by Steve Aylett
A roulette sea spiralled to Lint’s centre, illuminating his cranium in curious flashes, and then a narcotic concussion nearly blew the eyes out of his head. He wrote of the experience: ‘Drowsy empires flutter in some elemental distance, I chase over colors and proportion to observe the hazardous bliss of canyons, the glowing yards of platform factories, black whales passing over dead tops of towers, pullulating system creatures, the purple darkness changing in tiers, anatomy adhering to its walls.’ He watched comparative chances streaming like waterfalls inside a phenomenal landscape.
Somewhere in all this Lint turned to see that Elsa Carnesky was striding a cinematic hero-world, the toughest cowgirl gunslinger in the echoey west, her theme tune reminding him of her amazing identity. An intensity of painted desert scrolled past her, sheriff stars falling from the sky. He was stunned by this sacred Technicolour heart of Elsa and his experience of her would be forever affected by the vision.
Looking down to observe red and blond blood cells teeming through his arm, he noticed that letters were falling on dirt to twitch like worms and shrivel to nothing. In researching maverick substances in text DNA, Lint had nipped at the heels of a process he called ‘tagging’, in which atoms and molecules could be labelled with words and concepts and allowed to weave texts by natural processes. The main problem was getting to a state where the atomic was visible and the observer was in a fit state to creatively record those observations—Lint briefly thought he had found a way, and returned to the rotting and fertile jungle ‘with the scent of heaven still on my hands’. The old brujo scrutinized Lint and said he had seen volcanic sludge feeding towards him, each little light in it pulsing like a code.
Carnesky told Lint she had spent the whole trip talking to a spider with an abdomen the size of a spacehopper.
But for Lint the experience wasn’t over. The next day he walked out to greet an X-ray, the crisp cataclysm of the morning, heaven’s unasked-for confessions scalding his brain. Nature was the blue-eyed unkindness of children, a cold necessary blade. ‘What we will find is the hair of our soul, an earthy force acting upon itself.’ Raw value was spreading surflike, the endless accident of the universe including the etheric angst of those become conscious of it. ‘The flavor of obliteration wasn’t so bad,’ he wrote later. ‘A bit like boiled sprouts.’ Lint’s zebra heart broke at angles to the stripes.
Lint and Elsa travelled on together and enjoyed Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations, ‘a vaudevillian skull amid prophecy and pastries’. But it was amid the sugar heads and fortune music of New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, snapshot flowers leaving stains on his eye, that Lint realised he was in love with Elsa. ‘She had one of those smiles that went upside-down, using all the muscles,’ said Lint. ‘It worked her whole face. She wasn’t afraid to crack her mask.’ Lint tried to impress her by taking part in a ritual test of endurance. ‘The cake was difficult to eat, being made of mashed blindfolds. But by god I made a go of it.’
There followed more than a year of world travel with Carnesky. Lint filtered all through his hauntbones or, as Lord Pin put it, ‘mastered the Thousand Sights and came out saying blimey’.
Describing a still stick insect: ‘A moment on the green leaf, sham twigs.’
Restaurants: ‘Short wine glass? Curse their game.’
London: ‘a mistake built to last a thousand years.’
Border guards: ‘tend to be the sort of men who like being observed.’
The Rainforest: ‘These pythons are always on the go.’
Their trip to India, a land ‘teeming with deities’, included a visit to a cavern lined with earlobes. ‘The locals have told us this cave is where humanity’s earlobes wind up after death, and I’m inclined to believe them. Why would they lie about something so unimportant?’
A local swami told Lint, ‘Electricity can’t be shocked—neither can one who is enlightened.’ To which Lint made a graceless allusion to Thomas Merton and complained about the fixtures in the local hostels. ‘Tropical plugs are a different color,’ he recorded elsewhere. Lint wrote of foyer world, of the check-in desk with its ‘lion telephone like a golden bottle’.
As if repeatedly encountering Jelly Result’s town of Eterani, Lint would conclude from his travels that ‘All cities are designed for the same scenarios.’
‘Even my luggage is aching,’ Lint wrote to Alan Rouch, and concluded that he was ‘too old for rotted sleeping bags and licking the mountain’.
He and Elsa were married in Oaxaca in 1975 and lived there a while, Elsa painting landscapes under ‘the sun, an epic anode’, and Lint writing to Rouch that ‘they have a very large daytime over here’. ‘To do nothing isn’t inherently bad,’ he told poet Sue Diebold, ‘it depends what you’re doing nothing about.’
Lint told Rouch these were ‘Happy days. Distorted rats are pulled from melons. Falling into the undergrowth presents no real difficulties. What is commonly called money is really a series of photographic snapshots of the death process. Come join us, Alan.’
Rouch visited and found a mild domestic scene, both Lint and Carnesky working productively in the adobe house. Lint went on about how every location opens up into every other location (something he had already described in the first Arkwitch book). During Rouch’s stay he witnessed the beginning of the fan phenomenon that would grow around Lint, when a young reader showed up on the doorstep with books to sign and arcane questions. Presumably in reference to the Draining album, the nervous kid wanted to know how an anteater knows its responsibilities. Perhaps feeling obliged to profundity, Lint thought a little while. ‘In the atoms of things,’ he said, ‘are details like decrees. The intent of the creator is stored in the creation. That’s why wood sounds certain and metal merely inflexible.’ Lint was now something of a recluse and described the mild conversation as a ‘violent novelty’. His only advice to young writers was ‘ignoring newts’, something that surely went without saying.
Another time he told a bothersome fan to ‘Go across town and hassle Castaneda.’ The fan said he didn’t believe anything Lint said. Lint claimed that he was not used to having his words doubted, a quip which provoked caustic laughter from his young wife.
Working on Fanatique, Lint enjoyed describing the textured oasis around him, the white-noise ethanol sky, hot tin chassis in weeds and the crinkled feeling of tree. ‘A spider like a shiny bead, eyelashes growing from the side of a wall, a pressing heat before thunder relieves the sky.’
One morning Elsa snapped at him ‘You’re selfish’ and Lint, thinking she’d said ‘Your shellfish’, sat waiting for her to present him with some sort of seafood platter. After ten silent, staring minutes he demanded ‘Well? Where are the clams?’ and Elsa went into the bedroom to pack her stuff. Lint was baffled and bereft after the breakup and his writing routine, which he usually described as ‘interlocking structures of towering fire’, suffered. When he did write, birds ‘rummaged through the air’ instead of being described properly.
Lint was experimenting with ‘the beading of creativity in an almost-vacuum’, by which colour denied gathers to a node or very disparate nodes—in this case, to Lint himself—where it is utilized and appreciated. London seemed the perfect venue, but he mis-timed his arrival in Britain—the vacuum he expected would not hit for another few years. As it was he found a major colour node already blushing out in the form of punk, a rare outbreak of honesty in a covertly brutal nation. ‘The Japanese will hand you a business card with both hands,’ Lint wrote, ‘the British will propel you under a train the same way.’ But during his sojourn in London in 1976-77 he would form links with the punk and nascent industrial scene, raising his profile further among the young. By now looking like a grinning bone ghost of a hawk and striding the streets in a white leather coat (Malcolm McLaren called him ‘a living knife’), he found he could scare the shit out of anyone looking for trouble, just by creasing his ageing face.
Lint continued to experiment. Inspired by Gex’s poem about events in Chile in 1974, Santia
go, in which a first-hand description of the US-backed massacre of 9/11 was simply divided up into lines, Lint did a similar thing with Kissinger’s green light to Suharto’s genocide in East Timor:
the use of U.S.-made arms
could create problems
our risks of being found out
our efficiency is cut
our main concern is that whatever you do
does not create a climate
that discourages investment
we will do our best to keep everyone quiet
until the president returns home
He tried imposing Perecian constraints on his writing and many code-derived passages turn up in Fanatique, such as the Oulipo (‘o’ in every word) chapter ‘Blood Orange Apocalypse’.
‘Lord only knows how Ollie overruled our orthodox proposals.’
‘Oh, Ollie’s not so honest.’
‘How so?’
‘Too old. Poorly codgers often obstruct out of outright orneriness.’
He also worked with SOA code, by which each word must begin alternately with the first and last letters of those in the text of U.S. torture manuals. Thus the CIA’s KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual:
‘The following are the principal coercive techniques of interrogation: arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis, and induced regression.’
is raw source for the following text (from chapter 7 of Fanatique):
‘To go about energized, put everyone to flight immediately through drawling nonsense or yelling something heretical. Soon the old rules may seem absolutely random. Decisions needn’t hold you. A slave’s negative decision is noble.’
But these and other experiments, including a sojourn in Paris, couldn’t distract from Lint’s loneliness after Elsa’s departure. He travelled to visit her in Elora, Canada. But upon arrival he peered in through the window of her huge barn studio to find it filled with dozens of paintings portraying him as the Devil incarnate, biting the head off a little lamb. He went away again bereft, and visited Rouch in LA.
Rouch was going from strength to strength in TV land, with pre-production starting on his crime series Everywhere We Go, People Die (later retitled Hart to Hart). He suggested that Lint throw a few ideas at the studio. ‘Chuck a load of trash directly at their faces and see what sticks behind their shades,’ said Rouch. ‘And for God’s sake don’t laugh.’
Lint went to see ABC exec Lyndon Eagleburger and proposed a TV movie about an air pilot who was incredibly skilled, but who screamed the entire time he was off the ground. ‘He isn’t even scared,’ Lint explained. ‘It’s just a medical reaction. After the war he gets work as a commercial pilot and his shrieked Captain announcements instil stark panic and terror in the passengers, even when he’s commenting on the beautiful weather and perfect adherence to the timetable.’ Finally he becomes a hero when a hijacker, entering the cockpit to find the captain screaming like a bastard as he grips the wheel, concludes that the plane is going down and faints like a cartoon wife.
‘I think it’s a crappy idea,’ Eagleburger told him and Lint threw himself across the desk, strangling Eagleburger with one hand and stealing an ashtray with the other. Lint was thrown out of the studio building with Eagleburger’s final advice ringing in his ears: ‘Irrespective of you trying to strangle me, I still think it’s a crappy idea.’
Lint sold the ashtray for almost nothing, but felt satisfied by what he’d learned: ‘There’s a fine line between real entertainment and a tightrope walker.’
It was not until the eighties and the horrors of Nose Furnace and Caterer the Movie that Lint would deal with Hollywood again.
20
SWAYING FAST IS ROCKING
Lint rock · The Energy Draining Church Bazaar · flies · trun · strange incidents · a policy of terrorizing · bloat · cable cheese · Unsmile · The Prophecies · on reading new books · explorers are never suspicious
‘Music can be lengthy, some kinds get the soul,’ Lint told Zig Zag magazine in 1969. Lint’s claim to musical fame at the time was an album of pellucidant ravings, The Energy Draining Church Bazaar, recorded with The Unofficial Smile Group. Lint seemed to blunder effortlessly into such projects, his young fanbase seeing in him an icon of far-outness. From the late sixties onward he was regularly adopted by rock movements and pasted into their agenda, whether in The Fall’s ‘Caterer’ tracks or in the raucous crowd of a bar in Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara, laughing as Ruth Tyrangiel urges Dylan to ‘bare yourself like the cross’. The Crystal City Martyrs (named after motor fatalities among Lint wedgers) made several Lint references in their eponymous first album, such as the graveyard lion in ‘Gong Over Crib: That’s Discipline’.
In the case of Draining, the Smile band were on the verge of splitting when Lint rolled up with a dumb song about flies:
One half of the truth is that
The eye loves a coffin
‘It creeped me out a bit,’ says Don ‘Corny’ Rensin in his autobiography Crooked Smile. ‘And he kept saying that “flies can be awfully dismissive.” But two of the others had heard of him, and it was those times, and we got together.’ Gabriel Hutton and ‘Judge’ Pete Fox had read Lint and were flattered that he had written a song for them. ‘Foxy even tried to impress Lint by saying something like “brocade doesn’t last long in the North Sea”, but Lint just stared at him.’
Lint, whom Rensin described as ‘a scary, freakishly strong old man’, began a collaboration with the fragile group, writing an albumful of songs which he reworked as rehearsals progressed. He took to showing up at the Mission Hills rehearsal house to oversee progress. ‘One time he turned up in some sort of carpet coat,’ says Rensin, ‘smacking snow out of it like Dr Zhivago. We looked outside and it was perfectly sunny.’
Lint’s presence began to permeate the project, his ideas for new sounds sparking the others to invention. ‘He’d say “I want a sound like a hot moon bursting like a bubble and dropping atom-size hens in the sea” or something—in fact exactly that, and that’s the sound we came up with for “Memory X-Ray Hammer”.’ Fox created the sound by hitting a melon with a frypan while letting out a sort of keening wail. The recorded sound was then slowed right down and thrown away, along with the rest of the song.
The ‘pragment’ had been the beginning of Lint’s habit of inventing words. By now he was having stories rejected for his use of words like ‘spile’ (bitterness on a wet, yellow-coloured day), ‘spagran’ (gangly stranger with probable unhealthy habits) and ‘trun’ (stubborn out-thrust of chin upon almost facing the truth). One unused story began ‘Walking out, I felt a pang of spile’ and goes on to describe a spagran who, upon being observed, gives it a ‘bit of trun’. The occupants of 10619 Sepulveda Boulevard began to converse in similar terms, visitors finding the place like a tar pit from which almost anything could emerge. The previously accomplished Hutton found he had become inept and had to re-learn his playing as though the guitar were an alien object. ‘Lint seemed to want to rewrite us,’ says Hutton today. Lint would term their rehearsals ‘a stiff daily godlet tasting of tetanus’ and persistently addressed drummer David Owen as ‘Comrade Plunge’. Owen remembers a groupie injecting ‘brimstone endorphine’ directly into her forehead and saying in a monotone, ‘Spiders manage without us and wires don’t care. An argument against.’ The statement shows up in ‘DNA Interruption Charm’, a song which on the album segues with confounding ease into the band’s celebration of the joys of the country, ‘Mesmerised by Midges’.
It seems that the scariness many attributed to the older Lint was beginning to manifest at around this time, along with the inexplicable visual quirks that fans were to witness in later years. Many strange incidents have been recounted by those who have availed themselves of the un-signposted public right-of-way through Lint’s head. Daniel Guyal of the Lint fanzine Too Pleased to Apologize told of Li
nt sitting at his window and very slowly becoming a piled construction of glass shells. Approaching these finally, Guyal found that the objects were so brittle and airy that they disintegrated at his touch, blowing away like the lightest of skin-flakes. In the hysterical enclave of the Sepulveda house, Lint’s creative strangeness was sending everyone into weird coping postures. Fox wrote at the time: ‘Waking in the morning’s like looking out a plane window and seeing the wing’s on fire.’ Their predicament seemed to go beyond psychodrama. Lint set rules for times when group members could leave the house, but these times did not exist on any actual clock—Lint called it Newt Horology. Like clipper sailors ready to quit and retire to dry land, the band now found their ship commandeered by an insanely unpredictable pirate. Lint terrorized them. ‘He would bring us instruments I’d never seen before, like the one that was a triangular shadow. He told me to touch the edges and it had pulsing filaments there, like the legs of a millipede. He set it down on the floor and it flowed steadily away into a corner. I never went near that shadowy corner again. And then there was Damage Night.’