Saturns day ahhh the autonoma of weekends when the silence of alarmclocks proves that there are still seasons and this we call time is something born from our watching of the planets........here is something I have been trying to get on this site for about a week now, perhaps today is the day:
Naked Lunch (1991)
A film by David Cronenberg
Naked Lunch is a novel by the nomadic American beat writer William S Burroughs (1914-97), first published in 1959. The original text is both a humorous and horrific collage centered around themes of addiction in various forms, sexuality, the nature of language, and the experiences of the author whilst a heroin addict in the United States, Mexico, and Morocco in the 1950�fs.
The film adaptation of Naked Lunch is an analogous adaptation of the novel. The Canadian director David Cronenberg (Scanners, The Fly, Videodrome) actually consulted with Burroughs during the making of the film to develop a story based upon what many considered an unfilmable book. It comes together as a third story based on a combination of the original novel, the biography of William Burroughs and the cyborg insect visions of Cronenberg. The original text could be said to be more reptilian, but the film Naked Lunch is well and truly bug infested.
William �gBill�h Lee (Peter Weller) is a bug exterminator in New York and the year is 1953. At a cafe/diner he is asked by some writer friends about preferred writing method he replies in a deadpan voice �gDestroy all rational thought�h, which seems to be his primary mission statement. Someone is stealing his bug powder and his grotesque employers are not happy about it. Bill soon discovers his wife Joan (Judy Davis) is injecting it for its �gKafkaesque literary high�h qualities (�gyou feel like a bug�h) and she is addicted to it. He begins doing the same and descends into a bizarre world of strange espionage, insect typewriters with huge talking anal sphincters (who recruit him as an agent), alien beings, hallucinations, and sadomasochistic sex, while writing reports which become the novel �gNaked Lunch�h. His first action as an agent is to shoot his wife in the head during a drug binge. Although Bill is unaware of having being preprogrammed to murder by his �gcontroller�h as Joan was an agent of Interzone Inc., and not human but �gan elite core centipede�h. With the police after him he flees the United States, taking refuge in the North African free port of Tangier, an International Zone where �gNothing is real and everything is permitted�h. Here he continues with heavy drug use, conversations with talking insect typewriters, investigating Interzone Inc., report writing and also resumes a relationship with his dead wife who has taken the form of another writer, Joan Frost. Bill is also queer as �ghomosexuality is the best all round cover an agent can have�h, according to instructions from his typewriter. The film ends with Bill speaking the opening lines of the book �gNaked Lunch�h, and again shooting his wife as he crosses the boarder into the Soviet looking nation of Annexia.
It is a confronting and difficult film and for these reasons I found it interesting. Within both the original text and the film are narratives concerned with identity, sexuality, semiotics, simulation/representation, travel and the exotic. The concept of a third piece of art, which complements the original novel and the biography of the author is appealing, with a multimedia type genre suiting the multidimensional narrative. To understand the film in all its dimensions it is necessary to not only read the novel but also a biography of William Burroughs. The use of music is effective in the film with Ornette Coleman�fs wild jazz coupled with the traditional trance rhythms of Morocco transporting us deeper into the chaos of Interzone. Throughout the whole film it is difficult to determine what is actually real and what is dream and hallucination, which also seems to be a central theme in the novel.
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[2/21/2003 2:30:18 PM | Jim Didge]
Trying again...lost some valuable words there trying to upload and failed.....where do they go I wonder. Really tired at the moment but I am trying to get something down every day just to keep this thing viable. Instead of polluting the ether with my own story I submit some fiction based on a collection of true stories:
Shamanic Imperative
“I have no time. I know that I have been brought to the White Mountain Psychiatric Hospital and that for me now the music has finished. It was only ten days of constant playing in perhaps seven cities, many villages and anywhere I could sit for long enough to weave the magic, which I found for myself in the rhythms and notes that began in dreams all those years ago. Perhaps I touched enough among those of this continent to ensure that the invisible dance continues, perhaps not? Perhaps they have also been taken for I know that the doctors have been looking for me for a long time. Me, with no time and them with all the time in the world. Strange really considering how long this dance has been going that those who confine me now are calling themselves the deciders of time. I shall however begin at the beginning of my final journey and perhaps, if the spirits are willing, the men in uniforms shall leave me in peace long enough to tell the tale.
I entered Europe via Tangier aboard the fat boat that hops the short way across the water to Algerciras, with a 7-day transit permit for Spain, and I had come from the desert. It was the desert of Australia not that of Africa as I had only been in Morocco a few days before making the jump over to the Hollywood love lanes and chrome glass fetish parlours of Europe in the 21st century. I knew I had to move quickly so as soon as I moved away from the port areas I sat down and played my first notes. The shopping was just finishing for the day so many where on their ways home to prepare for the Television Assignments which their jobs had set for them earlier that day. I disturbed their routines with the first puckered blow of my horn carved from the petrified stump of the desert acacia. My clap sticks rendered as glass as I tapped them slowly together and began that which the wind had taught me in the first weeks of my loosing all in the sands. I found the magick half notes there in those weeks of silent education and now I had come to the soft underbelly of the beast to reek liberation upon any whose ears were open enough to hear, they did not even need to listen, only catch as few as 7 seconds of the sound and they themselves would do the rest.
The change came first into their eyes and then the way they walked. If they were carrying anything they usually just dropped it right where they were and began a more springy style of step. Often they took off their shoes but some even stripped themselves naked and began singing. It was a beautiful thing to see but usually I was unaware of it all. For myself the song had become so that it just drifted me right away, I could have been on fire with bull ants eating my testicals and nothing would have moved me from that dark mountain of sound, which rose up with the blowing. So I played and the way become open for all those that heard, they were suddenly heart born and all the ideas that had plagued them their entire adult lives where suddenly as chaff to the wind. Scattered they would usually rush to the nearest person who had not yet the feeling and begin pleading for juncture; a type of understanding that could not be explained. It was sad sometimes as not all could tolerate it, but they were now beyond harming themselves or others so there was never any danger. Only a lost look about them as they tried and failed to remember how it had been to win power over others or having the self-satisfaction of secret fantasies. These false realities, which before had composed whole personalities where now undetectable and everything seemed to be here and now but impossible to actually represent in any other way than gapping wonder. I knew I would not be permitted to play for very long and I had to keep moving if I was to make any sort of change to the madness all around me.”
The Music of Schizophrenia??
Police today reported the first case of terrorists using audio technology as a weapon of mass destruction.
A lone individual of unidentified southern origin has been playing sounds on the streets of southern European tourist towns, which infect the listener with a previously unknown form of schizophrenia.
Up to 9000 people have been hospitalised in the last 2 days and so serious is their conditions that they are all unable to describe either the so-called music or the perpetrator of the atrocity.
Doctors at the American Mission Hospital in Malaga said they had been expecting some form of attack by terrorists in recent weeks, following recent fringe media propaganda regarding food shortages in Africa being somehow linked to the international economy.
“We were ready for nerve gas but never expected music,” said head surgeon Dr Chuck Noriega as he issued an international request for the supply of slow release sedatives to deal with the influx of casualties.
Police meanwhile have intensified the search for the terrorist and have urged people not to listen to street musicians.
International Herald Tribune
May 23 2003.
“The first days of playing in Europe were not so difficult. Each location was chosen carefully and I could only play for half an hour at the most before the confusion became so great around me that I would have to pack up and slip away. Transport was not easy as my middle ear enlightenment made it impossible for me to travel at speeds of more than 30 or 40 kilometres per hour. Progress was very drawn but I discovered if I stayed away from the highways there was much less of a chance of me being detected by the authorities. So I moved slowly up the coast spreading the divine chaos, the Pan-ic as it had been in the hills all those centuries ago. I knew they needed it and after they met me they were grateful for the gift. This world that had been created for them was guaranteed to keep them fed and out of direct danger but what of the boredom that ate away at their souls nightly alone with only their dreams?
Problem was, I had no real plan, only to go, go, go as fast as I could and touch as many as possible before the inevitable crash with me being taken behind the scenes of the society which has so many public layers as seeming to be composed of only them. It could not have worked with recording and distribution as these avenues were sown up tighter than the tunnel control at Calais. Radio broadcasts would only have been allowed to happen for one short burst and then it would have been satellites, jamming, tracing and besides that sort of deal is expensive. It had to be authentic unmediated experience for the full effect to take people and that is rare thing in this circus of the berserk which daily takes from you in the morning and sells it back to you in the evening, as you try to remember what it was you actually wanted in the first place. So the street was the place and the harmonic trance beats the tune. Perhaps I though that I would be able to reach critical mass fast enough to escape detection and the liberation of what the Spirit called The Shamanic Imperative would continue by itself and I could go back to the forest where I was before all this began…………but that was not to be, as I found out in the last days. You see I discovered too late that I was not the first to be called to do this sort of forced evolution, just the first to be caught after the technology had been developed for the controlling terrestrial powers to introduce it into the population genetically. Only they were not moving toward expansive principles, shit no, they wanted to build the flesh machines needed to push the money around.
It was Barcelona and then over the border somehow into France when things started to get very sticky. I managed 36 hours of playing in the streets and subways of Barcelona and then just missed a military police raid on the squat I was saying in. They took out the 11 occupants in the zip lock prison transfer bags they use for absolute sensory deprivation these days. I was watching from inside a garbage silo across the square and knew that I would not be able to move until after nightfall and even then it would have to be through the sewer system if I was going to get out of town with my travel itinerary intact. Using a compass through the tunnels I made it to the northern quarter of the city and then broke cover heading for the hills as my grandmother used to say. At the boarder it was motion detectors on the microwave towers set at regulars intervals on the hilltops which picked me up first and then as I saw the armoured personal carriers coming towards me I tried to play but they already knew what to expect and all of them where wearing remote-directed sensory equipment. Everything they saw and heard was coming from somewhere else and whatever I did was simply blanketed out with electronic fill content. I could have been playing the most awesome trance disassociate journey and they would have only received straight marching rhythms and threatening visuals. Then it was the black bag and a hypo shot through the canvas………………Good night Irene.
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[2/19/2003 3:48:15 PM | Jim Didge]
My flat is a place of intense debate. Quite good actually as it forces me to think. This is something with which I need help with sometimes. At the moment the debate concerns wheather prostitution should be permitted in fact in Sweden (the Swedish legal phrasing is complicated and allows for only the best intentions to be emphasised when forbidding anything). I wish I could type as fast as I think. I imagine there will be an implant on day which performs such a task. I come from Australia which has basically legalised prostitution and now the debate rages in Sweden with such statements as "the myth of the happy whore" being made in the press...people screeching about "but is it a choice?" and there being brothels established in caravan parks along the Finnish boarder so Swedish men can pay for sex (some lonely elk farmers driving up to five hours to fuck a women who does'nt speak the same langauge they do). What do I believe? Difficult to take a stand on this one although I've thought of a few concepts that get me out of the really tricky questions: the main one is Morality, If we accept that it is a moral question then does that leave it up to whoever it is who establishes such things in society (Cop out? I say not). I myself am not offended by prostitution, having had friends who worked as such while trying to establish themselves as artists, musicians, students or travellers. They all did make a choice to sell their bodies, and not just for sex, some of them where trying up judges in leather and beating the hell out them ("you have been a very naughty boy Justice Elms"). It is not something I would recomend as a career to anyone, or something I would like to do myself (or be able to have my partner do), but neither is working in a high security psychiatric prison, and I have done that before myself. There are many nasty dirty dangrous jobs......they often pay well.....not many people do them for very long. It is difficult to say if prostitution has only negative or positive effects on citizens. It certainly can have a negative effect on a marriage, but that is pretty obvious. If you are married to a man who feels the need to visit a prostitute there requires some serious discussion going on around the kitchen table after the children have gone to bed (it's a lie otherwise). There are also, as far as I see, so many types of prostitution: the obvious image of the overdone mamma in her underwear on street corner is cliché¼There are peep shows, strippers, sex tourists, phone sex, massage and "mail order" brides, not to mention the world of the male prostitue, which does not receive as much attention and is often far more underground. There is also the top end of the market which crosses boarders with ease (often in a Lear jet), and is so discreet nobody hears about it or even recognises it; a hint was given in the USA a few years ago with the Heidi Fliess trial. One thing is for sure; as this European Union really seems to be coming together, the legal topography of the continent will have to become more and more consistent................
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[2/19/2003 12:13:13 AM | Jim Didge]
I supose I should begin with a little bit about myself....Born on a mountain in eastern Australia in 1969.........Grew up reading running and riding.......Finished high school 1986 having discovered poetry around 1983.......Began working and studying as a male nurse...got sick of hospitals and went to university 1988 studied journalism found The Word and decided to live by it....graduated University 1990......spent the next 10 years wandering the waste........have lived in Brisbane, a shack in the bush (a few times), in Sydney (Redfern- bless The Fern), in a tipi on the coast south of Sydney, in Varanassi India, in Amsterdam (de Pijp), presently in the north of Sweden (Ume›T and in many locations in between....married Amsterdam 1998 (Kraak de stat!!), and then a legal one in Sydney 1999 to Erika (met India 1996).....a son Silas born 14th April 2000...Studying English Literature Culture and Linguistics at Ume‘Âniversity and now Blog being part of a bigger project with the Humlab So lets roll......... More links: and for a tune and some pictures
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