She is here. S/he is her/e.
It’s so hard to know exactly how to describe Genesis to the uninitiated. Even the most basic signifiers are complicated. During the twenty years that I had the pleasure of knowing Genesis as her friend and gallerist (and now curator of her and her partner Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge’s current exhibition at Pioneer Works, We Are But One), pronouns switched from he / him to s/he / he/r to they / them. And the last assignation was not gender neutral, but rather a plurality, as Genesis had now absorbed her other half, Lady Jaye, as part of their Pandrogyne project—an effort to transition their bodies through plastic surgery into a single, ‘pandrogynous’ being named BREYER P-ORRIDGE. To further muddle things, Genesis was not precious about pronouns. The confusion was part of the game.
Performance artist; founder of COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV; collagist; sculptor; anti-musician; pop musician; pervert; poet; psychonaut; explorer; advocate; imp; icon; occultist; activist; archivist; super-fan; mentor; instigator; romantic; and cultural engineer. The last is the most apt, but the most complex. Genesis changed the world by changing herself. Over and over again. S/he pushed against all the boundaries, all the time, fulfilling her [William] Burroughsian mandate of “short circuit control” many times over. And remained generous and kind ‘til the end; this is abundantly clear after reading the stories of her compiled below from friends and loved ones.
S/he is still her/e, and s/he will be for a very long time.
- Benjamin Tischer
Daniel Albrigo
Genesis at home, 2017.
Courtesy of the author.
Musty Dagger at home, 2017.
Courtesy of the author.
Genesis and Musty Dagger on a walk, 2017.
Courtesy of the author.I went through some old film and found this set I took at Gen's house in 2017. This was somewhat typical of our meetups. We'd meet up at he/r place for a cocktail (usually the world's strongest vodka OJ, woof), take he/r dog Musty Dagger for a walk around the block, and then go out to dinner or drinks. Visiting and spending time with Genesis was my happy place. I think about he/r every day.
Genesis and I met almost immediately after my wife and I moved to New York City in 2008. We met through a mutual friend and within a few days of meeting, I was at he/r apartment in Queens taking photos. We became good friends very fast.
One night we went to see Roky Erickson play in Brooklyn. S/he was beyond excited to see him perform and wanted to get there early for a good spot. Genesis was VERY recognizable around New York City, especially in a music venue. A few people said hi, but for the most part everyone gave he/r space to watch and enjoy the show. Genesis was in another world watching Roky perform, but everyone around us was watching Genesis Watch Roky.
Similar to most times we went out, people would always recognize he/r, but s/he was either too wrapped up in the moment to notice or just blissfully unaware of how much an impact s/he made on others. S/he really knew how to Live in the moment.
The role Genesis played in my life was a devoted friend and mentor. S/he showed me unconditional love and helped me have a better understanding of myself and life’s true potential.
Thank you Genesis, I love you.
Daniel Albrigo
Daniel Albrigo is an artist based in Southern California. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at the Museum of Art & History, Lancaster, CA; Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, CA; and Muddguts Gallery in New York City, among other venues. The collaborative work he created with P-Orridge has been shown at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.
Paul Bee Hampshire
Genesis lived to create art and music, and spent every day doing just that. In Gen’s treacherous final months, they struggled to get life-sustaining oxygen into their failing body (or “suitcase,” as they called it), but there was never a lack of resolve to create. They did so until their very final breath—it was a compulsion. That commitment and dedication to the arts is what I call to mind at the start of every day when I pledge my allegiance to the muse.
In the mid-eighties my band, Getting the Fear, signed a massive half-million-pound contract with RCA Records in London. They organized a posh party for handing over the check. Genesis came with me to the champagne-fueled celebration.
Towards the end of the night, Gen whispered giddily in my ear, “Let’s go creepy crawl the exec’s offices.” Moments later, we’re on the top floor of the building rooting through the unlocked filing cabinets in the managing director’s office. I did manage to stop Gen from shredding the Eurythmic’s signed contract but couldn’t resist letting them add a rather rude handwritten clause to a contract for one of their most respected artists.
Paul Bee Hampshire thrives best operating between boundaries, borders, and binaries. He is currently working on his ‘ThaiCapsule’ spoken word recordings and making music with his band, Into a Circle.
Jeff Berner
I came into Psychic TV in 2009 as the last-minute "holy-shit-get-your-passport-we-are-leaving-in-two-weeks!!!" guitar player, for what was then billed as Gen's last tour.
What immediately struck me about Gen was the way that s/he approached making music: absolutely fearless, with an incredible sense of playfulness. So many of us struggle against our internal self-appointed “editors” while creating, and Gen just seemed to bypass all of that. It's something I remind myself of constantly while making records or playing an instrument.
S/he taught me to be intentionally playful, to approach it with the unbridled joy of a child. Throw away all of the conscious thoughts weighing down your instinct. Abandon all fear in the service of making the next thing, whatever it may be. Lady Jaye's quote, "See a cliff...jump off!" rings truer than ever.
Jeff Berner is an American record producer, engineer, mixer, and multi-instrumentalist based in Brooklyn, NY. From 2009-2020 he played guitar in Psychic TV/PTV3, touring worldwide and recording numerous records with the group.
Michael Fox
Jackie and Gen had this magical, sweet, once in a lifetime if you’re lucky love affair that evolved over the years into the Pandrogyne Project. We knew each other from around 1996 or 7, and I used to take a lot of pictures, so they asked me if I would take pictures of them before and after their first breast augmentation, so this happened at the end of 2003 for the pre-surgery shots and the beginning of 2004 for the ones a week or so after surgery. They were fun to be around and I remember laughing more while we were together than I usually do. Their energy really came across in the pictures. We kept in touch over the years and until the end with Genesis. They were lovely people.
Michael Fox’s photographs of Genesis have been published in Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (First Hand Books, 2013) and exhibited at Marlborough Gallery. He curated Jayne County, Paranoia Paradise at PARTICIPANT INC and published Paranoia Paradise: Interviews with Jayne County, Volumes One and Two (2018). His photographs of County have been featured in BUTT Magazine and Artforum, and have been exhibited at PARTICIPANT INC, Marlborough, and James Barron Art.
Alice Genese
These are some memories I wrote down on 11/08/19:
Gen fell earlier in the week, two days ago, and she has a huge gash that required internal and external stitching. Her eye is swollen and bruised. She’s unshaven, which is unusual for her. She only needs to shave from the neck down, as her face has had enough electrolysis to kill all the hair follicles. I’m happy though to find her in good spirits despite nearly losing an eye in the fall. I bought her a pair of non-slip house slippers to be delivered to her door on Sunday.
Today, Gen and I discussed her mortality. She told me that for the first time she began to feel sad, that she felt a sense of missing out, that when she died she would no longer get to see how her friends’ lives pan out.
I asked if she believed in the “what comes after” of life—like the spirit world. I remember after Lady Jaye died, several of us were sitting in a room, I think it was after her funeral. I recall it: Gen, Eddie O’Dowd, myself, and perhaps Genesse [Breyer P-Orridge] and Carress [Breyer P-Orridge] and maybe Markus Persson and Hannah Haddix. We were just sitting in the living room at the Gates (we called the house Genesis and Lady Jaye lived in on Gates Avenue "The Gates Institute") when suddenly a photo of Jaye, picture frame and all, flew across the room and landed in the middle of our little circle. No one could really explain this; we were just all so fucking sad that day. We were sitting there with air between us in a circle, consoling each other—mostly consoling Genesis. It was such a tragedy to have lost Lady Jaye at so young an age.
“Look at that picture! Look at that picture!” we said. It flew into the middle of the room and landed with a bang. We were all stunned back to some weird reality. When we saw it was a photo of Jaye, well, it became one of those of course moments. No one felt a shake in the building or heard any loud trucks going by. Not one of us could explain it. I think we all thought she wanted us to know she was there with us, and what better way than to put herself in the middle of our little circle.
Gen said she now feels there’s a sort of conglomerate of spiritual beings in a place where no matter and no time exists, just entities existing in some unknown place, and that this is what true practitioners—spiritual mediums, tarot card readers, Runic readers, and so on—tap into. I do believe this in some way.
Gen and I carry on with our usual banter. She’s excited to be writing and is enjoying the process. She reads me a passage and then, with her usual naughty smile, tells me that the next bit of the story will be much more interesting, including passages on circle jerks. I think she’s trying to get me to blush. She then complains a little about having to film an interview so soon when she’s feeling so poorly. She is struggling to breathe every day, as she’s been on oxygen for over a year now after healing from a horrible surgery. I tell her that I’m happy she will film this interview, that I want more of her captured. I told her that the missing [of her friends] will go both ways. I fight back tears. I don’t dwell on it. She is here. S/he is her/e.
And so am I…
Genesis in the studio, 2012.
Courtesy of the author.
Genesis in Russia, 2012.
Courtesy of the author.
Genesis onstage in St. Petersburg, 2012.
Courtesy of the author.
Genesis, Genesse, and Jeff in L.A., 2012.
Courtesy of the author.
Psychic TV backstage in Pittsburg, 2013.
Courtesy of the author.
Genesis at home with Musty Dagger, 2013.
Courtesy of the author.Alice Genese is a musician and jeweler. Her first music experiences were with the bands Gut Bank and Sexpod. She has also been the bass player of Psychic TV since 2003, touring with the band both nationally and internationally. In 2013 she released her first solo album, Sticks and Bones, and continues to work on new music, most recently as OV STARS with writing partner Shaune Pony Heath.
Clarity Haynes
Genesis posed for a painted torso portrait in my studio over a period of about a year, 2018-2019. S/he had leukemia and a busy life but managed to show up when s/he could. When s/he first arrived s/he noted the name of the building where my studio was: “INDUSTRY City.” S/he saw meaning and magic everywhere. And music.
We celebrated he/r 70th birthday in the studio. Ben [Tischer] brought a cake. Later there was a party at he/r Lower East Side apartment, which I couldn’t go to. But I loved visiting Gen there. Now every time I am in the neighborhood and pass he/r block I feel a loss. The apartment was full of altars. There was an intimate, baroque bedroom altar; there were tiny altars on the shelves of he/r bookcase; I began to understand that he/r work, often made from found objects, was a form of altar-making. My favorites were the high-heeled shoes that s/he transformed with feathers, bones and gems into wicked and sublime sculptures.
Clarity Haynes is a New York-based artist whose painting practice centers on the body, queer feminist resistance, and the archive. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. She has been awarded residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo.
Gibby Haynes
I can't remember when exactly I met Genesis, but it was after he got his tit job—or she got her tit job—but the first thing Genesis did was raise his shirt and say, "Cop a feel, Gibby." I really regret not getting him from behind and tweaking his nipples. Her nipples, excuse me. But I know [I met Gen] in England, in the eighties. And I was shocked that members of Throbbing Gristle were aware of us [Butthole Surfers], and Gen and me became friends, as well as "Sleazy" Peter Christopherson, who was in Throbbing Gristle. And Gen goes, "You always liked our pop music," which was a bit of a stretch. And there was one time somebody questioned her knowledge of industrial music and she said, "I invented the genre."
One afternoon I went and recorded some stuff for Psychic TV. And then we were eating Chinese food and Gen had a heartburn attack; it was great Chinese. And she was like, "Lady Jaye, this is the big one. This is the big one." And I could tell she was totally over-dramatizing that shit. And so I got her plate and started eating her food, and she goes, "Gibby, how could you? I was dying over here and you were just eating my food." And then Gen’s expression softened significantly, and she said, "I suppose I would've done the same."
What an amazing individual. It was crazy to meet members of Throbbing Gristle. That's a high point in my career. There was this guy I met in Los Angeles [in college]; I had a couple hundred bucks and he took me to a record store and was like, buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this. And I [heard it] and voila! They had a big influence on my work, just the idea of using traditional instruments in a non-traditional way and with an importance assigned to witty lyricism:
Something came over me / I think it's white and sticky /
I think it's / I think it's white and sticky /
Something came over me / Don't know what it was /
No I don't know what it was.
Gibby Haynes is an American musician, painter, author, and the lead singer of the band Butthole Surfers. He was a featured guest on the third Psychic TV album, Hell Is Invisible… Heaven Is Her/e.
Eric Heist
Genesis had a very attractive personality. I attended a number of Psychic TV performances before we met; they could last for many hours. By the end we all ended up on the stage together, and who was performing and who was “audience” seemed to melt away. Genesis was very skilled in breaking down the barriers that separate us. Those shows operated as guides for what I wanted art to do: bring people together. This, for me, was the most beautiful part of Genesis’s many parts, in her art and in all the things s/he did.
Around 1999, Laura Parnes, my wife at the time, was working with Jackie Breyer [Lady Jaye] on a video titled No is Yes, in which Jackie played a wise dominatrix character advising some young teenage girls who had “accidentally” mutilated and murdered their favorite rock star. I think Jackie had suggested that Genesis take a look at some of the sugar-coated body prints I was doing at the time, and Genesis showed up with Jackie at a Momenta Art opening and asked to come over to the studio. I was very nervous, but Gen had a way of making people feel at ease. We embarked on a collaboration that Gen dubbed Candy Factory, mashing up Candy Darling of the Warhol Factory with Factory Records, blurring boundaries between art, music, design, fashion, commodity, and fetish along with class considerations. It was so freeing for me to work with he/r. The expectations that we as artists internalize went away, and I was able to drop my ego and work more freely.
After exhibiting Candy Factory in New York and London, we stopped working together, and Genesis continued her own practice and projects, as did myself. S/he had given me a mailer envelope at the end of that period containing a number of Polaroids s/he had taken of close-up body imagery. It was never made clear who the people depicted were, or even what body parts they were, but I felt they were part of a ritual process for Genesis. They had a dark and private quality to them that was irresistible. Around 2018, as I was moving toward more ritualistic systems of artmaking, I revisited the photos. I wanted to include those dark body images in this manner. Gen had left Brooklyn and moved into the Lower East Side after Jackie passed. I went to her “Nest” to discuss the project. We sat together and she had a video of her surgery with Jackie going, creating a very fractured conversation with me occasionally interjecting an “ack!” when I glanced at the video. Gen told me she was applying the cut-up technique of [William] Burroughs to our meeting.
After making plans to start some new Candy Factory works, Gen told me s/he had contracted leukemia. We kept meeting at “Thee Nest” to discuss work, even as she became more ill. S/he was working all night, writing. Friends dropped by to help take care of her. I dropped off some silk screen panels that she wanted to work on, which s/he wanted to make “electric blue.” But s/he passed before we could finish them. I still made a large, four panel work from one of her Polaroids in the most electric blue I could find.
I kept working with her instant film, and I still feel he/r presence every time I open up that mailer that s/he handed to me 25 years ago. I do feel s/he is still her(e) in my studio when I look for her.
Eric Heist is an artist who works primarily with silk-screened images in a serial process to explore contradictions regarding notions of unity and individualism. Recent exhibitions include Galerie Bernhard, Zurich, 2022; Palai Project, Lecce, Italy, 2021; and Kanal Pompidou, Brussels, 2021. He is a founder and, since 1986, director of not-for-profit organization Momenta Art. He received a Pollock Krasner Award in 2020 and a New York Foundation of the Arts award in 2003.
Marie Losier
I first saw Genesis perform at the Knitting Factory, the now legendary club in Tribeca. Watching her perform was pure enchantment. Her words from the stage hovered somewhere between song and speech, deeply poetic, primitive, at times frightful. It completely hypnotized me. I knew immediately I had to film this perplexing and powerful figure, perhaps as a way of understanding what I had just experienced, but moreover to prove the existence of a being I was convinced had arrived from somewhere else!
In a typically miraculous New York City coincidence, I eventually met Genesis at a gallery opening in Soho, in one of those sardine-can spaces where you can barely walk and hardly breathe. Being relatively small, I got pressed into a corner where I inadvertently stepped on someone’s toes. I turned to apologize and there was Genesis smiling, her gold capped teeth glittering down over me. We spoke briefly, but in that time I felt something special had passed between us. She asked me about my films and gave me her email. Whether it was fate or pure clumsiness, this marked the beginning of an artistic collaboration that would develop into a close friendship.
After some correspondence, I met Genesis and Lady Jaye in their home for our first meeting. I was sitting in that giant green plastic chair in the shape of a hand, and they were looking at me very intensely for a long time. We talked and it was evident I was not a groupie, I didn’t know much about who they were, and I was not making commercial films at all. After 20 minutes Jaye said out loud, “She is the one…” They explained they wanted someone who could film their lives and that they were waiting for that person for a long time. I was then invited to go on tour with them and PTV3 [a reformed version of Psychic TV] in a month… and that was how it all started. I went with the band on tour, in a giant bus, with my Bolex 16mm hand-cranked camera from the silent film era that I always use, and a ton of three-minute rolls of film, and it all started there. It lasted seven years!
Marie Losier is a filmmaker and curator who was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and was the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, in 2018, and at Le Jeu De Paume - the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris in 2019. Her first feature film was a portrait of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and their partner Lady Jaye. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2011, winning the Caligary and Teddy Awards.
Carlo McCormick
I interviewed Genesis P-Orridge sometime towards the end of the 1990s. I had known Gen for some years at that point, first through his music—especially his early band Throbbing Gristle, which exerted a strong influence on me as it did so many other people at that time—and more particularly through an expansive and slippery context in which a lot of us began to think of music as sharing and expounding upon strategies concurrent in the art world. In short, we thought of him as an artist, regardless of medium or genre. Probably I had long wanted to interview Gen, but knowing his persuasive powers it’s quite possible that he initiated the story and convinced me it was my idea.
Our conversation was based on our shared interest in the possibilities of post-evolutionary development—one in which the social and physical imperatives of male/female would be obsolete. Our mutual fascinations were based on psychedelic experiences that had informed us, and would continue to inform us; but whereas I was so much more literal, linear, and binary than s/he, Genesis used this opportunity to reveal a far more profound transformation than my meager theorizing could fathom. He and Jackie were embarking on a complete melding of spirit, identity and body—they were becoming one. Gender, they told me, was divisive and a dead end. Aptly, we did this story for Paper Magazine, which has long championed a more inclusive and empowering understanding of LGBT culture. It was a fortuitous coincidence for me, but Genesis always knew what he was doing, even (or especially) when he left things to chance. In the many years of friendship still to follow, Genesis and Jackie no longer existed as I once knew them, they—in plural and singular—had different names and identities that had nothing to do with the he and she of things. I’ve always been wary when people predict the future… it seems the kind of speculative folly sure to be wrong in so many ways, but they were more than visionary, they were actually right.
Carlo McCormick is a critic and curator based in New York City.
David Charles Rodrigues
HOW I MET GEN OR “Wisdom can only be passed on by the touching of hands.”
I believe that the end of one thing is the beginning of something else. It was October 2018, the same night I finished one of my most important projects. Gen came to me in a dream. It was the first time we ever met. S/he came to my house and like an awkward fan I said, “Gen, let me show you some of your art I have on my walls.” Every time we walked up to one of her pieces it would disappear. I felt embarrassed, like an imposter. Gen, in all her kindness, said “don’t mind the art.” She put her hands over mine and continued, “I’m passing all of my knowledge to you right now.” We stood there in front of a white wall for what seemed like hours, hand in hand, a full wisdom download. I woke up out of it. My first two thoughts: “I must connect with Gen and make a movie about all of the knowledge s/he’s accumulated in her many lifetimes,” and “No, I’m not losing my mind, I don’t think.”
I didn’t reach out.
Then, a few weeks later, I was looking at Instagram when I saw a close friend of mine from New York City post a photo with Gen at the hospital. I was scheduled to speak with this same friend five minutes after I saw that post. So I was like, to the universe, “All right, you win.” I immediately asked my friend to connect me with Gen. At first he said no, Gen wasn’t well and it wasn’t a good idea. Then, I told him about my dream and he gave me her email.
I wrote to her. Not about the dream, but about meeting up to discuss a project. I hit send and didn’t really expect a response. One hour later, she wrote an epic, thoughtful, loving, two-page email. For a second, I felt like what Gen must have felt when she received William Burroughs’s first letter back in the day.
I came to New York three weeks later. We were supposed to meet on a Saturday for one hour. We spent five hours on Saturday and another three on Sunday. Towards the end of our hang, I finally told Gen the dream. She looked at me, slowly got up, and went to her bookshelf. She pulled out a book she recently published about her conversations with Brion Gysin. Gen flipped to a page and showed me a sentence in all type and bolded. It said: “WISDOM CAN ONLY BE PASSED ON THROUGH THE TOUCHING OF HANDS.” Brion Gyson. That was the first time I had ever heard that quote. But I think Gen knew that already.
S/he gave a mischievous giggle and right then we made a cosmic agreement that I was going to document the last year of her life and make it into a feature film. As a contract she took a rare copy of Psychic TV’s cover of Set the Controls For The Heart of the Sun (with visuals by Derek Jarman), and with a sharpie wrote the following “David, BEFORE WE ARE AFTER, LET’S DO THIS. LOVE, GEN”
I spent the next 12 months filming with her, becoming a dear friend, drinking cran-grape vodkas (her favorite drink), and documenting some of the greatest concepts on our human existence I had ever heard. Coming soon.
***
While I was filming with Gen in the last year of her life, we talked a lot about legacy. I think something that meant a lot to her and kind of surprised her was how the concepts within TOPI and Thee Psychick Bible have mutated into younger artists' work, music, writing and pervasively influencing a more mainstream mindset and expanding its dimensionality around the world. She knew it was an endless well and that comforted her a lot.
I also asked Gen if she could leave us behind with the greatest thing she’s ever learned. Genesis said, “Actually, it was something Lady J taught me. The greatest power and best kept secret of mankind is that we have the capacity to wake up every morning and be someone different each day.”
David Charles Rodrigues is a creative director, writer, and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. His latest feature, Gay Chorus Deep South, won the audience award for best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019.
Marti Wilkerson
Shoe Connection
For Lady Jaye's memorial S/he is (Still) Her/e at PARTICIPANT INC, Genesis asked me to re-enact my "Shoe Dance." I usually performed it wearing fetish heels, but on this occasion I did it instead in my Westwood court shoes, with a pair of Lady Jaye's lace-up Westwoods on my hands. We all loved Westwood, so I altered it in honor of that. At the end of the dance I hugged a Polaroid blow-up I had taken of Jaye wearing her Mr. Spyros patent pumps from The Little Shoe Box (an adored custom boot shop that used to be on Holloway Road [in London].) There was always a big Shoe Connection. In 1995 I did an early photo shoot with Genesis and Lady Jaye against a bright pink background. I had glued a print from the shoot onto a red heart for the wall display at the PARTICIPANT memorial. Genesis used the photo/heart object later in Marie Losier's documentary as a prop. So it became many things: a picture, a memorial item, a prop, and then a spread in the First Third book Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. That is very "Breyer P-Orridge," to continue changing and transforming into other things.
Of Course
I want to emphasize the Breyer P-Orridge elements of comedy and lavish decoration. I was friends with Jackie Breyer (Lady Jaye) first. We used to run down the hallway together making high-pitched calls, pretending to be "birds of prey." And Genesis had a ridiculous comedic streak at a Music Hall-level: raising one eyebrow at the end of a sentence, speaking in a Teletubbies voice, or imitating a proper British person while having tea, proclaiming Sugar in the Raw "too posh." And both Jaye and Genesis were so into Swinging London, Mod furniture, and psychedelic crazy outfits. When Lady Jaye was working with gold leaf, sometimes the application went awry. Once they posed for me in front of a wall of the flaking gold, with golden hair and leather ties, while mixing camo with stripes and holding up a plaque that read, "Please Do Not Lick the Paintings." Shredded gold leaf with camo and stripes: Breyer P-Orridge seriocomic beauty. The picture with the black and white checks has the "Of Course" factor—Of Course we were listening to Pebbles Volume 10 when they happened to visit. Of Course!
A Candy Cabaret
For many years I've been working in a guitar/vocal combo with Paul Twinkle, Beaut (aka COKE). It's not really a band. Genesis was doing this project Thee Majesty with Bryin Dall that wasn't really a band, either. Gen would do spoken word and Bryin would play his guitar with a machete. So we started doing this weird cabaret together with these two guitar and vocal "not bands" and called it A Candy Cabaret. The first time we tried it was November 1999 in Hamburg, at Hafenklang, in this tiny wharf side basement. On the way back, Thee Majesty stopped to do their high profile show in Berlin. Somehow Genesis convinced the venue, Maria Am Ostbahnhof, to add us to the bill. The place was located right by the former Berlin Wall. So we got to do this unexpected Candy Cabaret at the edge of Berlin. It was an incredible quasi-Weimar experience. Genesis made it happen. This was another quality s/he had, always asking questions, trying to see if something was possible. Just Go For It, and see what surprising/amazing things might occur. ♦
Marti Wilkerson is a photographer, actress and musician who works with dreamlike/hardboiled themes. She has performed at MoMA PS1, New Museum, and The Kitchen [all NYC]. Her solo show is upcoming this fall at Participant, Inc. NYC.
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