Sunday, 8 March 2009
William S. Burroughs - Shotgun Painting (Film)
BURROUGHS:There is no exact process. If you want to do shotgun art, you take a piece of plywood, put a can of spracy paint in front of it, and shoot it with a shotgun or high powered rifle. The paint's under high pressure so it explodes! Throws the can 300 feed. The paint sprays in exploding color across your surface. You can have as many colors as you want. Turn it around, do it sideways, and have one color coming in from this side and this side. Of course, they hit. Mix in all kinds of unpredictable patterns. This is related to Pollack's drip canvases, although this is a rather more basically random process, there's no possibility of predicting what patterns you're going to get.
I've had some I've worked over for months. Get the original after the explosions and work it over with brushes and spray paints and silhouettes until I'm satisfied. So, there isn't any set procedure. Sometimes you get it right there and you don't touch it. The most important thing in painting is to know when to stop, when everything is finished. Doesn't mean anything in writing.
here.
William Burrough's shopping lists for sale on ebay @ $485 (US)!!!
Offered here are three pages of grocery lists with most of the items being written by William S. Burroughs. Each page is approx. 6" x 9" and has writing on both sides. Some of the writing is in an unknown hand. These pages are guaranteed to be authentic and from William Burroughs' home in Kansas with most of the lists having been handwritten by Burroughs.
Page 1: Items written by Burroughs - 1. Cat Pans. 5. Limes & lemons. 6. Dry Cat Food. 7. Canned (sic) Cat Food - Mealtime, bits of beef - salmon dinner. There are 4 items written on the back and none are by Burroughs
Page 2: Items written by Burroughs - 1. Waffles (plain buttermilk). 2. Triscuits. 3. Cat Food Canned. 4. Vodka - last but not least 5. Marshmallow for toasting over stove (?) last word is a guess - hard to read. There are 4 items written on the back - Burroughs has written "Lysol."
Page 3: Items written by Burroughs - 1. Lemons and lime. 2. Milk. 3. Bottled water. 4. Honey (crossed out). 5. Lipton tea bags (the brisk tea). There are 4 items written on the back but none are written by Burroughs.
Each page has been folded down the center. There are some stains on two of the pages.
Satisfaction is Guaranteed! Please ask any questions you may have.
(!!!)
I have in my collection a signed Burroughs screenprint done for the Island International Bookstore in Amsterdam, circa 1983 or so (No. 16 of 23.) & a signed copy of 'Cities of the Red Night' (liberated from Zurich jail - don't ask!)
Offers over a million dollars to the usual address!
I have in my collection a signed Burroughs screenprint done for the Island International Bookstore in Amsterdam, circa 1983 or so (No. 16 of 23.) & a signed copy of 'Cities of the Red Night' (liberated from Zurich jail - don't ask!)
Offers over a million dollars to the usual address!
'Anger Is Holy' - Mark Stewart*
“Anger is an energy.” - John Lydon
From 'nuzz prowling wolf' here.
* Mark Stewart
From 'nuzz prowling wolf' here.
* Mark Stewart
Saturday, 7 March 2009
Cooking with Alex
(Sorry! Couldn't resist it after my previous post!)More Alex Trocchi here.
Next when I get to my books in storage I will bring you William S. Burrough's recipe for majoun.
Cooking with Brion
"This is the food of Paradise - of Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises: It might provide entertaining refreshment for a Ladies Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution). In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by an 'un évanouissment reveillé'.
Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of de-stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.
Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as cannabis sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everyone in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called cannabis indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green."
Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of de-stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.
Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as cannabis sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everyone in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called cannabis indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green."
REPOST - Could've been written by me
In Search of the Dark Star
I'm a music collector, of sorts. Obsessive and arrogant. With pendantry bordering on unbearableness, some might say - and some do say. I collect the likes of Coil, Sun Ra, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Nurse With Wound, Can. Erratic, esoteric, obscure. Lately I've been into Dark Star. Not the band or the record label, but the track by the Grateful Dead. Come to think of it, I've always liked the Dead. Especially their 1969 album Live/Dead which I bought in the mid 1970s. It's got Dark Star on it. A whole vinyl album side long. It was like nothing I'd heard before. It has these weird guitar lines going on for eternity, making worm holes in the brain. I couldn't match any of them on my acoustic guitar, although I had mastered the intro of Smoke on the Water by then. But Jerry Garcia wasn't in the same league as Ritchie Blackmore - Jerry wasn't even on the same planet, judging by his freeform experimenations on the seventy or so live versions of Dark Star that I've collected so far.From 1968 till 1974 Dark Star was the ultimate Grateful Dead song, the centre piece of their legendary marathon concerts. Although originally recorded as a 3 minute single (with lyrics by Robert Hunter) Dark Star became the vehicle for improvisations that could take up 30 minutes or more and saw Garcia soaring and ascending to unknown regions. For Garcia as a solist Dark Star became what Chasin' the Trane was for John Coltrane, or Voodoo Child for Jimi Hendrix, and Starship for both Sun Ra and the MC5. Exploration of inner and outer space. Dark Star was prototypical of the early Grateful Dead. The track contained everything Jerry and the Dead stood for. Americana, psychedelic rock, free jazz. All in one long guitar solo aided by a fearless band - and inspired, I might add, by Owsley's finest.
'Dark star crashes/pouring its light into ashes', wrote Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead's lyricist. Cosmic hippie stuff? You bet! But although the Dead was an unashamed hippie band the musical structure of the song itself was far removed from the typical West Coast sound. Sure, in concert Dark Star was an extended jam, but compared to the jams that their peers, like Jefferson Airplane or Quicksilver Messenger Service played on stage it must be noted that Dark Star was not derived from the traditional 12 bar blues format. Where guitarists like Jorma Kaukonen and John Cipollina based their improvisations mainly on blues licks, Jerry Garcia seemed to draw from an all together different source. A source rich with all kinds of American (folk) music but transfigured and expanded by the influence of LSD. Let us not forget that Garcia and the Dead were heavilly influenced by the time when they worked as the house band for the (in)famous Acid Tests conducted by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Maybe more than other musicians of his day and age Jerry Garcia's views on music in general and guitar playing in particular were dramatically altered by the use of chemicals. The blues element in the Dead sound was personified by Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan (organ, harmonica, vocals) who usually kept a low profile whenever Dark Star was played. During the 80s, when Dark Star was very rarely to be found in a Dead set, keyboardist Brent Mydland used to ruin it for me with his pseudo-jazz noodling on what sometimes sounded like a plastic honky tonk piano. The best versions of Dark Star were performed in the early 70s, like for instance the magical and rather subtle Dark Star from 1971 in Columbus, Ohio (released on Dicks' Picks Volume 2) or the mesmerizing 37 minute version performed one year later in Philadelphia (Dick's Picks Volume 36). Of course, Jerry Garcia's cryptically fluent and warmly organic playing made Dark Star into the most celebrated Grateful Dead piece. But praise should also go to Phil Lesh, whose 'lead bass' never failed to mark new routes in space for Garcia to explore.
Great versions of Dark Star are easily to be found in the extensive discography of the band. Besides Live/Dead and the two Dick's Picks, I also recommend the version from the 4 CD set Steppin' Out With The Grateful Dead, Engeland '72. Those of us who can't get enough should check out www.archive.org where a few hundred (nearly 6,500 different recordings!) concerts by the Dead can be found. It's a real treasure trove for Dead Heads with downloadable gigs (mostly lofi-ish audience recordings) and streams (excellent soundboard recordings). A very special Dark Star that I've found on archive.org is from a Hollywood Paladium gig dated september 10th, 1972, where half way through Dark Star the band is joined by David Crosby on 12-string electric guitar.
Advanced Dark Star fans should try the double CD set Grayfolded by sample-artist John Oswald. Phil Lesh invited Oswald, who is wellknown and rather infamous in the music industry for his 'Plunderphonics', to have a go at the Dead catalogue. Oswald choose Dark Star for obvious reasons. He took some 50 versions recorded between 1968 and 1992 and transformed them by way of layering and 'folding' bits and pieces, speeding up and slowing down, and turning them inside out. The results, as released on Grayfolded, are impressive yet very beautiful - even for Dead-purists.
(Written by Q-Base @ Crummy-tapes.blogspot)
Defunkt!
Grateful Dead - 'Dark Star' Musichalle Hamburg 29th April 1972
The venue
Jerry Garcia.Today's choice in the continuing (been a while, sorry) series of all the 'Dark Stars' played on the Grateful Dead's European tour of 1972, is from Hamburg and is significant for me as it was the very first 'Dark Star' that I ever heard, having picked up the bootleg below as a 14 year old in Glasgow.
Bonus:'Matrix' (a combination of SBD & AUD scource) of 'Dark Star-Sugar Magnolia-Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks)- Who Do You Love'
Other Europe 72 Dark Stars:
Wembley, London - 04/08/72 here.
Bickershaw Festival - 05/07/72 here.
Rotterdam - 05/11/72 here.
(Use the search button on right to find more non Europe 72 live 'Dark Stars'.)
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