David Woodard

Woodard was born in Santa Barbara, California, Woodard claimed in 2001 that his interest in death stemmed from the fact that, when he was a teenager, his girlfriend was mysteriously found dead; in another instance he said that she had killed herself and her parents had blamed him. Woodard studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, before he moved to Napa, California in 1987. There he worked at the Tulocay Cemetery. Due to the chapter, the book was removed from circulation in Russia as "drug propaganda". Copies of the book were destroyed and the printer who produced them was fined. == Dreamachine ==

While in Napa, he became interested in the Dreamachine, His landlord had been a friend of Gysin and was in possession of the schematics used to build the device. Based on those schematics, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Woodard built replicas of the device. He turned this into a business and largely sold his Dreamachines through word of mouth. and William Burroughs: 100 Years of Expanding Consciousness at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas in 2014. A dreamachine was sold to Kurt Cobain, possibly by Woodard, which rumors and some organizations claimed was somehow responsible for his suicide, criticizing both Burroughs and Woodard for this. Most commentators, and Woodard, disregarded this, and later reports on Cobain's suicide contradicted it. Woodard also constructed and offered for sale a device he referred to as a "wishing machine", inspired by Burroughs' writings, which he claimed had allowed him to control the weather and cure cancer. == Prequiems ==

During the 1990s, Woodard coined the term prequiem, a portmanteau of the words preemptive and requiem, to describe his practice of composing dedicated music "for the soon-to-be-deceased". In 2005, Woodard was the music director for the Los Angeles Chamber Group, which mostly focused on memorial pieces. Woodard got in contact with Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people in 1995, to conduct a prequiem Mass on the eve of his 2001 execution in Terre Haute, Indiana. According to Woodard, the composition was originally intended to be for "Dr. Death" Jack Kevorkian in case he died during a prison hunger strike. It was originally intended to be called "Farewell to a Saint", but he changed this to "Ave Atque Vale" (Hail and Farewell) due to potential offensiveness. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Woodard also wrote a "memorial suite" for neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce in 2002, following his unexpected death. Following the September 11 attacks, he attempted unsuccessfully to stage a memorial to the 9/11 hijackers. == Nueva Germania ==

and Christian Kracht in 2008 In 2003, Woodard, then a resident of Juniper Hills, California, proposed a sister city relationship with Nueva Germania, Paraguay, which had originally been founded as a "racially pure utopian settlement" for Germans. He wrote a music composition for the place, entitled "Our Jungle Holy Land". He is close friends with Swiss novelist Christian Kracht. They met in 2003. A book of the correspondence between Kracht and Woodard during the years 2004 to 2009 was published in 2011 under the title Five Years. Upon its publication, the book received little notice from the media, but following a controversy relating to Kracht's 2012 novel Imperium, Five Years became controversial for, according to some critics, indicating far right and New Right opinions. Both authors' ties to Nueva Germania were particularly the subject of criticism. An analysis described it as "uncertain" textually, with difficulty distinguishing irony and seriousness, or closer to a novel in form. an alternative university that was run from 1997 to 2007 by German artist Rafael Horzon. == Wikipedia promotion campaign ==

In 2025, Wikipedia editors uncovered what was described as the "single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history", in which a network of around 200 sock puppet accounts and numerous proxy IPs created or edited articles in 335 languages to promote Woodard for over a decade. A Wikipedia editor with the username Grnrchst suggested that the accounts were likely to have been operated by Woodard or people close to him. Following an investigation by Grnrchst, who later wrote about their findings in the English Wikipedia's newsletter, The Signpost, Wikipedia stewards and local communities deleted over 300 articles and banned associated accounts, leaving about 20 editions of the Woodard article intact. == References ==