FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
If you like PKD, Burroughs, or Vonnegut then you should be reading Séb Doubinsky

01sebdoubinsky.jpg
 
At the end of March, the writer Séb Doubinsky should have been traveling across America giving readings from his latest novel The Invisible. Picture him in a busy, crammed bookshop wearing a plaid shirt, leather jacket with steel-rimmed glasses and neatly-trimmed beard. He sits at a table with a pile of books to his left, a glass of water to his right, the audience in front. Some sit in chairs, some stand around the edges with arms folded, heads tilted, all listening to Doubinsky’s strong, clear voice. There are questions then a long-line of bright-eyed readers waiting to shake his hand, take pictures, and get their copies signed.

In another reality this all happened. Turn the page, there’s someone at the back, leaning against shelves laden with bright, clean paperbacks asking:

What is your earliest memory?

Sébastien Doubinsky: My earliest memory is actually a patchwork of scenes from my childhood in America, between 1966 and 1968. I can see myself playing with my favorite toys, which were rubber Mattel astronauts, watching black-and-white Spiderman cartoons sitting upside down on the sofa, riding in my father’s dark blue huge station-wagon, going to Space Needle’s fun park and having a blast… Very vivid memories, in color, which have certainly influenced the very way I write, like Pop Art—or rather Anti-Pop Art, as Rosenquist called it—and Punk well, much later.

But a virus stopped all this. Doubinsky is in lockdown at his home in Denmark. If anyone could have seen such a deadly pandemic coming then it was him. He had already written about a similar outbreak in Absinth—the story of the Apocalypse with ancient Gods attempting a new order, the publishing of a new gospel according to Jesus (“Burn all churches”), and an outbreak of Ebola that claims the lives of the President and the Vice-President. There’s hope for us yet! Doubinsky saw it coming.

What the Corona crisis taught us: all useful people are underpaid and all useless people are overpaid and decide who will live or die.

Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider that gave him, in some unfathomable way, arachnid powers of strength and agility to jump great heights, climb walls, and have a tingling spider sense that alerted him to danger. At some point, most kids want to be Peter Parker, but then they give up on their imagination and subscribe to another’s imposed order.

August 1963, copies of The Amazing Spider-Man #3 were in bookshop carousels when Sébastien Doubinsky was born at a Parisian cinema. Spidey was fighting a new enemy the “grotesque Dr. Octopus.” Doubinsky’s parents had been watching a Hollywood western. They never saw the end of it. Celebrating the birth of a son was more important. Arriving at a hospital, Mother and child were doing fine. Father then found some work in America. Doubinsky spent his early years growing-up in the States watching TV and marveling at the unchanging blue sky. What’s your earliest memory? “I already answered that.”

Back in Paris, Doubinsky discovered a copy of William S. Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded while visiting his Aunt’s apartment on the Avenue René Coty. It was a weird looking book with a weird sounding title. Doubinsky sat down and read it. He was blown away. He might not have understood it but he knew he loved it. He had discovered his superpowers.

When did you first think seriously about becoming a writer and why?

SD: It’s rather a difficult question to answer, as there were many stages in this decision—at least until it became a rationally formulated one. I come from a very intellectual background, culturally mixed (Jewish and Catholic, but both my parents were leftists and radical atheists) and extremely open to other cultures. What’s more, both sides of my family had been very active in the French Résistance during World War Two, and I therefore inherited quite a strong human-rights ethic. All this to say that literature was not a passive element of my upbringing, but was seen as a powerful object that could serve the best or the worst causes, and that it was important.

Growing up I loved poetry, and for a long time wanted to be a poet (but also a painter, until I discovered I was colorblind…) but little by little, prose seeped in and took more and more space. I began to write some short stories in my late teenage years, but still not really considering dedicating myself seriously. The tragedy that sealed my writer’s fate was the suicide of my beloved cousin Bruno, then, like me, 20 years old. He had introduced me to punk and New Wave—especially The Cure, Bauhaus and all the darker stuff—and in his last note, he told me I should carry on writing “my great stuff.” That’s when the weight of words and the responsibility attached to writing hit me like a runaway train. That’s the day I really became, in my eyes, a “writer.”
 
04_SEB_DOUBINSKY.jpg
 
More from Sébastien Doubinsky, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
05.21.2020
08:25 am
|
William S. Burroughs’ ‘Blade Runner: A Movie’

01bladerunnerpbk.jpg
 
1879: Doctor Benway is addressing a crowd of cowboys in the arid deserts of Nevada.

‘“Now, boys, lissen-up, I have two things for sale today. One a book by some fella named Burroughs, but that won’t really innarest you. The other, the most important thing, is a Quantum Vibrating Egg, which I have especially devised for you lonesome cowboys out on the plains.”
“Whatsitdo?”
“What does it do? You may very well ask. Now this here Quantum Vibrating Egg will lead you to undreamed of pleasures. Sensual delights unimaginable. Each egg when carefully inserted into the anus will begin to vibrate. The device is at zero degrees and will slowly rise to the body temperature of 37 degrees c. As the Egg’s temperature increases so does its vibrating motion, if you’ll pardon the pun, which renders the victim…I mean the er..indulger in fits of unrelenting erotic ecstasy. This here Egg will provide multiple hands-free orgasms. No hands, no wood, what I like to call sissygasms, wave-upon-wave, literally hundreds of them until the individual expires in orgasmic bliss…”
“...Tell us about the book.”
“...What…?”
“Shove yer egg and tell us about the book.”
“The book…? Why does this always happen…Well, okay then…”

 
04bladerunnerburroughsdanger.jpg
 
William S. Burroughs was an avid reader of low-rent pulp fiction. These kinda books stimulated his imagination. The poet W. H. Auden had a similar interest. He indulged in a passion for cosy murder mysteries written by the likes of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh. He even wrote several damned decent essays on the subject including “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict.” Now, I expect at this juncture some bright bod will notice a pattern and supply a graph showing the correlation between a liking for low-brow fiction and high intellect. It could be true, as anyone who’s read Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs can attest, Old Bull Hubbard liked his pulpy tales of gangsters and the Mafia.

Sometime around 1974, just after Burroughs had quit London and moved into “the Bunker” a converted YMCA building in lower Manhattan, Burroughs got his long slender fingers on a copy of a science-fiction novel called The Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse. It was a speculative tale of a future where the only way to receive medical treatment was to be sterilized to stop any further progeny polluting the world. This draconian bargain led to a blackmarket of doctors operating on patients who refused to be sterilized. The book’s main character was one Billy Gimp. He was known as the “bladerunner” because he supplied the tools of the doctor’s trade in this dark and dangerous world.
 
02bladerunnernourse.jpg
 
Nourse had been a medical man who turned to writing sci-fi shorts for pulp magazines like Weird Tales, Astounding Stories and alike. His biggest hit before Bladerunner was his “shock-u-rama” expose of the realities of working in a hospital called Intern which he wrote under the alias of Doctor X.

Burroughs liked the ideas in Nourse’s book but thought he could do something better. He had his amanuensis-cum-editor James Grauerholz write to his agent stating he wanted to adapt Nourse’s novel into a movie and could he sort it out for him?

Burroughs wrote a script or rather he wrote a treatment for a movie. In part, he wrote a prequel to Nourse’s story, examining the events that led to the “medical emergency” which caused doctors to demand sterilization of patients. The culprits were capitalism and big business. But Burroughs then developed his own storyline where medicine or medical aid was limited to only the rich and powerful elite. Thus eradicating the so-called “unfit” or “undesirable” from America. In other words, killing-off ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and those considered as politically transgressive.

He also turned Nourse’s characters of Billy Gimp into a gay revolutionary who indulges in some full-on sex; and made Doc into an aggressive and vituperative medical man—not too far from Naked Lunch‘s Doctor Benway. In Burroughs’ tale the stories of Billy and the Doc run parallel like two separate movies being projected at the same time. Burroughs thought this as a possibility for screening—two separate screens, two separate stories, which merged when the characters of Billy and Doc met. The scripts technical difficulties were nothing compared to the violent, excessively sexual explicit content, which made Blade Runner: A Movie unfilmable. Burroughs supposedly quipped that New York would have to be leveled if anyone ever wanted to make his script into a movie.
 
03bladerunnerburroughs.jpg
The original hardback cover for Burroughs’ ‘Blade Runner: A Movie,’ 1979.
 
Burroughs’ Blade Runner: A Movie was published in a limited signed edition of 100 hardbacks by Blue Wind Press in 1979. It was then issued in paperback format the same year.

Tangerine Press are set to release three different 40th anniversary editions of Burroughs’ Blade Runner: A Movie in November. The books will come in a paperback edition; 100 numbered copies; and 26 lettered editions. The book will have an introduction by Oliver Harris. Gerard Malanga has been commissioned to supply the artwork for the covers of the paperback and the numbered editions. While Peter Blegvad will supply the artwork for the lettered edition. This is certainly something to get your hands on. Details here.
 

 
With thanks to Cherrybomb.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
10.30.2019
11:13 am
|
When William S. Burroughs met Francis Bacon: Uncut
09.18.2019
08:44 am
Topics:
Tags:

03burrbac.jpeg
 
When William Burroughs met Francis Bacon a lot of tea was drunk, cigarettes smoked, a few secrets shared but very little was revealed about the two men. At times, this “historic meeting” of two great minds in 1982 is like the old class reunion where two former pupils meet up only to find they have very little in common other than they once shared the same classroom together.

The two men first met in Tangiers in the 1950s when Burroughs was technically on the run for murdering his wife after a “shooting accident” during a drunken game of William Tell. Bacon was then in a brutal and near fatal relationship with a violent sadist called Peter Lacey who used to beat him with a leather studded belt. Bacon once remarked in a documentary that he had lost all of his teeth to his lovers—Lacey was the boyfriend who knocked most of them out.

It was Allen Ginsberg who first introduced Bacon to Burroughs as he thought Bacon painted the way Burroughs wrote. Ginsberg had also wanted Bacon to paint his portrait in the act of having sex with his partner Peter Orlovsky. Bacon wondered if Ginsberg would be able “to keep it up” for the duration of the sitting. In the 1960s, Ginsberg again asked Bacon to paint his portrait. Bacon demurred claiming he had an aversion to long hair and beards and preferred painting short-haired, clean-shaven men because he could see the skull underneath the skin.

Burroughs thought he and Bacon were “at opposite ends of the spectrum.”

“[Bacon] likes middle-aged truck drivers and I like young boys. He sneers at immortality and I think it’s the one thing of importance. Of course we’re associated because of our morbid subject matter.”

This meeting between the two men was filmed by Mike Southon at Bacon’s studio/home 7 Reece Mews for a documentary on Burroughs directed by Howard Brookner. Burroughs appeared slightly standoffish, self conscious, and occasionally looks bored though he almost warms up when he riffed on some of his favorite subject matter—Jajouka, Mayans, and immortality. He also looked far older than Bacon, but was in fact five years younger. Bacon is waspish, bitchy, gleeful like a naughty schoolboy, and delivers the best lines (Jackson Pollock is “a lacemaker,” Mary McCarthy is “a bitch”).

According to Burroughs, when the pair first met in Tangiers they had several conversations about art though Bacon feigned not remembering the details. Burroughs reminded him that he had dismissed the then popular trend in art Abstract Expressionism as “mere decoration.”

Bacon recalled their mutual friendship with Jane and Paul Bowles, going on to discuss Jane Bowles’ mental decline and the tragedy of her last years being tended to by nuns, a situation which Bacon thought ghastly. Ironically, Bacon died just over a decade later being tended to by nuns after becoming ill in Spain (an asthma attack).

Burroughs seemed a little ill-at-ease having a camera crew film his every word. The pot-bellied Bacon seemed more relaxed (he’s on home turf) and even made the occasional dig at Burroughs. When discussing painters Bacon asks “Do you mean Monet or Manet?” like Lady Bracknell.

This is the unedited footage of something that (understandably) ended up being but a few minutes in Brookner’s finished documentary. I suppose one would have (perhaps) expected something far more scintillating and IQ-raising when two great artists meet but Burroughs and Bacon skate around subjects and stick to those things that obsesses them without revealing too much—even if they can’t always remember people’s last names or who or what it is they’re exactly talking about.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
That time Marty Feldman almost had his portrait painted by Francis Bacon
‘Junkie’: William Burroughs talks about his heroin habit, 1977
Francis Bacon gets drunk
Disorientation of the senses: William Burroughs makes a ‘sick’ and ‘disgusting’ movie, 1966
‘Fragments of a Portrait’: Classic documentary on Francis Bacon from 1966
William S. Burroughs’ time-traveling experimental flexi disc, ‘Abandoned Artifacts’
Why Francis Bacon destroyed his portrait of Cecil Beaton
William Burroughs’ curse on Truman Capote
That time Jack Kerouac finked out on helping Allen Ginsberg promote ‘Junkie’

Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
09.18.2019
08:44 am
|
The stop-motion cartoon of William S. Burroughs’ ‘Ah Pook Is Here’


The 1979 collection ‘Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts’
 
William S. Burroughs envisaged Ah Pook Is Here, an extension of the comix serial The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, as “a picture book modelled on the surviving Mayan codices.” However, after nearly a decade collaborating with artist Malcolm McNeill on an illustrated version of the tale, Burroughs was unable to find a publisher for his graphic novel avant la lettre. Instead, it appeared without images in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts, a 1979 collection of Burroughs’ researches into Mayan, Egyptian, and space age magical techniques. (McNeill has since published his artwork for Ah Pook Is Here in a separate volume.)

Burroughs’ novella concerns an American plutocrat named John Stanley Hart, whose fear of his own mortality leads him to disturb the gods of the Mayan pantheon. Hart is a junkie with a jones for the suffering of others, especially poor people and ethnic minorities. Narcotized by the “blue note” of their pain, congenitally selfish and incurious, he can’t imagine that calling down awful deities from another dimension might have unwanted consequences: “Mr. Hart has a burning down habit and he will burn down the planet.” Before you know it, blood is spurting from delegates’ every orifice at the “American First” rally, and the Acid Leprosy has eaten a hole in time.
 

‘The Unspeakable Mr. Hart’ from Cyclops magazine (via Virtual Library)
 
Philip Hunt made this stop-motion film of Ah Pook Is Here as a student at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in 1994, taking the sound from Burroughs’ collaborations with John Cale on the Dead City Radio album. At six minutes, it is a distillation of the story, but a good one: death gods disturbed by a grotesque people-thing.

Given the vintage of Ah Pook Is Here, I can only interpret the suicide-by-shotgun at the end as a reference to the death of Burroughs’ former collaborator, Kurt Cobain—an unlikely candidate for Mr. Hart.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The last words of Dutch Schultz, the cartoon

Posted by Oliver Hall
|
03.22.2019
08:49 am
|
William S. Burroughs’ time-traveling experimental flexi disc, ‘Abandoned Artifacts’
08.10.2018
07:04 am
Topics:
Tags:


Talk Talk Vol. 3, No. 6, cover art by William S. Burroughs

The Lawrence, Kansas label Fresh Sounds had a long-standing relationship with William S. Burroughs. In ‘81, owner and proprietor Bill Rich introduced Burroughs to Fresh Sounds recording artists the Mortal Micronotz, to whom the author gave his song lyric about child-chewing, “Old Lady Sloan.” Burroughs later read his Civil War tale, “Death Fiend Guerrillas,” for a Fresh Sounds compilation, and he recorded his own interpretation of “Old Lady Sloan” for a 1995 Mortal Micronotz tribute album.

Bill Rich also edited a magazine called Talk Talk, some of whose numbers came with Fresh Sounds flexi discs. One such issue was Vol. 3, No. 6, published in September ‘81, with cover art by WSB and, inside, a square, six-inch disc of the author reading from the first chapter of The Place of Dead Roads (page 10 in the Picador paperback)—or, more precisely, three Burroughses reading the same text at three different points in space and time. Abandoned Artifacts superimposes recordings from performances in Toronto, Chicago, and San Francisco, and it is downright spooky when they match in cadence and tone. Percussion by one Martin Olson juices the passage’s weird, incantatory power.

The interview with Burroughs from Talk Talk Vol. 3, No. 6 helps make sense of the title Abandoned Artifacts, especially if you don’t have The Place of Dead Roads handy:

Mr. B.: We are squandering time and time is running out. We must conceive of time as a resource. That is one of the concepts central to this book. Another is that people are living organisms as artifacts made for a purpose, not cosmic accidents, artifacts created for a purpose.

TT: What are some of the purposes?

Mr. B.: Space. Leaving the planet. We are here to go. This first chapter shows you the concept of living beings as artifacts which is developed much more in the rest of the book. Artifacts created for a purpose, just like arrowheads.

TT: Have you decided on a title?

Mr. B.: Oh, yes, Place of Dead Roads… The planet earth, place of dead roads, dead purposes.

Leaving the planet? Yes, please!
 
Have a listen after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
08.10.2018
07:04 am
|
The British neurologist who uses William S. Burroughs’ ideas to treat Parkinson’s disease


 
Though he never met William S. Burroughs, the British neurologist A.J. Lees credits the author as an important teacher in his recent book, Mentored by a Madman: The William S. Burroughs Experiment.

The expert in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases first encountered Burroughs on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. During the 1970s, after reading Naked Lunch, Lees began experimenting with apomorphine, the substance Burroughs advocated to cure junk addiction, as a treatment for symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

In 2013, again following Burroughs’ example, Lees traveled to the Amazon rainforest to take yagé, or ayahuasca. He told the Guardian that taking the drug “broke down certain rigid structures that were blocking innovations in Parkinson’s disease research.”

Lees has also used apomorphine and Brion Gysin and Burroughs’ Dreamachine to investigate visual hallucinations in Parkinson’s patients.

Below, in an interview at the Beat Hotel, Lees talks with Andrew Hussey about Mentored by a Madman. He’s also spoken about the book on Erik Davis’ Expanding Mind podcast and in a video for ACNR Journal
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
|
06.14.2018
07:08 am
|
William S. Burroughs on the cut-up technique and meeting Samuel Beckett & Bob Dylan
03.22.2018
09:35 am
Topics:
Tags:


“It’s the stink of death, citizens!” (Photo by Peter Hujar)

This hour-long BBC Radio special opens with “Old Lady Sloan,” the Mortal Micronotz’ interpretation of a Burroughs lyric about a happy pedophage, a record the host, John Walters, borrowed from John Peel for the occasion. If the program starts out sounding like a clip-show tribute to Burroughs’ cultural influence, it’s more than that. Aside from a chat with future WSB biographer Barry Miles (identified only by his surname), a little music, and Burroughs’ performances of the now-classic routines “The Do-Rights” and “The Wild Fruits,” the broadcast is given over to Walters’ lengthy interview with the author, champion of apomorphine, and devotee of the Ancient Ones.

Burroughs tells Walters about his years in England, and meeting Samuel Beckett and Bob Dylan; he observes that certain American politicians boast of their ignorance and stupidity. His (camp, I think) misogyny has softened by ‘82. What really sets the interview apart, though, is Walters’ enthusiasm, his openness, his willingness to risk sounding uncool. Here he is grappling with the implications of the cut-up technique:

Walters: What always attracted me when I first heard about that—I suppose, a lot of students at the time—it seemed to introduce a random effect, a found work, do you know what I mean? I wonder if it was so random as all that.

Burroughs: Well, how random is random? Uh…

Walters: Well, let’s put it like this. I was in a pub in Charlotte Street, of all places, in Soho, and a mate of mine had read Nova Express—this was ‘64, ‘65—was talking about this, “You must buy this book,” and started to try and explain to me his interpretation of cut-up and fold-in techniques, which he probably got wrong. And I couldn’t remember the name of the book when I got outside, and then an Express Dairy van from the Express Dairies came by, and I thought, “Express, Nova Express!” And I thought, “That’s what he’s trying to tell us. Random events can have a hidden meaning. We can get messages.” But I don’t think that’s what you see in it, is it?

Burroughs: Oh, exactly. Exactly what I see in it. These juxtapositions between what you’re thinking, if you’re walking down the street, and what you see, that was exactly what I was introducing. You see, life is a cut-up. Every time you walk down the street or look out the window, your consciousness is cut by random factors, and then you begin to realize that they’re not so random, that this is saying something to you.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
03.22.2018
09:35 am
|
That time Bill Murray interviewed William S. Burroughs on Ken Kesey’s farm


Bill Murray, Ken Kesey, and the video crew at the First Perennial Poetic Hoo-Haw, 1976 (photo by Clyde Keller)
 
“Everybody with his fucking hand out,” William S. Burroughs slurs, deep in his cups. He and Bill Murray are discussing the custom of bribing officials when traveling south of the border.

Murray calculates how much it will cost to keep things friendly in TJ. “We figure we’d buy off everybody in Tijuana, just give ‘em two dollars every time they came by.”

Burroughs shakes his head. “No, listen—as soon as you give ‘em two dollars, the next time they come back, they want four dollars. It’s geometric!” He pulls another smoke from his pack of Senior Service. “See, you do not get rid of people by giving them money.”

The occasion, I learn from RealityStudio, was Ken Kesey’s First Perennial Poetic Hoo Haw, held on Kesey’s farm and the University of Oregon campus in June 1976. Photographer Clyde Keller says Murray was there as part of the crew from Eugene’s KVAL-TV, and the gig may also have been related to Murray’s work with the TVTV video collective. Too bad the clip of this historic meeting, with Murray in between The National Lampoon Radio Hour and Saturday Night Live, is only a minute long.

But wait—there’s more! Keep scrolling down for the full, hour long documentary Murray and crew shot at the Hoo Haw, which turned up on YouTube about a week ago. The video includes the moment Burroughs and Murray met in Kesey’s blueberry patch, Burroughs’ reading of “When Did I Stop Wanting to Be President,” and performances by Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Watch it all, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
01.19.2018
10:46 am
|
William S. Burroughs fronts Yellow Magic Orchestra, reprograms your mind
12.07.2017
09:29 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
For 1993’s Technodon, Yellow Magic Orchestra acquired vocal tracks from cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, dolphin-dosing scientist John C. Lilly, and Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs’ contribution to the album’s first song, “Be A Superman,” is a short vocal sample, structurally integral, information-poor. But on “I Tre Merli” (“The Three Blackbirds,” an image from a Wallace Stevens poem that points directly to Burroughs and Gysin’s “third mind”), Burroughs reads a few lines from The Job. His text comes from the book’s “DON’T HAVE TO THINK” section, which describes an exercise for “becoming oneself” through liberation from mental conditioning. According to this counterintuitive practice, you find your true self by pretending to be other people:

What I am here to learn is a new way of thinking. There are no lessons and no teachers. There are no books and no work to be done. I do almost nothing. The first step is to stop doing everything you “have to do.” Mock up a way of thinking you have to do. This is one exercise derived from Scientology we have all studied at one time or another. Exercise loosens the hold of enforced thinking and extends the range of don’t have to think.

Example: You have to run the things you are going to do today write letters call so-and-so take clothes to laundry see about getting the radiators fixed. You run these items ten times when once is already too much. So mock up a run of imaginary errands. Now mock up some thinking you don’t have to do. Select a person whose way of life is completely different from yours and mock up his thinking.

(Example: You have to mock up interviews or situations in which you play an effective role before imaginary audience. Well, mock some up. Now mock up some enforced thinking you don’t have to do, somebody else’s enforced thinking what Dutch Schultz the numbers racketeer had to think, what a hotel manager has to think what a poor Moroccan farmer has to think.)

 

Genesis P-Orridge models a YMO shirt on the back cover of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Greatest Hits’
 
A few paragraphs down, Burroughs provides a negative definition of this “new way of thinking”:

The new way of thinking has nothing to do with logical thought. It is no oceanic organismal subconscious body thinking. It is precisely delineated by what it is not. Not knowing what is and is not knowing we know not. Like a moving film the flow of thought seems to be continuous while actually the thoughts flow stop change and flow again. At the point where one flow stops there is a split-second hiatus. The new way of thinking grows in this hiatus between thoughts. I am watching the servants on the floor pointing to the map and not thinking anything about what I see at all. My mind moves in a series of blank factual stops without labels and without questions. The objects around me the bodies and minds of others are just there and I move between them without effort or comment. There is nothing to do here, no letters to answer no bills to pay no goals barriers or penalties. There are no considerations here that would force thinking into certain lines of structural or environmental necessities. The new way of thinking is the thinking you would do if you didn’t have to think about any of the things you ordinarily think about if you had no work to do nothing to be afraid of no plans to make. Any exercises to achieve this must themselves be set aside. It’s a way you would think if you didn’t have to think up a way of thinking you don’t have to do. We learn to stop words to see and touch words to move and use words like objects.

Continues after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
12.07.2017
09:29 am
|
William S. Burroughs’ answer to the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’


The author at home
 
It’s the 40th anniversary of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen,” and you know what that means: it’s the 40th anniversary of the letter of support William S. Burroughs sent the band, along with his own all-purpose slogan and answer song, “Bugger the Queen.”

Victor Bockris writes that Burroughs’ piece predated the Sex Pistols’ single by three years, but even so, “God Save the Queen” was the occasion for its debut. As far as I can tell, Burroughs never mentioned “Bugger the Queen” without reference to the Sex Pistols. In October ‘77, writing from Naropa, Burroughs sent Brion Gysin a Rolling Stone feature on the Sex Pistols (presumably Charles M. Young’s contemporary cover story) along with the words to “Bugger the Queen,” which he referred to as a new song he might record with Patti Smith. Though the published letters haven’t yet caught up to the punk rock period, Ken Lopez Bookseller has made the typescript of this one available. Punctuation and spelling are WSB’s:

Dear Brion:

Enclose article from the Rolling Stone on the Sex Pistols and punk rock, in case you didnt see it. This explains the action in Paris. I guess we are classified with Mick Jaeger. I am writing some songs and may do a record with Patti Smith. Here’s one
My husband and I
The old school tie
Hyphonated names
Tired old games
It belongs in the bog
With the restofthe sog
Pull the chain onBuckingham
The drain calls you MAM.
BUGGER THE QUEEN
Whole skit goes withit illustratting everything I dont like about England.

“Bugger the Queen” was still on Burroughs’ mind one year later when he told a writer for the San Francisco punk zine Search & Destroy about his letter to the Sex Pistols (as quoted by Victor Bockris):

I am not a punk and I don’t know why anybody would consider me the Godfather of Punk. How do you define punk? The only definition of the word is that it might refer to a young person who is simply called a punk because he is young, or some kind of petty criminal. In this sense some of my characters may be considered punks, but the word simply did not exist in the fifties. I suppose you could say James Dean epitomized it in Rebel Without a Cause, but still, what is it? I think the so-called punk movement is indeed a media creation. I did however send a letter of support to the Sex Pistols when they released “God Save the Queen” in England because I’ve always said that the country doesn’t stand a chance until you have 20,000 people saying BUGGER THE QUEEN! And I support the Sex Pistols because this is constructive, necessary criticism of a country which is bankrupt.

 

The cover (cropped) of ‘Little Caesar’ #9, the first publication of ‘Bugger the Queen’ (via dennis-cooper.net)
 
The “skit” Burroughs mentions in the letter to Gysin, or a later version of it, is one of the entries in the essay collection The Adding Machine. Burroughs read it toward the end of 1978 at the Nova Convention celebrating his work. It was first published in the ninth issue of Dennis Cooper’s zine Little Caesar, whose previous number featured an interview with Johnny Rotten; International Times ran it too. The gist: chants of “Bugger the Queen” lead to a spontaneous uprising that forces Her Maj to abdicate. From the opening, a few words of inspiration, and the annotated lyrics:

I guess you read about the trouble the Sex Pistols had in England over their song “God Save the Queen (It’s a Fascist Regime).” Johnny Rotten got hit with an iron bar wielded by HER Loyal Subjects. It’s almost treason in England to say anything against what they call “OUR Queen.” I don’t think of Reagan as OUR President, do you? He’s just the one we happen to be stuck with at the moment. So in memory of the years I spent in England—and in this connection I am reminded of a silly old Dwight Fisk song: “Thank you a lot, Mrs. Lousberry Goodberry, for an infinite weekend with you . . . (five years that weekend lasted) . . . For your cocktails that were hot and your baths that were not . . .”—so in fond memory of those five years I have composed this lyric which I hope someday someone will sing in England. It’s entitled: Bugger the Queen.

My husband and I (The Queen always starts her spiel that way)
The old school tie
Hyphenated names
Tired old games
It belongs in the bog
(Bog is punk for W.C.)
With the rest of the sog
Pull the chain on Buckingham
The drain calls you, MA’AM
(Have to call the Queen “Ma’am” you know)
BUGGER THE QUEEN!

The audience takes up the refrain as they surge into the streets screaming “BUGGER THE QUEEN!”

Suddenly a retired major sticks his head out a window, showing his great yellow horse-teeth as he clips out: “Buggah the Queen!”

A vast dam has broken.

Alas, no one has stepped up to record “Bugger the Queen” during the intervening decades. I hold out hope Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye will set it to music. Below, for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in June 1977, the Pistols make themselves heard from a boat on the River Thames in what must surely be Sex Pistols Number 2.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
|
06.02.2017
09:30 am
|
Punk, Patti Smith, William Burroughs & capitalism: A ‘conceptual conversation’ with RE/Search’s Vale


Vale with William Burroughs

This interview with V. Vale was conducted by Michael Lee Nirenberg, director of the 2014 documentary Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story

Early in my conversation with publisher and writer V. Vale he called me a “conceptual conversationalist,” although that moniker really belongs to Vale himself. Vale has had an interesting life. He was born in a Japanese-American internment camp in 1944, moved to Haight-Ashbury at the height of the 1960s counterculture movement, joined the original lineup of Blue Cheer, went on to publish punk zine Search and Destroy while working at beatnik bookstore City Lights, and then made his serious mark on the emerging post-punk culture with RE/Search.

For me, the seminal RE/Search journals which Vale has been publishing since the 1980s are a snapshot of culture at its most vital and ideas at their most radical. RE/Search was like early Interview magazine but the interviews were largely unedited, ran long, and each volume more or less tackled a particular subject. Some of the more well-known ones are: Pranks, Incredibly Strange Films, and The Industrial Culture Handbook.

Needless to say Vale’s work has been an influence on me. I met Vale at the New York Art Book Fair last year and interviewed him by phone on April 2, 2017. Below is that conversation edited lightly and segmented because Vale is a stream of consciousness type guy and you have to just roll with him. Enjoy.
______________________________
 

 
On interviews and conversations

VV: So I invented a phrase for you while I was waiting for you to call; “conceptual conversationalist.” How’s that?

MN: That’s pretty good, man. All of a sudden I feel like I’m in a RE/Search interview.

VV: (laughs) Well that’s proper. It’s all useful. Conversations are two-way streets.

MN: I agree and I think that’s what attracted me to RE/Search throughout the years, and why I return to the volumes. I wrote out a dozen or so question but that doesn’t mean I have a script I’m going to follow. As you know a conversation takes you elsewhere.

VV: The holy grail of a conversation is when suddenly there appears a concept or an idea that neither person has contemplated before.

MN: Yeah. I agree with that and I think that’s when it’s the most successful.

VV: Whatever. I’m not a success or failure guy, I just observe what’s happening but that’s kinda rare and when it happens it’s a mini cause celebre.

MN: I think that’s a good point. I was wondering if everyone who has ever interviewed you has attempted to do a RE/Search interview on some level.

VV: I don’t really call them interviews, I call them conversations. That gives you a lot more latitude to go into some unexpected direction. Play and humor are like the supreme goal I suppose. I don’t know. I suppose I don’t know how to answer that one (laughs), I just try to have fun with whoever I’m talking to.

MN: Yeah, I think I do the same thing.

VV: Good! Hooray we’re on the same wavelength.

MN: Yeah, it seems obvious that humor is the thing that makes life bearable. And ideas.

VV: Well yeah… ideas. Especially ideas. Yeah, humor of course.
 

 
On Capitalism

VV: Oh yeah, ideas especially. The main idea always (laughs) is the overarching theme of how do we make this world a better place? How can we conceptualize a better world? How do we visualize a better world? For example I don’t understand why there aren’t more young artists making films about how life ought to be and dare I say a future that’s post-capitalism. I’m sure you know who (Slavoj) Žižek is and I think the best thing he ever said was, “You can imagine the apocalypse, you can imagine the end of the world, but you can’t imagine a world after capitalism.”

MN: Oh, that’s good.

VV: I’m a capitalist. I make books and hope someone buys them and I obviously need to make a profit so I can pay my rent, but I can’t imagine another system. Boy, if you can you will be the first!

MN: I struggle with this too. For all its flaws, the critiques don’t offer a way out. Look at the countries that went all in with socialism and communism. They started off as such high-minded concepts until they became religion.

VV: Even worse than religion (laughs). I think it’s all patriarchy, but yet I like most ideas of feminism which are actually the same ideas found in anti-racism i.e fighting privilege. There’s that famous saying you probably know which is “privilege confers blinders.” A lot of times if you have privilege you don’t feel it. It doesn’t even exist within the world you’re conceptualizing.

I always said my goal in publishing was (and I stole it from Hegel), “if you’re working, work for more freedom, more consciousness (that’s a great word) and more justice for more people.” The hard thing is the justice because then you get into the grimy world of lawyering and criminality and it’s just so much. Can you imagine if you were a heterosexual seeking a relationship with another heterosexual of the opposite gender. Let’s say complementary gender. I’m not a fan of opposite. I’m a fan of complimentary.

MN: Yes and relativity.

VV: Yes. Can you just imagine a world in which you try to act in perfect justice with another partner? I’m a huge fan of having a partner for a simple reason which is the hardest thing you can do. I’ve never had a job and I managed to support myself mostly and the hardest thing to do is guess what? Make next month’s rent.The other person (your partner) has to worry about the same thing. Take my word for it. It makes life a helluva lot easier and bearable.

More with Vale after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
05.15.2017
05:44 pm
|
When Tom Waits met William Burroughs
05.15.2017
01:24 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets is a lesser-known project of William S. Burroughs (who wrote the opera’s book) and a somewhat better-known work of Tom Waits (who composed the majority of the music and lyrics). The pair collaborated on the piece at the behest of theatrical visionary Robert Wilson, who staged and directed the avant-garde production which premiered in a German-language version at Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre on March 31, 1990.

The Black Rider
is based on a gruesome German folktale with supernatural themes called Der Freischütz, which had previously been made into an opera by the Romantic school composer Carl Maria von Weber. Historically, it is considered to be one of the very first “nationalist” German operas. Wilson’s innovate lighting and staging took its cue from German Expressionist cinema of the silent era.
 

 
The story is simple: A mild-mannered clerk falls in love with a hunter’s daughter and seeks his approval in order to marry. He is offered magic bullets in a Faustian bargain. On the day of their wedding, the final bullet kills his love. He loses his mind and joins other of the devil’s victims in a hellish carnival.
 

 
Worth noting that while The Black Rider is based on German folklore, the book has a bit of unavoidable thematic overlap with William Burroughs’ own life, the sordid “William Tell” incident that ended in the shooting death of his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico in 1951.

In the late 90s, English language versions of the opera started to occur. In 2004, Robert Wilson and Tom Waits teamed up again for an English language version of The Black Rider that would tour the world. Cast members included performers such as Marianne Faithfull (who essayed the devil character), eccentric Canadian chanteuse Mary Margaret O’Hara and Richard Strange from The Doctors of Madness. The opera has been staged several times since then by various companies, mostly in Europe. (“It’s like Cats over there,” said Waits.)
 
See some of ‘The Black Rider’ after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
05.15.2017
01:24 pm
|
DEVO meet William Burroughs: ‘David Bowie would never make an audience shit their pants. We would.’
05.04.2017
02:44 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
Marilyn Chambers said no. The star of Behind the Green Door and Insatiable did not consent to participate in one of those two-way interview features with DEVO for Trouser Press in early 1982.

So Trouser Press enlisted William S. Burroughs to do it instead.

According to the magazine’s longtime editor Ira Robbins, the editorial assignment belonged to Scott Isler, “who set this thing up (after failing to get Marilyn Chambers to interview Devo).”

This was back in the days of no-Internet, when the U.K. audience and the U.S. audience could be considered two entirely unrelated entities. Trouser Press had an arrangement with New Musical Express to run the same material Isler had put together. Robbins noted that the encounter “proved to be a lot less entertaining or illuminating than we hoped it would be” and that “it took a lot of editing for Scott to fish out what we published.”

Even though they went about expressing it in entirely different ways, DEVO and Burroughs share an absolutely withering take on the accepted American empire as we know it. Burroughs responded to it with randomness, calculated perversity, and debasement, DEVO with a tongue-in-cheek insistence that the decline of the capitalist system was irreversible and indeed, salutary. Both placed the standard and stupid conformist stance of Middle America squarely in its sights.
 

Beat Meets Blank: A lovely spread from the NME version of the interview
 
According to Isler’s intro, Burroughs was on hand to promote Cities of the Red Night, his first novel in a decade, while DEVO was between albums. Their most recent effort was New Traditionalists, released several months earlier. Oh, No! It’s Devo wouldn’t hit the shelves until the end of 1982.

By the way, “DEVO” is here defined as the two main spokesmen for the group, Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, who are both identified as fans of Burroughs in the intro to the piece. Unexpectedly, almost as soon as the interview is underway, Casale goes into a lengthy explication of DEVO’s goals and methods. Casale cites Burroughs’s 1974 conversation with David Bowie in Rolling Stone about “sonic warfare” and then the Casale and Burroughs speculate as to how much abuse it’s proper for an artist to put his or her audience through. Death is too far, surely, but “making them shit their pants”?

Read the whole thing after the jump…........

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
05.04.2017
02:44 pm
|
Mad nuns, torture, witchcraft, & Satan: Silent film ‘Häxan’ narrated by William S. Burroughs


A movie poster for the 1922 silent film, ‘Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages.’
 
Like many of you, I share an affinity for topics of interest that involve the guy who should have built your hotrod, Satan. Given the choice between Heaven or Hell, I just want to be where my friends are. And my post today is about as satanic as they come as it involves possessed nuns; witchcraft; grave robbery; cannibalism as well as the occasional human sacrifice. If that’s not dangerous enough for your mind, then consider the fact that the unmistakeable voice of William S. Burroughs narrates the subject of this post—the mind-fucky 1922 silent film Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, a flick full of all the sacrilegious subjects I mentioned above and much much more!

Initially, Häxan is presented as a kind of historical document providing legitimate information about the origins of witchcraft and paganism. It is also widely considered to be one of the very first films to do so in such vivid detail. Director Benjamin Christensen—a former medical student—even cast himself as the devil as well as making a brief appearance as Jesus in the film. However, before Häxan could be officially released in Sweden, Swedish censors requested that Christensen omit several scenes including a rather shocking one involving a newborn baby covered in goo being held over a boiling cauldron. Many of the depictions of witchcraft in Häxan were apparently loosely based on the results of research conducted by prominent British anthropologist, Egyptologist and folklore historian, Margaret Alice Murray in her controversial 1921 book by The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology. Subsequently, after its censored release and being summarily banned in several countries, the film was heralded by members of the surrealist movement—as noted in the 2011 book 100 Cult Films—who called the film a “masterpiece of subversion.” 

Christensen’s care in making Häxan look and feel realistic truly knew no bounds. To reinforce its authentic darkness and to help convey the appropriate mood that is required for demonic possession he sent one of his cameramen to take photographs of the bleak, cloud-filled skies of Norway that he used throughout the film as a backdrop. His actors are genuinely terrifying looking and appear to be deeply tormented. In other words, Häxan looks like an actual snapshot taken in Hell.
 

A disturbed nun surrounded by an equally disturbing array of torture devices from ‘Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages’

Adding another layer of satanic panic related to Häxan is a story attributed directly to Christensen himself regarding actress Maren Pedersen who played “Maria the weaver,” a witch in the film. According to Christensen, when he discovered Pedersen she purported to be a Red Cross nurse from Denmark—though when they met she was a street vendor selling flowers. While they were in the middle of filming Pederson allegedly confessed to Christensen that she believed that the devil was “real” and that she had “seen him sitting by her bedside.” So enthralled was he by Pederson’s diabolical revelation that the director decided to include it in the film’s storyline. Presumably, because the power of Satan compelled him to, of course.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
|
03.24.2017
01:17 pm
|
Bill Paxton, William Burroughs, ‘Blade Runner’ and the making of ‘Taking Tiger Mountain’

01tigermountainposter.jpg
 
Taking Tiger Mountain is a strange film with an even stranger back story. It all began in 1974 when thirtysomething filmmaker Kent Smith saved up enough dough from making educational shorts to go off and produce his dream first feature. The folly of many first-time directors is knowing when to curb their ambitions. Smith was certainly ambitious—maybe overly so. He had an idea to make a kinda art house movie set in Tangiers—something inspired by Albert Camus’ novella The Stranger. There was no script, just a poem Smith had written on the kidnapping in 1973 of sixteen-year-old John Paul Getty—heir to the Getty oil fortune. Smith thought of his poem as the film’s framework. Add in a touch of Jean-Luc Godard and hint of Fellini and his debut feature was gonna be just peachy.

So, Smith had ambition—check. A basic storyline—check. And a nineteen-year-old actor by the name of Bill Paxton. Check.

Paxton was a hunk. A pin-up. The type of young actor who had I’m gonna be a big movie star pumping out of his pores. He had the looks, the demeanor and the talent. He was also fearless—as anyone would have to be if they were going to hook-up with Smith on a madcap movie-making adventure.

They packed their bags, leased some Arriflex Techniscope equipment and headed off to France. On arrival at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, they discovered that their equipment had been lost in transit. It was the first of several small obstacles that eventually turned the film onto a different course. When the pair were eventually reunited with their equipment, they hired a car and headed for Spain. But the roads were like parking lots—gridlocked with holidaymakers on their way south to the coast. Eventually after a long, slow, infuriating drive, they made it to the ferry terminal and waited for the first ferry to take them across the waters to Tangiers.

As Paxton told Variety in 2015:

We got to Tangiers around midnight, and all of our equipment was impounded because we hadn’t paid the baksheesh. We got out in about 48 hours, and my attitude was “What the f–k?” I remembered I knew someone in South Wales when I was a foreign exchange student, so we drove there, and that’s where we shot the film.

 
02takingtigermopax.jpg
A young Bill Paxton as seen in the film.

Paxton and Smith traveled back up through Spain and France to England and then to Wales where things got “even crazier.”

We had purchased black-and-white short ends (film stock) from the film Lenny, and we sort of shot things as we came across them.

One guy had a Kenyan vulture, so we used that for a scene of eating my entrails. We met some girls and talked them into doing some nude scenes with us.

Basically it was a bunch of hippies running around naked. It was all silent, black-and-white footage.

They shot ten hours of footage—but what the hell to do with it all? They returned to the States. Paxton began making inroads into big screen movies, while Smith sat with his rushes wondering how to make a movie out of it.

In 1975, Smith showed the footage to a student at the University of Texas called Tom Huckabee. Nothing happened until Smith relinquished the rushes over to Huckabee in 1979. That’s when Huckabee started logging and assembling the ten hour’s worth of material together as he explained to Beatdom:

I started building scenes using the script they had which was loosely based on the J. Paul Getty kidnapping. There was no sci-fi element, no assassination, no prostitution, no feminism, or brainwashing. It was a dream film about a young American waking up on a train – with amnesia, maybe – who wanders into a Welsh town, meets a lot of people, has adventures, bad dreams, and then gets killed on the beach, or does he?

Once I had assembled all their footage into what seemed like a narrative flow, I started thinking about what the story could be. I didn’t like their story much, it was too languid for me,  disconnected, but mostly they had only shot half of it and I knew I couldn’t go back to Wales. I’d been reading Burroughs and a lot of other avant-garde, transgressive, and erotic literature. Story of the Eye was a big influence. I started reading The Job. I got the idea that he was an assassin… and maybe the idea to set it in the future.

Huckabee’s friends were all chucking in their two cents’ worth. A “mysterious guy named Ray Layton” had “the idea to make it about feminist terrorists brainwashing Billy…. and the prostitution camps.” Then Huckabee read William Burroughs’ novella Blade Runner (a movie) and the whole thing began to take shape in his mind.

I lucked into finding a backer who promised $30,000, and that’s when it got real. I remembered seeing another short film that Kent and Bill had made; a thinly veiled homoerotic portrait of Bill, called D’Artagnan. I thought it could be used to represent Billy’s brainwashing. By then I’d acquired the MKUltra transcripts and was heavily into The Job.

Huckabee approached Burroughs and obtained his permission to adapt Blade Runner into his movie. This was now the early 1980s, Ridley Scott was making a movie version of Philip K. Dick’s cult sci-fi book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Scott had also approached Burroughs to buy his title Blade Runner for his movie.

It took at least a year to write the script to conform to the footage, which by the way was 60 minutes. I knew I needed 75 min. minimum for it to be a feature. So I built five minutes of dream sequences out of outtakes, including one where I threw the film in the air and put it together as it came down – cheating a lot.

I should mention that I was fairly regularly during this time, maybe once every one or two months, on acid, mushrooms, and baby woodrose seeds… this, added with all the experimental film I was seeing, and avant-garde and erotic and left wing and feminist political literature I was reading, kept my mind open to outré thematic and formal tropes… so, say, if a scene wasn’t working I could always run it upside down and backwards… Also by then I was thoroughly versed in MKUltra brainwashing, psychic warfare, so in that respect I think I was getting a lot of that independently from Burroughs, maybe from the same source he was getting it.

Then I wrote the opening scene and shot it… and started dubbing in dialogue. I forgot to mention Woody Allen’s Tiger Lilly as an influence. First I hired a lip reader to tell me what the characters were saying and many of them were speaking Welsh.

Huckabee finished his film. Now called Taking Tiger Mountain—the title lifted from a Chinese opera—it was released in 1983. The film was described as a “unique sensory experience.” Set the near future Taking Tiger Mountain follows Paxton as:

Billy Hampton, a Texan who [has] fled from occupied America to British island in order to avoid compulsory military service. Once there, he [is] abducted by a group of sophisticated feminist terrorists, who have been opposing the oldest profession [prostitution] legalization, creating assassins by brainwashing and then setting them on the prostitution camps leaders. (They also specialize in redirecting sexual orientation and sex change operations.)

At the start of the film:

[A] quartet of middle-aged women analyze Billy and persuade him to believe that an aging major is actually a tiger sent by God to kill him. That prologue is a combination of sequences with Huckabee’s signature and those from a short film that Smith and Paxton had been working on prior to their arrival to Wales. What follows could be described as a sporadically wet psychotropic nightmare, with hypnotic soundtrack composed of gloomy drones, overdubbed dialogues, confusing monologues and omnipresent radio announcements about the war [and its] aftermath and the use of thermonuclear weapons on the United States…

More ‘Taking Tiger Mountain’ after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
03.06.2017
12:24 am
|
Page 1 of 6  1 2 3 >  Last ›