I had heard about the Beat Museum from a classmate a few months back and had been meaning to check it out this quarter. I still haven't made it up to SF, but in a state of procrastinating writing one of my final papers, I decided to check out their website. At the top of their homepage, there's currently a picture of Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller's "Fool us", placed next to a peculiar picture of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. If you click on the picture, it will send you to an article written by the Beat Museum about Penn's visit to North Beach. There are two headlines on this page: one reads "ALLEN GINSBERG STANDS NAKED BEFORE THE WORLD" and the other says, "PENN JILLETTE STANDS NAKED BEFORE THE WORLD." These headlines are peculiar enough, but not too surprising, given it was a single instance and not unlike Ginsberg or Penn to do something out of the ordinary.
What was really surprising to me was the contents of the article... Apparently, "Ginsberg used to like to get naked at poetry readings because 'The poet stands naked before the world.'"
Ok, I read this wrong, and according to the Beat Museum, "Beat scholars tell us it only happened once, at a reading where one of Allen's friends was being heckled by an audience member and Allen leaped to his friend's defense, took his clothes off and challenged the heckler to do the same."
Still, I thought this was an interesting tidbit about Ginsberg, and even better when I learned that Penn had been acquainted with Ginsberg back in the 80s and 90s and loved his work-- so much that he not only posed in a picture with the photo of Ginsberg and Corso, but he chose to do it naked in honor of his enjoyment of Ginsberg and the Beat movement.
You can see the article here: http://www.thebeatmuseum.org/penn-jillette/
Here's the picture of Penn with the photo of Ginsberg...
No comments:
Post a Comment