(and, in case you missed it – yesterday’s posting).
Daniel Radcliffe is interviewed (by Simon Mayo on BBC radio) on playing Allen Ginsberg and on working with director, John Krokidas – here.
That interview contains the following exchange:
SM: Is it true that you’re a poet, Daniel?
DR: Well, after a fashion.
DR: I do occasionally. Yes. It’s not..not with the frequency that I used to, but I like to think that what I write now is better.
SM: Are you radical? Do you do new things?
DM: I’m actually really not. I’m very traditional. I love rhyme and meter and form, and I know Allen wouldn’t agree with it but, I liked Robert Frost‘s line about free verse where he said writing a poem without a meter [sic] is like playing tennis without a net. (“I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down” )- ( Editorial note – but, of course, “non-traditional” verse does not imply the jettisoning of all formal or metrical consideration – T.S.Eliot – “No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job”)]
Lando Palmer at Film School Rejects opines on “the new crop of Beat movies” – “How the New Beat Cinema Narrows The Mythology of Kerouac and Friends”.
Katherine C Mead-Brewer, author of the recently-published The Trickster in Ginsberg, offers her (enthusiastic) ten cents worth here.
From the outer regions of pop/movie culture – remember “the other Allen Ginsberg”?
From an interview on moviesaddicts.com with James Franco and Winona Ryder
James Franco: Winona teased me this whole time. (during the making of Howl) She was very close with Allen Ginsberg, and her family is close with all The Beats [her father is author and archivist Michael Horowitz], and I played Allen Ginsberg (in the film). She told me that I was going to get..
Winona Ryder: But you never came in
James Franco:…one of Allen Ginsberg’s t-shirts.
Winona Ryder: I have it in…
James Franco: And it’s been two years.
Winona Ryder: I’m going to kill you. I still have it. You never… You’re like, “Oh yeah, I’ll come over…” but you never have.
James Franco: I’m owed an Allen Ginsberg t-shirt!
Is he looking for one of these perhaps?
“I saw the best minds of my generation..” – Singing sensation, Lana Del Rey gets to drop the iconic opening phrase from “Howl” in the opening of her enigmatic new “Tropico” video (is this zeitgeist week on the Ginsberg Project, or what?!). She’s long time been an avowed and fervent Allen fan (“I remember when I was 16 and I read “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, that was the first time I kind of realized you could paint pictures with words and I wanted to do that”) – a fan also of (Walt) Whitman (“Whitman is my daddy”). Here’s Lara, earlier this year, reciting Whitman
Harry Smith‘s extraordinary archives have now been cataloged and are searchable via the Getty Research Institute. For more information see the listing and finding-aid here (for more on the collection (including his astonishing paper aeroplane collection!) see here
The Boo-Hooray Gallery in New York City (who have already presented informative archival shows on Angus MacLise, Ed Sanders, and Barbara Rubin,amongst others) turn their attentions this month to the legendary Wallace Berman and his ground-breaking magazine, Semina – As part of the presentation, a full-color catalog, Semina 1955-1964 Art is Love is God, has been created (in a limited edition of three hundred copies) For more information – see here
Speaking of limited editions, for the occasion of the recent Charles Plymell-Kennedy Assasination reading, Bill Roberts of Bottle of Smoke Press designed, printed and bound a beautiful letter-press edition of Allen’s poem, “November 23, Alone” (It is included, of course, in Collected Poems 1947-1997 from HarperCollins). George Wallace writes about that fugitive poem here