Film Review: The Final Academy Documents (William Burroughs)

This DVD made for one of the strangest viewing experiences I’ve ever had.

 

To begin with, the menu is vague about the contents.  I finally started at the beginning and played through to the end.  That presented me with two short experimental films involving William Burroughs, one or more public readings by Burroughs, and four (I think) readings/performances by John Giorno.  There were also ads for other DVDS, though those tracks did not provide very much in the way of information.

The public readings apparently formed part of a “Final Academy Tour” in the 1980s (and possibly earlier?) at the Hacienda Club in Manchester, England.  They included excerpts from (I believe) Naked Lunch dealing with the infamous/notorious Dr. Benway.

The experimental films, Ghosts at Number Nine and Towers Open Fire utilized a “cut-up” approach, little or no dialogue, and various added noises.

What can I tell you?  The first film is long (over twenty minutes) and disconnected.  The second film is not quite as long—but just as disconnected.  I can’t hold the “disconnected” against them, because that is part of the point, part of the artistic approach.  I watched them, after all; and, in a way, I enjoyed them; but once was probably enough.

I enjoyed Burroughs’ reading about Dr. Benway.  Nevertheless, is “enjoyed” ever the proper word to use when discussing Naked Lunch?  Well, it’s funny and grotesque—so I suppose “enjoyed” is the proper word!  And although Burroughs speaks and reads in a manner that resembles no one else I know of, this too is enjoyable in a macabre, rather twisted way.  This is not the way we generally train public speakers!

John Giorno—well, he proves one can talk over a musical background.  He’s passionate, certainly.  I got tired of his repetition of lines; but he has an interesting approach to poetry and recitation and I’m glad I got to see him in performance.

So, overall, I’m glad I watched this DVD, and I can recommend it, with reservations.  Unless you’re an avant-garde film buff, you may want to skip the two films.  And if you aren’t familiar with Burroughs or Giorno, you may want to approach this DVD with caution, “in measured doses.”

Awakening on Thanksgiving, 2012

Woke up this Thanksgiving morning with many thoughts all jumbled together, trying to form a coherence.  Rather than coherence here, I’ll aim for images and splotches of feelings.

Thinking of William Burroughs, having finished reading Naked Lunch last night.  I know people personally wounded by addiction, or the addictions of their friends or relatives.

Thinking of Burroughs poem, “Thanksgiving Day, 1986” (quoted below).

Thinking of guns.  A friend of mine is buying a gun to defend herself from a stalker.  I’ve been reflecting on that, but I’ll share those thoughts later; they need to settle a bit more.

Thinking of friends far away, hoping I get to know them better as the years come and pass.

Thinking of the United States, and all the countries and people of the Americas, actually; and the world.

Thinking of places I’d like to visit and know better—particularly Latin America.

Thinking of the film I saw over the weekend, George Wallace, with Gary Sinise and Angelina Jolie.    

Thinking of the white southerners depicted in the film, and the blacks brought here as slaves, “freed,” then left to fend for themselves in a hostile, exploiting society.

Thinking of Martin Luther King, killed for demanding justice

Thinking of John Kennedy, assassinated on this date, forty-nine years ago.

Thinking.

. . .

Wondering (when I woke up, anyway) whether people fall into three categories:  People who have always lived in the same place, people who have willingly travelled about, and people who are taken against their will to other places.

Waking this morning, I felt a great connection to all the people who had come to the Americas from Europe.  I’d been reading, last night, about Buenos Aires; and thinking about the many people of the Americas who came here from Europe (and wondering why someone would leave the place they were born, to live and die somewhere else, far from their parents, family, and what they were used to).

Then thinking about people who have never lived anywhere other than where they were born; whose ancestors have lived there as well, as far back as memory or history goes.  Wondering how it is possible to stay in one place.  My own background is so different.

Thinking about Africa, the original home of all humans, scientists say (though indigenous American legends and so on would dispute that); Africa the Great Indigenous Homeland (yet how differently “Whites” think of the “Black Africans” and the “Native Americans” and the “Australian Aboriginals” and themselves).

And thinking about the people who were conquered, or who were enslaved, or who were kidnapped and dragged off somewhere else against their will; abused, exploited, tortured, killed; considered of no importance other than for how they could be used.

And thinking of our current situation, the vast machinery of Black Friday, in the land where the commercial exploitation of each holiday begins at midnight at the end of the previous holiday; or even sooner—where Santa Claus now appears in stores not long after Halloween, before we’ve even staggered into Thanksgiving.

A friend of mine calls the United States a “heaving monstrosity.”  Burroughs, in his inimitable way, says “Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.”

Nevertheless, I’m still thankful for my friends, my lovers, my family.  I’m still glad I’ve grown up and live in the United States.  I’m thankful for my own past and my own present, in spite of the contradictions and paradoxes and darkness contained therein (along with the light).

Afterword and Poem for "Gang of Souls"

I was thinking about that “look” I mentioned, that Lydia Lunch would sometimes throw at the camera in the documentary, after she ended her reading or recitation or performance or whatever; the same look that came out of Gregory Corso sometimes.

There’s something about Corso that has always annoyed me, beyond the fact that in other documentaries he’s complained about how people always think of the other Beats first—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs—not him—when they think of “Beat Writers.”

So I was thinking “What was that look?—The look I saw in the documentary?

Now I realize it’s related to something I see in videos of William S. Burroughs—an exceedingly odd individual, responsible for the fable novel Naked Lunch, which I am now about 40% of the way through reading.  “The Look” has something to do with delivering unwanted opinion, unappreciated points of view, perhaps; delivering the Bitter Truth to people who, we believe, certainly don’t want to hear it; delivering that truth, perhaps, with secret enjoyment.  Maybe not actually enjoying it, per se—but determined to Spit Out The Bad News anyway!

So here’s a poem I wrote about that.

“Tentative Interpretation of Gregory Corso and Lydia Lunch”

The performance poet Lydia Lunch has been called “confrontational.”

Gregory Corso, the Beat poet, and Lydia Lunch—what bothers me about them?

“Confrontational?”

As in the following, which is what I feel like they’re saying:

“Here’s the deal:

We don’t care what you think.

We don’t care if we offend you.

Maybe we intend to offend you,

To confront you,

To be ‘in your face.’”

(And maybe they don’t care whether you understand them or not.

Maybe they aren’t trying to explain—or communicate!

Maybe they’re just expressing themselves—

And you happen to be the person just now

In front of them. 

Maybe it isn’t personal.

But there it is anyway.

So there

<grin?>).

Review: “William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers” (1 of 2)

I recently watched the documentary William A. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sewers.  I suppose I can call it a documentary, although it contained no commentary; I suppose that is one form of documentary.

It wasn’t particularly unified either.  Instead, it was a collection of short clips, about thirteen as I recall, that ran a total of about fifty-one minutes.  Some of the clips were of Burroughs reading from his writings.  Others were interviews conducted by Jurgen Ploog.  Still others were clips of experimental films featuring Burroughs or his texts.

I find Burroughs more and more interesting, although I expect this phenomenon to flip without warning into boredom.  Although Burroughs interests, he also gently repulses.  I can’t imagine being his friend.  My ultimate reaction is that he was a very odd man.

I first learned of him while reading Jack Kerouac.  Burroughs was the model for the character Old Bull Lee in On The Road.  His persona there was certainly strange.  Kerouac in fact refers to the relationship between Burroughs and his wife “one of the strangest.”  During Kerouac’s visit to Burroughs' house near New Orleans, he observes him and his wife Joan drinking and pretty much taking every drug in the book.  Burroughs gets up in the morning, takes a fix, is lively for awhile, takes another fix, is lively for awhile…..etc.  A few years after the events recounted in On The Road, Burroughs would accidentally kill Joan while trying to shoot a glass off the top of her head a la William Tell.  He later was forced to the “appalling conclusion” that this event drove him to become a writer.  Over the following decades, he became known for novels like Junkie, Queer, and Naked Lunch.  Some of these were written using the “cut-up” method of writing something and then slicing pages in half and rearranging the sequence of half-pages.  

Given the variety and amount of substances that Burroughs took into his system, it is perhaps a miracle that he produced any writing at all.  I haven’t read much of it—I certainly haven’t read Naked Lunch (although I read a few pages from time to time).  Consequently, I can’t judge the coherence of the work.  I know that some people regard Naked Lunch as one of the great novels of the twentieth century.  About all I really know of Burroughs' work is the poem “A Thanksgiving Prayer, November 28, 1986,” which is, if nothing else, memorable.  It is by no means clear that Burroughs is expressing thanks; disgust seems closer to the truth.

And yet, in the mythic Beat trio of Jack Kerouac/Allen Ginsberg/William S. Burroughs, Burroughs seems the ultra-conservative.  Kerouac said that Burroughs harbored a nostalgia for the country as it was around 1910.  He nearly always appeared in a suit and tie.  There is just this little problem of his drug habits and some nasty things he said about his country—he was a cantankerous curmudgeon.  And he outlived both Kerouac and Ginsberg, though older than both.