Known Occupations: poet, professor, noisician,
forger, sailor, pimp, lumberjack, thief.
During his time in Paris, Cravan would take control of his life by changing his identity weekly. Not only his name, but also his whole appearance and personality would be completely different each and every single week. Each new personality would never have any memory of any of the former identities. No one could deal with such a polywave of mannerism. Cravan however, thrived!
Cravan's messy brilliance, as cultural provocateur, is represented by his pledge to publicly commit suicide. The auditorium filled with curious Parisians. Cravan appeared, but he accused them of simple voyeurism, and then delivered an exceptionally detailed three hour lecture on entropy!
His guerrilla art magazine "Maintenant!" was a prototype for the modern zine produced since the 1970's.
Cravan filled his poems and critical writings with longing references to freedom and new frontiers alongside hallucinatory prose fragments and seemingly arbitrary yet bilious personal assaults on his fellow artists.
Cravan travelled widely after the outbreak of the First World War. In
New York city he fell in love with the poet Mina Loy. They travelled together
to Mexico, where Cravan disappeared in 1918. Cravan had been spotted in both Paris and New York in the 1930s & '40s; but to this day, nobody knows what really happened to him...
