The Beat honeymoon is officially over

Looks like all the moonbeams and starshine are starting to wear off.

In an article titled "Even when I loved it, I secretly knew Beat poetry was rubbish,"Lucy Jones reveals a sobering truth: despite being enamored with the romantic idea of the Beats, she couldn't suffer through On the Road and doesn't find "Howl" particularly impressive if not in a drug-induced haze:

From the Telegraph:

I rushed to see Howl, a film about Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs: A Man Within at the London Film Festival last week. I was excited to see how their stories would be told for the first time on film and interested to revisit the texts that I focused on at university. But as I listened to James Franco (playing Ginsberg) read Howl and watched footage of Burroughs reading his verse, it slowly dawned on me that their poetry is not (whisper it) particularly good.

Now chew on this tangential bit of cultural criticism at the end of Jones's essay. Is Keith Richards the new Ginsberg?

Apparently, Disney are thinking about cutting Keith Richards out of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film after he wrote about taking drugs in Life, his new memoir. Two questions. Did the film company really need a book to tell them that Richards has been abusing drugs for decades? And are they genuinely worried that children will see a gnarled rocker who resembles a Medjool date and think drugs are cool?