Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [8]
The shooting of Kennedy last nite was something in the way of a final straw for me. I can see the great storms coming, but at this point I’ve given up hope on finding any sort of even temporarily pacifying solution. McCarthy is almost certainly out of the Democratic running for the presidency. Humphrey will most probably run against Nixon, & the latter will almost certainly win. Whatever else happens, I’m thru combing magazines and papers and pamphlets and what not in that vain effort to figure out what is going on in all those regions of darkness around. Fuck ‘em all, squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry. I’m going to write as much as I can, this is what I want to do, take you on a guided tour of my Mainline, trying to make the frescoes imprinted on my own skull's inner walls as comprehensible to you as possible, with as little oldtime speedflight wordsperm bullshit, to create at last and for once for me a real old-time book, which is its own world and simultaneously represents my own inner world to as high a degree of satisfaction as I can give myself, although the form is jumbled and random and flawed and excessive and self-indulgent, yes, at least at last to make my soul soil comprehensible & truly personal a splash and splatter between duration of intermittent straight statement maybe I can attain what I sense budding here & get real expression to radiate from these white and empty faces for once this summer if never another time fore or aft.
from Part 1 (Prologue), Chapter 1
Previously Unpublished, 1968
A Quick Trip Through My Adolescence
Growing up with ease and comfort, but fast, about as fast as you could imagine short of some primitive tribe's brutal confirmation, using LSD as a rite of passage like you’re supposed to be able to use the army things sometimes get a bit complicated. Brain befogged in the halls of wisdom, Elements of Civilized Communication hammered home on chains of bleary-eyed mornings by mechanical-minded profs with a mania for grammar and gentle lady Grade Eleven romanticists who believe in youth and poetry and tearing out some proof of basic competence from each of their pupils for one furious, feverish month before disembarking with them for isles of Hawthorne and Longfellow and tender hothouse flowerings of student poem and story. Which for me was a snap, but I was still eternally hung up. Desperately I wanted my writing not to ring true, because if it rang true it was adolescent and that was seven leagues below hack. Rare flashes of insight all but lost in python coils of muscular, crepuscular verbiage, but how those clumsy image-clusters would zing like crystal arrows straight and true from my heroic pinnacles to stand all smooth and apple-cheeked and rustless on the page, grinning there in total imbe-cilic self-confidence like Disney archetypes, cute piglike little Fans spawned by Hercules galoots slopping sperm into backseat blondes who once upon a springtime's incognito wailed like saxophone sirens and stole their future husband slaves away from Elysium's prom/game whirl, drawing them to bedroom corners where they spread themselves in musky lust of joy-blundering boys finally entering that frothy twilight world where slow rivers of a delicious stench gushed and groaned outpouring from underground grottoes holding the sacred mystery of all those years, all o’erhung with tangles of soft brown brush, an ecstatic raving jungle whose interior we plumbed coming some when each of us to learn it bit by bit as we plunged eyes or hands or finally cocks in from so many afternoons, went foraging in the thighs and wombs and brought back sizzling jewels and smoky dreams to give our art some shape and ballast, for that was how it always was: I’d seldom start a writing session without a spiritual recharge from my secret Grove Press muses beforehand, some mad laughter or an apocalyptic tantrum and then to work!, wham, bam, slashing away at my typewriter until occasionally