The iconic picture of Peter Orlovsky, the painting that made Allen fall in love with him, Robert LaVigne‘s Nude With Onions (1954), is going up for sale. The painting will be featured in Bent, an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s, (“Because progress is never a straight line”), taking place next month, (on June 27, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising) –
“Sotheby’s New York is bringing together an interdisciplinary array of works informed by the LGBTQ experience as reflected in the arts from antiquity to the present”, the auction house proudly declares. The estimated sales price for Nude With Onions? – between one-hundred-and-fifty and one-hundred-and-seventy thousand dollars. One of a kind. Maybe it’ll go for even more than that?
Hollywood continues its fascination with the Beat Generation. Variety announces Ben Foster‘s as-yet-untitled upcoming William Burroughs film (scheduled for later next year):
“The film explores an unusual love triangle between Burroughs, portrayed by Foster; his charismatic, common-law muse, Joan Vollmer, played by (Kristen) Stewart; and a straight-laced American expatriate portrayed by (Tom) Glynn-Carney, who upends their lives to the extreme. Foster will direct from a script he’s co-written with Oren Moverman, based on Burroughs’ early works.”…
“Our film is kind of anti-Beat”, Foster declares. “We meet our star-crossed lovers in New York City, head to the Texas border, roar through Mexico City’s underbelly, and end up in the Amazon jungle. This film is about love, sex and self-discovery in all of its lush, dark and often hilarious complexity.”
Celluloid Dreams, the distributors, are (not surprisingly!) full of praise for the work:
“We were so moved by the poetry and depth of Ben and Oren’s beautiful script – it was a revelation. It’s a new, tender view of Burroughs, a long time hero of ours, so pertinent to our present times and the importance of otherness, and full of both humor and poignancy. Ben is so immersed in this material, so familiar and committed, that we know the movie will be authentic and luminous”
You’ll forgive us if we withold judgment. Wonder if there’ll be an Allen figure? More anon.
A brief Beat miscellany:
Zen practitioner James Ford on Gary Snyder
Rick Dale (of the Daily Beat) reviews Gerald Nicosia’s Kerouac – The Last Quarter Century
& Jonah Raskin – Kerouac Meets (Senator Joseph) McCarthy on TV
Luigi Caracciolo and Rachele Bertelli last week celebrated the Beat Generation in Mantua
Erika Z Galli and Anna Lou Castoldi celebrate this week in Rome
Oh, and Paterson’s Great Falls Park gets a new poetic mural – “Elizabeth Estella Valverde, vice-chair of the Paterson Arts Council, noted that the first mural had a quotation from William Carlos Williams, “In summer, the song sings itself.” “He was Ginsberg’s mentor,” she said of Williams, “so I thought it would be appropriate to have something from Ginsberg.”. “The weight of the world is love” is what they chose.
