Beat Generation

Like, Blake's experiments with, you know, literary and visual art have, you know, developed into the comic book in some respects, and now, you know, here is Gaiman pointing back to Blake and pointing back to Blake's interest in art.

you know miltonian christianity and a sort of revisionist christianity in some way and this is not the only time that gaiman will do this like lucifer becomes a recurring major character in gaiman's work whether it is you know in something like good omens which he did with terry pratchett or when he's uh creating you know the the sort of like procedural detective show lucifer um which he was like a major producer for like gaiman's work is often indebted to blake in this way But on the other side, from the Surrealist movement, we also get the Beats.

And we're going to actually look at the Beats.

We're going to be looking specifically at William S. Burroughs, one of the major Beat writers of the time.

The Beats were very much connected to the anti-war movement and the protest movement in America in the 1970s.

It'll be one of the few times we're actually studying America dead on.

But the beats were also indebted to the Dadaists, were also indebted to the Surrealists, used a lot of the same symbolic imagery in a lot of their work.

He was a champion of the French Revolution.

And that just sort of absolutely radically changed in just a year due to the impact of this particular pandemic.

cultural movement but anyways yes so the beats were the really the founding fathers of the hippies and they were involved and you have you know ginsburg just directly transitioning right he transitions directly into the hippie movement um and and neil cassidy as the icon right sort of this god figure of the beat generation right so as neil cassidy he is the the star he's the the avatar of the primal life force right he is just this amazing superman so to speak um you know in on the road um that that book but anyways yeah so jerry garcia um what's fascinating is i got i have all these like interviews with a number of you know members of the dead even owsley you know talk this mannerist and clips from owsley but yeah jerry garcia um he he goes into all this stuff in great detail and knows all about the ritual stuff, everything I'm talking about, 100%.

Of course, he says it's a good thing, but yeah, his end goal, and he's going into that, and this is in 92, so you can think of his virtual reality linking everybody into a single computer network and you literally in one of the things he says is like well you don't need to waste your time learning guitar like me you can just play guitar on your own virtual mind and then you have sex with someone you wear a bodysuit and you never meet and he says the most amazing thing but he's literally saying like why you make up your own language there's no so i mean he's talking about this apps you know 6g you know we're just you know i mean you know everyone's like a mind-controlled robot slave locked you know hardwired into the internet 60 you know like the you know where people you know literally your brain is part of this internet network and and that's what 6g is 100 is you know it is a bio transmission level so everybody becomes a node and even feeds these this network that is in either using like graphene oxide or neural implants or a combination is actually operating in your brain, man.

It doesn't sound too much fun, but Jerry, he knows about this stuff in the early nineties and he, You know, in great detail and highly erudite and intelligent and very well read and, you know, not your average rock star.

And Allen Ginsberg, of all of them, It was Allen Ginsberg who maintained kind of this steady presence in the media from the great success of his poem Howl, which was, I guess you could say, Kerouac's On the Road and Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl.

Those are the two biggest events in the world of the beat writers and the beat generation of the 50s.

Allen Ginsberg became a TV personality, man.

He was on television.

Rich is the former California Beat Poet Laureate, but more than that, he's also a drummer, a novelist, an editor, a performer, and an exemplary creative collaborator.

His work draws from the restless spirits of the Beats, but it is rooted firmly in consciousness and awareness.

and in the present, in a culture struggling to pay attention, and in the communities where art still brings people together.

In this conversation, we traverse the United States, digging into the essences of Rich's work.

And we were we didn't want to do another sort of rehashing of the beat poets because that's, you know, been done.

And and it's been done really well.

we wanted to kind of find intersections between, you know, a lot of the elements that Beats brought us, you know, the social consciousness, political consciousness, You know, the rhythm

and, you

Anybody did this.

When the Beat Generation came, when Burroughs and Kerouac and others came along and they were precursors to hippies, it was like nothing anybody had ever seen.

This...

In the 20s in France with what that meant when Hemingway and Picasso and, I mean, wow, these revolutions.