MY FIRST MONTAGE

I first saw Paris in 1954 – after a three-day tour of brothels and bars in several cities between there and Frankfurt where I was stationed as a GI. It wasn't until I realized that I had no money left and only nine hours to report back to barracks that I decided to take a few pictures of this illustrious city. I had the idea of shooting several rolls of film of only one object in order to create a photo from a new and strange perspective. Besides, I was still so ripped from the night before that I couldn't stand up anyway. The photos for this first montage were done from a hotel room in the Hotel de Suede. To this day I  can't remember how I got to the hotel or who the people in the room were, but the view overlooking Notre Dame was tremendous. I would have taken more pictures, but since I’d already emptied the glasses of my sleeping hosts, I figured it was senseless to stay.

While in the stockade (I was a little late getting back to base) I realized my life had taken an artistic direction from which I would never escape. After getting out of the army, I immediately signed up for classes in Paris – which I never went to – and lived off the GI Bill. Fortunately, the abundance of cheap booze, beautiful women and easy money gave me the artistic freedom I needed.

In 1957 and again in 1970 I added the photos of my friend the Beat poet Gregory Corso. Gregory  used to hang out at the Café Monaco on La Place Odeon. The Monaco catered mostly to ex-Korean war vets studying French girls and wine on the GI Bill. One day a polio-disabled Franco-American playboy named Jack Stern pulled up in his chauffeur-driven Bentley. Gregory demanded all the money in his pocket, but Jack held back $100 for lunch. (He liked to eat well.) Gregory argued, then grudgingly settled for about another $100. This was enough money to support Corso for a month, but he decided instead to buy a coat for protection against the coming winter. He went to the flea market and while looking for a warm coat he spied a Hamlet costume in velvet, which he bought. That fall and winter  he sat around his attic room in the "Beat Hotel" in his velvet costume . . . BROODING!


PARIS

Childcity, Aprilcity,
Spirits of angels crouched in doorways,
Poets, worms in hair, beautiful Baudelaire.
Artaud, Rimbaud, Apollinaire,
Look to the nightcity -
Informers and concierges,
Montparnassian woe, deathical Notre Dame,
To the nightcircle look, dome heirloomed;
Hugo and Zola together entombed,
Harlequin deathtrap,
Seine generates ominous mud,
Eiffel looks down-sees the Apocalyptical ant crawl,
New Yorkless city,
City of Germans dead and gone,
Dollhouse of Mama War.

Gregory Corso

Gregory Corso with a staff stolen from Notre Dame

GARGOYLES

The gargoyles trumpet Paris to me
when it rains out of their mouths
For centuries the same tremulous
petrified sepulcher cries
all into the Seine's narrow ear
It's the way they're placed
Outstretched gargy necks
screammouthed haunched pensivity
blasting golden era echoes from cathedral nests
as though avenging I imagine speechless Quasimodos
My ear is unlike the ear of the Seine
In my ear more resounded unsepulcher birds
loom the sphere the pinioned dome that is mine
this dream frontier the brief flight the zoomed  utterance
that is mine to hear
O I don't know what to think when they sit
like spies with no clothes with no real eyes
watching me in the rain gushing storms like a defiance
They too would like raincoats
Or something I don't know yet enough to know
Their image false their purpose contagious  counterfeit
I cannot feel that demondrains benefit the houses  of God
on a rainy day forbidding or decreeing  nourishment for
The river's diet

from "The Happy Birthday of Death"

by Gregory Corso