Scope and Contents One of the last pages in this book depicts the following words, " Life Death Breath." This page is also displayed in this record of the database.Gladys Fabre May 2010 writing on inside dust jacket stated: "Painter, writer, poet, filmmaker, and performer Brion Gysin (1916-1986) was a source of inspiration for many Beat Generation artists and for underground culture in general (for Gregory Corso, John Giono, Bernard Heidsieck, but also for Keith Haring, The Rolling Stones, Steve Lacy, the painter Matta and his son Ramuntcho, Laurie Anderson). In books, films and sound poems, together with the author William Burroughs, he developed methods such as Cut-ups and permutations previously employed in painting. With Ian Sommerville, he designed a stroboscopic apparatus to arousing hallucinatory visual effects called the Dreamachine. Such artistic multidisciplinarity enabled him to explore thoroughly a multiple self. He saw himself and indeed lived as if he had been allotted the wrong part by...

Scope and Contents Brion Gysin (1916-1986) was a multifaceted artist whose fertile mind and wide range of original ideas were a source of inspiration for artists of the Beat Generation in Paris, as well as to innovative artists and performers such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Keith Haring, and Laurie Anderson in the next generation. Painter, writer, sound poet, tape composer, lyricist, and performance artist, Gysin is remembered particularly for his evocative paintings of the North African desert in the 1950s and his original calligraphic abstractions based on Japanese and Arabic scripts. The chance discovery by Gysin of the cut-up technique (later developed and refined by William S. Burroughs) and the concept of permutated poems gave rise to new and original forms of sound art wordplay, striking not only in print but also in recordings or live performance. Gysin's inventive ideas also extended to the Dreamachine and to collages of text and photographs. This is the first comprehensive publication on...