Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 120

April 5 - Allen Ginsberg's Parinirvana - April 5, 1997 - the date when Allen's spirit left its bodily form. 

Big poetry celebration event tomorrow-night in Los Angeles (at Beyond Baroque) - Claiming Ginsberg - An Evening of Allen Ginsberg and Friends (featuring Ronee Blakely, Rick Overton, S.A. Griffin, Marc Olmsted, and a whole lot more). 

And speaking of the West Coast, a heads-up for the upcoming Hal Willner Kaddish performances (the performance at the San Francisco Jazz Festival is pretty much sold out, but you can still get tickets for the April 17 date at UCLA). 

The last couple of days (today and tomorrow) for the New York City Grey Gallery's "Beat Memories" show (Allen's photos) before it heads off to San Francisco (May 23-September 9). In case you missed it, and the, mostly, enthusiastic response to it - there've been numerous reviews - see our earlier posts here, here and here.
Joseph Neighbor's recent Salon piece, for example, (which originally appeared in Hypoallergic) can be found here.     



Last week, we surveyed a bunch of On The Road (movie) reviews - Here's a few more, starting with - what we have to declare to be hyperbole - Harry Kloman in the Pittsburgh City Paper - "Walter Salles' moody, energetic film is more enjoyable than Jack Kerouac's book" (sic!). Barry Paris  in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is a little more measured - "On the Road film takes slower trip than book", is the headline, and he goes on to note - "This film version feels less exuberant than the book, slowed down and muted to emphasize the loneliness and melodramatic pain more than the wild excitements of the road. Still, it's a worthy rendering of its be-bop bohemian - dissipated yet strangely innocent - heroes.."   Rob Boylan in the Orlando Weekly points out the dilemma - "The problem with this film is that it's impossible to divorce it, even a little bit, from its source material. It seems unfair but those are the breaks.." - "Even a (very) good film would suffer in comparison with the novel" ..."director Walter Salles and writer Jose Rivera have (at least) not corralled the text - no-one ever could, and that's sort of the point". Kelly Vance's review for East Bay Express is here. Ryan Sartor for Patch.com here, Duane Dudek for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel here. For more (an extensive and on-going gathering of On The Road reviews) see here. 



Helen Weaver, an old friend, writes to us that she recently unearthed a piece - Hare Krishna SRO: Allen Ginsberg at The New School (on a reading from 1969) - "Allen, the internationalist, the breaker of barriers, who will roll up his trouser legs and wade into any strange waters..."  

Allen in Poland! - There's a whole web-site devoted to Allen-in-Poland/Allen seen from the perspective of Poland (mostly in Polish, natch, but this recent interview with poet Adam Lizarkowski - My Encounters With Allen Ginsberg - has been helpfully translated into English and is certainly well worth a read).

Allen in Bangladesh! - a national hero! - stay tuned, we'll have more about that next week.   

Friday Weekly Round-Up - 102

[John Wieners - Hyannisport, MA - February 21, 2002, John Wieners' Last Reading]

The Allen Ginsberg Project is a pretty hyper-rich hyper-link site (as I'm sure all those who've been following us would agree). So it's in the nature of the beast that links occasionally go dead (we try to keep on top of this, but, please (an appeal to our community) report and send in notice of any particularly frustrating broken links that you find  - yes, we know about "Good Morning, Mr Orwell" and "Renaldo and Clara"!). 
That said, the most egregious (and frustrating) "downed link" of late has been this one (initially provided by our good friend Derek Fenner at Bootstrap Press, in May of 2011), the extraordinary last reading by the phenomenal poète maudit  John Wieners. We were astonished to see it taken down - the ominous blank screen and the notice - "This video contains content from UMG who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds" - UMG? (Universal Music Group)? and John Wieners? - we couldn't quite see the connection. Turns out that there was 30 seconds, (literally, 30 seconds!), of Thelonious Monk  playing 'Round Midnight in the cafe, in the background, right at the beginning, sufficient for UMG, or more precisely, their lawyers, to sniff it out and shut it down.  
Happy to report it's now up again (sans the copyright-disputed 30 seconds) - and with a bonus vid, to boot (thank you, Derek). While we're on the subject of Wieners material, we've already reported on priceless video (on PennSound) of John reading, in San Francisco in 1990, (not to mention, vintage audio (on the same site) and recordings (recorded a decade later) available on-line from Harvard University's Woodberry Poetry Room).

Howard Brookner's 1983 movie, Burroughs (another focus of a previous Ginsberg Project post - and another one with, notably, some links down) is about to get a new lease of life, along with the rest of Brookner's oeuvre, courtesy his nephew, Aaron. A campaign to restore the film will officially be launched on Kickstarter on World Aid's Day, December 1st, and will run for 30 days. A rare screening of the film (pre-restoration) will take place at the October Gallery in London on December 11th at 7 o'clock (this will be in the context of a wider event, "William S Burroughs - All out of Time and into Space", opening on December 6th). More information about that exhibition (and some images from the exhibition) may be had here. 

"A party at Richard Howard's in the 'sixties, where I wore a flaming red chiffon dress that was much too dressy for the occasion, and Allen, literally, fell at my feet. Peter Orlovsky took off his cap and his hair fell down to his butt and he danced with Allen (which was a big deal in those days). I remember that Peter asked a stuffy Columbia professor named Eric Bentley if he was getting any.."
and, again - 
"Whenever we [Allen & I] got high at a party, we always sang "O Moon of Alabama" from Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera" at the top of our lungs. Once we did this while lying down on the street waiting for a bus.. "

The two quotes above are from the redoubtable exuberant Helen Weaver on Michael Limnios' consistently-informative Blues and Greece site. (see here and here for earlier appearances of Helen on The Allen Ginsberg Project). 
For the rest of her lively interview (gossip about Kerouac and Corso and Lenny Bruce also) see here. 

Photographer Alec Soth (in conversation with curator, Leslie A Martin): "(Allen) Ginsberg saved the day for me. "A Supermarket In California" clearly illustrates (Walt) Whitman's profound influence on Ginsberg, but Ginsberg's voice rises above it. He sings with Whitmanesque bravado, but it's still Ginsberg's world..".
and then this, (speaking of the Paris Review interview)
"In this interview, Ginsberg talks about a vision he had after masturbating while reading Blake. I found this kind of exuberance refreshing. It helped me shake loose from some of the somber reverence I sometimes feel when engaging with (my particular hero) Robert Adams' world." 

Candor and irreverence - Marc Olmsted's serialized memoirs of Allen continue on the Rusty Truck site   

Allen's Astrological Chart

[AG note:  "file astrological chart or any other appropriate title"]

Allen's astrological chart. We've had this for some time in safe-keeping. In a note in The Woodstock Journal, astrologer Eric Francis, (the astrologer who drew it up), has observed:

"With (his) Sun and Mercury tightly aligned in Gemini and in the powerfully mental third house (the astrological engine room) we get an astrological picture of his (Ginsberg's) brilliant linguistic gift"...(He) has one of those charts you could cut up with scissors, pick up any one piece at random, and (still) read the whole horoscope accurately".      

"But one feature in particular screams out - an exact (to the minute) conjunction between Venus (who represents the feminine, erotic, attractive and creative human nature, and Chiron, who is a powerful spiritualizing force that works mainly through early wounding...Simply, Venus conjunct Chiron is about our wounded feminine side."

Elsewhere, the significance of the Moon has been noted. Significantly, both Allen and William Blake were born under a powerful Twelfth House Moon. 

Helen Weaver in her analysis of the chart of Jack Kerouac (and the comparative chart of Allen) writes: "Ginsberg's Pisces Moon, Mars and Uranus all lie over Kerouac's Uranus/Fortune, Sun, and Venus like spokes of a wheel in three conjunctions whose mathematical precision suggests that these men were destined to work together; one of the most striking examples of synastry I've ever seen."   

The Responsibility of Allen Ginsberg

Really been itching to post this poem that Helen Weaver wrote a few years ago and posted on her blog for Allen's birthday this year. So, finally here it is! While we're on Helen Weaver, be sure to check out her recently published book The Awakener published by City Lights. A fantastic fun read.

The Responsibility of Allen Ginsberg

for a friend who said she couldn’t put “Allen Ginsberg” and “responsibility”
in the same sentence

Clearly I have a different definition of the word

I think Allen was one of the most responsible people I’ve known

He was responsible to his Muse

He was responsible to his friends

He was responsible to all the poets who got busted for smoking grass and who he bailed out when he was living in a cold water walkup on nothing a year

He was responsible to his job which was waking people up telling the truth and making his life into poems

He was responsible to all the scared gay guys who now aren’t scared any more

He was responsible to the people who still aren’t ashamed to call themselves liberals or even socialists

He was responsible to New York San Francisco Denver Mexico Canada and all the continent in between

He was responsible to the King’s English and the queens

He was responsible to Blake and Whitman, to Kerouac and Burroughs and Cassady, to Corso and Rimbaud and Artaud

He was responsible to the future which is more than you can say for the motherfuckers who run this country from the banks and boardrooms of Moloch

He was responsible to all the kids who burned their draft cards and went to Canada and to the pacifists of old and to the pacifists who weren’t even born yet

He was responsible to Lenny Bruce and free speech and the Bill of Rights and the ACLU

He was responsible to all the people who got electric shock treatments in the fifties and who died insane anyway

He was responsible to his mother Naomi who served him uncooked fish and an inedible childhood and died in Greystone State Mental Hospital eli eli lama sabachthani

He was responsible to his father Louis also a poet for whom he wrote his most beautiful song Father Death

He was responsible to all of us including people who never heard of him and people who’ve heard of him but never read him and people who’ve read him but can’t spell his name

He was responsible to Life

He was responsible to America and we should be so lucky to have one like him again

From Helen Weaver

Helen Weaver: The Awakener

Helen Weaver's book The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the 50s is now in stores, after nearly 20 years in the making. Weaver, whom Kerouac immortalized as Ruth Heaper in Desolation Angels, was one of the "two Helens" who awoke one snowy, cold December morning in 1956, to Allen, Peter and Jack freshly returned from Mexico with no place to stay. More details at City Lights online >>

Steve Silberman's written a decent review for SFGate/SF Chronicle >>