Years ago, I linked to a sequence of still images and the text of the poem. Now, as you see, we have the video.
It seems that Warren Ellis, who clearly got out the wrong side of whatever it is he sleeps in, is all been-there-done-that on the subject, claiming that “everyone else has all seen a million fucking times”.
This, I’m afraid, is just so much cooler-than-thou bullshit. Actually, Warren, “everyone” hasn’t seen it at all; every year, there’s a whole new bunch of people who not only have not seen it, they may not even have heard of William Burroughs, and for those people, this clip is going to have as much of an impact as it had on “everyone else”, they first time they/we saw it. So I’m running the clip anyway — and unless something tastier and more appropriate comes along, I’ll probably run it again next year, too.

UPDATE: There’s a more complete and concise version of the Thanksgiving Prayer on YT here, and here‘s a link to a higher quality mpg version, for which we are indebted to WFMU blog…

FURTHER UPDATE: I’ve swapped the video embedded above with the video originally linked in the previous update. The video that was previously embedded, which contained a major but incomplete chunk of the Thanksgiving Prayer, and does provide a little wider context about Burroughs, is now linked here. Try to keep up.