Black Sifichi, Joseph Nechvatal, Rhys Chatham

Destroyer of Naivetés is a recording by Cave Bacchus (Joseph Nechvatal, Black Sifichi and Rhys Chatham) of Nechvatal’s sex farce poetry book Destroyer of Naivetés that was published in 2015 by Punctum Books (and is available here). Destroyer of Naivetés is an epic passion poem, power- fully read by Black Sifichi, that takes up a position of excess from within a society that believes that the less you conceal, the stranger you become. Destroyer of Naivetés owes much to the too-much artists who helped inspire its pulsating ornate manner- ism: Petronius Arbiter, Giacomo Casanova, Jean Genet, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Tristan Tzara, Raymond Roussel, Comte de Lautréamont, Kathy Acker, Ovid, Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, Jack Smith, Ken Russell, Robert C. Morgan, William S. Burroughs, Francis Picabia, Samuel Beckett, Federico Fellini, John Giorno, Allen Ginsberg, Georges Bataille, Bradley Eros and Carolee Schneemann. All helped inspire its eccentric erotic sensibility and its self- consciously elaborate stylistic conceits.