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 While we usually shun improv in favor of calculated risk, “Naked Lunch” is an obvious exception, an attempt to use techniques of “automatic writing” employed by author Burroughs. A free-association on the color blue, little censoring in the creation stage was allowed. On top of unrehearsed percussive loops (found garage objects such as the crunch of accidentally tripping over an ancient cage fan or the pop-smack of lips for a sound check) was smothered guitar growl, placed on an old plank atop a shitty practice amp in our darkroom’s sink. Feedback growing in intensity matched a single string’s harmonic, “plucking” the string and shaking its diving board foundation, which fed into this cycle. (This idea owes some theoretical similarities to Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire, in which a miced 50 ft wire was excited by an oscillator.) As a gag on Modern Classical, samples from Zorn’s Cobra were inserted, neutralizing its original celebration of slap-dash into a structured endeavor. All in all, the song was meant to have a tossed-together feel, a stream-of-consciousness jam session in which the knob-turner is more important than the musician, and so the video’s aesthetic followed suit. In several feverishly productive days, a rotating composition of fingernails, dead skin, and clipped hair was put together. This grotesque imagery represents physical growth occurring long after the host body is deceased, tying into the notion that Burroughs was in essence a heroin-addicted zombie creating while “dead”. An obscured shot of a pin-up model drapes behind in a wash of blue, signifying the sexual as it’s perverted into crude obscenity (an adjective often used to describe the novel). It’s blocked by a hazy smokescreen, a dark joke on the way junk can short-circuit libido. The final images make apparent that the ubiquitous blue background is actually a crashed computer screen, the infamous “Blue Screen Of Death” that’s so synonymous (like self-medication) with impeded productivity .  “Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper -------- have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goofballs . . . So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past irridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish . . . New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It’s a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico. Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, nigger-killing sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel . . . Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water.” - William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959) “Egos drone and pose alone like black balloons, all banged and blown On a backwards river the infidels shiver in the stench of belief And tell my mama I’m a hundred years late I’m over the rails and out of the race And the crippled psalms of an age that won’t thaw are ringing in my ears” - Beck, “Bottle Of Blues” (1998) “There is no one, nothing to see The night is useless and so are we Because everybody knows The fabric of folly is falling apart at the seams And I’ve been looking for a good time But the pleasures are seldom and few There’s no whiskey, there’s no wine Just the concrete and a worried mind ‘Cos everybody knows death creeps in slow Till you feel safe in his arms And I’ve been looking for a new friend I don’t care if he’s decrepit and grey” - Beck, “O Maria” (1998)  The Dream Syndicate – “Burn” DePaul University Avant-Garde Music Society – John Zorn’s Cobra Wire – “Fragile” Lone Justice – “I Found Love” Men At Work – “Be Good Johnny” Fingernails Hair clippings Smoke clip art Alberto Vargas – pin-up model painting Self-sample – lip smacks, guitar feedback, finger snaps, furnace, electric fan, microphone foam windshield, spoken word, percussion & vox |
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