Gen's upcoming events and Misc.upcoming projects...





GENS MISC. UPCOMING PROJECTS: Heartworm Press are publishing “Collected Lyrics and Poems of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge – Volume One 1961 to 1971. Later they will publish Gen's first novel, written in 1969, “Mrs. Askwith”. Other books will follow.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Ruminations on sexiness and aging with the inimitable genesis breyer p-orridge

From http://www.janestown.net/2011/01/ruminations-on-sexiness-and-aging-with-the-inimitable-genesis-breyer-p-orridge/

ruminations on sexiness and aging with the inimitable genesis breyer p-orridge 01.05.11



One of my silliest memories of hanging with Genny was an evening back at The Gates Institute where we’d taken Biggie for a walk in his new giant “pram” (British for stroller). The latter had been purchased in anticipation of Genny’s upcoming move to a condo in the LES, inhabited largely by Hasidic Jews, that didn’t allow dogs. It was intended to be a disguise vehicle for getting the little Jack Russell mutt in and out of the building and also to enable Biggie, who’d grown frail with age, to get outside more without the pain of walking. There we were strolling along Myrtle Avenue on our way to a Dominican diner, Biggie sitting upright in the pram looking to and fro through its thick plastic pane, pleased as punch in his extravagant carriage. And more or less invisible to the passing naked eye lest one peer hard enough at the oddly contoured baby inside with his pointed noise and tall perky ears. Could there be a better way to travel? Periodically, a bold or curious child would try to look inside, and you could see their surprise… is that a dog?! Indeed so.  Genny’s canine “son” we’d explain. Our giggles and theirs sum up what I love best about Gen:  h/er generosity and patience with those that might stare (as many often do), h/er ability to disarm ignorance with humor and grace (though never resorting to condescension), and above all else h/er noble sense of daring.

Fate is many things but rarely indifferent, and this is how I must describe my friendship with Genesis, which grew in the aftermath of h/er greatest tragedy; the untimely passing of h/er beloved wife and “Other Half”, Lady Jaye. I’d been curating an exhibition called “Keeping Up with the Joneses” that was to include their work, and the utter shock of Jaye’s passing broke my heart.  That such a rare and beautiful love as they shared could so mercilessly be derailed in what was obviously its prime was, and remains, truly heartbreaking stuff. Still, as I grew to understand, the special bond they shared was very much alive. Transcending the physical limits of bodily form, after all, was essential to their project of pandrogeny as was the desire to create a third sex and unified being. This is why Genesis still often speaks today in the pronoun of “we”.  Like Gilbert & George who once informed me they weren’t a collaboration, but rather “an artist” the concept of identity for Genny extends beyond both gender — and ultimately, the grave. H/er ruminations here on sexiness and aging then necessarily revolve around and entwine h/er relationship with Jaye, revealing in the process this pandrogenous notion of transcendent integration. As s/he signs all her correspondence, “’S/HE IS (STILL) HER/E’ New TOPI Proverb. DEDICATED TO THEE MEMORY OF MY GUARDIAN ANGEL, LADY JAYE BREYER P-ORRIDGE 1969-2007,” so too I dedicate this article to the spirit of Lady Jaye.

JH: I think that people feel – and are! – sexier as they grow older (providing they are sexual people to begin with), but how to manage the ironic fact that our bodies grow less sexy with age. Or is this already the wrong assumption? I tend to think that its instinctual to associate decay – i.e.. wrinkles/sagging flesh – with mortality yet know that feeling sexy can make you sexy, right?…or is this wishful thinking?



Men, of course, have traditionally dealt with this mortality factor by exercising their social prerogative to fuck younger women/bodies – an advantage extending from greater economic and political power and the fact that they can procreate longer…Women, gaining ground in this area, are doing the same now (I have), even if their prowess is still pejoratively limited by terms like “cougar” and “MILF” (another topic for another day). I must admit that I’ve always felt resistant to dating older men as it seemed so easy and without challenge. The older I get, of course, the more I feel I should adjust this attitude. Yet like sex with beautiful people, which I’ve also had the luxury(?) of, sex with younger men – beyond the initial conquest – often holds little satisfaction, as sexiness, in the end, is more important and often independent of looks and age…For me, anyway, sexiness is very much rooted insomeone’s sense of themselves as an embodied creature, though I’d be lying if I said my initial interest wasn’t always governed by a sense of chemical and physical attraction….I have always generally liked conventionally good-looking men as well, a somewhat embarrassing fact – for its uninspired superficiality. Though I’ve fallen in love with men I didn’t find particularly handsome at first, most have been sexy in their own way.

Here’s the question I ponder at the moment: Does sexiness assume a physical dimension for most? And/or is power the ultimate aphrodisiac? Sometimes I believe it is just as mysterious and impossible to quantify as any other “taste”, but if power is the current – the energy force – that drives all human relations (as I believe it is), can one assume that powerful people possess and access sexiness more readily than those with less power? If so, is this the result of animal instincts? Or am I just conditioned by the exploitive hierarchies of capitalism to think this way?

GBP: When you first threw this subject at me we were not exactly daunted, but, surprisingly swiftly, (as our thought streams played around with those two seemingly innocuous words,) found that each bout of contemplation appeared to actually conceal clarity from my inward search. This was a process of layering, not unlike putting on “our face” with cosmetics. Our inner gaze was being distorted, even tricked.

This distortion should not have come as such a surprise or revelation. After all, our invitation to probe a little deeper into this enquiry was, at least in part, because of our chosen path as one half of the artist “BREYER P-ORRIDGE” otherwise known as the “PANDROGYNE” and, through that investigation, our gestural use of the hermaphroditic body as a transformative tool and a symbol for the eradication of gender altogether!

At the core of our Pandrogeny project are some threads of thought that entwine to create an integrated, hopefully new, form of symbolic “being” through which to achieve that eternally sought after state that we call “unconditional love” or “soul mate” or “my other half” as Lady Jaye preferred. We felt ourselves driven to pursue total mutual integration. So consumed by our discovery of what Lady Jaye dubbed “Big Love” were we that our deepest desire was to, in a sense, quite literally be totally absorbed by each other (if a means ever became possible and accessible to us). We were driven by a boundless passionate energy to eventually achieve absolute union by whatever means became available to us.

Now, please, don’t mentally imagine/visualize this concept as annihilation by one of the other; nor as one single cell that splits to form two separate cells of a whole, like identical twins. No…we picture two single cells that meet and at that precise point on the cell wall at that infinitesimal nanosecond they touch there is a blinding flash and those two previously single cells have become one much larger (not necessarily double-sized) autonomous single cell. Breyer P-Orridge call this process of the transfer of positive passionate energy from one human being to another  “COSMOSIS.” And of course the bright new shiny penny of a single cell created by this recombinant event a Pandrogyne.





Nevertheless, as artists, Breyer P-Orridge believe we must seek an eventual resolution of our enquiries through and with our art practice. Our puzzling over questions like: Why we are here? Is there a God? What happens after our body dies? Why don’t men get menstrual cramps? (Well a chosen few DO with fastidious practice) and so on. And, as artists, we turn to creation as an expression, notation, and vision of our internal dialogs. If we are fortunate artists we also get to “SHOW”, to “EXHIBIT” the evidence and detritus. Lately, our own complicated after-modernism works have been injected into that mysterious life blood of our species…CULTURE, thereby generating an external dialog, what we see as a conscious viral invasion of a host body by artists, or “CULTURAL ENGINEERING”.

Who have been our most mischievous secret agents for change? Those visionary creators who have been covertly honing their skills and talents for centuries under the very noses of their natural born and, probably, sworn antagonists who we shall dub the Aristocrats of Inertia. As artists we still swim in the same cultural stream of miasmic blood as everyone else, distilling and purifying as much as possible before apathy, greed and layer upon layer upon layer of bureaucracy and fear censor us. We exist within an inherited system, a status quo we do not choose. One that is constructed to simplify and homogenize moral standards and traditions innately bound to the maintenance of a self-serving hierarchy. This out of control edifice IS control. A monstrous, useless self-serving monolith fueled by hypocrisy, bigotry and hate always with a threat of intimidation and censorship close by. William S. Burroughs once said to me “When you want to know what’s really going on, look for the Vested Interests”.

So it was that the passionate energy regenerated by the collision of my SELF with the SELF of Lady Jaye became our very own Little Big Bang calling into question ALL our inherited conditioning, our sexual identities until we found our SELVES referring to the prevailing status quo… “nonsensus reality.”

S/he (Lady Jaye) was biologically 24 years old and female, 5 feet and 10 inches with a women’s size 7-8 shoe size and 36 x 22 x 34 inch figure. S/he topped off that supermodel body with a Brian Jones (of The Rolling Stones) blonde pageboy/shag haircut, the naughtiest, most compelling ever twinkle in her brown eyes. On the day that we met Lady Jaye, she informed me “…if you can’t run for and catch an MTA bus in 5 inch high heels you shouldn’t wear them”. Watching her demonstrate this speed running in 5-inch “pumps” (as they are known here), wearing the tiniest “pussy grazer” mini skirt with the “essential accessory”, a cigarette, s/he was indubitably New York born and bred. Or, as s/he preferred, s/he was the “ARBITER OF ELEGANCE.” And, s/he was insanely, incredibly sexy. WHY?

As a teenager we came from an age where there were NO porno magazines, no sex education. Severe censorship in the cinema and even books now considered classics like Henry Miller’s “Tropics”, William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch”, Jean Genet’s “Thief’s Journal”, and many others were considered obscene and prosecuted as such. So my knowledge of even the rudiments of sex came from other boys at all male schools and our often exaggerated discussions during naïve but erotic circle jerks. Our first constructs of sexiness begin there, right then, at the time we are exposed to combinations of orgasms and images, from the taboo and suppressed to the popular.



We grew up in a household of three generations of biological women.My grandmother, my mother and my elder sister. We vividly recall watching my sister having her long hair brushed and being jealous of the entire process. The sound, the sensuous length which was at that time taboo for males, the communal aspect of a somehow secret circle rooted in the “privilege” of being female. We also found it baffling that women’s clothes were so various and exotic, colorful and ever-changing with fashion’s whims. We felt unreasonably deprived. Why couldn’t men wear glamorous and multi-layered clothes, distinctive make-up and limitless hairstyles? It was early on, about 10 years old, that the trappings and apparent freedoms of style and display we associated with being a woman became erotic, certainly, but also, more than sexiness, they represented an oppression of my outward expression of sexuality and sensuality through display and gesture. Somehow for me, femininity in all its outward guises became inextricably linked with sexiness. The fact that it was a taboo for a biological male to desire “peacockiness”, never mind to speak of coveting the apparent freedoms of women added another layer to my burgeoning triggers of desire. We found that anything erotic that was inappropriate, or considered “perverted” turned me on and generated an ever deepening urge to explore and experience it. Or was it that anything inappropriate to the prevailing modality was by the very nature of BEING “verboten” erotically magnetic?

When we were born we were considered in great danger from being extremely underweight. All my childhood became a battle to try and make me eat, and we were forced to drink strange protein concoctions called “Complan” to try and fatten me up. My nickname at school was “Auschwitz”. Oddly enough Lady Jaye was also a sickly child, always considered too skinny and was even also called “Auschwitz” at school. Just a couple of many, many conjunctions and synchronous similarities we discovered after we met. But, to return to my teens where my concepts and imprints of sexiness were developed and imprinted. Mine was the era of Twiggy. The androgynous boy-like girl image seemed to permit a cross-over that might liberate cross-dressing. We will carry a wish to be as skinny as Twiggy to the grave. To this day we retain a small but cherished collection of Twiggy memorabilia. The other critical addition to my ever more formed standards of sexiness was the television program “The Avengers”. We would try to see every episode on a Saturday night, fascinated by the character Emma Peel who wore skin tight leather cat suits with buckles and belts, knee high boots and a violently effective karate kick. The Avengers brought fetish into my world, though we were unsophisticated enough at 15 to know little about its more specific role in sexual practice.

Amongst my peers the basic, and to me base, urge to simply fuck was everything. Boys wanted to fuck to prove their manhood, and women did everything they could to deny that pleasure. For me, the mere act of fucking was already a mundane idea by age 12 or perhaps younger. My tastes were for complexity.  Starved of sexual imagery in photos, films or on TV we were forced to imagine what might transpire with a willing partner and the very act of persuasion, far from being frustrating to me, was satisfying and exciting. Simple surrender was not sexy. It turned out that what we pictured in our fantasy exploits was already beyond the socially acceptable norm long before we lost our so-called virginity. Oral sex, anal sex, group sex, mutual masturbation were all in my imaginary repertoire. It came as a shock to me as we began to explore the delights of the flesh that our desires far outmatched the menu available. So we lived a dual existence. What it was possible to persuade a lover to do, and what we pictured in a future as we did it.

Sexiness for me became very much about what occurred in my mind and with that self realization my quest began to search for a person. An ultimate sexual mate to explore every nuance of possibility with.

A final point perhaps worth noting is the explosion of neo-dandyism that happened as psychedelia hit the British mod-scene in the mid-sixties. Suddenly people like Brian Jones dressed in silks and brocades, grew their hair long and it became acceptable for the male to be as meticulously exotic and flamboyant visually as they could afford or imagine. This permission briefly bloomed across the Flower Children era in 1967-69 in England. Then it was sadly drowned in a sea of denim and tie-dye Grateful Dead t-shirts, except, in particular, amongst rock musicians. We mention this because it relates to my personal experience in terms of aging. This androgynous gender ambiguity gave public permission to those of us feeling constricted by convention to create a personal SELF regardless of any status quo or social norm. We have exercised that generous freedom ever since.

These formulative imprints of “sexiness” we believe become fixed templates for all that comes after. This is why so many men remain fixated on young adolescent women. Its not just the scent of youth, nor the porcelain smoothness of new skin, not even the irresistible hormonal rush of lust within passion. We each create an individual, personal stereotype that we crave over and over. We are forever repeating our fetishes and fantasies over and over in a perpetual loop. We may hide this archetype we have assembled, consciously or unconsciously, but we remain forever vulnerable to it, seeking this unattainable yet precious and unique embodiment of perfection throughout our lives. For some of us as obsessively as one seeks spiritual truth.

My search took me through various forms of relationships.

Because my totem for “sexiness” was solidified early in my life, we sought out partners who initially seemed to exhibit enough of my required characteristics to potentially be, or become my ideal. So strong and clear was my template of desire that it led me to damage perfectly healthy relationships by pressuring and persuading lovers to explore my fetishes in order to please me. Needless to say all our lovers had already passed the skinny test! As time went by we found ourself unconsciously being drawn towards women who worked in some area of the sex industry. Usually, without knowing it in advance, we would find those objects of our affections to be strippers, performers in porn films, dominatrices and topless go-go dancers. We found it easier to socialize and converse with women who were at ease with their sexuality and erotic potential. We did not identify with the male gaze or the male audience. Rather we felt a kinship with the women. In fact we imagined being them, flaunting and taunting from within a female anatomy. Just as we had coveted my sister’s privilege to have long hair and dazzling clothes when young, so now we fantasized having breasts and vagina and being an embodiment of worldly sensuality and display.

So somewhere along the line our masturbatory fantasies were no longer about finding the perfect example of my fetishized ideal, but about merging the one desiring with the desired. In fact even that is not quite right because it implies too strong an aspect of narcissism which would be incorrect. There is, of course an element of narcissism but the aspect of MERGING was the real key to this situation being sexy, whether imagined or physically realized.

In fact as time went by we found each new relationship was a little closer to satisfying and manifesting sexiness. And our picture of that sexiness had grown and evolved. It still required skinniness, smooth flawless skin, but it also became essential for there to be no pubic hair, Why? Not, as is often, sometimes angrily assumed, because of anything to do with pre-pubescence.

Well in 1981 we began getting genital piercings and tattoos in intimate areas from a practitioner called Mr Sebastian. He it was, who pointed out that pubic hair and body hair over tattoos and piercings covered and spoiled them. That they should be displayed clearly and never hidden. Since that sage advice we have not only shaved as much of our body hair as we can reach, but all my lovers have shaved too and we find it well nigh impossible to eroticise a vagina with pubic hair! Sexiness came to include this smooth state. We also found that we love vaginas and love to see them in their glory. To hide them away seems a sin.



Sexiness, therefore, if it is actively explored and contemplated, becomes more sophisticated, more detailed and in many ways as a result more demanding of both of us in our quest and of those we desire. So many males just wallow in lust, content to achieve orgasms and little else. In those instances, aging reduces pleasure  physically through jaded familiarity. The orgasm chaser maintains sexiness only by switching partners, regenerating the initial thrill of novelty and “conquest” but it’s a sexiness of diminishing returns.

The roué, the person, male or female who has a complex combination of fetishes and qualities that can be infinitely rearranged in different orders, degrees and amounts need never get bored or fall into the mundane. Even when a male can no longer “perform” there are unlimited variations of pleasure, just as many mental as biological.

We count ourself blessed that when we met Lady Jaye in 1993 s/he not only was physically my ideal and still perfecting, but s/he was superbly versed in the nuances of being a professional dominatrix and s/he was a licensed nurse! What more could we want than a lover who looked like a fashion model (my Twiggy!) who had no inhibitions or limitations sexually, and who was more than willing to  explore any new variation or fantasy that might occur and who saw gender stereotypes as pointless obstructions. Lady Jaye embodied all the qualities, sacred and profane, we had ever sought in a lover and was an absolute of “sexiness”.

Sexiness for me, by the way, is not something innate, or common to all, nor does it develop for everyone at puberty. That should be obvious despite the advertising industry trying to homogenize sexuality and attraction, beauty and desirability. Sexiness is a malleable thing with infinite potential limited only by our imaginations or bodily constraints.

We have always been shocked at the confident ease and self assuredness of so many people. They seem confident that the mere possession of genitals alone makes them sexy and special.  We have never taken it for granted that anyone could ever find me “sexy”. We are not fortunate enough to have a natural confidence in our qualities as a lover. Despite having had the great fortune to have known and had relationships with very special, sexually daring women prepared to experiment and grow in areas normally considered perverse and taboo, despite that, not one fully convinced me we were special, or truly sexy, truly desirable. Their assurances never quite made it to my centre, where whatever is my pure SELF resides. So we always felt hollow, unfulfilled and alone, still seeking a dream. Sexiness never felt completely genuine. We remained unconvinced…

Lady Jaye changed all that and became the first woman to truly make me BELIEVE…believe we were unique, wonderfully sexy, the perfect lover. S/he told me we were made for each other and fitted together perfectly. When we made love the very first time my age was 44 years old. S/he was just turned 25. We had waited a year to be certain we were as deeply in love as we believed before making love. There’s a first time for everything! When we DID make love it was like no other time in either of our lives. We both knew something incredibly precious was occurring and we were both in awe and a little afraid of its power. It was the most perfect moment of our lives and suddenly sexiness, fantasies, fetishes and the like were meaningless because in that amazing moment joined together we had reached every place ever desired simultaneously and transcended our frail imaginations. We both knew we had really found our “Other Half” and THAT union, that merging of two into one is sexiness and is beyond age or even physical existence.

We fell in love at first sight, quite literally. We were together almost every day for 14 years. We never got bored. We felt just as lucky, just as horny at the end of our earthly time together as we did that first time we made love. Perhaps Lady Jaye somehow knew s/he would die that day? S/he recreated our first lovemaking day for me. Pampered me rotten, took me for breakfast at a diner like that first day and we made stupendous, mind shattering, Divine love. S/he alone convinced me that it was me that was sexiness to her, nobody else. We felt the same way about her.

We found our SELF a widower at 57 years old. With the best will in the world, past our prime. Worse still, without Lady Jaye’s reinforcement and insistence that we were beautiful, we felt ugly again. Uglier than ever before, because we knew what we had lost was a magick mirror that reflected the best of me back. There was nothing sexual left to explore, for we had taken each other everywhere we could possibly have contemplated. My earlier fantasy of “being” the female sex worker had even been realized when s/he and we worked together as dominatrices in a dungeon. We lost our perfect partner overnight leaving me resigned to being left alone and sexless by death.

Sexiness now is all those details we built up over years and years that we ultimately found personified in one person, Lady Jaye. Because the last thing we did together was make blissful wild love and within minutes s/he was dead in my arms, we associate grief, loss, and pain beyond words with sex. The two are jumbled up, Eros and Thanatos. But it is not an intellectual consideration. Not a clever essay by an academic. It is a real trauma and it has left me numbed.

By losing everything we had ever desired or dared to even hope for at this age (we are now 60 as we write) we find it impossible to think anyone could ever desire me. My own minimum requirements in a lover of youth, energy, no limiting sexual conditions, skinniness and so on seem presumptuous when we cannot fulfill them in return…who could possibly want this being, so insecure, so self critical and still in love with another? So, while my ideal of sexiness has not changed, aging inevitably reduces the possibility of its recovery or discovery. Maybe other people can be more realistic in their expectations…mine remain the same as they were way back when we first began to fantasize and masturbate.

http://theearchive.bandcamp.com

Being converted to digital for http://theearchive.bandcamp.com...


...and this is not everything! Many more tapes from Gen's archives on the way...live, rare, unheard.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Unique item from Gen's personal archive: “SLEAZY” PETER CHRISTOPHERSON/COIL/TG/PSYCHIC TV SIGNED and personalized to Genesis



“SLEAZY” PETER CHRISTOPHER SON/COIL/TG/PSYCHIC TV SIGNED COLLAGE


Notes on this auction from Genesis.
People always ask where we get these items AFTER the auction is over. The Jajouka Hand Made drum was a gift from Bachir Attar when he and his brother lived with Lady Jaye and myself Genesis for almost a year in our The Gates Institute house in Brooklyn. It has found its way home to Morocco with exactly the right trusting and kind person. This new item for sale is also very, very special. It was a“Happy Birthday” “One More Or Less?” collaged photograph. The image is black and white and grey print from an old Picture Post or Life magazine. There is a chair partly in view, a pair of legs from the knee down in polished riding boots that may well be German war issue? In the foreground is a beautiful German Shepherd dog with its eyes closed, in peaceful repose. The bottom right corner of the image, which is mounted on an off white backing paper, has“Sleazy’s” right thumb print across it in red paint. Don’t get excited out there, blood would have gone brown and not be as thick. Bottom left is a blue rubber stamp “22 FEB 1981” with a black hand added line under the “E” as this is from the era when we wrote “E” instead of “I”. In the centre bottom is handwritten “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” with a rubber stamp of his name “Peter Christopherson” beneath. The rubber stamps of signatures was an in joke begun by myself in Hull as an ironic reference to the Dole Office Manager’s name always being rubber stamped. Later we learned Divine would stamp “Yours Sincerely Divine” when asked for autographs by fans, which added to our fun with this concept for a while. Beneath Sleazy’s stamped “signature” is handwritten “one more or less ?” There is a second date rubber stamped in blue “23 FEB 1981” which also has a careful black double line under the “E”. The birthday card/collage is especially unusual as Sleazy rarely created pieces of “art” in this way. We were privately intensely close friends during this period. The image is framed in black coated wood. The outside measurements of the FRAME are 9 inches wide by 6 and an half inches high. The actual photographic picture is just under 6 inches by just under 4 inches. The back is still sealed as originally, nothing has been removed ever. There is wire to hang the picture as illustrated. There is also a message written by myself from a slightly later date around the period 1982-83 when Sleazy actively joined the band Alex Fergusson co-founded with me in 1981, Psychic TV. The message in brown ink reads “ BLESSINGS TO YOU SLEAZY L-OV-E Genesis P-Orridge”. There is a Psychick Cross and a scrawled 23 next to the signature.
The two illustrations are scans made by my assistant for me who found it in an envelope amongst boxes of books where it had lain forgotten. We feel something so beautiful and that illustrates how loving and loyal a friend Sleazy always was to me and any others he truly cared for in his quiet but special and timeless way is now best shared by all of us who share the same core values of loyalty, chivalry, trust, and courageous sacrifice to protect each other without fear of the potential, even ultimate cost.
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE , New York June 2011.

Friday, June 24, 2011

L-magazine write up on "The ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye at BAMfest

BAMcinemaFest 2011: Marie Losier, Director of The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

Posted by Mark Asch on Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:46 PM

Marie-Losier-BalladofGenesisandLadyJaye2.jpg
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, which plays tomorrow night at BAMcinemaFest, blends seven years of intimate footage with archival glimpses and old-school bohemian stylization to tell the story of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the frontman of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and his wife, Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, and their "“pandrogyne” project, as they got extensive plastic surgery to resemble one another more closely, so as to transcend the limitations of the body. I emailed this week with director Marie Losier.
I've heard Genesis and Lady Jaye approached you at the start of the pandrogyne project, because they knew they'd want to document it-how well did you know them, and their histories in the music/art/fetish world going in? How was the project presented to you, and how did your sense of it evolve over the course of the film?
I knew nothing about Genesis and Lady Jaye, their music, art or history. I first saw Genesis perform seven years ago, at the Knitting Factory. I went to see Alan Vega but the third part was Thee Majesty with Genesis, Lady Jaye and Bryin Dall. Watching Genesis perform was pure enchantment. His words from the stage hovered somewhere between song and speech, deeply poetic, primitive, at times frightful. It completely hypnotized me.

In a typically miraculous New York City coincidence, I met Genesis the next day at a gallery opening in Soho, in one of those sardine-can spaces where you can barely walk and hardly breathe. Being relatively small, I got pressed into a corner where I inadvertently stepped on someone's toes. I turned to apologize and there was Genesis smiling, his gold-capped teeth glittering down over me. We spoke briefly, but in that time I felt something special had passed between us. He asked me about my films and gave me his email. Whether it was fate or pure clumsiness, this marked the beginning of an artistic collaboration that would develop into a close friendship.
Soon after I was invited to his home and sat there in the basement when Lady Jaye appeared with her beautiful self and a giant glass of tea for me... we talked, and very soon, Jaye said to Genesis, "She is the one"—so I smiled wondering what that meant—"the one we have been waiting for to film our life and love and pandrogeny project" Of course I make films and it always happens with sudden encounters, and surprise, so I said yes without knowing a thing about the project. Two weeks later I was on tour with Psychic TV on a bus, my first rock 'n' roll experience and the beginning of many years of friendship, filming, learning and shaping the film.
They never questioned me, or directed me, they let me film what I wanted, and I felt myself, free and clumsy but just able to be there and do it my own manner, with deep respect and love for them both and their life. There was not sense of what the project would be, I first thought it would be a documentary on music... and fast I saw it would be a love story because of their deep relationship that was in front of my camera at all time, such a peculiar love story mixed with art and music... but love above all.
Marie-Losier8-Genesis-Jaye1.jpg
Did it seem like there was a sexual element to the pandrogyne project? Of course Gen frames it as a convergence of these two souls, and you've produced a deeply moving film on the subject. But given Lady Jaye's history as a dominatrix and the, I guess, somewhat more noticeable transformations undergone by Gen (along with the sort of ticklish excitement from transvestism as glanced a couple of times in the film), I wonder whether you have any insight into the sexual side of things.
To be true, I never really questioned that part of their relationship because it was pure love always, very romantic, sexual, sensual and on that level not much different from the typical couple you can see around most likely. They both were extremely open and their work is often very much on the body: Genesis for decades worked and works still today on performance, body art, collages, writing, always using the body as a center for much happening, experience, and discovery; same for Lady Jaye who was not just a dominatrix but also a nurse, a dancer, a performer... so of course that brings much of the subject of sexuality. But when you know them both and spend time around them, they are just like an eccentric couple with a very balanced relationship, who love to dress up, transform, transfer, masculine, feminine at the same time and deeply in love at the end.
Marie-Losier-Bernard-Yenelouis10-Genesis.jpg
You use some rudimentary experimental techniques—mixing stocks and frame speed, say—reminiscent of New York's underground cinematic history. You've also made short films with Tony Conrad, the Kuchars, etc.; how do you see your work, here and elsewhere, in relation to this tradition? How do you apply this aesthetic sensibility in a documentary such as this one, where there's also an expository imperative?
I have to say I never learned how to make films, I come from literature and painting, so I just made my first film with a Bolex someone gave me as a gift and I learned how to load film and shoot my first with the wonderful and wonderfully clumsy Mike Kuchar... So that really helped not worrying much about my lack of technique and knowledge, and just play. I had already been in the circle of the "underground" world for a while, while working for Richard Foreman, programming films at Robert Beck, being around those people I really loved. So it was quite natural to me to be there and participate, yet not having a preconceived idea at all. Yet at the same time because I have no lineage in it, it took a long long time for me to show work and have a place there... and I'm still not showing much in NYC actually. Coming from loving films and classical cinema and being a painter, making experimental films was very natural and logical transition to me.
The film portraits I made were all based on encounters and friendships. I never go make a film with an idea that I want to make a film about such and such artist, it would not work.
As for the style, it is the same style for the shorts and the feature, the way I film, the way I edit and shoot alone so without synch sound, make costumes, make a lot of tableau like Melies to set the characters in them... and what is surprising is that Genesis's work and "cut up" project with Lady Jaye, is very close to the manner I myself make films, collaging, using different formats, raw and quick editing... so aesthetically the sensibility was one of the closest to my style.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

A LOT of material upcoming..working with Gen.... and Dust La rock interview video

Hello all,


Here in New York working with Genesis, a lot to be taken care of in these next few days including tomorrow "The ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye" screening at Bamfest here in NY with Thee majesty performance...much being added to thee archive over the next few days, as well as going thru Gens audio archive to add to the Genesis P-orridge audio archive project!


For now heres a Genesis interview video Dust La rock asked me to share~!




Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Dust La Rock for Frank151 from Frank151 on Vimeo.

Friday, June 17, 2011

wall street journal .com article - "The Ballad of a Rebel and Her Lost Love"


http://online.wsj.com/
Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in her Lower East Side apartment, with her late wife tattooed on her right forearm.



Lady Gaga has nothing on Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

The British performance artist and musician was a lightning rod for controversy in the 1970s, inventing industrial rock with the band Throbbing Gristle and engaging in transgressive conceptual-art display. At the time, her extreme presence was enough to lead an enraged member of parliament to condemn the Manchester native's art collective as "wreckers of civilization."

"People have an image of Genesis being extreme or scary," said filmmaker Marie Losier. "She's not." The Brooklyn-based director spent much of the last seven years in the company of the performer, who was born Neil Andrew Megson in 1950 but no longer answers to the male pronoun and in conversation uses the collective "we" instead of the first-person singular. The reasons for that are a big part of Ms. Losier's lyrical documentary "The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye," which screens Thursday in Brooklyn as part of BAMcinemaFest. The film, which has yet to find a distributor, is a kaleidoscopic portrait not only of a punk-era iconoclast but of the transformative powers—both literal and figurative—of love.

Ms. Losier, whose subjects have included avant-garde dramatist Richard Foreman and underground filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar, began shooting as Ms. Breyer P-Orridge embarked on a radical project with her wife, Jacqueline Breyer, a lithe and mercurial blonde performance artist known as Lady Jaye. The pair became fascinated with the idea of becoming a single persona—"pandrogyny," they called it—and on Valentine's Day 2003, initiated an extensive series of plastic surgeries to merge their genders.

"That was a hilarious day, it really was," said Ms. Breyer P-Orridge, 61 years old, recalling how Lady Jaye settled on a pair of plump C-cups in the doctor's office before her mate piped up: "'And we want them too! Can you make them exactly the same?' He wasn't flustered at all."

View Full Image

Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal

Lady Jaye and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge together in a portrait.
.That process would have been the prevailing theme of the movie, which Ms. Losier painstakingly shot in 16mm, one three-minute roll of film at a time. But in 2007, Ms. Breyer, who worked as both a registered nurse and a professional dominatrix, died suddenly of unexpected complications from stomach cancer. She was 37 years old.

The couple had been together since 1993, when, after three solid days of partying, the musician awoke on the floor of a Chelsea dungeon (the guest accommodations) to see a "beautiful, tall woman walking back and forth, accenting everything with a cigarette, very glamorous and aesthetic…and it was Jaye."

It was love at first sight. Eventually the couple wed and made a home in a brownstone in Ridgewood, Queens, owned by Lady Jaye's ailing grandmother. It's here that much of the film takes place, between tours with Psychic TV, the band Ms. Breyer P-Orridge founded in 1981. (She will perform with a later rock 'n' roll iteration, Thee Majesty, in a post-screening concert on Thursday).

Ms. Losier shaped her footage, which includes a volume of archival materials and an intricately layered soundtrack, into the story of an epic love affair. The concept of pandrogyny was, Ms. Breyer P-Orridge said, like a flesh-and-blood version of Beat-era artist Brion Gysin's surrealist creative strategy called the "cut-up." But, as the couple sought to explore, it also was a spiritual process. A guiding principle, she noted, was, "Let's see if there's a way to become so completely entwined that we can find each other after death. Jaye, like me, is someone who says, 'See a cliff? Jump off!'"

Charming and loquacious, the former scourge of England is more like an imp of the perverse these days, inviting guests to look through mementos of art and music happenings whose history she narrates in often playful asides. All that radical derring-do is offset by the Zen-like calm of her renovated apartment in the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, purchased 18 months ago. Once, "we were the only eccentrics who got off at that subway stop," she said of the station in Ridgewood. After Lady Jaye's death there were too many new arrivals asking for autographs. It was time to move on.

The performer still cuts a radical figure, flashing gold teeth between plump lips, platinum blonde bangs contrasting with one of several customized black leather motorcycle jackets she favors. "Genesis has a lot of layers," said Ms. Losier, who met her subject the day after she first saw Psychic TV perform, when she stepped on the performer's toes at a SoHo art opening. Just a few weeks later, Ms. Losier was on a tour bus with the band somewhere in the middle of Russia. "We thought she was so fragile," Ms. Breyer P-Orridge said of the filmmaker. "But she did it."

Though it's often traumatic for the artist to watch Lady Jaye as she flickers on the screen, the movie is nevertheless fulfilling. "People came up in tears," Ms. Breyer P-Orridge said, recalling a recent festival showing. "Someone said, 'You made me realize that I shouldn't be afraid of committing to love.' That's an amazing thing to happen, isn't it, from a film? It's all that Jaye wanted."

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

More video up from Q and A session at 49th Ann Arbor Film Festival showing of "The ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye"

More video up from Q&A session with Genesis and Marie Losier following the  screening of "The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye" at the 49th Ann Arbor Film Festival.3/23/11




Here is the short clip i recorded of the opening
My camera ran out of memory space!

Thursday, June 9, 2011

How The Pandrogyne Confounds Hir DNA: Interview with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (2003) By R.U. Sirius

 How The Pandrogyne Confounds Hir DNA: Interview with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (2003)

By R.U. Sirius

“People will say, “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body’… And I say, ‘I feel like I’m trapped in a body.’ ”

While he’s best known as the musician who helped start both the industrial music and the acid house music subcultures, Genesis P-Orridge is foremost a hero of the post-punk counterculture, a true mutant, an experimental artist, and an androgyne (“I prefer pandrogyne where ‘p’ is for positive/power/potent/precious.”) If you don’t know about Mr. P-Orridge’s oeuvre, you haven’t just missed a career, you’ve missed an entire dimension of hyperreality.

His pornographic postcards earned perhaps his first serious public attention (from the law, of course. Beat luminaries and collaborators William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin aided in his defense.) His performance/art group COUM Transmissions involved physically challenging, graphically sexual and upsetting presentations executed to the accompaniment of assaultive sound collages just before hippie gave way to punk. With Throbbing Gristle, the first industrial rock group, P-Orridge became something of a punk pop star.

Most of us would be content to live out that role for a decade or so but P-Orridge moved on. As an expression of his interest in magickal practices —particularly as prescribed by the eccentric Englishman Austin Osman Spare, he started Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth; an “anti-religion” dedicated to novel forms of magickal invocation frequently involving the transference of sexual secretions through the mail. And then, back to music: with Psychic TV, P-Orridge proselytized for the Acid House movement, which he helped to import from Detroit to England. Today’s rave culture is its (mostly rather pallid) successor.

In the early ‘90s, chased out of England by Scotland Yard for obscure fictive reasons, P-Orridge settled in the USA where he became a close friend with Timothy Leary and continued to perform with variations of his Psychic TV lineup. In the early 200s, P-Orridge messed with his own gender identity, dressing continually in women’s clothes and then getting breast implants. He and his wife, Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, who passed on in 2007, were transforming their physical appearances to be as similar as possible. Since her death, Genesis has been incorporating her into everything he does, referring to himself as “us,” and insisting that “SHE IS (STILL) HER/E”

P-Orridge is an unusual mix: he’s taken punk provocateurism to its outer limits but his manner is that of an androgynous British pop star. And beyond all the pop culture referents is a serious, almost classical explorer of consciousness and what it is to be a human being.

I interviewed him for The Thresher in 2003, after the release of Painful but Fabulous: The Lives & Art of Genesis P. Orridge, published by Shortwave/Soft Skull Press.

Recently, I’ve found myself thinking about a number of elements of this interview, particularly Genesis’s idea that he is resisting his DNA. I decided to revisit and re-edit this conversation for Acceler8or.


RU SIRIUS: Your book is sort of an autobiographical scrapbook. Could you describe your life in one breath?

GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE: One breath?

RUS:Well, two or three.

GBPO: Let me answer that in two parts. The book was intended to be entirely autobiographical, but focusing for a change on the fact that I’ve viewed myself as an artist. I even state categorically that I’ve never said that I’m a musician. But I’m known more for music. All the different strategies and manifestations that they might associate with me make a lot more sense when you view them from a post-Dada, post-Fluxus art perspective. When I was asked to put a book together I thought I was actually going to assemble it. But I found it impossible to edit myself in terms of significance. I didn’t have the capability or drive or motivation to do it in that form. So I started to ask people like Douglas Rushkoff if they were interested in giving me commentaries that would help me figure out what the book should be like. And as people started to give me essays or remind me of interviews I’d given that they thought summed up some aspect of my work, suddenly that became the book. And it’s a jigsaw. What I discovered was that I really had this incredible consistency in terms of my work ethic; one principle being putting my body where my mouth is. I’m prepared and feel a sense of duty to actually experiment on myself — my own physical self, as well as my own mental and psychological self — and report back. So I retrieve information and then present it to the public rather than just theorize. So by example, I try to contribute to the psychosexual heart of the alternative culture.


The other bit in this is identity. That is the bit that really surprised me. When I really looked back at the pictures and the writing — and this was only an instinctive thing — my obsession was very much with who creates identity. Who creates the character, the software that we give the name that’s on a passport of an ID card? Who is a person? Who is me? Who made me and how was I created? And all these folks who’ve been around me: who are they? And who was it saying that when I was saying something a couple of years ago? All of this has something to do with the character I’ve been playing in the story of life.

RUS: When you changed your name to the character of Genesis P-Orridge, was this a complete break or is there a fluidity between Neil Megson (his original name) and Genesis. In other words, is there a coherence there or is it more jagged and abrupt?


GBPO: The interview in the book that completely reveals this as a kind of epiphany is the actual chapter called “Painful but Fabulous.” It was an interview on the dematerialization of identity that I did with Carol Tessitore. It was one of those days when you feel like you’re channeling, and the voice that’s coming through you is actually summing up and resolving all kinds of issues that your other states of consciousness have been disassembling and reassembling for decades. So what struck me was that Neil Megson thought back in 1966 that he was taking Andy Warhol’s idea of playing with the media and creating superstars and asking what happens if you actually invent a character as a work of art and inject that into the culture? So I viewed Genesis P-Orridge almost as a Warhol screenprint. I thought Neil Megson was the artist who made Genesis P-Orridge. But what seems to have occurred is that Genesis P-Orridge has dissolved all those boundaries so the question now for me is where is Neil Megson?

I would be hard pressed to say where Neil is located. If I could go back now to 1966 and ask Neil if he wanted to do Genesis, the artwork; he might not want to do that, knowing that he would be subsumed by the creation itself. It’s a strange sensation and I think quite unique really in terms of how totally I’ve allowed the creation to absorb the person. But that’s how I ended up with my current idea of becoming an androgyne. When you think about the source of this identity, you might think about the book of Genesis, which I was initially nicknamed after. I didn’t pick Genesis. It was a nickname that I was given that I decided to use. So I thought about the Garden of Eden. Two things struck me. One is that it’s the book of creation. Genesis isn’t a person — it’s a name for the creation. And that re-engaged my fascination with the idea that creativity is the nearest we get to a divine energy. Creativity is one of the most noble or honorable professions that a human being is capable of. It seems that in all of the very early paintings of the so-called Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are always portrayed as hermaphrodites. I found one of those pictures and — as you can imagine — the Holy Roman Empire and its cronies did a cleansing of the image and tried to destroy every image they could. There is only two or three left.

RUS: I always saw you as a deprogrammer or de-brainwasher in the lineage of Gurdjieff and Leary and Burroughs, but you’re the one who really took the body as the site for the experiment. This is both a very ancient and a very contemporary sort of post-punk approach.

GBPO: It’s true. I think some people in intellectual circles too are finally coming around to see the body as an important part of the deprogramming process. If you could take what Burroughs and Gysin did with traditional writing and art, the idea of the cut-up, I asked: “Can you create cutups of identity and character? Can you create an open source for the self?” Is there a way to keep on chopping up behaviors, breaking up your own new patterns, waking up each day with the potential to change again?

In the book, I talk about the commune I was part of where we had this box of clothes. And whoever got the clothes would put on the outfit and become that character for the day. So you’d behave the way that character would. So if you were an old lady, you would move like you thought an old lady would, and you might have outdated opinions and be sort of prudish. Then another day you might be a teenage schoolboy. We did that two, three, four days a week for three years! I feel as though no one has pushed it quite as far as I have. Not that I want to be overly egocentric, but it’s just an observation.

RUS: While I was reading about your performances, I thought of the scene in the film Performance where the character played by Jagger says, “The only performance that really makes it is the one that achieves madness.” But as I read further in the book, I thought that you weren’t trying to achieve madness, you were trying to achieve sanity.

GBPO:The preface to that would be that I was fascinated by the Surrealists and the Dadaists. Not so much the objects, but their lives. The lives were more fascinating to me. So ultimately the process of self-analyses and exploration is really to see what it’s about. And within that you make a deal with yourself. I remember very clearly in 1968 waking up in a hospital emergency ward and having been declared dead. There were two ways to go at that point: I could be scared for the rest of my life or I could view that as a liberating moment. You can’t put off anything that you want to find out. You can’t say, “Well, first I’ll put this nice buffer zone up and then I’ll think about the meaning of life… or I’ll get there with degrees and qualifications.” So I very deeply experienced right at that point the sort of Buddhist state that each day is truly a blessing, without guarantee.

I feel duty bound to explore — as far as I can go mentally and physically — anything that seems to me fascinating or significant to the human condition, or has the potential to tell me what consciousness is or that can lead me toward comprehension of the mystery of physical life. Mortality became a very clear and crystallizedsensation.

RUS: Do you ever read war reports or accounts of people with more mainstream sensibilities who push themselves, or get pushed into extreme situations involving physical mortality and disruption?


GBPO: I haven’t really made a study of it. I do like to read biographies though. I’m fascinated with the tensions and conflicts around the way people choose to self-author their character as a story. I was born in 1950, so I remember all the bombed-out buildings. My father was in Dunkirk during the blitz. His job was to ride a motorbike while the bombs were dropping and deliver messages to the anti-aircraft people. So he was riding a motorbike at night with firebombs all around him. What was interesting when I talked to the people that went through that was that everybody took it for granted. No one got counseling then. No one got debriefed. No one got asked about whether they were traumatized. [laughs] And they would describe things in a very vivid way but also in a matter of fact way. It’s an area of fascination for me as to how much of our response to difficulties is how we’re taught to react and how much is our actual reaction.

That’s why I explore things like: Why does this particular idea embarrass me? Why would it embarrass me to masturbate in public, which I did in a performance? What is the reason I would find it embarrassing and should I?

RUS: Have you thought about what the differences are between biological and cultural programming?

GBPO: Oh yeah! One of the very first things that Burroughs ever said to me back in 1971, we were talking about control, he was asking: “How do you short circuit control? To what extent is it possible to break programming?” That’s really where I’m at right now. You asked me before the interview if I was going to have a sex change. In a way, I think everybody had a sex change when we became binary. And so I’m interested in re-union. And I do find as I have gone through life that culture and consciousness isn’t enough. There is this physical… biological… what Grant Morrison has called a “space-time suit.” We’re deep sea diving in linear space-time. And it’s such a brutal environment, although rich in experience and sensual input, that the diving suit degrades and falls apart quite rapidly… within about 100 years.

What is the body? Timothy Leary used to suggest that it was the way the brain got around, and as the World Wide Web and transportation got more efficient than some of the functions of the biological brain mover were less important. I don’t think that’s really the story. I see that the human body is more like the coral reef. I used to think that DNA was the real life form and we were just arrogant clusters of matter that were tricked into perpetuating DNA. But it seems it’s not that simple because DNA on its own doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t make eyes blue. It doesn’t make brains bigger. It holds information… suggestions.

So what happens when you refuse to allow the physical body to unfold according to that information from DNA, which I consider an alien species? Is that going to explain some other things that happen in society and culture on a wide scale? So I use my body as a physical laboratory to actually see if any information can be gleaned.

RUS: You’re doing this in public, so besides learning about yourself, you’re doing this as a challenge to people who are observing you. How has that interaction gone?

GBPO: [laughs] It’s worked so far. It’s been incredibly respectful and incredibly positive. I have not received a sarcastic or negative remark yet.

I’ve gone under a physical change by having breasts and living 24-7 androgynously… I like to call it pandrogyny. And the hermaphrodite, the androgyne, I see as representing a very necessary evolutionary shift in the species. I think it’s imperative.

RUS: We went through an androgynous period in pop culture in the ’70s and to some extent the ’80s, but the cultural trend has been more towards very macho…

GBPO: Well, I live in Brooklyn in a very unhip ghetto district. So here I am a white androgyne doing my daily test going back and forth and so far it’s been fine. Of course the problem is that somebody might be embarrassed by me or confused by me. I’m very aware of that and I try never to knowingly make anyone feel uncomfortable because that’s not the issue.

RUS: You’ve exercised a great deal of discipline in your work. As a fairly undisciplined person, I find that when you push past all the programs say through psychedelic experience, there are still appetites. That’s a danger — you can find yourself stripped down to nothing but appetite. So I think maybe the Buddhists had it right. You have to decondition the appetites first.


GBPO: I’ve thought about that a lot. And I’ve thought about celibacy as a sort of reverse sex magick. And certainly if you think about DNA, well maybe DNA is an alien virus and maybe we are a species programmed to build something. Is there anyway for us as creatures to fuck with the DNA program? [laughs] And could it be by refusing to replicate biologically? And I think there’s a very strong argument that says, “Yes, ongoing unquestioning biological replication could be our downfall.” And I wonder why the Vatican church and so many people in power, why they all tend to want to control reproduction almost at any cost… like with stem cells. Now why is that? It’s so obvious that overpopulation is a primary problem. If we actually had a much-reduced population a lot of the territorial and resource problems would become secondary. So it’s almost like saying if you don’t want to be at war with Iraq, you’re unpatriotic… if you don’t want biological replication you’re not patriotic to humanity.

If you think, “How can I confound this DNA with which I am riddled?” [laughs], one obvious way is to refuse to continue your species. And to that end I actually got a vasectomy as a symbolic act. It’s symbolic because I already have two children. I’m already implicated.

I honestly feel that, for all the cultist downside of the Raelians, there’s a really valid point in there. We should be free as a species to design ourselves. We should be looking at the most incredibly eccentric ideas about human genetic engineering and cloning and cyborgs. And we have an absolute right to become creatures rather than just human beings. And that’s something that — to get back to having breast implants — I am trying to symbolize by having my body not reflect the program that DNA intended. How can I confound and reveal the central issues around our relationship with DNA and the fact that it may or may not be benign? It’s not about becoming male or female. People will say to you, “I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body” or “I feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body.” And I say, “I feel like I’m trapped in a body.”

I think that’s what it comes down to. We’re trapped in these bodies so how do we take away the boundaries and edges and frames.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Notes from Gen on George Clinton/Maggot Brain connection and Funkadelic's Process connection

From Genesis..
Timothy Wyllie's name for some time during his MANY years in The Process was "Father Jesse". They'd move around various chapter houses. Timothy did most of the layout of The Process magazine ( all by hand and typeset,letterpress, NO computers then). George used to hang out in the coffee bar and got into a lot of the ideas. It was a radical system of persona(ity) change that was not racial in any way. George is a VERY smart guy. So he got involved intellectually and asked for permission to use some De Grimston text on the album back cover. It suited both parties. Process got to huge new, more black, market and George got some radically hip writing. It was the era of Black Panthers, Weatherpeople and so on. Cross fertilising of antiestablishment concepts and collectives.




Psychic TV were playing in Tokyo ( late 1991) under sponsorship of PANASONIC at PAN HALL. We heard Funkadelic were playing nearby nite before our gig so went along. PFunk played 4 plus hours and were great, including Maggot Brain. We were in the dressing room waiting for George to be introduced and we(me) wrote "FATHER JESSE & FATHER MALACHI say hello" with a Process symbol next to it on his dressing room door. In the end we had to go to a meeting before George came off stage. He came to OUR gig next nite though as a result of my cryptic message. He saw us after we came off stage and first words he said were " You are the ONLY band I've ever seen that plays non-stop on stage as long and longer than ME!" (we'd playe 6plus hours!!! So we became friends and stayed in touch. Then the "OF COURSE FACTOR", one of our key TOPY people in Denver became a roadie for George Clinton to me and Lady Jaye would be in the VIP list every concert they played in Bay Area until we moved to New York. Lost track after that with first and stuff....Djin loved George. How he bascally just wanders about the stage looking fabulous and conducting the musicians...yet his charisma holds the audience spell bound everytime.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

UPCOMING..LICKER LICENSE Saturday, July 2 Brooklyn, Ny

PENDU NYC presents: LICKER LICENSE



A touring girl-on-girl Video & Performance Event
Curated by Hazel Hill McCarthy III

LICKER LICENSE a touring 1-night event with all-female video and performance artists featuring video by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (THROBBING GRISTLE and PSYCHIC T.V.), Nicola Kuperus (ADULT.), Kristy Fenton (MODERN WITCH), Kathleen Daniel, Laura Brothers, Pheobe Collings-James, Actually Huizenga, Adriana Estrada, ...Stellar Om Source, Bobbi Woods and Hazel Hill McCarthy III.


LICKER LICENSE is a sensually grotesque observation of the female experience as seen through an anti-feminist/feminist show. 30 minute video presentation of work followed by live performances by Modern Witch and Djs Fervent Moon and DDF.




VIDEO ARTISTS

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV): http://www.genesisbreyerporridge.com/

Nicola Kuperus (Adult.): http://www.nicolakuperus.com/code/video.html

Bobbi Woods: http://www.openwidepdx.com/

Kathleen Daniel: http://www.duh-real.com/

Laura Brothers: http://out-4-pizza.livejournal.com/

Phoebe Collings-James: http://www.phoebecollingsjames.com/

Kristy Fenton (Modern Witch): http://kristyfoom.com/

Hazel Hill McCarthy III: http://www.hazelhillmccarthyiii.com/


PERFORMING ARTISTS
No Bra (http://www.myspace.com/nnobra)




DJ SETS
Thalia Mavros (Vice)

$10 // Doors at 9PM


Venue: SECRET PROJECT ROBOT / 210 Kent Ave. / Brooklyn, NY

For More Info:::

http://www.pendu.org/events

http://www.hazelhillmccarthyiii.com/licker-license.html

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Ghosts#9 article from http://www.dazeddigital.com

Taken from http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/9684/1/genesis-breyer-p-orridge-ghosts9

Text by Carmen Gray


Noise and performance-art legend Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was at the Berlinale last week for the premiere of two film projects. He assembled Ghosts#9 from material he’d salvaged in London in 1980, including excerpts of The Cut-Ups film collaboration between William Burroughs and Antony Balch. And New York-based filmmaker Marie Losier’s atypically romantic documentary The Ballad Of Genesis and Lady Jaye traces the relationship between Genesis and Lady Jaye Breyer, who died in 2007. Applying Burroughs’ Cut-Up technique to their own bodies, they underwent surgical procedures to look more alike with the ideal of merging into a single pandrogynous being. Jet-lagged but sipping on champers, this is what he (using the pronoun “we” in reference to Lady Jaye’s continued presence) had to say.


Dazed Digital: Ghosts#9 contains material Antony Balch shot from the mid-60s of William Burroughs and Brion Gyson - how did it end up in your hands?

We were living in Hackney in a squat on the dole. I got a phone call from William from America saying “Genesis, there’s a real crisis, you’ve got to help us.” Antony Balch had died. He’d shared an office in Soho, and they’d decided to throw out all his stuff including all the films he’d made. William and Brion wanted me to go and save it. We had got the dole cheque, so we had to make a quick decision to cash it and get a taxi into Soho to the address they’d given me. When we got there workers were coming down the stairs with big cans of 35mm film about to throw them into a dumpster.


DD: What made you decide to edit it into a film?

It dawned on me there was all this amazing stuff that no-one had ever seen, some of it’s from the 50s. And it’s unusual to make whole movies with 35mm - Antony wandering Paris, Tangiers and London with this massive camera is hard to imagine.
DD: Balch is sort of a forgotten figure, but in the 60s was also doing some radical programming…

He had a deal with one of the soft-core porn cinemas in London and that’s where they first showed The Cut-Ups, on a slow night. They were very amused at the stuff that got left behind after the film, they said there were just hundreds of items of clothing and shoes and underwear and all kinds of things all over the floor, and no-one could quite figure out why. I think it short-circuited people’s brains.

DD: Why the title Ghosts#9?

Some of the tins said “Guerilla Conditions” and the others said “Ghosts at No. 9” which we liked better. The soundtrack is from another project we had with William. He’d invited us to Kansas to go through all his Cut-Up experiment tapes. We kept saying to William everyone’s been hearing about them but no-one’s ever heard them, so let us make an album of highlights. After seven years he agreed. We released an album called Nothing Here Now But the Recordings on Industrial Records.


DD: How did you assemble the film?

It was done in the tradition of The Cut-Ups, at random. There’s a deep magical reason. William and Brion had a really deep belief the Cut-Up was a way of revealing the nature of reality. That if you consciously structured something you were influencing it with your own particular life and prejudice and it couldn’t be pure and wouldn’t necessarily tell you anything new. They leave it to the material itself to explain or reveal connections and collisions that otherwise would never occur. It’s the product of this collaboration, the third mind, and that’s been so influential on my life, with myself and Lady Jaye. We decided to apply that to the body and identity and create a third being that was the combination of two.

DD: What’s the original context of some of the other material?

Klaus Maeck, a Hamburg filmmaker, wanted to have William in his film Decoder. He arranged to shoot a scene in London where William was working in an electronics shop selling tape recorders to the main character who was the leader of a cult swapping the muzak in McDonald’s for noise tapes so people would riot instead of just enjoying their food. That’s why you see William waiting in the street saying: “When is it gonna happen?” And there’s a book that never got published by William called The Alternative Boy Scouts Manual. We found cassette tapes of William reading the entire text of the book but putting in all the punctuation for somebody to type it up later. The chorus of the book is “Bugger the Queen”, and it’s all about how to destroy the royal family. It never got published. We asked William why and he said because he was afraid of what they’d do, because they are so insidiously powerful.


DD: How did you first meet William?

It was way back in 1971. We were reading a Canadian mail art magazine called File and in the middle was an image-bank request list called the Yellow Pages. People doing mail art in Fluxus were all in there and one of them said: “William S. Burroughs wants camouflage for 1984.” We wrote a letter which went on just insulting him. About three weeks later a postcard came through the door. It was from him and it said: “If you’re ever in London come and see me. Here’s my phone number.”