Home & Away #3
The Elixir
13.09.2014
Home & Away #3: The Elixir
West Den Haag, with Chad Weidner & V. Vale
Saturday 13.09.2014 (7pm – 10pm)

Dinner, a glass of Green Beast punch, and entry is free, but we kindly ask you to make a reservation by emailing eloise@westdenhaag.nl as space is limited.

Home & Away returns to West for its third edition, and is joined by Dr. Chad Weidner who is invested in ecocriticism, the beat generation, and William S. Burroughs. Together, with special guest V. Vale we will address the method of art-making through the consumption of mind-altering substances and out-of-body experiences as a means of travel by looking at the works of William S. Burroughs, and the experiments of Dr. Timothy Leary. After a light meal, Home & Away continues its search into notions of home and travel with a lecture by Chad Weidner on life and works of the prolific and influential American writer William S. Burroughs (Queer, Naked Lunch). In his presentation, Weidner tracks Burroughs extensive travels, his uses of the South American psychedelic brew yagé to journey to different times and places, and how this can be read in his writings. As part of his European Tour & Destroy circuit, we a pleased to present writer, publisher, musician, and founder of RE/search Labs V. Vale, friend of the late Burroughs and acquaintance of psychologist and psychedelic drug advocate Dr. Timothy Leary. Vale will give a talk on his friendship with Burroughs and give insights into Dr. Leary’s LSD experiments in 1960s.

About the contributors:

Chad Weidner (BE) is assistant professor in English and film at University College Roosevelt. His research interests include ecocriticism, the Beat Generation, and William Burroughs. He has co-edited a special issue on the Beat Generation in Comparative American Studies, and is co-editing a book on experimental writing called Fractured Ecologies. His other book project that is near completion is entitled, The Green Ghost: William Burroughs and the Ecological Mind. He is co-convener of ‘Flow and Fracture from North America to Europe and Beyond: Reflections, Refractions and Diffractions within the Ecopoetic Avant-Garde’ at the Université Libre de Bruxelles Belgium in December.

V. Vale (USA) is an editor, writer-interviewer, historian, photographer and pianist. As publisher-editor of the 1977-1979 zine Search & Destroy, V. Vale helped bring international attention to a Punk scene as prophetic as more publicized ones elsewhere. The publication was launched with $100 each from Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and published at City Lights Bookstore, where Vale worked at the time. For Vale, Punk provided a launching pad for a host of cultural-anthropological explorations, including Industrial music, the writings of J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs, feminism, pranksterism, studies of The Body, plus ‘Incredibly Strange’ filmmaking and music, which he has chronicled with the RE/SEARCH series of publications that he founded in 1980.

Home & Away #3: The Elixir occurs during Split by acclaimed Polish artist Konrad Smolenski and music critic Michal Libera. Taking the split cassette as influence three of Smolenski’s works are faced with their B-side with recordings from Gregory Whitehead, mittin, and Jack Sutton. Home & Away is a thematic program series, which travels from West Den Haag in The Netherlands to cities such as Perth, Western Australia and Sao Paulo, Brazil to think about what, it is to be away, or stay at home, and how this impacts on both art production and consumption.