KRASSNER ARTICL CONTINUED As moderator, I asked, "Abbie, since you used to quote Che Guevara saying, 'In a revolution, one wins or dies,' do you have a response to that?"
Hoffman: "All right, Ginzo. Poems have a lot of different meanings for different people. For me, your poem Howl was a call to arms."
Ginsberg: "A whole boatload of sentimental bullshit."
Hoffman: "We saw in the sixties a great imbalance of power, and the only way that you could correct that imbalance was to organize people and to fight for power. Power is not a dirty word. The concept of trying to win against social injustice is not a dirty kind of concept. It all depends on how you define the game, how you define winning and how you define losing--that's the Zen trip that was learned by defining that you were the prophets and we were the warriors. I'm saying that you didn't fight, but you were the fighters. And I'll tell you, If you don't think you were a political movement and you don't like winning, the fuckin' lawyer that defended Howl in some goddamn obscenity suit--you wanted him to be a fuckin' winner, I guarantee you that. That was a political debate."
Ironically, Ginsberg was very insecure about Howl, and he questioned the big fuss over it. "There shouldn't be a trial over this poem," he once lamented. In fact, a biography of Allen Ginsberg--American Scream by Jonah Raskin--has a surprising revelation:
"In the mid-1970s, in the midst of the counterculture he had helped to create, he promised to rewrite Howl. Now that he was a hippie minstrel and a Pied Piper for the generation that advocated peace and love he would alter Howl, he said, so that it might reflect the euphoria of the hippies. He would include a 'positive redemptive catalogue,' he said."
The famous opening line of Howl was, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." Abbie Hoffman would've been shocked to learn that Ginsberg had planned to rewrite Howl, this time beginnng with an upbeat line: "I saw the best minds of my generation turned on by music..."
On one hand, Ginsberg was a pacifist. When he first started taking LSD, he thought that world peace would come about only if President Kennedy and Russian premier Nikita Krushchev would take acid together. And yet I remember a scene---this was in the early '70s--Ken Kesey, my daughter Holly and I were visiting William Burroughs in New York. He lived in this huge loft, with a great many cardboard boxes and one cat, and he was wearing a suit and tie with high-top red sneakers.
We decided to visit Ginsberg in the hospital. He'd had a stroke, and part of his face was paralyzed. He was in bed, and I introduced him to Holly, and he graciously struggled to sit up and shake hands with her, but he was weak and deep in some kind of medication. A little later--in psychiatry this is called a "primary process"--he blurted out, "Henry Kissinger should have his head chopped off!" It was a pure case of Ginsbergian Tourettes' Syndrome.
Subsequently, Kesey would reminisce, "I was at a party one time, when I first knew Ginsberg, and he was standing by himself over by the fireplace, with a wine glass in his hand, and people millling around, and finally some young girl sort of broke off from the rest of the crowd and approached him and said, 'I can't talk to you--you're a legend.' And he said, 'Yes, but I'm a friendly legend.'"
-- From HuffingtonPost.com
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2006 THE RESULTS ARE IN Skypilotclub has overwhelmingly swept away the opposing parties and has the house all to itself. From the first note of reveille, let the revelry begin. Time enough tomorrow to undertake the sobering problems which lie ahead. Lie being the operative word. Like, we will no longer take their lies lying down or, as Cleopatra said to Antony, "I am not prone to argue." No," he said, "you are supine." Thus proving again, in the grand game of semantics we skypilots are no slouches. No, we stand up, stand straight, stand tall, stand for universal literarcy, universal equality and as much fairness as the budget can afford. Or, as the Grand Wizardry wryly put it, "Pipe that in your put and smoke it."
Exactly what is on the agenda? The firewood is in. The leaky roof has been adequately repaired, a mere dribble or two here and there after yesterday's raging rainstorm. Thus secure, there is no longer any excuse for the ol' Kapn not to finish the longest running novel re-write in the marathon history of the American novel. Add to that the ongoing CD and DVD creations and you have a full-fledged three-pronged attack on insiped thumb chewing and wastrel TV watching: print, audio and visual skypilot flights into the fancy and the ordinary.
Or, as a skypilot recently wrote: "there are really no limits to the heights which a skypilot can go.. whether it be the heights of love, something a skypilot can all encompass... thanks to our Captain that is... and the heights of reality we have all but surpassed.. with proper care a skypilot knows no bounds..."
To which another skypilot astutely replied, "Except for the bounds of decency."
-- Kapn Ken
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2006 MILKWEED PODS Skypilot G.J. in the Boston area sent me some milkweed pods. Here's the lowdown:
Capn:
Milkweed has all but been eradicated either naturally or by man north of California on the west coast. This is unfortunate in that the migration of the Monarch butterfly depends on the milkweed plant, a symbiotic relationship betwen plant and butterfly. The Monarch flutters its way from high in the North American continent to a brief stay in Mexico.
These milkweed pods are of the variety found all across the eastern U.S. in any farm field, vacant lot or roadside plot. The sap of the plant is a topical treatment for skeeter bites, bee stings and poison ivy. In the fall, the pods appear. There are umpteen varieties of milkweed, and this variety is not native to the west. This one is, I believe, called "syrica" and is the most pervasive of all the varieties.
As far as populating your part of the west with these pods (you can check with the Oregon Milkweed Project), they shouldn't throw the local ecosystem out of whack. If small kids are around, let them break open the pods and set the wisps free on a breezy day. Next step, alert the Monarchs. A child's whisper upon setting free the whirlybird wisps is rumored to do the trick.
Skypilot Greg in Shanghai reports
he is no longer able to access the skypilotclub website. Can
it be that we are too counter-revolutionary, capitalistic pigs
flaunting our affluent lifestyles and day-glo mohawk hair do's
or don'ts for them to accept, plus the danger of corruping the
masses, all by the billions? Greg writes:
I told him, seemed to me it was around '67, the summer
of love. He thought it was late '66, and the first time he saw
the word was in an issue of Evergreen Review.
On the east coast of the U.S., in Greenwich Village,
young counterculture advocates were called, and referred to themselves
as, hips. At that time, to be hip meant to be "in the know"
or "cool", as opposed to being called a stodgy "square".
Disaffected youth from the suburbs of New York City flocked to
the Village in their oldest clothes to fit into the counterculture
movement, the coffee houses, the streets. Radio station WBAI
was the first media outlet to use the term hippie as a pejorative
term originally meaning "hip wannabes", to describe
these poorly-dressed middle class youths.
September 5, 1965 marked the first San Francisco newspaper
story where hippie appeared in print. Michael Fallon wrote an
article about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse entitled "A New
Haven for Beatniks," and he used the term hippie to refer
to younger bohemians. The name did not catch on in the mass media
until almost two years later after San Francisco Chronicle columnist
Herb Caen began using the term hippies in his daily columns.
I have old radio shows from 1958 Jean Shepherd (outta
New York) where he continually refers to the 'Greenwich Village'
scene as 'hippies.' He doesn't seem to use it as a negative or
positive, just uses it.
