Gordon Ball recently published a new book, Ginsberg & Beat Fellows: A Personal Record: Photographs 1966-2022. Over the course of sixty years, this gathering of image and information across sites as various as New York’s Lower East Side, San Francisco’s North Beach, Allen Ginsberg’s farm near Cherry Valley, New York; Boulder, Colorado and Lexington, Virginia (Naropa Institute and the Virginia Military Institute); as well as Jackson, Mississippi and Tokyo, features unique photographs of America’s celebrated poet in the company of “sacred companions” including Peter Orlovsky, William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, Carl Solomon, Gregory Corso, Anne Waldman, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and many others. Within its pages artist Robert LaVigne, who introduced Peter and Allen in 1954, serves the poet oatmeal and raisins for breakfast forty years later; Ginsberg and fellow Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky “conspire” together just ten feet from police; Shig Murao, who went to jail for selling Howl, welcomes visitors behind the register at City Lights; photographer Allen Ginsberg shoots rock star Lee Ranaldo reading from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The historical and aesthetic value of this treasure of personality and imagination across time and space is immense.
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