Found these two photos on the web yesterday and put them on Facebook but meant to put them here. They were taken at Cafe Largo in West Hollywood where my partner Eve Brandstein and I started and ran (from 1988 to I think around '96?) a weekly poetry reading called Poetry In Motion that got a lot of publicity and a lot of flack because we included friends who wrote poetry and did other things as well that they may have been better known for (that's Eve with the black hair and her hand on Downey's shoulder) like movie acting or directing or being a comedienne or musician or dancer or in some cases the more traditional and accepted occupation for poets: teacher.
All kinds of amazing people passed through the weekly readings which usually included about a dozen people who got to read for no more than five minutes. This was taken one night when these people all read. It was a lot of fun but there were poets who refused to participate because it wasn't "pure" enough, meaning just poets who identified mainly as poets or were identified mainly by the rest of us as poets, though no one who did other things they were known for ever declined reading out of some sense of "purity" etc.
I personally took a lot of flack for the actors who participated in particular. An article in Newsweek (if I remember correctly) had a reporter there on a night when Ally Sheedy and some others from what was then called "the brat pack" read some poems (Ally was particularly brilliant as I remember it) and though they had their mind changed and wrote a very positive story about how moved they were (which they later showed me) their editor decided to make it more controversial and headlined it "Wannabe Whitmans" and slanted it toward sarcasm.
Another article in The New Yorker referred to me as a "poetry hustler" if I remember correctly, which I should have made the title of my next collection. Anyway here are the photos:
8 comments:
I was at a number of your readings (before we'd met), weren't some of them at another place other than Largo also, more toward Los Feliz area? Isn't that Caroline Ducrocq? and of course Katie?
Yeah, originally we met at Helena's and then a couple of other clubs before Largo opened and invited us to be the first scene. And yep that's Katy Sagal and Caroline Ducrocq down in the corner, Michael Des Barres behind her and the French singer Merriam Mezeneires (I'm way off on the spelling and pronunciation but she was a great writer) and Michael Harris and between her and Downey and behind them the late comedienne Lotus Winestock, then Eve, poet/teacher Jack Grapes & me, with Yvonne de La Vega and Michael O'keefe in front of us, Hubert Selby Jr. to my right and in front of him Anne Beatts (one of the early writers of Saturday Night Live, she came up with the coneheads I'm pretty sure) and then Katy and Tommy Swerdlow, great poet, great writer (wrote the movie COOL RUNNIN'S among others I'm pretty certain).
I'm good friend with Jon Turteltaub, who I believe direct Cool Runnins). What an illustrious group photo!!!
I still have my apartment around the corner from Largo, my link to that time.
THANK YOU for this photo, you are a keeper of generational memories.
As are you with your KINDSIGHT photos Robert.
Sorry to divert, but must insert the semi-weekly '2ND AMENDMENT BASTARDIZATION UPDATE":
http://news.yahoo.com/3-dead-including-gunman-oregon-mall-shooting-014507348.html
Another tragedy due to completely insane, un Godly, ILLEGAL/IMMORAL/SINFUL gun non-laws and barbarian culture.
No need to apologize Robert, your anti-gun comments are appreciated and needed from a lot more of us. One of the first things I learned on the street as a little boy was "The Sullivan Law" which to this day I don't even know if it was true, but what the other boys said was that if you were caught with a gun (it may have pertained only to New York but we thought it was Jersey too) you went to prison, period. So we all were scared about having guns and guns seemed to be very difficult to get. That's why some of the more determined thuggish boys made "zip guns" in shop that were pretty crude and usually only fired one bullet and fairly weakly if they worked at all. So gang fights were with fists and at worst knives which sometimes ended in deaths but never innocent bystanders being killed etc. Gun laws have to be made tougher no doubt about it.
Statistically, most gun deaths do not come from self defense or making our nation secure. They come from insane, rage/wacko murder, from people who have no business handling an object whose sole purpose is killing.
I somehow got on the bill to read three times. Twice at Largo, and a third time when the event moved to a club that was up on Sunset though I can't remember the name of the place. As one of Jack Grapes' students at the time, I was very into the ethos of "stand-up poetry." The readings were always lively, well attended, and the work appreciated.
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