NY Post Heralds NYC's John Giorno Explosion

A festival of art, writing, and performance by John Giorno has taken hold of the city of New York. "Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno" began on June 21 at sites across the city, and as New York Post's Barbara Hoffman writes, "Giorno radiates the serenity of someone who’s seen it all. He probably has." Let's pick p with the story from there:

“Over there, that was the heroin connection,” he says, pointing out a window at what’s now a gallery. “You’d find them on Sunday, guys shooting up in their cars. When the police came, they’d run into the old Prince Hotel. Sometimes, they’d jump into beds and hide under the covers!”

He was born in Brooklyn and went to James Madison High School, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg and before Bernie Sanders. At 14, told to “Go home and write a poem,” Giorno did, and found it “blissful.” He’s been writing ever since.

As a teenager, he went from bar to bar, just to see the artists and writers he worshiped: the San Remo, where Jack Kerouac hung out; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death (“Just to see his sweating head from behind was enough!”); the Cedar Tavern, watering hole of Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell.

And then he met Warhol.

It was 1962, and the fright-wigged artist was still getting the hang of his Bolex movie camera when he turned it on Giorno, fast asleep. Enter “Sleep,” a five-hour-plus B&W classic that will be screening at the Swiss Institute.

Giorno remembers Warhol as shy, gentle and hooked on speed, which he calls “Andy’s drug of choice. It made him fearless.” Only after Warhol was shot, in 1968, years after they’d split up, did Giorno see fear in his eyes.

It was another artist boyfriend, Robert Rauschenberg, who encouraged him to find new ways to make poetry — his own and other people’s — accessible. Like “Dial-a-Poem,” which bowed at MoMA in 1970: Call a number, and you’d hear a short recorded poem written by a list of artists that included everyone from Anderson to Frank Zappa — Giorno collaborators all.

Read more at New York Post