Photo of Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg by Richard Avedon.
 
I was saddened today, to hear of Beat poet Peter Orlovsky’s death. The longtime companion of Allen Ginsberg passed away on Sunday at the age of 77 from lung cancer. Wired’s Steve Silberman wrote a sweet, beautiful elegy for Peter that was published at Shambhala Sun titled Impossible Happiness, here’s an excerpt:

The night I met Allen Ginsberg in 1976, his lifelong companion Peter Orlovsky raised a handkerchief to Allen’s nose a fraction of a second before he sneezed. We were in a basement club in Greenwich Village commemorating the death of Neal Cassady, one of Allen’s great loves, and the muse of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. The poet had a bad cold, and it was his second reading of the night.

Anticipating Allen’s need for a handkerchief was just one way Peter manifested what photographer Elsa Dorfman called his “unearthly sensitivity and caring” in an email to a friend after Peter died last Sunday. Kids, animals, and growing things adored Peter. Just before writing “Howl,” Allen pledged his love to him, recognizing in him a character out of a Russian novel: the saintly shepherd, a holy innocent. In Foster’s cafeteria in San Francisco in 1955, the two men grasped hands and vowed never to go to heaven unless the other could get in — a true marriage of souls. “At that instant we looked into each other’s eyes,” Allen wrote, “and there was a kind of celestial cold fire that crept over us and blazed up and illuminated the entire cafeteria and made it an eternal place.”

At Allen’s urging, Peter also became a poet. In 1978, City Lights published a collection of his work with the memorable title Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs. (The vegetables were those Peter grew with tireless enthusiasm on the couple’s organic farm in Cherry Valley, New York, bought as a respite from the grit and druggy temptations of their neighborhood on the Lower East Side.) While no one would have compared Peter’s creative output to Allen’s, his poems – sometimes only a single line – could be remarkably pure and surprising, even luminous.

Impossible Happiness: An Elegy for Peter Orlovsky by Steve Silberman (Shambhala Sun)

Anne Waldman on Peter Orlovsky’s death (Patti Smith.net)

 
An appropriately mad new video for a very jammy tune from the legendary Squarepusher off his last LP Just a Souvenir.  I normally prefer his more obviously micro-programmed sounding stuff to his more fusion like workouts such as this, but I can really get behind the lone hippy-weirdo-freak-out-in-the-home-studio vibe of the video. And how.

 
thx Dave Madden !

 
The relationship between Beach Boy Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson has been well documented in various books on both the band and Manson.  What some may not know is that Dennis actually cribbed one of Manson’s songs, changed the lyrics and created his own version.  Never Learn Not to Love was actually called Cease to Exist, which of course is way too morbid for our beloved Boys, so Dennis keenly flipped the lyrics to Cease to Resist, making it a bit more sexual and a bit less, er, creepy.  Reborn as a beautiful love song, this is one of the highlights on the 20/20 album.  Though Dennis initially did this as a favor to Manson, once he found out that his lyrics had been changed he threatened Wilson with death threats, thus ending the very bizarre and brief relationship between he and the band.

 
Despite the fact that I found this private press gem on the derogatorily named blog Glorify The Turd, and the cover art is a masterpiece of mid 70’s delusional douchebaggery, I can’t get this damn song out of my head ! Sure, dude can’t really sing and the show-offy guitar licks are wildly out of place with the wobbly rhythm section but this really puts me in the mind of the breezily casual messed up tunes of Kevin Ayers or even the Kinks. Plus: The song is called Mellow Heaven Clout, which must be one of the hippest song titles I’ve ever heard. And those spring reverb hand claps ! Play on repeat until happy.
 

 
Only the high-minded stuff from me this morning. This clip rather begs the question: Is it possible to enjoy a nice booty in your face whilst having your neck broken? Not to mention a squashed pelvic region. Party ?
 
thx Brian Morishita !

(via Nerdcore)

 
Right?

 
Over the weekend, I picked up a copy of the 5:1 surround mix of King Crimson’s classic 1974 album, Red, but I didn’t have a chance to listen to it properly until this afternoon. And when I say properly, I mean loudly, as Red happens to be one of the heaviest rock albums of all time. Crank it up loud enough—as I did today—and it feels like a jumbo jet is taking off inside your skull. The sonic power of that album can blow you away like a feather in the wind at top volume. Most King Crimson albums I find to be a bit spotty (some of them are really spotty, in fact) but when they lock into a serious groove, like on Red’s title cut, it’s an awe inspiring thing to listen to.

This new surround version, mixed from the original multi-source mixdown tapes by Porcupine Tree’s Steve WIlson (with Robert Fripp’s participation) tends to put the listener in the middle of the mix, that is to say, it sounds like you are standing in the room as they are playing. I find that this approach worked great on Wilson’s redo of In the Court of the Crimson King in 5:1, but with Red, the violent onslaught of Fripp’s buzzsaw guitar riffs sounds emasculated somewhat (when compared to the familiar stereo version) unless the album is played at an almost ear-splitting volume. Me, I’m happy to oblige. Listen to it as loud as fuck and it sounds wonderful. I suppose that was the point. Who’s going slap on Red to listen at a background volume anyway?

There’s not much by way of film footage of pre-80s incarnation of King Crimson. As in nearly none. I did find two amazing clips, though. First an intense run-through of Lark’s Tongue in Aspic on what appears to be Germany’s Beat Club show.
 

 
Below, a 1973 performance in New York’s Central Park of Easy Money:
 

 
(Incidentally, the new leaked Kanye West single, Power, samples King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man)

 
“Why did God create herpes? So Robin Williams could give something to his female fans that they couldn’t just turn around and sell on eBay.”

Last Friday, Xeni Jardin, Tara and I went to Rich Fulcher’s comedy benefit in Los Angeles for victims of the Tennessee flood and on the (stellar) bill was anti-comic Neil Hamburger. I have a few Neil Hamburger CDs and quite enjoy the warped wit and “anti-comedy” of America’s funnyman, but I had never seen the Neil Hamburger experience live and let me tell you, he’s very, very funny “in concert.” His frequent appearances on the Jimmy Kimmel show are the closet thing we have these days to Brother Theodore or Harvey Pekar turning up on Letterman in the 1980s. The next time Neil turns up in your town—and he will—make sure you go see him.

“Why did God give Smashmouth three top ten singles? Well, it was a clerical error—he meant to give them all AIDS.”

Hungry for some more Hamburger?
 

 
What I did not realize until this weekend is that “Neil” (or rather his alter ego Gregg Turkington) was responsible for one of my all time favorite collections of prank phone calls, the side-splitting, Great Phone Calls. Here’s the classic cut I’m in Your Band:
 

 
And here are a couple of pizza related prank calls:
 

 
Neil Hamburger UNOFFICIAL website

Neil Hamburger on Twitter

 
The Red Chapel is a new comic documentary that exposes the paranoiac culture of Kim Jong Il’s North Korean dictatorship in the form of a chronicle of a two-week trip made to the country by a deliberately bad comedy act (which includes a straight-talking spastic) purportedly there on a cultural exchange mission. It recently won the top documentary award at the Sundance film festival and the daring humor of the film is said to make Borat look tame in comparison. It’s fascinating to read that all of the footage had to be cleared on a daily basis with North Korean authorities. These guys have balls!

From Cinematical:

Here’s a documentary so astonishing that, for a time, I was convinced that I was being had—that no sane filmmakers would ever attempt, much less pull off, anything this crazy. The Internet assures me that Mads Brügger and Johan Stahl’s The Red Chapel, which won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, is very real indeed: that Brügger and a pair of comedian friends really did sneak into North Korea pretending to be a pro-Socialist vaudeville troupe there to engage in cultural exchange with local schoolchildren, that they really did get most of it on tape, and that they really did escape that fascist hellhole with life and limb intact. In the process, they’ve made a film equal parts horrifying, exhilarating and hilarious—an epic prank on the world’s most sinister dictatorship that makes Sacha Baron Cohen look like a shrinking violet in comparison.

I have an abiding fascination with North Korea, or, as it is more affectionately known, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). I think it was Christopher Hitchens who once wrote that the reason George Orwell’s writing remains relevant today is that the word “Orwellian” is the only accurate descriptor of the North Korean regime—its complete intolerance of independent thought, the elaborate false reality painstakingly constructed for its citizens, the personality cult of the Dear Leader at its center. Never mind that, as The Red Chapel informs us, the Dear Leader is personally responsible for starving countless of his own people.

The DPRK is, among other things, notoriously secretive, meticulously controlling the image it projects to the rest of the world, and taking pains to hide—with the sort of appalling disingenuousness that is the hallmark of dictatorships—what we know to be the realities of everyday life in the country. The Red Chapel, which takes place almost entirely in the country’s relatively maintained cities, doesn’t try to get at the most shocking of those realities: the incredible poverty, the starvation, the labor camps to which the “untrustworthy” are sent. But it does give us an astonishing glimpse into a world that only seems possible in dystopian fiction; a world of brainwashed sycophants literally worshipping at the altar of the Dear Leader, living out a facially ridiculous fantasy built for them by what may be the most evil government in the history of civilization.

The most fascinating character in the film may be Mrs. Pak, the motherly, slightly creepy government functionary assigned to be the caretaker for Brügger and the two young Danish-Koreans who make up the “comedy troupe” that Brügger “directs.” There is nothing to suggest that she is a bad or malevolent person. Her belief in the fundamental greatness of her country and her government, and in the “values” of unity and togetherness used to keep North Koreans in line, is wholehearted and pure. She can’t talk about the Dear Leader without being emotionally overcome. Aside from the mentally ill, I’ve never seen a human being who exists so completely in an alternate universe. It’s terrifying.

 
Thank you Chris Campion!