Feeling a bit lost in the desert recently but not sure if I’m Christ in the desert or just a fisherman starving in a shanty, but it’s been nothing but Willem Dafoe weather around here, and even though my blog can’t keep its senses together it’s insisting upon itself. Here’s another very odd entry that I thought of after seeing a band name that reminded me of the 1990′s zine This is the Salivation Army…

As punk had once turned to queer culture for its social-sexual strategies, now it was returning the favor. The blinkered gay and lesbian mainstream in the mid-90s felt neither inclusive nor progressive, or even particularly political, suffering as it was from what can only be called battle fatigue. Under siege for so long, the scene seemed to want to return to some kind of clement version of a pre-AIDS heyday where everyone could listen to mediocre dance music in the company of others who wanted to conform to the new gay normal. If the world was fair, the likes of Queer Nation, Outrage and Gran Fury would’ve thrived, but there was less room now for the libertine weirdos and troublemakers who might (or might not) have caused all of the chaos in the first place. Eventually two Toronto-based punks, G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce, would change everything by launching an incendiary campaign through zines, music and manifestoes, to call out the gays on their conservatism and to make the supposedly open-minded punks put their inclusivity to the test. Following their lead, queercore bands, zines and record labels – like Matt Wobensmith’s Outpunk – flourished. For me personally, as a twenty-year old punk recently transplanted back in Toronto in 1993 after a year of living hand-to-mouth in London, discovering that I could reconcile my music, my politics and my sexuality was a revelation. Already ideologically hopped-up on publications like RE:SEARCH, RAPID EYE and HOMOCULT, I’d also had a fortuitous meeting with queer saint Derek Jarman shortly before my return who clinched for me the idea that there was more to one’s sexuality than simply who you fucked. Jarman’s idea of queerness was that it was a blessing of sorts, a radiant kind of permission. It reinforced for me what I’d always felt: that being queer meant that you could slough off a past, an ideology and a trajectory, that’s not yours to inherit and keep on forging paths that are as yet unimagined. And if that wasn’t punk, I didn’t know what was.

Graduating from art school in 1996, and with G.B. Jones’ help, I shot the world’s first queer punk documentary. More of a polemic than a who’s-who, QUEERCORE: A PUNK-U-MENTARY was an attempt to unify some of the politics and positions of the company of outcasts I was keeping. Combining these ideas with some stark pseudo-military aesthetics copped from postpunk bands like Psychic TV and New Model Army, I also started publishing my own zine, THIS IS THE SALiVATION ARMY. Rejecting salvation as a nebulous, ludicrous concept, *salivation* was where it was at; always on the tip of your tongue, something your body knows. And in the wake of the full on body-terror that followed AIDS, this kind of fluidic moniker was about more than just spit. Branding itself as a the mouthpiece of a full-fledged “queer pagan punk” movement with hundreds of members and everybody fucking each other, it didn’t seem useful, or poetically true, to tell readers that in reality it was just me with a gluestick, alone at 3am in an all-night photocopy shop. Another lesson learned from punk: print the legend. Aside from the hyperbole, the zine distinguished itself by trying to be an honest platform to discuss and celebrate sexuality in all its forms, and to this day it’s a point of pride to know that my readership wasn’t solely made up of horny homocore boys, but an equal amount of women, bi and straight readers, too.

Eventually the zine spawned a film of the same name in 2002 that would try to keep the myths alive alongside the truth. The fact that the zine and the film still get unearthed says something, to me at least, about its view of sexuality as something innately powerful, and the punk ethos at its core still gives the go-ahead to explore in the company of like-minded others; being part of an ongoing, swelling history is always better than being part of something unique. When punk first reared its head in the 70s, decrying sex as squelchy and boring was a genius way of disarming the shame-makers, the rockers and the doting hippies, showing a preference instead for anger and action over getting your rocks off and calling it a weekend. In the 90s however the slogan had shifted to take aim at the puritans and fear-mongers with a distinctly feminist pitch. The patches on people’s jackets were daubed with slogans like: You Say Don’t Fuck, We Say Fuck You!, Silence = Death, and Not Gay As In Happy, But Queer As In Fuck You! On the heels of this declaration that queers weren’t the filthy creatures that the religious zealots and right wing would have you believe, another reinvigoration of sexual awareness came in the form of a wave of punk-made porn. It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but in the pre-selfie, pre-internet world, occupying pornography was a radical act. Like industrial musician and performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti’s astutely aware ownership of her participation in pornography – usurping the male-made-for-male-gaze structure – the queercore scene wrestled its bodies away from the overly muscled uniformity of the Aryan sideshow freaks that populated gay porn and made images of their own. Like Warholian superstars, Jones’ and LaBruce’s zines and films launched a new blue generation and everyone, myself included, loaned their time and their bodies to one another in the pursuit of a new kind of radicalism. Suddenly you weren’t jerking off to the too perfect torsos in mainstream porn, instead you could find insanely erotic homegrown smut to get off on that also served the purpose of smashing the stereotypes purveyed by the other mags. The empowerment had positive effects on the models, too. Starring in a couple of centerfolds and films, I found that the lowly view I’d held of my weedy twenty-year old body started to vanish. Better yet, as I got behind the camera I learned to make other models snap out of their narrow views of what turned people on as we added our own brands of eroticism to the collective pool.

Here’s a bit about the film version of the zine…

This Is the Salivation Army was a ‘queer pagan punk’ zine, produced by artist Scott Treleaven from 1996-1999. The film tracks the rise and demise of Treleaven’s publication and the strange cult it spawned:
“Blurrily combining evocative enactments of cult-like activities with genuine evidence from the project’s epoch, the film lyrically represents The Salivation Army as a brief movement in history—both inspirationally realized and pointedly imaginary. As Treleaven explained in the film’s voiceover, the best thing for The Salivation Army was not to be unique, but to be part of an ongoing history. These historical inspirations are unmistakable—from the cult musician/performer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and writers William Burroughs and Brion Gysin to the most evocative influence: late-radical-queer-punk filmmaker Derek Jarman.” — Matt Wolf (‘Wild Combination’, ‘Teenage’)

Here’s the film which is celebrating it’s 15th birthday in 2017. Happy New Year, everybody.

THE SALiVATION ARMY (Scott Treleaven, 2002) from S T on Vimeo.

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The late great David Bowie made changing his artistic identity look easy by borrowing freely from every creative discipline within his reach — Bowie studied mime, played the saxophone and was well-versed in Beat Generation lit…

Here Bowie demonstrates his own application of Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up” technique…

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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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Continuing our celebration of National Poetry Month, here are some words about South African poet Sinclair Beiles: Beiles was associated at-a-distance with the Beat Generation, but you have to get a little deeper into their mythology before you find his mark. Beiles was primarily a surrealist poet who was also known for his collaborations with the Greek artist Takis. Here’s the breakdown from the Wiki…

Sinclair Beiles (b. Kampala, Uganda, 1930 – 2000, Johannesburg) was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of writing poetry and literature.

Beiles was involved with American beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, and Burroughs at the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris. The photographer Harold Chapman recorded this period in his book The Beat Hotel (Gris Banal, 1984). He co-authored Minutes to Go with Burroughs, Gysin and Corso (Two Cities Editions, 1960). Beiles helped edit Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

He worked with the Greek artist Takis and read his magnetic manifesto — “I am a sculpture… I would like to see all nuclear bombs on Earth turned into sculptures”—in 1962 in Paris at the Iris Clert Gallery. At this event he was famously suspended in mid-air by a magnetic field from a powerful magnet in a sculpture developed by Takis. Beiles attributed his subsequent mental instability to this experience even though he insisted that Takis provide him with a helmet to protect his head from the magnetic field.

There is a sense of the “overlooked artist” surrounding Beiles and every now and then I come across another article, post or comment arguing that the writer deserves a higher place in the post-war pantheon. This post was inspired by this recent remembering of the poet (Beiles died in 2000) at Empty Mirror…

Gerard Bellaart is a legendary small-press publisher in France and was Sinclair Beiles’s publisher in the 1970s, with his Cold Turkey Press. I asked him how Beiles should be remembered. He replies that Beiles work is “of the calibre of Celan”, the famed French surrealist poet, but doubts that his reputation will rise anytime soon. “Beiles’ oeuvre as a whole has been neglected (read: ignored),” says Bellaart. He says that:

Literary market forces thought it more profitable to hail Burroughs and Gysin as the founding fathers of the ‘cut-up’. Neither had either the culture or background to recognise the principle of cut-up inherent, say in Mallarmé’s “Coup de Dés”, and in Baudelaire’s essay on de Quincy’s definition of Palimpsest for that matter. Sinclair Beiles of course knew these works by heart and in French.

Furthermore, he believes that Beiles was an originator, and should be recognized as such. He continues:

It was Sinclair Beiles who first developed the technique of using a layer of text as a transparent entity, the superimposition of which would create an entirely new and unpredictable context. The further appropriations of the technique by Burroughs and Gysin we do not need go into at this point.

Here is Beiles in a long interview about his adventures with Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs…

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Copyright William S. Burroughs Estate

Another post celebrating the William S. Burroughs centenary, this video is a fascinating document of the man himself visiting a gallery show of his own paintings on paper at Galerie Waschsalon in Frankfurt, Germany. Here, we see Burroughs accompanied by Udo Breger and Burrough’s man Friday, James Grauerholz. Breger is a writer and publisher who published works by Burroughs and other Beat luminaries including Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and John Giorno.

In this video, the trio meets up, hits the gallery and then relaxes with a chat and a smoke. Burroughs’ paintings look sharp, seemingly presented in frame-less displays, sandwiched between sheets of glazing. The works here appear to be Gysin-esque abstracts, but it’s kind of hard to tell as the camera continually follows Burroughs’ meandering, never stopping to linger on the paintings.

This video is from 1990 and it’s a fascinating window into the last period of the artist’s work. Here you go…

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In a recent post I mentioned the January opening of the new photography exhibition Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs. I’ve just received a copy of the catalog and I’m planning a review of the volume in an upcoming post or on an episode of Coincidence Control Network.

In the meantime, here is a very insightful little overview of the show featuring the curators at The Photographers Gallery, London. While Burroughs’ paintings are well-known, his work as a photographer is just beginning to be examined and understood. This interview was shot during the installation of the exhibition and it reveals Burroughs’ work behind the camera to be both an extension of the cut-up techniques he developed with the artist and writer Brion Gysin, and the even earlier aesthetic lessons Bill learned as a boy studying the flower arrangements his mother created for their St. Louis home.

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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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With the launch of the new blog design, I wanted to add a fresh new Burroughs post. WSB haunts the entirety of counter-cultural curation like the eminence gris he was often portrayed as, but, it’s important to note that Burroughs rarely portrayed himself this way.

Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs On the Road is  a 1983 documentary that finds the Beat Generation icon touring Scandinavia, signing books and giving readings of works like The Place of Dead Roads in his inimical, laconic snarl. Along the way, he waxes philosophical about cats, Hiroshima, Brion Gysin and the illusion of duality. He’s polite and hilarious throughout.

Watch the full movie at the Snag Films website.

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RE/Search Publishing was founded in 1980 by V. Vale and Andrea Juno. According to the Wiki, the San Fransisco-based company was originally funded by $100 they were given by Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. This is an interesting fact as RE/Search becomes known as a magazine – eventually in book form – that celebrated Western countercultural ancestors while simultaneously seeking out cutting-edge expressions, mixing together content on/by The Slits, Situationism, Burroughs, Ballard, Throbbing Gristle and Brion Gysin.

The Gysin connection is a particularly interesting one as it seems Vale has an archive of original paintings and audio interviews with the artist that he has never shared. In this video, he talks about his relationship with Gysin and the art monograph that never was – but could still be.

Here is Vale discussing his most famous issue: RE/Search #4/5

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As many readers of these here illuminated letters surely know, the great author/Beat ghost/junky/exterminator William S. Burroughs also added the title of “painter” to his resume before his death in 1997. He began painting in his later years while living in Lawrence Kansas, but his relationship with painting and painters began much earlier.

I like to trace Burroughs’ origins as a painter back to his 1959 meeting with Brion Gysin. Gysin was also a polymath. Gysin’s written work is as underrated as his paintings were during his lifetime. Gysin died in 1986 and while his sometimes-stunning prose has yet to be reconsidered, the publication of a few great books and the organizing of gallery retrospectives have seen his visual art getting the respect it deserves all these years later. Of course, Burroughs was way ahead of the curve: “I don’t think I’d seen painting until I saw the painting of Brion Gysin,” he once snarled. It goes without saying that it was Gysin’s painting practice that lead directly to the pair’s developing of their version of the “cut-up technique.”

I’ve recently moved into a new place and a friend gave me a housewarming gift of a framed poster announcing an exhibition of Burroughs’ paintings in Santa Fe in 1988. The image on the poster is typical of the spray painted, shotgun blasted panels that Burroughs is best known for. But, this poster has inspired me to look for more examples of his art and I’ve been pleasantly surprised. It turns out that WSB actually had a fairly wide range as a visual artist and his output includes creepy/funny simple drawings, Gysin-esque abstract grids and collage.

Here is a fun online gallery that shows a wide range of his work, including one image that features a figure that looks like the silhouette of one of Ralph Steadman’s Hunter S. Thompson cartoons.

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