Alan Rickman warned me about this: In his new play at the Golden Theater on Broadway, Seminar by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Sam Gold, Rickman plays a well-established teacher of a private writers’ workshop. He cajoles and humiliates his students, sleeps with them, getting his point across.
Continue reading "Jack Kerouac Dissed in Seminar on Broadway" »
In Robert Creeley's poem, I Know A Man, an unnamed narrator urges his friend John, which is not his name, to buy a goddamn big car/ “drive, he sd for christ's sake, look out where yr going,” predating the spirit of a current slick and stylish movie, Drive, directed by Copenhagen-based Nicolas Winding Refn, who won Best Director in Cannes. On a recent afternoon over an iced cappuccino at Gemma in The Bowery Hotel, I talked to Refn about the making of Drive, his casting of Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Christina Hendricks, Albert Brooks, and his “vision.”
Continue reading "Drive: Nicolas Winding Refn's Fetish Film " »
When James Franco co-hosts the Oscars this weekend, it won't be as the bespectacled poet Allen Ginsberg he so lovingly portrayed in the movie Howl. Of course, Franco may win the Best Actor Oscar for his work in 127 Hours, but his Ginsberg is spot on.
The multi- talented Franco has good taste in poets, currently immersed in projects involving American literary giants Harte Crane (the Bridge) and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury). And Allen Ginsberg had good vision: even before Warhol made fame famous, the poet understood fame's power as a marketing tool. He may remain the most famous poet of the Beat Generation literati, but even till the time of his death in 1997, he worked diligently, championing his close associates, Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso, Micheline, Huncke, Whalen, etc. so that they too would be known. Who wants to be the sole famed figure in his coterie, he would say.
Now Allen Ginsberg seems to be everywhere: Witness his moving (literally in motion) portrait on the 6th floor of MoMA, in a fine show featuring Andy Warhol's screen tests. In perfect synergy, his face looms large with those of Dennis Hopper, Edie Sedgwick, and others. James Franco's excellent performance is freshly available on the Howl DVD, along with an audio feature, Franco reading Howl.
And, an exhibition of Ginsberg's photography-yes he was a visual artist too-- is displayed at the Howard Greenberg Gallery. A handsome book, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, accompanies the show. While it is not the first collection of the poet's photos, the book includes many well-known pictures-i.e. Kerouac smoking on a fire escape-as well as lesser known Robert Frank, Peter Orlovsky, and New York back alley takes. A distinct feature of Ginsberg's work is the hand scrawled caption situating those he shot in the historic moment.
Recently, the yearly reading of Howl at Columbia University with music by David Amram attracted crowds to that institution's Philosophy Hall. An irony was not missed: in his days at Columbia he represented rebellious youth, and now more than a decade dead, he is revered as the poet of our time.
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
On a random Friday afternoon between snowstorms, visitors to Tibor de Nagy's midtown gallery for the “Painters & Poets” exhibit marveled at the small press editions in vitrines (with work by Joe Brainard, Kenward Elmslie, Charles Henri Ford, and Allen Ginsberg) and whimsical black & white films by Rudy Burkhardt starring his artworld buddies: Larry Rivers, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Alex Katz, etc. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz, poet Honore Moore, actor Bob Dishy, and painter Duncan Hannah milled about. Jane Freilicher came by too. Her painting, “The Painting Table” (1954) is perhaps the centerpiece of the show along with Rivers' and O'Hara's “Portrait and Poem Painting” (1961) the art that graces the handsome catalogue. The exhibit includes work by Fairfield Porter, Joan Mitchell, a religious triptych by Red Grooms and poet Anne Waldman. Not an opening or special viewing, the afternoon had the exhilarating spark of a Happening.
The collaboration of artists and poets is of course not new, but the show celebrates a unique New York moment when publications were small, and the cross fertilization of artistic energy gave rise to The New York School of Poetry, the beat and other literary movements. Commerce, though not ignored, was not at the forefront of art. But that of course was pre-Warhol.
Artist George Condo has some literary cred: he collaborated with Burroughs and Ginsberg, and coming from Lowell, Massachusetts, the working class milieu that spawned Jack Kerouac, he wrote a spirited intro for Kerouac's “Book of Sketches.”
George Condo, the artist as Warholian “superstar,” is affirmed at the New Museum's survey of his career, “Mental States,” where Condo posing with Kanye West and Marc Jacobs at the shows' opening, signifying a synergy of arts and marketplace. Just look at those portraits in the show's main gallery on the 4th floor, hung in important frames, the Guston/ Crumb/ Picasso/ Looney Tune inspired, pod heads juxtaposed with abstract riffs on Old Masters oils. Artist Judy Hudson observed, “Here we are at Disney World again.” The whole enterprise is a subversive riff on art history, including the gnarly bronze busts titled “Dionysus,” “The Old Sea Hag,” “Perseus,” “Tristessa,” etc.
Down what feels like a secret staircase to the 3rd floor where smaller spaces house works of various themes, LeeLee Sobieski and others crammed into the largest gallery focused on abstract work. You can say, Condo mines the collaborative; his imagination is keyed in with music, and with celebrity.
Especially the notorious. One room themed, “Manic Society” features finely wrought paintings of a toothy screaming priest, of sex on a striped couch; the figures form a two-headed beast both bizarre and frightening. This unforgettable picture is called “The Return of Client No. 9.”
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
A scheduling glitch created the following conundrum: Best Generation poet and Allen Ginsberg's longtime mate, Peter Orlovsky, who died in June, was remembered on Wednesday at St. Mark's Church. Meanwhile the New York premiere of “Howl,” the new movie starring James Franco with Peter (Aaron Tveit) in a small role took place a few blocks across town at the IFC Center. Having filled the prestigious slot of opening night film at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the anticipation was high for this movie: part animation, part courtroom drama, part period piece about the creation of the iconic beat poem and the censorship trial for obscenity that followed its 1956 City Lights publication.
An event in beat style, the memorial featured performances by Patti Smith, Philip Glass, Gordon Ball, Bob Rosenthal, Hal Willner, Simon Pettet, Rosebud Pettet, Ed Sanders and anecdotes remembering Peter's generosity of spirit and obsession with cleanliness by Juanita Lieberman Plimpton who as a teen fell in love with this much older poet. Anne Waldman accompanied by her son Ambrose Bye brought down the house with readings of Orlovsky's poems. Peter Orlovsky penned the poetry volume, Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs, encouraged by Ginsberg to write. Bill Morgan, Ginsberg scholar, author of the recently released “The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation” (Free Press), and co-editor with David Stanford of “Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters” (Viking) also spoke. The correspondence reveals the sweet and sometimes belligerent Orlovsky on every page-he's called Petey-- in his role as muse and significant other.
Robert Frank and others, poets and beat luminaries looked on. Frank was co-director of the iconic “Pull My Daisy,” that black and white gem epitomizing the aesthetics of spontaneity that so defined the beat movement. Jack Kerouac was narrator, exercising his bebop prosody while Ginsberg took on the movements of a cockroach and intoned Holy Holy Holy before a bewildered bishop and his family played by Milo O'Shea and the painter Alice Neel. Another painter, the horn playing Larry Rivers also starred in the beat classic along with David Amram, Gregory Corso and Orlovsky. Many at the memorial mentioned “the ghosts” that lingered in the church best known as a performance space for them all.
The new movie “Howl” to its credit and poetic beauty maintains much of the downtown fervor of the beat post war urgency to create its own American language. Enacting the time when the use of such words as “cocksucker” could get you censored, “Howl,” the movie, illustrates how “Howl” was a landmark poem in its resistance to that violation of the First Amendment. The actual trial transcripts supply the dialogue, comic in today's world. Actor James Franco channels poet Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” perhaps because the role reflects this Yale literature student's own passion for poetry.
Many at the Peter Orlovsky memorial scrambled for cabs to attend the “Howl” premiere after-celebration at Kastel at the elegant steel and chrome Trump Soho newly built on Spring and Varick, sponsored by Maestro Dobel Tequila and Woolrich Woolen Mills. You have to wonder what Allen and Peter would have thought of the uptown feel. Some poets simply boycotted the party in protest of this sleek edifice: there goes the neighborhood. For his part, Peter might have appreciated the establishment's cleanliness.
“I will protect you,” sings Father in the opera The Lost Childhood to comfort his son Julek, the tragic irony being that shortly thereafter he, emblematic of so many Jewish fathers, will be marched out of his Lvov, Poland home and murdered by the Nazis.
Last Thursday, young Julek, now Dr. Yehuda Nir, a prominent Park Avenue psychiatrist and author of the memoir The Lost Childhood on which the opera, composed by Janice Hamer with libretto by Mary Azrael, is based, celebrated his 80th birthday at The Box on Chrystie Street. A hundred or so guests, family and close friends, rejoiced in his “childhood found,” listening to selections sponsored by the American Opera Projects in a lavish celebration, the brainchild of his daughter Sarah Maslin Nir, a writer for the New York Times.
Dr. Nir endured these terrible times posing as an altar boy in a story that has as many twists as an action adventure thriller, defying the concept of survivor. As he often says, his life is a triumph over a million Nazis who set out to kill a 10 year old boy.
The Holocaust is further remembered this weekend with screenings of Blessed is the Match, Roberta Grossman's fine documentary portrait of the poet Hannah Senesh at the Center for Jewish History and an Anne Frank twitter campaign: http://twitter.com/UNandHolocaust .
The publication of A Jew Must Die, a novel based on a true story about a murder in his small town of Payerne by the Swiss Goncourt Prize winner Jacques Chessex (Bitter Lemon Press), underscores the Holocaust as a frontier of perspectives on what it means to be human. Now 65 years after World War II's end, the door does not close on the Holocaust, a subject that only continues to resonate, fascinate, and perplex.
The National Arts Club was jammed with poets on Tuesday evening, and those were on the walls: images of Auden and Berryman, Ashbery and Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein for the Portraits of Poets 1910-2010 exhibition. What about off the wall, the 3 hundred or so filling this historic Gramercy Park institution's homey Christmas sitting rooms? A who's who of poets and their photographers: Jill Krementz, Nancy Crampton,Chris Felver among them sat to hear the verse, though soon the seats ran out and the New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn urged the standing room crowd to use the floor if necessary. Soon floor space ran out too.
The occasion marked the centennial of the Poetry Society of America with a stellar reading by Richard Howard, Galway Kinnell, Marie Ponsot, Yusef Komunyakaa, and ending withSapphire, the author of Push, the novel on which the movie Precious, sure to be nominated for Best Picture Oscar, is based. Causing a sensation for the level of family dysfunction and abuse, Precious' most egregious figures are the parents.
Sapphire read a Father's Day tribute, “June 17, 2007,” and it was a relief that the poem's father was unlike the father in her novel.
The charismatic beat writers were present in pictures: Bob Kaufman, Anne Waldman, Michael McClure,Patti Smith. One writer, William Burroughs, a poet in his pal Jack Kerouac's praise, will be remembered in a new documentary to be featured at the upcoming Slamdance festival. Talented filmmaker Yony Leyser is asking for eleventh hour help:
See http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/williamburroughs/william-s-burroughs-a-man-within-0upremer
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
Photos: Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman courtesy of Chris Felver
