and forth across its various timelines, with the hallucinatory animated images designed by artist Eric Drooker further complicating its narrative. The overall effect could have been dizzying and confusing; instead, like ‘Howl’ itself, the film is inspiring and ecstatic.

As the young Ginsberg, James Franco is brilliant, capturing the poet’s clipped and awkward speech patterns; his frustrated love for Kerouac (Todd Rotondi) and the “cocksman and Adonis of Denver,” Neal Cassady (Jon Prescott); and his lasting guilt over his mentally ill mother, Naomi, whose lobotomy papers Ginsberg had to sign at the age of 21.

The animated sequences are occasionally a trifle literal, but they also provide an emotional component which is otherwise absent from the film, particularly when illustrating parts II and III of ‘Howl’; and Beat Generation devotees will enjoy spotting scenes which the filmmakers have recreated directly from Ginsberg’s own photographs, such as Kerouac smoking on a New York fire escape, and Allen and his lover Peter Orlovsky (Aaron Tveit) sitting back to back, like one of Plato’s Children of the Sun reunited at last.

The film’s production design, by Thérèse DePrez, is detailed without being flashy, Jake Pushinsky’s editing is excellent, and Carter Burwell’s original music sensitively and generously compliments the action on-screen.

Cleverly cast and imaginatively made, Howl is a fitting testament to the power, beauty and passion of Ginsberg’s poetry, and a fascinating fusion of cinematic forms. At the time of writing it is showing on a single Australian screen, at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova, prior to a Madman DVD release later this year. It deserves a much wider audience.

A book of blood about the crime which inspired the Beats

And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks is an early novel written collaboratively by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs over the winter of 1944-1945. Narrated in alternating chapters by the young merchant seaman Mike Ryko (Kerouac) and barman turned private investigator Will Dennison (Burroughs), the book is a semi-fictionalised account of a murder and the events leading up to it - the murder of one of their friends by another - written in terse, unaffected prose.

On a muggy summer night in the predawn hours of Monday August 14, 1944, Lucien Carr, 19, stabbed his constant - to the point of stalking - companion, 33 year old former teacher David Kammerer. Thinking Kammerer was dead - he wasn't - Carr weighed the body down and threw it in the Hudson River, where Kammerer drowned.

Both Kerouac and Burroughs were retained as material witnesses to the crime, as the following day Carr had confessed to them both about the killing. Burroughs urged Carr to get a good lawyer and turn himself in; Kerouac helped Carr dispose of evidence, including the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses.

After a court case in which the killing was represented as an 'honour slaying' - an act of self defence to prevent Kammerer committing rape - Carr was found guilty of manslaughter. He served two years in the Elmira Reformatory for the crime.

As James W. Grauerholz, Burroughs’ literary executor explains in an afterword in Hippos:

'The enmeshed relationship between Lucien Carr IV and David Eames Kammerer began in St. Louis, Mo., in 1936, when Lucien was 11 and Dave was 25. Eight years, five states, four prep schools and two colleges later, that connection was grown too intense, those emotions too feverish. As 'Will Dennison writes in Hippos, 'When they get together, something happens.'"

Although Carr's lawyers presented an easily digested version of the crime to the court, in which the slender young Columbia University student was depicted as defending himself from the unwanted advances of an older, sexually aggressive gay man, the truth of the matter is much more complicated. Writes Grauerholz:

'David is reduced to a pathetic caricature: the obsessive, older male homosexual who increasingly oppresses his innocent, heterosexual victim, finally leaving the younger man no alternative but to "defend his honour" with violence. This was, in fact, the theory of Carr's legal defence, intended to be palatable to a judge, as well as the public - especially in 1944.

There is much more to be said, however, about Lucien Carr's early life and youthful bisexuality ... Lucien did, for example, share a number of sexual encounters with [Allen] Ginsberg in 1944. So did Kammerer: that became clear when Ginsberg's early journals were published in 2006 ... But Lucien never had any sexual contact with Dave - not even once, according to what Burroughs remembered Kammerer telling him often, and undoubtedly Dave would have told his old friend Bill if anything at all had ever happened.'

It's clear from Grauerholz's afterword, and from the events depicted in Hippos, that Kammerer and Carr's relationship was dangerously complex. It's unfortunate, then, that Kerouac and Burroughs lacked the literary skills to fully explore this amour fou at the time Hippos was written.

As written, the characters of 'Phillip Tourian' (Carr) and 'Ramsey Allen' (Kammerer) may get to speak for themselves, but their voices lack clarity, and their characters are far from detailed. Readers hoping for psychological insights into their passive-aggressive relationship will be sorely disappointed. Rather than a complex rendering of their fatal attraction, Hippos presents a thinly fictionalised account of the facts surrounding the murder without ever getting to the dark heart of the matter. Consequently, readers will know how things happened after finishing the book, but are left to wonder why.

Nonetheless, Hippos is still a fascinating book for Beat Generation devotees: presenting as it does a detailed snapshot of New York City life in the midst of the Second World War, and simultaneously providing an insight into the early development of two significant American writers.

Writing as 'Dennison', Burroughs aims for hard-boiled prose but has yet to acheive the narrative clarity and precision which he would later display in his first published novel, Junkie (1953). His eye for detail and fascination for the demi-monde, however, are already on display.

'The place where I worked is called the Continental Cafe. It is open all the way across the front in summer; with doors that fold back. There are tables where you can sit and look at the sidewalk if you want to. There are several waitresses/hostesses who will let you buy drinks for them. Inside is the usual chromium, red leather, and incandescent lights.

As I walked down the bar I noticed a fag, a couple of whores with two Broadway Sams, and the usual sprinkle of servicemen. Three plainclothes dicks were drinking scotch at the far end of the bar.

... I went up to the other end of the bar and waited on two sailors. The jukebox was playing 'You Always Hurt the One You Love', and one sailor said, "Hey Jack, how come that machine never plays what I want?" "I don't know," I said. "People are always complaining about it."'

Overall the book lacks depth, and its tone is repetitive and listless. There are, however, moments in which one can glimpse the writers' emerging voices, such as in a long, lyrical account by 'Mike Ryko' of a days-long drinking binge during one of his trips in the Merchant Marine:

'It was all a blur to me. I remember later on we were standing in a courtyard somewhere in midtown Boston and the seaman with me was calling up to a second-story window where a whore was supposed to live. The window opened and this big Negro stuck his head out and poured a bucket of hot water down on us.

Well finally, the sun came up, and I was lying on a city department toolbox on Atlantic Avenue, right on the waterfront, and there were all these little fishing smacks docked right beside me with the red sun touching their masts. I watched that for awhile, then I sort of dragged myself to North Station to get my gear, and then had to go across town in a taxi to South Station and buy a ticket from New York. I’ll never forget that glorious return to our fair shores.

It's passages like these than indicate the emergence of Kerouac's own, original voice: a voice which merges the opulent, impressionistic prose of Thomas Wolfe with William Saroyan's autobiographical observations of everyday American life, although the final catalysing influence - the frank, colloquial, first person narrative of Kerouac's muse, Neal Cassady - was still some years away.

And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks is not the suppressed masterpiece some Beat fans and scholars may have been hoping for; its simplistic structure and two-dimensional characters see to that. But as an early collaboration between two writers who collectively, along with poet Allen Ginsberg, cast a long shadow over popular culture and the canon of 20th century literature, it's a fascinating insight into the Beats' creative development; and a valuable documentation of New York City's bohemian subculture before a self-publicising mythology took hold.


And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, $35.00 (Hardcover, 214 pp, Allen Lane, ISBN:9781846141645).

Doing the Beats

Thanks to excellent film blog My New Plaid Pants, I've just discovered that producer par excellence Christine Vachon has greenlit a new film called Kill You Darlings, which is based on a little known murder that helped catalyse the birth of the Beat Generation: the 1944 killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, the youth Kammerer had ardently pursued (read stalked) for several years.

Both Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were connected with the murder, indeed Kerouac was jailed as an accessory after the fact; an event which he touches on in both his first novel, The Town and the City, and many years later in The Vanity of Dulouz.

Interestingly, a novel which Burroughs and Kerouac co-wrote about that murder, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is about to be published by Grove Press next month.

Yeah, daddy-o!

MIFF part two

So now I've managed to squeeze in a total of 12 sessions at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which to people who only see a couple of movies a year will seem like a lot of cinema-going in just 13 days, but by my usual festival-going standards is pretty pissweak. Damn work deadlines and tiredness-generating-workloads interfering with my film-viewing pleasure...

Enough grumbling: time for details.

BOB MARLEY: FREEDOM ROAD


















At only 54 minutes, this brief doco about reggae superstar Bob Marley's life, death and career was, unfortunately, the most unsatisfying film I've seen at the festival so far. Its reverential tone never dipped far beneath the surface of the man's life and music; an impression unfortunately bolstered by a series of personal testimonies from those close to Marley, none of whom seemed to have anything bad to say about the man. In short, Bob Marley: Freedom Road felt like a clumsily-produced piece of filler for a cable TV channel, and I regret wasting an hour on it.

Even more frustratingly, the accompanying doco, Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee 'Scratch' Perry, was by far the better film: imformative, engaging, detailed and analytical, or so it seemed in the 10 minutes I had to appreciate it before racing out of the session to get to the opening of the Melbourne Art Fair 2008... dammit!


OTTO, OR UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE






















Buoyed-up by the sublime experience of a Sigur Rós gig at Festival Hall that had ended just half-an-hour before this session started at 11:30pm last Friday, I was in an excellent mood when the latest schlock opus from Bruce LaBruce (Hustler White, Raspberry Reich) started; and being perfect fodder for a late night slot at the festival, Otto; or, Up With Dead People didn't disappoint. This story of a recently reanimated gay zombie, who falls in with the cast and crew of a strident politco-porno underground zombie movie while trying to reassemble the fragments of his former life, is certainly not for everyone. However, if your tastes extend to deliciously observed irony juxtaposed with low-budget gore, some dead sexy boys (excuse the pun), and a dash of relatively serious commentary about a) the environment and b) the painfully unaware foibles of the self-consciously avante-guard, then Otto is for you.


ALONE IN FOUR WALLS












While not outstanding (I accidentally caught a short film, the name of which escapes me at the moment, at MIFF two years ago which explored a similar premise with considerably more finesse) this feature-length doco by Alexandra Westmeier is certainly not without merit. It's a quiet, contemplative film which dispassionately (at times almost too dispassionately: some more vigor might have made for a structurally more engaging film) and non-judgementally documents the day-to-day lives of a group of Russian teenagers in a boy's reform school over the course of a year.

Some of the boys - all of whom were aged 14 and under at the time their crimes were committed - have been sentenced for two years remand for petty theft; others are serving three years for murder. Over 89 minutes, Westmeier allows these boys to tell their own stories, complete with tears in some cases, and laughter in others. We see the daily routines which may help some of the boys - the majority of them from dysfunctional and impoverished families - develop something akin to normal lives. We also hear occasionally from their bewildered parents, and in one instance from the mother of a teenager who one of the film's softly-spoken subjects violently battered to death. While the uncomfortable seating of the Greater Union Theatre didn't help my appreciation of this film, overall I'd had to describe it as solid rather than especially

WORDS OF ADVICE: WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS ON THE ROAD





















Another documentary which suffered from an excess of adulation syndrome, ie a lack of critical engagement with its subject, was this Danish feature about the late Beat Generation writer and author of Junkie, Queer and Naked Lunch, William S Burroughs. That said, it mostly made up for the flaw, in part through its engaging collection of interviewees (including one particularly odd character who, without qualms or self-consciousness, proudly showed us one of Burrough's turds which he'd found floating in the man's sewerage-flooded basement and kept in a jar).

The focus of the film is primarily the author's later years from the 1970s onwards, including his development as a pop culture icon and spoken word performer (though frustratingly, the director failed to acknowledge that Burroughs was an accomplished performer and raconteur as early as 1944, while sharing a house with Joan Vollmer Adams (who he would later marry, then kill) and Jack Kerouac in New York City). The centrepiece around which the doco has been constructed is an array of previously unseen footage from Burroughs' 1983 European tour, specifically his appearances in Denmark.

Fans of Burroughs will enjoy this doco to a degree, but for a Beat Generation devotee such as myself, it was a little lacking in substance, and could perhaps have done with more editing to trim it down to a leaner, sharper running time. An hour would have been ideal; at 74 minutes, I felt this particular doco slightly outstayed its welcome.

More capsule reviews in my next blog entry, hopefully tomorrow...

Concerning Kerouac, and 'On The Road'

'In one of the most famous, free-flowing, and deceptively careless paragraphs in his second novel, On The Road (1957), Jack Kerouac writes with disarming honesty about his relationship with ‘Dean Moriarty’ (Neal Cassady) and ‘Carlo Marx’ (Allen Ginsberg); each of whom were later to become, like Kerouac himself, central figures in the mythology of the ‘Beat Generation’:

“But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany? Wanting dearly to know how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have. “Now, Carlo, let me speak - here’s what I’m saying…” I didn’t see them for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship to fiendish allday-allnight talk proportions.”

In a new edition of On The Road, which reproduces Kerouac’s unedited first draft of the novel - written in a frantic three-week burst on a 120-foot-long scroll of paper in 1951 - we can read this paragraph for the first time as the author intended it; sexually frank and uncensored:

“…but then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing…but burn, burn, burn, like roman candles across the night. Allen was queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw that, and a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night, and wanting dearly to learn how to write poetry like Allen, the first thing you know he was attacking Allen with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have. I was in the same room, I heard them across the darkness and I mused and said to myself “Hmm, now something’s started, but I don’t want anything to do with it.” So I didn’t see them for two weeks during which time they cemented their relationship to mad proportions.”

On The Road: The Original Scroll (2007) – named the after the carefully prepared roll of paper Kerouac wrote his first draft upon, which he made by taping together long, thin sheets of drawing paper - is significant for a number of reasons; not least because its publication celebrates the 50^th anniversary of the book’s original release on September 5 1957: an event heralded in its day as an ‘historic occasion’ by New York Times reviewer, Gilbert Millstein...'

Want to read more? You'll have to wait for the December issue of Australian Book Review, out later this month, which contains my entire 2,700 word essay on Kerouac's life and literature, and which argues that Kerouac should be considered a modernist prose stylist in the league of Joyce or Woolf.

Sorry to be a tease!