Egon Bondy is dead

[swag]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/books/15bondy.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin



Egon Bondy, a poet and philosopher whose idiosyncratic cocktail of whimsically demented verse and profoundly subversive metaphysics lubricated the underground movement that helped topple Communism in Czechoslovakia, died on Monday in Bratislava, Slovakia. He was 77.

Mr. Bondy wrote some 60 books, most printed secretly and few published in the West. But his greatest fame came when the Czech underground band the Plastic People of the Universe used his morbidly funny poems as song lyrics. One concerned constipation. Another listed all the drugs that Mr. Bondy, a hypochondriac, ingested.

The group, which was hounded by the government for endangering the morality of the young, secretly recorded these lyrics on its first album in 1973 and 1974. Its title, in English, was “Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned.”

In 1976 the police raided a Plastic People concert and arrested the band on charges of “organized disturbance of the peace.” The raid angered Czech dissidents, including the future president Vaclav Havel; they issued a manifesto, Charter 77. It kick-started the chain of events that led, 12 years later, to the Velvet Revolution and to Mr. Havel’s assuming leadership of the country.

In an interview last year with The Independent, a London newspaper, Mr. Havel, now the former president, hailed the band’s “special mystical, magical flavor, a very Prague flavor.” He called Mr. Bondy “a remarkable eccentric.”

. . . more

[swag]

1. And he ain't comin' back.

[darkstar]

2. No, no, no, no...he's outside

looking in.

[swag]

3. Pardon me

for being sentimental.

I saw Pulnoc on their first US tour in 1988 or so. Anyway, Robert ("I Killed") Christgau ("with my big fuckin' dick"), Greil Marcus, Jefferson Morley, Vaclav Havel and other people had us all convinced that this Egon Bondy guy was kind of a big deal.

Of course Jefferson Morley went on to spend a night smoking up in a crack house just to write about it. Strangely, he did not become a crack addict. Such is the nature of the war on drugs. But that's another story from the same time.