I was wondering if Taylor Swift liked visual poetry so I asked AI and here's what it said...
My private joke now exposed to the world! Have I no shame? I found the answer amusing; the way AI twisted the genre to fit Taylor Swift. Of course, yes, another medium can provide examples of 'visual poetry'. Tarkovsky in film, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks etc. To my surprise, the reference above to Swift's Tortured Poets Department lead me to the video for the single and her lyric captured below.
Who indeed. She's known some bohemians has Taylor. Well, the character in the song has. Perhaps her reference to and use of a typewriter in the video boosted the typewriter's popularity? Have sales rocketed worldwide now? Do Swifties plague their parents for a typewriter? Would they actually use it more than once? They do make nice home decorations, don't they? That is true. I don't blame anyone for succumbing to the lure of a lovely-looking machine just to put on top of their sideboard. Mine's a bit big, though, for a decorative object. And, let's be honest, too ugly.
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I designed this poster for London Interzone. I'm not sure how many tickets are left for each day.
Revisiting Destroy All Monsters' artworks and music inspired me to create some prints. I was keen to try and avoid blatant copies, of course, although LJ believes that to be impossible. She, bless her, is oblivious to software program capabilities in that respect. Of course you can click on the 'Grungy Xerox' button to give your images that look. But what look is it? The look of old Xerox technology. Or is it only that? I wonder...because it's not only a look, it's the product of a time, place, technology, attitude etc...a culture.
In the same way that it would be very hard, I imagine, to recreate the sound of Jamaica circa 1972 (is their an Off-Center Pressing button for that slightly warped and woozy sound - oh and scratches) recreating a visual style that perfectly mimics an old one may, technically, be possible, but I doubt it's so good as to be indistinguishable from the real thing. No, I'm not going to research that.
There are plenty of typewriters fonts available online and I've used a few but to these eyes they still don't look exactly like anything produced on an actual typewriter. The inherent variation in pressure applied to keys and the resulting different shades of type is absent. Don't tell me, there's a typewriter app that does vary the weight of lettering randomly. Huh!
The Destroy All Monsters magazine, collected in one volume, is a treasure. Unfortunately, both books are pricey nowadays. Their aesthetic, visually and sonically, is spot on - raw, rock'n'roll.
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I'm not sure when my eyes stopped communicating properly with my brain but it's a worry, naturally. Why do I ponder this? Well, I bought Soft Need 23 (2020) from Typewriter Jim last year, about 10 months ago - flicked through, shelved it, flicked through again more thoroughly, shelved it and had another look a couple of weeks ago, this time noticing the comic panel joke on page 48...hold on...that's mine! I made that years ago! I think...I'm almost sure, but it takes some recall to say, exactly, so I search my old blog, Include Me Out, and sure enough, there it is. I'm uncredited in SN 23 because by the time they sourced it my name had become detached, I suppose. I don't mind. It was funny, though, that I didn't discover it for months.
I went to see Typewriter Jim about some vintage paper he might have that I could buy. The first thing he showed me was this Dreamachine which he got from a friend who's friend had it built as a project. "Over-engineered," Jim said. I wouldn't have noticed. The outer shell is also the wrong colour. It should be dark, to increase the 'strobe' light effect. Yes, that made sense. He turned it on. I watched it rotating for a while, but looked away for fear of entering a hypnagogic state.
I have a fear of any mind-altering experience, perhaps because I consider my mind already 'altered' since birth and further changes could be distressing. So I have never dabbled in mind-altering drugs. The nearest I've been to that kind of 'high' was when smoking a joint given to me whilst staying at my then girlfriend's flat. I smoked it on the balcony and didn't enjoy the feeling of my mind floating free from it's natural home..
These days I get high from buying books. There are several kinds of high involved, of course. The surprise bargain find in a charity shop, the online hunt and capture, the high street hunt and capture, the book fair find and the unexpected online find, such as the one pictured below. It's a box containing facsimiles of every issue of the Archigram magazine. I didn't know of its existence until a couple of weeks ago. It was published in November of last year. The high experienced when opening the package was just about the greatest possible when it comes to buying books, or in this case, magazines.
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I've always had an aversion to adverts. I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, just that they have always irritated me. From way back in the days of watching television I would do anything but endure adverts - look away, get up, close my eyes etc. It's as if, from a young age, I had an inkling that I would never be a great customer, a person susceptible to the seductive art of the advertising 'creatives'. Why? Because I would never be materialistic enough? Because I've never liked being told what to do either with my money or, to be honest, anything else.
All attempts to sell anything from a brand of baked beans to the latest car were wasted on me. That said, adverts of old now have a charm, don't they? Of course they do, being snapshots of what feels like an ancient civilisation; relics of consumerism past. At least those adverts from British TV were just that, British. Today, on YouTube, for instance, I'm plagued by American female voiceovers. I don't know why I find the chosen voices so irritating. It's not as if I have anything against Americans. But..."Grammarly" - ugh!
Most adverts today supposedly aimed at the British look as if they portray another country. They always have to me, in a way. Those homes, those lifestyles...yes, I was raised in a normal council house environment but upon leaving home I went in a different direction, one which did not take the supposedly 'normal' route known commonly as 'progress' from bedsit to house and family etc.
You'll know if you're a regular reader that I'm certainly not 'anti-consumerism' in the classic sense. Look at all the books I buy, some of which are quite expensive. The Archigram box was not cheap. One of the things I like about Archigram's collective ethos is a celebration of the material Pop world and even it's disposability. That is not fashionable nowadays nor, one could say, is it responsible regarding the welfare of the planet. But that was the 60s and working out of the epicentre of the Swinging world, London, who could blame them for celebrating the products of that golden age?
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Psychological Compromise, RTomens 2026
More work with ink pens. I'm enjoying drawing the lines which dictate the course of the typing, perhaps because it means I have one decision less to make, namely where to begin with a blank canvas.
Continuing the JG Ballard theme (see last post), here's a Christmas present...from me to me - ha! Well, I swear it was comparatively cheap by at least £100, so I treated myself to this 1972 Grove Press first American edition. OK, it doesn't have the annotations by Ballard included in the Flamingo 2001 paperback but...look at that cover! Plus, it a hardback...it's a lovely size...it's so good-looking! You can over-indulgence in food at Christmas, but never books.
The painted skull by Alan Winston used for Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A. was also used five years earlier for Archie Shepp's album, The Magic Of Ju-Ju. Winston isn't credited in the book. I don't know about the album. I used to have it on vinyl but it went years ago, along with many others I've sold. Once upon a time I listened to a lot of Free Jazz and the title track of the album certainly is 'free'. But gradually I listened to it less until it then got to the stage where I joined the common listener in finding it bloody annoying! I'll dip in now and again, these days, but generally you could say my taste in Jazz has got more 'conservative'.
When it comes to literature though, I suppose my taste is...'radical' (?), alongside genre fiction. Ballard's novel would certainly be considered radical amongst most people and The Atrocity Exhibition (it's UK title) his most adventurous work regarding structure.
Ballard was a big fan of William Burroughs, as I'm sure you know. I see a connection between Burroughs' cut-up novels and concrete poetry when it comes to disrupting structures of 'normal' poetry and text generally to shape new images, new ideas and ways of looking at words and letters. A connection can also be made between Eduardo Paolozzi's 'sampled' texts and Burroughs, then to The Independent Group (of which Paolozzi was a member) and their influence on Ballard. That whole 'scene' inspires me greatly, from This Is Tomorrow to Abba Zaba, Moorcock's New Worlds magazineand British art in the 60s.
Eduardo Paolozzi at New Worlds: Science Fiction and Art in the Sixties is highly recommended. The best place to buy it is here.
Looking through loads of typed sheets that haven't been shown online I pile 'em up, thinking 'Huh! Got to do something different', so I tear a page from An Outline Course in Mind Training and type over it - erase! - erase!
It's not the first of it's kind I've done but there hasn't been one for a while.
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‘Calling all active agents, recalling all active agents' - Active Agents and House Boys by British Murders Boys has been unleashed. Anthony Child channels Suicid(e)al-but-with-an-English-accent vocals (like post-Punk?) and Karl O'Connor makes sure the machine goes bang-bang-bang with a variety of pulverising rhythms but not just mindlessly, no, no there are many interesting textures taking your brain apart to reassemble it as a cut up, captured, collaged bundle of raw nerves...so the wild boys...'They were like feral animals, wild and untamed, moving with a grace and power that was both beautiful and terrifying.'
I've spent the last few days in the Space Age - nothing new in that, except to say that recently I've been focused on both interplanetary and inner space, travelling back in time to the golden (space) age optimism of the 50s, hence the collage above - and towards a future (The Future?) where my bank balance is considerably smaller thanks to Stephen E. Andrews' YouTube channel. That's a recent discovery. In a reasoned, well-informed manner, Stephen explains why books he chooses should be read.
I won't spoil your enjoyment by naming the books he chooses for his Top 25 in two videos, suffice to say I agree with some of the choices and haven't read a lot of them. I have an on/off love affair with sci-fi; thinking it's the greatest genre one minute, then the most stupid. It's the first genre I read as a mid-teenager, naturally choosing the big names such as Asimov, Clarke and Herbert.
Its appeal probably stems from the fact that I was always accused of just 'staring into space' as a kid - it's true, I was, but not Outer Space, no, inner space more like or, actually, that weird zone between what I could see out of the classroom window and what was between, without focus...a mental drift into another dimension, my eyes not seeing anything clearly...my mind altered to suit another dimension.
Fast forward through many decades' reading and I've always dipped into science-fiction but spent more time with writers such as Graham Green and the hard-boiled school (Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, for instance). Yet there is a connection. J.G.Ballard is on record as a big fan of Greene. In the latest collection of Ballard's writing there's an essay on G.G. It's a great book and I'll be reviewing it soon.
William Burroughs is another writer I've been into for years. The connection between hard-boiled American writers and WSB is also there in Bill's perversion of pulp fiction and the private eye (or 'private asshole'). His use of street slang ('Wising up the marks') and the exploits of the Nova Police.
It was good to see Burroughs in Andrews' Top 25. He's too radical for most sci-fi fans, I would guess. Whilst the early ideas of space travel and alien menace seems 'radical' on paper, it became a hackneyed cliche, a space trap into which all sci-fi writers seemed to fall, the end results being no more than Boys Own adventures in space. Well, as Ballard once said when explaining the appeal of sci-fi to him as a young man, at least no-one lived in Hampstead. Burroughs, meanwhile, was rewriting the book, exploiting space-age cliches to radically alter literature and our perception of time through extensive use of cut-up texts which sampled Graham Green, Conrad and a host of others. It felt to me upon discovering his universe that this was 'true' science-fiction; speculative texts for the multi-media overload age.
Stephens' Top 25 got me thinking. I'm in no position as an expert to name that many but here are 10 that would be in my chart. In no particular order:
Nova Express - William Burroughs
Hard To Be A God - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Man Who Fell To Earth - Walter Tevis
The Atrocity Exhibition - J.G Ballard
The Death of Grass - John Christopher
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philp K. Dick
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
I'm bound to have forgotten some!
Here's Stephen's first 25. His channel is highly recommended.
Pick a book, quick, for the bus journey - pull out The Wild Boys by William Burroughs.
In a charity shop this week LJ points to an album on the wall...
"What's that?" She asks.
"The Heavy Metal Kids were named after a character in a Burroughs novel," I reply. What I don't add is that they sound nothing like a musical representation of Burroughs' writing, as if anything could - they sound too tame for starters.
But what could be Burroughs-like in sound? John Oswald's plunderphonics, most obviously. He was influenced, supposedly, by Burroughs. The Tape-Beatles, Christian Marclay's cut-up records and People Like Us. Vicki Bennett's Recyclopedia Britannica album could almost have been named in honour of Burroughs' art of recycling literature.
If you want to hear my mixture of Burroughs' reading put to music, you can do so here.
Sound, word and image collage have all influenced my art over the decades. Here's a collage I made today...
I'm currently bouncing back and forth in time and place between a bunch of books (and one by Bunch), from Moderan to Kill The Dutchman! to Riddley Walker - the first and last being contrasting visions of the future, one a plastic-wrapped planet populated by bio-mechanical 'humans', the other a primitive, ritualistic world after science. Both Bunch (Moderan) and Hoban (Riddley Walker) exploit the potential of language as a tool to describe imaginary worlds.
As with Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and William Burroughs' cut-up 'novels', the brave new words and scrambled syntax used by Bunch and Hoban brilliantly break up common language to leave most formal sci-fi way behind. As you know, the most interesting futures in fiction were created by those who broke the genre barrier.
Whilst reading Moderan I was also revisiting one of my Eduardo Paolozzi books and his sculptures struck me as representations of Bunch's metal-machine men, despite being made decades earlier. OK, they're bronze, not metal, but despite making aluminium sculptures too (see last picture) it's the bronze mutations which seemed to be more Moderan-like since they too retain something human about them, albeit vague and suggestive.
Art and Fiction similarities aside, there's also a connection between Kill The Dutchman! and Burroughs, of course. The latter created The Last Words of Dutch Schultz as a screenplay to a film that was never made. Schultz's last words from a hospital bed were spoken whilst delirious from fever and fatally wounded (lead poisoning); being gibberish, they appealed to Burroughs, who used them as a springboard for his own interpretation. Paul Sann's telling of Shultz's life is so authentically Noo Yawk 30s reporter style you can small the cigar smoke and see the pages through his green visor as he hammers the typewriter keys. The tone is comic, hardboiled, and the book is highly recommended for a flavour of how gangster life and death was described at the time (although it was written circa 1970).
Here's a collage I made a few years ago using an image from the era described by Sann. I called it Tempted To Kill.
I have another job now, aside from selling books. Yes, I'm a freelance Sensitivity Reader! As luck would have it I got an assignment just two days after signing up with an agency. I have to read The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, since a new edition is coming out this year.
I started this week, guidance notes to hand. Previous employment as a proofreader taught me to never tamper with the author's style, only grammatical, spelling errors etc. This can get tricky when reading an author who's style is unconventional. I heard of a proofreader who had a nervous breakdown working on Finnegans Wake. As for Burroughs, a proofreader I once worked with, upon learning of my new job, told me she knew of a reader who requested sick leave through stress having tried to work on a novel of his called The Ticket That Exploded.
So far there hasn't been too much to alter, although I must say that as a story it's severely lacking. Still, that's not my concern.
Update: Changed 'Traffickers in the Black Meat' to 'Traffickers in the White Meat'. A 'chapter' called 'the county clerk' is littered with the 'n' word! I suppose Burroughs is ridiculing such language, but one can never be sure and I'm not taking any chances. The book also contains a lot of perverted, graphic sex and foul language. To be honest, I wouldn't even allow it to be published. I feel as if I should rinse my eyeballs of the filth they're seeing but I'm just glad to have a job, especially one that can be of service to society.
"A man of taste!" I told the young man who had just bought The Russian Experiment In Art (Thames and Hudson) whilst saying how much he liked the music I was playing (Cannonball Adderley's Blue Note classic, Know What I Mean?). There was me thinking LJ and I were the only people in the world to appreciate both. That's not true, of course, I know there must be others, but how often do you meet them, eh?
Years ago, when I worried about such things, I'd sit moping in my room wondering where all the like-minded souls were, despite having met a few during various phases, such as the emergence of Jazz as a viable club soundtrack in 80s London...or drunken nights in Aylesbury's Green Man discussing fanzines to the sound of Punk. But most of my life has felt like a lonely one regarding finding fellow travellers. These days I care less. The internet may have created the potential for finding the types you wish to find, but guess what, they live on the other side of the world and just typing text as an act of mutual appreciation always feels empty compared to actual face-to-face encounters.
I've rarely complimented people on their taste in the shop, so far. Sometimes I've silently acknowledged to myself what a great choice they've made. Thursday provided two exceptions; first the young man mentioned above, second a girl who bought a copy of Burroughs' Naked Lunch and a picture-heavy book on Kandinsky - my kinda gal! I was even more pleased because I'd put the book out on the table that morning in a bid to force Art upon the masses. Surprise, surprise, putting books out does work, sometimes. I can put out what I think are the greatest books in the shop but you know, you can't make a horse drink. That said, displaying the Kandinsky book definitely sold it as opposed to leaving it on the shelves.
She, like all of us, enjoyed being complimented. She thanked me very much, beaming a youthful smile. Not for the first time since we've had fresh copies of Naked Lunch in did I wonder if the buyer knew what they were letting themselves in for. After Joyce's Ulysses, it may be the second-ranked unread-must-have on the shelves of the world. The day before, two girls in their early twenties cooed upon discovering the Sex Drugs and Rock'n'Roll section, one remarking on all the Hunter S. Thompson books. I overheard the words 'Beat Generation' mentioned as they talked. One of them had a copy of Naked Lunch in her hands. I ventured to offer any help if they needed it regarding Beat literature, which sparked the taller one into rambling about being inspired by the film, Kill Your Darlings, which I haven't seen. She said she had Naked Lunch but hadn't read it. Somehow I doubt that she ever will. Something about them suggested to me that if any glamour exists in the allure of the Beats these two had managed to find it and that, rather than the literary merits or cultural significance, is what they were focused on. Good luck to them! I won't pretend there wasn't glamour in those adventures on the road and all that Jazz to me as a teenager.
Meanwhile, back in the shop, the Constructivist/Jazz-loving chap had a friend who came in earlier and bought Miles: The Autobiography(Picador). I only found out they were friends upon seeing them together outside afterwards. He asked me what I was playing (the Adderley album). "Nice", he replied when I told him. I also told him that the book he'd bought was good. Seeing them together I wondered "Who are these young freaks?" They weren't dressed stylishly. One had a lot of curly hair, which means he was quite possibly studying music (ha-ha). I pondered them for some time afterwards since trade quietened down. They were anomalies. They could have eclectic taste, by which I mean one foot in the contemporary/obligatory 'street' music scene and the other in the Cool World of the past. There's no movement afoot, that I know of, which involves youngsters discovering Jazz. Whatever, it was a pleasing conundrum.
Mark Jenkin's Bait had me hooked (ha-ha) after a few minutes. The mood is immediate, intense, artful but not alienating, unless you expect conventional cinema. Shot in 16mm on a 1976 Bolex camera and hand-processed, Bait not only looks amazing but in a vision of self-evident physical treatment fuses the grit of a Cornish fisherman's life with the very texture of how it's presented. Salty air virtually sprays off the screen. There are many beautiful close-up shots of objects which revel in the kind of detail only a camera can capture and the sea is rendered hyper-real in grainy black and white, creating the feel of it as opposed to simply the sight.
The basic story is about the tension between locals and second home-owners but Jenkin is not just siding with one or the other. It describes complicated and conflicting family relationships, harsh economic realities and how people deal with a changed world.
In a shot of the studio on the website I noticed a picture of William Burroughs on the wall, which made me wonder if his cut-ups in both print and on film had any influence on Jenkin. When asked in the interviews I've seen there's no mention of him. Perhaps, like so many influences for any artist, they were subconscious? Bait is edited in such a way that's very suggestive, at times, of Burroughs' cut up films. I couldn't help but also think of French New Wave rapid cuts whilst watching.
I can't praise this film highly enough. Do watch it when you get the chance.
16.20. The sun sets dusty pink over the rooftops opposite, the same sun that lit the trees in the back garden such a brilliant gold a few hours ago and which I stared at for a few minutes thinking: 'That's the kind of light you should appreciate whilst you still can'. Not that I was morbidly contemplating my mortality but just...trying to grasp the 'meaning' of the moment, the sight.
It's been one of those days...when I drift, mentally, feeling fatigued, physically...thinking of watching a film, searching Netflix, which I joined only to watch The Irishman (thoughts on that another day) and discovering, as I have before, that the channel just doesn't supply the kinds of films I enjoy but mostly seems to be so populist that I imagine no serious film buff would ever confess to having even looked.
So half an hour ago I decided that I could draw...at least I could do that. Drawing in my chosen style as seen above is a good way of...relaxing? As William Burroughs said of cut ups, they're something to do, or words to that effect. Talking of drawing and WSB, I posted this on a Burroughs Facebook page and was astounded at how popular it proved to be, proving my inner cynic wrong about how many people would get (or enjoy) the joke...
So it struck me to draw every day for a while once I'd started the one at the top of the page. I'm not one for imposing every day routines on myself although I know that many artists and writers do it as a freeing-up exercise if nothing else. For me, it's simply satisfying to draw and more so when nothing else creative happens.
With the Media Player in shuffle mode Tod Dockstader cropped up a few minutes ago. The UN Climate Change Conference is taking place so the eco-apocalypse-minded amongst you might find this appropriate. Me, I just love Tod Dockstader...
As always, the urge to reconfigure text is strong, though I must have some breaks from the word collage Vispo/concrete world and do so as the mood takes me. I'm waffling. A bit. If not waffling...meandering...struggling to construct proper sentences, perhaps as a result of so much sentence-mangling in search of visual 'poetry'. It's the only kind I can bring myself to read nowadays.
Once upon a time I wrote poetry...or rather, I ranted poetry, as was the popular mode in the early 80s. In an (unconscious) bid to cross Kerouac with Attila The Stockbroker, I probably fell a long way between stools. Serves me right.
Yet still, today, I find myself fusing influences. I rarely adhere to a genre's strict boundaries, assuming we can claim they exist. There are many forms of Vispo, of course. Fusion of all kinds intrigues me - film, literature, music. In the case of the latter, Miles Davis' 'electronic' phase is an endless source of wonder and intrigue. William Burroughs' literal 'fusion' in the form of cut ups and his genre-tasting as in Clem Snide, 'private asshole' (and other pulp genres).
Exploiting The Upgrade Urge fuses paper collage with print.
I'm on the 91 bus this morning reading Burroughs and Friends: Lost Interviews (RE/Search), the section with Brion Gysin talking about art, how he didn't attend art school, when I get off in Crouch End, grab a coffee and sit outside the cafe where two men are talking...what? I don't know. Some Middle Eastern dialect? They could have been Moroccan. I like to think they were, coinciding with reading about Gysin in Tangier. It would have been a coincidence Burroughs would have appreciated and more than that no doubt had a theory that it was no coincidence.
Strolled casually into the Takis exhibition at Tate Modern the other day, not knowing what to expect but pleasantly surprised by the electromagnetic wonders within. These sculptures too...
...it's hard to appreciate the finesse with which he uses electromagnetism from a picture but...
...an exhibition catalogue (can't recall the date but I think it was early-70s) in a case was opened on the page including text by William Burroughs. Apparently Takis visited him and Gysin whilst they were at The Beat Hotel...
...and the final showstopper, which we filmed but not as well as whoever uploaded this...
A Victorian seance is comparable to writing a blog. Is anybody there? Perhaps one has more chance of contacting the dead than a readership!
No matter. Here I am to report on an excellent exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology Of Magic. Despite the word 'magic' in the title, it also covers psychic phenomena, seances, spiritualists etc. There are lots of fascinating documents, photographs and objects such as this...
...there's Conan Doyle, a famous believer in spiritualism. He also features on the Sub Rosa compilation that's just been released, Spectra Ex Machina / A Sound Anthology Of Occult Phenomena , which I received around the same time as attending the Welcome Collection.
It comes with an extensive booklet telling the stories behind the recordings. On 'the voice produced by Janet Hodgson under a trance' we're definitely in The Exorcist territory, minus abusive language and vomit but still unsettling. Believe it or not, it's an interesting documentation of occult phenomena.
Another psychic connection: reading Michael Stevens’ The Road to Interzone: Reading William S. Burroughs Readingthe other day I saw that Eileen Garret, medium and psychic, supposedly 'channelled' the captain of the ill-fated R101 airship days after he died in the crash. The part that interested me was that Brion Gysin knew her and the title of his book Here To Go: Planet R101 was inspired by the incident and Garret. News to me. The book's highly recommended, by the way.
