Monday, February 28, 2011
Rare original poetry from G P-O 1971
Rare original poetry from G P-O - from the collection of Malachi Gammon.Thanks for the contribution to thee archive. 1971
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Upcoming: Psychic TV Live at SXSW Austin,Texas!
Thee Return ov Psychic TV
Genesis P-Orridge's Psychic TV has been a moniker for groundbreaking new music since the release of their first album Force The Hand of Chance back in 1981 and the pioneering avant-garde industrial group Throbbing Gristle in 1975. Psychic TV's current incarnation began in 2003 when Genesis teamed up with Edley ODowd to form a reactivated version of the band named PTV3. At the end of 2009, the band announced they would no longer tour but play the occasional show if the spirit moved them. The band have agreed to perform in conjunction with the North American premiere of Marie Losier's film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye at SXSW 2011 on Tuesday, March 15th. This will be the first time Psychic TV in any form has performed in Austin since 1988. Expect a highly psychedelic performance full of long, joyous jams and trademark video projections!
See the full SXSW schedule for more details.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/
Genesis P-Orridge's Psychic TV has been a moniker for groundbreaking new music since the release of their first album Force The Hand of Chance back in 1981 and the pioneering avant-garde industrial group Throbbing Gristle in 1975. Psychic TV's current incarnation began in 2003 when Genesis teamed up with Edley ODowd to form a reactivated version of the band named PTV3. At the end of 2009, the band announced they would no longer tour but play the occasional show if the spirit moved them. The band have agreed to perform in conjunction with the North American premiere of Marie Losier's film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye at SXSW 2011 on Tuesday, March 15th. This will be the first time Psychic TV in any form has performed in Austin since 1988. Expect a highly psychedelic performance full of long, joyous jams and trademark video projections!
See the full SXSW schedule for more details.
http://schedule.sxsw.com/
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
MKA Presents >>Through THe WORMHOLE:An Interview With Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
http://www.mishkanyc.com/ Contains the following dowloadable interview with Genesis as well as the GPO clothing collection preview to be released in spring 2011! Keep checking the site for when the line becomes avaliable!
The 45 minute "BK SCUM" mix can be downlaoded from the Mishka blog here!
http://mishkanyc.com/bloglin/2011/02/23/%d0%bc%d0%b8%d1%88%d0%ba%d0%b0-presents-b-k-scum-a-psychic-tv-mix-by-star-eyes-dust-la-rock-free-download/
Our clothing line for Spring 2011 is one of our best. And one of the best things about our best lines is our collaboration with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge who is one of the best people from several of the best bands and creator of many of the best ideas.
In the late sixties Genesis was in COUM Transmissions, an art/performance group. Later he formed Throbbing Gristle, considered the first industrial music band and coinners of the term "Industrial Music for industrial people." Genesis then formed the band Psychic TV in 1982 which went on to make some of the best psychedelic, experimental, punk and electronic music. Psychic TV has their own cult/fanclub referred to as Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth. They have their own religious book, Thee Psychick Bible. They have a symbol to unify them, thee psychic cross. Мишка is pleased to present them with nice things that they can wear.
We have made four T-shirts bearing iconic Psychic TV image. There's one of a corroded Psychic Cross. There's one featuring the unforgettable and frightening cover of Psychic TV's Unclean 12" single. There's also a remake of t-shirt worn in one the groups most iconic photos featuringthe eyes of Charles Manson. Another with Cyco Simon crucified to the psychic cross instructs the Psychick Youth to rise. We've also produced a fitted New Era hat featuring thee Psychic Cross. The prestige piece of this collection is our Psychic M65 jacket, a long camoflage coat with a removable hood and ornamented with Psychick icons inside and out. There are four patches, two buttons, a Psychic Cross pattern lining and on the back there's the word "PSYCHIC" in embroidered in an arc over the Psychic Cross.
We're also releasing a new and exclusive interview which I conducted with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge as part of this collaboration. The interview explains who this person is to the uninitiated and explores he/r for the familiar. The 22 page interview features a preview of our entire capsule collection and was conducted not long after Genesis' most recent transition from one home to another and focuses on the reasons behind the dramatic changes that have occurred in he/r lifetime.
The entire capsule collection will be available in a couple of weeks along with the first drop of our Spring 2011 collection
MKA Presents
Through THe WORMHOLE
An Interview With Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
by NIcholas Gazin
Edited by Catherine Macey
article design by masami kubo
This Spring, MIIIKA will be releasing a capsule collection with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and
Psychic TV. We consider Genesis to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and are
personally thrilled that we had the chance to work with someone we admire so much. Over he/r career,
s/he has used everything s/he has – he/r heart, mind and body – to create art and music that
challenges the status quo, which is as pure and powerful as art can get. MIIIKA hopes to be a platform
that helps to spread the message of Genesis’ work, and indoctrinate new lifetime members into
Thee One True TOPI Tribe – and hope as they get older, they do the same for the next generation.
If you’re looking for somebody to blame for the popularity of body piercing, you can point your
finger at avant-garde anti-hero Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Even though it would be shameful to recognize
he/r for only this one minor anecdote in a life filled with artistic achievements, it’s an important
example of just how influential and controversial s/he has been. If you’re not already familiar
with Genesis, you’ve definitely felt the ripples from he/r intimidating amount of output. Love he/r or
fear he/r, Genesis has been known throughout the years as many things: an artist, a musician, a
“wrecker of civilization” and a cultural engineer.
Genesis’s first notable creative output was in the 1960s, as founder of the performance art group,
COUM Transmissions. COUM challenged cultural taboos so successfully that they caused British Parliament
to reconsider government funding for public art. COUM then transformed into Throbbing Gristle,
which takes its name from a slang term for an erection. Throbbing Gristle created the term “industrial
music” and is considered to be the first industrial band, and was an innovator of using sampling in
music. After the break up of Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge formed Psychic TV, a band that made music
that was at times avant-garde and at other times poppy, and for a brief time it performed acid house.
At the same time as Psychic TV, Genesis formed TOPI (or the Temple of Psychic Youth), which was a
sort of cult/fanclub for the musical group. In 2003, Gen and his other half Lady Jaye began a project that they called “the Pandrogyne,” in which they received surgeries in order to become the same person. Because of this, when Gen is referred to, he/r gender is written as “he/r” and “s/he,” and s/he often refers to he/rself as “we.” Lady Jaye died in 2007, but the Pandrogyne project still lives on in Genesis.
The first time I met Gen was on the subway and s/he was very polite although I was probably bothering
he/r. The second time was at the tag sale s/he had in the basement of the building s/he was vacating
where s/he’d lived with Jaye. A slideshow of photos of he/r late wife were projected on the wall as
everything from used dildos to kitchen implements were offered for sale with certificates of authenticity.
I was amazed that s/he was able to make something as mundane as a tag sale into something both
cute and sad that also memorialized he/r lost partner. Knowing he/r body of work, it’s easy to imagine
Genesis P-Orridge as some monstrous freak who lives like Dracula, but like many people who lead
successful creative lives, s/he’s a polite and open person who seems to genuinely enjoy the company
of others and knows how to speak and tell stories in a way that’s so compelling that it’s hard not to feel
a little self conscious.
I’d been attacked outside of my home a couple of weeks before conducting this interview with Gen
and it was still affecting me. Moving was on my mind, and Gen had just moved to Manhattan from
the Ridgewood neighborhood in Queens. I knew that Gen had made a few large exoduses in he/r
life - s/he started off in England, moved to California and then to Ridgewood, and I was curious
because each of these moves seemed to have been forced by tragedy. Also, I really like Canterbury
Tales and structuring interviews around travelling from one place to the next. It makes the reader feel
like they’ve accomplished something when they’re done reading- it’s like we’re on a quest with Genesis.
So I decided to begin by asking Gen about her latest relocation.
You moved recently.
We moved recently: three months ago, after living in Ridgewood from 1996 to 2010. So that’s fourteen
years in Ridgewood. When Lady Jaye and myself moved to Ridgewood, it was a form of random
chance. We were living in Northern California, in the countryside, not far from Santa Rosa. We were
between Santa Rosa and Bodega Bay, where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds. We were right in
the middle of acres of land, with a creek and redwood trees and a big house, but then it was my fate
to fall out of Harry Houdini’s old mansion in Laurel Canyon1 during the famous Rick Rubin fire.
Yikes.
It was very frightening. Myself and David J had been at the top of the house recording and trying
to get ideas for their [Love and Rockets] new album. We were chatting and then we fell asleep.
All of a sudden, at six in the morning, this voice came through my sleep saying, “Wake up everyone,
the house is on fire! The house is on fire!” I kept hearing this voice and I went out of my room
and didn’t see anything, and then I looked down the stairwell and it was like Hell. This huge rolling
ball of flame was being fed by all these nylon carpets so there was this thick black plastic smoke,
and it was coming up the stairs like it was alive. Your mind just goes into this strange place: “Am
I on a TV show? This can’t be real.” This is what you see on television and in the movies, but you’re
never actually in the burning house. “Oh shit, the house really is burning.” What the fuck do you
do? So we tried to remember all these things we’d seen on TV. We get real low to the ground, get
back in the room, slam the door and say to David J, “The house really IS on fire.”
The night before, he’d been telling me how he’d made this guitar he had next to his bed that he’d
named Big Woody. He’d made it at school. It was his first guitar and it was his talisman for luck. He
doesn’t remember, and we don’t remember, but somehow he got out of the room, through the window
and onto the ground safely. So then, Muggins here must save Big Woody. So we toss it to David: “Here,
catch.” But then the master tapes for the new album are here, too - “We can’t let those get destroyed!”
So we grabbed all these blankets and threw them through the window and then tossed the master tapes
onto them so that they’d bounce and not be destroyed. Then the door of the room started to melt.
It was a metal door, and I thought, “Well, I’m not going out that way,” so out the window I went. It
was a sloping window ledge, and it was really dusty because it was still summer in LA. My feet slipped,
and it was like one of those Tom and Jerry cartoons where you’re running on air. Then we saw a tree
and we thought “Ah, a tree!” and grabbed the tree, but it was dead and the branch just snapped off.
That moment all my balance went right off. At the moment you begin to fall, all you say is, “Oh, shit.” And then WHAM! I landed on concrete steps. I got nerve damage, hit my hip, broke all my ribs on the left side, smashed that wrist and shattered my elbow into thirty-six pieces.
Urghhhh.
And all we were thinking was: “When are we going to faint from the pain so we don’t have to feel
this anymore?” But we couldn’t. And then these firefighters came running out and said “Don’t worry,
we’re going to come back, but the windows are about to explode outwards, so we’re just going to
put this lead blanket over you, and then we’ll come back.” So they put this lead blanket over me and
ran away! (Laughs) And then they came back and got me on a stretcher and put me in an ambulance.
It took so long to get out of Laurel Canyon because nobody would move out of the way due to early
morning traffic. So it took ages to get to the hospital. Why are we talking about this now?
We were talking about moving and how you came from California to Ridgewood.
So it was impossible to play music or anything. It turns out that post traumatic stress disorder is a real illness.
You don’t realize until it happens how real it is. When people light candles or anything, it really gets me
spooked. I get nervous about cigarettes in the house. It’s a horrible feeling to be trapped by a fire.
I can try to imagine, but I can’t really imagine.
They did reconstructive surgery. We were lucky enough to be taken to Cedar Sinai and we got a
specialist doctor who came in to work on my arm because it was in so many pieces that it was considered
impossible. He said it really was a jigsaw.
In fact, he said that there were several little bits that they couldn’t figure out where they fit so they just
threw them away. There were pins going in laterally through the arm, screws in the elbow and pieces of
metal bent around here. Some of it’s still in there to this day. The cast they put on almost felt like concrete,
on my left arm from my wrist to the top of my shoulder. I had a cast on for eighteen months. The
second day after the surgery, they said, “It’s good for you to walk around, so if you have to go to the
toilet, just walk to the toilet and have a pee.” So we got up, walked over and as we got out of the
toilet, we couldn’t breathe. We thought it was an asthma attack from the stress. It got so bad that we
were crawling along the floor towards the bed, trying to get to the emergency button that would call
the nurse. The emergency button was a bit out of reach and it took a great last burst of adrenaline,
lying on the floor at this weird angle, to reach up and squeeze it. This sweet nurse comes in saying,
“Yes, yes, what would you like?”, “WE NEED OXYGEN. NOW! ORRR - ” And then we went into a
coma. And woke up in intensive care.
It turned out that we had blood clots from the impact on this thigh and they’d gone up to my lungs
and stopped me from breathing. That put me in intensive care for twelve days. [The hospital] said it
was a miracle that we survived. The good bit was that we had a morphine drip and we could press
it whenever the pain got too bad. There was a special computer to stop you from ODing.
Lady Jaye, she was a registered nurse as well as a dominatrix. She heard about [my hospitalization]
because it was a newsflash on MTV. They cut into the MTV programming to say that Genesis P-
Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV has been seriously injured in a fire in Laurel Canyon
while working with Love And Rockets! And that’s how my children found out, too. Their friends came
over and said, “Your dad’s been in a big fire and he’s in intensive care.” Everyone assumed it was serious
- well it WAS serious - but everyone assumed I’d been burned. Thank God I wasn’t.
So Jaye borrowed some money, got on a plane and flew to LA to see me straight away. The first
thing she did was get in the bed with me, cuddle up to me. Soon as she did, one of the other nurses
came in and then excused herself. Because Jaye was a registered nurse, she could come and visit me
any time. We made love in that bed several times despite all the wires. (Laughs)
But we had to move [from California] eventually because I couldn’t work. My mind wasn’t in a fit
state to work. People would ring up and say “You really don’t sound like you.” So they suggested I
see a...psychologist? Which one is the one that can prescribe Prozac?
Psychiatrist.
He said, “You’ve got really severe post-traumatic stress disorder” and prescribed us Prozac, but we
stopped taking it after about four weeks. I fought through it on my own.
My inability to work meant we couldn’t stay in California. Jaye, though she was a registered nurse in
New York, and California recognizes the New York license because it’s a high standard, it takes them a
year to process the paperwork. She couldn’t work as a nurse for a year.
We were stuck, when her family rang up and said that her grandmother was really ill and had really
severe dementia. She had a colostomy bag and she couldn’t walk. They said, “There’s an empty apartment
and you can both live there for a year rent free if you look after Mimmy 24/7.” This was in Ridgewood.
We got the biggest kind of truck you can rent from Budget, and a trailer on the back of that with our Ford Escort car. And in our Ford Escort were four cats in separate boxes. And still with the cast
on my arm, we drove the Southern route, through New Mexico, right down through Louisiana, all the
way back through Texas.
Gary Panter told me the story of driving from LA to New York to escape from his ex-wife. Did you ever
see Pee Wee’s Playhouse?
Yeah, we had the whole set. Jaye introduced me to it. We’d seen bits in England, but never had time to
really take it in. We’d have Pee Wee days where we’d just watch all the episodes. We were Pee Wee
addicts. We also had the full set of The Avengers, that ‘60s English program.
I know it but I’ve never seen an actual episode.
We grew up with that and it was the first fetish clothing we’d ever seen. At one point, we owned one of
Emma Peel’s leather catsuits.
Wow!
We did a trade for it. We knew an artist in Brighton who did photos and paintings of highly fetish S&M
imagery. One day we were looking through his stuff and there was a leather catsuit hanging on the wall
behind some canvases. We said, “That’s really nice, where’d you get that?” And he said, “This guy, his
name was John something.” The guy who did the costumes for the original Avengers program used to
buy paintings from this artist, and traded the costume one time when he didn’t have enough money. So we
said, “You’ve just got it hanging on the wall. We’d appreciate it much more.” We did another trade
and got it from him. Sadly, it was taken by Scotland Yard when they raided our house in 19922 .
Oh right. That’s why you originally came to California.
Yes, but we’re jumping ahead.
Jaye had arranged for her brother and sister to help us unload the truck and we had to get there
on a Sunday or there’d be no one to help us. So we drove forty hours without stopping. We stopped for
gas and coffee, and we took trucker speed, ephedrine. It makes you feel really awful but it keeps you
awake. With one arm, Gen drove the whole way.
I hadn’t realized that you were actually driving this truck, but I suppose that Jaye being from New York, she wouldn’t know how to drive. She’d never driven on the freeway and she’d never driven
a truck. We used to have a school bus with Psychic TV.
So we built a big pile of cushions under the left arm. We had to smuggle the cats into the motels on the
first half of the journey. Looking back, we wonder, “How did we do that?” Sometimes there’s no choice,
like refugees. How do they climb over the Himalayas in a pair of sneakers? Sometimes there’s just no other
option. So we ended up in Ridgewood [Queens].
We would get the subway back from Manhattan and it would empty out until there would only be
African Americans and Latinos, and then me and Jaye. We’d be the only white people to get off the
train at the Myrtle-Wykoff stop. It was in no way a hostile or unpleasant atmosphere, but it was very
odd. It was just so specific. That’s one thing that surprised me about New York: how one side of the
street can be bourgeois middle class, and the other side can be burned out buildings and crack houses.
It’s jumbled but separated at the same time. It’s changed and it’s like sixty percent hipster kids getting
off at that stop now.
Do you find the hipster kids annoying?
Yeesss.
Do you find me annoying?
No. But when you’re going down the street from the subway to your house and you’re tired and thinking
about something, and someone starts yelling, “Genesis! Genesis! May I have your picture, please?”
or they try to invite themselves in to have dinner… That’s not our way. We like to be left alone.
Were you irritated when I first met you on the subway?
I don’t remember, was I?
You were friendly but that might have just been British politeness.
I am very polite. Jaye always said that I’m too polite.
You were reading a paperback book and wearing a MIIIKA sweater, which made me think I had
license to say hello since I work for them.
We love to read on the subway. It makes it a joyful experience instead of a pain in the ass.
I work from home and the only time I can budget for reading is either the subway or the toilet.
People do say we’re very polite on the subway and so when we get stopped and people ask us if we’re Genesis,we say no. Some people love to be recognized and harassed. It’s difficult because you’re glad that people feel safe enough to speak to you, because it means that they think you’re approachable, or that they like what you do enough to think that you’re worth talking to. But where does your privacy begin and end?
I’ve certainly had my share of unpleasant interactions with people who came up to me to let me
know in one way or another that they knew who I was and didn’t like me. Those are more confusing
than anything.
There are definitely people who are obnoxious. What’s the name of that guy who used to be in
Generation X? Tony... bass player... Tony James. In 1975, or a very early ‘76, probably, one of
the people we were at university with was called John Krivine. We all had this commune called the
HoHo Funhouse, and he was a kind of part-time member. He found a cottage in the countryside
in a place called Burton Pidsea, which we rented for a shilling a year (that’s like ten cents a year)
from a farmer. In return, we would do some of the really boring labor jobs when it was time to plant
potatoes. So we had an acre of ground where we grew food and would trip.
He sort of disappeared for a while. One day we were walking down the King’s Road in Chelsea and
see a store that sold original mod clothing called Acme Attractions. So we go in because we always
liked mod stuff, and had a scooter and things. And there’s this guy with really long dreadlocks, who
was Don Letts, who did The Punk Rock Movie3. So I introduced myself and he said, “Oh, you know
my boss, John Krivine.” And we go, “He’s your boss?” “Yeah, this is his shop.” So I said, “Oh
wow, say hi, here’s my phone number. Be nice to
see him again.”
So John rang me up and said, “You still into music, Gen?” And we went, “Yeah, we started this band
called Throbbing Gristle.” And he said, “Well, I want to start a band because Malcolm across the
street has this shop Sex. He’s got this band called the Sex Pistols, and I’ve got this shop and I want to
have a band, too.” They were big rivals. And I said, “But you don’t know anything about music, John.”
“Exactly, that’s why we want you to come help! So we’re going to hold auditions in my warehouse and
pick the people to be in my band.” I said, “Well that’s not really my thing John.” But he said, “Oh
pleeease?” And I said alright.
He picked me up in his car and he took me to this place that he called a warehouse. You’ve seen the
subways in England? They have those big arches. A lot of them have been blocked in and are used
as warehouse or storage space. Some of them were really nice, some were just damp. He had a
good one that was really dry. He was dealing in antique jukeboxes, importing them from America
and selling them to rock stars like Led Zeppelin at ludicrously expensive prices.
He’d built a little stage and put up a set of drums and some amps and all these young kids were there.
The first one was Bill Broad . He had black hair and sideburns. He was auditioning for rhythm guitar.
We said, “He’s great, he’s amazing. Gotta have him in the band. Good presence.” Then John Towe
was the drummer. John had already picked a singer, which was the real disaster of the whole project.
John had picked this guy Gene October who was a gay hustler from Piccadilly. For some reason, John
thought this was really punk and would make for a fantastic band, but [Gene] couldn’t sing and was
pretty inarticulate. But we had no choice; we were told it was not negotiable. So Bill Broad, as he still
was known, said, “I’m not going to be in the band unless my friend can be in the band,” and we went,
“Well, who’s he?” And Bill said, “His name is Tony James and he plays bass.” So we said okay, we’ll
try him out. So then there’s a rehearsal.
The rehearsal’s in another place John had, which was basically a sweatshop where people made
the clothing for his shop. So they all come along, and along came Tony James. And the rest of Throbbing
Gristle came along because they’re all curious about this project. Everyone’s getting ready to
rehearse and perform “I’m a Roadrunner,” and all that crap they did at the beginning.
I like that song.
Well yeah, me too. It’s just that every punk and garage band did it. So Tony James asked us, “So
what do you lot do?” And we tried to explain what TG was about. He said, “Oh right, I had a band like
that when I was ten or eleven.” Something about the way he said it really pissed me off. So we said that
he’d better apologize. And he said, “Why should I have to apologize to you? You going to fucking hit
me?” And I said, “I have to warn you, I’m on these adrenaline pills, and when I get angry, there’s a
point at which I can’t control my anger.” And he said, “Yeah right,” at which point it flipped. I really
do take adrenaline pills every day to stay alive.
My switch flipped over, and the next thing, he was flying through the air like in a Western movie. I’d
never done such a good punch before or since. It was perfect: whacked him right on the jaw, knocked
him flying through the air, across an entire sewing table and into the wall behind him. And then he
began crying, “That fucking bastard hit me! I’ve lost a toof! I’ve fucking lost a toof!”
John Krivine came in from the other room to try to mediate and said, “I understand why you did that,
Gen, but it would be really good if you’d apologize.” We said, “No. We did that deliberately because
we were pissed off and we’re not going to apologize. Just tell him don’t be rude to people and don’t push people’s buttons if you’re not prepared for the consequences.”
He’s had two false teeth since then. He went on to be in the Sisters of Mercy and Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
We’d see him on TV and just smile and think, “Two false teeth.”
Amazing!
I don’t think I’ve told anyone else that story.
When we were talking on the phone you mentioned that you average about two hours of sleep a night.
I also have terrible sleeping patterns and think that they’re part of the reason I try to make money doing
art and creative junk. Has sleep dysfunction driven you towards a creative lifestyle?
It’s hard to say. It only really started rearing its head around 1970. We were living in the second building.
We had a Gypsy Joker biker from New Zealand living with us; he was also called Gypsy. And we had
a Freewheeler named Rick from Redding. Our house was also used as the Hell’s Angels clubhouse on the
weekends. It was a pretty wild lot.
There was this one time having been in the Exploding Galaxy4, where you can’t sleep in the same
place two nights running, all the walls were knocked down, you couldn’t use the toilet or have a bath in
private and your sleep patterns were deliberately disrupted so that you wouldn’t do anything based
on habit. This was in ’69 or ‘70. It was an art commune. In between University [of Hull] and Coum
Transmissions, we lived in this art commune. It was founded by a guy named David Medalla, who was
this Filipino kinetic sculptor. He wanted art to become a life style and be just as valid in the street
as in the gallery. That whole era was full of a lot of breaking down the idea of where art belongs.
That sounds an awful lot like that documentary We Live in Public. That guy who made all that
money off the internet set up a commune where everyone was monitored all the time.
It was a little like that but without technology. Everyone was monitoring each other. You could stop someone
as they were walking through the middle of the room and make them justify everything. “Why are
you wearing that? It’s the same thing you wore yesterday. Have you got no imagination? Why are you still
walking in shoes? Can’t you make your own shoes? Why is your hair the same way it was? Why have you
got hair? Why are you talking in the same voice?”
Everything you did was challenged constantly.
Doing the opposite of what you did before seems to be the theme of your artistic life and career. As
soon as you get comfortable with something, you’ve
changed.
Yeah, that’s where it probably got rooted. So we were in Hull again, doing our own thing, and we got
it into our head that, “Why must everything be done at normal speed? Why can’t it be done faster?” So
we decided to see if we could run as much as possible and not sleep, too, so we wouldn’t waste any
time. The idea was not to waste any time, not a moment.
It lasted several days until we collapsed in a gibbering heap. We felt really strange and had to
go see a doctor who said, “You’re suffering from severe nervous exhaustion.” The body can only go
so long without sleep before you hallucinate and the brain begins to short circuit. I asked what they
recommended and they said, “We’ll give you some valium and some sleeping pills, but we suggest you
buy a television. Turn it on quietly and stare at the television and you’ll go to sleep.”
That’s what I do!
Lady Jaye called it mindless television. She’d say, “Let’s watch some mindless television.” We treat it as
a medication. It works usually.
What do you fall asleep to?
The National Geographic channel is good. The History
Channel is good. And Discovery.
I can see that. I find anything with narration pretty calming.
Anything with narration and complicated descriptions about the universe. We don’t watch any cable
TV. We’re really enjoying Korean gangster films.
Did you see Oldboy?
Yes, very strange. They have all kinds of strange ideas. Ghosts and spirits are really important. Surreal
situations. We saw one the other day, can’t remember the title, where a school girl’s in a record
shop and she’s flipping through CDs and some guy comes up and smiles at her, and then she sees that
he’s left his wallet. She’s tempted to keep it and sort of pokes at it, sees there’s a lot of money and
eventually she steals it. When she gets out of the shop, he’s standing there with two gangster kids.
They walk her around the corner and tell her that her options are to become a prostitute for them or
they’ll tell everyone that she’s a thief and ruin her reputation. So she just agrees to be a prostitute,
which seems unlikely, but there’s a lot of shame in their culture I suppose. So one of the gangsters becomes
obsessed with her but he never speaks. He just stares at her and gets a room with a two-way
mirror so he can watch her. She fights off the men who pay to have sex with her at the last moment, but
eventually does have sex with someone after they threaten to kick her out. It goes on like that until he
gets stabbed with a big piece of glass and there’s all this strange gangster stuff going on and she doesn’t
know whether she likes him or not. At the end, he gets so upset that she’s leaving that he speaks for
the first time and he’s got this squeaky high-pitched voice, which is the secret of the whole movie. She
falls in love with him because of his squeaky voice and they drive off in a car. The end of the movie
is her having sex with fishermen while he smokes a cigarette on a port. Very weird movie.
Where were we? We were thinking of moving to New York. Or had we got there yet? Oh right, so we were
living in that house. Because of the fire in LA, the hospital bill was a $120,000+ dollars. Being British, it
never occurred to me that we would get a bill since the hospital’s free in England. So when these bills
started arriving, we thought, “What the fuck are we going to do about this? There’s no way we can find a
hundred and twenty-thousand dollars.” We assumed the insurance on the house would have paid it.
In the end, we had to take it to court and sue the insurance company and Rick Rubin. We went to the
Supreme Civil Court of California with this two week jury trial and everything5. A lot of people assume
that when you’re awarded $1.6 million that you’ve got $1.6 million. We wish. For about a second we
were millionaires. But to fight the case, we needed money. There are these companies you can go to
and they loaned us a quarter of a million dollars to fight the case. The deal is that if you lose, you don’t
pay them back, but if you win, you pay them double.
So $500,000 went to them. Then there’s the hospital bills and the lawyers and the witnesses and
the expert witnesses. So we were left with about $400,000. Isn’t that crazy?
That’s a real bummer.
We knew that would happen. All we wanted was
to pay the fucking bill. So that was a bonus and
we treated it like that. We thought of it as lucky
money, and that’s when we got the gold teeth and
we bought the house (Mimmy had passed away
by then) and we renovated it. And it left us enough
that if we were frugal, we didn’t have to take on
any real work for two or three years. We went to
the Himalayas and Katmandu and all the things
we wanted to do together. Now looking back,
we’re really glad we did, because if we’d waited,
it would have been too late. So thank you, random
chance. Things that seem bad can turn good.
It also gave us the freedom to think about pandrogyny.
The first day Jaye met me, she dressed me in her
clothes. It was in the air, but then we thought, “We
can actually do this. We can get breast implants.” Jaye was the kind of person who would always say,
“Yeah!” which is the perfect partner for someone like me. See a cliff, jump off. So we went for it.
How many people get to experience the things you have and live?
Heights are something we have a problem with. My children are fearless. Caresse has done sky diving.
What are your children like? All I know about them are their names.
Caresse and Genesse. Both were conceived at home and both were born at home. Natural childbirth.
No drugs, no nothing. They’re both very smart.
We always took them everywhere with us, my ex-wife and myself. When we were touring in the school
bus with Psychic TV in the ‘80s, we had a friend who was a nursery school nurse and a nanny come on
tour and the kids would come. We’d have them do soundchecks with us with low mikes so they could
pretend to be doing soundcheck. They’d get a hotel room so if it’s a late show, they could go back
and watch TV and fall asleep. Some of their happiest memories are spending weeks on end in a school
bus with a rock and roll band. They loved it.
Caresse, she was born in 1982 in August, and in September or October a friend and I curated an
event called the Final Academy6. We’d read about the Nova Convention in New York, which was an homage to Brion Gysin, John Giorno and the Beats. We thought, “Why don’t we do one in London?” So with a friend of mine, David Dawson, and another guy called Roger Ely, we decided to call it the Final Academy.
We decided to make it about the Beats but also include modern musicians and writers who use cut-ups
or tape recorder experiments, so it’s not just looking back but also looking at the present and what’s possible in the future with sampling and so on.
We got a trendy gallery called B2 to do a big exhibition of drawings and manuscripts and that kind of stuff. We got BBC2 to finance Howard Brookner, who did the first documentary called Burroughs. It was not quite finished and he was very ill with HIV AIDS. He was dying and we got the BBC to donate an editing suite to finish the film. And Derek, Joe, Howard and myself sat there and finished the movie off. It got broadcast during the festival on BBC2. They also let us do fake Temple of Psychic Youth adverts, which was amazing. It was sold out every single night. One night, William [Burroughs] read, and another night Brion [Gysin] read, and another night John [Giorno] read. In between, we had 23 Skidoo, Psychic TV, Cabaret Voltaire, stuff like that. We had big banquets.
At that point, almost all of William’s books were out of print, but because of the festival, they reprinted them all. So it gave him a big boost in his recognition.
And the first night, he walked on stage with Caresse, and he blessed her when she was just six weeks old.
We never thought we’d see William Burroughs holding a little tiny baby and stroking it like that. (Laughs)
They used to call him Grandad William.
And Timothy Leary has four god daughters: Uma Thurman, Winona Ryder and Caresse and Genesse P-Orridge.
They’d better start pumping out some movies.
They don’t seem to want to do anything too public.
They’re a bit like the real me. They don’t want their privacy interfered with too much. [One daughter] sent me a text message saying she’d gone to a friend’s house, and her brother was a big fan of mine and kept asking, “But what’s it like to be the daughter of Genesis P-Orridge!?”
I suppose one thing that people might be surprised by is how I never have music here. People who’ve known me for years will point out that they never hear music in my house. When we go out and listen to music, we can hardly ever enjoy that because my brain starts decoding how it’s made. It’s hard to just be swept up in it.
We just made a new Psychic TV record. It’s called Maggot Brain Versus Alien Brain. I’ll play you a bit if you want.
You’re really into using stamps, seals and making everything you do official.
I’ve been doing that forever. I started doing that in 1969 probably. I’d been doing official postcards.
We were asked to do a performance as COUM by the British Arts Council and we did the Ministry - it was when Britain joined the common market and we did the Ministry of Anti-Social Insecurity. It was a whole spoof on going to the dole office and filling out these forms and there were all these stamps. As people came to the museum, they were interviewed and assessed and stamped, told to come back a week later to see if they had any money for you. Being on the dole was a big inspiration. I used to steal their rubber stamps when they weren’t looking. The first one we stole just said UNEMPLOYED.
At my second high school - it was called a public school, which actually meant it was a private school.
In the old Britain, everyone had to take the same exam at eleven years old called the Eleven Plus exam, which they used to decide how good your prospects were later in life and higher education. If you did badly, you’d be sent to what was called a secondary modern school. That meant that they’d give you a trade like an electrician or a plumber. If you did a bit better, you went to a grammar school, which meant they’d try to get you to a university. If you did really, really well, you’d get a scholarship to a private school. And that’s what I got. The second one of which we went to from ‘64 to 68 was called Solihull School, and that was a nightmare. You ever see that movie If… where they get all the weapons and try to shoot all the teachers? It’s an amazing film and just like my school, but not as bad. Our school actually had a large parade ground for doing marching and drills. They had an airforce section, who actually had jet fighters at the airbase. They had an artillery section. We had a forty-five pound artillery gun at the school. We had mortars, heavy machine guns, about six hundred rifles - sniper rifles, automatic pistols, everything.
Shooting was fun. We had our own shooting range in the school. We ended up being a first class sniper. We got a special badge with a rifle and a star above it and everything. We’d been in the Boy Scouts and the Cubs, too, so we got really into getting badges and trinkets. It really appealed to me.
Somewhere around here is my original Cub jumper with all the badges on it. We’ve kept it all these years. So that always appealed to me. Then in 1968, ‘69. ‘70, we used to hitchhike to London a lot and go to the Arts Lab in Drury Lane. At some point in either ‘68 or ‘69, they squatted an old empty hotel up the street and the Hell’s Angels were the security. We went there for a weekend and hung out with them. It really appealed to me how they had different badges for what they’d done. One Percenters and Brown Wings and Red Wings and so on. We’ve used it in every project. Patches, badges, medals and things.
Do you have a name for the Psychic TV symbol?
Yeah, it’s called the Pyschic Cross. It’s actually registered as an international trademark.
It’s a lot like the Cross of Lorraine, which Boyd Rice likes so much, and which he sees as representing the duality of man.
Mine does as well. It has the right way up cross, the upside down cross; it’s balanced. You take the bit off the bottom it means something in Japanese. There’s a chapter in the Psychic Bible about all the different ways you can arrange the Psychic Cross.
It’s also got some kind of sacred geometric connection with other potent symbols. When it’s done perfectly, it’s in proportions of two and three. So if the vertical was three inches, the two wider horizontals would be two inches, and the one in the middle would be two-thirds of two inches.
When did you design this?
About 1980.
Your album design and visual sense is always great.
We try to control every detail we can. We made a one-off prototype medal years ago. What we wanted was, for each tour, to strike a medal with a different ribbon just like in the army, and on the back, stamp the dates in. Everybody in the band and all the roadies would get a medal for having been through that campaign and having survived. It’s bikers and armies and freemasons. All these organizations, they do things that they know work.
Rather than try to attack them and do the opposite, why not just absorb their strategies and use them in your own subversive ways. It’s been pretty successful. We seem to have caused quite a lot of electrical shocks to the culture so far.
But thank you for saying that about the design. We do try to work hard on it and make it as interrelated and integrated as possible. We’ve been really lucky. We’ve had really good people working with us: Sleazy from Hipgnosis, Edley who works for Sony all the time. We’ve had an amazing team.
We’ve also been good at finding people and attracting people to us. The musicians have always been really good, too.
One thing I’m curious about is the significance of the number 23. You intended to make twenty-three live albums for twenty-three consecutive months and it appears consistently in your work.
Everyone always asks about that. It began because of William S Burroughs, who we first met in 1971 and were friends with until he unfortunately passed away. We used to go down to London and hang out with him and get drunk with him. He would show me all his original handmade notebooks, a lot of the ones that are in the New Museum at the moment. And we noticed there was lots of stuff about twenty-three.
What happened with him was he was doing lots of cut-ups with Brion Gysin and they noticed twenty-three kept cropping up. So they kept things they found in newspapers with twenty-three. The more they noticed them, the more they appeared. Then they’d buy an airticket and it’d be seat twenty-three. They’d get a hotel room and it would be room twenty-three. They’d get a bill and it’d be twenty-three dollars and so on. So they thought, “What’s this? Would this happen with other numbers or just twenty-three?”
But when you try it with other numbers, it’s just not the same. It appears that twenty-three has some sort of life, a consciousness. There have been lots of books written about it by mathematicians. It supposedly takes twenty-three seconds for blood to go around the body once. There’s twenty-three chromosomes. It’s biologically locked into the center of life.
So that’s why when we’d be at the record cutting plant and they’d say it’s a bit too long, how long do you want it to be, we’d say, “Make it twenty-three minutes each side.” Or there’d be twenty-three tracks.
The more we used it, the more it cropped up like William said. Now we have the “of course” factor.
We get seated at table twenty-three. And everything is twenty-three. It seems to be a friendly force if you’re respectful of it. Twenty-three represents the cut up, too. The act of chopping up a piece of music or writing and putting it back together can put it in a possibly more revealing light. As William used to say, “Let’s see what it really says.” So that’s another reason.
TOPI (Temple of Psychic Youth) and Psychic TV and We personally just started using it as the ongoing magical number that seemed to make friends and be friends with us. So it also represents the psychic cross. It represents everything we do under the auspices of the psychic cross.
Do you believe in numerology?
For sure. When you think of how physics is developed, it’s done through mathematics. Before an atomic bomb, we had to have an equation. So we had to have numbers first. There’s a strong argument that the whole universe is a mathematic equation. There’s a theory that when they discover the equation that reveals the essence of the universe, there’ll be another big bang and we’ll go around in a huge loop and another universe will start again.
So yes, numbers are very powerful. I’m not sure if birthdates are more than marginally significant,
though. You can become paranoid schizophrenic looking at billboards and importing too much meaning onto things.
I also wanted to ask about COUM. Is it pronounced
“coom” or “cum?”
It was originally pronounced “cum” but nobody got it, so we’ve accepted Coum to be the way the world wishes it to be. It actually stands for Cosmic Organism of the Universal Molecular, which was actually a particle theory we came up with in 1968. One of the first people in Coum was Dr. Timothy Poston, who was involved in the creation of chaos mathematics and fuzzy geometry. He would give us lots of this amazing advanced information about mathematics and physics and where it was heading.
We had this amazing time in a car with my mom and dad. We’d hitchhiked our way to Britain,
knew we weren’t going to get to the place in time, so we went and stayed at their place for a day
or so. We went for a car ride and had a kind of flicker experience. We were in the back of the car,
leaning on the window. All of a sudden, we disintegrated into particles and moved outside the car and were just able to go through the bushes and through the trees and through anything solid. That’s when we had the realization that particles get so small that they disappear. It’s since been mathematically codified. Whenever I told anyone the theory, they thought I was mad, but now of course they agree. We’ve only started admitting recently what it was meant to mean. Physics is like metaphysical poetry these days. Do you watch that program, Through the Wormhole?
I don’t get reception.
What a shame, it’s a really good series. Lots of speculation on the weirdest ideas, like that the entire universe is two dimensions, lying flat on a membrane at the edge of the universe, and we just think it’s three dimensions. They’re trying to prove all these things that you can see on Ketamine once. These scientists should all try Ketamine and save themselves a lot of time.
Do you still take Ketamine?
Occasionally. Only when we want to find something specific out. Haven’t done that since we were in Katmandu. When you get older, your body just doesn’t recover as quickly, but we’ve done more than enough to remember. We had a friend, Dr. Timothy Wiley, who first suggested that Lady Jaye and I try that. He also said that you had to do it three-hundred times before you understood it, so we did. The effect completely changes after.
What led Psychic TV into making acid house music?
In my head, I’d started to wonder, “Is there a way to do a contemporary equivalent of Sufi Trance music, something that works for people now? And if it could be done, what would it sound like?” So we started mixing tapes straight away with Psychic TV. We used to call it “the Box of Tricks.” Sometimes on tour in the States, in radio stations, we’d do an interview and then just do an hour of mixing using all the record decks, all the CD decks we could find.
We were in Detroit doing that; we’d just done two hours with Don Bolles, the drummer of the Germs. Then these really hip black guys turned up at the radio station and asked who was doing that stuff on the radio, and they were told,
“That’s Psychic TV.” They were really friendly. It was Derrick Carter and all that lot. They said, “We love what you’re doing. Come with us and hear what we’re doing and we’ll play it to you.”
So they took us to this little record shop in the ghetto. They had all these white labels of the first acid tracks and they played them to us. As soon as we heard it, we thought, “That’s the answer, those rhythms. That’s how it’s going to work.” So we bought one of every 12” they had and made cassettes of them and handed them out to people. We made Dave [Ball] from Soft Cell listen to it in the car. So we said, “Yeah, we’ve got to do something like this.”
So we booked the studio space and in two days we’d made Jack The Tab. And we said to Dave,
“If they know it’s you and me and they don’t like us, they’re going to say they don’t like this, so let’s
pretend it’s other people. Let’s pretend it’s found tracks from the vaults, like garage tracks.” People didn’t know it was us for a while. NME gave a rave review to it and they always said negative things about anything I did.
Those dicks, why didn’t they like you?
The editor of NME came to one of the first Psychic TV gigs and the video we were projecting was the section of people getting pierced. It freaked him out.
It was too much for him and he told everyone at the NME only to write negative things about us.
Someone told me that you popularized body piercing.
There was only one person doing piercing at all in Britain: Mr. Sebastian7. And his friend Mr. Ronald in Amsterdam was doing it. And then Sailor Sid [Diller] in America. It was that small. And Mr. Sebastian only did gay people when we met him. We were the first heterosexuals he had ever pierced.
What were they piercing at this point?
They did the septum - nothing around the eyebrows - nipples, scrotums, labia, clits. All the genitals. That was it. It was very secret and very underground. There were probably less than thirty people with piercings in Britain in 1981.
Temple of Psychic Youth had a network of about ten thousand people world-wide, and we sent out leaflets through our network with drawings of the different piercings. It became a voluntary initiation into the world of TOPI.
If you go back to the press in the early ‘80s, they’re all saying how shocking it was that we had screws and nuts and bolts in our bits. They said it was destroying Britain. It’s hard to imagine, but Mr. Sebastian got raided by Scotland Yard and they confiscated his appointment book and they picked out twelve names, including mine, of people who’d just had appointments.
They charged him with grievous bodily harm to twelve people and illegal use of pain killer. They also raided other people. Some other guy up North tried to pierce his own foreskin and took the pictures of it to get developed. He got four years in jail for that. This is in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. It was illegal to have piercings or to have a new tattoo since it had broken the skin and that’s a wound and that’s grievous bodily harm. Even if it was consensual, it was illegal, and you could get put in jail for it. Mr. Sebastian was sentenced for two years in jail, but because he had lung cancer, they eventually suspended it and he died a couple of years later anyway.
As you know, the efforts to stop piercing didn’t work and it’s now a global phenomena. Everybody’s a fucking expert. There’s two piercing shops on Myrtle Avenue in Ridgewood now. They’ve even got tattooing and piercing in Katmandu now. What’s sad is in Thailand, where it used to be all tribal with a stick in the jungle, they’re all doing Western style stuff with a tattoo gun, which is a real shame. It’s become really homogenized. One time Jaye was walking down St. Marks and there were these kids with all these piercings and she said, “I blame you for this.
That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t go back to England, because I’d popularized piercing, and they wanted to put me away. We knew Vale, who does the Re/Search books8, and the first book had been the Industrial Culture Handbook. The next book was the Modern Primitives book, because we’d been talking about piercing and tattooing and he’d said, “That would be a fabulous topic for a Re/Search book.” We said, “We
can put you in touch with everyone,” and that book was what did it. Step 1 was we got lots of people doing it privately. Step 2 was that Vale used that as the subject of a book that sold something like two hundred thousand copies, and who knows how many more people read it. It really
appealed to people. So that’s what we had to do with piercing becoming A) legal and B) popular.
Is there anything else we should talk about?
We haven’t spoken about Jaye or pandrogyny. A new movie just got finished, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye9.
We decided in earnest to do the pandrogyny project in 2003, Lady Jaye and myself. We both went on Valentine’s Day and got matching breast implants. We woke up holding hands in the recovery room and when we looked down, found myself saying, “Oh look, this is our angelic body.”
The whole thing kept mutating. It began primarily as a love story, but then we thought, “What are
we really saying? We want to confront DNA. We don’t want to accept without question the way that
our body evolves and assume that it’s the finished thing. What are we really fighting? We’re fighting
the programming of DNA. What’s DNA and behavior and is there a way to change those?”
The human species is stalled in this holding pattern. Most of it is because we think of the human body as finished and sacred. Timothy Leary said of the body that it’s just a way of getting the brain around. If we choose to use genetics to mutate the body, then we can colonize space. There’s a salamander that can be frozen solid for two years and wakes up when it thaws. A salamander’s figured out how to do that - surely we could learn from that and learn how to hibernate, which is a major issue of space travel. Bears hibernate, too. Warm blooded and cold blooded animals both hibernate. And if you’re going to go into space, do you necessarily need legs or long legs? There’s not going to be gravity, so maybe we don’t need those. Maybe you could have fur to save on the energy to keep warm. You could have feathers. You could start redesigning each being to suit their needs.
Stephen Hawking recently said something about how the human species will have to move into
space to survive.
Absolutely. And Brion Gysin’s book was called Here To Go for the same reason. The human species is making a terrible blunder by cutting the funding for space travel. It’s our one chance to escape. If we stay here, we’re going to polarize and regress. We’re going to have another Middle Ages, another Dark Ages,
an Armageddon, and we’ll be lucky to be fucking mutated chimpanzees. And that’s the end.
The MIIIKA+PSYCHIC TV collection
will be available as part of the MIIIKA spring 2011 collection and will be available in-store and online this February.
http://mishkanyc.com/bloglin/2011/02/23/%d0%bc%d0%b8%d1%88%d0%ba%d0%b0-presents-b-k-scum-a-psychic-tv-mix-by-star-eyes-dust-la-rock-free-download/
Our clothing line for Spring 2011 is one of our best. And one of the best things about our best lines is our collaboration with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge who is one of the best people from several of the best bands and creator of many of the best ideas.
In the late sixties Genesis was in COUM Transmissions, an art/performance group. Later he formed Throbbing Gristle, considered the first industrial music band and coinners of the term "Industrial Music for industrial people." Genesis then formed the band Psychic TV in 1982 which went on to make some of the best psychedelic, experimental, punk and electronic music. Psychic TV has their own cult/fanclub referred to as Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth. They have their own religious book, Thee Psychick Bible. They have a symbol to unify them, thee psychic cross. Мишка is pleased to present them with nice things that they can wear.
We have made four T-shirts bearing iconic Psychic TV image. There's one of a corroded Psychic Cross. There's one featuring the unforgettable and frightening cover of Psychic TV's Unclean 12" single. There's also a remake of t-shirt worn in one the groups most iconic photos featuringthe eyes of Charles Manson. Another with Cyco Simon crucified to the psychic cross instructs the Psychick Youth to rise. We've also produced a fitted New Era hat featuring thee Psychic Cross. The prestige piece of this collection is our Psychic M65 jacket, a long camoflage coat with a removable hood and ornamented with Psychick icons inside and out. There are four patches, two buttons, a Psychic Cross pattern lining and on the back there's the word "PSYCHIC" in embroidered in an arc over the Psychic Cross.
We're also releasing a new and exclusive interview which I conducted with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge as part of this collaboration. The interview explains who this person is to the uninitiated and explores he/r for the familiar. The 22 page interview features a preview of our entire capsule collection and was conducted not long after Genesis' most recent transition from one home to another and focuses on the reasons behind the dramatic changes that have occurred in he/r lifetime.
The entire capsule collection will be available in a couple of weeks along with the first drop of our Spring 2011 collection
MKA Presents
Through THe WORMHOLE
An Interview With Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
by NIcholas Gazin
Edited by Catherine Macey
article design by masami kubo
This Spring, MIIIKA will be releasing a capsule collection with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and
Psychic TV. We consider Genesis to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and are
personally thrilled that we had the chance to work with someone we admire so much. Over he/r career,
s/he has used everything s/he has – he/r heart, mind and body – to create art and music that
challenges the status quo, which is as pure and powerful as art can get. MIIIKA hopes to be a platform
that helps to spread the message of Genesis’ work, and indoctrinate new lifetime members into
Thee One True TOPI Tribe – and hope as they get older, they do the same for the next generation.
If you’re looking for somebody to blame for the popularity of body piercing, you can point your
finger at avant-garde anti-hero Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Even though it would be shameful to recognize
he/r for only this one minor anecdote in a life filled with artistic achievements, it’s an important
example of just how influential and controversial s/he has been. If you’re not already familiar
with Genesis, you’ve definitely felt the ripples from he/r intimidating amount of output. Love he/r or
fear he/r, Genesis has been known throughout the years as many things: an artist, a musician, a
“wrecker of civilization” and a cultural engineer.
Genesis’s first notable creative output was in the 1960s, as founder of the performance art group,
COUM Transmissions. COUM challenged cultural taboos so successfully that they caused British Parliament
to reconsider government funding for public art. COUM then transformed into Throbbing Gristle,
which takes its name from a slang term for an erection. Throbbing Gristle created the term “industrial
music” and is considered to be the first industrial band, and was an innovator of using sampling in
music. After the break up of Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge formed Psychic TV, a band that made music
that was at times avant-garde and at other times poppy, and for a brief time it performed acid house.
At the same time as Psychic TV, Genesis formed TOPI (or the Temple of Psychic Youth), which was a
sort of cult/fanclub for the musical group. In 2003, Gen and his other half Lady Jaye began a project that they called “the Pandrogyne,” in which they received surgeries in order to become the same person. Because of this, when Gen is referred to, he/r gender is written as “he/r” and “s/he,” and s/he often refers to he/rself as “we.” Lady Jaye died in 2007, but the Pandrogyne project still lives on in Genesis.
The first time I met Gen was on the subway and s/he was very polite although I was probably bothering
he/r. The second time was at the tag sale s/he had in the basement of the building s/he was vacating
where s/he’d lived with Jaye. A slideshow of photos of he/r late wife were projected on the wall as
everything from used dildos to kitchen implements were offered for sale with certificates of authenticity.
I was amazed that s/he was able to make something as mundane as a tag sale into something both
cute and sad that also memorialized he/r lost partner. Knowing he/r body of work, it’s easy to imagine
Genesis P-Orridge as some monstrous freak who lives like Dracula, but like many people who lead
successful creative lives, s/he’s a polite and open person who seems to genuinely enjoy the company
of others and knows how to speak and tell stories in a way that’s so compelling that it’s hard not to feel
a little self conscious.
I’d been attacked outside of my home a couple of weeks before conducting this interview with Gen
and it was still affecting me. Moving was on my mind, and Gen had just moved to Manhattan from
the Ridgewood neighborhood in Queens. I knew that Gen had made a few large exoduses in he/r
life - s/he started off in England, moved to California and then to Ridgewood, and I was curious
because each of these moves seemed to have been forced by tragedy. Also, I really like Canterbury
Tales and structuring interviews around travelling from one place to the next. It makes the reader feel
like they’ve accomplished something when they’re done reading- it’s like we’re on a quest with Genesis.
So I decided to begin by asking Gen about her latest relocation.
You moved recently.
We moved recently: three months ago, after living in Ridgewood from 1996 to 2010. So that’s fourteen
years in Ridgewood. When Lady Jaye and myself moved to Ridgewood, it was a form of random
chance. We were living in Northern California, in the countryside, not far from Santa Rosa. We were
between Santa Rosa and Bodega Bay, where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds. We were right in
the middle of acres of land, with a creek and redwood trees and a big house, but then it was my fate
to fall out of Harry Houdini’s old mansion in Laurel Canyon1 during the famous Rick Rubin fire.
Yikes.
It was very frightening. Myself and David J had been at the top of the house recording and trying
to get ideas for their [Love and Rockets] new album. We were chatting and then we fell asleep.
All of a sudden, at six in the morning, this voice came through my sleep saying, “Wake up everyone,
the house is on fire! The house is on fire!” I kept hearing this voice and I went out of my room
and didn’t see anything, and then I looked down the stairwell and it was like Hell. This huge rolling
ball of flame was being fed by all these nylon carpets so there was this thick black plastic smoke,
and it was coming up the stairs like it was alive. Your mind just goes into this strange place: “Am
I on a TV show? This can’t be real.” This is what you see on television and in the movies, but you’re
never actually in the burning house. “Oh shit, the house really is burning.” What the fuck do you
do? So we tried to remember all these things we’d seen on TV. We get real low to the ground, get
back in the room, slam the door and say to David J, “The house really IS on fire.”
The night before, he’d been telling me how he’d made this guitar he had next to his bed that he’d
named Big Woody. He’d made it at school. It was his first guitar and it was his talisman for luck. He
doesn’t remember, and we don’t remember, but somehow he got out of the room, through the window
and onto the ground safely. So then, Muggins here must save Big Woody. So we toss it to David: “Here,
catch.” But then the master tapes for the new album are here, too - “We can’t let those get destroyed!”
So we grabbed all these blankets and threw them through the window and then tossed the master tapes
onto them so that they’d bounce and not be destroyed. Then the door of the room started to melt.
It was a metal door, and I thought, “Well, I’m not going out that way,” so out the window I went. It
was a sloping window ledge, and it was really dusty because it was still summer in LA. My feet slipped,
and it was like one of those Tom and Jerry cartoons where you’re running on air. Then we saw a tree
and we thought “Ah, a tree!” and grabbed the tree, but it was dead and the branch just snapped off.
That moment all my balance went right off. At the moment you begin to fall, all you say is, “Oh, shit.” And then WHAM! I landed on concrete steps. I got nerve damage, hit my hip, broke all my ribs on the left side, smashed that wrist and shattered my elbow into thirty-six pieces.
Urghhhh.
And all we were thinking was: “When are we going to faint from the pain so we don’t have to feel
this anymore?” But we couldn’t. And then these firefighters came running out and said “Don’t worry,
we’re going to come back, but the windows are about to explode outwards, so we’re just going to
put this lead blanket over you, and then we’ll come back.” So they put this lead blanket over me and
ran away! (Laughs) And then they came back and got me on a stretcher and put me in an ambulance.
It took so long to get out of Laurel Canyon because nobody would move out of the way due to early
morning traffic. So it took ages to get to the hospital. Why are we talking about this now?
We were talking about moving and how you came from California to Ridgewood.
So it was impossible to play music or anything. It turns out that post traumatic stress disorder is a real illness.
You don’t realize until it happens how real it is. When people light candles or anything, it really gets me
spooked. I get nervous about cigarettes in the house. It’s a horrible feeling to be trapped by a fire.
I can try to imagine, but I can’t really imagine.
They did reconstructive surgery. We were lucky enough to be taken to Cedar Sinai and we got a
specialist doctor who came in to work on my arm because it was in so many pieces that it was considered
impossible. He said it really was a jigsaw.
In fact, he said that there were several little bits that they couldn’t figure out where they fit so they just
threw them away. There were pins going in laterally through the arm, screws in the elbow and pieces of
metal bent around here. Some of it’s still in there to this day. The cast they put on almost felt like concrete,
on my left arm from my wrist to the top of my shoulder. I had a cast on for eighteen months. The
second day after the surgery, they said, “It’s good for you to walk around, so if you have to go to the
toilet, just walk to the toilet and have a pee.” So we got up, walked over and as we got out of the
toilet, we couldn’t breathe. We thought it was an asthma attack from the stress. It got so bad that we
were crawling along the floor towards the bed, trying to get to the emergency button that would call
the nurse. The emergency button was a bit out of reach and it took a great last burst of adrenaline,
lying on the floor at this weird angle, to reach up and squeeze it. This sweet nurse comes in saying,
“Yes, yes, what would you like?”, “WE NEED OXYGEN. NOW! ORRR - ” And then we went into a
coma. And woke up in intensive care.
It turned out that we had blood clots from the impact on this thigh and they’d gone up to my lungs
and stopped me from breathing. That put me in intensive care for twelve days. [The hospital] said it
was a miracle that we survived. The good bit was that we had a morphine drip and we could press
it whenever the pain got too bad. There was a special computer to stop you from ODing.
Lady Jaye, she was a registered nurse as well as a dominatrix. She heard about [my hospitalization]
because it was a newsflash on MTV. They cut into the MTV programming to say that Genesis P-
Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV has been seriously injured in a fire in Laurel Canyon
while working with Love And Rockets! And that’s how my children found out, too. Their friends came
over and said, “Your dad’s been in a big fire and he’s in intensive care.” Everyone assumed it was serious
- well it WAS serious - but everyone assumed I’d been burned. Thank God I wasn’t.
So Jaye borrowed some money, got on a plane and flew to LA to see me straight away. The first
thing she did was get in the bed with me, cuddle up to me. Soon as she did, one of the other nurses
came in and then excused herself. Because Jaye was a registered nurse, she could come and visit me
any time. We made love in that bed several times despite all the wires. (Laughs)
But we had to move [from California] eventually because I couldn’t work. My mind wasn’t in a fit
state to work. People would ring up and say “You really don’t sound like you.” So they suggested I
see a...psychologist? Which one is the one that can prescribe Prozac?
Psychiatrist.
He said, “You’ve got really severe post-traumatic stress disorder” and prescribed us Prozac, but we
stopped taking it after about four weeks. I fought through it on my own.
My inability to work meant we couldn’t stay in California. Jaye, though she was a registered nurse in
New York, and California recognizes the New York license because it’s a high standard, it takes them a
year to process the paperwork. She couldn’t work as a nurse for a year.
We were stuck, when her family rang up and said that her grandmother was really ill and had really
severe dementia. She had a colostomy bag and she couldn’t walk. They said, “There’s an empty apartment
and you can both live there for a year rent free if you look after Mimmy 24/7.” This was in Ridgewood.
We got the biggest kind of truck you can rent from Budget, and a trailer on the back of that with our Ford Escort car. And in our Ford Escort were four cats in separate boxes. And still with the cast
on my arm, we drove the Southern route, through New Mexico, right down through Louisiana, all the
way back through Texas.
Gary Panter told me the story of driving from LA to New York to escape from his ex-wife. Did you ever
see Pee Wee’s Playhouse?
Yeah, we had the whole set. Jaye introduced me to it. We’d seen bits in England, but never had time to
really take it in. We’d have Pee Wee days where we’d just watch all the episodes. We were Pee Wee
addicts. We also had the full set of The Avengers, that ‘60s English program.
I know it but I’ve never seen an actual episode.
We grew up with that and it was the first fetish clothing we’d ever seen. At one point, we owned one of
Emma Peel’s leather catsuits.
Wow!
We did a trade for it. We knew an artist in Brighton who did photos and paintings of highly fetish S&M
imagery. One day we were looking through his stuff and there was a leather catsuit hanging on the wall
behind some canvases. We said, “That’s really nice, where’d you get that?” And he said, “This guy, his
name was John something.” The guy who did the costumes for the original Avengers program used to
buy paintings from this artist, and traded the costume one time when he didn’t have enough money. So we
said, “You’ve just got it hanging on the wall. We’d appreciate it much more.” We did another trade
and got it from him. Sadly, it was taken by Scotland Yard when they raided our house in 19922 .
Oh right. That’s why you originally came to California.
Yes, but we’re jumping ahead.
Jaye had arranged for her brother and sister to help us unload the truck and we had to get there
on a Sunday or there’d be no one to help us. So we drove forty hours without stopping. We stopped for
gas and coffee, and we took trucker speed, ephedrine. It makes you feel really awful but it keeps you
awake. With one arm, Gen drove the whole way.
I hadn’t realized that you were actually driving this truck, but I suppose that Jaye being from New York, she wouldn’t know how to drive. She’d never driven on the freeway and she’d never driven
a truck. We used to have a school bus with Psychic TV.
So we built a big pile of cushions under the left arm. We had to smuggle the cats into the motels on the
first half of the journey. Looking back, we wonder, “How did we do that?” Sometimes there’s no choice,
like refugees. How do they climb over the Himalayas in a pair of sneakers? Sometimes there’s just no other
option. So we ended up in Ridgewood [Queens].
We would get the subway back from Manhattan and it would empty out until there would only be
African Americans and Latinos, and then me and Jaye. We’d be the only white people to get off the
train at the Myrtle-Wykoff stop. It was in no way a hostile or unpleasant atmosphere, but it was very
odd. It was just so specific. That’s one thing that surprised me about New York: how one side of the
street can be bourgeois middle class, and the other side can be burned out buildings and crack houses.
It’s jumbled but separated at the same time. It’s changed and it’s like sixty percent hipster kids getting
off at that stop now.
Do you find the hipster kids annoying?
Yeesss.
Do you find me annoying?
No. But when you’re going down the street from the subway to your house and you’re tired and thinking
about something, and someone starts yelling, “Genesis! Genesis! May I have your picture, please?”
or they try to invite themselves in to have dinner… That’s not our way. We like to be left alone.
Were you irritated when I first met you on the subway?
I don’t remember, was I?
You were friendly but that might have just been British politeness.
I am very polite. Jaye always said that I’m too polite.
You were reading a paperback book and wearing a MIIIKA sweater, which made me think I had
license to say hello since I work for them.
We love to read on the subway. It makes it a joyful experience instead of a pain in the ass.
I work from home and the only time I can budget for reading is either the subway or the toilet.
People do say we’re very polite on the subway and so when we get stopped and people ask us if we’re Genesis,we say no. Some people love to be recognized and harassed. It’s difficult because you’re glad that people feel safe enough to speak to you, because it means that they think you’re approachable, or that they like what you do enough to think that you’re worth talking to. But where does your privacy begin and end?
I’ve certainly had my share of unpleasant interactions with people who came up to me to let me
know in one way or another that they knew who I was and didn’t like me. Those are more confusing
than anything.
There are definitely people who are obnoxious. What’s the name of that guy who used to be in
Generation X? Tony... bass player... Tony James. In 1975, or a very early ‘76, probably, one of
the people we were at university with was called John Krivine. We all had this commune called the
HoHo Funhouse, and he was a kind of part-time member. He found a cottage in the countryside
in a place called Burton Pidsea, which we rented for a shilling a year (that’s like ten cents a year)
from a farmer. In return, we would do some of the really boring labor jobs when it was time to plant
potatoes. So we had an acre of ground where we grew food and would trip.
He sort of disappeared for a while. One day we were walking down the King’s Road in Chelsea and
see a store that sold original mod clothing called Acme Attractions. So we go in because we always
liked mod stuff, and had a scooter and things. And there’s this guy with really long dreadlocks, who
was Don Letts, who did The Punk Rock Movie3. So I introduced myself and he said, “Oh, you know
my boss, John Krivine.” And we go, “He’s your boss?” “Yeah, this is his shop.” So I said, “Oh
wow, say hi, here’s my phone number. Be nice to
see him again.”
So John rang me up and said, “You still into music, Gen?” And we went, “Yeah, we started this band
called Throbbing Gristle.” And he said, “Well, I want to start a band because Malcolm across the
street has this shop Sex. He’s got this band called the Sex Pistols, and I’ve got this shop and I want to
have a band, too.” They were big rivals. And I said, “But you don’t know anything about music, John.”
“Exactly, that’s why we want you to come help! So we’re going to hold auditions in my warehouse and
pick the people to be in my band.” I said, “Well that’s not really my thing John.” But he said, “Oh
pleeease?” And I said alright.
He picked me up in his car and he took me to this place that he called a warehouse. You’ve seen the
subways in England? They have those big arches. A lot of them have been blocked in and are used
as warehouse or storage space. Some of them were really nice, some were just damp. He had a
good one that was really dry. He was dealing in antique jukeboxes, importing them from America
and selling them to rock stars like Led Zeppelin at ludicrously expensive prices.
He’d built a little stage and put up a set of drums and some amps and all these young kids were there.
The first one was Bill Broad . He had black hair and sideburns. He was auditioning for rhythm guitar.
We said, “He’s great, he’s amazing. Gotta have him in the band. Good presence.” Then John Towe
was the drummer. John had already picked a singer, which was the real disaster of the whole project.
John had picked this guy Gene October who was a gay hustler from Piccadilly. For some reason, John
thought this was really punk and would make for a fantastic band, but [Gene] couldn’t sing and was
pretty inarticulate. But we had no choice; we were told it was not negotiable. So Bill Broad, as he still
was known, said, “I’m not going to be in the band unless my friend can be in the band,” and we went,
“Well, who’s he?” And Bill said, “His name is Tony James and he plays bass.” So we said okay, we’ll
try him out. So then there’s a rehearsal.
The rehearsal’s in another place John had, which was basically a sweatshop where people made
the clothing for his shop. So they all come along, and along came Tony James. And the rest of Throbbing
Gristle came along because they’re all curious about this project. Everyone’s getting ready to
rehearse and perform “I’m a Roadrunner,” and all that crap they did at the beginning.
I like that song.
Well yeah, me too. It’s just that every punk and garage band did it. So Tony James asked us, “So
what do you lot do?” And we tried to explain what TG was about. He said, “Oh right, I had a band like
that when I was ten or eleven.” Something about the way he said it really pissed me off. So we said that
he’d better apologize. And he said, “Why should I have to apologize to you? You going to fucking hit
me?” And I said, “I have to warn you, I’m on these adrenaline pills, and when I get angry, there’s a
point at which I can’t control my anger.” And he said, “Yeah right,” at which point it flipped. I really
do take adrenaline pills every day to stay alive.
My switch flipped over, and the next thing, he was flying through the air like in a Western movie. I’d
never done such a good punch before or since. It was perfect: whacked him right on the jaw, knocked
him flying through the air, across an entire sewing table and into the wall behind him. And then he
began crying, “That fucking bastard hit me! I’ve lost a toof! I’ve fucking lost a toof!”
John Krivine came in from the other room to try to mediate and said, “I understand why you did that,
Gen, but it would be really good if you’d apologize.” We said, “No. We did that deliberately because
we were pissed off and we’re not going to apologize. Just tell him don’t be rude to people and don’t push people’s buttons if you’re not prepared for the consequences.”
He’s had two false teeth since then. He went on to be in the Sisters of Mercy and Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
We’d see him on TV and just smile and think, “Two false teeth.”
Amazing!
I don’t think I’ve told anyone else that story.
When we were talking on the phone you mentioned that you average about two hours of sleep a night.
I also have terrible sleeping patterns and think that they’re part of the reason I try to make money doing
art and creative junk. Has sleep dysfunction driven you towards a creative lifestyle?
It’s hard to say. It only really started rearing its head around 1970. We were living in the second building.
We had a Gypsy Joker biker from New Zealand living with us; he was also called Gypsy. And we had
a Freewheeler named Rick from Redding. Our house was also used as the Hell’s Angels clubhouse on the
weekends. It was a pretty wild lot.
There was this one time having been in the Exploding Galaxy4, where you can’t sleep in the same
place two nights running, all the walls were knocked down, you couldn’t use the toilet or have a bath in
private and your sleep patterns were deliberately disrupted so that you wouldn’t do anything based
on habit. This was in ’69 or ‘70. It was an art commune. In between University [of Hull] and Coum
Transmissions, we lived in this art commune. It was founded by a guy named David Medalla, who was
this Filipino kinetic sculptor. He wanted art to become a life style and be just as valid in the street
as in the gallery. That whole era was full of a lot of breaking down the idea of where art belongs.
That sounds an awful lot like that documentary We Live in Public. That guy who made all that
money off the internet set up a commune where everyone was monitored all the time.
It was a little like that but without technology. Everyone was monitoring each other. You could stop someone
as they were walking through the middle of the room and make them justify everything. “Why are
you wearing that? It’s the same thing you wore yesterday. Have you got no imagination? Why are you still
walking in shoes? Can’t you make your own shoes? Why is your hair the same way it was? Why have you
got hair? Why are you talking in the same voice?”
Everything you did was challenged constantly.
Doing the opposite of what you did before seems to be the theme of your artistic life and career. As
soon as you get comfortable with something, you’ve
changed.
Yeah, that’s where it probably got rooted. So we were in Hull again, doing our own thing, and we got
it into our head that, “Why must everything be done at normal speed? Why can’t it be done faster?” So
we decided to see if we could run as much as possible and not sleep, too, so we wouldn’t waste any
time. The idea was not to waste any time, not a moment.
It lasted several days until we collapsed in a gibbering heap. We felt really strange and had to
go see a doctor who said, “You’re suffering from severe nervous exhaustion.” The body can only go
so long without sleep before you hallucinate and the brain begins to short circuit. I asked what they
recommended and they said, “We’ll give you some valium and some sleeping pills, but we suggest you
buy a television. Turn it on quietly and stare at the television and you’ll go to sleep.”
That’s what I do!
Lady Jaye called it mindless television. She’d say, “Let’s watch some mindless television.” We treat it as
a medication. It works usually.
What do you fall asleep to?
The National Geographic channel is good. The History
Channel is good. And Discovery.
I can see that. I find anything with narration pretty calming.
Anything with narration and complicated descriptions about the universe. We don’t watch any cable
TV. We’re really enjoying Korean gangster films.
Did you see Oldboy?
Yes, very strange. They have all kinds of strange ideas. Ghosts and spirits are really important. Surreal
situations. We saw one the other day, can’t remember the title, where a school girl’s in a record
shop and she’s flipping through CDs and some guy comes up and smiles at her, and then she sees that
he’s left his wallet. She’s tempted to keep it and sort of pokes at it, sees there’s a lot of money and
eventually she steals it. When she gets out of the shop, he’s standing there with two gangster kids.
They walk her around the corner and tell her that her options are to become a prostitute for them or
they’ll tell everyone that she’s a thief and ruin her reputation. So she just agrees to be a prostitute,
which seems unlikely, but there’s a lot of shame in their culture I suppose. So one of the gangsters becomes
obsessed with her but he never speaks. He just stares at her and gets a room with a two-way
mirror so he can watch her. She fights off the men who pay to have sex with her at the last moment, but
eventually does have sex with someone after they threaten to kick her out. It goes on like that until he
gets stabbed with a big piece of glass and there’s all this strange gangster stuff going on and she doesn’t
know whether she likes him or not. At the end, he gets so upset that she’s leaving that he speaks for
the first time and he’s got this squeaky high-pitched voice, which is the secret of the whole movie. She
falls in love with him because of his squeaky voice and they drive off in a car. The end of the movie
is her having sex with fishermen while he smokes a cigarette on a port. Very weird movie.
Where were we? We were thinking of moving to New York. Or had we got there yet? Oh right, so we were
living in that house. Because of the fire in LA, the hospital bill was a $120,000+ dollars. Being British, it
never occurred to me that we would get a bill since the hospital’s free in England. So when these bills
started arriving, we thought, “What the fuck are we going to do about this? There’s no way we can find a
hundred and twenty-thousand dollars.” We assumed the insurance on the house would have paid it.
In the end, we had to take it to court and sue the insurance company and Rick Rubin. We went to the
Supreme Civil Court of California with this two week jury trial and everything5. A lot of people assume
that when you’re awarded $1.6 million that you’ve got $1.6 million. We wish. For about a second we
were millionaires. But to fight the case, we needed money. There are these companies you can go to
and they loaned us a quarter of a million dollars to fight the case. The deal is that if you lose, you don’t
pay them back, but if you win, you pay them double.
So $500,000 went to them. Then there’s the hospital bills and the lawyers and the witnesses and
the expert witnesses. So we were left with about $400,000. Isn’t that crazy?
That’s a real bummer.
We knew that would happen. All we wanted was
to pay the fucking bill. So that was a bonus and
we treated it like that. We thought of it as lucky
money, and that’s when we got the gold teeth and
we bought the house (Mimmy had passed away
by then) and we renovated it. And it left us enough
that if we were frugal, we didn’t have to take on
any real work for two or three years. We went to
the Himalayas and Katmandu and all the things
we wanted to do together. Now looking back,
we’re really glad we did, because if we’d waited,
it would have been too late. So thank you, random
chance. Things that seem bad can turn good.
It also gave us the freedom to think about pandrogyny.
The first day Jaye met me, she dressed me in her
clothes. It was in the air, but then we thought, “We
can actually do this. We can get breast implants.” Jaye was the kind of person who would always say,
“Yeah!” which is the perfect partner for someone like me. See a cliff, jump off. So we went for it.
How many people get to experience the things you have and live?
Heights are something we have a problem with. My children are fearless. Caresse has done sky diving.
What are your children like? All I know about them are their names.
Caresse and Genesse. Both were conceived at home and both were born at home. Natural childbirth.
No drugs, no nothing. They’re both very smart.
We always took them everywhere with us, my ex-wife and myself. When we were touring in the school
bus with Psychic TV in the ‘80s, we had a friend who was a nursery school nurse and a nanny come on
tour and the kids would come. We’d have them do soundchecks with us with low mikes so they could
pretend to be doing soundcheck. They’d get a hotel room so if it’s a late show, they could go back
and watch TV and fall asleep. Some of their happiest memories are spending weeks on end in a school
bus with a rock and roll band. They loved it.
Caresse, she was born in 1982 in August, and in September or October a friend and I curated an
event called the Final Academy6. We’d read about the Nova Convention in New York, which was an homage to Brion Gysin, John Giorno and the Beats. We thought, “Why don’t we do one in London?” So with a friend of mine, David Dawson, and another guy called Roger Ely, we decided to call it the Final Academy.
We decided to make it about the Beats but also include modern musicians and writers who use cut-ups
or tape recorder experiments, so it’s not just looking back but also looking at the present and what’s possible in the future with sampling and so on.
We got a trendy gallery called B2 to do a big exhibition of drawings and manuscripts and that kind of stuff. We got BBC2 to finance Howard Brookner, who did the first documentary called Burroughs. It was not quite finished and he was very ill with HIV AIDS. He was dying and we got the BBC to donate an editing suite to finish the film. And Derek, Joe, Howard and myself sat there and finished the movie off. It got broadcast during the festival on BBC2. They also let us do fake Temple of Psychic Youth adverts, which was amazing. It was sold out every single night. One night, William [Burroughs] read, and another night Brion [Gysin] read, and another night John [Giorno] read. In between, we had 23 Skidoo, Psychic TV, Cabaret Voltaire, stuff like that. We had big banquets.
At that point, almost all of William’s books were out of print, but because of the festival, they reprinted them all. So it gave him a big boost in his recognition.
And the first night, he walked on stage with Caresse, and he blessed her when she was just six weeks old.
We never thought we’d see William Burroughs holding a little tiny baby and stroking it like that. (Laughs)
They used to call him Grandad William.
And Timothy Leary has four god daughters: Uma Thurman, Winona Ryder and Caresse and Genesse P-Orridge.
They’d better start pumping out some movies.
They don’t seem to want to do anything too public.
They’re a bit like the real me. They don’t want their privacy interfered with too much. [One daughter] sent me a text message saying she’d gone to a friend’s house, and her brother was a big fan of mine and kept asking, “But what’s it like to be the daughter of Genesis P-Orridge!?”
I suppose one thing that people might be surprised by is how I never have music here. People who’ve known me for years will point out that they never hear music in my house. When we go out and listen to music, we can hardly ever enjoy that because my brain starts decoding how it’s made. It’s hard to just be swept up in it.
We just made a new Psychic TV record. It’s called Maggot Brain Versus Alien Brain. I’ll play you a bit if you want.
You’re really into using stamps, seals and making everything you do official.
I’ve been doing that forever. I started doing that in 1969 probably. I’d been doing official postcards.
We were asked to do a performance as COUM by the British Arts Council and we did the Ministry - it was when Britain joined the common market and we did the Ministry of Anti-Social Insecurity. It was a whole spoof on going to the dole office and filling out these forms and there were all these stamps. As people came to the museum, they were interviewed and assessed and stamped, told to come back a week later to see if they had any money for you. Being on the dole was a big inspiration. I used to steal their rubber stamps when they weren’t looking. The first one we stole just said UNEMPLOYED.
At my second high school - it was called a public school, which actually meant it was a private school.
In the old Britain, everyone had to take the same exam at eleven years old called the Eleven Plus exam, which they used to decide how good your prospects were later in life and higher education. If you did badly, you’d be sent to what was called a secondary modern school. That meant that they’d give you a trade like an electrician or a plumber. If you did a bit better, you went to a grammar school, which meant they’d try to get you to a university. If you did really, really well, you’d get a scholarship to a private school. And that’s what I got. The second one of which we went to from ‘64 to 68 was called Solihull School, and that was a nightmare. You ever see that movie If… where they get all the weapons and try to shoot all the teachers? It’s an amazing film and just like my school, but not as bad. Our school actually had a large parade ground for doing marching and drills. They had an airforce section, who actually had jet fighters at the airbase. They had an artillery section. We had a forty-five pound artillery gun at the school. We had mortars, heavy machine guns, about six hundred rifles - sniper rifles, automatic pistols, everything.
Shooting was fun. We had our own shooting range in the school. We ended up being a first class sniper. We got a special badge with a rifle and a star above it and everything. We’d been in the Boy Scouts and the Cubs, too, so we got really into getting badges and trinkets. It really appealed to me.
Somewhere around here is my original Cub jumper with all the badges on it. We’ve kept it all these years. So that always appealed to me. Then in 1968, ‘69. ‘70, we used to hitchhike to London a lot and go to the Arts Lab in Drury Lane. At some point in either ‘68 or ‘69, they squatted an old empty hotel up the street and the Hell’s Angels were the security. We went there for a weekend and hung out with them. It really appealed to me how they had different badges for what they’d done. One Percenters and Brown Wings and Red Wings and so on. We’ve used it in every project. Patches, badges, medals and things.
Do you have a name for the Psychic TV symbol?
Yeah, it’s called the Pyschic Cross. It’s actually registered as an international trademark.
It’s a lot like the Cross of Lorraine, which Boyd Rice likes so much, and which he sees as representing the duality of man.
Mine does as well. It has the right way up cross, the upside down cross; it’s balanced. You take the bit off the bottom it means something in Japanese. There’s a chapter in the Psychic Bible about all the different ways you can arrange the Psychic Cross.
It’s also got some kind of sacred geometric connection with other potent symbols. When it’s done perfectly, it’s in proportions of two and three. So if the vertical was three inches, the two wider horizontals would be two inches, and the one in the middle would be two-thirds of two inches.
When did you design this?
About 1980.
Your album design and visual sense is always great.
We try to control every detail we can. We made a one-off prototype medal years ago. What we wanted was, for each tour, to strike a medal with a different ribbon just like in the army, and on the back, stamp the dates in. Everybody in the band and all the roadies would get a medal for having been through that campaign and having survived. It’s bikers and armies and freemasons. All these organizations, they do things that they know work.
Rather than try to attack them and do the opposite, why not just absorb their strategies and use them in your own subversive ways. It’s been pretty successful. We seem to have caused quite a lot of electrical shocks to the culture so far.
But thank you for saying that about the design. We do try to work hard on it and make it as interrelated and integrated as possible. We’ve been really lucky. We’ve had really good people working with us: Sleazy from Hipgnosis, Edley who works for Sony all the time. We’ve had an amazing team.
We’ve also been good at finding people and attracting people to us. The musicians have always been really good, too.
One thing I’m curious about is the significance of the number 23. You intended to make twenty-three live albums for twenty-three consecutive months and it appears consistently in your work.
Everyone always asks about that. It began because of William S Burroughs, who we first met in 1971 and were friends with until he unfortunately passed away. We used to go down to London and hang out with him and get drunk with him. He would show me all his original handmade notebooks, a lot of the ones that are in the New Museum at the moment. And we noticed there was lots of stuff about twenty-three.
What happened with him was he was doing lots of cut-ups with Brion Gysin and they noticed twenty-three kept cropping up. So they kept things they found in newspapers with twenty-three. The more they noticed them, the more they appeared. Then they’d buy an airticket and it’d be seat twenty-three. They’d get a hotel room and it would be room twenty-three. They’d get a bill and it’d be twenty-three dollars and so on. So they thought, “What’s this? Would this happen with other numbers or just twenty-three?”
But when you try it with other numbers, it’s just not the same. It appears that twenty-three has some sort of life, a consciousness. There have been lots of books written about it by mathematicians. It supposedly takes twenty-three seconds for blood to go around the body once. There’s twenty-three chromosomes. It’s biologically locked into the center of life.
So that’s why when we’d be at the record cutting plant and they’d say it’s a bit too long, how long do you want it to be, we’d say, “Make it twenty-three minutes each side.” Or there’d be twenty-three tracks.
The more we used it, the more it cropped up like William said. Now we have the “of course” factor.
We get seated at table twenty-three. And everything is twenty-three. It seems to be a friendly force if you’re respectful of it. Twenty-three represents the cut up, too. The act of chopping up a piece of music or writing and putting it back together can put it in a possibly more revealing light. As William used to say, “Let’s see what it really says.” So that’s another reason.
TOPI (Temple of Psychic Youth) and Psychic TV and We personally just started using it as the ongoing magical number that seemed to make friends and be friends with us. So it also represents the psychic cross. It represents everything we do under the auspices of the psychic cross.
Do you believe in numerology?
For sure. When you think of how physics is developed, it’s done through mathematics. Before an atomic bomb, we had to have an equation. So we had to have numbers first. There’s a strong argument that the whole universe is a mathematic equation. There’s a theory that when they discover the equation that reveals the essence of the universe, there’ll be another big bang and we’ll go around in a huge loop and another universe will start again.
So yes, numbers are very powerful. I’m not sure if birthdates are more than marginally significant,
though. You can become paranoid schizophrenic looking at billboards and importing too much meaning onto things.
I also wanted to ask about COUM. Is it pronounced
“coom” or “cum?”
It was originally pronounced “cum” but nobody got it, so we’ve accepted Coum to be the way the world wishes it to be. It actually stands for Cosmic Organism of the Universal Molecular, which was actually a particle theory we came up with in 1968. One of the first people in Coum was Dr. Timothy Poston, who was involved in the creation of chaos mathematics and fuzzy geometry. He would give us lots of this amazing advanced information about mathematics and physics and where it was heading.
We had this amazing time in a car with my mom and dad. We’d hitchhiked our way to Britain,
knew we weren’t going to get to the place in time, so we went and stayed at their place for a day
or so. We went for a car ride and had a kind of flicker experience. We were in the back of the car,
leaning on the window. All of a sudden, we disintegrated into particles and moved outside the car and were just able to go through the bushes and through the trees and through anything solid. That’s when we had the realization that particles get so small that they disappear. It’s since been mathematically codified. Whenever I told anyone the theory, they thought I was mad, but now of course they agree. We’ve only started admitting recently what it was meant to mean. Physics is like metaphysical poetry these days. Do you watch that program, Through the Wormhole?
I don’t get reception.
What a shame, it’s a really good series. Lots of speculation on the weirdest ideas, like that the entire universe is two dimensions, lying flat on a membrane at the edge of the universe, and we just think it’s three dimensions. They’re trying to prove all these things that you can see on Ketamine once. These scientists should all try Ketamine and save themselves a lot of time.
Do you still take Ketamine?
Occasionally. Only when we want to find something specific out. Haven’t done that since we were in Katmandu. When you get older, your body just doesn’t recover as quickly, but we’ve done more than enough to remember. We had a friend, Dr. Timothy Wiley, who first suggested that Lady Jaye and I try that. He also said that you had to do it three-hundred times before you understood it, so we did. The effect completely changes after.
What led Psychic TV into making acid house music?
In my head, I’d started to wonder, “Is there a way to do a contemporary equivalent of Sufi Trance music, something that works for people now? And if it could be done, what would it sound like?” So we started mixing tapes straight away with Psychic TV. We used to call it “the Box of Tricks.” Sometimes on tour in the States, in radio stations, we’d do an interview and then just do an hour of mixing using all the record decks, all the CD decks we could find.
We were in Detroit doing that; we’d just done two hours with Don Bolles, the drummer of the Germs. Then these really hip black guys turned up at the radio station and asked who was doing that stuff on the radio, and they were told,
“That’s Psychic TV.” They were really friendly. It was Derrick Carter and all that lot. They said, “We love what you’re doing. Come with us and hear what we’re doing and we’ll play it to you.”
So they took us to this little record shop in the ghetto. They had all these white labels of the first acid tracks and they played them to us. As soon as we heard it, we thought, “That’s the answer, those rhythms. That’s how it’s going to work.” So we bought one of every 12” they had and made cassettes of them and handed them out to people. We made Dave [Ball] from Soft Cell listen to it in the car. So we said, “Yeah, we’ve got to do something like this.”
So we booked the studio space and in two days we’d made Jack The Tab. And we said to Dave,
“If they know it’s you and me and they don’t like us, they’re going to say they don’t like this, so let’s
pretend it’s other people. Let’s pretend it’s found tracks from the vaults, like garage tracks.” People didn’t know it was us for a while. NME gave a rave review to it and they always said negative things about anything I did.
Those dicks, why didn’t they like you?
The editor of NME came to one of the first Psychic TV gigs and the video we were projecting was the section of people getting pierced. It freaked him out.
It was too much for him and he told everyone at the NME only to write negative things about us.
Someone told me that you popularized body piercing.
There was only one person doing piercing at all in Britain: Mr. Sebastian7. And his friend Mr. Ronald in Amsterdam was doing it. And then Sailor Sid [Diller] in America. It was that small. And Mr. Sebastian only did gay people when we met him. We were the first heterosexuals he had ever pierced.
What were they piercing at this point?
They did the septum - nothing around the eyebrows - nipples, scrotums, labia, clits. All the genitals. That was it. It was very secret and very underground. There were probably less than thirty people with piercings in Britain in 1981.
Temple of Psychic Youth had a network of about ten thousand people world-wide, and we sent out leaflets through our network with drawings of the different piercings. It became a voluntary initiation into the world of TOPI.
If you go back to the press in the early ‘80s, they’re all saying how shocking it was that we had screws and nuts and bolts in our bits. They said it was destroying Britain. It’s hard to imagine, but Mr. Sebastian got raided by Scotland Yard and they confiscated his appointment book and they picked out twelve names, including mine, of people who’d just had appointments.
They charged him with grievous bodily harm to twelve people and illegal use of pain killer. They also raided other people. Some other guy up North tried to pierce his own foreskin and took the pictures of it to get developed. He got four years in jail for that. This is in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. It was illegal to have piercings or to have a new tattoo since it had broken the skin and that’s a wound and that’s grievous bodily harm. Even if it was consensual, it was illegal, and you could get put in jail for it. Mr. Sebastian was sentenced for two years in jail, but because he had lung cancer, they eventually suspended it and he died a couple of years later anyway.
As you know, the efforts to stop piercing didn’t work and it’s now a global phenomena. Everybody’s a fucking expert. There’s two piercing shops on Myrtle Avenue in Ridgewood now. They’ve even got tattooing and piercing in Katmandu now. What’s sad is in Thailand, where it used to be all tribal with a stick in the jungle, they’re all doing Western style stuff with a tattoo gun, which is a real shame. It’s become really homogenized. One time Jaye was walking down St. Marks and there were these kids with all these piercings and she said, “I blame you for this.
That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t go back to England, because I’d popularized piercing, and they wanted to put me away. We knew Vale, who does the Re/Search books8, and the first book had been the Industrial Culture Handbook. The next book was the Modern Primitives book, because we’d been talking about piercing and tattooing and he’d said, “That would be a fabulous topic for a Re/Search book.” We said, “We
can put you in touch with everyone,” and that book was what did it. Step 1 was we got lots of people doing it privately. Step 2 was that Vale used that as the subject of a book that sold something like two hundred thousand copies, and who knows how many more people read it. It really
appealed to people. So that’s what we had to do with piercing becoming A) legal and B) popular.
Is there anything else we should talk about?
We haven’t spoken about Jaye or pandrogyny. A new movie just got finished, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye9.
We decided in earnest to do the pandrogyny project in 2003, Lady Jaye and myself. We both went on Valentine’s Day and got matching breast implants. We woke up holding hands in the recovery room and when we looked down, found myself saying, “Oh look, this is our angelic body.”
The whole thing kept mutating. It began primarily as a love story, but then we thought, “What are
we really saying? We want to confront DNA. We don’t want to accept without question the way that
our body evolves and assume that it’s the finished thing. What are we really fighting? We’re fighting
the programming of DNA. What’s DNA and behavior and is there a way to change those?”
The human species is stalled in this holding pattern. Most of it is because we think of the human body as finished and sacred. Timothy Leary said of the body that it’s just a way of getting the brain around. If we choose to use genetics to mutate the body, then we can colonize space. There’s a salamander that can be frozen solid for two years and wakes up when it thaws. A salamander’s figured out how to do that - surely we could learn from that and learn how to hibernate, which is a major issue of space travel. Bears hibernate, too. Warm blooded and cold blooded animals both hibernate. And if you’re going to go into space, do you necessarily need legs or long legs? There’s not going to be gravity, so maybe we don’t need those. Maybe you could have fur to save on the energy to keep warm. You could have feathers. You could start redesigning each being to suit their needs.
Stephen Hawking recently said something about how the human species will have to move into
space to survive.
Absolutely. And Brion Gysin’s book was called Here To Go for the same reason. The human species is making a terrible blunder by cutting the funding for space travel. It’s our one chance to escape. If we stay here, we’re going to polarize and regress. We’re going to have another Middle Ages, another Dark Ages,
an Armageddon, and we’ll be lucky to be fucking mutated chimpanzees. And that’s the end.
The MIIIKA+PSYCHIC TV collection
will be available as part of the MIIIKA spring 2011 collection and will be available in-store and online this February.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Contribution from Scott Treleaven
While dropping a message about his "Touching of Hands" Screening, (see last post) Scott Treleaven shared this with thee archive...
UPCOMING: 'The Touching of Hands' screening Wednesday, March 2, 2011
'The Touching of Hands' screening
Wednesday, March 2, 2011, 8:00 pm, $6
Location Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA
“The title for the show comes from a remark that Gysin made to Genesis, and Genesis to me: that magical training can only be passed on by the touching of hands.” — Scott Treleaven
An evening of solo and collaborative projects by Scott Treleaven, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and Terence Hannum, focusing on the shared influence of artist and mystic Brion Gysin. Gysin’s close friendship with Breyer P-Orridge, in turn her friendship with Treleaven, and Treleaven's friendship with Hannum has over time given rise to a number of aesthetic and philosophical affinities, communicated from one to the other by direct contact.
Each has explored, in his or her own way, the nature of extreme mental states, ideas of eros and thanatos, and modern applications of occult thought. Permutations of the cut-up technique, invented by Gysin in the 1950s, can be found in the reordering of audio and visual information in all of these works. A preoccupation with the legend of the Cult of the Assassins led to Gysin collaborator William Burroughs’s novel The Wild Boys, Breyer P-Orridge’s collective Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth and, later, Treleaven’s The Salivation Army, his VHS classic about a mid-90s movement centered around a Wild Boys/Psychick Youth-inspired zine. Hannum's band, Locrian, is now inspiring a similar sentiment amongst their listeners. All demonstrate what Treleaven calls a “pre-Web concept” of “total intimacy and privacy, unmediated by uncontainable social networks.”
Tonight's program will consist of rarely-seen Temple Ov Psychick Youth ritual videos (circa 1990), a newly completed piece by Breyer P-Orridge, Weird Woman (2010), and The Salivation Army (2002), Last 7 Words (2009), Treleaven's affectionate and ethereal Super-8 portrait of Breyer P-Orridge with a score by Locrian, and Incantation (2009) by Terence Hannum.
Scott Treleaven's upcoming solo exhibition will also be on view at Silverman gallery (http://www.silverman-gallery.com/) in San Francisco, March 18 - April 23, 2011.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was born in Manchester, England in 1950. S/he was a member of the Kinetic action group Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia Exploration from 1969-1970. S/he conceived of and founded the seminal British performance art group Coum Transmissions in 1969 and was the co-founder of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and the spoken word/ambient music performance group Thee Majesty. Throughout Genesis’ long career, s/he has worked and collaborated with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Derek Jarman and Dr. Timothy Leary, among others. She explores human behavior, ritual, and personality modification through performances that create neo-shamanic collaged paintings called “Sigils." Her most recent work documents the physical alterations s/he and her partner, the late Lady Jaye, endured within their project Pandrogeny, about re-union and re-solution of male and female to a perfecting hermaphroditic state. "Breyer P-Orridge" is the 3rd Being created by the collaborative fusion of the two artists, of which they are each an active half.
Scott Treleaven was born in Canada, in 1972. His work incorporates a variety of media, predominantly collage, film and photography, and his versatility has allowed him to collaborate with such notable artists as AA Bronson, Lady Jaye & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Dennis Cooper, Kevin Drew (of Broken Social Scene), director Carter Smith, and G.B. Jones. Treleaven first came to attention in 1996, while still a student, with his initial foray into filmmaking, Queercore. The movie proved to be a decisive documentary of the gay punk scene in the 1990s, which he followed with the publication of his zine, This Is the Salivation Army, influenced by the writings of W.S. Burroughs, Breyer P-Orridge and the seminal Rapid Eye publications. Treleaven's work continues to focus on concepts of sexuality, psychology, mysticism and perception. He lives and works in Paris.
Terence Hannum is a Chicago based artist and musician, who plays in the band Locrian. he has exhibited at Western Exhibitions in Chicago and in the fall of 2010, he presented solo shows at the Richard Peeler Center on the campus of DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana and at Peregrine Projects in Chicago. Other solo shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Light & Sie in Dallas, 40000 in Chicago and The Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois. His collaborations with artist Scott Treleaven have been shown at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago the The Breeder in Athens. Hannum’s work has been written about by Dennis Cooper, in Art Papers, Artnet, Beautiful/Decay, the Chicago Tribune, ArtUS and Punk Planet. His zines and publications are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Indiana University, Herron School of Art and Design, Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University. Hannum received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
A special thank you to LIGHT INDUSTRY for helping to realize the first incarnation of this event
Wednesday, March 2, 2011, 8:00 pm, $6
Location Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA
“The title for the show comes from a remark that Gysin made to Genesis, and Genesis to me: that magical training can only be passed on by the touching of hands.” — Scott Treleaven
An evening of solo and collaborative projects by Scott Treleaven, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and Terence Hannum, focusing on the shared influence of artist and mystic Brion Gysin. Gysin’s close friendship with Breyer P-Orridge, in turn her friendship with Treleaven, and Treleaven's friendship with Hannum has over time given rise to a number of aesthetic and philosophical affinities, communicated from one to the other by direct contact.
Each has explored, in his or her own way, the nature of extreme mental states, ideas of eros and thanatos, and modern applications of occult thought. Permutations of the cut-up technique, invented by Gysin in the 1950s, can be found in the reordering of audio and visual information in all of these works. A preoccupation with the legend of the Cult of the Assassins led to Gysin collaborator William Burroughs’s novel The Wild Boys, Breyer P-Orridge’s collective Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth and, later, Treleaven’s The Salivation Army, his VHS classic about a mid-90s movement centered around a Wild Boys/Psychick Youth-inspired zine. Hannum's band, Locrian, is now inspiring a similar sentiment amongst their listeners. All demonstrate what Treleaven calls a “pre-Web concept” of “total intimacy and privacy, unmediated by uncontainable social networks.”
Tonight's program will consist of rarely-seen Temple Ov Psychick Youth ritual videos (circa 1990), a newly completed piece by Breyer P-Orridge, Weird Woman (2010), and The Salivation Army (2002), Last 7 Words (2009), Treleaven's affectionate and ethereal Super-8 portrait of Breyer P-Orridge with a score by Locrian, and Incantation (2009) by Terence Hannum.
Scott Treleaven's upcoming solo exhibition will also be on view at Silverman gallery (http://www.silverman-gallery.com/) in San Francisco, March 18 - April 23, 2011.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was born in Manchester, England in 1950. S/he was a member of the Kinetic action group Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia Exploration from 1969-1970. S/he conceived of and founded the seminal British performance art group Coum Transmissions in 1969 and was the co-founder of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and the spoken word/ambient music performance group Thee Majesty. Throughout Genesis’ long career, s/he has worked and collaborated with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Derek Jarman and Dr. Timothy Leary, among others. She explores human behavior, ritual, and personality modification through performances that create neo-shamanic collaged paintings called “Sigils." Her most recent work documents the physical alterations s/he and her partner, the late Lady Jaye, endured within their project Pandrogeny, about re-union and re-solution of male and female to a perfecting hermaphroditic state. "Breyer P-Orridge" is the 3rd Being created by the collaborative fusion of the two artists, of which they are each an active half.
Scott Treleaven was born in Canada, in 1972. His work incorporates a variety of media, predominantly collage, film and photography, and his versatility has allowed him to collaborate with such notable artists as AA Bronson, Lady Jaye & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Dennis Cooper, Kevin Drew (of Broken Social Scene), director Carter Smith, and G.B. Jones. Treleaven first came to attention in 1996, while still a student, with his initial foray into filmmaking, Queercore. The movie proved to be a decisive documentary of the gay punk scene in the 1990s, which he followed with the publication of his zine, This Is the Salivation Army, influenced by the writings of W.S. Burroughs, Breyer P-Orridge and the seminal Rapid Eye publications. Treleaven's work continues to focus on concepts of sexuality, psychology, mysticism and perception. He lives and works in Paris.
Terence Hannum is a Chicago based artist and musician, who plays in the band Locrian. he has exhibited at Western Exhibitions in Chicago and in the fall of 2010, he presented solo shows at the Richard Peeler Center on the campus of DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana and at Peregrine Projects in Chicago. Other solo shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Light & Sie in Dallas, 40000 in Chicago and The Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois. His collaborations with artist Scott Treleaven have been shown at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago the The Breeder in Athens. Hannum’s work has been written about by Dennis Cooper, in Art Papers, Artnet, Beautiful/Decay, the Chicago Tribune, ArtUS and Punk Planet. His zines and publications are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Indiana University, Herron School of Art and Design, Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University. Hannum received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
A special thank you to LIGHT INDUSTRY for helping to realize the first incarnation of this event
Message from Genesis 2/23/11
Genesis has asked me to share the below message with you all!Dear Friends,
How wonder full! the last 8 daze we were in Berlin at their huge and very influential BERLINALE Film Festival. Ov course, there's a Hollywood based section where everyone was raving about thee "KING'S SPEECH IMPEDIMENT". We have knot seen I.T. but assume it's cute and CRASS. Thee Other Section is organised by the FORUM coum-unity. Thee documentary by MARIE LOSIER about my SELF and Lady Jaye's SELF was one ov thee movies chosen out ov hundred's submitted. I.T. was screened five times and sold out almost every T.I.M.E. ! About 3000 plus people saw I.T. Thee title is "The Ballad Of Genesis and Lady Jaye". Thee audiences gave standing ovations, whistles and cheers and a lot of inspired tears at thee end. You may all know that before s/he dropped her body Lady Jaye told me that ALL s/he ever WANTED to be remembered for was being one ov thee great L-ov-E stories. A One True TOPI BIG LOVE STORY! And s/he has succeeeded! People were amazed at thee intimacy we allowed thee camera, and at thee intense BIG LOVE we shared and explored. As a result thee movie won TWO prizes. A special prize that means at LEAST 120 Independent theatres guarantee to screen thee movie in Germany this couming y-era! AND there's extra funds for posters and press releases etc plus even some more towards the $20,000 Marie still needs to raise to retrieve thee negative. This is amazing, OH and I.T. gets shown on German TV too...PLUS there is an award system called thee TEDDY's. This was begun many y-eras ago by thee GBLT coum-unity in Berlin and Germany. At thee start it was small and a Teddy Bear was thee prize. NOW I.T. is huge and there were 2000 people at thjee awards ceremony by Invitation only! I.T. was held in thee old airport from which Nazis escaped, thee Berlin airlift was managed during the Cold war attempts by communist Russia to starve West Berlin into submission to East German control. Now this huge building is a venue! "The Ballad Of Genesis And Lady Jaye" also won thee Teddy for "BEST DOCUMENTARY" and Marie got a golden metal Teddy on a plinth. Thee ceremony was televised. This is an incredible honour AND a sign that thee T.I.M.E. is here for thee OTTT to flourish and expand into thee public arena to propose new and radical ways to set up both nettworks butter ultimately, my and Lady Jaye's dream, to develop by mutual and intense discussion, ideas for structures and ways ov practical operation and survival for OTTT collectives AND coumunes in preparation for thee collapse ov totalitarian materialistic economic systems ov repression.
We welcoum you ALL to this zxone for discussion. We are TOTALLY serious about looking for a template to set up coumunal groups, even eventually villages, around thee world in a Global strategy for both survival AND a New Way On.
Today we also heard that thee "FLICKER" documentary about Brion Gysin that OTTT Individuals worked on including my SELF has broken out ov various bureaucratic red tapes and is NOW! free to be given worldwide distribution on DVD, via Netflix and Independent cinemas, even cable TV!
We just returned from a dinner with our extended OTTT famille in New York to celebrate my B-Earthday; thee success of Marie's film which IS being acclaimed in Germany AS a MODERN and incredibly inspiring L-ov-E story!!! Thee prizes AND thee Brion Gysin movie...this all feels like a declaration to this "world" ov thee re-emergence ov our tribe, stronger, clearer and ever more creative and experimental to demand a TOTAL rethinking ov how to be an humanE BEING and how to develop and extend all and every possibility ov personal achievemeant ov your true potential...
WELL COUM ! and
VIVA LA EVOLUTION !!!!
BIG LOVE Genesis & Lady Jaye BREYER P-ORRIDGE
Monday, February 21, 2011
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge recent Berlin Videos...
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Morrison Edley / Hebbel am Ufer 2 (HAU 2), Berlin / 19 February 2011
Genesis has been spending some time in Berlin...Heres a few recent videos from performances that have popped up online!
Tony Conrad & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Morrison Edley / HAU 2, Berlin / 19 February 2011 / Part 1
Tony Conrad & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Morrison Edley / HAU 2, Berlin / 19 February 2011 / Part 2
Tony Conrad & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Morrison Edley / HAU 2, Berlin / 19 February 2011 / Part 3
Genesis has been spending some time in Berlin...Heres a few recent videos from performances that have popped up online!
Tony Conrad & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Morrison Edley / HAU 2, Berlin / 19 February 2011 / Part 1
Tony Conrad & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Morrison Edley / HAU 2, Berlin / 19 February 2011 / Part 2
Tony Conrad & Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Morrison Edley / HAU 2, Berlin / 19 February 2011 / Part 3
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Genesis returns to Thelema NOW! Podcast...
Fri, 18 Feb 2011
Thelema Now! Guest: Genesis P-Orridge, Round 2 (107 minutes)
Thelema Now's most popular guest is back! Listen as she talks about life, love and death.
Download the podcast at
http://oto-usa.org/podcast.html
Thelema Now! Guest: Genesis P-Orridge, Round 2 (107 minutes)
Thelema Now's most popular guest is back! Listen as she talks about life, love and death.
Download the podcast at
http://oto-usa.org/podcast.html
Sunday, February 13, 2011
The One True Topi Tribe Mission State-Meant.
A call to action.
An invite.
Extended to Those GENuinely interested in developing a new TOPI coum-UNITY to becoum involved in discussions at
http://truetopi.ning.com/
WHO WANTS REAL CHANGE?
Thee motive?
To build...an ongoing nettwork of centres and creation -based communities.
When WE say creation/Creation WE mean "creativity."We just feel Creativity is too simplistic and flimsy in its day to day use..."Creation" re-minds us that the act of CREATION is the most vital, essential source of all else. The book of Genesis begins with acts of CREATION. At the centre of ALL "existence" before T.I.M.E and SPACE is that first action, without which nothing can be perceived. CREATION....
OTTT find this a vitally impoprtant distiction and linguistic foundation. So by stressing the magicakalcore we
re-MIND our SELF that this is Dvine work, Divine activity, devition to Creation is prayer and perception coumbined to manifest the billions of Individual Universes that already co-mingle on earth.
Each humanE Being lives entirely within THEIR lifelong personal Universe. Others come and go within it, but only the Individual is present 24 x 7 in THEIR Universe. and present at every momeant that their senses and
consciousness(s) EXPERIENCE.
http://truetopi.ning.com/
The One True Topi Tribe Mission State-Meant.
THEE CURRENT SITUATION
Western materialist capitalism. That’s obviously already failed. It’s been running on an empty tank for so long, andthe next step is China of course, which is totalitarian capitalist-- Russia, too. It's where you use violent force and threats and fear to control the economy for profit. But all of them are going to collapse; it’s inevitable. You can’t have infinite growth forever when you’re on a finite piece of planet. We thought to preempt all that, we’d start with the patch, hence, “The One True Topi Tribe.”
THEE OPEN ROAD AHEAD
In any movement-- be it new or regurgitated or reassembled in a new way with a different emphasis,especially in street culture-- there are certain things that are very helpful. One is to have a great logo. Well, we already had that with the Psychick Cross. It was beautifully ubiquitous. Another possibility is cheap, easy outfits. It’s accessible to everyone who’s willing to make the
investment for a patch. That’s why, in the beginning, industrial [style] was old camo and clothing, and it didn’t
matter if it got dirty. Actually, being dirty was part of the function. This time, it’s a leather jacket or a denim
vest. Slice off the sleeves, put a patch on it, and then decorate it how you wish with your own particulars. It
gives you instant recognition and a very easy form of entry into groups, so that you see it and know that these people are probably going to have very similar thoughts to you. That’s why we’re working on that now, in advance of the collapse. A lot of people don’t know, but actually one of the Temple ov Psychick Youth [TOPY] access points was a motorcycle club. called the Illuminati of Bavaria Motorcycle Club. Still got my colors from that. They were based in Portland, Oregon, and there were over 20 of them, all with bikes. It was a real motorbike club, an actual outlaw motorbike club. In the '80s, when it was really thriving (and when TOPY was too), we would tear down the West Coast and catch up with them in Portland. Then we’d
have them as outriders as we went down the Coast. We were in our old school bus-- a ’66 school bus-- with the words “Even Further” written on the front, and it all looked fantastic going down the freeway.
Very post-apocalyptic, very Mad Max.All very functional,mobile, nomadic, flexible. And even though it
might look extreme in the way that we are deliberately inserting a movie into everyday life, the lines are so blurred anyway right now. It’s a good way of giving people strategies to work with. Even if you are using something as a metaphor or just for fun, it can still say to people, “Don’t forget, because you might find that useful in 'the futures'. That might be how you find yourself needing to operate.” For those people who wish to have a fulfilling, creative, and more free-flowing and free-thinking way of life, they need to take it upon themselves to build autonomous units that give that to them. The way to do that is to find enough like-minded people to create this super organism that is the sum-total of everyone involved. Partly why we’ve been using “we” so much, instead of “me", “you”, etc.
FIND THEE OTHERS
At the very beginning, we were seeking out what we nicknamed “hotspots” in the culture. At any time, there are usually pretty obvious signs of what’s exciting at the moment. We made the effort to find [William S.] Burroughs and hang out with him, and people have made the effort to find me. Then people make the effort to find them, and so on. It’s very much an organic thing. It’s an amazingly simple, but unusual process.
THEE NEXT-NEW WAY-ON
Psychic TV: new guitarist, new sound. That doesn’t meant it’s, “Oh shit, it doesn’t sound like us anymore.” Instead it’s, “Oh great! It doesn’t sound like us anymore!” It’s always been very flexible. One of the great things about it is that it keeps changing. On our last tour, we started to get a little bit tired, and one night we were sitting in the dressing room and they were all yelling for an encore. We just had this moment where we turned to Jeff and said, “Have you ever heard ‘Maggot Brain’ by Funkadelic?” “Yeah, of course.” “Ok, you’re the encore for tonight.” And he says, “But there’s a piano part.” So we look at Jess and she says, “Don’t look at me, I’ve never heard of Funkadelic.” So he says, “It’s easy. B flat, A, C, and la
dee da.” She says, “Ok, I can do that.” So they walked onstage in Moscow and played “Maggot Brain” for 20 minutes and totally entranced the audience. So Ed, when we got home, he said, “We should record that.”
We improv most things, actually. “Maggot Brain” really isn’t really the old “Maggot Brain” at all anymore, just a few notes here and there. That truly made me like music again, because in all honesty we’d kind of lost interest in Throbbing Gristle, and we thought we’d stop doing Psychic TV, and that was fine. When it’s not exciting, when it’s not giving anything, and nothing is moving, then don’t do it. Like we were saying before, go where the action is. Then suddenly the action is in PTV3 [current incarnation of Psychic TV], and the music is just really good and fun to play. We're shredding the speakers and doing wild prog rock. So that happened simultaneously with the idea of making a network again, with the biker sort of structure.
It’s all exciting. It’s been a while since we’ve been this excited. I mean, obviously we’ve been grieving for Lady Jaye for the past 3 years. All things considered, we’ve been pretty productive and efficient, despite that. There’s this huge influx of energy and it’s coming from the grassroots; it’s coming from young people coming in. We’re kind of being taught at the moment by new people to reevaluate everything. Not just throw things away because we've already done them, but reassess and rebuild and extend whatever’s working. It’s a really interesting time
We’re buzzing, yeah. It’s a hotspot… And yes, we are going
to get motorbikes.
-Genesis P-Orridge/OTTT 2011
An invite.
Extended to Those GENuinely interested in developing a new TOPI coum-UNITY to becoum involved in discussions at
http://truetopi.ning.com/
WHO WANTS REAL CHANGE?
Thee motive?
To build...an ongoing nettwork of centres and creation -based communities.
When WE say creation/Creation WE mean "creativity."We just feel Creativity is too simplistic and flimsy in its day to day use..."Creation" re-minds us that the act of CREATION is the most vital, essential source of all else. The book of Genesis begins with acts of CREATION. At the centre of ALL "existence" before T.I.M.E and SPACE is that first action, without which nothing can be perceived. CREATION....
OTTT find this a vitally impoprtant distiction and linguistic foundation. So by stressing the magicakalcore we
re-MIND our SELF that this is Dvine work, Divine activity, devition to Creation is prayer and perception coumbined to manifest the billions of Individual Universes that already co-mingle on earth.
Each humanE Being lives entirely within THEIR lifelong personal Universe. Others come and go within it, but only the Individual is present 24 x 7 in THEIR Universe. and present at every momeant that their senses and
consciousness(s) EXPERIENCE.
http://truetopi.ning.com/
The One True Topi Tribe Mission State-Meant.
THEE CURRENT SITUATION
Western materialist capitalism. That’s obviously already failed. It’s been running on an empty tank for so long, andthe next step is China of course, which is totalitarian capitalist-- Russia, too. It's where you use violent force and threats and fear to control the economy for profit. But all of them are going to collapse; it’s inevitable. You can’t have infinite growth forever when you’re on a finite piece of planet. We thought to preempt all that, we’d start with the patch, hence, “The One True Topi Tribe.”
THEE OPEN ROAD AHEAD
In any movement-- be it new or regurgitated or reassembled in a new way with a different emphasis,especially in street culture-- there are certain things that are very helpful. One is to have a great logo. Well, we already had that with the Psychick Cross. It was beautifully ubiquitous. Another possibility is cheap, easy outfits. It’s accessible to everyone who’s willing to make the
investment for a patch. That’s why, in the beginning, industrial [style] was old camo and clothing, and it didn’t
matter if it got dirty. Actually, being dirty was part of the function. This time, it’s a leather jacket or a denim
vest. Slice off the sleeves, put a patch on it, and then decorate it how you wish with your own particulars. It
gives you instant recognition and a very easy form of entry into groups, so that you see it and know that these people are probably going to have very similar thoughts to you. That’s why we’re working on that now, in advance of the collapse. A lot of people don’t know, but actually one of the Temple ov Psychick Youth [TOPY] access points was a motorcycle club. called the Illuminati of Bavaria Motorcycle Club. Still got my colors from that. They were based in Portland, Oregon, and there were over 20 of them, all with bikes. It was a real motorbike club, an actual outlaw motorbike club. In the '80s, when it was really thriving (and when TOPY was too), we would tear down the West Coast and catch up with them in Portland. Then we’d
have them as outriders as we went down the Coast. We were in our old school bus-- a ’66 school bus-- with the words “Even Further” written on the front, and it all looked fantastic going down the freeway.
Very post-apocalyptic, very Mad Max.All very functional,mobile, nomadic, flexible. And even though it
might look extreme in the way that we are deliberately inserting a movie into everyday life, the lines are so blurred anyway right now. It’s a good way of giving people strategies to work with. Even if you are using something as a metaphor or just for fun, it can still say to people, “Don’t forget, because you might find that useful in 'the futures'. That might be how you find yourself needing to operate.” For those people who wish to have a fulfilling, creative, and more free-flowing and free-thinking way of life, they need to take it upon themselves to build autonomous units that give that to them. The way to do that is to find enough like-minded people to create this super organism that is the sum-total of everyone involved. Partly why we’ve been using “we” so much, instead of “me", “you”, etc.
FIND THEE OTHERS
At the very beginning, we were seeking out what we nicknamed “hotspots” in the culture. At any time, there are usually pretty obvious signs of what’s exciting at the moment. We made the effort to find [William S.] Burroughs and hang out with him, and people have made the effort to find me. Then people make the effort to find them, and so on. It’s very much an organic thing. It’s an amazingly simple, but unusual process.
THEE NEXT-NEW WAY-ON
Psychic TV: new guitarist, new sound. That doesn’t meant it’s, “Oh shit, it doesn’t sound like us anymore.” Instead it’s, “Oh great! It doesn’t sound like us anymore!” It’s always been very flexible. One of the great things about it is that it keeps changing. On our last tour, we started to get a little bit tired, and one night we were sitting in the dressing room and they were all yelling for an encore. We just had this moment where we turned to Jeff and said, “Have you ever heard ‘Maggot Brain’ by Funkadelic?” “Yeah, of course.” “Ok, you’re the encore for tonight.” And he says, “But there’s a piano part.” So we look at Jess and she says, “Don’t look at me, I’ve never heard of Funkadelic.” So he says, “It’s easy. B flat, A, C, and la
dee da.” She says, “Ok, I can do that.” So they walked onstage in Moscow and played “Maggot Brain” for 20 minutes and totally entranced the audience. So Ed, when we got home, he said, “We should record that.”
We improv most things, actually. “Maggot Brain” really isn’t really the old “Maggot Brain” at all anymore, just a few notes here and there. That truly made me like music again, because in all honesty we’d kind of lost interest in Throbbing Gristle, and we thought we’d stop doing Psychic TV, and that was fine. When it’s not exciting, when it’s not giving anything, and nothing is moving, then don’t do it. Like we were saying before, go where the action is. Then suddenly the action is in PTV3 [current incarnation of Psychic TV], and the music is just really good and fun to play. We're shredding the speakers and doing wild prog rock. So that happened simultaneously with the idea of making a network again, with the biker sort of structure.
It’s all exciting. It’s been a while since we’ve been this excited. I mean, obviously we’ve been grieving for Lady Jaye for the past 3 years. All things considered, we’ve been pretty productive and efficient, despite that. There’s this huge influx of energy and it’s coming from the grassroots; it’s coming from young people coming in. We’re kind of being taught at the moment by new people to reevaluate everything. Not just throw things away because we've already done them, but reassess and rebuild and extend whatever’s working. It’s a really interesting time
We’re buzzing, yeah. It’s a hotspot… And yes, we are going
to get motorbikes.
-Genesis P-Orridge/OTTT 2011
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