EXPLORING IMAGERY ... SELF PORTRAITURE ... PAPER INVENTORY back and said, “Yes, I found people that can print and bind in that fashion. And you could have a 1,600-page book if you really wanted to.” With that, we’re working towards that book. And while we were putting it together, I found that there were like, seven or eight volumes [of red binders] that each had 100 cards that looked really similar, that were all eyes — it was after Myopia that I started doing a lot of eyes. And I remember there was this period in time about 14 years ago where I had taken this plaster [eye] medallion, a wall hanging that I’d found at a botánica store in downtown LA, like probably ’77 to ’79. I used to be fascinated with those kind of shops and I loved going in and there’d be incense, or candles that you burned if you had like a lazy husband, or if you had a cheating wife, or if you wanted to make more money, or if your car wasn’t running properly. You could buy these things that would channel energy towards these different places in your life to help you solve problems. And there were these eyes that protected you from the evil eye, from evil doers and malevolence. And you would take an eye and hang it maybe on your front door or above your bed. And you would have it as an apotropaic element. And I loved all that stuff, but I’d found these [medallion] eyes that were really detailed. Like this is what the plaster eye looks like (shows the front cover of Apotropaic Beatnik Graffiti). It’s a lure to get somebody to buy the book — it’s three-dimensional and shiny and fun. S. Putnik: And it’s staring right at me. Mark: It’s the basis. And so I wrote things and I drew things around them, like, um ... Jonny: Stream of consciousness. Mark: Yeah. So there’s text and it’s all kind of abstract. During the time period I was doing these two books, I was thinking about Beatniks because I remember when I first started working with Jerry Casale, writing music with him, his lyrics back then, to me, sounded like Beatnik poetry. And when I was a kid, I just missed the Beatnik thing. I was in high school in the late 60s, and I remember driving up to a house that was a Beatnik pad in downtown Akron, close to Akron U. And you’d hear music inside, it might have been bongos and a guitar. And you knew they had espresso in there. Maybe they had marijuana. But I didn’t even think about that stuff then. I was like too intimidated when I was in high school to go into one of those places. And then when I went to Kent State, there was one right across the street from the main entrance to the campus. And people would go in and sit around, drink coffee, talk about books, politics, all the things that a good Beatnik does. And I liked them because to me, Beatniks were the first art movement, book movement, intellectual movement post atomic bomb in the U.S. And they were like, “We fucked up. We went too far.” They were pre-Devo. I think a lot of our concerns about humans were very similar to Beatniks and the Beat world. And so I became interested in this similarity between Beatniks and punk rock about the same time I was doing these books. And there were people — like Jerry would argue with me. He’d say, “No, the difference between Beatniks and punk is punk is stupid for the most part.” I go, “It’s not all No. 123 stupid though. You have to admit that.” And punk does have things in common with Beatniks as far as rejecting society and things like that. It made me set out to look for the similarities and in the process, I realized this guy that I’d known since 1977 had done a San Francisco fanzine called Search & Destroy, which I think was the best punk rock review magazine. His name is V. Vale. I just happened to be talking to him a couple years ago about Beatniks and punk. And he goes, “I’ll tell you a connection. I don’t know if you know this, but two people gave me money to start Search & Destroy — Alan Ginsburg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.” They each gave him a hundred bucks and that’s how he started the magazine. So I started looking at these pages, the ones with all the eyes, and I thought of them as little like Beatnik. And they’re kind of graffiti too, because I blew the eyes up poster size for my first Beyond the Streets show (2018) and then I painted on top of the paper. I did like 20 of them. I really got into this imagery and I thought, It’s taking a while to get this big book done. I could put this eye book together really fast. Because if I took five of those red binders that are these eyes, that’d be 500 images with stories on them. And that could be an interesting book. And so we kind of mocked it up and liked it so much. I said, “John, we’re going off track for a minute. But here’s another book.” And then he could afterwards like chicken-out of the bigger one that’s going to be expensive to print up even in small numbers. So we printed, like 1,500 copies of [Apotropaic Beatnik Graffiti]. S. Putnik: We got V. Vale to write for it. Mark: V. Vale wrote an introduction, his is so sweet. S. Putnik: It’s a “how-to” read this book. Mark: I asked a couple other people to write forwards too and one of them was Ian Svenonius, who wrote the first book I read after I got out of the hospital. I volunteered to be a guinea pig for COVID back before they had any way to treat it. And so I went into intensive care and had a terrible experience. But when I came out, I read Psychic Soviet by Ian Svenonius. S. Putnik: I gave it to you (laughing) Mark: (laughs) Putnik gave it to me. And because I liked the book so much, I asked him to write something. And his introduction is really nice and totally different than Vale’s. And then I asked a third person, Bob Lewis, who was around in the very early days of Devo. And he helped come up with the term Devo. And de-evolution existed of course, because ever since Darwin came up with evolution, there were religious people that freaked out and then made jokes about de-evolution. And there’s always been this thing between science and faith. I think they both need to work together a little more, because both elements have definite use in the human experience. But to this day, they’re afraid of each other. It’s kind of interesting. V. VALE AND WILLIAM BURROUGHS (1982)
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