The short films of Galveston-based Kelly Sears illuminate and offer alternate origin stories for cultural detritus … high school yearbooks and other gone-by-the-wayside texts in which undercurrents of Cold War anxiety and similar leap to the fore. “All the films I make come from old magazines in thrift stores, books from library sales, and from archives that house orphaned films,” Sears says. “I like working with things that are outdated or cast off as a way of reinvigorating the material and making it resonate in today’s cultural climate. I’m really interested in using the veneer of nostalgia to look back at the archetypes and ideologies found in the source material that can be expanded into other kinds of stories or histories. I try to tell a story about the present but shape it through images of another time.”
Working in a style that combines collage and the associative logic of cut-ups à la William Burroughs or Brion Gysin, Sears produces images in an uncanny, flickering style with oddly floating figures and juxtaposed textures that belie a staggering amount of labor. “Frame-by-frame filmmaking is a labor of love; some days I can work all day on three seconds of footage. But it’s [in] that meditative space that the stories really start to percolate,” she says. “I look for an entryway to engage with the story that already exists in the frame. The images always come first. I’ll collect a bunch of material, and as I’m experimenting with animating and layering the images, a story slowly emerges.”
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Originally published in 2004 ‘Perilous Passage – The Nervous System and the Universe in Other Words’ by Terry Wilson is being republished in 2012. It describes the author’s apprenticeship under the tutelage of the avant-garde artist and writer Brion Gysin; along with a wonderful passage about Wilson’s experiences in South America with ayahuasca. The book is the final part of his ‘Green Base Trilogy’, which includes ‘Dreams of Green Base’ (1986) and ‘‘D’ Train’ (1985). He has also previously published ‘Here to Go’ (2001), a book of interviews with Gysin that documented his life, work and philosophy.
KENNEBUNK — River Tree Arts and The Kymara Gallery present, “Charles Gatewood’s Wall Street,” an exhibition of rare vintage and contemporary photographic prints based on the photo essay, “Wall Street.” The exhibition illustrates the 1970s style and culture of New York City’s notorious financial district and has won acclaim for the photographer’s use of architectural imagery and satire. Included in the exhibit are the photographer’s most famous portraits of William S. Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and Brion Gysin with his “Dream Machine.”
Work influenced by historical figures such as William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, an homage to Cocteau’s Orpheus and an adaptation of Ronald Tavel’s play The Last Days of British Honduras are among the items to be presented in an expanded Berlinale Forum section, organizers said Monday.
… “The only people who liked these [Poem Machines] in 1962 when I first exhibited them were artists and a few poets.
Transhumanism is the augmentation, and therefore reinforcement, of the self. It is the current edge of the “project of Western civilization” that is concerned, and always has been concerned, with the extension of the individual will into physical, manifest reality. It is the directed use of technology to amplify the human experience — and technology can easily mean nonphysical means or techniques as well.
An era captured in the French capital city half a century ago by Deal photographer Harold Chapman is soon to be shared on the big screen with the release of a new film The Beat Hotel. Alan Govenar of Texas-based Documentary Arts has been delving into the legacy of the American Beats in Paris between 1957 and 1963, when Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso fled the obscenity trials in the United States surrounding the publication of Ginsberg’s poem Howl. They took refuge in a cheap hotel at 9, Rue Git le Coeur and were joined by William Burroughs, Ian Somerville, Brion Gysin and others from England and elsewhere in Europe, seeking out the so called freedom of the Latin Quarter.
A new book collating the writings of Brion Gysin’s friend Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky), who first initiated Gysin, Burroughs, and others to life in North Africa, will be available August 23. ’In more than forty essays and articles that range from Paris to Ceylon, Thailand to Kenya, and, of course, Morocco, the great twentieth-century American writer encapsulates his long and full life, and sheds light on his brilliant fiction. Whether he’s recalling the cold-water artists’ flats of Paris’s Left Bank or the sun-worshipping eccentrics of Tangier, Paul Bowles imbues every piece with a deep intelligence and the acute perspective of his rich experience of the world. Woven throughout are photographs from the renowned author’s private archive, which place him, his wife, the writer Jane Bowles, and their many friends and compatriots in the landscapes his essays bring so vividly to life.
