Adrienne Rich May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012.
Poet Adrienne Rich was a pioneering feminist and alchemist. Her alchemical compounds were composed of vowels and consonants. She showed us that words, spun from a revolutionary tongue, point the direction while embodying the essence of the destination. The poem arrives at itself with the immediacy of sunlight striking glass.
On the occasion of the publication of William Hjortsberg’s extraordinary 900 page biography of Richard Brautigan, Jubilee Hitchhiker, I am sharing something I posted awhile ago on Dangerous Minds:
“I was 15 when I first read a book by Richard Brautigan. It was called A Confederate General From Big Sur . I borrowed the book from my friend Joseph, a free spirited guy two years older than me who had a beard and rolled his own cigarettes. Though he looked like one, Joseph wasn’t a hippie. Hippies were part of a movement and Joseph wasn’t a joiner. In the small town in Virgina where we grew up, Joseph was completely his own man, a suburban teenage Zen monk who seemed ancient at the age of 17. It made perfect sense that he would be the guy to turn me on to Brautigan. They shared common traits: a clarity of mind, a sharp sense of humor and a deep love for language. Joseph kept a notebook with him at all times in which he wrote short stories, poems and haiku.
In this moment of recalling Joseph, I am convinced he was as close to being enlightened as any teenager could be in America in 1966. I wonder where he is today and what he’s reading.
Joseph, Brautigan, Jack Kerouac and The Doors were my saviors in the year of the Summer Of Love. I was stuck in the suburbs, surrounded by jocks and greasers, completely alone in my world of beatnik books and a meerschaum pipe full of banana peel. It was the year I read Brautigan’s second book Trout Fishing In America and the year that I left home for San Francisco. Joseph was there and I needed to make the connection with the Bodhisattva of the ‘burbs.
Those were the days when a book or a record album could change your life. If literature had a Beatles, its name was Richard Brautigan. It comes as no surprise that John Lennon was a Brautigan fan. They both had a whimsical point of view that started in the square inch field and expanded into the cosmos.
In 1968, I lived inside of a parachute inside of a dance hall in a ghost town near Los Gatos, California. It was my summer of In Watermelon Sugar. I read that magical book repeatedly (my psychedelic New Testament) and lived a simple life of bathing in waterfalls, eating brown rice and scarfing down countless tabs of Benzedrine (in honor of my hero Jack Kerouac) while trying to write with the ease and purity of Brautigan. I discovered that ease ain’t easy (particularly when you’re wired to the gills) and purity is near impossible. Really good writers make writing seem so natural that we all think we can do it. And then we try and soon discover just how hard it is to take energy from where you get it through the word to the reader without losing any immediacy in the process of transference. Brautigan’s poems and prose had this uncanny ability to gently slap you upside the head while maintaining a Basho-like quality of disappearing into what is being described - you saw the words become transparent as they melted into watermelon sugar. Watermelon sugar was Brautigan’s river Tao, a sweet subtle liquid that flowed through the pink flesh of our being.
William Carlos Williams famously wrote “no ideas but in things” and embodied that thought in poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Brautigan wrote from a similar point of view - a kind of American Zen that was ordinary and transcendental, modern and prophetic…
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammels and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
One of the things that was most compelling and inspiring for a young would-be writer like myself about Brautigan’s books were their covers. With every new book that Richard published there was always an attractive bohemian woman on the cover. It was as though Richard was sending a message to all the reclusive teenybopper poets in the world that said “write poetry and you will get laid.” And it was true. I would sit in the Mediterranean Cafe on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley with my journal unfolded before me and invariably a young flower child would approach and ask if I were a poet. A response of “yes” would often lead to a fuck fest in my attic apartment on Channing Way. In the sixties being an artist/intellectual had the same aphrodisiac qualities associated with cocaine and Rolex watches in the 80s. Being smart was sexy.
For many of us, Brautigan was a door into a consciousness that was liberating in its playfulness and here and nowness. Reading Brautigan is like taking a pure hit of oxygen. Things sparkle. There is a sense of boundless delight and eroticism in his prose and poetry - a promise of the unspeakable, where language transcends itself.
Brautigan, now more than ever.” February 2, 2011.
You can purchase Jubilee Hitchhiker here. If you’re a Brautigan fan, you’ll find it an immersive and deeply satisfying trip. It took Hjortsberg, who knew Brautigan well, 20 years to write the book and during his research he discovered unpublished Brautigan writings that had been locked in a safe-deposit box in Eugene, Oregon for 30 years. This is a gift from the poetry gods.
The following recordings of Brautigan reading were intended to be released on Zapple records, a spinoff of The Beatles Apple label. But the project was never fully realized. Harvest Records released them as Listening To Brautigan in 1973.
Flesh of the Gods
Don Juan disciple Carlos Castaneda is interviewed by the brilliant teacher and author Theodore Roszak (The Making of a Counter Culture) on Berkeley-based KPFA radio on January 30, 1969.
Venerable, groundbreaking and radical, KPFA was the coolest station to ever elevate the airwaves. Unfortunately, its owner Pacifica Radio corporation went from a progressive collective of media activists to a union-busting bunch of assholes who seem intent on destroying what made the station so extraordinary: its independent spirit. If you’re interested in the ongoing struggle between KPFA’s workers and their corporate bosses, check this out.
Okay, back to the psychedelic part of this post.
On the occasion of posting this interview with Castaneda, I’m taking the opportunity to share with you this excerpt from my memoir describing the first of many of my experiences with peyote (I was 18 at the time):
One afternoon this guy with a wild blonde afro came into the Arbor Café, a natural food restaurant where I worked in 1969. He was from Arizona and wanted to trade a bag of fresh peyote buttons for food. We made the trade. I gave him all he could eat and he gave me three dozen big fat juicy buttons. I called my dear friend John The Poet and told him about my score. That night we had our first peyote experience. An experience that taught me more about the Universe, God and my place in the grand scheme of things than all the books I’d ever read or have read since.
John came up to my apartment. In one room, which was to become John’s, I had laid the peyote buttons on a little altar I’d constructed out of a milk crate covered with Indian fabric, candles and a beautiful statue of the Buddha. We each ate 12 buttons while drinking black cherry juice to try to mask the extreme bitterness of the cactus. 12 buttons is a large quantity of mescaline for even an experienced peyote eater. We had made a serious commitment to Mescalito.
John stayed in the altar room. I went into my room and sat on the bed, which was the sole piece of furniture in my spartan digs. When the peyote came on, it came on strong. The window in my room looked out over the Bay and I could see the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond glowing in a haze of jaundiced luminosity as it spewed spires of rank sulphuric smoke. It was a futuristic vision of hell - an Etch-A-Sketch of a Boschian nightmare. I was consumed with a sense of dread and doom. But soon that dark vision was swept away by a surge of powerful euphoric energy, the beginnings of the awakening of my kundalini and the activation of my chakras.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking. This sounds like some new age mumbo jumbo. But, keep in mind, this was 1969 and I was 18 years old. All the new age crapola hadn’t been written yet. There were a handful of books by scholars of Eastern mysticism on the subject of kundalini and you had to make an effort to seek out this information. I’d read a few books on kundalini, also known as serpent power - a dormant energy coiled at the base of the spine that just waits to be awakened - and I knew about seven points of energy along the spine that corresponded to bundles of nerve endings called the chakras. I’d read about this stuff, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Well, peyote made a true believer out of me. That bitter green flesh introduced me to serpent power in precise and intricate detail. Unlike the epic acid trip I’d stumbled into back in D.C., my peyote experience was as physical as it was mental, every cell of my body was engaged in a cosmic dance.
I was in the grip of Mescalito’s magic…my body suddenly became white electricity and was humming with energy, and my spine was tingling with waves of pure ecstasy. Beautiful and perfectly detailed geometric mandalas were spinning in the space between my closed eyes. My chakras were spiraling, pulsing, sparkling and luminescent like pinwheels of light in a Fourth of July fireworks display. And when all the chakras were vibrating at the exact same frequency, none prevailing over the other, I disappeared into an infinite white light and no longer existed. Ego death.
While I was going through this extraordinary transformation, John was having a similar experience in the altar room. From to time, we’d call out to each other across what seemed to be infinite space “you still there, you still there?” Our voices faded like the industrial smoke outside my window until they were no more. Our tongues had disappeared along with the rest of us…whater “us” is.
The lesson I learned was this: when we emphasize one aspect of our being while ignoring the rest, we create ego. If our sexual energy is dominant, we create ego. If our intellect is dominant, we create ego. If our emotions are dominant , we create ego. Only when sex, heart and mind are in complete balance and harmony do we experience so called enlightenment. When all of our chakras, our energy centers, are vibrating on the same wavelength, at the same pitch, we become in tune with the cosmos.
We are refined and subtle beings not just meat and bone. Embodiment is the result of getting stuck in just one corner of our totality. The Catholic concept of original sin, the idea of humans as fallen angels, is simply the result of being out of balance. When our mind is in tune with our heart and our sexuality is in touch with both, we become one with the natural order of things and no longer exist apart from the world. That’s how it works. If you don’t believe me, eat 12 fat peyote buttons and get back to me.
The morning after Mescalito’s visit, John and I re-entered the world tenderly, with the vulnerability and openness of newborn children. We looked at each with amazement and humility. We were no longer quite as solid as we were before our peyote trip. We had been introduced to something that was so enormous in its scope and yet so pure and simple that we were both blissed out as well as bewildered.
The deal with psychedelics is that you get the Cliff Notes version of cosmic consciousness. Don’t me get me wrong, the experience is real, genuine, but it’s also just a kind of crash course giving us a quick glimpse of who we really are. Most of us, actually all of us, can’t afford to leave our jobs, family etc. to sit on a mountaintop and contemplate the nature of existence. There have been a handful of human beings who could make that commitment: Milarepa, Buddha, Jesus and a few divinely intoxicated bums who used to practice their Dharma on Bowery and Broadway back in the 70s. But, in this day and age, when there are so many forces conspiring against our attaining even the slightest insight to who we are and what has authentic value in our lives, we need guidance that can lead us to a deeper and more profound understanding of why we are here and where we are going. I suggest taking the crash course. If you can get your hungry hands on some peyote, psilocybin mushrooms or clean LSD (it exists) go for it. Don’t wait for the world to become your paradise. Throw away the travel brochure. Create your own cosmic getaway. If your head’s in the right space, Newark is just as beautiful as the beaches of Belize. But ultimately it’s up to you to follow up on the psychedelic experience and do the hard work of self-realization on a daily basis. While psychedelics do open the doors of perception, it is our mission to walk through those doors and keep walking. There are no quick fixes for what ails us. Peyote showed me the way, a cosmic road map, but I still had to do the driving.
My next peyote trip was in 1972 with the Yaqui Indians on their reservation in Tuscon during Deer Dance. This is a story I’ll share at another time.
Fractals by Arnie Greif.
I always preferred Len Deighton’s anonymous spy to Ian Fleming’s James Bond. There was something too glib and unexciting about Bond, like Superman you knew he could never be defeated, which made it all rather pointless. Whereas Deighton’s spy was fallible, awkward, funny and quite often messed things up.
When it came to the films, it was a more difficult choice. Sean Connery made Bond his own, and has never been equalled. But Michael Caine was equally successful with his interpretation of the Deighton’s insubordinate spy (now named) Harry Palmer in a trilogy of brilliant spy films. Of course, he later nearly blew it all by making two sub-standard Palmer films in the 1990s, the less said about which the better.
Here is Michael Caine with a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the second Palmer movie, Funeral in Berlin. The quality of this video is not brilliant, and yes, it does have an irritating text written over it, but there is enough fascinating things going on to make Man on the Wall very watchable.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
The true story behind ‘The Mackintosh Man’
To coincide with the Keith Haring: 1978-1982 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Keith Haring Foundation has scanned the artist’s journals and will be posting one page a day for the duration of the show. The first few pages are already available here. Nothing startling to see yet, but one to keep an eye on.
For details of Keith Haring: 1978-1982 at the Brooklyn Museum, check here.
More pages from Keith Haring’s journals, after the jump…
Via Nerdcore
Strange to think, had he lived, Jack Kerouac would have been 90 this week. It begs the question, what would he have been like? Rabid raving Republican? Drunk demented Democrat? A pairing of the both? A religious nut? Would he have continued writing? Become an éminence grise? Would he still have mattered? Would we have cared?
Ninety. And to think he’s been dead for almost half that time, during which he has gone in-and-out of fashion. And yet, his appeal has somehow always stayed, though arguably that appeal has sometimes been more for what he represented than for his books or writing.
Even so, Kerouac at his best captured a hope, a joyous sense of what life could be - the potential of a moment, of the living of a life, rather than the having of a life-style.
I saw Whatever Happened to Kerouac? on the day it was released, in olde fleapit cinema, southside of Edinburgh. There were around a dozen people in the audience, gathered together in the flickering dark like a secret religious group come to give devotion, as we reverentially watched what is still the best documentary made on the “King of the Beats”. But this film is no hagiography, it captures what was both good and bad about Kerouac, and most of what you need to know, answering some of the questions other bio-pics and documentaries have avoided. The essence of the film is best summed up by William Burroughs when asked, “Whatever happened to Kerouac?” responds, Jack incited:
‘’....a worldwide unprecedented cultural revolution….”
The list of contributors is a who’s who of the Beat Generation: William Burroughs, Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady, Ann Charters, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Diane DiPrima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Joyce Johnson, Michael McClure, Edie Kerouac Parker, and Gary Snyder. Directed by Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdam, this is a must for fans of Kerouac and the Beats.
Ben Gazzara performs Charles Bukowski’s poem “Style,” from Marco Ferreri’s film Tales of Ordinary Madness.
Style is the answer to everything
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous
thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable
to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style, is what
I call art
Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art
Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men
Although not many dogs have style
Cats have it with abundance
When Hemingway put his brains
to the wall with a shotgun, that was style
For sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Christ
Socrates
Caesar
García Lorca
I have met men in jail with style
I have met more men in jail with style
than men out of jail
Style is a difference, a way of doing,
a way of being done
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, walking out of the bathroom naked without seeing me
A memorable definition, and a fine delivery from Gazzara, which you can compare against Bukowski’s reading below.
Bonus - Bukowski reads “Style”
Thanks Tara McGinley!
It took Kurt Vonnegut more than twenty years to turn his experience of surviving the allied bombing of Dresden during World War II, into his novel Slaughterhouse Five. In this short interview with James Naughtie, Vonnegut recalls the horror of Dresden and how it shaped his vision of the world and led to the creation of his most famous work.
“A writer is lucky to be able to treat his or her neuroses everyday. We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is. And teh Arts are one way to help people get through this thing. the function of any work of Art, successful work of Art is to say to a certain segment of the population, ‘You are not alone. Others feel as you do.’ We must have kids now, you know, saying the world is crazy - and indeed, it is.”
Recorded for the BBC’s This Week series in 2005, to mark the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Creative Writing 101 with Kurt Vonnegut
Many, many books have been written about disco, and I have read a whole bunch of them (including more well known works like Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco by Peter Shapiro, Everybody Dance: Chic and the Politics of Disco by Daryl Easlea and The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night by Anthony Haden Guest) but still nothing comes close to matching Tim Lawrence’s exhaustive yet entertaining Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture 1970-79.
For those of you who still believe that disco was nothing more than an music-industry creation dreamt up in a backroom by a bunch of coked-up suits and sold to passive, gullible consumers too high to know it was an empty fad (here’s looking’ at you, Em!) then you need to get your hands on this book. That goes for anyone else with an interest in the disco genre, particularly those who know the basics of the story but crave more. Because, believe me, it’s all here.
Lawrence is a lecturer at the University of East London and a renowned writer on dance music and culture. He has in the past published books on the avant garde/disco composer and performer Arthur Russell (Hold On To Your Dreams; Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene 1973-1992) and most recently added the introductory foreword to Voguing And The House Ballroom Scene of New York City, 1989-92. But to me, at least, Love Saves The Day is still his best work. From his website:
Opening with David Mancuso’s seminal “Love Saves the Day” Valentine’s party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music culture in the 1970s - from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell’s Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire transmission through America’s suburbs and urban hotspots such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark, and Miami.
Tales of nocturnal journeys, radical music making, and polymorphous sexuality flow through the arteries of Love Saves the Day like hot liquid vinyl. They are interspersed with a detailed examination of the era’s most powerful DJs, the venues in which they played, and the records they loved to spin - as well as the labels, musicians, vocalists, producers, remixers, party promoters, journalists, and dance crowds that fuelled dance music’s tireless engine.
TIm Lawrence may not have lived through this era, but his book is phenomenally well-researched and features interviews with all of the remaining key players, sketching the very earliest days of the movement: from David Mancuso’s Loft parties to Francis Grasso mixing records at the Sanctuary as far back as 1970 (the first dj ever to do so), from Nicky Siano opening The Gallery while still a teenager in 1972 to Steve Ostrow’s gay/mixed Continental Baths (home not just to performances by Bette Midler and Barry Manilow, but also the venue where future legendary djs Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles cut their teeth.) all the way up through the decade to the opening of both Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage.
Love Saves The Day IS exhaustive (perhaps too exhaustive for disco newcomers) and while it can act as a great reference for fact-checkers, it’s also an entertaining read that spares little detail of the complicated drug-and-sex lives of these people. This was an era of radical social change and these folks (and this music) were right at the forefront of those changes. The first chapter of Love Saves The Day is available to read in full on Lawrence’s website, and it focuses on David Mancuso, the man whose Loft apartment-cum-dance-space gave birth to disco culture and who, to this day, remains the beating heart of “real” disco. It also makes clear the connection between hippie culture of the 60s and the emerging gay/black/female-centeric dance culture of the 70s:
When it came to public venues Mancuso’s preferred to go to the Electric Circus, which opened in June 1967, and the Fillmore East, which opened in the spring of 1968. Both of these psychedelic haunts were situated in the East Village — the Electric Circus was located in an old Polish workingman’s club on St. Mark’s Place, the Fillmore East, in the words of the New York Times, on “freaky Second Avenue” — and both hosted live entertainment 1. “I went to the Electric Circus at least once a month,” says Mancuso. “Everybody was having fun and they had good sound in there. It was very mixed, very integrated, very intense, very free, very positive.” The Fillmore East showcased some of his favourite artists. “I heard Nina Simone perform there. I went with my friend Larry Patterson. The Fillmore East would often be noisy but that night everybody was very focused. She was wonderful.”
Mancuso didn’t just go to the Fillmore East to listen to music. “That’s where I also first heard Timothy Leary. He gave a series of lectures backed by the Joshua Light Show.” The ex-Harvard academic was already an important figure for Mancuso, who had first taken Sandoz when he was twenty and the drug was still legal. An early trip coincided with a snowstorm (“each flake was like a universe”) and ten tabs later he came across Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which argues that psychedelics can provide a shortcut to enlightenment. “The book blew me away. It became my bible and I started getting involved with him.” The young acolyte met the acid guru at his LSD (“League for Spiritual Discovery”) headquarters in the West Village, went to his Technicolor lectures and became a regular at his private parties. “People were tripping but the parties were more social than serious. There was food and music. I knew we were on a journey.”
Mancuso’s personal voyage took a vital turn in 1965 when he purchased the key to 647 Broadway, just north of Houston, for two hundred dollars.Like Soho, NoHo (as the north of Houston area was nicknamed) had historically functioned as a manufacturing district, drawing on New York’s immigrant population as its low-wage workforce, and when industry relocated to the cheaper terrain of New Jersey and beyond New York’s artists moved in, delighted to exchange their cramped Upper East Side apartments for a range of stunningly expansive lofts. The influx triggered off a sophisticated experiment into the relationship between art, space and living that apparently excluded the likes of Utica-born Mancuso, but he quickly established himself as a key player within this creative population, intent as he was on reintroducing art back into the party. “Everyone loved my space,” he says. “There might have been a hundred people living like this so it was very new. A lot of people would just come and hang out there. There were all sorts of activities going on.”
Some of these activities were influenced by Leary. “I would organise these intimate gatherings where we would experiment with acid,” says Mancuso. “There were never more than five of us when we did this. One person would take nothing, another would take half a tab and the rest would take a whole tab. It was all very new and we took it very seriously. We used The Psychedelic Experience as our guide.” Leary also had a bearing on the decoration of the loft space. “I built a yoga shrine, which I used for yoga and tripping. In the beginning it was three feet by five feet and it eventually grew to fifteen feet by thirty feet. As you walked into the loft you were immediately drawn to this area. It was gorgeous.”
Music — which was similar to LSD inasmuch as it could function as a therapeutic potion that “de-programmes” the mind before opening up a mystical trail that culminates in spiritual transcendence — was also introduced into the equation. “Leary played music at his lectures and parties and I went in the same direction. I bought a Tandberg tape recorder so that I could play tapes. The Buddha was always positioned between my two speakers.” That was the perfect position from which to hear the homemade compilations, which drew on a diverse range of sources and were structured to complement the hallucinogenic experience. “I made these journey tapes that would last for five hours. They drew on everything from classical music to the moody blues. They would start off very peacefully and the reentry would be more about movement, more jazz-oriented. Somebody might get up and start dancing around the room at some point, although they weren’t dance sessions.”
...and that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
I can’t stress enough how good this book is, and how anyone with an interest in disco, underground culture or the 70s should try and track down a copy. It features some invaluable dj playlists from specific spots and times, which act as a checklist for a whole world of great, under-valued music, but besides that, it’s just a great read. I dip in and out of it all the time, and still find amazement and amusement after many readings, so I guess it would be pretty fair to say that Love Saves The Day is my bible.
Charles Bukowksi (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) made me want to write and he made it look it look easy. But there is an art and skill to “easy” that is everything but easy. Finding your own true voice in writing is something multitudes of young novelists and poets have attempted only to watch their words lay there on the page like orderly dead flies. Shake em off and start over again.
Bukoswki made me want to write because he made writing seem essential to life, a sign of life, as important as breath or food or drink. As profane as Bukowski could be, he could also draw forth the spiritual in the most mundane of acts and make tying your shoe seem as profound as death.
Rich with footage shot by Taylor Hackford and Barbet Schroeder and plenty of talking heads who knew Bukowski well, Born Into This is probably the definitive documentary on the man.