Sorry about no cartoon yet this week. It’s mostly drawn, but needs inking, scanning and colorizing. Paying work, meetings, more art sales, and the Sequential Tart article deadline (I’ll have four pieces in the December issue) have taken up all my work time this week.
I just finished another book, Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin by John Geiger. Gysin is one of those people you haven’t really heard of but everyone else talks about how influential he was on their art. Famous people, that is. I first heard of him through William Burroughs, but he also influenced The Rolling Stones, Keith Haring, The Beatles, REM, Andy Warhol, John Giorno, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and many others. He invented the cut-up method, which was most successfully used by Burroughs. It involved taking the vertical half of a page from, say, the New York Times and half a page from, say, Joyce’s Ulysses, laying them side by side and editing them together. Gysin also invented a mind-altering moving lamp called The Dream Machine. He was friends with Alice B. Toklas, contributing the hash brownie recipe to her cookbook. Gysin never felt he got the recognition he deserved – and it seems that’s right. The author attributes this to the fact that having so many interests and talents, he did too many different things, never focusing his energies on one thing long enough to see it to success. Hmm. Could be instructive. When you intensely focus on one thing, you do miss a lot along the way, though.
From Burrough’s piece”Pook The Destroyer” on his Dead City Radio CD:
Bryon Gysin has the all purpose nuclear bedtime story.
The all purpose bedtime story, in fact.
Some trillions of years ago a sloppy, dirty giant flicked grease from his fingernails.
One of those gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor.
Splat.