I really should finish reading On the Road some day..

[mnaz]

Was wandering around the site and wandered into the Trailerpark, stumbled on a clip of Steve Allen and Kerouac from 1959—most excellent…

http://www.videosift.com/video/Jack-Ker ... Jazz-Piano

... although, apparently he threw off the television crew by reading from his "Visions of Cody," according to one of the comments. But I swear that last paragraph sounds familiar though-- "God is pooh bear" and all that...

Man, that guy could write. He had the beat… And it's not all wailing jazz
urban, he even painted the prairies and mind-blowing desert red rock with that beee-bop in those little gems he read for the cameras...

Cool. Thanks, Scoot...

[Barry]

That was awesome, Marc. Thanks for posting it. I'm gonna have to see if I can find more video of him. I read his biography, Kerouac, by Ann Charters, years ago, then read it again years later. I may even have read it a third time since. And of course, I read the assigned sections of On The Road in Lit class in college. I, too, will really have to finish it someday.

I've also read quite a bit about him, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsburg and others in my studies of 20th century history and culture. Did you know Neal Cassady walked up to Ken Kesey at La Honda in '65 or '66 and thanked him, saying "You wrote me," meaning Randall P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? That was told in Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, by Jay Stevens. I can't imagine such a meeting taking place today. The author, whoever it was, would think this vagrant stumbling up, whoever he was, was some nutbag and get paranoid. Too bad our world has changed in this way.

Anyway, thanks for the trip down memory lane. It's so much different actually seeing such personages, even on video, after all these years. God bless the internet for that.

Peace,
Barry

[mnaz]

Thanks Barry. I was too young to understand all that 'counterculture' stuff when it came into its own. Hell, I was too young at forty, but the longer I live... hmm... And of course it cuts across generations and decades and centuries. Twain was 'counterculture' in some ways. Thoreau too. I'm sure the list is long on every continent.

JK perhaps wrote some of his stuff too quickly, and my eyes/ears detect 'cliche' every so often-- but one could say that about any writer I suppose. And perhaps it points out the curious nature of 'cliche'-- if it's brilliant and memorable enough, a passage may end up 'loved to death,' rendered 'cliche' over an extended time, through sheer repetition. I think maybe I'll throw in a chapter in my next collection of scribblings consisting of nothing but touchstones of literary genius slipping slowly toward 'cliche'...

That last paragraph in the clip makes me want to read 'The Tao of Pooh' as well as all that roadgoing...

[Artguy]

I'm rereading Desolation Angels....and pow !!! like a sandal in the side of my head....I love that clip with Steve Allen trying sooo hard to be sooo cool....." with forefinger pointed straight at me..."

[WIREMAN]

....once started it's hard to put a kerouac book down.....the dharma bums changed my life in '73....................