Saturday Signal: sifting the signal from the noise of the Internet’s occultural cacophony.

I’m writing this a few days before I leave for Paris, so I’m going to assume that I’m happily sitting in a cafe somewhere sipping  cafe sans lait, eating a croissant and conversing with the locals in perfect Ontarian franglais.

C’est magnifique, I’m sure.

Next vacation spot: Titan? Right now its surface has the texture of creme brulee, but give it time.

I’ve prepared this Signal especially for your clicking pleasure. Just you. Enjoy.

• Ryan Hurd offers an excerpt from his eBook on Reality Sandwich with “Sleep Paralysis Visions: Demons, Succubi, and the Archetypal Mind“. I suffer from this more often than I like, and it’s always frightening as hell when it occurs. Hurd discusses a variety of commonly experienced apparitions and the theories surrounding them.

• Duncan writes “God Does Not Exist: Some Thoughts on Anselm’s Ontological Proof ” on Open Enlightenment. Weird (a)theistic mindplays to “prove” non-existence. Kind of. (Atheism’s so much more straightforward.)

• Klint Findley’s been hard at work at Technoccult creating groovy dossiers on leading contemporary occultural figures. So far he’s done Hakim Bey, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, William S Burroughs, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Timothy Leary, Dennis and Terrence McKenna, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Robert Anton Wilson. There may be more by now, but I haven’t found a page yet where they’re all collected to link to. It’s a neat resource.

As always, if you come across anything nifty, please share it in the comments, or if you use delicious tag it “ahrfoundation” and we’ll take a look. Thanks!

Be a Happy Panda.

Feral House has just issued a revised and expanded edition of Thee Psychick Bible: A New Testameant by artist and cultural engineer, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

This new edition contains 544 pages of material, and comes with a DVD of 120 minutes of material from Psychick TV, Temple ov Psychick Youth, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, Derek Jarman, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

From the description found at Feral House:

This signed, numbered limited edition (999 copies only) is also presented with a remarkable DVD of impossible-to-find videos from P-Orridge archives of early Psychic TV and TOPY creations which includes the work of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Derek Jarman. Several of the videos included were seized by Scotland Yard in 1991, and as a result the DVD is provided here are second-generation and are reproduced in this CD for their historical value.

The artist, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, says about this edition: “It has been a revelation and become very thrilling for me to see 30 years+ of social, ritual and communal creative explorations consensed into what we feel may become the most profound new manual on ‘practical magick’ taking from its Crowleyan level of liberation and empowermeant of the Individual to a next level of realization that magick must then give back to its environment, its community, become about liberation and empowermeant to change this ‘world’ and evolve our humanE species.”

For more info check out this excellent two part discussion on Dangerous Minds by Richard Metzger with Genesis P-Orridge (Part I, Part II).

Metzger relates how he sought out Genesis P-Orridge in London when he was a teenager, and P-Orridge discusses how s/he sought out hir heroes, William Burroughs and most especially Brion Gysin, in Paris. Which causes me to wonder, is this still done, or do we assume that books and the Internet are enough? Do people still “touch hands”?

They also reminisce about the early days of TOPY, the (sometimes shocking) content of the DVD, the material created from the start, and more recent. It’s fascinating to watch their interaction.

Thanks to Cole Tucker for the heads up about the interview on Dangerous Minds!

Thee Chariot, 1989

Genesis P-Orridge is a musician and artist perhaps best known for his band Psychic TV.

S/he is presently being represented by a New York gallery, Invisible Exports, which is showing a collection of hir art “30 Years of Being Cut Up” from September 9th to October 18th, select images of which can be viewed on their website.

From the press release:

In the early 1970s, P-Orridge met William S. Burroughs, who introduced h/er to Brion Gysin, marking the beginning of a seminal and influential collaborative relationship. Burroughs, under Gysin’s tutelage, repopularized the “cut-up” technique of the early 20th century Surrealists, in which text, or narrative imagery, is cut up and re-organized, creating a new, non-linear formulation. The supremely Dadaist practice would influence P-Orridge throughout h/er career and remains an integral element of h/er work, highlighted in “30 Years of Being Cut Up.” [...]

“30 Years of Being Cut Up” is a three decade retrospective of photomontage and Expanded Polaroids, which includes many works never exhibited before, as well as a sampling of P-Orridge’s early Mail Art. The show will mark the culmination of a new, re-emergent phase in BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s life. He/r career — and most particularly he/r recent pursuit of pandrogyny — tests the limits of transgression and traces the tragic fate of the underground, proving again the expressive power and pervasive influence of those artists who take the world not as it comes to them — sensible, orthodox, predictable — but as they would like it to be.

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