America
“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
H/T the Literary Outpost.
This is Ginsberg reciting his poem but I don’t know why the word order is changed from the original. I’m sure Bent could help us with this.
I think this re-mix is fantastic. I’ve emailed the creator of the video to ask her/him about the music and video that was chosen. I love how Ginsberg is adopted and recreated as contemporary political and social commentary.
UPDATE: Here’s the reply I received from the video’s author.
The project had more to do with American history (1932-62) than Ginsberg himself or the Beat movement. It accompanied an essay about how we got from the New Deal to the Communist witch hunts and Cuban Missile Crisis.The music is from Angelo Badalamenti and the Prague Philharmonic. The reading is from a Library of Congress recording from San Fransisco in 1959. The video is public footage from news reels from the above period and my own archive of family home movies from the Fifties and early Sixties.
I suppose the intention is to project how the population’s own divided feelings about the national identity reflect Ginsberg’s confused feelings about his own identity as American.
March 9th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
This montage is one of many YouTube versions of Ginsberg’s “America” with accompanying music. I don’t really like any of them…
I esp. don’t like the cut-up of the sequence of the lines in this version, which sentimentalises the poem. The accompanying jumble of images from several decades is not too terrific either – the images’ attempt at narrative places the poem within the genre of the ‘domestic melodrama’. I doubt Ginsberg’s intentions lay within that genre…
I recommend the live reading Ginsberg did in front of an audience that gradually laughs itself hysterical as he progresses. The version he reads on that occasion is an early, unfinished draft, so we are talking mid-50s here. It is clear from this recording that the genre Ginsberg used masterfully for this poem is comedy rather than melodramatic pathos…
The comic effect is easily lost on a contemporary class-room, but using the live take usually gets the students to realize that the poem is a live, vibrant, funny piece, not a dead museum artefact.
March 9th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I’m sympathetic to your position.
I’ve seen many of those other montages as well. I’m familiar with the live reading you linked to above. I was therefore really unclear about Ginsberg’s intentions.
That said, I posted this for how I thought it reflected a contemporary political mood, and not so much as a value for understanding Ginsberg. As it turns out, the creator wasn’t really thinking about the contemporary situation.
The point is, not only did the creator of this montage recreate Ginsberg (in ways which according to you, don’t do Ginsberg justice) to reflect his/her project, but the political blogosphere has taken this montage and assigned yet another meaning. The meaning thus becomes a remix of a remix. In this context, I don’t think it really matters what Ginsberg intended. But it is interesting (perhaps not for a Ginsberg scholar) to look at how Ginsberg is transformed from poet to social symbol.
In my mind, this is the essence of postmodern social construction which in and of itself I don’t find particularly problematic. However, in the context of studying Ginsberg’s poem within the context Ginsberg would have placed it, well, I completely differ to you.
Thanks as always, I’m certain I’m not the only one who has been enjoying your fantastic series of articles on the Beats.
Cheers
March 9th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Thanks Stuart for following up (and for the kind remarks at the end!) -
Maybe I was being a little too short-hand in that first comment…
I certainly don’t want to argue that the re-mix should not have been posted, nor that it cannot be interesting (perhaps also for our contemporary political situation). I also agree that re-mixes are the life-blood of postmodern aesthetic as well as political practices, and I am all for that…
In fact, the stuff you have recently been writing about political icon-work, and Steen’s recent post on re-mixes of Hollywood film stills and photo shoots, all show that this practice is getting more and more common. In my work on that type of pastiche or palimpsest I distinguish between adversarial and collaborative icon-work – pastiches usually being the latter. I guess with the Ginsberg re-mix I might have to introduce a third category: insipid icon-work
I got a bit irritated with the aethetics of the re-mix, but my three main beefs with it were:
1. It de-queers Ginsberg, by hiding his final (punch)line in the middle of the mix…
2. It inserts his text in the trivial narrative of domestic melodrama, almost making it come off as a pale echo of Johnson’s Daisy ad.
3. Worst of all, it makes Ginsy unfunny!
That said, I am all in favour of the re-mixer’s right to do whatever to any text in the world. In that I hold with Burroughs’s dictum: Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
This also goes to the issue of intentions. I certainly don’t believe that the author’s intentions are sacrosanct or prohibit other readings. But we can sometimes learn from an author’s intentions in surprising ways. In the case of “America” it is clear that in the live take I referred to Ginsberg is energized by the audience’s feedback to perform more boldly and milk the laughs more. In the more sartorial 1959 performance without audience he chooses a restrained tone of voice, and I tend to read that as an emphasis of the ironic qualities of the poem. That his public persona and his status have also developed over the intervening 4 years may also be taken into consideration: it may not have suited him to go for the stand-up comedy bravoura anymore, so perhaps he was ultimately no longer addressing the same type of audience..? Thus, the tone changes and the intentions we can read out of them may clue us in to Ginsberg’s beginning perception of himself as a grand political prophet, rather than just a funny punster.
So, I would argue that issues such as these can perhaps best be approached through a discussion of intention…
March 9th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Hear, hear, they would say in courts and parliaments. The reason why Ginsberg is succesful is because he presents us with common-sensical arguments that are difficult to refute, insofar as they have a strong or graphic quality to them – and you can’t argue with a picture. What futhermore makes the question of intention interesting is the fact that he actually leaves it to the reader to participate in that intentionality: the whole poem is a series of questions, that I’m sure once articulated for an audience, elicits the same response and affirmative nod: hear, hear. Ginsberg is always right; he knows it, and his audience learns to know it, because he lets them.