Harry Smith‘s birthday today (born May 29, 1923, Portland, Oregon) . For more Harry birthday postings on the Allen Ginsberg Project – see here, here, here, here, here and here
Allen Ginsberg on Harry Smith – here
National Poetry Month in America this month. “April is the cruellest..” and all that. We’re very much of the opinion of noted poet Charles Bernstein.
`Beats and Buddhism. We mentioned David S Wills’ essay, “The Intersection of Buddhism and the Beat Generation”, a few weeks back, here’s another one, Michael Amudsen’s essay in Empty Mirror – “Jack Kerouac – Avatar of American Buddhism”
Twenty-seven years since the passing of Harry Smith on this day, Monday the 27th, (Harry would, of course, have enjoyed the numerological alignment)
Harry has been profiled and featured often on The Allen Ginsberg Project. most recently and extensively – here (see that page for links to several of our other Harry Smith postings)
Next Friday (December 1st) at New York’s Howl Happening Gallery, Raymond Foye will host a celebration of Harry’s life and work – featuring the screening (a New York premier) of a 1984 film by Robert Frank… Read More
A real treat this weekend – with gratitude to Robyn Brentano and students from the NYU Ethnographic Film Program – “Buddhism and the Beats.”. “In 1993, Allen Ginsberg spoke to a gathering of students of the Tibetan Buddhist monk, Lobsang Samten, about the impact of Buddhist thought and practice on himself, the Beat writers, and American culture at large”. The full hour-and-a-half tape is transcribed below (continuing tomorrow, and with the Q & A session to be featured here next weekend)
AG: Well, good evening, Rinpoche [Lobsang Samten Rinpoche] and I met very recently at the house … Read More
Harry Smith‘s birthday today, born in Portland, Oregon, May 29, 1923.
Allen certainly admired, and took a great many pictures of Harry (more indeed than almost any other subject). Here is just a sampling of a few of them, various locations, but mostly in Allen’s kitchen, East 12th Street NYC, 1984-1989.
See also other Harry Smith Birthday postings on the Allen Ginsberg Project – here, here, here, and here. Also, for example, here and here.
Excited to have received early advance copies of Pat Thomas‘ remarkable follow-up to the The Last Word on First Blues CD-set, (release-date isn’t until June 23) – the two-CD re-packaging of the Blake songs – The Complete Songs of Innocence and Experience.
For a previous announcement on that important and highly-anticipated project – see here
Did we mention, May 8th, Gary Snyder‘s recent 87th birthday – this? (an extensive and illuminating interview in Lion’s Roar ) – … Read More
Rose “Rosebud” Feliu-Pettet, a long-time friend of Allen’s, author of the definitive account of Allen’s passing, passed away herself this week. She’d been suffering from a particularly virulent form of cancer, bile duct cancer. She was 69 For more of Rosebud on Allen – see here: “Well, I met Allen a long time ago, about 1964, I was living in this crazy dinky kind of collective called Kerista, a sort of benign Manson family [sic] . There were about eighteen people living in a store front on Ludlow Street … Read More
Continuing from yesterday’s listing of “Allen Ginsberg’s Top Ten films”. We begin today with the very earliest that he cites, Sergei Eisenstein‘s 1925 Броненосец«Потемкин» Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin)
The Franco-centric nature of Allen’s choices we’ve remarked upon already – two Jean Cocteaus and two Marcel Carnés. This is the second one of Carné’s, his classic 1938 film noir, Le Quai Des Brumes (Port of Shadows)
Gerd Stern: “It was a great success. The auditorium was always full; everybody paid except Harry Smith. Harry Smith was someone who was a spectacular creative being who died recently [1991]. I first met Harry–I think the first time I came to San Francisco he was working as a photographer for the Examiner, and he was living in a black hotel–he was pale white–in the Fillmore. He had done these way-ahead-of-their-time murals at Jimbo’s Bop City—which was just like it
… Read More