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Poster design by Mishka Westell for this month’s Austin Psych Fest. Billy Gibbons’ pre-ZZ Top psychedelic outfit, The Moving Sidewalks, surprised everyone by reforming for a New York gig last month, their first performance together in 44 years. • Pye Corner Audio played the Boiler Room, London, last week, and remixed a track from FC […]

Photo by Kate Simon. Howard Brookner’s 86-minute documentary Burroughs: The Movie (1983) has been mentioned here on several occasions, and with good reason since it’s the best film anyone has made or will make about William Burroughs and the Beat circle he emerged from in the 1950s. Brookner’s documentary is a model film biography, opening with […]

Der Triumph des Tintenfisches from Meggendorfer-Blätter (c. 1900). Via Beautiful Century. Much dismay this week at the news that Coilhouse—the web and print magazine founded in 2008 by Nadya Lev, Meredith Yayanos and Zoetica Ebb—was closing its doors for the foreseeable future. I always loved what they were doing, and was delighted when S. Elizabeth […]

Illustration and design by Karlheinz Dobsky. Above and below: samples from Die Lux-Lesebogen-Sammlung, an exhibition of booklets for young people published by Sebastian Lux from 1946–1964. All were designed and illustrated by Karlheinz Dobsky. • At The American Scholar: “Vladimir Nabokov’s understanding of human nature anticipated the advances in psychology since his day,” says Nabokov […]

Jarek Piotrowski is a Polish-born Canadian artist whose exhibition of hand-cut PVC mats at Galerie8, London, borrows a title and inspiration from William Burroughs’ The Soft Machine. From the usual slab of gallery-speak: Drawing on the subversive William S. Burroughs novel The Soft Machine (1961), Piotrowski’s work explores themes of the human body under siege, […]

Calder & Boyars, 1972. Design by John Sewell. This must be the first space novel, the first serious piece of science fiction—the others are entertainment. Mary McCarthy defending The Naked Lunch in the New York Review of Books, June, 1963. Mary McCarthy’s view—echoed a year later by Michael Moorcock and JG Ballard in the pages […]

Picador, 1982. Being an occasional cover designer I naturally have a more than passing interest in how the books of favourite writers are packaged. I’ve mentioned a couple of times how much I liked the covers that Thomi Wroblewski produced in the 1980s for UK editions published by Picador and John Calder. Wroblewski is a […]

Naked Lunch (1991). So what happens when you take a regular scenario like this: There is a type person occasionally seen in these neighbourhoods who has connections with junk, though he is neither a user nor a seller. But when you see him the dowser wand twitches. Junk is close. His place of origin is […]

The Cut-Ups (1966). More of the present preoccupation. Choosing Brion Gysin as a subject seems like a detour but the shots above are from Antony Balch’s 1966 film The Cut-Ups which also features William Burroughs, Ian Sommerville and someone-or-other’s cute boyfriend of the time who’s only ever credited as “Baby Zen”, a person about whom […]

William Burroughs and Maurice Gerodias. More specifically, William Burroughs photographed in 1959 for Life magazine by Loomis Dean. This was no doubt a story based around the publication of The Naked Lunch by Olympia Press: in the full set there’s shots of Burroughs with Olympia boss Maurice Gerodias, some pictures of the author signing copies […]

What was Network 21? It’s easiest to grab an explanation from the people responsible: NeTWork 21 was a pirate television station which broadcast a 30mns program on Fridays from midnight throughout April to September 1986 in London. It had never been done before, and has not been done since anywhere in the UK. The broadcasts […]

Nite Flights (1978) by The Walker Brothers. Cover design by Hipgnosis. something attacked the earth last nite with a kick that man habit-eye cut the sleep tight boys who dreamed and dreamed of a city like the sky Scott Walker quotes Brion Gysin (and who knows what else) in Shutout (see below), one of the […]

It’s that time of year again when my good friend Ed Jansen unveils the latest edition of Passage, his Dutch-language webzine: The 14th issue of Passage contains articles about language, the dreamachine of Brion Gysin, the collaboration of Gysin with William Burroughs and Ian Sommerville (The Third Mind), a recently discovered photograph of Arthur Rimbaud’s […]

The interior of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County “Old Main” Building, 1874. Reblogged over the past few days on numerous Tumblr postings, none of whom had bothered to find out any details about the picture. I’m with Silent Porn Star on the contextless reblogging issue. • Keith Richards et Mick Jagger à […]

A poster by Kazumasa Nagai. • Franco Maria Ricci creates the world’s largest maze. “The former publisher said he first confided his ambition to Jorge Luis Borges, who characteristically told him the world’s largest maze already existed and was called a desert.” Related: Mirror, Mask, Labyrinth, a review of two new collections of Borges’ poetry. […]

Rammellzee. I consider that immortality is the only goal worth striving for: immortality in space. Man is an artefact created for space travel. William Burroughs, 1982 We have to leave this tasteless mould of a planet. Rammellzee, 2004 It’s fitting that a post about the late Rammellzee should follow one about Brion Gysin even if […]

Brion Gysin—autoportrait (1935). “A shaman to me is always a pansexual being,” says the gay Canadian filmmaker. “These guys all came out of that period where queer was really hardcore, it was part of their radical art — and of course it was illegal.” (more) The filmmaker in question is Nik Sheehan discussing FLicKeR, his […]

Aladdin Sane (1973). Cover photo by Brian Duffy who died this week. • Among the obituaries this week: artist Louise Bourgeois; poet and partner of Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky; film director Joseph Strick, a man who dared to film James Joyce’s Ulysses; photographer Brian Duffy. • The dustbin of art history: “Why is so much […]

The author at home in his Bunker. When I was writing last August about Yony Leyser’s new Burroughs documentary William S Burroughs: A Man Within I mentioned Howard Brookner’s 1983 film, Burroughs, a 90-minute study of the writer’s life and work that as a film biography remains definitive. Brookner was fortunate to capture all the […]

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros. “The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. […]