Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 686

Alice Neel‘s 1966 portrait of Allen (which was not included in our somewhat extensive posting on Alice Neel and Allen from a few years back) appears as the opening image in an exciting new show in Los Angeles (curated by Hilton Als) – ‘At Home – Alice Neel in the Queer World” ( at the David Zwirner Gallery, through to November 2nd).  Melissa Seley, in LA Review of Books, describes it -” (Allen) seated cross-legged in the dark on the set of the Jack Kerouac–penned 1959 short film Pull My Daisy, flanked by a glowing yellow candlestick and haloed by trippy black orbs that echo the shape of his wet lips pursed into the “O” of his “Howl”

“Underscoring the main themes of the show – alienation, disconnect, love”, she notes, as Als points out, there are significant connections between sitter and painter – “Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, died a few months before Neel painted this portrait. Naomi and Neel were both open communists… Naomi suffered from schizophrenia during her son’s youth, and she, like her son, like Neel, (had for a time been) institutionalized.  Neel, a mother of two boys herself, would’ve acutely felt Ginsberg’s loss.”

and Meka Boyle in Family Style quotes Als:

“There is a difference between visions and visionaries…When you have a vision, one could say it’s a hallucination or something you made up. But when you’re a visionary, you see the world before the world sees itself. This painting is about Alice’s visions, but it’s also about an identification with a visionary.”

‍Speaking of visionaries:

It’s that the of the year again – well, almost that time of the year, LCK (Lowell, Jack’s home town, celebrates Kerouac). The first (pre-festival) events took place last week with a Poe-Kerouac presentation  and a marathon reading of Doctor Sax.
The festival proper begins on Thursday (October 10 through to the 14th).

The full listing of events can be found here

Here are some highlights:

Thursday the 10th –  5:00 pm. LCK Festival opening gathering at The Old Worthen.
Worthen House Café, 141 Worthen Street. – 7:30 pm.  – Music and Poetry at The Worthen. Hosted by John McDermott. featuring poets Meg Smith, Dan Bacon, and Jim Dunn. Music by local Beatles-Tribute act Glass Onion and Mike Dion  and George Koutmanzelis

Friday, October 11 – 2:00 pm. at Lala books, 189 Market Street, “Talking Jack – An open conversation on Jack Kerouac” led by Matt Theado. . He’ll kick off the conversation about Kerouac with his particular specialty – Kerouac’s presence in Japan and how Japanese people respond to his work. –  6:00–7:30 pm – Use Poetry: An LCK Kerouac reading and discussion. “Poets Tanya Grae, Ariella Ruth, and Linda Bratcher Wlodyka will read their work and join poet and UMASS Lowell Associate Professor Maggie Dietz for a discussion of Jack Kerouac’s influence and legacy as  poet” –  8:00–10:00 pm.  Toussaint the Liberator. and his band.

Saturday, October 12 – 9:00 am. Commemorative/Remembrance – of LCK Board member Tom Mansour and poet John Sinclair (two recent passings) at Kerouac Park, 75 Bridge St.

10:00 am. Bus tour of Kerouac sites of Lowell. Led by Bill Walsh. Includes stops at Kerouac’s birthplace, some of the neighborhoods he describes in his Lowell novels, and the gravesite at the Edson Cemetery. 10:00 am. Walking tour of Downtown Kerouac sites. Led by Kurt Phaneuf. The walk takes in some of the downtown places described in the Lowell novels.
Departs from Kerouac Park, 75 Bridge St.

11:00 am–12:00 pm. LCK book presentation: Portraits Along the Way by Paul Marion. and. 12:00–1:00 pm. Lowell Reads Kerouac book discussion (on Pic).1:00 pm. Library Haunts and Hooky Tour. Led by Bill Walsh.  (‘The tour centers on the Pollard Library’s Kerouac Corner, noting the times Jack played hooky from Lowell High School in order to read books of his choosing”) – Pollard Memorial Library Community Room, 401 Merrimack Street.

2:00 pm. Annual LCK Parker Lecture by Charles Shuttleworth –  “Kerouac’s Buddhist Years and Other Discoveries Lowell National Historical Park Visitor Center Theater, 246 Market Street.

4:00 pm.  An Open Mic., featuring a reading by Beat Poet Laureate Mark Lipman. Also, Steve Belletto, editor of the newly published The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac, along with some contributors to the book, will be gathered to celebrate the launch of this important new book – Worthen House Café, (upstairs), 141 Worthen Street.

7:30 pm -An evening of jazz at Olympia’s Zorba’s Music Hall, 437 Market Street. Legendary jazz man and Kerouac collaborator David Amram and his band Kevin Twigg on drums, Rene Hart on bass, Jerome Harris on guitar, and Adam Amram on percussion) perform 9.00 pm – Lowell’s own The Party Band ( “a 10+ piece jazz street band inspired by NOLA parade bands and the historic roots of jazz”, led by drummer Savannah Marshall, who first performed with David Amram at LCK while a music student at UML).

and on Sunday, the next day, Sunday afternoon at Worthen House Café, (downstairs) – 1:30 pm – The Annual Amram Jam.  “Bring your Kerouac-inspired poem or prose to read while accompanied by David Amram (and his band)”
7:00 pm. Film Screening – Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s  “Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for Someplace Kool”– with introduction by Brian Hassett at the Luna Theater, Mill No. 5, 250 Jackson Street

 

Looking forward to its publication in December (we first noted it here),  Jonah Raskin provides an advanced review of a much-anticipated Beatdom publication – Victor BockrisThe Burroughs-Warhol Connection

David S Wills, Beatdom‘s editor, interviews the author – here
Bockris makes a further statement here
Raskin’s review and his observations about its publication can be read here.

For example:

“For all his acumen as a photojournalist and interviewer, Bockris is way more than just a machine taking pictures and recording voices and sounds. He’s a thinker of the first order especially when he goes into extended riffs on the similarities and the differences between Burroughs and Warhol.
Both of his subjects here, Bockris points out, depended on drugs: Warhol on amphetamines, Burroughs on heroin. Both were well informed about surrealist film, both made the tape recorder pivotal to their work and both worked from inside their headquarters: Burroughs in his Bunker and Warhol in his Factory. Their entourages, Bockris explains, were also their collectives.
They were both romantics and both were ‘double agents,’ Bockris insists: men who were married to their work and of necessity had to be alone. ‘Andy fell in love with thousands of people for five minutes,’ Bockris says, surely meaning to recycle the observation often attributed to Warhol himself that ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.’ On the subject of Ginsberg, Bockris says that it was ‘hard not to love’ him, but that he had ‘a hard time loving himself’. That sounds like an accurate assessment.”

Daniel Craig‘s impersonation of the Burroughs figure in Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Queer (likewise in general distribution soon) continues to wow the audiences

The film premieres at the New York Film Festival on Sunday and will be released on November 27 in select US locations.

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