2022. High Friends in Low Places
Alan Lord is someone I 1st met at the 6th International Neoist Apartment Festival in Montréal in the beginning of 1983. He had a good sense of humor & he was willing to participate in & generate absurd activities that gave many neoists that special feeling of truly being alive. At the time, I was so poor that all my shoes had holes in them - so I wore sandals with socks to Montréal, in a haevily snowy winter, because my sandals didn't have holes in the soles. Boris Wanowitch, another Montréal neoist with a great sense of humor, had built an igloo on a government building parking lot where the snow plows had conveniently provided plenty of snow in one place for building materials. A small group of us gathered around a fire outside the igloo while Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor) sang a song about Dracula & other songs of his. Alan, Boris, Monty, & I decided to spend the night in the igloo. It was cold. Very cold. & it dripped. Still, we had sleeping bags, we survived. It was a remarkable time, a time when our Cultural Conspiracy was strong. We talked about Raudive's belief that the voices of the dead could be heard in 'blank' tape recordings. Monty was skeptical but Alan & I thought there might be something to it - or, at least, found it interesting.
In 1987, Alan organized Ultimatum II, a literatures festival, again in Montréal, that was very ambitious & brought together a fascinating array of vital people. I was honored to be among them. I presented a new piece of mine called "GENERIC AS-BEENISM", possibly the most ambitious 'performance' I'd made to date . There's no completely adequate documentation of this but the best representation I've managed of it so far is uploaded to my onesownthoughts YouTube channel October 18, 2018: https://youtu.be/OL1Mppt2ck4 . Unusually, for me, my presentation was received with great enthusiasm, despite the attempt by one woman associated with the festival to sabotage it by throwing away my slides for it. Fortunately for me, someone saw her do this & told me.
I remember crossing paths with him next in Toronto where he was in the audience for my "sO-cALLED wHATEVER" at the Music Gallery on September 8, 1995. A good representation of that is online here: https://youtu.be/kjkDZsaWhkk . Alan loved it. It's now 27 years later & we haven't seen each other since but there's a remarkable Neoist bond that helps keep us in touch. After all, it takes a special type of person to sleep in an igloo discussing Raudive's beliefs about recording the dead.
Below are scans of the pages in Alan's book where I've found myelf mentioned. Eventually, I'll read the book & make detailed commentary. For now, suffice it to say that it's exciting for me when friends write their autobiographies & I get mentioned - but that doesn't mean that I find the desciptions accurate!
2147. "review of Alan Lord's "High Friends in Low Places""
- the complete version of my review
- credited to: tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
- published on my "Critic" website February 28, 2023
- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticLord.html
review of
Alan Lord's "High Friends in Low Places"
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 28, 2023
http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticLord.html
"Instead of "No Future", to me Punk meant No Bullshit-a punk speaks his mind bluntly, gets to the heart of a matter, and tells you what's what. Which is the exact opposite of polite social conventions and "being diplomatic"-which is shorthand for bourgeois hypocrisy." - p 16
That seems ok in theory but in actuality it can just mean that any idiot can blurt out any stupid thing in a spirit of total self-righteousness. Just b/c someone says something bluntly doesn't mean that they get anywhere near the "heart of the matter" - wch brings me to writing reviews in general & to writing this review in particular:
I've known Alan for 40 yrs. I consider him to be a friend, I'm certainly glad we know each other & that we still communicate. I'm very glad to have read this autobiography - but that doesn't mean that I agree w/ him about everything. SO, I'll be blunt:
For me, the people who were & are really serious about rebelling against mainstream society take a stance that there's no turning back from. I remember being in Chicago in 1986 for the Haymarket Centennial, an anarchist gathering, the 1st for a very long time & the 1st in a series of such gatherings to come. I met a woman there who had a mohawk. She told me she'd gotten it for that weekend in Chicago, she was a weekend warrior, she was just going to comb her hair down again to look normal when she went back to her NYC office job on Monday. I was disgusted, I didn't like her at all. She was very loud in her belligerent mouthing off but it was just her act, something to make her feel like a hero. She was a poseur.
I had long since been leading a life that pretty seriously showed me as rejecting normality 24/7. A yr later I got my 3D brain tattoo on my head. I kept my head shaved for yrs to make it so people SAW THE TATTOO. Once I got that done I knew I'd have a helluva time getting work to support myself w/, I wasn't rich, I was pppooooorrrrrrrrrr & I needed to survive somehow. That meant that if I got a job the employer had to accept me as is, I was a flagrant weirdo & that was that. Even tho Alan was a 'punk', he was a punk who cd get a straight job any time he needed to. Look at the cover of his bk, he looks pretty damn normal.
I wanted to get that out of the way 1st. So much for bluntness. Did I cut thru the bullshit? Maybe. But I also took the risk of alienating Alan, of destroying our friendship. Maybe diplomacy doesn't have to be "bourgeois hypocrisy", maybe it can mean being sensitive to the other person. In this case, I can recognize that Alan has led an extraordinary life, it doesn't have to be an exemplar of what I was going for - & this bk expresses it very clearly.
I've been lucky to receive a USB stick w/ "ALAN COMPLETE ARCHIVES" on it that includes things like recordings from his bands. That's a good companion volume to this bk. Alan also sent me this:
HIGH FRIENDS IN LOW PLACES - CLICKABLE WEB LINKS
The following web links are the ones referenced in the book's footnotes; you can click on them to access them immediately. They are listed by chapter. The Appendix B web links are also included."
This is a very conveniently organized list of the links scattered throughout the bk. I'll list the relevant ones here at the end of every chapter that I comment on & quote from. If you're interested in underground musical & literary culture in Montréal (& beyond) in the 1980s (& beyond) this is an excellent resource.
The 1st chapter begins thusly:
"I smoked a joint with Burroughs at sunset and fucked Kathy Acker's brains out at dawn. At the time I was a hot shit sunglassed guitarist in the coolest band in town, single and miserable, lonely with six girlfriends and a few unspellable venereal diseases. And stoned whenever possible. We were well into the Eighties and I was still not using condoms. Splodging into gummy plastic wasn't in my DNA. Sure, it was high risk, but what's the point if things aren't exciting?
"Welcome to my Eighties. I had high friends in low places. Mostly at the Foufs-or Les Foufounes Électriques" - p 1
Alan provides the translation as "The Electric Buttocks". When I played there on tour in 1992 I was told it meant "The Electric Vagina". An online translator has it as "The Electric Vulva". Maybe it's "The Electric Cloaca".
"Or how about the time in New York, when Pop artist James Rosenquist poured me a glass of champagne. Chris Burden explained to me how to drop steel beams from a helicopter clean through concrete pads, Grace Jones had a fit during her birthday party, and Divine walked in on my brunch? I also once had a hilariously futile phone conversation with Nam June Paik, and J.G. Ballard wrote to me on the back of photos of his cat.
"This is not boasting, it's not name dropping, it's the icing on the cake of the crazy life I had throughout the Eighties-which were my Sixties, except I remember 'em better because blow and champagne don't fog up your brain like weed and acid." - p 4
I'm inclined to think that it is, indeed, name dropping b/c otherwise why wd it be worth mentioning that someone walked in on yr brunch or wrote something to you on the back of a picture of their cat? Nonetheless, it's interesting for me since all the people named are of interest to me.
Alan mentions me, usually in a complimentary way, quite a few times in this. Given that I'm as ego-starved as the next guy (No, not him - the one lurking in that corner over there), I enjoyed that & I make sure to carry the bk w/ me at all times so that I can shove relevant pages in front of the faces of girls that I want to have sex w/ who are then horrified that this dirty old man is coming anywhere close to them. Still, ya gotta do what ya gotta doo. My 1st appearance, however, isn't one that many people are likely to pick up on:
"No, we weren't "high on life". We were high on killing normality before it killed us" - p 5
Kill Normality Before It Kills You being one of my main slogans & one that I wd've introduced to the Montréalers in 1983 at APT 6 (more about that later) - although sometimes I used the alternate version: Stop Normality Before It StopsYou. Somewhat astonishingly to me some people are actually threatened by the version in wch "kill" is used as if "normality" were a flesh & blood being being threatened instead of an abstraction. If I sd Kill Geometrics Before It Kills You wd people feel as threatened? Maybe if they were a geometer.
Chapter 1 - PLEASED TO MEET YOU
Page 3: MTL Punk movie trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHPUKTq0xGw
Page 3: Montréal New Wave movie trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LG7bo3e6xk
"The work was easy. I just had to hop around the construction site with my surverying instrument, and plant rows of sticks showing the height to which earth graders had to pile the subbase gravel. The doofusses driving the dump trucks had fun careening roughshod and regularly snapped whole rows of my precious work, so I had to start all over again. I figured that was my job security." - pp 7-8
People are like dust, you can clean as often as you like but the unwanted will always be there again the next time. Might as well get used to it.
"England's '77 Summer Of Hate turned into 1978, and at the end of spring I wrapped up that semester's studies. When Elvis Costello's This Year's Model came out I was utterly demolished. It felt like an insulting gauntlet flung at my feet: if such a dweeb could put out an album, well then so could I! I bought myself a guitar, slowly dusted off my chops, and out of nowhere I immediately began writing songs-something I'd never been able to do." - p 12
Elvis Costello so immediately struck me as mediocre that I never took him seriously. When someone like that has such a prominent media presence there's inevitably some money backing them. How that backing comes into being can be quite arbitrary. I think it might've been John Cougar Mellencamp that I read an interview w/ who stated that his career got a kickstart when a British guy just liked his accent & decided to invest heavily in him. Maybe it was somebody other than Mellencamp. Whoever it was didn't attribute their 'success' to any special talent they had - just to the lucky break of having some rich guy fancy him. How often has that sort of thing happened?
"Tracy and Scott got together and soon evolved into the superb five-piece Heaven 17, and gave a show at the McGill Ballroom. In addition to Scott and Tracy they now had Roman Martyn from the Young Adults on guitar, and new faces-Kim Duran, and the luscious Lysanne Thibodeau on keyboards." - p 17
& it must've been a combination of Thibodeau's lusciousness & her having used German underground pop stars in her film "Bad Blood for the Vampire" that led to that film being included in "La Première Rétrospective Filmique Mondiale du Néoisme" in Québec in January, 1999, as well as in a smaller Neoist film fest in Windsor, ONT, in November of the same yr - b/c her film certainly had no connection whatsoever to Neoism & was just being used by the curator in an attempt to associate himself w/ Blixa Bargeld of the band Einstürzende Neubauten. Anyway, if you want to watch a 6 minute close-up of her mouth you can do so here: https://youtu.be/fhYqGKCBTlA .
Chapter 3 - MONTREAL PUNK
Page 17: Vertigo - by The Screamers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0-w0hUnhpI
Page 21: Love On A Leash - by Arson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0I2k4uV0j0
In the next chapter, Alan quotes a member of a Montréal band called "222" in its early days:
""The following day, a car couldn't be found to return the goddamn Cerwin Vegas" [speaker cabinets] "to the rental store. Since no one in the band had a solution and the rental was in his name, poor Johnny had no choice but to bring back the huge cabinets by himself. He pushed one of the wheeled cabinets from our rehearsal space downtown on Beaver Hall, all the way uphill to Marrazza-a distance of over 7 kilometers. Then he had to go back for the other unwieldy cabinet and do it all over again."" - p 21
My kindof guy! I really respect that he was honest enuf & responsible enuf to do that. Very few people wd. I'm reminded of a time when I was in Baltimore & I saw a woman pushing a guy w/ amputated lower legs in a wheelchair. They were both obviously dirt poor & the guy was trying to get to a hospital for some emergency he was in the midst of. The woman wasn't a relative or a friend she was just someone who took pity on him. When she saw me she recognized a kindred spirit so she asked me to take over & I pushed the guy the last mile or 2. What misery.
"My first gig was set for May 11th and 12th" [1979] ", under the name of Alan Lord & The Marauders." - p 23
& on the USB drive holding Alan's life in a nutshell there're 4 recordings of Marauder songs: "I Guess I Like Her", "Feelin Fine", "Go On", & "Just One More Chance". Listening to them, if I didn't 'know' they're 1979 Montréal punk I might think they're 1966 Brit rock. Anyway, they're standard rock instrumentation: rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass, drums, vocal. The playing is simple & primitive & competent for what it is. The rhythm guitar has amp reverb on it. I can imagine young people drinking, dancing, & flirting to it. What more do you need?
"For the Nelson gig I pasted up my own posters that asked the burning question: "Who is Alan Lord?" Indeed, who the hell was he? I sure wanted to know, I was still looking for him." - p 23
The Marauders were far from original but, what the hell, I'm sure the audience didn't give a shit as long as they got laid at the end of the night & I'm sure they had fun.
Chapter 4 - MONTREAL NEW WAVE
Page 25: Public Image - by PIL (Public Image Limited)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjzkNOzFVtg
Alan writes about meeting Bernard Gagnon, a synthesizer player, & starting to collaborate w/ him.
"After a few jams we saw things gelled between us. I sang and played rhythm guitar, Gagnon played Minimoog on half the songs, then switched to lead guitar for the rest. We recruited Phil Nolan on bass, Angel "Dust" Calvo on drums, and I christened the band Alan Lord & The Blue Genes." - p 27
How about Alan Lord & The Alan Lords? or Alan Lord & The Self-Promoters? Those wd've been funnier band names. There's one song from what they turned into on Alan's USB stick called "DNA". There were hundreds of pop bands in the 1970s w/ synth players but it was still alot fresher than the typical rock instrumentation listed above. Still, synths were expensive. I built a function generator from a (maybe $60) kit in 1976 but it was stolen from me in 1982. That was more my kind of electronic instrument in that era. That & the toy Muson sequencer/synthesizer that cost about $25 & that I wish I still had! One was priced at $714.37 (+ $60.78 shipping) on Reverb 6 yrs ago! What. A. Rip. Off.
One thing that I particularly love about this bk is that Alan is truly thankful, truly appreciative of his fellow insider outsiders.
"Without the Nelson Grill the nascent scene could have been strangled at birth. So a big Thank You John to Spike. Without him I would have been nothing, I would have remained a frustrated office slave with his pipe dreams quickly dashed." - p 26
In BalTimOre, the thx shd probably go to Roger & Leslee who ran the Marble Bar & the Galaxy Ballroom in the Congress Hotel. Both were havens for the weirdos. The Marble Bar was more of a punk rock club & Roger is reputed to've died in 1984 from a heart attack while dancing there, presumably under the influence of too much coke. The Galaxy Ballroom was where the weirder stuff happened, that's where I did things, that's where part of the 3rd Church & Foundation of the SubGenius Convention happened, that's where part of the 7th International Neoist Apartment Festival happened. In other words: I feel ya, Alan - w/o people like Spike & Leslee & Roger so many of us wdn't've had a place to be as wild as we were. Lardy knows the Marble Bar tolerated my more human-time-bomb aspects.
"After the Nelson Grill show, Phil left us to form Ulterior Motive, and we no longer had a bass player. I changed our name to the simpler Vex, and in July we recorded our seminal song DNA" - p 31
Chapter 5 - FROM NEW WAVE TO POST-PUNK
Page 30: Nancy Beaudoin - by Aut'Chose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV9HB5pNH60
Page 32: DNA - by Vex
https://soundcloud.com/user-55178726-221949985/vex-dna-1
Chapter 6 - THE RETURN OF JOHNNY SHIVERS
Page 37: Did You No Wrong - by The Sex Pistols
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niaIRGZFMdU
Alan recounts meeting his soon-to-be close friend Mario Campo. As w/ his appreciation of the guy who ran the Nelson Grill, Alan's love for & appreciation of his friend is apparent.
"When it was his turn to go onstage, Mario Campo walked up to the mic, holding a sheet of paper. Instead of reading from it, he violently scrunched it into a ball against the mic-which gave loud crinkly sounds coming out of the speakers. He then tossed it at the audience and left in disgust-to howls, hoots and whistles of approval and disapproval." - p 40
Had I been there I suspect I wd've loved the elegance of this gesture of exasperation.
"Dave shot me up. I immediately felt woozy and started teetering. "Uh oh," he said, "maybe I gave you too much." Exactly what I didn't want to hear. I collapsed onto the couch and felt happy as a cooing Tribble. I was fine. The great feeling you get on heroin is like sinking into a warm bubble bath and enjoying it eyes closed, a happy mollusk in the suds. Right then I knew I should never get into smack, because that was the only thing I'd ever need in my life. Then I threw up a little retch. Every twenty minutes an unpleasant little retch. Well that nailed the fun out of Junkie Life for me." - p 45
Personally, I've been shot up w/ heroin & dilaudid, I drank paregoric & oral morphine, & smoked opium. I don't recommend any of them. I remember being on heroin while a gay friend read a passage from a bk about how sperm supposedly contains the active ingredient of heroin that supposedly makes you feel so good. I didn't feel good, I just didn't care, I didn't care about my friend or about much of anything else. I was taking heroin b/c I was being self-destructive b/c I'd broken up w/ a woman that I was obsessed w/.
The one time I drank oral morphine I was performing w/ my band "Something That Dissolves The Shadow of Something That Was Next to Something That Combusted Twice. Once." (1989.11.04) ( https://youtu.be/yamGE-mVW8A?t=1h26m51s ) in a concert that lasted 4 or 5 hrs. We'd pre-planned that we were going to play a section as hard & fast as we cd for an hr. Just before this section I drank the morphine. I'd been drinking hard alcohol all night. It occurred to me that I might've overdone it so I really plunged into the hard & fast section in an effort to work the morphine & alcohol thru my system in the hope of not ODing.
I cd go on & on about such foolishness but I never had the slightest urge or inclination to be a junkie. People often become addicts in the process of trying to escape from their lives & end up more trapped in them than ever. Fortunately, I don't seem to have an addictive biology. I've seen friends shoot heroin & end up under house arrest or worse w/in mnths b/c of their absolute lack of self-control.
"But Mario didn't have to travel far to find trouble. Usually he found it in the biker dives of Montréal or at Peter's, where he liked to go get beaten up. Or else in a drunken fit at home, smashing his toilet door, throwing beer bottles at the wall or down the corridor of his apartment building, bringing the cops at three in the morning." - p 52
I met Mario in early 1983 at APT 6 (more about that later) where I witnessed his performance at his apartment & where he translated my English into French for my "Practice for Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear Piercing". He seemed to be a good translator, taking it seriously & doing me the favor in good faith. While I can believe that he had his bad times, such as those described above, I'm glad to say that I met him when he seemed to be up.
Chapter 7 - MARIO
Pages 47, 51: Insomnies Polaroïde , Le délire - by Mario Campo
https://mario-campo-poete.com/mariocampo-recueils.html
"As if discovering Burroughs wasn't enough, one evening on the Vidéotron cable TV channel I saw a strange video of a guy strapped to a wall doing a series of bizarre rituals. He drew a semi-circle over his head on the wall with a liquid and set fire to it." - p 57
That was Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor)'s "Restriction". At some point he performed it & fell & punctured one of his internal organs causing ongoing health problems. I've put a video online from what was probably its 1st performance at Véhicule Art: on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/-fP21YvehgE ; on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/Restriction . This is probably the same performance video that Alan witnessed.
Chapter 8 - A BRIEF RETURN TO REASON
Page 57: William Burroughs on SNL (Saturday Night Live)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTl6xVMbJ6Y
Page 57: Last Words of Hassan Sabbah - by William Burroughs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvbz_kKJcqU&t=32s
"At the time, Véhicule Art was run by a triumverate of notorious performance artists: Bernar Hébert, Michel Ouellette, and Monty Cantsin-the guy I saw strapped to the wall on cable TV." - p 61
"Inspired by his visit to Berlin, Mario called his production <i>Berlin Blocus Haemoglobin</i>, and put up a wall that split the gallery space into "East" and "West". As you entered the show you were given a "passport" and entered "West" Berlin, which was set up like a typical Berlin discothèque playing the post-punk music of the time. My guitar performance was shown on a video screen, and Mario spliced in scenes of himself shooting up with a syringe. Spectators then stepped through a door in the "Wall", where dour officers in grey uniforms grilled them and stamped their passport, after which they found themselves in "East" Berlin." - p 62
That seems like another excellent work by Mario.
"The day came to take down my exhibit at Véhicule. This Funny Guy Frenchman was in the gallery talking loudly to Monty and gesticulating animatedly. When he was through, I went up and introduced myself, and for some reason I launched into a routine, speaking in the exaggerated syllable-stretching style of Salvador Dali. He answered me perfectly in the same manner without skipping a beat, rolling his eyes like Dali-I had finally found a kindred spirit! His name was Pierre Zovilé, but called himself Boris Wanowitch. He was one of Monty's Neoist compères." - pp 64-65
Chapter 9 - RENAISSANCE PUNK
Page 62: Berlin Blocus Haemoglobin - Noise Guitar performance by Alan Lord
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOr-hJHaUpk
Page 63: Poems by Mario Campo illustrated by pocket computer (Alan Lord)
https://mario-campo-poete.com/mariocampo-recueils.html
Page 64: Gwendoline Descendue! - by Bernard Gagnon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwQ0I70_aFY
Page 64: Mondmächen - by Boys du Sévère
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB299JlQV5Q
Page 66: PartyKat - by Boys du Sévère
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyQ-QOmEn9s
"The Neoists were a loose collective of musicians, writers, artists, filmmakers, video artists, art provocateurs and innovators, a bunch of incredibly creative individuals grouped around the performance and video artist Monty Cantsin. They were consumed by a total pursuit of raw artistic expression while crusading against social norms by carrying out disruptive public "actions". They sacrificed themselves for their quixotic visions with little regard either for personal health, comfort or rewards. For them, money was a rare and bizarre resource largely unavilable at all times." - p 68
Having been both a neoist & an anti-neoist myself I appreciate Alan's flattering description but I beg to differ. For one: take out the "art". I lived in BalTimOre City from roughly 1975 to 1994 during wch time I had an incredibly active life involving association & collaboration w/ a large group of people. From my POV BalTimOre had a far more vital & innovative scene going than that of the Montréal-based Neoists. For one thing, starting on January 24, 1979, we initiated a telephone mass media called B.U.T.N. (BalTimOre Underground Telectropheremonal Network) - an initially anonymously-run service that reached, hypothetically at least, thousands, if not TENS of thousands of people. We had various guerilla performance groups starting w/ B.O.M.B. (Baltimore Oblivion Marching Band) & followed soon therafter by nameless wandering wind ensemble & Crab Feast. We organized large-scale popular events such as a fake science fair held at John Hopkins University where a real science fair might've been expected. We organized parades, etc, etc. Some of us, such as myself, were heavily active in what I called "P.I.N.-U.P." (Postal Interaction Network - Undergound Participant) more commonly known as "Mail Art". We even had a collective identity name, David A. Bannister - akin to Neoism's Monty Cantsin. We had a time travel society called the Krononauts. The one thing that rubbed me wrong about more or less everyone I worked w/ was that everyone was obsessed w/ 'being artists' & making 'art'. Except me. I generally knew far more about art & artists than the people I was working w/ & had been rejecting it as a context for my activities since the fall of 1978. My friends & collaborators just cdn't relate.
But then Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor) contacted the Krononauts in the fall of 1980. He wanted to forge an alliance between the Neoists & the Krononauts & he came to BalTimOre to do that in December. Monty & I seemed to be on the same page about "art", we wanted to have a Cultural Conspiracy. Hence I became interested in what was happening in Montréal & a group of 4 of us attended & participated in APT 81 at the Peking Poolroom (Kiki Bonbon's apartment) in February, 1981. My 3 friends were put off by the arrogant & pompous posturings of the teenagers there, Kiki & Zbigniew, &, after leaving, wanted nothing further to do w/ them. I, on the other hand, enjoyed the philosophical challenges, the rejections of normality, & continued to form close bonds w/ most of the neoists that I continued to meet as the conspiracy grew. But the point here is that what was best about neoism, to me, had as little to do w/ art as possible. This was a zeitgeist at work of people pursuing their own deviant visions in tandem w/ each other w/ a total disrespect for mainstream society & the art world career goals & glamor games that motivated so many. Not surprsingly, it didn't necessarily stay that way as simple survival was often achieved in the most appealing way by accepting art world perqs - such as the Governor General Award for Monty/Istvan. But that came later.
"Meeting the Neoists in the fall of 1982 was a crucial moment in my life." - p 68
"What exactly was Neoism? The perfect example to illustrate what it was all about was a poezine they put out called Salut Les Riche: The poezine cost $1, but a two-dollar bill was glued to the inside back cover. If you don't get it, there's no chance you could ever be a Neoist. Not everyone could be a Neoist-it took a special mindset." - pp 68-69
& there was a time when if people asked me what neoism was I'd reply w/ "Are you a neoist?" & if they answered "yes" then it was up to them what it meant. As far as I can recall, no-one ever answered "yes". That meant they weren't neoists & never wd be, they weren't daring enuf to take a plunge into such unknown territory.
"He fled Hungary in a meat truck, hiding under the bloody carcasses of pigs, and breathed through a thin tube. He was wrapped in a cotton sheet soaked in pig blood and guts so no police dogs could sniff him out in case of a stop n' search.
"He arrived in Montreal in September 1977." - p 69
Now, that's a very heroic story of Monty/Istvan's escape from Communist Hungary but it's a new one to me. The way I remember it is that Istvan's dad was a Hungarian doctor & that Istvan went to Paris to follow in his father's footsteps by studying medicine. My impression was that this was done w/ the approval & assistance of the Hungarian government. In Paris he decided against becoming a doctor & managed to immigrate to Canada from there. That's a considerably less exciting story but it seems to me that it's the more likely one. Perhaps Alan's version is true. This was definitely a difficult time for any Hungarian wishing to go elsewhere. One Bulgarian ex-pat friend of mine claims that in order to leave Hungary Monty/Istvan probably had to agree to work w/ the secret police. That's possible too, I suppose, but I prefer my more prosaic version of the story.
"The following couple of years were amazingly rich in subversive activities for the Neoists, and one of their signal activities was holding the occasional "apartment festival"-events organized in their homes, to which the public was invited." - p 70
&, indeed, the APT Fests were, for me, where it was at, if you weren't at the Apartment Festivals you were missing out on the heart of the conspiracy. & these activities went on for far longer than Alan suggests - it's just that he dropped out after only a yr's involvement. What was even an APT Fest, per se, is open to debate. There were many neoist events, not all of them APT Fests, not all of them even specifically declared neoist but still sharing characteristics of APT Fests. Here's a strict list of them w/ not-really-qualifying events in [brackets]:
APT 1 - Sept 17-21, 1980, No-Galero (Monty/Istvan's apartment), Montreal, CacaNada
[Semain d'occupation Neoist - Oct 15-19, 1980, Motivation 5, Montreal, CacaNada]
[Meeting of the Krononauts & Monty Cantsin - Dec, 1980, Calvert St house + the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, BalTimOre, US@]
APT 81 - Feb 1981, Peking Poolroom (Kiki Bonbon's apartment), Montreal, CacaNada
81 APT - May 29-June 7, 1981, Greenway's Folly (the mansion where I, & others, lived), BalTimOre, US@
Public Works/APT 4 - October 1981, Toronto: Public Works / Montreal: Low Theatre (Monty/Istvan's apartment), CacaNada
APT FIVE - March 15-21, 1982 Multi-Locations, New York City, US@
[THE NEOIST NETWORK'S FIRST EUROPEAN TRAINING CAMP - June 21-27, 1982, Wurzburg, West Germany]
Le Sixieme Festival International D'Appartement (6th International Apartment Festival OR APT 6) - February 21-25, 1983, Montreal (Alan Lord's apartment, Pleine Lune, the streets, Olympic Basin on Ile Notre-Dame, etc), CacaNada
APT 7 - September 20-28, 1983, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's apartment + the Galaxy Ballroom in the Congress Hotel + "That Frame Place Gallery", Baltimore, US@
The Neoist Network's 8th Apartment Festival - May 21-26, 1984, Pete Horobin & Steve Thorne's squat + the London Musicians Collective, at Greenwich Park (where the observatory is), & at Lambeth Pier, London, Ungland
[Ultimatum I - May 1-5, 1985 - Montreal, CacaNada]
APT 9 - as the book that Emilio published identified it: "the 9th neoist festival", June 1-7, 1985, Emilio Morandi Arte Studio, Ponte Nossa, Italy
APT 64 - 1986, Artcore Studio, Stilleto's Studio, Berlin, Germany
[Ultimatum II - September, 1987 - Montreal, CacaNada]
[Festival of Non-Participation - June 5, 1988 - August 20, 1988, Glasgow, Dundee, Edinburgh, Tents Muir, etc.., Scotchland]
The 1988 Neoist Anathema Party Take-over (note that "Anathema Party Take-over" forms the A.P.T. acronymn) or the ONE-MILLIONTH Neoist Apartment Festival, October, 1988 Rivington School / Multi Location New York City, US@
[Zeroworks Jubilee, August, 1992, 50 Wabash (Gordon W. Zealot's home by the junkyard), Toronto, CacaNada]
XXXPanzio A Neoizmus?! Anti-Esemény / XXXPanzio In the Name of Neoism?! Anti-Event"; In (Buda)Pest it was: "Neoista?! Puccs"; In Debrecen it was: "Neoista?! Zajpiknik és Monty Cantsin? Kiképzôtábor / Tolerance (?) Festival & Camp - Neoist?! Noise Picnic and Monty Cantsin? Training Camp, July 2-6 (officially, this didn't start until the 4th, but there was plenty happening in the previous 2 days): Vac; July 7-9: Pest; July 11-12: Debrecen, 1997 Multi-location, Budapest/Vac/Debrecen, Hungary
[PoPo into the Wasteland, August 22, 1998, Toronto, CacaNada]
[Archeologie du Neoisme - La Premiere Retrospective Filmique Mondiale du Neoisme - January 29 & 30, 1999, AntiTube, Quebec, CacaNada]
Neoist Festival - November 25-29, 1999, Windsor, CacaNada
1st Non-Existent International Neoist Apartment Festival in the Year 000, March 20-25, 2000; April 5 & June 8, 2000, Adelaide, Australia
Department Festival, fall, 2004, Berlin, GermMany
That makes at least 15 APT Fests over a 24+ yr period w/ plenty of other related activities. I was able to particiate in 11 of those + several of the other things listed above. These were amazing times.
"Soon the locus of gratuitous havoc shifted to Bonspiel and Tristan's notorious lair The Peking Poolroom."
[..]
"The Flaming Iron was invented by Tristan, and in a grainy black and white video filmed at Peking Poolroom he can be seen setting fire to an iron and start waving it around, yelling "Austérité! Sévérité!"" - p 73
To be nitpicky: "grainy" is a physical quality specifically of film, there's no such thing as grainy video. The video referred to (in a slightly modified version) is online here: https://youtu.be/TZXcxzCoBrg .
"I was thrilled beyond belief to be with these remarkable fellows, finally people who shared my indefinable disgust and disdain for conventions and conventional people. They possessed this indefinable quality which I call surrintelligence-a kind of higher, unquantifiable intelligence, beyond the banal IQ-Test sort, that surpasses any conventional criteria bent on quantifying it." - p 76
Ha ha! At the risk of being an egomaniac, I like the term. As to whether the intelligence is "higher" or not I question the hierarchy.
Next up is APT 6, the 6th International Neoist Apartment Festival, & one of my personal favorites . I quote from this section in the document from this fest that I recently put online: on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/u8KUb-8Kutg - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/apt-6 . Given that the visuals for this are primarily stills taken w/ a cheap camera coupled w/ audio recordings made w/ a very cheap portable mono cassette deck, I don't expect many people to find this exciting. Still, it's informative & representative w/in its limitations. I also quote extensively from this section in my review here:
"The 6th Neoist Apartment Festival was inaugurated at Phillips Square, across from The Bay department store downtown, with all of us waving flags and flaming irons at arm's length" [..] "We handed out the festival program and yelled "Severity! Austerity!" to puzzled shoppers and harried office workers on break.
"Soon a car stopped, and the legendary Neoist and American artist tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE disembarked, straight from the US border. He wore a beany cap with rotating propeller, trousers made entirely of zippers sewn together side by side, and from his belt hung a cassette player that played a loop of constant applause, "Because," he explained, "it's the wish of all artists to have an approving audience clapping them, so I carry mine with me at all times."
"He chose his name to point out the fact that a name was a mere convenience, tentatively. We'll call him "Tent" for short. He lived in Baltimore, and for a time called himself Tim Ore, so that the name of the city would serve as a subliminal message to the ladies: Ball Tim Ore.
"Tent is the most radical and inventive artist I've ever known. One of his favorite hobbies in Baltimore was to be driven around the city, tied to the roof of a car like a bagged deer. It never failed to annoy the police, who couldn't figure out what ticket to give him for such an outrageous affront to normal behavior. Tent also took Marcel Duchamp's declaration "The great artist of tomorrow will go underground" quite literally, and held performances in the subterranean canals of Baltimore.
"On his otherwise bald head, Tent shaved out ten moustaches, because he wanted to be "ten times more normal than any upstanding cop, firefighter or security guard." His slogan was "Kill Normality Before it Kills You". Another one was "Anything is Anything"-which remains the perfect repartee to counter and completely demolish anyone's deeply held theory or conviction." - pp 78-79
Whew! Alan took quite a few writerly liberties in the above so I'll make a few clarifications: In the fall of 1978, I gave away the main 20 art objects that I'd made up 'til that point to friends & declared myself to be transitioning from artist to mad scientist. From that point on I stopped calling myself an "artist", preferring more personal language that bespoke of more creative contexts. I wd've very emphatically NOT called myself an artist at the time of APT 6. I WAS wearing "a beany cap with rotating propeller" at the time but the "trousers made entirely of zippers sewn together side by side" weren't made until January, 1984. I WAS carrying a cassette player w/ a loop of applause that I'd made but I didn't usually play it continuously, preferring to turn it on when I shook hands w/ someone. Since I was using the tape recorder to record what was happening during much of APT 6, I cdn't use it for playback. There must've been 2 tape players involved in the one instance where I recorded the playing of the loop in context. Alan's quote from me is his best guess of what I might've sd by way of explanation. I wdn't've sd that, esp w/ the "artist" part. Instead I wd've sd something like: 'Since I consider this to be an historic occasion, I brought along the appropriate sound effect."
The car belonged to Boris Wanowitch & it had a large painting of a gold steam iron on its side, done w/ a stencil wch had the iron broken into stripes. On top of the car there were 2 large speakers wch were connected to a microphone & a tape player in the car. While we were driving there Monty/Istvan had a siren playing in the background while he proclaimed such neoist slogans as "Neoism Now!" & my own variation on that "Neoism Now & Then!". We were stopped by the police & ticketed for a noise violation. Boris & I & Monty/Istvan all stepped out of the car carrying a flag that also had the steam iron image on it.
Indeed, the name "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE" is the answer to the question: What's your name? or What function does a name serve?. As for being tied to the roof of a car? That's true - but it was something that Eugenie Vincent & I did in Toronto when we arrived there for the 1st half of APT 4, "Public Works". We had small signs on the side of the car that were an advertisement for Public Works & for "HOMEX", a queer zine created by Ricki Kilreagan, who was inside the car. HOMEX was named after an FBI program that targetted homosexuals. We DID get stopped by the Toronto police in front of a bar called "The Valiant Trooper" (did they pick the location?). They seemed to be both bemused & amused & eventually ticketed us for a seatbelt violation. We managed to drive around for about 20 minutes before getting stopped. Pictures of this can be seen here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOutline1981.html in entry 45.
I DID have a haircut called "12 moustaches & t he 5 utters of ignorance" wch I had in 1979 ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/H1979moustache.html ) & 1981 ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/H1981moustache2.html ). To quote from my webpages where I document this: "In the 1970s, the male porn stars all had moustaches. My logic was that if a porn star was virile with only one moustache, I'd, obviously, be much more virile with 12. So what if they were on the top of my head instead of on my face? Less abrasive during oral sex., eh?! The "5 utters of ignorance" were made from the piece of long hair that I left on the top back. I usually separated that into 2 braided 'pony-tails' that I sometimes forced upward with wire to make what looked like tv antennae. I wore a hat with a hole to enable the hair to stick through. Since they were the "5 utters of ignorance", in my 'ignorance' I could neither count them or describe them accurately." HOWEVER, that wasn't the haircut that I had as of APT 6. Instead I had my "circle" haircut ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/H1982circle.html ). The webpage re that one describes it thusly: "After I'd spent half my life, 14 years at that point (I actually calculated it to the day), with long hair I decided to cut it off. The new idea was to have a circle of hair, died black, running around my face with one side of the circle in front of my ear, where hair ordinarily grew, & on the other side behind my ear, where hair didn't ordinarily grow. Then I took the hair that was cut off & glued it to the place where hair didn't grow to complete the circle."
Ahem.
"Permission was obtained to build an igloo out of a big snowbank in a parking lot at the corner of Cherrier and Saint-Denis. We all built the igloo together, at the direction of architect Boris, who'd studied the method and demonstrated it to us. When the igloo was completed, we gathered for the inauguration. Boris set his homburg hat on fire-another speciality of his-then poured rubber cement over Monty's shoes and set them on fire. As the flames danced off the tips of his shoes, he regaled us with his new song Dorogoj Dracula.
"That night we all slept in the igloo, in sleeping bags. It was very comfortable, warmed from the heat of our bodies. There was the occasional drip drip of melted snow, but nothing to worry about in the sub-zero cold." - p 79
&, indeed, for me, this is the type of thing I live for. It was so absurd, so absurdly funny. We had a bonfire outside, probably in a 50 gallon metal barrel, & Monty had a boom-box that he played the cheesy electronic background music on for his songs. I don't remember how many of us there were outside but I'm fairly sure that when it came time to sleep in the igloo there were only 4 of the most dedicated left: Boris, Monty, Alan, & me. We had lively conversation before falling asleep. A good time was most definitely had by all.
"Please keep in mind that all of this wonderfully creative zaniness was accomplished with no money, no arts grants, no sponsorships. We had no rich benefactors, no Comtesse de Noailles, no Peggy Guggenheims, no Gertrude Steins, no nothing. Very few of us had jobs, and even these were iffy. We were artists whose palettes and brushes had become the personal computer-meaning we made nothing we could sell. Or would even want to.
""When you're old, make art. When you're young, make trouble"
-Nam June Paik" - p 82
All in all, I think Alan describes the spirit of the thing wonderfully. I do have to qualify that I DID have a job, usually multiple jobs, but I was still very poor. In 1983 I was a hard-wood floor finisher, not a job I'd recommend to anyone: very hard work, insufficient pay. I also didn't have a computer until a friend of mine gave me one in the fall of 1994.
Chapters 10 - ATTACK OF THE NEOISTS
Page 77: Blood And Gold - by Monty Cantsin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57T3vvv9cJE
Page 78: Catastronics - by Monty Cantsin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd1SUu8dypM&t=54s
Page 78: Inauguration of The Spring Campaign 83
https://mario-campo-poete.com/mariocampo-photos.html
Writing about his bk "Silver Amusements":
"When Dave and I opened the boxes from the printer, the books were stuck together-when we tried prying them apart, the covers ripped off. Dave had forgotten to instruct the printer to slip in a sheet of paper between the freshly silkscreened ink of the front and back covers. So it was a very "limited edition" indeed-only a few dozen books survived intact." - p 84
Well, well.. I didn't know that! THAT makes me feel even more honored b/c I have a copy that Alan gave me!! I don't think it's one of the bks I've reviewed b/c I got it & read it so long ago. W/ this rarity in mind, I just pulled my copy off the shelves of my personal library's Poetry section so that I can give you a taste here:
The bk's broken into 3 sections: HOT, CLIPS, & ADS. The titles of each short poem aren't bold & have usual case relations. The poems themselves are in all emboldened caps. The terseness has a compelling pop punchiness. On the left side, p 32, there's an image of a Valvoline Motor Oil can, on the right, p 33, is "Lubbock Bbls":
"TEXXON
MOONBUGGY
MINIBIKE
HEART THROB
LAST CHANCE
SUPERCHIEF
MONKEY RANCH
GAS BAR"
"So, as with all things, my adventure with the Neoists came to an end. I bailed because Monty's rote histrionic slogans started sounding stale and getting on my nerves. I was also sick of serving as an extra in his serial narcissistic wackopaloozas."
[..]
"My involvement in official Neoist projects may have lasted only several months, but I continued collaborating throughout the Eighties-and beyond-with my comrades in arts Bonspiel, Zilon, JM & Fred Mignault, Boris, Tristan, and latecomer Jack Five. In fact most of my future bands were to feature Neoist alumni. The Montreal Neoists have always been the people I feel closest to. It was our singular attitude that united us. There was always an instinctual complicity among us that remained unspoken." - p85
&, in fact, I know from recent personal correspondence w/ Alan that he has great respect for Monty/Istvan's ability to attract exceptional weirdos.
Alan gets to visit William S. Burroughs's famous "Bunker" in NYC:
Ira very graciously gave me a tour of The Bunker. "Bill's left for Lawrence, Kansas," he explained, "but his stuff is still all here."
"And there it was, laid out before me: all the objects I had become so familiar with, perusing the countless classic photos: the chunky typewriter atop the army-issue desk, the long table that served for all the illustrious dinners in Victor Bockris' With William Burroughs, the gun-practice targets riddled with bullet holes. I even got to sit in Burroughs' famed Orgone Box. I closed my eyes and waited patiently for the Orgones to tingle my energies. Nothing." - p 91
In the early days of the used bks, records, bikes. clothing, etc store that I cofounded in BalTimOre we had an Orgone Accumulator in the basement half of the store. I never spent much time in it but when I did I felt no effect. I wish I'd spent more time in it now. The store doesn't have it anymore. I don't know what happened to it.
"In early December Monty had a big show at the Spectrum called Opérat Blanc, and asked me to make a guest appearance as guitarist on a couple of songs. How could I refuse an old comrade?" - p 91
Alan provides a translation for the French title as "White Operat". I suggest a more comprehensible rendering: "White Rat Opera" or "White Rat Operation" or "Operation White Rat". I don't know of any footage from that online so I've uploaded some from my own aRCHIVE: on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/udwpTJqwr2g ; on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/operat-blanc . As I understand it, the video I've uploaded wd've been used in performance & wd've been accompanied by live elements.
Chapter 11 - BRANCHING OUT
Page 87: LOST AND FOUND: The Work of Bern Porter
https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/lostandfound/
Page 90: Fun Time - Electro-Luxe version of Iggy Pop's song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz73xGj6l1o
Writing about NYC in the early-to-mid '80s, also the time when I was most often there:
"The most ingenious among those crazy names was ABC No Rio-which was inspired by the letters that had either faded out or were missing on a sign spelling "Lawyer And Notary" in Spanish (ABogado Con Notario)." - p 98
& I went to ABC No Rio back in the day. I just checked online to see if it'd survived to the present &, Lo & Behold!:
"ABC No Rio is a collectively-run non-profit arts organization on New York City's Lower East Side. It was founded in 1980 in a squat at 156 Rivington Street, following the eviction of the 1979-80 Real Estate Show. The centre featured an art gallery space, a zine library, a darkroom, a silkscreening studio, and public computer lab. In addition, it played host to a number of radical projects including weekly hardcore punk matinees and the city Food Not Bombs collective.
"In July 2016, ABC No Rio vacated the Rivington Street building in advance of demolition and construction of a new facility on the same site for its programs, projects and operations, including the silkscreen studio, zine library, art exhibitions and music shows." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_No_Rio
A positive outcome! I wasn't expecting that. It's nice to know that greedy real estate interests don't always win out in NYC.
"The place for underground Montreal artists and musicians to hang out now was the new club Les Foufounes Électriques." - p 104
Chapter 12 BURROUGHS, HUNCKE, NEW YORK, THE FOUFOUNES
Page 103: There's Taters - By Cleveland Noisegate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdAdVGi3qhQ
Page 103: Première - By Débris
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/premiere
Page 103: Fashion In Kansas - By Débris
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/fashion-in-kansas
Page 104: I Like Your Paintings - By Débris
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/ilike-your-paintings
Page 104: Clone Café - By Débris
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/clone-cafe
"So I came up with the idea of putting together a festival of avant-poetry to be called Ultimatum. I bit the financial bullet and bought an Apple IIe computer, applied for a Canada Arts Council "Explorations Grant". and got it. I was given $15,000 to put on a five-day cutting edge "Urban Poetry" festival."
[..]
"It turned out to be multi-media, before the term even existed." - p 111
Alan's very proud of Ultimatum & Ultimatum II, justifiably so. However, I have to put Ultimatum in historical perspective a bit. In Baltimore, the Merzaum Collective had been putting on extremely ambitious festivals of a similar nature that lasted for as long as a mnth called Festivals of Disappearing Art(s). They went from about 1977 to 1982. The International Sound Poetry Festivals started in April, 1968. The point is that there were plenty of precursors to Ultimatum. As for the term "multi-media" not having existed yet? Well..
"The term multimedia was coined by singer and artist Bob Goldstein (later 'Bobb Goldsteinn') to promote the July 1966 opening of his "Lightworks at L'Oursin" show in Southampton, New York, Long Island. Goldstein was perhaps aware of an American artist named Dick Higgins, who had two years previously discussed a new approach to art-making he called "intermedia"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia
"The Ultimatum Montreal Urban Poetry Festival was held from May 1st to 5th 1985, at the Foufounes Électriques. There's a CBC TV newscast that shows Bill Bissett, The Toronto Research Group, The Woeurks, Christopher Dewdney, Ken Decker at an Apple computer, poet Anonyme Sanregret being tattooed, and a John Giorno video clip." - p 112
& for those of you born after this time, the popularization of tattooing didn't happen until after the very influential 1989 RE/Search "Modern Primitives" issue. Those of us who were tattooed before then were an extreme minority unless we were in the military or a biker club.
"In all, Ultimatum featured 54 poet/writers and 42 musicians, artists and technicians, and the local attendance was about 2000 people. It was covered by local TV and radio, plus Montreal and Vancouver's major dailies, as well as arts magazines. The festival was entirely recorded on audio tape and filmed on 3/4" video-all of the audio is still available, but the only videos to have survived are the readings and performances in French, and a few band clips, including John Giorno." - p 120
Is the lack of video a loss? For me, yes, for people understandably concerned w/ a mania for documentation as a symptom of people becoming too distracted from their own present, perhaps it's for the better. Given that I have vaudeo (as I prefer to call it) dating back to 1977 in my own aRCHIVE & that I have other media dating more than 100 yrs earlier, it's no surprise that I'm in the pro-documentation camp - but that doesn't mean that I'm completely unsympathetic to arguments against.
Chapter 13 ULTIMATUM
Page 114: Sylvère Lotringer's performance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfQoG3plySY&t=161s
Page 115: Microprocesseur - By Anonyme Sansregret
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/07-anonyme-sanregret
Page 115: The Story Of Billy Manicoti - By Concept Variable
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/11-concept-variable-the-story
Page 116: This Is The Worst (Of Love) - By Red Shift
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/02-red-shift-this-is-the-worst
Page 116: Arabesque - By Mario Campo (music track by Débris)
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/10-mario-campo-arabesque
Page 116: Modesty - By Colette Tougas
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/05-colette-tougas-modesty
Page 116: Wild Horses - By Open Mouth (with Tristan Renaud)
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/06-open-mouth-wild-horses
Page 117: Jésus - by Boys du Sévère
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/12-boys-du-severe-jesus
Page 117: Ignoring The Future Today - by Alan Lord
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/04-alan-lord-ignoring-the
Page 119: Poésie guerrière - by Jack Five
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp5RbILEQpc&feature=youtu.be
Page 119: (Last Night) I Gambled With My Anger And Lost - by John Giorno Band
Page 123: Beat The Clown - by Jack Five
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AY13Fl-ThM
"Along with brainiac software developer Alain Bergeron, Dubé was also a member of the SCP-Societé de Conservation du Présent-a quirky sort of conceptual art trio that fused visual art, technology and "the archiving principle". Among other activities, their habit was to stamp a number on any document or artefact coming their way, this "archiving" it. Together they made a pilgrimage to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which houses Marcel Duchamp's main body of work. They had the gall to affix a red COPY stamp on Duchamp's Large Glass. Museum officials subsequently scrubbed it off, but Bergeron says a bit of red smudge can still be seen." - p 127
I gave a "Didaction" at the SCP's "Bunker" on Samedi, 19 Avril, 1986. To quote from my description of this on my "Mere Outline" website: "Representatives of the S.C.P. typed in a description of the (did)action while it was happening into a computer which displayed their typing on a screen to the audience. This is the "show" that led to 1 idiot labelling me a "pornographer disguising himself as an artist"." ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOutline1986.html ) The "idiot" referred to wasn't associated w/ the SCP, she DID later become associated w/ Ultimatum II - at wch she tried to sabotage my "GENERIC AS-BEENISM". Some often off-center super-8 footage of the SCP's typing begins here: https://youtu.be/2QIZAxc1K6M?t=552 in my movie of the tour that my Bunker action was at.
The SCP called me from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I was under the impression that they had a residency there. They asked me to give an over-the-phone performance for their archive that they were making there. In conjunction w/ my girlfriend, Laura Adele Trussell, we talked in odd voices for a half-hr describing the photos in some photo albums of our. I've since tried contacting the Museum & looking thru their online info to try to find traces of the SCP &/or Laura's & my contribution but I've found nothing & gotten no reply. Similarly, I've tried to find an SCP bk that Dubé told me was being published but have been unable to find that either.
Chapter 14 THE WIND FROM MOUNT SCHÄRR
Page 126: Footnote No. 8 - First gig by VDMS (Vent du Mont Schärr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54PnIEUYimY
Page 130: Shirley - by VDMS (Vent du Mont Schärr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTFPGkJk484
Page 131: Sophie Stiquée - by VDMS (Vent du Mont Schärr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_D_GOD9LRE
Page 131: Hey Mulroney - by VDMS (Vent du Mont Schärr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXdM1gi2ymY
Page 136: French TV News report on VDMS winning a battle of the bands concert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga2FJ1HmDJ8&t=67s
"The first thing Kathy did in her hotel room was to take out books from her suitcase and line them up reverentially on the dresser. She had about half a dozen books she was currently reading simultaneously-obscure tomes on literary theory and criticism, and others by radical feminists. I was much impressed by that. I later learned from her writer-dominatrix friend Terence Sellers that Kathy was a bookworm-she had literally "read everything". Books lined every wall of her apartment, two rows deep. Terrence said she once got a call from Kathy asking her to pack up all of her precious books and ship them off to Seattle-where she lived for six months in 1980.1
"1. "900 boxes for your 72,000 books" (from the literary biograhy After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus)" - p 138
I have my doubts about the math of the above. One rm of my house is my personal library, it's the largest of such libraries I've ever seen. I know that Richard Kostelanetz's is much bigger. But Acker's library is sd to've been in an "apartment", a NYC apt no less where space is at a premium. I don't know how many bks I have in my library but I'd guesstimate no more than 8,000. That wd be roughly 1/9th of Acker's purported library. That wd mean that she'd have to have floor-to-ceiling shelves both on the walls AND the middle of the rm in 9 rms - basically an entire house. 900 boxes?! That's 80 bks per box. Well, that's doable - but 80 bks per box wd be rather heavy & the boxes wd have to be strong. I imagine that Acker wd've hired professional movers. At any rate, I pronounce the above figures PROBABLY BULLSHIT from people w/ limited practical logistical experience. If it's true, Acker wd've had to be fairly rich, wch I imagine she was.
Alan fucks Acker & is led to believe that such intimacy might be prolonged. Then he has the rude awakening.
"Not two blocks down Third Avenue we ran into none other than her old friend the writer Gary Indiana, whom she hadn't seen in years. They had a lot of catching up to do, and started chatting. Not only did she neglect to introduce me, she now chose to completely ignore my presence. I definitely got the hint my services were no longer required. "Ok Alan," she said unceremoniously, "thanks for everything. I'll be seeing you Thursday."
"That was my subtle cue to fuck off. Boy, that was the fastest cold shower I ever got. My torrid four-day affair was over. There was not to be any follow-up "relationship". I'd only been her Montreal Night Stand. Fine. Trouble is you see, I'd fallen in love with Kathy. I wouldn't be spending Christmas with her in Spain. Not that I gave a shit about that." - p 142
I might as well mention at this point that I hated the one bk by Acker that I read, "Blood and Guts in High School". Here's my very sparse review of it:
"I 1st heard about Acker thru my friend Charlie Brohawn in the 1970s. He was always a good source of info & he was excited about Acker because he'd heard that she made plagiarism a literary philosophy. When I finally got around to reading this bk many yrs later, I hated it. To make matters worse, it was published by Grove Press - one of my favorites. My recommendation? Don't waste yr time w/ this. Read the people that she rips off instead - esp Jean Genet. She's just a parasite. Then again, that's pretty harsh. Maybe someday I'll read something else by her & revise my opinion." - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/11995617
I did read an interview w/ her at some point in wch she mentioned getting a double mastectomy to get rid of her breast cancer only to still have cancer afterwards anyway (wch she eventually died from). That made me sympathetic to her. But a great writer? Nah. I suspect that her family wealth coupled w/ being a New Yawker artificially catapaulted her to an ill-deserved fame.
Even tho she's depicted as having ""read everything"" she certainly hadn't read 72,000 bks. If she read one bk a day she wd've had to have made it to 197 yrs old to've read all those. I'm 69, I read more than anyone else I know (& that means reading bks from cover-to-cover), & I guesstimate that I've read about 5,000 bks at most. Acker lived to be 50. Let's be generous & say that she'd read 5,000 bks by the time of her death - starting at age 6: That wd mean roughly 114 bks per yr, over 2 a wk. If the bks were all easy reading paperbacks then that's not too unbelievable. I'd give Acker credit for more difficult reading than that - in wch case if she lived a stay-at-home doing little other than reading lifestyle, wch she obviously didn't, then that's possible. Otherwise, I imagine that Acker's ""read[ing] everything" might've meant reading 3,000 bks or so.
"Next I went to visit Victor Bockris-poet and author of my cherished With William Burroughs book-who lived on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. He knew Terence Sellers-author of The Correct Sadist-the dominatrix writer I desperately wanted to recruit for my festival." - p 145
Oh, well, here I go again. Bockris is another writer I have zero respect for, very much the product of NYC money artificial inflation. Here's my review of "With William Burroughs - A Report from the Bunker":
"Ok, I hope Bockris never reads this review b/c I don't really want to hurt anyone's feelings but I just HAVE TO SAY THIS: by this point in Burroughs' career every moronic parasite in the world was trying to attach theirself to him & this bk exemplifies that. Bockris cd take the most brilliant subject & trivialize it thru gossip & name-dropping 'til you'd feel like puking. All of Bockris' bks shd just be called "If I Drop These Names Will I Be Famous TOO?!" I mean, why not just get to the point? The cover portrait is by Robert Mapplethorpe - another artiste whose work I hate. This bk is SO New York in the worst way. Too bad the center of the publishing industry is there b/c we end up w/ idiocies like this: this bk MUST BE IMPORTANT b/c it has ALL the scenesters in it (no matter if half of them are idiots!)! The only thing that salvages this is that Burroughs is, yes, actually represented in it somewhat. If you're going to read everything connected to the guy, save this one for LAST. I'd hate to see you die w/ this one under yr belt & "The Book of Breeething" (eg) unread." - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1332671.With_William_Burroughs
By now, I might seem like a bitter sour grapes kindof a guy. It's really just that I'm passionate about culture & literature & I take it seriously. So does Alan, too, of course - I don't mean to imply otherwise.
"I also dropped in on Giorno, and sobbed to him about my aborted tryst with Kathy. He became alarmed. "Careful," he warned, "she likes anal sex and gets gays to fuck her in the ass." Gulp. I hadn't used any condoms-my speciality. When broaching the subject of AIDS, I remember Kathy telling me: "My doctor told me to just stay away from the asshole." I didn't get it then, but that would explain why we hadn't gone there when I asked her if she wanted "anything special"." - p 146
Chapter 15 KATHY GOES TO MONTREAL
Page 141: French TV News report on Kathy Acker's upcoming Foufounes reading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYn8lh86ILg&t=34s
"With the great wind that was blowing in its sails, VDMS" [Alan's band] "was asked to host the New Year's Eve party at the Foufounes. It was our custom to spoil our fans, and we were always busting our asses (and meager incomes) to bring our shows a little something extra-a bit of theatrical magic, something out of the ordinary. This was not only meant to keep our fans' interest, but also ours: costumes, makeup, different themes and quirky gimmicks-to make each show a unique, one-time event you either witnessed or missed. This concern to push our creativity to the limit naturally stemmed from our shared Neoist roots." - p 148
Alan starts "Ultimatum Tuesdays", something I can only imagine as an insane amt of work.
"What with the videotaping, salary paid to the cameraman, equipment rentals, artist fees, travel expenses, hotel, lavish meal invitations and whatnot, I was going broke with my Ultimatum folies. On a good night I'd lose $250.10 On a bad one-like Kathy Acker-I lost up to $1000.11 Out of my pocket, folks. Yes, of course I was sick in the head. It was never my intention to be an art martyr, but I just didn't know how to stop, how to decelerate."
"10. $600 today
11. $2400 today" - p 152
& that, of course, is a helluva lotof moolah & a demonstration of Alan's dedication. Still, money is always relative to how much one has available. Alan was working a good job off & on & making 4 times what I was making at the time. I remember having a giant woman in fatigues asking me for money on the streets of BalTimOre. She had a reputation for severely beating people. I wasn't afraid of her, I was generous so I gave her my 8¢, my entire fortune - I had no bank acct, no savings. That 8¢ wasn't going to do me any good so I didn't mind parting w/ it. The woman looked at the 8¢ then at me as if she wanted to break me in half but I was being enormously generous.
The cast of characters relevant to Ultimatum II adminstration is gradually introduced:
"In turn, CP introduced me to tall, thin Sheila Urbanoski-her friend since teenagehood in their native Saskatchewan." - p 157
"At a salary of $250 a week, Joe Martek got things organized in no time. He hired an accountant, balanced the books, booked the wonderful little theatre Le Milieu for the festival" - p 160
"Well one day this asshole walked into the Canada Arts Council's spanking new $40 million dollar building in downtown Ottawa, and sat down in front of a smug bureaucrat. I looked at all the expensive art on the walls and the snazzy furniture all around me, while listening to him politely explain that there just weren't any funds left for art projects." - p 161
Ha ha! THX for sharing that, Alan. It seems to me that most, if not all, arts organizations exist to make the lives of people who want the glamor of being an artist w/o having the talent cushy while the artists themselves are little more than window dressing. Such organizations only continue to thrive if they're ostentatious in their presentation, the money's for things to make their bldgs look flashy & 'well-nourished' & the administrators - esp the directors.
I'll give an example from my own life: I've had a few museum shows here & there in multiple countries. I was going to show some films at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan, NYC) & I was discussing the arrangement w/ a MoMA person on the phone. She sd to me: 'We'll pay for your pla-". While she was in the midst of offering me plane fare, wch wdn't've have been very expensive, someone in the background cut her off & told her to say "bus fare" - wch is how she ended the sentence. Now, I was glad to do it under even worse conditions b/c the series I was to be part of was a great one & I was honored to be included. As it turned out, they pd me $100 to take the trip from Pittsburgh (& back again). I think my bus fare was something like $84 so I had a left-over $16 to pay for part of my dinner. $16 wasn't enuf for the whole meal. I don't think that measley $100 put a dent in their operating budget but if they cd get away w/ paying me so little they were certainly going to.
"While I was scribbling away at the lyrics, David had given himself as mssion to erect a Temple of The Elvis Cult on the beach" - p 163
I wonder how many tongue-in-cheek 'Elvis religions' there've been? I learned about one from its cofounder Ralph Eaton (now the proprietor of the great Art Rat Studios, one of the only places that actually welcomes me):
"The Holyland Church of Sacred Retardation was an interdisciplinary collaborative project with artist Brett Waller. Our Holyland monikers were Rev. Ralph and Dr. Brett. The project spanned 1988 to 1991, and our base of operations was located in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles. We used the name Holyland as a title for our art project, our business, and our home/office/church/museum. The Holyland was modeled after the Church of the Sub-Genius, and was greatly influenced by Voodoo Village. The Holyland was a mashup and absurdist critique of pop culture and religion. We worshiped the two headed god Jesus/Elvis and sacred retardation. Holyland USA was the home of the Elvis Head. We had church services every Sunday at sundown. We went out with a bang on March 31, 1991." - https://ralpheatonprojects.com/holyland/
Chapter 16 ULTIMATUM TUESDAYS
Page 147: Un Cycle Laurentien - by Bernard Gagnon
Page 148: Foufounes New Year's Show 1987 - by VDMS (Vent du Mont Schärr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hmYO_YNUFw&t=505s
Page 149: David Rattray reads from his translation of Artaud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOlD2oqNde0
Page 153: The "Rec Room" VDMS show - Café Campus, March 1987
Page 155: Between C & D - Joel Rose, Lisa Blaushild, Catherine Texier, Darius James
Page 162: Mon Pays (My Country) - By Les Frogs
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/mon-pays-les-frogs
Alan worked as an engineer, proud to apply skills other than his musical, literary, & arts organizing ones.
"At Monenco-LGL, we were now onto Phase II of the Norsk Hydro project-designing the magnesium plant for real. To my surprise, the whole 1000-foot long Chlorination Building I'd spent a good part of the previous year on was gone from the project-it had been eliminated from the process line. So Armin put me in charge of designing the foundations for the 1000-foot-long Electrolysis building. There were many load combinations possible, so to simplify my task I wrote a Footings design program in Basic." - p 165
As Alan tells it, his computer skills were underappreciated back in those days b/c most engineers didn't have them & saw them as somehow not apropos. In the meantime, he was also working on the 2nd of the Ultimatum festivals:
"I didn't feel like re-inviting people from the first festival. I wanted new faces. I made a few exceptions of course, and re-invited Giorno, Lotringer, Eldon Garnet, Karl Jirgens, Jack Five and Ian Stephens. Among the exciting new names were David Rattray, Chris Kraus, Lisa Blaushild, Darius James and his Lower East Side crew, the SCP, VDMS, Violence & The Sacred, Nick Toczek, and tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE." - p 168
This was September, 1987, & it was a very exciting time. I had just turned 34, had had part of my 3D brain tattoo done, I was still full of energy & enthusiasm. I stayed for as much of Ultimatum II as I cd, liking large parts of it, possibly having to leave a day or 2 before the end - perhaps b/c I was traveling in a borrowed car.
"As previously explained, the nine-day festival was completely audio and videotaped, filmed on 3/4" video by Cynthia's team and broadcast on Vidéotron. In the end I managed to raise a total of $60K in cultural grants and corporate sponsorships for the event. I would've needed at least double that." - p 169
Ok, I get it. Alan wanted to produce this festival professionally & probably most of the participants wdn't've been part of it w/o pay. However, I have to be an embarrassing braggart here & show what I (sometimes co-)organized w/o any budget whatsoever other than whatever miniscule money I had from working ill-paying jobs:
81 APT - BalTimOre, May 29-June7, 1981 - 10 days - starts here: https://youtu.be/_FfY1dw6RDI , every day is a separate URL
The 3rd Church & Foundation of the Subgenius Convention - BalTimOre, September 16-18, 1983 - 3 days
APT 7 - BalTimOre, September 20-28, 1983 - 9 days - https://youtu.be/naU37TVUBRY
Telectropheremoanin'quinquennial - BalTimOre, January 24, 1984 - 1 day - https://youtu.be/SSP1tJK3pjs
PXL-2000 Movie Festival - BalTimOre, October 27-29, 1991, 3 days - https://youtu.be/KIVUeDkKNDo
LatinAmer¡Mix!can - Pittsburgh, April 4-5, 1997 - 2 days
[I actually got pd $150 to organize this & it was catered by the venue that it occurred in]
Anonymous Family Reunion - Eastern Pennsylvania, August 30-31, 1997 - 2 days - https://youtu.be/Igk75JaCTPw
Yr of Sundays - Pittsburgh+, roughly mnthly from March 30, 1997 - February 22, 1998 - 12 days
the 1st Non-Existent International Neoist Apartment Festival in the Year 000 - Adelaide, Australia - March 20-25, 2000; April 5 & June 8, 2000 - 8 days - https://archive.org/details/1stNonExistentInternationalNeoistApartmentFestivalInTheYear000
UNDERAPPRECIATED MOVIEMAKERS FESTIVAL - Pittsburgh, August 1-4, 2018 - 4 days - https://youtu.be/KwlfRxmRU3E
That's 10 somewhat large-scale events (except for the one-day Telectropheremoanin'quinquennial) that I, at least, consider to be historic, 6 of wch had international participation. Nobody got pd (except for the one exception already mentioned), & most of it was heavily documented - w/ the documentary movies online. The total budget for ALL OF THEM was probably less than an average of $200 apiece, $2,000 TOTAL. Just sayin'.
In other words, it's possible to create something ambitious in 'unprofessional' ways & still have it be marvelous - APT 6 is a great example. I'm not saying this to knock Ultimatum II - I loved Ultimatum II - but if I cd've managed it I wd've participated w/o pay out of the sheer love of participating in something I thought was important - & I was probably one of the lowest pd people anyway. How many of the people who expected higher fees wd've come motivated by passionate enthusiasm? Perhaps not many. Such people get it into their heads that they're too important to not be treated as 'stars' (relatively), they're there to shine, they don't even care if they meet anyone else or witness any of the other acts, they're not there to conspire.
Why didn't I get grant money? Well, for one thing, this is the US@, not CacaNada. The arts administrators here wd've probably rather have me put in jail than give me a penny. I applied for a grant of a few hundred dollars for making copies of the Patanational PXL-2000 Festival VHS compilation & was denied. Was it b/c the 1st piece on it is a close-up of a vagina slowly forcing out small lightbulbs? Was it b/c it was shot w/ a very lo-fi TOY camcorder? The person who got the grant was a female art student who used a higher quality camcorder to make a movie honoring her mom. It was pure schmaltz, American Heimat culture. In 1983, after my infamous "Poop & Pee Dog Copyright Violation Ceremony" for wch I got arrested, Linda Burnham, the editor of High Performance magazine was invited to speak to the board of M.A.P. (Maryland Art Place). Linda, who had been at t he Ceremony, told the board members that I represented the 'future of performance art'. After she left, the board told the director of M.A.P. that Burnham was never to be allowed back there again b/c of what she sd about me. No matter that that single performance is probably the most famous performance in all of BalTimOre's history now, I was repulsive scum to the board.
"Violence And The Sacred's performance was astounding-a dramatic industrial sound collage, against a backdrop wall of amazing expressionist videos." - p 172
& I thought it was fantastic too - but when I went up to one of the group's members afterwards to tell him that I loved it he introduced me to the other band members as "a fan". He didn't even realize that I was one of the other performers whose work was similar to theirs but more complex & sophisticated. This is the mindset that I was referring to: they were just there to shine & had no apparent interest in anyone else. These are the type of people who degrade you if you're simply friendly - if you were 'as important' as they are you'd snub them. I detest that art world bullshit.
"Thankfully, this pretentious interlude was offset by the irrepressible mad monk and faithful Neoist Gordon W. Zealot, who kept rushing up and down the aisles banging his tabla, whirling a dervish, whooping and heckling his fellow citizens on stage. Someone turned to me and said: "You couldn't get these people on the same stage in Toronto."" - p 183
"That night, Bonspiel appears in a wifebeater, atop a gray sarong skirt: "We are very pleased, and more than a little bit enthusiastic to be receiving our friends, acolytes, colleagues and partners in crime from both Vancouver and Baltimore. It made sense to me (wry side glance). So first up, allow me to introduce a man who introduced himself to me as Monty Cantsin on at least one occasion, and who has lent his anus in kind complacence to just about everyone else's eyeball . . . John Berndt . . ."
"Berndt read from his Dialectical Materialism, that references capitalism and metaphysics, in front of a keyboard emitting a spooky drone punctuated by aggressive stabs of harsh electronics. Accompanying him were throbbing images and text stroboscoped onto the giant screen. It should be noted that Baltimore scion John Berndt was a long-time associate of Tentatively's, and thus very familiar to us." - p 183
John's piece was actually called Dialectical Immaterialism, a term that he either invented independent of SF writer Michael Moorcock or took from him w/o necessarily remembering it. For those of you who're electronic instrument nerds, John was playing a Yamaha DX-7, something that was still fairly new in 1987 (it was released in 1983). As for John being a "long-time associate" of mine? We'd met in 1984 & John played his 1st improvising gig w/ me in Montréal in 1986. My Montréal friends met him then & probably corresponded w/ him after that.
"Lastly, trading his wifebeater for an I, Braineater T-shirt, Bonspiel introduces Tentatively, a Convenience thus: "the first person I saw one morning was Tentatively, a Convenience. He hadn't bathed for three months. He had spent his entire time sticking little plastic cowboy hats on the backs of crabs in shopping centers. The man was eccentric. The man was way out. And in fact this evening he will wig out. Let me tell you, wigging out is the term. In a few moments, a man full of Usefulofshitlessness himself . . . Tentatively, a Convenience. Cue the tape . . ."" - p 174
As w/ Kiki/Bonspiel's reference to John Bernt's anus, the reference to "wigging out" was a way of giving the audience a clue as to what was going to happen. As for the word Useful[l]ofshitlessness? I asked Kiki to use it in his intro. As w/ Alan's description of me in his account of my arrival at APT 6, Kiki's intro is part conflation / part fantasy. There's never been 3 mnths in my life where I haven't bathed - that was probably Kiki's trying to take a dig at me for not being as clean-cut as he usually was. The crabs reference is to the 2nd Crab Feast in wch Gayle Hanson & I & some others took crabs w/ things glued to their shells to a shopping mall where we set them loose near Santa's station to the extreme confusion of the shoppers on December 22, 1979, when the mall was crowded w/ Christmas shoppers.
"Quite simply, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's performance Generic As-Beenism was the high point of the festival, hands-down. The short extract we see on the Videotron mixdown doesn't do it justice, but luckily Tent provided me with some of the original video that accompanied his performance-which had three separate screens going simultaneously. The performance began with Tent sitting on a throne, with next to him an assistant wearing huge mechanical angel wings strapped to her back that were beating slowly. Projected onto the giant screens were astounding films flickering a collage of sounds and images at a dizzying speed-literally at hundreds of frames per second.
"Tent's assistant angel proceeded to shave his head, revealing a brain tattooed onto his skull in 3D. Tent then got up and walked into the audience, approaching each spectator one by one, and let them inspect his brain carefully with 3D glasses, while his assistant held a flashlight. Tent was Cirque du Soleil as imagined by Throbbing Gristle." - p 175
Naturally, I'm honored & delighted that Alan (& the audience in general) was so enthusiastic about my Mad Scientist Didaction. A few points of clarification: as far as I can remember I wasn't sitting on a "throne" but whatever chair was available. I was playing 2 cheap home entertainment units that cost $60 apiece w/ each consisting of a turntable, a radio, & a cassette player. The cassettes were made esp for live mixing purposes - what I called "Concrete Mixing". John Berndt was playing his DX-7 as part of it. Alan calls the wings "angel wings" b/c a part of the performance text explains the concept of angels as bird-brains. The 3 projections consisted of slides of the text in French & English + other images.
Shortly before the performance was to begin a worried looking woman came up to me & informed me that Sheila Urbanoski had taken my slides & thrown them away. Thank you, whoever you were. She showed me where the trash can was & I retrieved them. Sheila's sabotage was based on her considering me to be a "pornographer disguising himself as an artist" b/c I used sexual footage at my SCP Bunker presentation the yr before. Sheila's favorite artiste in Ultimatum II was I, Braineater whose performance consisted of rockabilly music w/ video of strippers swinging extra-large breasts. This was somehow okey-dokey to Sheila's purported feminism while my sex footage wasn't. Making this particularly ironic to me was that the sex footage Sheila had objected to was a fake peep show movie that had been snuck into an actual peep show. It included things like animation of vegetables fucking & a guy getting a 'blow job' from a wig. The film had actually been made as a parody of porn & was intended as a subversion of the peep show it was surreptiously screened in.
The other 2 projections were a video that had been made esp for the performance & a super-8 film that had been made for the performance called "Easter Island Bunny booed usic" that I'd given a few mnths before. Alan's claim that these movies were shown "literally at hundreds of frames per second" was his fanciful reaction to the density of imagery. Technically speaking, there were only 80 slides so that's roughly 2&2/3rds slides per minute in a half-hr performance - meaning such a small fraction per second that it doesn't matter; I don't remember whether Boris Wanowitch's super-8 projector used cd go at 24 frames per second or only at 18fps - let's say it was at 24fps; the NTSC VHS video wd've been at 30fps so together they'd add up to no more than 54fps. The 3 projections were all somewhat coordinated w/ each other so that, e.g., there were times in the video when the text slides wd appear in tandem w/ their slide projection & there were times in the video when the super-8 wd also appear in tandem.
The wings were made esp for the performance at my request by a friend of mine named John Sheehan. I made 200 special pairs of 3D glasses to give out to the (v)audience. I also made a costume that was a soft-shell cello case that I'd cut a leg-hole out of. The material was brown canvas. One leg went thru the hole, the other went thru the neck. My head came out the inverted bottom & my arms probably came out of holes cut in the bottom sides. It looked like some sort of caveman hide unless one looked closely enuf to realize it was a cello case. Laura didn't really shave my head, that wd've taken too long. Instead I had on a wig & she cut the hair on that & then too the wig off to reveal my bald head. Laura & I had driven straight thru from BalTimOre to Montréal, 550 miles, no doubt complicated by CacaNadian Customs running interference w/ their fantasies that I was coming into Canada to make my fortune. The car I was driving belonged to John Berndt's parents whose generosity in loaning it was spectacular. My own parents wd've NEVER done such a thing. I'd written the original performance text in English & then gotten a friend of John Berndt's to translate it into French. In the soundtrack I read the text alternating in both languages. I was one of the few performers or the only performer to make sure I addressed the audience in both the main languages used. Some people in attendance only spoke English, others only spoke French. I took that into consideration. In short, I did an absolutely insane amt of work in preparation for this.
"Then we moved over to the fake "talkshow" itself, following the classic TV format: Bonspiel sat ar a desk stage left, with a row of seats for the guests to his right. Some of the guests were Terrence Sellers, Tentatively, Judy Radul and Sylvère Lotringer. Throughout the ersatz talkshow, Bonspiel was the consummate witty host, in top shape, ad-libbing brilliant asides-his speciality. We even had a "house band" off to the side-the rest of VDMS-that is me, Jack and JM. In between interviews we played brief snippets of our songs, just like it was done on TV." - pp 177-178
"Ostensibly irked by Judy Radul, who asked him to switch seats with her so that she could "sit next to someone famous"-namely, Lotringer-Tent theatrically dropped his handheld mic onto the floor and walked off the set in pointed disgust. Knowing Tent, he'd probably planned to do this all along, and was only waiting for the slightest excuse to do so. Feigned outrage for a fake show." - p 178
Now, Alan had asked me about this in an email exchange before he wrote this bk & I told him my version of the story as I'll reiterate here. Why Alan chose to ignore my version & go for the above is beyond me.
SO, the whole truth & nothing but the truth: I'd had a subscription to Semiotext(e) since possibly as early as the late 1970s & I respected it immensely. Lotringer was the editor in those days. Therefore, I was looking forward to having some hyper-intelligent conversation as part of this talk show - wch wasn't really fake insofar as it was being videoed for presentation on TV. Even if that hadn't been the case, I wd've enjoyed just the dialog that seemed likely to occur. The way it worked was that each of the participants came on stage one by one. Lotringer might've been 1st, I might've been 2nd - sitting audience left of him. We probably each made some sort of introductory statement when we were seated & then the next person came on, Judy Radul followed me. I remember sitting there & hearing what Lotringer & Radul were saying & finding them disappointingly dull. I thought something along the lines of 'What the fuck? Why aren't they saying anything in the least bit intelligent?!' I was exasperated, I'd been expecting hyper-intellectualism & was witnessing the usual dullards-on-TV. Then Radul added the icing on the cake by asking me to switch seats w/ her so she cd sit next to the famous guy, Lotringer. I thought 'Is that what this is about? Celebrity & glamor?!' That was just too dumb. I don't remember dropping my "handheld mic onto the floor" but I might've done that just to leave it on the stage as I left. I probably told the audience what Radul had sd to me & then commented on how stupid that was & how disappointing the whole thing was. Then I left. This wasn't, as Alan suggests, preplanned, it was a spontaneous gesture of disgust. I remember Monty/Istvan supporting me from the audience by shouting something like 'tENTATIVELY just said something radical why don't the rest of you?!' My outrage wasn't "feigned", it was real - I expected better from these folks.
"Last on the bill that night was the noble-miened Paul Chamberland-arguably Quebec's most important living poet and essayist. That is, before pedophilic accusations relegated him to a literary purgatory that will surely last beyond his lifetime. He read from his Multiple événement terrestre, assisted by SCP-produced computer graphics projected onto the screen." - p 180
"Crisis du jour, DAY EIGHT: Darius James had insisted on curating a whole evening titled Montreal's First Annual Mutant Junkie Corporate Dinner. To accomplish this, he brought up several of his less respectable associates, in order to reproduce for us a genuine evening of spoken word and mayhem as typically found on the Lower Easy Side. Fine.
"Problem is, now they were refusing to go on until they were paid upfront. In heroin. Well they didn't call themselves junkies for nothing, did they? But Montreal wasn't a smack town. It was a pot town. And even if there was some smack somewhere, I was clueless how to find it. It would have to be coke. But I was out of the loop-I didn't do coke. The Kathy Acker night had been a one-off exception.
"I called Louis Coté of the Foufounes in a panic. "Louis, where can I get some heroin?" He hadn't a clue. "Then how about some coke?" Luckily, this was doable. So I ran to the bank-with Tent in tow-withdrew $150 and gave him his fee, then another $250 for my twitching pals starting to feel the breath of cold turkey running down their necks.
"I ran around, got the pile of coke, and that tided over the Mutant Junkies. The show must go on. And it did. On coke. They put on a great in-your-face Loisada-style show-just as Darius had promised me-climbing over the seats and literally assaulting anxious faces in the audience. A living Theatre of Cruelty. The real cruelty was that this story became the source of the rumour that I'd snorted all of the festival money up my nostrils." - p 180
Whew! Alan & I had emailed each other about this, too, before he wrote these memoirs &, once again, he chose to go w/ a story not informed by my own input. Something like 6 yrs ago, John Berndt had emailed me about this very subject. He told me that what he remembered was that during the festival he'd heard that Alan wasn't paying people b/c he was spending the money on coke. John further claimed that the reason why he & I got pd was b/c, hearing that people weren't getting pd, we requested that we go w/ Alan to the bank & get our money right away. Hence John & I BOTH went to the bank w/ Alan & BOTH got pd. I didn't, personally, remember anything about coke.
What I do remember is that Steve McCaffery had given a great ventriloquism performance & I probably complimented him on it sometime after at wch point he complained that he hadn't gotten pd. I was shocked by this b/c the performance was really one of the best I've ever seen. It's possible that he didn't complain to me at the time. I do remember that he definitely complained to me about this in 1995 when I crossed paths w/ him again at SUNY-Buffalo when he gave an amazing reading in Charles Bernstein's class. Regardless of whether it was Steve or someone else who groused at Ultimatum II about not getting pd, the word was going around. Maybe John had been the 1st one to mention it to me, I don't know. SOMEBODY, &, probably, multiple somebodies, were saying that performers weren't getting pd. I don't remember anyone saying anything about coke. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. I have the vaguest of recollections of going to the bank w/ Alan & John & getting cash then. I don't remember Alan saying a thing about getting money for coke but if he was doing that then he probably wd've told us about it in exasperation & b/c it wd've made a good story.
Since my companion Laura & I had driven to Montréal in John's parents' car & since John had come up some other way later it's possible that John had to return before the end of the festival & that, therefore, all 3 of us had to drive back before the fest was over. That wd acct for my not remembering the above-decribed Mutant Junkies performance at all. It wd also acct for our asking for our pay - wch we wd've wanted to help pay return trip expenses.
Whatever the case, I find the implication above that I generated the 'rumor' about the pay going up Alan's nose b/c of my going to the bank w/ Alan & then telling people about it to be somewhat disingenuous. After all, people didn't get pd so that was the real problem. If they'd participated w/ the understanding that they were doing so free it wd've been a different story, but they didn't. Alan explains that the money was insufficient & mismanaged - whether too much of it went to coke or not is almost beside the point. It's doubtful that all of the missing money went to cocaine b/c that wd've meant quite an extravagant bit of coke usage. I probably wd've sd no to coke, myself, I never liked it much as a drug & had stopped my minimal use of it yrs before - but I probably wd've been offered some by Alan if he'd been using & I don't remember his doing so.
As for Montréal not being "a smack town"? Well that wd explain why everytime I went there Montréal seemed like such a safe place in contrast to BalTimOre. It also implies to me, at least, that the police in Montréal weren't nearly as corrupt as they were (& still are) in BalTimOre b/c heroin is big business & corrupt cops love that extra cash flow. In BalTimOre, a city of 600,000 at the time, reputedly 60,000 people were heroin addicts. That's 1 out of every 10. They were everywhere & junkies steal to support their habits. I had one friend whose apartment was burglarized 8 times in 2 yrs. That's once every 3 mnths for those of you who can't do the math. If you put a fucking trash can out for the garbage men someone wd steal that so you'd just have to put the trash out in bags. In other words, be glad that Montréal wasn't "a smack town" - if you want to see how brutally a place can be destroyed by widespread drug problems go to BalTimOre.
As for substituting cocaine for heroin for junkies?! Well, that's a new one to me. Junk, obviously, is a downer; coke, obviously, is an upper. People who do one often do both but never as a substitute for one another that I know of. Well, whatever.
Chapter 17 ULTIMATUM II
Page 166: Ultimatum II Theme - by Tristan Stéphane Renaud
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/ultimatum-ii-theme
Page 166: Ultimatum II Theme - with voices
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/ultimatum-ii-theme-with-voice-track
Page 168: Uh Oh Plutonium - by Anne Waldman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHX-PU9SN8A
Page 171: Ultimatum II performance - VDMS (Vent du Mont Schärr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4DnOTZ119A
Page 173: Rampike magazine online
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/rampike/about.html
Page 175: Generic As-Beenism - by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
Alan started dating a lawyer.
"She brought me to a dinner that was held regularly by her friends and law colleagues, to show off her new boyfriend. Throughout the dinner they made snide remarks, rolled their eyes, looked at each other and snickered openly as if I weren't there. They knew I was only Anne's bad boy toy of the month, and would have a replacement by their next dinner appointment." - p 187
Fuck 'er. Oh, yeah, he did.
Chapter 18 MY DOLCE VITA BEFORE THE STORM
Page 187: Father Death Blues - by Allen Ginsberg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrM41x_Db1c
Page 190: Babel Baby - By Les Frogs
https://soundcloud.com/alan-lord-4/2-babel-baby
"Ok, fine, the festival had been a great success-no doubt about <i>that</i>. It featured a total of 158 artists, poets, writers, musicians, dancers, and audio-video technicians from seven cities, with roughly half the performances split between English and French. A total of 35 hours had been taped audio and video, and the team of 30 techs had used three Sony cameras to mix on the spot broadcast-quality videos that were aired nightly on the Vidéotron cable channel. TV, radio, newspaper, and magazine coverage had been extensive, exposing over 2 million people to the event." - p 192
One of my many fond memories of Ultimatum II is of when Jean-Luc Bonspiel, Jack V, Gordon W. Zealot, & I went to be interviewed by the host of an arts radio program. The program was in French & my French was terrible so I had the plan of saying "Je me sens drôle ces derniers temps" (or something like that) everytime I was asked a question & putting on a confused, befuddled expression as if I were losing my mind on air. That can be heard on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/Radio1987 - Although, I just listened to that again & I didn't hear myself say that ONCE (did I miss it?) so I think I don't have the complete recording or some such.
"Then HRH Eldon Garnet flew into Montreal from Toronto and presented me his Air Canada ticket: $250. No bus either for this regal Can-Art star. I handed him the full amount. Why?" - p 193
Why? is right. I'm all in favor of people getting pd, I'm all in favor of ME getting pd & I've lived in poverty most of my life partially b/c I've never been greedy - but actual greedy people are a drag & shdn't be fed - it's like not feeding human meat to alligators, you don't want to get them too habituated to liking it too much b/c once they like it too much they might just expect an arm & a leg from you.
"The only one who instead of criticizing actually helped me out was Karl Jirgens. He got sick of hearing one of those career arts-council tit-suckers going on and on about me, and gave him $250 to shut him up. What a mensch, that Karl. He was the only one who understood.
"In a downtown bar I spotted Ivan of the Hats. he asked me how I was. I told him I owed $10,000 [8] after my Ultimatum fiasco."
"8. $23,000 today" - p 194
I might as well add my praise for Karl Jirgens: One yr when I contributed something to an issue of his magazine RAMPIKE I explained to him in a letter that I was even more desperately broke than usual & he actually PAID me for my piece. That wd NEVER happen in the US, all hail CacaNada!!
""Do you have what it takes to be a glorious failure? No? Well stick with me, I'll show you how! First you get a crazy idea. Like putting together a $100,000 nine-day avant-lit festival with only $30,000 in grant money."" - p 195
Hhmm.. not to nitpick or anything but earlier the author claimed that he got $60,000 in funding: "In the end I managed to raise a total of $60K in cultural grants and corporate sponsorships for the event."
"When I got home, the only thing waiting for me was a stack of bills I could do nothing about. After a while I stopped opening the envelopes and just frisbeed them into a growing pile in the corner. My answering machine was full and always blinking, overloaded with messages. I ignored it." - p 196
I'm reminded of neoist Dave Zack's collages made from unpd bills.
"By winter and then springtime 1988, I was spiral crashing my way down into the gutter. For the first time in my life I paid for sex. I went to see a hooker in her crappy apartment in east end Ville d'Anjou. The whole experience was as depressing as Ville d'Anjou. Sometimes, instead of spending my nights as the Foufs I spent them at Campo's apartment in The Loser's Palace, drinking. You could always count on him for that.
"By then Sapin had become a starving artist quite literally, and slept on the floor of his unheated Shred. He clued me in on all the perfectly good food and produce you could find in the dumpsters behind restaurants and food marts along Mt. Royal street. Here Dave, have another toot on me. Want another Scotch? It's only 3 AM at the Foufs, the night is still young, and our lives are going nowhere." - p 198
"Even though I was a wreck psychologically, I still managed to show up for work, sober and on the dot. As always." - p 199
& I can respect that. Many people I know are "anti-work", meaning against allowing society's structure to turn them into wage slaves. I can respect that too. Alas, given that just about everything that I truly excel at, having an almost unceasing dedication to my imagination, is something that most people seem to find unbearably repulsive & horrifying - I basically took it for granted that friendly support wd be few & far between & that I'd either have to be a 'criminal' or take whatever ways of supporting myself I cd manage that weren't too egregious. While I dabbled w/ being criminally sane (as I like to call it) I mostly preferred to just do something useful for other people that they were willing to pay me for. As such, I worked for 47 yrs at jobs that gave me as much flexability as I cd get to pursue my real interests & generally lived in poverty. In other words, I get it: showing up for work punctually just goes w/ the territory of accepting that people aren't going to love you for being a polymath, they're going to (under)pay you for doing whatever it is that they need you to do. Such is life. I'm still working on overthrowing their 'reality' fulltime in my own way. Ironically, perhaps, one of the people I worked w/ who was the least likely to EVER show up to work on time was also trying to become a boss & was the MOST LIKELY PERSON I KNEW to absolutely screw over her coworkers. THAT, I don't respect.
"I got a call from a mid-level manager at my bank. He wanted to see me. So I went to their stately building in Old Montreal. The fiftyish guy with a salt and pepper mustache started grilling me. "What's your problem, Mr. Lord? You're an engineer, you have a good job . . . we make about the same salary, I would say . . . but I have a wife and kids, I have a car, a house, and in addition I have money set aside for an RRSP" ["Retirement savings plan registered with the Canadian government"] "... yet you, with the salary you make, have no RRSP's set aside and have all these debts. Do you have a gambling problem? Ot a drug problem? What's your problem, Mr. Lord?"
"What could I tell him? That I had an ART problem? That I once was a Neoist? That I could only shit on his normaloid values and wipe my ass with his sacrosanct "money"? That instead of paying my rent I preferred forking out $600 for David Rattray to fly up so I could listen to him doing a reading at The Foufounes Électriques? How could a bank manager make any sense of that? He frowned and consolidated my debts-I now had just one payment to make every paycheque, but I had to follow this schedule strictly." - p 200
HahahahHAha! This is another point where I can really identify. I live in a house full of thousands of bks, of records, of DVDs, of blu-rays, of 16mm films, of VHS tapes, of microfiches, of audio cassette tapes, of CDs, of magazines, of musical instruments, of costumes I've made & purchased, of files on obscure subjects, of musical scores, of super-8 films, of filmstrips, of regular-8 films - in short I've dedicated phenomenal amts of time to EDUCATING MYSELF & to CREATING THINGS at a level that yr average university professor wd never approach. At the same time, I can barely afford to eat or pay the bills. The money I get from Social Security for 47 yrs of work is waaaaayyyyy below the poverty limit. Am I insane?! To people who don't give a shit whether they ever know anything or have an original thought in their lives or ever actually accomplish anything other than make sure that when they're in their 70s they can afford to park their vacationing heavily-drugged ass in a hotel so that they can bask in the sun like drying fruit, the answer is YES, I'm probably insane - but to people who feel like really living life means to embrace its possibilities passionately I might very well be a hero. Alan's pursuit of his passions are well worth the aggravation that ensues b/c at least he's truly alive wch is more than I'd say about most people.
Chapter 19 GUTTERDÄMMERUNG
Page 199: Appel au Clan Panneton - by Les Frogs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP8QdD7AAos
"On July 28th 1988, Dubé and I decided to call up Nam June Paik. We dialed up his number in the morning and when he answered we yelled: "Wake up Nam June Paik, today is Marcel Duchamp's birthday!" He yelled back at us excitedly "Duchamp! Duchamp! Duchamp!"
"On the same date the previous year-Duchamp's centenary-Dubé and the SCP had set up a computer installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which houses Duchamp's main body of work." - p 214
&, as noted previously, I participated in that w/ a 31 minute performance over the telephone by myself & my girlfriend at the time, Laura Adele Trussell. In fact, inspired by this reminder, I just pulled my audio cassette of it from my aRCHIVE, digitized it, & put it on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/photo-albums-for-duchamp . The piece is called "Photo Albums for Duchamp".
Chapter 20 DOWN AND OUT IN MONTREAL
Page 205: T'é Qui Toé - by Dédé Traké
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsYb8Ea989M
"I sorely regret never making it to Brussels' famed <i>Moeder Lambic</i>-the Mecca of Belgian beer: 1100 different brands, with 110 available on tap, all in line along the counter." pp 218-219
If I were to become an alcoholic & drink myself to death I think I'd DEMAND that I do so w/ the most expensive Belgian beer.
"Finally we were invited to play in a festival at the legendary Plan K hall in Molenbeek, where Joy Division, Bauhaus, Cabaret Voltaire, Human League, and the Psychedelic Furs had played. It was a lugubrious industrial music festival-a Brussels speciality at the time-and a dozen mournful Gothic synth bands, with darkened eyes and gloomy music, were waiting to take turns playing. Unfortunately for them, with our cheerful bouncy songs the audience started dancing and having fun-obviously against the wishes of the festival promoters. After our show, everyone left. The hall was empty, and their Dying Undertakers Fest gave its last sigh. We'd managed to destroy a festival!" - p 221
When I think of "Plan K" I think of the Belgian theater group that I saw perform at the Theater Project in BalTimOre whose name was taken from a pun of William S. Burroughs so I assume that the venue was connected to them. They were excellent.
"When we received our "import" album we went to the Café Cléopatre to celebrate. Dédé Traké was the DJ that night. He put on the album and made the strippers pole dance to our charmingly sick songs. The manager told him to stop it. Dédé shrugged him off and cranked up the volume. He refused to take it off and was fired, right in front of us. Poor Dédé. Lost his job because of Vent du Mont Schärr." - p 227
Chapter 21 VDMS IN EUROPE
Page 219: Le Moeder Lambic - Brussels' Temple of Beer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp1dalUT354
"So finally, The Losers Palace had become our Beat Hotel. All three of us laid down our key literary works there, and read them out loud to each other, choking with laughter. It was at Mario's Castel Rosalie, apartment 23, that I served my stint as a seedy bum, a doomed poet, a hungry artist, a welfare loser, a broke musician.
"It was the best time of my life." - p 241
Chapter 22 BURROUGHS' SHOTGUN PAINTINGS
Page 233: A demonstration of Burroughs' Shotgun Paintings technique
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u02kFg_nxeA
"Miraculously, I got a translation contract from Traductor-the translation company Caroline worked for-just in time to provide money for the trip. It was a technical translation for Circo Craft-a company that made printed circuits. I needed a computer to work on, so Traductor lent me a Mac. The owner was a sleazy fat fuckface who notoriously paid late or not even at all, so I held the Mac hostage until he provided me with a certified bank cheque." - p 242
"Gagnon later pointed out to me that Bonspiel had taken off with our Frogs' fee. Fair enough for me-it was payback for the money I owed him. But how about the other Frogs? That's the sort of assholery that was par for the course in music, and which I'd had enough of by then. That was to be the last show for The Frogs, and the start of my countdown to blowing off VDMS for good." - p 243
Soon after the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, Alan was applying for a job:
"The secretary asked me to sit in the waiting room. I passed a sign which said WELCOME TO THE CHINESE PEOPLE'S DELEGATION. Then a horde of geeky white-shirted Chinese piled in through the door and were led by chuffed executives into a boardroom.
""What the hell is this?" I was thinking. "Are these cocksuckers schmoozing those murderous pricks to build hydro towers in China?" I was stewing in anger, feeling powerless. "I'm a Neoist," I finally reminded myself. "What would a Neoist do in a situation like this?"
"I charged into the boardroom meeting, and ran around yelling in fake Chinglish "BANG! BANG! TIEN AN MEN! YOU KILL STUDENTS??? BANG! BANG! TIEN AN MEN, TIEN AN MEN!"-I took them all by surprise. The Tri-Steel execs froze, and before they could react I bolted out the door and scrammed the hell off, squealing the tires of my Fire Chicken Camaro, like Steve McQueen." - p 252
You did NEOISM proud w/ that one, Alan. Good onya, meatey.
Chapter 23 ON THE ROAD IN FRANCE AND CATALUNYA
Page 243: Du Beaujolais - by Les Garçons Bouchers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X06TM8dIEg4&t=8s
Page 247: The Guardian article on Manu Chao
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/may/09/manu-chao-clandestino-culshaw
Page 249: Patchanka - by Mano Negra
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Iu0u9IBxw
"Bonspiel says: "Our last show was at the Foufs in May of 1990 and it really felt like it." After packing up the gear I told the boys not to call me ever again to do any shows. That was it, I was throwing in the towel, hanging up my skates, pulling up my socks. I wanted to concentrate on my Biodome project, and settling down to a normal life with Caroline. I was now nearly 36 years old and finally smartening up. I stopped doing drugs. The time for fun and excess was over. That had become boring now. Throughout the Eighties I had the time of my life. Now it was time to change it." - p 258
My time for fun & excess hasn't exactly ended but I, too, at least stopped smoking pot & hash after a ridiculous paranoid incident in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1988. I was 34. I'd already stopped my brief flirtation w/ C & D. IMO, it's healthy when a person can distance themselves from their behavior & recognize patterns that cd stand being changed.
"That June, Dubé and I got together and created a Third MInd-we founded Le Groupe Absence-a pseudo-corporate entity that subverted a culture so cherished by Anglo-Americans: Corporate Culture. Our goal was to exasperate business-inclined folks with newsletters, slogans and catch phrases even more ridiculous than theirs.
"We were soon joined by Tristan-who wanted to put together an opera called Ultramar-as well as John Berndt in Baltimore, and Florian Kramer in Germany, who got it immediately and dove right in." - p 261
It's "Cramer", not "Kramer". I participated in it too w/:
"Air Drop #1: Code Name: Uniform Foxtrot Oscar
- overtop Baltimore, us@
- Saturday, September 28th, 1997, 3:30 to 4:30PM
- I (tANGO, aLPHA cHARLIE {Practicing Promotextual & Air Dresser}) plotted this action with pilot Delta Bravo. We decided to drop approximately 1,000 paper airplanes from a small plane over Baltimore - coincidentally simultaneous with the 2nd annual book fair being held in the Mount Vernon area there. Delta & I agreed to have a text printed on the planes that would vaguely give it the appearance of an advertisement & to use green paper to be suggestive of money. The basic text was:
"Free Ticket Out Of Baltimore
LIMITED OFFER!
Redeemable Anywhere Within City Limits
Le Groupe Absence""
- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOutline1997.html
A movie that's of this & the 2nd Air Drop is online - on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/HnT-zipCquM - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/air-drops .
Chapter 24 THE END OF MY ROAD TO RUIN
Page 263: Bonyeu - by Les Colocs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJpyEGj9jjA
"I also deposited my Carnaval Tragique manuscript at Les Éditions Blanche. They'd published Kathy Acker. After a few weeks the verdict came back: "C'est une bombe, mais est-elle bien amorcée?" [""It's explosive, but is the bomb well-primed?""] "It was rejected, and I didn't push it any further. I suspect being a complete unknown was my fatal crime. I was a nobody, and didn't have the inclination to start tirelessly building a cult following and carefully nurture some stupid purple-haired tattooed "persona"." - p 272
Why did Les Éditions Blanche publish Kathy Acker? Given my already expressed opinion that she's a horrible writer perhaps she wasn't published b/c after careful consideration they thought her writing deserved to be canonized. Perhaps her being rich & sexually promiscuous was more important in the decision-making process. Alan was already a rock star so having purple hair or tattoos weren't really necessary. Despite Alan's contempt, there was time when having purple hair & being tattooed actually took more courage than, I think, Alan ever had.
"Virilio was a curious little man, very vivacious. He could have passed off as the cheery village priest in any corner of France. Except he started out as an urbanist, quickly becoming a sought-after "public intellectual"-something France has an abundance of-and which the rest of the world sorely lacks." - p 276
"Paris is so romantic, isn't it? Well, we knew better by now. It's a hot, dirty, smelly, overcrowded, surly, gridlocked, polluted, expensive hell-hole for those who aren't rich or just passing thru with a load of tourist cash, and are actually stuck living there scuffling to make ends meet. If you work there, you're poor. You have to fight your way through the subway crowds at rush hour, observing the rats cavorting merrily around the tracks, or watch in horror as a homeless woman squats to pee on the subway platform across from yours." - p 281
Chapter 25 ESCAPE TO PARIS / ESCAPE FROM PARIS
Page 271: Opéra Bulles exhibit, Parc de La Villette, Paris
http://www.lucie-lom.fr/site/scenographies/opera-bulles/
"For over 30 years I had thought the audiovisual archives of Ultimatum II lost forever. Fortuitously, it turned out that Tentatively surreptitiously asked the video crew for a copy of those Videotron mixdowns, and in 2017 he told me he had the mixdown tapes for five nights of the festival. He was kind enough to digitize them, so we have at least that."
[..]
"Overall, Cynthia Jarvis did a great job, but she was gender biased at say the least, and preferred long rambling texts by women, instead of much stronger performances by male iconoclasts. Thus, left on her cutting room floor were the SCP, Gordon W, and Steve McCaffery's superlative Bachelor Machine." - p 293
I remembered that I had gotten the tapes by asking for them from a cooperative & friendly video crew member. However, looking at my records, it appears instead that Boris Wanowitch got them somehow & generously shared them w/ me. This was the Neoist spirit: sharing ideas & products w/ each other in support of our peculiar form of revolution.
"This book proves in spades that what we had going on here in the Eighties was a world-class underground art scene rivalling any other in History." - p 295
"After making it to old age and surviving a few close calls, you realize that what matters isn't what you may have done or accomplished, it's the people you were with. Suddenly, your memories of them is the only precious commodity that's left to you." - p 297
A takeaway from this for me is that it's the people who're passionate about something other than money who are the ones most likely to be supportive fellow-travelers. Remember that I DROVE from BalTimOre to Montréal at my own expense for Ultimatum II - I didn't expect Alan to pay for a plane or a bus. I got pd $150, considerably less than the art-stars - so who was the one salvaged that the Ultimatum II tapes? Me. The guy who wasn't getting pd to do it. 30 yrs later I still had those tapes, I'd aRCHIVED them b/c I thought they were important - not b/c I thought there'd be money in it for me. The best times of my life have been spent w/ cultural conspirators w/ the same passionate mindset - I can live w/o the art stars - & so can the rest of humanity.
Chapter 26 EPILOGUES
Page 287: Mario Campo memorial website
APPENDIX B VIDEO WEB LINKS
"ULTIMATUM (1985)"
The John Giorno Band: https://vimeo.com/553330473
VIDEO 1 CBC TV News & Performances in French: https://vimeo.com/553300131
CBC TV News Feature, Geneviève Letarte, Michel Lefebvre, Steve Montambault, Janou Saint-Denis, André Tcetera... , Michael Delisle
VIDEO 2 Performances in French: https://vimeo.com/553305367
Claude Beausoleil, Colette Tougas, Jean-Paul Daoust, Anonyme Sanregret, Daniel Guimond, Josée Yvon, Denis Vanier, Mario Campo, Pauline Harvey
VIDEO 3 Performances in French: https://vimeo.com/553321768
The Woeurks, Jean-Claude Gagnon, Alain Martin Richard, Richard Martel, Jean-Yves Fréchette, Pierre-André Arcand, Concept Variable, Paul Chamberland, Jack Five, Boris Wanowitch / Boys du Sévère, Sylvère Lotringer
ULTIMATUM Record Launch (Part 1): https://vimeo.com/553712997
Anonyme Sanregret, Concept Variable
ULTIMATUM Record Launch (Part 2): https://vimeo.com/553715734
Vent du Mont Schärr (first show ever), Mario Campo
"ULTIMATUM TUESDAYS (1986 - 1987)"
Kathy Acker Reading (Part 1): https://vimeo.com/554680291
Kathy Acker Reading (Part 2): https://vimeo.com/554683748
Between C & D (from New York): https://vimeo.com/551972168
Introduction by Alan Lord, Joel Rose, Lisa Blaushild, Catherine Texier, Darius James
Un Cycle Laurentien (Bernard Gagnon): https://vimeo.com/551939471
"ULTIMATUM II (1987)"
DAY I - SALUT LES RICHES (French Montreal): https://vimeo.com/554710556
Festival kickoff by Alan Lord, The Pantry Partners, and emcee Jean-Luc Bonspiel,
Jack Five, Poutines Productions (Myriam Cliche), Claude-Michel Prévost, Nitroglycérine with artists David Sapin, Christian Dion, reading by Jean-Luc Bonspiel, VDMS (Vent du Mont Schärr)
DAY 2 - COLD CITY FICTION (Toronto): https://vimeo.com/554719049
Emcee Jean-Luc Bonspiel, Eldon Garnet, Arnie Achtman, The Nibelungenbüro (John Bentley Mays), Violence & The Sacred, Karl Jirgens, Judith Doyle, Donna Lypchuk, Susan Parker
DAY 3 - BORDERLINES (Vancouver & Baltimore) https://vimeo.com/554728366
Emcee Jean-Luc Bonspiel, John Berndt, Ken Lester, Mecca Normal, Judy Radul, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, I, Braineater
DAY 4 - ANGLOMANIACS! (English Montreal): https://vimeo.com/554738018
Joy Lou G, Mohamud Togane, Ian Stephens, Darrell Ecklund, Anne Seymour, Nick Toczek, Rhythm Activism
DAY 7 - AU DELÀ DE LA 'MODERNITÉ' (Quebec Poetry): https://vimeo.com/554748778
L'ATTACQ Orchestra (Alain-Arthur Painchaud, René Lussier), Josée Yvon, Irène Mayer, Hélène Monette, Nicole Brossard, L'ATTACQ Orchestra, Les Sanscoeurs, Paul Chamberland
ULTIMATUM II TRAILER (IN ENGLISH) https://vimeo.com/554696423
Ultimatum II trailer, then clips from Ultimatum 1985: Monty Cantsin, a Miguel Raymond video, Anonyme Sanregret, Concept Variable, Red Shift, Geneviève Letarte, Jack Five, The John Giorno Band, Boys du Sévère, Colette Tougas
GENERIC AS-BEENISM (tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE): https://vimeo.com/552128815
- December 4, 2022 notes from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
idioideo at gmail dot com
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Anti-Neoism page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Audiography page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Bibliography page
to my "Blaster" Al Ackerman index
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE BYOC page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Censored or Rejected page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Collaborations page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (d) compositions page
to Amir-ul Kafirs' Facebook page
to the "FLICKER" home-page for the alternative cinematic experience
to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's GoodReads profile
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Haircuts page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Home Tapers page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE index page
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE Instagram Poetry page
to a listing of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's manifestations on the Internet Archive
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE as Interviewee index
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE as Interviewer index
to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE'S Linked-In profile
to the mm index
to see an underdeveloped site re the N.A.A.M.C.P. (National Association for the Advancement of Multi-Colored Peoples)
to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's Neoism page
to the DEFINITIVE Neoism/Anti-Neoism website
to the Philosopher's Union website
to the tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE movie-making "Press: Criticism, Interviews, Reviews" home-page
to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's Score Movies
to SMILEs
to find out more about why the S.P.C.S.M.E.F. (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sea Monkeys by Experimental Filmmakers) is so important
to the "tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - Sprocket Scientist" home-page
to Psychic Weed's Twitter page
to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's Vimeo index
to Vine movies relevant to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE made by Ryan Broughman
to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's presence in the Visual Music Village
for info on tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's tape/CD publishing label: WIdémoUTH
to a very small selection of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's Writing