What do you get when you cross Howl with Día de los Muertos? Brett Underwood, the man behind Day of the Dead Beats, tells all
I was a simple country youth when I told my parents I’d like to be a priest during off-seasons resting from my pitching career with the Cardinals. Perhaps the singular mastery of physics involved in hurling a baseball clashed too extremely with the Beatitudes—at any rate, my pitching elbow is blown out, and I haven’t gone to church regularly since I pitched for a Jesuit university.
Now I am the producer, promoter and emcee of Day of the Dead Beats, a collective reading that saw its advent through the efforts of a local poet, Paul Thiel. The first reading was staged in ‘97, the year Burroughs and Ginsberg died, and has continued as a celebration of Beat writers who are gone but not forgotten. During my tenure, I have been sporadically reminded of Matthew 5:1-12, perhaps because Thiel invited me to read the works of Charles Bukowski at the Way Out Club in 2000. I’ve closed the last couple of readings with a debauched rendering of Buk—not as one of the meek but as a frazzled producer and unpublished poet who doesn’t otherwise share the bill with Aaron Belz, K. Curtis Lyle, Hunter M. Brumfield, Mariah Richardson and Bob Wilcox, all reading their favorite Beat pieces.
The Beats spawned a culture as expansive as hip-hop. The four-letter–word magazines created the “beatnik,” and the Beats continued to swim outside of the waters of language and society as meadows turned to cornfields turned to cornflakes turned to corny and pseudo-hip pop commodities like Dobie Gillis. Day of the Dead Beats simply attempts to recapture some of the Beats’ energy and pour cheap sangria into the hearts of the audience, staging the words that brought a little Zen to a decidedly non-Zen nation. It’s never as drunk, smoky and strung-out as some would expect, though neither is the evening something your grandmother would approve of ... unless she’s hip and down with the word.
Beatniks ‘R’ Us
A St. Louisan is credited with the birth of the Beats, but it’s not who you’re thinking. Lucien Carr’s scandalous headlines, rather than William S. Burrough’s scandalous work, marked the beginning of all things Beat. Burroughs moved to New York City in ‘43; Carr, a St. Louis acquaintance, was enrolled at Columbia. That’s where he’d met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who he introduced to Burroughs. A former scoutmaster of Carr’s, David Kammerer, had followed Carr to New York, taking a job as a janitor to be nearer to him. Carr included him in the circle for a time, but the relationship turned fatal on August 14, 1944 when Carr, then a sophomore, killed Kammerer by stabbing him twice in the heart with a Boy Scout pocketknife, then rolled the body into the Hudson River. Carr claimed he was defending himself from an unwanted sexual advance and served two years of a 20-year sentence before being paroled. After his release, he took a job as a reporter for the United Press, breaking what Ginsberg called “the libertine circle.” Over the next 40 years, he became one of UPI’s most respected editors. Carr supplied Kerouac, speed-typing champion of the greater Boston area, with a roll of UPI Teletype paper, aiding the novelist in his pursuit of his signature writing technique, “spontaneous prose,” which spawned his famous stream-of-consciousness novel On the Road.
Day of the Dead Beats takes place, of course, on Día de los Muertos—November 2. The time is 8 p.m., and the place is Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest. For more information, visit www.observable.org.
