"Howl" By Allen Ginsberg - Re: Heath Ledger, Brad Renfro

From Howl

by Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to thestarry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water fiats 'doating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night,

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, I listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels,

who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the E.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccupped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blonde & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930'S German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam-whistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity.

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddhas or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive' or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisy-chain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally * * * * * *, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 AM and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time--

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

1956

The Anthropologist Within

Less than a year after graduation, I find myself thirsting for a good opportunity to overanalyze the hell out of simple things. This would explain why I read (for fun) an article that pitted whole-language against a phonics-based system to measure their success in the acquisition of literacy skills. It would also explain why I'm thinking about trash cans.

Jossip posted a sighting of Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon snatching a ziplock bag out of a trash can after it was thrown away by another woman. Naturally, she places her son's half-eaten sandwich within. Delicious. (Thanks for the hepatitis, mom!)

My knee jerk response was, "That's disgusting!" but then my SuperSecretAnthropologistSense went into full gear and the comment became the question, "But what makes it disgusting?" Allow me to mine my memories for the wise words of Mary Douglas!

In Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas establishes a Structuralist view of the way we organize our world. Since we perceive the world as a structure, that which is outside the structure is "dirty" or "taboo." Think about this. A shoe on your foot is harmless. A shoe on your pillow, however, is filthy.

How did we suddenly reassign meaning to this shoe? By looking at its surrounding context. The shoe by itself carries no inherent value; it is given significance by its position in our socially-constructed culture.

Hereby, forthwith and all that other stuff, Cynthia Nixon's dumpster dive is not a particulary unconscionable act of Bad Mothering. The whole incident can be broken down into many parts, which can be each examined as bit players in our evaluation of the event.

Part 1: What was initially in the bag? It's unlikely that we'll ever know, but it's safe to say that any residue, stickiness, or other ephemera attached to the bag would render it "unusable", especially as a container of somethinig edible. A ziplock bag that had contained a small collection of unused matchbooks? Not so bad.

Part 2. What did the garbage can look like? I've lived in NY on and off for about five years. I have seen the horrors of public trash cans. And the trash can itself it a tainted object in our culture, serving as a repository for all the things we no longer desire. Objects that come into close contact with it become tainted by association.

Part 2. What was in the trash can? Content is important. Would you rather dig your hand through a garbage can full of paper (neat, contained, well-defined edges) or a garbage can full of picnic debric (disorderly, decaying, a variety of textures).

(I know I know, you'd leave it for the intern. Unless you are the intern, and then it would just suck to be you.)

Part 3. Where in the trash can did it fall? On the top, you got a good Five Seconds of Regret to pluck it out. The lower it drifts, the more likely it is that you,'ve "given it to the universe" to quote my sister.

And you cannot take back from the universe.

Retro.Grade. : Reevaluating and grading your childhood experiences

Disney's The Little Mermaid

A recent bout of the food poisoning kept me from writing my original article for Retro.Grade, a review of Bruce Coville’s Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher. When the sickness finally cleared, I found myself hosting The Little Mermaid for the Saturday Family Movies series at my job.

The 1989 classic film holds a special place in my childhood Disney collection, being the only film for which my family bought three versions. The first one, of course, was the wrong version. It stuck to the Hans Christian Andersen original far too religiously for any kid weaned on a Disney diet. Ariel wears no bra, is blond, does not sing, and turns into sea foam at the end, having sacrificed her life for the prince’s. He consoles himself by marring another, similar-looking girl.

This is a bad movie to buy your kid.

My mother got it right the second and third time with the Disney version of The Little Mermaid. A red-haired spunky mermaid belts out her lungs in love songs, a Caribbean crab composer keeps it crunk, and the strangest looking flounder ever swims around nervously. (Have you seen a real flounder before? It looks nothing like the eponymous character in the movie.)

“Flounder, you’re such a Guppy” “I am not!”

The movie’s stakes are high. Ariel trades her voice for the chance to become human. If Eric doesn’t kiss her before sunset on the third day, she’ll become one of those moaning gremlin-y things in Ursula’s lair (Latin name: soulus poor unfortunatos). This is a high price for true love, people.

Disney throws sufficient obstacles in the couple’s way to keep you engaged but tense. Will Eric recognize Ariel as the fantasy woman he’s been mooning over? Will Ariel be able to make Eric fall in love with her even though she lost her most significant trait – her voice? Will Sebastian escape that crazy French chef? Sacre bleue! Mon couer!

Known for their visual storytelling, Disney’s animators and screenwriters do not disappoint. Characters don’t so much tell you their emotions but telegraph them through their actions. When Eric casts his flute into the sea, we see that he has finally abandoned his dream of the mysterious woman. As he walks back to Ariel, asleep in the castle, we see Ursula (disguised as Vanessa) making her way up the beach, singing (with Ariel’s voice) the same song that Eric has been playing on flute. Score one for Ursula and for narrative continuity!

Ursula, by the way, is one of the best villain’s ever. In a delightful homage to the ‘80s, Disney gives her fluorescent eye shadow, a flippant white do, and bright red lipstick. (Rumor has it that she was based on the drag queen Divine). She is threatening, entrancing, and repulsive – the Triple Threat to which all Disney Villains aspire.

When the sun sets on the third day and all is revealed, all hell starts to break loose. Ariel turns back into a mermaid; Ursula resumes her original form and drags her into the ocean. Sebastian has run to get King Triton. Triton halts Ursula only to find that Ariel is bound to her by contract, then in the heart wrenching moment (that always makes me cry), he exchanges himself for his daughter’s freedom. Now Ursula rules all! But those plucky Disney characters refuse to be beaten down by any nefarious villain and by the end of the scene, Flotsam and Jetsam, her two familiars, have been vaporized, and Ursula has met the pointy end of an abandoned ship’s prow. Ouch.

King Triton realizes how much his daughter loves Eric and turns her permanently into a human. Now they can get married! (Cue more sobbing on my part). They sail off under a sparkly rainbow as a chorus of heavenly voices sings; “Now I can be part of your world!”

I wipe the last of tears off my face as the three cheerful children and their parents bounce out of the room.

As I turn off the projector, a thought pops into my mind, Doesn’t Ariel declare at one point that she’s sixteen?

“I’m 16 years old, dad, I’m not a child!”

And she just got married? Wait, how old is Eric? Is there statutory rape in Far Away Kingdoms Long Long Ago? Hmmmmmm.

The Little Mermaid Report Card:

Visuals: A
Script: A
Character development: A
Songs: A
Unsettling subtext of statutory rape: A+

Final Grade: Ladies and Gents, I present to you The Little Mermaid, an A+ movie of your childhood.

The Worst Part

About being gainfully employed is realizing how much of your time is spent thinking about, commuting to, commuting from, and just plain old bitchin' about work.

Week 5 is in effect: I've experienced a new stalkerish boyfriend; a hellish cold, a nutrition consult, an overage on the cellular phone minutes, two overdue books. Believe me, there will be details!

Rolling Out New Features

Here at etre_productif we are dedicated to, well, being productive, or at the very least, projecting a semblance of productivity. So look forward to these new and the return of these old features in the upcoming weeks.

The Return of Mo' Movies, Mo'Popcorn with a mini Thanksgiving edition, followed by the launch of the Winter Season Watch. Brrrr!

The Officializement of The Reluctant Vegetarian. You will witness and read my botched cooking attempts, restaurant reviews, and general contemplation of all things edible.

The Birth of the Book Report. I'm taking it back to primary school, guys. All those lovely books you cherished as a child will be either eviscerated/embraced here. First up: The Rag and Bone Shop by Robert Cormier, author of such lovelies as The Chocolate War, I am the Cheese, After the First Death, and The Bumblebee Flies Anyway.

And last, but certainly not least, A Corporation of Brilliance, lessons learned from conversations and eavesdropping.

RE: Africa is the Old Black, but the New Red

Answer: MANNERISM.


This is Parmigiano's Madonna of the Long Neck. Notice any resemblance?

Africa is the Old Black, but the New Red

Before I begin my general kvetching, I would like to direct your attention to the most peculiar of the new Gap RED advertisements. The woman in question is supermodel Christy Turlington. Apparently, she is a yoga afficionado, which certainly explains the pose. Unfortunately, it does nothing to explain her ridiculously elongated body. What the hell is going on there? Ten points to the first person who can figure out which art period her body reminds me of. Remember, it was covered in the AP Euro art project. (Answer will be posted on Saturday)

Corporate flacks everywhere are touting the (Product) RED campaign as a historic union of branding and charity. The effort was spearheaded by Bono and Bobby Shriver to encourage companies to raise awareness and funds for AIDS and HIV relief by selling products (many made in Africa) that advertise the RED movement. Although I am always happy to have people pay attention to Africa, unfortunately, no one ever notices it until it is knee deep in a new crisis (read: massacres, famines, epidemic diseases, rising fundamentalism, lack of education, and human rights violations.) The way that HIV and AIDS have devasted Africa, and Southern Africa is particular, is no longer suprising. With leaders like South African President Mbeki, who deny the link between HIV and AIDS, and US-funded abstinence models of sex education, sucessful, progressive reproductive health programs achieve spotty results at best.

So Corporate America has stepped in to shephard us to salvation. Or, if not salvation, then $50.00 denim bags with the word "red" rendered in multiple languages the front. Half of the profits of the Gap RED collection go to The Global Fund, which aids African women and children with HIV/AIDS. At first glance, this is a win-win situation for everyone. The GAP gets to appear relevant and socially conscious, attracting shoppers with its humanistic clothing line. The Global Fund gets increased donations, more Africans are helped, shoppers get wear their consumerism as an example of social responsibility, and Bono gets something new to put on his CV.

But you have to wonder: How much do these people really care about the HIV/AIDS crisis? When I attended last year's Live 8 concert in Philadelphia, I could sense that more people came for the free music than in support of one.org. When Will Smith came on stage, he told the audience that someone dies of HIV/AIDS every time you snap your fingers. Then he asked the audience...to snap their fingers. Alright, call me a wuss, but when I first saw that one.org commercial with all of the celebrities snapping their fingers, it creeped the heck out of me. Every time it came on, I changed the channel. That single sound rendered the epidemic tangible to me: someone's death toll was being sounded. How many times can you listen to that?

Apparently, many times. Everyone around me raised their hands and snapped. But I didn't see any look of recognition on their faces. My hands remained silent.

From the looks of it, the GAP is trying to do what Will Smith couldn't, encourage the client to turn his gaze inward with the outward display of abstract, positive terms, all ending in "red." From hono(red) to cente(red), we can all pay homage to the more enlightened aspects of our identies while simultaneously signalling our social awareness. I was thoroughly enjoying the love-in until I saw a mannequin with a shirt that read:

Hamme(red).

Yeah, me too.