![]() ![]() The theory made perfect sense to Burroughs, who believed in a Magical Universe ruled by occult forces and who experimented heavily with Scientology, Crowley-an Magick, and the orgone energy of Wilhelm Reich. By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the recordings, I become God for this local. Adam experiences shame when his discraceful behavior is played back to him by tape recorder 3 which is God. The recording once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their control. So a recording made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. ![]() Tape recorder 2 in the Garden of Eden was Eve made from Adam. Tape recorder 2 is my recordings of the Moka Bar vicinity. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is pristine condition. Now to apply the 3 tape recorder analogy to this simple operation. ![]() The trigger for the magical operation was, in his words, “playback.” In a very strange essay called “ Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden,” from his collection Electronic Revolution, Burroughs described his operation in detail, a disruption, he wrote, of a “control system.” You played back a tape that had taken place two days ago and you superimposed it on what was happening now, which pulled them out of their time position.”īurroughs also connected the method to the Watergate recordings, the Garden of Eden, and the theories of Alfred Korzybski. “The idea,” writes Morgan, “was to place the Moka Bar out of time. There, “on several occasions a snarling counterman had treated him with outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy, and served him poisonous cheesecake that made him sick.” Burroughs “decided to retaliate by putting a curse on the place.” He chose a means of attack that he’d earlier employed against the Church of Scientology, “turning up… every day,” writes Watts, “taking photographs and making sound recordings.” Then he would play them back a day or so later on the street outside the Moka. Burroughs, who so approvingly refers the possibly apocryphal anarchist pirate colony of Libertatia in his Cities of the Red Night, would, one might think, appreciate the budding anarchism of British youth culture, which would flower into punk soon enough.īut rather than joining the coffee bar scene, the cantankerous Burroughs had taken to frequenting “plush gentlemen’s shops of the area, not to mention the ‘Dilly Boys,’ young male prostitutes who hustled for clients outside the Regent Palace Hotel.” Burroughs-a London resident from the late sixties to early seventies-to hobnob with young dissidents and outsiders. “By 1972,” Watts writes, “coffee bars were everywhere and the teenage revolution was firmly established.” Places like the Moka Bar might seem like the ideal place for countercultural maven William S. This was a place where teenagers too young for pubs could come and gather, and it is said by some that the introduction of this coffee bar prompted the youth culture explosion that soon changed social life in Britain forever. London’s first proper coffee shop-one equipped with a Gaggia coffee machine-opened at 29 Frith Street. On his blog The Great Wen, Peter Watts describes its arrival as “a momentous event”: That is until 1953 when the Moka Bar, the UK’s first Italian espresso bar, opened in Soho. ![]() And yet, by the early 20th century it seems, coffee shops in London had grown scarcer and more humdrum. Certainly this was the case during the Enlightenment, as it was with the salons in France. As we’ve noted before, the English coffeehouse has served as a staging ground for radical, sometimes revolutionary social change. ![]()
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