William Burroughs' cut-ups
Old Man of the Mountain: Hassan ibn Sabbah: Alamut: Paradise: Persia: Hashish: Hashshashin: Assassin: Marco Polo
Mick Jagger: Blues: Rock
Anthology: Jorge Luis Borges
Coil: Love's Secret Domain: Further Back and Faster
Big Audio Dynamite: This Is Big Audio Dynamite: E=mc2
I like that, turn it up...It was Mad Cyril...We have been courteous...I need a bohemian atmosphere
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
You must merge gentlemen.
What's been puzzling you is the nature of my game.
‘Merger’ is heard repeatedly in the dialogue, and Mick Brown points to Borges’s theory that “every man is two men,” realized at the end upon the fusion of Chas (the personification of violence) and Turner (pacifism). In the first half of the picture, gangsters (seen reading Borges on their coffee break!), businessmen and lawyers are so utterly lost in their oppressive performance that single-mindedness has left them homosexual. In the second half, Cammell examines what he called “the interchangeability of gender,” via Chas’s overbearing manliness, Pherber’s domineering femininity, and Turner and Lucy’s androgyny, narcissistic characters approaching the liberation of the female-man and the male-woman, a ‘complete’ individual. — Ray Young
