Potrzebie: <span style="font-size:140%;"><span style="font-size:140%;">October in the Railroad Earth</span></span>

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Click title above to hear David Brent Johnson's Night Lights: Jazz and Jack Kerouac, and here Charles Laughton reads an excerpt from Kerouac's The Dharma Bums.

Tate Donovan has the title role in Noah Buschel's Neal Cassady with Glenn Fitzgerald as Jack Kerouac. The film's premiere was October 11 at the Woodstock Film Festival. The film poster is cleverly created to look like a tattered paperback from the 1950s. The designer is Marc Evan who also worked on storyboards and painted the recreation of the Merry Pranksters' bus known as "Further" (often driven by Cassady).

Jack Kerouac by Jim McDermott

In On the Road, Kerouac gave Neal the name Dean Moriarty:

Dean was the son of a wino, one of the most tottering bums of Larimer Street, and Dean had in fact been brought up generally on Larimer Street and thereabouts. He used to plead in court at the age of six to have his father set free. He used to beg in front of Larimer alleys and sneak the money back to his father, who waited among the broken bottles with an old buddy. Then when Dean grew up he began hanging around the Glenarm pool-halls; he set a Denver record for stealing cars and went to the reformatory. From the age of eleven to seventeen he was usually in reform school. His specialty was stealing cars, gunning for girls coming out of high school in the afternoon, driving them out to the mountains, making them, and coming back to sleep in any available hotel bathtub in town. His father, once a respectable and hardworking tinsmith, had become a wine alcoholic, which is worse than a whisky alcoholic, and was reduced to riding freights to Texas in the winter and back to Denver in the summer. Dean had brothers on his dead mother's side-she died when he was small-but they disliked him. Dean's only buddies were the poolhall boys. Dean, who had the tremendous energy of a new kind of American saint, and Carlo were the underground monsters of that season in Denver, together with the poolhall gang, and, symbolizing this most beautifully, Carlo had a basement apartment on Grant Street and we all met there many a night that went to dawn-Carlo, Dean, myself, Tom Snark, Ed Dunkel, and Roy Johnson.

Listen to the evocative October in the Railroad Earth. It starts at the 29:17 mark in the Night Lights show at top. Kerouac reads with Steve Allen on piano. Here's the opening paragraph:

October in the Railroad Earth

There was a little alley in San Francisco back of the Southern Pacific station at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel the impending rush of their commuter frenzy as soon they'll be charging en masse from Market and Sansome buildings on foot and in buses and all well-dressed thru workingman Frisco of Walk-up truckdrivers and even the poor grime-bemarked Third Street of lost bums even Negroes so hopeless and long left East and meanings of responsibility and try that now all they do is stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard and here's all these Millbrae and San Carlos neat-necktied producers and commuters of America and Steel civilization rushing by with San Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough time to be disdainful, they've got to catch 130, 132, 134, 136 all the way up to 146 till the time of evening supper in homes of the railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hotshot freight trains---It's all in California, it's all a sea, I swim out of it in afternoons of sun hot meditation in my jeans with head on handkerchief on brakeman's lantern or (if not working) on books, I look up at blue sky of perfect lostpurity and feel the warp of wood of old America beneath me and have insane conversations with Negroes in several-story windows above and everything is pouring in, the switching moves of boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine calling our mountains.

Playlist for the Night Lights show at top:
Night Lights - September 01, 2007, 11:00pm - 12:00am
"Jazz and Jack Kerouac." Featuring Kerouac's spoken-word performances with Steve Allen and other musicians, recordings by Charlie Parker and Brew Moore, an interview with musicologist Phil Ford, excerpts from the underground film Pull My Daisy and more.

Mexico City Blues 221: Deadbelly
Name: Jack Kerouac/Steve Allen
Name of CD: The Kerouac Collection
Track Label: Rhino
Release Year: 1958
Notes: Originally on the LP Poetry for the Beat Generation.

Mexcio City Blues 239-241: Charlie Parker
Name: Jack Kerouac
Name of CD: The Kerouac Collection
Track Label: Rhino
Release Year: 1958
Notes: Originally appeared on the album Poetry for the Beat Generation.

Move
Name: Charlie Parker
Name of CD: One Night in Birdland
Track Label: Columbia
Release Year: 1950
Notes: With Bud Powell on piano, Fats Navarro on trumpet, Curley Russell on bass, Art Blakey on drums.

Fantasy: the Early History of Bop (excerpt)
Name: Jack Kerouac
Name of CD: The Kerouac Collection
Track Label: Rhino
Release Year: 1958
Notes: Originally appeared on the LP The Beat Generation.

San Francisco Scene: the Beat Generation
Name: Jack Kerouac
Name of CD: The Beat Generation
Track Label: Rhino
Release Year: 1958

Blue Brew
Name: Brew Moore
Name of CD: Bebop Spoken Here
Track Label: Proper
Release Year: 1948

American Haikus (excerpt)
Name: Jack Kerouac/Al Cohn/Zoot Sims
Name of CD: The Kerouac Collection
Track Label: Rhino
Release Year: 1958
Notes: Originally appeared on the album Blues and Haikus.

October in the Railroad Earth
Name: Jack Kerouac/Steve Allen
Name of CD: The Kerouac Collection
Track Label: Rhino
Release Year: 1958
Notes: Originally appeared on the album Poetry for the Beat Generation.

Pull My Daisy (excerpts)
Name: Jack Kerouac/David Amram
Name of CD: Pull My Daisy
Release Year: 1959
Notes: Narration by Kerouac, score by David Amram.

Parker's Mood
Name: Mark Murphy
Name of CD: Stolen... and Other Moments
Track Label: 32 Jazz
Release Year: 1981
Notes: Originally from the LP Bop for Kerouac. Text from Kerouac's The Subterraneans.

On the Road (excerpt)
Name: Jack Kerouac
Name of CD: Reads From On the Road
Track Label: Rykodisc
Release Year: 1958

Labels: kerouac

¶ 7:00 PM

Comments:

Here's the website of the poster designer, Marc Evan:
http://binarystarsystem.com/wp/?p=119

He also worked on storyboards and painted the bus. With a simple name like that he should have a clearer signature.

# posted by

George Freeman : 5:14 PM

WOW! some great Illustration here.

# posted by

Anonymous : 10:43 AM

About Me