In Search Of The Lost Chord - 1967 And The Hippie Idea - Danny Goldberg

 IN SEARCH OF THE LOST CHORD -

1967 AND THE HIPPIE IDEA -

DANNY GOLDBERG

In one of the first ever interviews with the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten famously declared "I hate hippies and all they stand for." At this, music journalist and first division Punk inner circle member Caroline Coon rebuked Rotten for the tabloid journalism manner in which he was denigrating hippie idealism, warning him that "the gutter press did to hippies what they're going to do to you." She was right. What was at first deemed to be some sort of threat - as in Punk as an attitude and a state of mind - was very quickly recuperated and reduced to a style of clothes, a sequence of chords, a set of restrictions and a meaningless sneer. Distorted to cartoon level, a burnt-out memory of how it might have been, bought up, souped-up, sold out and served up as just another cheap product for the consumer's head.

Punk, however, was for a brief moment so much more than that, kicking open not only doors that had always remained tightly locked but also windows, emergency exits, cat flaps and any other sort of entrance to another world historically slammed shut upon the unwashed, the unwelcome and the unwanted. 

"If you want to understand the Sixties, you need to understand the Fifties," Timothy Leary once said, and it was good advice. Likewise, if you want to understand the Seventies, you need to understand the Sixties and ad infinitum with the Eighties, Nineties, Noughties, etc. The Sixties and the hippie idea didn't just come from nowhere and likewise with the Seventies and Punk.

The 'lost chord' of which Danny Goldberg writes in his book In Search Of The Lost Chord is the collection of energies that in 1967 harmonized and created a single feeling that briefly but deeply penetrated into the hearts and minds of those who could hear it. An ephemeral collective vibe that permeated the culture at that time. Those energies were myriad and diverse, emanating from the influence of psychedelics, rebellion, demands for civil rights, calls for peace, radical therapy, music, fashion, political critique and so and so forth.

According to Joe Boyd, one of the founders of the legendary UFO club in London, the Sixties peaked in 1967 and there's some across the board agreement with this, not least from Allen Ginsberg who said the Be-In in San Francisco in '67 was "the last purely idealistic hippie event". It's an idea shored-up further by the funeral procession held in Haight Ashbury that same year proclaiming the death of 'Hippie'.

"A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah," said the then governor of California Ronald Reagan but what did he know and what was he doing anyway attempting to mock those who were only asking that peace be given a chance whilst children burned to death from American napalm in Vietnam? As John Lennon later asked: "What in the world are you thinking of, laughing in the face of love?"

The problem with Goldberg's book is that in a way it's too polite, that Goldberg is a bit too nice about things. Through rose-tinted glasses he differentiates between the actual hippie idea and the distorted cartoon version of it but the actual version he proffers is so fragmented that it's almost incoherent. A vast chunk of the book is him joining the many dots so as to create a lineage, like mapping out the stars in the heavens to form constellations. If you look closely, you can just make out the Plough, Ursa Major and Orion though you really need to squint. To put it another way, it's like counting the pieces of a jigsaw to see if they're all there without actually making the jigsaw.

"I can't see this lasting because the media are going to get here and pretty soon (Haight Ashbury) will turn into Rip Off Street," said Paul McCartney whilst on a visit to San Francisco in 1967 and there's an unspoken consensus on this it seems. To such an extent, in fact, that it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. In San Francisco, coffee shops start selling 'love burgers' and tourist buses start including hippies as a highlight for sightseers - "Look! There's one!" In Amsterdam, people begin stealing and repainting the white bicycles. The term 'spiritual materialism' comes into play where pursuits of spirituality are turned into ego trips where supposed spiritual credentials are flaunted - rather like proto-versions of Russell Brand.

In London at the Roundhouse, a conference is held attended by the likes of RD Laing, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael and Allen Ginsberg. Founder of the San Francisco Diggers, Emmett Grogan is there too and delivers a fiery speech that receives a standing ovation, only for him to reveal the words had been an English translation of a speech Adolf Hitler had given to the Reichstag in 1937. The point Grogan making being to sensitize the audience to the moral emptiness of what in some quarters was being passed for revolutionary rhetoric.

The soul of hippiedom was a battleground where different warring factions were fighting it out for the upper hand and dominative representation. Some armed with flowers, some armed with guns. Some armed with hallucinogenic drugs and the Bhagavad Gita, some armed with the dollar and the power and influence of mainstream mass media - heralded by their attack dogs, the gutter press, as Caroline Coon later put it.

This is the nub of In Search Of The Lost Chord and what Danny Goldberg in a roundabout way identifies. It's easy to say, of course, that money won out but that's the narrative directed by the mainstream and as the mainstream is always conservative - enforced and maintained to preserve the status quo - it's only actually one side of the story. Danny Goldberg's 'lost chord' is another side. A single note buried in the symphony. A single flame flickering in blazing sunlight. A notion, an idea. An idea that's worth reading about, worth thinking about and worth preserving.

John Serpico

Grayson Perry - Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl - Wendy Jones

 GRAYSON PERRY -

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG GIRL - WENDY JONES

I don't have any particular interest in Grayson Perry's art nor do I have any particular interest in unleashing my inner transvestite. No, my interest in Perry is in where he's from, that being the swampland of early British punk rock and his forays into anarcho sub-cultures.

There's something very much of the Billy Childish method of confessional writing in the first half of Perry's biography where his honesty and frankness is enough to make you almost blush but at the same time to make you really feel for him. Childhood is never easy no matter what you're born into which for Perry is a working class household in Chelmsford in Essex where family life is rudely interrupted by the arrival of the local milkman and an affair with his mother, leading to divorce and half-brothers and sisters. From the turmoil of family relations Perry retreats into an imaginary world of teddy bears, Airfix models and a penchant for dressing up in women's clothes. It's a fertile breeding ground for being the archetypal cuckoo in the nest and in his own words a 'loner-weirdo on the periphery.'

It's the advent of punk rock that opens up an entrance point to allow him free expression in public, it being the glorious amateurishness of punk that appeals to him. So, come 1977 he's ripped the sleeves off of a grey school shirt and stencilled the word 'Hate' all over it. He's bought himself some plastic sandals, covered his school blazer in badges and put vaseline in his hair but to top it all he's found a huge, very brutal-looking horse collar that he takes to wearing round his neck. He then becomes an ardent and enthusiastic pogo-dancer at all the local punk gigs with such bands as the Vibrators, Boomtown Rats, Crispy Ambulance, The Damned, Bethnal and Fruit-Eating Bears blessing Chelmsford with their appearance.

After completing an art foundation course he moves to Portsmouth to study for a degree and it's here that his artistic expression comes into play, instigated not so much by his tutors but by the two new girl friends he meets. At a time when being 'cool' was becoming the new aesthetic, Perry learns to revel in being utterly uncool in a very postmodern way, to kick against the pricks and to embrace his transvestism.

During a summer break he heads off to London and stays at a squat behind Warren Street tube station where pre-fame Boy George and Marilyn also reside and it's here that he realises he's no more than a yokel in bohemia. Moreover, he also realises that art isn't an activity that you do but something you are and live.

After graduating he once again heads off to London to take part in a performance art project put on by the Neo-Naturists that essentially involves a lot of nude body painting. Such is the success of the project that it becomes obvious to Perry that rather than Portsmouth, London is the place to be so subsequently moves there to live permanently. More Neo-Naturist performances follow at such venues as the Notre Dame Hall off Leicester Square and interestingly at the Centro Iberico on Harrow Road, an old abandoned school taken over and squatted by Spanish anarchists where gigs were being put on under the umbrella of the anarcho punk crew who had been running the Crass-funded Autonomy Centre in Wapping.

When it comes to the world of art, the Neo-Naturists in the scheme of things were a blip, an aberration, though their sub-cult status is legendary if not near-mythical. Rather than being outstanding, their performance art was outlandish, provoking violent reaction at some venues, ejection from the premises at others, and even managing to stun the anarchists at the Centro Iberico into silence.

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Girl is wholly concerned with Perry's life leading up to him becoming an artist in his own right and his winning of the Turner Prize, and it's for this reason that it's so endearing. It cuts off and comes to an almost abrupt end just as Perry creates his first ever plate of the kind that was going to launch him on the path to becoming  one of the most powerful and influential people in the modern day art world.

Placing the accent upon Perry's childhood and his past influences reveal something of where he is coming from and the kind of detail anyone aware of Perry and his alter-ego Claire might very well be curious about. At the same time, by casting a light upon his appreciation of punk rock and his adventures in London's squat communities it also reveals in the same way it did to many other people how punk rock irrecoverably ruined Perry's life forever - but in a good way.

John Serpico

We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us Against - Nicholas von Hoffman

 WE ARE THE PEOPLE OUR PARENTS WARNED US AGAINST -

NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN

It starts with a description of Haight-Ashbury circa 1967 by which point in time the nascent hippy scene is already in a state of near chaos brought about by the mass influx of young people into the city. Apparently it's a freak show populated by 'poisoners, killers, burn artists, sadists, beggars and thieves'. It's a description of the decline and fall of the American Empire for better or for worse where San Francisco is the new centre of production for LSD where it's cheapest to purchase and where it's most plentiful, leading to the growth and trade of other drugs around it.

The hippies flocking to the Haight come in all shapes and sizes, of all religions and of all political persuasions but their unifying factor, the one thing they all have in common, is drugs. The monthly LSD market there shows 200,000 doses selling at not less than fifty cents apiece but there aren't that many hippies in the world so where is it all going? At the same time, sales of Vitamin C tablets are going through the roof as they're bought in bulk to use as blotting agents for liquid acid. Alongside this a whole industry of drug/hippy-related businesses have cropped up dealing in pipes, jewelry, mandalas, posters, music and publications.

We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us Against is a front-line report from the culture wars of America, written by Nicholas von Hoffman and first published in 1968. It's a picture of the world turned inside-out and reflected in on itself. A mirror image of Western democracy and twentieth-century capitalism distorted and cracked through the entry into the market of hallucinatory drugs. It's von Hoffman describing for the benefit of a readership confused, appalled and concerned at where America is heading as they cling to the promise of the American Dream like passengers on a sinking ship. It's a litany of observations and testaments from those aware there's something wrong with society but unable to quite put their finger on it.

Haight-Ashbury is the flame to which those of a more youthful nature are drawn, hoping to find some kind of answer or at least to share in the company of others of a similar disposition. Although von Hoffman paints a squalid picture he does also highlight a lot of the positive and interesting projects born from the hippy dream such as The Diggers and their free food program, the free information outlets such as Switchboard, the free press, and the free clinics. 'The Haight-Ashbury scene is the last hope of the country,' says a guy called Barthol who's a friend of The Grateful Dead, and perhaps at that moment he's actually right because after all, the alternative was the Vietnam War.

A depressing thing about von Hoffman's observations and the debates he's party to is that they're all so very familiar to anyone who has ever partaken in any form of 'alternative' scene. It's the same endless discussions that for the most part end up going round in circles and ultimately going nowhere except a retreat into drugs. It's the same bricolage of opinions and points of view coming from all angles and all places with no hint of consensus and with only an illusion of being together as a common thread. And yes, it is an illusion because whilst a shared liking of the same music, the same clothes and the same drugs can indeed constitute a sense of togetherness, scratch the surface and underneath the differences can be vast and manifold. Sharing the same tastes does not a movement make and neither is it enough to change the world, and therein is one of the reasons for the failure of the hippy dream and likewise for the punk dream, the techno dream and whatever other dream you might care to think of.

At the heart of all these teenage dreams and so-called social movements are the questions of capital and class that for the most part tend to remain unquestioned and unchallenged therefore allowing them to become ever more entrenched, robust and unassailable. They are the pillars supporting the structure and the engines driving the machine, so much so in fact that they now seem to have become the structure and have become the machine itself.

An interesting observation that von Hoffman makes of Haight-Ashbury and its influx of new inhabitants is its relationship to Detroit and the black inhabitants of the ghettoes there that at the time was being wracked with riots. Von Hoffman suggests that for the majority of black people living in such places as Detroit it's incomprehensible that the white hippies should build a new ghetto albeit in San Francisco and lock themselves up in it to take dope. So much so that for von Hoffman to see these sons and daughters of white collar America making a virtue of dirt, shiftlessness, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, and irresponsibility - all the so-called sins laid upon black people and subsequently used against them to exclude and cast them as 'other' - it is an affront and a put-down to black people.

'So rich, so precious, so secure,' von Hoffman writes of the hippies 'so much to the manor born, they can despise the money, the cleanliness, the comfort, the balanced diet, the vitamins, and the living room carpets black people have been willing to die for.'

It's a debatable point, of course, but an important one. The problem being, however, that it again fails to mention the two elephants in the room - capital and class - and so ultimately ends up chasing its own tail whilst the structure remains intact and the machine rumbles on.

Von Hoffman is out to understand what the hippies of Haight-Ashbury are up to and you can tell he's trying to be impartial but his own personal background betrays him and prejudices his overview. He just can't let go of the safety and security of his own personal raft that he sits on but then why should he for he'd only be cast overboard and be put at risk of drowning? And for what? Utopian dreaming? Middle class conceit? Idle naivety?

He ponders the politics of it all and somewhat surprisingly concludes that the entrance into the political arena of ardent idealists of the kind that can be found in Haight-Ashbury could potentially tax the system of government and provoke serious and even revolutionary crises. He sees that historical demands for such things as the abolishment of slavery and votes for women have after much consternation and disruption been met via formal changes in laws and institutions, allowing the system to recover and continue. It's when the system faces demands, however, that is not in the power of government to meet that a whole other battleground opens up and exposes the system's Achilles heel .

'Be reasonable, demand the impossible' as the Situationists of Paris '68 advised, suggesting this is more than just a clever slogan fit only for daubing on the Sorbonne walls.

'The Haight is like one great, enormous Rorschach card,' a doctor of Behavioural Sciences is quoted as saying and it's one of the most accurate summations in the whole book. On the subject of drugs the same doctor says 'People all through history have wanted to intoxicate themselves. Even little children spin themselves on a swing to get a little dizzy high.' He errs on the side of caution as to whether marijuana should be legalised, however, because he wonders if there is any need for another intoxicating drug in society. The only thing he neglects to ask is which are the most harmful drugs? The legal ones such as alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine and the many pills doctors dispense or the illegal ones?

And then finally there's the owner of The Psychedelic Shop in Haight-Ashbury, a guy called Ron Thelin who on announcing the closure of what is America's first ever headshop gives an explanation as to why, summed up by a stack of cards on the counter inviting everybody to the funeral of 'Hippie' to be held at sunrise at a local park. 'It's the mass media that changed us from men into hippies.' Thelin explains 'We wanted to be free men and build a free community. The word 'hippy' turned everybody off. Well, the hippies are dead and the funeral's next week.'

It's a point of view endorsed by others: 'There never were any flower children,' declares a local dope dealer and social commentator by the name of Teddybear. 'It was the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American public. This wasn't a 'Summer of Love', this was a summer of bullshit. The so-called flower children came here to find something because the media told 'em to, and there was nothing to find.'

The funeral was apparently well attended and was followed by a procession in which the body of 'Hippy' was carried through the community in a coffin before being burned. It's another familiar story and one that every youth cult seems to go through where it at first burns brightly before turning to rust and becoming just another cheap product for the consumer's head. Such is the way of the world it would seem and such is the conclusion of Nicholas von Hoffman's book.

John Serpico.

The Drowned And The Saved - Primo Levi

 THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED - PRIMO LEVI

What better time to read about Auschwitz and the Nazi extermination camps? For is there not always waiting in the wings a would-be tyrant with beautiful words on his lips? Is there not behind every smile a Hiroshima? Does not anyone who has been tortured remain tortured? So it was with Primo Levi who having survived imprisonment at Auschwitz spent the rest of his days wondering why him? Why did he survive and so many did not? How to understand what had happened during the period of the 'millennial Reich' and how to understand how it was allowed to happen? How to make sense of the senseless?

'The pressure that a modern totalitarian state can exercise over the individual is frightful,' writes Levi in The Drowned And The Saved 'Its weapons are substantially three: direct propaganda or propaganda camouflaged as upbringing, instruction and popular culture; the barrier erected against pluralism of information; and terror. Nevertheless, it is not permissible to admit that this pressure is irresistible especially in the brief twelve-year term of the Third Reich, and in the affirmations and exculpations of men responsible for serious crimes." For Primo Levi, the much vaunted explanation of 'only obeying orders' does not wash. It is a lie. To not see the imbalance between this as an explanation and the enormity of pain, suffering and death caused by actions is nothing less than a dereliction and monstrous denial of what it is to be human.

The world, of course, is never black and white, and with an unswerving eye, Levi also looks at 'the grey' and those fellow prisoners of the Nazis who conducted the most horrific labours within the camps: the extraction of the corpses from the gas chambers, the running of the crematoria, the extraction and elimination of the ashes, etc.

'It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness,' Levi writes 'and yet I think it must be done, because what it was possible to perpetrate yesterday can be attempted again tomorrow, can overwhelm ourselves and our children.'

1944 is history but it actually wasn't that long ago and there are vitally important lessons to be learnt and taught. Levi has no hesitation in condemning the perpetrators of Nazism and those involved with the functioning of the death camps and indeed states that it was perfectly right that after being held to account that they be hung, but in regard to those prisoners who worked the gas chambers and the crematoria he accentuates that no-one but no-one is authorised to judge them, not those who lived through the experience of the camps and even less those who did not live through it.

The terrible truth that Levi conveys is that the true, collective and general crime of almost all Germans of that time was that of lacking the courage to speak. That behind those who were directly responsible stood the great majority of Germans 'who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride, the 'beautiful words' of Corporal Hitler.' Both those directly responsible and those who remained silent were all made of the same cloth. They were average human beings, averagely intelligent, and averagely wicked. Save for exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces. They were, for the greater part, diligent followers and functionaries, some fanatically convinced of the Nazi doctrine, many indifferent, or fearful of punishment, or desirous of a good career, or too obedient.

I think the word here is 'enable'. Those who directly and physically supported Hitler enabled his ascent to power then maintained, developed and worked his political machine. Those who looked the other way, through their silence gave their consent and enabled Hitler's power and authority. 'Privilege, by definition, defends and protects privilege,' Levi states, and again this is a truism that cannot be denied. As a foil to this, however, he adds that it is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but which then begs the question: is remaining silent a privilege?

The word 'Fascism' is often too easily flung about and in the process loses some of its meaning. It's not a word that Levi actually uses a lot but if anywhere it's going to be when writing about the Nazi death camps that it's going to be the most applicable. Fascism, however, doesn't start with the death camps - that's where it ends. It doesn't arrive with jackboots and a tank, it arrives in more sensible attire and transport such as a suit and a limousine. It doesn't arrive with a shout and a bang, it arrives in silence.

'We are all in the ghetto, the ghetto is walled in, outside the ghetto reigns the lords of death and close by the train is waiting.' The Drowned And The Saved is an intelligent, reasoned, very gentle but vitally important word of warning. It's a shot across the bows of history and a testimony to the limitless capacity for a person to inflict suffering upon a fellow human being but so too a testimony to the limitless capacity to show love. Primo Levi falls firmly within the latter category.

John Serpico

The KLF - Chaos Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds - John Higgs

THE KLF - CHAOS, MAGIC AND THE BAND WHO BURNED A MILLION POUNDS -

JOHN HIGGS

Call me a cynic but I don't actually believe Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned a million pounds. The only way they would have done it is if they had at least the equivalent amount behind them, thereby reducing (to them in their eyes) the worth of the amount burnt. One million is a lot and it's enough, another million on top is peripheral and surplus to requirement. It's only greed and a lust for money that provides the impetus to keep adding or trying to add another million after a million after a million after a million ad infinitum. It's feasible, I guess, but I don't imagine Drummond and Cauty were rich enough at the time to be in a position of not needing anymore money so I suspect the idea of burning a million pounds was just that: An idea. An experiment. A test. An investigation into the consequences of burning a million pounds and one that clearly proved to be interesting, not least for the mythology that has since sprung from it of which this book is a part.

"Bill Drummond is a cultural magician," as writer and music critic Charles Shaar Murray once said, whilst according to comic book artist and writer Alan Moore "Bill Drummond is totally mad." Well, I've actually met Bill Drummond and found him to be a very likeable and affable bloke though at the same time someone who is probably prone to exaggerate and who probably believes his exaggerations to the point of coming across as a confident and very believable exaggerator.

When someone begins talking about the Illuminati, Discordianism, and the assassination of JFK as author John Higgs does, you know you're entering a maze of mirrors and it's probably time to go home and go to bed. When Higgs then also starts talking about giant invisible rabbit spirits as in the kind that the sleeve art of the debut Echo And The Bunnymen album evoked, the kind that Robert Anton Wilson talked about, the kind that walked with Jimmy Stewart in Harvey and popped up in Donnie Darko that opened with the Bunnymen's track The Killing Moon - and then tells you not to think about it - you can't help but wonder where he's going with all this? Well, the answer is in the title of his book: The KLF - Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds.

Higgs weaves a tangled web of conspiracy theories, coincidental coincidences and Chinese whispers in a bid to serve up meaning and critical theory to Drummond's and Cauty's art and music but the only thing that really sticks is Situationism, an optic that when looked through makes complete sense of it all.

'The Situationists,' Higgs writes 'saw in our culture a shift in our focus from being to having, and then from having to appearing to have. This is a process that the users of Facebook will probably grasp immediately.'

Situationism explains Bill Drummond, the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Time Lords, the KLF, the K Foundation - everything. It's all cultural jamming. It's all spectacle. It's all appearance. A fine example of this being the KLF appearance at the Brit Awards in 1992 where they performed a Hardcore Punk version of 3am Eternal accompanied by Extreme Noise Terror, ending with Drummond spraying bullets into the audience from a machine gun. Although the dead sheep left on the steps of the after-show party venue was very real, the bullets were fake. Machine-gunning the music industry was appearance. It was spectacle.

And then at an earlier appearance at the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam, whilst performing a twenty-three minute long version of What Time Is Love? they gave most of the instruments and mixing equipment to the audience for them to take home and keep. A slight problem, however, was that none of it actually belonged to the band but was instead the property of the club. 

The fact that I don't believe a million pounds was ever burned presents a bit of a problem when reading Higgs's book as it blows the whole premise out the window from the very start. Not that it really matters to Higgs, however, because apparently rather than just burning a million pounds, Drummond and Cauty actually sacrificed it. There's a difference. It's a fine line between the two but it is there if you care to look and it's where Drummond and Cauty can be placed. A kind of no-man's land between imagination and reality. A hinterland between fickle Pop gimmicks and subversive art. A three o'clock in the morning-type place. An eternal 3am. The cusp of the moment when you're waiting for the MDMA to kick in and your mate turns to you and asks 'What time is love?' It's a place where anything can happen and where the choice is essentially yours as to whether you hang on to the balloon as it rises or you let go before it's too late? Posing the next question, of course, as to how long can you keep a grip on the rope?

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty are interesting people though Drummond is arguably the more interesting. The KLF were an interesting band - or should that be 'concept'? John Higgs's book is pretty interesting but not absolutely and is somewhat less interesting than Higgs probably thinks it is.

John Serpico

The Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship - Charles Bukowski

THE CAPTAIN IS OUT TO LUNCH AND THE SAILORS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE SHIP - CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Written in the style of his classic newspaper columns disguised as diary entries, The Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship was published in 1988, four years after Charles Bukowski's death and was the last thing he ever wrote. Bukowski was 71 years-old and having survived the senselessness of life he was only too aware that the end was fast approaching. What then to do with the finite time left to a man? Never mind 'to be or not to be', that is the question.  Having spent his life drinking and fighting and in the spaces in-between working dead end jobs, going hungry, reading books and writing, Bukowski gets to wondering what is a life well spent? 'Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.' Bukowski writes 'Sometimes I feel as if we are all trapped in a movie. We know our lines, where to walk, how to act, only there is no camera. Yet, we can't break out of the movie. And it's a bad one.'

Has Bukowski's life been a wasted one? Hardly. At least no more wasted than anyone else's. His life's saving grace, of course, has been his writing and it's that flame that he has kept alight through the thick and thin right up to the point of where he is at the age of 71. 'The whole world is a sack of shit ripping open. I can't save it. But I've gotten many letters from people who claim that my writing has saved their asses. But I didn't write for that, I wrote it to save my own ass. I was a fool. And yet, even when I was a fool I knew that I wasn't a complete fool. I had some little corner of me that I was protecting, there was something there.'

Bukowski is hardly a role model and his cynicism is often over-bearing but there are aspects to him that are identifiable particularly in regard to his love of 'the word' and his respect for the masters of it. The Great Writers. The Great Novelists. They are the only people he's ever really respected and the inspiration he has derived from them is the fuel to his own creativity. They were the keys to the unlocking of the doors to his own writing and to the release of the words that have subsequently poured forth. It was they who first lit the fire he has shielded and kept alight his whole life. This, in my eyes, is a significant point because in my own small way I have also endeavoured to keep a little flame alight. A candle lit to the act of writing.

On leaving school at aged 16 I can guarantee that most of my peer group never used a pen again and the closest most would get to writing anything nowadays would be when sending a text message or some kind of work-related report. I guarantee it. Whether it's actually important or not I don't know but I feel that once you discover something of some semblance of good within yourself you should try at least to keep it alive. This is what I think Bukowski is saying and it's this that he ruminates on in this book alongside horse racing, humankind, readers, specific writers, workers, gamblers, life, death, the universe and everything therein.

Whereby in the past Bukowski would always use a typewriter, at this late stage in his life he uses a computer of which he extols its virtues. No dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist he possessed of misguided notions of the purity of the soul transferred through the click clack of tapped keys. No, a computer makes the act of writing that much easier that subsequently makes for an easier life. As he said, he might be a fool but he's not a complete fool.

At one point in the book Bukowski writes about him and his wife being invited to a concert by a millionaire rock musician who reads his books and how during the set the rock star announces to the audience of 25,000 people "This concert is dedicated to Linda and Charles Bukowski!" 25,000 people then cheer as if they know who the Bukowski's are. It's great that rock stars read his work, Bukowski thinks, but so too do men in jails and madhouses. So what's the difference? Though he doesn't name them, the band that Bukowski is referring to can only be U2 whom he describes as being 'simplistic' and what a very apt description, it must be said.

At the after-show party in the VIP bar Bukowski wonders what he's doing there among the rich and famous who though he doesn't dislike at all, he knows he has very little in common with and is not impressed by. In fact the one person he finds he has something in common with and has respect for is the huge black bartender who Bukowski at first light-heartedly offers outside for a fight. The bartender, however, actually knows who Bukowski is from reading his Notes Of A Dirty Old Man columns of old in the LA free press. "Well, I'll be god-damned," Bukowski says and they shake hands. The fight was off. For Bukowski, meeting this bartender is better than meeting Bono and the various actors and film directors also present.

The Captain Is Out To lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship is illustrated throughout with pictures drawn by Robert Crumb - another so-called derelict loser from the Sixties of a life mis-spent - and it's a perfect match. Crumb obviously knows where Bukowski's coming from and captures him perfectly in his classic black-and-white pen and ink style that makes for the book being even better, more of a novelty, and even more worthy of reading.

John Serpico

The Basketball Diaries - Jim Carroll

THE BASKETBALL DIARIES - JIM CARROLL

Patti Smith always spoke highly of Jim Carroll, saying how great a poet he was and in fact his book The Basketball Diaries whilst dedicated to the memory of folksinger Phil Ochs, singles Patti out for special thanks. Apart from the film of course starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carroll is probably best known for his song People Who Have Died that is exactly what it says on the can as in a list of Carroll's friends who have died along with the circumstances of their deaths. It's a cracker. When it comes to his poetry, what tends to stand out first and foremost about it is where it's coming from as in New York on the Lower East Side, the kind of impoverished place that in the Sixties was ghetto-like and not somewhere you'd expect to find a lot of poetry. No gleaming spires of Cambridge, moons in June and chasing butterflies there. No, Jim Carroll was a proverbial flower in the dustbin, an original angel with a dirty face.

The Basketball Diaries chronicles tales of his growing up in New York and involves his playing basketball, drinking, smoking reefer and sniffing glue. It's the story of a wise-cracking, street-smart kid growing up with the city as a playground and what better playground than New York in the mid-Sixties? In fact what better playground than New York in any decade? The drawback is that the city is also a jungle wherein dwell monsters be they in the form of over-zealous police, predatory paedophiles and easily if not near freely available heroin.

So, at the age of thirteen Carroll takes his first heroin hit and loses his virgin veins, as he puts it. By the age of fifteen he's a recreational heroin user turning tricks on Third Avenue for middle-aged homosexuals on New York vacations. A veritable mini-Midnight Cowboy. A toilet trader rather than a rose by any other name. He's in control, however, and in spite of his usage becomes a talented if not erratic Junior High School basketball player though over time the more books he reads the more he realises that what he actually needs to do is write. Alas, also over time he proves to be no exception to the rule and ends up like Bowie's Major Tom strung out in heaven's high hitting an all time low, with nothing else to be done apart from spending all day chasing a fix.

Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries is a stir of echoes channelling Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, Lou Reed and Christiane F. A majorly interesting aspect of it is in the fact that it's the voice of a genuine working class street kid that at the time was a rare thing though arguably it's even more of a rarity nowadays with culture at all levels becoming increasingly the domain of the University-educated middle class. Jim Carroll, however, is/was the real deal and for that if for nothing else makes The Basketball Diaries a thing of rare if not dark, tainted yet entertaining beauty.

John Serpico