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PopRally / THE CONTENDERS: DON’T BLINK — ROBERT FRANK

Robert Frank takes a unique look at his life and career in documentary made by his longtime editor

DON’T BLINK — ROBERT FRANK (Laura Israel, 2015)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, January 7, $15, 7:30
Series runs through January 12
Tickets: $12, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days
212-708-9400
www.dontblinkrobertfrank.com
www.moma.org

“I hate these fucking interviews,” innovative, influential, ornery, and iconoclastic photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank says while preparing to be interviewed in 1984; the scene is shown in Laura Israel’s new documentary, Don’t Blink — Robert Frank. “I’d like to walk out of the fucking frame,” he adds, then does just that. But in Don’t Blink, Frank finds himself walking once more into the frame as Israel, his longtime film editor, attempts to get him to open up about his life and career. Born in Zurich in 1924, Frank immigrated to the United States in 1947, became a fashion photographer, and had his artistic breakthrough in 1958 with the publication of the controversial photo book The Americans, which captured people unawares from all over the country, using no captions, just image, to get his point across. (In 2009, “The Americans”) was installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in addition to a gallery show of related photographs at Pace/McGill.) In the film, Frank does talk about his past and present, discussing his time with such Beats as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Peter Orlovsky, which he displayed in the 1959 film Pull My Daisy, narrated by an improvising Kerouac and codirected by Alfred Leslie; touching on the tragic early deaths of his son and daughter; sharing details about his parents, including his father, whose hobby was photography; hanging out with his wife, fellow artist June Leaf; and delving into such influences as Walker Evans and his creative process, which is not exactly complex. “Usually the first picture is the best one. Make sure they’re smiling, say cheese,” Frank says with a laugh, then adds, “The main thing is get it over, quick.” Israel takes that advice to heart, trying to get what she can out of Frank before he changes his mind; at first he didn’t want to participate in the film at all, but once he went with it, he also made sure to playfully battle with Israel over who was really in control.

Robert Frank has fun with some of his old films in DON’T BLINK

Israel (Windfall) does not tell Frank’s story chronologically but instead relies on a kind of thematic wandering through his life, intercutting old lectures, interviews, home movies, and photographs with clips from such Frank films as Conversations in Vermont, About Me: A Musical, Energy and How to Get It, Candy Mountain, One Hour, and Paper Route. Israel spends the most time on Cocksucker Blues, an unreleased work about the Rolling Stones on tour in 1972 (and about which Mick Jagger told Frank, “It’s a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again”), and Me and My Brother, which focuses on Julius Orlovsky, Peter Orlovsky’s brother, who suddenly awakened from a catatonic state and had some fascinating things to say. Just as Frank’s films went back and forth between color and black-and-white and avoided conventional storytelling methods, Israel does the same with Don’t Blink, using offbeat angles, also switching between color and black-and-white, and incorporating other deft touches that lend insight to Frank, who is now ninety-one and still has disheveled hair, and his work, especially when he’s taking Polaroids and scratching and painting on the back of the pictures. (Alex Bingham served as both editor and art director, while the cinematography is by Lisa Rinzler.) The film’s fierce soundtrack meshes well with Frank’s independent streak, with songs by the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, the Mekons, New Order, the Kills, Yo La Tengo, Patti Smith, Johnny Thunders, the White Stripes, and Tom Waits, many of whom Israel has made music videos for. Perhaps at the heart of Frank’s methodology is what he calls “spontaneous intuition,” something that works for both life and art and helps propel Israel’s warmhearted but never worshipful documentary; their camaraderie is evident in nearly every frame. Don’t Blink — Robert Frank is screening January 7 at 7:30, presented by MoMA’s PopRally programming for ages twenty-one and older, and will be followed by a conversation with MoMA curator Josh Siegel, producer Melinda Shopsin, editor Alex Bingham, and Israel, as well as a reception with wine, beer and music; it is also part of MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders,” which consists of films the institution believes will stand the test of time; the festival continues through January 12 with such other favorites as Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train Busan, and Johnnie To’s Three.

DIANE ARBUS: IN THE BEGINNING

Diane Arbus, Lady on a bus, N.Y.C., gelatin silver print, 1957 (© The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC. All Rights Reserved)

The Met Breuer
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 27, suggested admission $12-$25
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

The Met Breuer doesn’t just invite visitors into the early work of photographer Diane Arbus in the sensational show “diane arbus: in the beginning.” It ingeniously immerses them in the world that so attracted the New York City artist in her formative years, allowing museumgoers to make their own path through the people she encountered. “We’re looking at 1956 to 1962, made primarily in New York City, from Times Square to Coney Island to the Lower East Side, the same terrain that so many other artists of the era covered, offer[ing] this artist a new way of understanding who we are and who we might be. You feel the authentic quality of each of the individuals,” curator Jeff Rosenheim says in a Met Breuer video. “She seems to be able to separate the individual from the society. That is the power of a great Diane Arbus picture, that incessant need to know, and to record, and to follow her own eyes to wherever it took her, is defining of her career.” Consisting of more than one hundred works, most of which have never been shown publicly before and were printed by Arbus herself, the exhibition features photographs mounted on two sides of large rectangular stanchions arranged in rows in the gallery, allowing people to weave in and around Arbus’s fascinating landscape. Born in 1923 in New York City, Arbus got her first camera from her husband in 1941. (She was married for twenty-eight years to actor and photographer Allan Arbus, best known for playing psychiatrist Sidney Freedman on the M*A*S*H television series.) By the mid-to-late fifties, Arbus was documenting a wide variety of men, women, and children primarily in New York City as well as sideshow performers in Palisades Park, strippers in Atlantic City, and female impersonators on Long Island. One of her favorite haunts was Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus, where she photographed freaks, but none of her pictures were exploitative.

“I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photograph them,” she said. She also noted, “For me the subject of the picture is always more important that the picture. And more complicated.” Most of her subjects were well aware they were being photographed and posed for the camera, although some were caught unaware. In “Miss Stormé de Larverie, the Lady Who Appears to Be a Gentleman, N.Y.C. 1961,” an elegant trans person, cigarette in hand, sits confidently on a park bench. In “Miss Makrina, a Russian Midget, in her kitchen, N.Y.C. 1959,” a small woman pauses while cleaning. In “Kid in a hooded jacket aiming a gun, N.Y.C. 1957,” a child in a winter coat points a gun at the camera. In “Seated female impersonator with arm crossed on her bare chest, N.Y.C. 1960,” the subject is topless, his anatomy clashing with his makeup and hairstyle. And in “A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970,” a man hunches over, towering above his parents in their living room. There are also photos of a tattooed man, the Human Pincushion, scenes from movies, a family relaxing on their expansive lawn, a trapeze act, and an old lady in a hospital bed nearing her last breath. In the early 1960s, Arbus would switch to a 2¼-inch square-format Rolleiflex camera, continuing to capture a different side of America, but “in the beginning” wonderfully reveals where it all started. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,” Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, famously said. The same can be said for this must-experience exhibit.

MOVIE IN MY HEAD: BRUCE CONNER AND BEYOND

Bruce Conners A MOVIE is centerpiece of film exhibition at MoMA

Bruce Conner’s A MOVIE is centerpiece of revelatory film exhibition and retrospective at MoMA

MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
September 16-30
Tickets: $12, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

I first saw Bruce Conner’s seminal film A Movie in college, when I was studying with Amos Vogel, the Austrian-born founder of Cinema 16 and cofounder of the New York Film Festival. Conner’s 1958 twelve-minute marvel consists solely of found black-and-white footage edited into a fascinating tale of life on Earth in the post-WWII era, with an epic, boisterous soundtrack. “One of the most original works of the international film avant-garde, this is a pessimistic comedy of the human condition, consisting of executions, catastrophes, mishaps, accidents, and stubborn feats of ridiculous daring, magically compiled from jungle movies, calendar art, Academy leaders, cowboy films, cartoons, documentaries, and newsreels,” Vogel wrote in his 1974 book, Film as a Subversive Art, placing the film in his section about death. “Amidst initial amusement and seeming confusion, an increasingly dark social statement emerges which profoundly disturbs us on a subconscious level. . . . The entire film is a hymn to creative montage.” Watching A Movie can be a transformative experience; it was for me, showing me a whole new purpose behind filmmaking and leading me to further study cinema at NYU. So it’s fitting that A Movie is the first thing you see upon entering the MoMA exhibition “Bruce Conner: It’s All True,” a revelatory survey of Conner’s fifty-year career as a visual artist, including drawing, sculpture, photography, collage, photograms, performance, and, of course, film, continuing through October 2. It’s a stunning retrospective that ranges from his early “Ratbastard” hanging constructions to his obsession with the mushroom cloud and the atomic bomb, from his creepy “Child” sculpture to his punk-rock photographs for the music magazine Search and Destroy, from collages using found print materials to spectacularly detailed inkblot drawings, from his ghostly photograms using his own body to buttons declaring, “I Am Not Bruce Conner.” But at the center of it all are Conner’s films, scattered throughout the exhibition but also screening in the exciting film program “Movie in My Head: Bruce Conner and Beyond,” which runs September 16-30 and consists of nearly all of Conner’s cinematic output seen alongside work by many of his contemporaries.

Toni Basil gets all groovy in Bruce Conner’s dazzling short film, BREAKAWAY, a precursor to the MTV video

A leading counterculture figure, Conner was born and raised in Kansas and spent most of his life in San Francisco, where he met up with the Beats, hippies, and punks; he died in 2008 at the age of seventy-five, leaving behind a legacy of cutting-edge short films that offer a unique look at America and its values, commenting on consumerism, war, religion, pop culture, and film itself — the mechanics of the medium, including the countdown leader and the physical filmstrips themselves, were often visible and part of the subject matter — in precisely edited works embedded with subliminal messages and featuring surprising soundtracks to match. “In my opinion, Bruce Conner is the most important artist of the twentieth century,” his friend, collaborator, and fellow native Kansan Dennis Hopper said. Hopper was on the set of Conner’s Breakaway with actor Dean Stockwell; Conner honored Hopper with the three-volume work “The Dennis Hopper One Man Show,” twenty-six collage etchings actually made by Conner. The MoMA exhibition includes that as well as Hopper’s photograph “Bruce Conner’s Physical Services” and Conner’s 1993 collage “Bruce Conner Disguised as Dennis Hopper Disguised as Bruce Conner at the Dennis Hopper One Man Show.” That’s all part of Conner’s modus operandi, where the art is more important than the artist, even though his hand is so evident in his works (although his name is often not). Breakaway is a frenetic short in which Antonia Basilotta, aka Toni Basil (later of “Mickey” fame), dances wildly in various black-and-white costumes (and naked) as Conner’s handheld camera keeps pace. Conner, considered by some (but not him) to be the father of MTV because of his editing style, also made videos for Devo (“Mongoloid”) and Brian Eno and David Byrne (“Mea Culpa,” “America Is Waiting”) in addition to Cosmic Ray, set to Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” Conner made two versions of Looking for Mushrooms, about his time in Mexico (and his search for psychedelic fungi), one silent, a later edit boasting the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Two of his most political works are Report, which incorporates the Zapruder footage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with clips from advertising and industry films, and Crossroads, in which he repurposes the military’s Operation Crossroads film about the atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. And in 2008’s Easter Morning, Conner’s last completed major film, he reworks his 1966 Easter Morning Raga, creating a hypnotic compilation of abstract Kodachrome shots of nature set to Terry Riley’s “In C.”

CROSSROADS explores the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests, which fascinated Bruce Conner

“Movie in My Head: Bruce Conner and Beyond” begins with “Opening Night,” featuring A Movie and Conner’s Marilyn Times Five, which combines Marilyn Monroe’s performance of “I’m Through with Love” from Some Like It Hot with existing porn shots of a Marilyn look-alike, and Crossroads, introduced by chief curator Stuart Comer. Each program starts off with Conner’s Ten Second Film, a commissioned trailer for the 1965 New York Film Festival, under the leadership of Vogel, that was ultimately rejected for being too experimental. The series is arranged into eleven programs that encompass nearly all of Conner’s films along with works by Fernand Léger, Joseph Cornell, Carolee Schneeman, Christian Barclay, Stan Vanderbeek, William S. Burroughs, Robert Frank, Wallace Berman, Ron Rice, Cauleen Smith, Bruce Baillie, and others. On September 28, “Dreamland: An Evening with Peggy Ahwesh and Julie Murray,” the two filmmakers will show their own works along with Conner’s Take the 5:10 to Dreamland and Valse Triste, and on September 30, Michelle Silva of the Conner Family Trust will present “Revisitations,” consisting of rare and unfinished Conner films, shorts by George Kuchar and Ben Van Meter, and a talk with Brooklyn-based artist and archivist Andrew Lampert. The title of the MoMA series is taken from a 2003 interview in which artist Doug Aitken sat down with Conner for the nonprofit group Creative Time: “One of the reasons I made A Movie was because it’s what I wanted to see happen in film. Ever since I was fifteen years old, I’d been watching movies and thinking of ways to play with their storylines. For instance, I would imagine taking a backlit shot of Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus walking through a doorway and overlaying it with something like the final words from King Kong: ‘Beauty killed the beast.’ Then I’d imagine the next shot being something else entirely using different sound. Basically for years, I’d been playing with bits and pieces of different films in my head, and I kept assembling and reassembling this immense movie using pictures and sounds and music from all sorts of things. I’d been waiting for someone to come up with a movie like this. And nobody did.” So Conner did, as this MoMA exhibition and film series so effectively display.

DON’T BLINK — ROBERT FRANK

Robert Frank takes a unique look at his life and career in documentary made by his longtime editor

DON’T BLINK — ROBERT FRANK (Laura Israel, 2015)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, July 13
212-727-8110
www.dontblinkrobertfrank.com
filmforum.org

Robert Frank has fun with some of his old films in DON’T BLINK

Israel (Windfall) does not tell Frank’s story chronologically but instead relies on a kind of thematic wandering through his life, intercutting old lectures, interviews, home movies, and photographs with clips from such Frank films as Conversations in Vermont, About Me: A Musical, Energy and How to Get It, Candy Mountain, One Hour, and Paper Route. Israel spends the most time on Cocksucker Blues, an unreleased work about the Rolling Stones on tour in 1972 (and about which Mick Jagger told Frank, “It’s a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again”), and Me and My Brother, which focuses on Julius Orlovsky, Peter Orlovsky’s brother, who suddenly awakened from a catatonic state and had some fascinating things to say. Just as Frank’s films went back and forth between color and black-and-white and avoided conventional storytelling methods, Israel does the same with Don’t Blink, using offbeat angles, also switching between color and black-and-white, and incorporating other deft touches that lend insight to Frank, who is now ninety-one and still has disheveled hair, and his work, especially when he’s taking Polaroids and scratching and painting on the back of the pictures. (Alex Bingham served as both editor and art director, while the cinematography is by Lisa Rinzler.) The film’s fierce soundtrack meshes well with Frank’s independent streak, with songs by the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, the Mekons, New Order, the Kills, Yo La Tengo, Patti Smith, Johnny Thunders, the White Stripes, and Tom Waits, many of whom Israel has made music videos for. Perhaps at the heart of Frank’s methodology is what he calls “spontaneous intuition,” something that works for both life and art and helps propel Israel’s warmhearted but never worshipful documentary; their camaraderie is evident in nearly every frame. Don’t Blink — Robert Frank opens July 13 at Film Forum, with Israel participating in Q&As following the 8:00 screening on July 13 with author Nicholas Dawidoff, after the 8:00 screening on July 15 with Bingham, Rinzler, and producer Melinda Shopsin, and at the 4:15 show on July 17 with Ed Lachman, the award-winning DP who has shot several Todd Haynes films and is credited with additional camera on Don’t Blink. And as a bonus, Film Forum will be showing the rarely screened Cocksucker Blues at 9:50 on July 20 and 21. (Don’t Blink also serves as excellent preparation for the upcoming BAMcinématek survey “The Films of Robert Frank,” which consists of twenty-five works by Frank screened on Thursday nights August 4 through September 22.)

DOC NYC SHORT LIST: FINDING VIVIAN MAIER

Documentary turns the camera on mysterious street photographer Vivian Maier (photo by Vivian Maier / courtesy of the Maloof Collection)

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER (John Maloof & Charlie Siskel, 2013)
Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas
260 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Friday, November 14, 12:30, and Saturday, November 15, 12 noon
Series runs November 13-20
www.docnyc.net
www.findingvivianmaier.com

By their very nature, street photographers take pictures of anonymous individuals, capturing a moment in time in which viewers can fill in their own details. In the wonderful documentary Finding Vivian Maier, codirectors John Maloof and Charlie Siskel turn the lens around on a street photographer herself, attempting to fill in the details of the curious life and times of Vivian Maier, about whom very little was known. “I find the mystery of it more interesting than her work itself,” says one woman for whom Vivian Maier served as a nanny decades earlier. “I’d love to know more about this person, and I don’t think you can do that through her work.” In 2007, while looking for historical photos for a book on the Portage Park section of Chicago, Maloof purchased a box of negatives at an auction. Upon discovering that they were high-quality, museum-worthy photographs, he set off on a mission to learn more about the photographer. Playing detective — while also developing hundreds of rolls of film, with thousands more to go — Maloof meets with men and women who knew Maier as an oddball, hoarding nanny who went everywhere with her camera and shared little, if anything, about her personal life. “I’m the mystery woman,” Maier says in a color home movie. Her former employers and charges, including talk-show host Phil Donahue, debate her background, the spelling and pronunciation of her name, her accent, and how she might have felt about a documentary delving into her secretive life.

Street photographer Vivian Maier captured a unique view of the world in more than 100,000 pictures (Vivian Maier / courtesy of the Maloof Collection)

Street photographer Vivian Maier captured a unique view of the world in more than 100,000 pictures (photo by Vivian Maier / courtesy of the Maloof Collection)

Maloof also discusses Maier’s work with such major photographers as Joel Meyerowitz and Mary Ellen Mark. “Had she made herself known, she would have become a famous photographer. Something was wrong. . . . A piece of the puzzle is missing,” Mark says while comparing Maier’s work to such legends as Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, and Diane Arbus. Maloof tries to complete what becomes an ever-more-fascinating puzzle in this extremely enjoyable documentary that gets very serious as he finds out more about the mystery woman who is now considered an important twentieth-century artist. Finding Vivian Maier also has an intriguing pedigree; codirector and producer Siskel (Religulous) is executive producer of Comedy Central’s Tosh.0, executive producer Jeff Garlin (I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With) is a comedian who played Larry David’s best friend and agent on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Kickstarter contributor and interviewee Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs, Lie to Me) is an Oscar-nominated actor who collects Maier’s work. Maloof and Siskel will be on hand when Finding Vivian Maier is presented November 14 & 15 at Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas in the Short List section of the 2014 DOC NYC festival, which runs November 13-20 and consists of more than 150 documentaries being shown at Bow Tie, the IFC Center, and the SVA Theatre. To experience Maier’s work in person, be sure to check out the photography exhibit “Vivian Maier: In Her Own Hands,” continuing at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Midtown through December 6.

THE AIPAD PHOTOGRAPHY SHOW 2014

Gyorgy Kepes, “Juliet with Peacock Feathers,” vintage gelatin silver print, 1939 (photo courtesy James Hyman Fine Art and Photographs)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. between 66th & 67th Sts.
April 10-13, one-day pass $30, four-day pass $50
www.aipad.com

Formed in 1979, the Association of International Photography Art Dealers is, per its mission statement, “dedicated to creating and maintaining high standards in the business of exhibiting, buying, and selling photographs as art.” The next year, AIPAD organized its inaugural AIPAD Photography Show; the 2014 edition will be held April 10-13 at the Park Avenue Armory, preceded on April 9 by a gala benefit for Her Justice, a nonprofit consisting of lawyers and law firms that help facilitate life-changing results for women facing poverty and abuse. The fair features more than eighty galleries from around the world exhibiting solo, group, and thematic displays; you’ll find works by Stan Douglas, Philip diCorcia, Thomas Ruff, and James Welling at David Zwirner; Richard Renaldi at Bonni Benrubi; William Eggleston’s Memphis series at Catherine Edelman; Jim Campbell at Bryce Wolkowitz; Robert Heinecken at Robert Koch and Stephen Daiter (as well as a terrific show at MoMA), Jen Davis at Lee Marks; Robert Frank’s Peruvian images at Alan Klotz; Matthew Brandt’s “Dust” at Yossi Milo; Debbie Grossman’s “My Pie Town” at Julie Saul; Zhang Bing at 798; Richard Misrach at Etherton; Teikoh Shiotani at Taka Ishii; Charles Marville at Charles Isaacs, Hans B. Kraus Jr., and Robert Koch (in addition to a show at the Met); and Kikuji Kawada at Photo Gallery International and L. Parker Stephenson.

Elinor Carucci will be signing copies of her new book at AIPAD show

Among those signing books at various times are Adrienne Aurichio at Monroe (The Beatles: Six Days That Changed the World), Jerry Uelsmann at Scheinbaum & Russek (Uelsmann Untitled: A Retrospective), Andy Freeberg at Kopeikin (Art Fare), Elinor Carucci at Edwynn Houk (Mother), John Cyr at Verve (Developer Trays), and Renaldi at Bonni Benrubi (Touching Strangers). There will be also be four panel discussions on Saturday around the corner at Hunter College, beginning with “The Deciders: Curating Photography” at 10:00 and continuing with “LGBTQ/Photography” at noon, “Perspectives on Collecting” at 2:00, and a screening of Cheryl Dunn’s Everybody Street at 4:00, followed by a talk with Dunn, Jill Freedman, Max Kozloff, and Jeff Mermelstein.

PETER ORLOVSKY MEMORIAL READING

The Poetry Project will honor the life and work of Peter Orlovsky, longtime partner of Allen Ginsberg, at free event at the Poetry Project on September 22 (photo by Ludwig Urnig)

The Poetry Project, St. Marks Church
131 East Tenth St. at Second Ave.
Wednesday, September 22, free, 8:00
212-674-0910
www.poetryproject.org

On May 30, Beat Generationer Peter Orlovsky died of lung cancer at the age of seventy-six. Although most well known as the longtime on-and-off partner of Allen Ginsberg, New York City native Orlovsky was a poet in his own right. “Make my grave shape of heart so like a flower be free aired & handsome felt, / Grave root pillow, tung up from grave & wiggle at blown up clowd,” he wrote in 1958’s “Snail Poem.” Orlovsky also taught at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, was an army medic in the Korean War, and appeared in several Robert Frank films, including the classic short PULL MY DAISY and ME AND MY BROTHER, which dealt with Peter’s mentally troubled brother, Julius. On September 22, a large group of friends and admirers will gather at the Poetry Project to pay tribute to Orlovsky, reading from such works as CLEAN ASSHOLE POEMS AND SMILING VEGETABLE SONGS, STRAIGHT HEARTS’ DELIGHT: LOVE POEMS AND SELECTED LETTERS, and LEPERS CRY; among those scheduled to participate in the free event are Chuck Lief, Philip Glass, Ed Sanders, Steven Taylor, Hal Willner, Janine Pommy Vega, Andy Clausen, Patti Smith, Anne Waldman, Gordon Ball, Rosebud Pettet, Simon Pettet, Bill Morgan, Anselm Berrigan, and John Godfrey.