Henry Miller, Asleep And Awake is a charming visit with the Buddha of Brooklyn.

Tom Schiller’s 1975 documentary follows Miller from the microcosmos of his very own shit-hole to a mock-up 1890s New York of his childhood—or “that old shit-hole, New York’” (in fact the set for Hello Dolly, with Barbra Streisand & Walter Matthau, 1969). Schiller describes his documentary this way: ‘A guided tour of the pictures and artifacts of his bathroom’ ... though it feels to be very much more than that.

 

 
These are just stunning! Stunning! I certainly wouldn’t mind owning one of those fantastic Zappas. From the artist Lisa Brawn:

I have been experimenting with figurative woodcuts for almost twenty years since being introduced to the medium by printmakers at the Alberta College of Art and Design. Recently, I have been wrestling with a new challenge: five truckloads of salvaged century-old rough Douglas fir beams from the restoration of the Alberta Block in Calgary and from the dismantling of grain elevators. This wood is very interesting in its history and also in that it is oddly shaped. Unlike traditional woodcut material such as cherry or walnut, the material is ornery. There are holes and knots and gouges and rusty nails sticking out the sides.

To find suitably rustic and rugged subjects, I have been referencing popular culture personas and archetypes from 1920s silent film cowboys to 1970s tough guys. I have also been through the Glenbow Museum archives for horse rustlers, bootleggers, informants, and loiterers in turn-of-the-century RCMP mug shots for my Quién es más macho series. Cowgirl trick riders and cowboy yodelers in their spectacular ensembles from the 1940s led to my Honky-Tonkin, Honey, Baby series. Inspired by a recent trip to Coney Island, I have been exploring vintage circus culture and am currently working on a series of sideshow portraits including Zip the Pinhead and JoJo the Dog-faced Boy. There is also an ongoing series of iconic gender archetypes, antiheroes and divas, which includes such portraits as Sophia Loren, Maria Callas, Edith Piaf, Jackie Onassis, Steve McQueen, and Clint Eastwood.

Please visit Lisa Brawn’s website to view hundreds of amazing woodcuts.

(via Everlasting Blort)

 
In this fascinating article, written for Crawdaddy magazine in 1977, William Burroughs explores the music of Led Zeppelin and discusses Crowley, infra-sound, magic, Moroccan trance music and rock and roll with Jimmy Page.

The essential ingredient for any successful rock group is energy–the ability to give out energy, to receive energy from the audience and to give it back to the audience. A rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy. Rock stars may be compared to priests, a theme that was treated in Peter Watkins’ film ‘Privilege’. In that film a rock star was manipulated by reactionary forces to set up a state religion; this scenario seems unlikely, I think a rock group singing political slogans would leave its audience at the door.
The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose–that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco, musicians are also magicians. Gnaoua music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Joujouka evokes the God Pan, Pan God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts–music, painting and writing–is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.”

Read the entire article here .
 
Thanks HTMLGIANT

 
A poem by Ted Hughes, considered lost, was published today in The New Statesman magazine after being discovered in the British Museum among his papers. In it, Hughes addresses the painful suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath. The poem, written in the 70s, would seem to be the “missing link” from Hughes’ 1998 book about his marriage to Plath, Birthday Letters, as none of the poems in that book discuss the circumstances of her death.

Carolyn Kellog, writing at the Los Angeles Times, Jacket Copy blog:

Actor Jonathan Pryce read part of the poem for the [BBC4 Radio] broadcast, reading:

Late afternoon Friday
my last sight of you alive
burning your letter to me
in the ashtray
with that strange smile

Sylvia Plath, who today is best-known as the author of the autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar,” was a young poet living in England when she met Ted Hughes, then also a young poet. The two married in 1956, moved to the U.S. for three years, and then returned to England. They had two children together.

Plath was 30 when she killed herself by inhaling the fumes from an unlit oven. Hughes went on to become one of the significant British poets of the 20th century, serving as British poet laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998.

The poem includes how Hughes learned of Plath’s death, in its final lines.

And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.

 
In 1967, an older poet friend of mine, Zoltan Farkas, gave me a copy of Bukowski’s Crucifix In A Death Hand and my life was changed forever. Imagine discovering Bukowski at 16, well before he became a hero to millions. Opening the pages of Crucifix opened up a whole new world to me, where writing was accessible and real, not a mystic art but a blunt weapon, a blackjack of words upside my head. He rescued poetry from academia and the bardic tradition and brought it down to earth, from marble halls to the sidewalk, from the bards to the bar. And he made it look so easy…but it isn’t. Taking the energy of language from where you got it, thu the poem to the reader, is tougher than it looks. Bukowski inspired me to write by making me feel it was possible. He taught me that poetry, great poetry, takes not only passion, it takes guts. Rimbaud, Henry Miller and Bukowski: the big 3.

Bukowski was directed by Taylor Hackford in 1973 and broadcast on KCET in Los Angeles. Hackford’s film was responsible for bringing Bukowski to a wider audience. It was said to have been lost forever, but remastered clips from the film appeared in the recent Bukowski documentary Born Into This. So, there must be a good master somewhere. Until an official version of this is re-released, here’s the best that is available.
 

 
Nice to hear that Dangerous Minds pal, “raving, unconfined nut” and legendary countercultural figure, Paul Krassner, will be receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from prestigious writer’s organization PEN, on Saturday afternoon, December 11, at the Oakland Public Library in Oakland, CA. Knowing Paul, I’m sure he’s is as thrilled as he is amused by this wonderful recognition.

Also, if you happen to be lucky enough to live in Los Angeles, then next Sunday, you are in for a treat. Michael Simmons, writing in the LA Weekly:

Paul Krassner has led a remarkable life: Lenny Bruce’s collaborator, editor of The Realist , co-founder of the Yippies, stand-up agitator and investigative satirist. All of it is chronicled in his autobiography, 1993’s Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture, an essential bible for troublemakers and recommended reading for those seeking aid, comfort and laughs amid our glut of bad news. Krassner never endeared himself to the powers-that-be and the book’s title designation was courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As George Carlin said, “The FBI was right: This man is dangerous—and funny, and necessary.” An expanded Confessions… is being published in paperback this October and will be available by Kindle and Nook as an eBook from New World Digital later this year. (One can see Paul reading sections on paulkrassner.com.)

As a combination book launch and benefit for candidates for the Peace & Freedom Party, Krassner will perform tonight with comics Marc Maron, Rick Overton, Ann Randolph, Jimmy Dore, Kelly Carlin, Gary Gordon, Jann Karam and MC Paul Lyons. The Peace and Freedom Party was founded in 1967, the same year as the Yippies, and are fielding candidates on the California ballot in November for U.S. and State Senate and Congress. If you want your vote to stand for justice without corporate pursestrings attached, voting for Peace and Freedom folk is a choice—not one endorsed by the L.A. Weekly , but a choice nonetheless.

Powerhouse Theatre, 3116 Second St.; Santa Monica CA, October 3rd, reception starts at 6pm.

Below, a fun interview I did with Paul Krassner in the Summer of 2009. I always enjoy seeing Paul (and his lovely wife, Nancy) immensely:
 

 
Tessa Dick, Philip K. Dick’s widow, is facing some financial trouble and will be auctioning off this letter from PKD, with a minimum bid of $900 at her blog.

Via The American Book of the Dead.

Jill Johnston, a longtime cultural critic for The Village Voice whose daring, experimental prose style mirrored the avant-garde art she covered and whose book “Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution”spearheaded the lesbian separatist movement of the early 1970s, died in Hartford on Saturday. She was 81 and lived in Sharon, Conn.” New York Times

I read Jill’s Village Voice column religiously in the 1970s. She was an outlaw and she captured my heart and mind. She once described her style of writing as “east west flower child beat hip psychedelic paradise now love peace do your own thing approach to the revolution.” Her book ‘Lesbian Nation’ (1973) had a huge influence on me and the way I approached the word, the world and women. Like Bukowski and Lester Bangs, Jill’s prose was energetic, alive and provocative. As a young man, reading her essays on the feminist movement, sexual politics and lesbianism wasn’t an act of penance for being male, they were exhilarating, a punk rock call to arms that transcended the subject of sexual identity and became a universal “fuck you” to stale attitudes and broken down systems of thought. Johnston was my hero. The dyke of my dreams.

This video clip is from D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus documentary Town Bloody Hall.

At a debate on feminism at Town Hall in Manhattan in 1971, with Germaine Greer, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos of the National Organization for Women sharing the platform with Norman Mailer, the moderator, and with a good number of the New York intelligentsia in attendance, Jill Johnston caused one of the great scandals of the period. After reciting a feminist-lesbian poetic manifesto and announcing that “all women are lesbians except those that don’t know it yet,” Ms. Johnston was joined onstage by two women. The three, all friends, began kissing and hugging ardently, upright at first but soon rolling on the floor. Mailer, appalled, begged the women to stop. “Come on, Jill, be a lady,” he sputtered. The filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker captured the event in the documentary “Town Bloody Hall,” released in 1979. Mary V. Dearborn, in her biography of Mailer, called the evening “surely one of the most singular intellectual events of the time, and a landmark in the emergence of feminism as a major force.”

Jill Johnston was a revolutionary with a take no prisoners approach and an enormous sense of humor. I will miss you, my sister.
 

 
From BBC News:

Letters written by the late playwright Oscar Wilde are to be auctioned off later this month.

The letters appear to reveal Wilde “propositioning” a magazine editor at a time when homosexuality was illegal.

Alan Judd from Bamfords auction house said they are important as they “help to fill in pieces of Oscar Wilde’s tempestuous jigsaw”.

The collection of five letters is expected to sell for £10,000 on 24 September.

The letters were written to magazine editor Alsager Vian and are being sold off by his descendants.

 
A Day In The Afterlife: BBC documentary on Philip K. Dick in its entirety (57 minutes).

A Day in the Afterlife  focuses on the man himself, in all his crazy, drug-addled, paranoid glory. The mind behind some of my favorite books is fascinated by the constant bombardment of advertising, the effects of giant media conglomerates, and the overwhelming feeling that the world in which we live exists only in the glowing vacuum tubes of countless television sets. It is an ode to one of the most creative minds in science fiction, and another step in the crusade for a wider recognition of his accomplishments.” Ross Rosenberg