Air Max Nikes brought to you by Burroughs by Kevin Murphy

Remember when William S. Burroughs was featured in a Nike commercial? Neither do I, but fortunately for us the internet does.

Here it is, in all its confounding beauty.

Or maybe it’s not confounding at all. Maybe a frail postmodernist was the perfect spokesman for a campaign targeting sporty young people …

The pairing made sense, anyway, to Timothy S. Murphy, whose book, Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs, serves up some interesting details on how this unlikely union came to be.