The passengers of this hopped up mixed media set are on a trip to the end of the nervous system, to the end of the Invisible Environment. There is no guide, no voice, no word. Walled in by oscillographs of the past the crew plot a precarious course in dead space of random topograhies. Infra-red TV screens, exposed nerve ends, phosphorescent comics, roentgen films & tapes of fictitious events, windtunnels of gossip, rigged history. LAUTLOSER FLUG DURCH VERFALLENES FLEISCH. Et pas de commissions. SAUVE QUI PEUT.

The night croons in a thousand orange loudspeakers. (Invisible tracks of passengers on the run like bursting blobs of transparent jelly; windtunnels of luminous comics photographed with a 180 degree distortion lens, interrupted again & again by the white-out of exposed reel endings.) The Braille Film of Present Time unfolds in flesh-colored rushes sharp & clear as an electroshock orgasm.

RealityStudio published Carl's second book, Death in Paris, 37 years later, posting it online in 2007. It too is written in American English, but this time the tone is coolly sardonic and deeply personal, darker and richer than The Braille Film. And very funny, sometimes hilarious. It is the work of a more mature writer. This time the word-slinging, if you will, is the least part of the story. This time the apocalypse comes wrapped in the jaded tones of a police procedural, a metafiction that brims with the blackest gallows humor. Here is how it begins:

Establishing Shot

He woke at 3 AM. Dim yellow light filled the room. Smog had descended on the city, filtering the bright lights of the hotel. The city was cast in a sinister sepia, as in a 1930s gangster movie. 'I should have killed myself when it still made sense,' he thought. He closed the curtains and went back to bed.

Near-Collision in the Main Character's Subconscious

The Hotel Bogotá, close to a hundred years old, had been kept in shape with an attitude of bored efficiency. Room service was non-existent, but there was a fat stream of brown water from every tap in the building, and the ceiling fans blew the sweat off your face in sheets. The hotel had two elevators whose cabins moved soundlessly through shafts of soot and axle-grease. In one of them, Gerald Lake rode down at 7:50 in the morning, and entered the ground floor Starbucks from the lobby.

At the far end, near the street exit, the familiar silhouette of a man in his mid-seventies made the small hairs on the back of his neck crackle with the voltage of pure hatred. He had always felt sure that he had killed his father ten years ago in Germany, by deliberately steering the car, with the old man in the passenger seat, into the concrete pillar of a bridge across Highway 3 near Cologne. He had been somewhat less than half conscious when firemen cut him out of the wreck with acetylene torches, his face swollen and rainbowed, coated in abrasions, bloody lips and cheeks flecked with tiny shards of glass. Before they could shove him into the EMS truck, he was in a deep coma. When he emerged from it after six months, his doctors showed him a letter with a photo of his father's grave somewhere in southern Germany. His stepbrother, Tony, who worked for a large software outfit down there, had made the arrangements and handled the paperwork.

Lake turned around unsteadily and crossed the diamond pattern of black and white marble tiles that had earned the Bogotá the dubious distinction of a San Francisco landmark. He pushed through the heavy slow-motion revolving door, turned left and started looking for a cab.

Posted by CW
Label: Doomsday Lit
December 7, 2007
3:12 AM

You can see that Carl, the writer, was as tough-minded as they come. But Carl, the person, glowed with warmth. He was kind, thoughtful, generous, and given to modesty. (Yes, I know, sounds like a cliché.) His erudition always amazed me, though he rarely put it on display. It only showed when the situation demanded it, and then he was scintillating. To quote Ian MacFadyen, he was "one of the great ones."

Among his lesser talents was his old musical training. Here is Carl's rusty Chopin after not playing for, oh, 50 years. "This is the schmaltzy version -- Viennese," you can hear him say in the video. Also, he combines pieces. "But what the hell." Typically careless of his ego, he let me post the video despite calling his playing "terrible." When a YouTube viewer praised his hesitations as "rubato," he gave a hearty laugh.

Ave atque vale, dear Carl. You were beloved by many. Play us out.

Everybody knows that he is dead except me
Why don't I know it yet?
Maybe because we were downstairs when he went to bed
We were downstairs and he went to bed because he had a sore throat
He had a sore throat and he didn't want to spread any germs
He didn't want to infect anybody
He particularly didn't want to infect Signe
Who had offered to bring him up some soup that night
When we had called him on the phone expecting to meet him
Downstairs
At the gallery
Where we were planning to join him in the festivities
No, he said he was tired
I told him a couple of funny stories on the phone
which I can't remember now
He was not too tired to laugh
He could laugh no matter how much it hurt
And there was nothing more he was waiting for
Than a chance to get a good laugh
A good innocent laugh
Or a even bitter caustic laugh at hypocrites
Who he shrugged off with fine chosen words
As fine as the cakes and cheeses and ciders and wines
He brought us
And such fine things we had for dinners that we invited him to
Or dining out in the "ghetto" as we called it
Slumming was the word we used
in his neck of the woods
I called him Mister Mooch
Which by definition is a man that mooches off people
Takes their comforts and their food
It was an intimate joke between us
He was never a mooch
He was our friend
And nothing can take that away
Signe just said I forgot something
We asked Carl once
What his favorite meal in the world was
And he told us spaghetti and meatballs
So one night
I made them
Just like my mother did
And he was about as happy
As anybody I have ever seen!

-- Cody Mahler

Penzel, a Berlin-based author of several books, including TraumHaft (a rock 'n' roll novel) and Rebell im Cola-Hinterland (a biography of Jorg Fauser, written with Ambros Waibel), says he met Carl when he was starting out as a journalist: "He rolled many balls in my direction, contacts, ideas, door-openers, the whole works."

This version of Penzel's obiturary restores cuts made in the published German text and adds a few enhancements. As he explains: "Nelson Algren once said, 'No book was ever worth the writing that wasn't done with the attitude that this ain't what you rung for, Jack -- but it's what you're damned well getting.' Same goes for this -- ok?"

One of the few stories he wrote in German ("Last Exit to Mannheim")* kicks off with the first-person narrator sitting at the foot of the Bay Bridge, San Francisco, on the stairway of his apartment house fire-escape, clocking the neighbor across the street with an old pair of binoculars ("used to play with Charlie Parker at the Five Spot") as he watches TV ("an old Hollywood ditty with Robert Mitchum who was once again wearing a pair of underwear way too huge for him"). Just hearing the title of one of Carl Weissner's books, published years ago, makes contemporary cutting-edge writers like Mark Z. Danielewski sit up and listen -- the title in question was The Braille Film (most interesting to a guy whose House of Leaves emulates the syntax of movies and features the scribbled notes of a blind man who happens to be the only person to have watched a certain movie). This may capture it: the story of the life and impact of works by Carl Weissner.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
When you phoned him, you would be greeted -- for years -- by nothing but the shrill pheep of an incorrectly set fax-answer-phone-machine. When he insisted on driving you home because of atrocious rain at six in the morning -- his glasses finger-thick -- doing 18 mph on the highway, in the right lane at least -- and then when you awoke from nightmares, when letters were returned unopened, because the mailman -- working a Mannheim neighborhood of Turkish gambling parlors -- didn't see the name-tags on the door bells, which would have led him to a letter box inside Carl's apartment block across from a Women's Bookstore, then you would sometimes ask yourself: Was ist hier bloß los?

Carl Weissner translated books. While he tried pretty hard to remain in the background and unreachable, he is known to people in the weirdest hangouts -- in Calcutta just as much as in Luxemburg, at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, among Bukowski readers worldwide anyway. If you mentioned to him that underground poets from East Germany or ad writers or celebrity reporters in Hollywood would scream in awe, "You know Carl Weissner!?!," he would only shrug and react with a smile. Impenetrable. How does someone grow up as a child during the war, amidst the rubble, and learn to be gentle? Someone who looks and listens, who goes way beyond fine manners. A good boy at the piano who discovers jazz, then with a grant goes off to Manhattan and '68 San Francisco. And then becomes, in still grey and triste Germany, the expert for hipster slang.

His translations are actually exactly that: transfers from a different world, interpretations into a language, a country, in which -- as he put it -- "many understand 'Schriftstellertum' like an employee, right in the midst of a streamlined career -- never to wrong-foot or make a mistake, but rather to function straight and reliably."

Funeral is Feb. 10, in Mannheim. [Photo: Signe Mahler]
After the war, performing with and for GIs in Karlsruhe, he would play in jazz bands, gobble up special editions of the Times Literary Supplement, and wanting more from life, start to write. Letters. Up to twenty a day. To legends of the counter-culture, John Sinclair, Burroughs, Ginsberg, the dramatist Mohit Chattopadhyay in Calcutta, beatniks in Greece, Mexico; at the same time to Wolf Vostell; and as he could not afford all his own reading material, he cobbled together a magazine, in which he would print this New Internationale. Like a pretty cool agent, or rather a dealer, he would translate J.G. Ballard, the Beats, Warhol, Dylan, Leonard Cohen -- but also Will Eisner, Denton Welch, Diane Arbus, Muhammad al-Murabit -- into a German that had not existed before. The man who stayed in the background thereby kicked open a door to a library, existing invisibly and parallel to what every well-educated literary student had been completely unaware of, a door to a world of books, to grooves and a language that pulsated with life.

This he did with an active vocabulary that made some of his translations -- another silent smile here -- look even better than the originals. And because he was a pro at his craft -- never too self-assured, always with open ears, wide-awake vision, and with AFN radio playing in the background. He translated books -- and did well, not grand -- many of which got reprinted, repeatedly. Ten hours a day in the early days. The gain, in terms of merit not earnings, was that Weissner helped knock the mildew of past decades out of the German lingo. Zappa, whom he also translated, has by now had streets named after him; Dylan is touted as a contender for the Nobel Prize -- yeah, sure (so what). Weissner remained unobtrusive. Ten years ago, he quit what he called his "day job." Kept listening, looked around, and wrote. In Thailand, Paris, in Marseilles tracing Rimbaud, then back into the shadow of the Empire State Building. Finally, at the age of 70, he found a home for his own novels -- Milena-Verlag, in Vienna -- which he had nearly given up hoping for. Also his latest book, only months old, seems to be taking a whole new generation of readers on a trip.

(See updates below.)
I had asked about his Rimbaud-in-Marseille novel, which he'd put on the back burner while finishing Manhattan Muffdiver and The Adventures of Trashman. He replied: "i should get into that marseille story, but I think I'll have to suffer, in situ, endless bad weather bad food bad drinks in crummy waterfront bars first. in other words, earn it." I told him about a recent trip to a shaggy little Caribbean village, which had "exceeded my expectations," and I wondered whether he was "earning it." He messaged back: "in their xmas edition, STERN gave my book five stars" -- the reference was to Trashman -- "as a result of which I get a chance to say my piece on austrian TV next week. so, I am not earning it, I'm living off yesterday's laurels." As to the Caribbean village, he said, "maybe one day we'll have a 2 week get-together there, bottle of rum and a mulligatawny soup, ploog can hop over from ft lauderdale, we'll have our own table, with a brass sign that says: The Survivors."

Phone just rang ... my daughter Olivia (who also loved Carl dearly and to whom he dedicated Muffdiver as one of the "Hermans") is about to give birth, so I must stop here. I have much more to say, but that will have to wait for now. In the meantime, please have a look at realitystudio.org's In Memory of Carl Weissner, which is largely about Carl and William Burroughs.

Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, and torture detainees. Despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a budding police state.

-- Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch

I suppose that's not the same thing as the Sunni genocide or the death squad massacres hidden in plain sight or the loud whispers, which we blogged about in 2005 and 2006. But it's a reminder.

FUG YOU reads like a nonfiction outtake from Thomas Pynchon's V. The tales Sanders tells, bizarre but true, are buttressed by illustrations and citations from a mammoth archive he compiled through the years. They include everything from mimeo magazines and antiwar flyers to FBI memos and news clippings; from poems scribbled on napkins to set lists and lead sheets; from Peace March photos and concert posters to literary relics such as the "well-scooped cold cream jar" that Allen Ginsberg used as a "cock lubricant."

A sample vignette:

I was working weekends -- Friday, Saturday, Sunday -- on the 5:00 PM to 2:00 AM shift at the cigar store where I had toiled off and on, and learned a lot about the underground world of Times Square, since 1960. It was freaky. One evening a guy who worked at the 2-for-25¢ hamburger place next door came in for cigarettes. I asked him why he was barefoot. He replied, "I have a date with a Toe Queen, and my date likes dirty feet."

All that evening I wrote a series of poems depicting the life and times of "Tillie the Toe Queen" on white, elongated slats of thin cardboard from cigarette cartons. By the next weekend I had published The Toe-Queen Poems.

When I read them at Le Metro, the response, in applause and overwhelming laughter, was the first I had received for anything I'd ever read in public, and I think it was an impetus to form a satiric proto-folk-rock group called The Fugs a few months later. One of the first Fugs songs, never, unfortunately, put on an album, was a ditty called "Toe Queen Love."

Although FUG YOU has no sewer-dwelling alligators hunted by a posse of misfits with shotguns, it has plenty of details that are equally preposterous and Pynchonesque. For instance, an anti-yodelling edict at the Chicago 7 trial. The presiding judge won't let Sanders demonstrate from the witness stand how well he yodels. "I was disappointed," Sanders writes, "for verily I was and am the only Beat who can yodel. However, I resisted the dramatic impulse to weep and show trembling agitation in front of the judge at this restriction on my yodeliferous genius. Why? Six-month jail term and maybe a $1,000 fine for insulting the dignity of the court. I had to get to L.A. and start investigating the Manson family." (Which he did.)

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

I've written about Patterson before, the first time in connection with 326 Years of Hip, a group show of outsider artists Mary Beach, Taylor Mead, Boris Lurie, and Herbert Huncke, which Patterson produced and curated in 2005. I wrote about him again in connection with Lurie and the No!art movement. But that only scratched the surface of someone I think of as the opposite of what Marcuse called one-dimensional man.

Patterson -- rightly dubbed a "docucontrarian" -- has lived a multidimensional life of exemplary defiance and commitment. His record of arrests for antagonizing authority is by itself enough to put him in a category far above extraordinary. If you asked Patterson what he's proudest of, however, he would probably point to the massive archive he has created with his partner Elsa Rensaa, who is also featured in the Legends coloring book.

Their archive documents the people, culture, and history of Manhattan's Lower East Side, and captures the neighborhood's dramatic changes over the past three decades with hundreds of thousands of photographs, approximately 2,500 hours of video, and a unique collection of ephemera. Many of Patterson's projects are a direct outgrowth of the huge amount of material he has gathered as a historical legacy, including a handful of books -- Inside Out (1994), Wildstyle (2003), Captured (2005), Resistance (2007), Arabic Tattoos (2007), and the Front Door Book (2009) -- all of them dedicated in one way or other to free expression.

Here's an interview from 2010 with the man himself:

Postscript: Dec. 20 -- I see that Alexander Cockborn wrote a welcome antidote to the Hitcharoma that has gripped the press.

At a glance the photo would appear to illustrate the report of Putin's claim that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had personally spurred protesters to action after Russia's recent parliamentary elections. "She set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal," the Times article quoted Putin as saying. Clinton denies the allegation, of course. She would never stick her head in the toilet, would she? What kind of signal is that? Better she should stick her finger down her throat. In fact, the photo illustrates a feature story for the Home & Garden section, Scrub the Halls, about neat freaks tidying up at home for holiday visitors. But I'm still wondering what the editor had in mind.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Albany at San Pablo & Solana (Photograph © 2011 by Richard Sargent)

One could insist that Sargent is late to the game. But it's not as if he has chosen to stand outside art history. He himself notes in a statement on the back of the calendar, "Artistic interest in decay is not new." He also points out that "the images, messages, and juxtapositions are always changing," and they offer "new meanings" to the viewer. Sargent, who is 79 and lives in Berkeley, says he was a former Navy photographer with an MFA in painting from the University of Southern California when he arrived in New York, in the 1950s, "during the prevailing reign of Abstract Expressionism." His Pop-saturated décollage billboards evoke that influence.

Trained from adolescence in the ascetic self-effacement of the Christian Brothers, a rigorous order of Catholic teaching monks, Reggio nonetheless has a self-indulgent urge. He wants to bask in the pleasurable glow of the film's reception. Koyaanisqatsi was, after all, a relentless obsession that claimed seven years of his life.

Yet, staring at the Reichstag, Reggio can't help being assailed by gloomy feelings. Perhaps more than anyone except his chief collaborators -- the composer Philip Glass and the cinematographer Ron Fricke -- he knows what a desperate Valentine he has brought to Berlin.

The message of the film, as defined by its ancient Hopi Indian title, means "life out of balance," "life in turmoil," "life  disintegrating." Indeed, the most tellingly accurate meaning of the word "koyaanisqatsi" is "life that calls for another way of living."

Ruminating on this, Reggio realizes that he has been gazing at the ornate stone edifice for a very long time. Despite the bone-chilling cold, he is fixated. And then it dawns on him that he is looking not at a stone monument but at an hallucination of history, a grandiose embodiment of a vast, devoutly worshipped mystification. The Reichstag, in all its ghostly Nazi glory, shimmers with the mystos of the modern world. More than the Kremlin in Moscow or the Capitol in Washington, it is the supremely haunting symbol of faith in mass society.

He wonders, shivering, if anybody has calculated the radioactive half-life of state mysticism.

Four years later ... a day in July, 1987. Reggio is recounting his Reichstag experience in a bright, brick-lined study tucked at the back of a dark, sprawling factory loft in lower Manhattan. His desk is piled with neatly stacked books, all in the process of being read simultaneously: The Art of Memory, The Age of Illusion, Art and Politics in France: 1918-1940, Black Mask Witness, The Cosmological Eye.

Reggio, who is 6-feet-7 and towers over his visitor, offers a blue velvet armchair by the window. He himself settles into a swivel seat with his back to the makeshift desk, a door laid flat on two small filing cabinets. The brick wall behind him, painted canary yellow, faces a white chalkboard filled with indecipherable diagrams written in green. An orange canopy hangs in a graceful arc from the ceiling.

"Historically, the Reichstag represented the new cathedral, if you will, the new mysticism," Reggio said. "Bismarck created it as a symbol of unification of the nation-states of Germany. Every schoolboy knows that or should. So I was actually in the right place to be trembling."

Sometimes, he says, the most staggering revelations are completely obvious. "It became crystal clear, as I stood there, that the whole East-West conflict is a self-serving fraud," he continued. "It is an enormous diversion perpetrated by the nations of both blocs. The Berlin Wall" -- still standing that summer day -- "is a kind of analogy of this insanity."

This profile was published for the first time in 1987 in German, translated from English by Carl Weissner, in the Munich-based magazine TransAtlantik. In 2000, when Koyaanisqatsi was screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it was published online at MSNBC.com for the first time in English. On that occasion I re-interviewed Reggio for a Q & A, which is included at the end of the profile. The film is being screened this time with live music at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall on Nov. 2 and 3.

There are five interruptions for one-minute ads, but you can skip each of them after five seconds.

Postscript: As soon as I can get it scanned, I'll post an extensive interview I did with Godfrey Reggio back in the '80s when Koyaanisqatsi was developing its well-earned rep. Whew! He was a fabulous subject.

PPS: Oct. 28 -- It's posted.