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December 2, 2022
Jason McBride's Playlist for His Book "Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Jason McBride's book, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, is a marvelously insightful and thoughtful examination of the author's life.
Jeet Heer wrote of the book at the Nation:
"This book is going to be a barn-burner, the literary biography of the year."
In his own words, here is Jason McBride's Book Notes music playlist for his book Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker:
“Kids Will Be Skeletons,” Mogwai
I spent almost a decade working on this book, though only about six months actually writing the first draft. During that sprint, I craved music that immediately put me in the right mood, that had the proper atmosphere and speed. A few bands and solo musicians did the trick—Slowdive, Tortoise, Julia Holter, Brian Eno—but the most reliable was probably Mogwai. This is among my favorite of their songs.
“I’ll Be Your Mirror,” The Velvet Underground
Acker first discovered Andy Warhol when she was 16, through her boyfriend, the prodigious film scholar P. Adams Sitney, three years her senior. Later, in her early 20s, she fantasized about becoming part of Warhol’s world, listening to the Velvet Underground with her best friend Melvyn Freilicher when the two lived in San Diego. “For hours, Melyvn and I would listen to Warhol’s production of The Velvet Underground,” she wrote, “and fantasize about living in a society such as that of Warhol and his friends, a society in which the two of us weren’t outcasts.”
“Gloria,” Patti Smith
On February 10, 1971, Patti Smith gave her first public reading at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the East Village. Warhol was there, as were Lou Reed, Rene Ricard, Joe Brainard, and Acker. Acker was mesmerized by Smith, by her self-possession, her fierceness, her androgyny. “She’s gorgeous half male,” Acker wrote in her journal, “though she comes on very tough at the point of exploding into total femininity.” Three months later, partly inspired by Smith’s example, Acker would make her own Poetry Project debut.
“Contort Yourself,” James Chance and the Contortions
Acker loved punk, and is routinely, reflexively, referred to as a “punk” or “post-punk writer.” The punk band she adored above all others was probably James Chance and the Contortions. (Acker also had a brief romance with the group’s keyboardist, Adele Bertei.) Punk’s an insufficient word, though, for the unclassifiable Contortions, which have also been called no wave, avant jazz, and dance punk. In an unpublished manuscript, Girl Gangs Take Over the World, Acker describes them as “the best rock-n-roll, jazz, soul, theater, and guerilla band in the world.”
“Winter,” Peter Gordon and David van Tieghem
Acker met the experimental composer and musician Peter Gordon in 1972 in San Diego. He would eventually become her second husband, and would play a significant role in shaping her early Black Tarantula work. The couple spent many years in San Francisco, then New York, with Gordon introducing Acker to pioneering musicians and composers like Robert Ashley and Jill Kroesen, among others. Gordon and Acker collaborated frequently—they hosted a couple of radio shows in the Bay Area, and Acker was, briefly, a member of Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra, which also featured Kroesen, van Tieghem, Rhys Chatham and Arthur Russell.
“Leading a Double Life,” “Blue” Gene Tyranny
“Blue” Gene Tyranny was also a member of the Love of Life Orchestra, and first met Acker and Gordon in San Francisco. He shared a house known as the Honeymoon Hotel with several other musicians, all of whom had similarly winsome stage names: Clay Fear, Phil Harmonic, and Rich Gold. It was an age of aliases. Acker went by the pen names Rip-off Red and The Black Tarantula.
“I Would Die 4 U,” Prince
Acker’s musical taste was eclectic—she loved everything from Van Morrison to The Swans—and she typically listened to music when she wrote. Loud music. It was a method, like writing in foreign languages, for overriding the conscious, deliberate, rational part of her mind. One of her most cherished musicians was Prince. “She thought Prince should rule the world,” one former lover of hers told me. I don’t know what Acker’s favorite Prince song was, though, so here’s one of mine.
“Rebel Girl,” Bikini Kill
Acker inspired legions of young writers and artists. Also, musicians—the most famous of which is probably Kathleen Hanna, front woman of the Olympia, Washington riot grrl pioneers, Bikini Kill. Hanna famously took a writing workshop with Acker in Seattle in 1989, where Acker told her to abandon the spoken word poetry she was working on, and form a band instead. “You’re young,” Acker told her. “That’s what young people are into. You’ll have such a bigger audience to hear what you have to say.”
“Butch in the Streets,” Tribe8
When Acker taught at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early '90s, one of her students was Lynn Breedlove, the founding member of Tribe8, a queercore band that often spoofed the antics of hair bands like Bon Jovi. Breedlove was completely enamored of Acker, and in her classes, he wrote about years lost to drugs and alcohol and about his past life as a bike messenger. That writing would eventually become Godspeed, Breedlove’s first novel. Acker, in turn, called Tribe8 the “hottest band in San Francisco,” and Breedlove “one of the dreams I had had when I was a girl.”
“Spice Up Your Life,” The Spice Girls
For much of her career, Acker subsidized her fiction by doing other writing: book reviews, art criticism, essays. One of her last, and most surprising, assignments, was a profile of the Spice Girls for the Guardian. Acker wasn’t particularly thrilled with the gig—“a fine object for the mind,” she told a friend—but she threw herself into the work with characteristic vigor and seriousness. She tapped music critic friends for their insight and at one point even commissioned astrological charts for the group’s members. Acker ended up actually liking this particular girl gang—they were a world away from Tribe8, but they had moxie and style and an anger that Acker enjoyed encouraging. The final profile remains one of her most enduring pieces of journalism.
“Antigone Speaks About Herself,” The Mekons and Kathy Acker
In 1995, Acker and the post-punk band, The Mekons, turned her novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, into a rollicking, mysterious rock opera of wide-ranging style and tone. Repurposed as lyrics, Acker’s prose make for an irresistible, blunt poetry, and the record is one of the best reminders of her power as a performer. Acker toured with the band, even after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, performing with them at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in September, 1997. This would be Acker’s last public performance—halfway through the show, she collapsed and had to be carried offstage.
“Metamorphosis: One,” Philip Glass
When Acker was dying at an alternative cancer treatment clinic in Tijuana, friends brought her music that she had requested or which they thought would comfort her. Her friends, David and Eleanor Antin, brought her a CD of La Traviata, though Acker was no opera fan. Matias Viegener, another friend and later the executor of Acker’s estate, gave her Felix Maria Woschek’s Mystic Dance, an album of Hindu bhajans and Islamic mantras, and Philp Glass’s Solo Piano. Acker played the last two CDs constantly, and they provided a meditative, almost unearthly, soundtrack.
Jason McBride’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, The Believer, The Village Voice, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Hazlitt, and many others. He lives in Toronto. Eat Your Mind is his first book.
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