Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 543

“Dior” is how we ended last weekend’s Friday Round-Up, and, of course, it was Kim Jones and his Jack Kerouac-inspired fashion show that we were alluding to. See the report in The Guardian from the next day,  in The Financial Times – here – W magazine, The Face, I-D, Vogue… The event got a lot of press, it was a major international runway show – and what a runway!  (see above – the models paraded down a a giant, eighty-metre long replica of the legendary On The Road scroll to a soundtrack of Kerouac and Throbbing Gristle!)

Quite the drama as the scroll is unfurled and then, later, rolled back again.

In combination with this there was also on display a number of items from Jones’ own lovingly-assembled “Beat Generation” collection (rare manuscripts, first editions, totemic items).  Allen’s Empty Mirror was there, a copy of Planet News (inscribed to Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull), and (perhaps most unlikely, faithfully preserved through time, his credit card!). Of the Kerouac items, his mother’s personal copy of On The Road, and a copy of The Dharma Bums, with the author’s own penciled-in annotations.

Kerouac 2022 celebrations have started.

 

On Saturday, it’s a full moon, and San Francisco is having a special event in Golden Gate Park (one of a number of events scheduled as part of a month-long celebration of poetry and light) – a Howl exorcism! – “The full moon will be visible…starting around 4.30pm”, the organizers note, and we will howl throughout the night”. Revelers will be able to observe the  poem “Howl” scrolled in lasered letters across the full facade of the de Young Museum. Wow! – It should be quite a night!

 

This past Monday, San Francisco poet Jack Hirschman, who died this past August, would have been 88.  “Happy Birthday Jack”, a beautiful memorial celebration took place for him on that day and can be viewed in its entirety – here

and more memorials – here‘s City Lights recent memorial to Diane di Prima – and here

 

From The Beat Museum – a visit to the show (that closed a week or so back) “The Beat Goes On – Poets As Painters”.  Curator/gallery-owner  John Natsoulas takes us around the exhibit 

 

Beat Scene – 102 (yes, 102!) – Kevin Ring‘s extraordinary and devoted achievement (with, not just the magazine but a series, an on-going series, of unique Beat-related chapbooks) is just out. 102 – a follow-up collection to 2014’s  “The Beats in Britain” (issue 74!) – For orders and more information, Kevin can be contacted – here

Simon Warner’ Substack continues to engage us – this week –  a visit with Beat scholar and our beloved web-maestro Marc Eliot Stein

 

Tomorrow (Saturday December 18) there will be a marathon group-reading of Bernadette Mayer‘s Midwinter Day, the 4th Annual St. Rocco’s Poetry Collective reading  – see here. – and for live-stream here 

We’ll have more on Midwinter Day here, on the actual Midwinter Day, next Tuesday.