"'As the ordeal went on, it became clear to certain of these
balloonists, observing from above and poised ever upon a cusp of
mortal danger, how much the modern State depended for its survival on
maintaining a condition of permanent siege--through the systematic
encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the
relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against
citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities like those of the
infamous pétroleurs of Paris. When the Sieges ended, these
balloonists chose to fly on ...'"
-(Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 19f.)
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Callithumped, Jugged & Punked: Part 3
What are we to make of the crayon palimpsest of Bohemian subcultures, each one scrawling its boast over the lyrics of a previous generation, creating colorful forms that, while new, remain indebted to older eccentricities? The true iconoclast is something rare. Instead, it’s all too common for the avant garde to pillage its predecessors, sometimes with a sly wink and satirical flourish. In this way, what once was obscure is revealed in a new form or even popularized. Rock & Roll is struck from old Blues. Punk attitude owes much to the irreverence and DIY approach of old jug bands and forgotten roots music.
Is that the train that they speak of
The one I heard in my younger days
All great bluesmen have rode her
I'm jumping up gonna ride that train.
This from “Version City” by The Clash; here and there are nods to tradition, admissions of musical mummery, and signs of transitional forms. Following the punk genealogy set forth by Jeffrey Lewis, we find two precursors of punk that seem unlikely at first blush: The Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs.
"The Rounders were the first really bent traditional band. And the first traditionally-based band that was not trying to sound like an old record," Pete Stampfel explained to Folk Roots in 1995. Together with Steve Weber. Stampfel formed the nucleus of a collection of bands real, imagined and loosely associated: MacGrundy’s Old Timey Wool Thumpers, The Strict Temperance String Band of Lower Delancey Street, The Temporal Worth High Steppers, The Motherfucker Creek Babyrapers and The Hoochie Koochie Dream Band among many others. The two met in 1963 and started gigging. Their first album, The Holy Modal Rounders, came out in 1964 and boasts the first use of the word “psychedelic” in pop music lyrics. In a natural twist of fate, the two played with The Fugs briefly in 1965.
The Holy Modal Rounders offer an interesting glimpse of musical mutation as an agent, or perhaps symptom, of sub cultural change. Their first two albums were comprised of covers of old standards, most, if not all, from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which boasted a cover by occultist Robert Fludd and selections from the dawn of electronic recording. Smith was a most peculiar man and a famous Thelemite who, though not a member of the occult Ordo Templi Orientis, was nevertheless consecrated as a Bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica in 1986. In addition to being an occultist and ethnomusicologist, he was also a painter and renowned experimental film-maker. Perhaps cognizant of his own role as musical catalyst, when he received a Chairman’s Merit Award at the Grammy Awards ceremony he said,” "I'm glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music."
Pete Stampfel and Pete Weber, the original duo at the core of The Holy Modal Rounders, were no strangers to musical eccentricity. It might be safe to suggest that they were a vital part of the chain of transmission from Harry Smith in changing America through music.
In October 1962 whilst in New York, Stampfel played with Tiny Tim and Phil Ochs at a Greenwich Village Club called The Third Side. Stampfel and Weber met in New York in March 1963 and they started to gig as a duo at places like The Cafe Flamenco and The Playhouse Theatre under a series of bizarre names like the Total Quintessence Stomach Pumpers
In the period that followed Stampfel formed The Hoochie Koochie Dream Band and then, in late 1974, The Unholy Modal Rounders, who together with Michael Hurley and friends recorded the Have Moicy album, which was one of their better efforts and superior to Last Round, which was actually recorded in 1976.
There is a sort of anarchic heathen energy in the music of the Holy Modal Rounders. Even as their music is firmly rooted in the wildness found in the Smith anthology and elsewhere, their sound also pointed the way forward to the punk rebellion, squeezing juice from the older radical sounds that inspired them and allowing it to ferment. In creating a bridge from the American folk sound to the raucous rebellion and irony in which punk was steeped, they changed the stream of musical history. Their contemporaries, The Fugs, carried the torch forward into realms of freakish vulgarity, perversion and Yippie absurdity, and their legacy will be explored in Part 4 of this series
Is that the train that they speak of
The one I heard in my younger days
All great bluesmen have rode her
I'm jumping up gonna ride that train.
This from “Version City” by The Clash; here and there are nods to tradition, admissions of musical mummery, and signs of transitional forms. Following the punk genealogy set forth by Jeffrey Lewis, we find two precursors of punk that seem unlikely at first blush: The Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs.
"The Rounders were the first really bent traditional band. And the first traditionally-based band that was not trying to sound like an old record," Pete Stampfel explained to Folk Roots in 1995. Together with Steve Weber. Stampfel formed the nucleus of a collection of bands real, imagined and loosely associated: MacGrundy’s Old Timey Wool Thumpers, The Strict Temperance String Band of Lower Delancey Street, The Temporal Worth High Steppers, The Motherfucker Creek Babyrapers and The Hoochie Koochie Dream Band among many others. The two met in 1963 and started gigging. Their first album, The Holy Modal Rounders, came out in 1964 and boasts the first use of the word “psychedelic” in pop music lyrics. In a natural twist of fate, the two played with The Fugs briefly in 1965.
The Holy Modal Rounders offer an interesting glimpse of musical mutation as an agent, or perhaps symptom, of sub cultural change. Their first two albums were comprised of covers of old standards, most, if not all, from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which boasted a cover by occultist Robert Fludd and selections from the dawn of electronic recording. Smith was a most peculiar man and a famous Thelemite who, though not a member of the occult Ordo Templi Orientis, was nevertheless consecrated as a Bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica in 1986. In addition to being an occultist and ethnomusicologist, he was also a painter and renowned experimental film-maker. Perhaps cognizant of his own role as musical catalyst, when he received a Chairman’s Merit Award at the Grammy Awards ceremony he said,” "I'm glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music."
Pete Stampfel and Pete Weber, the original duo at the core of The Holy Modal Rounders, were no strangers to musical eccentricity. It might be safe to suggest that they were a vital part of the chain of transmission from Harry Smith in changing America through music.
In October 1962 whilst in New York, Stampfel played with Tiny Tim and Phil Ochs at a Greenwich Village Club called The Third Side. Stampfel and Weber met in New York in March 1963 and they started to gig as a duo at places like The Cafe Flamenco and The Playhouse Theatre under a series of bizarre names like the Total Quintessence Stomach Pumpers
In the period that followed Stampfel formed The Hoochie Koochie Dream Band and then, in late 1974, The Unholy Modal Rounders, who together with Michael Hurley and friends recorded the Have Moicy album, which was one of their better efforts and superior to Last Round, which was actually recorded in 1976.
There is a sort of anarchic heathen energy in the music of the Holy Modal Rounders. Even as their music is firmly rooted in the wildness found in the Smith anthology and elsewhere, their sound also pointed the way forward to the punk rebellion, squeezing juice from the older radical sounds that inspired them and allowing it to ferment. In creating a bridge from the American folk sound to the raucous rebellion and irony in which punk was steeped, they changed the stream of musical history. Their contemporaries, The Fugs, carried the torch forward into realms of freakish vulgarity, perversion and Yippie absurdity, and their legacy will be explored in Part 4 of this series
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The Death of Mystery?
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
-Albert Einstein
There is a shell-game going on and it isn’t pretty.
That hoary old bogeyman of philosophy, Aleister Crowley, once suggested that his exploration of occult and visionary states involved “the methods of science, the aim of religion.” It’s an interesting idea which is a bit analogous to the scientific method, though admittedly more subjective: try these methods and find out whether they work or not. The “methods” in question involve, at the very least, the manipulation of consciousness and will.
Lately, the often-useful and sometimes dreadful tool known as science has been making a stand as a philosophy, something referred to as Scientism. Authors like Richard Dawkins are, in a peculiar and limited way, analyzing religion through the lens of science. Or are they? Sometimes this critique is little more than an interdisciplinary bait-and-switch. Myth is dismissed after being scrutinized as history. Hearsay miracles are dismissed for their scientific irreproducibility. For the most part, “religion” is typified by the most violent and cantankerous extremists and fundamentalists. It’s as if one set out to critique science and considered only the hydrogen bomb, daisy-cutter missiles, mustard gas, napalm, Agent Orange, pollution, Chernobyl and the neutron bomb which kills people but leaves property standing. Surely this would be recognized as a straw man argument, a selective consideration of the achievements of science. But if not, think of the vast millions of bodies that could be laid at the foot of scientific discovery where it is arguably uncoupled from ethics. In a similar way, religion is selectively considered for its failures, for its political actions and for the insubstantial nature of the wilder claims of world scripture.
Largely absent from the ostensible critique is an element of religion which has actually been considered by science: religious experience. And while religious experience has been analyzed and compared with temporal lobe epilepsy, that is just one among many possible causes. And the factors that catalyze alleged religious experience are legion, if you will pardon the expression. Fasting, meditation, sex, drugs, visionary plants & fungi, music, dancing, pain and sensory deprivation can all be on the list of practices/ factors that induce what William James, the father of modern psychology, referred to as “the varieties of religious experience.” James enjoyed his own seemingly transcendental experience of the divine through experimentation with laughing gas; the methods of science, the aim of religion. But scientists like the late Dr. John Lilly, who pioneered studies in both altered states of consciousness and human/ dolphin communications, have been castigated by the scientific community for violating the objective nature of scientific experiment by becoming their own test subjects. And here is the Catch-22 of the matter, our need for another tool which is like the scientific method yet allows for subjective assessment of the content of such experiences. Failing that, the scientific study of religious experience bogs down at the limits of the tool of science: while neurophysiology can be examined, the content and importance of religious experience is beyond the purview of science. For Scientism, this isn’t a problem. Scientism presumes the veracity of the most dysfunctional model as a way of dismissing the subject. Consider the once-popular “psychotomimetic” model of psychedelic drug effects, the idea that visionary experience mimics psychosis. Consider the draconian difficulty of legitimately studying psychedelics in the United States, despite the fact that both LSD and MDMA have been successfully employed in psychotherapy. For Scientism, which not being science is free to indulge in speculative value judgments, these phenomena can be dismissed without further study as psychosis and hallucination. One wonders when science will presume to challenge the existence of love and pass sentence on its subjective bliss and exaltation.
Before we succumb to the religion of Scientism, with its untested assumptions and beliefs about what will or won’t be proven in the future, perhaps we should employ an interdisciplinary approach to not only religion but to ostensible transcendental experiences. This would include scientific methodology where appropriate: in understanding the neurophysiology and somatic mechanisms of ecstatic and religious experience. But it would also include literary criticism, mythology (not in its popularized denigrated sense), subjective experiment and praxis, psychology, ethnobotany, psychoacoustics, and statistical analysis.
Ultimately, we must look for the return of mystery, like believers waiting for a resurrection. As much as Scientism would presume to what we may one day know, it may be more important at this juncture to remind ourselves of the vastness of what we don’t know and in some cases perhaps cannot know. As humbling as the experience may be, our ignorance is unimaginable and we owe respect to what remains to be seen or known, mystery. There will always be an eagerness to dogmatically accept the death of mystery in order to relax in faux certainty. And as admittedly useful and revolutionary as science has been, one need only consider the succession of new scientific models replacing old to see that we are still far from fabled certainty in so many areas. New hypotheses are being studied with regard to issues as fundamental as time or the Big Bang.
If we seek Mystery in its oldest historical guise, we will find the old Mystery Religions with their secretive initiations which, an increasing body of evidence suggests, offered psychedelic potions as sacraments. Little more than a few hundred years ago, what we now recognize as science was inextricably intertwined with magic. For example, we know now that Isaac Newton spent as much time studying alchemy as he did regarding what we would now call science. While the Enlightenment summarily banished the occult and welcomed a world assured of knowledge discovered through modern science, we are left wondering what might have occurred if science had remained coupled with ethics and mystery. Even the oft-mischaracterized Luddites simply desired scientific progress that would be conjoined with quality of life, something that seems quite reasonable in light of our world filled with poisonous by-products and weapons of mass destruction. We have learned how to kill with obscene efficiency but in too many areas we haven’t learned to live or to maximize pleasure and ecstatic experience. Yet progress, which often seems hideously regressive with hindsight, marches on like some capricious god, conferring incredible benefits on one hand and ever-greater means of mass-murder on the other. Dogmatic certainty is not the monopoly of the religious fundamentalists, nor does it seem that we can logically look to science for answers that may be not only subjective but deeply personal, requiring more than just one tool. As much as Scientism would suggest otherwise, Mystery lives and continues to generate enigmatic surprises. In doing so, it should confer a deep sense of humility on any thinking person. And wrangling with Mystery and its meaning or lack thereof will continue to be an interdisciplinary effort that can only be carried out by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of tools like scientific methodology.
-Albert Einstein
There is a shell-game going on and it isn’t pretty.
That hoary old bogeyman of philosophy, Aleister Crowley, once suggested that his exploration of occult and visionary states involved “the methods of science, the aim of religion.” It’s an interesting idea which is a bit analogous to the scientific method, though admittedly more subjective: try these methods and find out whether they work or not. The “methods” in question involve, at the very least, the manipulation of consciousness and will.
Lately, the often-useful and sometimes dreadful tool known as science has been making a stand as a philosophy, something referred to as Scientism. Authors like Richard Dawkins are, in a peculiar and limited way, analyzing religion through the lens of science. Or are they? Sometimes this critique is little more than an interdisciplinary bait-and-switch. Myth is dismissed after being scrutinized as history. Hearsay miracles are dismissed for their scientific irreproducibility. For the most part, “religion” is typified by the most violent and cantankerous extremists and fundamentalists. It’s as if one set out to critique science and considered only the hydrogen bomb, daisy-cutter missiles, mustard gas, napalm, Agent Orange, pollution, Chernobyl and the neutron bomb which kills people but leaves property standing. Surely this would be recognized as a straw man argument, a selective consideration of the achievements of science. But if not, think of the vast millions of bodies that could be laid at the foot of scientific discovery where it is arguably uncoupled from ethics. In a similar way, religion is selectively considered for its failures, for its political actions and for the insubstantial nature of the wilder claims of world scripture.
Largely absent from the ostensible critique is an element of religion which has actually been considered by science: religious experience. And while religious experience has been analyzed and compared with temporal lobe epilepsy, that is just one among many possible causes. And the factors that catalyze alleged religious experience are legion, if you will pardon the expression. Fasting, meditation, sex, drugs, visionary plants & fungi, music, dancing, pain and sensory deprivation can all be on the list of practices/ factors that induce what William James, the father of modern psychology, referred to as “the varieties of religious experience.” James enjoyed his own seemingly transcendental experience of the divine through experimentation with laughing gas; the methods of science, the aim of religion. But scientists like the late Dr. John Lilly, who pioneered studies in both altered states of consciousness and human/ dolphin communications, have been castigated by the scientific community for violating the objective nature of scientific experiment by becoming their own test subjects. And here is the Catch-22 of the matter, our need for another tool which is like the scientific method yet allows for subjective assessment of the content of such experiences. Failing that, the scientific study of religious experience bogs down at the limits of the tool of science: while neurophysiology can be examined, the content and importance of religious experience is beyond the purview of science. For Scientism, this isn’t a problem. Scientism presumes the veracity of the most dysfunctional model as a way of dismissing the subject. Consider the once-popular “psychotomimetic” model of psychedelic drug effects, the idea that visionary experience mimics psychosis. Consider the draconian difficulty of legitimately studying psychedelics in the United States, despite the fact that both LSD and MDMA have been successfully employed in psychotherapy. For Scientism, which not being science is free to indulge in speculative value judgments, these phenomena can be dismissed without further study as psychosis and hallucination. One wonders when science will presume to challenge the existence of love and pass sentence on its subjective bliss and exaltation.
Before we succumb to the religion of Scientism, with its untested assumptions and beliefs about what will or won’t be proven in the future, perhaps we should employ an interdisciplinary approach to not only religion but to ostensible transcendental experiences. This would include scientific methodology where appropriate: in understanding the neurophysiology and somatic mechanisms of ecstatic and religious experience. But it would also include literary criticism, mythology (not in its popularized denigrated sense), subjective experiment and praxis, psychology, ethnobotany, psychoacoustics, and statistical analysis.
Ultimately, we must look for the return of mystery, like believers waiting for a resurrection. As much as Scientism would presume to what we may one day know, it may be more important at this juncture to remind ourselves of the vastness of what we don’t know and in some cases perhaps cannot know. As humbling as the experience may be, our ignorance is unimaginable and we owe respect to what remains to be seen or known, mystery. There will always be an eagerness to dogmatically accept the death of mystery in order to relax in faux certainty. And as admittedly useful and revolutionary as science has been, one need only consider the succession of new scientific models replacing old to see that we are still far from fabled certainty in so many areas. New hypotheses are being studied with regard to issues as fundamental as time or the Big Bang.
If we seek Mystery in its oldest historical guise, we will find the old Mystery Religions with their secretive initiations which, an increasing body of evidence suggests, offered psychedelic potions as sacraments. Little more than a few hundred years ago, what we now recognize as science was inextricably intertwined with magic. For example, we know now that Isaac Newton spent as much time studying alchemy as he did regarding what we would now call science. While the Enlightenment summarily banished the occult and welcomed a world assured of knowledge discovered through modern science, we are left wondering what might have occurred if science had remained coupled with ethics and mystery. Even the oft-mischaracterized Luddites simply desired scientific progress that would be conjoined with quality of life, something that seems quite reasonable in light of our world filled with poisonous by-products and weapons of mass destruction. We have learned how to kill with obscene efficiency but in too many areas we haven’t learned to live or to maximize pleasure and ecstatic experience. Yet progress, which often seems hideously regressive with hindsight, marches on like some capricious god, conferring incredible benefits on one hand and ever-greater means of mass-murder on the other. Dogmatic certainty is not the monopoly of the religious fundamentalists, nor does it seem that we can logically look to science for answers that may be not only subjective but deeply personal, requiring more than just one tool. As much as Scientism would suggest otherwise, Mystery lives and continues to generate enigmatic surprises. In doing so, it should confer a deep sense of humility on any thinking person. And wrangling with Mystery and its meaning or lack thereof will continue to be an interdisciplinary effort that can only be carried out by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of tools like scientific methodology.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Forty Years After The Prisoner's Last Episode: Have We Escaped?
(Attached Spoiler Warnings apply only to video embeds, not to the text)
It has been 40 years since that landmark of creative television, The Prisoner, concluded its brief run with the climactic episode Fallout. This series finale was so controversial that reportedly series creator and star Patrick McGoohan had to hide out to avoid being attacked in the streets. Just as Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow was cited by an imprisoned Timothy Leary as “…an authoritative text on how to understand and neutralize the Cybervillians, the secret police of all nations...[that] exposes the weirdo psychology, the kinky sociology, the ruthless inhumanism of all the national espionage combines,” so does The Prisoner offer similar methods of resistance, revelation and escape from any given year’s Village and new Number 2.
It seems redundant to mention that a show about a retired secret agent who was “disappeared” to a place where he was held and interrogated without due process was remarkably prophetic. In the intervening four decades, ubiquitous surveillance and loss of privacy have become the norm. Even the show’s torture, though often science fictional, strikes a chord with any human rights advocates considering current events. But it was McGoohan’s genius to transcend the pop conventions of 1960s media spy fare in offering something more allegorical, surreal and cerebral. The Prisoner’s influence on other media, most notably on Lost, should be apparent. The short-lived Nowhere Man and even story arcs in Buffy the Vampire Slayer owe much to the show.
While McGoohan has resisted the many different interpretations and expressed disdain for cultish fans, structurally and symbolically his show seems akin to multi-layered Sufi teaching-stories. Pointedly, its last episode pay-off is notable for its defiance of genre conventions, its somewhat dated freak-out exposition, and daunting openness to interpretation. The very aspects which angered most fans are also the things that give the show universality while, in open reverence for the right of “the individual to be individual,” offering so much in the way of individual interpretation, depending on what one brings to the viewing experience. It has often been noted that McGoohan artfully deals with themes that will be familiar to any reader of Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Franz Kafka. But it is seldom mentioned that there is much here for consideration of those who cherish the works of Jilaladin Rumi, Ibn Arabi and Aleister Crowley.
SPOILER WARNING
Four decades later, The Prisoner is more relevant than ever. Our shrinking Global Village stands exposed. The ways in which we are all, in one way or another, prisoners are all too apparent. Freedom seems like an ever-receding goal. Escape has been sublimated and replaced by escapism. Too often we rail at external authority without due consideration for the authority that is implicit in our own domestic apathy or the corporate media simulacrum that dictates everything from what’s newsworthy to fashion and behavior.
SPOILER WARNING
Like the best art, The Prisoner will change and teach us if we let it. Its dystopian dream remains all too familiar. Its techniques for resistance and escape remain useful. And its challenge to be a free individual is timeless and inspirational.
The door to your cell is open. What will you do now?
It has been 40 years since that landmark of creative television, The Prisoner, concluded its brief run with the climactic episode Fallout. This series finale was so controversial that reportedly series creator and star Patrick McGoohan had to hide out to avoid being attacked in the streets. Just as Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow was cited by an imprisoned Timothy Leary as “…an authoritative text on how to understand and neutralize the Cybervillians, the secret police of all nations...[that] exposes the weirdo psychology, the kinky sociology, the ruthless inhumanism of all the national espionage combines,” so does The Prisoner offer similar methods of resistance, revelation and escape from any given year’s Village and new Number 2.
It seems redundant to mention that a show about a retired secret agent who was “disappeared” to a place where he was held and interrogated without due process was remarkably prophetic. In the intervening four decades, ubiquitous surveillance and loss of privacy have become the norm. Even the show’s torture, though often science fictional, strikes a chord with any human rights advocates considering current events. But it was McGoohan’s genius to transcend the pop conventions of 1960s media spy fare in offering something more allegorical, surreal and cerebral. The Prisoner’s influence on other media, most notably on Lost, should be apparent. The short-lived Nowhere Man and even story arcs in Buffy the Vampire Slayer owe much to the show.
While McGoohan has resisted the many different interpretations and expressed disdain for cultish fans, structurally and symbolically his show seems akin to multi-layered Sufi teaching-stories. Pointedly, its last episode pay-off is notable for its defiance of genre conventions, its somewhat dated freak-out exposition, and daunting openness to interpretation. The very aspects which angered most fans are also the things that give the show universality while, in open reverence for the right of “the individual to be individual,” offering so much in the way of individual interpretation, depending on what one brings to the viewing experience. It has often been noted that McGoohan artfully deals with themes that will be familiar to any reader of Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Franz Kafka. But it is seldom mentioned that there is much here for consideration of those who cherish the works of Jilaladin Rumi, Ibn Arabi and Aleister Crowley.
SPOILER WARNING
Four decades later, The Prisoner is more relevant than ever. Our shrinking Global Village stands exposed. The ways in which we are all, in one way or another, prisoners are all too apparent. Freedom seems like an ever-receding goal. Escape has been sublimated and replaced by escapism. Too often we rail at external authority without due consideration for the authority that is implicit in our own domestic apathy or the corporate media simulacrum that dictates everything from what’s newsworthy to fashion and behavior.
SPOILER WARNING
Like the best art, The Prisoner will change and teach us if we let it. Its dystopian dream remains all too familiar. Its techniques for resistance and escape remain useful. And its challenge to be a free individual is timeless and inspirational.
The door to your cell is open. What will you do now?
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Bougainville, Diderot and The Earthly Paradise
Denis Diderot accompanied Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the explorer, navigator and mathematician, on his global circumnavigation/ voyage to the South Pacific. I became interested in Bougainville's voyage because my father walked in his footsteps as a Marine in World War II and was part of the first wave attack on Bougainville's eponymous island. Diderot's essay takes Bougainville's arrival at Tahiti as its point of departure.
Diderot's essay, with its colorful dialogues, seems to be a mixture of French Utopianism (many of the French, including Gaugin, regarded the South Pacific islands as the real Earthly Paradise), social satire of European mores, and philosophical/ anthropological observations. Bougainville's voyage and Diderot's commentary sparked Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thinking and led to the sterotype of the "noble savage." Pointed observations regarding sex and religion are particularly interesting and often amusing. The entire essay can be found here or collected in The Libertine Reader.
As this excerpt opens, the ship's chaplain has succumbed to the charms of Orou's youngest daughter, despite earlier protestations. His exchange with Orou continues:
OROU: "I see my daughter is well satisfied with thee and I thank thee. But pray tell me what is this word religion, that thou didst repeat so often and with so much pain?"
The chaplain, after reflecting for a moment, answered: "Who made thy cabin and its articles of furniture?"
OROU: I did.
CHAPLAIN: Very well. We believe that this world and all it contains is the work of a workman.
OROU: Then he has feet, hands and a head?
CHAPLAIN: No.
OROU: Where does he live?
CHAPLAIN: Everywhere.
OROU: Here too?
CHAPLAIN: Yes.
OROU: We have never seen him.
CHAPLAIN: He is not to be seen.
OROU: A poor sort of father! He must be old. For he must be at least as old as his handiwork.
CHAPLAIN: He never grows old. He has spoken to our ancestors: he has given them laws: and has prescribed the manner in which he would be honoured. He has ordained for them certain actions as good and forbidden them others as bad.
OROU: I see, and one of those actions he has forbidden as bad is to sleep with a woman or girl. Why then has he made two sexes?
CHAPLAIN: For union, but on certain fixed conditions and after certain preliminary ceremonies, as a result of which a man belongs to a woman and belongs to her alone. A woman belongs to a man and belongs to a man alone.
OROU: For their whole life?
CHAPLAIN: For their whole life.
OROU: So that if a woman slept with anyone else than her husband and a husband with anyone else than his wife -- but the case can never arise, for since the workman is there and disapproves of it, he knows how to stop them.
CHAPLAIN: No, he lets them go their way, and they sin against the law of God (for that is what we call the great workman) and the law of the land; and they commit a crime.
OROU: I should hate to offend you with my remarks, but with your permission, I will give you my opinion.
CHAPLAIN: Go on.
OROU: I find these singular precepts opposed to nature and contrary to reason: they needs must multiply the number of crimes and continually annoy the old workman, who has made everything without the help of head, hands, or tools, who exists everywhere and is to be seen nowhere: who endures to-day and to-morrow and is never a day the older: who commands and is never obeyed: who can prevent and does not do so. These precepts are contrary to nature because they presuppose that a thinking, feeling, free being can be the property of another like himself. Upon what can this right be founded? Do you not see that, in your country, you have mixed up two different things? That which has neither feeling, thought, desire nor will, and which one can take, keep or exchange, without its suffering or complaining; and that which cannot be exchanged or acquired: which has liberty, will, desires: which can give itself and refuse itself for a single instant, or for ever: which complains and suffers: which could not become a mere article of commerce without its character being forgotten and violence done to its nature? These precepts are contrary to the general law of existence. Does anything really appear to thee more senseless than a precept which refuses to admit the change which is in ourselves: which insists on a constancy which has no counterpart in us and which violates the liberty of male and female, by chaining them for ever one to the other: more senseless than a constancy which confines the most capricious of pleasures to a single person: than an oath of immutability between two fleshly beings in the face of a heaven which is not a moment the same: under caverns that threaten ruin: beneath a rock that falls in powder: at the foot of a tree that cracks: upon a stone that breaks in pieces? Believe me, you have made the condition of men worse than that of animals. I know not who thy great workman is. But I am glad he has never spoken to our fathers and I hope he never speaks to our children. For he might say the same silly things to them and they might be silly enough to believe him. Yesterday at supper thou toldest of magistrates and priests, whose authority rules your conduct. But tell me, are they lords of good and evil? Can they make what is just unjust, and what is unjust just? Does it rest with them to label good actions harmful and harmful actions innocent or useful? Thou canst not well admit it, for then there would be neither true nor false, good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly, except in so far as thy great workman, thy magistrates and priests thought good to say so. Then from one moment to another thou wouldst be compelled to change thy opinion and thy conduct. One day one of thy three masters would give the order kill and thou wouldst be obliged, in conscience, to kill. Another day steal and thou wouldst have to steal; or, Do not eat this fruit and thou wouldst not dare eat it; or, I forbid thee this fruit or animal and thou couldst not touch it. There is no goodness they could not forbid thee: no wickedness they could not order. And where wouldst thou be if thy three masters, falling out among themselves, took it into their heads to permit, enjoin and forbid the same thing as I am sure often happens? Then to please the priest, thou must needs quarrel with the magistrate: to satisfy the magistrate, thou must anger the great workman; and to be agreeable to the great workman, turn thy back on nature. Knowest thou what will happen? Thou willst get to despise all three! be neither man, citizen, nor pious person: thou wilt be nothing: on bad terms with all sorts of authority and with thyself: wicked, tormented in heart: persecuted by thy insensate masters: and wretched as I saw thee yesterday evening when I presented my wife and daughters to thee and thou didst cry out: "But my religion, but my calling." Dost thou wish to know what is good and bad in all times and all places? Cling to the nature of things and actions: to thy relations with those like thee: to the influence of thy conduct on thy private convenience and the public good. Thou art mad if thou thinkest there be anything, high or low, in the universe which can supplement or be subtracted from the law of nature. Her eternal will is that good be preferred to evil and public to private good. Thou mayest aver the opposite but thou wilt not be obeyed. Thou wilt multiply the number of malefactors and those made wretched by fear, punishment or remorse. Thou wilt deprave men's consciences and corrupt their minds. They will no longer know what to do or what to avoid. Troubled in their state of innocence, calm in sin, they will have lost their pole-star on their journey. Answer me frankly. In spite of the express order of thy three legislators, does a young man in your country never sleep with a girl without their permission?
CHAPLAIN: I should lie, if I asserted it.
OROU: And does the woman, who has sworn to belong only to her husband, never give herself to another?
CHAPLAIN: Nothing is commoner.
OROU: In these cases thy legislators either do or do not take action. If they do, they are wild beasts who make war on nature. If not, they are imbeciles, who have exposed their authority to contempt by a useless prohibition.
CHAPLAIN: The guilty ones, when they escape the severity of the law, are chastised by public disapproval.
OROU:: You mean that justice functions through the absence of common sense in a whole nation: that a maniacal public opinion does duty for the laws.
CHAPLAIN: The girl who has been dishonoured can no longer find a husband.
OROU: Dishonoured! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The faithless wife is more or less despised.
OROU:: Despised! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The young man is called a cowardly seducer.
OROU: Cowardly! A seducer! Why?
CHAPLAIN: Father, mother and children are heart-broken: the flighty husband is a libertine: the betrayed husband shares his wife's disgrace.
OROU:: What a monstrous tissue of extravagances are you detailing to me! And even now thou hast not yet told me everything. For the moment men are allowed to regulate at will notions of justice and property, to endow things with some particular character or deprive them of it arbitrarily, to associate good and bad with certain actions or the reverse, then, by consulting only their own caprice, the men become censorious, vindictive, suspicious, tyrannical, envious, jealous, deceitful, uncomfortable, secretive, dissimulating. They spy, they cheat, they quarrel, they lie. Daughters impose on their parents, husbands on their wives, wives on their husbands. Girls, yes, I am sure of it, girls will suffocate their children: suspicious parents will despise and neglect theirs; mothers will abandon them to the mercy of fate: crime and debauchery will appear in all their forms. I know it all, as well as if I had lived among you. It is so, because it cannot be otherwise: and thy society, which your chief praises for its order, turns out to be only a collection of hypocrites, who secretly stamp the laws under foot: or unfortunates who are themselves the instruments of their own torture by submitting to such laws: or imbeciles in whom prejudice has completely stifled the law of nature: or beings of feeble organism, in whom nature does not claim her rights.
CHAPLAIN: There is a resemblance certainly. So you have no marriage then?
OROU: Yes, we marry.
CHAPLAIN: What is marriage with you?
OROU: Agreement to share the same hut and sleep in the same bed as long as we wish to do so.
CHAPLAIN: And When you wish to no longer?
OROU: We separate.
CHAPLAIN: And what happens to the children?
OROU: Ah, stranger! Thy last question finally reveals to me the profound misery of thy country. Know, my friend, that here the birth of a child is always a source of happiness and its death a subject for regrets and tears. A child is a precious possession because it will become a man. So our care for them is quite different from our care for our plants and animals. The birth of a child is the occasion of domestic and public joy. It means an increase of fortune for the cabin and of strength for the nation, arms and hands the more in Tahiti. We see in him a farmer, a fisherman, a hunter, a soldier, a husband, a father. When a wife passes back from the cabin of her husband to that of her parents, she brings with her the children she had taken as a dowry: a division is made of those born during cohabitation: and as far as possible we share out the males and females so that each one may have about the same number of boys and girls.
CHAPLAIN: But children are for a long time a source of expense before doing any service in return.
OROU: We put aside for their upkeep and as provision for old people one-sixth of all the country's fruits. This tribute follows them everywhere. So you see a Tahitien family becomes richer the larger it grows.
CHAPLAIN: A sixth part!
OROU: Yes. It is a sure way of increasing the population and of interesting it in the respect due to old age and the rearing of children.
CHAPLAIN: Do your married couples sometimes take each other back again?
OROU: Very often. Meanwhile the shortest period of a marriage is from one moon to another.
CHAPLAIN: Unless the woman is with child; then cohabitation lasts at least nine months.
OROU: Thou art mistaken. Paternity like the tribute follows the child everywhere.
CHAPLAIN: Thou hast told me that a woman brings her children as a dowry to her husband?
OROU: Certainly. Take my eldest child, who has three children: they walk: they are healthy: they are handsome: they promise to be strong: when she takes it into her head to marry, she will take them with her; they are hers: her husband will receive them joyfully; and he would be all the more pleased with his wife were she about to have a fourth.
CHAPLAIN: By himself, I presume.
OROU: By himself or somebody else. The more children our daughters have, the more they are in demand. The robuster and stronger our boys are, the richer they are: and so we pay as much attention to preserving our girls from the approach of men and men from dealings with women before the fruitful age as to exhorting them to have children, when the boys have reached the age of puberty and the girls are nubile. You cannot imagine the importance of the service you will have rendered my daughter Thia if you have got her with child. Her mother will no longer say to her each month, "But Thia, what are you thinking about? You do not become pregnant. You are nineteen. You should have had two children already and you have not got any. Who is going to look after you? If you waste your youth like this, what will you do when you are old? Thia, you must have some fault that keep men away. Take yourself in hand, my child. By your age I had had three children."
Diderot's essay, with its colorful dialogues, seems to be a mixture of French Utopianism (many of the French, including Gaugin, regarded the South Pacific islands as the real Earthly Paradise), social satire of European mores, and philosophical/ anthropological observations. Bougainville's voyage and Diderot's commentary sparked Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thinking and led to the sterotype of the "noble savage." Pointed observations regarding sex and religion are particularly interesting and often amusing. The entire essay can be found here or collected in The Libertine Reader.
As this excerpt opens, the ship's chaplain has succumbed to the charms of Orou's youngest daughter, despite earlier protestations. His exchange with Orou continues:
OROU: "I see my daughter is well satisfied with thee and I thank thee. But pray tell me what is this word religion, that thou didst repeat so often and with so much pain?"
The chaplain, after reflecting for a moment, answered: "Who made thy cabin and its articles of furniture?"
OROU: I did.
CHAPLAIN: Very well. We believe that this world and all it contains is the work of a workman.
OROU: Then he has feet, hands and a head?
CHAPLAIN: No.
OROU: Where does he live?
CHAPLAIN: Everywhere.
OROU: Here too?
CHAPLAIN: Yes.
OROU: We have never seen him.
CHAPLAIN: He is not to be seen.
OROU: A poor sort of father! He must be old. For he must be at least as old as his handiwork.
CHAPLAIN: He never grows old. He has spoken to our ancestors: he has given them laws: and has prescribed the manner in which he would be honoured. He has ordained for them certain actions as good and forbidden them others as bad.
OROU: I see, and one of those actions he has forbidden as bad is to sleep with a woman or girl. Why then has he made two sexes?
CHAPLAIN: For union, but on certain fixed conditions and after certain preliminary ceremonies, as a result of which a man belongs to a woman and belongs to her alone. A woman belongs to a man and belongs to a man alone.
OROU: For their whole life?
CHAPLAIN: For their whole life.
OROU: So that if a woman slept with anyone else than her husband and a husband with anyone else than his wife -- but the case can never arise, for since the workman is there and disapproves of it, he knows how to stop them.
CHAPLAIN: No, he lets them go their way, and they sin against the law of God (for that is what we call the great workman) and the law of the land; and they commit a crime.
OROU: I should hate to offend you with my remarks, but with your permission, I will give you my opinion.
CHAPLAIN: Go on.
OROU: I find these singular precepts opposed to nature and contrary to reason: they needs must multiply the number of crimes and continually annoy the old workman, who has made everything without the help of head, hands, or tools, who exists everywhere and is to be seen nowhere: who endures to-day and to-morrow and is never a day the older: who commands and is never obeyed: who can prevent and does not do so. These precepts are contrary to nature because they presuppose that a thinking, feeling, free being can be the property of another like himself. Upon what can this right be founded? Do you not see that, in your country, you have mixed up two different things? That which has neither feeling, thought, desire nor will, and which one can take, keep or exchange, without its suffering or complaining; and that which cannot be exchanged or acquired: which has liberty, will, desires: which can give itself and refuse itself for a single instant, or for ever: which complains and suffers: which could not become a mere article of commerce without its character being forgotten and violence done to its nature? These precepts are contrary to the general law of existence. Does anything really appear to thee more senseless than a precept which refuses to admit the change which is in ourselves: which insists on a constancy which has no counterpart in us and which violates the liberty of male and female, by chaining them for ever one to the other: more senseless than a constancy which confines the most capricious of pleasures to a single person: than an oath of immutability between two fleshly beings in the face of a heaven which is not a moment the same: under caverns that threaten ruin: beneath a rock that falls in powder: at the foot of a tree that cracks: upon a stone that breaks in pieces? Believe me, you have made the condition of men worse than that of animals. I know not who thy great workman is. But I am glad he has never spoken to our fathers and I hope he never speaks to our children. For he might say the same silly things to them and they might be silly enough to believe him. Yesterday at supper thou toldest of magistrates and priests, whose authority rules your conduct. But tell me, are they lords of good and evil? Can they make what is just unjust, and what is unjust just? Does it rest with them to label good actions harmful and harmful actions innocent or useful? Thou canst not well admit it, for then there would be neither true nor false, good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly, except in so far as thy great workman, thy magistrates and priests thought good to say so. Then from one moment to another thou wouldst be compelled to change thy opinion and thy conduct. One day one of thy three masters would give the order kill and thou wouldst be obliged, in conscience, to kill. Another day steal and thou wouldst have to steal; or, Do not eat this fruit and thou wouldst not dare eat it; or, I forbid thee this fruit or animal and thou couldst not touch it. There is no goodness they could not forbid thee: no wickedness they could not order. And where wouldst thou be if thy three masters, falling out among themselves, took it into their heads to permit, enjoin and forbid the same thing as I am sure often happens? Then to please the priest, thou must needs quarrel with the magistrate: to satisfy the magistrate, thou must anger the great workman; and to be agreeable to the great workman, turn thy back on nature. Knowest thou what will happen? Thou willst get to despise all three! be neither man, citizen, nor pious person: thou wilt be nothing: on bad terms with all sorts of authority and with thyself: wicked, tormented in heart: persecuted by thy insensate masters: and wretched as I saw thee yesterday evening when I presented my wife and daughters to thee and thou didst cry out: "But my religion, but my calling." Dost thou wish to know what is good and bad in all times and all places? Cling to the nature of things and actions: to thy relations with those like thee: to the influence of thy conduct on thy private convenience and the public good. Thou art mad if thou thinkest there be anything, high or low, in the universe which can supplement or be subtracted from the law of nature. Her eternal will is that good be preferred to evil and public to private good. Thou mayest aver the opposite but thou wilt not be obeyed. Thou wilt multiply the number of malefactors and those made wretched by fear, punishment or remorse. Thou wilt deprave men's consciences and corrupt their minds. They will no longer know what to do or what to avoid. Troubled in their state of innocence, calm in sin, they will have lost their pole-star on their journey. Answer me frankly. In spite of the express order of thy three legislators, does a young man in your country never sleep with a girl without their permission?
CHAPLAIN: I should lie, if I asserted it.
OROU: And does the woman, who has sworn to belong only to her husband, never give herself to another?
CHAPLAIN: Nothing is commoner.
OROU: In these cases thy legislators either do or do not take action. If they do, they are wild beasts who make war on nature. If not, they are imbeciles, who have exposed their authority to contempt by a useless prohibition.
CHAPLAIN: The guilty ones, when they escape the severity of the law, are chastised by public disapproval.
OROU:: You mean that justice functions through the absence of common sense in a whole nation: that a maniacal public opinion does duty for the laws.
CHAPLAIN: The girl who has been dishonoured can no longer find a husband.
OROU: Dishonoured! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The faithless wife is more or less despised.
OROU:: Despised! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The young man is called a cowardly seducer.
OROU: Cowardly! A seducer! Why?
CHAPLAIN: Father, mother and children are heart-broken: the flighty husband is a libertine: the betrayed husband shares his wife's disgrace.
OROU:: What a monstrous tissue of extravagances are you detailing to me! And even now thou hast not yet told me everything. For the moment men are allowed to regulate at will notions of justice and property, to endow things with some particular character or deprive them of it arbitrarily, to associate good and bad with certain actions or the reverse, then, by consulting only their own caprice, the men become censorious, vindictive, suspicious, tyrannical, envious, jealous, deceitful, uncomfortable, secretive, dissimulating. They spy, they cheat, they quarrel, they lie. Daughters impose on their parents, husbands on their wives, wives on their husbands. Girls, yes, I am sure of it, girls will suffocate their children: suspicious parents will despise and neglect theirs; mothers will abandon them to the mercy of fate: crime and debauchery will appear in all their forms. I know it all, as well as if I had lived among you. It is so, because it cannot be otherwise: and thy society, which your chief praises for its order, turns out to be only a collection of hypocrites, who secretly stamp the laws under foot: or unfortunates who are themselves the instruments of their own torture by submitting to such laws: or imbeciles in whom prejudice has completely stifled the law of nature: or beings of feeble organism, in whom nature does not claim her rights.
CHAPLAIN: There is a resemblance certainly. So you have no marriage then?
OROU: Yes, we marry.
CHAPLAIN: What is marriage with you?
OROU: Agreement to share the same hut and sleep in the same bed as long as we wish to do so.
CHAPLAIN: And When you wish to no longer?
OROU: We separate.
CHAPLAIN: And what happens to the children?
OROU: Ah, stranger! Thy last question finally reveals to me the profound misery of thy country. Know, my friend, that here the birth of a child is always a source of happiness and its death a subject for regrets and tears. A child is a precious possession because it will become a man. So our care for them is quite different from our care for our plants and animals. The birth of a child is the occasion of domestic and public joy. It means an increase of fortune for the cabin and of strength for the nation, arms and hands the more in Tahiti. We see in him a farmer, a fisherman, a hunter, a soldier, a husband, a father. When a wife passes back from the cabin of her husband to that of her parents, she brings with her the children she had taken as a dowry: a division is made of those born during cohabitation: and as far as possible we share out the males and females so that each one may have about the same number of boys and girls.
CHAPLAIN: But children are for a long time a source of expense before doing any service in return.
OROU: We put aside for their upkeep and as provision for old people one-sixth of all the country's fruits. This tribute follows them everywhere. So you see a Tahitien family becomes richer the larger it grows.
CHAPLAIN: A sixth part!
OROU: Yes. It is a sure way of increasing the population and of interesting it in the respect due to old age and the rearing of children.
CHAPLAIN: Do your married couples sometimes take each other back again?
OROU: Very often. Meanwhile the shortest period of a marriage is from one moon to another.
CHAPLAIN: Unless the woman is with child; then cohabitation lasts at least nine months.
OROU: Thou art mistaken. Paternity like the tribute follows the child everywhere.
CHAPLAIN: Thou hast told me that a woman brings her children as a dowry to her husband?
OROU: Certainly. Take my eldest child, who has three children: they walk: they are healthy: they are handsome: they promise to be strong: when she takes it into her head to marry, she will take them with her; they are hers: her husband will receive them joyfully; and he would be all the more pleased with his wife were she about to have a fourth.
CHAPLAIN: By himself, I presume.
OROU: By himself or somebody else. The more children our daughters have, the more they are in demand. The robuster and stronger our boys are, the richer they are: and so we pay as much attention to preserving our girls from the approach of men and men from dealings with women before the fruitful age as to exhorting them to have children, when the boys have reached the age of puberty and the girls are nubile. You cannot imagine the importance of the service you will have rendered my daughter Thia if you have got her with child. Her mother will no longer say to her each month, "But Thia, what are you thinking about? You do not become pregnant. You are nineteen. You should have had two children already and you have not got any. Who is going to look after you? If you waste your youth like this, what will you do when you are old? Thia, you must have some fault that keep men away. Take yourself in hand, my child. By your age I had had three children."
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
The Subculture that Wasn't
Last Friday I was visiting with a friend who had just attended Movement: Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival and came back refreshed and effusive about everything she saw and heard. There was something genuinely touching about her enthusiasm, particularly the fact that she was sharing it with me, a longtime loather of rave music in all its micro-categories as well as a notorious cynic with regard to the utopian pretensions of the rave movement.
Rafael Behr unintentionally summed up the rave dilemma in his Guardian comment piece, Where are you, my fellow old ravers? “Imagine a formula for calculating the impact of a subversive youth culture. It would factor in the scale of moral panic, the effectiveness of subsequent hijacking by fashion and music industries and changes in values that were smuggled into the mainstream. Rave would come out as the biggest sell-out ever. Consumerism won hands down.” Indeed, such is the ubiquity of this music that for a few years it has been the staple of Guy Ritchie-style, pretentious action movie soundtracks. For a while it seemed like any kid with a computer was supposed to be a musician and any asshole with a record collection was supposed to be a DJ. It was dizzily wonderful until it became omnipresent and oppressive. Or, as Rafael sums it up,” Electronic dance music is part of Britain's audio furniture. It reverberates in bars and clubs, is the soundtrack to TV shows, adverts and radio jingles. And it always plays in gyms. It was there that I found myself pondering…the peculiar fact that this music was once illicit.”
Our nostalgic friend is specifically referring to Great Britain’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which made it illegal to gather and listen to music comprised of repetitive beats. As a long-time freeform disc jockey, I was ever leery of the claims that raves were subversive, but such organized oppression certainly lent that illusion to embattled ravers. Also, it wasn’t really the music that was illicit as much as the widespread use of club drugs, particularly MDMA or “ecstasy.”
Like the ‘50s revival in the ‘70s and the ‘70s revival in the ‘90s, rave music is being recycled by the nostalgia machine. Thirty-something ravers, driven from dingy warehouses, open-air massives and “renegade” parties, are now flocking to dingy or glitzy bars to hear their favorite “illicit” music: oldies.
“But while the aesthetics of the 80s dance revolution colonised popular culture, the political consequence was tiny,” Rafael admits. So thoroughly did rave culture aggressively sell out that it is now the stuff of mainstream culture. Another friend, a keyboard player in a live House music band, told me that there was no such thing as selling out anymore. “That died with the ‘60s. I’m a professional musician. My goal is to sell out.”
It wasn’t more than a few years into the ‘90s that organized raves, by and large, closed ranks and abolished the short-lived tradition of “chill rooms,” where ambient and diverse downbeat music could once be heard. The tyranny of the beat prevailed, despite shrilly spurious claims to diversity. Dance party culture wasn’t really a culture or even a sub-culture. Purged of the incessant tennis-shoe-in-a-dryer beat, what is left? A faint echo of late ‘60s counter-culture garnished in a vaguely warm-fuzzy acronym: PLUR.
My friend who had just made her pilgrimage to Detroit seemed bittersweet about it all. She urged me to reconsider rave music festivals like Movement (which seems to be a most unfortunate choice of names) as being comparable to festivals like Burning Man or Flipside in Texas. And while I don’t doubt that she had some profound epiphany, it’s hard for me to compare rave conferences with DIY camping events that, in essence, do play host to a remarkable variety of music, art and culture. As a long-time observer of Bohemian movements, I can only hope that one day there will once again be viable counter-cultural movements that, even as they draw on inspiration from the past, present us with a startling freshness and purpose that is all too rare these days.
In retrospect, such outbreaks of social magic are inevitably ephemeral. We take for granted that the long festive nights will never end but eventually they do, only to return in another guise over time. It is only when they continue in lock-groove perpetuity that the law of diminishing returns takes over. And when that happens, we are forced to admit that another underground movement has passed or been positioned and merchandized. If we try to cling to it, instead of searching for new forms of expression and resistance, we find ourselves on the treadmill of nostalgia, lost in memory and identified as part of a marketing niche. It is in the unexpectedness of freeform expression that we may find new juxtapositions, gazing beyond the limits of mundane time and space so that all of history is celebrated along with the best speculative future we can conjure. Real diversity hasn’t had its day in court just yet.
Where have all the ravers gone? Where are all the “tribes” that once danced the weekend away in industrial no-go zones? Our forlorn pal Rafael answers these questions, but there is something of the epitaph in his response. “The repetitive beats are everywhere, but the rave generation is invisible. We pound out our hippy idealism on the treadmill.”
Rafael Behr unintentionally summed up the rave dilemma in his Guardian comment piece, Where are you, my fellow old ravers? “Imagine a formula for calculating the impact of a subversive youth culture. It would factor in the scale of moral panic, the effectiveness of subsequent hijacking by fashion and music industries and changes in values that were smuggled into the mainstream. Rave would come out as the biggest sell-out ever. Consumerism won hands down.” Indeed, such is the ubiquity of this music that for a few years it has been the staple of Guy Ritchie-style, pretentious action movie soundtracks. For a while it seemed like any kid with a computer was supposed to be a musician and any asshole with a record collection was supposed to be a DJ. It was dizzily wonderful until it became omnipresent and oppressive. Or, as Rafael sums it up,” Electronic dance music is part of Britain's audio furniture. It reverberates in bars and clubs, is the soundtrack to TV shows, adverts and radio jingles. And it always plays in gyms. It was there that I found myself pondering…the peculiar fact that this music was once illicit.”
Our nostalgic friend is specifically referring to Great Britain’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which made it illegal to gather and listen to music comprised of repetitive beats. As a long-time freeform disc jockey, I was ever leery of the claims that raves were subversive, but such organized oppression certainly lent that illusion to embattled ravers. Also, it wasn’t really the music that was illicit as much as the widespread use of club drugs, particularly MDMA or “ecstasy.”
Like the ‘50s revival in the ‘70s and the ‘70s revival in the ‘90s, rave music is being recycled by the nostalgia machine. Thirty-something ravers, driven from dingy warehouses, open-air massives and “renegade” parties, are now flocking to dingy or glitzy bars to hear their favorite “illicit” music: oldies.
“But while the aesthetics of the 80s dance revolution colonised popular culture, the political consequence was tiny,” Rafael admits. So thoroughly did rave culture aggressively sell out that it is now the stuff of mainstream culture. Another friend, a keyboard player in a live House music band, told me that there was no such thing as selling out anymore. “That died with the ‘60s. I’m a professional musician. My goal is to sell out.”
It wasn’t more than a few years into the ‘90s that organized raves, by and large, closed ranks and abolished the short-lived tradition of “chill rooms,” where ambient and diverse downbeat music could once be heard. The tyranny of the beat prevailed, despite shrilly spurious claims to diversity. Dance party culture wasn’t really a culture or even a sub-culture. Purged of the incessant tennis-shoe-in-a-dryer beat, what is left? A faint echo of late ‘60s counter-culture garnished in a vaguely warm-fuzzy acronym: PLUR.
My friend who had just made her pilgrimage to Detroit seemed bittersweet about it all. She urged me to reconsider rave music festivals like Movement (which seems to be a most unfortunate choice of names) as being comparable to festivals like Burning Man or Flipside in Texas. And while I don’t doubt that she had some profound epiphany, it’s hard for me to compare rave conferences with DIY camping events that, in essence, do play host to a remarkable variety of music, art and culture. As a long-time observer of Bohemian movements, I can only hope that one day there will once again be viable counter-cultural movements that, even as they draw on inspiration from the past, present us with a startling freshness and purpose that is all too rare these days.
In retrospect, such outbreaks of social magic are inevitably ephemeral. We take for granted that the long festive nights will never end but eventually they do, only to return in another guise over time. It is only when they continue in lock-groove perpetuity that the law of diminishing returns takes over. And when that happens, we are forced to admit that another underground movement has passed or been positioned and merchandized. If we try to cling to it, instead of searching for new forms of expression and resistance, we find ourselves on the treadmill of nostalgia, lost in memory and identified as part of a marketing niche. It is in the unexpectedness of freeform expression that we may find new juxtapositions, gazing beyond the limits of mundane time and space so that all of history is celebrated along with the best speculative future we can conjure. Real diversity hasn’t had its day in court just yet.
Where have all the ravers gone? Where are all the “tribes” that once danced the weekend away in industrial no-go zones? Our forlorn pal Rafael answers these questions, but there is something of the epitaph in his response. “The repetitive beats are everywhere, but the rave generation is invisible. We pound out our hippy idealism on the treadmill.”
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Requiem
It was unavoidable. Mobs of old guys are shaking their calloused fists and ranting about the goddamned good ol’ days when punk rock punched a hole in the sky and the ever-patient satellite of VALIS blasted us with its pinkly delicious message of cosmic love and cultural transgression. It was 1974. It was 1980. It was timeless. We were young and we would never die. There was rioting, fucking in the streets, non-musicians releasing amazing albums (which were still spun by specially trained bees out of vinyl with gatefold sleeves that shamed the Renaissance masters, goddammit!) and the unavoidable orgasmic bliss of shaking things up. This immediatist breach, to hear some rant, was the last time that real people made music that was so strange and baffling that Biz assimilation was just impossible. Out there, in the Wasteland where the tire-fires never stopped and the ruins of civilization so-called stood like sarsen stones above the 24/7 freakout, we did the St. Vitus dance and slammed our sweaty bodies together until the low brown clouds glowed with morning light or nuclear terminus. Somewhere in the dim cathode twilight we could still hear the existentialist mumblings of Peter Ivers before he was unceremoniously snuffed-out like a microcosmic cover-version of the heat-death of the universe. We gathered in squalid nightclubs, deranged, full of life, burning brighter and brighter until the inevitable fall, unsustainable but not giving a shit because we were outside of time. It was surely the culmination of an act of magick, decades in the making, weird old Harry Smith plucking the Monochord with a shellac plectrum, shaking feathered sticks and unearthing dinosaur-bones of mad, mad music from the bedrock, from beneath the floor, down there rattling like haints. Who’s down there? The devil! Arne Sarknussem! The Living Heads of Mu! Now we walk through this land of ghosts where well-coiffed fascists wield the razor of public relations, wondering how we lost the secret and when that weapon was turned against us, retooled, moneyed, omnipresent. It’s Crystal Night again. The Buzzcocks were right, seeing far into the hazy expanse of a 4th, 5th and 6th Reich hosted by kinder, gentler Nazis where the occluded spawn of morons would take refuge from genocide and corruption in superficial media-death. Now it seems like a lost dream, as if the Finnegans never woke and would never wake again. When these stories are told, younger eyes roll. There is nothing in their experience like this. The evidence still spins, vital, liberating. The Monochord still vibrates and if you find that foolish, quiet center inside of yourself, it will, sure-as-shit, fill with the old madness of a world gone by. There are techniques to defy mass-mesmerization, free spaces to be seized, inside and out. One day there will be music that, while strangely familiar, will move us in new ways, casting out ancient demons of control and once more setting us on that long, well-traveled road. Drink up, dear souls, for tomorrow may be the day. Like epopts, we will die before death and see with fresh eyes, hear with fresh ears. And the corruption that we shuffle off will fall like black snow, like ashes from the mouth of a harbinger.
Shhhh! Listen now…
Shhhh! Listen now…
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Eat a Bowl of Freakies
Today is my birthday and I'm celebrating with the Freakies: Boss Moss, Hamhose, Snorkledorf, Grumble, Goody-Goody, Cowmumble, and Gargle.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
10 Most Disturbing Films #5: The Haunting
Robert Wise’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, remains possibly the best filmed ghost story to this date. It is included here because of Wise’s ability to engage the imaginations of viewers, an art that seems to have been almost forgotten in our tell all/ show all age.
"Hill House", which was Ettington Hall at the time but is now the Ettington Park Hotel.
The premise is an old one: a team of psychic investigators spend the night in a haunted house. But the film (as well as the novel) transcends the stock plot with memorable characters, among which we must include Hill House itself. Filmed in gloriously crepuscular black & white, with some exterior shots completed with infra-red film, The Haunting is claustrophobic, obsessive and gothic without losing is sharp, understated edge. Mousy, awkward protagonist Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) is seduced by Hill House, its own madness inciting and exacerbating hers. She is drawn into its secret center even as it fills her with dread, just as we are.
It is a tribute to Robert Wise that he was able to use less to make more of an impact. We are frightened by what remains unseen, leaving our imaginations to fill in the blanks. What we hear at times is unsettling and suggestive, more so because it is also muffled and abstract. Humphrey Searle’s score is, by turns, bewitching and chilling, an ideal complement to this shadow-play. Precious few special effects are involved, quite different from the abysmal 1999 remake coughed up by Jan De Bont.
Unlike vintage radio drama, it is hard for film to engage the theater of the mind with the intensity that The Haunting does. It draws us into the shadows where we may hear or feel but seldom see. It invites us to plumb our own darkness and to summon our own ghosts. In doing so, it’s as subtly disturbing as our minds will let it be.
"Hill House", which was Ettington Hall at the time but is now the Ettington Park Hotel.
The premise is an old one: a team of psychic investigators spend the night in a haunted house. But the film (as well as the novel) transcends the stock plot with memorable characters, among which we must include Hill House itself. Filmed in gloriously crepuscular black & white, with some exterior shots completed with infra-red film, The Haunting is claustrophobic, obsessive and gothic without losing is sharp, understated edge. Mousy, awkward protagonist Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) is seduced by Hill House, its own madness inciting and exacerbating hers. She is drawn into its secret center even as it fills her with dread, just as we are.
It is a tribute to Robert Wise that he was able to use less to make more of an impact. We are frightened by what remains unseen, leaving our imaginations to fill in the blanks. What we hear at times is unsettling and suggestive, more so because it is also muffled and abstract. Humphrey Searle’s score is, by turns, bewitching and chilling, an ideal complement to this shadow-play. Precious few special effects are involved, quite different from the abysmal 1999 remake coughed up by Jan De Bont.
Unlike vintage radio drama, it is hard for film to engage the theater of the mind with the intensity that The Haunting does. It draws us into the shadows where we may hear or feel but seldom see. It invites us to plumb our own darkness and to summon our own ghosts. In doing so, it’s as subtly disturbing as our minds will let it be.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Negativland: It's All in Their Heads
Last Sunday night, I had the rare opportunity to see Negativland in Dallas at the Sons of Herman Hall. I have long enjoyed their provocative releases, lawsuit-related art, and the wit of their sampling compositions.
It was amazing to see their "live radio show" and the cooperative mixing that they do so well. I even put on the blindfold for a while and just listened, though if I hadn't taken if off for the last half of the show, I would have missed some wonderful visual gags. After a while, though, I noticed something missing: laughter.
Granted, there were a few really funny bits scattered throughout the night but ultimately the show, which included a massive amount of spoken samples from religious and secular media, became didactic and even strident. While part of the problem seems to have been that the samples themselves were didactic and strident, the show was reminiscent of those Negativland routines that stop being funny and become bang-on-the-head preachy, a word I use intentionally.
One may forgive the "band" their lapse in thinking that Dallas is still "the tightly clasped buckle on the Bible Belt" rather than the exciting and diverse global city it has become. It was apparent that they considered themselves in enemy territory, albeit with a crowd of friendly fans. While Negativland has often mocked religion to great effect, as with "Christianity is Stupid," the strain of issue polarization seems to have taken its toll. Granted, there were many thought-provoking samples filled with useful advice or ludicrous assertion, but after the 100th repetition of "God is dead," my eyelids started to feel heavy and Sunday night started to feel more like Sunday morning. Specifically, I think that I laughed more when I used to go to church as a kid.
Maybe it's the deadly serious business of thwarting busy-body fundamentalists and violent extremists that sucked the fun out of the room and left Negativland in reactionary black & white mode. The Message, which was pounded into the crowd with tedious regularity, is that religion is "all in your head." That's also the name of the tour, and converts are called "Headites." This would have been mildly amusing had the man one seat away from me not reacted to the show with Holy Roller enthusiasm, nodding and quaking and gesticulating wildy. It was a stark reminder that there is more to this discussion (or presentation) than belief versus atheism. Worse, if the show was any indication, we now have to grapple with the belief atheists have about what believers believe, naturally drawn from the craziest representatives.
Sure, it's all in your head (and mine) but what does that mean, exactly? Presently, science is still addressing fundamentals like the nature of consciousness and the neurophysiology of ostensible mystical experience. Putting it succinctly, we still don't understand our own capacities nor can science adequately address the subjective experiences that are claimed as gnosis, experiences of some Otherness arrived at through various means which cannot be conveyed through speech or text. Pending future findings and methodologies for approaching this dilemma, it's possible to see the emergent New Atheism as a creature that can't seem to shake its own dogmatism, with a sad tendency to ape the very worst aspects of religious fundamentalism. Like Reagan with the "war on drugs," Negativland and the New Atheists have closed the debate for us and wrapped it up with a bow of bombastic mockery.
And so I was shown the error of my own belief that I would be laughing that Sunday night. And the art of Negativland, presented with great skill, ultimately collapsed into polemic rubble of the sort that is now all too familiar to readers of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. With a few exceptions, the foibles of religion are depicted as if all religionists are crazed hillbillies and mouth-frothing lunatics. In the process Negativland seems to be inaugurating the First United Church of Atheism, the Headites. It would apparently be a gag if it didn't seem so very earnest. With plenty of unexamined assumptions and an Us versus Them mentality, Negativland is coming to your area with the New Dogma. It's as subtle as a blow to the head and about as funny.
It was amazing to see their "live radio show" and the cooperative mixing that they do so well. I even put on the blindfold for a while and just listened, though if I hadn't taken if off for the last half of the show, I would have missed some wonderful visual gags. After a while, though, I noticed something missing: laughter.
Granted, there were a few really funny bits scattered throughout the night but ultimately the show, which included a massive amount of spoken samples from religious and secular media, became didactic and even strident. While part of the problem seems to have been that the samples themselves were didactic and strident, the show was reminiscent of those Negativland routines that stop being funny and become bang-on-the-head preachy, a word I use intentionally.
One may forgive the "band" their lapse in thinking that Dallas is still "the tightly clasped buckle on the Bible Belt" rather than the exciting and diverse global city it has become. It was apparent that they considered themselves in enemy territory, albeit with a crowd of friendly fans. While Negativland has often mocked religion to great effect, as with "Christianity is Stupid," the strain of issue polarization seems to have taken its toll. Granted, there were many thought-provoking samples filled with useful advice or ludicrous assertion, but after the 100th repetition of "God is dead," my eyelids started to feel heavy and Sunday night started to feel more like Sunday morning. Specifically, I think that I laughed more when I used to go to church as a kid.
Maybe it's the deadly serious business of thwarting busy-body fundamentalists and violent extremists that sucked the fun out of the room and left Negativland in reactionary black & white mode. The Message, which was pounded into the crowd with tedious regularity, is that religion is "all in your head." That's also the name of the tour, and converts are called "Headites." This would have been mildly amusing had the man one seat away from me not reacted to the show with Holy Roller enthusiasm, nodding and quaking and gesticulating wildy. It was a stark reminder that there is more to this discussion (or presentation) than belief versus atheism. Worse, if the show was any indication, we now have to grapple with the belief atheists have about what believers believe, naturally drawn from the craziest representatives.
Sure, it's all in your head (and mine) but what does that mean, exactly? Presently, science is still addressing fundamentals like the nature of consciousness and the neurophysiology of ostensible mystical experience. Putting it succinctly, we still don't understand our own capacities nor can science adequately address the subjective experiences that are claimed as gnosis, experiences of some Otherness arrived at through various means which cannot be conveyed through speech or text. Pending future findings and methodologies for approaching this dilemma, it's possible to see the emergent New Atheism as a creature that can't seem to shake its own dogmatism, with a sad tendency to ape the very worst aspects of religious fundamentalism. Like Reagan with the "war on drugs," Negativland and the New Atheists have closed the debate for us and wrapped it up with a bow of bombastic mockery.
And so I was shown the error of my own belief that I would be laughing that Sunday night. And the art of Negativland, presented with great skill, ultimately collapsed into polemic rubble of the sort that is now all too familiar to readers of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. With a few exceptions, the foibles of religion are depicted as if all religionists are crazed hillbillies and mouth-frothing lunatics. In the process Negativland seems to be inaugurating the First United Church of Atheism, the Headites. It would apparently be a gag if it didn't seem so very earnest. With plenty of unexamined assumptions and an Us versus Them mentality, Negativland is coming to your area with the New Dogma. It's as subtle as a blow to the head and about as funny.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
(No worries- 10 Most Disturbing Films will resume soon. Also, look forward to future installments of Callithumped, Jugged and Punked)
Against the Day is unlike any other book I have ever read, and one that defies review. Thomas Pynchon’s latest epic tips the scales, packed with 1,086 pages of wonderful characters, marvels, and a tapestry of themes. Ostensibly a novel of revenge, AtD is also (among many other things) an extended rumination on various kinds of light, from the mundane to the esoteric. As the title implies, this is no glorification of spiritual Illuminism so much as a cautionary tale about excesses of light set against the consolations of night.
Taking place in the years prior to World War I, depicted as a sort of historical tipping point here, AtD explores many fascinating themes: Orphism, anarchism, espionage, the elusive nature of freedom, Utopian dreams, Shambala, secret societies, Tarahumara shamanism, peyote visions, doppelgangers, sexual escapades, emergent plutocracy, time travel, the 4th dimension, Icelandic spar, intelligent dogs, Gnostic inversions, Tarot trumps, super-weapons, Lovecraftian monstrosity, Bogomils, hollow Earth theories, Nicolai Tesla, Central Asia, the set of all sets that have themselves as a member, rembetica, fezzes, ukeleles…
The novel begins with the Chicago Exposition of 1893, and some of the best and funniest writing is devoted to this event. Here we first become aware that although this is a book that begins more than a century ago, it sheds a lot of light on our contemporary world and its problems. Much of Against the Day follows the lives of the Traverse family and their acquaintances. Webb Traverse, the patriarch, is an anarchist dynamiter who is done in by hired guns working for the mining company, the owner of which, Scarsdale Vibe, is the novel’s designated vile plutocrat. The task of vengeance falls to Traverse’s three sons, Kit, Reef and Frank. Traverse’s daughter, Lake, marries Deuce Kindred, the man who shot her pa.
This is an incredibly sprawling and tempestuous read. Erudite passages collide with goofy gags, spontaneous musical numbers and puns. Woven throughout the pages is a hilarious parody of juvenile adventure novels and pulps featuring a zeppelin crew of boy adventurers, the Chums of Chance, inspired by the likes of Tom Swift and Doc Savage. Theosophy is also lampooned as T.W.I.T., the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys. Then there are the Visitors, who come from the future or possibly another dimension. “They have been crossing here, crossing over, between the worlds, for generations. Our ancestors knew them. Looking back over a thousand years, here is a time when their trespassings onto our shores at last converge, as in a vanishing-point, with those of the first Norse visitors.”
I will admit to my share of bafflement at much of the math, and confusion generated by a multitude of characters that pop in and out of the narrative like prairie dogs. In the beginning, I leaned heavily on the in-progress Pynchon wiki to help decode obscure historical references, foreign phrases and greater context. But in the last few hundred pages, I surrendered to the flow which carried me hither and yon beyond my wildest expectations.
One of the interesting things about finishing this book is rereading reviews of it. It seems that more than a few reviewers didn’t finish reading it and covered their retreats with bluster. One or two actually admit to skimming. Malcolm Jones of Newsweek arguably takes the best approach and serializes his review in an attempt to keep pace with the novel:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15771953/site/newsweek/
Having lived with this book for three months, I can’t imagine reading it on a deadline. It’s accessible even if one doesn’t run all of the references to ground, but I would recommend savoring it and doing a little bit of reference legwork. If it touches on a subject you happen to relish, you will find plenty of delightful in-jokes and references. But even without a compass, you can appreciate this wild and wide-ranging ride, by turns hilarious and horrifying, intimate and cosmic.
For those interested in Pynchon’s meta-fictional innovations, a running theme of doubling is woven through the book, along with the material symbol of doubling, Icelandic spar, which acts as a sort of mystical lens. Toward the end of the novel, the narrative splits off into an alternate fictional “reality,” one in which we discover the destinies of the major characters as they unfold there. Even in this alternate reality, one character makes an escape into yet another reality, where he is informed that he just returned from Shambala. Fans of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics will find much to enjoy here.
As long as Against the Day is, I didn’t find myself wanting to skim pages or eager for it to be over. I savored the experience to the very last page, enjoying Pynchon’s ability to conjure so much in this play of light and darkness. Ultimately, the experience of reading becomes lysergic, phantasmagorical and transcendental. The novel, like Biblical Leviathan, swallows you whole and spits you out, exhausted but happy to be alive, on some strange beach.
Against the Day is unlike any other book I have ever read, and one that defies review. Thomas Pynchon’s latest epic tips the scales, packed with 1,086 pages of wonderful characters, marvels, and a tapestry of themes. Ostensibly a novel of revenge, AtD is also (among many other things) an extended rumination on various kinds of light, from the mundane to the esoteric. As the title implies, this is no glorification of spiritual Illuminism so much as a cautionary tale about excesses of light set against the consolations of night.
Taking place in the years prior to World War I, depicted as a sort of historical tipping point here, AtD explores many fascinating themes: Orphism, anarchism, espionage, the elusive nature of freedom, Utopian dreams, Shambala, secret societies, Tarahumara shamanism, peyote visions, doppelgangers, sexual escapades, emergent plutocracy, time travel, the 4th dimension, Icelandic spar, intelligent dogs, Gnostic inversions, Tarot trumps, super-weapons, Lovecraftian monstrosity, Bogomils, hollow Earth theories, Nicolai Tesla, Central Asia, the set of all sets that have themselves as a member, rembetica, fezzes, ukeleles…
The novel begins with the Chicago Exposition of 1893, and some of the best and funniest writing is devoted to this event. Here we first become aware that although this is a book that begins more than a century ago, it sheds a lot of light on our contemporary world and its problems. Much of Against the Day follows the lives of the Traverse family and their acquaintances. Webb Traverse, the patriarch, is an anarchist dynamiter who is done in by hired guns working for the mining company, the owner of which, Scarsdale Vibe, is the novel’s designated vile plutocrat. The task of vengeance falls to Traverse’s three sons, Kit, Reef and Frank. Traverse’s daughter, Lake, marries Deuce Kindred, the man who shot her pa.
This is an incredibly sprawling and tempestuous read. Erudite passages collide with goofy gags, spontaneous musical numbers and puns. Woven throughout the pages is a hilarious parody of juvenile adventure novels and pulps featuring a zeppelin crew of boy adventurers, the Chums of Chance, inspired by the likes of Tom Swift and Doc Savage. Theosophy is also lampooned as T.W.I.T., the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys. Then there are the Visitors, who come from the future or possibly another dimension. “They have been crossing here, crossing over, between the worlds, for generations. Our ancestors knew them. Looking back over a thousand years, here is a time when their trespassings onto our shores at last converge, as in a vanishing-point, with those of the first Norse visitors.”
I will admit to my share of bafflement at much of the math, and confusion generated by a multitude of characters that pop in and out of the narrative like prairie dogs. In the beginning, I leaned heavily on the in-progress Pynchon wiki to help decode obscure historical references, foreign phrases and greater context. But in the last few hundred pages, I surrendered to the flow which carried me hither and yon beyond my wildest expectations.
One of the interesting things about finishing this book is rereading reviews of it. It seems that more than a few reviewers didn’t finish reading it and covered their retreats with bluster. One or two actually admit to skimming. Malcolm Jones of Newsweek arguably takes the best approach and serializes his review in an attempt to keep pace with the novel:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15771953/site/newsweek/
Having lived with this book for three months, I can’t imagine reading it on a deadline. It’s accessible even if one doesn’t run all of the references to ground, but I would recommend savoring it and doing a little bit of reference legwork. If it touches on a subject you happen to relish, you will find plenty of delightful in-jokes and references. But even without a compass, you can appreciate this wild and wide-ranging ride, by turns hilarious and horrifying, intimate and cosmic.
For those interested in Pynchon’s meta-fictional innovations, a running theme of doubling is woven through the book, along with the material symbol of doubling, Icelandic spar, which acts as a sort of mystical lens. Toward the end of the novel, the narrative splits off into an alternate fictional “reality,” one in which we discover the destinies of the major characters as they unfold there. Even in this alternate reality, one character makes an escape into yet another reality, where he is informed that he just returned from Shambala. Fans of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics will find much to enjoy here.
As long as Against the Day is, I didn’t find myself wanting to skim pages or eager for it to be over. I savored the experience to the very last page, enjoying Pynchon’s ability to conjure so much in this play of light and darkness. Ultimately, the experience of reading becomes lysergic, phantasmagorical and transcendental. The novel, like Biblical Leviathan, swallows you whole and spits you out, exhausted but happy to be alive, on some strange beach.
Friday, April 4, 2008
The Esoteric Rocketman
(I will return to the 10 Most Disturbing Films shortly. In the meantime, I offer this literary intermission)
Many years ago, like an amateur rock-climber who impulsively decides to take on a mountain, I tried to read Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow (referred to by the 1974 Pulitzer Prize jury as "unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene"). I only made it through about 100 pages, but the challenge whetted my appetite. I enjoy literary puzzles, experiments and challenges, and learning the lessons encrypted in this book became a holy grail for me. I made two more attempts before I finally read the entire novel. I have since read it two more times, the last time with the aid of the invaluable Gravity's Rainbow Companion. Like Huckleberry Finn or Illuminatus!, Gravity's Rainbow is a book that grows with you and rewards your life experience and intellectual expansion. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this novel is the creation of rocket mythology, something Pynchon does with enormous insight inspired, in part, by Jacob Grimm's (of the Brothers Grimm) 4-volume masterpiece, Teutonic Mythology. This is carried out with complexity that falls beyond the scope of this blog, though it is worth mentioning that GR's anti-hero, Tyrone Slothrop (anagram for "sloth or entropy"), while on clandestine assignment in recently liberated France, assumes the identity of Rocketman, complete with a costume of white Zoot suit and conical hat. Among his other heroic duties, he liberates a cache of hash and engages in a pie fight in a hot air balloon. His destiny is bound with the emergent mythology of the rocket and a strange, secret ritual involving rocket 0000 and its payload.
Which brings me to another celebrated rocketman, the scientist/ occultist John Whiteside Parsons featured in "John Carter's" Sex and Rockets (Feral House, 2000). This meticulous study could well stand as a non-fiction sequel to Gravity's Rainbow, concerned as it is with rocket science, alchemy and the crossroads between the two disciplines. While this is plainly a journeyman effort, with uneven though enjoyable writing, the subject is fascinating and the book is exhaustive in telling its tale. The first half of the book concerns itself mainly with John/ Jack Parsons (born under the name Marvel) and his importance to the American rocket program, specifically with reference to the development of solid rocket fuel and JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) technology that may have helped the allies prevail in WWII. He was also instrumental in the founding of Jet Propulsion Laboratories and a founding partner in Aerojet.
Carter argues convincingly that Parsons is the most important figure in American rocketry, and largely self-taught, at that. Simultaneously, his significance to the occult, specifically the Ordo Templi Orientis that was reconfigured by Aleister Crowley, is denigrated, depicting Parsons as a failed magician whose endeavor to bring about the incarnation of BABALON, the Great Whore of Biblical infamy, also revealed by John Dee in his Enochian workings, was undermined by ego and hubris. That Parsons attempted this with L. Ron Hubbard as his scryer makes the story irresistably juicy, packed with occult melodrama. That Parsons' fame was greater than his accomplishment, at least in the occult realm, is well-argued. However, one is left to wonder at the results of his Great Work. There is speculation that Parsons' BABALON working resulted in the advent of UFOs or the birth of the 1960s counter-culture. That Parsons was apparently swindled by L. Ron Hubbard, identified in Crowley's correspondence as a "confidence trickster," adds elements of sensationalism to the story. Hubbard reportedly took off for Florida with Parsons' girlfriend Betty and a lump sum of his cash, which was to be used to establish a business partnership between the three. Sex & Rockets reprints an explanation from the Church of Scientology alleging that Hubbard was employed to bust up America's hotbed of black magick, bringing Naval Intelligence expertise to the matter. In the end, Parsons is largely undone and in debt. Disillusioned with the OTO as the chariot of Thelema (Crowley's Hermetic philosophy summarized, "Do what Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under Will") he quit the order, while remaining a student of the more secretive A.:A.:. Ultimately, he illegitimately took credit for the grade of Magister Templi. Having lived an incredibly full life, Parsons was killed by a mysterious explosion in 1952, followed by his mother's suicide by sleeping pill overdose mere hours later. Later, rather unsavory details are alleged concerning an incestuous relationship that existed between Parsons, his mother and her dog.
Much of the fun of this book is reading about the many notable figures who passed in and out of Parsons' life and his rooming house for eccentrics and free love, that also accommodated the Agape Lodge of the OTO for a time. Actor John Carradine is said to have read poetry at the opening of this Lodge, something missing in the details of the recently reviewed Hollywood's Hellfire Club (also Feral House). L. Ron Hubbard's pre-Scientology role is provocative and mysterious. A Who's Who of American rocket scientists is featured. The politics, trickery and melodrama of the Agape Lodge is diverting. And the book does a wonderful job of following Parsons' partner, "elemental" Marjorie Cameron, through a burgeoning counterculture, featuring cameos from Kenneth Anger to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell.
In the end, the reader is left with several questions and the sense that the story has many holes left to be filled. The connection between Parsons' innovations in rocketry and his occult/ alchemical enthusiasms remains largely unexplored, though hinted at here and there. His legacy seems to be primarily literary and should remain safe with the publication of the concisely stated essay "Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword," which considers Crowley's magickal philosophy of Thelema as the vehicle for radical anarcho-libertarianism. His enceavors to bring about the incarnation of BABALON are discounted by Crowley, though, and Carter concludes that magically, Parsons was an egotistical failure who offers an object lesson for aspiring occultists. At the same time, though, he is credited with working harder than most at his occult work.
This is a fascinating study, amply documented (sometimes distractingly so), that carries a strange cargo of hard science and deep esotericism, much as Gravity's Rainbow does in its fictional framework. In the end, the failures of Parsons are as interesting as his successes. And his legacy seems to be a missing chapter of the rocket mythology painstakingingly created/ depicted by Pynchon. In closing, Carter offers a fitting epigraph from a science fiction story to the effect that Parsons was instrumental in bringing about the end of the world but the beginning of the galaxy. For me, the story is one best closed with the lyrics of the '70s band Jigsaw:
You, You've Blown It All Sky High
Our Love Had Wings To Fly
We Could Have Touched The Sky
You've Blown It All Sky High
Up Round I've Flown
Then Down Down Like a Stone
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