Genesis P-Orridge, Hakim Bey and John Perry Barlow in Conversation (1993)

Technoccult dug up an old Mondo 2000 interview from 1993 with both Genesis P-Orridge and Hakim Bey conducted by Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow

Barlow's Introduction to the Interview:

1. Zoning Out, Temporarily with Hakim Bey and Genesis P-Orridge
2. by John Perry Barlow, Mondo 2000 No. 9 1993
4. It was Queen Mu who made this happen - her conspiratorial whisper suggesting that I get myself together with Hakim Bey, Genesis P-Orridge, and a MONDO tape recorder. I wasn't too sure what she had in mind.
6. I mean, aside from the fact that all three of us are white, male acid-altered, old enough to know better, and crazy enough to do it anyway... Our resumes just didn't hook up and I wondered if we would.
8. Mr. Orridge, for example, is one singular fellow. He's got hardware dangling all over a body which sports more ritual scars and tattoos than Melville's Queequeg (with whom he shares other characteristics, most notably a nightmarish appearance cloaking a sweet and reasonable mind). He also happens to be the father of modern primitivism, the post-industrial tribes, the Rave Movement, the avant-garde band Psychic TV, and a couple of beautiful young daughters.
10. Orridge has been willfully causing such grave offense to British proprietary for the last twenty years that they've finally seen no alternative but to seize all his works and archives and pass laws which, though tailored to outlaw him, also make it a crime to give any other British subject so much as a hickey. (Or cause any physical harm to oneself or another consenting adult in the pursuit of dark pleasures.)
12. Finally, agents of the Crown have sent him packing into exile in California - a place so much more congenial to abominations that Mr. Orridge is having to scratch around for something to sink his sharpened teeth into.
14. Hakim Bey is another whose deviances have forced him to hide behind another name. Spending much of his life disguised as a mild-mannered comparative religion scholar, he emerges in print as an anarcho-gay drug fiend and Sufi pirate, compared to whom Salmon Rushdie is as orthodox as an ayatollah. Hakim's the guy who put the Temporary Autonomous Zone on the map.
16. However similar they might seem in their jointly unspeakable practices, their unabashedly unnatural acts, Bey and Orridge are quite different. Bey is reclusive and ascetic, a closeted natural philosopher, whereas Orridge is a performer, indeed something of a rock star.
18. And there's my own staid self, known to MONDO readers as a retired cattle rancher, rural gentlemen of such probity that, a couple years ago, I came within one vote of a Republican state senate seat in Wyoming, the most conservative part of the non-Islamic world. I'm a Freemason, a jack-Mormon, and a problem if I've been drinking. In short, just about everything these two are not.
20. And yet...
22. When, by virtue of a couple minor miracles, I was able to horse all three of us into my borrowed apartment in San Francisco's Potero Hill, a curiously complete zone of shared understanding arose between us. It felt as if we'd been opining around the same cracker barrel for years. During the hour and a half this field remained intact, we covered a vast stretch of philosophical country which the hacked and decimated thing below can only hint at.
24. -John Barlow
    
    
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