Ira Landgarten and Tate Swindell / Exploring the Life & Work of Ira Cohen

City Lights and Lithic Press celebrate the publication of

A Certain Kind of Wizard: Treasures From the Vaults of Ira Cohen

By Ira Cohen

Published by Lithic Press

A Certain Kind of Wizard includes Ira Cohen’s poetry and prose writings from his remarkable journals, as well as photographs and his interviews with artists Paul Bowles, Charles Henri Ford and others. Longtime collaborator, Ira Landgarten, will be joined by archivist Tate Swindell to discuss Cohen’s life and work.

Filmmaker, photographer, poet, publisher and all-around raconteur; Ira Cohen was a catalyst for creative scenes in New York, Tangier, Kathmandu, Amsterdam, and elsewhere.

In 1961 he took a Yugoslavian freighter to Tangiers where he lived for four years and published Gnaoua, a magazine devoted to exorcism, introducing the work of Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Harold Norse and other members of the Interzone mob.

Between 1968 and 1971, in a NYC loft, he created some of the most mythic images of the late 1960s. Inspired by his friends Jack Smith and Bill Devore, Cohen’s initial experiments with black light developed into an experimental ritual space he termed the Mylar Chamber—a simple room of hinged boards hung with reflective Mylar film.

His debut film, Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda, was made in 1968 with an original score by Angus MacLise.

In the 1970s he went to the Himalayas where he started the Starstream poetry series under the Bardo Matrix imprint in Kathmandu, publishing the work of Paul Bowles, Gregory Corso and Charles Henri Ford while developing his art of bookmaking, working with local craftsmen.

Returning to NYC Cohen continued to mount photographic shows throughout his life.

Ira Landgarten is an independent producer, photographer, scholar, critic, archivist and aficionado, who has been studying and documenting Indian classical music for over 40 years. A close associate of Ira Cohen, for three decades he hand-printed exhibition prints of Ira Cohen’s photographs as well as collaborating with Cohen on his celebrated film, Kings With Straw Mats. He digitally scanned, retouched and restored all the original vintage images appearing in the Cohen’s visionary posthumous book Into The Mylar Chamber (Fulgur Press, 2019).

His articles, interviews, liner notes and photographs of many of India's most renowned musicians have appeared throughout the world. Ira is currently working on an anthology of his photos and interviews with many of India's major classical musicians.

Archivist, Poet and Photographer, Tate Swindell is the founder of Unrequited Records, which specializes in poetry records released on the vinyl format. Editor of On Valencia Street: Poems and Ephemera by Jack Micheline (Lithic Press, 2019). Co-editor of the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman for City Lights Books (2019). Tate, and his brother Todd, worked extensively on the Harold Norse archives, which were donated to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. He is currently writing short stories about his experiences in the San Francisco medical cannabis movement. Previous collections of writings include Palpitations; The Creation of Deadlines; and Fotopomes and the most recent SOLAR HITS (Lithic Press, 2025).

Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.