William Burrough's Junky animated cartoon
adapted and abridged
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=7787544216554700224
http://vimeo.com/3045491
the first part: opening
part 2: A dream that I had of Burroughs when I was in Thailand, with the true and real time soundtrack.
part 3: Main Narrative
The fourth installment: Closing credits.
I was raised in a solid, three story house in a large city. My parents were very well educated.
It was in the summer of 1944 during the war that I first used heroin. My friend Norton worked at the shipyards. One August evening, he visited my apartment with a machine gun and a small pharmaceutical box like a first aid kit with five 1 tenth gram syrettes of morphine tartrate. A syrette is like a triangular toothpaste tube. There would be a pin which would puncture a needle. This needle would then be ready to use.
I knew of a short order cook named Jack. "The morphine I could get rid of right away. The Tommy gun will take a bit of time. The law. Let's take a walk."
At Jack's apartment, there was a man. A friend of Jack's. Waves of hostility emanated from him like a television broadcast. The effect was like a physical attack.
In the city, I met a girl named Lillian. She invited me to her apartment. She saw me looking at a Chinese character she had on the wall. "I wonder what that says?" she wondered. "Shirts cleaned 31 cents." I said. She walked around, opening and closing her robe showing me her anatomy in installments. "I have a rare disease. Only a few cases on record."
Amphetamines is a good kick. Take them along with sleeping pills. They get down there and have a fight. It's a good drive.
At the 24 hour cafe in Times Square New York, there Lillian and I sat together. She put on some Victrola piccolo records on the jukebox and beat her hands on the table with the expression of a masturbating idiot.
I heard that amphetamines were supposed to be a real spiritual drug, or at least an empathy drug. I thought of people I have not seen for years, even people whom I did not like and who did not like me. "They're OK," I thought, "But just the same I don't want to contact them ever again."
I decided to sell heroin. That way I could make some money as well as keep up my habit. However, it wound up being more trouble than it was worth. Most of the customers were constantly asking for credit and most of them could be counted on to spill under the slightest Police questioning and certainly not one of them who could not be expected not to confess after a punch to the jaw.
One of my customers had just arrived from a plane trip. During the 50s, they did not check people so much. My friend was on the airplane and injected the syrette intramuscularly in his leg while he was sitting in coach, looking out the window. He even went through customs with a spot of blood on his pants leg which no one noticed!
The Police arrested me and after drawing a Court Summons, I decided to move to New Orleans.
In a bar at New Orleans I enjoyed a dozen oysters and about seven glasses of beer. After drinking the beer, I felt as if my knees had been clipped from under me. I went to my hotel room, lay on the bed and fell asleep right away.
While in New Orleans, I was with some friends in a car I had just bought. The Police flashed their lights. Cole had a joint and put it in his shirt pocket. The Police soon found the joint in Cole's pocket.
"I got enough here to hold the whole bunch of you." A lawyer got me out in the morning. After this, I decided to move to the Rio Grande Valley.
During the Twenties real estate operators brought trainloads of prospects down to the Valley. A premonition of death hangs over the Valley. Death is the absence of life. Whereever life withdraws, death and rot move in. Whatever it is, lifeforce, orgones, there is not enough of it in the Valley. Food rots before you can get it home. Milk sours before the meal is finished. Old men sitting in real estate offices say, "Well this is nothing new. I have seen this all before. I remember back in '28..."
I moved to Mexico and immediately started looking for junk which has a certain energy. Whenever one passes through a transient part of town within a central hub of a main arterial network of metro buses and transportation in and out of the area, that is an area where there is junk lurking.
An area with strange wig shops, pawn shops, clothes hemmed and chop suey restaurants, an area where marginal businesses operate within a Skid Row. One day if the Earth ended and junk were gone from the earth, these junkies might still be lurking in these junk neighbourhoods, ghosts, feeling the vague and persistent lack of junk sickness.
Lupita was the main drug dealer of downtown Mexico City at the time dealing out her papers of heroin like an Aztec goddess.
One day in Mexico, my friend Ike visited me when I was without heroin, and sick and wondering when my next hit would come. I asked him if he scored any heroin. He said no and watch my eyes sick with disappointment. He then smiled and his spiderly wrinkly smile spread wide across his junky monkey face. He said that he did indeed have some heroin watching the instant change of mood. He had the heroin, to a junkie who was junk sick, the dealer was a high Priest adminstering to a grateful penitent.
"Got a little cocaine as well." Ike said.
"Come on in." I said.
"Be careful with the coke, it's strong stuff. He put a little bit of cocaine at the end of a butter knife and then emptied it into the spoonful of the morphined water. The coke dissolved like snow flakes hitting hot water.
A red spurt of blood flowed through the needle.
The cocaine hit in a sweet dizzying wave. My breath was heavy.
I then decided to drink a cup of tea.
Ike was livid. "That Bastard has ripped me off! He won't last a month!" His mouth was twisted with hate.
Afterwards, I travelled on to other countries like Tangier.
PS
Watch more cool animation and creative cartoons at aniBoom
I have a new friend. Aniboom. They are an online animation house. The history of my cartooning and illustrative distal oeuvre should include at least a couple of cartoons uploaded to aniboom.
______________________________________________________________
William Burrough's Interzone animated cartoon
adapted and abridged
"We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule or rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push."
William Burroughs, Interzone
opening
part one
part two
adapted: Mostly faithful to the story, however in some places paraphrased or with a few details done differently.
abridged: shortened.
Junky is going to be more challenging than Interzone. Essentially, Junky is a novel a couple of hundreds of pages long, whereas Interzone is just a seven page write up. These are very great stories. This is going to be a straight rendition of these stories. Burroughs wrote a lot of details which were lurid, he lived a lifestyle that I would not approve of, and which I do not want to talk about so they will not be displayed in the cartoons. Not because of, but rather in spite of his strange lifestyle, I still find William Burroughs to be a very compelling writer with an excellent poetic instincts and a very intellectual style of narrative.
I have to extrapolate the best parts of Junky, otherwise it would have to be a two hour movie.
The thing about Junky is that I read the book about a hundred times and I know very well the images that come to my mind time and time again when I read those certain paragraphs.
As drawings, Interzone is more challenging. I have to look at pictures of Tangiers and study them to get a general idea of the graphic structure so I can channel the essential needed building shapes when it comes time to draw the pictures. I channel, I see the animal in my mind, feel the line structure and then draw the animal.
Junky is a druggie adventure, very much like Dr Hunter S Thompson's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas which was written twenty years later. Junky was set in the 50s, FALILV was written in the 70s.
Interzone is a novel which encapsulates the theme of travel. For some people life can only be lived as a traveller, as long as one is not in a hometown which has a dreaded familiarity, they are travelling.
_____________________________________________________________
