Zele Community Table
7-24-06, 5:30-6-30 PM
The Beat Generation’s next performance is Sunday July 30, 2006, at Zele’s Café on East Hopkins Avenue in downtown Aspen @ 9:00 PM.
We were joined for a discussion of The Beat Generation by Kent Reed and members of his Hudson Reed Ensemble playing the parts of writers and poets Jack Kerouac (Kim Nuzzo), Allen Ginsberg (Ed Foran), and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Lee Sullivan). Also joining the conversation were Lisa Zimet of Zele and two members of the Aspen community, Cy Coleman and Tricia McKenzie.
Would the Sixties have been the Sixties without The Beat Generation?
Kim Nuzzo (KN): I really don’t think it would have. The Beats were an underground literary movement. They created the philosophical foundation and opened the doors of the cultural space for the Sixties to build on—civil rights, green, women’s liberation.
Kent Reed (KR): And the antiwar movement.
Tricia McKenzie (TM): A friend of mine’s daughter was in a history course in her junior year, and she would tease me that I’m a hippie, a peace activist, and she told me: “There’s actually a dictionary definition of hippie in my textbook.” In the textbook it said: “A counterculture movement defined by the pill, free sex, premarital sex, shocking the status quo, using pot and LSD.” I said: “Then I’m not a hippie.” It was about protesting war, peace and real love for all humanity, the environmental movement, feminism, burning the bra, anti-establishment, not trusting anyone over 30. I didn’t do drugs.
Ed Foran (EF):It’s important to remember that music was a very big part of it. Woodstock. I was telling these guys, one of the reasons I was interested to be involved. was my father prosecuted the Chicago 7 as a U.S. Attorney. We got a Christmas card from Jerry Rubin [one of the Seven] and his wife having sex. It said: “Merry Christmas, Tom, Do it.” That was a really big part of it. My father couldn’t stand this—he thought this movement gave us AIDs. That was his perspective. He actually cross-examined Jerry Rubin, but he didn’t think much of him. Ginsberg was really a visionary, a flawed human being. They were all passionate about what they believed in. Ginsburg had the courage to talk about his sexuality 1955, when people just didn’t go there. There was a lot of discomfort in society. My father’s role in all this gave this project a whole ’nother dimension when Kim approached me about it. I wanted to understand more about the Beat poets. My perspective was as an eighth grader during the Chicago Seven trial. It was a very vivid time for me and I wanted to understand the genesis.
KN: Ed and I connected, riding the car from ABC into town one day. Lee Weiner, a Jewish attorney, was one of the Chicago 7, and I worked for Lee Weiner. So I had a connection to Ed’s father, the Darth Vader of the trial.
Were they convicted?
EF: They were found guilty of conspiracy for crossing interstate lines and appealed and it was thrown out because of the prejudice of the Judge, Julius Hoffman. He slept through much of the testimony. Even as a kid I was thinking: “This isn’t right. He should be listening carefully.” Every time the State objected, it was sustained, and the defense was always overruled. So it was not a level playing field.
KR: When I lived in Chicago, I was in a play called “Chicago Conspiracy Trial.” Ed’s “father” was cross-examining me in the play. It had a long run in Chicago at the Remains Theater Company. There was a Chicago 8 but Bobby Seal was bound and gagged and they ended up giving him a separate trial. Abby Hoffman came in wearing judge’s robes one day. He said to Judge Hoffman: “We have the same last name, we’re both Jewish, and we must be related.” The whole thing was cartoonish.
KN I wonder out loud how people like Abby Hoffman and Alan Ginsburg would be if they were here now. What they would be like?
EF: Tom Haydn became a State Senator in California. He married Jane Fonda.
TM I think those people are here and they’re expressing their voices. There’s a new SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], a resurrection. It’s like the way I got my name “Tricia.” My stepfather was part of the military industrial complex: he created a cartel and nicknamed me “Tricia” after Tricia Nixon. We never had a quiet dinner conversation. I worked with SDS. He was the one who said to me: “The FBI will have you on a list and you’ll never be able to work for a Fortune 500 company.” He was concerned I’d disappear. He was such an insider, he was indicted in the Checkers affair. He was my stepfather. His name was Phil Goodwin. He worked for Philco, National Aviation, National Electronics. He was the one blackballed in the Fortune 500 [after he went to jail]. I just went to the Colorado Committee for Justice and Peace. A lot of them are young people. The SDS has been resurrected.
EF: It’s not anywhere near as powerful as it once was. The spinoff of SDS was the Weathermen, and they turned violent, and the Black Panthers—they started losing people when it got violent.
KN I wonder why today there isn’t something comparable happening.
Cy Coleman (CC): There’s a volunteer army. Everyone’s a spectator.
TM: There are people in Oregon, the arson in Vail for the environment. What captured the imagination in the Sixties? Where did it all go?
Lisa Zimet (LZ): Those were environmental terrorists versus a pacificist movement.
KN: Isn’t that part of the thing that’s happening? Our society has a way of co-opting everything. Except Fundamentalist Islam. Now there’s this head-butting. How’s there going to be a resolution of that?
EF: We’re talking about twenty years ahead of the Beats. I always thought about how these people resonated.
Is there a line of poetry that sticks out in your performances of these poets?
LEE SULLIVAN (LS): Lawrence Ferlinghetti [played by Sullivan] had a line: “Security screened it out.” It’s about the ability to be peaceful, the need to not be violent. The need to not be a spectator. If you can’t express your thoughts obviously you’re being controlled. Security is the promotion of humanity, a calm place where wisdom can live.
KN: Kerouac, of all these characters, was the least political. He died of alcoholism at 47, and he combined French Catholic Canadian with Buddhism, that there was nothing more than the eternal now. He said he was visiting heaven when he passed out on the lawn. He saw: “The events of now just as phantom and ungraspable as the events of a million years ago, or the events of a million years from now, or the events of the next ten years.” Everyone is in a state of oneness. It was spacey, influenced by LSD. He wrote a book of poems called “Mexico City Blues,” the first truly American haikus. Bob Dylan said: “This is the very first book I ever read I can relate to.”
EF: “Sunflower Sutra” is a big Buddhist thing. Ginsburg was influenced by Tibetan Buddhism, the concept of Buddha nature. Adolf Hitler, Timothy McVea—he would have said everyone is born with this essential goodness. It’s about a sunflower he sees in a landfill on the coast. I love this line. He’s appealing: “Poor dead flower, when did you forget you were a flower…. You’re a sunflower.” Being raised with these Baby Boomers, it was such a refreshing change from traditional religion, it focuses on being present, compassionate, peaceful. For Ginsburg especially it really resonated with him. It’s interesting because with Kerouac, his faith was important to the very end. A lot of Catholics get into Buddhism, because of the similar ritualistic aspects.
TM: Father Thomas Keating out at the monastery [in Snowmass]—
EF: He’s half-Buddhist to begin with.
KN: It’s the American version of these things which include basic ideas like questioning authority and rule from on top. Individuality is still of value.
CC: It’s not fair to say it’s the genesis. The Beats created some of the iconography. There was a mainstreaming of folk music, Wobbly kind of stuff. It was not protest but labor.
EF: And there was some old country music from the New City Ramblers.
CC: One of the main conduits was the music. In the Fifties, there was folk music if you were tired of conventionality, and the beginning of the influence of television. Consequently it was easy to identify with alternatives.
LZ: Folk music came out of the union forms.
CC: It goes farther back.
KR I just had this thought. Along with the individuality, everybody had a guitar. Everybody could start writing their own music.
LS: In the Fifties, the land of liberty had to do with duty. A nation finding itself to be number one in the world. Ayn Rand writing things about egotism and the individual. There were a lot of seeds of what does the individual look like in the land of liberty. [The Beats were saying] individualism has sunbursts that can reach further and lend identity to our nation, to tap the ability to expose itself even further. People just need to get out and look.
When did The Beat Generation start?
KN: “The Beat Generation” was first coined by Jack Kerouac in 1948. In the beginning it meant being beat down to a level of nakedness, to see the world in a new way. The dark night of the soul. Also the beat that was in everything.
TM: Socialists and communists were organizing across the globe. There were the McCarthy hearings.
CC: The McCarthy period has something to do with the Beats.
KN: Is the answer conformity and materialism?
CC: Tracing the origin of the word, it doesn’t necessarily mean that.
TM: I was at a Women of Colorado Foundation group, and they were saying women view money as changing the status quo, men see it as preserving the status quo. World War II was a freeing up of women working in the factories. The men who came home had lost their positions during the war and tried to reassert their traditional role. All this movement of liberation of blacks and minorities, of men coming back, we have to re-group and family values. There was a massive wave of conservatism to shove the genie back in the box. We had the largest march in U.S. history for the women’s march two years ago. The media downplayed it.
EF: They say the media’s out of control.
CC: The [idea of the liberal media is] worst scam in a generation!
EF: Aspen’s very sheltered. I don’t know about you but I thought John Kerry was going to win the election. We were so clueless about what’s going on in the country. Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Fox News is the only place people listen to the news.
LS: It’s not “Fair and Balanced,” the people on there feel it’s their duty to uphold their side. That’s where it comes from. We’re living in the Puritanical reaction, the Reagan-Bush years.
CC: It’s not a natural phenomenon. It was carefully engineered by a very intelligent campaign. What happened is exactly what the right wing accuses the liberals of—a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” The connection between its various elements.
But it hasn’t been a secret. It’s just politics.
CC: It’s hard to keep secret something you’re trying to propagate throughout the system. “Conspiracy theory” is a phrase that is one of the most brilliant executions in propaganda ever. People who talk about conspiracy theory are generally considered to be somewhat insane. The assumption is that things that go on happened naturally.”
TM: The Phoenix Project.
But conspiracy theorists are never able to connect the dots.
CC: Listen to the logic of what you said. You just proved it’s impossible to use that word [conspiracy]. If you weren’t so bright you’d think you weren’t. This is different, to change the meaning of words. It happens, it’s an old phenomenon. The effect of it is for a particular reason. Imagine you’re a Republican. Your job is to get elected. First you have to get people to vote against their own political interests. This is realized by people. The problem you have to solve is how to get people to vote against their other interests. It’s basically plan a vast marketing campaign.
Let’s get back to the Beats.
KN: If you listen to the work of these poets, you realize the highest value the poet appeals to is to question all things, everything, all structures, systems, and too look at things in new ways. That’s what poets do with words. They turn them around. Even though some of these men were very political. I think poetry is more than left or right—appealing to the highest spiritual values.
LS: Ferlinghetti was a poet walking this high wire, trying to present beauty and to tell the truth at the same time. He’s this little Charlie Chaplin: truth comes flying in, his job is to catch truth and beauty.
Are you looking forward to the next performance this Sunday night [July 30 @ 9:30 PM at Zele’s in downtown Aspen]?
EF: It was really fun last week. Just to look out in the room and see a real cross-section in the community. Bob Rafelson was there, a Buddhist monk, teenagers. It’s a little different because we’re off-book, we’ve memorized the text. William Morabito is really in character as William Burroughs. I don’t look like Alan Ginsburg. He’s reading from his book of poems. Kim—we try to channel the poetry through us, this organic attachment to us. It’s different from your typical reading. And there’s a great bass player improvising with us.
LZ: Colin Corner from the Aspen Music Festival . He’s going on to the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra.
EF: Next week my son is going for his college interview at Naropa. They have a Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
How would your father feel about that?
EF: I don’t think he’d be too happy, but I’m very happy about it.
TM: This was the emergence of East and West after World War II. It continues to this day to inspire.
Whose idea was it to do The Beats?
KN: It was an idea that Kent actually asked us, members of the Hudson Reed Ensemble, for something different to do during summertime.
KR: We’re without a venue, yet we’re trying to get out in the community. We’re doing Shakespeare Scenes Wednesday evening over behind the library. Just a guerrilla kind of theater in this town.
EF: It was so cool to be in here [Zele’s] and the place was jammed, to look up and hear people with their eyes closed listening to words.