Left: Rirkrit Tiravanija, JG Reads, 2008, still from a black-and-white film in 16 mm, 10 hours 6 minutes. Right: John Giorno, LIFE IS A KILLER, 2008, pencil on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2.”

This is the 500th post on the new blog. I suppose after 500 posts,
I should stop calling it “the new blog.”

Here is a collection of snippets and links about and by one of the most significant voices in queer art and culture, John Giorno. The man is a living legend and a queer treasure. Nobody tells Giorno’s tale like he does himself. I’ll step aside.

From ArtForum:

For over forty years, the poet John Giorno has explored the media through which poetry is disseminated. In 1963, Giorno was the subject of Andy Warhol’s Sleep, and recently Giorno collaborated with Rirkrit Tiravanija on the latter’s work JG Reads, 2008, which was shown at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise November 22–December 20. An exhibition of Giorno’s artwork is on view at Almine Rech gallery in Paris January 10–February 25, 2009.

[ … ]

The greatness of the poet is to get the audience to connect with a poem. As poems grow older and enter the museum of history—the Modern Museum of Poetry, or what have you—they lose it. Take Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Being a gay man reading it the year it was written, 1956, he blew me away; it was the first time anyone had said words that related to my mind. Now, at every university across the country, I hear these kids say, “John, I’m glad it did it for you, but . . . ”

If you look back over the past thousand years, there were often never more than a hundred people who heard your poem. With Baudelaire, they’d only print his poems in one hundred books, and maybe three hundred people read them, and yet he was the most famous poet in France. Our generation changed things. Years ago, a young woman came up to Patti Smith and said, “Patti, I’m a poet. What should I do?” And Patti said, “If you want to have more than twenty people in the audience, get yourself a rock band.” The young woman turned out to be Chan Marshall of Cat Power. I think that’s happened to countless people: Jim Carroll, Lou Reed, Tom Waits; it’s that Pop thing of connecting to a large audience.

From The Guardian:

My 15 minutes

Our interviews with Warhol’s friends and collaborators continue with John Giorno, 65, poet, Aids activist, friend and confidant of Warhol and subject of his film, Sleep. Interviews by Catherine Morrison

I was a kid in my early 20s, working as a stockbroker. I was living this life where I would see Andy every night, get drunk and go into work with a hangover every morning. The stock market opened at 10 and closed at three. By quarter to three I would be waiting at the door, dying to get home so I could have a nap before I met Andy. I slept all the time – when he called to ask what I was doing he would say,“Let me guess, sleeping?”

[ … ]

He didn’t really know what he was doing; it was his first movie. We made it with a 16mm Bolex in my apartment but had to reshoot it a month later. The film jumped every 20 seconds as Andy rewound it. The second shoot was more successful but he didn’t know what to do with it for almost a year.

The news that Warhol had made a movie triggered massive amounts of publicity. It was absurd – he was on the cover of Film Culture and Harper’s Bazaar before the movie was finished! In the end, 99% of the footage didn’t get used; he just looped together a few shots and it came out six hours long.

From The Leslie Lohman Gay Art Foundation:

An interview with John Giorno

By Bill DeNoyelles

Part 1: Subduing the Demons in America

John Giorno remains a fierce, independent voice in American Gay Culture. His work as a poet, performer, activist and fundraiser spans over four decades. Without any loss of his manic energy Giorno continues to champion the work of friends like Andy Warhol, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Unrepentant and radical, he displays remarkable insight into the turmoil of the sixties, the explosive sexual jubilation of the seventies and the viral devastation of the eighties. A practicing Tibetan Buddhist in the Nyingma tradition since 1971, John Giorno is meditation in action. His AIDS Treatment Project of the 1980’s delivered hard cash to those suffering and in need–directly, without middleman or politics. If you were sick and needed the cash, he gave it to you. He continues this work today, setting up endowments for those who are seriously ill with little or no resources. Traveling worldwide Giorno continues to perform his poetry for new generations introducing works that honor gone friends while revealing outlaw history.

Part 2: Money, School and Drugs

“I’m a gay man and a poet. The big influences on me were other poets and writers. To see what William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg did with their work in the context of being gay and explicit was an eye opener. I was in the art world where Robert Raushenberg or Andy [Warhol] would never allow a gay image in their work– ever! Andy did it secretly with The Cock Book. They consciously were not gay because they didn’t want to ruin their lives. The last thing they needed was the big problem of a dick in a painting and all the sudden they get branded as a gay artist.

[ … ]

“I thought that it was heroic to be gay in your work. I’m not worrying about losing the sale of a painting or the critics. I’m not a painter I’m a poet. So it was a heroic action, a heroic stance like going into battle not caring if you got killed because your intention was to do so. My reaction against all those artists was something that propelled me into being gay in my work.

Part 6: Dial A Poem

“What happened was that Dial-A-Poem became hugely successful. The idea of an LP was a natural progression, keeping in mind the concept of a new audience for poetry. I couldn’t get anyone to produce it. In those years the record companies were dumping money out of their offices, giving it to anybody who wanted to produce a record. Even though I was sort of famous I couldn’t convince any of them to do poetry. It was not rock n’ roll. One day I get a phone call from a guy named John Hart, who was the vice president of the Record Club of America, saying ‘We would like you to make a selection for one of our months.’ I couldn’t believe it! I had already given up on the idea. That became the first record that came out in 1972.

“The sound poems in 1965 were the first real major things I had done. It was also happening at a time when other friends of mine were musicians like Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. People who used tapes and tape loops. They were all young and nobody was famous yet. They were part of this extended art and poetry scene. I had my eye on them since I was working with loops. I was looking at what they were doing in comparison even though it was a totally different world than mine.

Part 8: Kissing, Intimacy and Affection

“Something happened in America in the seventies that lasted until around 1980. It began to end when people began dying of AIDS which was 1981-’82, around there. There was a sexual freedom that existed among men that was truly unique. We know all the givens–The Village People, Studio 54, The Mineshaft, dissolving bad and good, dissolving all these concepts and liberating to levels that had never been achieved before.

[ ... ]

“One was incredibly depressed in the early to mid eighties because of the devastation of AIDS. In 1984 I started to deal with it by my starting The AIDS Treatment Project out of this depression. In the spring of 1980 I had met a former lover who told me his roommate died so suddenly, horribly and fast. I realized in those early years that what people with AIDS needed most was money. They were getting sick, losing their jobs and apartments. People would come home from the hospital to find their furniture out on the street. Week after week I’d hear this.

[ ... ]

“It still goes on today. It’s changed, it’s shifted into people with medical problems. Often poets, artists or people with little money or resources who are like 50 years old and suddenly have a stroke. I still work at it everyday. I get asked by somebody to help and we get a little bit of money and we give a grant. Because we’re not-for-profit we can create a fund and their friends can give money easily. We do that for anybody. It was not consciously that I did this. It came out of the despair of what was happening to mostly gay men.”

Part 1: Subduing the Demons in America
Part 2: Money, School and Drug
Part 3: Balling Buddha
Part 4: Up Against the Wall
Part 5: The Process
Part 6: Dial A Poem
Part 7: Grasping At Emptiness
Part 8: Kissing, Intimacy and Affection
Pornographic Poem/John Giorno

From Art MoCo: Welcoming the Flowers is a set of 18 screenprinted poems
by John Giorno