Withniall & I: a picaresque… of sorts, at 33 1/3 rpm

“We have failed to paint it black”

[ Scene 1 ]

A television screen is black in the flick of an eye.

So why does he do it?

Who’s he and what does he do?

Withnail, that Hamlet stuff he spouts to a wolf in a cage.

My companion for the evening sits perplexed. He is impatient with the apparent ambiguity of the question. Not looking at me he shifts uncomfortably on the couch in which he is slumped, crosses his legs and lights up another smoke.

What film?

Withnail & I, we only watched it like half an hour ago. Right at the end, you must remember.

Well now you mention it, sure. But what does he say?

You know, after that bloke from Stratford…. “What a piece of work is a man…” blah blah blah.

So? I would probably say the same thing in his circumstance.

Really? Funny that, coming from you. Having said that there is some comedy relief in a shit-faced Withnail, the failed actor, slushing out his best inebriated iambics to a completely indifferent animal. Expressionless, it simply stands there inert. As Withnail reaches the inevitable counterpoint, “man delights not me”, it simply walks off as if it’s had enough. Withnail certainly hasn’t, as he takes another slug of wine.

Yeah yeah I get it.

Anyway it’s probably the key sequence in the film. Withnail has just said farewell to his drinking mate. Marwood has a landed a part in a play and cleaned up his act. Unlike Withnail, struggling actor and all that, he has made a change. New haircut, shave, snappy duds. He’s completely unrecognisable. Looked much cooler with long hair though. Anyway they are both losers. Bit like us really.

What do you mean?

Well, first we get knocked back for Ziggy because it wasn’t what 33 1/3 were looking for.

So what, we’ve both had rejections before. Secondly…?

We started planning to do something next but never got around to it.

What was it?

I don’t remember.

[ Scene 2 ]

33 1/3 weren’t interested in a Ziggy by Darren Tofts and Niall Lucy. But they were interested in Low, though not from us. Hugo Wilcken had previously published a tidy little book on it in 2005.

Pity about Low.

Clearly you’ve got to get in quicker than anyone else. Everyone wants to write for them.

The blurb describes it as a “kaleidoscope in which Bowie’s obsessions and traits explode into fragments and reform in a new pattern.”

Shouldn’t it be re-form? Sounds like it’s just got out of jail. Anyway I get the picture, it’s already been written about.

Ok just think of how much has been written on Elvis’ first album, London Calling, or Radio Ethiopia? You gonna tell me that we couldn’t scribble something new on any of those albums, something that people would actually want to read?

Well when you put it that way, sure. But we can’t predict or imagine who is actually going to read it or how. I mean it’s not like we are going to write some page turner for the train.

And nor should we. Let’s write something that will make people put on the vinyl while turning the page. Given that we ain’t doing Ziggy, why not Iggy?

Which album?

Raw Power. You gave it to me, remember?

Get me a beer.

[ Scene 3 ]

It had been on my mind for a while. Having seen Iggy Pop recently at Festival Hall I had become fixated on him. The guy was 72 but he pranced and prowled around the stage like he was twenty-something. For that matter so did Chuck Berry when I saw him there years ago. He was 50. Old rockers never die, right. I’m sure the speed and whatever else Iggy was on helped. Remember the hyperactive, drug fucked interview he did with Molly Meldrum on Countdown in 1979? Not to mention his appalling miming to the song. He clearly was chairman of the bored.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMtH58M3HXA

On the way home from North Melbourne it hit me that Niall and I could still write a book together, an imaginary text in which we are a bit like Ron Blaskett and Gerry G. Junior. I ventriloquize and pull the strings. There’s no need to explain who Niall is. But I also got to thinking of Bowie’s alter ego, the Thin White Duke from Station to Station, an aristocrat fed up with America and desperate to get back to England. This scenario was controversially brought to life in a 1976 photograph of Bowie’s arrival at London’s Victoria Station as a self-proclaimed Aryan fascist, complete with Nazi salute.

I have no idea how that image crept in or why. Perhaps it was some vague hint of return, of coming back and trying it on, seeing what can be done with a bit of agro and if any anyone is going to do anything about it. Whatever the reason, it was certainly not one of his golden years.

[ Scene 4 ]

Then it happened.

Not long after I had started preliminary scribbling for this text Lisa and I were getting into the car to go shopping. I noticed something in the gutter. It was a photograph. But not just any photograph. It was a classic style professional portrait, not a casual family snap, probably for a passport, official image for identification or something formal like that. Finding it was the inspiration for this text, and all the more tantalising in a Reservoir street. It immediately struck me, why this photo and how did it get here? The guy pictured really was the man who fell to earth. It is very staged and poised. A young man in profile looks directly at the camera. He’s about 18 and there is no discernible emotion in his gaze (a young James Newell Osterberg Jr. was 7 at the time). It is stamped June 1954 on the back. But there was another stamp identifying its provenance: “FOTO VAARHORST”. It immediately struck me as Afrikaans, but it’s actually Dutch and is the name of a photographer in Haaksbergen dating back to 1929 and still operating today (Spoorstraat 10, 7481 in case you’re interested).

I was not in any way nostalgic for the image, nor for the person. Had no need to be. But what really kicked-started Proust’s involuntary memory was the image itself, taken for no apparent reason other than being a reproduction of the self, of “me”, whoever me was. At that moment I was transported back in time to those vernacular, instant photo-booths that were once everywhere, at train stations, the arcades of Melbourne, suburban shopping centres. They were like a mini TARDIS from Dr Who, a device of time. The most memorable for me was the one at Northland shopping centre in Preston during the early 70s. In fact the photo was found one suburb away. Many years before the culture of ubiquitous self-reproduction using mobile phones, the post-photographic vanitas of the reproducible self, I loved the delicious thought that, well at least for some, the last thing they were used for was to take an actual portrait. They were for capturing pics of brown eyes (and I don’t mean pupils), seeing how many of your mates could crowd into one like so many sardines in a tin, mug for the camera, sneer and otherwise just look pissed off and pouting. Though some images could be a little unnerving as well.

Grotesque ventriloquist dummies and clowns aside, they were a real hoot. And even in the age of the virtual they are still around, awaiting to be courted by the anonymous and famous alike. Which brings me back to the Thin White Duke.

The figure who immediately came to mind while thinking about the photo I found was Bowie. In particular the Bowie of the Station to Station period from 1975 to 1976. This was an unexpected connection which was kind of interesting and certainly had potential to be explored. The image is more of a faded, greyish tone than sharp black and white. The subject, like Bowie, is “flashing no color”. The come-hither gaze is highly stylised, certainly practised in “throwing darts in lover’s eyes”. He is certainly more robust than the virtually anorexic Bowie of the period. But then I saw something, or rather someone else in this visage whom I had recently seen at Festival Hall, one James Newell Osterberg Jr., also known as Iggy Pop. There is a similarly posed photo of a young Iggy in 1965 that bears an uncanny resemblance to this figure. Confident, impeccably groomed, he averts his gaze from the viewer, unlike the other sitter who seems keen to hold our attention. There’s even a melancholy there, a sadness. And unlike Ziggy, Iggy didn’t play guitar (insert canned laughter or pained groan here).

But while he never strummed the ax, he was in no doubt the singular, bad-ass peacock of The Stooges. Photos of him on the back cover of Raw Power make him look like a street thug and as well as a lunatic fleeing the asylum. In the liner notes to the 1996 remastered version of Raw Power on CD, Iggy boasts that they “could kill any band at the time and frankly can just kill any of the bands that built on this work since, just eat any of those poodles”. And since we are on the topic of poodles, the writer Ben Watson ingeniously suggests that the one which bites and chews in the Frank Zappa song “Dirty Love” represents “punished nature”, an evocative phrase that may well have been a Stooges song. The title of Watson’s book is no less pretentiously enticing, being Frank Zappa: the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. It is highly likely, too, that Zappa probably nicked “Dirty Love” from the Marquis de Sade, who in The 120 Days of Sodom wrote that if it is “the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.”

[ Scene 5 ]

Fit the first… after Lewis Carroll

Roughly around the time I started writing this text I had been re-reading Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark. Not quite sure sure why. I had been scouring Ralph Steadman’s art work and it somehow reminded me of it. He had also designed the typography and Gonzo style for the promotional images of Withnail & I. They were grungy and evocative, with a gothic edge to them that counterpointed the unnerving feel of Carroll’s story.

The snark is a grotesquely perverse hybrid, part human, part fantastical beast. And the rest, well, just fucked-up mayhem. And although it may have been a Boojum anyway (whatever that means), there is no clear image of what it actually looks like. In Martin Gardner’s Annotated Snark we only see a vague, anthropomorphic-like thing emerging out of rocks and shrubbery in the last of Henry Holiday’s images that accompany the text. What could be a claw or a beak (interpreted as such by annotators of the text) is dragging the terrified Baker from the story into melancholy darkness.

Looking at this image I can’t stop thinking of the opening lyrics from “Raw Power”, “Dance to the beat of the living dead”. Not sure why those words came to mind, but it might have something to do with the suggestiveness of Carroll’s subtitle for the book, “An Agony, in Eight Fits”, foreshadowing imminent terror to come. Gardner’s explanation of Carroll’s use of the word “fit” suggests that it combines the notion of physical convulsion with a nineteenth century term for a canto. And on the subject of a fit, there is more than one photograph of Iggy Pop that looks as if he is having one, most notably in Mick Rock’s iconic image of 1972.

I always loved that image of Iggy bent over backwards, pushing the body to gestural extremes of contortion. It was part of the perverse ballet of his on-stage persona as both idiot and psychotic. Niall and I had spoken of this, something along these lines:

Well, I always thought he made Harry Houdini look like a Muppet.

You telling me you know the Muppets?

Look I don’t know which one is which, but I know of them. Dylan used to watch them as a kid.

I’m sure you know Animal. Complete nutter, totally hyper. Lou Reed was another Muppet, the rock and roll Animal.

No shit. Anyway I’ve got things to do.

Not so fast we ain’t finished with this. Here’s one for you, speaking of fits. Imagine, in a parallel universe, that Iggy wrote the Cantos?

By Pound?

Yeah.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

No, hear me out on this. “And we rocked down to that muthafucking ship, set fire to the mast and got really wasted, then busted that keel to break shit up”. How cool is that?

[Silence]

[Scene 6] Black as an Ideal

The Rolling Stones’ 1966 “Paint it Black” is not the most cheerful number in their catalogue. Nor is “Satisfaction”, a song totemic of their Satanic Majesties and the mystique they confected of inventing the dark side of rock in English popular music in the shadow of Robert Johnson. They may not have had a hellhound on their trail (though Keith looked like he may have had one or two in his time), but as the bad boys in the class they were the nemesis of the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, the Nice, Pretty Things… you get the picture. And the epigram to this text is not, in fact, taken from the Stones. It’s an obscure observation made by the picaresque character of Danny the Drug Dealer in Withnail and I. Withnail and Marwood have gone to his pad to score and Withnail can’t resist boasting that he can take anything Danny has to offer. Danny is more than happy to oblige. Then in his own drug-fucked wisdom, he proffers the sage epithet that the “greatest decade in the history of mankind is coming to an end and as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black”. Presuming Ed is an enigmatic, self-contained black guy who doesn’t say a word. He sits slumped in a chair, humming deeply and sonorously while spinning a wooden globe of the world on a stand tucked between his thighs. He too is stoned off his face.

It’s tantalising to fabulate that Ed, when not on the gear (or for that matter on it) was a reader of Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s essay “Black as an Ideal” is a kind of paean to the darkest colour in the spectrum, an album of which coincidentally features on Classical-Gas:

classical-gas.com

“Radical art”, Adorno asserts, “is the same as dark art: its background colour is black”. And further, thinking of a line by Baudelaire, he adds that one “has to be downright naive to think that art can restore to the world the fragrance it has lost”. Loss, like Presuming Ed’s admission of failure, is an absence. It is the abject emptiness of something that has been desired, sought after, fought for as a basic and inviolable necessity, a human right. It is the agon of segregation, vilification and racial violence, action and counter-action. And the fanciful thought that comes to mind is that Presuming Ed may have at some point muttered an apocryphal quote attributed to Nelson Mandela on the black struggle: “it always seems impossible until it’s done”. Or maybe not.

[ Scene 7 ] Which brings me to chess… a strategic digression

Raw Power is suggestive of the unadorned and the naked (well half naked in Iggy’s case, most of the time anyway). The stuff of the world brought down to basics, that which can’t be reduced any further, from quantum particles of matter to fire. It is the simple “whatness” of the thing itself, its quidditas after Aristotle. And there is nothing more elemental, well in the world of culture anyway, than chess.

As someone who has never played chess, nor has any idea how to do so, I am nonetheless in awe of its strategic complexity. It is a mental hustle between two opponents, the sole object of which is to reach an endgame, the event horizon at which someone will be defeated or will resign. As if to make the point, Boris Spassky said of playing against Bobby Fischer, the Grand Master of chess, that “it is not a question if you win or lose. It is a question if you survive”. Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play Endgame is structured around such a series of chess-like manoeuvres within the dialogue between the characters Hamm and Clov. “Me to play” are the first words spoken by Hamm. Among his last, before whatever oblivion he faces (“If you must hit me, hit me with the axe”) he mutters, “Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing”. Always a cheery chap was Sam.

In November 2011 something very strange took place in Fremantle, Western Australia (which is in no way a reflection of that wonderful town). It was a staged event as part of a symposium entitled “Writing in the Age of New Media”, curated by Niall Lucy and Robert Briggs (both editors of Ctrl-Z: new media philosophy journal).

The performance was called, after T.S. Eliot, “‘And we shall play a game of chess’” (a title pretentiously borrowed from The Waste Land). Conceived by myself and the artist Mark Amerika, it involved 40 moves, with text rather than chess pieces. This is how it starts:

Marcel Duchamp vs. Professor VJ

Game 1, Philadelphia, February

Starting with the arrival of Picabia, Berliet then films the chess sequence, which is from a scenario commissioned by Rolf de Maré for the Ballets Suédois. Duchamp and Professor VJ sit astride the low balustrade at the edge of the roof with the chessboard between them. An IBM technician is nearby.

Duche to play…

1. e4 c5 2. c3

D: Think of the artist as a medium

VJ: Think of the artist as a postproduction medium

D: As a remixologist or artist-medium tapping into their unconscious readiness potential, what do you suppose it means to render into vision the next VERSION of Creativity coming?

2….. d5 3. exd5 Qxd5 4. d4 Nf6 5. Nf3 Bg4 6. Be2 e6 7. h3 Bh5 8. O-O Nc6 9. Be3 cxd4 10. cxd4 Bb4

VJ: Vito Acconci once wrote that the contemporary artist did not need to specialize IN a medium, but should instead BECOME a medium, or what he refers to as an INSTRUMENT that acts on whatever ground is available at any given time

D: All of the decisions we make while performing involve what I call “The Creative Act”

11. a3 Ba5 12. Nc3 Qd6 13. Nb5 Qe7 14. Ne5! Bxe2 15. Qxe2 O-O 16. Rac1 Rac8 17. Bg5

VJ: I often feel like someone who does what he does because he does not know any better and continues doing what he does regardless of the outcome which then somehow strategically situates me as part of the avant-garde tradition

D: But then the question emerges “Whose avant-garde tradition?”

This goes on for six pages before VJ resigns. The mise en scène of the piece was deliberately and quite pretentiously sampled from a famous image of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray playing chess on the rooftop of the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris (from René Clair and Francis Picabia’s 1924 film Entr’acte). Though in reverse, it is clear who is whom.

[ Scene 8 ] Raw Power revisited (after Bob Dylan)

The cover of Raw Power is compelling. A half naked Iggy, staring into nothingness and clutching the mike, looks like he is about to collapse at any minute. And he probably did. It is in stark contrast to the smiling, lovable boy-next-door image on Lust for Life or the contorted gorgon of The Idiot. It would be repetitive to entertain any sustained discussion of the lyrics of the album as there’s plenty around in books and on the Web. Anyway, the title itself is already a dead give away. Iggy’s image is also highly suggestive of someone more than happy to flash a bit of flesh, not to mention a risque affectation for a young man who, in what seems like aeons ago, was brought into the world as James Newell Osterberg Jnr. In fact he is even more revealing on the cover of a 1977 bootleg with David Bowie entitled “Iggy and Ziggy”. The cover of the album I own is exactly the same as this image. While doing a search for it on the web I was stunned that virtually every instance of it that I found had blacked out Iggy’s credentials. I had to double check that it was 2019. Bowie’s handcuffs remain untouched. For the prudish redactors it would seem that bondage is less of an evil than images of genitalia.

Some of the titles on Raw Power are worthy of a nod, just to set the tone: “Search and Destroy”, “I’m a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm”, “Gimme Danger”, “Your pretty face is going to hell”. Cheery stuff. But that said the great Lester Bangs, as with so many other things, hit the nail very hard on Iggy’s head when he asked “What kind of person tries… to make it in big-time rock’n’ roll with an album called The Idiot.” In his uncannily titled book (especially under the current circumstances) Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Bangs uses words like “carnage”, “apocalypse” and “dementia”, of Iggy leaving his audience “bleeding” (206). With epithets like these (and this is a very small sample) it’s perfectly fitting that the title of the chapter on Iggy, with a deferential nod to Frank Zappa, is “Blowtorch in Bondage”. His account of a Stooges concert in 1974 in Detroit is revealing of the visceral attack and whatever havoc Iggy could unleash in live performance:

A far more powerful documentation of the Iggy Holocaust at its most nihilistically out of control… is the last concert the Stooges ever played, at the Michigan Place in Detroit in January of 1974… The audience, which consisted largely of bikers, was unusually hostile and Iggy, as usual, fed on that hostility… So the Stooges played a forty-five-minute version of “Louie, Louie”, including new lyrics improvised by the Pop on the spot which consisted of ‘You can suck my ass/ You biker faggot sissies,’ etc.

Greil Marcus writes in a very particular way about music. His style and approach is studious, meticulously detailed. He refers only a couple of times to The Stooges in Lipstick Traces, in one instance as “cult prophets” of the late 1960s (a book on punk that fittingly features a deliciously maniacal Johnny Rotten on the cover). Lester clearly writes another way. And it is equally delicious to note that Lester’s name is also, in fact, a short sentence (like “Ruth is Sleeping”). Zappa, as an astute connoisseur of language, would have no doubt been well aware of this conceit and may have even pondered it as a song for Hot Rats. Then slumped on a sofa, paring his fingernails like Flaubert’s God in creation, he would have smiled ironically and lit up another smoke.

[ Scene 9 ] Cigarettes and Coffee

Niall always started the day with smoke and caffeine. I always thought he would have been a perfect foil for Tom Waits in one of the vignettes from Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 short film Coffee and Cigarettes. He would though have had some stiff competition, as Waits’ puffing companion is none other than Iggy himself. Suffice to say it is notably a more chilled out and cool encounter than his chat with Molly Meldrum. During the course of the conversation Iggy is concerned that Tom suggests that he has always thought of Iggy as a “Taco Bell” kind of guy. Iggy finds this an unusual assertion. Then, both furtively eye off a pack of cigarettes left on the table at which they sit. They talk robustly of how good it feels to have given them up. But neither can keep their eyes off the slightly crumpled object. It’s only seconds before before Tom grabs one and lights up. He then invites Iggy to do the same. Ever the student of difference, Niall would have liked the idea of substitution, an alternative scenario of himself in conversation with Iggy about music. I would love to have been a fly on the wall to hear that. It might have gone something like this:

There’s one thing I could never reconcile with you.

What’s that?

How does Lust for Life fit with your other albums?

What do you mean man, I mean, it’s one of my records right?

I’m specifically thinking of the cover.

What about it?

Well you look so… happy, carefree, clean-cut, like some stereotyped middle-American boy next door. I can smell the apple pie cooling on the open window sill. And you look like you would step over a snail.

Yeah but Lust for Life came out the same year as The Idiot.

Sure but on Lust for Life you have lyrics like “I ride through the city’s backsides, I see the stars come out of the sky, yeah the bright and hollow sky, you know it looks so good tonight”. On The Idiot you’ve got “Nightclubbing we’re nightclubbing, We walk like a ghost”, and “Though I try to die, You put me back on the line, Oh damn it to hell, Back on the line — hell”.

You’re forgetting that “lust” is the first word in the title of this supposedly wholesome album you are hustling for. Then there’s “Some Weird Sin” and “Neighborhood Threat”.

You look so threatening on the cover. I can barely look at you. Anyway I think we need to move on.

Well you know I interviewed Johnny Depp once right?

You’re kidding me?

Sure. For Andy Warhol’s Interview and everything. He used to be a telemarketer trying to sell pens. Can you believe that? He also told me this great story about how Allen Ginsberg once flirted with him. He never flirted with me though, which was kind of a bummer.

You would have liked that?

Sure, who wouldn’t?

I’m not so fussed. If it had been Derrida, though, that might have been different.

Who’s this Derrida guy? Some kinda rock buddy of yours?

I’ll tell you another time.

[ Scene 10 ] Lust for life

Didn’t you nick some stuff from William Burroughs once?

Sure. He knew about it.

What was the song?

“Lust for life”.

What a surprise. Which Burroughs book was it?

Nova Machine.

And the text?

“Here comes Johnny Yen again, with the liquor and drugs, and the flesh machine”.

First line of the song. I suppose you have to keep the Godfather of punk on side, right?

Sure, he influenced everyone man. You gotta pay your dues. Bowie was a huge Burroughs fan. Used to hang out with him New York, had some great pics taken with him. Steely Dan were named after that milk squirting dildo in Naked Lunch, the Velvets had “Lonesome Cowboy Bill”, even Dylan was turned on by him and he also fucked around with the cut-ups and shit. Can you believe that? Mr folksy troubadour himself!

Anyway you gonna smoke that last cigarette?

Let’s split it. Hey you wanna play a little handball with me sometime? Maybe we can drop some acid!

Don’t call me, I’ll call you.

A final word on chickens. I always thought that the frontispiece image of this text was by Ralph Steadman. I knew though that Steadman had produced a number of images of specific scenes from the film for its promotion, which were suitably raffish and scratchy. But there was no trademark, splashed red paint signature. I contacted his agent and asked about it. They confirmed that the image was not one of his. They pointed me to an artist in the UK. They also had not made it, but wished they had. They put me in touch with yet another artist. Another dead-end. Whether by Steadman or not, it was too good not to use. The only thing I had to do was remove the text. As much as I wanted a clean image, this was a tough thing to do, as it is for me the funniest thing spoken in the film. Withnail and Marwood are starving, wandering in the countryside, soaking wet. They come upon a farmer tilling his field and ask him if he could sell them some food. He later presents them with a live chicken. Neither has any idea how to dispatch it. As they walk away Withnail, completely bewildered, asks “how can we make it die?” Marwood says bluntly that “you have to throttle them”. Withnail’s response was used as the quote on the poster to promote the film, the image that precedes this text. They are possibly the best words spoken in the film: “I think you should strangle it instantly, in case it tries to make friends with us”.

I can just hear Niall saying that.