Tag: music

Saturday March 3, 2018

My mood quickens, turns, rushes recklessly toward sublime paranoia as I read a photograph of a concrete poem handwritten by German-born Jewish psychonaut Walter Benjamin. “The little sheep reads,” reads the printed translation below the photograph. “Is the figure a writing-song is it an image. Sleep my little sheep sleep. Write my little sheep write.” After this encounter, I experience rhapsodic visions. The protocol from Benjamin’s mescaline experiment of May 22, 1934 abounds with allegorical riches and utterances of Delphic import. (See also Scott J. Thompson’s translation of Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel’s “The Hashish-Rausch: Contributions to an Experimental Psychopathology.”) Heads oscillate continually between waking and dreaming states. The illuminated tip of a Lighted Head Demagnetizer leads me to Osamu Kitajima’s Benzaiten.

Let us concern ourselves again with experiences. Let us relaunch the project Benjamin believed Surrealism had set for itself: “to win the energies of intoxication for revolution.” Voices speak to me. “Go ahead and listen,” warns one. We are sonic beings, transmitting signals into meatspace using navigable databases filled with recorded samples of spoken word. Truth is only possible when silence is broken.

Wednesday February 28, 2018

Receive and digest — or when that fails, depart the avatar and swim through virtual space. Respond initially as if bewitched, befuddled, inventing before one’s eyes tales of men on poles dragged off by crows. With appropriate adjustment, though, attention can relax its concerns and wander. Unlock the ideal athletic state of “relaxed concentration.” Get high snuffing twists of eucalyptus. “Not by one avenue alone,” wrote ancient statesman Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, “can we arrive at so tremendous a secret.” Truths that languages of conquest have rendered unutterable.

Souls hover amid the frequencies of Leo Noble’s Ashenden and Isaac Willow’s Treamplasturin’, while courts grant the State the right to indefinitely detain immigrants. How do those of us who have glimpsed utopia free the prisoners, the cavedwellers, those still ensnared in the Construct, the Collective Choice Architecture known as the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”? Perhaps we should teach them the story of Coeden Brith, “a 220-acre parcel owned by Alison Harlow on the 5600-acre Hippie homesteading community called Greenfield Ranch near Ukiah, CA.” Of special note is this countercultural, neo-pagan community’s ties to ecotopian fantasy and sci-fi writers Ernest Callenbach and Ursula K. LeGuin. As youth rise up, we can begin to think again about sustainable futures, the lives we want.

Tuesday February 27, 2018

An illustrated snake crawls across a two-dimensional background and forms a magic circle. A title sequence: a dolphin’s head punctures the surface of an ocean oranged by a setting sun. Guitars and drums kick in. Fireworks light a night sky. “No more clouds, no more rain,” sing Lal & Mike Waterson, as if to invoke a triumphant god on their pagan masterpiece, “Bright Phoebus.”

Let us interpret these deities, at least for the time being, as guiding passions that produce distinctive outcomes and inner states. Let us associate one such state with medicine and healing: to this, we sing our paean. Doors open onto an endless regression of doors.

Sun Ra appears, says “Time is officially ended. We work on the other side of time.” A plant sprout seeks sunlight against a blur of browns and grays. I run my hands through my hair and sense around me to gauge my whereabouts. A desert island — or rather, a detailed simulation of one. Wind chimes, palm trees: a beachside cottage. Purple clouds above a tree line steeped in shadow. Archetypes guard the gates between levels and worlds.

Sunday February 25, 2018

Sarah and I tour Faculty Drive, a street that sounds like a Monopoly property. Faculty Dreams Boulevard, lined with mid-century modernist ranches and fields of daffodils. I recall and make use of a recently acquired distinction between war ecologies and plantation ecologies. What are some of the consequences today of the American South’s history of slave plantation monocultures? I appreciate the hollow rumble of an empty plastic water bottle as wind rolls it across an Einstein intersection. Eave’s “The Night of The Burning River” shocks me into a state of wakefulness.

I indulge my tastes with caramels and chocolates. Narratives open rifts onto radically heterogeneous worlds. Of different kinds, degrees, or dimensions. Reconciling these worlds with the combination of first-person and third-person perspectives needed to access them is the great challenge facing the student of consciousness. Modification of sense organs causes modification of experience, yet the self is something else, persisting eternally in a dimension of dream. This dimension is as foreign to experience as are the worlds of players from the worlds of their games.

Saturday February 24, 2018

Electrified guitar strings reverberate in concert with windblown grass. I cross my arms, jut out my chest and lean back into a park-bench. When the sun appears from behind a patch of clouds, I raise my face to greet it. When others walk past on a sidewalk, I pick up my phone and make myself look normal. Nothing here, folks. Continue with your day. BTW, thanks, all of you anti-humanities STEM folks. This is a really great world you’ve created for us. Compulsory labor in support of nominally profit-driven capture of tuition dollars by layers of administrative bloat. They house us in square-plot rent-extraction prisons. Students, when asked about culture, know only the debased form it takes in lousily-acted young adult TV dystopia snoozefests like The 100. Better, thus, to withdraw and to agitate. Inhale while listening to Lea Bertucci’s “Patterns for Alto.”

As the 23rd hour of the 23rd day approached, shit got witchy. Additional synchronicities involving the number “23” cropped up, as did stories of witches. Let us conjure, let us legislate. Adjust the speed of the present with ADT’s “Unlimited Self-Service.”

Fearsome cat god mask lifts from the face of a female figure skater. To her side, applying commentary, sits the critic: the alien with the pulsing brain.

Friday February 23, 2018

After 15 years of teaching, all I can say with confidence is that education dooms itself to the circular reproduction of an empty formalism the moment it becomes compulsory. To extract myself from complicity with these and other compulsions, I walk alone on a sunny day, and whenever else the spirit moves me, listening to “Catfish Blues” by Alexander.

Crows and squirrels appear into consciousness and greet me on my way. As I crest a hill, I imagine myself happening upon a serene alpine lake. Plants offer me high fives, along with other, as-yet-unnameable signs of congratulation. Aye, crow, I hear ye. Greet me here in my true guise, the god of layaway and roustabout. Itinerant wanderer, upswept in a quest narrative that, through its inward-pointedness and self-invention, defies the tropes of conquest-oriented heroic fantasy. I look down at a pile of papers I’m supposed to grade and wonder, “Why am I here, again?” “Before being a worker,” I exclaim, “I am a person, perplexed by an alien imposition, the compulsion to work. Why should I complete tasks imposed by others, given this society’s open, gun-brandishing contempt for the only freedom that matters, the freedom from want?” To my students who complain only of Isis, of terrorism but not the terrorism of capitalism, I want to reply, “Relax. You are a non-subject, a non-event. A non-player character. History operates despite you.” Other students, thankfully, mine included, are organizing as we speak. OUT OF THE SCHOOLS AND INTO THE STREETS.

Wednesday February 21, 2018

Walking has been a theme of late. Sarah and I on a walk delight in a burst of edgeworthia that edges a sidewalk in our neighborhood. Walking brazenly onto our campuses, meanwhile, alt-right groups push, harass, assault Marxist professors. Let us care not that these self-styled “alphas,” the members of white supremacist organizations Kool Kekistani Kids (KKK) and Identity Evropa, think us “betas.” What care we what they call us, as this mind-murdering culture of ours steers us into a setting sun? Let us rally, though, to demonstrate solidarity with those comrades of ours who have been assaulted in their places of work. Darkness now. Binaural beats transport me to enchanted lands, where voices sing to me with flute solos and light percussion. Waves are heard crashing, seagulls crying. A violin and a cello duel one another as per the anxious pace of animated film composer Carl Stalling. Lightning-quick odes to speed. My mind, hanging like a weight behind the back of my head, hears snippets of voices interspersed with the sound of a finger compressing a rectangular plastic button on an old car stereo. Did the flickering lights of old video game cabinets stimulate Dreamachine-like hypnagogic states? Video games and cartoons: because of how, when, and where I was raised, these are the languages of my unconscious.

Tuesday February 20, 2018

I light up and contemplate Gaussian Curve’s The Distance, a version of contemporary ambient that I want to like but can’t. Too clean, too relaxed, too untroubled in its appreciation of the Muzak-oriented end of the Windham Hill catalog. Painfully aware of the modularity of my sonic environment, I discontinue The Distance and replace it with Shirase by Bonie Jash.

Without further warning, I receive ‘Ken Burns’-style slow zoom montage sequences: associative chains within a cavernous virtual environment. Each of us possesses a language-shaped map of the totality. Purple core memory units rotate around axes as virtual cameras race across space. As localized points of awareness, we drift without external points of reference, voices buzzing, chattering, asking, “Is this you?” Do I wish to imagine myself in the likeness of Nick Bottom? Are we all just minds awaiting absorption in tales told by imaginary tellers, metanarrative actants of our own desire? Bottom faced the dilemma faced by psychonauts. He had “a most rare vision…a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1: 202-203). If these dreams are past wit of man to say, what then of these trance-scripts? Can a spirit search a dream that hath no bottom?

Sunday February 18, 2018

Writing while high is a bit like trying to describe a sense beyond words. One would need formal devices — spinning Hypno Disks, entrancing patterns and rhythms. One could soundtrack one’s walk beside a curved, moss-covered wall with Equal, a cassette-sized aggregate of “electro-acoustic clicks, knocks and bumps” by Ecto Mist, released this past summer on Genot Centre.

Ecstatic, transcendental and magickal bliss. Or one can feel real awe tinged with fear by walking outdoors listening to Brian Jones Presents The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka. Defy western culture’s ban on new ontologies. Fashion for oneself a homemade version of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s Dreamachine. For more on this device, see John Geiger’s book Chapel of Extreme Experience.

Thursday February 8, 2018

I fell asleep the other night listening to a “past life regression” CD plucked from a bin at Goodwill. I woke up afterwards feeling a mild sense of confusion, but otherwise remembered nothing from the experience. What if I’ve been brainwashed, I worried. Had Dick Sutphen, the founder of Valley of the Sun recordings, succeeded in hypnotizing me?

dick-sutphen-1976_orig

Although the experience wasn’t the “ultimate altered state of consciousness” that the CD had promised, it did weird me out a bit—especially when my post-hypnosis buzz morphed into a raging headache. As I allowed for time to pass, however, this, too, vanished without a trace. I find myself instead in a new scenario, one where I trudge alone through the streets of my neighborhood, shaking off stress, exhausted from a full day’s work. I amuse myself by observing houses, assessing them as expressions of class. One wonders: How much of one’s facade is really ‘chosen’ in this society? For me, housing is paid into simply as a kind of happenstance. Trapped at all points in my life a mere renter. Always and forever, under another’s roof. To compensate, I listen to “Tree Vision” by Rambutan and stare into the depths of a mirror-night, reflected on the surface of a puddle.