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Communions
Channeling hallucinated versions of dead artists and junkies, these fragments access the uncanny allure of shared experience. Elements of speculative fiction, criticism and encrypted auto-biography merge to form a disconcerting portrait of the artist as addict. Neither denunciation nor valorization, Communions is an attempt to probe the haunting singularity of opiate addiction and its ineradicable influence on art and culture.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
236 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 25, 2022
From laudanum to lean, Adam Lehrer's Communions takes you on a journey through the lives of artists dealing with opiate addiction. I guess you could call this "historical fiction", as each chapter deals with a different era/artist, the basic facts seem accurate but there's obviously plenty of fictional embellishment. Some of the people involved are Antonin Artaud, Philip Seymour Hoffman, a chapter that features a wide range of jazz greats who are stuck in purgatory, Anna Kavan and more.
My two favorite chapters were the ones involving Zoë Tamerlis Lund - a name I wouldn't have recognized but she starred in the cult classic Ms. 45 and also assisted Able Ferrera with the screenplay for Bad Lieutenant. The other was a fictional meetup between Ol' Dirty Bastard and DJ Screw. ODB is on the run from the law, and decides to make a trip to Houston to meet Screw, who is in poor health due to his consistent use of codeine cough syrup.
The changes in era and personalities keep this book entertaining, while it continually looks at the relationship of hard drugs with artistic personalities from different perspectives. In the final chapter, the author looks back at his own history of substance abuse. Lehrer is careful not to glamorize drug use, but he doesn't condemn it either. The final chapter also takes some swings at the pharmaceutical industry, along with some thoughts on the current opiate crisis.
I've enjoyed the author's podcast and Substack, and this, his first written work is well-worth checking out.
My two favorite chapters were the ones involving Zoë Tamerlis Lund - a name I wouldn't have recognized but she starred in the cult classic Ms. 45 and also assisted Able Ferrera with the screenplay for Bad Lieutenant. The other was a fictional meetup between Ol' Dirty Bastard and DJ Screw. ODB is on the run from the law, and decides to make a trip to Houston to meet Screw, who is in poor health due to his consistent use of codeine cough syrup.
The changes in era and personalities keep this book entertaining, while it continually looks at the relationship of hard drugs with artistic personalities from different perspectives. In the final chapter, the author looks back at his own history of substance abuse. Lehrer is careful not to glamorize drug use, but he doesn't condemn it either. The final chapter also takes some swings at the pharmaceutical industry, along with some thoughts on the current opiate crisis.
I've enjoyed the author's podcast and Substack, and this, his first written work is well-worth checking out.
Read
July 21, 2022another novel from a friend and an especially dazzling one -- reflections on the philosophy of drug use, the creation of art, alienation and proximity to the other, all chopped and cut from hundreds of years of history and presented in a whirling antifiction defined both by truth and illusion. i've never done heroin but adam writes about it with such heartbent clarity that the book seems to stick together in a gauzy dream of the stuff. minds meet, contract, expand and expire across rock musicians, jazz musicians, great authors and great actors and the writer in question. special stuff, and published by a wonderful press. read it read it read it!
October 15, 2022
Verhalen over bekende personen die verslaafd waren aan opioiden. Best intrigerend, maar niet alle verhalen even sterk.
February 21, 2025
Wow-woo-wee-wow. I tore right through this book. It was filled with cultural references that made me feel cool for knowing (throbbing gristle, merzbow, the germs, etc). Had a swell time reading about heroin and stuff and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this reading experience— picked this book up at random, but glad I did.
January 27, 2025
Reading John Coltrane and Charlie Parker argue at a Jazz Club in Purgatory for an eternity is always a treat.
Coltrane says no, Charlie, yes that drugs are essential to making jazz.
Miles, Pharaoh, Max Roach, Nina Simone.
They're all there, all connected by their drug use.
Bill Hicks, made a joke about this conundrum.
"Do me a favor, If you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor then. Go home tonight, take all your albums, tapes and CDs and burn them...cause you know what, the musicians who made that great music that has enhanced your lives throughout the years......
REEEEAAAAL FUCKING HIGH ON DRUGS...
The Beatles were so high they let Ringo sing a couple of tunes."
The Communions encompasses the effect Heroin has on artists. For some, it's a gateway vehicle, others it's a fuel for their art.
What you'll read is fictional depictions on using the drug through perspectives of artists like Modigliani and Basquait. Described by their own words on how heroin makes them feel, or how heroin makes them, them.
Each chapter is a room of the artist's head. Garbage and filthy and ruined with Rolling stones and Teenage Jesus tapes. Other rooms with a type writer and cousin-drugs of heroin, paralyzed by regret.
Communions is a museum of portraits on what heroin has coloured/discoloured artists frames.
Coltrane says no, Charlie, yes that drugs are essential to making jazz.
Miles, Pharaoh, Max Roach, Nina Simone.
They're all there, all connected by their drug use.
Bill Hicks, made a joke about this conundrum.
"Do me a favor, If you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor then. Go home tonight, take all your albums, tapes and CDs and burn them...cause you know what, the musicians who made that great music that has enhanced your lives throughout the years......
REEEEAAAAL FUCKING HIGH ON DRUGS...
The Beatles were so high they let Ringo sing a couple of tunes."
The Communions encompasses the effect Heroin has on artists. For some, it's a gateway vehicle, others it's a fuel for their art.
What you'll read is fictional depictions on using the drug through perspectives of artists like Modigliani and Basquait. Described by their own words on how heroin makes them feel, or how heroin makes them, them.
Each chapter is a room of the artist's head. Garbage and filthy and ruined with Rolling stones and Teenage Jesus tapes. Other rooms with a type writer and cousin-drugs of heroin, paralyzed by regret.
Communions is a museum of portraits on what heroin has coloured/discoloured artists frames.
May 7, 2023
The Burroughs chapter is great!
August 1, 2024
Probably the best book I've read this year after hearing Lehrer on the Art of Darkness podcast. The premise of the book intrigued me, and I'm something of a fan of Burroughs, so I wanted to explore further the idea I heard on the podcast about how junk was so influential on Burroughs's writing, even down to the level of syntax.
"In this text from The Soft Machine, Burroughs's cut-up parallels the late-stage addict's burnt-out senses. Nothing holds any narrative sequential cohesion. The addict barely registers what's happening around him, everything is turned to visual fragments and haphazard incidents. Nothing else matters...Perception in opioid addiction is exceedingly difficult to render onto page, but with these pseudo-realist fragments, Burroughs narrates the collapse of the human psyche barely glued together by the burning sensation of need." (20)
Never have I heard Burroughs's cut-up technique put as so deeply intertwined with the addictions that dictated much of his life. In doing so, Lehrer has conflated biography and criticism, in a sense pointing out that context and technique are inseparable from each other. We are shaped by the things that hold power over us. Here is where Lehrer also reveals a kind of working thesis/question - it never really is answered - that develops throughout this novel/collection(? - it's exact form is extremely hard to pinpoint, which is part of its appeal - its essay, biography, memoir, short fiction, but unified by certain themes) about whether or not the drugs and the addiction are the source of the art's transcendence or if it is a deep-rooted excuse that artists claim to further the depths of their depravity. One particular section stands out here, where Lehrer embodies the subjectivities of jazz greats Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, arguing about bebop in purgatory, and to a larger extent art:
Bird: You ain't better than me, John. We both here. We just some dead motherfuckers who blew our horns real well...Humilation became the source of my ambition. And what did I do? I shot dope and I practiced. And practiced and shot more dope...Jazz is struggle, and I needed the obstacles presented by my excesses to carry me through every one of those hard living years.
'Trane: I wouldn't have ever reached my level if I hadn't decided to get that poison out of my system, Charlie. I was holding be back, man. Miles kicked me out of his band. I was sick all the goddamned time or falling asleep on the damn stage." (90)
Bird presents the argument that heroin allowed him to access the very essence of jazz, where as Coltrane argues he never would have been transcendent if he hadn't kicked heroin. Can drugs really bring art to a higher state? Is it all justification of bad habits? Even more interesting is the idea of inhabiting the subjectivity of someone not himself. Of course we do not have access to these artist's thoughts or feelings except for what they choose to put on record, but I think Lehrer gets as close as possible. Even if some of the stylistic choices come off as dicey when they clash with the author's level of essayist intellectualism, I think the idea he's getting across is that being on junk is like inhabiting another subjectivity, an outsider from an insider's point of view, watching someone else, a husk or shell of yourself run through the mundanities of its junk-addicted life. On another level, it's exercising some form of understanding and empathy at its closest possible boundary - we cannot literally be someone else, but we can certainly try. This is where the title of the book functions at its strongest: it's a series of spiritual and intellectual exchanges channeling the dead for a kind of wisdom.
"How come when some cracker goes up on a stage and starts jacking his dick off he's called a genius and praised right there as an artist that the world needs to take serious. But when I do something crazy, shit - when ODB does anything, I'm called a lunatic, a thug, or whatever else they wanna call me. Welfare Queen. Word" (126)
Towards the end of the book, Lehrer turns his mix of biography and criticism on himself, going through his own addictive phases and impulses, sparing himself few kind words. He looks at his past with a critical eye, developing a theory of addiction and transformation born out of his own experiences, and articulated almost perfectly: "You are sick, alone, and incapable of getting out of bed. Or, you are out in the world feeling nothing. You don't process subjective experience as one normally does. Things happen, but they don't register as happening, like a key lever of your awareness has been stolen from you." (222) There's an incumbent darkness to this, a necessity to describe what it's like to live life removed from yourself, to shamble around as a zombie. For Lehrer, junk destroys you mentally and physically, but it is also possible that junk addiction is what enabled Lehrer to write this book. Delving back to earlier points, would it have been possible for Lehrer to write this specific book in its exact form if he had not gone through the experiences he did? Would the version of this without his history be more polemicized, more strongly moralistic in its approach? That's the great paradox of this book, and one of the things that makes it, at least, transcendent for me as a great piece of literature: It decries the very thing that gave it life, it never preaches, but it does reflect.
In spite of Lehrer's political stances, he presents a unique voice in literature that is a refreshing change of pace from the world of sanitized, mass-marketed fiction, a voice that is brutally honest in its tone and worldview.
"In this text from The Soft Machine, Burroughs's cut-up parallels the late-stage addict's burnt-out senses. Nothing holds any narrative sequential cohesion. The addict barely registers what's happening around him, everything is turned to visual fragments and haphazard incidents. Nothing else matters...Perception in opioid addiction is exceedingly difficult to render onto page, but with these pseudo-realist fragments, Burroughs narrates the collapse of the human psyche barely glued together by the burning sensation of need." (20)
Never have I heard Burroughs's cut-up technique put as so deeply intertwined with the addictions that dictated much of his life. In doing so, Lehrer has conflated biography and criticism, in a sense pointing out that context and technique are inseparable from each other. We are shaped by the things that hold power over us. Here is where Lehrer also reveals a kind of working thesis/question - it never really is answered - that develops throughout this novel/collection(? - it's exact form is extremely hard to pinpoint, which is part of its appeal - its essay, biography, memoir, short fiction, but unified by certain themes) about whether or not the drugs and the addiction are the source of the art's transcendence or if it is a deep-rooted excuse that artists claim to further the depths of their depravity. One particular section stands out here, where Lehrer embodies the subjectivities of jazz greats Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, arguing about bebop in purgatory, and to a larger extent art:
Bird: You ain't better than me, John. We both here. We just some dead motherfuckers who blew our horns real well...Humilation became the source of my ambition. And what did I do? I shot dope and I practiced. And practiced and shot more dope...Jazz is struggle, and I needed the obstacles presented by my excesses to carry me through every one of those hard living years.
'Trane: I wouldn't have ever reached my level if I hadn't decided to get that poison out of my system, Charlie. I was holding be back, man. Miles kicked me out of his band. I was sick all the goddamned time or falling asleep on the damn stage." (90)
Bird presents the argument that heroin allowed him to access the very essence of jazz, where as Coltrane argues he never would have been transcendent if he hadn't kicked heroin. Can drugs really bring art to a higher state? Is it all justification of bad habits? Even more interesting is the idea of inhabiting the subjectivity of someone not himself. Of course we do not have access to these artist's thoughts or feelings except for what they choose to put on record, but I think Lehrer gets as close as possible. Even if some of the stylistic choices come off as dicey when they clash with the author's level of essayist intellectualism, I think the idea he's getting across is that being on junk is like inhabiting another subjectivity, an outsider from an insider's point of view, watching someone else, a husk or shell of yourself run through the mundanities of its junk-addicted life. On another level, it's exercising some form of understanding and empathy at its closest possible boundary - we cannot literally be someone else, but we can certainly try. This is where the title of the book functions at its strongest: it's a series of spiritual and intellectual exchanges channeling the dead for a kind of wisdom.
"How come when some cracker goes up on a stage and starts jacking his dick off he's called a genius and praised right there as an artist that the world needs to take serious. But when I do something crazy, shit - when ODB does anything, I'm called a lunatic, a thug, or whatever else they wanna call me. Welfare Queen. Word" (126)
Towards the end of the book, Lehrer turns his mix of biography and criticism on himself, going through his own addictive phases and impulses, sparing himself few kind words. He looks at his past with a critical eye, developing a theory of addiction and transformation born out of his own experiences, and articulated almost perfectly: "You are sick, alone, and incapable of getting out of bed. Or, you are out in the world feeling nothing. You don't process subjective experience as one normally does. Things happen, but they don't register as happening, like a key lever of your awareness has been stolen from you." (222) There's an incumbent darkness to this, a necessity to describe what it's like to live life removed from yourself, to shamble around as a zombie. For Lehrer, junk destroys you mentally and physically, but it is also possible that junk addiction is what enabled Lehrer to write this book. Delving back to earlier points, would it have been possible for Lehrer to write this specific book in its exact form if he had not gone through the experiences he did? Would the version of this without his history be more polemicized, more strongly moralistic in its approach? That's the great paradox of this book, and one of the things that makes it, at least, transcendent for me as a great piece of literature: It decries the very thing that gave it life, it never preaches, but it does reflect.
In spite of Lehrer's political stances, he presents a unique voice in literature that is a refreshing change of pace from the world of sanitized, mass-marketed fiction, a voice that is brutally honest in its tone and worldview.
August 13, 2024
Not entirely sure what a lot of people seem to see in this. I didn’t find any of Lehrer’s anecdotes particularly insightful or meaningful, and most of the chapters read like fan fiction. That’s not to say there isn’t an interesting connection between opiate use and the arts, but that topic would be better served as a nonfictional accounting rather than this messy collection. I found the authors obsession with “libidinal energy” to be particularly weird- I don’t believe any of the artists depicted in this collection ever even thought of that phrase, and Lehrer is projecting his own ideas on to these people in a way I found strange.
September 3, 2022
Equal parts memoir and cultural overview of the correlation between opiate addiction and the arts. Powerful reading.
September 20, 2024
This book is bizarrely intriguing. It’s very imaginative, yet dark. I like speculative fiction because it relates to the times we are living; a mesh of real and fake. Its a dizzying good read.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews