["Self-Portrait on my Seventieth birthday in Borsolino hat and black cashmere-silk scarf from Milan & Dublin Thornproof-tweed suit, Oleg Cassini tie from Goodwill, shirt same source, kitchen windwo mid-day, I stayed home & worked on Selected Poems 1947-95 proofs after returning from Walker Art Center reading - Beat exhibition weekend. Monday June 3, 1996, NY. photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]
Errol Morris' so-far well-received film onElsa Dorfman debuted this week at the Toronto film festival. From the review in Screen International: "Dorfman, a self-described "nice Jewish girl" didn't pick up a camera until her late twenties. Before this, she had worked as a secretary in New York at the Grove Press, a leading publisher of the Beat writers. She recalls her incredulity when Allen Ginsberg demanded "Where's the can?", having never heard the toilet referred to in this way before. Inauspicious a meeting hough it was, this was the beginning of a lifelong friendship."
[Allen Ginsberg - Photograph by Elsa Dorfman]
Sarah Haason one-time local boy Allen Ginsberg appeared last week in the Boulder (Colorado) Weekly - "Pot is fun" - (For the November 1966 Atlantic Monthly article, the prime source of this article, "The Great Marijuana Hoax" - see here and also here) - (For more of Allen on drugs and drug-taking - see here)
Ginsberg-week next week on the Ginsberg blog - celebrating his upcoming 90th birthday next Friday. Meantime, great response so far to the recently-released 3-cd set, The Last Word on First Blues
Don't miss Tom Semioli's extensive piece in Huffington Post - Pat Thomas, the producer, is lauded and quoted - "This set is essential for all Ginsberg fans, and a great bookend to "Howl", especially for newcomers. You get a complete overview of the work of Allen Ginsberg - from his first great work to something that stands among his final major works" "The Ginsberg Estate gets thousands of letters praising his poetry, I was the one guy who writes to them praising the music. They turned me loose in his personal tape archive at Stanford! I spent years listening to hundreds of hours of Allen's music.."
Semioli notes this unfettered exuberance ("I was struck by how, to my ears, the collection reminded me of Dylan's joyous Basement Tapes.. Ginsberg is ebullient throughout the recordings, as are the other musicians. The passion, the humor, and the intensity of lyrics and melodies are irresistible.." Thomas - "Oh yeah, Ginsberg could not be embarrassed. He may be the purest performer of all time."
[Allen Ginsberg in 1984 with Pat Thomas] Other reviews have been equally positive. Sean Jewell in American Standard Time (who describes Thomas as "Our man in the skies doing God's work") declares that "The Last Word on First Blues is proof that Ginsberg never stopped finding new ways to express himself". James Mann, in Ink 19, while acknowledging contemporary criticisms that it was "obscene and disrespectful", considers it to be "a worthy edition to Ginsberg's canon", "the definitive look at this example of Allen Ginsberg's genius", and, "really quite fun."
Our good friend Hal Willneris at it again. Speaking of "obscene and disrespectful" (sic), you possibly can't be more (cathartically) "obscene and disrespectful" than William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. The Independent, this week, reports on Willner's new project - "Burroughs recited the most obscene passages from his non-linear free-flowing novel for an experimental album shortly before his death in 1997 but the project was "buried and put out of print very quickly". Now, more than two decades later, the audio is being dusted off…Canadian psychedelic soul singer King Khan..has composed new music to accompany Burroughs' recitations…The new album, named Let Me Hang You, after an episode from Naked Lunch will be released on Khan's record label on 15 July." For more on that (for the original story in the New York Times) - see here And one more on "obscenity", censorship, and provocative words - here's a troubling case reported last week in Myanmar
More on that case from PEN International - here and here "Dirty Ferdy, filthy ferdie, lousy louie,
looney louie, lecherous louie, lazy louie. lucky louie, blu Lou, lispin' lou", as Neal Cassady, in the fabled Joan Anderson letter, famously describes him (keeping with that theme), today is Louis Ferdinand Celine's birthday.
Terrible news to report regardingDavid S Wills exemplary site, Beatdom. "The website was hit by a major cyber-attack on Monday night. All 1,ooo posts, 2,ooo images, and 9 years of work were wiped out, and it has proven impossible to recover the lost data." Undaunted, Wills is hoping to rebuild the site from scratch, "start(ing) with recent posts and work(ing) our way back", "but a huge amount of material will prove impossible to replace". Beatdom and David have our deepest condolences. Please support Beatdom in this time of difficulty by buying their magazine and books.
Jim Jarmusch's recent movie premiered a couple of weeks back at the Cannes Film Festival, did we mention it evokes William Carlos Williams and Allen (main character, a bus-driver, who, matter-of-factly also writes poetry)? - and the name of the character? - same as the name of his town - and the name of that town? - Paterson The great Ron Padgett was consultant to the film, and poems by him are included. Next Friday, as well as being Allen's birthday, is, not coincidentally, the beginning of New York's ambitious Beats and Beyond programme. Some minor shifts and additions since last week when we announced the program. With so much happening, it makes sense to check up - here, keep up-to-date (Beat happenings every day, starting with a salute to the birthday-boy himself!) - Howl Happening!
Allen Ginsberg, in 1987, surveys
his musical history.
The interview (from which these remarks are excerpted) is dated June 25, 1987, and was
conducted by journalist and music critic, David Menconifor theBoulder Daily Camera, the local paper. A considerably edited version (incorporating some of these notes) was published contemporaneously, but the bulk of the interview has remained unpublished and is appearing for the first time here.
part two - a continuation (Allen discusses Buddhism, politics, poetry, and '80's zeitgeist), will appear in this space next week
[Allen arrives [only temporarily, happy to report] on
crutches, explaining, “I took a spill on the pavement a few nights back”.]
Around 1971, I had gone into the Record Plant Studio
with (Bob) Dylan, the idea being to improvise whatever we could. About three
cuts from those sessions are on First Blues.
I also did a little work here in Denver with The Glu-ons - Birdbrain – do you know
that? It was put out by Wax Trax! .That’s a classic,
it’s really good, the thing I’m most proud of. It was the first time I was able
to work with lyrics that weren’t rhymed, with irregular lines like my poetry,
but with a definite dance beat . So I happened to have the e-las-tic sense of
timing to lay the verses out within sixteen bars without interrupting the beat
– with a refrain – “Birdbrain”. You never heard that? For a forty-five from
Wax Trax! it did really good, sold three-thousand copies and was on most of the
college stations across the country for about a year. As far as being
dance-able, up-to-date & punkish, and, at the same time, classical, I think
it’s the best thing I’ve done. And I think it cost fifteen-dollars-an-hour (not
that anybody got paid for it)
I also did a whole album, [unreleased] with a band called Still
Life, with Mike Chapelle [of the Glu-ons] .We might
do something more this year [1987] while I’m here. I made another album with
him that hasn’t come out . And I recently did something with Bugs Henderson, a Texas guitarist. In February, the revived Fugs are
playing in New York & I’ll be their opening act. I’m also going to do a record later with Hal Willner.
I hit it big with a total hit number, heard by millions of
people in Hungary in 1980, so I’m a minor but notable rock star in Hungary with
the Hobo Blues Band. My first full-length album
came out there about a month ago, in which they set music to “Howl”in Hungarian. I sing on one cut, a thing called “Gospel Noble Truths”,
but the rest is all Hungarian translations by a very literate Hungarian rock
band using great Eastern European poetry. I was there last Fall, in the studio,
for three days, and it was fun being a Hungarian rock & roll character.
I worked with The Clash a little on the
lyrics for the Combat Rock album, on three cuts,
including the one I like most – “Death Is A Star”.I did some background vocals and I’ve
sung with them live a few times (including at Red Rocks in
(19)82).
(Bob) Dylan taught me the three-chord blues pattern. I
didn’t know that until 1971. Before that, I kept confusing everyone by calling
something a blues when it wasn’t, it was just a ballad. I’ve never played much
of my own stuff but I was always good at improvising (‘cause I used to wander
under the Brooklyn Bridge with (Jack) Kerouac & make
up poems or funny songs, nonsense blah-blah-blah rhymes). Apparently, that’s
all Dylan does, spontaneous composition.
A lot of the rockers, like Dylan, began conceiving of poetry
as a real and possible expansion of folk lyricism. So I got to know some of the
musicians, like Jim Morrison, who I met through Michael McClure, his poetry guru. I later met Van Morrison,
who’s interested in (William) Blake, (as I
am).
I don’t know enough about music because I’m not really a
musician (I know five chords, maybe, enough to do rudimentary blues) but I
think music is a sacred pursuit. I think any art is sacred if your attitude is
sacramental. I’m also interested in photography from the same
point of view – sacred moments, scared faces,sacramental awareness
of the scene as you snap the photo, while time passes into eternity. It’s the
same way with poetry or music.
The first music I heard as a kid was at grammar school. I
used to go down to the spiritual churches on River Street [in Paterson] and
hear black spiritual singingat revival meetings.In high school I would listento a lot ofBessie Smith,Louis Armstrong,Jelly Roll Morton,
Lead Belly, Billie Holiday & the older jazz & blues people. In the
(19)40’s, I was following the development of rhythm & blues, stuff like “Open The Door, Richard” – [Allen begins singing] – “Open the door,
Richard/ Open the door and let me in” – You know that one? – To me,
itwas some sort of apocalyptic
opening of the gates of heaven! – People like Fats Domino
and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins too – (We) used to go out and listen to mambo
Kerouac was interested. I
always felt more like an intellectual Jewish poet rather than a down jazz
musician but there was some kind of relationship between the kind of poetry I
was writing & the free-form spontaneous jazz style. He used to listen a lot
to bop, in the
Village at the time, Charlie Parker was
playing at a place calledThe Open Door, where they
didn’t sell alcohol, (in those days the great jazz musicians were (all) illegal
because of the cabaret license – if you’d been busted (even on something minor,
like a little stick of grass, at a gas station in Delaware), you couldn’t get a
license to play in cabarets. So people like Thelonious Monk
were forbidden to play & make money in the (Big) Apple.)
In 1960, I had the chance to hear a lot of Thelonious Monk, night after night
at the Five Spot, where I also met Lester Young. (I) went
out one night and turned out the junk with Thelonious Monk. [sic]. In 1960, I
deliveredpsilocybinfrom Timothy Leary to
Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, to see
what they’d say about it. Dizzy (‘s response) was - “Anything that gets you
high, man” – Monk, when I asked him what happened, he said - “Got anything
stronger?”
By historical lineage, there’s a connection, certainly.
There’s a scene in Renaldo and Clara where (Bob) Dylan and I are improvising songs and talking over Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Mass., and Dylan reads a poem from (Jack) Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues”. When that scene was over, they were filming us walking
out of the graveyard, and I asked Dylan, why he was so interested in coming to
Lowell, and what his knowledge of Kerouac was. He said – “That was my first
poetry. Someone handed me a copy of Mexico
City Blues in St. Paul and it blew my mind”. I asked “Why?, and
he said – “It was the first poetry that talked American, that I could actually
understand & read. It meant something to me.
Their styles are certainly of the same mode, the
improvisational, accidental rhyme, inspired connections made up out of
lightning-bolt flashes. (Dylan once described his method of making a tune as
going into a studio & jabbering into the microphone, then going back into
the control room and taking down what he said, improving it a little, then
going back in & singing it).
Making it up at the mike. That’s what we did in 1971. I have
one manuscript ,(the first and only version of which is on tape, and it’s on First
Blues), a little gay song, “Jimmy Berman”. They
(sic) were playing “Jimmy Brown, the Newsboy”,
and I didn’t understand what it was. I said, “What’s that, Jimmy Berman? I
heard you drop his name” (that was the beginning line) – “What’s he got to say?
What papers is he sellin’?/ I don’t know if he’s the guy I met or aint…”
[Allen “excuses himself to
go to the bathroom. As he hobbles off on crutches, he sings - “Jimmy Berman does (some) yoga, smokes a little grass.."]
Here's the "op-ed" on April Fools Day from the local newspaper (the Hartford Courant) declaring it up front "an obscene poem" - A what? - What do you think?
"For the first time, Dr. Philip Hicks, psychiatrist to Allen Ginsberg in the mid-1950's will give a talk on the cathartic conversation he shared with a young Allen, which led him to become one of America's most celebrated poets" - "In 1954, Dr Philip Hicks was a young psychiatrist at Langley Porter Clinic (an extension of UC Berkeley Medical School) in session with a young patient, an aspiring businessman. Dr Hicks asked, "What wold you really like to do?". That patient was Allen Ginsberg and that question became a crucial catharsis - the realization that it was okay for him to quit his job & write poetry, that it was okay for him to date men instead of women. This at a time when the American Psychiatry Association still classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. That conversation changed Ginsberg's life, and this (this occasion) will be the very first time Dr Hicks has spoken publicly about it." More on the Beatnik Shindig on the Ginsberg Project in the coming months.
and also the breaking news - sad news - the death, at 85, in Stockholm, this past Wednesday, of legendary music scholar, Sam Charters. We featured his Jack Kerouac talk as a three-part series back in August of last year. HisNew York Times obituary (by Larry Rohter) can be accessed here
"I always had the feeling that there were so few of us and the work so vast..." "For me, the writing about black music was my way of fighting racism…" (Sam Charters to Matthew Ismail, in Blues Discovery (2011)
More Lion For Realamplification. More early Ginsberg lyrics - today's offering - Refrain
To hear his 1989 version, see here Sleeve note: "Among the earliest writings in this suite, echoing late Yeats' style. "Shadow changes into bone," was my Kerouackian motto, 1948, intending to say that eternal prophetic poetic intuition (shadow) will turn out to be real (bone). Having heard (William) Blake's voice I was headed for the booby-hatch for a season. Michael Blair's arrangement's midnight reflectiveness fits this rhyme's mood and meter" Marc Ribot's on guitar (it's his solo), Steve Swallow's on bass, Michael Blair is on guitar, "marimba, shakers (and) clay pot" The air is dark, the night is sad, I lie sleepless and I groan. Nobody cares when a man goes mad: He is sorry, God is glad Shadow changes into bone Every shadow has a name When I think of mine I moan, I hear rumors of such fame Not for pride, but only shame, Shadow changes into bone. When I blush I weep for joy, And laughter drops from me like a stone: The aging laughter of the boy To see ageless death so coy. Shadow changes into bone. "Shadow changes into bone" - he had written earlier - "Shadow changes into bone" was my symbolic language for meaning, thought, high intellectual thought, ambition, idealized desire, and that it can actually come true and you do get to see a vision of eternity which kills you. So shadow, mind, insight, changes into three-dimensional bone."
[Eric Drooker - illustration used for Planet News: Allen Ginsberg Memorial at The Cathedral Chutch of St John the Divine, New York, May 14 1998] "Shadow changes into bone", we might also mentioned here, was the name of the very first "Clearing House For All Things Ginsberg", the Ginsberg site, in the early days of the internet, before The Allen Ginsberg Project. Tip of the hat to the prescient "Mongo BearWolf", the site's administrator (the site's long down but are you still out there?)
- here's another early (1949) lyric -"Complaint Of The Skeleton To Time" Sleeve note - "1949 lyric influenced by Thomas Wyatt's "My Lute, Awake!" & Wm Butler Yeats' "Crazy Jane" - part of The Shrouded Stranger of the Night concept conceived same time as (Jack) Kerouac's Dr Sax.Gary Windo's free jazz sounds a variant of drunken Mexican Day of the Dead dancing skeleton band" Take my love, it is not true, So let it tempt no body new; Take my lady, she will sigh For my bed where'er I lie; Take them, said the skeleton, But leave my bones alone. Take my raiment, now grown cold, To give some poor poet old; Take the skin that hoods this truth If his age would wear my youth; Take them, said the skeleton, But leave my bones alone. Take the thoughts that like the wind Blow my body out of mind" Take this heart to go with that And pass it on from rat to rat; Take them, said the skeleton, But leave my bones alone. Take the art which I bemoan In a poem's crazy tone; Grind me down, though I may groan, To the starkest stick and stone; Take them, said the skeleton, But leave my bones alone.
Bones, bones, bones - it's a perennial (eternal) motif -
Here's (from 1995) the Ballad of the Skeletons
Steve Swallow' s on piano, Michael Blair on guitar, Ralph Carney on clarinet. Allen's sleeve note - "Casual note, a long melancholic affectionate 1956 thought about the late irascible Bay Area anarchist Poet, Kenneth Rexroth, might be 4 A.M. in the soul that Michael Blair's music mirrors"
Scribble
Rexroth’s face reflecting human tired bliss White haired, wing browed gas mustache, flowers jet out of his sad head, listening to Edith Piaf street song as she walks the universe with all life gone and cities disappeared only the God of Love left smiling
Berkeley, March 1956
Here (added bonus) a recent translation of the poem into Spanish:
Garrancho
A cara de Roxroth refletindo a cansada beatitude humana A cabeleira branca, a sobrancelha arrebitada o bigode tagarela, as flores rebentando de sua cabeça triste, a ouvir as cantigas mundanas de Edith Piaf como se ela passeasse pelo universo com toda a vida ida e as cidades desaparecidas somente o Deus do Amor ficou a sorrir
