Tonight (March 15) at 7 pm BST at London’s Horse Hospital, Jesse Goodman and Peter Hale will introduce The Fall of America, two albums of compositions based on Ginsberg readings by artists including Scanner, Thurston Moore, Yo La Tengo, Angelique Kidjo, Bill Frisell and Devendra Banhart, followed by screenings of selected videos from the project. Youth, and special guests, will then perform a set drawn from the Iron Horse project (with video interventions by Antonio Pagano)
from Douglas Field‘s TLS review of Pat Thomas and Peter Hale’s recently-published Material Wealth – “In the handsomely produced Material Wealth – Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg, Pat Thomas succeeds in showing his subject in new and unexpected ways…Portraits of Ginsberg have a tendency to flatten their subject, who is rarely depicted beyond his roles as one of the architects of the Beat Generation and a poet of resistance during the 1960s and 1970s. In Material Wealth, Ginsberg, like his hero, Walt Whitman “contains multitudes” – from geeky young poet to countercultural court jester, from gay liberation hero to anti-Vietnam War protester and from musician to teacher and countercultural guru..”
The Material Wealth book-tour continues. Hear Thomas and Mike Scott in a warm-up conversation before last Tuesday’s Dublin gig.
Next stop, this Sunday at the Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds – see here
John Allen Cassady (Neal and Carolyn‘s son) remembers – Read “Further recollections of the Cassady kid” – on Simon Warner‘s Substack – here
& another illuminating Substack – Benjamin Breen’s – Don’t miss his excerpt from his Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science – here
We’re looking forward to the publication of The Collected Poems of John Sinclair due out from The Ridgeway Press in the coming year. Meanwhile there’s Rebecca Kosick‘s reminder and impressive over-view for the Poetry Foundation – here
John Sinclair on The Allen Ginsberg Project – here
Beat Scene – the new issue of Beat Scene is “coming quite soon” – issue 109 (Winter 2024) – William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beats in North Dakota, and a whole lot more. To order your copy/to make sure of your copy, please contact directly, editor Kevin Ring at kevbeatscene@gmail.com