| Naked
Lunch by William S Burroughs 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. |
|
|
Bibliography: |