Let’s initiate today’s ritual with a notch-lowering jaunt through X.Y.R.’s “False Angel Lullaby.”
Today’s headlines feature reviews of dramas performed by morons. Like Herrigel’s bow and arrow, my trance-scripts are “only a pretext for something that could just as well happen without them, only the way to a goal, not the goal itself, only helps for the last decisive leap.” Not Not Fun have been putting out some top-notch records: “mesmerizing maze music mapped for altered states,” as they say in one of their promos. These records lend themselves to me as “Temples of Solitary Thought.” Let’s end things today, by the way, in anticipation of the season gestured to in Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s “Autumn,” playing both that and Magnetizer’s “See What U See.”
Neighbor wars, street wars. The culture war has been heating up over several decades, to the extent that now it functions not just as war by other means, but war by many means. Tree-chopping homeowners, bumper-sticker micro-aggressors, coal-rolling sociopaths: these are some of the monsters immediately in our midst. And yet there at the corner, a garden of great beauty. “Reality Redux (feat. The Blues)” serves as mood-supplementing accompaniment as I go for my afternoon run, along which I intermittently walk and type.
An old yellow truck is tucked in the side lot of one of the homes I pass on my way. Don’t you love it when performers of feats perform cockily? Insects in the trees unleash a pulsing, multi-directional, multi-sourced roar in the moments of dusk’s fading light. Funny, in contrast — I vibrate into an icy unease when my body’s focus shifts to the repetitive drone of my next-door neighbor’s air unit, as if the mechanical and the organic were out of harmony with one another. This is the escapist fantasy into which I implode. Coherence involves a thing’s relation to itself. The marijuana firm American Green just purchased an entire town. It’s small, certainly, atop a mere 120 acres in California; but it signals an intensification of green capitalism’s commodification of peak experiences. With bottled cannabis-infused water, mineral baths, and marijuana retail outlets, it’s a first-of-its-kind, at least here in the US — the latest advance in psychedelic tourism, where your body travels to a particular location in meatspace, but only so that your mind can relax into the exoticism of an altered inner state. What hope is there for the positive changes in consciousness of the kind proposed by Acid Communism when legalization efforts are run by capitalists?
Trance-Scripts 