Thursday, February 28, 2013

My Footprints

I danced in a studio in the red brick building in the center of this photo.



I had lunch at Whelan's luncheonette, which was located where TJMax now stands. 


And I started the short trip back to Long Island through the arched
subway entrance which is visible in this photo.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Illiers-Combray Haiku


Signs point to one way
And it was the only place
To find memories

© Marjorie Levine 2013

Brooklyn Haiku


Alone in body
Who am I to determine
The sweet soul of self

 © Marjorie Levine 2013

Manhattan Haiku



Driving south one day
Miles spill over shoulders
I was almost home

© Marjorie Levine 2013



Saturday, February 16, 2013

Beat Poetry Contest 1st place winner

WHAT WAY TO GO TODAY
Here's my poem that won Rick Dale's Beat Poetry Contest on December 3, 2009.

WHAT WAY TO GO TODAY

Almost dusk:
Last summer on one Wednesday, in July,
I sat on a bench, a grey wooden tired
Bench on a boardwalk out at old Long Beach.
In the sky a lonely and lost grey kittiwake tipped
As the hot pink sun set in blazing technicolor over
Hot pinkish sand and the fading blue ocean water.

That morning:
I had thought about seeing great art...
Vermeer, or Courbet, or maybe Monet.
But, I drove to the beach instead to think
To think about everything creative that had been
Created before I got here, and when I was here,
And what will be created when I leave this place.
When one day I leave my place and all places in my
Consciousness that is now in this time and was
At a past time and will be in some next time;
Maybe all time exists at the same time.
The great minds of theoretical physicists search
For the "Theory of Everything" as they sit
In their cluttered rooms, their great thinking rooms.
In universities, they ponder the mathematical equations
And Schrodinger's cat and all those mysteries.

In the evening:
It is during the quiet and still and sad night when
I miss most the people I never met:
Edie Beale, and the Rat Pack, and even Rod Serling
Who made me want to time travel: to go back to simpler places
Like Nedick's, or the Belmore, or Bickford's, and Willoughby.
Then the longing, a longing when distant sounds and faraway
Foghorns drive thoughts to reflect on a life visible through some
Smoky cracked mirror, a haunted and haunting steamy mirror.
As I am sort of old now and getting older
There is a vague and odd feeling that I,
Like the kittiwake, somehow must have lost the way.

© Marjorie Levine 2009

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

BEAT MEMORIES The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg

Today's adventure was glorious! I went to NYU's Grey Art Gallery to see:




‘Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg’

“Without even intending it, there is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. A little shiver of eternal space. That’s what I was looking for,” Allan Ginsberg wrote.

This is the same exhibit that was at the National Gallery a couple of years ago. In addition, there are several exhibit cases featuring materials drawn from NYU's Fales Collection, including letters to Huncke and others, drawings by Gregory Corso, and a first edition of On The Road.

in the NYTimes

more

"Events ‘Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg’ (Tuesday through April 6) Allen Ginsberg used his camera to capture the stories of his fellow beat poets. Eighty of his black-and-white photographs, taken over a 70-year period, will be on display in this exhibition. Organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington and that gallery’s senior curator Sarah Greenough, the exhibition includes photographs of William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac, many with Ginsberg’s handwritten notes. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-6780,nyu.edu/greyart; suggested admission, $3; free for New York University students and faculty and staff members."



WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 16 AT 7:00PM
Ginsberg Recordings (a collaboration of Ginsberg’s Estate and Esther Creative Group), Housing Works, VitaCoco, and Warby Parker are hosting a musical soiree to celebrate a vinyl and digital reissue of Ginsberg’s FIRST BLUES. The work was originally released as a double LP back in 1983, and as a CD in 2006.  Produced by legend John Hammond Sr., this record of songs is a collection of studio sessions from 1971, 1976, and 1981 and included the likes of Bob Dylan, Arthur Russell, David Mansfield, Happy Traum, David Amram, Steven Taylor and Peter Orlovksy. To commemorate this reissue, a limited run of 500 seven track vinyl that mimics the original style down to the newspaper insert will be available that night and online. Join Allen Ginsberg's friends, collaborators, relatives and co-conspiratorsAnne Waldman, Ambrose Bye, CA Conrad, Steven Taylor, Hettie Jones, Arthur's Landing and others for a night of poetry and songs in one of New York's quintessential spaces to breathe new life into First Blues in 2013.
MORE PHOTOS

an Allen Ginsberg website



3120 Wilkinson Avenue, Bronx NY
Carl Solomon's home


206 East 7th Street
Allen Ginsberg's home, second building on the left



“The poignancy of photography comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world.”
- Allen Ginsberg

"I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window, one day recognized my own world the familiar background, a giant wet brick-walled undersea Atlantis garden, waving ailanthus (“stinkweed”) “Trees of Heaven,” with chimney pots along Avenue A topped by Stuyvesant Town apartments’ upper floors two blocks distant on 14th Street, I focus’d on the raindrops along the clothesline."  “Things are symbols of themselves,” said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. 
New York City August 18, 1984- Allen Ginsberg, Photograph


Allen Ginsberg in the East Village: A Self-Guided Walking Tour

 1) Washington Square Park
 2) Mills House, 160 Bleecker Street 
 3) Former San Remo, 93 MacDougal (now La Pasta Bistro Grill)
 4) Former Kettle of Fish, 114 MacDougal Street
 5) Former Gas Light Café, 116 McDougal Street
 6) Minetta Tavern, 113 MacDougal Street
 7) Café Wha?, 115 MacDougal Street
 8) Café Reggio, 121 MacDougal Street
 9) Former Fugazzi’s Bar and Grill, 305 Sixth Ave (now LensCrafters)
 10) Former Pony Stable Inn, 150 West Fourth Street (now Washington Square Diner)
 11) Pedestrian island between West Eighth Street and West Ninth Street at Sixth Avenue
 12) Former Eighth Street Books, 32 West Eighth Street
 13) Former Cedar Street Tavern, 82 University Place
 14) Former Café Le Metro, 149 Second Avenue (now The 13th Step Bar and Grill)
 15) Former The Dom, 23 Saint Marks Place (now Grand Sichuan Restaurant)
 16) Gem Spa, 131 Second Avenue
 17) Former Kiev Restaurant, 117 Second Avenue
 18) Bill Keck/Norman Mailer’s apartment, 41 First Avenue
 19) 170 East Second Street
 20) 704 East Fifth Street
 21) 206 East Seventh Street
 22) Leshko’s Restaurant, Seventh Street and Avenue A
 23) Avenue A and Saint Marks Place
 24) Tompkins Square Park
 25) Former Peace Eye Bookstore, 383 East Tenth Street
 26) 408 East Tenth Street
 27) Paradise Alley, northeast corner of Avenue A and Eleventh Street
 28) 437 East Twelfth Street 29) 404 East Fourteenth Street
 29) 404 East Fourteenth Street