Allen Ginsberg, James Franco & "Selfies"

The "selfie" (word of the moment), the ubiquitous "selfie" - As Paul Gallagher noted recently, on one of our all-time favorite blogs, Dangerous Minds - "Along with being a poet, Beat writer, radical, teacher, diarist, singer, musician, photographer and Buddhist, Allen Ginsberg was also the pioneer of the selfie. Long before everyone was posting their self-portraits on social media, Ginsberg was out there taking snaps of himself in front of every hotel mirror. He snapped himself cross-legged, naked, half-dressed, fully-dressed, vulnerable, confident, unwashed, washed, smiling, squinting, happy-face, ugly-face, old-man-tired-and-going-to-bed face - the Ginsberg selfie captured it all".

Here's a few more Ginsberg "selfies" - 












And a show-down this week on Instagram - James Franco (who played Allen, of course, in 2010's Howl movie)  and Allen - "Who Did It Better?" -  Word-on-the-street says Allen. What do you think?



And what's this? who's this? why, it's American photographic pioneer Robert Cornelius and a daguerrotype taken in 1839 - according to Wikipedia, "the first known selfie"!

















Here's James Franco again.  Okay, enough of this - moving along...



Here's James Franco reading his poetry (courtesy another of our favorite blogs, Open Culture) - James Franco Reads Six Short Poems From His New Collection



Here's James Franco reading Allen 

Some Ginsberg Animation & Illustration

Here's a graphics-rendering of (the first part of) "Howl" (complete with Spanish sub-titles!) that's been up there on You Tube for over five years now. That means you may very well have watched it - It also means you may very well might not have. Of all the, often well-meaning but not-necessarily successful "renditions", we like this. 

Of course, it doesn't compare (surely entirely unfair to compare it) with Eric Drooker's "Howl" animations, featured in the 2010 Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman movie (James Franco is, of course, reading the poem):



and, while we're at it, since we're not sure if we've spotlighted it before: 



Here's John Leland in The New York Times reviewing The Beats: A Graphic History

Here's Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing

Here's Michael White's review in Multiversity Comics. 


[Illustration by Ed Piskor from "The Beats: A Graphic History" (2010)]

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Kill Your Darlings (we hadn't actually mentioned it for a couple of weeks!) opens in the UK and Ireland today (It opened in Australia yesterday). We'd draw your attention, if you missed them, to a few of our early postings - here, here and here - but, also, importantly, here and here.  
(and, in case you missed it - yesterday's posting).

Daniel Radcliffe is interviewed (by Simon Mayo on BBC radio) on playing Allen Ginsberg and on working with director, John Krokidas - here.

That interview contains the following exchange:

SM: Is it true that you're a poet, Daniel?
DR: Well, after a fashion.
SM: Do you still write poetry?
DR: I do occasionally. Yes. It's not..not with the frequency that I used to, but I like to think that what I write now is better.
SM: Are you radical? Do you do new things?
DM: I'm actually really not. I'm very traditional. I love rhyme and meter and form, and I know Allen wouldn't agree with it but, I liked Robert Frost's line about free verse where he said writing a poem without a meter [sic] is like playing tennis without a net. ["I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down" - (but, of course, "non-traditional" verse does not imply the jettisoning of all formal or metrical consideration - T.S.Eliot - "No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job")]

Lando Palmer at Film School Rejects opines on "the new crop of Beat movies" - "How the New Beat Cinema Narrows The Mythology of Kerouac and Friends".  

Katherine C  Mead-Brewer, author of the recently-published  The Trickster in Ginsberg, offers her (enthusiastic) ten cents worth here.





From the outer regions of pop/movie culture - remember "the other Allen Ginsberg"?

From an interview on moviesaddicts.com with James Franco and Winona Ryder:

James Franco: Winona teased me this whole time. [during the making of Howl] .

She was very close with Allen Ginsberg, and her family is close with all The Beats [her father is author and archivist Michael Horowitz], and I played Allen Ginsberg [in the film]. She told me that I was going to get …

Winona Ryder: But you never came in …

James Franco: …one of Allen Ginsberg’s t-shirts.

Winona Ryder: I have it in…

James Franco: And it’s been two years.

Winona Ryder: I’m going to kill you. I still have it. You never… You’re like, “Oh yeah, I’ll come over…” but you never have.

James Franco: I’m owed an Allen Ginsberg t-shirt…

Is he looking for one of these perhaps?

[Allen Ginsberg t-shirt via the Allen Ginsberg store]


"I saw the best minds of my generation.." - Singing sensation, Lana Del Rey gets to drop the iconic opening phrase from "Howl" in the opening of her enigmatic new "Tropico" video (is this zeitgeist week on the Ginsberg Project, or what?!). She's long time been an avowed and fervent Allen fan ("I remember when I was 16 and I read "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, that was the first time I kind of realized you could paint pictures with words and I wanted to do that") - a fan also of  (Walt) Whitman ("Whitman is my daddy"). Here's Lara, earlier this year, reciting Whitman

    

Lawrence Ferlinghetti has a new book (or rather, booklet) coming out in  January from New Directions, Blast Cries Laughter - "blasts, blessings, and curses in the vortex of today"

Harry Smith's extraordinary archives have now been cataloged and are searchable via the Getty Research Institute. For more information see the listing and finding-aid here  (for more on the collection (including his astonishing paper aeroplane collection!) see here) 

The Boo-Hooray Gallery in New York City (who have already presented informative archival shows on Angus MacLise, Ed Sanders, and Barbara Rubin, amongst others) turn their attentions this month to the legendary Wallace Berman and his ground-breaking magazine, Semina - As part of the presentation, a full-color catalog, Semina 1955-1964 Art is Love is God, has been created (in a limited edition of three hundred copies)  For more information - see here

Speaking of limited editions, for the occasion of the recent Charles Plymell-Kennedy Assasination reading, Bill Roberts of Bottle of Smoke Press designed, printed and bound a beautful letter-press edition of Allen's poem, "November 23, Alone" (It is included, of course, in Collected Poems 1947-1997 from HarperCollins). George Wallace writes about that fugitive poem here 

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[Beat Merchandizing - Ginsberg is God sweater by Bella Freud  

Comedy Central's "roasting" of the actor James Franco takes place this month in Los Angeles (and will be aired on that (television) channel on September 2nd. Upcoming Ginsberg mockery?

(Boxer, Mike Tyson, it might be recalled, gave Allen a surprising, and curiously-respectful, name-check in an earlier roasting) 

Ginsberg and cats. We've been wanting to publish this shot forever

and now we have an excuse - Liz Acosta's erudite article (sic) - "Burberry" as Jack Kerouac?, "Dorothy the cat as Allen Ginsberg?   

Elvis Costello has some explaining to do (well, he - or rather his Blue Note Records label boss, Don Was - have already agreed and explained it, actually!) - cover art for Wise Up Ghost, the upcoming new record.

We've complained here of "The Beat Goes On", tired, lazy cliche's - but how about this as a headline - "Noodles Ginsberg Howled For Return For Second Serving" - (uh?) - The story (non-story) involves the re-opening of an East Village noodle shop (Mee), around the corner from his 12th Street apartment, which Allen would latterly frequent. No fools the real-estate brokers so the Allen connection becomes a marketing op. 

& more depressing NYC real estate news - Mary Help of Christians (also noted on this blog earlier), the church across the street from Allen's 12th Street home, subject of any number of through-the-window shots, is being unceremoniously torn down (scaffolding now up), as we speak, to make way for property developer, Douglas Steiner's..ahem.. "urban development". 

Read, the current inhabitant of Allen's old apartment, Daniel Maurer's observations on the changes here



[Mary Help of Christians Church in New York City, awaiting demolition - Photograph by Greg Masters via E.V.Grieve]


Steven Bollinger here writes of, quite literally, bumping into Allen Ginsberg 

Joao Paulo Ramos had Allen Ginsberg (that's to say, an image of Allen Ginsberg) recently  tattoo-ed on his biceps




"The Howl Onesie" - $20  -  and here's more merchandise (City Lights merchandise) 













El Pais reviews  Diarios indios,  Daniel Ortiz Penate's translation of Indian Journals here 

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An interesting note by self-confessed "bourgeois philistine", Lewis Lapham, to appear in the upcoming Winter 2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly. This, from a slighty-adapted version posted at TomDispatch.com (the complete essay, "Raiding Consciousness: Why the War on Drugs Is a War on Human Nature", is well worth reading). Lapham, here is looking back, recalling, his "one experiment with psychedelics in 1959":

"Employed at the time as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, I was assigned to go with the poet Allen Ginsberg to the Stanford Research Institute there to take a trip on LSD. Social scientists opening the door of perception at the behest of Aldous Huxley  wished to compare the flight patterns of a Bohemian artist and a bourgeois philistine, and they had asked the paper's literary editor to furnish one of each. We were placed in adjacent soundproofed rooms, both of us under the observation of men in white coats equipped with clipboards, the idea being that we would relay messages from the higher consciousness to the air-traffic controllers on the ground.
Liftoff was a blue pill taken on an empty stomach at 9 a.m., the trajectory, a bell curve plotted over a distance of seven hours. By way of traveling companions we had been encouraged to bring music, in those days on vinyl LP's, of whatever kind moved us while on earth to register emotions approaching the sublime.
Together with Johann Sebastian Bach and the Modern Jazz Quartet, I attained what I had been informed would be cruising altitude by noon. I neglected to bring a willing suspension of disbelief, and because I stubbornly resisted the sales-pitch for the drug - if you, O Wizard, can work wonders, prove to me the where and when and how and why - I encountered heavy turbulence. Images inchoate and nonsensical, my arms and legs seemingly elongated and embalmed in grease, the sense of utter isolation while being gnawed by rats.
To the men in white I had nothing to report, not one word on either the going up and out or the coming back and down. I never learned what Ginsberg had to say. Whatever it was, I wasn't interested, and I left the building before he had returned from what I think by then I knew to be a dead-end sleep".  

James Franco is a poet (Well, we knew that!) - but it's kind of official now, as 2012 sees publication of his first chapbook, his first book of poems, the provocatively-titled "Strongest of the Litter". He speaks about writing and about poetry in a recent interview with Greg Barrios in the L.A.Review of Books - "("Strongest of the Litter") is written in a much different way than most of (Hart) Crane's work. I (unlike him) use a lot of plain speech and also personae. I try to use personae to evoke rhythms of contemporary speech and to find the poetry in that. I am very interested in masks and ventriloquism. I have made my living as an actor for a decade and a half  so I am used to trying on different roles, the poetry often works in a similar way...(William Carlos) Williams is a big influence. I am often drawn to plain speech and boiling things to their essence, simplifying them on the surface for more complex effects from structure and subject. Williams was not a fan of Crane's, partly because I don't think he understood him, but also because their philosophies of writing differed so much. Allen Ginsberg was a student of both Crane's and Williams' styles, and I like to think I'm a student of all three - and of Frank Bidart as well... I had been a reader of both (Ginsberg and Crane)..for years before I did the films  ("Howl" and "The Broken Tower")..Doing the films showed me how the poets differed. Ginsberg was a communicator. He wanted to reach people. He was a teacher. His work reflects that. Although it has a collage-heavy beatnik-style approach, most of the references are traceable. It is not difficult to give definition to his miasma of references...." 

 
[Diego Luna performing "Howl" ("Aullido") at the Guadalajara International Book Festival, November 2012  - photo by Teresa Puente}

Diego Luna's Spanish-language presentation of "Howl" was spotlighted here a couple of weeks ago (the November 24 presentation, as part of the 2012 Festival Internacional de Teatro Puebla). It was performed again at the FIL (the Guadalajara International Book, "considered the most important book festival in the Spanish language", a week or so ago. An account (in English - on the Bar None Group site) of that performance and that evening, may be read here. 
"To hear Howl in Spanish", the author writes, "is a treat", (but), "(c)uriously, at no time before, during or after the show was Allen Ginsberg credited, or even mentioned, as the author of "Howl". While the press-release mentions Ginsberg, he should have been mentioned at least once during the evening"
 - To which we, at the Allen Ginsberg Project, add "hear hear". 

Next week (December 21), don't forget, is the official US opening for Walter Salles' "On The Road" film. Here's a collection of recent press ("eight recent media stories"), gathered by our friends at Kerouac.com    

and here's a (brief) note by Scott Staton on Neal Cassady ("Neal Cassady: American Muse, Holy Fool") for The New Yorker.

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[Harry Gordon - "Poem By Allen Ginsberg" - (vintage) Poster Paper Dress (1968) - at the Indianapolis Museum of Art]

Today is the anniversary of the death of Hart Crane - see here (and last week we reminded you of James Franco's ambitious Hart Crane movie.

Also last week, we noted the publication of Sharin Elkholy's The Philosophy of the Beats anthology. Marc Olmsted's useful essay in that volume can be read in its entirety here.

Here at the Allen Ginsberg Project, we recognize our (inevitable) predominantly Anglophone slant (and, at times, even USA-New York City bias) which is why we were pleased to discover Houman Harouni's account - practical matters of translation - "Howl in Farsi"

We hope to feature more translation. Here's "Song" in Arabic" (from the very first "Weekly Round-Up)

And here (not translation this time, but a very different, and usefully different, perspective nonetheless), an unidentified young Islamic-American woman recites the classic Ginsberg poem, "America" ("America I've given you all and now I'm nothing/ America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956/ I can't stand my own mind/ America when will we end the human war?..")

Tomorrow is Beat legend Carolyn Cassady's (unbelievable-but-true, 89th) birthday. The faithful custodians over at Kerouac.com/The Beat Museum have opened up a tribute page for her. Read it, please, and add your comments here.

oh - and don't miss ("this just in") the first part of Daniel Maurer's interview with Bob Rosenthal - "Allen Ginsberg Revisited By His Right-Hand Man". We at the Ginsberg Project, as we've said before, can't wait for Bob's memoir, "Straight Around Allen'' (Bob was Allen's long-time secretary, and the stories that he has to tell!). We'll have more to say about this and promised further episodes of the Maurer interview in the days to come.

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Another Ginsberg tat? Why not? - Leyna has "ecstatic and insatiate" tattooed on her arm (from "Howl" - "who copulated ecstatic and insatiate.." - but you all knew that.) For more Ginsberg "tats" (and there's always more Ginsberg tats), click here.

And would it be too obvious a segue to mention the upcoming (print) edition of Sensitive Skin - featuring a rare, previously-unpublished 1992 interview by Allen with (William) Burroughs, conducted in Lawrence, Kansas, after a trip to the sweat-lodge! The publisher, B. Kold explains: "I got the manuscript from Christian X Hunter, many years ago, 1995? 1996?, when he was Friday-night co-ordinator at The Poetry Project.He was also an editor at Sensitive Skin. He went to Allen's office one day and was given the ms, either by Allen or his assistant (he can't remember) for inclusion in Sensitive Skin. We'd published a number of Beat writers by that time ((Herbert) Huncke, (Jack) Micheline, (John) Giorno) and he thought we were a good fit for the article. Unfortunately, I took a brief break from publication (15 years), and haven't gotten around to publishing it till now. What prompted me to publish it now? Last Fall, I visited another Sensitive Skin contributor, photographer Ruby Ray, at her apartment in San Francisco, and realized that it was she who took the iconic Burroughs photos for REsearch magazine. The penny dropped.. Ruby gave me three previously-unpublished photographs of Burroughs from the original REsearch shoot of 1981. David West, the painter, also created several original illustrations for the story that I'm also going to include. It looks great!"

- Sensitive Skin "hits the stands" April 27th.

Burroughs' invaluable 1953 Latin American journals (facsimilies and transcriptions), incidentally, are available here

"The person I was playing was an eighteen-year-old guy who hadn't come out yet, wasn't the voice of a generation, was confused, shy, intellectually brilliant, but sort of socially inarticulate - which is totally against what the world's thought of him would be". (Tom Sturridge, playing Carlo Marx aka Allen Ginsberg, in the upcoming "On The Road" movie has been doing his homework, as we have reported before - here.) So now he declares: "I read everything...every piece of poetry he wrote up until that age, all his diaries. I read biographies. I read so much stuff - but remembered on the first day of filming that I wasn't trying to become a Ginsberg expert. I was trying to play a character. I remember shooting a first scene, and them saying "action!", and thinking, "fuck! I've totally forgotten to sort of...read the scripts!. I can tell you all sorts of things about Ginsberg's dietary feelings in this period in time, but have no idea how to say these lines!".

On The Road. Cannes, next month.

Speaking of films,

Not sure why we've never featured it before, but here's the trailer for James Franco's Hart Crane film, The Broken Tower.

We did feature a note on Hart Crane (the anniversary of his tragic suicide is coming up again) here, and a link to Francisco Ricardo's intelligent "defence" of the movie here...

Beat culture. More publications. Happy to announce that Sharin Elkholy's The Philosophy of the Beats anthology has just come out. The book "explores the enduring literary, cultural, and philosophic contributions of the Beats in a variety of contexts" (drugs with Kerouac and Allen, feminism with Diane di Prima, the "issue of (the) self" in Bob Kaufman's poetry, etc, etc). Among the contributers, Ann Charters, and our good friend, Marc Olmsted.

Diane di Prima's medical difficulties (first reported on here) continue to plague her (or rather, this being America, all the attendant medical expenses continue to plague her). You can do something about it. Please click the link here.

"Said the Buddha Skeleton/ Compassion is wealth/ Said the Corporate Skeleton/ It's bad for your health!" - Open Culture's another site we're happy to support. Their Ballad of the Skeletons posting matches our own (equally comprehensive) one here.

Patti Smith's Howl Spells

Dave L Stevens of Stevens Internet Productions has generously uploaded to You Tube this stunning performance of "Spell" a.k.a."Footnote to Howl" by Patti Smith and her band, with Philip Glass on piano, and back-up "vocals" by saffron-robed Buddhist monks (the recitation was in honor of a visit by His Holiness the Dalai Lama). As Stevens himself notes, "Not seen for more than a decade. I directed and produced this interactive webcast. When Patti Smith begins "howling" on her clarinet, it's sublime."

Contrast for production values, this next rendition, recorded in Florence, Italy, in 2009 (hence the Fernanda Pivano reference!), the shakey hand-held camera, the straight-from-the-audience

placement, the decidedly amateur "bootleg" quality, and yet, and maybe even because of all that, the power of the invocation comes through

The 1997 version that appeared on her album, Peace and Noise, may be listened to here.

The version she performed at the New York St John the Divine Ginsberg Memorial (beginning approximately 19 minutes in to the recording) here

A spirited live version (recorded 2000 in Seattle) here

From Steven Sebring's 2008 documentary, Patti Smith:Dream of Life - here (along with German sub-titles!):

Here's James Franco, from Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl (2010)

and here's Allen himself reading it (with on-screen translation in Spanish !)

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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.

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[Allen Ginsberg & Ted Berrigan - Collaborative Postcard, February 11, 1982]

Trawling through E-bay, this past week, we came across this, Ted Berrigan and Allen Ginsberg's collaborative poem, Reds:

REDS

There isn't much to say to Marxists in Nicaragua

with .45's

afraid of the U.S. Secretary of State, eating celery.

Back in New York, "we went to see a beautiful movie",

said Allen Ginsberg. "It made me cry."

"I hadda loan him my big green handkerchief,

to blow his nose on!" Peter Orlovsky laughed.

Some background. This is clearly an "out-take" from Berrigan's 500 postcards project (a 1982 commission from Ken & Ann Mikolowski's Alternative Press). Berrigan (along with several other artists) was presented with 500 ready-made postcards to do with as he pleased. As Alice Notley, in her preface to The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, points out:

"There were five hundred cards to work with, one side left blank for a poem and/or image, and the other side incorporating space for a message and address. "Postcard by Ted Berrigan" was printed at the top of the message space, and running sideways, "The Alternative Press, Grindstone City". Many other artists and writers participated in the Mikolowski's project, producing original art or text for the blank sides of their own five hundred postcards, the finished cards were always sent out singly, along with other Alternative Press items - broadsides, bumper-stickers, etc. - in the Press's standard free packets. Ted, so far as I know, was the only participant who turned the postcards into a full-scale writing project and then a book." (that book, A Certain Slant of Sunlight, published by Leslie Scalapino's O Books, she discusses in more detail here).

Allen's allusions to "Marxists in Nicaragua" interacting with "the U.S. Secretary of State" clearly dates and links the jottings to the Sandinista revolution (and, more specifically, his visit there in 1982).

We can only speculate on the "beautiful movie" that he was watching.

More Ginsberg encounters? - here's a touching piece by Clark Knowles - Allen Ginsberg and Me - "I met Allen Ginsberg and he changed my life", Knowles declares - but then goes on to tell of belatedly-recognized missed-opportunities (the result of misplaced youthful fears and foolish pride?) - "(He) asked (one time, visiting the University of Charleston, West Virginia) to keep some of my poems to look at and comment on. It's hard to believe (that) I said no, but I did."

Another rejection is recounted in Chris Clarke's account - A Long Time Ago - "Allen, I think I owe you an apology. (I declared), I treated you as a celebrity, "Allen Ginsberg", instead of, you know, you. I'm sorry". Ginsberg smiled. "Well, to tell you the truth, I was actually going to ask you if you wanted to come home with me." I hadn't seen that coming. Was I wearing a sign today or something?"

One person who didn't reject Allen's advances was sometime-lover, wandering guitar-player, Mark Israel. His first feature-length documentary hitch-hiking-on-the-road movie, 1997's How I Spent My Summer Vacation, (including cameos by Anne Waldman, amongst others) has recently been transfered to DVD. The trailer for the film can be accessed here.

More film news. James Franco's Hart Crane pic, that we've spoken of earlier, has its premiere in the coming week at the Los Angeles Film Festival. A Q-and-A with Franco about the project (yes, we've been relatively silent on our Franco news of late!) can be found here.

A shout-out to our English readers. Have we gotten around to mentioning Mark Ford's Faber and Faber selection of Allen's poems? We think not. (Ford's extensive 2007 New York Review of Books piece on Allen is certainly, also, well worth revisiting). Next Tuesday (June 21) at Rough Trade East at 7pm, along with poet Heather Phillipson, he'll be reading from his own poems, but also reading selections from that book.

And, finally, the big story (well, at any rate, yesterday's big story) - the New York Public Library has just acquired Timothy Leary's archives. The Library announced that it had paid the sum of $900,000 for the collection (335 boxes of papers, videotapes, photographs, letters, and other items). Patricia Cohen's story in The New York Times seems to re-iterate Peter Conners' thesis - "The meeting between Ginsberg and Leary marked an anchor point in the history of the 1960's drug-soaked counter-culture", she writes. "Leary, the credentialed purveyor of hallucinatory drugs, was suddenly invited into the center of the artistic, social and sexual avant-garde. It was Ginsberg who helped convince Leary that he should bring the psychedelic revolution to the masses, rather than keep it among an elite group.". Scott Staton has a useful follow-up piece in The New Yorker - and Boris Kachika's piece in New York magazine presents a few choice selections - "acid commentaries from Timothy Leary's just revealed archive". We leave you with Allen's unique personal account:

"After an hour...I withdrew into visual introspection...I lay down on a large comfortable couch next to my companion Peter Orlovsky and drifted off into a reverie about the origins of the universe which involved the visualization of a sort of octipus (sic) of darkness breaking through out of the primal void...(I) envisioned various people I knew...as Seraphs or Fiendish Angels with fangs of Judgement rushing thru the void over Atlantic Blakean spaces to make meet with each other to take Conference over the future of Life."