Miles and Iain Sinclair discuss Allen Ginsberg’s impact on the British counterculture. The conversation will be followed by a screening of Sinclair’s film Ah, Sunflower and Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion, as well as a sequence of previously unseen footage of Allen shot by Peter Whitehead (courtesy of The Whitehead Estate).
Image source: The Peter Whitehead Archive
Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £12 [£10 concessions]
The Ginsberg In London exhibition and events programme is proudly supported by The Wire magazine.
Miles, countercultural historian, biographer and beat journalist par excellence, was Ginsberg's closest British friend from their first meeting in 1965. He counts his epic biography of the poet as the first ‘proper book’ amongst the 80 plus he has published. In the early '70s he relocated to Ginsberg’s farm in upstate New York to help archive the poet’s vast collection of taped performances, lived with him in a commune in Berkeley and remained his usual London host up until his death.
In 1967, poet and author Iain Sinclair was commissioned to make a 16mm colour-film about Ginsberg's visit to London. The film, Ah! Sunflower witnesses the Hyde Park Dope Rally, the Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation at the Roundhouse and Allen in repose. The story of the filming with its madcap drives, political arguments, technical disasters and human comedy - was subsequently told in Iain's book The Kodak Mantra Diaries featuring interviews with Allen, RD Laing - and Miles.
The conversation will be followed by a screening of Ah! Sunflower and Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion film of the 1965 poetry readings at The Royal Albert Hall and a sequence of previously unseen footage of Allen shot by Peter Whitehead (courtesy of the Whitehead Estate)
Miles is an English author widely known for his participation in and writing on the subjects of London counterculture. He is the author of over seventy books and his work has regularly appeared in many newspapers, magazines and journals. In the 1960s, he was co-owner of the Indica Book Shop and Gallery where Lennon met Yoko and helped start the independent newspaper International Times. A lifelong friend of Ginsberg, he wrote the first major biography of the poet - along with books on William Burroughs, The Beat Hotel, Charles Bukowksi, The Beatles, Paul McCartney and David Bowie amongst many others.
Iain Sinclair is a critically-acclaimed poet, writer, flaneur, metropolitan prophet, urban shaman and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, recently within the influences of psychogeography. His early poetry in the 1960s was self-published, and he worked as a teacher and labourer while researching occult aspects of the city's past. He remains connected with the British avant garde poetry scene and has written a multitude of fiction, poems, essays, criticism and digressions including The Kodak Mantra Diaries, a recollection of the film Ah Sunflower! he made about Ginsberg in London in 1967