A rich new vein of countercultural history sees light of day thanks to the 2015 documentary Here Come The Videofreex. The archival footage used in the film is chaotic and messy, capturing with all of the power and potential of new media the revolutionary movements of the early 1970s. Watching the film today, I can’t resist wishing for a chance to restage the Revolution, the first attempt’s energy and conviction guided now by the lessons learned from half a century of culture war. Let the forces of magic and of miracle triumph where before we succumbed to our frustrations and our desire for vengeance.
Category: Uncategorized
Sunday February 17, 2019
The Revolution proceeds in each of our lives, in the smallest of acts, scaling outward and upward, each act its own reward. Take it into the kitchen, I tell myself. Make it personal. Sometimes, as the people of Pala realize, the Revolution is as simple as following a recipe for bread. “It’s all a question,” as Huxley writes, “of being shown what to do and then practicing” (Island, p. 277). This simple technique, like a seed, contains within itself an entire method of liberation. “Not complete liberation, of course,” notes Huxley. “But half a loaf is a great deal better than no bread” (277). By these means, we begin to slip free of money’s grip.
Saturday February 16, 2019
If I were an animal among animals, I imagine I’d be a seagull. But alas, I’m not. Instead, I’m the landlocked proprietor of a botched life, hours passing unheeded. What dreams I once had of rising from this wretched state! Of course, it isn’t always wretched. I text with friends and find a book on Tai Chi in the Goodwill bins. I meet the day’s paper-grading quota and go for a run midafternoon. Alan Watts coaches me in the Taoist principle of wu-wei, which he defines as acting without forcing, “in accordance with the flow of nature’s course which is signified by the word Tao, and is best understood from watching the dynamics of water” (Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain, p. 2). My reading for class teaches a similar lesson. We act, say the Palanese of Huxley’s Island, “to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to” (243). The day ends with a minor life achievement: I prepare a biga so that tomorrow I can bake my first loaf of Italian bread.
Friday February 15, 2019
Time to get back into the habit of a public/private split, so as to juggle in each hand like Shiva the Destroyer the activities of mind and body, line and syllable, metaphor and metonymy, head and heart. I’m not sure what I mean by that, other than, “I wish for reconciliation, evening sound a grand symphony. Cars, dogs, voices: by these, evening in the neighborhood is heard, and all is well.” Evenings are weird, and it’s hard to know how to word a wish. We hear ourselves wondering, “Where are we?” and “What did Freud and Jung and Sartre believe, what powers did they ascribe to the event in the life of the spirit known as the Wish?” My foremost wish is that Sarah and I grow into enlightenment by raising a child together. Let our worlds fill with loving kindness.
Thursday February 14, 2019
2019 is for me a search for ways to re-engage lovingly with reality. I need to shake off and step out from under the frozen pose of feeling crushed by it. Let go, relax, get loose. Dive into Light In The Attic’s new compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990. These tracks of ethereal, gossamer-fine wisps of furniture music from a corporate future-past sometimes resonate with human-sized sadness as on Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Blink.”
Empire of Signs, the label that reissued Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Post Cards, knows how to weave around this “recovery” a good account of the work’s origins amid the bubble economy if 1980s Japan. Simon Reynolds calls it the “Fourth World Japan moment.” If only I could re-conceive myself as young, free, and driven. I would cook myself chestnuts. The picture would be big enough, robust enough. Life would feed me its signs, crows would speak to me, we’d crack jokes about malls and grocery stores. I wouldn’t just sit around all day surrounded by books.
Wednesday February 13, 2019
Friends, allow me to report on my second pass through Aldous Huxley’s Island. The book assembles for us an elaborate alternative culture, by which I mean (in Raymond Williams’s sense) a “whole way of life,” from the perspective of which we might imagine ourselves anew. What might we do after reading this book? How might we live our lives differently?
Tuesday February 12, 2019
After watching a trailer for Japanese consultant Marie Kondo’s Netflix series Tidying Up (but before yet having watched the series itself), I wander about my house asking of objects, “What will give me joy?” The one that answers is an LP by a Bootsy Collins project called Sweat Band. It’s not a “great” record. Some of it bores me, but for some riffing back and forth by the drummer and the sax player. Does this record give me joy, or should I sell it? “Jamaica” saves it, I decide; the record’s worth keeping, even just for that alone.
What I want, though, is an intensification from within, jewels and miracles revealed amid an otherwise empty present. Sometimes nothing short of pennies from heaven will do. But absent that, I tell myself, try exercise.
Monday February 11, 2019
Like Aldous Huxley’s character Robert MacPhail, I am a proponent of “poetry as an autonomous universe, out there, in the space between direct experience and the symbols of science” (Island, p. 136). By which I mean poetry as liberated ground, liberated domain of being. Time and space set aside for breathing, listening, mulling anxiously, retraining awareness (birds in trees: over there! can you hear them?), so as to allow the totality to grow anew.
Sunday February 10, 2019
I start it right with World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love’s a Real Thing, a compilation from 2007 that has me up on my feet ready to march to the sound of Moussa Doumbia’s “Keleya.” Next thing I know, I’m watching an African movie from Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène called Ceddo (1977). Like Huxley’s mynah birds, my students help to bring me to attention. I flower, I bloom. I pick up and thumb through a copy of Edward Espe Brown’s The Tassajara Bread Book. Among the rich assortment of cookbooks tossed into being by the counterculture, Brown’s is one of my favorites. Definitely a book written to and from “heads” — those of us who speak to each other throughout the ages. Sarah and I plan to create a print to hang in our kitchen based on the book’s opening poem, “A Composite of Kitchen Necessities.”
Saturday February 9, 2019
I find calming and centering Suzanne Ciani and Kaitlin Aurelia Smith’s use of Buchla synthesizers on one of my favorite LPs of recent years, their FRKWYS record, Sunergy (2016).
(Best heard, BTW, in a darkened room while watching a muted version of this Joshua Light Show video. I find the experience of pairing the two thrillingly synesthetic.) Drone, darkness, repetition, primordial shapes, sketches, free improvisations, print-based consciousness supplanted by multi-sensory “happenings” — together, these form a potent combination. Birds fly near and perch beside me. Above I hear the roar of a plane. What I long for, though, is an alteration of the fundamentals of experience, like my sense of time and space. Out of the meltdown of consensus reality comes a voice like Whitman’s shouting, “Cheer up, slaves, and horrify foreign despots.” But perhaps reality also wants us to hear Seneca the Younger, to whom my initial response is wonder at the dude’s disdain for a figure akin to Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” (In his critique of the followers of Epicurus, Seneca writes that the situation is like that of “a sturdy man dressed in women’s clothes: your decency remains unimpaired, your virility unharmed, your person is free from any degrading submission, but in your hand is a tambourine.”) Let’s see: according to Dylanologists, the bearer of the tambourine is the Singer’s Muse. And the Singer’s Muse is one’s inner voice, is it not? The one that counsels “If you’re currently uncertain whether you’re located outside or inside the Gates of Eden, then stay home and ‘let virtue lead the way.'” When faced with this voice, the question is always, “Who are we? Are we already in accord? Are we already centered? If not, then who does the letting, who the leading? Who gets to be the shadow after whom the Other is always chasing?” Lucky for us, a card is a card, a hand a hand. It is in our moderation that we horrify despots.
Trance-Scripts 