Space is the place: Andy Warhol & John Phillips, "Man on the Moon" (1975)

Un-earthed (there's no better word for a musical about space, is there?) from the vaults of musician John Phillips, Man on the Moon (Varese Sarabande) is one of those legendary 1970s projects that benefits from its dusting of superstar glitter, even if the effect of the project as a whole seems to totter on its own silver platform-soled spaceboots.

Just consider the title itself. Andy Warhol Presents Man on the Moon: the John Phillips Space Musical. There's a sense of whole creative universes colliding -- layers of west coast rock and downtown art, the message of peace and love in man-made stage space, a singing astronaut, a bomb on the moon, and heavenly aliens who save mankind from itself. ("I built the V1 and I built the V2 / I worked for the Fuhrer / now I work for you" is, perhaps, the most unsettling opening number in a musical ever written.)

But the lyrics also ran deeper and into more personal terrain. After the end of The Mamas and the Papas, Phillips -- into worsening addiction -- wrote a short song cycle in the early 70s that sounded notes of his own alienation and drug-fueled confusion. These lyrics are included here too, as in the achingly sweet "There Is a Place":

"There is a place between two stars / Somewhere in space that's ours that's yours / we watch the worlds roll by / and never think of dying / there's a place in space that's ours ... / People everywhere are inclined to stare / I have a need for privacy, dear / feel like a sardine and / I don't feel very clean / I'd like a star of my own / There is a place in space for stars ... "

Phillips kept writing more songs, securing funding, rewriting the script. It was the seventies, after all, with Bowie's space oddity Ziggy Stardust a cult hit LP and Transylvanians like Rocky Horror a surprising off-Broadway curiosity. Brian dePalma's rock-n-roll film version of Faust, Phantom of the Paradise, featured a stitched-together rock star and his gothic back-up singers. An intergalactic peace-and-love rock musical seemed right, even one with a bomb that threatens the universe.

Unfortunately, over time the musical became a classic case of too much and never enough. Fact and fiction flew (Elvis was approached to play the role of the astronaut; Nicholson was interested; George Lucas might be involved, then stole ideas for Star Wars, Phillps claimed). Lavish costumes reflecting beams of light like disco balls were designed and created. One draft called for a scene to be played by actors in mid-air. Phillips and Genevieve Waite, his third wife, moved from Bel Air to New York, in part to promote her recording career.

By this point the project had taken five years, and untold amounts of money. Phillips's drugged paranoia became too much to deal with. Director Michael Bennett abruptly quit, saying he couldn't work with Phillips any longer; he went on to direct A Chorus Line. The producer Michael Butler, who had a surprising hit with Hair, then followed suit. (John's temperment, rather than creative tension, he said, was the reason).

Eventually the musical's sheer excess and constant changes sank the production. Genevieve, as a last effort, approached Warhol to help out. Whether Andy did it as a favor or as a sincere creative move, he must have been fully aware of the backstage drama. Produced at last by Warhol and directed off-Broadway by Paul Morrisey, "Man on the Moon" closed in less than five days. In the CD's bonus tracks he can be heard on the play's opening night. Warhol's live stage recordings from the first night audience are provided from the Warhol tape archives, available here for the first time.

What survives in the form of the original song cycle are tunes recorded by Phillips in the studio, songs by Genevieve as Angel and also included in the play, performances by the cast including Denny Doherty, and a few out-takes --"The Elephants and the Donkeys" is ready to be anyone's protest chant.

The resulting whole is bare-bones music that is charming and warm and obviously autobiographical, if a little oddball for either a rock or a Broadway audience. Here's the astronaut, slyly named Andy, describing his Marine father: this isn't The Mamas and The Papas by any stretch, as Phillips describes his own family memory.

"Well the service finally cashed my daddy out / they say his heart blew a fuse / so he spent the next twenty years living down in the basement / drinking booze. / He was singing / he had his dogs with him / had a hell of a time ..."

This contrasts with other songs, as Chris Campion describes in greater detail, where Phillips sounds like a space-age Cole Porter. Here he's wistful and bittersweet, "questing after love in other realms" -- "Penthouse of Your Mind," "Yesterday I Left the Earth," "A Myth Amongst the Family of Man" (" ... that there is something higher than themselves."). Whether any of these tunes would have left the audience whistling as they left the theater is, well, left for another Broadway backer to discover.

The enhanced CD and liner notes collect lots of memorabilia associated with the musical; a full early script, interviews and reviews, black-and-white video footage from rehearsals drawn from the Andy Warhol archives, and cast and party photos from the show's brief run. Mick, Yoko, Andy, and Warren are there. Mackenzie is at the opening-night party seated next to Genevieve, looking wide-eyed.

What remains of Man on the Moon certainly seems like one of those by-gone eras, as they used to write, of a golden age. At the very least, it makes those old enough to remember those glittery days feel quite a bit older. Is Man on the Moon a lost classic? Not quite. But it's like hearing new stories about a great party you missed: you know you should have been there.


From the show's closing number, "Stepping Through the Stars":

"Take my hand and I'll show you / a dance that's really new / way back home at the Hippodrome / it's the one the sheiks all do / No one can resist the rhythm / it's like driving racing cars / He will love you when you're with him / steppin' through the stars / when you're steppin' through the stars."

A celebration for James Broughton tonight in Atlanta

I don't know what the Left is doing,

said the Right Hand,

but is looks fascinating.

(James Broughton)

Tonight in Atlanta AQLF and Andy Ditzler's Film Love are hosting a reading/screening/benefit for the Big Joy Project. The Project is making a film about the late filmmaker, poet, playwright and faerie shaman James Broughton (aka "Big Joy," as Jonathan Williams dubbed him.)

As the event's creator Franklin Abbott writes on the Big Joy Facebook page: Join us and lots of avant garde cinephiles for an evening of spoken word, film and faerie buffet. Doors open at 6:30, the reading begins at 7:30 and after a dalliance the films begin around 9. $5 donation is requested (please give more if you can and less if need be). Feel free to bring food and bev for the buffet. Of course there will be door prizes, faerie dust and Big Joy blessings. For more on the film project go to www.bigjoy.org.

The event is being held at the Phillip Rush Center, 1530 DeKalb Avenue, Atlanta. The center is across from the Candler Park MARTA station.

Broughton once wrote of himself that "he was a hometown swami who couldn't keep his mouth shut." Never shy -- Broughton was an indefatigable self-promoter -- he was a writer and artist, as well as an actor in 23 films, which earned him descriptions as "San Francisco's own man for all seasons," its "leprechaun poet laureate." Here is Broughton in his own words, spinning freely through his own universe of past and present, goatsongs and angelic visions:

"I am a third generation Californian.

My great grandfather was a scout with Fremont,

my grandmother was born in the Mother Lode,

my aunt served in the State Legislature.

When the sun was in Scorpio, the moon in Aries,

and the cusp of Virgo and Libra rising in 1913,

I was born in the San Joaquin town of Modesto,

On the Tuolomne River of Stanislaus County

in the state of California.

My grandfathers were bankers, and so was my father.

But my mother wanted me to become a surgeon.

However, one night when I was 3 years old

I was awakened by a glittering stranger

who told me I was a poet and always would be

and never to fear being alone or being laughed at.

That was my first meeting with my Angel

who is the most interesting poet I have ever met.

My childhood passions were dancing and swimming,

circuses, amusement parks, movies, vaudeville,

the Book of Knowledge and the Land of Oz.

Pet playthings: my toy theater, my magic lantern.

When I was 10 I was sent away to military school.

There my Angel came to my rescue:

I fell madly in love with the English language.

(And also the captain of the baseball team.)

My favorite book is still Webster's Unabridged, 2nd ed.

At 12 I imitated all of the Oxford Book of English Verse

and most of the Louis Untermeyer anthologies.

But ultimately I have learned more about poetry

from music and magic than from literature.

The clearest poetic memory of my years at Stanford:

the day Yvor Winters ordered me out of his class.

Poetry is a living adventure, not a literary problem.

(Other favorite books: Roget's Thesaurus, Tao Te Ching,

Mother Goose, Candide, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

"Laughter is the soap of the gods." Williams writes about Broughton's irrepressible nature: "Almost as noble as James Broughton's willingness to stand there as naked as a jaybird is his willingness to use babytalk, prattle, doo-doo, goo-goo, and loony-camp lingo when called upon to do so. A lot of it works outrageously well. He reminds me of Jacques Tati playing tennis in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot....

Big Joy and Joel Singer retired from the San Francisco Scene and lived in the midst of a forest near Port Townsend, on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. James, much reinvigorated by the relationship, was very productive into his early eighties, until slowed by a stroke. He was increasingly frail, yet cheerful."

How often do you think of Death?

Death thinks about you all the time

Death is fatally in love with you and me

and his lust is known to be relentless...

"The Art of American Book Covers: 1875-1930," a book of disappearing art

Picture this: The Art of American Book Covers 1875-1930 (George Braziller Publishers, 2010) by Richard Minsky celebrates an almost-lost art that was once an integral part of book publishing. From the mid-ninetenth century to the nineteen-fifties, hardback book cover art -- with an endless variety of gilt lettering, embossed, silhouette, finely-drawn and sometimes experimental styles -- was part of the visual and often tactile appeal of the printed book.

In an era of increased leisure reading time and developing consumer demand, this form of illustration and commercial art became a marketing tool in the publishing insustry. An engaging cover drew the eye to an author's latest offering: book publishers relied on a talented group of artists whose names may mean little today but whose art remains on display in second-hand or antique shops, libraries, and museums.

Minsky's recent book, and his blog of the same name, contains a marvelous selection of book covers by artists whose names may have faded but whose art is a striking and still attractive form. Minsky, an artist himself, continues to curate the Center for Book Arts he founded in 1974, and his research provides historical background on a great number of these artists.

(cover for Aboard the Mavis, by Richard Markham, 1880)

Probably the most visually interesting art of his collection, several examples of which are reproduced here, is by an unkinown illustrator, for whom Minsky makes an educated guess of John LeFarge:

...The authority on La Farge has advised me that there are no records of his having done any book covers. If they are not by his hand, it looks to me like it may have been his influence. We know that he taught several of the earliest and best book cover artists--Sarah Wyman Whitman and Alice Cordelia Morse learned from him, and Margaret Armstrong grew up with La Farge as a neighbor and family friend.

To my way of thinking, the lack of evidence that he did book cover commissions does not rule him out. It was several years later that artists' monograms began to appear regularly on covers. La Farge illustrated many books, knew the publishers and their art directors, and would be a likely artist for a cover commission.

(cover for Mr. Bodley Abroad, by Horace Scudder, 1881)

In these days of reduced budgets and monthly articles forecasting the death rattles of publishing, it's unlikely this form of mass-market art will make a big return in any way except as an expensive, high-end luxury item.Ironic as it seems, the internet is becoming the default curator of book art for those interested enough to track it down.

One site that describes itself as "delving daily into the arcane and esoteric of the book world" is here, and bibliophemera is another site that's worth a browse for its collection of book-cover art and other publisher-related items from the 1800s.

And for those willing to wear out shoe-leather in their home town, just browsing the shelves at your local library or book sale can turn up a find: that's where I bought a first edition of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House from 1946 (for one dollar) with original illustrations by William Steig -- the artist whose later, wobbly line-drawings in the New Yorker featured a cranky but lovable monster named Shrek.

Jorge Luis Borges, born August 24, 1899

"There's no need to build a labyrinth
when the entire universe is one."

"Ibn-Hakim Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth,"
in The Aleph (1949)

"Kitsch" (1968): pop culture, fine art, and the line between them

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.

Hitler & Mussolini, art critics

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 ofkitsch 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 thatkitsch "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 ofkitsch, 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?

"The Poem of Poems": Brion Gysin's disappearing act

This fair child of mine (roses and bitumen)
I make my old excuse:
He shall have the gift of song.
Praise deserves his beauty's use.
O, if thou couldst answer with studs of silver
this were to be new made!
What ease to our way
walled with silver, gold and beryl!

Excerpted from "The Poem of Poems"
Brion Gysin

While living in Paris at 9 Rue Git-Le-Coeur in the late 1950s, the artist and writer Brion Gysin accidentally sliced through some newspapers with a knife and became fascinated with the resulting jumble of text -- half of one sentence became the end of another, unrelated one. He began to experiment with this technique, slicing up newsprint, books, and other materials. He refered to these as "cut-ups," and when he demonstrated the process to William Burroughs, Burroughs asked if he could try it himself. "Go ahead, that's what it's for," Gysin replied.

Unwittingly, Gysin handed Burroughs a writing tool that he would use extensively in his career (The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine, Nova Express and Exterminator). He achieved such infamy that Burroughs -- although he was careful to credit Gysin as often as possible -- became famous for the cut-up technique, while Gysin (whose multifaceted career as a musician, writer, painter, and calligrapher contines to defy categories) went on to write The Process (1971) and The Last Museum, an edited version of a much larger work about the fate of 9 Rue-Le-Coeur itself, published posthumously in 1986.

In order to show Burroughs the extraordinary possibilities of juxtaposing text-on-text, while in Paris Gysin experimented with the cut-up technique on audio tape (heard here) as well as print. Describing this in an interview published in Terry Wilson's book Here to Go: Planet R-101, Gysin says:

I suggested to William that we use only the best, only the high-charged material: King James' translation of the "Song of Songs" of Solomon, Eliot's translation of "Anabasis" by St. John-Perse, Shakespeare's sugared "Sonnets" and a few lines from "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley, about his mescaline experiences.

The result -- as can be expected from such diverse sources -- is at once mysterious and glorious, beautiful, and maybe the finest example of the cut-up process Gysin himself created. Unfortunately, it was never published in its entirety during his lifetime. An excerpt appeared in the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up collaboration The Third Mind (1978) and mistakenly credited to Burroughs -- once more undercutting Gysin's contribution.

The full text finally appeared in 2001. Jason Weiss' Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader helps to restore Brion Gysin's legacy, after so many of Gysin's works have become unavailable, hard-to-find, or have simply slipped out-of-print. There are excerpts from his first published novel in 1947, five chapters from The Process, a scene from Gysin's unpublished script forNaked Lunch.

There is a large selection of his cut-ups, as well as uncollected magazine pieces, scores and lyrics, and reproductions of his unique calligraphy. Full texts are included of his permutated poems, "I Am That I Am" and "Junk Is No Good Baby," as well as "The Poem of Poems."

In one interview Gysin put his multimedia career in perspective by saying the art world thought of him as a writer, and the writers thought of him as an artist. "I should have been one or the other," he said, somewhat ruefully. By the 1980s, he was a performer as well -- he'd written for Broadway in the '40s, but here he was onstage singing new lyrics he'd written and describing himself as "the world's oldest living rock star."

It's all the more ironic that Gysin's work remains largely undiscovered in this multimedia age his work helped create. His legacy, long overshadowed by others of more fame or infamy, remains elusive as ever.

Anna Quindlen: "Don't read these," a back-to-school memo on censorship

School is (or is about to be) back in session, which means the annual battle over books appropriate for school-age readers is about to heat up. Young or old, it's not easy reading banned books. There are traps for unsuspecting readers on every page: "inappropriate" language, "desensitizing" violence, "stimulating" stories. As Anna Quindlen comments, "And then there's Faulkner. Oy."

Quindlen wrote a witty column in 1994 in which she outlines a week's worth of reading censored books, and comes to a "wonderful end to a depressing week" -- she re-reads Bridge to Terabithia and finds it even better. Her final recommendation? Tell kids there are certain books not to be read, and then watch the reading scores soar. If only.

Monday: Begin Banned Books Week by reading Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, which parents in several school districts have tried to remove from required reading lists. Weep copiously at realistic tale of friendship and loss among children. ...

Discover that Terabithia caused such a stink in Oskaloosa, Kan., that the school board has required teachers to list each profanity in any book they assign and how many times the profanity is used. Page through book. Find a "damn" and write it down. Feel like a fool. "I hate to say it, but sometimes grown-ups are really stupid," says oldest child. ...

Tuesday: Read reams of material about the banning of In the Night Kitchen, fanciful account of dreams of little boy by Maurice Sendak. Boy falls out of clothes, is naked, has penis. Penis has been described as "desensitizing children to nudity" (Beloit, Wis.), "nudity for no purpose" (Norridge, Ill.) and "the foundation for future use of pornography" (Elk River, Minn.). In Missouri copies of book were distributed to kindergarten class after artist was commissioned to draw shorts on boy. ...

Wednesday: Contemplate bookshelves in office. Moby Dick encourages whale hunting, Anna Kareninaadultery, Shakespeare teen suicide, usury and the occult. Faulkner, oy. ... Realize cat with hat encourages children to make a mess while mother is out. Discover in American Library Association Banned Books Week literature that the Bible was challenged as "obscene and pornographic" at library in Fairbanks, Alaska. Fear for future of human race.

Library Association sends information on case in Wyoming challenging Judy Blume book Forever. Judy reigning Queen of banned books, maybe because writes books about teen-agers in which they talk and think like actual teen-agers as opposed to adult's idea of what teen-agers should be like. (How quickly we forget.) Parent complained Forever contains sex described graphically. Spells graphically "grafically."

Read that parent in Lambertville, N.J., objected to The Amazing Bone by William Steig, because animals use tobacco. Love Steig, love Bone, hate tobacco. Heart sinks. Reports of censorship at highest mark in last 10 years. Find myself counting uses of Lord's name in vain in Catcher. Read dictionary instead. ...

Consider entire K-12 curriculum of banned books, beginning with Night Kitchen ... Great stuff all. Foolproof pedagogical method: tell students they cannot, repeat, CANNOT, read these books. Too stimulating. Watch reading scores soar. Next stop, Faulkner. .. Decide oldest child is right. Reread Bridge to Terabithia. Even better the second time.