Pseudo-Beatniks bore the fuck out of me.
You don’t live in the US, it’s not 1950-67 anymore, you don’t even know any cool black people, pop-art is dead, noise-collage is dead, beat poetry is dead, YOU then, are dead.
… and Kerouac isn’t even that good anyway.
For the same reasons I have sex.
They both serve the same purpose, don’t they? It feels amazing and beautiful and links us all together by giving us something we all have in common with one another. We have sex to breed, but without art we wouldn’t have sex simply to enjoy it.
When I slag off “Art”, I slag off the capital letter. The fact it has now turned into a elitist, obscure game of ticking each box of fancy words and awards has made me ask myself why I do “Art” myself. It’s strange you asked, or have you been asking a lot of people as some kind of “project”?
People just aren’t getting it. And I’m certainly not getting it either. I’m baffled by the whole thing, by the whole world at the moment. Our Crits we have on the Friday are insane, in it’s original context. Hearing 18 year-old homosexual ex-public school boys talking about how the density of the paint reminds him of the inconsistency of life and death… I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I wanted to answer you in the briefest way possible and write “Because it’s smashing”, and I would have too if I hadn’t asked myself the same thing earlier…
Bill Hicks
“The world is filled with people who are no longer needed. And who try to make slaves of all of us. And they have their music and we have ours. Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare. And without their music and ideological miscarriages to compare our songs of freedom to, we’d not have any opposite to compare music with —- and like the drifting wind, hitting against no obstacle, we’d never know its speed, its power….”
— Woody Guthrie
