Less than a minute
In 1978, some three years after the violent assault on William Merwin and Dana Naone, the Italian documentary filmmaker Costanzo Allione visited Boulder, Colorado to film at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa Institute.
According to Allen Ginsberg, Allione’s film Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds provides a “serious and spontaneous account of conversations and teachings and home scenes.”
This documentary provides a rare contemporaneous glimpse inside the Jack Kerouac School and Naropa Institute, right around the time these nascent institutions were embroiled in The Great Naropa Poetry Wars.
Joan Rousmanière Ewing, then known as Tsultim Ewing, a former Tibetan Buddhist nun, taught and worked at Naropa Institute and Vajradhatu at the time. She and Constanzo Allione met and married later, after which she became known as Lama Tsultrim Allione.
