THE SIGNAL from David Katznelson
"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."--Gertrude Stein
Langston Hughes’ 120th birthday earlier in the week has taken me on a mid-century jazz-poetry journey leading right to the beats. I have already been on a Gary Snyder kick for a little over a month so the pathway was open and tread. And then there was the article about Paul Yamazaki and his tenure at City Lights Books that I posted yesterday, and then my friend Josh Rosenthal alerted me to the below article about Vesuvio’s. It is a beat week to be sure.
And as usually happens when I get into the beat mind set, I am eventually led to the poetic doorpost of Bob Kaufman. Like Hughes, Kaufman had a close affinity to Jazz, as a fan, as a poet. Poet and friend Jack Hirschman once said about Kaufman, “If he were alive today, he would want the affirmation… of the relation to the Beat movement and jazz itself.”
Kaufman “lived” at and was often thrown out of Vesuvio’s, where—at least pre-Covid—there still were a few pictures of him framed on the wall lining the steep stairway that connected the second tier to the bathroom-basement depths. He found fame abroad, being called the "Black American Rimbaud" in France, but in San Francisco lived a fairly anonymous life, anonymous to the masses but not to the other poets around him.
To me, Kaufman was the quintessential beat poet—some saying he actually coined the term “beat” others that it was a name given to him describing how he would walk down the street. Kaufman led the Beatnik image of a down and out life, unfortunately manifested through his fight with mental illness, drug addiction, and the law. He once stating that he hoped that he and his poetry would be forgotten, and is famous for taking a vow of silence that lasted from when JFK was assassinated til the end of the Vietnam war. Luckily his poems have survived him, and they are the best examples of the poetry of his time. Hands down.
Unlike Kerouac and company, there were no epic journeys with larger than life characters lavished in the books left behind, but instead a group of tremendous poems and a story of a street poet—the Beat poet— and wanderer whose story is kept alive by a handful of friends, like poet laureates Hirschman and Bruce Isaacson, who cherished him and understood his genius.
One of Cicely Tyson’s Final Interviews, With Her Friend Phylicia Rashad
The best bar in America is in San Francisco. Why we need Vesuvio
To spend an afternoon in Vesuio’s. That is a dream during this time of lockdown. My Dad frequented the establishment during his residency in San Francisco, and I always wondered who he drank next to, since it was the late 50s and prime Beat era. I have been sneaking in since high school, grabbing a book at City Lights across the street, ordering a whisky-ed coffee to sip while reading while all of Northbeach was in view walking by. We need Vesuvio.
KIDILL FW21 Detonates Punk Cliches
I am not a huge fashion follower but could not resist checking out Japanese designer Hiroaki Sueyasu’s latest show, since he chose to use legendary experimental artist Keiji Haino as the musician to construct the soundtrack and resultant video. The Birdman and I once traveled from Los Angeles to San Francisco just to see the sole West Coast performance of Haino’s iconic band of heaviness Fushitsusha. Any Haino performance is unexpected and awesome. The fashions displayed here are pretty out there on the goth/dark/bizarre side and the video…with Haino’s brand of sonic chaos, is fantastic.
Pabst Blue Ribbon Reveals Top 25 Finalists for Annual Art Can Contest
Believe, Believe
BY BOB KAUFMAN
Believe in this. Young apple seeds,
In blue skies, radiating young breast,
Not in blue-suited insects,
Infesting society’s garments.
Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz,
Tearing the night into intricate shreds,
Putting it back together again,
In cool logical patterns,
Not in the sick controllers,
Who created only the Bomb.
Let the voices of dead poets
Ring louder in your ears
Than the screechings mouthed
In mildewed editorials.
Listen to the music of centuries,
Rising above the mushroom time.
