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GERD STERN, 84 years old, with sneakers, rings, khaki pants and wild white hair, sports a bushy beard reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg in his pomp. Then again, the two beat poets had a long history: they first met in the late 1940s when they were residents at the same psychiatric hospital in New York City.
As part of a collective called USCO – the Company of Us – Stern started combining beat poetry with multimedia installations in the early 1960s. A typical example might recreate the experience of an LSD trip using slide projectors, oscilloscopes, flashing diffraction patterns, shouting voices and sitar music.
It was to revive memories of those times that early last year Stern found himself at New York's John F. Kennedy airport, bound for Germany. In his ...
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