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 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 quietly expire in his sleep.
In 1996, Burroughs persuaded Woodard to contribute a Dreamachine to the oldster's first major visual retrospective, "Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts," at the 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 (LINK).
In 1997, on Burroughs' sudden passing, handlers petitioned Woodard to provide a dedicated Dreamachine for 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 from Tupinamba-harvested ermine, cocobolo and copper.
On April 19, 2001, Timothy McVeigh invited David 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 listenership including McVeigh's legal team and the balance of the following morning's witnesses. Within a fortnight, Most Rev. Daniel M. Buechlein, OSB, Archbishop of Indianapolis, would travel to Vatican City and deliver Woodard's score to Pope John Paul II, in quest of a blessing—an issue remaining under Holy See review. In Los Angeles Cardinal Mahony echoed Buechlein's request to the Holy Father. Woodard's Terre Haute organizer at Indiana University School of Music, in nearby Bloomington, was and remains an avid Dreamachine user. (PDF)
In 2003 the Dreamachine stood witness to not only Jan Bruun's ruminations in Headpress' Flicker Edition, and John Geiger's admirably concise Chapel Of Extreme Experience, but also Woodard's appointment as Councilman in the Los Angeles bedroom community of Juniper Hills—where his proposed sister city relationship with subtropical Paraguayan Nueva Germania would be realized (JPG).
The idea behind 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 continuing to recite stanzas in an otherwise lost 19th century Saxon accent. The bushy-tailed Wagner, who had not been keeping up with Nueva Germania's advancements in other directions, 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 Jewish people, 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 perhaps a bit on the simplistic side: "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 newly 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 (or "5 minute") snake, the spat-out husk of a bum-steered people, doomed now to hesitantly 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 served as Music Director for the Los Angeles Chamber Group. In 2003/2004, inspired by the Nueva Germania alliance, LACG recorded Francisco Acuña de Figueroa's "National Anthem of Paraguay" (MP3) and, in a banishing farewell to the colony'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 reluctant utopians: Elisabeth Nietzsche's Yerba Maté, for export. In Spring 2006 Woodard lectured throughout Germany on Wagner, Elisabeth Nietzsche and Nueva Germania. The October 2006 colonial expedition 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 them selected and assigned by Paraguayan maestro Diego Sánchez Haase to a mid-October recital in Nueva Germania under Woodard's stick.
J. Rentilly's 2006 article concerning Woodard's version of the Dreamachine features previously unpublished stills (PDF). A Bohemian model of the machine made its German debut in November/December 2006 at Berlin's Pogrom Gallery, paving the way for its March 2007 Russian dalliance 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 2007, within the dusty pages of Germany's FAZ, Woodard 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 to the Abbey of Thelema (PDF). (Not all subscribers were necessarily thrilled by the mainstay's acknowledgement of Harry Potter, Rabelais, et al.)
In April 2007 the Woodard trio "56 Minutes" (Angelic Version) premiered in Berlin—blogger / rock singer Momus offers a kind of historical context.
Woodard's 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 fleeting moment of gentrification (VID).
In September 2007 the brass section of the Los Angeles Chamber Group gave the world premiere of "A Cornerstone Cringle," under Woodard's stick, at the symbolic 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 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 almost yielded a work of beauty—"Her ble ikke den amerikanske drømmen til," in the December 2007 issue of the Norwegian magazine Vagabond (PDF).
In Spring 2008, awarded Switzerland's Eiger Stiftung scholarship (LINK), David served as Writer in Residence at Schloss Wiesenburg, a 12th Century castle nestled in the frosty GDR-tinged hinterlands between Bach's Leipzig and Eno's Berlin (LINK). His Summer 2008 exhibition at Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, co-curated by CV Director Adrian Notz, includes elegant and heartfelt contributions from Ma Anand Sheela and Christian Kracht (LINK). A report on the post-mortem thought processes of Ernst Jünger appears in Bunter Staub. Ernst Jünger im Gegenlicht (2008, Matthes & Seitz), a handsome anthology edited by Alexander Pschera and also featuring an essay by noted philologist Eckhart Nickel, published on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Jünger's passing (LINK). Max Planck neuroscientist Jonas Obleser questions Woodard about Jünger, and includes a brief excerpt, on his smashing WallOfTime.Net website (LINK)—which borrows its name from Jünger's 1959 work of speculative futurism, At the Wall of Time. In the luxurious ashen confines of Solution 9: The Great Pyramid (2008, Sternberg Press) is a candid account of the conception and composition of "A Cornerstone Cringle" (LINK).
