Does the world need a new shaman? There are some slides on the net which show Iggy Pop and the Stooges playing at a high school on Michigan in December of 1970. The connection of Iggy with Artaud is always on the dissociation of meaning from language. A quest for a more profound manner of communication that on the surface, and perhaps beyond, is inaccessible and possesses no viable logic or inherent structure. Or, the structure is a form of misguided intentionaly, impulses that seemingly find an order out of an anarchic chaos. But, there is a cadence, a captivating, enveloping music that emerges that defies the bland lyrics, simple composition and mediocre technical ability…
Then, in my cups, I had it! Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty. My humble article had its introduction. Would Iggy and Jim, Lou and Bowie have had a stage act, had not the crazed Frenchman 30-years previously, opened out the Doors of Perception, unhinged on pain, drugs and Surrealism? Well, probably, in some shape or form, but Artaud articulated the inarticulate and gave them intellectual authority. ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen’, Wittgenstein wrote in his famous Tractatus. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must stay silent. Artaud might have said, ‘I will try to speak, whereof one cannot speak, and the world must follow as best it can’. Read More:http://www.trakmarx.com/2007_03/07-artaud.html
Image: http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/09/iggy-and-the-stooges-farmington-high-school-mi-december-5th-1970/ Read More: http://www.trakmarx.com/2007_03/07-artaud.html---In 1936 Artaud took off for Mexico where he lectured, as well as investigating the drug rituals of the Tarahumara Indians, like some early Carlos Castaneda. After 10-months there he returned to France where he resumed a relationship begun the previous year with Cecile Schramme. Amazingly, they became engaged - but the engagement was broken off in May 1937. In August of ’37, Artaud set sail for Ireland, and made his way to the Aran Islands off the west coast, trying to find some tranquillity in a chaotic and turbulent life. He also believed he was in possession of St. Patrick’s walking stick and wished to return it.....
…Funhouse is the album that put an amassed moist disgust into your stereo’s speakers and made no bones about the horrible meltdown that was definitely going to occur. The Stooges highlighted a teenage disaffection with syrupy peace and love, that was slowly slinking into it’s middle aged twenties. It was the ability of these amped amphetamine kids that they managed to actually get paid for this type of venom to be released. Music is a commodity after all, it has to sell, and how was Elektra going to sell this?
Image: http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/09/iggy-and-the-stooges-farmington-high-school-mi-december-5th-1970/ Read More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/mylifeandtimeswithantoninartaud.htm ---In fact, massive doses of laudanum and opium are about all that sustain Artaud in his psychic agony, and Mordillat does an extraordinary job of capturing the drug-sick state of agitation and paranoia in which the artist exists. Frey plays Artaud as a sort of Iggy Pop of the Left Bank; one look at him and you're instantly convinced that he's wandered way around the bend. For his part, Prevel can't determine if the man is insane or just hyper-lucid and so cut off by his brilliance that his world is impenetrable. That's the way Artaud likes it.---
So is it a calculated version of music or just some drunken spat? Iggy Pop confirms this during the opening few seconds of the song “TV Eye” – where he screams and unleashes, the most horrendous vocalization EVER committed to black wax. Iggy lets loose an incantation to terrify, but to also spark upon your soul some exact reaction. He starts the song, abusing his microphone by bellowing ‘Lorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd!!!!!!!’ If there is a lord, I’m sure he’s repulsed by this unyielding clarification in his name. Natural rebellion, and we’re not talking some market product, is charged up and flown against the boring world.
Each track was recorded live in the studio, numerous times over those days in May. At the conclusion, all we care about is the infinite facets of all the noise that can be absorbed by our eardrums. Seven tracks were edited out of these session reels and re-arranged and assembled to make up the original 36-minute opus to degradation. Funhouse bounces off every object as the sound sidles into the skull, with an electric buzz, with white washes of grandiose blasting through dense amplitude. Funhouse is all about the very brawl in the human abattoir that The Stooges had at once made, but later realized they had to outrun. Rumor has it that the running time was as long as a Stooges concert could go for, until Iggy’s brain had a convergence with every coma of decoded flame, and he had to either pass out, or go backstage and once again get bound to the trifle vices of heroin. Like Artaud, The Stooges had to enlist many fated pleasures to succeed.Read More:http://www.furious.com/perfect/artaud.html
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Read More:http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/09/iggy-and-the-stooges-farmington-high-school-mi-december-5th-1970/
As I watched these clips it hit me that Iggy is among a very small handful of artists who are keeping Antonin Artaud’s Theater Of Cruelty and Julian Beck’s Living Theater concepts alive. Can you a imagine a more inspired bit of casting than to have Iggy portray Artaud in a film of the French provocateurs life. “I Wanna Be Your Frog.” Or the Bunuel version: “I Wanna Be Your Andalusian Dog.”…Read More:http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/iggy_pops_infamous_lust_for_life_freak_out_on_dutch_tv_1977/
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- Man, when he is not restrained, is an erotic animal,
he has in him an inspired shudder,
a kind of pulsation
that produces animals without number which are the form that the ancient tribes of the earth universally attributed to god.
This created what is called a spirit.
Well, this spirit originating with the American Indians is reappearing all over the world today under scientific poses which merely accentuate its morbid infectuous power, the marked condition of vice, but a vice that pullulates with diseases,
because, laugh if you like,
what has been called microbes
is god,
and do you know what the Americans and the Russians use to make their atoms?
They make them with the microbes of god.
- You are raving, Mr. Artaud.
You are mad.
- I am not raving.
I am not mad.
I tell you that they have reinvented microbes in order to impose a new idea of god.
They have found a new way to bring out god and to capture him in his microbic noxiousness.
This is to nail him though the heart,
in the place where men love him best,
under the guise of unhealthy sexuality,
in that sinister appearance of morbid cruelty that he adopts
whenever he is pleased to tetanize and madden humanity as he
is doing now.
He utilizes the spirit of purity and of a consciousness that has
remained candid like mine to asphyxiate it w
all the false
appearances that he spreads universally through space and this
is why Artaud le Mômo can be taken for a person suffering
from hallucinations.
- What do you mean, Mr. Artaud?
- I mean that I have found the way to put an end to this ape once and for all
and that although nobody believes in god any more everybody believes more and more in man.
So it is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate.
- How’s that?
How’s that?
No matter how one takes you you are mad, ready for the straitjacket.
- By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.
I say, to remake his anatomy.
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,
god,
and with god
his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ….Read More:http://ndirty.cute.fi/~karttu/tekstit/artaud.htm
( excerpt. Artaud. To Have Done With the Judgement of God )
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