Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 243

We’re a little behind “Our Allen” with this stuff, but wanted to share with you a few more of Randy Roark‘s treasure-trove of old Allen pages

His observations on these two:
“By popular demand, this is the other poem I photocopied from Allen’s notebooks so he could take it on an airplane and decode the words I couldn’t decipher. It was so casual that when I realized I’d cut off the first lines by using letter-sized paper rather than legal, I just wrote in the words that I’d missed. What’s the difference, right?’

Big news – big international news – the announcement of an exhibition in Paris in June (June 2016) on the Beat Generation (co-curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud and Jean-Jacques Lebel.

L’exposition “Beat Generation”, imaginée et présentée au Centre Pompidou, est la première grande rétrospective sur ce thème en Europe. Inédite, elle met l’accent sur cet épisode parisien, souvent oublié d’un mouvement qui allait profondément marquer la création contemporaine”.
(“The exhibition, “Beat Generation”, designed and presented at the Pompidou Center, is (will be) the first European major retrospective on this topic. Uniquely, it will place an emphasis on the oft-neglected Parisian period of  a movement that would have a profound effect on contemporary creation)

Geographically-organized –“Suivant un parcours géographique, cette exposition épouse le nomadisme Beat, de New York à San Francisco, Mexico, Tanger et Paris.” (Following a geographical track, this exhibition links Beat nomadism, from New York to San Francisco,  (to) Mexico City, Paris and Tangier”)

And also – “Elle est l’occasion de montrer comment le mouvement Beat a correspondu, peut-être pour la première fois dans l’histoire, à un usage systématique des techniques analogiques par les écrivains et les artistes (magnétophone, disque, radio, téléphone, appareil photo, caméra…”(“It’s an opportunity to show how the Beat movement corresponded, perhaps for the first time in history, with a systematic use of analog techniques by writers and artists (tape, disc, radio, phone, photo devices , camera(s)…)

“….et de confronter l’œuvre de cinéastes (Christopher MacLaine, Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek…) à celle des photographes (Allen Ginsberg et William Burroughs en collaboration avec Robert Frank, Charles Brittin, John Cohen, Harold Chapman...) ou encore de montrer les extensions de la culture Beat à la scène artistique californienne (Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, George Herms, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo…”) –  (“…and (a chance to) confront the work of filmmakers (Christopher MacLaine, Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek …) (and) photographers (Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, in collaboration with Robert Frank, Charles Brittin, John Cohen, Harold Chapman …) or, again, show the extension(s) of Beat culture to the California art scene (Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, George Herms, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo…”)

More on this groundbreaking exposition in the months ahead.

The (fourth) annual European Beat Studies Network (EBSN) Conference took place last week at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, and was, by all accounts, a rousing occasion, a great success. Anne Waldman was there to give the first keynote address – “The Beat Legacy in the Anthropocene”

Anne’s own recent Jaguar Harmonics.. (along with Ammiel Alcalay‘s truly significant a little history) is reviewed by Jay Murphy in The Huffington Post – here

Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s Writing Across The Landscape, his travel writings, is reviewed in the same forum – here
Joanne Kyger interviewed in the San Francisco papers – here
Gary Snyder interviewed in the Santa Barbara paper – here 
Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Alan Watts words weaved into – and intelligently used in “Off The Trail” by Manchester filmmaker, Nick Jordan