Category: Uncategorized

Tuesday September 19, 2017

In today’s episode, language blows about the room, the latter’s surfaces pulsing, oscillations occurring in rapid unit time intervals. Nothing works anymore; media bubbles have us quarantined. The ungraspable totality leaves us lost by the river, our hours stolen away from us, leaving us little time to think. Consciousness drops anchor, sinks part of itself down into objects. I’m also trying desperately not to get sucked back into another asceticism. Object-worlds: can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. (Thanks, folks, I’ll be here all night.) Friends throw shade, say “Take a look at yourself.” None of this happens: I’m just making it up in my head. Isn’t that sometimes a fantasy of ours? The DIY primitivist aesthetic. By Season Four, the characters on Halt and Catch Fire have become the early 90s Silicon Valley types hallucinated into being via Wired magazine. One of these days, I’ll get around to writing something about videogames and their relationship to the psychedelic aesthetic. Osamu Sato’s LSD: Dream Emulator will certainly figure prominently, as will Fernando Ramallo’s Panoramical.

Dig out the hidden, suppressed history. That’s one thing I really enjoy about Halt and Catch Fire: its historical revisionism. Capitalist education system structured like a pinball table, locking subjects into a downward plummet. I made bad choices, poor decisions. My body failed to comply with my aspirations, and there was no one there to correct me. There is a fundamental tension, Sarah declares, late in the evening and by this point well in her cups, between parental responsibility and truth. No matter how fucked up things are, she says, people have a sensibility that if they tell that truth to their child, they are not a good parent. Your parental responsibility is to give your child a sense that the world is improving, following an upward trajectory. Do you rear a child to think the future is fucked? How do you do both? That’s most people’s only way of imagining they can change the world. When in fact, it’s the way you perpetuate it. We would all be far more radical if we believed and thus lived our lack of a future. “Be like Foucault,” I reply: “Drop acid while camping in Death Valley.”

Monday September 18, 2017

All of a sudden, this Britishness! Art thou a Britisher? “Alas, no,” I reply, if only for my merriment, “There’s naught but an ounce of British in me!” Partnered to contingency, I embark outward into the greater reality, the one of Jesus Christ and the Reverend Freud. Leonard Cohen steps in and immediately ups the ante for us, asking, “Is This What You Wanted?” The heat and sweat of the outdoors?

I admit: it’s not easy, this wandering. I reserve the right to fast-forward on at least one occasion, so as to dwell instead amidst the sly funk and street-corner brokenness of Savoy Motel’s “Sorry People.”

Observe the old ones stranded outdoors along the paved banks of the hospital here in town. Death is this terror, this grand interruption, spreading its wings somewhere behind us in the midst of Being. Witness, too, the “Wah-Wah” cry of wary kindness that erupts from those who take life’s jabs in stride. Meaning arrives for me in the marvelous weirdness and propulsive forward thrust of Francis the Great, who instructs me via restless hybridity of form to “Look Up In the Sky.”

But the alphabet never ceases to rephrase itself: “meaning” is just a freeze-frame, a momentary crest amidst later sequences filled with seagulls and crashing dominos, Being in its further jungle-like stirring-and-coming-forth. ‘Tis but a ceaseless profusion of ants and moss, detritus tossed carelessly. The Wipers strike a note of caution here, reminding all eager seekers among the so-called “Youth of America” that hidden within us lies a secret reserve, a hunger for transcendence.

Because afterwards, it’s the return of the crows. Into this indecisiveness, this place where we find ourselves, comes our reckoning, the call of love. Having retired to our bed for the evening, my love and I read aloud from an illuminated manuscript passed back and forth between us Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” While a cruelly-written passage involving a female dwarf leaves us appropriately aghast, the tale is otherwise so finely wrought and so perceptive in its rendering of self and world that I fall effortlessly into imagining courses by which to introduce the piece to students. Think of the many great works of literature one could assign, for instance, in a course on flaneurie and the art of walking. Baudelaire, Poe, Debord, de Certeau. Pleased with the thought, I resolve to make it so.

Saturday September 16, 2017

With my eyes closed, I imagine from an external vantage point the sight of my arms held above me. As if into a phone, I request the identity of the one with whom I speak with the phrase, “Who’s calling?” “Nevermind that, now,” it answers, “let me buy you a drink.” I pull the phone away from my ear and stare at it. My head drops through the screen and tumbles downward, as if into a fantasized space. I unlock a new level, where life resembles Campbell Logan’s video for D/A/D’s “Orion Beach.”

Looks good, right? With other work I sometimes purse my lips. My head ricochets backwards, overstimulated, distracted, and bored. Try again, but don’t push so hard, urges a voice. Capital’s subjects perform their function — chasing “good business” to the letter — because they’re abused by the thought that they’re always being hunted. “The wolf, thy brethren, will come for thee,” says an imaginary ancient prophecy. We are immersed in a zone of consciousness called Ideology: an illusory yet sensate world. The nightmare world, with adjustable levels. We need to start dreaming ourselves differently. Cognitive liberty means the right to allow thought to toboggan down mountains, wander through strange neighborhoods in search of moments of clarity. A part of my self tells another part to check out Edmund Berger’s Uncertain Futures, as well as his essay “Into the Mystic.” As I stroll through my neighborhood, I realize that every house has a hum. The night’s performances make use of helicopter, lawnmower, cars, air units, and cicadas. Sarah runs her hand through lavender and remarks on the evening’s strange music: “complex conversations,” she says, “in alien languages.” Afterwards we watch a bearded asshole of an old man grumble, “Actions have consequences.” Ozark, by season’s end, has become a variant of what’s that show, eaten by goddamn worms: ding-dong, The Walking Dead. Also a family-based reality tv show. The family of contestants receives a new challenge each episode: to accept, say accept. To decline, say decline. Marty Byrde is understood to be the reluctant but masterful god and devil, capital incarnate: the show’s Zen-like tragic hero.

Friday September 15, 2017

Fuck this shit. Let it all collapse. I’ve lost whatever remained of my ability to care. And allow me to say that, by the way, in full knowledge that I’ll likely feel differently before the end of this trance-script. Speaking of which: check out Thom Donovan’s essay in Tripwire 13 on Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue and on note-taking as a mode of composition. “Note-taking,” Thom writes, “as opposed to prose that results in novels, involves lived duration. ‘Discharge’ rather than ‘disclosure’ […]. Without preparation, nor the time to be edited (rewritten for the dominant culture’s genres), they comprise a continual improvisation, taking form amidst life’s general emergency” (279). A small grey-brown mantis stands alert, perched on the arm of a chair on my deck. For those looking for additional recommendations: I recommend giving yourself time to turn on, preferably during a sunny afternoon, to Pauline Anna Strom’s “Energies,” a track off her upcoming release Trans-Millenia Music from RVNG Intl.

Georgia’s video for that, by the way, takes me to precisely where I want to be. I also recommend Georgia executive Justin Tripp’s interactive generative art app Silk. Greg Fox’s “By Virtue of Emptiness” goes well with that, too. Art of this sort, I think to myself, amounts to a raw language into which heads can unfold their heads. The unified self is that which imagines itself making all of this, as in the video for Lusine’s “Just a Cloud.” My jungle-canyon rope-bridges, meanwhile, all feel limp and broken. This is a brain when fried. We’re all living in separate but adjacent mass-mediated frames, as in the title sequence to John Carpenter’s They Live.

Think the concept of differential immanence from the perspective of one who channel-surfs among parallel worlds. Remember: we who criticize the brutality of this world have been sent to perform necessary work here on behalf of the post-capitalist future. Think of us, in fact, as heroic time travelers whose tasks bear cosmic-eschatological implications, as with John Connor’s father, the protagonist in The Terminator. Each of us, trapped as we are in our private-personal, capitalist-realist prison-caves, must become once more our own Messiahs, interceding, both individually and collectively, on our own behalves — but only so as to be joined again with those we love.

Thursday September 14, 2017

“The tyranny of reason,” as Christian Bök calls it, has increased my esteem for the mad. We heads are an invisible people. A buzzer goes off, causing me to silence a lecture. The best smack talk is no talk at all. “Shit happens. Act accordingly,” says the voice of a dead man. Life is too short, says conventional wisdom, as we observe decline in all selves and all things. Money — or more accurately, the value-form — spoils, strips of magic, degrades and corrupts. Consciousness loses contact with place, its affective investments captured in the constructs of others. Have I mentioned that friends and I walked around town the other night chatting with one of the dudes from Negativland? He regaled us with tales of a party thrown for Negativland at the home of none other than Mr. LSD himself, Timothy Leary. R. U. Sirius (aka Ken Goffman), the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000, arranged the introduction. This was back in the early 1990s, at the height of the band’s kerfuffle with U2’s label Island Records following Negativland’s unauthorized sampling of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” I also recall there being some mention of a mouse — poor creature! — crushed inside the gatefold cover of an Abba record.

Wednesday September 13, 2017

Jason Bateman ends and begins episodes shouting, “Jesus! Fuck! They put up a cross.” To me, those people are invasive of ecosystems, turning every town into a bait shop. Zombies pissing into oceans. Starlings in Central Park. Established entities like that worry me. Drug money, narco-dollars: that’s the world for me. The weeds, the rich earth: which are we? Is drug money the capitalist economy’s pump primer? So says Ozark, as I try to get my bearings. Voiced bodies make me laugh. Among creatures, they’re pretty peculiar. We shouldn’t be arming them. Many of them also know kung fu. Reality becomes gridded as I relax in my mission. I started this blog out of a perception that present iterations of the maze-world lack authentic, whole-person modes of communication — modes attentive as well to the always schizoid, always provisional nature of contemporary subjectivity. Bath products hanging from my shower-head advertise themselves as “Damage Detox” elixirs and provisioners of “Nature’s Therapy.” Let this blog extract from all such things the kernels from the husks. Let it compensate for the fact that a student of mine showed up to class this week wearing a “Raised Right” GOP hoodie. (Alas, my only remaining hope involving this country is that I may one day escape it.) In yesterday’s case, “Nature’s Therapy” meant sitting in a room, drinking from a thermos, listening to the progression of sustained and unsustained notes that fill the air below the vaulted ceiling of Sarah Davachi’s cathedral, The Untuning of the Sky.

To transform ourselves, we must allow ourselves to wander. By the way, Full Spectrum Records was founded by a pair of heads in Greensboro in 2008; they’ve been churning out high-quality head treatments ever since. Check out Build a Mountain Where Our Bodies Fall, for instance, by the Andrew Weathers Ensemble, or beneath the by Des Moines-based artist Lindsay Keast performing under the project name Tree branch Twig.

Witness, too, the heartbreaking window onto the canine soul that is Laika’s Lullaby, Keast’s collaboration with animator Julia Oldham, for a 2015 exhibition at the Portland ‘Pataphysical Society. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a city where that was a thing? All right — enough, then. Go lightly on thy way.

Tuesday September 12, 2017

How I wish I could live more in keeping with a reverence for nature as something more than just a giant money-laundering scheme. Getting high helps. However, the reverence it provokes, while focused on one thing at a time, is otherwise indiscriminate. The nature/culture binary means little in this state; but things are more complicated when it comes to economy and ecology. When I smoke, I defeat my usual fearful posture toward life. We must languor in the telling, I tell myself. Allow others to congregate ’round it. Another voice interrupts here, stating, “Man cannot tame what God wishes to remain wild.” I do worry, by the way, that reverence for nature might be the one necessary element of a properly utopian political theology that Gnosticism fatally lacks. “We are poems in the making,” proclaims M.C. Richards: “Logos at work.” “A craftsman,” she adds (“craftsman” being her name for the utopian subject), “has the opportunity of acting out daily the wisdom of his organism, in its intuitive and other aspects. […]. He knows what can happen of itself once certain rhythms are set in motion. He knows that hand and head, heart and will, serve in a process and a wisdom greater than his own” (61-62). Despite the above passage’s unfortunate tendency to default to masculine pronouns, I feel like every subsequent sentence in Richards’ book Centering contains the precise knowledge of how one ought to live one’s life. She even captures my understanding of what I’m doing, or what I ought to be doing, with these trance-scripts: “The artist participates in a subtle dialogue with nature. Who is saying what to whom? If we allow our views of craft decorum to loosen, we may see more simply what is there. We do not need to fight for our right to be off center. We find that once we are on center, we may be off center as wholeheartedly as we like, for at that level there is no difference. At that level, we are free to create whatever form occurs” (62). Classic modalities crack away like cheap facades that others years ago plastered over or by other means affixed to the forms and surfaces of Practico-Inert-ville, aka the capitalist built environment, i.e. our prison. Try digging your way out of that one. Radical psychedelic healing techniques must be used to de-reify these structures, not just pickaxes and shovels and dynamite.

Monday September 11, 2017

Pour water on fish from a glass decanter. It was like Medusa: you can’t just rationalize it away. The Self models a home and stages a territory. A whole new game: small beginnings can bring down mountains. One must imagine trying to play the game: hands there, on the joystick, a voice says, pointing. I hope to spend some time, perhaps next summer, exploring the contents of the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library. It’s the world’s largest private collection of material documenting altered states of consciousness. Since the bulk of the collection came from Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Jr.’s acquisition of San Francisco’s Fitz Hugh Ludlow Library in 2001, Harvard now refers to it as the Ludlow Santo Domingo (or “LSD”) Library. Time to start hunting for grant money. “Wow, it’s really coming down out there, man,” says a gloriously reverbed voice belonging to a member of The Electric Peanut Butter Company.

That guitar solo mid-song, and that drum solo that succeeds it, shall serve as my coping mechanism, a memory of a lofty peak on an otherwise dreary work day. Joy is a revolutionary hammer and sickle that one can deploy in plain sight. Heavens are portals everyone can step through into blissed-out, gravityless, non-dimensional modes of being. Alien creatures like Chocolate Vine fruit start showing up in a side garden: light shines down on one’s shoulder. A new development: I feel alright. Beautiful weather today. Getting high resembles the shape of Ought’s “Beautiful Blue Sky.”

I hear in it nods to Native Nod, The Van Pelt — a tour de force spoken-sung vocal performance taking some inspiration, perhaps, from Life Without Buildings. “Goes fast. Don’t waste it,” says a voice: “Afterwards, it’s cold.” Speaking of wasting it: the Netflix Original series Ozark sickens me with its perverse valorization of the hypertrophied work ethic, its characters flinging themselves through life in pursuit of money. Fishing is the name and metaphor for this mode of being — except capitalists drop their hooks on their peers.

Saturday September 9, 2017

Voices from my inner cast of characters tell me I’m living a depressingly subdued existence. Hush, we don’t use that word, they say. We’ve just got something on our mind. Green, orange, and streetlight-yellow balls of light flash across my field of vision. Do others all have their own peak experiences? Or are they too absorbed in neoliberal pastimes like compartmentalization and time management? I ponder these questions during a brief respite from the demands of the nine to five. I imagine myself reconstituted as a child again, lying on my stomach on the floor of a room, playing with a set of anonymous, faceless action figures. I don’t care about job security or the rest of it. My path is my path no matter what. Rushing to dinner with friends last night, Sarah and I talked about bars in our neighborhood and marveled at massive yellow-and-green-lined leaves of plants in neighbors’ gardens.

Green Leaf

Sarah used to be (and to some extent remains) a race walker, so I permanently trail behind her whenever we make our way along what a friend of ours calls “the upside-down cone of uncertainty.” A vague discomfort in my sinuses. Friends were all supportive as a fellow instructor and I explained to them the crisis we’re facing at work. When I asked them how they accounted for the way everything was all of a sudden turning to shit synchronistically, all at once (by which I mean job cuts, friends’ cars breaking down, all of us sick with colds or the flu, another university in town accepting the poisoned chalice of strings-attached funding from the Koch brothers, hurricanes, wildfires, the Trump administration’s decision to rescind DACA, the threat of nuclear war), everyone laughed and nodded: ha ha, point well taken, apocalypticism FTW. But part of me had also asked the question in earnest. Are the usually semi-autonomous levels of the totality collapsing together now, base and superstructure merged through crisis into a form resembling an infinite regression of homologies for Trump’s America? As the National Enquirer used to say, “Enquiring minds want to know.”

Friday September 8, 2017

My favorite works of art are psychedelic, and usually partake of what I like to call an “inner-cosmic epic” aesthetic involving ego death, ascension, discovery of hidden realms, humans becoming gods, gods become human — essentially, journeys inward to the edges of the known and beyond. I encountered formative works of this sort as a child: Marvel’s Secret Wars comics, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance Legends trilogy, adolescent geek culture seeded with radical cosmic fallout from the psychedelic art of the 60s and 70s. Are there similar works available today, readying the soon-to-be heads of Generation Z? “Work,” though — that source of all blues. Let me just say, “What a fucking drag.” My blood boils. I can’t even look at anything having to do with it. And now I’m going to have to run around wasting consciousness — and by that I mean creative labor-power and labor-time — hustling for some alternative form of it. My time was to be used on a project of self discovery and collective redemption. Not on this bullshit. The philistine capitalist devils among the ranks of my countrymen have succeeded. They’ve stripped me of the right to determine my own life practice and life product. They’re fucking with my daily ritual, my devotion to my chosen craft. If you want me to educate, then allow me time to read and write. And let the writing be the teaching. That is the life I want. And fuck anyone who tries to guilt me for that. Fuck my employer, too, though, for threatening me with non-renewal of my contract. That’s right: my job and the jobs of some of my coworkers are now in jeopardy. The chair of my department called an emergency meeting midweek. “I regret to inform you,” he announced, “but our provost has been ordered by administrators higher up the food chain (either the president or the board of trustees) to cut instructor positions in departments across the campus.” Looking ruefully at my colleagues and I, he predicted that, among the half-dozen faculty holding these positions within our department, several of us are likely to be let go Apprentice-style by schoolyear’s end, with letters announcing the university’s decision to can us likely to arrive in our mailboxes sometime in October. So a pox on those country-club cornbread motherfuckers. Job market, here I come.