Saturday, May 08, 2010

shots like a rock/it

do check out jim mccrary's post about target shooting with william s burroughs here. mccrary was burroughs' office manager/assistant. i've no idea why burroughs was obsessed with guns and weaponry. there are a few vids floating about where the old beat talks about knives and guns. but below is the only vid i know of where you can see mccrary in jeans jacket helping to set up the target of shakespeare. funny yes, but i'm a pacifist by nature and even watching vids of guns, esp. pistols, freaks me out. i grew up with weapons, my father and i used to do a lot of hunting for deer and bear when i was a wee lad. however, the awesomeness of firepower is too intense for me. take nothing personal from my own fear and squeamishness. guns simply scare the shit outta me. i do like how mccrary ends his post with burroughs telling some punk to not shoot a living creature. and i do like how for a few moments you can see mccrary whom i consider a very close friend even if we have yet to meet in the flesh.

3 Comments:

At 8:25 PM, Blogger Jim K. said...

ha...that's interesting..
and with the same youtube
type fidelity as other clips..
definitely puts it 'next door'

Shooting milk jugs of water is
more commensurate. Holes in
paper always seemed weird to me.

 
At 9:18 PM, Blogger Geofhuth said...

My pal Johnny Brewton, proprietor of the X-Ray Book Co., was a friend of Burroughs'. For one of Johnny's magazines (an issue I was in), the cover was some piece of paper that Burroughs had shot a hole through.

I thought that interesting, so many years later, I had my pal Ficus strangulensis shoot a hole through a stack of postcards for me, so that I could send those damaged cards out in the world to friends and mailartists.

Amazing, "somers' is the captcha. Suzanne?

Geof

 
At 11:08 PM, Blogger richard lopez said...

jim: back in the day we would shoot thru paper, water jugs, beer cans and old cars. well, my friends would, i'd mostly sit there and drink beer and be deathly afraid of those firearms. stopped doing that shit, and hanging out with people who did that shit when i was in entered my early 20s. last time i was on a shooting range i accompanied my brother as he was in preparation to become a deputy sherrif. it was surreal, those dudes behind the counter wearing holsters and in those holsters were loaded guns. then there was some guy shooting some huge caliber handgun that shook the entire room. fuck that shit. never went back, with my brother or anyone else.

geof: well, suzanne did publish a book of poems and a friend was gonna write responses to her poems. don't know if he followed thru with it or not. i think there's burroughs art hanging in some galleries here and there pockmarked with bullet holes. and it's instructive that burroughs is shooting thru a drawing of shakespeare done by ralph steadman who was no stranger to writers who loved firepower.

 

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