Blah Blog Blah has a post up about Allen Ginsberg's old apartment in New York City. The photos in the post aren't much to look at but the words that accompany them are those of a former neighbor and intimate observer.
We didn't bother with each other much, but he'd take photos of my shirtless carpenter boyfriend when he'd use the fire escape for an impromptu workshop. You never knew who'd be gathered around his kitchen table: a PBS film crew, a minion of men with black garb and payis chanting Sabbath prayers, etc.
Get a little more about Ginsberg's old homes here and here.
Blah Blog Blah's post got me to thinking about the recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Art featuring Ginsberg's photographs from the Beat era.
Ginsberg's photographs are far more than historical documents. The same qualities that governed his poetry -- intense observation of the world, deep appreciation for the beauty of the vernacular, and faith in intuitive expression -- also permeate his photographs. Drawing on the most common form of photography, the snapshot, he created spontaneous, uninhibited pictures of ordinary events to celebrate and preserve what he called "the sacredness of the moment."
I love the captions that Ginsberg added to the photographs.

[from 1953] © 2010 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.
Myself seen by William Burroughs, Kodak Retina new-bought 2'd hand from Bowery hock-shop, our apartment roof Lower East Side between Avenues B & C, Tompkins Park trees under new antennae.
Hey Jack Kerouac...

[from 1953] © 2010 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.
Jack Kerouac wandering along East 7th Street after visiting Burroughs at our pad, passing statue of Congressman Samuel "Sunset" Cox, "The Letter-Carrier's Friend" in Tompkins Square toward corner of Avenue A, Lower East Side; he's making a Dostoyevsky mad-face or Russian basso be-bop Om, first walking around the neighborhood, then involved with The Subterraneans, pencils & notebook in wool shirt-pockets, Fall 1953, Manhattan.
This one ties in just right with the old apartment story.

[from 1984] © 2010 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.
I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window, one day recognized my own world the familiar background, a giant wet brick-walled undersea Atlantis garden, waving ailanthus ("stinkweed") "Trees of Heaven," with chimney pots along Avenue A topped by Stuyvesant Town apartments' upper floors two blocks distant on 14th Street, I focus'd on the raindrops along the clothesline. "Things are symbols of themselves," said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. New York City August 18, 1984
My mind is wild with the thoughts of the energy that filled the room while Ginsberg had his morning tea. Or even the energy the view from his apartment gave back.