Palm Beach Photographic Centre Will Host BEATITUDE: The Beat Festival

Fatima NeJame, president and chief executive officer of the Palm Beach Photographic Centre (PBPC), has announced a special fun and informative three-day festival augmenting the nonprofit organization's current major exhibition: BEATITUDE: The Beat Attitude – Photographs by Joey Tranchina.

Now to accompany this stunning exhibition of over 70 images and commanding enlargements of iconic culture-bending poets, activists, and artists of the Beat Generation, the Palm Beach Photographic Centre is hosting BEATITUDE: The Beat Festival, three days of FREE presentations and concerts featuring award-winning musicians and poets from New York to San Francisco celebrating all things “Beat”.

Monday, November 27

11:30 am

Exhibit introduction and walk-through with co-curators Dolores Lusitana (Project Director) and Dr. Anthony Bannon, author of the book Beatitude: The Beat Attitude (published by Steidl Verlag, with photographs by Joey Tranchina, and forward by Ed Sanders,). Also, guest artists' sale, and signing of books, CDs, posters, and more.

4:00 pm

Who is the Greatest Beat Poet of Them All?

An open classroom with culture critic Jeff Simon, Buffalo News Book Editor and four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.

7:30 pm

Live Concert

+ Bufflux: Tub Bunny Suite and Stuff, with Don Metz, concert guitarist and former director, North American Music Festival, and Michael Basinski, Sound Poet and former director, SUNY Buffalo Poetry  Collection. Performing works by Jackson Mac Low; Michael McClure, Basinski and Metz.

+ John Kruth, celebrated New York composer, writer, and polymath musician whom David Amram called “a high octane real thing, musician and writer,” performing O Yeah with Anthony Bannon, a conversation, with readings and instrumentals.

Tuesday, November 28

11:30 am

Live Concert

Rebekkah Palov of Carrier Band celebrated experimental sound and image artist, with The Planes (s) Extended—new sound state, live and YouTube, a tete-a-tete with prepared sound files performed via Rebekkah's custom software instrument.

3:00 pm

The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan: A Torch for Peace

Screening of 2009 film by and conversation with Teri McLuhan, award-winning filmmaker, documentarian, and nonfiction writer (Touch the Earth).

7:30 pm

Conversations

+ With Andrei Codrescu, poet, essayist, novelist, editor of Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Books & Ideas, filmmaker and National Public Radio commentator, who will talk about his friendships with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, and the New York School.

+ With artists who are children of famous fathers: Dick Blau, son of Herbert Blau, co-founder of the Actor's Workshop, San Francisco, and the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater; Peer Bode, son of Harold Bode, the inventor of the sound synthesizer; Teri McLuhan, daughter of Dr. Marshall McLuhan, media theorist, philosopher, literary critic, educator, writer (The Medium Is the Massage); and Anthony Bannon, son of Dr. Robert Bannon, visual scientist and inventor, Dartmouth Eye Institute and Department of Visual Science, American Optical Company.

Note: There will be an intermission between the two Conversations.

Wednesday, November 29

11:30 am

An Improvisational Attitude: How to Get There from Here?

A conversation between Anthony Bannon and Dick Blau, a Yale PhD with Harold Bloom, who presented a theater in his attic in Buffalo and created books about the Polish Polka and the Greek Romanae. 

4:00 pm

Live Concert

Peer Bode of Carrier Band, formerly chair of Expanded Media, School of Art and Design, SUNY Alfred, performing FLASHES OF LIGHT, which utilizes electro acoustical sound and video of Beat words and spirit as source for a new electronic sight and sound performance.

7:30 pm

An interview with Joey Tranchina conducted by Anthony Bannon, followed by an intermission.

8:30 pm

Live Performance

New York diva Pat Oleszko, who promises to make “a spectacle of herself and doesn't mind if the audience laughs.” She will perform BEATS/ME: A show and yell with pix and tricks, orchestrating the plunder and blunder of the banned book bozos.

To RSVP for BEATITUDE: The Beat Festival, please visit www.workshop.org.

About BEATITUDE: The Beat Attitude:

This collection of images taken in the 1960s and '70s by little-known poet/photographer/activist Joey Tranchina were stored away for nearly 50 years before being discovered by his son in 2018 and later shared with critic and art historian Dr. Anthony Bannon and art consultant and producer Dolores Lusitana.

BEATITUDE captures a cross-generational array of multi-cultural, race and gender diverse artists linked by a “Beat” aesthetic which founded an early social movement that championed  humanity over economy, ecology over industry, and equal rights for women and men regardless of race, social status, or sexual orientation.

BEATITUDE: The Beat Attitude, a book of Joey Tranchina's photographs, with an essay by Bannon and introduction by American Book Award winning poet Ed Sanders, is forthcoming internationally from Steidl Verlag.

“The Palm Beach Photographic Centre's 35 years of service in Florida – and the nation – is nicely summarized by BEATITUDE, for ours has definitely been a Beat Attitude, always ready for change, proceeding with a vision to participate in a spirit of excellence and achievement,” says NeJame. “This show is a perfect way to begin our 35th anniversary celebration—and in conjunction with this exhibition we will be presenting a series of lectures, conversations, and special guests, who participated in the Beat revolution.

For more information about Joey Tranchina and his work go to: www.transparent-press.com.

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