Double Rainbow, End to End

Acid Heroes by Ace Backwords

As a teenager I read several books by Alexander King, and they were a huge influence on my tender psyche. His memoirs formed my concept of what an artist is, and made me decide to grow up to be one. Sure, he was a heroin addict. But he was also the first one to confirm every one of the sneaking suspicions about the world which had been developing in my subconscious. And I wanted to make for myself a life that I could look back on with as much pleasure as King looked back on his.

It’s possible that Acid Heroes could have pretty much the same effect, and ruin a whole new generation of kids. Ruin them, that is, for the purposes of the military-industrial-religious-educational complex.

It’s okay to laugh ruefully at your old hippie self from the pinnacle of middle age, but to totally renounce that earlier, crazier self, as so many have done, is despicable. Ace Backwords has neatly avoided this possibility by remaining crazy, and also by pouring out for our delectation the results of years of psychedelically abetted thought processes.

Ace has been a fixture of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue scene for yonks. He used to publish Twisted Image, one of the zine era’s most widely-circulated publications. Cartoonist, musician, and writer, his mission has been to collect and present the art and music of street people. He’s published two other books, Twisted Image and Surviving on the Streets, both from the late lamented Loompanics Unlimited.

Acid Heroes is a druggy book with an anti-drug message; a detailed analysis of the downside of the counterculture which went on to become, in many negative ways, the culture. More than a memoir, it’s almost like being there – too much for comfort, maybe.

Geniuses, who often violate the rules of established society, certainly come to suffer for these deviations in various cruel ways but they are, at least, sustained in their travails by the glory of their brilliant accomplishments.
Alexander King

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Acid Heroes on YouTube

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Dry Hustle

Dry Hustle was published in 1977, and over the following 30 years, while Sarah Kernochan made a name for herself as a screenwriter, director, producer, singer, pianist, songwriter, and journalist, her book was on my want list. It turns out to be worth the wait.

Hippie girl Randy comes to NY with her boyfriend, and with, at his request half a pound of cocaine concealed on her person. He calls himself a neurophenomologist, but basically he’s a coke-head. Their plan falls apart, and Randy goes to work as a taxi-dancer. Kristal, a gypsy proficient in the art of getting money from men and giving nothing in return, takes young Randy under her wing.

“The first place you should never have to go is hungry,” Kristal says. Also she says, “I’m pleasingly plump. Anyone doesn’t like it can keep skinny eatin’ shit.”

“A good sadist is hard to find,” Kristal explains, after setting up a top-dollar gig with a man who wants to be abused by Kristal while Randy looks on and jeers. Kristal’s particular area of expertise is the story about why they need to be paid up front, a different story for each man. This poor sucker, like all the others before him, will arrive at the rendezvous to find no dominatrix and no apprentice.

Kristal teaches Randy all the ropes and then some. Money yes, sex no, is the operating principle. But then…. Randy meets a guy who seems to be a shining example of hippiedom, and falls for him like a ton of hashish. But when he and Kristal meet, they immediately recognize each other as master hustlers, and start talking shop. Cody is a motorcyclist in a gang of one, who says, “I don’t need any of the brother shit, just so I can ride a bike.”

Sarah Kernochan is a splendid writer. The Dry Hustle characters were based on a pair of real women she hung out with in the sleaze district of New York. Here is the beautiful description of Kristal eating:

Her eyes were narrowed to slivers, as if she were on top of a mountain facing into a steady powerful wind and she were eating to gain the extra weight needed to stand fast, immutable, immune, impenetrable, against the power.

A long, long time ago, I read that Karen Black would be playing Kristal in the movie. In fact, that’s probably how the book got on my want list in the first place, because Black is a favorite actor. She would have been great, but it never happened. Then Bette Midler was going to play Kristal, and I would have hated that. Kernochan and Glenn Close were school friends – why on earth didn’t Close get this movie made, and play Kristal herself?

Kristal sums up her worldview:

You can fool alla the people alla the time. One at a time. You got to do them one at a time, that’s why it’s a life’s work.

Related:

In A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (1922), Ben Hecht describes a representative member of an earlier generation of taxi-dancers:

The wise, brazen little virgins who shimmy and toddle, but never pay the fiddler. She’s it. Selling her ankles for a glass of pop and her eyes for a fox trot. Unhuman little piece. A cross between a macaw and a marionette.

Dance Hall Racket with Honey Harlow

A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (1922) – Ben Hecht

This is probably the first grownup book I ever read, not too long after finishing The Little Engine That Could. In fact, I’m sure it’s the main reason I learned to read. Although the stories were in tiny print, I wanted to know what that tiny print said, because of the pictures.

After a long hiatus, I found the book again, and traced back some of the ways in which I was influenced, as an artist and as a writer, by A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, this collection of newspaper columns written by Ben Hecht, with art by Herman Rosse. To call that influence profound wouldn’t be an exaggeration.

These vignettes transcend the topical: Hecht wrote for the ages. The preface, by his editor, describes the extraordinary pieces as the fruits of Hecht’s Big Idea -

…the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life….

It goes on to say that his daily columns “invaded the realm of literature, where in large part, journalism really dwells.” And he produced one of them every day.

Ben Hecht is one of the masters before whom I bow. He proved over and over that you can find a story anywhere, more stories than you’ll ever live long enough to write. He asks a policeman to recall interesting cases, and the policeman modestly demurs, saying he doesn’t really have any. Unless maybe Hecht means something like the man who had a tobacco jar made from a human skull, “and that’s how they found out he killed his wife.”

Hecht could get the essential story out of a person, and divine the defining events of the life. “Life stories are sometimes no longer than a single line–a sentence, even a phrase,” he said. That sounds condescending, doesn’t it? But Werner Erhard said pretty much the same thing. Everyone’s bio can be distilled into one line. “Your life is about……” That’s why geniuses like Hecht write cautionary tales, of people with these cramped, constricted mini-lives–as a way of warning us not to follow their example, if we can possibly help it.

He wrote of the obscure nobodies, trying to fight their way into the light. He saw the atavistic, archaic, and mythic elements beneath the surface of everyday life. He could lay down an atmosphere, like Ridley Scott did for another city in the Bladerunner movie. The urban variety, and the characters Hecht introduced, helped me know how banal my existence was. His reportage set up a template in my head, from which I learned what to look for in a city. It bent me toward wanting to live someplace full of weirdness, which I later did, in Venice, CA. When I went to Chicago, I found it there too. I found it in so many places along the way, because of being taught how to seek it, by this book, at a very young age.

Here’s one way 1001 Afternoons directly affected my life: its writer and illustrator modeled for me a way of assimilating the city that made it bearable. At 20, I spent a lot of time in downtown Buffalo, and thanks to all that Hecht/Chicago imagery that had been planted in my childish head many years before, the metropolis was not as ugly or alienating as it otherwise would have been.

I worked in a 26-story building–just four stories shorter than Rosse’s picture At the end of a wretched day, when everyone else rushed for street level, I’d take the elevator to the top floor and gaze for a while upon the darkening city. I don’t think I’d have had it in me to do this, if not for Hecht and Rosse.

I like the way Hecht would put things in context. For instance, when interviewing a renowned tattoo artist, he learned from the man’s press clippings that–surprise!–this was not a new phenomenon. Back in the late 1890s, skin art had been a wildfire fad among Chicago’s elite. The Americans were “following the lead of New York’s Four Hundred, who followed the lead of London’s most aristocratic circles…” In the early 1920s, when Hecht got around to writing about the tattoo, it was no longer a status symbol, but had become a lower-class kind of thing.

He wasn’t afraid to write experimentally. Except it’s not really an experiment when such a master does it. I wouldn’t hesitate to call this the first gonzo journalism. Although Hecht speaks of himself in the third person, as “the newspaper man,” the approach is unashamedly subjective. His tone could be acerbic, what we might call snarky. His writing has attitude. He certainly combines elements of fact and fiction, with a good deal of embroidery. What he could make, for instance, of a glimpse of a young woman buying a newspaper….

Thoughts from Ben Hecht, while wandering in the rain one night, which is different from daytime rain:

Ideas do not come so easily or so clearly. The ennobling angers which are the emotion of superiority in the iconoclast do not rise so spontaneously. And one does not say “People are this and people are that…”

Hecht listened to and recounted stories from a taxicab driver, an old watchmaker, a manicurist, a Chinese laundry man, a charwoman, a night conductor on the El. He listened to a man who’d traveled all over the world and had nothing to say about it, and a prison guard who says, “They pick me out for the death watch on account I have a way with doomed men.” A death-obsessed young woman. A vendor of roasted chestnuts. A sailor with a wooden leg.

Hecht would hang out with the day laborers waiting to be hired, or check out talent contests in bottom-feeder bars. Sometimes he went to dangerous places and mixed with desperate people. Or he would report on a formal concert in a glittering hall, and note that the admission price was “33 cents, including war tax.” Wonder why he threw that in?

He tells poignant tales from the sales clerk at the 10-cent wedding ring counter, and from the man who won a pig and brought it home to live in a dirt-filled bathtub. He explores the reasons why another man devotes his life to being a juror, and relates the strange and funny saga of the auctioneer’s wife. He conveys the air of bacchanalia in the nightclub that played the blues and catered to race-mixing (remember, this was 1922). He interviews black entertainer Bert Williams about the time Williams found in his dressing room a huge bouquet of flowers from Sarah Bernhardt, and about how Eleanora Duse called him the best artist on the American stage.

In the midst of the city, Hecht managed to meet up with some nomadic Americans or rubber tramps similar to the ones I composed a MySpace page for decades later. All these encounters became part of the furniture of my immature, impressionable brain. There was the snake charmer, the Japanese female impersonator… This was heavy stuff for a little kid who didn’t even have TV. I was warped into a bohemian – by a book.

So, starting young, as a direct result of 1001 Afternoons, I was attracted to mavericks and outcasts. Decades later, this explained why I was fascinated by Alky Bob (who is briefly shown in this movie , occupying a bench on the Venice boardwalk, with the used magazines he sold spread out around him.)

Doll Lady Susan Moscowitz was one whose story I inquired about, following the example of my mentor. She was a boardwalk regular, making her dolls from found scraps, sometimes selling a doll to a tourist. After being widowed once, Susan chose for her second husband a big, strong man who looked like he wouldn’t die any time soon. He became ill with multiple disease processes. He drove his rickety old car around and habitually crashed into things. Living with him became a terrible burden, and then he died, that big, strong man. Susan shook her head over the irony of it, and I knew Ben Hecht was watching and listening from somewhere.

One effect of the book was almost immediate, taking place when I was a kid. I didn’t really hear any cuss words until I was about 14, but had caught on early that there were such words. I remember, as a kid, using “blankety blank” as a substitute for the cuss words of which I was still innocent. That’s a nerd story if I ever heard one.

I see that familiarity with Hecht’s perception filters contributed to my cynicism. He writes of a woman who

…belongs to the type that becomes charitable around Christmas time. She makes a glowing pretense of aiding the poor…she regards the poor as a sort of social and spiritual asset . They afford her the double opportunity of appearing in the eyes of her neighbors as a magnanimous soul and of doing something which reflects great credit upon her character.

In the piece titled “Nirvana,” he writes of one of the

wise, brazen little virgins who shimmy and toddle, but never pay the fiddler. She’s it. Selling her ankles for a glass of pop and her eyes for a fox trot. Unhuman little piece. A cross between a macaw and a marionette.

He reproduces quite a lot of dialogue from a flapper, and now I realize, all over again, why Inserts is a great movie. Because this piece of writing by Ben Hecht was lodged somewhere in my subconscious, I recognized the character Harlene as authentic.

In one piece, a mother is in a courtroom, trying to keep her baby quiet, waiting to know if her older daughter will be charged with prostitution. In another, a woman’s children are taken away by the juvenile authorities, because when her husband died she spent the insurance money on a big funeral for him. Thanks to Hecht, I was sensitized to stuff like this early on, and I can see the results in the things I wrote in college. I’m sure it wasn’t conscious at the time, but looking back, the influence is plain as day.

About an event that happened at lunch with author Sherwood Anderson, Hecht tells a story so strange, you wonder if they clashed over who got the material to use. Hecht must have been tempted to make it into a screenplay. He writes about the magic of a used book shop on a rainy day. He talks about a book scout finding a 30 cent book that turns out to be worth $150, a 75 cent book that fetches $200. Fifty years later I became a book scout and racked up some amazing finds, but nothing that impressive.

“Ill-Humoresque” contains his reflections on a beggar, the same kind of mental exercise I went through so often when I lived in a community full of mendicants. There’s a great exegesis of the psychology of panhandlers and the citizens who donate dimes to them. This is what is meant by the examined life

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A Great Mystery: the Tattoo
Ben Hecht and Bill Haywood

The Golden Age

The golden age of Scene Magazine, that is–namely, when I was editor. (No offense to any former or subsequent Scene editors. Of course it was the golden age – it was the only one I knew about! It was also, in some ways, harrowing beyond words.)

This is one of my very ultimate favorite biographical photos. There’s me, graphics guy Doug Shald*, and behind the camera was Scene publisher Mike Mockler, who came back from somewhere and caught us slacking.

In Old Town, Fort Collins, Colorado, this funky labyrinthine complex of retail spaces was formerly known as the Clifton Building. Over the years it has housed dozens of alternative ventures: shops, therapists, publications, eateries, workshops, studios, organizations, etc. At this time, the open-air hallways had been covered over with scavenged roofs that used to be on bus stop shelters. The city got rid of them and the owner’s sons recycled them here, to keep the rain and snow off us.

* Also, percussionist

Toyer by Gardner McKay

If you think a dreamboat ex-actor from a mediocre TV series can’t write a good book, this one will make you think again. Toyer starts with a portrait of LA as evocative, in its own way, as Ridley Scott’s vision of the city in Bladerunner.

Toyer is the name given by the press to a felonious psychopath who has mutilated a dozen women. He doesn’t kill them, he just de-activates them. An impressive scene is the verbal sparring between Toyer and one of his proposed victims. There’s a moment when he says, “Your roommate’s not coming home,” and everything changes.

Toyer’s bizarre mission is complicated by the fact that the at-large killer offers to write his memoirs and let his share of the profits go to his victims. His avenging archenemy is a doctor with a psyche as convoluted and off-kilter as his own. Finally, when he agrees to meet her for a therapeutic talk, she takes along a scalpel, planning to kill rather than counsel him. On a dark night she parks at Venice beach and walks out into the sand to confront Toyer…

Gardner McKay has more than the ability to simply write a story. Lovely lines keep coming up – “It rains so rarely, that it rains without knowing how.” There’s great, almost throwaway, stuff about things like the advantages of Catholicism to the bereaved. And we have here the best ever use of a cat in a suspense story, proving that even the most mawkish, overdone cliché can still be redeemed and made art.

The details of haunting loss in a life, he’s good on that. And he reveals perhaps a bit too much about how men think, and more than a man ought to know about how women think. It’s not only that a man gets so into the mind of a woman, but that anybody gets so into the mind of anybody. With all this intelligence, perception and wicked black humor, McKay must have been a scary man to know.

One of the characters is up for a part in an 8-hour cable TV version of Justine – from the Lawrence Durrell book – for that I love the author. Another character reflects that by his age, Rupert Brooke had already died. I love him for that, for even knowing who Rupert Brook was.

The author is as interesting as the novel he wrote: the impossibly handsome actor who starred as Captain Adam Troy in the TV series Adventures in Paradise. Amidst a very strenuous life filled with physically demanding pursuits carried out all over the world, he studied journalism, won awards for writing plays, and gained some fame as a photographer and sculptor. Aside from Toyer, McKay wrote other novels and a biography. And he sure knew Hollywood.

The best way to experience this book, and I wouldn’t lie to you about a thing like this, is to listen to the Brilliance Corp. audiotape, because the novel is read by its author. He has a quirk of pausing between words you wouldn’t expect. He doesn’t try to read the female characters’ lines in a femmy way, and it works just fine. Damn, he’s good. If you possibly can manage it, do yourself a favor and listen to the story. Not while driving, or in the midst of other distractions. Just settle down in a comfortable place, slip on the headphones, and listen.

Kidd of Speed

Free-lance archaeologist Elena in the field

For so many reasons, this gets my vote for all-round greatest website. Virtually join Elena’s motorcycle tours of Chernobyl, old battlefields, and other unbeauty spots. She also writes, for instance, a series of reminiscences from Gulag survivors. Oh, please just go there. You must discover Elena’s world for yourself.

First, I got to thank all who support my “Ghost Town” story. Inspite of all dirt that our officials pouring, story is still on and keep showing people the tragedy of Chernobyl. click here for entering a “Ghost Town”, you will see Chernobyl with my eyes.

BIKERS’ PAGE

kawasaki big ninja, ZZR-1100 (ZX-11) is also known as “big Zed” or “eleven”.

Kidd of Speed, one of the Russians my government tried to teach me to hate.

This days people forget their history, ask anyone in downtown where is bunkers, they don’t have no idea what is bunkers. They can only show pubs and I can show both bunkers and pub.

Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath

Wallace Smith illustration

This weird book was suppressed for many years, not without reason. Plenty of explicit sex, it goes without saying. But the really disturbing part is the beginning, perhaps the most venomous, hate-filled, manic-depressive, pathological piece of literature in circulation. It’s a book that can actually make you want to commit suicide.

Oddly, author Ben Hecht is famous for writing, among other things, screwball comedies such as His Girl Friday and Some Like it Hot. In fact, he received screen credit in 70 movies. Director John Huston admired his work ethic, saying,

Ben Hecht wrote pictures for a flat fee, with incredible speed, sometimes completing an entire script in three or four days. When he started to work, he didn’t stop, other than to eat and sleep sparingly, until it was finished.

Hecht wrote some film scripts under other names because of a spot of political trouble he got into in the late Forties, early Fifties. J Edgar Hoover called him a “fellow traveler,” in other words, a Communist sympathizer. He was boycotted by the Brits for being a right-wing Zionist.

Good grief, Hecht wrote 35 books including The Sensualists and A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (a collection of his newspaper columns.) Fantazius Mallare came out in 1922, apparently in a limited edition destined for a small circle of friends. Legend says, and I see no reason to doubt it, that most of the copies were destroyed by the authorities.

Before ever hearing of Fantazius Mallare, I’d stayed with a friend whose wall held a poster depicting a man who appears to be in sexual congress with a tree. Yes, it was the Sixties. But see, that’s the thing. This artwork from back in the Twenties made a resurgence. Illustrator Wallace Smith, who like Hecht was also a newspaperman and a screenwriter, was recognized and remembered. That’s a beautiful thing. Because when alive, he did jail time for this drawing.

A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (1922)- Herman Rosse

I’m all in favor of people telling what books influenced them the most, especially if they are specific about why and how. In my case, one Ur-book towers above all the rest.

My grandmother’s books were kept in low, open shelves, within the reach of a crawling or toddling kid. I was allowed to take the books out and look at them. Most had no pictures, although the paper coverings were interesting. But this one was my favorite. So unlike the pastel or primary hues of kiddie picture books, its pages held the first real art in my life.

It was the early 1950s, and we didn’t have television. Visually speaking, the world was pretty dull. A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago had been published in 1922, and I was ready to discover it.

I absorbed Herman Rosse’s stylized, realistic, stark, beautiful, bizarre pen and ink drawings, and wondered what these pictures were about. In order to find out, I had equip myself to read the words of Ben Hecht that told the stories. Along with learning to read, there were many delayed-reaction side effects in my psyche and behavior on account of this book.

Over the turbulent years, when I thought about it at all, the memory was an intense one. I looked it up once, but it was way beyond my starving artist budget. I thought about it again when I saw 365 Views of Mt. Fuji, the collaborative marvel by Linda and Todd Shimoda. I was like, “Where have I seen it before, this literary/pictorial synergy, this perfect fusion of art with text?” Of course. The Ben Hecht book with the black and white pictures.

I told the Shimodas about this insight, and they bought a copy, and saw what I meant. A few more years went by. Online, I found a cheap battered copy of the 5th printing (1927) and finally acquired my own 1001 Afternoons (without a dust jacket, sad to say). But who cares about that? My interest was, to put it bluntly – did the book still hold up? OMG yes.

Rosse was head of the School of Design at the Chicago Art Institute, and an art director in Hollywood, where he designed the sets for Dracula, Frankenstein and Murders in the Rue Morgue in the early Thirties.

Revisiting Rosse’s illustrations, after 50 years, I realized many things. It was because of this influence that I recognized the quality of a friend’s work when we were in junior high school. And indeed today that precocious student is an esteemed artist back East, with one of his works hanging in Buffalo’s Albright-Knox gallery. In the Sixties, I vibed to Aubrey Beardsley because of Herman Rosse. His work in
A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago so informed my taste that I was always looking for its equivalent, for Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics. I sprang at the opportunity to publish work by such artists as Musicmaster, and Billy Mavreas, and a whole bunch of other really great ones.

One thing I realized as an adult is, how clever Rosse was in meeting the challenge of illustrating stories when mostly constrained to vertical strips. Working with these uncommon dimensions, the height so much greater than the width, the artist is both stretched and confined.

When I was a kid we lived in Niagara Falls, NY, and my dad worked in a factory. Sometimes we went to pick him up, out on that long, long road lined with factories and the occasional ancient, desolate, falling-down house that wasn’t in their way yet. The factories were enormous, dirty and stinking industrial plants that produced chemicals as both product and by-product.

Thanks to Herman Rosse’s artwork, I saw them differently. At night they were fairy palaces dotted with lights and jets of flame. When I was older and taking the bus to Buffalo, twenty miles away, the incredible evening beauty of some industrial areas made indelible mental snapshots I can still call to mind. The ability to see things in certain ways, I trace directly back to this piece of art, right here.

Today, a 1922 first edition of A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago goes for a $1000 or so, but I’m pretty sure what my Grandma had was the book club edition. (Pause for research.) Uh-oh, it seems there was no book club edition. Wonder what ever happened to Grandma’s books?
Related:
The Sensualists
Fantazius Mallare

Antony

Antony

I adore this androgynous person, who is like Roy Orbison meets Joe Cocker. He’s in the Leonard Cohen tribute concert film “I’m Your Man” and in this clip he sings “If It Be Your Will.”

In the YouTube clip, as in the movie, Antony wears the ultimate grunge garment, which appears to be a sweatshirt so deconstructed it almost doesn’t exist, a gossamer shell of mostly spider-web fineness. I bet it cost $1200 on Melrose Avenue or whatever the contemporary equivalent hipster street is.

The composite image above is made from Creative Commons photos by marillo (left) danieluis (center) and marillo (right)

Antony Hegarty represents to me what fellow Irishman Bobby Sands might have been, if he had followed art instead of politics, if he had made love not war, if he had flourished as a poet instead of starving himself to death in Long Kesh prison. Who’s to say which is better?

Bobby Sands

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