{"id":13419,"date":"2013-02-18T03:03:40","date_gmt":"2013-02-18T03:03:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=13419"},"modified":"2024-04-09T13:13:44","modified_gmt":"2024-04-09T12:13:44","slug":"the-ticket-that-exploded-an-ongoing-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2013\/02\/18\/the-ticket-that-exploded-an-ongoing-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ticket That Exploded: An Ongoing Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/ticket1.jpg\" alt=\"ticket1.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em>The book that made my head explode when I was 16. Calder &amp; Boyars edition, 1968; design by John Sewell.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Years ago the idea of an opera based on <em>The Ticket That Exploded<\/em> would have been a wry joke: a novel brimming with text that&#8217;s fragmented even by Burroughs&#8217; standards, as well as the usual preoccupations with spurting cocks, alien sex, parasitic invasion and erotic asphyxia. That said, if you can swallow the content (so to speak) a libretto is no doubt easy to create from all those sentence fragments, and there&#8217;s no worry about anyone complaining that you&#8217;ve missed some crucial part of the story. James Ilgenfritz&#8217;s <em>The Ticket That Exploded: An Ongoing Opera<\/em> attempts just this in an extract which can be seen on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LUz_A2FZybI\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">YouTube<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Premiered at Issue Project Room while I was Artist in Resident in 2011, and based on William S. Burroughs&#8217; 1962 novel of the same name, <em>The Ticket That Exploded<\/em> takes all its text directly from the novel. I wrote the libretto and composed the music, which was then exquisitely interpreted by some of the greatest musicians in the New York area. Jason Ponce collected a massive array of bizarre visual materials and innovative digital processing programs to perform the visual component of this work live onstage at the premiere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There&#8217;s more from Jason Ponce at <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/48469947\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Vimeo<\/a>. A DVD of the complete work is planned in 2014. Via <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/supervert\/status\/301536073211850752\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Supervert<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LUz_A2FZybI\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/ticket2.jpg\" alt=\"ticket2.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Elsewhere on { feuilleton }<br \/>\n\u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/themed-archive-pages\/the-william-burroughs-archive\/\">The William Burroughs archive<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The book that made my head explode when I was 16. Calder &amp; Boyars edition, 1968; design by John Sewell. Years ago the idea of an opera based on The Ticket That Exploded would have been a wry joke: a novel brimming with text that&#8217;s fragmented even by Burroughs&#8217; standards, as well as the usual &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2013\/02\/18\/the-ticket-that-exploded-an-ongoing-opera\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Ticket That Exploded: An Ongoing Opera&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,28,7,5,3],"tags":[4557,4558,2990,1037,1190],"class_list":["post-13419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-burroughs","category-film","category-gay","category-music","tag-james-ilgenfritz","tag-jason-ponce","tag-john-sewell","tag-supervert","tag-william-burroughs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-3ur","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}