In spring of 1997, Nancy Peters the remarkable publisher at City Lights Books, called with the sad news that Allen Ginsberg had died. It was hard to imagine the world without him. Allen and I were allied as poets and pacifists over decades of reasons to rally. The world knew Allen as a rapturous poet who vigorously opposed militarism, materialism, and sexual repression. My freshman year, a college senior, the emerging poet, Anne Waldman, took me to a New Year’s Eve party in downtown Manhattan. At midnight, Allen led an ecstatic circle of rolling Oms. This was before his notorious…
Fortune has its cookies to give out………….A Coney Island of the Mind
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —Lawrence Ferlinghetti
My ongoing push and pull of art and money had me brainstorming business ideas over Chinese food. At Hong Fat’ sometime in the eighties, a gang of witty friends were breaking the cookies we never ate but always read. Over a mountain of crumbs and corny predictions, we hatched the concept for Divines. The product was a re-invention of the fortune cookie — filled with poetry and dipped in Belgium chocolate. The…
Revenge Killings 50 Years Apart
On October 16 2020, the BBC warned listeners the next story depicts gore and shame. As he was leaving school a junior high teacher in a Paris suburb was beheaded by a teenage Islamist terrorist.
On February 1, 1971, the city of Philadelphia went into shock, when a 14 year old student killed a junior high school teacher as he was leaving school, with a blast through the back of his head exiting through his face.
These horrific events amplify and detonate existing antagonisms. Both are tragic in personal and public ways that cannot be…
