BYRON COLEY
http://ecstaticyod.com

THURSTON MOORE
http://twitter.com/#!/DemoedThoughts
http://flowersandcreampress.com

JESSE LOCKS

TRINIE DALTON
http://sweet-tomb.blogspot.com

ARIK ROPER
http://arikroper.com/blog

DANIEL CHAMBERLIN
http://www.danielchamberlin.com

DAVE REEVES
http://twitter.com/#!/crosbyreeves

PETER RELIC
http://www.peterjrelic.com/

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
http://twitter.com/#!/rushkoff

PAUL CULLUM
secret projects

MOLLY FRANCES
http://mollyfrances.com

OLIVER HALL

ERIK DAVIS
http://twitter.com/#!/erik_davis

CENTER FOR TACTICAL MAGIC
http://www.tacticalmagic.org

NANCE KLEHM
http://spontaneousvegetation.net

KRISTINE MCKENNA
http://foggynotionbooks.com

GABE SORIA
http://www.bitchinville.blogspot.com

TOM DEVLIN
http://www.drawnandquarterly.com

JOSHUA SINDELL

PLASTIC CRIMEWAVE (STEVE KRAKOW)
http://plasticcrimewave.com

JAMES PARKER
http://www.theatlantic.com/james-parker/

JORDAN CRANE
http://whatthingsdo.com/

EDDIE DEAN
Wall Street Journal
Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times by Ralph Stanley with Eddie Dean

EDEN BATKI
http://www.edenbatki.com

STACY KRANITZ
http://www.stacykranitz.com

JOSEPH REMNANT
http://twitter.com/#!/JosephRemnant

ALIA PENNER
http://twitter.com/#!/aliapenner
http://www.aliapenner.com/

JOHN COULTHART
http://twitter.com/#!/johncoulthart

ALAN MOORE
http://www.dodgemlogic.com/

WILL SWOFFORD CAMERON
http://www.perfectwavemag.com
http://www.boo-hooray.com
http://twitter.com/will_cameron

CAMILLA PADGITT-COLES
http://ivymeadows.blogspot.com

JASON LEIVIAN
http://floatingworldcomics.com

TRAVIS CATSULL
http://www.haggardandhalloo.com

ALVIN BUENAVENTURA
http://buenaventurapress.com/

SPECTRE
http://twitter.com/#!/SPECTREVISION

EMILIE FRIEDLANDER
http://www.visitation-rites.com

MELANIE PULLEN
http://www.theagencygroup.com/artist.aspx?ArtistID=5009

DANIEL PINCHBECK
http://twitter.com/#!/DanielPinchbeck

SONNY SMITH
http://www.sonnysmith.com/

MICHAEL SIMMONS

JOE CARDUCCI
http://newvulgate.blogspot.com

RAINBOWS, CAPRICORNS, VIRGOS & ALCHEMY…
This Sunday March 13th please join us for a series of events at THE FREE CHURCH:

Beginning promptly at 8pm:
A lecture about rainbows by TRINIE DALTON:
Trinie will give a slide-talk about rainbows what they are, how they’re formed, and their roles in the history of art, spiritualism, mythology, and color theory.

at 8:45pm
A video screening curated by CATHERINE TAFT:
Catherine Taft presents a Capricorn/Virgo-inspired selection of videos by Dale Hoyt, Lauren Lavitt and Andrew Steinmetz

and at 9:30pm
RON REGÉ, JR. will read (and project!) comics from The Cartoon Utopia concerning the basic tenants of Alchemy and Hermetic Philosophy in Fairy Tale.”

This event will be situated in LUX, an installation by Maureen Keaveny

come!

Public Fiction in Highland Park
749 Avenue 50, 90042
http://www.publicfiction.org/

illustration by Arik Roper

Arthur, such as it is, is set to close March 15, 2011.

The Arthur online archive and Store will remain operational for as long as makes sense.

Thank you kindly, and love to all.

A: Arthur has been on hiatus from print publication since December, 2008, when for the first time in Arthur’s six-year history, we were unable to go to press, due to repercussions from that year’s financial catastrophe, fatigue, mounting debts, etc etc.

It’s February, 2011. Although I’ve been able to clean up almost all of Arthur’s debt (magic works!), I still do not have the logistical means to resume print publication. Arthur needs a West Coast-based someone to handle its business affairs—that is, a publisher/co-owner—cuz I sure can’t do everything myself. It’s a challenging gig, fer shure, but… Know anyone? Please be in touch.

Jay Babcock
editor-owner, Arthur Magazine

now let me tell you
what is a Brahmasastra
Brahmasastra, hindu weapon of war
near as I can make out
a flying wedge of mind energy
hurled at the foe by god or hero
or many heroes
hurled at a problem or enemy
cracking it

Brahmasastra can be made
by any or all
can be made by all of us
straight or tripping, thinking together
like : all of us stop the war
at nine o’clock tomorrow, each take one soldier
see him clearly, love him, take the gun
out of his hand, lead him to a quiet spot
sit him down, sit with him as he takes a joint
of viet cong grass from his pocket . . .

Brahmasastra can be made
by all of us, tripping together
winter solstice
at home, or in park, or wandering
sitting with friends
blinds closed, or on porch, no be-in
no need
to gather publicity
just gather spirit, see the forest growing
put back the big trees
put back the buffalo
the grasslands of the midwest with their herds
of elk and deer

put fish in clean Great Lakes
desire that all surface water on the planet
be clean again. Kneel down and drink
from whatever brook or lake you conjure up.

Download: “I Wanna Thank You Jesus”—Bishop Manning and the Manning Family (mp3)

Stream:

Here’s some proper Sunday morning message music from North Carolina’s Bishop Manning and The Manning Family, sourced off the recently released “Converted Mind – The Early Recordings,” a fantastic new collection of their recordings. “Converted Mind” features 28 cuts, recorded mostly from the 1970s, with extensive liner notes by Alan Young, vintage photos and 7-inch label shots. Highly recommended for believers and non-believers alike. Available on CD for $13 direct from the Fat Possum Records affiliate, Big Legal Mess Records of Oxford, Mississippi.

Download: “DDB” – The Psychic Paramount (mp3)

Stream:

Eight—no, NINE—minutes of ear-shearing action rock from a gifted instro band that’s been silent on the recording front for too many years. Give in now. From II, out Feb 22 via the good folks at No Quarter.

More: http://www.thepsychicparamount.blogspot.com

New cut “Perfect Life” off Belong’s forthcoming album ‘Common Era,’ out March 21 through the good folks at Kranky. The dreamy fog/mugginess-on-the-needle sound, memorably investigated by Gabe Soria in his piece on Belong in Arthur No. 23 (with illustrations by Arik Moonhawk Roper) is still here, but now the New Orleans duo have ’80s (read: Martin Hannett) electronic drums and Syd Barrett/young-man-lost vocals. Not gloomy in the least—beautiful, like an electric swan in a starlit bayou.

Belong: http://belongneworleans.blogspot.com

Interview with American fabulist author, critic, artist and longtime Arthur contributor and inspiration Trinie Dalton: http://twodollarradio.blogspot.com/2011/02/qa-with-editor-trinie-dalton.html

Download: “Fragrant Nimbus” – Skull Defekts (mp3, 14mb)

Stream:

Six and a half this-just-in minutes off Peer Amid, a new album by Swedish band Skull Defekts, who now feature the sui generis tattooist-shaman-Lungfisher Daniel Higgs on vocals. It’s a brilliant album, and I wish we could share a different track—as good as this one is, it’s not quite representative of the album’s overall occultist Sonic Youth vibe—but here you go. Figure it out for yourself. Cover artwork by Frederik Söderberg.

Details on the band and how to obtain a copy of this album, which is out Feb. 22, here: http://www.thrilljockey.com/catalog/index.html?id=105205

Announcement of Kenneth Grant’s death: http://www.starfirepublishing.co.uk/main_frames_page.htm

Tribute to the great man/magus/scholar/visionary by John Coulthart: http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2011/02/03/kenneth-grant-1924%E2%80%932011/

Covers for some of Kenneth Grant’s truly beguiling books:

Download: “You Can’t Hurry God” — Rev. John Wilkins (mp3)

Stream:

Gorgeous title track off Reverend John Wilkins’ debut album You Can’t Hurry God—which is otherwise pretty foot-stompin’ and hand-clappin’—just out on CD for 13 bucks from Mississippi’s Big Legal Mess Records, a label all music fans should be keeping an eye on. Big Legal Mess is an offshoot of Fat Possum Records, more in line with their ’90s/early ’00s commitment to releasing new albums by underheard local blues musicians like Junior Kimbrough, RL Burnside, Cedell Davis, T-Model Ford, and many others, that were free of the studio polish and cheesy showboating of most American blues recordings from the last three decades. This treasure of an album, produced by Amos Harvey and recorded by Fat Possum vet Bruce Watson, is very much in that ’90s Fat Possum vein.

There’s a lot to say about John Wilkins, and where this music comes from—go to the Big Legal Mess website (address below) for the full scoop—but real quick: Wilkins played guitar with O.V. Wright in the ’60s, as well as performing in local churches, parties and clubs, very much in the North Mississippi Hill Country country-blues style of his father Reverend Robert Wilkins, whose 1930s version of “That’s No Way To Get Along,” entitled “Prodigal Son,” was later covered by the Rolling Stones on Beggars Banquet. Since the early ’80s, Reverend John Wilkins has been pastor at Hunter’s Chapel Church in Tate County, Mississippi. Past members of this congregation include Fred McDowell and his wife Annie Mae, Other Turner and Napolian Strickland. Its singers recorded the album Amazing Grace: Mississippi Delta Spirituals By The Hunter’s Chapel Singers Of Como, Miss. for Testament Records in 1966.

You Can’t Hurry God sports a full bass-drums-guitar-Hammond lineup, with Reverend Wilkins’ daughters on backing vocals. Wonderful and hallelujah!

Tons more biographical, recording and ordering info: http://biglegalmessrecords.com/revwilkins.htm

906 (Radiant Strategy), 36″ x 36″

Loveless sez: “This unique Glue Painting process has been in development for 15 years. It involves an original wet-on-wet technique that yields an intricate patterned surface of milky translucence.”

More: http://wlovelessart.blogspot.com

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — At the first protest, on Jan. 25, Majd Mardini noticed that an ambulance could not get through the crowd of demonstrators. Outgoing, voluble and anything but shy, he began asking people to step aside, parting the crowd so the ambulance could get through.

From this small gesture, Mr. Mardini, 37, and several other men who stepped in to help discussed the fact that citizens would have to work together if the protests against the Egyptian government were going to proceed without tearing their city apart.

Out of these humble beginnings, the Popular Committee for the Protection of Properties and Organization of Traffic was born. “What we tried to do first was protect the electricity, water, gas — even the state-owned ones,” Mr. Mardini said, his voice a hoarse whisper after starting on the street at 8 in the morning on Sunday and finishing at 6:30 a.m. Monday, with a two-hour nap before hitting the road again. His stubble is gaining on his soul patch, and if he does not shave soon he will have a full beard.

Compared with the chaos in Cairo, Alexandria has seemed relatively orderly, though only relatively. In some neighborhoods the only building that has been destroyed is the police station, though there has been looting in others. The streets are filled with volunteers.

“We want to show the world that we can take care of our country, and we are doing it without the government or police,” said Khalid Toufik, 40, a dentist. He said that he also took shifts in his neighborhood watch, along with students and workers. “It doesn’t matter if one is a Muslim or a Christian,” he said, “we all have the same goal.”

“I am glad, that they are all on the streets to protect us from robbers,” said Hannan Selbi, 21, a student. “We are sure that it’s in the interest of the government to create chaos.”

Soon after Mr. Mardini’s first tentative steps, committee members were recognizable by the simple white armbands they wore, often just strips of fabric. They created logos and distributed fliers asking for more help from the public. Some wear photocopied pieces of paper on their chests like marathon runners’ numbers. Mr. Mardini wore a badge that read simply People’s Committee in red Arabic. But the way people walked up to him and began talking, it appeared he needed no introduction.

The civic enterprise is now divided into four branches: traffic, cleanup, protection and emergency response.

Though others refer to him as the head of the committee, Mr. Mardini said: “We don’t have a leader. This is our country, and we all have to protect it.”

Mr. Mardini, of Syrian and Egyptian descent, has lived in Alexandria for 15 years. He studied in Britain and may have unwittingly prepared himself for his current work when he was employed at the Dubai airport in passenger services. His English is quite good, but he kept forgetting the word “demonstration.” “I never actually had to use the word ‘demonstration,’ ” he said, describing himself as apolitical until he became fed up with the police and corruption and joined the protests.

In his black jacket, black jeans and black boots, Mr. Mardini, who cites Che Guevara as a hero, looks like he should be on a motorcycle, but he said that he walks to stay in touch with as many of the youths directing traffic at intersections and manning checkpoints as possible.

“We have water, juice, chocolate for the kids, because we don’t want to scare them,” he said. “Any problem, and we can call the military to handle the situation.”

In his neighborhood, Sidi Bishr, volunteers had caught and turned over 20 accused criminals to the military as they searched vehicles and checked registration papers against identity cards. The young men at the checkpoints look scary holding knives and heavy pipes but are polite, and despite being volunteers, professional.

Mr. Mardini said he was doing it for free elections. Asked what kind of government he wanted, he said he did not care, even if he disagreed with it, as long as it represented the people’s will.

But when those elections come, he said he would be back managing his small computer business and raising his three young sons, not running for office.

“Candidate? No, I don’t want that,” he said. “I’m a normal guy.”

ZAZEN, Vanessa Veselka’s first novel and Arthur’s first online serialized novel, will finally be available in print in 2011.

In the USA, Zazen will be available May 22, 2011 via Red Lemonade/Cursor, the new publishing house headed up by Richard Nash. Here is the Amazon listing. And here’s the new book cover…

Meanwhile, Zanzibar Editions, a critically acclaimed French publishing house, has picked up ZAZEN after reading it on Arthur, and is translating it for publication in September, 2011, the height of the French literary season.

Congratulations, Vanessa!

Vanessa’s blog: http://vanessaveselka.wordpress.com/

FIGHTING SHADOWS, FINDING LIGHT
A close encounter with enigmatic folk adventurer BEN CHASNY of Six Organs of Admittance
By Jay Babcock, with photography by Allison Watkins

Originally published in Arthur No. 15 (March 2005), available from The Arthur Store for $5

Last summer Ben Chasny told me about his plans for the next record he would be making under his Six Organs of Admittance monniker. The upcoming album would be a turning point for him: it’d be the first Six Organs recordings done in a studio and his first album for his new label (Chicago indie perennial Drag City), sure, but he also wanted the record to be a creative step forward.
“I told them I want to go in there and have some folky stuff, but I also want to attempt something more freaked-out and free,” he said.

School of the Flower, recorded during those August 2004 sessions with drummer Chris Corsano and released last month, is more freaked out and free than previous Six Organs albums. It’s a front-to-end lovely, beguiling work that alternates simple, emotionally reassuring campfire folk songs with expansive, occasionally ominous instrumental tracks: long, quickly fingerpicked acoustic guitar lines repeat and interlink into infinity, electric guitars toll and squall, drums skitter and bubble underneath. The record is like an owl—it sees and knows all, but is willing to communicate to others only some of what it knows. We are lucky—privileged, really–to hear its voice at all.

The following conversation was constructed from a long phone interview in early January and some follow-up elaboratory emails. Chasny and I had been in touch off and on for the previous year or so by email, mostly hipping each other to recent discoveries: books, records, films. To be honest, Chasny was doing most of the hipping, and I was struck by both his strong passion for other artists’ work and ideas, and the degree of erudition in his reading. His impulse may be towards hermithood and withdrawal, to living alone in the woods, but the reality of his life was more complex: he’s a part of a web of consciousness very much of his own making, one that stretches around the globe and involves many of the planet’s most idiosyncratic, hermetic artists. I soon realized that, just as Timothy Leary had instructed, Chasny had gone and found the others—the Japanese psych-folk group Ghost, the bizarre English goth-folk of Current 93’s David Tibet, the utterly indescribable Sun City Girls, and many more I’d never heard of. And then, in the past whirlwind year, he’d actually toured or recorded with many of them, while, at the same time, continuing to be a full-fledged member of Bay Area combo Comets On Fire, whose 2004 album Blue Cathedral was some kind of acid rock knockout masterpiece.

Here’s how it all happened, in Ben Chasny’s own voice.

Arthur: People often wonder if you’re a practicing Buddhist, because of your band’s name.

Ben Chasny: When I did the first record, I wrote “Six Organs of Admittance” on it because I had just read Road to Heaven by Bill Porter. He goes and explores a mountain range in China, encountering for Buddhist and Taoist hermits. One hermit was such a damn hermit that during the conversation with the author, he stopped and asked, Who’s this Chairman Mao you keep referring to? That’s amazing. And in that book I came across the “six organs” phrase—the five senses and the soul make up the six organs of admittance—and it struck me. I thought it’d look really good on the record cover. I put it out, without saying who was on the record or anything. Later, when I decided to put out more records, I figured I’d just take that name.

Talk a little about where you grew up.

I was born in L.A. My dad was sick of the city, so he moved us way up in the middle of nowhere with redwood trees and chickens and bunnies. It was me, my mom and my sister. I grew up in Elk River Valley, a little south of McKinleyville. My dad was always playing shit on the stereo, pretty good popular stuff from the ‘60s. A lot of good folk too, Nick Drake and stuff, and even some weird experimental records like Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. That was how I lived until I was 13 or 14. Then we moved into the city—well, Eureka’s not really a city, it’s just a little dirty town, or a dirty old town, to give it a Pogues description. After school, there was only ever one other kid around, and I had to hike over a hill and go find him to make tree forts. That’s probably why I’m interested in hermits, because I lived that way for a while. Hermits seem to appear in a lot of the literature that I read; when I come across them, it really sticks out in my head. Like Gaston Bachelard says: “The Hermit’s hut is a theme that needs no variation, for at the slightest mention of it, phenomenological reverberations obliterate all mediocre resonance.”

You talk a lot about writers, quoting them on CD sleeves and such. I know you dig the writing of Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey.

Yeah. His ideas are not 100% original, but he makes such a beautiful synthesis out of anarchism, surrealism, chaos theory, Sufism and such. He has this essay about how in certain societies, musicians are the scum of the earth. They’re there to serve a purpose, to do music, to give that, sure, but they’re not elevated like stars. And when you think about it, in that situation, only somebody who really believes in the art itself–not about becoming cool or popular or making money–will actually want to make music. So he talks about the importance of art as art, not as buying, not as putting into museums—not that art can’t be sold, but that art in itself is very, very important, just on the basis of giving to somebody else as a gift. It’s not about selling your paintings for $300 at the coffeeshop: it’s for creating this subversive community – that is the way to start looking at this stuff, as subversion.

What did you study in college?

I didn’t go to college. I’m not really that well read or learned—certain books just really grab me, and I become obsessed with certain authors. I have a few people who I like to read who inform my world. And almost everything I listen to or read translates into music in some way, or a reason to not do music. When I play music, that’s just what comes out: it’s the shit of all the books that are the food.

So you’ve been playing acoustic guitar for a long time, since the mid-‘90s. Why not electric guitar? How did you get started down this acid-folk path?

The first three notes of the first Nick Drake record hit pretty heavy, and made me think I should really think about acoustic guitar and put down the electric bass guitar I’d been playing. That opened me up to Leo Kottke, and later, John Fahey. The music just meant more than getting up there and being silly. At the same time I started to get into Fushitusha and Rudolph Grey and KK Null: really noisy electric guitar bands.

Who’s Rudolph Grey?

Rudolph Grey developed action guitar, which is pure extreme playing. It’s not free jazz. I mean, he’s played with free jazz drummers before, and jazz musicians, but I think his music is more accurately described as action guitar. It stems from no-wave and free jazz. HE is the guy who blew my mind. I got this Rudolph Grey record called Mask of Light and I’m thinking I know stuff about music, I’ve heard experimental music, whatever, and I put that on and he just CLEANED the slate. Anything’s possible. It cleared my mind of everything. Then I could listen to folk music, NEW. Any kind of music. Suddenly, Keiji Haino made sense to me. And Leo Kottke as well. Rudolph Grey: no note is more important than any other note. It has a correlation with a lot of kinds of music, but it’s ACTION GUITAR. Now, Keiji Haino is one of my favorite musicans of all time. Pure sound. Pure emotion. Kan Mikami is an absolute hero of mine: he once said that the only true musician is the musician who has been forsaken by God.

Anyways, I didn’t really know how to put together the rock n roll aspect I liked with folk music. So I started listening to acid folk music, which melts the two together: Ghost were a really huge inspiration to me to start playing folk music, and there’s that one Amon Duul record that’s heavily acoustic. Through the Forced Exposure catalog, I found out that PSF [a Japanese record label] had these compilations called Tokyo Flashback, and on the third one, there’s a picture of the guy sitting in what I guessed were the PSF offices, and there’s records stacked to the ceiling, a total mess, with this box in the front that’s labelled “acid folk.” I remember thinking, I don’t know what’s in that box, and I don’t exactly know what it would sound like, but whatever it is, it’s probably really great. I want to make music that you could put in that box.

So I just made what I was looking for. I’m trying to shed it lately, though, trying to go for the folk thing, a more natural song thing. There’s too many traps in trying to do ‘acid folk.’

So it’s more about songwriting at this point?

Kind of. But I’m not even that good of a songwriter. I figure that I’m kind of good at a bunch of stuff. I’m not really that amazing at one thing. I’m kind of good. That’s enough for me. The first step in overcoming one’s mediocrity is to be aware of it. Hopefully at some point I can overcome it. Artists like Tomokawa Kazuki and Kan Mikami play folk music like it is a beautiful knife (and not coincidentally were part of their own political resistance!). I always return to those two when I am in doubt about music. They are fire and a thousand hurricanes and the beautiful mist and the blooming garden. Folk is not some trend for them, but then again, their brand of folk is more volatile than any rock band I can think of. That is something to aspire to: to find the dirt in a melody and a flower in the chaos. I think I am about a million miles away from that. But I hope I can get closer, everyday, to be that strong.

Judging from your facility with the acoustic guitar, I assume you practice a lot…

Not anymore. Ten years ago, when I started getting into acoustic guitar, I was really studying the guitar, learning things about it. I
was only working two days a week. That went on for like three years. Then I realized if I studied any more, this is gonna be bullshit. I’m going to make music that’s not interesting to anybody but guitarists. That’s when I realized I better start working on actually communicating—writing songs and all that. At that time I was playing with this violinist who’d been playing since she was four. We’d duet, that’s where I learned a lot of finger picking techniques. (Finger picking is using your right hand to play the strings and usually using your thumb to play the bass strings in different patterns.) But after that, it wasn’t very interesting to me at all. There are other people out there who are really good guitarists and are doing really good things with guitar, pushing it out. But it just doesn’t interest me. I’d rather become good at playing rocks. I’d like to be a fucking virtuoso of stone playing; knowing the right stones that resonate, how big, where to play them, things like that. That’s much more interesting than guitar. I don’t respect the guitar the way guitarists do. You can ask Ethan. [laughs] Even my new acoustic that I just bought now has a big crack in it from me putting my fist into it.

You know, I was talking with Stephen O’Malley [guitarist in SUNNO))) and Khanate] a few months ago about how there was a time when the acoustic guitar was an instrument of resistance. I don’t mean in the naive ‘60s, when to most people resistance meant putting up a picture of a Hindu god, smoking some grass and singing about getting it together. That wasn’t the real musical resistance of the ‘60s (though the folks singing about getting it together really were resistant to a fucked war. I’m talking about a resistance of culture rather than a resistance of political stupidity and death). The resistance was in feedback and a wall of destruction from rock ‘n’ roll, the very simulacrum of resistance today. But sometime in the late ‘90s, for me anyway, the acoustic guitar was a part of the culture of resistance, even against a resistant culture. Tomokawa Kazuki, Kan Mikami, and Ghost were right up there as my heroes. At the time, everyone was making noise records and noise from Masonna, Solmania, Hijokaidan ruled the underground. A lot of them were great, like the aforementioned and Michael Morley and Rudolph Grey and A.N.P. But like any trend, there became more and more derivative versions of it all. And so even though I loved Bob Banister and the Noggin records, I didn’t want to join the pack, and I knew that my version would just be a derivative of a copy of a notion of wanting acceptance. To resist, I picked up the acoustic guitar. And that’s it! That’s the origin of it all. Now, years later, everything is flowing the other way. It makes me want to make that noise guitar record I always wanted to make, and I will.

And that’s what I love about John Fahey. He was a man of resistance, even against himself. I could give a fuck about his finger picking or melody. I love his writing more than his playing. If you can’t understand that his world was one of absolute hurt and resistance you will never understand any part of how beautiful his music was. He would burn it all, in his memory, again and again. That is a personal resistance.

You seem simultaneously attracted to these resistant individuals, who are almost like modern hermits, and also to the idea of a community, which necessarily involves others.

I’d like to have a place to live where I lived all by myself somewhere, but…I’ve realized I need friends. Hanging out, community, is really good. I don’t think I couldn’t live all by myself, I’d get pretty depressed. All we have is our friends, and giving, and making things as our hope. I may be making records for a few people to listen to, but you better know that there are things going on that are much more important. Like dinners and gatherings against all the bullshit of the world. Like a letter for one. If it doesn’t hold a trace of possibility, it is worthless. That is how I judge what is made, whether for the public or private. Because it is all worthless when it comes down to it. There is only inspiration—which is our analogue for the WANT TO LIVE in Eastern thinking—and there is Nothing, which we will all be faced with at some point. So hold on to your friends and laughter and family and hope. Nothing else exists.

You’ve told me before that you considered your records to be dark records but that you always tried to put a hint of light in there. The new record, though, doesn’t seem as dark to me, overall.

The new one isn’t dark in that way, and that’s why—I think—I was able to explore musical ideas on School of the Flower that I wasn’t able to explore before. Because before I was dealing with emotional ideas and emotions, trying to wrestle with this or that.
When I did Dark Noontide, I was really inspired by Current 93. I was listening to Thunder Perfect Mind pretty religiously for a while. They’re always pegged as gothic, especially cuz [Current 93’s] David Tibet’s earlier life is influenced by Crowley, which he has totally renounced since then… Thunder Perfect Mind is the record where he started talking about more personal things. When I first heard it, I was really disappointed. His delivery was a little too dramatic for me at the time. I didn’t get into it for a full year. Then I went through a super bad space where I quit my job, because I really couldn’t communicate, I had this really bad bout of depression, and Thunder Perfect Mind was pretty much the only kind of music I could listen to for some reason…I kind of just suddenly got it. It was as if his vocals where a veil to keep the listener away, and once the veil was lifted, his vocals became AMAZING to me. To me, it’s not about magic or the gothic side or anything that a lot of people peg him as, but like, inside of all of that, inside of the darkest time, he’s always looking for some little fraction of light. So when I started listening to it I felt pretty close to that.

About the same time I started getting into Current 93, I made the pinnacle of the crazy, emotional records that I’ve done is Nightly Trembling. It’s called that because that’s what was happening. Originally it came out in an edition of 33, just on lathe cut. (It was recently reissued on Time-Lag Records. We only did 500 of them. Eventually it’ll be available.) The reasoning was… You know how when you have to take a piss really bad while driving a car, your consciousness focuses on one point, and you’re not aware of much else? It’s the same thing when you’re depressed: your consciousness focuses on one point and it becomes a feedback loop, and it’s really hard to get out of that. Which is really similar to what Bruce Kapferer talks about in Feast of the Sorcerer, which is about Sri Lankan Buddhist sorcery and anti-sorcery. When you’re under a sorcery attack, you get this feedback loop that you can’t get out of. So, they have these anti-sorcery rites that allow people to break out in certain ways. The ritual is called a Suniyama and it encompasses theater and music as well as the destruction and exhaustion of wealth, much like a potlatch. I thought that was what I needed to do. So I made this record. It was based on that book, and also on Marcel Mauss’ The Gift, which is about potlatches: you know how certain cultures in the South Pacific islands, instead of warring, they give gifts! That idea—the power of the gift—and Hakim Bey is always talking about that—this project was totally based on all that. I made 33 of these records and I handpainted all of them. I got this beautiful paper from China. Every one had handwritten liner notes. The same liner notes, but on a whole page. Wrote out all the liner notes, painted them, and then just gave every single one of them away to different points that I knew where people were: one in Australia, Germany, London, New Zealand. If I had had friends at the poles I would have sent them there! The idea was to set up this web of consciousness around the world in order to reverse my own consciousness loop. And that’s a kind of reverse—well, Anthony Braxton talks about creating webs of consciousness around the world. For good, not for your own personal bullshit like I was doing. He talks about doing particular concerts at particular places to create a web of consciousness. So I did sort of a reverse Anthony Braxton-style thing. But what happened was, it helped!

There’s a certain person that kind of triggered all of this. I wasn’t talking to them at the time—now we’re best friends—but years later, they told me that they’d figured out that at that exact same time that record was released, they’d actually suffered a pretty bad, pretty weird breakdown: they’d started suffering from all the same things I was suffering from—couldn’t go out of the house, couldn’t talk to anybody, bed-ridden, they had to go into therapy for a while. Maybe that’s coincidence, I don’t know. [laughs] It was pretty weird shit. I’m never gonna do that again. That’s one of the reasons I reissued it was to make those records a lot less powerful – reverse a lot of the power. That project was definitely the pinnacle of the depression.

But I’ve been feeling really good lately. Between that and going into a studio, I was able to do stuff that I’ve always wanted to do on the new album. Like that long song.

Still, some things stay the same for Six Organs, live: you always play solo acoustic guitar…

That’s going to change. The new record has more elecric guitar. Live, I want to loop the acoustic guitar and then pick up the electric guitar.

And you’ve always sat down.

That might change too! Cuz my girlfriend just got me a strap for my acoustic guitar…

Next thing you’ll have a harmonica set-up like Dylan…

The strap and the acoustic guitar is a tricky thing, because you could end up looking like Ani di Franco—or you could end up looking like Neil Young. It’s tricky. I usually prefer to sit so people can’t see me at all.

Live it seems like you’re on a tightrope… I can never tell what you’re going to do next.

I rarely go up with a setlist. I just don’t want it to get boring. I come up with setlists if I know there’s going to be a lot of people out there, and I want a safety net, you know? But I think things are gonna change a little bit. I want it to be interesting for me, too—I’ve always been looking at performance from an improvisor’s point of view. It could fail, but when it’s great, it’s amazing—you really break through something, you really feel something you wouldn’t’ve done if you knew exactly what was happening. Mark Twain, when he had to go out on the lecture circuit, he just hated it. He only did it to make money. He was still great, just because his natural stuff was good, but he wasn’t trying to improvise, to search inside of himself. The time for that was sitting at the table, writing something. I don’t know. I’m not the most emotionally stable person, so I can get really bummed out onstage. Somewhere down South I just broke down and had this attack. That was my most shameful show, ever. Sometimes weird things happen when I play. I stopped playing and I told the audience that what they’d heard was NOTHING, it was NO GOOD. Just preaching nihilism and death. It was just horrible. Sometimes things get ahold of me. This year I’ve realized that there are shadows. Sometimes the shadows are really intense, they can take up a lot of space. Sometimes I’m fighting shadows… Sometimes the room is filled with shadows. I can’t describe it, really. Once when I played in L.A., I don’t mean to be all hocus pocus, but really, I was playing and there was only a few people there and I swear to God there were weird shadow entities, non-friendly shadows there, and I started to get super-freaked out.

Are you able to meditate at all?

I don’t meditate — I drink. [laughs] But, by the time I was playing in San Francisco, on that tour last year with Ghost, I wasn’t agitated at all. Everything was so peaceful and quiet. I wasn’t stomping. Ghost have this internal peace within them. I would talk to Batoh after shows and he would ask me why I was so agitated on stage [laughs], he’d tell me that I should try and calm down. He taught me a lot about being peaceful onstage. Then of course a week after that I played with Sun City Girls and they just destroyed all of that. I’d see them just TAKE it. It was THEIR stage. You’re gonna have a good time, and if not, man, you’re gonna get fucked with. They taught me that it’s war on stage. Which I knew it was. [laughs] Once Ghost left the country, I felt like my parents had gone and I could party it up. But of course Sun City Girls have a kind of self-confidence that I’m lacking.

How’s it going playing with Comets On Fire? That allows you to do something different.

It’s hard to divide my time between Six Organs and Comets. If I had my way I’d just tour with both of them, non-stop. We’re all strong personalities, we don’t write a whole lot of music. We’d rather jam out bar band songs and drink beers.

You were working on a free-noise thing with Noel Harmonson thing the other day.

It’s fun to do that. It’s really important. It’s important to be aware of sound as music, rather than music as a nominal and deterministic exercise or science. For me anyway. All things must be possible, at all times. Otherwise, what magic could music even hold? If I want a bunch of laws and rules, I’ll go stand in line at the Oakland DMV! But…I think we should have some sort of disclaimer here to let the folks know that I don’t think anything I say has really much of an importance to anyone. It’s just bullshit. But at least I recognize that. During the day I like to listen to Sun Ra, drink coffee and read about chaos linguistics. And at night I get drunk, and start raging and getting pissed off. And listen to Tomokawa Kazuki or Townes Van Zandt. For the last couple of years, Townes Van Zandt, he’s just my buddy. He feels like my brother. I don’t have a brother, but… I mean, he got really depressed. You listen to his studio records—they’re super-happy! But he was dealing with a lot of stuff. On a music level I like him because, even today, I’ve listened to this one song for years, and just today I figured out these two lines and how fucking brilliant they were “mother was a golden girl, slit her throat just to get her pearls, cast myself into a world, before a bunch of swine” from “Dollar Bill Blues”—and they’d just passed me by because he speaks this language that isn’t flowery. He’s speaking everyday language but then a couple years later, you go, Holy fuck I get it, I can’t believe he put those two words together. He’s absolutely brilliant—anyone can listen to him and get more and more into him. Anytime I hear any music, I’m thinking about it in terms of, Oh that’s a good idea, that’s a bad idea, how does this relate to anything I do. Townes is the only person where I never, ever do that. He’s the only musician I just listen to.

It’s like listening to my brother talk.

Via Don Lattin via Huffington Post: “Here’s some rare footage of an experimental LSD session…from a television program, circa 1956, about mental health issues. The researcher, Dr. Sidney Cohen, was dosing volunteers at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Los Angeles…”

This clip shows a ‘normal’ housewife speaking with Dr. Cohen before taking LSD, then, three hours later, explaining to the good doctor what she is experiencing. This is followed by a brief conversation with philosopher Gerald Heard regarding LSD’s significance, and then a short ad for Lattin’s book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America.

From http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/01/secret_government_informer_karen_sullivan.php

Secret government informer “Karen Sullivan” infiltrated Minnesota activist groups

By Nick Pinto, Wed., Jan. 12 2011 @ 12:59PM

​The Twin Cities activists who had their homes raided by the FBI last September are starting to learn more about why they’re being investigated by a Chicago grand jury in relation to material support of terrorism.

Lawyers for the activists have learned from prosecutors that the feds sent an undercover law enforcement agent to infiltrate the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee in April 2008, just as the group was planning its licensed protests at the Republican National Convention.

Going by the name “Karen Sullivan,” the agent blended in with the many new faces the Committee was seeing at meetings in the lead-up to the RNC. But she stayed active afterward, attending virtually every meeting.

“She presented herself as a lesbian with a teenage daughter, and said she had a difficult relationship with her daughter’s father, which is one of the reasons she gave us for not being more transparent about her story,” says Jess Sundin, a member of the Anti-War Committee and one of the activists who has received a subpoena from the Chicago grand jury. “It was a sympathetic story for a lot of us.”

Sullivan told the group she was originally from Boston but that she had had a rough childhood and was estranged from her family. She said she had spent some time in Northern Ireland working with Republican solidarity groups.

Sullivan at first said that she didn’t have any permanent address in the area, but she eventually got an apartment in the Seward neighborhood. She claimed to be employed by a friend’s small business, checking out foreclosed properties that he might buy. The cover story of a flexible job schedule let her attend all the meetings she wanted to, and to have individual lunches with other activists.

​”She really took an interest,” Sundin said. “It raised some suspicions among other members at first, but after the other undercover agents from the RNC Welcoming Committee came out, and no in our organization did, we figured we didn’t have any. Besides, we didn’t think we had anything we needed to be secretive about.”

Sullivan began to take on more responsibilities with the organization, chairing meetings, handling the group’s bookkeeping, and networking with dozens of other organizations.

In the summer of 2009, Sullivan joined two other Twin Cities activists in a trip to visit Palestine. Somehow, when they landed in Tel Aviv, Israeli security forces knew they were coming, and that they were headed to Palestine.

The three women were told they could get on the next plane back home or they could face detention. Sullivan took the flight. The other two women chose detention and were ultimately deported.

Attorneys for the activists have also learned that prosecutors are especially interested in a small donation the women intended to give to their host organization in Palestine, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees. The group is registered as an NGO with the Palestinian Authority and not listed as a terrorist group by the United States.

Last fall, Sullivan disappeared from the Twin Cities, telling her fellow activists that she had some family business to take care of. She never came back. On September 24, the FBI launched a series of early morning raids on the homes of members of the Anti-War Committee and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

​The FBI would not confirm or deny Sullivan’s identity as a government agent or comment on this story by the time of publication. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago has said it will not comment on anything related to the grand jury investigation.

Last fall the Justice Department’s Inspector General released a scathing report that criticized the FBI for invoking anti-terrorist laws to justify their investigations and harassment of groups including Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Catholic Worker.

“This is exactly what the Inspector General’s report was talking about,” Sundin told City Pages this morning. “The FBI doesn’t have the right to spy on us. It’s an abuse of our democratic rights. We’re supposed to have freedom of association, not, ‘You can associate but we’re going to spy on you.’”

From Jan 13, 2011 Guardian:

Revealed: Second undercover police officer who posed as activist

Spy spent four years living in Leeds and played a central role in planning a demonstration to shut down the Drax power station

The controversy over a police surveillance network embedded in the environmental protest movement has deepened dramatically after the Guardian identified a second undercover officer who spent years living a double life as an activist.

The woman’s name has been known to a group of six activists since Mark Kennedy – the police infiltrator identified by the Guardian on Monday as having spent seven years inside the movement – claimed she was also a police officer when confronted by them about his own identity last October.

Senior police chiefs said they were concerned for the safety of the second spy, and a major operation involving several UK forces is now under way to identify other operatives whose safety may have been compromised by Kennedy.

The second spy spent four years living as an environmental activist in Leeds, gaining the trust of dozens of activists and playing a central role in planning a demonstration to shut down Drax power station in North Yorkshire.

Her deployment ended in 2008, when she told activist friends she was leaving town for personal reasons. The Guardian has established the identity of the officer, who is from a force in the south-east of England, but has decided, after representations from senior police officers, to refer to her only as Officer A, and to use pixellated pictures of her.

Meanwhile politicians across Europe demanded information about the activities of Kennedy, the first undercover operative identified, who was on Tuesday accused of having had several sexual relationships with activists while undercover. Senior police sources have described these relationships as “unacceptable”.

His UK-based handlers have flown to the US in an attempt to find an agent now accepted to have “gone rogue”.

Aside from questions over his conduct while undercover, Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer, committed a serious breach of protocol when he told friends from the protest movement that Officer A was his colleague. A police chief with detailed knowledge of the deployments of undercover officers in the protest movement said Kennedy’s breach of protocol could lead to the “relocation of a considerable number of people”.

That included undercover officers currently involved in ongoing police investigations across the UK and their families. “This is serious stuff,” the police chief said. “Lots of people are at risk – their lives are at risk.”

Kennedy, who has expressed remorse over an operation he told friends was “wrong”, now appears to have been a key player in a pan-European network of leftwing and environmental groups.

Using a fake passport, he travelled to more than 22 countries from his base in Nottingham. A parliamentarian in Germany said Kennedy had been “operating on the border of illegality” in the country, and demanded disclosure about the operation. Kennedy’s activities in Iceland, Ireland and Italy are also coming under scrutiny.

Documents obtained by the Guardian also suggest that, after quitting the Met last March, Kennedy attempted to continue to use his adopted identity to infiltrate protest groups. In an indication he planned to turn his hand to corporate espionage, Kennedy, who is said to have had money problems, set up two companies. One is connected to an individual who previously worked at Global Open, a private security firm set up by a former special branch detective. The company specialises in keeping a “discreet watch” on protest groups.

Police chiefs discussed the unfolding crisis at a meeting of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) yesterday, which has limited company status and to which Kennedy and Officer A were seconded.

It is now believed several undercover police officers have been living long-term in the environmental movement, feeding intelligence back to the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), an Acpo body that runs a nationwide intelligence database of political activists. After concerns were raised about the accountability of NPOIU, police chiefs came up with a plan to move the unit to Scotland Yard. Subject to agreement, the unit will be taken over by Met officers next month.

However, a major review will now be under way into the oversight of officers such as Kennedy. Explaining why he and Officer A had spent so long undercover, the police chief said: “It is simply because of the environment. If you are a deeply ideologically motivated person … then getting close to you to understand your thought processes – and some idea of what you’re doing – takes a lot longer.”

He added that Kennedy’s numerous sexual relations with women would not have been officially sanctioned. “That is conduct that is not acceptable,” he said.

From the Jan 9 2011 Guardian

Undercover officer spied on green activists

Guardian investigation reveals details of PC Mark Kennedy’s infiltration of dozens of protest groups

A police officer who for seven years lived deep undercover at the heart of the environmental protest movement, travelling to 22 countries gleaning information and playing a frontline role in some of the most high-profile confrontations, has quit the Met, telling his friends that what he did was wrong.

PC Mark Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer, infiltrated dozens of protest groups including anti-racist campaigners and anarchists, a Guardian investigation reveals.

Legal documents suggest Kennedy’s activities went beyond those of a passive spy, prompting activists to ask whether his role in organising and helping to fund protests meant he turned into an agent provocateur.

Kennedy first adopted the fake identity Mark Stone in 2003, pretending to be a professional climber, in order to disrupt the UK’s peaceful movement to combat climate change. Then aged 33, he grew long hair and sported earrings and tattoos, before going on to attend almost every major demonstration in the UK up to the G20 protests in London. He was issued with a fake passport and driving licence.

Sensitive details about Kennedy’s activities had been set to be raised in Nottingham crown court in legal argument relating to a case of six activists accused of conspiring to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power station.

But prosecutors unexpectedly abandoned the trial after they were asked to disclose classified details about the role the undercover officer played in organising and helping to fund the protest.

Kennedy, who recently resigned from the Met, is understood to be torn over his betrayal, telling one activist that his infiltration had been “really wrong”. “I’ll just say I’m sorry, for everything,” Kennedy said. “It really hurts.”

Apparently keen for redemption, Kennedy indicated he would “help” the defendants during their trial and was in touch with their lawyer. He backed out three weeks ago, citing his concern for the safety of his family and himself.

The Met could face pressure to explain the ethics of deploying an officer so deep undercover. It has been repeatedly criticised for its handling of protests. A Metropolitan police spokesman said: “We are not prepared to discuss the matter.”

Kennedy is believed to have been one of at least two undercover operatives working for the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, an agency that monitors so-called domestic extremists. He told friends each undercover spy cost £250,000 a year.

The officer was found out in October after friends, some of whom had grown suspicious about a seemingly “perfect activist”, discovered a passport bearing his real name. They eventually unearthed documentary proof that he had been a policeman since around 1994, and, confronted with the evidence, Kennedy confessed. He is now living abroad.

Police arrested 114 activists at a school near Nottingham in April 2009 in a controversial operation to prevent activists from breaking into the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station the next day.

Twenty-six activists were later charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass. Of those, 20 admitted they planned to break into the power station to prevent the emission of around 150,000 tonnes of carbon.

They were convicted after failing to convince a jury their actions were designed to prevent immediate greater harm from climate change. Handing down lenient sentences last week, a judge said they had been acting with “the highest possible motives”.

It is widely presumed that Kennedy tipped off police about the protest. But activists who spent four months working with Kennedy to hatch the plan now question whether he crossed a boundary and became an agent provocateur.

The allegation was set to emerge during the trial of the six defendants who – unlike the other activists – maintained that they had not yet agreed to break into the power station. According to legal papers drawn up by their lawyers, Kennedy helped to organise the demonstration from an early stage, driving on reconnaissance trips of the power station and suggesting the “best and easiest way” to get into the plant.

“He continued to participate, including hiring, paying for and driving a vehicle and volunteering to be one of two principal climbers who would attach himself to the [coal-carrying] conveyor belt. He actively encouraged participation in the action and expressed the view that he was pleased it was going to be an action of some significance,” the papers say.

The documents state that planning meetings for the protest took place at Kennedy’s house and he paid the court fees of another activist arising from a separate demonstration. “It is assumed that the finance for the accommodation, the hire of vehicles and the paying of fines came from police funds,” they state.

Lawyers for the activists submitted their demand for material about Kennedy’s role last Monday. The CPS confirmed it would not proceed with the trial, stating that “previously unavailable information” that undermined its case had come to light.

It said there was no longer sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of prosecution.

“I have no doubt that our attempts to get disclosure about Kennedy’s role has led to the collapse of the trial,” said Mike Schwarz, a solicitor at the Bindmans law firm who represented the activists.

“It is no coincidence that just 48 hours after we told the CPS our clients could not receive a fair trial unless they disclosed material about Kennedy, they halted the prosecution. Given that Kennedy was, until recently, willing to assist the defence, one has to ask if the police were facing up to the possibility their undercover agent had turned native.”

Coming next week: Who Knows What Tomorrow Might Bring, the second volume in Arthur’s digital download mixtape series.

The cover photograph is by KEVIN BAUMAN — http://www.100abandonedhouses.com

Who Knows… is quite different from Blackout, the first volume in Arthur’s digital download series (which is available now as a pay-what-thou-wilt download starting at $4.20—info here.).

More details soon.

More: http://devendrabanhart-art.com

The Industrial Workers of the World — the I.W.W. — “the Wobblies.” The most righteous labor movement ever, and the first to have a sense of humor…and a great songbook.

Came across these via a notice on Mr. Hutchinson’s passing at Rob Young’s Electric Eden blog. Yes, that is Stonehenge in the background. More are available at http://ukrockfestivals.com

Photo by Tim Rooke / Rex Features ( 1259561a )

09 Dec 2010
Prince Charles and Camilla Duchess of Cornwall’s Rolls Royce Phantom VI is attacked by student protesters (leaving it with a smashed window and covered in paint) as they travel to the London Palladium for the Royal Variety Performance.

Download: “Grey Owl” – THEUSAISAMONSTER (mp3)

Stream:

The lead song off R.I.P., the biophile prog-psych band THEUSAISAMONSTER’s new—and final—studio album.

What strange characters. We miss them already.

More info: Northern Spy Records.

THE BEAUTIFUL & THE DAMNED: Punk Photographs by Ann Summa
Edited with an introduction by Kristine McKenna
Foreword by Exene Cervenka
Foggy Notion Books/Smart Art Press
Hbk, 9.25 x 12.25 in. / 112 pgs
“When photographer Ann Summa arrived in Los Angeles in 1978, the city’s punk scene was still fresh, diverse, smart, utterly original—and fertile territory for a young photographer. The Beautiful & the Damned is a collection of her portraits of the musicians, artists and fans who made Los Angeles such a crucial part of the history of punk. Taken between 1978 and 1984, the images mostly revolve around L.A.’s first punk generation, and include portraits of the Germs, the Screamers, X, the Cramps and the Gun Club, among many others. From there, the book expands its scope to accommodate the cross-pollination that took place between L.A.’s punk scene and the fine art community, (at the time, the audience for avant-garde artists such as the Kipper Kids, Johanna Went and Laurie Anderson was primarily drawn from the underground music scene), and the two other cities—London and New York—that played a central role in the birthing of punk. Photographed during their first U.S. tours are U.K. groups the Clash, Magazine, the Fall, the Slits, Bow Wow Wow and the Pretenders, among others. Visiting dignitaries from New York include Television, James Chance, Lydia Lunch and Talking Heads. Also included are portraits of artists who served as an inspiration to L.A. punks—Captain Beefheart, Iggy Pop and David Bowie, among others—plus candid shots of unidentified audience members. Includes 95 previously unpublished images.”

From the introduction…
“Everyone knows that punk rock is rude. What’s less known is that during its first incarnation in Los Angeles, during the late 70s, it was ecstatically beautiful. At that point mainstream culture hadn’t yet detected the scent of money on this newly-born music, and punk hadn’t yet been hijacked by adolescent boys bent on transforming themselves into human cannonballs. Punk was an intimate affair then. Nobody was watching or judging that original band of outsiders, because there was no money to be made, and nothing much to be won or lost at all. There was no reason for those people not to cast off the rules that had governed their world up until that point. And so they cast off the old rules, and made themselves a new world that was entirely their own. And, for a brief, glorious period they operated in a zone of complete freedom.
“The taste of freedom can be startling — you can see that in the faces of many of the people who appear in these pictures. They were surprised to find their tribe — surprised to discover they actually had a tribe. Surprised to learn they could be themselves and be embraced for it. Surprised to find they could create beauty, and live without the comforts of the middle-class homes they came from. What made all of this possible was the simple fact of community. Most L.A. punks of the late 70s were poor, many were high a lot of the time, and everyone was a little crazy. Nonetheless, they supported and shared with one another, and they saw the brilliance in each other.”
$39.95
Info: http://www.beautifulandthedamned.com/book.html
Buy: http://www.artbook.com/9781935202271.html

HOW TO WRECK A NICE BEACH: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop—The Machine Speaks
by Dave Tompkins
Stop Smiling Books
Color, 336 pages
“The history of the vocoder: how the Pentagon’s speech scrambling weapon transformed into the robot voice of pop music. How to Wreck a Nice Beach includes interviews with:
Afrika Bambaataa, Ray Bradbury, Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk, Peter Frampton, Laurie Anderson, T-Pain, Teddy Riley, DJ Quik, ELO, Rammellzee, Arthur Baker, Michael Jonzun, Midnight Star, Lester Troutman of Zapp, Holger Czukay of Can, Donnie Wahlberg, Egyptian Lover, Fab Five Freddy, Forrest J. Ackerman, Man Parrish, Cybotron and Wendy Carlos, composer of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.
”
$25.00 ($10 off the cover price)
Info/blog: http://howtowreckanicebeach.com/
Buy: http://www.stopsmilingstore.com/howtowreckanicebeach.aspx

SPELL TO DRAW YOUR TRUE LOVE
by Dame Darcy
“This multimedia pink 3 ½ in. doll cake is really a little round box containing pink powder puff and magnetism glitter body powder to puff over your skin after bathing. Rose love potion bubble bath, Mini-Chalice, instructions for moon water and a magic wand for stirring your bath. Draw your true love to you now and forever!”
$35
Info/buy: http://www.etsy.com/listing/63883739/love-doll-cake-spell-draw-your-true-love

SMITHEREENS
by Steve Aylett
Scar Garden Press
122 pages
“Collects 19 stories including ‘The Man Whose Head Expanded’, the prophetic ‘Download Syndrome’, ‘The Burnished Adventures of Injury Mouse’, the full text of ‘Voyage of the Iguana’, the last ever Beerlight story ‘Specter’s Way’, ‘Horoscope’, and the closest thing Aylett has ever written to a traditional SF story, ‘Bossanova’ (featuring a robot and two spaceships!) There are also animal-attack-while-writing reminiscences in ‘Evernemesi’ and top-of-the-line declarative bitterness in ‘On Reading New Books’. Snails, whales and cortical drills. Aylett’s last collection.”
$9.55
Info: http://www.steveaylett.com
Buy: Amazon

SWEET TOMB
by Trinie Dalton
Madras Press
Paperback
104pp.
“The story of Candy, a candy-addicted witch who resents her inherited lifestyle. After a fire burns down her gingerbread house, she leaves the forest and ventures out in search of the excitement of a more urban environment. Along the way she encounters a self-mutilating puppet, tastes meat for the first time, and falls in love with Death, a skeletal woman with a shoe fetish. Proceeds benefit the Theodore Payne Foundation.”
$7
Trinie Dalton blog: http://sweet-tomb.blogspot.com/
Info/buy: http://www.madraspress.com/bookstore/sweet-tomb

BLOOD SPORT: THE LOUISIANA COCKFIGHTERS MANUAL
by Stacy Kranitz
Square 80 pgs Premium Paper, lustre finish
Cultural ethnography by photojournalist Stacy Kranitz.
Hardcover with dustjacket, $100
Stacy Kranitz: http://www.stacykranitz.com/
Preview/buy: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1752353

PURE COUNTRY: The Leon Kagarise Archives, 1961-1971
Text by Eddie Dean
Process Media
9.5” x 9.5” • 204 pages • 140 Color images
“Throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, many of country music’s biggest stars played their favorite shows on the small backwoods stages of rural America’s outdoor music parks. These intimate, $1-a-carload picnic concerts might have been forgotten if it hadn’t been for the documenting eye of music lover Leon Kagarise, whose candid photographs of the musicians and their fans provide the only surviving window into this long-vanished world. Kagarise captured dozens of classic country and bluegrass artists in their prime, including Johnny Cash and June Carter, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Bill Monroe, Hank Snow, The Stanley Brothers, and many other greats. Pure Country presents this collection of rare color images for the first time, revealing an archive considered by historian Charles Wolfe to be one of the richest discoveries in the history of American music. Foreword by Robert Gordon.”
$35.00
Preview/buy: http://processmediainc.com/store/books/pure_country.php

DEFEND BROOKLYN by Dave Reeves
“We have all your favorite colors, as long as your favorite color is black.”
$24 tshirt, $40 hoodie
Info/buy: http://defendbrooklyn.com/

ENVISIONING SUSTAINABILITY by Peter Berg
Subculture Books
208 pages
“A collection of the important essays that helped define the bioregional movement and established Berg as an icon in the environmental community. Spans three decades of Berg’s life work, combines the candor, humor and vision that helped shape the sustainability revolution.” Don’t let the unfortunate cover throw you off. This has some classic San Francisco Diggers-era Berg pieces from now-unobtainable broadsides and posters in addition to the aforementioned pivotal bioregionalist texts.
Paperback $11.69, Kindle Edition $8.99
Buy: Amazon

MAKE A TERRARIUM IN AN OLD LIGHTBULB
Informational video: Arthur blog

NOMAD CODES: Adventures in Modern Esoterica by Erik Davis
Yeti Verse Chorus Press
352 pages
“In these wide-ranging essays, Erik Davis explores the codes—spiritual, cultural, and embodied—that people use to escape the limitation of their lives and to enrich their experience of the world. These include Asian religious traditions and West African trickster gods, Western occult and esoteric lore, postmodern theory and psychedelic science, as well as festival scenes such as Goa trance and Burning Man. Articles on media technology further explore themes Davis took up in his acclaimed book Techgnosis, while his profiles of West Coast poets, musicians, and mystics extend the California terrain he previously mapped in The Visionary State. Whether his subject is collage art or the ‘magickal realism’ of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, transvestite Burmese spirit mediums or Ufology, tripster king Terence McKenna or dub maestro Lee Perry, Davis writes with keen yet skeptical sympathy, intellectual subtlety and wit, and unbridled curiosity, which is why Peter Lamborn Wilson calls him ‘the best of all guides to modern American spirituality.’ Cover artwork by Fred Tomaselli.”
$17.95
Buy: http://www.buyolympia.com/q/Item=erik-davis-nomad-codes

HOWLIN’ RAIN “The Good Life” EP
Birdman/American
Ethan Miller from Comets On Fire’s other, earthier acid rock band. Features two originals sandwiching a daring cover of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Burning of the Midnight Lamp.”
$2.97
Preview/buy: iTunes

TED LUCAS “Ted Lucas”
Yoga
Beautiful wise hippie folk music from 1974.
cd $12
Preview/buy: http://yogarecords.com/artists/tedlucas/

IASOS “Realms of Light” dvd
Inter-Dimensional Music
“Iasos has created heavenly visuals to accompany the celestial music on his Realms of Light album. There are visuals for all 8 pieces on the music cd. The visuals are synced with the music with delightful precision. Like the music, some of the visuals are stimulating, and some are relaxing. And all are heavenly, uplifting, beautiful, and celestial. It took Iasos 4 years to learn video special-effects, and then another 3.5 years to actually create the 65 minutes of visuals to go with this music. But finally, here it is! Underlying Purpose: Music is capable of inducing Divine Emotions. Visuals are capable of inducing Divine Thought-Forms. When these two work together synchronistically & synergistically,their combined influence can trigger or “ignite” expanded States of Being. THAT is the Intention behind this DVD.”
$22
Preview/buy: http://iasos.com/detalist/rol-dvd/

EARTH ”A Bureaucratic Desire for Extra Capsular Extraction”
Southern Lord
“For the first time the debut recordings of Earth are available in one concise, beautifully documented capsule. All 7 tracks have been carefully remastered by Mell Dettmer to make a more burly, mammoth and crushing audio experience. Includes liner notes from Dylan Carlson with artwork by Simon Fowler and package design via Stephen O’Malley.”
CD $10, 2xLp $18
Preview/buy: http://blog.southernlord.com/?p=297

ROTARY SIGNAL EMITTER 12-inch picture disk LP by Sculpture
Not even sure if these are even still available—they only made 300 of them—but…gee whiz. Coolest low-cost audio/art object since the Buddha Machine? Yes.
Preview/info: Arthur blog

2011 calendar and poster by RON REGE, JR.
Little Otsu
“Experience the mind-blowing combination of colors and drawings that make up this incredible 2011 fold-out calendar & poster by the talented Ron Regé, Jr. On the calendar side, the amazing devolving drawings form a comic-like linear backdrop to the twinkly bars of dimensional months. Turn it over to find a detailed panoramic scene of hot-air balloons and mountains and lands surrounding a giant inverted triangle of “abracadabra” magic. So at the end of the year, you can flip over the calendar and still have a great poster to hang on your wall, giving this calendar a second life.
Measures 8” wide x 9” tall folded and 24” wide by 18” tall when unfolded. Printed in Hayward, CA with vegetable-based inks on 100% post-consumer recycled 80# cover stock.”
$12.00 USD
flat poster (limited ed. of 50) for $16.00 USD
Preview/buy: http://shop.littleotsu.com/products/2011-calendar-poster-by-ron-rege-jr

“THROUGH THE PSYCHEDELIC LOOKING GLASS” calendar by JOHN COULTHART
“A full colour calendar comprising all-new artwork in a psychedelic interpretation of Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there. The 1860s collide with the 1960s in lurid efflorescence!”
£15.00
Preview/buy: http://www.johncoulthart.com/pantechnicon/lookingglass.html

2011 AUTONOMEDIA JUBILEE SAINTS calendar
32 pages, 12 x 16 inches, saddle stitched
“Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project – a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the “New World” and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. The Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever! Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!
$9.95 / Pay for two, and we will send a third calendar for free!”
Preview/buy: bookstore.autonomedia.org

PLASTIC CRIMEWAVE’S GALACTIC ZOO MIX TAPE CLUB 2011
“Plastic Crimewave, creator of the Galactic Zoo Dossier magazine for Drag City, proprietor of the Galactic Zoo Disk reissue label, leader of spacepunkers Plastic Crimewave Sound, and general music historian/head has reached the end of the fifth consecutive year of his Galactic Zoo Mix Tape Club, and will be taking subscriptions again with another year of Mix Tape-age starting in December. You get six 90 min. tapes (one every other month) with exclusive artwork and the sounds of rare and populist psychedelia, glam, acid folk, prog, boogie, power pop, soft rock, shoegaze, protopunk, hard rawk, experimental, bubblegum, etc. for a mere $30.”
Info: Arthur blog
Paypal at plasticcw@hotmail.com, or send a check or cash to 1061 N. Western Ave, Chicago, IL 60622.

BLACKOUT Arthur mixtape
49-minute compilation curated and sequenced by Arthur editor Jay Babcock to stimulate or simulate a sweet blackout, featuring music by Moon Duo, White Hills, White Noise Sound, Lords of Falconry, Endless Boogie , Masters of Reality, Messages and Enumclaw. Mixed by Bobby Tamkin (Xu Xu Fang), with cover artwork by Arik Moonhawk Roper. All proceeds go to Arthur Magazine. Pay-what-thou-wilt digital download starting at $4.20…
Preview/buy: http://arthurmag.com/blackout/

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON ARTHURING
A tax-deductible donation of any amount may be made to Arthur by going here: http://www.arthurmag.com/donate/

Happy season,

The Arthur Goofs
Austin * Marfa * Joshua Tree * Portland, Oregon * Greenpoint * wherever you are

Excerpted from a recent episode “The Culture Show” on BBC2, with background music from Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock album…

courtesy W. Crofoot

“We are writing to alert you of the documentary film project we are excited to be working on. It is about Nancy Klehm—visionary herbalist, edible plant forager, and plant communicator among other things… We want to go to Tucson to continue filming Nancy on her latest project, a move to the Southwest from Chicago, IL. We will spend 3 days with Nancy in her new living space, a small RV possibly, and go with her to see some local plant folks and other adventures. This would involve renting a car in Los Angeles, making the 7-hour drive and staying with a friend once we get there. The money we are asking for would go toward gas, food, and the rental car. That’s it! Simple.

Sincerely,

Eden and Marty”

KICKSTARTER
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weedeater/weedeater

EDEN BATKI
http://www.edenbatki.com

NANCE KLEHM:
http://spontaneousvegetation.net

Here we cast anchor in rich earth.
— Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto (1918)

“Just as the turtle cannot separate itself from its shell, neither can we separate ourselves from what we do to the earth.” —Ted Andrews

For our Mother the Earth, we set sail on Celestial Ships. Anchored in Erda, we ride the wind. For Gaia, we take flight, spreading terrifying Cafardic wings. No longer trembling at the emasculating, defeminizing sound: the Name of the Father. We re-member Mama. Papa dismembered Mama. We now re-call the suppressed Names of the Mother. Anamnesis for anonymous Inanna. A surre(gion)al celebration, a Manifestival for Mama Earth. This is dedicated to the One we love. For the One Big Mother, in her thousand forms, here it is: the Mama Manifesto (1989).

Breton said “we are still living under the reign of logic.” Today this is true more than ever. Indeed, we are now living under the Acid Rain of Logic.

There are Logics and there are Logics. Eco-Logics, Geo-Logics, Psycho-Logics, Mytho-Logics, Ethno-Logics, Socio-Logics, Astro-Logics, Cosmo-Logics, Onto-Logics, Physio-Logics, Bio-Logics, Zoö-Logics, et cetera.

Yet all of these are transformed into subsets of the one universal Techno-Logic. Techno-Logic, the death of Truth. Techno-Logic, the enshrinement of Truth. The burying of Truth under a crushing burden—under a Wealth of Knowledge.

Authentic knowing requires the “search for Truth,” the pursuit of Truth, the chasing after Truth, the hunger and thirst for Truth, the following of Truth along all her devious paths of Logic, through her labyrinths of the Logics. It means climbing logical mountains, plunging to logical ocean bottoms, traversing an infinitude of unparalleled planes. The search for Truth means always allowing her escape.

“The Region regions” said Heidegger the Egg-Hider, hiding his eggs. Edelweiss und Eselscheisse! Scion of a Scheisse-ridden race! Shyster Lawyer of Being! The “Region” does not “region.” It’s exactly the reverse. (For the Time Being).

Where is the Region, anyway? For every Logic there is a Region. To mention some of particular importance to us, the Surre(gion)alists: Ecoregions, Georegions, Psychoregions, Mythoregions, Ethnoregions, Socioregions, and Bioregions.

This is no joke! We are Bioregionalists only if we are Regionalists. And once we begin to think Regions, we discover a vast multiplicity. Of Regionalisms and Regions, of Regions within Regions, and Regionalisms within Regionalisms. Thus, Surre(gion)alism.

Regions are inclusive. They have no borders, no boundaries, no frontiers, no State Lines. Though Regionalists are marginal, Regions have no margins. Regions are traversed by a multitude of lines, folds, ridges, seams, pleats. But all lines are included, none exclude. Regions are bodies. Interpenetrating bodies. Interpenetrating bodies in semi¬simultaneous spaces. (Like Strangers in the Night).

Region is origin. It is our place of origin. Where all continues to originate. Origination is perpetual motion. Reinhabitation means reorigination. We return to our roots for nourishment. Without that return, we wither and die. We follow our roots and find them to extend ever deeper, and ever outward. They form an infinite web, so all-encompassing that uprooting becomes impossible and unthinkable, deracination irrational.

Regions are multiple and arbitrary. Techno-regionalism says, in a Techno-Rational rage for definition, that when less than 90% of the species of one defined area are present in another defined area, then each is a separate Bioregion. How Techno-Logical! How Scientific! Or so it sounds. For such a definition is entirely self-annihilating, and absurd in its very technicality. This is, of course, its beauty. It is entirely valid, if taken as part of the Science and Logic of the Absurd. An infinite number of Regions can be defined by such criteria. Occasionally the Region will run after a stray organism (calculator in hand). This is a hallucinogenic Logic. (Though it is seldom taken in this way—even in small doses).

The Region always suffers the danger of capture by Techno-Logic. But Science can also be captured by the Aesthetic. Thales, the first metaphysician and scientist, said “All is Water,” and thus became the first humorist, also. And Technics can also be captured by Erotics. (Fourier proposed a “New Amorous Order” in his Phalansteries, based on tactics of Utopian Technique.)

The Region is the end of Centrism. Centrism is an obsession. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with obsessions, as long as we know that we’re obsessed. Take, for example, Mr. Alan Fairweather, whose entire life revolves around his obsession with, study of, and consumption of potatoes. In Mr. Fairweather’s words:”I suppose you could say I have a potato-centric view of the world.” (Newsweek, 5/30/88.) But centrists are seldom so healthy.

Anthropo-centrism has been our world-champion Centrism. It’s come close to K.O.ing the Earth (a T.K.O.—a Technical Knock-Out). But it’s long been on the ropes. Astro-Logic knocked Anthropos off Cosmic center. Bio-Logic knocked him off Planetary center. Psycho-Logic even knocked him off Ego center. And Techno-Logic itself melts him into air. We hardly need any post-structuralist Post-Logic to “de-center” the vapor that remains.

But do we need a new Centrism to replace the moribund one? Some suggest “Biocentrism.” This one will surely win if beetles and algae are given the vote. In a Bio-centric world, the undisputed center of “North America” is somewhere in the Achafalaya Basin. Probably in Grosse Tête (day gone gat a beeg had don dare, yeah!). A magnificent idea, and absolutely true in its own unique way. Strangely, Bio-centrism is the ecological counter-image of capitalist rationality. Quantity and accumulation are what count. But Biomass instead of Bucks.

Ecocentrism, which may be the the ultimate Centrism, has strange, surre(gion)al implications of its own. On being asked the meaning of the term, a prominent ecocentrist replied that it means that “everything is central.” The final truth of Centrism: all is central and thus nothing is central. The ecocentrist definitely has surre(gion)alist potential!

Decentering is inevitable today. But there are many species of decentering, some regionalist, others profoundly anti-regionalist. Some creative, others nihilistic and conservative (preserving the civilized path of Progress: annihilation, dissolution, evisceration, evacuation).

Capitalism abolishes Centrism. A European travels to some anti¬center of Late Capitalism—perhaps Houston or Los Angeles. Accustomed to town squares, cathedrals, remnants of city walls, historical sites, signs indicating the geomythical center (Centre Ville, Centro Ciudad, etc.), this voyager asks, “Which way is the center?” What answer is possible? The hapless explorer is offered a myriad of decentered centers—every mall and shopping center in the vast urban sprawl. The Megalopolis is the economistic triumph of decentering. Its reality flows—not like a river, but like Capital. It seeks, monster-like, hydra-like, only to grow, and never to return to its source. To grow and to consume, endlessly.

Regionalist anti-centrism is of a different quality. We surre(gion)alists proclaim an end to Centrism, but we seek to create and recreate a multitude of centers. Because there is no one Center (the Patriarchal God, the Authoritarian State, the Ineluctable Bottom Line), imaginative centers can proliferate. The human spirit has always found the center of the universe in places of significance. Indeed, any place can be the center. Such centers are centers of spiritual intensity, foci for the convergence of realities: The Altar. The Hearth. The Communal fire. The Town Square. The Sacred Mountain. The Clock at Holmes. (Note for extra-Mesechabeans: On the Clock, see J. K. Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces).

Only someone really desperate, or, perhaps, inordinately hurried, would suggest as the center of the universe la Gare de Perpignan. Or was there a hidden, anti-subversive Grand Central Station in the Dalian mind?

For the Region, there is no State and there are no State lines. The State is a parasitical growth on the Region, something exterior, hostile, threatening. It has no life of its own, but drains vitality from the living Community. It has rightly been called the “cold monster” that steals even our words, and claims to speak for us. The State is inherently genocidal. It murders all that it cannot assimilate. What is left after this Pyric and Vampiric act is only a State apparatus, the State Machine. (Even the old “political machine” had to die—for not being mechanical enough, and perhaps for being too political, too Regional, for the age of “total administration.”) The State is the March of the God of Power on Earth, its History, the Cunning of Instrumental Reason. Regional politics do not take place in Washington, Moscow and other “seats of power.” Regional power does not “sit”; it flows everywhere. Through watersheds and bloodstreams. Through nervous systems and food chains. The Regions are everywhere & nowhere. We are all illegals. We are natives and we are restless. We have no country; we live in the country. We are off the Inter-State. The Region is against the Regime—any Regime. Regions are anarchic.

For the Region, there is no Church. There is no upper-case R Religion, because there are as many religions as there are Regions. Heresy is the norm. There is no monopoly on the holy. There is no spiritual capital or spiritual Capitol. All Regions are spiritual, and for regionalism all realms are sacred. Regionalism abolishes both Theism and Atheism. Theism: the Idea that there is only one God—the God of Power, and that all must believe in Him. Atheism: the equal and opposite absurdity that this same God is the only One truly worthy of disbelief. Civilization’s imaginary [God?] has been bound to monotheisms, and substitutes for monotheisms. Regionalism breaks the bonds and erases the line between the sacred and the profane. All busses go to Grace Land. Nothing is beyond the pale. Regions are of the land: pagan, paysan. The Regions give birth to a multitude of rites and rituals, a sacral of sites and cycles. The spirit of the Region is inspired, enlightened. By feu follet, Will o’ the Wisp. By inner lights and outer. The spirit of the Region is the Free Spirit. To be in touch with the Spirits of the Place, the local Gods, is to have Tongues of Fire, to regain the stolen power of speech.

For the Region, there is no Race. Miscegenation is the rule. The Ten Thousand Races were born from the Ten Thousand Places, and they have multiplied to ten thousand times ten thousand. Those of us raised in a racial caste system were taught as children how to treat people of “the opposite race.” But now the die is cast; the castes have died. Now we know there are no opposite sexes, much less opposite races. Nature just passes and repasses. It’s all Mardi Gras. Under the mask, a mask. Ethnicity, like ethos, thrives on the play of difference. Enjoy the play! For the ideology of race, the play’s a dismal tragedy. All is reduced to dull sameness and demonic otherness. True, paranoia has its own peculiar excitements, but misses the stimulation of subtle variation, texture, multiplicity, quality. Ethnoregionality. The topography of culture.The Carnival of Culture.

For the Region, there is no Patriarchy. The Region is certainly feminine. And at the same time, androgynous. The One gave birth to the Two, and the Two to the Ten Thousand Things. The Mother is both Mother and Father. As GENESIS explains, quite clearly, our Primal Ancestor was an androgynous being, who was later divided into male and female. For the Region, there remain no clear lines: paternity is not established. The family is extended, the tribe all-inclusive. The Region, like the Dao, is vague. Mountains and valleys flow into one another. Streams and rivers flow into one another. The maternal blood flows through the Region. But sometimes the blood boils. As modern “Man” is beginning to learn: it’s not nice to rape Mother Nature! The kindly Maiden Aunt Nature of the Audubon Society, the jelly-breasted, nonjudgmental Momma Nature of the New Age, transforms herself into the Badass Goddess, the Angry Warrior Woman Nature, Vagina Dentata, the electrifying Shakti. Just when you think you’ve had her, Man—she gets you where it hurts!

For the Region, there is no Capital. There is no bottom line. All is recycled. Everything returns to the top, recirculates, and the bottom falls out. Life is uneconomical, inefficient. All economic rationality is ecological irrationality. The nature of nature is to waste, to spend foolishly, to squander. Capital requires scarce resources, but the Region is superabundance and has no resources. Only sources and the return to sources. Regions bankrupt the economic, they rupture, they break the bank, they overflow their banks. Regions are in balance, and need no balance sheets. Capital has already rendered its judgment on the Earth: the rich abundance of Life—the Bio-Logical, Ethno-Logical, and Psycho-Logical Wealth that is the legacy of eons of evolution—is not cost effective. For the Earth to live, Capital must die.

Regions are wild. For State and Capital, wilderness means wasteland. They look upon the wild with a cruel and rapacious eye. They hunger to rape and plunder the wild. They yearn to subdue, control, exploit and kill all that lives freely. The antithesis of the wild is the domesticated—controlled for the ends of power. The same forces that seek to destroy wild nature, destroy wild mind. (See Gary Snyder’s “Good, Wild, Sacred”). Out of ancient forests and ancient communities, they produce tree farms & suburbia (tree farms, the suburbia of trees; suburbia, the tree farm of humanity).

“The antithesis of the wild is the domesticated—controlled for the ends of power.” The Region, like the Dao, is vague. The “obscure object of desire.” The object of desire is always obscure. Buñuel’s famed object may be obscure in a special sense, but all objects of desire are vague, ambiguous, obscure. The system of domination attempts to make them more definite, more definable. By identifying objects of domination. By subordinating desire to an authoritarian code. By seeking to capture desire and then to direct and channel it in accordance with the demands of Power. Our challenge: to get beyond our bondage to this Desire Project. To reach the Elysian Fields of the liberated imagination. Where there are (contrary to rumor) no Poles, but only a meeting of the Antipodes.

Regionalists inhabit Regions. They are, in fact, creatures of habit, unpredictable though their habits may be. They are what they do, and they do it in that familiar, indefinable place: their Region. Regionalists almost dwell in Regions, and in fact, once did completely, until dwelling became so heavily laden with layers of mystique that their dwellings sank out of sight. (Especially true of swampy regions like the Mesechabe Delta).

Regions are not systems. Systems are dead, mechanistic, and manipulable. Systems thinking is only the most advanced, and most mystified variety of instrumental rationality. Regions are incomprehensible and priceless. They are not systematic. They are not systemic. They are living and imaginary, and therefore surpass all system. Some Regions have systems, as persons have systems, but they cannot be reduced to one or more of those systems.

Regions are not World Class. The Political Insect (apologies to all authentic insects) can think of no greater compliment to the community than to call it World Class. It becomes World Class when it is filled with World Class Attractions: when all its living local and regional realities are murdered and replaced by World Class plastic imitations, to attract swarms of World Class Economic Insects who occasionally venture out from their sterile World Class Hotels and Convention Centers and dispense World Class Dollars to the embalmed natives. Regions are not World Class. The Bomb is World Class. McDonald’s is World Class. Henry Kissinger is World Class. Global Warming is World Class. Auschwitz is World Class. The Capitalist Class is World Class. Regions are not World Class.

Regions follow Geo-Logic, and move in Geo-Logical time. Regions are served on plates. They are flowing, floating islands upon islands. (Follow my Drift?) Occasionally the Earth reminds us that from its point of view Geology is Destiny. That mountains and valleys are like waves on the sea. The restoration of Geo-Logic relativizes the pseudo-politics and pseudoeconomics of all systems of Power. True Eco-Logic and Eco-Nomics cannot be upset by even the most powerful earthquake. But the myth that nature can be dominated lives on. Still the Army Corps of Engineers battles to control the course of the Mesechabe. But in a few years the Great River will have its way—with a vengeance. Still the power companies build their nuclear plants along the River. They forget that a century ago the earth shook violently, the Mesechabe flowed North, and that a small Mesechabean Atlantis still lies beneath the waters.

What hath civilization wrought? Vespucciland has already made the Mighty Mesechabe its sewer (Capitalist Sewer-regionalism), it has sent us garbage barges, and now it sends its wastes to the Delta in trains! Post-modern politics becomes auto-critique. Never before has there been a political cause célèbre like the “Poo-Poo Choo-Choo” presently incensing Mesechabean citizens. Indeed, the Mesechabeans would like to cast some aspersions on our bene-factors (doers of their noble duty), who seek to transform our Mesechabe Delta, the Ravine of the World, into a veritable Sierra Merdre.

Outside the Region, all is excrement, all is waste, all is garbage. Capital and State are outside the cycles, outside the self-renewing Whole. Their Logic is accumulation, the Eternal Non-Return, the non-returnable bottleneck of being. They have accumulated much, and alas, it’s all Poo Poo.

Where is Reality today? When the corporate polluters spew poison into rivers and streams, direct actionists seal the pipes. The reality police are called out: the poisoners are protected; the protectors imprisoned. “This is not poison . . . . This is not a pipe . . . . “ When reality is the Waste Land, we must just say no to Reality. Surre(gion)al surreality is elsewhere.

Regionalists are Pataphysicians. Jarry, the founder of the Sublime Science of Pataphysics, made an inestimable contribution to regionalist thinking in his invention/discovery of Pataphysics. Pataphysics, he says “will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be—and perhaps should be—envisaged in the place of the traditional one, since the laws that are supposed to have been discovered in the traditional universe are also correlations of exceptions, albeit more frequent ones, but in any case accidental data which, reduced to the status of unexceptional exceptions, possess no longer even the virtue of originality.” (Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, ed. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor. (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 192-193.)

Pataphysics helps us recollect the oft-forgotten Truth that the Universe is itself the Great Exception—to the everyday ordinary course of Non-Being. Regions are, of course, entirely exceptional— exceptions even to themselves. Regionalists are exceptional people and should therefore, like Regions, be treated entirely differently.

Heraclitus discovered 2500 years ago that Reality is always what it is not, and that it is always strange. As he put it, “if one does not expect the unexpected, one will not find it out, since it is not to be searched out, and difficult to compass.” (Fragment 18) Regions are where the unexpected always takes place. However mightily one struggles not to think some troubling thought, it is impossible to keep it out of consciousness—out of one’s Psychoregion. Thoughts such as: “The Marquise was out for the Count”; or “He rode off into the sunset on his pet pony, Trotsky.”

We need a Green Politics that is a Politics of the Regions, and thus, a Politics of the Imagination. The old politics is dead—the politics of the State, of bureaucracy, of economism, of technocracy. It is overwhelmingly powerful, but it is dead. Burying it is another matter. It buries us. Poor old Krushchev said to the Capitalists: we will bury you. They are burying him and everyone else instead — in garbage. The old politics is a politics of plastic on asphalt. The politics of the inorganic, of disorientation, of placelessness, of necrophilia.

The Wobblies, the most radical of American labor movements (the only labor movement to appeal to hobos and surrealists) said it was “creating the new world within the shell of the old.” Today, the old one is an even more dried-out shell than ever. It’s time to begin growing a new world! This is the meaning of “Green Politics.” But sometimes it seems that what passes for “Green Politics” follows the slogan: “creating the new world by boring from within.” True, the old world must die, but we certainly cannot bore it to death.

Green Politics must become the Politics of the Regions—all the Regions, from the celestial to the subterranean. Let the next Gathering of the Greens conduct all its business in poetry. This will foreshadow the day when America will be Green. Even better, the day when for a small fee we do an international name exchange and America becomes a large frozen island, while Green Land extends from sea to shining sea. The day when Green Politics rules. The day when the President pantomimes the Inaugural Address and sings the State of the Union in falsetto. The day when the Supreme Court sits naked in powdered wigs and hands down rulings in Pig Latin. The day when the Congress throws a multi-party and dances all the Laws out of existence.

Our symbol—one of the thousand symbols of our polysymbolica—is the Sacred Mirliton. The Chayote. Chayotli. Sechium edule. The Mirliton (regional pronunciation: “Mellatawn”): in the subtropics, the regionalist plant par excellence. Spreading everywhere, covering all, trespassing all boundaries, respecting no lines of property. Greening promiscuously, abundantly, indiscriminantly. Equally green on either side of the fence. Offering its fruit to all, in limitless profusion. Green Politics, the Politics of the Mirliton. The Mirliton against the militant, the mechanical person. The Mirliton against the military-industrial complex, the mechanical State. Green vs. Machine. (No accident that the word “Mirliton” also refers to that most populistic and anarchic of all musical instruments, the Kazoo.)

Green Politics is the Politics of Lagniappe. “Lagniappe” for us Mesechabeans signifies something extra, neither bought nor sold, freely given, weighed only on the human scale, a symbolic exchange, a tangible expression of the intangible, of the non-instrumental, of the nonfungible, of the communal, of the common wealth. A vague memory of the Gift. A token of the backwardness, the peripherality, the atavism of certain strange and remote ethnoregions—such as the Mesechabe Delta. Green Politics is the Politics of Lagniappe: it “decrees the End of Money.” It looks to the day when we are no longer held symbolic hostages by the Signs of the Dollar. To the day when All is Lagniappe. And to the Night also!

It is of the nature of the Louisianian to create Order through Anarchy: This is the lesson of Gumbo; this is the lesson of Jazz.—Lafcadio Bocage, Cahiers Du Mouvement Anarchiste Creole (trans., M. Cafard) What is true in our mysterious Delta region can, in its own way, be true anywhere. Let us never forget the words of the wise Mesechabean!

A phantom is haunting Europa. Breton stated it well, with all the power of inadvertency: “The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost.” What Breton consciously missed but unconsciously betrayed was the greatness of this impression. For what makes more impression on us than does a ghost—and is so resolutely evaded, except in our dreams? We are like ghosts, Ghosts along the Mesechabe. Haunted by the Earth. When we are nowhere, existence is elsewhere. The Region is the elsewhere of civilization.

RC Harvey reviews “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus” by Gilbert Shelton (625 pages!)
http://bit.ly/apZsSk

#ubuweb [download] Another great Queer music comp, this time a bunch of novelty records from the 60s: Queer To The Core!:
http://is.gd/hi90z

#johncoulthart New blog post: Through the Psychedelic Looking-Glass: the 2011 calendar
http://bit.ly/9fyPnj

“I think in the next three to five years, you’ll see half the bookstores in this country close.”
http://bit.ly/aS2TFT

Arik Roper’s “TUFF WIZARD” Arthur t-shirt in forest green on cactus green now available $18.95 postpaid
http://bit.ly/aV5cOr

November 16, 1938 – Albert Hofmann synthesizes LSD
http://bit.ly/982Z3D

“William S. Burroughs: A Man Within” biodoc screening sched
http://bit.ly/8ZxWMD

Bitches’ Brew ale
http://on.fb.me/9LkWbF

Soaking the Rich, Cutting the Deficit
http://nyti.ms/9wpYwd

Weird that NYT neglects to mention of EMI’s current troubles (er) with Citigroup w/r/t Beatles/iTunes
http://nyti.ms/9Q5AiC
That is, Citigroup v Terra Firma (who own EMI)
http://nyti.ms/bkAzri

Via Sean Carnage – CONCERTPAGE 1.1 arrives! Monthly one-sheet guide to LA DIY throwdowns
http://bit.ly/aQswd8

#cinefamily: DEVO! THE CRAMPS! DEAD KENNEDYS! Get in gear for our punk weekend with the URGH! A MUSIC WAR soundtrack.
http://bit.ly/c5SscM

Super news: JOSH T PEARSON (ex-LIFT TO EXPERIENCE) is releasing a new album on Mute next year. Paris rooftop performance of Woman When I’ve Raised Hell by Josh T. Pearson
http://bit.ly/a1Oezh

“Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ” by Josh T. Pearson
http://mysp.ac/dnhKlx

#johncoulthart: Iain Sinclair’s ‘Compass Road’ watch: British road sign design with Blake, Wells, Ballard, etc as destinations
http://bit.ly/9phmhX

#ubuweb – 35 Viennese Actionist Films (1957-1995)
http://is.gd/h7Zpy

“The apocryphal story is that this book of drawings, which form a loose narrative, is about Moebius giving up weed.”
http://bit.ly/ddLYU5

“The Sioux sometimes showed their contempt for their enemies by…displaying their genitals or buttocks”
http://nyti.ms/bwQsXS

My plan for the deficit via @nytgraphics
http://t.co/IgsvY8L

#samarov: Daniel Higgs artwork on @roundmyskull:
http://bit.ly/bsitgQ

#johncoulthart – New blog post: Weekend links: Hodgson edition
http://bit.ly/cAUbKd

#ubuweb – [download MP3] Sorry to hear about Górecki. His Symphony No. 3 w/Dawn Upshaw is still staggeringly moving
http://is.gd/gYDnM

“It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees,” she famously exclaimed. * http://bit.ly/d1RZb4

#SirRichardB Happy Birthday Gocher! I miss you brother. Hope you are creating more havoc than ever. Stop by sometime, will be good to see you!
#SirRichardB Sun City Girls on Lebanese TV. We’ze in trouble now! @ 23:25
http://tumblr.com/xkcpnlwrm

“You say this sounds like turning the whole world into a national park? Precisely.” (Kenneth Rexroth, May 1969)
http://bit.ly/csf2g2

“I have formatted 78 of my Sixties photographs as Tarot cards”
http://bit.ly/b3eT6p

#comicsreporter – great piece on Doonesbury from the historian Garry Wills
http://is.gd/gRBGG

Eagerly awaiting the “Arrest or kill Dick Cheney and George Bush for war crimes” mission on “Call of Duty” videogame
http://nyti.ms/aRKS2f

Tuli plays God in this 1972 film by Canadian cineastes Michael Hirsh and Jack Christie, screening in the USA for the first time as part of the FUG ON FILM Tuli Kupferberg memorial screenings happening in New York THIS SUNDAY, NOV 14 at Anthology Film Archives.

J. Hoberman’s review in this week’s Village Voice

Details here: Arthur presents Tuli Kupferberg Memorial Screening – Nov. 14

We’re desperately seeking a copy of BE NOT CONTENT: A Subterranean Journal by William J. Craddock, published in 1970 by Doubleday. It is long out of print and original copies are going for $300-$400, which is well beyond our price range. We just want to read the darn thing. If you can help, please let us know via Comments or email. Thank you.

For the curious: here’s Rudy Rucker writing on Craddock.

Author and longtime Arthur columnist Douglas Rushkoff has contributed a chapter to THE POT BOOK: A Complete Guide to Cannabis, an essential new compendium of sensible thinking about marijiuana edited by Julie Holland, M.D. and available now from the good people at Inner Traditions. Other contributors include Michael Pollan, Andrew Weil, M.D., and Rick Doblin, Ph.D.

From Rushkoff’s chapter:

Like a girlfriend or boyfriend who sees the “real” you, marijuana desperately wants you to shed the artifacts of the Western European colonialists among whom you live, and just stop where you are. Every action has a reaction. Assess the impact. What happens when you throw that plastic bottle in the trash? Where and under what conditions was this videogame cartridge assembled? Which side of what equations am I on?
…
After a few hundred conversations on precisely this subject with pot users and ex-users alike, I’ve come to a conclusion about the mechanism behind pot’s ability to raise and question conscience—particularly in older, more experienced users. To put it most simply, pot stops time. Or at least it creates the illusion that time has ceased to move forward. When you are stoned, you are no longer in motion. Even if you are moving, you are no longer moving toward something—but simply moving.

The lean-forward of your directed, intentional life ceases. You are still doing what you are doing, but the goal no longer exists. The simplest effect of this time-stoppage is to bring focus to the task at hand. There is no goal; there is only process. The stoned farmer isn’t growing pumpkins; he is planting a seed—or, better, clearing dirt with his finger, placing the seed in the impression left behind, and covering it with fresh soil. Then doing it again, with Zenlike attention to detail, texture, and grace. The act in this moment is all there is.
Likewise, however, once time is removed from the equation, goals can no longer be used to rationalize your tactics. Without ends, no “means” can be justified. They must be judged on their own merit. So what are you doing?

Download the whole chapter here: “Cannabis: Stealth Goddess” by Douglas Rushkoff (RTF)

Book website here: thepotbook.com

Buy the book here: Inner Traditions

Rushkoff’s latest book is the just-published Programmed or Be Programmed, available only from O/R Books.

‘The whole planet is the museum!’
Author-theorist Douglas Rushkoff takes tea and talks shop with veteran mindboggler/conceptualist/artist/visionary Genesis P-Orridge, best known for his work as co-founder of seminal industrial outfit Throbbing Gristle and leader of neo-primitive-shamanic ravists Psychic TV

I met Genesis in the early ’90s in the Bay Area. He needed a lift to Timothy Leary’s house in Beverly Hills, and I needed an interview for a book I was writing about viral media. We spent about six hours in the car together, trying to impress one another with our strangest thoughts while Gen’s two daughters fought in the back seat.

So, Gen and I have these long talks every month or so. Sometimes they’re data dumps, and sometimes they’re progress reports. This one is probably a little more the latter, coming as it does on the release of Gen’s new book, Painful but Fabulous: The Lives & Art of Genesis P-Orridge (Soft Skull Shortwave). —Douglas Rushkoff

Dougas Rushkoff (DR): Your new book has served for me as an occasion to look back on the history of cut-and-paste, as well as its tremendous influence on art and culture every since. Cut-and-paste can even be understood as a first, rebellious step towards the attainment of genuine co-authorship. From a broad, historical perspective, it seems to me that we move through three stages. We begin by passively absorbing the information that’s fed to us—the datastream. Then, maybe with the Protestant Reformation and the printing press, we gained the ability to interpret this information for ourselves, to some extent. Then, with cut and paste, we achieve the ability to take what’s been presented to us and move it around a little bit. We can create new meanings through transpositions of what’s there, but that’s limited, in a sense, to a kind of satire or self-conscious juxtaposition. And now, finally, with computing and the internet, with the ability to actually author what for lack of a better word would be ‘original’ material, now we move into artistry. But a truly interesting moment was that first cut-and-paste moment, that first moment of, “Okay this is being fed to us, BUT we can do this with it, or to it, and get something else.” I’d be interested in hearing from you what was it like to be part of that moment.

Genesis P-Orridge (G P-O): Well… The preamble would be this: in the early ‘60s, somewhat parallel to my becoming aware of the beatniks, I started to discover Dada and Surrealism. The first time I’d heard of cut n paste, I think was Brion Gysin giving Raoul Hausman and one or two of the Dadaists the credit as one of his inspirations. He said they would cut up words from one of their poems, putting them in a hat, and then they’d draw words out of the hat, and make a new poem. What had happened was that more emotionally based artists, the ones who were actually involved in feeling human as well as just glorifying creativity, had become very disconnected from the concept of linearity, the concept of Reason, all the material concepts of the world. They had just experienced the first world war, which had led to this Armageddon, this hell on earth, and this was their reaction against what they saw as that war’s cause: the misplaced celebration of Reason, the control over information and culture in society, the harmful repression of irrationality, which has backfired.

That’s really where the first step came, that disconnection from, and obsession with, a finished, perfect result that was ‘owned’ by the artist that made it. One of Brion Gysin’s greatest poems, which I didn’t understand until very recently, was ‘Poets don’t own words.” He would do a permutation: “Poets don’t own words, words poets don’t own, own words poets don’t” and it was only recently that I actually experienced it in a visceral way, that that’s been the big change. This is what you’re talking about: that we are blessed, or gifted, or pushed, by various events to deal with the information that’s coming at us, and that society and culture are, if you like, a solidity that’s based on the inertia and linearity. This solidity is oppressive, and in order to even begin to be anything one might label ‘free’ or ‘liberated, you have to, as Burroughs used to put it, ‘First you have to short-circuit control.’ Because control is ultimately an oppressor. Control really does contain all the feedback loops of consumer culture that you’ve talked about so astutely.

I’m know I’m going in a weird loop here, but basically the point is that during the middle of the last century, the idea of having to be an Artist who owned each thing fell apart. The Dadaists did live events. They did collaborations. They did The Exquisite Corpse, where they would do a drawing, fold it, next person would draw some more, fold it, and then the result was the art. And of course no one could say with any of these activities, ‘I did that.’ They all did it, but it also made itself. That process intrigued the more interesting artists from then on.

Now, it’s always good to look at what’s happening parallel to the art world in science at the time, whether it’s called ‘alchemy, or ‘science’ or ‘physics.’ Here, the big moment, really, is just after the Second World War, when we learnt to split the atom and we also learned to split consciousness with psychedelics at almost exactly the same time. Then you had people like Brion Gysin and William Burroughs learning to split the cultural atom with cut-ups in a much more methodical and conscientious way. Instead of it being a reaction against the Horror, it was actually a considered and very carefully and very meticulously observed process of… Well, in a sense they challenged themselves: How do we short-circuit linearity and control? Let’s experiment, and let’s be methodical, let’s CHOP THINGS UP—just like a scientist would!—and see what the building blocks are. And in their case of course, the thing to chop up would be language. So they started to chop up words.

I came in around this point, where suddenly it’s ALL up for grabs. I was born in 1950, so in 1960 I’m ten: my mind’s beginning to really think, make thought processes as well as just observe and absorb, and so I was really blessed in that the material world, the world of consciousness, and the world of accepted forms of writing and painting and music, all suddenly came up for grabs. They all became malleable. To many people, the rulebooks were thrown out. I don’t think it’s just coincidental—I think that it was a very important evolutionary moment, that we still haven’t fully grasped. As you said, it’s TOTALLY affected the culture on every possible level—on television all the adverts are just cut-ups!—to degrees that most people haven’t even considered yet.

I was being educated in an English public school and the basic bumper sticker for those is, We’re building the leaders of tomorrow. The ‘leaders of tomorrow’ were supposed to be the shepherds and farmers of inertia: to maintain the status quo, the Establishment. There was a book that came out that was called The Shock of the New. [pausing] Let me think about what it felt like. I’m just trying to track back. I remember, this seems weird to say this, I remember the Cuban missile crisis. I remember going to school, being told, You may not come home tonight because there might be an atomic war. And I was on a bus, with my face on the window of the bus, and I suddenly imagined the glass just melting around my face. I imagined there being an explosion, and the result of that being me, enfolded in molten glass, preserved in this shell of molten atomic glass. That image somehow simultaneously suggested the idea of preserving oneself, and that the shell that is oneself is invisible and transparent, and that in fact everything I’d been told about reality just wasn’t true. [laughing] Don’t ask me why that image made that happen for me! But that was my epiphany, and that was when I decided to seek out alternative methods of reporting upon experience.

In a way, I think that what we’ve always looked for is methods and media and techniques to report back upon what experience is and what being alive is. And as social life and civilization and Western Culture, which is what I know, as they have developed and become more and more complex, you would think that that implies we would be seeing some kind of shimmering atomic kaleidoscope that would be really vibrant and exciting, and constantly getting more complex. But the irony is that Western civilization seems to be more and more like threads binding rather than atomic splitting.

So what happened was, I was given a tape recorder by somebody at around the same time. Because I had very little tape, it just became natural to go back and use the tape more than once. It didn’t take long to notice that as I used it, I got these weird intersections of sound. So, on my own, by a mixture of poverty and desire, I discovered that I could actually change the order of time and reality and information. And it was exciting. I started to look for other ways of describing what I was feeling, because what I was being told was a description of being alive and reality just didn’t fit what I was feeling. As I said, I came across the Surrealists, the Dadaists and the Beatniks. At that time, it was not well documented that the beatniks were cutting up and pasting. But because of my own experiments and these little bits of information from the Dadaists, when I did see little references to tape recorder experiments, it had a really profound resonance for me, and I started to seek out all the information I could, and later on get to know the Beats too. And at the same time I started getting involved with all the underground press and so on.

What you really end up doing is, you surrender to the idea of oblivion. At some point you have to wipe absolutely clean every preconception that’s given to you both by the senses and by the culture—the ‘datastream’ that you talk about. You have to actually at some point dismiss it totally, and then you can start to make choices about what you wish to allow back in.

DR: I have always understood the kinds of shifts you’re talking about as the same kind of shift in perspective that occurs through a full-fledged renaissance. If you look back at the original “capital-R” Renaissance, what do you really have going on there? Perspective painting, successful circumnavigation of the globe, the printing press, calculus, and then the sonnet (which is really just an extended metaphor). Each of these 15th-cenutry innovations is all about being able to see three dimensions where there had formerly been two—or being able to relate two dimensions to three as in calculus, or being able to go around the globe, which is to experience the planet as three-dimensional rather than as flat. That’s renaissance . And we’re going through a similar shift, now. From the 1940s to the present, you have a series of analogous innovations. Instead of being able to circumnavigate the globe, we can blow the globe up!

G P-O: [agreeing] Or go into space and look at it.

DR: Indeed, or go into space and see it from a distance—which is just another increase in perspective. Instead of the printing press, we have the Internet, which rather than just allowing the individual in his drawing room to interpret a piece of literature, enables him or her to write one and then disseminate it through the whole network. Instead of just having perspective painting which allows you to see three dimensions on two, you get the holograph, which allows you to see four dimensions on two: the bird waving its wings, or the girl winking her eye as you walk across the plate. And then instead of calculus, which allows you to relate the second dimension to the third, or the third to the fourth, you get fractals, which is about fractional dimensionality: this thing has two and three-quarters dimensions, and what does that mean? Instead of the sonnet, which gave us the extended metaphor, we get hypertext, which allows us to make anything into a metaphor for something else—it’s all potential allegory.

Now, take a look at the results of the original Renaissance and the newfound ability of people to interpret their own culture and religion. For most of Europe that meant overturning the Catholic Church. It led to the Protestant Reformation, and eventually to bloodbaths. But before then, it was an extremely positive possibility being presented—that every man can interpret religion for himself.

And we are going through something like that again, obviously at a much faster pace, between say 1940 and the year 2000. That’s why we’ve had all these ideologies passing through until very recently—this increased amount of dimensionality, this sense of ‘Anything goes, so what do we want to bring back in?’ Which is what happens during any Renaissance. It’s as if a renaissance is a moment of shift in dimensional perspective which allows for the implantation of a new idea. Renaissance means you’re going to have a rebirth. Literally, a “renaissance,” or re-birth, of old ideas in a new context. What do we want to let back in? There’s a bit of a battle over ideas, over which ideas are going to make it back in now that everyone has the ability to re-frame this thing. Maybe what we’re in now, in the 21st century, is this struggle over authorship, this struggle over story, this global debate over narrative. In other words, whose narrative is going to be used as the template for the next several centuries or more?

G P-O: And of course the answer is no one owns the narrative anymore. That’s the thing that’s disturbing and frightening so many people, is the displacement of ownership in a very, very fundamental way.

DR: It’s a sense of ‘We won. But: uh-oh.’

G P-O: Well yeah, because even DNA is no longer a finite fixed program. DNA was once God’s book, you know. Well, now we can engineer the genetic book, the thing that’s the nearest we have to a source book of the ‘intended unfolding.’ There is no longer a fixed unfolding. For the first time we’ve actually almost surprised ourselves. Instead of us looking in the mirror, the mirror has literally dissolved. Maybe that’s what that glass was about! That metaphor.

The point you’re making is absolutely right. I was looking at the television just yesterday on the news and there was a person from a Muslim country and they were talking and they said, ‘Well you’ll never understand because you’re all Christian.’ And their assumption is still that the narrative in the West is ultimately a linear narrative that has an author, that its an unfolding linear story; and that if you’re not Muslim, you must be Christian, and that your whole behavior is based upon Christian dogma, because theirs is based on their dogma. So, for this Muslim, that’s obviously that’s the problem: it‘s Muslim dogma versus Christian dogma.

But the problem isn’t that at all. The problem is that we in the ‘West,’ are in their sense, amoral. We don’t care! Most people over here DON’T CARE what religion people are, and most people in the West don’t label themselves ‘Christians’ or anything else. The majority in the West are irreligious. They don’t have a faith. I’m not saying that’s a good thing—I’m saying it’s a fact. They’re a godless people. And in a sense, maybe, God is supposed to be ‘The Author.’ In the past, God was the ‘ultimate author.’ Well, guess what? We always said we wanted to challenge god and be like god—and now we have! We’ve just fallen, you know? [laughs] It’s as if the story of the fallen angel—Lucifer—has just happened. In a way, we’ve just started to reap the rewards of having decided to ask the questions.

DR: [agreeing] Right. Lately, I’ve started to wonder, ‘What if the painful truth is that we really are a fungus on a rock, hurtling through cold and meaningless space?’

G P-O: [laughs] Oh, I think about that every day!

DR: To me, it doesn’t really matter, because just as easily as the idea that God could have created us with meaning, is the possibility that just as life emerged from this cold and meaningless rock, and that meaning can now emerge…from us!

G P-O: I absolutely agree with you. This is our great opportunity to grow up as a species, and stop being larval. Because ultimately I think we’re still in a larval, primitive stage. Because there’s no other excuse for the way that we treat each other. If this isn’t primitive and pathetic and early behavior, then as a species we really are in trouble!

DR: And just as it’s a painful moment for any child to realize that his parents aren’t gods, it’s a painful moment for a civilization to realize that its god is not a parent.

G P-O: And that it’s actually making itself.

DR: Right. We are the adults here. We are in charge.

G P-O:Hence, it is painful—but fabulous. And that, in a way, is the whole point of the book. That’s why it’s not written just by me. This is dealt with in the book. What happened was, it became impossible for me to make a book that was both by me and about me, because I don’t even know if ‘me’ exists. And whoever ‘me’ is, is shifting and changing too—because one of things I’ve done is cut-and-pasted identity. I’ve taken it even further, you know?

DR: I ran into the same problem in my own SoftSkull book too [the novel Exit Strategy, published earlier this year], which is that if I’m writing a book about our ability to co-author the reality in which we live, how can I do that as a solitary author? So I had to put it online and let people contribute live to it.

G P-O: I think that’s one of the ONLY authentic and the nearest to an honest answer with any integrity is that you have to actually surrender to the fact that we’re in a moment where there is no need for genius to be individualized. Also, it’s not that healthy for it to be individualized because it continues this hierarchy thing. Hierarchical society means injustice, it means that certain numbers of people will follow other people and do damage based upon sort of an unthinking state of mind. So we’re at this amazing point where we have to actually say that no particular person has answers. It’s a collaborative effort.

You’ve always said, and we’ve agreed, that what goes on in art is usually the metaphor for what’s REALLY going on. So when you do an open source book, or I find it impossible to assemble a book about my art that isn’t done by a collective, at the end of it all I can say is, ‘Well, the art is actually the fact.’ Everybody did the book, and the rest is kind of the evidence that that happened, but that’s not the stuff. The pieces of art aren’t the art anymore. It really is the process of not just making it, which is the earlier idea that we had in the art world, but now it actually, truly is the process of Being that’s the only thing that really has any integrity right now.

DR: Talking the talk IS walking the walk.

G P-O: It’s just the classic conundrum which is, I’m using words to describe the fact that they’re useless. Of course, the response to that has always been, ‘But there’s such joy in talking about it.’ [laughter] And then you get back to the cut-up, of course. BECAUSE we’re so aware that, especially in a linear way, language has become this controlling factor–that every word is loaded with meaning and history, that each word is a hologram, and each hologram has all kinds of hidden agendas from all the people who have utilized it–

DR: Your language is an incantation, whether you realize it or not–

G P-O: Absolutely, so how you, at least to some degree, protect yourself and give yourself space to breathe and consider the moment, is to break those patterns that you’ve inherited, and surprise your own holograms. What I mean is this: From the moment of being able to hear words, my nervous system has been trained to an English language program in England, which of course would be different to my body and nervous system being trained in America with the English language. So I’ve got this incredibly inert, inherited, and not self-determined nervous system, that is on a day-to-day basis primarily it expresses and receives information with language, in terms of functioning with other beings. And that makes me very vulnerable because I didn’t pick that program or language! So how can I get some kind of independence from that program? It’s almost like doing karate with a blindfold on, rather than with your eyes open, because… If you’re in a cave, and it’s completely dark, and you know three people are going to attack you, and you have your eyes open, part of you is distracted by, still trying to see the enemy. But if you actually put the blindfold on in the dark, you wouldn’t think about seeing! And you might just hear that tiny bit better that might save your life.

It’s that kind of analogy, that the cut-up gives you that breathing space, in a sense a moment for survival as an intelligent and autonomous being. For me. So, if you take all the words and cut them all up and give yourself the opportunity to have these unexpected collisions, to have things revealed that you would just have forgot, filtered out, were lazy about and so on. It is just SO radical when you start to do it. The sense of empowerment and freedom from expectation…

DR: When you do it consciously—dis-assembly, re-assembly, compression—it’s almost identical to creating a sigil. [A sigil is a picture used in magical incantations. Like the symbols we use for letters, today, they are composed of drawings and symbols that are condensed into simpler sets of lines that can be remembered and meditated upon.]

G P-O: That’s true, and there’s a whole section in the book all about creating sigils, and some of the possibilities of them.

DR: The strange thing about the sigils is not so much hearing about them or figuring out how they function, but the almost-always surprising truth that they WORK.

G P-O: Yes. [laughter] This is mind-boggling, isn’t it?

DR: I don’t believe in magick, exactly. But I know that sigils work, if they’re created the right way. And sometimes they work so well that they almost come back at you as a joke. Like Grant Morrison was telling me about this big sigil that he wanted to meet Superman, and he was sitting on a park bench and Superman walked up. But it was a guy working at a convention! He treated him like he was Superman, though, and had a great interview. So sometimes it’s obviously not going to be that magical, in the sense of a puff of smoke or something. And obviously if you pick something too specific, you end up getting it, which can be scary.

G P-O: As they say, be careful what you wish for! It’s like the genie-in-the-bottle thing, isn’t it? You’ve got your wishes, except with sigils you get more than three.

DR: Right. And you can work sigil magick completely though language I suppose, but it affects realms way beyond the linguistic ones.

G P-O: Oh yeah. Well, it’s the whole Butterfly-in-the-West Indies thing, isn’t it? I think what’s really important is, if you make a decision to work within life, you let go of the scientific concept of matter being only objects. You see that culture is a material, and that language is a material, and that time is a material, and emotions are material. Basically you think of everything in terms of matter, and all matter is ultimately flexible, fluid, manipulatable and malleable. (Of course, as science and physics goes on, it keeps on confirming everything that we’ve speculated anyway. There’s not been any dissent yet about this, from what I’ve looked at in scientific.) If you start to cut things up and re-assemble them, at first it’s kind of fun. You go, Well ooo that’s nice. But it really does seem to be more than that—cut-and-paste seems to be one of the few practical ways that any person can use to truly re-wire the inherited neural system and the DNA program. You can re-wire what you were given.

DR: That’s why for me the open-source software movement is such a terrific allegory and practice for accepting the fact that we live in a malleable reality. Or certainly for accepting that a hell of a lot more of our world is programmable software than we’ve previously thought. There might be some hardware down there somewhere, but we haven’t got close to that yet. People are starting to accept that they have indeed been the programmers, whether they were witting or not, and that they’re actively programming the world we live in. I think it’s healthy for people to realize this. I think that then they start to experience everything—from their bodies to the air we breathe—as a medium through which they can create and transmit their story.

G P-O: Absolutely. Well you know that Burroughs and Gysin used to say, In a pre-recorded universe, who made the first recording? I’ve thought about that a lot. And what it led me to wasn’t so much wondering about that question, because I think you’re right, it doesn’t matter, actually, but what it did make me realize is that the entire planet is a recording device. That, as you and I are speaking now, on this planet, there is, certainly it seems that way, and we’ll probably find more, there’s some kind of data recorded—whether it be fossils, geological strata—

DR: [laughing]: Or the digital cassette that we’re recording on right now.

G P-O: —basically everything that’s happened so far is still here, recorded. On the planet, and in the planet. And there are people in New Guinea living in different centuries to the ones we’re living in. The people in the Kalahari are living in the pre-Stone Ages. So we actually still have the pre-Stone Age, parallel to the next phase, which is, because some people in the West and Japan and so on, high-tech societies, are already in the future, so allllllll the realities humanity has programmed through history are still here simultaneously! We’re actually layering more on top. So what we really have is a point of intersection, which is the earth, and everything that’s ever been manifested is still here. That’s not just a concept, this is actually HOW IT IS.

I mean, I walk down the street and if I meet somebody that I know who’s from Nepal, I also quite deliberately through my own interest, I remember I’m talking to somebody who’s from a different century, in terms of where they grew up. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of their intelligence! I have to remind myself that there’s ALL these stories happening simultaneously, all the stories are unfolding simultaneously. Each individual being, walking by, is the center of their own particular universe, in terms of subjectivity. You’re the only person who’ll be in your world every second that your world exists. And your world is all the things you perceive while you are—theoretically—‘alive.’ And that is your unique universe, because you do go out into what’s out there just the same as I do. So this place is just amazing, because there’s billions of universe clustered on this point of intersection, and all the stories going right back are still here too! We have trillions and trillions of universes, many of them mobile, because they’re in human bodies, all clustered in these tiny, tiny concentrated places.

DR: That’s why the real artistic act is not one of authorship but one of resonance. You know, being open to these conversations…

G P-O: Yes, it’s remaining open to dialogue. It’s not about the ego—look at me, I’m a great artist, I have something in the Tate, you know? That is SO redundant. Museums? THIS IS THE MUSEUM! The whole planet is the museum! I call all of that The Museum of Magic, because it’s all about illusion. That’s the whole illusion.

We really are in a new place. And as people kind of grasped almost immediately, the Internet is, they knew it would be a metaphor, but it’s actually also a reality. Yes, we are actually building some kind of new brain. A global brain, as Howard [Howard K. Bloom, author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000)] would call it. That’s actually going on. These AREN’T abstractions.

That’s the thing that I think that we’ve got to get hold of.

DR: What words of encouragement would you have for the passionate but still currently amateur and underappreciated young artist who might be reading ARTHUR at this moment, who makes her cut-up tapes and homespun zines and online blogs, and yet there’s not anyone willing to pay for what she has to say, not that many people coming. But this person feels she’s resonating with everything that you’re saying now, or might be saying in one of your books…

G P-O: Well… In doing this book, I had to go right back to childhood and look at my entire unfolding so far, as a character. I had to look at everything. And one thing that immediately struck me as significant is that I’ve always worked in collectives. I’ve never had this need, or this motivation, to identify myself as the sole source of anything. ‘Oh, it’s because I’m clever that this happened.’ No. All the time I say, over and over again, we just did what was inevitable anyway. And that’s the important thing, is the people should LET GO of the concept of success and celebrity and fame and fortune. That’s not important. Of course we’d all love to have whatever it might be that represents for us–which is mainly not worrying about bills, for me! I think that although Warhol was wonderful, he did us all a great disservice by making celebrity into this red herring. And I think that people will find that if they just, as I used to say, ‘change your own bedroom and you can change the world.’ It’s about self-discovery and it’s about collaboration and collective action, WITHOUT any kind of narcissistic, secret agenda. That’s over. You know, sometimes someone for whatever reason happens to be chosen to represent a collective metaphor, as a person. That’s why I chose a fictional character, Genesis P-Orridge, in the first place. Neil Megson is the artist, not Genesis. Neil Megson created this fictional character, and then let loose that character to see if it was true that you could cut and paste a person, and what would happen if you put a truly flexible and malleable being out there.

D: But ‘Genesis’ is still the author of the book.

G P-O: Actually I don’t think it says that. I think if you look it doesn’t say that at all. It says it’s by everyone else.

D: Oh, right. “With text by…”

G P-O: Yeah. See?

D: Well, Neil’s not on there.

G P-O: No, but he’s discussed in one chapter. So no, I don’t put myself as the author. I’m not the author. I’m blessed to have let other people do it for me! [laughs] This is an open-source book, see? I said to everybody, Look you’ve got carte blanche for once, no one’s gonna censor you, you can use me as an excuse to say something you’ve always wanted to say, I don’t care, I don’t have to agree with you, use ‘Genesis P-Orridge’ the idea to say whatever you want, and if you need Genesis P-Orridge the idea to trigger something, feel free. And that’s basically how the book happened, as you know. And that’s why I love it so much. Because I got to see it happen too. I was just as much of a witness as anyone who reads it. And of course truly I do feel incredibly humbled and honored by the amount of positive energy that people gave me based around this character, that they HAVE found that something was useful for them. And at the end, the last page says, ‘To be continued.’ For the very reason that this isn’t over, this is an ongoing thing. I don’t know the end. That’s why there’s all these different faces in there. Which one is me? I don’t know. Funny thing is none of those is how I look now, so…

It’s all about letting go of those preconceptions, and not being afraid to not exist in a sense, because even as you are theoretically here and present, you still don’t really know if you exist. It’s incredibly liberating when you let go of that need, and let yourself become fictional–as well as knowing you’re fictional. Because actually we all are fictions. We’re all just stories unfolding.

D: And until you accept that you’re fictional, you don’t stand a chance of writing your own story. You get too bogged down.

G P-O: In answer to that question, then, with those people, right, that you want me to encourage them. However this may sound, this is the basic exercise I’ve used. First of all is the classic Sufi thing, which is ‘Always try to go to sleep feeling that the day you’ve just had, something extra was added into the word’—something that you’re proud of, or pleased about. It may be that you cleaned a room. Or you wrote a nice postcard to a friend. Or made a phone call to Mum. It doesn’t have to be grand. Something happened that day, that wouldn’t’ve happened without you being alive, something that is somehow to you a positive thing. Feed the dog, stroke it, whatever. That’s one thing to do. The other exercise is to be able to think at any moment during the day, whenever you’re doing something… like if you’re writing a letter, think to yourself, ‘If I died now, and my life was judged by what this letter is like, would I be proud of that?’ Do EVERYTHING as if that so meticulously, make it so full of passion and of love for the moment and for the thing that you’re doing, so that you would always be proud to be remembered by that thing. Whatever it is, whether it’s cooking for a friend, washing up, anything. To always feel honorable and proud and that you’ve given love back by the way that you act every day.

And then another exercise is this: Imagine your life is a book, and you’re going to write this book. So when you’re thinking, What should I do? Should I have this relationship or not? or something, you can think in terms of would doing that make for an interesting chapter. Even now sometimes I sit back with Miss Jackie and go, There’s another good page in the book. [laughs] The Theoretical Autobiography that I could never write because it’s too much stuff, but… It’s a good exercise, to just go ‘Well yeah, that was a good bit of the book.’ Sometimes it’s ‘Well that was dramatic, but that was a good bit of the book too.’ Or, ‘That was terrible, oh, argh, but it’ll look great in the book.’ Or if you want to get more contemporary, you can imagine your life as a movie: ‘Was that a good scene?’

Suddenly you will find more balance. The great ups and the great downs start to become the coloring of the story—they start to have their own special value and emotional joy, because it’s YOUR story and it’s your passion and it’s your tragedy and it’s your moment of adulation. It’s your moment of…whatever. All these wonderful emotional events that take place that make us more individual than anything else–those are always wonderful, no matter how hard they are to experience. And that’s the other thing, the other trick: always try to work with other people, because none of us know everything. My feeling is, if I can have one good idea, and it’s quite a good idea, and I know four really clever people, and then I share it with them, then the odds are higher by getting four clever people, or four people I trust, to be involved, it’s gonna be somehow better than I could do on my own. Now why do I need to prove I can do it on my own when it’s not gonna be as good or as useful to other people? The old way was, to try and claim individual genius.

D: That’s the academic’s way, at least.

G P-O: [continuing] But a), it’s not the most efficient method, and b) it’s not glamorous to be narcissistic like that.

D: [laughing] And c), it’s not as much fun!

G P-O: When I did Contemporary Artists (1977), I’d written these questionnaires to the thousand ‘most important’ artists in the last century, and they would write back, and one of the things asked was what were their influences. Most people would say ‘oh I was influenced by meeting this person or reading that book,’ but once in a while you would get somebody who would say, ‘Nothing.’ They would basically say ‘I am just so brilliant and I have this God-given talent that’s MINE ALONE, and NOTHING influenced me.’ That’s ridiculous! Everything that happens to us every second is influencing everything else. That’s the new way. That’s what we’ve taught ourselves.

D: Right, and to be open to that is to be open to being a great artist for this century, and to be closed to that is for an artist die.

G P-O: It’s also just being modern. There’s the old way, which is all about individual ego, individual power, individual self-gratification and so on. It‘s over. Just geographically, there’s too many people now. You’ve GOT to learn to get on with each other. We’re pushed up against each other, that’s why there’s friction right now. There’s a lot of individual universes clustered here, and they’ve got to start to not trying to keep maintaining that little separation, they’ve got to start becoming, if you like, instead of atoms and molecules, instead of molecules, something else. So, as we’re more and more able to go smaller in terms of what we observe with science in a literal sense, we have to, funnily enough, get bigger in terms of us as beings.

Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, will be published by Crown in April, 2003. A deluxe boxed 24-CD edition of Throbbing Gristle’s 24 Hours of TG has just been released by Mute. A new Throbbing Gristle compilation will be released in early 2003.
For more information on Douglas Rushkoff, visit www.rushkoff.com
For more information on Genesis P-Orridge, visit www.genesisbreyerporridge.com

STRANGE BREW
Canadian-Swiss anthropologist JEREMY NARBY on what hallucinogens like LSD and the Amazonian drink ayahuasca have to teach us

Introduction by Erik Davis
Q & A by Jay Babcock
Illustration by Arik Roper

Originally published in Arthur No. 22/May 2006 (available from the Arthur Store)

INTRODUCTION
by Erik Davis

The anthropologist and author Jeremy Narby hit the intellectual freak scene in 1998 when he published The Cosmic Serpent, an audacious, intriguing, and entertaining dose of righteous mind candy that grew out of his decades-long explorations—both personal and scholarly—of the ayahuasca-swilling tribes of the upper Amazon. A Canadian living in Switzerland—at least when he’s not researching in the jungle or working on indigenous rights—Narby is no bug-eyed hippie prophet of “the tea.” He is a grounded, sensible fellow with a dry wit, an unromantic but respectful view of shamanism, and an allergy to vaporous supernatural claims. (In Europe he also sometimes performs with the guys behind the Young Gods, a seminal Swiss industrial band that led the Wax Trax pack back in the day.) While Narby’s head has definitely been broken open, his book does not spend a lot of time on the “spiritual” import of the jungle brew. Instead, Narby focuses on one of the biggest claims made by the Amazonian shamans: that their ritual ingestion of the hallucinogenic brew not only brought them contact with the spirits of animals and healing forces, but actually gave them knowledge—actual data—about the workings of the jungle around them.

After all, some sort of weird data transfer is going on in the jungle (though its hard to say it reaches the increasing numbers of spiritual tourists who are now hustling down to the Amazon and transforming shamanic culture with first world dollars). The existence of ayahuasca itself may be one of the greatest mysteries. Ayahuasca is not one plant, but a relatively complex brew that requires a fair amount of preparation. How did the old ones know that, out of the 80,000 some species of plants in the jungle, only this vine, combined with that shrub, and then boiled down into black gook, can produce the mother of all trips (not to mention some grade-A karmic Drain-O)?

Narby takes the mystery one step further: could the shamans be right? Could the brew, which one informant calls “the television of the jungle,” facilitate the knowledge of the jungle? To approach this question, Narby attempts to “defocalize” his gaze so that he can perceive science and indigenous understandings at more or less the same time. This trippy conceptual exercise leads him to the central mindfuck of the book: that the serpents that commonly slip into the visual field during ayahuasca trips are a figurative expression of the ultimate source of ayahuasca’s visionary communiqués: the coils of DNA. Ayahuasca is not just a head trip – it is a communication with the “global network of DNA-based life.” Narby is no true believer, and he is somewhat startled by his own hypothesis, but that makes it all the more compelling, and the lengthy notes in the back of the book prove he is doing more than riffing.

After co-editing a powerful collection of first-hand reports of Western encounters with shamans, Narby came out with the book Intelligence in Nature. Rejecting the idea that plants and “lower” animals are mute mechanisms, Narby uncovers scientific evidence that impressive feats of cognition are going on outside the precious smartypants club of the higher primates. Narby looks at bees capable of abstract thought, and unicellular slime molds who are able to solve mazes. Perhaps inevitably, the book is not as wild a ride as The Cosmic Serpent, and Narby spends too much time describing his mundane journeys to research labs and too little time wrestling with how “intelligence” relates to choice, or awareness, or intention. Nonetheless, the book is a worthwhile example of Narby’s “defocalized” gaze – an undeniably scientific appreciation whose inspiration lies with the fundamental shamanic belief that other creatures, and even some plants, are, in their own world, “people” like us.

INTERVIEW
conducted by Jay Babcock over the telephone in late January, 2006

Arthur: You attended the conference on LSD held in Basel this past January to coincide with the 100th birthday of the father of LSD, Dr. Albert Hoffman. What happened there?

Jeremy Narby: What didn’t happen? I think one needs metaphors to get at it, really. When LSD hit in the ‘60s, it was like a drop of mercury that went in all kinds of directions, broke into a lot of different shards. Because LSD affects consciousness and consciousness affects everything, LSD had an impact in art, in music, in thinking, in the personal computer industry, in biology, and so on. In Basel all the different little pieces came back together and arranged themselves in a kind of mosaic that was psychedelic, multi-faceted and beautiful. All the chickens came home to roost after 40 years, looking good. One of my favorite moments was when Christian Ratsch came on the big stage with Guru Guru, which is the original Krautrock band. He was walking around with amber incense and stuff, providing incantations and shamanistic energy during the set, and these sprightly gentlemen, who must be about 55, just rocked the house down. It was fantastic.

Arthur: So, where does it go from here?

Jeremy Narby: One of the aims of the symposium was a kind of explicit political aim at getting psychedelic research back on the scientific map, and I think the point’s well taken. But you know, I’ve been working as an activist to get recognition for the knowledge systems of indigenous peoples and essentially despite a couple of decades of work and a lot of clear data (it seems to me), there’s really a fundamental resistance coming out of rationalism, coming out of Western cultures, coming out of the political systems. So I have the feeling of having led the horse to water but it didn’t want to drink. Sure, we can talk to the horse nicely and try and get it to drink the water some more, but finally I feel like more drastic tactics are needed. Like kicking the horse in the butt, or telling it to go and take a hike, or turning your back on it.

So I applaud these efforts to legalize psychedelic research, but… There are those among us who have wanted to use hallucinogens how indigenous people use them—in a serious way to understand the world. And we’ve been doing it, underground, for the last bunch of decades, and getting results that are richer and more interesting than what the Western rationalists are producing. So, I’d say that I’d rather take hallucinogens and then write stunning books than make speeches about hallucinogens.

Arthur: What was the response of Western rationalists to your hypothesis in The Comsic Serpent—that Amazonian shamans were actually receiving information at the molecular level via the ayahusaca trance?

Jeremy Narby: Scientists said that I hadn’t tested my hypothesis. Well, okay : I was just happy to have it considered testable! [chuckles] So how do we test it? Well, you try to falsify your hypothesis. You come up with a test to try to demonstrate that it’s wrong. That’s the scientific method. So, I thought, let’s send three Western molecular biologists with questions in their labwork down to the Amazon and put them into ayahuasca-induced trances. If they didn’t come up with any information then my hypothesis would start to look falsified. Now, it is a heavy thing to ask people who have never taken mindbending hallucinogens before to submit themselves to the experience in the name of science. These people are making their psyches available to you and then you distort them with these powerful hallucinogenic plants. In terms of ethics, this is even worse than experimenting on animals. It’s experimenting on humans. They were consulting subjects and all, but sheesh, this is serious business. I mean, the first thing that ayahuasca does, before it answers whatever questions you might put to it, is it tells you about yourself. It puts its finger on your weak spots, fast. It encourages you to clean up your act. This makes it a hard path to knowledge for somebody who’s into ‘being objective’ in the lab. As a scientist, you’re not supposed to pay attention to your subjectivity—you’re supposed to jettison it. But when you end up in an ayahuasca experience, it’s your little subjective self that is the hot point. Your subjective self comes to the forefront in your acquisition of knowledge. For a scientist, that’s a rough one.

Arthur: You were able to find volunteers, nonetheless. I gather they were colleagues… ?

Jeremy Narby: Actually, no. Fishing for molecular biologists is a kind of special sport. One of these molecular biologists runs a lab at a federal research institute here that specializes in modifying plant genomes. After a talk I gave in Lausanne in 1997 where I said that I was looking for molecular biologists to test the hypothesis, she raised her hand and said, ‘I am a molecular biologist.’ This other French molecular biologist, who was 64 and about to retire, had written to me, saying how impressed he was with The Cosmic Serpent and so on. I corresponded with him and cultivated the relation. Finally there was this Californian woman molecular biologist who runs a genome sequencing lab with 60 people under her responsibility, and she showed up at the book launch of The Cosmic Serpent in San Francisco and introduced herself. It’s no light thing getting people to do this. But, as scientists, they agreed, they found it too interesting to pass up.

Arthur: They each had questions from their individual researches…

Jeremy Narby: The French fellow was studying how sperm cells become fertile. When a sperm cell comes into the sperm duct out of the testicles it isn’t capable of fertilizing an ovum. But by the time it gets to the end of the sperm duct, it can fertilize an ovum. There’s something like 50 different proteins that work on it in that duct, somewhat like automobile workers working on a car as it goes through the chain. So the question that he was working on is, Which of the 50 proteins is responsible for making sperm fertile? He was working on this at the French National Center for Scientific Research because he was looking for a male contraceptive. He had two other questions: Why is it that we’ve been looking for so many years without being able to find the answer, is it because this is ‘forbidden’ knowledge? (That was a kind of Catholic question.) And, Is the mouse the appropriate model for us to be studying this, because what interests us is humans, of course.

He got some fairly clear answers. In his third ayahuasca session, fairly early into the session a voice explained to him, he later stated, that the answer to Question Number One was that it wasn’t one protein, but the combination of all 50 that was doing it. The answer to the second question was, See my first answer. In other words, you’ve been not finding it for so many years because you’ve been concentrating on one protein rather than how the 50 interact. And the answer to the third question was, ‘This question is too small for me to consider. Ask me something else.’ You know, you figure out for yourself whether the mouse is an appropriate model for humans. He later stated that he did not have the impression of accessing independent or outside information. The two women, on the other hand, had definite impressions of encounters with independent intelligences in the form of plant mothers: the mother of tobacco, and the mother of chacruna. We actually had to negotiate over words. I asked them whether they thought these were ‘outside’ intelligences and both of them preferred the word ‘independent.’ So the jury is still out on just where the information may be coming from…

Arthur: At a minimum, though, the ayahuasca was an activating agent.

Jeremy Narby: That, and the singing of the shamans. I was surprised by the extent to which they did come up with ideas and hypotheses in their visions. But when I reported this [at a 2000 symposium, later published as the final chapter in 2001’s Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge anthology], nothing happened. It never got reviewed. Like I said, the world doesn’t seem to be ready for this stuff.

Arthur: Your work seems to complement that of Benny Shannon, the professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jeremy Narby: That guy is a heavyweight. To me his book [The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience, Oxford University Press, 2002] seems to demonstrate beyond argument that knowledge can be gained in altered states of consciousness attained by ayahuasca. He’s interviewed hundreds of people who are experienced ayahuasca users and he’s made sense out of their answers. So yeah… It’s very complementary. Benny Shannon pointed out to me when we first met, it might’ve been in ’97 or ’98 that he thought that my hypothesis was rather narrow. He was one of the few people that said that. He said, ‘All you talk about is molecular biology, but there does not seem to be a limit to the domains that are pertinent to ayahuasca, where people can learn things about these domains via ayahuasca. You can have insights into all kinds of domains, not just molecular biology.’

What I like about Benny’s work there is that he places us like the early European explorers in the 16th century, arriving on this new continent, without maps: the first thing they had to do was to get in those canoes and go upriver and make maps. So Benny took ten years to map the ayahuasca continent, to provide a preliminary map of these altered states of consciousness induced by ayahuasca from a scientific point of view. That hadn’t been done before. I don’t know if he’s the Christopher Columbus or the Amerigo Vespucci of consciousness, but what that means is we’re in kindergarten, or the 16th century, when it comes to understanding this stuff. More research is certainly needed. Benny himself is working on the philosophical implications of what he’s found.

Arthur: Where is your own work headed from here ?

Jeremy Narby: If we are part of nature, as science indicates, and if nature is intelligent, as science and shamanism also indicate, then is there anything special about human intelligence? In other words, I’m looking at human specificity, reconsidered from a point of view that presupposes no separation between humans and nature, and appreciates the presence of intelligence in nature. So it comes down to the question: What are human beings? How do they fit into the scheme of things? What are we doing here, in other words. If Nature has got intelligence, what does it have in mind coming up with us?

Arthur: Western thinkers like Terence McKenna, Richard Tarnas and Grant Morrison have suggested that humans are what happens when the universe becomes self-aware.

Jeremy Narby: Well, there have been many things that have seemed to be uniquely human but when we looked at it closely we found out it wasn’t so uniquely human. Shamans are telling us that the other species are human just like us in fact. We usually say that humans are the “symbolic species” but it turns out that DNA molecules are symbols, and that all of nature is shot through with symbols. We used to think we were the only humans, now indigenous Amazonians tell us “humanity” is a condition that applies to all the beings in the world. We first think, What does that mean? But if you think that being able to symbolize is specifically human, and then you understand that there are symbols in every cell in the world, you can see the whole thing more clearly. [Humanity] as the symbolic species remain a quintessentially natural product. But admittedly a peculiar one. We do all kinds of things that other species don’t do. This is true of other species, also, but we are a pretty surprising bunch. So just what is going on with these human beings?

Arthur: If Western rationalism is simply catching up to the shamanic understanding of reality, why not just go native? Rather than spending time and energy translating these truths into words that Western rationalists can understand and maybe even accept, why not just embrace the shamanic worldview?

Jeremy Narby: Well, I’m a Canadian, with blue eyes, and I like ice hockey, y’know? So I can put on feathers and start smoking pipes, but it’d be a bit of a fraud. Not that I don’t smoke a pipe or anything, but… I think that [going native] would be a mistake. Part of my dayjob, as the Amazonian Projects Coordinator for Nouvelle Planete, a small Swiss NGO, is to live in the Western world, to be an outsider here, to explain to the Westerners indigenous reality in the Amazon, why it should be interesting to us, and to back the survival of indigenous people there. And these are very concrete projects: right now I am trying to get funding for people in Peru who are running programs to benefit Aguaruna Jivaro women and their knowledge about nutritional and medicinal plants, or to help fund the Cacataibo people’s efforts to demarcate an area for non-contacted Cacataibo people in the central forest area. My role is to find funds for them here, in the West. I go to Peru once a year, I am in constant contact with the people there, but the money is here. So I’ve got to speak the language of these Westerners, I’ve got to know what motivates them. But I want to have a distance from it.

Arthur: So you’re constantly crossing between the Amazonian shamanic worldview and the materialist, rationalist worldview that you were raised with and are embedded in. There must be moments of jarring culture shock, right?

Jeremy Narby: I used to have that problem closer to 15 or 20 years ago, just getting back from the Amazon and stuff. I went through a couple of years of, I dunno, cultural schizophrenia. For example… I’m not Catholic myself, but in this part of Switzerland people are. All you gotta do is read the last chapter of the Bible and you’ll know who the cosmic serpent is associated with. So on the one hand I’m walking around with serpents and DNA molecules in my head, and outside there’s the Judeo-Christian rational world. Probably when you go to the supermarket you don’t want to get into the ‘I am transforming into a jaguar’ mode! [laughter]

But that’s the profession of the professional anthropologist: to know how to feel at home abroad and how to feel abroad at home. So, okay: bi-cognitivism. Bilinguals have more fun! It’s fun to have two languages, because there are things that you can say in another language that you can’t in your own, so being able to go back and forth between a kind of rational view and a shamanic view, I think it’s beneficial. To be able to know how to juggle points of view; to be able to look at your own presuppositions, it’s something that your average citizen would gain from being able to do. The world that’s currently unfolding in front of us where Pakistan and Denmark are linked and the same news bulletins about what’s going on in Iraq are read on television in Japan, Switzerland and Venezuela [is one in which radically different points of view need to be better understood.] In other words: everybody’s gotta become a kind of anthropologist at this point. And to those of us in the West, this can be painful. It was shocking to me as a rationalist to discover that my way of looking at the world actually was pretty arrogant in its presuppositions, and that I had excluded a priori shamanism as being a ‘real’ way of knowing, and that the only real way of knowing I presupposed with most rationalists, is Rationalism. Opening one’s mind to that I found rather painful.

Arthur: Some basic presuppositions need to fall away, or at least be put up for debate. Which brings us back to LSD: a deconditioning tool that challenges what you know, and even how you know.

Jeremy Narby: It’s not for nothing that they call it a trip. You can go traveling and physically take your body to different countries and learn that people in different places do things differently. And that forces you to look at your own presuppositions. Or you can stay home and if you work with these psychoactive plants correctly, you can examine your own presuppositions in your living room. And I’d say, if you do both, it’s even better.

I get a lot of strength from being specific—in working from particular cases and then generalizing from there. My beat has been the Western Amazon for the last 20 years. But I’m sure that one could make similar gains by going to Siberia or China or India or Lebanon or Africa. The whole world is interesting.

TULI KUPFERBERG MEMORIAL SCREENING – Nov 14

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
32 SECOND AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10003
(212) 505-5181

A tribute to the 60s icon, Fugs co-founder, cartoonist, and New York underground beat poet laureate, who passed away in July. Two shows of shorts, clips, and U.S. premiere of the new high-def transfer of the long-unscreened underground film VOULEZ-VOUS COUCHER AVEC GOD?

Sixties icon, Fugs co-founder, cartoonist, and New York underground beat poet laureate Tuli Kupferberg passed away in July 2010 at age 86, leaving a rich legacy of a lifetime’s worth of artistic radicalism and fun, including many rarely-seen film and video appearances. This special memorial screening presents a diverse collection of short films and videos from the 1960s onward, including Tuli’s appearances on the public access programs REVOLTING NEWS and IF I CAN’T DANCE YOU CAN KEEP YOUR REVOLUTION, some of Tuli’s more recent web clips, and other odds and ends. Not to mention the first screening in many a moon of the long-lost counter-culture feature VOULEZ-VOUS COUCHER AVEC GOD?, starring Tuli in the title role!

To be screened:

PROGRAM 1

Shorts, clips, and odds & ends, including Edward English’s short film:
FUGS
(1960s, 12.5 minutes, 16mm)
“(Sights and sounds of the lower East Side rain forest.) This film captures a bit of the Fugs’ environment, which includes the lower East Side, the Waldorf Astoria, the MacDougal Street scene, police harassment, show biz, humanity, their audiences, and the filmmaker.” –E.E.
–Sunday, November 14 at 6:00.

Tuli with hat, taken from the film. Tuli plays God. Image courtesy Jack Christie and Michael Hirsh

PROGRAM 2

Michael Hirsh & Jack Christie
VOULEZ-VOUS COUCHER AVEC GOD?
(1972, 69 minutes, 16mm-to-video.)
(U.S Premiere of new high-definition transfer from original 16mm elements.)
Voulez-vous coucher avec God? Judge for yourself at the New York premiere of this vintage, Canadian-made experimental flick featuring a groundbreaking potpourri of live action and animation, backed by a rollicking soundtrack of 1960s hits. As portrayed by Kupferberg, there’s no messing with this Yahweh who’d just as soon enjoy a blow job from an inflatable schmoo as mastermind a presidential election from the cozy confines of his bathtub in Hashish Seventh Heaven, where a cast of pipe-dreaming souls journeys to be reborn. All hell breaks loose when the angel of the Lord attempts to cover up his failure to avert the sacrifice of young Isaac by his father, Abraham (also played by Kupferberg).
–Sunday, November 14 at 8:30.

Directions: Anthology is at 32 Second Ave. at 2nd St. Subway: F to 2nd Ave; 6 to Bleecker. Tickets: $9 general; $8 Essential Cinema (free for members); $7 for students, seniors, & children (12 & under); $6 AFA members.

Web: http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
Twitter: http://twitter.com/anthologyfilm
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AnthologyFilm

Download: “Run From the City” – Purling Hiss (mp3)

Purling Hiss is pig latin lover Mike Polizze of Philladelphia jammers Birds of Maya laying down some serious ’70s-style aquarock—it’s so submerged you feel like you’ve already got your earplugs in. Nah, that’s just the mix, bro. Right here is “Run From the City”—the title is a great tactical suggestion for contemporary coping; the song itself is, I dunno, Grand Funk meets Skynyrd in a thick cloud, recorded three rooms down. By accident. You can smell it more than you can hear it, if that makes any sense. From the Hiss’s third album Public Service Announcement, being released on vinyl and iTunes by the kind folk at Woodsist.

PURLING HISS tours now:

10/19 Charlottesville, VA Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar *
10/20 Chapel Hill, NC Local 506 *
10/21 Atlanta, GA The Earl * ^
10/22 Birmingham, AL The Nickw * ^
10/23 Nashville, TN Mercy Loungew * ^
10/25 Toledo, OH Mickey Finn * ^ !
10/26 Covington, KY Mad Hatters * ^
10/27 Columbus, OH Skully’s * ^
10/28 Ann Arbor, MI Blind Pig * ^
10/29 Indianapolis, IN White Rabbit Cabaret * ^
10/30 Chicago, IL Empty Bottle * ^
10/31 Chicago, IL Empty Bottle * ^
11/01 Minneapolis, MN Triple Rock * ^
11/04 Seattle, WA Neumos * ^
11/06 Portland, OR Berbatis Pan * ^
11/09 San Francisco, CA Rickshaw Stop * ^
11/11 Los Angeles, CA Echoplex * ^
11/13 San Diego, CA Casbah * ^
11/14 Tempe, AZ The Trunk Space *
11/17 San Antonio, TX The Korova *
11/18 Austin, TX Emo’s (Inside) *
11/19 Dallas, TX Club Dada *
11/21 Memphis, TN Hi Tone *
11/24 Washington, DC Black Cat (Backstage) *
11/26 Philadelphia, PA Johnny Brenda’s *
12/03 Brooklyn, NY Knitting Factory *

* = w/ Kurt Vile
^ = w/ The Soft Pack
! = w/ Jaill

Download: “Bar Bar” – Peter Stampfel & Baby Gramps

Great American human being Peter Stampfel teams with new-to-these-ears Portland, Oregon-based Old Timey old timer Baby Gramps for an album’s worth of cartoon-folk gitdowns, including this catchy anti-bar, anti-sports TV ditty. Sadly, Outertainment is not available on vinyl—you gotta settle for the cd, available from Red Newt Records or Amazon.

Extremely entertaining/insightful recent interview with Peter (“One reason I’m better now than then is that I was so mediocre back then”) by Greg Kot: Chicago Tribune

You can befriend Peter Stampfel here: facebook

CLICK POSTER TO ENLARGE

More info: cloacina.org

Thanks Camilla!

[Lately] I’ve been able to spend some time on my passion: dream comics. I’ve picked up SUBTLEMAN again, which launched in the last issue of RARE BIT FIENDS. The second chapter appeared in THE FORBIDDEN BOOK, and what you see here is the third chapter, in progress. I posted both previous chapters here on the blog last summer if you need to get up to speed.

SUBTLEMAN is an exploration of what might be called my “shamanic” dreams; those mystically charged, magically strange, quantum-tunneling visions that hint at the true nature of consciousness and the multi-dimensional universe. When last we saw my dream self, he’d covered himself in clay, which seemed perfectly fitting. I’ll write more about the direction of SUBTLEMAN in upcoming posts. Meanwhile, enjoy.

Here are a few pages from Chapter 3:

More: rickveitch.com

Above: Sweet Tomb cover by Matt Greene

Author and longtime Arthur contributor Trinie Dalton writes:

Hello Providence!

I’ll be coming out this Saturday, October 16th, for a reading at Ada Books. I hope you can join me. 6pm. I’ll be reading with Madras Press editor, Sumanth Prubhaker.

http://ada-books.com

Madras Press is a great new small press that publishes novella-length books:
http://www.madraspress.com/news

See you there, and thanks for helping to spread the word—if you’re not in Providence but know someone who might like to come, please kindly forward this note.

Trinie Dalton blog: http://sweet-tomb.blogspot.com

Your friend,
Trinie

Download: “It Is So Nice to Get Stoned” – Ted Lucas

Recorded in Detroit, 1974. So beautiful. The timeless, centerpiece song from Ted Lucas’s eponymous solo album, to be reissued on October 12 by Yoga Records.

You can listen to a radio interview with Ted Lucas from the period over at Waxidermy.

This video just surfaced. “Why the Fly” 10 minutes, live in Frankfurt, 2001 by Masters of Reality in that special Chris Goss-Joshua Homme-Nick Oliveri formation

Download: “Motorhead With Me” — Nobunny

This here song is on the new, insta-classic Nobunny album First Blood, from the great Goner Records of Memphis, Tennessee. [Note: Looks like Goner is down for Gonerfest, try Midheaven instead.] It’s also the B-side to a new 7-inch from Hozac Records of Chicago, whose hype text from for this is so good/accurate that it’s pointless to write our own. Here it is:

Just as the rest of the modern world is warming up to the fuzzy pop nightmare of Nobunny’s debut LP, we’ve got the follow-up 7″ with two brand new songs that will bring back that virginal feeling “down there” and reinstate your faith in humanity. Sunshine Ramones pop run through a Kim Fowley diarrhea daydream that will have you mesmerized by it’s simplicity, and won over before the end of the chorus on the first side. Two more stone-cold classic Nobunny songs that’ll stick with you through the hard times and with laden with hooks so infectious that you’ll have to have them surgically removed from your brain.

REIGN IN BLOOD
The secret mark that French pulp villain Fantômas left on the 20th Century

By Erik Morse

Early in 1911 popular French publishing house Fayard released the first of 32 monthly serial novels of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantômas. Subtitled ‘A Shadow on the Guillotine,’ this ultra-violent pulp tale recounted the exploits of the eponymous master villain as he reined blood and magick upon the boulevards of Paris. Pursued by police inspector, Juve, and his journalist sidekick, Jerome Fandor, Fantômas slaughters members of French high-society indiscriminately before stealing away with their wealth and, often, their very identities—in his travels between the Dordogne and Paris, Fantômas dispatches the Marquise de Langrune, her steward Dollon, Lord Beltham, Princess Sonia Danidoff, the famed actor Valgrand and a passenger liner full of travelers en route to South America. When Fantômas, alias Etienne Rambert, alias Gurn, is apprehended by Juve at Lady Beltham’s villa, he is brought to trial at the Palais de Justice, found guilty of murder and condemned to the guillotine. However with the aid of his mistress, Fantômas steals away from his Santé prison cell and fills the vacancy with an unsuspecting look-a-like who is left to the blade. When Juve discovers the ruse, he proclaims, “Curses! Fantômas has escaped! Fantômas is free! He had an innocent man executed in his place! Fantômas! I tell you, Fantômas is alive.”

Within months of its February debut, the Fantômas serial became a pop smash with the reading public, profiting no doubt from the French public’s unquenchable thirst for violence, mayhem and pulp. At 65 centimes a copy, sales for each volume reached easily into the hundreds of thousands. American poet and Fantômas enthusiast John Ashbery contends that the real success of the serial was its transcendence of class, education and sex, from “Countesses and concierges; poets and proletarians; Cubists, nascent Dadaists, soon-to-be-Surrealists. Everyone who could read, and even those who could not, shivered at posters of a masked man in impeccable evening clothes, dagger in hand, looming over Paris like a somber Gulliver, contemplating hideous misdeeds from which no citizen was safe.” Such was the popular reaction to the Fayard publication, Marcel Allain would later recall, with some hyperbole, “The adventures of Fantômas have surpassed those of the Bible.”

Nearly a hundred years later, we can see the frightening metastasis of the master of crime’s “brand”—from his beginnings amongst the Right Bank sophisticates who released him upon the world, to the marauding gangs plundering and murdering in his name, to the sacrificial cults who would congregate at the witching hour to reenact his sins. His transgressions—bold, fiendish and inexplicable—were the narratives of nightmares. Fantômas captured the imagination of his admirers and extended his influence through the artistic genealogies of Europe, leaving a catechism of excess, debauchery and violence to a brood as varied as Pablo Picasso, Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille, Alain Robbe-Grillet, James Joyce, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Desnos, Jean Marais, Alain Resnais, René Magritte, Francois Truffaut and the Mike Patton-Buzz Osbourne-Trevor Dunn-Dave Lombardo art-rock superband of the same name. In their major contributions to the century, the words and deeds of France’s supreme villain pullulate still more revolutionary achievements and still darker crimes.

Here, in this extended fait-diver, is the unedited, uncensored and untold history of the criminal of the century…

This article continues, for 9,500 more words, in Arthur No. 28 (March 2008), available for $4 from: The Arthur Store

More: erinlizardo.com

Fishing for Paradise
by Freeman House, author of Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species

Humans need a taste of wild foods once in a while, preferably gathered with one’s own hands. The basic psychic comfort of experiencing the earth as a place that welcomes us by feeding us was hardwired into each of us during our long residence in the Pleistocene. We haven’t evolved very far from that need: It’s still part of the basic definition of being human. It’s this need, I think, that accounts for the undiminished taste for hunting and fishing for which modern supermarkets offer no substitute.

But we are losing ground in our relationships with nature. Within the last century, the developed world has embraced expensive technologies in transportation, agriculture and energy, which in turn provide us with an illusory sense of comfort and prosperity. The expense of those technologies can be calculated in lost topsoil, deforestation, the dewatering of our rivers – the list goes on. Our “comforts” are killing us just as surely as they are making us feel safe. Meanwhile, we grow further and further from the sources of our sustenance, and our very imaginations are drying up as a result of the absence of our primary teachers – the lands and waters themselves, and the creatures with whom we share them. The pleasure of fishing is now tainted by the question of how long such pleasures will be available to us.

Tom Wesoloh, manager of North Coast projects for Cal Trout, tells of fishermen who say to him “If we just let ‘em go, everything will be fine.” Or “If we just stopped fishing for five years, wouldn’t the fish come back?” He replies sadly, “if only it were true.” A growing number of activists and scientists think that we need a more proactive approach to the restoration of our fish populations and (especially) the habitats that support them.

Few individual human minds can grapple with global ecological problems without falling into despair. A watershed, however, presents a scale of possibility in terms of working with nonprofessional residents and neighbors toward a common understanding of home. The goal of working in common toward optimum health and productivity of a complex system is scaled down to fit within our daily experience. You may very well have political and practical differences with a watershed neighbor, but if you are standing on the ground discussing what’s before you, ideological differences have a way of resolving themselves, mediated by the place itself. If you happen to share a watershed with native salmon or trout, it’s not hard to find allies in such work.

In 1978, when my wife and I bought land in remote northern California, watershed restoration was a new idea to most people. It was not a new idea for native Californians who had, before contact, tended to organize their cultures within watershed constraints for millennia. But we moderns had drifted away from our connection to place. In our new home, we identified the obstacles to salmonid reproduction, and introduced the first community-based native salmon streamside hatchery system in California. The idea was to maintain a remnant salmon population while the river recovered from the logging boom of the fifties and sixties.

Although our early efforts showed promise, resulting in an egg-to-fry survival rate consistently higher than 80 percent (compared to 5 or 10 percent in the damaged river), we realized during the first year’s work that it wasn’t nearly enough. It just wasn’t that simple. We needed to develop strategies to hasten the recovery of habitat and ultimately to develop community standards of behavior that wouldn’t replicate the mistakes of the past. We were involved in a timescale much longer than that of a few salmon generations – it was more likely we were looking at a project that might involve several human generations. Public schools and community meetings became as important a part of our activities as were projects to improve riverine habitat and repair sources of future sedimentation.

Twenty-five years later, it’s hard to find a watershed without its own watershed council, at least on the west coast of North America. People who fish, either commercially or recreationally, are often core members of these groups. In my mind, community watershed groups represent the stirrings of a metaproject overdue in modern America – the project of learning to live where we are.

Download: “I Just Don’t Know Where I Stand Anymore” – THE FLIPS (mp3)

Available on REAL VINYL from HoZac

The show at Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown (near Joshua Tree) is FREE and (as always) ALL AGES. See ya there…

From Ondi McMaster:

A BENEFIT FOR IRA COHEN
Poet, Publisher, Photographer, Filmmaker, Media Shaman
September 8, 2010 7-10pm
(Yes it is the first night of Rosh Hashana)

Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery New York, NY 10012
(212) 614-0505

The evening’s suggested donation is $20…. or more if feeling compassionate and generous. We will do a drawing among the donating guests for one of his signed prints. Ira Cohen himself may appear in the beginning of the evening and there will be a 9:30 showing of Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda.

Readings by poets and music of magicians, friends and peers of Ira, including

ALLAN GRAUBARD
CANNON HERSEY
DEER FRANCE & Friends
JIM FEAST
JORDAN ZINOVICH
COSMIC LEGENDS : SYLVIE DEGIEZ, WAYNE LOPES, PERRY ROBINSON
MARIANNE VITALE
PETE DRUNGLE
ROBERT GALINSKY
STEVE BEN ISRAEL
STEVE DALACHINSKY
SHIV MIRABITO
VALERY OISTEANU
& others

We will be selling special CDs of Ira’s past readings($10) and signed photo giclees of a few images from his mylar series of the ’60s (see below). The giclees start at $250 each for 8×10′s $600 for 11X14, Jimi Hendrix or William S. Burroughs with cobra). (I will take preorders on these and you can pay now with Paypal by contacting me)

We need to raise money for Ira Cohen and his archives that have been displaced by the effects of the bedbug condition of his building. It has been an expensive and torrential experience, though Ira is for now staying peacefully at the Chelsea Hotel until he can return home.

This night is dedicated to him. Be inspired by his work. Come and support this benefit.

Here’s a story I did for the LAWeekly on Ira Cohen back in March, 2002, on the occasion of his reading at the Sonic Youth-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties at UCLA…

AKASHIC OFFERING: Ira Cohen, human being
By Jay Babcock

“Know that it is not imagination, but experience, which makes poetry. And that behind every image, behind every word, there is something I am trying to tell you, something that really happened.”

Ira Cohen said that, on a CD he made with DJ Cheb i Sabbah (The Majoon Traveler, Sub Rosa) back in 1996. And if any living American poet has experience to draw from, it’s the Earth-trotting Cohen.

Born in 1935 to deaf parents, raised on 92nd Street in New York, and higher-educated at Cornell and Columbia, Cohen went on to spend substantial creatively productive periods of his life in happening locations with adventurous people: the years in Morocco with Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and Paul Bowles; the mid- to late ‘60s in New York with the Living Theater, filmmakers Jack Smith and Alexandro Jodorowsky, and musicians like Tony Conrad and original Velvet Underground drummer Angus MacLise; and the ’70s, when he spent two and a half years in India, a year in Nepal, and the rest of the decade — in what Cohen calls his “Shangri-la period”—in Kathmandu, living with artists like MacLise and other members of Asia‘s “hippie-drug dealer-saddhu fraternity.” Today, Cohen reclines amid book landslides in a Manhattan apartment like some kind of psychedelic-in-residence, regaling visitors and phone callers with a steady stream of bohemian biography, financial complaints, and improvised observational poem-riffs that drip with the gathered wisdom of a uniquely blessed life and learned, generous, unrepentant “been there, smoked that” perspective.

“In the West, everywhere you look you see some kind of desecration of the human spirit,” he snorts. “Graffiti and ads. Used condoms in the Hudson River. Commercialized crapola. In the East, what you find on a comparable level is acts of consecration. That’s a very, very great difference. Now, yeah, there‘s a lot of poverty and suffering there. But there’s a lot of dignity in poverty—I saw people in Ethiopia starving during the famine who had more dignity than anyone on the planet. I can‘t say I’ve seen people putting flowers in little boats with candles and sailing them up the Hudson River with hopes for divine indulgence—not asking for something, but offering something, rather than trying to take something.”

Cohen‘s wide-ranging career—encompassing poetry, experimental and documentary filmmaking, audio recordings, astonishing “Mylar chamber” photographic portraiture, publication of the infamous Hashish Cookbook, and the editing of the landmark underground magazine Gnaoua (included on the cover of Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home)—is about offering something back to the world. Cohen calls that something—his collected works—the Akashic Record.

“Akashic basically means timeless thoughts,” he explains. “It‘s Sanskrit for ’toward the shining manifestation. A spot in the ether, a point where a potential thing is about to occur.‘ Or, as Judith Malina said, ’the hidden meaning of the hidden meaning.‘ Or, as Paul Bowles said, ’God‘s home movies.’ I never wanted to be a photographer like the commercial photographers. For me, it was more about the involvement of the mirror, and scrying, reflection, crystal-ball-gazing, trying to get to some other place. It was all about reflection, in the deepest sense of the word. Like a shamanic trip: A shaman is some kind of magician who can take on all kinds of special journeys like astral travel and come back with answers by putting himself into a certain space. He takes on the pain, he goes out there, he comes back with the answer or with the medicine. He‘s a healer. I like all those words — tantra, akasha, healing, shamanism. Add a touch of surrealism and humor, and you’ve got me dead in your sights.”

What‘s been Cohen’s response to the 9/11 attacks and their global aftereffects?

“It hasn‘t impinged on what I do on a given day, but . . . my dreams are stranger. My fears are greater. I feel somewhat depressed, because I feel that there are millions of people out there who are hell-bent on one thing only, which is destruction. Think of it! That’s never been true before. Sometimes I consider human almost a bad word.

”As an artist, you just keep writing what you feel, and what you think, and be the conscience of Planet Earth. I feel that my arms are extended as a human being across another chasm, I‘m trying to think intergalactically, I’m living my life as best I can. I‘ve been pushing a peanut with my nose ever since I can remember, and I don’t know what else to do! I don‘t have a big podium—I just have a small pen.“

A song from Swans’ new album, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, their first in over 13 years, out September 27 via Young God Records.

Download: Swans – “Eden Prison” (mp3)

New York Times on Swans’ return. Michael Gira, pictured upper left, is interviewed, Thurston Moore provides testimony & insight.

Gira describes the album, track by track, to The Quietus

Dragon’s Tongue Bean: $3.50 / $3.00 for members
Stringless purple-striped wax beans are delicious for fresh eating and make great dry beans for soup. Illustration by Arik Roper. 50 seeds per pack.

Available from the highly advanced-civ people at Hudson Valley Seed Library

Not sure what’s so dystopian about this, and the music is eh, but certainly worth viewing (and enacting!)…

Read: “Leila’s First Hijack” (onthisdeity.com)

Download: Highlife – “F Kenya Rip”

White Magic’s Sleepy Doug Shaw awakes and, with his Highlife mates, gives us this lovely North African dream reverie. From the forthcoming Best Bless EP, via the good folk at The Social Registry of Brooklyn…

Download: “Merticane” – KIT

Bodacious Soft Machine-meets-Deerhoof lead track off the new K.I.T. album Invocation, out October 12 from Upset the Rhythm.

Revolutionary Letter #4
by Diane di Prima

Left to themselves people
grow their hair.
Left to themselves they
take off their shoes.
Left to themselves they make love
sleep easily
share blankets, dope & children
they are not lazy or afraid
they plant seeds, they smile, they
speak to one another. The word
coming into its own: touch of love
on the brain, the ear.

We return with the seas, the tides
we return as often as leaves, as numerous
as grass, gentle, insistent, we remember
the way,
our babes toddle barefoot thru the cities of the universe.

from Revolutionary Letters

More info: ThrillJockey

All best,

Jay Babcock
Arthur Magazine

Download: “Tea Lights” – Lower Dens (mp3)

Stream:

Beautiful song off the new Lower Dens album, available via Gnomonsong. Details on the band’s current tour, plus a great photo blog, are at Lower Dens on tumblr.

Lower Dens features the vocals of Jana Hunter, who was one of 20 artists on Arthur’s 2004 compilation Golden Apples of the Sun, curated by Devendra Banhart (available for $10 from the Arthur Store).

Jana also played the Arthurdesh benefit in Brooklyn in early 2009, for which we are forever grateful.

We are psyched to welcome her and her new band to Pappy & Harriet’s Palace in Pioneertown, California for a special FREE, ALL-AGES, special DUSKTIME (6pm) show on Sunday, September 5.

More info on Pappy & Harriet’s here: pappyandharriets.com

turn this one up…

Paul Krassner, Tuli Kupferberg, and unidentified woman. Photo by Paskal / The Rag Blog.

Tuli Has Left the Planet
by Paul Krassner for High Times

Prologue: Ah, the songs . . . “Boobs a Lot” . . . “Nothing” . . . “Morning, Morning” . . ..

I first met Tuli Kupferberg in the early ’60s at the Paperback Gallery in Greenwich Village. I was delivering my magazine, The Realist, and he was delivering his booklet, Birth. Sharing a concept that tragedy and absurdity were two sides of the same coin, we bonded immediately.

In 1966, I published an article by John Wilcock, “Who the Fugs Think They Are.” Tuli talked about the importance of sexual liberation. “Americans like to kill or be killed,” he said. “Aggression is reaction to frustration. Sexual frustration is still the major problem to be solved and in my opinion the appearance of sexual humor is a healthy sign. And if we can put some joy, some real sexy warmth into the revolution, we’ll have really achieved something.”

When Norman Mailer wrote his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, he used the euphemism “fug” for “fuck,” which was then a literary taboo. At our first encounter, I asked him if it was true that when he met actress Tallulah Bankhead she said, “So you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck.” With a twinkle in his eye, he told me that he replied, “Yes, and you’re the young woman who doesn’t know how to.” Anyway, that’s where the Fugs got their name. In “Doin’ All Right,” they sang, “I’m not ever goin’ to Vietnam/ I’d rather stay right here and screw your mom.” Tuli told me, “That was enough to get us beaten up if we did it in the right place.”

In 1968, at the counter-convention in Chicago, hash oil in honey was the drug of choice. The Fugs co-founders, Ed Sanders and Tuli, sampled it. This was strong stuff, and they got completely fugged up. Sanders described the grass he was walking on as “a giant frothing trough of mutant spinach egg noodles.” Tuli’s friends had to carry him by the armpits back to the apartment where he was staying. “They’re delivering me,” he explained.

There was a rumor that Philip Roth had lifted the masturbatory obsessed theme of his novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, from a Fugs song, but that notion was disavowed by Sanders, who assured me, “Philip Roth did not plagiarize a Fugs song. He came to a Fugs show in 1966, and I think he was inspired by Tuli, in top hat and cane, singing ‘Jack-Off Blues.’ Many times in reunion concerts, introducing Tuli singing that song, I have suggested that Roth got some of the impetus for Portnoy’s Complaint from that time he was inspired by the Tuli tune.”

Another rumor was triggered by Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem, Howl. Tuli acknowledged that he had been the inspiration for this passage: “…jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer…” Actually, it was the Manhattan Bridge. Tuli was just out of college and in the throes of the break-up of his first major love relationship, which contributed to a nervous breakdown that precipitated his suicide attempt. He was rescued by a passing tugboat and taken to Governor’s Island Hospital with a broken transverse process that put him in a body cast.

“Throughout the years,” Tuli complained, “I have been annoyed many times by, ‘Oh, did you really jump off the Brooklyn Bridge?’—as if it was a great accomplishment.” At first he had refused to talk about it, but as Ginsberg’s myth spread that he had simply “walked away” after jumping off a bridge, Tuli became concerned about wrongly influencing young people. He didn’t want anyone else to take a similar chance of being severely injured if they survived.

Tuli was the first Poet-in-Residence at the Bowery Poetry Club. Proprietor Bob Holman sent an e-mail two days before Tuli’s death on a gloomy Sunday: “I am in Medellin at the amazing International Poets Festival here—100 poets! Ten days of it!—and Tuli’s spirit is everywhere. Tell that bum to get up and out and over here.” Norman Savitt, producer of Tuli’s TV show, Revolting News, reported from the hospital bedside that Tuli reminded him “what a shame it was that I had my son circumcised, how I should be putting lyrics to all my instrumental music, and the importance of raw garlic in my diet.” And Larkworthy Antfarm adapted a Fugs song, applying the original lyrics to the BP catastrophe, singing about “a river of shit.”

Epilogue: Ah, the condolences: “Tuli, may you see Boobs a Lot in Heaven” . . . “This Monday will be just a little more Nothing” . . . “Mourning, Mourning” . . .

and of course Sinead O’Connor – “Nothing Compares 2 U”

More info: sinatoro.com

Grant Morrison gave a performance at ArthurBall in Los Angeles, Spring 2006. He was featured in an extended interview in Arthur No. 12 (see the cover below, by Morrison collaborator Cameron Stewart), available now from The Arthur Store for $7.50 postpaid.

Photo by Robert Altman, 1969

BOBBY SEALE * 17 March 1999 * unedited transcript

I interviewed Bobby Seale (official site) in person in Oakland for Vibe Magazine, on a commission by Peter Relic, who was editing the front section of Vibe that year. I think the transcript runs to 12,000 words. The published Q & A was about 700 words. There’s lots of great stuff in here about Black Panther Party history and philosophy, Bobby’s times in prison, barbecue and so on, after we get done with talking about what he’s up to at the moment…—Jay Babcock

Bobby Seale: I’m out here [in Oakland] for David Hilliard. David Hilliard is running for City
Council, 3rd district, to mount a real student involvement and people’s
involvement-type of campaign for him to win that particular political
office. It’s all about the continuing progressive Old Left-radical politics
today. We want to get these students involved in this campaign to teach
them techniques and methods of the old Black Panther party campaign, Old
Left radical politics, progressive politics. To teach students that they
gotta take over, that they have to be part and parcel of this kind of
stuff, they gotta take seats over all over this country and this is gonna
set an example for that. That they’re the ones who have to begin to
understand the need to control, run these political institutionalized
functions whether they’re city council, county seats, state legislative
seats, etc., and make laws, legislation and policy that reflect the real
true human liberation of the people, the empowerment of the people, whether
you’re black, white, blue, red, green, yellow, polkadot, we don’t care.
We’re progressive. In the 1960s we were an ALL power to ALL the people. We
didn’t care what you were.

People think we were just a strict so-called xenophobic-type Black power
organization. Not true. If people look and know our history…as an
African-American group of young people who were part of a young
intelligentsia of the 1960s, what we evolved were some of the most profound
progressive politics that emerged out of the Black community: to set up
coalitions, working face-to-face coalitions with all our white left radical
friends, with all the young Hispanics, young Puerto Ricans with the Young
Lords organization or the young Mexican-Americans Chicano brothers and
sisters with the Brown Berets and the Cesar Chavez farm labor movement. We
had a working coalition with that organization. AIM—American Indian
Movement—we worked directly with. All the young Asians, young Chinese and
Japanese worked with us, like the Red Guard out of Chinatown. Young Chinese
students and young Japanese. In fact, of all those ethnic groups, it was
always a few of each one of those ethnic groups that actually literally
joined our Black Panther Party. I’m just saying that, that’s the kind of
progressive, “All power to the People” politics that we put into the ’60s.
We crossed racial lines even though we were able to be an African-American
community organization that ran our own organization without any
intellectual or offbeat, abstract, academic dictates. We REFUSED to allow
for that, because our concept and our method was putting theory into
practice. Learning as we did.

And we want to show the youth—when I speak today—we want to show the
youth that if you participate, I want you to sign up for this campaign
because it is not about just a political seat, it’s about another kind of
movement, moving into this Y2K period…it’s not necessarily about the
continuing, old politics as usual of the Democratic and especially the
right-wing conservative Republican politics… There’s the Green Party,
there’s the Constitutional Party, etc. so on. For instance David is running
his total non-partisan, there’s no political party per se mentioned here in
terms of being listed on the ballot. So. We’re saying there are
multi-thousands of these seats. You talk about 50,000? or are you talking
500,000? …duly-elected seats in the United States of America, especially
on the local level. And this campaign is not the last of this era, it will
be another one evolving.

For instance in Winston, North Carolina, used to have a chapter of the
Black Panther Party there. The Party was over, what, in the late ’70s and
early ’80s? What in effect happened was the former Party members ran for
political office. Larry Little, the former Deputy Chairman down there, won
a councilmanic seat that represented that poor low-income African-American
community there. And since then, for 26 years, it’s always been a former
Black Panther connected to that seat. The people will not allow anybody
else. If you weren’t in the former Black Panther Party organization in
Winston/Salem, North Carolina—they call it , the old other conservative
council members call that particular seat “the Panther seat.”

In other words you have to remember those young Black Panther Party people,
young students and others, they put together a free ambulance program for
the people. They put together a free health clinic with a free pharmacy
program which all chapters and branches did. They put together free
breakfasts for children programs that served those people in that
community. So those people never forgot that. They remembered that. These
are tangible programs. This was not rhetoric, this was not talk. So this is
what I’m saying.

So we have various examples of former Party members still in political
office like Bobby Rush, who was an alderman there in Chicago for 12 years
and then became a Congressman. We have Michael McGee in Milwaukee, he is
still a councilman up there representing a heavy electoral group of the
African-American community.

What a lot of people forget is this is really the politics of the Black
Panther party. Even though we had a lot of shootouts and a lot of battles
with the police attacked us, when the politicians would send their law
enforcement agencies in on us, even though J. Edgar Hoover and all these
guys were out to smash us, try to terrorize us out of existence, they
killed 29 of my people in this country, particularly in the year 1969. 14
policemen wound up getting killed in those attacks. They attacked our
offices, they attacked our homes and we vowed to defend ourselves. Cuz in
our sense, all we were doing was defending our Constitutional, democratic,
civil, human rights: one, to organize the people, political electoral
community power…

People used to say “you’re outside the System.”
You can’t be outside of something that’s oppressing you.
You have to get right into the middle of it, change its structure,
change its direction, change the laws, change the
policy to serve the empowerment really and truly of the people.
And THAT’s the kind of politically revolutionaries we were in the 1960s.

So this is
the kind of stuff, and I’m going to be talking to these students about
today, … Not only that, but, Where are we going in the future? Getting
another kind of paradigm that incorporates where we are today. In other
words, there are Civil Rights issues, there are human rights issues, there
are people-community empowerment-economic issues, etc.

BUT–we are not living in the ’60s. Even though we know the ’60s, there’s a
lot of things we can PULL from the ’60s, a lot of positive organizing
methodologies we can pull from the ’60s…BUT how do you place it in the
present day context? So I’m trying to get these students to understand: you
live in an overdeveloped, high-tech, fast-paced, computerized,
scientific-technological social order. You are NOT living in the ’60s. This
communications technology information base world globalizing on the level
it’s in, you’re gonna have to learn how and get creative with this
communications technology an integrate it into some of your methodology,
your communicating and organizing and raising the consciousness of the
people, politically and programatically.

In other words, the Black Panther Party, historically, we set up numerous
programs. It united a lot of people in the community. But the programs
were not just for the sake of setting up programs, it was to get the people
INVOLVED on a practical level. So those very people who were being served
with this programs became part and parcel…and the ones who became active
and the ones who became involved, as they went out and organized more and
more people, and they became the voters for thes eyoung political
revolutionaries. Whether you were white or black, and if we could assess if
you were a young white radical, i fwe could assess that your
heart-mind-soul was dedicated to true human liberation for all peoples,
BOOM–we would vote for you, set you up, you’d be part of this new wave
that was the 1960s.

I’m saying the same thing can happen in this high-tech-fast-paced social
order. More important, it HAS to happen, because too much corporate
money-rich people control the politicians in this country, campaign
financing, etc. For instance, this campaign we’re talking about, it’s not
about money. “How much money you have to run the campaign?” We tell the
students about your participation, and YOU get out here and get involved
and YOU when you turn 25, 26, 30 years of age, YOU need to be running for
these offices. YOU need to be taking over these seats, city council seats,
county seats, state legislative seats, etc. and caucusing up and evolving a
PROFOUND people’s human liberation ideology. And I like to say an “ideology
in motion” cuz I can’t stand strict, doctrinaire ideological approaches,
that’s theory without practice when it’s too doctrinaire. Once you get out
there and get with the people, you see, you can come up with somehting that
makes human sense…so you can EVOLVE a future world of cooperational
humanism. This is the kind of message I’m gonna give to the students today.
But I do this for what, 40 colleges a year. This will be the 20th
engagement of 1999. I’ll do six more during the spring.

I’ve been living in Philadelphia since 1983. When I first resigned from the
Black Panther Party, I actually wound up in Denver, CO. The Party had
dwindled down to less than 200 and some odd members, and there was some
small ideological problems. You have to remember, the Party at one time had
5,000 active members in 45 cities throughout the United States of America.
45 chapters and branches of the Black Panther Party. The peak of that was
January 1969. The Party was almost 2 and a half years old. Started in
October 1966. We had international notoriety seven months later, May 2,
1967. Martin Luther King was killed April 6, 1968. Up to Martin Luther King
I only had 400 members up and down the West Coast, San Diego to Seattle.
When Martin Luther King was killed, in a matter of a couple of months,
particularly when the colleges let out, it blew my mind that so many young
people started flooding into our organization. They were so angry that
brother Martin Luther King was killed. They said, ‘I’m joining the Black
Panther Party.’ So we had an influx, 60% of that membership being
particularly college students, high school students headed to college who
decided to postpone their college education.

In a matter of 5 or 6 months following the death of MLK, we had peaked at
5,000 active full-time members of the BPP. Plus our working coalitions had
EXPANDED to a point that by 1969 we were able to create what we called the
National Committees to Combat Fascism as an extension organizing effort
BEYOND the Black Panther Party, we didn’t care whether you was white,
black, blue, red, green, yellow, polkdaot, anyone could be a community
worker with the NCCF. And that group was composed of almost 10,000 more
people. This was why the power structure was really afraid of us, about
that. Because to mobilize those kind of people, to mobilize those brothers
and sisters, people who were angry, and to tell them we need to take over
all of these political seats. These political seats, whether it’s a city
council or making legislation, laws and policies, are not serving the basic
desires and needs of the people. So we the young political revolutionary
humanists, we can get in there. We’re saying the same thing as to exist now
– in the context of the present, though.

By 1968 when the BPP was two years old, Huey P. Newton was on trial and in
jail without bail. I ran for California State Assembly with my name on the
ballot. We had a working coalition with the Peace & Freedom Party. Kathleen
Cleaver ran for state Assemblyman out of San Francisco. Eldridge Cleaver
was slated as the presidential candidate in 28 states and garnered 2
million votes. YES! 2 mllion votes Eldridge Cleaver got! Huey Newton was in
jail, defending himself for his life, and we put his name on the ballot of
his ninth congressional district. Running for political office was always
part of the Party–[it wans't] just the programs, not just the philosophy,
the argumentative left radical critiques and ideology. And we critiqued
them, about the War, about racial discrimination…wetc. We did all of
this. But the BPP’s real true character was manifested in the programmatic
organizing relating to political electoral commuinity empowerment. To unify
votes of people on another conscious level and opposisiton to the
corruption, the avariciousness and the racism manifested in the political
institutions of America.

Jay: WHY DID THE PANTHERS DECIDE TO GO THAT WAY INSTEAD OF BEING SEPARTISTS?

Well we never related to it. You have to remember, I come up in the
high-tech world. Before I ever got involved with this stuff, I was working
on the Gemini missile project in the engineering department at [unintellig]
aerospace and electronics. I was doing electromagnetic field, black light,
non-destruct testing for all the engine frames for the Gemini missile
program. For all three stages of exhaust housing for the Gemini missile
program. I went to college originally as an engineering design major, and
when I went to college, remember this is AFTER the four years in the United
States Air Force, structural repair, hihg-performance aircraft for the
USAF, so …raised a carpenter and a builder…architect by the time I’m
18. So I based everything in my life and my understanding, even by the time
I got in college, based on it on good, proven, scientific evidentiary FACT.
So when the Nation of Islam, as religious Black nationalist-type of
organization was propagating some very mythical misunderstanding, it’s not
scientific fact for me. I have no time for it, you know what I mean? I did
respect their call for financial self-sufficiency in the Black community,
etc., but in terms of having an organization, we refused to have religious
and/or myopic, xenophobic Black nationalists as the ideology or as any part
of, we didn’t want that as the head, or the leading ideological notion.
What happened was that in forming the Black Panther Party, Huey and I came
up with what we called a functional definition of power. In those days,
people were spouting in 1964 or ’65 or ’66, “Black power! Black power!”
There so much RHETORIC, you see what I mean. It was so much TALK, it was
not really being put together. Huey and I set the word “black” to the side
for a minute to come up with a functional definition of the term “power.”
And we came up with “Power is the ability to define phenomena and then in
turn, make it act in a desired manner.” What I’m getting at here, this is
like three-dimensional to me. An engineering design major, an architect, I
THINK three dimensional. [That definition], oh my god, it’s metaphorical,
it’s applicable to understanding what the situation is. If the city council
are a bunch of low-life avaricious racists, BANG! We have defined them for
what they ARE. Now we must unite all the people, vote they butts out of
office and make them in turn act in a desired manner, giving greater
people’s community political representation POWER. So this is where we came
from.

So our point was, I think it was a pivot point when we came up with that
definition, we looked at and began to see a CLASS analysis, in the sense
that it was not only black people that were being oppressed, we had poor
whites who were oppressed, poor Mexian-Americans who were oppressed, Native
Americans, etc. Crossing the racial lines. And THAT’S why we moved not for
some Black nationalist, xenophobic-type separtist ideology. Two, I didn’t
think that way. Ohmigawd, gimme a break, you know. I looked at the world
as being interconnected and interrelated. Thinking three-dimensional.
See, we were part of a young Black intelligentsia. We were researchers. We
were avid readers. We took time to know. You couldn’t just come up with
some platitude, some emotional speech, ha ha ha, to get us all hooked up.
Cuz we would QUESTION it. “Where you going with it? What do you mean
by…?” So much theory. “Well how you gonna put that theory into practice?”
In other words: I’m an architect. When I draw and lay out the plans for
building a structure, those plans are only theory for the idea, right?
[But] When I build the building, it’s real. You have to put it in practice.
So you have to put all that together and you can see where we came from.
The separtist ideology was ABSURD. And I used to tell people, “No, we’re
not outside the system.” “Oh yes you are.” I says, “Agnew said that!”
Agnew, the vice president of the United States, part of a corrupt political
structure, telling people we were outside the political system. Which was
BULLCRAP, when we’d already ran for political office. How can you be
outside of something that’s oppressing you, I would tell peopl. “Oh that’s
right, how can you be outside of something…” Then I’d ask the white left
radical buddies one time, after Bobby Kennedy was killed, [they were
saying] “Oh no Bobby, man, we’re tired of the System, man. We’ve dropped
out, man.” I says, “You CAN’T drop out. You cannot drop out of the total
system. We have to get rid of the avaricious corporate monopoly capitalism.
We have to get rid of the institutionalized framework of racism in America.
Those two aspects we must fight against.” “No we’ve dropped out!” I sez,
“You think you can drop out of the TOTAL System? cuz everything IS
interconnected and interrelated, then you take all your buddies, go down to
Cape Canaveral, I want you to hijack one of those rockets, take your butt
to the moon. When you get to the moon, the president of the united states,
Tricky Dick Nixon, is gonna send some troops up there, bring you back.
There is no such thing as dropping out of the total system!” So my point
becomes you must struggle to CHANGE the frameworks, the institutions and
make those institutions make human sense.

So this is the argument and this is where we came from in the 1960s. I
mean, yeah we were political revolutionaries, yeah we identified a racist
for what he was, and if we said “Black power” as fast as we said “Black
power” we said “Red power” and as fast as we said “Red power” we said “Brown
power”, “white power” and then we summed it up with “All power to all the
people.” See what I’m getting at? So this is where we came from. Our
concept was that working closely with other people, particularly students
and young people, cuz it was student movement., people forget that, it was
student movement. Students did that 1960s protest era. They were the key,
they were the young intellectuals, they were the ones who became and
learned how to critique, we were the ones, we must have had over 200 very
heavily circulated underground weekly tabloid newspapers throughout the
United States of America and including the BPP being one of em. We were
circulating up to 250,000 copies of this newspaper every week on time,e
very saturday by mid-1969.

So if you understand that, then we understand where we were coming from. We
just didn’t have a time… if you look at the original Ten-Point Panther
program, I don’t think we used the phrase “Black Power” as such. We make no
reference to religion. We make no reference to state control command
economy-style socialism. People think the BPP eveolved out of
Marxist-Leninism. It didn’t. Later on, we picked up on, checked out and
critiqued Marxist-Leninism. But what we thought may be valuable out of it
…But ours was more of a democratic socialism, if anything was going to
develop out of it. …or cooperative community control form of socialism,
even allowing for democratizing capital for some concepts, possibilities,
depending on what we got creative with, of market economy socialism. And
then of course we dropped all of the social phrases and came up with
community controlled economics. How do we evolve greater community control
of economic frameworks and reach out and produce services and goods in a
high-tech fast-paced social order of the USA?

The Soviet Union’s Politburo state control command economy socialism was
out. I pushed it out of the BPP because it started seeping in, a few
concepts of it. I pushed it out. But we had to grow through this
process–these arguments, these debates, implementing programs, seeing what
was happening, etc. And we come up with community controlled politics. Well
that’s more related to the concept of direct democracy, or greater
participatory democracy. Participatory democracy is people’s grassroots
community decision-making democracy, NOT the decision of a handful of
bought-out politicians, politicians bought out by the corporate money-rich.
So that was the difference.

Q: NYC COPS NOW?

The recent shooting of a Guinean immigrant, 41 shots, heard him 19 times,
he was unarmed. I think there’s three major incidents that happened there
in the last year and a half or so…
[weary:]

I’ll say it this way: We have still too many cases of police brutality.
That’s really overwhelming, it’s a key issue that a lot of students have to
understand that you have to have new policies and new legislatures and new
directors, new training programs, and all these city governments, state and
legislative frameworks in the one hand. But the primary difference between
the ’60s when we were out there is that it was ten times as much police
brutality and murders and stuff going on as it is now. Two, nobody went to
court in the ’60s. Police were not charged, were not put on trial, were not
suspended, you see what I mean? Undue and unneccesary force with glaring
evidence, witnesses–they didn’t happen. Today at least we get a lot of
these people to trial, to court, etc., win or lose the case. So that’s one
somewhat change, even with the overwhelming amount of police brutality we
still have going on now today.

I say we need to network with hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods, whole
blocks, network with camcorders, of if you can get people to pool together
and set up some town or block watch, some camera systems to watch these
police. Take this stuff and put it on the Internet. Edit the stuff down and
get some of these young, youthful students, these computer whizzes and
political organizational groups and make video leaflets. Not even for that
community but for the whole congressional or councilmanic district, etc.
That kind of stuff. Integrate all this communications technology into our
ability to raise the consciousness of the people to unify them in
opposition to government frameworks that perpetuate this crap. There’s
profiling going on in Jersey, that’s a big issue. I’m sure there’s
profiling going on all over the country. In jersey state troopers are
trained by policy to stop Blacks and hispanics if they’re driving nice cars
as “suspects” or possibly running or carrying drugs. Now. The training
procedure that’s set up, the racial profiling… Young college students
were shot, cops coming to the window with guns drawn based just on the
racial profiling. Verbal altercation occured, the police stepped back and
started shooting. State trooper. When in fact under the law the cops are
not supposed to be stopping unless they have reasonable cause to do so. To
train police to SUSPECT people because of their racial ethnicity who may be
driving nice cars as drug pushers is not reasonable cause, it’s beyond the
law. So that’s another aspect of what we call insitutionalized racism. The
institutional function of the police department, setting up policies…

This is only one issue. The real problems and issues I think are primarily
rooted economically. We talk about a boom economy–I’m saying every poor
and low-income person and others need to be able to root themselves
economically in such a way and evolve to a point in a 10-year period to
where they put themselves in some decent standar of living way above the
poverty line. This is the uppermost overd-developed, high-tech, richest
country in the world. It’s absurd for this not to happen. So these are the
real issues. The other issues are higher education for the masses of the
people. Part of our mass protest movement…you have a handful or
organizations runing around saying ‘That’s the white man’s education.’ I
say, ‘You’re full of shit. 1 + 1=2 if you got it in your head whether
you’re white, black red bluegreen yellow polkadot, that’s your education,
that’s your knowledge. If you master the quadratic formula in college math,
that’s your knowledge. You can apply to probably every field of research,
even when if I think something’s being taought incorrectly in some way,
it’s skewed such as anthropolgy that use the word “negroid” when I think
they should use the word “Africanoid”..this kind of stuff.. it becomes my
education, your education as a human being.

To me, education is about whether or not your ideas, your beliefs, your
notions, your understandings, your new relaizations, whether or not they
correspond correctly to reality or not. That is the definition of what
education is. Whether you get it out of institutional framework or whether
you do a lot of self-education.

Q: WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHEN YOU SAY IT’S AN ‘OVERDEVELOPED’ SOCIETY?

We have a corporate money rich, not only in America but expanded to the
worldwide framewqork, where too much 1) money and political power is being
concentrated int he hands of one percent. Overdeveloped to the extend that
90% of the wealth is ultimately owned and controlled by that % corporate
money rich. Too many of those corporate money rich are too avaricious. They
overproduce goods to a point of pure waste. To the point that we have
excessive environmental problems. Wastefulness. I say Hey we can provide
environmental renovation jobs projects, if I can raise this first $10
million with my barbeque book-CD-ROM-DVD cookbook guide. I’m gonna raise
$10 million to set an example of an environmental renovation youth jobs
project, which would be a community controlled economic development
project. Putting youth ages 16-27 or 28 renovating old houses, old cars,
and step by step evolving alternative energy. We could create 2 or 3
million jobs this way across the country. These are just two examples.
I came from a line of carpenters, of builders, hunters and fishermen. I was
an architect by the time I was 18. [Air Force, Gemini...] This was all part
of my make-up on the one hand, then wehn I began to learn about the social
ills, and began to realize that I had to make a contribution to deal with
trying to end institutionalized racism in America, BANG. I shifted to the
political, social and behavioral sciences in college, and next thing you
know, I’m out here organizing. But I brought all those skills and
abilities, insights, concepts, my 3-D view of things with me and applied it
to that grassroots community development.

Q: WHAT DOES ‘POLYECTIC’ MEAN?

In the old days we talked a lot and used ‘dialectics.’ It’s applicable. But
I thought we wouldn’t hit six billion in world population til 2003, 4 or 5,
but we’ve already hit it. We gotta one, slow down this exponential growth
of population but at the rate we’re going it’s estimated by the year 2040
we’re gonna have 10 billion human beings on the face of this earth, living
human beings consuming resources. Now, how do you beging to deal with this
when you’re trying to teach or get people active? Develop another paradigm,
raise it to another level, so it’s applicable to a broader, interconnected,
interrelated, interdependent situation that goes on. So dialectics I
rememeber tended to be a line-linear analysis, thesis-antithesis-synthesis,
but generally it was applied to one or two factors in a general sense. You
could find multiple factors related to that, but what I’m saying here, I f
we move to the higher level paradigm we could find the dialectics of 20
different oa hundred different categorical things… We have to see how
they interesect, how all these dialetcial points of view intersect,
interrelate. One of my next books is called “Polyectic Reality: The
Non-Linear Analytic View.”

When you go back and you hear Malcolm X say the ballot or the bullet, if
you read further, you’ll find out the man preferred the ballot. And he
defined it in terms of black folks unifying their vote. And even he said
when we get some black unity then we can some black and white unity, but
they killed Malcolm. What we did with the BPP, we could move this up now.
We moved it up a notch. We coalitioned with all the progressive young
whites, etc. and any ethnic group that’s progressive enough to understand
and relate.

If a former Panther runs for office, he always gets a group, they will get
a group of us to come into the city, come on in there and support them,
because that was always part of the characteristsic aspect of the BPP–we
run for political office, we put four people’s names on the ballot right
here in the state of California including Eldridge Cleaver with the Peace +
Freedom Party coalition, in 1968.

Most of these politicians perpetually amend bills and everything else to
empower the corporate rich and concentrate too much political power and too
much money in the small one percent who control things.

What we’re saying is, Here we are in another era, there’s no Cold War, a
boom economy and people are gettin’ ready to get sucked. People are looking
for something different. We want to raise the consciousness of people to
get something different. Jesse The Body Ventura getting elected is an
indication that people are ready to step outside the old politics, the
corporate money rich–controlled politics of usual of the Democratic and
Republican party.

Q: WHAT ARE SOME OTHER MISCONCEPTIONS THAT PEOPLE HOLD ABOUT THE PANTHERS?

Sure. When people see the movie “Panther,” 90% that you see portrayed on
the screen is absolute fiction. Crap. It has nothing to do with the real
true history and the involvement of what the BPP was truly about. It
totally missed the true character of the party, it missed the coalition
politics of the BPP. That was essential, that was a profound characteristic
of ours that the power structure hated. They hated us crossing these racial
lines! If you got people racially divided, politicans up there easily use
one group against another. When you get people crossing those lines, going
to the real issue and critiquing them as the enemy, as the avaricious
racist enemy of the masses of the people, ah, they don’t like that!
Politicians think they own these seats. You don’t own this goddamned seat,
the people own this seat.

Other misconceptions is that we were all locked up and put in jail. We won
95% of all our coutroom cases, people don’t know this. We had one of the
best legal teams in this country, we won those. They had me in jail without
bail for 22 months, and I won both cases. Angela Davis own her case,
ultimately Huey Newton won his case. Geronimo Pratt. We still got Party
members in there, maybe we can get amnesty for them in the next few years.
“You picked up guns cuz you hated white people!” What do you mean? We ran
up and down the streets with millions of our white buddies. We almost got
killed together, in fact they shot and killed some of my white left radical
friends, buddies, right here in Berkeley at People’s Park protesting. We
were working directly with Stu and Judy Gumbo Albert. And they shot and
killed and brutalized 10, 20 people up there. We weren’t the ones gettign
shot and killed, although we were a focal point in terms of the racist
mentality of the FBI and police departments led by the politicians. They
ain’t just a cop. Somebody has to be giving orders and
directives–policy–of how to treat the Black Panthers, how to treat the
left radical movement. People don’t understand that.

That doesn’t mean that everybody in the BPP was perfect. Not true. I mean,
I could probably cite 15 or 20 people out of 5,000 Party members who did
some fuck-ups. We had to kick em out of the Party. A couple people got
hurt… But let’s talk too about the provocateur agents that in the BPP.
They screwed up shit out there and then the FBI tried to blame us, but it
was the FBI. We got the COINTELPRO documents that we can read at the
library to show all the dirty tricks they pulled on us. So these are the
things that were in the Establishment newspapers that never got really
corrected, movies don’t know, most of these jive plays that people write on
the Panthers, they don’t even know the history of the Party. Half of the
academics or most of em who are writing books STILL do not know their
history. I networked with over a thousand party memebers. We can tell our
own history–real-life, real active involvement, human experience history,
which is what we’re doing. We’re not sitting on our butts. We’re about
getting that feature film out, Seize the Time, named after the book, which
would really be my life story, but 80% of this feature film will be the
rise and decline of the BPP. The real history.

Our producers got John Singleton, by 1992 he was contracted and had an
option payment already in his pocet, I had an option payment in my pocket
before Melvin Van Peebles ever started Panther. Now when he put the movie
out, Warner Brothers, who made a mistake with Wyatt Earp and Kevin
Costner…[TAPE ENDS] We had the coopeartion of 20 former Panthers, we’d
been in development. So Melvin jumps up and does some cheap $7 million
production, scraping money, rushes some junk out there that 90% of whiich
has nothing to do with our real true history.

Q: BUT NOT MANY PEOPLE SAW IT. IT WAS KIND OF A BOMB…

Wellll…I’m saying it this way. It was a bomb.

Q: SO THAT HURTS YOUR CHANCES FOR MAKING A FILM.

No it doesn’t hurt it. It hurt THAT chance. They did it in 1995 and we’re
almost into 2000. So if I can geta film done by 2002, major feature film
that really reflects us….I’ve written the screen play, me and my wife
expanded the screenplay, we’re including all these other former Party
members’ contributions to get a continuity-type story, okay? So it’s done.
We’re gonna do this. I’ve taught myself how to produce movies. I went and
talked to Danny Glover, who tentatively said he’s definitely interested in
helping me raise the money and possibly being one of the producers in this
thing. That’s just a possibility. If I can get Will Smith to do this,
playing Bobby Seale, my $42.5 million budget’s gonna jump to $62.5 million
cuz Will Smith needs $20 million a film. But that’s what we’ll DO. Will
Smith playing Bobby Seale based on Bobby Seale’s script, NOT some other
cheap script or cheap research that has nothing to do with the real history
is. People got notions in their head…but they don’t know, unless you talk
to real Black Panther Party members, you don’t know what the real history
is.

Q: WASN’T THERE SOMETHING IN FOREST GUMP THAT WAS REALY DEROGATORY TOWARDS THE
PANTHERS?

Yeah. It was a satire. They used BPP to play with a satirical notion.
That’s all it was. I’m not even upset about that. I’m more upset about a
major feature film, publicized, and he and his son, gets on television and
pretends that this is the real history of the BPP: “Oh yeah it’s really
fiction but it’s real history.” I sued! I took all the production companies
and Melvin Van Peebles to court. I lost the suit because I’m a public
figure. But my point is, my real reason for suing them is, win or lose, is
that I want to y’all to know that I totally disagree with that film, I
totally disagree with the crap you put out. So for the record, for the
historical record, you know. You know.

Q: WHERE DID THE MONEY COME FROM TO FUND THE PANTHERS’ COMMUNITY PROJECTS?
First, our BPP newspaper. Individual chapters made 15 cents per paper they
sold which helped pay rent, phone bills, etc. The other level where money
came form is really a lot of people–black and white–I’m talking about
Ossie Davis, Jane Fonda, Paula Weinstein, people don’t even KNOW Sammy
Davis Jr. donated over $60,000 to the BPP, $10,000 here, $15,000 there.
Paule Weinstein’s mom, Hann Weinstein the movie producer set the thing up
with the conductor Leonard Bernstein. You see what I’m getting at? Sarah
Pillsbury from the Pillsbury Cake and Flour people just donated money. The
Stern fund our of New York used to, they handed me $100,000 a year. These
are foundations that did this stuff. Then we had individual people who just
came around. We had one lady who wanted to help out, a little old white
lady, I got her to give us $250,000 to buy this one square block school and
church, to take the whole thing over under a non-profit entity.

Q: WHAT ABOUT SELLING THE RED BOOKS?
We did sell the red books, but what I want people to understand is that the
BPP did not evolve out of Marxist-Leninism, it evolved out of a profound
research and understanding of our African-American history. Red book didn’t
come along until a little bit later. Huey calls me up one day, I think we
were 5 or 6 months old, “I know how we can make some money!” Since this
news over and over and over had talked about China, Mao Tse Tung and the
little Red Book, they would show millions of people on the television news
holding up the little red book, Huey stumbled on a place where we could buy
them in bulk for 20 cents a piece, we bought 200 books, went up to Savior’s
Gate at University of California, 40,000 student population, half of them
walk throught that gate, “Get your Red Book! One dollar, right here!” They
sold like hotcakes. We went and bought some more Red books, bought some
shotguns, paid the phone bill at the office, got some more books and
reading materials, etc. THen a couple of weeks later we heard there was
gonna be a big giant antiwar rally at Kesar football stadium in San
Francsco. Naturally we left our guns at home, so we took our little
contingent of 25 or 30 Party members, that’s all we had handy to go out and
do the work and sold 2,000 Red Books all day long for a buck a piece. Now
check this out: we sold that book for a solid month and hadn’t even opened
it to read it. [laughs] We were busy making money to be financially
self-sufficient, to pay our rent, to buy more shotguns, to buy more
political education African-American history books, etc. THIS was what was
important. So that’s how the Red Book got in there. But that little
portrayal that they did in the movie PANTHER about the Red Book, it was
totally off. Bobby Hudd never said, ‘This one I’m putting my money out
for.’ That’s bull shit! Lil Bobby Hudd, ‘Wow man we making money!” He was
the first one to help sell Red Books. See what I’m getting at?

Q: TO GO ALONG WITH THAT SELF-FUNDING THING… SO THAT’S WHAT YOUR BARBEQUE
BOOK IS ABOUT? YOU DID THAT FIRST IN THE ’80S?

First cookbook I ever wrote, I wrote that in 1985 and ’86, and I …I had
the idea, but I really buckled down to do it when 15 former Party members
in Philadelphia met with me in my office at Temple University. ‘Chairman,
we need to raise some money. We need to get something to do with renovating
these housing, creating jobs for these youth.’ And they were giving me the
information, they were former Philadelphia Panther member, they knew more
about Philadelphia than I did. I said ‘Well dang the only thing I can think
is we ain’t got the Stern Fund no more, we ain’t got these other groups no
more. Jane Fonda did an aerobics tape and I heard she donated her money to
things. I’ll tell you what; What about me writing a cookbook?’ ‘Right on,
Chairman!” So it was us ex-Party members.. ‘Come on chairman, man, right
that book.’ We”ll raise some money with that and with that we’ll try to
buy a couple of these houses up. So later on I went to work for the
Environment YES program, environment youth program, I did have some youth
…. But that’s the real reason I worte the barbeque cookbook.

Now–the book went out of print, I wrested control of the book from the
original publisher, that was in my original contract. Now I got the book.
I’m expanding this hundred and some odd recipe book to a 450-page recipe
book. This cookbook, I’m intending to have a CD-ROM with DVD
demonstrations…three-dimensional graphics of how to light a pitfire on 20
different styles of barbeque pits. Plus the recipes.

I’ve been barbequing since I was 12 years old. We used to have rallies at
the park right here in Oakland, 5,000 people, we would sell to two and
three thousand barbeque plate dinners. Another source of our funds for the
free breakfast program, the preventative medical health clinics, etc.
My uncle taught me how to barbeque in Liberty, Texas when I was 12 years old.
Now if I roll out this new edition with CD-ROM and DVD… there’s a TV show
that goes with this, a 16-part series, 13 for the summer and three for the
winter/holidsy season pit smoking. Cuz in my recipes you can pit-smoke a
whole 22-pound turkey with a cranberry baste marinade. Whole roasts, whole
rib roasts, beef roasts… Hmm mmm. These are recipes that people could
use. My point is if I pull $20 million, $10 million of it goes into this
idea of environmental renovation youth jobs non-profit entity structured to
evolve examples of a community-controlled economic development project,
youth jobs.

I’m just the type of guy who love to organize the real program. I’m a
grassroots guy. I don’t have no money, so I have to make money, and then
pour money and funds in…In other words, in the final analysis, even
though I think in terms of ‘How do we evolve a new economic practice where
we truly democratize the capitalist system, democratize capital, this is
all I’m talking about’, at the same time, you have to set examples for
people to say ‘Oh okay this makes sense.’ It is not about politburo state
control command economy socialism which is the model of the Soviet Union,
which I rejected in 1968. It is NOT about the continued avaricious, racists
behind the major corporations who are part and parcel of why all the money
and political power is being concentrated in one percent of the population.

Q: WHAT SETS YOUR BARBEQUE STUFF APART FROM THE WAY THAT PEOPLE DO IT RIGHT NOW?

Well a lot of people are still barbequing with bottle-back recipes. A lot
of people who say Well I just want some barbeque.’ So they pick up some
sauce, they see a bottle-back recipe, and 9 times out of 10 it tells them
to rub the sauce on some raw meat and put it over hot coals. All barbeque
sauces have some kind of sugar content, epsecially store-baught barbeque
sauces. Honey, mollasses, brown sugar. If you put sauce on raw meat over
hot coals the sugar tends to BURN before the meat is even seasoned or done.
So in my book we have numerous recipes with various flavors, what we call a
baste marinade–totally different from sauce. This is the way I learned to
barbeque form down south, from my uncle and most people down south barbecue
this way. Even old white folks KNOW that you baste meat, good old down-home
white folks down south know that you baste marinade the meat before you put
all the sauce on. Now you can put the sauce on at a certain poiint, halfway
done or three-quarters done, start braising the sauce in. But that’s what
sets mine apart. So all these various blends of baste-marinade recipes, I
got ‘barbeque quick!’ recipes, I got heavy blend recipes with boiled
vegetables, worchester sauce, hickory liquid smoke…

Q: THAT’S WHAT WAS SPILLED IN THE BACK OF THE CAR?

Hickory liquid smoke. It’s extracted from hickory wood. In the old days,
people barbequed with hickory wood, that was the most popular wood to
barbeque with. You can also barbeque wiht various kinds of ruti woods,
sweet woods, etc. You can even barbeque with oak wood, as far as that goes.
But it’s the outdoor wood flavor that goes with the taste. Now. What has
happened over many many years, since I come out of the military, some
company started extracting the pure hickory liquid smok, juice, out of
green hickkory wood. THAT’S where it comes from. And it’s pure, so it’s
strong. You can buy it at a supermarket. It comes in mesquite now, too. If
you want to buy large quantities you go to restaurant supply places, you
can buy up to a gallon. A gallon, if you just barbequing for the house and
the home, might last you a whole year. A cup of this, and a cup of
worchester, a cup of red wine vinegar, or you might want
some….raspeberry wine vinegar! Or you may want…onion wine vinegar!

See, it’s blending. That’s why I say cooking is creative. None of my
recipes is secret, never have I tried to say they were secret.
Some guy told me one time, ‘I canout-barbeque you. My recipe is better than
yours.’ I say, “Okay fine. Whachu wanna do, you come up here you cact like
you want a contest..’ ‘All my friends say no way you gonna get, Bobby Seale
can barbeque circles around you. We gonna hold a acontrest.’ I say,
“Waitaminute.’ So when I first wrote that book, I had my draft with me, so
I got out and said run down to the corner and copy me a copy. I copied my
recipe and said Here, here’s my recipe. ‘Huh?’ I say, Oh yours is secret,
right? Mine isn’t.’ ‘Oh I see you got apple juice here.’ So when the
contest came down, I din’t use apple juice! This time I shifted to
pineapple juice in one recipe and then shifted over, he says ‘ Whachu doin
over ther’ I says ‘It’s a turkey.’ “Turkey?!?’ “yeah, a 14-pound turkey.’
And I put a little bit of hickory, a little bit of worchester, and a whole
quart of cranberry juice. The accent is on it! And I take that turkey
sitting in a plastic bag in a high-rim pan and I twist-tie it so that the
marinade will come all up around the turkey and sit it in the refrigerator
over night, marinating. Then you come out and you save that base marinade
and you put that turkey on the pit in a small shaving pan and baste it with
that same marinade. You take that marinade out of there, you could even put
a little butter or margarine in when you warm it up again. MMMm uhh!

So I did television shows on this stuff, showing people boom boom boom
boom, they loved it. When we first published this book I did one particular
show, one of those early cable TV shows and I think I got 1,300 orders. I
was only on there, demonstrating for approximately 16 minutes, in between
commercials. They put my address up on the screen, boom boom boom, you can
get this book, you can write Bobby Seale and he’ll autograph for you….
I’m just saying: This works. Cuz it’s family-type buying. If you ever
studied the market, systems of how this market has survived, one of the
things that’s caused this market to survive is family-type buying of the
whole computer technology. When you develop techonolgy that’s usable by
people, they will buy it. Specially if it’s a functional for them. This is
something that’s functional, lifetime function. You’re gonna get this big
spiral-bounded 450-recipe book with a CD-ROM maybe …and a separate
DVD….DVDs are now being made for six hours, imagine I can practically
alll of those video demonstrations of various recipes…That’s a marketable
item, it’s ahousehold item, it’s something people like to do. And I teach
you not only to barbeque in pits, I teach you oven-baked barbeque, I teach
you microwave, convective oven barbequing,etc. the whoel gauntlet. I teach
you how to actually take and cook some of your meat, boril some of your
meat right quick and I teach you how to blend all of these items, put them
over and cover this thing in a microwave, and i just want you to
quick-broil it, and kick that in the microwave but seal it down, so to
stpeak, all those juices and sauce stuff just comes together! [laughs]
this book is gonna be fantastic.

Q: AND YOU DID A LOT OF BARBEQUING THROUGH THE YEARS WITH THE PANTHERS.

Sure man, that business was one of the key things I intergrated! See,
that’s why you have to do a lot of things, it’s not just a “rally.” I never
liked “just a rally.” Specially when you gonna do it at a grassroots
community. When we had a rally, we not only had barbeque for sale, we had
the bandstand, the rock bands and the rhythm and blues bands and the blues
band, we had the speakers there, we let other organizations’
representative groups cuz we was in coalitions speak too, then we would
have tables, every fifty feet some tables and a big giant sign: ‘sign up to
work on the breakfast for children progam.’ another sign: ‘sign up tot
work on the people’s free medical health care clinics. sign up to work on
the six-cylinder engine testing program. sign up to work on the free shoe
program. sign up to work on the BPP’s free clothing program. Sign up to be
a voting registrar and do some community work. You don’t have to join the
BPP. See you’re doing more than just speaking, you’re organizing the
people, they become part and parcel of something.

And me I was always a troop feeder. I learned that in the military service.
All the troops have to eat! We were always able to leave and go to the chow
hall three times a day and eat to our hearts’ content. How do you think I
got B-52 bombers out of them docks? I’m a crew chief leader, and I got 6-8
people and a B-52 bomber with 450 gigs on it, shet metal structure repair
gigs, and BOOM. We got four weeks to clean this plane. I cleaned that plane
up in 2 weeks, 2 and a half weeks. We were able to go eat! You feed the
troops [punches hand rhytmically]. So in the BPP, I had cookin’ crews. And
I was one of the head cooks. Lotta the times when they wanted to have a
central committee meeting, I’m the Chairman, the head of the Party, guess
where they held it? In the kitchen. I might be smothering down a hundred
pork chops, big giant frying pan and a half-pan, and I got this big giant
pot here with the onions and the celery and everything already chopped up
in there, and you’re gonna dump a couple of cans of blended stew, tomatoes
in there. As fast as I brown them pork chops, I’m dumpin them in there,
this is gonna gravy up itself, right? I cook a couple of pots of long-grain
rice, I had these big ol pans where we could bake 24 cornbread muffins at
one time. We have two or three pans of that. Party members come in from the
evening working, selling papers, to this day, and I’m not tryign to be
conceited, Party members say ‘We love the Chairman!’ Why? ‘He used to feed
us, he used to…’ That’s what you do. ‘What the Chairman cook today?!” Big
6 or 8-gallon pot of that hickory sirloin chili. i had 65, 75 Party members
working at the headquarters. Each head office had to have cooking crews!
For party members. You eat breakfast there…boom boom boom…If you
tellin’ your troops to serve the People, there’s something got to be in
your structural framework where if you got arrested in jail, we had a bail
fund. Your fett be hittin’ ground. You’re not gonna sit up in a jail,
[laughs], unless you got in there with murder and they ain’t give you no
bail. But party members, boom. You know, out selling papers and some cop
starts harassing them and somtehing happens and words of exchanged and he
comes in an arrests them all, ‘they was disturbing the peace’.’ Man, two or
three hours your feet are on the ground. And then we’d go to court. We
loved to go to court. Fast as the court is open we got the press–and the
underground press–and we always could get 20 people from the Guardian to
the Barb to whoever, to come to the press conference, telling the people
about what this case is about. This case is abotu harassment, the police
said this and he said this and witnesses… Most people don’t even
remember, 90% of all the arrests, charges amounting to 2,000 charges,
sometimes people arrested with two, three counts of charges….were
dropped, right after the arrests. 10% of all thsoe charges ever went to
court and then we turn around and won 95% of those cases.
We were a helluva fine organization, because we dealt in multiple
leadership. We didn’t limit it to one mono thing like Farrakhan is some
mono-type leader of the Nation of Islam. He’s probably got a committee, I’m
not criticizing him there per se on that. My point is that we dealt with
committee leadership. Each chapter and branch had a committee. And each
chapter and branch had leadership spokespersons, two, three or four of
them. Multiple leadership! So when they put me in jail, forced Eldridge
into exile and Huey was already in jail–we the top known leaders, early
organizers–the party continued to function. David Hilliard was Chief of
Staff, he kept it together. When I came out fo jail, they put David in
jail. [laughs]

Q” HOW DID YOU SURVIVE MENTALLY IN JAIL, BEING SUCH A NATURAL ORGANIZER OF PEOPLE?
They put me in isolation cell. I had no problem. I’d been in stockade
before in the service. I did six months in the stockade for some racism.
They kicked me out of the military services after three years, eleven
months and eleven days. I only enlisted for four years! I was kicked otu
with undesirable discharge, I couldn’t deal with the racism. I didn’t have
any political consciousness then–I just couldn’t take it. I didn’t give a
damn if you were a colonel, you’re doing wrong. I never allowed a bully to
run over me, even when I was a kid. Even if I get my ass kicked, I’m gonna
confront this bully. And I guess it was something having to do with my
character, I don’t know. Cuz I truly believed in fair-shares equality, fair
relationships between people, I don’t care what color you was. I learned
through the party, and before the party…My biology, your biology–white
or black, that’s bullshit to me. I took biology, I took anthropolgy, I
says, wait a minute, we’re all human beings. I believe that. And I know
that. And I proved it to myself with good human scientific evidentiary
fact. I’m no better than you and you no better than me. You’re just another
human being. Those are the kinds of relationships we had with all our white
left radical buddies. Cuz it was this free-flow attitude. We weren’t
running around, ‘Oh you white!’ WE had no time for that. We kicked people
out of the Party for messing around with our white radical friends.

We had a female who was the head of the whole Massachusetts state chapter.
8 or 9 young black males called me–”oh chairman Bobby, they called me from
Boston, their headquarters–”uh uh, we Black men and we can’t be taking no
orders from a woman, we need a brother, a man in charge of this chapter out
here, and we allg o together.’ So I said, ‘gimme all your names’ and i
told somebody to pick up the other line, take these names down, these
brothers are protesting sister Audrey Jones out there. We finally got all
the names and then I says, Lemme tell you something. You read the rules of
the Party, you’re supposed to write up your charges and your disagreements
and send em in in the mail to me. And you can still do that, you can
appeal, cuz I’m getting ready to tell you something: If you cannot take
directives from deputy chairman sister Audrey Jones, get the FUCK out of my
organization, Cuz I don’t have no time for no punk-ass sonovabitches
running around here with they penis in front of their ego like they’re
supposed to be better than in front of another human being which is a
female and she is THE sister, she is THE organizer. Get out of my goddamned
organization! Roll, cuz I can see it all stickin’ out now. The police come
up there to attack the offices, sister Audrey Jones give you a directive to
go downstairs and get the guns, ‘we ain’t taking no orders’ but i says the
racist power structure is getting ready to kill us, I said, get the fuck,
hurry up. Let the door slam you in the ass and knock you down to the next
block and don’t come around.’CLICK. They never forgave me for that.

[laughter]

Maybe they did, some of them. But my point i, I have no time for the little
dumb…

Q: IT’S SO HARD FOR ME TO IMAGINE YOU BEING IN THE THICK OF IT ON A DAY-TO-DAY
BASIS AND THEN BEING PUT IN JAIL.

Well I’d been in jail before. I was in the stockade, that was the first
time I went to jail. The second time I went to jail was when the BPP six
months, when I led the 24 males and 6 females armed, led that delegation to
the California state legislature, May 2, 1967. That’s when the BPP received
its notoriety. All of that was about leaving a message cuz they were trying
to make a law to stop us from patrolling the police, that’s how legal we
were. We were legally patrolling the police. They couldn’t arrest us just
for observing the police; they were legal guns, as long as they were not
concealed. But we were very disciplined, and they knew this. So I lead that
delegation…and ultimately I had to serve six months in jail because we
were not—it was not about carrying illegal guns that we got arrested, we
got arrested for disturbing the peace of the California state assembly, cuz
some of the party members got ahead of me and happened to walk on the real
floor, just walking, and upset the legislators. And Ronald Reagan wanted us
arrested on anything… But we were not arrested on illegal weapons
[charges]—they had to give us our guns back! We filed a brief in court.
You give us our private property back, and they had to give them back.

Q: SO YOU WERE IN JAIL FOR SIX MONTHS THERE..
Six months there, and then they put me in jail a second time around…by
the time I was in jail a second time, I had a helluva reputation. “Oooo,
don’t let him around the other prisoners.” So they put me in an isolation
cell. Then later they threw me in “the Hole.” The Hole is a punishment
location, isolation cells you get fed with the prisoners but you just in a
different location then the rest of em. Why? Cuz Bobby Seale will organize
these prisoners if they let him in the big room…so they always put me in
isolation cells. Then when I got Connecticut for that case– ‘m in jail
without bail, remember–I took the State Jails Commissioner to federal
court while I got another case, a conspiracy to commit murder case in
Connecticut, and I won, they were violating the Eighth Amendment of the
Constitution of the United States of America. So mine’s was a fight and a
struggle. When I walked into a jail–cool! Now if you’re gonna act the fool
with me, prisoner-wise…? Most prisoners say hey man that’s Bobby Seale,
hey brother man, good to meet cha, white and black, cuz they knew, they see
it on the news, this guy leads the BPP. So, boom.

They beat me up in Oakland, over here in San Francisco County Jail in the
testicles and choked me to unconsciousness and threw me in the Hole for
three days. They really threw me in there for 15 days but I got out in 3.
Because I knew before I went there that the Hole in San Francisco had been
declared illegal. You cannot put prisoners in there. So the third day they
let me out to clean out the junk, it had defecation in it. Some kind of
liberal guard opened the big thick door, it’s a thick door, the Hole is
seven feet this way, six feet wide, a grate in the center, no bed, no
nothing, 12-14-foot ceiling wiht one little light beaming down on you. Well
the grate was where you defecated or urinated, the grate is the floor. The
cheap racist guards flushed it from the outside, they would flush that
thing cuz they knew it was stopped up. I’d be laying

[tape ends]

“R.L. Burnside at home in Independence, Mississippi, shot by Alan Lomax and crew in August, 1978.”

R.L. Burnside: Fat Possum Records

Download: Seth Pettersen – “Baby Buddah” (mp3)

Stream:

An office singalong favorite off the beachgoers’ summertime hit parade that is Seth Pettersen‘s new album, So Fully, available from iTunes.

Seth is playing some surf shops in the coming weeks:

Jul 22 2010 7:00P Pacific Beach Surf Shop (San Diego, CA)
Aug 7 2010 8:00P Shelter Surf Shop (Long Beach, CA)
Aug 21 2010 7:00P Surfy Surfy Surf Shop (Leucadia, CA)
Aug 27 2010 8:00P Duckywaddles Emporium (Encinitas, CA)
Sep 10 2010 8:00P Hensley’s Flying Elephant (Carlsbad, CA)

Panama Al Brown

“When the eminent French poet Jean Cocteau died last October at the age of 74, his obituaries noted that he had followed an astounding number of part-time careers as well—novelist, playwright, choreographer, film director, critic and artist. But Cocteau’s journalistic biographers overlooked the most bizarre of his avocations: he was once the successful manager of a world champion prizefighter.

“The fighter was Alphonse Theo Brown, better known as Panama Al Brown, born in Panama in 1902, a lean, spindly-legged, thin-waisted boxer who won the bantamweight title when he was 26 years old. With a scrupulous exactitude that was rare for him—he was one of the most tireless name-droppers in the history of literature—Cocteau insisted that he was not Brown’s manager in a professional sense, that there was no contract or financial arrangement between them. But, in fact, Cocteau got to know Brown when he was down on his luck, persuaded him to train, selected opponents for him, directed a masterly publicity campaign on Brown’s behalf and guided and goaded Brown back to the championship. Nor is the sporting significance of this feat to be underrated. Unlike America, where the heavyweight class has long dominated public interest-even as it does this very week—Europe has always revered the smaller fighters, from the middleweights down. A flashy Al Brown could be, and was, the talk of Paris.

“No professional manager could have done a better job than Cocteau did with Brown, and probably no one in boxing history ever had less preparation for it…”

—from Robert Cantwell’s introduction to a long excerpt drawn from Monstres Sacres du Ring by Georges Peeters, published in the March 2, 1964 issue of Sports Illustrated. Here are links to both:

The Poet And The Boxer by Robert Cantwell

How Cocteau Managed A Champion by Georges Peeters

Joaquin Miller (1837 – 1913)
Beard type: Mock Forked Elongated
Typical opus: Kit Carson’s Ride
Gravity (UPI rating): 51

More on this remarkable beard weight ranking system at the ever-fabulous A Journey Round My Skull

Eagles of Death Metal bassist Brian O’Connor has been diagnosed with cancer, and is undergoing treatment in Los Angeles. More info on how you can help: brianeodm.org

Queens of the Stone Age & Eagles of Death Metal

A Benefit for Brian O’Connor

Thursday, August 12th

Club Nokia

Los Angeles, CA

PRE-SALE begins Thursday, July 15th 10 am PST

http://www.ticketmaster.com/event/090044E7E1D46680?brand=clubnokia

password: bighands

tickets on sale to the public Friday, July 16th @ 10:00 am

Download: “I Was Denied”—Thee Oh Sees (mp3)

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Properly rambunctious Fall homage from Thee Oh Sees, featuring everyone’s favorite ex-Coachwhip/Pink and Brown-er, John Dwyer. Off their tasty new grinder, Warm Slime, available from In the Red Records of Los Angeles, California. Spiffy cover too.

New York Times: obituary by Ben Sisario

Harvey Pekar (right) with longtime Arthur contributing artist Joseph Remnant. They had been collaborating on a new book at the time of Pekar’s passing.

Cleveland Plain Dealer: news report

New York Times: report/obituary

Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter: long, smart essay on Pekar’s life, work and impact

From Watt’s current online Stooges tour diary:

“backstage w/us are the zz top guys – pretty happening for me cuz I saw them in the early-middle 70s and really dug their third and fourth albums big time, really fucking BIG time – I loved them and they were my kind of power trio in those days, my favorite. you know, when I do interviews about bass I’m thinking now I don’t give enough credit to dusty roads cuz I learned tons from him. I’m gonna make that right. I get to talk some w/frank beard, the drummerman – what a very nice guy. so is mr dusty, man, he is something. his fingers are kind of small, like thumbs but man, he can work a bass like no one’s business. he is very kind to me too. what nice cats….

“….I go watch most of their gig – their basshelperman, pulls up a case me to sit on and even gives me a dusty roads pick though I only see him use fingers the whole gig. he’s a great singer too though mr billy does must of it, they do a lot together also. mr billy’s an incredible guitarist and mr frank is really grooving – them all playing together is really something else. wow. I played a telecaster bass in the later minutemen days cuz I finally found one and I could play like mr dusty. now I got to see him work it up close – crimony! they get done and I tell him “much respect” even start foaming some but work hard to hold it back. he is very gracious. I talk to mr frank and he’s also very gracious – I saw him watch our whole gig – he says he dug the stooges show said “it was mach twenty the whole way!” mr billy goes talk to him and I thank him, also he’s big time gracious – they’re all so nice to me. I told mr frank about seeing them in my teen years – I tell him and mr billy I’m an old punk but they put HUGE influence in me and d. boon – why we wanted to be a powertrio, more than cream – be more like them w/their mic stands up there real close together.”

Japanese landscape design studio EARTHSCAPE have created a giant travelling human-shaped herb garden.

Called Medical Herbman Café Project (MHCP), the garden arrives in shipping containers which convert into a shop and cafe at each location. Herbs are planted according to the parts of the body they can benefit.

Here’s some text from Kobayashi:

“Herbman carries his trunk (the container) as he travels, bringing good health and giving dreams to children wherever he goes. This is the vision of our project. Herbman is a person-shaped herb garden. Various herbs are planted in this garden. Herbs are planted on Herbman’s body according to their effects: for example, herbs that aid digestion are planted in the stomach area, and herbs that work to relieve shoulder stiffness are planted in the shoulder area. In this way, Herbman acts as a kind of herb dictionary. Just by looking at Herbman, people can learn which herbs work for their trouble spots. We also plant herbs that grow naturally in the locale, so that our herbs are constantly changing, and a site-specific Herbman is born in each locale.”

More text and photos: dezeen.com

Hipped to this via Stephanie S.!

Download: INTERNATIONAL HELLO – “Arise Superslide” (40mb, mp3)

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A long cut of primo California psych damage from California’s International Hello, featuring former members of the legendary Monoshock. Available on their new self-titled debut LP, out now from Holy Mountain of Portland, Oregon. Yes!

Originally published in the August 08, 2002 LAWeekly

The Lair of Doom lies on a Hollywood boulevard, upstairs from a Thai restaurant. There, above the ambulance sirens and Metro bus brake squeals rising like so many noxious sonic fumes from the street below, a single industrious man labors intently. Listen close, at almost any hour of the day or night, and you‘ll hear his hearty cackle and—something else: a strange clatter, like the rattle of bones in a plastic tumbler.

Actually, that’s just the sound of Greg Anderson, 32-year-old founder of Southern Lord Records and currently its sole employee, working the phone and tapping out e-mail.

“I‘m here all the time,” says the longhaired, affable Anderson, gazing lovingly at one of the sources of his endurance, a 72-ounce pitcher-bucket of Coke he’s constantly refilling at the 7-Eleven across the street. “But I‘m not looking for sympathy! This is what I like to do.”

What Southern Lord has been doing since its inception in April 1998 is “doom metal,” a certain species of heavy music whose ultimate ancestor is Black Sabbath. Basically it sounds like the product of a bunch of guys smoking a lot of pot and trying to play music slower than the Melvins: bands have names like WarHorse and Place of Skulls, albums have titles like As Heaven Turns to Ash and Supercoven. It’s low-end music for black-clad midnight masses.

But Southern Lord does more than doom metal (strictly defined). Another look at the Lord‘s roster reveals: Mondo Generator, a churning, rumbling post-SST racket led by Queens of the Stone Age/ex-Kyuss bassist Nick Oliveri; SUNN 0))), which features dark, massive guitar sludgework by Anderson and Southern Lord graphic designer Stephen O’Malley; and Khanate, an O‘Malley-led band that Anderson characterizes as “black metal on ludes—it’s got that same grim evilness.”

With recent releases by the latter two ensembles, Southern Lord has begun to attract attention from new quarters. Acclaimed Japanese avant-garde noise warlock Merzbow mixed two tracks on SUNN 0)))‘s latest record, Flight of the Behemoth; Julian Cope has been an outspoken public champion (he’s called the just-released Rampton by Southern Lord supergroup Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine “an endless ambient Ragnarok”); and SUNN 0))), much to their surprise, found themselves being profiled this past spring by influential British artsy-music magazine The Wire. A recent East Coast tour by Khanate was attended as much by drone seekers and experimental music aficionados as the usual collection of stoners and adventurous metalheads.

Doom, it seems, is everywhere.

What follows are the Ten Commandments of Doom: both a how-to list for would-be micro-label operators and the slightly abridged tale, told in his own words, of how Greg Anderson found his grim calling…and followed it to the bitter end.

1. HEED YOUR CALLING.
Right around the time I was getting into heavy rock—this is like 1982—there were all these seminars around Seattle about how rock music was evil. So I went to one of them. I found out about all this music that I didn‘t know about! I was like, “Who’s Alice Cooper?!” I walked out of there going, “Okay, these tapes are what I want for my birthday.”

My main influence is early Melvins—Buzz is my all-time hero!—and Earth. When they came out with Earth 2, it really struck a chord with me. I got to see them once in ‘91 or ’92. They played this small club, there were maybe 15 people there, it was just awesome. I think it‘s great when bands play excruciatingly loud. It’s like a two-part experience. You see the band, they‘re doing their thing, but you’re feeling the band, too. It‘s the same reason you may want to take drugs. You want to change your perception.

I look at playing SUNNO))) now, it’s like a body high. Having your body being enveloped by sound waves, especially droning low-end ones, is really massaging, especially if you‘re leaning against the cabinets. It’s like the drugs are almost an afterthought. I played an entire tour sober. We would invite the audience to come lay on the stage, while we were behind our wall of amps, lying down. After the set, I would be soooo relaxed.

2. I AM NORWEGIAN, HEAR ME RAAAARGH.
Stephen O‘Malley and I actually grew up in the same neighborhood and went to the same high school, but I was three years older. We became friends later, through mutual friends. We had all these mutual interests—he was a big Melvins fan too, and I really wanted to know more about death metal, and he was the guy. Steve and I formed Thorr’s Hammer with our friend Runhild Gammelsaeter, who was a death metalblack metal fan from Norway that was in Seattle on an exchange program. She was this gorgeous Norwegian teenager, but she sings-growls in this bellowing, guttural, superlow voice. Runhild was going back to Norway, so we had to cram everything in in two weeks—we recorded a demo, we played two shows. That‘s it. After that Steve and I did a band called Burning Witch together. Then I left Burning Witch to come to L.A. to play with the guys from the Obsessed, and we became Goatsnake.

3. PERFORM APPRENTICESHIPS.
When I moved to L.A. in ’96 from Seattle to do Goatsnake, I got a job at Aron‘s. I’ve never been treated worse in my life than at Aron‘s. Talk about a group of the most pretentious fucking people! Record store lackeys that are making like four dollars an hour, punching out for your 10-minute smoke breaks, they were a bunch of fucking losers, nothing going on musically or artistically. I almost gave up and moved back to Seattle. Ironically, the people that were the coolest to me at Aron’s were the people that had the most shit going on for them as musicians.

A friend got me a job at Caroline Distribution, answering phones, making copies, just crap. Stupid shit. But I got to hear all the music coming in from all the labels we distributed. It opened up a whole new world, and I was being exposed to it for free. I became friends with people at the different labels Caroline was dealing with, and so I learned from them how labels work. I moved up at Caroline, all the while doing music on the side with Goatsnake. Eventually I got tired of selling other people‘s records. Some of the stuff people were putting out, I was like, “Dude . . . I don’t wanna put my name behind this.” I held on for a while and then I decided to take a chance. Do my own thing.

4. SET MODEST, ATTAINABLE GOALS.
Burning Witch had continued on after I left, and they made a recording. And then eventually Steve came down here. Me and him were supposed to put out the Burning Witch and the Thorr‘s Hammer material with these other labels, and people just kept on flaking. A friend of ours who was really into this stuff, he was like, “You guys gotta put this out. I’ll give you the money, just pay me back.” And so we just did it. We just wanted to document it, get it out there.

5. MANIFEST THE BRAND: NAME, LOGO, IDENTITY.
Me and Steve would carry bottles of Southern Comfort around everywhere to parties and just get wasted. We were trying to think of a name for the label and I was just like, “Southern . . . Lord.”

Steve‘s a real amazing artist as far as like graphic design, and musically as well. His portfolio is sick. He’s done a lot of all the real famous Burzum covers, he‘s done Mayhem, Emperor. People love the designs. People want the package. Even if you’re not 100 percent into the music on the record, you buy it for the artwork.

The name Southern Lord doesn‘t really have much meaning, I just thought it sounded cool. Some people try to tie the label to this Satanic thing, and I’m like not really into that at all. I don‘t have any affinity to any sort of religion, really. I just put out this band called Place of Skulls, which is the guitar player from this old band called Pentagram, who were a pretty Satanic band. But his new band is Christian. They’re not blatant about it, they‘re just Christians. And people have been giving me shit: “What’s so evil about Place of Skulls, those guys are fucking Christians!” Well, I never claimed to be evil or Satanic.

People ask, “What is Southern Lord? Are you a stoner rock label? Are you a doom metal label? Are you a death metal label?” Our label puts out heavy, intense music, that‘s all. We’ve been lucky to escape the “stoner rock” label. Would you call Black Sabbath a stoner rock band? No. They‘re a heavy band. I just think labeling music in general is kinda silly. Sabbath are, for lack of a better word, the grandfathers of “doom metal,” but Melvins, St. Vitus, Trouble and Pentagram are just as important: They took Sabbath and fused it with more of a heavy metal thing, and that fusion comprises what I would call doom metal.

A lot of people think taking drugs and playing as slow as you can is what Southern Lord is about. Which it is—kind of.

6. MAINTAIN BRUTAL FOCUS.
Initially, I didn’t really have any goals beyond the Burning Witch and Thorr‘s Hammer records. And those two records did really good: We got distribution, people were into it, our money was coming a back. We were stoked. The guys from the Obsessed who had been playing with me in Goatsnake were like, “Hey man, there’s all this unreleased Obsessed stuff, if you wanna put it out.” We‘re like, yeah, there’s a great band that didn‘t really get a lot of exposure. And these really rare and unreleased tracks we were getting for this compilation were killer stuff. So we used the money from the first two releases and put out that third record. And then that did great.

The whole time that this is going on I’m in Goatsnake. The fourth release happened because we were over in Europe touring with Electric Wizard, and it was just like, “Man, this band is awesome, I wanna put out a record.” And so we did. That‘s how it kept going.

Thank God for Man’s Ruin existing so that I could see what not to do. Man‘s Ruin was a big inspiration. They were one of the first labels that was really putting out, and really supporting, the heavy music scene. Here’s a label that I thought was just brilliant as far as some of the releases, the artwork and everything. The respect that I have for [Man‘s Ruin owner] Frank Kozik is that he was really passionate about what he did, and he came from a real artist’s perspective. But he didn‘t know how to run a business. The main flaw was quality control. At one point, it was like if a band had even heard of Kyuss, Fu Manchu, or owned a Big Muff pedal, Man’s Ruin was gonna put it out. I was appalled at some of the shit he was putting out.

I‘m a fanatic about pretty much every song on every release. I wouldn’t put out a record and go, “Yeah, it‘s okay.” I want everything that I put out to have real quality. And I’m really proud that Southern Lord is starting to get a name for itself. There are a certain amount of people that we‘ve built as a following that are gonna buy our stuff, no matter what. They like my taste, and I don’t deviate too far. I‘ve done a few kinda different releases, but people were into it.

7. EMBRACE ALL MODES OF DISSEMINATION.
Our main distributor is Caroline, they account for about 70 to 80 percent of our sales in the U.S. And the rest go through smaller distributors in smaller quantities.

The Internet has definitely changed distribution. There’s all these cool people who are into this certain kind of music, and they‘ll sell it on their own Web sites and fill orders out of their bedroom. I’ll do a couple boxes of CDs consistently with them.

Our Web store accounts for a good percentage of our income. And of course I get tons of mail orders through my post office box. We do a 7-inch singles club, six a year, and those go like wildfire. I like to do vinyl for as many projects as I can, because I like the sound and the packaging, but it‘s expensive. And at the distributor level, my sales of vinyl have gone down so much. It’s mostly mail order for vinyl. If a band tours, that‘s where you can really sell it.

I deal directly with as many record stores as I can. People working at record stores, they like talking to labels anyways ’cause they wanna be able to get on the guest list when your bands are coming on tour, or to try to get the bands to come into the store and sign shit. So whenever I get an e-mail or a phone call from a store, they‘re like, “Uh, can we get a play copy or a poster?” I’m like, “How ‘bout dealing direct?” ’Cause that way they‘ll remember you, they’ll put up your posters, and you get the money immediately. You don‘t have to wait 90 days for your distributor to pay you, minus the returns, minus the charge-backs for advertising. Dealing direct is where you really make your connection with the store.

People come up to me all the time and say, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but when I first heard your record, I burned it from a friend—but then I went out and bought it! And I got a T-shirt too!” I love how people try to justify it with me. They wanna support the artist. Maybe if the first exposure is someone burns them a mix CD or they get something off the Internet, then that‘s the thing, they’re gonna go out and buy that, they‘re probably gonna go see the band in a club. They wanna go to the shows and pay. Because they know if that doesn’t happen, the artist ain‘t coming back down to their town. I think, at this level at least, that people can make that correlation.

8. ONLY ALLY WITH BANDS THAT ARE WILLING TO CONQUER.
With payment and royalties, it’s a profit split, 50-50 between the label and the bands. So I always tell bands, “I‘m gonna work hard. I need you guys to do the same, because we’re both splitting the money. So if you guys don‘t tour, if you don’t go out there and self-promote, if you don‘t do all this stuff that you should be doing to get your name out there, then the record’s not gonna sell” and I might not do another record with them. I do a certain job and I expect the bands to do a certain job. I‘m responsible for everything, and I try not to fuck up. I think bands can see that. You don’t have to go through five people to get your answer. It‘s me, and I’ll tell you straight up what the answer is.

How do I do it? I stopped smoking pot. I‘ve been playing music less and less, and doing this more and more. ’Cause this is what pays the bills, you know. It‘s been a curse for my social life. I don’t hang out with my friends very much anymore. But it‘s a choice I’ve made. Working for myself, that‘s all I’ve ever wanted to do, whether it‘s selling soap or selling doom records.

I’m not trying to sound pretentious when I say this, but I come from a punk rock background. I was in my own band when I was 15, put out my own tapes, got in the fuckin‘ Pinto and toured the West Coast. I grew up, learning that. I notice when I work with bands at Southern Lord that come from that same school of thinking, or they at least respect and know that, things are gonna go well. But when I’m dealing with people who have no idea about that, it‘s like a whole different world.

Mostly what I see with Hollywood and Los Angeles are a lot of these bands that are made up of either failed actors or these dudes that are just watching MTV and that’s all they know about music, and they start these bands. They‘re like, “Okay, the acting thing, I’m not getting very many phone calls on that, so I‘m gonna do a band, we’re gonna be, like, heavy, you know, like Limp Bizkit . . .” There are so many bands in L.A. that have that mindset. Sure, there‘s a chance that they’re gonna get signed by some fucking shitty major label, sign away their lives for $150,000, and that‘s it. That’s definitely not what I‘m about.

It’s funny: One of the greatest labels of all time, SST, they‘re not from Hollywood, but they’re from around here. That‘s kind of the whole thing about Los Angeles: You’ve got the worst shit you’ve ever seen in your life and you’ve got some of the best shit you’ve ever seen in your life.

9. LEARN FROM YOUR ERRORS.
I learn something all the time. I got caught with my pants down at the end of last year because I hadn’t put anything out from March until October, so I didn‘t have any cash flow happening. I learned it’s really good to put a record out at least every two months. But I also have to limit how many records I put out. Once you put out too many records, you can‘t take care of all the bands: Shit starts falling through the cracks. If you’ve got a priority, you can‘t even treat it that way ’cause you‘ve got so much manufacturing debt from pressing up five records a month.

I usually know how many a record’s gonna sell when I put it out, which is cool ‘cause then I can budget correctly. Some things have broken out and surprised me, which is really cool. We put out this record by this Japanese band Boris that’s basically a 50-minute-plus song of pure guitar dronefeedback. We sold 2,100 copies of that record! And that to me is a success, because I didn‘t think anyone was gonna understand it.

10. KNOW THAT THE INTERNET IS YOUR SPECIAL FRIEND WITH STRANGE AND WONDERFUL POWERS.
The Internet is extremely important. It’s almost eliminated the flyer; it‘s become the flyer. Instead of us sending out fliers in the mail, or people passing around fliers in the underground metal scene like they have in the past, now people just log on to the Web site. We keep it updated with information about new releases, bands being on the road, stuff like that. Right now we’ve got a sample from pretty much every release on there. If I could get enough space on my site, I might make a band‘s entire album free to download.

Caroline does a lot of promotion, and I have a press person in New York who does a damn good job. I don’t do any radio promotion, ‘cause a lot of the stuff I put out, the songs are too long for radio, and unless you got a lot of money, and you’ve got some radio dude working on the phones, it‘s not worth it.

A weird array of people are into what we’re doing. Adventurous metalheads, they wanna hear something different than Cannibal Corpse or your generic black metal. There‘s a lot of kinda like artsy people, who are into The Wire magazine, Alternative Press, shit like that. Experimental people. And hardcore kids. And Julian Cope! What he wrote was like the greatest thing I’ve ever read in my life! That‘s probably the whole reward of this: being surprised when somebody actually gets it.

Now available in hardcover direct from Fantagraphics for $15.99. Don’t ask why, just be glad.

Download an 11-page PDF preview/excerpt!

Download: Arp – “White Light” (mp3)

Stream:

New throb-bubbler from C & D fave Arp, off fella’s second album, The Soft Wave, out this September from Smalltown Supersound. Official Arp site: arpsounds.com

SETH PETTERSEN: sethpettersen.blogspot.com

WHEN: Friday, July 2, 8-10pm
WHERE: Grady’s Record Refuge, 2546 E. Main St., Ventura, 805-648-5565
WHAT: Seth Pettersen and Modest Fur

***FREE concert this Friday with Seth Pettersen and Modest Fur (from LA). The show will run from 8-10pm and the store will of course be open before, during, and after the gig. Hope to see you there!

Short film on Grady’s Record Refuge

Baltimore daretakers Lexie Mountain Boys inside “Igloo” at Noah Purifoy’s “Outdoor Desert Art Museum” in Joshua Tree, California, last Saturday.

More: Kristine McKenna on Noah Purifoy, from Arthur Magazine No. 11

Lexie Mountain Boys myspace

Noah Purifoy on NPR and Tavis Smiley Show

Noah Purifoy Foundation

Crazy Dreams Band (featuring Lexie)

From a piece by Randy Kennedy in yesterday’s Sunday NYTimes in advance of a show celebrating Gysin’s work that opens on July 7 at New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York:

“IF you want to disappear … come around for private lessons,” the artist Brion Gysin once offered in a prose poem. And during a period in Paris in the late 1950s, when he and the novelist William S. Burroughs were experimenting with crystal balls, mirrors and other contraptions of the occult, a mutual friend swore that he saw Gysin exercise the powers of dematerialization, perhaps with help from the various narcotics that always seemed to be lying around for the taking.

“Brion disappeared before my eyes, for periods of 10 or 15 or 20 minutes,” the friend, Roger Knoebber, told an interviewer.

But during a ferociously productive, wildly eclectic career in painting, writing and performance that lasted half a century, it often seemed as if Gysin, who died in poverty in 1986, had too great a facility for disappearance, at least as far as his reputation in the art world was concerned. Despite a longing for recognition, he was generally known less for his own work than for his associations with a prodigious number of more famous artists for whom he was, by turns, a teacher, friend and all-around guru: Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Max Ernst, Alice B. Toklas, Keith Haring, David Bowie and Iggy Pop, among others.

As death approached, Gysin feared that his peripatetic life had been only an adventure, “leading nowhere” except through a procession of illustrious homes like Tangier, the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan and the poet’s bunkhouse in Paris known as the Beat Hotel, where he spent several of his most productive years. “You should hammer one nail all your life, and I didn’t do that,” he wrote in a lament cited by his biographer, John Geiger. “I hammered on a lot of nails like a xylophone.”

But now the New Museum of Contemporary Art has gathered the widely scattered pieces of Gysin’s strange, necromantic career and is working to haul him up from the underground once and for all with “Dream Machine,” the first retrospective of his art in the United States. The show, which opens July 7, will include more than 300 paintings, drawings, photo-collages and films, along with an original version of the Dreamachine, the spinning, light-emitting, trance-inducing kinetic sculpture that Gysin helped design with a computer programmer, Ian Sommerville, in 1960 that has become his most famous work. (The exhibition’s catalog includes a paper foldout and instructions to build your own Dreamachine, provided you can locate your old turntable.)
…
Gysin’s lack of mainstream success can be attributed in part to the nature of his work, which was always about finding ways — as a gay, irreligious, stateless artist — to escape the controls of conventional society and of the conscious mind. He pursued this mission with vast amounts of kif (a blend of tobacco and marijuana) and with psilocybin pills, supplied by none other than Timothy Leary. In the show’s catalog the poet John Giorno, one of Gysin’s lovers, recalls descending into the New York City subway with him one day in 1965, lugging a suitcase-size tape recorder to create one of Gysin’s sound poems.

“It was very exciting,” Mr. Giorno wrote. “We were stoned, of course, sweating from the heat and seeing with great clarity.”

If Gysin had done nothing else, he probably would have earned a footnote in cultural history as the man who supplied the hash fudge recipe for “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.” (Toklas was an innocent in this caper; she had never heard of the ingredient “canabis sativa,” as Gysin spelled it.)

But Gysin was, among other things, an authority on the Sufi music of the Moroccan village of Jajouka, which led to his serving as a guide there in 1968 for Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. He was also an important literary innovator who picked up where the Surrealists left off, pioneering the Cut-Up Method, the aleatory springboard for Burroughs’s best writing. Gysin stumbled upon the idea in 1959 after accidentally slicing through some newspapers, unmooring words that he then arranged at random. Burroughs adopted the Cut-Up as a narrative technique, one that worked perfectly to expose what he later called “the monumental fraud of cause and effect.”

Gysin considered himself primarily a visual artist, however, and painting and drawing were woven through everything he did. His work, which has affinities with that of Cy Twombly and Mark Tobey, was heavily influenced by Japanese and Arabic calligraphy but also by a strange discovery in 1956 behind a wall of a restaurant he ran in Tangier: a Moroccan curse that included a paper with lines of script arranged in a grid pattern. The motif impressed him deeply and gridded, letterlike images — a kind of meeting of magic and mathematical rigidity — dominated his work.
…

Full article: New York Times
Exhibition info: New Museum of Contemporary Art
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge in Conversation about Brion Gysin and Other Matters: July 15 at New Museum Theater
Brion Gysin in Arthur No. 7 (2003): The Arthur Store

Hot off a tour as handpicked openers for Matmos, Baltimore’s experimental all-female a capella performance mob Lexie Mountain Boys make their High Desert debut TONIGHT outdoors in the Starlite Courtyard in downtown Joshua Tree, California in a FREE FREE FREE, pass-the-hat event. All ages are welcome. No two Lexie Mountain Boys performances are alike so please arrive on-time and be appropriately prepared to witness one of the most notorious acts to come out of Baltimore’s internationally renowned underground arts scene.

The Lexies have performed as St Augustine’s Tower (London), The New Museum (NY), The Rohsska Museet (Gothenberg SE), The Baltimore Museum of Art, and more. Their full-length CD “Sacred Vacation” was recorded in a Baltimore church by Wye Oak’s Andy Stack, and released on Carpark Records, also home to Dan Deacon & Animal Collective.

Lexie herself is also a member of the Crazy Dreams Band.

More Lexie Mountain Boys:
myspace
Facebook

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxzps-lfdmw

Fat Rabbit Bajada Lodge visitors Sam, cartoonist Ron Regé, Jr. and Tim Leanse display their house gift: the 15th edition of Ron’s “Yeast Hoist” comics series, “Kept in Balance by Equal Weights,” an eight-page alchemy zine that hangs from the neck of a reusable earthenware bottle filled with 16.9 ounces of a Belgian Abbey Ale! Sam and Tim roped the whole thing together. Right now the only place you can get one is from Whole Foods’ flagship store in Austin, Texas, but that should change soon. More info…

From 1971 to 1991, The New Alchemy Institute conducted research and education on behalf of the planet :

“Among our major tasks is the creation of ecologically derived human support systems—renewable energy, agriculture aquaculture, housing and landscapes. The strategies we research emphasize a minimal reliance on fossil fuels and operate on a scale accessible to individuals, families and small groups. It is our belief that ecological and social transformations must take place at the lowest functional levels of society if humankind is to direct its course towards a greener, saner world.”

“Our programs are geared to produce not riches, but rich and stable lives, independent of world fashion and the vagaries of international economics. The New Alchemists work at the lowest functional level of society on the premise that society, like the planet itself, can be no healthier than the components of which it is constructed. The urgency of our efforts is based on our belief that the industrial societies which now dominate the world are in the process of destroying it.”
—Fall 1970 Bulletin of the New Alchemists

New Alchemist Journals and other bulletins and reports from the New Alchemy Institute are now available as free downloadable PDFs from http://www.thegreencenter.net/

The fifteenth installment in Ron Regé, Jr.’s ongoing “Yeast Hoist” series of comics, “Kept in Balance by Equal Weights” is an 8-page zine that hangs from the neck of an earthenware bottle filled with 16.9 ounces of a delicious top-fermented Belgian Abbey Ale. This unique vessel features an original design screenprinted in Belgium.

Available beginning Thursday June 17th at Whole Foods’ flagship store in Austin, Texas

Special bottle signing and beer tasting event Saturday June 19th from 3-5pm prior to Cartoon Utopia opening at Domy Books in Austin

Watch this space for information on retail locations carrying YH15. Subscribe to info list for event and online availability announcements.

Questions? Ask!

yeasthoist.com

Filmmaker Sam Green, best known for his work on the Academy Award-nominated Weather Underground documentary film, is bringing his new “live documentary” “Utopia in Four Movements” project to the Redcat Theater in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, June 19th at 830pm. Sam narrates the film live, and the Brooklyn-based band the Quavers will be doing a live soundtrack. More info and advance tickets are available from lafilmfest.com

Click on the flyer to see it at full size…

Essay by author Rebecca Solnit about the project: “Big Utopias, Little Utopias”

Official “Utopia In Four Movements” site: utopiainfourmovements.com

Alan Moore describes “Unearthing,” a text that is being adapted into something more; collaborators include Mike Patton (of Faith No More), Justin Broadrick (Godflesh), Andrew Broder (Fog) and Stuart Braithwaite (Mogwai).

“…Commercialism has completed the destruction of the spirit of devotion to Art, the spirit of real participation in the performance. The public comes to it in search of sensation rather than prepared to experience life as and through Art. The greatest need perhaps of the New Art is a new public; the greatest need of the Artists is a consciousness of their true relationship with their public. The Artist has ceased to consider himself a provider of Spiritual Food, an arouser of dynamic Power; he has ceased to consider his position an ‘office,’ himself as an officiant. He thinks but of expressing himself, but of releasing forces which he cannot handle within himself. Why such releasing? He does not care to consider. He does not face deliberately and willingly his spiritual duty to the Race. Thus he does not attempt to mould the Race, to gather around his work the proper public for this work. He sells his wares. He is no longer a Messenger of life, attracting by the very example of his own living, human beings to the Message of which he is the bearer.” (Dane Rudhyar, 1895-1985)

“So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when prospective students take their college tours. The labs are more glamorous than the libraries.” (David Brooks, New York Times, June 7, 2010)

The Alchemy of Things Unknown (and a Visual Meditation on Transformation)
at Khastoo Gallery (7556 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90046 / (323) 472 6498 )

June 10 – July 31, 2010

Opening reception: Thursday, June 10th, 6pm – 8pm
With a film performance by Raha Raissnia, sound by Charles Curtis.

“After the cursing comes laughter, so that the soul is saved from the dead.”
– Carl Gustav Jung, The Red Book

This exhibition intends to examine and expose individual works of art in relation to theosophy, sacred tradition and devotional practice. From William Blake’s illuminated works of divine imagination to Carl Gustav Jung’s drawings of collective symbolic unconscious, the visual is undoubtedly an integral creative tool for reaching, exploring, animating and pervading the indefinable spaces beyond body and mind.

The artists in this exhibition, some more explicitly than others, sought after or seek spiritual truths through art making and employ an almost fervent and reverent experimentation to their practice, one that is both ritualistic and against the grain. This mystic behavior is what defines the show; the persistence on new and unorthodox visual experimentation reaches beyond the worldly sphere to heightened states of consciousness.

This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the generous contributions of William Breeze, Ordo Templi Orientis, Richard Metzger, John Contreras, Scott Hobbs, David Brafman, William Swofford Cameron, Hetty Maclise, and The Estate of Alfred Jensen.

More info:
http://www.khastoo.com

John McLaughlin

Coffee and Chocolates for Two Guitars
by Robert Fripp

Weather shut England and delayed the jammed flight to Paris by three hours, so I landed at 1:30 pm. A mad taxi driver helped to make up the lost time by driving like a mad taxi driver (the only madder ones than Paris’ are in Milan). This guy only hit one car but we nearly collected a second-a young Parisian jumped the light so we took it kinda personal, sped up and aimed. He backed down when he sized the opposition. Then we drove through the No Entry sign to John’s street; his number was inconveniently at the wrong end. I got out at the front door of the quintessentially French apartment building, in what looked suspiciously like a pedestrian zone, a small back lane of one of my two favorite cities in the world.

I am warmly greeted by John and his attractive roommate (and the keyboard player in Belo Horizonte), Katia LeBeque. Katia and her sister are a classical music duo with a four-hands piano rendition of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue selling modestly in Europe. John is a dapper dresser; today he’s in grey: flannels and pullover, shirt and tie not quite matching and just enough so that either you knew that he knew, or maybe he knew you didn’t. This subtlety of stressing the discontinuities, some exquisite Basque confectionery placed between us, the charm of the apartment—in mellowed pink, the ceiling veeing into the roof, spiral stairs—hinted at an intermezzo between the acts of flying. John is straightforward, friendly, and a gentleman. He speaks softly in a curious mix of Scottish, Indian, and French accents. We discussed the several occasions we had previously met for a time, and then I assumed a more journalistic role.

Fripp: Why do you think you became a musician?

McLaughlin: Happily, my mother was an amateur musician; she was a violinist and there was always music going on in the house. We got a gramophone one day, and someone had Beethoven’s Ninth, and on the last record, which is at the end of the symphony, there’s a vocal quartet in which the writing is extraordinary…the voices and the harmonies. I must have been about six or seven when I distinctly remember hearing it for the first time. I suppose that’s when I started to listen. Because when you’re young, you’re not paying attention. What do you know when you’re a kid? It was unbelievable, what it was doing to me was tremendous. I began to listen consciously to music and I started taking piano lessons when I was nine and went on to guitar at eleven…

Fripp: Did anything trigger the guitar in particular?

McLaughlin: Yeah, it was the D major chord. My brother showed it to me on the guitar, and I had this feeling of the guitar against my whole body…

Fripp: Did you have the F# on the bottom string?

McLaughlin: No, no. I was playing full-note chords. Eleven years old…what are you going to do? You have a small hand and, you know…What about you? Did you have a similar experience?

Fripp: I was ten. Definitely no sense of rhythm, and I spent a long time wonderting why it was that such an unlikely candidate would become a professional musician. But I knew right away that I was going to earn a living from it. Thinking about it over the years, I think music has a desire to be heard, such a kind of compulsion to be heard that it picks on unlikely candidates to give it voice.

McLaughlin: Yeah, I think that it basically comes from love. I mean, the kind of attraction that you have when you listen to it when you’re young. It’s inexplicable in a way.

Fripp: It’s a direct vocabulary…

McLaughlin: Exactly. Perhaps what you say is truth insofar as the music itself chooses, but it’s not a one-way street from music’s point of view. In a sense, you know, we fall in love with the muse and the muse falls in love with its prospective voices.

Fripp: The sentence I would add is that the music needed me to give it a voice, but in a feeble way. I needed music more, far more than music needed me.

McLaughlin: The most difficult thing, I think, in being a musician is to get out of the way.

Fripp: How do you get out of the way? Do you have specific techniques or regimens that you use? Can you just get yourself out of the way without thinking about it?

McLaughlin: If I’m thinking about it, I’m in the way. You have to forget, to forget everything. The minute we forget everything is when we’re finally found.

Fripp: How do you forget everything?

McLaughlin: Oh, it’s so hard…it’s so hard because you’re always looking for colors, for new scales, new chords, new ways to say what you feel. But to be able to say “I want to say what I feel” comes from a selfish point of view. Idealistically, the music should take what it wants and so we should bear it open and allow it to be. That’s difficult because it’s a paradox, Robert. You have to know everything, then you have to forget it all. Learning is relatively easy. It’s difficult to recommend how to get out of the way (laughs). That’s what I’m learning how to do myself.

Fripp: For a number of years, you worked with Sri Chinmoy. How did that help you?

McLaughlin: It helped me in many ways…because I felt a long time ago that music and being are aspects of the same mystery. I felt I was very ignorant, in fact, about me, ignorant about what is a human being.

Fripp: Was there a time when you kind of woke up one day and thought, “I see things in a different way!” or was it a gradual thing?

McLaughlin: I think it was gradual. It started when I was about nineteen or twenty. I had no religious education whatsoever. I was taught religious instruction at school, which was completely meaningless. Christ, God…it didn’t mean anything to me. And, in fact, it was my association with Graham Bond that really triggered a desire to know. This must have been around 1962. You know, we were smoking dope and this and that I remember having a few acid trips, and that itself is a very profound psychic influence, I think. Psychological, too. And Graham Bond was, by this time, involved in the Tarot, but, how shall I say, not just the cards, but from a philosophical point of view. He had this book he showed me one day, which I found fascinating. He was talking about what is possible…which seemed science fiction…what kind of powers we’re capable of. I bought the book and traced through the author, discovering through his index that he was a disciple of Romana Maharshi, who was a great Indian saint. So that was my first contact with Indian culture in general and philosophy in particular, and I joined the Theosophical Society in London, since my appetite was whetted. The best thing about the place was the library. They had incredible books in this library by people you don’t find in the local library around the corner. And it was through reading that I came in contact with the Indian philosophy. I felt I was walking into a new world. It’s a wonderful feeling to suddenly discover after all these years that the world was not how you thought it was. In fact, everything was possible…to discover that everything’s magical, nothing’s ordinary. I’ve been digressing, What was the original question?

Fripp: How did you get to Sri Chinmoy?

McLaughlin: By the time I was 27, I’d already started doing Hatha Yoga and doing mind and breathing exercises. I felt more capable mentally, but I had this feeling I was being tuned up but not being played very well, which relates to what we were talking about a while ago. I felt the need to learn from somebody who really knows. I arrived one evening at a meditation featuring Sri Chinmoy and he invited questions. I thought, “Great, this is the first time anyone has ever invited questions,” so I said, “What’s the relationship between music and spirituality?” and he said, “Well, it’s not really a question of what you do. It’s what you are or how you are that’s important because you can be making the most beautiful music sweeping the road, if you’re doing it in a harmonious way, in a beautiful way.” It sounds so simple, of course, but it was everything I wanted to hear and I felt I should stay with him, which I did for five years. Meditation in itself is a very subtle and complex process. I have to say that in the first two years, the only thing that happened in meditation was that my subconscious regurgitated everything, all its obsessions and fears and desires…which I think is normal when you try to still the conscious mind. It doesn’t like it. It likes to vibrate and think and hook into different emotions, good or bad, so when you force this process and you stay still for thirty minutes, an hour, two hours, what happens is that the punch starts to manifest itself, and this is sometimes horrifying and sometimes wonderful, but always good, I think, because you start to learn about yourself and you accept the good with the bad.

Fripp: How did your discipline work within the Mahavishnu Orchestra? Was that your band, was it cooperative…?

McLaughlin: It was my band in the beginning and it became more and more democratic…but the whole relationship with Sri Chinmoy was a cause of acrimony.

Fripp: I wondered how the other musicians dealt with the ideas…

McLaughlin: They rejected them outright. For me, I can still say music is God, music is the face of God. That’s everybody, that’s the hearts of men. And that’s important to me. But that’s not the way everybody sees it. And, of course, what happened in interviews, especially in collective interviews, was that people would ask me questions and I would talk about development and ideals, about which I already have talked too much this afternoon, and these questions would be posed to the other musicians and they would say, “We don’t want to feel that way at all, we’re not into that.”

Fripp: Everybody is always asked a perennial question that they wish not to be asked again. For me, it was always why did we break up King Crimson? For Bill Bruford, it was “why did you leave Yes?” What would yours be?

McLaughlin: Probably, “why did the Mahavishnu Orchestra break up?” or why did I break it up. Because that…that was a group that people enjoyed. It was loved by a lot of people, in fact, and it’s kind of sad to see that happen. I mean, it’s like when the Beatles broke up. I was very shaken. This is the kind of thing…you just don’t think is going to happen. I must say, thought, that I tried to put it together, for one concert, a few years ago, just to show that…that…all bullshit aside, we loved to play. Everybody but Jan (Hammer) wanted to do it. Jan…I…I still can’t figure it out. He’s a very enigmatic person. He’s such a great musician and he’s a big, big lover of rock ‘n’ roll. But perhaps still, there’s a certain…I wonder…maybe he still feels bad about something in that band. I can’t figure it out. But it was enough for him to say no.

Fripp: As we’re talking through these heavy things, I’m munching without any guilt at all through my favorite French confection.

McLaughlin: Can I get you more coffee?

Fripp: I should love more coffee. Where do these chocolates come from?

McLaughlin: They come from the Basque coast, where we go a lot of the time. Maybe one day you can come and visit.

Fripp: I should love to do that. I use French confection as an analogy sometimes. People say, “What’s the difference between earning a living, or having a go so it’s more than just a mundane process?” and I say it’s the difference between Hershey bars and French confectionery. You have to know French confection to understand what a Hershey bar is.

McLaughlin: Did you ever see The French Connection II? There’s a scene where Gene Hackman is in France and although there’s all this Swiss chocolate around, he only wants a Hershey bar…(laughs)

Fripp: I never did drugs, you see, so I was only told about the connection. It seems to me that details such as chocolate or clothing give insight to the person…

McLaughlin: It’s the small things, how a person walks, how a person talks, what they say, how they say it. We learn from that. I learn, surely.

Fripp: Do you dress in a certain kind of way to say anything deliberately…?

McLaughlin: Well, let’s look at it in music. I’ll tell you what I’m looking for. I’m looking for eloquence, accuracy, and elegance – among other things such as profundity, pathos, joy – but I think these three qualities, which are written on the back of _Love Supreme_ by John Coltrane; reading those liner notes had a great effect on me. It’s a way of life, a way of being. I don’t think one can strive for elegance and eloquence and purity in music and not in life.

Fripp: Your playing has always struck me as very similar to Coltrane, but I don’t hear a guitarist with mere technique, which you obviously have…it isn’t so much a geezer going through scales, it’s just ripping out…

McLaughlin: Looking for the way, just going through everything he knows to find out what he doesn’t know, and that’s what we’re all trying to do. I mean improvisation. I think it’s safe to say that you’re really happiest when you’ve gone through what you know and…

Fripp: You discover something you didn’t know before.

McLaughlin: Yeah, and suddenly the doors open and you see this incredible avenue with all kinds of tributaries going off…it’s the most incredible feeling that can happen in music.

Fripp: How do you increase the conditions under which it’s more likely to happen? What specific work do you do, what practice or exercises?

McLaughlin: Well, we can include working, playing. If you’re on a tour, you increase the possibility of being in the right place at the right time, rather than being at home and practicing. But I also reflect. I don’t meditate or fast or anything, but I reflect on the ramifications of what I do. For example, there’s a relationship between two chords that you’ve known, that I’ve known, for a long time, and only recently do I begin to discover this more intimate relationship, what it means. Even though I’ve looked at these chords from every possible viewpoint, I’m looking for a way that maybe exists up there, but I don’t know where it is. Then, a little while ago, I discovered it, it just arrived. So the work that we do, I don’t think we benefit from it until later. But once we have colors and palette, the richer the palette is, the richer the music can be.

Fripp: That D major chord which changed you from a pianist to a guitarist, what color would that be for you?

McLaughlin: What color…? (pause) I think it could be green.

Fripp: Exactly what I would’ve said…

McLaughlin: It’s got to be yellow and some blue.

Fripp: A major for me is yellow and A minor inclines toward white, which is my C major. Graham Bond said it was red.

McLaughlin: C major, red? No, E major, I would say, is red.

Fripp: E major for me is very blue, a kind of royal blue, and when you get to E minor it becomes more of a night blue, with kind of stars…

McLaughlin: That’s very interesting…

Fripp: G is very greenish, but not quite.

McLaughlin: I thought about this color aspect of music but I never literally tried to make an analogy. What I have done, and what I still today find very interesting, stems from the Tarot, because they assign twelve astrological signs to the twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Since I know what my own different signs are, I could find out what kind of harmony is, in fact, going on between my astrological signs, or between the signs of other people I’m playing with. There was a time when I was writing solos for people on the basis of their astrological key.

Fripp: How did the musicians feel about solos given to them because of their astrological sign?

McLaughlin: It wasn’t very significant to them. A lot of people, they don’t consider these kind of things.

Fripp: When did you come to Paris?

McLaughlin: Well, I’ve been coming here more and more for the last four or five years. I’ve been…

Fripp: More French confection, please.

McLaughlin: I’ve been coming here since 1977.

Fripp: Do you find any similarity between Paris and New York?

McLaughlin: Yeah, I do. New York’s more dynamic, more vital, more energetic. It’s more violent, too. I consider myself European, culturally speaking, even though the music that I play is enormously influenced by American music, so I’m a kind of mid-transatlantic person. But I’ve always loved France since the very first time I came here. I love the food. I love the language, the culture, the architecture. So I feel happy to be here. Although I must say, I love to visit New York. I really get a kick, I just feel great, just…whew, I love it. It personifies everything American, from best to worst.

Fripp: What’s the work climate for you here in Paris?

McLaughlin: I play here once or twice a year. We did this television show, and there’s another one coming up. So to be here gives me the possibility to participate more than I can do in New York (laughs), because, you know, the media in America, in relation to music, is much more precisely defined than here. In Europe it’s much more possible for me to appea