Aug 26, 2009
POSTED BY Administrator
After the jump is the latest Arthur Bulletin, sent out to all bulletin subscribers via email this afternoon.
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“Command Performance” No. 160
The Arthur Magazine Email Bulletin
August 26, 2009
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We meet again.
1. AYAHUASCA IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Credit where credit is due: one of the most mainstream magazines there is—National fuckin’ Geographic—has just published the best (bar NONE) article ever on the subject of ayahuasca-as-medicine. Features a first-person account of two ayahuasca treatments by courageous reporter Kira Salak, as well as commentary/information/insights from leading, sensible Western ayahuasca researchers (Charles Grob at UCLA; Benny Shanon at Hebrew University, Jerusalem; and psychologist/author Ralph Metzner) and footage of the beginning of an ayahuasca session. No Pinchbeck 2012 newagenik nonsense. Professional journalism for the people at its finest. Key text for a lot of us: “‘Ayahuasca is perhaps a far more sophisticated and effective way to treat depression than SSRIs [antidepressant drugs],’ Grob concludes, adding that the use of SSRIs is ‘a rather crude way’ of doing it. And ayahuasca, he insists, has great potential as a long-term solution.” Read it in print, or checkit out via this link: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/21/excellent-article-on-ayahuasca-in-new-national-geographic/
2. “YEARS LATER, SHE WAS STILL CALLING HER SISTER, TRYING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT EXACTLY HAD HAPPENED….”
Arthur freaks may remember Brian Evenson from his cover feature on Sunn 0))) and Earth, published in Arthur No. 20, and his short bit on an imaginary disease in Arthur No. 7. Regardless, Brian is a brilliant writer of unsettling 21st century fiction, and he’s got a new collection out of short stuff—Fugue State, published by Coffeehouse Press—out now. The story that begins with the text of this entry’s header continues online at http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/11/younger-a-new-short-story-by-brian-evenson/ Or you can just download the story in PDF by clicking here. Thank you to Brian and Coffeehouse Press for making this possible, and as they used to say, look for more of this kind of thing in the future from you friends at Arthur Magazine on our blog and in our website’s new nattily-titled BOOKS section. Internet is nice, but books are better, and that’s the triple-truth Ruth.
3. ARTHURMAG CO-EDITOR DANIEL CHAMBERLIN’S “INTERNET ACTIVITY PAGES”
Chambo is back and he’s linking it altogether in distinctive Chambo style. Catch him regularly at the Arthurmag blog. Here’s some of his recent stuff:
• AFRO SCI-FI: Sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor is talking with all of her pals about whether or not “Africa is ready for science fiction” as a guest-blogger on the Nebula Awards website and it’s chock full of clever anecdotes about creating sci-fi that appeals to non-Western audiences. As Notre Dame professor Naunihal Singh puts it, “Bring the Terminator to West Africa, and he’d stop running in a day. He’d sit there and glitch. It’ll be hard to make people afraid of a future where computers take over the world when they can’t manage to keep the computers on their desk running.” There’s also lots of great jumping off points for exploring other African sci-fi writers and absolutely bonkers-looking Nollywood B-movies like Across The Bridge; that’s the trailer up top there, sample line: “Are you willing to suck the breast of ever-flowing milk?” [Nebula Awards via Harper's]
• ATTN NEW WELFARE QUEENS: If you spend a lot of time reading Rushkoff’s commentary here in Arthur on the current death throes of American laissez faire capitalism, you probably know that when the unemployment numbers go down it’s often ’cause people STOP looking for work, rather than b/c they got jobs. But that doesn’t matter right now, ’cause “California’s jobless rate reached a fresh post-World War II high in July, climbing to 11.9%,” as the LA Times reported last week. WELCOME TO THE AMERICAN DOLE, you deadbeats. Here’s a great blog that’ll show all you n00b unemployees how to work it: UNEMPLOYMENTALITY has all the tips, tricks and hacks you’ll need to navigate California’s EDD. E.g. If you’d like to quickly bypass the robots and talk to one of the live drones, call the Vietnamese language line. BRILLIANT. [Unemploymentalitiy]
• MORE LIGHTNING BOLT NEWS: Did you know that lighting sometimes strikes up? See images of a “gigantic jet of upside down lightning” over at the Nature blog. [The Great Beyond]
• MINIMALIST CHRONICLES OF WESTERN DECADENCE: Do you guys read Texts From Last Night? It is a website where American exhibitionists offer up short form narratives about their bad trips, pregnancy scares and a super gross thing called “sharting.” On the one hand it’s as dumb a time-waster as LOLCats, but on the other it is like Ayman Al Zawahiri’s darkest fantasies of Western Decadence rendered in minimalist text-messaging prose, the area code from whence said texts were typed being the only identifying detail. [TFLN]
(813): I think dad’s getting high again. His last google search was “awesome ping pong shit.”
(323): The idiot babysitter thought my dildo was a teething toy and gave it to our child.
(1-323): Did you put it in the freezer again?
• AWESOME PING PONG SHIT: As it happens, that “high dad” had the right idea, Googling “awesome ping pong shit.” Case in point, the John McEnroe-caliber table tennis antics seen here: http://www.youtube.com/v/0laUX453tlQ
4. MUSIC WE ARE DIGGING ON AT HEADQUARTERS EAST, CENTRAL AND WEST
a. “You’re a Target” from NO AGE of Los Angeles, California: My Bloody Valentine smear plus concise punk at a Husker Du tempo. Nice!!! Available now as stream, next month in real world from Sub Pop of Seattle, Washington on thee new “Losing Feeling” EP. MP3, stream, purchase info etc: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/26/new-no-age/
b. “Now That I’m a Man Full Grown” – a hurricane of acoustic folk-blues from JACK ROSE of Philadelphia, released this year by the good folks at VHF Records. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/26/a-hurricane-of-acoustic-folk-blues-jack-rose/
c. “Motorboke” – psych rock rumble from WOODEN SHJIPS of San Francisco, Calfiornia, off their latest album Dos brought to your ears byo ne of America’s finest record labels, Holy Mountain of Portland, Oregon. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/26/wednesday-afternoon-psych-rock-rumble-wooden-shjips/
d. “Dear One” by PISCES —recorded in 1969, finally issued this summer by the lovely gents at Numero Group of Chicago, Illinois. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/24/late-night-psychedelia-pisces-dear-one-1969/
e. “Trouble” by HOPE SANDOVAL AND THE WARM INVENTIONS—another glamorously doomed blues serenade, with a rare chord change, from their forthcoming second album, Through the Devil Softly, out in late September from the good people at Nettwerk Records. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/24/monday-evening-music-hope-sandoval-and-the-warm-inventions/
f. “Networking” by PENS—from the sassy British misses’ zero-fi party jamz debut “hey friend, what you doing?” out next month on LP and CD via De Stijl Records of Minneapolis, Minnesora. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/18/sass-on-parade-pens/
g. “Colossus” by LIGHTNING BOLT—a heavy saga-as-song from the dude-os’ long-abornin’ forthcoming album “Earthly Delights” on Load of Providence, Rhode Island. MP3, stream, beautiful floral B. Chippendale album cover, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/17/new-lightning-bolt-epic-for-ya-colossus/
h. Perfect meditation aid, but also just striking as music/sound/drone: a shimmering 10-minute excerpt from BRENDAN MURRAY’s “Commonwealth,” released last year (and still available) via 23five. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/17/monday-evening-meditation-aid-music-brendan-murray/
i. “Freeway In Mind” a sweet tune by the infamous KURT VILE off his sleeper sub-hit, “Constant Hitmaker,” released last year by Gulcher Rec ords from somewhere in Florida. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/17/a-tune-for-you-kurt-vile/
j. “Cocaine Wedding” by THEUSAISAMONSTER—refusenik prog from one of the decade’s greatest-yet-underheard bands. From last year’s “Space Programs” released thru Load Records of Providence, Rhode Island. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/16/refusenik-prog-from-theusaisamonster/
k. “Her Death” by LOREN CONNORS—spectral midnight space blues, from the bottomless “Juliet” album, released a few years ago by the good people of Family Vineyard Records of Indiana. MP3, stream, purchase info: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/15/spectral-midnight-space-blues-loren-connors/
l. ESPERS covering Blue Öyster Cult’s “Flaming Telepath” live two friday ago at Harvest Records’ Transfigurations Fest in Asheville North Carolina. Downloadie: http://bit.ly/GdXuE
5. MASS ORGANIZATION FOR SERIOUS CHANGE IS OVER, SEZ RUSHKOFF (2009)
An End to Movements
by Douglas Rushkoff – Aug 15, 2009
The national healthcare movement was doomed from the start. TV clips of shouting matches at town halls and fear-mongering by cynical politicians may be lamentable, but we are witnessing something more profound than the collapse of civic discourse. The failure of a movement that could rightly claim over 70 percent public acceptance just a month ago, exposes the inherent failure of movements of any kind to effectively address our society’s ills.
That’s right. Mass organization may just have been a twentieth century thing: collective actions of all sorts—good and bad—were responses to the corporatization of government and industy. As such, they took the form of the entities with whom they sought to do battle. But—like the top-heavy, highly abstracted creatures they were created to counter —they are proving utterly incapable of providing an alternative to what they would replace.
They did work for a time. When a corporation had the power to hire a police force to crush labor unrest, labor created its own collective, virtual structure to fight back: the union. When disenfranchised blacks faced Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights movement gave them a tent under which to organize, a charismatic leadership to follow, and a clearly articulated cause to promote. It was branded. Marches could be scheduled, buttons could be worn. And it worked.
Between the 1960s and today, however, the mediaspace through which these causes disseminated ideas and gained momentum has changed. The best techniques for galvanizing a movement have long been co-opted and surpassed by public relations and advertising firms. Whether a movement is real or Astroturf has become almost impossible for even discerning viewers to figure out. The question often becomes the new content of the Sunday morning news panel, taking the place of whatever real issue might have been addressed.
But the problem is not simply that we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between real movements and cynically concocted fake ones. It’s that they are functionally indistinguishable. They may as well be the same thing.
In our current position, when disconnection from the real world is itself a cause for concern, movements only serve to disconnect us further from the actionable. They give us content for websites, language for our bumper stickers, and faces to put on our ideals. But they distract us from the matter at hand, and worse, turn our attention upward toward brand mythologies instead of immediately before us to the people and problems that need our time and energy. In the place of real connections to other people, we get the highly charged but ultimately fake connection to an image.
This is why progressives are so disillusioned by President Obama. He was never anything other than a centrist Democrat. But “brand Obama” gave his supporters—a movement in the fullest sense of the word—an abstracted ideal on which to focus. At least until his election. Meanwhile, the real requirements of progressive activists to contribute to their neighborhoods, promote local business and agriculture, invigorate failing public schools, were again left to someone else. This is not the failure of a president, but the flawed functionality of movements themselves.
For while civil rights, suffrage, and many other causes were largely won through traditionally organized, long-fought, top-down movements, the scale on which these great battles were waged is one no longer appropriate to the tasks at hand. In fact, it is the scale itself on which we have been attempting to orchestrate human affairs that is suspect.
Activists would do more to fight Big Agra simply by subscribing to their local Community Supported Agriculture groups. We’d more effectively pull the rug out from under a corrupt financial sector by simply investing in one another’s businesses—our own town restaurants and drug stores—instead of outsourcing our retirement savings to Wall Street. We could more easily re-invent public schools by volunteering our time to them directly, instead of sending our kids to private schools while we sign petitions for government to re-prioritize. And even in health care, we’d end up cutting everyone’s costs by commuting less, smoking less, landscaping less, and, yes, hating less. For each of these actions triggers different responses, undermines industries, requires new legal structures, and so on. It’s tiny, but it’s almost fractal in its impact.
For as the alternative is now teaching us, one size does not fit all. Americans, in particular, have been living under the premise that there’s something to buy, vote for, or believe in that will simply change everything. And it’s certainly still possible that government could develop the single payer system that pretty much everybody knows deep down would bring the best of industrial health care to the most people.
But just as we are learning that industrially produced food is not ultimately nutritious, a top-down, passionately executed, and highly branded movement is not ultimately effective.
In fact, by creating and branding a movement, even the most well-meaning activitsts are disconnecting from terra firma, and instead entering the world of marketing, public opinion, and language selection. Potential participants, meanwhile, are distracted from whatever on-the-ground, constructive and purposeful activity they might do. They get to join an abstracted movement, and participate by belonging instead of doing, or blogging instead of acting.
6. MASS ORGANIZATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE IS OVER, SEZ LEW WELCH (1967)
From an old Com/Co Broadside written by Beat poet/life actor Lew Welch and distributed on the Haight Ashbury in late March, 1967… (see copy of original here: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/21/the-diggers-papers-no-21-a-moving-target-is-hard-to-hit-by-lew-welch…
A MOVING TARGET IS HARD TO HIT
Whatever tribe I am the reincarnated member of, apparently won, or lost, or survived, as Ishi’s TRIBE, simply by fading away, dispersing, a whisp of fog no one can strike: “a moving target is hard to hit.” This can be the reverse of cowardice, it takes great courage, at times, to back off from what is rightly your place to stand.
Therefore, this is not advice for all. Some of you are people who stand there and take it, as the poles did, the ones who did, attack the hordes of tanks on horseback, with futile swords. Beautiful, that is your shot. It is not mine.
When 200,000 folks from places like lima ohio and cleveland and lompoc and visalia and amsterdam and london and moscow and lodz suddenly descend, as they will, on the haight-ashbury, the scene will be burnt down. Some will stay and fight. Some will prefer to leave. My brief remarks are for the latter. I will stay. At some distance. Available. But my advice for those who have a way or ways similar to mine: disperse.
Gather into TRIBES of 15 or less. Communal “families” of 5 adults (however divided into sexes) and the natural number of children thereby made, is ideal for nomadic tribal dispersal action.
More than 3/4 of the state of California is national forest, national park, or state forest or park. Take your truck or car and make your camp in the part of the state you like most. Most parks require that you move in two weeks. Some places require moving every two days. This is only fair. The idea is, no one has the right to hog one campsite for the summer.
Choose unfamous forests. Avoid yosemite. Work, honestly, with the forest ranger. Write the state of california for their booklet. I think the feds have a similar campsite guide.
Also, volunteer for summer fire fighting work. It’s good work, well paid, and necessary. When the fire starts they come to your camp and take you to the scene of disaster.
Another thing, as I was once quoted: “sometimes you only have to step 3 feet to the left and the whole insane machine goes roaring by.” Or something like that.
The point is, for those who have this kind of way, not out of cowardice, but as WAY, that sitting in the haight-ashbury in all that heat and the terrible crowd you cannot help anyway (maybe), is simple insanity.
Disperse. Gather into smaller tribes. Use the beautiful public land your state and national governments have already set up for you, free. If you want to.
Most Indians are nomads. The haight-ashbury is not where it’s at — it’s in your head and hands. Take it anywhere.
…Lew Welch
Church of One
March 29, 1967 San Francisco
Planet Earth
7. PETE TOMS’ PINK TOMBS PRETTY PRETTY
“Pink Tombs,” serialized in its entirety recently on Arthur Magazine courtesy of the artist hisself and Arthur Comix Editor Jason Leivian of Floating World Comics of Portland, Oregon, is now available direct from Toms himself. Why should you own a physical copy of something you may have already read online, for free. Well internet is nice but the real world is at, books are cool, and Pete can make more comics for you when he has a full stomach. The internet hasn’t fed him yet baby! Go here for more reasons a patrons’ edition of PINK TOMBS, more info on h ow to buy the sucker, and to examine the comics story if you somehow missed it first time ’round: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/20/pink-tombs-limited-edition-print-run-available-now/
8. HOUND DOG TAYLOR HOUSEROCKS YOU FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE THANKS TO THE INTERNET
Some of the finest music you will ever hear, here, now now NOW. Turn it up til the speakers are blowing out, turn down the lights, move the furniture outside, get out the best whiskey and get down to business. The world is going to hell, let’s enjoy what’s left of its greatness while we still can, goddammit… http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/08/21/friday-night-boogie/
Paz and love,
Arthur Magazine Outdoor Houserockers
Fishtown * The Russian River * a swimming hole near you