Friday, February 05, 2010

BEAT SURRENDER REMEMBERING JEFF NUTTALL

Jeff Nuttall died January 2004. Through work in 1960s International Times (it or IT) and writers forum press - visual, verbal, c(art)oon, zine collapsed in singular form. His pioneering Physiodelics, My Own Mag, Oscar Christ and the Immaculate Conception often came from different beat inspirations & source materials to North American underground comix with origins in US pulps, tijuana bibles (8-page sex cartoons), sick humor and horror comics.

Nuttall's poetry and prose fiction wasn't populist. But as broadsheet critic in emerging multicultural poetry scene he produced puff-friendly observations for poets' work including a young Bill Griffiths.

Nuttall's urgent spidery style of drawing was conventional in terms of technique. Yet every scratch of Jeff's pen and splodge of ink seemed to represent paraliterary challenge to text-heavy editorial regimes determined to edit out marks interfering, mocking, obscuring, or not doing job in illustrating body verbal.

Bob Cobbing's writers forum published last of Nuttall's poetics supper moves unlight, viper along with Jeff's own chapbook compilation of 1960s reprints (image above) in March 2002.

Jeff Nuttall enjoyed parallel careers as teacher in secondary modern and art school education, and as actor in several tv sit-coms and films. As well as a definitive Friar Tuck he played Dr Mikhail Arkov in James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough. He plays dead for most of his time on screen. This is movie where Robbie Coltrane plays 'Zukovsky'. And as Jeff Hilson speculates - a Nuttall suggestion to script-doctoring team?

from beat generation ballads sequence

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