Victor Bockris' Beat Punks Documents Downtown in the 1970s

Beat Punks (Da Capo, 304 pages, $16) revisits the same turf yet again. Most of it's interviews and Interview-style transcribed conversations with a very small universe of 70s downtown figures to whom Bockris apparently had the most and longest access?Burroughs (several times), Ginsberg, Warhol, Debbie and Chris (several times), Robert and Patti, Legs, Richard Hell. But there are some surprising fly-ins by the likes of Mick and Keith, Terry Southern, Martin Amis and Nicolas Roeg as well. Bockris says the 24 pieces here represent "my favorite and most enduring journalism." Elsewhere, he notes, "This whole book is about heroes." I think the latter is a bit closer to the point.

It needn't be stressed that this is already well-trod territory for most any reader likely to pick up this book. That reader probably has a bottomless appetite for this material.

As an interviewer, Bockris is not always the most penetrating or insightful ("Do you think Dead Babies is going to be very successful?" "Is music magic to you?"); he does best with subjects he already knows well. He tends to employ Warhol's faux-dopey, meandering interrogative approach, though he's not always as clever as Andy was in using it devilishly to lull subjects into candor. So there are some glaring missed opportunities here, as when he's talking to Mapplethorpe about his sexually charged photos in 1977:

MAPPLETHORPE: The idea is to have a show of the straight portraits and then all of a sudden come out with the sex stuff. And it's too late. You sort of trick people (giggles). Because I think this work in dealing with sexual images is the most difficult thing and the most interesting. If I was buying one of my photographs I would buy one of those, but unless I establish myself on another level it's hard to begin.

BOCKRIS: Do you have any cigarettes?

Oh well. Elsewhere, he asks Roeg, director of both Performance and The Man Who Fell to Earth, "Is there any way you can describe the difference between working with Jagger and Bowie?" Roeg reprimands him with, "I think that's an amazingly static question." Give credit to Bockris for not editing that out.

On the other hand, he was good at matching up interesting people and being there with the tape running. Richard Hell and Susan Sontag have a fairly deep discussion about popular versus high art, with Hell displaying a bright mind; Christopher Isherwood and Burroughs chat politely, both betraying, at least in this instance, a tendency to the banal.

The oddest and yet most enlightening scene in the book derives from one of these experiments. (Have I read it before, maybe in Report from the Bunker? Knipfel says yes, but I'm not sure.) In 1980, Bockris arranged to bring together William Burroughs, Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol (with assorted extras) for a dinner at the Bunker. As a haute-boho summit meeting it was a dismal fiasco, but a revealing one. Burroughs sat at the head of the table, playing the befuddled old granddad. Warhol twittered. Jagger, dragged there against his will, pouted and insulted. The evening instantly drops down a rabbit hole of confusion and rude grumbling:

JAGGER: What are we doing here? What is the purpose of this dinner?

BURROUGHS: The purpose of this dinner is very simple. David Dalton is getting together... What is this about Victor? The twentieth anniversary of The Rolling Stones?

JAGGER: What? What? That's not been going on for twenty years. They're making it up!

BOCKRIS: Bill, maybe we're confusing it with the twentieth anniversary of Rolling Stone magazine.

JAGGER: We're talking at cross purposes. The magazine wasn't founded twenty years ago, nor was the group.

BOCKRIS: So this is just a completely mistaken occasion?

BURROUGHS: It seems to be a mistake all round, but I got nothing to do with it. Don't put it on me, man. David Dalton, who you must know very well...

JAGGER: I've met him twice.

WARHOL: He's one of my best friends.

BURROUGHS: Listen, what is this thing about?

BOCKRIS: Well listen, man, you told me about it.

JAGGER: Couldn't it be your twentieth anniversary or something Andy? I mean you've been doing something for twenty years.

BURROUGHS: The Twentieth Century, I mean Anniversary Issue uuummm...which presumably would be devoted to The Rolling Stones' music...

BOCKRIS: The point is they asked Bill to write something...

WARHOL: Maybe this is one of those things that's going to take three or four years to do.

JAGGER: It's off to a racing start.

It dribbles on like that for a while, until Jagger abruptly bails. It's so not the expected meeting of great minds that it's as edifying as it is unsettling, and we have to thank Bockris for being there to record it.

Cabinetry Cabinet, the new art and culture quarterly out of Brooklyn, reads as smart as it looks. That's a rare achievement in art-and-culture journals, which tend to divide, like wheat and chaff, into text-dominated brainiac tombstones with the visual flair of your Uncle Louie's old alpaca cardigan, and hyper-designed art directors' playgrounds with the intellectual heft of a chickpea. I really like Cabinet's clean, functional design, with its tasteful use of photos, illustrations and an occasional typographical flirtation. It's a throwback to a Modernist esthetic, but in the best sense; a relief on the eyes in this continuing era of designer tyranny.

Much of the writing also is excellent?intellectually free-roaming and stimulating without becoming academic or obscurantist. It ranges from an interview with Harvard mathematician Robert Kaplan, in which we read that the current world record for computing pi stands at 51 billion digits, to our pal Jonathan Ames using an assignment from the editors?to write an essay on the dull blue-green color "bice"?as an excuse to ruminate about picking his nose.

An example of Cabinet at its best is a smart, funny piece by Gregory Williams, who lives on 7th Ave. across from the newly condoed Chelsea Mercantile monolith between 24th and 25th Sts. Williams writes of staring out his window for over a year at the giant cutout yuppie figure who dominated the building's wraparound self-promotional billboard. Williams dubbed him "Vance" and, after a little research, discovered that he's a "stock photograph model," a kind of human clip-art. A designer sent Williams a CD-ROM loaded with what we might call Vance Variations: the same model looking like "a confrontational jerk" in one shot, "alternately coy, puzzled, pensive and bored" in others. Gathering this demeaning information can be read as Williams' personal triumph over "Vance"?and by extension, the overbearing yuppie fortress he almost literally embodied.

One fascinating section addresses the theme of invented languages, from Esperanto to a "Martian" tongue spoken in a trance-state by a young woman in Geneva in the 1890s. It comes with a CD of invented-language vocal pieces by the likes of Kurt Schwitters and Charles Bernstein. Also in this section is a wonderful shape-poem by a Chinese-American artist, Xu Bing, representing a peak in the Himalayas, written/drawn in Chinese with an English translation on a translucent overlay. Very nice.

There's much more: it may be the most thought-packed inaugural issue of an arty journal since the first McSweeney's. There are some missteps?a few art-school mental doodles, and a few treks into territory too well covered already by the avant-gardistas (Kenneth Goldsmith may feel that a few of these pieces, and especially that Schwitters CD, are stepping on his grave). But it's quite an impressive debut. I like the website, too . Issue 1 is in local bookstores. A year's subscription is $24, available at the site or by phone (718-222-8434).

Afterwords The New York Film Critics Circle has just put up its new website, nyfcc.org, created by Matt Zoller Seitz and his brother Jeremy's company Atomic Fridge. It's a handsome site. At the moment its chief attraction is the list of this year's award-winning films, with links to their own sites. But soon Seitz plans to have up an archive of film essays, articles and reviews. "The long-term goal," he tells me, "is to make the site a portal for those who seek literate, meaningful film criticism. One-stop shopping for serious buffs. Build up the visibility and power of film critics by centralizing their image in one place on the Web. Strength through numbers. Real old-school union shit." "King Wenclas" is a zine-culture ass-pain who periodically harangues us for writing too much about rich and successful writers like Dave Eggers and not enough about poor and unsuccessful writers like...King Wenclas. I got a funny mailing from him last week. It included a postcard one could sign under the words "I HEREBY JOIN THE PROTEST AGAINST THE YEAR-2000 GUGGENHEIM GRANT TO AUTHOR RICK MOODY."

Moody's one of a number of writers, including Hilton Als and playwright David Auburn, awarded Guggenheim fellowships this year. The card came with a letter from the "Underground Literary Alliance" explaining that the fellowship "exemplifies the practice of giving financial assistance to already SUCCESSFUL and AFFLUENT writers, well-connected, who clearly don't need the help?while other writers abjectly struggle..." It goes on: "The award to Moody is a symptom of the elitist process of a tax shelter that gives money to those who prove they don't need it! (Established Professionals Only.) It indicates absence of character in the well-to-do author who accepted the grant. (A Member of the Club.) We ask literati to demonstrate the integrity and independence they're touted to have. Or are they jellyfish, or mice? Will one name writer sign the Protest? [So far, evidently not.] If not, the literary world is corrupt.

"This is the first of many actions." It seems odd to wait until nearly the end of the fellowship year to register the complaint. I guess news travels more slowly through the "underground" than it used to.