The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg

NEW YORK TIMES
The film at 85 minutes is amazing. The extras at over 6.5 hours are incredible. This DVD set is a source of all things Beat that I will be looking back at for years. It is beautifully arranged so that you can watch many extras on the same disc as the feature and also watch 35 interviews on Disc 2 including so many friends of Allen who also happened and happen to be cultural phenomenon's in their own right including Baez, Beck, Bono, Brakhage, Burroughs, Depp, Glass, Hoffman, Kesey, Leary, McCartney, Sonic Youth, Ono, Patti Smith, Hunter S. Thompson, Andy Warhol and so many more!

Also, Allen reads poetry to the camera for over 30 minutes, talks with Neal Cassidy in the basement of City Light in 1965 for almost 20 minutes, and reminisces with William Burroughs in 1984 at Naropa in Boulder, CO.

I can go on and on but this heartfelt collection made me want to read more of Ginsberg's poetry and remember a man who was truly a pacifist and helped make the world a...

Kaddish & cosmos
There are two features of Ginsberg's personality that come through over and over in this intriguing documentary: he was a deeply wounded man, and he was a deeply lovable one. The two were obviously connected: Ginsberg's wounds made him both vulnerable and compassionate. They could also make him rage against a world that condoned war and injustice, and all of these sides of him come through in his poetry.

Ginsberg's ur-wound was the tragedy of his mother, a remarkable woman who sadly suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, was in and out of institutions during Ginsberg's youth, and finally died in one. As a boy, Ginsberg was frequently charged with her care. As his stepmother says in the film, he was exposed to way too much for a young boy to take in. His feelings of helplessness, frustration, impatience, love, guilt, and fear in the face of his mom's illness and increasingly bizarre behavior marked him for life. Thankfully, his relationship with his father Louis, a...

A 2013 Re-Release Of the Classic Ginsberg Documentary: Same Movie, Same Features As 2007 2-Disc Set
This DVD release of "The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg" might catch your eye if you are a fan of the poet and revolutionary. The film itself premiered as part of the PBS American Masters series in 1994 after its run on the festival circuit in 1993. It has been released in DVD form on different occasions, most recently in 2007 to align with the fiftieth anniversary of "Howl." That 2 disc set combined both the movie feature with over six hours (yes, six) of Bonus features. That edition and the previous ones have been out of print for some time, so Docurama is picking up the mantle and re-releasing the picture. I mention all of this to clarify that this is NOT a new title. You may have seen it and you may already own it. This release is exactly the same in content as the 2007 DVD, so please do not double dip. If, however, you new to the Ginsberg phenomenon or have not seen the movie than it is an easy recommendation.

At 84 minutes, the movie itself is but a snap...

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