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Paul Bowles’ recipe for a Moroccan love charm
03.19.2018
09:46 am
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Paul Bowles in Fez, 1947

Paul Bowles’ contribution to The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook appeared under “Jams, Jellies and Confections,” opposite Robert Graves’ recipe for Sevillian yellow plum conserve. In it, Bowles explained how the people of Fez make one of his favorite treats: majoun keddane, a kind of jam that requires some dates, figs, walnuts, honey, spices, butter, and wheat, and at least two pounds of cannabis.

Embedded in this recipe was another, for an even more exotic and labor-intensive Moroccan dish called Beid El Beita F’kerr El Hmar. This was a kind of breakfast recipe said to bestow magical powers:

Buy an egg. Find a dead donkey, and the first night lodge the egg in its anus. The second night the egg must be put into a mousehole on top of a Moslem tomb. The third night it must be wrapped in a handkerchief and tied around the chest of the person desiring to perform the magic. The following day it must be given for breakfast, prepared in any fashion, to the other individual, who, immediately upon eating it, discovers that the bestower is necessary for his happiness. (Or her happiness; the sex of the two people seems to have nothing to do with the charm’s efficacy.)

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.19.2018
09:46 am
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Orson Welles first attempts at movie-making ‘Too Much Johnson’
12.20.2017
11:23 am
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Scene: A suite at the St. Regis Hotel, New York City, 1938. The floor is knee-deep in coils of highly flammable nitrate film. It sprawls across the floor, hangs from light fittings, bedposts, armchairs, tables, and glistens like a pit of malevolent serpents.

Center of the room stands boy wonder, Orson Welles, fueled by coffee and brandy and chicken sandwiches. He stands, puffing on an oversized pipe, filling the room with big black cartoon clouds of train engine smoke punctuated with angry fireflies of tobacco sparks which threaten (at any moment) to set the whole place alight. Welles is intently staring at one roll of film he slides up and down between his hands. He is oblivious to the chaos and possible fatal disaster that surrounds him.

His assistant John Berry is wrestling with a movie projector on which a roll of film has become snagged and is now kindling to a burst of yellow flames. Berry carries the projector back-and-forth anxiously looking for a safe place to dump the now smoking machinery. In front of him, like the best stage farce, a selection of doors offer escape but all are closed shut.

At one, there is a-knocking of someone wanting to get in. The door opens hesitantly. It’s producer John Houseman who has come to see what’s going on with the latest project Too Much Johnson. Houseman enters, retreats, enters, retreats, as if shyly rehearsing dance steps. He eventually opens the door wide, coughs once, then enters the room. He opens his mouth to speak but the shock of seeing 25,000 feet of highly flammable film decorating the floor, Berry with a burning projector seeking escape, and an oblivious Welles smoking like a volcano is all too much for him. He attempts to retreat back to the hallway while comically elbowing Berry over who gets out first.

Exit Houseman and Berry with flaming projector.

This is roughly around the moment when Orson Welles fell in love with movie-making and decided making movies was to be his future career.
 
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Orson Welles making magic out of thin air.
 
Welles and Houseman were the bright young bucks of NY theater. Their innovative, critically acclaimed, and highly successful productions of an all-black Macbeth in 1936, followed by Marc Blitzstein‘s socialist musical The Cradle Will Rock, led Welles and Houseman to form their own repertory company the Mercury Theatre in 1937. Their first production as the Mercury Theatre was a jack-booted, militaristic production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar called Caesar. It earned the pair column inches of praise and reputations as a major force in American theater.

In 1938 came productions of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Both of these received five-star reviews for their direction, acting, and original and creative approach to theater. Welles was always thinking up new and fresh ways to present well-known dramas. The Mercury’s next production was to be William Gillette‘s farce, about the misadventures of an amorous young man, Too Much Johnson which was more Welles’ baby than the “scholarly” Houseman’s, who was left to raise the cash and carry props. Gillette was the American actor who was famous for his character-defining performance of Sherlock Holmes—an interpretation that gave Arthur Conan-Doyle’s fictional hero many of the accessories, mannerisms, and tics still associated today with the renowned Baker Street sleuth.

Thinking of how to make Too Much Johnson seem new and original for the audience, Welles decided on filming a twenty-minute introduction to the play, with two ten minute sequences to be screened before acts two and three. There was no money to shoot these inserts, so Welles begged and borrowed and cajoled Houseman to raise whatever cash he could find. Too Much Johnson was to open at the Stony Creek Theatre in Connecticut. Welles was going to use the stage actors to perform in the inserts but gave so much of his time over to working on his filmed inserts, he left himself little time to focus on directing the actors for the stage production. Not that Welles was bothered—he was keen on improvising parts of the stage show.

Filming started in July 1938 amid all of Welles other commitments to radio, writing, and directing other productions.

Watch ‘Too Much Johnson,’ after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.20.2017
11:23 am
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‘Live animals are known to be devoured’: Brion Gysin and Paul Bowles’ Sufi recordings


Part of Ira Cohen’s layout for the Jilala sleeve (via Granary Books)
 
Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka was not the first album of Moroccan music inspired by the kif-smoking literary expats in Tangier. In 1964, Brion Gysin and Paul Bowles taped the Jilala brotherhood, a Sufi order whose ritual dance and music were supposed to exorcise evil spirits and heal the sick. The LP Jilala, released a year or two later by Ira Cohen, brought these recordings into limited circulation and preserved them for posterity.

Poet, musician, traveler, author of The Hashish Cookbook, and director of The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, Cohen was another Olympian of the arts who had joined Burroughs, Gysin, and the Bowleses in Tangier in 1961. (My old employer Arthur Magazine brought out Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda on DVD ten years ago, with new scores by Acid Mothers Temple and Sunburned Hand of the Man supplementing the original soundtrack by founding Velvet Underground drummer Angus MacLise.) Years before his psychedelic photo experiments with Mylar, Cohen edited the literary magazine Gnaoua, named after a form of North African religious music that’s related to but distinct from the Jilala’s. 

It’s not entirely clear how Jilala is connected to another Paul Bowles recording project involving the same collaborators, time, and place. Bowles wrote Cohen in 1966 about donating the profits from something called the “Hypnotic Music record” to the Timothy Leary Defense Fund. In a footnote, the editor of Bowles’ letters says this refers to a compilation of Hamatcha, Jilala, Gnaoua, and Aissaoua trance music that was put together from tapes made separately by Bowles, Gysin, and Cohen and released by Cohen. However, the Independent reports that the Hypnotic Music record was an unrealized project, so perhaps Bowles’ editor has conflated it with Jilala, which Discogs lists as the sole release on Cohen’s Trance Records.

I would be delighted to be proven wrong about this. Does anyone have a copy of the Hypnotic Music record?
 

The cover of the original issue of Jilala
 
Before putting Jilala in your gym playlist, you should probably read Cohen’s liner notes (reprinted in full at Big Bridge and Discogs) so you know what you’re getting yourself into. The Jilala knew how to pitch a wang dang doodle with their flutes and drums. The bath salts of their day, these religious tunes have been known to make listeners eat live animals, slash themselves with knives, and drink boiling water straight from the kettle, as Cohen tells it…

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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10.20.2016
09:08 am
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Surrealist masters, dada directors & avant-garde all stars in ‘Dreams Money Can Buy’


 
Dreams Money Can Buy is a 1947 anthology film made by artist/author Hans Richter and collaborators like Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst and others. There is music from John Cage, Paul Bowles and a number by scandalous bisexual torch singer Libby Holman and popular African-American singer Josh White (who was later caught up in the “Red Scare” and black-listed) on the original soundtrack titled “The Girl with the Pre-Fabricated Heart” that plays during Leger’s segment.

Richter’s goal was to bring the avant-garde out of the museum and into the movie house and the results, predictably, are rather unique. Certainly Dreams Money Can Buy must have been a stunner at the time and it still is. With no spoken dialogue, the plot, such that there is one, revolves around a man who rents a room where he can peer into the mirror and see people’s dreams. He sets up shop and we meet his clients and see their interior lives in the dream sequences. As you can imagine with the above list of collaborators, the film is a dizzying treat of audio-visual creation.
 

 
Marcel Duchamp’s contribution “Discs” is especially interesting. Here we see Duchamp’s famous Rotoreliefs in action, with a “prepared piano” soundtrack performed by John Cage. [I was once offered a box of glass and wood reproductions in miniature of Duchamp’s kinetic sculptures—at a good price, too—and like a fucking idiot I passed on it].
 

 
Below, Dreams Money Can Buy in its entirety on YouTube. If you want to watch with the original soundtrack, it’s here. The “modern” soundtrack in the version embedded below was recorded by The Real Tuesday Weld and is pretty faithful to the original music. This is one of those films that demands to be screened outside at night under the stars. You can buy the DVD (which has both the original and modern soundtrack) here.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.21.2014
04:38 pm
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Dreams Money Can Buy: Surrealist feature film from 1947

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Dreams Money Can Buy is a 1947 film made by artist/author Hans Richter and collaborators like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Ferdinand Leger, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Paul Bowles, Max Ernst and others. There is a number by scandalous bisexual torch singer Libby Holman and popular African-American singer Josh White (who was later caught up in the “Red Scare” and black-listed) on the original soundtrack titled “The Girl with the Pre-Fabricated Heart” that plays during Leger’s segment.
 
Richter’s goal was to bring the avant-garde out of the museum and into the movie house and the results, predictably, are rather unique. Certainly Dreams Money Can Buy must have been a stunner at the time and it still is. The plot, such that there is one, revolves around a man who rents a room where he can peer into the mirror and see people’s dreams. He sets up shop and we meet his clients and see their surreal interior lives in the dream sequences. As you can imagine with the above list of collaborators, the film is a dizzying treat of audio-visual creation.
 
image
 
Marcel Duchamp’s contribution, “Discs,” is especially interesting. Here we see Duchamp’s famous Rotoreliefs in action, with a “prepared piano” soundtrack performed by John Cage. [I was once offered a box of glass and wood reproductions in miniature of Duchamp’s kinetic sculptures—at a good price, too—and like a fucking idiot I passed on it].
 

 
Below, Dreams Money Can Buy in its entirety on YouTube. If you want to watch with the original soundtrack, it’s here. The “modern” soundtrack, in the version embedded below, was recorded by The Real Tuesday Weld and is pretty faithful to the original music.
 

 
Thank you Vanessa Weinberg!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.17.2012
11:01 am
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Cracking Open The Sheltering Sky

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Today’s NYT alerts us to the 60th (!) anniversary of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky.  A race to the limits of experience—and existence—set against North Africa’s unforgiving desert, Sky gave Bowles the means to live with the absolute freedom of his two most famous characters, Port and Kit Moresby.  That freedom would ultimately consume the Moresbys, but Bowles, along with his wife, Jane, lived out their years in Tangier, experimenting with hashish and bisexuality, and nurturing friendships with everyone from Gore Vidal to William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.

It was with Gysin that Bowles met The Master Musicians of Jajouka, a discovery that would later yield Brian Jones Presents: The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka.  Dubbed, dryly, by Burroughs as a “4000-year-old rock band,” The Masters can be seen below playing at the 40th anniversary of Brian Jones’ death.

 
In the NYT: Trusting in the Sheltering Sky, Even When It Scorched

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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08.31.2009
04:13 pm
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