Gun is Loaded

by Lydia Lunch

The Gun is Loaded narrates Lydia Lunch's evolution from No Wave singer and performer, through art-house actor, to spoken word poet and celebrated author. Featuring prose, poems and narrative alongside her own recent photography projects and a visually stunning collection of archive material, The Gun is Loaded is a provocative and powerful book.

Genres: Nonfiction, Poetry, Art

256 pages, Paperback

First published June 17, 2008

About the author

Lydia Lunch (born Lydia Koch) is an American singer, poet, writer, and actress.

In the mid-'80s, Lunch formed her own recording and publishing company called "Widowspeak" on which she continues to release a slew of her own material from songs to spoken word.

Later, she was identified by the Boston Phoenix as "one of the 10 most influential performers of the '90s", Lunch's solo career featured collaborations with musicians such as J. G. Thirlwell, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Nick Cave, Marc Almond, Billy Ver Plank, Steven Severin, Robert Quine, Sadie Mae, Rowland S. Howard, Michael Gira, The Birthday Party, Einstürzende Neubauten, Sonic Youth, Die Haut, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Black Sun Productions and french band Sibyl Vane who put one of her spoken words into music. She also acted in, wrote, and directed underground films, sometimes collaborating with underground filmmaker and photographer Richard Kern (including several films such as Fingered in which she performed unsimulated sex acts), and more recently has recorded and performed as a spoken word artist, again collaborating with such artists as Exene Cervenka, Henry Rollins, Don Bajema, Hubert Selby Jr., and Emilio Cubeiro, as well as authoring both traditional books and comix (with award-winning graphic novel artist Ted McKeever).

In 1997 she released Paradoxia, a loosely-based autobiography, in which she candidly documented her bisexual dalliances, substance abuse and flirtation with insanity.

Reviews

[Fede · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would marry this woman right now. And not only to get a green card.
Really.

This collection of poetry, photography and photopoetry - does such name even exist? Well, now it does - has all I love about Lydia Lunch's work: the raw beauty, aesthetic decay and cathartic violence of her writing, combined with her unparalleled sense of the visual and the unlimited potential of her cultural/artistic/human background.

All these pictures and texts seem to melt like lava flowing through the reader's fingers. Lydia's assault on our perception is indeed complete and multifaceted, a steady onslaught of words and images, sounds and colours conspiring against each other yet conjuring up a deranged, hypnotic dimension of the senses in which one is irresistibly sucked in from the beginning.
And her poetry... oh, my. Her poetry.

I first met her in Richard Kern's 1986 art film "Fingered" (not suitable for innocent souls, don't say I didn't warn you) and I knew at once that I would end up reading her stuff. ALL her stuff. Because I was irresistibly drawn to 1) her eyes, and 2) her madness. Now she might be, huh, a bit out of shape, but boy, those eyes... and her shameless insanity. Only an enormously talented creature could have both, I thought.
Well, I was right. For once.

The photos collected in this book are divided into sections, though there's an atmospheric common thread that makes them all part of a strange, indefinable whole. Abandoned houses and seedy outskirts, car wrecks, human wrecks, impressive portraits of lost kids from suburban slums ("All My Heroes Are Killers"), self-mutilated convicts and underage prostitutes ("Fatal Beauty"), gloomy neon-lit interiors and psychedelic overlays ("Insomniac Theatre"), erotic dreamscapes of lust and pain ("The Sickness of Strangers"), and the gorgeous pictures she took in the ruined Spanish town of Belchite, where an estimated 6000 people were killed during the civil war ("Landscapes After the Battle"), an overheated desert of debris and silence reminding of Dalí's orange, lifeless cliffs... and so much more, juxtaposed with Lydia's devastating poetry.
Many influences can be detected in her work, ranging from poetry to philosophy, music, visual arts (I discovered Cioran via this book, by the way). No wonder the complexity of her intellectual and artistic universe is so amazing, high-brow and yet accessible.
Only two excerpts, respectively from the "Spectrophilia" and "Still Life" sections:


I'm in a place where reason went missing
Where do you turn to
When everything inside you
Resists paradise
And you feel stuck inside an oasis
Of horror and boredom
Looking for a small pocket
To disappear into
But tiny wisps of someone else's thoughts
Project magnetic impulses
And ego that lucid viper
Bites like a snake
Whose secrets make you sick


***


Memorial

I am an island in this cesspool called history
I inhabit the crumpled remains
Of a place that once was
Suffocating in a solitude so fulfilling
That the merest rendez-vous
Becomes a crucifixion

A solitude more chaotic than war
A stoic who remains undaunted among the ruins
Of a world shattered into atoms
Some of us are born weary of being born
We are given the gift of life
To live obsessed with death

We bury on our souls the corpses
We have not yet murdered
Like an angel drafted onto the back of a leper
A criminal saint
The hero of yesterday
Becomes the tyrant of tomorrow
Unless he crucifies himself today

The restlessness of sleepless nights dig trenches
Where the corpses of memory lay rotting
A crater of lucidity whispers... time... time...
That slaughterhouse of the universe
Where is it not in the nature of a man who
Cannot kill himself to seek revenge against
Whatever enjoys existing


***


Is it just me or this is divine?

[Kira · Rating 3 out of 5]

parts of this are great. mostly the text imo. the part where she compares the walls of a building to a hologram, storing a composite of all the events that have happened there, the suffering and the voices.

[Mills College Library]

709.2 L962 2008

[Casey Kiser · Rating 5 out of 5]

and you're dead.