Post #387001 by Dr. Zarkov on Sat, Jun 14, 2008 2:46 PM

Okay, I'm real late in getting back to posting on this thread I started, so I apologize for only adding to it now that it appears to be thoroughly dead.

Off topic: Yes, I am a huge Kerouac fan, too. When I was in college at the University of Maryland (where friends dubbed me Dr. Zarkov after we saw the old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials), my parents lived in northern New Jersey where I ran into a guy who knew Kerouac when he lived on Long Island. He said he met Kerouac in a local bar one night and, not knowing who he was, asked him. "I'm the greatest writer since sweet Will," Kerouac replied boozily. The only other thing I remember this guy telling me was that the notion that Kerouac wrote without revising was a myth. He recalled visiting Kerouac's house and seeing him carefully revising one of his manuscripts, I believe it was verse. This guy was a teenager when he met Kerouac and later fell in with Allen Ginsberg and the rest of the beats in Manhattan, eventually becoming mired in the drug scene, which he had gotten clear of by the time he met me.

I am writing this while two photos taken by Allen Ginsberg look down on me: Gregory Corso eating grapes in a Parisian garret, and Jack Kerouac on the East River docks in 1953, complete with handwritten captions by Ginsberg. I bought them in the 1980s and met Ginsberg at the gallery where I purchased them in Washington D.C. I had a local framer place them in old fashioned frames to look like family photos.

When I was in college in the early 1970s some friends of mine and I met Ginsberg at a reading he gave at the Smithsonian's Baird Auditorium. During intermission we repaired to one of the entrances to the auditorium, which was like a short tunnel, and hidden by the crowd we lit up a joint. To our surprise Ginsberg walked right by us on his way out to get some air. One of my friends who was holding the joint while we were passing it around, offered it to him for a hit. He thanked us, grabbed the joint and kept walking with it!)

When it comes to books I think the other posters have pretty well covered the waterfront. Two that you may not have heard about that I would recommend are Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac, by David Amram. A respected musician and composer, Amram worked on Pull My Daisy and knew Kerouac well before he became famous. Some of the Beats' naysayers asserted that Kerouac and the others misunderstood modern jazz and failed to recognize the true discipline it requires. This book shows that Kerouac at least knew and understood jazz thoroughly and even before he was well known, jazz musicians appreciated his comments (although one told Amram that Kerouac was too young to be drinking as much as he was -- when a jazz musician in New York in the 1950s says you're drinking too much, you're drinking too much.)

The other book I would recommend contains Kerouac only as a ghost: When I was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, by Sam Kashner, who was the first -- and initially the only -- student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute. Although the divine Jack is not present, Kashner provides a vivid, sometimes scary, sometimes sad, sometimes funny look at Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs and other assorted characters in their twilight. His description of Naropa rings true to what I saw when I attended the Colorado Dance Festival in Boulder nine years later and hung out and partied with the Naropa crowd (although at that time all the famous Beats were long gone from there).

On topic: Elsa Posey, whose recollections of the Bali Hai you may recall actually started off this thread, put me in touch with a friend of hers who used to hang out there. He had recorded King Camio's Hawaiian Band on reel-to-reel when it performed at the Bali Hai in 1962 or 1963. He kindly sent me a CD with 23 minutes -- it cuts off mid-song at one point when I guess the tape ran out -- and it is wonderful: Medleys of My Little Grass Shack and Hukilau and other tunes I can't quite recognize, and Hawaiian versions of requests like Red Sails in the Sunset, all recorded along with decades-past laughter, conversations and the sounds of tinkling glasses and Tiki mugs providing a steady undercurrent, resurrecting Tiki ghosts of long ago.

[ Edited by: Dr. Zarkov 2008-06-14 14:51 ]