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| 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.
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| 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.
