Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 65

Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovksy and fellow meditators, blocking the supply rail for Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production facility, Jefferson County, Colorado, June 1978. photo c. Joe Daniel

One year on from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (of March 11). Here’s one of numerous news reports (this one from Aljazeera). Here’s Aileen Mioko Smith, executive-director of the Kyoto-based Green Action, speaking on Democracy Now! – Here’s our old friend (much-missed) Nanao Sakaki (in 1999, wise and prophetic – “Stone Age Japanese never knew Atomic Energy./ Now nuclear power plants are/ Poisoning modern Japan to a slow death”). Here (ever-timely) Allen’s magisterial “Plutonian Ode” (“What new element before us unborn in Nature..?” – and don’t miss Allen’s spirited reading of it and footage of the Rocky Flats anti-nuclear protest in Costanzo Allione’s” Fried Shoes and Cooked Diamonds“). The Poets For Renewable Energy and Peace (PREP) group-reading of this poem (that took place last October, in conjunction with the New York City East Village “Howl” Festival) has just recently been put on-line and can be accessed here.
Among the company on that occasion, Eliot Katz, Bob Rosenthal, Anne Waldman and.. David Henderson. David Henderson’s definitive-we-would say 1991 Bob Kaufman radio-documentary recently got another airing, via the singular energies of the irrepressible (and indeed likewise legendary), John Sinclair – on free radio, Radio Free Amsterdam. You can listen to it – here   (Cedar Sigo’s recent appreciation of Kaufman for the City Lights blog, Abandon All Despair Ye Who Enter Here, is, incidentally, while we’re on the subject, also well worth perusing).

Attention on another “legend” and “cult hero”, the late-lamented Richard Brautigan (do people still read Trout Fishing in America?) – Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan, William Hjortsberg’s long-awaited and monumental biography of the West Coast writer has just appeared (clocking in at close to 900 pages!). A (mostly positive) early review of the book (“Hjortsberg is a talented novelist and screenwriter. He knows how to tell a story and can create brilliant atmospherics..”) can be found here [2018 updatenot any more, the link’s down, but here’s the New York Times, and here’s the San Francisco Chronicle review(s)]

And Jack Kerouac – more Kerouac! – We reported last week on the On The Road film trailer. The latest Kerouac news involves a new (indeed, the first ever!) production of a “lost work”, Kerouac’s only play, The Beat Generation. Full details about it and its upcoming October 2012 production here.

And Jack (and Allen) are not the only ones to be having films made about them. News reaches us of another exciting “Beat” adaptation – “coming soon” – Steve Buscemi‘s eagerly-anticipated William Burroughs production, Queer. [2018 update – no further word about this project – nominally still in production]

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