Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 342

November 17, 2017Simon Pettet

[Paul Blackburn and company, from the Paul Blackburn papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego]

More big news, archival news, the Paul Blackburn audio collection, long in the safe-keeping of the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California, San Diego, the great trove of New York City poetry recordings (“the most comprehensive oral history of the New York poetry scene between the late 1950s and 1970.”, in the words of Blackburn editor and scholar Edith Jarolim), has finally been digitalized and is now available on line.

The first release of this collection includes … Read More

Philip Glass’ 80th Birthday

January 31, 2017Simon Pettet

screenshot-2017-01-27-08-51-00

[Philip Glass in 1990 – Photograph by Allen Ginsberg]

Today is Philip Glass‘ 80th birthday. We salute him at The Allen Ginsberg Project

See our last year’s  Philip Glass weekend here and here

and our recent transcription of Studs Terkel‘s interview with him and Allen here and here

See our previous birthday celebrations here, here and here

He was interviewed last week by Fiona Maddocks in The Guardian – here

NPR has been celebrating with a Philip Glass week – appreciations by Errol Morris, Nico Muhly, David Lang, Paul Simon and Laurie Anderson can … Read More

Studs Terkel Interviews Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass on WFMT, Chicago 1990 – part 2

September 25, 2016admin
 
Philip Glass – Photograph by Allen Ginsberg – Kiev Restaurant, NYC, 1993 – Photo  c. Allen Ginsberg Estate

continuing from yesterday

ST: Resuming with Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass, poet (and) composer working together. We heard just a piece of the very haunting “Satyagraha – the Evening Song“, earlier, that opened the Lyric Opera season. It was a pip of an opening. Critics and audience both (raved). That was three years ago… Liquid Days?  (Songs from) Liquid Days) is what?

PG: Well, it’s a collection of songs I did. In a way, it’s kind of … Read More

Studs Terkel Interviews Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass on WFMT, Chicago, 1990 – part 1

September 24, 2016admin

[Studs Terkel, 1912-2008

Jewel Heart Center, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Philip Glass, Gelek Rinpoche & Allen Ginsberg, November 17, 1989]

[Philip Glass]

[Allen Ginsberg]

Studs Terkel Interviews Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass, 1990

We featured, a week or so back, Studs Terkel’s hilarious 1959 radio interview with Allen, Gregory Corso, and a mostly-silent Peter Orlovsky. Here’s another Terkel interview with Allen (alongside composer-collaborator, Philip Glass), this one recorded over three decades later. Ginsberg and Glass are in town (Chicago) for a benefit performance for Gelek Rinpoche‘s Jewel Heart organization (as Terkel periodically reminds his listeners), an event … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up 222

June 12, 2015admin

The Academy of American Poets, on the occasion of his 89th birthday, gave Allen a tribute (the key component of which is this wonderful video of him and Steven Taylor on the rooftop of his East 12th Street, East Village apartment, in his final year, 1997, performing “A Western Ballad” (“the first song I ever wrote”). This video was produced and directed by Leita Luchetti as a part of the Poetry Breaks. series.More kudos for Allen, he was posthumously inducted, in 2015, (alongside Isaac Asimov, Dawn Powell, Francine Prose, Colm Tóibín, children’s book author Ezra Jack Keats and … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 221

June 5, 2015admin

 

The David Olio “Please Master” case (our focus last week) remains in the news (as well it should). Here’s Jerry Aronson, director of The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg reading recently-unearthed transcriptions of Allen explaining his intentions and inspiration for writing the poem:  “Some situations are exuberant, like “Howl” or “Plutonian Ode”. Some situations are “Gee, I feel so good, I think I’ll write down what I see at this moment”. Some situations, I’m trying to locate what is my erotic imagination and write it down as a sample, like “Please Master”, you know, to … Read More

Happy Birthday Philip Glass

January 31, 2015admin

[“Jewel Heart Center, Ann Arbor Michigan, Philip Glass, Gelek Rinpoche & Allen Ginsberg, November 17, 1989″ – Photo inscribed “for Philip” by Allen Ginsberg]

Philip Glass is 78 years old today Words Without Music, his long-awaited memoir, will be published this Spring 

 

As a teaser, Philip Glass  is interviewed here, last January, by Marc Zisman for Qobuz, the French commercial music streaming and downloading service, on the occasion of  Le festival Nouveau Siècle de Saint-Étienne, organized jointly by l’Opéra Théâtre and the Museum of Modern Art 

Some previous Glass-on-the-Ginsberg-Project  here and  here Happy Birthday, Philip!

… Read More

Meditation and Poetics – 37 (Wales Visitation)

January 27, 2015admin

 

 [Allen Ginsberg – Autograph and Typescript Working Draft of a portion of the 1967 poem “Wales Visitation“]

AG: I want to follow that up [that reading and discussion of Wordsworth’s “..Tintern Abbey”] with a poem of my own related to that, taking off from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, approaching a similar problem, or taking a similar approach to the problem – in this case, how to deal with phantasms, thought-forms, furies, monsters, of an acid trip, in poetry.  First of all, how to deal with the problem of in that exalted, or high, state of acid … Read More

Gelek Rimpoche’s 75th Birthday

October 25, 2014admin

 

Tomorrow – Gelek Rimpoche‘s 75th Birthday – This evening in New York City there will be a special gala event (with musical guests Paul Simon and Philip Glass, and more) hosted by the painter Francesco Clemente, a “diamond birthday celebration”, in his New York studio. On Sunday, in Ann Arbor, at the Jewel Heart Center, celebrations continue – Tenzhuk (Long Life) Puja at 11.00 a.m. and a Joyful Birthday Reception at 3.30 p.m. For more on Jewel Heart – see here For earlier notices on Gelek on the Allen Ginsberg Project – see here and … Read More

Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 184

August 1, 2014admin

 

 

 

[Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky on Cape Breton, 1992 – Photo – Phyllis Segura] 

 

“…Peter was a taciturn and rugged man with a gruff exterior and a submerged explosive intensity. To (Allen), he may have represented an opportunity to merge (as (Walt) Whitman put it) with the “landscape of the common world’. Like Herbert Huncke or Neal Cassady, Peter expressed the Beat notion that writing is not the exclusive province of an aristocratic, university-educated elite, that a more vital resource than the library or museum may be the idiom and lessons of the street and

… Read More