LSD – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 655

The Surrealist (1947) by Victor Brauner.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Terry Ratchett presents…18 needlessly obscured avant-garde films by Thomas White, Teinosuke Kinugasa, George Barry, Standish Lauder, Helge Schneider, Dusan Makavejev, Oliver Herrmann, Mauricio Kagel, Mamoru Oshii, Gian Carlo Menotti, Pat O’Neill, Vera Chytilová, Shozin Fukui, Willard Maas, Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy, Juraj Herz, and Jay Schlossberg-Cohen.

• “When I’m convinced that a certain type of book is completely beyond the capacities of my temperament and my technical skills, I sit down at my desk and start writing it.” Italo Calvino discussing his approach to writing in 1983. The essay, The Written World and the Unwritten World, gives its title to a collection of previously unavailable Calvino pieces translated by Ann Goldstein. John Self reviewed the book.

• New music: Komplett Kollaps (A Dedication To Jóhann Jóhannsson) by Rúnar Magnússon, and Composition 1 by Deathprod.

Brann’s new book sweeps across the vast range of things that hold her interest. It thus invites us to enjoy the life of the mind and to live from our highest selves. A thoughtful encounter with this book will make you, I swear, a better person. The book includes chapters on Thing-Love, the Aztecs, Athens, Jane Austen, Plato, Wisdom, the Idea of the Good. The first half provides an on-ramp to the chapter titled “On Being Interested,” which falls in the dead centre of the book. This central chapter serves as more than a cog in the wheel: it is an ars poetica. Addressing issues of attention, focus, and interest itself, as well as how and where to deploy these functions throughout our lives, “Being Interested” offers a solution for any seeker intrigued by the notion that happiness is not an accident but a vocation. Brann characterizes the pursuit of happiness as “ontological optimism […] to be maintained in the face of reality’s recalcitrance.”

Peggy Ellsberg reviewing The Habit of Interestedness by Eva Brann

• “God told me I should take more LSD.” Sari Soininen on her acid-induced photographs.

• At Public Domain Review: The Procession of the Months by Walter Crane.

• At Smithsonian Magazine: See the chilling beauty of winter on Mars.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Edie & Eddy Slab.

• RIP Michael Snow, film-maker and musician.

• Kollaps (1981) by Einstürzende Neubauten | Feed The Collapse (1992) by Main | Collapsing Inwards (2014) by Jóhann Jóhannsson

Weekend links 624

An alphabet designed by Ben Griffiths. Via.

• “From the cellular to the galactic, via Paleolithic cave markings to the trace impressions left by drone photography on our mind’s eye, incorporating dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, hyper-sexual fungi, chthonic descents, and skyward ascents, The Neon Hieroglyph weaves together a series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD.” Coming soon from Strange Attractor: The Neon Hieroglyph, a book, LP and folio of prints by Tai Shani.

• “3rd From The Sun was the last album of Chrome’s imperial phase, and it cemented their status as one of the most inhuman and superhuman rock bands that America ever produced. More people need to recognize.” Agreed. (previously)

• “People often say, ‘How can you be so disciplined?’ It’s easy. Otherwise, I would have to go work for somebody else!” John Waters (again). Also here.

I’ve always thought that literature should be entertaining as well as instructive—a very old-fashioned idea but one that I adhere to. When I set out to write in this way—particularly in this way, a political way, if you want to call it that—I intend to make a donation, to try to give something. There doesn’t seem to me to be any point in giving more misery or exacerbating unhappiness through some kind of hyper-intellectual, pyrotechnical writing about unhappiness and the shit that we all find ourselves in. That’s been done plenty. I think first of all that it doesn’t need to be done any more and second of all there’s a kind of reactionary aspect to it which is that the emphasizing of misery without any anti-pessimism, as you put it, would be simply seduction into inactivity and political despair. In other words, to do politics at all on any level, especially on a revolutionary or on an insurrectionary level, there has to be some anti-pessimism—I won’t say optimism because that sounds so fatuous, futile; but anti-pessimism is a nice phrase. And there’s a deliberate attempt at that in the writing. Then again it’s a matter of my personality, I guess, inclined towards the notion of the healing laugh to some extent. We have an anarchist thinker in America, John Zerzan, who wrote an essay against humour which maybe is one of the things I was reacting against. Even if irony is counter-revolutionary which I think it might be to a certain extent I don’t see any way in which you could say that laughter itself is counter-revolutionary. This doesn’t make any sense to me unless you mean to get rid of language and thought altogether, which is just another form of nihilism. So as long as you’re going to accept culture on some level you’re certainly going to have to accept humour. And as long as you’re going to have to accept humour you might as well see humour as potentially revolutionary.

Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey, who died last month. Many of Wilson’s writings are available at The Anarchist Library. From 2008: A poem for Leonora Carrington

• “It’s such a fundamental question,” says Midori Takada, “why do humans need to make rhythm, and the space that structure creates?”

• “14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture” by Ted Gioia.

• A trailer for Earwig, the new film from Lucile Hadzihalilovic, based on a story by Brian Catling.

• New music: Aura by Hatis Noit, and Warmth Of The Sun by Pye Corner Audio.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…SE Hinton Rumble Fish (1975).

• “Hear tracks from the 1980s Peruvian electronic underground”.

• Intermittent Eyeball Fodder at Unquiet Things.

• West Tulsa Story (1983) by Stewart Copeland | Kála/Assassins Of Hakim Bey (1997) by Coil | Neon Lights (2000) by Señor Coconut Y Su Conjunto

Richard H. Kirk, 1956–2021

Q: Was the initial idea to be a music group?

Richard H. Kirk: I suppose that depends on how you define “music”. No, the initial idea was to be more of a sound group, just putting sounds together like jigsaw pieces. If the result did sound like music then it was purely coincidental.

From Cabaret Voltaire: The Art of the Sixth Sense (1984) by M Fish & D Hallberry

This was a shock, in part because I tend to think of certain artists as perpetually young even when I’ve been following them for decades. In the case of the not-so-young Cabaret Voltaire it was an easy frame of mind to slip into when Kirk and Mallinder were only photographically visible up to about 1990. After this the group resumed their former obscurity, cloaked by abstract images and Designers Republic graphics.

Oddly enough I’d been running through the early Cabs albums only a couple of weeks ago, and wondering how long Kirk was going to keep the revived group going on his own. I suppose this means that Cabaret Voltaire is now definitely finished, in which case it’s a double RIP. And just a few days ago I was reading a Mark Fisher essay on Joy Division, feeling as frustrated as I always do when Curtis and co. are praised for “channelling” (or whatever) the spirit of William Burroughs when nobody would think to connect Burroughs and Joy Division if you changed the title of the song Interzone to something else. Throbbing Gristle were closer to Burroughs personally than were Cabaret Voltaire but the influence on TG only became really overt when Industrial Records released Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, an album of Burroughs’ tape experiments. The Cabs were more important to me as a youthful reader of Burroughs’ novels for seeming to be broadcasting from inside his texts. Their early albums were disturbed and disturbing (a friend once asked me to switch off their music for this very reason), an unwholesome amalgam of dialogue taped from TV and radio, crude electronics, threatening voices, and songs that were warped into strange new shapes. “This is entertainment…this is fun…“ I’m still amazed that their first album included a cover of No Escape, a song by psychedelic group The Seeds, which didn’t sound out of place despite the weirdness surrounding it.

William smiles. Left to right: John Giorno, William Burroughs, Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk. Photo by Sylvia Plachy from the gatefold interior of A Diamond In The Mouth Of A Corpse (1985), a compilation album released by Giorno Poetry Systems.

Cut-up theory was a constant in the Cabaret Voltaire discography, and in many of Richard Kirk’s solo recordings, with the group starting out as Dada-inspired tape collagists* before they found a way to present their experiments in a musical form. The concept is to the fore in the title of Cabaret Voltaire’s debut album, Mix-Up, and exemplified in the track that opens side two, Photophobia, a reworked version of a Surrealist monologue that dates from the group’s days making recordings in Chris Watson’s attic. Photophobia pulls you into the same queasy dreamspace in which you find yourself when reading Burroughs’ early cut-ups, a catalogue of oneiric splicings—”they’re injecting the rivers with stainless-steel fish…a coelacanth/a body with a shrunken head…”—the phrases being increasingly overwhelmed by rising synthesizer drones and Kirk’s squeaking clarinet. Kirk’s solo debut, Disposable Half-Truths, was a cassette-only release on Industrial Records infused with the Burroughs spirit in both technique and content, offering track titles such as Information Therapy and Insect Friends Of Allah. Cabaret Voltaire continually referred to Burroughs’ speculative essay collection The Electronic Revolution in interviews but it was Kirk who extended the group’s cut-up experiments to film and video. By 1982 they’d accumulated enough of their own video material to release a VHS collection on their own music and video label, Doublevision.

If I’ve concentrated on the early recordings it’s because the post-punk period continues to seem like a miraculous moment, a space of four years when anything was possible musically, a time when Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis could record an album as uncompromisingly strange as 3R4 then have it released on 4AD and sold in racks next to albums by label-mates Bauhaus and The Birthday Party. Cabaret Voltaire took advantage of this unique period to warp expectations in their own way, and to extend the boundaries of the possible. Richard H. Kirk’s subsequent career was prolific, releasing a blizzard of albums and singles under a variety of pseudonyms (Discogs lists 42 different Kirk aliases). One of my favourite pieces from his solo recordings is White Darkness from 1993, the last track on a 12-inch single, Digital Lifeforms, credited to Sandoz. There’s a mysterious quality here that I wish he’d explored more often on his later albums instead of letting the rhythms run their course for another seven or eight minutes. The sampled voice maintains a thread of continuity with Kirk’s music before and after, as does the reference to LSD in the Sandoz name, taking us back to Mix-Up and the mescaline experiments described on Heaven And Hell. Psychedelia by other means.

* For a taste of unadorned Cabs-related tape manipulation, see The Men With The Deadly Dreams, a cassette release compiled by Geoff Rushton/John Balance which features contributions from Chris Watson and Richard H. Kirk. Note that the blog post doesn’t give an accurate description of the tape contents.

• At Vinyl Factory: An introduction to Richard H. Kirk in 10 records.
• At The Wire: two interviews with Kirk from the magazine’s archives.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Recoil and Cabaret Voltaire
• Pow-Wow by Stephen Mallinder
• TV Wipeout revisited
• Doublevision Presents Cabaret Voltaire
• Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire
• European Rendezvous by CTI
• TV Wipeout
• Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo
• Elemental 7 by CTI
• The Crackdown by Cabaret Voltaire
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records

Pynchonian cinema

(Pynchonian? Pynchonesque? Pynchon-heads can no doubt supply the most common descriptor but for now Pynchonian will do.)

Is it possible to identify a Pynchonian strand in cinema? This question came to mind while I was reading the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, and probably a little before then during a scene that takes place in the Neubabelsberg studio in Berlin. The Pynchon reading binge is still ongoing here—after finishing the Rocket book I went straight on to Vineland, and I’m currently immersed in Mason and Dixon—so I’ve been watching films that complement some of the preoccupations in the Pynchon oeuvre, at least up to and including Vineland. This is a small and no doubt contentious list but I’m open to further suggestions. Inherent Vice is excluded, I’ve been thinking more of films that are reminiscent of Pynchon without being derived from his work. Elements that increase the Pynchon factor would include: a serio-comic quality (essential, this, otherwise you’d have to include a huge number of thrillers); detective work; paranoia; songs; and a conspiracy of some sort, or the suspicion of the same: a mysterious cabal–the “They” of Gravity’s Rainbow—who may or may not be manipulating the course of events.

The President’s Analyst (1967)
I’d be very surprised if Pynchon didn’t like this one. James Coburn as the titular analyst, Dr Sidney Schaefer, has little time to enjoy his new job in Washington DC before half the security services in the world are trying to kidnap him to discover what he’s learned about the President’s neuroses. This in turn leads the ~~FBI~~ FBR to attempt to kill Schaefer in order to protect national security. Pynchonian moments include a bout of total paranoia in a restaurant, Canadian spies disguised as a British pop group (“The ‘Pudlians”), and a visit to the home of a “typical American family” where the father has a house full of guns, the mother is a karate expert, and the son uses his “Junior Spy Kit” to monitor phone conversations. Later on, an entire nightclub gets spiked with LSD. This is also the only film in which someone evades abduction to a foreign country by the cunning use of psychoanalysis.
Is it serio-comic? Yes.
Is there detection? In the background: the ~~CIA~~ CEA and KGB agents have to work together in order to outwit the ~~FBI~~ FBR and discover who the ultimate villains might be.
Is there paranoia? You only get more paranoia in one of the serious conspiracy dramas of the 1970s like The Conversation or The Parallax View. (The latter includes the same actor who plays the All American Dad, William Daniels.)
Any songs? Yes. Coburn hides out for a while with the real-life psychedelic group Clear Light, and helps with their performance in the acid-spiked nightclub.
“They”? There are multiple “They”s in this one.
Pynchon factor: 5. Maybe a 6 for the LSD.

Continue reading “Pynchonian cinema”

Trip texts revisited

An update to a post from several years ago about the handful of significant books that appear in Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967). The earlier post was prompted by a DVD viewing; this update has been prompted by a re-viewing via blu-ray which yielded screen-grabs showing more detail. As I’ve no doubt said before, one of the pleasures of home viewing is being able to scrutinise film frames in this manner, something that was previously only possible if you were a writer with access to a cinema print.

Corman’s film is probably the only feature from American International Pictures that contains any kind of extraneous intellectual reference. The AIP ethic was always “shoot it fast and cheap”, a production rule that had no time for winking to the hip contingent of the audience with books, of all things. Leave that stuff to the French. The Trip was still shot fast and cheap but Corman had been stretching himself increasingly while making his cycle of Poe films, especially with The Masque of the Red Death which had a longer production schedule, a British cast and crew, and a symbolic finale that sets it apart from its rivals at Hammer and other studios. The Trip is as far-out as Corman gets, the cut-up shots of Peter Fonda stumbling in delirium around Sunset Boulevard wouldn’t be out of place in any underground film of the period.

The surprising thing about the books that appear in the scene where Fonda’s character, Paul, drops his acid is that they’re perfectly appropriate items of set decoration but only two of them—the unmissable copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and David Solomon’s LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug—would have been discernible to an audience. The latter inclusion is probably more to do with the three magic letters being so prominent on its cover than anything else, although it is the kind of book you’d find in a house owned by lysergic voyagers. The blu-ray detail now reveals more of the book hiding behind it although this one has eluded my attempts to search for a match: “The [something]….”? I thought it might be The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran but none of the editions prior to 1967 resemble the cover.

The main discovery this time round was finding a match for the book hidden by Howl, a title that I now confidently declare to be the 1962 Avon edition of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. (The reds and blues of the cover art are more discernible in a full-frame shot.) When watching the DVD I thought those words might be “Hugo Award Winner” but couldn’t make out an author’s name, and “Award Winner” was a guess. The book might also have been written by someone named Hugo… Heinlein’s novel was a hippy favourite in the 1960s, one of several books together with The Prophet, Richard Brautigan’s novels and poetry, Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, etc, that were popular with turned-on readers. The irony of the author of Starship Troopers being mooned over by the love ‘n’ peace crowd wasn’t lost on the younger generation of SF authors but their criticisms didn’t travel outside genre circles. Heinlein could evade opprobrium for being one of the signatories of an ad in Galaxy for June, 1968, supporting the war in Vietnam because hippies en masse weren’t reading SF magazines.

As noted in the earlier post, the book behind the Heinlein is a 1960 edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which I was only able to identify because I own a copy of the same edition. Behind this there lurks another title whose identity is now going to nag at me. The cover decoration means it will be easy to find if it ever turns up somewhere. But will I remember it when it does? We’ll see.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alice’s Adventures in the Horse Hospital
• LSD-25 by The Gamblers
• More trip texts
• Trip texts
• Acid albums
• Acid covers
• Lyrical Substance Deliberated
• The Art of Tripping, a documentary by Storm Thorgerson
• Enter the Void
• In the Land of Retinal Delights
• Haschisch Hallucinations by HE Gowers
• The art of LSD
• Hep cats