Today is the birthday of William S. Burroughs: writer, performer, critic, painter, wife-shooter, cat-lover, addict, bunker-dweller.
That last point recently caught the attention of photographer Peter Ross. Throughout most of the ’70s Burroughs lived in The Bunker, a partially renovated YMCA locker room on New York’s Lower East Side. He moved out in 1981, and the poet John Giorno became the apartment’s caretaker. Ross, also a friend of Giorno’s, was drawn to the space and Burroughs’ undisturbed possessions. He photographed items that particularly moved him, returning each one to its resting place when he was done; the resulting collection, William Burroughs’ Stuff, is as odd and haunting as the man himself. In The Morning News, he notes:
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find the right balance between people’s inner and outer identities, their common peacefulness…. But these items are very specific to one man, and a man with a public identity at that. His portrait has been made over and over, and it exists inside many heads: the man in the suit, in the city or the country, wearing a hat, serious, maybe holding a rifle, or talking to Mick Jagger. This is as close as I can ever get to that man.
For a remembrance that’s a bit less mythopoetical, there are always the “home movies” shot during the last years of his life in Lawrence, Kansas, with Burroughs looking a lot like your crotchety, if slightly drug-addled, great uncle. That is, if your great uncle ever had Patti Smith, Steve Buscemi, and Allen Ginsberg over for dinner.
(Photograph is “Shoes,” from William Burroughs’ Stuff, ©2009 Peter Ross.)
Interesting juxtaposition in the course of reading odds and ends today—an excerpt from an interview with Burroughs in RE/Search #4-5, in 1982:
Rebecca Skloot’s just-published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is getting all sorts of awesome press, being my most recent impulse purchase not 24 hours ago. Plate o’ shrimp.
Burroughs is also featured as one of Patti Smith’s inspirations in Just Kids.
I had often come to this area of the Bowery to visit William Burroughs, who lived a few blocks south of the club [CBGB], in a place called The Bunker. It was the street of winos, and they would often have fires going in large cylindrical trash cans to keep warm, to sook, or toi loight ther cigarettes. You coulkd look down the boiwery and see these fires
Sorry for that. My comment plum slipped outta my hands before I could spell check it. As you can see I have fat and unruly fingers and rely on corrections before I post.
Just Kids being one of my other purchases in the past week, for the birthday of the guy who shares his with William S. Burroughs. Lots o’ shrimp there.