This interview was conducted  on June 28,1993.A section was published in River King Poetry Supplement Volume 1 # 3

Michael McClure was born in Marysville, Kansas in 1932 and lives in San Francisco,California.His published work includes Dialectics of Love (1952),Hymns to St. Geryon & Other Poems (1959),The New Book (1961),Dark Brown (1961),Meat Science Essays (1964),September Blackberries (1974) Lighting the Corners (1993) as well as a play ,The Beard (1965)

In 1993 his work also appeared in Fantasy Records CD release of Beat poetry and music entitled Howls,Raps & Roars.

In this interview McClure discusses a myriad of topics.They include his contribution to the then just released CD; his on going collaboration with keyboardist Ray Manzerak (formerly of The Doors); the influence of the Beat Movement on the contemporary music scene;the transformation of the American counter culture since the !950′s; how his work has impacted on movies particularly thru his participation in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz; and the influence of Jackson Pollock on his poetry.McClure also talked of his unique involvement in the world of theater and his subsequent dilemmas with censorship.

Gounis: There are two older pieces of yours included on Howls,Raps & Roars I’m interested in how you still relate to those pieces recorded in 1963.Do you still perform those pieces live and do you still feel pretty much connected to them emotionally and artistically?

McClure:Absolutely.They are slightly mistitled on there.The one which is called”Love Lion” which starts out”Oh fucking lover roar with joy.”I do that when I perform with Ray Manzerak.We do a longer version of it at almost all our gigs.

Gounis: You’ve continued to perform it over the years?

McClure: Yes.It’s one that’s most meaningful to me and I hope that it’s as meaningful to other people.The McClure/Manzerak version is seven or eight minutes long.And we’ve done it on the Dennis Miller Show and on Night Music the David Sanborn show.David Sanborn accompanied us.I have done “Love Lion Blues” everywhere from the Jack Kerouac Festival in Lowell to the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and a couple of television shows.

Gounis: I missed you on the David Sanborn program, but I enjoyed that series because they would often have artists on there that you wouldn’t see on other programs.

McClure: I liked seeing Leonard Cohen playing with Sonny Rollins. How about that one?Beat that one.

Gounis: I did see Leonard Cohen on there, but I don’t remember him with Sonny Rollins. I remember David Sanborn and Marianne Faithfull on there as one of the memorable nights.

McClure: Oh yeah! In fact we were on the program with L.L. Cool J.It’s a great contrast,you know…and Jon Luc Ponty was on also.

Gounis: Another performance of poetry that I wanted to ask you about was… I remember seeing you perform with Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute in the summer of 1976…

McClure: Yeah.Allen was goading me to read “Fuck Ode”, a censored poem of mine that Kerouac liked a lot.Ginsberg read his “Please Master”and he was goading me to read “Fuck Ode” so I did.

Gounis: I think that it was in an auditorium of a Catholic school.Do you remember?

McClure: Right! That was wonderful.

Gounis: It was a very entertaining night of poetry.

McClure: I’m going to read with Allen and Anne Waldman on the thirty-first of July (ed.1993).

Gounis: At Naropa again?

McClure: Yes.

Gounis: I’d love to see that.

McClure: Manzerak and I work sometimes with Allen. Sometimes we work with Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead, sometimes with Jim Carrol.Mostly we do our own shows.

Gounis: When I saw you read again about twelve years later in Saint Louis I noticed the very different type of delivery that you gave to the poem.

McClure: Was that at Cicero’s ?

Gounis: Yes.Do you remember that gig?

McClure:Yeah! What Ray and I do…it becomes neither Michael McClure nor Ray Manzerak. We call it McClure Manzerak. It becomes a symbiosis.It is another art form in which I contribute the words and Ray contributes the music. I’ve learned from it.And when I read solo now, I have methods of bringing the words to the audience more clearly that I have picked up as Ray and I work together.

Gounis: In regards to a quote that I recently read of yours:”Now anyone with any degree of human feeling is a bit of an outlaw and knows it”; do you think that that type of sensibility is a response to the political use of language for manipulative purposes,which we’ve seen so much of in at least the last twelve years? Is that why young people are responding so strongly to the ideas of  the Beat Generation?

McClure: I carry it back further than that. In the 1950′s we were the radical forces at work in a bitter Cold War.It was a Mel’s Cheeseburger Diner Pit -flannel suit- Buick -cocktail America.We were the radical forces and we stood up because we had things that we wanted to say.We wanted to bring poetry off of the page into the listener’s ear to share with them more fully, to make a more complete experience.And we did that.The Beatles saw that and said,”Well we like that, we want to do something like that.”Their words became more serious and they also incorporated black American music;Willie Dixon for example or Howling Wolf or Robert Johnson, and much of what the Beat poets were doing,as well as drawing on their own great English gifts.

The Beatles’ music became more serious.It had mystery and beauty.It was art and it spoke in the language of the spirit and at the same time it spoke in the language of the pop culture.That was good.We had influenced that. Then we (the Beats) heard their music and we wanted to become more musical. I began writing songs and hanging out with Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg.And I knew artists in the Haight-Ashbury scene.

The rock scene was a radical scene when it first started…radical is a poor word.The rock scene was part of a total advanced art scene.Then corporations came and bought up rock and roll and stole the art to sell beer and tennis shoes.

Gounis: Now were talking about the era of the late 1970′s into the early ’80′s?

McClure: Yeah.Rock and roll was co-opted,de-radicalized, castrated, turned into plum pudding,however you want to describe it.And people listened to that for awhile and then said,”Hey wait, this isn’t what we want to hear.We know that we’re living in The Great Society with lots of propaganda, but can it be that much of our music has betrayed us also?…not all of it of course, but much of our music has betrayed us also – then they wanted to hear intelligence again.

Manzerak and I are doing the same thing that we have always done which is bringing poetry directly to the people and telling what our vision is.

Gounis: Right – and people under twenty five are now responding to what you have been doing for thirty years.

McClure: Yeah.Although I do think that there’s more.Part of it would be this collection on the CD Howls,Raps, & Roars.Another part of it would be Ann Charters’ interesting anthology The Beat Reader, just put out by Viking Portable Press.And the Beats are now being taught in some schools right along with Emerson and Thoreau.

Gounis: Another subject that I wanted to talk to you about, which ties very much into what’s going on the 1990′s, is that you have been very cognizant of the power of personality in literature.You’ve used subjects like Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, as diverse as they are, together in the play, The Beard.Would you comment on the concept of the cult of personality and how that has been used theatrically and politically?

McClure: Well, I’ll tell you that I agree with the great “body philosopher” Moshe Feldenkrais that that part of our body that is not genetic is largely an accident.Until we mutate to the point where we are able to select from our genetic hard wiring and also those things that happen to us randomly, then we accrue heavier and heavier personalities.

I don’t have a high opinion of personality.I think that I would like to shed a little bit of my personality every year rather than growing a more delightful, shiny, white toothy, cha-cha-cha, boogieing down the stage personality.I’d like to drop a little bit more personality and be a little bit more like I was when I was born.

The cult of personality is another ploy of the corporations and the big blind goverment to delude people into thinking that this is the way that one makes it in the world.And that may be,but it is a social world created by people having the same delusion. I don’t have a high opinion of what is called “personality”.I don’t like to see people making it on their personality.It’s delusional.People grow with something tougher, deeper, softer and sweeter, meaner and and angrier and gentle and more loving than that, if they’re really going to be something.

As for Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid…they’re great personae, and they’re great beings out there. I always felt that Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid selected me. I didn’t select them. You might think that I’m nuts for saying that they came to me, but they came to me for a good reason.I studied them, both of them historically.If you read my description ( in Lighting the Corners) of how my play The Beard came about and the various bunch of censorship busts that the play went thru, it will give the whole story.But I can tell you right off, I don’t like the cult of personality.There are great people; like Francis Crick is a great person,Francis Crick the Nobel Laureate for the elucidation of the DNA molecule.Herbert Marcuse the visionary philosopher is a great person.I have been privileged to know some great people, but the personality stuff,that’s to sell beer and tennis shoes.

I don’t think of Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid as being personalities.What came to me was more like spirit.They kept coming back to me.After The Beard arrest I really didn’t want anymore,but Harlow and the Kid came back to me for one last group song that I wrote for them.

William Blake said,”The authors are in eternity.”I understand what he meant now.They are in eternity and I feel like I’m taking dictation.

Gounis: We’re not getting close to the idea of channeling are we?

McClure: No, I don’t think so.I don’t know much about channeling,but I don’t see any relationship between what I’m talking about and channeling.Nor do I have any easy explanation for what I’m talking about other than that I know people that have had the same experience.

Gounis: I was thinking more in terms of how the concept of personality has been used,as you said, to sell tennis shoes,and in a very political way,especially in the Reagan years.

McClure: Yeah, I’m absolutely against it.I think that if we can all shed a little personality we’ll be much happier,much more intelligent,much more like we imagine ourselves to be.Society is a masterful educational device and at this point the education device is run by people who use others as marionettes to make themselves greedily rich and powerful.

Gounis: Do you think that the recognition of the values that the Beat movement has expressed and elaborated on, offer a resistance to that kind of thing?

McClure: One dimensional values already dominate society.They have already been internalized by society and the counter force that we represent is now part of the society and part of the polarization that is going on.And I think that the same thing is true not only of the Beats but of the ’60′s.The ideas that were represented by the Beats and by the great artists and socially active people of the ’60′s have been absorbed into the social environment.

You can see this yourself.You’re standing next to a young man and he’s got three earrings on, one side of his hair is grown out long and the other side is short and maybe he’s got a tattoo and his speaking very gently and you find out,that in many cases,that you share many of his ideas.He’s for peace; he’s for the environment; he’s for the body; he’s for liberation of energies; he’s often times very open minded.I’m using the male gender here, the same thing could be said with the female gender, let’s just say “that person”.Yet sometimes the person says,”whatever happened to the ’60′s? Why did the ’60′s fail?”And you look at them and laugh.And you think,”Jesus,kid if you only knew that you would be standing there with a crew cut and a grey suit saying,”Sir” and you wouldn’t even ask me these questions much less have the thoughts going thru your mind,if it hadn’t been for what happened in the ’50′s and the ’60′s.

Gounis: An exchange like that is mentioned in your book Lighting the Corners.

McClure: I knew that I had mentioned it in an interview somewhere.

Gounis: Don’t you feel that to major capitalist minds these values were a threat?

McClure: There’s that famous quote of Eisenhower’s…where he was warning about the military-industrial state.I think that he should have been warning about the military-corporate state.But on his way out he warned the United States.

One of the major reasons…that we started the Beat Generation together…that’s Allen Ginsberg,Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Diane Di Prima ,Lenore Kandel,Kenneth Rexroth and me…the reason that we were artists working together, speaking together, reciting our poetry together…one large reason was the Korean War – and our hatred for the idea that the U.S. was going over to kill Asians to protect the property of the wealthy of America.

To be anti-war was a radical idea. People now can say,”I don’t believe in the war.”In those days if you said that,you were thrown in jail.I don’t know if they had closed the conscientious objector camps in Oregon yet in the 1950′s.There was one nearby Oregon.They still had those things open.People were thrown in jail for saying things like that,even in the form we said it in.

I had been presented in Life magazine a couple of years previously in 1955 as being a”careful, young craftsman” with my picture.In Life magazine, that’s like being on TV today, because TV wasn’t big yet.Life magazine was it. A couple of years later they had a scandalous article,totally made up,full of lies about the Beat Generation.Insinuating that it would be a good thing to hang these filthy ,young jackal up from their necks by lamp posts.

And when that didn’t work, the next thing was to try to deconstruct who were by having pictures of silly people with rubber tire sandals, goatees and berets, playing congas in the street sipping warm,red wine – I mean, hey we were active! We weren’t doing that.The media showed people in coffeehouses having blabbermouth night.

We were busy.Active.Before the media had finished portraying North Beach as the Beat Generation, we had already left North Beach.It was a tourist scene. We were working with our environmental friends or we were working with our friends in Buddhist monasteries,or we were working with our friends in anarchists workshop circles,or we were joining our friends in publishing books,or we were working with our friends in editing magazines.It was an active period for the people who were called Beats.

Gounis: And that hard work translated into the underground press in the ’60′s…

McClure: It doesn’t translate; it just gradually blends into it.These activities were a threat to corporate greed on a day to day basis.

Gounis: I talked to Ed sanders about this idea that if you can make a pair of moccasins, you’re not going to buy a pair of new shoes.So this was a threat…

McClure: I think that you will, because you’ve been educated by that great educational device that we call television,to think that the moccasins that you made aren’t any good.I don’t think that we were much of a threat to capitalism.I’d like to think that we provided portholes for the imagination so that people could reconsider themselves.

Gounis: You don’t think that Madison Avenue saw the communal hippie movement as any kind of threat to consumerism?

McClure: (pauses) Gee, I couldn’t tell you in retrospect.I think that they first saw it as a chance to sell new products.(laughs)

Gounis: I thought that it became that later, when they realized that they could sell the hippies in the teepees acoustic guitars, but I thought that early on it was seen as a threat.

McClure: Actually the people that were called hippies were rather ingenious, because they had to learn to manipulate the media and actually take advantage of the media.We (the Beats) were used to being usually interviewed in a negative way.People like myself were the senior fellows of the hippie movement.We were like the old admired uncles of the family…or however you want to see it…or of the scene.

In talking about the thinking people of the’60′s,the movement had a wonderful way of dealing with the media.There was an enormous amount of media manipulation in favor of getting their ideas out before the ideas could be squashed.You’re right, some ideas were squashed by misinformation, but a lot got out.

I remember, I did a television documentary about Haight-Ashbury and we got that out…it showed in a lot of cities… a beautifully done documentary.

I remember Walter Cronkite’s program on Haight-Asbury had me reading a poem that had been distributed by the Diggers’ Communication Company which was an anarchist political movement.It was one of the centers of activity in Haight-Ashbury.

So I see The Movement not just simply as a poor calf that got beaten to death in the stadiums, but as a young creature of a lot of fight that got out a lot of energy of consciousness.That in fact in a large way got born into the general consciousness.Remember that the Vietnam War was going on then and remember that that many of the people that came out to protest against the Vietnam War, God bless ‘em, were old women – some of the first demonstrators – as they often are up here. The next demonstrators were the gays.The hippies and the gays came out about the same time.And then pretty soon you had young married couples with kids -baby strollers in the streets.Then the next thing that you know you had fifty thousand people marching down the streets instead of fifty, then the next thing you know, they’re having marches in Washington D.C. with half a million, then a million in New York City. That’s the only thing that stopped that war – that’s what Mister Pentagon Papers said – Daniel Ellsberg…demonstrations and protests stopped it.

Gounis: In regards to the use of media and popular culture, I have always looked on your appearance in the Martin Scorsese film The Last Waltz,as one of the highlights of that film and really one of the bright moments,when mass audiences became at least a little bit acquainted with yourself and Lawrence Ferlinghetti…

McClure: Yeah! Thank you.

Gounis: Would you talk a little bit about what your interaction was like there that night with the other performers? And what kind of interplay you had, if any, with people like Van Morrison for instance.I know that you knew Bob Dylan…but what was the interaction like between you and Ferlinghetti, Dylan and Van Morrison? Van Morrison by the way is a big Beat fan and long time reader of Kerouac.

McClure: Well, I was asked to put together a group of readers for that evening.And that came about again through the Diggers and the Communication Company.They asked me to put together some poets with the musicians because they wanted a real evening like the way things used to be.Remember that I said at one time there wasn’t a rock scene and an art scene, the rock scene was part of the art scene? There wasn’t that hugh platform separating us from “the stars”…they wanted to go back to that kind of situation. They said,”Let’s have poetry again”…and they probably were showing paintings in the lobby again like we used to do at the rock shows.So Emmett Grogan, who was one of the founders of The Diggers,said to me,” I talked to Martin Scorsese and he wants me to get some poets for the film.Will you ask some poets?” I said,”No problem.”

I had just finished writing the biography of my Hell’s Angels friend Freewhellin’ Frank and he was writing poetry,so I asked Frank.And I asked Lenore Kandel,one of the great Beat poets and I asked Ferlinghetti…and I read myself …and Robert Duncan great visionary San Francisco poet of the Modernist Period, kind of like my father in a way, in poetry anyway. I invited all of them; so we had a full evening of poetry.You only see Ferlinghetti and me in the movie.They edited it down that way.It would have been awfully nice to see some of those other poets.

Gounis:I wonder if those outtakes are floating around somewhere.

McClure: Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I never even thought of that. I’ll bet Scorsese has never thrown an outtake away in his life. I’ll bet that he has them.

Gounis: They could possibly do a “Behind the Scenes of the Last Waltz” like they did a “Behind the Scenes of Apocalypse Now”…

McClure: Mostly I talked with Joni Mitchell and Allen and Bob Dylan. I was backstage talking with Robbie Robertson and Bob.And my wife and daughter were there that evening and I was just …just doing business,being a poet.

Gounis: You had known Robbie Robertson too since ’65…didn’t you?

McClure: I think so…’64 or ’65…They were with Hawkins.

Gounis: They were with Ronnie Hawkins.There is a kind of well known photograph of you and Robertson in ’65.I think that it was taken around the time when Dylan had first gone electric.

McClure:Yeah, he had just gone electric a few months before at a festival.That was his first tour with an amplified sound.

Gounis: That was around the time that he gave you the autoharp too wasn’t it?

McClure: Yeah, that was the year.

Gounis: You have had a continuous influence on rock music with your poetry and other work that you have done.It has come to the forefront more recently because of your work with Ray Manzerak.

McClure: I would like to think of it that way.All the Beats have set a foundation.And all the great Black American artists of blues and of rhythm and blues have set a precedent for what’s happened in popular music.And some of us have returned…sort of counter…sort of counter-play.We are touched by music and go to the music world again and we go back and forth.I have done a lot of that.

Gounis: When I think of your poetry,and I think also in terms of Charles Olson’s Projective verse; we are getting very close to the idea of body expression which is closely related to the performance of rock music.

McClure: And also the painting of Jackson Pollock.

Gounis: I wanted to bring his name up.I recently saw where they are going to do a film biography starring Ed Harris.

McClure: I understand that there are three being planned right now.Robert De Niro and Barbara Streisand are planning another one and someone else is planning one.

Gounis: I think that it’s a very good idea to bring Jackson’s Pollock’s work to a mass audience and let people become aware of what he did.

McClure: Yes, it’ll be good won’t it?

Gounis: Would you talk a little bit about his influence on your work and again kind of discuss a bit this concept of projecting poetry onto the page?

McClure: I first encountered Jackson Pollock when there was an article about him in life magazine in the ’40′s. I was a kid in Kansas and I said,”Let me out of here! Something important is going on.An artist is using his body to think with in a media…in a media – painting…in the art media. I gotta find out about that.”And I went to New York shortly after that.That was the sort of thing that drove me to New York. I actually grew up in Seattle, Washington too,but I was living in Kansas when I first saw Pollock.

I had always considered the goal of my poetry was to make a gesture of art the same way that Pollock was involved in the gesture of painting.I originally came to San Francisco thinking not that I would take classes with Robert Duncan the great poet, who I did study with, but with the painter Mark Rothko and the painter Clifford Still, who I understood were teaching at the art institute here.They had come here.So when I got to San Francisco I had the good fortune to find a field of poets that were also interested in gesture as a basis for poetry. I quickly discovered Charles Olson and began trying to write Projective Verse. People see my poetry and think that it is free verse or something like that.They don’t recognize it when they see it,that it is a complex poetic act using the breath line and the gesture of the imagination with the syllable as a base.It is profoundly related to things such as the work of Jackson Pollock and Theolonious Monk and Miles Davis for that matter.

Once a person understands Projective Verse and how it relates to gesture in art, they can begin to see the threads of it in many of the things that they’re interested in. I now see gesture in art that I would never have thought of.

What Ray Manzerak and I are doing is very complex.I like working with Ray because one side of the brain registers language,the other side registers pitch;and the event that takes place,if it involves both pitch and word is much more complex than if it involves only pitch or only word. So when Ray and I work together it becomes complex and much easier to understand because the human brain is not attuned to simplicity.Sometimes people can’t understand something because it is to simple.They are poems of mine that absolutely baffle people when they see them on the page.When they hear Ray and I do it they say,”Oh yeah, of course – yeah! Perfect.”

And I say,”That’s right.This is the way that we are built to work.This is body art,because your brain is your body too.”

Gounis: You’ve completed a video tape with Ray Manzerak.Is that out?

McClure: We have a video out and we have CD  which will be out on August 15th (1993) from Shanachie Music,which is a world music company.

Gounis: What is the title of the video?

McClure: The title is Love Lion. You heard us do some of it at Cicero’s. The album opens with “Action Philosophy’,beginning with the words by Thoreau so that the listeners understand where we’re coming from and also so give them a chance to hear us before we get loud.And then the second piece is Love Lion, and then we go into a piece in memory of Jim Morrison,then a piece about the rain forests. I think you’ll like it.

Reprinted from The Riverfront Times May 23, 1990

Ever since the abrupt and drastic rip in the fabric of the American psyche at the time of the John F. Kennedy assassination , the fundamental mindset of most discerning Americans has been to expect the most unexpected of events;to be prepared to believe that which up to that point was unbelievable.All and any are suspect,particularly those institutions that previously had been the most trusted.

This on-the-edge mentality has been reinforced in the last quarter century by the atrocities and deceptions of  Vietnam, the revelations concerning Watergate,and most recently, the unearthing of information about the Iran-Contra affair.

And now, ( more than 30 years,edit.) after the crime was committed, British lawyer and journalist (The Chinese Mafia) Fenton Bresler puts forth the thesis in Who Killed John Lennon ? that the U.S. government’s Central Intelligence Agency executed the politically active rock star.And that it was done by use of a mind-controlled,manipulated,robotic Manchurian Candidate type assassin.

Ludicrous,even in an era of UFO and everyday Elvis sightings.Preposterous, stretching the limits of credibility,even for a generation of veterans of post- psychedelia.

But is it? One has to look no further than the research and the U.S. government’s documentation of the late 1950′s and early 1960′s to find the phenomena of mind control and thought manipulation need not be confined to the milieu of science fiction writers.

In the early chapters of his book,Bresler clearly points out much of the evidence  of government involvement with political assassination and mind control research gleaned from U.S. government documents.He reports on Senator Frank Church’s Congressional Committee of Inquiry, which in the 1970′s disclosed that “American officials encouraged or were privy to plots which resulted in the deaths of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic,Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam and Rene Schneider in Chile”(not to mention the murder of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba or the numerous attempts on the life of Fidel Castro).The author details the workings of what Daniel Sheehan of the Christic Institute, labeled a “generic program” available to take out individuals who are felt to be at odds with designated U.S. policies .This program continues to the present day.

The CIA was created as an off shoot of the post-World War II Office of Strategic Services, as a bureau to investigate foreign threats to national security.Bresler relates several incidents demonstrating how the agency has violated its own charter by unwarranted surveillance, and in the case of experimentation with with mind altering behavior modification,has used unsuspecting American citizens.This information is not new,but seen in the overview of political activist John Lennon as a victim of a programmed assassin,it gives support to the author’s theory.

Bresler recounts in detail Lennon’s unique blend of anti-war politics and rock and roll,and how it was significant in creating the anti-establishment ethos of the late 1960′s and early 1970′s.His supposition is that malevolent powers that be were not to allow the ex-Beatle’s influence to take hold once again,when the singer/ songwriter reactivated his career at the start of the Reagan 1980′s.

Relevant episodes in the life of Mark David Chapman, Lennon’s killer, have also been scrupulously examined; such as Chapman’s long association with the YMCA and its link with the CIA, his trip to Beirut in 1975,and his involvement with born again,right-wing fundamentalists. Unlike Albert Goldman,perhaps the most scurrilous of Lennon’s biographers, the attorney/journalist personally interviewed hundreds of individuals involved with the case.This included many close associates of Chapman’s and John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono.

It may have been financial limitations or a publisher’s deadline that inhibited him, but Bresler’s only real flaw is his  failure to press on, to follow through on some of the most significant leads.For example, he illustrates in meticulous detail that Mark Chapman had a three day lay over in Chicago right before he reached his destination in New York City, but Chapman’s activities there are barely reported. It is only suggested that at this point his homicidal programming was activated to motivate him to proceed to NYC to shoot Lennon.Also, a certain “Gene Scott” (the only pseudonym in the book) is not thoroughly investigated.After it is mentioned that Scott and Chapman”have complex undertones to their apparently still continuing friendship” and that Scott has been described as “mysterious” and a “bad influence” on Chapman,Scott is discounted.Apparently it is because of his lack of co-operation and a terse phone conversation with the author.

Still, Who Killed John Lennon? brings together in one  volume an abundance of information and critical evidence in a case that is potentially so much more than fodder for the tabloids and fanzines that have thus far reported on it.This serious examination of the case instead opens a most ominous can of worms by questioning how an ostensibly open society deals with its most vocal critics and proponents of participatory democracy.

This interview with  Philip Gounis took place at Saint Louis University in July,1981.It was conducted by Peter Plymton Smith during his research for his book,Your Hidden Credentials:The Value of Personal Learning Outside College,Acropolis Books,Ltd. 1986

Smith: Where I would really like to start,just…and it will help me identify things;to just have you do a sort of name and a short biography,you know,as you put name,rank,serial number,who you are,where you have been,what you have done and just in a short form,what you are doing now.

Gounis: I’m thirty-three years old,married with three children.My work has been published in poetry periodicals and small presses.I’ve done some record reviews.I’ve done radio broadcasting at Lindenwood College (now Lindenwood University,ed.)I have lectured in elementary and high schools in the area.Read my poetry on KWMU,FM radio.I have also tutored at Florissant Valley Community College for the English Department.

Also since I was fifteen years old,I have worked at a variety of blue collar jobs,which included driving a tractor trailer truck,working as a shipping and receiving clerk,a lot of delivery work and some inside sales and telephone work too.

Smith:All the while you were doing all these other things like writing,etc.?

Gounis:Yes.Right.All this was going on at the same time.

Smith:Were you going to college or just working then?

Gounis:My academic background is somewhat unique.I graduated from high school;having gone to McBride High School here in Saint Louis.It was a parochial non co-educational school which was established as a major learning institution -college preparatory curriculum.I left there after two years.At fifteen I was not interested in formal education -I was interested in having a good time(laughs).It was a special opportunity to have a high quality education that was relatively inexpensive and being foolhardy,naive and goofy as kids sometime are at fifteen – I blew it.Looking back…I wanted to have fun,I didn’t want to be…I felt stifled in the classroom.

Now,at thirty three years old having had some experiences in the academic realm and with children of my own,I think probably I should have taken advantage of the quality formal education back then.But instead I transferred to a regular public high school contrary to the advice and wishes of my parents.With the extra credits that I had acquired at McBride High School,I only needed to attend the public school for half days my last two years.It was all that my beleaguered parents could do to keep me in school anyways…

Smith:Tremendously interesting.

Gounis:And yet,when I think back I have always had a love of books and a love of knowledge.

Smith:That’s clear I think.Gee,all the things that you spend your time doing.

Gounis:Here’s the irony of ironies.I would skip school and go to the library and read-that’s the truth! (laughs) That points up some kind of flaw somewhere.I don’t know who or what in the educational system to fault for that.I guess that some of the fault was in my own self in being undisciplined in that kind of school environment.When I look back at myself at sixteen or seventeen years old and think of myself skipping classes,feeling again as I said,stifled or repressed or whatever in that school atmosphere…but I would go to the library not the pool hall or just hang out and waste my time;I wanted knowledge.I would seek out knowledge on my own.

Smith:And you got married in there sometime.

Gounis:Yes,right after high school.

Smith:All the way through up into the present you have described two tracks-parallel tracks.

Gounis:That right.The very practical track of having to put food on the table.This was all in a working class economic social structure.It wasn’t like I would inherit any money and just sit back and write poetry and paint and do what I wanted to do.I was on my own; I had to support myself and my family since I was nineteen years old.So consequently,I drove a truck.I worked in a warehouse.I was a shipping and receiving clerk…whatever,and always reading.I continued to take an interest in politics and all art forms too.And I tried to associate with people that did likewise…

Smith (pauses) I’m going to make notes as you go along because I want to mark a place in this…so just keep going.

Gounis:…yeah,definitely two parallel tracks all the time.One very practical money,dollars and cents track of supporting myself and my family and the other of fulfilling this creative need – something that I couldn’t put on the back burner even if I wanted to.

If you have talked to people that write or do create…that is a drive.It is just like hunger or sex or any drive;and it needs to be fulfilled.So you write or you play an instrument or you do both or you dance…whatever.The artist needs to do this.It has to be fulfilled.

Smith:We have a funny quirk in our family tree.I have an uncle who is thirty six whose a writer.And I understand that he goes through tremendous torque when he feels creative.He really can’t do anything else.He’s been published and won some prizes.He’s not in the middle of his field or anything,but when he sees something he needs to create.Everything else barely exists.He barely keeps his job going and he gets ulcers and terrible things happen to him while he plays that drive out that he has to play out.

Gounis: You see, something happens with this kind of existence.You have to associate and work with a lot of people who never even pick up a book.I mean,if you are working in a warehouse or loading trucks;the people that you work with are not educators and poets,and so…although if you can latch on to somebody…this is an interesting element,an angle,to this whole work environment…If you latch onto another person that is creative at all, you have a bond right there;because so many people that work an eight to five job,or work a blue collar job…you can see from…I work with young people and older people where they settle into this rut.Maybe that creative spark was there at one time but it has been slowly and definitively put out over a period of time.Just survival becomes the main goal.And maybe they’ll have a little kind of creative urge but it’s not encouraged.

Smith:Sure as hell not on the job!

Gounis:Yeah,not on the job for sure.

Smith:I was just talking to a guy who was recounting being harassed on the job because he went to school.

Gounis:Yeah?

Smith:He had been there ten years and everybody knew him.He went to Vietnam,came back and went through all that re-entry stuff.And then…he knows all these guys,drinks beer with them and he comes here to go to school and they put the blocks to him.

Gounis:Yeah.You see,something is happening where a lot of people who you work with in that environment,in fact feel threatened.

Smith:Sure.

Gounis:That is just something that people don’t realize unless they are in that kind of environment,like this fellow you were just talking about.He had to experience it first hand.I don’t mean to say that there is any kind of overt persecution of people that are trying to develop themselves creatively;but there is prejudice there.

Smith:It creates the kind of thing-it’s an attitude,an environmental thing-similar as if you put a woman in a work place that is predominantly male.

Gounis:Right.

Smith: People might not overtly say,”Look at the broad”,you know,but they are going to just make ostracism as a climatic thing.They will close them out.

Gounis:Yeah,that can happen.

Smith:Okay.Now let me…I need to create a an image,a metaphor…I am looking at this flat prairie and I need to create some bushes around…Could you tell me or…just describe how you think.How do you spend your time?Take whatever unit of time that is appropriate…

Gounis:Okay.

Smith:…a day, a week, a month. What are the major ways that you spend your time?

Gounis:Okay.Now is a unique time for me.As of the end of May of this year,I went from working a full-time eight to five job as a warehouse/deliveryman and tutoring at the junior college (that position runs out every Spring)…I am laid off for the summer;they cut back on staff;but I was also laid off from my day job.So, I went from working two jobs to no job.

And so,here I was with my family and all those financial responsibilities,but no income.What I found out was that I had to re-evaluate everything.What am I going to do now?

It’s interesting.When I tell people over say fifty years old who have lived through the Great Depression;they get a look of panic in their face,almost as if I told them that I have a terminal illness.They’re scared for me.On the other hand,some younger people ,some friends of mine,have this attitude that this could be a positive time for me.And I have that attitude too,because I have invested so much time and effort into being creative and into developing that part of me.I’m thirty three years old and I felt that maybe what was happening was…my schedule was opening up more and  now I didn’t have to work a day job.So I thought,this can be a time for me to develop myself even more creatively.

Smith:So that affects the way that you’re spending your time?

Gounis:Yes;and so this has been about six weeks now.Recently this disc jockey job at this lounge came through.And this is an interesting job.I don’t get to play a lot of music that I really appreciate or that I like;it’s mostly pop music,some disco,some country,some straight ahead rock ‘n roll.But it’s still kind of interesting to be in a bar every night,to interact with these people…and also to be lifted out of the eight to five rut of working the monotony and tedium of the warehouse job.So I feel more alive,somewhat liberated…

Smith:You’re making money,at least to…

Gounis:Yeah,I’m doing alright;I don’t have bill collectors calling.But I’m really in a state of indecision now because I do have a lot of applications pending now.Some are for general labor jobs.And I question should I go right back to doing that kind of work again.That could make it hard for me to find the time to write.

Smith:So you are doing some writing now too?

Gounis:Yeah.Quite a bit and developing some other ideas.Working with some drawings that an artist did for me a few years ago for an unpublished manuscript.One of the drawings did appear in Image magazine alongside some of my poems.I looked at those drawings the other day and they triggered something in me…And so I thought,well.I’m going to work up some ideas with these drawings,some poems.Maybe I can have them printed as poetry cards,something that somebody could tack on their wall.I find that with this extra time I want to find a way to make money outside of the eight to five routine.

Smith:You want to create something that you like.

Gounis:Right,that’s it. And I think that now might be the opportunity to do it,this summer.So this is an interesting time for me.

Smith:There are going to be some redundancies.It’s not just because my questions are redundant,but also the things that are important to you are going to come up again in some questions and I just hope you will play it through and sort of respond to the questions as we go because they are going to seem sort of redundant and you’re going think,”Gee,I think I’ve said these words before.”And there will be times when I may try to push you into what I meant by the question,so that we don’t get the same recitation each time.

What kinds of things do you think about?I don’t know any other way to put it.What kinds of things…let’s assume that you had a sit down lawn mower and you’re  mowing the lawn,you know,so that puts you doing something where all that you have to do is steer the thing and keep going around…whatever it is,what kinds of things do you find yourself thinking about?

Gounis:Yeah.Okay.I have to back track here a little bit to give you some perspective on this.About 1972…I had always been interested books and I was always writing,but I wasn’t a public person.I wasn’t being published.I was attempting to get things published,but I wasn’t really really out front aggressively doing so…but then I had this experience…are you familiar with Ram Dass or Richard Albert?Have you ever read the book Be Here Now?

Smith:No I haven’t.

Gounis:There is a parallel here…sometimes ‘ordinary’ people draw parallels with people in the media spotlight.They can identify with them…

Anyways,Richard Alpert was at Harvard with Timothy Leary when they started using psilocybin…

Smith:Okay,okay…(nodding)

Gounis: Does it start to ring a bell?Alpert and Leary got kicked out of Harvard for giving psilocybin to undergraduates…

Smith:Yes,yes…

Gounis:As Alpert tells it; he was wealthy;his father owned a railroad in Massachusetts.He had a Cessna airplane.He was dating fashion models.He had prominent academic credentials,lots of money.He had everything,but was doing LSD and was unhappy.

So,about 1966 he went to India because he had nothing else to do.He met this guru in India who was just this little old man in a blanket in Nepal…to make a long story short;this little old man read Alpert’s mind.He told Alpert,”You were out last night under the stars.You were thinking about your mother”-this is all in broken English because he is an uneducated Indian-”She died from cancer of the spleen and you are just kind of wandering around India-right?”

And Alpert just lost it,you know,he thought,”What’s going on here? Who is this guy ?Is he CIA or what? How’d this little old man get all this information?”Alpert broke down,he cried.He said that he felt that he was home.In response to this dramatic experience,Alpert began to study Hindu and Yoga disciplines and diet and meditation.He was given a Hindu name,Baba Ram Dass,which means servant of God.When he came back to America,Richard Alpert lectured as Baba Ram Dass.

So the reason that I bring this all up is because in the autumn of 1972 I heard a lecture by Ram Dass;and a short time before that I had had a very profound experience with peyote.And a short time after the Ram Dass lecture,I had an experience with a clairvoyant.These incidents made me reassess everything that I had learned in a linear Western way.Before this time,’ego’ was just a term in a psychology textbook.After these experiences I understood ‘ego’ as a vehicle for life on this planet.

Smith: Yeah.

Gounis:And so I re-evaluated all that I had been doing.I felt as if I had been playing an ego game.What I had been doing was trying to elevate ‘Philip Gounis’.And I had been doing this in my relationship with my wife and my associates.Trying to be “Top Dog”.In my circle of friends it didn’t necessarily mean having a Cessna,but it maybe meant having the best pot plants.(laughs)Being ‘hip’.

Smith:One step ahead.

Gounis:There are all kinds of status…I realized that it was all bullshit;that the way that I had been thinking was jive.It was a painful realization.I hit the bottom.I thought well,now I can just end it all or I can get my head together and really start to make some contribution.So what am I going to do?Now here I am.

It was a dark time.Nixon was President of the United States then,the oil crisis was happening.A definite malaise abounded nationally and for me personally.I felt very isolated.I felt alienated from my wife.I couldn’t relate to her.As fate would have it a lot of my buddies had been drafted or had moved away.I had been laid off.So I decided that the only way that I was going to feel better about myself or about anything was to really give to others and make a real contribution.

I had to take stock of myself.I had always been interested in writing and in reading books.I thought that maybe I could give something in that area.In the meantime I had to pay the bills.I was behind financially so I took a blue collar job that was offered to me.I also was reading a lot of Alan Watts and Ram Dass at that time…a lot about Eastern philosophy.

Smith: Did those events that you spoke about(the peyote and the clairvoyant)-just so I have it in perspective-did that instill in you-that may not be the right term-but a religious connection for you? And it stayed with you?

Gounis:The concept of God isn’t foreign to me.I was brought up in a Catholic home.I left the Catholic Church when I was sixteen because I just thought that it was false.It wasn’t doing the job for me.I went through a period of what I would call ‘agnosticism’;but the religious experience wasn’t completely foreign to me.But the kind of “religious” experience that I had in 1972 was.

Smith:Yeah,okay…all this leads up to today.When you have free time,what do you think about?

Gounis:Okay,that’s why I said that I had to go back.It’s a long story but it builds up to now(1981),okay?So that all happened in 1973.Then in 1974 I went to work for the Post Office.Bills were paid.I had time to do more writing and so forth.Made pretty good money,not what Dave Winfield made,but…(laughs)

Smith:He’s not real anyway.

Gounis:So it gave me more mental freedom to write and to think,”Well now I can do more.”I can actually pursue getting published or whatever.Also I took part in poetry readings on a radio station in Gaslight Square called KDNA.Then in the Fall of 1975 I enrolled in a Communications Course at Lindenwood College in Saint Charles.I was working nights at the Post Office with the intent of getting on the radio.I felt that I could make a contribution,that I could do something there.I got in what was called a Communications Lab which was hands-on experience with the Lindenwood College radio station KCLC doing radio board engineering and production.Later I dropped the course because I was able to get a program slot.

Smith:You just wanted to get in there.

Gounis:Yeah,and the station management was very open to my proposal.I said to them,”How about some blues music? All that you’re playing is Top Forty music.People come to Saint Louis and look to Saint Louis like they do New Orleans-for blues.”

Smith:Yeah,that’s right.

Gounis: “Blues and jazz-but it’s not even on the radio.Give me an hour.”So they gave me an hour on Wednesday night and it grew to three hours.And I could have done more,but because of my schedule-my family,my two other jobs-I could only do three hours a week.But it grew from one hour a week to three.I did the blues show for four years.I also hosted another program where local poets and musicians did their own thing live.I did that for a year and I also filled in on a jazz program sometimes.I loved it.I love radio.

Smith:It’s a wonderful media.

Gounis:It is and it has so much potential.Peter,if I turned on the radio now and I hear the garbage on there,I think what a waste.And that is one of my pet peeves,waste.Whether it be food,whether it be air,whether it be energy.Why waste potential.You can edify people while you entertain them.

Smith:Teach them something.

Gounis:Yes,instead-well, I’ll go on and on about it and I don’t want to-but we all know what the idea of consumerism is and what is happening in this culture commercially.

Smith: Yeah,commercialism,I would argue,is a weak excuse for lack of quality.People will,I am convinced,will pay for high quality things and it doesn’t have to cost any more than the crap that we get.It’s just that the people producing it are too lazy or too unimaginative or too hierarchical or too something.And they continually downgrade the intelligence of the people who are listening to their production.People learn to settle for less.

Gounis:Yeah exactly.

Smith:It’s just awful.(pauses)Let me just push you to a new-unless you’ve got more…

Gounis:I just want to say this one more thing;that is the idea that the “religious” experience in 1973 wasn’t just an experience like maybe an automobile accident,that though it may be traumatic,it is something that you can forget about once your leg or whatever heals.

Now I’ll jump from 1976 having gotten into radio and publishing a bit to my situation now(July 1981,ed.).Laid off from my day job,off for the summer from the Junior College,no paychecks.

Not to go off on another tangent but to make a point…I have this good friend who is a very religious person who has been through a lot.His mother committed suicide,he ran through the drug thing,he has been in prison.But he is a very positive person;he’s attending Antioch College right now.He has been an inspiration to me.

He told me about a class that he was in explaining medieval poetry.At some point during a lecture,the instructor nonchalantly said,”…of course at that time people believed in God”.My friend spoke up,just blurted out,”Some people still do”.(laughs) That’s the type of person my friend is.He has traveled the world over.And he told me that sometimes he will be out on the road and not know if he is going to eat or not for lack of money.But he told me,”I just put myself in God’s hands”.And I thought,”Man that’s a very child like kind of attitude to have about deity”;yet it is the only way to connect with what Ram Dass talked about.It’s more than a biblical concept.If you can’t connect with a real entity and a real force,then just forget it.

This same friend had recently written some very explicit and provocative poetry about his personal beliefs.I was reading it and I said to him,”You know you have to take responsibility for this”.Then we talked about the responsibility of the artist.You either truly believe in what you do or then it’s false.

Smith: Putting yourself in God’s hands doesn’t mean that you don’t take responsibility.You don’t lie down and say,”Do it for me”.

Gounis: Not at all.

Smith:Because then it won’t happen.To the extent that it is child like in its innocence,not child like in a helpless way.

Gounis:That’s right and…

Smith:I mean…and it’s the same thing with taking responsibility for anything that you do.These are facets of the same thing.

Gounis:Yes.There is always that duality that you have to recognize.I have control over my life,on the other hand there is a greater power.I have a narrow tunnel vision of possibilities.If I think that I have all the answers;it’s just me doing that ego thing.It’s all jive,bullshit illusions and I’m not going to be trapped in that again.I have outgrown that.And a lot of times I think on that kind of…

Smith:You honestly reflect on this a lot?On the relationship between what you do for work,what you do for your own fulfillment,who cares for you and how you care for yourself?I mean,these are major life kind of questions?

Gounis:That’s right.And if I’m say, cutting the grass like I was this morning,that’s the kinds of things that I’m thinking about.

Smith:Those relationships?

Gounis:Yeah.And I’ll tell you another thing that I think about.My children are an incredible inspiration and stimulus for me.My oldest daughter will be twelve in September and she might just as well be going on fourteen.She is running through a whole lot of adolescent attitude and tantrums and so forth.I can remember my older brother going through these stages when we were kids or I would be more concerned.Then I have a middle daughter who is going into the second grade,she’ll be eight. And then a little boy who will be six in August.

I don’t want to sound like I have an axe to grind,but I’ve had to work with a lot of people that are close minded,that are racists,that are dead end in their attitudes.And if you are not that type of person yourself and you have to work with those kinds of people day in and day out,you see them slowly decay.They don’t read a book.They don’t relax their parameters of belief;but then I come home and see my children-it’s the difference between night and day.

Smith:That’s right.

Gounis:If I didn’t have those kids with that kind of input,I’d be missing just a large input of positive energy in my life.

Smith:How would you,you know,right now- a lot has happened in the last two months-obviously,even with that;how would you describe yourself to another person?Imagine a situation where you know pretty well…just put yourself in as two”Philips” for a minute and somebody is going to move in next door to you.Some guy comes over the fence and says,”Who is this guy,Gounis? What’s he like? What kind of person is he?I am going to have to live next door and I want to go over and meet him,but can you give me any clues? What kind of guy is he?

Gounis:Okay.As far as putting it in that context.I would say that for the most part that I have a tolerance but not an enthusiasm for traditional middle class values.I keep my own yard nice,but it is not perfectly trimmed.I want my kids to go to a good school.That’s important to me.I want them to have opportunities.Those are mostly the middle class values that I adhere to.I believe in keeping your property up.It is ridiculous to invest in property and not keep it up.And I believe in simple things like a good school for your children and a good home environment.

Racism makes for a toxic environment.At this lounge that I’m working at now,I see a lot of racism.I see it as a poison,a real poison.It’s almost a poison that can make men physically ill.I have seen grown men cry because of it.I can remember an incident when I was sixteen-a black man kept out of a meeting where I worked.

Smith:Just…

Gounis:It was just racism.And I heard of it all the time in those blue collar jobs.

Smith:Is it mostly white people at the lounge where you work?

Gounis:Yes.Predominantly white.In fact the owner,the guy that I work for has told me outright that he discourages black business because he so close to a black neighborhood.I know that he doesn’t want it to become a predominantly black bar.On the radio I was able to play mainly blues.I have worked a lot with black artists.Racism is a sickness.It’s repugnant.I wonder where it comes from.

Smith:Fear.

Gounis:Yeah, that’s part of it but…I’m getting off of the subject-but in regards to values…

Smith:Yeah,what else would you tip this neighbor off to?

Gounis:Another kind of value thing is with drugs.My daughter is at that age where it is in the schools and she knows that I have indulged,so now I have totally sworn off.In fact it is a thing that my friends kid me about.If we are at a party or something and they pass me a joint I decline.So they kid me about it.

Smith: Do they have kids?

Gounis:Yeah.In fact we have had discussions about that.I tell them that in the area of drugs that you can do what you want,but I’m not doing it.My daughter is at an impressionable age.When she looks at me and asks me;I want to be able to truthfully say,”No,I don’t use drugs”.So I’m not doing them.That’s where that stands.

Smith:Yeah.

Gounis:So, I have those kind of values.

Smith:I understand that.

Gounis:Yeah.

Smith:I’m even having a hard time drinking beer these days.My kids come in and-

Gounis:It’s funny that I have never thought about alcohol that way,because I think that they associate that from commercials and so forth with a working man.(laughs)But drugs are associated with what my daughter calls “burn outs”.A Charles Manson type of person.A kid that gets low grades and is in trouble a lot.I don’t want anything to do with that.I really feel that a joint at a party is pretty harmless to me but…

Smith:At her age…

Gounis:Yeah,there’s a big difference.I don’t want her at her age to have anything to do with drugs.

Smith:Can you look back fifteen years to say age eighteen and say that that’s the way that you have always been? If the answer is yes,then I have one set of questions.If the answer is no,then I have another set.I am just interested in whether that is the current you.

Gounis:Yeah,okay.My interest in art,poetry and so forth goes back as far as I can remember,which is my mother reading Mark Twain to me.He came from around here-all that background,you know.Then Robert Frost passing the woods on a snowy night-all that stuff in grade school.And it’s a thing that gives me energy,that I want to impart on my kids and I think that I’ve always had it.I’ve always had it.

When I was working a lot of those blue collar jobs,working ten or eleven hours and coming home exhausted-no,I didn’t sit down and write poetry.I could maybe go months without writing anything,but if I heard say Norman Mailer’s name mentioned, I was interested.

Smith:Sure.

Gounis:It’s always been in me.The opinions about racism and commercialism and so forth- I might sound self-righteous,but I have seen the culture get more corrupt and lean that way.I lean in the opposite direction.And I resist more and more,going along with the crowd and so forth.And again with my children,I don’t want them to grow up in a world-that hustling world of,”Take a pill,instead of working it through,take a pill for what troubles you”.I can see that there is going to be a lot of struggle to not have that kind of world but…

Smith:Right.

Gounis:Yes,my values have become more entrenched.But see if you like blues music and you are seventeen years old,well where do you go to hear it?-black bars.And how can you be racist in that environment?So those views have been with me a long time.

I can remember the time in 1967 when my brother went into the Marines.I was already to go too;and it was only in the ensuing year that I listened to what Dr. Benjamin Spock and other peace advocates were saying.And I became influenced by it just like I was later influenced by Ram Dass.So I am a part of all that and I was influenced by all that in a lot of ways.On one hand I can identify with millions of people in their early thirties;and on the other hand I feel like I have had an experience separate from those with an academic background.I never stormed a university in the sixties although I might have sympathized with those people at that time.

Smith:I did.

Gounis:Yeah,see,but instead I was earning a paycheck because I felt that I had to.So I had the objectivity on it.I can remember talk of SDS (Students For a Democratic Society) infiltrating the Teamsters organization and I laughed.Because I knew, I worked with those guys.

Smith:It will never happen.

Gounis:It will never happen.I remember that.It was a joke to me.So I had that type of objectivity that when I picked up Rolling Stone magazine in 1968 and read about the activity at the Democratic Convention,I thought,you people are kidding yourselves.I could see the futility.I mean it’s great if your dad is bankrolling you,you can do a sit-in at the university.I guess that I would have been there too,but in reality I had to put food on the table and provide clothing and housing.And also educate myself and then make a contribution.

Smith:Let me put a construction on all that and see if it makes any sense.I hear what you are saying that in effect,the person that you were when you were seventeen has gotten stronger.There have been some changes,you know,but you can trace your present values as enduring and they have been with you.And out of the past came a commitment not just to work,but to be involved with radio,be involved with poetry and writing explicitly and try to make some time,no matter how hard it  was,to be thinking about these things even if you didn’t have much time.And always to remind yourself of their importance.

Gounis:Yes.

Smith:And now you have a situation where you are saying,”Who is Philip Gounis? How am I now(1981) going to make the best use of this present situation?What doesn’t look like an opportunity,make into an opportunity.

Gounis:Yes.

Smith:It’s similar to what happened to you in 1973;you could have given up.

Gounis:That’s right.That’s important that I haven’t changed in that way.

Three things that I want to rattle off real quickly before I forget.You see, I was looking for this extra time that I have now,but I wasn’t looking to be without a paycheck.I didn’t imagine that,okay?

Smith:Yeah,who would want to be without a paycheck?

Gounis:Yeah,two other things.I am thinking about values changing and so forth.In the last fifteen years I would say that my attitude toward women in general has evolved a lot.I feel that’s a reflection of the culture changing.

Smith:It’s changing for a lot of people.Not enough yet.How about Sandra Day O’ Conner being nominated for the Supreme Court? What did that do for you? Even if she is a conservative,I was excited.

Gounis:See,I don’t want to like Ronald Reagan,yet when he does something like that I think,”Not bad Ronnie”!(laughs)This is the guy that dropped the tear gas on the kids protesting in Berkley and I don’t want to like this character at all,but…

Smith:He just did something that no other president ever did.Every president in the last twenty years,every guy that has run for the presidency has promised to do that and now one of them has and yesterday people were saying that he would never do it,but he did it.It’s the power of action.That’s it.I happen to be a progressive Republican and I am in big trouble in my own party right now because of Reagan and all.I ‘m not in good standing.That’s alright it all passes,you know.I don’t want to like him either but I have to make sense of what he does.

Anyways,listen here’s what I want to do. I want you to really zero in on the last year.What I want to do is I want to see if I can get you to call up some learning,you know,to remember some learning.I want to get at some of the more mundane things in life because they’re important too.You talked about major life changes and I need that,but I also want to see what else there is.Okay?

Gounis:Okay.

Smith:If you can think,and just go back to last June,a year ago June.Can you think of any major events that occurred in your life,of events of any kind,that triggered a slightly different way of thinking about yourself or about the world?Can you think of any events that have done that?

Gounis:Okay.this is stretching the time from a year to about fifteen months.But in March 1980 after we bought this house,I figured that -I remember we bought it at thirteen percent interest and that seemed high then…

Smith:It was high then.

Gounis:And if you can get thirteen percent now-good luck.So,we bought the house and I had been doing the radio program for four years and I felt that,well,I wasn’t making money for it.It wasn’t a salaried position.I loved doing it,but I felt that had to devote more time to either being with my family or making money,because of the present economic climate.

Smith:And you had this thing on your mind called ‘mortgage’.

Gounis:Yeah.That was in March 1980,so I dropped the radio show.Also I started doing less with some of the small presses in town.Because I thought unless there is some dollars and cents involved- I continued to write,see I don’t shut that off even if it just piles up on my desk.That doesn’t shut off.

Smith:Okay.

Gounis:I felt that I should either spend that time with my kids or making money.I hated to be constrained like that,but I felt that the economic climate was such.My kids were getting to that age where they needed more time with me and I needed more money too.

Smith:So the event which changed you and which changed the rules for you,was acquiring the house.It put additional financial responsibilities on you.And were there other things?There doesn’t have to be,but were there other things?

Gounis:Well, I would say buying the house.And with the constant economic doom and gloom in the newspapers everyday;things didn’t look like they were going to get any better very soon.With three children,you get serious about the future.About five years down the road.Ten years.Driving down the road you might start to weigh the economic cost of doing even that.In your mind you start to split hairs.What can you afford to do with your time if it has only an aesthetic reward?

Smith:I understand that.

Gounis: See,in a way it was contrary to my nature to think like that.I’m an impractical,idealistic romantic.But the mortgage payment is real.The economic index is real.I don’t know how biased it is one way or another,but it seems real (pauses) and the unemployment line. I would just say the whole economic climate affected me.

Smith:Okay.Let me use some different words.Scrub ‘events’ and that was an event.Now think in terms of last year or fifteen months.I’m not religious about time,but I want it to be sort of recent.Can you think of any task or challenges or situations that you faced?I think of an event as something that you create.But a task or a situation might not be of your own creation.Something that confronts you and you have to learn a new skill or learn how to do something or learn something.Gain knowledge or learn a new attitude in order to deal with it.Can you think of a situation like that?

Gounis:Yes.I felt a lot like the tutoring experience at Florissant Valley Community College has been just like that.I can get a challenge there.

Smith:How so?

Gounis:Without much college background I have people coming to me needing remedial training which I can usually handle;and yet every once in awhile I get thrown a curve.Then I go right to the reference book with them.It might be grammar or even poetry interpretation.

Smith:Sure.

Gounis:And I can think of another entirely different situation.I have a good friend who was teaching in the Missouri Arts in The Schools Program.When he went to my daughter’s school he invited me over.It was the same week that the school’s faculty had invited me there to talk to the students about my experience in radio.I really loved that.I talked to several classes and when my friend talked to some other classes about poetry I was able to sit in on those.So I was able to observe an academic approach to teaching the structure of poetry.

Smith:That knowledge.

Gounis:Yes.that knowledge and that approach,a kind of nuts and bolts approach to building a structure with art,with a creation that doesn’t just fly out of your head.It starts with an idea.What are going to write about? What are we going to write about in school? Let’s write about it.It was a kind of approach which I didn’t have before.I knew that I could write,but I didn’t really know how to teach another person to do it.

Smith:You just go in there and use your wits.When you are tutoring somebody and you are taking what they show you and working with them.You give it back to them.

Gounis:Yes,that’s what happens.

Smith:Think of the last year in terms of print media.Can you think of a situation where you said,”I need to learn more about it and as a result I’m going to research more about it”?

Gounis:Yes,Okay.For me, some important writing in the last year has been that of Carl Jung on synchronicity.

Smith:Okay,why?

Gounis:I had a very striking experience that I was curious about;and a friend pointed me towards the writings of Carl Jung for insight.

Smith:Can I ask you what that experience was? I’m really interested in what motivates people.

Gounis:To explain it I want to reference a movie.Did you see Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories”?

Smith:No I didn’t.

Gounis:There is a scene towards the very end of the film where the main character experiences  a sensation of time suspended and feeling all powerful and invincible in that moment. I had a similar experience.Without benefit of any chemical or substance,just an ordinary afternoon at my home with my kids-I had a similar experience.Somewhat fleeting but it left a profound enough of an impression that I wanted to read what Jung had to say about such things.

Smith:Have you learned anything in the last year or sought to learn anything from either a medical person,a lawyer, a therapist,a CPA or any kind of specialist?

Gounis:Well,about fifteen months ago I was involved in a law suit and I had an ongoing rapport with my lawyer.And I learned some kinds of legal technicalities there about things involved-what’s allowed.Also the attorney that did my income taxes this year told me what exemptions were allowed.

Smith:What you could and couldn’t deduct?

Gounis:Yeah,on my tax return,that was a learning experience.

Smith:Have you learned anything from documentaries or courses on television or radio or theater?Have you seen something that spurred you to want to learn more about that subject?

Gounis:There was a program that dealt with the concept of time on public television,with Dudley Moore.I would say that there were several programs on public television this past year that I felt were enlightening or educational.I remember an interview that Dick Cavett did with Stanley Elkin the novelist living in Saint Louis,that I enjoyed.Also another interview that Cavett did with Allen Ginsberg.

Smith: Is there a subject that you have deliberately  sought to learn more about by seeking out certain individuals that you felt that you could learn from?

Gounis:It seems to me that what happens is that I acquire and assimilate facts and almost instantaneously absorb them.I almost forget the act of acquisition and the source.I guess that I retain them but then almost instantly assimilate them into some kind of action or into my writing.

Like right now I’m not that familiar with the music of Bob Marley,but I’ve been hearing so much about him lately.People talking to me about him and how significant he is.So I’m going to find out more about him and his music and try to introduce it to “my audience” at the deejay gig that I do.

Smith: And where will that take you?

Gounis:I don’t know where it will take me yet.At first it will take me to the library to find some of his records.Then I’ll play them at the lounge.

Smith:So,the next thing that I’m going to ask you is what do you think that you know now that you didn’t know before? If I was observing your behavior with your children and with others,what would be different then say a year or two years ago?

Gounis:You see the changes from two years ago would be so subtle or tiny that it would be hard to document them.

Smith:When you were going about this business of learning more about your interaction with your children and other people;what did you learn from reading about Carl Jung and synchronicity?

Gounis: It all gave me a wider perspective on getting beyond my own ego.That’s been helpful in the writing lab working with students,being more tolerant,maybe moving beyond a student’s uncooperative attitude.

In my own writing,I would ask myself how important something was just because it happened to me.Is it really significant?Is it going to be significant to someone else? Or maybe I should be writing about something else.Basic questions.Is this going to give anybody any kind of positive objective look at reality?Or is it just poetic masturbation?

Smith:After reading Jung what did you think that you knew that you didn’t before taking the book out?

Gounis:Jung reinforced in me the idea that – in experiences of clairvoyance and synchronicity- people can glimpse several time frames at once instead of just one sequence after another.

Smith:The final thing is to think in terms of consequences.We have covered a lot in terms of major life changes and all sorts of learning.How have the people around you been affected by your learning,by the changes in you?

Gounis:Learning and thereby growing can create stress in your own social circles.It can if you have grown out of that circle.At one time maybe you had a very strong connection.But you’ve changed and they haven’t;it can create stress.

Smith: That can be a real inhibition to growing in your own right.

Gounis:Yes,but I wouldn’t let that happen.And in the positive area you get into new situations and encounter new people by exploring and developing your own creativity.

The photographs chronologically display many of the picaresque locales and characters described in Bukowski’s poems,short stories and novels.Also a scattering of relevant chapbook covers,broadsides and fliers that figured prominently in the writer’s career are reproduced.In some of the photos dating back to the 1920′s,we see the writer when he was a young boy with his parents growing up in Los Angeles.The seemingly idyllic scenarios shown belie the hellish real life that was later depicted in his writing.Sounes’ research also showcases an assortment of Charles Bukowski’s relatives and young classmates.

Both the photographs and accompanying narrative details of true life incidents are sometimes at odds with the fictitious renderings in Bukowski’s books.One striking example of this is a 1947 picture of Buk.The nattily attired mien of the youthful writer posing at his parents’ California well kept home is in sharp contrast to the popular myth of Bukowski as the itinerant drunk during this era.

Bukowski in Pictures does more than take the reader/viewer to the haunts and picaresque havens of the barroom bard.Howard Sounes has deft ability to blend reportage with exposition.Inserted among the pictures of Los Angeles apartments and houses are reproductions of related eviction notices,various correspondences of Bukowski’s friends and lovers,some death  certificates and other telling documentation.One of the most striking of these are the pages of Charles Bukowski’s FBI file,of which were not known of in the writer’s lifetime. Unfortunately neither were these files were available to Howard Sounes when he wrote his biography Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy life.

The large circle of people that interacted within Charles Bukowski’s personal and social realm are also chronicled here.There are several pictures,including wedding photos,of  Bukowski and his last wife Linda Lee .Actor Sean Penn appears, as does singer/songwriter Shel Silverstein. Photographs of many of Buk’s L.A. hangers- on,local acquaintances and some real life characters that appear in his fiction also make an appearance.

Photos of rare chap books and book designs from Black Sparrow and smaller publishers also are represented.Also featured are selections by various West Coast contemporaries such as Neeli Cherkovski and Jory Sherman that pertain to the literary scene that was the background for Bukowski’s writing.This material brings to the fore the actual real life identities of many of Buk’s fictionalized contemporaries.In tandem with Howard Sounes’ chronological narrative,these comprehensive pictures and reproductions do much to flesh out the visuals that set the scene for the essence of Charles Bukowski’s spirited poetry and prose.

The eponymous album has the same color and versatility that made The Band more than just another rock band. It contains the same kind of rough edged country soulfulness that came through so strongly from The Band-and more.That ‘more’ is supplied by veteran rock ‘n rollers Eric Clapton,Ronnie Wood and the late Doug Sahm.In addition, Danko’s former band mates,Garth Hudson,Levon Helm,Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel contributed on separate cuts.

Besides Danko, the now deceased Emmett ‘Ringolevio’ Grogan and Bobby ‘See You Later Alligator’ Charles share song writing credit on the collection.Grogan’s contribution is especially unique in that he was a lively participant in the San Francisco cultural explosion of the 1960′s and founder of the anarcho-give-it-away assemblage called The Diggers.

Multi-talented record producer Rob Fraboni is to be applauded for harnessing all the diverse brilliance present into one unified presentation. The finished product demonstrates the direction that truly progressive rock can take while still retaining the most vibrant elements of basic rock ‘n roll.

Bob Dylan’s on stage persona at once embodies and fulfills the disparate multidimensionality of a post-modern culture tripping head long through its self- created House of Mirrors. Concert reviewers seek to report and interpret each Dylan grimace, grin or vocalization as if to unlock some essential element of his relationship to his work and his audience. The resultant response being similar to that of witnessing a sleight of hand impresario, as in; “How in the hell did he do that?” You know that you feel a certain way; that you are having a strong emotional response to the songs and yet this is definitely not the love song (Lay Lady Lay?) or emblematic anthem (Blowin’ in the Wind?) that you came to hear. If a valid definition of genius is to be aware of a vast amount of data to the extent that one can assimilate and utilize that data, be it emotional, musical or more; then Dylan is possessed of genius.

It is as if the compressed on stage scenarios that punctuate Dylan’s cinematic gestalt, “Masked And Anonymous” are allowed to fully develop in his almost nightly concerts. That same flowering (should I say mushrooming?) of activity redefines the theatricality of rock concerts. No strobe lights or exploding flash pots needed. The singer’s artistic playfulness at once engages his audiences’ preconceptions while he simultaneously lobs a humongous aesthetic custard pie into their faces. And they keep coming back for more; all the time delighting in the bittersweet flings, drips and gobs of irony and contradiction that fulminate from the performance.

As the extraordinary renditions of his songs shift from night to night, so must the expectations of Dylan’s audiences. To hear the snarl of Positively Fourth Street alchemized into the plaintive longing of a dispossessed lover is to experience the same emotional impact of the most powerful dialogue spoken in the theater of the absurd. The inherent contradictions displayed in Dylan’s gestures and song stylings challenge logical traditional theatrical and aesthetic interpretation.

Bob Dylan’s songs are valued for the power and expression of their lyrics. Listeners don’t find themselves later humming or whistling to the tune of “Highway 61” as they go about their daily tasks. We’re not talking about “Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover” here. Yet as Dylan now presents these lyrics live in concert they are so obfuscated by vocal slur, change in inflection and inapplicable musical disarrangement that they are rendered nearly unrecognizable within the context of the originals. This kind of delivery challenges the audience’s sensibilities in the same way as the most disjointed, repetitious seemingly meaningless dialogue of Beckett or Genet.

That Dylan at this stage in his career would undertake to approach his material this way is not surprising. It is keeping with his self- professed role as “musical expeditionary” as well as his smirking depiction of himself as a “song and dance man”. This is the eclectic and innovative artist that early in his career embraced the work of Bertolt Brecht and later collaborated with playwright Sam Shepherd. Through the varied, transformative presentations of Dylan’s diverse songs in concert, the tuned-in audience participant is treated to a dynamic, constantly spinning pinwheel phantasm containing the full spectrum of identities, personalities and personae that have been projected upon the cultural icon, “Bob Dylan.” The Mariachi troubadour entreating for one more cup of coffee morphs into the Dadaist rock ‘n roll rogue who invites you to join him as he romps Highway 61,but then through the gift of legacy and transcendence becomes the ‘60’s folkie that warns of the desolation that the hard rain can bring. The off-to-the-side Oscar statuette that has been a part the artist’s stage set for the last decade is a brilliant exclamation point to his forty plus years of performance. He was awarded it for his song “Things Have Changed” which appeared in the film Wonder Boys; not for any acting role that he’s done. And yet what other entertainer has presented his audience with such a vast variety of characters and proclamations and enunciations, both abstruse and heartfelt, than Dylan has? Maybe the folks at the Academy got it wrong.

There’s a girl in New York City                             

-Graceland (Paul Simon)

It seemed eerily significant that in the same week that I first met Chavisa Woods, scenes of youthful violence and victimization filled the media outlets. YouTube videos of teenage girls in Florida bloodying one of their own was broadcast ad nauseum; over four hundred children of a polygamous sect in Texas were taken into protective custody; and Virginia Tech noted one year since its on campus massacre. A societal landscape of pervasive brutality and ubiquitous perdition. This also is the milieu of Woods’ short story collection, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind. Her stories are at once a true-life chronicle of growing up absurdly in rural America and a surrealistic survival book on how to transcend the same.

Readers may have trekked some of this toxic terrain before with writers like Dorothy Allison, but Chavisa Woods leads us through these narratives with a Doris Lessing-like metaphysical clarity.

It is the author’s understated, wise beyond her years psychological perceptions that are the binding emulsion of this collection. In response to an interviewer’s comment on this, Ms. Woods response was,” Don’t they say it’s the mileage not the years that matter?” Indeed.

It is a mark of the writer’s syntactical brilliance that she opens this book with a textbook precise description of the honeysuckle plant only to then adroitly immerse the reader in the paradoxical childhood realm of vulnerability and acute awareness. “Where I was growing up, violence was as common as a sneeze”, Ms. Woods stated to me matter- of- factly. Characteristically the children in “The Smell of Honey” have become acclimated to an atmosphere of violence to the point where this acclimation has become their device for survival. This is a reoccurring thread throughout the book.

The vivid characters and scenarios are depicted with such sagacious nuance, that the reader is drawn into a childlike vision of rich metaphor that belies the knife sharp actuality. It is both a trenchant literary memoir and a searing indictment of a pitiless society. “Sundown in the Land of Lincoln” tells of a novice African-American grade school student who realizes that “People were processing the information of him and trying to fit him into the category of human being, without compromising the integrity of their own status…” Later, his dilemma is only finally resolved with a magical jolt of cultural and chemical shamanism.

By the time the reader reaches only the third story, “Kicking”; they find themselves vicariously enveloped in the complex vortex of adolescent sexuality. In just four pages, the writer vibrantly brings alive all the fear, anticipation and wonder of youthful physical discovery. All of this in what is ostensibly a short description of everyday playground shenanigans. This alternating sensibility of empowerment and vulnerability is the vehicle that transports and thereby transforms those who partake in all of Chavisa Woods’ art. It is an artistic statement that brings to mind the observations of French philosopher Jacques Lacan and his extensive explorations of his concept of “the Other.” In other stories, the female protagonists respond to their exploitation with a violent, brutal act. Mutilation or dismemberment is not disallowed. At the same time there is always a transcendent panoramic truth, both ontological and emotional that fills the page.

“Never Enough” is a narrative from her book that has a section that Ms. Woods often delivers as a performance piece. In it, the narrator, a female proto-punk dyke Holden Caulfield type declares: “ Or maybe I don’t believe in GOD anymore, ’cause my God was always talking about how he died for me and I had to die and be reborn for him all the time, or else spend all my afterlife dying, and I only have the energy to die for one thing at a time right now, and right now I’m dying for love. Maybe I’ll die for love right now, and later I’ll die for God. Or maybe I already died a little for God. Anyway. Fuck it.”

It is in fact, the philosophical undercurrent of these stories that drives them and distinguishes them from the genre of transgressive literature. And it is not as if these stories necessarily unfold in an orthodox linear manner. It is more accurate to say that the brilliantly descriptive prose barrels the reader through a Hieronymus Bosch like tunnel of images and deep perceptions. One rich in societal and psychological revelations. These seemingly shuffled chapters of one novel suggest progression and development simultaneously with freeze frame cinematic scenes that stop time for both the characters and reader. Beyond the constraints of linearity, the author is free to impart to the reader incidents in scenarios that are unbounded by cause and effect. What then surfaces and are truly experienced by the reader are the most profound of emotional and at the same time political truths.

Chavisa Woods’ prose explodes the connection between patriarchal tyranny and fascism. It is within that spectacle of explosion that the contemporary American Zeitgeist becomes illuminated. Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind is as much an indictment of the ignorant and sadistic among us as it is of the collective atmosphere of indifference that nurtures the same. What level of indifference must exist in a society that celebrates ignorance and pain? Is this indifference the only natural human response to an unfeeling, modern super- sized technological environment? And to what degree are these factors the result of a system of Darwinian economics?

Only the best narrative writing can provoke as this collection does. This is an extraordinary book. Woods’ impeccable use of language involves the reader in a high level of intense vicarious physicality, while it provokes an equally intense emotional and intellectual response. This is well crafted art in the form of effective, dynamic literature.

The full,mighty body of the tiger is on the ground,yet it is not completely relaxed.A hint of tension in its posture indicates that it could spring into action at any time.The expression on its whiskered face is that distinctive and inscrutable feline mixture of curiosity and independence.And this despite the fact that the Zen master’s body weight appears to press on the beast.The annular form of the man strives to dominate the overall portraiture if only because it is slightly larger and higher in the complete structure.His determined but also somewhat cryptic facial expression and slightly hunched position offers its own ostensibly  simple yet actually  multidimensional bid for interpretation.He seems to look at the viewer with a calm but intent comprehension that proclaims he shares with his fellow creature a capability for fierceness and focused vigilance.This symbiosis is underscored by the picture’s grey shading and black semi-circular lines that suggest the composition of not two but one single entity.

On initial perusal this Japanese depiction brings to mind two well known Western archetypes.The first is the familiar biblical narrative of Daniel in the lion’s den.Like Daniel the spiritual power of the Zen master transcends and transforms the wild beast.The animal is not only compliant in contrasts to its characteristic ferociousness,but in Shi K’o's work of art his very being harmonizes with that of the master.Thus the inherent separateness of the two souls dissolves.

The second archtypical image recalled is that of the nineteenth century English poet William Blake’s poem The Tyger:

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears

Did He smile his work to see?

Did He who made the Lamb make thee?

The savage predator and the meditative holy man come together as manifestations of the same Source.Zen Buddhism sublimates humankind’s brutish nature into that of strong focused awareness.As the face of the Zen master looks out to the viewer he displays at once a keen consciousness of the physical dichotomy of the tiger and himself but at the same time is totally mindful of their transcendent sameness.In both figures their semi-prone postures belie a sharp mental acuity.What could be an oppressive dominance by the Zen master and a docile capitulation by the tiger renders itself instead as a synergistic union of power and intelligence of the highest order.

The somewhat incidental object of the nearby tassel or snake like figure adds to the paradoxical koan-like gestalt of the entire scene.

In jolting contrast, Alfred Leslie’s The Accident is semi-naturalistic and yet horrific in theme and composition.It is Leslie’s impression of an actual event.The event is the hit and run murder of poet and friend Frank O’Hara in the summer of 1966 at Fire Island, a beach community in New York state.

The painter’s portrayal takes on the scope of a modern apocalyptic myth.In the representation,four human figures are shown in various stages of pandemonium,terror and injury.On an ocean washed night of a full moon,a wide dull crimson colored,late model American automobile appears to roar toward the viewer.Its slightly off center angle of approach conveys high velocity and impending doom.The car’s front grill and hood impact with the figure of a male pedestrian.He is illuminated both by the light of the vehicle’s headlights and the full moon.The man faces toward the incoming machine and his body is tossed feet high in front and above the careening weapon of death.He is dressed in a white shirt and dark slacks,but barefoot.His one shoe is seen thrown above’s the car’s roof.Upside down the victim seems to be making a pathetic and pointless attempt to protect himself and prevent the projectile’s crushing momentum.One pitiful hand grips his head in battered agony.No driver is visible behind the darkened windshield and no blood is seen.

The other three human figures are nude females in exaggerated postures of hysteria and response to the cataclysm.Two are slightly off center in the foreground.The third is back and to the left of the automobile.Rather than suggesting the Reubensque images of ladies at leisure at the seashore,their emaciated bodies of grey,shadowed flesh conjure up images of Dachau and Auschwitz.The woman near the side of the car vainly pushes against it as it speeds by her.The figure farthest to the left with an anguished,fearful open mouthed expression flails her arms in a gesture of pain and hopeless preventiveness.She is in a semi-crouch looking at the collision with dread and disbelief.The third nude female crouches almost in the two point position of a track runner.She stares off away from the murderous,oncoming vehicle although she appears to be in is intended path.Her left arm extends outward in the direction of her intense gaze.There is some fear in her eyes but not the expression of panicked affliction displayed by her companion.The entire spectacle is surrounded by ominous,dark shadings of bluish fog and mist.The pervasive effect is one of decimated,agonized physicality.

Alfred Leslie paints for a contemporary audience.He is also a film maker.He is well aware of the modern audience’s satiation with shocking imagery.In The Accident he freeze frames a single traumatic event and skillfully enhances it context of modern myth and confrontational inquiry.Do the three nude women represent the poet’s muse?Is this the way that the accident in fact occurred?

The bright full moon,inspiration for poetry and song is instead now an indifferent witness to the catastrophe taking place before it.the single hapless nude to the left center of the picture is helpless in her attempt to prevent the carnage.Te creature to the far left’s outstretched left arm is no defense against the speeding homicidal machine.The remaining nude figure squats and extends her hand in an empty gesture of self-protection.

The monstrous scene is one of technology gone berserk.It is beyond being simply misguided.It is without a helmsman.Its only direction is towards destruction and death.Even Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a putrid parody of humanity.Alfred Leslie depicts a horrendous instrument of mechanization with no connection whatsoever to humanity except to annihilate it.

The vehicle is the brownish red color of a blood stain.The lettering on the license plate is orangish red.”New York 66″ can barely be discerned as a foreboding clue.In 1966,the year of Richard Speck’s heinous, murderous crime;the year of the Austin,Texas university sniper and the year of the disastrous escalation of American combat in Southeast Asia.and now we see America’s most conspicuous object of consumer consumption on a rampage of butchery.Madison Avenue entreats,”See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet”,unless of course in some,sick bizarre Stephen King twist of unfortunate circumstance,the auto seizes the pedestrian and turns him into road kill.”Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat”,except if corporate America’s most ostentatious artifact which is”unsafe at any speed”,revolts and the slave transforms the master into a bloody hood ornament.The Accident is a microcosm of Guernica.It is a segment of a modernistic,demented Hieronymus Bosch landscape with futuristic portents.

Shi K’o's depiction of the Zen Master and the Tiger relates to Alfred Leslie’s The Accident in profound and reflexive layers of interpretation.Although they are centuries apart in their conception and millenniums apart in their technical representations,they are linked thematically.Both deal with survival and its analog spiritual salvation.

The human figure in the Shi K’o portrayal is at peace.This peacefulness allows him to look at the viewer with directness and to embrace a creature that has the potential to devour him.The black and white tone lack the shrillness of Leslie’s painting but not the immediacy.The Zen master is in the center of the picture and his mental perspective is centered also.He is touching the earth and embracing life.

In nightmarish contrast,Leslie’s prime figure is literally upended and tossed off the earth as if a macabre rag doll.An invention of humankind’s linear thought system has singled out its creator for obliteration by a most savage method.The embodiment of civilization’s salvation,the poet,is impaled by the outgrowth of the species’ inability to harmonize with its environment.The living,inspirational component’s of man’s spiritual essence are horrifically dispersed in fear and agitation.

Antithetically the Shi K’o portraiture demonstrates a forceful antidote to Western mankind’s limited and ultimately damning one dimensional non-grasp of the realities of human existence.The Zen Master and the Tiger illustrate with exactitude the sometimes abstruse concept of authentic,complete mindfulness.the audience is allowed to breathe in an aesthetic that at once edifies and therefore empowers.In this way Alfred Leslie’s harrowing vision is not just survived but transformed into an ennobling aspiration.

The eager multitude got an adult dose of Patti Smith Thursday night, July 13,2000 at Mississippi Nights. She was resplendent in all her varied but related representations. Patti the strutting, bellowing, bellicose, wailing rock singer; Patti the intense, demonstrative, artful poet; Patti the incantatory punk priestess; Patti the chatty, affable earth mother; Patti the confrontational political provocateur they all presented themselves at various times throughout the over two hour concert.

Only an artist possessing her unique and creative oeuvre, could have given this kind of show. She drew from and acknowledged, sometimes directly, antecedents and influences from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Robert Mapplethrope.

Smith and her three piece band opened with the eerie “Waiting Underground” from her 1997 Peace and Noise c.d. She then primed the anticipatory throng with a invocative reading of “Spell”, which is Allen Ginsberg’s Footnote to Howl. It was concluded with Patti joining her guitarists and drummer with a bleating, honking clarinet improv. Already from this point of the event, this powerful performer had solidified the bond with her audience.

Patti next went into a positively electrifying rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Wicked Messenger” (a la Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower”). The slightly flawed ending gave her the opportunity to extend her effusive rapport with the crowd. “I kinda messed that up … maybe I’ll have to come back to Saint Louis and do it right” – uproarious cheers from the patrons.

As the program progressed, Smith rocked, read and reeled through a comprehensive succession of her songs and poems. Her material spanned all the way back to “Horses” from her 1975 debut album of the same name. But the emphasis seemed to be on her latest release Gung Ho. Topics from that collection were accented by an accompanying light show. The visual projections at times splashed images of Ho Chi Minh and also scenes from civil rights clashes in the 1960′s. The backdrop for the stage was a huge American flag. During many of her numbers, the swirling psychedelic patterns reminiscent of decades past Trip Festivals lit on the performers and the background.

In addition to vocally romping through a replete assemblage of her most spirited work, Patti occasionally played acoustic or electric guitar also. Adding a vivid underling to her entrenchment in the role of primo garage rock girl.

Throughout the show Smith interjected banter with her audience; whether to introduce “Grateful” with a Jerry Garcia vision anecdote or to comment on the William Burroughs connection. “It’s a beautiful cemetery… here where William’s buried… you guys are lucky to have him here.” After holding up a copy of her Early Works 1970- 1979 to show a photo of Burroughs; she then read “Psalm 23 Revisited”, her tribute to the literary outlaw.

The concert seemed to come to a dynamic finale with a rousing “Because The Night”, with Patti belting out that ultimate paean to nocturnal rendezvous. But the stomping, shouting faithful throng brought her back on stage. The robust panoramic encore included not only The Ronettes’ classic “Be My Baby” (“Just for you Saint Louis”), but also a revamped “Babelogue/Rock ‘N Roll Nigger rant. At that point the Politico Patti took center stage. She exhorted the crowd with cries of, “You are being exploited! You are being exploited everyday! – by their television! by their credit cards! by their economy! … Go within … go to your spirit!”

As Lenny Kaye’s trademark, screaming guitar reverberated through the room Smith took up her own axe, thrashing at the strings and wailing. “People Have The Power” brought the spectacle to a crescendo with a repeated confrontational chants of “Gung ho! One more revolution!”

Sometime during this rock and roll harangue, Smith made the audience aware of voter registration rosters available at Mississippi Nights. “Sign up”, she entreated, “… even if you write in a name – vote!” It was a testament to the devotion of her fans and the integrity of Patti Smith’s transcendent art; that this consummate cultural bellwether could reconcile denouncements of flimflam consumerism with encouragement to participate in a plutocratic political system. The irony almost stole the show.