Here at "Politics, Culture, and Other Wastes of Time," we don't normally denote entires about something that's in "The New York Times." For one, because they don't have a comics section, it is not my favorite newspaper though it is more satisfying than "The Reidsville Review" (pardon the in-joke). Secondly, their web site is only available to those who are willing to pay a stippen.
Nevertheless, they did mention my friend Les Blank, a documentary filmmaker in Berkeley, Cal., a few weeks back.
And, the paper's July 24 edition featured a "Critic's Choice: New DVDs" column by Dave Kehr. One of Kehr's choices is a film that was showing when I was in Montreal as a young man, back in 1994, entitled "The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg."
Kehr states that director Jerry Aronson has 'augmented a crisp, straightforward documentary portrait of the poet with six hours of extra material for this double-disc release."
Kehr said the film follows Ginsberg from his middle-class childhood in New Jersey through his breakthrough as a beat poet in the 1960s. The doc also explores Ginsberg's conversion to Buddhism and his political activities.
The film also includes footage of Ginsberg and Bob Dylan visiting Jack Kerouac's grave (Ginsberg has since died as well) and a 1965 reading with Neal Cassady at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.
(New Yorker Video, $34.95)
For those interested in Les Blank, who directed the brilliant 1982 doc "Burden of Dreams" about the making of Werner Herzog's German epic "Fitzcarraldo," which was filmed in the Amazon jungles of Peru, you can log on to Blank's web site:
Herzog's new film, "Rescue Dawn," which is based on an earlier doc that he made is showing nationwide this week. It opened at the Grandin Theatre in Roanoke, Va., on Friday, for those of you from my neck-of-the-woods.
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