Kerouac-Cassady (Jack Kerouac Scat Singing)

June 25, 2018Simon Pettet

[Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac – Photograph by Carolyn Cassady]

We continue this week mining the treasure which is the extraordinary trove of audio at the Allen Ginsberg archives, now housed at Stanford University.

Today, a remarkable discovery – Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. The tape (there are two copies, actually, 131 and 132) is simply (and with no further information ) titled “Kerouac and Cassady, San Jose, 1952, William Burroughs“. (Burroughs, in fact, doesn’t appear on the tape (in those days ayahuasca-hunting in South America), but there’s some wonderful speculation on him)  … Read More

International Women’s Day 2018

March 8, 2018Simon Pettet

International Women’s Day today – The Allen Ginsberg Project stands in solidarity with International Women’s Day.

Recognizing Women and the Beats have a.. complicated relationship.

Tonight in LA – the opening of a five-day “Beyond Beat” festival at Beyond Baroque – a “Women of the Beat Generation” reading, with Eve Brandstein (reading Diane di Prima), Pegarty Long (reading her twin sister, Philomene Long), Phoebe MacAdams (reading Joanne Kyger), Skira Martinez (reading Janine Pommy Vega), Lorraine Perrotta (reading Carolyn Cassady) and Susan Heldfond Saunders (reading Aya Tarlow) 

There’ll also be … Read More

Neal Cassady’s Birthday

February 8, 2014admin

[Neal Cassady – Photograph by Allen Ginsberg c. The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

                                            
[Neal Cassady – original manuscript for “The First Third”]

Neal Cassady‘s birthday today, “cocksman and Adonis of Denver”. Had he lived, he would have been 88 years old.

Hear him with The Grateful Dead quietly noodling behind him (recorded live at The Strait Theater, San Francisco, July 23 1967)

Listen again, driving the bus for the Merry Pranksters, rapping some more Hear some recollections from some of his friends

Here‘s Beat artist Robert Branaman recalling his friendship with Neal Cassady – filmed by … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 146

October 4, 2013admin

Joep Bremmers‘ “Ik en mijn plasje – Allen Ginsberg in Vlissingen” (“Me and my peepee”), his study of Allen’s January 1, 1983, visit to the Dutch town of Vlissingen (and the occasion of the poem “What The Sea Throws Up At Vlissingen” (included in White Shroud – Poems 1980-1985)), will be celebrated tomorrow in Vlissingen with a gala event, featuring, among others, Eddie Woods, Bremmers himself – and The Mondriaan String Quartet, who will perform, not only “September on Jessore Road” as they originally recorded it (Bremmers in his book discusses that recording), but also, several other poems, … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 145

September 27, 2013admin

One Hundred Thousand Poets For Change, Michael Rothenberg & Terri Carrion’s extraordinarily ambitious annual global manifestation of poetic solidarity and commitment to cultural transformation, initiated in 2011, takes place again – tomorrow!

Numerous events are planned, world-wide. For further information see here, here, and here.

Among them, as the organizers point out, at least fifteen different events in the San Francisco Bay Area alone (including this one):

& Gary Snyder, Robert Hass, and others will be performing in Berkeley (as part of this umbrella) at the 18th Annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival.

The requisite … Read More

Carolyn Cassady (1923-2013)

September 21, 2013admin

[Carolyn Cassady (1923-2013)]

Word just reaches us of the death of  Carolyn Cassady.  Brian Hassett has the report here.  She died peacefully, with her son, John Allen, there, in attendance, close beside her. “She was her regular rockin self”, he (Hassett) reports, “up through Sunday, woke up with a tummy ache Monday morning, had an infected appendix and checked out by Friday”…”She was 90 years old and still drank her white wine and smoked her More menthol ciggies every day. That is to say  – she was living the life she chose, on her own terms, in her … Read More

Rebels – A Journey Underground

June 20, 2013Simon Pettet

Our feature today – A New Kind of Bohemia, segment two in a a six-part series by Kevin Alexander, made in 1999 for Canadian television, Rebels – A Journey Underground. (The other episodes, incidentally, are also well worth catching – see here)

From the episode synopsis – “Following World War II, a new period of post-war social complexity overtook America. It was during this turbulent, often repressive Cold War time that Jack Kerouaccoined the phrase “beat” and gave birth to a new literary movement. This film follows the activities of this new breed of writer – Kerouac, (Neal)

… Read More

Kerouac – On The Road to Desolation

March 30, 2013admin

[Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovksy and fellow meditators, blocking the supply rail for Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production facility, Jefferson County, Colorado, June 1978. photo c. Joe Daniel]

One year on from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (of March 11). Here’s one of numerous news reports (this one from Aljazeera). Here’s Aileen Mioko Smith, executive-director of the Kyoto-based Green Action, speaking on Democracy Now! – Here’s our old friend (much-missed) Nanao Sakaki (in 1999, wise and prophetic – “Stone Age Japanese never knew Atomic Energy./ Now nuclear power plants are/ Poisoning modern Japan to a slow death”). Here … Read More

Friday Weekly Round-Up – 60

February 10, 2012admin

 

 

We at The Allen Ginsberg Project, we love our “Ginsberg tattoos” – they’re among the most popular posts, curiously – or maybe not so curiously. So here‘s another – “I wake to see the world go wild” – the line is from “An Eastern Ballad”. “Lauralemon” explains: “My obsession with and love for Allen Ginsberg began when I was thirteen years old and picked up an anthology of modern American poetry from a garage sale. I read “America” and immediately became obsessed…and here I am six years later, finally bearing a small tribute to my favorite … Read More

Happy Birthday Neal Cassady (1926-1968)

February 8, 2012admin

[Neal Cassady … young & vigorous age 29…. surveying North Beach used car lot, he needed new wheels. Bay area Johnny Appleseed of pot from early 1950’s, he worked as conductor on Southern-Pacific Railroad, averted train crash as brakeman years earlier, breaking his ankle, collected insurance, bought his family a ranch-house in Los Gatos down the peninsula, gambled madly & disastrously at horse racetrack, wrote painfully in pencil on his “The First Third” autobiographical manuscript, visited me overnight in rooms on Polk and Montgomery Streets, San Francisco. Sometime March 1955. (Ginsberg Caption for similar image) photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate] … Read More