TamTam Books News

2006-12-16T16:07:00.000-08:00

There are only two great NEW albums released this year.

Sparks' "Hello Young Lovers"

I've listened to this album at least four times a week since it's release. For sure it made me a more balanced person. I have a better understanding what 'life' is and where it's going. I listen to music all the time. And this album is number one. There is not one bad song on it. In fact I am amazed at its complex arrangements, beautiful melodies, its swing, its bounce, its gall to be the best album of the 21st Century.

Yes you are thinking, "TamTam Books has totally flipped." Gone to the other side of the dark planet. But as I mentioned on this blog and elsewhere, if you have this album and you don't like it - well, I don't like you. It is simple as that. This is a great album. "Hello Young Lovers" is about life, pleasure and pain. You don't like life, pleasure and pain?

Scott Walker's "The Drift"

Unlike Sparks' "Hello Young Lovers" this is an album about history and hell. In fact this album is hysterical (so is Sparks' "Hello Young Lovers") because it is so dark that humor is bound to come out. Scott Walker is a remarkable writer and probably one of the great poets who is writing music these days. Yes Dylan has his strong points on his latest album, but he's coasting. Walker, at the same age, is pushing the music and lyrics forward and upward... or is it downward. Either way it's going for the throat. This album doesn't take no prisoners. Either bow down to its greatness or get out of the room.

I think this is a beautiful album full of beautiful stuff. In fact when I saw David Lynch outside Tower Records, I bought him this album. I think he should listen to it -and since I don't know him, he may have thrown this CD outside his car window. I doubt he would do that. Nevertheless who ever picks up this album from the street will find wonders and desires that are intense. We live in a horror show now, and art has to be really strong.

The two albums here are strong and brave. Buy them and surrender to their greatness.

2006-12-08T09:15:00.000-08:00

It is interesting what is in Syd Barrett's estate at the time of his passing. For the most of the world he was a reclusive man. Here are some of items and artwork from his estate:

2006-12-08T09:10:00.000-08:00

Syd Barrett's paintings from his estate

2006-12-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

Syd Barrett's self-made funiture from his estate

2006-11-27T07:43:00.000-08:00

2006-11-20T07:30:00.000-08:00

"LUN*NA MENOH: 1986-2006"

Curated by Kristine McKenna

December 2nd is the opening
Exhibiton runs from December 2 to December 23, 2006

Track 16 Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition, Lun*na Menoh:
1986-2006. The exhibition will run from December 2 through December
23, 2006, with opening reception for Lun*na Menoh from 6 to 8 P.M.,
with a fashion show featuring the work of Lun*na Menoh to follow, as
well as a performance by her band, "Jean Paul Yamamoto".

This first full career survey of Los Angeles artist Lun*na Menoh will
feature multiple works from all her art-making practices––painting,
sculpture, performance art, and video. Anchoring the exhibition are a
dozen of Menoh's subversive one-of-a-kind sculptural garments. In the
Surrealist tradition, these wearable artworks are at turns witty,
diabolical, and unabashedly beautiful. "The Magical Story Teller
Dress," for instance, is a mechanized gown with a full skirt that
incorporates several picture frames; as the wearer weaves her tale,
paintings in the picture frames shift to illustrate the story. "Men's
Wardrobe" is a clothing rack of men's wear that's been stripped down
to nothing but the seams, and "Which Room Do You Want to Get Into?" is
a bright yellow jumper inset with fantasy boxes evocative of work by
Joseph Cornell. The show will also include several pieces from Menoh's
"Dirty Shirt Collar," project, which includes a line of clothing
fashioned entirely from dirty shirt collars, and a series of painted
portraits of her favorite dirty collars. The founder and sole member
of the band Jean Paul Yamamoto, Menoh recently premiered her work of
musical theater, "A Tribute to Yoko Ono," at LACE.

www.track16.com
(for address, directions and basic information)

http://www.track16.com/exhibitions/lun-na_menoh/index.html (to view
some of Lun*na's work)

Also the catalogue "LUN*NA MENOH: 1986-2006" will be at the exhibition as well!

2006-11-18T11:16:00.000-08:00

This is a great article by the fantastic Jon Savage on the incredible Joe Meek

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1942723,00.html

Meek by name, wild by nature

Jon Savage
Sunday November 12, 2006

Observer Music Monthly
On 12 August, 1966, the Tornados released their last ever record with Joe Meek. Beginning with the sound of waves and seagulls, 'Is That a Ship I Hear?' bore all its producer's hallmarks: the boot-stomping drums, the extraterrestrial keyboard sound, and fierce, fierce compression. Like its predecessor, 'Pop-Art Goes Mozart', it was constructed around a gimmick. Meek hoped that the title and the ocean effects would convince the DJs on the pirate stations - Radio Caroline, Radio London, Radio City et al - to put his new record on heavy rotation. Just when the pirates' influence on the British charts was at its height, it seemed like a good angle.

However, this was not the Tornados' time. On 12 August, Revolver was on its first week in the British record shops. Blonde on Blonde was issued on the same day as 'Is That a Ship I Hear?'. While the Dylan album got detailed track by track rundowns in the British music press, the Tornados got short shrift: 'a whistleable little melody of promise'; 'good of its kind and doubtless a hit three years ago, but not for today's market'. It had been a long slow fall since 'Telstar', number one in the UK for five weeks in autumn 1962: the group hadn't had a hit since late 1963 and there were none of the original members left.

Yet while 'Is That a Ship I Hear?' was a shameless attempt to ride the pirate wave, the flip was something quite different. 'Do You Come Here Often?' begins as a flouncy organ-drenched instrumental and stays that way for over two minutes. By that time, most people - had they even bothered to even turn the record over - would have switched off. Had they remained they would have heard two sibilant, obviously homosexual voices bitching, well, just like two queens will.

The scenario is the toilet in a London gay club, possibly the Apollo or Le Duce. The organist is still pumping away, but that's only background, as the sound dims and the bar atmosphere comes in.

'Do you come here often?'

'Only when the pirate ships go off air.'

'Me too.' (giggles)

'Well, I see pyjama styled shirts are in, then.'

'Well, pyjamas are OUT, as far as I'm concerned anyway.'

'Who cares?'

'Well, I know of a few people who do.'

'Yes, you would.'

'WOW! These two, coming now. What do you think?'

'Mmmmmm. Mine's all right, but I don't like the look of yours.'

(A sniffy pause)

'Well, I must be off.'

'Yes, you're not looking so good.'

'Cheerio. I'll see you down the 'Dilly.'

'Not if I see you first, you won't.'

Exeunt, to swelling organ.

This brief but diverting exchange has the ring of authenticity. Its bickering is not just beastliness but the most important component of the camping which, as English academic Richard Dyer writes, is 'the only style, language and culture that is distinctively and unambiguously gay male'. In its social mode, camp privileges a caustic wit, best expressed by the quick-fire verbal retort, partly as a form of aggression, partly as a form of self-mockery, partly as a form of self-defence. It's an insider code that completely baffles the heterosexual majority, as it's meant to. (Why are they being so horrible to each other? Because it's good sport, and good practice for when you really need it.)

Like the Negro 'dirty dozens' - the ritualised insults of the Twenties and Thirties that have become embedded in rap - the camping spotlighted on 'Do You Come Here Often?' represents a complicated response to a hostile world. Its poisoned psychological arrows can help to control and neutralise the threat of homophobic violence: many bullies are right to fear the queen's forked tongue. Camping can provide a bulwark from which the gay man can sally forth into the world at large: it freezes the typecasting of homosexuals as effeminate, internalises it, and then throws it back in the face of the straight world as a kind of revenge.

However, that long 'mmmmmm', reverberating right through the diaphragm down to the male G-spot, gets to the heart of the matter. Meek's queen bitches are briefly united by an unstable mixture of camaraderie and competitiveness. Ever hopeful, ever alert, the gay man in cruising mode is relentless in pursuit of cock: the usual social rules go right out of the window. Sex drives the gay scene, its iconography, its economy, its inner and outer life. Meek's scenario highlights that heart-stopping instant, that highwire walk between acceptance and rejection that every gay man knows: when the Adonis turns into a Troll - not just the object of your desire but your own self.

'Do You Come Here Often?' was an extraordinary achievement: the first record on a UK major label - Columbia, part of the massive EMI empire - to deliver a slice of queer life so true that you can hear its cut-and-thrust in any gay bar today. Before 1966, homosexuality had been hinted at in odd mainstream records like Donovan's 'I'll Try For the Sun' or the Kinks' 'See My Friends', indeed had saturated Meek epics like 'Johnny Remember Me', but the allusions had been veiled. They didn't offer an insider viewpoint, just a mood or a stray word that seemed to briefly open a door usually locked and barred.

Since the early Sixties, there had been a trickle of products aimed at a market that was so off- the map as to be beyond marginal. Apart from Rod McKuen's vague but signifying spoken-word albums such as In Search of Eros , all of them were on tiny, fly-by-night labels. They took two different forms. Some took the Rod McKuen path: the sad young men, fated to wander through the twilight world of the third sex, condemned, like Peter Pan, to always be on the outside looking in. Their sensitive meditations on lust and loneliness were dramatised by covers of show tunes.

While these tragic figures, in accepting their exiled status, took care to be non-specific, the period's other archetypes were far more feisty. Unlike their more sober compatriots, drag queens could not pass, and so camping was honed into a corrosive chatter that could strip paint at 10 paces. Dovetailing into the market for outrageous adult albums by the likes of Rusty Warren ( Banned in Boston! ), nitroglycerin queens like Rae Bourbon, Mr Jean Fredericks and Jose from the Black Cat offered frank meditations on queer life: 'Nobody Loves a Fairy When She's 40', 'Sailor Boy', et al. Too real and too ghettoised, none had a hope of finding any wider distribution.

There were firm reasons for this state of affairs.

Although the law that would decriminalise it was passing through Parliament during 1966, homosexuality was still illegal in the UK, as it was in the US: punishable by prison and social ostracism. However, laws do not always reflect contemporary realities, and gay people continued to conduct their illegal sexual and social lives. For older men like Joe Meek, pleasure might have been irrevocably stained by guilt but, for the upcoming generation of 20 year olds, the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 was an anachronistic irrelevance. Fuck Lily Law and her evil twin, Laura Norder.

In fact, Joe Meek was unusually privileged, if only he had been able to take some comfort from that realisation. The music industry was one of the few places where gay men could be themselves, and indulge their sexual predilections in a way that was economically viable. Forty years ago, it was far from being the respectable career option that it is today, and indeed derived much of its energy from its outcast status. This was a natural consequence of its roots in showbusiness and theatre, but even more basic was the way in which the sexual and social aesthetic of genuine innovators such as Larry Parnes alchemised the raw material of working-class adolescents into hit parade gold. From 1957 on, Parnes bossed British rock'n'roll, and transformed all his Reginalds and Ronalds into a new Olympus peopled by emotional deities-cum-archetypes like Billy Fury, Dickie Pride, Vince Eager, Georgie Fame. His sensibility, and that of many who followed him, transmuted gay lust into the erotic longing that excited the passions of the young women who pushed these idols into the charts.

Meek arrived as the period's foremost independent producer with John Leyton's summer 1961 smash, 'Johnny Remember Me', an eldritch spasm that epitomised the heightened melodrama of teenage emotions. (Meek used to speed up all his records to achieve that very effect.) It also acted as a metaphor, for those who chose to hear, for the sense of loss and disassociation that many gay men then felt. 'Telstar' confirmed his elite sta tus and, although superseded by the Beat Boom, he was able to pull out huge hits such as 'Have I the Right?' by the Honeycombs, a summer 1964 number one and an oblique comment on his own blocked right to sexual and emotional fulfilment.

This was his last chart-topper, but Meek adapted to the prevailing conditions better than most of his contemporaries. Although identified with Fifties rock'n'roll - Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran in particular - he was too restless and forward-thinking to get totally trapped in the past. He made a stone freakbeat classic with the Syndicats' 'Crawdaddy Simone', a Brit R'n'B record so frenzied that it put the Yardbirds' rave-ups to shame. His 1966 singles with the Cryin' Shames featured the sinuously menacing garage stomper, 'Come on Back', while the overwrought vocal contortions of 'Please Stay' - Meek's last ever hit - attracted the attention of Brian Epstein.

Although he found it difficult to place many of his productions during 1966, Meek was far from being a spent force: his interest in the possibilities of sound remained vital. He also remained a player among the British music industry's gay mafia. During the brief entente cordiale that followed 'Please Stay', Meek accompanied Brian Epstein to witness Bob Dylan's June 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert from the Beatles' box. When the freezing of all 'Telstar' royalties thanks to a copyright dispute threatened to render him bankrupt later in the year, Meek was thrown a lifeline by the EMI chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, who offered him a job as an in-house producer.

'Do You Come Here Often?' also emerged into a more open cultural climate. The playwright Joe Orton had used camp's caustic cadences in his smash 1964 West End success Entertaining Mr Sloane : this was the key weapon in his desired 'mixture of comedy and menace'. The extremely popular BBC radio serial Round the Horne featured two flagrant queens talking in the gay argot of the time. Executed by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, Julian and Sandy's quickfire Polari - that mixture of gypsy language, cockney backward slang, and thieves' cant - slotted right into the verbal surrealism that the Goons had made the hallmark of British comedy.

At the beginning of the decade, Meek had entitled his futuristic but stillborn space concept album I Hear A New World . Music is always ahead of social institutions, and the new world that Meek had dreamt of became tangible after 1963. The Beatles' unprecedented success marked the death knell of the Fifties hegemony, and during the next few years, the agitation for social and sexual liberation gathered pace throughout the Western world: the civil rights struggle, the women's movement, the campaigns for homosexual equality in America and Britain. The long years of stasis and repression banked up the flood, and it was ready to burst.

The most obvious sign of this uprising was teen fashion's hothouse blooms, as young women went Op and young men squeezed themselves into striped hip-huggers and polka-dot shirts - topped off with Prince Valiant bangs. 1966 saw the full mainstream media recognition of Swinging London and its associated fashion, mod. Trumpeting the 'revolution in men's clothes', Life's 13 May cover showed four young men, making like Brian Jones in front of the Chicago skyline. The cutaway teal corduroy jackets, Rupert Bear check trousers and fruit boots were not standard male gear, and the copy played up the freak-ish angle: 'The Guys Go All Out To Get Gawked At'.

Mod's hint of mint was not entirely in the heads of hostile observers. Peter Burton, who ran London's Le Duce in those years, remembered the crossover between the mods and his young gay clientele: 'both groups paid the same attention to clothes; both groups looked much alike.' Not surprising really, as their clothes came from the same shops - initially Vince in Carnaby Street (whose catalogue of swim- and underwear could almost be classified as an early gay magazine) and eventually from the John Stephen shops in the same street. Both groups took the same drug - basically 'speed', alternatively known as 'purple hearts', 'blues', 'doobs' or 'uppers'.

In February 1966, the Kinks had a huge UK hit with their dissection of this Carnebetian army. They backed up the risque 'Dedicated Follower of Fashion' - 'he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight' - with some extraordinary costumes, like the thigh-length leather waders sported with such gusto by Dave Davies. On the flip was one of the period's definitive statements of outsider pride, 'I'm Not Like Everybody Else', to be racked up against other garage band staples like the Yardbirds 'You're a Better Man Than I' and the Who's 'Substitute'. These calls for non-conformity and the acceptance of difference were becoming more and more strident.

This urgency defined pop's cutting edge during the first half of 1966: the unforeseen complexities and demands of 1965's emblematic records were amplified, their abrasion and innovation honed to a razor-sharp point. 1966 was a hot year, crowded with clamour and noise as seven-inch singles were cut to the limits of the then available technology. Hit 45s by the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Supremes, James Brown, the Byrds, the Who, Junior Walker, Wilson Pickett, and Bob Dylan were smart and mediated, harsh and sophisticated, monomaniacally on the one or, raga-like, right out of Western perception into the eternity of one chord.

A blistering hostility was in the air on 12 August, so much so that you could taste it. That day the Beatles faced the first concert of their third American tour, an event marred by the controversy surrounding John Lennon's comment that the group were 'more popular than Jesus'. The formerly inviolable avatars of youth were suddenly vulnerable as DJs burned Beatles' records and the Ku Klux Klan threatened.

Time magazine's 12 August cover - 'The Psychotic and Society' - featured Charles Whitman, the sniper who installed himself in the clock tower at the University of Texas and, without warning, killed 15 and wounded 31 people. The horror triggered an anguished self-examination: Whitman's 'senseless mayhem' was not an aberration but intimately linked to American society. 'Potential killers are everywhere these days,' a psychiatrist warned; 'they are driving their cars, going to church with you, working with you. And you never know it until they snap'.

Across the Atlantic, 12 August saw 'the worst crime London has known this century'. Around 3pm, three police officers stopped a suspicious looking van near Wormwood Scrubs prison, north of the mod stronghold Shepherd's Bush. All three were gunned down by the vehicle's three occupants. A 10-year-old boy saw the whole thing: 'I saw a man shoot the policemen,' he told the newspapers; 'it was horrible and I was so scared.' Cop-killing was a huge taboo, and the nation recoiled.

'Do You Come Here Often?' partook of that season of violence, as did its author. Its candid dialogue uncovered a deep seam of outcast aggression. Camp's downside is that, unless employed with a light touch and a sure understanding of the game's rules, its ritualised viciousness can reinforce the hostility of the wider society. Peter Bur ton remembered that when he was entering the gay scene in the mid-Sixties, nothing 'was more daunting as an encounter with some acid-tongued bitch whose tongue was so sharp it was likely to cut your throat. These queens, with the savage wit of the self-protective, could be truly alarming to those of us of a slower cast of mind.'

Internalised homophobia fuels the twisted expression of an outcast's low self-esteem: instead of fighting the oppressors, why not fight those nearest to hand? Donald Webster Cory's groundbreaking 1951 survey, 'The Homosexual in America', had clearly identified poor self-esteem as one of the greatest threats to gay men's mental health - infecting every aspect of life - but it was difficult, given society's attitudes, to break the cycle of prejudice and self-hatred. Despite his bravado, Meek felt his homosexuality as a deep source of shame. He was too stubborn to tell it otherwise than it was but, ultimately, 'Do You Come Here Often?' presented gay life as a nitroglycerin nightmare.

Born in April 1929, Meek was sensitive, almost clairvoyant, but highly volatile. Brought up as a girl for the first four years of his life by a mother who had hoped for a daughter, uninterested in most boyish pursuits, Joe was called a sissy and left alone by most of his peers. This difference, coupled with his hair-trigger temper, led to the start of the persecution (both real and imagined) that lasted for the rest of his life.

As soon as he could, Meek fled rural England for London, but in the late Fifties, despite his reputation as one of the best sound engineers in the capital, he remained haunted by the fact that his emotional and sexual orientation was illegal. This laid him open, as it did generations of gay men, to ridicule, arrest, imprisonment, violent attacks and - perhaps worst of all - blackmail. In November 1963, Meek was arrested for cottaging, importuning in a public toilet: the news of his conviction made the front page. His friends were amazed. Joe could have had all the young men he wanted, as they were queuing up to be recorded by him: they concluded that he actually liked the risk.

It didn't help that Meek was spooky: obsessed with other worlds, with graveyards, with spiritualism. He claimed to be in regular contact with Buddy Holly through the spirit world, while the negativity that he experienced clung to him like worn-out, not yet shed skin. Charles Blackwell - who arranged 'Johnny Remember Me' - remembered Joe as scarier than Phil Spector: 'He was a split personality. He believed he was possessed, but had another side that was very polite with a good sense of humour. He was very complicated.' Meek terrified the usually confident Andrew Loog Oldham: 'He looked like a real mean-queen teddy boy and his eyes were riveting'.

By mid-1966, Meek's mental state was worsening as his heyday receded into the past. Giving free rein to his instincts with 'Do You Come Here Often?', he gained satisfaction from exposing a reality long suppressed. But this was a small victory, a transient revenge, as the forces ranged against him gathered speed. Jekyll overtook Hyde, as his money troubles and declining fame caused him to up his pill intake and to dabble further in the occult. He was beaten up and his prized Ford Zodiac trashed. He was also threatened by gangsters who wanted to take over the Tornados' management. His paranoia was justified; his loneliness became all-consuming.

Meek's slide into the depths of decline was played out against a minatory pop climate. Disturbance had already hit the US top 10 that summer with Napoleon XIV's banshee 'They're Coming to Take Me Away' and Count Five's 'Psychotic Reaction'. During September and October, the pure punk propulsion of Love's 'Seven and Seven Is', the Yardbirds' 'Happenings Ten Years Time Ago' and the Rolling Stones' 'Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?' rode the year's white line fever right off the rails. The last was an amphetamined apocalypse, glossed thus by Andrew Loog Oldham: 'The Shadow is the uncertainty of the future. The uncertainty is whether we slide into a vast depression or universal war.' Later that autumn, David Bowie's 'The London Boys' and the Kinks' 'Big Black Smoke' delivered bleak cautionary tales of speed psychosis. Meek's own productions - the few that were actually released - had already reached new levels of pill-saturated oddity: the bizarre helter-skelter rhythm of Jason Eddy and the Centremen's 'Singing the Blues', the nuclear-winter visions of Glenda Collins's late protest, 'It's Hard to Believe It'.

Like the Marvelettes sang, the hunter gets captured by the game, and, in January 1967, Meek's game was up. While his last ever single, the Riot Squad's 'Gotta Be a First Time', was dismissed as 'a corny bit of beat', he was implicated by association with a gruesome gay crime dubbed 'the Suitcase Murder'. Although the hapless producer had nothing to do with the young victim's dismemberment, the police interest tipped him over the edge. On 2 February, he burst into a friend's house all dressed in black, claiming he was possessed. The next morning, the 18th anniversary of Buddy Holly's death, he blasted his landlady with his shotgun before eating the barrel himself.

Joe Meek's was an extreme pathology, to be sure, with its incredible highs - just listen to the aerated hysteria of John Leyton's 'Wild Wind' - and annihilating lows, but what remains shocking is just how much his suicidal impulse was shared by many gay men of his generation. In his diary for 11 March 1967, Joe Orton wrote about a conversation he had with his friend Kenneth Williams, by then a national figure in the UK for his appearances in Round the Horne and the Carry On film series. Orton found Williams 'a horrible mess' sexually: 'He mentions "guilt" a lot in conversation. "Well, of course there is always a certain amount of guilt attached to homosexuality".'

Williams talked to Orton about a friend who had been caught soliciting: 'Found in a cottage she was,' he said. 'They gave her a choice of gaol or a mental home. She chose the mental home. "Well," she said, "there's all the lovely mental cock. I'll be sucking all the nurses off. I'm sure it'll be very gay." Kenneth said this man went into the mental home and was given some kind of treatment "to stop her thinking like a queen". The man apparently was very depressed after this and committed suicide. Kenneth then spoke of all the people he'd known who killed themselves ... he told all the stories in a way which made them funny, but it was clear that he thinks about death constantly.'

By early 1967, Orton was so successful and well-regarded that he had access to the new elite. He was approached by Brian Epstein to write the screenplay of the Beatles' third movie, which he titled 'Up Against It'. His diary entry for 24 January describes meeting Paul McCartney and listening to a pre-release copy of 'Penny Lane' and 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. As the public avatar of the new, aggressive homosexuality and, in private, an enthusiastic sex hunter - one of his most memorable diary entries concerned an orgy in a public toilet in Holloway Road in north London, just down the road from Meek's studio - Orton totally rejected Williams's sexual guilt as the holdover from a bygone era.

But even he could not escape its shadow, embodied by his older partner, Kenneth Halliwell. As the playwright's star rose, the balance of their 15-year relationship tipped irreversibly. The more that Orton flaunted his promiscuity and revelled in his success, the more depressed and inhibited Halliwell became. On 9 August 1967, he murdered Orton with nine frenzied hammer blows to the head, and then swallowed 22 Nembutals. Their bodies were found side-by-side in their shared bedsit.

Eighteen days later, the body of Brian Epstein was found in the locked bedroom of his Belgravia house. The cause of death was, according to the coroner's report, 'poisoning' by Cabrital - a kind of sleeping pill. Epstein's mental state had deteriorated since August 1966, after the Beatles' stopped touring: he hadn't been able to attend their last ever show at San Francisco's Candlestick Park because his then current boyfriend, a hustler called Diz Gillespie, had robbed him of money and valuable documents. According to his attorney and close friend Nat Weiss, that accounted for 'his first major depression: that was the beginning of his loss of self-confidence.'

The deaths of Meek, Orton and Epstein occurred just at the point when the freedoms of the Sixties were institutionally recognised, in Britain at least. As well as the relaxation of the laws on abortion and divorce, the famous 1885 statute that had done for Oscar Wilde and several successive generations of gay men was finally overhauled. The Sexual Offences Act, which became law right at the end of July 1967, substantially decriminalised homosexuality: allowing for the existence of gay social and sexual relationships, it removed the threat of blackmail and enabled the first, very basic steps to be taken towards the ultimate goal of total parity.

'Hey, you've got to hide your love away,' John Lennon had sung in one of the Beatles' most poignant songs, and, for almost every adult gay man born before the mid-1940s, the strain of having to do so was psychologically disastrous. In far too many cases, the result was alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive cruising, crippling guilt, an inability to form lasting emotional relationships - a monstrous waste of lives.

Reactions to the new law within the gay underworld were not always positive: a renewed bout of 'queer-spotting' in the media unleashed all the old venom about bestial 'buggers'. The historian Jeffrey Weeks remembered meeting men who were 'actively hostile, nervous that the new legality would ruin their cosily secret double lives'. In the same way that the gay underworld had existed despite, if not in defiance of, the law, then the long fought-for turnaround towards partial acceptance would not easily erase the decades of vitriol and prejudice. 'We'll be free,' Kenneth Halliwell had exclaimed to Joe Orton in late July, but it wasn't that simple.

Nearly four decades on, 'Do You Come Here Often?' remains sad, eerie, funny, and true: you can still hear its vivid vituperation in the gay hardcore dance records of the 21st century. By the same token, it is time-locked, a bulletin from a pivotal point in homosexual history: that moment when an oppressed minority began to claim its rightful place in society. However, that struggle was not without its sacrifices. Like Orton and Epstein, Meek would not live to see the sun, and his August 1966 single remains testament to the lethal power of the homophobia that, once rampant in Western society, is still virulent. Guilty pleasures can kill.

· 'Do You Come Here Often?' is available on Queer Noises, an anthology of gay records from 1960-78 curated by Jon Savage, out now on Trikont. A great collection of Meek's recordings, including most of the other records referred to here, is available on The Alchemist of Pop: Home Made Hits and Rarities 1959-1966 (Sanctuary UK 2xCD). An expanded version of this article originally appeared in Black Clock (California Institute of the Arts) Issue 4: Guilty Pleasures. Thanks to Steve Erickson

Hey Joe
The sixties' space cadet

Since his death, Joe Meek's reputation as a pioneer of space-age pop and an eccentric English Phil Spector has grown apace. But in the early Sixties the record industry hardly knew what to make of the man who made a series of hits from his home studio at 304 Holloway Road in north London.

Born in 1929 in the Forest of Dean, he developed an early obsession with gadgets which he nurtured while working for the Midlands Electricity Board and which found full rein when he started to make records in 1956. The best-known of these - John Leyton's 'Johnny Remember Me', the Tornados' 'Telstar' - sounded like nothing else and, far ahead of George Martin, Meek used the studio as an instrument, taking mixing desks apart, playing tapes backwards and adding washes of sci-fi inspired effects. The fact that in his studio people played guitar in the bathroom while others sang on the stairs only adds to the fun.

Scorned by the mainstream, Meek launched his own label, so becoming an indie pioneer in yet another field. Members of Meek's house bands became huge stars a decade later - Ritchie Blackmore, who played the guitar solo on Heinz's 'Just Like Eddie', went on to form Deep Purple, along with the Syndicats' Roger Glover, whose guitarist, Steve Howe, joined Yes.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006

2006-11-17T08:46:00.000-08:00

Last weekend the Observer Guardian had an amazing series of articles on the relationship between Pop Music and the Gay World. I have always been fascinated by this fruitful (no pun intended) relationship. So I want to reprint some of the articles on the TamTam blog - with my illustrations or images to go with it.

This was an article titled "20 Most Fabulous," and it's a commentary by a group of fascinating gay music figures commenting on what they consider gay music icons. I found this on

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1942200,00.html

Here it goes:

1. Blues stockings
by Tom Robinson

The term 'racy' derives from the phenomenon of 'race' records (marketed to black audiences) that blossomed with the birth of the blues in the 1920s. Classically, blues songs were about misery and deprivation, but human nature meant that songs with suggestive lyrics actually sold an awful lot better. In particular there were vivid expressions of female sexuality - as Sippie Wallace sang how she was 'A Mighty Tight Woman', and Maggie Jones wondered 'Anybody Here Want to Try My Cabbage ?'

And blues singers didn't just talk the talk. The bisexual Bessie Smith enjoyed nights in buffet flats - illegal drinking parties - which (we're told) often involved gay and lesbian orgies. She sang about it too - in 'Kitchen Man' and 'Young Women's Blues'. In the code of the time, 'sissy man' or 'freak' denoted a gay man, while 'BD' (or bull-dyker) referred to a lesbian.

When Ma Rainey (the 'Mother of the Blues') was arrested for running an indecent party, it was Bessie who bailed her out - while Ma's own 'Prove it on Me Blues' asserted: 'I went out last night with a crowd of my friends/ They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.'

· Tom Robinson presents The Tom Robinson show, Monday & Tuesday nights, BBC 6 Music

2. Men in skirts
by George Melly

Douglas Byng was a cabaret artist in the West End before the Second World War and was famous for his impersonations of women. His songs were full of innuendo - for instance, 'I'm one of the Queens of England'(1930) - and he's regarded as a pioneer of what we call 'camp' now.

There was widespread speculation about his private life, but among his immediate circle his homosexuality was common knowledge. He was a great friend of my mother's and I admired him enormously. He was a very sophisticated comedian - he wrote all his own material - and seemed the personification of homosexual smut. He was hugely popular: he told me once that when he'd walk down Piccadilly, all the whores would shout out to him 'Hello, Dougy, how did it go tonight?'

His boyfriends were always what we call rough trade. I went to his flat in Brighton when he was getting old and ill and cross, and one of these lads was lying on the sofa. Dougy said to me: 'This is my nephew' - he always introduced them as his nephew - and he then said to his 'nephew': 'Get Mr Melly a sherry.' The boy replied: 'Get it your fucking self!' Dougy just said: 'Aren't they so rude, young people?'

He ended up broke in an old people's home for theatricals. But he had a huge influence on the gay edge of society and he paved the way for performers such as Danny La Rue and a whole generation of artists who built up a tolerance to campness, because in those days there were a lot of violent homophobes.

· George Melly is a writer and entertainer. He is performing at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, November 27-29

2006-11-17T08:43:00.000-08:00

3. Will Young on the genius of Noel Coward

I find Noel Coward fascinating - particularly the notion of him as a celebrity and the extent to which that relates to our idea of celebrity now. It's almost exactly the same. He set the standard for men's style at the time - regardless of his sexuality. There's a comparison with someone like David Beckham today, who has heralded this metrosexual age. Because Coward was so suave and sophisticated and slightly effeminate, that became the way that young men wanted to present themselves. It's an astonishing level of influence for a gay man to enjoy, particularly given the fact that homosexuality was illegal at the time. And of course his relationship with fame underwent exactly that thing that every British celebrity goes through now. He was hugely popular and then hugely unpopular.

Next year I'm appearing in a production of The Vortex in Manchester. It's a play that was rather punk rock for its day, dealing with the mass consumption of cocaine - again, you can draw parallels with the present day - and then he went on to this period of unparalleled theatrical success with Hay Fever and Private Lives where he'd have three shows running concurrently in the West End at any given time. He became so nationally loved and so popular that people had nowhere to go with him but to start hating him.

I was talking about this kind of nature of success with my boyfriend only the other day. It's like what happened to David Gray. Massive. Then nowhere. But we live in a lot more fickle times now. If someone comes along and does David Gray in a better way than David Gray did it - like James Blunt did - then there is no need for David Gray any more.

What happened to Coward was the Sixties. When you have John Osborne with Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court I guess you don't really need Noel Coward. There is something essentially repressed about Coward that fell out of favour. So he went to Vegas and did shows there and bought a house in Jamaica and ... well, good on him! There is a great album called Noel Coward Live at the Sands, Las Vegas, with an iconic shot of him in the desert on the cover. I think the British saw it as a betrayal, that he was cashing in a bit on his success. But why not? England is so funny. In a way it was a double betrayal. It betrayed him so he betrayed it. And then he came back later and did a show at the Cafe de Paris with Marlene Dietrich, which must just have been the most amazing thing.

He knew everyone, of course. There are diary entries about him going to Chequers to visit Churchill and he was completely accepted by royalty and by politicians, people who were the society figures of the day. Politics and royalty were so much more glamorous then. There is a brilliant story of him taking tea at the Ritz during the Blitz. Bombs were going off around him and he said: 'How marvellous that the band kept playing.'

He does get a lot of criticism for not being more open about his sexuality, but it's all there. You could argue that he was bottling it by not being a bit more expressive, could have embraced it a little more - but you have to remember the times. And in a way his gayness did work against his classic English gentlemanliness.

The theatre and the music business were havens for people like Coward. It was one of the only places that you could have any sense of freedom about your sexuality, which follows through in the British arts right up until recently. And then you can trace it back to Oscar Wilde, who was vilified in something like the way George Michael is now. I'm sure Wilde would have been falling asleep at the wheel of his Mercedes if he was around now!

Coward's music is so important too. Largely, it is very patriotic, like 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen'. 'London Pride' is ever so ironic, if you think about it.

One of my favourite songs is 'Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans'. Just the title. It is so camp. But isn't that fantastic? Songs like that, and 'Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs Worthington' are incredibly camp. But then the British do have a very long and enduring relationship with the idea of camp. They love it. And the reciprocal situation here is that entertainment becomes a safe house for camp people. They are incubated by it. The British have a huge tradition of comedians, singers, actors, performers and pop stars who are incredibly camp, whether they are Noel Coward or Freddie Mercury. And they are all loved for it. I guess in some ways Coward didn't need to come out.

A lot of this helps to explain why I became a performer. I remember at school feeling this sense of difference, of otherness, that I think most gay people feel. You spend a lot more time observing things than necessarily participating in them and I think it gives you an eye for human behaviour that lends itself towards performance or some sort of social commentary, which Coward was fantastic at.

There's a great line from Coward's diaries: 'All I ever had was the talent to amuse.' I think that just about sums up the entire position of the gay relationship with entertainment. It is, quite literally, 'let's put on a show!' It's such a fantastic, resilient approach. Which is why I think, yes, being gay does still affect music.

· Will Young is appearing in The Vortex at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, from 17 January

4. The crooner
by Marc Almond

When Johnnie Ray sang 'Cry' for the first time in 1951, his eyes closed tight, melodramatically falling to his knees, pounding on the piano and shedding tears, I wasn't yet born. Yet when I saw him for the first time in black and white in those lavender times, I recognised something that I felt in myself, igniting something as yet undefined to me. It was a secret I kept to myself.

The spirit of his highly emotive crooning permeated the times, paved the way for Joe Meek and his adored Heinz, for Larry Parnes (perhaps the man who really invented gay pop) and his stable of pretty proteges.

He influenced Elvis, and annoyed Sinatra. He broke down musical barriers and, particularly towards the end, became Judy in a suit - fate even brought them together in the spring of 1969 when he briefly toured with Garland. But for me, it was his handsomeness, his wide smile, the floppy Brylcreemed quiff and haunting voice that proved so heartbreaking.

Like all the great (gay) stars who found fame in less enlightened times, he exuded mystery, his sexuality blurred by marriage and 'bearded' denials. Even before his first record was released he had been arrested for importuning. In 1959, he was arrested on a charge of soliciting an undercover police officer: his career never recovered.

In performance, he theatrically caressed the microphone. He was immaculate yet dishevelled, bothered, edgy and uncomfortable as he drank and pill-popped his way to musical immortality, to the accolade of affection.

· Marc Almond's next album, Dining with Panthers, is due out in 2008

2006-11-17T08:40:00.000-08:00

5. The Beatles
Simon Napier-Bell on how the Fab Five changed everything

Lemar, a British act, sings serious soul. As a result, he's said to sound American. The Scissor Sisters, an American act, are outrageously camp. So everyone thinks they're British.

There's no doubt about it - just as American pop music is permeated through and through with black culture, so British pop music is permeated with gay culture. In Britain, the selling of pop was never only about catchy songs; it was about artifice and sexuality, which as often as not meant gay sexuality.

Ever since the Beatles, the imagery needed to make pop and rock stars click with the public has included aspects of gay culture. The more the public has seen of it, the more indifferent they have become to it. Robbie Williams will probably be the last pop star able to tease us with the 'is-he-or-isn't-he?' theme, his provocation silenced by Will Young's brilliance at persuading us that 'gay is normal'.

Forty years ago that was the Beatles' message too. John, Paul, George and Ringo - the most visible, most photographed, most talked-about four people the world had ever known - had a gay manager. And they took him everywhere with them.

Brian Epstein was known as the fifth Beatle. Travelling with his group, Epstein was seen endlessly on TV and in the papers, meeting world leaders and celebrities. Though London was swinging, being gay was still against the law. But with someone gay in such a super-privileged position, it just didn't seem to matter. The Beatles' popularity, coupled with their affection for their manager, made it a sure bet that Harold Wilson's government would move forward on legalising homosexuality. Unintentionally, the Beatles were helping force the issue.

But there was more to it than that. Beatles music was played at every gay party, every gay disco, every gay bar and pub. While teenagers dreamed of being John, Paul, George or Ringo, business-minded gays saw another option - be a pop manager like Brian Epstein.

It worked. By 1966 the music business had become more gay than straight. The Beatles, the Yardbirds, and the Who had openly gay managers while the Rolling Stones had one who seemed to swing both ways. The backstage area of pop had become a haven for gays - songwriters, record producers, stylists and TV directors - but especially managers. Robert Stigwood managed the Bee Gees. Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley managed Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Vic Billings managed Dusty Springfield.

The artists, though, were mainly not gay. Which is exactly what made it work so well. Straight kids who teamed up with gay managers found themselves liberated from their dull upbringing. Encouraged to be outrageous, they threw themselves into it with abandon. When Mick Jagger got himself arrested for pissing against a wall; when Rolls Royces were driven into swimming pools and hotel rooms smashed, you could be sure it was done with a wink and a nod from the manager. It was largely this subversive gay input into Sixties pop that converted it into the rock music that invaded American stadiums in the Seventies.

With glam rock, the influence of all this backstage gay banter began to show itself front of stage too. Among the new batch of stars were some who were gay and many who were 'bi', but apart from Bowie, most were too cautious to cross the line from visibly camp to actually homosexual. It was only in the Eighties that gay artists started rejecting the ambivalence that had been the operating norm for previous generations. Even so, while projecting themselves as totally gay they still dodged the subject of bedroom proclivities. It's difficult to believe now, but in the Eighties Boy George and Marc Almond managed to keep the straight public guessing about their sexuality. It wasn't so much about hiding it as keeping it under an alluring veil.

Now even that has been pushed aside. Will Young presents his homosexuality with no compromise and it matters very little. The accepted wisdom of the music business was that female fans would be turned off by a male star who was gay. Yet since screaming for sex with your pop idol is likely to be a hopeless fantasy anyway, it seems to make little difference.

But what would have happened 40 years ago if one of the Beatles had turned out to be gay? Or even just a tiny bit 'bi'? In 1983, when my book You Don't Have to Say You Love Me was first published, I received death threats from outraged Lennon fans for suggesting that he and Epstein once shared a kiss. By the time the book was republished in the Nineties this had been more than confirmed by several biographies (in fact, Lennon and Epstein had tried an experimental dirty weekend together in Spain), but no one seemed to care any more.

In the Sixties a tabloid report like that would have been the death of the Beatles. Nowadays it does little more than raise eyebrows.

What a wonderful change!

· Simon Napier-Bell is an author and was the manager of, among others, the Yardbirds, Wham! and Japan

6. The soul diva
David McAlmont pays homage to 'Queen Beehive'

When Queen Victoria's government tried to legislate against lesbianism, the Queen thought the idea ridiculous as she didn't believe such a thing could possibly exist. It seems that Dusty Springfield was one of these non-existents. She won four NME awards during her own Sixties reign, and her sexuality was obvious to the gay crowd. I don't know that it matters in the face of such awesome music but for those who believed that she might be, those who thought it obvious or those who were similarly inclined, it must have meant the earth when she let her sexuality slip to Evening Standard journalist Ray Connolly in 1970 ('A lot of people say I'm bent, and I've heard it so many times that I've almost learned to accept it,' she said. 'I know I'm perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy').

Personally, I love the album Dusty in Memphis - for its sexual frankness, the production values and the affected coquettishness of Dusty's vocal performances. I also love 'You Don't Own Me' and 'You Don't Have to Say You Love Me'. Once heard never forgotten.

Nonetheless, my unassailable favourite song is ' What Have I Done to Deserve This?', which she recorded with the Pet Shop Boys in 1987. I remember exactly where I was, what time of day it was and what I was wearing the first time I heard it: WHSmith in the Whitgift Centre in Croydon, buying a copy of Smash Hits. I still experience a palpable thrill whenever I hear the intro with those stabs of stately, classy brass, ushering in Neil Tennant's laconic, pop-on-a-smoking-jacket drawl. He then steps aside for Queen Beehive to produce a profound interpretation of Allee Willis's sugary chorus. The song reached number two in the charts in Britain and America and while Dusty owned the Sixties, here she was with us again before we finally lost her. I salute the Pet Shop Boys for remembering how much we all loved Dusty when so many of us had forgotten.

· David McAlmont is part of McAlmont and Butler with Bernard Butler. Their most recent release is the single 'Speed'

2006-11-17T08:36:00.000-08:00

7. 'The seventies was a fantasy age - he was the ultimate fantasy figure'
Boy George on his first sighting of David Bowie

The beginning for me was seeing David Bowie on the Old Grey Whistle Test singing 'Starman' in February 1972. I was 10. Of course, then I saw the Ziggy Stardust tour at the Lewisham Odeon in 1973 - the tour that ended with the last ever Ziggy concert. It was such a nightmare to get tickets for. My grandmother was staying with us and my gran and my dad were always at each other's throats. They were locked in constant battle. My nan stopped me from trying to get tickets- 'what do you want to go and see that poof for?' - but because my dad wanted to upset my nan he got me one. I lived in Eltham and I only had the bus fare to get one way to Lewisham so I had to bunk my fare on the way back.

I knew I was gay by that time - I hadn't had my first sexual experience, but it came not long after. Discovering Bowie and those first experiences totally connected. Just seeing this whole other world was enough to spark my interest.

I got my auntie Jan to give me a Ziggy haircut for the night, but it was a bit feeble. It looked more like [Slade's] Dave Hill. I had a cheesecloth shirt that I'd borrowed off my brother and an embroidered jacket - a bit hippyish - and I remember getting to the gig and thinking I looked really sappy compared to all these other fantastic people.

Later, aged about 17, I was working as a messenger for a print firm in Hanover Square. I used to dress up and wear make-up - a bit punky. A very handsome, older, Italian man approached me one day. He said: 'Are you a girl?' and I said: 'No' and he said: 'Well, what are you?'. 'What do you mean, what am I?' I said. 'Well, I'm a boy.' And he said: 'Have you got a girlfriend?' and I said: 'No' and he asked if he could come with me. I said: 'I'm working!' but he followed me anyway and the next thing was, he invited me to a party.

I went with him to somewhere in Queensway [west London] and the first person I saw at the party was the dancer and choreographer Lindsay Kemp, who I knew all about through Bowie because he'd influenced him hugely. The party was at a house that belonged to Anton Dolin, the great ballet dancer. It was all very snobby, but as soon as I saw Kemp I went over to speak to him and he took my hand, brought it up to his lips, and kissed every one of my fingers. I said: 'Thank you' and he said: 'Ah, but the pleasure is all mine.' It's something that has never left me! And it was thanks to Bowie that that happened.

Rock'n'roll in its truest form is a fantasy realm where you can be whoever you want to be. It has no connection with the real world. Recently, there's been all this obsession with 'reality' and I think it's dragged music down with it to make it a lowest common denominator thing. But generally, certainly in the Seventies, music was fantasy - and Bowie was a fantasy figure. Bowie in Sainsbury's just was not going to happen. You imagined him living off space-age food. He never got up in the morning to find he had ran out of milk. I used to think that he'd just sit around and be visited by other people from the rock world. Maybe someone from the Sweet would pop round with some cakes. It was this idea of a fantastic bohemian lifestyle that you wanted to engage with.

I thought it was very brave of him to say he was bisexual. I don't actually think it matters whether he was telling the truth or not. Straight people have always made better homosexual pop stars. Certainly Bowie gave me the green light to start exploring my own sexuality.

· Boy George and Amanda Ghost's new single, 'Time Machine', is out on 13 November on Plan A

8. 'Glad to be gay articulated the desire for queer freedom'
Peter Tatchell on Tom Robinson's anthem

Released in 1978, when homophobic persecution was actively promoted by church and state, 'Glad to be Gay' was the world's first explicit gay pride pop song, sung by Tom Robinson, the world's first out and political gay pop star. Almost instantly, it became the de facto queer national anthem.

The song hit me emotionally. It damned homophobia and articulated the cry for queer freedom. It was the musical equivalent of the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto - uplifting and empowering.

Tom's lyrics savaged the bigotry of the police, church, judges and media. He also had the courage to take a dig at the internalised homophobia of self-hating, closeted queers - the enemy within. That was daring and ground-breaking too.

The repressive reaction to 'Glad to be Gay' helped highlight the homophobia Tom was singing against. His record company, EMI, was nervous about releasing a queer song as a single [it came out on the 'Rising Free' EP]. Many radio stations refused to play it. Gay was obscene, according to the BBC.

Homophobia has ebbed since 1978 and 'Glad to be Gay' helped make that possible. Thank you, Mr Robinson.

· Peter Tatchell is a human rights campaigner

2006-11-17T08:26:00.000-08:00

9. The glam god
Morrissey on the first major label gay star

I bought the first Jobriath album in 1974 at Rare Records in drizzle-fizzled Manchester. Neither for the ears of the elderly nor for those with middle-aged perspectives, Jobriath voiced the excess destitution of New York's most tormentedly aware, whose lives were favoured by darkness. Cinematic themes of desperate dramas in paranoid shadows were presented as choppy and carnivalesque melodies.

The hairy beasts who wrote for the music press laughed Jobriath off the face of the planet. He was, at best, merely considered to be 'insane'. It was clear that Jobriath was willing to go the gay distance, something that even the intelligentsia didn't much care for. Elton John knew this in 1973; Jobriath didn't. Surrounded on all sides by Journey, Styx, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Jobriath was at society's mercy. Yet it could have worked so well.

Neither America nor England was quite ready. Thus, Jobriath quietly expired, buried without a single line of ceremony in any music publication throughout the world.

· Morrissey tours the UK in December

10. Girl about town
Erica Roberts considers Polly Perkins's charms

Sporting collar, tie and pinstriped suits designed by John Stephen, Sixties and Seventies lesbian singer-cum-thespian Polly Perkins cut a dashingly gender-bending figure, and was frequently photographed smoking fat cigars. Aged just 15, she was the youngest performer to appear nude at the Windmill, and never hid the fact that she was a lady-lover - rare for any entertainer of the time.

Raised in a theatrical family, Polly sprinkled her speech with Polari and, although hit records eluded her, she racked up newspaper column inches because of her camp stunts. During her spell as the first compere on cult TV show Ready, Steady Go, Polly paid a young male 'ex-lover' to fling himself at her.

She became a much-loved figure in Soho clubs for her smoky rendition of Edith Piaf's 'Je Ne Regrette Rien' and her self-penned lesbian anthem 'Superdyke'. In 1973, Decca released her album Liberated Woman. She now lives in relative obscurity in Spain with her girlfriend and her youngest son Timmy.

· Erica Roberts is a writer for DIVA magazine
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006

2006-11-05T08:14:00.000-08:00

Andy Warhol's "Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort Of "

Wallace Berman's "Aleph"

With respect to my father's exhibition (Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and his Circle) that is taking place at the Berkeley Museum, there will be some cool films along with the show. My father's film "Aleph" will be shown as well as the rare Andy Warhol film starring the great Taylor Mead as well as my father and yours truly playing "Boy." I know.... Don't ask!

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 21
7:30 Beat Films
Hailed in its time as a harbinger of a new film movement that prized spontaneity and lived experience, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's Pull My Daisy (1959) is perhaps the ultimate Beat film, narrated by Jack Kerouac and featuring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky. Plus: Aleph (Wallace Berman, 1956-66); Breakaway (Bruce Conner, 1966); The End (Christopher Maclaine, 1953); A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958).

SUNDAY DECEMBER 3
2:00 Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort Of
Andy Warhol (1963)
Wallace Berman, Taylor Mead, Claes Oldenburg, and other art stars appear in an Andy Warhol romp through 1963 L.A., including Berman's backyard. With Lawrence Jordan's Triptych in Four Parts (1958), featuring Berman, Michael McClure and John Reed.

PFA Theater: 2575 Bancroft Way at Bowditch, Berkeley, CA
Info: (510) 642-1124 Advance Tickets: (510) 642-5249

2006-10-31T17:11:00.000-08:00

2006-10-31T07:26:00.000-08:00

The songlist down below was presented to an audience on October 29, 2006. I made 20 CD copies to give out to the audience for free. This of course was in conjunction with the Semina Culture exhibition that is taking place at the Berkeley Museum.

Lush Head Woman Jimmy Witherspoon & Wallace Berman
Bebop Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker
BeHop Wardell Gray
Yardbird Suite (-4) Charlie Parker
Night In Tunisia (-5) Charlie Parker
A Night In Tunisia Dexter Gordon
Cheers Charlie Parker
Cheers Wardell Gray
Hot House Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker
Hot House Wardell Gray
The Chase Wardell Gray

2006-10-28T18:24:00.000-07:00

If you ever get a chance do see “J’irai cracher sur vos tombes” (I Spit on Your Graves). It’s a strange film. I have it on DVD, and it has no English subtitles, but I know the story. Like the book the drama takes place in the U.S., yet was filmed in France. And it looks like a European’s idea what a small U.S. town looks like.

My favorite scenes are the ones in the bookstore. I love the magazine display in the store. Also I like the thought that the killer works at a bookstore. I work at a bookstore and therefore I feel like I am in good company.

As one knows by now, Vian had to sneak into the preview of this film. At the time he was arguing with the filmmaker. Basically he hated it. He died during the screening.

2006-10-13T23:19:00.000-07:00

I just read that Claude Luter passed away. For those who know the book I co-edited for Rizzoli "Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés" by Boris Vian, his name comes up often. One of the key figures in the whole Paris post-war generation - he is probably the key figure to bring New Orleans jazz to that great city and culture.

Sadly not that much information on him in English, but I imagine him to be a fantastic personality - especially anyone who was close friends with Boris Vian. If I am not correct he played regular shows at A club till very recently. Luter was 83 years old and forever young. TamTam salutes you!

2006-10-13T21:11:00.000-07:00

There is a fascinating interview with Henri Lefebvre on his relationship with Guy Debord and others in the Situationist International. Check it here:

http://orbita.starmedia.com/~novosdebates/Lefebvre/Lefebvre3.htm

2006-10-07T16:58:00.000-07:00

I believe this is the catalogue to the Jean-Luc Godard exhibiton at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I understand that there was a falling out between the subject of the exhibiton and the Pompidou. Nevertheless there is a show, and what I have read of it, sounds fascinating.

2006-10-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

For us Americans, Raymond Queneau’s name comes up between other writers. Georges Perec, Georges Bataille, Andre Breton, Michel Leiris, and so forth. He is also for the causal reader a hard writer to get a clear picture of his writing. In an essence he was the shadow writer of the 20th Century.

The first book I read of Queneau’s was “Exercises in Style,” which in one way serves as a writing manual while at the same time it is a witty a charming piece of fiction. The thing is with Queneau’s writing is that you get a duality – that I think is important in his work.

One of his masterpieces (I tend to like everything by an author I admire) is “Hundred Thousand Billion Poems.” It is a work that is never in place, it consistently moves. I think poetry should be written in air instead on rock. Or a book that looks like one of those changeable head/bodies/legs books.

Queneau’s most beloved book is probably “Zazie n the Metro.” Written n colloquial French instead of academic French, Zazie was considered to be a work from a rebel. But a charming rebel. The book is charming with regards of Zazie investigating Paris via the Metro system. A great city novel.

For the Boris Vian obsessive I strongly recommend a book Queneau wrote under another name Sally Mara. Like Vian’s ‘Vernon Sullivan’ Queneau wrote a noir thriller called “We Always Treat Women Too Well.” In many ways it is the sister or brother to Vian/Sullivan’s “I Spit on Your Graves.

2006-09-30T19:16:00.000-07:00

Vince Taylor was a strange boy. It is unlikely if you live in the United States that you have heard of his music. What’s remarkable about the man is not really the music, but more of his image that was thrown into the world of pop circ. Very early 60’s. It’s not enough to hear his recordings, but to see him live or better yet via photographs.

2006-09-30T19:08:00.000-07:00

He had a major impact on one pop artist, David Bowie. He has admitted that Taylor was an influence for his Ziggy Stardust character. No, Taylor was not from outer space, he was from somewhere better: England.

Taylor became obsessed with Jesus of sorts and became a cult leader in the UK. He went from wearing all black to all white. In a sense from the negative to the positive. But what inspired Bowie was the pop singer as a religious messiah. Vince Taylor was that, but first he had to become a huge star in France.

2006-09-30T18:57:00.000-07:00

I strongly suggest that you look up ‘Vince Taylor’ on YouTube.com. These little films are pure rock n’ roll imagery. In fact I can’t think of anything else that combines the imagery of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising to rockabilly.

For more ‘practical’ info on Vince Taylor check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Taylor

2006-09-29T00:33:00.000-07:00

At first Billy Fury always struck me just because of his name. Larry Parnes, who discovered him, gave him the name of Fury. There was Elvis of course, but I feel Billy represented the sadness that is in everyday life. He represents a sense of failure. But failure that is beautiful and pure.

The photo above is Billy on stage with Heinz, who was rumored to be Joe Meeks’ boyfriend. You can hear Heinz’s music through various Joe Meek collections that are out there.

The late and very much missed Eddie Cochran with Billy in the U.K. They both understood that life is not something to take for granted. In fact it is something special and our moments here are precious…

A man and his record collection. I often felt that if one looked at my possessions you would know who I am.

Billy looks at the world and I wonder what’s left of it.

2006-09-27T23:19:00.000-07:00

Billy Fury is one of my favorite pop singers of all time. I think the reason why I like him so much is because he knew he was going to die young due to his bad heart condition. Like Boris Vian he knew he had to go for broke every time. Also there is something beautiful about his face.

2006-09-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

I've been fascinated by Joe Orton's plays as well as his lifestyle. On one of my trips to London, I went on a very long walk through Islington, North London. I tried to imagine what it was like in the 60's. I found Orton’s flat where he was murdered. Also on the same walking trip I found Joe Meek’s recording studio and home.

I tried to imagine what their lives were like. First of all homosexual practices in public places were pretty much outlawed - and I did try to find the public bathroom in their neighborhood. I couldn’t find it - and I was told that the public toilet in that area doesn't exist anymore. Which is a shame, because it should be a plaque in the spot saying this is where Joe Orton and Joe Meek (among others) had sex and a pee as well.

I wondered if they ever met in the darkness of the toilets? One would presume so, but alas all we have are the brilliance of their work.

2006-09-03T21:29:00.000-07:00

As we are working on the new Vian title graphics I am looking towards the world as an inspiration. On that journey I found some interesting images connected to "Foam of the Daze." (L'écume des jours).

2006-08-26T19:10:00.000-07:00

The great Charlotte Gainsbourg (the daughter of Serge and Jane Birkin) is putting out a new album. I think officially it is her second album. It's called "5:55" and the lyrics are mostly written by Jarvis Cocker. Nigel Godrich, who is famous for his work with Radiohead and the recent Paul McCartney and Thom Yorke albums, produced the album.

There's an interview here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2324778,00.html

2006-08-19T16:16:00.000-07:00

TamTam Books salutes Paul Ruscha. In fact he will be doing a book signing at:

Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90069
310-659-3110

August 24, 2006
7:00 P.M.

I am very fond of Paul Ruscha's book "Full Moon." It's a weird mixture of artbook and memoir. It can remind someone why objects and especially artworks are so important to us funny humans. At this time I will also be doing an interview with Paul for the Book Soup website. But I will let you know when that happens. Meanwhile here are some information regarding Paul Ruscha's book.

Paul Ruscha's Full Moon
by Paul Ruscha
This is a book about the things I like to look at in-and-around my house. Things I like to study from day to day in an attempt to figure out why I am attracted to them; and just what about them has me wanting to be their caretaker? They have become creatures in my personal zoo.
Paul Ruscha’s home is a museum to the compulsions of collecting. Since early childhood he has been incapable of discarding anything and has built a collection out of everything from appliances to corporate detritus: typewriters, toasters, hair dryers, cameras, cocktail shakers, coffee makers, old ink pens, baseball caps, odd pieces of wood, and press-apply stickers which adorn every inch of the cabinets in his overcrowded kitchen. One of the oldest collections is the numbered paper inspection slips that began appearing in the pockets of new items of clothing.
This book is an incomplete and imprecise inventory of Paul Ruscha’s collection, a collection that also includes significant paintings, sculpture and objects accumulated over the years. It also includes texts by Ruscha
explicating the nature of his attachment to the various elements of his collection, as well as reminiscences on the artists whose work he has been collecting.

2006-08-01T23:23:00.000-07:00

Boris Vian and his music... told visually

2006-07-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

A still from the film "Performance." It is a mixture of Mick Jagger and James Fox.

2006-07-22T09:37:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading the new biography on the filmmaker Donald Cammell by Rebecca Umland and Sam Umland and it's a very good book. Cammell is most famous for the film "Performance," which has to be one of the great cinema works that came out of the 60's. These images are just a little tribute to the man's work.

2006-07-21T15:53:00.000-07:00

As you can gather now it is Spring - and alas there's no Boris Vian/Vernon Sullivan's "The Dead All Have The Same Skin." But don't fret it will come out Fall 2006. There were design issues that had to be taken care of, which caused some delay. But the translation by Paul Knobloch is finished and it's a beauty. Besides the main novel there is also a short story by Vian - that reminds me of Ballard's "Crash" as well a rant by Boris regarding the affairs of "I Spit on Your Graves." Plus an introduction by Marc Lapprand. It will be beautifully designed by the legendary Tom Recchion. Meanwhile here are the covers of the French edtion to look at while we work.

2006-07-11T20:45:00.000-07:00

The original and great Syd Barrett passed away last Friday. In my life time, Syd Barrett was an important figure to my culture and basically music enjoyment. For sure his solo work opened up my ears - and they're still open. Merci Syd Barrett!

2006-07-03T22:58:00.000-07:00

As usual there is a fascinating article in today's Guardian UK. It seems the pop music writer Jon Savage has just put together a collection of 'gay' pop songs from the 60's to the 70's - including a legendary Joe Meek b-side. The recording sounds like a must. Here's the article:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1812122,00.html

2006-06-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

The following images are from Charles Belmont's film "L'écume des jours," a film made in 1968 and based on the Boris Vian novel (Foam of the Daze):

2006-06-24T22:46:00.000-07:00

Nathan Lee in today's New York Times review Jean-Luc Godard's show at the Centre Pompidou.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/movies/25lee.html?pagewanted=all

2006-06-18T18:25:00.000-07:00

The following releases are a must for the TamTam Books lover. They are:

This is no surprise to those who visit my blog - but what can I say I love this album. Choosing the best Sparks album is like choosing your favorite finger on your left hand - it's pointless! But nevertheless this has to be one of their masterpieces. It is rare for a band that has been going on for over 30 years to come up with such 'fresh' and magnificent work.

Scott Walker's "The Drift" is a must. You have to hear it from the beginning to the end at least once in your life. I am interested in what Scott's fellow artists would think of this album. For sure it will make everything sound pale and sissy like compared to Walker's vision of hell (with humor thrown in). This album is not dark, it's pitch black with only the darkest humor showing up at the surface. It's a masterpiece, and the lyrics maybe the best poetry I read in the 21st Century so far. Do I sound over-the-top? Will give this album a listen and be prepared to hear things on a different plane and texture.

Patrick Hamilton's "Hangover Square" is finally back in print. My friend (thank you Sarah!) gave me a copy of this book about five years ago and I think she changed my life for the better. Of course saying that this is another dark world - which is London via the war years. Dark danky pubs with hopeless people and then on top of that you have a psycho killer about to be born in this horrid world. Hamilton is totally underrated and is totally a great writer. The closest writer I can compare him with is Patricia Highsmith. The one thing that he has though is his descriptive skills in talking about a city landscape that is both lonely and horrifying. Amazing book.

The U.K. has finally put out Louis Feuillade's masterpiece "Fantomas" on DVD. How many ways can I say that this is a perfect film and Fantomas is one of the great characters (or is it image, since he may or may not exist) in literature and film. I wrote about this film in an earlier blog. In a nutshell, I think about Feuillade and Fantomas everyday. For the past ten years or so. Obsession is never this sweet.

2006-06-14T23:28:00.000-07:00

Believe me this is a rare find on EBay. It is an issue of Bizarre, which was a French art/literary journal from the 60's. This particular edition featured Boris Vian. In fact every page is Vian. The text is in French, but what is great are the photographs throughout the journal. A good friend of mine gave me a copy. You reader, should go for it. Check it out at : http://tinyurl.com/qsddh

2006-06-10T23:03:00.000-07:00

Ebay right now has the original "English" copy of "I Shall Spit on Your Graves" for sale right now. This is THE source for my edition of "I Spit on Your Graves." This is a very hard copy to get a hold of - so I strongly suggest that those who are interested - they should go for it! And no, I don't know the person who put this book up nor do I get any money from this sale. Nevertheless it is a must for the ultimate Vian collection. Get it!!

2006-05-29T01:03:00.000-07:00

2006-05-28T23:29:00.000-07:00

The above stills are from Yukio Mishima's 1966 Film "Yukoku (Patriotism). The film just came out in Japan on DVD. It's a great piece of work - and of course it has additional meaning with respect to Mishima's suicide. Nevertheless check out the great Donald Richie's article on the DVD and it's bonuses. It's a must have!

Read the article at: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20060521dr.html

2006-05-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

Photograh by Jean-Philippe Charbon

Here's a fascinating interview! It is in today's Guradian, and the it is an interview with Juliette Gréco about her love for Miles Davis. What a couple!

You can read it here: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1782525,00.html

But also I am reprinting the entire piece:

'Sartre asked Miles why we weren't married. He said he loved me too much to make me unhappy'

Miles Davis was just 22 when he met the actor, and later singer, Juliette Greco. In the week he would have turned 80, she celebrates their love affair

Thursday May 25, 2006
The Guardian

'He was a real Giacometti, with a face of great beauty' ... Miles Davis

Like every young person of my generation, I immersed myself in jazz. I met the greatest musicians - Charlie Parker, the Modern Jazz Quartet, most often at the Club Saint-Germain with Sacha Distel, and Dizzy Gillespie when he came to Tabou. All that happened over the space of two or three years, a mythical period that today feels as though it lasted 20 years. They arrived after the war, we welcomed them, we listened to them fervently, we loved them, and in a way they transformed our ideas about what jazz was - what we already knew, we'd picked up almost by accident. During the Occupation, if you tried to listen to jazz, you risked punishment. So we listened to The Lambeth Walk - for us, the ultimate trip. But above all there was Django Reinhardt, again someone who had arrived from another world.

Article continues

I always loved it when I was taken to places where I could learn things. I was like a little sister to [the writer and musician] Boris Vian, who was very protective towards me. The first time Miles Davis came to Paris, it was at the Pleyel, a crumbling place. Recently, on a plane, I bumped into the man who ran the Pleyel and he said, "It's all changed, come and have a look." I was touched; it was very sweet. For it was there that I first met Miles, at his first concert in Paris.
There weren't any seats left - and anyway I wouldn't have been able to pay for one - so I was taken to watch from the wings by Michelle Vian, Boris's wife, who was looking after me. And there I caught a glimpse of Miles, in profile: a real Giacometti, with a face of great beauty. I'm not even talking about the genius of the man: you didn't have to be a scholar or a specialist in jazz to be struck by him. There was such an unusual harmony between the man, the instrument and the sound - it was pretty shattering. Miles was a spectacle in himself: he always dressed in a very classic way, not the way he dressed later on.

So I met this man, who was very young, as I was. We went out for dinner in a group, with people I didn't know. And there it was. I didn't speak English, he didn't speak French. I haven't a clue how we managed. The miracle of love.

I wasn't tempted to sing with Miles: why try to do badly, or less well, something that other people do so well? I'm not going to start singing jazz standards: it's not in my blood or my culture. Mind you, I have a deep affection and huge admiration for Ella Fitzgerald and a few others.

Miles didn't hear me sing until much later in New York, at the Waldorf-Astoria. Before that, to him, I was just me, a girl with a strange face, and it was me he loved, which made me happy. At that point I'd had only very limited success as an actress. I was becoming famous without really having done anything, which is a very uncomfortable position. I didn't talk much, only when I needed to ask questions - about existentialism, about things I'd read about without really understanding. One day [the philosopher] Maurice Merleau-Ponty spoke to me. He must have liked my face, because he invited me to dinner. We went dancing and he answered all my questions, which was magical. I was all curiosity but I felt I didn't have anything to give in return; I was at that age where all one does is take.

I'd heard of people like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir when I was 14 or 15, through my sister who was a student, but I couldn't ever have imagined that one day I'd be close to them. Sartre said to Miles, "Why don't you and Juliette get married?" Miles said, "Because I love her too much to make her unhappy." It wasn't a matter of him being unfaithful or behaving like a Don Juan; it was simply a question of colour. If he'd taken me back to America with him, I would have been called names.

Years later at the Waldorf in New York, where I had a very nice suite, I invited Miles to dinner. The face of the maitre d'hotel when he came in was indescribable. After two hours, the food was more or less thrown in our faces. The meal was long and painful, and then he left.

At four o'clock in the morning I got a call from Miles, who was in tears. "I couldn't come by myself," he said. "I don't ever want to see you again here, in a country where this kind of relationship is impossible." I suddenly understood that I'd made a terrible mistake, from which came a strange feeling of humiliation that I'll never forget. In America his colour was made blatantly obvious to me, whereas in Paris I didn't even notice that he was black.

Between Miles and me there was a great love affair, the kind you'd want everybody to experience. Throughout our lives, we were never lost to each other. Whenever he could, he would leave messages for me in the places I travelled in Europe: "I was here, you weren't."

He came to see me at my house a few months before he died. He was sitting in the drawing room and at one point I went to the verandah to look at the garden. I heard his devilish laugh. I asked him what had provoked it. "No matter where I was," he said, "in whatever corner of the world, looking at that back, I'd know it was you."

· Interview by Philippe Carles; translation by Richard Williams.

2006-05-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

TamTam Books salutes another grand publisher Ugly Duckling Presse for publishing and translating (by Michael Kasper) Gabriel Pomerand’s “Saint Ghetto of the Loans. It is a fantastic piece that mixes the everyday life of Saint Germain-des-Prés in a book length poem. Vian of course is mentioned. It is a great companion to the book I co-edited, ‘Manual of Saint Germain des Prés.”

I have footage of Pomerand reciting his Lettrist poetry – and it is pretty remarkable.

This is a painting by Pomerand.

This is some of the illustrations that are in the book. Do get it!

2006-05-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Caption: Scott Walker 1969
Byline: Chris walter
Credit: Chris Walter/Photofeatures

There is a fascinating unedited interview from Wire Magazine with Scott Walker. Do read it! You can find the interview at this address: http://tinyurl.com/qxl29

2006-05-04T23:27:00.000-07:00

TamTam Books totally approve of this great music artist. Scott Walker is interviewed in today's Guardian:

http://tinyurl.com/gx28g

2006-05-03T19:47:00.000-07:00

I found this reveiw from the New York Times. We're going to have to see it at the Rialto Theater! Is the theater still there?

Published: June 29, 1963

"I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE," the French melodrama that went on view yesterday at the Rialto, provides a revealing illustration of some foreign misconceptions of America.

This curious film, which caused a minor scandal for its anti-American bias when it opened in Paris some years ago, has been equipped with an inaudible dubbed soundtrack and lurid advertising for its appearance on local screens. It seems unlikely to satisfy 42d Street audiences, since, viewed simply as sex melodrama, it is conventional and mild.

On other levels, however, the film is inadvertently absorbing. For Michael Gast, the director, has placed his setting in the American South — in a region populated by elderly aristocrats attended by parasol-carrying Negro footmen in sculptured gardens, while leather-jacketed motorcycle hoodlums play games with homemade electric chairs in an ice-cream parlor next door.

The wild locale is no more improbable than the peculiar plot, which requires Christian Marquand, as a handsome and mysterious bookstore clerk, to wreak havoc among an assortment of class-conscious local belles.

Before Mr. Marquand is machine-gunned by policemen when attempting to cross the Mason-Dixon line, he is revealed to be a Negro seeking revenge for the lynching of his brother, who had dared to love an upper-class Southern girl.

As social propaganda, the film is so absurd as to appear laughable to Americans — though the thought of a foreign audience's reaction is sobering.

The Cast
I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, screenplay by Boris Vians and Jacques Dopagne, from a story by Mr. Vians; directed by Michael Gast; distributed by Audubon Films. At the Rialto Theater, Broadway and 42d Street. Running time: 100 minutes.
Joe Grant . . . . . Christian Marquand
Lizabeth Shannon . . . . . Antonella Lualdi
Stan Walker . . . . . Paul Guers
Chandley . . . . . Fernand Ledoux
Elmer . . . . . Jean Sorel
Don . . . . . Daniel Couchy
Sylvia Shannon . . . . . Renate Ewert

2006-04-25T22:03:00.000-07:00

Fascinating article in today's Guardian about the fantastic Georges Bataille. There seems to be a show opening up in London regarding him and his publication. Do read: http://tinyurl.com/rngmq

2006-04-22T16:34:00.000-07:00

2006-04-22T16:29:00.000-07:00

Alida Valli RIP

2006-04-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

TamTam Books is very happy to announce that we just purchased the world English rights to publish and translate “Serge Gainsbourg” by Gilles Verlant.

This promise to be biggest and the most up-to-date biography on the great pop artist, author and provocateur Serge Gainsbourg. 762 pages (at least) and rare photos as well. Paul Knobloch will be translating the biography, and with his knowledge and love for Gainsbourg, it will surely be a match-up from heaven (or hell if you prefer).

And with my dear friends from the French Publisher's Agency, here's their P.R. on the book:
Serge Gainsbourg
by Gilles Verlant

Albin Michel, 2000
762 pages.

ISBN : 2-226-12060-2
EAN : 9782226120601

Rights sold to Tam Tam Books

The provocative life of French pop icon Serge Gainsbourg has never before been told in its entirety in English. But now, with the recent publication in France of this exhaustive biography, English-language rights are finally available. Perhaps best known in this country for his 1969 erotic duet with Jane Berkin, "Je t'aime…Moi non plus," Gainsbourg boasted a litany of sacrileges that even shocked the French. To name just a few:
He appeared half-naked with his 14-year-old daughter singing a song about incest; burned a 500-franc note on national television; made a reggae version of "La Marseillaise"; wrote an entire novel about a farting artist ("Evguenie Sokolov," TamTam Books); and infuriated Whitney Houston when he told her he wanted to fuck her on national television. A rogue and a press hound, Gainsbourg wrote songs and had affairs with the most beautiful women in France. His romance with Brigitte Bardot caused a scandal that made headlines for months.
But Gainsbourg was much more than just a provocateur. His enormous impact on French music is undeniable, and even many of his admirers found his life objectionable.
Serge Gainsbourg is illustrated with unforgettable photographs. It includes an exhaustive index, as well as a filmography and a discography.

About Gilles Verlant :
Gilles Verlant is a journalist, author of a Gainsbourg Photo-biography (Albin Michel) and the Encyclopédie de la chanson française (Hors Collection). He is also the producer of special events on the French channel Canal Plus ("Nuit Gainsbourg", "Nuit Johnny Halliday"...)

For updates on this and other TamTam news, do check out the TamTam website at http://www.tamtambooks.com

as well as MySpace. Address is http://www.myspace.com/tamtambooks

Also on another note, I keep a personal blog at http://blog.myspace.com/tamtambooks

2006-04-14T20:33:00.000-07:00

Nick Kent is one of my favorite 'music' journalists from the punk days. He wrote this fascinating piece in today's Guardian about serving on the same film festival jury as Serge Gainsbourg and exposes a darker side to the great artist.

Also I have big news regarding a Serge Gainsbourg project. More wil come later.

Here's the link to the Guardian article : http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1754146,00.html

2006-04-14T12:22:00.000-07:00

The above illustration is the cover for the new Scott Walker album 'Drift.' Reports say that this album makes 'Tilt' sound like early Walker Brothers. I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to hearing this album!

The fact that one has to wait every ten years to hear a new release from this unique and wonderful artist makes watching nature going through its change of seasons, moving of locations, deaths, births, and the regular run of your favorite situation television show almost meaningless. What we are all doing is waiting for the Scott release. The release date is in May. It would be great if everyone bought that album on its released date, stay home from work, and just play the album. Wouldn't that be fantastic? A whole day of not workng, but listening to the new Scott Walker album. Ok, anyone here wants to join me?

2006-04-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

Although those who read this blog, know my obsessions with pop French and British culture from the 40's to the 60's, I also have a passion for Japan via early to mid 20th Century. "Astro Boy" strikes as a perfect example of what Japan was going through after the war. They just released a DVD package of the early Astro Boy cartoons. Some of these early anime episodes were considered lost or destroyed, so it's nice to see this package here as an example of Osamu Tezuka's genius at work.

If you ever go to Osaka or planning to go, I strongly recommend the Tezuka Museum. It is a fantastic place, where the Museum is actually an amine rocket. It's really really beautiful.

2006-04-07T21:14:00.000-07:00

I just purchased the Babyshambles album. It's great. I don't fully understand why the media doesn't like this album. Surely it is not because he is a bit of a Scandal and the Fashion Industry loves him? The song "Fuck Forever" is fantastic. To be critical the album is a bit long, but there are some wonderful music on the disk. Buy it!

2006-04-05T20:30:00.000-07:00

As usual, the Guardian did a fantastic obit. Pitney really made fantastic records. Do check them out. Here's the link to the obit on the Guardian: http://tinyurl.com/z42d7

2006-04-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

The great Gene Pitney. Never dies!

2006-03-25T17:54:00.000-08:00

At last I found a copy of Chantal Goya's "les années 60." I do have the soundtrack of "Masculin Féminin" but I really wanted this CD collection for a long time now.

It was worth the wait. It's awesome. It's a form of paradise where I feel dirty just by entering its world. I understand now that she is a big entertainer in the little kiddies world. I think that's fine. But this is the world (her 60's work) where I belong.

2006-03-23T19:54:00.000-08:00

Although I like to think Serge Gainsbourg as an Island, he seemed to invite a lot of other artists to his Island. When I was in Paris two weeks I picked up “Mr. Melody,” which is a 4 CD Box set that focuses on his work with other singers.

Ok, first of all the package and the book that comes with it is super fantastic. A lot of photographs I haven’t seen before – and it gives a great discography on the songs that are on the box set.

The music – it’s endless! It is like being in a great candy store – and you just want to sample every piece of candy. Besides the usual co-workers (Birkin, Dutronc, his daughter) we also get a rare super recording of pre-Velvet Underground Nico doing a Gainsbourg tune – as well as Catherine Deneuve, who I think made a fantastic album with M. Gainsbourg. Also a record that I have been looking for in Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo – and god knows where else – Bambou’s versions of “Lulu. She was Gainsbourg’s last muse. There are other surprises like a good candy store!

The box set does it job by showing the wide perspective and pure music genius of Gainsbourg. I highly recommend getting the box set even if you do have some of the songs.

2006-03-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

Listening to the new Sparks album “Hello Young Lovers.” It’s incredible. The songs are so beautiful, complex, insane, and again & again expose themselves to the world that superb taste matters. It is probably the most radical piece of work from a pop band in the 21st Century.

2006-03-18T10:17:00.000-08:00

Good for English readers everywhere, but bad for me personally is the new Dover edition of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s “Fantômas.” Good is that this is a major 20th Century piece of literature that has been way too long out of print. The bad is that I wanted to publish this book for a long time now. So sadly I am disappointed that this is not a TamTam Books edition.

But on the other hand it is good that this book is coming out (later this month) and it has an introduction by Robin Walz, who wrote the amazing “Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris.” Walz is an expert on French crime fiction, and he is the perfect match with respect to him writing an introduction to ‘Fantômas.”

But still… I am sad that this is not a TamTam Books production. Drats!

2006-03-18T08:18:00.000-08:00

A nice, but not too detailed, article in today's Los Angeles Times about Jazz great Johnny Griffin. He talks about his old days in Paris.

http://tinyurl.com/kyej2

2006-03-11T10:58:00.000-08:00

But then I was for some reason surprised to find Gainsboug's grave site. When I was there I found a group of older people around his site. I suspect that they knew him.

There were heads of cabbage placed on his grave site due that his nick-name was Cabbage Head. I regret that I didn't take my edition of 'Evguenie Sokolov' and placed it on his grave. Well, next time.... If there is a next time!

2006-03-11T10:48:00.000-08:00

Robert Desnos

Jacques Demy

Maurice Leblanc (totally underrated crime writer)

Jean Seberg

Delphine Seyrig

2006-03-11T10:37:00.000-08:00

I went to Cimetiere de Montparnasse to pay my respects to Charles Baudelaire, but ended up totally lost among the grave sites.

Nevertheless via the power of the internet: (www.findagrave.com) I found some photographs of grave sites of some of my favorite people:

Charles Baudelaire

Henri Langlois

Julio Cortazar

Joris-Karl Huysmans

2006-03-10T12:18:00.000-08:00

A classic 60's Ye-Ye singer

On my recent trip to Paris I discovered Lucky Blondo.

Right now I am listening to the Twistin' the Rock best of Lucky Blondo collection. I like the music. In ways he reminds me of Gillian Hill - another small obsession of mine.

I know nothing about him. But who knows, there maybe a TamTam Book on him.

2006-03-10T11:08:00.000-08:00

If you are in Paris within the next five months check out the "Los Angeles 1955-1985" exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. It's great! It has all the usual suspects : Dennis Hopper, David Hockney, Alexis Smith, Ed Moses, Mike Kelley, Kenneth Anger, George Herms, Gronk, and of course my Dad Wallace Berman. There are 60 artists in the show altogether. What I have seen of the catalogue it looks great. I am hoping that there will be future shows in Paris and other locations in Europe with respect to the art that was produced in Los Angeles.

As one can gather there is not one school of thought or a particular aesthetic - but it was (and still is) a community of artists that bounced off each other and with the rest of the world. I think this is an important show for the Centre Pompidou and Paris. Also I am super pleased with the installment of my Dad's work. You can see the "Semina" film as well! It is a short piece of work, but in my mind it is Wallace's masterpiece. But hey, you decide!

The above photograph is by Dennis Hopper - and it is the poster image for the exhibition. The show is up till July 17

2006-03-10T10:53:00.000-08:00

From the airport in Paris I picked up this CD "Monsieur Gainsbourg." It's good! It features Franz Ferdinand (with Jane Birkin), Jarvis Cocker, Portishead, Tricky, Marianne Faithful and others performing Gainsbourg songs in English.

The British band The Rakes do a London version of "Le poinçonneur des Lilas." Interesting translation!

But this is a must-have for the Gainsbourg fan. So get it!

2006-02-24T20:57:00.000-08:00

Fantomas, My Love
by Tosh Berman
(c) 1995

The Surrealist Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel had transmitted that he to a great extent, preferred Louis Feuillade's Fantomas serial to any of the so-called avant-garde films made at the same interval during the early Twentieth Century. Bunuel perceived the serial as an art form without the useless baggage of art attached to it.

French filmmaker Alain Resnais was quoted as saying "Feuillade is my god. I had always been a fan of the Fantomas dime thriller novels, but when I finally saw the films at the Cinematheque in 1944, I learned from him how the fantastic could be more easily and effectively created in a natural exterior than in a studio. Feuillade's cinema is very close to dreams and is therefore perhaps the most realistic kind of all, paradoxical as this may sound."

This infatuation for the physical with an additional mixture of dreams illuminates the Surrealists love for Louis Feuillade and his cinematic version of Fantomas (1913-1914). Feuillade's blend of natural exteriors and interiors with the dreamlike conspiracies comprise an inner--world, where anything can happen at any place. What seems to be the axiom is usually just an illusion. Images which seem so natural are truthfully revelations that are disturbing to the subconscious.

Ever since my father's unexpected death in a car accident, non-reality and what I feel is fundamental has become an overheated tango dance. Persons who were close friends become strangers in a matter of hours. The world has changed positions by just one incident. When I saw one segment of the five-part serial, Juve Contre Fantomas, the film had expressed my horror and fascination with images and people, and how they can mutate mysteriously into another disguise.

The fictional character of Fantomas represents the sleeping evil which rests in our subconscious, ready to strike at a moment's notice. Obviously whenever there is a misdeed somewhere on this world, Fantomas is behind the hideous crime. A majority of the public is not aware of this fact, except for the brilliant detective from the Paris police, Juve. Only he alone can stop evil, better known in his human form as Fantomas! As a master detective, Juve recognizes that Fantomas attacks from within: meaning he detects that Fantomas exists inside the subconscious -- particularly Juve's.

Here we find the eternal theme of two brilliant (and in most cases, indifferent from the rest of society) individuals fighting for the control of...actually control itself. Good and Evil sleeping together in a bed made for sexual passion and when it manifests itself into politics - the World explodes!

In the film series and books by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, Fantomas' victims are usually people in high society. There is an undercurrent cast of political terrorism in Fantomas' methods - kidnapping, pillaging, and killing members of the upper-class. The subject of control is very strong in the series, and the question that repeatedly comes up is: who is in supremacy, Juve (good) or Fantomas (evil)?

One wonders if Feuillade's version of Fantomas is not a politically motivated. One furthermore imagines why Fantomas and his gang only rob and murder victims placed in high society. Fantomas does not seem to be a man (spirit?) involved with politics of thought, but politics of consciousness. Fantomas steals and kills - therefore he exists!

For all we know his victims may be the living dead; perhaps only the brilliance of police inspector Juve and Fantomas can endure and the flesh (which Fantomas and Juve discard like old clothes, when in disguise) is an illusion when placed in a "real" ambiance.

Feuillade played with the real and unreal in natural settings in all of his serials. The Surrealists were the first ones to notice this quality in his work, and afterward, an even stronger influence appeared in the French new-wave films by Godard, Franju, and Resnais. There is a joy of illogical happenings in his films, which only a handful of filmmakers play with. Bunuel and Godard also show us that logic becomes boring after a while.

In writing about the Fantomas texts, the magnificent poet and critic of the nineteen-teens, Guillaume Apollinaire has been quoted as saying "that extraordinary novel, full of life and imagination...from the imaginative standpoint, Fantomas is one of the richest works that exist." The wild and characteristic vision of Surrealism which is in the novel and films were highly appreciated by the artists of that time. Besides Apollinaire, there were the poets Robert Desnos, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and Blaise Cendrars; the painters Picasso, Juan Gris, and Magritte. All of them were fans who used the resource that is Fantomas, for their own work.

All of these artists realized the dreamlike, irrational qualities of the Fantomas (film and book) series. Not the paint-by-numbers school of art that is currently being produced in a laboratory known as a classroom, but in that mysterious interval when the conscious becomes the subconscious. As art works are being hatched in this phantom transition, so are in a sense - the crimes of Fantomas.

There is a dauntless wild abandon when entangled with crime and art. The mad impulse to move from the so-called norm into another realm - is of course, an intoxicating act of creation. In this atmosphere, Fantomas is just as creative and mad as Antonin Artaud and Marquis de Sade. Both of these artists investigated their imagination and sanity to compose a weapon with words so as to antagonize society. Fantomas is a liteary creation used for the same purpose. Intentionally, the Fantomas film and books were produced only for amusement sake, but there are unmistakably undercurrents of dread, fear, anxiety, and perverse sexuality.

In Juve Contre Fantomas there are scenes which allude to bondage and S&M. In one particular scene Juve establishes a trap for Fantomas in his apartment. To protect himself from the assassin, Juve wears a truly bizarre garment consisting of spikes around his waist and arms. He then lingers for him in his own bed.

Fantomas also has a Rasputin charm over women. In one scene he is entertaining a pair of women at a posh restaurant. He also "dominates" a young lady, who is totally devoted to him and his cause. Another female is a love slave, awaiting at a large house for her master (usually in disguise) to appear. On the other hand, Juve seems to have no time for pleasure. His only passion is to catch Fantomas...And as I mentioned earlier, perhaps Juve wants to restrain Fantomas in his own bed!

The nature or lack of character is interesting, in that the "sexual" quality of Fantomas becomes stronger owing to the scarcity of a concrete identity. He is a master of disguises because of his line of work, but one wonder if this is not tied to his sexual identity. Each character he portrays is draped in fetishism. Juve is also a master of disguises, and likewise savors the changes his body makes.

Watching the film one sees a duel to make and relinquish as many identities as possible. In the beginning montage of Juve Contre Fantomas, each character (Juve & Fantomas) displays all the disguises that they will wear in the film. By the end of the film one sees identity being adjusted as simply as changing a soiled shirt. In most modern works of art, the need of identity or conscience is a source for the "lost man or woman." One thinks of Oscar Wilde's "Portrait of Doran Gray" or Luigi Pirandello's underrated novel, "The Late Mattia Pascal" which depicts the fall of one who is seduced into the conflict of good and evil. On the other hand, Feuillade/Fantomas relishes the chance to throw conscience out the window. The film is exhilarating in its love for anarchy, bondage, perverse sexuality, political consciousness and, more importantly, aesthetic revolution. Unintentionally, (which is the main ingredient for art-making) the film and novel are an inventive terrorist attack on the fear and mores of the bourgeoisie.

During the actual filming, Feuillade never used a shooting script. Andre Bazin - the film critic and theorist - wrote that "Feuillade had no idea what would happen next, and filmed step-by-step as the morning's inspiration came." The early pioneers of cinema all worked this way; it was not till the studios insisted on ideas put on paper for financial verification that things changed. Currently, Jean Luc-Godard is perhaps the only mainstream filmmaker who does not use a script, while shooting a film.

This also suggests that early cinema-making was a Surrealist technique in making art. Along with Feuillade, one thinks of the other "native" Surrealists such as Mack Sennett and Buster Keaton. Although their works were dissimilar, they contributed a suspicion on what is real and does it matter. It was not important to them to show "logic" moving from one scene to another. The early filmmakers shared a common dream occurrence where anything was allowed.

In the conclusion of "Juve Contre Fantomas" there is the magnificent image of Fantomas, dressed fully in black with a hood over his face, raising his arms in characteristic joy as he explodes the house with what he thinks is Juve still inside the structure. This is a spectacular moment and one wonders how many in the audience are thrilled with this commitment to artistic destruction? In certainty, since this was the end of the second segment out of five in the series, it ends with a large question mark (?) on the screen. This of course may center on what will happen in the ensuing segment...or is it a straightforward question to the conscientiousness of the public out there watching the film?

Tosh Berman
TamTam Books

2006-02-21T08:23:00.000-08:00

This is my friend Oscar on Rue Boris Vian.

2006-02-18T22:47:00.000-08:00

Check out this website: http://www.youtube.com/index

On this site are a lot of Serge Gainsbourg videos - including the legendary Whitney Houston love fest that took place on live French TV. Also included is the famous "Lemon Incest' music video with Gainsbourg and his daughter. Fantastic video! Incredible song. Really! Once you get to the menu, just write 'Serge Gainsbourg' and then send. Really!

2006-02-18T10:15:00.000-08:00

Homage to someone I miss a lot. Wallace Berman.

2006-02-17T16:18:00.000-08:00

But of all the maps of Paris I have seen, I think this one is the most beautiful. I think this is from 1789. I am not sure. Dates are not that important to me. What's important is connecting to the past with whatever is in front of me.

2006-02-17T16:16:00.000-08:00

For my journey to Saint Germain-des-Prés, I will be using this map.

2006-02-17T16:09:00.000-08:00

I will be going to Paris within a couple of weeks. One thing I am going to do is walk around Paris with a map. But not a new map. I plan to wonder around with a 1575 map of Paris as well as as map from 1779. If I really need to locate something contemporary then I will use a map from 1960. The above maps are what I am going to use for this particular trip.

2006-02-16T20:11:00.000-08:00

A nice little piece on the greatest man in the 20th Century Buster Keaton in today's Guardian U.K.
You can read it here by the link down below.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1711408,00.html

2006-02-14T08:21:00.000-08:00

The Sparks remix of Morrissey's 'Suedehead' is a must! I found it via I-Tunes, but for your traditional types you can get it on the album "Future Retro."

It's a great piece because I think it exposes the relationship (artistically speaking) between the two artists. Ron and Russell Mael tear into the song as if they were Picasso tearing into an image in front of his canvas. Get it!

2006-02-11T11:42:00.000-08:00

I have been often asked “why Boris Vian and TamTam Books?” Not really a simple yes and no type of answer can be given. I feel that my whole life somehow came to this point where I had to do these books.

Pop French Culture (I can’t think of a better term at the moment) was and is a major presence in my entire life. The first film I have ever seen was Roger Vadim’s “And God Created Woman.” My Father had to fight tooth, nail, and have a fit in front of the movie theater to let me in to see that film with him. The wise theater manager realized that this would be the beginning of the end for me – but hey “he’s not my kid!”

That and the books that were in my parent’s bookshelf as well as on the tables, floor, and maybe even outside the yard – had a major influence on me. Of course I was too young to read, but nevertheless the design of the book had and still has of course, a strong hold over me. It is the perfect device and can never be replaced. Neither by computer, e-books, etc. The book is a combination of style, presence, and stature.

Which reminds me that I was on the bus about a week ago and a very attractive girl was reading Alberto Moravia’s novel “Contempt.” The awesome discovery of secretly watching a beautiful girl reading “Contempt” was that her edition was a cheap paperback from the 60’s and a tie-in to the Godard film. Once I noticed that it became a peculiar erotic moment. So there is that aspect in what I do because I feel books are erotic by their nature and design. The perfect book with the perfect looking person equals erotic impulses.

About ten years ago everything became clear when I found Vian’s “I Spit on Your Grave” at the Los Angeles Downtown Library. Before that, Lun*na my wife introduced me to the “presence” of Boris Vian in Tokyo. She mentioned that my short stories at the time reminded her of Vian’s writings. So, I kept this man’s name in the filing cabinet that is located somewhere in my brain.

“I Spit on Your Graves” opened up the relationship between American and French popular culture for me. It was like someone threw cold water in my face and said, “Get to work moron!” The next day I started TamTam Books.

2006-02-07T22:31:00.000-08:00

This is too good. In my life time.... I didn't think it was possible. The Criterion Collection is putting out a DVD version of Louis Malle's "Elebator to the Gallows." Boris Vian was the A&R for the Miles Davis recording sessions for the soundtrack. The extra stuff includes Davis in the recording studio. I mean....really this is beyond life itself. Have you seen the film? It's great! The cover of the DVD package is above. Coming out in April!

2006-02-05T23:20:00.000-08:00

Nic Cohn is the Pinball Wizard according to Pete Townsend - in fact he based his song on Cohn's obsession with pinball. Not only that, but Mr. Cohn wrote the article that the film "Saturday Night Fever" is based on. Of course, the story is reported to be made up and based on Nic's old Mod days. His 'Rock Dreams' is a rock classic. But I strongly suggest one to get his "Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom" which is the history of rock n' roll according to Nic Cohn. Anyway this is his top ten favorite rock n' roll books. He's not a manager like the above, but he could have been. Fantastic!

1. Hellfire by Nick Tosches
A perfect match of writer and subject. Tosches's overwrought prose and boundless fascination with sin (the wages of) finds its ultimate exemplar in Jerry Lee Lewis. This isn't so much "warts and all," as "all warts, all the time." A top-class wallow.

2. Elvis in the Twilight of Memory by June Juanico
June and Elvis were teenage sweethearts and spent an idyllic summer together in Biloxi, Mississippi - the last summer that Presley would enjoy as a (relatively) normal citizen. Juanico's remembrance isn't writerly, thank God, but thoughtful, evocative, and possessed of a genuine innocence.

3. Unbelievable: The Life, Death and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G. by Cheo Hodari Coker
A fan's choice, pure and simple. I love Biggie Smalls, and this is chapter and verse on him, in all his oversized glory.

4. Take It Like A Man by Boy George
The title isn't the only great thing here. George O'Dowd's memoirs are witty, as one might expect, but also touching and, for the most part, unblinkingly honest (the one exception is the section in which he tries to fudge the implications of testifying against his drug dealer).

5. The Life and Times of Little Richard by Charles White
I speed-read this once while drunk and later thought I must have imagined it. But no - it really is the most jaw-droppingly outrageous of all rock memoirs.

6. Yes Yes Y'All: An Oral History Of Hip-Hop's First Decade by Jim Fricke, Charlie Ahearn and Nelson George
A motherlode (or muthalode) of Old Skool nostalgia. Here come DJ Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Fab 5 Freddy, and the other great originators. The text is fine, and the visuals are superb.

7. Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs by John Lydon
From Mick Jagger to Marilyn Manson, the one thing that all rock antichrists have had in common is that they're panto dames at heart. Rotten is Exhibit A - bright, hilarious, bloody-minded, and wildly camp. Picture a punk Dame Edna.

8. X-Ray by Ray Davies
As a writer, Davies possesses the same off-centre charm that he brought to his classic songs with the Kinks. Many rock memoirs are more sensational, none more endearing.

9. Clubland, by Frank Owen
A wonderfully trashy whirl through the underbelly of New York club life in the 1990s, fuelled by all the bad stuff one could hope for, and more. Humans don't half stink at times, mum.

10. The Autobiography of PJ Proby (unpublished)
A monumental, messianic sprawl of a book, over 800 pages of typescript, many of them fantastic. Publisher wanted; must be dauntless.

2006-02-05T23:10:00.000-08:00

Simon Napier-Bell has to be one of the great Rock n' Roll memorist in the world. He managed Marc Bolan, Yardbirds, Japan and of course Wham! His last book "I'm Coming to Take You To Lunch" is hysterical. It is his story in how he got Wham! to play in China. Very much recommended!

This is his top ten rock n' roll books"

1. Rock and the Pop Narcotic by Joe Carducci
Joe Carducci loves rock and disapproves of pop, dance, soul and almost every other type of popular music. I disagree with nearly everything he writes, yet he's the most convincingly brilliant propagandist of his own views I've ever read.

2. England's Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock by Jon Savage
Like Simon Frith, Jon usually writes in a style that's too intellectual to be easily understood and therefore requires too much effort for a lazy reader like me. In this book he totally changes his style and writes brilliantly and succinctly.

3. Wonderland Avenue by Danny Sugerman
This is an autobiography of Jim Morrison's protege and one-time manager of The Doors and Iggy Pop. It provides an account of a period in American music that simply cannot be better learnt about or assimilated from any other book.

4. Freakshow: Misadventures in the Counterculture, 1959-1971 by Albert Goldman
Albert Goldman is the king of music writing - provocative, outrageous, indecently politically incorrect. He writes like a Who finale, like Iggy Pop shooting up onstage.

5. Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music by Harry Shapiro
If Harry had only called his own book Black Vinyl White Powder, I'd have been out of a title. This is the REAL book on the subject.

6. Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now by Barry Miles
Probably the most important period in the history of pop, through the eyes of one of its most important musicians, perfectly captured.

7. Altered State by Mathew Collin and John Gregory
The late 80s was the period in which the groundwork was laid for the day when leisure drugs will finally be legalised, yet many adults lived through this period without a clue what was going on all around them.

8. Ball the Wall by Nik Cohn
Nik Cohn is one of the best ever British feature writers on pop music. This is a compilation of his best.

9. Shots From the Hip by Charles Shaar Murray
Charles Murray Shaar is another of the best British writers on pop music, and this is a compilation of HIS best.

10. Hear Me Talkin' to Ya by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff
This is a book compiled from interviews with all the greats of jazz from the 1890s to the late 1950s and it's 'the story of jazz by the men who made it'. It was my bible from the age of 12 until, at the age of 17, I actually went to America and started playing jazz there. It's still the best book ever written about jazz.

2006-02-05T22:59:00.000-08:00

The Guardian UK has this great section called "Top 10" in their book review part of the newspaper. I am obsessed with British pop culture from the 50's through 1995. I don't know if it is a guilty pleasure or not, but I admire creative rock managers and writers. Sometimes, in a boozy mood, I feel that they are more important than the artists that they represent. Here are two managers and one rock n' roll writer. I admire them greatly.

Here's Malcolm McLaren's favorite books:

1. Peter Pan by JM Barrie
The best sex story I ever read.

2. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
The toughest, bitchiest indictment of a dishonest society by the best writer England has ever produced.

3. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
An unforgettable journey into criminal behaviour that takes me back to my own childhood fantasies. A book I read when I was extremely young, and one that justified all my desires to create an environment in which I could truthfully run wild, forever recreating those artful dodgers/Sex Pistols.

4. Christian Dior by Francoise Giroud
Does passion end in fashion? The ultimate luxury item to be browsed over in the bath.

5. The Private Case by Patrick Kearney
The dirtiest list of rudery ever published in England or elsewhere, all its contents available on request to the British Library's chief librarian. Information Hitler's spies were desperate to get their hands on during the war.

6. Out of Control by Kevin Kelly
This is a wonderful, inspirational 21st-century thinking man's guide to the new culture - how machines are becoming more human and how humans, in turn, are becoming more like machines.

7. Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence
The most melancholic and blissfully romantic novel I have recently re-read.

8. Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
The allure of the digital revolution, with all the necessary roadmaps so that you cannot help but fall in love with it.

9. The Story of O by Pauline Reage
A strange and adorable journey into the sublime world of a girl's bad, mad and crazed sexual misadventures. Happiness in slavery; the laughter of genius in the bathroom of our mind.

10. Essays by Gore Vidal
If you want to know how America thinks, read this.

2006-02-04T20:32:00.000-08:00

Two great images of Boris Vian. One is a photograph of him playing with his guitar/harp. Vian's brother sold it to him, when he had to stop playing the trumpet due to health reasons. I actually have a film clip of him playing and singing a song with this guitar. The other is photograph is of him on a stage. I think he did one singing tour in the late 50's.

2006-02-04T20:26:00.000-08:00

I don't know Zizi Jeanmaire's music. But if Michel Legrand did the arrangements and Vian wrote the liner notes - well she's good right? This is the front and back cover of her ep. If you have good eyes you can read Vian's liner note.

2006-02-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

Gréco is the cat of all kitty cats. Here are two early ep covers.

2006-02-04T20:19:00.000-08:00

This is my private (well public) tribute to Phillppe Clay - whose face haunts me. I have seen him twice on DVD. On one DVD he's performing a Boris Vian song. On the other he's singing a duet with Serge Gainsbourg. I don't know anything about him. Yet I feel he's important.

2006-02-01T07:46:00.000-08:00

TamTam Books is behind Pete Doherty. Anyone who writes a song based on Joris-Karl Huysmans' "A Rebours (Against Nature) is ok in my book. To a better health through reading....

2006-01-27T16:34:00.000-08:00

To clear my head of all the junk, I like to have a glass of brandy and listen to Les Fréres Jacques. All vocal, all visual, and somewhere down the line they knew Boris Vian. Sort of an early Beach Boys, but super French sound. And I am not talking about 'Pet Sounds' or 'Smile' Beach Boys -hmm, I guess a Beach Boys sound that is in my head that doesn't exist. Nevertheless here's Les Fréres Jacques!

2006-01-23T07:40:00.000-08:00

The good news in 2006 is that you only need to buy two albums. One of course is the new Sparks album (down below). The other is the brand new Scott Walker album " The Drift." Have there ever been such a perfect name for a Scott album?

The album will be realeased on 4AD and it is coming out in May. Also NME has reported that there will be a documentary on Scott Walker including the making of the album. That film is called "30 Century Man" and it is made by Stephen Kijak

2006-01-20T12:51:00.000-08:00

It is no secret to the world of TamTam Books, that I am a huge fan of the band Sparks. It is with breathless excitement that I am waiting for the release of their new album "Hello Young Lovers." I had the pleasure of hearing the album (only once!) and it's a remarkable piece of work. The album is coming out in the States on March 7. I believe it is coming out in Japan and Europe in Febuary. Stay tuned to the Sparks website. You can get the address on the TamTam site -just look in the links section. Be prepared to be amazed!

2006-01-18T16:23:00.000-08:00

He's hitmaking producer Scott Storch. I don't know his music. But I am totally obsessed with his portrait. He's producing Paris Hilton's album.

2006-01-15T00:28:00.000-08:00

William Klein is the King! If you are in Paris do check out his retrospective. Down below is an article from today's Los Angeles Times:

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ca-klein15jan15,0,1467321.story?coll=cl-home-more-channels
PHOTOGRAPHY

A maverick in focus
A Paris retrospective puts the street-fueled intensity of provocative photographer William Klein in career-spanning context.

By Kristin Hohenadel
Special to The Times

January 15, 2006

A boy with the face of a killer points a gun so close it blurs. The photograph seems to capture what is wrong with today's shocking world. But it is testimony to 1950s New York, and the youngster with the toy gun has been teased by the maverick photographer and filmmaker William Klein — who ran into some aspiring little street punks one day in 1955 while making his first book of photos — "to look tough."

The image is the cover of Klein's latest book, "Retrospective," which has been published in France (Marval) to coincide with what is being billed as the most important retrospective of Klein's work in two decades, at the Pompidou Center through Feb. 20. This wide-ranging show includes documentary and fashion photographs, book covers, film posters and clips and an installation of gigantic painted contact sheets created specifically for the exhibition by the 77-year-old American, who has lived in Paris since 1948.

"Stop it with the boy with the gun," said the gruffly charming Klein at his grand apartment on the Rue de Medicis, with its million-dollar view of the Luxembourg Gardens. He is tall and wears his longish gray hair tousled, a red bandana tied ascot style peeking out from beneath a charcoal-colored cable-knit sweater, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

"Now, I get phone calls all the time, 'We are a magazine in Norway and we're doing a thing on what are our kids coming to...' " he said and laughed the soft laugh that interrupts most of his sentences. "I had maybe 30 or 40 covers that were done with that photograph and the headline 'What are our kids coming to?' "

Klein has always been a controversial, provocative photographer, known for a kamikaze street style that resulted in a widely imitated brand of photography that used wide-angle lenses, movement and blur and has created a dynamic and thrilling body of work over the last half century.

In a review of the show, the Paris daily Libération described him as "an ogre who turns upside down everything he touches." In the 1981 "William Klein: Photographs," John Heilpern wrote: "Among modern photographers, it could be that Klein is the joker in the pack. Without formal training, he set out to discover a way of taking pictures — and invented a prototype."

Klein, who is much better known outside his native country, has always collaborated in the making of his exhibitions — for the Pompidou show, with curators Quentin Bajac and Alain Sayag — blowing up photos and arranging them like movie stills on a wall and otherwise art-directing the experience. "William Klein has conserved his extraordinary vitality," Sayag writes in the text for "Retrospective," "whether he is producing a book, a film, a commercial, it's always the same manner of creating disorder to better get a handle on the ineluctable chaos of our time."

He designs his own books — the photos crowded to the edges of both sides of the spine, not carefully perched in the white space. "I always did my layouts and typography for my books," he said. "But I know really important photographers — Cartier-Bresson, Salgado — who choose the photograph or don't really choose them all, give it to an editor and he puts it together. I think if you don't do the sequencing and everything, it's not your book."

Klein grew up in a poor family on Manhattan's Upper West Side, spent his teenage afternoons hanging out at the Museum of Modern Art, finished City College at 18, and enlisted in the armed forces in 1946. He was sent to Germany, where he did cartoons for Stars and Stripes and oversaw the work of German art historians who were cataloging artwork stolen by the Nazis. "These guys had written books and they knew a million times more than I did, but I was an American soldier and they respected me a lot because I would give them chocolate."

After six months in Germany, Klein was sent to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne on the GI Bill. On his second day in the city, he said, a miracle happened.

"I had read a lot of things about Paris and I had toured around trying to find this place that Gide had talked about or whoever," he said. "I was going down Rue des St. Peres and I saw the most beautiful girl in the world. I said, 'Can you tell me where the Ecole des Beaux-Arts is?' And she started explaining and all I was doing was looking at her. Then I said 'What are you doing tonight?' and we stayed together for more than 50 years. It was really a miracle. She died 2 1/2 months ago. I still can't get over it." The show and the book are dedicated to his late wife, Jeanne, whose naive animal paintings occupy a whole wall of the salon.

In Paris, Klein had a brief spell at the atelier of Fernand Léger; made geometric, abstract, unsentimental paintings; and soon began taking photographs that applied the principles of art but did not aspire to be art photographs.

In 1954, Vogue artistic director Alexander Liberman bankrolled a photographic series on New York, which Klein documented for its poverty and violence and frenetic movement. "His pictures had a violence I'd never experienced in anyone's work," Liberman once said. "He went to extremes, which took a combination of great ego and courage."

Vogue never published the photos, engaging Klein as a fashion photographer instead. No U.S. publisher would touch this frank portrayal of the Big Apple by a native son, but the book became a cult hit when it appeared in 1956 in France. Federico Fellini and Louis Malle invited Klein to work on their films. Books on Rome, Moscow and Tokyo followed. Klein became the first photographer to bring the models to the streets for Vogue and subsequently spent two decades making films that include the classic "Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?" satirizing the media, fashion and television; "Muhammad Ali, the Greatest"; and the anti-Vietnam "Mister Freedom" in 1967. Orson Welles declared his 1958 short, "Broadway by Light," considered the first pop film, "the first film I've ever seen in which color was absolutely necessary."

In 2002, he produced a book on his adopted city, "Paris + Klein." In it are black-and-white photos of the 1968 riots, obese bathing beauties, the annual gay pride parade, Chinese New Year celebrations, Africans protesting for green cards — images that Francophiles may not recognize from their tours of the Crillon and the Louvre. Klein has said that he wanted to show Paris as more than just "a gray city full of white people."

"It wasn't romantic or it was kind of vulgar on purpose," he said of the book. "With all these so-called great photographers — Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau — everything is so hunky-dory." Klein is in many ways the anti-Cartier-Bresson, who he said discouraged an editor from publishing Klein's first book. "Well, it was the exact opposite of what he did — very soft and gray," Klein said. "So I mean I never really had a soft spot for Cartier-Bresson."

But he once had a soft spot for Cartier-Bresson's Paris. "When I was a kid, I dreamt of coming to Paris," Klein said with the practiced spontaneity of one who has recounted a story many times. "I thought I would be a painter, I would come to Paris, I would clap Picasso on the back, and we'd go to the Coupole together. I'd go out with Hemingway, and so on. I had this romantic notion of Paris in the '30s and '20s and when I came here it was the end of the '40s. Paris was kind of dead. It had just been occupied for so long." But he pointed out that Paris, a city that is purported never to change, is constantly reinventing itself.

"I'm from New York, and New York is supposed to be the Big Apple," he said. "What have they done as far as architecture's concerned in the last 30, 40 years? I remember the big hoo-ha about the Seagram Building. Here in Paris, they've done a lot of things — the pyramid, the big arch, the airport. I'm still amazed by the Pompidou — I think it's one of the greatest-looking museums in the world."

And while he may not have hung out with Papa and Pablo, he was neighbors with Man Ray. "He was bitter," Klein said. "He would say, 'Look at this Avedon, he photographs famous people. I photograph people who were unknown and became famous later.' " He recalled seeing a Man Ray show at the Pompidou a few decades ago. "In America they had never done a big show about Man Ray, then 10 years later the Smithsonian did a show and so on and so forth. Man Ray was considered a quirky expatriate, and he wasn't taken seriously. Also the photography market was not a Nasdaq like it is today — everybody is going crazy, and nobody knows how much a photograph is worth. When Man Ray's estate was sold, a photograph of his went for a million dollars."

Klein has been doing a lot of reminiscing on the Pompidou retrospective, and on this afternoon, with the December light failing outside the windows and his cat, Einstein, ("She's a genius; she's my best friend in the world") perched in his lap, he said that for the photographer, a photo on a contact sheet is a Proust's madeleine. "You look at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and you see a shot, suddenly it all comes back — that it was a nice day, you wanted a walk, your feet were hurting, you felt that you would hit on something."

Klein's current project is a marriage of painting and photography that emerged from a film series he made about taking photos. The giant contacts, painted with bold primary colors, are the last stop at the exhibition and the subject of his next book, which will be out this year.

"I had the camera traveling along a strip of contacts," he said, "with the photographer explaining why he was choosing this photograph rather than another; the spectator sees that he doesn't hit the bull's eye with every shot, which people think. Cartier-Bresson said, 'If I take one good photograph a month, I'm fine.' I mean, here's a guy taking photos for 60 years. But when you see a portfolio of his, you always see the same photographs."

The cover of "Retrospective" is painted in red to frame the photo perhaps like the barrel of a gun; and he has included two other smaller frames that work like a video clip.

"You can see in the next shot that the kid's laughing," Klein said of the frame, which now revealed a normal kid horsing around with his friends. "If you really look at the photograph, it's a photograph both of them, and me; I was a little tough kid and I was also a little angelic kid scared of some gang down the block."

But enough about the boy with the gun. "I think the idea of doing a retrospective is good," Klein said, "because a lot of things you put behind you."
I

2006-01-14T10:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-dearango14jan14,0,6620497.story?coll=la-home-obituaries
From the Los Angeles Times
OBITUARIES

Bill DeArango, 85; Jazz Guitarist Was Part of Bebop Movement in '40s
From the Washington Post

January 14, 2006

Bill DeArango, an innovative jazz guitarist of the 1940s, died Dec. 26 at a nursing home in East Cleveland, Ohio. He had Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. He was 85.

Few guitarists were part of the revolutionary bebop movement led by saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie until DeArango joined the New York jazz scene in 1944. He jumped into the lively nightclub action of 52nd Street, finding an immediate home with musicians who were taking jazz in bold new directions.

He was known for his lightning-fast runs, playing cascades of single notes that matched the speed and complexity of the saxophonists and pianists he modeled his playing after.

"I listened very closely to pianists and horn men as well as guitarists," he said in a 1996 interview with Guitar Player magazine. "I used to play along with Art Tatum's records, and Lester Young had a thing I wanted, playing out and intricate but still laid-back."

In 1946, Esquire magazine selected DeArango for its All-American Jazz Band and praised his "fleet, fevered single-string solo work."

He was in steady demand in nightclubs and recording studios in the mid-1940s and was a member of saxophonist Ben Webster's group from 1945 to 1947. He also led his own group, recording with an array of jazz stars, including vocalist Sarah Vaughan, saxophonist Don Byas and vibraphonists Milt Jackson and Red Norvo.

He performed on several early bebop recordings, including Parker's "Anthropology," Gillespie's "Night in Tunisia" and Thelonious Monk's "52nd Street Theme."

DeArango was born Sept. 20, 1921, in Cleveland and studied at Ohio State University.

While in a Dixieland band, he became drawn to the more progressive music of modern jazz.

Later, as he was gaining prominence as one of the premier guitarists of the bebop era, he grew irritated with increasing commercial pressures in music and abruptly left New York for Cleveland in 1948.

Except for occasional club work in his hometown and a well-received record he made in 1954, he all but dropped out of sight. During the 1960s and '70s, he ran a music store that became a center of the music scene in Cleveland.

Unlike many musicians of his generation, DeArango took a strong interest in rock music and adapted his style to fit the times.

Inspired by Jimi Hendrix, he attached a wah-wah pedal to his guitar to distort its tone. In 1993, he made his final recording, "Anything Went," a free-jazz romp with saxophonist Joe Lovano.

There are no known survivors.

2006-01-13T16:15:00.000-08:00

I just found this on EBay! I strongly suggest that Vian lovers get this record. Andre Hodeir is truly a jem.

2006-01-07T15:06:00.000-08:00

The following article is published in today's Guardian U.K. and the writer is James Campbell who wrote a remarkable social history on African Americans who moved to Paris during the post-war years. And of course Vian is mentioned in the book - as well as the article down below. I strongly suggest my readers to locate and read Campbell's book. This article concerns Richard Wright:

The Island affair

Richard Wright's last novel, thought to be a roman à clef about African-American exiles in Paris, was never published. James Campbell uncovers the real story behind the controversial manuscript

Saturday January 7, 2006
The Guardian

In the spring of 1988, I went to Paris to meet Ellen Wright, the widow of the American novelist Richard Wright, at her home in the heart of St-Germain des Prés. The purpose of the visit was to discuss James Baldwin, about whom I was writing a book and with whom Richard Wright had had a fractious, father-and-son relationship. The Wrights had moved from New York to Paris in 1947, and Baldwin, 14 years Wright's junior, arrived the following year. Whereas Wright was the author of several outstanding books, including the novel Native Son and the memoir Black Boy, the story of his gruelling Mississippi childhood, Baldwin was practically unpublished. One of the first things he turned his mind to, on settling in Paris, was an essay ostensibly about Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin, which ended by attacking the continuation of "protest" fiction in contemporary black literature. The prime example of the sterility cited by Baldwin was Native Son. Wright never forgave him.

The talk in Mrs Wright's living-room that afternoon turned naturally to the friendships within literary circles in Paris in the 1950s, when many other African-American writers and artists followed Wright to France, and to the climate of suspicion and resentment that gradually dissolved those alliances. The subject arose of a novel Wright had left behind when he died in 1960, set amid a fictionalised black community that congregated at the Café Tournon, in the rue Tournon, between Odéon and the Luxembourg Gardens. Island of Hallucination is mentioned in biographies - Michel Fabre offers an account of it in his excellent book The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973) - but it has never been published.
Mrs Wright spoke vivaciously about most things as we drank a bottle of what she delighted in calling "plonk". She briefly flattered me with the notion that I might write an introduction to a reissue of one of Wright's books. But when it came to Island of Hallucination she frosted over. The book would "never be published in my lifetime", she said, her eyes rising towards the ceiling as if a copy were stored in the attic above our heads. The story involved characters based on people still alive, who might view their presence in the novel as defamation. The Wright estate had fought, and lost, an expensive legal action over the use of unpublished material in a biography by Margaret Walker (Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, 1988). Ellen Wright did not say so outright, but I left with the impression that the presence in Island of Hallucination of a character based on one member of the Café Tournon circle in particular, an African-American writer and journalist called Richard Gibson, was largely behind her decision to withhold the novel.

Island of Hallucination, begun in 1958, represented a late departure for Wright: it was the first time he had written about Paris, his home for the past 11 years. Dispatching a completed draft to his agent, Paul Reynolds, at the beginning of 1959, he sounded pessimistic about its chances: "I can readily think of a hundred reasons why Americans won't like this book. But the book is true. Everything in the book happened, but I've twisted characters so that people won't recognise them." Wright's most recent published novel, The Long Dream (1958), had had a poor reception, with critics repeating the charge that he was out of touch with the subject matter that paradoxically most inspired him, the "Negro problem". He had recently turned to non-fiction, producing books about the Far East, Spain, and the newly independent Ghana, for the title of which he coined the term "Black Power". Island of Hallucination is a sequel to The Long Dream, in which a character from the earlier novel, Fishbelly, flees to Europe to escape the racial nightmare in his homeland, as Wright had done after the war. By the time he mailed the typescript to Reynolds, he was in frail health and living apart from Ellen and their two daughters. Each book having made a poorer show than the one before, his financial affairs were in a bad way. If Island of Hallucination should "get the same press that The Long Dream did", he told Reynolds, "then I must seriously think of abandoning writing for a time. One has to be realistic."

Apart from a brief stopover on his way to Argentina to make a film of Native Son at the end of the 1940s, Wright never returned to the United States after moving to Paris. The reasons for his estrangement are not hard to illustrate. Shortly before leaving the US, the couple - Ellen Poplar was from a Polish immigrant family - had been obliged to form a bogus property company to buy the house they desired, not in Mississippi, where Wright was born in 1908, the grandson of former slaves, but in bohemian Greenwich Village. Paris would spare them such bruising indignities. In the letter to Reynolds that accompanied Island of Hallucination, in which he brooded on his hobbled career, Wright endorsed his decision to live in France, which had brought him "such a bad press in the United States". His daughters would become "emotionally ill" if he were to take them back across the ocean. "I'd be a criminal to do so."

The motives behind Wright's departure from America were not exclusively racial. At the time of his success with Native Son, he had been a member of the communist party. Although he broke with his increasingly oppressive comrades in 1942 and wrote a well-publicised account of his reasons ("I Tried to Be a Communist", included in Richard Crossman's famous anthology The God That Failed), the allegiance was neither forgotten nor forgiven at home. Almost every entry in Wright's FBI file after 1944, when the essay was first published, makes reference to his party membership, continuing into the mid-50s, by which time he was a committed anti-communist.

In Paris, on the other hand, where literary life was flourishing in the new conditions creation by the liberation, and where modern American fiction was widely read, Wright was welcomed as the representative "Negro writer". Parties arranged in his honour were attended by Albert Camus, André Gide and others. Publishers competed to obtain his books. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir befriended the Wrights, and Ellen became De Beauvoir's literary agent, a position she still held at the time of our meeting. Wright's stories were translated by the mischievous writer and musician Boris Vian, and Native Son formed the basis of a scandalous policier, I Will Spit on Your Graves, written by Vian under the guise of being a black American.

However, Wright soon began to feel he was under threat from an unexpected source: the black American writers and artists who had travelled to France in his footsteps. The first blow was struck by Baldwin's essay about Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son, to which he gave the title "Everybody's Protest Novel", publishing it in the first issue of a Left Bank magazine called Zero (spring 1949). Wright's pain at the assault could only have been exacerbated by the fact that the accusatory piece appeared directly after a short story by Wright himself. "The Man Who Killed a Shadow" is the tale of a black cleaner who murders a white schoolteacher and hides her body, after she attempts to seduce him and falsely accuses him of rape when he refuses her. Baldwin argued that fiction such as Wright's - including, by implication, the story that readers had just read - perpetuated a self-spinning web of "lust and fury" which, instead of unshackling the black spirit, continued to imprison it. Because of its grisly action and tangled moral outcome, Reynolds had failed to place the story in the US, but it was welcomed by the editor of Zero, Themistocles Hoetis, who relished the idea of launching his magazine with a spat between "the old black writer and the new black writer", as he put it to me during a recent interview at his home in south-east London.

Hoetis recalls receiving "The Man Who Killed a Shadow" in person at Wright's apartment on rue Monsieur le Prince, close to the Odéon, where the successful author was once photo-graphed with his family at the dinner table, while a uniformed maid waited in attendance. Wright was "a bit staid, but very friendly", Hoetis says. "I remember thinking at the time that he seemed pleased that a Yank would even come and visit him." Baldwin did not visit Wright at home, in Hoetis's recollection. "He was going to chop him down."

"Everybody's Protest Novel" was followed by even more withering attacks from Baldwin's pen. Later, Wright quarrelled with another African-American writer and one-time friend, Chester Himes, after seeing himself portrayed in what he considered to be an unkindly light in Himes's novel, A Case of Rape. A younger novelist, William Gardner Smith, author of The Last of the Conquerors and Stone Face, was alleged by Wright to be in the pay of the CIA, for whom he was supposed to be spying on what Wright called the "black church" at the Café Tournon. Wright himself was not above suspicion of a similar kind. In 1956, the American writer Kay Boyle, a veteran of Paris of the 1920s, wrote to tell him that "there is a story, a rumour, about you that is going about . . . that you give information about other Americans in order to keep your passport and be able to travel". Wright must have blushed when he received this, for there were grounds for the rumours. Two years earlier, he had had difficulty in obtaining a passport from the American embassy to cross the Pyrenees to research his book Pagan Spain. After a visit to the embassy on September 16, 1954, when he provided or confirmed the names of more than one person "known to him as a member of the communist party", the passport came through. (A record of the interview is in Wright's FBI file, available under the US Freedom of Information Act.) The English poet Christopher Logue, who was in Paris in the 1950s, and was friendly with William Gardner Smith, says of the atmosphere at the Tournon: "Everybody thought everybody else was spying on someone or other for somebody."

This was the situation Wright set out to dramatise in Island of Hallucination, representing in fictional form the web of false friendship, deception, corruption and betrayal that increasingly threatened to ensnare him, or so he believed. By the time he entered the Eugène Gibez clinic, where he died of a heart attack at 52 on November 28, 1960, the project was in abeyance. Reynolds had forwarded the manuscript to Wright's editor at Doubleday, who had asked for cuts and changes that appear to have been beyond the author's energies. After his death, Ellen permitted a small section to be printed in an anthology, but then withdrew the manuscript. It now sits among the Richard Wright papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale. For many years, Wright scholars were not permitted to read it. One biographer, Addison Gayle, stated in a footnote in his book, Ordeal of a Native Son, that his request to read Island of Hallucination "was denied".

Ellen Wright died last year, at 92. Not long before, a photocopy of Island of Hallucination, more than 500 pages in Wright's typescript, came into my hands, by an unexpected route: it was lent to me by Richard Gibson, whose presence in the novel is thought to have been behind its suppression. Now in his 70s, Gibson, who was born in Los Angeles and raised in Philadelphia, has lived in west London for many years. He talks readily about a colourful past that involves various political affiliations and adventures, disgraces and protestations of innocence. In the early 1960s, he was head of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the United States, in which capacity he met Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara on several occasions. When John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Gibson was approached by the CIA for information on Lee Harvey Oswald, who also had links with the FPCC. He is the author of the book African Liberation Movements, and was for a time English-language editor of the Algiers-based magazine Révolution Africaine, run by the French lawyer Jacques Vergès, who later denounced Gibson in the magazine (July-August 1964). Since his Paris days, when he was a regular at the Café Tournon, Gibson has had to fend off suggestions of egregious activity, including spying for the US government, allegations he has consistently denied, sometimes in the law courts and sometimes with a touch of humour. "If I'm CIA, where's my pension?", he once quipped to me.

Of the many things that vexed Wright in Paris in the 1950s - Baldwin's perceived treachery, Smith's snooping, Himes's unfaithfulness - it was the sequence of events that became known as the "Gibson affair" that exercised him most. In 1957, Gibson and Smith, acting in concert, sent a letter to Life magazine criticising French policy in Algeria. Such a gesture could only be seen as foolhardy on the part of an American, provoking the risk of deportation from France. Gibson wrote the letter, but signed it in the name of the newspaper cartoonist Ollie Harrington, a popular figure at the Tournon and one of the few members of the "church" whom Wright did not regard with suspicion or contempt. Wright and Harrington were furious when the letter appeared over the latter's signature in Life (October 21, 1957). Gibson was questioned by French police, and admitted his part in the forgery. He was released without charge but lost his job at Agence France Presse and returned to the US to take up a post with CBS News. Gibson claims he wrote the letter as part of a scheme concocted with Smith, involving a series of communications to various publications, each signed in a false name by a different member of the black community. (His own account of the episode will be published later this year in the journal Modern Fiction Studies.)

A version of the Gibson affair, and the related disagreement between Gibson and Harrington over the lease to a Left Bank apartment which led to a violent fight between the two men, features prominently in Island of Hallucination. There is an unpleasant character in the novel called Mechanical, who reflects certain aspects of Baldwin, notably his homosexuality, which disgusted Wright. At one point, in a nightmare, Fishbelly opens a coffin to find Mechanical dressed as a woman. Other composites display fragmentary resemblances to Smith, Harrington, Gibson himself, and figures more peripheral to the black literary scene in Paris, such as the West Indian writer CLR James, who appears to have been used as the basis for the character called Cato. When I first met Mrs Wright, James was still alive.

Island of Hallucination is not the roman à clef that admirers of Wright who know of its existence might expect, however. As with the characters, events are distorted. There are story lines that appear to be pure products of the imagination, such as the opening scene involving Fishbelly and his entrapment by French con artists who rob him of $2,000 on the flight to Paris. There are ample examples of the "lust and fury" that Baldwin objected to in Wright's fiction. And there is evidence of the numbing of his talent that Wright himself feared, in thumping dialogue among characters that are two-dimensional personifications of various vices.

The novel is at its strongest in dramatising the psychology of the black exile. On arrival in Paris, Fishbelly sits in a boulevard café and marvels at the lack of attention from surrounding whites: "'I've been toting a hundred-pound sack of potatoes on my back all my life and it's goddamned good to get rid of it,' he told himself." A woman called Irene who has tricked guilty whites out of thousands of dollars by begging money to enable her to feel "the good old sweet ground of the United States under my old black feet" is said, in a brilliant phrase, to be "bitter, but completely happy about it". Only one figure, Ned Harrison, based partly on Harrington, rises above the moral swamp, acting at times as a sane chorus on the insane action. "No man can stand absolutely alone and make any meaning out of life," Ned says at one stage, speaking for the author as much as for himself. "When you begin distrusting the images that make your world, you're standing alone. Soon you'll begin to doubt everything. Your world turns into a dream. It's as though you were having a hallucination." The action comes to a close with Mechanical hurling himself off the tower of Notre Dame cathedral, only to be caught in a net spread by the police below, in which he succeeds in hanging himself.

Wright had always been a writer with a preference for the broad brush, but his early books emerged from a conviction that he was in possession of an original subject matter: the fiery passage of the "black boy", striving to become a man in a society bent on suppressing his masculinity. In Wright's hands, the odyssey was likely to have a bloody outcome, as Baldwin perceived. In a letter to his New York publicist Bill Cole about Wright's novel The Outsider (1953), which attempts to yoke the tenets of French existentialism to the psychic state of emergency of the black male in pre-civil rights America, Baldwin said it struck him "as though Native Son had read a few books which, far from changing him, simply affords him some kind of half-assed intellectual justification for his unhappy brutality".

Gibson has had to wait for more than 40 years to read the novel in which he and others were assumed to feature so significantly that the author's widow chose the safe course of deferring publication (Gibson prefers not to say how he came into possession of a copy of the manuscript). "I turn up as Bill Hart, the 'superspy from Rome who spied on spies'," he told me. While he believes that "the motor of the book's plot comes straight from the Gibson affair", he was surprised to discover that Bill Hart is cast not as the forger of the offending letter to Life, but as the person in whose name the letter is signed. The fraud is ascribed to Mechanical, the Baldwin figure, though when the events of the Gibson affair "rocked the African-American community in Paris" in 1957, as Gibson puts it, Baldwin was on his way to the American South to report on the civil-rights movement.

In Gibson's opinion, Island of Hallucination should now be published. "It's a curiosity. It would attract attention as a document, even if not for its literary value. Anyway, Wright wanted it published." Asked if aspects of his personality in the character of Bill Hart would be likely to prompt him to seek legal redress, Gibson scoffs. "You wouldn't even know it was me. All the characters are composites." In his view, the book "is a reflection of the nightmare that Wright was living in by then".

It would not be the first posthumous publication of a book by Wright. In 1963, the estate released a lively novel set in the offices of the Chicago Post Office, Lawd Today!. Written in 1935, it makes use of the "newsreel" technique pioneered by John Dos Passos in his U.S.A. trilogy in the same decade. Near the end of his life, Baldwin, who had long since played down the old enmity, cited Lawd Today! as his favourite among Wright's novels. Ellen Wright told me he had agreed to provide an introduction to a new English edition, but he died, in 1987, before he could fulfil the promise. Plans to reissue the book subsequently collapsed.

Two years before Lawd Today!, a collection of short stories appeared, under the title Eight Men, which Wright had prepared for publication during what turned out to be his final weeks of life. It contains "The Man Who Killed a Shadow", and is dedicated to friends "whose kindness has made me feel at home in an alien land".

· James Campbell's book Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and others on the Left Bank (1994) has recently been reissued in the US, under the title Exiled in Paris.

2006-01-06T19:51:00.000-08:00

TamTam Books’ Favorite Books

The following are things that I read in 2005 – and you must keep in mind this doesn’t mean it was written or published in 2005. Just stuff that impressed me in 2005 for various reasons – why, they may not be even good books. Nevertheless I never stop at just ‘good taste.’ Also the order down below are random. I don’t believe one can list books or records by a number with respect if they are greater than the other. That’s rubbish and boring.

Now saying that here are the books:

1) Dancing with DeBeauvoir by Colin Nettlebeck
2) The Lamberts by Andrew Motion
3) Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés by Boris Vian
4) Mike Mac’s White and Blacks by Michael McCartney
5) Mulliner Nights by P.G. Wodehouse
6) After the War by Simone DeBeauvoir
7) Japan Journals by Donald Richie
8) Love on the Left Bank by Ed van der Elsken
9) 30 Years in Vogue by John Rawlings
10) Elvis: The Last 24 Hours by Albert Goldman
11) Guy Debord by Andy Merrifield
12) Elizabeth Peyton by Elizabeth Peyton
13) Semina Culture by Kristine McKenna and Michael Duncan
14) The Dead All Have the Same Skin by Boris Vian
15) A Dysfunctional Success by Eric Goulden (Wreckless Eric)
16) Ball the Wall by Nic Cohn

2006-01-06T19:47:00.000-08:00

For the past two years I have found myself under the spell of Jack Nitzsche – and I found something that got my ears humming. It’s Jackie De Shannon’s “Breakin’ It Up on The Beatles Tour!”

First of all De Shannon is a superb pop singer and second a good writer. Third, you got Nitzsche’s stunning arrangements. Songs like “Hold Your Head High” is right out to the stars. Also it is co-written by Randy Newman – and it is 100% tough girl-pop. De Shannon in fact is total soulful, bratty, and of course sexy.

Probably the most famous song on this album is “Needles and Pins” by Nitzsche and fellow late recording studio rat Sonny Bono. It is a perfect pop record – and it just explodes and leaves a tattoo on your brain. This is really a brilliant record. Ok, it’s recorded between 1963 and 1965 – and I will try to find something to like in the dismal 21st Century – but really you know any album that cashes in on an early Beatles (Jackie opened up for them) tour has to be at least interesting. And this album goes beyond interesting into what I like to think is the future. Yesterday’s Sound Today!

2005-12-23T14:33:00.000-08:00

TamTam Books' favorite songs of 2005

Here’s a list of some of my favorite songs this year. And I do have to state that this doesn’t mean songs made in this year. I’ve been listening to a lot of music – and most of it is old – but new to me. And some of course, I rediscovered.

In no special order:

1) Face À La Merde by Jacques Dutronc
2) This Boy’s Evil by Pulp
3) Bird of Paradise by Charlie Parker
4) ?????? by Mako Midori
5) Tell Me by The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra
6) Que Reste-T-Il De Nos Amours by Boris Vian
7) My Fair Baby’s Coming For Me by Paul Kane (Joe Meek)
8) Don't Make Fun of Daddy's Voice by Morrissey
9) ????? by Akira Kobayashi
10) You'll Be On My Mind by Michel Polnareff
11) Like A Madrigal by Ennio Morricone (from The Cat O' Nine Tails)
12) Venus by Chris Stamey Experience
13) Train of Events by Cowboys International
14) Herikutsu-Boy by Jun Togawa
15) Maxim's by Serge Reggiani
16) My Baby's Taking Me Home by Sparks
17) ???? by Agata Morio
18) Little Baby by The Blue Rondos (Joe Meek)
19) BeHop by Wardell Gray
20) The Fallen by Franz Ferdinand
21) Conseils De La Fée Des Lilas by Michel Legrand/Christiane Legrand

2005-12-11T20:24:00.000-08:00

I just read that Roger Shattuck passed away. I always enjoyed his essays, but the one book that did it for me was his "The Banquet Years" which focuses on Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau and Apollionaire. If you haven't picked up on the book - do so. Ciao Mr. Shattuck!

2005-12-07T20:04:00.000-08:00

The front cover to the Spanish edition of 'I Spit on Your Graves' soundtrack - which by the way, is fantastic.