Kissed by Allen Ginsberg-Autobiography of a Hippy, Sort Of-Thanks for sparking this memory Alida

60's Vignettes

It seemed normal to me--spending the evening standing around in a small circle of guys at the Santa Cruz Zen Center.... Back then..........

Thanks to a good friend's daughter's Google + post, (thanks Alida), remembering that night has been obsessing me for the last few days, because those guys were Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  

I've been looking for a copy of the Berkeley Barb (Nov-1974) that had this party on it's cover....No luck yet (UPDATE:  Found it, here it is Berkeley Barb, Dec, 1974)--but these were easy to find:

 Allen Ginsberg

 Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Tim Leary at the GG Park Be-in (I was there too!)

 Charles Bukowski

Bob Dylan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Micheal McClure

It was the party after the Santa Cruz Poetry Festival, 1974.  I spent some hours standing around and talking vigorously with those guys--in the background, Ramblin' Jack Elliot was playing the guitar. I'm sure there were more famous people there, but I just remember having a great conversation for the evening with those very few standing together in the middle of this party. Bukowski mumbled maybe incoherently  Ginsberg was bright and engaging... I didn't really know whether they were they were cultural icons or not--I just lived in Santa Cruz working at KUSP. 

All the while there was a really drunk guy who kept harassing Charles by hovering around behind him and trying to pants him.  It didn't seem to phase Bukowski...He just kept going.  (see Berkeley Barb story--this is confirmed!)

I wish I remembered the conversation, I just see vividly this full room, with the marble floor, and a very energetic discussion.  Apparently I had something to say, I remember being listened to.  This group stood around together for quite awhile, but it was a time when a lot of specific's have faded. But it awakened me to some great writing, like Bukowski's "The 

Shoelace, copyright Charles Bukowski, 1972"...

".....no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies

that send a man to the madhouse

…

not the death of his love

but a shoelace that snaps

with no time left …"

I do remember that he explained it to us that night, mumbling, 

with the nutty guy pulling his pants down, it's the shoelace that 

breaks on the way to airport....the big stuff we expect, its those 

little things "that drive us mad"  

Trying to remember the exact date, I found this on the Bukowski pages, "April 24, 1971 ("ass drag from giving shitty poetry readings -- read from my stuff at S.C." - maybe Santa Cruz?)"  


I think this one was for USC....but on the same Bukowski pages, there is a time line that nails the Santa Cruz Festival on November 25, 1974, at the Coconut Grove.  

This festival was a big deal to the big poets...founded by  James Dalessandro, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, again from Wikipedia:

"From 1973-77, he (Dalessandro) was co-founder of The Santa Cruz Poetry Festival, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and served as its director for four years. As the nation's largest annual literary festival, it brought Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and musicians like Anthony Braxton and Charles Lloyd to the seaside town ofSanta Cruz, which set attendance records (over 2,000 people per night) at the Civic Auditorium. It ushered in what Lawrence Ferlinghetti called "A new birth of American Poetry."

So somehow, along with Ryan Brandenburg, and Kobun Chino we had the after party for this 1974 one.  I was big into the birth of KUSP, helped a little in the early days of the Zen Center, and did the news...So there I was.  

And only because I'm writing this, did I learn that this group included the man who amongst all the great art, also created the term 'Flower Power' in 1965...

From Wikipedia; "Flower Power originated in Berkeley, California as a symbolic action of protest against the Vietnam War. In his November 1965 essay titled How to Make a March/Spectacle, Ginsberg advocated that protesters should be provided with "masses of flowers" to hand out to policemen, press, politicians and spectators.^[8] The use of props like flowers, toys, flags, candy and music were meant to turn anti-war rallies into a form of street theater thereby reducing the fear, anger and threat that is inherent within protests.^[9] In particular, Ginsberg wanted to counter the "specter" of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang who supported the war, equated war protesters with communists and had threatened to violently disrupt planned anti-war demonstrations at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.^[10][11][12] Using Ginsberg's methods, the protest received positive attention and the use of "flower power" became an integral symbol in the counter-culture movement.^[13]"


I wonder how those great artists would have dealt with writing today....as I sit here and reminisce about that day, and write this down, I have access to the just about everything there is (except the Berkeley Barb Cover!!), I can put links to the history and archives, find pictures of the people, and most of my spelling errors are fixed.  I can imagine I would have to have intense motivation to find all this material if I was writing this in 1975.


And it's so easy to pull this together, like this:
an amazing link to the madness inflicted on  60-70's Black Panther's

  Another great link to this time:  Voices from the Underground 
Copyright 2013 George Martin/Martin Labs International