I captured this trio in Tompkins Square Park in my neighborhood, New York’s East Village.  An unseasonably warm day in the city, a lot of people were out to enjoy one of the few outdoor days before winter.

The guy was singing his heart out, and these two girls were lapping it up.  The girls were far more attractive than the guitarist.  Just goes to show how far music can carry the heart.  They were both quite taken with him.  He sang so loudly that passers-by had to look.  I am not saying the singing was bad, but its volume created a spectacle.

The one in the middle provided shy, barely-audible background vocals overpowered by his Steve Perry meets John Mayer power chords.

The listening fare included Shwayze – lol.

They are sitting at the base of the famous Hare Krishna tree (from Wikipedia):

One of Tompkins Square Park’s most prominent features is its collection of venerable American Elm (Ulmus americana) trees. One elm in particular, located next to the semi-circular arrangement of benches in the park’s center, is important to adherents of the Hare Krishna religion. It was beneath this tree, on October 9, 1966, that A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, held the first recorded outdoor chanting session of the Hare Krishna mantra outside of the Indian subcontinent; participants in the ceremony included Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The event is seen as the founding of the Hare Krishna religion in the United States, and the tree is treated by Krishna adherents as a significant religious site.

Photos taken with the Samsung Memoir camera phone.

Kamila Shamsie and Hari Kunzru were at Union Square B&N to read and discuss their work with Robert Polito.

Unfortunately, my contact popped off my super dry right eye, so I had trouble with the focus and it shows in most of the shots.  Grrr.  Win some, lose some.

Kamila Shamsie was interesting to see.  In a short time she has accomplished a good deal of award-nominated work and comes from a family of notable Pakistani writers (she is the daughter of Muneeza Shamsie and a niece of Attia Hosain).  She read from her work Burnt Shadows.

Equally interesting was Hari Kunzru, whose varied tastes have taken him from travel journalist at The Guardian to music editor at Wallpaper* to winner of the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel The Impressionist. You can never celebrate a renaissance man enough.  Kunzru read from his book My Revolutions.

Perhaps most exciting for me was the unexpected opportunity to see Robert Polito again, as I have some memories tied to him.

In 2006 there was a symposium at the Bowery Poetry Club for Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl. I found a table in the front, where I sat drinking vodka all night as Polito, David Gates, Bob Holman and Alicia Ostriker talked about the famous poet’s work and the effect that he had on their lives.  My camera was very cheap, but I liked the photographs I took of each of them (they could all stand to be cleaned up).

It was Ostriker on stage who indirectly brought up Ginsberg’s NAMBLA controversy that I recalled well, as I had asked Ginsberg himself about it.

In 1995 when I lived in Boulder and my brother-in-law Rob attended the Naropa Institute–Ginsberg helped found its poetics department–I wandered over to the campus with Rob and his classmates for a festival the school held each summer.  Ginsberg always came out to Colorado for it.

I saw him milling about on the grounds, so I approached him.  What I most knew about him then was his position regarding the North American Man-Boy Love Association.  More accurately, I didn’t know his position, just that he had caused a national firestorm over it.

I walked up and introduced myself.  “Mr. Ginsberg,” I said,” I don’t want to take too much of your time, but I was wondering if you would explain to me your position about your support for the North American Man-Boy Love Association.”  I was incredibly embarrassed to ask him, but I already had prejudged him negatively about it.  Part of me felt now was the only moment I could confront him politely to find out his thoughts myself.

“Follow me,” he replied.  We began to walk down a path through the campus, and he asked me some questions about myself, who I am, what I wanted out of life.  The sorts of things one expects an older poet to ask a college student.

We approached the bathroom, and he motioned for me to come in.   “So you want to know what I think about NAMBLA?  Well, tell me David,” and he unzipped his pants and stood at the urinal as I heard water begin to trickle, “did you know what you wanted to do sexually when you were 16?”

Ginsberg went on to say his support for NAMBLA was nothing about having sex with 10-year-olds or any other such nonsense.  “More,” he said to me as he held his penis in his hand and finished relieving himself, “it is about our culture’s complete immaturity regarding human sexuality that people under 18 are classified as sexual incompetents.”

His support–he said as he washed up his hands–was not for NAMBLA per se, but only that we should reexamine the issue of age-of-consent laws to see if they actually make sense.  “We simply don’t discuss it.  After all,” said Ginsberg as he turned toward me from the sink, hands dripping as he smiled, “I certainly knew what I wanted to do when I was 15.  Didn’t you, David?”  He paused for the answer, and I replied shyly that yes, yes I thought I did.

“Well then,” he said as he smiled again and dried his hands, “should we return to the festival?  Or is there something more you’d like to discuss?”

When I listened to Polito, Ostriker, Holman and Gates talk about him that night in 2006, it was a pleasure to photograph them with my cheap camera and to reflect upon my own Ginsberg tale.  That moment in 1995 was one of the first times in adulthood that I decided that I would take the time to discover the reality of a controversy myself, and not just listen to what other people said about it.  What a reward that was.

That night in 2006 at the Bowery Poetry Club Polito gave an impassioned, tear-inducing reading from his then-new book The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later.

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