For the 50th anniversary celebration of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which begins any minute now — it’s scheduled for July 1-3 at the University of London Institute in Paris — have a look at the cover of the original edition brought out in 1959 by French publisher Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press. Have a look, […]
Archives for June 2009
Harold Norse, R.I.P.
He died earlier this week in San Francisco just short of his 93rd birthday. I met him on a bitterly cold winter day in Paris, in 1962. I was keeping warm sitting in a seedy little cafe behind the Carrefour de l’Odeon. It was a neighborhood hangout where you could buy pot and waste your […]
More Than One Way to Bang That Can
Spent a few hours listening to the performances at the BANG ON A CAN Marathon 2009 with a friend of mine who has little patience for la sonorité artistique. She described much of what she heard as “beehive music.” I had to laugh. She wasn’t wrong. (One composer, Jeppe Just Christensen, played two pairs of […]