Martin Booth o-o-o-o

Crabapple sent me this one after a conversation over cocktails in Brooklyn back in the summer, during which Crowley’s name was brought up. Neither of us are Crowleyites (I think) but we both have varying degrees of interest in the occult. My curiosity is a bit more recent, largely ignited by three bits of information:

1. Modern Art had its beginnings in the occult (which—unbeknownst to the public—kinda makes modern art museums de facto temples of the occult).

2. Most modern occult movements seem to have been triggered by the European rediscovery of Ancient Egypt (see Napoleon’s Sorcerers and Margaret Murray).

3. Alan Moore.

Any interest I might’ve had in Crowley in particular though was largely based on what very little I knew of him; the things that make their way to you without any active research you might embark on on your own. Namely, that he was an occultist who amassed a large following after his death due largely to his efforts in self-publishing. Or so I thought. Reading this book brings every dark crevice of this wicked man’s life to light, and… it ain’t pretty. That isn't to say that the book is a negative look at Crowley. In fact, it's incredibly balanced, to the point where you might find yourself baffled by the author's ability not to comment on some of most outrageous bits in this chronicle. Those are the parts I like the most to be honest, because when the author does offer his own take on something, it can often be quite flawed. One example is when Crowley had a less than favorable opinion about the Statue of Liberty's location of New York when it was originally conceived for the Suez Canal, to which Martin Booth claims Crowley must've been misinformed. Why Booth is unaware of what is arguably common knowledge is rather surprising to me. And with that one must take caution in the passages where Booth imparts his own knowledge of history independent of Crowley. But otherwise, Booth chronicles Crowley's life from the moment of birth until death in such a masterfully exciting way, you'll find yourself glued to the book and burning through its pages with ferocious speed. It helps of course that Crowley's life was a fascinating one to say the least. It's certainly difficult to like him after reading this, so much that I question how on Earth he can possibly have a following at all. But as unlikeable as he is, there can be no dispute that his life was rather enthralling, dotted by one shitty choice after the next. There are aspects to him that I'm sure any maverick might find appealing (hello, Crabapple), like his disdain for societal norms and his inclination to oppose the culture at large at every possible opportunity. One of the bits I found most fascinating was Crowley's attempt at establishing a commune in Sicily. With someone of Crowley's incredibly poor decision-making skills at the helm, the experiment failed in every terrible way possible. But this still—along with many other aspects of Crowley's life—pits him as a leading predecessor to the counter-cultural movement that would take root in America some 40 years later! Had the details of his experiment been brought to light sooner on a mass popular scale, the utopia-seekers of the 1960's might've been able to finetune their methods and avoid making the exact same mistakes. Crowley was in fact ahead of his time in more way than one it seems, but they all seem to have filtered through the cognitive part of his brain that inevitably results in terribly poor judgement. Be it sex, publishing, mountaineering, money-management, human relations, religious exploration, travel... you always get a sense of brilliance combined with complete idiocy. It's such a dichotomy that makes for a fascinating read, even if you care not for Crowley or even the occult for that matter.

The other thing that makes this book so great is that—like the best biographies—it's an absolutely fantastic window on a tumultuous period in history. From the turn of the century to the World War I to the roaring twenties and well through World War II, all serve as a backdrop to the life of one of the most eccentric characters in human history, and you get a feel for how it must've been better than any movie or period piece could ever do justice. Down to the little fact that opium, cocaine, and heroin were readily prescribed to treat things like asthma and freakin' toothaches! It doesn't take much to deduce that likely every single person Crowley interacted with must've been at least mildly intoxicated at any given time. In fact, it probably applies to everyone we read about who ever lived between 1898 to 1950.

But that's not why you should read this book. You'll read it because it's a damn thrill, and... it'll probably make you think twice before making any horrendous life choices.

[Buy]

#prose

Cormac McCarthy o

I am so utterly angry at this book. It starts off good enough until you realize that the entirety of the thing is more or less the same as the first 10 pages. And if ever you wanted a blueprint for anticlimactic endings, well then no need to look any further.

And also, the subtext in this thing? Atrocious. All it wants to do is hammer in the notion that people who work in groups as a community are vicious cannibals, and the only way to possibly survive is to persevere on your own. What a load of poorly disguised Randian egoist trash.

Avoid at all costs.

#prose

Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett o-o-o-o-o

In most of his interviews, Andy Warhol wasn't very talkative and came off as hella awkward while simultaneously being kinda snarky, often dicking interviewers around. So it's quite refreshing to be getting his take on things in his own voice. 300 pages of it, no less. Sure, you can bet the actual writing was done by Pat Hacket, but you can be equally sure that the voice behind the writing belongs to no one but Andy Warhol.

“Very few people on the [West] Coast knew or cared about contemporary art, and the press for my show wasn't too good. I always have a laugh, though, when I think of how Hollywood called Pop Art a put-on! Hollywood?? I mean, when you look at the kind of movies they were making then—those were supposed to be real??”

It's also nice to see him recount his transition from his commercial art practice to his early beginning within the gallery circuit— when he was still not quite sure of himself— before he became a superstar and way before his studio became the go-to place for every major counter-cultural figure in America.

“By the time Ivan [Karp] (who worked at Leo Castelli Gallery) introduced me to Henry [Geldzahler] (who at the time was a new young 'curatorial-assistant-with-no-specific-duties' at the Met) I was keeping my commercial drawings absolutely buried in another part of the house because one of the people Ivan had brought by before had remembered me from my commercial art days and asked to see some drawings. As soon as I showed them to him, his whole attitude toward me changed. I could actually see him changing his mind about my paintings, so from then on I decided to have a firm no-show policy about the drawings. Even with Henry, it was a couple of months before I was secure enough about his mentality to show them to him.”

But if it's the explosive Factory years you're interested in, rest assured there's plenty of that as well. One of the best things about this book though is Warhol's observations about the times. Because that is very much what the book is: a window onto the 1960's through they eyes and words of Andy Warhol. It starts off in 1960 and ends in 1969. By all accounts the 60's was a very special decade in America, and Warhol's retelling definitely drives the point home

“Everything went young in '64. The kids were throwing out all the preppy outfits and the dress-up clothes that made them look like their mothers and fathers, and suddenly everything was reversed—the mothers and fathers were trying to look like their kids.”

It gets better:

“Generally speaking, girls were still pretty chubby, but with the new slim clothes coming in, they all went on diets. This was the first year I can remember seeing loads of people drink low-calorie sodas.”

And then later:

“Since diet pills are made out of amphetamine, that was one reason speed was as popular with Society as it was with street people. And these Society women would pass out the pills to the whole family, too—to their sons and daughters to help them lose weight, and to their husbands to help them work harder and stay out later. There were so many people from every level on amphetamine, and although it sounds strange, I think a lot of it was because of the new fashions.”

So you get interesting anecdotes like that, with associations and theories only someone like Warhol would come up with; Fashion made Speed popular.

He does go on tangents throughout the book, recounting other people's stories instead of his own—which I s'pose you can say is a very Warholian thing to do, isn't it? I can imagine some people getting tired of these long tangents, but I find them to be wonderful additions to Warhol's montage of the decade.

”'I gave Bob Dylan a book of my poems a couple of years ago,' Taylor [Mead] said, 'right after the first time I saw him perform. I thought he was a great poet and I told him so... And now', Taylor started to laugh, 'now when he's a big sensation and everything, he asked me for a free copy of my second book. I said 'but you're rich now—you can afford to buy it!' And he said, 'But I only get paid quarterly.'”

These asides cover a huge roster of characters, from Dylan to Jackson Pollock to Robert Rauschenberg to Jonas Mekas to Dennis Hopper to Edie Sedgwick to Jim Morrison to Lou Reed to Nico to Mick Jagger and on and on. The tone is very conversational and often gosspiy, but it isn't all mere gossip. You learn, for example, how Warhol introduced Henry Geldzahler to a young British painter by the name of David Hockney. This was before Geldzahler became curator of American Art at the Met and way before he became Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for New York City. And it was really before Andy Warhol himself became anything close to a cult figure, which he would start to become only 1-2 years later.

Hard to imagine the transition when you take into account the initial reception towards his work:

“When Ivan brought Leo Castelli up to my studio, the place was a mass, with the big canvases strewn around the living room—painting was a lot messier than drawing. Leo looked my stuff over, the Dick Tracys and the Nose Jobs in particular, and then said, 'Well, it's unfortunate, the timing, because I just took on Roy Lichtenstein, and the two of you in the same gallery would collide.”

And then later:

“Henry Geldzahler was also pounding the pavements for me. He offered me to Sidney Janis, who refused. He begged Robert Elkon. He approached Eleanor Ward, who seemed interested but said she didn't have room. Nobody, but nobody, would take me.”

Amidst the stories, the gossip, and observations, there's also the occasional tip.

“To be successful as an artist, you have to have your work shown in a good gallery for the same reason that, say, Dior never sold his originals from a counter in Woolworth's. It's a matter of marketing, among other things. If a guy has, say, a few thousand dollars to spend on a painting, he doesn't wander along the street till he sees something lying around that 'amuses' him. He wants to buy something that's going to go up and up in value, and the only way that can happen is with a good gallery, one that looks out for the artist, promotes him, and sees to it that his work is shown in the right way to the right people.”

He finally got his first New York show in the fall of '62 at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery (only 3 years before announcing his retirement from painting). By early '63 he'd moved his work studio from his home to an old firehouse on East 87th st, and soon thereafter he hired Gerard Malanga as his assistant, who was also instrumental in keeping Andy plugged into all the cultural happenings.

“Gerard kept up with every arty event and movement in the city—all the things that sent out fliers or advertised in the Voice. He took me to a lot of dank, musty basements where plays were put on, movies screened, poetry read—he was an influence on me in that way.”

The more things Warhol was exposed to, the more he soaked up stuff like a sponge, not just for his art, but for his very persona.

“In those days I didn't have a real fashion look yet... Eventually I picked up some style from Wynn [Chamberlain] , who was one of the first to go in for the S & M leather look.”

Perhaps some of the most interesting parts in the book is when Warhol recounts some of his efforts in film, which indeed took up the majority of the 60's despite not “bringing home the bacon” in the same way the paintings did. Even today Andy's films have yet to occupy the same place his paintings have, but in reading his retelling it's hard to think that even the most skeptical of skeptics wouldn't be able to see that there's at least a bit of genius in them. In one bit, Warhol even talks about “slow cinema” something that seems to be regaining popularity in recent years.

“That had always fascinated me, the way people could sit by a window or on a porch all day and look out and never be bored, but then if they went to a movie or a play, they suddenly objected to being bored. I always felt that a very slow film could be just as interesting as a porch-sit if you thought about it the same way.” But all in all the greatest thing about the book is that it's such a perceptive account of some of the most interesting aspects of 60's New York. There's lots on Jonas Mekas' Cinematheque, plenty on the changing neighborhoods, how the East Village was becoming all Bohemian, when the Beatles became all the rage and the Stones were having publicity issues, how fashions were quickly evolving year after year (“The masses wanted to look non-conformist, so that meant the non-conformity had to be mass-manufactured”).

I find it quite odd that in the wide array of art-related books recommended to me over the years, Andy Warhol's Popism was never mentioned once. In fact, I never even knew of the book's existence, and just happened upon it by sheer coincidence. It strikes me as essential reading to anyone interested in not just Andy Warhol, but New York's art scene in the 60's more generally, arguably the most important decade in American art and culture at large. And actually, art aside, it's an incredible telling account of the decade more generally, with Warhol's keen observations on things like fashion, music, and media. Even with Warhol's shortcomings—his obsessions with things like glamour, fame, and money, all things that come across in this here book—he still manages to do what he's always done best: hold up a mirror right in America's face.

Highly recommended.

[Buy]

#prose

by William Gibson o-o-c

NEUROMANCER is not a good novel, but it is essential reading.

How do you figure that?

Well, the first thing that hits you when reading NEUROMANCER is Gibson’s inventive use of language. The opening line, which is not dialogue, not a bit of “action”, not anything pertaining to any character—but rather a mere description of a scene—is one of the most memorable opening lines in the history of literature:

The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel. And that is actually very indicative of the entire novel. The characters negligible, the story unmemorable, but the passages: sheer magic. Most of the time, they won’t mean much, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be enchanted by them anyway.

Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline.... And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned, forehead drenched with the azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. Gibson, like Alan Moore, admits that he’s never cared much for plot, but unlike Moore, Gibson strikes me as someone who has very little to say (at least as far as his first novel is concerned), and rather than step away from the obsession with plot (that most entertainment writers are consumed by) in favor of a story’s core concern, Gibson seems to divert his attention entirely to the musicality of words.

Case triggered his second program. A carefully engineered virus attacked the code fabric screening primary custodial commands for the subbasement that housed the Sense/Net research materials. “Boston,” Molly’s voice came across the link. “I’m downstairs.” Case switched and saw the blank wall of the elevator. She was unzipping the white pants. A bulky packet, exactly the shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with micropore. She knelt and peeled the tape away. Streaks of burgundy flickered across the mimetic ploycarbon as she unfolded the Modern suit. Even when describing action, an actual plot point in the story, Gibson gets too caught up in the rhythm of fresh-sounding words, even if they do very little to affix the mind’s eye to the scene at hand. In fact, they typically serve to do the exact opposite, eject one from the story completely and instead get swept away by the sheer aesthetics of vocabulary, meaning be damned.

It is no wonder that even admirers of NEUROMANCER have very little to say about the story, and instead prefer to lean on Gibson’s invention of the word “cyberspace.” Of course, they also stress that one has to consider the time it was written: 1984, and as such realize how ahead of its time it really was.

While yes, envisioning a completely virtual world made capable by a vast network of computer mainframes that characters plug into in order to enter and operate within is indeed a visionary stroke of genius for that time, but let’s not forget that there was some degree of precedent to that idea in things like TRON (1982). Gibson is often credited with “envisioning” the internet before it happened, but a more accurate prophecy less soaked in fantasy can be found in the networked discussion forums imagined in Orson Scott Card’s ENDER’S GAME.

But yes, “cyberspace” as a word was indeed invented by Gibson in NEUROMANCER. And the book is full of like inventions. On every other page of the thing you’re bound to come across a new word:

Temperfoam Microbionics Ultrasuede Microchannel Dermatrode Shockstave Dermadisk Wintermute

And on and on. But after a while, you get the gimmick: slap two average words together and voila! A new exciting word emerges, much like “cyberspace”, or heck, the book’s very title for that matter: “Neuromancer”.

Not to downplay Gibson’s knack for inventing new words or his ear for the musicality of unexpected words following one another. It is, after all, the novel’s highest selling point as far as I’m concerned. Possibly even its only selling point, but not one to be undermined, for it will completely shed new light on the beauty of language and give you a purely aesthetic experience from the mere act of reading sentences.

But all of that comes at the expense of story.

Is it a good novel? No. Highly recommended? Hell yes.

[Buy]

#prose