Philomene Long’s The Beats – An Exisitential Comedy

We continue our spotlighting of video now available via the digitalization of Allen’s Stanford University archives.

Today – Philomene Long & (Jay D Kugelman)’s LA-based documentary from 1980, The Beats: An Existential Comedy

The video is available – here

[Stuart Z Perkoff appearing on Groucho Marx’s tv show, You Bet Your Life – from The Beats – An Existential Comedy]

Initially conceived as a tribute to the poet Stuart Z Perkoff (1930-1974), it developed into, significantly, more – much more.

As one reviewer had it, “The film is not so much a historical documentary of the period as a recreation … Read More

Expansive Poetics — 95 ( Q & A – Classroom Scraps)

[Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)]

Classroom Scraps – Here’s some Q & A at the end of Allen’s August 11 1981 Naropa Class –

AG: Well, I’ve been talking steadily [about Russian poetry, about Guillaume Apollinaire and Cubism and twentieth-century modernism] , so now I’ll shut up. Student: Did (Vladimir) Mayakovsky and his group.. were they familiar with “Zone”? AG: Well, now I think not. Maybe not. (They) might have. Some would have. There was a French influence on Osip Brik, Mayakovsky’s friend, and on (Nikolay) Gumilev and the Acmeists, but I don’t know. I know the … Read More