I’m feeling super down at the moment. My hope, however, is that by writing, I can pull myself up. Evacuate the current narrative. Bleed out into another. Lemme just get myself adjusted, as with the ludicrous prog of Gong’s “Master Builder.”
That band’s Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy belongs in a genre study of psychedelia. “Tea” is how you say it. (Ontological, with space whisper vocals.) It all comes down to whether or not one pronounces one’s Rs, these distinct identities out of which one’s community is made — though the word “community” these days seems a bit of a stretch. One can really mangle quite spectacularly one’s perception of reality. Crash symbols fill me with a sense of alarm. We cease to exist when lacking care and connection. The self mourns its disappearance from the minds of others. Sarah leaves today to deliver an invited lecture on an island in the Mediterranean. The world narrative, meanwhile, threatens to introduce “global nuclear” as a plot device. What would be the emotional response proportionate to such drama? I’d prefer to think about Marxism and the politics of psychedelic subjectivity. Patch up, repair, and in the process make new again. Sit back and let go. Imagine a narrative thread relating Hawkwind’s “Assault and Battery / The Golden Void” as precursor text to mid-90s big beat electronic artists like The Chemical Brothers.
Psychedelics pull Marxism toward seizure here-and-now of the means of pleasure-production: as in, fuck the bio-rhythms of capitalism, I’m gonna go listen to Augustus Pablo’s “Keep on Dubbing.” And after that, stretch out across Bardo Pond’s “Screens For a Catch (Fur Bearing Eyes).”
My goal is to devise protocols for drug-based rebellion against the twenty-first century work ethic. Slacker brutalism. Imagine a ‘Greil Marcus’-style secret history weaving a constellation out of Walter Benjamin’s On Hashish, the stories of Hawkwind, Penny Rimbaud of Crass, and related psychedelic anarcho-Marxist communes and art collectives. Throw the MC5 and John Sinclair’s White Panthers in the mix as well. Revise the contemporary meaning of religious-political-aesthetic radicalism. The radicalism of self-administered, medicinally-aided deconditioning therapies. Join up with your local psychic decolonization struggle today!
Trance-Scripts 