Beatnik spirit is alive and well at club; Cheshire man makes documentary about Cafe Nine’s Beatniks

By Jeffery Kurz, Record-Journal staff
 
CHESHIRE — “AM, FM, MBAs and Ph Ds, HMO’s and ICUs, there’s nothing left but your life to lose.” Add a conga drum and you have, via the syncopat­ed patter of Floatin’ Fred, a pretty good updating of beatnik poetry. For the past seven years, the beatnik spirit of the 1960s has been alive and well every Monday night at a small club in New Haven, Café Nine. Now the venue’s revival spirit has been captured on film, in a documentary called “300 Mondays: Beatniks, Music, and the Birth of a Scene.” The 1 ½-hour documen­tary intersperses wide­ranging performances, in­cluding poetry, percussion, folk music and a healthy dose of avant­garde fare, with artists sit­ting around talking about why they do what they do.

“You always see some­thing new at a beatnik show,” observes Frank Critelli, a Meriden song­writer and performer, in the film. “And after 300 shows, that’s quite a feat.” The video was shot on a single night, the 300th “Monday,” on Feb. 17. Check your calendar and you’ll notice the date land­ed on a Friday this year, which attests at least to the quirky nature of the whole enterprise. Actually the idea, says filmmaker James Camp­bell, was to try to capture the largest turnout possi­ble, and everyone knows Friday night’s a better bet than Monday. Critelli said Café Nine typically schedules cele­brations on Friday. “When they do special shows they do a Friday night extrava­ganza,” he said. Campbell said he was intrigued by “the openness of it. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get.” The film will show at Firehouse 12 in New Haven Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. following a reception. Afterwards, a party will take place at Café Nine, which is about a block away. Campbell will also have DVDs available for purchase. - complete article