Weekend links 253

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A painting by Stephen Mackey.

• “Creativity is visual, not informed thought. Creativity is not polite. It barges in uninvited, unannounced—confusing, chaotic, demanding, deaf to reason or to common sense—and leaves the intellect to clear up the mess. Above all else, creativity is risk; heedful risk, but risk entire. Without risk we have the ability only to keep things ticking over the way they are.” Revelations from a life of storytelling by Alan Garner. Related: Tygertale on Garner’s Elidor (1965), “the anti-Tolkien”. The BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Elidor remains unavailable on DVD but may be watched on YouTube.

• “One of my revelations was to reverse everything I’d been taught. Making lettering as illegible as possible falls into that way of thinking.” Psychedelic artist and underground cartoonist Victor Moscoso talks to Nicole Rudick about a life in art and design. Related: “I’ve gotten a lot of bad write-ups in newspapers over the years and they like to refer to my stuff as ‘kitsch’…Well, my stuff is way fuckin’ kitsch. It’s kitsch to an abstract level, you understand. It’s fuckin’ meretricious.” I love it when Robert Williams kicks the art world.

• “…a cerebral, challenging, visually stunning piece of 1970s American science fiction that enweirds the human perspective by challenging it with a nonhuman one.” Adam Mills on the inhuman geometries of Saul Bass’s Phase IV.

• “[Delia Derbyshire] taught me everything I knew about electronic music.” David Vorhaus talks to David Stubbs about White Noise and why he prefers the latest technology to old synthesizers.

• Costumes from Alla Nazimova’s film of Salomé (1923) have been discovered in a trunk in Columbus, Georgia.

• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. I, “music for a residual haunting” by David Colohan.

• At Dangerous Minds: Queer, boho or just plain gorgeous: photographs by Poem Baker.

Grimm City, a speculative architectural project by Flea Folly Architects.

Mad Max: “Punk’s Sistine Chapel” – A Ballardian Primer.

In Search of Sleep: photographs by Emma Powell.

Drains of Manchester

Road Warrior (1985) by The Dave Howard Singers | Warriors Of The Wasteland (Original 12″ mix, 1986) by Frankie Goes To Hollywood | Drive It Mad Max (Super Flu Remix, 2009) by Marcus Meinhardt

Atman, a film by Toshio Matsumoto

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Atman was made four years after Metastasis in 1975, and shares similar features: another static object—a woman sitting outdoors wearing a hannya demon mask from the Noh theatre—is seen from different angles in a succession of crash zooms and encircling jump cuts. Infra-red film gives the scene its lurid colouring this time; as in as in Metastasis the picture occasionally bleaches to white. Toshi Ichiyanagi once again provides an electronic soundtrack. Ten minutes of this makes for a very strange film. Watch it here.

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Metastasis, a film by Toshio Matsumoto

Metastasis, a film by Toshio Matsumoto

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Or Toshio’s Psychedelic Toilet. Toshio Matsumoto is known to cineastes for feature films such as Funeral Parade of Roses (which I’ve still not seen—sorry, Thom!), but he’s also responsible for a number of experimental films like this one. In Metastasis (1971) we watch a toilet bowl for 9 minutes while the colours and contrast shift continually. Matsumoto said (in a scrambled quote):

I used the Erekutoro Karapurosesu (Electro Color Processor), which is mainly used in the field of medicine and engineering, to create moving image textures Metastasis, I was interested in layering images of a simple object and its electronically processed abstraction. The electronic abstract image is manipulated in a certain rhythm, depicting an organic process.

This might be tedious if it didn’t also have a decent electronic score by Toshi Ichiyanagi. Watch it here.

Chumlum, a film by Ron Rice

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25 minutes of superimpositions, hammock swinging, fabric waving and costume play with Jack Smith as master of ceremonies. The music by Angus MacLise (under the direction of Tony Conrad, whatever that means) gives the proceedings a suitably dreamy and hallucinatory air, like an attic restaging of Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Yesterday’s Doctor Benway operation featured Warhol Superstar Jackie Curtis as the nurse, and there are two more Superstars among the participants here: Mario Montez and Gerard Malanga; Montez had appeared in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures a year before. (Tony Conrad was the sound recordist on that occasion.) Ron Rice’s film was made in 1964, and is another of those products of the mid-60s that anticipates the later excesses of the decade. Watch it here.

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The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, a film by Ira Cohen

Paging Doctor Benway

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Roy Scheider as Dr A. Benway in Naked Lunch (1991).

1: Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs

So I am assigned to engage the services of Doctor Benway for Islam Inc.

Dr. Benway had been called in as advisor to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens are well adjusted, cooperative, honest, tolerant and above all clean. But the invoking of Benway indicates all is not well behind that hygienic facade: Benway is a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control. I have not seen Benway since his precipitate departure from Annexia, where his assignment had been T.D.—Total Demoralization. Benway’s first act was to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest and, except under certain limited and special circumstances, the use of torture.

“I deplore brutality,” he said. “It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.”


2: Doctor Benway Operates (1983)

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A short sequence from Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie. Burroughs himself takes the role of the notorious doctor in a staging of the operation scene from Naked Lunch.


3: Repo Man (1984)

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Alex Cox’s feature film includes a hospital scene in which a Doctor Benway and a Mr Lee are paged over the PA. As I recall, Mr Lee is requested to “return the drugs”. There’s apparently a similar scene in Dark City (1998) but if so this must be in the director’s cut which I’ve yet to see.


4: Nomads (1986)

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I’ve not seen John McTiernan’s thriller but it contains another instance of a Doctor Benway being paged at a hospital. (Thanks, Márcio!)


5: Naked Lunch (1991)

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David Cronenberg’s film shows the address of Benway’s surgery to be in Mott Street, New York. This happens to be in the Chinatown area of the city, and is also the location of the Genco Olive Oil Company in The Godfather: Part II.


6: Standards (2001) by Tortoise

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Track 4: Benway.


7: Autopsy (2008)

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Adam Gierasch’s horror film has Robert Patrick playing a Doctor Benway. With a title like that it seems almost inevitable.


8: Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)

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Near the beginning of Panos Cosmatos’s feature film Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers) is seen consuming a quantity of unspecified pills. A brief shot shows the origin of the drugs. Some of the experiments taking place in the Arboria Institute where Nyle works aren’t far removed from either Cronenberg’s or Burroughs’ fictions.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Birth of a Zimbu
Seward/Howard
Thot-Fal’N, a film by Stan Brakhage
Mr Bradly Mr Martin Hear Us Through The Hole In Thin Air
The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, a film by Gerrit van Dijk
Burroughs at 100
Nova Express, a film by Andre Perkowski
Decoder, a film by Jürgen Muschalek
The Burroughs Century
Interzone: A William Burroughs Mix
Sine Fiction
The Ticket That Exploded: An Ongoing Opera
Burroughs: The Movie revisited
Zimbu Xolotl Time
Ah Pook Is Here
Jarek Piotrowski’s Soft Machine
Looking for the Wild Boys
Wroblewski covers Burroughs
Mugwump jism
Brion Gysin’s walk, 1966
Burroughs in Paris
William Burroughs interviews
Soft machines
Burroughs: The Movie
William S Burroughs: A Man Within
The Final Academy
William Burroughs book covers
Towers Open Fire