I spent the morning writing a review of the 1970, psychedelic classic Performance. For me this is one of the few films from America’s mid-century cultural revolution that still lives up to its shocking reputation. Most people associate Performance with its cinematographer and co-director Nicolas Roeg. Even if you are a die-hard fan of outre, countercultural cinema you might not leap to attention at the mention of the name of Roeg’s partner Donald Cammell.

A painting prodigy as a young man, Cammell was making a living with his brushes by the age of 19. Having built the foundations of a lucrative portrait painting career, Cammell moved to Paris in search of a more inspired path in art. This shunning of commercial opportunity for artistic possibility marked Cammell’s pursuits in the years to come. It’s both the reason why he’s not more widely known and why he continues to be re-discovered by lovers of cinema on the fringes.

Returning to Swinging London in the 1960′s, Cammell decided that painting was dead and that he needed to turn his talents towards cinema. He lived a bohemian lifestyle and became the embodiment of the era’s libertine ideals. He befriended the Rolling Stones and teamed up with Nicolas Roeg to co-direct their sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll classic. Although Roeg is usually associated with the film, its troubled production saw Roeg disconnecting from the post-production process and the film’s final cut, with its revolutionary editing style really belongs to Cammell.

After Performance, Cammell maintained an uneasy relationship with the Hollywood studios. Holding his creative integerity in the highest regard, he made ends meet selling treatments and scripts while trying to develop projects and find funding independently. He wrote a script for William Burroughs that found the author playing a Supreme Court Justice who is kidnapped to North Africa. Cammell also starred as Osiris in his friend Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising.

In addition to his friendship with Anger, Cammell had deeper links to the occult — is father was a friend of Aleister Crowley’s and he even wrote a book about the Great Beast. Cammell told Anger that he’d sat on Crowley’s lap when he was a little boy. Anger promptly sat on Cammell’s lap in an effort to complete the circle!

While Cammell would never secure a star turn in the Hollywood system, his place among experimental filmmakers is beyond dispute. Find out more about Donald Cammell in this fascinating documentary. Here’s Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance…

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I got back to Nashville late on Monday night after a week at the Sedona Summer Colony in Arizona. I spent last week writing songs, jamming with musicians and talking about movies, art and writing with artists and thinkers from around the country. It was an illuminating, immersive experience in a singularly beautiful setting and I want to thank the Tennessee Arts Commission for helping to make the colony the highlight of my summer so far.

If you follow my blog you know a bit about what was going down recently, but if you missed a post or are just catching up here’s a playlist of the videos I made to document each of my new compositions…

Traveling and re-inserting myself into my regular schedule has me starting my posts a little late this week, but I’ve been coming across lots of rad stuff to point to during my time in the desert. One discovery I made involves a new treasure trove of media from Beat luminary Allen Ginsberg. Here’s the skinny from the Stanford Library blog…

Ginsberg comes up fairly often in this blog (e.g. Rebecca Wingfield’s recent post about “Howl” going up online), but the release of over 2000+ audio cassette recordings to SearchWorks is truly another cause for celebration. These recordings represent a staggering amount of primary source material associated with the Beat Generation, the bulk of which date from the 1970s to 1990s. Once the open reel recordings and videos are completed, we’ll have one of the most comprehensive recorded outputs from a single cultural figure available for the whole world to access.

As a teaser, here’s a recording of Ginsberg and Burroughs having an afternoon conversation about art and Jack Kerouac…

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Recorded the 95th episode of the Coincidence Control Network podcast today. This week it was just me and Lil’ Ray, and I had some technical difficulties on my end, but I think we had a pretty good chat. I lifted some stories to talk about on the show from my Flipboard project. The last thing we mentioned before calling it a done deal was the briongysin.com website which is a great resource for anyone interested in Gysin’s life and work. It’s an especially good place for newbies to explore to get an overall feel for the influential artist and writer. I mostly talked about Gysin’s pioneering cut-up projects with William S. Burroughs, but Gysin — along with Ian Somerville — also invented the Dream Machine.

Here’s a great short documentary on the Dream Machine…

The Dream Machine was a device built by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville while living in the Beat Hotel in Paris in 1960. They were attempting to stimulate the brains alpha patterns with a rythmic strobing light effect and produce a natural high. The machine is quite possible the only work of art meant to be looked at with your eyes closed.

This short video shows Columbia University’s Dream Machine being setup, turned on and functioning.

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I don’t remember how old I was when I learned that Detroit was the only place with a Devil’s Night. I’m posting this on Thursday evening, but I won’t share it with anyone until Friday morning, just in time for the night before Halloween — Devil’s Night.

The film Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages was released in 1922. The silent movie tells a history of witchcraft dating from ancient times until the early days of the 20th Century. The most famous version is the 1968 release which adds a great narrative performance by William Burroughs, and a killer, abstract jazz soundtrack from Daniel Humair.

This isn’t the first time I’ve posted this for Halloween. It won’t be the last. Have a wonderful terrible celebration…

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This week it was confirmed that the William Burroughs doc, Burroughs: The Movie, will be released by Criterion Collection in December. In the meantime, here’s a cool little video about Burroughs and his connections to the occult. It’s made by Imperium Pictures…

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Continuing our celebration of National Poetry Month, here are some words about South African poet Sinclair Beiles: Beiles was associated at-a-distance with the Beat Generation, but you have to get a little deeper into their mythology before you find his mark. Beiles was primarily a surrealist poet who was also known for his collaborations with the Greek artist Takis. Here’s the breakdown from the Wiki…

Sinclair Beiles (b. Kampala, Uganda, 1930 – 2000, Johannesburg) was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature.

Beiles was involved with American beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, and Burroughs at the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris. The photographer Harold Chapman recorded this period in his book The Beat Hotel (Gris Banal, 1984). He co-authored Minutes to Go with Burroughs, Gysin and Corso (Two Cities Editions, 1960). Beiles helped edit Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

He worked with the Greek artist Takis and read his magnetic manifesto — “I am a sculpture… I would like to see all nuclear bombs on Earth turned into sculptures”—in 1962 in Paris at the Iris Clert Gallery. At this event he was famously suspended in mid-air by a magnetic field from a powerful magnet in a sculpture developed by Takis. Beiles attributed his subsequent mental instability to this experience even though he insisted that Takis provide him with a helmet to protect his head from the magnetic field.

There is a sense of the “overlooked artist” surrounding Beiles and every now and then I come across another article, post or comment arguing that the writer deserves a higher place in the post-war pantheon. This post was inspired by this recent remembering of the poet (Beiles died in 2000) at Empty Mirror…

Gerard Bellaart is a legendary small-press publisher in France and was Sinclair Beiles’s publisher in the 1970s, with his Cold Turkey Press. I asked him how Beiles should be remembered. He replies that Beiles work is “of the calibre of Celan”, the famed French surrealist poet, but doubts that his reputation will rise anytime soon. “Beiles’ oeuvre as a whole has been neglected (read: ignored),” says Bellaart. He says that:

Literary market forces thought it more profitable to hail Burroughs and Gysin as the founding fathers of the ‘cut-up’. Neither had either the culture or background to recognise the principle of cut-up inherent, say in Mallarmé’s “Coup de Dés”, and in Baudelaire’s essay on de Quincy’s definition of Palimpsest for that matter. Sinclair Beiles of course knew these works by heart and in French.

Furthermore, he believes that Beiles was an originator, and should be recognized as such. He continues:

It was Sinclair Beiles who first developed the technique of using a layer of text as a transparent entity, the superimposition of which would create an entirely new and unpredictable context. The further appropriations of the technique by Burroughs and Gysin we do not need go into at this point.

Here is Beiles in a long interview about his adventures with Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs…

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Hey, Insomniacs! I’m getting a slow start on the week after spending Monday driving back from Asheville, North Carolina. I played a solo singer/songwriter gig there over the weekend and had a real blast bumming around that great little mountain town with my girlfriend. Check out my YouTube channel to see videos from the show.

On the way home through the Smokies we were challenged with intermittent rain and dense fog, and there was plenty of time to think back on the weekend when we were slowed down. I recalled that Jack Kerouac had spent time in the area — Thomas Wolfe, Asheville’s literary saint, was Kerouac’s hero, and Kerouac made a number of trips to North Carolina to visit his sister’s family in Rocky Mount.

I’m a huge fan of the Beat Generation writers and I’m particularly pleased about recent articles, books and other media that continue to give them credit for their culture-changing artistry while also dropping the hero-worship that’s masked their less-savory qualities as naturally-flawed human beings: Kerouac was a deadbeat dad, a conservative reactionary and an alcoholic who drank himself to death; Burroughs murdered his wife in a very sketchy accidental shooting.

We celebrated Burroughs’ Centenary last year and I joined in with plenty of posts about the writer. I think of Burroughs as one of the most important satirists of the last century, but I totally understand why many people find him to be plain creepy. Talking about the beat scene on our trip back to Nashville, my girlfriend reminded me of a recent This American Life episode that found host, Ira Glass, confronting his own resistance to Burroughs by playing an audio documentary presented by Iggy Pop that opened his mind to the author and his work specifically because it didn’t shy away from the dark shadow cast by Burroughs’ often-tragic life and horror-filled writings.

Here’s that episode in honor of Burroughs 101st birthday this February (February 5, 1914).

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Andy Warhol is better remembered for his paintings, and even his films, than for the hundreds of photographs he took in the last period of his career. William Burroughs’ legacy counts writing and even painting before his drawn-on photographs. David Lynch is a known cinematic genius who happens to love capturing still images of massive industrial spaces.

Each of these tertiary bodies of work would be fascinating to see on exhibit, but a gallery in England has decided to display photos by all three artists in a trio of contiguous exhibitions. I know, it’s blowing my mind right now. Here’s the word from Channel 4:

They’re three of the key counter-cultural figures of the 20th century: Andy Warhol the pop artist, William Burroughs the cult novelist and the film maker David Lynch.

Warhol and Burroughs were camera obsessives, taking many thousands of photographs that informed and inspired their creative processes. The David Lynch show brings the director’s passion for factories to the fore: he has spent three decades photographing industrial scenes around the world, capturing a mood he recreates in many of his films.

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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.

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