- il y a 5 mois
William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (2010) is a documentary exploring the life and work of the influential writer William S. Burroughs. The film delves into his creative process, literary contributions, and lasting impact on contemporary culture. Featuring interviews, archival footage, and insights from those who knew him, the documentary provides a thoughtful and inspiring look at Burroughs’ life and artistry.
William S. Burroughs A Man Within 2010, William S. Burroughs documentary, literary documentaries, inspiring writer films, William S. Burroughs movie, A Man Within full movie, A Man Within trailer, A Man Within review, famous author documentaries, creative process films, literary influence movies, William S. Burroughs cast, must watch documentary films, A Man Within online, literary legacy films, insightful writer stories, A Man Within plot, educational documentary movies, William S. Burroughs highlights, artistic journey films, A Man Within streaming, influential author films, thought-provoking documentaries, William S. Burroughs analysis, A Man Within cinematic story, classic literary documentaries, writer biography films, inspiring cultural documentaries
William S. Burroughs A Man Within 2010, William S. Burroughs documentary, literary documentaries, inspiring writer films, William S. Burroughs movie, A Man Within full movie, A Man Within trailer, A Man Within review, famous author documentaries, creative process films, literary influence movies, William S. Burroughs cast, must watch documentary films, A Man Within online, literary legacy films, insightful writer stories, A Man Within plot, educational documentary movies, William S. Burroughs highlights, artistic journey films, A Man Within streaming, influential author films, thought-provoking documentaries, William S. Burroughs analysis, A Man Within cinematic story, classic literary documentaries, writer biography films, inspiring cultural documentaries
Catégorie
✨
PersonnesTranscription
00:00:00Death smells, I mean death has a special smell, over and above the smell of cyanide, cordite, blood, carrying her burnt flesh.
00:00:14It's a grey smell, it stops the heart and cuts off the breath, smell of the empty body, smell of field hospitals and gangrene.
00:00:25Now folks, if you'll just care to step this way, you are about to witness the complete all-American de-anxietized man.
00:00:55William Seward Burroughs, heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, founded by his grandfather, was born in 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri.
00:01:22After graduating from Harvard University and traveling Europe, he moved to New York City, where he met his future wife, Joan Vollmer, and fell in company with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
00:01:34Experimenting with new forms of literature, as well as drugs, the three friends formed the vanguard of a cultural phenomenon that would come to be known as the Beat Generation.
00:01:45Thanksgiving Day, November 28th, 1986.
00:01:51Thanks for the wild turkey and passenger pigeons destined to be shed out through wholesome American guts.
00:02:00Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
00:02:07Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
00:02:12Thanks for vass herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcasses to rot.
00:02:21Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
00:02:28Thanks for the American dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bear lies shine through.
00:02:39In the 50s, anything opened up a good avenue to thinking because it was, people talk about the 50s, they see happy days and think it was fun.
00:02:49It was horrible, the 50s. It was the most terrible time.
00:02:53It was the first memory I had and it was that you had to be exactly like everybody else.
00:02:56The Beat Generation was crushing that. It was an attempt to bust out of that, man.
00:03:01All of this was a big rap on the knuckles of mainstream, white, staid, pool-in-the-backyard America.
00:03:10Kid, what are you doing over there with the niggers and the apes?
00:03:18Why don't you straighten out and act like a white man?
00:03:22After all, they're only human cattle. You know that yourself.
00:03:28I hate to see a bright young man fuck up and get off on the wrong track.
00:03:33So, what was the Beat Movement? It was real.
00:03:36The Beat Movement, of course it was. There weren't many changes in the 60s. It became quite political.
00:03:42But as I've always said, it's more a sociological literary phenomenon.
00:03:47It was a sociological movement of worldwide importance.
00:03:52An unprecedented worldwide importance. A cultural revolution, you might say.
00:03:58So, I would characterize it as a spiritual liberation movement, actually.
00:04:03Black women's lib, black lib, spirit lib, or spiritual lib, that began in the 40s.
00:04:09First took shape as a literary movement, with a production of a number of notable utterances.
00:04:16Allen Ginsberg's first publication was Howl. It was published in 1956.
00:04:24Beatniks, in 1957, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and in 1959, Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs.
00:04:32These three books came out.
00:04:33Beatniks were big. Overnight, it was like a hula hoop.
00:04:38Much to their embarrassment, I think, because it started out pretty much in North Beach and stuff, like poets.
00:04:46So, once it became so big in the media, they were embarrassed by that term.
00:04:51All of those poets, they couldn't fit what the stereotype of Beat was.
00:04:56That was a media hype to sell papers.
00:04:59And they pimp that boy, they pimp that bad boy, really.
00:05:03Burroughs himself never identified with the Beat generation.
00:05:07He was a godfather and mentor.
00:05:09He was a bit older, and since he was also Harvard educated,
00:05:13he just brought in a whole bunch of ideas just from classical education that he had.
00:05:21And invented a style of book, almost.
00:05:24I mean, it was so original, and anything that's so original like that eventually lasts.
00:05:30Cut, angle, forward line.
00:05:33This man, the stimulus ripples for the cortex, even in the data description,
00:05:37can area, a vision, as a flicker experience, will project,
00:05:41further experience, and accompanies, this is a mass, subliminal, there, and as a...
00:05:44I think probably Freud would think him to be deeply, deeply troubled, profoundly mentally ill.
00:06:09Everybody was enamored by William because he was famous before anybody else,
00:06:13and he was also famous for all the wrong things.
00:06:16He was the first person that was famous for things you were supposed to hide.
00:06:18He was gay, he was a junkie, he didn't look handsome, he shot his wife,
00:06:23he wrote poetry about assholes and heroin.
00:06:26It was not easy to like.
00:06:29Class was an essential factor in the work and life.
00:06:34William came from a very traditional upper crust American family,
00:06:38though the fortune may have been lost, the breeding was deep and instilled,
00:06:43and thus the gentleman we know was bred.
00:06:48I could totally relate to the dry thing, the salesman thing that he'd created,
00:06:55you know, and this very underplayed thing, just very, very removed, very removed.
00:07:05Also very, very interested in death, and I think that's what scared Americans more than his writing itself.
00:07:14If he'd had that worldview and he was writing in a more polite way and it didn't have to do with guns and junk.
00:07:21Usually the most radical work tends to come from the upper classes because they're trying so hard to shock,
00:07:27so hard to get away from their roots.
00:07:30So he's a fascinating character, uniquely American in that regard.
00:07:34I don't think that work could have existed had he not been breaking away from an incredibly patrician Midwestern background.
00:07:42There was no rebellion in those days, certainly not in that strut, or very little that I saw in isolation cases,
00:07:53but by and large they were in a good spot, their families were in a good spot,
00:07:58and the sons wanted to just go along exactly the same way.
00:08:04Thanks for the KKK, for nigger killing lawmen feeding their notches,
00:08:23for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces,
00:08:33thanks for killer queer for Christ stickers, thanks for laboratory aids,
00:08:44thanks for prohibition and the war against drugs,
00:08:52thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business,
00:08:58thanks for a nation of finks,
00:09:00yes, thanks for all the memories.
00:09:03All right, let's see your arms.
00:09:07You always were a headache, and you always were a morse.
00:09:14Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
00:09:25Burroughs achieved a great deal more than being arguably the greatest writer in the world in the second half of the 20th century,
00:09:42because he did break down so many barriers, and he did play into and influence so many other fields, like rock and roll, like the movies.
00:09:51Well, William seemed to have a connection with anything and everything.
00:09:56You know, you see a movie like Blade Runner, and then you find the phrase Blade Runner came from him.
00:10:02The term heavy metal is attributed to him.
00:10:06Soft machine, you know, there's so many phrases, names of groups that come from William's work.
00:10:12He's like another kind of Bible.
00:10:15He's a great pioneer of the gay liberation movement, or the whole position standing of gay people around the world, really, now.
00:10:23Where did you learn about sex, originally, from friends?
00:10:30Books.
00:10:31Books, yes.
00:10:32Books, books.
00:10:33There's a book called The Plastic Age by Percy Marks.
00:10:36It was sort of a daring look in the 20s.
00:10:39The Green Hat and Coming of Age in Samoa.
00:10:42This is the 20s I'm talking about.
00:10:45It's a very different era.
00:10:47The Green Hat and Coming of Age in Samoa
00:11:06Burroughs once said to me, if one man stands up and, you know, rejects the bullshit of society,
00:11:15it makes it possible for everyone else to follow on.
00:11:18And he was that man, to some extent.
00:11:20And here is Reverend Braswell in the Denver Post.
00:11:24Homosexuality is an abomination to God and should never be recognized as a legal human right any more than robbery or murder.
00:11:34At the present time in Colorado, where this was written, approximate mob conditions prevail.
00:11:42And by mob, I mean my own business.
00:11:45No sex crimes on the book.
00:11:48You can fuck a cow right in front of the sheriff.
00:11:51And all he can say is BOOM!
00:11:54Which you can hardly expect to bring down the barn with an act like that.
00:11:58With the right virus offset, perhaps we can get this whole show out of the barnyard and into space.
00:12:05This is the space age and we are here to go.
00:12:09They asked him at a press conference what he thought of a gay rights movement.
00:12:15And his response was, I have never been gay a day in my life and I'm sure as hell not part of any movement.
00:12:26But Burroughs was a deconstructor of labels.
00:12:30You know, there was just another sort of amalgamized effort to not be marginalized.
00:12:39And he was one of the very few, maybe Jean Genet, maybe pure Pablo Pasolini, who had the balls way before it was like vogue.
00:12:51And certainly when it was dangerous, to say, I'm queer.
00:12:56But he was way beyond that because he didn't respect any of the rules of the gay world at all either.
00:13:01He was hardly a boy in the band.
00:13:03You know, he would have hated that.
00:13:05I mean, that culture would have been very foreign to him because there were so many rules.
00:13:09There were so many rules in the straight world too.
00:13:11And he violated the rules of even junkies' worlds.
00:13:15He opened up to me not gay culture, he opened up gay rebels that couldn't fit in gay culture.
00:13:20And I have to say that Burroughs, to this day in his work, have an uneasy relationship with queer culture in America or queer writing or whatever.
00:13:36Burroughs was never seen as part of that.
00:13:38He was still too transgressive.
00:13:40Even when it became sort of okay to be queer, he was beyond queer.
00:13:45I have to sort of take Burroughs and Warhol as parallel figures.
00:13:56Two people who in the late 50s and early 60s stood up for what they believed in, made no pretense about it, were totally out front about it.
00:14:07At that time that was absolutely outrageous.
00:14:10I mean, it's hard for people who didn't live in those times to know.
00:14:14When I moved to America in 1965, you could not mention the word homosexuality without everyone thinking you were gay.
00:14:21So, and it was really just verboten.
00:14:23And it's because of Burroughs and Warhol and what followed in their wake that the whole gay liberation movement sprung up.
00:14:31How old were you when you had sex?
00:14:37Thirteen?
00:14:38Fourteen?
00:14:39Fifteen?
00:14:40Sixteen?
00:14:41Sixteen?
00:14:42Yeah, boarding school.
00:14:43Boarding school.
00:14:44Boarding school.
00:14:45Okay, so you had sex when you were sixteen with who?
00:14:48Boy in Mexico.
00:14:51William's boyfriends were a series of obsessions, usually more or less foredoomed.
00:14:58Well, first of all, his cousin, Prin Hoxie, in St. Louis, who went off to a different university, Princeton, and then died a year and a half later in a drunken accident in New York.
00:15:11He was decapitated by a tunnel.
00:15:15And then he fell in love with a boy at Los Alamos Ranch School, and there was a big disgrace, and little Billy ran away home to St. Louis and couldn't go back to Los Alamos at all.
00:15:27Sent off for his diaries, and as he wrote, when the box arrived, the fearful diaries in him, he couldn't wait to rip it open and make sure he could destroy the offending pages.
00:15:39Some of these things were examples of how he had tried to write and why he had given up.
00:15:44He says, fact is I had gotten a sickener, meaning like a jail sentence.
00:15:49I mean, boyfriends like Jack Anderson, the one that he cut his finger off over, and who helped him wreck the family car.
00:15:57Louis Marker, the American student at Mexico City College, who was probably a pretty good intellectual company, but was not going to commit his life to Bill Burroughs.
00:16:08So, he very much was thinking of boyfriends as members of a class different from him.
00:16:14After I'd lived with William for several weeks, and then began my relationship with Richard Elovich, my first lover,
00:16:22I remember William commenting once, see, you and Richie have this idea about intellectual and social equals being a couple.
00:16:33He says, in my day, that's just unheard of. I mean, you know, it was an inter-class thing.
00:16:46In the fall of 89, I met him at his old place, his old stomping grounds in the Bowery, the bunker.
00:16:54And at that time, I was 18. I was a freshman in college.
00:16:58I was already basically Allen Ginsberg's boyfriend, but always kind of planned out that I would still hook up with William when and if the opportunity presented itself.
00:17:08But were you sexually interested in me at that time, do you think?
00:17:12Uh, I don't. Not particularly.
00:17:15Because I don't remember any.
00:17:17I don't remember any.
00:17:19How come? Because I was kind of cute.
00:17:24Looking back to my hindsight.
00:17:26Well, I don't know.
00:17:27If it was like an ordinary relationship in one of his novels, it was usually the theme of chasing after somebody
00:17:34that didn't quite want to have anything to do with the author of what you're reading.
00:17:41Which was, I think, in Queer, something that was shown, like, what his writings were for.
00:17:49They were love letters to make the person that he was interested in laugh.
00:17:54Because they were almost comedy routines.
00:17:57In a way, he was somebody who appeared to be incredibly sad to me as time went by.
00:18:04Someone who'd been hurt.
00:18:06For example, you read that William was crazy in love with Allen Ginsberg.
00:18:11And that it was almost always an unrequited passion.
00:18:16And I think that that disappointment that he had when he did fall in love, which was so rare for him,
00:18:27made him a lot more withdrawn sexually and emotionally.
00:18:34A lot more afraid of being vulnerable and then being hurt.
00:18:40So he started to close down quite a lot emotionally.
00:18:45Do you want to be loved?
00:18:47Not really.
00:18:49Depends.
00:18:51By who or what.
00:18:53By my cat, certainly.
00:18:57There was something essentially alien about William.
00:19:02And I think when it came to his physicality and his romantic life,
00:19:06he was one of the most awkward people in the world.
00:19:08While there was this facade of a gentleman, there was a very lonely man underneath that three-piece suit.
00:19:14And it was only once that I really heard him speak of someone he was genuinely interested and obsessed with,
00:19:24Mark Ewart, who he described as a young man having skin like alabaster.
00:19:30One night I was like, you know, I should tell this guy I love him, right?
00:19:36It was late at night and I wasn't quite sure if he had already fallen asleep for the night or not.
00:19:42So I kind of nudged him.
00:19:44I said, William, William.
00:19:46William, William.
00:19:48William?
00:19:49I said, William, I love you.
00:19:50I love you, William.
00:19:51He said, oh, you love women?
00:19:55I said, no, no.
00:19:57No, I said, I love you, William.
00:19:59And then what did he say back?
00:20:01He's like, oh, that's okay or something like that.
00:20:05And kind of patted me.
00:20:07But then the question is, well, what did he feel towards me?
00:20:10Or what did he feel towards other human beings in general?
00:20:17I remember reading this interview with him, and he was talking about nuclear war.
00:20:21And he said that all of a sudden he just started sobbing, which, first of all,
00:20:24it was very hard for me to picture him sobbing, period.
00:20:27But what he was sobbing about is he said he had all of a sudden been thinking about nuclear war,
00:20:31and then he was struck with this horrific thought of, well, what would happen to my cats,
00:20:36my six cats, if I had died?
00:20:38And that that just wrecked him.
00:20:41You can just see that cats were these kind of these pure spirit beings for him.
00:20:46And I remember some of our very first conversations the first night I met him
00:20:49were about endangered species and about lemurs that he was really into.
00:20:53And I think it was, that was just a really safe place for his love to flow.
00:20:59And I don't think that meant, I don't think that, so like his animals and his cats and these lemurs.
00:21:05And I don't think that that means that that love was false.
00:21:08But I definitely had the sense that it was all kind of flowing in this fairly narrow channel
00:21:15that would probably have been too hard for him in this lifetime to show for other people.
00:21:21And I hope in whatever his next lifetime is nowadays, it's easier for him.
00:21:25And it's not so threatening.
00:21:28I'll let you, I'll let you, I'll let you, I'll let you, I'll get you something.
00:21:38I'll get you something.
00:21:40No, no, no, no, I'll get you.
00:21:42I need that.
00:21:43I'll get you.
00:21:44Alright then.
00:26:37...
00:26:48...
00:26:49...
00:26:50...
00:27:04And he encouraged me to sing before I sang publicly.
00:27:16I think, actually, William loved Brian Gyson more than anybody.
00:27:23He was my friend of many years. Painter, writer, musician, and raconteur. Extraordinaire. Boy, could he tell a story.
00:27:33His studies of North African music and magic, of Japanese and Arabic polygraphy, as well as his own painting and writing, were influential upon a whole generation of creative individuals who went on to launch the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s.
00:27:53He was at ease with the Rolling Stones, the magicians of ancient jujuka, with the princesses and duchesses of Europe, and the young emigres who flocked to the Beat Hotel in Paris in the 1950s.
00:28:11When we lived there and began our collaboration, Brian invented the dream machine and the cut-up method. And his ideas were crucial to my own development as a writer.
00:28:27The cut-up was invented by Brian Gyson in the Beat Hotel. He wanted to set up a board for his artwork, and he had some newspapers on a table, and he cut through the board using the Stanley blade, and he cut through the newspapers.
00:28:45And when he looked at the newspapers, he realigned the pages of type and he could see that words made a particular kind of sense, almost like a telepathic sense. And he felt that he had discovered something truly fantastic and showed it to William Burroughs and was just so inspired and was able to really do terrific cut-ups.
00:29:13In fact, William produced three cut-ups. In fact, William produced three cut-up novels.
00:29:22You know, William had read a lot in philosophy, the nature of consciousness, in science, in mind travel, you know, magic, tantrism, genetics, the cloning worlds, looking at semantics, looking at intrinsic nature,
00:29:42looking at impermanence, looking at how we name and qualify, and what are, you know, where does that, where does that come from?
00:29:47His dedication to altered states and knowledge and tinkering with consciousness, that as well, I mean, always leads one into conflict with the powers that be, because that too is an illegal activity.
00:30:06The flicker administered under large dosage and repeated later could well lead to overflow the brain areas, sounds and even odours. That is a categorical characteristic of the consciousness expanding grey waters produce many other phenomena. Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways.
00:30:25The first things that William was investigating as a personal crusade or as a personal philosophy, all those things made him an outcast, an outsider and an outlaw, quite literally.
00:30:37When you have someone who's knowingly choosing to be outside the law or to refuse to accept the template of legality that some societies imposed upon them, then you have the potential for some degree of chaos or destruction of that status quo, that nonsenseless reality.
00:31:04So William chose a path that he knew would bring him into conflict with the powers that be, with social norms, and with the legal system. And he chose it because it would be intolerable to him to be a hypocrite and hide away his real sense of being.
00:31:30I bring not peace, but a sword.
00:31:35It's no mistake that the main obsession of Burroughs was control.
00:31:40The first time we met in 1971, just before we left his apartment, he said to me,
00:31:47How do you short circuit control? That's what I want you to spend your time thinking about, meaning my life.
00:31:57And that's basically what we've done.
00:32:00As long as you don't decide not to either act or say, but just sort of hide and be a hypocrite, then you're doing their job.
00:32:14People do it different ways.
00:32:16But no, I think that William was a very, very political, radical, anarchist man.
00:32:21In Oklahoma, they found a tiny little bit of hot down by this right place.
00:32:36He's got life in prison.
00:32:41I've been in prison.
00:32:42I've been in a miniscule or not.
00:32:45Are you going to shoot that son of a bitch?
00:32:46Where?
00:32:47In America?
00:32:48Oklahoma.
00:32:54His upbringing was middle class, but he had a housekeeper who introduced him to opium.
00:33:02So it's not surprising that he went in the direction that he went.
00:33:07Well, if you've got the Yahé papers, and he's the only guy I've ever known to take Yahé, which is the absolute sine qua non of hallucinogenic drugs.
00:33:15And he's also the guy that Timothy Leary and Babaram Das came over to Morocco and had him try psilocybin.
00:33:20He's the only guy I've ever heard of or known to take the original CIA's version of LSD, LSD-6, which is like a horse pill of insanity.
00:33:29I mean, the stuff that I did as a hippie in the 60s, you know, was like bubble gum, was fool's gold compared to the extensive experience that that guy had.
00:33:38He was a walking pharmacologist, you know, in the encyclopedia of it.
00:33:46There's a junk gesture that marks the junkie like the limp wrist marks the fag.
00:33:52The hand swings out from the elbow, stiff fingered, palm up.
00:33:57William Burroughs, sure, he romanticized drug use, but not in the way that usually people think romantic.
00:34:02I think no one had written about it.
00:34:04Nobody had read about it.
00:34:05It was a hidden, terrible thing.
00:34:07So that someone wrote about it in any kind of joyous way, which he did.
00:34:11Joyous and terrible and wonderful.
00:34:13Sure, he did romanticize it.
00:34:15Did anybody read Naked Lunch and try heroin?
00:34:17Probably.
00:34:18So what?
00:34:19That doesn't mean that that book shouldn't be read.
00:34:21I'm for anybody that shows, writes about their obsession and shows a murderer that can write a book about how great it is to murder.
00:34:29Doesn't mean it's not a good book.
00:34:31What the breakthrough or the late 50s was after how was a breakthrough to those people who lived in America and were Americans, but who were never focused on.
00:34:41And so the whole question of narcotics to kind of, I mean, even with the fantastic thing that Burroughs conceived of it, the idea that there were junkies in America, you know, was somewhat of a social breakthrough.
00:34:55And so the idea that Burroughs was cool, particularly in his persona.
00:35:02Usually when we think of cool in context of the hip world, the beat world, we're thinking of the difference between alcohol and heroin.
00:35:13Hip people who liked to take dope or who were addicted to it, they thought it was the pinnacle of coolness to go score a bag, maybe of Dr. Nova.
00:35:23They even had, like, William's own brand in a way, or many brands, score a glassine bag of this and take it to the bunker to share it with the Pope of Dope.
00:35:40On the street outside, Rivington and Bowery was a big pickup place.
00:35:44The junkies were five blocks going east.
00:35:47Howard was coming to visit me.
00:35:49He said, John, I scored for William.
00:35:51And they shot up together.
00:35:52I mean, Howard at that point had to be HIV positive.
00:35:55But William, having seniority, shot up first.
00:35:58William shot up many times.
00:36:00People came and visited.
00:36:01But he always got the first shot so that he never got AIDS.
00:36:07I thought that was pretty great.
00:36:08I mean, everyone died, you know, at least sadly so.
00:36:14There's always a question with someone who has the glamour image,
00:36:20let's say, Burroughs had, or Keith Richards has, or Lou Reed has,
00:36:24where they're seen to kind of glamorize using heroin.
00:36:28It seems like a very cool sort of thing, you know.
00:36:31But if you read everything William wrote about heroin,
00:36:36it was to warn people to not take it.
00:36:38And he was using it as a sort of image or symbol of control.
00:36:43That this is the ultimate control.
00:36:45You have to buy the product or else you're sick.
00:36:47I'm doing this press conference with Bill.
00:37:00I said, Bill, you know, I had this migraine last night, man.
00:37:03And I came by these pills in my medicine cabinet.
00:37:05And I had two Percodans in it.
00:37:07And his eyes went, what?
00:37:09I said, well, what are they?
00:37:11And he said, what do you mean, what are they?
00:37:15I said, well, what is Percodan?
00:37:19And he put his face about an inch from mine and said,
00:37:25it's junk, and walked away.
00:37:30And I sat there with my metaphorical ass spanked.
00:37:39And immediately saw the distinction between this actor
00:37:47who was acting Bill Lee and his addictions
00:37:51and a guy who'd like roamed the world in a sewer, hooked on this shit.
00:37:59And that said, that whole incident with him, man,
00:38:05with him leveling me with its junk,
00:38:10was like a laser through me about everything else in my life
00:38:16that I'm doing or taking on a whim.
00:38:20Not just pills, you know, sex or careerism or cigars
00:38:27or whatever that I think are just like, I can get by through.
00:38:31I can wing this today.
00:38:33I can hold my breath through this now because it's not the real deal.
00:38:36And then all of a sudden you wake up and it is the real deal.
00:38:39You know, it is life handed to you on a toilet seat, you know,
00:38:44rather than a silver platter.
00:38:46He opened the tunnel to a way out.
00:38:50Because if you're doing something and you want to stop,
00:38:54you're not going to stop until you figure out what it is you're actually doing.
00:38:58It's like ultra-subject regulator.
00:39:03It's a unique apomorphine.
00:39:05It's a metabolic.
00:39:07Dramatic relief from anxiety.
00:39:13Dimethyltryptamin.
00:39:14Alarming and disagreeable symptoms.
00:39:21Use of opium and our derivatives.
00:39:24The legend is that he went to London and kicked it with the apomorphine cure in 1956.
00:39:33The reality is that he was chipping around and off and on to one extent or another his whole life.
00:39:43I mean, when I met him in 74, he was not taking it except just, you know, gobble a pill or whatever.
00:39:53But within two years, he was again.
00:39:58And at that time, it got such a grip on him that the breakthrough there was to enroll in the methadone maintenance program.
00:40:08Under, his physician was named Dr. Harvey Karkas.
00:40:13Give me something to shoot.
00:40:15Don't you get any kicks like a mule, babe.
00:40:18I want something to shoot!
00:40:21C'mon!
00:40:22I want something to shoot!
00:40:25I want something to shoot!
01:03:46et le Wild Boys, dans lequel il prophesie de punk rock.
01:03:50William avait une vision de l'avenir
01:03:52qui était parallèle à punk rock.
01:03:55C'est l'idée d'un pack de boys,
01:03:57ou d'un pack d'androgyniste souls
01:04:01qui s'éloignent dans le futur avec sores
01:04:04et scarlet fever visions,
01:04:08et tout le mouvement de Johnny
01:04:13dans le Wild Boys.
01:04:16Et mon premier album, Horses,
01:04:19est litteré avec Burroughs type de référence.
01:04:23Punk rock a été influencé par Burroughs
01:04:26parce que j'ai regardé punk rock
01:04:28comme une grande, anti-authoritaire,
01:04:31culturel rediscovery et recreation révolution.
01:04:35Je veux dire, vous étiez à l'apprent
01:04:37tous les catégories et hierarchies.
01:04:39Vous étiez totalement anti-authoritaire.
01:04:42Et vous êtes après ces voix qui ont été
01:04:45neglectés parce qu'ils n'ont pas
01:04:46donner les valeurs de la
01:04:49middle-class bourgeois société.
01:04:50Dans le sens où punk
01:04:52c'était tout en train de dire la vérité
01:04:54et être anti-authoritaire
01:04:56et être black humour,
01:04:57je pense que Burroughs
01:04:58était totalement punk rock
01:05:01et un rôle modèle.
01:05:02C'est funny,
01:05:02parce que le punk rock
01:05:03c'est que je pense que c'est très intéressant
01:05:04pour lui,
01:05:05plusso que,
01:05:05c'est,
01:05:06comme,
01:05:07counter-culture 60s
01:05:09kind de musique.
01:05:11Je me rappelle,
01:05:11en 1977,
01:05:12c'est Burroughs.
01:05:13Il y a eu,
01:05:13il y a eu,
01:05:13il y a eu,
01:05:14il y a eu,
01:05:15il y a eu,
01:05:16c'est tellement
01:05:17hip,
01:05:17qu'il y a eu,
01:05:18il y a eu,
01:05:18il y a eu,
01:05:18il y a eu,
01:05:19il y a eu,
01:05:19il y a eu,
01:05:19c'est complètement
01:05:20amazé
01:05:21qu'il y a eu,
01:05:21il y a eu,
01:05:22il y a eu,
01:05:22il y a eu,
01:05:22English rock group
01:05:23The Sex Pistols
01:05:24wrote a song called
01:05:25God Save the Queen.
01:05:27I think he commended it
01:05:28and he says like,
01:05:29I'd like to sort of
01:05:29further the sentiment
01:05:30with a piece I wrote
01:05:31called Bugger the Queen.
01:05:33And he would read these
01:05:34verses and then he would like,
01:05:36you know,
01:05:37exclaim each one with like,
01:05:38Bugger the Queen!
01:05:39And then the whole audience
01:05:40was starting to join in
01:05:41and every time he said it
01:05:41they were,
01:05:41Bugger the Queen!
01:05:46Went to his house
01:05:47a couple times
01:05:48and hung out,
01:05:48you know,
01:05:48shot the Super 8 film
01:05:50and photos and whatnot
01:05:51and just kind of hung out
01:05:52with William a little bit.
01:05:53So, you know,
01:05:54he showed us around
01:05:55his backyard.
01:05:56We saw the different things
01:05:57he had going on out there
01:05:59and he built this box
01:06:00called the Orgone Box.
01:06:01It was like an outhouse
01:06:02almost or something like that
01:06:03was what it looked like.
01:06:04It was, you know,
01:06:05a bunch of plywood sheets
01:06:06put together
01:06:06with a little hole cut
01:06:07in the door
01:06:08and you would sit in there
01:06:09and I think Wright's theory
01:06:12was that sitting in there
01:06:13would allow you to gather
01:06:15certain accumulations
01:06:17of Orgone energy
01:06:18as he called it.
01:06:19They're kind of hard to explain
01:06:20but I gather they have
01:06:21something to do with him
01:06:23feeling like any lax
01:06:24in one's life
01:06:25had something to do
01:06:26with not being able
01:06:26to achieve a true
01:06:28and pure orgasm.
01:06:39I think he thought
01:06:40rock and roll's bullshit.
01:06:43Mostly is,
01:06:45you know,
01:06:46but then,
01:06:48so are most novels.
01:06:52So, you know,
01:06:54but yeah,
01:06:56I don't think he had
01:06:57felt any great affinity
01:06:58for all that.
01:06:59A lot of the pioneers
01:07:01of punk had
01:07:04read Burroughs extensively
01:07:06like Iggy Pop,
01:07:07Lou Reed,
01:07:07and Will Shatter
01:07:09from Negative Trend.
01:07:10Some of the ideas kind of
01:07:12trickled into people's work
01:07:14and then other people
01:07:15absorbed that work
01:07:17not knowing how much
01:07:18of it had come
01:07:18from Burroughs.
01:07:20Lust for Life
01:07:21by Iggy Pop
01:07:22has Johnny Yen
01:07:23and Hypnotizing Chickens
01:07:26and I just thought
01:07:27it was really cool.
01:07:28I wrote a song called
01:07:31Give Me Some Skin
01:07:33which is
01:07:35one of my most depraved
01:07:38sounding numbers,
01:07:39apparently,
01:07:40people say.
01:07:42I love it
01:07:43and I used,
01:07:44I talk about him
01:07:46in it.
01:07:46I was 23
01:07:49when I wrote it
01:07:51and then there's one
01:07:52of his characters
01:07:53in a reference to him
01:07:54and the lyric is
01:07:55Typhoid Mary,
01:07:57she got soul,
01:07:58sucks all night
01:07:59on an old asshole.
01:08:02Whip it on out,
01:08:03whip it on in,
01:08:05give it to me honey,
01:08:06you gotta give me some skin.
01:08:07and then the second verse is
01:08:09Billy Billy Lee,
01:08:10ain't no fool,
01:08:12all the junkies
01:08:13think he's cool.
01:08:22It's a good vocal,
01:08:23you should hear it sometime
01:08:24and it's particular
01:08:25and it doesn't even
01:08:26I can't even get
01:08:27the words on it.
01:08:29Certainly someone like Dylan
01:08:31took a lot of inspiration
01:08:32as a wordsmith
01:08:33from stuff that
01:08:34Alan and William
01:08:35were doing
01:08:36and the way they were
01:08:36approaching language
01:08:37and what they were writing.
01:08:38You know,
01:08:39a very sort of
01:08:40modern kind of approach
01:08:42to just language
01:08:43and using it
01:08:45to uncover different truths.
01:08:47And I think that's why
01:08:47people in the music community
01:08:48have responded
01:08:49to William's work
01:08:50is because there were
01:08:51a lot of ideas
01:08:52that he could
01:08:53take off from.
01:08:57One of the early
01:08:57Dead Kennedy songs,
01:08:58the B-side of our first
01:09:00single was
01:09:01The Man with the Dogs.
01:09:02The song itself,
01:09:04the lyrics are just
01:09:04not coming together.
01:09:06I couldn't figure out
01:09:07how I wanted to tell
01:09:08the story
01:09:09or what belonged where
01:09:10and it was just
01:09:11kind of a big mess
01:09:12and so I finally
01:09:13threw up my hands
01:09:14and figured
01:09:15what have I got to lose?
01:09:16I'm going to try
01:09:17the Burroughs method.
01:09:18I'm going to cut up
01:09:18every single line
01:09:19of this song
01:09:20and move it around
01:09:22until I get something
01:09:23I like.
01:09:24And sure enough,
01:09:24it worked.
01:09:26Some of the examples of this,
01:09:50sometimes when I realize
01:09:51I'm going to do this in advance,
01:09:53the rough drafts sometimes
01:09:54have to be kept in plastic bags
01:09:57and come out more like this.
01:09:59This is Vulcanus 2000
01:10:02from a later Lard project.
01:10:07White tuberculosis folks,
01:10:09Christmas Eve and old junkies
01:10:12selling Christmas seals
01:10:13on North Park Street.
01:10:16The priests, they called him.
01:10:17White tuberculosis folks.
01:10:20The medium of the counterculture
01:10:22was collaboration,
01:10:24beginning with the obvious example
01:10:25of rock glue.
01:10:50of rock glue.
01:10:53We were having a good old time
01:10:55in the bunker there
01:10:56and in the midst
01:10:57of the conversation
01:10:58we got to Marlena Dietrich.
01:11:00She best would be.
01:11:02to be in the middle of the night.
01:11:04And they had to cancel all her,
01:11:06uh, all her, uh,
01:11:08Australian tour because
01:11:09she was so drunk.
01:11:10Could not, would not heal.
01:11:13And she refused to listen
01:11:15or even discuss
01:11:17the possibility of surgery.
01:11:20Uh, well,
01:11:23that's the kind of
01:11:25bitch she was.
01:11:26And, uh,
01:11:28he started singing
01:11:29Falling in Love Again
01:11:30in German.
01:11:32And, to me,
01:11:34that signaled the beginning
01:11:36of the record.
01:11:36Oh, well, here's another William.
01:11:39William.
01:11:40I'm on the old
01:11:42school full south
01:11:45lady I'm
01:11:47as dealt.
01:11:49This is
01:11:50minor
01:11:51out
01:11:52on the
01:11:54car
01:11:55east.
01:11:55Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada
01:12:25...
01:12:27...
01:12:29...
01:12:51It's not so easy if you're a really great writer...
01:12:54à travailler avec les visuels, et il s'échecédait.
01:12:58Donc, il a floweré au début de sa vie,
01:13:00et il était capable de faire tous ces grands visuels.
01:13:03Il a toujours dit que c'était Brian's death, en 1986,
01:13:06qui a liberé à lui de devenir un artiste.
01:13:09Nous avons été shootés ici pour plusieurs années,
01:13:12et un jour, William et les gens qui ont conduit il y a eu,
01:13:15et ils avaient des canes de spray-paint.
01:13:18Donc, ils ont pris des canes de spray-paint
01:13:21et ils suspendent les en front de la pli-wood.
01:13:24Et William, il a commencé à exploser le spray-paint
01:13:27sur le pli-wood.
01:13:29Et c'était le début, à mon avis, de l'art, à mon avis,
01:13:32de l'art.
01:13:35J'ai eu l'impression de l'art,
01:13:37c'est l'over-the-top, fake macho.
01:13:40Il n'a pas, pour moi,
01:13:43une richesse comme un art que l'art de l'art.
01:13:48Fake macho est funny pour moi.
01:13:50C'est l'art de l'art de l'art, c'est l'art, c'est l'art de l'art.
01:13:53C'est l'art de l'art, c'est il y for moi.
01:13:54C'est l'art de l'art, c'est l'art de l'art?
01:14:09Oh, il y a les kinds.
01:14:11All kinds?
01:14:12Yes.
01:14:13Brushwork, shotgun, paint knife.
01:14:17What's the exact process?
01:14:20Do you set up the cans?
01:14:21There's no exact process.
01:14:22If you wanted to use a shotgun,
01:14:24I'd take a piece of plywood,
01:14:26put a can of spray paint in front of it,
01:14:29and shoot it with a shotgun.
01:14:35That was a good one.
01:14:37The sprays across your services
01:14:41is a possibility.
01:14:42What better do you get?
01:14:45I went to the LA County Museum
01:14:47where he had an art show.
01:14:49And in the courtyard of the museum
01:14:51there were all these glitterati
01:14:53and Absolute had a booth
01:14:55and they were serving burros
01:14:57because his drink is vodka and coke.
01:14:59And so after we had the little soiree,
01:15:02they took us up for the tour of the show.
01:15:05So we started going down the line
01:15:07of all of the paintings.
01:15:09We got to one which was this piece of plywood
01:15:11that had this angle on it.
01:15:13I remember the guy's roof
01:15:15that the plywood came on.
01:15:16And I had to chuckle
01:15:17because here it was,
01:15:18a scrap of plywood
01:15:19that had been sitting over there
01:15:20and now it's got a price tag
01:15:22of like $7,000 on it
01:15:24sitting in the LA County Museum of Art.
01:15:26too.
01:15:44John Witter of Recognition Physics says,
01:15:46nothing exists until it is observed.
01:15:50The artist observes something visible to others
01:15:53and puts on paper or canvas
01:15:56something that did not exist
01:15:59until he observed it.
01:16:02Obviously, he had some shortholds as a father,
01:16:20you know, even though his son's books
01:16:22I think were really, really good.
01:16:24He was very, very talented.
01:16:25But you read that biography,
01:16:27it was a terrible, terrible, wounded life.
01:16:30So, was William a good father? No.
01:16:32Billy Burroughs Jr. had little contact
01:16:34with his father,
01:16:35whom he tried to emulate.
01:16:37His father continued to neglect him,
01:16:39so Allen Ginsberg often came to Billy's rescue.
01:16:42Billy wrote two books
01:16:43about his struggle with alcohol and drugs.
01:16:45He was one of the first people
01:16:47in the United States
01:16:48to get a liver transplant.
01:16:50But by 1981, at the age of 33,
01:16:53Billy was dead of acute alcoholism.
01:16:58He was here and James was here
01:16:59and I was upstairs when Billy died.
01:17:0110.30 in the morning,
01:17:02James comes upstairs
01:17:03and knocks on my door
01:17:04and says,
01:17:05John, I have to talk to you.
01:17:06Something very serious happened.
01:17:08Billy has died.
01:17:09So we go downstairs
01:17:10and I come in here
01:17:11and I hugged William
01:17:13and it's the only time in my life
01:17:15I ever saw William crying.
01:17:17I hugged him
01:17:18and as I'm hugging him
01:17:19there are these things,
01:17:20these great tears coming,
01:17:21not for very long.
01:17:22William is William.
01:17:24But he cried for a few minutes
01:17:25and then we talked a little bit
01:17:27and then he went into the bedroom
01:17:28and closed his door
01:17:29and it was deep grief.
01:17:30He was devastated
01:17:32and he felt incredibly guilty about that.
01:17:36That he knew he hadn't been present enough
01:17:39in William Junior's life,
01:17:41had ignored him for years on end
01:17:43and was finally becoming his friend
01:17:46and it was too late.
01:17:49And William Junior was trying
01:17:51to emulate his father for approval
01:17:54in the most destructive possible ways
01:17:57and the most simplistic ways.
01:17:59If I become a junkie
01:18:01and write a book about a drug
01:18:02then I'll be like Dad
01:18:04and Dad will love me, you know.
01:18:06And it was a tragic situation
01:18:09to see the youngest William Junior
01:18:12destroying himself very publicly
01:18:19in front of William Senior
01:18:22to try and be accepted as an equal
01:18:27as part of the Beatnik family
01:18:30rather than the Blood family.
01:18:32And William just didn't know
01:18:34how to deal with that,
01:18:35how to express himself.
01:18:42After Billy's death, Burroughs adopted
01:18:55his companion and secretary, James Grauerholz.
01:18:58Together, the two left New York
01:19:00and moved to Lawrence, Kansas,
01:19:02where William spent the remainder of his life.
01:19:05which way did you want to go back?
01:19:12I came to Lawrence with the intention
01:19:14of luring Burroughs to Lawrence
01:19:16because he was reaching an age
01:19:18where it was kind of time to retire.
01:19:20It was an alternative to the heroin scene of the Bowery.
01:19:33I think James undoubtedly saved William.
01:19:37If not from drugs, from some other misadventure.
01:19:41William and Burroughs might fantasize
01:19:45about being these impenetrable
01:19:48gray men with canes
01:19:51fighting off young would-be attackers,
01:19:54but he was vulnerable.
01:19:57And, you know, an old man with a cane
01:20:02is just as weak as an old man without a cane.
01:20:07I bought a plot yesterday, man.
01:20:13Is your personal belief on death?
01:20:16Personal belief on death.
01:20:18Well, um...
01:20:21Well, is that how you know
01:20:24that you aren't dead already?
01:20:27No, quite seriously.
01:20:29The libardo, the period between death and rebirth,
01:20:34which is supposed to be populated
01:20:38by some mythological monsters,
01:20:40but I think it's much more likely
01:20:42if the monsters were too mythological,
01:20:45you would wise up
01:20:46that this wasn't for real,
01:20:48but if it was very much like your real life,
01:20:51you might very well be dead
01:20:53and not know it at all.
01:20:55I was just going to say,
01:20:58those monsters are projections of your own mind.
01:21:01Exactly, exactly, yes.
01:21:03External.
01:21:04But as I frequently said,
01:21:09I do believe in the possibility
01:21:11of survival after death.
01:21:13I think it's the only goal worth striving for.
01:21:17He certainly became much more explicitly lovable
01:21:22in his final year.
01:21:26Gentle and sweet-tempered.
01:21:30Not that he was so cantankerous and difficult before,
01:21:34but he...
01:21:36There was a transformation.
01:21:40I talked to William when Alan died,
01:21:59and it was incredibly hard,
01:22:02and he died just months later.
01:22:05It was as if there were some...
01:22:08Well, with both of them,
01:22:10these sparks went out of the world.
01:22:12Night, dear.
01:22:15Night, dear.
01:22:16Night, dear.
01:22:18What's the year?
01:22:20When we saw James Grauerholz,
01:22:23just after William had passed,
01:22:26we met in Ginsberg's apartment in the East Village,
01:22:29and he showed me a picture of William
01:22:33just after he'd died,
01:22:35that someone had taken.
01:22:40And it really upset me, surprised me.
01:22:45I started crying.
01:22:47And we said to James,
01:22:49what sort of frame of mind was he in
01:22:53when he died?
01:22:57And James said,
01:22:58well, look what he wrote,
01:22:59the last thing he wrote in his journal.
01:23:02And we said,
01:23:03oh, thank God.
01:23:05He managed to get there before he passed away.
01:23:08He finally managed to say that.
01:23:12But it took him a lifetime
01:23:14before he could say out loud
01:23:17that love was part of an equation of existence.
01:23:23I do believe in kind of saints that you can look up to
01:23:44when you're young and you're starting out
01:23:46and you don't fit in anywhere
01:23:47and you want to do something in the arts
01:23:48and you know really early you want to do it
01:23:50and you know that you're going to cause trouble
01:23:52with what you want to do
01:23:53and you don't care really.
01:23:54You don't want to fit in.
01:23:55People don't like you in school,
01:23:56but you don't care.
01:23:58You don't want to be those people
01:23:59and you don't want to hang out with them
01:24:00in the first place.
01:24:01So William for those people
01:24:03will always be almost a religious figure
01:24:07and I think that's wonderful
01:24:08and I think he would like that.
01:24:09Ours is just another skin
01:24:33simply slips away
01:24:38you can rise above it
01:24:42it will shed
01:24:44easily
01:24:45it all will come out fine
01:26:21Ours is just a craving and a twist of the wrist
01:26:30We'll undo the stopper with abrupt tenderness
01:26:39Die, little sparrow, and awake singing
01:26:47It all will come out fine
01:26:52I've learned it line by line
01:26:57One coming wire
01:27:00One silver threat
01:27:05All that you desire
01:27:10Rolls on ahead
01:27:15Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
01:27:25One coming wire
01:27:41One coming wire
Commentaires