Tag: music

Thursday November 2, 2017

Utopias are dreamt by those without a home. I must dig deeper. The bad ones have taken us from home. Find that anger. Thus begins the story of the dead-end kid. NO THRU TRAFFIC. Most of reality exists elsewhere, available only via special attention. Beings caught halfway between realms. Would you believe it if I said we’ve been robbed of our personhood? Robbed blind. We see nothing but darkness as we climb from bed each day. But indulge me as I imagine it differently: A beautiful sunrise soundtracked by Locrian on my commute to work.

And when I return home, I slurp food truck ramen in the cool autumn air at a picnic table at a local brewery, the sky a welcome canvas above my head. A time to laugh, a time to weep. Hat tip to King Solomon, Pete Seeger, and Roger McGuinn, I mutter in the awed, half-befuddled voice of hero Ted “Theodore” Logan. He of the band Wyld Stallyns. But my thoughts always drift back to Daphne, to whom I dedicate Alan Vega’s “Lonely.”

Death, man — what a fucking bummer. I close my eyes and picture a contraption on a wall — a hand soap dispenser. I rub my hands together in imitation of a cleansing. We’re coming now upon the verge of the superhuman. The West persists as a place I seek in my skull. Skunk smoke revives my starry eyes. “Where else except in the direction of the setting sun,” asks Fiedler, “can one look for the Great Good Place beyond death, the region where what survives of the human spirit bides forever or awaits resurrection?” (The Return of the Vanishing American, p. 30). The yesterday where we cut down the apple tree. “The world was so big,” sang Miracle Legion,” and I was so small.”

Emo of that sort really appealed to me when I was a young man. Multiples appear and degrade, and then it’s as if multiple TV screens turn off at once. I need to learn to speak BASIC.

Monday October 23, 2017

A colleague and I headed out into the woods for a brief weekend retreat, our shelter a cross between a tiny house and a cabin, loaned to us by a friend of a friend. But when I woke early yesterday morning, I learned that my dog — my companion of nearly 15 years — had fallen ill. Receiving a text from my wife about Daphne’s condition, I packed my things and rushed home, the world on the horizon reduced to a pure gray ambiguity as I stared intently at the road ahead. Eberhard Schoener’s Trance-Formation soundtracked my grief.

When the fog cleared, I witnessed a wake of turkey vultures picking at the remains of a young deer, the latter’s removal from the world of the living no doubt a consequence of some passing motorist. The destruction of alternative lifeways and nonhuman modes of being is an ineradicable component of capitalist reality. Look around: this system is cancerous. Unable to tolerate and coexist with radical difference. As I approached home, some algorithmic power operating through Spotify tried to console me by churning out 801’s cover of “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

“It is not dying,” Eno assures us, “it is not dying.” By mid-afternoon, Daphne’s condition had stabilized — but even now, as I write this, she lacks her usual appetite and seems confused and lethargic. It breaks my heart to see her this way, lying on her side, her face white, her tube-shaped dachshund body covered in lipomas and skin tags. She has a meeting with her vet scheduled for later today. My fear, though, is that he’ll say she’s in pain — in which case, we’ll have to put her down. All I can do in the meantime, I suppose, is kiss her neck, rub her belly, calm her, comfort her as best I can. I try to comfort myself by imagining episodes of We Bare Bears as conversations between the dog equivalent of Superego, Ego, and Id taking place within Daphne’s psyche. She and other wildlife dream the animal equivalent of proletarian revolution. Humor is the only way we can save ourselves from Seasonal Affective Disorder’s black pit of despair. So sayeth Broad City. It, too, spits up phrases suited to the tinfoil light of my condition. “Seratonin rising, dopamine flowing.” Ilana turns to Abbi and, making light of her proneness to depression, snarls, “So I get sick sometimes and need medicine — who cares?” The trouble is, I think of Daphne as being somehow a part of me — a link between me and my past — and I don’t want that part of me to die. Death is for me the destruction of all sense and meaning. How will I bear this loss?

Thursday October 19, 2017

It is for declaring their difference, their exceptionalism, that selves are punished. That is the Law, my friend, from here unto forever. I’m all about sensing, having an awareness of my body, but only in a fleeting way, feeling — but I rarely know my wants and needs enough to go after them. Perhaps I should teach myself Socionics. Anything to avoid living at a lower level of consciousness. Rabbit holes, rabbit holes. Optical illusions. (Just kidding, by the way, about Socionics. Though I like for use in a piece of fiction the idea of a psychedelic autodidact survivalist character obsessed with Socionics, seeking relationship advice from its teachings, classifying personalities of customers in terms of its typology at the convenience store where she works.) Here I am, traveling around stoned while reading Lindsey Michael Banco’s Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature. The world’s about to get a whole lot warmer. Beams of light shining through windows strike the narrator, prompting momentary blindness. Freezer joint, meat monstrosity. The jerk trail beckons. An article on Bandcamp points me to some really cool head music out of Mexico City: netlabel releases like Outworld Music by RITUALZ, HYPNOSYS by Upgrayedd Smurphy, and Desterritorialización by AASSP.

After listening to a recent episode about it on Erik Davis’s podcast Expanding Mind, I’m hoping to grab a copy of Rachel Nagelberg‘s debut novel, The Fifth Wall. While reading an excerpt from Nagelberg’s book in 3:AM Magazine, I stumble upon a scholar named Lindsay Jordan, who it just so happens (in classic synchronistic fashion) delivered a talk at the Breaking Convention conference last month titled “‘Unprofessional’… ‘Irrelevant’… “Fascinating’: A Story of Academia and Psychedelic Pride.” It’s as if the totality wants me to happen upon this stuff. As for instance the other night, when I settled into the futon in my “meditation room” (that’s right — I have a “meditation room”) and began listening to an 8-cassette recording of a lecture delivered at Naropa in the early 2000s featuring LSD researcher Dr. Stanislav Grof. Show of hands: how many of you have experienced “non-ordinary” states of consciousness? The room laughs when it sees hands up among nearly everyone. The tapes had washed up in the bins at Goodwill earlier that day, like gifts willed to me by the universe. I suppose I’m being guided toward Grof’s book Psychology of the Future. “We shall find there the answers we seek,” says a self-created mentor or guide. For native people, Grof claims, these states of consciousness are just accepted parts of the spectrum of human experience. One person’s mystical psychosis is another person’s holotropic episode.

Sunday October 15, 2017

Let’s put the revolution back in crazy talk. Grab people by the collar, get up in each one’s face and shout, “The revolution begins now, motherfucker!” Or (to remove any suggestion of aggression): “The revolution, an event of super-humanization affecting the one and the many, begins now, with chemically-assisted transfiguration of consciousness.” Mass exodus from participation in the social sacrifice of life via labor. “Capitalism ain’t getting shit from me,” smirks the narrator as he starts his break. Marx was at his most Marxist in his hatred of work. “Fuck wage labor,” he’d say, “I’m gonna go hang out all day in the British Museum Reading Room!” The anti-capitalist martyr remains an important latency in my political identity. An impossible self I’ve at times admired, a fatal temptation to which I may yet succumb. Weed is very much for me an example of “appropriate technology.” A tool for creative self-experimentation with consciousness. Peter Mortensen investigates a similar such view in his essay “Tripping Back to Nature: Aldous Huxley, Psychedelics, and Pro-Technology Environmentalism.” Earl Hooker’s “Lucky You” scored yesterday’s venture into the psychedelic unknown.

Stoned at a local outdoor music festival. Relaxing sunlit on a grassy hill, while bands perform below. Could this event have served as a turning point? And if a turning point, away and toward what? The vibe was surprisingly negative at first, as if festival-going were the performance in an evacuated church of a belief-less ritual. I still believe in these gestures, however, says the participant, my vomit reserved only for poor execution of ceremony. Beautiful out here under the night sky. The universe arranged for me. And on the date of my parents’ anniversary, no less: my locale, assembling itself in celebration. Spider Bags speak to me, testifying, “I found inner peace by ignoring things.” Is that what I want on my tombstone? Shit started to feel exactly that existential as I stood there afraid of slipping down a hill. “That’s a long, long way to roll,” sang the band. I could see stars above as they chanted, “Who will I be next?” The self must avoid destroying itself for those it loves. Particularly affecting was a song the band performed with NC blues singer extraordinaire Reese McHenry.

The night melted into super chill vibes, though, with level-up conversation and synesthetic animation, once headliner Washed Out took the stage.

Paranoia subsides, and the crowd sways like wind-blown grass. This is how it begins, the participant thinks to himself. This is how you educate desire. This is how heads are turned.

Thursday October 12, 2017

Cats are higher-dimensional beings who come and go as they please. The ones featured in the movie Kedi are like people, only nobler. Humans in Istanbul have developed a collective co-evolutionary dialogue with an alien species. Whereas my own country prefers to destroy all that is wild and free. We fail still to realize that interacting with people is not enough. We have our parks, our birds, our wildlife, certainly, but from them we extract cruel ideologies of territoriality, manifest destiny, kill or be killed. From Huxley, I’m led down a rabbit hole, the rabbit at the bottom (in a sense, my destination) being none other than Thomas Carlyle and his parody of German Idealism, the 1836 novel Sartor Resartus. While monstrous in many ways (as the author, for instance, of the dismal essay “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”), Carlyle nevertheless remains an author whose work intrigues me. Book tucked into my knapsack, I fix my gaze on the trail ahead. Somewhere in the distance stands Mdou Moctar, a singer-songwriter from Niger who plays Tuareg rock.

Tinariwen came to mind as I watched Moctar perform last night at a nearby bar in town. Dead arcade cabinets lined the walls, where in other times might have stood taxidermied bears and ancient suits of armor. I regard hunters and warriors, with their camouflage and their automatic weapons, as the most repulsive members of my species. All would be well but for them. That show last night, though: that was quite an experience! Hypnotic, like waves of heat at the point where a desert highway meets the horizon. We must charm the snake that has taken residence in the heart of the Western subject. Filling out the bill were Brooklyn’s premiere California Raisin snake charmers, Drunken Foreigner Band.

What can I say? A few days out from fall break, and already the world is conspiring to lift my spirits and/or get me high! I’ll take it.

Monday October 2, 2017

All of us become part again of that from which we came. Plant matter. Primordial soup swamp scum. Others but me get to be free, as complains Pearl‘s jeweler. How are we to conceive of the voices that speak for us: manipulable, or objectively other? I get sucked up into the aerial contortions of Joy Division’s “Atrocity Exhibition.”

I used to have such a positive outlook. What scripts have I forgotten? Are there mantras I should be reciting constantly under my breath? Eyes struggle to decide which light scheme to adjust to: inner or outer? Assimilative or immersive? The body communicates its irritation with our behavior by coughing. Follow me with emotional awareness through Eyeball Under by Weeping Icon.

Echoing hand gestures, BMX racers, stickers on binders: the band’s forward-driven noise-punk conjures these. An underlying propulsiveness amidst muffled, anguished languor. Heads can swim themselves between left and right speakers. But voices can’t always contend with it, can they? The body grows restless from too much repetitive mindlessness. “Turn off that damn racket!” yells a head popping out the window of an upper floor apartment. Receding feedback spray feels good, though, dunnit? The texture of the time is full-blown totalitarian. I am the cherub with the flaming sword, my own worst enforcer of the Big Other’s banishment of me from Paradise. Is it superstitious of me to regard the compositional process as fundamentally inexplicable? Perhaps — but the important thing is to connect the act of writing with the self’s refusal to be made someone else’s means. The world can be wonderful so long as it quiets to outdoor sounds like engines and crickets and birds. When we psychonauts forget what we’re supposed to be doing according to others (working, behaving productively for society), the moment-to-moment becomes a consistently joyful opening onto an endless becoming. (Consistently, that is, until our phones push-notify us of Trump’s latest atrocities.) Today’s high mellows me; sense data hover above me, a fog-covered nighttime skyline. I soundtrack it with Stone Fruit by Primitive Fiction.

“Huge buzzing synth drones”: think of that as denoting an affect. Moments later, Sarah calls and scares me half to death when, mid-conversation, she narrates what she thinks is a blown tire, but which proves later to have been no more than the breaking off of some plastic molding from the wheel well. Never a dull moment.

Sunday September 24, 2017

I’m feeling super down at the moment. My hope, however, is that by writing, I can pull myself up. Evacuate the current narrative. Bleed out into another. Lemme just get myself adjusted, as with the ludicrous prog of Gong’s “Master Builder.”

That band’s Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy belongs in a genre study of psychedelia. “Tea” is how you say it. (Ontological, with space whisper vocals.) It all comes down to whether or not one pronounces one’s Rs, these distinct identities out of which one’s community is made — though the word “community” these days seems a bit of a stretch. One can really mangle quite spectacularly one’s perception of reality. Crash symbols fill me with a sense of alarm. We cease to exist when lacking care and connection. The self mourns its disappearance from the minds of others. Sarah leaves today to deliver an invited lecture on an island in the Mediterranean. The world narrative, meanwhile, threatens to introduce “global nuclear” as a plot device. What would be the emotional response proportionate to such drama? I’d prefer to think about Marxism and the politics of psychedelic subjectivity. Patch up, repair, and in the process make new again. Sit back and let go. Imagine a narrative thread relating Hawkwind’s “Assault and Battery / The Golden Void” as precursor text to mid-90s big beat electronic artists like The Chemical Brothers.

Psychedelics pull Marxism toward seizure here-and-now of the means of pleasure-production: as in, fuck the bio-rhythms of capitalism, I’m gonna go listen to Augustus Pablo’s “Keep on Dubbing.” And after that, stretch out across Bardo Pond’s “Screens For a Catch (Fur Bearing Eyes).”

My goal is to devise protocols for drug-based rebellion against the twenty-first century work ethic. Slacker brutalism. Imagine a ‘Greil Marcus’-style secret history weaving a constellation out of Walter Benjamin’s On Hashish, the stories of Hawkwind, Penny Rimbaud of Crass, and related psychedelic anarcho-Marxist communes and art collectives. Throw the MC5 and John Sinclair’s White Panthers in the mix as well. Revise the contemporary meaning of religious-political-aesthetic radicalism. The radicalism of self-administered, medicinally-aided deconditioning therapies. Join up with your local psychic decolonization struggle today!

Friday September 22, 2017

Authority? Do you mean the pinnacle of order, as in “the market”? Or do you mean “realms within”? Lunch yesterday at a fast-food chain placed me in proximity to cops and military personnel. I imagine this as the universe’s way of suggesting that I go vegan. It also recommends, through the intermediary of a friend, that I read Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia — whilst listening to Swedish progg group Träd, Gräs & Stenar.

Note that the left-wing, anti-commercial “progg” movement, despite remaining mostly unknown in the United States, whips the pants off of what we think of here as “prog rock.” Spice things up with a shadow protestor throwing a Molotov cocktail. A squirrel jumps into frame and disrupts the leaves out of whose shadows leapt the protestor — promptly causing me to land back into language. “Vår Vila,” thou art such stellar stoner high drama! News from nowhere. Follow through with the explication, darlin’. Lamb, described by W.C. Hazlitt as a lover of “the Indian weed,” is in many ways my spiritual countryman. My new goal in life is to act like a capybara. “Poor youth!” cries Coleridge, as if reaching an arm across the centuries to console me, “who scarcely dar’st lift up thine eyes– / The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon / The visions will return!” Such, at least, is my hope. I imagine a primitive neural network undergoing routine maintenance, followed by a reboot. To Coleridge I reply, “Light that sucker up like a Christmas tree!” We live happily ever after in worlds built from memory, proclaims a tombstone. Is that my frightened existentialist self (a part of me I prefer to keep submerged) trying its best to imagine a best case scenario for an afterlife? The no-longer-there is still there: in the mind. The point of consciousness that operates upon, while remaining ontologically distinct from, the body, its avatar. Reality gets weirder — inflates again. Bewilderment gives way to a smile. Let us aspire to write something as great and divine as Lamb’s “Dream-Children: A Reverie.” Lamb’s chess-master, planned-ten-moves-out sentence structures are marvels; one savors their unfolding. That essay is definitely one I wish to include the next time I teach my “Psychedelic Lit” course.

Thursday September 21, 2017

I pull air into my lungs with long, extended breaths as I come to. Stabs of low-range electric organ. Lawn mowing forms a new container-act into which I spill my beans. And that’s not the only way in which my life now resembles a reboot to a ’90s VR horror thriller. I’m thinking here of The Lawnmower Man, with my face buried in a pint of fried rice. The old man, after eating like a chimpanzee, belches and groans contentedly. His dog, an elderly dachshund with Cushing’s, adjusts her failing legs and licks the scraps at his feet. Allow me to remain deliberately blasé, though, dear readers, especially when rendering something vacuous and unmemorable like liberal humanist subjectivity. Don’t you want something better? As in, wouldn’t you prefer to be a psychedelic superhuman? When the dog pees on the floor, I stomp around the living room and speak down to her in an angry British accent. Teaching sometimes grants me a platform from which to denounce corporate news media as capitalist propaganda. On those days, rare as they may be, I get to spring on students tried-and-true head-busters like Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. But even on these best of days, teaching can still end up feeling like a mere teeth-gritting exercise. Laurie Penny and Plan C both think anxiety is the relational mode of our age, and I suppose they’re right; but rage and depression are close runners-up. All the more reason to smoke weed and zone out. It’s like replacing the competitive self-promoting self with a neon air dancer. Or as the Situationists used to say, “Sous les pavés, la plage!” Claire Cirocco soundtracks the day’s affect with “Clear Base Living,” a new track by her project Comme À La Radio.

It angers me to no end to have to show up, semester after mind-rotting semester, to teach classes of students who will never be as financially fucked as me. Friends and I formed and met regularly as members of an Adorno reading group in grad school. Yet what do I have to show for it? How has my character or circumstance been in any way bettered? There we go: head to head, with cracks of thunder ’round our sides. My winning move: pass through history unscathed. Map the ground covered, and then get back in there and hustle, keep going, advance ever further into the game’s interior.

Wednesday September 20, 2017

Go deep into consciousness-diminished-to-swirling-mandala-made-of-mealworms trance-state with Healing Sounds by Dr. Christopher Hills & the University of the Trees Choir.

(Check out the Wikipedia page for Hills, by the way: sailor, commodities trader, Rastafarian, mystic, natural foods advocate. Quite a character!) I use cassettes like that to recharge myself after a grueling day at work. “The more you attempt to contain consciousness,” Hills argued, “the more you limit yourself.” As the universe, so on earth. All becomes clear and simple. What do games like DOOM do to consciousness? Heads link up and react upon the same virtual world. A technologically assisted version of what “indigo children” claim to do unaided. Am I a producer of ADHD prose? They try to medicate those of us who think differently than the majority. On days when I’m free from work, I sometimes cut out mid-afternoon and play Thymme Jones, a new tape on Unifactor by Luminous “Diamond Ben” Kudler.

Precision-made videogame tones soundtrack imaginary force-beams, fires, and explosions; also, occasional jump-sounds. Afterwards I contemplate the tape’s capacity to foster psychological projection into sonic avatars. Before listening, I too often and without thinking tended to limit my conceptualization of avatars to two kinds: objects encountered IRL, and icons seen onscreen. I had forgotten that sound, too, forms a distinct third kind. Scores can be entered into through performance by players. This entering into and drifting amidst is not unlike use of a park. As for instance, last night: talk of autopsy tables at the kudzu park. Kudzu forests, kudzu valleys. A friend recommended Tales from Moominvalley and Moominvalley in November, two books by Finnish author Tove Jansson. Our shadows extended upward over the path ahead of us as we ascended the side of the quarry. I am the world’s head browser and chief ontologist. Let me take for a ride an imaginary Airstream, while the monster who heads my country threatens to “totally destroy” whole nations. The Hell’s Angel now drives a truck.