Watch it while you can - YouTube has a copy of the legendary Beatnik film 'Pull My Daisy' online. It was shot during Januar '59 in painter David Leslie's loft on 4th Avenue and 12th Street, directed by Leslie and Swiss photographer Robert Frank (already famous for his book 'The Americans'), written and narrated by Jack Kerouac, featuring Allen Ginsberg, his lover Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers and music by David Amram. "Pull My Daisy" was first screened in November 1959 at New York's Cinema 16 festival on a double bill with John Cassavetes' Shadows'.
The film's script was based on the third act of Kerouac's play 'The Beat Generation', which in turn was based on an evening at Neal Cassadys' home in Los Gatos in 1955, when a visit of the local bishop and his elderly mother and aunt coincided with the unexpected arrival of Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky.The visit turned into a nightmare for Carolyn, Neal Cassady’s wife. After tea had been served, Ginsberg sat between the two elderly women and asked brightly, "Now, what about sex?" Caressing a bottle of wine, Kerouac slouched down on the floor by the bishop's legs and fell into a drunken sleep. As Carolyn tried to carry on a normal conversation with her guests, Kerouac would wake up now and then, look at the bishop, say, "I love you", then go back to sleep.
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Watch „Pull My Daisy“.
Jaron Lanier just published a brillant, if not seminal essay on the pitfalls of all implications of Web 2.0 in John Brockman's online forum 
Did anybody notice the shamless pandering to 911 fears in the trailer for „Superman Returns“? The hero's high speed flight through the skyscraper canyons of Metropolis looking not so different from American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower in the trailer for Oliver Stone's "World trade Center". The terrified masses looking up into the sky as seen in the numerous photo essays from that day. The burning, crashing plane tumbling towards the ground with the images of struggling pilots and passengers evoking „United 93“. The cathartic ascending of Superman and Lois over the Daily Planet's Globe, which looks like Fritz Koenig’s sculpture „The Sphere“ from the World Trade Center Plaza. The eerie resemblance of Planet Krypton to Ground Zero in the weeks after the attacks. 
Maybe this is as oversensitive as the poltical correctness brigade’s search for traces of mysognism and racism in blockbuster movies. But hey, we live in New York after all. Just this morning some low-flying jets were following a bulky transporter plane in the skies over Brooklyn. Some fleet week air show partiot prancing of military hardware. Still - the sounds of non-civilian planes chasing each other overhead even got the bunch of burly construction workers across the street to look up rather worried.
Of course there are no surprises in an ‚American Idol’ season, just as there are no surprises in a new Starbucks drink or a Tom Cruise movie. Every new twist and flavor will be comfortably familiar. Which is exactly the point. So in this week’s AI final you had the two classic embodiments of Pop music – a white boy with severly challenged motor skills imitating black men and a high-strung brat who can well up on command. No question who was about to win (that princess behaviour just goes so far after all). The really scary moment was of course Ryan Seacrest’s ratings brag “63.4 million votes were cast - more than any US President in history has received", which was immediately taken as just another proof for the degeneration threatening the fabric of America by cultural pessimists from Huffington Post to the Chinese State Press Agency. Well, in a presidential election you can vote just once and so far there has always been at least one more candidate, so the correct comparison would've been, that this American Idol finale had more combined votes amassed by millions of teenagers texting verociously for four hours than any presidential election since before 1960.
There we have it – all the excitement of an election year, real results and a clear winner without the consequences of having voted in an incompetent cronyist. There was actually one surprising moment – a bespectacled David Hasselhoff tearing up in the presence of another primetime idol ready for his very brief moment of glory with the prospect of spending your retirement on the German county fair and variety show circuit (yup, Kelly Clarkson made it to the Top 10 over there without being on the highest rated prime time TV spectacle for months on end ).
The David Childs designed monolith in mirrored glass towers over the gaping hole like a set piece from a Superman movie.
'The same speech like at Liberty? Who does he think we are? Hillbillies?", he scoffed. "He'll never ever be elected by anybody with more than a 6th grade education." Reed was followed by enigmatic Suzanne Vega who dutifully sang 'Luca' and 'Tom's Diner' (she was a bit miffed about the rather lame audience participiation during the chorus, but hey, sorry, the 80s been over for a while now). Heartfelt highlight of the show was her brand new song 'New York Is A Woman': 
That Luc Besson produced action flic that had foreshadowed the 
There was great alarm in Washington. Supposedly Jihadists had manipulated computergames to recruit the gullible youth of Arabia. The Defense Department got the 
Which could’ve been the first give-away. Islamic fundamentalists are forbidden to listen to music, so the wild accordions would definitely be „haram“. If you were just a bit pop culture savy you also could have identified the voice of the insurgent as „South Park“ creator Trey Parker’s voice-over from the movie 
This particular mod had been created by a gamer who calls himself Sonic Jihad and was published on the pages of the 
Still, 
Gary Brolsma's