
Photo by Christopher Dombres. Creative Commons Attribution License.
Stumbled across this nifty 'Beat Generator' image in Washington City Paper's Weekend Arts Round-Up coverage of last weekends goings-on in DC. They also had an interview with Anne Waldman as she walked through the National Gallery's "Beat Memories" exhibition [this interview with Jesse Rausch is now no longer available on-line but photos from the occasion, by Chris Svetlik, may be seen here]. She (Anne) was in the capital to read "Howl", backed by a string-quartet performing Lee Hyla's score for the poem. There's a 3-minute clip of that performance posted on You Tube by Busboys & Poets (who've also got clips of Kyp Malone & Matthew Hemerlein up from the very same evening).
On the subject of Ginsberg riffs, we came across this entertaining and amusing parody of Howl by Oyl Miller on McSweeney's last week. Definitely needs posting here too! Check Oyl's blog for more.
TWEET.
BY OYL MILLER
- - - -
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for
attention, dragging themselves through virtual
communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and
neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any
meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared
and skeptical approval from the holographic projected
dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak
connections and recession wounded and directionless,
sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of
Wi-Fi-enabled cafes, floating across the tops of cities,
contemplating techno, who bared their brains to the black
void of new media and the thought leaders and so called
experts who passed through community colleges with
radiant, prank playing eyes, hallucinating Seattle- and
Tarantino-like settings among pop scholars of war and
change, who dropped out in favor of following a creative
muse, publishing zines and obscene artworks on the
windows of the internet, who cowered in unshaven
rooms, in ironic superman underwear burning their money
in wastebaskets from the 1980s and listening to Nirvana
through paper thin walls, who got busted in their grungy
beards riding the Metro through Shinjuku station, who
ate digital in painted hotels or drank Elmer's glue in secret
alleyways, death or purgatoried their torsos with tattoos
taking the place of dreams, that turned into nightmares,
because there are no dreams in the New Immediacy,
incomparably blind to reality, inventing the new reality,
through hollow creations fed through illuminated screens.
Screens of shuttering tag clouds and image thumbnails
lightning in the mind surfing towards Boards of Canada
and Guevara, illuminating all the frozen matrices of time
between, megabyted solidities of borders and yesterday's
backyard wiffleball dawns, downloaded drunkenness
over rooftops, digital storefronts of flickering flash, a sun
and moon of programming joyrides sending vibrations to
mobile devices set on manner mode during twittering
wintering dusks of Peduca, ashtray rantings and coffee
stains that hid the mind, who bound themselves to
wireless devices for an endless ride of opiated
information from CNN.com and Google on sugary highs
until the noise of modems and fax machines brought them
down shuddering, with limited and vulgar verbiage to
comment threads, battered bleak of shared brain devoid
of brilliance in the drear light of a monitor, who sank all
night in interface's light of Pabst floated out and sat
through the stale sake afternoon in desolate pizza parlors,
listening to the crack of doom on separate nuclear iPods,
who texted continuously 140 characters at a time from
park to pond to bar to MOMA to Brooklyn Bridge lost
battalion of platonic laconic self proclaimed journalists
committed to a revolution of information, jumping down
the stoops off of R&B album covers out of the late
1980s, tweeting their screaming vomiting whispering facts
and advices and anecdotes of lunchtime sandwiches and
cat antics on couches with eyeballs following and
shockwaves of analytics and of authority and finding your
passion and other jargon, whole intellects underscored
and wiped clean in the total recall 24/7 365 assault all
under the gaze of once brilliant eyes.