This past Saturday, April 17, saw the (if I'm not mistaken) third incarnation of the Alternative Media Expo, sponsored by Leo McGovern and the good folks at Antigravity Magazine. Esconced in the urban vibe of the warehouse section of the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans' gallery district, the annual shindig highlights such homegrown, grassroots entrepreuneurial ventures as the New Orleans Craft Mafia, Defend New Orleans, Dirty Coast t-shirts and Crescent City Comics. Deep South Samizdat Books was, of course, honored to be in such esteemed company, and the day proved to be fun, inspiring and lucrative.
The organizers charge five dollars admission, which I admit I questioned the wisdom of originally. However, I have completely come around to the concept, as it seems to prime the pump for the festival of independent, noncorporate commerce that takes place, the collective thumbing of the nose to the Targets and Gaps and Old Navys that eternally threaten to turn us into just another Cincinnati or Dallas or Topeka. The interaction that subsequently takes place is not one of frenzied consumption, but one of appreciative engagement with artists, craftspeople, journalists, or in my case, a creative recycler of densely packed, interactive nuggets of intellectual, philosophical and spiritual wisdom known as books.
And the books you people were buying! Multiple copies of volumes by the erotic apostle D.H. Lawrence; quantum psychologist and cult novelist Robert Anton Wilson; modern mythmaker Neil Gaiman; transgressive science-fiction outlaw Samuel R. Delaney; Cold War-era Eastern European science fiction Solzhenitsyn Stanislaw Lem; Gothic Suburban Surrealist Shirley Jackson; militaristic crypto-libertarian Robert Heinlein; Noir Underbelly-of-the-American-
Century chronicler James Ellroy; the Mississippi Moonshine Modernist, William Faulkner; the creator of Conan, the spinner of sword and sorcery from central Texas, Robert E. Howard; the Florida sunshine and southern spice of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston; and the cyberpunk standard-bearer Bruce Sterling.
Now, I had the presence of mind to bring multiple copies of the aforementioned, but I would have been hardpressed to proclaim that they would outsell such counterculture mainstays as Vonnegut, Huxley, Rand, Camus, Hesse, etc. Heavy on the speculative fiction, with a smattering of classic modern lit, all embodying the ambiguous yet highly evocative gumbo of alternative media. Well done, my friends.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Urban Cowboy Mouth
Book reviewed:
Just Kids
by Patti Smith
Harper Collins Publishers, 2010
278 pages
Patti Smith's Just Kids is a passionate tribute to her dear friend (and one-time lover) the late Robert Mapplethorpe, and to the New York in which they came of age in the late 1960's and 1970's. Smith was just making a name for herself as a poet and rock journalist when she emerged from the CBGB's punk scene that spawned the Ramones and Talking Heads, among others, while Mapplethorpe developed an intense photographic style, much of it infused with gay and s/m themes, before dying of AIDS in 1989. The young, still-aspiring artists matured among the moveable feast of Beats and Punks, young turks and elders who were recreating the city and the world in their image.
Smith has made an idiosyncratic but iconic career as musician, writer and visual artist out of a romantic commitment to a pure distillation of art, idolizing and idealizing those she considers to have shared that utter commitment (Baudelaire, Genet, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards) or even been consumed by it as martyrs to artistic purity (Rimbaud, Jackson Pollock, Jim Morrison) Similar larger-than-life figures move in and out of the narrative, changing and evolving the culture around them as surely as Hemingway, Joyce, Picasson, Pound and Stein in 1920's Paris. Throughout, Smith maintains a certain Candide meets Forrest Gump innocence, resisting the drug use around her, professing surprise when Mapplethorpe's embrace of homosexuality becomes personal, rather than simply artistic and voyeuristic.
So many vivid portraits emerge, highly personal and unique, yet simultaneously timeless: Mapplethorpe embraces the transgressive New York world of Warhol, drag queens and bohemian socialites, but lies to his Catholic parents about him and Smith being married; Kris Kristofferson sings "Me and Bobby McGee" to Janis Joplin while Smith sits on the floor; Salvador Dali sees her with a stuffed crow and tells Smith she looks like a "gothic crow": she begins an intense affair with a drummer who introduces himself as Slim Shady, only to find out several days later that he is Off-Broadway playwriting sensation (and husband and father) Sam Shepard, who she collaborates with on the play Cowboy Mouth.
Harry Smith, Gregory Corso and Jim Carroll, (who appears in a similar, decadent saintly role in Kathleen Norris' 1970's in New York memoir The Virgin of Bennington), all dead now (if any of those names are unfamiliar to you, go to Google immediately, then come back. It's okay, we'll wait for you.... Take your time.... Okay, come on back now, you can return to that later.... come on, I'll loan you some books) are among the others who inspire Smith along the way, and are portrayed with much affection and respect. Each of the three were sporadically brilliant artists with emotionally trying personalities, as symbolic of their city at the time as anyone. As in Carroll's classic song, "People Who Died," Smith endows her time, her circle of friends and lovers, and her city, with a luminescent dignity which will make you search your bookshelves, cd racks and Netflix queue for the artifacts they left behind.
Just Kids
by Patti Smith
Harper Collins Publishers, 2010
278 pages
Patti Smith's Just Kids is a passionate tribute to her dear friend (and one-time lover) the late Robert Mapplethorpe, and to the New York in which they came of age in the late 1960's and 1970's. Smith was just making a name for herself as a poet and rock journalist when she emerged from the CBGB's punk scene that spawned the Ramones and Talking Heads, among others, while Mapplethorpe developed an intense photographic style, much of it infused with gay and s/m themes, before dying of AIDS in 1989. The young, still-aspiring artists matured among the moveable feast of Beats and Punks, young turks and elders who were recreating the city and the world in their image.
Smith has made an idiosyncratic but iconic career as musician, writer and visual artist out of a romantic commitment to a pure distillation of art, idolizing and idealizing those she considers to have shared that utter commitment (Baudelaire, Genet, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards) or even been consumed by it as martyrs to artistic purity (Rimbaud, Jackson Pollock, Jim Morrison) Similar larger-than-life figures move in and out of the narrative, changing and evolving the culture around them as surely as Hemingway, Joyce, Picasson, Pound and Stein in 1920's Paris. Throughout, Smith maintains a certain Candide meets Forrest Gump innocence, resisting the drug use around her, professing surprise when Mapplethorpe's embrace of homosexuality becomes personal, rather than simply artistic and voyeuristic.
So many vivid portraits emerge, highly personal and unique, yet simultaneously timeless: Mapplethorpe embraces the transgressive New York world of Warhol, drag queens and bohemian socialites, but lies to his Catholic parents about him and Smith being married; Kris Kristofferson sings "Me and Bobby McGee" to Janis Joplin while Smith sits on the floor; Salvador Dali sees her with a stuffed crow and tells Smith she looks like a "gothic crow": she begins an intense affair with a drummer who introduces himself as Slim Shady, only to find out several days later that he is Off-Broadway playwriting sensation (and husband and father) Sam Shepard, who she collaborates with on the play Cowboy Mouth.
Harry Smith, Gregory Corso and Jim Carroll, (who appears in a similar, decadent saintly role in Kathleen Norris' 1970's in New York memoir The Virgin of Bennington), all dead now (if any of those names are unfamiliar to you, go to Google immediately, then come back. It's okay, we'll wait for you.... Take your time.... Okay, come on back now, you can return to that later.... come on, I'll loan you some books) are among the others who inspire Smith along the way, and are portrayed with much affection and respect. Each of the three were sporadically brilliant artists with emotionally trying personalities, as symbolic of their city at the time as anyone. As in Carroll's classic song, "People Who Died," Smith endows her time, her circle of friends and lovers, and her city, with a luminescent dignity which will make you search your bookshelves, cd racks and Netflix queue for the artifacts they left behind.
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