Arts/Entertainment
University Daily Kansan / Thursday, September 10, 1987
7
River City Reunion brings beat poets, artists here
A week for memories
By BRIAN BARESCH
Staff writer
Organizing the River City Reunion has turned into a full-time job for James Grauerholz and Bill Rich.
Rich, who is working on a doctorate in social psychology, has had to take the semester off to organize the Reunion through his specially-formed company, River City Productions. Grauerholz already was involved with the beat poets because he works for author William S. Burroughs, a Lawrence resident who has been part of the beat movement since its birth in the 1950s.
Allen Ginsberg and George Wedge, associate professor of English, were trying to arrange a month-long residency for Ginsberg at the University of Kansas, and Wedge raised some of the money required. Before the arrangements were finished, however, Ginsberg committed himself to another year at Brooklyn College, so he could spend only a week in Lawrence.
Grauerholz said he then suggested the Reunion of beat poets and other artists.
Grauernoz, Rich and Wedge have been arranging for the various artists' flights and accommodations. Most of the performers, including Marianne Faithfull and Husker Du, are taking smaller fees than normal, Grauerholz said.
The organizers are quick to point out that the Reunion is not a nostalgia trip for the older poets. "It's really for the participants," Grauerhauer said, speaking of the
many artists invited to take part. "Memory is a shared commodity."
One special event organized for local participants is the series of readings at Club Babalo West, in the back of Hoch Auditorium. Mike Mader, Great Bend graduate student, said the open-mike readings might prove to be some of the most exciting events at the Reunion.
"Many of the well-known poets are going to be showing up at the readings to encourage people to come and read," he said.
"It's exciting to see people who have grown up with these poets get a chance to meet them and read with them." Mader said.
The readings will be from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. tonight and tomorrow night.
Poets won't be the only ones at the Reunion events. John Bell, Memphis, Tenn., sophomore, and Rob Mayberry, Leavenworth junior, said they were drawn to the Reunion by the beat poets' influence on the counterculture of the 1960s.
1905. "I think it shows how students today aren't materialistic." Maybury said. "We understand the changes that took place in the '60s."
Bell agreed. "And we appreciate the people who initiated these changes," he said.
changes." They said they would go to as many events as they could afford, concentrating on the free, on-campus events. Both said tey definitely would attend the talks by Timothy Leary, Ginsberg and Burroughs.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Timothy Leary, 66, was preparing for a conservative life as a Harvard psychology professor when he sampled a magic mushroom and became aware of what he called the mind-expanding properties of hallucinogenic drugs. His experimenting with peyote and LSD among faculty members resulted in his getting kicked off the Harvard faculty in 1963.
Leary's continued calls for responsible drug use made him a guru to the counterculture of the 1960s. His phrase "Tune in, turn on, drop out" became one of the most popular phrases — and philosophies — of the decade. He spent time in jail for drug possession, went to Algeria and Europe and now is working with computers and artificial intelligence.
Leary's books include "The Psychicheedal Experience," "Neuropolitics" and his autobiography, "Flashbacks." He will be speaking at 2 p.m. Saturday at Liberty Hall, 642 Massachusetts St. He will sign books at noon Saturday at the Oread Book Shop in the Kansas Union.
ANNIE WAILED Anne Waldman, born in 1945 in Millville, N.J., is well known as a reader-performer. Her best-known work is "Fast-Speaking Woman," published in 1975.
ANNE WALDMAN
waiwan said her expressive way of reading poetry was a way of evoking physical or aural imagery from the poem's construction.
Waldman and Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., where she teaches full time and directs the poetics program.
Motion!" Her video "Ub-Oh Plutonium!" won a blue ribbon at the American Film Festival's Manhattan Video Project. Her other published works include "Baby Breakdown," "Giant Night." "No Hassles" and "Skin Film Bones."
She toured as poet-in-residence with Bob Dylan's "Rolling Thunder Review" in 1975 and was featured in a documentary film, "Poetry In
Waldman is working on prose and more rigidly structured poems, but also is experimenting with ensemble reading performances
She will read from her works from 8 to 11 p.m. Saturday at Liberty Hall.
RIVER CITY REUNION
ANDREI CODRESCU
Andrei Codrescu was born in Romania in 1946 and immigrated to the United States 20 years later. He is best known as a weekly commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."
"I'm one of those strange pods that blew up in Eastern Europe at the reading of 'Howl' by Allen Ginsberg," he said. "I blew far enough to end up over here in 1966."
His poetry collection "License to Carry a Gun" won the 1970 Big Table Series of Young Poets Prize; other collections include "The History of the Growth of Heaven," "A Serious Morning," "For the Love of a Coat" and "Necrocorrida."
Codrescu teaches at Louisiana State University, where he edits the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse.
He also has written several works of fiction, including "Monsieur Teste in America," and two autobiographies, "The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius" and "Further Disturbances of an Involuntary Genius."
Codrescu will read from his works from 8 to 11 p.m. Saturday at Liberty Hall.
John Giorno was born in 1937 in New York. He has performed often with Burroughs on such occasions as the Red Night Tour in 1981 and the Nova Convention in 1978.
JOHN GIORNO
Giorno's books include "Grasing at Emptiness," "Johnny Guitar" and "The American Book of the Dead." He originated Dial-a-Poem and founded Giorno Poetry Systems Institute, Inc., which has released several album anthologies including "Life Is a Killer," "Darden Hidden in the Mouth of a Corpse," "Who You Staring At?" and "You're the Guy I Want to Share my Money With" and several video compilations.
MICHAEL McCLURE
Michael McClure was born in 1932 in Marysville, studied for two years at the University of Wichita (now Wichita State University) and eventually landed in San Francisco in 1964. His first reading night was Ginsberg first read "How," with Jack Kerouac shouting in the audience.
oac snorkling McClure's plays "The Beard" and "Josephine the Mouse Singer" later won the Village Voice's Obie Award.
McClure was a close friend of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, and he wrote "Mercedes Benz" for Janis Joplin. He has appeared in several films. McClure now lives in San Francisco.
FIRESTORE
He will perform with Marianne Faithfull from 9 to 11 p.m. tonight at Liberty Hall and will sign books at noon tomorrow in the Oread Book Shop.
marianne Faithfull, while bes. known as Mick Jagger's girlfriend in the 1960s and singer of "As Tears Go By" in 1964, has established her own
MARIANNE FAITHFULL
place in modern music. She lives in Boston. Her albums include "Broken English" from 1977 and the latest, "Strange Weather."
She will perform from 9 to 11 p.m tonight at Liberty Hall.
HUSKER DU
Their albums include "Warehouse: Stories and Songs" and "Candy Ample Red."
Husker Du, a three-man progressive-rock band from Minneapolis, Minn., blends the styles of popular and underground music. The band, composed of guitarist Bob Mould, drummer Grant Hart and bassist Greg Norton, has appeared in Gloria Poetry Systems's "Call It It Looks Like Daisy," singing the song "The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill."
Husker Du will appear at 9 p.m. Sunday at Liberty Hall.
WILLIAM BURROUGHS
William S. Burroughs was born in St. Louis in 1914, graduated from Harvard University and studied medicine in Vienna. He befriended Ginsberg and Kerouac at Columbia University in the 1940s.
The novel "The Naked Lunch" was printed first in France, but was not published in the United States for objection because of the stricter obscenity laws here.
When it was published, "The Naked Lunch" was immediately seized, and Burroughs was tried for obscenity. His eventual victory was a ground-breaking event in helping to eliminate censorship of the printed word in the United States.
Burroughs has lived in Lawrence since 1982. His books include "Junky," "Nova Express" and "The Place of Dead Roads."
burroughs will sign books at noon today in the Oread Book Shop and will read from his works from 8 to 11 p.m. Saturday at Liberty Hall.
Beat poet still 'Howl'-ing
Allen Ginsberg returns to Lawrence for River City Reunion
Staff writer
Bv BRIAN BARESCH
Allen Ginsberg, the poet who brought the beat movement into the national spotlight by reading "Howl" in San Francisco 32 years ago, is still trying to merge spirituality with the materialistic urges most people feel today.
Now, the co-founder of the hiphi movement is doing it as a distinguished professor at Brooklyn College, teaching heroic, expansive poetry, and history of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg also has taught at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist college in Boulder, Colo.
Ginsberg, 61, talked at length through a cloud of cigarette smoke Monday in his Lawrence hotel room, fresh from a 10-day meditation retreat in Colorado. He is in town as one of the primary attractions of the River City Reunion. His voice was quiet and measured, steady and deep; he was serious without being somber.
Ginsberg's poem "How!" was a wrathful attack on a sick urban society, he said, which ended in affirmation of compassionate ener-
"A denial of our basic goodness, a denial of our basic intelligence," Ginsberg called the poem.
"The mass media saw it as an angry protest rather than as an affirmation," he said. "It's a gesture of sympathy rather than a rejection in anger."
That poem, because of the raw language that complemented its pacing and wrath, was the subject of an obsessive trial in 1957. Ginsberg won the case, and the victory, coupled with William S. Burroughs' triumph in a similar trial over his "The Naked Lunch," for a while effectively ended literary censorship in the United States.
but now, Ginsberg noted, "Howl" and a lot of his erotic poetry can no longer be broadcast even on alternative radio stations, thanks to the Federal Communication Commission's recent crackdown on "shock" radio.
Under the new Reagan ethos, he said, "Everybody's been sared and inert, and the most aggressive are taking power. It's like Russia, in the sense that you've got congressional wives trying to curb rock 'n' roll; you've got the FCC trying to control, essentially, social commentary, under the guise of some kind of cleanup."
"The answer to all that is humor and some sense of speciousness, generosity, humane manners. We're in a state of panic, basically."
"Most people lack a sense of value, of subjective value, goodness value, cleaniness, a sense of energetic expansion," he said, "and so tend to distort all that into aggressive expansion.
Ginsberg still can see, in the United States, the aggression, fear and anxiety that inspired "Howl" and the beat movement.
aggressive greed, accompanied by panic and anxiety, or when it's done in a spirit of generosity, joyousness, gentleness and tenderness."
Ginsberg remembers Lawrence in the mid-1960s as culturally healthy and lively, with some culturally aware professors and a good local group of poets. That was a time when poetry was rediscovered as a means of social communication. Poetry outside the standa nd message communication of communication such as Reagan reading a script, he said.
"That was a time when rock 'n' roll lyrics were beginning to get really interesting, with the Beatles, Dylan and the Byrds," he said, "and folk music got electric, representing people's thinking rather than the commercialized bubble gum that it became."
“It’s not that I’m against materialistic expansion, but it’s the spirit in which it’s done; when it’s done as an
The lyrical tradition stretched from Sappho, an early Greek poet, to modern artists such as Dylan, Paul Simon, the Fugs and other performers such as Anne Waldman. From the beginning, poetry and music have gone together — the word lyric, he said, shows that the poems were meant to be accompanied by a lyre.
Ginsberg said the attack on rock lyrics, which are the main form of poetic lyrics now, was also an attempt to cut off communication
won the young, who are the largest audience for rock music. This also represents a ludicrous attack on liberty by a government that was supposed to "get off our backs," he said.
The beat poets, he said, did accomplish some things, among them the demystification of the Pentagon, which had once had the final word in U.S. military policy.
After "How!" and his testament to his late mother, "Kaddish," Ginsberg continued writing and traveling. He invented the term "flower power," became guru to the hippies in the 1960s, demonstrated against the Vietnam War and was tear-gassed at the rally of the National Convention in Chicago as he tried to soothe the crowd by chanting mantras.
In 1974, Ginsberg and Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembioped Poetics at the Naropa Institute. Ginsberg has worked to expose alleged government corruption and reform drug laws, and championed environmental and sexual freedom causes.
Recently, Ginsberg has been putting his poetry to music. He said he had just finished an album, on which he reads his poems with a musical accompaniment. He also is working on a collection of photography.
Poet Allen Ginsberg reads a selection of his work. About 700 people filled the Kansas Union Ballroom last night to hear Ginsberg and musician Steven Taylor.
Lawrence resident Michael Allen is the national champion of bluegrass banjo
Banjo champ's reign ends soon
Staff writer
By JORN E. KAALSTAD
When Michael Allen was a kid, his father laid some musical instruments on the bed and said, "Don't you touch these."
Of course he did, and the young boy, who was tricked into music by his father's use of reverse psychology, is today the national champion of bluegrass banjo.
Allen, a Lawrence resident who has a master's degree in physics from the University of Kansas, won the title last year at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield.
Alen is the reigning champion until Sept. 20, when the next festival takes place. But this time, Allen will participate as a judge.
Allen grew up in Crescent, Iowa.
He graduated from Iowa State
University with bachelor's
degrees in physics and Russian.
Crescent was traditionally not a good place for bluegrass. Allen said. He could recall his father, glued to the radio, listening to Nashville, Tenn., bluegrass programs late at night when the reception was good.
nuegrass originated in the rural South with roots in country and folk music. The form hasn't changed since it was invented by Bill Monroe in the 1940s. Allen said
While Allen was still in junior high school, his father, Charlie Allen, wanted to start a family bluegrass band.
Charlie's band was almost complete. He played guitar, his oldest son, Matt, played mandolin and his daughter Mindi played bass.
daughter Minna played sax.
The only instrument he needed was a banjo. So the father told
Michael, who already sang and played saxophone and guitar: "Play banjo!"
Play Band
Soon the Allen Family Bluegrass
Band was formed, and they
recorded an album featuring songs
like "Slewfoot" and "Grand-
father's Clock".
Allen is playing in two groups that have taken different approaches to bluegrass music.
One group is Last Kansas Exit. The band is endorsed and sponsored by the Kansas Arts Commission, allowing it to schedule performances throughout Kansas and in six other midwestern states.
While playing traditional bluegrass with Last Kansas Exit, he also plays Celtic-jazz fusion in a quartet called Gerald Trumble and Satura. Trumble is a Kansas City, Kan., cittern player — probably one of the United States' finest interpreters of the instrument, a 10-string mandolin, Allen said.
Going into different styles seems natural to Allen.
The prize he won in last year's contest may help him do just that. The prize, an electric banjo, is one of the existing in the world. Allen said.
"the only preconceived idea I have about music is not to have any preconceived ideas," Allen said.
Although he said he loved blue-grass for being traditional and unchanged, he thought it was impractical. He tried styles of banjo playing.
Surprisingly, this down-to-earth musician is working for the CIA.
His background in Russian and physics got him a job as an editor for a CIA office that translates Soviet physics and engineering
publications.
publications.
"Someday I plan on living off music full time so I don't have to work with this translating stuf," Allen said, "I'm thinking a lot about that."
"This kind of music is not that big of a business that record companies would seek you out. But, I don't know what kind to open some doors," he said.
Winning the championship did not mean to Allen that the record companies would fight to sign him up for big-buck contracts.
"For the most part, the contest has given me more confidence in my abilities."
Every Sunday from 7 p.m. to 12 p.m. he is a disc jockey for a bluegrass program called "Flint Hills Special," broadcast on CBS.
As a part of the preparation for the radio program, Allen is studying Gaeli to better pronounce Celtic music titles on the air.
Allen has spread his musical talents to reach out to a greater audience.
"Part of my philosophy is to keep learning about the things that interest me," he said.
His musical skill on the air also received widespread attention when Allen was named the best U.S. bluegrass disc jockey at the 1985 National Bluegrass Convention in Nashville with Gerald Trimble and Satura on Oct. 21 at the Jazzhaus, 92%6% Massachusetts St.