Cut Up Photographs at the Beat Hotel Part 1 (Cut Up Process #2)
THE ART OF THE CUT UP
THE STRAITJACKET OF coincidences
A WAY TO emerge THROUGH visual LANGUAGE
Calling all digital agents
Calling all cosmic agents
By slicing THE STRAITJACKET OF LANGUAGE
mind-bending coincidences emerge
I've come to free the perception
A WAY TO CUT THROUGH invisible
mind-bending reality emerge
That is, I need a human host.
film or audio- tape, mind-bending coincidences emerge
that otherwise would have remained invisible.
Last week I wrote a blog Cut Up Method at the Beat Hotel where I share some research of the Cut-Up technique of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. In that post, I make use of the technique on a series of Photographs by Brion Gysin at The Beat Hotel in Paris, October 1959.
The ‘Beat Hotel’ in Paris, which had become a hub for the Beats like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Peter Orlovsky, is where Burroughs and Gysin met there in October 1957. Beat Poet Gregory Corso endowed the forty-two cheap rooms at 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur, in Paris’s Latin Quarter, which later would be known as The Beat Hotel.
The hotel and its bar and café were run by Madame Rachou, who in 1933 had opened the place with her husband. Burroughs would recall the frequent early-morning checks carried out by French immigration officials:
‘The immigration police made passport checks from time to time, always at eight in the morning, and would often take away some guest whose papers were not in order. The detainee would be back in a few hours, having paid—not a fine—but a tax, attendant on the application for a carte de sejour; though few had the time and patience to fulfill the complex bureaucratic regulations required to obtain this coveted document.’
But Madame Rachou protected her tenants from the local police, some of whom she had worked with during the Resistance; and she offered a warm welcome to her carefully selected artists, whom she often allowed to stay in return for artworks rather than rent. After the death of her husband, just prior to the arrival of the Beats, it was to these artists that she increasingly turned for friendship. Brion Gysin became especially friendly with Madame Rachou. In The Third Mind, published in 1978, he fondly recollected:
‘I view life as a fortuitous collaboration ascribable to the fact that one finds oneself in the right place at the right time. For us, the “right place” was the famous “Beat Hotel” in Paris, roughly from 1958 to 1963.’
Brion Gysin took a series of photographs at The Beat Hotel and around Paris, shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch, as a means of publicizing Burroughs and his novel.
Making use of the Cut-Up technique, I cut up this series of photographs. I wanted to share the process, before I had the Dream that I shared in I am Reality and I am Hooked, on, Invisible Art (Cut Up Process #1). This Innerspace Cut Up Vision pushed me to play and post some of my process of Cut Up at the Beat Hotel.
This is Part One of the Process of Cut Up Photographs at the Beat Hotel.
Cut Up Photographs by Brion Gysin. (Paris, October 1959)
William Burroughs sitting outside the café La Palette on the rue de Seine,
photographed by Brion Gysin. Paris, October 1959.
Cut Up #1
Cut Up #2
Cut Up #3
Cut Up #4
Cut Up #5
Cut Up #6
William Burroughs in front of the Beat Hotel on the rue Gît-le-Cœur. Madame Rachou’s name is on the door behind him. Photographed by Brion Gysin. Paris, October 1959.
Cut Up #1
Cut Up #2
Cut Up #3
Cut Up #4
Cut Up #5
Cut Up # 6
Cut Up #7
William Burroughs outside the Institut française, photographed by Brion Gysin. Paris, October 1959.
Cut Up #1
Cut Up #2
Cut Up #3
Cut Up #4
Cut Up #5
Cut Up #6
Cut Up #7
Cut Up #8
Cut Up #9
Cut Up #10
What to do with all this?
Stick it on the wall along with the photographs and see what it looks like
It’s just material, after all. There is nothing sacred about words
(Cut-Ups, Fragments & Excerpts)
Burroughs, W. S. & Gysin, B. The Third Mind (New York: Viking Press, 1978). Via Nikoskorpio.net.
Miles, B. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963 (Grove Press, 2001). Excerpt via The New York Times.
Miles, B. William S. Burroughs: A Life (Hachette, 2014). Preview via Google Books.
Photographs via October Gallery.
I am Reality and I am Hooked, on, Invisible Art (Cut Up Process #1)
Cut Up Method, I've come to free the images
I am reality and I am hooked, on, reality.
That is, I need a human host.
I am reality and I am hooked, on, reality.
Give me an image and a knife and I can, by God,
sit, cut up and remix there forever.
Cut Up Photographs at the Beat Hotel Part 2 (Cut Up Process #2)
Works thank you for your collaboration,
but they can also create themselves on their own; thus:
Come to free the images
To free the visions come
Free the dreams to come
The visions come to free
Images come to free thee!
Where is the artist Brion Gysin?
Cut Up Utopism & Confuse the Algorithms
Gen's brings up this is why we still think the cut-up is such a powerful tool and it is that moment I knew I would have to cut up that audio and play around with it and see what happens. This is that edit.
Psychedelic Sundays: The Yage Letters
William Burroughs’ Junkie ended with Yage may be the final fix. In letters to Allen Ginsberg, a young poet in New York at the time, recorded his journey to the Amazon jungle, detailing vividly incidents of a search for Yagé — the common name for Ayahuasca, or Banisteripsis Caape — the fabled “soul-rebooting” hallucinogen of the Amazon region treated as a traditional spiritual medicine and usually consumed in shaman-led ceremonies. Author and recipient of these letters met again in New York, Christmas 1953, and edited the writings to form this single book, The Yage Letters. The correspondence contains the first seeds of the later Burroughs' bizarre fantasy style in Naked Lunch.
Silky Supple Mirrors to be folded(cut-up song)
Poets are supposed to liberate the words Poets are meant to sing and make words sings No poets don't own words I've come to free the words
Cut Up and Remix of Brion Gysin and William S Burroughs spoken word.
I am reality and I am hooked on reality (cut-up song)
I am junk and I am hooked forever.
I am reality and I am hooked, on, reality.
That is, I need a human host.
Cut Up Method, I've come to free the words
I've come to free the words(cut-up song)
Poets are supposed to Liberate the words
not to chain them in phrases
Poets are supposed to sing
and make the words sing
This is a cut-up song,
Making use of the Cut-Up technique,
I cut up Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Edgar Allan Poe
That is, I need a human host.
I can’t look at anything.
I am blind.
I can’t sit anywhere.
I have nothing to sit on.
translating the connections
between words and images
time in images, with the inner voice silent
Making use of the Cut-Up technique,
I cut up William Burroughs, Edgar Allan Poe
The Cut Up Method & Invisible Art
Brion Gysin Explains The Cut-Up Method and then I have fun Cut-Up his and William S Burroughs Words and Images:
Poets are supposed to liberate the words
Poets are meant to sing and make words sings
No poets don't own words
I've come to free the words
Ah, My Burroughs... you crazy genius, you.
Great work on the photos. I was thinking about Burroughs the other day, in relation to an essay I'm working on, and was thinking of referencing his cut-up work.
yea Burroughs, crazy bastard. but in the next one, I did a lil sneak peak in this one but in one of the cut up of his photos I got this:
the bastard had a third eye, interesting stuff. but the third eye burroughs, gave me some very fun to play around with =D
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