Editor Bill Morgan cataloged William S. Burroughs’ correspondence from the early 1960s through the mid-70s, selecting over three hundred letters for Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974, out this week from Ecco.

The material in this new volume covers an era that sprints from Beat to hippie to punk rather quickly. Some of the recipients of Burroughs’ letters at this time were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, Gregory Corso, Billy Burroughs Jr., Paul Bowles, Ian Sommerville, Alexander Trocchi and Brion Gysin.

Here’s one letter, sent to author Norman Mailer. Mailer had written to Burroughs requesting that he join the anti-war tax resistance protest against the Vietnam War.

Via the Paris Review’s website:

November 20, 1967
8 Duke Street
St James
London S.W.1
England

Dear Norman,

As regards the War Tax Protest if I started protesting and refus­ing to contribute to all the uses of tax money of which I disap­ prove: Narcotics Department, FBI, CIA, any and all expenditures for nuclear weapons, in fact any expenditures to keep the antiquated idea of a nation on its dying legs, I would wind up refusing to pay one cent of taxes, which would lead to more trouble than I am pre­ pared to cope with or to put it another way I feel my first duty is to keep myself in an operating condition. In short I sympathize but must abstain.

all the best,

William Burroughs

The volume is set for a February 7 publication date. You can pre-order a copy of Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974 at Amazon.

The cover portrait of Burroughs is a Polaroid shot by Andy Warhol. Below, some undated footage of Burroughs and Warhol dining together sometime in the late 70s, or more likely early 1980s that was used in a BBC documentary about the Chelsea Hotel. The voice heard off-camera belongs to Victor Bockris, author of the classic book With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker and Warhol: The Biography.
 

 
One of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Travel Talks, with “Voice of the Globe” James A Fitzpatrick, who takes the viewer on a trip along Chicago’s Loop, from 1947.

‘Night descends on Chicago, the heart of the city, or the Loop as it is generally known, is brilliantly aglow with the glimmering lights that lure us to its many attractions.’

These include the Bismarck, where we will see Don Julian and Marjorie do “their fantastic cape dance”; and Chez Paree, “where internationally famous artists have entertained the public for a quarter of a century or more”; to the Ambassador Hotel’s “renowned Pump Room, where food and drink are served with all the formalities of a Royal banquet”; and on to the Edgewater Beach Hotel, which served such famous guests as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, and Nat King Cole, and U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The men look old, their hair sleek, their suits formal. The women younger, framed by jackets and skirts in blues and reds, smile, smoke, wear hats. Everyone looks as if they are on show, pretending to have fun. It’s a different landscape, far away, and slightly out of focus, the images seem hand-painted, water-colored.

Hard to imagine this is the same year that began with the murder of Elizabeth Short (aka the Black Dahlia) in Leimert Park, Los Angeles; while Jack Kerouac traveled across country, an experience that formed the basis for On the Road, and worked on The Town and The City; and in Conroe, Texas, Joan Vollmer gave birth to her son named after the father, William S Burroughs; Marilyn Monroe made her film debut as a telephone operator; and back in LA, Kenneth Anger shot his dream-film Fireworks over a weekend, while his parents were away. And all of this happening, bubbling out-of-frame, of these streets fireflied with lights, and Julian and Marjorie cape-danced; gold lame draped girls kicked heels; and a cowboy turned rope tricks on a hay scattered dance floor.
 

 
Fantastic portrait series titled “Saints and Sinners” from New York City-based artist—and founder of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School—Molly Crabapple. Each print is available for $80 over at Molly’s website.

 

 
More after the jump…

 
When I was sixteen, in 1982, I ran away from home and made my way from West Virginia to Boston. There, I soon found myself quite lost. Spying an extremely attractive young woman who was carrying a clipboard and accosting people in a friendly way, I decided to ask her for directions with the most innocuous chat-up line I’ve ever used: “Can you tell me how to get to Newbury Street, please?”

She told me how to get there and we continued chatting. I thought I was really doing great with her, but it soon turned out she was a Scientologist, attempting to recruit random passersby to take the “personality test” like you always see people doing on Hollywood Blvd. She asked me if I’d heard of Scientology and I told her the only thing I knew about it was what I’d read about it in the writing of William S. Burroughs.

That went right over her head, but undaunted, she asked me if I’d be interested in taking a “personality test” and truth be told, I was interested in just about anything this chick had to offer me. So we walked to the huge, embassy-like Church of Scientology building a few blocks away, and she deposited me with staff members there before disappearing back to her clipboard and her post down the street.

I ended up spending a week sleeping there in exchange for doing janitorial work and re-binding a small library of dusty old books that were in bad repair. It was either there or the riverbank (I was also hoping I’d see the Sea Org hottie again, but that never happened).

It was an awfully strange experience going from a small town in the hills of West Virginia to bunking with a cult of headfuckers in “the big city” in less than 48 hours, but one that I will write about here another time.

My point of offering this, um, partial anecdote is to say that if it was not for the fact that I was an avid teenage reader of William Burroughs, I doubt I’d have gotten myself into that zany, madcap situation. Then again, maybe my brief brush with L.Ron Hubbard and crew could be more honestly attributed to me being a teenage guy who was thinking with his dick. That’s probably that’s just as valid of an excuse…

So that’s my introduction to William S. Burroughs’ Wild Ride with Scientology an interesting short essay Lee Konstantinou wrote about Burroughs’ decade-long flirtation with Scientology that appeared on io9 yesterday. Here’s an excerpt:

Scientology appears again disguised as the “Logos” group in Burroughs’s 1962 novel The Ticket That Exploded. As described in the book, Logos has “a system of therapy they call ‘clearing’. You ‘run’ traumatic material which they call ‘engrams’ until it loses emotional connotation through repetitions and is then refilled as neutral memory’ When all the ‘engrams’ have been run and deactivated the subject becomes a ‘clear.’” In the 1964 novel Nova Express, Scientology is for the first time openly described in Burroughs’s fiction. During an interrogation scene in the book, an unnamed character declares “The Scientologists believe sir that words recorded during a period of unconsciousness… store pain and that this pain store can be lugged in with key words represented as an alternate mathematical formulae indicating umber of exposures to the key words and reaction index… they call these words recorded during unconsciousness engrams sir… The pain that overwhelms that person is basic basic sir and when basic basic is wiped off the tape… then that person becomes what they call clear sir.”

At the start of 1968, Burroughs deepened his relationship to the Church. He took an intense two-month Scientology Clearing Course at the world headquarters of Scientology in Saint Hill Manor in the UK and Burroughs was declared a “Clear,” though he later claimed that he had to work hard to suppress or rationalize his persistently negative feelings toward L. Ron Hubbard during auditing sessions. The Berg has almost a dozen files filled with Burroughs’s pamphlets from Saint Hill as well as his almost unreadable hand-written notes on Scientology courses and questions he prepared for auditing sessions he himself conducted. These files include, as I’ve mentioned, an attempt to create a cut-up from auditing questions; from the start, Scientology was very much connected to the cut-up technique and Burroughs’s theory that language constituted a kind of virus that had infested the human host. At Saint Hill, Burroughs entered an intense and obsessive period of auditing sessions with an E-Meter, including a process of exploring past lives, though he slowly began to grow alienated from the Church and what he considered its Orwellian security protocols. Burroughs’s antipathy for Scientological “Sec Checks” are apparent in his strange and violent story, “Ali’s Smile,” which was published in the collection Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology.

Burroughs eventually rejected Scientology—because of what he called “the fascist policies of Hubbard and his organization”—but cautiously endorsed some of its “discoveries.” His break with the Church developed over course of the late sixties in the pages of the London-based magazine, Mayfair, where Burroughs wrote a series of increasingly hostile “bulletins” about his adventures with the organization. These bulletins culminated in Burroughs’s amusingly titled Mayfair article, “I, William Burroughs, Challenge You, L. Ron Hubbard.” This piece was republished in the Los Angeles Free Press. In his challenge to L. Ron, Burroughs wrote:

Some of the techniques [of Scientology] are highly valuable and warrant further study and experimentation. The E Meter is a useful device… (many variations of this instrument are possible). On the other hand I am in flat disagreement with the organizational policy. No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.

For his inquiries, Burroughs reports, he was expelled from the organization and in 1968 was put into what Scientologists call a condition of “Treason”; though the exact circumstances surrounding this incident remain unclear. Burroughs’s public battle against the Church continued in a 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, where he expressed his support for Robert Kaufmann’s exposé, Inside Scientology, published by Olympia Press. Here Burroughs uses his harshest language yet: “Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.” Strangely enough, despite his break with the group, Scientology reappeared in the 1972 film Bill and Tony, which Burroughs made with Antony Balch (the masturbating guy in Towers Open Fire). In Bill and Tony, an image of Burroughs’s disembodied floating head recites instructions for how to operate an auditing session.

 
Thank you Steven Otero!

 
An uncredited photo taken of William S. Burroughs and an “up and coming” young Madonna during the author’s big 70th birthday bash at the Limelight nightclub in New York, February 1984. You have to love this example of her insane chutzpah. He probably had no idea who she was, but there she is, right in the middle of it! I also like the detail of the joint being passed. What a great photo.

 
Abe Books has published part of a transcript from an interview with William S. Burroughs, conducted by Conrad Knickerbocker for the Paris Review on New Year’s Day, 1965. In it, Burroughs discussed “why the visions of art and the visions of drugs don’t mix.” Other interviews available at Abe Books include Ernest Hemingway and P.G. Wodehouse - now that’s a mix to get any Hogmanay party started. Have a great New Year.

INTERVIEWER: When and why did you start to write?

BURROUGHS: I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn’t seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you feel compelled to record these experiences?

BURROUGHS: I didn’t feel compelled. I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day. I don’t feel the results were at all spectacular. Junky [sic] is not much of a book, actually. I knew very little about writing at that time.

INTERVIEWER: Where was this?

BURROUGHS: In Mexico City. I was living near Sears, Roebuck, right around the corner from the University of Mexico. I had been in the army four or five months and I was there on the GI Bill, studying native dialects. I went to Mexico partly because things were becoming so difficult with the drug situation in America. Getting drugs in Mexico was quite easy, so I didn’t have to rush around, and there wasn’t any pressure from the law.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you start taking drugs?

BURROUGHS: Well, I was just bored. I didn’t seem to have much interest in becoming a successful advertising executive or whatever, or living the kind of life Harvard designs for you. After I became addicted in New York in 1944, things began to happen. I got in some trouble with the law, got married, moved to New Orleans, and then went to Mexico.

INTERVIEWER: There seems to be a great deal of middle-class voyeurism in this country concerning addiction, and in the literary world, downright reverence for the addict. You apparently don’t share these points of view.

BURROUGHS: No, most of it is nonsense. I think drugs are interesting principally as chemical means of altering metabolism and thereby altering what we call reality, which I would define as a more or less constant scanning pattern.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think of the hallucinogens and the new psychedelic drugs - LSD-25?

BURROUGHS: I think they’re extremely dangerous, much more dangerous than heroin. They can produce overwhelming anxiety states. I’ve seen people try to throw themselves out of windows; whereas the heroin addict is mainly interested in staring at his own toe. Other than deprivation of the drug, the main threat to him is an overdose. I’ve tried most of the hallucinogens without an anxiety reaction, fortunately. LSD-25 produced results for me similar to mescaline. Like all hallucinogens, LSD gave me an increased awareness, more a hallucinated viewpoint than any actual hallucination. You might look at a doorknob and it will appear to revolve, although you are conscious that this is the result of the drug. Also, van Goghish colors, with all those swirls, and the crackle of the universe.

INTERVIEWER: Have you read Henri Michaux’s book on mescaline?

BURROUGHS: His idea was to go into his room and close the door and hold in the experiences. I had my most interesting experiences with mescaline when I got outdoors and walked around - colors, sunsets, gardens. It produces a terrible hangover, though, nasty stuff. It makes one ill and interferes with coordination. I’ve had all the interesting effects I need, and I don’t want any repetition of those extremely unpleasant physical reactions.

INTERVIEWER: The visions of drugs and the visions of art don’t mix?

BURROUGHS: Never. The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts, and feelings. They are painkillers, pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers - the whole spectrum of sedative drugs. As for visions and heroin, I had a hallucinatory period at the very beginning of addiction, for instance, a sense of moving at high speed through space. But as soon as addiction was established, I had no visions - vision - at all and very few dreams.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you stop taking drugs?

BURROUGHS: I was living in Tangier in 1957, and I had spent a month in a tiny room in the Casbah staring at the toe of my foot. The room had filled up with empty Eukodol cartons; I suddenly realized I was not doing anything. I was dying. I was just apt to be finished. So I flew to London and turned myself over to Dr. John Yerbury Dent for treatment. I’ve heard of his success with apomorphine treatment. Apomorphine is simply morphine boiled in hydrochloric acid; it’s nonaddictive. What the apomorphine did was to regulate my metabolism. It’s a metabolic regulator. It cured me physiologically. I’d already taken the cure once at Lexington, and although I was off drugs when I got out, there was a physiological residue. Apomorphine eliminated that. I’ve been trying to get people in this country interested in it, but without much luck. The vast majority - social workers, doctors - have the cop’s mentality toward addiction. A probation officer in California wrote me recently to inquire about the apomorphine treatment. I’ll answer him at length. I always answer letters like that.

INTERVIEWER: Have you had any relapses?

BURROUGHS: Yes, a couple. Short. Both were straightened out with apomorphine, and now heroin is no temptation for me. I’m just not interested. I’ve seen a lot of it around. I know people who are addicts. I don’t have to use any willpower. Dr. Dent always said there is no such thing as willpower. You’ve got to reach a state of mind in which you don’t want it or need it.

INTERVIEWER: You regard addiction as an illness but also a central human fact, a drama?

BURROUGHS: Both, absolutely. It’s as simple as the way in which anyone happens to become an alcoholic. They start drinking, that’s all. They like it, and they drink, and then they become alcoholic. I was exposed to heroin in New York - that is, I was going around with people who were using it; I took it; the effects were pleasant. I went on using it and became addicted. Remember that if it can be readily obtained, you will have any number of addicts. The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them. In Iran, for instance, opium was sold in shops until quite recently, and they had three million addicts in a population of twenty million. There are also all forms of spiritual addiction. Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways, that is, if we have sufficient knowledge of the processes involved. Many policemen and narcotics agents are precisely addicted to power, to exercising a certain nasty kind of power over people who are helpless. The nasty sort of power: white junk, I call it - rightness; they’re right, right right - and if they lost that power, they would suffer excruciating withdrawal symptoms. The picture we get of the whole Russian bureaucracy, people who are exclusively preoccupied with power and advantage, this must be an addiction. Suppose they lose it? Well, it’s been their whole life.

 
Previously on DM

William S. Burroughs ‘The Junky’s Christmas

 
Via Abe Books
 

 
It caused nausea and vomiting when first shown at the Cinephone, Oxford Street, in London. Some of the audience demanded their money back, others hurled abuse and shouted “That’s sick,” and ““Its disgusting.” This was the idea, as writer William Burroughs and producer, Antony Balch wanted to achieve a complete “disorientation of the senses.”

Balch had a hard-on for the weird, unusual and sometimes depraved. It was a predilection born from his love of horror films - one compounded when as a child he met his idol, Bela Lugosi, the olde Austro-Hungarian junkie, who was touring Britain with the stage show that had made him famous, Dracula. Film was a love affair that lasted all of Balch’s life.

He also had a knack of making friends with the right people at the right time. In Paris he met and hung out with the artist Brion Gysin and druggie, Glaswegian Beat writer, Alexander Trocchi, who was then writing porn and editing a literary mag called Merlin, along with the likes of Christopher Logue. Through them, Balch met the two men who changed his life, Burroughs and Kenneth Anger.

Anger helped Balch with his ambitions as a cinema distributor, getting him a copy of Todd Browning’s classic Freaks, which was banned the UK, at that time. Balch paid Anger back when he later released his apocalyptic Invocation of My Demon Brother as a support feature.

Burroughs offered Balch something different - the opportunity to collaborate and make their own films.  This they did, first with Towers Open Fire, an accessible montage of Burroughs’ routines, recorded on a Grundig tape recorder, cut-up to Balch’s filmed and found images of a “crumbling society.” Put together stuff like this and the chattering classes will always take you seriously. But don’t doubt it, for it was good.

But it was their second collaboration, Cut Ups which for me is far more interesting and proved far more controversial. Cut Ups was originally intended as a documentary called Guerilla Conditions, and was filmed between 1961 and 1965 in Tangiers and Paris. It included some footage from Balch’s aborted attempt to film the unfilmable Naked Lunch. The finished material was collated and then conventionally edited - but the process didn’t stop there, no. For Balch divided the finshed film into four sections of equal length, and then:

...assembled into its final state by taking one-foot lengths from each of the four sections that were cut together with mathematical precision — 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 etc. Variations to this structure occur randomly when a shot change occurs within one of the already edited one-foot lengths.

Balch faced very difficult grading problems. “Twenty minutes with one change every foot was just too much, what we did was to have a graded fine-grain print made of the edited sequences and then chop up the fine grain and make a dupe negative from it, so the film prints at one light.” The film was cut into exact lengths by none of the actual artists. “The actual chopping was done by a lady who was employed to take a foot from each roll and join them up. A purely mechanical thing, nobody was exercising any artistic judgement at all.”

The idea was to achieve an effect akin to Burroughs cut-up technique, and cause a complete disorientation of the senses. This was aided by an audio track created by Burroughs, Gysin and Ian Somerville, which consisted of mind-numbing permutations of just four phrases: “Yes, Hello?”, “Look at that picture,” “Does it seem to be persisting?”, and “Good. Thank you.”

When all put together, the film achieved its intended effect, as Roy Underhill, assistant manager at the Cinephone told Balch during the film’s initial run:

...during the performances an unusual number of strange articles such as bags, pants, shoes, and coats were left behind, lost property, probably out of complete disorientation.

Mission accomplished. Burroughs and Balch didn’t collaborate again until 1972 on the rarely seen 70mm Bill and Tony in 1972, which had the pair endlessly fuck around with each other’s dialog. Well, if you’re going to make a statement, make it on 70mm..
 

 
Bonus clip of ‘Bill and Tony’ after the jump…
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

William S. Burroughs’ The Junky’s Christmas

 
It’s that time of year when stories once were told around a roaring open-fire, as snow flakes left their prints upon the windows. Now, continuing in that spirit, here is a tale of redemption and hope to enjoy around the flickering laptops and computer screens of our winter time.

Francis Ford Coppola produced this short Claymation film based on William S. Burroughs excellent story The Junky’s Christmas. Directed by Nick Donkin and Melodie McDaniel, it opens with live action footage of Burroughs as he begins his tale:

It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his worn, greasy black overcoat.
This beat benny wouldn’t pawn for a deuce, he thought.

 
Parts 2-4 of Burroughs ‘The Junky’s Christmas’ after the jump…
 

 
In their February 28, 1974, issue, Rolling Stone magazine paired up Beat generation godfather, William S. Burroughs with glitter god David Bowie for a dual interview. At the time of the talk, Burroughs had only heard two of Bowie’s songs and Bowie had only recently read Burroughs’ Nova Express novel, knowing the writer through his reputation more than his actual work. Famously, Bowie went on to use the literary and magical “cut ups” technique developed by Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin, when he soon afterwards began working on his stage musical based on George Orwell’s 1984, what later became known as Diamond Dogs.

Burroughs: Could you explain this Ziggy Stardust image of yours? From what I can see it has to do with the world being on the eve of destruction within five years.

Bowie: The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock-and-roll band and the kids no longer want rock-and-roll. There’s no electricity to play it. Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, ‘cause there is no news. So Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. ‘All the young dudes’ is a song about this news. It is no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite.

Burroughs: Where did this Ziggy idea come from, and this five-year idea? Of course, exhaustion of natural resources will not develop the end of the world. It will result in the collapse of civilization. And it will cut down the population by about three-quarters.

Bowie: Exactly. This does not cause the end of the world for Ziggy. The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage.

Burroughs: Yes, a black hole on stage would be an incredible expense. And it would be a continuing performance, first eating up Shaftesbury Avenue.

Bowie: Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman’, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch on to it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie the Infinite Fox.

Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starman. He takes himself up to incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song ‘Rock ‘n’ roll suicide’. As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible. It is a science fiction fantasy of today and this is what literally blew my head off when I read Nova Express, which was written in 1961. Maybe we are the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the seventies, Bill!

Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman (Teenage Wildlife)

Below, David Bowie receives an award for the Ziggy Stardus album in Holland, 1974. The dude giving him the award is quite Dutch, to be sure!
 

 
What do rich people do when they have too much money? Get pissed. So, it was for Conrad Rooks, who by the age of 15 was a full-blown alcoholic. Money may give you many things, but apparently not self-control or a conscience.

Rooks’ pappy owned Avon. Ding Dong, no need to worry about quitting the booze or getting a job, instead Rooks started a new hobby - drugs. He jumped from booze to dope, to coke, to LSD, to peyote, to heroin, then decided to get clean. Off to Switzerland, where he was given a new treatment - the sleep cure.

This is what happened to Rooks, and his story formed the basis for a 1966 movie Chappaqua, which Rooks produced, directed, wrote, and starred in. It is a mess of a film, though it picked up a Silver Medal at the Venice Film Festival, and became a “legendary” underground hit due to its association with drugs and the Beat Generation. And this is where its importance lies today: in the appearance of William S. Burroughs as Opium Jones, the brief cameos from Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovksy, and the beautiful, quite stunning cinematography by Beat film-maker, Robert Frank, who made Pull My Daisy and went on to make Cocksucker Blues for The Rolling Stones. Add to this performances by Ravi Shankar, Ornette Coleman, The Fugs, and a score by Philip Glass, there is enough going on to keep interest, and the finger only occasionally on Fast Forward.
 

 
The whole of ‘Chappaqua’ with Rooks, Burroughs and Ginsberg, after the jump…
 

 

 
These are just stunning! Stunning! I certainly wouldn’t mind owning one of those fantastic Zappas. From the artist Lisa Brawn:

I have been experimenting with figurative woodcuts for almost twenty years since being introduced to the medium by printmakers at the Alberta College of Art and Design. Recently, I have been wrestling with a new challenge: five truckloads of salvaged century-old rough Douglas fir beams from the restoration of the Alberta Block in Calgary and from the dismantling of grain elevators. This wood is very interesting in its history and also in that it is oddly shaped. Unlike traditional woodcut material such as cherry or walnut, the material is ornery. There are holes and knots and gouges and rusty nails sticking out the sides.

To find suitably rustic and rugged subjects, I have been referencing popular culture personas and archetypes from 1920s silent film cowboys to 1970s tough guys. I have also been through the Glenbow Museum archives for horse rustlers, bootleggers, informants, and loiterers in turn-of-the-century RCMP mug shots for my Quién es más macho series. Cowgirl trick riders and cowboy yodelers in their spectacular ensembles from the 1940s led to my Honky-Tonkin, Honey, Baby series. Inspired by a recent trip to Coney Island, I have been exploring vintage circus culture and am currently working on a series of sideshow portraits including Zip the Pinhead and JoJo the Dog-faced Boy. There is also an ongoing series of iconic gender archetypes, antiheroes and divas, which includes such portraits as Sophia Loren, Maria Callas, Edith Piaf, Jackie Onassis, Steve McQueen, and Clint Eastwood.

Please visit Lisa Brawn’s website to view hundreds of amazing woodcuts.

(via Everlasting Blort)

 
We all know that writer, William S. Burroughs is one of the “people we like” on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album cover, but did you know that Burroughs was around when Paul McCartney composed “Eleanor Rigby”? Apparently so. Over the weekend, I noticed the following passage in the book With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker by Victor Bockris:

Burroughs: Ian met Paul McCartney and Paul put up the money for this flat which was at 34 Montagu Square… I saw Paul several times. The three of us talked about the possibilities of the tape recorder. He’d just come in and work on his “Eleanor Rigby.” Ian recorded his rehearsals. I saw the song taking shape. Once again, not knowing much about music, I could see that he knew what he was doing. He was very pleasant and very prepossessing. Nice-looking young man, hardworking.

The connection here was, no doubt, author Barry Miles. Miles started the Indica Bookshop in London with McCartney’s financial backing. Miles states in his book In the Sixties that Burroughs was a frequent visitor to the shop. When the Beatles started their experimental label Zapple, with Barry Miles at the helm, the idea was to release more avant garde fare, such as readings by American poets Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Brautugan and comedian Lenny Bruce. McCartney set up a small studio that was run by Burroughs’ ex-boyfriend, Ian Sommerville, who also lived there, and this is why Burroughs would have been around.

It’s always thought that John Lennon was the far-out Beatle, but it was Macca who was obsessed by Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and Morton Subotnick, not Lennon (he got there later via Yoko).

Below, the “Eleanor Rigby” sequence from Yellow Submarine:
 

 
I lived in Manhattan’s East Village from 1984 to 1991 and the sight of the great poet Allen Ginsberg around the neighborhood was a pretty common one, although it was still cool to see him each and every time, I must admit. Now the apartment where Ginsberg lived until the mid-90s has been renovated and come on the rental market. There is a link to the listing today—$1700 for the one-bedroom—on Gothamist:

Allen Ginsberg spent 21 years of his life (1975 to 1996) living in a fourth floor walk-up in the East Village, and now—following the death of his partner Peter Orlovsky, it’s on the rental market. Earlier this month, The Allen Ginsberg Project stopped by as it was undergoing renovations, and there’s little left of the poetic madman’s presence. For example, the bedroom that his pal Harry Everett Smith once resided in is now a bathroom (read an interview Ginsberg did with Paola Igliori in 1995, where the two discussed his one-time roommate)

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Above: Harry Smith’s in the guest room, now a bathroom.
 

Above: Here’s how Wired’s Steve Silberman remembers the apartment:
 

Left to right: Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Louis Cartwright, Herbert Huncke, William Burroughs, Allen & Peter’s new apartment, 437 East 12th Street, New York City, December 1975. Photographer unknown. (Via)
 

 
Above: Allen Ginsberg on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line TV program in 1968.

There’s also a link on Gothamist to some photos of the converted YMCA on the Bowery where William Burroughs used to live, famously dubbed “The Bunker.” John Giorno, who took over the place when Burroughs left, kept his bedroom exactly as it was.

 
Enjoyable interview with the literary executor for the William S. Burroughs estate, James Grauerholz, who worked closely with the author for 23 years, conducted by Stephen Foland. It’s a discussion specifically about Burrough’s interest in magick—something that interests me greatly to read about, I can assure you—but what’s fun about the interview is reading between the lines as Grauerholz gently manages to provide a more, how shall I put it, secular viewpoint on the matter.

SF: William’s magickal experimentation, the aspects of recording what he called “Danger Sounds” and replaying them in proximity to his target, or using collage to hit a specific target has become the stuff of legend. Some attribute the closing of one particular establishment to William’s hexes. Is there another specific instance which you can recall that is as dramatic and apparently self-evident?

JG: Nope, not really. You are likely referring to the Moka Bar in London, where William said he received snide, snotty service and lousy, weak tea — and his tape-recorders-and-cameras mock-surveillance routine, back and forth on the sidewalk of Frith Street, and how the Moka Bar failed and was shuttered not too long after that.

Forgive me please, but my cast of mind leads me to suspect the Moka Bar, if it really did sell lousy tea with terrible service, might have been headed out of business, with or without the sound-text-tape-film sidewalk-pacing routine…

Below, Burroughs reads from Nova Express on Saturday Night Live in 1981. I remember seeing this the night it aired live and being totally flabbergasted to actually see William Burroughs on television. Something like that seemed impossible at the time!
 

 
Taking the broooooaaaaad view of things: A Conversation with James Grauerholz on William S. Burroughs and Magick (Pop Damage)

 
Some artists, like Picasso and Dali, were discovered when they were young and their talents grew to maturity before the public eye. Sometimes, however it takes,,, well, dying before the art world sits up and takes notice of you, This has certainly been the case with Brion Gysin, the Canadian/British painter and author who has long stood in the shadows, figuratively speaking, of William S. Burroughs, his lifelong friend and collaborator. Burroughs once said that Brion Gysin, the inventor of the Cut-Ups literary technique was the only man he ever truly respected.

Gysin is an artist whose work must be seen in person to be truly appreciated. This is said about every artist’s work, but it’s particularly true with Brion Gysin. What might appear to be random chicken scratch calligraphy when reproduced in a book, becomes ALIVE when seen in person. Seemingly careless hash marks become scenes of hundreds of people around a bonfire or a crowded Arab marketplace when you’re staring right at it.

The man was a master. And he left an awful lot of work behind. Although there were various Gysin gallery exhibits in New York while he was still alive—I recall being astonished by some large works on paper in a great 1985 show at the Tower Gallery—there has never been a museum level retrospective of Gysin’s work in the United States until now:

“Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” will be the first US survey of the work of Brion Gysin (b. 1916, Taplow, UK; d. 1986, Paris), an irrepressible innovator, serial collaborator, and subversive spirit who continues to inspire artists today. The exhibition will include over 250 drawings, books, paintings, photo-collages, films, slide projections, and sound works, as well as the Dreamachine—a kinetic light sculpture that utilizes the flicker effect to induce visions.

In 1959, Gysin created the Cut-Up Method, wherein words and phrases were randomly collaged to unlock unknown meanings, culminating in The Third Mind, a book-length collage created with his lifelong collaborator William S. Burroughs. Transferring the idea of the Cut-Up to magnetic tape, Gysin became the father of sound poetry. Throughout his life, Gysin was a collaborator and an inspiration to artists, poets, and musicians, such as John Giorno, Brian Jones, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Genesis-P-Orridge, and Keith Haring.

More than two decades after his death, his work continues to attract the interest of a new generation of artists drawn to Gysin’s radical inderdisciplinarity, including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cerith Wyn Evans, Trisha Donnelly, and Scott Treleaven. The exhibition is curated by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, and will be on view in the New Museum’s second-floor gallery. It will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published with Hugh Merrell, Ltd. which will include scholarly essays and appreciations by contemporary artists, musicians, and poets.

Video below, a trailer for FLicKer a Canadian documentary about Gysin directed by Nik Sheehan, in which I make a brief appearance.