Photographic Centre hosts three-day celebration of Beat artistry

WEST PALM BEACH — "The only ones for me are the mad ones," Jack Kerouac once wrote, and it’s in that spirit that the Palm Beach Photographic Centre is hosting a three-day “Beatitude” festival of poetry, conversation and music, centered on the Beat artists of the mid-20^th century, beginning Monday.

The three-day free gathering, called “Beatitude: The Beat Festival,” is being presented along with the photography center’s current exhibit of Beat-related photos by Joey Tranchina, which runs through Jan. 6 at the center in downtown West Palm Beach.

“This show is a perfect way to begin our 35^th 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," said center director Fatima NeJame, in a prepared statement.

• The festival starts opens Monday with an introduction to the exhibit and a talk by Anthony Bannon, a photography expert and former director of the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, N.Y. Bannon will speak at 11:30 a.m. and host a discussion called “The Importance of the Beats’ Influence” with the day’s artists at 4 p.m.

At 7:30 p.m., it’s a concert by the artist collective BuffFluxus, performing the “Tub Bunny Suite” and other works by Don Metz, Michael Basinski, Michael McClure and Jackson MacLow. Composer John Kruth will then join Bannon for a performance of “O Yeah,” featuring readings and instrumentals.

• The festival’s second day opens with a performance by Rebekkah Palov of the Carrier Band, who will perform “The Plane(s) Extended,” featuring Palov’s “custom software instrument.” (11:30 a.m.)

At 3 p.m., it’s a screening of “The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, a Torch for Peace,” a 2009 documentary about the Pashtun independence activist Abdul Ghaffar Khan. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker, Teri McLuhan, who also is the daughter of the late Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan.

At 7:30 p.m., the Romanian writer and National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu discusses his friendships with some of the major Beat figures, including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso. Following that will be a discussion with artists who have famous fathers. That includes McLuhan, Bannon (son of Dr. Robert Bannon, a pioneering optical researcher), Dick Blau (son of Herbert Blau, co-founder of the Actors’ Workshop and the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater), and Peer Bode, whose father Harold Bode invented the sound synthesizer.

• The final day of the festival begins at 11:30 a.m. with a conversation between Bannon and Blau, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, called “An Improvisational Attitude: How to Get There from Here?”

At 4 p.m., Bode, another member of the Carrier Band, performs “Flashes of Light,” which utilizes sound and video of the Beats. At 7:30, there is a showing of a pre-recorded video of Bannon in conversation with Tranchina, followed by an intermission.

The festival concludes at 8:30 p.m. with a performance by the New York-based performance artist Pat Oleszko, who will perform “Beats/Me,” described as “A show and yell with pix and tricks, orchestrating the plunder and blunder of the banned book bozos.”

All events are free and take place at the Photographic Centre, 415 Clematis St., in downtown West Palm Beach. The current exhibit, “Beatitude: The Beat Attitude,” features photos of Beat luminaries taken in the 1960s and 1970s by Tranchina, but only recently rediscovered and curated for an upcoming book.

The center’s hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. For more information, call 561-253-2600 or visit www.workshop.org or www.fotofusion.org.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Photographic Centre celebrates the artistry of the Beats