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David Woodard

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David Woodard
Woodard in 2020
Woodard in 2020
Born (1964-04-06) April 6, 1964 (age 60)
Santa Barbara, California, U.S.
OccupationConductor, writer
Citizenship
  • United States
  • Canada
Literary movementPostmodernism
SpouseSonja Vectomov
Children2
Signature

David James Woodard (/ˈwʊdɑːrd/ ⓘ;[1] born April 6, 1964) is an American conductor and writer.

Los Angeles memorial services at which Woodard has served as conductor or music director include a 2001 civic ceremony held at the Angels Flight funicular railway honoring mishap casualty Leon Praport and his injured widow Lola.[2][3]: 125  He has conducted wildlife requiems, including for a California brown pelican on the berm crest of a beach where the animal had fallen.[4][5]: 152–153  He is reputed to favor colored inks in preparing a score.[6]: 173 

Woodard's replicas of the Dreamachine have been exhibited in art museums throughout the world. His contributions to Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture book series and literary journals such as Der Freund include writings on interspecies karma, plant consciousness, ketamine and the Paraguayan settlement Nueva Germania.[7][8]: 176–188 

Early life

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David Woodard grew up in Santa Barbara, California, the youngest child of a Canadian Mennonite mother, part of the Kleine Gemeinde, and an American Hussite father. His irenic parents operated a public relations firm. Woodard was educated privately and at The New School for Social Research.[9]: 34–41 

Career

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From 1989 to 2007 Woodard built replicas of the Dreamachine, a mildly psychoactive lamp / stroboscopic device created by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, involving a slotted cylinder made of copper or paper encircling an electric lamp on a motorized base constructed of cocobolo or pine.[10] Woodard maintained that, observed with closed eyes, the machine could trigger mental states comparable to substance intoxication or dreaming.[11][a]

Agreeing to contribute a Dreamachine to William S. Burroughs' 1996 LACMA visual retrospective Ports of Entry,[12][13] Woodard also befriended the elderly author and presented him with a paper and pine "Bohemian model" Dreamachine on the occasion of his 83rd and final birthday.[14][15]: 23  Sotheby's auctioned the former machine to a private collector in 2002,[16] and the latter machine remains on extended loan from Burroughs' estate to the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas.[17] In a 2019 critical study, Beat scholar Raj Chandarlapaty re-evaluates Woodard's "idea-shattering" approach to the near-forgotten Dreamachine.[18]: 142–146 

Prequiems

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During the 1990s Woodard coined the term prequiem, a portmanteau of preemptive and requiem, to describe his Buddhist practice of composing dedicated music to be rendered during or slightly before the death of its subject.[19]

Timothy McVeigh asked Woodard to conduct a prequiem Mass on the eve of his 2001 execution in Terre Haute, Indiana.[20]: 240–241 [21]: 124–125  Acknowledging McVeigh's horrible deed, yet intending to provide comfort, Woodard consented by premiering the coda section of his composition Ave Atque Vale (Hail and Farewell) with a local brass choir at St. Margaret Mary Church, near USP Terre Haute,[22] before an audience that included the following morning's witnesses. Archbishop Daniel M. Buechlein and later Cardinal Roger Mahony petitioned Pope John Paul II to bless Woodard's full score.[23][24]: 37 [9]: 34–41 

Nueva Germania

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In 2003 Woodard was elected councilman in Juniper Hills (Los Angeles County), California. In this capacity he proposed a sister city relationship with Nueva Germania, Paraguay. To advance his plan, Woodard traveled to the erstwhile vegetarian[citation needed]/feminist[citation needed] utopia and met with its municipal leadership. Following an initial visit, having encountered a population "in moral and intellectual decline",[25]: 39–40  he chose not to pursue the relationship but had found in the community an object of study for later writings. What particularly interested him were the proto-transhumanist ideas of speculative planner Richard Wagner and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who along with her husband Bernhard Förster founded and lived in Nueva Germania from 1886 and 1889.[26][27]: 28–31 

In 2004, acknowledging sustainable aspects of Nueva Germania's founding ideals, namely compassion, self-denial and Lutheranism,[9]: 34–41  Woodard composed the choral anthem "Our Jungle Holy Land".[28]: 41–50 [29]: ch. 21 

From 2004 to 2006 Woodard led numerous expeditions to Nueva Germania, winning support from then U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.[30] In 2011 Woodard granted Swiss writer Christian Kracht license to publish some of their private correspondence, largely concerning Nueva Germania,[31]: 113–138  under University of Hanover imprint Wehrhahn Verlag.[32]: 180–189  Of the correspondence FAZ relates, "[The authors] obliterate the boundary between life and art."[33]: 32  Der Spiegel posits that Five Years[34] constitutes "the spiritual preparatory work" of Kracht's subsequent novel Imperium.[35]

According to Andrew McCann in 2015, Woodard embarked on "a trip to what is left of the place, where descendants of original settlers live under drastically reduced circumstances" and was moved to "advance the cultural profile of the community, and to build a miniature Bayreuth opera house on the site of what was once Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's family residence."[36] In recent years Nueva Germania has tempered into a more genial destination, with bed and breakfasts and a makeshift historical museum.

References

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Notes

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  1. ^ In 1990 Woodard invented a psychotechnographic machine, the Feraliminal Lycanthropizer, effects of which are purportedly opposite those of a Dreamachine.

Citations

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  1. ^ Roach, P. J., Hartman, J., Setter, J., & Jones, D., eds., Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary, 17th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 563.
  2. ^ Reich, K., "Family to Sue City, Firms Over Angels Flight Death", Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2001.
  3. ^ Dawson, J., Los Angeles' Angels Flight (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008), p. 125.
  4. ^ Manzer, T., "Pelican's Goodbye is a Sad Song", Press-Telegram, October 2, 1998.
  5. ^ Allen, B., Pelican (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), pp. 152–153.
  6. ^ Kracht, C., & Nickel, E., Gebrauchsanweisung für Kathmandu und Nepal: Überarbeitete Neuausgabe (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2012), p. 173.
  7. ^ Carozzi, I., "La storia di Nueva Germania", Il Post, October 13, 2011.
  8. ^ Busch, N., Das ›politisch Rechte‹ der Gegenwartsliteratur (1989–2022) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024), pp. 176–188.
  9. ^ a b c Woodard, D., "Musica lætitiæ comes medicina dolorum", trans. S. Zeitz, Der Freund, Nr. 7, March 2006, pp. 34–41.
  10. ^ Allen, M., "Décor by Timothy Leary", The New York Times, January 20, 2005. Archived from the original on April 22, 2015.
  11. ^ Woodard, Program notes, Program, Berlin, November 2006.
  12. ^ Knight, C., "The Art of Randomness", Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1996.
  13. ^ Bolles, D., "Dream Weaver", LA Weekly, July 26–August 1, 1996.
  14. ^ U.S. Embassy Prague, "Literární večer s diskusí", October 2014.
  15. ^ Woodard, "Burroughs und der Steinbock", Schweizer Monat, March 2014, p. 23.
  16. ^ Carpenter, "A vision built for visionaries", Los Angeles Times, October 31, 2002.
  17. ^ Spencer Museum of Art, Dreamachine, KU.
  18. ^ Chandarlapaty, R., "Woodard and Renewed Intellectual Possibilities", in Seeing the Beat Generation (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2019), pp. 142–146.
  19. ^ Carpenter, S., "In Concert at a Killer's Death", Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2001.
  20. ^ Siletti, M. J., Sounding the last mile: Music and capital punishment in the United States since 1976, dissertation under the tutelage of Prof. J. Magee, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2018, pp. 240–241.
  21. ^ Deaglio, E., Cose che voi umani (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2021), p. 124–125.
  22. ^ Staff, “Composer creates McVeigh death fanfare”, BBC News, May 11, 2001.
  23. ^ Vloed, K. van der, Entry on Woodard, Requiem Survey, February 5, 2006.
  24. ^ Wall, J. M., "Lessons in Loss", The Christian Century, July 4–10, 2001, p. 37.
  25. ^ Tenaglia, F., Momus—A Walking Interview (Turin/Milan: Noch Publishing, 2015), pp. 39–40.
  26. ^ Kober, H., "In, um und um Germanistan herum", Die Tageszeitung, May 18, 2006.
  27. ^ Lichtmesz, M., "Nietzsche und Wagner im Dschungel: David Woodard & Christian Kracht in Nueva Germania", Zwielicht 2, 2007, pp. 28–31.
  28. ^ Scheidemandel, N., "Der Traum in der Maschine", Der Freund, Nr. 1, September 2004, pp. 41–50.
  29. ^ Horzon, R., The White Book (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2021), ch. 21.
  30. ^ Epstein, J., "Rebuilding a Home in the Jungle", San Francisco Chronicle, March 13, 2005. Archived from the original on October 9, 2016.
  31. ^ Schröter, J., "Interpretive Problems with Author, Self-Fashioning and Narrator", in Birke, Köppe, eds., Author and Narrator (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 113–138.
  32. ^ Woodard, "In Media Res", 032c, Summer 2011, pp. 180–189.
  33. ^ Link, M., "Wie der Gin zum Tonic", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 9, 2011, p. 32.
  34. ^ Kracht & Woodard, Five Years (Hanover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2011).
  35. ^ Diez, G., "Die Methode Kracht", Der Spiegel, February 13, 2012, p. 102.
  36. ^ McCann, A. L., "Allegory and the German (Half) Century", Sydney Review of Books, August 28, 2015.
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