Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 247

From the audio-visual archives of RTBF, Belgium's public-broadcasting organization for the French-speaking community, this delightful footage of Allen (and Peter Orlovsky and Steven Taylor) in Belgium in 1983. Following a short introduction, Allen and company are glimpsed (briefly) walking the streets (of Liege) and then Allen is interviewed (speaking en francais!). Allen and Steven get down at the piano (sic - yes, really) to perform "Father Death Blues" 

and Allen-in-Austria footage (at the Schule Fur Dichtung/Vienna Poetry Academy - who is that woman sitting across from him at the table at the beginning?) - "I'll begin with music. Inspiration from William Blake, the poem "The Tyger", which is inspiration to breath and poetic inspiration".  Allen is then seen performing "Why I Meditate" (from White Shroud  ("I sit because the Dadaists screamed on Mirror Street/I sit because the Surrealists ate angry pillows..") and "Proclamation" (from Cosmopolitan Greetings) spliced in ("I am the King of the Universe/I am the Messiah with a new dispensation/Excuse me I stepped on a nail..")  


 

We've already noted Bob Arnold (Longhouse)'s recent edition of Janine Pommy Vega's final completed manuscript, Walking Woman With The Tambourine. Now news of a new Pommy Vega miscellany, Janina.
"Some people call us the Beat Generation, we just called it living. To be present at that time as a woman took more moxie than a guy. You had to go in the face of mores. When guys were "sowing their wild oats", we were "being promiscuous". But what I really was exploring was consciousness..the desire to dig deeper and live freer."

                                        [Janine Pommy Vega (1942-2010) - Photograph - Monica Claire Antonie] 

Great news -  Really great news! - "And When I Die, I Won't Stay Dead", Billy Woodberry's Bob Kaufman documentary will finally soon be out. Here's advanced word from the Hollywood Reporter.
US premiere will be Monday January 11 in LA.

                                                            

                                                                                   [Bob Kaufman 1925-1986]    

Meantime, if you still haven't heard it, do check out (don't miss) David Henderson's exemplary radio documentary on Kaufman. 

Drummond Hadley's poems were memorably described by Allen as  "like time and death". Voice of the Borderlands, a major collection of his work (with a foreword by his friend Gary Snyder came out in 2007 (a brief selection of some of the poems can be found here - an NPR report on him - here  - Chax Press published The Light Before Dawn ("koans of mortality") in 2010). 

"A poet among poets".."not a cowboy poet exactly. But it's tough to separate the cowboy from the poet", Drum" had been (for those who didn't know) ailing for some time (following a near-fatal car collision). He died peacefully this past weekend. 
Libby Cudmore's obituary notice may be read here 

                                                              [Drummond Hadley (1938-2015)]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Writing Across The Landscape in the Chilean newspapers (article in Spanish)

A profile of Fernanda Pivano (video in Italian)

Ezra Pound's  Posthumous Cantos reviewed in The Guardian

Two old codgers, Gerd Stern and Harold Channer get together - again - (yes, that Gerd Stern, the one mistakenly caught up in all that Kerouac-Cassady "Joan Anderson Letter" controversy. Stern's exhibition "Usco WhenThen" is still up at the Seton Hall University Walsh Gallery (if you happen to be in, or close to, New Jersey) until next Friday

Judith Malina (1926-2015)

                                                   

A page turns. One of the great pioneering American counter-cultural icons, Judith Malina (co-founder with her late husband Julian Beck) of the groundbreaking revolutionary theatre troupe, The Living Theatre, died this past Friday, (at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey, where she had been living, in assisted living, these past few years). She died following complications from lung disease. She was eighty-eight. 

Her obituary by Bruce Weber in The New York Times may be read here 

An appreciation en francais may be read - here
and in italanio - here and here 

Internationally respected and revered, without a doubt, many more appreciations will follow.



Here's a brief biographical portrait (an excerpt from a longer profile) from Steve Zehentner on The Lower East Side Biography Project

Here's a two-part interview (from 20o8) with Gerald Thomas -  here and here 

Here's a 2010 interview with Harold Channer



An earlier interview with Channer (with Malina alongside her husband Hanon Resnikov) may be viewed here

and interviews with Paulo Eno - here - and with John Bredin (from 2012) - here 


Here's Malina with her legendary partner Julian Beck discussing two of their most famous productions - "The Connection"  and "The Brig".

For The Allen Ginsberg Project note on Julian Beck see here.

Not only profoundly important as an actor and director (and activist above all else), Malina gained significant profile in later years as a bit-player in commercial films, a movie-star! This obit headline wasn't probably one she expected, but "such is the nature of  "fame""!

The occasion of the publication of her Piscator Notebook in 2012 was gloriously celebrated by the New School in New York and the whole occasion (well worth watching - including, among other things a riveting reading by Malina) can be seen here 

We should also note the singularly engrossing Diaries 1947-1957 (from 1983, published by Grove Press) 

Here's Judith Malina at the Poetry Project in 2012

and here's Judith Malina from the previous year:

Gerd Stern - 1

Gerd Stern - Here's an interview with the truly extraordinary Gerd Stern - Gerd Stern, who, allegedly lost that legendary Neal Cassady manuscript, Gerd Stern, artist, poet and multi-media visionary, at eighty-six years old - what remarkable stories he has to tell!  - his oral history, From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist 1948-1978  was  published, and is available on line from University of California, Berkeley. We'll be quoting, tomorrow, salient paragraphs from it - But first, this.

(Those with an interest in modern music should, also, on no account, miss this - Stern's vivid first-hand memories of the composer Harry Partch) 

So, Harold Channer, it has to be said, if sincere and well-meaning, is not the most telegenic of interviewers - but it doesn't matter, since Stern, as you'll see, is very much the raconteur.

The conversation was recorded in August of last year.

Coming in at, approximately, eight-and-a-half minutes in:

Gerd Stern:  (New York), that was after San Francisco and Sausalito where I went in the late (19)40’s..San Francisco and Big Sur, I couldn’t believe it. And, again, I met poets when 

I was in San Francisco. The first night that I was in San Francisco there was a reading at the old San Francisco Museum of (Modern) Art, which at that time was in the Civic Center. It was Brother Antoninus (except that was before he was that, he was Bill (Bill Everson)) - and Philip Lamantia, Robert Duncan, and I felt, like, part of it immediately.

Harold Channer:  What year or so would you have gone there? That was destined to be the site of Mario Savio and the Free Speech, the Movement of Love, and all that kind of stuff

Gerd Stern: Yeah but that was all later.

Harold Channer: That was later, but you were somewhat involved with that and with the people who were destined to build this period up to… You were at the heart of it all, it seems to me.

Gerd Stern: True. I mean, Summer of Love [1967] I was there again. But, in the 'Forties it was a very very different place than in the 'Sixties.

Harold Channer: Yeah , sure.

Gerd Stern: I mean, in 1947 I was back in New York and I was at the Psychiatric Institute at the time that Carl Solomon and Allen Ginsberg wound up there. So that’s where I met them.

Harold Channer:  Met them there, right, that’s where you met, right! - Meet your friends at the (Psychiatric) Institute!, right

Gerd Stern: We were three patients (we weren’t very patient, but..)

Harold Channer: Where did you…   When did he (Allen) write "Howl"?

Gerd Stern: Oh, quite a bit later in San Francisco, and I was at that first reading at the Six Gallery, where Allen read "Howl", yes. I didn’t go to hear Allen, I mean, I knew Allen, but I went because Philip Lamantia was reading [editorial note - Philip Lamantia, famously, did not read his own poems on this occasion] - and Kenneth Rexroth [Kenneth Rexroth was the m-c].. but Allen -  that was quite an experience hearing "Howl" for the first time. It was a little devastating to me, because.. kind of the main character in that poem, that he says (what turned out to be) perjorative things about, was Carl Solomon, a mutual friend - and he says that Carl Solomon had sex with his mother (although he uses a four-letter word to (describe it)) - and that was not true. It may, actually, have been something mischievous that Carl had said, but Allen knew it wasn’t true and it caused tremendous bad vibes in the family. I knew Carl’s mother, and his uncle was the head of Ace Books, and that was.., I don’t know if you remember them, they were like pocket-books but they were two-sided (in other words, they had two books(-in-one))..Carl worked for his uncle, and I was his West Coast agent, and the only book that he accepted from (us), (there were a lot of books that Allen had given me manuscripts of), was Bill Burroughs’ Junkie  (which was one of those back-to-back books) . But when "Howl" came out (which was about that same time), his uncle fired Carl, and his mother was devastated, you know, and Carl wound up back in the hospital. So I was pretty unhappy about Allen…"

More scandalous recollections about Allen - and Carl Solomon - tomorrow on The Allen Ginsberg Project