At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from

nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out

of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. Andre Breton expelled

Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the

Freudian couch.



In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut

newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at

random. "Minutes to Go" resulted from this initial cut-up experiment.

"Minutes to Go" contains unedited unchanged cut-ups emerging as

quite coherent and meaningful prose.



The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been

used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still

camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the

unpredicatble factors of passersby and juxtapositon cut-ups. And

photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . .

. writers will tell you the same. The best writings seems to be done

almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made

explicit-all writing is in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point-had

no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will

spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous

factor with a pair of scissors.



The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this

page. Now cut down the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . .

one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four

with section one and section two with section three. And you have a

new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes

something quite different-cutting up political speeches is an

interesting excercise-in any case you will find that it says something

and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy.

Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have

lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem

and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the

page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like. As many

Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said: "Poetry

is for everyone." And Andre Breton called him a cop and expelled

him from the movement. Say it again: "Poetry is for everyone."

Poetry is a place and it is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in

Rimbaud's place. Here is a Rimbaud poem cut up.



"Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the

suburban air improbable desertions . . . all harmonic pine for strife.



"The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood

laugh and drunken penance.



"Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle.



"The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to

mist."



Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut-upws. It is

experimental in the sense of bein something to do. Right here write

now. Not something to talk and argue about. Greek philosophers

assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object

would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two

objects off the table and see how they fall. Shakespeare Rimbaud live

in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut-

ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for

the cutter. Table tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an improvement on the

usual deplorable performances of contacted poets through a medium.

Rimbaud announces himself, to be followed by some excruciatingly

bad poetry. Cut Rimbaud's words and you are assured of good poetry

at least if not personal appearance.



All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard

overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit

and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be

composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a

page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing

enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images

shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound

sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color

of vowels. And his "systematic derangement of the senses." The place

of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling

forms.



The cut-ups can be applied to other fields than writing. Dr Neumann

in his Theory of Games and Economic behavior introduces the cut-up

method of random action into game and military strategy: assume

that the worst has happened and act accordingly. If your strategy is

at some point determined . . . by random factor your opponent will

gain no advantage from knowing your strategy since he cannot

predict the move. The cut-up method could be used to advantage in

processing scientific data. How many discoveries have been made by

accident? We cannot produce accidents to order. The cut-ups could

add new dimension to films. Cut gambling scene in with a thousand

gambling scenes all times and places. Cut back. Cut streets of the

world. Cut and rearrange the word and image in films. There is no

reason to accept a second-rate product when you can have the best.

And the best is there for all. "Poetry is for everyone . . .



Now here are the preceding two paragraphs cut into four sections

and rearranged:



ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT-UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC

BEHAVIOR OVERHEARD? WHAT ELSE? ASSUME THAT THE WORST

HAS HAPPENED EXPLICIT AND SUBJECT TO STRATEGY IS AT SOME

POINT CLASSICAL PROSE. CUTTING AND REARRANGING FACTOR YOUR

OPPONENT WILL GAIN INTRODUCES A NEW DIMENSION YOUR

STRATEGY. HOW MANY DISCOVERIES SOUND TO KINESTHETIC? WE

CAN NOW PRODUCE ACCIDENT TO HIS COLOR OF VOWELS. AND NEW

DIMENSION TO FILMS CUT THE SENSES. THE PLACE OF SAND.

GAMBLING SCENES ALL TIMES COLORS TASTING SOUNDS SMELL

STREETS OF THE WORLD. WHEN YOU CAN HAVE THE BEST ALL:

"POETRY IS FOR EVERYONE" DR NEUMANN IN A COLLAGE OF WORDS

READ HEARD INTRODUCED THE CUT-UP SCISSORS RENDERS THE

POCESS GAME AND MILITARY STRATEGY. VARIATION CLEAR AND

ACT ACCORDINGLY. IF YOU POSED ENTIRELY OR REARRANGED CUT

DETERMINED BY RANDOM A PAGE OF WRITTEN WORDS NO

ADVANTAGE FROM KNOWING INTO WRITER PREDICT THE MOVE. THE

CUT VARIATION IMAGES SHIFT SENSE ADVANTAGE IN PROCESSING

TO SOUND SIGHT TO SOUND. HAVE BEEN MADE BY ACCIDENT IS

WHERE RIMBAUD WAS GOING WITH ORDER THE CUT-UPS COULD

"SYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENT" OF THE GAMBLING SCENE IN WITH A

TEA HALLUCINATION: SEEING AND PLACES. CUT BACK. CUT FORMS.

REARRANGE THE WORD AND IMAGE TO OTHER FIELDS THAN

WRITING.  - William Burroughs



~ BRION GYSIN ~

A biography/appreciation by Terry Wilson . . .



BRION GYSIN

(19 January 1916-       )



SELECTED BOOKS



Minutes to Go, with William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Sinclair

Belles (Paris: Two Cities Editions, 1960; San Francisco: Beach Books,

1968);

The Exterminator, with William Burroughs (San Francisco: Auerhahn

Press/Dave Haselwood Books, 1960, 1967);

The Process, (New York: Doubleday, 1969; London: Jonathan Cape,

1970);

Oeuvre Croisee (The Third Mind), with William S. Burroughs (Paris:

Flammarion, 1976; New York: Viking Press, 1978; London: John

Calder, 1979).



Brion Gysin is regarded as one of the most influential and visionary

of living poets and painters. In 1958, a chance encounter with

William Burroughs on the Place St. Michel in Paris resulted in him

moving into the famous Beat Hotel at no. 9 rue Git le Coeur in the

Latin Quarter. He confided to Burroughs his inventions, the Cut-ups

and Permutations, and thus began the most important collaboration

in modern literature.



A naturalized US citizen of Swiss extraction, Gysin was born in

Taplow House, Taplow, Bucks, UK. After the loss of his father when

he was nine months old, his mother took him to New York to stay

with one of her sisters and then to Kansas City, Mo., to stay with

another. He finished high school at the age of fifteen in Edmonton,

Alberta, and ws sent for two years to the prestigious English public

school, Downside. While there, Gysin began publishing his poetry

before he went on to the Sorbonne. In Paris, he met everybody in the

literary and artistic worlds. When he was nineteen, he exhibited his

drawings with the Surrealist group, which included Picasso on that

occasion.



Gysin is an entirely self-taught painter who acquired an enviable

technique without putting foot in an art school or academy. At the

age of twenty-three he had his first one-man show in a prestigious

Paris gallery just off the Champs Elysees. It was a glittering social

and financial (even a critical) success, with an article in Poetry World

signed by Calas. But it was May, 1939. World War II caught Gysin in

Switzerland with an overnight bag. When he got to New York,

everybody asked: "How long you been back?"



~ HERE TO GO: PLANET R-101 ~

An excerpt from Here To Go: Planet R-101, by Terry Wilson



T: How did you get into tape recorders?

B: I heard of them at the end of World War II, before I went to

Morocco in 1950, but unfortunately I never got hold of good

machines to record even a part of the musical marvels I heard in

Morocco. I recorded the music in my own place, The 1001 Nights,

only when it was fading and even in later years I never was able to

lay my hands on truly worthwhile machines to record sounds that

will never be heard again, anywhere.



I took Brian Jones up to the mountain to record with Uhers, and

Ornette Coleman to spend $25,000 in a week to record next to

nothing on Nagras and Stellavox, but I have to admit that the most

adventurous sounds we ever made were done with old Reveres and

hundred dollar Japanese boxes we fucked around with, William and I

and Ian Sommerville. I got hold of the BBC facilities for the series of

sound poems I did with them in 1960, technically still the best,

naturally. I had originally been led to believe that I would have a

week and it turned out to be only three days that we had, so in a

very hurried way at the end I started cutting up a spoken text-I

think the illustration of how the Cut-ups work, "Cut-ups Self

Explained"-and put it several times through their electronic

equipment, and arrived at brand new words that had never been

said, by me or by anybody necessarily, onto the tape. William had

pushed things that far through the typewriter. I pushed them that

far through the tapeworld. But the experiment was withdrawn very

quickly there, I mean, it was . . . time was up and they were made

rather nervous by it, they were quite shocked by the results that

were coming back out of the speakers and were only too glad to

bring the experiment to an end. ["Well, what did they expect? A

chorus of angels with tips on the stock market?"-William Burroughs)

"The Permutated Poems of Brion Gysin" (as put through a computer

by Ian Sommerville) was broadcast by the BBC, produced by Douglas

Cleverdon. ("Achieving the second lowest rating of audience approval

registered by their poll of listeners"-BG) Some of the early cut-up

tape experiments are now available: Nothing Here Now But The

Recordings (1959-1980) LP (IR 0016) available on the Industrial

Records label from Rough Trade, 137 Blenheim Crescent, London

W11, England.]



What we did on our own was to play around with the very limited

technology and wattage we had in the old Beat Hotel, 40-watts a

room was all we were allowed. There is something to be said for

poverty, it makes you more inventive, it's more fun and you get

more mileage out of what you've got plus your own ingenuity. When

you handle the stuff yourself, you get the feel of it. William loved the

idea of getting his hands on his own words, branding them and

rustling anyone else's he wanted. It's a real treat for the ears, too, the

first time you hear it . . . made for dog whistles, after that. Hey Rube!

- the old carny circus cry for men working the sideshows when they

saw some ugly provincial customer coming up on them after they

had rooked him . . . Hey Rube! - a cry to alert all the carny men to a

possible rumble . . . Hey-ba    ba-Rube-ba! - Salt Peanuts and the

rude sound coming back so insistent again and again that you know

the first bar of Bebop when you hear it. Right or wrong, Burroughs

was fascinated because he must have listened to plenty of bebop talk

from Kerouac, whom I never met. He must have been a fascinating

character, too bad to miss him like that, when I was thrown up

against all the rest of this Beat Generation. Maybe I was lucky. I

remember trying to avoid them all after Paul Bowles had written me:

"I can't understand their interest in drugs and madness." Then, I dug

that he meant just the contrary. Typical. He did also write me to get

closer to Burroughs whom I had cold-shouldered . . . until he got off

the junk in Paris.



T: Who produced the "Poem of Poems" through the tape recorder?

The text in The Third Mind is ambiguous.

B: I did. I made it to show Burroughs how, possibly, to use it. William

did not yet have a tape recorder. First, I had "accidentally" used

"pisspoor material,"fragments cut out of the press which I shored up

to make new and original texts, unexpectedly. Then, William had

used his own highly volatile material, his own inimitable texts which

he submitted to cuts, unkind cuts, of the sort that Gregory Corso felt

unacceptable to his own delicate "poesy." William was always the

toughest of the lot. Nothing ever fazed him. So I suggested to William

that we should use only the best, only the high-charged material:

King James' translation of the Song of Songs of Solomon, Eliot's

translation of Anabase by St. John Perse, Shakespeare's sugar'd

Sonnets and a few lines from The Doors of Perception by Aldous

Huxley about his mescaline experiences.



Very soon after that, Burroughs was busy punching to death a series

of cheap Japanese plastic tape recorders, to which he applied himself

with such force that he could punch one of them to death inside a

matter of weeks, days even. At the same time he was punching his

way through a number of equally cheap plastic typewriters, using

two very stiff forefingers . . . with enormous force. He could punch a

machine into oblivion. That period in the Beat Hotel is best illustrated

by that photo of William, wearing a suit and tie as always, sitting

back at this table in a very dingy room. On the wall hangs a nest of

three wire trays for correspndence which I gave him to sort out his

cut-up pages. Later, this proliferated into a maze of filing cases filling

a room with manuscripts cross-referenced in a way only Burroughs

could work his way through, more by magic dowsing than by any

logical system. how could there be any? This was a magic practice he

was up to, surprising the very springs of creative imagination at

their source. I remember him muttering that his manuscripts were

multiplying and reproducing themselves like virus at work. It was all

he could do to keep up with them. Those years sloughed off one

whole Burroughs archive whose catalogue alone is a volume of 350

pages. Since then several tons of Burroughs papers have been moved

to the Burroughs Communication Centre in Lawrence, Kansas. And he

is still at it.



T: The cut-up techniques made very explicit a preoccupation with

exorcism - William's texts became spells, for instance. How effective

are methods such as street playback of tapes for dispersing

parasites?

B: We-e-ell, you'd have to ask William about that, but I do seem to

remember at least two occasions on whyich he claimed success . . .



Uh, the first was in the Beat Hotel still, therefore about 1961 or '2,

and William decided (laughing) to "take care" of an old lady who sold

newspapers in a kiosk, and this kiosk was rather dramatically and

strategically placed at the end of the street leading out of the rue Git

le Coeur toward the Place Saint Michel, and, uh, you whent up a flight

of steps and then under an archway and as you came out you were

spang! in front of this little old French lady who looked as if she'd

been there since-at least since the French Revolution-when she had

been knitting at the foot of the guillotine, and she lived in a layer of

thickly matted, padded newspapers hanging around her piled very

sloppily, and, uh, she was of absolutely incredible malevolence, and

the only kiosk around there at that time that sold the Herald-

Tribune, so that William (chuckling) found that he was having to deal

with her every day, and every day she would find some new way to

aggravate him, some slight new improvement on her malevolent

insolence and her disagreeable lack of . . . uh (chuckling)

collaboration with William in the buying of his newspaper (laughter)

. . .



So . .  one day the little old lady burnt up inside her kiosk. And we

came out to find that there was just the pile of ashes on the ground.

William was . . . slightly conscience-stricken, but nevertheless rather

satisfied with the result (laughter) as it proved the efficacity of his

methods, but a little taken aback, he didn't necessarily mean the old

lady to burn up inside there . . . And we often talked about this as we

sat in a cafe looking at the spot where the ashes still were, for many

months later . . . and to our great surprise and chagrin one day we

saw a very delighted Oriental boy-I think probably Vietnamese-

digging in these ashes with his hands and pulling out a whole hatful

of money, of slightly blackened coins but a considerable sum, and

(laughing) we would have been very glad to have it too - just hadn't

thought of digging in the thing, so I said: "William, I don't think your

operation was a complete success." And he said: "I am very glad that

that beautiful young Oriental boy made this happy find at the end of

the rainbow . . ."

T: She consummated her swell purpose . . .

B: (Laughing) Exactly . . . exactly . . . (chuckling)



Now the other case was some years later in London when he had

perfected the method and, uh, went about with at least one I think

sometimes two tape recorders, one in each hand, with prerecorded,

um-runes-what did you call them? You said William's things-

T: Spells.

B: Spells, okay, spells.

T: Like-

B: (chanting)

Lock them out and bar the door,

Lock them out for e-v-e-rmore.

Nook and cranny windo door

Seal them out for e-v-e-rmore

Lock them out and block the rout

Shut them scan them flack them out.

Lock is mine and door is mine

Three times three to make up nine . . .

Curse go back curse go back

Back with double pain and lack

Curse go back - back



Et cetera . . . yeah . . . pow . . . "Shift, cut, tangle word lines" . . . sure . .

.



Well, that was for the Virus Board, wasn't it, that he was gonna

destroy the Virus Board . . .



~ HERE TO GO: PLANET R-101 ~

An Excerpt from Here to Go: Planet R-101, Brion Gysin interviewed

by Terry Wilson (with original writing and an introduction by W.S.

Burroughs), available July 1982 from Re/Search Publications . . .



- Who Runs May Read



"May Massa Brahim leave this house as the smoke leaves this fire,

never to return . . ."



. . . Never went back to live, and I've only been back there even to

visit only very briefly . . .



And then it was back to Paris for a year or so, 1949-50, and then in

1950 I went to Morocco with Paul Bowles, who had taken, bought a

little house there, and I stayed there really, or felt that I was

domiciled there, uh, although I was really only a sort of terminal

tourist, from 1950 till 1973 . . .



"Magic, practiced more assiduously than hygiene in Morocco, through

ecstatic dancing to the music of the secret brotherhoods, is, there, a

form of psychic hygiene. You know your music when you hear it, one

day. You fall into line and dance until you pay the piper."



BG "CUT-UPS:

A Project for Disastrous Success"

in Brion Gysin Let The Mice In



B: Yeah . . . what a tale . . . what a tale . . . yeah, I met John Cooke in

Morocco uuummm but, uh . . . I don't know what to say about all

that, really . . .

T: He designed tarot cards . . . ?

B: Yeah . . .

T: A new set of tarot card . . .

B: Yeah, so he did. How did you even know that?

T: I saw them the other day.

B: Oh really? . . . No kidding? They're still around eh? Well well . . .

T: Is he still alive?

B: Yes, I imagine he's still alive, I think living in Mexico [John Cooke

died sometime after this was recorded.] . . . and he comes from one of

those very rich and powerful families who were the Five Founding

Families of Hawaii . . . who own the island, did own the island of

Molokai . . . and, uh, many people in his family have been interested

in mystic things, and he was particularly interested in magic all his

life . . . early connection with . . . what do they call it, kaluhas or

something, the Hawaiian shamanistic magic men? . . . Kahunas, yeah .

. .

T: Yeah. So tell me about Morocco . . . you got more and more

immersed into Islam, or, uh-

B: Not really, no, I never was much immersed truly into Islam, or I

would've become a Moslem, and probably still be there . . . uh, it was

most particularly the music that interested me. I went with Paul

Bowles, who was a composer long before he was a writer, and, uh, he

had perfect pitch, an unusual thing even among composers, and he

taught me how to use my ears a great deal during the years we'd

known each other in New York, but when he'd taken this house,

bought this house in Tangier, he suggested that I go and spend a

summer there living in the house and he was on his way to America,

he was just going to leave me in the house . . . but it turned out

rather differently . . . he was goin to New York to write the music for

his wife's play, Jane Bowles' In The Summerhouse, and he had

written a great deal of theatrical music for Broadway, all the

Tennessee Williams plays, all of the plays by Saroyan, and many

other productions of that time . . . and was a great expert on that . . .

but he also had very, very extraordinary ears, and, uh, he taught me

a lot of things, I owe him a tremendous amount, I owe him my years

in Morocco really because I wouldn't've gone there if he hadn't

suggested it at that particular time . . . I might have gone back to

Algeria, which isn't nearly as interesting a country, never was . . .



But, uh, in 1950 we went to a festival outside of Tangier on the

beach, on the Atlantic shore, at a spot which was previously a small

harbour, 2000 years ago in Phoenician times, and must've marked

one of the first landfalls that any boat coming out of the

Mediterranean via the Straits of Gibraltar would make as soon as the

boat entered the Atlantic, the first landfall would be at this little

place not very far from Cape Spartel . . . and, uh, the Phoenician habit

was always to establish a center of religion, I mean a thanks offering

for getting them safely over the dangerous sea, one supposes, and a

marking of the spot which eventually became a center of their

religious cult, presumably a college of priestesses . . . two or three

more landfalls further down the Atlantic coast is what used to be the

great harbour of Larache . . .



All these harbours are now silted up completely . . . Larache was the

site of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, where Hercules went to

get away from the demonic . . . the orgiastic priestesses, who were

guardians in a sacred grove surrounded by a serpent if you

remember, a dragon - well the dragon is the river, in each case there

are these winding rivers that go back up into the country; only one of

them still exists, the Lixos. Well the Lixos was presumably the

dragon in the mythological tale and there was an island in the

harbour, and this spot that we went to had been on the same

geographic and even religious plan, as it were, and the festival was

given there, which doesn't correspond to the Lunar Calendar but to

the Solar Calendar, and has to do with the harvest and actual cycle of

agricultural life of the people there . . . And I heard some music at

that festival about which I said: "I just want to hear that music for

the rest of my life. I wanna here it everyday all day." And, uh, there

were a great many other kinds of extraordinary music offered to one,

mostly of the Ecstatic Brotherhood who enter into trance, so that in

itself-it was the first time I'd seen large groups of people going into

trance-was enough to have kept my attention, but beyond and above

all of that somewhere I heard this funny little music, and I said "Ah!

That's my music! And I must find out where it comes from." So I

stayed and withing a year I found that it came from Jajouka . . .

(LOUD CRASHES, TAPE STOPS)

B: Your question . . . ?!

T: You found that your music was at Jajouka . . . The purpose of the

Rites of Jajouka is to preserve the balance of Male-Female forces, is

that correct?

B: Yes, in a very strange way I think it's a very pertinent question

that you ask. Uh, when I met them finally, it took about a year to

find them, and went up to the mountain village, I recognized very

quickly that what they were performing was the Roman Lupercal,

and the Roman Lupercalia was a race run from one part of Rome, a

cave under the Capitoline Hill, which Mussolini claimed to have

discovered, but is now generally conceded to be some 10 or 15

meters further down . . . and in this cave goats were killed and

skinned and a young man of a certain tribe was sown up in them,

and one of these young men was Mark Antony, and when in the

beginning of Julius Caesar, when they meet, he was actually running

this race of Lupercalia through Rome on the 15.March, the Ides of

March . . . and the point was to go out to the gates of Rome and

contact Pan, the God of the Forests, the little Goat God, who was

Sexuality itself, and to run back through the streets with the news

that Pan was still out there fucking as he flailed the women in the

crowds, which is why Julius Caesar asked him to be sure to hit

Calpurnia, because his wife Calpurnia was barren . . . Forget not in

thy haste, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia, for the Ancients say that in

this holy course the barren are rendered fruitful, or something like

that, are the lines from Shakespeare on the subject . . . Shakespeare

dug right away that's what it was, the point of the sexual balance of

nature which was in question . . . And up there on the mountain

another element is added, inasmuch as the women, who live apart

from the men, whose private lives are apart from the men's lives to a

point where even women's language isn't immediately understood by

men-women can say things to each other in front of men that men

don'ts understand, or care to be bothered with, it's just women's

nonsense, y'see . . . and they sing sort of secret little songs enticing

Bou Jeloud the Father of Skins, who is Pan, to come to the hills,

saying that . . . We will give you the prettiest girls in the village, we

will give you Crosseyed Aisha, we will give you Humpbacked- . . .

naming the names of the different types of undesirable non-beauties

in the village, like that, and, uh, Pan is supposed to be so dumb that

he falls for this, because he will fuck anything, and he comes up to

the village where he meets the Woman-Force of teh village who is

called Crazy Aisha-Aisha Homolka . . . well Aisha is of course an Arab

name, but it's derived from an earlier original, which would be

Asherat, the name of Astarte or any one of these Venus-type lady

sex-goddesses like that . . . And, uh, Bou Jeloud, the leader of the

festival, his role is to marry Aisha, but in actual fact women do not

dance in front of any but their own husbands, the women in Arab

life, all belly-dancing movies to the contrary, do not dance in public,

or never did, and most certainly don't in villages, ever dance where

they're seen by men any more than men dance in front of women . . .

so that Crazy Aisha is danced by little boys who are dressed as girls,

and because her spirit is so powerful-

(TAPE STOPS)

" . . . a faint breath of panic borne on the wind. Below the rough

palisade of giant blue cactus surrounding the village on its hilltop,

the music flows in streams to nourish and fructify the terraced fields

below.

"Inside the village the thatched houses crouch low in their gardens to

hide in the deep cactus-lined lanes. You come through their maze to

the broad village green where the pipers are piping; fifty raitas

banked against a crumbling wall blow sheet lightning to shatter the

sky. Fifty wild flutes blow up a storm in front of them, while a

platoon of small boys in long belted white robes and brown wool

turbans drum like young thunder. All the villagers, dressed in best

white, swirl in great circles and coils around one wildman in skins.

"Bou Jeloud leaps high in the air on the music, races after the women

again and again, lashing at them fiercely with his flails-'Forget not in

your speed, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia'-He is wild. He is mad.

Sowing panic. Lashing at anyone; striking real terror into the crowd.

Women scatter like white marabout birds all aflutter and settle on

one little hillock for safety, all huddled in one quivering lump. They

throw back their heads to the moon and scream with throats open to

the gullet, lolling their tongues around in their heads like the clapper

in a bell. Every mouth is wide open, frozen into an O. Head back and

hot narrow eyes brimming with dangerous baby.

"Bou Jeloud is after you. Running. Over-run. Laughter and someone is

crying. Wild dogs at your heels. Swirling around in one ring-a-rosy,

around and around and around. Go! Forever! Stop! Never! More and

No More and No! More! Pipes crack in your head. Ears popped away

at barrier sound and you deaf. Or dead! Swirling around in cold

moonlight, surrounded by wildmen or ghosts. Bou Jeloud is on you,

butting you, beating you, taking you, leaving you. Gone! The great

wind drops out of your head and you hear the heavenly music again.

You feel sorry and loving and tender to that poor animal

whimpering, grizzling, laughing and sobbing there beside you like

somebody out of ether. Who is that? That is you.

"Who is Bou Jeloud? Who is he? The shivering boy who was chosen to

be stripped naked in a cave and sewn into the bloody warm skins

and masked with an old straw hat tied over his face, HE is Bou Jeloud

when he dances and runs. Not Ali, not Mohamed, then he is Bou

Jeloud. He will be somewhat taboo in his village the rest of his life.

"When he dances alone, his musicians blow a sound like the earth

sloughing off its skin. He is the Father of Fear. He is, too, the Father of

Flocks. The Good Shepherd works for him. When the goats, gently

grazing, brusquely frisk and skitter away, he is counting his flock.

When you shiver like someone just walked on your grave-that's him;

that's Pan, the Father of Skins. Have you jumped out of your skin

lately? I've got you under my skin . . .

"Blue kif smoke drops in veils from Jajouka at nightfall. The music

picks up like a current turned on . . . On the third night he meets

Aisha Homolka who drifts around after dark, cool and casual, near

springs and running water. She unveils her beautiful blue-glittering

face and breasts and coos.

"And he who stammers out an answer is lost. he is lost unless he

touches the blade of his knife or, better still, plucks it out and

plunges the blade of it into the ground between her goatish legs and

forked hooves. Then Aisha Homolka, Aisha Kandisha, alias Asherat,

Astarte, Diana in the Leaves Greene, Blest Virgin Miriam bar Levy,

the White Goddess, in short, will be his. She must be a heavy Stone

Age Matriarch whose power he cuts off with his Iron Age knife-

magic.

"The music grooves into hysteria, fear and fornication. A ball of

laughter and tears in the throat gristle. Tickle of panic between the

legs. Gripe of slapstick cuts loose in the bowels. The Three Hadji. Man

with Monkey. More characters coming on stage. The Hadji joggle

around under their crowns like Three Wise Kings. Monkey Man

comes on hugely pregnant with a live boy in his baggy pants.

Monkey Man goes into birth pangs and the Hadji deliver him of a

naked boy with an umbilical halter around his neck. Man leads

Monkey around, beating him and screwing him for hours to the

music. Monkey jumps on Man's back and screws him to the music for

hours. Pipers pipe higher into the air and panic screams off like the

wind into the woods of silver olive and black oak, on into the Rif

mountains swimming up under the moonlight.

"Pan leaps back on the gaggle of women with his flails. The women

scream and deliver one tiny boy, wriggling and stumbling as he

dances out in white drag and veil. Another bloodcurdling birth-yodel

and they throw up another small boy. Pan flails them as they push

out another and another until there are ten or more little boy-girls

out there with Pan, shaking that thing in the moonlight. Bigger

village dragstars slither out on the village green and shake it up

night after night. Pan kings them all until dawn. He is the God Pan.

They are, all of them, Aisha Homolka."



BG "The Pipes of Pan"

Gnaoua 1, 1964



. . . It would be very difficult to say just what they are aware of and

what they are not aware of, I have known them for more than 30

years now, 20, more than 20 of them in very intimate daily contact,

with some of them at any rate, and for the period that I knew them

the most . . .



. . . Obviously they know so much more than I ever thought in the

beginning; I think of course they realize that their name has to do

with the whole history of Sufi thought, because the family name of

the musicians is Attar . . . uh, it was after knowing them well for 20

years and then getting into some kind of legal difficulty and

attempting to help them with their documents that I found this out . .

. uummm really the longer I knew them the less I knew about them,

is almost a way of phrasing it . . . they, uh, know a great deal more

than they let on, of course . . . I don't know how much, how much do

you want to know, because I could go on for booklength about

whatever I have learned about them which is curious . . .

"I kept some notes and drawings, meaning to write a recipe book of

magic. My Pan people were furious when they found this out. They

poisoned my food twice and then, apparently, resorted to more

efficacious means to get rid of me . . . "



BG Let the Mice In



T: Your restaurant . . .

B: Oh the restaurant came about entirely becaue of them . . .

(CHANT BECOMING OBVIOUS ON TAPE)

I said, "I would like to hear your music every day" and, uh, they said,

"Well, why don't you just stick around and live in the village?" And I

said, "No, that isn't possible, I have to go back and earn my living" . . .

and they said, "Well, then why don't you open a little cafe, a little

joint, some place in Tangier, and we'll come down and make the

music, and, uh, we'll split the money?" And, uh, their idea was a very

simple one, I think, which got blown up into . . . palatial size, because

of the fact that I found a wing of a palace that belonged to some

Moroccan friends of mine, where I set up the restaurant and, uh, it

turned out to be a very expensive and very . . . as I had no previous

experience in such matters, it turned out to be a very expensive

venture (laughing) . . . I'd always been at most a customer in such

places, and to learn how to run it . . . I had many other things to do

which kept my mind off the musicians, although the rest of the staff

were always complaining that the musicians were being favored, and

I said yes, the restaurant existed entirely for the music, and it was

literally true . . .



A group of them came down from the mountain and stayed a period

of time, living in the house with me, and so I heard them practising, I

heard them teaching the younger children how to play, and learned

more and more about the intricacies of the music . . . I found out

various interesting things about them, first of all that they had a

secret language, that they can talk through the music, they can direct

a dancing boy, for example, to go from . . . they can give him all his

instructions simply musically . . . but that they also have a language

of which I really learned nothing, I didn't have the time to, but I

think that at that point they would have been willing to teach me a

great deal about it, even to start writing a vocabulary to find out

what it was, which language it was that they speak in private . . . but,

uh, the restaurant folded with Moroccan Independence, a very

difficult moment, when all of my clientele disappeared overnight,

inasmuch as Tangier had been a small country of its own, with

embassies, and ambassadors and their staffs and their visitors and

everything connected with them, which was the backbone of my

clientele . . . and they all left, and Tangier lost its independence and

became part of Morocco . . . so the restaurant folded up and they

went back to their hills . . .



And then I saw them later as friends, went back to the village

several times for the festival, and, uh, then the Rolling Stones came

to stay in Morocco, brought along Robert Frazer, who was an art

dealer in London at that time, and he knew them and brought them

to visit me and we made trips together through Morocco, and Brian

Jones later came back, he wanted very much to go up to the

mountain, and although he never got there during the festival time

he did bring a sound engineer with him and recorded the music

which appears on that record [Brian Jones Presents The Pipes of Pan

at Joujouka, Rolling Stones Records, 1971.], which is now out of print

I'm sure . . . about which there was an enormous amount of legal

difficulties over trying to get money to the musicians, for all of the

usual recording company reasons, and naturally complicated by the

fact that Brian had died and that the other Stones were not terribly

interested in the record, probably because it reminded them too

much of things that they preferred to leave in the past, partly on the

musical level, because Brian had wanted to take the Stone's music

rather more toward the openings that Moroccan music made

possible, and, uh, which have appealed to other musicians since and I

think will have even more and more effect in the future . . . but Mick

was very determined to keep it right down to that R&B which they

had ripped off the American Black music, which he found a perfectly

good product to last for the next 20 years, and has lasted 10, at any

rate . . .

T: So a different type of relationship with the Jajouka musicians after

the restaurant folded?

B: Well, I might say about it, from the beginning, uh, that I got to

know them much better than most people ever would because of the

fact that we were in business together, whether we were first in

business around the restaurant, or later around one or other records

that they'd made, uh, you really get to know people only when you

do business with them, and we got to know each other very well, for

good and for ill, for reasons of business . . .

T: There was some difficulty, wasn't there . . .

B: Plenty . . .

T: Involved you losing the restaurant . . . ?

B: Plenty, yeah, plenty . . . hhmmm . . .

(TAPE STOPS)



~ BRION GYSIN INTERVIEW ~

From a forthcoming book of interviews with Brion Gysin, edited by

Genesis P-Orridge. In Paris, Jon Savage asked the questions . . .



R/S: You said it was worth surviving the whole cancer operation

because there were some things you wanted to do-

BRION: Oh, you make that sound much too optimistic-too positive! No

no . . . the only reason for surviving was to wrap up some odds and

ends, and some of them are already wound up. I mean like getting

The Third Mind published. Less satisfactory - getting Dreamachines

into production, which they are, only partially. And getting some

shape to my life as a painter-and that hasn't really happened yet-I

mean, some successes along the way like this show at the museum . .

. but this will take more work.

R/S: Do you mean wrapping things up, or just sort of putting things in

perspective, or continuing-

BRION: Mostly wrapping them up. Because I have plenty of things to

continue. Let's say-the songs that I've written with Steve Lacy [Steve

Lacy and Brion Gysin Songs (12" LP + 7" 45), Hat Hut Records, Box

127, West Park, NYC, NY 12493, or, Box 461, 4106 Therwil,

Switzerland.]-I want to get that all onto a record . . . if that's the ideal

receptacle for it, whatever. I have a long manuscript that I would

like to finish, but I found I'm not the activist I once thought I was.

It's very difficult to do too many things at once-in fact I can't really

ever do two things at once.

R/S: Is the manuscript The Beat Hotel?

BRION: Yeah.

R/S: The bit that was published in Soft Need - was that the beginning

or-

BRION: That was just a small piece in the middle.

R/S: Ideally, would it be a book like The Process?

BRION: It would have a form, yes, and I have found a form - it took

me many years to find the exact form. And I really have wanted to

fill the form that I now can see ahead of me.



The Process certainly is a very formed book - the whole idea actually

end-to-end. So in that same way-Yes, I do now have an exact

receptacle of the form into which I would pour all this.

R/S: Is that how you worked with The Process as well?

BRION: Yes, I only was able to work when I had found the form . . . it

filled itself in, sort of inevitably. Once the form was recognized, then

the material sliped into its proper place quite easily.

R/S: Because - in The Process . . . there's an enormous mixture. On

one level there were all sorts of allusions to Othello and Homer, and

then . . .there seemed to be people like Mya who were definitely sort

of creations that you'd actually known. Also, there was lots of ethnic

stuff about Morocco . . . there seemed to be a lot of different things-

BRION: Well, I had decided very definitely to put into it practically

everything that I know about Morocco, because it would be

impossible for me to write any more, inasmuch as it's rather the

stomping ground of Paul Bowles, who has invented his own

mysterious, murderous Morocco which is not mine. But, it's his

territory as much as Malaysia was the territory of Maugham . . . My

good friend Sanche de Gramont has written a very successful book

about him (Maugham).

R/S: To a lot of people you're only known as a writer - is painting

actually harder to organize?

BRION: They're both very hard to organize. There are definite forms

for getting a book published or not published, and getting some

money or not getting any money from it . . . Whereas painting is

much more formless, much more mysterious . . . As to how a piece of

spoiled canvas or scribbled-on paper suddenly becomes worth an

enormous amount of money . . . has nothing to do with the case of

literature and life and a career.

R/S: In all the books you put out you're actually communicating to a

large number of people instantly, because-let's say the book has a

run of two thousand-there'll probably be about ten thousand people

who read it-and that's a lot of people. That's more than will probably

ever see a picture of yours . . .

BRION: Yeah, that's true . . . And certainly more people can read a

book than can "read" a picture, in any case. The level of pictorial

education is not the same as just the ordinary literacy level of people

who can read a book and get one kind of sense out of it, at any rate.

Pictures reverberate much longer than a book does, because of the

fact that they exist in a very different time from the time of a book.

The time of a book is the imagined time in which the book is written

(which it is meant to represent) . . . and the time that it takes to read

it. The time in music is the time that it takes to play it from the

beginning to the end. Whereas a picture changes with every second

of the day because of the changing light . . . all of what I do changes

that dramatically, even. And many people that I have known who

own pictures of mine have said, "You know, I owned that picture for

several years before one day, I happened to look at it and then I saw

it. I had already bought it because I liked it, but I hadn't really seen

it until several years after I had owned it." Well - that's not the same

time that a book exists in.

R/S: Do you actually prefer either medium, or is that irrelevant - or

do you just like them both for different reasons?

BRION: Yes, apparently. It's rather troublesome to me as a matter of

fact - to like them equally well.

R/S: Do you think the course of your career would have been

different if . . . I think people find it very hard to cope with the fact

that one does two different things at once-

BRION: I certainly do, and I don't do just two, I do more than two.

Yes-as you understand the word "career"-it's certainly a mistake to

do more than one thing. In fact, even if it's only in sports or in a

physical skill of some kind, you are better off to do just one thing . . .

Not everybody can be a decathalon hero . . .

R/S: How do your paintings get out? Do they all go through galleries,

or-

BRION: No, exhibitions. I've never had a gallery that really occupied

itself with my career at all, and that's a very considerable lack. As I

was saying to you, it's insane that my work should be in all the

museums in France and all the important museums in America, and

not in any gallery. But that's obviously my fault . . . more my fault

than theirs, at any rate.

R/S: Presumably, painting is actually also different from a business

point of view, in that you presumably (if you have an exhibition, sell

paintings) make a fair amount of money every few years. Whereas

with a book, you may not make any money at all, but they might

come out more frequently-

BRION: No, it doesn't really work that way. If you make a book which

is a hit book, you make quite a good deal of money. If you make

anything less than a hit, you make nothing at all. Because they find

ways of charging it off to advertising or public relations or god

knows what, and you really get only your advance. I personally have

never seen any royalties, except some so ludicrous that they're not

even worth mentioning.



In regard to pictures, they are sold by a gallery which takes a

percentage according to whether you have made an agreement for

just that one show, or - if you are going to work a number of years

with that gallery, they will then pay you a monthly stipend, and they

take a much greater percentage of the price for which the picture is

sold at that time. And if the picture is re-sold after that, you have no

lien at all on the money. As in the case of the Jasper Johns that he

sold for nine hundred dollars eleven or twelve years ago . . . and has

now been sold for the ludicrous sum of a million dollars.

R/S: I bet he's pissed off-

BRION: Not really - he said he just doesn't understand it. He was

brought up during the years of the Depression, and such sums are

really quite unreal to him . . .

BRION: One of the reasons is that . . . I think it scares people . . .

Because of the fact that it deals with the area of interior visions

which has never been tapped before. Except in history, one knows of

cases - in French history, Catherine de Medici for example, had

Nostradamus sitting up on the top of a tower (which is now just

being restored, at the present time, over there). and there was no

pollution in those days . . . one didn't have any screen between the

man on top of the tower and the sun. and he used to sit up there and

with the fingers of his hands spread like this would flicker his

fingers over his closed eyes, and would interpret his visions in a way

which were of influence to her in regard to her political powers . . .

they were like instructions from a higher power.

R/S: But they were good visions-

BRION: They could also foretell bad things too. Peter the Great also

had somebody who sat on the top of a tower and flickered his fingers

like that across his closed eyelids . . . And any of us today can go and

look out the window or lie on a field and do it, and you get a great

deal of the type of visions - in fact, it's the same area in the alpha

bands of excitation of the brain - within the alpha band between

eight and thirteen flickers a second. And the Dreamachine produces

this continuously, without interruption, unless you yourself interrupt

it by opening your eyes like that.



So, the experience can be pushed a great deal further - into an area

which is like real dreams. For example, very often people compare it

to films. Well, who can say who is projecting these films - where do

these films come from? If you look at it as I am rather inclined to

now-like being the source of all vision-inasmuch as within my

experience of many hundreds of hours of looking at the Dreamachine,

I have seen in it practically everything that I have ever seen-that is,

all imagery. All the images of established religions, for example,

appear - crosses appear, to begin with; eyes of Isis float by, and

many of the other symbols like that appear as if they were the

Jungian symbols that he considered were common to all mankind.



And then one goes very much further - one gets flashes of memory,

one gets these little films that are apparently being projected into

one's head . . . one then gets into an area where all vision is as in a

complete circle of 360 degres, and one is plunged into a dream

situation that's occurring all around one. And it may be true that this

is all that one can see . . . that indeed the alpha rhythm contains the

whole human program of vision. Well-that is a big package to deal

with-and I don't think anybody particularly wants . . . amateurs

sitting in front of Dreamachines fiddling with it, perhaps . . .

R/S: Are you paranoid or realistic (depending on your definition of

that). Do you think that part of the fact that the Dreamachines

haven't turned out is deliberate?

BRION: Somebody said that the lesson of the 60s was the fact that all

the paranoids turned out to be right!

R/S: I think William Burroughs said that: a paranoid is somebody

who knows what's going on-

BRION: Who see what's happening. And it's a very easy package of

dismissal into which to dump every kind of objection to what is going

on. Who can say? I don't really know - it seems to me much more

random than that. I don't feel paranoid in that-I don't think there's

some sort of agency after me-or if they are, they're doing it with kid

gloves . . .

R/S: Talking about dream-like states . . . is there any sort of

Surrealist source in that? Because they were trying . . . they made

some attempts to merge the two states . . . Has the Dreamachine and

even cut-ups taken it a whole stage further?

BRION: Oh, but quite a different stage. It's actually dealing with the

material involved - I mean, cut-ups are taking the actual matter of

writing as if it were the same as the matter involved in sculpting or

in painting . . . and handling it with a plastic manner. The

Dreamachine is something else again, as it gives an extended vision

of one's own interior capacities, which could also be overwhelming.

After all, people could think that these were being imposed upon

them - before they were capable of realizing that these were a part

of all human experience. And from there - say they did realize that -

well, a great deal of what they see in life would be changed, it's true.



In some people's lives, they say, "Oh yes, I've had visions like that

when I rubbed my thumbs in my eyes," or, "Yes, I remember one

time I was going past a row of trees" or something or another like

that. It would become more general knowledge that this is part of

one's interior vision, and I think that-I would even go as far as

saying that this particular century in which we live has given a great

importance to painting, and this knowledge of one's own interior

possibilities would rather lessen the importance - as there have been

other centuries which have given greater importance to say,

architecture or music. Painting itself looks to me like it's on its way

out - as though it were dying on the vine. And this recognition of

one's own interior possibilities might very well supplant it.

R/S: Why would you say painting is dying on the vine? Is it because

of the gallery system . . . is it because of the social and cultural place

it has?

BRION: No, it really began with the Einstein apprehension of the

physical quality of the world, where the energy of the world (which

is supposed to be represented in the arts, after all) is declared to

equal m, which is the mass of the earth times the speed of light

squared. And anybody who realized that you can change the forces

in an equation-you can change the elements from one side to the

other of the equation-in the same way people realized that the

matter of painting (which for the last few centuries has been

considered to be colors, ground colors floated in oil and laid onto a

surface and dried, producing an effect of luminosity and

transparency) could be changed by adding pieces of cut-up

newspaper as the Cubists did, or throwing sand into the mixture to

produce exploding kind of matter itself. So, matter was being played

with very early in painting . . . by the beginning of the twentieth

century, at any rate . . .



Here's the energy-which is sort of the talent or the genius of the

artist-represented by the speed of light squared which is a flash

vision forward. And the m is the oil and vinegar mixtue-like I always

said-like you're making a salad . . . here was oil and linseed oil and

lengtheners like turpentine and whatnot were used as a medium in

which to float colors and prduce an image of the world. But then one

say that that image was not sufficient. By the time that photography

had jumped into its place in the middle of the nineteenth century,

people had annouced it: "As of today, painting is dead!" That was the

announcement with which photography was hailed, at the time, and

there was such a grain of truth in this, that one thought that

obviously pursuing the exact representation and the way of . . .

hyperrealism was no longer interesting - so let's try and change the

nature of the matter. And so - sand was thrown into the canvas . . .

collages were invented, and that's why I thought that all of those

techniques which had entered into the arts in the beginning of the

nineteenth century hadn't even touched the realm of literature yet.

R/S: I think you'd be surprised to see how much cut-ups have

actually been assimilated and taken for granted-

BRION: That's true - even in France, where it doesn't work nearly as

well because of the nature of the language . . . Almost immediately,

within the very first few months, there was a group of American

poets that brought out a two-volume book of their 'genius' work

called Locus Solus, which was all cut-ups. But they never

acknowledged it - it happened within six months of the publication

of Minutes To Go, in January 1960.

R/S: How did you work the cut-ups-was it an accident which you

then observed and then built upon systematically?

BRION: Yes - that's what it was, an accident . . . but which I

recognized immediately as it happened, because of knowing of all the

other past things - I knew about the history of the arts, let's say. And

it seemed like a marvelous thing to give to William, who had a huge

body of work to which it could immediately be applied. It wasn't

applicable to my condition because I didn't have that body of work

just to take and cut up and produce something new with. I would

have to produce new work which then I would cut up - it seemed

like a contradiction in terms. and William was doing so well with the

marvelous subjects that he had, which were drugs, sex and rock'n'roll

- he was doing good with it. So-let him have it!

R/S: And indeed The Process is cut-up-

BRION: No, there are lots of cut-ups in it and lots of things that came

out of using cut-ups, but very thoroughly assimilated-

R/S: It's more stylized, I think, and the temporal cut-ups are very

clear . . . they're mated, actually. A lot of William's books are quite

hard to read all the way through because you just sort of jump and

pick bits out . . . I just like savoring bits, all the gamey bits, or

whatever. But The Process is much more like a proper novel . . . it

would seem to be scripted.

BRION: It's tooled actually . . . The general all-over picture is that

there's no voice of an omniscient author, and that these are a series

of voices which are the different presences of speech. There's I, thou,

he, she, it, and you-they, etc . . . As I said, they were tooled down

until they fitted like that, and lots of the pieces going through the

information was cut-up and echoes of Herotodus, echoes of T. E.

Lawrence - echoes of all kinds of people are cut up right into it to

give it that sort of particular timeless flavor.



THE BURROUGHS ARCHIVES



BRION: . . . I was always telling William - in fact it's the thing that did

pull us out of the hole - was my insisting on this with William, who

had always just thrown, practically abandoned, his manuscripts

everywhere. Lots of manuscripts have disappeared and god knows if

they'll ever see the light of day. The suitcase full of material that

never went into Naked Lunch was left behind in Tangier and the

street boys were selling it for a dollar a page!

R/S: So somebody somewhere has got them-

BRION: A few pages here and there . . . But there is a huge amount of

material in Lichtenstein . . . you've seen the William Burroughs

Archive [catalog]? All of that stuff hasn't been seen by anybody. One

hopes . . . very soon it will be sold to somebody else or sold to a

university who will know how to catalogue it and put it at the

disposal of people who want to consult it. But as it is now, it's just

wrapped up in boxes in Lichtenstein.

R/S: Why is it there?

BRION: It was bought by somebody in Lichtenstein.

R/S: Are they doing any research on it?

BRION: No. Nobody's allowed to look at it at all . . . The man who owns

it has a very good reason - that he knows nothing about how to

catalogue it, and as it has once been catalogued as it appears in that

printed book, he wants the material to remain just in that order, in

order to be able to hand it on intact to somebody else. Because he

made a poor investment for reasons which had to do with the

enormous money gap that occurrred between the dollar and the

Swiss franc. Like, if he sold it today for a sum which is offered, he

would make a profit of forty-five percent on his dollars, but he'd be

losing money on his Swiss francs . . .

R/S: When did you first start thinking about films?

BRION: Right then at that time, particularly saying to William that . . .

we should get hold of somebody that could help us - that was in the

business already. And right in that same short street which is only

one block long, somebody that I knew just as a neighbor invited me

to a party, and that's where we met Antony Balch.



Antony had been intent on making films since he'd been twelve

years old . . . Our plans didn't work out - I mean, we made only those

two short films, after all, and we had meant to make at least Naked

Lunch - that's never been made yet, although I wrote two scripts for

it at different times. A lot of money was spent . . .

R/S: I've seen the storyboard for one of those . . . that Genesis P-

Orridge has.

BRION: We saw it when Antony died-it was very nearly thrown

away, all of that material-his mother didn't know anything about

him, and none of his business associates did, because they were

really quite on a different beam with him. And it seemed the best

idea for Gen to have it - which is why I sort of shoved it off in that

direction. He has the storyboard and a whole layout of the pictures . .

. of camera angles and shots and stuff like that.

R/S: Cans of film-

BRION: Which he hasn't seen yet.

R/S: I'm dying to see that stuff-

BRION: So are we all.

R/S: Was it all on 16mm?

BRION: Thirty-five. There may be some 16mm in there, but

everything they shot was always in 35mm . . . and in 70mm.

R/S: Did you actually find it difficult to do at the time?

BRION: Of course! The money's always enormous! It's always very

expensive. Antony was a very successful distributor of films, and

made a good deal of money. He also spent a good deal of money, as

one does in that movie world. You have to spend that sort of money

in order to be able to get to the people who will put up a good deal

more money. You have to travel around as we did and see them and

meet them and whatnot, and none of those things worked out.

Antony spent a really . . . I have no idea of how much, but, say- fifty

or a hundred thousand pounds, perhaps already was spent on those

film projects . . .

R/S: William also did a bok recently called The Blade Runner - do you

know if that's to be made into a film?

BRION: No, nothing's been made into a film and put on the screen

except the two that we did together, Towers Open Fire and the Cut-

ups, and then Antony and he did Bill and Tony on 70mm. And then

the material that Genesis now has which has never been seen by

anybody . . .

R/S: Where were those films done?

BRION: They were done in Paris, London, New York and Tangier.

R/S: Over a period of years?

BRION: No, not all that long.

R/S: When they came out, were they actually shown?

BRION: Sure they were shown. And even now they're still shockers

when they're shown. People yell and scream and jump up in their

seats and are very affected by them, still. They still look very, very

new to people.

R/S: I'd agree with that. I saw them . . . when Throbbing Gristle was

playing . . . people were actually completely flipped out, and the

whole concert ended up in a huge fight. The whole evening was very,

very charged . . . I felt, not as a result (but pretty damn nearly) of

seeing those two films first, in combination with all of that.

BRION: Sure. Well, the same thing happened in New York, where you

would think the audience might be more blase, but they were not -

people were also jumping up and down there too. Almost everything

that we've done still has that kind of charge in it . . .

R/S: In a way that's wonderful-

BRION: Well, it's also difficult to live with, because people - as

recently as this week, where I've been frequenting all the art dealers

that I know who are now sitting there ensconced in their art fairs

dealing in million dollar, half million dollar pictures that they have

hung around the walls of their stalls - are just sitting thre on their

balls saying, "You know that's what we're doing, and you, dear Brion,

as much as we appreciate you, you're still very avantgarde . . . We're

tired old gentlemen, you know - if you'd only come to us twenty

years ago when were full of enthusiasm . . . " Of course, twenty-



I did . . . I've known them that long, and they gave the same answer

then. They were all after ten minute masterpieces by Andy Warhol

or Frank Stella or any of those stars that they've invented, who sell

for huge sums of money . . .

R/S: Were those two films originally part of larger things?

BRION: No, they were meant to be what they are. For the Cut-ups, a

great deal more film was exposed than that, and that's presumably

what Genesis has there now - the stuff that one didn't use . . . more

than that, even. I'm not quite sure myself - Antony was always fairly

vague about it, even . . .



We were always going to see that old stuff again, but there was

always new stuff to see - we'd be visioning that, and I'd say, "When

are we going to vision all the rest of the stuff that you have there?" -

"Well, it's at, you know, the B.F.I. in cans . . . " So, I'm not sure what

Genesis has. A good deal of it is photographs of me working in Paris,

and working . . . painting a huge great big paper in New York that

William just - left the studio and left the paper behind. It was

shoved up into a place where you could easily have forgotten it, but

he's always been a great one for just picking up his hat and what he

can hold in one hand and-a portable typewriter in the left hand-he

leaves his own manuscripts behind, so I can't really complain too

much when he's left a great deal of my work behind. He has-he's

destroyed an enormous amount of my work-but he's destroyed a

great deal of his own by just letting go . . .

R/S: I suppose at the time it didn't seem to matter.

BRION: Well, one was just so busy and, having all these tons of paper

to move around and-where were you going to put them-and, where

one was going one wasn't quite sure-it wasn't as if one was going

home . . . we were just settling some place else for awhile . . .



~ BRION GYSIN INTERVIEW ~



"Romance is about losing, essentially. Delights are about control . . . "



JOHN GACY AND ROSALYN CARTER



BRION: The American scene is certainly full of death. Full of it, my

god. The Monster of Augsburg - in my childhood there was a horrible

cat who, at the end of the war, 1919, had eaten some thirty-two

boys. He made them into pates and sold them to his friends and stuff

like that. Well, this was considered very extraordinary: a case for

Krafft-Ebing. But now, here's Rosalyn Constable Carter, whatever her

name is, in a photograph with-

SLEAZY: Yeah, but the fact that Gacy was around just meant that he

was a little bit more-

BRION: You're absolutely mad, man, he was a community leader. He

dressed up as Santa Claus and he gave Santa Claus performances; he

wasn't disguised at all. That's who he really was, he was Santa Claus . . .



He was a pillar of society, like a Norman robber baron. You got all

these people buried under you, you put them through the dungeons -

you got them like that. Why shouldn't you go up and shake the

President's wife's hand and get you picture taken? . . .



We've arrived back where we've always been. Now things are getting

back to normal when this is happening. Who did Eleanor of Aquitaine

have for dinner? She had Gilles de Rais, who had eaten one-hundred-

and -thirty five boys, or something like that - that's who came to

dinner in those times. Little Mrs. Carter from the South - she's

getting right up there in history! She's in there with Empress

Theodora and Messalina. She's rubbing elbows with good company

like that. She's got the Monster of Augsburg right there, turned into a

fat Kiwanian. I think that's the way it's going . . .

SLEAZY: I don't think any of that stuff actually happens in New York.

It always happens in suburbs, doesn't it?

BRION: Oh no, it happens on the WestSide . . .

SLEAZY: You don't get mass murderers in New York. You get

murderers obviously. You get muggings, you get stuff like that, but

you don't get people that are really specialized.

BRION: You kidding yourself? You just haven't been frequenting the

specialists . . .



ON PAPER



BRION: Paper was invented by the Chinese, and got to the Arabs

about the eighth century. Before then, there'd been papyrus paper

from Egypt, which was older, of course. But the sort of paper as we

know it appears in Europe only about the twelfth century, and came

from Arab sources through Sicily, through the German kings -

Hohenstauffen. Kings of Sicily imported paper first of all, because

they had large schools set up of people, copying manuscripts for the

first time onto paper. And so paper making made its way in Europe

connected with good water, which is very important - the water

source. All the paper mills were set up along rivers that were then

still very clear. The Rhine was clear until my day; I saw the Rhine

clear in 1930. Now it's a great big sewer . . . dangerous sewer.



My first cousins had a paper factory on the Rhine from about 1500,

maybe earlier, and made paper from reclaimed linen sheets and

things like that; made that fantastic handmade linen paper that's so

tough you can barely tear it. And they made money for bank notes

too, for a long time - centuries.



As a child, I made paper there too, where there was this big mess

like porridge-Genesis P-Orridge!-and you'd grab a dollop of it in a big

wooden spoon and throw it into a box that had a net at the bottom

like a sieve, and you'd dump it up and down in a mortar like that

until a sort of drool was distributed evenly all over the surface of

your mesh. Then you'd turn it out on a marble slab and roll it either

cold or hot . . . and that was handmade paper.



In the S----- Museum they still have those things shown, materials

that they used and the machines that they had, stuff like that. Their

paper went up and down the Rhine-from Amsterdam-it went quickly

and easily to London; that was the nearest port. So they and people

from Basel used to go back and forth from London from Elizabethan

times regularly. Well, the Holbein, who was the principal painter at

the court of Henry VIII, came from Basel, and worked on paper. And

this woman that I know has this collection of papers that are of such

value that she's always been afraid to distribute them in any way,

because of the fact that they could fall so easily into the hands of

forgers. And she should worry.



All collections are full of fakes and forgeries, in any case. I spent a

whole winter working and going through the archives that the

Louvre has here in Paris. You have to get special permission and a

letter from your embassy and all kinds of stuff to get in - I did that.

And I was particularly interested in the German and Basel painters

and graphistes like Durer and Holbein and Urs Graf and Nikolaus

Manuel Deutsch, of which they have a big collection. And half of their

Durers are fakes! At least half. Obvious fakes. And they say, "Yes,

yes, we know they're fakes, but you know, they've been here so long

- they were given by somebody in the eighteenth century, so they

have some kind of historical value, and we're not saving them simply

because they are real or are very good, but . . . " - You know, those

kind of museum-ology-type stories that they tell; I guess they're

reasonable enough. But this woman has given me quite a lot of these

different papers. I have still big wads of them in there that I haven't

used. And I have used them on some very interesting projects, but I

don't have enough to . . . a book of this size, for example. I wouldn't

even be able to make a single copy.

GEN: That's a nice sort of connection, timewise, isn't it?

BRION:  As I said, it was studying Japanese-the Japanese language

school-that got me so interested in paper and ink, really. It's a whole

study and it's the basis of their aesthetic. As a matter of fact it's

based on the two-

GEN: Actually coming from the materials rather than imposing them.

BRION: Right.

GEN: Strange coincidence that there is a family connection . . . Can't

escape your roots, boy! - What is it he says in Towers Open Fire?

"You can't deny your blood."

BRION: I deny that statement!

GEN: I got a horrible sensation the other day watching myself on a

video. I suddenly looked and - I did an expression identical to my

father. It was horrible, I thought, "Oh shit!" . . . That always worries

me a bit - being trapped.

BRION: "Somber moor, looking like Othello."

(tape ends)



A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN . . .



BRION: . . . We live in a period, I think, unique in all history. No house

has an attic anymore, there's no granny to put it in the attic -

granny's gone away to Florida to an old age home in St. Petersburg.

Nobody even knows her maiden name. You ask any American the

maiden name of either one of his grandmothers and he hasn't got

any idea. So there's no connection anymore - most of them don't

want any connection. They've decided that they're going to be just

Americans, for one reason or another.



More than that, we have this enormous privilege which I think is

unique and comes about for the first time in any society - of it being

possible to have a room of one's own. Nobody has a room of his or

her own ever in all of history. Everybody lived with . . . dogs . . . and

camels . . .

GEN: You mean, even within somebody's family you have your own

room-

BRION: Yeah, it was never possible. You always slept with brothers

and sisters, and mothers and fathers and grandparents and all sorts

of people; maids living in the house, sleeping behind the kitchen

door. Do you know how much the idea of having a room to yourself

has changed the whole sexual scene? In fact, I think that really the

basis of the sexual scene is the fact that it's been possible to be able

to be alone to do these fancy things that you've thought up. It was

never possible if you lived in the bosom of a family, how can you

possibly? People do get up in some really kinky situations but not

like that.



And I think a society like Muslim society where all sexuality occurs

with your clothes on! I was once sitting with a man who had four

wives and I suggested that any one of his wives might have seen him

with his clothes off and he was shocked at the idea. And sex is very

quick, and religious law demands immediate washing after it so it's

all bangbangbang and shoo . . . zoot to wash yourself! None of this

languorous lying around and this luxury situation that everybody's

thought about; for our ancestors that never really existed at all.

Maybe sometims for a sultan and his harem, yes. But even so, just

think of that: all of them tattling on each other and jealous of each

other and poisoning each other's children - all that happened

regularly, and still does.

GEN: The only way to change a society properly is to break down the

family units and the atomic structure of whatever they call it. 'Til

you break it down you can't break any other system of control. At

the moment most societies still are based on the assumption of

families, so it's one of the key areas to fight if you want to change

things.

BRION: Yeah, but do you? Does one? Are you going to change it into

what?

GEN: Change it into what!? Why do people always have to change

things into something else?

BRION: William changes it into a Wild Boys scene - you and I know

that William himself wouldn't survive a wild boys scene! (laughs)

GEN: . . . I think . . . loose alliances you choose, not a family in the

normal sense, but people you find you relate to more naturally than

you do people who are related by blood. Whom you tend to associate

with more often than you do with (what do you call them?) filial

family. I've never understood the logic of the filial family - why just

because somebody came out of the same fanny you should like them,

or because somebody was your mother's sister you should like them.

BRION: Well, it hardly ever happens, does it?

GEN: No, but it's traditional that you keep in touch with aunts and

uncles and cousins and all that shit, you know. And it's very unlikely

you even like your own family. But it's still suggested to you from an

early age that it's quite natural and reasonable to like relatives. And

to dislike relatives is unnatural.

BRION: Not in my family . . .



DEAD FINGERS TALK



GEN: How did William lose part of his finger?

BRION: The most commonly told story is that he cut it off himself and

threw it into the face of a psychoanalyst who was questioning him in

an army examination . . .

GEN: And that's the story he tells?

BRION: No, he doesn't it, other people tell it. He's never told it to

anybody. He doesn't say anything-

GEN: As usual. I guess that's a good technique sometimes: to clam up.

I do remember it now.

BRION: He's not the only one. Partly the legend may be due to

Maraini, who was an Italian who wrote a very admirable book called

Secret Tibet twenty years ago, and more recently a monograph that

was written also twenty years ago (it has come out only now) about

Japan. And he and his wife and three daughters were taken prisoner

by the Japanese at a time when he had come as a diplomatic-cultural

expert from Italy to Japan, and then Mussolini joined with the Axis

and all the Italians were demanded-obliged-to take their fascist oath.

And they refused and so they were thrown out to the Japanese

prisoner camp where they were very badly treated.



Maraini demanded an interview with the general and- here's this

Japanese general sitting with regimental sword in front of him like

that, and Maraini . . . took his sword, and cut off his own finger and

threw it into the man's face. And that had absolutely the desired

effect - it was the thing that really impressed the Japanese more

than anything else that he could have done. Everybody got more

food, and lives were saved by this gesture. So maybe it's partly that

true story that's been loaned to William as part of his legend. But

that didn't happen quite that way.

GEN: So you've lost a toe, and he's lost some finger-

BRION: Everybody loses a little something here and there on the way

through this rat race . . .



This excerpt is from a forthcoming book of interviews with Brion

Gysin, edited by Genesis P-Orridge, Genesis and Peter (Sleazy)

Christopherson asked the questions . . .



"Real total war has become information war, it is being fought now . . . "



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Michael A. DuVernois / duvernoi@odysseus.uchicago.edu

Référence: http://brainwashed.com/h3o/cut-up.html