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Happy birthday, Frank :)

Interesting side note:

“It’s been great to see lots of people around the web noting that today is the birthday of Frank O’Hara, who was born on March 27, 1926.

But there’s a strange story about this which complicates things a bit: today is not the day O’Hara thought was his birthday.

As Brad Gooch details his biography of O’Hara, City Poet, O’Hara believed that he was born on June 27, 1926. That’s what his parents told him, and presumably that was the date he always celebrated as his birthday. He even wrote some funny lines about his supposed birthday in “Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and other Births)”:

I hardly ever think of June 27, 1926, when I came moaning into my mother’s world and tried to make it mine immediately by screaming, sucking, urinating and carrying on generally it was quite a day

O’Hara also deliberately began one of his amazing long poems, “In Memory of My Feelings,” on the day he thought was his 30th birthday — June 27, 1956.

But he was wrong. As Gooch explains, O’Hara’s ‘birth certificate — found twenty-five years after his death — recorded his real birth as three months earlier, on March 27, 1926, at Maryland General Hospital. The presiding physician: Maurice Shamer, M.D.’

Gooch offers a compelling explanation for this error:

‘The discrepancy is a mystery. But not a difficult one to solve. His parents had been married in Grafton, Massachusetts, on September 14, 1925 — six months before the birth of their first son. As both were offspring of morally conservative Irish-Catholic families, the shift of their baby’s birthday three months later implied conception after marriage rather than before. The cover-up also solves the mystery of his parents’ eighteen-month stay in Baltimore. They fled their thickly rooted families in New England to hide the progress of the pregnancy, then soon returned.’

So there you have it: today, March 27, is actually Frank O’Hara’s real birthday — but that would’ve come as a big surprise to him.”

Founded by James Sherry to anthologize writing by poets working at the Naropa Institute, Roof Magazine was published in New York City between the summers of 1976 and 1979.

Click HERE to download PDFs of each issue

Curator Jasia Reichardt introduces the "Cybernetic Serendipity" exhibition held at London's ICA, August 1968

Click HERE to read a pdf of "Cybernetic Serendipity: the computer and the arts."

This publication, published as a special issue of Studio International, served as the catalog for "Cybernetic Serendipity," an exhibition of computer-related art held at London's ICA in August 1968. It features essays by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and James Tenney, among others.

9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering

In October 1966, a group of artists which would later become the organization Experiments in Art and Technology (led by Robert Rauschenberg, BIlly Kluver Robert Whitman and Fred Waldhauer) assembled a series of performances generated by collaborations between artists and engineers. Held in New York's Armory Hall, the events would include performances, happenings and demonstrations by such artists as Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and David Tudor.

Folder was an unbound magazine containing poems, plays, stories, and original prints, each printed loose leaf and collected in a folder with silkscreened covers.

"Folder, published by poet Daisy Aldan and Richard Miller, and printed by Floriano Vecchi at Tiber Press, provided an outlet for the poets and painters of the New York School. There were four issues, published between 1953 and 1956, and they included a wide variety of artistic expression: musical scores, translations, drama, criticism, and poetry, as well as prints and drawings. Featured artists included Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Grace Hartigan, and Kenneth Koch."

Semi-Colon was a four-page broadside edited by John Bernard Meyers and published through Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC. Running ten issues from 1953 to 1956, the periodical featured works of poetry and prose by Frank O'Hara, Saul Bellow, W.H. Auden and Kenneth Koch, among others.

Roughly three hundred copies of each issue were printed and sold for twenty cents each through the gallery, as well as at the Eighth Street Club and the Cedar Tavern.