William Burroughs – Page 39

William Burroughs: Gnostic visionary

Burroughs by Coulthart (2001).

Lengthy article examining the WSB worldview through a Gnostic lens.

The art of Shinro Ohtake

Shinro Ohtake is always on the attack. Whether it’s against misguided art education, against the cold treatment and economic constraints Japan puts on anyone who could dare to live differently, against the contemporary art establishment that can’t be bothered to even disguise its own incomprehension—his fight as an artist continues. Ohtake is prodigious, original, and a trouble-maker—in the sense that the work of the artist is always to create difference.

William Burroughs

Two disparate things had me looking for Shinro Ohtake‘s work this week: I’ve been doing a short interview about album cover design (more about that at a later date) in which I mentioned his collage for the cover of Seven Souls by Material (1989), then an editorial in the latest Wire describes his current retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.

The Material cover is one I picked as a favourite design. It’s difficult trying to pin-point why I think this works so well without it being at all illustrational. (I’m guessing, but it’s likely that Bill Laswell picked it out of one of Ohtake’s collage books, rather than it being specially commissioned.) It may be the collage aspect that works here. The album features readings by William Burroughs set to music and for me is the best of all the Burroughs recordings (Dead City Radio being a close second). Burroughs’ work, of course, involved literary collage via his own cut-up process, and the musical content can also be seen as a collage in the way it mixes different styles and musicians—Simon Shaheen, Shankar, Rammellzee, Foday Musa Suso, Fahiem Dandan and samples of the famous Brian Jones recordings of the Jajouka pipers. It’s a shame that when the CD was reissued in 1997 (in a superior mastering, it should be noted), the original artwork was largely junked in favour of a lot of muddy Photoshop work from the usually excellent Russell Mills. I’ve a huge respect for Mills but this treatment was a serious mistake.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs book covers

William Burroughs gives thanks

Lest we forget…

William Burroughs.

Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986.

For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts —

thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —

thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger —

thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot —

thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes —

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through —

thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces —

thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers —

thanks for laboratory AIDS —

thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs —

thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business —

thanks for a nation of finks — yes,

thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your arms… you always were a headache and you always were a bore —

thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.• From Tornado Alley (1989).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• William Burroughs book covers
• Towers Open Fire

Gay for God

So, another week, another gay sex scandal in America… Schadenfreude levels are going through the roof with all this happening days before a critical midterm election. Latest culprit is Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals who yesterday was denying that he paid for sex with a male escort and bought drugs (yet he still resigned; er, okay…) but now seems to be fessing up, perhaps prompted by incriminating voicemails being passed to the press.

Pastor Ted claims to have the ear of the White House and has been very vocal in the past about the iniquities of gay sex. Here’s a random sample from the NAE website:

May 17, 2004

A Special Message From Pastor Ted Haggard, President

Today, homosexual couples are marrying in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The crisis concerning marriage is now a real and present danger to our society. Join with the National Association of Evangelicals for an important 90-minute Church Communication Network (CCN) broadcast this Sunday evening, May 23rd, 6:00-7:30 PM Mountain Daylight Time. Hear some of the nation’s leading experts on the crisis of homosexual marriage and its detrimental impact on America’s families — Dr. James Dobson, Chuck Colson, Bishop Wellington Boone and Tony Perkins — as they inform, educate, and call the Church to action.

Business-as-usual, in the world of the god-botherers, and there’s more of the same drivel here. But Pastor Ted has gone beyond mere preaching in the past, as this eye-popping Harper’s article reveals:

Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings.

Seems like the sinful gay men may have done some inviting of their own. Then there’s this:

He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—”Control.”

Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.”

This may be coincidence, but any reader of William Burroughs’ work will tell you that Burroughs patented the term “Control” as a name for abstract forces (human or otherwise) attempting to dominate the world. Burroughs’ work, of course, contains a lot of gay sex, often used as a means of combating that same Control.

The Harper’s article has a great description of Haggard’s World Prayer Center:

The angel’s pedestal stands at the center of a great, eight-pointed compass laid out in muted red, white, and blue-black stone. Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting, most depicting gorgeous, muscular men—one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-style, in chains—in various states of undress. My favorite is The Vessel, by Thomas Blackshear (above), a major figure in the evangelical-art world. Here in the World Prayer Center is a print of The Vessel, a tall, vertical panel of two nude, ample-breasted, white female angels team-pouring an urn of honey onto the shaved head of a naked, olive-skinned man below. The honey drips down over his slab-like pecs and his six-pack abs into the eponymous vessel, which he holds in front of his crotch. But the vessel can’t handle that much honey, so the sweetness oozes over the edges and spills down yet another level, presumably onto our heads, drenching us in golden, godly love. Part of what makes Blackshear’s work so compelling is precisely its unabashed eroticism; it aims to turn you on, and then to turn that passion toward Jesus.

In fairness to the artist, I think that’s supposed to be annointing oil they’re pouring. Blackshear’s paintings are certainly preferable to the dreadful figurines on his site, the kind of things that give kitsch a bad name. His eroticism is of the unspecified variety that one sees in Frank Frazetta’s work and which was also present in the fascist sculptures that Arno Breker produced for the Nazis. Breker was gay but Hitler managed to overlook that inconvenience, just as the evangelicals probably overlook the ambiguous qualities in Blackshear’s paintings. As Kenneth Clark says in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, all nude art is erotic. Or maybe that’s just “Control” speaking through us lousy perverts?

To return to Pastor Ted, I’m curious now to see how the “gay is a lifestyle choice” contingent deal with this one. The wingnuts who deny a biological component to gay attraction are going to have to accept that their noble leader willingly entered into a sinful relationship rather than being driven there by even the slightest genetic impulse. In Colorado at the moment it seems that Control has the upper hand.

Update: latest news is that Pastor Ted bought crystal meth (an addictive compound very popular among gay men when used during sex) out of curiosity. More than once. At $100 a shot. That’s an expensive curiosity habit you have there, Ted. Oh and the escort gave him a massage but they didn’t have sex, no sir. The current Congressman for Colorado is the egregious Marilyn Musgrave, a woman who recently made Rolling Stone‘s list of “10 Worst Congressmen“, and “an evangelical Christian who married her Bible-camp sweetheart”. Marilyn is down on the gay in a big way:

Once in Congress, Musgrave introduced a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage — which she calls “the most important issue that we face today” — nearly a year before a Massachusetts court approved civil unions. “She doesn’t like the idea of one gay person,” says Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts. “So obviously the idea of two of us hanging out makes her very unhappy.” For her opposition to gay marriage — as well as her push to legalize concealed weapons — Musgrave received an endorsement from the KKK in May.

I wonder what she has to say about Pastor Ted’s curiosities?

And there’s more from the party of gay hate, with the news that the Republican National Committee has accepted donations from the president of a gay porn distribution company, Marina Pacific Distributors. I think this is what’s called sending a confusing message to the voters. Coming next (as it were), President Bush is caught being fellated by a chimpanzee in the Oval Office. Maybe.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The election Google Bomb
• Why doesn’t America believe in evolution?

The Final Academy

The event booklet, designed by Neville Brody.

William Burroughs’ reading in the city of Manchester took place on the 4th of October, 1982, at Factory Records’ Haçienda club, as part of the Manchester “edition” of The Final Academy, a Burroughs-themed art event put together by Psychic TV (Genesis P Orridge & Peter Christopherson) and others. A recent posting on the Grey Lodge is a torrent of The Final Academy Documents, the shoddily-produced DVD made from the low-grade video recordings that captured the event (originally an Ikon Video production from Factory). The DVD is so badly presented by Cherry Red that no one should feel guilty about downloading this.

I’ve always been grateful that a record was made of this event, however poor, since I was in the audience that evening, very conscious of the fact that this was my one and only opportunity to see Burroughs in the flesh. His appearance was the magical part of a scaled-down version of the larger two-day Final Academy that had taken place earlier that week in London. The rest of the event was either strange or underwhelming, not helped by the chilly and elitist atmosphere of Manchester’s newest and most famous club. In the days before “Madchester” and the rave scene (the period that gets excised from the city’s cultural history), the Haçienda was a cold, grey concrete barn with terrible acoustics and a members-only policy that required the flourishing of a Peter Saville-designed card at the door. The place was usually half-empty and the clientèle tended to be students living nearby.

Continue reading “The Final Academy”