Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 384

September 21, 2018Simon Pettet

Leonard Cohen‘s birthday today. He would have been 84.  We start the Weekly Round-Up today with a beautiful woodcut of him and Allen by George A Walker

and this note from Cohencentric – Leonard Cohen Considered – “Leonard Cohen Meets Jack Kerouac at Allen Ginsberg’s Home”

Our 2014 posting on Cohen (well worth re-visiting) may be accessed – here

and here‘s David Remnick’s haunting profile and last interview with him (for The New Yorker)

Out next month, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the posthumous volume – The Flame – Poems Notebooks Lyrics Drawings 

“This volume contains … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 362

April 20, 2018Simon Pettet

[Allen Ginsberg, March 1964,  Protest at the Women’s House of Detention, New York City  – Photograph by Benedict J Fernandez]

4/20 Cannabis Culture. Time to revisit Allen’s extraordinarily clear-headed (sic) and prescient 1966 Atlantic Monthly essay, “The Great Marijuana Hoax – First Manifesto to End The Bringdown” .

And here’s some fun he had with his 1985 Naropa students – “Marijuana Makes…” – Marijuana makes.. what?

NORML, the pioneering organization, for a long time now, working to reform the marijuana laws can be accessed here 

[Allen Ginsberg and Barbara Rubin together at the Albert Monument, outside … Read More

Allan and Allen’s Complaint

September 23, 2017Simon Pettet

Another video from the Stanford Archives this weekend – Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kuboto’s 1982 experimental video  “Allan ‘n’ Allen’s Complaint” (the twin subjects are Allan Kaprow and Allen Ginsberg), both sons of patriarchal fathers. The film explores that complex relationship.

“People are always talking about Jewish mother and nobody talks about Jewish father.”

AG: (So perhaps the father) is more withdrawn,  more vulnerable, less pushy in his emotions and relationship

AK: And there’s another side to it, (and) that is, the father tends to be the one who openly suffers, or is consecrated to some kind of suffering … Read More

Quit Speed – Allen Ginsberg’s 1967 Plea to Peter Orlovsky

August 10, 2017Simon Pettet

August 10 – Fifty years ago today. Allen in London, writing to his beloved, Peter (Orlovsky) in New York City, warning him, pleading with him, about amphetamines (“meth”) – “I’d rather be with you than without you. Stop meth, cool everything, come over here”

Dear Peter,

Irving (Rosenthal) wrote and Barbara (Rubin) wrote, said you were on meth, then, thinking house was afire, window moldings bugged or electrified, etc, and had begun taking them out . I don’t know how far you are into that thought process, but I am worried about the house, my manuscripts, etc. I can’t … Read More

Barbara Rubin (1945-1980)

March 31, 2014admin

Taken in England 1964

[top image – Allen Ginsberg and Barbara Rubin together at the Albert Monument, outside the Royal Albert Hall, London, May 1965, on the occasion of the First International Poetry Incarnation – bottom image – Barbara Rubin filming in the streets of London – May 1965 – photo by Allen Ginsberg  c. The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

 

Last year’s celebrations at the Anthology Film Archives and at Johan Kugelberg’s New York City Boo-Hooray Gallery (specialists in the occluded and forgotten), suceeeded in shining a little light, perhaps, on the perennial “underground legend”, Barbara Rubin, but not so very much. She … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 108

January 11, 2013admin

Next Wednesday, January 16 in New York – Join Allen Ginsberg’s friends, collaborators, relatives and co-conspirators – Lou Reed, Steven Taylor, Anne Waldman, Ambrose Bye, CA Conrad, Andy Clausen, David Amram, the Arthur Russell tribute band, Arthur’s Landing, & others for “a night of poetry and song” in one of the quintessential downtown New York Spaces, the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, to breathe new life into “First Blues”, Ginsberg Recordings new special edition/limited vinyl reissue.

A tad overly tongue-in-cheek, but ultimately “won over” – (“sharp insight and analysis of one … Read More

Gordon Ball’s Cherry Valley

January 16, 2012admin

[Clockwise starting from upper left: Peter Orlovsky, Denise Mercedes, Julius Orlovsky, Gordon Ball, Allen Ginsberg, Bonnie Bremser (Frazier), Ray Bremser, Gregory Corso c. 1971. photo: Allen De Loach]

East Hill Farm is out. Wanting to spread word on Gordon Ball‘s new book.

 From the publisher’s blurb:

“During the late 1960s, when peace, drugs, and free love were direct challenges to conventional society, Allen Ginsberg, treasurer of Committee on Poetry, Inc., funded what he hoped was “a haven for comrades in distress” in rural upstate New York. First described as an uninspiring, dilapidated four-bedroom house with acres of untended land, … Read More

The Orlovsky Brothers

March 4, 2010admin

Happened to catch these on Gary Parrish’s excellent Farfalla Press blog. Peter’s “Good F*ck with Denise” has enough expletives in it that no doubt You Tube will yank it soon, so catch it while you can! [2012 update – miraculously, it’s still up!] – Julius Orlovsky is represented by just a short clip from Robert Frank’s remarkable Me and My Brother, (available in its entirety through Steidl – We highly recommend tracking that down!) [2012 update – that clip however has been pulled]. The third and final clip is raw footage from 1966 of the Velvet Underground

Village Gate, NYC, … Read More