An interview with Klaus Maeck
by Christophe Becker
“Ich war Prinz in diesem Land. Alle anderen mussten vor mich auf den Boden blicken, und niemand durfte mir in die Augen sehen, aber nun bin ich in Ketten, wie mein Volk. Jetzt muss ich auf den Boden schauen.”
[“I was a prince in this country. Everyone else had to look at the ground in front of me and no one was allowed to look me in the eyes, but now I am in chains, like my people. Now I have to look at the floor.”]
Werner Herzog, Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972
Christophe Becker: Last time we talked you mentioned your travels across Central and South America: Peru, Colombia, Mexico. Now you’ve just come back from Mexico-City where you did a reading of William Burroughs’ Queer for the 110th anniversary of his birth in St. Louis, Missouri.
Klaus Maeck: Well, I decided to flee the cold and the snow in Hamburg and spend the 3 months of winter in Mexico City. But I knew I needed to do something there instead of simply being a tourist and hanging around. I wanted to organize some screenings. My idea was to present a series of Burroughs films in the area where he lived in the early 1950s, in Colonia Roma. Besides my own films Decoder and Commissioner of Sewers, both starring Burroughs, I was keen to show Beat by Gary Walkow [2000], a film about the visit of Allen Ginsberg and others who left for CDMX (Mexico City), starring Kiefer Sutherland [as William S. Burroughs] and Courtney Love [as Joan Vollmer]. It’s a little-known film, I only knew it from some bad Japanese pirate internet stream. Ginsberg and his friends didn’t run into Burroughs since he’d gone to South America with a young lover at the time, they met with his wife Joan and went together on a trip. Other films I wanted to present were Drugstore Cowboy [Gus Van Sant, 1989], Naked Lunch [David Cronenberg, 1991], William S. Burroughs: A Man Within [Yoni Leyser, 2010], and Burroughs: The Movie, the documentary by Howard Brookner [1983].
Burroughs’ birthday on the 5th of February was a welcome date since the press always needs some distinctive reason to publicize. Besides the films I wanted to do something in the legendary Bounty Bar where Burroughs used to drink with his friends and where he met that young American with whom he travelled to South America searching for Yage — the psychoactive drug also known as ayahuasca. Well, it’s also the house where he accidentally shot his wife in an apartment right above the bar.
I was in CDMX the year before, just for a few days. I went to that building which is now a modest restaurant named Krika’s. [Monterrey 207 Esq Chihuahua Roma Nte, Cuauhtemoc, Mexico City.] I spoke to the owner and asked if he minded me organizing an event there. On the marquee was stenciled: “El lugar de la Leyenda,” “the place of the legend.” He also had some pictures of Burroughs inside. But before I resolved to do anything there I wrote James Grauerholz, Burroughs’ secretary, asking if he believed it was stupid to actually choose this location — because of that tragic incident. The answer was a straight “yes.” Oops. Plus, James informed me that the restaurant is not exactly where the Bounty Bar was. It was really next door, and is now a print shop. Almost no one knew about this. Okay, I get it… However, during the Cut-Ups@2023 event in Paris [12-15 Sept. 2023] I’d told some other Burroughsians about my idea and they’d all said “Go for it! Do it anyway!”
So, when I went back to Mexico, I checked with the owner if he was up for it, not showing films there but doing a reading of Queer, the novel that unfolded from the Bounty Bar — and of course he liked it, as it meant promoting the place. However, I did make plain to the small audience that the restaurant was not the original location.
C. B.: There are two German words: fernweh [marrying the words fern, or distance, and wehe, an ache or sickness, the word can be roughly translated as “distance sickening” or “far woe” — a pain to see far-flung places beyond our doorstep. Think of it as the opposite of heimweh (homesickness). It’s an ache many of us have felt but hitherto we didn’t have a word to describe it.” in David Farley, “The travel ‘ache’ you can’t translate,” BBC.com, 24 March 2020.], not to be confused with wanderlust if memory serves. Which one was it, do you figure?
K. M.: What can I say — both? For a long time I dreamt of spending the winters in that country since I love it so much. The spectacular countryside and coastlines, the spectacular history and traditions, the relaxed way of life… and finally, since I stopped making films, I could afford to leave the cold gray wet Tiefebene of Norddeutschland at least for one winter.
C. B.: Are you seriously telling me you’re done with films?
K. M.: Well, yes… for the films I would like to produce you not only need a large professional team but also hard cash. Suppose you have all that and decide to spend your next 3-5 years on that new film, going through all the funding hassle and development, adjusting your ideas to please investors and audiences before you actually start shooting — obviously the most exciting part as well as editing. But, even if you have an enthusiastic distributor who puts cash into advertising, the potential audiences are shrinking alarmingly. Only few people still go to cinemas these days, it’s quite frustrating, but cinema is dying. There are new formats, especially streaming platforms, but they are solely looking for commercial productions, same goes for television. Outside this framework filmmaking seems more like an expensive hobby and yes, I am tired of that.
C. B. : Among the many countries Burroughs decided to settle in, Mexico probably was the only one he didn’t truly select. It was a last resort solution after he killed Joan Vollmer on September 6, 1951.
K. M.: Well, Burroughs and his wife actually went to Mexico City because he had legal problems in the US. He was on and off drugs, as was his wife Joan, and both were quite heavily drunk and stoned as they had the fatal idea to play a William Tell game in the friend’s apartment where they were partying. So it obviously was an ambivalent decision to do something there… but I made up my mind as the Bounty Bar downstairs was the place where he fell in love with the young American Lewis Marker, named Allerton in the novel. Burroughs wrote about this love affair and their trip to Latin America when he was still living in Mexico in the early 50’s, although it was only published in 1985, with some lively descriptions of the wild nightlife. Much of it was composed while he was awaiting trial for the allegedly accidental homicide. Another driving force to settle for that place was Burroughs’ confession that Mexico City and the shooting of his wife actually caused him to seriously start writing, as he stated later in a foreword to Queer. Plus, the novel was just being adapted by film director Luca Guadagnino for a feature film with Daniel Craig which should be released later this year. To be honest I don’t expect too much of that… and sadly enough the first film adaption planned by Steve Buscemi some years ago did not work out.
Well, I did find a nice arthouse cinema in Colonia Roma, the Cine Tonalá, but in the end I could only show my own films and the documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within since I knew and asked the director Yoni Leyser for permission. The cinema was not ready to ask for screening rights for the other films as they were all distributed by major film companies.
The screenings went quite well, especially Decoder, much to my surprise… A band called Virgen Siamesa had designed a crossover between the Decoder logo and the Psychic TV logo — the latter we adapted ourselves for Decoder, since our street pirates and their leader were a spoof of the Temple ov Psychick Youth. I was utterly surprised to find young people who were familiar with the film as it wasn’t available in the country and was never shown in Latin America until my own trip to Mexico.
C. B. : Luca Guadagnino directed a remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria that I found surprisingly interesting. He voluntarily erased the profound misogyny and / or homophobia present throughout Argento’s movies to put together a more “feminist” version (for lack of a better word). The fact that he and (script-writer) David Kajganich are homosexual might have had an effect on the script. I was thinking about it because both Bertrand Mandico and David Cronenberg had problems adapting Burroughs’ problematic view of women.
K. M.: I am not familiar with Guadagnino’s films and I am curious to see his adaptation of Queer.
C. B. : I was surprised by the choice you made of reading Queer. Unlike most of Burroughs’ texts you typically refer to (from Naked Lunch to The Electronic Revolution), the novel can be seen as fairly formal. Do you consider Burroughs’ work as a whole, or, like a certain number of critics, do you divide it into two distinct parts? An orthodox Burroughs, preceding an experimental Burroughs?
K. M.: I never thought that way, no. However, my fascination and admiration for this man only started after I read his essays, interviews and manuals (The Electronic Revolution for instance) — his preoccupation with mystical and occult themes, also with mafia politics and the power of mass media. His tone is always wonderfully irreverent and radical, wrapped in subversive black humor. But his novels also amazed me from the very beginning — the power of language that his stories convey, although his unconventional writing style leaves so much open — or perhaps precisely because of this. The images, smells and feelings squeeze out between the lines and jump out at me, even his fragmentary texts without much plot leave bizarrely powerful impressions.
But to be honest, I was also happy when the plot wasn’t whizzing through time and space, wasn’t quite so fragmented and coded and therefore naturally much easier to read — as in the Red Night Trilogy or in Queer especially, where he tells a very personal story that contains many references to his later work.
But for this anniversary event in Mexico, Queer was chosen simply because the true story behind the novel took place right there. Even though the Bounty Bar has not been around for a long time, I found it exciting to present this story in the place where it originated.
C. B. : How did you choose the passages to read?
K. M.: To begin with I chose an excerpt of that introduction Burroughs wrote for a later edition of Queer — what he loved about Mexico City in the 50’s and where he mentioned the tragic shooting of his wife and what it did to him. In my own foreword to the reading I made clear that we were celebrating his novel and the place where it was born, not the spectacle of the killing. From the novel I chose passages where Burroughs described his visits to the Bounty Bar and his first encounters with Allerton, the developing of their strange love affair until his return to the city — alone.
I found two Mexican actors for the reading, Ignacio Velasco and Fernando Yacamán, and I compiled some video footage from Mexico City in the 50’s plus some authentic photos of Burroughs and Lewis Marker in Mexico which were screened in the background. The reading was not well attended, but we had a great time…
C. B. : You were interviewed by journalist Hernán Muleiro for La Jornada. The journalist talked about la “Guerra de los ruidos” (the war of noises). The very first version of Decoder I saw was subtitled in Spanish, I was wondering if, maybe, the movie had had an unusual impact on the Spanish-speaking world…?
K. M.: You saw a Spanish subtitled version? I thought the Mexicans were the first ones to do Spanish subtitles… well, I don’t think the rather poor dialogue makes a big impression, it is rather the authentic images, the unusual edit and the spirit of the time that appeal to a young generation, no matter the part of the world.
And yes, the “war of noises” still is one of my favorite topics… there are crazy findings if you research how and where music is or can be used as a weapon!
C. B. : In that very same interview you mentioned the danger of Spotify and its algorithms.
K. M.: Well, I found it alarming when I studied their marketing strategies. For their advertisers they claim: “At Spotify, we have a personal relationship with over 191 million people who show us their true colors without filters!” And that’s just the number of premium users worldwide, the total number of users is more than twice as high (as of 2022, old figures by now!). What makes Spotify unique within the larger platform economy is that they have vast amounts of data related to our emotional states, moods and feelings, billions of data points every day. This data forms the basis for Spotify’s massive streaming intelligence: Spotify can track your every habit and mood. When they combine this with the psychographic data about you that they can access from the other major players — Facebook, Instagram — their streaming intelligence will be the greatest of all. One of Spotify’s senior business developers said in an interview: “What we ultimately want to do is to be able to predict people’s behavior through music.” Back in 2018, they filed a patent for “Methods and systems for personalizing user experiences based on personality traits.” Whether such applications are carried out within the strict boundaries of ethical guidelines on data use, collection and storage is highly doubtful, don’t you think?
By the way, Spotify used part of its gigantic profit made with music, namely more than 100 million euros, to invest in an AI start-up in 2021. The company Helsing plans to use artificial intelligence to support the military in the assessment of battlefields. In addition to aerial surveillance by military drones, not only sensors and special cameras are used on the ground, but also automated software that enables customers to make faster decisions. So far, their technology has been sold to the French, British and German military, as well as to the European Union, which, to give an example, naturally uses it to better prevent refugees from entering the country.
C. B. : Many programs have recently been developed, mostly AI, including AI music generators that use already existing material. Is it that different from Burroughs’ will to “loot the Louvre” and “steal anything in sight”?
K. M.: Well, in the end it’s a program stealing. It is different because a program can never be a creative artist whose ideas stem from a very individual and personal experience. It can be programmed to steal and compile it in a certain way, even by chance like a random cut-up, but the personal expression will always be missing, don’t you think?
I recently had a script written by ChatGPT, as a test. I added a book to my prompt that I think might make a good film and asked for a 90-minute script. In no time at all I had a well-structured but totally conventional script. The AI learns from successful films, I suppose, so there’s no room for artistic experiments that ultimately make a film special. The AI can do some of the work for me by suggesting a structure, a dramaturgy or certain scenes, but it can only become something unique with my creative input. Now, of course, this only applies to the weird films I would like to make — not to blockbusters.
Regarding music, I love mashups! They emerged in the 80s, songs in which a musical collage of pieces from different artists is mixed together by sampling. I am waiting for more. But what can I tell you as a long-standing music publisher? Knowing the economic situation of so many talented artists, more precisely creators of art, be it music or literature or painting, I am very much in favor of fair remuneration for their work and have long campaigned for it.
Well, copy right or copy wrong? My second self, the artist, still grins and nods when he hears the Burroughs quote!
C. B. : In 2023, Paul McCartney told BBC Radio 4 that “artificial intelligence has enabled a ‘final’ Beatles song,” adding the technology was used “to ‘extricate’ John Lennon’s voice from an old demo.” What to do you make of it, considering McCartney was largely influenced by Burroughs’ cut-up technique and Ian Sommerville’s sound experiments?
K. M.: I think that Paul simply tested the new technology in order to create a new/old song to the legendary library and make some more money.
C. B. : What about your projects?
K. M.: My book is the only project I am working on now. It is out on Moloko+, a small independent publisher that cannot invest in any marketing activities. So, in the last weeks I was busy editing a dozen of short film teasers with me reading excerpts of my texts. Fortunately, my 24-year-old nephew helped me to set up an Instagram account to weekly post a new reel, the same on YouTube and on my homepage maeck.net. I had to use my Facebook account to spread the news, my only activity on that creepy platform. And to my surprise I received quite a bunch of likes and comments, including some personal messages of spirited readers.
I did not want to write a biography, even though there was so much material lying around. I got the old stuff out again, compiled my conversations with William Burroughs, found the very first [Einstürzende] Neubauten interview and took the opportunity to write autobiographical outlines apropos my punk period and the making of Decoder, and while I was at it, I puffed up the notes from my world travels a bit and worked through my pain-induced mood swings. The title of the book I only found by chance, at a flea market in Mexico: Full Throttle into Ruin. It was on the cover of a bootleg DVD of the film Head On which I produced in 2004 with Fatih Akin, a slang translation of the original German title Gegen die Wand.