Newly discovered photo of Allen Ginsberg (sans beard), Cherry Valley NY, 1980. By Cliff Fyman.

(via Steve Silberman)

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the passing of poet Lenore Kandel, a SF beat and anarchist who provoked censorship furor with her graphic poetry compilation The Love Book:

Lenore Kandel hung out with Beat poets and was immortalized by Jack Kerouac, wrote a book of love poetry banned as obscene and seized by police, and believed in communal living, anarchic street theater, belly dancing, and all things beautiful.

Ms. Kandel, a lyric poet and one of the shining lights of San Francisco’s famous counterculture of the ‘60s, died on Oct. 18 in San Francisco. She was 77 and had been diagnosed with lung cancer two weeks earlier.

“I met Lenore in 1965 at a citywide meeting of artists opposed to the war in Vietnam,” said actor Peter Coyote. “Lenore was physically beautiful and physically commanding. She had this voluptuous plumpness about her and an absolute serenity.”

(Lenore Kandel via Arthur Magazine)

 
Nat Finkelstein, “court photographer” from ‘64 to ‘67 for Andy Warhol‘s Factory has died at his home in Shandaken, New York:

Mr. Finkelstein created spontaneous portraits not only of Factory regulars like Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga but also of the artists and celebrities who drifted in and out of the Warhol orbit.  He was on hand when Warhol presented Bob Dylan with one of his Elvis ?

 
In 1963, City Lights published The Yage Letters, the correspondence between William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, which charts, among other things, the former’s efforts to score the possibly “soul-rebooting” hallucinogenic, Ayahuasca (Yage), in Mexico and Brazil.  The footage below is culled from Ayahuasca, a Burroughs-narrated documentary which I think—until someone corrects me—exists only in fragments.  Even so, it’s always great to hear Burroughs’ voice.  It’s up there with Werner Herzog’s!

 
(via Arthur)