London – King’s College; 17 December 2011.

Pictures by Amy Freeborn

And indeed it was on Twitter that I heard Tom Morello was going to play a gig at the Occupy movement’s London tent city outside St Paul’s cathedral on Wednesday (November 9) night.

I had been given a two-hour ‘early minute’ from work and as I was walking to the tube station to make my way home, browsing Twitter on my phone, I saw this post from Tom Morello: “Running well behind but WILL get to St. Pauls to occupy rock occupy rock occupy rock”.

Reasoning that if he was running late, I probably had enough time to make the 40-minute journey myself and get there in time to see him, that’s what I did.

There was a tense atmosphere in the city that evening. Not only was the Occupy LSX crew (much to the chagrin of the ‘establishment’) still camped out opposite the stock exchange at St Paul’s after more than three weeks, another protest group – students against tuition fee rises and benefit cuts – had marched that day, culminating at the cathedral.

On the streets there was police everywhere – cordons set up manned by four or five men a-piece, van loads of constabulary parked up and down the roads, and horses clip-clopping through one of the world’s leading financial districts.

It was a strange sight indeed.

Tom Morello, the politically-active Rage Against the Machine guitarist and ‘one-man revolutionary’ behind The Nightwatchman, has been an ever-present fixture at protests and union struggles for years in the US. Providing a soundtrack for such events was part of the raison d’etre for creating his alter-ego The Nightwatchman in the first place.

Since the Occupy movement – a worldwide protest against social and financial inequality – rose to public prominence on Wall Street in New York in mid-September, Morello has visited eight of its camps across America (New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco), Canada (Vancouver) and the UK (Birmingham, Newcastle and now London).

Given that he had a gig at London’s Brixton Academy that evening, and with the additional objectors on the streets for the student march, it was not entirely unexpected that Morello might come down to tent city and play a few songs for those who had come out to stand up for what they believed in.

And around 5.30pm that’s what he did. And thankfully I had made it in time to see it.

Outside the Occupy LSX kitchen tent, Morello declared: “It is an honour to be at Occupy London with you today.”

Starting each sentence with “mic check”, the crowd responded by shouting back everything that he said, passing on Morello’s messages to those not close enough to hear firsthand, and helping alleviate the sporadically overpowering sound of the police helicopters flying overhead.

“The people that own and control this world don’t deserve to,” Morello said.

“I have a message for them: the beginning is here.”

Quoting from ‘Black Spartacus Heart Attack Machine’, the opening track of his fourth solo album, ‘World Wide Rebel Songs’, he continued:

“Because history’s not made by presidents or popes, or kings or queens or generals, or CIA kingpins running dope. History’s not made by nine robed men, or billionaires or bankers; it’s not made by them. They might throw a little money around, wondering who can be bought. Some might find they’re cheaper, some might find they’re stronger than they thought. But we’ll stand right here, in our country, in our home. I used to think that I was alone; I ain’t alone no more.”

He played three songs – ‘Flesh Shapes The Day’, Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Guerrilla Radio’ (which you can see below), and ‘World Wide Rebel Song’.

Interviewed after the impromptu gig, Morello said: “The lesson that the Arab Spring taught the world was that in order to change the world all you have to do is walk out your front door and just do it.

“People are realising… young people that’ve never been to a protest or demonstration ever, are coming out in their tens of thousands and they realise that they have their hand on the wheel of history and they are trying to turn it in a better direction.”

He continued: “I’m here playing because I believe in this. In my country, there’s never been a successful, progressive struggle for social justice that hasn’t had a good soundtrack, so I do my best to provide what I can.

“What (music) does is it puts wind in the sails of a struggle, and there’s something that speaks truth to the reptilian brain in people about the combination of melody and rhythm and rhyme.”

Picture and video by Amy Freeborn

But when police arrived to disperse the reportedly peaceful gathering, some members of the crowed turned violent, and sparked what would lead to (at current count) four days of rioting, vandalism, looting and arson across all points of London, and around the country.

Police and their vehicles have been attacked, retail stores – from grocery to clothing to electrical – smashed and looted, and commercial and residential properties destroyed by fire.

Events in Tottenham were rekindled on Sunday, and spread to Enfield, Islington and Oxford Circus. By the early hours of Monday, mobs had erupted in Walthamstow and Brixton. On Monday evening a new front formed in Hackney, with further outbreaks in Croydon, Clapham, Ealing and Enfield.

A furniture store in Croydon established in 1867 and run by five generations of the same family was burnt to the ground, while a warehouse blaze in Enfield destroyed the stock of many of the UK’s favourite independent record labels.

Meanwhile, copycat violence and destruction broke out in Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool.

The genesis of the events was a call for justice for the Duggan family, but it evolved into an on-going series of senseless vandalism and theft, and various commentators have pondered why so many young people have been so willing to take to the streets purely to smash and grab.

While there can be no excuse for this behaviour, certain issues cannot be ignored: Young people today find themselves in the historically rare situation of having fewer prospects than the generation before them.

Couple that with a Government that has invested little in their interests – see: cuts to local services including youth centres, cuts to Sure Start and the Educational Maintenance Allowance, and a rise in tertiary tuition fees – and the result is a section of youth with no stake in society.

Without a sense of social or community solidarity, they have no respect for it, or the consequences of their actions; they feel they have nothing more to lose.

Prime Minister David Cameron cut his summer holiday short in order to return to the UK this morning to deal with the unrest, as did London Mayor Boris Johnson.

And while leaders and the authorities met and pledged to draft an additional 10,000 police officers to patrol the city tonight, the residents in areas affected by the events of the nights before came together to reclaim their streets.

Rallied by a group set up on social networks, Riot Clean Up, many more than had perpetrated the damage turned out to clean it up. Images spread online of crowds of helpers with brooms aloft, in a heartwarming display of community strength and cohesion.

At 5pm today Scotland Yard confirmed that 563 people had been arrested and 105 charged, and 111 officers and 5 dogs injured, in London since violence broke out on Saturday.

Also confirmed this evening was the finding of the Independent Police Complaints Commission that Mark Duggan did not shoot a gun at police.

Tonight, London is unusually quiet. Many shops closed early this evening and others boarded their windows in an effort to avoid damage, but so far there have been only minor disturbances in Canning Town. Elsewhere citizens were taking to the street in several areas to patrol and protect their neighbourhoods.

But outside the capital, major incidents of property damage and theft are ongoing tonight in Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, and a police station in Nottingham has been fire-bombed.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

My account:

I live about one mile down the road from where the most intense action took place in Hackney on Monday night.

And while the evening was filled with the constant distant sound of sirens and the buzz of helicopters flying overhead, I remained calm and confident of my safety.

After all, the driving propensity of the rioters seemed to be looting – my house is in a residential area and the few shops nearby aren’t worth targeting.

But what I hadn’t taken into consideration was mob mentality – evident in the way the initial rioting had sporadically spread from one north London location, to handfuls of disconnected locations across the capital, and later, the country – and the idleness of youth.

And so it was, around midnight on August 8th, that the smell of smoke began to waft in through my kitchen window.

Outside, the skeleton of a building on a construction site across the road was on fire.

My first assumption was that it was started by one, or a group, of the local hoodlums who congregate on the street corners all hours of the day and night, with nothing better to do than roughhouse with, and yell at, each other. It might have been one of the boys I had seen earlier in the night, yelling towards the sky at the police helicopters flying over: “fuck you, pigs”.

While the fire was by no means a riot situation, it had clearly been inspired by the various pockets of violence, looting and arson which were sweeping not only the capital, but the whole country.

Remarkably, given the amount of unrest that night, the local fire brigade arrived in minutes and extinguished the blaze without any incident.

The home-owner in me was glad the fire didn’t spread, but the journalist in me secretly wished for more action; the clothes on me smelt of smoke.

Picture by Amy Freeborn

After all, I remember reading the 2009 story about eBay-er Morace Park who bought a battered old film tin for £3.20 – because “it had a lovely look to it” – and ended up with a never-before-seen Charlie Chaplin film that was later valued at £40,000.

The item description read:

‘Do you like a gamble? Answer yes and read on… What we have here is a roll of unprocessed film. It’s still in its original plastic tube and has laid unseen for the past thirty years. Like opening the Holy Grail, you have the opportunity to view what pictures have been caught on film. Worth a gamble… we’ll let you decide.’

And I thought, yes, I’ll take that gamble.

Once I’d confirmed my purchase, a real excitement began to build as I contemplated what may lie within.

While I was realistic enough to know that I probably wasn’t going to discover a photographic treasure worth tens of thousands of pounds, like Mr Park had, I hoped at least that I would find an interesting range of images that would make a good subject for this article, and that they’d have that currently-desirable vintage look to make for a pretty pictorial accompaniment to my words.

I was reasonably confident that it would yield something other than trash.

The film arrived in the post on Tuesday, four days after my purchase, and I immediately walked down the high street and put it in for processing.

The man at Snappy Snaps commented on the silver-ended roll: “I haven’t seen one of these for a long time”, and asked me how old it was.

I told him it was apparently 30-years-old and that I’d bought it on eBay as a bit of an experimental documentary project. I instructed him that even if the images appeared tainted, damaged or otherwise worthless at first glance, that I wanted them all put onto the disc anyway.

He tore off the little strip at the top of the envelope, handed it to me, and told me to come back after 12 o’clock to pick up the results.

That was an hour and a half away, so I returned to my office and fired off an email to the seller, who I shall name only as Eileen:

“I was just wondering if you are able to give me any background details on the film at all, ie: where did you get it? who did it belong to? how do you know it’s 30 years old? etc. I bought the film as a sort of documentary project, as I am a writer and photographer, so any background information you could provide on the film itself would be very helpful.”

The hour of noon came, and I trotted back to Snappy Snaps to pick up my disc and the contact sheet of images. The man who had served me earlier did not make any comment on the results; he just took my money and handed over the envelope.

As I walked back up the road to my office I couldn’t wait, and sneaked a peek at the contact sheet.

And what did I see? A series of amateur soft-porn shots of a blonde woman wearing only black high heels, occasionally using a chair as a prop.

I shut the envelope in an almost embarrassed fashion, as if passers-by might be able to see what I was looking at (they couldn’t, of course).

I suppose it didn’t really come as a total surprise – I had had a fleeting thought prior to the film’s arrival that porn was a possibility.

At least they had a retro, expired film, light-leak look to them, I reasoned with myself.

As I walked the rest of the way back to the office I wondered who the woman in these pictures could be.

Was it possible that Eileen was an exhibitionist and had bought on old, unused roll of film, shot these images of herself, and listed it under the aforementioned pretence?

A look at her other eBay items revealed a host of slides and vintage photographic paraphernalia and accoutrements, but nothing to reveal any kind of kinky side.

Then, about six hours after I had sent my email to her, Eileen, from East Sussex, replied, saying:

“I really wish I could help you more but all I know is that I bought the films and other goods from someone who found them in a loft. All he knew was that the films must have been stored away for at least 30 years. He had no idea who they belonged to, or anything else. Sorry I can’t help.”

I responded saying that she might be interested and/or amused to know that the film contained pornography; she was shocked and apologised profusely.

I said it was fine; the item description had clearly stated that it was a gamble, after all.

So, while this project of chance didn’t turn out as I had expected, I did at least get this story out of it; and as they say – one woman’s trash is another man’s treasure (or pleasure, as the case may be).

]]> http://www.thefreeborntimes.com/archives/1642/feed 0 http://www.thefreeborntimes.com/archives/1519 http://www.thefreeborntimes.com/archives/1519#comments Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:41:32 +0000 Amy Freeborn http://www.thefreeborntimes.com/?p=1519 On a trip to Santa Cruz, California, in the summer of 2007 a 12-year-old girl from Texas dropped her digital camera off the pier.

But where this story really begins is almost four years later and six miles away following two particularly stormy days in March.

Peter Govaars and his daughter were beachcombing at Hidden Beach in Aptos, (340 miles north-west of Los Angeles), examining the debris washed ashore, when Peter noticed the skeleton of a camera under his feet with, remarkably, its memory card still attached.

With his father’s tinkering spirit in mind and his grandfather’s adage (translated from Dutch) of “you have ‘no’, you can always try for ‘yes’”, he decided to take the SD card home and see if the pictures could be recovered.

After a little care, and with the help of a craft knife, and some rubbing alcohol, Peter removed the chip from its plastic housing, cleaned off the corrosion and green slime, put it all back together and inserted the card into his computer.

“Lo and behold – the card appeared on my desktop and was readable,” Peter recalls.

The modern-day message in a bottle had, against all odds, given up its secrets after four years lost at sea.

“At that point the experience went from technical to emotional. I was excited that these lost photos were viewable, and immediately started to wonder about the people in the pictures.”

What he had discovered, and recovered, was around 100 images taken over a two-week period in June 2007. They featured a child’s birthday party, a Burger King meal, a trip to the beach, and finally, the Santa Cruz pier, where the camera’s owner had presumed her photographic memories lost forever.

In fact, the last photo on the card was a side-ways shot of a sea lion in the water – perhaps snapped just moments before the camera was dropped and began its remarkable journey.

Having come this far, Peter decided to try and reunite images and owner.

He set up a Flicker set featuring a handful of the images under the name ‘DoYouKnowUs’ and about a month ago sent an email to the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper. A reporter interviewed him on June 14th, and the story was published online on June 19th and in print on June 20th.

Then “everything just spread like wild-fire”, he says.

The story was picked up everywhere from New York, to the UK, to Brazil.

Amongst Flickr messages “blessing” Peter and his “good deed”, was a group of followers who took on the role of amateur investigative journalists.

“A small group of people took a strong interest in the story and each contributed a bit to solving the puzzle. My thanks go out to all of them,” Peter says.

“A few people were able to look up a name and address from a license plate in one of the photos. Another found the phone number for the name/address, but found it was disconnected.”

Then US news and entertainment program Inside Edition caught wind of the story, “did some magic and got in touch with the family in Texas by phone”.

“At roughly the same time, one of the owner’s cousins contacted me via email because she saw the story on a Bay Area news website,” he says.

In just a fraction of the time that the camera had been lost, its owner had been found, and the mystery solved.

“There was roughly a week of background work to put the initial story together, and then around two days for it to go viral and the crowd-sourced investigation to find the owner.

“The power of the internet is phenomenal. You can see it with this story, but more importantly in the reporting from places like Egypt, Syria, and Libya. Although this is not an earth-shattering event, this story was able to resonate with people, and it got picked up around the world in only two days time,” Peter says.

While he has yet to speak to the camera’s owner or her family, he has spoken on the phone with the owner’s cousin, who made contact through Flickr.

“She said her cousin that lost the camera was giddy about suddenly being famous, and was telling all her friends about it on Facebook.”

Peter says there is talk of Inside Edition arranging for the owner (who appears at the front in the above image) and her family to fly out for a TV reunion, “which looks like it may actually happen”.

Reflecting on the flurry of attention his story has brought this week, Peter said yesterday:

“I’m glad to get the card back to her. It’s a story she’ll be able to think back fondly about for the rest of her life. I know that when I go back through my own family photos, the pictures remind me of great stories about the times and places the pictures were taken. And that’s not even for pictures that were lost at sea for four years! I hope the same will be true for her, along with the follow-on story of all the media attention that surrounded it.”

Pictures courtesy of Peter Govaars and the camera’s owner

Graffiti icon Banksy has created a new piece in London – a tribute to the ubiquitous tagger and recently criminal damage-convicted, Tox.

At Tox’s trial on June 6th, prosecutor Hugo Lodge told the jury: “He is no Banksy. He doesn’t have the artistic skills”, and he was subsequently found guilty on seven counts.

But while Tox has been dismissed by the police and legal establishment as a vandal, Banksy’s work – which has sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds – is considered artistic and culturally significant.

So much so, that tonight, just a day after the piece appeared on Jeffrey’s Street in Tox’s hometown of Camden, three workmen were busy fitting the frame for a perspex encasement to protect it from damage or theft.

The image features a young boy, whose identity is concealed with a black bar over his eyes, creating the word ‘Tox’ with a bubble wand.

It is quintessentially Banksy, while giving a nod to the practice of tagging through its bubble writing-style.

Tox – real name Daniel Halpin, 26-years-old – was arrested and remanded at the beginning of the year as part of the British Transport Police’s ‘Operation Misfit’ to crack down on graffiti, and remains in custody awaiting sentencing on July 1st.

He has been acclaimed the ‘King of Taggers’ by his peers for his dedication to spraying his tag on more, and riskier, places than any other in the UK.

The Camden piece is a fitting display of solidarity and support from Banksy; and a raised middle finger to the authorities.

Pictures by Amy Freeborn

That is the finding of The Global Commission on Drug Policy – whose 19 members include former presidents, humanitarians, as well as previous UN secretary general Kofi Annan and Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson – in a report released today.

The report coincides with the publication of an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron, signed by 30 prominent UK figures – including Dame Judi Dench and Sting – calling for drug policy reform in this country.

The GCDP report says that criminalisation has clearly failed and that governments need to experiment with models of legal regulation of drugs.

“Replace drug policies and strategies driven by ideology and political convenience with fiscally responsible policies and strategies grounded in science, health, security and human rights.”

Today’s open letter, published in The Guardian and organised by Release, the national centre of expertise on drugs and the law, points out that countries that have decriminalised drugs, such as Portugal in 2001, have seen problematic drug use and drug-related deaths fall.

The letter marks the 40th anniversary of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and states: “In the past forty years use of illicit drugs in the UK has grown rapidly. It is clear that the present system of applying criminal law to the personal use and possession of drugs has failed in its aim”.

“We call on the Coalition Government to undertake a swift and transparent review of the effectiveness of current drug policies.”

The Misuse of Drugs Act was created not as a policy for prohibition, but one of protection, and covers legislation “with respect to drugs which are being or appear likely to be misused and of which the misuse is having or appears capable of having harmful effects sufficient to constitute a social problem”. And it allows for any method of control that best serves in protecting society, including healthcare, education and police intervention.

But UK lawmakers seem to have been pre-occupied with criminalisation, rather than harm minimisation and education.

Indeed, in October 2009 Professor David Nutt, then chair of the government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, was sacked when he publicly stated that ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco.

The UK Home Office has issued a statement saying it will ignore the GCDP report and the open letter.

“We have no intention of liberalising our drugs laws. Drugs are illegal because they are harmful – they destroy lives,” a spokesman said.

But what the Home Office refuses to acknowledge is that legal ‘drugs’ – such as tobacco and alcohol – create substantially more health and social problems and cause many more deaths, than illegal drugs.

Figures from both the Department of Health and Office for National Statistics show that yearly deaths attributed to tobacco average more than 100,000, alcohol averages around 60,000, while illegal drugs average less than 1500.

Yet in the past year alone, more than 80,000 people in the UK have been found guilty or cautioned for possession of an illegal drug.

The GCDP report recommends that governments around the world consider the “legal regulation of drugs to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens”.

The open letter – endorsed by politicians, professors, members of the nobility, lawyers, police, entrepreneurs and those in the entertainment and media industries – echoes that recommendation: “It is time for the UK to review its policy, reduce its reliance on an overburdened criminal justice system, and to adopt an evidence based and health focused approach to drug use”.

They are as aurally as they are aesthetically pleasing; the logo typeface as iconic as the product itself.

Over the years, Orange has provided amplification for artists as diverse as Fleetwood Mac, James Brown, the Beach Boys, Tina Turner, Johnny Cash, Madonna, Slipknot, Kid Rock, and countless other up-and-comers and also-rans in between.

So it is little surprise that there is public desire and company inclination enough to see the release of a coffee table book dedicated to the brand.

The result is a 200-page flipbook, covered in luxurious orange velvet, which splits the Orange story into two parts – the building of the brand, and its various products and users – telling the tale through an archive of press cuttings, photographs and promotional material.

‘Building The Brand’ chronicles company founder Cliff Cooper, who went from radio and television repairman in the early ‘60s, to bass player in a band, to opening his first shop in 1968 on New Compton Street, part of London’s “music walk” that stretched between Denmark Street and Shaftesbury Avenue in Soho. The store was Cooper’s first enterprise to bare the ‘Orange’ name, and when the basement recording studios didn’t pay the bills, he designed, built and sold his own amplifiers on the ground floor from early ’69, with a sideline in second-hand instruments. He then branched out into equipment hire (including to the Munich Olympics in 1972), before expanding the business to include artist management, a record label, music publishing and an artist booking agency.

Brand building also included comic strip adverts, branded beach buggies and motor sport sponsorship; as well as company expansion into Europe, China and America; and most recently the development of a new product, the Orange Personal Computer, an all-in-one playing, recording and editing console.

The flip side of the tome, ‘The Book Of Orange’, celebrates the company’s more than 40 years of innovation in amplifier design, aesthetics and sound technology.

It covers Cooper’s first amp invention – a miniature transistor amp with an ear piece, conceived in response to noise complaints from neighbours at his Stratford demo recording studio in 1966 – and Orange’s subsequent 50-plus editions, including a 12×24 foot “world’s biggest guitar cabinet”.

It also details the brand’s use of colour (which has included editions in black, white and green), picture-frame design, unique hieroglyphic symbols and the development of the equipment’s distinctive “warm and crunchy” sound.

This side of the book closes with a gallery and testimonials from “only a small selection of the many” artists who have used and helped to promote the Orange brand, which include Led Zeppelin, Oasis, PJ Harvey, Clutch, Kaiser Chiefs, Fall Out Boy, Mastodon, Down and Scissor Sisters.

The book is certainly a comprehensive overview of the history of Orange, with just two drawbacks, as I see it – it is just an overview, particularly the product details; and some of the images could be better, such as some low-quality scans (although this could be down to the original source material) and the use of some unclear artist pictures (I would imagine many artists would be happy to pose in a specific Orange photo shoot or supply top-quality live images).

Having said that, the book doesn’t claim to be anything more than a coffee table book – it’s not an encyclopedia or in-depth study of day one to current day of the company with full technical specifications and product reviews – and by pick-up-from-the-table-and-flick-through standards it is a good and attractive offering, so, thumbs up.

The Orange coffee table book is priced at £29.99 and available right now (for orders to the UK) at this link: http://orangeamps.com/uk-shop/product.php?id_product=54

In honour of this month’s 40th anniversary of the film ‘Charlie And The Chocolate Factory’ creative confectioners Bombas & Parr, known for their spectacular culinary events, launched the world’s first walk-through chocolate waterfall.

The installation flows with five tonnes of chocolate at a rate of 12,000 litres an hour and I went along to the preview event before it opens to the public for just four days this Easter weekend, under the atrium at Whiteley’s shopping centre in Bayswater, London.

Sam Bombas says the waterfall – tickets for which sold out in advance – is a thing of “wonder and beauty” and explores the relationship between sight, smell and taste.

The chocolate waterfall experience begins with visitors being ushered through a pink and purple arch into a low-lit, pink-tinged room adorned with bubble-like objects.

Here we were issued with protective suits and booties and sent forward into a room filled with (another world first) a cloud of breathable chocolate; so thick it was you could barely see your hand in front of your face.

The technology for the cloud was developed by Bombas & Parr in association with CASE, the Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine.

Emerging from the cloud, one at a time, we walked onto a bridge over a chocolate river into which the waterfall gushes; the flowing mixes the chocolate-y concoction with hints of plum and red wine.

And as Willy Wonka says, mixing by waterfall is “the only way if you want it just right”.

Stepping off the end of the bridge brings visitors into the installation’s processing unit where we were invited to pour our own bottle of chocolate elixir from a tap piped directly from the waterfall.

Before sealing the bottle of concentrated chocolate cordial, we could customize it by blending in flavours such as lavender, jasmine, frankincense or juniper.

After 48 hours infusing the elixir would be ready to make chocolate flavoured milk drinks at home.

With pink and gold-labeled bottle in hand, we shed our protective gear, and were thrust back into reality and the bright lights of the shopping centre.

My first thought upon exiting was that perhaps my expectations had been too high going in – while I wasn’t intending to do an Augustus Gloop and jump into the chocolate river – I was hoping to get closer to the waterfall, walk under its flow, rather than view it from a bridge.

But, on reflection, I realise that it is the closest anyone is likely to get to the imaginary chocolate factory of Willy Wonka, and it certainly was a sight and sensory experience to behold.

Pictures by Alex Sterling and Amy Freeborn

William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac – the leaders of the Beat Generation – are each the subject of a film recently, or soon to be, released.

The Beat Generation was a group of friends first, a movement later, formed in New York, with some later migrating to San Francisco. William S Burroughs was seen as the godfather and mentor of the group, while Jack Kerouac was the spokesperson (or at least the most outspoken).

They were writers, poets and artists; bohemian hedonists who experimented with drugs, sexuality, language and life itself. They were post-WWII youth who rejected conformity and materialism; steeped in jazz, they were exuberant and unreserved in their expression and being.

The Beat Generation inspired and documented its own new culture in three key publications – Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ (1957), Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’ (1958), and William S Burroughs’ “cut-up” novel ‘Naked Lunch’ (1959).

The videographic tribute to Burroughs comes in the form of director Yony Leyser’s November 2010 documentary ‘William S Burroughs – A Man Within’.

It brings together archival footage of interviews and other events, home-video and photographs, as well as personal insights from friends and influence-ees including Thurston Moore, Patti Smith, Gus Van Sant and David Cronenberg.

The life of Burroughs is uncovered, from his middle-class up-bringing during which we was apparently introduced to opium by the house-keeper, to his graduation from Harvard University and subsequent move to New York, his friendship with Ginsberg and Kerouac, and the spawning of a movement.

He was gay and a heavy drug user (dubbed the ‘pope of dope’) and broke boundaries with his writing on drugs and homosexual culture in books such as ‘Junky’ and ‘Queer’.

He was ever-resplendent in a three-piece suit, loved cats (he had at least six in his later years) and guns. Tragically, he accidentally shot and killed his wife, Joan, while demonstrating his shooting skills, William Tell-style, with a glass of gin and tonic on her head. Although a gay man, he was married and loved his wife very much.

Burroughs writing was responsible for spawning various words that are part of our lexicon today. He prophesised punk in ‘Naked Lunch’, championed it in his column for Crawdaddy magazine and was lauded as its godfather at his local venue, CBGBs.

Patti Smith, who would become a regular performer at CBGBs, says: “I had a huge crush on William. I used to dream that we would get married… He encouraged me to sing before I sang publicly.”

Director Leyser says of ‘A Man Within’: “I wanted to capture on film his life, persona and the friends he influenced. His circle of friends was incredibly diverse – rock stars, trash collectors, intellectuals, ‘gun nuts’, conservatives, shamans, upper-class New Yorkers, junkies, and good corn-fed Kansans.

“They were absurdly supportive of the film, and once they saw the progress I was making, pushed me forward with footage, introductions and incredible interviews.”

Burroughs’ novel ‘Naked Lunch’ is arguably his most well-known and influential work and is considered a landmark in American literature. It pioneered a new form of writing, the ‘cut-up’ technique (invented by his friend Brian Gysin), in which text was literally cut-up and rearranged to form new narratives. The book is made up of loosely-connected “routines” that are intended to be read in any order, and which chronicle the various exploits of the central character, a junkie called William Lee.

‘Naked Lunch’ was the subject of the US’s last obscenity trial, in 1962. It was later made into a film by David Cronenberg in 1991, starring Peter Weller as Burroughs.

William S Burroughs died at the age of 83 in August 1997.

It is the 1957 obscenity trial of Allen Ginsberg’s book ‘Howl And Other Poems’ that forms the central storyline of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s recently released movie ‘Howl’.

The mixed-media, mixed-format film is a hybrid of drama, imagination and reality starring James Franco as Ginsberg and Aaron Tveit as his life partner, Peter Orlovsky.

It weaves three stories – the obscenity trial against the book’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights, a biographic portrait of Ginsberg, and a wild animated ride (designed by Ginsberg collaborator Eric Drooker) through the reading of the poem.

Court proceedings created from actual transcripts and reconstructed interviews with Ginsberg are shown in colour, while key moments – such as the infamous 1955 Six Gallery reading of the poem, and interactions with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy – are shown in black and white. Archival footage is briefly inserted in reference to a line from ‘Howl’ (“angel-headed hipsters”) and electro-shock therapy in reference to Ginsberg’s 8-month stay in a “loony bin”, where he met the man to whom ‘Howl’ is dedicated (and the recipient of said shock therapy), Carl Solomon.

Epstein says of the film: “We set out to find a way to bring together all these different elements – the text of the poem, Ginsberg’s life and ideas, this landmark trial – to create a multi-faceted picture of ‘Howl’s’ creation and the world’s response. The thrilling part was that we were inventing the form as we went along.”

The San Francisco obscenity trial in the summer of ’57 debated the literary merits of Ginsberg’s four-part, 3000-word poem and particularly whether the language and themes it contained – which included homosexuality and drugs – were ‘necessary’.

Ferlinghetti’s attorney, Jake Ehrlich (played by Jon Hamm), closed his case with the statement: “Let there be light. Let there be honesty. Let there be no running from non-existent destroyers of morals. Let there be honest understanding.”

The trial proved to be a watershed freedom of speech case. Federal Judge Clayton Horn (played by Bob Balaban) dismissed the charges: “An author should be real in treating his subject and be allowed to express his thoughts and ideas in his own words”.

Ginsberg believed the key to great literature (and what would come to typify the writing of the Beat Generation) was including the most exciting aspects of casual conversation.

He said: “We talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re going to fuck tomorrow, when we got drunk, everyone tells ones friends about that. So the question is what happens when you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your muse?

“The trick is to break down that distinction, to approach your muse as frankly as you would talk to yourself, or your friends; to commit to writing, to write the same way that you are.”

While ‘Howl’ may have been Ginsberg’s most publicised poem, he wrote many more volumes of work. But he was more than just a poet – he was a champion of social justice, a songwriter and photographer, a political agitator, a renowned teacher of poetry, a spiritual adventurer and world traveler.

Allen Ginsberg died in April 1997 at the age of 70. His partner of more than 20 years, Peter Orlovsky, died in 2010.

Third member of the vanguard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, also subscribed to the premise of real and raw writing.

His seminal book (and probably the most widely-read work of the movement) ‘On The Road’ – which is currently being adapted into a film – is just that.

Kerouac described his style as ‘spontaneous prose’ and is said to have approached the writing of ‘On The Road’ in the style of a letter to a friend, rather than a traditional novel.

The book captures on paper the energy and enthusiasm of the Beat Generation. Indeed, the draft of the novel is said to have been written in just three weeks, typed onto a continuous roll of paper 120-foot long.

‘On The Road’ takes the form of a cross-country hedonistic search for release and fulfillment, incorporating drink, drugs, sex and jazz – “We were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of the time, move.”

The spirit of the characters – all drawn from real-life Beat figures and others met along the road – is captured by this passage: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…”

Walter Salles (director of the Che Guevara-based ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’) has completed principal photography on a film version of the book, and it is expected to be released before the end of the year.

It stars Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty (the fictionalized version of Neal Cassady), Sam Riley as Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s own fictional alter-ego), and Kristen Stewart in the role of Marylou.

Jack Kerouac died in 1969 at the age of 47, preceded by a 41-year-old Neil Cassady in 1968.