The ghost of Allen Ginsberg rises again when the HOWL! Festival returns to haunt the East Village. It starts tonight at 7pm with a benefit at the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge (101 Avenue A) for Emergency Life Project, which provides financial assistance and social services to artists who live in the East Village and L.E.S. Lydia Lunch (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) hosts the bash, featuring performances by Warhol Superstar Bibbe Hansen, playwright, actor, and master storyteller Edgar Oliver, and others. Highlights of the fest (all happening in Tompkins Square Park) include the annual reading of HOWL! (Friday at 4:30), a performance by Riki Colon’s Men in Skirts (Saturday 5:30), and a tribute to the great ladies of the Lower East Side titled Bowery Bombshells (Sunday at 5:30).— By Angela Ashman

About the festival

For more than a century, the East Village has been home to poets, jazz musicians, Vaudeville and Yiddish theatre, artists represented by blue chip galleries and those painting in the subways, rock stars, and performance artists. Building on this tradition and inspired by long time East Village resident Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem, the HOWL! Festival was founded in 2003. The mission of HOWL! Festival is to honor, develop, create and produce. With an estimated 100,000 visitors last year, the many performances celebrate local cultural icons and lionize, preserve, and advance the art, history, culture, and counterculture unique to the East Village and Lower East Side.

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