Last year, I linked to an Orange County Weekly article about David Woodard, an eccentric artist and musician in Lon Angeles. A friend of William S. Burroughs, Woodard handcrafts Dreamachines, the hallucinogenic flicker device invented by Bryion Gysin and Ian Sommerville and popularized by WSB. New World Disorder has republished an interview with Woodard that first appeared last year in the UK magazine Headpress:
"In college, I found the Dreamachine would cure my own writer's block. When I mentioned this to Burroughs, he concurred. That is the extent of what I know about his use of the machine for that purpose. In 1997, when we were both living in Lawrence, Burroughs tended to use his two Dreamachines together as a postprandial ritual along with a marijuana cigarette. He would write the following morning.
I think the Dreamachine's most distinctive property is its (potentially insidious) subtlety. The machine is similar to absinthe, in that both create a residual language-oriented delirium of which the user tends not to be aware. Fortunately light pulses do not yield the additional effect of Syphilis-like rotted brain stem."
