Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Tattooed Genital Gallery

Remembering Lester Bangs ...

happens more or less likely to encounter in books or readings and to discover authors who express feelings, facts, concepts which are particularly sensitive.
Similar situations almost always lead us first to fathom all the news related to that particular author biobiliografiche available at a later time to deepen the knowledge of his works.
Our wonder, our huge admiration for a writer just discovered may result from our laziness or the inability to represent words or writings to define or even just mentally and in a manner so clear something down there beyond the boundaries although reason for us to reflect continues.
and 'what can happen when you find the literature of Lester Bangs.
Lester Bangs did not belong to the vast plethora of writers who unexpectedly or perhaps despite its intentions, have managed to earn a space, large or small will be the time for each of them to say, in the context of contemporary American literature.
Among the greatest journalists environments pop music and fans of the genre have never got to know (worked for Rolling Stone, Creem, where he became head of the main writers, NME, Village Voice, all journals of worship, in their kind), exponent of the so-called 'New Journalism' [1] , debt Bangs against Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski, but even more of the writers 'beat', head Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs and authors such as Hunter G. Thompson [2] , it seems undeniable.
Introducing the book 'Psychotic Reactions and Carburator Dung', Greil Marcus argues significantly that 'maybe this book asks the reader to be willing to accept the fact that the best American writer could write reviews of records almost exclusively ' [3] .
Meanwhile Anna Mion, who has translated several works of Bangs in Italian, said that 'translate Bangs means not harness his improvisation but get on the wild horse of his typewriter and go with him where he wants' [4] .
Bangs's prose, spontaneous and immediate, is unambiguous and, especially in the early writings, seems to leave no room for implied or stylistic embellishments.
Nor, with particular reference to the contents, we can say that Bangs has used media terms to describe the decay of the American system:

I told Andy that had widely expected the breaking of the seams of the old American frock, and added: - I imagined that he could not go otherwise ...
- and she replied: - The Democracy does not work, it's a shame but it will never work - and I said: - The reason why everything is going to pieces in this way is that Americans are living with memories for too long ... It 's too long to send the dream Americans all the stations as if it were gospel, and all are happy memories of living ... .... The nation is now falling because people have not been able to face the moment when the arrow the granite fell straight on the pumpkin, the fact that the American Dream is just a dream, and that the American reality is an imperative, a powder keg ready to explode -. [5]

Lester Bangs, one can see well in the film that has been dedicated by Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, presented for the first time at the Toronto film festival on 8 September 2000) was well aware of form as part of that system, a loose cannon, in 1973 even managed to get fired by Jann Wenner, the director of the famous Rolling Stone magazine, for expressing negative opinions against, it seems, the American blues rock band Canned Heat.
Indeed, this was only one manifestation of lack of esteem for the American music industry by Lester Bangs, but in reality the target of Bangs was framed around the music publishing system and among its allegations were those based on the finding that rock magazines were used to be in a state of 'affordable' subjection to the system of major, major music labels who have signed the most famous singers and groups of the pop world.
ingenious, introverted and consistent to the end of his days, a writer who has been called 'generation' and sometimes umbilical Bangs experienced loneliness more black because this is what usually happens to people like him uncomfortable. He says he
critic Jim De Rogatis:

[...] when I met him was reduced real bad. Connect little, drank like a sponge every time he drank and apologized to us, which met for the first time. Not ashamed to say they feel very lonely. We did catch a box full of fruit discs everything we wanted and we gave them [...] I remember that greeted us asked if we knew some other chore around of any kind - not even music - said to me was ... find me a shock ... before the man who had most influenced the way I see it reduced to writing and so ... I decided that I never wanted to find my life in such a state ... [6]

not inclined to compromise and any kind of 'alignment', especially in the off-putting to many critics and their colleagues in this sense returned and was severely criticized, Bangs consistently found refuge in writing:

Whatever else happens, - Bangs wrote back in 1968 - I'm done with the browse magazines and newspapers and leaflets and who knows what else in a vain effort to understand what is happening in all those dark areas around me. Fuck them all, are conformists, from either side. I'm the only man of integrity in that round. I will write as I can, here's what I do, will accompany you on a guided tour of my Vena delusional, trying to make as much as I can understand the frescoes engraved on the inner walls of my skull, with very few old style crap spermaverbali anfetamagiche [...] Yes, I want to at least make you finally understand and very personal territory of my mind, a glimmer and a sketch in the range of a normal phase and the other, maybe I can achieve what I see here in the making, and ensure that for once this summer by those white faces and empty it gives off a true expression, now or never, neither before nor after [7] .

Here, I seem, these very human words that draw a portrait of former if Bangs, the portrait of a man rather fragile seeming hard skin, a man with a self-destructive nature that alone was enough to 'justify' without too many worries of soul His death at 33 in 1982 to an overdose of psychotropic substances.
John Graziano missing

[1] The 'new journalism' states in the United States at the turn of the decades of sixties and seventies of last century. It formed part of authors such as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson et al. To describe the observed reality and lived, the authors New Journalism of each using its own peculiarities literature combined with a marked tendency for unconventionality of the style. Inside the New Journalism, then, the affirmation of 'gonzo journalism' is due to the pen of Hunter S. Thompson. Under this form of journalistic writing, the fact is described and given to true even if you find more accurate and detailed description are the author's personal experience and feelings rather than the narrow objective of the events.
[2] G. Hunter Thompson was the founder of 'Gonzo Journalism'. He, like Bangs, rock wrote for magazines, notably oversaw the political pages Rolling Stone.
[3] See Lester Bangs, reasonable guide to the most horrible noise, edited by Greil Marcus, tr.it. Anna Mion, Minimum Fax, Rome 2005, p.21.
[4] See Anna Mion on www.minimunfax.com / newsletter, website accessed on 24.01.2009.
[5] See Lester Bangs, unprintable!, Tr.it. Anna Mion, Minimum Fax, Rome 2008, p.19.
[6] See Jim De Rogatis on www.ilpopolodelblues.com / state , website accessed on 24.01.2009.
[7] See Lester Bangs, cit. pp.22-23.

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