Tag: music

Friday September 13, 2019

1953, the year Gerald Heard first tried mescaline, was also the year he began writing for ONE, the first openly gay periodical in America. In the years that followed, he held seminars for the Mattachine Society, one of the country’s first gay rights groups. He also helped shape the curriculum for the first gay studies institute in the United States, the ONE Institute for Homophile Studies in Los Angeles (Falby 139). For Heard, gay rights and psychedelics both signaled the arrival of a new stage in the history of consciousness. Humanity was undergoing spiritual evolution, a transformation similar to the one imagined by astrologers and New Agers who saw around them “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Meanwhile, I’m humming Madonna’s “Holiday” while walking beneath a Harvest Moon. It’s a magical night, moonlight back-lighting a cover of cloud. Lovely energy, air pulsing with life. A good night, perhaps, to listen to Craig Leon’s Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1, or to lie in a chair and read Anne Kent Rush’s Moon, Moon.

“The first revelations came,” Rush writes, “by allowing myself to make place for the moon in my daily living. These moments have remained the strongest and most palpable knowing. I started with the recognition that because the moon was shining on me at night and pulling on me during the day, it probably had been ‘speaking’ to me for a long time, and i had not been listening. I had to learn its language. I decided to begin my research at night by standing and looking out an open window” (21).

Wednesday September 11, 2019

Returned from work, I change out of my work clothes, settle in, listen to Intentions by Sunburned Hand of the Man.

The album’s soundscape is dreamy and cosmic, as on “Experiments,” instruments stretching into other dimensions. Afterwards, I find myself wanting to drum, sound erecting around me a kind of cosmic cottage. A voice pipes up recommending Laurence Veysey’s The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in America. History is ours to reclaim through anamnesis. It’s time to dive in and retrieve what was lost.

Saturday September 7, 2019

Wherein the dreaming mind reflects on its use of forms. What do we remember (or “encounter and take back with us”) when we turn inward? What’s there? Whose home? Who’s home? I see a version of myself — backpacking, walking beside child companion, hair worn long with braids, voice echoing through valley. Shall we turn to the dialogue form? Say after me: listen, sing what comes into one’s heart, let carolers carol. In my classroom, I do not merely impart information, I suggest overtones and analogies. This is as it should be. My teaching is, as Irwin Edman said of the work of Alexandre Koyré, “a concentration of much thought and much scholarship into an instrument of analysis and contagious communication” (ix). Or so it seems as I reflect mid-afternoon. By evening, my mind is elsewhere, loosening in partnership with John Abercrombie, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette’s “Back – Woods Song.”

Friday September 6, 2019

A cat has been sitting on a chair on our deck these last few days, napping midday. I like having it around. Deck chair cat. Classes are going well. After a full day of teaching (a pretty magical performance, I must say), I hang out with colleagues at a department party. Once home again, I splash water under my arms and rinse my feet. I spent the day talking with students, dialoguing about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where the freed prisoner ascends toward sight of the sun, much as the philosopher ascends toward knowledge of the good, and by evening, I’m attending a show by the band Sunwatchers. Life assembles into these weird coincidences, these synchronicities. I share Gabriel Marcel’s view: “Hope is a memory of the future.” As Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox note, “Memories of primal pleasure are alive and well in the unconscious; all we need to do is call them forth.”

Wednesday September 4, 2019

Constellations of thought rotate around like the cover of Led Zeppelin III or the wheel of a rotary telephone, an object common to domestic space during the era of my childhood, replaced over time by cellphones. Thinking of the Led Zeppelin album, I kneel beside my unalphabetized, unsystematized wall of vinyl whispering, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

Led Zeppelin III

There it is, a psychedelic thing of beauty. “Visual Creations by Zacron,” reads the circular stamp beside the credits on the inner sleeve. I guess this device I’m imagining is a volvelle, a wheel chart featuring concentric circles with pointers. Volvelles were used in medieval Europe to calculate the phases of the sun and moon. “While at the Royal Academy Schools,” I learn, “Zacron produced a rotating book” called One Line and a Box.

Zacron Rotating Book

Users could ask the book “questions about their interaction with the environment,” as they might using devices like the Tarot or the I Ching. From this earlier work, Zacron derived the idea for the design of Led Zeppelin III. My courses begin to shape up into elaborate nested allegories.

Thursday August 29, 2019

I listen excitedly, hands tapping thighs, to HausLive 1: Sunwatchers at Cafe Mustache 4/13/2019 after an afternoon at the pool, swimming, reading Kiese Laymon’s Heavy.

Laymon’s prose remedies with its tender heavy murmur. He writes as a son addressing a letter to his mother. It’s a book that hits hard. Subtitled “An American Memoir,” the book allows personal and familial history to tell as well the story of the harm done by the country to black bodies: the weight of antiblackness those bodies are made to bear. His mother’s withering appraisal of Dukes of Hazzard when he was a kid forces me to reflect with disappointment upon my own upbringing. My parents thought it appropriate to dress me in a pair of Dukes of Hazzard pajamas at one point when I was a toddler. It is my duty to confront that past and live differently.

Wednesday August 28, 2019

Returned from a successful day of teaching, I dance around the house, my hand out in front of me swimming like a fish as I listen to Patrick Cowley’s “The Runner” from his album Afternooners.

Students seem cool: joyful, inquisitive minds. I think they dig the way I talk. I think they dig the way I walk. Like I’m shaking bells and a tambourine, our conversations a kind of dance. Cue Young-Holt Unlimited’s “Dig Her Walk,” take it for a spin. Then find a quieter place. Sit back, relax.

Thursday August 22, 2019

Tap on Relatively Clean Rivers. Flash that archetypal Dayglo river-road landscape on the album cover, hint of the mid-1970s privately pressed Marin County-rooted psychedelic folk-rock contained therein. The record includes odd instrumental hollows, exudes a sweet blend of joy and melancholy: “weight off one’s mind,” as the band sings on “Hello Sunshine.”

To encounter it is to encounter a psychedelic beacon, the acid equivalent of the holy spirit, beaming a signal to fellow heads across time. What is it that we’re trying to tell one another, I hear myself asking, we who have had psychedelic experiences? Where did we find ourselves before, in the midst of, and after? The lyrical persona in “A Thousand Years” speaks as one frustrated by subjecthood and identity, disappointed to find itself left again with a face—but the voice persists in its attempt to communicate. It’s an Orphic persona: one who attempts to realize and comprehend the totality, one who bears news from the other side. The news seems to be that all that is Good is trying to win us to its side. Songs are credited to band member Phil Pearlman, a name that recalls past parables as well as poems from the beginnings of English literature. Pearlman’s two incarnations prior to Relatively Clean Rivers were called The Electronic Hole and The Beat of the Earth. After a conversion of sorts involving a bible on a beach, however, Pearlman changed his name to Seth Philip Gadahn. Quite a story there, for those who wish to look.

Monday August 19, 2019

I establish as part of the “setting” of my “set and setting” the Visible Cloaks mix, A Young Person’s Guide to Unseen Worlds.

The mix forms a semi-stable backdrop as I sit with Eroding Witness, an early collection of poems by Nathaniel Mackey. He’s performing with the Our True Day Begun Soon Come Qu’ahttet on campus this semester, and I hope to read and discuss some of his work with students in advance of that performance. Horns echo and cascade across space. This work is challenging. One has to lift up one’s arms and breathe, like the colophons for Verso and City Lights. Sarah arranges for us an online baby registry containing beautiful friendly objects, many of them with faces. I read about the Ghede, a family of Haitian Loa said to embody the powers of death and fertility. Those who are “mounted” by these deities launch stinging critiques of bosses and elites. I note down Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou: 6” as a work I might include in my course.

Sunday August 18, 2019

Do words play some role in helping us assemble? Can we with them raise consciousness, as does the hornplay of Ornette Coleman’s “Beauty Is a Rare Thing”? Sit back, I tell myself. Close eyes, listen to the mad scramble of “Kaleidoscope,” and then scramble downstairs, assemble and play drums. Repair what needs repairing, tune what needs tuning.

After performing these tasks, I return to my office and read a weird tale from Gerald Heard’s AE: The Open Persuader, the final part of the book, when AE leads L to a “Fulfiller Dome” in Antarctica, home to reindeer and a Baleen whale. Through AE, Heard gives voice to a radical cultural pessimism, wearied to the point of despair. Another voice intervenes, however, with news of a “psychic ‘thaw out'” made possible by “Polar radiation” (258-259). Under the glare of the latter, “ideological-conditioned fanatic ideologies, defrosted, fall off” (259). The voice warns, though, of a further false step along the ladder of enlightenment, the retreat inward to escape suffering, claiming that “the greatest brains in the world” have fallen prey to this error. As example, the voice points to what it calls “those stupendous body-mind hypertrophies, the Baleens,” the voice regarding these large-brained creatures as “living specimens of the utmost terminal state of false samadhi” (261). By this point I’m out of my element, exhausted by the book’s elaborate eccentricity, as well as the occasional cruelty of its worldview. One way to approach the book would be to read it in light of José Esteban Muñoz’s ideas about “queer futurity.” Ideas from Lee Edelman’s book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive also seem relevant and applicable.