Established by James East in the 1950s, Burgess Hill School (aka the Beat School) in Hertfordshire, England, allowed its pupils to do what they wanted, in the belief this was the best way for youngsters to learn. Rules were frowned upon, and “Tradition,” it was claimed, “was clinging to the dead past.” Even smoking in class was tolerated, for as Headmaster East explained to Time Magazine in 1962:
“Kids always smoke, and I’d rather know about it than have it done in secret.”
Such openness encouraged the young uns to fulfill their potential, and find happiness in doing so, which is how it should be.
Like the best of the British Pathe clips, this short clip on Burgess Hill Beat School leaves you wanting to know more. What happened to the school? Did the experiment of a Beat School work? What did these children grow up to do? Where are they now? It would make for an interesting documentary on BBC 4, and one hopes a dozen researchers are penning such a proposal right now.
Original Beats is a short documentary film by Francois Bernadi on Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke.
Huncke was the original Beat. He coined the term, lived the life and was on the road long before Kerouac. Here he talks about his life as petty criminal, drug user and Beat writer.
Corso believed the poet and his life are inseparable. It was a belief he held true, otherwise the poet couldn’t write like a lion, write truthfully.
This is a fascinating and informative portrait on the eldest and the youngest of the original Beats, filmed shortly before Huncke’s death in 1996.
Those with an interest in writers following on from the Beat tradition may like Spencer Kansa‘s first novel Zoning. The story is about zoning - traveling without moving - and the strange interactions between teenage occultist, Astral Boy and Skyrise Kid, a young budding porn star. We’re in familiar territory here, and Kansa is a fan of William Burroughs, who said of Spencer’s book:
“Zoning reads like an urban Celine.”
It’s the first imprint from Beatdom Books, a small independent publisher, set up by a young Scot, David S Wills, in 2007. Willis also publishes a non-profit literary journal dedicated to the study of the Beat Generation, publishing Beat inspired poetry and prose. He has also issued Beatdom’s second book The Dog Farm - based on Wills’ experiences of living and working in South Korea.
Beatdom is well worth checking out and you can find details of Spencer’s novel Zoning and Willis’s The Dog Farmhere.
Happy Birthday William Burroughs, born today in 1914, one of the most “culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century.”
Here’s Burroughs in the “informal documentary” The Commissioner of Sewers from 1991, where he discusses his writing, his life, his thoughts on art, literature, and the use of language as a weapon, his world view, as well as space and time travel, mummification, and politics.
Lee Harris is a playwright, poet, publisher and “foot soldier” of the UK’s counter culture. Born in Johannesburg in 1936, Harris was one of the few whites on the African National Congress, opposing segregation during the time of Apartheid, and was involved with the Congress of the People rally in Soweto in 1955.
Harris arrived in the UK in 1956, to study drama, after college, he had a small part in Orson Welles’ film Chimes at Midnight and later worked in theater.
A major turning point for Harris came on the 11 June 1965, when he first heard Allen Ginsberg at the decade defining International Poetry Reading at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
We turned up in our thousands to hear some of the best poets of the Beat Generation. When Allen Ginsberg stood up to read his poems you could feel an electric charge in the air. There he was, like an Old Testament prophet, with his long dark hair and bushy beard, his voice reverberating with emotional intensity. Never before in that hallowed hall had such outrageous and colorful language been heard…..Hearing Allen that first time was a revelatory and illuminating experience.
That event and his presence in London that summer, helped kindle the spark that set the underground movement alight in the mid-sixties.
Harris began to write plays with Buzz Buzz and then wrote the critically acclaimed Love Play, which was performed at the Arts Lab in 1967 - a highly important venue for alternative arts, founded by Jim Haynes, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono exhibited and David Bowie performed. It was during this time Harris became acquainted with William Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Ken Kesey and toured with The Fugs.
Harris wrote for the International Times and in 1972 established the first “head shop” Alchemy in London on the Portobello Road, where he sold “paraphenalia” brought back from India and counter culture books.
“I’d started off in the West End before as an anarchist trader selling psychedelic posters in the late sixties you see because I did not know how to make a living. I ended up in the Portobello Road, making chokers, selling chillums, first because that was the in thing with beads.
I had traded at many festivals so it was natural for me and I started to be a sort of medicine head, with Tiger Balm, Herbs and I believed in cannabis as the ‘healing herb’.
It was here that Harris was famously prosecuted for selling cigarette papers. The shop was a focus for alternative culture, and it was here Harris began publishing underground ‘zines, including Jim Haynes, infamous drug-smuggler Howard Marks, and artist, journalist and activist Caroline Coon.
Part two of ‘Life and Works of Lee Harris’ plus bonus Lee Harris and the Beat Hotel, after the jump…
My college friend Alex Marshall surfaced this excellent montage (done apparently by a filmmaker named Azure Pepe Valencia) of Ginsberg’s classic 1956 poem to the country, the ideal, the situation. Hurrah for independence!
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the passing of poet Lenore Kandel, a SF beat and anarchist who provoked censorship furor with her graphic poetry compilation The Love Book:
Lenore Kandel hung out with Beat poets and was immortalized by Jack Kerouac, wrote a book of love poetry banned as obscene and seized by police, and believed in communal living, anarchic street theater, belly dancing, and all things beautiful.
Ms. Kandel, a lyric poet and one of the shining lights of San Francisco’s famous counterculture of the ‘60s, died on Oct. 18 in San Francisco. She was 77 and had been diagnosed with lung cancer two weeks earlier.
“I met Lenore in 1965 at a citywide meeting of artists opposed to the war in Vietnam,” said actor Peter Coyote. “Lenore was physically beautiful and physically commanding. She had this voluptuous plumpness about her and an absolute serenity.”
: