William Burroughs on roof 206 E. 7 Street N.Y. 1953, with view of Tompkins Park

Gary S. Davis Allen Ginsberg

1953

Medium: gelatin silver print
Dimensions: image: 29.9 × 19.7 cm (11 3/4 × 7 3/4 in.) sheet: 35.5 × 27.8 cm (14 × 10 15/16 in.)
Genre: Photographs
Museum: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, US

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Peter Orlovsky (b. 1933 –) visiting his family — Lafcadio then age 47 had lived with us S.F – N.Y. 1955 – ’61 & intermittent years later on; Mother Katherine aged 78 totally deaf lip-reading some after botched mastoid operation N.Y. Eye & Ear Hospital 1933, drunken surgeon; Laff’s twin sister Maril who’d roomed with Peter & me East 2’nd Street Lower East Side 1959 while attending baby-nurse school in Jersey, later a half-dozen years she quit hospital job angry hearing other nurse voices’ “filthy gossip” she said about Me and My Brother, Robert Frank’s film on Orlovskys— all this two decades before this moment. From second floor flat on lonely Cottontail Road they needed taxi for any heavy shopping with monthly Social Service Indemnity checks at Supermarket a mile away in Center Moriches, Long Island. July 26, 1987.

Gary S. Davis, 1987

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Gary S. Davis, 1948

$Harry Smith, hermetic film-maker, philosopher, archivist, painter & bibliophile stayed in that little music room in my apartment for nine months recovering from a compression fracture of his right knee. He spent months tape-recording ambient sounds of the Lower East Side coming into my Manhattan windows from miles around.$

Harry Smith, hermetic film-maker, philosopher, archivist, painter & bibliophile stayed in that little music room in my apartment for nine months recovering from a compression fracture of his right knee. He spent months tape-recording ambient sounds of the Lower East Side coming into my Manhattan windows from miles around.

Allen Ginsberg, 1985

Anna & George Condo before center of large canvas, "Adoration of St. Lucy" nailed to wall of his studio then in large townhouse East 64th Street Manhattan, first time I visited them, January 15, 1993.

Gary S. Davis, 1993

Walking down Second Avenue in East 20's I stopped for a meal in Sushi bar, went to the tiny bathroom and saw myself several dozen times multiplied, Aetat 59. September 24, 1985.

Allen Ginsberg, 1985

William S. Burroughs beside typewriter on kitchen table, getting in condition to edit his South American "Yage Letters" and "Queer" epistolary mss. to be published decades afterward - immortality comes later! We slept in striped wallpaper'd tiny rear bedroom, my wooden wardrobe visible behind his shoulder. 206 East 7th Street, Apartment 16, Lower East Side Manhattan October 1953.

Allen Ginsberg, 1953

Lou Reed, poet-musician (hero to avant-guard Czechoslovak intellectual rock-band dissident "Plastic People of the Universe" defended from government persecution by playwright Vaclav Havel and his Charter 77 friends) at make-up table in green room, public Theater Lafayette Street New York, invited by impresario Rose Lesniak (above) to Master Ceremonies, Premiere of Poetry- Music Video Clips by Anne Waldman ("uh! oh! plutonium") and myself ("Father Death Blues"), September 1984.

Allen Ginsberg, 1984

“…Hundreds gathered for trip in white dresses carrying cloth bags, pails, candles—going to inaccessible & most venerable religious festival of Tres Reyes…Train started 7 A.M. with a hundred in a box car, people hanging on steps of platform even—engine went off tracks like some great sad silent dead horse of iron at noon, usual occurrence.” (See _Journals Early ‘Fifties Early ‘Sixties_ , N.Y., Grove, 1977, 1992, P.37.) Narrow-gauge railroad, Merida to Valladolid, Quintana Roo, Mexico, January 1954.

Allen Ginsberg, 1954

Neal Cassady with cigarette young & vigorous age 29 with salesman surveying North Beach used car lot, he needed new wheels. Bay Area Johnny Appleseed of pot from early 1950’s, he worked as conductor on Southern Pacific Railroad, averted train crash as brakeman years earlier, breaking his ankle, collected insurance, bought his family a ranch-house in Los Gatos down the peninsula, gambled madly & disastrously at horse racetrack, wrote painfully in pencil on his “The First Third” autobiographical manuscript, visited me overnight in rooms on Polk and Montgomery Streets, San Francisco, sometime March 1955.

Gary S. Davis, 1955

Formal banquet speeches, meeting of American Academy of Arts & Letters delegates to Soviet Writer’s Union—Playwright Arthur Miller head bowed stoic at left, Jacob Laurence white-collard in front of Miller, white haired Chairman Fedorenko in horn-rimmed glasses leaning against wall looking up third from right, Lithuanian Writer’s Union Chairman/Chief gazing down at his notes at microphone, Buffet table as yet untouched—at the time the Russians wanted to emphasize integrity of Society boundaries so meeting was deliberately held in Vilnius (in secret from local writers—November 19, 1985.

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Gelek Rimpoche working hard to ferry a few students across the waters after outing on lake-front bathing shore, late-summer Jewel Heart retreat, Yankee Springs State Park, Michigan August 27, 1993.

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Jack Kerouac 1953 Seen through window sill lined with books, from Fire Escape 206 E. 7 St. N.Y.C. He was living or writing Subterraneans

Allen Ginsberg, 1953