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Taylor Mead’s Home Movies (1962-1968) and The Queer Temporalities of Travel, Memory, and Bliss

Juan Antonio Suárez

Abstract

This article wants to fill in a gap in Beat studies around Taylor Mead’s films and writing. Most frequently celebrated as an actor-performer associated to the late fifties and early sixties’ film underground, and noted for his lifestyle and public persona rather than for his creative work, Mead was also a significant writer and filmmaker, but the bibliography on these facets of his output is practically non-existent. This essay broaches primarily his films. They are examples of the experimental home movie and travel film of the sixties, but, in their casualness, irony, and overt queerness, they differ from those of better-known contemporaries such as Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage or Andrew Noren. Mead’s films are in dialogue with contemporary film poetics—particularly for their use of single frames and extremely brief shots—but they are, at the same time, visual counterparts of his synoptic, often elusive, diaristic writing. They dwell on ephemeral and transient impressions, combine the factual with the oneiric and hallucinatory, and put forward singular figurations of queer embodiment, temporality, and memory. While they are fully inserted in sixties’ experimental visual cultures, they are also original contributions whose singularity remains to be acknowledged.

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1Taylor Mead (1924-2013) has long remained a recondite footnote in accounts of beat literature and culture. A prolific poet, occasional filmmaker, tireless performer, and the subject of two documentaries (William A. Kirkley’s Excavating Taylor Mead [2005] and Steven Watson’s Taylor Mead [2020]) and of numerous homages on and off the screen, he has yet to receive sustained critical attention. Most writing about him is journalistic and topical, takes the form of interviews, and tends to deal with him rather than with his work. This writing casts him as a sixties relic, a bohemian icon, a quirky downtown New York personality, and a frequent presence in American experimental film, while his poetry and his filmmaking are seldom, if ever, mentioned. Some reasons for such uneven coverage may be the visibility of his film performances, associated with canonical figures such as Andy Warhol and with well-publicized fifties’ and sixties’ movements, such as the New American Cinema and underground film, and the sheer volume of his acting credits. Towards the end of his life, he claimed to have appeared in over 130 titles.

  • 1 Biographical information about Mead is scattered in Giorno, Kempton, Watson, Tipmore, Siegel, Mead (...)

2In many ways, Mead was a characteristic beat figure. Born in 1924 to a well-to-do family in Detroit, he was raised in the affluent Grosse Pointe neighborhood and attended exclusive boarding schools.1 But he eventually decided to drop out of the world of his childhood and adolescence, and spent most of his early adulthood, barring some time as a Merill Lynch trainee, writing and hitchhiking across the country, during which time he was repeatedly arrested for vagrancy and indecency. Mead has claimed that, by the late 1950s, after reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), he decided to embrace his artistic ambitions and bohemian lifestyle full time. He read his poetry in New York cafés, such as New York’s Epitome, run by painter Larry Poons, where he shared the stage with a still-unknown Bob Dylan, and later became a denizen of San Francisco’s North Beach scene. There, he befriended Kerouac and poet Bob Kaufman and garnered attention for his humorous brand of confessional poetry, his faux-naïveté, his blatant sissiness, and his sleepy delivery. In his own testimony: “My more scatological and defiant poems overcame the often rowdy jaded bar and coffeehouse crowds” (Giorno 111). He certainly caught the attention of Ron Rice, a New York-born filmmaker who had briefly studied at Cooper Union and was at the time living in San Francisco. Rice cast Mead, along with Kaufman and “the last 20 or so genuine intellectual wastrels of the area” (Mead, Son 61) in The Flower Thief. This was one of the inaugural acts of the New American Cinema, and, in the words of a contemporary reviewer, “the purest incarnation of the beat spirit on film.” (Mekas 1972) Mead’s appearance granted him instant underground stardom. He was featured in Rice’s subsequent Senseless (1963) and The Queen of Sheba Meets Atom Man (1964) and in films by Vernon Zimmerman, Charles Wade Chatterton, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Downey Sr., José Rodríguez Soltero, and, most famously, in seventeen Andy Warhol productions, including two screen tests and Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964)—an hour of Mead caressing, swaying, twitching, gyrating and shimmying his buttocks and pretending to insert and extract an astonishing variety of items into and out of them. Beyond the sixties, Mead remained a steady presence in later independent and experimental films by Michel Auder, Marcus Reichert, Nick Zedd, and Jim Jarmusch, among many others.

  • 2 Information on Mead’s theatrical activity is gathered from The Reginald Gay Collection of Taylor Me (...)

3Mead’s first avocation was the stage, the one métier in which he received some schooling. He trained as an actor at the Pasadena Playhouse Theater School for nine months in the early 1940s and later on with Herbert Berghof, one of the promoters of method acting, in New York in the 1950s (Mead “Acting” 14; Mead Son of Andy Warhol 33-37). In the 1960s, Mead was cast in plays by Michael McClure, Leroi Jones (in pre-Amiri Baraka days), and Frank O’Hara, winning an Obie for his performance in O’Hara’s The General Returns from One Place to the Other (1964). In addition, he participated in some of the pioneering happenings in France—directed by Jean-Jacques Lebel—and in the earliest productions of the Theater of the Ridiculous, and remained a fixture of New York’s alternative theater and poetry scene for the rest of his life.2 His closest brush with the conventional stage was his participation in Al Pacino’s version of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in the late 1970s. (Mead Son 173)

4Fig. 1. Taylor Mead, My Home Movies. Frame grab.

5Against this relative visibility as a performer, Mead’s activity as a writer and filmmaker has been scarcely noted. Between 1961 and 2005, he published five books of poetry: Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth, volumes one to four, published in 1961, 1962, 1968, and 1986, with different subtitles, and A Simple Country Girl (2005). (A lengthy manuscript titled Son of Andy Warhol remains unpublished). And between 1961 and 1968, he shot footage of his journeys and his life in and around New York that circulated, at different times, under various titles. Today, Mead’s films are distributed as My Home Movies (1964), Home Movies-Rome / Florence / Venice / Greece (1965), and Home Movies / NYC to San Diego (1968). Initially distributed with sound on tape, the first two have definite soundtracks now. In early screenings, Mead occasionally improvised soundtracks on the spot, playing records and—John Cage-style—randomly tuning a radio into different stations. Mead’s films had some circulation in the mid and late sixties. Rome / Florence / Venice / Greece was included in the Underground Film Exhibition in Turin, Italy, in 1967, and he was one of the speakers featured in the roundtable discussions that accompanied the event. But in the long run, neither the films nor Mead’s poetry have accrued much critical esteem. Marc Siegel mentions Mead’s films in passing his detailed discussion of Mead’s acting in the films of Charles Wade Chatterton, made in Venice, California, in 1961, and Charles Kane marginally refers to Mead as a member of the Lower East Side poetry movement between the late fifties and early seventies, but does not address his writing. For their freshness and ingenuity, both films and poetry deserve more attention than they have received, but their apparent simplicity may have placed them beyond the range of critics, usually drawn to the more solemn end of the beat spectrum. Apparently artless and unplanned, Mead’s films are peculiar send-ups of the experimental home movie and the travel film and, through their inventive use of frame-shooting, they put forward provocative modes of queer embodiment, temporality, and memory.

1. Home Movies

6Mead’s filmmaking career spanned a relatively self-confined period. He started making films in 1962, shortly after his emergence as a beat performer, with a Keystone camera he purchased in Mexico DF’s “national pawn shop”: “The smallest 16mm camera I could buy with a fixed focus.” (Mead Son 68) And he stopped making them around 1968, shortly after he returned from a three-year sojourn in Europe, where he had decamped in 1964 after winning his Obie. Sometime in 1968, his camera broke down and, being an old model, he was unable to find a repair shop that would fix it. In fact, the last of his films shows signs of camera malfunction—in the last sections, the image is consistently overexposed and the strip of film slips through the gate, resulting in a blurry capture.

7Despite being labelled “home movies,” Mead’s films do not feature the home as such, but rather the lack of one during his years of nomadism. My Home Movies registers his ramblings in Mexico, scenes in New York, and his trip to Los Angeles in September of 1963 as part of Warhol’s entourage, with the occasion of Warhol’s second exhibition at the Ferus Gallery. Rome / Florence / Venice / Greece captures his European travels. And Home Movies: New York / San Diego gathers views of New York streets and the trip to San Diego as a member of the cast of Warhol’s San Diego Surf, filmed in La Jolla in May 1968. Working with Warhol bookends Mead’s home movies and marks as well the beginning and end of Warhol’s sixties film work. My Home Movies shows the participants and locations of Warhol’s Tarzan and Jane, Regained ... Sort Of (1963), which Warhol often misidentified as “my first movie” (Jenkins 92), shot during the Los Angeles trip with Mead as protagonist, and New York to San Diego records the making of one of the last films in Warhol’s sixties’ cycle.

8Fig. 2. Taylor Mead, My Home Movies. Frame grab.

9True to their titles, Mead’s films are examples of the home movie aesthetic, as they are simply conceived and casually made. They have a paratactic structure that juxtaposes different kinds of views as they are encountered: urban scenes, meetings with friends, glimpses of men that attract Mead’s attention, and numerous samples of the ubiquitous commercial media (posters, theater marquees, advertisements). There is also abundant self-reference: moments when Mead appears in his own films, signs announcing “Expert Tayloring,” the façade of a Lord & Taylor department store, and Mead’s name on the marquee of the Charles Theater, an early sixties experimental film venue in New York’s East Village, announcing his presence in Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief. In addition, the end of My Home Movies unusually features Mead’s own paintings and drawings, a poem (“The Tree / God’s Penis / Sticks / Into / The ground / Creating Birds / Beasts and men”), and some intertitles awkwardly scrawled with oil paint on canvass: “This film being a continuation of Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth whatever I felt like putting on film or practicing with or could afford to pay for July 1963.” The films seem to have been mostly edited on camera, framing and lighting are casual—at times frustratingly so—apparent errors in exposure and in motor traction were kept, and the camera movement is gestural and embodied in a way that had been popularized by Stan Brakhage and that underlines the deeply personal character of the images.

10Home movies were an emergent form in experimental film at the time. Deliberately non-commercial and practiced by self-taught amateurs working in non-industrial gauges, avant-garde cinema had always steered close to the domestic vernaculars, but it did not fully embrace the home movie until the late 1950s. After roughly a couple of decades dominated by surrealist-indebted psychodramas, trances, and mythopoetic films, experimental film then shifted its focus to the everyday and became engaged in a direct, spontaneous capture of daily life. In a letter to the journal Film Culture dated November 23, 1962, filmmaker Bruce Baillie, who had just started Canyon Cinema, the Bay Area-based collective devoted to the exhibition, production, and distribution of alternative film, declared home movies “a term for the way I plan to exist and continue working.” (76) In struggle against the “authorities,” alternative art had to be clandestine and underhanded, and home movies allowed rebellious energies to circulate under the radar: “Forced back to the most bare limitations of life and work, one can still walk familiar streets, stand at the back door to watch the changes of sun.” (Baillie 76) In truth, Baillie did not really cultivate the genre and used the expression as a metaphor for a minor, unpretentious poetics of cinema. A few months later, Jonas Mekas, editor of Film Culture and preeminent experimental film critic, aired similar views in his Village Voice column of April 13, 1963. The 8mm home movie was the new “folk art” that “will save us” with a fresh take on reality: “travelogue footage; the Brooklyn Bridge footage; the spring cherry blossoms footage; the Coney Island footage; the Orchard Street footage—time is laying a veil of poetry over them.” (“Movie Journal,” April 13, 1963; Movie Journal 83)

11With these words, Mekas was celebrating amateur home movies (“the beauty of the sunsets taken by a Bronx woman when she passed through the Arizona desert” (83)), but more seasoned, self-conscious artists had also been engaging this minor form. Since the late 1940s, Marie Menken had been assembling brief notations of daily life—raindrops on puddles, arrangements of Christmas lights, the moon in the sky, casual accretions of odds and ends on her desk—into witty, rhythmically animated films largely devoid of human presence. Menken stands as a pioneering explorer of the artistic possibilities of home movies. Directly inspired by her, Stan Brakhage used his daily life as raw material for much of his work, filmed in his characteristic gestural, impressionistic style, punctuated by black screens and abstract frames. Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959), Cat’s Cradle (1959), Window Water Baby Moving (1959), or Scenes from Under Childhood (1967) uncovered the aesthetic possibilities of the ordinary and heightened the appeal of the genre. After Brakhage, not only Baillie and Mekas, but also David Brooks, Andrew Noren, Carolee Schneemann (Kitch’s Last Meal, 1976), Harry Smith (Late Superimpositions, 1965), Saul Levine, Howard Guttenplan, Barbara Hammer, Geoge Kuchar, and Robert Huot, contributed their own inflections to the home movie and the diary film in the sixties and early 1970s.

12Home movies can be seen as part of the turn towards the personal and quotidian that had already taken place in other realms of the culture. In the increasingly technocratic, over-regulated society of “the organization man” (Whyte) and the “pseudo-event” (Boorstin), as different sociological studies described post-war culture, everyday life and, particularly, leisure time off the production chain were among the few realms where freedom and idiosyncrasy might be cultivated. This retreat to the personal was also felt in other areas of the culture. Post-war experimental literature, for example, took a decided turn towards the confessional and subjective. In Donald Allen’s influential anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, formalism took a backseat to various strands of subjectivism, predominant in New York School poetry—Frank O’Hara’s “I-do-this-I-do-that” poems—Black Mountain or beat writing, within which Taylor Mead’s poetry could be included. (“Dear Robert Moses: I am a famous (or rather infamous) ‘beat generation’ poet.” (Mead On Amphetamine 140)) Much of the attraction of beat literature resided in its subjective character. Its unconventional form and content bore the imprint of unconventional lives lived on the margins of administered society and its styles of dissent were not only philosophically-grounded but also lived and experienced first-hand.

13Nevertheless, both leisure and the everyday were also increasingly colonized by advertisement and consumerism. Patricia Zimmermann has shown the extent to which home movies, associated with privacy and unregulated, non-productive time, became a disputed terrain throughout the 1950s. As home movie-making grew into a substantial niche market, it was also increasingly promoted as a nuclear family practice, intended, in Zimmemann’s words, “for the beatification and celebration of the home”—the normative suburban, consumer-oriented home, that is (25). Perhaps because home life is full of dissipative, unfocused eventuality, the main focus of the normative home movie were conventional life markers endowed with their own ritual unity and plot: weddings, birthdays, get-togethers, and trips. Amateur film magazines, newsletters, advice columns, and advertisements for photographic and cinematic equipment sought to standardize the style in which these were filmed. They upheld the clarity and legibility of commercial photography and the continuity of commercial film as common-sense standards to be emulated. They imposed in this way Hollywood-style narrative grammar and form on the potential anarchy of domestic images. This aesthetic was far from universally accepted, however. Non-professional film also harbored counter-publics and alternative image cultures.

14Experimental home movies were certainly among these alternative image cultures, and Taylor Mead stood as one of the first practitioners of the form, even if his films have been seldom acknowledged in this regard. By the time he started to swing his Keystone around Mexico, sometime in 1962, neither Menken, Jacobs, nor Brakhage were yet the influential figures they would later become. Menken had just been the object of a retrospective at the Charles Theater at the end of 1960, Brakhage was still a rising star, and Mekas was trying to break into feature-length art cinema and was not yet known for his home movies. Even though he had been filming his daily life since 1949, when he purchased his first camera, he conceived of his domestic footage as mere practice—brief visual notes that allowed him to stay in touch with his instrument. (“Diary Film” 191) He only belatedly thought of assembling his extensive film diaries into lengthy, elaborate works. His first diary film, Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches dates from 1970, even though it gathers material shot throughout the previous decade. Mead may have easily missed Menken’s screenings at the Charles, since he lived in Los Angeles at the time, where he was a regular of the Venice coffee-house / poetry scene. He may well have seen Brakhage’s work and certainly knew Mekas, who had praised Ron Rice’s The Flower Thief and Mead’s performance in it in the Village Voice, and eventually invited Mead to submit a brief manifesto (“The Movies are a Revolution”) to Film Culture. But it is very unlikely that he may have seen Mekas’s most intimate footage. Of the three, Mead’s work seems closest to Menken’s for his playfulness, his light touch, and his use of single-framing. He lacks Brakhage’s seriousness, lyricism, and penchant for theorizing. And there is no trace in him of Mekas’s wistfulness, nostalgia for a lost homeland, or acute sense of the passing of time. Mead similarly abjures Mekas’s poetic intertitles, meditative voice-over or literary quotations—shots of the books he is reading or of his type-written diaries.

15Mead also foregoes these filmmakers’ tendency to unify the heteroclite content of the diary film by means of overarching conceptual schemes or rhetorical devices that bind the unwieldy scattering of daily experience. Menken’s films are tightly built around conceptual or formal conceits. Brakhage’s main conceit is the conquest of an embattled subjectivity and of a unique perspective on a world intent on homogenizing the inherent dynamism of vision and its attendant affects. And Mekas, born in Lithuania and relocated to the United States as a Displaced Person at the end of World War II, structures his images as a protracted, circuitous nostos: the return to a lost home that he attempts to reconstruct in alien shores through the redemptive activity of filmmaking, through family life, and through the search for—and nurturing of—a community of like-minded artists.

  • 3 Other times, unity in Levine is more conceptual than experiential: Notes after Long Silence (1989) (...)

16Subsequent home movies sought to discipline unruly quotidianeity through form, through unity of place or time, or through a combination of all. Howard Guttenplan’s diaries are close to Mead’s scattered observations, but much more polished formally and tend to be geographically unified. Other filmmakers like Brooks, Schneemann, Levine, Noren or Huot subject their atomized daily experiences to some sort of formal or thematic discipline. Brooks presented his films as records of bound periods of time or as visual letters, whose unity lies in the communicative act itself. Schneemann’s Kitch’s Last Meal is tightly bound by time, place, and the gradual decline of her cat (Kitch). Levine’s 8mm and Super 8 films dissolved and recomposed, through laborious editing and recurring thematic and formal signposts, particular self-enclosed moments: a snowy New England morning (Note to Pati 1969), a protest (New Left Note 1968), the remembrance of old songs (A Brennen Soll Columbus N Medina 1984), a gathering with friends in the country (Lost Note 1968), a period of routine and emotional drain (Mortgage on My Body 1973), or a journey (Light Licks: By the Waters of Babylon: I Want to Paint it Black, 2011).3 Noren imposed a strict formal discipline on tidbits of his daily life, which he shot, often one frame at a time, producing dazzling variations of light and shadow. He further underlined the unity of his output by making all of his films parts of a single series (Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse 1968-2008), where “individual parts” are “lesser wheels that move within the larger wheel of the whole.” (MacDonald 189) And Huot often subjected his diaristic observations (often messy, visceral moments of sex or animal slaughter) to closely measured rhythmic patterns. Framing, patterning, and binding have a gender politics. Most of these filmmakers are men seeking to narrate a realm—domesticity—usually conflated with femininity. Perhaps the main ordering pattern they all share is what Romantic poet John Keats named the “egotistical sublime”: the phallic assertion of selfhood as a unifying principle in the face of randomness, a term that Sitney has aptly applied to Brakhage and other subjective filmmakers (Eyes Upside Down 97).

17There is little of the egotistical sublime or of phallic assertiveness in Mead’s filmic or written diaries. In these last, in fact, he chastised “[t]hese assholes who presume that what I was yesterday I am today” (On Amphetamine 7). He seems happy to dwell in the disintegrated, paratactic temporality of daily life, where events succeed one another without necessarily being recuperated into a storyline or a conceptual or formal scheme. His notebooks and poetry deliver less the arc of a “a life” than notes taken on the run and are usually unintelligible without minute knowledge of Mead’s circumstances. While he wrote some narrative and situational poetry, most of his work consists in epigrammatic one- or two-liners delivering opinions, maxims, or thumbnail sketches of humorous or emotionally complex situations—failed seductions, tiffs with friends, annoyance at the complications of sex, or frustration at not being sufficiently published or recognized.

18On Amphetamine and in Europe (1968), the most extensive of his poetry collections and the one he composed during his filmmaking years, hints at several biographical threads: a fling with a sailor—or sailors?—of the USS Lexington (a navy boat moored in New York?), his drug use, and his tense relationship with filmmaker Ron Rice, to whom the book is dedicated. But none of these suggestions gels into a cohesive account. Rice’s strand is an example. Mead reports screenings of Rice’s films, Rice’s apathy at promoting his work, his departure for Mexico (with someone else’s editing equipment (120-21)), along with obscure allusions to his Puerto Rican golden shoes (frontispiece, 92), his addictions, a possible lawsuit (“for grand larceny” (201)), and Mead’s need “to bid goodbye” to him. (Rice died destitute in Mexico in 1964 at age twenty-eight). Outside such legible threads, there is a dust of elliptical memories, addresses and phone numbers, locations (“library bldg. NYU 5th & 7th floors”—a cruising spot?), reminders of appointments, proper names, and film and record titles that seem to log Mead’s voracious cinematic and musical consumption. They are written in a combination of poetry, prose, and mere jottings separated by asterisks. This is less bop prosody—to recall Kerouac—than bop hiccups: a tightly compressed form of spontaneity that reflects less the wanderings of the mind than everyday chance. Almost any page in On Amphetamine exemplifies such miscellany:

9 Great Jones / * Edith Gordon, Village Gate / * I’m a negro in America and I don’t want to be integrated / * Al 4-6300 Cooper Union / * Martinique / * Exquisite brutes / * this is Sister Sue in Chicago on Delmont street / * the world is wild / or tame in a terrible way / * Mrs Hemingway was shocked at some of my book and next week she was in Life showing her shooting all kinds of animals in Africa. and she thinks I’m obscene. / * Johanssen composer, Oslo Phil. – Gruner Huger cond. / * Lord and Lady Shambles / * I understood it so beautifully so briefly. (On Amphetamine 124)

  • 4 Warhol’s earliest efforts, before adopting his long-take, static framing, no-edits style, resemble (...)

19With their brevity, abrupt juxtapositions, and lack of context, these poetic jottings echo the style of Mead’s home movies. They capture the world as strings of unaligned particulars that stand metonymically for different situations that are never fully developed or explained. They offer sparks of humor, paradox, beauty, surprise, and sexual appeal, sliding through the actual without subsuming it into a higher conceptual plane. In this regard, Mead is perhaps closest to Warhol’s open acceptance of what is without subjecting it to the discipline of narrative or symbolism. Yet while Warhol’s acceptance most often took the form of recording whole fragments of experience without edits, abridgements, or subsequent manipulation, Mead, much more synoptic, captured the world in brief shots and often reduced events to their minimal cinematic expression.4

2. Single Frames

20Prominent in Mead’s formal repertoire was the combination of short panoramic takes with sequences made entirely of single, double, or triple frames, an alternation that gives his films a characteristic stutter. For his single frame sequences, Mead used a standard feature of amateur cameras employed in time-lapse photography. In a way, he was using his film camera as if it were a conventional photographic one, assembling still or nearly still images that became cinematic upon projection. Mead repeatedly justified his choice for the expense of film and his consequent desire to compress into each roll as many views as possible. Longer takes could be ruined by bad exposure, random accidents, or defective mechanics, while single frames or extremely short takes were certainly easier to control; if bungled, they could be taken out singly, without chucking the entire roll, or they might be swallowed by the overall visual stream. Still, economics aside, Mead’s insistence on single-frames and extremely short takes suggests an aesthetic intentionality and endows his films with a stylistic unity that glosses over their geographical and thematic diversity.

21Mead was an early practitioner of frame shooting, a device pioneered by Marie Menken and often associated with Robert Breer’s abstractions, Tony Conrad’s and Paul Sharits’s perceptual experiments, and amply used by practically all practitioners of the experimental home movie. (Exceptions would be Schneemann’s Kitch’s Last Meal and Harry Smith’s Late Superimpositions). By the time Mead started making films, the single frame was becoming a frequent object of discussion. In statements, brief essays, interviews, presentations, or even in the films themselves, filmmakers described the single frame as a basic structural component of the cinematic image and as a resource to articulate alternative forms of storytelling and new figurations of consciousness and perception. “This is what cinema is ... single frames ... frames,” muses Mekas off-screen in Walden, while one can hear the clatter of his typewriter in the background.

22Robert Breer may have been the first filmmaker to use single frames systematically. In 1954, he had exposed six feet of film to generate “240 different optical sensations packed into 10 seconds of vision,” and looped the footage to discover that repetition did not produce monotony but spurred the eye to discover new images every time. The procedure destroyed dramatic development but created a new continuity “in the form of a very dense and compact texture.” (73) He first used it in Recreation (1956), which combined his customary drawings and colored paper cut-outs with takes of disparate objects, and returned to it in Eyewash (1959), Fist Fight (1962), and others. With a more abstract aesthetic, Carmen D’Avino used single frames and lens changes to fuse colors in the spectator’s pupil and give color fields the “impression of dimension” (74).

23Gregory Markopoulos also saw in single frames and extremely short takes the potential for a different form of organizing cinematic textuality, but his frame of reference was modernist literature and poetry rather than formal or textural explorations. In an essay published in Film Culture in 1964, he complained that the frame had been understood only as a “photographic necessity,” submerged in the longer take. However, it could be the basis of a filmic system that rejected the temporal continuity of classical montage in favor of other relationships between images: “very quick cuts” could be used as “the harmonic units found in musical composition .... The phrases establish ulterior relationships among themselves” (11). They could also telegraph evanescent mental states, visions, the fluidity of memory and the imagination, and the rapidity of thought. Since Psyche (1947), he had been using single- or two-frame takes as “thought-images,” memory flashes, proleptic pointers, or, grouped in brief sequences, as “summations, recapitulations” of entire films. (Brown 6) This type of montage expanded the emotional range of the cinema and the subtlety with which emotion might be communicated: “The transient impact of meetings, handshakes, kisses and the hours spent apart from these contacts becomes revealed in all its astounding simplicity” (Markopoulos 12).

24Mead was not interested in abstract values, like Breer or D’Avino, nor in the narrative possibilities that Markopoulos envisioned. His brief takes and single-frame passages did convey “transient impacts” and subtleties of perception and recall: they are both immediate reactions to experience and memory-holders for past experience. In addition to the lability of mental life, single framing also conveys the mobility of travel—the giddiness of placelessness and drift. The technique upends the usual goal of the travel film—capturing recognizable views of foreign territories—and disintegrates what John Urry has called “the tourist gaze”—the centered, focused attention to the monumental, the memorable, or the distinctively exotic and alien (2-3). The Mexican footage of My Home Movies, for example, shows a Mexico City largely devoid of exoticism and recognizable landmarks. It avoids most of the best known views of the city, skips lightly over the impressive cathedral—shown through two hasty vertical pans of one of the baroque steeples—and concentrates instead on relatively unknown landmarks (the Museum of Natural History) or traces of Mexican urban modernity. The newspaper buildings (the headquarters of El Universal), neon signs (including one for Coca-Cola), billboards, storefronts, traffic, and milling crowds that attract Mead’s attention do not look particularly foreign; except for the Spanish in the names of businesses and in advertisements, which is barely readable because of the fast editing and therefore ceases to signify locality, these markers of contemporary urbanity could belong almost anywhere. In fact, Mead’s fascination with advertisement and design are in tune with the aesthetics of pop art and translates México’s distinct visuality into the repertoire of contemporary art and modern consumer culture. Subsequent segments filmed outside the capital offer an indistinct dash with fleeting glimpses of poor rurality (ragged children, pigs rooting in the garbage, unpaved streets, humble adobe houses). Schematic entries in Mead’s notebook of the time indicate that he travelled from Mexico City to the western coast, with stops in Cuernavaca—“Guernavaca [sic]-basement-wild café-Richie” (Mead Notebook 1 unpaginated)—Guadalajara, Mascota, San Blas, and Puerto Vallarta, but none of these locations is recognizable in the visual flow.

25Fig. 3. Taylor Mead, My Home Movies. Frame grab.

26As the film that uses frame-shooting most consistently and steadily, Rome / Florence / Venice / Greece is similarly partial in its rendering of cityscapes, monuments, and views. Mausoleums, churches, statues, museums, and palazzos are glimpsed in a rush: the Piazza del Popolo, the Vatican Galleries, or the Piazza di Spagna in Rome; the loggia at the Uffizi, Michelangelo’s David or Elizabeth Barret Browning’s tomb in Florence; and the Piazza di San Marco and the canals in Venice. These are intermixed with passersby, cats, dilapidated façades, (once more) abundant advertisement signs and billboards, urban signage, cars, and bicycles, and with captures of Mead’s friends and travel companions drinking in sidewalk cafés, riding a train or loafing on the grass in a bucolic setting. The last section (“Greece”) is much more indefinite and might just as well be set in Southern Italy or Spain. Ultimately, detail or geographical specificity matter little, as the ultimate referent of the films is horizontal progress across the world.

  • 5 The term “kinetic energy” to designate the potential of frame-shooting to convey visual dynamism is (...)

27In addition to transmitting the rush of travel and the dizzy succession of views, the alternation of single frames and short takes also communicates the kinetic energies inherent in more static situations, such as the motion-in-place that characterizes professional filmmaking.5 Several moments of My Home Movies are set at the site of Jerome Hill’s production Open the Door and See All the People (1963), a whimsical small-town comedy in which Mead had a small role as a tramp. Mead appears in costume, rehearsing, or perhaps acting, the last scene in Hill’s film, in which he pushes a cart fantastically laden with discards to the top of a junk pile. The pace shifts between sedate pans on actors and crew around the set and speedy montages that lend a vibrant dynamism to the film’s staid setting. My Home Movies ends up in the locations, and among the performers, of Tarzan and Jane Regained ... Sort Of. It does not capture the actual filming but speeds instead through the thrilling social scene that surrounded it and through a varied Los Angeles geography, from Pasadena to the canyons to La Brea to Santa Monica. New York / San Diego’s early scenes offer a collage of New York City. Shots of a dark interior with a television set on are mixed with a mélange of city views that frequently return to the milling crowds at Washington Square Park. The scene changes as Mead boards the airplane to take part in the filming of Warhol’s San Diego Surf (1968), in which he played the husband of a wealthy couple (Factory superstar Viva plays the wife) who host a gang of surfers in their seaside home at La Jolla. The rest of the film, mostly over-exposed, often unfocused, and tinged with an orange hue, is a fast-paced diary of the shoot. It offers glimpses of the stars and crew working on recognizable scenes in the film, but its focus is the performers’ domestic routines, moments of sunny conviviality between takes, and views of the seafront, all combined in a jerky collage. These sequences can be read as self-reflexive moments that implicitly contrast the complex dynamics of larger productions to Mead’s artisanal endeavor—filming alone with a cheap amateur camera. Hill’s sequences in particular visualize the bulky 35mm cameras and the mesh of cranes, tracks, dollies, and electrical support that professional filmmaking requires; tangled in the equipment, the actors and crew twitch about as further pieces of the mechanism. These scenes may also be read as a gentle joke about shooting. The uneven rhythms of filming—the fabled combination of rush and wait—are turned into a forward plunge characterized by a staccato beat and clockwork precision. By contrast, the travel footage and the portraits of friends, for all their rapidity, suggest lethargy, dreaminess, and a slightly narcotized consciousness that are, paradoxically (or not), further effects of frame shooting.

3. Flicker, Narcotics, Hallucination

28Frame-shooting was not only a way to experiment with texture, rhythm, and storytelling, as Breer and Markopoulos proposed; to undo the visuality of travel cinema; or to transmit the energies of filmmaking. It was also a gateway to altered states of consciousness and eccentric temporalities. Frame-by-frame changes in perspective, color, and light values heighten film’s inherent flicker, which remains ordinarily concealed thanks to the continuity of the takes, with each photogram differing minimally from the preceding one, and the persistence of vision, which prevents the eye from registering the division between frames. Intermittent light had long been known to have hallucinatory qualities, but this attribute was not thoroughly studied until the post-war years by British-Canadian neurologist William Grey Walter (Geiger 15-27). He flashed flickering light of different intensities and at different rates on experimental subjects with their eyes closed and, after a short interval, they began to develop hallucinations that ranged from geometrical shapes and vivid colors to changing patterns and dream-like scenes. As Walter and later researchers eventually discovered, the hallucinations could be categorized into types but were also intensely personal—neural fingerprints of individual mental functioning. Walter presented his findings to a broad readership in The Living Brain (1953). Beat writer William Burroughs encountered the book in the late fifties, and it allowed him to understand the visions that his friend, painter and writer Brion Gysin, had experienced on a bus trip during which the light of the sun was periodically blocked by a long line of trees planted at regular intervals along the road, and the ensuing flicker produced in him an intense hallucination that Gysin was at a loss to explain, but quite eager to repeat (Geiger 45-47). In order to make the experience repeatable, Ian Sommerville, a mathematics student at Cambridge University and Burroughs’s boyfriend at the time, manufactured the prototype of the Dream Machine (also called Dreamachine): a perforated carboard cylinder mounted on a turntable with a light bulb inside that emitted a flicker as it spun at 78 rpm (Geiger 49-50). Sitting in front of it with one’s eyes closed, produced the visions that Gysin named at different times “autonomous movies” or, in reference to television, “inner programming” (Geiger 54, 66). It was the first work of art to be enjoyed with one’s eyes closed, he quipped. It was also, John Geiger observed, the work of art to end art and turn everyone into their own best image producer (63).

29The Dream Machine entered the counterculture largely through Burroughs’s enthusiastic advocacy (172-74). Flicker could replace drug-induced hallucination. As Burroughs put it after kicking an intractable heroin habit, “everything that can be done chemically, can be done in other ways,” and flicker was one of those ways (131). It offered the prospect of “a drugless high.” (Cited in Geiger 68) But the ultimate interest of such high was that, just like drugs, but at a lesser economic and personal cost, it could “break the association locks” (Burroughs 49, 163) and the automatized responses enforced by the media and by inherited perceptual habits, and to free the mind into new ways of seeing and feeling. Such liberation was pursued across the sixties’ counterculture by means of stroboscopy in light shows, discos, and experimental film.

30Following up on Burroughs and Gysin’s ideas, filmmakers such as Sharits and Tony Conrad explored the perceptual possibilities of flicker. Sharits did it percussively, through a combination of image and sound seeking to disintegrate perception rather than generate inner visions. Conrad translated musical intervals into alternating black and white frames projected at different ratios. Ideally, the resulting harmonic relations generated visual overtones in the form of colors and shapes synthesized by the spectator’s perceptual apparatus. His film The Flicker, where he implemented these ideas, was both a musical and a visionary experience: “a hallucinatory trip through unplumbed grottoes of pure sensory disruption” (1); “a science-fiction film” that transported spectators “to an abstract planet ... a parallel universe.” (Geiger 75-77) Less directly influenced by Burroughs and neurological research, Andrew Noren used the concatenation of single frames—Charmed Particles (1979) is a great example—to depict the force fields latent in apparently insignificant actions and views: “If it’s done right, it can evoke high energy states of mind” (MacDonald 190)—states such as drugged consciousness, P. Adams Sitney was quick to suggest (175).

31Mead’s films do not use flicker as such, but the constant kaleidoscopic shifts of single-frame sequences produce a similar hypnotic effect, particularly the alternation of dark and light frames, which succeed each other without deliberate pattern—in contrast with Conrad’s and Sharits’s carefully planned ratios—but still generate strobe-like intermittence. Rapid cutting evokes memory’s abrupt shorthand, which tends to operate, as William James had famously noted, less as a chain of well-rounded contents than as a stream of transitional impressions, decontextualized fragments, and faint sensations. Externalized through film, the overall effect of such a flux is quite hallucinatory. Because of their subtlety and speed, single-frames hover between actual and virtual, recollection and fantasy. Towards the end of My Home Movies, after a string of prosaic actualities, the camera zooms in on a dream-like, vividly colored tiger on a circus advertisement. And the journeys through Italy and Greece, which unfold in autumnal gardens, empty squares, and darkened interiors decorated with classical statues, have a dreamy overtone, accentuated by a trippy soundtrack of progressive rock. Richard Condon and Michael Mason noted that flicker-driven hallucinations often combined individual memories in unfamiliar patterns and provoked temporal dislocation or the feeling of standing outside time (Geiger 78-79)—as the tiger, the statues, and the abandoned gardens seem to do in Mead’s films. This way of blurring memory and fantasy and of scrambling chronology is also typical of narcotic states, which flicker had the potential to emulate.

32While Mead’s films do not reference his narcotic autobiography, his writings and interviews do. The title of his most substantial poetry collection—On Amphetamine and in Europe—is eloquent in this respect, as is the preface: “This big husky blond young man said, ‘drink!’ and I drank this amphetamine in a little teeny glass of water … turned me on 48 hours (somewhere in book here is writings).” The cover photograph shows the hunk in question, shirtless, next to an amenable Mead, glass in hand, about to imbibe. The book, however, does not particularly privilege amphetamine, but mentions being “zonked” on a range of substances—cocaine, “efedemine,” “ephetomine (184) (ephedrine?), and particularly opium (“poppies,” “the poppy lagoon”), which may be a synonym for heroin: “Psychologically – I / am one heated spoon”; “I want to play / the heated spoon song / on my machine”; and “(if) / you don’t make the / poppy fields at least once / you’ll have missed the / Grand Canyon of culture.” (On Amphetamine 66, 55). Use seems frequent—“I have a federal narcotics habit in my pants” (On Amphetamine 92)—and Mead jokes about it, but also warns against it: “Accept what it gives you physically, but don’t keep it up physically [sic]—cocaine, ephetamine [sic] etc.” (105) Mead’s drug preferences shifted over time. During his years in Europe, he discovered Revonal or Nubarene, an anti-anxiety medication with the same active compound as quaaludes that was easily available over the counter outside the US at the time. Revonal gave him needed focus and peace of mind, but amphetamine and acid enchanted his surroundings (Gay Power unpaginated; Son of Andy Warhol 95-96). In a 1976 interview with The Village Voice, he recalled some of his best trips around the Village (on STD), when “Washington Square turned into Persia one thousand years ago, or one thousand years from now,” and later, while standing on a gutted pier covered with broken glass, he fantasized how that landscape might be transfigured by amphetamine (“Sheer heaven!”) (Tipmore 69).

33In some ways, Mead’s films evoke the (contradictory) temporal signatures of different psychotropics. The speedy changes of scene recall amphetamine’s frenzy and single-mindedness, their dreaminess suggests “the poppy,” and their even-leveled attention and universal acceptance chimes with relaxants like pot or quaaludes. Critic Parker Tyler distinguished between “dragtime” and “drugtime” in Warhol’s films: the lengthy unfolding that at times “cries out ... for the right conversion formula in the witness”—for a chemical aid to turn them “into inexplicable wonders of eventfulness.” (103) Eventful as they are, thanks to constant changes of scene and perspective, Mead’s films do not drag, but elicit a vicarious high, or rather, different highs. They are the “home movies” of someone who was as much at home in motion across the actual as in a range of artificial paradises that were simulated through his film’s visual qualities.

4. Queer Temporality

34As works that convey liminal states of consciousness, Mead’s films are at home in different temporalities: in the linear calendar time, suggested by the roughly chronological succession of takes; in the non-linear times of individual perception and recall; and in the elastic flow of narcotic vision and daydream. As they navigate these different times, Mead’s films echo the temporal ambiguity of other beat productions: the mixture of mystic allusions and everydayness in Wallace Berman’s Aleph (1958-76) or the shifts between external chronology and internal durée characteristic of beat literature. These were distinctions, by the way, that Grey Walter, pursuing his flicker research into the early sixties, found moot, as he discovered that the brain did not differentiate between real and anticipated images: “The electrochemical changes in the brain are as ‘real’ as when the stimulus is real” (qtd. in Geiger 84). Beat writers could have told him that. In their work, the line between hallucinated and remembered (or “real”) experience is frequently blurred and, in the end, irrelevant, as both have a similar power of suggestion. One can think of Ginsberg “hearing” William Blake’s voice over Manhattan’s rooftops or recreating his mother’s delusions in Kaddish (1956); of Kerouac’s oneiric reminiscences in Visions of Gerard (1963); or of Burrough’s sliding from gritty realism to paranoid fantasy in practically any of his works. Time in Mead’s films is similarly indefinite, but does not yield to the totalizing frames of the best-known beat writers: mystic visions, paranoia, or melancholia. Atomized and disaggregated, it lacks any sense of emplotment or direction. “Everything is accidental,” Mead once wrote, and went on to describe himself as “shy gorgeous lovely incidental” (On Amphetamine 110, 191) Most incidental of all is the random prickling of a queer, cruisy affect that became emblematic of Mead’s persona and (un)structures his films’ temporality.

35Queerness was prominent in Mead’s self-presentation. The Flower Thief, which catapulted him into underground fame, closes with Mead’s character picking up a young man at a penny arcade and walking with him into the sunset. The synoptic self-portraits in On Amphetamine confirm his fagginess: “I’m a communist sissy” (32); “I’m a sissy narcotics addict” (35); “simple, infamous faggot, Taylor Mead” (35); “Taylor Mead went down on a couple of guys (gossip column)” (187); “Taylor Mead got fucked in the ass (rear) (lost hope column and gossip column)” (187); “mark my grave with a cocksucker” (94). At a time of timid homosexual visibility, as were the late fifties and early sixties, he was exuberantly “overexposed,” as he put it. And observers were quick to corroborate. Parker Tyler described his acting persona as “definitely faggot” and fellow poet Ed Sanders once humorously introduced him as “poet, thinker, & cocksucker par excellence .... He’ll cruise yr mind with his hot verbal dick” (Kane 66). On film, Mead’s queerness is relayed through a floating, cruisy attention to handsome men around him and, more abstractly, through a discontinuous succession of charged presents indifferent to the past or the future.

36Fig. 4. Taylor Mead, My Home Movies. Frame grab.

37This temporality does not abide by any of the registers of what Elizabeth Freeman called “chrononormativity”—the normative temporality of the state, of capital, or of heterosexual life narratives, and is therefore an example of what has recently been labelled “queer temporality.” The time of the films is intensely personal and never chimes with the rhythms and milestones of the collectivity; it is also a time of pure expenditure that never yields a conceptual return; and it is indifferent to such scripts as maturation, procreation, the accumulation of property, and generational transmission. It is the time of an unplanned life that never invested on the future, was never geared toward profit, career, or success, and took the contingency of the world as its only guideline. This temporality might be represented less as a line—as time is often visualized—than as a series of dots: the random moments that set the staccato pace of Mead’s films. None of these moments seems particularly remarkable: they are passing glances, temporary habitations, hasty transits, and casual encounters of no ulterior consequence. Musician and gay activist-preacher Al Carmines—who turned Judson Church into a hub for avant-garde activity in early sixties New York—praised a similar floating presentness in The Flower Thief, and particularly in the actions of Mead’s character: “[he] moves from experience to experience, scene to scene, participating in some kind of religious abandonment to the minute, the present scene, literally ‘taking no thought for the morrow’” (1) The comment is perfectly applicable to Mead’s films. In fact, My Home Movies shows the Judson Church announcement board with the title and date of the sermon that Carmines dedicated to the film (“Saint Francis and The Flower Thief” August 13, 1962). Carmines regarded this attitude a form of holiness—love “for the most intimate daily doings and objects that surround us”—that characterized beat poetics and was a rerun of the spirit of Saint Francis.

38This holiness is also the result of an ecumenical libido that, in a very Franciscan manner, cathects everything it encounters, particularly the attractive passersby towards whom Mead’s lens constantly turns. A fleeting, surreptitious eroticism punctuates the onrush of images. My Home Movies captures in candid-camera fashion shirtless black men playing basketball in New York’s West Village, workers at a building site, and onlookers at a parade. Mead is caught several times by his subjects, who stare back, laugh, or camp up a flirtatious routine, as do several men in Washington Square Park—a popular gay cruising spot at the time. On other occasions, he confronts his erotic interests head on. Early in Rome / Florence / Venice / Greece Mead engages a frisky group of teenagers in a lively conversation and later films them drinking and dancing at a bar and pissing by the roadside. In My Home Movies a young man clad only in briefs exhibits his body and plays with a ball on a rooftop, and a blonde muscle builder in Santa Monica obligingly strips to his swimsuit and stands in front of the camera. Among the flashes of sexual possibility, Mead smuggles in what may be the first interracial gay kiss in experimental cinema between a black and a white man who are also shown separately smiling and mugging at the camera.

39One can catch a glimpse of utopia in this erotic presentness: the sense of a world that endlessly proffers possibilities for sexual fulfillment. Any encounter, any stolen image, could become a story, an affair, a moment of pleasure. As the films do not follow up on these hints and merely gesture at them, their development is constantly interrupted and their temporal structure bypasses ordinary narrative molds and syntactical structures. Roland Barthes’s characterization of the experimental “text” and its pleasures provides an appropriate metalanguage for this interruptive textuality. In Barthes’s terms, Mead’s images are lexical units without a grammar: “words, tiny sintagms, bits of formulae, and no sentence formed” (49). Sentences—whose cinematic equivalent are structured sequences—are “hierarchical,” Barthes writes, and involve “subjections, subordinations, internal reactions” (50). They are the prerogative of expert language—“The professor is someone who finishes his sentences” (50)—and conventional storytelling. In contrast, the fragmentary language that Barthes describes—and Mead’s films implement—is non-narrative, open, “perverse” for lacking didactic or political “finality” and only invested in play and sensuous appeal. With their pliable (un)structure, indeterminate time, floating eroticism, and aimlessness, Mead’s films offer a visual counterpart of Barthes’s textual utopia.

40From a different perspective, such constant truncation has a tinge of dystopia; it could be understood as an inability to pursue the affective and erotic possibilities that open up to the filmmaker and, by proxy, to the spectator. The inability to form a sentence or to create a narrative might be the result of frustration rather than joyous play, and the quick editing might then be a symptom of obstruction rather than a gateway to utopia. It is a possibility that filmmaker Warren Sonbert pointed out in relation to his own work. A gay filmmaker who did not work in a confessional, representational mode, Sonbert connected shots of a vast range of human activity and different locations through subtle thematic and compositional echoes. From Carriage Trade (1971) forward, his films combine traits of the travel film and the home movie and are, in that respect, reminiscent of Mead’s, but where Mead is speedy, spontaneous, and often careless, Sonbert’s work is carefully stylized and cadenced. In a lecture delivered at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979, Sonbert reflected on the duality transmitted by cutting in his own films. Constant interruption is sadistic towards audiences, “a metaphor for frustration” and “hopes dashed,” and provokes “feelings of deprivation, expectation dissolved, even sadomasochism” (172). But such constant interruptions also transmit “serenity” and contentment with the world’s vastness and resilience; with the imperturbable temporal cycles that exceed the filmmaker / observer: “all this activity has been going on, is going on, will be going on, and even all at the same time” (172).

  • 6 Except where indicated, all quotations in this paragraph come from Heys, unpaginated.

41Such duality is less present in Mead’s films, which transmit a general breeziness about traveling and cruising, than in his writings, which often dwell on the dark side of his free-wheeling nomadism and cast the films in a slightly gloomier light. The columns he wrote for the magazine Gay Power in 1969 and 1970 frequently return to his years abroad with a mixture of black humor and deranged fantasizing reminiscent of William Burroughs.6 In them violence and danger constantly hover over his sexual escapades in Mexico and in grand old Europe. One of these columns recalls that Rome in the mid-sixties was “the cruisiest place” in Italy. “Roman youths were inexpensive, honest and loving” and he met there “one of the great beauties of Europe”—a runaway, it seems, who needed a place to sleep for a few hours. At the same time, the hustlers could be obstreperous and unreliable, informal surveillance at Roman pensions made sexual encounters difficult, and that great European beauty showed no sexual interest in Mead and quickly vanished from his life. He recalls the episode in On Amphetamine but can only approximate the name of his beau in what becomes an allegory of the elusiveness of sexuality and memory: “Mario – the guy’s name in Rome is Mario is Mario Renzi or Sinsi something like that yes about Sinzi” (198)—perhaps a pun with senza, or “without” in Italian. In a different column, he reports that the destruction of the pissoirs in central Paris severely diminished cruising opportunites, and, under “fascist De Gaulle,” the baths have become dangerous: “you were liable to six months in dreadsville if you groped the wrong Frenchman.” While on the make in Alameda Park, Mexico, Mead is denounced by “a sinister man” and jumped and beaten by policemen. And in Fez he is knifed by a local after sex; during his long recovery at the hospital, the Moroccan police treat Mead as the offender and make him sign a confession of his “crime against nature.” Other times, eroticism on the road is overshadowed by failure and loss. There are numerous rejections and unconsummated affairs—due to Mead’s mismanaging his chances, misunderstanding or indecision. Partly because of this, life is often burdensome and frustrating: “The world is killing me”; “I have a shit-list that reaches to the stars” (Mead On Amphetamine 148, 151).

42Still, humor and amusement at the absurdity of life lighten the weight of the world and take Mead across to the other side of horror. Again, a Gay Power column laments ever-present homophobia: “Prejudiced shits from every walk of society, ready to kill a fairy if the sun happens to catch and reflect off its wings. Fear. It’s so real. It eats me up.” But the pessimistic musing is quickly followed by a humorous affirmation of “love” against the odds: “Of course he slept with everyone in the Village, but I loved him anyway” (Heys unpaginated). If the interruptive, quick cut on film stands for loss, impediment, and impossibility, it also contains and defuses negative affect, propels the text—and life—onward, and communicates diversity and endurance. Perhaps the transitoriness of experience helps to make life bearable— “A lot of stuff is just OK if you just glance at it” (On Amphetamine 149). In this regard, Mead’s way of speeding the sights is in part a coping mechanism, a way to make a home—an impermanent one—in an essentially hostile world. “I’m very pessimistic / But I have a very good time anyway” (Mead A Simple Country Girl unpaginated).

43Fig. 5. Taylor Mead, My Home Movies. Frame grab.

44Presentness and impermanence make Mead somewhat elusive as a political subject. Like much of the contemporary underground cinema—by Kenneth Anger, Warhol, Jack Smith, of the Kuchar brothers—his films are perched between two moments in queer history. They are made at the end of a post-war period of discretion, accommodation, and clandestinity, conditions that this body of film, like beat literature, helped to disrupt. And they do not yet belong to the more confrontational era of liberation politics and gay porn, against which they may seem coy and evasive. Great in many respects, gay lib seemed to lead to standardization and might have normalized what was for a long time an unassimilable lifestyle, especially when lived on the social fringe, as Mead did. And it might have turned sexuality into another bourgeois routine, into another form of consumerism: “Non-sensual masturbators / machine-like sameness / You fuck me I’ll fuck you” (Heys unpaginated). And elsewhere: “I’m not a Wanton Hussy / I have been celibate ever since gay liberation” (Mead, A Simple Country Girl unpaginated). Suspended between different regimes of rebelliousness, Mead does not easily accommodate the main temporal tropes current in queer critique. He is neither militantly anti-futurity (Edelman) nor for a queerness that is ever impending (Muñoz 1-2), nor does he submit to the pull of the past (Freeman’s temporal drag (62-64)) or vindicate its backward affects (Love), although he amply records them. Mead opts instead for an ever fleeting presentness that is never entirely apprehensible and keeps sliding under his feet— “My Timing’s Slightly Off” (Mead, A Simple Country Girl unpaginated). Quickly flashing by like the brief takes in his films, presentness does not easily lend itself to an emancipatory project, which is inevitably orientated towards the future, nor does it seek to repurpose the past—“No use / Looking / Back / It’s not there” (A Simple Country Girl unpaginated). Mead simply keeps things open and moving, permanently unsettled and accidental. He invites us to look for utopia not only in a future then and there, but also in a here and now that can be infiltrated, illuminated, and undone through the infusion of queer energies that may not last, but do remake the world in the brief time that they flare up. “I’m part of the fabric of / qu’est-ce que c’est” (Mead A Simple Country Girl unpaginated).

45Acknowledgment: Funding for this research came from project PID2022-137592NB-I00, Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Gobierno de España.

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Bibliography

Baillie, Bruce. “Letter to Jonas Mekas, November 1962.” Film Culture 29, Summer 1963, p. 76.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, The Noonday Press, 1975.

Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Harper, 1962.

Breer, Robert. “A Statement.” Film Culture 29, Summer 1963, pp. 73-74.

Brown, Robert. “Interview with Gregory Markopoulos.” Film Culture 32, Spring 1964, pp. 6-7.

Carmines, Al. “St Francis and The Flower Thief.” Typescript. The Reginald Gay Collection of Taylor Mead and Related Materials, 1941-1991. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Billy Rose Theater Division. Box no. 4.

Conrad, Tony. “Tony Conrad on The Flicker.” Film Culture 41, Summer 1966, pp. 1-3.

D’Avino, Carmen. “A Statement.” Film Culture 29, Summer 1963, p. 74.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2006.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke UP, 2010.

Geiger, John. Chapel of Extreme Experience. A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine. Soft Skull Press, 2003.

Giorno, John. “Taylor Mead: An Interview.” Gay Sunshine Interviews, vol. 2, edited by Wynston Leiland, Gay Sunshine Press, 1978, pp. 109-121. First published in Gay Sunshine, Summer 1975.

Heys, John E., editor. Gay Power. The Taylor Mead Columns, 1969-1970. BoD—Books on Demand, Nordesrstedt, 2014.

Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome. The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s. U of California P, 2003.

Kempton, Sally. “The Homosexual Clown as Underground Star.” The Village Voice, November 30, 1967, pp. 19, 49.

Jenkins, Bruce. “Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort of …” The Films of Andy Warhol. Catalogue Raisonné, edited by John Hanhardt. H. N. Abrams / Yale UP, 2021, pp. 92-99.

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward. Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard UP, 2007.

MacDonald, Scott. “Interview with Andrew Noren.” A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, edited by Scott MacDonald, U of California P, 1992, pp. 175-205.

Markopoulos, Gregory. “Towards a New Narrative Form.” Film Culture 31, Winter 1963-64, pp. 11-12.

Mead, Taylor. “The Movies are a Revolution.” Film Culture 29, 1963, p. 9.

---. “Acting 1958-65.” The American New Wave, 1958-1967, edited by Bruce Jenkins and Melinda Ward, Walker Art Center, 1982, pp. 13-17.

---. On Amphetamine and In Europe. Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth. Vol. 3. Boss Books, 1968.

---. A Simple Country Girl. YBK / Bowery Arts & Science, 2005

---. Son of Andy Warhol. Unpublished Memoir. c.1989. The Reginald Gay Collection of Taylor Mead and Related Materials, 1941-1991. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Billy Rose Theater Division. Box no. 4, folder 3.

---. Notebook 1 (undated). The Reginald Gay Collection of Taylor Mead and Related Materials, 1941-1991. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Billy Rose Theater Division. Box no. 2, folder 1.

Mekas, Jonas. Movie Journal. The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971. Macmillan, 1972.

---. “The Diary Film.” Avant-Garde Film. A Reader of Theory and Criticism, edited by P. Adams Sitney, NYU P, 1978, pp. 190-98.

Muñoz, José E. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU P, 2008.

Siegel, Marc. “Taylor Mead, A Faggot in Venice Beach in 1961.” Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, edited by David E. James and Adam Hyman, John Libbey, 2015, pp. 163-174.

Sitney, P. Adams. Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson. Oxford UP, 2008

Sonbert, Warren. “Lecture. San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979.” Framework, vol. 56, no. 1, 2015, pp. 160-175.

Tipmore, David. “A Walk on the Wild Side with Taylor Mead,” The Village Voice, June 14, 1976, pp. 66-68.

Tyler, Parker. “Dragtime and Drugtime, or Film á la Warhol.” Andy Warhol Film Factory, edited by Michael O’Pray, British Film Institute, 1989, pp. 94-104.

Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. Second Edition. Sage, 2002.

Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. Simon & Schuster, 1956.

Zimmermann, Patricia. “Hollywood, Home Movies, and Common Sense: Amateur Cinema as Aesthetic Dissemination and Social Control, 1950-62.” Cinema Journal, vol. 27, no. 4, 1988, pp. 23-44.

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Notes

1 Biographical information about Mead is scattered in Giorno, Kempton, Watson, Tipmore, Siegel, Mead “Acting,” and Mead Son of Andy Warhol, an unpublished memoir that (confusingly) shares title with vol. 4 of Excerpts of the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth and with another extensive manuscript of poems, also unpublished, both at the The Reginald Gay Collection of Taylor Mead and Related Materials, 1941-1991. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Billy Rose Theater Division. Box no. 3.

2 Information on Mead’s theatrical activity is gathered from The Reginald Gay Collection of Taylor Mead and Related Materials, 1941-1991. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Billy Rose Theater Division. Box no. 1.

3 Other times, unity in Levine is more conceptual than experiential: Notes after Long Silence (1989) shows family life invaded by the media—the television screen—and particularly by ever-present catastrophic news—a frequent refrain in his work.

4 Warhol’s earliest efforts, before adopting his long-take, static framing, no-edits style, resemble Mead’s home movies for their use of frame-shooting and gesturality (Jenkins 32-38). One of Warhol’s very earliest includes Mead, goofing about in Warhol’s Lexington Avenue townhouse.

5 The term “kinetic energy” to designate the potential of frame-shooting to convey visual dynamism is Andrew Noren’s. See MacDonald 189-90.

6 Except where indicated, all quotations in this paragraph come from Heys, unpaginated.

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References

Electronic reference

Juan Antonio Suárez, Taylor Mead’s Home Movies (1962-1968) and The Queer Temporalities of Travel, Memory, and BlissEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-4 | 2025, Online since 07 December 2025, connection on 10 March 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/25491; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15oy4

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About the author

Juan Antonio Suárez

Juan Antonio Suárez is a Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Murcia (Spain). He is the author, among others, of Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (Indiana UP), Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Illinois), Jim Jarmusch (U of Illinois P) and Experimental Film and Queer Materiality (Oxford UP). He is the Principal Investigator of a research project on queer memory in contemporary anglophone cultures funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (Project PID2022-137592NB-I00) and is writing a monograph on queer memory in contemporary experimental film. 

By this author

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