Ginsberg Rare Video Footage Addenda

Following on from yesterday's posting of Allen in Scotland in 1973, there's a fourth and final video that we omitted, but include today just to give you the complete picture. 
It consists of documentation of a press-conference (but with considerable intrusive ambient sound interference, not to mention amateur camera-work, making it almost impossible - indeed quite literally impossible - to transcribe - Listen hard and you can, perhaps, glean a few of the highlights.  

Approximately sixteen minutes in, that conference concludes, and the focus shifts to Allen in a performance of the popular Hindu mantra, Om Namah Shivaya, accompanying himself on harmonium and with back-up by Victor and Allan, the two local guitarists. 

The tape concludes with Allen announcing what he will read (the preamble to what was presented on yesterday's tapes) and we hear the very beginning of his setting of William Blake's "Spring".

"(Is Tom here?). Well, is he supposed to set it off for me. Is he going to ring a bell or something? do you know? [turning to one of his accompanying guitarists] Your name? - Victor here from Glasgow,and Allan from Glasgow also. So we all met about an hour or so ago and have been rehearsing while you [the audience] were coming in. So, the music, (or that portion of tonight that will be music), which will be.. mantra(s) as this last [Om Namah Shivaya], there'll be some..(what I'll do next) some of (William) Blake's Innocence and Experience set to tune(s) which can be chanted in unison. In other words, community singing. I'll read poems written since I was last here (which was 1967), probably mostly of the last year or so, and sing some blues songs also, most of which we have not rehearsed so 
that we'll be improvising to some extent, or improvising musical parts.
Tom, do you want to begin the program, or is there any formal thing to be done? - Tom McGrath - since we started..  (I've an) old friendship with Tom McGrath, who's working with the Scottish Arts Council (who was one of my first publishersin England, actually) and John Schofield here, who worked under the Traverse Theater in Edinburgh."

"To (William) Blake. We haven't done this so I'll sing the verses, that's three verses, which will be in G and C  and which I'll do unaccompanied, but where there's a refrain that's repeated you'll join in. So I'll repeat the refrain four times after (the) first verse, four times after the second verse, and then a longer, an infinite number of times after the third - "(To) Spring - a very slight lyric by Blake.You may not have noticed. It's in Songs of Innocence - "merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year"           
    
from the press conference (excerpts):

"In terms of this Buddhist scheme, ok, my outlook's pretty close…My heart chakra is relatively open..through chanting, vocalization.. AH! - that's the mantra, AH!… without being mystical about it..simply the relaxation of the breathing..no pressure"

"Well, yes, I've lately I've seen it for myself because I find if I really don't smoke, (and maintain) a good diet, don't (jerk) off, I get laid more!"

"and also general lightness of the body, lightness of mind, lightness of temperament. You just feel lighter"

"When you meditate you get skin itches.. If you scratch it itches more and more. If you don't scratch it goes away within about thirty seconds"

 [Question - What are your fears?] - "Ultimately, not too much, because, at this point,there's not much I have to lose. Pain, I think more than anything else (is a problem to confront) and I had a great deal of that this year. I had a hernia operation in the last twelve months and then a very bad broken ankle - four months in a caste - so pain was the most difficult situation."

[Question - Was that your first? - "No, no I've had other experiences but it was the one I was able to resolve. This time I got into it a little more by (the beauty of) prayer. In moments of pain, relieving my attention from the pain of the leg to the heart area, breathing lightly into the heart area and then singing to myself, singing mantras to myself.."

"..finding out everything I could figure out to pray to, from human beings to gods to teachers to swamis to yogis to chogyams..to faith-healers - and out-breathing.."

[Question - You said something before about looking into a camera's eyes? - " (Yes) In this situation, in this moment - looking into a camera's eyes."

"I had a really interesting experience ..last year…with a famous kundalini swami named Swami Muktananda..who was (recognized) by a lot of people as being a big deal - and is - (not a big deal like (the) Maharishi) - a technician, a great technician of what is called shaktipat, which is touching you, giving you a signal and turning you on, awakening the kundalini, the kundalini being certain body vibrations from the base of the spine all the way up to the crown of the head. So he was someone that I understood, that I was told was real in that area, and was competent and trustworthy. He was told to me (by) people that I trusted, namely Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass) and Swami Satchidanananda (whom I did know) and Swami Satchidanananda's teacher, Sivananda Saraswati. So, within this family of gossips who all knew each other, Swami Muktananda was considered someone to learn from. I went to see him….We held hands and he looked me in the eye and I looked him in the eye, and it went on for a long time. And I was trying to figure out what he was laying on me. And I suddenly realized that his eyes were completely empty. He wasn't laying anything on me. And that was precisely the teaching!"

"Later on, I checked back and that was the teaching - with no oppression, no story, no trip.. no fantasy…"

"..looking at it from another perspective, say, not looking at each others' eyes but looking at flowers on acid - you can see faces or dragons, or you can see… 
So the "no trip" trip on acid is…(the) indestructible one, everything else is subject to your fantasy and..  but not seeing..not seeing faces, not projecting, not tripping is ultimately the highest perfect wisdom.."

"so in that scene, trying to use this situation to try and make a little turn.. to where we would actually know what we're talking about (whereas if we're sending a message saying what that might be) or what's really authentic, you know, and (then) it's mystery again…

[Question (Ego) - … Is there anything, something in your poetry that you're especially proud of? - "I try not to be (proud), If I catch something… In confronting that proposition, it's interesting practicing traditional Tibetan yoga. Traditionally, you're supposed to keep your mantras secret, but I've never been able to do that (so that my inhibit my development). On the other hand, I feel that poetry is where I deal with it. So everything goes into poetry."

"I'm lazy, I don't write enough"

"I find less occasion when  I want to write, when I want to memorialize... Like, say, visiting Durham Cathedral with Basil Bunting . (Now) I was reading (William) Wordsworth last night and he had a poem about…(when) he went to see Sir Walter Scott, and he thought that was a big deal and he could write a big poem out of it (and he did write a beautiful poem about  (meeting) Scott and that situation, and art, and friendship (and everything)) - and I didn't have the heart or (intention) to write a big poem about visiting Durham Cathedral with Bunting and I was wondering about that - am I getting tired? - or, is it.."

"I mean, (also) a conversation with (William) Burroughs in the…station, or a conversation with a beggar man in the corner (also - different). So, finally everything… because everything's equal. At that point, something can be boring, so.."

"In other words, having lunch with the Queen would be just as boring…as having lunch with Harry Fainlight (in fact, probably more exciting with Harry Fainlight! - more upsetting, because of the situation - that you'd have to deal with it more).
 (Fainlight is a poet-friend of (Tom) McGrath's)."   

"I'm finding more and more perplexity finding the impulse of writing but at the same time finding more freedom to do with writing any time I want, so I improvise…"

(Question - When you improvise do you…(embody) -  "Yes, the inspiration it's a certain embodient... Inspiration's breath (and that drives it).. (So) there’s a certain point in improvising when the reading comes very easy, words come on the breath ..  now it's steady one-in-five times , it's extended, sometimes it goes on for twenty-minutes or an hour (or more). And, after about ten minutes or so you might get a little tight force in your blood.." 

" It’s a lost art.. the reason I'm talking about is it's a lost art  it's the twentieth-century art of  jazz and blues - George Melly (has done a little), it's a "trad" form. Among poets it's not considered a practical thing to do…"

(Question - Do you add to your improvisation? I mean do you improvise and (then) re-improvise Do you add (to) it? - " Well, I guess that I've been doing it for about a year and I haven't really got round to taking it down. I 've got a few tapes…. It'd be an interesting project (but) it'd be a lot of work. It's just as easy to write something  down, to start over and write something down. In other words, you improvise and (so) why bother to write it down?, why not just ... (No), In other words, the present moment is the most interesting thing, rather than.. the past, the present moment, in any case, where we're sitting right now (or where we're standing up singing) is the most interesting, because that's where the whole body. mind, the possibilities (are)"

(Question - regarding releasing of the tapes with Bob Dylan - "I was eager to do it a first because of the glory of it! - but still, natural factors intervened (to do with Apple - (John) Lennon wanted to do it with Apple) then - and they even had the cover set in type and designed - then.. they never sent a contract. And then Allen Klein stopped answering the telephone, and  Lennon and Klein severed their relationship, and around the same time, Klein  sent me a message that they'd lost interest (and if  that date had not been (met in) twelve months, then the impulse was gone (and my vanity kind of set in)"

"Then I got a letter from Dylan saying forget about contracts . Energy spent. No point going on, save songs for your friends, make your friends happy..' 

[Allen to one audience -member - "I know you write for the newspaper" - "Yeah (but) newspaper people have all run away to meet deadlines"  - Allen -  "I said the wrong things then!"         

Friday Weekly Round-Up - 101

Mexican heart-throb actor, producer, director Diego Luna brings, once again, his acclaimed rendition of Allen's "Howl" to the stage, tomorrow night (Saturday the 24th) (along with musical accompaniment by Jaime Lopez) as part of the 2012 Festival Internacional de Teatro Puebla Héctor Azar (Héctor Azar International Theater Festival, in Puebla, Mexico).  Here's an audio taste of it.

Tomorrow, in Hackney, London, at the Apiary Studios, is the UK launch of "the first ever bespoke Brion Gysin Dreamachine". The night will include talk, films, music, and.. dreamachines! - Featured performers include Terry Wilson, Stewart Home, Ian MacFadyen, and others..  

Two brief obituary notices (that you may have missed)
 -  maverick American poet Jack Gilbert

from Rita Signorelli Papas review/recognition in World Literature Today

“Although he once hung out in San Francisco with Allen Ginsberg (he is said to have helped Ginsberg write “Howl”) and has won some of the higher poetic accolades in the American poetry world, he essentially shuns fame and publicity, is affiliated with no university, and has spent much of his life living in seclusion here [in the U.S] or abroad. This relative isolation has been instrumental in shaping a poetic style of uncommon lucidity, a voice that speaks directly and with philosophical force.”

and Patrick Creagh, another maverick, Allen’s sometime translator. It was he who invited him to the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto in 1967, and he who’s (Italian) translation of “Who Be Kind To” (for Harry Fainlight) “was so faithful to the spirit of the original that Ginsberg was questioned by police for three hours, then arrested for obscenity”.  

Friday's Weekly Round-Up 31

Bob Rosenthal, "poet and writer, long-time secretary for Allen, and Trustee of the Allen Ginsberg Trust", leads off this Friday's weekly Round-Up, reading Allen's remarkable 1965 poem, "Who Be Kind To". Allen's own reading of the poem can be accessed here. Harry Fainlight, dedicatee of the poem, can be seen, in sweet confusion, here. The poem itself may be read here (just scroll down, it's right below another lively Ginsberg text, "Come All Ye Brave Boys"). There was also a classic Wes Wilson poster of the poem published in that same year by San Francisco's Cranium Press (a reproduction of that image is available here).

The Ginsberg Turn On (GTO) continues. Bob's reading is number 7 - and number 8, "Queens (New York)'s Poet Laureate", Paolo Javier, reading "Song" (mis-labeled here as "Psalm"). GTO is the brain-child of Bob Holman - "Allen evoked..his energy acknowledged..the continuance of his work engaged" - the project is open-ended.

Our absolutely number one post, most popular post so far, is April 1st (sic) 2010's Buddha's Footprint. Another popular post was our tattoo feature. So, combining them together, 18-year-old "cosmicbrownie" from Texas, just recently, came up with this

"Allen Ginsberg is my favorite poet, so of course I would get this tattooed on myself! It’s the first tattoo I’ve gotten. (On my eighteenth birthday which was June 19th!) It was a fantastic experience. I thought it would hurt a lot more than it did, but it was pretty much painless. I got it done at True Love, which is in Kemah, TX. The artist who did it was a fantastic guy and talked to me about poets and books pretty much half the time I was being tattooed. All in all, this will not be my last tattoo! "

The Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco is presently showing "The Art of Howl", through till September 11 - "This multimedia exhibit", the Museum reports, "includes character design drawings, animation keyframes & concept art [relating to the recent movie], photos by Allen, storyboards, animatics, and images from (Eric) Drooker's graphic novel.." On Thursday July 14 (they've just announced), they will be hosting a special reading/benefit - "an unusual reading", they declare - "this is not your usual poetry reading, prepare yourself for an inspired presentation". The evening will be hosted by Anna Conda and feature such local luminaries as Ben McCoy, James Tracy, Sunny Angulo and Dean Disaster. Local comic artists Justin Hall and Jon Macy Hunter will also be in attendance. More information on the event can be found here.

..and while you're in San Francisco, perhaps you might want to stay in "the Allen Ginsberg room". Jamie Agnello, in this brief note, reminds you - Hotel Boheme, Room 204 (for a more expansive view of the city's "literary landmarks", go, of course, to Bill Morgan's The Beat Generation in San Francisco - Bill also has Beat guide-books to New York City and, now, a, cross-country, Beat Atlas).

San Francisco's poet-laureate, Diane di Prima, is the subject of a new "impressionistic" documentary - Melanie LaRosa's "The Poetry Deal" (which played. this past Wednesday, in Manhattan (at the 86th Street, uptown, Barnes & Noble, alongside a reading by her old friend, Maria Mazziotti Gillan). More on the film, in the coming months, here. The poem, from which the film takes its title may be read here

also, don't miss the recording of Diane's extraordinary recent New York (CUNY Grad Center) reading. That can be accessed, in its entirety, here.

More movie-news, James Franco's Hart Crane biopic, The Broken Tower, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival a couple of weeks ago, and was met, it has to be said, with less-than-enthusiastic critical response. Here's the Variety review and here's The Hollywood Reporter. Even the usually sympathetic Indiewire, which led off with a Franco quote, "This is a slow film, on purpose", was moved to add, "Regardless of what Franco thinks, it's not slowness that holds it down, but rather its overly ponderous nature, a trait only appealing to those with the same existing appreciation for Crane that Franco has" (that would be readers of The Allen Ginsberg Project, yes?). Francisco Ricardo presents a spirited defence of the movie here -" "The Broken Tower operates in the medium of film", he writes, "but it is not primarily a motion picture, nor can one fairly place it in the convenient classification of "character study" - those objectivist, externalizing terms prevent us from understanding the work that we must perform in order to observe a soul that is deeply poetic, personal, and palladian. The film is not to be viewed as much as navigated, one must be in it, for its method is less that of a visual panegyric than that of the existential problem.." (hmm, that might be criticized as being a little bit ponderous too!)

One group that seem to be acquiring both critical and popular acclaim are "power-pop/punk" Philadelphia band, The Wonder Years, who's Ginsberg-influenced Suburbia I've Given You All And Now I'm Nothing (previously mentioned here) continues to get rave reviews (like this one). Melodicnet notes that it debuted this week at number 65 on the Billboard Top 200. Here's the lyrics to one of the songs - "I had dreams of myself/As the Allen Ginsberg of this generation/but without the talent, madness, or vision...I know we've got miles to go but I'm putting my shoulder to the wheel".

Word reaches us of a huge data trove - the recently-released files on the "Yippies" from the FBI - several thousand pages! - something tells us that the name "Allen Ginsberg" is likely to turn up! We'll keep you posted.

Simon Vinkenoog (1928-2009)

[Allen Ginsberg and Simon Vinkenoog at Musee Rimbaud, Charleville, December 1982. Photo: Joep Bremmers]

As Stewart Home pointedly noted, in his review of Wholly Communion (Peter Whitehead and the Sixties) - "Curiously it is Simon Vinkenoog who is featured on the cover of this BFI (British Film Institute) DVD, despite the fact that (his) Vinkenoog's on-stage performance at the Albert Hall was not recorded by Whitehead". Indeed, Whitehead (in an interview with film scholar, Jack Sargeant) takes it one step further, professing to have no memory whatsoever of there ever even having been such a performance. What is captured - and has remained indelibly memorable, however - is Vinkenoog, in the audience, high on mescaline, interrupting the frail figure of poet Harry Fainlight reading - it was, very much, a drug-influenced night that night - Fainlight was reading his quintessential LSD poem, "The Spider".

As Whitehead recalls:

"Harry was waxing lyrical in the middle of recreating his LSD trip, and suddenly this howl came from somewhere - we didn't know where - someone was shouting. I didn't even know what the sound was, finally I figured it out that it was "love" that he (Simon) was shouting: "Looovvve! Looovvve!" you see. He's shouting "love", but, number one, he is Dutch, number two he's on mescaline. And this interrupts Harry's poem, and of course he finds it then very difficult to get started again. Harry turns around and accuses Simon, who was a friend, "You're a lovable idiot".."

This key moment should illuminate this - a copy of Vinkenoog's Plutonische Ode (Plutonian Ode) in a bi-lingual (Dutch-English) edition - "signed by Vinkenoog, who has also written the word "Love" three times across the rear endpaper and inside of the rear wrap". Simon was, and remained, Allen's esteemed Dutch translator.

Jap van der Bent in his groundbreaking essay, "O fellow travelers I write you a poem in Amsterdam - Allen Ginsberg, Simon Vinkenoog and the Dutch Beat Connection":

"Strangely enough neither of the Ginsberg biographies which have been published to date [he's writing in the year 2000] pays much attention to the artistic and personal relationship between the Dutch and American poet, even though the two met not only in 1957 and 1967 but also during Ginsberg's visits to Holland in the 1970s and 1980s. On each of these visits Vinkenoog served as Ginsberg's translator, after having published the first, and still the only, substantial Dutch translation of Ginsberg's poems, "Proef m'n tong in je oor" (Taste my mouth in your ear), (1966). [he also published the book-length collection, "Me and my peepee" (translations of Allen) in 2001] It was also during one of those visits that Ginsberg found the inspiration for his poem, "What The Sea Throws Up at Vlissingen", published in White Shroud: Poems 1980-1985 (1986) and dedicated to Vinkenoog."

In 1982 Vinkenoog famously accompanied Allen to Arthur Rimbaud's birthplace in Charleville. Joep Bremmers has been engaged in annotating and footnoting Allen's notebooks from this period (some of which may be accessed here).

Simon was European Beat personnified, "poet, activist, lifelong hippy, and [not incidentally] cannabis connoisseur par excellence", he, as this short but succinct biographical note points out, "never seemed to go out of style and was regularly rediscovered by new generations of poets and performance artists". He wrote and published extensively (his 1972 anthology with George Andrews, The Book of Grass, might, perhaps, be singled out, but that was just one of many, of a host of titles; he wrote novels, biography, journalism, as well as singularly influential translation). As an anthologist, his 1950 anthology, Atonaal (Atonal) launched an important movement, the "Fifties Movement" in Dutch poetry. Towards the end of his life, in 2004, he was chosen as "Dichter des Vaderlands" (Poet Laureate) for the Netherlands. On his death, in July 2009, an international community mourned. Even Dutch Queen Beatrix sent her condolences, from her summer residence in Italy, stating "With this man the world has lost a unique writer".

His web-site (posthumous tho' it may be) is a veritable trove and well worth examining. Among the treasures therein, we select this. Ever the optimist, this is how Simon faced the world:

Annotated Streaming Video 4 (City Lights Footage) (ASV4)

After a brief hiatus, we're back with our series - Annotated Streaming Videos. For the first three posts see here, here and here

So, next up, the wonderful 1965 City Lights Bookstore footage (often trumpeted on the internet due to the appearance of Neal Cassady in it, as "rare" - it is in its own way, it's true, but if it appears on the internet, doesn't that make such designation something of an oxymoron?)

[2012 update - It now returns to a stricter definition of "rare" - not available on the internet, only available on the DVD of The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg - Jerry Aronson's definitive film biography, (a brief excerpt of it may be glimpsed on his web-site here)]

"This, frankly, essential item".

As the note on his web-site explains (regarding the expanded DVD)

"Academy Award nominated Director Jerry Aronson spent twenty-five years accumulating more than one-hundred-and-twenty hours of film on Allen Ginsberg, resulting in this comprehensive portrait of one of America's greatest poets. This deluxe two-DVD set contains the Director's cut of the award-winning documentary updated and remastered. This DVD set includes never-before-seen material and historical interviews with friends, family and contemporaries and the latest generation of artists influenced by Ginsberg. This eight-hour [sic] compilation illuminates the last sixty years of American culture and the uncertainties and possibilities of current times."

Regarding, specifically, the City Lights footage, Jerry provides a little of the background:

"The first item that I came across at the American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State was called "USA Poetry - Out-takes". It was shot for WNET in 1965 [by filmmaker Richard O Moore, out-takes from the Ginsberg episode of his (Moore's) pioneering poetry series].. (It)

was a poor-quality video-transfer but was 25 minutes long and contained all of the material, just not in good shape. I began hunting for the original black-and-white film and (for) better-quality transfers.

I called the Archives in the early '90s and they did not have anything else that could help me. Lucklly, other filmmakers (around that time) were making documentaries on Kerouac, Burroughs and the Beats in general. Richard Lerner who made What Happened To Kerouac?

and John Antonelli who made Kerouac had portions of this sequence in much better video-transfers and they were kind enough to let me borrow them.

When I assembled everything I was still several minutes short and (then) sometime in the late '90s, while looking through (the) WNET archives, (I) found the missing footage, in decent shape. One of my students and editing assistants, Trevor Hubbard, put everything together and this uncut footage was then ready for the DVD."

WNET's original Allen Ginsberg program was filmed, according to Bill Morgan's invaluable "The Works of Allen Ginsberg 1941-1994: A Descriptive Bibliography" , on two separate occasions - the first (the footage at City Lights) on July (July 18), further filming took place in December of 1965 in Allen's apartment and in the studio of Robert Lavigne. The program aired in March of 1966. The "out-takes" footage (similar "out-takes" are available from all twelve programs) were formally worked on ten years later. Ross Lipman's masterful restoration work for the UCLA Film and Television Archive, transferring the original 16mm film to a 35mm print should also be noted.

More on Moore (a poet as well as a documentarian) can be found here and here

More on Jerry Aronson.. well, you're just going to have to wait until tomorrow when we feature his memoir on first meeting Allen.

To the footage itself, broken, in this instance, courtesy of You Tube, into a number of segments

[The following, of course, refers, (now) to a segmentation that is no longer available]

- Part one (not from the Aronson DVD but included in it) Allen reading "Who Be Kind To" (composed, shortly after the London reading at the Albert Hall, June 10 1965, so read a little more than a month after its composition - for poet Harry Fainlight). The next part, Allen chanting, and speaking about, mantra - and, later, about Eastern European politics (three minutes in, Cassady arrives and Allen quizzes him about his (Cassady's) recent marijuana bust). In the next part, Allen speaks of his own recent deportation from Czechoslovakia and reads in its entirety the likewise just-recently-composed "Kral Majales" (he also points to the "Who Be Kind To" reading, tho' this doesn't take place in this segment).A fourth section features Allen displaying the sign that he carried "two years ago, when I was last in town" (1963), demonstrating "in front of the Palace Hotel to picket Madame Nhu" (the First Lady of South Vietnam). He shows, and explains, the three-fishes-with-one-head symbol ("meaning three bodies with one consciousness"), which he would go on to use as his own personal symbol - and the writing on the placard, which reads as follows:

"War Is Black Magic - Belly Flowers To North And South Vietnam - Include Everybody -End The Human War - Name Hypnosis - Fear Is The Enemy - Satan Go Home - I Accept America And Red China To The Human Race - Madame Nhu And Mao Tse Tung Are In The Same Boat Of Meat"

and on the other side:

"Man Is Naked Without Secrets - Armed Men Lack This Joy - How Many Million Persons Without Names? - What Do We Know Of Their Suffering? - Oh How Wounded Says The Guru - Thine Own Heart Says The Swami - Within You Says The Christ - Till His Humanity Awake Says Blake - I Am Here Saying Seek Mutual Surrender Tears - That There Be No More Hell In Vietnam - That I Not Be In Hell Here In The Street [Allen adapts it for this occasion "In This Basement"]"

Allen also speaks eloquently against the Vietnam War. He also stands bemused and apart from Cassady's more pessimistic (apocalyptic) view. The two can be seen in the footage articulating their sharply different visions.

and one more from this City Lights occasion - Allen sings the praises of his Russian comrad, Andrei Voznesensky