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Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century. Overview It was a "class 13" hotel, meaning bottom line, a place that was required by law to meet only minimum health and safety standards. It never had any proper name – "the Beat Hotel" was a nickname given it by Gregory Corso, which stuck. The rooms had windows facing the interior stairwell and not much light. Hot water was available Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The hotel offered the opportunity for a bath – in the only bathtub, situated on the ground floor – provided the guest reserved time beforehand and paid the surcharge for hot water. Curtains and bedspreads were changed and washed every spring. The linen was (in principle) changed every month. The Beat Hotel was managed by a married couple, Monsieur and Madame Rachou, from 1933. After the death of Monsieur Ra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sinclair Beiles
Sinclair Beiles (b. Kampala, Uganda, 1930 - 2000, Johannesburg) was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature. Beiles was involved with American beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, and Burroughs at the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris. The photographer Harold Chapman recorded this period in his book ''The Beat Hotel'' (Gris Banal, 1984). He co-authored ''Minutes to Go'' with Burroughs, Gysin and Corso (Two Cities Editions, 1960). Beiles helped edit Burroughs' ''Naked Lunch''. He worked with the Greek artist Takis and read his magnetic manifesto -- "I am a sculpture... I would like to see all nuclear bombs on Earth turned into sculptures"—in 1962 in Paris at the Iris Clert Gallery. At this event he was famously suspended in mid-air by a magnetic field from a powerful magnet in a sculpture develop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration. Allen Ginsberg's ''Howl'' (1956), William S. Burroughs' ''Naked Lunch'' (1959), and Jack Kerouac's ''On the Road'' (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.Charters (1992) ''The Portable Beat Reader''. Both ''Howl'' and ''Naked Lunch'' were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.Ann Charters, ''int ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eddie Woods
Eddie Woods is an American poet, prose writer, editor and publisher who lived and traveled in various parts of the world, both East and West, before eventually settling in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where in 1978 he started ''Ins & Outs'' magazine and two years later founded Ins & Outs Press. He was born on May 8, 1940 in New York City. According to Stanford University Libraries, which house Woods' archive: "In his role as a cultural impresario and artistic entrepreneur, Eddie Woods... is an important presence, both in American expatriate circles and among European avant-gardists. Woods' promotional activities made him, in short, a crucial center to the movement, and his archive documents his close connections with its leading figures..." Early to middle years After not quite finishing high school, Woods worked for two years in Manhattan as a first-generation computer programmer, until in 1960 he joined the U.S. Air Force for a four-year stint, three years of which were spent in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Watson (author)
Steven Watson (born 1947) is an author, art and cultural historian, curator, and documentary filmmaker. His 1991 book ''Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde'' was called "a chapter in our national biography" by Stefan Kanfer for the ''Los Angeles Times'' and "a marvelous group portrait of a band of cultural renegades" by ''Publishers Weekly''. Watson has written five books about 20th century American avant-garde and counterculture movements, curated two exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery ("Group Portrait, The First American Avant-Garde" and "Rebels: Painters and Poets of the 1950's"), and served as consultant curator for the Whitney Museum exhibition "Beat Culture and the New America". Biography Watson was born in 1947. He grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota and graduated from Mound High School. He majored in English at Stanford University and participated in anti-Vietnam War protests, including a guerrilla theater piece called ''Alice in RO ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harold Chapman
Harold Stephen Chapman (26 March 1927 – 19 August 2022) was a British photographer noted for chronicling the 1950s in Paris. Biography Chapman was born in Deal, Kent on 26 March 1927. He produced a large body of work over many years, with his most significant period from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, when he lived in a backstreet Rive Gauche, Left Bank guesthouse in Paris later nicknamed (by Verta Kali Smart) ‘the Beat Hotel’. There he chronicled in detail the life and times of his fellow residents – among them Allen Ginsberg and Allen's lover Peter Orlovsky, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin, Harold Norse, and other great names of Beat Generation poetry and art. When the Beat Hotel closed its doors in 1964, Chapman was the last guest to leave. The collection of photographs he had taken there provide an artistic and historic record, and became the mainstay of his reputation. Chapman's other works attract worldwide attention, and in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
