Evergreen Review Reader, 1967-1973

by Rosset, Barney

• ISBN13: 9781568581101
• ISBN10: 1568581106
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-01-04
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group

Summary

From its first issue in 1957 to its final in 1973, Evergreen Review was hailed as one of the most provocative magazines ever. The bible for a generation of radicals and freethinkers, Evergreen championed Beckett and Brautigan, erotica and liberal activism, with an in-your-face attitude that confronted and challenged the conventions of the day. Edited by Evergreen's founder and publisher, Barney Rosset, this selection represents the best of the magazine's final years - 1967 through 1973 - a politically and socially tumultuous time that included such pivotal events as the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Che Guevara, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the massacre at Mylai. Complete with 100 photographs from the original magazine, Evergreen Review Reader has the historical relevance and literary muscle to speak to a new generation.

Table of Contents

Introduction	11	(4)
Barney Rosset
1967	15	(70)
William S. Burroughs
Exterminator!	15	(2)
Allen Ginsberg
Chances R	17	(1)
Parker Tyler
Dragtime and Drugtime; or Film a la Warhol	18	(6)
Paul Blackburn
Listening to Sony Rollins at the Five-Spot	24	(1)
Samuel Beckett
The Calmative	25	(6)
Malcolm X
God's Judgment of White America	31	(7)
LeRoi Jones
Three Poems	38	(1)
Patsy Southgate
Nobody Operates Like an IBM Machine	39	(1)
Michael McClure
The Beard	40	(17)
Karl Shapiro
Aubade	57	(1)
Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues
The Tide	58	(4)
Michael O'Donoghue
Capriccio to Djuna	62	(2)
Tennessee Williams
Young Men Walking at Daybreak	64	(1)
Robert Coover
A Short Story	65	(8)
Fred Rayfield
How the War Ended in Vietnam	73	(2)
Vaclav Havel
Peace	75	(1)
Allen Ginsberg
Beginning of a Poem of These States	76	(2)
John Rechy
By the Motel Pool	78	(4)
Lenore Kandel
Blues for Sister Sally	82	(3)
1968	85	(130)
Fidel Castro
El Che Vive!	85	(1)
Che Guevara
Where It All Began: The Landing in Cuba	86	(5)
Che Guevara
Farewell Letter	91	(1)
Cesar Vallejo
Human Poems	92	(3)
Michel Bosquet
The Last Hours of Che Guevara	95	(6)
Luis J. Gonzalez
Gustavo A. Sanchez Salazar
The Story of Tania: Che's Woman in Bolivia	101	(9)
Che Guevara
Bolivian Campaign Diary	110	(13)
Tom Stoppard
The Story	123	(4)
John Lahr
Sex and Politics: An Interview with Vilgot Sjoman	127	(6)
Jack Kerouac
The Murder of Swinburne	133	(10)
Eugene Ionesco
Fragments of a Journal	143	(5)
Michael Reck
A Conversation between Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg	148	(3)
Muriel Rukeyser
Bunk Johnson Blowing	151	(1)
John Schultz
Pigs, Prague, Chicago, Other Democrats, and the Sleeper in the Park	152	(11)
Robert L. Terrell
Tea Party	163	(4)
Dotson Rader
Up Against the Wall!	167	(10)
Kenzaburo Oe
Aghwee the Sky Monster	177	(14)
Abdullah Schleifer
Al Fatah Speaks: A Conversation with "Abu Amar"	191	(7)
Kim Philby
My Silent War	198	(17)
1969	215	(120)
John Lahr
The Fall and Rise of Beckett's Bum: Bert Lahr in Godot	215	(11)
L. M. Kit Carson
Easy Rider: A Very American Thing	226	(6)
Calvin C. Hernton
Game Life, London 1967 (to Colin MacInnes)	232	(2)
William S. Burroughs
My Mother and I Would Like to Know	234	(3)
Jean Genet
From: Funeral Rites	237	(6)
Sol Yurick
Hubert Selby: Symbolic Intent and Ideological Resistance (or Cocksucking and Revolution)	243	(6)
Hubert Selby
Happy Birthday	249	(3)
David Myers
Jack Bonus
Seven Days from Zen Camp	252	(2)
Kenneth Tynan
Two Plays from Oh! Calcutta!	254	(5)
Pete Hamill
An American Bird	259	(1)
William Eastlake
The Hanging at Prettyfields	260	(5)
John Lahr
Jules Feiffer: Satire as Subversion	265	(6)
Joseph Skvorecky
Pink Champagne	271	(7)
Andre S. Labarthe
A Way of Life: An Interview with John Cassavetes	278	(4)
Harold Printer
Landscape	282	(8)
Marco Antonio Montes de Oca
Ode on the Death of Che Guevara	290	(1)
Woody Allen
Viva Vagras! Excerpts from the Diary of a Revolutionary	291	(3)
Emmanuelle Arsan
An Open Letter to Paul VI on the Pill	294	(5)
Seymour Krim
Should I Assume America Is Already Dead?	299	(5)
Jack Newfield
The Day of the Locust	304	(10)
June Jordan
Blacks Studies: Bringing Back the Person	314	(5)
David Henderson
Boston Road Blues	319	(3)
Nat Hentoff
Blacks and Jews: An Interview with Julius Lester	322	(8)
J. Anthony Stowers
Three Poems	330	(5)
1970	335	(78)
Tom Hayden
Repression and Rebellion	335	(4)
Bobby Seale
The Double Standard of Justice	339	(3)
Allen Ginsberg
Memory Gardens	342	(2)
John Schultz
Like the Last Two People on the Face of the Earth	344	(12)
Charles Bukowski
The Day We Talked about James Thurber	356	(4)
Cecil Brown
About LeRoi Jones	360	(6)
Richard Brautigan
The Betrayed Kingdom	366	(1)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Back Roads to Far Towns After Basho	367	(1)
Frank Zappa
Richard Blackburn
`50s Teenagers and'50s Rock	368	(4)
Michael O'Donoghue
30's	372	(2)
Samuel Beckett
Lessness	374	(2)
Kent E. Carroll
Film and Revolution: An Interview with Jean-Luc Godard	376	(9)
Jean-Paul Sarte
The Socialism that Came in from the Cold	385	(15)
Henry Miller
Quiet Days in Clichy	400	(2)
David Amram
In Memory of Jack Kerouac	402	(2)
Richard Brautigan
Complicated Banking Problems	404	(1)
Donald Newlove
The Black Eye	405	(8)
1971	413	(90)
Claudia Dreifus
Freeing Women's Sexuality: An Interview with Germaine Greer	413	(10)
Vivian Gornick
Woman as Outsider	423	(9)
Diane diPrima
Rant, from a Cool Place	432	(1)
Claudia Dreifus
St. John of the Bogside: An Interview with Bernadette Devlin	433	(9)
Oriana Fallaci
Nicole Bonnet
Two "Last" Interviews with Regis Debray	442	(13)
Nguyen Phuc Dao Duc
A Remembrance for You	455	(1)
Joe Eszterhas
The Selling of the Mylai Massacre	456	(16)
Nicolas Guillen
Five Songs of China	472	(2)
John Forbes Kerry
Words of a Winter Soldier	474	(4)
John Schultz
Chicago Conspiracy Postscript	478	(3)
C. P. Cavafy
September, 1903	481	(1)
Paulin Reage
Return to the Chateau	482	(7)
Timothy Leary
Jail Notes	489	(5)
Ron Seitz
Lenny Bruce	494	(1)
John Lahr Ali
The Last Goodbye	495	(4)
Frank O'Hara
Four Poems	499	(4)
1972	503	(10)
Khushwant Singh
The Prostitute of Delhi	503	(7)
Michael Rumaker
Four Months After the Breakdown (A Poem for My Lady)	510	(3)
1973	513	(14)
Norman Mailer
A Transit to Narcissus	513	(9)
Al Young
Some Recent Fiction	522	(2)
J. G. Ballard
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race	524	(3)
1984	527
Marguerite Duras
The Malady of Death	527	(7)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
History of the World: A TV Docu-Drama	534	(2)
Terry Southern
Trib to Von	536	(4)
Kathy Acker
A Trip to Hell	540

Excerpts

Excerpt

Exterminator!

William S. Burroughs

    During the war I worked for A. J. Cohen Exterminators ground floor office dead end street by the river. An old Jew with cold gray fish eyes and a cigar was the oldest of four brothers. Marv was the youngest wore wind breakers had three kids. There was a smooth well dressed college trained brother. The fourth brother burly and muscular looked like an old time hoofer could bellow a leather lunged "Mammy" and you hope he won't do it. Every night at closing time these two brothers would get in a heated argument from nowhere I could see the older brother would take the cigar out of his mouth and move across the floor with short sliding steps advancing on the vaudeville brother.

    "You vant I should spit right in your face!? You vant!? You vant? You vant!?"

    The vaudeville brother would retreat shadow boxing presences invisible to my Goyish eyes which I took to be potent Jewish Mammas conjured up by the elder brother. On many occasions I witnessed this ritual open mouthed hoping the old cigar would let fly one day but he never did. A few minutes later they would be talking quietly and checking the work slips as the exterminators fell in.

    On the other hand the old brother never argued with his exterminators. "That's why I have a cigar" he said the cigar being for him a source of magical calm.

    I used my own car a black Ford V8 and worked alone carrying my bedbug spray pyrithium powder bellows and bulbs of fluoride up and down stairs.

    "Exterminator! You need the service?"

    A fat smiling Chinese rationed out the pyrithium powder--it was hard to get during the war--and cautioned us to use fluoride whenever possible. Personally I prefer a pyrithium job to a fluoride. With the pyrithium you kill the roaches right there in front of God and the client whereas this starch and fluoride you leave it around and back a few days later a southern defense worker told me "They eat it and run around here fat as hawgs."

    From a great distance I see a cool remote neighborhood blue windy day in April sun cold on your exterminator there climbing the gray wooden outside stairs.

    "Exterminator lady. You need the service?"

    "Well come in young man and have a cup of tea. That wind has a bite to it."

    "It does that, mam, cuts me like a knife and I'm not well you know/cough/."

    "You put me in mind of my brother Michael Fenny."

    "He passed away?"

    "It was a long time ago April day like this sun cold on a thin boy with freckles through that door like yourself. I made him a cup of hot tea. When I brought it to him he was gone." She gestured to the empty blue sky "cold tea sitting right where you are sitting now." I decide this old witch deserves a pyrithium job no matter what the fat Chinese allows. I lean forward discreetly.

    "Is it roaches Mrs. Murphy?"

    "It is that from those Jews downstairs."

    "Or is it the Hunkys next door Mrs. Murphy?"

    She shrugs "Sure and an Irish cockroach is as bad as another."

    "You make a nice cup of tea Mrs. Murphy ... Sure I'll be taking care of your roaches ... Oh don't be telling me where they are ... You see I know Mrs. Murphy ... experienced along these lines ... And I don't mind telling you Mrs. Murphy I like my work and take pride in it."

    "Well the city exterminating people were around and left some white powder draws roaches the way whisky will draw a priest."

    "They are a cheap outfit Mrs. Murphy. What they left was fluoride. The roaches build up a tolerance and become addicted. They can be dangerous if the fluoride is suddenly withdrawn ... Ah just here it is ..."

    I have spotted a brown crack by the kitchen sink put my bellows in and blow a load of the precious yellow powder. As if they had heard the last trumpet the roaches stream out and flop in convulsions on the floor.

    "Well I never!" says Mrs. Murphy and turns me back as I advance for the coup de grace ... "Don't shoot them again. Just let them die."

    When it is all over she sweeps up a dust pan full of roaches into the wood stove and makes me another cup of tea.

    When it comes to bedbugs there is a board of health regulation against spraying beds and that of course is just where the bugs are in most cases now an old wood house with bedbugs back in the wood for generations only thing is to fumigate ... So here is Mamma with a glass of sweet wine her beds back and ready ...

    I look at her over the syrupy red wine ... "Lady we don't spray no beds. Board of health regulations you know."

    "Ach so the wine is not enough?"

    She comes back with a crumpled dollar. So I go to work ... bedbugs great red clusters of them in the ticking of the mattresses. I mix a little formaldehyde with my kerosene in the spray its more sanitary that way and if you tangle with some pimp in one of the Negro whore houses we service a face full of formaldehyde keeps the boys in line. Now you'll often find these old Jewish grandmas in a back room like their bugs and we have to force the door with the younger generation smooth college trained Jew there could turn into a narcotics agent while you wait.

    "All right grandma, open up! The exterminator is here."

    She is screaming in Yiddish no bugs are there we force our way in I turn the bed back ... my God thousand of them fat and red with grandma and when I put the spray to them she moans like the Gestapo is murdering her nubile daughter engaged to a dentist.

    And there are whole backward families with bedbugs don't want to let the exterminator in.

    "We'll slap a board of health summons on them if we have to" said the college trained brother ... "I'll go along with you on this one. Get in the car."

    They didn't want to let us in but he was smooth and firm. They gave way muttering like sullen troops cowed by the brass. Well he told me what to do and I did it. When he was settled at the wheel of his car cool gray and removed he said "Just plain ordinary sons of bitches. That's all they are."

    T. B. sanitarium on the outskirts of town ... cool blue basements fluoride dust drifting streaks of phosphorous paste on the walls ... gray smell of institution cooking ... heavy dark glass front door ... Funny thing I never saw any patients there but I don't ask questions. Do my job and go a man who works for his living ... Remember this janitor who broke into tears because I said shit in front of his wife it wasn't me actually said it was Wagner who was dyspeptic and thin with knobby wrists and stringy yellow hair ... and the fumigation jobs under the table I did on my day off....

    Young Jewish matron there "Let's not talk about the company. The company makes too much money anyway. I'll get you a drink of whisky." Well I have come up from the sweet wine circuit. So I arrange a sulphur job with her five Abes and it takes me about two hours you have to tape up all the windows and the door and leave the fumes in there 24 hours studying the good work.

    One time me and the smooth brother went out on a special fumigation job ... "This man is sort of a crank ... been out here a number of times ... claims he has rats under the house ... We'll have to put on a show for him."

    Well he hauls out one of those tin pump guns loaded with cyanide dust and I am subject to crawl under the house through spider webs and broken glass to find the rat holes and squirt the cyanide to them.

    "Watch yourself under there" said the cool brother. "If you don't come out in ten minutes I'm coming in after you."

    I liked the cafeteria basement jobs long gray basement you can't see the end of it white dust drifting as I trace arabesques of fluoride on the wall.

    We serviced an old theatrical hotel rooms with rose wall paper photograph albums ... "Yes that's me there on the left."

    The boss has a trick he does every now and again assembles his staff and eats arsenic been in that office breathing the powder in so long the arsenic just brings an embalmer's flush to his smooth gray cheek. And he has a pet rat he knocked all its teeth out feeds it on milk the rat is now very tame and affectionate. I stuck the job nine months. It was my record on any job. Left the old gray Jew there with his cigar the fat Chinese pouring my pyrithium powder back into the barrel. All the brothers shook hands. A distant cry echos down cobble stone streets through all the gray basements up the outside stairs to a windy blue sky.

    "Exterminator!"

    Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914 , William S. Burroughs was aligned with the Beat Generation. Burroughs wrote of his drug experiences in the 1953 book Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. He is also the author of The Naked Lunch, among others. He died in 1997 in Lawrence, Kansas .

Chances R Allen Ginsberg

Red glow on the tables,

spider chandeliers,

Nymph and shepherd raising electric tridents

against the plaster wall

(guardian spirits of antique meadow

and warrior town)

The jukebox beating out the magic syllables

A line of painted boys snapping fingers

& shaking thin Italian legs,

or rough dungarees on big asses

bumping and dipping

ritually, with no religion but the

old one of cocksuckers,

naturally, in Kansas center of America

the farmboys in Diabolic bar light

alone and stiff necked or lined up dancing

row on row like Afric husbands

& the music's sad here, where at the Sunset

Trip or Jukebox Corner it's ecstatic pinball

machines--Religiously, with concentration &

free prayer; fairy boys of

the plains

and their gay sisters of the city

step backward toward the bottled tables,

forward to the center of the concrete floor,

illumined by machine eyes, screaming drumbeats,

passionate voices of Oklahoma City

chanting No Satisfaction

Suspended from Heaven, the Chances

R Club floats in solid space

rayed with stars on an avenue in

Wichita traversed with streetlight

on the plain.

    Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1926, Allen Ginsberg gained fame as the poet laureate of the Beat Generation. His first major work , Howl!, was published in 1956. Author of hundreds of poems and contributor to many other written works and audio recordings, Ginsberg was the recipient of a National Book Award. He died in New York in 1997 .

Dragtime and Drugtime; or Film a la Warhol

Parker Tyler

Dragtime

Pop Art is a cultural misnomer. It was really studio pheno mena that went Pop, by way of comic strip drawing and advertising layout, so that "Pop Art" became a commercial article patronized by a section of the sophisticates who go in for art collecting. If we hope to do justice to a distinguished art world personality such as the Andy Warhol who makes films, we must abandon all the film-poetry cant of the Underground cultists and look at his work and its motives in a much more realistic light. Warhol, at first letting it out to friends that he wished to make "bad films," served fair enough warning of his own. Granting nobody consciously wants to do or be "bad" (why should bland, nice Andy Warhol want to do anything or anybody harm?), he must have meant he planned to make films that were "bad" as films but "good" as almost anything else, including the fun-potential based on the success of Pop.

    In 1963, when Warhol first set up his sentinel camera, it wasn't original to ignore the hard-won title of "art" that had been historically attached to film. It was already a confirmed, and in fact celebrated, habit of the new American avant-garde to practice an art-economy motivated to some extent by the economy of production costs. For many years, Cinema Verite and the Nouvelle Vague of France had been impressing film fans over the world with the virtue of informal manners, uncomplicated photography, spontaneous fancy, and texts taken unpretentiously from contemporary life. For all I know, the Nouvelle Vague to Warhol was only a name. However, he was brought along to a private screening at the office of Film Culture by Charles Henri Ford, whom I had asked to attend. Getting there a heavy load of the current Underground style of reeling around on the reel, Warhol also seemed to get the idea that nothing was easier than to make an impression with the medium of film. Film, after all, was even more untouched by human hands than the technical means Warhol employed for his graphic works. His intuition turned out to be very shrewd. His first films, Sleep, Eat, Kiss , and Haircut , aroused the fervor of the dominant New York Underground film group, whose magazine, Film Culture , proceeded at once to give him its Sixth Independent Film Award.

    Pop is a cult of the ready-made reprocessed for the uses of camp entertainment. Its parody idiom stretches from the puritanically strict to the bohemianly brash. A lot of rough stuff in the home-movie style (played, as in Flaming Creatures , for pathos camp rather than camp laughs) was then available as models. Yet, in an instinctive gesture, Warhol chose to exploit a minimal rather than a maximal animacy, and to limit his subject matter accordingly. His first move, metaphorically speaking, was to nail the feet of his camera to the floor. He might have decided that the camera was at least as talented as Gertrude Stein and deserved every single second of its liberal say-so. The consequent unedited footage was as fetishistic as musique concrete except that, as cinema concret , its silence, for a while, was unbroken. He himself knew nothing about the film camera, was probably frightened of its famous pyrotechnics, and so began by treating film as if it were a tentative extension of his still portrait variations, such as the multiple Marilyn Monroe.

    It seemed to work wonderfully with the unaided image of a sleeping man. Here was a living organism in which unconsciousness is the more spectacular in that, when wide awake, man is, without a rival, the most intelligent among the animals. True, his reputation has seriously declined in this century, but in the six-and-a-half hours which Warhol devoted to this specimen breathing blissfully along, man as such tends to regain a certain appealing, even monumental, innocence. God knows who in the eyes of the general audience, the sleeping man is but he proves that an adult can sleep like a baby; and not just any baby, but a Pop baby.

    The precieux among cult connoisseurs were not slow stress the exquisiteness of displaying the simplest, most ordinary happenings at an unvaried pace, to unprecedented lengths of time, and from a viewpoint with the fixity a voyeur's if without the voyeur's dividend; the aspect of the early subject matter is prim, not scandalous. Other spectators, more permanently and loyally acclimated to the variety and skills of the film art, found Warhol's dragtime film much more replete with nullness than with nuance. Nevertheless, we must note, nuance had appeared with some real success in the filmmaker's Pop paintings.

    The multiple Marilyn Monroes show the actress's head in poster colors via the Warhol simplified-photography method, but each of these images is subtly varied so that we get very much what, if it were transposed to film, would be a series of frames cut from a film sequence in which colored lights had been passed around Marilyn's head. As Allan Kaprow once pointed out, the subject's facial expression varies from unit to unit so that a fluently moody Marilyn is created. Such an effect (Warhol repeated it more dramatically with variations on Jacqueline Kennedy's head) is indeed "human" when compared with the static rows of those poker-faced soup cans. Later, Warhol converted the red-and-white Campbell's Soup color scheme into arbitrary "psychedelic" spectra, related to the fluent kaleidoscope of his Velvet Underground projector.

    Whatever value, market or aesthetic, may be placed on Warhol's Pop paintings, they do not demand the passive attention of a fixed (that is, seated) spectator in a film theater. This is what makes the viewing time required for his films into a drag exquisitely nuanced or excruciatingly redundant. Once you take an attitude, it's not hard to decide which of these responses is yours. But suppose you don't find it easy to take an attitude, to judge the thirty-three minute Haircut after three minutes or the forty-five minute Eat after five or ten minutes? Suppose a sort of hypnotism emanates from the screen so that you begin to feel rather like a rabbit being fascinated by a snake? The "freeze" is not only on the subject, and the camera swallowing it, but on your own morally committed attention.

    I am analyzing a likely spectator-response. After all, it's the ritual habit of a filmgoer to enter, sit down, and relax. Does any filmgoer avoid this habituation? Film-seeing implies the most passive psychological state of all the visual arts because the theater seat itself is habit forming, and because while watching plays, on the contrary, one shares a certain tension with the live performers. Stage actors themselves speak of rapport with the audience: a feeling that cannot exist for film actors. The very decision to applaud is incubated from the first in the theatergoer and stimulates his attention. Both mind and eye, in the theater, feeling more responsible to the spectacle as a living thing, are the more alert. On the other hand, deep within the principle of film action (and thus film time) is something "not living": a self-starting independent mechanism, a kind of perpetuum mobile , that relieves the watcher of his maximal mental cooperation.

    A part of Warhol's negotiable charm as a modern entertainer is his work as applied art-naivete. There is something both perverse and violent about pasting the camera eye on a limited field of vision, with limited action inside it, and asking the spectator to paste his eye over that, and just wait. The ensuing charm, I should say, is more than a trifle masochistic. But take the contrary view. A high pulse exists in the modern temper (I mean everybody's temper) for elective affinity with occupations that dissociate themselves from the ugly spectacle of war, and lesser lethal agents, as forms of cutthroat competition. The very peacefulness of just watching a man eat a mushroom (even though, as if on purpose, he takes forty-five minutes to bite, masticate, and swallow it all) has its exclusive charm: an exclusive charm that makes it easy for the watcher to feel both chic and restful. The idea of peace, I mean, is directly related to the ultra-passivity of the pre-conditioned, relaxing filmgoer.

    Obviously, too, the chic feeling relates to the Pop ambience of the vulgar made precious through parody. The Pop cult is a cult of reassuringly minimal irony; the more it blows up actual scale beyond natural proportions, the less room there is for bothersome irony. Warhol, incidentally, liked to give his early films "art projection" (magnified 16 MM) on ordinary interior walls. A pair of kissers then look like an animated mural, billboard size. If overwhelming reality must invade our privacy and peace, let it be screened, at least, at the door, and only amusing versions allowed in. As we know so well, certain scales in Pop painting, especially murals, simply giganticize the scale of advertising art, often literally as large as, or larger than, life. Warhol's first film gambit was to giganticize with time instead of space . Doing it with time (in the film house there is no inevitable sense of the actual physical magnification) made it necessary for him to choose subjects just as obvious and commonplace as those of his paintings.

    For many years now there has been a school of film thought of which film a la Warhol is Pop parody. Its theory may be conveniently termed (in the late Siegfried Kracauer's phrase) "the redemption of physical reality." This school believes that the true function of film was not to produce and maintain a new art form, but to provide a super-investigation of mere physical reality. To struggle with this theory on the basis of whether art is a mirror, and film a representational art, would waste time in this place. Warhol's (probably unconscious) parody of "the redemption of physical reality" makes such an aesthetic argument pointless. The living organic world we see in Sleep, Eat, Haircut , and Kiss , has a visually implosive force whose burden we must bear or else heave off. Warhol's point is exactly that what we see should reveal nothing new in proportion to the quantity of time required to watch it; indeed, his object might be to portray a deliberate "vicious circle": a closed process with no progress whatever, only an "endless" self-engrossment.

    Inevitably, all mental interest and visual attention are governed by an economy that establishes a self-sustaining rhythm. Experimentally, Warhol matched the pulse beat of the camera and the respiration of a sleeping man (the mastication of an eating man, the osculation of erotic couples, etc.) with the pulse beat of the spectator's available interest. If these don't match in the film house, the spectator's boredom will take over. At the same time, the filmmaker's strategy was to make a direct appeal in line with the automation atmosphere of the film. The temptation for the watcher (the preconditioned individual I mentioned above) is to be automated along with the camera's automation as this is rhythmically adjusted to the basic physical drives of eating and kissing. It is "good" to eat. It is just as good, or better, to kiss. How could either occupation make a bad film? Such commonplace activities are universal and thus very easy to "identify" with. The film, Warhol plainly says, is no "better" or "worse" than what it records. Result: the plastic medium that creates "filmic interest" and "film art" becomes the victim of another Pop put-down.

    That a number of filmmakers in the Underground movement, as well as a brace of art connoisseurs, fell prostrate before the Warhol Pop film tells us something tangible about the current state of the American avant-garde in film and elsewhere. Dragtime (the superficial tempo of Warhol's primitive films) might be said to have more than a mite to do with drugtime and the magic beauties of an expanded time assisted (as it is in The Chelsea Girls ) with overt psychedelic decor. Theoretically, the Warhol devotees suppose that a definite beauty exists in his reductio ad "least" absurdum of progress in objects.

    The same reduction seems less absurd if we expose it to a light to which it might seem to aspire. We know a great deal about the chemical change of witnessing organisms that much expands time-lapse as measured on the clock. The well-publicized "psychedelic experience" is all we need to be informed that the agent of such wondrous expansion is a variety of drugs, having a range of effects on time-awareness and the appearance of objects, but all peculiarly improving the rewards of sense perception. I recall how, as long ago as pre-WPA days, certain Village brahmins would speak of the marvelous thrill to be had from smoking marijuana. A cat would cross the room; that was all. And yet not only was this something that seemed to go on forever, but also it produced a fantastic sort of pleasure: a pleasure which looking at a cat crossing a room when one was in a normal state decidedly failed to produce. The later Warhol films suggest that he divined in the physical accumulation of screen time a potential hypnotic effect on watchers which nothing else but drugs could guarantee. I think that his primitive films can be called experiments in dragtime which logically predicated an innoculation of unwinding reel with drugtime.

Drugtime

    Warhol was still a rather esoteric quantity as filmmaker till his latest film, The Chelsea Girls , which climaxes his self-maneuver out of his original styleless style into something like profession-pretending filmmaking. The purity of the original eventless films was first modified Blow Job , an erotic conceit that begins with the opening a fly and ends with closing it. In between, with only the passive subject's face in the unswerving camera range, are treated to a process which actually, since it leads to orgasm, is also a progress with a ready-made mounting interest. Here the psychological element of a tiresome progress, an exhaustible drive, was significantly, in fact fatally, hinted.

    Even the sexual act is something in which a boredom-potential inheres. At the same time, sex has an indispensable organic suspense: the climax may be irritatingly or profitably postponed; the very physical labor may unaccountably grow wearisome; still the green end, psychologically and physiologically, stays in view. Referring Blow Job to the preliminary sexual activity of kissing, one notes that Kiss , which lasts fifty minutes and holds numerous pairs of kissers, does not fail to show signs of tiring its subjects and forcing them to fresh prodigies of osculative style to justify, it seems, the camera time being spent on them. Here already was a flagrant "impurity." The human subjects involuntarily betrayed that a sort of theater was present, a "show" which felt obliged to sustain the "interest."

    Hitherto, Warhol's subjects notably seemed indifferent to being watched, to (so to speak) having to perform anything with a "program" or a "script." For all that suspense or expectation is involved, Haircut or Eat might be totally outside time in a vacuum like that of far space. When, for example, we are asked by Empire to watch a famous landmark ("the world's tallest") standing quite motionless, with the camera equally unmoving, while the sun is allowed to take all of eight hours to go down and come up, we are being asked to submit ourselves to an endurance test; that is, to the opposite of an entertainment form ... unless (which is, I think, the point) it should occur to us that this quantitative time, spreading out its minutes in a morgue, is merely the abstract proposition for a much more entertaining, specifically psychedelic, time. The latter provides a dramatically decisive change not in the object, but in the one viewing it. Drugtime is the other pole of dragtime . However unconsciously, Warhol began playing with this interpolar tension as if it were a new toy (which in a way, being a camera, it was!). His social milieu already contained these same two polarities and their vibrating rapport. Another ready-made subject awaited his Pop ministrations.

    Narcotizing is very close to Narcissizing. The only distinction is that with drugs, the gazer's own image is not the object of fascination; rather it is the image of the world transmuted by a chemical change in the gazer's perceptive faculties. Narcissus' image has become the world and the resultant rhythm of merged awareness is, exactly, drugtime. It is the time of sublimated leisure: all the time in the world . Warhol's Vinyl , his first film with "progressive" social action, came along as a documentation of people in the mixed throes of narcotizing and narcissizing; also for the first time, there were credits for the title, the idea-man and the leads; otherwise, as usual, the film was titleless. A group of young men, watched by a motionless female odalisque, are got up in a way to suggest exotic Leather Boys while their behavior (sado-masochistic according to the shadowy script) suggests the dazed performers of an impromptu, faltering charade. We are witnessing a snail-paced fantasy in which familiar homosexual sadism, enhanced by drugtime, is putting on some kind of an act. Warhol still holds up a still, small mirror to nature, but now nature, by all the signs, is narcotized narcissism.

    One hears that Warhol's productions have a way of being group-groomed. Logically, then, his function became a parody of the Hollywood "genius" producer who decides everything and delegates the execution to others. However valuable another's contribution, the Warhol label is the only thing featured. A curious accident took place in the next film, My Hustler , aligning it with the objective hazard of the Surrealists. Not only does this film fall apart into two sections of very unequal aesthetic caliber, but the accident seems to have been caused by the studied inattentiveness to form typical of Warhol's cinema concret . A rather flossy homosexual, with a handsome, freshly picked hustler as guest at his beach cottage, is in a tizzy that marauding male or female will grab him away during his lone sunbath on the sand; this is the gist of the clumsy screen sequences, badly framed, casually inter-cut, amateurishly acted, indistinct in sound and altogether home-movieish, that comprise the first section. The second section is a small miracle, not the less miraculous for seeming just as ad libbed and "unprofessional" as the first; once more, the camera is without so much as a tremor to disturb its voyeurish solitude.

    A dark-haired hustler, an old-pro, has appeared at the beach cottage and has evidently decided, on his own, to help initiate the blond, a newcomer to the trade. Cozily flank by flank in the cottage's tiny bathroom, the pair engage in some beautifully deft verbal sparring. The hush that can sound like an interminable desert of silence in Warhol's films is here as precisioned into tense pauses as the most carefully crafted dramaturgy. One has a notion the directorial genius that makes everything in this true-life put-on look utterly right is a real objective hazard; I suspect it was due simply to the perfect understanding between the two performers as to just what was involved. Adagio, sotto voce, it leads into a veiled proposition from the old-pro--tactically prolonged through an endless shave and wash up--that the blond, in return for the other's invaluable list of tried customers, must first render up his body to the old-pro himself. The charade idea is built into the ready-made material, which is as sober in tone, as ordinary in rhythm, as the action of Haircut . Here, too, is the old faint-away stop: tantalizing because we don't find out if the wary neophyte accepts the proposition or even if he's faking his alleged puzzlement over what the proposition really is.

    Then came the expanded-keyhole variations of The Chelsea Girls suite, which, as I write, has just been promoted to art-theater status. Some confusion among fluttered commentators has been created about whether the film is "dead serious" or a horrendous "put-on." Whichever it is, they like it as much as if it were a homemade La Dolce Vita , which is what it is. The fact should have wider currency that nothing can be so "dead serious" as a "put-on" by Warhol Super Stars. Super Star is a category which some of his actors claim and to which all have the legitimate right to aspire. Fame, sheer fame, has a way of stirring up its favorites and would-be favorites with the force of, at least, amphetamine. The whole cast of The Chelsea Girls , seen for 3 1/2 hours in a series of sometimes overlapping rooms, has the habit of loitering before the camera with looks half drug-dazed, half glamor-glutted, and for super-measure, more than half bold with nonchalance. Without nonchalance, they could hardly "perform." And sometimes--it is Warhol's big step toward "theater" and "story"-- the actors here do perform.

    Not only do the actors before Warhol's cameras seem, now, really involved with something, his camera itself is involved with what it sees. All tend to freak out. Intermittently, in contrast to some steady-eyed close-ups, the camera pointlessly starts zooming with the push-button ease of an addict launching on a rhythm kick. No longer is it a stand-in for the beautifully bland, impersonal, kind and so tolerant gaze of a transfixed watcher immune to boredom. Now it is as perambulant as some of the guests at a (supposed) Chelsea Hotel who pay each other cozy, more or less friendly, visits. The dragtime, with its monotonously circular non-progression, is much tightened, though still distance-going. The subject is, in fact, peepshows, and the show is, nearly always, intoxicated persons (even beer is one of the intoxicants) doing their stuff under bright lights with the dazzling intimation of coming publicity. It is for intransigent critics or in-group gossip to say whether the performers are really drug addicts, or just pretending to be. The inside myth is, I take it, that they are, and thus that Warhol's camera has grown daringly, shockingly candid.

The truly shocking thing, in terms of the previous Warhol, is the new sort of violence: the violence of sadists and masochists freed into their desired domain by courtesy of a stimulant such as amphetamine or an hallucinogenic such as LSD. Yet, while there is a dedicatedly dreary scene in which a hustler lolls around in bed with his male patron, spitefully upstaging him, there are no wild orgies even approaching Sadian eroticism. Because of the pacifying effect of the drugs, apparently, the sadistic impulse, like the erotic impulse, is rerouted and held in a kind of narcissistic trance in which the monologue takes command. Here is narcotized narcissism in full, unimpeded, leisurely stride. As a sadistic bout, it seems best suited to Lesbian delusions of grandeur; for instance: the Amphetamine Amazon on the telephone and Hanoi Hanna in her straight-camp TV parody, during which, on the side, she persecutes two of her weaker mates. Not that cinematic skill or theatrical form have materially altered Warhol's primitively flat style. At best, The Chelsea Girls provides some scenes that, properly trimmed, would look like respectable Cinema Verite . But that is the limit of Warhol's homage to the film art, with the sole exception of a color sequence where his sliding Velvet Underground lights project the interior of an addict's trance. This sequence has quality but within the context of The Chelsea Girls it is only another form of Olympian self-documentation.

    Curiously enough, however, the "self" has become schizoid here: both in some of the actors and in the camera. Through most of the film two screens (or "rooms") exist side by side. Dragtime/drugtime is itself a split plastic "personality" and this is reflected in the alternate aspects of a character seen simultaneously in different psycho-physiological states in different rooms. Crudely handled as the device is, it is intrinsically interesting, especially as to its possibilities. Warhol's invasion of hallucination as promoted by drugs poses a procedural dilemma for his future film making. The formal restrictions super-exploited by his primitive style (the dragtime) imply an almost puritanical detachment from life: reality's fabulous deadpan dream. Now he has chosen to grapple with that peculiar collective secession from normally rational society that implements drugs to achieve its isolation. He has not tried to use hallucination as a device of creative film making; rather he has shown, almost exclusively, the outsides of those seeking hallucination as means of rescue from sober, everyday reality. Has this "behaviorism" of hallucinated subjects always been Warhol's Underground motive? Did he always intuit the psychic tension between dragtime and drugtime and gradually begin manipulating it?

    This seems certain: The anti-heroic film marathons he calls Sleep, Eat, Haircut, Kiss , and Empire can be conceived by dedicated audiences as if they were drugtime--that is, as inexplicable wonders of eventfulness. As I say, Warhol has translated into quantitative minutes on the screen the magical duree inducible in watchers by marijuana and other drugs. Psychologically it is possible for quite sober persons to grasp the physiological principle lodged in drug-taking and transpose its consequences, in terms of visual perception, to some film objectively laid out like a "trip" . Hence the primitive Warhol films might function as dialectic antitheses, demonstrating how what is excruciatingly tiresome and commonplace cries out for the right conversion-formula in the witness--not the intermediate witness, the camera, but the final witness, the audience. Warhol may have moved in some mysterious way his wonders to perform--those wonders so filmic and yet not filmic!

    Born in 1904 , Parker Tyler wrote several books, including The Hollywood Hallucination, The Magic and Myth of the Movies, and Chaplin--Last of the Clowns. He died in 1974 .

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