Category: Uncategorized

Sunday April 25, 2021

I sit in the yard staring at the sun on the western horizon, singing along to “Hermes Trismegisto E Sua Celeste Tábua De Esmeralda,” listening carefully to the sung nature of the Portuguese, longing to read Christopher Dunn’s book Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture.

The song’s author Jorge Ben is an interesting figure in occult or hermetic terms, having penned not one but two songs about legendary Egyptian sage Thrice-Greatest Hermes: the one above from 1974, and a second one, the one below, called “Hermes Trismegisto Escreveu” from Ben’s fabulous 1976 album África Brasil.

Thursday April 22, 2021

My eyes travel across spines of books, searching, seeking ways to proceed. Parenting, though, leaves little time to read. As Mark Fisher notes in Postcapitalist Desire, “In order to raise consciousness, you need time” (265). Time is the terrain of struggle. Time is what capitalists steal from those who labor. Stolen time equals stolen consciousness.

Wednesday April 21, 2021

Pranksters run loose across the country, reversing the journey West by heading east, unsettling what was settled. The future advertised at the 1964 New York World’s Fair: that was the destination toward which the Pranksters drove. Yet the Fair was just a ploy. They were also heading to New York for the launch of Kesey’s second novel Sometimes a Great Notion. With their doors of perception “cleansed,” however, the Fair appeared to them as it was: lame. The future as designed by clueless technocrats. And just as the Fair was a bummer, so was Millbrook. So they drove home and, as if in reply to the Fair, launched a series of “blissful counterstrokes”: the Acid Tests and the Trips Festival.

Tuesday April 20, 2021

Trees bloom, flowers grow wild in the grass as Bicycle Day gives way to 4/20. Cardinals alight on branches, visiting throughout the day. I delve again into World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love’s a Real Thing. The cover notes describe the compilation as “an African assimilation of the psychedelic revolution — distorted, political, hallucinogenic, and, of course, danceable. Thousands of miles from the Summer of Love’s utopian origins, yet somehow, not so far away…” It’s an amazing collection: twelve tracks of funky West African psychedelia from the early 1970s. Tracks like Moussa Doumbia’s “Keleya.”

External influences interact with indigenous traditions and vice versa. “Acid rock as something familiar if not entirely home-grown,” writes Ronnie Graham, who hears on the album “the African beats missing from Monterey and which Woodstock lacked.” One longs for a transnational history of psychedelia. Brazil, Japan, Germany, the countries of West Africa: let us tell of how minds manifested in these countries. In the meantime, though, let Luaka Bop and its World Psychedelic Classics series serve as our guide.

Monday April 19, 2021

On the floor of the hallway is a disco ball. At the end of the hall is a mirror. And the disco ball is not a disco ball; it’s a light projector. In the evening we dance. After the dance party, I retreat to the basement and listen to The Modern Folk’s Primitive Future / Lyran Group, a tape released last month from Eiderdown Records.

A track in and I remove the tape and replace it with Herbie Hancock’s Sound-System. When, a few tracks in, the latter album shifts frequencies and goes smooth jazz, I intervene again as DJ and swap in Healing Sounds by Dr. Christopher Hills & the University of the Trees Choir. As José David Saldívar argues in Border Matters, nation-states can be reimagined. Or as Raffi sings, “The more we get together / Together, together / The more we get together / The happier we’ll be.” It is with Raffi in mind that I attend an event: a series of “microtalks” hosted by a friend. Passcode to enter and we’re there. One participant asks “Can AI detect a new designer at Prada?” and shares his findings. Companies like Heuritec apply algorithms to “predict” new fashions. The Jacquard Loom is a kind of computer: a difference engine. Big data comes to fashion and biology. Properties and classes. “Zen koans for robo-cars.” Fluidity and nonbinarism allow for evasion of the predictors. The Ones Who Are Driven By Data. Expert Systems for the Design of Decisions. Blur the categories; Drive AI Crazy. Next up, a discussion of “Alchemical Chess.” The mysteries of the game’s origin in 6th century India. Chaturanga becomes Shatranj in 7th century Persia. The speaker wonders, though, what came before, like the ancient Greek game Petteia, mentioned by Plato, who claimed it came from Egypt, or the “Han Cosmic Board,” as described by Donald J. Harper. Think about the Lo Shu “magic square,” and the SATOR square, and the yantras. The latter means “machine” or “contraption.”

Sunday April 18, 2021

Utopias and dystopias promote and project contrary “affects” or (to use Raymond Williams’s term) “structures of feeling.” Reading Philip K. Dick’s drug dystopia A Scanner Darkly, one feels deflated. One would rather get stoned. Stand around in the yard, share a joint and chat about bats, skunks, porcupines, dogs, and gardens with one’s elders. “Bats are interesting,” says a friend’s mother.

Thursday April 15, 2021

“The kid who’s into Althusser”: that was one of my identities as an undergrad. I read Althusser in my first English course, first semester of my freshman year. Newly hatched from the egg of the family. So coming to “consciousness” has been quite a journey. I spent most of my adult life questioning it or denying it, focusing instead on categories like “false consciousness” or “class consciousness.” Althusser’s essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” knocked me over the head when I read it. The repetitions of Althusser’s prose enchanted me. Yet his story is a tragic one, and so one must become other than Althusser, through rejection of his scientism and determinism. One must find instead a practice of love and joy.

Tuesday April 13, 2021

A friend introduces me to Novos Baianos’s “Mistério do Planeta,” a brilliant bit of Brazilian psychedelia from 1972. After two initial listenings, I attempt the admittedly foolish task of trying to read the song’s lyrics through a Google translator. “I participate being the mystery of the planet / […] / That I pass by and be him / What is in each one.” The band’s vocalist admits to being no more than a malandro: “a street kid from Brazil.” “But I walk and always think,” he sings, “with more than one / so no one sees my bag.” We, too, are more than one. That is what we are here when we communicate via trance and song. The song is an anthem of psychic liberation. “I participate being the mystery of the planet,” sings the poet, “I’m showing how I am / And I’ll be like I can / Throwing my body to the world / Walking Everywhere.” Listening again while reading along, knowing the translation to be an imperfect one, I am awed nonetheless, both by added dimensions of meaning, and by that which is in excess of meaning: the angelic bebop scat / free indirect discourse that happens between chorus and verse.

Monday April 12, 2021

I begin to craft and draft a spell called “TO BUILD A FENCE.” I watch videos, I weigh methods, I note down a list of required tools and materials. Even as I do this, though, I remain on the fence: “To fence or not to fence?” Must we commit to enclosure? The garden also needs an irrigation system, I tell myself: some combination, perhaps, of water harvester and drip. With drip, I can attach a timer, allowing us to water the garden when out of town. As for what to plant, I refer myself to Eric Toensmeier’s Perennial Vegetables. Part of me, though, still wants to pay attention to Silicon Valley and is easily distracted. “Attention being,” as a friend notes, “the one hero that might take us through the web, the webs, and leave us semi-intact at the end of the day” (Forms of Poetic Attention, p. 2).

Sunday April 11, 2021

Friends gather for a gala get-together on my front porch, all of us vaccinated and thus able now to be with one another after our year apart. Spring is lovely here this year, trees budding, the yard awash in constellations of blue, white, and purple: wildflowers and patches of clover. We celebrate the publication of a friend’s novel, an historical romance just out this past week from Berkley, everyone wanting to read it, cheered too by the arrival of her parents, new in from up north. When last we saw each other, F. was new in as well: a newborn, a wee lass just home from the hospital. Amazing how much she’s grown these past fifteen months. Our friend’s dad is an artist, as is another of the party’s attendees. Both draw beautiful illustrations in colored chalk on our cement walkway. I admire these on my evening wanderings about the yard come dark. ‘Tis a starry night, across which flies a ship, discernible here below only as Morse code flicker: modest dots of red and white light. I resolve to read Black Quantum Futurist Rasheedah Phillips’s book Recurrence Plot (and other time travel tales), at the heart of which is a character named after the scarab-faced Egyptian god Khepri. This character is, like me, a frequent thrift-shopper. Let us, like Khepri, donate something each time we thrift.