Houses, cars, restaurants: all are inhospitable and lined with icicles. Clad with love, though, one can despite it all still have it made. But lo and behold: what kind of fascism is it that parades the Rolling Stones in front of inert, stadium-sized masses in Hal Ashby’s 1983 rock-doc Let’s Spend the Night Together? The film is a cruel parody of rock’s once joyous, raucous, incendiary stirrings. No consciousness-expansion takes places there whatsoever. Arena-rock of that sort served in the fashion of an experimental prototype, a formalization of what has now become our permanent social relation. I admit moments of beauty, however, when the band slows down for “Beast of Burden.” If we try real hard, sings Mick a few songs later, we get what we need. Keith Richards, for his part, manages by way of drink and drugs a kind of sleepy-eyed authenticity in the film’s punked-up version of “Little T&A” — that, too, I admire. The film is ultimately about industrial workers doing what it takes to make it though their shifts as America becomes a bomb-dropping monstrosity. We witness this, for instance, in the haunting use of Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” at the start of the film’s closing credits. Cinema enables and makes use of a variety of narrative models, meanwhile, in an unrelated 2013 Belgian film called Violet, producing fluctuations across several realities at once. Sonics and visuals reveal a multi-layered ontology: interiors and their external substitutes. Sound sculpted variously around a muted center, as in the song of that name by the band Deafheaven. Consciousness inhabiting different sound-worlds and temporalities. Every reflection also a distortion. As Robert Anton Wilson reminds us, one should always juggle several. Never commit to just one.
Tag: Movies
Wednesday December 27, 2017
I imagine myself as unconscious author of or at least central cause for all characters in my life narrative. This is the scene where we don’t know where we are. This is what it feels like to get yanked out of a tree. Reach out and touch a universe of signs predicting system shutdown, life finding its way amidst racing velociraptors. I switch on the light and laugh my way through a double-take of Laura Dern’s bizarre style of acting in the classic 90s fear-drug stimulator flick, Jurassic Park.
I imagine viewers of the film participating in a testosterone cult initiation ritual. Kids are taught here to believe in computer technology as part of the way they can rescue themselves from their parents. A few people get eaten — always — but always, the kids survive. I was from an early age not just a kid, however, but a kid who wandered off from his parents. What can I say? I have always despised Superego personas like Judge Judy. The Christmas season reiterates itself as a time of moralism and worry about parental accountability. Keep eyes unfocused, says the experience, and trust in closeness to family, and the healing power of psychedelics. Sitcoms like Seinfeld, I realize, are portraits of a cultural psyche: the apartment as interior of the skull, like the control room from Inside Out. Personas interacting within a single brain. The anxious one, the lackadaisical one, the clumsy one, the peculiar one — the whole of it unrehearsed and at least spontaneous-seeming. I am ready to dream the future, says the one who sits before the screen. I am ready to prospectively live out in my nervous system my imagination’s greatest, most optimistic hopes for the species as a whole.
Friday December 22, 2017
I relish the multimedia composites featured at the start of Wormwood, the new Netflix series from Errol Morris about the mysterious suicide of CIA employee Frank Olsen, one of the casualties of Project MK-Ultra. The series makes abundant use of screens within screens, the mind left straddling levels. In this act of mirroring, we find ourselves. My sister-in-law and her husband, however, unimpressed by Wormwood, recommend I watch an anime series called One Punch Man. Eventually we settle on Gremlins, as if choice of film is of some moment. I listen bewitched to the song of the Mogwai: a metaphor, no doubt, for the importation of drugs and electronics devices from the Far East into American society. Revenge via “gizmos” and heroin. With Wormwood weighing on my mind, I find myself projecting onto Gremlins a “War on Drugs”-era narrative of the psychedelic revolution gone haywire — drug culture as national nightmare. This was of course one of the key allegories hammered home to me during my childhood via D.A.R.E. and Narc. But like so many films of the 1980s, it also emphasizes the cruelty of the rich and of people in general. Think of the father character as Daddy CIA, bringing home to his teenage son a shiny, brightly-wrapped package, gotten at a “junk” shop in Chinatown. After an explosion of Orange Sunshine, kids like Corey Feldman start running around dressed like trees. Like a wired artichoke, out pops the comic book Id.
The term “mogwai,” remember, refers to a kind of “devil” or “demon” in Chinese culture. So sayeth the purveyors of ancient myths. What happens, though, when the African-American scientist character starts to inject these mogwai with hypodermic needles? It’s as if someone left the culture’s brain exposed in a darkened laboratory. “Do you hear what I hear?” asks the television. “Do you see what I see?” Coming this Christmas: Takeover by foreign power. All the invaders need do is suspend the postal service, fuck with traffic signals, and seize the airwaves, and the nation is theirs. Note, though, that in the movie, the forces of anarchy don’t succeed at overpowering the community until the gremlins find their way to the water supply.
Thursday December 7, 2017
Some would say we commit ourselves to metaphysics the moment we accept the existence of “minds.” But what else would it be but a mind that contemplates Ingrid Goes West, a new film that uses cash inheritance as the premise for its infiltration and critique of selfie culture? The master of that culture, the film notes, is some “emotional wound” that turns self-promotion into way of life. One imagines oneself floating above oneself with a camera, turning money into props for self-actualization through delivery of life narrative to followers. Such is the subjectivity at the heart of the film’s critique. Comedy, of course, requires that the film overstate this critique for laughs. Its stalker character acts on urges the rest of us repress. Speaking of urges: A pulse is touched and quickened. I reach out and connect as if by dial-up modem to Brett Naucke’s Multiple Hallucinations.
I feel like I’m living inside a montage sequence from Halt and Catch Fire, mulling over an idea beside a window on a rainy night, flashing back to visual and tactile memories bound to videogame sound-narratives from my childhood. Dots, squiggles, exploding fractal mandalas. Seeing multiples, reprocessing. A computer asks for permission to speak further. Glowing outlines perform expressive dance against a black background. The computer sucked us in and we never got out, I realize. It swallowed us like a sandworm or a whale. So teacheth the Gnostics, or rather, modern New Age derivations therefrom. This would be the “reality-as-simulation” theory. It was by repression of entry into the Matrix that the Matrix got us, goes the theory. Movement amidst abstract sign-systems. Neon re-imaginings of witch-burnings cut with similar blood sacrifices atop ancient Aztec temples. Knowledges are fed through the air in packets. Do I possess an ethics? Do one’s best? Stay formally attentive? Listen and learn, I tell myself, and you will know how to act. Trust intuition over reason. Seek the flows and go with them. Even when they lead to French onion soup and a cartoon scarecrow with corn growing out its chest. Go out on adventures, says an imaginary Australian life coach, gesturing with his hands as he speaks. Too bad my brain has been soldered to things, I shudder, as the hallucination comes to an end.
Sunday October 8, 2017
I caught a matinee screening of Blade Runner 2049 with some friends yesterday. Think of it as shelter from the rain. Water collected on my sweatshirt and in my beard as I crossed the parking lot. “The world needs your dreamy energy,” announced a commercial for Dropbox. Sitting through the trailers beforehand, I thought to myself, “Ready Player One‘s brand of retro panders to the lowest common denominator.” Everywhere I looked, I kept seeing eclipsed light shining through cracks in reality. And then the film itself: monstrous urban futures. Midway through, Jared Leto’s mad scientist character turns to his assistant and proclaims, “We can storm Eden and reclaim it!” If those words had been spoken by the replicants themselves, assembled now as an army, I’d say, “Right on, right on. Power to the people.” Because as another character notes later in the film, “Dying for the right cause is the most human thing you can do.” Rhythm makes me ask, “Is time progressing or am I stuck in a rut?” I remind myself of a friend’s advice: belief is mine to dole out as I please. Smuggle into the anthill ants whose disposition toward the hill is basically, “House is on fire and I don’t give a fuck.” As a philosophy minor, I was taught to disregard emotional reads of situations or knowledges derived via gut check. Has that teaching unfolded into a liability in the years that have passed since college? What would it mean to be able to rouse oneself from a lifetime of slumber? White-knuckle it for a bit. Peter out after a prolonged decline. Or, the alternative: push through the curtain in search of some half-glimpsed secret order.
Sunday October 1, 2017
Big discovery today: Richard M. Doyle’s Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere. Doyle also blogs at mobiused and wrote an “Afterword” to Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis. Dick’s exploration of Gnostic beliefs and teachings in the Valis trilogy proved to be of great importance to me in the months following my initial encounters with psychedelics, so I’m excited to see what kind of sense Doyle makes of these themes.
Lana Cook at MIT is another scholar to watch. She recently completed a dissertation at Northeastern titled “Altered States: The American Psychedelic Aesthetic.” Along with studying more canonical texts in the psychedelic tradition, like Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Cook’s project also sheds light on works by early female psychonauts. Adelle Davis, for instance, writing under the pseudonym Jane Dunlap, published a book on LSD in the early 1960s called Exploring Inner Space. That’s about as far as I advance with my research when the dog enters my office begging for food. “No! No food! Stop with the begging!” I tell her. She lies on her stomach and stares up at me, breathing heavily, continuing to whine — at which point I promptly cave to her demand, and then hustle across the street, where my neighbors are screening Guardians of the Galaxy 2 on a sheet in their backyard. Walking beneath trees amidst shadows and streetlights. A videogame offers me work as a courier. Kids play with green, pink, and blue glow-stick bracelets and say, “Wow, trippy, man.” They make such a satisfying “pop,” those glow-sticks. And with floor speakers and a stereo amplifier, it’s quite a set-up, here inside the neural net of a catch-22 fungus from outer space. The activity feels vaguely utopian: a weird sovereign fleet, neighbor-stranger gathering, each of us remotely piloted. Are the characters we play in videogames posthumans? Is my marijuana-enhanced self an empath? The jerk who doesn’t trust anyone is a show that, for fear of bad ratings, never gets made. Young People’s Socialist League versus the planet-devouring Boomer Ego.
Thursday August 31, 2017
Time to go “Up Top,” inhabit life differently, as in Joseph Frank & Zachary Reed’s Sweaty Betty (2014). Due to a past incident, I’ll admit, the film’s dog narrative filled me with dread. Formally, though, it resembles a sequence of YouTube videos, brilliant in its use of unsettling song choices to provide glimpses of subjective interiors. Black holes of infinite sadness. Ontologically protected realms. Time moves as slowly as the wheels of a cassette tape. When I’m not teaching, I’m exploring psychedelic space using new tapes from labels like Moss Archive and Nostilevo. Tendrils of vine with curlicued ends hang down from the trees and reach for me. I wish that by assigning readings, I could hypnotize whole classes and help students burrow en masse out from under capitalist realism. Shit, though: grok this mind-melter of a track from the Watchword / Stopped Clock split on Cleveland-based cassette label Polar Envy.
Guitars and synths form a locust-like freak-out of lacing spirals. Laying down on the pavement, blissed out, purring, looking up at the sun: that’s how it feels as I walk semi-passively, trailing behind comrades, through the winding hills of our neighborhood. I become the ghost in the box who gesticulates for a camera-phone. I become “life in the age of public performance of selfhood.” Is it at all compelling to converse with AIs, or to imagine humans as conveyance mechanisms for the upload of consciousness? “Of course it’s not! Of course it’s fucking not!” I shout in my best imitation of Feeding the 5000-era Crass. The Deuce, by the way, far surpasses my initial take on it. Sarah spots me sitting on a bench reading a book in the neon light of the show’s nighttime seventies Manhattan. Why were residents unable to defend that era’s liberties when finance capital’s push came to shove? Why was capital so successful in its war on urban vice? “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” and just like that, the city’s polymorphous subjectivities dropped dead. The above questions, however crude in formulation, speak not to capital’s strength but to its weakness. Police, under different regimes and pressures, can be compelled to let things slide.
Monday August 14, 2017
Synth chimes lay atop the opening to the documentary 8-Bit Generation to great effect, reminding audiences of the psychedelic aura that well-nigh shimmered around Commodore 64s and early experimental electronic music, the original consumers of which came to each with an appropriate sense of reverence, viewing said devices as tools of consciousness. Heads of the time used to play with pocket calculators. By the way, though, terrible documentary in all other respects; don’t waste your time. A reminder that tech-geeks are to heads as cops are to freaks, even though all such groups arrive at their minds through dialectical struggle against insufficient facts. Those who worship the religion of business break with heads in that they use force to replicate obedience to their fancy in others, whereas heads are content to chill. One seeks to profit from nature, while the other co-evolves with it and reveres it. Logics, controllers, processors. Think of the multiple subjects active in a spontaneous prose autobiography: writer plus actor plus thinker plus knower. Because of this multitude, there results a significant delay as I interpret Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, understanding the latter to be a psychogeographical narrative structured around a two-person dérive. Talk remains the preferred method in our society for the extemporization of consciousness. To write it down is another thing entirely. The actor plays himself, but in a scripted narrative written while seated. Winterbottom’s film, meanwhile, only occasionally arrives at scenes that are improvised. What kind of memory is needed to realize “I’m living the dream, it’s all a dream”? I need to study performance and acting, especially method acting, where one learns to inhabit one’s role. Do people with greater memories inhabit richer universes?
A switch is flipped, and suddenly one is singing “The Winner Takes It All,” the words belted forth with a slightly choked-down lump of indignation in one’s throat, one’s hand reaching up to clasp it. We all improvise ourselves through learned routines. Butterscotch has become my jam, says the impressionist who performs only for the one he loves. Romantics are performative selves, with enormous self-confidence and an abundance of energy. They grab the tree of knowledge from the base and shake out all the apples. They do this especially when young and rich. Don’t fool yourself into ignoring, says another, the existence of other currencies: personality, quick wit, prestige. Everyone and everything is available to be observed, but there is disrespect, a voice tells us, in the act of observing. Massive cloud formations drift lazily past a blue that lies beyond. I did manage to squeeze in a brief pool trip the other day. A cardboard box in my garage contains the words “A SMOOTH AND FRUITY WINE” printed diagonally in repeating lines across its side. Can’t you tell I’ve been reading Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems? White supremacists launched a terror attack with a grey Dodge Charger, while in another state I swam. Social networks accessed through my cellphone, however, brought news of the events close to me. Some asshole with a radio blasted crappy Top 40 dance-pop on the poolside pavement next to me. But where is the benefit in me bearing mass-mediated witness to the alt-right and its murderous acts of violence? Surely my consciousness is altered into immediate sympathetic identification with the victims through that encounter — but toward what end? Shall we permit their ghosts to haunt us? I’m reminded of Foucault’s remark in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: “Do not think,” he writes, “that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable” (xiii). What dark telos inspires the ways we allow ourselves to be used by our technologies? Moments later, I saw myself in a bird circling overhead while I floated on my back in the pool. I sometimes worry that I haven’t evolved sufficient compassion for others, as when I walk to the concession stand and order a pair of hot dogs. Is it wrong of me in such moments to attend to appetites? Recognize these as defense mechanisms, I instruct myself, installed during childhood gender programming. And the programmers are the ones who possess vastly superior arms. The political parties are just good cop and bad cop; neither is on our side. Any call for “order” under these terms is tyrannous and indefensible, for the bullies own the earth.
Trance-Scripts 