How about a Burroughsian blast of a graphic cut-up by Gary Lee-Nova? He is looking for a publisher for 'The Nova Machine.' Here's an excerpt. Any takers? "In all my experience as a police officer I have never seen such total fear and degradation on any planet." Click to enlarge. … [Read more...]
Old Misery at The Daily News
The decimation of The Daily News brings back memories of the two-and-a-half miserable years I worked there. I had been hired away from the Chicago Sun-Times, where I'd spent happy times during the early 1980s -- actually thrilling years -- before Rupert Murdoch bought it. To my ridiculously innocent surprise I discovered that a NYC tabloid by contrast could be a back-stabbing horror of a place to work, especially if you've been enlisted as some kind of out-of-town star to write fancy Sunday features about Hollywood movies and Broadway theater. … [Read more...]
Loose Screws in Politics
Mike Ferguson's permutation poem makes a whole lot of sense. It is also a reminder of the influence of Brion Gysin, who set the template for permutation poems back in the 1960s. Brion Gysin Let the Mice In includes texts by Gysin, William S. Burroughs, and Ian Sommerville. It is an expensive collector's item these days. The German publisher Moloko Plus has offered to bring out a facsimile edition for interested readers at an affordable price. … [Read more...]
Weinstein’s Rehab Reading
"Harvey Weinstein entered New York State Supreme Court yesterday clutching a copy of A Talent for Trouble. Was Weinstein looking for someone to teach him about being a mensch?" -- Leon Freilich He walked to the courthouse with a copy of "A Talent for Trouble," the 1997 biography of "Ben-Hur" film director William Wyler, according to CNN. -- AM NY (July 10, 2018) My own thought: What did Willy do to deserve this? … [Read more...]
NNOI Festival = 90% Water
Living organisms are gathering near the old water mill in Groswaltersdorf, 70 kilometers north of Berlin. NNOI Festival 2018 July 12 -- Crossposted at IT: International Times, The Newspaper of Resistance. … [Read more...]
Celebrating Carl Weissner, Buk, and Burroughs
They say Berlin is the place to be. Since I can't be there myself, here's the next best thing . . . This is the Maher-Mähler film about Carl that will be screened as part of the celebration: Always These Nightmares! Toward the end of his life Carl was a writer on a rampage. He wrote three books — one in English, Death in Paris, which he described as “Doomsday Lit,” and two in German, Manhattan Muffdiver and Die Abenteuer von Trashman, whose biting satirical humor he called “vulgo-cynicism.” All three … [Read more...]
From the Pond Across the Street
We would travel light years to find alien beings inhabiting fabulous worlds. -- Malcolm Mc Neill Some things just won't stay down. 'The permutations are infinite: Whatever it is, the joke is on us.' … [Read more...]
The Moody Splendor of Manchester
I was corresponding by email recently with Jay Jeff Jones, an American expat playwright, journalist, and poet, who is working on a new edition of Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture, a long-out-of-print classic about the British counterculture of the 1960s. Jones, who has lived in Manchester, England, for many decades, wrote that he was "in fine fettle ... good weather ... long walks over the moors on most days." I replied, "Walking on the moors? So 19th century. I didn't know they still exist." By coincidence, I had begun reading Virginia Woolf's … [Read more...]
Streaming What We Breathe
Quantum Words for Bill Osborne Stealthy quantum words phantoms of expectation and suicides of time riddle us with springs and traps. Self-delusion streaming what we breathe we who breathe in silence holding worlds together & apart like ancient beacons bearing witness in halos of fading light. -- JH … [Read more...]
Edward Snowden on The Intercept
Since I don't tweet, this is the next best thing. Click to listen. Edward Snowden discusses surveillance, tools to help protect your privacy, and the likelihood of a Trump-Putin deal to extradite him. … [Read more...]
‘Meeting Jim’ (Who’s Having the Time of His Life)
I've never met Jim. We've only corresponded by email about the strange case of Orwell's typewriter. But I know that Jim Haynes is a man for all reasons -- pleasure, food, sex, mind, books, theater, life -- and that to meet him in person all you have to do is show up at his door in Paris for dinner on a Sunday night. He puts on feasts open to anyone who cares to make a reservation. If you can't get to Paris, however, you can meet him on screen at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, where "Meeting Jim" will have its world premiere in … [Read more...]
Tribute to John Bryan from Cold Turkey Press
John Bryan published so many underground papers and magazines over three decades -- beginning in 1962 with renaissance, a San Francisco literary journal inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (which John said he read “half a dozen times,” and which turned him onto LSD) -- that Warren Hinckle called him “the Peter Zenger of the underground press ... unconquered and ungovernable by the puny laws of journalism.” Paul Krassner said he was “a one-man band, and the printing press was his musical instrument.” He put John “in the tradition of … [Read more...]
Huge Wyler Retrospective in Paris
One of the beauties of a William Wyler retrospective as big as the one that the Cinemathèque Française has currently mounted in Paris is the chance to see the immense variety of his work. I don't think as thorough a retrospective (41 films, including some of the silents) has been screened since the 1996 Berlin Film Festival. The Cinemathèque has also posted a deeply researched web page with so many layers you can get lost in them. One pleasure of the site is the rarely seen stills of Wyler with his actors behind the scenes. Another is an oral … [Read more...]
Big Moment for a B-17
UPDATED May 21: When the 10-man crew of "The Memphis Belle" completed their 25th mission over Europe in 1943, they and their B-17 heavy bomber were brought home to the U.S. for a cross-country publicity tour and were made famous by William Wyler's World War II live-action combat documentary (also called "The Memphis Belle"). I wrote about all of that in my Wyler biography, A Talent for Trouble. On May 17 -- 75 years to the day of that final mission -- the restored aircraft was put on permanent display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air … [Read more...]
Connecting With Burroughs
I was walking down Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan the other day when I saw someone reading Naked Lunch. I know the shot looks posed, but it wasn't. This is exactly how he was sitting (below left). The guy was in front of an office building at 777 Third Ave., between E. 48 and E. 49th Streets, where you couldn't find more ordinary pedestrian traffic. It's the last place I would have expected to see anyone connecting with William Burroughs and his subversive satire. Which is why I snapped the shot (with permission). When I showed the shot … [Read more...]
Trump’s Corrupt Precursor
Carl Weissner and I made this track in 1971 during the Vietnam War before Nixon resigned his corrupt presidency. The collage shows Nixon's customary "V" for victory salute, which was as hollow and phoney as he was, with his wife Pat behind him looking over his shoulder against a backdrop of two pots, one clean and one dirty. The opening snippet, "We like it here," is from a duet by two out-of-tune daughters of the late, loathsome Texas oil baron H.L. Hunt. We laughed like hell when we heard it. But we couldn't stand it, so we cut it short. Too … [Read more...]
Art Shay, Man With a Camera, R.I.P.
He was 94. His classic book of photographs, Nelson Algren's Chicago, was published three decades after shooting them for Life during the height of Algren's fame in the 1950s. The magazine never used them. Shay was kind enough to sign a copy of the book for me. According to Shay's obit in the Chicago Tribune by Rick Kogan, the late Roger Ebert once said that Shay’s photography "shakes you up, sets you down gently, pats you on the head and then kicks you in the ass." … [Read more...]