Great Demon Kings

A rollicking, sexy memoir of a young poet making his way in 1960s New York City When he graduated from Columbia in 1958, John Giorno was handsome, charismatic, ambitious, and eager to soak up as much of Manhattan's art and culture as possible. Poetry didn't pay the bills, so he worked on Wall Street, spending his nights at the happenings, underground movie premiers, art shows, and poetry readings that brought the city to life. An intense romantic relationship with Andy Warhol--not yet the global superstar he would soon become--exposed Giorno to even more of the downtown scene, but after starring in Warhol's first movie,Sleep, they drifted apart. Giorno soon found himself involved with Robert Rauschenberg and later Jasper Johns, both relationships fueling his creativity. He quickly became a renowned poet in his own right, working at the intersection of literature and technology, freely crossing genres and mediums alongside the likes of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Twenty-five years in the making, and completed shortly before Giorno's death in 2019,Great Demon Kingsis the memoir of a singular cultural pioneer: an openly gay man at a time when many artists remained closeted and shunned gay subject matter, and a devout Buddhist whose faith acted as a rudder during a life of tremendous animation, one full of fantastic highs and frightening lows. Studded with appearances by nearly every it-boy and girl of the downtown scene (including a moving portrait of a decades-long friendship with Burroughs), this book offers a joyous, life-affirming, and sensationallook at New York City during its creative peak, narrated in the unforgettable voice of one of its most singular characters.

Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment

Biographies & Memoirs

Giorno, John

Arts & Literature

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

American artist Elizabeth Peyton has been credited with breathing new life into the ancient art of portraiture. Her highly stylized, idealized oil paintings, drawings, and watercolors are driven by the emotional, adoring eye of an unrequited lover. Willowy, melancholy young men and women contemporary pop stars, royalty, artists, and friends are the magnetic subjects of her devotion. Caught as if in a state of ambiguous absorption and frozen at the height of their youth, they embody a new kind of portraiture that confirms and updates the immortalizing aura of the traditional genre. Peyton's melding of influences and obsessions ranges widely: from fandom and fashion illustration to academic anatomical studies; from David Hockney and Andy Warhol to a range of Mannerist and Old Master classics; from innocence to the world of bohemia, equally crediting photography and life drawing as its driving forces. Her enamored yet refreshingly informal light wash technique underscores her uniquely delicate, informed hybrid of high and low culture, a statement executed with infectious, seemingly effortless fluidity. Published in conjunction with the artist's major solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York, which will travel to the Whitechapel in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht.

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton

Arts & Photography

Hoptman, Laura

Blazwick, Iwona

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press~ Inc

Cancer in my left ball;: Poems, 1970-1972

Something Else Press

Cancer in my left ball; poems, 1970-1972

Picador Paper

Associated with key 1960s avant garde figures such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Rauschenberg, and Johns, John Giorno was an early pioneer of multimedia poetry through Giorno Poetry Systems, which also distributed a who’s who of the American underground from Patti Smith to Sonic Youth. Giorno’s use of transgressive material and in-your-face, amplified delivery was also a key influence on punk/new wave pioneers such as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Black Flag. Not just a poet but a sexual, spiritual, and political radical, Giorno helped pioneer the open celebration of queer sexuality in poetry in the 1960s. Subduing Demons in America offers the best of Giorno’s revolutionary poetry, from his striking Pop Artinfluenced poems of the 1960s to the psychedelic, echo-laden, multitracked cut-ups of the 1970s with their explosive configurations of queer sex, spiritual practice, and the bohemian Good Life. Also here are the pared-down punk/hip-hop performance poems that Giorno performed in the 1980s.

Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962-2007

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Soft Skull

The originator of Spoken Word and performance poetry, John Giorno is one of the most influential figures in the world of contemporary performance. You Got to Burn to Shine, his first book in many years, collects intensely rhythmic, sexual and philosophical poetry spanning two decades. Here, too, are deeply personal memoirs, including the story of his friendship with Andy Warhol (Giorno had an occasionally sexual relationship with Warhol, met his mother, and starred in Warhol's first film Sleep); an anonymous sexual encounter with Keith Haring, an aspiring painter who recognized Giorno in a subway station toilet; and notes toward a Buddhist understanding of death in the age of AIDS.

You Got to Burn to Shine: New and Selected Writings (High Risk Books)

History & Criticism

Serpent's Tail

This volume brings expert opinion and first-hand testimony to bear upon the events surrounding the creation and destruction of Andy Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men at the 1964 New York World's Fair. The complex constellation of art, politics and gay life surrounding Warhol's mural and its painting-over comes alive in 13 interviews―with historian Hilary Ballon, critic Douglas Crimp, poet Diane di Prima, 1964 World's Fair head of television Albert Fisher, poet John Giorno, art historian Anthony Grudin, civil rights historian Felicia Kornbluh, former Warhol assistant and poet Gerard Malanga, filmmaker Jonas Mekas, art historian Richard Meyer, former Warhol assistant and photographer Billy Name, Rockefeller biographer Richard Norton Smith and architect and critic Mark Wigley. The interviews are introduced by the show's co-curator Larissa Harris, and accompanied by reproductions of all of the Thirteen Most Wanted Men; photographs of Warhol and the Fair by Factory regulars and photojournalists; and rarely seen archival documents from Warhol's Time Capsules.

13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World's Fair: Conversations

Crimp, Douglas

Name, Billy

Meyer, Richard

Ballon, Hilary

Chambers, Nicholas

Elman, Dick

Finkelpearl, Tom

Fisher, Albert

Frye, Brian

Grudin, Anthony

Kornbluh, Felicia

Malanga, Gerard

Mekas, Jonas

Mennel, Timothy

Di Prima, Diane

Queens Museum/The Andy Warhol museum

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