The Job: Please Mind the GAP (Part 2)

Please mind the gap. Introduced in 1969 on the London Underground, the same year as the 1^st edition appeared titled The Job, William S. Burroughs. Both acts as a warning to passengers to take caution while crossing the gap at various levels. However as a word of caution you first need to identify them, as gaps only become visible by means of what surrounds them.

Word and text is not the same thing in the same way that space and void could be opposites similar to the experimental view vs. perspective.

I find the explanations of William S Borroughs technique to the word as a serious of objects and the cutting and pasting of text fascinating. He’s projected idea of delivering a twisted or dystopian vision to his audience on the real “event and sound” by showing a movie. Using their doubt and lack of confidence to the original detail Borroughs convinces his audience that he, the director are god by letting them doubt themselves as they believe in his image of reality…as he holds the truth, captured for all to see. Their voices of rebellion will not be heard even if they speak as those around them will doubt them.

 It’s either doubt yourself or be in doubt by others…

 It’s about controlling perception from within an individual. Burroughs presented a book that had to be read as a metaphor of a metaphor of a metaphor. Although he tries to convince his interviewer that he’s after more clarity for all to see in his writings…he doesn’t mean a word of it. He’s playing from within, and he knew it.

The world is an experiment for some and without the mass image words and illusions of another kind remain in the order of day in the artist’s way. Writers’ weather they aim to be seen as an artist or not the public might perceive it differently and Burroughs  took no shame in the fact that once he’s tricked  or convinced the audience that he was wrong. Burroughs words was one of these not be seen or confused with an end product but instead to be seen as an order or an experiment to achieve logic and to prove a point, which came prior to him suggesting solutions on how to save the world from the bourgeoisie way of controlled thinking, teaching and accumulation.

He was by no means completely insane and no one ever suggest this, the world would rather brand him by his previous book titled “Junky”…but then I’d imagine Burroughs  will take this as a compliment. He analysed the world of a certain time, in our case it’s historical but nevertheless one that still replicates the basic connections and condition between the complicated DNA of cultivating control.

Burroughs never aimed to give his hierarchy a formula to a solution as he admits “it dangerous” but in the end he realised there’s no escaping the machine as it stands…he realised he’s been absorbed by the silence. The only solution would be cut off the machines “supply and demand” from the proletarian line which feeds the bourgeoisie.  If all fails it’s simply because you’ve been taught the wrong values by your parents…and to see or realise or escape these principles which you can’t…well then… take drugs (but do make sure it’s the right ones). He goes into great depth about the right drugs and shows he still cares about he’s own theory from the Chapter 1 interview “not to be judged” which is why he back it up. He realises he still haven’t escaped the machine and that he’d still be judged by an audience with “distorted values”.

He hates the idea of a family and the woman. And as woman remains the key to nurturing and teaching their young by making them disciples of the machine. For that reason he most probably hates gardening as it paints the same picturesque image of family life. He’s solution is not one to change the way of thinking to the masses but to change their chemical or molecular body structure either physically or chemically. He’s not highlighting the machine as the problem to be changed but insinuate that people are the problem as they need to change first in order to change the machine instead of the other way around. After all it's a problem created by people.

If Burroughs was a god he’s solution would be to stop the human reproduction cycle and family completely. Produce them artificially and let boys be raised by their fathers and girls by their mothers…as parents influence their young by injecting them with the same virus of words imprinted on their artificial parental DNA for survival or need…most probably confused with tradition. This was inevitable and is impossible to stop…hence” screw humanity”.

Burroughs takes on the role of a child throwing a tantrum in this book. Maybe he knew this which is why the books start with a quote from the diary of a six year old. He’s in a state of being the dominating child displaying toxic behaviour instead taking the lead role as that of the controlling parent. The display of toxic behaviour acts as the solution that will influence those around him to the point where the only solution is to stop all human reproduction. Even his arguments remains structured in a childlike fashion by saying “I’m serious but here’s a joke for you” in his satirical writing style, whilst being cleverly artistic on the words as an object hidden within the text itself. Word and text is not the same thing.

However he does make valid points but nothing more straightforward than what’s already been said in books like the “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Freiderich Engels. On his artistic abilities as a writer he’s brilliant and well ahead of competition at the time. Burroughs is an artist whether he’d turn in his grave for me saying this or not. He considers techniques of discovery and exploration to the word mixed up with other scientific formulas and thoughts to paint a new sea of text within reality, driven by his formed hallucination techniques.

People fear what they don’t understand and fear is a form of control. As mentioned in the beginning “it’s either doubt yourself or be in doubt by others…” thus the fear of rejection. Rejection = Death

Burroughs had an interesting view on silence (not death) but he said the obvious, that: "anyone who prays in space is not there". He’s giving into space, the silence of the world’s words…the invisible text as explained in my previous article titled “The Job: Space Age Experiment I – II”, which highlights the invisible ink thus creating a sense of silence to a page.

However by indicating to the world a message of HOPE that these “invisible blanks” within his work represents another future and that they’ve not been written yet…although it might seem already printed.

We hear it every day…”please mind the gap”...perhaps Burroughs could've written or inspired that line to mock society with a scotoma, where the mind chooses what it wants to see. To help us to recognise the gaps and to remind us to play an active part in writing our new futures whilst were on a daily journey to enslave our souls within the machine.

The Job: Space Age Experiment I - II (Part 1)

This is an experiment...

If I die…then it was in good faith in the name of experimentation and education. Why will I die you might ask? Well for one I'd be experimenting with Boroughs theories and I've read a book and what seemed to be described as a rather “dull read”….turned out to be my best read so far. It contains the DNA and processes of Burroughs and his works. 


The cut and paste technique (Experiment I) and the hallucinations which shapes his world and visions in many parts of this book,  informs us of his solutions to changing the molecular and chemical structure of humans to improve the world.  Hence Experiment II…getting high and reading it again, whilst causing a spasm to the machine as I'd be out of order for a short while...thank you very much. After all this is education on the Burroughs level.

After reading the book for the 1^st time I knew I had to get onto other readings but I've done it twice again. Not because I'm as thick as a strawberry milkshake but because every time I read it there was a different reason for experiment. He’s projected idea of delivering a twisted or dystopian vision to real time users…does works by the way. He’s admitted that this technique was discovered from the process of drug use (not addiction) that he can now control without it… 

If Boroughs took a clean sheet and glued the selected words on the paper, the story he’d like to express to all would be clear, you’d end up with a final product consisting of nothing more than a white sheet with a few words or sentences spread along with large amounts of white space surrounding “it”…the “word”…becoming the “object”… which is what the bourgeoisie and governments of this world aim to separate from one another as far as possible…but he goes further. He fills these blank spaces with normal words to ease the reader, only to shock them occasionally. The sea of white is there…and it only struck me when I experimented with his technique of hallucinations to write this 1^st part (meaning I was high)…how else would you understand it? As I said…it only struck me when he highlighted the clue of white space or the importance of ink that should be there in the book in the first place with the following words..".the road without sound is white under the empty moon, stinging like the salt of a child’s tears sexualizing interdependence latterly contingent upon a motionless boat."


Explanation you might care to ask? ..."the road (our path) without sound (meaning irrelevant words/gibberish) is white (the colour that the ink should be, if you could “see”) under the empty moon (your head/mind)… stinging like the salt of a child’s tears (his tears)…sexualizing interdependence (the pleasure of being free) latterly contingent upon a motionless boat (meaning you won’t achieve a thing if you don’t act on the previous clues).

I will do a follow up of “The Job”, where I’d be discussing the book in more detail from my perspective but as this is architecture, were all about experimenting and learning, I have "retyped...and unglued the glued” for you to see the truth from The Job, Interviews with William S Boroughs” as Experiment I-II with the aim of telling the story of what he’d like to say. In essence I’ve taken one sentence from each page and pearl neck laced them together.

Below you can read three chapters in under a minute as a result of Experiment 1 and 2. It’s very interesting and the plot thickens in his typical satirical "straight but bent" humour writing style…more in my next article.

Prisoners of Earth, 83:108

I work for 23 Screwball Department. We got our files on all nut cases and each case is classified.  We intend to destroy the police machine and all its records. To put it “country simple”, we have heard enough bullshit. “Joe” may my flesh rot if this department knows you are talking about it…bleeding profusely he was carried into the lobby where he described his assailant as the “Lamb of god from the beast 666” after three Martinis. It’s the normal process of conditioning people to believe what they’re told.

I sit down in my room and open the window and light a sigarette. There is a young woman who lives in the chateau above the garden. The new way of thinking is the thinking you would do if you didn’t have to think about any of the things you ordinarily think about if you had no work to do nothing to be afraid of no plans to make. The training is often interrupted with nausea, a springlike pressure around the forehead, cold shivers alternating with hot flashes. “Well chicken I think you’ll live”.

I look out the glass wall and that post card fjord explodes in my brain green and pink and blue. The brain artefact has a built-in mechanism that prevents it from solving problems and that mechanism is The Word. Dualism is the whole basis of this planet – good and evil, communism, fascism, man, woman, etc. As soon as you have a formula like that, of course you’re going to have trouble. Any life form that gets stuck with outmoded built-in artefact is doomed to destruction. So are the Hippies…chickens can live so without the head nourished from tubers and guerrillas will destroy every vestige of the old economy based on mass production and consumption.  The American dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. An essential feature of the Western control machine is to make language as non-pictorial as possible, to separate words as far as possible from objects or observable processes.

The jewel striking twelve concentrates of otherness with orifices bitter perspectives. The road without sound is white under the empty moon, stinging like the salt of a child’s tears sexualizing interdependence latterly contingent upon a motionless boat. The words used have no referent; they absolutely intend to start a nuclear war.

Three Frogs, 111:122

Words are loaded with hidden meanings…we don’t know enough to know. The most prudish people and “respectable” people who regards Bosch’s paintings with unconscious admiration; no one could really take them seriously anymore: Dust of the dead gods “Killed While Cleaning Their Guns”…

I don’t dwell on torture, woman are a perfect curse. Normally such information lies dormant, but in Oxford experiments it has been activated. I think that the whole anti-sex orientation of our society is basically manipulated by female interest, what we call love, but rather what we might call recognition.  The whole human race is crippled in childhood. Nations and countries is merely an extension of the biological family and I don’t see the need for family at all. Now, if you could produce artificial beings, you could produce them at a reasonable age, and you won’t have all this infancy.

Yes, it seems to me very desirable. You can almost judge the importance of a discovery by the efforts made to suppress it…the apomorphine treatment for drug addiction in another.

4 Academy 23, 125:137

Oh, unquestionably the most important point of control is inside the soft machine. Children should be paid to go to school and drugs are one of the ideal power devices. Western authorities won’t come out into the open with what they’re doing but they can keep young people under continual threat of police search or action.

I think it is necessary to establish the difference between different drugs and hallucinogens, between addicting and non-addicting drugs, perhaps altering the molecular structure of certain cell groups in the body. Under the influence of mescaline, I have had the experience of seeing a painting for the first time, and found later that I could see the painting without using the drugs. Recently, a Cambridge dentist has extracted teeth with no other anaesthetic than music through headphones….anxiety is treatment of the consciousness-expanding drugs to normalize metabolism.

Cannabis serves as a guide to psychic areas which can then be re-entered without. I am able to achieve the same results for cut-ups and fold-ins of my texts to thin in association blocks, instead of words.  Thus youth is deliberately led into these dead-end channels which are then made criminal by act of Congress or Parliament. The press says that cannabis is habit-forming. It’s not habit-forming and no ill effects resulting from its use have ever been established.  Just tell the machine to enforce all laws by whatever means and the machine will sweep us to the disaster of a computerised police state.

To bring drugs into perspective I would suggest that academies be established where young people will learn to get really high…high as the Zen master is high when his arrow hits a target in the dark…high as a karate master is high when he smashes a brick wall with his fist. . .high. . .  weightless. . .in space.

This is the space age.

Time to look beyond this rotten radioactive planet.

Steroid Cities

French novelist and critic Marcel Proust best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu once said “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

For me the voyage is only one ingredient to an encounter and encounters are key to remember and returning an experience or for that matter storing it as a memory. Everything in live will always be an encounter. The ethics of an encounter helps us to understand something central to the analytical experience be it a city or not. The potential for reaching out and across to the other. The potential for reaching out from Las Vegas and across to Dubai as a comparison.

I’m sure we can draw many similarities between Las Vegas and Dubai but these superficial similarities will be as unreal as the symbol itself. Instead of drawing on physical properties I believe we have to look at it from psychoanalysis point of view in terms of a sense of place and why. We need new eyes as all that seems real is nothing but a hyper reality.

Prior to its physical existence the urban plan dictated Dubai to be a super city. Today it currently holds true to exactly that. The world largest artificial islands (seen from space) in addition to the largest waterfront, tallest hotel (Burj al-Arab hotel), the first underwater hotel, towers three times the height of the Empire State Building in essence to clear all competition in order to hold the title of the tallest structure in the world. Currently, the Walt Disney World Resort is the number one tourist destination in the world. Once fully completed, Dubai land will easily take over that title since it is expected to attract more than 200,000 visitors daily. Something the Greeks aspired to but have failed miserably lately.

Learning from Las Vegas, 1972 under “Directional Space” Las Vegas was diagrammatically represented with pure images highlighting Las Vegas elements as” space, scale, speed and symbol “all of which forms part of the modernised American dream at the time. Although Las Vegas happened a lot quicker than most other new cities it was the idea beyond “encounter” and commodity that drove the energy within these desert sands. If you look at Las Vegas today it’s only the thriving areas that are still driven by the original idea of an encounter which remains successful. Everything else have been faded in grey, now displaying a huge neon sign to highlight it’s understated iconic status which never was never fully realised to these urban parts to a true symbol or myth within the grain.

The Las Vegas urban grain consist of grids with several civic buildings in it and therefore contain the object/icon building which displays a jewel/neon like quality in contrast with the city backdrop (may I add a backdrop with a secured infrastructure), meaning its framing the vista in addition to the object building terminating the vista at a pedestrian level. This was one of the points highlighted in Complexity and Contradiction.

Dubai’s grain is treated as a serious of jewels, in contrast to Las Vegas. This makes the city layers almost impossible to read and the building fragments become clusters of what a super master plan demands rather than what a city demands. 

However it remains a hollow city of what appears to be a serious of iconic landmark buildings without an emphasis at ‘underpinning infrastructure"...For all we know the backdrop could be in slum status with dressed up surrealistic facades of make believe…similar to the american dream. So as a superficial comparison it might appear to be similar but it's not...its the security in the infrastructure that will always remain one of the biggest differences between the two cities. Dubai will realise this at some point...and spend the next 20 years working on what’s been forgotten in the 1st place and if Venturi could...a book wouldve follwed named "What weve forgotten from Dubai"

Las Vegas cannot be compared to Dubai. They’re not the same. How can one love a place with no history? Dubai is an instant super which becomes an imperative for destabilising illusions of understanding, mastery and the individual agency of one city obsessed with itself….the instant aiming at creating a history and overthrowing all other foundations around the globe in order to become the world’s biggest commodity. It’s selfish but driven by reasoning true to a capitalists system on every level perceivable. Then again even capitalism have become a hyper reality for destabilising illusions of society.

Dubai left me with the sensation of having “your spine plugged into” a second hand account of yet another grand finale performance by a bully. Performances that typically involve an exposition of vulnerability to question what reality is? Where Las Vegas forges a meaning from their anecdotes which sees a conjunction between the analytic session and the theatrical performance with foregrounds of what society coins in terms of “liveliness” associated to each encounter, Dubai aim to be of a challenging and over-turning of such idealized urban forms of human history which shapes the human encounter to a capitalist encounter without remembrance or true renaissance.