Beatdom

Interships/We've Moved

2010-03-30T00:52:00.000-07:00

In case you missed the last post, Beatdom has once again moved... We're no longer using this blog (except to remind you not to read this blog...) as we've now moved to a much nicer Wordpress blog: http://beatdommag.wordpress.com/

I know a few people still swing by here from time to time (it's more search engine friendly than www.beatdom.com) so I want to post a little reminder.

Beatdom is currently looking for interns. The interns will help put together Beatdom #7 and receive education in the field of editing, graphic design and writing.

For more info, please visit either the website or the blog.

We're Moving

2010-03-10T00:47:00.000-08:00

Beatdom's true home has always been www.beatdom.com. That's where you'll find the best information, and links to all of our issues. If you want to contact us, learn about us, or read our magazine, go there.

But this blog has always been a secondary source - a search engine-friendly and easily updated blog.

However, it has run its course. Blogger is nowhere near as advanced as WordPress, and Beatdom is moving over to the darkside. We believe we will be able to provide our readers with a better looking, more detailed blog by moving to WordPress.

If you own a website or blog, please update your links to include the new Beatdom blog. We'll keep updating this one for a few more months, before eventually switching over and shutting this place down.

From now on, you'll find us at: https://beatdommag.wordpress.com/

Letter from the Editor

2010-03-09T01:00:00.001-08:00

Dear All,

The idea for Beatdom’s travel themed sixth issue first appeared about a year ago. I had been travelling a lot and trying my hand at travel writing. Everywhere I went I read a few travel guides first, and everywhere I went I found the place was completely unexpected. The guides may have had all the right names, times and prices, but they didn’t have the soul of the place. Even the photos often failed to capture what a destination was actually like.

But every now and then I’d go somewhere and it would feel familiar. I went to Big Sur and remember passages of Kerouac’s classic, and San Francisco I found myself recalling the great poets and musicians who’d described it.

It occurred to me that the best kind of travel writing doesn’t concern itself with facts and figures. It comes from the experiences and spirit of travel. The best travel writers tell you what they felt, and I believe that gives a far greater pictures of a location than any traditional approach that you might find in a Lonely Planet Guide, or in a pamphlet you pick up at the airport.

I began thinking about starting a travel magazine, featuring only the best travel writing. I wanted my writers to take their inspiration from Kerouac and Whitman and to write from the heart. The magazine was going to be called Beatdom Travel.

After a while I realized a single issue of Beatdom could achieve the same goal. Perhaps it could even take subjects like music and war and politics and do the same. That way, the readers and writers of Beatdom could explore the world around together, and contemplate its significance in relation to the Beat Generation.

And so we have this, the first themed issue of Beatdom. Inside you’ll find articles about travel in the modern world, and in the world of the Beats. You’ll find essays about their influences and the influence they’ve had upon the world.

After this, we’ll tackle the subject of music in Beatdom #7, and continue taking subjects and exploring them through a Beat vision.

Issue Six is not just a travel issue. We are incredibly honoured to present to the world an essay about Alene Lee, written by her daughter, Christina Diamente. Christina read Steven O’Sullivan’s essay about her mother in Issue Four and felt the Beatdom was the right publication to finally reveal the truth about the woman most know as Mardou Fox from Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans.

Christina has also collected some examples of her mother’s unpublished writings, and has written short explanations of each one. But perhaps of greatest interest to Beat readers is “Sisters,” a short memoir written by Alene Lee, whose writing has never before been published.

As always we’re proud to present a piece of frantic prose by our art director Edaurdo Jones, and poetry by one of the world’s finest living poets, Kyle Chase. Both these authors have books pending release by City of Recovery Press.

Yours on the road

David S. Wills

Editor

The Bukowski Postal Stamp

2010-02-28T21:22:00.000-08:00

A few years ago Beatdom tried to help save Charles Bukowski's old bungalow from destruction. Now we're eager to help immortalise the low-life bard by having his image grace a US postal stamp.

There's a Facebook group and a petition.

Let's keep Bukowski in the public consciousness.

Issue Six Cover

2010-02-22T21:34:00.000-08:00

On the 5th Anniversary of the Death of Hunter S. Thompson...

2010-02-18T21:30:00.000-08:00

On February 20, 2005, Hunter S. Thompson shot himself and ended thirty-five years of Gonzo journalism. There never was another Gonzo journalist and there never will be. It was a one man genre. And likewise, there will never be another HST. He was utterly unique. In fact, “unique” is perhaps too weak a word… He was a freak, an atavistic freak.

His literary influences were numerous, yet he was always an original. Thompson grew up worshipping Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and yet ended up being something totally different – Gonzo. He lived in weird times, and his style of writing develop in response to his surroundings – living through the 1950s, 60s & 70s; a turbulent era to say the least.

Most people know him from his work over only a short period of time. The development and maturation of Gonzo, from “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Yet to fully respect the man one must look back further, beyond HST as a drug-fiend, to HST as a dedicated, scrupulous journalist. Prior to his Hell’s Angels fame, Thompson worked as hard as anyone in the game, and while that effort appeared later, it never fully reappeared.

Fame changed Hunter S. Thompson. Drugs changed him, too. Some say he created a caricature and felt compelled to live up to it… and that he became trapped in himself. Reading The Proud Highway drives home just how different Thompson was in his later years. He was not perfect. He came to feel later in life that he’d never reached his potential, and that his work was not respected as serious literary work.

So on this anniversary of his death, let’s celebrate his life and work not by wearing bright shirts, floppy hats and cigarette holders, or by getting messed up and speaking like Johnny Depp… Let’s remember Hunter S. Thompson as a serious writer; an important journalist who earned his place in history through hard work and devotion to the truth.

From the Desk of Edaurdo Jones...

2010-02-15T00:19:00.000-08:00

Thanks to our Art Director, Mr. Edaurdo Jones, for this photo... If anyone else has a photo of Beatdom at their cluttered desk, I'd love to see it.

Beatdom #5 is Here!

2010-02-01T07:28:00.000-08:00

From: http://www.beatdom.com/issue_five.htm

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Naked Lunch, Beatdom's fifth issue includes a William Burroughs tribute section.

We also have interviews with the Academy Award winning directors of "Howl," and Helen Weaver, author of The Awakener.

There's also a look at the raging Kerouac estate battle and the role of the internet in forging a new Beat Generation.

We're proud to bring back Beatdom regular Edaurdo Jones, as well as some magnificent new short fiction and poetry by some of the best writers in the world.

¡¡

Buy Beatdom #5 now or download it for free through our publisher.

This issue will soon be available to read through Google Books.

J.D. Salinger

2010-01-28T20:22:00.001-08:00

Book freaks remember the first time they read something better than the first time they fucked someone. Your first fuck is usually quick, drunk and ugly; but when you read a special book for the first time it sticks with you. Read it again and again and you still always remember that first time.

I think everyone remembers the first time they read The Catcher in the Rye. It’s one of those special books. You read it when you’re young and it helps you; it touches you. Holden Caulfield touched a lot of adolescent lives and made the world make a little more sense.

Cover

2010-01-22T23:04:00.000-08:00

The cover for issue five...

Naked Lunch on Film: Filming the "Unfilmable"

2010-01-19T04:36:00.000-08:00

The novel does not obviously lend itself to adaptation for the screen: it has dozens of characters, few of whom are developed from their initial appearance; the action is set in cities all over the world; it is composed of many small, fragmentary, kaleidoscopic scenes; and there is no traditional story line. It is a novel with a great deal of talk, and the rule of film is that movies move, with minimal talk.

William S. Burroughs, speaking in 1991

With the publication of Naked Lunch there immediately came the cries of “obscene!” from so many conservatives and critics. Nevertheless, the book won its obscenity trial and was released to the general public in the United States, becoming a notorious classic – one of the most depraved and perverse books in modern history, and more importantly a ferocious assault on society and government.

It seemed unlikely, then, that Naked Lunch would one day become a feature film. Yet, not long after the obscenity trial that declared the book of enough social value to be unleashed upon the public, William S. Burroughs was plotting its way into cinema.

From the late sixties until the mid seventies Burroughs tried to turn his literary masterpiece into a commercially viable film. He enlisted the help of legendary British director and producer, Antony Balch, and fellow cut up master and friend, Brion Gysin.

The three men formed a production company in 1970, called Friendly Films Limited. They reviewed screenplays, treatments and ran through ideas together on how to make Naked Lunch work as a movie.

Of course, there were myriad problems. For one thing, it had been a major headache releasing the book because of laws regarding obscenity. It wouldn’t be easy to put together such a pornographic project without incurring the wrath of the censors, or, once again, the law.

Furthermore, Naked Lunch isn’t comprised of a traditional narrative that would adapt well to the screen. The story jumps around wildly through time and space, with characters rarely developing, if at all. Its fragmentary composition would surely baffle film-goers.

This all made the project increasingly unlikely, especially given the cost of making films. Whereas as book could be written with no more wasted than the time and effort of the author (and perhaps a few hundred sheets of paper) a movie cost at least a few hundred thousand dollars to make. And Naked Lunch would have been no ordinary movie: the constant shift from city to city to city would demand filming on location on several different continents.

It is hardly surprising, then, that many considered Naked Lunch “unfilmable”.

Documents still exist in the archive of Terry Wilson – a friend of Burroughs, Gysin and Balch – that let us see what the three men had in mind for filming the “unfilmable” project. Through letters, screenplays and storyboards it is possible to examine the vision they had in attempting to bring Naked Lunch to the screen.

To get around the disjointed narrative the story was to be reordered around certain key points – “intersection points” – that Burroughs dictated. This would have given the plot a little more coherence. Additionally, characters would develop more than in the novel, in line with what Burroughs’ later works suggested would happen – switching quickly through a variety of possible scenarios. For example, Dr. Benway, who appears in several of Burroughs’ novels, would have developed according to his activities outwith Naked Lunch.

Of course, Naked Lunch was never an entirely fictional book. Certain elements were highly autobiographical, and it was possible to elaborate upon the text by simply looking at reality. Gysin- who was the primary screenplay writer for the project – only had to look back at people and places he and Burroughs had encountered together in Tangiers, to find inspiration for additional material. As Gysin said, “Interzone, of course, was Burroughs’ very personal vision of the Tangier scene in the 1950’s, here reinterpreted by me to include the cast of characters whom we both knew there at that time.” The result was a strange mix of fiction and reality.

It was also a challenge finding someone to play the role of William Lee, who would most likely have taken a larger role in the movie than in the book (as in fact was the case in Cronenberg’s movie, twenty years later). Burroughs wrote a confusing, frantic note to Gysin on May 6^th 1971:

You see Lee in a sense is an idealized image of the writer able to do all sorts of things the writer can’t do well so maybe start would be possible writer I mean actor who could do a predistiginal you dig. You want somebody to shoot find somebody knows how to shoot just like we find somebody who knows how to hang for the hanging scenes. Just a thought. CAN WE MAKE OUR OWN LEE FROM THE C SCRIPT? It seems to me that the first essential for Lee is PHYSICAL PRESENCE BEING THERE. Love, William.

To get around the shifting and switching of time and space, Gysin proposed something called “Transvestite Airlines” – a device used to transport characters from one time/location to another in an instant.

Perhaps the least surprising element intended for use was that of wild and creative cuts to slice through the randomness of the text. One can’t help but observe that readers of Naked Lunch decades after its first publication probably perceive the book differently in part because of the developments of cinema, which have imposed upon our minds a framework of possibility – allowing present day readers to imagine such cuts as we read, applying some of the rules of experimental cinema to the text of an experimental novel.

An example of the above techniques and ideas can be seen in the following excerpt of a synopsis, one of many versions of many possible plots:

Some say that A.J. is the real controller of the world. A.J. kept Dentway alive to use his genius, hidden in his secret fortress in the heart of Africa in Interzone. Lee travels on a very strange airline to Interzone, determined to find Dentway and get his secret. However, on arrival in this strange land he finds that no one has ever heard of A.J. or his fortress . . . no one that is, except for a small boy. The Shoe Shine boy tells Lee he knows the hideout and will take him there. On arrival at the fortress they are met by Salvador O’Leary Chapultapec, A.J.’s right hand man who was expecting them. Inside the fortress, Salvador shows Lee the hospital wing where the captured Dr. Benway, who has gone mad, is perfecting his newest and even more hideous technique for A.J. A secret meeting for heads of state and visitors from space will be held to demonstrate Dentway’s latest horror. The show is so frightening that Lee, helped by the Shoe Shine boy, sets fire to the fortress and escapes. Nick’s hand extinguishes the fire which is in the ashtray on the Everhard bar and hands Lee his junk. Lee leaves the bath at dawn and buys an old typewriter . . .

One of the more interesting things to note from this excerpt is the cut that keeps the story flowing in spite of the massive jump in time and space. They intended to move as smoothly as possible from an image of a fire in a jungle fortress into a gay bar ashtray.

In 1963 Burroughs, Gysin and Balch collaborated on the short film Towers Open Fire. Directed by Balch, the film featured Moroccan music performed by Gysin, and voice-overs by the unmistakable sardonic Burroughs.

Perhaps of most interest to us are the shots of Burroughs and Gysin performing their cut-up technique, by slicing up a piece of writing and then reading the disjointed results. We also see the “Dreammachine,” Gysin’s zoetropic device that is watched through closed eyes…

In 1966 Burroughs and Gysin worked together to create the short film, The Cut Ups. Whilst filmed before they began plotting a movie of Naked Lunch, The Cut Ups nonetheless came from their collaboration in the aftermath of the publication of Naked Lunch and thus may be able to tell us a little about what we could have expected from the doomed project.

In a word, The Cut Ups is weird. It is a highly experimental film, with a soundtrack of the words “Yes” “Hello” “Look at that picture. Does it seem to be persisting?” “Good” and “Thank you!” run together over a series of seemingly disconnected images that feels very much like an odd dream sequence.

The clips that accompany the unusual soundtrack are mostly of Gysin and Burroughs. When Gysin appears we see him wearing a sweater with a calligraphic design of his own creation, walking through the street. In another scene he is working on paintings. We also see his “Dreammachine.” These scenes often begin with a roller painting a grid.

Burroughs is usually seen looking for or hiding something or things. He is going through a large collection of objects.

All of this is cut together extremely fast, with some of the action sped up. An image is barely on screen for more than a second or two, but then we return moments later and see another brief glimpse of whatever seemingly random thing it was that we were being shown.

These films can both be seen on Towers Open Fire and Other Films by Antony Balch. They also collaborated on other projects, which can be viewed freely on www.ubu.com along with a great many other Beat resources.

In 1991 Naked Lunch was finally committed to film by the director David Cronenberg, and with Burroughs’ permission. Cronenberg acknowledged the book’s label of being “unfilmable”, saying that a straight forward adaptation would “cost 100 million dollars and be banned in every country in the world.” Indeed, that’s not hard to imagine.

Instead of filming the events and characters of the book, Cronenberg merged the book with the life of Burroughs, and even with some of his other works. It is metatextual in as much as the film depiction the creation of the book.

Interestingly, Cronenberg decided to blur the lines between reality and hallucination. What transpires the in novel and what actually happened to Burroughs in life are all viewed as a hazy drug-trip. One is never entirely sure what is going on.

Many well known friends and associates of Burroughs are depicted in the movie, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as well as events that formed part of the Beat consciousness, such as the shooting of Joan Vollmer.

In fact, one could view the movie less as an adaptation of the book than as a biopic with elements of Naked Lunch thrown in to represent the perpetual junk haze in which Burroughs spent most of his life.

The movie featured some of the book’s most memorable moments, including the characters William Lee and Dr. Benway, as well as the Mugumps and the talking asshole, and the locations Interzone and Annexia. All of these were used very differently in the movie than in the book.

With the release of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, Burroughs distanced himself somewhat from previous attempts to film the “unfilmable.” He said that “the late Brion Gysin and Antony Balch, set out to adapt it for film,” failing to mention his own input. Also, Gysin’s screenplay had been “long on burlesque . . . a series of music-hall comedy songs that he composed.” He appeared content with the result of a twenty year pursuit for a silver-screen version of his literary classic.

It should be noted, however, that Burroughs scholar Timothy S. Murphy made some very interesting points in criticising the movie. He argues that whereas Burroughs’ depiction of drug abuse and homosexuality were politically and socially charged, Cronenberg’s proved merely for show, a heartless portrait of something without any meaning. Moreover, the literary techniques Burroughs used for his devastating social and political critiques become merely the ramblings of a junky in the movie, rather than something to be respected and studied.

Indeed, fans and critics seemed generally sated by Cronenberg’s effort. Whilst many complained about a lack of faith to the original text, many realised that it had indeed been “unfilmable” in its true form. Cronenberg had certainly achieved something spectacular by coming this close.

Happy New Year

2009-12-31T00:43:00.000-08:00

I’d like to wish a Happy New Year to all the readers of Beatdom magazine. 2009 was a kind year to us. We have successfully built upon our fanbase, passed the two year milestone since our founding in 2007, and we have continued to grow and change.

As we move into 2010 and towards our third anniversary, Beatdom is still changing. We are developing and finding new writers; attempting to make literature as significant and inventive today as it was when the Beats were in their heyday.

January will see the release of the fifth issue of Beatdom magazine, which will be followed closely by number six, a travel issue. If we continue to receive excellent submissions, we will probably release a seventh issue shortly after that.

As always, Beatdom remains a non-profit organization dedicated to the memory of the Beats and to the continuation of their legacy. We need all your support in this endeavour. I trust that 2010 will see our fans as loyal as ever.

Please follow our Twitter page, our MySpace and our Facebook group. And as always, please keeping checking the website.

I hope you all have a great New Year!

David S. Wills,

Editor,

Beatdom

The New Beatdom

2009-12-18T02:01:00.000-08:00

The Beat Generation is something people have trouble in defining. The participating members often later contested the name and their role within the group, and if we’re being strict and specific about it, one could boil the group down to a handful of writers.

More than that, the Beat Generation was an ethos. The Beats embodied a spirit that was created in reaction to their surroundings. They existed at a specific place in time and probably would not have existed elsewhere.

People become confused about who the Beats were. They might know a few names and facts, but often the word “Beat” or “Beatnik” is applied incorrectly.

Beatdom began as a literary journal devoted to the study of the Beat Generation. However, it has changed since then. Today more than 95% of submissions for Beatdom are poetry or short fiction. Also, the bulk of our fan mail is in praise of our poets and fiction writers.

It seems that our readers consider themselves modern Beatniks…

Which as I’ve noted is a silly notion. We are not Beatniks. We are something different. As the Beats recognised their influences, so shall we. We shall hold Ginsberg as our inspiration as he held Blake.

We can take their ethos and change it and apply it and become something significant in ourselves. The Beats sought to make their own special place in a cold, unforgiving world, and that is an important message. They sought to reveal their souls through their art, and that is something we can do.

We are not part of the Beat Generation. We may perhaps be a New Beat Generation or Beatdom Generation, but we are something different from our predecessors

And so Beatdom magazine will be different from our original ideas. We will no longer devote the majority of our pages to studies of the past, but instead focus on tying the past, the present and the future together with the Beat ethos.

Beatdom will publish more modern poetry and fiction, and help advance the cause of literature today.

In doing this, we need the help of our readers and contributors, so please see our new submission guidelines. .

On Green Publishing

2009-12-14T03:41:00.001-08:00

When Beatdom was first published in the summer of 2007, we made sure that our magazine was an innovation in green publishing. We didn’t want to cut down trees to make magazines that no one wanted to buy, so we made Beatdom a print-on-demand operation.

Print-on-demand is not exactly the most popular option for publishing magazines. For one thing, it pushes printing costs higher. For another it brings with it the stigma of an ill-conceived, under-edited vanity operation.

But print-on-demand allows our readers to purchase a copy of Beatdom whenever they wish, anywhere in the world, simply by using the internet. Our magazine has maintained its professional standards, ultimately pushing the boundaries of print-on-demand publishing. We don’t believe that damaging the environment is necessary to prove that you have a quality product.

Furthermore, we are very much aware of the sensitive issue of price. Beatdom is an expensive magazine and we wish it wasn’t. In an ideal world it would be free, but we have to pay the printers. What we don’t do, however, is take a cut for ourselves. The editors and writers of Beatdom are unpaid. This is a non-profit organization.

Beatdom is available for free online – through Lulu, through our website, and through Google Books. We don’t make aim to make money – we just want people to read and enjoy our product without hurting the Earth.

If you like what you read online, we encourage you to buy a copy of Beatdom. But we won't stock our magazines in stores and let the trees that made them go to waste. When you are finished with Beatdom, we invite you to share your copy with your friends and family.

Tropic of Cancer Quotes

2009-12-08T00:10:00.001-08:00

Sorry for not posting much on here, folks, but I’ve been a busy man. Issue Five is coming along nicely and I’ll keep you updated, but for now here are a few quotes from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. I know it’s random, but they knocked me over as so damn brilliant I just had to share them.

When the tide is on the ebb and only a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the much, and Dome looks like a shooting gallery that’s been struck by a cyclone. P161

There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt… I will send you home… with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out… He knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt… I shoot hot bolts into you… I make your ovaries incandescent… I have set the shores a little wider, I have ironed out the wrinkles. After me you can take on stallions, bulls… I am fucking you… so that you’ll stay fucked. P.5

HST for Beginners

2009-10-23T21:11:00.000-07:00

Beatdom is honoured to present "HST for Beginners" over at www.hstbooks.org. Several Hunter Thompson scholars and friends have gathered to offer their views of the separation of Hunter Thompson from his alter-ego, Raoul Duke.

This blog post marks a significant moment in the history of Gonzo. We are aiming to gather new fans, and to inform previous readers of Thompson's work of its true importance.

Hunter Thompson was, first and foremost, a serious writer. He deserves respect and a place in the canon of American literature. Hopefully this project will help him be remember the way he would have wanted - as a great writer, rather than a frat boy's hero.

http://hstbooks.org/2009/10/23/hst-for-beginners-part-1-the-separation-of-hunter-and-raoul/

Remembering Jack Kerouac

2009-10-21T04:12:00.000-07:00

Forty years ago today (October 21st), Jack Kerouac died. Let’s celebrate his life by remembering the contributions he made to literature.

The fourth issue of Beatdom magazine was released earlier this year, but was a special Kerouac themed magazine, in celebration of the author’s life. We looked various books and poems by Kerouac, and considered his life and ancestry.

Issue Four is free to read online through Google Books or download. Or, if you want a printed copy, you can have that, too.

Let’s all remember Kerouac in his prime, as he wanted – as a truly great writer.

Paul Maher Jr. vs. Gerald Nicosia

2009-10-09T20:36:00.001-07:00

A battled was fought in the wake of the Kerouac Estate verdict and that battle is was waged on the forum at Literary Kicks...

Paul Maher Jr. and Gerald Nicosia were fighting with vitriolic words over several issues relating to Jack Kerouac... Check it out and weigh in at http://www.litkicks.com/KerouacEstateBattleAgain/

A Beginners Guide to Hunter Thompson

2009-10-07T21:10:00.001-07:00

The wonderful Martin Flynn at HSTbooks is honouring the late, great Hunter S. Thompson as he deserves to be honoured, by introducing a new generation of readers to the more serious side of the man's work.

"The aim will be to catch folks new to the HST world and steer them in the direction of his writing talent and away from the crazed loony side of the man."

A selection of scholars and friends will contribute to a series of blogs which will expose the truth behind the madness and the skill behind the free-wheeling and frantic prose.

Thompson always wanted his work to be taken seriously, and lamented that his books were popular largely among frat-boy types. He was known in his time for the wild excess of his alter-ego, and not for his intelligence or literary abilities.

It’s time for people to realise his genius, and this series should help to introduce his work in the right way so that he can truly be read as he intended.

Read about it here: http://hstbooks.org/2009/10/07/hunter-s-thompson-for-beginners/

Ginsberg & HST: Now in Skin Format

2009-09-16T21:45:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm a book nerd. You know this, I know this, let's get over it... I have two tattoos and both of them are nerdy bookish things... See below...

This is my newest tattoo and isn't a great photo. I had it done in Daegu, S. Korea, and it reads: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness". Makes a great lesson starter for my kids. "Teacher, everyone is crazy?" "Yes, Little Timmy, they are all fucking batshit bonkers!"

This is my first tattoo. Again, the photo sucks. It looks better after all these months in the sun, strangely. It's Hunter Thompson's Gonzo Fist emblem and it's my simple way of wearing what I believe on my skin. I don't care about all the madness and drugs and such... I care about the truth and dignity of his goals as a writer.

Wayne Ewing's Vodcast

2009-09-09T00:53:00.000-07:00

My old friend and Hunter S. Thompson documentarian, Wayne Ewing, has started up a vodcast on his website - www.hunterthomsonfilms.com.

Ewing directed ‘Breakfast with Hunter’, ‘Free Lisl’ and ‘When I Die’, and was Thompson’s friend, neighbor, and chosen biographer for many, many years. His films have continued the legacy of a great American writer, offering visual images that help animate the letters and books that made Thompson famous.

Now Ewing has a vlog (I’m not sure what that means, but I like it…) that offers text, images and videos combined to explain moments in the later stages of the life of Hunter Thompson.

I suggest, nay, demand, you go and visit the vlog at: http://hunterthompsonfilms.com/vodcast/

Call for Papers

2009-09-06T05:13:00.000-07:00

Whitman & The Beats

March 26-28 2010

St. Francis College Brooklyn, NY

The English and Communication Arts Departments at St. Francis College calls for papers that celebrate the influence of Walt Whitman on Beat writers including but not limited to Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.

We seek papers that break new ground in addressing Whitman's presence in the works of Beat writers, the reception of Whitman's poetry by the Beats, and papers which address how the legacy of the Beats, their perspectives of their era and artistic innovations, may be traced to Whitman’s influence on American literary culture. Topics may include (but are not limited to) areas of inquiry such as “the road”, “gender and sexuality”, “mysticism”, “religion and spirituality”, “America”, and “transcendentalism”. Examples of possible papers include (but, again, are not limited to)

“The Beats and the Search for Authenticity”

“Forging a New American Language”

“The Spontaneous Yawp: "New" Writing Styles in Whitman and the Beats”

“Cultural Minutia Found in Whitman and the Beats”

“Whitman's and the Beats use of New York City”

“The Beat's (Sub)Consious Rewriting of Whitman”

“Whose America? The Idea of a Nation in Whitman and the Beats”

“Homosexuality in the Beats and Whitman”

“War in Whitman and the Beats”

“Poetry for (and about) the People”

“Autobiographical Influences in the Poetry of Ginsberg and Whitman”

“Not Ready for Prime Time: the “Forgotten” Works of Whitman and the Beats”

“Nationalistic Drum Banging in Whitman and the Beats”

To submit, please send a 500-word abstract to Dr. Scott Weiss at sweiss@stfranciscollege.edu by January 31, 2010. Finished papers should be 8-10 pages, capable of being read in 20 minutes or less. Please note on your abstract your technological needs for your presentation.

718-489-3487

Email: sweiss@stfranciscollege.edu

Scott Weiss, PhD

Department of Communication Arts

St Francis College

180 Remsen St

Brooklyn Heights NY 11201

718 489 3487

Issue Five

2009-08-20T03:34:00.000-07:00

Issue Five is currently in the pipeline... We've signed up two pieces of fiction, and that's about enough for that category. Now we need articles and poetry. And maybe a photo or two.

I have interviews scheduled with several members of the team behind the new movie, 'Howl', starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg.

This issue will also need a lot of work on the life of William Burroughs, whose 'Naked Lunch' turns 50 yrs old this year!

It would be nice if we could get more into some literary analysis, following the brilliance of our Issue Four articles.

So, visit www.beatdom.com for more info, or e-mail me at editor@beatdom.com

Happy Birthday, Charles Bukowski!

2009-08-16T04:55:00.001-07:00

Today would have been Buk's birthday... He'd have been 89 years old...

Let's all knock back a few beers, read a poem or two, and reflect upon the Dirty Old Man's Dirty Old Life.

http://www.beatdom.com/saving_bukowskis_bungalow.htm

Beatdom Now

2009-08-07T22:58:00.000-07:00

From: http://www.beatdom.com/beatdom_now.htm

I want to start a second magazine - a sister publication for Beatdom. This has been a goal of mine for a long time, but Beatdom is a cruel mistress. She demands more attention than I can normally afford, and a second magazine might just kill me... But it might just make me, you and our readers all a little happier... It might just make the world a brighter place.

I want to depart from the world of the Beat Generation and focus on the world around us. Beatdom has always claimed to be both a study of the Beat Generation - literary, historical, cultural - but also professed an interest in exploring the world around us through the messages set forth by Ginsberg, Kerouac et al. We've published rants and musings on the modern world, and explored the reincarnations of the Beat Generation, through our new fiction and non-fiction.

And Beatdom will continue to do all that. It's not changing. Issue Five will follow in the style is the first four, and be entirely unaffected by the publication of Beatdom Now.

What I want from Beatdom Now is to take our regular writers and readers, and maybe a little of the style, and simply forget all our heroes. Beatdom is a literary journal. We explore the past. But in Beatdom Now we will take the stylistic teachings, and moral messages, and just be journalists...

That may sound strange, because Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs etc etc were not journalists. In fact, during the heyday of the Beat Generation they weren't even particularly interested in the politics of the world - they wanted to take refuge and carve out a space for themselves.

But we are taking style and morals from the Beats, as well as from Hunter S. Thompson and other late twentieth century writers and artists. I want to publish creative non-fiction that is dedicated to the destruction of injustice, and the dissipation of illusions. I want to read the sort of thing you wouldn't find in all the biased, dumb popular press outlets.

I know Gonzo was a one man genre, and that people look foolish for taking too much inspiration from Thompson's work, but that needn't be the case. Take an intelligent look, and write your own report on the world. Forget drink, drugs and parody; remember truth, skill and sledgehammer vitriol.

Let's change the world with another adventurous assault on the publishing world.

Submissions are now open for Issue One, with no deadline currently given... Find something in this world that makes you sick, and use your words to destroy it.

Jack Kerouac's Estate

2009-08-05T20:53:00.000-07:00

I suggest you all Google 'Jack Kerouac Estate' and look at the news...

Thirteen years after the death of his daughter, Jan Kerouac, the estate of Jack Kerouac has finally been liberated from the wrongful ownership of the Sampas family. It was determined by a judge that Gabriel Kerouac's will, which passed control of Kerouac's estate to his third wife, Stella, was forged.

That means that the millions of dollars of revenue, as well as the right to control Kerouac's estate, passes to Paul Blake Jr., Kerouac's nephew and closest living relative.

Jan Kerouac always said that his works should be given to libraries, but the Sampas family had turned down numerous such offers. Now we wait and see what Blake decides to do.

Issue Four Release

2009-07-24T23:59:00.000-07:00

Issue Four

This issue marks the Fortieth Anniversary of Kerouac's death with articles about his life and work, covering subjects you've never even thought about. We also have plenty about the women of the Beat Generation - including an 'interview' with Carolyn Cassady. Our poetry section is better than ever, with poems by our favourite poet, Nathan Dolby, and hip hop star Scroobius Pip! We have the return of old writers, and many new ones to mark an incredible era in the magazine's history. We're everywhere right now, and to capitalise on this period of fame, we're going to make Issue Four the best issue ever!

As usual, Beatdom is free to download. So, whether you wish to buy a copy or download one, please visit this link.

Contents:

Regulars
Letters from the Editor
Notes on Contributors
Poetry
Modern Beat
Features
HST & The Beats: Fleeting Encounters
Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard
Joan Vollmer: In the Eyes of her Contemporaries
Beats & the Sixties Counterculture
Alene Lee: Subterranean Muse
Articles
The Sea is my Brother, by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac & The Outsider: A Puzzle
The Breton Traveller
The Plurarity of the Beat Spirituality
Interviews
Carolyn Cassady
Gary Snyder
Reviews
Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway
review No Country for Old Men
Required Reading
Fiction/ Art/ Memoirs
Woodcuttings of the Beats
First Encounters with Allen Ginsberg
The Gun and the New Dark Way
Deep Fried Ducktape and Sushi Knives
Jack & Edward

The Good Doctor

2009-07-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

Beatdom #4 will be delayed until the scum who keep fucking with our website are murdered. Seriously. Go kill the fuckers and let me know, then you'll get your goodies... The magazine's ready, but without a website there's just no way to put it out!

---

But on a lighter note, I stumbled across this article from the New York Times Book Blog, which normally sucks, but which has given us maybe two good HST articles...

Here's the second one, folks...

Read it here.

Emergency!

2009-07-20T03:09:00.000-07:00

Two days before the release of Issue Four of Beatdom magazine, some degenerate scumbag rat has hacked and crashed the www.beatdom.com website.

Needless to say, that pretty much fucks our whole gameplan... If you know who did this, tell me. I will go to their house and cut their fucking head off.

In the meantime, I will be working around the clock to get the website back online, and trying to finish up editing together the last pieces of the issue.

Happy Birthday, Hunter S. Thompson!

2009-07-18T01:18:00.001-07:00

Today is 18th July, which Hunter S. Thompson's birthday.

I hope people all around the world are filling their glasses, dropping their tabs of acid, and lighting their fat joints in a shared memory of one of the finest writers of the 20th Century!

More than that, we should all take a scathing look at the world around us and trying to write some searing indictments of the world that is run by fat, crooked swine. Don't let the bastards get away with this!

If you're in a more scholarly mood, I've posted an article about Hunter S. Thompson's relationship to the Beat Generation on the Beatdom website. Read it here: http://www.beatdom.com/hst__the_beats.htm

Anyway, enjoy the day. It's what he would have wanted you to do.

Mahalo,

David

Hunter S. Thompson & the Beats

2009-07-08T03:29:00.000-07:00

There's an article available online that is a sneak preview of what's coming in Issue Four of Beatdom!

You can view the article at http://www.beatdom.com/hst__the_beats.htm

Johnny Depp Remembers Allen Ginsberg

2009-07-04T23:06:00.000-07:00

A big thanks goes to HST Books (at www.hstbooks.org) for this great piece by the legendary Johnny Depp. Here, he remembers his friend and idol, Allen Ginsberg.

I love Johnny Depp, by the way. He's about the coolest person on the planet.

-----------------

The Night I met Allen Ginsberg. By Johnny Depp.

An appreciation of Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady and the other bastards who ruined my life.

There I was, age thirteen, eyes shut tight, listening intently to Frampton Comes Alive over and over again, as some kind of pubescent mantra that helped to cushion the dementia of just how badly I wanted to whisk Bambi, the beautiful cheerleader, away from the wedge of peach melba that was the handsome, hunky football hero. …

I was daydreaming of taking her out behind the 7-Eleven to drink Boone’s Farm strawberry-apple wine and kiss until our mouths were raw. ZZZZRRRIIIPP!! was the sound I heard that ripped me from that tender moment. My brother Danny, ten years my senior and on the verge of committing fratricide, having had more than enough of “Do you feel like we do?,” promptly seized the vinyl off record player and with a violent heave chucked the sacred album into the cluttered abyss of my room.

“No more,” he hissed. “I can’t let you listen to that shit anymore!”

I sat there snarling at him in that deeply expressive way that only teens possess, decompressing too fast back into reality. He grabbed a record out of his own collection and threw it on.

“Try this … you’re better than that stuff. You don’t have to listen to that shit just ’cause other kids do.”

“OK, fucker,” I thought, “bring it on … let’s have it!”

The music started … guitar, fretless stand-up bass, flutes and some Creep pining away about venturing “in the slipstream … between the viaducts of your dreams. …” “Fuck this,” I thought, “this is pussy music — they’re not even plugged in! Those guitars aren’t electric!” The song went a bit further: “Could you find me … would you kiss my eyes … to be born again. …” The words began to hit home; they didn’t play that kind of stuff on the radio, and as the melody of the song settled in, I was starting to get kind of used to it. Shit! I even liked it. It was a sound I hadn’t really ever given any attention to before, because of my innate fear of groups like America, Seals and Crofts, and, most of all, the dreaded Starland Vocal Band. I didn’t give half a fuck about a horse with no name, summer breezes or afternoon delights! I needed space to be filled!!! Filled with sound … distorted guitars, drums, feedback and words … words that meant something … sounds that meant something!

I found myself rummaging and rooting wildly through my brother’s record collection as if it were a newfound treasure, a monumental discovery that no one — especially no one my age — could know about or understand. I listened to it all! The soundtracks to A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango in Paris, Bob Dylan, Mozart and Brahms … the whole shebang! I couldn’t get enough. I had become like some kind of junky for the stuff and in turn became a regular pain in the ass to my brother. I wanted to know all that he did. I wanted to know everything that rotten white-bread football brute didn’t. I was preparing to woo that fantastic little rah-rah girl out of the sunlight of the ice cream parlor and into my nocturnal adolescent dreamscape.

And so began my ascension (or descension) into the mysteries of all things considered Outside. I had burrowed too deep into the counterculture of my brother’s golden repository, and as years went by he would turn me on to other areas of his expertise, sending me even further into the dark chasm of alternative learning.

One day he gave me a book that was to become like a Koran for me. A dogeared paperback, roughed up and stained with God knows what. On the Road, written by some goofball with a strange frog name that was almost unpronounceable for my teenage tongue, had found its way from big brother’s shelf and into my greedy little paws. Keep in mind that in all my years of elementary school, junior high and high school, possibly the only things I’d read up to that point were a biography of Knute Rockne, some stuff on Evel Knievel and books about WW II. On the Road was life-changing for me, in the same way that my life had been metamorphosed when Danny put Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks onto the turntable that day.

I was probably about fifteen by this time, and the cheerleader had begun to fade from my dreams. I didn’t need her now. I needed to wander … whenever and wherever I wanted! I’d found myself at the end of my rope as far as school was concerned; there seemed no particular reason for me to stay. The teachers didn’t want to teach, and I didn’t want to learn — from them. I wanted my education to come from living life, getting out there in the world, seeing and doing and moving amongst the other vagabonds who had the same sneaking suspicion that I did, that there would be no great need for high-end mathematics, nope. … I was not going to be doing other people’s taxes and going home at 5:37 P.M. to pat my dog’s head and sit down to my one-meat-and-two-vegetable table waiting for Jeopardy to pop on the glass tit, the Pat Sajak of my own private game show, in the bellybutton of the universe, Miramar, Florida. A beautiful life, to be sure, but one I knew I was destined not to have, thanks to big brother Dan and the French-Canadian with the name Jack Kerouac.

I had found the teachers, the soundtrack and the proper motivation for my life. Kerouac’s train-of-thought writing style gave great inspiration for a train-of-thought existence — for better or for worse. The idea to live day to day in a “true pedestrian” way, to keep walking, moving forward, no matter what. A sanctified juggernaut.

Through this introduction to Kerouac, I then learned of his fellow conspirators Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Huncke, Cassady and the rest of the unruly lot. I dove into their world full on and sponged up as much as I possibly could of their works. The Howl of Ginsberg left me babbling like an idiot, stunned that someone could regurgitate such honesty to paper. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch sent me into fits of hysterical laughter, with the imagery of talking assholes and shady reptilian characters looming, always not far behind. Cassady’s The First Third rants on beatifically like a high-speed circular saw. The riches I was able to walk away with from these heroes, teachers and mentors are not available in any school that I’ve ever heard of. Their infinite wisdom and hypersensitivity were their greatest attributes and in some cases –as I believe it was with Kerouac — played a huge part in their ultimate demise.

I had the honor of meeting and getting to know Allen Ginsberg for a short time. The initial meeting was at a soundstage in New York City, where we were both doing a bit in the film The United States of Poetry. I was reading a piece from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, the “2nth Chorus,” and as I was rehearsing it for camera, I could see a familiar face out of the corner of my eye: “Fuck me,” I thought, “that’s Ginsberg!” We were introduced, and he then immediately launched into a blistering rendition of said chorus, so as to show me the proper way for it to be done.

“As Jack would have done it!” he emphasized.

I was looking straight down the barrel at one of the most gifted and important poets of the twentieth century, and with all the truth and guts I could muster up, I said in response, “Yeah, but I’m not reading it as him, I’m reading it as me. It’s my interpretation of his piece.”

Silence — a LONNNGG silence. Ticktock tickrock ticktock

I was smiling nervously, my eyes sort of wavering between his face and the floor. I sucked down about half of my 5,000th cigarette of the day in one monster drag and filled the air around us with my poison. It was at that point that I remembered his “Don’t Smoke!” poem … oops … too fucking late now, boy, you done stepped in shit! I looked at Ginsberg, he looked at me, and the director looked at us both as the crew looked at him, and it was quite a little moment, for a moment there. Allen’s eyes squinted ever so slightly and then began to twinkle like bright lights. He smiled that mystic smile, and I felt as though God himself had forgiven me a dreadful sin.

After the shoot, we took a car back to his apartment on the Lower East Side and had some tea. He was gracious enough to speak to me about the early years with Kerouac, Cassady and the others. We spoke of many things, from the cost of a limo ride to the high-pitched voice of Oscar Wilde; he actually had a recording of Wilde reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He flirted unabashedly and nonstop for the duration of my visit, even allowing me to smoke, as long as I sat next to the kitchen window and exhaled in that direction. He kindly signed a book to me and a couple of autographs (one for my brother, of course), and then I made my way back to the hotel, only to have already received a call from him, inviting me to some kind of something or other.

From that day forward, we stayed in touch with each other over the next few years and even spent time together from time to time. Our communication continued until our final conversation, which was just three days before he passed on. He called me to say that he was dying, and that it would be nice to see each other again before he checked out. He was so calm and so peaceful about it that I had to ask how he felt given this situation. He gracefully said that it was like a ripple on a sea of tranquillity. He then cried a little, as did I; he said, “I love you,” and so did I. I told him I would get to New York as soon as possible, and fuckin’ A, I was gonna go — the call came only days later.

Ginsberg was a great man, like his old pals, who had paved the way for many, and many more to come. The contribution of these people goes way beyond their own works. Without On the Road, Howl or Naked Lunch, for example, would we have been blessed with the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Bob Dylan? Or countless other writers and poets of that caliber who were born in the Fifties and Sixties? Where would we be without modern classics like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Times They Are A-Changin’?

So much has happened to me in the twenty years since I first sat down and took that long drag on Kerouac’s masterpiece. I have been a construction laborer, a gas-station attendant, a bad mechanic, a screen printer, a musician, a telemarketing phone salesman, an actor, and a tabloid target — but there’s never been a second that went by in which I deviated from the road that ol’ Jack put me on, via my brother. It has been an interesting ride all the way — emotionally and psychologically taxing — but a mother-fucker straight down the pike. And I know that without these great writers’ holy words seared into my brain, I would most likely have ended up chained to a wall in Camarillo State Hospital, zapped beyond recognition, or dead by misadventure.

So in the end, what can anyone … scholar, professor, student or biographer … really say about these angels and devils who once walked among us, though maybe just a bit higher off the ground?

Issue Four Cover

2009-06-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

Here is a sneak previous of Issue Four's cover. This is very preliminary, but the final version will look a little like this...

Price Change

2009-06-06T05:48:00.000-07:00

Apparently Beatdom has been selling so well that the publishers have cut our prices! Of course, it's still a non-profit venture for me, but it's nice to see the publishers take a smaller cut.

There's never been a better time to buy Beatdom!

Google Books

2009-06-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

All three issues of Beatdom are now freely available on Google Books! I don't know how they got there, but it's pretty cool. You don't have to download the magazine or even visit our site. Just go to Google Books and you can read Beatdom and search through each magazine.

Here's the link for Issue One.

Beatdom Available on Amazon

2009-05-26T20:14:00.000-07:00

Beatdom has been selected as a special publication by its publishers. This is probably because we've sold so many copies, so I must thank everyone who has bought, downloaded or stolen Beatdom at some point in the last two years.

Now, as a special publication, we are listed on Amazon,com. I know this is a pretty standard thing in this day and age, but for a small literary magazine, that's actually quite an achievement.

Here's the link: Issue One and Issue Two

Unfortunately, the price of Beatdom on Amazon will be higher than elsewhere, but it is still non-profit. The publishers take their cut, Amazon take theirs (30%!) and we take nothing. However, you can still download the magazine for free through our website.

Issue Four thus bodes well, with a much better platform for distribution. So get on board by sending your submissions quickly.

Update, May 20th

2009-05-20T08:23:00.001-07:00

Beatdom is moments away from rolling over the 5,000 page views for its website, only a month after hitting 4,000. With that increase in traffic, we've managed to sell around 100 copies of the magazine, making this the fastest month of sales since our first month in business. Beatdom is finding new fans at a great rate, and we're working hard on getting Issue Four ready for publication. To celebrate our recent good form, we've invested in an ISBN and a place on Amazon.com so that we can be bought more easily (but still remain non-profit, of course). That means you can grab a hard copy faster than ever before, while still reading the online version for free at our website. We're also being viewed as required reading in universities, and considered among the worlds foremost resources regarding the Beat Generation. So if you want to jump on the bandwagon of popularity and help make Issue Four the best ever, getting writing about the Beats, and e-mail us at editor@beatdom.com

Issue Four

2009-05-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

Issue Three was a great success, and riding on that wave, Beatdom is rushing forth the next issue. We made you wait too long for Issue Three, and now we'll make it up to you. Issue Four is scheduled to appear within three months! That's a quarter of the time it took to release issue Three...

Issue Four has so far lined up the following selection of brilliant Beat studies...

The search for Kerouac's roots
Hunter S. Thompson & The Beats
Gary Snyder's poetry
A look at Alene Lee
The changing lines in Kerouac's poetry
The next instalment of Modern Beat
An interview with Larry Keenan

But we need more... Issue Four needs submissions, so please see www.beatdom.com for the details.

Beatdom Archives

2009-05-07T05:19:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since we started archiving our old articles, but it's still slowly coming along... Today we added the interviews from our first issue - Barry Gifford, Zane Kesey, Ken Babbs and Paul Krassner. Those were some great interviews, a wealth of information passed on to a new generation.

We've got about half the first issue archived, some of the second, and the main feature from issue three - the guide to Kerouac's characters. They're all free, online and easy to access at our archives.

Kerouac in SLO

2009-05-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

I recently found this brilliant article about Jack Kerouac's time in San Luis Obispo, back in 1953. That was the town where I spent several months editing issue two of Beatdom, and used as my base for conduting interviews and research from San Francisco to Denver. I had NO IDEA that Kerouac actually stayed in that glorious little place.

http://www.newtimesslo.com/cover/2443/off-the-road/

We're Back

2009-04-22T03:07:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay, folks, but after more than a year of waiting, Issue Three of Beatdom is finally here.

Get it for free at www.beatdom.com/Issue_Three.pdf

Letter from the Editor

2009-01-15T18:00:00.000-08:00

Dear Patient Readers,

It’s been a long year of constant change since Beatdom last made a foray into the public domain. Since then I’ve been doing my best to keep the magazine in the minds and hearts of its fans, but that hasn’t been easy without something for them to read…

It was February 2008 when Issue Two hit the proverbial newsstands, and now we’re in a whole new year. In that time much has happened.

Firstly there was Beatdom’s first ever public display, as we were asked to appear at Scotland’s nation poetry festival, StAnza. In typical form, your humble editor forgot about the event until the night before, when he was playing a gig with a local band, and together, he and the band spent the post-gig night both partying and making posters. We were late to the festival, but still put on a display, selling out our stock and drawing much interest for the magazine and its website.

Ah, the website. www.beatdom.com has kept the magazine alive in the absence of any creative endeavour on the part of the staff. Through our high Google rankings, Beatdom has maintained a strong internet presence that has ensured a steady flow of fan mail and submissions. I can honestly say that without these, Beatdom would have faded into history.

But the reason for this lack of productivity and creativity was the increase of activity in my own life. In Scotland I was unemployed and partially employed, and constantly had time to write. But with no money and no job prospects, I was forced to emigrate to South Korea. I took a job teaching in a small hagwon in Daegu, and have been here ever since.

Life in Korea has been too hectic to facilitate much writing. The hours are long and the alcohol is cheap, and consequently I found myself not sleeping for five months, but instead working from 10am to 8pm, and drinking from 8pm to 5am, six or seven nights a week. No writing, no Beatdom.

When holidays came, I vanished across the seas again – to the Philippines, to Japan, to China. In 2007 I toured American like Kerouac, and in 2008 I hit Asia like Ginsberg and Snyder. Maybe one day I’ll get to Latin America like Burroughs…

Constantly the fan mail and submissions kept rolling in, and I realised that I had a duty to the fanbase I had established with the first two magnificent instalments. The people wanted more, and I had to give it to them. Out went the drinking, and back came the editing.

I started various blogs about life in Asia, uploaded old articles and essays from the first two issues to the website, and created a Beat Generation social network, all to pique the interest of the people. We’d lost too many staff members over the year of absence to rely upon the same contributors. Impatience set in. The distance became a factor. My old artists and illustrators went on to new jobs in Scotland. Eduardo Jones, our bat-shit crazy regular, was killed. Rodney Munch went missing somewhere in the Sea of Japan…

But now we’re back with an issue that takes the Beat out of the fifties and brings it right back into the ugly new millennium, where it’s needed the most. When the world changes too fast, and the hands of the diabolic wander beyond their stations, the spirit of the restless few must rise and seize the day.

Massive Update

2009-01-06T02:28:00.000-08:00

Well, it's a whole year now since the last issue of Beatdom magazine was released, and almost two years since the Rodney Munch Project. In that time a lot has changed for this writer. I've lived on three different continents, visited eight countries, held four jobs, and made and lost many, many friends. Inspiration has come and gone and continues to cycle thusly, but I'm taking this little burst of enthusiasm to finally move towards assembling that near ridiculous idea: My Chinese Democracy, Beatdom Issue Three!

So go ahead, writers and artists, and beginning bugging me with submissions so that I have as little writing to do myself. Send me everything you've got on the Beat Generation and the counterculture.

Also, as a little treat, to whet your Appetites for Destruction, I'm in the process of a massive update. I'm finally throwing all of the articles and features from the first two issues onto the website, where they can be read in classy black & white for free, forever. That's let everyone see the quality of Beatdom and let them buy an issue when they so choose.

Also, I'd like to thank the visitors to www.beatdom.com for keeping the counter rising, and to all the well-wishers who still keep finding this already outdated publication and reading and loving it. Your kind words keeping me going.

Yours, always, David S Wills

Bohemian New Orleans: A Review

2008-01-16T03:11:00.001-08:00

It was through my love of the work of Hunter S Thompson that I came to watch Wayne Ewing’s films, and through his films that I came to learn about Loujon Press and the Outsider.
The story of the Webbs and their press is a fascinating one, and certainly one of which Beatdom has lapped up any and all information. After all, it’s not easy starting up and running a small magazine.
So when the opportunity arose to review the beautifully presented Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of the Outsider and Loujon Press, I was as eager to read it as I was to travel to Denver and back for The Outsiders documentary.

Bohemian New Orleans is well researched and informative, yet intimate and charming. Before coming to the creation of the press and magazine that made the Webbs famous, we are taken through their lives separate and together, but always fascinating and romantic in the face of constant and almost comical hardship.
The introduction takes us through the history of the small press and of the underground literary magazines that began with the modernists, stumbled in forties, and flourished post-war with the Beats and the ‘mimeograph revolution.’
We’re then taken through the life of Jon Webb – his constant aspiration to be a great novelist, followed by his ingenious armed robbery.
And then there is the story of Jon and Lou, the two lovers who would sit and get drunk together every Thursday and tell the other exactly what they didn’t like about them. If either of them was not entirely honest, or got angry at the other’s complaint, then they weren’t allowed to drink.
Weddle presents these unique characters beautifully, using their story to weave the history of magazines, and then of New Orleans. When they move briefly to Hollywood, their lives again become the story against which an informative history is narrated.
When the Webbs return to New Orleans, we are given stories about Whitman, Faulkner and Williams’ escapades in the city, building a picture of the city’s artistic and literary heritage.
Then through Lou and Jon we are presented with the artistic output of the French Quarter as Lou begins painting, becomes Gypsy Lou, and Jon takes the role of editor and founds Loujon Press.
Against all this we are given a frightening and literary picture of the racism prevalent in even the most liberal parts of the city. Lou and Jon’s run-ins with the New Orleans police are stark departures from the usual comedy of their tragedy, as Lou’s comments and outlooks always lighten any situation.
The Outsider published the work of Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov and Walter Lowenfals, and stories about the their relationships to the Webbs abound in the latter half of this excellent book.

Issue Two

2008-01-05T08:34:00.001-08:00

Coming Soon...

Fear & Loathing in Denver

2007-12-23T07:43:00.000-08:00

Denver to me meant Hunter S Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. It existed in books alone, as brief home of the Beats, and tantalisingly close to Woody Creek, once the ‘fortified compound’ of Doctor Gonzo. I had no real idea of what Denver would be like, except that temperatures would be well below zero, the air thinner than an anorexic’s waist, and that I was invited to the premiere of Wayne Ewing’s The Outsiders of New Orleans.
So, armed with that knowledge, I rolled into Denver at midnight, with no place to stay, having stumbled off a train after a forty hour journey from San Luis Obispo, having freaked the shit out of many a passenger by telling them the two painful truths of my trip: that I was travelling a thousand miles to catch a movie, and that I had been living in a barn for the last few months… Oh well, some folks just don’t get the luxury of barns, sleeping crooked-necked on Amtraks, and subsisting on a diet of dehydrated cranberries…
Denver was not cold at midnight in the middle of November. Not any colder than Central California had been, anyway, and nothing like a brisk winter chill back home in sunny Scotland. I had gone out in preparation and bought a World War II jacket, as used by the troops training in the Rockies in the dead of winter… And I was wearing it over a t-shirt, a jersey, and another warm jacket. I also had on a hat, a scarf and a pair of gloves. Below freezing? I was fucking roasted alive as I walked past the Coors stadium, a piece of paper with the address of a hostel in my hand.
I knew fine well that hostels closed before midnight across the world, but I still hoped maybe I wouldn’t end up sleeping in the gutter in Denver, getting sodomised by some angry black man. Indeed, I was right to worry, for as in any American city, I seemed to draw an outrageous amount of attention from the black population, who watched me and followed me and talked about me, and so I was constantly driven to keep my head down and walk quickly and purposefully.
Which is not an easy thing to do when all you really know is that you’re looking for a number of a building on a street that stretches for over a mile, and none of the buildings seem to have numbers, so you just keep walking back and forth until it get to about one am and you finally find the place locked… I looked about, seriously considering a night on a park bench or in some soft gutter, but instead just hammered away at the door, afraid of trespassing on someone else’s gutter-spot.
“Where are you from?” a gruff voice boomed down from the second floor window. It emanated from the head of an old man who appeared to be tied into some kind of breathing apparatus. I was surprised even from my vantage point to hear such a loud voice.
“Scotland,” I replied, quietly, as I could see the locals beginning to stare and ponder whether or not they could have their way with me before my predicament was resolved.
“Where are you from?” he asked again, and again and again and again until eventually he gave up not hearing me and buzzed me in.
I pushed the gated metal door open and received a massive electric shock for my efforts. I thought it was some kind of joke, but later found that everything in the hostel had an electric current running wildly through it, and I became used to receiving brutal jolts of blue magic.
I signed into the hostel in the old man’s bedroom, sitting silently with his wife as he wheeled his breathing machine around and wheezed and struggled to talk. I guessed the effort of shouting down had utterly worn him out, for his voice was now no more than a harsh whisper. I gave him the money for one night stay, plus a deposit I would never get back. I knew that then and I didn’t give a fuck, but a dump like this was enough to tide me over and I’d have paid anything for not receiving a street-bumming and losing my laptop to some homie.
I crashed for the night in an electric room, exhausted after my forty hour sitting session and brief stroll through the streets of ‘whores with hearts of cheap gold’.
I woke and realised that the night had been acceptable: I’d slept and that was all I’d wanted. After spending half an hour on the internet, I realised that there was no way out of Denver I could get after attending the premiere, so I had to book another electrifying night in the Melbourne. I ran into town and found an ATM, then ran back in time for the ten am check-out time, and booked another night.
Then I walked back into town, determined to have a good day, and knowing from my online research that I’d be getting the six am bus out of Denver the following morning. It would be a short stay, and I wanted to pack as much in as possible. This was the stomping ground of Kerouac, Cassady and Ginsberg, and Doctor Gonzo had spent more than a few nights in the city, too. I had a list of Beat sites to see, but I never intended on a structured programme of touring. In San Francisco, I’d made firm plans and stuck them, and I’d seen what I’d wanted to see, but suffered brutally for my efforts. That trip had been a bit of a disaster, but Denver would be short and sweet and spontaneous.
I stopped for coffee at Caribou, and then walked down the 16th Street shopping mall, digging it in its morning-quiet state of intrigue. The Christmas decorations were up and the shops were ones I’d mostly never seen before: Colorado chains and tourist traps. I walked to the end of the mall and sat in the park between the Capitol Building and the State and County Building, watching squirrels and hobos bask in the sun, and writing crude poems in my little notebook. The city was stunning from where I sat, and I was more relaxed than I’d ever been in San Fran. And sitting there, I knew I was where Kerouac had watched bats and Ginsberg had contemplated madness.
After a while I stood and walked into town again for lunch in a café next to the big town clock. I used their WiFi to check Google Maps, confirming where I was going next: The Tivoli at Denver University. It didn’t seem to hard to find.
And it wasn’t. I found it, waited around outside, and then watched The Outsiders of New Orleans in a room full of guys in Hunter S Thompson get-up, drinking Bloody Marys and clutching grapefruits. After the film I talked to Wayne Ewing and arranged a tour of Thompson’s home for the next day. I also agreed to go to a directors’ party in the evening.
My purpose for the visit complete, I took a walk back into town, up Larimer and dug Cassady’s street in all its modern nothingness. Now it was somewhere between poverty and affluence, and utterly without character, but back in the hazy Beat street days of Denver delinquency, it was skid-row all the way from top to bottom. It was once nothing but bars, pool halls and pawn shops, and was now bars, but somewhere between classy and faux-classy reminiscence.
I walked back across the city and into the Colorado Natural History Museum, where I conversed with an Iranian security guard after hours about the state of America. I loved it, he loathed it; but we could both agreed that things were rather fucked up. I hesitated to ask him why he had come here if he didn’t like America or Americans, or even why he’d stayed for five years, and why he thought he had the right to complain so aggressively if the country had accommodated him for five long years… But instead I listened as he told about his learning Japanese in order to move to Japan and start a new life in a friendlier country. As I left, he drew me a map of places not to go after dark in Denver, and I bid him farewell.
Somewhere and at sometime during the day, my phone had died. The battery was dead and I was a bit screwed. I needed the phone because it had all my phone numbers stored in its memory, and it also served as an alarm clock, which I needed for getting up at five in the morning. Luckily, I had Wayne Ewing’s business card, so I would able to call him from a phone box in a sketchy little park.
But the phone wouldn’t work, and kept giving me bullshit directions on how to operate it, but my knowledge of US area codes and phone operation was not up to scratch. I decided to walk into town and try another. I needed to call him to get the address of the party. No luck. There are few public phones these days, and the ones that do exist are generally broken and pissed on by a weird and depraved breed of Americans.
I headed back to the hostel, intending to get dinner later, on my way to the party. But when I used the hostel phone, all I got was his answer phone. Shit. I was tired from having walked around the city all day, and starting to think that maybe going to a party was not such a tempting idea. It seemed a waste to have travelled a thousand miles and not go, but tomorrow would be an eventful day…
The problem for tomorrow lay in the fact that it hinged on my contacting Wayne Ewing and arranging to get to Woody Creek. I did a spot of online research and could find no way of getting there on my own, and if I did manage to get there, I could see no place I could stay. I couldn’t risk getting trapped out in the mountains, but if I waited until the light of day to get plans hammered out, then I might be forced to spend another night in Denver. It wasn’t a bad city, but I was done. Next up was Woody Creek or something else.
I could hardly afford the trip, either. The whole thing was mounting in cost with ever passing hour, and one thing I’d learned was that travelling could save money in sleeping, for if done right you could combine the two and avoid paying for accommodation.
I phoned Wayne a few more times and kept getting the answer phone, so I though ‘Fuck it,” and decided to take the first train out of Denver the next day. I wasn’t about to get lost in the middle of nowhere with no money and no phone. So I made up my mind and thought about dinner.
I sat in the kitchen of the Melbourne hostel and debated my options until a pretty Australian girl appeared and made me dinner. She knocked up bacon rolls and green tea and we sat and talked about America and the years it turned out she’d spent in Glasgow. Eventually, the subject came around that she was going to Aspen in three days, but that she wasn’t really sure how to get there. She reckoned she’d probably have to pay for a private ride out, which had certainly seemed to me to be the only realistic way of getting there.
After a few hours she went to bed, and I kept sitting around until a Chinese guy came through and we got thoroughly wasted on a crate of Corona he’d bought. We talked about computers and business, and he told me that he’d come to Denver to work a minimum wage job, even though he had a degree in Computer Programming. Poor bastard, I thought, but good luck to him.
I went to bed and slept in two minute sessions, on and off, until four in the morning. It was ridiculous, trying to use my own body as an alarm clock in the absence of my phone. The bald fuck-head across from me was snoring like an asshole, too, and I kept falling asleep and dreaming of murdering him, and then waking and hearing him and regretting that it was only a dream and that I didn’t have the balls to actually kill the fucker… What would it matter, anyway, as I was fleeing the city in a few sweet hours?
I woke when I woke and went to Caribou for more strong, black coffee, and talked to the black guy behind the counter about life and Christmas. He was a damn fine gent of a man, and I left with a smile on my face, a coffee in my hand, and a newspaper under my should, deciding that I’d go to Arizona and see what the craic was…

Issue Two

2007-12-14T12:19:00.000-08:00

Issue Two of Beatdom Magazine is coming... There is no date yet, but we're gathering the submissions, laying it all out, and hopefully by the end of the year we'll have another issue ready for you all to read.

www.beatdom.co.nr

The Outsiders of New Orleans: A Review

2007-12-05T02:16:00.000-08:00

Wayne Ewing became a personal hero of mine when he made a fantastic trilogy of documentaries about the late, great Dr. Hunter S Thompson. When I discovered he was putting together a documentary about the eccentric publishers of Beatniks and Bukowski, I jumped at the chance to take Beatdom from the cold climes of Scotland to the surprisingly warm weather of Denver, Colorado, where The Outsiders of New Orleans: The Loujon Press was premiering…

“Where are you from?” the disembodied head called from a window above the heavily gated security door at the front of the Melbourne Hostel in Denver.
“Scotland,” I called back.
“Where are you from?”
“Scotland.”
“Where?”
“Scotland.”
“Where?”
And thus ended my chase through the streets of angry negroes after dark, in a strange city and entering a strange world of respirator-clad old people with heading problems and a penchant for over-warm rooms… But I guess that’s a sidestory. I was staying in a dank little hostel on 22nd and Welton, not exactly the best of places, but far from being the worst. Nonetheless, it was a tough place to find after a forty-hour train ride across the American West, into a dark new city full of angry blacks and ‘whores with hearts of cheap gold.’
I decided there and then I was not going back out onto the streets that night to traverse the city and find the party that Wayne had suggested I attend. I settled down in my room full of snoring dudes and went to sleep for the night.
The next morning I took advantage of the daylight and explored the city a little, before heading to the university area and the Tivoli, where the 30th Annual Starz Denver Film Festival was being held, an event at which Wayne Ewing has become a regular guest director.
I’m no stranger to university campuses either side of the Atlantic, but I liked this one. The student union was not only home to beer and debauchery, but like so many buildings in Denver, it once was a brewery. Of course, now like so many buildings in any American city there were McDonalds and various other cheap ‘n’ nasty eateries inside.
The atmosphere was the healthy film fest blend of young and old, artists and critics, students and masters… A few hardcore types wandered about with grapefruits and Bloody Marys, a tribute to the late Doc, started during the premieres of Ewing’s documentaries in years gone by… Popcorn, beer and Coca-Cola sated the masses; the promise of photo exhibitions and movie debuts got the rest worked up...
I grabbed a second row seat in the theatre, next to a decent looking chap in Hunter get-up, kitted out with the apparently traditional drink-and-fruit combo. From the way the organisers and personnel spoke with the crowd, I could tell Ewing’s documentaries were a regular and popular festival feature, with a group of familiar fans. This hardly surprised me, having spent time perusing his websites and forums, and seeing the die-hards that hang out and discuss the scenes and ideas throughout Ewing’s work.
It’s not hard to see why. We know from (and I will continue to dwell on the Hunter S Thompson references for the simple reason that I try and crowbar his name into every aspect of my life…) Breakfast With Hunter et al that Ewing can perfectly present an intimate portrait of an eccentric character and a masterful telling of a fantastic literary legacy, and The Outsiders of New Orleans does the same for the Webbs and their Loujon Press.
Gypsy Lou is no normal woman. She’s wonderful and unique, and Ewing allows us to get up close and personal with her, letting her largely narrate the story of her life, that of the Loujon Press, and of the Old New Orleans, telling all in her inimitable style.
It is surely testament to both Ewing’s endearing personality and skill as a filmmaker that we come to see Lou on such a personal level, in a time where the documentary film genre is running rampant with contrasting propaganda and bullshit sensationalist facts.
It was a pleasure, too, watching the crowd watching the picture. Gypsy Lou drew laughs at every turn, telling even the tragic tales from her past with her deliciously warped sense of humour, bring her fearlessness, optimism and warmth into the hearts of a crowd that included her niece and a Beat Book seller with an impressive Loujon Collection.
The film ended with a Q&A for Ewing, Curtis Robinson and Edwin Blair. The crowd seemed unanimously to have been engrossed in the film, and while the documentary left little to question, Blair, who had become well acquainted with Lou, was peppered with questions about the wonderful woman, and about his personal generosity in helping her through elderly years made more difficult by Hurricane Katrina.
Upon leaving the Tivoli, I arranged with Wayne to attend the Late Night Lounge and tour the legendary Woody Creek. I took a walk up Larimar, digging Neal Cassady’s old stomping ground, and visiting the Capitol and the City and County Building, where Kerouac watched bats circle and Ginsberg contemplated madness…
A few stubborn staffers and some fruitless research resulted in my non-entry to the Late Night Lounge and the decision to ditch Woody Creek for a cross-country train ride.
So Denver was soon history. I’d caught a damn fine movie, continued my American Beatnik tour by walking vaguely in the footsteps of Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg, and met in person a great filmmaker of our times. I met some interesting people (an Iranian-US govt official who “fucking hate(s) the USA!”) and saw some great sights (breweries as far as the eye can see, friend…) I’d also come within a few hours drive of the home of Hunter S Thompson… But a few hours drive is only that when one has a car… Oh well, Farewell Denver, Farewell Colorado… And it’s off into the sunset on another fucking Amtrak…

Please visit www.loujonpress.com for more info.

Who Is Rodney Munch?

2007-10-11T22:11:00.001-07:00

The book is now available, containing the whole horrible sage of art's most devious character, Rodney Munch. Get it here: http://www.lulu.com/content/1296015

San Francisco

2007-09-25T13:21:00.000-07:00

The weekend past just saw Beatdom visit San Francisco in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac and the Beats. The inspiration was the Booksmith's 50th Anniversary Kerouac Discussion at the All Saints Church, just off Haight and Ashbury.
John Leland, Barry Gifford and Michael McClure discussed Kerouac and had a few laughs with a great crowd.

Beatdom also visited City Lights, Vesuvios, Tosca, the Beat Museum and Allen Ginsberg's house.

More info will be posted at www.beatdom.co.nr and in the next issue of Beatdom Magazine.

New Site

2007-09-20T20:12:00.000-07:00

This is no longer the home of Beatdom Magazine. You will find Beatdom Magazine located at www.beatdom.co.nr
This is once again the home of David Wills' and Rodney Munch's rants and ravings and other stuff that's not really worth reading. You dig? Now go away and get on over to www.beatdom.co.nr, where all the cool cats hang...

The Stevia Conspiracy

2007-09-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

Stevia: A Bitter/Sweet Story

By Ms. B. and David S Wills

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Notes from the editors…

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From Ms. B…

What’s this? Yet another example of corporations wielding their unlimited power to ban substances that threaten their wealth. Why you ask? Of course, they are branded ‘unsafe’.

Is this worse than the conspiracy to outlaw cannabis?

Another to add the heap of injustices left to the public, in order for a corporation to maximise profits. Hmm, does anyone else feel this might be wrong? If so, why as usual, is so little heard on the matter?

A good example of out of sight, out of mind; nothing much is heard within the confines of mainstream media because it is not within their interests and they are restricted by their loyalties to supporters. The aim of this, and subsequent articles on similar topics is to raise public awareness, and to encourage people to think about everything they are told, to question why they are being sold certain drugs, food products, clothes, values, and to decide for themselves what is right. Morality and legality seemingly parted ways some time ago. What we are told is wrong is not always the case, but simply corporations using their influence upon ruling bodies to get their own way.

From Mr. Wills…

An aged hippy-poet friend of mine, Mark, and his Anglo-Franco wife, Felicite, invited me to breakfast one day. The three reasons for my visit were: firstly, breakfast, but also to help Felicite get her old laptop online, and to raid Mark’s Ventura-come-library.
I was living on an organic farm in the surprisingly liberal community of San Luis Obispo, Ca., at the time, and had left my entire book collection back home in Scotland, so I was extremely grateful for the opportunity to raid Mark’s books. We sat in the old wagon and rapped poetry back and forth and talked about literature and drugs and life – the usual. I picked out a Blake collection, Danny Sugerman’s Wonderland Avenue, William A. Henry III’s In Defence of Elitism, Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, Thomas A Harris’ I’m OK – You’re OK and Bruce Eisner’s ecstasy: The MDMA Story.
After borrowing the books, we all sat down to breakfast. It was Sunday, and we were not working until mid-afternoon. Their place consisted of an eight-by-ten foot ‘barn’ and two ancient campervans, all positioned to create a little garden in the middle, shielded from the life of the farm, and wind, and cornered in by bushes, over the top of which we could see Hollister Peak and several other of the Nine Sisters mountain range, in front of which ran an occasional charge of horses.
Felicite was in her mid-seventies, and had recently taken a bad fall and struggled with mobility, but while Mark and I went a found an old picnic table, and brought it into the middle of the sun-drenched garden, she managed to put together a wonderful breakfast of tea, pancakes, butter, strawberries, goat yoghurt, seven-seed mix and syrup.
“Now,” Felicite said in her quiet, yet somehow motherly voice, which had a strong English accent despite her having spent the last few decades living around America and Southern France, “First you put the butter on the cakes. Then you put the syrup on the butter. Then you put the yoghurt on the syrup. Then you put the strawberries on the yoghurt. That’s the only way to do it. Sometimes Mark and I, we talk with our breakfast and forget, and it’s never quite right if you do it any other way.”
Felicite, quiet though she was, and retiring though she was around others, was pretty bossy with Mark, and fairly straight with me by this stage, having known her for a few weeks. She demanded Mark pour the tea. He did.
We were eating the pancakes and sipping the tea, and talking as usual of thrift stores and bargains and the usual ways to make life better and easier, when Mark suddenly jumped up, that flash of inspiration coming to his eyes like I’d seen on a few occasions, and he ran off to the campervan with the kitchen area. He returned momentarily with a small shaker of white powder.
“Stevia,” he said. “You ever heard of it? It’s a sugar substitute.”
“No it’s not!” Felicite cried.
“Babe, like, it is.”
“No. It’s not a substitute.”
“Babe, it is.”
“No, it’s not, it’s real. It’s like sugar, but different, and better for you.”
“David, like, stevia is a naturally occurring plant, man. You dig? It’s, like, way sweeter than sugar, and it tastes better, but it’s illegal. But it’s good for you.”
“It’s got no calories!” Felicite added. “And it doesn’t harm your teeth.”
“See, the government don’t want us to have it. They shut down stores that sell it, and burn plants when people grow it. They even burned books about stevia that some guy had.”

That breakfast with Mark and Felicite was the first time I ever heard of stevia. I tried it with Honeybush Tea, and I liked it. It was exactly as Mark described – similar to sugar, but way stronger and with a slightly different taste. But I never fully believed what he said. Mark is a great guy, and nobody can deny that, but even he will admit he’s “burned his brain out” with drugs. He has become paranoid and eccentric, though not to great extents. He is a little unusual, but it’s more like a slight exaggeration of characteristics than anything too out there.
So when he told me about stevia, I knew there was truth behind what he said, but I assumed it was more like he’d gotten the wrong end of the stick and taken the idea too far. He often railed against many governmental or corporate conspiracies, and I don’t doubt that he’s often right, but I do doubt how right he is.
Yet I was intrigued enough to go straight home and Google stevia. If nothing else, part of me wondered what I had just taken. I know that the US government is fucked up enough to allow dangerous substances to be legal (cigarettes and booze) while banning safe substances (marijuana). So even if Mark had gotten hold of something legal, who knew what effects it would have? And if it was illegal, maybe it wasn’t as safe as Mark’s strange information would have me believe…
So I Googled “stevia” and, unsurprisingly, was presented with the Wikipedia entry, which is what I wanted – an easy lay explanation of a new topic for learning, with links to more in-depth sources elsewhere. It appeared Mark was right.

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Stevia: The History

For centuries the Guarani Indians of Paraguay guarded the secret of the plant they called kaa he-he. They used it in medicine, in the drink ‘mate, and for chewing and eating to enjoy the sweet taste. They guarded it for they cherished it and believed it to be of some mystical significance. They documented its existence and popularity in writing that still exists today in the Paraguayan National Archive, in Asuncion.
However, like so many Western stories, the credit for the discovery of kaa he-he lies with a European – the Italian botanist, Dr. Moises Santiago Bertoni. He is said to have heard of the legendary but elusive plant in 1887, twelve years before he actually saw the dried leaves, presented to him in an envelop.
Finally, after searching for the plants in many of the wrong places, over many years, Bertoni was sent a live plant in 1903, by a priest from the village of San Pedro. He studied it intensively, and came to rename it after himself and the scientist that managed to extract its sweetness, a man named Rebaudi. It became known as Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni, and in 1905 Bertoni completed and published his study.
Following Bertoni’s studies, the cultivation of stevia spread, and it came to be grown as a crop, rather than simply harvested in the wild. By 1908, one ton of stevia was harvested from cultivated crops, and soon after the questions of export and commercial feasibility were raised.
In 1918, stevia was brought to the attention of the US government by botanists, and three years later, it was brought before the USDA by George S. Brady, who described the plant as safe and non-toxic. He also said that stevia was liable to find a market, and that he wished to see US companies capitalise on its appeal.
However, as early as 1913, German sugar-producers were raising concerns over the impact of stevia upon their own industry. They recognised the superiority of this new product, and sought to stem its use.
In 1931, French scientists managed to isolate steviocide and rebaudiocide, the sweetest natural products yet discovered. They were shown to be between 150 and 300 times sweeter than sucrose, as well as heat and pH stable, and non-fermentable. However, although scientifically significant, doubts were already raised regarding the value of steviocides in day-to-day life. In the US, a government researcher, Dr. Hewitt G. Fletcher, deemed steviocides useless, despite admitting their overwhelming sweetness.
It was during the 1960s that Japan came to ban or impose strict regulations upon the use of chemicals in their food. As a result, they did extensive research into the safety and viability of stevia as a natural sweetener, and found it to be of no danger to humans.
Therefore, in 1970, when stevia was introduced to the Japanese food market by a consortium of investors, it quickly entered everyday use as an additive and tabletop sweetener. By 1990, Japan accounted for forty percent of the global consumption of stevia, with not one single complaint or health concern raised. And in 1988, stevia represented forty-one percent of the Japanese sweetner market.
But use was not only restricted to Japan. Across South America, stevia has always remained popular, and in other parts of Asia, too.
Like marijuana, the use of stevia dates back over hundreds of years, with no documentaed negative effects on human health. Even in massive quantities it has been conclusively proven to be non-toxic, and offers not only a healthier alternative to a market dominated by dangerous products, but actually provides some significant health benefits.
Yet, like marijuana, the US government, and other governments around the world, also dominated and controlled by large corporations with no interest in the welfare of the general public, have banned and restricted the use of stevia. Using massively and embarassingly flawed data and ‘evidence’, the governments of Western nations have outlawed the use of stevia, and then, under pressure from campaigners and organisations acting in the public interest, have revoked their decisions to an extent, choosing to instead block the use of stevia in any capacity perceived to be of threat to profits of the sweetener and sugar industries (including the mighty Coca-Cola and NutraSweet companies).

- - - -

Stevia: The Controversy

There is no reason to ban or restrict the use of stevia. That’s it. That’s all that need be said to an intelligent freethinker. But let’s face it, this is a world dominated by profit-hungry greedheads with no concern for decent folks, and the average human is just ignorant enough to go with the flow and believe the shit. So to change anything, one must be armed with knowledge and a drive to fight injustice. So, with that in mind, let’s continue exploring exactly why this miracle plant is vilified by fucking halfwits…

In 1991, the United States Food and Drug Administration received a complaint from an allegedly anonymous source, concerning the safety of stevia. The source is widely accepted to have been the manufactures of NutraSweet, the aspartame based sweetener. The motivation for the complaint is believed to be stopping the encroachment of stevia upon the sweetener industry. Congressman John Kyl is one of many believers that the FDA acted only as a response to pressure from the sweetener industry. However, despite the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, the FDA has refused to formally announce the origin of the source.
Following the complaint, the FDA labelled stevia an ‘unsafe food additive’ and placed restrictions upon its import into the United States. The reason given for the ban was that no solid evidence could be provided to show stevia was safe, which contravenes FDA regulations stipulating that a substance used since or before 1958 with no history of known ill effects should be ‘Generally Regarded As Safe’ (GRAS).
FDA guidelines also require a product to be proven unsafe through testing in order to be given the label ‘unsafe’, and no testing has been able to conclusively prove any negative health issues arising from the use of stevia.
However, despite these overlooked technicalities, stevia was an entirely banned substance in the United States until the passing of the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which forced the FDA to allow stevia to be sold as a dietary supplement, but not as a food additive or commercial sweetener. This shows the FDA labelling stevia as safe and unsafe, depending upon its use, publicly contradicting themselves for the purpose of securing the marketplace for known harmful sweeteners produced by big-pocketed industry bully-boys.
NutraSweet, also known as aspartame, is has been shown to cause migraines, seizures and blindness. It has been the subject of several thousand complaints to the FDA, even FDA testing has linked its usage to brain tumours. However, the overruling of the commissioner of the Administration made sure that nothing so trivial as serious health problems was worth troubling such a major corporation over… And let’s not forget that in hundreds of years of use in South America, and thirty-odd years of use in Japan, not one concern has been raised over the safety of stevia, whereas aspartame alone makes up seventy-five percent of all food additive related complaints in the United States each and every year!
But hell, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the so-called ‘food police’, also went easy on aspartame and MSG. They knew of the dangers, even labelling aspartame: ‘caution, try to avoid’. But that didn’t stop them from serving aspartame containing yoghurts to their own employees in their staff cafeteria… No, money is more important than public health when you’re a crooked organisation with the power to dictate the fate of an entire species.
And perhaps that’s why the FDA and the CSPI have embarrassed themselves constantly since first they thought it wise to bend over and obey the wishes of the mighty NutraSweet-dominated sweetener industry. Surely by trying to blind the public to the truth regarding this ancient plant, whose safety had been known for decades, they were as ignorant as Bertoni when he believed he was the first person to discover stevia growing in the mountains of Paraguay.
These powerful bodies hold themselves to be guardians of American health, yet will go to the lengths of burning books, seizing imported shipments, confiscating stevia-containing products, fabricating evidence, and other CIA-inspired covert ops, just to protect the producers of substances they themselves deem unsafe.
That’s right, in May 1998 the FDA ordered the burning of books on the history, growing and cooking of stevia by a Texas-based distributor, resorting to threatening letters before the condemnation of the public, the media and ACLU resulted in a forced change of heart.
And the CSPI, desperate to back-up their co-conspirators, twisted the statements of two pro-stevia proponents and relied upon discredited, irrelevant and outdated ‘evidence’ in order to put together a ‘case’ against stevia, while ignoring a massive and persuasive body of work that supports the safety of stevia.
The problem with the CSPI’s ‘Stevia: Not Ready For Prime Time’, written by David Schardt, which is nothing more than a piece of childish propaganda, is that firstly it’s based on entirely the wrong substance. The article is based on studies of steviol, a derivative of stevia which cannot be produced within the human body, and which regardless of the impossibility of producing through digestion, is not even proven to be harmful. It is merely a suggestion that steviol may pose some risk, hence repeated use of unclear and speculative language… Vague words, Schardt.
Schardt also references Douglas Kinghorn and Ryan Huxtable, two pro-stevia scientists. He quotes vague and hypothetical statements made by the scientists that show possible counterpoints to their own studies, but which Schardt purports to be evidence of their anti-stevia views.
Kinghorn, a professor or pharmacognosy, is quoted by Schardt as saying ‘The Japanese don’t consume large amounts of stevia,’ and other such racial generalisations. His argument here is supposedly that Americans will take consumption further than the Asians, and therefore are more inclined to encounter new health problems. Perhaps this is an easy thing to believe in these days of rampant anti-Americanism, but it is absurd to suggest that Americans are all stupid enough and fat enough to eat enough stevia to cause greater, and as yet untold, health problems that would be of any significance in comparison with the masses of McDonalds and Coca-Cola related deaths and morbid obesity recorded every year.
And what health problems is stevia meant to cause? It’s a non-calorific, hunger-relieving, diabetes-beating, digestion-aiding, pancreas-nourishing, tooth-friendly fucking plant! Fuck off! Go suck a dick if you believe the propaganda. Americans already eat massive quantities of sugar and sweeteners and other shit that rots their teeth and guts and makes them fat. Yet studies have shown that stevia is harmless even in massive quantities. It even reverses plaque development on teeth, which is all too often caused by eating sugar! Surely it would be better to have some fat bastard eat a plate of stevia-laced ice-cream rather than the same with sugar or aspartame on top… But no, stevia is a natural plant, like marijuana, that could be grown and used by the common man, and so would infringe upon the corporate and government agendas that have resulted in the current health crisis. It’d be harder to tax stevia than sugar, and easier to produce ones own stevia leaves for a cup of tea than to engineer a bowl of aspartame…
But no, there’s hope for stevia yet! We still may see it legal, but only on corporate terms, of course. Rebiana is the name of a sweetener in development by the Coca-Cola Company, whose name and finances will no doubt be enough to push the legality of stevia past the FDA. No need to worry about its infringement upon the sweetener industry now, folks! Just buy a can of Coke-Rebiana and everything’ll be ok. So long as a big ole American company owns the rights to a little Paraguayan plant, you can consume it. That’s all that fucking matters, isn’t it?
But back to science, from which we’ve become distracted… And whereas Kinghorn is quoted by our friends, the CSPI, as arguing against the Japanese experience as proof of stevia’s safety, he is more commonly found arguing in favour of stevia and of the Japanese and their intensive research into stevia…

‘Stevia extracts and/or stevioside (a concentrated extract) have been widely used as sweetening agents in Japan over the last 15 years; . . . no adverse reactions have appeared in the scientific or medical literature during this period, and it may be concluded . . . that these materials do not present a potential toxicity risk to humans.’

‘I don't think it's that big a question mark because of the Japanese experience. They've been taking it (stevia and stevia extracts) for 20 years now and they've had multigenerations of humans using it. (To produce steviol) requires metabolic activation which may or may not happen.’

‘We do have the evidence from the Japanese that stevioside is not carcinogenic. It hasn't been resolved whether steviol is produced in animals, let alone in humans.’

Huxtable, too, is normally a proponent of the pro-stevia scientific community, although is a little more reserved in his arguments, saying: ‘there seems little scientific reason for the FDA not to approve the use of stevia extracts in the U.S,’ and ‘There are no studies on humans that show it presents a hazard.’
Of course, both scientists are right. And more than that, these are not necessarily the scientists one would normally list in a study of stevia, as far more qualified scientists have come to value stevia as a healthy footstuff. Rather, they are worth mentioning because they, like most of the scientific community, are in favour of the full legalisation of stevia, but were quoted by the CSPI in their ludicrous drive to validate the outlawing of a harmless plant. This is just another example of major league idiocy marring the attempts of the authorities to ban stevia.
Here’s some more:

- The FDA using a thirty-two year old fertility study, which was wholly dismissed by its own author.
- A Brazilian study of mice, which only the FDA considers of any scientific merit, translated by an FDA employee with only a basic understanding of Portuguese.
- Ignoring a massive body of scientific evidence and historical use that supports the claim that stevia is harmless.
- The FDA threatening to burn stevia reference books of Sunrider International, and then informing their Director of Operations that ‘if we wanted to make carrots (be) against the law, we could do it.’

These diabolical assholes are even prepared to ignore the studies of the World Health Organisation, who, in 2006 concluded their research into the safety of stevia, by finding that stevia and its derivatives are non-toxic and not carcinogenic. Also, that stevia could prove useful in helping patients suffering from type II diabetes and hypertension, because of its blood-sugar stabilising qualities. These facts were largely known for hundreds of years in Paraguayan culture, and obviously why stevia had been used in medicines across South America. So if the WHO know the truth, and ancient Indian cultures knew the truth, and the scientific community knows the truth, and the common man, through recent media coverage, knows the truth, and indisputable evidence has been provided by Asian experience and testing, to reveal the truth that stevia is utterly harmless… Then what chance is there of the legalisation of yet another innocent victim in the ongoing rampage of corporate dominance over government and public-interest organisations?
Well, two petitions submitted to the FDA, seeking Generally Regarded As Safe status for stevia, were submitted in 1992 and 1995. These petitions included and summarised a huge body of work, detailing the impressive array of health boosting qualities held by stevia, as well as hard evidence of the safety of the plant.

‘Stevia leaf is a natural product that has been used for at least 400 years as a food product, principally as a sweetener or other flavoring agent. None of this common usage in foods has indicated any evidence of a safety problem. There are no reports of any government agency in any of the above countries indicating any public health concern whatsoever in connection with the use of stevia in foods.’
Gras affirmation petition submitted on behalf of the American Herbal Products Association, April 23, 1992

‘The petition cites over 120 articles about stevia written before 1958, and over 900 articles published to date. In this well-chronicled history of stevia, no author has ever reported any adverse human health consequences associated with consumption of stevia leaf.’
Supplement to GRAS affirmation petition no. 4G0406, submitted by the Thomas J. Lipton Company February 3, 1995

It hardly seems necessary to summarise this article. The facts speak for themselves, and are almost too numerous to print. Stevia is quite simply a botanical and culinary miracle. In fact, the process of eliminating facts supporting the safety and benefits of stevia took as much time as any part of preparing this article. The sheer volume of work is testament to the injustice of the ban imposed against stevia by governments worldwide at the asking of the sweetener and sugar industries. And it is proof that morality and legality have little connection anymore, and that the governments of this world operate not in the interests of the people, or even themselves, but of those that wield the power to dictate the future of the world – the money-grabbing, immoral, half-wit, greedhead swine that are the heads of their industries. These pigs bring out the evil and ignorance of governments forced to move their hands against their people, and then to look foolish when the media and the intelligent few see what’s going on and call the forces to order. We are lied to and persecuted for nothing more than freedom of thought and expression, and an appreciation of the natural world, simply because what we do contravenes the wishes of those that would sell us dangerous commodities and rob our lands and indoctrinate our minds… Don’t let them get away with it, EAT STEVIA!

Further Reading

For a list of websites on stevia, from cooking to growing to the conspiracy against this miracle plant, just Google the word ‘stevia’. There are hundreds of sites available, but Beatdom reckons www.stevia.net is the best.

As for books,
Take a look at The Stevia Story: A Tale of Incredible Sweetness & Intrigue, by Linda and Bill Bonvie and Donna Gates.

Zeitgeist

2007-09-10T22:52:00.001-07:00

Zeitgeist is quite simply the most important movie of all time. If every person were to watch it, the planet would easily be saved. Forget these environmental awareness flicks, because the planet won’t kill us off for years. But within a year or two we will all be thoroughly screwed over by martial law and implanted ID chips.
The movie begins with a debunking of Christianity, which is simply an elegant way of putting that which all but mental defectives know: religion is a form of social control and nothing more. It’s a load of shit and if you don’t get that, you’re ignorant and in denial.
Then it moves on to 9/11 and conclusively proves that it was an inside job set up to rob the American citizens of their constitutional rights, and to rob the Middle East of its oil. If it weren’t for the constant footage of innocent people jumping to their deaths while government planted bombs go off around them, and you can here them scream and cry, you’d actually laugh at the fact anyone could doubt the government brought down the towers, and that no plane ever crashed into either the Pentagon or Shanksville.
Part III focuses on the Federal Reserve Bank and how it controls America. In 1907, the Federal Reserve Bank was founded by private corporations, and through bribery, came to be the central bank of America. Ever since, these wealthy bastards have been funding the American government and taxing the people. And what’s better for business than war? Nothing.
And what does the future hold? By next May all Americans will be made to carry ID cards. Many people already have chips in their bodies with ID data monitored from space. And Bush has signed an agreement with Canada and Mexico to create the North American Union, one country. No more America. No more dollar. The world will be changed beyond recognition. Next up? A world government, as envisioned by the men behind the bank behind the government.

So watch Zeitgeist. It is the only thing that will seriously change this little world of ours. People are so fucking ignorant that they seriously believe in religion and conservativism and democracy. The only way to change is to be intelligent and aware and to call to account those we place in charge when they fuck up.

On the Road

2007-09-06T21:53:00.000-07:00

The Fiftieth Anniversary of Jack Kerouac's legendary On the Road is this week, and to celebrate, the original scroll version of the text has been released as a hardback book.
To find out more, grab yourself a copy of Beatdom, or wait until the release of the special edition of Paul Maher Jr.'s The Kerouac Quarterly.

We're On Sale!

2007-08-27T19:18:00.001-07:00

At last, Beatdom has hit the presses. Get it here and now:

Or visit the website: Beatdom

Front Cover

2007-08-24T09:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we had a graphic designer come in a begin to overhaul the magazine. It's looking good, I must say...

Pete Doherty: Modern Beat

2007-08-21T09:45:00.001-07:00

Allen Ginsberg called the group most frequently considered Beats – himself, Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady - ‘the libertine circle’. He wrote this after the murder of David Kammerer by Lucian Carr, the first major scandal to rock the Beats.
The Beats were frequently tied to scandal. They were famous literary types who indulged in hedonistic and alternative lifestyles, consuming drink and drugs, having sex and listening to dangerous music. They were the libertines of their time, in the public eye and painfully misunderstood by their contemporaries.

Pete Doherty needs no introduction on this side of the Atlantic. The poor bastard is notorious in a time when notoriety means front page pics for no damn reason at all. If he smokes a cigarette, it’s called a joint, and some oh-so-witty headline is plastered in red across the top of the page. Every time he’s with a girl, it’s a date; when he’s tired, he’s on crack; when he’s on holiday, it’s rehab; when he move house, he’s been kicked out. And very little attention is given to his obvious genius, save for the constant, over-the-top swooning coverage given to him by NME, desperate to cotton on to any new trend. Forget his music, forget his poetry… He’s taking crack! He’s painting with blood!
He is the new Jack Kerouac. History’s full of bright young men with too much talent. They see the world too clearly to live a normal life. They see the crap most people just don’t notice, and consequently they’re forced to live different lives to the rest of the rabble, and are ostracised and admired in a shocking concoction of media vulturism and general hysteria.
They’re self-destructive rebels with nothing to lose. No scandal will ever bring them down to the level of ignorance occupied by their fans and detractors, and only death will gain them the respect and understanding they may or may not desire.
They do what they want because they are smarter than those that make the rules in the first place, and because they can see through the crap that the rest are fed by those in charge. They take drugs to numb the pain caused by seeing reality to clearly; to experiment with mind expansion and to shun daft rules; on principals because it should be a basic and fundamental right; because they know fine well that all there is in life that’s worth doing is having fun; because they are addicted, being only human in spite of their intelligence; to feel a sense of longing in a society that cares not for their true talents…
They break the law because they no better than to take shit from fools in uniforms, upholding the nonsensical and outdated gibberish we call the law. No, society should be a hierarchy of intelligence, not of wealth and power and tradition…
They draw jealousy from society because they are talented and wild and hedonistic, doing things most can’t or won’t do, and then writing, painting or singing about it. So the world loves to read ‘Kate Dumps Potty Pete!’ in The Sun over their buttered toast and tea, and talk ignorantly about him to their retarded friends in broken English and hideous dialects, in scummy houses, before going to their crappy jobs…
And it wasn’t much different with Kerouac or Byron or Burns or any other the other talented misfits who have brightened the world in death. There’s nothing that soothes the soul like taking some ill-founded moral high-ground and spitting down on your superiors…

But enough of the rebel side of our modern Beat. Enough ranting and madness and chastising ignorant fools. Who wants the respect of these greasy fuckers anyway?
Doherty is a learned man and an anti-academic. He knows literature, film and music. But his are the modern classics and the same sort of thing that drove the Beats wild. His poets are the Romantics, his music the rebellious sound of youth, and his films the dangerous tales of contemporary society.
Who cannot see in the punk, post-punk and Brit-pop eras a similarity in attitude to the jazz era that lifted the Beats? And the influence of Blake is obvious in both Ginsberg and Doherty. Were their earlier works not separated by almost half a century, surely the list would go on and on and on. But through literary chains we can see the influences upon influences upon influences that inspire generation after generation, resulting in what we have now, whether the focus of that is writing or music. And even if the don’t share the same influences exactly, the certainly share the same sort.
And apart from the general chastisement of the awful ignorant public, radical libertine wordsmiths have brought poetry to the disaffected youths of the world and inspired creativity. Remember, ‘three people do not a generation make.’ The Beats were heroes to mad young men and women searching for something outwith the norm. All through history we see dedicated fans seeking solace in their anguished idols. And Doherty has certainly brought poetry back to the sort of people to whom it has been lost for a long time. The delicious irony is that it’s the loathing and condemnation of society that drives their young into the hazy embrace of these mad rebels.
When Doherty was a 16 yr old fledgling poet, he read at places like the Foundry bar, and still posts his poems on his website, and does the occasional poetry festival between touring, binging and jail. He still reads alongside poets he started out with, often accompanied by music, and with whom he got drunk in Moscow on an earlier, council-sponsored, poetry reading… The comparisons with the café readings, friend circles and Six Gallery legends are obvious.
Pete Doherty is Beaten man, through and through.

Barry Gifford

2007-08-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

I just interviewed Barry Gifford today for the first issue of Beatdom. Despite the best efforts of Virgin Media, I managed to get the interview done.
Virgin Media claims we have not paid a bill that we can prove we have paid, but they cut our internet and phone so we couldn't complain, and have added on other fictional charges. They are cheap, cheating scum and fuck them all to death.
Anyway, despite their best attempts, we got the interview. Barry Gifford is another big name and a massive boost for the magazine's sales. He's a Beat fan and a great writer in his own right.

Publication

2007-08-08T16:37:00.000-07:00

Beatdom will be available at the end of August, via Lulu.com.
There will be three editions of the first issue:
- One... The full, uncut, glossy, photography infused, graphically awesome, original edition, priced at around nine pounds sterling.
- Two... The black and white, text based, chapbook edition, at a reduced price.
- Three... A downloadable pdf version of the original edition, costing only one pound.

No money will be made by the magazine from sales from the print editions, but after three months, the money garnered through sales of the downloadable edition will be used to reduce the cost of Edition One, which will be available, signed, through the editors.

Credo

2007-08-06T17:22:00.000-07:00

We are again a beaten generation, suffering amid unrivalled prosperity… Lost in ignorance in a time of education… Confused and controlled and taught too many things… Tamed by a world of passivity and acceptance, obscured by pretensions and the illusion of revolution… We are tired of the benefits wrought by the Beats and the generations and movements they inspired… Ours is a generation looking to the past, like theirs, but lost in the present and uncaring for the future, I suppose, like them…
Beatdom examines the Beat Generation in depth, but looks at the world around us through eyes created by our predecessors, and exploits the talents of people learning from the artists of the past, struggling to survive in a world of apathy…
Beatdom is indulgence and sorrow combined and confused and seeking clarity and union and that sense of community that’s garnered by something as simple as a label…
Beatdom is in good company, downtrodden all, and fighting for the preservation of the past and the highlighting of the failures and injustices of the present, though sceptical of even contemplating the future…
Beatdom is in the later stages of production, open to submissions and criticism, and now more than a dream…

Another Online Presense

2007-08-06T17:20:00.000-07:00

Beatdom has yet another online outlet, clawing our way to notoriety, as a MySpace Group at:

http://groups.myspace.com/beatdom

So join up and debate and fight and bicker like all petty MySpace junkies.

Trespass Clothing Inc.

2007-08-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

Our possible investors, Trespass Clothing Inc., today pulled out of advertising in Beatdom. So we're back to advertising stuff we believe in at no cost... an admirable pursuit, but not one that will finance a magazine.
The guy I spoke to resented my inability to demand an exact monetary value for a double page spread, and my apparent colloqial response. At the risk of sounding childish: Go fuck yourselves, you cheap whorish swine. You're money would have been nice, but I loath your company, your values and your arogance. I resent playing up to it for so long. Fuck you.
Which leads me to the conclusion that money must be sought... Get in touch with me if you're a wealthy idiot that likes throwing his cash around.

Rodney Munch Title

2007-08-01T05:20:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that this blog has become more about Beatdom Magazine and Godless: Fragments of Contemporary Society than about Who Is Rodney Munch? So I've changed the blog title to Beatdom and The World of Rodney Munch.
The reason is basically that editing Beatdom and promoting Godless has pretty much taken over my life, whereas Rodney Munch banter has become a thing of the past. Some day soon I'll finish editing it and publish the book, and then you'll seen some Rodney Munch posts, but until then this blog is more about my work in general.

I used MySpace to promote Godless last night, and have had some success and interest through this, so hopefully that'll inspire me to get on with more Munching about. More maybe it'll throw me further into promoting Godless and getting more sales...

Zane Kesey Interview

2007-07-28T17:24:00.000-07:00

71 pages...
I finished the Zane Kesey interview ages ago, but I've just gotten round to editing it tonight. He said he didn't want to be interviewed because he hated typing, and I can see why. His writing is abysmal, but he's got some great stories. So I spent a good hour editing this mess of e-mail correspondance into a presentable interview, and it looks good. I've just got to write a decent intro to it, and bang, another section done.
I've been working all day every day for a long time now, broken foot and all, and now a pulled stomach muscle, so magazine productivity has dropped substantially, but tonight has been good.
Plus, I've also written that last post, the Harry Potter and the Death of Literature thing, which will be severely edited later on, and stuck in there. I posted that on every forum and group in MySpace, and my god are people stupid! No one could offer me a decent response: it was all 'you're a tool' and 'i like harry potter' and 'so what if she can't write?' Well, I presented an argument, and defended my position in the forums, and the masses didn't. Or couldn't. Ok, so I embarrassed myself with a stupid spelling error, but that doesn't invalidate an argument, fools. Get over your little selves. And what are you doing on MySpace, shouldn't you be reader the latest installment of your precious little series of wizardingly wonderful books?

Harry Potter and the Death of Literature

2007-07-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels have sold in excess of 325 million copies, with the first run of the last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, having a first print run of 12 million copies in the United States, making Rowling the highest paid writer in literary history. Her novels have turned an illiterate generation into avid readers.
Yet she, and other writers such as Dan Brown, seem to have begun the end of literature. Their poorly written novels appeal to a DVD generation that wants easy, fast reads with little substance. Bookshop windows are full of copies of the most popular novels, alongside guides to said novels, and spin-off books. You get biographies of J.K. Rowling and other celebrities, a few cookbooks, and some travel guides. My local Waterstones has ‘Literature’ section smaller than my own little bookcase, with one copy of each of a small selection of well-known authors’ works, and twice as many of each edition of each Harry Potter book than the whole ‘Literature’ section put together.
But hell, Waterstones and co. are big businesses that need to make profits. They are just doing what they have to do to stay a float. Sadly, if they were to stock a thousand copies of ‘Howl’ I doubted they sell them in a year. You can’t force the population to get good taste, all you can to do is give them what they want.
And if the people like Harry Potter, then so be it. Rowling can’t be held accountable for the damage her books appear to be doing to real literature. She’s created a monster that is unstoppable and subject to the whim of the readers.
Thanks to the widespread love of Harry Potter, every shop wants to be able to sell the latest book in the series. But of course, competition comes into the picture. Shops must sell the book at profit, or else there is no point in selling it, and so they all compete for the buyers. And because of this, the companies with the greatest spending power will usually prevail, at massive cost to those smaller companies who just can’t keep up. It’s sad, but that’s the way the world goes round.
And when it’s not just bookshops that sell books, then there are even bigger problems for smaller shops to face. With Tesco and Asda and the rest selling Potter, customers are more likely to buy there, with better prices and convenience. In fact, the big supermarkets can afford to sell the books at lower prices than they buy them, and absorb the cost through the spending of the customers in other departments.
And so we have Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code in supermarkets and in the windows of Waterstones, and the little bookshops scrape by with the help of readers of real literature, who are dwindling in numbers are getting little in the way of decent new literature, because every publisher wants the new hit book about wizards and guns. Why should Bloomsbury want a revolutionary new literary style on their books when they could otherwise have to dig through a pile of cash to find ‘the books’?
The champions of mad new literary forms have often been the small time publishers, and the small time bookshops. But these are closing and folding under the pressures of a saturated marketplace.
Who can imagine Six Gallery and City Lights being as influential today as they were so many years ago? It is impossible to see similar organisations having the same beautiful influence in a world where everyone is home watching Big Brother, and who know only of Rowling and Brown in the world of books. There would be little interest in a prophetic poetry reading or cheap little chapbooks that change the readers’ lives.
But no one wants change. They don’t want to read a new style of writing or hear revolutionary ideas. The people want to be cheaply amused with silly little tales and not have to think too much. Generations of big ideas and social change have contented and exhausted people into a mass of lazy rabble with no hopes or aspirations or mad notions.
It’s hard to see a generation of idealist radicals ready to make the world a better place stemming from the cult of Potter. I can’t imagine millions of fans becoming wizards and witches and learning about spells and potions and the dark arts, like Kerouac sent millions ‘on the road’. I can hardly see brilliant writers of the future (if they come to be) remarking upon Rowling’s influence upon their work. And it’s doubtful English PhD students will be writing magnificent glowing studies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

But Harry Potter has turned kids onto reading… True, and this is great, if the kids understand that there is more to books than the merchandise and movies that accompany them. If the kids go back and read Dahl and Carroll and Kipling and develop wide varieties of interest that spawns new and creative writers, then that’s fine. If the kids themselves continue a wider spectrum of interest that turns them into a generation of experimental and thoughtful writers, then that’s fine.
But it’s all about the cult of celebrity and the cheap pacification and the aisles of lunchboxes and t-shirts and action figures. Harry Potter has become an obsession and created narrow-minded readers with little care for anything beyond ‘does he die at the end?’
Critic Harold Bloom argues against the tide of praise, saying ‘Rowling’s mind is so governed by clichés and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.’ However, the series has mostly gathered critical acclaim, except for the usual circle of religious and feminist ‘critics’ who apply the same rhetoric to Harry Potter as to any non-conventional text. Mostly, the criticism from even pro-Potter critics seems to centre on the rigid structures and plot devices Rowling uses: having Harry start ever novel in the same place, have clichéd and poorly drawn characters, and similar situations and character responses throughout each book.
But back to Bloom. His 2003 article for the Boston Globe, ‘Dumbing down American readers’, attacks J.K. Rowling and Stephen King for their awful books, and the literary community of today for rewarding Rowling and King, due only to their commercial success. In savaging her work, Bloom remarks upon Rowling’s use of phrases such as ‘stretch their legs’ being used dozens of times within a few pages.

Hunter S Thompson Festival

2007-07-23T15:43:00.000-07:00

My hero, Doctor Hunter S Thompson, will be celebrated next year, around this time (his birthday). His fans are trying to put together a HST Fest to celebrate the late author's work, although a date and location are as yet undecided.
I'll keep you informed as more information comes along, but for now, please check out the following websites for more info/debate:
http://www.gonzofest.net/
www.myspace.com/hstfestival
http://www.hunterthompsonfilms.com/

Beatdom Update

2007-07-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

51 pages and counting...
We now have an interview with Ken Babbs, the legendary Merry Prankster, friend of Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady and The Grateful Dead. He seems enthusiastic about the project.
Zane Kesey, Ken Kesey's son, has also agreed to do an interview, and that will hopefully go ahead during the week.
Diane di Prima, Beat poet, has declined to be interviewed, but has sent the magazine a signed copy of her newest book, and wishes us all the best.
Beat biographer and author of Beat, Chris Falver, has given us his blessings and sent a host of photographs for the magazine.
We now have four poets, two photographers, one artist, two graphic designers, and several writers.
Ms. B. is about to start redesigning the front cover with Photoshop. Our old one, designed be me, is decent enough, but doesn't reflect the fantastic quality of the inner depths of Beatdom.

Beatdom Update

2007-07-12T03:43:00.000-07:00

It's going well...

The original vision of the editors was a collection of historical and literary studies, and essays drawing links between their world and ours.
But here we are, only weeks on, with artists, photographers, interviews, random stuff... But it's all good. There's nothing going to be in the magazine that doesn't deserve to be there.

Right now I have edited together 41 pages, using Adobe Pagemaker. It's basic, and there will be a LOT of improvement in the coming month and a half, but it's not bad. Everything is very simple, and some of the features and articles ain't finished yet... But it's something to work from, and it's pretty promising.
We have a 5,000 word MySpace interview conducted with Steve McAllister, author of The Rucksack Letters, articles on Beat Books, Beat Tales, Bob Kaufman, a feature on Buddhism and the Beats, a guide to Beat figures, photography of Buddhist direction, poetry, a short story, collages, fake advertisement for William S Burroughs' crack...
Oh, I'm pleased about this. I plan on putting together a one hundred page rough draft and whoring it out to investors, then spending a month putting a proper version together for sale.
The reason there is an end of August deadline for going to the presses is because I'm off to California to work on a farm as part of the WWOOF program. For three months I'll toil my heart out, before returning to the UK in December, in time for Christmas, New Year, and the second edition of Beatdom. Hopefully my travels will provide me with some On the Road experience to infuse the next issue with.
Of course, I'll keep you informed of when each issue is available to buy...

Rodney Munch Is Alive!

2007-07-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

Rodney Munch first made his appearance in Duncan of Jordanstone on the 19th May, at the premier of the Dundee Degree Show, and he is still there today!
I visited the art school to use their printers and scanners and Photoshop for Beatdom, but I saw the two paintings and the Rodney Munch name tag proudly hanging outside Fine Art.
:) Oh I'm happy, friends!
Who knows how long Rodney Munch will be on display? We succeeded so royal in our endeavour that nothing can take our legacy away!

Published

2007-07-09T17:13:00.000-07:00

I wrote a little book back in the summer of 2005. When I finished it, I printed it and tucked it away in a box so I could forget about it and edit it later with a more objective point of view.
So a little while ago I found the manuscript and began the editing process. It's a strange feeling to read something and not knw what will happen next, only to find out and remember you already knew. It's also weird to see your writing, and know it's your writing, but it's so different to what you write like now... My style was so different back then, but still good. Parts of the book, I feel, are better than what I could write now, but parts are far worse. I decided not to edit the style, because it is different but good enough.
It's not easy getting a book of short stories published, even if the book is more like a novel, so linked are the stories to one another. No first time author really stands a chance with such a manuscript. So I decided I'd try and take the first step myself and publish the book on my own.
Lulu seems to be the way to go these days. I guess there's a lot of crap out there, and it can't be easy to market a self-published book, but all I really want is a few hardback copies for people I care about to read.
So last night I finished editing Godless: Fragments of Contemporary Society and formatted it for Lulu. Within fifteen minutes the damn thing was for sale to the whole world! I tried to order a single copy for myself, but some unknown error stopped this from happening.
Oh well, I'll get one eventually. And in the meantime I'll edit and format and publish Who Is Rodney Munch?

I'm not bothered about marketing, because I don't much care about making money or selling thousands of copies. I want the respect of my peers, not the masses.
But if I do decide to market the book, I know how I'll do it... I bought a copy of The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson a while ago, and inside the cover was a business card advertising a book published through Lulu, that the author believed to be of interest to HST fans. It's guerrilla advertising, friends! Clever and subtle stuff. It won't make you rich, but it'll gain you a few loving fans.

I think I'll indulge in a little guerrilla advertising of my own: leaving poems lying around the city with the address of this website at the bottom of the page and I'll link this page to the Lulu page (http://www.lulu.com/content/996109). I'll outright copy that clever author and leave my business cards in books like The Rum Diary.
Mwhahaha!

Projects

2007-07-06T06:52:00.000-07:00

Guerrilla art is done for now. The process of creating art and illegally showcasing it in the University of Dundee Degree Show 2007 is done and dusted. Whether it was a success or not is something you will have to read, if you care to do so, in the book, Who Is Rodney Munch?

And so what is next?

Well, I've just graduated from university after four years, and at the end of August I'm off to be a farmer in California for a few months. The Rodney Munch book is finished, and I'm awaiting the editing committee's comments, judgements and corrections.
Next up, I have to change all the names in the book to avoid prosecution. Then I reckon I'll self-publish it and whore it out to all the participants in the Rodney Munch saga. If that goes well, then maybe I'll let a big name published come near it, but I doubt that right now.
Also, I'm in the process of editing an untitled book I wrote three years ago It's a collection of short stories that explore life lived in the knowledge that there is no god. Reading it again, I realise some of it is amazing, and some of it is downright awful.
But the main literary concern of my life right now is the magazine I co-own and co-edit. It's called Beatdom, and explores the life and works of the Beat Generation. We've managed to sign up some talented writers, have a bundle of good ideas, and a promising investor lined up.
If you want to help out in any way, then get in touch.

Guerrilla Art

2007-07-06T06:34:00.000-07:00

Guerrilla art is a concept explored in my forthcoming book, Who Is Rodney Munch? It follows the adventures and misadventures of a group of students with no artistic backgrounds, who challenge Scotland's leading artistic institution by inviting themselves to put their own 'art' in the annual Degree Show.
The Degree Show is the highlight Duncan of Jordanstone's calander, drawing thousands of visitors every year, and showcasing the work of Scotland's best young artists... and Rodney Munch.

The book explores covert operations and guerrilla activities, and the very nature of rebellion. It also holds a mirror to the art world, while opening a range of possibilities to the daring rebels that would shock the world with their ideas - guerrilla poetry, guerrilla gardening, guerrilla music.
Yeah, so maybe they've all been done before, but Rodney Munch draws on Dundee's finest minds to create a unified purpose and philosophy, and pushes guerrilla creativity to its very limits.