Gossip Central

Ferlinghetti: Not all Beat Poets are Beat

Back in the day, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was all the rage. Paperbacks of A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) could be seen stuffed in jean pockets on college campuses, on subways. Even mainstream readers who were not particularly into poetry loved the surreal imagery of this verse. A decade later, books by Allen Ginsberg were not as popular, and those of Jack Kerouac were mainly out of print. Present at the historic Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg’s reading of Howl galvanized a poetry movement, and Kerouac passed a bottle of tokay, Ferlinghetti took action suggesting he put Ginsberg’s beat epic into print. This was the official dawning of a particularly American avant-garde literary movement: especially as founder of City Lights Books, publishing house and iconic San Francisco store, Ferlinghetti was at the center of The Beat Generation.

Jack Kerouac’s Mother Tongue: On the Road and The Voice is All

Kerouac aficionados will have a fine time teasing out details director Walter Salles and scriptwriter Jose Rivera took from the 1957 On the Road publication vs. the 1951 scroll text, the ur-Road first published in 2007. For example, the first line of the new movie focuses on the father, but then the story flips to the fictional characters familiar to readers since 1957. In a further innovation, viewers will note that Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) talks to his mother (Marie Ginette-Guay) in a curious French, referencing Kerouac’s French Canadian roots. The writer, from an ethnic neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, spoke a dialect called joual.

Interviewing surviving members of the beat generation in their research, the filmmakers spoke to Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time that On the Road was published to become an overnight bestseller. The author of the memoir Minor Characters told them about her own study of Kerouac’s language. Looking for ways to give Sal speech, the filmmakers incorporated this source, reaching outside Kerouac’s text in creating French dialogue between mother and son. Recently published, Joyce Johnson’s new biography,The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, traces the development of Kerouac’s prose style, showing how his French freed him to create his famous spontaneous narrative.

On the Road: The Vehicle Gets a Tune Up

En route to L.A. for its West Coast premiere, Director Walter Salles introduced a private screening of his new film, On the Road, last week, pointing out that as a teen in his native Brazil, he was drawn to the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novel; they represented a freedom foreign to his homeland, where writing was censored. “This book about the creative process, this ode to literature, got to me. The characters became my heroes,” he said noting too his current inspirations: poets Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima and Gary Snyder. So charming that Peggy Siegal now calls him her new BFF, Salles took on the making of this film, a project that has eluded Francis Ford Coppola for decades. In 2004, after he saw Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries, Coppola asked him to consider the un-filmable beat classic.

Barney Rosset, Richard Seaver, and William Burroughs in Midcentury Paris

Woody Allen may have won this year’s Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his whimsical movie, Midnight in Paris, with its time tripping to the 1920’s when Gertrude Stein held court in her salon. But Paris had another literary heyday in the mid-century when another round of Americans, among them George Plimpton, James Baldwin, Peter Stone, Irwin Shaw, Barney Rosset, Richard Seaver, and the beats hung out. Rosset died last week at age 89, and for those who valued his contribution to upholding first amendment rights in this country, his championing the works of artists, transgressive in subject and language (Beckett, Burroughs, Miller, Lawrence, Genet, Ionesco) the event truly marks the end of an era. People said the same when Dick Seaver died in 2009, but this time we really, really mean it.

Jack Kerouac Dissed in Seminar on Broadway

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.

Drive: Nicolas Winding Refn's Fetish Film

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.”

Allen Ginsberg at the Oscars, at MoMA, at Large .

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.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

 

Words and Pictures: at Tibor de Nagy and Condo's Subversive Art at The New Museum

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.” 

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

Howl for Peter Orlovsky: A Clash of Aesthetics

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.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Howl Has New York Premiere at NewFest/ In Memorium Peter Orlovsky

The actor James Franco channels poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl, the 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. Having filled the prestigious slot of opening night film at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Howl was featured this week at NewFest, premiering in New York at the 22 year old lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender film festival--appropriately so, as every kind of sex is openly rejoiced in this iconic poem, written at a dire time comedian Richard Pryor dubbed “the great pussy drought.” 

Howl, unusual for a film, delves deeply into the poem's language evoking taboo images of a subterranean realm of sex, drugs and jazz, and effectively conveys the arguments critics had to make in defense of the poem's redeeming human values, and America's first amendment rights at large. The actual trial transcripts supply the dialogue, comic in today's world. 

Thus focused, Howl avoids the biography of the poet. And so spends little screen time on Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg's life partner who died this week of lung cancer, and who was buried on June 3, Allen Ginsberg's birthday. Peter Orlovsky penned the poetry volume, Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs, encouraged by Ginsberg to write.

This sad synergy augurs the end of an era: with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Diane DiPrima, and Gary Snyder the remaining elders of the beat movement. Fortunately the literature holds up with new publications forcing a re-evaluation of this literary circle that used to be best known for scandal. Look for the just released, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation by Bill Morgan (Free Press), and especially the upcoming Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (Viking). The correspondence reveals the sweet and sometimes belligerent Orlovsky on every page-Jack calls him Petey-- in his role as muse and significant other.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura