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 hislife.
"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 . 
. "




 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 . . . 


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