Usually on Fridays I just post something from my blog’s archive, and I’ll do that today as well, but first this:

I write a monthly column for the Nashville Scene that previews the First Saturday art events that happen at two different gallery crawls all over the city. I don’t get a ton of words to cover everything so I have to pick and choose. This month was extra tough as we’re going to print early to compensate for the holiday weekend. As a result some interesting looking shows didn’t make the cut if only for length or rushing, and I wanted to mention one of them here because it looks like a cool mix of poetry and images that speaks to the overlap we’ve already been seeing between Nashville’s literary and visual arts communities. My own Pikes Project mixes photography, essays and poetry so a show that combines verses with visuals automatically catches me eye and my ear.

Here’s the word on Listen:

CONVERGE is pleased to present LISTEN, a provocative group show of text based artwork curated by Alysha Irisari Malo. LISTEN celebrates the expression of the written word in the visual arts, exploring various media including painting, printmaking, installation, mixed media, and fiber art. Participating artists include Jane Braddock (represented by Tinney Contemporary), Briena Harmening, Alysha Irisari Malo, and Cynthia Marsh. The show runs from Saturday, May 6th through Sunday, June 4th, 2017, at the SNAP (South Nashville Action People) Building, 1224 Martin Street, Nashville, TN 37203. The second floor will have artwork installed for the duration of the show, while the first floor will have artwork installed for pop-up events during the Opening and Closing Reception weekends. These events coincide with the monthly Arts & Music at Wedgewood-Houston crawl and are free and open to the public. The Closing Reception for LISTEN will be held on Saturday, June 3rd, from 6:00 to 10:00 pm.

CONVERGE is a conscious collective of creative individuals interested in collaborative projects and community outreach, initiated by the husband and wife team, architectural designer Eric Malo and artist and poet Alysha Irisari Malo. The group conceives and realizes project-based art and design, lifestyle, cultural, and community programming in Wedgewood-Houston. CONVERGE currently hosts a series of neighborhood urban design workshops in Wedgewood-Houston, and is excited to have LISTEN as its inaugural art crawl event.

Find out more about this exhibition on their Facebook event page.

Now here is a poetic From the Archives Friday post featuring poet Michael McClure and a caged lion in a weird performance that I’m thinking about as a kind of farewell here at the last days of The Greatest Show on Earth…

I’ve written about 2nd generation Beat poet Michael McClure on this here slate of light before. McClure joined up with Ginsberg and Kerouac when the New Yorkers made their way to San Fransisco, setting off a poetry renaissance and a worldwide youth movement upon arrival.

It’s easy to look back at the ’60′s with rainbow-colored glasses, but that’s no excuse to. A lot of wrongheadedness and naivety ran much of the ’60s counterculture off the rails. Of course, a lot of good art, music and ideas came from that time as well.

Sometimes, weird bits of 60′s countercultural expression that still turn up from that time seem just as absurd today as they must have 50 years ago. Here, McClure is interviewed before stopping at a zoo to read poetry to a lion.

Stay awake,

Joe Nolan

This week we remember Richard Brautigan’s birthday on January 30. Brautigan would’ve been 81 this year. Celebrate this hippie happening with this 1970 release, Listening to Richard Brautigan…

This early-’70s cult classic doesn’t just feature hippie/beatnik writer Richard Brautigan reading from his novels “Trout Fishing in America,” “A Confederate General from Big Sur” and “In Watermelon Sugar,” as well as his short story collection “A Revenge of the Lawn” and various poems; it also has such tracks as “Here Are Some More Sounds of My Life,” which features the sounds of the author brushing his teeth, taking off his clothes and shaving. In other words, you really are “listening to Richard Brautigan,” and if those mundane sounds don’t pique your interest, then there are the disarming, poetic moments, like when you hear phones ringing while Brautigan explains why he won’t answer the phone, or when he shares the actual sound of the stream he wrote about in “Trout Fishing in America.” Special guests include Michael McClure, Imogen Cunningham and Bruce Conner, but for 52 minutes this is pretty much pure Brautigan, as whimsical and searching as ever.

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counter Culture posts.

Writer Amiri Baraka was born Everett Leroi Jones in 1934, but changed his name in 1961. Baraka’s poetry included insightful and incendiary critiques of social mores and politics during a time when the American way of life at home and at work, in the bedroom and the boardroom and at the ballot box was being held up to a harsh light and called into question.

In his musical, propulsive verses, Baraka asked a lot of questions of his country and his neighbors and himself. He was also that rare artist who transitioned from the philosophizing and experimenting of the Beat culture of the 1950′s to immerse himself in the direct action of the creative revolutions of the 1960′s. Kerouac couldn’t manage the cross-over, but Baraka did, following right behind Allen Ginsberg — the Beat writer whom Baraka’s insistent lines most clearly recalled. Here’s what Reality Studios has to say about Baraka’s Beat credentials:

My interest in Jones centers on his Beat phase lasting until the mid 1960s. This work would make an outstanding collection. In 2000, Brown University showcased its Jones holdings and the Beat pieces really spoke to me. I was especially struck by Jones’ work as an editor. It seems like he had his hands in every major magazine coming out of New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yugen, Floating Bear, Kulchur. This does not include his founding of Totem Press and that press’s publications with Cornith Books. Jones published Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Diane Di Prima, and Paul Blackburn.

More recently, Baraka proved he still knew how to ruffle feathers in high places when his 2002 poem “Somebody Blew Up America” questioned the official story behind the 9/11 attacks, creating enough controversy to lose Baraka his status as New Jersey’s Poet Laureate. Here’s the Beatdom take on the controversial poem:

With the death of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., (who visited Baraka’s Newark home a week before his murder), he left the mostly-white Bohemian literary scene and the environs of the East Village to take up a more radical stance towards Black Nationalism. But despite his distancing himself from the Beats in the mid-sixties, Baraka read poetry and attended panel discussions at Beat-haven Naropa Institute through the 1980-90s, and remained friends with Ginsberg until Allen’s death in 1997.

More recently his poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” brought an end to his New Jersey “Poet Laureate” post when Governor Jim McGreevey took umbrage to the poem’s questioning of the events surrounding the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Centers. The “Who?’ of the exploding owl in the poem echoes the angst of Ginsberg’s voice in “Howl.” Having heard Ginsberg recite live from ten feet away, this writer finds both poems equally as exciting and important.

Here is Amiri Baraka reading “Somebody Blew Up America”

The poet died today. He was 79.

If you’re interested in more about Baraka’s Beat roots, download this outstanding, complete .pdf collection of Yugen from Reality Studio.

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Books posts.

I’ve written about 2nd generation Beat poet Michael McClure on this here slate of light before. McClure joined up with Ginsberg and Kerouac when the New Yorkers made their way to San Fransisco, setting off a poetry renaissance and a worldwide youth movement upon arrival.

It’s easy to look back at the ’60′s with rainbow-colored glasses, but that’s no excuse to. A lot of wrongheadedness and naivety ran much of the ’60s counterculture off the rails. Of course, a lot of good art, music and ideas came from that time as well.

Sometimes, weird bits of 60′s countercultural expression that still turn up from that time seem just as absurd today as they must have 50 years ago. Here, McClure is interviewed before stopping at a zoo to read poetry to a lion.

Stay Awake!

Joe Nolan

Wallace Berman was born in Staten Island, New York in 1926. While he was still a child, he correctly predicted that he would die on his 50th birthday. He was hit by a car in 1976.

During those five decades, Berman became a pioneering assemblage artist as well as one of the cornerstones of the post WWII California art scene. Berman became associated with the Beats and his self-published magazine Semina combined his own collage imagery with writing by luminaries like Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, David Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau. In addition to his groundbreaking, multimedia assemblages, Berman made the short film Aleph. The artist’s only experiment with moving pictures,Aleph reveals both Berman’s love of collage as well as his interest in the Kabbalah.

Here is what www.jewishmuseum.org has to say about the film:

Aleph is an artist’s meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture. In an eight-minute loop of film, Wallace Berman uses Hebrew letters to frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire montage that captures the go-go energy of the 1960s. Aleph includes stills of collages created using a Verifax machine, Eastman Kodak’s precursor to the photocopier. These collages depict a hand-held radio that seems to broadcast or receive popular and esoteric icons. Signs, symbols, and diverse mass-media images (e.g., Flash Gordon, John F. Kennedy, Mick Jagger) flow like a deck of tarot cards, infinitely shuffled in order that the viewer may construct his or her own set of personal interpretations. The transistor radio, the most ubiquitous portable form of mass communication in the 1960s, exemplifies the democratic potential of electronic culture and serves as a metaphor for Jewish mysticism. The Hebrew term kabbalah translates as “reception” for knowledge, enlightenment, and divinity.

Check out Joe Nolan’s Insomnia to find out more about another West Coast artist with an eye for the surreal.

Stay awake!

J

The San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive is full of gold. There is tons of material here from the ’60′s including lots of great footage of the Black Panthers and plenty of Haight Street hippies to be had.

The Maze is a television news documentary that was made in 1967. It features 2nd generation Beat poet Michael McClure as a tour guide on this ramble through the patchouli-choked purgatory that was the Summer of Love. Part Paradise, part fool’s vision, that season passed like all the others and took much of its idealism and peaceful potential with it. However, at that time, it seemed like McClure and his ilk just might change the world. As the narrator here observes:

“Some call Haight-Ashbury another bohemia, like the Left Bank, Greenwich Village and others … But it’s more like Brigadoon: a magical land that appeared only yesterday and may be gone tomorrow. But if it lasts, the effect on the rest of society could be far reaching. And that’s why the outside world must try to understand what is happening here.”

Check out The Maze and the SFBATA here.