JOHN 'HOPPY' HOPKINS - HOPPY REMEMBERED WITH NEW SITE

LSD meets CND. Hoppy in London.

In the 2015 obituary for his friend, John Hopkins, John Boyd wrote the “counterculture took much of its inspiration from him, and he was the closest thing the movement ever had to a leader.”

Hoppy was central to so much of the 60s underground scene, his restless energy pivotal to sell-out poetry readings at the Royal Albert Hall; the creation of underground newspaper, International Times; the ground-breaking psychedelic all-nighter, the UFO Club; the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream at the Alexandra Palace; and even sowing seeds for the Notting Hill carnival. Hoppy was a scene-maker, creator and pied-piper, clearing a path for others to follow. The authorities were less enamoured with his activities, raiding his flat for a small amount of Mary Jane, they threw him in jail, calling him a “menace to society”.

Before all this took up his time Hopkins was primarily a photographer, with his focus on political protest, social issues and music, appearing in, amongst others, Peace News, The Sunday Times and Melody Maker.

Now, I’m delighted to see a website, HoppyX, has recently appeared dedicated to Hoppy, his life and achievements. The image gallery is stunning and the recollections from his friends are delightful and inspiring in equal measure.

“Hoppy was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2007, around the time of his 70th birthday. The decline is slow but inexorable. Hoppy remains active in his chosen pursuits until his physical faculties fail him, graciously allowing himself to be interviewed many times by younger generations as they gradually discover his historical significance.”

I can vouch for this. After publication in 2008 of From The Hip: Photographs of John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins 1960-66 by Damiani, I went to Hoppy’s flat to collect a copy of the book. I expected to simply go there, pick it up and come away but was invited in, made a cup of tea, and we spent a long time going through the book, page by page, with Hoppy providing generous commentary to anything I paused on. I’d later purchase a print of a suitably steely-looking William Burroughs taken in New York.

After that, and with his health obviously deteriorating, I’d still frequently see Hoppy attending various exhibitions, talks and readings around London. That I’d see him more than any other person at these events always struck me as how deeply rooted and supportive he was – still - in the more marginal elements of the arts and society. He never gave it up.

Before you go to explore Hoppy’s site, the last word to the man himself whose inscription in my copy of From The Hip reads: “To Mark & Paula, Be happy for no reason, Best wishes, Hoppy.”

https://hoppyx.com/

William Burroughs in New York. Photo by Hoppy.

Blues Inc. Alexis Korner, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Cyril Davies at the Marquee. Photo by Hoppy.

CND Fence Rest. Photo by Hoppy.

Allen Ginsberg point to the Royal Albert Hall. Photo by Hoppy.

BEAT SCENE - ISSUE 83

On the sleepy teatime quiz show Pointless last Friday one question was something like “Who in 1957 was author of characters Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty?” Of a survey of one hundred people, two correctly identified Jack Kerouac. My immediate response was to deride the great British public for their lack of knowledge of On The Road, yet after some consideration every 50^th person recognising the central characters of a 60 year old American novel was a decent result and those conducting the survey possibly struck lucky to hit that many.

Jack Kerouac naturally enough features in the latest issue of Beat Scene. The design might not have changed in over twenty years but neither has editor Kevin Ring’s passion for all things beat related as he draws together new articles, published transcripts and news and reviews of the latest happenings. I’m excited to read of the publication of Kerouac’s original unexpurgated text of Maggie Cassidy and the article by Kurt Hemmer identifying the Beat Generation’s influence on Morrissey threw up a number of interesting associations. How have I never seen that photo of James Dean up a tree before?

Other pieces include Lawrence Ferlinghetti recalling ‘Howl’, Kenneth Patchen’s Poetry and Jazz days, saxophonist Steve Lacy discussing Brion Gysin, and William Burroughs is central to a number of inclusions.

Available from www.beatscene.net/ priced £5.50 or via subscription.

TAKING SHOTS: WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS AT 100

“ROCK AND ROLL ADOLESCENTS STORM INTO THE STREETS OF ALL NATIONS. THEY RUSH INTO THE LOUVRE AND THROW ACID IN THE MONA LISA’S FACE. THEY OPEN ZOOS, INSANE ASYLUMS, PRISONS, BURST WATER MAINS WITH AIR HAMMERS, CHOP THE FLOOR OUT OF PASSENGER PLANE LAVATORIES, SHOOT OUT LIGHTHOUSES, TURN SEWERS INTO THE WATER SUPPLY, ADMINISTER INJECTIONS WITH BICYCLE PUMPS, THEY SHIT ON THE FLOOR OF THE UNITED NATIONS AND WIPE THEIR ASS WITH TREATIES, PACTS, ALLIANCES.”

William Burroughs

The above extract from Naked Lunch was printed – like that, in capital letters – on the back of Manic Street Preachers single “Motown Junk”. When I bought that record, one snowy Saturday afternoon in January 1991, I knew who William Burroughs but hadn't read him. Those lines perfectly complimented the exhilarating speed rush of this new Welsh punk band I was hearing for the first time. It turned out to be momentous afternoon; I've still not bought a better record and have yet to discover anybody comparable to William Seward Burroughs.

Before the next Manics release I’d ploughed through Burroughs’ Junky, Queer and Naked Lunch. The first two were straight narratives, easy to follow and opened the lid into worlds I was not familiar. The third, well, what the flaming hell was that all about? If there was a “story” I couldn't fathom it – I shouldn't have bothered looking - but individual passages were unlike anything I’d read before. When Richey Edwards later said "Books were just as exciting to us as records," it was clear what he had in mind. 

I found the Manics quote. It was longer than their cut-up version on their sleeve and included a passage about candiru – an eel-like fish – which would “dart up your prick or your asshole or a woman’s cunt” and hold itself there with sharp spines. If candiru were frightening, they were nothing compared to what a mugwump could do to you sat in your local bar. What was based on fact and what was from Burroughs’ disturbed imagination (Jack Kerouac had nightmares after typing Bill’s manuscript pages) was difficult to ascertain but this was incredible stuff. Likewise, it was difficult to tell what was past, present or future. Sections like Hassan’s Rumpus Room, where murderous sex games were played out, were genuinely shocking – I couldn't believe Burroughs got away with this in the 1950s – but other parts were just plain funny. Having a quick flick through it again today that mixture of shock and comedy hasn't diminished. Who else would instigate a scene set in Cunt Lick, Texas?

The more of his books I read the less I seemed to understand – his cut-up books I still struggle with – but as a man he soon became, and firmly remains, a source of endless fascination. At my imaginary dinner party he'd be sat at the top of the table with Keith Richards to his right. We'd pass on the food. There are so many eyeball kicks to be had in his work. Some I “get”, some I haven’t a Scooby what he’s on about but I like the mix of his subversive nature and desert-dry humour. Bill may have been deadly serious about time travel and telepathy and the Ugly Spirit but I can’t help think he was putting us on much of the time; his pursed lips and involuntary twitch giving him away. As Darran Anderson wrote in his excellent piece for The Quietus the other week: “William S. Burroughs was a high modernist and a writer of complete trash; the two are by no means mutually exclusive. He was a genius and a bullshit artist.”

This year marks the William S. Burroughs Centenary (born 5th February 1914 in St. Louis) with events taking place around the world to mark the occasion, co-ordinated by the official Burroughs 100 website. London is well represented with two exhibitions currently showing.

The first is Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs at the Photographers’ Gallery, Ramillies Street, W1 with its title neatly alluding to Bill’s preoccupation with photography, junk and firearms. Photography being the least well known and this is the first exhibition to focus on a previously overlooked area. Burroughs took thousands of photographs but they were a means to an end. He used them to inform his writing, creating characters out of his shots or capturing people and scenes he believed he’d already written about. Time, for Burroughs, didn't run in a chronological order the way it does to you and me, and he’d systematically attempt to jump and cut between time frames. He’d also use his photos for collages, including taking photos of photos and repeating the process until the images were indistinguishable.

For Burroughs, “The collage is like flower arranging,” a subject his mother, Laura Lee Burroughs, knew well and published volumes of books on the subject. Her prim guide “Flower Arranging – A Fascinating Hobby” gives advice on how to keep a modern home stocked with ice-cold Coca-Cola, is displayed feet away from a series of photographs showing Bill’s bed before and after sex. Quite what ma would have made of her son displaying his jizz-stained bed sheets to all and sundry I can’t imagine.

Burroughs' main theme was control and how to fight against agents of control and authority, whoever or whatever they were, and he’d use photography and tape recordings in his arsenal to, according to biographer Barry Miles, "disrupt the space-time continuum and cause change." When in 1972 “the horrible old proprietor, his frizzy-haired wife and slack-jawed son” of London’s first ever espresso bar, the Moka Bar off Shaftsbury Avenue, upset Bill with “outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake” he would return every few days to record the place and play back the recordings and take more and more photographs.  Two months later the coffee bar closed down and a satisfied Burroughs rubbed his hands with a job well done.

Taking Shots is filled with fascinating artefacts - although a Burroughs novice would struggle to see the relevance of snaps of radio towers, desolate St. Louis streets or unnamed young men hanging around Piccadilly – which reveal more of the man who knew no boundaries. Writer, painter, sculptor, explorer, exterminator, film maker, drug taker, collaborator, photographer, the list goes on: piecing together Burroughs’ life is like assembling a jigsaw with no edges.

One of my favourite Burroughs notions is that words are a virus that get inside us and take over. He’d challenge people to see how long they could go without thinking in words. Try it. Can you fight the words for more than a couple of seconds? With that in mind it was little wonder he’d turn his hand, especially in later life, to non-verbal forms of communication.

Around the corner from the Photographers’ Gallery is the aptly named Riflemaker gallery at 79 Beak Street, W1 and a small selection of Burroughs’ gunshot wooden sculptures, stencil paintings, target practice drawings, photography and illustrations. Burroughs might have been a paranoid, cold-hearted, wife-killing, misanthropist, dope fiend but he loved his cats. His slim book The Cat Inside is so out of character it'd make a lovely present for any Grandmother or cat doting spinster. In one painting at the Riflemaker a sequence of thick black vibrating squiggles becomes lip-quiveringly sad when in the bottom right corner his shaky hand writing reads “The cat who came here to die”. 

William S. Burroughs, rather miraculously, didn't die until 1997; he was 83 years old.

See also Burroughs 100 - The Official Website.
A hardback book to accompany Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs is published by Prestel, priced £29.99.

William Burroughs 100 at the Riflemaker

KILL YOUR DARLINGS (2013)

Another year, another Beat Generation film. Following Walter Salles’ disappointing adaptation of On The Road, John Krokidas makes his directorial debut with a movie based on the true story of Allen Ginsberg’s first year in New York and the killing by Lucien Carr of David Kammerer.

When young Ginsberg (played by a wide-eyed, round spectacle wearing, boyish Daniel Radcliffe) arrives at Columbia University in 1944 and questions his lecturer’s insistence that poems without rhyme, meter and conceit are like untucked shirts he soon finds himself adopted and in awe of the only other student daring to challenge convention and tradition: the wild, handsome and streetwise Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan). Possessing verve, a brilliant mind and a strong manipulative streak, Carr was looking for a writer to capture his ideas and in Allen he found the perfect accomplice.

Shy and innocent, Ginsberg’s excitement and confidence grows when encouraged in the pursuit of a literary “New Vision” by Carr (and the sexual tension between them) and the much older William Burroughs (Ben Foster) who is keen to advocate the derangement of the senses and aspiring writer and football playing jock Jack Kerouac (Jack Hudson). Together - all at least ten years away from any work which would make their literary name - they grandly adopt the title “the Libertine Circle” and indulge in practices suitably applicable to their cause.

The central event of Kill Your Darlings – Carr stabbing his long-time stalker and sexual predator David Kammerer with a pocket knife and throwing his body into the river to drown - is well known to Beat readers (Jack, Bill, Allen and others all wrote about it with varying degrees of accuracy) but unlike On The Road there is no sacred text, which makes the transition to film easier. Unlike Salles, who attempted to force a square peg into a round hole, Krokidas’ film stands on its own and works well when taken purely as entertainment. It has characters, a straight forward narrative, and is reasonably well acted. Those who don’t know the Beats from a bar of soap can watch and enjoy it.

There are factual inaccuracies – as in any “based on a true story” film – but I preferred to gloss over those. But, unlike On The Road, this didn’t feel over stylized (the occasional use of modern rock music in a 1940s-set film was jarring, although "Don't Look Back Into The Sun" by The Libertines over the end credits was a nice touch) and for a bunch of cliquey know-it-all university students none of the characters were particularly annoying. As much as they all fascinate me I'm convinced in "real life" - bar Kerouac and Burroughs - the Beat crowd would've annoyed the hell out of me with their pretentiousness. 

Kammerer’s death and the reaction by the others has always intrigued me. Being on the edge of their scene he was well known to all of them (Burroughs and Kammerer had been friends since kids in St Louis) yet Kerouac helped dispose of the dead man’s glasses and Burroughs did little more than shrug and suggest Carr get himself a good lawyer and turn himself in. Both were arrested as accessories to murder. Ginsberg is the only one shown to wrestle with his conscience as Carr requests his help in his trial.

This enjoyable film shows the fledging Beats coming together and Ginsberg, in particular, begin to find his voice. More importantly it makes the Beats - with their thirst for a "New Vision", a new way of writing and living - look like something worth investigating further. Do it.  

Kill Your Darlings is in cinemas now.

BEATS, BEATNIKS AND THE BEAULIEU JAZZ RIOT OF 1960

The People (1960)

If I were a young man on 7^th August 1960 and not already a jazz loving beatnik, the Sunday paper The People would’ve had me scurrying to Dobell’s record shop for Mingus Ah Um and searching backstreet bookshops for an under-the-counter copy of The Naked Lunch quicker than one could say “Straight from the fridge, Dad”.

“Blame these 4 men for the Beatnik horror” exclaimed Peter Forbes, as shocked Britain learnt how a great unwashed army of beatniks had been driven to violence by a group of American writers and poets, culminating in a riot at the Beaulieu Jazz Festival. Exciting stuff.

Organised by Lord Montagu and held on the lawns of his Palace House in the New Forest, the Beaulieu Jazz Festival was in its fifth year when it achieved notoriety due to the behaviour of fans from both ends of the jazz spectrum: the traditionalists rooted in sounds of 1920’s Dixieland and the modernists building on a bebop template. According to photographer David Redfern both sides complained not enough of “their” type of jazz was being performed before things came to a head when increasingly drunk youths pulled down lighting rigs, set fire to a building and destroyed the stage. The BBC, broadcasting the event live on television, abruptly ended their coverage ahead of schedule with a typically understated comment, “Things are getting quite out of hand”.

The People told its readers, “The outbreak of violence that wrecked Lord Montagu’s jazz festival at Beaulieu last week must be blamed on the cult of despair preached by four strange men”. Those four strange men identified like names on a wanted poster as Jack “The Hobos’ Prophet” Kerouac; Allen “The Hate Merchant” Ginsberg; William “The Ex-Drug Addict” Burroughs and Gregory “The Crank Poet” Corso.

“These four beatnik “prophets” do not themselves preach violence. But they do infect their followers with indifference or outright hostility to established codes of conduct. Nothing matters to the beatnik save the “kicks” or thrills to be enjoyed by throwing off inhibitions. If you feel any urge, no matter how outrageous, indulge in it. If the beat of jazz whips up violent emotions, why not give way to them?”

That was the strength of the Beat Generation Quartet’s link to Beaulieu but it gave the paper enough to feed into the moral panic surrounding the nation’s latest youth menace and expand upon their exposé from a fortnight earlier; a double-page spread “The Beatnik Horror” that warned how thousands of young Americans hooked on this beat craze became “drug addicts and peddlers, degenerates who specialize in obscene orgies… and outright thugs and hoodlums”.

To illustrate how this cult was manifesting itself on Britain’s streets they visited Gambier Terrace in Liverpool to show a group of residents sitting in “unbelievable squalor” with their friend who’d dropped by to “listen to some jazz”. The property shown was shared at the time by John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe, and the bearded chap in the photo was Allan Williams, owner of local coffee bar The Jacaranda and manager of the then Silver Beatles, just about to head to Hamburg for the first time.

Gambier Terrace, Liverpool (1960)

It’s doubtful any of the “prophets” saw the article in a British tabloid - I couldn’t find any reference in their correspondence or journals – but it’s interesting to speculate on their differing reactions. Kerouac – likely the only name some more enlightened readers may have vaguely been familiar with - the People conceded, was a talented writer who unfortunately “devoted his great gift to exalting the bums and jazz-maniacs of the New York jive cellars” but he would’ve been hurt and upset as he frequently was in the backlash following the success of On The Road when held up as the avatar of, in his words, “beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks and bugniks”.

Kerouac copped much of the blame for the beatniks but they were a media creation - step forward Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle - which bastardised Kerouac’s experiences and vision of a spiritual beatific Beat Generation into a cartoonish band of beret wearing poets and jive talking bongo beaters. The American College Dictionary wrote to Jack in ’59 for his definition. He wrote: “Beat Generation: Members of the generation that came after World War II-Korean War who join in relaxation of social and sexual tensions and espouse anti-regimentation, mystic-disaffiliation and material-simplicity values, supposedly as a result of Cold War disillusionment. Coined by Jack Kerouac”.      

In 1958, only a year after On The Road’s publication, Jack already weary from the attention and trivialization of his writing wrote to Ginsberg, “I don’t want no more frantic nights, association with hepcats and queers and Village types, far less mad trips to unholy Frisco, I just wanta stay home and write”. Whilst rampaging youths at Beaulieu grabbed a microphone from the stage to demand “Free beer for the working man!” Jack was attempting to kick his alcoholism by detoxing in California. He failed but it did provide the material for one of his best books, Big Sur.

Ginsberg however tended to welcome any publicity for himself or his friends. He’d already seen his signature work Howl dragged screaming through the courts on obscenity charges yet Burroughs’s Naked Lunch still had that to come. In 1960 it had only recently been published in Paris by Olympia Press who were known to intrepid travellers and customs officials as purveyors of hard-core pornography and therefore all their titles were banned in the U.K. Copies were smuggled into the country down the shirts of returning visitors and placed in all the best bohemian pads where they were read aloud to fits of stoned laughter. Counterculture activist and beat chronicler Barry Miles, who acquired his copy that year, wrote in Naked Lunch@50, “The Naked Lunch was the hippest, coolest book ever written, and for a seventeen-year-old art student, that was quite something to have on the shelf”. For all their sensationalism The People were reasonably quick off the mark in Britain’s mainstream press to give coverage to Burroughs and also Gregory Corso.

William Burroughs, The Beat Hotel, Paris by Duffy (1960)

Already ancient at 46, Burroughs was far from a crazy beatnik – none of the original beats, except maybe Ginsberg, much fitted the profile – but he had at least one important similarity as far as the People were concerned: they were all filthy soap dodgers. The paper relished partially quoting Burroughs on the effect his junk habit had on his personal hygiene. “I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes [or removed them] except to stick a needle [every hour] in the fibrous grey wooded flesh [of heroin addiction]”.

It was a recurring theme in the media regarding beatniks. The film Beat Girl in cinemas at that year followed coffee bar and jazz club dwelling Jenny; described as “the mad one” by a fellow St Martin’s art student for being a beatnik. When Jenny’s stepmother pressed the student to elaborate, she’s told, “It’s a craze from America. Hopeless and soapless”. Even the left-leaning Observer reported the rarefied grounds of Palace House were “packed solidly with unkempt humanity” and quoted a hotelkeeper as saying “I wouldn’t mind so much if they washed now and then”. The paper agreed, “Certainly one could see his point as the jazz fans turned up in their standard uniform of rumpled jeans and T-shirts, sandals and haircuts that must have wrung the hearts of the two former Irish Guards sergeants who were running the campsite behind the car park”.

On the same bank holiday weekend as Beaulieu (held in those days on the first Monday in August), Alan Whicker reported for the BBC’s Tonight programme. Councillors in Newquay had written to all shopkeepers, café owners and bar managers urging them not to serve beatniks visiting the Cornish town over the summer and for restaurateurs and hoteliers to refuse them jobs as washer-uppers. Their hair and beards were just about tolerated but their stink was more than the council could stand. “A man owes it to society to keep himself clean,” according to one pub landlord. Such claims were refuted by local long-hair Eric who told Whicker he washed at least every two days.

When Gregory Corso read his poem “Bomb” (the text cleverly arranged to form the shape of an atomic mushroom cloud) to New College, Oxford in 1958 members of CND present were not amused. Rather than an easy Ban The Bomb message, Corso’s poem humourlessly accepts of the inescapable presence of the bomb and that we’re all going to die anyway. Ginsberg attempted to explain his friend’s meaning and pacify the hecklers but that didn’t work so, after dodging shoes thrown at them, he summoned all his poetic powers and reportedly called them assholes before sheepishly leaving. It’s not too surprising the gathered campaigners had trouble comprehending the lengthy poem on first hearing but a little ironic two members of the Beat Generation faced such hostility a bunch of peaceniks. 

What the People didn’t make clear is which side of the trad/modern divide the rioting beatniks were on. Jack Kerouac’s writing style (and some of Ginsberg’s) was directly shaped in the 40s and 50s by the new rhythms of bebop, of Lester Young, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, of the modern jazz they were hearing as they discovered and created their own artistic voice. It would therefore follow British beatniks, like their American counterparts, would also adopt this music yet large swathes of them backed the wrong horse and used trad (and folk music) as their soundtrack. As the duffle-coated, sandal wearing, middle-class, beatnik brigade marched to Aldermaston in bowler hats with the CND symbol taped to the front in honour of Acker Bilk it was to the accompaniment of trad bands (in fairness, it was a far easier music to play whilst marching).

Beaulieu Jazz Riot by David Redfern (1960)

Bilk, whose set at Beaulieu was wrapped up in the ensuing chaos, thought, “They were phoney imitation beatniks. Real ones may be weird, untidy and excitable but they're not hooligans”. Duncan Heining’s book Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers: British Jazz 1960-1975 provides much fascinating sociological context and suggests although the division between jazz fans was real (worse trouble occurred along similar lines in Hackney’s Victoria Park that summer), some attendees claim the trouble was primarily the work of local Teddy Boy hooligans rather than an ideological riot over jazz (which is rather disappointing).

The unnamed narrator in Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners (1959) believed anyone over 20 didn’t “give a lump of cat’s shit for the bomb” and gives wonderful descriptions of his associates Dean Swift and the Misery Kid, who didn’t like to mix in public on account of Dean being “a sharp modern jazz creation” and the Kid having “horrible leanings to the trad thing”. The forward-thinking modernists, with their sharp European and Ivy League styling, were quick to pour scorn on Misery Kid for admiring backdated “groups that play what is supposed to be the authentic music of New Orleans, i.e. combos of booking-office clerks and quantity-surveyors’ assistants who’ve been handed their cards, and dedicated themselves to blowing what they believe to be the same note as the wonderful Creoles who invented the whole thing, when it all long ago began”.

To the likes of Barry Miles, the Beats and modern jazz went together. He wrote how The Naked Lunch was difficult to get hold of in the early 60s and “was a shorthand way of saying you were cool, which in those days meant you listened to Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk; you appreciated the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, and Mark Rothko; you smoked marijuana and hash when you could get it; you read Beat Generation writers”.

From here it’s only a short step from modernist to mod. In my profile on this page I’ve always described myself, slightly tongue-in-cheek, as a Beatnik Modernist. I did receive one testy response telling me it was a contradiction in terms but I’m not sure it is. I like this quote from an original mod, Steve Sparks, in Jonathan Green’s Days In The Life, “Mod has been much misunderstood… Mod before it was commercialized was essentially an extension of the beatniks. It comes from “modernist”, it was to do with modern jazz and to do with Sartre. It was to do with existentialism, the working-class reaction to existentialism”.

For a little evidence how some of Britain's sharpest Mod Faces of the mid-60s came from a beatnik background, take a close look at this CND badge wearing, guitar carrying, shaggy haired fella from North London making his way to the last Beaulieu Jazz Festival in 1961. I give you, Rod The Beatnik Mod. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm_fswB3QrE

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: ALL OUT OF TIME AND INTO SPACE at the OCTOBER GALLERY

The first published interview with William S. Burroughs appeared in the 1961 issue of Journal for the Protection of All Beings, a periodical edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and published by City Lights. Conducted by Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg it began with Corso asking “What is your department?” to which Burroughs replied “Art and science”.

Burroughs is of course primarily known for his writing but using today’s terminology he was a multi-media artist and his reputation as such grows with each passing exhibition and event. There have been a number in London alone over the last few years: paintings and shotgun art at a series of shows at the appropriately named Riflemaker Gallery; tape experiments at IMT Gallery; films made with Antony Balch at the National Film Theatre; collaboration with his close friend (and in some ways mentor) Brion Gysin at the October Gallery; and a major retrospective at the Royal Academy which featured elements of all those things and more, including photo-montage, text-image collage and even sculpture.

This latest exhibition focuses mainly on the abstract/action paintings he produced during the last ten years of his life until his death, aged 83, in 1997. Those years don’t account for his most interesting or innovative period but there’s still much for the Burroughs enthusiast to enjoy (and by implication those who will wonder why he stuck photographs of lemurs to paintings might find it bewildering). The best pieces are ones like Death by Lethal Injection (1990), a combination of yellow and black spray paint, ink and stencils. The more one looks the more things gradually appear. There is definitely a figure in a prison cell but is that really a shadowy man in the bottom left corner? Is there really a ghostly face laughing in the foreground? Is that somebody pulling a belt around their arm? Burroughs would've studied this closely. For him events weren't random acts and what might look like haphazard chance was the manifestation of unseen forces and agents controlling his every move. Similarly it is possible to get inside the thick blood red and bright yellow psychedelic heat of Radiant Cat (1988). If I had £8000 burning a hole in my pocket that small painting would be on my wall tomorrow.

The manilla folders Bill decorated with swirls of paint splodges are reminiscent of primary school children painting one side of a butterfly on a piece of paper and then folding it to create the other half; only not as effective. Cue “Modern art? What a load of rubbish. My five year old could do that.” The crude black marker-pen outlines of figures Bill set up in his yard to shoot holes in have debatable artistic merit but are amusing nonetheless as they reinforce the cartoon image of a gun toting Burroughs we know and love. The metal No Trespassing sign spray painted and peppered with shotgun blasts is “very Bill” and spells out his opinion of law enforcement - again, agents of control.

My favourite part of the exhibition is the glass cabinet containing odds and ends from his studio including some of his stencils, not least the one of a penis. Yes, William Burroughs’s penis stencil. Not necessarily a stencil of the penis belonging to William Burroughs but certainly a stencil which belonged to William Burroughs in the shape of a penis. Glad we've got that straight. My, what started as a look at the artistic achievements of one of the 20^th century’s most influential writers ends with knob gags. Don’t blame me, for all my highfalutin pretensions there’s no getting away from the fact that deep down I'm controlled by the spirit of Sid James.

William S. Burroughs: All Out Of Time and Into Space is at the October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AL, until 16^th February 2013, admission free.   

OUR BEAT CORRESPONDENT WILLIAM BURROUGHS REPORTS FROM HACKNEY

As my Hackney, and others areas in London and beyond, yesterday further descended into anarchy and lawlessness with rioting gangs looting, burning and mugging, scenes from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, first published in 1959, came to mind as I navigated myself away from chaotic and ugly streets to eerily deserted ones. What made these "disturbances" different from the usual ones was their undiscriminating nature. Storming the Bank of England or putting through the windows of McDonalds might pass for political protest but attacking family businesses and destroying homes? There are a number of appropriate passages but I’ll share this, as in typical Burroughs style it mixes horror with dry humour.

“From the roof of the R.C. we survey a scene of unparalleled horror. INDs stand around in front of the café tables, long streamers of saliva hanging off their chins, stomachs noisily churning, others ejaculate at the sight of women. Latahs imitate the passers-by with monkey-like obscenity. Junkies have looted the drugstores and fix on every street corner… Catatonics decorate the parks… Agitated schizophrenics rush through the streets with mangled inhuman cries.
/…/
“Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description. Who can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed mandrill, alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in his mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals?”

Naked Lunch: The Restored Text by William Burroughs is published by Fourth Estate, priced £9.99.

DUFFY: A VISUAL RECORD OF A PHOTOGRAPHIC GENIUS at the IDEA GENERATION GALLERY

In 1979, in a not uncommon fit of pique, and after an assistant had dare tell him he was out of toilet paper, Brian Duffy (known simply as Duffy) took his negatives and contact sheets in to his back garden and angrily set them on fire, incinerating twenty years of work. Along with contemporaries, competitors and drinking buddies David Bailey and Terence Donovan he had not only documented the Swinging Sixties but, through his innovative style and force of personality, helped shape it too. Bailey has since claimed the only thing the Black Trinity – as they were dubbed by Norman Parkinson – had in common was their working class backgrounds, but looking now at Duffy’s photographs it seems to me he was being more than a tad disingenuous.

That there are enough pictures to fill a new book and have an associated exhibition is down to the efforts of Duffy’s son Chris who has diligently assembled a collection from the archives of publications around the world. Fashion models, pop stars, actors and actresses, designers and gangsters all flaunt a confident, wealthy glamour, and if Duffy can squeeze in a Jaguar E-Type that’s all the better in my book. William Burroughs sitting in his Beat Hotel hovel is one of the few shots that contrast sharply, something that wouldn’t have been lost on either man.

The Idea Generation Gallery continues to show tremendous taste, with one hip exhibition after another; this is the latest in a long line. If you can get there, you should, but not everyone lives around the corner from their East End hideaway so you might need to get hold of the book, “Duffy”. Unfortunately it costs £45.

Duffy: A Visual Record of a Photographic Genius is at the Idea Generation Gallery, Chance Street, Bethnal Green, E2 until 28th August 2011, admission free. “Duffy” edited by Chris Duffy is published by ACC Editions.

BEAT SCENE - ISSUE 64, SPRING 2011

It seems a long time since Monkey Picks covering anything Beat Generation-related, so with impeccable timing the latest issue of Beat Scene has landed on the mat.

As usual it wastes nary an inch of space in its 64 pages, as the big hitters jostle with less celebrated writers and activists. Book reviews, interviews and analysis of names including Diane Di Prima, Sinclair Beiles, Gary Synder, Michael McClure, William Everson, plus and an in-depth look at the cinematic experiments of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Anthony Balch should keep both the beat intelligentsia and novice off the internet for a couple of hours.

Great value at £4. For ordering details see beatscene.net

WILLIAM BURROUGHS ARCHIVE FOR SALE

If you’ve exhausted the list of William Burroughs material on Amazon you could try Ken Lopez Bookseller who has:

“A substantial archive of manuscript material, correspondence, and books and printed matter, mostly signed. The manuscript material comprises some hundreds of pages, mostly from the 1950s to the 1980s, much of it unpublished [….] Most of this material never appeared in print, or appeared in markedly different form… It is likely that this is one of the largest collections of original Burroughs material still in private hands; outside of that which James Grauerholz (Burroughs's longtime assistant) has, it may be that this is the single most extensive archive that is yet to be institutionalized. For the time being, it is being offered only as a single lot, but serious inquiries for significant portions of it are invited.”

It's currently on hold for $260,000. You can view the collection here but please don’t try to outbid me. Cheers.

ANGELHEADED HIPSTERS: IMAGES OF THE BEAT GENERATION at the NATIONAL THEATRE

“Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”.

Many of those hipsters who hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in cold-water flats contemplating jazz in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” can now be seen adorning the walls of the National Theatre on London’s Southbank; a far cry from when they were the motley crew of aspiring writers, junkies and madmen (some all three, and always men) the world had yet to discover.

Ginsberg was obsessive in chronicling and championing the lives of himself and his friends in diaries, notebooks, poems and letters, and when he happened upon a second-hand Kodak camera in New York in 1953 he added photography to his arsenal. The pictures he took that year turned out to be the most historically important and thus interesting. The Beat Generation nucleus of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs together again in New York had yet to achieve fame and notoriety and their lives would soon take different paths but here we see them in Allen’s apartment variously larking around, reading, deep in thought or outright posing – most amusingly in the case of a skinny, shirtless Burroughs adopting the improbable stance of a bare knuckle fighter.

For all Kerouac’s good looks - and their rapid disappearance – it’s the Burroughs pictures that are the most revealing. There’s a touching shot of him sitting on a rooftop with Arlene Lee (“Mardou Fox” in Jack’s The Subterraneans): she dressed in archetypal beatnik black with headscarf and looks at him with a cute cheeky face, he in return wears a beatific smile at odds with his persona as a misogynistic cold fish. Mind you, she was typing up his manuscripts of Queer and The Yage Letters.

By 1957, the year of On The Road, it was Kerouac’s turn at the typewriter as he worked through nightmares attempting to fashion readable pages from Burroughs’s notes that would eventually become Naked Lunch. Ginsberg catches him taking a breather in the yard, cuddling a cat in the afternoon sun.

Credit though to the curators for also including the likes of Herbert Huncke, Joan Vollmer, Carl Solomon, Lucien Carr, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky and more. Oh yeah, Neal Cassady.

Not everything in the exhibition was taken by Ginsberg but he was the source for the majority and as years go by it’s noticeable how his photography changes from the quick snapshots in the ‘50s to the studied compositions of the ‘80s and ‘90s, which include Gary Synder, David Hockney, Robert Frank and of course, still, William Burroughs, at home thumbing through a pile of gun magazines.

Their minds may have been destroyed by madness but these hipsters still burn and this collection offers eyeball kicks a-plenty. Allen Ginsberg – I’m with you in London.

Angelheaded Hipsters is in the National Theatre foyer, Southbank, London until 20 March 2011. Admission free.
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BEAT SCENE - ISSUE 63

Beat Scene has a cover price of only £4 but each quarter plays havoc with my finances due to its coverage of the latest books by or about Beat Generation writers and associates.

Bill Morgan’s The Typewriter Is Holy (featured last week) is covered in detail including an interview with it’s writer; William Burroughs’s Queer has come out again including a new introduction by Oliver Harris who is also interviewed and along with his recent talk in Hackney compels me to buy it once more; John Clellon Holmes – author of the first published beat novel, Go – is subject of a new book by long standing biographers Ann and Sam Charters who – you guessed it – say their piece too, alongside a lengthy Holmes article by Jaap Van der Bent.

Loads of other stuff squeezed in its 64 advert-free pages.

Buy Beat Scene

THE TYPEWRITER IS HOLY by BILL MORGAN

The jacket of Bill Morgan’s book proudly boasts as being “The complete, uncensored history of the Beat Generation”, which asks two questions: can any biography be considered complete and if this is uncensored, what has previously been censored?

Morgan pulls off an impressive feat of editing the lives of its key protagonists: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac, plus their associates, into just 250 pages that zip by. He manages to combine their overlapping lives with conciseness yet provides clarity lacking in similar works, not shying away from Allen’s orgies, Bill’s drug use or Jack’s drinking.

Morgan has studied the Beats for over forty years and that knowledge shows itself in some of the extra detail and correcting of previous misinformation. For example, the killing of their friend David Kammerer: I always thought he was stabbed to death yet he died only after his body was dumped in the Hudson River. Also the death of Neal Cassady’s girlfriend Natalie Jackson after slashing her wrists and jumping off a building is given extra background detail. Cassady, as ever, doesn’t come across in a good light.

The Typewriter Is Holy focuses on their topsy-turvy lives, from the 1940s to the end of the 60s, rather than their works, and as with the stories above can be read as a stand-alone introduction into what can seem a confusing myriad of characters. It’s as complete and uncensored as you’ll need to start picking through the addictive Beat universe.

The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat Generation by Bill Morgan is published by Free Press, priced $28.

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: A MAN WITHIN at the NFT

The UK premiere of Yony Leyser’s feature length documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within is as good a place as any to see what Bill’s readers look like. Do a spot of profiling. I like to imagine they’re a motley crue of misfits and outsiders on the margins of society with fierce independent and individualist elements. I’m sure they are, but beside counterculture legend and Burroughs photographer John Hoppy Hopkins who shuffles in to the NFT still resolutely anti-establishment with his long grey hippy hair, little knitted hat and luminous trainers, the rest have learned well from “El Hombre Invisible” and go about their business drawing as little heat as possible.

Leyser’s film opens as a standard documentary “William Seward Burroughs was born…” etc but soon unravels into a segment exploring his sexuality and relationship (or not) to gay culture. It’s relationships in general that the film looks at and Burroughs’ reluctance or inability to give or accept love. In one clip Allen Ginsberg asks if he wants to be loved. “Weeeell, that depends on from whom or from what”. Pause. Pursed lips. “From my cats certainly”.

Instead of a chronological story the film lumps together themes and uses archive footage and talking heads in an attempt to unveil Burroughs the man rather than Burroughs the wife shooting junkie queer who wrote a bit. Although there is still plenty of that amongst the sections on guns, drugs, sex, the William Tell incident, cut-ups etc. As a thorough life story it wasn’t particularly strong and details of his work were lacking but it still managed to offer plenty to attract the interest of new viewers and enough new snippets to please the old guard. You won’t find me complaining; I’m eager to watch it again when it gets a DVD release.

The interviewees were a mixed bag. Some, like Iggy Pop, were presumably only there for marketing purposes but John Waters was entertaining, Victor Bockris enthusiastic, Peter Weller larger than life and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge thoughtful, personal and curiously attractive. These people look like Burroughs readers. They’re not in the margins, they’re off the page. More revealing though were the contributions from the likes of people closer to him like his friend James Grauerholz, his gun dealer and a young boyfriend whose name unfortunately escapes me. They all do great impressions too.

Burroughs achieved much during his surprisingly long life yet watching this it’s hard not to think it was a sad, painful and lonely life with little happiness. His friends did find comfort in the very last words he wrote in his spidery handwriting in his journal just days before he died in 1997. “Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE”. He was talking about his cats.

TALKIN' 'BOUT MY BEAT GENERATION

I was asked a few questions by a glossy Italian style magazine a while back for an article about the Beat Generation. I’m still waiting to be flown to San Francisco for the photo shoot of me sagely thumbing the paperbacks in City Lights or supping a beer in Vesuvio’s with The Subterraneans casually placed on the bar.

Why do you think there’s an ongoing fascination with characters like Ginsberg, Kerouac etc?
They were groundbreaking in their writing; shaking up the staid, conservative, dull and frightened America. They looked it dead in the eye and challenged it. That alone would be enough but when you discover further controversy, court cases, links to the criminal underworld, prostitution, homosexuality, mental illness, lobotomies, murder, suicide, mysterious deaths, firearms, alcohol abuse, drug experimentation and addiction, travel, religion, wife sharing and bigamy, you’ve all the ingredients of a fantastic soap opera that continues to develop with every new publication of their correspondence (see the recent Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters).

Were the Beats perhaps more a cult than anything else?
For me, the Beats were solely Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and their close associates – nothing to do with the cartoonish Beatniks that followed. The Beat Generation term came from a drunken Kerouac which Ginsberg was savvy, passionate and generous enough to use as the means to get his friends published in the aftermath of Howl. There’s little stylistically to link Howl, On The Road and Naked Lunch so it’s difficult to categorize them as a genuine literary movement; really they were/are a media phenomenon – even if they created it themselves.

Do they have a true legacy when it comes to poetry and literature?
They do, but time is dusting over the tracks of that legacy. The obscenity trials of Howl and Naked Lunch paved the way for greater freedom of expression and people like City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti shouldn’t be forgotten in all this. They made poetry and literature exciting, even dangerous. On The Road reads somewhat quaintly these days but the rhythm and phrases in Howl, exploring and questioning the soul of America, could be hip hop lyrics of today and if Naked Lunch was published tomorrow its nightmarish visions could scarcely be any less powerful.

What are you expecting from the Howl film? Do you think Coppola’s On The Road project is a good idea (what I mean is, can you really hope to capture the essence of the book on film etc?).
From the short trailer, I can’t wait to see Howl . Visually looks spot-on, Franco looks convincing, a gripping courtroom drama and the greatest poem of the 20th Century. Looks like a winner to me. On The Road is a harder task to pull off. I can’t see any film doing the book justice but I’m not precious about it; it’ll come out and be forgotten just as quickly whereas Jack’s novel will continue to be read for another fifty years.

DEAD FINGERS TALK: THE TAPE EXPERIMENTS OF WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS at the IMT GALLERY

Before my thoughts, here are extracts from the IMT press release:

“Dead Fingers Talk is an exhibition presenting two unreleased tape experiments by William Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators.

Few writers have exerted as great an influence over such a diverse range of art forms as William Burroughs. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Junky, continues to be regularly referenced in music, visual art, sound art, film, web-based practice and literature. One typically overlooked, yet critically important, manifestation of his radical ideas about manipulation, technology and society is found in his extensive experiments with tape recorders in the 1960s and ’70s. Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs is the first exhibition to truly demonstrate the diversity of resonance in the arts of Burroughs’ theories of sound.

Inspired by the expelled Surrealist painter Brion Gysin, and yet never meant as art but as a pseudo-scientific investigation of sounds and our relationship to technology and material, the experiments provide early examples of interactions which are essential listening for artists working in the digital age.

In the case of the work in the exhibition the contributors were asked to provide a “recording” in response to Burroughs’ tape experiments. The works, which vary significantly in media and focus, demonstrate the diversity of attitudes to such a groundbreaking period of investigation.”

Got that? Now, it would make sense to have the Burroughs recordings at the beginning and then to see/hear the replies afterwards but that isn’t how it is. His two tape experiments are near the end amidst a bunch of the replies playing one after another so you need a degree of patience to get to them. There is no information displayed: nothing about how and where they were made but I’ll presume they were made at the Beat Hotel in Paris with Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin but Burroughs would conduct tape experiments until the late 70s – chopping up the order of his texts, playing parts backwards, making new words, and creating a hypnotic and disorienting effect on the listener that he believed could be used as a weapon of control.

The responses range from mildly interesting to downright pathetic. One is a blank monitor screen. Yeah, clever. Another is two black buckets of water. Get over yourself. The rapid cut multiple spilt screen video images by o.blaat with a slurping soundtrack has a Burroughsian effect and a hanging sculpture by David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan (Plastique Fanstastique “Yage-Cat-Demon Shrine”) at least has a bit of thought and effort but the majority of exhibits simply expose smug self-satisfaction and a sorry lack of imagination - an accusation that could never be leveled at Burroughs himself.

Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs is at the IMT Gallery, Unit 2, 210 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 9NQ, Thursday-Sunday 1200-1800 until 18th July 2010, admission free.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS "WAVING HIS DINGDONG" - WRITES JACK KEROUAC

Letters of Note: Correspondence deserving of a wider audience is a fantastic site edited by Shaun Usher. It gathers fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes and memos and posts a daily entry. A quick flick through has uncovered a host of goodies not least the above letter written by Jack Kerouac in early 1957 to Lucien Carr. Kerouac had travelled to Tangier to help William Burroughs assemble and type-up sections for what Kerouac would later be credited in titling The Naked Lunch; an experience that would famously give Jack nightmares.

As you can read, it wasn’t just Burroughs’s writing that played on Jack’s mind as he describes his host’s unpredictable behaviour, including the hilarious line “he keeps saying he's going to erupt into some unspeakable atrocity such as waving his dingdong at an Embassy party & such or slaughtering an Arab boy to see what his beautiful insides look like” and later “his message is all scatological homosexual super-violent madness”. Marvelous.

Click on the letter to read in Kerouac’s own hand or click here to read the transcript at Letters of Note.

JACK KEROUAC - BEST DRESSED BEAT?

Jack Kerouac was recently voted 23rd best dressed man of all time by Esquire magazine. According to them “because during the decade that brought the world The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Kerouac embraced workwear as both a functional uniform and a nod to nonconformity.” I’m guessing Jack would be flattered and bemused in equal measures.

For the full list see here.

BEAT SCENE ISSUE 61

It must be twenty years since I first bought Beat Scene issue 9 – with Charles Bukowski holding one of his cats on the cover – from Compendium Bookshop in Camden Town and have bought every one since. Now up to issue 61 and it keeps getting better. Where else would you find a twelve page piece about William Burroughs in Denmark?

Other articles include Burroughs and Drugs, Eddie Woods remembering Harold Norse and a tribute to Jim Carroll. Among the reviews are books by Dan Fante, Charles Bukowski, Knut Hamsun, and Michael McClure.

Loads of other stuff crammed in its 64 pages. Yours for a mere £4 at Beat Scene.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS LIKES WEAPONS

“I’m not anticipating any trouble – because I don’t like violence”. So says our old mucker William Burroughs in this well funny clip after demonstrating all types of handy tools he has just happens to have stashed around his Bunker.

Bill somehow lived to the ripe old age of 83. Had he defied logic and nature to even greater extremes, today would be his 96th birthday. Now, where did I put that spring blackjack? Stand back...