About David Woodard

Woodard composed a military fanfare setting of Mark Twain's posthumous story "The War Prayer," based on his own revision. The work was recorded at San Francisco's Old First Church, the oldest Protestant congregation west of the Mississippi, with attorney Melvin Belli as orator. Within two weeks, the King of Torts would demonstratively croak in his sleep.

He perfected the Dreamachine. In 1996, Burroughs persuaded Woodard to contribute a Dreamachine to the octogenarian's first major visual retrospective, "Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts," at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. To Burroughs' chagrin, seasoned Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight would hail Woodard's machine "the only interesting object in the exhibition," which LACMA claims to have been its best-attended since the legendary Picasso retrospective fourteen years earlier. The following year, Woodard developed and constructed several models of an electronic Wishing Machine.

In 1997, on Burroughs' sudden passing, handlers petitioned Woodard to provide a dedicated Dreamachine to be used at the funeral service. Inspired by the author's otherworldly stateliness, and moved by his swift departure, Woodard agreed and set to work on a machine constructed of Tupinamba-harvested ermine, cocobolo and copper.

On April 19, 2001, Timothy McVeigh invited Woodard to conduct a prequiem (non-liturgical accompaniment by which to expire) at his death. Vehemently opposed by an unremitting Board of Prisons Regional Director, Warden and Public Affairs Officer, rescued and sponsored by the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, and rendered in accordance with McVeigh's own prayerful contingencies, Woodard conducted "Ave Atque Vale" with a brass quintet at a neighboring parish on the eve of the execution. His immediate listenership included not only McVeigh's legal team but the balance of the following morning's witnesses. Within two weeks, Most Rev. Daniel M. Buechlein, OSB, Archbishop of Indianapolis, would travel to the Vatican City and personally deliver Woodard's score to Pope John Paul II in quest of a blessing—an issue remaining under Holy See review. Shortly thereafter, Los Angeles' Cardinal Mahony echoed Buechlein's request to the Holy Father. Woodard's Terre Haute musician recruiter at Indiana University School of Music, in nearby Bloomington, was and remains an avid DM user. (PDF)

In 2003, the Dreamachine stood witness to not only Jan Bruun's ruminations in Headpress' Flicker Edition, and of course John Geiger's admirably concise Chapel Of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine (Soft Skull), but also Woodard's appointment as Councilman in Los Angeles bedroom community Juniper Hills—where his proposed sister city status with subtropical Paraguayan Nueva Germania was realized (JPG).

The idea for the municipal alliance was initially suggested by Wolf-Siegfried Wagner, great-grandson of composer Richard Wagner, after Councilman Woodard had mused over the fate of Nueva Germania's Lutheran choir—alleged in Ben Macintyre's Forgotten Fatherland to be very much alive and still reciting stanzas in an otherwise lost 19th century Saxon accent. The bushy-tailed Wagner, who had not been keeping up with Nueva Germania's advancements, wryly suggested that desertous Juniper Hills form a sister city relationship with the abject jungle outpost.

It was the 1880 publication of Richard Wagner's anthology of essays, Religion And Art, that had inspired Elisabeth Nietzsche and her husband Bernard Förster to travel to Paraguay, forge a clearing and, in 1886, accompanied by 14 hand-picked German peasant couples, christen what was to be a family-planning sodality. In Religion and Art, Wagner had railed against Germany's 1871 emancipation of the Jews, and insisted on his belief that the miscegenation of noble and ignoble races would destroy the best of human traits. Only by retaining the purity of the Teutonic race could one bring about "an authentic rebirth of racial feeling . . ." Further, he claimed, "the degeneration of the human race has come about through its departure from a natural [i.e., vegetarian] diet." His solution was simple: "What is to prevent our carrying out a rational migration of these peoples to those quarters of the globe whose enormous fertility is sufficient to maintain the entire present population of Earth, as is claimed of the South American peninsula itself?" Colonizing South America would offer the added advantage of preventing "the English traders" from getting their hands on potential new colonies. As the landlocked jungle proved a more hostile environment than anticipated, Bernard committed suicide within three years, and, shortly thereafter, Elisabeth slipped back to Germany to care for her now unhinged brother Friedrich, the philosopher, never to return. She left behind a sampling of stranded, racist followers—i.e., those who had not yet succumbed to the refuge of starvation, malaria, tuberculosis or the pervasive jararaca ("five-minute") snake, the spat-out husk of a bum-steered people, resigned now to breed and commiserate in barren, ostracized Nueva Germania over the next century and a quarter... That is, until now.

Shrugging off young Wagner's fawning sarcasm, Councilman Woodard found surviving descendents of the botched utopia not only cooperative but genuinely inspiring. At the behest of Ceferino Zena, Guaraní mayor of racially integrated, contemporary Nueva Germania, Woodard composed a partially Luther-inspired anthem to celebrate the burgeoning alliance. Summarily proscribed by the Juniper Hills High School Choir for its unbridled exuberance, "Our Jungle Holy Land" was recorded (MP3) during a brave 2004 collaboration between San Francisco Opera Company and Cirque du Soleil. The Council project was endorsed (PDF) by the White House. Plasticos Foundation of Huntington Beach (PDF), moved by Woodard's actions, is endeavoring to supply Nueva Germania with not only gratis reconstructive surgery and training in rudimentary surgical procedure but also a permanent facility catering to the special needs populace of Paraguay's impoverished 2º Departamento San Pedro.

From 2000 to 2006, David Woodard served as Music Director of Los Angeles Chamber Group. He is completing work on a symphonic remembrance of Cumantsa and the women in Wagner's life, to be performed at Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles' Historic Core. In 2003/2004, inspired by the alliance, LACG recorded Francisco Acuña de Figueroa's National Anthem of Paraguay (MP3) and, in a banishing farewell to Nueva Germania's uncomfortable past, modestly contributed to the scant recordings of Wagner's Trauermusik (MP3). In October, 2005, Woodard built Nueva Germania's first Brion Gysin Dreamachine—followed in November by a more suitably elegant gesture to benefit the colony: Elisabeth Nietzsche's Yerba Maté for export. In Spring of 2006, Woodard lectured throughout Germany on Wagner, Elisabeth Nietzsche and Nueva Germania. The colonial expedition in October, 2006 closed with Asunción's November 1 premiere of Tannhäuser. This was the first time that any of Wagner's operas had been performed in Paraguay. Musicians were flown in from Brasil and Europe, fourteen of whom the esteemed Paraguayan maestro Diego Sánchez Haase had selected and assigned to a mid-October recital in Nueva Germania under Woodard's stick.

J. Rentilly's July, 2006 article about the Dreamachine features previously unpublished stills from filmmaker John Aes-Nihil's documentary in post-production, William S. Burroughs in the Dreamachine (PDF). A Bohemian model of the machine made its German debut in November/December, 2006 at Berlin's Pogrom Gallery, paving the way for a Russian dalliance in March, 2007 at the otherwise icky 2nd Moscow Biennale.

Woodard's treatise on the role of trees in the history of religion makes reference to the Dreamachine and lesser known prototypes (ENGLISH/GERMAN). On the Ides of March he described, with Nueva Germania pioneer Christian Kracht, a reenactment of Kenneth Anger's and Dr. and Mrs. Alfred Kinsey's 1955 excursion to Cefalù, home of the Abbey of Thelema, within the dusty pages of Germany's FAZ (PDF). (It seems not all subscribers were thrilled by the mainstay's acknowledgement of Harry Potter, Rabelais, etc.)

In April, 2007, the Woodard trio "56 Minutes" (Angelic Version) premiered in Berlin—literary New Romantic Momus offers historical context.

His definitive essay on the life and work of American painter Joe Coleman (ENGLISH/GERMAN) appears in the lavishly illustrated catalog accompanying the artist's most complete retrospective to date ("Internal Digging," Kunst-Werke, Berlin, May 27 - August 12, 2007), issued by Walther König.

Hans Blüher scholar Martin Lichtmesz published "Nietzsche und Wagner im Dschungel," an interview with Woodard and Nueva Germania co-lecturer Kracht, in the Summer, 2007 issue of Zwielicht (PDF). Woodard constructed a number of Bohemian NG Dreamachines prior to the colony's gentrification (VID).

In early September the brass section of Los Angeles Chamber Group gave the world premiere of "A Cornerstone Cringle" under Woodard's amiable stick, at the cornerstone-laying ceremony / opening gala of the Great Pyramid—an aggressive, Kulturstiftung des Bundes-funded architectural project with potential to develop into the world's largest columbarium, near Dessau, Germany.

David’s September, 2007 Dreamachine exhibition at Freud’s Dreams Museum (LINK), in the childhood home of Lou Salomé, yielded record attendance for the East-European psychoanalytic axis—exceeded in vastness of bodycount only by his closing lecture, which examined the role of tree worship in the history of religion and the concomitant role of flickering sunlight in the development of the primitive human brain (Oct. 2: LINK / Oct. 1: PDF / Sept. 28: LINK / Sept. 26: LINK / Sept. 23: LINK / Sept. 22: VID). The Dreamachine on display was lent to Freud’s Dreams Museum by the distinguished German collector Alexander Schröder.

Photojournalist Heidi Hattestein's recent visit to Paraguay, including a sidestep to lakeside Hotel del Lago in the Asunción suburb of San Bernardino (where Bernhard Förster crossed the Great Divide and David happened to be brunching), has yielded a work of beauty—"Her ble ikke den amerikanske drømmen til," in the December, 2007 issue of the Norwegian magazine Vagabond (PDF).

David's Summer 2008 exhibition at Cabaret Voltaire (the birthplace of Dada), Zürich, which he co-curated with CV Director Adrian Notz, is a collaboration with Christian Kracht and Ma Anand Sheela: LINK.




links dm news		David Woodard was educated at Columbia, New School for Social Research and UC Santa Barbara. In 1984 he privately issued Breed The Unmentioned, a book about the Master Great Cultural Figure ("The secret is the secret / Sincerity is the word"). Later in the year he fell into correspondence with William S. Burroughs, when he anonymously mailed a copy of the same to the reclusive author, whose windy replies launched an enduring exchange. Woodard composed a military fanfare setting of Mark Twain's posthumous story "The War Prayer," based on his own revision. The work was recorded at San Francisco's Old First Church, the oldest Protestant congregation west of the Mississippi, with attorney Melvin Belli as orator. Within two weeks, the King of Torts would demonstratively croak in his sleep. He perfected the Dreamachine. In 1996, Burroughs persuaded Woodard to contribute a Dreamachine to the octogenarian's first major visual retrospective, "Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts," at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. To Burroughs' chagrin, seasoned Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight would hail Woodard's machine "the only interesting object in the exhibition," which LACMA claims to have been its best-attended since the legendary Picasso retrospective fourteen years earlier. The following year, Woodard developed and constructed several models of an electronic Wishing Machine. In 1997, on Burroughs' sudden passing, handlers petitioned Woodard to provide a dedicated Dreamachine to be used at the funeral service. Inspired by the author's otherworldly stateliness, and moved by his swift departure, Woodard agreed and set to work on a machine constructed of Tupinamba-harvested ermine, cocobolo and copper. On April 19, 2001, Timothy McVeigh invited Woodard to conduct a prequiem (non-liturgical accompaniment by which to expire) at his death. Vehemently opposed by an unremitting Board of Prisons Regional Director, Warden and Public Affairs Officer, rescued and sponsored by the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, and rendered in accordance with McVeigh's own prayerful contingencies, Woodard conducted "Ave Atque Vale" with a brass quintet at a neighboring parish on the eve of the execution. His immediate listenership included not only McVeigh's legal team but the balance of the following morning's witnesses. Within two weeks, Most Rev. Daniel M. Buechlein, OSB, Archbishop of Indianapolis, would travel to the Vatican City and personally deliver Woodard's score to Pope John Paul II in quest of a blessing—an issue remaining under Holy See review. Shortly thereafter, Los Angeles' Cardinal Mahony echoed Buechlein's request to the Holy Father. Woodard's Terre Haute musician recruiter at Indiana University School of Music, in nearby Bloomington, was and remains an avid DM user. (PDF) In 2003, the Dreamachine stood witness to not only Jan Bruun's ruminations in Headpress' Flicker Edition, and of course John Geiger's admirably concise Chapel Of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine (Soft Skull), but also Woodard's appointment as Councilman in Los Angeles bedroom community Juniper Hills—where his proposed sister city status with subtropical Paraguayan Nueva Germania was realized (JPG). The idea for the municipal alliance was initially suggested by Wolf-Siegfried Wagner, great-grandson of composer Richard Wagner, after Councilman Woodard had mused over the fate of Nueva Germania's Lutheran choir—alleged in Ben Macintyre's Forgotten Fatherland to be very much alive and still reciting stanzas in an otherwise lost 19th century Saxon accent. The bushy-tailed Wagner, who had not been keeping up with Nueva Germania's advancements, wryly suggested that desertous Juniper Hills form a sister city relationship with the abject jungle outpost. It was the 1880 publication of Richard Wagner's anthology of essays, Religion And Art, that had inspired Elisabeth Nietzsche and her husband Bernard Förster to travel to Paraguay, forge a clearing and, in 1886, accompanied by 14 hand-picked German peasant couples, christen what was to be a family-planning sodality. In Religion and Art, Wagner had railed against Germany's 1871 emancipation of the Jews, and insisted on his belief that the miscegenation of noble and ignoble races would destroy the best of human traits. Only by retaining the purity of the Teutonic race could one bring about "an authentic rebirth of racial feeling . . ." Further, he claimed, "the degeneration of the human race has come about through its departure from a natural [i.e., vegetarian] diet." His solution was simple: "What is to prevent our carrying out a rational migration of these peoples to those quarters of the globe whose enormous fertility is sufficient to maintain the entire present population of Earth, as is claimed of the South American peninsula itself?" Colonizing South America would offer the added advantage of preventing "the English traders" from getting their hands on potential new colonies. As the landlocked jungle proved a more hostile environment than anticipated, Bernard committed suicide within three years, and, shortly thereafter, Elisabeth slipped back to Germany to care for her now unhinged brother Friedrich, the philosopher, never to return. She left behind a sampling of stranded, racist followers—i.e., those who had not yet succumbed to the refuge of starvation, malaria, tuberculosis or the pervasive jararaca ("five-minute") snake, the spat-out husk of a bum-steered people, resigned now to breed and commiserate in barren, ostracized Nueva Germania over the next century and a quarter... That is, until now. Shrugging off young Wagner's fawning sarcasm, Councilman Woodard found surviving descendents of the botched utopia not only cooperative but genuinely inspiring. At the behest of Ceferino Zena, Guaraní mayor of racially integrated, contemporary Nueva Germania, Woodard composed a partially Luther-inspired anthem to celebrate the burgeoning alliance. Summarily proscribed by the Juniper Hills High School Choir for its unbridled exuberance, "Our Jungle Holy Land" was recorded (MP3) during a brave 2004 collaboration between San Francisco Opera Company and Cirque du Soleil. The Council project was endorsed (PDF) by the White House. Plasticos Foundation of Huntington Beach (PDF), moved by Woodard's actions, is endeavoring to supply Nueva Germania with not only gratis reconstructive surgery and training in rudimentary surgical procedure but also a permanent facility catering to the special needs populace of Paraguay's impoverished 2º Departamento San Pedro. From 2000 to 2006, David Woodard served as Music Director of Los Angeles Chamber Group. He is completing work on a symphonic remembrance of Cumantsa and the women in Wagner's life, to be performed at Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles' Historic Core. In 2003/2004, inspired by the alliance, LACG recorded Francisco Acuña de Figueroa's National Anthem of Paraguay (MP3) and, in a banishing farewell to Nueva Germania's uncomfortable past, modestly contributed to the scant recordings of Wagner's Trauermusik (MP3). In October, 2005, Woodard built Nueva Germania's first Brion Gysin Dreamachine—followed in November by a more suitably elegant gesture to benefit the colony: Elisabeth Nietzsche's Yerba Maté for export. In Spring of 2006, Woodard lectured throughout Germany on Wagner, Elisabeth Nietzsche and Nueva Germania. The colonial expedition in October, 2006 closed with Asunción's November 1 premiere of Tannhäuser. This was the first time that any of Wagner's operas had been performed in Paraguay. Musicians were flown in from Brasil and Europe, fourteen of whom the esteemed Paraguayan maestro Diego Sánchez Haase had selected and assigned to a mid-October recital in Nueva Germania under Woodard's stick. J. Rentilly's July, 2006 article about the Dreamachine features previously unpublished stills from filmmaker John Aes-Nihil's documentary in post-production, William S. Burroughs in the Dreamachine (PDF). A Bohemian model of the machine made its German debut in November/December, 2006 at Berlin's Pogrom Gallery, paving the way for a Russian dalliance in March, 2007 at the otherwise icky 2nd Moscow Biennale. Woodard's treatise on the role of trees in the history of religion makes reference to the Dreamachine and lesser known prototypes (ENGLISH/GERMAN). On the Ides of March he described, with Nueva Germania pioneer Christian Kracht, a reenactment of Kenneth Anger's and Dr. and Mrs. Alfred Kinsey's 1955 excursion to Cefalù, home of the Abbey of Thelema, within the dusty pages of Germany's FAZ (PDF). (It seems not all subscribers were thrilled by the mainstay's acknowledgement of Harry Potter, Rabelais, etc.) In April, 2007, the Woodard trio "56 Minutes" (Angelic Version) premiered in Berlin—literary New Romantic Momus offers historical context. His definitive essay on the life and work of American painter Joe Coleman (ENGLISH/GERMAN) appears in the lavishly illustrated catalog accompanying the artist's most complete retrospective to date ("Internal Digging," Kunst-Werke, Berlin, May 27 - August 12, 2007), issued by Walther König. Hans Blüher scholar Martin Lichtmesz published "Nietzsche und Wagner im Dschungel," an interview with Woodard and Nueva Germania co-lecturer Kracht, in the Summer, 2007 issue of Zwielicht (PDF). Woodard constructed a number of Bohemian NG Dreamachines prior to the colony's gentrification (VID). In early September the brass section of Los Angeles Chamber Group gave the world premiere of "A Cornerstone Cringle" under Woodard's amiable stick, at the cornerstone-laying ceremony / opening gala of the Great Pyramid—an aggressive, Kulturstiftung des Bundes-funded architectural project with potential to develop into the world's largest columbarium, near Dessau, Germany. David’s September, 2007 Dreamachine exhibition at Freud’s Dreams Museum (LINK), in the childhood home of Lou Salomé, yielded record attendance for the East-European psychoanalytic axis—exceeded in vastness of bodycount only by his closing lecture, which examined the role of tree worship in the history of religion and the concomitant role of flickering sunlight in the development of the primitive human brain (Oct. 2: LINK / Oct. 1: PDF / Sept. 28: LINK / Sept. 26: LINK / Sept. 23: LINK / Sept. 22: VID). The Dreamachine on display was lent to Freud’s Dreams Museum by the distinguished German collector Alexander Schröder. Photojournalist Heidi Hattestein's recent visit to Paraguay, including a sidestep to lakeside Hotel del Lago in the Asunción suburb of San Bernardino (where Bernhard Förster crossed the Great Divide and David happened to be brunching), has yielded a work of beauty—"Her ble ikke den amerikanske drømmen til," in the December, 2007 issue of the Norwegian magazine Vagabond (PDF). David's Summer 2008 exhibition at Cabaret Voltaire (the birthplace of Dada), Zürich, which he co-curated with CV Director Adrian Notz, is a collaboration with Christian Kracht and Ma Anand Sheela: LINK.