He was called the vibrant new voice of his generation the avatar of the Beat movement. In 1957, on the heels of the triumphant debut of his groundbreaking novel, On The Road, Jack Kerouac was a literary rock star, lionized by his fans and devotees. But along with sudden fame and media hype came his unraveling, and, by 1960, Kerouac was a jaded cynic, disaffected from the Beat culture he helped create and tortured by self-doubt, addiction and depression.
Desperate for spiritual salvation and solitude, as well as a place to dry out, he secretly retreats to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's rustic cabin in the Big Sur woods. But his plan is foiled by his own inner demons, and what ensues that summer becomes the basis for Kerouac's gritty, yet lyrically told, semi-autobiographical novel, Big Sur.
One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur, takes the viewer back to Ferlinghetti's cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City for an unflinching, cinematic look at the compelling events the book is based on. (...)
Ray Johnson (1927- 1995) was a seminal figure of the Pop Art movement. Primarily a collage artist, Johnson was also an early performance and conceptual artist. Once called “New York’s most famous unknown artist", he is considered the “Founding Father of Mail Art" and pioneered the incorporation and use of language in the visual arts.
Johnson’s initial collages were mainly abstract works made of cut, painted and distressed paper strips and irregular designs. He referred to these early collages as “moticos,” a term he coined and used for several different elements in his work, including these collages and early poetic texts that he wrote at this time. Following his lifelong practice of cutting and recycling various materials, Johnson cut apart many of his early collages and used the fragments in later works. As Johnson once said, he created “Chop Art, not Pop Art.”
By the mid-to late-1950s, Johnson’s collages became increasingly referential, as he combined fragments from earlier works and ink drawings with images from popular culture. He included fragments of popular advertisements and images of Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Temple, and others in a way that anticipated the 1960s works of Pop artists, such as Warhol. Due to his early use of popular imagery, Johnson is considered one of the earliest exponents of Pop Art. Johnson also included references to art world celebrities and personal acquaintances. In the late 1950s, Johnson began creating “tesserae”—small, highly worked blocks he created from layers of cardboard glued together, painted, and sanded—to add a three-dimensional element to his works.
Throughout his career, Johnson repeatedly returned to and re-worked his collages, adding additional elements and recording the dates of his progress directly on the collage. He developed several motifs and series in his collages, including silhouettes of artists and acquaintances, "Lucky Strike" symbols, Cupids, "Tit girls," Dollar bills, Potato Mashers, and "Fingernails." Johnson juxtaposed images, words, and ideas to create new meanings and endless associations.
In the late 1950s, Johnson began exploring the possibilities of Mail Art. He developed a network of friends, acquaintances and strangers to whom he sent highly conceptual images and texts. Like Marcel Duchamp, Johnson was one of the first artists to incorporate instructions for active participation in his artwork, as he encouraged the recipients to “add to” his work or to “please send to…” or to “return to Ray Johnson.” In 1962, Johnson founded the "New York Correspondance (sic) School," a name invented by Ed Plunkett and used by Johnson for his international network of Mail Art participants he spawned by mailing an enormous amount of material, including fragments of cut-up collages, drawings with instructions, found objects, snake skins, and annotated newspaper clippings.
One of the first performance artists, Johnson began staging what he called “Nothings” in 1960. These performances paralleled Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings” and later Fluxus events. Johnson described his “Nothings” to William S. Wilson as “an attitude as opposed to a happening,” and he staged numerous performances throughout his life, including his “Throwaway Gesture Performances.”
Severely shaken after being mugged and attacked in lower Manhattan on June 3, 1968, the same day that Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas (and two days before Robert Kennedy was assassinated), Johnson decided to move to Glen Cove, Long Island, and then to Locust Valley. Until his death in 1995, Johnson continued his work in collage, sent out volumes of mail art, and staged numerous performances, but he became increasingly reclusive. As his contemporaries became famous, Johnson cultivated his role as an outsider, parodying celebrity through performances, fake openings, and photocopy-machine art. From 1982 on, he repeatedly refused offers from numerous galleries to exhibit his art, and for the last five years of his life, he refused all public exhibitions of his works.
On January 13, 1995 Ray Johnson’s body was found floating in a small cove in Sag Harbor, NY. All aspects of his death, revolved around the number "13". His age 67 = 6+7=13, the room number at his hotel was 247 which adds to 13, the date: Jan 13, etc. He jumped off the bridge on a cold winter night, and his body was found the next day. As with much of the particulars of his life, little is known about the circumstances of his death. Those who knew him best, inasmuch as they knew him at all, have even speculated that his suicide was his final performance (or Nothing as he then called his pieces). Johnson lived frugally, but had $400,000 in bank accounts at the time of his death. He left no will and his 10 first cousins inherited his estate.
Raven Row’s inaugural exhibition was the first large UK show of the collages and mailings of New York artist Ray Johnson (1927–1995). Works in the exhibition can be viewed here.
"My Life" is a song by Billy Joel that first appeared on his 1978 album 52nd Street. A single version was released in the fall of 1978 and reached #2 on the U.S. adult contemporary chart. Early the next year it peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The melody echoes the ending of Elton John's 1975 single "Someone Saved My Life Tonight".The verse about an old friend who "closed the shop, sold the house, bought a ticket to the west coast, now he gives them a stand up routine in LA." is a reference to comedian Richard Lewis.Chicago members Peter Cetera and Donnie Dacus performed the backing vocals and sang along with Billy Joel during the bridge and in the outro ("Keep it to yourself, it's my life")."My Life" was used as the theme song for the television series Bosom Buddies (1980-82), however due to licensing issues it does not appear on the DVD release of the series.
Bruce Haack (May 4, 1931September 26, 1988) was a musician and composer, and is considered a pioneer within the realm of electronic music. He was born in Alberta, Canada.
Bruce Haack (May 4, 1931September 26, 1988) was a musician and composer, and is considered a pioneer within the realm of electronic music. He was born in Alberta, Canada.
The Beat Hotel, a new film by Documentary Arts, goes deep into the legacy of the American Beats in Paris during the heady years between 1957 and 1963, when Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso fled the obscenity trials in the United States surrounding the publication of Ginsberg’s poem Howl. They took refuge in a cheap no-name hotel they had heard about at 9, Rue Git le Coeur and were soon joined by William Burroughs, Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin, and others from England and elsewhere in Europe, seeking out the “freedom” that the Latin Quarter of Paris might provide.
The Beat Hotel, as it came to be called, was a sanctuary of creativity, but was also, as British photographer Harold Chapman recalls, “an entire community of complete oddballs, bizarre, strange people, poets, writers, artists, musicians, pimps, prostitutes, policemen, and everybody you could imagine.” And in this environment, Burroughs finished his controversial book Naked Lunch; Ian Somerville and Brion Gysin invented the Dream Machine; Corso wrote some of his greatest poems; and Harold Norse, in his own cut-up experiments, wrote the novella, aptly called The Beat Hotel.
The film tracks down Harold Chapman in the small seaside town of Deal in Kent England. Chapman’s photographs are iconic of a time and place when Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, Burroughs, Gysin, Somerville and Norse were just beginning to establish themselves on the international scene. Chapman lived in the attic of the hotel, and according to Ginsberg “didn’t say a word for two years” because he wanted to be “invisible” and to document the scene as it actually happened.
