A Loving Accounting Of Allen

Ginsberg at Cherry Valley, 1973

Among various roles he has filled in his life, from political consultant, attorney and elected official, to college professor, CPA and all-around troublemaker, Don Wilen will speak this Tuesday at Curley’s about how his recommendation to Allen Ginsberg as a prospective personal financial/business adviser launched a friendship filled with warmth and memorable adventures rivaling the fecundity of Ginsberg’s own farm in Cherry Valley, New York, where Don and his family spent many weekends.

Initially referred to him in 1966 by underground press pioneer Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist (1958-2001), the Yippie-era satire magazine, Don’s introduction to Ginsberg and his friends in the Beat circle led to meals in seedy restaurants on the lower East side, occasional forays to the Carnegie Deli and second-hand clothing stores (not to mention a few near-arrests). Of all this and other fond recollections, Don’s one regret remains not being able to say goodbye to his friend before he passed in 1997.

Click here for a past entry on Ginsberg, along with clips from 2007’s The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (available on two DVDs) and Howl, the 2010 experimental film starring James Franco, which combined live-action and animation to relate the genesis of his titular heretical indictment of modern industrial life and the legal fallout that ensued in 1957.

Ginsberg, 1994

More developmental in its cast of the man and the movement, last year’s Kill Your Darlings (Sony Pictures Classics), directed by John Krokidas, features Daniel Radcliffe as a still younger Ginsberg during his years at Columbia in the 1940s, where he first met William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and others who would help form the core of the Beat Generation. Against the backdrop of a murder mystery, Kill dramatizes the revolutionary rationale and social necessity for what Ginsberg and his peers were trying to accomplish: 

Don is active with Sarah Van Arsdale’s Bloom readings program, based in the Washington Heights area, which presents poetry/spoken-word art in the Lounge at Hudson View Gardens, West 183rd Street & Pinehurst Avenue in New York City. Don is also part of the Three Arrows Cooperative Society, an intentional community alternative to urban isolation established by New York socialists in 1936, located in verdant Hudson Valley.