On Serge Gainsbourg‘s album Mauvaises Nouvelles Des Étoiles (Bad News From The Stars) from 1981 there is a song called Evguénie Sokolov. Although accompanying lyrics were printed on the sleeve, the song itself consists of nothing but farts, gurgling and rumbling accompanied by The Wailers from Jamaica. After all, the lyrics are a passage from Gainsbourg’s story of the same name, in which an artist suffering from incessant windiness is the protagonist…
Il sogno di una cosa was Pasolini’s first novel. He wrote it during the brief spell that he was active for the Friulian division of the Partito Comunista Italiano, which ended in 1949 when the party expelled him for “immoral behaviour”. But the text was not published until 1962 when Pasolini lived in Rome. At that time he had already made his name with the…
Black Dogs Circled is a collection of poems compiled by Mick Farren and Sea Urchin and printed in a limited edition. The 18 poems contain personal observations, phantasies, obsessions, memories and lyrics, composed by Farren with a musical ear and a sense of humour.
Eddie Woods and Jane Harvey launched their Ins & Outs postcards series in 1979. The b/w series, which shows works by artists who also contributed to Ins & Outs magazine at the time, immediately met with acclaim. And with good reason: Ira Cohen’s “Bandaged Poets” photos were published as Ins & Outs postcards (they were part of the larger Bandaged Poets project, a “living poem” which documented the…
The summer of 1975 was hot. A heatwave of eighteen consecutive days singed Western Europe and turned its capitals into seething cauldrons. Ira Cohen landed on the soft tarmac of Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, in August — his mind still filled with the opiate clouds over Kathmandu, where he had lived since 1972 — and stepped into a wildfire of events. Fellow filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was feverishly working on his…