Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 771 (Centennial Countdown)

Centennial  (Allen’s birthday fast approaches). Looking ahead to some of the upcoming events.

A major gathering at The Poetry Project, New York City on June 3rd (Allen’s birthday).
See our notation- here

The event has been organized by Eliot Katz in collaboration with The Poetry Project and the Allen Ginsberg Estate 

Em-cees for the event will be Eliot Katz and Bob Rosenthal

Alongside Rosenthal and Katz, readers and performers will include Ed Sanders, Steven Taylor, Anne Waldman, David Amram, Simon Pettet, Anselm Berrigan, Bob Holman, Rochelle Kraut, Sharon Mesmer, Lee Ann Brown, David Cope, Jim Cohn, Vincent Katz,
Danny Shot, David Aaron Greenberg, Mosab Abu Toha, Christopher Rey Perez, Funto Omojola, Pamela Sneed, Zoe Breszny, Sol Cabrini, Shannon Sky, Jenni Muldaur, No Land & Oliver Ray, and Allen Ginsberg on video

 

The following day at the Howl! Archive   (250 Bowery)  – continuing the celebration – “Allen Ginsberg at 100 – A Brief Walk Through Ginsberg’s Life”  – panels, talks, readings – Bob Rosenthal, Bill Morgan, Gordon Ball, Deborah Baker & Bob Holman,

Bob Rosenthal, Allen’s long time personal secretary, reads his new work, which breaks down Allen’s humorous (but also serious) “Theory of Idiots”.
Bill Morgan – Allen Ginsberg: “The Unknown Photos” – Allen’s biographer and bibliographer presents a slide show of new unseen photographs
Gordon Ball – Allen’s friend and early journals editor, will share a slideshow of his own photos of Allen – “Allen As I Knew Him”
& Deborah Baker and Bob Holman will discuss “Allen’s near mythical 18 months in India”, his all-important Indian sojourn.

 

 

and opening that day too, uptown, at the Howard Greenberg Gallery (through till September 12) – Celebrating the Centennials – Notes from the Margins – Allen Ginsberg and Vivien Maier – a two-part show  highlighting  two great, distinctive photographers

“”Notes from the Margins” offers a timely reconsideration of two distinct yet unexpectedly resonant artistic legacies. Bringing together Ginsberg’s poetic and photographic sensibility with Maier’s extraordinary street photography, the exhibition explores how each transformed everyday experience into a powerful record of memory, observation, and human presence.”

“The legacies of Allen Ginsberg and Vivian Maier endure. For Ginsberg, poetry and photography became a vehicle for radical openness – documenting queer identity, political unrest, spiritual searching, and the emotional intensity of postwar America. Maier, who spent much of her life working as a nanny while privately producing an immense body of photographs, only discovered by chance after her death, transformed ordinary city life into an imperishable and deeply human visual archive.”

“The show features approximately 80 modern and vintage prints, along with Maier’s experimental film footage and a film of Ginsberg reciting his poem “Howl.” Self-portraits and the urban landscape are a recurring thread through the exhibition. Together, Ginsberg’s and Maier’s work reveals two singular modes of looking – one public and outspoken, the other private and elusive.”

 

 

Saturday June the 6th sees the opening of an Allen Ginsberg Film Festival at the Anthology Film Archives:

“Throughout June, we’ll be presenting screenings of a wide variety of films that Ginsberg participated in directly, as actor, narrator, presiding spirit, or inspiration, or that have chronicled his life and work”, among them ” seminal Beat or underground films such as “Pull My Daisy”, “Guns of The Trees”, and “Wholly Communion”, as well as rarely-screened gems like, from 1967,  “Ah! Sunflower”, and from 1973  “Emouna”, plus “ a host of documentaries that either center on Ginsberg in particular or chronicle various dimensions of 20th century American poetry in general (and which inevitably feature memorable appearances by Ginsberg)”

“The series will also feature introductions and discussions with poets, filmmakers, and artists who worked with or alongside him”

The first night’s programming consists of Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie‘s Pull My Daisy, Pamela Mayor and Barbara Rubin‘s Emouna and Nam June Paik and Shigiko Kubota‘s Allan and ‘N Allen’s Complaint, followed by Peter Whitehead‘s Wholly Communion and Iain Sinclair & Robert Klinkert‘s Ah! Sunflower!

A complete  listing of the films and the Anthology’s Allen Ginsberg Film Festival may be found here

 

 

Mention should be made too of Stanford – Ginsberg at 100 – Selections from the Allen Ginsberg Papers at Stanford   which opens next Friday:

“In honor of the centenary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth on June 3, 1926, Stanford University Libraries will host its first-ever exhibition of Ginsberg, exploring his complex legacy as a poet, activist, promoter, traveler, spiritual seeker, and teacher. The exhibition will draw upon the extensive array of notebooks, diaries, manuscripts, photos, and other items from the Allen Ginsberg Papers, a collection acquired by the Department of Special Collections at Stanford in 1995.”   More on the Stanford exhibit – here

Gatherings and events in San Francisco at the Counter-Culture Museum begin today, a week-long celebration of the Museum’s one-year anniversary – and Ginsberg’s one-hundredth – “movies- films – panel-discussions – surprise guests” – The first Ginsberg-specific event is on Sunday (3 pm)  – Tate Swindell oversees an America, Give A Shit! release party. On Tuesday, there’s a showing of Chuck Workman‘s movie, The Source.
On Allen’s birthday (6 pm) a novel presentation – a video interview with Allen’s psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks (followed by a poetry reading (San Francisco poets read Allen’s poems). The following day, another rarely-screened video – Jerry Gainor‘s 1997 footage of Allen’s San Francisco memorial.  Pat Thomas, Dennis McNally, original Merry Prankster, George “Hardly Visible” Walker & several others round out contributors to a week of fascinating examination.

For a full listing of events and participants  – see here 

Meanwhile  in Rome:

 

Michele Corleone‘s Interzone Gallery in Rome, Italy, presents a two-day program
Wednesday & Thursday, with photographic portraits of Allen (and Beat luminaries) by himself, and photographic portraits of Allen by Ai Weiwei. In addition, there will be
the screening of two short films – “Allen and Ai”  (shot by Ai Weiwei, edited by Davo Liver and Aliah Rosenthal) and “Allen Ginsberg Came To My Bar Mitzvah” (directed by Liver and narrated by Rosenthal). There will also be exhibition of original drawings on the Beat Generation by Marco Petrella. 

At the Nuovo Cinema Aquila there will be a  further film screening  – Jerry Aronson‘s “The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg”  –  and poems from Rosenthal, Corleone, Angela Maria Piga and Marco Cassini, and a live music set by Davo Liver & Antonia Gozzi.

and in Berlin,

At Buchhandlung Knesebeckstraße 11, reading and talk with  Durs Grünbein, Michael Kellner and Alexander Schnickmann  chaired by bookstore owner Felix Palent.

and in Dortmund,

and in Prague

Some (further)  readings/celebrations on the occasion of Allen’s birthday, elsewhere:

At Mother Foucault’s Bookshop in Portland, there’ll be a  Centennial Reading hosted by Dan Raphael and Christopher Luna

Alongside Luna and Raphael, Casey Bush, Darrin Daniel, Katherine Factor, Benjamin Fisher, and other local poets will gather and be reading poems by Allen

& at Bedlam Books in Worcester, Mass.

At Bedlam Books in Worcester, Mass, (6.30-8.30), there will be a performance of Allen’s songs by singer-songwriter Kevin Keady, and a reading of his poems (including a complete reading of the poem “Howl“) by store-manager Patrick Warner. Both performers were friends of Allen and knew the poet from the early 1980s until his death in 1997.
Rare Ginsberg books, ephemeral and photographs will also be on display. You’re invited to come early.

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And, if we are permitted, a few non-Ginsberg-Centennial notes:

Harry Smith, (a good three years Allen’s elder  – only three years? he always seemed ancient!) was born on this date.  Happy cosmic birthday Harry!

Tonight in L.A., concomitant to the closing  (Sunday) of his Brain Drawings show, that’s been up this past month at the Hansell Gallery, there will be a celebration of his legendary Anthology of American Folk Music, a tribute concert featuring musical guests including Kacey Johansing, Shannon Lay, Barry Johnson, Matt Baldwin, Frank Fairfield, David Elsenbroich, and more at Zebulon.

Two monumental dates in the jazz world this week – the Centennial of Miles Davis and the death (rest in peace) of the great  Sonny Rollins.

and we also note with sadness, the death of our friend, the poet David Henderson (1942-2026). See a transcript of a reading that he gave with Allen at Naropa back in 1981 here and here

Onward to Allen Ginsberg’s glorious 100th Birthday!