.sniffing keyholes.

A short film about Alexander Trocchi

2011-05-07T11:00:00.000-07:00

Cain’s Film followed by a short video on Trocchi featuring William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen.

soul of man

2011-02-05T09:05:00.001-08:00

another little gem from my box of found music
(found in st.pauls/bristol)
mix cd w/ tracks by
soul of man |Beat Generation|James Taylor Quartet|Dub Pistols|Moog
breakthru vol 1 mp3
here

I couldn't be arsed to do a decent cover. Sorry

2011-01-07T09:24:00.001-08:00

another little gem from my box of found music.
(found in st.pauls/bristol.)

mp3 here

the velvets revolution

2010-12-01T05:26:00.000-08:00

another little gem from my box of found music
(found in st.pauls/bristol)

mp3 here

DBL + Rural Balance

2010-11-12T06:02:00.000-08:00

another little gem from my box of found music.
(found in st.pauls/bristol.)
What a Found!!! I was immediately smitten with their Sage Francis /anticon inspired hip hop upon first listen. Other than DBL + Rural Balance being Bristol based, probably from St.Pauls & in possession of some canny impressive wordplay, i couldn't discover any other info about them.
mp3 here

Jackie Tilston

2010-10-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

jackie>>> TILESTON

josh mcdonald - huffing and puffing (10 stories)

2010-10-18T09:14:00.000-07:00

mp3 here

small world band

2010-10-08T07:38:00.000-07:00

another little gem from my box of found music.
this time a taste of jazz zz z.
found in st.pauls/bristol.

here

Tanya Wolski - Paintings

2010-10-08T06:33:00.000-07:00

facebook

perfecting invisibility

2010-07-27T09:42:00.000-07:00

2010-06-18T10:16:00.000-07:00

poem | on found photos

2010-05-13T13:34:00.000-07:00

books

2010-05-03T09:32:00.000-07:00

daevid allen

2010-05-03T07:38:00.001-07:00

Here & Now a | b | c |
INVISIBLE OPERA COMPANY OF TIBET * | *

digital founds

2010-04-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

found

2010-04-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

found sounds | part two

2010-04-15T07:07:00.000-07:00

compilation of found music
.part two.
klik here for free mp3 download

found photo

2010-04-15T06:59:00.000-07:00

book found

2010-04-14T09:50:00.000-07:00

Dave Rendle

2010-04-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

Di-Waith/Without Work
Wandering
where we are,
some say not having a job
creates a lack of identity,
have you seen us lately
walking up and down,
situationist's vacant.
Some say that most of us
are lost,
it depends where you are found,
some stunned into silence,
some in the nightshot sparkle.
Visions of one day
colliding with the next,
the secret is distraction
different winds blowing,
calling one another.
All summer
space is eternal,
we find gradually
that somethings are never there.
In groups
of solitary walkers,
in dreamtime
we don't give a damn,
this world has shifted
a million miles,
telescopes seek new horizons.
We carry on shuffling through,
sometimes taking the wrong turn
spiralling monk like
out of
control.
All battlefields are the same
it's never an easy road,
all this is work
where there is none.

More at Teifidancer blog

Picture Shows

2010-04-06T08:52:00.001-07:00

Picture Shows
is a new exhibition by Rob Hunter and Jon McNaught running from 8th April - 8th May

here shop/gallery details here

Pakito Bolino

2010-04-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

Pakito Bolino | here

Karen Finley - A Certain Level of Denial

2010-04-05T08:40:00.001-07:00

New York-based Karen Finley is best known for her controversial performance art, but she has exercised her talents in virtually every creative medium, publishing several books of prose and poetry, displaying collections of visual art, acting in several films, and recording albums of poetic musings with the use of self as a narrative tool

Many of her works deal with the issues of violence against women, emotional despair, a sense of loss, and abuse.Some of her pieces deal with her upbringing and dysfunctional family situation. According to her book, "A Different Kind of Intimacy," her father used to put Karen in a refrigerator, and he committed suicide while she was still a little girl.Her self-effacement is no pose. When right-wing foes criticized her performances for their content, fixating on her use of food as a prop, she retorted out a whole show entitled Revenge of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman.

As a guest on television’s Politically Incorrect she has been known to change her opinion on current events mid-show, to the often hilarious fury of her pea-brained pseudo-celebrity "opponents."Her work onstage smashes stereotypes of Performance Art as Gong-Show castoff fare. They are mesmerizing experiential masterpieces. Finley takes her audiences through contemporary terrain at an accelerated pace, unheard of even in this age of instant access and continual gratificiation. Instead of the "shock" so many would have you believe they center on, her performances tend towards religious frenzy, complete with potent, quasi-spiritual transformation.
A Certain Level of Denial is a studio version of the performance piece.

Karen Finley - A Certain Level of Denial: mp3 here

klik on cover for track listing

website
interview
THE TRUTH IS HARD TO SWALLOW HERE
A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley

found

2010-04-05T08:38:00.000-07:00

Omniasphere

2010-04-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

surfing the zuvuya

like voting changes anything

2010-03-22T15:14:00.001-07:00

working class unity

2010-03-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

It has become common place to patronise working class people, whether Guardian readers who tell us that we don't exist or the condescending description of us as 'chavs' etc. and 'dole scum'. We are working class and we are proud of it. The British working class is the oldest in the world created in the furnace of the industrial revolution and brutality of enclosures and destruction of the commons. We have our own cultures, tradition, language of which we can be well proud.
The contemporary working class must reclaim control over our lives as part of a long and honourable tradition of working class resistance to oppression. We stand with the peasant revolts of 1381, 1450 and 1549, the Edinburgh 'Porteous' rising of 1736, the Levellers in the English civil war, the 'United Englishmen', the Luddites and 'General Lud', the East Anglia rising of 1816 and the 1820 Scottish Rising, the 'Captain Swing' rural workers revolts of 1830/31, the Bristol riots of 1831, the Merthyr and Newport uprisings, the Pentridge and Grangemoor uprisings, the naval mutineers of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries from Spithead to Invergordon, the army mutinies in India, the London Mob of the 19th century - the most political and feared mob in Europe that kept the Royal Family off the street! The 'Battle of the Braes' on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. The miners and railways strikes of 1910 and 1911, the heroic mutinies during and after World War One, the direct action of working class women for the vote, the Glasgow and Luton rioters of 1919 (amongst many others), the general strikers of 1926, the unemployed workers movement battles with the police in the 1930's from Glasgow to Belfast to London, the 'Battle of Cable Street' in the East End of London against the police and fascists, the volunteers that went to fight fascism in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, the mutinies and strikes of World War Two, the soldiers squatting movement immediately after, the 'teabreak' strikers of the 1960's, the mass strikes of the 1970's and the battle of Saltley gate of 1972, the Grunwicks strikers of 1977, the 1979 Southall rising against the fascists and the police, the urban and rural rioters of the 1980's starting with Bristol in 1980, the great miners and printers strikes of the 1980's and the poll tax and prisoners revolt of 1990 when the jails and Central London burned! This is our tradition and our roots and we are proud of it.
We are still here. And until wage labour, capitalism and the State are destroyed there will always be a working class. The working class are a varied bunch of people who have certain things in common . . . The pathetic attempts to wish us out of existence by the middle class intellectuals of the Left and Right only confirm the crisis that their ruling class masters are experiencing in keeping control of us.

found

2010-03-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

The Astronauts - Now & Then

2010-03-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the UK punk explosion Mark Astronaut formed the band with a few friends in 1977 and began playing local gigs in their hometown of Welwyn Garden City.By 1979 The Astronauts were regularly appearing at free festivals and gigs in London organised by a hippy collective known as Fuck Off Records and from these began a close friendship with London punk bands Zounds and the Mob. After more than 30 years they are still gigging & recording.
*****
The Astronauts ep 1979 (Bugle)** *
Restricted Hours ep 1979 (Stevenage RAR)** *
Really Weird Comp 1979 (Fuck Off Wreckords)** *
Pranksters In Revolt ep 1980 (Bugle)** *
Peter Pan Hits The Suburbs LP 1981 (Bugle)** *
Folk in Hell Comp 1981 (Fuck Off Tapes)** *
Only Fools & Optimists cassette album 1982 (All The Madmen)** *
Its All Done By Mirrors LP 1983 (All The Madmen)** *
Soon LP 1986 (All The Madmen)** *
Seedy Side Of The Astronauts LP 1987 (All The Madmen)** *
In Defence Of Compassion LP 1989 (AcidStings)** *
Constitution 7" 1991 (Acid Stings)** *
Peter Pan Hits The Suburbs CD 1994 (Lazy Dog)** *
Its All Done By Mirrors CD 1994 (Lazy Dog)** *
Upfront & Sideways cassette album 1995 (Dizzy Positivity)** *
Anarchists Of Magick cassette album 1995 (Dizzy Positivity)** *
Baby Sings Folksongs one-sided 7" 1995 (Farce)** *
You're All Weird CD 1999 (Irregular)** *
Restricted Hours: Live'04 CD 2009 (Band) ** *
The Donkey Riding ep 2010 (trashville)** *

live recordings** *
Street level/fuck off records gig Ladbroke Grove 1980
East Coker Yeovil 1984
The Crypt St.Albans 1985

found photo

2010-03-13T05:37:00.000-08:00

Mohammed M'rabet - The Storyteller & The Fisherman

2010-03-12T06:11:00.001-08:00

I was first introduced to the work of Mohammed Mrabet through the work of his translator and friend for the past twenty five years. American x-patriate writer Paul Bowles. Through Bowles translations Mrabet has written eleven books, both short stories and novels. The autobiography Look and Move On recounts Mrabet's first impressions of the US, encounter's with the law in Tangier and his unusual story of the events that led to his meeting and marrying his wife Zohra, a powerful woman who has stood by him for so many years. I have spent the better part of the first half of 1990 in Morocco recording Mrabet and Paul for this collection, one of Paul's writing, and one of trance music of the Jilala and Gnaoua, two Sufi brotherhoods that inhabit North Africa and for the most part Morocco.

While I was in Tangier, Mohammed took me in to his family and looked after me. The hours spent in his sala with Aicha and Khadija, his daughters, were a dream come true. After voraciously reading through Marriage With Papers, The Lemon, M'Hashish, Love With A Few Hairs, and all the others I was consumed by this Moroccan storyteller. His writing pulls you in with such an understanding of life, of knowledge of the streets, the reader is captive and mesmerized, in awe of the strength and brutality of the work.

Mrabet ran away from home when he was 12 years old. Like so many Moroccan boys he was not up to the strict discipline and rigid lifestyle set down by his father Hamed. This led to a life in the streets. When he was about 14, while trying to buy some wine, Mrabet was questioned by a
Police Inspector (alcohol is forbidden for Moslems). With the fight that ensued (Mrabet practically sliced the man's ear off) Mrabet was forced to flee Tangier and for a time lived in the caves at Cap Spartel. There with food brought to him by friends, he was able to survive by catching both fish and the "contraband" of liquor, cigarettes and other "Back Market" items that washed ashore. Pirates and smugglers have worked the coastline of Morocco since the time of the Phoenicians.

As he grew older, he returned to Tangier and began a life in the bars and cafes, a life that almost killed him. It was here that he began telling stories to amuse his friends. Storytelling was a tradition passed down through the Mrabet family, from Mrabet's grandfather, Mehend, to his son, and from Mrabet's father to him. Mohammed says his grandfather was the best. The love for Mehend goes deep.It was about this time that Mohammed met Jane Bowles and they became fast friends. Jane being more of an extrovert liked to go out at night, while Paul busied himself with writing and the translating work of authors such as Mohamed Choukri, Jean Paul Sartre, and Frederico Garcia Lorca. It was the perfect arrangement for a woman out alone, in Tangier in the 5o's. After a time, Jane introduced Mohammed to Paul. The three became inseparable and enjoyed happy times traveling about the county. One evening when Mrabet came to visit, he found Paul translating a story by Larbi Layachi and asked him what he was doing. When Paul explained, Mrabet put on an indignant face (there was a hatred between Laychi and Mrabet for years) and left. The following day Mrabet returned saying he would like to tell a story and for Paul to record and translate it. So began his Storytelling "professionally". He began painting much the same way. After seeing some art at Bowles house he felt he "could do it better" went home, returned a few days later, with the first of many pieces not unlike the ones contained herewith.

Now sit back and listen to the tales heard by William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and all of the others who have made Tangier their home at one point, and Mohammed their friend. The art of the storyteller is slowly dying in this modern world. For awhile, here, we can forget all of that and return to the golden days of Moroccan culture. Let the words not be lost

Mohammed M'rabet mp3 hereThe Storyteller & The Fisherman

1. The Cheikh Idriss Ben Mohammed (Recorded On Radio Tangier)
2. Mohammed M'Rabet Self Introduction And Story Titles Of Stories He Told In Darija
3. Maimouna
4. The Sea In The Street
5. The Fisherman And The Young Man
6. The Ants
7. The Doctor From The Chemel
8. Street Sounds And Music From The Jemaa El Fna, Marrakech
9. The Young Man Who Lived Alone
10. The Rhoula
11. The Muezzin
12. Street Sounds And Music Of Mohamed Abdel Wahab
13. Baraka

14.Street Sounds And Music From The Jemaa El Fna, Marrakech

BIOGRAPHY
Mohammed Mrabet's Fiction of Alienation
buy here
Paul Bowles in Exile
By Jay McInerney

found

2010-03-12T06:09:00.000-08:00

alpha & omega

2010-03-10T08:13:00.001-08:00

the legend of

Karen Finley - The Black Sheep

2010-03-09T10:40:00.001-08:00

The Black Sheep

May, 1990 - April 1991
First Avenue between 1st Street and Houston
Photo © Dona Ann Mc Adams

The Black Sheep was a public poem by Karen Finley cast in bronze and mounted on First Avenue between First Street and Houston. The poem was set in concrete monolith, on location for one month, and comprised of nine-stanzas about living apart from mainstream society.

After a funeral someone said to me -
You know I only see you at funerals
it's been 3 since June -
been 5 since June for me -
He said I've made a vow -
I only go to death parties if I know someone before
they were sick -
Why?
cause - cause - cause I feel I feel so
sad cause I never knew their life -
and now I only know their death
And because we are members of the
Black Sheep family -

We are sheep with no shepherd -
We are sheep with no straight and narrow
We are sheep with no meadow
We are sheep who take the dangerous
pathway thru the mountain range
to get to the other side of our soul.
We are the black sheep of the family
called Black Sheep folk.
We always speak our mind.
appreciate differences in culture
believe in sexual preferences
believe in no racism no sexism no religionism
and we'll fight for what we believe
but usually we're pagans,
There's always one in every family
Even when we're surrounded by bodies
we're always alone -
You're born alone
and you die alone
written by a black sheep.
You can't take it with you -
written by a former black sheep.
Black Sheep folk look different from their family -
The way they look at the world
We're a quirk of nature -
We're a quirk of fate -
Usually our family, our city, our country
never understands us -
We knew this from when we were very young
that we were not meant to be understood.
That's right. That's our job.
Usually we're not appreciated
until the next generation.
That's our life. That's our story.
Usually we're outcasts, outsiders
in our own family.
Don't worry - get used to it.
My sister says I don't understand you !
But I have hundreds of sisters with me tonight.
My brother says I don't want you !
But I have hundreds of brothers with me here tonight !
My mother says I don't know how to love someone like you !
You're so different from the rest !
But I have hundreds of mamas with me here tonight !
My father says I don't know how to hold you !
But I have hundreds of daddies with me here tonight !

We're related to people we love who can't say -
I love you Black Sheep daughter
I love you Black Sheep son -
I love you outcast, I love you outsider
But tonight we love each other -
That's why we're here -
to be around others like ourselves -
So it doesn't hurt quite so much -
In our world, our temple of difference -
I am at my loneliest when I have
something to celebrate and try
to share it with those I love but
who don't love me back.
There's always silence at the end
of the phone -
There's always silence at the end
of the phone -

Sister - Congratulate me !
NO I CAN'T YOU'RE TOO LOUD -
GRANDMA LOVE ME
NO I DON'T KNOW HOW TO LOVE
SOMEONE LIKE YOU
Sometimes the Black Sheep is a soothsayer,
a psychic, a magician of sorts -
Black Sheep see the invisible
We know each others thoughts
We feel fear and hatred

Sometimes, some sheep are chosen to be sick
to finally have average, flat, boring
people say I love you.
Sometimes, Black Sheep are chosen to be sick
so families can finally come together
and say I love you.
Sometimes, some Black Sheep are chosen to die
so loved ones, families, countries
and cultures
can finally say
Your life was worth living !
Your life meant something to me !
I loved you all along !

Black Sheep's destinies are not in
necessarily having families,
having prescribed existences -
like the American Dream.
Black Sheep destinies are to give
meaning in life - to be angels,
to be conscience, to be nightmares
to be actors in dreams.

Black Sheep can be family to strangers
We can love each other like MOTHER
FATHER SISTER BROTHER CHILD
We understand universal love
We understand unconditional love.
We feel a unique responsibility
a human responsibility for feelings for others
We can be all things to all people -
We are there at 3.30AM when you call
We are here tonight cause I just can't
go to sleep. I have nowhere else to go -
I'm a creature of the night -
I travel in your dreams
I feel your nightmares
We are your holding hand -
We are your pillow, your receiver,
your cuddly toy.
I feel your pain.
I wish I could relieve you of your suffering.
I wish I could relieve you of your pain.
I wish I could relieve you of your death.
Silence at the end of the phone.
Silence at the end of the phone.
Silence at the end of the phone.
NO PAIN, NO ACCLAIM: THE CANONIZATION OF VICTIM ART

Claudio Parentela

2010-03-09T09:14:00.001-08:00

Born in Catanzaro(1962| Italy) where he lives|works…
Claudio Parentela is an illustrator, painter, photographer, mail artist, cartoonist, collagist, free lance journalist... and has been active for many years in the international underground scene.
more here

found

2010-03-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

ALEXANDER BARON

2010-03-09T05:33:00.000-08:00

Alexander Baron was one of the greatest British novelists of the last war and among the finest, most underrated, of the postwar period. He burst on the literary scene in 1948 with his debut novel, From The City, From The Plough, described by VS Pritchett as "the only war book that has conveyed any sense of reality to me'; and went on, through the 50s and 60s, to become a seminal London novelist, as well as pursuing a successful screenwriting career.

While working as editor of New Theatre magazine, Baron published From The City, From The Plough, which met with immediate critical and popular acclaim. Written from the point of view of the squaddie, it is both a portrait of the British class system disintegrating, and an at times almost unbearably moving and visceral account of a group of soldiers who have landed in a situation in which heroism is the only available option

Baron was born towards the end of the first world war in the heart of the then largely Jewish East End. He went to Hackney Downs school and was drawn into the anti-fascist struggle, combating Mosley's black-shirts on the streets of White-chapel. His experiences in Italy and Normandy during the war left him physically and emotionally scarred, but provided the raw material for the extraordinary war trilogy that began his literary career.

Baron then turned to another familiar topic, London life and the personalities, destinies, hopes and tragedies of the metropolis. 'The Lowlife' (1963) is a gripping narrative of the ups and downs of an East End gambler Harryboy Boas, intelligent and able, and yet is listless and driven by a secret guilt from his past to escape emotional attachment or responsibility in wild rushes of excitement on the dog tracks or racecourse, in loveless sex in 'swinging' sixties Soho, in drink and gourmet food, or in long sessions of reading the literature he loves.'Strip Jack naked'(1966) a sequel to The Lowlife'King Dido'(1969) is one of Baron’s best novels, a gripping thriller of underclass crime in the East End Baron grew up in and knew so well. Set on the eve of the First World War, it tells the story of Dido Peach, who is drawn into the violent world of protection rackets and gang warfare.Baron had an extraordinary eye for period detail and was highly knowledgeable about East London slums. But his greatest gift was storytelling and the creation of unforgettable characters. His rediscovery is long overdue King Dido has just been republished by Five Leaves Press here
Lost Steps with Ken Worpole discuss the Baron classic King Dido
30 minute interview|mp3 here
EXTRACT FROM THE CITY FROM THE PLOUGH here

The Teams That Meet In Caffs

Hare Marsh

amazon

Horizontal with bong

2010-03-09T04:11:00.000-08:00

Set the controls for the heart of the sun...

emma goldman

2010-02-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

i n t e l l e c t u a l p e r v e r t s

found

2010-02-14T09:57:00.000-08:00

Vomitus Skink-in mude

2010-02-03T09:41:00.000-08:00

For Vomitus Skink:

The harp callers pull the throats out with a force that cannot be perceived by waking walkers..................

Lime(green)light proteins bubble to the surface and form a film distorting the visions of the serpentine transistors=== ===//=== ===

It bubbles under the surface

It bubbles to the moon

It bubbles to the cranes

the cranes lift themselves effortlessly

...carry the rocks to the cradles...

Hit and run

hit and ran

running

rannnnn

the length of the skyway to the forest

and fell into the big green ....CVCCCCCCCCVVVVVVVVV

Ninety forms creep the green the green does not creep back

it stands as it has always stood

even as the little clamping piranha jaws illustrate the beat of the piano wire encroachers

the big green is fucking pissed. Its parts arrange themselves to form a pine forest with devouring fog.

the devouring fog lifts the meat from the little critters. The meat and fur gently continues upward and performs an Icarus... falling back down as more fog...

the forest is like a castle preparing for siege. The piranha jaws begin the march...

the eyes of the fog meet the eyes in the needle teeth... caught in the stare is the earth which bows under the magnetic force and falls like a crushed tin can....

...like an aborted bingo card

...like an aborted bingo card?

...the battle never ends, but the big green is forever victorious

Until the locusts come with their end. Spears and shields ringing in the new world. The new world will unfurl and vomit its smooth sandstone spires and lifeless sands.

Smooth lifeless sands, sandstone spires... barren.

a-f-t-e-r-t-h-o-u-g-h-t::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

beds of cicada husks. beds of cicada husks hushing the wind..

...to the tune of the harp callers goat-like pupils

Vomitus Skink-in mude (free mp3 album)
myspace

Georges Rouault

2010-02-02T11:59:00.001-08:00

a paradox about people

2010-02-02T06:12:00.000-08:00

what is very dangerous about people:
they want you to be the same person that they met
that they assume they know
when you are constantly becoming yourself, that is to say, being who you really are,
they become uneasy
they have nothing to hold on to

for this reason people make disappointing friends

aryan kaganof

more here

molotov and stone (2008)

2010-01-30T09:35:00.000-08:00

Lunapark 0,10 (Avant-Garde Voices 1913-1974)

2010-01-30T09:34:00.000-08:00

"Luna Park 010" features an incredible collection of word mangling heavyweights, Apollinaire, Mayakovski, Joyce, Artaud, Tzara, Duchamp, e.e. cummings, Gysin and others. words have never seemed so alien and other... and have never served so little purpose while seeming to mean so much without knowing quite why. This collection forms a panorama of the most important avant garde writers and artists of the twentieth century. All material is read by the artists themselves & spans the decades, from Apollinaire in 1912 to the Brazilian avant-garde of the seventies...

V/A - Lunapark 0,10 (Avant-Garde Voices 1913-1974)MP3 HERE

KLIK ON COVERS FOR TRACK LISTING

SARAH GARZONI

2010-01-25T09:11:00.000-08:00

PROJECTS

Bern Porter - The Godfather of Founds

2010-01-20T05:21:00.000-08:00

Bern Porter's life and career was complex and filled with contradictions and dissent. Born in 1911, Porter's academic training was as a physicist. Grieved by participating in the development of the atomic bomb, he quit the Manhatten Project and following World War II, Porter spent time in Japan (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) working with doctors and scientists on developing burn ointments and artificial limbs.

Acceptance

Is the word

Take it

Or leave it

This here is the world

Without breast milk

Breast softness

So pliant

Warm

Warm

And the womb gone

Gone

Mother gone

Wife gone

Near mothers gone

Near wives gone

Left

As an artist-writer-philosopher-scientist, Porter's underground reputation is secure, and his philosophy of dissent respected among visual artists and writers. He has authored over fifteen artist books and published works by many important writers. His publishing endeavors, while working on the atomic bomb in Oak Ridge, Tenn. in 1944, included Henry Miller's anti-war book Murder the Murderer.

When Mother said
I was a cold fish
She did not specify
Cod
Halibut
Trout
Sword
Or
Finnan Haddie
All cold.
She only called me A Cold Fish.
To which I reply
Yes, I am cold
In temperature
In mannerisms
In approaches
In techniques
In ways generale
But being a fish
That I do not know.

Recognizing Porter as one of the earliest and most prolific practitioners of "Found Poetry" Peter Frank, in his book on the Something Else Press, has written; "Porter is to the poem what (Marcel) Duchamp was to the art object, a debunker of handiwork fetishism and exemplary artist-as-intercessor between phenomenon and receptor. He rejects the typical artist's role of semi-divine Creator. Porter's eye never tires of seeking accidental, unconventional literature in odd pages of textbooks, far corners of advertisements, the verbiage of greeting cards and repair manuals, ad infinitum".

Bern porter recordings

An Interview with Bern Porter here

Selected Founds by bern porter buy it here
Where to Go, What to Do, When You Are Bern Porter: A Personal Biography buy it
Sounds That Arouse Me: Selected Writings buy it here

d*face

2010-01-19T10:44:00.000-08:00

d*face

A Life in Pieces: Reflections on Alexander Trocchi

2010-01-18T04:02:00.000-08:00

A Life in Pieces: Reflections on Alexander Trocchi
[Rebel inc.]
ed. Allan Campbell and Tim Niel

A follow through from the TV documentary of the same name, this volume collects together the various interviews that were gathered for research and presents them in their entirety together with fragments of Trocchi’s writing, odd letters, tape transcripts, essays and appreciations. The basic tenor of the questioning lies around Trocchi the writer and the reasons for his ‘silence’ after Cain’s Book; so like the TV programme there is much about wasted talent and drugs. As most of the interviewees have some kind of professional investment in writing it is hardly so surprising that they don’t too arduously pursue the reasons behind Trocchi’s criticisms of and dissatisfactions with writing. At the same time, though the interviewers˛ try to encourage people to talk about Project Sigma, the phrasing of their questions shows next-to-no identification with even the idealist component of Sigma. An image of rebellion as egotistical and radicalism as self-indulgent is what certain interviewees and contributors eagerly embrace and it is really only Bill Burroughs and Leonard Cohen who defend Trocchi’s communitarian hopes. It is Burroughs, who responding to the lead-in that Sigma was far-fetched, replies sympathetically: “I think that it is indeed far-fetched but he possibly had some idea there’s enough minds that would…. Different ideas would of course make a change in society and that’s not without foundation. It’s the way changes come about”.

Amongst the previously unpublished documents, two of the most interesting pieces in the book are by Trocchi himself and date from the period of the early 50s before he became involved with the Lettrist and Situationist International. In a editorial for the magazine Merlin, Trocchi discusses language as an “apparatus for thinking with” and he extrapolates that if the apparatus is faulty then “language itself can be the greatest obstruction to clear thinking”. For me this points towards his initially controlled use of heroin at the same time that it sets the terrain for the experience and furtherance of communal-affects that his counter-cultural activities with Sigma were intended to catalyse. I think, for Trocchi , “clear thinking” was not always a matter of words and his resistance towards writing could well be seen as another layer of his revolt: against a logo-centric society. Though once more in this volume there is next to nothing #±about his participation in the Situationist International, their activities of ‘drift’ would hardly be unknown to Trocchi and it is interesting to view this activity, which depends upon a non-verbal sense of the environment, as a means towards accessing an unacknowledged form of “clear thinking”. It is the same with music: words are always the yardstick but what about the complexities of feeling music can inexpressibly set-off?

The other piece of interest is a letter by Trocchi that was published in the magazine Nimbus in 1952. Here in an article about French writing of the early 50s he articulates the schism between Sartre and Camus in terms of the former’s interest in a writing that is politically committed. In a discussion of existentialism Trocchi shows his support for Sartre’s position and his letter contains passages of rhetorical invective against ‘Literature’ similar to those that characterised Situationist exasperation with ‘Art’. Here he bemoans a ‘Literature’ that has become a “superior amusement” and is practiced as a means of arttaining a “position” within the “reigning literary oligarchy”. In a manner akin to the Situationists, Trocchi dismisses ‘Literature’s’ transcendental pretensions, rejecting the then, and sadly still now, commonly held view that writing and politics are separate categories: “The point is that if you pretend to be ‘above’ politics, i.e. the contemporary situation, then however amusing your professions and ingenious your pleadings, you are in effect contributing to the maintenance of a repressive status quo…”. Here dismay with where writing can get you, the required self-centredness, the conformist obeisance that accompanies careerism translates into the breadthening, the ‘doing it for yourself with others’ that characterises the hopes of Sigma. Like the Situationists, who saw strikers, rioters and revolutionaries as creative agents, Trocchi was trying to free-up an und~erstanding of creativity that would no longer be accepted as being contained within ‘individuals’ but as existing between them. When this is the case, the forms that creativity can take are also widened: pig-farming, crime, poems on bog roll, revolutionary movements, tape recordings, portfolios (1).

Points such as these, appreciations of Trocchi’s intent, are what is lacking from this collection. No one is really inclined to deal with the ideas that thread through Trocchi’s life in terms other than their being stereotyped as a quaint 60s exuberance. Instead what we have are Trocchi’s contradictions and enigmatic faces taking them forefront once more. Some commentators seem almost to relish his personal failings as if these somehow mean that the ideas he generated have failed and his example means that no-one should take these responsibilities seriously anymore. This was an interpretation, itself a conditioned response, that Trocchi was at pains to play down and Sally Child notes how his being known as a heroin addict was a way that some of his contemporaries could avoid taking him seriously. Trocchi himself rued the fact that others exploited Sigma tactics for personal, non-sigmatic ends (to feed “Sam Self” as he once put it).A At pains to counter-balance the prevailing image of Trocchi as a ‘monster’ she also importantly adds that he was keen to help people, “encourage them to be creative and give them confidence” and when we add this to the perennial Sigma plan to establish an anti-university we can understand that maybe part of Trocchi’s ‘work’ was to directly pass his non-institutional knowledge and experience on to other young malcontents. The example of an older person who hasn’t sold out is always an inspiration for it confirms and strengthens those initially unsteady oppositional thoughts and attitudes that are constantly being drawn back into conventionality by their characterisation as ‘childish’, ‘self-indulgent’ and ‘pretentious’.

As much as Trocchi’s heroin addiction obscures most peoples attention from a consideration of the ideas Trocchi proffered, Jeff Nuttall’s piece in this anthology expresses with a keen regret the pain and wastage it caused, how it may well have led to the dissipation of Sigma projects for which funding ha–d been secured. This unromanticised reflection is, after Burroughs’s comment, probably the piece which is most sympathetic to Project Sigma. But, would a state-funded Sigma still have the same resonance today, the same potential to inspire those post-media operators who work, rest and play in the latter-day underground? Would it have encouraged people to imaginatively delve into it seeking connective points to situationists, anti-psychiatrists, dissident beats, crazy architects, black power activists? Like Russian communism, would its potent eclecticism have diminished and been written out the longer it actually existed. Trocchi’s comparatively small literary output is a similar point in case. Unresolved and left hanging it does not weigh over the reader like a tradition. It is inspiring because Trocchi’s not making a career out of it makes us view his writing as relative and equal to other pursuits. There’s more to make than just a book. You could do it too.

buy it here

mean streats;guardian bio

datacide

found

2010-01-11T10:10:00.001-08:00

Jacques Prévert - song

2009-12-21T07:31:00.000-08:00

song

What day are we?
We are every day
My friend
We're the whole of life
My love
We love and we live
We live and we love
And we don't really know
What life is
And we don't really know
What the day is
And we don't really know
What love is

Jacques Prévert

amazon

found art (unknown 2009)

2009-12-21T05:32:00.000-08:00

constantly risking absurdity (2007)

2009-12-19T08:17:00.000-08:00

found

2009-12-19T07:29:00.000-08:00

Anna Kavan - De Quincey's heir, Kafka's sister

2009-12-07T06:00:00.000-08:00

Anna Kavan (April 10, 1901—1968; born Helen Emily Woods)

was a British novelist, short story writer and painter.
During the war Anna Kavan worked for nearly two years at the offices of Horizon. ‘Understandably, Connolly was never comfortable with Kavan,’ Michael Sheldon wrote in Friends of Promise, his book about Connolly. He was presumably referring to her heroin addiction. Friends and mentors over the years – Rhys Davies. Peter Owen, Brian Aldiss – have made considerable efforts to dispel such feelings by stressing how smart and cheerful she was, how little her drug addiction appeared to affect her. Such loyal friends did not wish her to be regarded as a pathological case, although since Kavan had constant access to clean legal drugs there was no reason at all why she should not appear cheerful, well-groomed and hard-working.
The stories that deal directly with her addiction never seem to be reprinted: the Picador edition of her selected writings, My Madness, contains none of them. ‘Julia and the Bazooka’, which deals with her introduction to drugs, ‘High in the Mountains’, which describes the effects of heroin, and ‘The Old Address’, which details obsession and withdrawal, provide considerable insight into Kavan’s personality, and her work can’t really be understood without them. Attempts to distance Kavan from her drug habit, although well-meaning, are misleading. She was one of those rare writers who did not publish at all until she was an addict. Heroin was central to her existence, her lover, her religion, her salvation, and almost all her later work charts the processes of addiction, again and again using images and landscapes familiar to us from De Quincey and other addict-writers of the Romantic period.
"A writer of such chillingly matter-of-fact, unself-pitying vigour that her vision transcends itself.
Kavan's is a dangerous, frightening world - you don't go there for laughs - but it is also tender and intellectual and immersed in a shimmering hush. She is one of England's few modern masters.'' Duncan FallowellIn his autobiography Brian Aldiss writes of Kavan that when he met her in the late Sixties she: "...was lame, tired, in her late sixties or so. She lived in a house she had designed herself, just off the Bayswater Road in West London. One ascended to her living quarters up a stair encased in glass, outside which greenery raged within the smallest of stone-walled gardens, a small slice of an imprisoned Botswana, or maybe Gondwana. We talked and talked. Like most authors, Anna had fallen in her old age on hard times, and was delighted to be regarded as a science fiction writer. She said it made her feel modern again: she was of that generation for whom 'modern', 'fast' and 'pneumatic' were key words of praise. Imagine, in the late sixties, it was a fashionable thing to be a science fiction writer!
"Anna was a dedicated writer. She never enjoyed any great success; her books contain a strangeness and coldness which guarantee her status as a cult figure, but are caviar to the general. She worked with Cyril Connolly on Horizon, and had a grudge against him because he would not help her in some way or other.... [her] heroin habit of many years standing thirty and more, she is a successor to the great Thomas De Quincey. I was so taken up with Ice that I tried to persuade my publisher at Doubleday to interest himself in the novel.
"Margaret and I had a plan to induce Anna away from her painting-lined nest, to stay with us at Heath House for a weekend. She wrote me a little note to say that she was feeling too inhuman to move. Forty-eight hours later she was dead. After a week or two I received a letter from Larry [Ashmead] the benevolent editor at Doubleday, to say he would publish Ice if I wrote an introduction to it... kavan's prose is like pollen, frail yet enduring. ''
Anna had a good friend in the novelist Rhys Davis. He wrote a novel about her, Honeysuckle Girl... He was then living in a hotel room near Russell Square, and from under his bed in the cramped room, he dragged a trunk full of paintings, gouache and watercolor. All were Anna's work. He presented me with three pictures. They hang framed in my study. One shows two naked bodies, conjoined but without a head, another a similar scene, , where the bodies float in space, and the third a woman slumped naked in a chair, having masturbated or given herself a shot. They are uncompromising gouaches. To bad that an exhibition was not arranged. The public never knew what a good painter Anna was

"If Anna Kavan, who was a heroin addict, invited you for dinner, she'd say, 'Bring your wife,' but you never did because Anna disliked women. When she went out of the room, Rhys Davies said, 'She's good today but I've been here when she's thrown a chicken.' Peter Owen

"Anna Kavan made a significant beginning as a nocturnal writer with Sleep has his house and achieved this kind of revelation with a classic equal to the work of Kafka titled Asylum Piece in which the nonrational human being caught in a web of unreality still struggles to maintain a dialogue with those who cannot understand him. In later books the waking dreamers give up the struggle and simply tell of their adventures. They live in solitude with their shadows, hallucinations, prophesies." Anaïs Nin (The Novel of the Future)
"A remarkable poetic writer who could transmute the most ordinary matter of daily life into a dangerous, haunting vision . . . her work transcends the agony of the confessional ''"This glittering hallucinogenic novel is surely one of the best of the books inspired by drug-taking. . . You have entered a realm of the marvelous, like a latterday Ancient Mariner compelled to follow the tale, hypnotized by this storyteller '' Doris Lessing.
". . . there are gems here, passages of startling poignancy and radiance . . ." -- Joyce Carol Oates
Rhys Davies and Anna Kavan@babylon wales
Abigail Nussbaum :: strange horizons
Anna Kavan: We salute you
Anna Kavan - Asylum Seeker*article

Jan Hanford- Anna Kavan::life & books

What's the Story? Reading Anna Kavan's Ice
Outside the asylum of her mind- Duncan Fallowell
buy from peter owen here
amazon

Maya Van Jeier - mail artist

2009-12-04T05:13:00.000-08:00

facebook

found

2009-11-30T11:37:00.000-08:00

trace (2008)

2009-11-30T11:34:00.002-08:00

lett eri st inter nation al

2009-11-30T11:34:00.001-08:00

The protagonists of this truly underground movement developed beyond the usual institutions and lifestyles into a subculture that was unconditionally dedicated to social protest. Various spectacular actions and publications testify to the irreconcilable negativism that stopped at nothing, not even self-destruction. Every form of personal pact with the existing order was despised. Neither the production of art nor work was supposed to corrupt the negativist rebellion.

During their wanderings in the Summer of1953, an 'illiterate Kabyle' suggested to them the term Psychogeography. They published an information bulletin called Potlatch. One of their most important texts was Ivan Chtcheglov's Formula for a New Urbanism which was not published until 1958 in the first issue of the journal Situationniste Internationale. He advocated a new city where everyone would be able to live in their own cathedral. Psychogeographers produced a broad range of proposals: the abolition ofmuseums and the placing of art in bars, keeping the Metro open all night, opening the roofs of Paris like pavements with escalators to help gain access.
Those involved in the LI include:

Michele Bernstein
Andre-Frank Concord
Mohamed Dahou
Guy Debord
Jacques Fillon
Alexander Trocchi
Gil Wolman

un-lubricated (2006)

2009-11-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

of hoof and horn...

2009-11-29T12:38:00.001-08:00

Oroonies

Allen Ginsberg | Sunflower Sutra

2009-11-29T10:18:00.001-08:00

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and

sat down under the huge shade of a Southern

Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the

box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron

pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts

of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,

surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of

machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun

sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that

stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves

rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums

on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray

shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting

dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,

memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes

Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black

treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the

poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel

knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck

and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the

past--

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,

crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog

and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like

a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,

soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays

obliterated on its hairy head like a dried

wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures

from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster

fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O

my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human

locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad

skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black

mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance

of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--

modern--all that civilization spotting your

crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless

eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the

home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar

bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards

of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely

tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what

more could I name, the smoked ashes of some

cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the

milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs

& sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you there

standing before me in the sunset, all your glory

in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent

lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye

to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited

grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden

monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your

grime, while you cursed the heavens of the

railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a

flower? when did you look at your skin and

decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?

the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and

shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a

sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me

not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck

it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul

too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread

bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all

beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed

by our own seed & golden hairy naked

accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black

formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our

eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive

riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening

sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg - Berkeley, 1955

This poem was written in 1955. The sunflower has a special meaning for Ginsberg, whose life was changed by an earlier vision of William Blake reading his own poem "Ah! Sunflower," in an East Harlem apartment.

found

2009-11-28T07:59:00.000-08:00

daydreaming at the window [2006]

2009-11-25T06:40:00.000-08:00

SID CHAPLIN - The Day of the Sardine

2009-11-24T18:07:00.000-08:00

SID CHAPLIN (1916 - 1986)

Chaplin was born at 23 Bolckow street, Shildon, and worked as a miner until 1946. While living at 9 Gladstone Terrace in Ferryhill, he published his first masterly collection of stories The Leaping Lad (1946). It gained him a prize which enabled him to take a year off and produce his first novel My Fate Cries Out about the lead miners of Weardale.

Sid Chaplin may be said to have influenced a whole generation of post-war British writers, including Keith Waterhouse and Stan Barstow. He also helped to form Northern Arts, the country's second (and largest) Regional Arts Association in 1961. Meanwhile his 1950 novel The Thin Seam formed the basis for a successful and moving musical play Close the Coalhouse Door by local writers Alan Plater and Alex Glasgow.

From 1957, Chaplin lived at 11 Kimberley Gardens in Sandyford, Newcastle. Remarking that the term regional writer made him spit blood, he wrote television scripts, including some for When the Boat Comes In. His two important novels The Day of the Sardine and The Watcher and the Watched are set among the working class communities of Scotswood, Byker and Elswick. D.J. Taylor in A Vain Conceit remarks that in the novels of Barstow and John Braine, the gutsy protagonists wanted houses and cars and a chunk of Macmillan's affluent society. Only in Sillitoe's Arthur Seaton do you find Chaplin's sort of anarchic, purposeless vitality that somehow places the character outside the normal channels of ambition and achievement.

'When he depicts Arthur's search for some sort of moral framework within the anarchy of modern society, he speaks for all of us, poetically and passionately, as truly now as he did almost half-a-century ago.' (From the foreword by Alan Plater)

The Day of the Sardine published in 1961, in many ways it is a similar work to Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with Arthur Haggerston, its moody hero experiencing the same problems with older women and useless labour, the sense of being part of some imperfectly perceived system, rebellion against which will always be futile. There is still aspiration but it exists only to be mocked: John Braine's heroes really want the trappings of material success, Arthur is being ironic.

'Chaplin's prose is wonderfully alive, and his novel is itself an overlooked but untarnished gem' - Independent

Chaplin's style sets him apart: stark elliptical blocks of sentences, stripped of pronouns and prepositions. 'Once mentioned this... Times you want to scream.' It conveys the twists and cadences of local speech, but without mimicking the bourgeois manner which George Orwell deprecated, and frequently rises to an odd, quirky lyricism - sharp fragments of prose that have a strangely voluptuous quality. Taylor goes on to characterise Chaplin as one of those 'fine Northern autodidacts', whose novels are, on one level a conscious extension of their own lives. 'His young modern equivalent would be off to Oxford and a job at the BBC - a fine thing for him no doubt, but a career unlikely to inspire a book like The Day of the Sardine which is in its way a better novel than many of the alleged landmarks of post-war British fiction. Taylor adds that Chaplin may continue to be classed as a regional author, but few novelists have so comprehensively demonstrated the hulking debt that post-war British fiction owes to Our Friends in the North.

buy from Flambard Press

myers project

Now I've got real detachment- n.spaces |Guardian article

Chaplin lives on

amazon

Rhys Davies - The Withered Root

2009-11-24T15:45:00.000-08:00

The Withered Root by Rhys Davies

Hugh Daniels at last got married, and immediately after the ceremony in Pisgah Chapel, Martha and he settled down to life in the little cottage that was part of Martha’s legacy from her deceased father – a dwelling in one of those naked rows, chiefly occupied by colliers, that rise, shrouded in grey coal-dust, on the Valley hills.

At this time the Valley was a community to itself, its squat rock-crowned hills imprisoned hardly any but the native Welsh, and in their bleak isolation the people lived their lives with all the primitive force of the Welsh – a natural life of toil, lust, and worship. Existence was not yet vitiated; the schools were disliked; each man worked long without question, and each woman lived to fulfil, without quavers, the function of her sex. The men obeyed the ancient law of the labourer, and the pits gave forth coal rhythmically and generously; the women nurtured their children in the old bare way. These people toiled and died and the world knew little of them. Only in Heaven could be realized the complete bliss they sometimes dreamed of, a Heaven that was to be an everlasting eisteddfod – all singing and recitals and organ-playing. Pieces of earth, they sank back into the earth in that hope.

Hugh had lived in the same part of the Valley all his life; he had been a collier there, and his brothers, colliers also, were scattered in various parts of its mine-torn ramifications. He knew no other place, he had never once ventured over the hills: the local pits, the public-houses and the chapels were a satisfactory world – all beyond was an alien unknown that he had no desire to penetrate. One of the old colliers – reared so satisfactorily – unknown to rancour or despair, satisfied with his day in the earth’s interior, to be followed, according to his temper, with a booze in the pub, or a little meeting in the chapel.

He was forty when he married Martha. He had been almost content with his state, a bachelor, having the chapel for wife and beer for servant, and perhaps he would never have really troubled himself about marriage had not Martha herself proposed to him, revealing also her fortune of two hundred pounds, beside the long lease of her home.

Martha was thirty and had kept a widowed father going until a fall of roof in the pit killed him. Then she began to look around with increased energy for a husband, buying herself new clothes and perfumes and cultivating attractive manners as she went about. She met Hugh one gloomy night as he was returning, almost drunk, to his lodgings. In a little lane that runs between two rows of cottages, where there are a few rickety, blackened trees and, at night, always clasped couples. When Martha and Hugh emerged from the lane they were holding each other’s hand and laughing together.

Hugh saw that she had a strong body and, after a few enquiries, found out that she was honest and that her father never had occasion to complain about his food and house. There was, however, a rumour that she was sometimes fond of a little drink. But to Hugh that was a virtue then – for he courted her during one of his prolonged inebriated periods.

‘More attractive is a female with a bit of spirit inside her,’ he had said.

For though Hugh feared and respected God and paid regularly for a pew in chapel, alas, he loved the drink too well. He wavered continually from a state of grace to sottish behaviour and was in despair of Pisgah, the chapel that had fostered his religious boyhood. But though he had long spells of drink, and the little woman living alone in her house of sin near the cemetery was not unknown to him, Pisgah had the greater part of his love. In true contrition and shame Hugh never failed to return to the old chapel after his drunken bouts, hanging his head before the fierce glances of the deacons, but proudly asserting his repentance by singing the hymns louder than anyone else. And he would attend every service, Sunday and week-days, for two or three months, until his disgusting thirst came upon him again and he would creep back to his scandalous other love. He believed that God would always forgive him. Also, he intended becoming the most religious man in the Valley – later on.

Faith burned in him as clearly and simply as love in a child, and even when drunk he was always aware of God and could sing all the verses of a Welsh hymn without a mistake and with deep emotion. (He was often asked, in the pub, to give this performance.) God, he felt sure, in spite of the minister, always winked an eye if one intended to return, faithful and contrite, to his worship.

So Hugh, when he married Martha on August Bank Holiday, said to her after they had entered their home: ‘Now let our lives be sweet-scented in the nostrils of God, Mrs Daniels. Kneel you down with me and speak a little prayer.’

And as it was the wedding-day Martha humoured him, but said: ‘Speak you for us both, Daniels. A suitable way you have got for such speeches.’

The house was neat and bright, with many brass candlesticks, painted tea-pots, large pictures, and shining lamps; the fireplace in the living-room as imposing as any to be seen in a Welsh collier’s house – brilliant and black, with brass gleaming here and there, two brass-handled kettles and strips of brass nailed round the mantelpiece. A large piece of Welsh bacon hung from a hook in the ceiling and a stout tabby-cat usually sat between the two andirons on the hearth.

‘Cosy, this is,’ Hugh remarked, looking round the livingroom. ‘There’s nice and fat that bacon is. How much a pound paid you for it?’

From the back of the house, beyond the strip of garden, the mountain curved up steeply, a greyish green. In winter the winds swept down fiercely from the wide uplands, and the snow drifted, half-burying the back of the Row. A single railroad track, leading to the pit, was cut on the breast of the mountain and, about half-a-mile from the Row, the pit sprawled, an amorphous collection of dim sheds and structures coated thickly with black dust, the tall chimney stacks rising up barrenly, smoke issuing from them slowly like black thin banners of submission.

‘A little home of my own at last,’ murmured Hugh in the bedroom. ‘Dear me, empty my life has been before, without a woman and all.’

Martha wound the clock.

‘Say what o’clock you want to get up,’ she said, a little peevishly. ‘A change it will be for me, to get up so early. Working on the night-shift was father.’

Hugh did not offer to get up alone and prepare his breakfast himself. And Martha supposed she would have to see him off to the pit for the present, as they’re only just married.

‘Not a lady’s life, is it, being married to a collier,’ she grumbled, getting into bed.

info::here

found photo

2009-11-24T09:29:00.000-08:00

William S Burroughs & Brion Gysin

2009-11-24T09:01:00.000-08:00

William S Burroughs & Brion Gysin -Third Mind.pdf

aiwazzsaying

William Burroughs

2009-11-21T11:45:00.001-08:00

William Burroughs Book Covers

a.d. winans - two poems

2009-11-21T09:42:00.000-08:00

remembering harold norse

Neeli and I visit the ancient warrior
Praised by William Carlos Williams
And other literary giants
90 years old
Early stages of dementia setting in
Playing hide-and-seek inside
His solitary room
Now an old man trapped
In death’s shadow
He reads us a poem from
His collected works
His voice still loud and clear
Like Sunday church bells

He puts down the book becoming
Frail and vulnerable again
This rock of ages with peaked hat
Walking slowly with us to the
Cafe across the street
Complaining about the loud music
As Neeli orders him a cup of coffee

‘”Make mine black,” he says then
Wants to know why I didn’t”t put
Milk in it.
This forgotten warrior
Walking back to the care facility
Neeli shielding him with an umbrella
To ward off the cold rain
“That’s my hotel the
Beat Hotel”, he says
Hotel Nirvana racing inside
His blood

He stops says,
“I can’t go on.”
Out of breath
As if the next step
Might be his last

He is like a bird
His eyes nesting
In my soul
Feeding on poetry the
Sum total of his life

one too many poets one too many poetry readings

you can find them in the back room
poised for a quick exit
they’re the first poets to read
and the first to leave
they always carry
a loose leaf notebook with them
they always have a pretty young girl
hanging on to their arm

there is always one who claims
to have known Kerouac or Ginsberg
to have slept with one or both

two or three live with the Gods
another two or three claim
to be God

two ex-junkies one homosexual
one drag queen with too much mascara
two sad eyed women rubbing their hands
when they’d prefer to be rubbing something else

always a drop out from the Beat Generation
a hold over from the Hippie days
a woman with short hair
a nervous poet with a tic
a refugee from the drug set
a failed poet who drops names
faster than an auctioneer

one poet who reviews poetry
one poet who is an editor
one poet who wants to be an editor
one Messiah
and one visiting out of town star

TRIBUTE TO JACK MICHELINE - THE LAST OF THE STREET POETS

A.D. Winans: The Holy Grail: Charles Bukowski and the Second Coming Revolution interview

Ira Cohen & DJ Cheb I Sabbah - The Majoon Traveler

2009-11-17T08:16:00.001-08:00

Ira Cohen is a seminal figure in the consciousness-raising, mind-altering counter-culture movement that began in the 1960s. Over the past five decades, he has produced a wide-ranging body of work that includes poetry, audio recordings, photographs, and experimental and documentary films. Influenced by the many years he spent in North Africa, India, and Nepal with several other key figures of the counterculture, Cohen captures in his work transcendent moments filled with potential and being, embodiments of the Sanskrit word Akash, meaning “ether” or “timeless thoughts.”In New York in the late 1960s, Cohen created his Mylar Chamber, a room covered with bendable, distorting mirrors in which he produced psychedelic photographs of shamans, divas, the rock stars Jimi Hendrix and Noel Redding, and the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith. These melting, vibrant images are featured in his film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968). An extraordinary visual trip into a mythical land populated by wizards, sorcerers, dreaming plants, and magical animals, with an accompanying soundtrack by Velvet Underground drummer Angus McLise, the film epitomizes the hallucinogenic experiences of the psychedelic era, melding image with sound, color, movement, and light.In his poetry, Cohen shies away from ornamentation, favoring a style more akin to collage, in which fragments are brought together to create a unified whole. For Cohen, the most important aspect of his poetry remains the subject matter, which is taken from lived experience, not from the imagination. In “Something I’ve Been Thinking a Lot About” (2005), he ruminates on the possible exploitation of tsunami victims, the uncounted dead in Iraq, and the rapidity with which these events can be glossed over and forgotten. In “Cornucopion” (2004), he reflects, after discovering long-forgotten flower petals embedded in the last pages of his notebook, on the passage of time.Cohen’s engagement with poetry is not limited to the written word, for, following in the tradition of Dylan Thomas and others, he remains deeply invested in the power of reading his poetry out loud. Through this performative act, he gains a deeper connection to the poem and to his audience, a connection that reaffirms a universal consciousness of being as conveyed through image and word.The Majoon Traveler was released in 1994 by Sub Rosa, It is subtitled The Poetry Of Ira Cohen With DJ Cheb I Sabbah's Cut Up Mix Of Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Angus MacLise, Lights In A Fat City, Jilala"

Ira Cohen & DJ Cheb I Sabbah - The Majoon Traveler mp3 here

1. Blind Violinist
2. Imagine Jean Cocteau
3. Song to Nothing/Letter to Caliban/End of a Line
4. Kathmandu Dream Piece
5. Cembalism
6. Tangier Telegram from the Majoon Traveler/From the Moroccan ...
7. Allah Moulana
8. Even the King of the Ginza Must Sometimes Sleep for Yamaguchi Kenjiro
9. Ornette Comes Home
10. This Is Real Timing
11. Djemaa el Fna

Tracks 1, 6 and 11 recorded by Ira Cohen in Marrakesh, 1987.
Kumbh Mela recording on track 4 by Ira Cohen and Ira Landgarten, Hardwar 1986.
Track 7 recorded by Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin for Ira Cohen, Tangier 1961.
Don Cherry recorded at Earwax by Hans Christian Reumschussel.
Ira Cohen's voice on tracks 4, 6, 8 and 9 recorded by Bill Laswell.
Ira Cohen's voice on tracks 2, 3 and 10 recorded by Naut Humon.
Steven Kent recorded by Naut Humon.
All tracks engineered and assisted by Naut Humon at Bloody Angle Studios.
Produced by DJ Cheb I Sabbah.

ira cohen at the october gallery
excellent website

Kathmandu Portfolio + 1
biography
jacket mag interview

Poet's brains prove to be useful!
6 poems by Ira Cohen

Exquisite Corpse/Ira Cohen & The Night A Fried Egg Went to the Whitney
a phone conversation with blastitude

HASHISHEEN;THE END OF LAW HERE

Herbert Huncke - From dream to dream

2009-11-09T06:07:00.001-08:00

Herbert Huncke is the pivotal figure in the development of beat literature.
Huncke's use of the carny term beat in his stories of riding the rails in
the thirties inspired Jack Kerouac to chronicle his own tales of rootless
wandering in On the Road.

Huck, whom you'll see on Times Square, somnolent and alert, sad, sweet, dark, holy. Just out of jail. Martyred. Tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship, open to anything, ready to introduce a new world with a shrug.-Jack Kerouac

Alcohol is not his habit but he'll kindly allow you to buy him a drink at Montero's. His voice is deep, gentle and musical. He never forgets his manners and you'd rarely think of him as Huncke the Junkie. He respects law and obeys none of it - Frank McCourt

He turned William Burroughs onto heroin, and
appears as a character in Burroughs Junky, the first step in an immersion
in addict culture that would eventually produce Naked Lunch. And the image
of Huncke's shoes filled with blood tramping 42nd Street gave Allen Ginsberg
the very model of the angel-headed hipster in his seminal poem Howl. But
most beat fans do not realize that before he even met the beat lit
triumvirate, Huncke was writing in a journal he always carried with him.

The stories that come down to us, depicting lyrical childhood memories, loss of
innocence, misfits of society, petty crime, incarceration, junk sickness and
the downtown art scene, reveal that Huncke's legendary storytelling skills
were infused with their own touch of the poet.

The Herbert Huncke Reader is one of those books that you just don’t want to put down but you equally don’t want to read it too fast because that means you might get to the end and then there is nothing left to read.buy it here & here

This reader contains the full texts of Herbert Huncke's out-of-print works, "Huncke's Journal" and "The Evening Sun Turned Crimson", and a wide selection from his other published and unpublished poems, stories, memoirs, letters and diaries.

"Huncke's greatest crime was that he was an unreconstructed, unredeemed drug addict who made no apologies for his behavior, who had learned from hard experience that those used drugs in America were not simply downtrodden but truly among the damned. Next to blacks and poor immigrants, they were the most despised and persecuted outcasts of the society, without rights, beneath dignity, beyond the pale of compassion. The word that Huncke coined for such a condition was 'beat.'"

- Martin Torgoff

"I always followed the road of least resistance. I just continued to do what I wanted. I didn't weigh or balance things. I started out this way and I never really changed."

"I wish I could say I'd hit upon the answers to the great mysteries of life. But it doesn't make any more sense to me than it did on day one." -Herbert Huncke

excepts from
Guilty of Everything
Huncke’s Journal

Irving Rosenthal. SHEEPER[Excerpt]
The book includes fascinating accounts of Herbert Huncke and Alex Trocchi.
Herbert Huncke - From dream to dream-MP3 here

1 - The Lights Are Shining On Me
2 - Louis
3 - I Try To Tell Things
4 - The Evening Sun Turned Crimson
5 - Listen To Me
6 - Elsie
7 - On Heroin
8 - Cheers
9 - New Orleans
10 - Impressions
11 - On Being A Romantic
12 - The Savior
13 - On Language
14 - Beat/nik
15 - On Joan Burroughs (with the bells of Brugge)

Huncke-Times
Herbert Huncke, the unsung Beat, finally gets his due
Huncke and Louis/ A Video Documentary by Laki Vazakas

Herbert Huncke's Introduction to Pipe Dreams

Interview with Herbert Huncke By Johnny Strike
buy more books by Huncke here

Joe Ambrose - Chelsea Hotel Manhattan /Extreme living in New York’s Chelsea Hotel

st.pauls,bristol.

2009-11-09T06:05:00.000-08:00

James Kelman - Seven stories cd

2009-11-08T12:23:00.000-08:00

Born in Glasgow in 1946, James Kelman left school at fifteen to begin an apprenticeship as a compositor (where he became sensitised to the look of words on the page), which was followed by periods of work and unemployment and a brief spell in the USA. A keen reader, it wasn’t until the early 1970s, in his late twenties, that he began to seriously acknowledge his creative ability, enrolling on a writing course under the tutelage of the influential Philip Hobsbaum, alongside fellow aspiring writers Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead and Tom Leonard.

Variously described as gritty, essential, authentic, postmodern, existential, realist, socialist, experimental, original, traditionally working-class, traditionally Scottish, traditionally European in its similarities to Kafka, Joyce, or Beckett, or just incomparable, the work of James Kelman sparks commentators into a labeling frenzy which necessarily falls short of a true appreciation of this highly gifted writer.

Published first in the USA, Kelman had to wait until 1976 for his work to receive a British audience, in Three Glasgow Writers (with Alex Hamilton and Tom Leonard). But it was really during the following decade that Kelman’s unique voice started making waves on the Scottish literary scene. Not Not While the Giro, his first book-length collection of short stories, was published in 1983 by Polygon, and with his first two novels, The Busconductor Hines (1984) and A Chancer (1985), Kelman firmly established his artistic flair and commitment to showing real life in Thatcherite Britain as faithfully as possible (far removed from the falsities and stereotypes of the media).

The Busconductor Hines is the moving and frequently irreverent tale of Rab Hines, a family man and, as Kelman once referred to him, a ‘working-class intellectual’; a highly imaginative soul increasingly disillusioned with the monotony of his job. A Chancer, a book which the author had been struggling to finish for many years, is the brilliantly restrained narrative of a younger Glaswegian man whose only real sense of purpose is derived from the betting shop and the greyhound tracks.

In the late 1980s Kelman began to receive the recognition he deserved, when first his short story collection Greyhound for Breakfast (1987) won the Cheltenham prize and his third novel, A Disaffection (1989), took the James Tait Black award and made the Booker shortlist. With its nods to Kierkegaard and Kafka, A Disaffection brought extravagant literary comparisons on its author, and furthered Kelman’s championing of the ‘working-class intellectual’.

In 1994 James Kelman’s name shot to mainstream as well as literary prominence with the novel How Late it Was, How Late, the powerfully unsettling story of a few days in the life of Sammy Samuels, a tragic ne’er-do-well who is beaten blind by police and struggles to get by in a world of unremitting tension and danger. General astonishment followed when this most unlikely contender won that year’s Booker Prize, the most prestigious, anglocentric of book awards. Inevitably, this caused a fierce debate in the broadsheets which divided opinion between those who admired Kelman’s unwavering description of life on the edge and those who failed to see past the swearing. Simon Jenkins in The Times sneeringly referred to Kelman as an ‘illiterate savage’, while others believed that serious criticism constituted counting the instance of the f-word.

Following his Booker triumph and a new legion of supporters (although his novels have never achieved bestseller status), Kelman took up successive teaching posts on various creative writing courses, while his fiction took a rather new direction. In 2001, Translated Accounts emerged, a strange collection of anonymous testimonials introduced as originating from ‘an occupied territory or land where a form of martial law appears in operation’. While challenging his readership more than ever, Translated Accounts also offers a humanitarian, hard-hitting indictment of post-9/11 right-wing political newspeak, and wisely avoids commenting overtly on real people or places (and thereby narrowing the relevance of the message).

Kelman’s You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004), is a return to his old style, albeit in a new setting. The first-person narrative belongs to Jeremiah Brown, a Glaswegian expatriate drinking in a small town somewhere in the USA, brooding over his past and his ex-girlfriend. There is renewed satire of governmental discourse and its treatment of ‘unassimilatit aliens’ like Jeremiah. As in the previous novels, what is striking is Kelman’s appreciation of the heroism of ordinary human beings just getting by, and Jeremiah Brown, with all his bad luck and resilient humour, is one of his best creations yet.

James Kelman - Seven stories mp3 here

the same is here again

roofsliding

learning the story

the witness

acid

are you drinking sir?

a wide runner

His most recent novel Kieron Smith, Boy[2008] has been descibed as 'Magnificent and important ... might just be Kelman's greatest achievement to date' 'A vibrant, beautiful portrait of childhood ' 'I have read no other depiction of the inner life of a boy that comes as close as this to The Catcher in the Rye '

Of all the words used to describe James Kelman, perhaps the most pertinent then is ‘essential’. Kelman’s commitment to the ordinary individual struggling against systems of oppression, both in his work as a novelist and as a political activist (which he describes in his two collections of essays), is admirable. But it is the way he writes, his calculated subversion of the English language and his total disregard for convention, that singles him out as a truly great contemporary writer, and as much as one would like to avoid the labels, the comparisons with Kafka, Joyce, and Beckett are inevitable and much deserved.

buy James Kelman books here

An Interview with James Kelman

Gil J. Wolman

2009-11-08T11:20:00.001-08:00

Those who live by obscurity die by it also, so the minimal response to the disappearance of Gil J. Wolman is hardly surprising. Wolman led a brave, ferociously independent existence at war with the forces of contemporary conformity, the celebrity machine of the mass media being high amongst the accused.

Born Gil Joseph in Paris in 1929, Wolman was an active agent provocateur from an early age. At 24 he published a brief summary of his activities: member of the Young Communists, journalist for the magazine Combat, drug trafficker in the Algiers Casbah, long-distance lorry driver from Greenland to Pompeii, merchant marine captain, published poet and accomplished knitter. But Wolman's anti-career really commenced after meeting Isidor Isou in 1950, when together they developed the principles of Lettrisme, a radioactively nihilistic form of late Dada in opposition to everything that might be termed Culture (capital C representing Class interests) and status quo.

In February 1952 Wolman was part of a major scandal, mounting a screening of five films, including his L'Anticoncept, the first of his experiments in "Cinematochrone", abolishing images altogether, a violent flurry of black and white strobes projected on a balloon accompanied by a very loud soundtrack of assorted noises. This was nothing compared to the film of his best friend, the agitator Guy Debord, whose Hurlement en faveur de Sade was dedicated to Wolman and resulted in police intervention.

In April the same year Wolman led a systematic disruption of the Cannes Film Festival and was only saved by a police escort. Most importantly, in May, he founded the Internationale Lettriste with Debord in Belgium. At the end of 1952 he was under arrest again, this time for breaking through a police cordon to shower Charlie Chaplin with insulting pamphlets declaring, "Go home Chaplin."

From their Cafe Bonaparte HQ Wolman planned other Lettriste attacks, including a rescue mission to liberate a reform school for young girls. Such attacks extended to Andre Breton, whose Surrealism they particularly disdained. Wolman's published letter to Breton ended: "You should shut it down and let your daughter look after her old dad. The Surrealist movement is composed of imbeciles or FORGERS."

Wolman's aesthetic innovations, films like Atochrone, which reversed the cinematic process by breaking up a second into 24 parts, or "Megapneumie", a sort of organic noise music, and his researches into new forms of painting such as the canvas HHHHHH, were part of a radical change in the arts, which, if dated and tamed by half a century, were vital to the spirit of post-war Europe.

More important were Wolman's collaborations with Debord, including the seminal "derives" throughout Paris, walks that laid bare the "psycho-geographic" structure of the city. The Lettristes were much concerned with the nature of urban life, especially the detrimental effects of town planning, which they saw as an assault on the erotic and criminal vitality of the metropolis. At a time when progressive artists were supposedly committed to the "modern", Wolman published open attacks on Corbusier and his "Unite" housing.In 1955, responding to an article on the planned demolition of Limehouse, the Times published this manifesto-letter from Wolman and Debord:

We protest against such moral ideas in town planning, ideas which must obviously make England more boring than it has in recent years already become. We hold that the so-called modern town planning which you recommend is fatuously idealistic and reactionary. The sole end of architecture is to serve the passions of men. If modernisation appears to you to be historically necessary we would counsel you to carry your enthusiasms into areas more urgently in need of it, that is to say, to your political and moral institutions.

Lettristes were ahead of their time in this critique of Modernist planning and their approach to the city, as a site of negotiable personal experience with unclassified pockets of resistance, has had a permanent influence on architectural theory and teaching. Likewise, the radical ideas of the Lettristes and their descendants the Situationists came to fruition in May 1968, as well as in the graphics, tactics and f-you aesthetics of UK punk, not to mention a horde of anarcho-squatter-travellers who live out the ideals of Wolman and his collaborators without having heard of him or his demise.

The Anticoncept | Cinematochronic Argument For A Physical Phase of the Arts

Gil J. Wolman-L'Anticoncept mp3 here

2009-11-08T09:41:00.000-08:00

thoughts on doing it here

list

2009-11-07T06:54:00.000-08:00

funked compilation

2009-11-07T06:46:00.000-08:00

another little gem from my box of found music.
this time a collection of funk/soul.
found in st.pauls/bristol

klik here for mp3 download

sunrise today - bristol

2009-11-06T06:59:00.000-08:00

found photo

2009-11-02T09:07:00.000-08:00

Gerard de Nerval - Gilded Verse

2009-11-01T10:33:00.000-08:00

Gerard de Nerval - Gilded Verse

Man, free thinker! You think you alone think
In this world where life splatters everywhere?
You're free to dispose of your charge,
But the firmament's gone from your schemes.

Respect the spirit that moves in beasts:
Every flower a ghost that opens to Nature,
Every alloy harbors the secrets of love;
"Everything is sentient," & everything can change you,

Fear the eyes in blind walls,
Even dead matter is infused with a verb,
Don't use it perversely.

Even in the shunned ones lives a secret god,
Like a nascent eye obscured by its lids,
A pure spirit blooms behind the veil of stones.

Poet, visionary, short-story writer and autobiographer, Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) explored the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness, autobiography and fiction with his groundbreaking writings.Gerard de Nerval was a prolific poet and wrote many tales including 'Sylvie', his most read work. At 20 years old, he made a name for himself by translating Goethe's Faust from German into French. This endeavor was not only successful, but it was applauded by Goethe and readers alike.
His greatest subject was himself. Throughout his tempestuous life, this French Romantic poet journeyed to distant parts of the globe in order to comprehend and articulate the demons that assailed his inner-most being. The culmination of Nerval's quest was Aurélia, a masterful surrealistic prose dissection of mind and soul, completed only a year before his death.

A contemporary of Poe, De Quincey, Gogol and Heine, he introduced into French literature a mode of writing rooted in German romanticism yet already recognizably modernist, De Nerval was a dreamer and seemed disinterested in reality, after meeting Victor Hugo, he sided with the Club des Haschischins, whose members dressed in Oriental garb and handed each other a hashish pipe. He'd walk his pet lobster through the streets of Paris on the end of a blue silk ribbon and regarded them as "peaceful, serious creatures, who know the secrets of the sea, and don't bark".
His Bohemian lifestyle veered out of control, and he was eventually committed to a psychiatric ward. He viewed his residence there as a rite of initiation, which would lead him to higher spheres of literature. With de Nerval so much more attuned to reverie than reality, his friends became worried. Seeking inspiration, he traveled to the Middle East. His observations were cloaked in personal disappointment, so that he preferred his imaginings of foreign settings to the physical reality of those places he had visited. During the winter of 1855, his burdens overcame his capacity to cope with them and he was found hanging from a lamppost in the rue de la Vieille Lanterne, Paris

An Introduction

a letter to miss Girton
Robert Robbins on Nerval

In the name of the other I ... Gerard de Nerval

The 'Club des Hashischins' over at friends of cannabis
review of The Salt Smugglers over at bookslut

amazon

found photo

2009-10-31T04:16:00.000-07:00

found

2009-10-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

not bored!

2009-10-29T11:38:00.001-07:00

GUY DEBORD, 1988

Secrecy dominates this world, and first and foremost as the secret of domination. According to the spectacle, secrecy would only be a necessary exception to the rule of freely available, abundant information [...] No one sees secrecy in its inaccessible purity and its functional universality. Everyone accepts that there are inevitably little areas of secrecy reserved for specialists; as regards things in general, many believe they are in on the secret [...] Their only role is to make domination more respectable, never to make it comprehensible. They are the privilege of front-row spectators who are stupid enough to believe they can understand something, not by making use of what is hidden from them, but by believing what is revealed!

more!!!

Jack Micheline and his painted poem room

2009-10-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

Jack Micheline

and his painted poem room
Jack came into the bookstore often. He'd sort through the sale books out front and then he always headed for the back to use the bathroom. I just had to hope he'd hit the toilet and not splash all over. What a cantankerous grumpy man Jack was. Jack Micheline, Beat poet, 68 years old. He couldn't let a day go by without ranting about how Lawrence Ferlinghetti had fucked him over and publishers were too timid to touch an outlaw like him. He wasn't an outlaw. But he was also a loudmouth (a gifted one) who tried to sell me lousy books or sell back the books I gave him with his penciled in imaginary prices. Then when I wouldn't buy them he'd shout at me, "What's the matter with these man! Didn't you say your store is going to fold if you don't have more people bringing in books to sell? What's the matter with these! These are good!"

I'd say to him, "Yes, Jack but these kind of books will put me out of business quicker. I can't buy these."

Then he'd say, "I'll trade you! You keep your money. Just give me trade credit!"

I had to keep telling him, "Look, if I trade bad books for good books then I'm letting you cannibalize my store!"

I'm not saying this is what Jack was all about. This is the Jack that I saw, in the last few years of his life. He was unwell and worried about the future and he got rather ill tempered. But would you believe, after all that, Jack was actually a tender, caring man? Would you believe he was a Santa Clause of kindness? That he was a teddy bear with the volume up to high? He and his fellow Beat writers, more than merely writing and painting and making music, also showed people how to take back ownership of their lives.

I remember when I first saw Jack several years ago at another bookstore. He was sitting on their couch and going on about how great he was, how his writing was the genuine article and what everyone else was writing was crap. (Except Saroyan, Algren, Bukowski and a very few others.) He complained that some books he'd tried to sell over in Berkeley, he couldn't unload. His face, with the missing teeth looked like it had a flat tire. His pants looked like he'd pissed himself. He was so loud! Did he just sit on that bookstore's couch all day and broadcast? If that was a full-time poet, I'd rather think about sweeping streets. That was my first impression.

Who cares if Jack Kerouac wrote a half page introduction to his first thin pamphlet of poems? So what? I saw him several more times, then I heard he was going to do a reading at the Mission Cultural Center. I thought, what the hell, I'll go out and see him. At the reading most the chairs were filled. Filled! I was surprised. Where did everyone come from? I noticed many younger people and this amazingly pretty woman in the first row, part gypsy, part princess. Stunning. I didn't expect that either. I don't know what I expected—gray toothless men taking a break from AA meetings? I had no idea. Jack got up; he had on a silk pink shirt, a blazing red scarf and his floppy purple hat. His pants were half falling down and filthy. He thanked everyone for coming.

Then he started.

I'll never get this on paper. I'll never do it justice. But there are people who look ordinary as hell and you think they couldn't hold down their side of a bus bench, but then they get up before you, do their thing, and it's sensational!

Jack Micheline amazed me.

He read poems about remaining a free spirit. He hollered, wailed, cooed, sang, ranted like a rusty drum. He read a poem about flowers and prostitutes and a couple of poems for old friends, cheated and gone. He described sweet souls caught at the bottom in life's meat grinder. He had poems for sad, lonely, locked out people.

Everyone at the reading loved his poems. They loved Jack. What a original! Some of them were old friends. I don't know what I expected, but there he was, putting everything he had into it. Shouting, wooing, singing, playing the harmonica, dropping lines, apologizing, then going on, his glasses slipping down his nose, waving his arms about, being a clown, a dirty old man, a preacher, a social misfit full of hugs and kisses for everyone, enemies included. A poet. After the reading, people clapped with enthusiasm. A couple of people were taking pictures.

There was something to drink and Jack had laid out all sorts of little chap books that he was offering for sale. If you bought one he'd sign it for you. He had some books he'd put together himself at the Xerox store where he hand painted the covers. They cost extra. He called women, "sweetheart."

Afterwards, I went out, down the stairs, onto Mission Street, and thought to myself, "Well I sure as hell misjudged Jack Micheline! He's terrific."

On a more personal level, I didn't really get to know Jack until the summer of 1995 when I cleared out a small room at the back of the bookstore. One day when Jack came in I asked if I could pay him to paint a few men with hats and other figures on one of the walls of the room Id cleared out. I wanted something colorful. He said, "No problem, sure thing," and better still he wouldn't charge me. Buy him a sandwich and the paint. That's all he wanted.

Jack came in a few days later to prepare the wall. The next thing I knew he asked if it would be all right if he used two of the walls. "I've been waiting a very long time to do something like this. Very long! Scott, you have no idea!" He started coming in every day and getting to work in the little room. He needed $120 for paint and undercoating which I gave him.

"Scott, this is going to be great. This is going to be fantastic. Wait till you see what I'm going to do. I have it all in my head. It's going to be very spiritual. People don't realize I'm a very spiritual person. I'm going to thank some of the people who have helped me in life by painting them." Then he said he needed $60 more. He was using only the best quality paint. It wasn't cheap.

We got into sort of a daily pattern. I'd come to work, open the bookstore. Soon Jack would walk in with his coffee, papers, letters, paints, filthy pants and hands all covered with paint. He'd march on to the little room and start to work. Then I'd hear his coughing and swearing. He'd smoke. I'd hear him dragging the aluminum ladder around. He made a lot of noise. He often came up front and said how his entire life he'd been ignored by the major publishers but they'd discover him when he was dead. He said he was too honest. They weren't ready for an outlaw like him. Then after one or two hours he'd quit. Every few days he'd ask for more money.

I started to complain, "Jack how much is this going to cost? It's getting pretty expensive for being free."

Then he'd almost shout back at me, "How can you put a price on art, man! It costs what it cost. How am I suppose to know. Go complain at the paint store! They decide what to charge! Would you ask Matisse or Picasso how much the paint cost!"

The good news was that Jack had decided he needed the two remaining walls and he started to work on them. I'd pass through his painted room to use the bathroom and he'd be intently at work, usually applying the paint right from tubes to his fingers then onto the wall. He filled the walls with brilliant figures, faces, cats or horses, and words.

It was marvelous. Especially when the afternoon sun filled the room. He reworked parts which he didn't like. He was a hard worker. He'd curse and cough and bang around with the ladder. He'd smoke. He listened to Classical or Jazz on a small tape player he plugged in. He regularly came up front and asked to use the phone. He frequently introduced people to me and to the store.

One day he put a thick manila envelope on the front desk. "This is something I wrote back in the 1950's. It's never been published. It's a novel in the form of a long series of poems. I thought you might like to have a look. If not, that's OK too."

Jack went on back to his painted poem room. I sat waiting for customers and I settled down to read. This work he'd handed me was quite good. It was a lyrical social protest in the form of a series of clear pictures of working people and their struggles. It reminded me of John Steinbeck and Dorothea Lange. I remember thinking at the time that it would be a tragic thing if this work never got published.

Later when Jack was going out on an errand he said, "Scott, I'm going to need more paint. I'll need some more money to get it."

I said to him, "Jack this poem-novel is really good. I mean really good."

"Of course it's good! I can't get any publisher to touch it. It's the story of my life, man! I'm glad you liked it. What about the paints?"

Week after week, Jack kept coming back to work on the room. He had so much energy. He painted the north wall specially for children. On the south wall he painted the one armed piano player and painter Ed Balchowsky and copied a poem he'd written about him.

It didn't seem to matter what was going on, Jack came back day after day. Sometimes he'd sit for long spells looking at what he'd done. Over the five weeks he'd tell me little things about himself. He mentioned his son and his wonderful grand daughter.

He was so proud of his grand daughter.

He'd also talk about when he organized labor in the south in very black areas where other organizers were afraid to go. He'd been to Mexico City to paint. Franz Kline had given him $1,000 to start out. He painted down there in Mexico City right out in the open. They thought he was crazy. He traveled to Spain. Elsewhere.

I remember him telling me once, "You need to get yourself a girlfriend Scott. Are you still hung up on that Mexican woman who paints? Get over her! You're one of the few gentle, kind-hearted people I know. Believe me I know what I'm talking about. You should find somebody kind hearted like you are."

Mostly during those six weeks (and more than $800 in paints and sandwiches) I saw how Jack's persistence day after day resulted in something greater than the parts, something magnificent. He did one "brick" at a time. He didn't make excuses. He made sure it was the best "brick" he could do. The best. Then the next day he'd worry about another "brick," and so on.

Jack was a living example of how to get work done.

Jack finished the painted poem room injuly of 1995 and we had a special Jack Micheline event at the store to celebrate. He invited all the people he believed in to participate. He filled the place.

After he completed his poem room, he'd gotten so much into the habit of coming over from the Curtis Hotel (which was down Valencia and across the street from the bookstore) that he started coming in and going to the back to sit daily. He brought all kinds of people in to see his mural, his painted poem room.

He said to me many times, "People are going to come from all over the world to see this. I should charge admission."

Sometimes he'd sit up near the front desk on the black couch. I saw him day after day. He'd be peddling books and complaining how another bookstore had backed out of printing his book, "Don't Eat Red Meat on a Hot Day." He complained about the printer across the street that was going to bring a book of his out but the printer went out of business.

He loved the work Matt Gonzalez was doing to put together a book of selected poems ("Sixty-seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints," FMSBW Press, San Francisco). When that book did come out Jack even found a young guy out on the street to take copies to New York. Jack specially inscribed several copies to friends in New York.

The guy vanished along with the books. "I should have known better. The guy was a junkie!" is all Jack could say. "I can't help believing in people."

Once Jack told me about the women he'd write to in prison. He exchanged some steamy letters. He sent money to one woman who promised to visit him when she got out. She never did.

His luck in all departments, including going to the track, seemed to be consistently awful. (But this didn't keep him from being an optimist and betting on the long shots.) He didn't want anyone's pity but I just couldn't help but feel bad for him.

He went to New York for a Beat conference. He went to Denver. He visited a friend that owned a beautiful farm. He came back crusty as ever. Restless, restless always on the move. He wanted to move, for good, out of San Francisco. He wanted to go out into the country, with trees and nature and relax. He kept saying he'd been screwed his whole life and they'd discover him after he was dead.

Nobody had any idea how good he really was.

The day before he died he looked no different from on any other day. He was restless as ever. I'd just returned from a trip to LA.

He said, "Be well," as he went out the front door that night. He headed on down the street to who knows where. I'd seen him cross the street right through traffic with big manila envelopes under his arm, so many times.

It was the next afternoon that someone from the Curtis Hotel came over and asked, if I heard?

They'd found Jack Micheline dead on BART.

"No" I answered. I hadn't heard.

The morning after his death I put a candle and some flowers in the window. One of his friends, Julia, came in and we stood in a state of speechless grief. She said, "Well I hope someone will do some sort of service for him. Something fitting for Jack."

I said, I didn't know. His son might just come to settle things and to take his remains.

Then Julia said she knew someone who had a former church building, so next thing I know, Julia and the tireless video chronicler, Kush, met in my store and started making plans.

Hundreds of people came. (People had been informed of the event entirely by word-of-mouth.) Julia showed me the food Puerto Alegre, Katz Bagels, and other local restaurants had donated. A television monitor was playing clips of past readings. There was Jack, lively as ever.

The room was filled with the Who's Who of San Francisco alternative press (as opposed to commercial) literary history. Among them all, John Bryan, former publisher of the legendary "Open City," which first carried Charles Bukowski's famous weekly column, "Notes of A Dirty Old Man," the young publisher Johnny Brewton, creator of "X-Ray Magazine," Allen Cohen, the originator of the quintessential freedom psychedelic newspaper of the 1960's, "The Oracle," A.D. Winans, close friend of Jack's and publisher of two of his books.

The place was full of such people.

Then upstairs in the big room under the watchful eyes of Jack himself (rendered in a giant spirited portrait of him) the speakers began paying tribute: Harold Norse, Neeli Cherkovski, Michael McClure and Jack Hirschman who electrified the audience with a thundering good poem that brought everyone to their feet cheering and clapping. There were musicians who wailed out sad tunes and the owner of an art gallery who'd put on a one man show for Jack.

In the audience was Eileen Kaufman (widow of Bob Kaufman), so frail, swaying her head back and forth, seemingly caught between smiling and crying.

George Tirado, the big man got up on the stage, a street poet himself. He belted out a howling beautiful lament for his lost friend Jack and the hard life street poets live.

Ken Kesey and Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent messages of sympathy, which were read. The program for Jack Micheline began at eight and speakers and poets went on till near one in the morning.

Of all the people who climbed those stairs and stood before the audience, what touched me the most, was when Jack Micheline's only child, his son Vince, stood on the stage with Nicole, Jack's grand daughter in his arms, and gave a warm, humble, heart-felt thank-you to everyone for the love and kind words to his father. Nicole leaned over and said thank you into the microphone in her small child confident, Jack-Micheline-like voice.

When I left to walk home I felt torn. To see such a grounds well of support was so moving, but I also felt so broken with sadness. Jack was gone. If only he could have been there to see it all.

I still hear Jack Micheline shouting, "They fucked me over good, man! They'll discover me when I'm dead! Just watch!"

But what is left since Jack has died, is a beautiful body of work (mostly unpublished) and his bright lively paintings. Fountainhead of a rainbow. You'll be hard pressed to find one bit of the bitterness, pain and frustration he experienced in his life, in the work he's left behind.

scott harrison

(from Ragged Lion : a tribute to Jack Micheline)

Charles Bukowski - loner

2009-10-29T06:38:00.000-07:00

klik to read

Westonbirt Arboretum / Gloucestershire

2009-10-27T10:48:00.000-07:00

Westonbirt Arboretum here

found

2009-10-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

found

2009-10-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

Emmett Grogan - Ringolevio

2009-10-19T04:13:00.000-07:00

Emmett Grogan (c.1943-1978) was born Eugene Grogan in Brooklyn, New York. Called a "Superman of the Underground" by The Times (London), he was the founder of the Diggers, a legendary anarchistic group in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s that supplied free food, housing, and medical aid to runaways. On April 6, 1978, the thirty-five-year-old Grogan was found dead on a subway car in New York City, possibly of a drug overdose.
Ringolevio is a classic American story of self-invention by one of the more mysterious and alluring figures to emerge in the 1960s. Emmett Grogan grew up on New York City’s mean streets, getting hooked on heroin before he was in his teens, kicking the habit and winning a scholarship to a swanky Manhattan private school, pursuing a highly profitable sideline as a Park Avenue burglar, then skipping town to enjoy the dolce vita in Italy. It's a hard-boiled, sometimes hard-to-believe, wildly entertaining tale that takes a totally unexpected turn when Grogan washes up in sixties San Francisco and becomes a leader of the anarchist group known as the Diggers. The Diggers, devoted to street theater, direct action, and distributing free food, were in the thick of the legendary Summer of Love, and soon Grogan is struggling with the naive narcissism of the hippies, the marketing of revolution as a brand, dogmatic radicals, and false prophets like tripster Timothy Leary. Above all, however, he struggles with himself.
buy it here

The Free-Fall Chronicles:Playing For Keeps

Francis Picabia

2009-10-19T03:39:00.000-07:00

Drawing by andy c. 1992

2009-10-18T08:07:00.001-07:00

my stomping ground

2009-10-13T04:17:00.000-07:00

self portrait [2007]

2009-10-11T07:47:00.000-07:00

oils and acrylic on found canvas while smoking heroin [2006]

2009-10-11T05:08:00.000-07:00

underground ourselves (2009)

2009-10-11T05:05:00.000-07:00

found photo

2009-10-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

found photo

2009-10-10T10:00:00.001-07:00

book found

2009-10-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

book found

2009-10-10T09:51:00.001-07:00

FLIPside

.sniffing keyholes.

A short film about Alexander Trocchi

Cain’s Film followed by a short video on Trocchi featuring William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen.

soul of man

I couldn't be arsed to do a decent cover. Sorry

the velvets revolution

DBL + Rural Balance

Jackie Tilston

josh mcdonald - huffing and puffing (10 stories)

small world band

Tanya Wolski - Paintings

perfecting invisibility

poem | on found photos

books

daevid allen

digital founds

found

found sounds | part two

found photo

book found

Dave Rendle

Picture Shows

Pakito Bolino

Karen Finley - A Certain Level of Denial

found

Omniasphere

like voting changes anything

working class unity

found

The Astronauts - Now & Then

found photo

Mohammed M'rabet - The Storyteller & The Fisherman

found

alpha & omega

Karen Finley - The Black Sheep

Claudio Parentela

found

ALEXANDER BARON

Horizontal with bong

emma goldman

found

Vomitus Skink-in mude

Georges Rouault

a paradox about people

molotov and stone (2008)

Lunapark 0,10 (Avant-Garde Voices 1913-1974)

SARAH GARZONI

Bern Porter - The Godfather of Founds

d*face

A Life in Pieces: Reflections on Alexander Trocchi

found

Jacques Prévert - song

found art (unknown 2009)

constantly risking absurdity (2007)

found

Anna Kavan - De Quincey's heir, Kafka's sister

Maya Van Jeier - mail artist

found

trace (2008)

lett eri st inter nation al

un-lubricated (2006)

of hoof and horn...

Allen Ginsberg | Sunflower Sutra

found

daydreaming at the window [2006]

SID CHAPLIN - The Day of the Sardine

Now I've got real detachment- n.spaces |Guardian article

Rhys Davies - The Withered Root

found photo

William S Burroughs & Brion Gysin

aiwazzsaying

William Burroughs

a.d. winans - two poems

TRIBUTE TO JACK MICHELINE - THE LAST OF THE STREET POETSA.D. Winans: The Holy Grail: Charles Bukowski and the Second Coming Revolution interview

Ira Cohen & DJ Cheb I Sabbah - The Majoon Traveler

Herbert Huncke - From dream to dream

st.pauls,bristol.

James Kelman - Seven stories cd

Gil J. Wolman

The Anticoncept | Cinematochronic Argument For A Physical Phase of the Arts

TRIBUTE TO JACK MICHELINE - THE LAST OF THE STREET POETS

A.D. Winans: The Holy Grail: Charles Bukowski and the Second Coming Revolution interview