‘ONLY THE MAD ARE’ & Collected Works

Evelina Kvartunaite is a multidisciplinary artist, photographer, producer, community weaver, a podcast host and experience designer based in Amsterdam. With over 20 years of experience in creative education, community engagement, and cultural programming, her work bridges the personal and collective through emotionally resonant, participatory practices. She has been focusing on education and creativity also actively working in conflict areas and war zones like North Africa, Balcans, East Turkey and Caucasus. Her projects often unfold in ephemeral, site-specific ways: through spoken word events, community altars, reflective workshops, or memory walks.

ONLY THE MAD ARE 

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‘Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I’m not so sure about that’. Lux Interior, Napa Mental Hospital, California, June 13, 1978.

So, you’re a rock n’ roll band and that’s it, right? You’ve even cultivated a deliberate decadence. Art for art’s sake. The side of music you come from is not the righteous kind, it’s just in it for the love of it. There is a difference. Not even the money attracts, as capitalism is just cheesy and boring. You’ve nothing against the mad, let’s say. They’re probably even saner than the rest of torrid humanity, for sure. But c’mon you’re an evil rock n roll band, you don’t have a conscience and you’re certainly not gonna do something for charity. That would be too, what’s the word, good. 

Somehow, something shifts. This is 1978. Maybe it’s that the psychiatric hospital is located along the Napa Vallejo Highway, which sounds like it should be a song by Tim Hardin. Somehow, permissions granted to enter the lunatic ward. Anyways, this band are mad.

• Warder, look I ain’t bein’ funny but since when are The Cramps seen as good for crazy? My son is bad enough already. Tried to kill me and his daddy. Who let these psycho-billies in? I ain’t jokin’. That guitar gal is called Poison Ivy for a reason.

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‘The fascism in our heads’ – Foucault

First song in look at the kooks. Nick Knox on drums is less balanced than anyone here. Lux Interior has difficulties telling reality from rock n’ roll. On bass, Bryan Gregory, a man tragically dead soon. The patients are sympathetic. One turns to yell ‘thanks’. At the back of the hall, the warder with the Link Wray tattoo is laughing into his illegal beer. 

Interview with Dennis Cooper 

‘Wish that I could eat your cancer when you turn black’ Cobain

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A way of talking about things, Cooper had a way of talking about things. One subject would flow into another but not effortlessly. Abrasion was his middle name, in all things, actions as well as his speaking voice and cognitive thread, and of course his very appearance.  He was unabashedly queer growing up, from as soon as I can remember and although I don’t have a great memory, still that’s a long time ago. When I say unabashedly, it sounds like he wasn’t trying to hide it but it was more than that really. It was clear in his tonality of voice, a little lighter and more languid, somehow more intimate for a man, he was softer but also lascivious so he made you feel that his voice was undressing you and sizing you up but slowly and never as a come-on. This was intellectual eroticism, more as a sense of homosexual understanding, where you rated on his lifeworld’s compass, North South East or West, and how you registered, fuckable or lovable or neither. Understood from a purely epistemological perspective you understand, albeit it was still a kind of objectification. Maybe sometimes, rarely, you might rate both for Cooper, that is fuckable and lovable epistemologically and simultaneously. I was certainly fuckable but I don’t think he could ever love me. And him for me? Well, I never entertained any real feelings of fuckability when it came to Cooper. Sure, I’ll admit, I did like his style, the way he looked and moved and had his being. Then again, who didn’t?

Studying Cooper was not an exact science.  But you can start with the physicals, which contain less ambiguity.  He had the longest and most sensitive hands that I’ve ever seen and his fingers were bony aesthetic, as if they were expensive antiques or the stone figures of an ancient Athenian statue masquerading as digits for everyday use. His long blonde hair was almost like a girl’s or that of a marine goddess, the way it twirled and spun around in tight curls, the way it would fly out in all directions when he ran or jumped or played guitar, the way he would flick his neck to draw attention to his gorgeous mane. His lips were thick and ruby full, always pursing in a mock pout when he would address a serious topic, and he rarely wasted time on the superficialities of existence. No ordinary man, then. He knew it well too, of course. His favourite phrase being it ain’t my fault I keep turning you on. What do you say to that?

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Some writers and artists are harder to track down than others. Hubris gets in the way or maybe they’re just insanely busy on some new project.  With Cooper he ran a famous and controversial blog (finally excommunicated from the internet) and made himself available to his readers, so all I had to do was send an email. I had a reply in days.

Yes Mr Tim Dlugos, sure thing I remember us growing up together. I’d be delighted to talk to you, just send on some questions in advance, we can generally stick to that rubric but let’s leave some room for some organic and spontaneous play. To be honest, I’m flattered that you want to discuss my work which isn’t false modesty but I’m always a little surprised when people get what I’m trying to do. Of course, I often inspire exactly the totally opposite reaction, especially recently and I have a thick skin so it doesn’t kill me or make me want to kill me, but lately yeah I have been a bit low about the constant flak. You’re probably following the Google trouble, fucking corporate cocksuckers. So, let me confirm; flattered. Happy to know you, Mister Dlugos, again after all these bloomin’ years man.

Wow, Dennis Cooper was flattered by little old me. Sure, I was excited.

I thought up some what I at least thought were pertinent questions, which didn’t take me that long, truth be told, as I was somewhat of a Cooper obsessive. Of course, I don’t necessarily say that proudly. After all, Cooper’s paradigmatic themes of death, abusive relationships and the search for language to convey extreme emotions may say something about the character of their author, but they also tell something about the fragmented psyche of the readers drawn to his work. Maybe due to our shared background, Dennis and I could blame the environment, eh?

But looking around the café we are meant to meet I’m thinking everyone is a bit fragmented these days. I’m sitting at a table in The Onyx, a dimly lit east Hollywood coffeehouse and sure this is well middle-class bourgeois but you can see the hustlers outside on the sidewalk, scoring and jonesing.

That’s Dennis storming through the entrance. For some reason he reminds me of Lee Majors when he played The Million Dollar Man. I think about saying this when he arrives at my table (I have waved so he recognises me although I’d also sent a cute pic through the email) but decide against it. Thing is, I don’t remember ever Cooper talking about the rehabilitation of 1970s American machismo idols, not the heterosexist ones that is. So, I keep schtum. I’ve resolved anyhows to stick to more intra-literary questions and mostly about his own work, as let’s face it I’m a fan. That’s why I’m here. And looking at my watch somewhat nervously, it’s already fifteen minutes past midday and he did say he had another appointment at 2. Also, we need to order. Lordy, the stress! Honestly, I would not want to be doing this every day.

Still, I wasn’t gonna waste the gilded opportunity after all this time now was I? Truth be told, there were demons from the past that needed finally to be put to bed. Course Cooper knew this as well as I did.

So, Tim, what’s this meeting really about, I mean, what’s it really about then?

 Shit, man. 

I thought this latter phrase to myself although a seer like Cooper could undoubtedly  read the script off my silent lips. 

Where to hide, now?

Oklahoma Dirty Realism - Why We Need Larry Clark Now 

Some called it a devastating portrait of an American tragedy. Appropriately, this first photography book came bound in black. We might rather refer to it as a statement of life – surprising, beautiful, cruel, thanatological. Existence, as Plato said of philosophy, is a preparation for death. On one page, there is a picture of a young man in his later teens, fondling a gun with the words death is more perfect than life.  It is accompanied with a caption: dead 1970. But if Larry’s Clark’s Tulsa is a tragedy – and it unequivocally is – then it is also a romance. The group of teens Clark hung with as a feral teenager in Oklahoma were sexy as hell, wild as the jungle, free as a dream. We fall in love with them as we see them rise and then fall; 1963, 1968, 1971. The latter year, the year I was born, starts with obscene sex and ends with a baby in a coffin box. This is romance in sketchy Oklahoma. 

Today, this Saturday April morning, 2020, I read that America is the new epicentre of Covid 19. It takes me back to one of the captions that mark the Tulsa photos. Accidental Gunshot Wound.  A bearded man is prone on the bed, his trousers down to reveal his bloodied thigh. He resembles a dishevelled Jesus portrait on one of the earlier room walls. He has crucified himself and soon, no doubt, his time will be up. His girlfriend faces away from him crying hysterically with her head in her hands. She knows the end could be nigh. This is us today in 2020. Clark’s photography, in all its ruthless realism, is also a generalised indictment of a system and a humanity that would allow this to happen. Everytime punk, you’re gonna get the same. 

MARLEY IS GOD

On the way to the church, St Monica’s Catholic, you had to try to navigate the shopping arcade. As you came through the gap in the wall at the top you had the large pool hall on the immediate left. This was a kind of concrete rectangle with a corrugated iron roof  and a façade of plywood which had an image of giant pool balls on a blue slate background with two cues cross ways and a big Clockwork Orange eye stared out from between the cross. It wasn’t a religious cross but then what is religion?

If that wasn’t enough to scare the bejesus out of you then the mammoth ghetto blaster mounted outside the door to the pool hall should have done the job. It pumped out dub reggae from 9.30am all the way to about 10pm and in the summertime, opening hours went later again. This meant that all the children of the parish from the early days walked to a kind of roots rocksteady beat that tended to make them unnaturally sway from side to side in a kind of unruly swagger and move their heads back and forth as if under the influence of some deep psychedelic source.    

The soundtrack did vary slightly – between ska and reggae say - but for the most part it focused in on early Wailers albums. The two big albums, Catch a Fire and Burnin’ were particular favourites. The former began with the song Concrete Jungle which felt like it was especially written for this neighbourhood. The second album was more uplifting but it had a heavier dub sound too and the uplift was also a revolutionary one. Get Up Stand Up and Burnin’ and Lootin’ gave us a political vocabulary from taking a stance to actually getting out on those main streets and causing trouble for change.

That’s how it all started.

People Seem Like Bad Copies

After Tasos Denegris

On the thoroughfare at Howth

They walk past in single and double file

Their gestures and their moods

Nothing sweet about it 

Some kind of death

People seem like bad copies

Also just as well as

On the thoroughfare at Thessaloniki

Is this a thanatology

Or an existential comedy?

Still Life With Nude

After a Gee Vaucher anti-war collage, 1983

The soldier’s favourites up front 

in a kind of battlefield nest

his family portraits and a brunette

with pert tits surrounded by used

bullets – and in the background

this soldier’s dead body prostrate     

Jones Irwin teaches Philosophy and Education in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. He has published poetry most recently in Espacio Fronterizo (Borderland/ Espace Frontière), and with Moonstone Press and Tofu Ink Press. He is resident Poetry Critic and Columnist with Red Ogre Review. His first Chapbook of poems, entitled 'GHOST TOWN' was published by Moonstone Press, Philadelphia, US, in Summer 2022. His second Chapbook of poems, entitled 'American Haikus', was published in Autumn 2024, also with Moonstone Press. His third Chapbook, entitled ‘Deep Image’, will be published by Tofu Ink Press in early 2025.