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Review

The Bunker Diaries – review

Marc Olmsted

The Bunker Diaries By Stewart Meyer Beatdom Books $19.99 The Bunker* is one of the major sites of Beat History, the downtown NYC lair of William Burroughs. Two others I can think of: The Six Gallery** where Howl was first read aloud by Allen Ginsberg. The third is the Beat Hotel in the Latin quarter of Paris,***, where Gregory Corso lived in the attic, Burroughs & Brion Gysin discovered the cut-up method with an accidental slice of newsprint, and Allen Ginsberg passed through at the end of the 1950s. photograph by James Grauerholz With only Gary Snyder remaining among us, we now must rely on younger friends of the Beats for any direct history. Stewart Meyer hung out at the Bunker quite a bit from 1978 to 1983. This was New York City’s hey-day of punk bands -- as well a wide wave of heroin use. Elsewhere in NYC, photographer Nan Goldin’s polaroids capture the baked eyes of cool kids, some on their way to the grave. ...
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Review

TRIPPING WITH A VIPER – by Anne Marie Maxwell – review

Marc Olmsted

Tripping with a Viper By Anne Marie Maxwell Mystic Boxing Commission $29.99 available at: www.sparringartists.com Reviewed by Marc Olmsted Much has evolved around Neal’s long lost Joan Anderson letter as the key to Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prosody. Rediscovered, the big surprise is that it has nothing to do with Kerouac’s streamlined stream-of-consciousness experimental prose. Instead, it moved Jack into writing first person and about actual events with the mad energy of the multiple pages Neal had produced with blazing enthusiasm. Tripping with a Viper fills in some first-person Beat history that explains some more of the legend that is Neal Cassady. The viper of the title is actually also a “pot-head” as referenced in the song “When You’re a Viper,” written by Stuff Smith and first recorded by Rosetta Howard. Still, the ambiguity of this title can’t be merely shaken off. Anne Mar...
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Review

Between Good Men & No Man at All – poetry by Pam Ward – Review

Marc Olmsted

Between Good Men & No Man at All By Pam Ward World Stage Press $20.00 Poet Richard Modiano first brought Pam Ward to my attention by telling me she was writing the introduction to his poetic collection, The Forbidden Lunchbox. I didn’t know her work, so he read her to me over the phone. I was instantly hooked by her images, candor and the gallows humor known only to those the System does not favor. Still, as an old white man and apparently retro Post-Beat poet, I would not have had the temerity to review her new work Between Good Men & No Man at All, but I was asked, so here we are. I already knew we weren’t going to get homogenized Hamilton rap or highbrow slam’s rhyming editorial language (i.e. non-imagistic). Instead I was surprised to be reminded of stumbling into an L.A. skid row grind house for the last half of Sweet Sweetback’s Bad Ass Song. Plus, like all grind house double- and triple-bills, t...
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Review

HIGH WHITE NOTES—The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism—Review

Marc Olmsted

HIGH WHITE NOTES The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism By David S. Wills Beatdom Books $17.99 High White Notes takes a phrase from F. Scott Fitzgerald that was of prime importance to Hunter S. Thompson (or any serious writer) - being in the zone while creating. It is of course important to all artists to be in that zone, and thus David Wills uses Thompson’s writing exclusively (rather than a more conventional biography) to get to the man and his self-created myth, one far more invented than I previously realized. Most of us enthusiastic about Thompson agree that Hell’s Angels, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 are his “high white notes” - and anyone attempting to follow and understand him can see that there is a deterioration in his work from that point - relatively slow enough to entice us back momentarily (I used to regularly pick up the San Francisco Examiner ju...
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Review

TAXI NIGHT — Poetry by Cliff Fyman — Review

Marc Olmsted

TAXI NIGHT Poetry by Cliff Fyman Long News Books $15.00 I connected with Cliff Fyman some years after his association with Naropa University (then Institute) and its 1977 Summer Writing Program - a heyday-hosting of teachers like William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I met him through then-fellow student writers Peter Marti and Vincent Zangrillo. Although late in the book, there is this poetic statement from Fyman, and it sums up his view: I see every object alive and luminous and at the same time I see the decay and death inherent in it’s very shining. Cliff Fyman is essentially influenced by William Carlos Williams and his school of Objectvism, something Allen Ginsberg returned full circle to in his teaching at Naropa. Cliff learned to sit in the Buddhist style of “calm abiding,” shamatha. Add to that - he is also a vegetarian as we...
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