Joe, who would you cite as influences?
JA: Hamri, Bowles, and to a lesser extent the writer Mrabet, are the Tangerinos who've influenced me. Since I’m not a painter, it’s more as a man that Hamri has influenced me. He gave me a thousand stories to tell and a country to write about. And of course I’ve part-inherited his thorny crown of Joujouka. Like an old Joujouka legend, he was a lion pulling a plough. I seem to be shackled up to that same plough now, like a few other lions. His life would’ve been so much simpler without Joujouka.
Frank talked about Paul Bowles in this interview and Bowles is the only writer I aspire towards resembling in any way. It’s a tricky business writing novels when you’re an intelligent prodigy like he was but he managed to pull it off.
Mrabet is the last surviving member of the Tangier Beat Generation Scene. To some extent he is a Bowles’ satellite, insofar as Bowles collaborated with him on all his books but Mrabet very much has a voice of his own. He is good at putting the fear of God into dippy white men and I like that.
How long did the Here To Go Show take to plan and actually put on?
FR: About one year. It was like a production line. In the last months there was a book in production, Brion Gysin’s Here to Go Tapes being edited, galleries being contracted, flights being booked, hotels, visas, everything was happening at once. I don’t know how we did it. Terry Wilson was central to the project. I struck up a conversation with him at a terrible art opening in Notting Hill in London. Soon myself and Joe Ambrose were sitting cross-legged on a mattress in his apartment going through box after box of Burroughs and Gysin manuscripts, letters and works of art. It seemed crazy not to do something with this material.
JA: The Show took its title from a book Terry wrote with Gysin, Here To Go, which is available on Creation Books and which anyone interested in countercultural life should buy and read.
FR: Terry connected us with various participants. However, I think it was the fact that we were new faces to the scene that allowed myself and Joe to cut through the petty squabbles that preoccupied many of Gysin’s friends.
JA: Terry Wilson marked our cards about the choppy shark-infested waters we were drifting into. Many of the people around Gysin had been right-wing, effete, and snobby. I’m none of these things so Terry’s knowledge of the whole area was good to have. Gysin really knew how to divide but was not so great at conquering. As a result, it was hard to get all his friends to cooperate with each other without neutral third parties stepping in. London literary whores sell container-loads of consumer-friendly novels and leave no space or niche for Terry or for a thousand others like him. I feel he’d do a lot better somewhere like New York where aesthetics and art ideas still mean something. As regards the Here to Go Show, he opened a hundred doors.
Article comments
1 - johnny boy
very stimulating
2 - paul hawkins
thanks, what did you find stimulating johnny boy ?