Who Sent the Private Investigator To Check Us Out??? Where Is Old Snarly?

Gentle Readers,

This message is not really for you.

We are dropping the editorial ‘us’ in parts to make it less confusing. We think Cynthia Oldsnarly may have sent them.

On Friday, a private investigator named Kellie showed up at our Motel. She checked in with no luggage or purse, wearing a short-ish white dress and stylish hair and nails.
She came out of the front desk office and wandered the parkinglot aimlessly for an hour and then went to her room, near mine, when I came out on the balcony to see which room the possible hooker was going to visit.
As it turns she kept obviously spying on me, looking through the open spaces of a luggage rack on a car parked between us.
So, I decided to STARE at her to let her know she was not un-noticed. This prompted her to come over and up the steps to the balcony, where we sat drinking and chatting…about me…all about me…she said she would be gone in the morning and i watched her leave on foot, no luggage or purse, just a copy of Beatdom we gave her to read…

She kept me up talking about myself until 3am. We did not talk adult topics or any such shit…so why do people spy? why do they lie? why do they not be real in 2014????

funny thing is…we hide nothing, as all you kind readers know…and any import given to us is undeserved, since we are morons.

best from the staff!

*tis is a free blog…if you see typos, live with it or contact us about our exclusive paid blog!!!!!

So Where Do People Actually Read This Crap??????

Gentle Readers,

We certainly appreciate your patronage!
We find it gratifying to reach so many places around the world. If you wonder where people read this drivel, er, wonderful blog, then here is a list of countries that your fellow readers have checked in from.
No matter where they are in the world, they are still stuck on one tiny screen…are we all? We shouldn’t even question it, since it brings us traffic…ha…but it is the magnificently humble nature of us to be amazed that you all took the time to look…
and Thanks!
In order of readership, here where others are suffering through this along with you!

United States
United Kingdom
Canada
Australia
Germany
France
India
Brazil
Netherlands
Singapore
Ireland
New Zealand
Italy
Pakistan
Taiwan
Philippines
Norway
Japan
Switzerland
Sweden
Belgium
Cambodia
Spain
Denmark
Hong Kong
Thailand
Mexico
Portugal
Iraq
Turkey
Hungary
Poland
Republic of Korea
Bahrain
Jordan
Yemen
Indonesia
Croatia
Romania
Puerto Rico
Bulgaria
Bangladesh
Czech Republic
Ecuador
Egypt
Finland
United Arab Emirates
Chile
Israel
Viet Nam
New Caledonia
Lebanon
Venezuela
Russian Federation
Slovenia
Myanmar
Estonia
Jersey
Argentina
Ghana
Namibia
Saudi Arabia
Austria
South Africa
Uruguay
Afghanistan

Attention Spiritual Followers!

Enlightened Readers,

At this juncture in our…kaf…Voyage to Namaste’-Land we hereby adopt the Spirit name Wind Walker based on our expulsion of air, miles traveled, comparative idiotic names, as well as other considerations too lengthy to be spelled out in this Proclamation.

Should any of you naysayers and faithless souls think this is all some off the cuff joke, you are absolutely right. We would never change our name. It is a badge of honor to wear your name. If you faced adversity with your given name and overcame it, then exhault in it. Black Americans who threw off slave names to return to the tribal name, as well as Natives anywhere – that is a whole other story.
This relates to Post New Age Pseudo-Hippie Schizzo-delic Wack-Job (PNAPSW) names only.

So should you address us in the Spiritual, and request our kind assistance, use a first and last name or to Hell with Spirituality.

Obstreperously Yours,
Your Constant Advisors in this Blog,
Your Soul’s Key To Your Own Salvation,
Your Credit Card Number please.

Best,

Wind

Walker

“…and Ten Grams of Krassner LOL, Please.”

Learned Readers,

We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Paul Krassner for the next edition of Beatdom. Mr. Krassner is known and unknown for many things. He founded The Realist, co-founded the Yippies, worked closely with Lenny Bruce, gave Groucho Marx his first hit of LSD, hung with the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey, uncovered presidential neckrophilia, tested a new batch of acid for the Mafia, played violin onstage at Carnegie Hall at age six, and  a lot of other stuff we are saving for the Summer issue of Beatdom.

Mr. Krassner has written fourteen books so far and is also working on a novel and one on the MK ULTRA program, which all you readers should know about by now.  While running The Realist, he also wrote/edited for such prestigious publications as MAD, Playboy, Hustler, Rolling Stone, Spin, The Nation, National Lampoon and so many other places that unless you lived under a rock for the past half a century, he got into your heads.

Allow us to illustrate: recently we spoke with Kitty Bruce regarding her father, Lenny. She was on crutches and said it reminded her of the time when Lenny was on crutches. He had fallen out of a window while trying LSD and shouted something both prescient and amusing as he fell. We told her what he said and she laughed at the story. We told it to her before and she asked me where we heard it. We said that we were not sure but would find out. Looking through our books on Lenny, we couldn’t find it, many books still being packed from the move west. Somehow, we were sure of the line but still questioned  the veracity.

In the meantime, we bought a copy of Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut by Paul Krassner in preparation for the interview. Flipping through it…voila!…there was the story about the fall from the window. To find out, get the book. The ISBN is 9781593765033. The point here is that we carried that anecdote around for years, maybe forty-some years. How did it get into out brains in the first place? It started with him typing it and ended up with who knows how many of us retaining it. That is influence.

We often take off on tangents about how things should be and we think a man like Paul Krassner needs to be immortalized in some way.  Considering his achievements, as well as his personal preferences, we thought the most appropriate way to honor him is to create a new hybrid of medical marijuana/recreational marijuana in his name. It is something he enjoys. If it were not for people like him, we would not even be allowed to talk about getting it legalized. It used to be a crime to talk about it in public, as a young Allen Ginsberg (we think it was) found out.

Going around the country we saw a bunch of jam bands out there and we see a lot of young people here on the coast. One thing we saw at both places was lots of pride in the production of quality medical marijuana and its oils and elixers and tinctures. It is nice to see somebody who is proud of their work and that seems common in the pot industry.

All that said, to all you growers out there who are into producing the hybrids, please develop a hybrid for Paul. He doubts that you can do it, so please take this seriously. With the way business and competition is going here, it would put you on the map to come up with the chosen bud for KRASSNER LOL. If you do it, you will have it publicized nationally, probably by actual news stories, since he IS a public figure. What could be better for business than an exclusive product?

When asked what type of bud it should be, he became more specific. We will be publishing his exact words so we will not print them here…except to say, most importantly, that the strain should not be something to put you to sleep, it should make you laugh. Laughter is the most healthy thing we can do, he says, and that is his reasoning. It is scientific fact, so who can argue?

We found Laughing Buddha on one of the pot sites and that may be a step in the right direction. Look at this list below. This is what somebody put on their ad on Craigslist to get attention. There are a lot of names left out but a new name would Google up faster, we bet…a name like Krassner LOL.

Green crack, snoops cut blue dream, girl scout cookies, afoogey, green crack, permafrost, mmj, marijuana, doctors, recommendations, weed, pot, Maryjane, caregiver, medical marijuana, hash, hash oil, edibles, ISO hash oil, dispensaries, medicinal marijuana, medical marijuana doctor, medical cannabis, buy weed, legalized marijuana, legal marijuana dispensaries, medicinal dispensary, medicinal dispensaries, pot, medical marijuana, weed, 420, buds, joint, kgb, mary jane

More soon…

buy the book at www.paulkrassner.com

This is a free blog so ignore any typos which appear.

2014, A Good Year To Not Be Fooled Again!

Gentle Readers, we wish you the Happiest of New Years.
The holidays are behind us now and it is time to get behind the mule again.
While we are swiping phrases here, we may as well bid 2013 to kiss it’s blistered balls goodbye. We did manage to find our way west over some rough road but landed on our feet in Washington.
Now we get to work. Do something for the community and become part of it. if that doesn’t work out there is plenty of room here to start new types of community. In fact, there is a new networking going on and it is stimulated by the recent legislation making pot legal here. This is one of the few places where you can still get in on something new. It makes the American dream possible again, really.
This is closest we managed to come to ‘the sky is the limit’ since maybe the sixties. Our younger friends show signs of optimism returning.
Forget the Phish concert in NYC last night where at least 228 people were arrested, according to the New York Times, mostly for drug possession, drugs being ‘marijuana, hash, psychedelic mushrooms, LSD, MDMA or ecstasy, amphetamine and prescription drugs like Oxycodone, OxyContin and Xanax, among other drugs.’ Funny, no beer?
Here is a NY Times photo of the event…

But that was last year. Police in Virginia are quoted as ‘eagerly awaiting’ the arrival of the band’s tour.
There is money in drugs, one way or the other. About 70 people were arrested at a total of five Phish shows in NY/NJ over the past year or so. Cops at Madison Square Garden more than tripled that number last night. That is a lot of $$$ in fines and also a number of people with lost privileges, depending on severity of the charges. A felony takes away your voice at the voting booth and creates other irritating humiliations if you live in society.
We hope it’s not a trend but it IS something we should all keep our eyes on.

Also, a good thing that happened in 2013 was a concert Friday night, performed by Patti Smith, also in NY. You can find the whole show posted on http://www.expectingrain.com courtesy of a blogger there.
Patti is always a hero to us. She gave us a nice interview for Beatdom Issue Twelve and the other night she gave some sage advice on the year ahead. In light of our own past year, we found it especially pertinent and thought we should share. Patti always pegs it. Between songs the other night, she said…

“I think we need for 2013, god bless it, to come to a close. I found that…it was a bit of a rough year, a bit of a challenging year, but I think that 2014 is gonna be…this is what I think for 2014…first of all I think it might be an economically rough year but I think for us, the People, We, Us…we will find our own world because the world around is so fucked and it’s so corrupt and it’s so full of shit that we all have to say, is “Okay, you do your thing. I’m doing mine.”
We’re gonna get healthy.
We’re gonna get strong.
We’re gonna get aware.
We’re gonna work on our ideas.
We’re just going to do our fucking thing.
(sings), it’s your thing, do what you want to do.
That sounds really wise. I can just hear people going, ‘she said, ‘do your thing. Hahaha. How wise.” Well think about it…DO YOUR THING…”

So…like she says.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(this is a free blog so do not sweat the typos…)

Whatever Happened To This Blog?

Gentle Readers, for months, perhaps a year, we have been putting you off and have let this once-heralded blog slip into near obscurity. Today, we return and not only that – we return with our original name.
We remain uncertain as to whether we were trying to protect ourselves or trying to get laid when we changed the words ‘substance abuse’ to ‘substantial abuse’.
Too much information on one’s pattern of substance abuse can put low on the list for certain social invites. The fact remains that, as a result of being fed beer regularly as a baby (imagine yourself sucking from a beer bottle as tall as yourself…but just on weekends…), the editorial we naturally became alcoholic. We missed out on all the fun of gateway drugs – ha, ha, as if such a thing exists. We are not Hippies because we were born too late but we did manage to ingest LSD in every decade since the seventies, inclusive, and still keep the old neuro-plasticity working well enough to keep your attention!

We thank all the people who kept reading old entries of the blog while we were out of action.

We also thank Paul Krassner – for inspiration. We contacted him regarding some Beatdom business. Although he influenced us greatly over the years, from MAD to High Times magazines, we felt a pang of guilt when viewing his bibliography. He never shies away from a topic. He is fearless. He wrote a lot about drugs and put them in the titles of his books. He has integrity. We were afraid we would never be able to get laid if we had to explain our substance abuse issues…a pretty lame excuse, looking back.
Mr. Krassner helped change the course of American history to a degree. His activities during the sixties – his outspokenness, sense of humor and respect for Truth – allowed many others to open up with their personal views. Somebody always has to break the ice in a repressive situation and he melted minds. Conversely, The Realist allowed so-called ‘broken minds’ to melt the ice of the oppression of the time through humor. We remember how you Dear Readers love illustrations, so here is the book to look for……if you do not buy it and read it, you will not know what we are writing about when we refer to it in future important dispatches.
Anyway, there is a lot to learn about him and we encourage you all to pick up copies of his books. The best place to find them is on his website, http://www.paulkrassner.com

So, with all that being said, we shall now resume the blog as it ran a few years ago, three to four times a week. We will try to be more politically-minded and will try to be less silly. Things have gotten a lot more serious since we reported Governor Christie getting stuck in his gubernatorial bathtub and being pried out with two boat oars and a handy few pounds of butter from the larder….ah…”larder”… We thank the Gov for allowing us to resurrect an old word! May we gain from his girth.
Another reason for our return lies in the excitement we feel as we explore new lands. Native to New York, we left the east coast and drove west this past summer. After a lifetime in the Eastern Standard Zone except for vacations and other excursions, we find great novelty here in the State of Washington. We knew the diversity of topography to be extreme but the last thing we expected was to wind up stuck in a desert, much less the scablands. Everybody said it rains all the time here.
Not so.
We never experienced such pesky sunshine in all our days. Sun, sun, sun…nothing but sun, all summer. Like Bob Dylan asks a recent LP, “Don’t you know the sun can burn your brains right out?” Speaking of Dylan, we can’t help but compare the area to the locale depicted in the film Masked and Anonymous. With all the Native Americans, Mexicans, sand and abandoned junk cars, the resemblance strikes us as uncanny. In fact some areas here are so bleak as to resemble Afghan mountain ranges; so much so that troops bound for that bloodbath got used to the elements by training near here.
Fall arrived and clouds followed and as the sky got darker, things got brighter. We love rain! The first good rain to come in brought our first dust storm along with it. A fantastic sight! A cool thing to view from the safe confines of a car with rolled-up windows.
There is so much here to discover in Washington, we didn’t know where to start so food is never a bad idea. Crossing the US, we noticed portions of food increasing in size as we pushed westward. True, we settled for road food but it actually tasted good and we had to start comparing fast foods, just to see the cultural anomoly we are faced with.
It started at the ‘Steak’N’Shake’ somewhere in Michigan. Years passed since the last fast food burger touched my lips. It came down to ‘eat or starve’ so we went with Steak’N’Shake. It was amazing! The first thing that freaked us out was the whipped cream and cherry on the milkshake…we remembered that from soda fountains in the distant past. When we opened up the burgers, a cornucopia of veggies stuck out from the bun. While we chose our move to a liberal land where pot is legal, as is same-sex marriage and assisted suicide, liberal portions never occurred to us.
So amazed were we, that to push the idea to the limit, we tried a McDonalds…we must report that our two kitties, along for the trip, actually ate some of the ‘meat’. We tried the same thing in Pennsylvania and they shunned it. Finally, even McDonalds had a cherry on top of the shake.
Now here is the rub.

It is sort of like Lenny Bruce’s ‘Jew vs Goy’ bit…only it seems like Lenny was wrong on that one. He said anybody who lives in New York is jewish, whether they are goyim or not. While admittedly goy to the catholic degree at childhood, we can’t help but feel that the whole northeast seaboard, as well as points as far west as Chicago, create the true demarcation.
Try to find some real foods, foods we grew up with and now we seem to have entered a weird zone of culinary depravity. Perhaps being in the east, where European immigrants first landed, exposed us to a variety of victuals. Ethnic foods spread out from immigrant neighborhoods as they became popular with other cultures.
Brie, capers, anchovies, hummus, halvah, Finlandia or Jarlsburg brand swiss or Parmigiano-Reggiano, olive oil from Italy, couscous…mention these items and prepare to be met with a blank stare. Other seemingly unbotchable staples – pizza and bagels, for instance – get ‘the treatment’. To find a simple slice of pizza (crust, sauce, cheese and spices) the closest option is to send out for a Papa John or Domino imitation pie and cut it in the shape of a slice…or make your own. The concept of an italian pizza shop where you can walk in and buy a slice is exactly that, here on the eastern part of the state, a concept. It is an idea that does not exist. Maybe you can get it in Seattle but we have not gotten that far yet.
Forget bagel shops…but the street tacos rule!
We admit to enjoying a bagel at the most fabulous hotel we could find this side of the Cascades, The Davenport Hotel in Spokane. Here, birthplace of Crab Louis (after Louis Davenport), they referred to the smoked salmon as lox and knew well enough to put capers on the plate. For as many salmon as swim through here every year, we expected that most people would be familiar with lox. Maybe they are better off. I did see a number of big fish float belly up in the Columbia River just around migration time, when the state warned residents not to eat the local fish due to dangerous levels of pollutants in the filets.
Hordes of homeless tweakers who live under bridges and eat these fish since a little added protein never hurts a meth binge, are likely unaware of these warnings. A lot of homeless drifters hang here, though, so that makes us feel welcome. Hitch-hikers spot the roads, too. We hadn’t seen one since 2003 in Ireland. No wonder the serial killers like it here.
There is so much to say, so much to compare, so much to type that we will hold it for another day, tomorrow maybe…
~

Sorry for not really promoting the substance abuse this time. We did drink beer while driving across most of the states, though. We shall make up for this in due time.
Thanks all, for coming back to read this blog, and it feels good to be back!

Egypt Cemetery by Michael Hendrick

 Dearest Readers,

It seems like all we do on this page anymore is to apologize for not keeping up to date and blogging as usual, like last year. We have even gotten a warning from Amazon.com that if we do not post another blog, we shall no longer be published on the Kindle page there, so let us explain.

The novel, Egypt Cemetery, is a trip through the childhood of Michael Hendricks (yes, Hendricks), as seen by the author, as far back into the 1950s as he can recollect and taking him up to the sad year of 1971, by which time JFK, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, along with the ‘hippie scene,’ were all dead.

It is a story, it is a purging of the soul, it is what kids did back when kids were allowed to be kids and grown-ups were still allowed to yell at strange kids whenever they saw them up to something wrong.

Today, if you yell at a strange kid for riding his bike into traffic and nearly killing himself without realizing it, it is as good as starting a Third World War. Parents do not care if the kids are safe. They just do not want you to yell at them.

When we were kids, we got yelled at everyplace we went. Sometimes we got chased. Somebody was always after us, one way or the other. We did other things back then, besides get yelled at, that the youth of today will never have the opportunity to experience…like making crank phone calls. The closest you can get to that today is watching Bart Simpson make a fool out of Moe over the phone at Moe’s Bar on The Simpsons.

Nobody asks if you have Prince Albert in a can anymore, of if your refrigerator is running. All the fun has been stymied in the wake of caller ID. There is no more fun anonymity. There is no more good music on the AM radio. Monsters are no longer scary.

Today, a big issue is bullying. When we were kids, it was a free for all, as to who could heap the worst insult onto the next kid. If you got insulted, you shot back. We actually used to purchase ‘insult cards’ at the price of 25 insults for a dime. They were the size of business cards and said things like, “Get rid of 20 pounds of ugly fat…cut off your head!”…of “Its nice to see your back…especially after seeing your face.”

There was a whole industry devoted to helping us insult each other. Another good one was to take the theme song from a currently-popular television show and insert the name of your victim into it, while adding assorted rhyming jibes to the tune of the ditty. Or take the case of the poor unfortunates who were marked from the start just by the spelling of their last names…like Randy Nipples, who was doomed to a life of saying, “It is ‘Nip-PELS!” Sure we had our fun with his name but we played together, too.

The message is that childhood has changed. It is not as much fun…or it does not look it, anyway. In many ways, we are glad to be considered ‘old’, since the new world is not as much fun as the old one. In Egypt Cemetery, the author tries to present those innocent days of youth, before everything had a double meaning and things were what they appeared to be. It is not exotic, it is not earth shattering, it is not politically correct…it is the way it was before the internet robbed us of everything from regional dialects to colloquialisms to regional pride. We are all one big country now. We are all starting to sound the same. In the sixties, you could tell where a person came from as soon as they spoke. Not any more…even the charming and warm southern accent is fading, and that is a shame.

The cemetery pictured above is actually the cover photo for the book, taken by the author in County Tipperary, Ireland. His love of cemeteries began at with the Egypt Cemetery in Podunk, Pennsylvania.

Mr. Hendrick is an integral part of the writing staff here at CFYSA and we look forward to his return in July, or maybe even in June, once he has finished all the editing and writing of the novel. If you are hungry for some new work from him, you can get a copy of Beatdom Issue 11 ~ The Nature Issue. You can enjoy the front cover he conceived of Arthur Rimbaud (painstakingly drawn by the back-from-the-dead fingers of illustrator Waylon Bacon) or look at the tables of contents, which he photographed at two places which are very dear to him, his local library and the raptor sanctuary, where he has been a volunteer for fourteen years.

On the back cover, you can see the cover of Egypt Cemetery, as it will be published, and inside you can read interviews he conducted with Beat writer Ann Charters, country music legend Hank3 and punk rocker Richie Ramone, who was the fastest drummer in the fastest of the original punk bands. He also recently conducted an interview with punk icon Patti Smith, which will appear in Issue Number Twelve of Beatdom…The Crime Issue. Part of that interview is posted on www.beatdom.com .

So hold onto your hats and the fun will begin again soon enough. We just need Michael here to inspire us with some of his insane views that somehow seem to make sense in an insane world. He is almost done with the hard work and misses his readers very much.

He says we should say, “Hello!”

Bob Dylan, Sony and the Supper Club- Set Your Chickens Free!!!!

Dearest Readers,

We crawl out of our hole to post again, it being closer to Spring and we having things on our mind.

Thank you for your repeated visits over the past months and keeping this blog going with your reading. We have been involved in setting up a new online book and vinyl shop, called The Used Beat Book Shop and it is online at http://www.usedbeatshop.com , although it is still under construction in the capable hands of the folks at SONA (not Sony) Entertainment.

You can click on the url to see about that one…but today we want to chat about chicks…chickens, that is and why they should be set free. It is all allegorical and not a reality, as it would appear in real life as shown in the cartoon here by Gilbert Shelton, writer and artist of such wonderful comix as The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and his work in Zap, Rip-Off and other higher-grade underground comix. They are, ahem, available at The Used Beat Book Shop and will be online with prices attached one day very soon. Keep looking!

Anyway, Bob Dylan and Sony have chickens they ought to release in the form of the Supper Club tapes, two nights of live performances in the NYC venue by Dylan in November 1993. These are excellent performances of many songs which have become staples to Dylan fans and have never been heard in live or alternate takes. In some cases these live versions are more touching than the originally-released recordings.

Many of them have been popping up on Youtube and then taken down by the record company after a few days. It would be nice to have a copy of the songs on a cd, perhaps as the next volume in the official Bootleg Series, but fact is the performances were professionally filmed and recorded and would be a wonderful treat for fans around the world!

To this end, a Facebook group has formed to push a petition, the page is called Petition To Convince Sony & Bob Dylan to Release the Supper Club Tapes. It is gaining ground with more people signing the petition every day. They need you to sign. You need to sign, if you would like to have these great performances available to you and not ‘here today and yanked from the web tomorrow’, as has been happening with them.

A lot of excellent songs and new versions of the standards are found here, like Tight Connection To My Heart, Ring Them Bells, Jack-A-Roe, Ragged and Dirty, Blood In My Eyes and others.

It does not take much to sign the petition, just go to FaceBook and copy the name of the group from this blog onto the search bar and, Hey! Presto!, there it is. It is that easy, so please do it and we can all have these to play in our cars or watch on our screens at some time in the near future.

Again, we thank you for supporting this blog. We thank you for checking in every day, all those of you who know who you are, whether for kind or nefarious purposes – we welcome you all!

The Used Beat Book Shop will be up and running soon…we have so much inventory it is a monumental task just to scan it all and figure the proper price. You can sell stuff there, too, and if you look at the site you will notice that details about that are shown near the bottom of the page. There will be no fee or charges. It is a community service to an underground community. www.usedbeatshop.com

In the meantime, we are plugging away on the next issue of Beatdom. This issue, your humble narrator has managed to get interviews with Ann Charters, noted Beat Historian, and Hank3, the grandson of Hank Williams (arguably the father of country music and, according to Hank3, maybe the father of rock and roll). For details on that, see www.beatdom.com

Allow us to entertain you with one of the songs from the Supper Club tapes. This is a great version of Tight Connection To My Heart, a song that a lot of people write off but which is a favorite of true Dylan fans around the world.

Oh, and another reason we have been so scarce is that we are hard at work on our novel, Egypt Cemetery, which will be  released by Beatdom Books in Spring, so please keep your eyes open for that, too! Once that is done, we will show some excerpts and get back to more regular blogging…we have just had SO much work to do that we are happy to have busy hands but we can only write so much and the blog takes a lot of energy, since it is so damned good!

Repost From Beatdom Regarding Kitty Bruce on Lenny

 

Gentle Readers,

We have been busy and posting on the Beatdom site. We thought we should share this!

 

Posted by michaelhendrick in Beat News on December 8, 2011 4:10 pm / no comments

In November, Kitty Bruce, daughter and only survivor of comedy icon/legend Lenny Bruce, was gracious enough to talk to Beatdom about her father’s distain for organized religion, as evidenced in a number of his comedy routines, life at home and Lenny’s House, the twelve step rehab for women in NorthEast Pennsylvania which she started in memory of her father. Kitty tells us about her father’s, and her own, childhood in the new Beatdom Issue 10, The Religion Issue, on sale soon.

Was Lenny a Beat?

He was called that by police and press. Allen Ginsberg organized the “Emergency Committee Against the Harrassment of Lenny Bruce” during the 1964 Cafe Au Go Go trial in New York City. Queried on the connection between Lenny and the Beats, Kitty said, ”I’m very familiar with Allen, I knew Allen…if the question is, did my father sit around coffee houses and snap his fingers?…probably…haha..”

Many reached out to help Lenny when the law was out to kill him (Vincent Cuccia, one of the New York D.A.’s who prosecuted Bruce’s last obscenity case, said, “We drove him into poverty and bankruptcy and then murdered him. We all knew what we were doing. We used the law to kill him.”) and Kitty reaches back out to help women by providing a safe, sober and nurturing environment , providing support, education and other tools necessary to stay clean and sober.

 You can honor the memory of Lenny Bruce by donating to The Lenny Bruce Memorial Foundation, PO Box 1089, Pittston, PA 18640. Many of Lenny’s prized possessions and memorabilia are up for sale, for those who would like to help Lenny’s House and also own a priceless item such as the typewriter Lenny used or his famously-photographed trenchcoat! Send inquiries to the address above.

Beatdom Issue 10, The Religion Issue, is coming your way in a few days. Read what Kitty Bruce has to say, along with many other fascinating writers and great work by our excellent artists!!!

Beatdom is available at http://www.beatdom.com and http://www.amazon.com and http://www.kindle.com and www.usedbeatshop.com

Some Good Reasons To Buy Beatdom Issue 9

Cats and Kittens, Cherished Readers,

Open minds that have no leaders,

We return to you today after quite a long break in the action, although we see you have been reading daily and we appreciate the patronage!

Our disappearance was caused due to the fact that Your Humble Narrator is now Co-Publisher of Beatdom Books and we published our first two exciting volumes in the month of July…Beatdom Issue Nine and Zoning by Spencer Kansa, which we shall tell you about in the next blog.

     So why buy the new Beatdom? Ten dollars…one dollar per reason…as we have changed the format to that of a more traditional literary journal and also have gone to black and white, save for the excellent cover illustration by R.H.Harper, an excellent Philadelphia artist.

     First and foremost, you will find a lot of great writing from our regular crew of writers, as well as some new faces. We have new, yes NEW, photos of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Norman Mailer which have never been published before and were donated to us by the remarkable Jerry Aronson, whose DVD, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg is reviewed at length, as well as a review of the PBS Naked Lens film by filmmaker Yony Leyser,  William S. Burroughs: A Man Within. You can find reviews of both of them on this blog space if you use the search function but the review in Beatdom, with the photos from Jerry, make an exceptionally fine piece.

     The cover is so nice that you will be sure to look hip while reading it, so that is a reason in itself and it is a real conversation starter…just look at that cover…and there are numerous other great illustrations inside…you may ascertain from the cover that this is our ‘Drugs’ issue, so we have a number of articles with a droogy theme, as well as straight essays and poetry.

     …which brings us to yet another reason, which is the excellent fiction by Katy Gurin, Chuck Taylor and Dan Leo (as well as by Your Humble Narrator) and the accompanying illustrations and art by award-winning filmmaker Waylon Bacon and Haydn Lock.

     Then, we have the scholarly studies from around the world, like the essay on Hunter S. Thompson in Kentucky, by Rory Feehan in Ireland, and a detailed look at Mr. Burroughs’ forays into the jungles of South America in search of yage by Nick Meador and Geetanjali Joshi Mishra’s insightful look at Allen Ginsberg, From Ganja To God, about the late poet’s experiences with ganja in India, and a look at Burroughs’ groundbreaking work with yage by David S, Wills, our fearless leader.

     We have poetry smuggled out of the heart of a womens’ prison, poetry about addiction and poetry about supermarkets, plus more poetry, for the verse-lovers in the crowd.

     Another fine reason to buy this treasure-trove of Beat knowledge and enjoyable fiction and poetry, as we mentioned earlier, is that we have made it available at the ridiculously low price of $9.99 a copy, plus $2 for shipping…that is two dollars in America and two euros for international customers. Our first copy was sent to a reader in Australia…if you order quickly (www.beatdom.com) you may even get your copy before the first one hits the land down under.  We have squeezed the large, airplane-browsing-sized, full colour issues into a standard format literary journal, so it is easy to keep in pocket or purse. In fact, we dare you to find something better to read at that price and if you find something even half as hip, we want to know about it.

    This is actually an old reason, but Beatdom is the world’s most popular Beat-themed literary journal. We have readers on every continent except Antartica and we may open an office there just to stimulate sales…when we have the cash, that is…which may be a while since we only hope to break even on this endeavor…as has always been the case with Beatdom, all along…we are not here to get rich on your hard-earned book money. We are here to keep the Beat spirit alive and let you know what is happening in the world of Beatdom.

     This issue was printed and bound by the prestigious Sheridan Press. We chose them so that we could offer you the best in quality, not just in the writing and art but in the reproduction of such fine work. Sheridan is a venerable force in the publishing industry, printer of the best among literary journals…and that is why we chose them to bring you the finest Beatdom possible.

     It will not be online for immediate free download, like the older, more expensive issues were. It will be in the future – but at the moment, the only way to see it is to open a copy and start enjoying yourself. To older readers, consider this a literary take on ZAP Comix…great art, good messages and hip from beginning to end.

      Also, check out the cover illustration for David Wills’ upcoming (on Beatdom Books) novel The Dog Farm. You may have heard recent news about the glow-in-the-dark dogs which were created by those krazy koreans but Mr. Wills gives you a whole new view of South Korea.

    So what are you waiting for? You can buy it with check, money order or Paypal. Orders paid with check or money order will be shipped once funds have cleared, which is overnight in the day of instant wire transfer…so take a chance…don’t be a mooncalf, don’t be a fuddy duddy…get hip and get yourself a copy of Beatdom Issue Nine…it may sell out before you get the chance…