“It was a little difficult to see old friend Bill looking at me as if I was a robot sent to check him out. And also to be suggested by him that I examine him to see who he was representing, because he assumed that everybody was an agent at that point. Not necessarily for the government at all; an agent for a giant trust of insects from another galaxy actually. Women were suspect as being agents and Burroughs thought that maybe you had to exterminate all the women, or get rid of them one way or another. Evolve some sort of male that could give birth through parthenogenesis.” <-- Allen Ginsberg
        Ah, the late great William Seward Burroughs, what a card! Hardcore drug addict, extreme misanthrope, literary outlaw, lover of teenage boys, experimental shotgun painter…and a bit of a nutcase. Even admirers of the man’s work (as I am, finding some of it very inspirational, if pretty creepy; to me ‘The Market’ section from ‘Naked Lunch,’ one of my all-time favourite books, has some of the most beautiful prose poetry ever written in it) would have to say that he was a disturbing genius, living in the theoretical world in his own head and transcribing what he found in there in his fiction as what he actually believed. When he talked about the usefulness of Scientology or the curative powers of orgone boxes or about him being a representative of alien insect trusts he wasn’t kidding, and he’s one of these people whose achievements, to a degree, that you can admire from afar. After all, the above statement, coming from a man who shot his own wife in the head and who subsequently became even more enamored of guns than he had been before the tragic event, is a frightening prospect indeed.
        However. It’s always interesting to see the man read his own work (which, as has been noted before, adds a great deal to the prose; he truly was a hilarious performer, with his desert-dry voice and wit, which really bring the words on the page before him to life (look for the old, now-deleted abridged Warner Brothers release of ‘Naked Lunch’ if you want to hear a fine reading), as this DVD is testament to. It presents clips from a reading done by El Hombre Invisible in Berlin on 5/9/1986, where he reads segments from works like ‘The Western Lands,’ (his attempt at writing his own Book of The Dead) ‘Naked Lunch’ and ‘Roosevelt After Inauguration’ amongst others. These readings are presented with clips of films made of the text back-projected behind them, to varying degrees of effectiveness, along with a selection of Burroughs’ own paintings or appearances in films ‘Drugstore Cowboy’. The clips of old experimental films like ‘Ghosts at No.9’ and ‘Towers Open Fire’ look very interesting, and I’d personally love to see them in full.
        Forming the meat of the DVD is an interview with Burroughs conducted by author Jurgen Ploog, who is a pretty bright guy; you’d have to be to interview the subject of this film. Nevertheless, it’s fun to see Burroughs correcting Ploog a number of times on