By Elsadorfman – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

I unexpectedly found myself in New York City last week. One of the best things about a creative life is that I can grab my gear and run at an opportunity like this. I had pending writing deadlines and some design work to do, but I just grabbed my phone and my laptop and headed for the airport. The Hilma af Klint and Robert Mapplethorpe exhibitions at the Guggenheim were both great — and a great pairing. Casa Ramen’s pop-up at The Ramen Lab was the best food I ate in a week of great food. Get the pumpkin broth and go for all the spicy options. Amazing bowl. The most New York moment I had was when I grabbed lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Chinatown while I watched this great interview of Lawrence Ferlinghetti in celebration of his 100th birthday. Here’s a bit from the Democracy Now site:

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a leading literary figure of the Beat Generation, turned 100 on Sunday. Ferlinghetti is a poet, bookseller, book publisher, artist and activist. In 1953, he co-founded City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, the first all-paperback bookshop in the country. Two years later, Lawrence Ferlinghetti launched the City Lights publishing house. Both institutions are still running today. City Lights might be best known as the publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl.” It revolutionized American poetry and American consciousness, but it also led to Ferlinghetti and his publishing partner being arrested and put on trial for obscenity.

This is an amazing interview with the great American writer and champion of free speech…

I also wanted to take a second to talk about the evolution of the blog. Insomnia is your spot for all things countercultural. While I haven’t been posting here daily, you might not know that I’ve been expanding the blog’s reach over multiple platforms in an effort to explore creating content on crypto-powered sites like Steemit. I’m also posting on a brand new platform called Narrative. I’m wrangling the Counterculture Niche on the site, and I want to encourage authors to add the niche to all of their scrawlings about sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, the paranormal, the occult — you get the idea.

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Growing up during the second half of the Cold War, when I was a child the Soviet Union was notable for two reasons: nuclear weapons and censorship. That’s about all I really knew: the Russians and citizens of their satellites can’t read or watch or print what they want. Also they have enough warheads to make our assured destruction one of the mutual sort.

I know I’m constantly posting stuff from Open Culture here, but that site is so smart and their free-to-watch/read/listen to finds are a kind of palette cleanser for the shitty mall that most of the internet has become. I came across another great find on the site today, one that put me back in mind of those nights when I couldn’t sleep because I was worried about nuclear annihilation. You know — childhood for Generation X. Here’s a bit about Glass Harmonica, the only animated film ever banned in the Soviet Union…

At first glance, one would think The Glass Harmonica would fit right into the long tradition of Soviet propaganda films begun by Vertov. As the opening titles state, it aims to show the “boundless greed, police terror, [and] the isolation and brutalization of humans in modern bourgeois society.” And yet, the film offended censors due to what the European Film Philharmonic Institute calls “its controversial portrayal of the relationship between governmental authority and the artist.” There’s more than a little irony in the fact that the only fully censored Soviet animation is a film itself about censorship.

The central character is a musician who incurs the displeasure of an expressionless man in black, ruler of the cold, gray world of the film. In addition to its “collage of various styles and a tribute to European painting”—which itself may have irked censors—the score by Alfred Schnittke “pushes sound to disturbing limits, demanding extreme range and technique from the instruments.” (Fans of surrealist animation may be reminded of 1973’s French sci-fi film, Fantastic Planet.) Although Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s film represents the effective beginning and end of surrealist animation in the Soviet Union, only released after perestroika, it stands, as you’ll see above, as a brilliantly realized example of the form.

Stay Awake!

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Taking a break from our spooky October posts here at the end of the month — we’ll let today’s merrymaking bring its own hard-earned scares — here’s a great little show from Canadian television that I stumbled upon the other day. Prisoners of Gravity was an interview show disguised as a pirate broadcast, covering all sorts of books, films and art through a countercultural lens to dazzling effect. The series aired 139 episodes over 5 seasons from 1989 to 1994. Here’s the word from the Wiki…

As established through a comic-strip montage opening sequence drawn by Ty Templeton, the premise held that a fan of speculative fiction becomes disturbed by news broadcasts describing the alarming state of the world and decides he must escape. He broadcasts his show each week from an orbiting space station. The show’s presentation was fully wrapped in its quirky premise, featuring on-screen graphics and background sounds to simulate a space station atmosphere, “using active, innovative cinematography to ease the visual boredom that often accompanies interviews with talking head(s).”

The week’s topic was introduced with a few opening thoughts before launching into various interview clips. In each episode, Rick would interview a number of authors and artists, along with filmmakers, animators, and the occasional futurist. Topics that were discussed ran the gamut: censorship, superheroes, humour, religion, fairy tales, Mars, cyberpunk, war, overpopulation, sex… Episodes were 30 minutes in length (having no commercial breaks on public television) and typically showcased six to fourteen interviewed creators alongside bridging commentary from Rick. Roughly six-hundred interviews were conducted and aired by the time the show’s run came to an end.

Prisoners has its own YouTube channel and this playlist is a bit chaotic so you’ll need to bounce around a bit to follow episode to episode. I’ve set the video in this post to start with the first segment of an episode that deals with racism because it dovetails so nicely with the recent news about Marvel’s upcoming Black Panther film. Here’s a bit about that from The Guardian…

The newly announced films are two-part Avengers sequel Infinity War and a Captain America movie called Civil War, alongside new film outings for Doctor Strange and – most interestingly – Black Panther.

The latter will be Marvel’s first lead black superhero, and it’s a breakthrough moment. The positioning of this ethnic minority as heroic – however tortured that heroism may likely be – is a valuable statement in this most high profile of US pop cultural products, in a year when the dominant media image of black men has been as subordinated to (often white) police.

My favorite thrill with this show comes at the beginning of every episode when it seems like a program called Second Nature goes to static and is “interrupted” by the program — so retro-meta I wanna roll around in back issues of Mondo 2000. Enjoy Prisoners of Gravity…

Stay Awake!

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While we all get tired of the endless holidays that have been squeezed into the calendar by charities, special interest groups and greeting card manufacturers, I’m happily celebrating Banned Books Week, which is happening now – from September 22 – 28.

BBW was started in 1982 when the dawn of Reagan’s America saw a rise in attacks on free speech in schools at bookstores and in libraries. Since its inception, Banned Books Week has documented more than 11,000 attempts to ban books — as reported by the American Library Association.

The censorship of literature was common even after WWII and it’s thanks to brave authors, publishers, editors and readers that we can now barely conceive of the draconian strictures that this country placed on books not-so-very-long ago.

William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch was one of the last books to be banned by the U.S. Government. You can listen to the whole book right here on my YouTube channel…

The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom curates a multitude of banned books lists here. Browse a bit and see how many of your favorites have been attacked. For me, Naked Lunch, The Sun Also Rises, Catcher in the Rye, The Lord of the Flies and everything by Henry Miller are all indispensable reading. List your faves in the comments section.

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Books posts.

This week: Gremlins cause havoc with our computers, but Kim saves the day, art is vandalised, art is vandalised by it’s artists, a film that will melt your head with mushrooms and magick, YouTube the censor, American fast-food chains cheat their employees, Mos Def is a cool guy, football goes batshit, Germans get harassed by advertising in their skulls, and isn’t it about time we got a theme tune for sinkholes?

Personnel – Joe Nolan, Kim Monaghan, and Ken Eakins

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Linkypoos:

• Vandalised art exhibitions retrospective – Link

• 5 Famous Artists Who Tried to Destroy Their Own Work – Link Link

• A Field in England – Link

• Do You Trust YouTube to Define Art? – Link

• Why America has a bad reputation with the rest of the world – Link

• Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) Force-Fed Gitmo Style – Link

• It’s just a game, people – Link

• Adverts beamed directly into your head…in Germany! – Link

• Sinkholes : The Revenge – Link

Interludes:

Secret Chiefs 3, Aaron Spectre. and Zombi