humanity of jackNothing happened to Jack Kerouac. He died like the rest of us eventually will. Jack Kerouac was a regular human being. Now you're problably saying "yea I already knew that, so what?". But what you problably didn't know is that Jack used literature to show how beautiful and ugly human beings can be. Kerouac was a man equally feminine as he was masculine (read Charter's biography about his relationships with Ginzy, N.C., as well as the women of his life.) All of this is touched on in the video documentary, which thrives off the somber emotion,and that sort of "grey sky comtemplation" of things, which seems to pervade all of Jack's work. The video moves through Jack's life in a fairly straightforward manner. We see him as a shy french speaking Mass. adolescent, a cleft chinned Columbia undergraduate, a rucksack wanderer,a chanting buddhist,an aloof catholic, who loved his mother and drank much too much Johnnie Walker. In "What happnened to...
THIS IS THE ONE - BY FAR, THE BEST KEROUAC DOCUMENTARYA near-perfect documentary on Kerouac, and the list of interviewees is...well, they are all here: Herbert Huncke,
William S Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1st wife Joyce Kerouac, daughter Jan Kerouac, Diane DiPalma, Carolyn Cassady, a short, but priceless b & w film clip of Neal Cassady at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in the 1960's, much of the William F Buckley interview with Jack from 1968, Kerouac reading from On the Road on the Steve Allen Show, many of Jack's tape-recorded poetry readings with appropriate vintage footage from San Francisco, Times Square NYC, Jack's hometown, Lowell,MA etc., and an insightful interview with Gregory Corso, who seemed to understand, and put into words better than anyone else, the essence of Kerouac.
MacAdams kindles Beat flameIn a subject where "expert" commentary frequently brings to mind overused, deflated balloons or some flaccid, rubbery French pastry, this film is a nonpareil. Amazingly, MacAdams has drilled into a motherlode of material elsewhere untapped; sources include the fiercely protected estate of Kerouac (evident through a rare, outstanding recording of Kerouac reading parts of Dr. Sax high on tea; Tulane historian Douglas Brinkley is now sifting through all of it), Ken Kesey's Merry Prankster footage (live reels of Cassady!), Kerouac's later, soused appearance on Buckley's "Firing Line," and interviews with central figures in Kerouac's life and in the Beat movement: John Clellon Holmes, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Carolyn Cassady, Herbert Huncke, Joyce Johnson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and (best of all) Gregory Corso (watch for the explanation of "the classy spirit"). The film is simply produced but marvelously filmed, with picturesque...
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