BEIRUT

(John Cale first came to prominence as one of the founding members of the Velvet Underground. On the Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/ White Heat albums — the Velvet's peak period — Cale’s keyboards and viola were central to their exploratory brilliance. Following his departure from the band, he contributed to Nico’s Chelsea Girls and a later Nico album, The Marble Index, on which he arranged and played all the instruments. He then produced the first Stooges album and helped put together yet another Nico album, Desertshore. Striking out on his own, he released Vintage Violence on Columbia, following it with Church Of Anthrax in collaboration with Terry Riley. He recorded an album of contemporary classical music for Warner Bros, called The Academy In Peril, from which “Days Of Steam ” was lifted for use in the soundtrack of Andy Warhol's film Heat His new album, Paris 1919, is already being acclaimed as one of the finest records of the year. At present, Cale is busy producing a band called the Modern Lovers for Warners, as well as preparing a couple of books. You're familiar with the music of John Cale; what follows is an example of what he can do with the printed word. —Ed.)

Somehow or other the word got out that sadness came with spellbound excavations of the tomb of Tutanhkammen. The students letting the occasion be its own articulate illusion for the event as the strongly flavoured garlic props of outstanding pretentiousness and hilarious hollywood hoodlums sucked their toes with apparent intent. Between the time it came to be the equinox and that of mediocre temptations lay a vast scheme of puerile advancement closely allied to the dream of death. Many had asked for forgiveness many begged for it o god for once forgive someone send it down a host of heavenly warmth. We are all sinners with or without the half finished work of our saviour. Theres no escape the tides will get higher and higher nothing will be said nothing heard so we are told. And blindly like mosquitoes that outwardly rode the cold assuming sandstorm chuls in concert we fizzured out the similarities to drain ■ the greedy holes abroad or sing alive the static price of upon its owner ransom. The stamina of inadequate boundaries must have saved the day cos the tree was straightened out by seven and the milkman arrived with his mouth. There were more studious attempts made to fraternise with the gentry but all met with the statistical fate of rhythm and the conscious nuisance in the back. Anyway nothing new came of it before Lent came around with its sordid vision like a distrusting peeping tom pulling his dead mothers pigtails in a 1910 photograph covering his face. The ceiling had by this time gotten considerably lower to around the top of the ice box and was flirting with the elevator. Symbols of humanity hang from the walls pregnant with the chimes of rising abbeys and sulking corners antipodent. Among the prurient sidelong glances first to shadow the pierced ship were those of wisdom paling in the sunshine overwhelmed by the morbid sexuality of tnose crusaders lancing turkish ribs at dawn consider then this ambiguity with the embarrassed praying of the King. Slowly the troupe came to rest within a stones throw of Carthage and her great big lions fornicating and fornicating some more in the mediterranean sun the whistling jeering and pandemonious assault on the ears was too much for everyone so some retreated to the other side of the road and organised a gymanfa ganu in the shade. Two weeks later the lions tired out by a monsoon the night before were shot and left for dead in the company of 4000 gyraffes leaning in a different direction altogether what with the rambling sense of honour they possessed and elephantine presence of mind to control their timidity among the disturbances of stellar position. Incidentally Arm ana with fertile acidity the redolent abscesses of marauding mothers answered in awkward incandescence their cripple portraits by the sea. If it were not for the towns surrounding the staid antiseptic country executions over the hillside estates the precarious alternatives more or less would not now be the fatuous dependents of frivolity and dissipation that was thought too significant for approval nor even excusable as humour.^