cover image 66 Frames

66 Frames

Gordon Ball. Coffee House Press, $15.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-1-56689-082-3

In late 1960s New York, experimenting with sex and psychedelics, Ball ""sought the `romance' of the city,"" and he found it in film. Editor of Allen Ginsberg's Journals Mid-Fifties, Ball arrived in Manhattan in 1966 at age 21, after a childhood in Tokyo and college in North Carolina. His fascination with the avant-garde and new American cinema prompted him to sign on as assistant to filmmaker Jonas Mekas (whose best-known work remains 1964's The Brig), a position that led to encounters with pivotal personalities at Andy Warhol's Factory, the Filmmakers' Cinematheque, the Filmmakers' Cooperative, Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery and other subway stops along the New York Underground. In addition to encounters with Emmett Grogan (Ringolevio), Paul Krassner and other writers, Ball recalls meetings with avant-garde filmmakers like Ken Jacobs, Stan Brakhage and Shirley Clarke. Amid the passing parade of poets and ""flaming creatures,"" there were gallery openings, rooftop parties, premieres and publications (including Mekas's Film Culture), confrontations with film censors and federal marshals, good acid trips and bad (""the sky would darken and the droning generator of the universe continued...""), police break-ins, the sudden success of Warhol's The Chelsea Girls, the memorable 1967 Human Be-In in Central Park on Easter Sunday and the ""entire blossoming of the arts in the mid-sixties."" Ball sees the time as ""a crucial moment in the development of American art in general and film in particular."" Those who regard Mekas as a true prophet of the cinema will embrace this book, while others will discover a new perspective on the fertile decade through the poetic refractions of Ball's memory. (Apr.)