Online, web based dreammachine

(via Bruce Eisner, who has some additional information about Brion Gysin and dreammachines)

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A novel co-written by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, two giants of the “Beat Generation” of poets, writers and drug-takers, is to be published for the first time more than 60 years after it was written.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, written in 1945, was inspired by an actual killing which led to the arrest of both authors.

The novel draws upon the stabbing in 1944 of a homosexual, David Kammerer, by Lucien Carr, a friend of the duo and another Beat leading light.

Carr served two years after admitting manslaughter, claiming Kammerer had been obsessed with him and had become violent.

Carr confessed to Kerouac and Burroughs, who helped him dispose of the knife but did not go to police. Kerouac was arrested as an accessary to the killing in 1944 and was put in a Bronx jail but he was freed after his girlfriend, Edie Parker, stood bail.

Full Story: Adam Gorightly’s Untamed Dimensions.

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My friend Richard Phantastica has a blog, with posts about EsoTech, Grant Morrison, Gilles Deleuze, and William S. Burroughs. Check it out.

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The other day I watched eXistenZ. Afterword, I reached into the box of old Mondo 2000s that Bill Whitcomb recently gave me, and pulled out an issue at random. It just happened to have an interview with David Cronenberg (an excerpt from Cronenberg on Cronenberg, which I was also flipping through). Here’s an interesting bit where he talks about gender:

William Burroughs doesn’t just say that men and women are different species, he says they’re different species with different wills and purposes. That’s where you arrive at the struggle between the sexes. I think Burroughs really touches a nerve there. the attempt to make men and women not different - to pretend that little girls and boys are exactly the same and it’s only social pressure, influence, and environmental factors that make them go separate ways - just doesn’t work. Anyone who has kids knows that. There is a femaleness and a maleness. We each partake of both in different proportions. But Burroughs is talking about something else: will and purpose.

If we inhabited different planets, we would see the female planet go entirely one way and the male another. Maybe that’s why we’re on the same planet, because either extremes might be worse. I think Burroughs’s comments are illuminating. Maybe they’re a bit too cosmic to deal with in daily life, but hear it reflected in all the hideous cliches of songs: “You can’t live with ‘em, and you’ve can’t live without ‘em.”

Burroughs was fascinated when I told him about a species of butterfly. They couldn’t find the male of one species and the female of another. One was huge and brightly colored, and the other was tiny and black. It took forty years before lepidopterists realized were the same species. When Burroughs talks about men and women being different species, it does have some resonance in other forms of life. But there are also hermaphrodite version of this same butterfly. they are totally bizarre. One half is huge and bright and the other halve - split right down the middle of the body - is small and dark. I can’t imagine it being able to fly. there’s no balance whatsoever.

(See also my article on Breyer P-Orridge).

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I’m sure you’ve now seen his Thanksgiving prayer fortyleven times. But this is the first time I’ve ever seen this.

(Thanks Amy!)

See also: Burroughs Nike commercial details.

Update: Direct download.

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In 1974 William S. Burroughs and David Bowie got together for a little chat, documented by Rolling Stone. Here’s a particularly weird part where Burroughs and Bowie talk about the alien and reptilian nature of Andy Warhol:

Burroughs: Have you ever met Warhol?

Bowie: Yes, about two years ago I was invited up to The Factory. We got in the lift and went up and when it opened there was a brick wall in front of us. We rapped on the wall and they didn’t believe who we were. So we went back down and back up again till finally they opened the wall and everybody was peering around at each other. That was shortly after the gun incident. I met this man who was the living dead. Yellow in complexion, a wig on that was the wrong colour, little glasses. I extended my hand and the guy retired, so I thought, ‘The guy doesn’t like flesh, obviously he’s reptilian.’ He produced a camera and took a picture of me. And I tried to make small talk with him, and it wasn’t getting anywhere.

But then he saw my shoes. I was wearing a pair of gold-and-yellow shoes, and he says, ‘I adore those shoes, tell me where you got those shoes.’ He then started a whole rap about shoe design and that broke the ice. My yellow shoes broke the ice with Andy Warhol.

I adore what he was doing. I think his importance was very heavy, it’s becoming a big thing to like him now. But Warhol wanted to be cliche, he wanted to be available in Woolworth’s, and be talked about in that glib type of manner. I hear he wants to make real films now, which is very sad because the films he was making were the things that should be happening. I left knowing as little about him as a person as when I went in.

Burroughs: I don’t think that there is any person there. It’s a very alien thing, completely and totally unemotional. He’s really a science fiction character. He’s got a strange green colour.

Bowie: That’s what struck me. He’s the wrong colour, this man is the wrong colour to be a human being. Especially under the stark neon lighting in The Factory. Apparently it is a real experience to behold him in the daylight.

Burroughs: I’ve seen him in all light and still have no idea as to what is going on, except that it is something quite purposeful. It’s not energetic, but quite insidious, completely asexual. His films will be the late-night movies of the future.

Full Story: Teenage Wildlife.

(via Waking hte Midnight Sun).

See also: Williams S. Burroughs interviews Jimmy Page.

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Burroughs Book Covers.

(via Posthuman Blues).

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PDF of Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology, William S. Burroughs’s collection of anti-Scientology materials.

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Dr. Menlo’s looking for the exact “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on” William S. Burroughs quote. There are a few permutations of it on the web, and I’ve yet to find a single actual citation. Did he say it in an interview? Was it in one of his books?

Leave Doc a comment.

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This is the most detailed description of the commercial I could find online. I recall once finding a more detailed description, without commentary, but I can’t find it now. It may actually have been in a book about Nike, not online.

In the first scene of the ad, a child wearing Nikes and playing basketball with friends runs over to a tiny hand-held television sitting on the ground and turns it on. Burroughs appears on the screen saying, “hey, I’m talking to you,” while the boy runs off. This scene emphasizes most of the major themes of the commercial. Burroughs appears on a TV on the TV and is thus contained by technology. The commercial’s repeated refrain–”the purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body”–highlights a conflict between mastering and serving technology, and Burroughs is clearly the subject rather than master of technology. The boy, however, who turns on the diminutive TV, small enough to be easily be handled by child, is in control of technology and thereby of Burroughs as well. Furthermore, the child runs off, back to his sports despite Burroughs’ command, showing contempt for the older generation and particularly for its failure to master technology in relation to sports.

Burroughs then continues to appear on TV screens throughout the commercial’s series of quick-cut images of young athletes and of high-tech computer graphics of Nike designs. The athletes themselves are portrayed primarily as body parts, intensifying the focus on humans as athletic machines, or on TVs which shake when they appear on the screen, again emphasizing that technology can’t contain or control the young and powerful. The TV screens containing Burroughs are either shown in a stack (stable and unshaking, unlike those containing the youthful athletes) or placed on the playing fields, in which case they are doused with dirt as a baseball player slides into second base, swept off the street by a hockey stick, tossed aside with sand as a longjumper lands, splashed and shorted out by water as a jogger runs through a puddle. This re-emphasizes contempt for the older generation and shows that it’s the strength, athletic limit-breaking, and mastery of new technology (i.e., the computer-designed Nike shoes) that sets the young above the old. This then identifies the next major theme of the commercial: both Burroughs and the athletes are rebels. Burroughs’ narration admiringly speaks of the ability “to make anything possible” and to do “more that what was done [or] thought possible…put the beyond within reach.” So the mastery of technology (again, Nike shoes) has made the young into limit breakers that previous generations of rebels may admire but cannot themselves equal.

Burroughs’ admiration throughout the abuse and contempt he receives comes off sounding obsequious. In the final scene of the commercial, after the static caused by the runner disappears, Burroughs takes off his hat and bows his head in an image both of obeisance and emphasized baldness, age, and fragility.

From: BEAT, BEATNIK, OR DIET BEAT: THE CHOICE OF A NEW GENERATION by Mitchell J. Smith.

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Sweet bumper sticker designs by Bruce Sterling.

(via Posthuman Blues).

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Wes is brilliant. I haven’t read this whole article yet, but from what I’ve read this promises to be a great insight into his work.

It is my intention that these tracks represent the most available Philip K Nixon tracks, as they form the materials out of which I have hopefully constructed a weapon. This weapon works to destroy conditioning.

To understand why I believe this construct is important, I’m going to need to get into some depth. I’ve dug into my files and bookshelves and pulled together the sources listed at the end of this article to help me articulate what has been until now mostly a metalinguistic experience. Working with collage and cut-ups does something seriously uncouth to the analytical brain. Coming down from this neurolinguistic high required serious grounding, and reading through what others have said has proved to be an excellent form of psychic reintegration.

Full Article: Mutato Nomine.

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The New York Public Library is expected to announce today that it has purchased the Burroughs archive for its Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The acquisition will make the Berg Collection, which also includes Kerouac’s literary and personal archive, perhaps the premier institution for the study of the Beats.

Full Story: New York Times.

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Torrent: 4 mp3s (78.68 megs).

This may be abridged… it’s four 45 minute files. Seems a little short. I can’t find any information about this on the web, except that it was released in 1995 and parts of it are on the Naked Lunch Criterion Collection.

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It’s about time Technoccult hit the high tech groove… so I’m doing the torrenting and podcasting thing. I think I’ve got this working now. Could still use tracker suggestions.

Final (?) update:

Torrent: Naked Lunch (avi, 694 megs).

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The latest issue of the Grey Lodge Occult Review includes:

The Divine Horsemen, the famous voudoun documentary by Maya Deren.

The Cut-Ups by Antony Balch, William S. Burroughs, and Brion Gysin.

The original Disinfo ‘net TV series.

Grey Lodge Occult Review 17.

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WB: I was thinking of the concentration of mass energy that you get in a pop
concert, and if that were, say, channeled in some magical way…a stairway
too heaven…it could become quite actual.

JP: Yes, I know. One is so aware of the energies that you are going for, and
you could so easily….I mean, for instance, the other night we played in
the Philadelphia Spectrum, which really is a black hole as a concert
hall….The security there is the most ugly of anywhere in the States. I saw
this incident happen and I was almost physically sick. In fact, if I hadn’t
been playing the guitar I was playing it would’ve been over somebody’s head.
It was a double-neck, which is irreplaceable, really, unless you wait
another nine months for them to make another one at Gibson’s.

Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, And a search for the elusive stairway to heaven orgininally published in Crawdaddy Magazine, June 1975.

(via LVX23)

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What role do magic and the occult science-arts play in the future of politics? I don’t believe that our prayers and servitors and egregore to effect outcomes of elections are the right way to go. Never have. What we should hope to gain from magic is the insight and creativity, the vision, to enact change in the real world.

Key23: magick and politicks

Jason Louv: We Are the Moral Majority

FutureHi: wake up

William S. Burroughs: Man You Voted for a Goddamn Ape!!! (via Dr. Hyatt ??? comment here if you linked this recently).

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Excerpts and critical essays and other information William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch.

Link (via Social Fiction)

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The new issue of the Grey Lodge Occult Review has film clips of Burroughs, Gysin, Man Ray, and DuChamp.

Link (via New World Disorder)

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Hyperstition is a new blog by Reza Negarestani, K-Punk, and a bunch of other people (and hosted by William Blaze) that merits a little more introduction. Hyperstitions are, in short, “fictions that make themselves real.”

K-Punk recommends Lemurian Time War and this article as an introduction to Hyperstion:

The situation is closer to the modern phenomenon of hype than to religious belief as we?d ordinarily think about it. Hype actually makes things happen, and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it?s not ?real? now, doesn?t mean it won?t be real at some point in the future. And once it?s real, in a sense, it?s always been.”

Sounds very much like Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, especially when he talks about emergence.

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Grey Lodge Occult Review #11

this issue features pieces by Antonin Artaud, Colin Wilson, Chris Hyatt Ph.D & Jason Black, Aldous Huxley, Howard Bloom, & excerpts from The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln as well as from Cities of the Red Nights by William S. Burroughs

good stuff, great format.

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Both of these are from Zen Werewolf, a while back.

A Burroughs interview about magic:

Possibly not, to perform a certain function, but I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh…. they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page. Klee said that quite distinctly, that the “artist who is called” as he put it, is ahh “attempting to create something apart, that has an existence apart from him and apart from the canvas and that can even put the creator in danger”, which is of course the clearest proof of his difference, its separation from him. I read that years ago and put it down and I was interested to find that ahh, 20 or 30 years later, that I had noted that down. It became of course very much more significant to me when I started painting myself. Yes, all artists are engaged in the supreme blasphemy, of creating life, trying to, some very much more successfully than others, but none of them completely successful. It probably would be a disastrous success. I should say that it would depend upon the degree of his engagement. It could be, certainly, the whole area is dangerous.

The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What Really Happened? (long PDF about William and Joan’s relationship)

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The new issue includes a “William S. Burroughs Special” as well as reprinted work by John Dee, Jorges Luis Borges, Deleuze & Guattari, Michel Foucault and others.
Link (via Stare)

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Did William S. Burroughs shoot Joan on purpose? From an article by George Laughead Jr.:

“Shoot the bitch and write a book. That’s what I did.” That still echoes. Later, Grauerholz denied even hearing the statement, not that I ever gave a damn whether it was murder or not.

Link (via Rotten).

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