What do you think is the best, most representative, Allen Ginsberg recording? Allen Ginsberg at his “mojo-strongest”? Peter Conners, author of the recently-published White Hand Society – The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg following a tip from our good friend Steve Silberman, proposes “Kral Majales” in the version off The Lion for Real album. What do other folks think?
(An invitation to sample our extensive audio and visual links is hereby proffered to refresh your memory!)
White Hand Society is now out, incidentally (we announced it a few months ago), and an excerpt can be read here on Reality Sandwich, and here on the City Lights web-site. There’s also an illuminating interview here with the author, speaking of his time researching the book among the Ginsberg archives in Stanford.
Critical poems. It could be a poem like “Kral Majales”, or, for Seattle-based poet Martha Silano, “A Supermarket in California”. Her memory of that poem’s life-changing affect on her is the subject of a radio essay recently aired on KUOW public radio.
Heard enough about Howl the movie? – I know we’ve featured such material before but here’s another profile/interview with Erik Drooker. It describes, among other things, his recent City Lights visit. Did we mention City Lights recent 50th Anniversary Edition of Kaddish? Yes we did.
I wouldn't necessarily describe the recording of "Capitol Air" with the Clash in 1981 as "best, most representative" but it is fantastic. Not only that, it provides a fine indication and tonal sense of Allen's ensuing 1980s work, his political concerns/sensibilities, his delight in the stage and the adulation that flowed from it.
I would pay ridiculous amounts of money for a recording of the Ginsberg reading I attended at Rutgers University in the fall of 1979! He was so vivacious and wild! Dang, how excitedly and feverishly he read poems like "My Alba" and "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California." He was so completely electric that night. Sigh. He also read well a few months later at the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC, sort of a tribute to William Carlos Williams. A friend of mine who was also in attendance actually taped it, but I played it so many times the cassette finally gave it up. If anyone knows of a recording from around this time (late 70s, early 80s), I would really like to know about it!