[This one's inspired by a bunch of puns from work today, and the ridiculousness of the anxiety that manifests itself in Pittsburgh this time of year. Enjoy!]
Bananarchy in the Bowl of Winds
It was third down in the final minutes of the third quarter, and Jerry was on the edge of his seat. C’mon, he screamed, just catch the ball! I can’t believe that call, he was clearly across the line… I couldn’t tell how Jerry knew; it was almost impossible to see the field from as high up as we were in the stands. But the seats were cheap, even if in this terrible weather the wind just whipped down into the bowl of the arena and froze our faces off, even though the group of fans in bright yellow suits right below us seemed jovially unconcerned.
Touchdown! No it’s not, Jerry howled, wringing his towel and jumping up and down. One of the fans cast an odd glance up our way, but his friends were occupied, huddled around something I couldn’t see, probably watching a replay on the Net as the JumboTron screen was having a hard time staying focused. The fan’s face was inexplicably painted like a clown’s, in a yellow as garish as his suit. Jerry had warned me the fans often dressed quite strange to show their team spirit. I’ve never understood football myself, being more of a story man. What’s the entertainment value of watching large men you can’t even see tumbling all over each other? But Jerry’s enthusiasm was contagious, so when he begged me to come along with him to the game I agreed, not realizing how miserably wretched the weather would be, even in the chintzy team windbreaker Jerry leant me that did nothing to keep out the wind. Those thick yellow suits were starting to look appealing right now.
The game wore on, Pittsburgh falling behind as Dallas caught a second wind, and then a third. Unable to make out the ant-like players below, my attention kept wandering, returning to the yellow-suited fans who seemed to be having a lot more fun. It looked like they were busy constructing some apparatus, what after a moment my brain told me was a catapult. A catapult? I wanted to ask Jerry if this was for some post-game ritual, but he was too busy chewing his mittens to shreds over the last foul to listen, so I sat back again to watch, finally a little curious.
Third down in the final minutes of the last quarter, and the Steelers had just used their last timeout, hopefully planning how to turn their game around before poor Jerry threw himself from the bleachers in despair. The whole crowd was on the edge of their seats, except for me, unable to see why this was so important, and the yellow suits, who’d finished building their contraption and all leaned back, opening their jackets despite the chill. Suddenly, just as one of the Cowboys was about to claim another first down (I think that’s what it’s called), a small flapping object went whirling out of the stands, landing right in front of the runner, whose feet flew out from under him in an inglorious pratfall.
The crowd went wild as the cameras zoomed in to reveal a banana peel on the jittery JumboTron screen. The announcers all mumbled, uncertain where it had come from. The crowd was actually aghast, but they couldn’t keep from laughing at the absurdity of it, the yellow-suited fans most of all. Finally the field calmed down again so the Cowboy could redo his play without interruptions. But no! This time with an audible thwang another yellow whirl went sailing, and another. Suddenly the arena’s cold air was filled with banana peels, all landing whichever way the winds blew them! Looking around I realized that the top rows of the stands were dotted with yellow-suited individuals, each group of them busy at their own little catapult. They must have planned this whole caper in case the Steelers began to loose, unless it was a political statement, hiding the bananas in their jackets to keep them from freezing.
No one else seemed to notice the characters depart, all eyes intent on the field, where the game carried on now despite the rain of peels, the players slipping and tumbling all over the place, the ball slick with juice and a fruity reek wafting up to the stands. It was chaos, sheer bananarchy! Jerry could only shake his head as his cherished pastime was reduced to the buffoonery I’d always told him it looked like, while I laughed and laughed, entirely forgetting about the cold. Eventually the game was called on account of the mushy sabotage, and as we were walking to the lot I turned to Jerry and said, you know what, that was a lot more fun then I expected, you wanna go get a smoothie? For some reason he only grumbled and kept walking.
Showing posts with label anarchy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anarchy. Show all posts
11.30.2009
The Way of What is to Come
Monday, listening to M.Pyres, dancing up and down over my copy of Jung's "Red Book" [on his theories of interpretation] finally arriving, though won't have time to dive into it for a couple weeks due to the increasing school work load. But soon.
For the time being here's some links that have been building up in my reader:
Images
From Kris Kuksi's Beast Anthology (above).
Dust Echoes: animated stories from the Australian dreamtime.
The dawn of a new post postmodern era in art.
Words
Viking love (and war) poetry.
Alan Moore's new zine, Dodgem Logic.
A Reader's Manifesto, or why contemporary literature sucks.
Bad sex in fiction award 2009 (NSFW).
The Books that founded D&D.
Faith and Politics
Obama omits reference to God in Thanksgiving speech.
The inherent fail of New Atheism.
Ritual sacrifices in Nepal see 320,000 animals sacrificed.
Switzerland Votes to Ban Minarets
CIA's lost magic manual resurfaces.
The global protest movement, ten years later.
Science
Doctors Recommend Medical Marjiuana for Minors with ADHD.
Humans hear through their skin.
Plants have a social life.
Science is shackled by intellectual property.
Large Hadron Collider sets world record for particle acceleration.
Virgin Galactic's Space-Grazing Aircraft Is Ready for Liftoff.
For the time being here's some links that have been building up in my reader:
Images
From Kris Kuksi's Beast Anthology (above).
Dust Echoes: animated stories from the Australian dreamtime.
The dawn of a new post postmodern era in art.
Words
Viking love (and war) poetry.
Alan Moore's new zine, Dodgem Logic.
A Reader's Manifesto, or why contemporary literature sucks.
Bad sex in fiction award 2009 (NSFW).
The Books that founded D&D.
Faith and Politics
Obama omits reference to God in Thanksgiving speech.
The inherent fail of New Atheism.
Ritual sacrifices in Nepal see 320,000 animals sacrificed.
Switzerland Votes to Ban Minarets
CIA's lost magic manual resurfaces.
The global protest movement, ten years later.
Science
Doctors Recommend Medical Marjiuana for Minors with ADHD.
Humans hear through their skin.
Plants have a social life.
Science is shackled by intellectual property.
Large Hadron Collider sets world record for particle acceleration.
Virgin Galactic's Space-Grazing Aircraft Is Ready for Liftoff.
9.14.2009
Literacy Narrative
For my class on Narrative and Technology I was asked to create what's called a literacy narrative, the story of my development as as "content producer/consumer" (to use the parlance of the age, focusing also on how our experiences with media have helped us develop standards of quality. The results were interesting and integrating, somewhat like a statement of intention or a road map, if a bit lengthy and abstract (I am trying to write a novel dealing with some of these similar themes). Thought it was worth posting here:
Long before the written word meant anything to me I loved a good story. Weekend nights growing up my father would tell my brothers and I bedtime stories; made up on the spot, featuring our stuffed animals as characters, a continuing series of tales that always intertwined with the previous nights’ adventures and with the content of our lives. Years later, when my father lost his job as a graphic designer and turned to his passion for genealogy, his stories became an ongoing collection of family legends that he hasn’t finished discovering or telling us. Encouraged more than anything to use our imaginations, my twin brother and I would go on long walks on the beach each summer and make up our own stories, often placing ourselves as characters in our favorite books and video games, but also creating between us an entire internal world through our words, which we would explore and return to year after year.
When our father was at work late, our mother would read us books, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and when I learned to read, sometime before kindergarten (roughly 1985), I became a voracious reader, consuming the entire sci-fi and fantasy sections of our local libraries before turning to more realistic literatures. I was such an avid reader that I would often stay up all night reading with a flashlight under the covers, or read books beyond the reading level of my peers, which I realized in 6th grade when I read the entire unabridged “Les Misérables” back to back with the Bible. Though I read everything I could get my hands on I became most intrigued by ancient mythologies, which I discovered in dusty large-prints in the school library, containing that epic and symbolic sense that reality contains much larger stories than those we experience on a daily basis, which we are also participating in, a sense furthered through role-playing video games and the choose your own adventure novels of the ‘80s.
Most of my love of reading was due to certain challenges I experienced as a child. The first was a sensory integration dysfunction, which eventually resulted in encouragement towards more physical and multi-modal forms of expression: music, art, acting, and gymnastics. Secondly, though, or perhaps due to being, intelligent and imaginative, I was entirely outcasted from my peers, and turned instead to a richer inner life, full of imagined stories and made up games. When I became aware of popular cultures, I explored alternate ways that teenagers express who they are in the world, researching the aesthetic and arts of various subcultures, settling eventually into the narrative of punk rock, with its Do It Yourself and world-changing ideals, the idea that anyone can say anything in any way they want, giving up my viola and books for a guitar, which was my main tool for creative expression for many years, though not the one that would become ultimately important to me.
I never wrote much when I was young, a few fantasy stories in grade school, one journal filled mostly with imaginary maps and drawings. It wasn’t until the first time I tried going to college that I learned that was what I wanted to learn to do. In a philosophy class on the meaning of death I had to keep a daily journal, assumedly so the teacher could keep track of our emotional responses, but this combined with a really droll fiction class and the encouragement of my poetess girlfriend convinced me I had to apprentice myself to recording my thoughts and experiences before I could ever tell a good story. Though my family members are mainly computer programmers/designers and I was raised with several old machines in the house, I always rejected using them for my writing, in somewhat of a luddite or romantic stance (in Pirsig’s sense) combined with being too poor to afford a decent machine. Though most importantly I write by hand, and in cursive, because this method replicates the flow of my thoughts better than my mediocre typing skills, and while typing the urge to go back and edit is too strong/easy, and the sense of flow this creates is generally apparent in the finished work.
An equally important lesson from the class of death was the idea that it is possible and necessary to more fully experience life, which I took to with a vengeance, immediately dropping out of school and moving from the DC area to Pittsburgh. Due to this idea, my imagination, literariness, and love of mythology, as well as several conversations on the subject with my new likeminded band-mates, I realized that instead of experiencing life fully in a random way, a person’s life could become a story, a narrative, a work of art or self-made mythology (an idea that many associate with Kerouac, though his wasn’t at all the story I wanted to live, because it wouldn’t be a good story if it had already been told). To this end I pursued a variety of novel and extreme experiences: protest/activism/street performance, rock and roll, romance, making fairie wings, web design, blogging (and before it was called blogging), circus performances, collective living, children’s storytelling, entheogenic drugs, various spiritual and occult rituals/experiences, psychological and philosophical studies, going crazy a couple times, writing poetry, cooking, traveling, etc. Through all of which I journaled what happened and what it could mean in terms of a larger personal narrative, making several attempts to write it into a novel that was some combination of a Proustian autobiography (as in not necessarily factual) with Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, that extended works of art are akin to magic spells created in order to realize and chart the course of one’s intentions in and for the world. This magical use of writing is important, as language as a technology may also originally have been a form of magic (spelling as a spell): words have power to cause changes in how we think/look/act in the world, as well as conjure real sensory experience in our imaginations.
In order that my particular personal narrative be interesting or applicable to other people, I have attempted to tie it into common human themes and symbols culled from psychology and mythology. At the same time I have explored the deeper symbolic content of my own life through a study of my dreams, which are admittedly rather wild and epic, which have added to my personal story and sense of meaning as well as help develop my memory and sense making apparatuses. Dreams eventually took on a greater significance as a source or form of narrative, as they are contained, symbolic even when dealing with everyday concerns, and contain a weird or thwarting element in which the thing itself escapes (a concern with the possibility of description I find in Magical Realist literatures, that the imaginative and the non-real can sometimes express more about reality by sidestepping the inefficacy of language to actually capture what really is, best summed up in the Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant...”). At the very least, dreams are like personalized narratives or an internal TV show, offering some of the most interesting inspirations to one’s artistic process.
As for my definition of Quality, it is expressed in four parts relating back to the above narrative. First I find Quality in that which is rare, unique, or novel, that is, not what can be found in the everyday or in mass consumer culture. I recall throwing my TV out the window in 7th grade and wearing a shard of the screen around my neck for many years after, though more recently I’ve been appreciating some of the higher quality TV programming (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Deadwood), art that pushes its medium to new places or beyond the mean and expected. Quality as not yet been done.
Second, that which has Quality contains an element of intention or ability to evoke a response. Quality art always moves people in some way. Prior to an academic response it is felt viscerally, if you love it or even if you hate it the work is doing something worthwhile, allowing the viewer to experience a fullness or depth of experience. This is somewhat like Garcia Lorca’s concept of the Duende, the clear emotional depth to a performance that sets it above more rote ways of creating. Quality as authentic.
Next, Quality implies to me a harmony or reflexivity across scales, which comes from two pivotal ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s concept that the medium is the message, that form and content reflect each other, and the alchemical idea of as above so below, that the smallest scale of a work has to be reflexive of the whole, that when the parts reinforce each other they add up to something complete and larger than the sum of the parts. In terms of Quality storytelling, this means personal or local stories are reflexive of global concerns and the human condition. Quality as interconnected.
Last, I find Quality in those things that strike me as being connected to my own creative or learning processes, the eureka! or synchronistic moment where that thing is exactly what I was looking for next. Of course, this is entirely subjective and implies that Quality is conditional to the time and place of a person’s encounter with the thing, but things that don’t have that Quality don’t force themselves on our attentions in the same way (if at all). Quality as immediate and personal.
Since returning to school for creative fiction writing, in the last two years I have been trying to hone my writing process, getting a number of stories published in print and online [1] [2], making the rest of my creative output available, blogging (though I rarely have the time for this), reading more than ever, and attempting to finally finish my first novel, as there are two more pushing at the back of my brain to be written. My current literary concerns focus around the interplay of very short and very long forms, that is, flash fiction’s ability to capture the immediacy of a moment vs. the tome (800+ pages), which allows an author to create a full and changing world; second, ergodic or non-linear narratives, and last the use of storytelling and memory as a way of literally saving the world (as in backing it up so it won’t be lost), writing as a collage of personal experiences, global events and narratives, ideas, imaginations, &c. which I wish that I'd thought of two decades ago before my father's bedtime stories were mostly forgotten.
Long before the written word meant anything to me I loved a good story. Weekend nights growing up my father would tell my brothers and I bedtime stories; made up on the spot, featuring our stuffed animals as characters, a continuing series of tales that always intertwined with the previous nights’ adventures and with the content of our lives. Years later, when my father lost his job as a graphic designer and turned to his passion for genealogy, his stories became an ongoing collection of family legends that he hasn’t finished discovering or telling us. Encouraged more than anything to use our imaginations, my twin brother and I would go on long walks on the beach each summer and make up our own stories, often placing ourselves as characters in our favorite books and video games, but also creating between us an entire internal world through our words, which we would explore and return to year after year.
When our father was at work late, our mother would read us books, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and when I learned to read, sometime before kindergarten (roughly 1985), I became a voracious reader, consuming the entire sci-fi and fantasy sections of our local libraries before turning to more realistic literatures. I was such an avid reader that I would often stay up all night reading with a flashlight under the covers, or read books beyond the reading level of my peers, which I realized in 6th grade when I read the entire unabridged “Les Misérables” back to back with the Bible. Though I read everything I could get my hands on I became most intrigued by ancient mythologies, which I discovered in dusty large-prints in the school library, containing that epic and symbolic sense that reality contains much larger stories than those we experience on a daily basis, which we are also participating in, a sense furthered through role-playing video games and the choose your own adventure novels of the ‘80s.
Most of my love of reading was due to certain challenges I experienced as a child. The first was a sensory integration dysfunction, which eventually resulted in encouragement towards more physical and multi-modal forms of expression: music, art, acting, and gymnastics. Secondly, though, or perhaps due to being, intelligent and imaginative, I was entirely outcasted from my peers, and turned instead to a richer inner life, full of imagined stories and made up games. When I became aware of popular cultures, I explored alternate ways that teenagers express who they are in the world, researching the aesthetic and arts of various subcultures, settling eventually into the narrative of punk rock, with its Do It Yourself and world-changing ideals, the idea that anyone can say anything in any way they want, giving up my viola and books for a guitar, which was my main tool for creative expression for many years, though not the one that would become ultimately important to me.
I never wrote much when I was young, a few fantasy stories in grade school, one journal filled mostly with imaginary maps and drawings. It wasn’t until the first time I tried going to college that I learned that was what I wanted to learn to do. In a philosophy class on the meaning of death I had to keep a daily journal, assumedly so the teacher could keep track of our emotional responses, but this combined with a really droll fiction class and the encouragement of my poetess girlfriend convinced me I had to apprentice myself to recording my thoughts and experiences before I could ever tell a good story. Though my family members are mainly computer programmers/designers and I was raised with several old machines in the house, I always rejected using them for my writing, in somewhat of a luddite or romantic stance (in Pirsig’s sense) combined with being too poor to afford a decent machine. Though most importantly I write by hand, and in cursive, because this method replicates the flow of my thoughts better than my mediocre typing skills, and while typing the urge to go back and edit is too strong/easy, and the sense of flow this creates is generally apparent in the finished work.
An equally important lesson from the class of death was the idea that it is possible and necessary to more fully experience life, which I took to with a vengeance, immediately dropping out of school and moving from the DC area to Pittsburgh. Due to this idea, my imagination, literariness, and love of mythology, as well as several conversations on the subject with my new likeminded band-mates, I realized that instead of experiencing life fully in a random way, a person’s life could become a story, a narrative, a work of art or self-made mythology (an idea that many associate with Kerouac, though his wasn’t at all the story I wanted to live, because it wouldn’t be a good story if it had already been told). To this end I pursued a variety of novel and extreme experiences: protest/activism/street performance, rock and roll, romance, making fairie wings, web design, blogging (and before it was called blogging), circus performances, collective living, children’s storytelling, entheogenic drugs, various spiritual and occult rituals/experiences, psychological and philosophical studies, going crazy a couple times, writing poetry, cooking, traveling, etc. Through all of which I journaled what happened and what it could mean in terms of a larger personal narrative, making several attempts to write it into a novel that was some combination of a Proustian autobiography (as in not necessarily factual) with Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, that extended works of art are akin to magic spells created in order to realize and chart the course of one’s intentions in and for the world. This magical use of writing is important, as language as a technology may also originally have been a form of magic (spelling as a spell): words have power to cause changes in how we think/look/act in the world, as well as conjure real sensory experience in our imaginations.
In order that my particular personal narrative be interesting or applicable to other people, I have attempted to tie it into common human themes and symbols culled from psychology and mythology. At the same time I have explored the deeper symbolic content of my own life through a study of my dreams, which are admittedly rather wild and epic, which have added to my personal story and sense of meaning as well as help develop my memory and sense making apparatuses. Dreams eventually took on a greater significance as a source or form of narrative, as they are contained, symbolic even when dealing with everyday concerns, and contain a weird or thwarting element in which the thing itself escapes (a concern with the possibility of description I find in Magical Realist literatures, that the imaginative and the non-real can sometimes express more about reality by sidestepping the inefficacy of language to actually capture what really is, best summed up in the Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant...”). At the very least, dreams are like personalized narratives or an internal TV show, offering some of the most interesting inspirations to one’s artistic process.
As for my definition of Quality, it is expressed in four parts relating back to the above narrative. First I find Quality in that which is rare, unique, or novel, that is, not what can be found in the everyday or in mass consumer culture. I recall throwing my TV out the window in 7th grade and wearing a shard of the screen around my neck for many years after, though more recently I’ve been appreciating some of the higher quality TV programming (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Deadwood), art that pushes its medium to new places or beyond the mean and expected. Quality as not yet been done.
Second, that which has Quality contains an element of intention or ability to evoke a response. Quality art always moves people in some way. Prior to an academic response it is felt viscerally, if you love it or even if you hate it the work is doing something worthwhile, allowing the viewer to experience a fullness or depth of experience. This is somewhat like Garcia Lorca’s concept of the Duende, the clear emotional depth to a performance that sets it above more rote ways of creating. Quality as authentic.
Next, Quality implies to me a harmony or reflexivity across scales, which comes from two pivotal ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s concept that the medium is the message, that form and content reflect each other, and the alchemical idea of as above so below, that the smallest scale of a work has to be reflexive of the whole, that when the parts reinforce each other they add up to something complete and larger than the sum of the parts. In terms of Quality storytelling, this means personal or local stories are reflexive of global concerns and the human condition. Quality as interconnected.
Last, I find Quality in those things that strike me as being connected to my own creative or learning processes, the eureka! or synchronistic moment where that thing is exactly what I was looking for next. Of course, this is entirely subjective and implies that Quality is conditional to the time and place of a person’s encounter with the thing, but things that don’t have that Quality don’t force themselves on our attentions in the same way (if at all). Quality as immediate and personal.
Since returning to school for creative fiction writing, in the last two years I have been trying to hone my writing process, getting a number of stories published in print and online [1] [2], making the rest of my creative output available, blogging (though I rarely have the time for this), reading more than ever, and attempting to finally finish my first novel, as there are two more pushing at the back of my brain to be written. My current literary concerns focus around the interplay of very short and very long forms, that is, flash fiction’s ability to capture the immediacy of a moment vs. the tome (800+ pages), which allows an author to create a full and changing world; second, ergodic or non-linear narratives, and last the use of storytelling and memory as a way of literally saving the world (as in backing it up so it won’t be lost), writing as a collage of personal experiences, global events and narratives, ideas, imaginations, &c. which I wish that I'd thought of two decades ago before my father's bedtime stories were mostly forgotten.
5.24.2009
Manifestoes from Beyond the Real
Artists from all times have attempted to escape or transcend the constraints they saw in the culturally constructed realities in which they found themselves, often through the penning of manifestoes as statements of purpose for the new realities they wanted to instead create. I have also often struggled with this desperation against the day, in this age against the quotidian, the snarky, the postmodern, the realism that is "just this," when clearly there is so much more to living that can not be contained by pale reiterations of last century's visionaries whose words and worlds no longer apply, at the edge of the future, the crumbling edge of what may be left for us, the necessity of human survival let alone all the possibilities of the imagination, which are vast and untapped except by scattered madmen and genre writers. Despite the beauty of the manifestoes given below though, I have been trying to formulate a new perspective, not against reality or realism, because obviously we do live in the real world, if a limited constructed one, but a sense of reality that contains all that, all the horror and wonder, all the magic, dreams, the future, alternative histories and galactic alignments with the stars spiraling out of all expected orbits, the sense that every day, every moment, is an ultimate moment, reality being pushed to the furthest edges of where we have been, with the realization that we are only now barely learning just how far and fantastic we can go.
"The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF — time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. — are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded." [from Rudy Rucker's A Transrealist Manifesto]
"Leave it all, new... the entrance is in the area and the entry into adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero of heroes unveiled. Tenderness as an exercise in speed. Respiration and heat. Experience fired, structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions. If the poet is interfered, the reader will have to interfere... The true imagination is one that dynamite elucidated, injected into other microbes esmeraldas imaginations. In poetry and whatever, the entry must be in the area and the entry into adventure. Create tools for the subversion of everyday life. The stations of the subjective human being, with its beautiful trees and huge obscene, as laboratories of experimentation. Fix parallel glimpse situations and so heartbreaking as a large scratch on the chest, in the face. Analogy endless gestures. There are so many that are new or when we notice, although we are doing / watching in front of a mirror. Stormy night. The perception is opened by an ethical-aesthetic brought to the last." [from Roberto Bolaño's "Primer Manifiesto Infrarrealista" (translated by Googlebots)]
"We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds." [from F. T. Marinetti's The Futurist Manifesto]
"The realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity... Taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking, has still today been so grossly neglected. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams" [from Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism]
"So what really is the situation? It's the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence." [from The Situationist Manifesto
"The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF — time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. — are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded." [from Rudy Rucker's A Transrealist Manifesto]
"Leave it all, new... the entrance is in the area and the entry into adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero of heroes unveiled. Tenderness as an exercise in speed. Respiration and heat. Experience fired, structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions. If the poet is interfered, the reader will have to interfere... The true imagination is one that dynamite elucidated, injected into other microbes esmeraldas imaginations. In poetry and whatever, the entry must be in the area and the entry into adventure. Create tools for the subversion of everyday life. The stations of the subjective human being, with its beautiful trees and huge obscene, as laboratories of experimentation. Fix parallel glimpse situations and so heartbreaking as a large scratch on the chest, in the face. Analogy endless gestures. There are so many that are new or when we notice, although we are doing / watching in front of a mirror. Stormy night. The perception is opened by an ethical-aesthetic brought to the last." [from Roberto Bolaño's "Primer Manifiesto Infrarrealista" (translated by Googlebots)]
"We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds." [from F. T. Marinetti's The Futurist Manifesto]
"The realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity... Taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking, has still today been so grossly neglected. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams" [from Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism]
"So what really is the situation? It's the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence." [from The Situationist Manifesto
9.25.2008
Punk Rock and Irish Literature
The Sick Bag Of Cuchulainn
[from The Blog of Revelations]
The folks from the Edge08 festival invited a few of us up to Ballina recently to talk about how punk rock influenced Irish literature. That’s a big question. The short answer is ‘not enough’, but of course it’s a little more complicated than that. The corollary is that Irish literature influenced punk rock – or at least the Irish strain of the virus – a lot more than punk subsequently re-influenced modern Irish writing.
Irish punk bands and their new wave cousins swallowed Joyce, Beckett, Wilde and Flann O’Brien, chewed them up in a blender and spewed them back out in a great technicolour yawn. By contrast, modern Irish fiction writers, even the ones who treasured their copies of Never Mind The Bollocks and London Calling, seemed to be looking the other way when the punk stinkbomb let off. The influence is there, but in the most staggered and splintered way, a series of sporadically tossed pipe bombs rather than one big atomic bang.
Punk rock was a musical – some say cultural – revolution that happened in New York circa 1975, instigated by the Bowery bands who played Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs: The Ramones, Television, the Patti Smith Group, the Heartbreakers. Latter-day New York Dolls manager Malcolm McClaren caught the bug from Johnny Thunders and Richard Hell and passed it onto his charges the Sex Pistols a year later. But if the New York strain was an art movement conspired by misfits who’d never been to university, its English counterpart was more seditious. The Sex Pistols were the ultimate Oedipal act: ‘Anarchy In the UK’ attempted to kill the King; ‘God Save The Queen’ stuck it to her Majesty.
These were leery, sneering rebel songs played at high volume, sung by a London-Irish misfit with a wicked mouth and eyes like headlights. The Pistols were a horror show, and like the best horror shows they were conceived on a shoestring, with the production values of a snuff movie, and so their music felt scarily real. Never Mind The Bollocks ripped a fissure in reality through which could be glimpsed a whole new wave of horrors: The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag.
But despite the Year Zero propaganda, punk wasn’t conceived in a void. It was a mutant Eraserhead baby with many fathers: the 60s garage acts collected by Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye on the Nuggets box set, Detroit’s Stooges and the MC5, the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Roxy Music.
Punk lifted bits of its aesthetic from the Decadents, the Symbolists, the Modernists, the Lettrists, the Dada-ists and Surrealists and Situationists, from the Paris Communes and the 1968 riots. It was Un Chien Andalou and Howl and A Clockwork Orange and Catcher In the Rye. Its icons included Rimbaud, Genet, Beckett and Burroughs. It produced poets and writers like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Jim Carroll and John Cooper Clark, artists like Raymond Pettibon and Ray Lowry, filmmakers like Don Letts, Julien Temple, Alex Cox and Mary Harron, was documented by journalists like Lester Bangs, Nick Kent, Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, and inspired a hundred fanzines and indie labels.
But if punk began as an homogenous skinny whiteboy noise, it evolved with the speed of mutagen into something that transgressed genre. It refused to know its place, wouldn’t stay within the prescribed lines. It had the gall to speak in bad taste, to venerate energy and innovation over technique, to thieve from previously prohibited sources. By comparison with the old boys’ club of stadium rock acts, punk was multicultural, homo-friendly and equal opportunities.
It acknowledged Captain Beefheart and Neu and Can, ska and dub and street poets like Lynton Kwesi Johnson, and through The Clash’s appropriation of ghetto blaster chic, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. When John Lydon teamed up with Afrika Bambaataa for the one-off single ‘World Destruction’ in 1984, it sounded like a replay of ‘Anarchy in The UK’ set in a New York dance club, and prophesised Public Enemy’s armagedddon effects, the smash and grab sample larceny of hip-hop.
Punk was, on the face of it, aggressively Modernist bordering on dystopian Futurist, even if many of its avatars were of the old guard. Pete Shelley was a Beckett fan. Joy Division channelled JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. The Clash co-opted Allen Ginsberg for Combat Rock. Martin Scorsese considered casting the Clash as a street gang in his earliest imaginings of Gangs of New York. Eraserhead’s Jack Nance looked like a member of Pere Ubu.
Burroughs was celebrated by the punk set at the Nova Convention in New York in 1978. Debbie Harry collaborated with HR Giger, appeared in Cronenberg’s Videodrome, and but for her management’s intervention might have secured Darryl Hannah’s part in Blade Runner. She and Chris Stein forged a friendship with William Gibson, chief visionary of the literary movement that would become termed ‘cyberpunk’, a new wave of streetwise noirish sci fi that proliferated in the early 80s, and whose Neuromancer mantra – “the street finds its own use for things” – could have been a neo-Situationist slogan.
“1977 seemed kind of like a roots moment,” Gibson said. “My take on it wasn’t that it was brand new nihilism, it was like a return to something that had been the real beginning of the ’60s but had been collectively forgotten. I had forgotten it to some extent myself.
“And it actually wasn’t so much the punk from England that did that for me, it was the stuff from New York that slightly predated what happened in London: Television and the first Patti Smith album. They were very consciously subversively retro in a really irony-free way, they seemed very, very sincere about it, and what I was seeing and hearing out of London was much more self-conscious material.
“Now, decades later, I know that Malcolm McClaren had been reading the Situationists, and the stuff from New York was somehow way less considered and in fact didn’t really go anywhere. Most of those people vanished or took too much heroin or wound up pumping gas, which is actually a more traditional fate for young artists at that time.”
Here in Ireland, punk did something unprecedented: it occurred in real time. Pre 1977, the future was on a five year sattelite delay. Ireland received its inklings of a brave new world via Radio Luxembourg. The country didn’t have a pop music station until 1979. But London and New York punk generated a direct current that jumpstarted The Radiators, The Boomtown Rats, U2, The Virgin Prunes, The Atrix, Stiff Little Fingers, the Outcasts, DC Nien, The Blades, The Undertones.
Except Irish punk acts were different. They resisted the Oedipal pose, acknowledged rather than erased history. On The Radiators’ second album Ghostown, Philip Chevron wrote about ‘Kitty Ricketts’, one of the prosititutes from the Nightown section of Ulysses. U2’s debut album Boy namechecked Dorian Gray and stole from William Goldman’s Lord Of The Flies, a sacred text shared by The Virgin Prunes. Gavin Friday took Wilde as his oracle on Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves. The Pogues’ brilliant, bawdy carnivalesque songs referenced Brendan Behan and James Clarence Mangan and James Stephens.
Nor did Irish punk bands necessarily disassociate from their musical predecessors. They were more likely to consult members of Horslips or Thin Lizzy for advice than badmouth them in the press, and if they didn’t exactly pay homage to Rory Gallagher and Van Morrison, they didn’t deny them either.
Van, always a contrary figure, started out with Them, a snotnosed Belfast R&B band who wrote the all time great garage staple ‘Gloria’, but he made his reputation with Astral Weeks, an emigrant’s recurring dream of an East Belfast demimonde populated by hustlers, heroin casualties and persecuted drag queens.
The songs had strong literary associations – the dirty old man obsessed with a thirteen year old schoolgirl in ‘Cypress Avenue’ could’ve been Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert; the tragic drag queen Madame George was straight out of Last Exit To Brooklyn by way of Tennessee Williams.
Like its weirder twin, the Velvet Underground & Nico, Astral Weeks was a seminal album dealing with adult themes of vice, mortality and deviance. And like the Velvets, its influence vastly overshadowed its sales. In time it came to occupy the same place in pop music as Joyce’s Ulysses does in literature.
But if Irish musicians were galvanised and inspired by the country’s literary history, its post-war writers were always in danger of being paralysed by the towering figures of Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Sean O’ Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’ Neill – the litany invoked by by Kevin Rowland in Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Dance Stance’. To any young scribbler, such figures could seem as ancient and ominous as the Tuatha De Danaan, mythic beings, ten feet tall, casting shadows of influence in which few new forms could grow.
The revolutionary example of punk rock – and the free for all polyglot of styles and sounds that it permitted – did not find expression in an identifiable Irish literary movement akin to the Beats of ’50s New York, or Scotland’s Children of Albion Rovers in the 90s. Throughout the 1970s it seemed more furtive, more covert. There were secret meetings and small presses, cellar rendezvous and writers’ groups that numbered among their suspects Dermot Bolger, Neil Jordan, John Banville, Colm Toibin.
Punk’s impact on writers like Clash fan Roddy Doyle was manifest in form rather than content. His first novel The Commitments chose proletarian soul rather than white noise as its motif, although the book’s self-published DIY ethic, plus its use of sawn off rapid fire dialogue and Northside Dublin vernacular, was pure punk. Elsewhere, the cover of Boomtown Rats disciple Joe O’ Connor’s Cowboys and Indians featured a London postcard mohawk. Novelist and playwright Billy Roche started out as singer with The Roach Band, who combined Springsteen-ish smalltown visions with a the taut energy of Elvis Costello and Graham Parker; his first play A Handful of Stars climaxed with a James Cagney stand-off soundtracked by PiL’s ‘Rise’.
Despite these strobe flashes, Irish fiction seemed still preoccupied with trying to make sense of the grim and grey preceding decades – a landscape of domineering fathers, martyred mothers, ogre-like Christian Brothers, despotic priests, skeletons in family closets, valleys of squinting windows, incessant rainfall. Throughout the 1980s it operated under the influence of the late John McGahern, the big daddy of rainy realism, a writer many modern Irish novelists still feel compelled to define themselves in alliance with or opposition to.
Maybe the satellite delay was still in effect, because 1977 finally arrived in 1993, in the unholy form of Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. Notwithstanding the fact that it was written in the late early 90s and set 30 years before, this was the first true Irish punk novel, the Never Mind The Bollocks of letters, and its impact on modern Irish fiction was analogous to that of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting on Scottish writing: an adrenaline jab to the heart. Pitched halfway between slapstick and horror, the tale of Francie Brady was a shocking but moving hybrid of Huckleberry Finn, A Clockwork Orange and Lord Of The Flies, and Pat McCabe became the dragon young upstarts had to slay – or at least sneak past – before they gained entry to the crypt.
“I remember reading The Butcher Boy and recognising something about small town Ireland, and the dialogue struck me as amazingly vivid,” says Mayo writer Mike McCormick. “I was really sickened, because I was about halfway through the writing of the Getting It In The Head when I read it. McCabe’s work was important, as was Roddy Doyle’s, in that it also allowed people to use popular culture, songs and comic books.”
McCormack is, as the old saw goes, a man out standing in his own field: in this case a wind-blasted pasture in a mythologised Co. Mayo where the natives veer between decent skinnery and intemperent religiosity, where speaking statues of the Sacred Virgin drive local women to apocalyptic ministry, where earthbound angels coast across bay waves the colour of hammered lead, where you can’t move but for masonry saints and shrines and visitations and plastic Jesuses luminescing day-glo green.
Both McCormack’s full-length novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes From A Coma (2006) meld the fantastical and future-shocked with the local and parochial. If Pat McCabe’s feverish inner monologues trace the southern gothic bloodlines of Faulkner and O’Connor back to their Irish origins, McCormack’s yarns are rendered with a rigorous, almost Anglo-Irish formalism on a par with Patrick McGrath.
“I was asked to describe Notes From A Coma towards the ending of my writing of it,” McCormack recalls, “and I say this respectfully now the man is dead, and I respected his work hugely, but the book was like if you imagined John McGahern and Philip K Dick were contracted to write an episode of the X Files, this would be the result.”
This, I believe, is under-explored territory in Irish fiction. We’ve had books like Eoin McNamee’s Belfast noir classic Resurrection Man, Joe Ambrose’s squat culture dispatch Serious Time, Conor McPherson’s rewiring of ghost stories and strange tales for the modern depopulated rural Ireland, Julian Gough’s metafictional Jude trology, John Connolly’s Nocturnes, Claire Keegan’s tales from the county hell. But the literary chattering classes are still more likely to cite John Banville over Blade Runner.
Maybe writers like Roddy Doyle and Joe O’Connor and Colm Toibin confuse the argument when they produce their richest writing in the guise of stately historical novels like A Star Called Henry, Star Of the Sea and The Master. But imagine a climate where Irish writers, and, crucially, non-Irish writers resident here, co-opted punk’s refusal to observe protocol, where there’s no confining delineation between so called serious and popular literature, where language, theme, storytelling craft and imagination all co-exist.
The equivalent, maybe, of the generation of writers who’ve thrived in the realm of the slipstream, an umbrella term wide enough to encompass Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Joe Hill, AM Homes, David Foster Wallace, Steven Hall, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggars, George Saunders, Katherine Dunne and Tom Spanbauer.
The compost theory of culture holds that what was once held as ‘low’ entertainment – gothic, southern gothic, pulp fiction, westerns, post-war noir, horror, magic realism, new journalism, the new wave of 60s sci-fi, EC and Marvel comics, tales from the crypt, performance poetry, graffitti art, graphic novels – gets turned to precious metal by the pressure of successive decades heaped on top of each other, until, at this end of the process, what was once derided as common has become retroactively transmuted into art.
Anybody feeling queasy here should note that Cormac McCarthy, maybe the most respected living American writer, has worked exclusively in genre for decades, be it the post-apocalyptic (The Road), modern noir, (No Country For Old Men), western (The Border Trilogy) horror masquerading as western (Blood Meridian) or southern gothic (Child of God, Outer Dark).
The Serious Fiction Factory, the Man Booker mill, seems a long way from the surreal, funny, hyperbolic, fantastical tales that reside in the national body of mythology, legend, folk tale, gothic yarns, murder ballads and outrageously tall tales. Celtic storytelling has always been by turns bawdy, mystical, absurdist, and prone to gross exagerration. The Midnight Court contained lusty couplets that’d make a sailor blush. The Song of Amergin was a visionary shape-shifter hymn. And there’s an account of Cuchulainn’s bersker fit in Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin that reads like a live review of Iggy & the Stooges:
“The first warp-spasm seized Cuchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of… His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t poke it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek.
“His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram’s fleece reached his mouth from his throat.
“His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. Malignant mists and spurts of fire – the torches of the Badb – flickered red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury.”
Now that’s what I call punk rock.
[from The Blog of Revelations]
The folks from the Edge08 festival invited a few of us up to Ballina recently to talk about how punk rock influenced Irish literature. That’s a big question. The short answer is ‘not enough’, but of course it’s a little more complicated than that. The corollary is that Irish literature influenced punk rock – or at least the Irish strain of the virus – a lot more than punk subsequently re-influenced modern Irish writing.
Irish punk bands and their new wave cousins swallowed Joyce, Beckett, Wilde and Flann O’Brien, chewed them up in a blender and spewed them back out in a great technicolour yawn. By contrast, modern Irish fiction writers, even the ones who treasured their copies of Never Mind The Bollocks and London Calling, seemed to be looking the other way when the punk stinkbomb let off. The influence is there, but in the most staggered and splintered way, a series of sporadically tossed pipe bombs rather than one big atomic bang.
Punk rock was a musical – some say cultural – revolution that happened in New York circa 1975, instigated by the Bowery bands who played Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs: The Ramones, Television, the Patti Smith Group, the Heartbreakers. Latter-day New York Dolls manager Malcolm McClaren caught the bug from Johnny Thunders and Richard Hell and passed it onto his charges the Sex Pistols a year later. But if the New York strain was an art movement conspired by misfits who’d never been to university, its English counterpart was more seditious. The Sex Pistols were the ultimate Oedipal act: ‘Anarchy In the UK’ attempted to kill the King; ‘God Save The Queen’ stuck it to her Majesty.
These were leery, sneering rebel songs played at high volume, sung by a London-Irish misfit with a wicked mouth and eyes like headlights. The Pistols were a horror show, and like the best horror shows they were conceived on a shoestring, with the production values of a snuff movie, and so their music felt scarily real. Never Mind The Bollocks ripped a fissure in reality through which could be glimpsed a whole new wave of horrors: The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag.
But despite the Year Zero propaganda, punk wasn’t conceived in a void. It was a mutant Eraserhead baby with many fathers: the 60s garage acts collected by Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye on the Nuggets box set, Detroit’s Stooges and the MC5, the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Roxy Music.
Punk lifted bits of its aesthetic from the Decadents, the Symbolists, the Modernists, the Lettrists, the Dada-ists and Surrealists and Situationists, from the Paris Communes and the 1968 riots. It was Un Chien Andalou and Howl and A Clockwork Orange and Catcher In the Rye. Its icons included Rimbaud, Genet, Beckett and Burroughs. It produced poets and writers like Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Jim Carroll and John Cooper Clark, artists like Raymond Pettibon and Ray Lowry, filmmakers like Don Letts, Julien Temple, Alex Cox and Mary Harron, was documented by journalists like Lester Bangs, Nick Kent, Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, and inspired a hundred fanzines and indie labels.
But if punk began as an homogenous skinny whiteboy noise, it evolved with the speed of mutagen into something that transgressed genre. It refused to know its place, wouldn’t stay within the prescribed lines. It had the gall to speak in bad taste, to venerate energy and innovation over technique, to thieve from previously prohibited sources. By comparison with the old boys’ club of stadium rock acts, punk was multicultural, homo-friendly and equal opportunities.
It acknowledged Captain Beefheart and Neu and Can, ska and dub and street poets like Lynton Kwesi Johnson, and through The Clash’s appropriation of ghetto blaster chic, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. When John Lydon teamed up with Afrika Bambaataa for the one-off single ‘World Destruction’ in 1984, it sounded like a replay of ‘Anarchy in The UK’ set in a New York dance club, and prophesised Public Enemy’s armagedddon effects, the smash and grab sample larceny of hip-hop.
Punk was, on the face of it, aggressively Modernist bordering on dystopian Futurist, even if many of its avatars were of the old guard. Pete Shelley was a Beckett fan. Joy Division channelled JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. The Clash co-opted Allen Ginsberg for Combat Rock. Martin Scorsese considered casting the Clash as a street gang in his earliest imaginings of Gangs of New York. Eraserhead’s Jack Nance looked like a member of Pere Ubu.
Burroughs was celebrated by the punk set at the Nova Convention in New York in 1978. Debbie Harry collaborated with HR Giger, appeared in Cronenberg’s Videodrome, and but for her management’s intervention might have secured Darryl Hannah’s part in Blade Runner. She and Chris Stein forged a friendship with William Gibson, chief visionary of the literary movement that would become termed ‘cyberpunk’, a new wave of streetwise noirish sci fi that proliferated in the early 80s, and whose Neuromancer mantra – “the street finds its own use for things” – could have been a neo-Situationist slogan.
“1977 seemed kind of like a roots moment,” Gibson said. “My take on it wasn’t that it was brand new nihilism, it was like a return to something that had been the real beginning of the ’60s but had been collectively forgotten. I had forgotten it to some extent myself.
“And it actually wasn’t so much the punk from England that did that for me, it was the stuff from New York that slightly predated what happened in London: Television and the first Patti Smith album. They were very consciously subversively retro in a really irony-free way, they seemed very, very sincere about it, and what I was seeing and hearing out of London was much more self-conscious material.
“Now, decades later, I know that Malcolm McClaren had been reading the Situationists, and the stuff from New York was somehow way less considered and in fact didn’t really go anywhere. Most of those people vanished or took too much heroin or wound up pumping gas, which is actually a more traditional fate for young artists at that time.”
Here in Ireland, punk did something unprecedented: it occurred in real time. Pre 1977, the future was on a five year sattelite delay. Ireland received its inklings of a brave new world via Radio Luxembourg. The country didn’t have a pop music station until 1979. But London and New York punk generated a direct current that jumpstarted The Radiators, The Boomtown Rats, U2, The Virgin Prunes, The Atrix, Stiff Little Fingers, the Outcasts, DC Nien, The Blades, The Undertones.
Except Irish punk acts were different. They resisted the Oedipal pose, acknowledged rather than erased history. On The Radiators’ second album Ghostown, Philip Chevron wrote about ‘Kitty Ricketts’, one of the prosititutes from the Nightown section of Ulysses. U2’s debut album Boy namechecked Dorian Gray and stole from William Goldman’s Lord Of The Flies, a sacred text shared by The Virgin Prunes. Gavin Friday took Wilde as his oracle on Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves. The Pogues’ brilliant, bawdy carnivalesque songs referenced Brendan Behan and James Clarence Mangan and James Stephens.
Nor did Irish punk bands necessarily disassociate from their musical predecessors. They were more likely to consult members of Horslips or Thin Lizzy for advice than badmouth them in the press, and if they didn’t exactly pay homage to Rory Gallagher and Van Morrison, they didn’t deny them either.
Van, always a contrary figure, started out with Them, a snotnosed Belfast R&B band who wrote the all time great garage staple ‘Gloria’, but he made his reputation with Astral Weeks, an emigrant’s recurring dream of an East Belfast demimonde populated by hustlers, heroin casualties and persecuted drag queens.
The songs had strong literary associations – the dirty old man obsessed with a thirteen year old schoolgirl in ‘Cypress Avenue’ could’ve been Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert; the tragic drag queen Madame George was straight out of Last Exit To Brooklyn by way of Tennessee Williams.
Like its weirder twin, the Velvet Underground & Nico, Astral Weeks was a seminal album dealing with adult themes of vice, mortality and deviance. And like the Velvets, its influence vastly overshadowed its sales. In time it came to occupy the same place in pop music as Joyce’s Ulysses does in literature.
But if Irish musicians were galvanised and inspired by the country’s literary history, its post-war writers were always in danger of being paralysed by the towering figures of Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Sean O’ Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’ Neill – the litany invoked by by Kevin Rowland in Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Dance Stance’. To any young scribbler, such figures could seem as ancient and ominous as the Tuatha De Danaan, mythic beings, ten feet tall, casting shadows of influence in which few new forms could grow.
The revolutionary example of punk rock – and the free for all polyglot of styles and sounds that it permitted – did not find expression in an identifiable Irish literary movement akin to the Beats of ’50s New York, or Scotland’s Children of Albion Rovers in the 90s. Throughout the 1970s it seemed more furtive, more covert. There were secret meetings and small presses, cellar rendezvous and writers’ groups that numbered among their suspects Dermot Bolger, Neil Jordan, John Banville, Colm Toibin.
Punk’s impact on writers like Clash fan Roddy Doyle was manifest in form rather than content. His first novel The Commitments chose proletarian soul rather than white noise as its motif, although the book’s self-published DIY ethic, plus its use of sawn off rapid fire dialogue and Northside Dublin vernacular, was pure punk. Elsewhere, the cover of Boomtown Rats disciple Joe O’ Connor’s Cowboys and Indians featured a London postcard mohawk. Novelist and playwright Billy Roche started out as singer with The Roach Band, who combined Springsteen-ish smalltown visions with a the taut energy of Elvis Costello and Graham Parker; his first play A Handful of Stars climaxed with a James Cagney stand-off soundtracked by PiL’s ‘Rise’.
Despite these strobe flashes, Irish fiction seemed still preoccupied with trying to make sense of the grim and grey preceding decades – a landscape of domineering fathers, martyred mothers, ogre-like Christian Brothers, despotic priests, skeletons in family closets, valleys of squinting windows, incessant rainfall. Throughout the 1980s it operated under the influence of the late John McGahern, the big daddy of rainy realism, a writer many modern Irish novelists still feel compelled to define themselves in alliance with or opposition to.
Maybe the satellite delay was still in effect, because 1977 finally arrived in 1993, in the unholy form of Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. Notwithstanding the fact that it was written in the late early 90s and set 30 years before, this was the first true Irish punk novel, the Never Mind The Bollocks of letters, and its impact on modern Irish fiction was analogous to that of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting on Scottish writing: an adrenaline jab to the heart. Pitched halfway between slapstick and horror, the tale of Francie Brady was a shocking but moving hybrid of Huckleberry Finn, A Clockwork Orange and Lord Of The Flies, and Pat McCabe became the dragon young upstarts had to slay – or at least sneak past – before they gained entry to the crypt.
“I remember reading The Butcher Boy and recognising something about small town Ireland, and the dialogue struck me as amazingly vivid,” says Mayo writer Mike McCormick. “I was really sickened, because I was about halfway through the writing of the Getting It In The Head when I read it. McCabe’s work was important, as was Roddy Doyle’s, in that it also allowed people to use popular culture, songs and comic books.”
McCormack is, as the old saw goes, a man out standing in his own field: in this case a wind-blasted pasture in a mythologised Co. Mayo where the natives veer between decent skinnery and intemperent religiosity, where speaking statues of the Sacred Virgin drive local women to apocalyptic ministry, where earthbound angels coast across bay waves the colour of hammered lead, where you can’t move but for masonry saints and shrines and visitations and plastic Jesuses luminescing day-glo green.
Both McCormack’s full-length novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes From A Coma (2006) meld the fantastical and future-shocked with the local and parochial. If Pat McCabe’s feverish inner monologues trace the southern gothic bloodlines of Faulkner and O’Connor back to their Irish origins, McCormack’s yarns are rendered with a rigorous, almost Anglo-Irish formalism on a par with Patrick McGrath.
“I was asked to describe Notes From A Coma towards the ending of my writing of it,” McCormack recalls, “and I say this respectfully now the man is dead, and I respected his work hugely, but the book was like if you imagined John McGahern and Philip K Dick were contracted to write an episode of the X Files, this would be the result.”
This, I believe, is under-explored territory in Irish fiction. We’ve had books like Eoin McNamee’s Belfast noir classic Resurrection Man, Joe Ambrose’s squat culture dispatch Serious Time, Conor McPherson’s rewiring of ghost stories and strange tales for the modern depopulated rural Ireland, Julian Gough’s metafictional Jude trology, John Connolly’s Nocturnes, Claire Keegan’s tales from the county hell. But the literary chattering classes are still more likely to cite John Banville over Blade Runner.
Maybe writers like Roddy Doyle and Joe O’Connor and Colm Toibin confuse the argument when they produce their richest writing in the guise of stately historical novels like A Star Called Henry, Star Of the Sea and The Master. But imagine a climate where Irish writers, and, crucially, non-Irish writers resident here, co-opted punk’s refusal to observe protocol, where there’s no confining delineation between so called serious and popular literature, where language, theme, storytelling craft and imagination all co-exist.
The equivalent, maybe, of the generation of writers who’ve thrived in the realm of the slipstream, an umbrella term wide enough to encompass Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Joe Hill, AM Homes, David Foster Wallace, Steven Hall, Jeffrey Eugenides, Dave Eggars, George Saunders, Katherine Dunne and Tom Spanbauer.
The compost theory of culture holds that what was once held as ‘low’ entertainment – gothic, southern gothic, pulp fiction, westerns, post-war noir, horror, magic realism, new journalism, the new wave of 60s sci-fi, EC and Marvel comics, tales from the crypt, performance poetry, graffitti art, graphic novels – gets turned to precious metal by the pressure of successive decades heaped on top of each other, until, at this end of the process, what was once derided as common has become retroactively transmuted into art.
Anybody feeling queasy here should note that Cormac McCarthy, maybe the most respected living American writer, has worked exclusively in genre for decades, be it the post-apocalyptic (The Road), modern noir, (No Country For Old Men), western (The Border Trilogy) horror masquerading as western (Blood Meridian) or southern gothic (Child of God, Outer Dark).
The Serious Fiction Factory, the Man Booker mill, seems a long way from the surreal, funny, hyperbolic, fantastical tales that reside in the national body of mythology, legend, folk tale, gothic yarns, murder ballads and outrageously tall tales. Celtic storytelling has always been by turns bawdy, mystical, absurdist, and prone to gross exagerration. The Midnight Court contained lusty couplets that’d make a sailor blush. The Song of Amergin was a visionary shape-shifter hymn. And there’s an account of Cuchulainn’s bersker fit in Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin that reads like a live review of Iggy & the Stooges:
“The first warp-spasm seized Cuchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of… His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t poke it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek.
“His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram’s fleece reached his mouth from his throat.
“His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. Malignant mists and spurts of fire – the torches of the Badb – flickered red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury.”
Now that’s what I call punk rock.
8.26.2008
Zenarchy
[via technoccult]
“Zen anarchy? What could that be ? Some new variations on the koans, those classic proto-Dadaist Zen “riddles”? What is the Sound of One Hand making a Clenched Fist? If you see a Black Flag waving on the Flagpole, what moves? Does the flag move? Does the wind move? Does the revolutionary movement move? What is your original nature—before May ‘68, before the Spanish Revolution, before the Paris Commune?
Somehow this doesn’t seem quite right. And in fact, it’s unnecessary. From the beginning, Zen was more anarchic than anarchism. We can take it on its own terms. Just so you don’t think I’m making it all up, I’ll cite some of the greatest and most highly-respected (and respectfully ridiculed) figures in the history of Zen, including Hui-Neng (638-713), the Sixth Patriarch, Lin-Chi (d. 867), the founder of the Rinzai school, Mumon (1183-1260), the Rinzai master who assembled one of the most famous collections of koans, Dogen (1200-1253), the founder of Soto, the second major school, and Hakuin (1685-1768), the great Zen master, poet and artist who revitalized Zen practice.
I. Smashing States of Consciousness
This is what all the great teachers show: Zen is the practice of anarchy (an-archy) in the strictest and most super-orthodox sense. It rejects all “archys” or principles—supposedly transcendent sources of truth and reality, which are really no more than fixed ideas, mental habits and prejudices that help create the illusion of dominating reality. These “principles” are not mere innocuous ideas. They are Imperialistic Principalities that intrude their sovereign power into our very minds and spirits. As anti-statist as we may try to be, our efforts will come to little if our state of mind is a mind of state. Zen helps us dispose of the clutter of authoritarian ideological garbage that automatically collects in our normal, well-adjusted mind, so that we become free to experience and appreciate the world, nature, and the “Ten Thousand Things,” the myriad beings around us, rather than just using them as fuel for our ill-fated egoistic cravings.”
Part 2 and Part 3
“Zen anarchy? What could that be ? Some new variations on the koans, those classic proto-Dadaist Zen “riddles”? What is the Sound of One Hand making a Clenched Fist? If you see a Black Flag waving on the Flagpole, what moves? Does the flag move? Does the wind move? Does the revolutionary movement move? What is your original nature—before May ‘68, before the Spanish Revolution, before the Paris Commune?
Somehow this doesn’t seem quite right. And in fact, it’s unnecessary. From the beginning, Zen was more anarchic than anarchism. We can take it on its own terms. Just so you don’t think I’m making it all up, I’ll cite some of the greatest and most highly-respected (and respectfully ridiculed) figures in the history of Zen, including Hui-Neng (638-713), the Sixth Patriarch, Lin-Chi (d. 867), the founder of the Rinzai school, Mumon (1183-1260), the Rinzai master who assembled one of the most famous collections of koans, Dogen (1200-1253), the founder of Soto, the second major school, and Hakuin (1685-1768), the great Zen master, poet and artist who revitalized Zen practice.
I. Smashing States of Consciousness
This is what all the great teachers show: Zen is the practice of anarchy (an-archy) in the strictest and most super-orthodox sense. It rejects all “archys” or principles—supposedly transcendent sources of truth and reality, which are really no more than fixed ideas, mental habits and prejudices that help create the illusion of dominating reality. These “principles” are not mere innocuous ideas. They are Imperialistic Principalities that intrude their sovereign power into our very minds and spirits. As anti-statist as we may try to be, our efforts will come to little if our state of mind is a mind of state. Zen helps us dispose of the clutter of authoritarian ideological garbage that automatically collects in our normal, well-adjusted mind, so that we become free to experience and appreciate the world, nature, and the “Ten Thousand Things,” the myriad beings around us, rather than just using them as fuel for our ill-fated egoistic cravings.”
Part 2 and Part 3
7.31.2008
Anarchism, Mysticism, and Anamnesis
The other day James of that veiled gazelle and I were having an interesting conversation about the curious disconnect between anarchist philosophy and spiritual practices, and the handful of authors who write about both.
Anarchism comes from the Greek for "without archons (rulers)," and is defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics as "the view that society can and should be organized without a coercive state." While this idea has divided into many (often conflicting) schools and sub-schools of thought, some general trends in belief emerge that are what originally attracted me to the ideal: Instead of meaning chaos and destruction, living without rulers, if it is to work at all, requires autonomy (self-rule/ DIY), equality (mutual respect for all others), pacifism (responsibility of getting along with oneself/ other/ the environment, etc), and not a small smattering of wide-eyed wonder. Of course, these are ideals, and like all social philosophies actual practice often falls far short of how people are expected to live (though it doesn't help that there are infinite negative interpretations on anarchism portrayed by the media and youth market). One of the main points where anarchist belief conflicts with itself is over what to do with religion and spirituality. For the most part, anarchists follow the creed of "no gods, no masters," rejecting religious behavior as no better than the opiate of the masses (probably a result of some of anarchism's roots in 18th Cent. Russian Communism). For example, a friend of mine considers herself both an anarchist and a Christian, which she does not see as being a conflict. However she has gotten an extraordinary amount of shit over the years from her anarchist friends because of her religious preferences, a kind of knee-jerk dogmatism that at times rejects anything remotely spiritual or mystical in favor of the pragmatic, rational, political, and all too real.
The irony being however that in its current incarnation, as a modern American youth movement drawing on its resurgence in the punk subculture, Anarchism has come to take on the trappings of a religion itself. A system of beliefs, a mode of dress (black, dirt, patches), a series of ritualistic practices (from train hopping to protesting), and a teleological doctrine (drawing on the Communist worker's uprising) that aims toward some utopia after the Revolution when everyone can take care of themselves and each other. Another common phrase: "Who will build the roads? We will!" It strikes me that even before this paradise is reached, it would be necessary for anarchists to apply their open ideals not just to themselves, but to everyone, drawing on a much more interesting belief that "nothing is true, everything is permitted," that all beliefs, even spiritual ones, are subjective and potentially valid. If one doubts the socio-political, revolutionary force of religion, look at Liberation Theology which in Latin America has attempted to do just that.
There are of course certain contemporary authors who have been somewhat successful in trying to unite principles of anarchism and spirituality (at least for a handful of people like James and I). The first one that comes to mind is Hakim Bey (full writings beyond link), whose tenets of Ontological Anarchy, and the Temporary Autonomous Zone find a direct correlation to certain occult ideas like the magic circle. In his more academic role as Peter Lamborn Wilson, he is an authority on the darker side of the Islamic mystical sect of Sufism. While criticized by anarchists for his mystical and individualist leanings, Bey is also openly a pederast, which is essentially waving a stick in the face of anyone who claims that they don't live by rules.
Another text that had a similar appeal was Days of War, Nights of Love. As an anarchist organization, Crimethinc. has gotten a lot of flack with the years, both at first for being too individualist and lifestyle, then for promoting irresponsible scrounging, and finally for becoming just another protest-centered anarcho-webpage. However, what first impressed me in their earlier writings, beyond the beautiful and often-times personal prose, was the sense of mystique they weaved around their organization: here were anarchists handing out secret invitations, discussing magic as direct action, and in fact weaving their own mythology in an effort to make it into their real world, which for a time actually seemed to work, and hopefully inspired countless other children to do the same.
Take for example this excerpt: "This world, the so-called “real world,” is just a front. Pull back the curtain and you’ll see the libraries are all filled with runaways writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees and sympathizers, all the receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to show how alive they still are. . . and all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us."
Perhaps one reason for Crimethinc.'s reliance on such mystical and utopian imagery was the involvement of one Mark Dixon, a friend of James, and a self-professed "folk scientist" most infamous for his use of think tanks (like highly focused temporary autonomous zones) for accomplishing all sorts of zany acts, like turning a bike into a record player. Most of the truly interesting, magical, and revolutionary writing in Days of War, Nights of Love seems to be credited to him. Among the many zines that he helped pen and pass around were two that I and others have come to call Anamnesis I and Anamnesis II, being absolutely chaotic and fun-house style (yes that is how the zines were originally formated) enquiries into many esoteric, yogic, and metaprogrammatic practices that are absolutely essential to anyone trying to live outside of even one's own rules (Anamnesis being the Platonic doctrine of psychic memory or the eternality of knowledge, an idea later articulated as the Theosophical Akashic Records, Hebrew Book of Life, or Sufi Khafi, and according to Wikipedia is "the closest that human minds can come to experiencing the freedom of the soul prior to its being encumbered by matter").
I am sure there are others writing about spirituality and anarchism in the same breath, though I am yet to find them. Any thoughts?
Anarchism comes from the Greek for "without archons (rulers)," and is defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics as "the view that society can and should be organized without a coercive state." While this idea has divided into many (often conflicting) schools and sub-schools of thought, some general trends in belief emerge that are what originally attracted me to the ideal: Instead of meaning chaos and destruction, living without rulers, if it is to work at all, requires autonomy (self-rule/ DIY), equality (mutual respect for all others), pacifism (responsibility of getting along with oneself/ other/ the environment, etc), and not a small smattering of wide-eyed wonder. Of course, these are ideals, and like all social philosophies actual practice often falls far short of how people are expected to live (though it doesn't help that there are infinite negative interpretations on anarchism portrayed by the media and youth market). One of the main points where anarchist belief conflicts with itself is over what to do with religion and spirituality. For the most part, anarchists follow the creed of "no gods, no masters," rejecting religious behavior as no better than the opiate of the masses (probably a result of some of anarchism's roots in 18th Cent. Russian Communism). For example, a friend of mine considers herself both an anarchist and a Christian, which she does not see as being a conflict. However she has gotten an extraordinary amount of shit over the years from her anarchist friends because of her religious preferences, a kind of knee-jerk dogmatism that at times rejects anything remotely spiritual or mystical in favor of the pragmatic, rational, political, and all too real.
The irony being however that in its current incarnation, as a modern American youth movement drawing on its resurgence in the punk subculture, Anarchism has come to take on the trappings of a religion itself. A system of beliefs, a mode of dress (black, dirt, patches), a series of ritualistic practices (from train hopping to protesting), and a teleological doctrine (drawing on the Communist worker's uprising) that aims toward some utopia after the Revolution when everyone can take care of themselves and each other. Another common phrase: "Who will build the roads? We will!" It strikes me that even before this paradise is reached, it would be necessary for anarchists to apply their open ideals not just to themselves, but to everyone, drawing on a much more interesting belief that "nothing is true, everything is permitted," that all beliefs, even spiritual ones, are subjective and potentially valid. If one doubts the socio-political, revolutionary force of religion, look at Liberation Theology which in Latin America has attempted to do just that.
There are of course certain contemporary authors who have been somewhat successful in trying to unite principles of anarchism and spirituality (at least for a handful of people like James and I). The first one that comes to mind is Hakim Bey (full writings beyond link), whose tenets of Ontological Anarchy, and the Temporary Autonomous Zone find a direct correlation to certain occult ideas like the magic circle. In his more academic role as Peter Lamborn Wilson, he is an authority on the darker side of the Islamic mystical sect of Sufism. While criticized by anarchists for his mystical and individualist leanings, Bey is also openly a pederast, which is essentially waving a stick in the face of anyone who claims that they don't live by rules.
Another text that had a similar appeal was Days of War, Nights of Love. As an anarchist organization, Crimethinc. has gotten a lot of flack with the years, both at first for being too individualist and lifestyle, then for promoting irresponsible scrounging, and finally for becoming just another protest-centered anarcho-webpage. However, what first impressed me in their earlier writings, beyond the beautiful and often-times personal prose, was the sense of mystique they weaved around their organization: here were anarchists handing out secret invitations, discussing magic as direct action, and in fact weaving their own mythology in an effort to make it into their real world, which for a time actually seemed to work, and hopefully inspired countless other children to do the same.
Take for example this excerpt: "This world, the so-called “real world,” is just a front. Pull back the curtain and you’ll see the libraries are all filled with runaways writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees and sympathizers, all the receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to show how alive they still are. . . and all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us."
Perhaps one reason for Crimethinc.'s reliance on such mystical and utopian imagery was the involvement of one Mark Dixon, a friend of James, and a self-professed "folk scientist" most infamous for his use of think tanks (like highly focused temporary autonomous zones) for accomplishing all sorts of zany acts, like turning a bike into a record player. Most of the truly interesting, magical, and revolutionary writing in Days of War, Nights of Love seems to be credited to him. Among the many zines that he helped pen and pass around were two that I and others have come to call Anamnesis I and Anamnesis II, being absolutely chaotic and fun-house style (yes that is how the zines were originally formated) enquiries into many esoteric, yogic, and metaprogrammatic practices that are absolutely essential to anyone trying to live outside of even one's own rules (Anamnesis being the Platonic doctrine of psychic memory or the eternality of knowledge, an idea later articulated as the Theosophical Akashic Records, Hebrew Book of Life, or Sufi Khafi, and according to Wikipedia is "the closest that human minds can come to experiencing the freedom of the soul prior to its being encumbered by matter").
I am sure there are others writing about spirituality and anarchism in the same breath, though I am yet to find them. Any thoughts?
3.20.2008
Radicals in Space
"I may agree with Shelley that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but he didn't mean they really get many laws enacted, and I guess I didn't ever really look for definable, practical results of anything I wrote. My utopias are not blueprints. In fact, I distrust utopias that pretend to be blueprints. Fiction is not a good medium for preaching or for planning. It is really good, though, for what we used to call conscious-raising."
-Ursula K. LeGuin, on anarchy and writing, interviewed by the Infoshop News
This is a pretty wonderful statement, considering that one of her utopias was the novel "The Dispossessed," in which the anarchists are given the moon. Though this may not be such a feasible blueprint, it certainly raised my consciousness up above earthly concerns when I was a young anarchist.
While we are on the topic of interviews and the radicalizing of space, here is the final interview with Arthur C. Clarke before his death, in which it is revealed that he probably didn't get his last wish, which was for aliens to finally reveal themselves on earth. But certainly he did his part to make Earth a much more welcoming place for them.
1.01.2008
Happy Zeitgeist
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity..."
-Yates, from The Second Coming
It's kind of incredible to see how far world civilization has progressed, and yet how mundane modern celebrations have become. In ancient Mesopotamia, the new year was not just celebrated, but had to be ritually brought about by returning the city-state to a point of chaos; mass orgies, feasting, the dethroning of the king, and then the world is re-created by two teams acting out the mythological slaying of Tiamat by Marduk. While I am still not quite convinced that modern America isn't Babylon (our worship of towers and law, and our war-like and demonizing social rhetoric), our new years celebrations only seem to return to chaos on a surface level: screaming in the streets, drinking and fireworks and singing. While these actions certainly don't re-create the cosmos in any paradigmatic image, they do suggest that the spirit of the times is one of a general and undirected anarchy.
I, on the other hand, had a quiet evening with Sophie. We finished setting up and cleaning our new house, had a lovely dinner, watched a silly movie and played scrabble, watched the fireworks from our window view of downtown, reminisced about how positive last year was and how we planned on reaffirming our practices for 2008, called our families and friends, and curled up in bed, where I dreamt of attending a conference held in all the languages of the world.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity..."
-Yates, from The Second Coming
It's kind of incredible to see how far world civilization has progressed, and yet how mundane modern celebrations have become. In ancient Mesopotamia, the new year was not just celebrated, but had to be ritually brought about by returning the city-state to a point of chaos; mass orgies, feasting, the dethroning of the king, and then the world is re-created by two teams acting out the mythological slaying of Tiamat by Marduk. While I am still not quite convinced that modern America isn't Babylon (our worship of towers and law, and our war-like and demonizing social rhetoric), our new years celebrations only seem to return to chaos on a surface level: screaming in the streets, drinking and fireworks and singing. While these actions certainly don't re-create the cosmos in any paradigmatic image, they do suggest that the spirit of the times is one of a general and undirected anarchy.
I, on the other hand, had a quiet evening with Sophie. We finished setting up and cleaning our new house, had a lovely dinner, watched a silly movie and played scrabble, watched the fireworks from our window view of downtown, reminisced about how positive last year was and how we planned on reaffirming our practices for 2008, called our families and friends, and curled up in bed, where I dreamt of attending a conference held in all the languages of the world.
1.24.2006
self rule vs mob rule, social games and how we play them
I don't like organized sports. I think they are a waste of time, a distraction, a smokescreen, whathaveyou. But at the same time they play a powerful part in the psyche of Pittsburgh right now, and offer up an illustration of what's wrong with society at whole, and how people act in mob situations. As someone whose interested in how people organize themselves and reclaim their own power, I decided that studying the absurdity of Steelers mania is worthwhile from a sociological perspective. Look at the WTO protests in Seattle several years ago, how a bunch of young dispirited anarchists managed to create a national stir over such a fuzzy political issue through exploiting the crowd situation of a political rally. All it took was one person throwing a brick through a Starbucks' window to slingshot the whole issue into the national spotlight. Granted, the "revolution" has gone back underground since then, but the general population now has a better idea of what the WTO is and what's wrong with our current economic position.
Now we have a similar situation here where whatever the outcome of the Superbowl, there will most likely be rioting in Pittsburgh, and potentially in other cities across the United States. Now, I don't particularly think ochlocracy (rule by the mob) is a particularly useful form of governance, but mob situations offer up opportunities for more to happen, for the people to feel that they can take some amount of power back into their lives and wield it for a change instead of having it wielded over them. Of course, it would be a shame to see wanton violence erupt over something as silly as a football game, and as much as I dislike the Southside, seeing it burn would be mostly embarrassing for someone like myself who would like to see my revolts actually revolt against something. But even still, I am curious about this situation, because it would be an example of people coming together and finding power in each other throwing all the rules out the window, and potentially making there own.
In a previous comment I tried to make a distinction about that word "rule" because it means many different things. In a political sense it is to hold power over someone else. In a game/ social setting it means the guidelines or mores by which people consent to interact. As an anarchist I am opposed to ruling in the sense of exerting power over another, and am opposed to the "rules of the game" only so much as they are used by those in power to continue their rule over others. But like any ideology this is a gray area, to some degree rules, or set guidelines for interaction, are still necessary (in a society in which people do not hold themselves ultimately responsible for the affects of their actions and respectful of those affects on other people). We do not live in a utopia currently, there are still people who will try and get away with whatever they can to the detriment of others. The system of stoplights for instance is a set of rules whereby pedestrians can still cross the street safely and accidents not occur. Without these we could have pure chaos and mob rule, because the majority of people are trying to get where they're going as fast as fucking possible without a shit who they might hit. Yes, I know there are procedures for if stoplights go out, but these are also socially sanctioned rules. In the event of a major blackout would they be followed? Most likely the law will step in and establish order and we won't be given a chance to find out if people can govern themselves.
There is a third definition of the phrase "to rule" coming from the modern street vernacular which defines ruling as a). playing the game well, ie. being able to utilize the current set of rules to win (which doesn't necessarily mean winning over someone else, the best games to play are the ones where we all win). and b). to create one's own set of rules or game entirely, and then win by playing that. In relation to organized sports, the only rules being played are those set up for the game itself and the socio-political rules for how the spectators should behave towards the game and each other, as a vicarious past-time with no other social repercussions. However, in the event of rioting or other mob situations, those rules are discarded and a situation occurs in which anything might happen. Granted without a sense of collective direction, or some force stepping in to rule the situation one way or the other, the best that can be hoped for is a short lived chaos with a modicum of violence and property damage. What I'm interested in is how this can be utilized for some sort of greater good. Organized sports is one of the few things that can get large amounts of people riled up and onto the streets. War holds nothing on football here anymore, the Superbowl could be the next WTO. Regardless what happens, it may offer up some unique insights in how people choose to rule themselves and how new rules and games are created when the old ones don't apply. Perhaps somewhere in there is hints at a game we can all play to win.
Now we have a similar situation here where whatever the outcome of the Superbowl, there will most likely be rioting in Pittsburgh, and potentially in other cities across the United States. Now, I don't particularly think ochlocracy (rule by the mob) is a particularly useful form of governance, but mob situations offer up opportunities for more to happen, for the people to feel that they can take some amount of power back into their lives and wield it for a change instead of having it wielded over them. Of course, it would be a shame to see wanton violence erupt over something as silly as a football game, and as much as I dislike the Southside, seeing it burn would be mostly embarrassing for someone like myself who would like to see my revolts actually revolt against something. But even still, I am curious about this situation, because it would be an example of people coming together and finding power in each other throwing all the rules out the window, and potentially making there own.
In a previous comment I tried to make a distinction about that word "rule" because it means many different things. In a political sense it is to hold power over someone else. In a game/ social setting it means the guidelines or mores by which people consent to interact. As an anarchist I am opposed to ruling in the sense of exerting power over another, and am opposed to the "rules of the game" only so much as they are used by those in power to continue their rule over others. But like any ideology this is a gray area, to some degree rules, or set guidelines for interaction, are still necessary (in a society in which people do not hold themselves ultimately responsible for the affects of their actions and respectful of those affects on other people). We do not live in a utopia currently, there are still people who will try and get away with whatever they can to the detriment of others. The system of stoplights for instance is a set of rules whereby pedestrians can still cross the street safely and accidents not occur. Without these we could have pure chaos and mob rule, because the majority of people are trying to get where they're going as fast as fucking possible without a shit who they might hit. Yes, I know there are procedures for if stoplights go out, but these are also socially sanctioned rules. In the event of a major blackout would they be followed? Most likely the law will step in and establish order and we won't be given a chance to find out if people can govern themselves.
There is a third definition of the phrase "to rule" coming from the modern street vernacular which defines ruling as a). playing the game well, ie. being able to utilize the current set of rules to win (which doesn't necessarily mean winning over someone else, the best games to play are the ones where we all win). and b). to create one's own set of rules or game entirely, and then win by playing that. In relation to organized sports, the only rules being played are those set up for the game itself and the socio-political rules for how the spectators should behave towards the game and each other, as a vicarious past-time with no other social repercussions. However, in the event of rioting or other mob situations, those rules are discarded and a situation occurs in which anything might happen. Granted without a sense of collective direction, or some force stepping in to rule the situation one way or the other, the best that can be hoped for is a short lived chaos with a modicum of violence and property damage. What I'm interested in is how this can be utilized for some sort of greater good. Organized sports is one of the few things that can get large amounts of people riled up and onto the streets. War holds nothing on football here anymore, the Superbowl could be the next WTO. Regardless what happens, it may offer up some unique insights in how people choose to rule themselves and how new rules and games are created when the old ones don't apply. Perhaps somewhere in there is hints at a game we can all play to win.
10.25.2005
Shadow Culture Manifesto
Shadow Culture Manifesto.
(still) in progress:
[transcribed from Adbusters, #62, the Precarity Issue]
01 This time we’ll get straight to the point.
02 The act of asking for less, not more, is a radical act. It may be the most radical gesture of out times.
03 Even though, you know, it is usually overlooked.
04 Consumption is the foundation of civilization as we know it, far more powerful than, say, religious faith or political ideology. This society stands or falls on consumption. Consumption is our daily contribution and most intimate connection to a doomsday system.
05 Did we say a doomsday system? We did. Can anyone still fail to see that we live in times genuinely different, more fragile and uncertain than ever before? Human societies have faced terrible threats and instability in the past. But not every human society, at the same time, in every corner of the Earth.
06 In exchange for some of us living as the wealthiest and most privileged humans ever to exist, we have fettered ourselves to eye-poppingly complex systems that we depend on for our survival. Trouble being that these same systems are now failing or being actively withdrawn at almost every level. The degree of interconnectedness is incomprehensible. Imagine a castle somehow suspended in the air. It’s walls, floors, turrets and dome riddled with hairline cracks. Where will the first total failure occur?
07 This is the vertigo of collapse.
08 Anyway. Take away the endless growth of consumption and you need to come up with a radically different system. Do you see where each of us has a role in this?
09 On this point, nothing has changed. Certainly not since the day the President of the United States of America told his people to keep on shopping or the terrorists win.
10 (Don’t they seem to be winning? Or at least, not loosing?)
11 What is changing is the sense of urgency. We are in the process of imagining the next civilization while living within the existing one. Some came to this purpose because they felt disturbed or repelled by the culture that we live in. Many more, now, are just looking for a softer landing when we go spinning off the ragged-ass end of this falling star.
12 There’s a wild kind of energy to it, a tearing off in all directions. The proof is in, again, that the key component of advance in any sphere – innovation – has nothing to do with private interest or ownership or the exchange of paper money.
13 We are inventing a way of life with less. We are asking the following question: Take away consumerism. What does the next culture look like?
14 And? Are we finding any answers? Seeing any patterns?
15 Let’s be bold enough to say, yes.
16 We are finding a next culture that looks something like the barn-raising parties of our grandparents, the community canning kitchens of the Second World War, the quilting bee, the teach-in, the village shaman, the underground economy, the monastery, the potlatch, the agora, the cooperative, the commune, the squat.
17 Except different.
18 We have never had so many people with so much knowledge, so much power to share, so much longing to work toward a new and different purpose, and so much need to do exactly that. Those who ask less have more to give. The hunger to contribute and to learn doesn’t vanish as our own demands diminish. In fact, the opposite appears to be true.
19 If we went in for slogans, this might be the one:
20 Self-reliance and mutual aid.
21 Might we say this is what democracy looks like? We might. More than that, it is a kind of freedom.
22 But the pierogi-making party instead of the blockbuster Hollywood film? It sounds corny. It even feels corny. Then again, a lot of things are done in this world that seem strange when observed with the benefit of distance. Like spending 15 hours a day in front of different types of glowing screens. Like paying for food that would grow out of every crack in the pavement if someone would plant a seed. Like watching golf on TV.
23 Does this make us outsiders? Not at all.
24 We refuse to be outsiders because we refuse to cede the culture. Far more is at stake than following our bliss. Ours is not a lifestyle preference but a moral imperative.
25 Still.
26 We have the capacity, more than ever before, to decide our own terms. We can generate energy and treat our own waste. We can build homes, raise food, create new forms of community and family. If we choose, it is possible to design and produce any product we require. We may do so locally; we may do so globally. What we cannot do is do it all alone.
27 In every respect we are working to produce the impossible, prototypes of a parallel way of life. The working model looks something like this: a sphere composed of interconnected clusters. At any given moment, some nodes are forming, others are dissolving. Seen at the level of the individual, it is a galaxy of possibilities and a person might contribute to none, one, ten or an infinite number in series. At the system level, it is a network. More metaphorically, a net.
28 We are the people, sitting on the porch, sharing a meal at mid-day, asking more and more from each other but less and less from the earth and the state – less of its schools and shopping malls, its trade rules and tax regimes. We are the people who serve to remind that there are other ways to live, and that anyone can join in that imperfect search.
29 We are living from beneath, on the fringe, in the shadow.
30 A shadow culture.
...
Looks like the Ultraculture's got some competition, or more like some allies.
(still) in progress:
[transcribed from Adbusters, #62, the Precarity Issue]
01 This time we’ll get straight to the point.
02 The act of asking for less, not more, is a radical act. It may be the most radical gesture of out times.
03 Even though, you know, it is usually overlooked.
04 Consumption is the foundation of civilization as we know it, far more powerful than, say, religious faith or political ideology. This society stands or falls on consumption. Consumption is our daily contribution and most intimate connection to a doomsday system.
05 Did we say a doomsday system? We did. Can anyone still fail to see that we live in times genuinely different, more fragile and uncertain than ever before? Human societies have faced terrible threats and instability in the past. But not every human society, at the same time, in every corner of the Earth.
06 In exchange for some of us living as the wealthiest and most privileged humans ever to exist, we have fettered ourselves to eye-poppingly complex systems that we depend on for our survival. Trouble being that these same systems are now failing or being actively withdrawn at almost every level. The degree of interconnectedness is incomprehensible. Imagine a castle somehow suspended in the air. It’s walls, floors, turrets and dome riddled with hairline cracks. Where will the first total failure occur?
07 This is the vertigo of collapse.
08 Anyway. Take away the endless growth of consumption and you need to come up with a radically different system. Do you see where each of us has a role in this?
09 On this point, nothing has changed. Certainly not since the day the President of the United States of America told his people to keep on shopping or the terrorists win.
10 (Don’t they seem to be winning? Or at least, not loosing?)
11 What is changing is the sense of urgency. We are in the process of imagining the next civilization while living within the existing one. Some came to this purpose because they felt disturbed or repelled by the culture that we live in. Many more, now, are just looking for a softer landing when we go spinning off the ragged-ass end of this falling star.
12 There’s a wild kind of energy to it, a tearing off in all directions. The proof is in, again, that the key component of advance in any sphere – innovation – has nothing to do with private interest or ownership or the exchange of paper money.
13 We are inventing a way of life with less. We are asking the following question: Take away consumerism. What does the next culture look like?
14 And? Are we finding any answers? Seeing any patterns?
15 Let’s be bold enough to say, yes.
16 We are finding a next culture that looks something like the barn-raising parties of our grandparents, the community canning kitchens of the Second World War, the quilting bee, the teach-in, the village shaman, the underground economy, the monastery, the potlatch, the agora, the cooperative, the commune, the squat.
17 Except different.
18 We have never had so many people with so much knowledge, so much power to share, so much longing to work toward a new and different purpose, and so much need to do exactly that. Those who ask less have more to give. The hunger to contribute and to learn doesn’t vanish as our own demands diminish. In fact, the opposite appears to be true.
19 If we went in for slogans, this might be the one:
20 Self-reliance and mutual aid.
21 Might we say this is what democracy looks like? We might. More than that, it is a kind of freedom.
22 But the pierogi-making party instead of the blockbuster Hollywood film? It sounds corny. It even feels corny. Then again, a lot of things are done in this world that seem strange when observed with the benefit of distance. Like spending 15 hours a day in front of different types of glowing screens. Like paying for food that would grow out of every crack in the pavement if someone would plant a seed. Like watching golf on TV.
23 Does this make us outsiders? Not at all.
24 We refuse to be outsiders because we refuse to cede the culture. Far more is at stake than following our bliss. Ours is not a lifestyle preference but a moral imperative.
25 Still.
26 We have the capacity, more than ever before, to decide our own terms. We can generate energy and treat our own waste. We can build homes, raise food, create new forms of community and family. If we choose, it is possible to design and produce any product we require. We may do so locally; we may do so globally. What we cannot do is do it all alone.
27 In every respect we are working to produce the impossible, prototypes of a parallel way of life. The working model looks something like this: a sphere composed of interconnected clusters. At any given moment, some nodes are forming, others are dissolving. Seen at the level of the individual, it is a galaxy of possibilities and a person might contribute to none, one, ten or an infinite number in series. At the system level, it is a network. More metaphorically, a net.
28 We are the people, sitting on the porch, sharing a meal at mid-day, asking more and more from each other but less and less from the earth and the state – less of its schools and shopping malls, its trade rules and tax regimes. We are the people who serve to remind that there are other ways to live, and that anyone can join in that imperfect search.
29 We are living from beneath, on the fringe, in the shadow.
30 A shadow culture.
...
Looks like the Ultraculture's got some competition, or more like some allies.
10.24.2005
Center for Tactical Magic
As opposed to the university-fed Emma Goldman Institute for Anarchy, we give you...
The Center for Tactical Magic! [via exploding ardvark]
"The Center for Tactical Magic engages in extensive research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical Magic. A fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and the private investigator, Tactical Magic is an amalgam of disparate arts invoked for the purpose of actively addressing Power on individual, communal, and transnational fronts. At the CTM we are committed to achieving the Great Work of Tactical Magic through community-based projects, daily interdiction, and the activation of latent energies toward positive social transformation."
Blurring the border between art, shamanism, and activism, the CTM's actions include everything from agit-prop seminars to free occult clinics to passing out donuts at protests to both protesters and police officers alike!
The Center for Tactical Magic! [via exploding ardvark]
"The Center for Tactical Magic engages in extensive research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical Magic. A fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and the private investigator, Tactical Magic is an amalgam of disparate arts invoked for the purpose of actively addressing Power on individual, communal, and transnational fronts. At the CTM we are committed to achieving the Great Work of Tactical Magic through community-based projects, daily interdiction, and the activation of latent energies toward positive social transformation."
Blurring the border between art, shamanism, and activism, the CTM's actions include everything from agit-prop seminars to free occult clinics to passing out donuts at protests to both protesters and police officers alike!
Emma Goldman Insitute for Anarchist Studies
Emma Goldman Institute For Anarchist Studies or, the capitulation of a movement into history.
$368 Million
Federal Grant Funds, & Gift from Securitas Inc.
from the official site:
"While the EGIAS exists only as a plan at the time of this writing, the positive impact such a center of study could bring to the world could never be more needed. Anarchist ideas influence our everyday life from peer relationships to modern business management theories to open source software development. Anarchist organizing for social change has brought about a more peaceful and just world while slowing the movements towards hegemony, violence, and injustice. For one, the Anarchist Institute will help clear misconceptions about anarchism. First and foremost anarchism's incorrect equation with violence and riots - as Emma Goldman said herself ""It takes less mental effort to condemn than to think." The EGIAS will also function in further advocating, promoting, and developing anarchist thought."
Once built, the EGIAS will house:
* The Chomsky Anarchist History Museum - Spanning from pre-columbian native precursors to anarchism up through the modern day peace movement and into the future of anarchism in our world. A hall of Anarchist fame will honor famous anarchists like John Cage, Mother Jones, Henry Miller, Utah Phillips, Mark Rothko, Joe Strummer, Henry David Thoreau, Emiliano Zapata, and the modern day Zapatistas.
* Birth control distribution center
* Bakunin Center for Applied Anarchist Research - An anarchist think-tank.
* Kropotkin Café - serving coffee and light meals into late night hours. Live music every Tuesday - Saturday.
* Goldman Dance Studio - adjacent to both the Kropotkin Café and Bakunin center for easy access.
* The Sacco & Vanzetti Memorial Learning Center will serve as a classroom for the departments of Peace Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, and Labor History.
as mutato nomine sez: to kill something, build an ivory tower around it.
$368 Million
Federal Grant Funds, & Gift from Securitas Inc.
from the official site:
"While the EGIAS exists only as a plan at the time of this writing, the positive impact such a center of study could bring to the world could never be more needed. Anarchist ideas influence our everyday life from peer relationships to modern business management theories to open source software development. Anarchist organizing for social change has brought about a more peaceful and just world while slowing the movements towards hegemony, violence, and injustice. For one, the Anarchist Institute will help clear misconceptions about anarchism. First and foremost anarchism's incorrect equation with violence and riots - as Emma Goldman said herself ""It takes less mental effort to condemn than to think." The EGIAS will also function in further advocating, promoting, and developing anarchist thought."
Once built, the EGIAS will house:
* The Chomsky Anarchist History Museum - Spanning from pre-columbian native precursors to anarchism up through the modern day peace movement and into the future of anarchism in our world. A hall of Anarchist fame will honor famous anarchists like John Cage, Mother Jones, Henry Miller, Utah Phillips, Mark Rothko, Joe Strummer, Henry David Thoreau, Emiliano Zapata, and the modern day Zapatistas.
* Birth control distribution center
* Bakunin Center for Applied Anarchist Research - An anarchist think-tank.
* Kropotkin Café - serving coffee and light meals into late night hours. Live music every Tuesday - Saturday.
* Goldman Dance Studio - adjacent to both the Kropotkin Café and Bakunin center for easy access.
* The Sacco & Vanzetti Memorial Learning Center will serve as a classroom for the departments of Peace Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, and Labor History.
as mutato nomine sez: to kill something, build an ivory tower around it.
10.18.2005
wanted: a lot of hope
and in other news, James Gyre just told me he found out that the builidng he and Lara are trying to buy on Penn Ave. for a new community center is being signed for tomorrow, either by them or the other group that submitted a proposal. So he asked that anyone who cares (and you should cuz this space will be awesome) should put out some positive energy that things go well at the meeting (8pm tomorrow) and everything turns out for the best. If it ends up in their hands this project could really become a necessary turning point for the Pittsburgh radical arts scene. So put your hopes out there.
Crimethinc.net/work 2.0
"After years and years of failed attempts and results so horrendous as to boggle the mind, we open for public participation the newest attempt at a CrimethInc. networking site, CrimethInc.Net/work 2.0. There are a lot of bells and whistles here—an events calendar, a cell directory, user blogs, a recipe database, art galleries—all of which are begging for content created by you. This site is only as valuable and useful as y'all make it, so let's work together to make this an indespensible resource for ambitious lunatics all over the world. A good place to start after registering is the .net owners' manual."
10.07.2005
the second superpower - mankind
"There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the “will of the people” in a global social movement. The beautiful but deeply agitated face of this second superpower is the worldwide peace campaign, but the body of the movement is made up of millions of people concerned with a broad agenda that includes social development, environmentalism, health, and human rights. This movement has a surprisingly agile and muscular body of citizen activists who identify their interests with world society as a whole—and who recognize that at a fundamental level we are all one."
"How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally. The symbol of the first superpower is the eagle—an awesome predator that rules from the skies, preying on mice and small animals. Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants. Ants rule from below. And while I may be awed seeing eagles in flight, when ants invade my kitchen they command my attention."
This sounds an awfully lot like the principles of stigmergy and swarm intelligence in action that Metachor's been talking about for years now.
"How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally. The symbol of the first superpower is the eagle—an awesome predator that rules from the skies, preying on mice and small animals. Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants. Ants rule from below. And while I may be awed seeing eagles in flight, when ants invade my kitchen they command my attention."
This sounds an awfully lot like the principles of stigmergy and swarm intelligence in action that Metachor's been talking about for years now.
10.02.2005
life is not a true or false questionaire
It wouldn't be a proper family reuninon unless at some point, preferably after everyone's got at least a couple drinks in them, someone brings up politics. Of course, in my family this is less an argument over which party is in the right, as much all around laughter at how little any of actually believes in the system and the lies it continues to spew forth on a daily basis. After reading the article this morning on the biological attack on the protesters in DC last week, and hearing that it was extensively covered in other media I began to wonder, does it really matter if it's true?
To some degree, yes, the idea of our government being so low as to poison its own population is horrendous, and needs to be addressed, but even more horrendous is that regardless of whether it's true or not, the possibility that they very well could is utterly believable. What makes something true anyway? These days, that seems to rely less on whether a particular event did or did not happen and more on how widespread the belief of its possibility is. Shortly after the Katrina debacle, on reading in multiple sources that Bush staged photo-ops of rebuilding levees and soup kitchens only to have them torn down when he left, I tried telling this to a number of people, only to find utter shock and disbelief that any human being could be so callous. What do you believe? Even if it's not true, could rumors alone impeach a man or mark him up as one of the most heinous war criminals of all time?
Truth is a sketchy issue, and one that's fascinated me for some time, because no matter where or how far you look for it, it's not there. At least by any objective standards of validification. Certainly you could toss out hassan i-sabah's old bromide that "nothing is true, everything is permitted," or, as Siga pointed out earlier, "truth comes from within" and we alone can determine what we believe, but even then it comes down to value judgments and a defined sense of morality than cold hard facts.
Let's face it, the media lies to us, and not just the corporate sponsored newscasts. About nine tenths (or more) of everything we read or hear is shadings of truth, spin and counter spin of events aimed at getting across certain ideas and agendas till our heads are dizzy and we fall down under the hubris of inaccurate information. In one might be the greatest conspiracy of them all, the "Illuminatus" trilogy (which is itself only one book full of misinformation), Robert Anton Wilson coins the term fnord, which is the almost audible sound of the full truth not being disclosed. Open up the newspaper and read any article with a critical and detached frame of mind. You can almost visibly see the gaps in logic and will to suspend disbelief that lie embedded in the slick writing. Just what is not being said? And how are we to believe any of it?
Inspired by Alfred Korzybski's general semantics and assertion that "the map is not the territory" (nor really an actual map itself but just a word), R. A. Wilson eventually formed the idea of Maybe Logic, which "consists of never regarding any model or map of Universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial." Not looking for concrete validity but for the suggestion of possibility, including the possibility to disregard one's own standards for validity.
Take your deepest held beliefs. The one's you never question and live your every moment as if reality depended on. Ask yourself, why do I believe this? (and don't answer "because it's true"). Dig into the roots of the issue, morals, upbringing, social mores or lack thereof. Here's one that used to haunt me (and is a rather minor issue when it comes down to it), vegetarianism. I used to be vegan, now I occasionally eat meat. Do I care about animals any less, did I suddenly decide that my reasons for not consuming them were fallacious? No. The more I looked at why I was doing it, the more I realized the whole issue was far more complex, far more gray than my individual actions alone would ever be able to address. I still refuse factory farmed animals, I still (and even more so than ever) am conscious of how my actions affect other living beings, but I realized that the basis for that black/white decision was based more on what I should do in toto than taking any given situation for what it was and acting accordingly. I still listen to records and ride a bike, and vulcanization requires bone marrow. There's the possibility that sometimes you can not fight every battle. There's also the possibility that we create rules and guidelines for ourselves that are just as stringent and confining as any law created by impersonal governmental policies. And the best way to not get caught in rules (or stagnant beliefs) is to occasionally break them. Out with the cop in the head, and all that. If you haven't already made up your mind it's never too late to change your opinion.
Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh yeah. Don't believe everything you read. But don't disbelieve it either. Entertain the possibility that it's possible the US government released bioweapons on its citizens or that it's all a big conspiracy. And then laugh and go to bed and make sure to watch your health. Sweet dreams and don't let the tulerimia bite.
To some degree, yes, the idea of our government being so low as to poison its own population is horrendous, and needs to be addressed, but even more horrendous is that regardless of whether it's true or not, the possibility that they very well could is utterly believable. What makes something true anyway? These days, that seems to rely less on whether a particular event did or did not happen and more on how widespread the belief of its possibility is. Shortly after the Katrina debacle, on reading in multiple sources that Bush staged photo-ops of rebuilding levees and soup kitchens only to have them torn down when he left, I tried telling this to a number of people, only to find utter shock and disbelief that any human being could be so callous. What do you believe? Even if it's not true, could rumors alone impeach a man or mark him up as one of the most heinous war criminals of all time?
Truth is a sketchy issue, and one that's fascinated me for some time, because no matter where or how far you look for it, it's not there. At least by any objective standards of validification. Certainly you could toss out hassan i-sabah's old bromide that "nothing is true, everything is permitted," or, as Siga pointed out earlier, "truth comes from within" and we alone can determine what we believe, but even then it comes down to value judgments and a defined sense of morality than cold hard facts.
Let's face it, the media lies to us, and not just the corporate sponsored newscasts. About nine tenths (or more) of everything we read or hear is shadings of truth, spin and counter spin of events aimed at getting across certain ideas and agendas till our heads are dizzy and we fall down under the hubris of inaccurate information. In one might be the greatest conspiracy of them all, the "Illuminatus" trilogy (which is itself only one book full of misinformation), Robert Anton Wilson coins the term fnord, which is the almost audible sound of the full truth not being disclosed. Open up the newspaper and read any article with a critical and detached frame of mind. You can almost visibly see the gaps in logic and will to suspend disbelief that lie embedded in the slick writing. Just what is not being said? And how are we to believe any of it?
Inspired by Alfred Korzybski's general semantics and assertion that "the map is not the territory" (nor really an actual map itself but just a word), R. A. Wilson eventually formed the idea of Maybe Logic, which "consists of never regarding any model or map of Universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial." Not looking for concrete validity but for the suggestion of possibility, including the possibility to disregard one's own standards for validity.
Take your deepest held beliefs. The one's you never question and live your every moment as if reality depended on. Ask yourself, why do I believe this? (and don't answer "because it's true"). Dig into the roots of the issue, morals, upbringing, social mores or lack thereof. Here's one that used to haunt me (and is a rather minor issue when it comes down to it), vegetarianism. I used to be vegan, now I occasionally eat meat. Do I care about animals any less, did I suddenly decide that my reasons for not consuming them were fallacious? No. The more I looked at why I was doing it, the more I realized the whole issue was far more complex, far more gray than my individual actions alone would ever be able to address. I still refuse factory farmed animals, I still (and even more so than ever) am conscious of how my actions affect other living beings, but I realized that the basis for that black/white decision was based more on what I should do in toto than taking any given situation for what it was and acting accordingly. I still listen to records and ride a bike, and vulcanization requires bone marrow. There's the possibility that sometimes you can not fight every battle. There's also the possibility that we create rules and guidelines for ourselves that are just as stringent and confining as any law created by impersonal governmental policies. And the best way to not get caught in rules (or stagnant beliefs) is to occasionally break them. Out with the cop in the head, and all that. If you haven't already made up your mind it's never too late to change your opinion.
Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh yeah. Don't believe everything you read. But don't disbelieve it either. Entertain the possibility that it's possible the US government released bioweapons on its citizens or that it's all a big conspiracy. And then laugh and go to bed and make sure to watch your health. Sweet dreams and don't let the tulerimia bite.
emergency broadcast
this is frightening, very frightening: (and yes I know it's been posted at american samizdat but I read it in the paper this morning since I'm down in dc with my folks and this was my immediate reaction).
"Biohazard sensors showed the presence of small amounts of potentially dangerous tularemia bacteria in the Mall area last weekend as huge crowds assembled there, but health officials said they believed the levels were too low to be a threat." (via Washington Post)
I need to do more research on this, but it sure sounds like the US Government released a biological weapon that it created on the anti-war protestors who assembled last weekend on the mall. They claim it's not contagious person to person, and yet almost everyone I know is suddenly sick with symptoms that sound an awful lot like those of the released disease, tularemia.
please keep in mind this may not be true, but the article does not go into great depth of detail. Either way, the mere possibility that our government is attempting to infect protestors, or endanger the lives of its citizens in any way is enough to make me sick, and could infuriate people nationwide. Reminds me of the last big protest there where several people died of menengitis.
Please spread this information, and if you have came in contact with anyone who was in dc last week and you are showing signs of this disease, please seek medical attention.
"Biohazard sensors showed the presence of small amounts of potentially dangerous tularemia bacteria in the Mall area last weekend as huge crowds assembled there, but health officials said they believed the levels were too low to be a threat." (via Washington Post)
I need to do more research on this, but it sure sounds like the US Government released a biological weapon that it created on the anti-war protestors who assembled last weekend on the mall. They claim it's not contagious person to person, and yet almost everyone I know is suddenly sick with symptoms that sound an awful lot like those of the released disease, tularemia.
please keep in mind this may not be true, but the article does not go into great depth of detail. Either way, the mere possibility that our government is attempting to infect protestors, or endanger the lives of its citizens in any way is enough to make me sick, and could infuriate people nationwide. Reminds me of the last big protest there where several people died of menengitis.
Please spread this information, and if you have came in contact with anyone who was in dc last week and you are showing signs of this disease, please seek medical attention.
9.26.2005
may the circle be unbroken
Cindy Sheehan arrested monday protesting in front of white house.
"Sheehan and several dozen other protesters sat down on the sidewalk after marching along the pedestrian walkway on Pennsylvania Avenue. Police warned them three times that they were breaking the law by failing to move along, then began making arrests.
Sheehan, 48, was the first taken into custody. She stood up and was led to a police vehicle while protesters chanted, "The whole world is watching."
how strange, that's exactly what the crowd chanted when I was arrested for sitting in front of the white house and not moving at a protest against sanctions in Iraq back when I was in high school. and the cops gave three warnings then too.
some things never change.
"Sheehan and several dozen other protesters sat down on the sidewalk after marching along the pedestrian walkway on Pennsylvania Avenue. Police warned them three times that they were breaking the law by failing to move along, then began making arrests.
Sheehan, 48, was the first taken into custody. She stood up and was led to a police vehicle while protesters chanted, "The whole world is watching."
how strange, that's exactly what the crowd chanted when I was arrested for sitting in front of the white house and not moving at a protest against sanctions in Iraq back when I was in high school. and the cops gave three warnings then too.
some things never change.
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