The Wild Boys - William S Burroughs

 THE WILD BOYS - WILLIAM S BURROUGHS

There is beauty in the writings of William S Burroughs. And that's the truth. Maybe not so much in some of his subject matter but in his use of words. His turning of phrases. In his opening up of language itself to reveal its very core. Its very essence. It's like lifting the lid on a boiling cauldron of soup and inhaling its smell but where a cook might think to add a sprinkle of another ingredient, Burroughs' particular soup is perfection and cannot be improved. His writing is like the smell of fresh cut grass. Of burning charcoal. Of the most sweetest incense from a Middle Eastern bazaar. 

I would argue that William S Burroughs even though at opposite ends, sits at the same table as James Joyce, Henry Miller and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He dines at the same banquet as some of the greatest and most important writers who have ever lived. There. I've said it. I've laid my guns on the table. William S Burroughs is a genius - be he dead or alive - and the world is still catching up.

I once had the idea that I would start reading everything I could by Michael Moorcock but hadn't realised he'd written quite so many books, so that kind of put the kibosh on it. It could be done but it would mean I would put a halt on reading other writers so I backed off. When it comes to William S Burroughs it's a slightly different matter. Though his canon is large it's not quite on the same scale as Moorcock's so to read all of Burroughs' is achievable and more plausible. The question, however, is might it be advisable?

Will reading too much of Burroughs all at the same time edge you into a sickness where you not only start trying to emulate his style of writing but you start to tune-in to his wavelength and start seeing the world as through his eyes? Too many sweets will make you sick and rot your teeth - every good mother knows that. Will too much Burroughs have you ranting like a madman: 'CUT WORD LINES - CUT MUSIC LINES - SMASH THE CONTROL IMAGES - SMASH THE CONTROL MACHINE - BURN THE BOOKS - KILL THE PRIESTS - KILL! KILL! KILL!'. Will it have you metaphorically strung out in heaven's high hitting an all-time low?

To get things done you better not mess with Major Tom, as Bowie's mum once proffered. So as not to fall unduly under his influence it's probably better to stagger your William S Burroughs intake, is what the angel on my shoulder whispers. Whilst the devil on my other shoulder whispers 'Read 'em! Read 'em all! Read 'em all now!' followed for good measure of course by a 'Burn! Burn! Burn everything!'

What's apparent from reading The Wild Boys is that rather it being gibberish from a fever dream, there is actually a method to Burroughs' madness. His writings are precise, composed and beautifully laid-out. There are recurring motifs that form a pattern that even when shaken like you would a kaleidoscope and altered irrecoverably, retain a pattern of sorts and to paraphrase another William (Butler Yeats) though mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, things don't fall apart and the centre holds.

The Wild Boys is a work of art.

John Serpico

Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes - John Jakes

 CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES -

JOHN JAKES

Back when I was but a callow, fragile youth - in between playing with my Action Man and chasing butterflies with a large net in fields of rape - I read the paperback novelization of Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes and was struck by its closing speech made by Caesar, the talking chimpanzee, following the uprising of the apes. The city is in flames and the city's governor is about to be executed. The governor's assistant is in chains and begs Caesar to bring to a halt what he sees as a futile rebellion:

'How can you possibly think this riot can win freedom for all your kind?' he asks 'Why, by tomorrow, the central government -'

'I promise you,' Caesar cuts in 'by tomorrow it will be entirely too late. If a small, mindless insect like an emperor moth can communicate with another over a distance of eighty miles, can't you see that - '

'An emperor ape might do slightly better?'

'Slightly? What we have done tonight every ape on earth will be imitating tomorrow.'

'Knives against guns? Kerosene cans against flame-throwers? Artillery? Jet aircraft? Missile submarines?'

''We will not win everywhere,' Caesar shrugs 'Perhaps not even in a majority of cities. But fire brings smoke and in that smoke from this night onward, my people will crouch. And conspire. And plot against the inevitable day of man's downfall. We both know that day is inevitable. The day of the writing in the sky. Look!' And Caesar turns to gesture at the ruined city. 'The beginning of that day is upon you even now.'

Great stuff. Particularly to a boy of 11 years-old or whatever age I was when I first read it. Radicalized, politicized, proselytized at such a tender age but in a good way! And great stuff still to this day though I suspect as a book now long lost to time and so far under the radar of younger generations that it's never going to be rediscovered.

Which means that Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (as in the book more so than the film) is now simply an object of nostalgia. A curio from the 1970s to be collected rather than actually read. A book that has no remaining value apart from its attachment to the past. A problem with this, of course, being that to purchase a book for it only to sit unread on a shelf gathering dust is an act of utter meaninglessness because a book is not a Dead Sea scroll. A book is meant to be read or at least to be kept available to be read.

So here I am.

The immediately interesting thing about Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (written by John Jakes based on the screenplay by Paul Dehn) is that published in 1974 it's set in the then far distant future of 1991. During this interim period all cats and dogs have been wiped out by a virus brought back by an astronaut returning from space. As a replacement for their pets, people start adopting small monkeys such as marmosets but on realizing how quickly the monkeys learn and how easy they are to train, the pets become larger until chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas start to be trained as servants - and then from servants to slaves.

This is the world that Caesar encounters on entering a city for the first time after growing up in a travelling circus, where the apes are kept subdued and controlled by gun and electric shock night-stick wielding police. For humans, or at least the richer elements, it's a life of near-luxury but for the apes - now doing all the menial jobs of the once-working class - it's a veritable Fascist state they are under, with the word 'No!' barked out relentlessly by police, bosses and masters day and night.

In real life, 1991 came and went and though the Gulf War started and the Soviet Union collapsed, apes were not enslaved and all the drudgery of all the menial jobs in the world remained the lot of the working class. In 1991 in real life there was no great revolution from below, ape-led or otherwise.

The comparison between the working class of the world and the enslaved apes is a far-stretched, tentative one at best but we're talking Planet Of The Apes here, not Das Kapital. To drill down into this comparison, however, the commonality is 'fear'. The apes are fearful of men due to the pain they can inflict via their cattle-prod truncheons and correction centres. Just as equally, men are also fearful of the apes due to knowing what they might one day be capable of.

'Why did you turn us into slaves?' Caesar asks the governor. 

'Because your kind were once our ancestors,' the governor replies 'You're the beast in us that we have to whip into submission. You taint us. When we hate you, we're hating the dark side of ourselves.'

'Kill him!' Caesar orders his ape insurgents. 

Might it be too much to suggest that in the real world the working class are fearful of the middle and upper class, or to be more precise they're fearful of the power the middle and upper class wield and their capability to take away what little the working class have and reduce them to homelessness and destitution? But that similarly, the middle and upper class are also fearful of the working class due to knowing what they might be capable of?

Is it possible I might be reading too much into what is after all just a stupid sci-fi book from the 1970s? Probably but then every good book should have a subtext to it or else it would be a flat drone or white noise at best. And Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes is a good book. It's sci-fi porn. It's revenge porn. It's revolution porn. Moreover, it's violent revolution porn.

'A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.' as Mao Tse Tung once declared 'A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.'

Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes is in a very roundabout way, a reminder of that.

John Serpico

The Stooges: Head On - A Journey Through The Michigan Underground - Brett Callwood

THE STOOGES: HEAD ON -

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE MICHIGAN UNDERGROUND -

BRETT CALLWOOD

The Stooges, baby! Anyone who likes a bit of rock'n'roll always likes to get down and dirty with The Stooges but do they like to read books about them? I suspect not too many but that's alright because that's why I'm here. To do it for you. To read it on your behalf. To take one for the team. So to The Stooges: Head On - A Journey Through The Michigan Underground written by Brett Callwood that I at first mistakenly thought was a recently-written book but that on closer inspection can see it was actually published in 2011. What was clear, however, was that the subject matter was The Stooges as a whole - as a band - because if it was mostly about Iggy Pop then his name would surely be on the cover - and it's not. Iggy is in there, of course, because in a book about The Stooges how could he not be? It's just that he's not the main focus. If it's anyone, in fact, that the main focus is upon then it's Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton who passed away just before publication and just before The Stooges were inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame.

Like the Velvet Underground's debut album, even though it wasn't a big commercial success, The Stooges debut had a very deep cultural impact particularly upon the original punk generation of '76 and '77. The Sex Pistols covering No Fun is the obvious influence but by no means the only one. There's the influence upon The Clash, for example, and them naming a song '1977' like The Stooges did with '1969'. A single line from a Stooges song such as 'so messed-up' from Now I Wanna Be Your Dog being turned into a whole song by The Damned. More importantly, however, there's the influence in attitude where The Stooges proved by example and particularly through the guitar playing of Ron Asheton that to be in a band there was no need to be a stellar musician playing radio-friendly tunes. Instead, simply learn to play three chords and have an exhibitionist out-front on vocals and you're good to go - if not practically made it to fame and fortune already. This was the real power and influence of The Stooges and their debut album and in this the case can be made for them being the true godfathers of punk.

According to Iggy, Ron Asheton was a 'genuine, unique talent' and that his big contribution to The Stooges was in coming up with two 'world-class eternal riffs in No Fun and Now I Wanna Be Your Dog'. In a review of the debut album in Creem magazine, very presciently it was written 'This is probably the guitar style of the future'. And that's the nub of it. By coming up with these riffs, Ron Asheton was securing his place in Heaven where on entering the pearly gates he'd be met by Archangel Gabriel himself and shown straight to the VIP lounge. 'There's Jimi over there' Gabriel would say 'And there's Janis, and there's Mr Cohen talking to the Drake boy. And there's Elvis over there on his throne of course, and Hank and Buddy, and there's Brian by the swimming pool, obvs. Take your place, Ron. Pull up a chair and make yourself at home, man. The drugs are over there. There's no limit to them and they're all free. Welcome to Heaven'.

Brett Callwood's book is a labour of love, forged from countless sources and personal interviews. A labour of love to such an extent, in fact, that come the end of the book he informs us he's made the decision to permanently move to The Stooges hometown of Detroit because after researching The Stooges, their city and its surrounding area, it's all had such an impact upon him that he can't think of anywhere else he'd rather be. There have been plenty of books written about Iggy Pop over the years but none as far as I know about The Stooges, so there's really no other book to compare it to. Which means that if you like a bit of Stooges, Callwood's book is an essential purchase. Moreover, whilst writing about The Stooges, Callwood also enters into the subject of Ron Asheton's other bands, Destroy All Monsters and Dark Carnival both featuring the semi-legendary Niagra on vocals, with both bands never really achieving a lot of recognition or acclaim during their time and so probably deserving now of a reappraisal?

John Serpico