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...]
‘Peculiar Shortcomings’
A word of warning from a century ago ... Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred name of equality. At all costs we must get rid of our hypocrisies and falsehoods and see ourselves as we are -- a domineering race, vengeful and brutal, as exemplified in Haiti; we must study the inevitable effects of our soulless, … [Read more...]
What Would Daumier Make of Trump?
Here's the perfect hint: A mocking depiction of King Louis-Philippe as the Rabelais character Gargantua. The caricature might as well be Trump. He feeds on bundles of swag delivered by his obsequious minions and, from his outhouse throne, he shits out appointments, titles, and other rewards for the privileged class. Not incidentally, Honoré Daumier went to prison for six months for this 1831 lithograph after its publication in a satirical illustrated periodical that appeared weekly in Paris, La Caricature morale, politique et littéraire. Hat's … [Read more...]
Once Upon a Time in India . . .
There was a mimeo magazine called ppHOO69 *Intercontinental*1969. It was edited by Pradip Choudhuri and published by Subhas Ghose, with a front cover by Alejandro Jodorowsky and a back cover by Claude Pélieu. The poems and prose were divided into two sections, one in Tamil and one in English (with some French). CLICK THE IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM. CLICK THE IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM. … [Read more...]
‘Righteous Poles’ Make an Appeal
Following Ronald S. Lauder's open letter ("It's Time to Dial Back the Rhetoric") about the Holocaust and recent anti-Semitic developments in Poland, another open letter has appeared (also in The New York Times). This one is signed by 50 Polish citizens, "the remaining living Righteous representing the 6,850 Righteous Poles" who have been recognized by Yad Vashem, the World Holocast Remembrance Center in Israel, for taking great risks to save Jews during World War II. Read their letter here. They say, among other things: We were all victims, … [Read more...]
Poland Dials the Wrong Number
An open letter from Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, took up a full page yesterday in The New York Times. The heading was "It's Time to Dial Back the Rhetoric in Poland." I have no expertise in the matter, but I couldn't help recalling Tuvye Tenenbom's take on the situation of Polish Jews and the video he made during a period when Lauder claims things were looking up for them. Tenenbom recorded what he called “rampant” anti-Semitic graffiti everywhere in the city of Lodz. Have a look, then read Lauder's letter below. … [Read more...]
A Burroughs-Gysin ‘Motherlode’
SEE UPDATE BELOW My staff of thousands informs me that the Smithsonian Institute has posted scans of three notebooks by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin dating from 1963 to 1973, and 1977. It was described to me as "a motherlode" of writings and collages. And indeed it is. Have a look by clicking the images and/or the caption. American flag over the empty field DECEMBRE 23 VICTORY by J. Conrad 358-8 EN ROUTE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD Look out the window. . . fire by the track. . . streams crusted with. . sewage. to yesterday and … [Read more...]