Adventure And Literature: John Law Reading

Last night, I saw John Law give a reading and a slide-show at City Lights Books to a capacity plus crowd of admirers, old friends, new friends and people like me who he doesn't know from Adam. The event was to celebrate the release of his first book, The Space Between which is a series of short stories about his nightmarish and hallucinatory experiences climbing bridges and exploring their intricate interiors.
Altogether it was a great presentation, highly inspirational and the slideshow was dazzling, especially the crazy photographs that nobody else had been to able to capture unless they were as brave as him and the rest of The Suicide Club. After the reading I wandered a bit around Chinatown thinking about bridges. Someone at the New York opening filmed John Law's slide show and put it on youtube in three parts. Below is the first part:

Adventures In The City Part 1 of ???

I still haven't written about the psychogeography of the Chinese New Year's Treasure Hunt...
I think I'm still trying to think of a way to conceptualize it, a tangential quest that has led me down the purple rabbit's hole of Chinatown history and alleyway cartography. Which are, of course, indispensable realms of knowledge.

Instead, being pinioned to the internet, I'm distracted by all the cool things I learn once a month from the Re/Search press blog. I know I can't possibly attend, or see, or purchase all of the gems listed, but some definitely seem necessary. One event I'm particularly excited about involves bridges (like the Lost Boys bridge above) and adventures.

Especially the bridge-adventures of the famous San Francisco counter-cultural adventurer John Law and his Suicide Club.

The Cacophony Society followed in the footsteps of the Suicide Club and perpetuates a similar spirit of adventure and misrule. (Yet I can't help but think in those pre-9/11 days much more in the way of adventure was had.) A little research and I found some priceless photos of John Law and company in the early days of Cacophony: here and here and here.

Anyway, John Law's eagerly anticipated book of short stories, The Space Between is coming out soon. He will be doing a reading at City Lights on March 5th. It should be an interesting evening and an opportunity to meet and hear a local legend.

Other upcoming things of note: The Anarchist Book Fair is coming and so is Throbbing Gristle.
I doubt I can afford either event though. We'll see.