A Coney Island of the Mind (1958)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was an American poet and publisher, co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers.
Ferlinghetti was best known for his first collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) with sales of more than one million copies.
As the owner of the City Lights bookstore, Ferlinghetti was arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl, which resulted in a lengthy First Amendment trial.
Agnès Varda was a Belgian-born French film director.
Her films were popular among critics and directors, giving her the status of a cult director.
This is perhaps not the best of times to rid the world of a minor misconception regarding the work of Varda, but it is what I must do after researching her oeuvre following her death.
Agnès Varda made one film about the Black Panther Party, just one. That film was Black Panthers (1968), a color film which can be viewed in its entirety at Archive.org[1].
Another film from that same year is called Huey! and is directed by a certain Sally Pugh. It can be seen in full on YouTube [below] and has nothing to do with Varda, although the general subject matter as well as some scenes overlap.
As you may have heard, I have resumed my work as pornosopher and I am currently writing my master’s thesis which investigates whether porn can be art. In my research I get lost very often (which kind of seems to be the purpose).
However, it is time for me to stop getting lost, because I have another paper to finish on political myth, a paper which I have tentatively titled “Mythe, meute, Europa,” which translates as “Myth, mob, Europe.”
Before I start that work, one of my most satisfying finds of the latest obsessive quest: Annie Besant’s sublime pamphlet: “Is the Bible Indictable?” (illustration).
Besant asks (in 1877, mind you!):
“Does the Bible come within the ruling of the Lord Chief Justice as to obscene literature? Most decidedly it does, and if prosecuted as an obscene book, it must necessarily be condemned, if the law is justly administered.”
RIP Simon Vinkenoog, 80, Dutch poet and writer.
Simon Vinkenoog (1928 – 2009) was a Dutch poet and writer. He was instrumental in launching the Dutch “Fifties Movement“.
In the Anglosphere Vinkenoog’s name is associated with the Albert Hall poetry event (and the film Wholly Communion) and his connection with IT magazine.
He was one of the Néerlandophone beat writers. The same cultural climate that begot the beat writers in the United States engendered European counterparts.
These countercultures must be looked for in two spheres, the sphere of European counterculture and the sphere of European avant-garde.
In France this was the Letterist International, in Germany perhaps Gruppe 47; visually and on a European scale there was COBRA.
Vinkenoog was born in the same year as Andy Warhol, Serge Gainsbourg, Jeanne Moreau, Nicolas Roeg, Guy Bourdin, Luigi Colani, Stanley Kubrick, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, William Klein, Roger Vadim, Yves Klein, Jacques Rivette, Alvin Toffler, Ennio Morricone and Oswalt Kolle.
Stonewall riots @40
![Stonewall riots @40[1] The Stonewall riots were a series of violent conflicts between New York City police officers and groups of gay and transgender people that began during the early morning of June 28, 1969, and lasted several days. Also called the Stonewall Rebellion or simply Stonewall, the clash was a watershed for the worldwide gay rights movement, as gay and transgender people had never before acted together in such large numbers to forcibly resist police. From the New York Times of June 29, 1969: HUNDREDS OF YOUNG MEN WENT ON A RAMPAGE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE, shortly after 3 A.M. yesterday after a force of plain-clothes men raided a bar that the police said was well known for its homo-sexual clientele. Thirteen persons were arrested and four policemen injured. The young men threw bricks, bottles, garbage, pennies and a parking meter at the policemen, who had a search warrant authorizing them in investigate reports that liquor was sold illegally at the bar, the Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher Street, just off Sheridan Square.—New York Times, June 29, 1969[2] The Sanctuary epitomized the post-Stonewall era, when gay men had won the right to dance intimately together without worrying about the police.](http://22.media.tumblr.com/Y3KxdEiQup9bs39weHt9Eiebo1_400.gif)
From the New York Times of June 29, 1969:
The Stonewall riots were a series of violent conflicts between New York City police officers and groups of gay and transgender people that began during the early morning of June 28, 1969, and lasted several days. Also called the Stonewall Rebellion or simply Stonewall, the clash was a watershed for the worldwide gay rights movement, as gay and transgender people had never before acted together in such large numbers to forcibly resist police.
Except for Illinois, which decriminalized sodomy in 1961, homosexual acts, even between consenting adults acting in private homes, were a criminal offense in every U.S. state at the time the Stonewall Riots occurred: “An adult convicted of the crime of having sex with another consenting adult in the privacy of his or her home could get anywhere from a light fine to five, ten, or twenty years—or even life—in prison. In 1971, twenty states had ‘sex psychopath‘ laws that permitted the detaining of homosexuals for that reason alone. In Pennsylvania and California sex offenders could be locked in a mental institution for life, and [in] seven states they could be castrated.” (Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, by David Carter, p. 15) Castration, emetics, hypnosis, electroshock therapy and lobotomies were used by psychiatrists to attempt to cure homosexuals through the 1950s and 1960s.(Katz, pp. 181–197.)(Adam, p. 60.)
Subsequent nightclubs, such as The Sanctuary, often billed as the first modern DJ-led nightclub of New York, epitomized the post-Stonewall era, “when gay men had won the right to dance intimately together without worrying about the police.” —Peter Braunstein
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beTsOONfVNk]
“Stained Sheets” (1979) Lydia Lunch
“Stained Sheets” is World Music Classic #325
Via « boredom is always counter-revolutionary
The full run of the International Times has been archived online[1].
The International Times (it or IT) was an underground paper started in 1966 in the UK, based in central London. Editors and writers included founders John Hopkins (Hoppy), Barry Miles and Jim Haynes. ITs first editor was the recently deceased playwright Tom McGrath. Singer of the Deviants Mick Farren, Jack Moore and avant-garde writer Bill Levy were closely involved. The name International Times was changed to just “it” for a time after objections from The Times newspaper. However, it was anyway generally referred to by the letters “I-T”.
Previously at Jahsonic[2].
RIP Stanley Chapman (1925 – 2009)[1]
via www.tate.org.uk
Cover illustration for Subsidia Pataphysica, no.1, 19 December 1965
Stanley Chapman (1925 – 2009) was a British architect, designer, translator and writer. His interests included theatre and pataphysics. He was involved with founding the National Theatre of London, was a member of Oulipo of the year 1960, founder of the Outrapo and a member also of the French Collège de ‘Pataphysique, president the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics and the Lewis Carroll Society. His English translation of Hundred Thousand Billion Poems was received with “admiring stupefaction” by Raymond Queneau.
RIP Christopher Gray (1942 – 2009)
Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (1974) – Christopher Gray [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Christopher Gray is a British writer and activist, editor of Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (1974). He was a member of the British SI and of King Mob.
Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (1974) is an anthology of Situationist texts edited by British activist Christopher Gray. The original edition was designed by Jamie Reid.
![[2]](http://contexts.org/socimages/files/2009/02/1times1a.gif){kind=link}