Marlins rule!
Considering that today marks the
first day of the long dark cold baseball-less winter it's
pretty darn warm and even more fun than watching the
pinstriped ones go down to defeat at the hands of the
lowest paid team in baseball last night and
setting the clocks back for the end of Daylight Saving
Time. What, you may ask, could be more fun than that? Why
Lawrence Ferlinghtti of course!
F-day has finally arrived. Ned and
Nancy and I teamed up to take Tom and Julie to the Museum
Of Fine Arts in Boston for Poetry in Motion, an
event put on by the film department featuring a screening
of the Christopher Felver documentary The Coney Island
of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1996), Lawrence
Ferlinghetti himself reading his poetry, and Eric
Andersen performing his new 26 minute song
Beat
Avenue.
The program lead off with the first
14 minutes of the film as an introduction to Ferlinghetti
with a promise that we'd see the rest of the film after
the performances. Ferlinghetti read generously from his
poems. He was supposed to read for half an hour and went
well beyond that. He was fabulous. He does not look 84 at
all! He chose to read poems about paintings (fitting for
the Museum of Fine Arts) so read my favorite one about
Goya's Disasters of War first. I've always loved
that poem but I think it sunk in especially deep today
and touched a nerve because I was flooded with relief
that BiB, who was in the vicinity of the Al Rasheed hotel
this morning, is now safely back in Kuwait just hours
after the excitement (what do you call a war after the
"end of formal hostilities"?). In my mind's eye in
Goya's greatest scenes I seemed to see Iraqis and
Americans in Baghdad at the exact moment they became
suffering humanity. Ferlinghetti's poems are
that visual.
Eric Andersen performed Beat
Avenue, which he's been writing for 15 years and is
finally out on CD. The song recounts his experiences at a
gathering with Beat poets on the day President John F.
Kennedy was assassinated 40 years ago. Andersen's
performance was kind of disappointing partly because he
was standing too close to the mike and accompanist Robert
Aaron was also miked too loud and drowned him out. But it
was mostly because NOBODY can follow Ferlinghetti.
In true Beat fashion I had a sudden moment of insight
when Andersen's song recounted a moment in the bathroom
of Ferlinghetti's house with Allen Ginsberg puking red
wine. Something about celebrating red wine puke in such
an august blue-hair institution as the MFA revealed the
cosmic joke as clearly as that moment in Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer when the guy achieves
enlightenment by looking at his own excrement in the
toilet. What is art? What is enlightenment? Who is it who
asks what is art? Who is it who asks who is
it?
Since both Ferlinghetti and
Andersen ran over their allotted time, we didn't get to
see the rest of the film so have to go back in the spring
for the Chris Felver film festival to see it (either that
or rent it at Acme Video when I can drive to Providence
again). Who cares? I'm still jazzed hours later. Tom and
Julie have twice made great life changes (like moving to
Spain) after Ferlinghetti readings. Me, I'm just wired on
words and images. What a Coney Island of art and
culture!
Tom and Ned sneaked out to be first
in line for the book signing and ended up spending 10
minutes alone with Ferlinghetti chatting about poetry and
Henry Miller. They were thrilled. Especially Tom, who got
to tell Ferlinghetti how much his poem about waiting for
a rebirth of wonder has meant to him over the years.
Tom'll be high for weeks. And we've got to keep an eye on
him in case he and Julie up and decide to become expats
again.
All this AND the Marlins defeated
the pinstriped ones convincingly in the World Series. How
about that Josh Beckett?! What a pleasure to watch. What
a weekend!
