SMOKING - "RIGHT SEXY, AN' STUFF"
THE DUKE ON BEAT ANGEL
On October 21st of 1969, with the grog-battered liver
misshapen and warped and slumped around his gallbladder like
the folds of a heifer’s arse stretched about the head of a
fried sparrow, with his skin yellowed and his skull afire,
Jack Kerouac let fly his last lilting haiku from atween the
sheets in St Anthony’s hospital, Florida, or front the telly
in his living room, depending on who tells it. Kerouac, who
had spent the past twenty years etching the blueprint for an
original, spectacular, incendiary, wholly holy form of
writing, he died the predictable, depressing, sad, uninspired
death of the Renegade Writer.
That this man who dedicated half his life to kicking and
pulling and tugging and spitting and lashing and thumping at
cliché should die a cliché himself… God above, the irony of it
all. Sure wouldn’t it have you chuckling something wicked if
it didn’t break your bastard heart.
But there you go, such is life.
Now, couple nights past I was musing along these lines with my
ladyfriend, Beautiful Ms Gillian, debating the ins and outs of
Kerouac’s life and death and weighing up The Work against All
The Other Guff and pondering off and on with regards the
shower o’ insufferable, stuck-up goons wandering the train
stations at all hours high on every click and every other
clack of Kerouac’s much-mythologized typewriter. “Those
individuals” I yapped in-between pulls on a Mayfair King Size,
“Those elitist, pompous tools, they are surely The
Establishment’s revenge for the Beat Generation.”
“Have your fun” The Powers What Be done glowered, “But by
Jesus you'll pay for it, I tell you that. And your children
will pay for it. And their children. And their children’s
children. Then, it'll take a break on account of the children
of those children will most likely be too busy playing with
their second willies. But their sprogs, oh boys-a-boys,
they'll pay a thousandfold what you paid. And the price? The
braying and blowing of a thousand yaps in unison all gibbering
wild about how On The Road changed their lives and do you know
who you are, I bet you don’t and no-one knows nothing ‘till
they’ve heard it told ‘em through a fugg of stewed ‘shroom.”
The final victory is that no-one will ever again read On The
Road or Big Sur or even Howl or Naked Lunch or The First Third
and if they do, they won't mention it in public, and why?
“Why?” asks Beautiful Ms Gillian.
“Because one o’ them bastards might overhear, and next thing
you know it’s ‘Oh, but you’ve never read it until you’ve heard
it read, and you’ve never heard it read ‘till you’ve heard it
read on acid, and…’ Saint’s preserve us, sure it’d turn your
head.”
She stubbs out her cigarette and through the waft of smoke
rising from the ashtray she says “That’s a touch bitter for
you, that. And anyroad, what are you doin’ now, if not talking
about it? And thirdly, what’s the point of it all, also?”
The Point Of It All, it transpired, was that I had recently
come into possession of a DVD entitled Beat Angel, being a
film all about Jack Kerouac’s spirit comes back to Earth on
the thirtieth anniversary of his death for to inhabit the body
of a vagrant, hang around at a beat poetry night being held in
his honour and also discuss his life and work with a trio of
struggling artists; the painter who gave up painting, the
writer who gave up writing and the young lass still in awe of
the power of a beautiful sentence lain o’er the page like an
angel lain touching itself in the shadow of The Lord.
“Is it good?”
“Well that’s the thing, I haven’t watched it yet. I’m scared.
I’m scared it’s the work of one of them. I’m scared it’ll be
full of self-obsessed, pretentious knobs smoking dope and
battering drumsticks off of beer-cans whilst a prat in a
terrible sweater slurs for hours about some wank they heard
their granddad having back when they were a kid.”
“I think you should watch it” she says. “You love Jack
Kerouac. You dig the purple parpin’ of a bop-fried trumpet of
an evening. You’re pretentious and self-obsessed. Go for it.”
“You’re right” says I, and she was, and I did.
Now, what happened was this;
Some time ago, back in the coke-scourged haze of the nineteen
and eighties, an actor / writer by the name of Vincent
Balestri was busy wandering stages left and right and here and
there delivering a one man show by the name of Kerouac: The
Essence Of Jack. The play, conceived by both Balestri and
Kerouac’s first wife, Edie, turned out to be a funny,
insightful, inspiring account of the fella’s life and work and
so, as is only fair, it proved right successful.
Around the arse-end of the nineties, Balestri was concerning
himself with bringing the show to the screen, discussing the
matter at great length with fellow actor Frank Tabbita, a
fella who, coincidentally, bears uncanny resemblance to Howard
Marks, being another scribbler (although one scarcely fit to
wipe the commas from Kerouac’s blurbs) right venerated by,
y'know, them, on account of he got high a whole lot one time.
Tabbita probably said something along the lines of “Well, now,
it’s a grand play, but by the friar’s o’ Culloden, boy, would
it be anything a man or a woman might want to sit afore in a
movie picture-show for an hour and 39 minutes?”
“It’s that and plenty more” I dare say Balestri asserted. “I’d
wager they’ll do that and they’ll also buy the DVD with an
excellent writers’ commentary and also a 30 minute film of the
stage show and a couple deleted scenes, and they’ll enjoy it
so much they’ll forget all about the wanker stood front of
them in the queue for Borat saying about the night he got
drunk and wrote a novel there and then just nearly like
Kerouac, and would’ve had it published, too, except it was
just too personal.”
Balestri and Tabbita enlisted the help of director Randy
Allred and writer Bruce Boyle and lo and behold, there it is,
Beat Angel, A Film About The Spirit Of Jack Kerouac, and also,
conveniently enough, The Film About Which I’m Talking.
Beat Angel is a curious affair, and I’ll tell you why here and
now whilst I remember for I’d be a man fond of a digression if
given half a chance. It’s a curious affair because it seems to
capture with right alarming clarity The Essence Of Jack whilst
also being devoid of a good chunk of what that Essence had to
do with.
To wit; Style.
Kerouac’s writing has plenty to say about this and the other,
and both of them articles are often worth a good fourteen or
fifteen minutes-worth of contemplation far-side of a read
over, but he also marries that substance with an incredible
style. You might’ve heard tell of such things in one of the
eighteen million and seven articles written about Kerouac’s
style in the past week. You might've came away from them with
a thought in your head about how right enough, there’s no
doubting that the man had a wicked style about him.
Beat Angel, as a motion picture, has plenty of substance. A
man can scarcely skip from one frame to the next without
hitting his shins the fuck off of a great wadge of substance
sticking up out the floor-tiles. What it doesn’t have is very
much style, and what style it is in possession of is that of a
trailer for a 1978 Abel Ferrara film about a man who has no
style wandering stylelessly about a street nobody can find
because it looks like a crap cardigan.
It’s oft-times stagey, the performances are somewhat eccentric
of occasion, i.e., some of them aren’t very good, the sound
leaves a lot to be desired and visually, it’s none too
appealing at all. Whilst some folks, the aforementioned Mr
Ferrara there amongst them, have made a virtue of such an
aesthetic drought, Randy Allred oft-times seems like he’s
shrugged his shoulders and figured to blazes with it, the
substance’ll carry us through.
Which it does, so plenty marks for foresight.
At this point in the proceedings, me sat scribbling in a café
filled with Spanish revellers all out their minds waiting for
the fuck-club next door to open, a gentleman arrives out the
gloom of the late evening and says some things along the lines
of the following;
“It’s all well and good jerking the knee like yonder knee just
jerked o’er that there page” says he, “But is it at all true
what you’re saying? Is it true, right enough, that from start
to end Beat Angel employs none style whatever? I’d be right
amazed if that were indeed the case.”
“Well” says I, “To tell you the truth, there are some
stylistic virtues here and there, wee moments that pierce that
veil of inherent… ugliness, for want of a better word. For one
thing - and it’s a marvel of a thing in itself - it is
undeniably charming for to see a grainy, 16mm motion picture
in this day and age. Bejeesus it warms the cockles fierce to
see an ultra-low-budget independent film that’s actually a
film, as opposed to a video.”
“It is that” says the fella.
“And also, while I’m perched in the coal-hole of this
particular train of thought, the scene that intercuts the
death of Jack Kerouac with his momentary rebirth via yon hobo
protagonist, that’s right beautifully handled too.”
“And what of the…”
“And then, and then” says I, interrupting with a great flail
of the arms, “Now, the open-mic ‘Kerouac’ performance that
serves as the centrepiece of the whole enterprise, a
breathless bop-lashed Definition of the man’s manners and
means delivered by a tsunami-tongued Balestri, that right
there is perfectly realised. And so too are the biographical
sketches potting the narrative there, wonderful scenes wherein
Balestri plays both Jack and, by way of example, for I know
you’ve got a thirst for some examples…”
“By Jesus I have that.”
“By way of example, says I, his publisher, or his high-school
sports coach, or whoever.”
The old fella blows a fistful of nose-muck into a scrunched up
wad of pink toilet paper and wipes the yap with the back of a
hand. “So for that loose triumvirate of flourishes” he sniffs,
“If nothing else, you could almost say that your remark about
the film has no style is in itself a terrible fallacy.”
“I dare say so. But if’n I’m to give a right proper review of
the whole enterprise, which is what I’m set for doing as a
matter of fact, it’s surely only fair that I must mention the
overall sense of none much prettiness nor flair whilst also
leaving space aside for a few points the likes of which we’ve
raised here and now.”
“I’d be keen to see the state of your tongue after tryin’ to
wrap it around such a contradictory set of musings.”
And me too, I’m soon thinking. And me too.
“But enough of the style” says Beautiful Ms Gillian the
following evening, “What of this substance?” She says this to
me whilst the pair of us are stood about a pool table in a bar
a shit's fling shy of the university. She says this and thank
God for that, for if she hadn’t I could’ve spent another
twelve paragraphs talking about how much the mercifully-brief
dream-sequences annoyed me and what have you and afore you
know where you are you’ve got a Negative Review, you’ve got
Three of a possible Nine stars and no, that would be wrong,
for I enjoyed Beat Angel immensely.
Principal to my enjoyment was the writing, fittingly enough,
but I'll concern myself with that in due course, for first of
all a man must rightly applaud the central performance of Mr
Vincent Balestri. The central performance of Mr Vincent
Balestri is a thing of no small wonder, right enough,
straddling that line ‘twixt cute caricature and Proper
Performance with incredible, assured grace, much like Phillip
Seymour Hoffman managed in Capote, a film about, if my sources
are correct, celebrated author Dean Koontz.
The Voice, specifically, is eerily accurate. Thon banter-
patterns are spot-on, all monotone stretches all a sudden set
upon by manic, ‘lectric charges of jiving, evangelistic
delirium, and then again with the drooping and the slouching
of the vowels and the shit-myself-waddle of the consonants.
“Would you say he’s the stand out then?” Ms Gillian enquires
as she pots the black for to shame the five red blotches still
looming out the green on account of I’m crap at pool. “No, on
account of I’m exceptionally good.”
“Fair enough. And yes, Balestri is the man the eyes crave and
the ears pine for throughout much of every scene. Although, in
saying that, the other principals are by no means a pox on the
fine profession of the acting. For sure, there’s the odd line
delivery here and there has a fella pickin’ splinters out his
ears for a fortnight, but now and then they right blossom,
they do. Soon, a fella’s noting the sadness in your painter
woman’s eyes, the flickering of both naivety and uncertainty
in the shrug of the young scribbler’s shoulders and the
curious amalgam of sorrow and resentment and spite and
affection all flushing about Tabbita’s well-slung jowls.”
And then, as I hinted up yonder, there’s the writing.
The poetry let loose now and then for to thunder about the
screen like a herd o’ buffalo afire with rabies and with
Christ… the funny, altogether right touching slabs of
biographical anecdote related with much colour and charm and
wit every so often… the grand banter about Kerouac was a God,
no, he was a twat matter of fact, no, he wasn’t etc etc… All
of it, most every syllable, is glorious. Refreshing and
thought-provoking and sore beguiling, and by the punctured
palms o’ Padre Pio it’s liable for to leave a man with fierce
erection of the brains, or a touch o’ cerebral panty-weep,
if'n you’re perchance a lady.
“It’s inspiring, is what it is” I’m telling a fella sat half-
asleep ‘front a re-run of The Good Life. “Inspiring.”
“Oh aye, is that right?”
“It is right, an’ all. Inspiring.”
For as much as it hollers wild about Kerouac, for as much as
it has the man’s name in the title and his words running rings
around the celluloid, for as much as all of that, Beat Angel
is nonetheless a flick less concerned with Kerouac than it is
with Inspiration.
At risk of soiling my Review Card beyond any measure of hope
however faltering, I’ll go ahead and relate that immediately
before and after viewing Beat Angel I myself was sat six
chapters deep in the scribbling of a grand novel that’s been
frying my fuck right useless for much of the past seven
months. Battering at one sentence in particular, I was, and
with the smoke stinging my eyes and the nausea planting a
terrible chorus o’er the stave of my caffeine-scourged gut.
In need of a kick to the stimulation glands, and with none
coffee left to my Mother’s maiden name, I watched Beat Angel
and found myself, far side of it all, with at least five words
I’d been lacking hitherto, and if those five words weren’t the
finest I’d utilised all week then by God they were right close.
It’s impossible to watch Beat Angel and not be inspired, is
the truth of a case. Play it front a drunk and you’ll find
he's concocted seven brand new hangovers first thing in the
morning. It's like yonder Dream Machine William Burroughs sat
staring at for hours of a winter’s morn, it sets light the
crud all hanging about the thought-chutes and melds the
resultant pus into something not a skip and a twirl north of
Thoughts Worth Thinking.
And, praise Jandek, Thoughts Worth Writing where I was
concerned.
The ashen-chinned crowd, it cries Conclude, and so aye, In
Conclusion;
Even here and now in this year of 2024 or whatever the fuck it
is, even now when a man can’t fart twice in succession without
a youngster sniffin’ about the arse for to upload the texture
of the gas onto youtube, even now when no-one remembers what
it was like to see something that didn’t clip and stop and
start every so often and with the sound running four minutes
and 14 seconds ahead of the visuals, even now, says I, Beat
Angel could quite possibly appear jarringly lo-fi to some
folks.
“The lower the fi the better!” cries a lad wearing a Bonnie
Prince Billy armband, and I raise a hand, I say “You’ll get no
argument from me. But for some of us here it could rightly put
us off proceeding much further than the opening two and a half
minutes.”
But that would be a grand mistake, because whilst Beat Angel
is far from perfect and whilst it lacks a bit in the
aesthetics, it is nonetheless for all of that a joy to be in
the presence of. It’s got Heart enough for a thousand and six
renditions of What About Love? It has enthusiasm and charm and
by God it has a right savage way with the words.
What more could a man ask for with regards a flick concerned
with Jack Kerouac?
“Maybe a bit where he points out the myriad myths about his
life and work and corrects them, since for a film so
preoccupied with Truth, it is right enough well indebted to
Fiction.”
Well, maybe so, but in the world of Films What Are Indeed Real
And Have Indeed Been Made, Beat Angel is as beautifully
soulful a picture about Jack and Writing and Time and all that
stuff as anyone has yet gone ahead and conceived.
In the still of the wee hours with the sleepers still unpopped
from the packet and with the head hung weary on my shoulders,
I figured I’d forget about Chapter Seven for a time and
watched Beat Angel again, and then the 1986 feature
documentary Kerouac. As fine a double bill as I’ve ever been
sat afore, that right there.
I fell asleep with my head on a week-old Guardian.
Thanks folks.
Fling The Duke An Email or Sign The Mondo
Guestbook
misshapen and warped and slumped around his gallbladder like
the folds of a heifer’s arse stretched about the head of a
fried sparrow, with his skin yellowed and his skull afire,
Jack Kerouac let fly his last lilting haiku from atween the
sheets in St Anthony’s hospital, Florida, or front the telly
in his living room, depending on who tells it. Kerouac, who
had spent the past twenty years etching the blueprint for an
original, spectacular, incendiary, wholly holy form of
writing, he died the predictable, depressing, sad, uninspired
death of the Renegade Writer.
That this man who dedicated half his life to kicking and
pulling and tugging and spitting and lashing and thumping at
cliché should die a cliché himself… God above, the irony of it
all. Sure wouldn’t it have you chuckling something wicked if
it didn’t break your bastard heart.
But there you go, such is life.
Now, couple nights past I was musing along these lines with my
ladyfriend, Beautiful Ms Gillian, debating the ins and outs of
Kerouac’s life and death and weighing up The Work against All
The Other Guff and pondering off and on with regards the
shower o’ insufferable, stuck-up goons wandering the train
stations at all hours high on every click and every other
clack of Kerouac’s much-mythologized typewriter. “Those
individuals” I yapped in-between pulls on a Mayfair King Size,
“Those elitist, pompous tools, they are surely The
Establishment’s revenge for the Beat Generation.”
“Have your fun” The Powers What Be done glowered, “But by
Jesus you'll pay for it, I tell you that. And your children
will pay for it. And their children. And their children’s
children. Then, it'll take a break on account of the children
of those children will most likely be too busy playing with
their second willies. But their sprogs, oh boys-a-boys,
they'll pay a thousandfold what you paid. And the price? The
braying and blowing of a thousand yaps in unison all gibbering
wild about how On The Road changed their lives and do you know
who you are, I bet you don’t and no-one knows nothing ‘till
they’ve heard it told ‘em through a fugg of stewed ‘shroom.”
The final victory is that no-one will ever again read On The
Road or Big Sur or even Howl or Naked Lunch or The First Third
and if they do, they won't mention it in public, and why?
“Why?” asks Beautiful Ms Gillian.
“Because one o’ them bastards might overhear, and next thing
you know it’s ‘Oh, but you’ve never read it until you’ve heard
it read, and you’ve never heard it read ‘till you’ve heard it
read on acid, and…’ Saint’s preserve us, sure it’d turn your
head.”
She stubbs out her cigarette and through the waft of smoke
rising from the ashtray she says “That’s a touch bitter for
you, that. And anyroad, what are you doin’ now, if not talking
about it? And thirdly, what’s the point of it all, also?”
The Point Of It All, it transpired, was that I had recently
come into possession of a DVD entitled Beat Angel, being a
film all about Jack Kerouac’s spirit comes back to Earth on
the thirtieth anniversary of his death for to inhabit the body
of a vagrant, hang around at a beat poetry night being held in
his honour and also discuss his life and work with a trio of
struggling artists; the painter who gave up painting, the
writer who gave up writing and the young lass still in awe of
the power of a beautiful sentence lain o’er the page like an
angel lain touching itself in the shadow of The Lord.
“Is it good?”
“Well that’s the thing, I haven’t watched it yet. I’m scared.
I’m scared it’s the work of one of them. I’m scared it’ll be
full of self-obsessed, pretentious knobs smoking dope and
battering drumsticks off of beer-cans whilst a prat in a
terrible sweater slurs for hours about some wank they heard
their granddad having back when they were a kid.”
“I think you should watch it” she says. “You love Jack
Kerouac. You dig the purple parpin’ of a bop-fried trumpet of
an evening. You’re pretentious and self-obsessed. Go for it.”
“You’re right” says I, and she was, and I did.
Now, what happened was this;
Some time ago, back in the coke-scourged haze of the nineteen
and eighties, an actor / writer by the name of Vincent
Balestri was busy wandering stages left and right and here and
there delivering a one man show by the name of Kerouac: The
Essence Of Jack. The play, conceived by both Balestri and
Kerouac’s first wife, Edie, turned out to be a funny,
insightful, inspiring account of the fella’s life and work and
so, as is only fair, it proved right successful.
Around the arse-end of the nineties, Balestri was concerning
himself with bringing the show to the screen, discussing the
matter at great length with fellow actor Frank Tabbita, a
fella who, coincidentally, bears uncanny resemblance to Howard
Marks, being another scribbler (although one scarcely fit to
wipe the commas from Kerouac’s blurbs) right venerated by,
y'know, them, on account of he got high a whole lot one time.
Tabbita probably said something along the lines of “Well, now,
it’s a grand play, but by the friar’s o’ Culloden, boy, would
it be anything a man or a woman might want to sit afore in a
movie picture-show for an hour and 39 minutes?”
“It’s that and plenty more” I dare say Balestri asserted. “I’d
wager they’ll do that and they’ll also buy the DVD with an
excellent writers’ commentary and also a 30 minute film of the
stage show and a couple deleted scenes, and they’ll enjoy it
so much they’ll forget all about the wanker stood front of
them in the queue for Borat saying about the night he got
drunk and wrote a novel there and then just nearly like
Kerouac, and would’ve had it published, too, except it was
just too personal.”
Balestri and Tabbita enlisted the help of director Randy
Allred and writer Bruce Boyle and lo and behold, there it is,
Beat Angel, A Film About The Spirit Of Jack Kerouac, and also,
conveniently enough, The Film About Which I’m Talking.
Beat Angel is a curious affair, and I’ll tell you why here and
now whilst I remember for I’d be a man fond of a digression if
given half a chance. It’s a curious affair because it seems to
capture with right alarming clarity The Essence Of Jack whilst
also being devoid of a good chunk of what that Essence had to
do with.
To wit; Style.
Kerouac’s writing has plenty to say about this and the other,
and both of them articles are often worth a good fourteen or
fifteen minutes-worth of contemplation far-side of a read
over, but he also marries that substance with an incredible
style. You might’ve heard tell of such things in one of the
eighteen million and seven articles written about Kerouac’s
style in the past week. You might've came away from them with
a thought in your head about how right enough, there’s no
doubting that the man had a wicked style about him.
Beat Angel, as a motion picture, has plenty of substance. A
man can scarcely skip from one frame to the next without
hitting his shins the fuck off of a great wadge of substance
sticking up out the floor-tiles. What it doesn’t have is very
much style, and what style it is in possession of is that of a
trailer for a 1978 Abel Ferrara film about a man who has no
style wandering stylelessly about a street nobody can find
because it looks like a crap cardigan.
It’s oft-times stagey, the performances are somewhat eccentric
of occasion, i.e., some of them aren’t very good, the sound
leaves a lot to be desired and visually, it’s none too
appealing at all. Whilst some folks, the aforementioned Mr
Ferrara there amongst them, have made a virtue of such an
aesthetic drought, Randy Allred oft-times seems like he’s
shrugged his shoulders and figured to blazes with it, the
substance’ll carry us through.
Which it does, so plenty marks for foresight.
At this point in the proceedings, me sat scribbling in a café
filled with Spanish revellers all out their minds waiting for
the fuck-club next door to open, a gentleman arrives out the
gloom of the late evening and says some things along the lines
of the following;
“It’s all well and good jerking the knee like yonder knee just
jerked o’er that there page” says he, “But is it at all true
what you’re saying? Is it true, right enough, that from start
to end Beat Angel employs none style whatever? I’d be right
amazed if that were indeed the case.”
“Well” says I, “To tell you the truth, there are some
stylistic virtues here and there, wee moments that pierce that
veil of inherent… ugliness, for want of a better word. For one
thing - and it’s a marvel of a thing in itself - it is
undeniably charming for to see a grainy, 16mm motion picture
in this day and age. Bejeesus it warms the cockles fierce to
see an ultra-low-budget independent film that’s actually a
film, as opposed to a video.”
“It is that” says the fella.
“And also, while I’m perched in the coal-hole of this
particular train of thought, the scene that intercuts the
death of Jack Kerouac with his momentary rebirth via yon hobo
protagonist, that’s right beautifully handled too.”
“And what of the…”
“And then, and then” says I, interrupting with a great flail
of the arms, “Now, the open-mic ‘Kerouac’ performance that
serves as the centrepiece of the whole enterprise, a
breathless bop-lashed Definition of the man’s manners and
means delivered by a tsunami-tongued Balestri, that right
there is perfectly realised. And so too are the biographical
sketches potting the narrative there, wonderful scenes wherein
Balestri plays both Jack and, by way of example, for I know
you’ve got a thirst for some examples…”
“By Jesus I have that.”
“By way of example, says I, his publisher, or his high-school
sports coach, or whoever.”
The old fella blows a fistful of nose-muck into a scrunched up
wad of pink toilet paper and wipes the yap with the back of a
hand. “So for that loose triumvirate of flourishes” he sniffs,
“If nothing else, you could almost say that your remark about
the film has no style is in itself a terrible fallacy.”
“I dare say so. But if’n I’m to give a right proper review of
the whole enterprise, which is what I’m set for doing as a
matter of fact, it’s surely only fair that I must mention the
overall sense of none much prettiness nor flair whilst also
leaving space aside for a few points the likes of which we’ve
raised here and now.”
“I’d be keen to see the state of your tongue after tryin’ to
wrap it around such a contradictory set of musings.”
And me too, I’m soon thinking. And me too.
“But enough of the style” says Beautiful Ms Gillian the
following evening, “What of this substance?” She says this to
me whilst the pair of us are stood about a pool table in a bar
a shit's fling shy of the university. She says this and thank
God for that, for if she hadn’t I could’ve spent another
twelve paragraphs talking about how much the mercifully-brief
dream-sequences annoyed me and what have you and afore you
know where you are you’ve got a Negative Review, you’ve got
Three of a possible Nine stars and no, that would be wrong,
for I enjoyed Beat Angel immensely.
Principal to my enjoyment was the writing, fittingly enough,
but I'll concern myself with that in due course, for first of
all a man must rightly applaud the central performance of Mr
Vincent Balestri. The central performance of Mr Vincent
Balestri is a thing of no small wonder, right enough,
straddling that line ‘twixt cute caricature and Proper
Performance with incredible, assured grace, much like Phillip
Seymour Hoffman managed in Capote, a film about, if my sources
are correct, celebrated author Dean Koontz.
The Voice, specifically, is eerily accurate. Thon banter-
patterns are spot-on, all monotone stretches all a sudden set
upon by manic, ‘lectric charges of jiving, evangelistic
delirium, and then again with the drooping and the slouching
of the vowels and the shit-myself-waddle of the consonants.
“Would you say he’s the stand out then?” Ms Gillian enquires
as she pots the black for to shame the five red blotches still
looming out the green on account of I’m crap at pool. “No, on
account of I’m exceptionally good.”
“Fair enough. And yes, Balestri is the man the eyes crave and
the ears pine for throughout much of every scene. Although, in
saying that, the other principals are by no means a pox on the
fine profession of the acting. For sure, there’s the odd line
delivery here and there has a fella pickin’ splinters out his
ears for a fortnight, but now and then they right blossom,
they do. Soon, a fella’s noting the sadness in your painter
woman’s eyes, the flickering of both naivety and uncertainty
in the shrug of the young scribbler’s shoulders and the
curious amalgam of sorrow and resentment and spite and
affection all flushing about Tabbita’s well-slung jowls.”
And then, as I hinted up yonder, there’s the writing.
The poetry let loose now and then for to thunder about the
screen like a herd o’ buffalo afire with rabies and with
Christ… the funny, altogether right touching slabs of
biographical anecdote related with much colour and charm and
wit every so often… the grand banter about Kerouac was a God,
no, he was a twat matter of fact, no, he wasn’t etc etc… All
of it, most every syllable, is glorious. Refreshing and
thought-provoking and sore beguiling, and by the punctured
palms o’ Padre Pio it’s liable for to leave a man with fierce
erection of the brains, or a touch o’ cerebral panty-weep,
if'n you’re perchance a lady.
“It’s inspiring, is what it is” I’m telling a fella sat half-
asleep ‘front a re-run of The Good Life. “Inspiring.”
“Oh aye, is that right?”
“It is right, an’ all. Inspiring.”
For as much as it hollers wild about Kerouac, for as much as
it has the man’s name in the title and his words running rings
around the celluloid, for as much as all of that, Beat Angel
is nonetheless a flick less concerned with Kerouac than it is
with Inspiration.
At risk of soiling my Review Card beyond any measure of hope
however faltering, I’ll go ahead and relate that immediately
before and after viewing Beat Angel I myself was sat six
chapters deep in the scribbling of a grand novel that’s been
frying my fuck right useless for much of the past seven
months. Battering at one sentence in particular, I was, and
with the smoke stinging my eyes and the nausea planting a
terrible chorus o’er the stave of my caffeine-scourged gut.
In need of a kick to the stimulation glands, and with none
coffee left to my Mother’s maiden name, I watched Beat Angel
and found myself, far side of it all, with at least five words
I’d been lacking hitherto, and if those five words weren’t the
finest I’d utilised all week then by God they were right close.
It’s impossible to watch Beat Angel and not be inspired, is
the truth of a case. Play it front a drunk and you’ll find
he's concocted seven brand new hangovers first thing in the
morning. It's like yonder Dream Machine William Burroughs sat
staring at for hours of a winter’s morn, it sets light the
crud all hanging about the thought-chutes and melds the
resultant pus into something not a skip and a twirl north of
Thoughts Worth Thinking.
And, praise Jandek, Thoughts Worth Writing where I was
concerned.
The ashen-chinned crowd, it cries Conclude, and so aye, In
Conclusion;
Even here and now in this year of 2024 or whatever the fuck it
is, even now when a man can’t fart twice in succession without
a youngster sniffin’ about the arse for to upload the texture
of the gas onto youtube, even now when no-one remembers what
it was like to see something that didn’t clip and stop and
start every so often and with the sound running four minutes
and 14 seconds ahead of the visuals, even now, says I, Beat
Angel could quite possibly appear jarringly lo-fi to some
folks.
“The lower the fi the better!” cries a lad wearing a Bonnie
Prince Billy armband, and I raise a hand, I say “You’ll get no
argument from me. But for some of us here it could rightly put
us off proceeding much further than the opening two and a half
minutes.”
But that would be a grand mistake, because whilst Beat Angel
is far from perfect and whilst it lacks a bit in the
aesthetics, it is nonetheless for all of that a joy to be in
the presence of. It’s got Heart enough for a thousand and six
renditions of What About Love? It has enthusiasm and charm and
by God it has a right savage way with the words.
What more could a man ask for with regards a flick concerned
with Jack Kerouac?
“Maybe a bit where he points out the myriad myths about his
life and work and corrects them, since for a film so
preoccupied with Truth, it is right enough well indebted to
Fiction.”
Well, maybe so, but in the world of Films What Are Indeed Real
And Have Indeed Been Made, Beat Angel is as beautifully
soulful a picture about Jack and Writing and Time and all that
stuff as anyone has yet gone ahead and conceived.
In the still of the wee hours with the sleepers still unpopped
from the packet and with the head hung weary on my shoulders,
I figured I’d forget about Chapter Seven for a time and
watched Beat Angel again, and then the 1986 feature
documentary Kerouac. As fine a double bill as I’ve ever been
sat afore, that right there.
I fell asleep with my head on a week-old Guardian.
Thanks folks.
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