Showing posts with label William Burroughs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Burroughs. Show all posts

Thursday, December 24, 2009

William S. Burroughs: The Junky's Christmas

Francis Ford Coppola Presents
William S. Burroughs' The Junky's Christmas

Part claymation and part live action. The Junky’s Christmas, depicts a story by William S. Burroughs written in 1952. Burroughs takes down a book and reads us the story of Danny the car wiper, a desperate character who has just been released from jail on the upper west side of Manhattan, searches for a fix on a cold Christmas day. His story ends in a revelation that even Danny could never have thought possible.

Merry Christmas!
E

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

William Burroughs: Thanksgiving Prayer



THANKSGIVING PRAYER

William S. Burroughs
 Hear Burroughs Read His Poem: Mp3 Download
Thanksgiving Prayer (QuickTime 7.6 MB)
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.

“Thanksgiving Day” first appeared in the chapbook Tornado Alley, with illustrations by S. Clay Wilson. Director Gus Van Sant then put together the above montage whose power derives almost solely from Burroughs’ reading and, perhaps, the strange sad-old-man expression of his staring eyes at the end. There are numerous variants of “Thanksgiving Day” floating around the internet, but this entry is from RealityStudio.org who copied this directly from the original printed text.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Panel discussion: Leary, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Hoffman, Corso, Di Prima + McKenna

corso ginsberg burroughs
From: The Psychedelic Salon

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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Gregory Corso, and Diane Di Prima

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PROGRAM NOTES:
"There are no bad drugs. There are simply people who don’t know how to use them. Intelligent people use drugs intelligently, and stupid people are going to abuse drugs the way they abuse everything else. And our function is to raise the level of intelligence. We have to have a program of drug education." –Timothy Leary

"I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made." –Allen Ginsberg

[NOTE: The following quotes are all by Terence McKenna.]

"To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances." –Terence McKenna

"It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, some percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake. And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake. It is never entirely asleep. It exists in some kind of indeterminate zone."

"Technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey-mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth, or redemption myth, to lay over the crazy, contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist, post McLuanist, electronic, pre-apocalyptic existence."

"I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying [than conspiracy theories]. The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one!"

"The global destiny of the [human] species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream."

"The carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people’s lives is love. Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in Nature."

"The primary contribution of 20th century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information. … The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked."

The Psychedelic Salon