The ORIGINAL BEATS outtakes: HERBERT HUNCKE
Published on Mar 10, 2012
Never seen before outtakes from the film of Francois Bernadi
HERBERT HUNCKE AT THE CHELSEA HOTEL 1994
ana-christy#herbert_huncke#beatnikhiway.com#counterculture#junkie
Dec29
Tag Archives: HERBERT HUNCKE
Jun3
a bit of personal history about Dave Christy and my involvement in the small press
Dave and Ana Christy
Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
Doug Holder
This blog consists of reviews, interviews, news, etc…from the world of the Boston area small press/ poetry scene and beyond. Regular contributors are reviewers: Barbara Bialick, Lawrence Kessenich, Lo Galluccio, Zvi Sesling, Irene Koronas, Rene Schwiesow, Dennis Daly, and others. Founder Doug Holder: dougholder@post.harvard.edu. * B A S P P S is listed in the New Pages Index of Alternative Literary Blogs.
Home
About the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
Showing posts with label Dave Christy founder of the Alpha Beat Press Has Passed Away Doug Holder. Show all posts
Monday, February 08, 2010
Dave Christy founder of the Alpha Beat Press Has Passed Away…
I received notice that Dave Christy founder of the Alpha Beat Press has passed away. The press was very prolific and influential in the little magazine and chapbook scene in the 80’s and 90’s. I had my first chap published by Dave Christy: “Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From the Back Bay to the Back Ward” May he rest in peace.
From the website:
Alpha Beat Press has been publishing Beat Generation, post-Beat Independent and other modern writings since 1986. Alpha Beat Press had its beginnings in a Montreal flat with the idea of keeping the aesthetics and sensibilities of the Beat generation alive. Our first magazine, Alpha Beat Soup was unique, being the only small press magazine publishing original and current Beat writings. In our new magazine Bouillabaisse and in our other poetry publications we have continued in that tradition, publishing a wide variety of writers and styles, from Bukowski to the lesser known poets. Alpha Beat Press is certainly the best of the small press!
Past Contributors include: John Clellan Holmes, Charles Bukowski, Beatrice Wood, Allen Ginsberg, Diane DiPrima, Carolyn Cassady, Gary Snyder, Carl Solomon, Ken Kesey, Simon Vinkenoong, Kaviraj George Dowden, John Montgomery, Jack Kerouac, Ken Babbs, Bruce Fearing, Ray Bremser, Al Aronowitz, Ana Christy, Gerald Nicosia, Diane Wakowski, Bob Kaufman, Steve Richmond, Janine Pommy Vega, Antler, Herbert Huncke, Pradip Choudhuri, Jack Micheline, Gregory Corso, Joan Reid, Allen Cohen, Yusuke Keida, Barbara Moraff, A.D.Winans, Tuli Kupferberg, Richard Morris, George Montrgomery, Frank Moore, Erling Friis-Baastad, t.k.splake, ruth weiss, elliott, Ted Berrigan, Neeli Cherkovski, Clayton Eshleman, Gerald Locklin, Joy Walsh, Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Kurt Nimmo, Ron Androla, Graham Cournoyer, Bill Costley, Jan Kerouac, Jeanne Conn, Stephan Ronan, Christine Zwingman, Chris Challis, Lyn Lifshin, Ulvis Alberts, Lorrie Jackson, Tony Seldin, Judson Crews, Steve Allen, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady & Ted Joans.
Posted by Douglas Holder at 2:31 AM 4 comments:
Labels: Dave Christy founder of the Alpha Beat Press Has Passed Away Doug Holder
Review: COKEFISH ing IN ALPHA BEAT SOUP
A Beat-Post Beat Independent Poetry Broadsheet
January 2009
“Cokefish” or “Cokefishing” is a pretty unique publication in that it really is a broadsheet, printed on two sides of a giant piece of paper which arrived at my door (at least) folded in quarters, and set in a variety of types, largely because the type that each poem or letter (it features author letters too) was submitted in seems to have been copied directly onto the broadsheet. And this is a choice the editors Dave and Ana Christy are making: “This broadside is dedicated to the small press and the way it used to be,” reads the legend over the top of the first poems, next, in this issue, to a photocopied picture of the late, much lamented Dave Church, whose passing several poems and letters commemorate.
I like their style here. This is the sort of homemade, no-frills publication which sold me on the romance of the small press in the first place, when Bryn Fortey was doing something similar in Wales, though he folded his sheets in half and stapled them. Bryn introduced me, through his “Outlaw” magazine, to some of the best living poets, including (as he was) Church and t.kilgore splake; and Dave and Ana’s roster includes both of those old greybeard heroes, along with Steve Dalachinsky, whose work I found impossible to format for BEATNIK (sorry Steve) and Gundy, whose name I came across a few years ago and haven’t heard from for a while, during my own weird peregrinations around the literary world and in real unreality. It’s good to know that there are still some places where the way a magazine/ publication looks doesn’t matter and the way it reads does. Lately even Beat-influenced sites have gone for fancy production which has nothing to do with the original spirit of the writing.
You can track “Cokefish (ing)” down via Alpha Beat Press and Dave and Ana Christy at 806 E. Ridge Ave. Sellersville PA 18960 USA. And like I said, it’s a buck an issue, so remunerate the Christys accordingly.
Posted by Bruce Hodder at 2:26 AM
Sell on Amazon
Charles Bukowski and Alpha Beat Press 1988-1994 Paperback – January 1, 1994
by Dave and Ana Christy (Editor)
1 Collectible from $125.00
Can Man Says Goodnight on luver.com an internet weekly radio show
Join Dave & Ana for an hour of good talk, a lot of laughs and a lot of vodka! Reminiscent of the old radio show, THE BICKERSONS – The Christy’s add a special guest poet/musician along with a Country Classic tune and Ana’s “Pick Your Nose” of the week.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Can Man Says Goodnight #81
Posted by Michael LaBash at 5:47 PM No comments:
Can Man Says Goodnight #80
Posted by Michael LaBash at 5:47 PM No comments:
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Can Man Says Goodnight #79
Download/listen to the show by clicking on the title.
Posted by Michael LaBash at 11:23 AM No comments:
Can Man Says Goodnight #78
Download/listen to the show by clicking on the title.
Jan3
ORIGINAL BEATS-HERBERT HUNCKE AND GREGORY CORSO
Original Beats: Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke
City of Strangers
youtube width=”560″ height=”400″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbY6KXPg6wY&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Often overshadowed by the Beat triumvurate of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac, Herbert Huncke and Gregory Corso were nonetheless integral to the Beat family and, on a personal level at least, often the most interesting. Both had been in jail (the same jail though not at the same time), both, in contrast to the Big Three who were all Columbia Grads, were self taught.
I never read a lot of Corso because he mostly wrote poetry and I don’t read a lot of poetry. I still have my copy of Huncke’s ‘The Evening Sun Turned Crimson‘, which, despite a relative lack of artlessness, is direct, honest, even charming. Huncke details his early life hustling, plumbing the depths of drug addiction (I still recall, even years after I read the book, Huncke describing walking into Alphabet City with open sores on his face after scratching his skin raw shooting speed). This kind of thing has been done to death (literally), but Huncke was the firstest, even amongst the Beats, and his stories about the people he met along the way – drag queens, hustlers, junkies, and general people around the city – often have warmth, even tenderness, even when he described the most desperate characters.
Herbert Huncke and Allen Ginsberg 1960s
Corso I remember most from ‘The Beat Hotel’, a dive hotel in Paris where Corso lived and shared a bed with Ginsberg and Ginsberg’s love Peter Orlovsky. Not that Corso got into any kinky three way thing. Corso knew from his days in jail that he was into chicks, and chicks only – they shared a bed because they had no heat.
In contrast to the gaunt, priestlike (or creepy, depending on your point of view) Burroughs, who lived in his own room on an upper floor, the three younger men (and Corso was the youngest of all) run wild like especially Rabelesian college kids on a spree. Invited to meet the French surrealists, they arrive ecstatically drunk, crawl around on all fours barking like dogs in what they thought was an appropriately Surrealist action. Corso, I think it was, jumped on Breton’s lap and chewed on his tie. Breton and most of the other guests, good Parisian bourgeoisie despite their pretensions, were not amused by this behaviour. Duchamp, the exception, was charmed by their very American irreverence and energy.
These guys were still around when I first got to New York. I had a friend who knew Huncke through Robert Frank. Huncke used to come by his place on East 3rd, bum cigarettes and talk. He was a great talker apparently. I missed meeting him one afternoon by a few minutes apparently. I missed meeting Ginsberg as well, which I regret less, having been oggled by the Great Man in the East Village a couple of times. I don’t say this out of any vanity – if you were under 30 and male and in the East Village before 1995, you were likely oggled by Allen Ginsberg.
In this charming half-hour short by film-maker Francois Bernadi, which was shot in 1996 shortly before Herbert Huncke’s death, Corso and Huncke read at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and are interviewed separately. Corso is irascible, brittle; Huncke is more amenable, sitting at a desk in his room in the Chelsea Hotel. We see the lobby of the Chelsea, and the 42nd that Huncke first discovered in the ’50s. Of this discovery, Huncke says:
“I liked the lights, I liked the way people moved. It was fresh . . . people seemed a lot freer in their actions than people did elsewhere.”
Corso, who also hustled on 42nd for a time, getting older men to take him out to dinner then running off, remembers the Deuce in less romantic terms:
“The most deplorable area to hang around – only the lowest of the low hang around there, if you’ve got nothing to offer society or even themselves . . . there was no class there.”
When I first moved to New York, the Beat tradition lived on, in places like the Tribes gallery, Nuyorican Cafe, in countless places now long gone, and amongst the Unbearables, Sensitive Skin Magazine, Red Tape. By the mid-’90s, the Beats were becoming a brand, more famous for their lives than their books, endlessly imitated in form if not in spirit. Some of these groups, or former members of these groups survive in rent-controlled apartments, in places they were lucky enough to buy when the real estate was still cheap. But no one would call the East Village bohemian now.
Gregory Corso in sunglasses
With thanks to Dangerous Minds where I found this video
Jul8
BEATNIKHIWAY 