When Allen Ginsberg stayed with the family of a young Tyler Stoddard Smith, the two played video games and read together. But the harmony was broken when the yoga began. It wouldn’t be the last time.
From the piece in the Morning News...
Sitting in the living room, Ginsberg and I bonded over our mutual love for The Clash, although my primary attraction to the band was the army fatigues the members wore in the “Rock the Casbah” video. I put on a fashion show for Ginsberg, in which I played Combat Rock out of my ghetto blaster, dressed in fatigues from an Army surplus store-cum-saloon in Galveston. My prized possession of the moment was an old plastic Kalashnikov that made a machine gun-like rata-tat-ratatat-ratata and while I paraded around in front of Ginsberg, I fired my gun into him, which he seemed to enjoy, indulging me with spot-on death rattles and war cries. I was even more thrilled to learn Ginsberg had been enlisted by The Clash to chant the Heart Sutra on “Ghetto Defendant.” Before my bedtime he read to me from Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. Our favorite poem was “Captain Hook.” He said he knew Silverstein, said the man was “fucking crazy…maybe don’t tell your mom and pops I said that word.”
No comments:
Post a Comment