William Burroughs, by Royal Appointment http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/mick_brown/blog/2009/01/16/william_burroughs_by_royal_appointment
by Mick Brown Jan 16, 2009 Nobody better embodied the maxim that the true subversive always travels in disguise than William Burroughs. Transgressive novelist, junkie, homosexual, erratic marksman, Burroughs was invariably to be found dressed in a suit, tie and an expression of lugubrious inscrutability. The notable exception to this was during his sojourn in Morocco, when Burroughs blended in by wearing a djellaba, invariably with the hood drawn over his head, earning him the name among the local boys - with many of whom he was intimately acquainted - of El Hombre Invisible. A series of photographs of Burroughs in Paris and London (is he a suburban bank-manager? An undertaker?), and photographs taken by him, will be on show from next week in an intriguing exhibition at the Maggs Gallery in Hays Mews, London. The pictures of Burroughs were taken by his friend and cut-up collaborator Brion Gysin, when Burroughs was living at the 'Beat Hotel' in Paris in 1959, and by the exhibition's curator Barry Miles, the Beat historian and author of a number of excellent books on the period. The photographs taken by Burroughs himself are prints from a series of negatives that the author gave to Miles when he was living in London between 1972 and 74. These are mostly what would nowadays be called 'psycho-geographical' studies - taken from the window of the rooms where Burroughs was living in Duke Street, St James, and on street-corners, demolition sites and alleyways in the vicinity, and which Burroughs intended not as art studies but as visual 'deconstructions' and a way of developing the texts he was working on at the time. Most intriguing are a series of photographs of the Moka Bar, London's first ever espresso bar, which had been opened by the actress Gina Lollabrigida in 1953 and was located at 29 Frith Street in Soho. And therein lies a story, which Miles recounts in his catalogue. After attending the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968, Burroughs became interested in the idea of 'cut-ups' as a way of altering consciousness and subverting control. He began experimenting with tape-recordings, recording situations on the street and then playing them back in situ, as Burroughs put it, 'tampering with actual reality.' Burroughs experiments suggested to him that taking photographs and making recordings in or near some location that you wish to discommode or destroy will disrupt the 'time space contiuum', leading to 'accidents, fires or removals.' In 1972 Burroughs decided that his dissatisfaction with Scientology merited an attack on the organisation's premises, which were then located at 37 Fitzroy Street in Bloomsbury. Over a period of some weeks he haunted the premises, taking photographs and making tape-recordings. Sure enough, Miles recounts, within a couple of months the Scientologists had packed their bags and moved to 68 Tottenham Court Road. Fortified by this success, Burroughs now attacked a new target, the Moka Bar, where, he complained, he had been the victim of 'outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy and poisonous cheesecake'. Burroughs began the attack on 3 August 1972, making no secret of his activities. 'They are seething in here', he reported. 'The horrible old proprietor, his frizzy-haired wife and slack-jawed son, the snarling counterman. I have them and they know it.' As Burroughs returned on a daily basis to play the previous day's recordings and take more photographs, their business began to fall off and they kept shorter and shorter hours. On 30 October 1972, the Moka Bar closed. Later the premises reopened as the Queen's Snack Bar - 'a name', Miles notes, 'that gave Burroughs a certain degree of satisfaction.' This exhibition is the first at Maggs Gallery, an interesting new adjunct to Maggs Bros - London's most distinguished antiquarian bookshop. Maggs is one of those places you could drive past 100 times without noticing - a discreet Georgian house on Berkeley Square, where the Maggs family have been trading since 1853, nowadays by royal appointment. As well as antiquarian books and manuscripts, the company have recently extended their interest into the realm of counter-culture. A catalogue of 'international situations' contains interesting pamphlets, posters and ephemera related to the Beats, the Sex Pistols and the Situationists. Even if you can't afford £2,000 for a three page typescript of William Burroughs, Salt Chunk Mary, dated 1965 and signed by the author in 'a child like scrawl' (he was drunk apparently) or the £42,000 it would cost you to buy a signed first edition of TE Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom - it's worth pretending you can in order to ring the bell, gain admission to Maggs and lose yourself happily browsing the shelves. There are few things more seductive than the evocative aroma of aisles and aisles of rare books - a limitless world of ideas, lining the shelves like time-bombs, waiting to be opened and exploded. Subversives disguised in fine leather binding. -- William S Burroughs: London Photographs is at Maggs Gallery, 50 Hays Mews, London W1J 5QJ, from January 19 to February 20 . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. 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