A few weeks ago I showed up for a cool poetry reading at a dive called Gunther’s in Northport, Long Island, a bar famous for being Jack Kerouac’s favorite drinking spot when he’d lived nearby. This reading was significant to me because something was happening for the first time. When … Read the rest
Introduction
PARIS – AUGUST, 1870 – An incorrigible, horrible genius. A fifteen year-old! disembarks at Rue de Maubeuge. A concussion of uncombed hair infested with a plague of lice. Soiled clothing. A homicidal cupid with the enormous hands of a strangler. A smarmy smirk, perfect skin, a beautiful terror with … Read the rest
Phife Dawg aka Malik Taylor, the raspy half of the seminal hiphop band A Tribe Called Quest, has died at the age of 45. The brilliant, funny, wise, immensely talented and lovable rapper from Queens had suffered from diabetes and other ailments for years. Despite his renown as one … Read the rest
A favorite novelist of mine, Sam Savage, is entering hospice. According to the Numero Cinq article revealing the sad news of his medical condition, he has suffered for decades with a blood disease called “alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency”. It never harmed his ability to write.
Savage was born in 1940 … Read the rest
I’m going to let other people remember David Bowie for his cultural importance — his brave and liberating embrace of sexual ambiguity, his clever shape-shifting, his sophistication as an actor, his sharp sense of pop art’s relationship to rock and roll.
He was truly great in all of these ways. … Read the rest
What does “Beat Generation” mean today, 60 years after Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg rocked a San Francisco crowd with a world-changing poetry reading, and 46 years after Jack Kerouac’s wan and befuddled death in St. Petersburg, Florida? And what, I wonder, does it mean personally to … Read the rest
A couple of weeks ago I announced my plan to launch a new nonprofit organization and website, Pacifism21 and Pacifism21.org, in order to promote pacifism as a viable political philosophy for the 21st century. A beta version of this website will go live in the next few days, and … Read the rest
It was very easy for me to meet Herschel Silverman, then a Beat/jazz poet of some renown, around twenty-five years ago when I began frequenting the downtown New York City poetry scene that swirled between St. Marks Church, ABC No Rio and the Nuyorican.
These were the years when Allen … Read the rest
The Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary final shows are now over. Blowing past the boring cliches about aging hippies, the finale turned out to be a spectacular tribute to a gentle cultural phenomenon that offers balm and hope to a pained world … as well as a glorious summertime-flavored dive … Read the rest