Just tripped across these two vids while I was writing a little blog about my namesake, Philip Whalen.

“…An excerpt from the film the United States of Poetry by Washington Square Films. 2006.

Johnny Depp reading Jack Kerouac. The first line is Ginsberg’s America, the rest is Depp reading Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues Chorus 113″

Sitting in the control room of a radio station and smoking a cigarette is a long-haired, quiet, intense young man. The lights blink ON AIR ON AIR, and then switch to KEROUAC KEROUAC. And indeed the words are from the author of On the Road, and here the voice breaks into the jazz poems of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, perhaps the greatest volume of straight-out jazz poetry ever written. And the man who’s reading them, in a gently-inflected smoke-tinged voice, is JOHNNY DEPP, who, when not starring in movies, is an avid Kerouac fan and scholar. “