"The Moon Pool" and other (nearly forgotten) stories for a scary season

Samhain or Dia de los Muertos, Celtic New Year, All-Saints Day or Halloween, whichever festival a reader celebrates at this time of the season it's bound to be fraught with thoughts of impermanence, the coming winter's chill, the fragility of life, the world of spirits. What to read as the nights grow dark and cold and candle-lit? When the curtains are closed and shadows leap upon the walls, there's always Poe and Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley to scare us, of course. But what else?

Plenty. There are lots of writers these days willing to scare us or spook us, naturally. But there is much more in the dusty stacks of forgotten and near-forgotten fiction, from serious writers like H.G. Wells to pulp master H.P. Lovecraft. (It wouldn't be much of a stretch to include William Burroughs in the ranks of the weird and spooky: Cities of the Red Night is a mind-melting nightmare of a diseased, dystopian world.)

As is often the case, Jonathan Williams's view from Skywinding Farm was much more inclusive and forgiving of such matters as what our well-meaning teachers of English literature would deem worthwhile of our time spent reading. And he sadly notes, in this essay from the Jargon Books website, how much worthy reading eventually slips away nearly forgotten, and how "each of us has read almost nothing."

Williams -- himself "internationally overlooked," with a bit of honor and pride in such a distinction -- was asked by Dennis Cooper, of Little Caesar magazine, to guest-edit an issue called "Overlooked & Underrated." He happily complied, and the result was an extensive list of nearly forgotten novels in every genre, a list which was published eventually in 1981, added to in 1989, and once more in 1998. More than ten years later, it would be easy to imagine that the list in "our dummified times" would be longer still. Here's an excerpt from his letter to Ian Young, with an emphasis on stories of horror and the supernatural.

"What a civilization! Nobody even remembers who wrote THE MOON POOL." Often I think of that ultimate lament by Kenneth Rexroth. However, good buddy, I remember that Honest Abe Merritt wrote THE MOON POOL, and I was very turned on by its unique art-deco, sci-fi eroticism back in the ur-sexy days of Flash Gordon and Batman and Robin.

... I'd love to write you a whole book on marvellous caitiff writers who go unread in our dummified times. But, I remain up to my hunkers in chores for the Jargon Society -- all that reading and writing that serve to make me internationally unknown, like one had better be these days. "Of making many books, there is no end." That's in, I believe, Proverbs ... "The flesh is sad and I have read all the books." That's Mallarmé. These quotations remind us that each of us has read almost nothing.

... If you asked the poet Basil Bunting to name the few, world-class masters, he would name you twelve, half of whom you'd never heard of. Viz: Homer, Ferdosi, Manucherhri, Dante, Hafez, Malherbe, Aneirin, Heledd, Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Wordsworth ... For Basil, that was it. No one in the 20th century, even his great mentor, Ezra Pound, made the Top Dozen. I know a lot that's "readable" and that will help get a reader through good and bad days and nights. I'll select a few genres and see what I think of, off the top of my head. One thing to mention at the start is that our friend, The Devoted Reader, is going to need the services of a very excellent library system.

... Horror and the Supernatural? Howard Phillips Lovecraft was my transition from boys' adventure books to the surrealism of Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen. Nothing wrong with a "third class" writer with a peerless imagination. THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME and THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD are perhaps better than I remember. They stick in the conk.

Others that do: THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, by William Hope Hodgson; THE PURPLE CLOUD, by M.P. Shiel; THE HILL OF DREAMS, by Arthur Machen; and a lot by H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, M.R. James, Saki, Lord Dunsany, E.F. Benson, A.E. Coppard, Walter de la Mare, Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, and Colin Wilson.

The two current writers of boogieman prose I like best are Stephen King (The World's Richest Writer, who rivals the Big Mac for style and usability) and the more literate Peter Straub. 'SALEM'S LOT and THE SHINING are first-class books by Mr. King. And IF YOU COULD SEE ME NOW, GHOST STORY, and MYSTERY by Mr. Straub. Two other writers of interest: Whitley Strieber (THE HUNGER, THE WOLFEN) and Robert R. McCammon (MYSTERY WALK). Check your local drugstore.

In Atlanta: Film Love presents works of Mauricio Kagel

Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008)

Halloween weekend is here, and the Atlanta-based Film Love presents a timely night of unusual film and music at Georgia State University by the late composer Mauricio Kagel, whose compositions explore the shifting boundaries between music and performance art.

A second, different program, a rare screening of Kagel's unique film Two-Man Orchestra will be featured at Eyedrum on Thursday, November 11. The series is curated by Robert Ambrose, Andy Ditzler, and Stewart Gerber, and tonight's event is sponsored by the University's Center for Collaborative and International Arts. At the very least, the evening promises to be a viable and entertaining alternative to marauding hordes of zombies and vampires wandering the streets demanding ransoms of candy from helpless victims in lieu of their brains and precious bodily fluids.

PROGRAM ONE: Films + Live Performance by Bent Frequency

Kopleff Recital Hall, Georgia State University
Friday, October 29, 2010 | 7:30 PM | free

Musician as actor, composer as filmmaker, film as concert – the works of Mauricio Kagel constantly upend conventions and expectations. Often, his compositions are actually theater pieces played by virtuoso musicians in a concert hall rather than performed by actors in a theater. He instructed musicians to play guitars with fan blades and coffee mills, and constructed giant instruments in which musicians were encased.

In addition to creating a vast compositional output, Kagel doubled as a film director, with typically mindblowing results. Together with the contemporary music ensemble Bent Frequency, Film Love is proud to present two evenings of films and music highlighting the creative, subversive, and fascinating work of a key figure in twentieth-century music.

In tonight's program one, two short films accompany two live performances:

In Antithese, a hapless studio engineer becomes entangled in technology, leading to a comically disastrous climax.

Unter Strom features traditional – and not-so-traditional – instruments played with industrial and kitchen equipment rather than human hands, resulting in paradoxically delicate and fragile sounds.

In addition, Bent Frequency performs Match, one of Kagel’s most famous works, involving two cellists in what seems to be more of a contest than a duet, complete with a percussionist serving as referee.

PROGRAM TWO: Film: Two-Man Orchestra (1973, 71 minutes)

Eyedrum | Thursday, November 11, 2010 | 8:00 pm, 290 Martin Luther King Jr Dr, Atlanta, GA 30312

Program Two is an exceedingly rare screening of Kagel’s film Two-Man Orchestra. Two musicians are inserted into Kagel’s specially built one-man-band setups (of over 250 instruments!) which they control with their fingers, feet, legs, heads and any other possible way. Trapped in these enormous, overgrown constructions and dealing with their unpredictable malfunctions, the performers evoke everything from Charlie Chaplin to circus music to complete atonality in a virtuoso physical and musical feat.

"Drainspotting," Remo Camerota (2010): the art underfoot

(A collection of Japanese manhole covers

from Reno Camerota's new book Drainspotting)

On an island chain with limited space, every inch is coveted. In Japan, public space is a premium in crowded cities like Tokyo, and increasingly so even in smaller urban areas.

This can create unexpected friction between the demands of providing more public services and devising practical solutions to existing problems. During the 1980s Japan experienced country-wide resistance to replacing ancient sewer systems until one politician came up with an idea that approached the old problem in a new way. He appealed to civic pride by suggesting, and then implementing, the idea of custom manhole covers for each community.

The idea was a great success -- sewer systems were repaired and many towns received the benefit of an unexpected civic boosterism, as well as a new kind of art appreciation: thousands of one-of-a-kind manhole covers that tell local history and commemorate local heroes.

Remo Camerota's new book Drainspotting (Mark Batty Publishers) is a brick-sized photo collection of these unique artworks in appropriately less-than-coffeetable format (six-by-six inches). Besides being an unexpected and attractive art, the result has been a beneficial civic program, a great example of how the demands of politics, the needs of communities, and the aesthetics of art can combine -- and a reminder how rarely they do, too.

Since their original introduction the manhole covers have taken on new themes. Designs range from images that evoke a region's cultural identity, from flora and fauna to landmarks and local festivals. There are even fairytales and fanciful images dreamed up by school children. With its photographs organized by individual region, Drainspotting documents another distinct aspect of contemporary Japanese visual culture.

(Little Red Riding Hood: Ishibashi, Japan honors its sister city, Hanau, Germany,

home of the Brothers Grimm)

In June, Drainspotters was named best art/photography book at the New York Book Festival. The book and its current blog is just one aspect of Camerota's burgeoning, near-exhaustion multimedia career: it's also worth mentioning his Australia-based Whitewall Studios is a hot-house of music production, art, video, and Drainspotting iPad/iPod apps. His first book, Graffiti Japan, was published in 2008. He's at work on several TV productions, client projects, museum exhibitions, and another book on the history of Menko cards, a Japanese children's game with a hundred-year history.

"Life," Keith Richards (2010): The main offender takes the stand in his own defense

"I'm gonna booglarize you baby ... "

(Captain Beefheart, 1972)

As difficult as it is to believe in the 21st century, rock music was once a dangerous and provocative force in the booglarizing of America. The age from Elvis through the Rolling Stones were years and years of sheer terror for parents and politicians throughout the land, and even if the floor-shaking noises coming from the upstairs bedrooms of America were the sounds of a consumer-driven teenage market finding its voice (and its feet), the music was definitely something most of its listeners had never heard before.

And that was just the threat in the pounding, amplified beat -- the words were a whole new scare. The Beatles may have wanted to hold your hand, after all, when they could be understood above all that racket, but before that Jerry Lee Lewis was shouting about great balls of fire, and not necessarily about getting burned in the hellfire of damnation. And the Rolling Stones! Prancing about like ... like ... well, who knows like what, exactly, parents weren't sure, but inexplicably, obviously, bad-for-you, do you understand?

As it turns out, for the Rolling Stones time really is on their side after all. Determined to grow older -- if increasingly wrinkled -- with some dignity intact, Keith Richards has been wandering around the bookstores and TV talk shows with a new book in tow, disarmingly titled Life, filled with stories that somehow amaze with how different the world seemed back then. Now, when the only parental outrage Katy Perry can generate is her outfit on Sesame Street, tales of the Stones in America seem positively other-worldly.

Why did we stop at the 4-Dice Restaurant in Fordyce, Arkansas, for lunch on Independence Day weekend? On any day? Despite everything I know from ten years of driving through the Bible Belt. Tiny town of Fordyce. Rolling Stones on the police menu across the United States. Every copper wanted to bust us by any means available, to get promoted and patriotically rid America of these little fairy Englishmen.

It was 1975, a time of brutality and confrontation. Open season on the Stones had been declared since our last tour, the tour of '72, known as the STP. The State Department had noted riots (true), civil disobedience (also true), illicit sex (whatever that is), and violence across the United States. All the fault of us, mere minstrels. We had been inciting youth to rebellion, we were corrupting America, and they had ruled never to let us travel in the United States again.

It had become, in the time of Nixon, a serious political matter. He had personally deployed his dogs and dirty tricks against John Lennon, who he thought might cost him an election. We, in turn, they told our lawyer officially, were the most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world.

As much grief as aging boomers get about their increasingly passe memories, rock music remains, if not exactly a threat, at least a thread of connection between generations. The music of the not-quite-greatest generation can still thrill, even if the cultural meaning doesn't quite grab as it once did. The lessons are learned, and age has its privileges: every few years, there's talk of another tour, and the Stones rock machine gears up for another assault on the wallet -- and still (still!) remains the biggest rock show on earth.

The Stones, gentlemen all, are grandfathers these days, but they are attempting to go old gracefully without the albatross of a young man's "hope I die before I get old" lyric in their book. (As far back as 1978 Keith contemplated the wisdom in the words "I'm going to walk before they make me run.") Mick Jagger has always played at the continental charmer, and even Keith seems content to retire most of he bad-boy stories, at least for this (book) tour. Will Mick and Keith play on stage again? As long as there is a five-pound note in The Bank of England's vaults.

Keith-the-estate-gardener may have retired most of his well-told war stories, and in the book de-fuses many of the more outlandish tales, but not all of them. And then there's this, which should give hope to bookworms everywhere: "When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equalizer."

The rock star who played the Pirate King to Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow must maintain some wickedness, certainly, if even for press junkets: it seems he did actually snort some of the old man's cremated ashes that had fallen out on the coffee-table. Then again, Keith has given up drinking now, at the age of 66, and a man must surely be allowed at least one vice.

"Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste" (1968): one man's trash ...

For whatever reason, some books just stay with you. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste by Gillo Dorfles is one of those books.

It's long out of print, but ten years ago I found a second copy, "profusely illustrated with more appalling pictures than you can shake a stick at," as the New York Times reviews with typical understatement. Newsweek puts it more succinctly: "This compendium of corn is guaranteed to contain something to offend everyone." The familiar figure playing the violin on its cover demanded I pay her one-dollar price at a book sale.

It replaces a copy I left behind in college thirty-five years ago. This was the book I would turn to on rainy days to pass the time between classes, and in upstate New York there was a lot of bad weather. Mr. Dorfles and a wide-ranging group of art critics rack their brains (and twist ours) trying to describe what makes kitsch so appallingly bad. Some, like Herman Broch, are afraid they may pose more questions about bad art than they answer. But a ten-minute look inside at the kaleidoscope of images in Kitsch will open eyes to the avalanche of junk that makes up popular culture.

The titles in this collection of essays, photos, and illustrations, published in 1968, indicates, really, that bad taste knows no bounds. "Death," "Christian kitsch," "Tourism and nature," "Politics," and "Pornokitsch and morals" are just a few of the topics surveyed. The reader will also see more creative uses for the swastika of the Third Reich than one could imagine possible after 1945.

Also included is Clement Greenberg's essay "The Avant-Garde and Kitsch," published originally in 1939, tracing the rise of art in the service of totalitarian regimes. In this case, one photograph of Mussolini and Hitler at the Borghese gallery speaks volumes. The palpable disdain on their faces as they survey the half-nude reclining figure of Napoleon's sister on her couch makes it clear: Il Duce and Der Fuhrer will soon put an end to the decadence of the Little General's age of neo-classicism. Tomorrow the world.
Kitsch -- "trash" or "cheap finery" in German -- has become a universal term for much of the things consumers see, admire, or desire. Mass production has made kitsch an unavoidable part of contemporary culture; it's so pervasive that most of us see elements of kitsch everywhere, yet would have a difficult time separating the art from the artificial.

Let's face it, no one goes to Disney World expecting an adventure in high art, but now that Times Square in New York has been "imagineered" by Disney, who can say where the kitsch fantasy ends? Dorfles states that kitsch "threatens to become the most pervasive style of our times." Considering the book was written forty years ago, the relentless, artificial tide has only increased.

The book was first published in Italy and many of the photographs and illustrations are from European sources. Yet the sentimental and commercial pull of kitsch, with its tug at the heartstrings and purse-strings of millions, is universal. Anyone who thinks of The Lone Ranger or Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when listening to "The William Tell Overture" by Rossini has been influenced by kitsch.

While the line separating art from kitsch is exceedingly fine, one man's trash is still saved from being another man's treasure by context, or more rightly kitsch's complete lack of it. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa appears much less inscrutable on a plastic shower curtain. Mass production has made the irony of "authentic reproduction" available on a grand scale.

Some of the academic essays have not aged well, even if the gently tortured Italian-into-English translation has its own charm: "And obviously before long (and even now in fact) we will witness the anti-family kitsch, the kitsch of hippies and long-haired youths, the kitsch of addicts and beatniks," writes Dorfles -- foretelling Nirvana's cover version of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" by a good 20 years.

Fascinating, funny, and full of hideously bad art, this book is a wonderland of the high-brow, the low-brow, and the no-brow of taste. In a pop-culture blender that makes no such distinctions, how else can you explain the success of American Idol?

Bob Wade: Still doing big in Texas

"13 Cowgirls" (1979), Bob Wade color retouching, photo silkscreen, 4 feet by 10 feet)

Bob Wade is a Texas artist whose 40-year multimedia career ranges from the ridiculous out-size sculpture of a pair of giant ostrich-feather boots at a San Antonio mall, to the sublimely hand-colored postcard images of wild-west cowgirls. Of course, art on that kind of scale needs lots of Texas-sized space, and a larger-than-life sense of dedication to promote. True to the adage that you can't keep a good man -- or a giant iguana -- down, one of Wade's most recognizable creations has a new home in Fort Worth, far from its once-lofty perch observing the skyline of Manhattan over the Lone Star Cafe in the 1980s.

On June 1, after eleven years in semi-retirement, Wade's giant sculpture of Iggy landed on the roof of the administration building at the Forth Worth Zoo. (As the Austin American-Statesman reported, "an iguana airlift? You know Austin is involved."). It's just the most recent adventure for the artist and his roaming creations, who have crisscrossed the country for decades in outlandish and eye-catching ways. But then, Wade has always been doing things in a big way.

Inspired by the exploding pop-art scene of the 1960s and stints at the University of Texas and Berkeley, Wade returned to Austin and discovered that "the Austin counterculture had finally taken off": the funky mix of artists and musicians that the city relishes to this day in its unofficial slogan, Keep Austin Weird.

Wade's 1995 book Daddy-O: Iguana Heads and Texas Tales (St. Martin's Press) is a careening ride through the artist's Texas hill country and the even wilder art scenes of New York and California that followed. His early experiments were funded more by bursts of inspiration and civic pride than business sense: as Wade puts it, "I took on the persona of artist turned Texas-style land developer wheeler-dealer." The Bicentennial Map of The United States was a huge 3-D project, three hundred feet wide:

Bicentennial Map (1976) & Texas Mobile Home Museum at the Paris Biennale (1977)

"We mailed a letter to every state chamber of commerce asking them to send anything we could associate with each state. Louisiana and a bunch of others sent flags, which waved in the breeze. One business agreed to build us an outhouse and asked us where to put it. Since we had nothing from Arkansas we put the outhouse there. Soon after, we received an irate letter from the Arkansas chamber of commerce. I told them to send a check for $1500 and we'd move the outhouse to Oklahoma."

The next year there was the Texas Mobile Home Museum exhibited at the 1977 Paris Biennale: a rolling, chromed Texasmobile stuffed with cultural artifacts and tricked out with a pair of steer horns mounted on the front.

The Boots,1979

Wade's self-made career -- the Texas wheeler-dealer with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts -- has been a succession of larger-than-life commissions and personal visions. His website contains a section simply labeled "Weird." But he is far from beyond passing up a chance at promoting simple civic boosterism or outsize advertising, Texas-style. The Biggest Pair of Cowboy Boots in the World, originally an installation in an empty lot three blocks from the White House, were eventually purchased by the Rouse Company to grace the North Star Mall in San Antonio.

Then there is Wade's giant iguana, forty feet long and twelve feet wide, that found its way to a New York rooftop. From its perch overlooking 52nd Street at The Lone Star Cafe, the iguana saw a large part of the Austin scene as it made its way to New York. Because the Parsons School of Design was directly across the street from the Lone Star (and several floors above the sculpture) the iguana became a favorite sketching subject. Of course, as with many extraordinary things in New York, the forty-foot iguana became a cause for concern.

"The city of New York finally declared the Iguana to be a sign, and as a sign it broke various codes to which signs are subject -- not attached properly, incorrect permits, and flammability. This went on even though I appeared in court as 'the artist' as opposed to 'the signmaker.' Numerous 'art' experts appeared in court, including a former member of Art Park's advisory staff and a curator from the Brooklyn Museum of Art. ... On November 4, 1979, the judge found in favor of the Lone Star Cafe, declaring the Iguana not a sign but a bona fide work of art."

"It was in the Texas towns of Waco, Beaumont, Galveston, San Antonio, El Paso, and Marfa that I learned the ways of the 'Texas Myth," Wade says. "Gigantism, outrageous humor, and exaggerations still play a big part in my life." The book is a continual succession of outrageous "can you beat this?" bar-room tales.

No doubt Wade got a kick from the jacket copy to Daddy-O, which features quotes from Willie Nelson, former Texas governor Ann Richards, and Prince Albert of Monaco. And somewhere Wade's giant Iguana -- once the toast of the Lone Star, then eventually banished from sight in yet another city litigation -- was just taking a well-deserved nap, getting ready for his next appearance.

All of this attention has made Wade and his art a continued feature in festivals, books, and films, and his website contains photos of new art created in 2010. Too High, Too Wide and Too Long is a Texas-style road trip documentary of Wade on a book tour in his 1956 tricked-out Airstream trailer, an "iguana's-eye view" of the artist filmed in 1995 by Karen Dinitz. For more information and a gallery of Bob's "cross-pollination of border-town kitsch, commercial roadside eyesores, and sideshow curiosity," visit Daddy-O's site: www.bobwade.com. As the Texas Kid would say, "If it's fer ya, it's fer ya. If it ain't fer ya, it ain't fer ya." You decide.

Dada, meet mama: Hugo Ball and Marie Osmond

Sometimes it's best to let words and images speak for themselves. Explaining too much about the theory and writings of Hugo Ball and the Dada movement he helped create in the early decades of the twentieth century would risk ruining the joyous rhythms (and the sheer beauty of nonsense language) that resonate in his poetry.

If you're up to it, though, Malcolm Green's anthology of many early Dada texts offers all the intentionally maddening mysteries of the Dada movement. Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka!, with a title taken from a poem by Hugo Ball, offers a look at Dada's brief but complex history, and the resulting outrage from Dada's confounded critics and even more confused audiences.

Ball did try to upset the cultural expectations of his time. His poems sought to "dissolve language" and create "a new sentence that was neither determined by, nor tied to, any conventional meaning," according to his diaries. The Cabaret Voltaire -- his Zurich nightclub -- became the center of a riotous, intentionally provoking, group of artists who called their movement Dada, itself a nonsense word chosen at random from a dictionary, and meant to denote no particular meaning.


Academic discussion aside, public outrage was swift at the total confusion of word and image that followed Dada performances, even surpassing Ball's own previous experiments with Expressionism and theater. Sophisticated audiences who were learning to appreciate (some would say grapple with) new artistic ideas such as cubism in art, dissonances explored by twentieth-century composers, and other experimental artistic forms were confused and angered by the Dada artists' complete disregard for meaning -- a clear reaction to the meaninglessness of World War I. In March 1916 one critic complained about the movement's "unforgivable blasphemy against the intellect":

They no longer believe in the intellect and its words ... and all they produce are monkey tricks. And if they were asked why they do it, probably they would answer it would be impious to expect them even to know. And they would underline this answer with a smile and this smile with a gesture of superiority.

On the evening of June 23 1916 Ball came to the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire dressed in a cardboard suit and wearing an outrageous headdress, looking, as Green observes, like a "shaman." Nervously he recited a few of his sound poems, and inspired by his Catholic upbringing he began to recite his nonsense words in the "ancient cadences of priestly lamentation," Ball later wrote. One sound experiment, "Karawane," read:



When the performance was over, Ball wrote in his diary, "covered in sweat, I was carried from the stage like a magic bishop." This event turned out to be a defining moment in Dada; and although Dada art took many forms, the photo of Ball in his "magic bishop" suit has become a visual representation of the entire movement.


And who better to express the ineffable in the spoken words of Hugo Ball than the delightful Marie Osmond? For a presentation on sound poetry in an episode of Ripley's Believe It or Not television series from the 1980s, Marie introduces the audience to the complex world of Dada as she puts on makeup -- explaining that "when you know you're going to be on stage, you want to be sure you look your best -- and that you're properly dressed for the part."

It's an amusing way to describe the unconventional concepts of Ball's Dada poetry and its performance as art -- especially so when she produces the famous printed text of "Karawane" (reproduced above), pauses for a long moment, and creates one of the most unexpected and truly most dada-like moments in the history of television. Marie's introduction and striking performance of "Karawane" would undoubtedly bring a small smile from Hugo Ball. It would probably be impious for him to suggest he knows why.