"Call Me Burroughs" [Barry Miles]: el hombre invisible, in the bunker & out

 

Barry Miles' doorstop-size 2014 biography Call Me Burroughs is likely to be the go-to print resource for anyone interested in the parapatetic author's long battle with the forces of Control. From the C.I.A. to heroin, guns to aliens, his hatred of dogs and his houseful of cats in Lawrence, Kansas, it's all here in 700-plus pages, along with Burroughs' never-ending [and never resolved] anxiety over whatever strange thing happened with Nursy when he was a toddler. 

It's an exhaustive and obsessive report, as only a long-time observer [in this case, Barry Miles, the founder and editor of London's  International Times] could assemble from memoirs, new interviews, and private letters from Burroughs associates. Ironically, the more Burroughs is revealed in the book's pages the more he achieves his reputation as el hombre invisible :  he moves through his own life as a shadow and wrestles often with the Ugly Spirit [Burroughs' own term], trying to hide from the destructive force that seems to dominate his life.
 
The historiography of William Burroughs, now enters an elemental half-life, sustaining an entire writerly sub-culture by itself since the cat-daddy of beat-noir disappeared from the scene in 1997. What Burroughs himself would think of all this is a guessing game -- although it would be a promising bet he would offer his cantankerous opinion to anyone who might listen.

While Uncle Bill is busy now in another Bunker tending his cats, it's instructive to listen to the stories of those who interacted with Burroughs as an artist. Reputations, especially cultivated ones, are funny things: beyond the publicity it's still about the ideas. And, of course, ideas are not responsible for what happens to them.

At this remove, the life of William Burroughs has become an antidote to the church of Elvis: rock-and-roll may have been thoroughly subsumed by the culture, but drug addiction remains a mess of creative impulses without a hero. Excepting, of course, one's self: as a bad boy, Burroughs was his his own best creation. 

With Ginsberg and Kerouac to support and promote his work, and with a burgeoning underground press in America bored with tailfins and refrigerators ready to howl in the 1950s and 1960s, Burroughs' walks on the wild side [booze and sex and powders and opiates in exotic locales] became the template for members of a post-war generation that didn't feel it fit in the Eisenhower era.
 

 William S. Burroughs & Marc Olmsted,

from Burroughs on Bowery (1978)

Self-creation is an unbeatable American fixation for bad boys: Marc Olmsted -- as one description puts it -- "is a writer who did some time in prison, got straight while staying gay and writes poetry while making the world a better place." In 2007 he blogged as The Trash Whisperer, picking up trash near Los Feliz, California and writing about it online. 

Before that -- in the 1970s -- he was a film student at San Francisco State, where he suggested making a film to Burroughs, and Burroughs agreed to participation and a subsequent interview; yet creativity, even with the best intentions, seldom runs smooth -- a lesson Olmsted learned in the process. Here's an excerpt from Olmsted's piece online at Rusty Truck, called "Burroughs in the Bunker and Out:"

... I told Burroughs that I had a dream about him where his face was covered with tattoos like Quequeg in Moby Dick, and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt like Hunter S. Thompson, and also looked like a sort of half-Thompson, which was not a stretch.  In the dream, he told me he was a master of Peruvian magic.  Burroughs didn’t seem to like the Thompson part, scowling slightly as I told it, but then leaned forward and said, “I am a master of Peruvian magic, my dear.”  At another point he just leaned on his hands and gazed at me, openly appreciative.   I felt like a young boy at the swimming hole – which was slightly unnerving coming from Burroughs.

I told Burroughs about this great sci fi movie I had seen that reminded me of his work, They Came From Within, where man-made parasites (looking like a cross between a penis and a bloody shit) turned you into an insatiable sexual zombie.  It was actually David Cronenberg’s first feature, who would later make Naked Lunch some 15 years later.

Burroughs presented me with a signed copy of a recent chapbook.  As we began slowly gathering ourselves to leave, I had the brainstorm to use Burroughs as the subject for a rephotography film experiment I was considering.  I talked to James Grauerholz out of Bill’s earshot and asked what he thought.  James went off to Bill and came back with a positive from Bill.  We’d meet for breakfast at a diner the next day and shoot Bill walking around the neighborhood.

So the next morning, I went to the diner and got to bring old pal Richard Modiano (who lived in NYC then), previously denied when I attempted to wrangle him an invitation to the Bunker from Allen.  So we were both quite happy about this new development.  Besides my Bauer Super 8, I was also armed with a primitive cassette tape recorder.

We met at the breakfast joint, and Bill was considerably more reserved, stiff and looked a little hungover.  Still, he was friendly in an otherworldly sort of way.  He was also most definitely a good sport.

I turned on the cassette player, thinking I’d use it for background to the film.  Our discussion turned to film itself, and I made some mention of Godard’s maxim that every camera movement was a moral statement.

“To move the camera or not to move the camera,” said Bill.  “Right,” I answered.  It turned out to be the only remotely legible section of the entire tape, which was mostly a cacophony of restaurant background noise.  I later used these two sentences as a loop for the film, though there were only a few mortals who could recognize the words.  Basically, Bill then took a walk around the neighborhood and I filmed him.

Later I intercut the then-rephotographed footage with fragments shot off the TV from Monster Zero, From Russia with Love and White Heat.  I also shot some peep show gay porn right off its rear-projected screen where fellow film student Craig Baldwin worked.  Some cruising cat wanted to join me in the booth.  I declined.

The San Francisco State University Film Department had this device where you spooled the Super 8 through and it would show up as a TV image, a sort of pre-VCR device the industrial world used that would allow cheap screenings of Super 8 training films.  I had been introduced to this device by Craig (he was later to make the great Tribulation ’99), because it allowed all kinds of crude rephotography off the TV screen, going in for close-ups on what was original a full shot, and filming 2nd and 3rd generations of Super 8 footage. Craig had a big influence, cementing an interest in found footage and deconstruction of image.  Craig lived in this big ramshackle house on Andover in the Mission.  It would eventually be condemned, with problems like a giant broken hole in the bathroom floor into the apartment below, covered with a sheet of plywood.

Blue first Burroughs walk?

saucer-ray-crowd water

gun window

fence

saucer take-off

walk

flare

spider face-end

– found poem of my own scribbles: how to edit Burroughs on Bowery.

I finished the work print in my graduate film production class, having a terrible contest of wills with instructor-filmmaker Karen Holmes.  She gave me a C in the class and a D in the one unit lab, basically because I wouldn’t do what she said.  I had been used to a great deal more freedom & empathy in my undergraduate years.   They were the worst grades of my entire film school career. ...

Through these difficulties, Olmsted persevered: He completed Burroughs on Bowery and then American Mutant, with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary. His website is a kaleidoscope of reinventions, from punk musician to Buddhist student to filmmaker.  

Burroughs on Bowery, described by Olmsted here as a student film project, would be hard to distinguish the writer beyond the projected image and intercut randomness: still, as WSB once wrote, "you have to take a broad, general view of things." Olmsted is quoted in an interview as saying Burroughs "laughed ... when I showed it to him in 1978.  Then he said, “Great movie, Marc,” after that funny evil, closed-mouth mmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm laugh throughout the 4 minute movie." 
  
It's a safe bet Burroughs never had to get a passing grade from a demanding film instructor, though: "The movie was HATED by my film school, San Francisco State University.  They voted not to include it in the Film Finals of that year."

Jack Kerouac, born March 12 1922: "c'mon now, Marlon, put up your dukes and write!"

Kerouac would have been 92 today: "I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

In 1957, Jack Kerouac wrote the letter, shown above, to Marlon Brando. Kerouac's approach to the 1950's most volatile actor was a pitch to Brando's ego: a buddy-buddy tone that takes on Jack's big ideas about remaking the American film industry itself with Brando's help -- much like he would write that The Dharma Bums would bring Buddhism to America in a letter to Gary Snyder in 1958.

The Brando letter was Jack's star-struck attempt to bring his words to the big screen after the unexpected success of On the Road. Kerouac was desperate to capitalize on the incredibly positive reaction, and wanted Brando to buy the rights to the movie adaptation, and then play the part of Dean Moriarty opposite Kerouac's own onscreen portrayal of Sal Paradise. 

Kerouac's dream casting never happened, and Brando never responded. Here's the letter, posted at Letters of Note.

Jack Kerouac

1418½ Clouser St 

Orlando, Fla 

Dear Marlon

I'm praying that you'll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it. Don't worry about the structure, I know to compress and re-arrange the plot a bit to give perfectly acceptable movie-type structure: making it into one all-inclusive trip instead of the several voyages coast-to-coast in the book, one vast round trip from New York to Denver to Frisco to Mexico to New Orleans to New York again. I visualise the beautiful shots could be made with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak. I wanted you to play the part because Dean (as you know) is no dopey hotrodder but a real intelligent (in fact Jesuit) Irishman. You play Dean and I'll play Sal (Warner Bros. mentioned I play Sal) and I'll show you how Dean acts in real life, you couldn't possibly imagine it without seeing a good imitation. Fact, we can go visit him in Frisco, or have him come down to L.A. still a real frantic cat but nowadays settled down with his final wife saying the Lord's Prayer with his kiddies at night...as you'll seen when you read the play BEAT GENERATION. All I want out of this is to able to establish myself and my mother a trust fund for life, so I can really go roaming around the world writing about Japan, India, France etc. ...I want to be free to write what comes out of my head & free to feed my buddies when they're hungry & not worry about my mother. 

Incidentally, my next novel is THE SUBTERRANEANS coming out in N.Y. next March and is about a love affair between a white guy and a colored girl and very hep story. Some of the characters in it you know in the village (Stanley Gould etc.) It easily could be turned into a play, easier than ON THE ROAD. 

What I wanta do is re-do the theater and the cinema in America, give it a spontaneous dash, remove pre-conceptions of "situation" and let people rave on as they do in real life. That's what the play is: no plot in particular, no "meaning" in particular, just the way people are. Everything I write I do in the spirit where I imagine myself an Angel returned to the earth seeing it with sad eyes as it is. I know you approve of these ideas, & incidentally the new Frank Sinatra show is based on "spontaneous" too, which is the only way to come on anyway, whether in show business or life. The French movies of the 30's are still far superior to ours because the French really let their actors come on and the writers didn't quibble with some preconceived notion of how intelligent the movie audience is, the talked soul from soul and everybody understood at once. I want to make great French Movies in America, finally, when I'm rich...American Theater & Cinema at present is an outmoded Dinosaur that ain't mutated along with the best in American Literature. 

If you really want to go ahead, make arrangements to see me in New York when you next come, or if you're going to Florida here I am, but what we should do is talk about this because I prophesy that it's going to be the beginning of something real great. I'm bored nowadays and I'm looking around for something to do in the void, anyway—writing novels is getting too easy, same with plays, I wrote the play in 24 hours.

Come on now Marlon, put up your dukes and write!

Sincerely, later,
(Signed, 'Jack Kerouac')

Buster Keaton, born October 4, 1895

Buster Keaton
born October 4, 1895
Film: Samuel Beckett
youtube
(1965)

Worth a second look: An August weekend selection of music, fiction, and film books (... and Russians)

Author Jesús Ángel García:

now hear this ...

It's an August weekend, and a reader's mind tends to wander the stacks looking for something to accompany the iced tea in afternoon heat -- at least until the cocktail hour, with a generous splash of bourbon and mint. Here's a short list of titles reviewed in the past year at Bellemeade Books that are worth a second look.

 
Jonathan Evison's novel about the Pacific Northwest, West of Here, is a comic and sprawling story that is equal parts Edward Abbey and Ken Kesey. It's the fictional tale of events in the town of Port Bonita over the course of one hundred years as the townsfolk try to reclaim the land from the effects of a dam across the Elwa River, an ecological history of the Olympic Peninsula told with an evolving cast of characters.The book is populated with a wide assortment of idealists, ex-cons, adventurers, politicos and romantics. In the fictional town of Port Bonita there is the very real story of the Pacific Northwest struggling to reconcile the past with the present.

To a current generation that has witnessed the instant combustion of revolts in Egypt and Libya and beyond, the idea that music can carry the weight of a revolution may seem obvious, but 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (Ecco) is a good history lesson on the challenges presented by "protest music" over the past sixty years, and the threat some well-turned and sharp lyrics posed to contemporary standards and social expectations.This book is about those scattered messages and the impact they had on audiences, from Billie Holiday's stunning revelation of "Strange Fruit" to Guthrie's Okie dustbowl tales, from Dylan's incendiary folk to Sam Cooke's smooth croon, from the Clash to Green Day. What these songs and singers have in common is that they reach beyond the conventions of popular music of their day to deliver specific, and very pointed, contemporary messages.
 

Even in the anything-goes decade of the 1970s the work of film-maker, author and playwright Pier Paolo Pasoliniappeared over-the-top. His art was too much for some, who found his open homosexuality too challenging, and yet his Communist politics didn't go far enough for others. His life and work didn't hew to perceived boundaries, and his polemics challenged even revolutionary ideologues to the point of anger. In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology presents the first translations of much of Pasolini's work in English, and although the book covers a dizzying amount of ground from poetry to polemics, it's a valuable resource toward an understanding of the Italian multi-media artist, who relished confronting realism with firebrand idealism and constantly questioned the effect of mainstream culture on human values.

For readers who have always resolved to read those hefty Russian novels sooner or later, Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them is a good starting point. Batuman's best talent is creating the desire to get the books off the shelf and begin reading, a feat in itself for a literature most Americans consider oblique and daunting. Her essays, detailing her own reading post-graduate experience, delve into reasons why these books continue to intrigue and thrill readers beyond their labyrinthine plots and tongue-twisting patronyms. Politics, intrigue, adventure, romance, deception, and more politics: the background of Russian literature is a vortex that drew Batuman to read Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky over a seven-year period. While her shaggy-dog stories don't always lead to great insights, it certainly makes scaling the heights of Russian masterworks easier to contemplate.

Jesús Ángel García's first novel badbadbad is "a transmedia novel" aimed right at the heart of weird America. The novel is its own experiment in splicing together elements of religion, technology and 21st century personality crisis. The story of badbadbad (or3xbad, in the author's own shorthand) is the age-old conflict between want and need, of the search for paradise and lunch, one man's sudden awakening to life's duality ... In short, after his wife unexpectedly leaves with their infant son, there's the realization that, for the book's fictional Jesús Ángel García faced with no options, everything becomes an option. It's a novel, a CD, a film: badbadbad is a total package of media immersion that beats corporate American culture to the punch.

From "Burroughs In the Bunker and Out," Marc Olmsted

 William S. Burroughs & Marc Olmsted,

from Burroughs on Bowery (1978)

The historiography of William Burroughs has entered an elemental half-life, sustaining an entire writerly sub-culture by itself since the cat-daddy of beat-noir disappeared from the scene. What Burroughs himself would think of all this is a guessing game -- although it would be a promising bet he would offer his cantankerous opinion to anyone who might listen.

While Uncle Bill is busy now in another Bunker tending his cats, it's instructive to listen to the stories of those who interacted with Burroughs as an artist. Reputations, especially cultivated ones, are funny things: beyond the publicity it's still about the ideas. And, of course, ideas are not responsible for what happens to them.

At this remove, the life of William Burroughs has become an antidote to the church of Elvis: rock-and-roll may have been thoroughly subsumed by the culture, but drug addiction remains a mess of creative impulses without a hero. Excepting, of course, one's self: as a bad boy, Burroughs was his his own best creation. 

Self-creation is an unbeatable American fixation for bad boys: Marc Olmsted -- as one description puts it -- "is a writer who did some time in prison, got straight while staying gay and writes poetry while making the world a better place." In 2007 he blogged as The Trash Whisperer, picking up trash near Los Feliz, California and writing about it online. 

Before that -- in the 1970s -- he was a film student at San Francisco State, where he suggested making a film to Burroughs, and Burroughs agreed to participation and a subsequent interview; yet creativity, even with the best intentions, seldom runs smooth -- a lesson Olmsted learned in the process. Here's an excerpt from Olmsted's piece online at Rusty Truck, called "Burroughs in the Bunker and Out:"

... I told Burroughs that I had a dream about him where his face was covered with tattoos like Quequeg in Moby Dick, and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt like Hunter S. Thompson, and also looked like a sort of half-Thompson, which was not a stretch.  In the dream, he told me he was a master of Peruvian magic.  Burroughs didn’t seem to like the Thompson part, scowling slightly as I told it, but then leaned forward and said, “I am a master of Peruvian magic, my dear.”  At another point he just leaned on his hands and gazed at me, openly appreciative.   I felt like a young boy at the swimming hole – which was slightly unnerving coming from Burroughs.

I told Burroughs about this great sci fi movie I had seen that reminded me of his work, They Came From Within, where man-made parasites (looking like a cross between a penis and a bloody shit) turned you into an insatiable sexual zombie.  It was actually David Cronenberg’s first feature, who would later make Naked Lunch some 15 years later.

Burroughs presented me with a signed copy of a recent chapbook.  As we began slowly gathering ourselves to leave, I had the brainstorm to use Burroughs as the subject for a rephotography film experiment I was considering.  I talked to James Grauerholz out of Bill’s earshot and asked what he thought.  James went off to Bill and came back with a positive from Bill.  We’d meet for breakfast at a diner the next day and shoot Bill walking around the neighborhood.

So the next morning, I went to the diner and got to bring old pal Richard Modiano (who lived in NYC then), previously denied when I attempted to wrangle him an invitation to the Bunker from Allen.  So we were both quite happy about this new development.  Besides my Bauer Super 8, I was also armed with a primitive cassette tape recorder.

We met at the breakfast joint, and Bill was considerably more reserved, stiff and looked a little hungover.  Still, he was friendly in an otherworldly sort of way.  He was also most definitely a good sport.

I turned on the cassette player, thinking I’d use it for background to the film.  Our discussion turned to film itself, and I made some mention of Godard’s maxim that every camera movement was a moral statement.

“To move the camera or not to move the camera,” said Bill.  “Right,” I answered.  It turned out to be the only remotely legible section of the entire tape, which was mostly a cacophony of restaurant background noise.  I later used these two sentences as a loop for the film, though there were only a few mortals who could recognize the words.  Basically, Bill then took a walk around the neighborhood and I filmed him.

Later I intercut the then-rephotographed footage with fragments shot off the TV from Monster Zero, From Russia with Love and White Heat.  I also shot some peep show gay porn right off its rear-projected screen where fellow film student Craig Baldwin worked.  Some cruising cat wanted to join me in the booth.  I declined.

The San Francisco State University Film Department had this device where you spooled the Super 8 through and it would show up as a TV image, a sort of pre-VCR device the industrial world used that would allow cheap screenings of Super 8 training films.  I had been introduced to this device by Craig (he was later to make the great Tribulation ’99), because it allowed all kinds of crude rephotography off the TV screen, going in for close-ups on what was original a full shot, and filming 2nd and 3rd generations of Super 8 footage. Craig had a big influence, cementing an interest in found footage and deconstruction of image.  Craig lived in this big ramshackle house on Andover in the Mission.  It would eventually be condemned, with problems like a giant broken hole in the bathroom floor into the apartment below, covered with a sheet of plywood.

Blue first Burroughs walk?

saucer-ray-crowd water

gun window

fence

saucer take-off

walk

flare

spider face-end

– found poem of my own scribbles: how to edit Burroughs on Bowery.

I finished the work print in my graduate film production class, having a terrible contest of wills with instructor-filmmaker Karen Holmes.  She gave me a C in the class and a D in the one unit lab, basically because I wouldn’t do what she said.  I had been used to a great deal more freedom & empathy in my undergraduate years.   They were the worst grades of my entire film school career. ...

Through these difficulties, Olmsted persevered: He completed Burroughs on Bowery and then American Mutant, with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary. His website is a kaleidoscope of reinventions, from punk musician to Buddhist student to filmmaker.  

Burroughs on Bowery, described by Olmsted here as a student film project, would be hard to distinguish the writer beyond the projected image and intercut randomness: still, as WSB once wrote, "you have to take a broad, general view of things." Olmsted is quoted in an interview as saying Burroughs "laughed ... when I showed it to him in 1978.  Then he said, “Great movie, Marc,” after that funny evil, closed-mouth mmmmm, hmmmm, hmmmm laugh throughout the 4 minute movie." 
  
It's a safe bet Burroughs never had to get a passing grade from a demanding film instructor, though: "The movie was HATED by my film school, San Francisco State University.  They voted not to include it in the Film Finals of that year."

Grand guy Terry Southern: "I am against proclamations, as a matter of principle, as I am also against principles"

That grand guy, the gadfly writer Terry Southern, gets a scholarly biography at last. With access to forty years' worth of much unpublished material the result, Terry Southern and the American Grotesque, by David Tully, turns out to be quite a ride.

"The swinging sixties" wasn't just a worn catchphrase for Southern: he cast an amused eye over much of it, from Paris days with Burroughs and Beckett to London with the Stones and Beatles (making an appearance on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's), later with Stanley Kubrick and into the Seventies with Saturday Night Live. Here's an excerpt from the introduction, by his son Nile, who has been busy reshaping his father's legacy; there's lots more at the Terry Southern website. Why don't you pop over for a drink?

... Terry’s great impulse to write came from his exposure at an early age to the elaborate prose of E.A. Poe. (Tully) reveals how Poe became Terry’s key technical strategist—for he had cracked the code between seemingly authentic reportage (where credibility is paramount), and the timeless terrain of the ‘far-out’ tale. My father was smitten by Poe’s ability “to render as real the most weird.” ...

The philosophical idea that Nature will always trump contrivance was, as Tully points out, a constant theme of Terry’s, weaving throughout even his most unnatural settings, from Flash and Filigree’s sterile waiting rooms, to Guy Grand’s ever-shifting metropolis. Another unexplored idea put forth by Tully places Terry as a practicing student of the Surrealists and Situationists. After David showed me some of Terry’s early surrealist texts, such as C’est Toi Alors, his thesis was further confirmed by a recent discovery: a treasure trove of reel-to-reel audio tapes that my father recorded in his apartment in Greenwich Village in the early ‘50s.

The radio-show routines, some of which are in French, captured much of the vibe and intensity that still resonated from his life spent in Paris between 1949 and 1954. These recordings (soon to be released) are like an audio odyssey into what Tully calls “the quicksilver philosophy” of Terry’s Existential world: a place where dreams and absurdist invention puncture the ubiquitously growing and ever-crass commercial culture. ...

Terry’s voice, reading Tristan Tzara’s 1918 Dada Manifesto, captures the pure state where hipster persona meets mad-cap Bunuelian intensifier. Embodying the surrealist impulse, the voice is dreamy, provocative and eerily defiant:

"I am writing a proclamation, and I want nothing. Yet, I say certain things. And I am against proclamations, as a matter of principle, as I am also against principles. I write this proclamation to show that one may perform opposed actions together, in a single, fresh respiration. I am against action, for continual contradiction. For affirmation also. I am neither for, nor against. I do not explain, because I hate good sense—but there exists an art which does not reach the voracious mob."

...as Tully reminds us, Terry’s role as the musical genius side-man, blowing note-perfect riffs on now-classic film dialogue, is often how he’s remembered—at the expense of his written work. The best-selling Candy reached the “voracious mob,” however, and many of Terry’s most far out ideas (space burial, media pranks, diving for dollars, A-list erotic films) are current cultural phenomena. More importantly, Tully reminds us that in Terry’s literary output his true brilliance and originality endures; a capacity to astonish, hard and precise as a diamond. ... David Tully’s book may finally lay to rest the “party boy” image of Terry Southern—and confirm him as an accomplished artist of moral strength who found “beauty in every form,” and never lost sight of the powerful impulse to make it hot for them.

"Wholly Communion": poetry, the police, and serendipity in London, 1965

 Allen Ginsberg, June 11, 1965

On June 11, 1965, a poetry gathering in London's Royal Albert Hall got a little visit from the police and a lot of subsequent attention in the press. After the dust had settled, the usual suspects -- Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso -- and a host of other participants and creative provocateurs had been witness to the first countercultural "happening" and the subject of a film by Peter Whitehead, sometimes characterized as the first cinema verité film.  

The resulting documentary, Wholly Communion, was a spontaneously filmed account of the International Poetry Incarnation, an event involving members and fellow travelers of the beat generation. Whitehead's film is now available as a DVD and, of course, on YouTube. What's striking about the film is its entirely unintentional style, which rose from the incremental energy, rising emotional intensity, and sheer accidents during the event itself. Luck and serendipity placed the filmmaker in situations that revealed an audience responding spontaneously, and wildly, to the force of the spoken word.

The film even has its unintentional "down in front" moment courtesy of Allen, who wanted a clearer view of Corso reading while sitting on stage: one later reviewer commented "that Whitehead has subsequently pointed out that the much debated segment of Gregory Corso, partially obscured and framed between the heads of two spectators, was, rather than premeditated mise-en-scene, a result of him being pushed to the floor by a horizontal Ginsberg so that he could see."

Peter Whitehead, 1965

Whitehead himself has written further:

Allen Ginsberg, travelling pal of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, this time fresh back from Poland where he had been crowned "King of the May", started the proceedings by singing a Tibetan mantra, accompanying himself with finger cymbals. Lawrence Ferlinghetti launched into a poem - "To Fuck is to Love Again" - and the evening - and England - was never the same again. Alexander Trocchi kept the police at bay and the events rolling. Gregory Corso read his poem "Mutation of the Spirit". Ernst Jandl read  two sound poems in German.

English poets Michael Horovitz and Christopher Logue read calmly, but Harry Fainlight, reading a poem written on LSD, "The Spider" was interrupted by Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog, high on mescalin, shouting out "Come man come" and Harry's attempts to carry on and read more and more poems are some of the highlights of the film. Not so much about poetry - but the awesome experience of poets exposing themselves, reading to a public which can be sometimes hostile.

Adrian Mitchell's poem "To Whom it May Concern" - a savage diatribe about the Vietnam War - brought the house down. Allen Ginsberg read a poem written by the Russian poet Andrei Vosnesensky - "New York Bird" - he was present but not allowed to read by his Embassy. Allen brought the evening to a close with a reading of two long poems - "The Change" and "Who be Kind To" - in which he wrote "Tonite let's all make love in London". While he was reading, a young girl danced - in a haze of pot smoke - oblivious of time and space and people - following the rhythm of the poetry as if it was music.

Handbill for Royal Albert Hall reading

At one point after the shaken Fainlight reads a second poem, Trocci tells the excited audience:  "Ladies and gentlemen, hold on, hold on, this evening is an experiment and we're finding out what happens when you put five thousand people in a hall with a few poets trying to act naturally." The police arrive, and Trocci -- as a good event compere, realizing how easily things could get more out of hand than they already are -- keeps the police at bay while the poets continue. By then the reading has the now familiar aspect of a rock show as clouds of smoke drift overhead, and the poets themselves are surprised performers in a spectacle they could hardly imagine is happening.

At the end, Ginsberg, either drunk or excited or both, takes the stage and reads a translation of Andrei Voznesensky's poem "The Three Cornered Pear / America" to Voznesensky who is sitting in the audience, forbidden by his embassy to read himself. Then Allen reads one of his own poems, "The Change." As the film ends and the titles roll, Ginsberg's voice is heard requesting the time, and then declaring that he has "lost his poetry book." 

Whitehead made a second film in 1967, Tonite Let's All Make Love In London, taking its title from one of the Ginsberg poems read at the Albert Hall. Wholly Communion  can now be seen in its entirety (broken up into four segments – the Ginsberg segment being the last of them) – here, here, here – and here. More about Peter Whitehead can be found  here on his own website.

Photos from The Allen Ginsberg Project (top, photo by Hoppy Hopkins), iCine, Australia (middle), and Project MUSE (bottom).