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“Full of encounters with a veritable who’s who of downtown New York and the counterculture beyond it (Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Andy Warhol, Pete Seeger, Ken Kesey, Charles Olson, George Plimpton, Abbie Hoffman, and the Grateful Dead, just to name a few), Fug You is an illustrated history of social change in the 60’s, as told by he man at the center of it all. In short and in long, this is a “coming-of-age” drama of epic proportions, tracing the voyage of a man through the wild electromagnetic forests of the 1960’s as he holds together a longtime marriage with his college sweetheart while savoring an era of experimental art, music, sexual rebellion, and demand for genuine change in America.” -from the introduction to Fug You Sometimes described as the bridge the between the Beat and Hippie generations, Ed Sanders has been at the forefront of the American avant-garde since the early 1960’s. He created Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts in 1962, the year before opening the legendary Peace Eye Bookstore in NY’s Lower East Side, which quickly became an important gathering place for bohemians, artists, and radicals. In 1964, he co-founded The Fugs, a satirical and self-satirizing rock band with a political slant, who performed at various war protests against America’s involvement in Vietnam. The band’s often frank and humorous lyrics about sex, drugs, and politics have caused a hostile reaction in some quarters, most notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the late 1960’s. In 1966, he was at the center of a notorious obscenity trial after authorities raided the Peace Eye Bookstore, landing him on the cover of Life magazine as “a leader of New York’s Other Culture.” In 1971, Sanders wrote The Family, a profile of the events leading up to the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders. He attended the Manson group’s murder trial, and spent time at their residence at the Spahn Movie Ranch. Sanders is also the founder of the Investigative Poetry movement. His 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, had an impact on investigative writing and poetry during the ensuing decades. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry in 1983, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry in 1987. His Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, Selected Poems 1961-1985 won an American Book Award in 1988. Watch an hour-long interview with Ed Sanders from 1975 here. Book Beat is located at 26070 Greenfield Rd. in Oak Park, MI. |
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| Posted in: Author signings, Author/artist interviews and lectures, Beat & Experimental lit, Book Signings | No Comments » |
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“I imitated him, to the point of transcription, to the point of devoted and impassioned plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, is literature. Whoever preceded him might shine in history, but they were all rough drafts of Macedonio, imperfect previous versions. To not imitate this canon would have represented incredible negligence.”—Jorge Luis Borges Written during the 1930s and ’40s – the heyday of Argentine literary culture – Museum is in many ways an “anti-novel: It opens with more than fifty prologues – including ones addressed “To My Authorial Persona,” “To the Critics,” and “To Readers Who Will Perish If They Don’t Know What the Novel Is About” – that are by turns philosophical, outrageous, ponderous, and cryptic. The second half of the book is the novel itself, a story about a group of characters (some borrowed from other texts) who live on an estancia called “La Novelo”. Macedonio Fernández is considered one of the greatest Argentine writers of the twentieth century. He was a close friend of Jorge Luis Borges, and Macedonio’s metaphysical and aesthetic ideas greatly influenced Borges’s generation. The mythical life of Macedonio is almost as interesting and fun as his books. Some of the stories about his life include: his campaign for president, which consisted of leaving notecards with the word “Macedonio” on them throughout Buenos Aires’ cafés; his attempt to found a utopian society, only to be thwarted by pesky mosquitoes; and his belief that he shouldn’t publish, instead allowing his work time to “age.” He passed away in 1952, and the first edition of Museo de la Novela de la Eterna was released in 1967. |
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| Posted in: Beat & Experimental lit, Reading Group, world lit | No Comments » |
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“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 7 “LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 1, Ch. 13 “I want to be like him. He’s never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he’s the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 2, Ch. 4 “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” “What’s your road, man?–holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.” “By the time fame crashed on his doorstep in 1957, Kerouac had already been done with On the Road for several years, but he hadn’t found much early success getting someone to publish the book. It could have been that America wasn’t ready for his stream-of-consciousness tale of jazz, sex, and fast, aimless driving on an open road. He would soon be a literary star, but on the eve of the book’s publication, Kerouac actually had to borrow money for a bus ticket to New York from his girlfriend at the time, Joyce Johnson.” – from NPR’s multi-media page for On the Road, |
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| Posted in: Beat & Experimental lit, Reading Group | No Comments » |
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This new book collects interviews with Sun Ra, his friends, associates, and contemporaries, regarding his prolific output, mystique, and philosophy. It includes essays by Wayne Kramer, Amiri Baraka, Sadiq Bey, and others. This book is in a series of titles that Sinclair has edited for Headpress publishers in London, England. Composer, bandleader, pianist and space philosopher, Sun Ra was a unique individual and one of the most colorful and enduring of musical legacies, transcending time, place and culture. From the mid 1950s until his death in 1993, Sun Ra led The Arkestra , a fluid collective that lived and played together under the despotic tutelage of their leader, who claimed to hail from Saturn. Their music was jazz, but avant garde compositions in which players were instructed to adhere to a space key improvising without regard for conventional tonal centers was symptomatic of an altogether different direction in sound: electronic music, space music and free improvisation. But Sun Ra s legendary status was earned as much for his eccentricities as for his unique artistic vision. He developed and propagated a mystifying sci-fi mythology which he weaved into both the music and Dadaist performances of The Arkestra (performances which inspired artists as diverse as George Clinton and MC5). This book collects together for the first time interviews with Sun Ra, the people that knew him, and his contemporaries, alongside illuminating essays and conversational pieces regarding his prolific musical output, mystique, philosophy, fans, and much more.
About the AuthorEDITOR BIO: In 1969, the poet-provocateur, MC5 manager and White Panther John Sinclair found himself the victim of that decade s draconian American drug laws, and facing a twenty-year jail sentence for the possession of two joints. The counterculture Sinclair helped create came to his rescue, however, when John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs and others performed at a successful benefit gig to petition for his release. Since that epochal moment, Sinclair has travelled the globe and performed with some of the world’s finest musicians. He interviewed Sun Ra in 1966. Also available at this sigining will be a reprint facsimile of the “Poetry is Revolution” poster from 1967 by Leni Sinclair produced in a limited edition of 75 copies, and a reprint of Sinclair’s 1966 book Fire Music: A Record. Both editions have been printed by Book Beat.
The Endless Realm
I have nothing The idea of nothing I have the treasure of nothing |
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| Posted in: Author signings, Beat & Experimental lit, Book Signings, Detroit & Michigan, Music, Psychedelia | No Comments » |
Poet and blues scholar John Sinclair will be at The Book Beat on Thursday, August 5 from 7-8:30 pm to sign and discuss his newest book Sun Ra- Interviews and Essays. 
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| Posted in: Author signings, Beat & Experimental lit, Book Signings, Poetry | No Comments » |
Sunday, October 18th: Afternoon Discussion on the Detroit Artist Workshop Press with John Sinclair and Mike Jernigan
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| Posted in: Author signings, Beat & Experimental lit, Book Beat Gallery, Music | No Comments » |
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