PULSE FIELD Playlist
Date: Monday January 27,
2003
Title: The Word is a Virus: Cut-Ups and Other Methods by
William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin
Description: At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man
from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a
hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. Andre Breton expelled Tristan Tzara
from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.
In the summer of
1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut
newspaper articles
into sections and rearranged the sections at
random.
"Minutes to Go" resulted from this initial cut-up experiment.
"Minutes to Go" contains unedited unchanged cut-ups emerging as quite
coherent and meaningful prose.
The cut-up
method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty
years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from
movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition
cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are
accidents… writers will tell you the same. The best writings seems to be done
almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit-all
writing is in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point-had no way to produce
the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce
the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.
experimental in
the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk
and argue about. Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as
heavy as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to
push the two objects off the table and see how they fall. Shakespeare Rimbaud
live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut-ups
often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter. Table
tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an improvement on the usual deplorable performances
of contacted poets through a medium. Rimbaud announces himself, to be followed
by some excruciatingly bad poetry. Cut Rimbaud's words and you are assured of
good poetry at least if not personal appearance.
All writing is
in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard
overheard. What
else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and
variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged
cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new
dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic
variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to
sound sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of
vowels. And his "systematic derangement of the senses." The place of
mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms.
The cut-ups can
be applied to other fields than writing. Dr Neumann in his Theory of Games and
Economic behavior introduces the cut-up method of random action into game and
military strategy: assume that the worst has happened and act accordingly. If
your strategy is at some point determined . . . by random factor your opponent
will gain no advantage from knowing your strategy since he cannot predict the
move. The cut-up method could be used to advantage in processing scientific
data. How many discoveries have been made by accident? We cannot produce
accidents to order. The cut-ups could add new dimension to films. Cut gambling
scene in with a thousand gambling scenes all times and places. Cut back. Cut
streets of the world. Cut and rearrange the word and image in films. There is
no reason to accept a second-rate product when you can have the best. And the
best is there for all. "Poetry is for everyone …
***please use linked websites for further details of recordings. www.ubu.com
& http://bernard.pitzer.edu/~bkeeley/REALITY/TOPY_BG.HTM
are especially extensive.
10:00
·
William
S. Burroughs, ‘ Nothing Here Now, but the Recordings’ c.1960-65 (74:11)
Complied by
Genesis P-Orridge at the Burroughs archives in Lawrence. Under the title
"From the archives of William S. Burroughs 'Nothing Here Now but the
Recordings'", the album was cut in January 1981. Co-producers were James
Graurerholz and Peter Christopherson. Engineer was James Grauerholz. Project
co-ordination in the U.K. was done by Peter Christopherson & Genesis P-Orridge,
co-ordination in the U.S.A. was done by James Grauerholz. Sleeve design and
photo were by Peter Christopherson. Sleeve notes were by Genesis P-Orridge.
This was the last release on Industrial Records.
Contents
include:
Side
One (22.07)
1965 or
thereabouts. Everyone on board was
killed when the plane crashed enroute from the Midwest to San Francisco. Several days later there was a
big air crash at
Clark Airbase in Manila in the Philipines.
Once the pilot of aplane Burroughs too from Tangier to Gibraltar was
named Captain Clark.
2. The Saints Go
Marching Through All The Popular Tunes (Early 1960s)
3. Summer
Will" (Early 1960s)
4. Outside The
Pier Prowed Like Electric Turtles (Early 1960s)
5. The Total
Taste Is Here - News Cut-up (Early 1960s)
6. Choral
Section - Backwards (Circa 1965) - Simply a tape of the Hallelujah
Chorus played
backwards.
7. We See The
Future Through The Binoculars of the People (Circa 1978) -
Text of a
lecture given by W.S.B. to the Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics, Naropa
Institute, Boulder, Colorado in Summer 1976 originally entitled "It
Belongs To The Cucumbers" cut-up with phrases from the book
"Breakthrough - Voices From The Dead" by Konstantin Raudive with
which the lecture dealt. The cut-up was made in 1978 in Boulder on a borrowed tape
recorder. Basically Raudive deals with
the phenomena of intelligible phrases spoken in different languages by often
identifiable people appearing on blank tape run through a machine at high
record level in an otherwise silent environment. In other words no apparent input.
8. Just Checking
Your Summer Recordings (Early 1960s) - The tune is "Brother can't you
spare a dime?"
Side
Two (22.41)
1. Creepy Letter
- Cut-up at The Beat Hotel In Paris (Circa 1959) - Earliest
surviving cut-up
tape. Recorded during a conversation
between Brion Gysin
(the person who
originally conceived the cut-up technique), Gregory Corso,
William S.
Burroughs and probably Sinclair Beiles (unconfirmed). This
tape was made in
the Beat Hotel, 9 Rue Git le Coeur, Paris in 1959. A
letter from
London dealing with film business connected to Antony Balch
is spontaneously
cut-up after an incantation to "se what it really says".
2. Inching - "Is This Machine
Recording?" (Circa 1965) - Inching tech-
nique involved
manually pulling the recorder whilst recording, or while re-
recording, inch
by inch. "I.S. is Ian Sommerville."
3. Handkerchief Masks - News Cut-up (Early
1960s) - Examples of the cut-
up technique
applied to radio and TV news broadcasts are included as
demonstrations
not as finished works in themselves.
The theory is that the
future
"leaks through" that the real message can be revealed. Here is a
U.S. President
on trial for perjury before a Grand Jury over 10 years
before
Watergate.
4. Word Falling - Photo Falling (Early 1960s) -
Ian Sommerville operated
the echo on this
track which uses text from Nove Express, a cut-up book
[whoops, I meant
Nova] by W.S.B.
5. Throat Microphone Experiment (Circa 1965) -
These were experiments
carried out
holding a microphone against the throat whilst talking in the
hope of
recording sub-vocal speech. Burroughs
himself notes that whilst
he has no doubt
that sub-vocal speech occurs, the equipment he used then
and the
microphones accessible to us even now fail to register this on
tape. "All we got were some interesting
noises."
6. "It's
About Time To Identify Oven Area" (Early 1960s)
7. Last Words of Hassan Sabbah (1960-61) -
Hassan Sabbah "The Old Man
Of The
Mountain" was the leader of a fanatical fraternity in the
eleventh century
A.D. that lent its name, the "hashasheen" to the
concept of
assassination. His base was a castle on
Mount Alamut in
Northern
Persia. This Text by William S.
Burroughs is an expansion
of a section in
Nova Express written and read onto tape in the Empress
Hotel, London
1960-1961. This hotel has since been
demolished. The
tape was
intended to illustrate a condition of advanced paranoia.
Brion Gysin has
visited Mount Alamout, now a ruin.
11:15
·
William
S. Burroughs, ‘Break Through in Grey Room’ 1960’s (44:00)
12:00
·
Projected Footage: ‘Thee Films:
W.S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Ian Somerville
1:30
·
Brion
Gysin, ‘Brion Gysin’ 1950’s-60’s (62:14)
2:30
·
(Moroccan
Music recorded by) Brion Gysin, ‘One night @ the 1001’ c. 1954 (61:00)
3:30
·
Brion
Gysin, ‘Dilaloo’ c. 1955 (63:00)
4:30 Brion Gysin, ‘Self-Portrait Jumping’1974 (70:00)
5:40
·
‘The
Myths Collection (Part One)’
o Mark Stewart + MAFFIA, ‘The
Wrong Name and the Wrong Number’ 1984 (9:20)
o HULA, ‘Torn Silk’ 1985
(5:45)
o Wm. S. Burroughs &
Martin Olson, ‘The Five Steps’ 1983 (8:10)
o Genesis P-Orridge & The
Angels of Light, ‘SuperMale’ 1985 (8:10)
o SPK ‘In the Dying
Moments’1983 (6:40)
o Steven Brown ‘Gone with the
Winds’ 1986 (4:35)
o The Camberwell Now, ‘For those
in Peril on the Sea’ 1984 (4:10)
o Martyn Bates/Peter Becker,
‘SUN-LIKE-GOLD’ 1983 (3:57)
o Paul Lemos & Joe Papa,
‘Under Heaven’1986 (12:45)
o Tibetan Ritual Music,
‘Tibetan Evening Ritual’1987 (6:03)
5:00
video: ‘Thee films’; ‘The Dream Machine’;