Killy reacts; thinking is not his gig. So it is hard to honor him for whatever straight instincts he still cultivates in private -- while he mocks them in public, for huge amounts of money. The echo of Gatsby's style recalls the truth that Jimmy Gatz was really just a rich crook and a booze salesman. But Killy is not Gatsby. He is a bright young Frenchman with a completely original act. . . and a pragmatic frame of reference that is better grounded, I suspect, than my own. He is doing pretty well for himself, and nothing in his narrow, high-powered experience can allow him to understand how I can watch his act and say that it looks, to me, like a very hard dollar-- maybe the hardest.

A Final Note from the Author

Owl Farm

Please insert this quote at beginning or end of Killy piece. -- Thompson.

“No eunuch flatters his own noise more shamefully nor seeks by more infamous means to stimulate his jaded appetite, in order to gain some favor, than does the eunuch of industry.”

-- The quote, as I have it, is attributed to one Billy Lee Burroughs. . . but if memory serves, I think it comes from the writings of K. Marx. In any case, I can trace it down if need be. . .

Scanlan's Monthly, vol 1, no. 1, March 1970

The Ultimate Free Lancer

You asked me for an article on whatever I wanted to write about and since you don't pay I figure that gives me carte blanche. I started out tonight on an incoherent bitch about the record business. . . I was looking at the jacket copy on the “Blues Project” album. . . but the “producer's” name was in huge script on the back, and underneath it were four or five other names. . . punks and narks and other ten-percenters who apparently had more leverage than the musicians who made the album, and so managed to get their names on the record jacket.

I was brooding about this -- which I'll write about sometime later -- when I picked up the latest Free Press and read an obituary for a three-year-old kid named “Godot”. . . which was nice, but as I read it I was reminded again of Lionel Olay and how the Free Press commemorated his death with a small block of unsold advertising space that had to be used anyway, so why not for Lionel? I'm also reminded that I've asked you twice for a copy of his article on Lenny Bruce (in which Lionel wrote his own obituary), and that you've disregarded both queries. Maybe there's no connection between this and the fact that the Blues Project people were fucked out of any mention except photos on their own album, but I think there is. I see it as two more good examples of the cheap, mean, grinning-hippie capitalism that pervades the whole New Scene. . . a scene which provides the Underground Press Syndicate with most of its copy and income. Frank Zappa's comments on rock joints and light shows (FP 1230) was a welcome piece of heresy in an atmosphere that is already rigid with pre-public senility. The concept of the UPS is too right to argue with, but the reality is something else. As Frank Zappa indicated, if only in a roundabout way, there are a lot of people trying to stay alive and working WITHIN the UPS spectrum, and not on the ten-percent fringes. That's where Time magazine lives. . . way out there on the puzzled, masturbating edge, peering through the keyhole and selling what they see to the wide world of Chamber of Commerce voyeurs who support the public prints.