Recorded the 95th episode of the Coincidence Control Network podcast today. This week it was just me and Lil’ Ray, and I had some technical difficulties on my end, but I think we had a pretty good chat. I lifted some stories to talk about on the show from my Flipboard project. The last thing we mentioned before calling it a done deal was the briongysin.com website which is a great resource for anyone interested in Gysin’s life and work. It’s an especially good place for newbies to explore to get an overall feel for the influential artist and writer. I mostly talked about Gysin’s pioneering cut-up projects with William S. Burroughs, but Gysin — along with Ian Somerville — also invented the Dream Machine.

Here’s a great short documentary on the Dream Machine…

The Dream Machine was a device built by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville while living in the Beat Hotel in Paris in 1960. They were attempting to stimulate the brains alpha patterns with a rythmic strobing light effect and produce a natural high. The machine is quite possible the only work of art meant to be looked at with your eyes closed.

This short video shows Columbia University’s Dream Machine being setup, turned on and functioning.

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Brion Gysin is one of my favorite painters and his writing is an undervalued commodity. A counterculture fixture, Gysin is best known for his cut-up collaborations with William S. Burroughs and his role in creating the Dream Machine. Here is Gysin live in London in 1982, lecturing on the possibilities of teaching creativity. Gysin dives headlong into an existential rant here, evoking his adventures in the Sahara, Islamic assassins, smoking weed, the magician as an outlaw, Jean Genet as a dependable friend, purity through depravity, friends versus enemies, English food and the Beat Hotel. Gysin reads from both his novel The Process as well as his posthumously published novel, The Last Museum, which recalls the Beat Generation’s heyday in Paris. The lecture is accompanied by an edit of William S. Burroughs’ cut-up film experiments.

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British author Barry Miles is a prolific chronicler of the counterculture. He’s authored books about Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and the Ramones. The Beat Hotel is the definitive account of the Beat Generation in Paris and his coffee table volume Hippie captures 60′s flower power in full color.

Miles’ 1993 biography William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible is one of the most important accounts of the writer’s days and now Miles is back with William S. Burroughs: A Life. The book revisits Burroughs’ story and goes on to illuminate the author’s last decades and artistic legacy.

Here is Miles in a conversation about the book at Strand Books in New York…

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