CABARET TOXIQUE celebrating the centenary of William S. Burroughs in Paris

Tsunami Books presents CABARET TOXIQUE celebrating the centenary of William S. Burroughs - 2 theatres of operations-interventions in France (Paris & Lyon), featuring Tsunami Gang (Henrik Aeshna, Anita Volk, Sandra Wild, and more)

1st part: LYON (January 25, 6pm - La Menuiserie, 3 rue Carquillat 69001),
featuring Tsunami Gang (Henrik Aeshna, Anita Volk, Sandra Wild & others)
2nd part: PARIS, late February (place and date to be announced)

ACTIVITIES :

sound pandemonium with multiple instruments & voices – supernovas glossolalias newbornscreams dancing plague erotic apocalypse
° cut-ups & excerpts of William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Claude Pélieu, Charles Plymell, Carl Weissner, Hassan-I-Sabbah, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Steve Dalachinsky, Stanislas Rodanski, Antonin Artaud, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Sainkho Namtchylak, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, Anita Berber, Kathy Acker, Baba Yaga
+ Chansons Toxiques &
Shamanoise Hallucinema SchizoPoP Manifesto

THE CONSPIRATORS :

* HENRIK AESHNA is a visionary vandal hated by Blablaist theoreticians and all kinds of conservatives -, poet-performer, provocateur, unclassifiable multidisciplinary creator, editor, polyglot translator and voyager-explorer based in Montmartre-Paris.
Former nude model turned Rimbaudian anti-model/anti-prophet of SchizoPoP Manifesto, Aeshna is also engaged in a radical dialogue with the masters of disorder and ecstasy from faraway tribal cultures (especially after his many experiences with Ayahuasca in South America, years ago), with Experimental Cinema, Butoh, women writers, street art, long lost bohemias and radical underground avant-gardes, and whatever interesting, disturbing, taboo-defying, rule-breaking and magma-infused crosses his way (without attaching to any reproductions and clichés).
Poet-bomber-wild-child armed with a sharp dionysian syntax (incendiary pies with splashes of absurdity and humour noir thrown in defying all the crowns and clichés of our post-post-post-modern age), in 2008 he sold Van Gogh’s ear in minced meat packages displayed in a kiosk set up outside the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
For further info (news, art, books, interventions, Shamanoise Hallucinema / intravenous visual deliriums):
° http://www.henrikaeshna.com/#!__exhibition-henrik-aeshna
° http://ebsn.eu/members/henrik-aeshna/

* ANITA VOLK is a brazen clown exploring wetlands of ungratefulness, weirdness and nakedness, storming long waiting rooms to smear armchairs ornaments clocks and masks. She sings writes writhes breathes spits out her words and those of others. Inspired by the writings of Michaux, Bataille, Vian, Bachelard, Nietzsche, Novarina, Deleuze, Dostoyevsky, the Dada comets, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Artaud, Joyce Mansour, Kerouac, Hesse and Butoh, the chansons of Fréhel, Nitta Jo, Yvette Guibert, Marie Dubas (CHANSONS TOXIQUES - 1907-1946), Léo Férré, Brel, Brassens, Bobby Lapointe, Vian and Gainsbourg, Anita’s universe is made up of the forces, rages, disarrays, beauties and hideousnesses of this world. Focusing her research on chant, dance and poetry, her aim is both to enter the secret realms of these languages and develop them through improvisation, thus achieving a spontaneity situated outside all disgusting logics and atavisms.

* SANDRA WILD is a whore of the present time, the President’s whore. She’s Margheritta, margheritte, Saint Rita (showing an incurable wound on her face), the saint of desperate and lost causes (staring at someone) she herself desperate. She’s called Mireille Havet, and she won’t ever eat your bread. Call her Sandra. Sandra Wild. Having just finished her 7-year philosophy studies Sandra Wild is now due to open a butcher’s shop-delicatessen in a children’s center so as to give the unemployed aged less than 10 years a chance to work. They will learn on site how to bone one another.

“The Burroughs Century: Celebrating the Legacy of William S. Burroughs” 5-8 Feburary Bloomington IN.

William S. Burroughs is an American author, essayist, painter, and spoken-word performer, and would turn 100-years-old this upcoming February. He is considered to be “one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century,” writing eighteen novels and six short story collections. His life’s journey took him through an education at Harvard, many reckless experiences in Mexico and other countries, and countless artistic endeavors amongst the other great Beats, Kerouac and Ginsberg, in New York City.

In celebration of his 100th birthday this February, Bloomington has developed a festival in his honor, knowing his influence throughout America, and our own everyday lives. We are calling this event the Burroughs Century, but we are not looking backward; rather, we believe that the Burroughs Century is ongoing, that we are in the midst of it, and we intend to stage an event that indicates the full range of that continuing influence, including a film series, art and literature exhibits, speakers and panels, musical performances, and more.

Listen to The Beatdom Podcast for more information on the festival and discussion of the Beat Generation.

Beat Generation Misogynists?

 Jack Kerouac Trying to Remember a Woman's Name (That is Not his Mother)

The so-called Beat Generation was as much a product of the media that despised them as they were of their wild emotions. One point worth making in regard to there every really being a 'beat movement' (when what was described in the books and poems was actually happening and not when it became the topic of Time Life articles), is there were serious divisions between the writers, artists, painters and musicians that could be termed 'Beat' to the extent that several of the main figures had little or no contact with each other after about 1959. 



But the point about art and life being different roads is a good one. 'Howl' is not about men or women in the sense of characters, it is about people living in a militaristic society that practiced judicial psychiatry, which executed people in the name of national security, which imprisoned gays and even lobotomized them. 'On the Road' is about the mythology of the Old West and a eulogy for a freedom that it was imagined to embody. The writings of William Burroughs are a nostalgic longing for an imagined lost world of boyhood (that probably never actually existed), which we view through a language obsessed with the dull sensation and slow time of insatiable drug addiction. Each of these writers was looking at (and living in) the beginnings of the post-modern world, when the fables of progress and freedom seemed to be melting in the exhaust smoke and consumer culture of the 'free world'.



I recently started reading Burrough's 'The Ticket That Exploded'. It is a long poem, a painful clouded hallucination that assembles the ruins of a life that was filled with regrets (dead friends, murder, painful withdrawals, poverty and crime, misunderstandings between strangers in bars and cafeterias all driven on by the need to feed some invisible hunger or need). The cut up technique emphasizes this horror and dream-like quality to the prose and the chaos of the experience.

 By today's standards the writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, along with Huncke and Corso could be well considered misogynistic. But what about Ferlinghetti, Snyder, Bukowski, Micheline, Giorno, Di Prima, Waldman and the many writers who published in the 'Little Magazines' or yelled their verse in coffee houses and on street corners? This post-War movement of writers and poets that first broke open the boundaries on the "unspeakable visions of the individual" and commit them to the public gaze made important steps for later artists and writers. Much has happened since then which would not have happened if those initial steps had not been taken by Kerouac et. al.

Blame These Four Men For Beatnik Horrror (1960)

Remix and Resistance in the Work of William S. Burroughs

Remix and Resistance in the Work of William S. Burroughs from jim on Vimeo.

Short excerpt from the film The Source (1999)

The Last Platonic Conversationalists

"who talked continuously seventy hours from park to

pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists

jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon" 

- Howl by Alan Ginsberg (1956)

The American Novel Since 1945 with Amy Hungerford: Jack Keroauc 'On the Road'

The American Novel Since 1945 (ENGL 291)

Yale Professor Amy Hungerford's lecture on Kerouac's On the Road begins by contrasting the Beats' ambition for language's direct relation to lived experience with a Modernist sense of difficulty and mediation. She goes on to discuss the ways that desire structures the novel, though not in the ways that we might immediately expect. The very blatant pursuit of sex with women in the novel, for example, obscures the more significant desire for connection among men, particularly the narrator Sal's love for Dean Moriarty. The apparent desire for the freedom of the open road, too, Hungerford argues, exists in a necessary conjunction with the idealized comforts of a certain middle-class American domesticity, signaled by the repeated appearance of pie.

00:00 - Chapter 1. The Beats: Similarities and Differences to Literary Modernism
09:46 - Chapter 2. A New Use of Language: Mirroring the Speed of Experience
18:13 - Chapter 3. "The Prophet of 'Wow'": The Language of Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady
29:48 - Chapter 4. Dean and Sal: Tangled Sexual Tensions
33:56 - Chapter 5. The Hunger Metaphor: The American Culture of Consumption
40:21 - Chapter 6. Modes of Craftedness: Carlo Marx's Papier-Mache Mountains

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Spring 2008.

In this second lecture on On The Road, Yale Professor Amy Hungerford addresses some of the obstacles and failures to the novel's high ambitions for achieving American community through an immediacy of communication. Sal Paradise's desire to cross racial boundaries, for example, seems ultimately more exploitative than expansive; Dean's exuberant language of "Yes!" and "Wow!" devolves into meaningless gibberish. And yet the novel's mystical vision of something called "America" persists, a cultural icon that continues to engage the interest of readers, scholars, and artists. Among these latter is the digital art collaborative Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, with whose online work DAKOTA Hungerford concludes the class.

00:00 - Chapter 1. Kerouac's Mythical America: Trans-historical Communities
22:03 - Chapter 2. Defining American Identity: Sal's Illusory Vision of Mystical Oneness
30:01 - Chapter 3. Dean and Sal, Again: The Theme of Sadness
41:12 - Chapter 4. The Publication History: Creating a Literary Object

Neal and Dean

A man and his image. Neal Cassady raving at City Lights in 1965. Notice the look of the other figure in each image. The woman next to Neal does not take her eyes off him for the duration of the film this comes from. Neal seems to be playing Dean Moriarty. A man written into a book by his best friend.

Gary Snyder "The Practice of the Wild" Trailer

'The Practice of the Wild' is a film profile of the poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder. Snyder has been a creative force in all the major cultural changes that have created the modern world. Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, he was a central figure of the Beat generation. He helped bring Zen Buddhism into the America scene, was an active participant in the anti-war movement and an inspiration for the quest for human potential. All along he was a founding intellect, essayist and leader of the new environmental awareness that supports legislation and preservation without losing sight of direct wild experience -- local people, animals, plants, watersheds and food sources.

This film, borrowing its name from one of Snyder's most eloquent non-fiction books, revolves around a life-long conversation between Snyder and his fellow poet and novelist Jim Harrison. These two old friends and venerated men of American letters converse while taking a wilderness trek along the central California coast in an area that has been untouched for centuries. They debate the pros and cons of everything from Google to Zen koans. The discussions are punctuated by archival materials and commentaries from Snyder friends, observers, and intimates who take us through the 'Beat' years, the years of Zen study in Japan up to the present -- where Snyder continues to be a powerful spokesperson for ecological sanity and bio-regionalism.

Ah Pook is Here

Click on Images to Come to Truth.

The show runs at the Saloman Arts Gallery in downtown Manhattan till December 14. There is a website as well with some nice high rez images online.

First Recording of 'Howl' by Allen Ginsburg Found

Allen Ginsburg in 1956

In February 1956, during a hitch-hiking trip from Berkeley to the Pacific Northwest with fellow-poet Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg gave a poetry reading at Reed College, Portland, Oregon at which he read “Howl” and seven other poems. Ginsberg and Synder were on campus for two nights, February 13 and 14; the recording unearthed recently in the Reed archives includes Ginsberg's “Howl Part I,” the longest section of the poem published six months later by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books with the initial title “Howl for Carl Solomon.” The reel-to-reel tape held by Special Collections at Reed's Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library is the earliest-known recording of Ginsberg reading “Howl.” The recording is of high quality, and does not include the entire poem, as Ginsberg stopped reading soon after concluding Part I of “Howl.”

Listen to the Recording

The New Bohemians 1959

Silent footage of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and others in New York, Summer 1959. The location is in and around the Harmony Bar & Restaurant at E 9th St. and 3rd Ave. Others seen are Mary Frank (wife of film-maker Robert Frank, who made Pull my Daisy with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso the same year) and children Pablo and Andrea, as well as Lucien's wife Francesca Carr and their three sons, Simon, Caleb and Ethan.
I think it is interesting to read the body langauge between the figures in this film. Kerouac the slouched smoker whose eyes seem to move constantly but whose body is already bloated and sagging. Ginsberg a wire like pivot to the whole arrangement, around him the small crowd rotates on the hot street corner. Women who do not seem to be the accomadating mothers/saints/whores of Beat Generation mythology, rather they seem to be taking issue with the males, responding sharp and quick to their words and leading the talk and action.
Another nice Beat related video is HERE.

Free Burroughs Material

William Burroughs and Tangier. Both are very interesting subjects as far as I am concerned. Burroughs on the cut-up techniques, language and the mind, reality and the place of technology in understanding, on the "breaking through".
Tangier, the international zone and point of transfer between the north and the south, Africa and Europe, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. There are several texts available online:

The Electronic Revolution (PDF)
The Electronic Revolution is an essay collection by William S. Burroughs that was first published in 1970 by Expanded Media Editions in West Germany. A second edition, published in 1971 in Cambridge, England, contained additional French translation by Jean Chopin.

The book is divided into two parts.

Part One, entitled "The Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden" invokes Alfred Korzybski’s views characterising man as "the time binding machine" due to his ability to write. Burroughs sees the significance of a written word as a distinguishing feature of human beings which enables them to transform and convey information to future generations. He proposes the theory of "the unrecognised virus" present in the language, suggesting that, "the word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host."

Part Two, "Electronic Revolution" concerns the power of alphabetic non-pictorial languages to control people. It draws attention to the subversive influence of the word virus on humans and dangerous possibilities of using human voice as a weapon. Recording words on tape recorders and employing the Cut-up technique can easily lead to the false news broadcasts or garbled political speeches causing confusion and psychic control over individuals.

The basic idea of language as a virus has been widely used and quoted from several of Burroughs' interviews. Here is a passage from the text:

I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. (...) we may forget that a written word is an image and that written words are images in sequence that is to say moving pictures. (...) My basis theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made the spoken word possible. Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forward an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls biologic mutation effecting a biologic change in its host which was then genetically conveyed. One reason that apes cannot talk is because the structure of their inner throats is simply not designed to formulate words. He postulates that alteration in inner throat structure were occasioned by a virus illness ....

The referred German Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz is another of Burroughs' inventions.

The book influenced numerous musicians in the industrial music scene of the 1970s. Richard H. Kirk, of Cabaret Voltaire, employed many ideas and methods from the book, saying, “A lot of what we did, especially in the early days, was a direct application of his ideas to sound and music.” He described it as "a handbook of how to use tape recorders in a crowd … to promote a sense of unease or unrest by playback of riot noises cut in with random recordings of the crowd itself."
La Revolution Electronique
CD released by crash magazine - France - 1998
all text cut into 96 parts
mastering : samon takahashi

THE PIPES OF PAN AT JOUJOUKA
Recorded by Brian Jones (of the Rolling Stones) and Bryan Gysin at Joujouka 1968. Liner notes by Burroughs (booklet included in download page).