Hear's one for all the brokenhearted shut-ins out there...

Essential Reading.

King of the cut-ups

"Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted" by John Geiger
By Mick Brown

The Daily Telegraph, Sunday, August 28, 2005

Brion Gysin's slender claim to literary reputation rests largely on his association with William Burroughs, and his role as the originator of "the cut-up" technique Burroughs used in his novels. But, as this book suggests, Gysin's life was much more interesting than that.

Writer, artist, dilettante and hedonist, a precociously talented under-achiever, Gysin's life straddles pre-war bohemian Paris, the Tangier demi-monde of the 1950s and '60s, the Beats, and the hippies and rockers who followed them. He took psilocybin (a lot of it) with Timothy Leary, guided the Rolling Stones on their drug-addled excursion through Morocco and introduced Brian Jones to the Master Musicians of Jajouka. In the 1970s, he fondled Iggy Pop and, in the twilight of his life, recorded a disco single, boasting that, "I am the oldest rock singer in the world now that Mae West is dead."

Gysin would always claim he was Swiss. In fact, he was born, in 1916, in a Canadian military hospital in Taplow, Bucks - the son of an English army officer who was killed at the Battle of the Somme - and grew up in Canada. At his prep school in Edmonton he was dubbed "Trotsky" by his headmaster, then sent back to England and Downside, "the Catholic Eton", where he cultivated his nascent bohemian tendencies and acquired an enthusiasm for luxury, and a nose for people who could provide it.

At the age of 18, he decamped to Paris to make a life as a painter. "Classically handsome and fit", according to John Geiger, with coarse hair "like an Airedale rather than a Spaniel", he was already a mesmerising raconteur. One acquaintance said that listening to Gysin talk was "like watching a man covered with elaborate Japanese tattoos. You might wonder what the point of it all was, but it was hard to take your eyes away."

He was taken up by a "hairy, goatish" Greek homosexual writer and boulevardier, Nicolas Calas, who launched him into café society. He attended the salon of Natalie Barney, dined with Gertrude Stein and was welcomed into surrealist circles - and just as quickly expelled by the surrealist "pope" André Breton, ostensibly for parodying him in a drawing of a severed calf's head on a beach, although Gysin suspected the real reason was that he was homosexual.

Equally at ease among "the international queer set" and on "the princess circuit", Gysin, at this point, seemed to be living with no visible means of support, often being, as Geiger delicately phrases it, "maintained at the pleasure of the company he kept" - a useful euphemism for Olympic-standard sponging. In Athens he fell in with the opium-smoking and cocaine-sniffing Denham Fouts, "the most expensive male prostitute in the world". In Lisbon, one minute he was to be found dallying with "a blue-blooded Brazilian" in the posh Hotel Aviz; the next, holed up in a seaman's hostel with "the most beautiful Greek sailor of those years" - a judgment that suggests an encyclopedic knowledge of the field.

The war years found him in New York, failing as a writer of short stories and novels but - peculiarly - publishing an acclaimed history of Josiah Henson, the emancipated slave who was the basis of the character Uncle Tom.

By 1950, he had tipped up in Tangier, which he exalted as "the wild west of the spirit". He took to the city's precarious debauchery - the intrigue, the kif, the boys - like a fish to water. He travelled in the Sahara painting desert scenes, flourished briefly as a restaurateur and enjoyed an interlude with an Englishwoman called Felicity Mason, who had been married to the Queen Mother's cousin, and whom William Burroughs (whom she tried unsuccessfully to seduce) described as "the last of the intrepid English women travellers, who screwed their way across the desert".

It was in Tangier that Gysin met Burroughs, who had "taken up residence in one of Tangier's male brothels". Mutual suspicion quickly gave way to mutual adulation; Burroughs would later describe Gysin as "the only man I have ever respected".

Gysin followed Burroughs to Paris, taking lodgings at number 9, rue Git-Le-Coeur, an address that was to become famous as "the Beat Hotel", frequented by hookers, bag men and pretty much everyone with pretensions to being part of the Beat generation. Here, Gysin set to work, devising abstract calligraphic compositions based on Japanese and Arabic script that led Burroughs to claim that he was as great a painter as Francis Bacon. "He regards painting as a hole in the texture of so-called 'reality'," Burroughs wrote, "through which he is exploring an actual place existing in outer-space." The copious amounts of hashish both were consuming probably helped.

It was in the Beat Hotel, in 1959, that Gysin happened upon the cut-up technique. Cutting a mount for a drawing with a Stanley knife, he sliced through a pile of newspapers below and on impulse began arranging the pieces randomly, with bemusing results. "Asked whether he had a fair trial he looks inevitable and publishes: 'My sex is an advantage'."; "Swiss boys were absolutely free from producers of outboard spiritual homes."

Burroughs hailed the cut-up as a revolutionary way of smashing "the control system" of the power of words, and predicted it would "threaten the position of the establishment… and therefore they will condition people to fear and reject or ridicule it". He became the method's arch-practitioner: his archives list more than 6,000 pages produced between 1959 and 1964, and the cut-up method was later adopted by filmmakers and songwriters such as David Bowie and REM's Michael Stipe. Jack Kerouac, more astutely, dismissed it as "just an old Dada trick".

Gysin, meanwhile, had moved on, devising a proto-psychedelic, stroboscopic "dream machine" that he hoped would make his fortune. It didn't.

All his life, Gysin would chafe that his genius went unrecognised and that others, namely Burroughs, got the recognition he deserved. By the 1970s, he was broke and paranoid - victim, he believed, of malevolent magical forces over which he had no control. He suffered terribly after a colostomy, laboured for years on a screenplay of Burroughs's Naked Lunch that was never made, and wrote a novel about Morocco, The Process, that was hailed as a flawed masterpiece but vanished without trace. He died in Paris in 1986.

Geiger's book clips along at a terrific pace - it would be hard to resist plunging into a chapter that begins, "Back in Paris in the fall of 1958, Gysin had overstayed his welcome with the Princess Martha Ruspoli, a society figure he knew from Tangier, when he ran into Burroughs in the Place Saint Michel. 'Wanna score?', Burroughs asked."

Gossipy and erudite by turns, it provides an illuminating and entertaining glimpse into the bohemian demi-monde of literary queens and dope-fiends. But the abiding impression of its subject is of brilliance squandered and a final, lingering sadness.

Gysin's posthumously published and autobiographical final novel, The Last Museum, ends with him pondering wearily on his own life. "I don't intend to go to one single more party, ever. I don't want to go back to Capri or Positano or even Capistrano as a swallow. I mean to get out here and come back again never! Heavenly reunions with one's Loved One? Ugh. There is no one I ever knew in this world I want to see again. A story like this can have no happy ending. Or can it?"

On his career he was bleaker still; it was, he wrote, "a life of adventure, leading nowhere".

Previously: RE/Search #4/5: W.S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Throbbing Gristle

RE/Search #4/5: W.S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Throbbing Gristle

William Burroughs, Brion Gysin & Throbbing Gristle talk about advanced ideas involving the social control process, creativity and the future. Interviews, scarce fiction, essays: this is a manual of ideas and insights. Strikingly designed, with rare photos, bibliographies, discographies, chronologies & illustrations. [8 1/2 x 11" 100 pp, 58 photos & illustrations, $20]

Thee 'infamous' PSYCHIC BIBLE

Thee infamous PSYCHIC BIBLE from Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth receives an updated, expanded, corrected edition,complete with dozens of new visuals and essays. The Feral House edition is handsomely presented in smyth-sewn hardcover with a red ribbon. Thee 544 pages within are printed in two colors on high-quality 60-pound stock on acid-free 100% recycled paper stock.

This signed, numbered limited edition (999 copies only -- at least 998 avail, I have #633) is also presented with a remarkable DVD of impossible-to-find videos from P-Orridge archives of early Psychic TV and TOPY creations which includes the work of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Derek Jarman. Several of the videos included were seized by Scotland Yard in 1991, and as a result the DVD is provided here are second-generation and are reproduced in this CD for their historical value.

The artist, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, says about this edition: “It has been a revelation and become very thrilling for me to see 30 years+ of social, ritual and communal creative explorations consensed into what we feel may become the most profound new manual on ‘practical magick’ taking from its Crowleyan level of liberation and empowermeant of the Individual to a next level of realization that magick must then give back to its environment, its community, become about liberation and empowermeant to change this ‘world’ and evolve our humanE species.”

Thee Psychick Bible (signed and numbered) and Thee Psychick Videos are available for $69 plus shipping directly from the Feral House website.

Link: Thee website of artist & musician Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

The Rag Time Ephemeralist

Dedicated to the Preservation and Dissemination of Articles and Items Relating to Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Popular Music. [256 pages, 6.75" x 9", squarebound]

50 copies of thee issue numbered 3 still available here.

Previously: Rainy Sunday...

Last Kind Words Blues

The Holy Grail of Groove -> -> HERE <- <-!!!

The All England Summarize Proust Competition

Previously: The Case of the Scarlet Membrane...

Link: The Cork-Lined Room: Publishing Perspectives on Proust (by a guy who proclaims that he has decided he must read the whole of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu before he turn 40. Hrumph! Some of us finished that little fucker by age 25...)