A couple of days ago on March 26 2025 at the time of this writing, the centennial celebration of serialist defender, Pierre Boulez began. He was an ambassador of the avantgarde, and a celebrator of poetry. In today's post we will explore his legacy as a conductor and as the creative force who behind the establishment of one of the worlds great sonic laboratories of sound innovation, IRCAM. The following is an excerpt from my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Syntheis and the Birth of Electronic Music. 

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At the end of the 1950s Boulez had left Paris for Baden-Baden where he had scored a gig as composer in residence with the South-West German Radio Orchestra. Part of his work consisted of conducting smaller concerts. He also had access to an electronic studio where he set to work on a new piece, Poesie Pour Pouvoir, for tape and three orchestras. Baden-Baden would become his home, and he eventually bought a villa there, a place of refuge to return to after his various engagements that took him around the world and on extended stays in London and New York. His experience conducting for the Théâtre Marigny, had sharpened his skills in this area, making it all possible.

Boulez had gained some experience as a conductor in his early days as a pit boss at the Folies Bergère. He gained further experience when he conducted the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra when he was on tour with his friend Jean-Louis Barrault. In 1959 he was able to get further out of the mold of conducting incidental music for theater and get down to the business he was about: the promotion of avantgarde music.

The break came when he replaced the conductor Hans Rosbaud who was sick, and a replacement was needed in short notice for a program of contemprary music at the Aix-en-Provence and Donaueschingen Festivals. Four years later he had the opportunity to conduct Orchestre National de France for their fiftieth anniversary performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where the piece had been first been premiered to the shock of the audience. Conducting suited Boulez as an activity for his energies and he went on to lead performances of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. This was followed by him conducting Wagner’s Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde.

In the 1970s Boulez had a triple coup in his career. The first part of his tripartite attack for avantgarde domination involved his becoming conductor and musical director the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Then second part came after Leonard Bernstein’s tenure as conductor of the New York Philharmonic was over, and Boulez was offered the opportunity to replace him. He felt that through innovative programming, he would be able to remold the minds of music goers in both London and New York.
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Boulez was also fond of getting people out of stuffy concert halls to experience classical and contemporary music in unusual places. In London he gave a concert at the Roundhouse which was a former railway turntable shed, and in Greenwich Village he gave more informal performances during a series called “Prospective Encounters.” When getting out of the hall wasn’t possible he did what he could to transform the experience inside the established venue. At Avery Fisher Hall in New York he started a series of “Rug Concerts” where the seats were removed and the audience was allowed to sprawl out on the floor. Boulez wanted "to create a feeling that we are all, audience, players and myself, taking part in an act of exploration".
The third prong came when he was asked back by the President of France to come back to his home country and set up a musical research center.

Yesterday, March 26 2025, began the centennial celebration of serialist defender, Pierre Boulez. He was an ambassador of the avantgarde, a celebrator of poetry, and an instigator who helped establish one of the great sonic laboratories of sound innovation, IRCAM. 

The following is an excerpt from my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Syntheis and the Birth of Electronic Music. This part takes his poetic imagaination.

As Boulez got his bearings as a young composer, the connections between music and poetry came to capture his attention, as it had Schoenberg. Poetry became integral to Boulez’s orientation towards music, and his teacher Messiaen would say that the work of his student was best understood as that of a poet.

Sprechgesang, or speech song, a kind of vocal technique half between speaking and singing, was first used in formal music by Engelbert Humperdink in his 1897 melodrama Königskinder. In some ways sprechgesang is a German synonym for the already established practice of the recitative in operas as found in Wagner’s compositions. Arnold Schoenberg used the related term Sprechstimme as a technique in his song cycle Pierrot lunaire (1912) where he employed a special notation to indicate the parts that should be sung-spoke. Schoenberg’s disciple Alban Berg used the technique in his opera Wozzeck (1924). Schoenberg employed it again in his Moses and Aron opera (1932).

In Boulez’s explorations of the relationship between poetry and music he questioned "whether it is actually possible to speak according to a notation devised for singing. This was the real problem at the root of all the controversies. Schoenberg's own remarks on the subject are not in fact clear."

Pierre Boulez wrote three settings of René Char's poetry, Le Soleil des eaux, Le Visage nuptial, and Le Marteau sans maître. Char had been involved with Surrealist movement, was active in the French Resistance, and mixed freely with other Parisian artists and intellectuals. Le Visage Nuptial (The Nuptial Face) from 1946 was an early attempt at reuniting poetry and music across the gap they had taken so long ago. He took five of Chars erotic texts and wrote the piece for two voices, two ondes Martenot, piano and percussion. In the score there are instructions for “Modifications de l’intonation vocale.”
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​A few years later, he worked with material written by the symbolist and hermetic poet Stéphane Mallarme, when he wrote Pli selon pli in (1962). Mallarme’s work A Throw of the Dice is of particular influence. In that poem the words are placed in various configurations across the page, with changes of size, and instances of italics or all capital letters. Boulez took these and made them correspond to changes to the pitch and volume of the poetic text. The title comes from a different work by Mallarme, and is translated as “fold according to fold.” In his poem Remémoration d'amis belges, he describes how a mist gradually covers the city of Bruges until it disappears.

Subtitled A Portrait of Mallarme Boulez uses five of his poems in chronological order, starting with "Don du poème" from 1865 for the first movement finishing with "Tombeau" from 1897 for the last. Some consider the last word of the piece, mort, death, to be the only intelligible word in the work. The voice is used more for its timbral qualities, and to weave in as part of the course of the music, than as something to be focused on alone.
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Later still Boulez took e.e. cummings poems and used them as inspiration for his work Cummings Ist der Dichter in 1970. Boulez worked hard to relate poetry and music together in his work. It is no surprise, then, that the institute he founded would go far in giving machines the ability to sing, and foster the work of other artists who were interested in the relationships between speech and song.

Pierre Boulez would have been 100 today, March 26th, 2025. Let's give this serialist defender some love.

Pierre Boulez doesn’t get enough street cred in today’s electronic and experimental music scenes. He doesn’t have the same cache of compositional cool as his fellow maverick of European serialism, Karlheinz Stockhausen. He doesn’t retain the respect of American noiseheads driven on the by the sound of Cage’s silence. He didn’t drone on an on and on as La Monte Young has, so the worshippers at the amplified altar of drone don’t think much about his message. Neither was he awakened to the trance reducing repetitive power of pulse as were Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. His music doesn’t suck the listener in with these entranced dances of sound. His fellow Frenchmen Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry embraced technology at the expense of traditional instruments. Boulez never did away with the orchestral palette he knew so well, and combined it only in small ways with electronics to enhance the sound color of the instruments in play, even though he hung out in the world of concrète. His total dedication to total serialism kept him on the avant edge of classical composition, and often had him playing intellectual fisticuffs with its detractors, and he wasn't afraid of lambasting things he didn't like to smithereens. His stance was combative and he could come off like a total asshole. Yet the severity of his jerkiness can be tempered when it is realized that for French intellectuals, this sneering pose was in part an act, a role to play. ( His fellow Frenchmen weren’t as hurt or put off by this stance, as people in the English-speaking world were more inclined to be, because they were familiar with all the other intellectual jerks who make their national life of the mind as interesting as it is irritable. Think of Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Louis René Deleuze and Felix Guattari as similar arrogant types, and Boulez fits right in.  For us Americans, his bombast can come across as rudeness layered on top of egocentric rhetoric. Yet for the most part it seemed the European crowd was hip to this ruse, and overlooked his brusque shenanigans. 

Yet Boulez was also a conductive force. Not just through the sheer love of music that he exuded from his years as a conductor, but in this other role he took on as an ambassador of the avantgarde. His luminosity excited the minds and musical capacities of those around him, as he continually challenged the old forms and encouraged composers and musicians to take up the challenge of the new forms. 

As Boulez wrote, “A composition is no longer a consciously directed construction moving from a ‘beginning’ to an ‘end’ and passing from one to another. Frontiers have been deliberately ‘anaesthetized’, listening time is no longer directional but time-bubbles, as it were…A work thought of as a circuit, neither closed nor resolved, needs a corresponding non-homogenous time that can expand or condense”.

So let's take a look at his life and celebrate his accomplishments. The following is an excerpt from my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Syntheis and the Birth of Electronic Music.

His devotion to music can be seen in the way the path of his life moved him through his own non-linear circuit path to a dual career as composer and conductor. Part of his perceived arrogance can be thought of as a defense mechanism against the hostility of critics opposed to the new music. He didn’t let it deter him.
Boulez was born in Montbrison, France on March 26, of 1925 to an engineer father. As a child he took piano lessons and played chamber music with local amateurs and sang in the school choir. Boulez was gifted at mathematics and his father hoped he would follow him into engineering, following an education at the École Polytechnique, but opera music intervened. He saw Boris Godunov and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and had his world rocked. When he met the celebrity soprano Ninon Vallin, the two hit it off and she asked him to play for her. She saw his inherent and talent and helped persuade his father to let him apply to the Conservatoire de Lyon. He didn’t make the cut, but this only furthered his resolve to pursue a life path in music.

            His older sister Jeanne, with whom he remained close the rest of his life, supported his aspirations, and helped him receive private instruction on the piano and lessons in harmony from Lionel de Pachmann. His father remained opposed to these endeavors, but with his sister as his champion he held strong. In October of 1943 he again auditioned for the Conservatoire and was struck down. Yet a door opened when he was admitted to the preparatory harmony class of Georges Dandelot. Following this his further ascension in the world of music was swift. 

            Two of the choices Boulez made that was to have a long-lasting impact on his career was his choice of teacher, Olivier Messiaen, who he approached in June of 1944. Messiaen taught harmony outside the bounds of traditional notions, and embraced the new music of Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Debussy and Stravinsky.

            In February of 1945 Boulez got to attend a private performance of Schoenberg’s Wind Quartet and the event left him breathless, and led him to his second influential teacher. The piece was conducted by René Leibowitz and Boulez organized a group of students to take lessons from him for a time. Leibowitz had studied with Schoenberg and Anton Webern and was a friend of Jean Paul Sartre. His performances of music from the Second Viennese School made him something of a rock star in avant-garde circles of the time. Under the tutelage of Leibowitz, Boulez was able to drink from the fountain of twelve tone theory and practice. Its waters of inspiration continued to renew him all his life.

            Boulez later told Opera News that this music “was a revelation — a music for our time, a language with unlimited possibilities. No other language was possible. It was the most radical revolution since Monteverdi. Suddenly, all our familiar notions were abolished. Music moved out of the world of Newton and into the world of Einstein.”

The work of Leibowitz helped the young composer to make his initial contributions to integral serialism, the total artistic control of all parameters of sound, including duration, pitch, and dynamics according to serial procedures. Messiaen’s ideas about modal rhythms also contributed to his development in this area and his future work.

            Milton Babbitt had been first in developing has own system of integral serialism, independently of his French counterpart, having published his book on set theory and music in 1946.  At this point the two were not yet aware of each others work. Boulez’s first works to use integral serialism are both from 1947: Three Compositions for Piano and Compositions for Four Instruments.            

While studying under Messiaen, Boulez was introduced to non-western world music. He found it very inspiring and spent a period of time hanging out in the museums where he studied Japanese and Balinese musical traditions, and African drumming.  Boulez later commented that, "I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time."
           
​ In 1946 the first public performances of Boulez’s compositions were given by pianist Yvette Grimaud. He kept himself busy living the art life, tutoring the son of his landlord in math to help make ends meet. He made further money playing the ondes Martentot, an early French electronic instrument designed by Maurice Martentot who had been inspired by the accidental sound of overlapping oscillators he had heard while working with military radios. Martentot wanted his instrument to mimic a cello and Messiaen had used it in his famous symphony Turangalîla-Symphonie, written between 1946 and 1948. Boulez got a chance to improvise on the ondes Martentot as an accompanist to radio dramas. He also would organize the musicians in the orchestra pit at the Folies Bergère cabaret music hall. 

His experience as a conductor was furthered when actor Jean-Louis Barrault asked him to play the ondes for the production of Hamlet he was making with his wife, Madeline Reanud for their new company at the Théâtre Marigny. A strong working relationship was formed and he became the music director for their Compagnie Renaud-Barrault. A lot of the music he had to play for their productions was not to his taste, but it put some francs in his wallet and gave him the opportunity to compose in the evening. He got to write some of his own incidental music for the productions, tour South America and North America several times each, in addition to dates with the company around Europe. These experiences stood him well in stead when he embarked on the path of conductor as part of his musical life.

            In 1949 Boulez met John Cage when he came to Paris and helped arrange a private concert of the Americans Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. Afterwards the two began an intense correspondence that lasted for six-years. In 1951 Pierre Schaeffer hoste the first musique concrète workshop. Boulez, Jean Barraqué, Yvette Grimaud, André Hodeir and Monique Rollin all attended. Olivier Messiaen was assisted by Pierre Henry in creating a rhythmical work Timbres-durè es that was mad from a collection percussive sounds and short snippets.

            At the end of 1951, while on tour with the Renaud-Barrault company he visited New York for the first time, staying in Cage’s apartment. He was introduced to Igor Stravinksy and Edgard Vaèse. Cage was becoming more and more committed to chance operations in his work, and this was something Boulez could never get behind. Instead of adopting a “compose and let compose” attitude, Boulez withdrew from Cage, and later broke off their friendship completely.

In 1952 Boulez met Stockhausen who had come to study with Messiaen, and the pair hit it off, even though neither spoke the others language. Their friendship continued as both worked on pieces of musique concrète  at the GRM, with Boulez’s contribution being his Deux Études. In turn, Boulez came to Germany in July of that year for the summer courses at Darmstadt. Here he met Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, and Henri Pousseur among others.

All of his experience, training and new found connections converged to force him into a role as an acerbic ambassador for the avantgarde. 

.:. .:. .:. ​This was in part, an excerpt from my book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music published by Velocity Press in the UK and available from Bookshop.org and that big place named after a rainforest, and fine bookstores everywhere. 

The celebration of the Pierre Boulez centennial will continue tomorrow in an exploration of the way he fused music and poetry together.

Along the heartworn highway, a row of hawthorn
& drooping lines of electric wire
drifting away from the city, that only birds adorn

Hitchhikers flit back home, heavy, heartworn
from trials of the road they soon tire
mama welcomes in her wayward firstborn.

The dust of years leaves us all shopworn
as the passion of youth spends its aching fire
making a path through thickets of aging corn.

To cherish the rose we must water the thorn
& risk wakening the old mans arthritic ire
to become gardeners of life, in rocky soil, stubborn.

Along the heartworn highway a row of hawthorns,
whose blossoms reach up to the sun, their sire.
From the heights of midnight to the first rays of morn
traveling along this lonely road of the twice born.

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I've been inspired to start posting some poems again, seeing how much poetic action their is over on substack, with the likes of Josh Datko at Bitpunk.fm, who has turned me on to a community of poets gathering together over at that venue.  Reading Frederick Moe's poems in the AAPA bundles is also a treat, reminding me I need to bundle some up... Noah Rymer has also given me a jolt of inspiration to start submitting poetry again. 

When I first started writing it was poetry and stories, and that's always remained, so I hope to continue putting more of my poems up here. You can grab a copy of my poetry book Underground Rivers if you like. Its a free download (and also available in print for a modest price on that shibboleth named after a rainforest). My work has also  been collected in the out-of-print chapbook Shards of Glass. 

.:. .:. .:. ​Do you like what you have read here?  The best way to support my continued work as a writer is to buy a copy of my book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music published by Velocity Press in the UK and available from Bookshop.org and that big place named after a rainforest, and fine bookstores everywhere.

Much has been said about America being a melting pot, as if all the cultural, spiritual and material influences that have gone into this nation will combine, congeal, and blend into one substance. I can only imagine the result as becoming some kind of bland government cheese, bright yellow queso, packaged in a can for mass consumption. How disgusting that would be. In connection with the melting pot metaphor of a whole nation on the macro scale, on the micro scale there exists this idea of the so-called blended family, an experience many of us are familiar with in the little nations under our own roofs.

            I don’t really like the idea of a blended family either. Blend is too close to bland. Yet it is an experience everyone is familiar with, even if they are one of the rare birds whose family of origin hasn’t been riddled with divorce, loss, some kind of separation. (Show me them if you know them.) Everyone is familiar with divorced people hooking up with other divorced people, or those otherwise single people hooking up with someone who has already started a family, but who are no longer with the baby daddy or baby momma of their own kids. The other partner often has some other kids of their own involved. These two units come together, and are apparently blended if the union between the people is successful. In practice, it’s much more complicated, but can also be more beautiful.

            A more useful metaphor would be that of a stew pot family. I got the idea from a friendly family therapist from Ireland named Tony Fryer who thinks a blended family isn’t all that good for the reality people actually experience. Fryer writes, “‘Blended Family’ is a term I don't like. It suggests we are all to become alike. I like to call it a ‘Stew Pot Family’ (maybe because I'm Irish). This term allows for many different looking constituents but all are surrounded by a great gravy.” His idea is that the individual ingredients that make up a family, that have come together from many different families, is more like a stew where all the people represent their own ingredients of carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, and onion, but are swimming in the same juices  made from tomato paste and hearty broth.

            This has been my own experience in a stew pot family. My two older sisters are from two different fathers. My mom had my oldest sister when she was eighteen, then got married to my other sister’s father. They ended up splitting and then when she met my dad, they had me. They stayed together for over thirty years, until she died unexpectedly at a young age. I was 28, and my mom was 56. Then my father remarried and now I have an adult step-brother, and all the relationships that come from my step-mom’s family. That’s the stew pot I was born into.

            Yet the complexity of the stew pot family is also present in my life in other ways. I have a birth daughter, born when I was sixteen. She was placed for adoption, in an open adoption, where my family remained close with hers and we saw each other all throughout her life, continuing today. That joined our families together in ways not possible in closed adoptions. That’s another stew pot.

​            Then there are all the relationships from my wife’s family. Like me, she had already had children when we met, and I have two step-daughters. My wife’s parents are divorced, so that added its own complexity to our lives, but also its own possibilities. We all have our differences, but are swimming in the same gravy, and I thank Tony Fryer for helping us to think of it as a stew pot, rather than as some bland blending.  

 (I still like this song, even if I don't love the term "blended family")

By the same token, as an American, I much rather like the idea of us being a stew pot nation. Isn’t that tastier than us all being blended together into something that can’t be differentiated? Into a bland sameness where everyone believes the same things, does the same things, watches the same things, listen to the same things, and when they bother to read, read the same things. Our differences are great though, and they should be celebrated. But we also all swim in the same soup base that gives us a common language, feeling, core symbols and cohesiveness amid all the different ingredients. Perhaps another way to think about would be is that America is a stir fry with a lot of different elements are getting heated up together, but drizzled by the same collective sauce.

            Thinking of ourselves as in a collaborative stew together, all being boiled by common mounting pressures, might be an antidote to the divisions and differences of perception and focus that cause families and nations to split apart. America right now is like a couple who won’t talk to each other about the things that need to be talked about, but each side wanting to silence the other. Splintered by divorce, riddled by division, disrupted and diseased by malicious incisions within and against the national psyche, the United States is showing increasing signs of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called schizo-culture (following in the footsteps of the great systems thinker and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson). Schizo, from the Greek word schizéin, to divide. The divided states of America.

Part of the issue and division in our lives came in with the ascendancy of the nuclear family, a fiction and myth if there ever was one. I do not deny that biologically and socially a strong commitment between two partners raising their young together is a good thing. Pair bonding is an innate urge written into the soul and DNA of humanity. Yet the two-parent family that exists in isolation, having moved away from the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in exchange for a new job in a new town to work for some corporation, has created an extensive culture of disconnection. The freedom of movement has caused the stewpot to swirl and spill. Some bits are now outside the pot and all alone, without the resources an extended family provides, causing the other isolated members of the nuclear unit, each doing their own career, going to their own school, and engaging in their own hobbies and extra curriculars, to now have to rely on financial systems to meet needs that were once met by family and friends. This is one of the divisionary effects of our current economic arrangements.

These very socio-economic trends are in part what have so often caused people to disconnect and break apart instead of fulfilling those bonds. The same freedom to pick up and go and start off fresh somewhere else geographically for work or other reasons has also seemed to coincide with an increase in the way people just pick up and go from a struggling relationship, leave it behind to go on to the seeming greener pastures of a new relationship. Green pastures that often turn out to be an illusion. As Erma Bombeck noted, “The grass is always greener over the septic tank.” On the other hand, watering it is a good idea. All of these factors have led to increasingly complicated family situations in a society that has been pushed through the grindstone of industrialization, empire, and now deindustrialization and the collapse of the empire we inherited from Britain after World War II.
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The web of relationships people once knew and experienced has been shattered by these economic forces and the antisocial media of the internet. Increasingly isolated, much more stress is placed on primary relationships because the other relationships in our lives have faltered. James Hillman and Michael Ventura pointed out some of the problems that happen when we place so many of our needs for fulfillment onto fewer and fewer individuals in their 1993 book, We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse. 

In their dialogue Hillman said, “Why do we need this Norman Rockwell family, this make-believe ideal, that’s so rampant now in politics and in therapy? I don’t know what it’s doing for the body politic, but I know what it’s doing for therapy. For therapy, it is keeping an ideal in place so that we can show how dysfunctional we all are. It keeps the trade going [the therapy trade].”

Ventura replied that, “But even the Norman Rockwell ideal of the happy, self-sufficient family is a distortion of what families were for thousands, probably tens of thousands, of years. During that time, no family was self-sufficient. Each family was a working unit that was part of the larger working unit, which was the community -the tribe or village. Tribes and villages were self-sufficient, not families. It’s not only that everyone worked together, everyone also played and prayed together, so that the burden of relationship, and of meaning, wasn’t confined to the family, much less to a romantic relationship, but was spread out into the community. Until the Industrial Revolution, family always existed in that context.”

            Hillman goes on to point out how therapy in part relies on the idea of the dysfunctional family. That’s often why people end up on the reclining couch to talk about their problems in the first place. Before therapy came about, a person who was having problems would talk to an older relative, an aunt, uncle, grandfather, father, someone with experience, someone deemed wise, or just a friend who was a bit more impartial, but still had the closeness they shared in their heart. Now that kind of advice is mediated through life coaches and expensive therapy sessions that themselves thrive on the broken web of extended families.

​            Norman Rockwell’s perfect nuclear family never really existed anyway. As an aspirational ideal of the suburban American dream, it was painted into our magazines. For those who compared themselves against it, failure to attain this particular ideal led to shame. Others were forever outside of this norm to begin with. What was their place? The gay uncle, the lesbian sister, the mixed couple with their mixed kids -these never found their way into Rockwell’s fantasy, yet they have their place in the world and make it a better world to be in. Stew pot families are more accommodating to different ideas of what a family is and can become. The complexity of arrangement creates a complexity of taste. Those who want to continue on with bland Rockwellian monoflavors are welcome to do so, but equal freedom should be given to those who envision different ways of being, the ancient and the new. Something transcending the individual ingredients is liable to emerge when bold flavors are merged together.

This also gives us the opportunity to not abolish the family, as some clusters of groups on the left would like to do. Nor does it have to give way to a narrow idea of what family is as certain clusters on the right would have us limit the definition. Rather, as Anthony Galluzzo has pointed to in two recent articles, “How about instead expanding the family model—reinventing premodern extended family and kinship structures—to accommodate alternative, queer, familial forms alongside traditional families?”

A return to, and celebration of extended family systems can also give the current, overtaxed, overextended, alienated individual, a resource web that does not rely exclusively on financialization in place of the relationships people once had before money was inserted and started driving wedges between them where there had once been closeness and collaboration.   

What about calling up a cousin who is a mechanic for help with redoing the brakes on a car, in exchange for something you can help him with? Business has inserted itself in place of this kind of familial network and now, as things have further eroded, a lot of those kind of relationships don't even exist for people anymore. But we’ll need them again in the face of the declining systems that have taken their place.

It’s not that I think extended families would solve all interpersonal problems, or be able to replace all financialized transactions. But they might solve some of the loneliness that comes from “bowling alone.” It’s also another way forward towards reskilling ourselves and learning from our elders. Some of the problems facing the fragmented world come from rubbing elbows less with people from different generations. This only hanging out with people your own age pattern tends to flatten notions of time and perspectives about just how different the world can be made in a span of decades.

The stew pot family also has a place for strong ties with family friends, the other families all families come in contact with. These include and are strengthened by various subcultural affiliations and mutual aid societies, volunteer groups, social clubs where we go to meeting rooms and third places to join in the kinship of those who share our tastes and interests. For too long many in the counterculture and various subcultures have used these as replacements for family. Sometimes rightly so when an individual has had to flee their family of origin and find sanctuary somewhere else. Yet when the subcultures themselves are isolated from kindred groups, tribes and familial relations, they become their own echo chamber. Rubbing up against others and having creative friction with people whose ideas and beliefs are different from our own are just as important in these subcultures as they are in families, in local communities, to the bioregion and the nation. Third places, volunteer groups, and subcultural activities are also great places for people to meet the others, especially if they are looking for romance. No need to cede love to the technocrats as well.

In the end, America isn’t really one nation anyway, but a patchwork of regional and bioregional cultures. The flavors of one area differ greatly from those in another, but are all part of the overarching stew.* The particular flavors of each region might be considered as different kinds of stew. After all, Irish Stew isn’t the only thing around. There is goulash and gumbo too. The particular ways we create family in place, allows for the sharing of local knowledge, and family knowledge. This in turn allows for ground up resource sharing, pooling, and distribution of culture, rather than the top-down bland forms of pseudoculture imposed on us by the technocratic corpocracy. Allowing the individual microcultures of our families to simmer in their various stews together, can go a long way towards the creation of true diversity, of the differences and variation that become something we are happy to encourage, rather than denounce.

So, forget about trying to blend your complex family into some homogenized goop. Instead I suggest thinking of your family as a stew pot, with the different ingredients all adding to its great taste. And as we think of the family as a stew, so too we can think of America as a stew. If people want to try to recreate their life after a Rockwell painting, that’s there business. Yet in a pluralistic society, it can also be our business to make room in the pot for the pushed aside indigenous, the immigrants threatened with being thrown out, and the old-time immigrants whose families have been here for generations. Together we can make something tasty in a spirit of unity through diversity, and encourage the boldness of our unique funky flavors.
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* I have addressed the matter of bioregions and how that relates to the idea of hyperlocal microcultures in an essay for the winter 2025 issue of New Maps. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into detail.

Joining something called The Suicide Club might give a normal person pause as they think of the probability of diminishing returns such a dwindling social group would have. On the other hand, with a name like that, it probably did a good job of weeding out people who had no business being a member in the first place. In the end, the club wasn’t about suicide anyway, but about danger, and having what some might call peak experiences, and what others might call experiences that put you in touch with reality. Started by Gary Warne in 1977 the Suicide Club was known for its anarchic practical jokes pioneering development of what is now known as urban exploration. It’s influential tendrils also left marks on people involved in the early days of Burning Man. As such Gary Warne and the Suicide Club have left crucial marks in the collective national character because he doubled down on his own eccentric individuality and shared the spirit of adventure with his fellow travelers, leaving behind a radical legacy.

Gary Warne was a native to West Virginia, born in 1948 and brought up in Florida and Kentucky. He did a stint in the army where he was stationed in Puerto Rico, followed by a westward drift to the left coast.

​In 1968 throngs of long-haired freaky people descended on the city of San Francisco to dip their toes in or totally immerse themselves in the swinging psychedelic epicenter of the hippie counterculture that was just then reaching its peak. Gary Warne was one of those freaky people. Whether he had long hair or not is another matter. He came to the city with his friend Sutton Breiding, and he ended up living in a pad at 800 Shrader Street with several others. His domicile was not far from Golden Gate Park and the bridge that spanned above it, which would leave a lasting impression on Warne’s life. Before we go further into that life, we have to take a detour into the Free University Movement and San Francisco’s Communiversity.

The heady days of the late 1960s and early seventies saw a renewal of interest in the defense of free speech and the First Amendment. In addition to focusing on freedom of expression through words, speech, and lifestyle, the hippies endeavored to make other things free and it was inevitable the freedoms they wanted would spill over into the costly education system. An education system tied to preserving the establishment. The “Free University Movement” was one of the results of such thinking as people looked for alternatives to mainstream schooling. 

In particular the idea that spurred the Free University Movement can be traced to the New Left of the sixties and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1962 the SDS released their manifesto named the Port Huron Statement. It’s a strange name for such a political document, but it is called that because of the place it was written at, a United Auto Workers retreat outside Port Huron, Michigan, where the SDS had their first national convention.

Among the many calls for reform within the manifesto was a section on the importance of higher education and it’s “permanent position of social influence.” The SDS called out the many ways that the intellectual ability cultivated at these institutions was put into use for the service of the military-industrial complex, as opposed to their own aims for cultivating a culture of civil rights and peace. Amid the issues addressed about universities was the call to action to “wrest control from the administrative bureaucracy.” There was also the notion that an “ideal university” is a “community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.”

As the boomers came of age, more and more of them were going into the university system and getting educated. Yet the educations they were getting weren’t making the world a better place. In fact, wars continued to proliferated, people were still treated unjustly and were discriminated against, and pollution and the treatment of our ecological systems continued to worsen even as more and more of the people who wished for a more equitable society got university degrees. The intellectuals within the hippie movement took note. None of this was producing the ideal world so many of them had dreamed of. Yet they knew from psychology that there is more potential within each person than ever fully gets awakened and realized.

In opposition to this a call was made within the counterculture for citizens to make allies outside the university system. This seed of thought led to the eventual rise of the Free University Movement which flourished briefly and then faded like so many other dreams of the hippies as they sold out their ideals in exchange for a paycheck and a job at the bank.

Gary Warne wasn’t a sellout though, and during its height (or is that haight?) he was one who got involved in the Free University Movement. His entry was when San Francisco State University (SFSU) affiliated Communiversity had started to sponsor a series of free classes. In the meantime, in April of 1974 Warne decided to give his own unaffiliated class on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The other people who studied Poe with him met in the confines of his bedroom.

One of the attendees was William M. Breiding. He recalls the heady days reading America’s early master of the macabre, “Each week we piled into Gary’s romantically decorated garret to discuss a previously read Poe story or poem. The Poe group was diverse and interesting. Our range of activities went far beyond Edgar Allan to dinners and outings throughout San Francisco, including each other’s homes. Carter was a poet who organised readings. I met John Fugazzi there, fresh from Cincinnati, who was to become a lifelong friend. … John R., Gary’s old friend and roommate, was also a part of the class, and brought a vibrancy and humour to the class that might have otherwise been missing.”

Eventually Gary was on the roster at the SFSU Communiversity and given a teaching stipend. Part of the university experience in America has been the tradition of the practical joke and the Communiversity was not immune from the impulse. Far from it, Warne and his circle had the bright idea to not just do practical jokes, but give a class on practical jokes.  

“This event was to signal a new era for Communiversity, the Free University Movement and many of us individually. As soon as it hit the streets we were told [by the SFSU that the class] was ‘not educational, in poor taste and probably illegal from the sound of it.’ Preliminary discussions went on among the top brass at State about withdrawing our pay checks until threats and coercion failed. At the end of the year we withdrew the school from State forming a non-profit. A hundred people signed up for the practical jokes class, making it the most popular class in the history of the school….”

With Communiversity out of the control of SFSU, the people involved were free to go their own way and do their own thing.

​A Communiversity catalog from 1982, celebrating their tenth anniversary noted that, “Communiversity has been doing it for a long time. In 1971 Gary Warne took Communiversity out of San Francisco State University; Communiversity has been trading junk for free classes and events ever since. This has added, in a real way, to the exchange of information from one person to another. This exercise has been enlightening to the thousands of students, teachers, and volunteers who have participated.”

As the seventies continued on, Warne ended up with a new hobby. He had become a book hound and had amassed a library of some 16,000 volumes through his scouring of second-hand stores, garage sales, flea markets. On these excursions he also picked up weird stuff, material for costumes, any items with a whiff of the recherche.

All of this material went into his next project: Circus of the Soul, a used bookstore and community center that became a focal point for the further burgeoning of freakdom between 1975 and 1980. It was a happening place. From hosting the Fantasy Film Festival to musical meetups, and a bizarre range of other events, it became the locus operandi out of which the Suicide Club evolved.

On the dark and stormy night of January 2, 1977 Warne and three friends ventured to Fort Point, the Castillo de San Joaquín, a brick fortification built on a spur at the entrance to the San Francisco Bay in 1861. The Golden Gate bridge towers above this point. When the weather turns stormy waves will crash over the wall near the point where there is a large chain just before the large rocks that go down to the water. Adrienne Burk, Nancy Prussia, Warne, and David Warren each took turns holding that chain and letting the waves of the ocean violently crash onto them. Those waves, if they didn’t hold tight, would have been powerful enough to pull them into the bay where the risk of drowning was quite real. In this moment of dangerous living, with cold water exhilaration and close calls with death, the Suicide Club was born.

The name came from the title of a collection of three linked stories by Robert Louis Stevenson where Prince Florizel of Bohemia and his sidekick Colonel Geraldine look for adventure and thrills, starting by infiltrating a secret society where the goal of its members is losing their lives, each member selected one by one on the night of their meetings to die.

Warne and the others who had held onto the chain wanted to repeat this experience of survival, and later in the year opened it up to other people, starting by offering a class in the Communiversity from February through May. 

The announcement for the Charter Member Meeting of the SF Suicide Club read as thus, “Meeting regularly but at odd times.  Members must agree to set their worldly affairs in order, to enter into the REAL world of chaos, cacaphony and dark saturnalia, and they must further agree to live each day as though it were their last, for it may BE.  The club will explore untravelled, exotic, dismal and exhilarating experiences of life:  deserted cemeteries, storms, caving, haunted houses, Nazi bars, fanatical movements, hot air ballooning, stunts, expose, impersonation.  The Club will be ongoing for the rest of our lives.” The charter was signed, “Nancy Prussia, Gary Warne, Adrienne Burk, David Warren, R.J. Mololepozy, The Phantom, The Crimson Pirate, Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys.”

This penchant for probing the underbelly of the city led the Suicide Club to becoming the first group dedicated to urban exploration, often in extremis. Expeditions generally began an ended at Circus of the Soul, leading it to become the birthplace for a genuine American psychogeography. 

To this end they planned escapades into the sewers beneath the streets, other tunnels they weren’t supposed to be in, abandoned industrial buildings, and climbed onto the terrifying heights of the Golden Gate Bridge. Doing these stunts helped the members face their fears and start living life beyond their fears. They also liked to play games inside of the cemeteries and inside the financial district. One of their most-daring do’s as far as physicality, was when they got thirty people on top of the cable cars in San Francisco, and did so while naked. Commemorative post cards were made for that expedition.

Club member John Law touches on how Warne wanted the experiences of doing an activity with the club to be a kind of initiation into super-reality. “The Suicide Club could create an other-worldly, surreal environment. Getting naked on the cable cars was a surreal experience. He wanted a disconnect with 'reality' and a connection with 'super-reality.' 'Cuz knowing you could fall off the bridge and die is a super-real feeling.”

Like their namesakes in the Robert Louis Stevenson story, they also engaged in daring infiltrations of strange groups. They penetrated the Unification Church, aka the Moonies and the American Nazi Party, exposing themselves to the literal danger of being exposed as infiltrators (and potentially brainwashed).

Another form of infiltration was when they started going to meetings for the National Speleological Society (NSS) at the local Paolo Alto Grotto. The NSS is a group dedicated to exploring and gaining knowledge about caves. The NSS members were a bit skeptical about the strangeness of all the sudden new members from the Suicide Club, but they ended up joining forces and working together to explore the Cave of the Swallows, or Sótano de las Golondrinas, the largest known cave shaft in the world and a favorite of vertical cave spelunkers who have to rappel down into its depths.

Being in San Francisco the spirit of the Diggers certainly lived on. One of the activities listed on a flyer for Suicide Club events listed “Ringolevio IV.” I don’t know if that was a reading of Emmet Grogan’s book Ringolevio, or a meet up for playing the game the book was named after. Warne liked games and I could see the suicide club playing ringolevio all around the city. Grogan had written about this old game of expanded tag, played on the streets of New York and other cities in America for well over a century, that “It's a game. A game played on the streets of New York, for as long as anyone can remember. It is called Ringolevio, and the rules are simple. There are two sides, each with the same number of players. There are no time limits, no intermissions, no substitutes and no weapons allowed. There are two jails. There is one objective.”

​Here in the Midwest it was played as a version of “Hunters and Hunted” when I was a kid. And it was the best outdoor game of all. Seeing adults play this game in cities across America again would certainly be welcome.

One of the things Warne liked to do was connect people. Ideas only went so far. They had to be put into action. One way of putting them into action and connecting people was his ‘zine the Answer Man Newsletter. For just a bit of money, people could write to Warne and ask him a question. He would then get back in touch with them, sending them resources, contacts to experts in the area they were asking about, and other information.

His extensive book collection and knowledge found other uses too, because in between everything else he did, Warne somehow found time to write fiction and poetry. Some of this was collected after his death into The Lord of Sensation and Other Fragments and Dreams. His articles meanwhile turned up in places like the Surrealist Exchange, SF Free and Easy, and the Bystander. Another project he was working on was the creation of a multi-media piece exploring the history of the San Francisco earthquake.

Warne’s burning energies continued to expand, and his next project was the Gorilla Grotto. It started at the very end of the 1979, and continued on for most of 1980. Located at 775 Frederick Street, it had something of the idea of the happening, and it was happening on a daily basis with just one day off to recuperate. On six out of seven nights a week the seeker of dissident revelry could go to the Grotto for a heady combination of lectures, of movies, of storytelling, readings and live music. If that wasn’t enough, a playpen had been provided that was big enough for adults, made for adults. Revelers often ended the night with a pillow fight. Warne also curated a series of social events that he called the “Museum of the Inconsequential” for the Grotto.

He even found the time for traditional volunteer work. His efforts took him into the hospital to hang out with the elderly in his capacity as a volunteer pet therapist. He buddied up to the police and begin working as a trainee officer with the S.F.P.D. towards the end of his life, when he wasn’t busy slinging books with the Friends of the S.F. Public Library.
Warne didn’t stop until death stopped him. A heart attack ended his life on Thanksgiving Day, 1983. His friends took his cremains up on one last daring climb of the Golden Gate Bridge and dropped his ashes into the bay. His friend John Law even painted some of those ashes onto the bridge. Warne would remain part of that vast golden expanse that had so inspired him. Some remaining ashes were given in small vials to his friends.
​
John Law, who had been a member of the Suicide Club, would go on to start the Cacophony Society and co-found Burning Man.

.:. .:. .:. ​Do you like what you have read here? Unlike substackers, I don't ask for a subscription fee to read my blog. The best way to support my continued work as a writer is to buy a copy of my book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music published by Velocity Press in the UK and available from Bookshop.org and that big place named after a rainforest, and fine bookstores everywhere.

FIND THE OTHERS: READ THE REST OF THE AMERICAN ICONOCLASTS & NATIONAL CHARACTERS SERIES:

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams
Fakir Musafar, Richard Simonton, and Jim Ward
Going Native In America
David Wills: The Weatherman
Jim Tully: Writer, Circus Man, Boxer, Hobo
Harlan Hubbard: The Man Who Lived on the Fringe
Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song
Raymond Thundersky: The Construction Clown
Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood
Peace Pilgrim
The Long Memory of Utah Phillips
Anti-Art and Hillbilly Tape Music with Henry Flynt

Remember, think for yourself, question authority, and let it rip!