One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur

What literary genius has to do with indie music icons, a cabin, and San Francisco.

Jack Kerouac was perhaps the last big literary rock star. The avatar of the Beat movement, he skyrocketed into success in the late 50’s after the triumphant debut of his groundbreaking novel, On The Road. But, by 1960, Kerouac had fallen victim to his own success, unraveling into addiction, depression, cynicism and a jaded disaffection Beat culture. After a tortured attempt at spiritual revival in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin, Kerouac wrote the gritty semi-autobiographical novel Big Sur.

This year, director Curt Worden takes us back to that cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City in One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur — a cinematic journey into the events the book is based on. Narrated by John Ventimiglia of The Sopranos fame, the film stars some of Kerouac’s iconic contemporaries — writers, poets, actors and musicians, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joyce Johnson, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, and Sam Shepard — whose first-hand accounts and reflections come to life in a stunning selection of high-def visual imagery.

But what caught our attention about this film in the first place was its extraordinary soundtrack, an inspired collaboration between Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and Jay Ferrar of Son Volt. Recorded over the course of three days in the cabin Kerouac wrote about, the original score is coupled with haunting, intimate lyrics taken straight from the pages of Big Sur — a melodic contemplation of this powerful story of epic talent and epic collapse.

Today, the film opens in theaters and the gem of a soundtrack becomes available on appropriately classy vinyl with DVD. But, if you’d still rather have bits over atoms, you can snag it in good ol’ mp3 form, too.

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Writing Without Words: Visualizing Jack Kerouac’s On The Road

Literature as a canvas, a book as a living organism, and rhythm as a texture.

London-based artist Stefanie Posavec has a gift for words. Or for the lack thereof, to be exact. Her latest project, Writing Without Words, explores the literary world when its most important building blocks are removed by visually representing text.

The project uses Jack Kerouac’s iconic On The Road and takes a number of different approaches in dissecting its content visually. One examines “literary organism patterns” through simple tree structures that divide each of the book’s three parts into chapters, which divide into paragraphs, paragraphs into sentences, and sentences into words. All these elements are color-coded based on key themes in the book.

Another visualization technique looks at sentences, representing them by lines organized according to the number of words per sentence and color-coded to the theme.

Finally, there’s an exploration of rhythm textures — visualizing sentences by using their punctuation to create circular diagrams. Each line represents a word, with the thickness of the lines and the space between them representing the cadence, pauses and emphasis created by the punctuation.

So if you fancy yourself a fan of the written word and an advocate of visual literacy, now’s your chance to nail both — to your wall, that is: The work is available as on-demand posters here.

More about Stefanie and her work from NOTCOT.

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