IN CASE YOU ARE INNARESTED, the detourned machines at the party at Blackout Books will include:

1. a dream-machine (invented by Brion Gysin around 1960), which can be created by suspending a light bulb over the center of a turn-table, and by placing a paper tube with holes cut in it on top of the spinning table. A dream-machine produces a flickering light. You "stare" at it with your eyes closed. (See Tony Conrad's unknown 1966 film "The Flicker.")
2. a spiral-spinner (invented by Little Billy not de Bored), which can be made by painting a spiral on to the blades of a fan. The result is a fluttering vortex-like effect, with the shapes being drawn inward.
3. a walkman tape player that has been been modified to play tape loops (you take all the important stuff out of the player's plastic casing, mount it on something secure, cut a short tape loop out of already existing audiotape, and load it in using q-tips to guide its path).
4. an electric guitar placed on top of a small amplifier; its volume settings arranged so that the guitar/amplifier continuously feeds back.

OUR IDEA HERE IS TO PRODUCE an atmosphere that will be very intense, very disorienting, very pleasurable (all these things, plus people, weird background music, images on the wall, free beer, free copies of the new issue of the magazine, incense and other perfumes, will be stuffed into a small one-room bookstore). In other words, we are trying to "construct a situation" (a la the situationists) or have a "happening" (a la Allan Kaprow). The similarities between the two (especially between 1958 and 1961) is very close indeed.

NOTHING NEW HERE, either for History or for NOT BORED! (Little Billy has always thrown a little party when an issue of the mag has come out). It's an experiment, a rehearsal. At the moment, we've access to a small space, where the number of variables is small and we can try to detourn each of them, and it'll make a good trial run for another such party to be held in an even larger place. It seems likely that this next party will be another experiment, another rehearsal for an even larger place.

rose@thorn.net
29 April 1997