(Video and music above made from a Donna Tartt interview with Charlie Rose by Matt Pope. )
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“Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening.”-Pauline Oliveros
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Two people sitting, talking at a table. Telling stories. Listening to each other. It seems so common, but also uncommon. When was the last time you went over to an aunt’s house, or an older sister, and let her tell you something from the deep wells of her mind and heart? When was the last time you listened to the village wise woman tell you a tale around the fire?

To really listen to a tales such as these, a person needs to be silent, and when silent, listen. To be silent we need to slow down. What else is as cheap and free as entering into silence so we can listen?

Silence has a way of clearing the head. How can we hear our own inner voice, the voices of our sisters and brothers, the voices of the animals and trees, the voices of the rivers, the voices that come in on a warm and gentle wind, if we don’t stop the frenetic pace of production long enough to hear what they have to say?
Slowing down gives us the pause that revives.

Talking is only one side of the equation in speaking truth to power. To hear the power of truth, we need to first shut our mouths and open our ears. To cut through life’s noise we have to turn off the volume of the worlds chatter and mental chatter and go into deep listening. From that silence the voice of our own intuition might just be one of the things we hear awaken.

Lucky for us the composer Pauline Oliveros left a roadmap for re-tuning our ears to inner and outer voices. We can use it to slow down and enter those silences that are pregnant with sound.

FROM THE DEPTHS OF SILENCE, INTUITION

The title for this chapter comes from experimental sound artist, composer and ritualist Pauline Oliveros. A Tejana native of Houston, Texas, born in 1932, she was already playing music in kindergarten, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with sound and listening. She listened to everything, all the time. When she was nine, she started to play the accordion which was to be her lifelong instrument of choice though she became an accomplished multi-instrumentalist. She also became a maverick explorer of tape music, electronic sounds, and the creator of her own specialized delay systems.

Pauline was the definition of a deep listener. To her, the entire world of sound was rich with latent musicality. Reflecting on listening as a kid she said, “I used to enjoy my grandfather tuning his crystal radio. I liked the sounds of tuning the radio much more than the program. My father had a shortwave radio, which also I enjoyed the sounds of the shortwave tuning as well. Those were sounds that I liked.”

As she continued to excel at music in school, and with the encouragement of her pianist mother, she added violin, piano, tuba and French horn to the list of things she could play. At age sixteen, feeling the call of her vocation, she resolved to become a composer, and in time went to college in California. There she supported herself in part by giving accordion lessons. It was at San Francisco State College where she met the poet and composer Ramon Sender, the burgeoning minimalist master magician Terry Riley, and the devotee to avantgarde musical expression, Loren Rush.

With Riley and Rush she formed the very first free improvisation group outside of jazz music in the modern west. Riley had been commissioned to make a piece of music for a film score, but he hadn’t written anything, so he recruited Rush and Oliveros and took them over to the studios at KPFA to use their trusty Ampex tape recorder. They sat down with their instruments and no score. They improvised and caught the results on tape. Riley was on piano, Oliveros on French horn, and Rush on koto and percussion. They improvised several five-minute takes, and in the process realized how much fun they had playing unscored music together. When they listened to the playback together, they all realized they wanted to continue playing improvised music together. It’s an experience many kids who formed bands in the decades afterwards replicated: playing crazy ad hoc music, recording it to tape, and listening back with astonishment to the results. There is an entire world of seldom heard basement tapes containing such untold treasures.

Oliveros spent the remaining years of the 1950s steeped in Beat era circles of strangeness, making friends with a variety of iconoclastic composers, artists, and poets. Sender became one of her improvising partners, and the practice of improvisation became a key to the development of her work. For her twenty-first birthday, her mom had gifted her with a tape recorder, an expensive gift in 1953. The medium of tape created another avenue for creative composition and was another part of her greater destiny.

The legendary electronic synthesist Morton Subotnick was one of the strange ones who was called to the cultural scene in SF and he started swimming in the same circles as Oliveros. Soon he struck up friendship with Oliveros and Sender. They were all interested in electronics and what could be done with tape. With a hefty helping of the DIY spirit and some elbow grease, they cobbled together the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962 that functioned as a non-profit recording studio and performance space for experimental arts. (The full story of the SFTMC and how it evolved into the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College is a fascinating story in itself, and is something I’ve covered in a series of articles you can find in my archives.)

Over the next decade Oliveros continued to compose, to write, to listen, to meditate and to collaborate. By 1971 she had performed and published her piece, Sonic Meditations. Oliveros was a lesbian and part of the feminist movement, and the piece came about from working intensely with a group of female-identified artistically focused spiritual explorers. From this sapphic locus of creative energy, the teachable practice of Deep Listening was born. Sonic Meditations was published in 1974, but the basic practices were further modified, tinkered with, adapted and extended over the next decades until her passing along with her growing body of work that included compositions, recordings and performances.

Oliveros explained Deep Listening as:

“a life long practice. The more I listen the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is…

The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening – listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time. Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception.

We open in order to listen to the world as a field of possibilities and we listen with narrowed attention for specific things of vital interest to us in the world. Through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to the sounds of our daily lives, the environment or music. Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.
Deep Listening is a birthright for all humans.”

One of the many close collaborators with Oliveros was her life partner Ione, herself an accomplished playwright, poet, writer and explorer of sound. They worked on the practice of Deep Listening by developing further sonic meditations, incorporating bodywork, and interactive performance. On a personal level the work included paying attention to “the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination, and dreams.” Ione brought dreamwork into practice as a core element. Our dreams are something are something to be heard and attended to. The effect of the work creates heightened aesthetic appreciation music and environmental sounds but doesn’t stop there. Deep Listening shoots its roots deep into the internal world of the imaginal realm. Through its deliberate cultivation it can help create a field of awareness where personal and community growth occur through “experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness.”

This practice opens a door to the growth of our intutive capacities. Such intuition is necessary not only for those who wish to improvise music in a group setting, but also to storytellers and writers looking to bridge scenes and sections of work, and for anyone who wants to lie there life as a creative work of art.

To get to that one of the first steps is slowing down, get comfortable with silence, as the master John Cage taught us. Cage also taught about response ability. In his essay “Experimental Music” he wrote that,

“Hearing sounds which are just sound immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing, and the emotions of human beings are continually aroused by encounters with nature. Does not a mountain unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder? otters along a stream a sense of mirth? night in the woods a sense of fear? Do not rain falling and mists rising up suggest the love binding heaven and earth? Is not decaying flesh loathsome? Does not the death of someone we love bring sorrow? And is there a greater hero than the least plant that grows? These responses to nature are mine and will not necessarily correspond with another’s. Emotion takes place in the person who has it. And sounds, when allowed to be themselves, do not require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is what is meant by response ability.”

The ability to listen deeply is also the ability to pay attention. In that attention we develop our response ability. Rather than react, having actually heard, a person can decide whether to remain in stillness or move into action.

Listening, then, is also tied to slowing down. To minding the gap between an impulse and whether or not it is worth following.

Listening becomes a creative act and a necessary rebellion in a time of deindustrialization. It creates a space for discernment amidst cognitive dissonance and conflicting narratives. Listening allows us to choose our own adventure within the available options, showing us new options as we grow the ability to pay attention for longer intervals of time, to hear what other people are really saying and doing, and await the response from our own inner voice. In difficult times listening will give us the ability to improvise with what life is calling to our attention.

Since Oliveros passed away in 2016, Deep Listening continues to be taught at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The work is also continued on another dream level and spiritual level by the Ministry of Maat, a group dedicated to “Spiritual, Educational and Holistic support for women and the full spectrum of cultural and gender identities” started by Ione.​

​SLOW AND LOW THAT IS THE TEMPO
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When I listen to music deeply, I slow down. I decelerate to the hiss of cassettes. I rewind the vinyl to hear it crackle and pop. I pop in a CD that might glitch and skip because of an imperfect surface scratch. When I slow down, I also think of how precious music used to be, before the era of recording. Then it can only be experienced live. Every performance was unique, never to be repeated. I thinking of the time and effort spent in learning an instrument, the time spent in composing a song or symphony. These heavy time investments continued with the dawn of recorded music. Artists and bands spend incredible amounts of time in the studio perfecting an album. Yet the glut of available recordings, especially when accelerated to streaming platforms, have made the experience more disposable. People don’t pour over the liner notes with the same obsession as music fans of previous generations did. On Spotify, there are no liner notes.

Art can help teach us how to be present with our attention. Present to looking at a painting for longer than five or ten minutes. Reading a book more than one time. Listening to an album multiple times, and then come back to again and again, with new experiences to hear what else is inside.

Patience in creativity is a factor here too. I was inspired to write about the slow and steady route of creation in part from reviewing the album Electric Voyeur by Big Blood. They spent ten years making that album. It would have felt dismissive to write a review of the album if I’d only listened to it once or twice. It was good to have some time with the album before I wrote my review, considering the time they invested into creating the masterpiece. On this album, they not only played all the music, they also built all the electronic instruments that were used to play the music. Hours and hours and hours, days, weeks, months, years were spent going between the soldering bench and the home studio. Yet the result can be listened to in under two hours. Artwork can be consumed with such brevity, but the time it takes to create art is long. The personal life experience required to make art is also something that cannot be rushed. No one gets to be an elder without the harsh personal experiences that have a weathered a person and given them the necessary gravitas to make lasting work. Such experiences run in parallel with time devoted to learning a craft.

Donna Tartt is a writer who listens deeply to herself and takes her time writing a book. Somewhere in an interview Tartt mentioned that it took her about ten years to write a book. Her breakthrough masterwork The Secret History came out in 1992. Her next novel, The Little Friend came out in 2002. Goldfinch was published in 2013. While I can admire the work ethic and prolific pens of people like Stephen King and other one-book-a-year writers, I cannot argue with the deep saturation and grain of language to be found in Donna Tartt’s novels. The prose is exquisite. True master craftsmanship. That takes time. I’d love to read another novel of hers. It has been over ten years since the Goldfinch came out. I hope she is still working, and if so, I imagine it will be worth the wait. The secret processes of the soul and creation cannot be rushed.
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The musician Matt Pope (Milhaus) made the amazing video and music here from an interview with Donna Tartt on the Charlie Rose show. It took a lot painstaking edits to make something like this. It took a lot of listening to her words, to her voice. It took a lot of time to make this beautiful video and music.

Creating a body of work as an artist takes an entire lifetime. If that body of work is to have grain, the same kind of gnarl and character as a tree, it is slow work. In the attention economy where everyone wants eyeballs on a finished piece, sloppy work and to AI slop is just one one result. With the financial economy in constant chaos and shambles, perhaps it is also time to opt out of the attention economy. Attention isn’t a bad thing. It is a good thing. Yet the more attention is craved, the more attention seems to go towards its own bankruptcy and deficit. When I give my attention to shallow clickbait, my attention accelerates into hyperactivity, my focus decreases and my efforts become scattered. I lose my ability to hold attention and concentrate on something for a longer period of time in the rush for immediate gratification. The ability to concentrate for longer periods of time necessary to do what Cal Newport calls “deep work” is eroded. Giving up becomes easy, staying with something, or with someone, over the long haul, is just another option instead of a lifelong commitment.

Slowing down to extend our attention gives grain to a work, it gives what the science fiction writer Rudy Rucker calls gnarl. It is something he seeks to put into his novels, which are my favorite of the cyberpunk writers. His works went beyond cyberpunk of course. As a mathematician, his books are of high philosophical concept, and the way he used stories from his life and transposed them into science fiction settings (a style he calls transrealism), make them so unique, there is nothing quite like them in the SF canon.

In one of his blog posts Rucker describes gnarl this way. “I use gnarl in an idiosyncratic and somewhat technical sense; I use it to mean a level of complexity that lies in the zone between predictability and randomness. The original meaning of ‘gnarl’ was simply ‘a knot in the wood of a tree.’ In California surfer slang, ‘gnarly’ came to describe complicated, rapidly changing surf conditions. And then, by extension, something gnarly came to be anything with surprisingly intricate detail. As a late-arriving and perhaps over-assimilated Californian, I get a kick out of the word.”

Rucker sought out the gnarlier end of literature for inspiration and sought to put the same high gnarl into his own writing. “If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone else’s dream. The gnarly zone lies at the interface between logic and fantasy.”

Gnarl cannot be easily automated, because part of what makes something gnarly is the grain of weathered experience, the slow growth of rings over the tangled knots of life.

THE SLOW GROWTH OF MEMORY
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Human memory is another thing that has atrophied under the influence of viral media that burns out after just a few infectious days. News cycles (or as I like to call them, noose cycles, because they cut off circulation to the head) are as disorienting as they are vapid. Memories should be generational, if not longer. Our phone enhanced collective dementia places some of our stories at risk of swirling down the collective psychic drain.
At the beginning of this essay I asked, “When was the last time you went over to an aunts house, or an older sister, and let her tell you something from the deep wells of her mind and heart? When was the last time you listened to the village wise woman tell you a tale around the fire? ” Hanging out with Pauline Oliveros, Ione, and her other collaborators feels like hanging out with some older wise aunties, even when I am only listening to their recordings or reading their words. Reading the words of Donna Tartt I feel like I am with a cool older sister. When I read the stories of Bette A. in her book Slow Stories, and listen to her words in the collaboration with Brian Eno that was made for the book, I feel like I have been invited over to a hearthfire for a cup of tea and to hear the wisdom of another time. It’s like I’ve gone to see this storyteller who has things inside of her she needs to share, and that I need to know. These stories seem to come straight from the dreamworld and carry me to a place beyond material reality.

​Listening to Bette A.’s voice and the soft ambience from Eno on the recording, I feel safe, in a cacoon. It is this primal feeling I get, of having a mother or an aunt or a sister read to me while in bed. It’s so primal. It’s so timeless, as we are taken into the world of story.

(As of now, there is only a vinyl version available of the recording. I got to listen to a promo as a music reviewer. It would be wonderful if they released an edition that made the recording affordable for everyday fans. That said, the entire art package does go to a charity, The Heroines! Movement, a global storytelling movement around women role models, co-founded by Bette A.)

The quality of Bette’s voice is such that it fills me with emotion. It is this feeling of being read to, slowly, softly. I realize I haven’t experienced this in so long, that I am overwhelmed with a grief I did not know I had, grief for something I did not know I was missing. I listen to audiobooks sometimes but those don’t really count. Podcasts can be even worse. Poetry readings are good, but there every poet wants to be heard. When was the last time someone told you a tale and you really slowed down enough to listen and take it, be absorbed into it, be absorbed by and saturated by the story?

The fact that they are slow makes them better. This isn’t an audiobook you are rushing to listen to because you need to fill up your information gathering quota. Information isn’t knowledge. These are stories and there is wisdom inside them. The information highway sped things up, this is an analog off ramp inviting us to slow down.

When they started to record the stories in this multimedia project, Brian’s only instruction to Bette was to read her tale “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow.”

It seems to me that “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow” should be a new Oblique Strategy.

Slow down, listen deep, and find the grains of wisdom spoken by the wise woman in your life.

A Cheap Thrills Vacation Primer for Beating the Heat

May Day marks the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. It’s also the time of year when people start really figuring out what they are going to be doing for their summer vacations if they are lucky enough to take one. While it may not yet be blazing hot, the humidity and higher temperatures are coming, at least on this side of the hemisphere. With that in mind I share this Cheap Thrills article on what beating the heat might look like in a world of accelerated climate weirding and lower resource base. Along the way we take a dips in the lake at a summer Chataqua, hang out with Thoreau at his cabin, visit a bungalow in the borscht belt, and stop off for some gelato before having a siesta in the height of Ferragosto.
This article was originally written for the summer 2025 issue of New Maps and was edited by Nathanael Bonnell. 

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.” – Sam Keen

​​Sometimes you just want to get away from it all. Hit the road. Get out of Dodge, go someplace else for a little while, and then come back. One word for it is vacation. People really started going on them when the railroad hit its stride. The car, bus and airplane expanded the options of where to go, and for a time, long distance travel was relatively affordable. It can now be expected to become quite expensive again in the years ahead, thanks to the downward-sloping curve of Hubbert’s peak. Feeling that pinch doesn’t mean folks aren’t going to want to hit the escape button, though, as vacations have become a habit for the world’s industrial denizens.
Vacationing is, for the most part, a product of our industrial culture. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century the word itself generally meant a time when teachers and students vacated the schoolhouse. The main reason for vacating the schoolhouse was to get busy with the other work that needed to be done in the prime of growing season. To actually take a break from work, people had to have a bit of money, making vacations and resting cures the domain of the wealthy. As the oil gush of prosperity drove everyone’s fortunes up, the middle and working class were able to start taking a break too. A bit of surplus meant that taking a week off for a bit of rest and relaxation didn’t have to drain the coffers to their dregs.

Nineteenth-century physicians started to advocate that such breaks were good for the nerves, while other advocates of leisure suggested that they could be used as a time of spiritual renewal. This was all in contrast to the way many Puritans and Calvinists preached the gospel of work from the pulpit, proclaiming that idleness created a playground for the Devil. As more liberal forms of Protestantism such as Unitarianism came to the fore, they pushed back on this work ethic, and contributed to the idea of the good that could be had by taking a break. The influence of the Transcendentalist movement, and their ideas of taking time for reflection and self-culture, played no small part in this change of attitude.

The practice of going on a vacation is something that can be saved as a habit of leisure even as the industrial economy continues to decline. Adjustments into how far and how often a person will travel will need to be made, especially by those belonging to the international jet set class. Even those of us who are used to more modest vacations will need to change our expectations. The days of hopscotching across the globe in planes are, in the long run, numbered. Most folks never could afford to go even to the other side of the country, much less another continent, anyway. Finding contentment in our home counties, states, and bioregions will be one of the waves future vacationers aim to catch. Meanwhile, those with an entrepreneurial spirit, and who live in the right kind of place, might even be able to cater to the wants and needs of future travelers as a secondary source of income in a time of decline.

The issue of climate change and seasonal work is not unconnected to vacation. Decline brings with it many difficulties, and one of them will be adjusting to harsh outdoor work as the limitations of air conditioning begin to assert themselves. Summer is the traditional time of a break from school in the United States. This was ostensibly tied to the needs of farmers. Extra hands were needed in the barns and fields during the long hot days. Yet hot days also make hard work more difficult. In places like Italy, where the summers can be as humid and scorching as here in Ohio, it has become tradition for most of the country to take off for at least the first two weeks of August. One way to cope with increased heat is to slow down and go for a swim.

The exact patterns around vacationing will be different in Illinois and Indiana compared to Texas or Maine. For one thing, many people in North America are landlocked, and it won’t be so easy for everyone to get to the ocean to escape the heat, though rivers and lakes are likely accessible, and even closer to home, so are swimming holes in creeks and ponds. If trains can be kept chugging for a longer time, and buses used in place of atomized cars, they may take some people away to a variety of shorelines. The trains were the first to take people to the oceans for getaways in the first place.
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To return to the Transcendentalists, it was in the nineteenth century that one man made a personal escape, and set a promising pattern for future vacationers in America. That person was Henry David Thoreau and the pattern he pioneered was established in this nation’s collective consciousness when he built a small and economical cabin for himself down by Walden Pond.

​For the American, getting away from it all seems to have started when Thoreau went to Walden to live his life in the woods. Walden wasn’t that far away from his original home in Concord, Massachusetts. He could easily walk back as needed, and he did so often to eat dinner with family or friends like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Being a prolific walker, heading into town was no problem for Thoreau. His isolation was, in this respect, mostly internal, as he also received visitors. But just being on the outskirts of town, it was enough for him to help his mind escape from the kind of thoughts people had in town, to really start thinking his own thoughts. He collected those thoughts in his book Walden and now they continue to echo down the years. I think they have led to the establishment of a permanent Walden in the American mind. He moved in to his cabin on the Fourth of July, after all.

It seems appropriate to start with Thoreau when talking about vacation, considering that in the last issue I wrote about the practice of naturalism. Of all the things Thoreau was, he liked to consider himself as foremost a naturalist. His imprint is all over the environmental movement. Yet the word vacation and the name Thoreau aren’t often thrown together, even while for many people a vacation is a way to get back to nature. At least for citified folk like myself, I often think of vacations as a journey to a place where I’m going to do some hiking, some swimming, some walking, some spending time outdoors. They’ve often included camping, and it’s always a bonus if I can get far enough away from the light pollution of the city to really be able to see the milk in the Milky Way.

​As Thoreau’s good friend Emerson wrote in his essay “Nature”:

​Restoration from real sorrows can come from being alone in the woods, in communion with the trees, bathing in the air of a forest, the light of the stars. A cabin is a place to, in Thoreau’s words, “Simplify, simplify, simplify. ” This is in contrast to the complexity of the contemporary vacation, whose planning, execution and cost often create as much stress as they are supposed to alleviate. It can be hard to simplify when our internal and external lives are a cluttered mess. Breaking from regular routines, forgetting about work, errands, and chores, and stopping long enough to allow what matters to us to register inside our minds can be considered a first step towards simplifying.

The urge to rusticate loomed large in our collective imagination even in 1845, when our population was smaller and our square concrete cities less sprawled. Despite the language Thoreau used to talk about Native Americans (“savages”), it is clear from his writing he truly admired their way of life and gives many passages of his prose to praising it. One way of looking at his experiment at Walden might be as a white man’s vision quest, a search for what a person could be in America. Thought of in this way, a vacation can be used to retreat from society at large, a tool to recalibrate ourselves to our own inner vision. A cabin retreat is a great place for such a quest.

The cabin in the woods takes on another resonance today as a possible place to “bug out” when the shale hits the fan. A person would flee to such a bug-out location if their main domicile was struck by a disaster of some kind, whether natural or man-made. Stocked up and equipped with the tools of survival, these kinds of shelters are for more than just getting back to the basics: they’re places to hunker down for shorter or extended durations. Consider working on them as a kind of vacation a prepper might have now, before taking a permanent vacation later.

Thoreau’s cabin escape was, for the most part, a solitary venture. Not all vacationers have the luxury of that kind of alone time, nor the funds for a plot of land and the permits required to build if a person wanted to keep it legal. A secondhand camper or a repurposed van is more affordable for people, as evidenced by the many modern-day nomads living in them. There are lots of people already living in campers and vans stationary as well. As the cost oil continues to go up, living in these kinds of vehicles, parked in the yard of a family member, a vacant lot, or hidden away elsewhere, will continue to be a downwardly mobile home option.
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Sometimes being alone isn’t really what a person wants anyway. Sometimes they want to get away with a spouse, family and friends. This brings us to a slight detour at summer school, or summer camp anyway, and that convivial movement of gathering together for self-improvement known as the Chautauqua.

he Transcendentalist movement helped to get a number of ideas and practices around education into circulation. The majority of Transcendentalist movers and shakers had worked as teachers to one degree or another. This includes Emerson and Thoreau, but also Amos Bronson Alcott, whose ideas were a forerunner to much that is taken for granted in education today, such as his taking kids on field trips to learn through experience. Field trips were a radical idea in the 1800s. Now they are standard educational practice. Thinkers like Elizabeth Peabody promoted a view of education emphasizing the innate knowledge within a person, and teaching as a way to help facilitate a flowering of what might as well be called intuition. Getting an education, then, became a mode of self-culture and spiritual refinement. As such, it was considered to be a lifelong endeavor.

In time, people would even take vacations from work to attend lectures in the summer as part of the Chautauqua movement, which had a precursor in the Lyceum movement.

The Lyceums were kickstarted in Massachusetts by Josiah Holbrook in 1826. He was another believer in the notion of self-improvement by learning across the span of an entire life, and his efforts promoted the transmission of “useful knowledge” through public lectures. After he created the National American Lyceum to teach his method of teaching, other Lyceums grew up all around the country as if a colony of fruitful mushroom spores had just erupted from the soil. By the mid-1830s there were 3,000 Lyceums catering to the public’s inclination to learn, and to be entertained while learning.

A number of the New England Transcendentalists got involved, using the Lyceum as a way to transmit their philosophy to the wider country on the speaking circuits that developed with their growth. Emerson and Thoreau were both avid Lyceum lecturers, and many of their talks were later polished up into poetic prose for publication.

Following the chaos of the Civil War the Lyceum waned as a cultural touchstone, but in 1874 the Chautauqua waxed in its place as something of a successor. The Chautauqua started off in western New York near a lake of the same name, as a summer training program for Sunday school teachers and other churchy types. The Methodist ministers John H. Vincent and Lewis Miller were the two people behind it, and like other summer traditions, it was first organized as a camp, this one geared towards religious instruction. As interest and enthusiasm for this camp of learning grew, they loosened things up a bit to include talks on general topics, music, and recreation. The success of the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly was such that the format was copied and other Chautauquas sprouted around the country. Later in 1904 the enterprising Keith Vawter and Roy Ellison took the show on the road and presented the Chautauqua in tents as they traveled from town to town, city to city, giving people the chance to pay a modest fee to attend.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering its religious origins, that mixed in with the whole Chautauqua shebang was the idea that society could be improved through teaching citizens to be morally upstanding. As such it was in direct competition with other circuits of the time that had more in common with the circus. In other words, vaudeville. Whereas racy vaudeville offered humorous and libidinous ways to take the mind off of everyday stress, the Chautauqua billed itself as being able to improve the mind and character. As such it aimed to appeal to self-styled upper-crust highbrows, and keep out those deemed rancorous, lowbrow, and lower-class. Failing that, it would build them up into something better.

As the role of education continues to be questioned in America and change with time, the possibility of developing a new kind of summer school for “useful knowledge” might be a potential model for vacationers who want to improve their life of mind and have uplifting entertainment. As with any organic social movement, it is the people in the movement who get to decide what it is about. If I had my druthers future family summer camps would be devoted to the Humanities, Ecology, and Memory, or what I call HEM (in contrast to STEM). The inclusion of some bawdy songs and ample time dipping in a lake might be enough to keep it free from moral grandstanding and appeal to a variety of peoples. For that matter, there might as well be multiple types of summer camps catering to the needs of a diverse array of communities. After all, WASPs bent on social reformation aren’t the only ones looking for a distraction in the dog days of summer heat.

For the greater part of fifty years smack dab in the middle of the twentieth century Jewish vacationers from New York City regularly headed to the Catskill Mountains to what was called the Borscht Belt, also known as the Yiddish Alps. In a large part, it was driven by the need to get out of the hot multistory apartment buildings of the sweltering metropolis. The mothers and grandmothers would get a place at one of the five hundred resorts that catered to people at various income levels and head up with the kids as soon as they were out of school. This vacation land was in its prime between the 1920s and 1960s. Excluded elsewhere, especially during the 1930s, the Jews found an oasis in the Catskills. In the seventies, the rise of affordable AC, cheaper air travel, and the decline of rail service to mountains all contributed to their downturn and, in many cases, eventual abandonment.

There were fancy hotels for the wealthy, but for those of lesser means, bungalow colonies and kuchaleyns. The bungalows were little cottages all grouped together. Usually just a bedroom or two, kitchenette and screened porch to play cards in when it rained or get away from the mosquitoes. The same families rented the same bungalow year after year so when the kids went up with the women for the summer, they got to meet up with their summer friends, different from the city friends they had the rest of the year. There is something about being with certain group of people for a specific set amount of time during our adolescent years that lends itself to creating a sense of enchantment.

These bungalows had communal centers where people gambled in little homespun casinos, comedians told jokes, and movies were screened in the evenings. Sometimes a musician would pop in. All of these and more were standard fare at the hotels as well. Meanwhile, the kuchaleyns were even a bit more down-at-heel than the bungalows. This Yiddish word means “cook it yourself” and was used to denote boarding houses where people could stay but no meals were provided. People went to them anyway and managed to have a good time.

Modern stand-up comedy in its present form owes quite a bit to the entertainment circuit of the Borscht Belt. Just as the Transcendentalists polished their material through Lyceum lectures, Jewish comedians crafted their art of talking into what we now know as stand-up comedy on the circuit. Comedians such as the late Joan Rivers cut their teeth catering to the roughly half-a-million people who went up to the Borscht Belt each summer, giving them plenty of experience for their further efforts in showbiz. Others such as Sid Caesar and Jerry Seinfeld were influenced by that particular style of humor. All of this has left an indelible mark on American culture. It makes me wonder how future patterns of summer leisure, and the entertainments provided for them, will in turn influence the larger cultures in which they are nested.
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During these summers it was standard for the men to stay in the city to put in their work hours for the week. By the time Friday afternoon rolled around they were eager to get in on the comedy, the card games, and time with their families. They got into their cars and headed up to the bungalows as fast as they could. This particular behavior is less likely to be emulated in a time of increased fuel shortages, but the other pattern, where children and their caregivers (of whatever gender) go to a kind of retreat for a part of the summer, just might. Another possibility for getting away with the whole family is to just shut everything down for a few weeks in the summer, like they do in Italy.

​If summer has a last stand, it’s in August. The promise of a summer and its freedoms are in full bloom on Memorial Day. As Labor Day draws near those promises start to wilt. I can still relate to punk rocker Henry Rollins when he wrote, “August used to be a sad month for me. As the days went on, the thought of school starting weighed heavily upon my young frame.” I remember wanting to pack in as much time with friends as I could before the school bell rang again. August is a time when everyone might as well have one last hurrah for the summer before getting back to the grindstone, and the Italians have good enough sense to just close it all down for half of the month.

They call this time of year Ferragosto and it goes all the way back to Emperor Augustus in 18 BC. He gave the first day of August off to farmers following the rigors of the summer growing season. When the Catholic Church gained ascendancy, the holiday needed some religious mojo and got moved to August 15 to celebrate the Assumption of Mary into heaven. During the Fascist years when Benito Mussolini was in control, he threw the lower classes a bone and gave them three days off from August 14th to 16th and made tickets on the trains cheaper so they could go to museums in the cities and to their beloved beaches. People would pack up lunch supplies and head out for fun. As the twentieth century wore on, many workers got in the habit of taking a week or two off in August. Since this made it difficult for anyone else to get anything done with so many other people just taking it easy, the culture as a whole followed suit. These days Italian businesses by law give four weeks off a year, and most companies generally just close down for Ferragosto, and that word is now associated with this collective pause. Travel agents advise against going to Italy in August because many of the shopkeepers and the like are on holiday, the big cities are deserted, and everyone has gone to the beach.

Part of my interest in Ferragosto came from when I was reading about the “Lazarus Lizards” or common European wall lizard (Podarcis muralis), that was introduced to Cincinnati around 1950 by the son of the owner of the Lazarus Department store. This so-called “invasive” species is now prolific. Someone else told me how the climate here is similar to Italy (hot and humid in the summer). One branch of my family is Italian (from the town of Ripafratta, outside Pisa) and I had been reading about the kitchen gardens of Italian immigrants in the United States. Thinking of the climate being similar, I started to wonder what else I could learn from these ancestors, such as how they coped with the heat.
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Soon my mind turned to gelato and how a summer vacation isn’t really a summer vacation without at least one stop at an ice cream stand. One of the most beloved of my Italian ancestors was a guy named Ice Cream Johnny. He lived from 1851 to 1943 and made his life in the hills of Kentucky outside of Frankfort. While so many of our other relatives are forgotten, we are still talking about him. That’s what being an ice cream maker will do for you. Give you immortality, or at least your name a longer memory.

Hand-cranked ice cream freezers were invented in 1846 by Nancy Johnson in New Jersey. Before that time, ice cream was an occasional luxury of the rich. After that, with new ways for transporting and keeping ice frozen, ice cream became something even poor little whippersnappers could get as a summer treat. Ice Cream Johnny had his own dairy cows to make his own ice cream with, before taking it into town on a horse-drawn wagon to sell to his fellow Kentuckians.
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Hand-cranked ice cream is a low-tech process, so the possibility of ice cream can remain in our hot futures as long as ice itself can be kept and the special metal-lined bucket and canister used to make it can be crafted. For that matter, shutting everything down for a two-week holiday requires zero technology. What it does require is a willingness to slow down and set aside production to practice il dolce far niente, or the sweet art of doing nothing. In a world of strict energy limits, periods of time where no work gets done can be great for everyone.

RE/SOURCES:

​Aron, Cindy Sondik. Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. New York, NY.: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Carter, Jamie Betesh. “Back to the Borscht Belt.” <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/back-to-borscht-belt-jewish-catskills-revival>
Groubert, Mark & Hunley, Eric. “Levine’s Bungalow Colonies.”

​I first heard about the bungalow colonies on this episode of America’s Untold Stories. Mark Groubert is a great story teller and he tells about his time as a kid growing up and spending summers in one of the bungalow colonies. He even snuck off to visit a music festival known as Woodstock. I don’t endorse Groubert or Hunley’s political views, but for history and JFK assassination lore, the earlier episodes of their program are worth digging through.

Hayes, Brittany. “The Fourth American Institution.” <https://ushistoryscene.com/article/chautauqua/>
Joelle, Memoree. “Comedy in the Catskills: Remembering the Borscht Belt” < https://newyorkmakers.com/blogs/magazine/comedy-in-the-catskills-remembering-the-borscht-belt>

Minchilli, Sophie. The Sweetness of Doing Nothing: Living Life the Italian Way with Dolce Far Niente. London, UK.: Thorsons, 2020. This little guide to slowing down in the manner of the Italians is the perfect thing to read in a hammock.

Nichols, Ashton. Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement. Chantilly, VA.: The Teaching Company, 2006. This course of 24 lectures on DVD with accompanying guidebook was a great source of pleasure to listen to this past winter. There is no need to watch the lectures as it is just Professor Nichols talking with occasional slides. I listened to them on my headphones while working, playing the DVD in a computer. Courses from the Teaching Company are the kind of thing you might be able to find at your local library!

Provenzo Jr., E Eugene F. & Provenzo, Asterie Baker, ed. “Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education.” <http://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/foundations/chpt/lyceum-movement>
Visit Italy “15th of August: origins and facts about the Italian Tradition of the ‘Ferragosto’” <https://www.visititaly.eu/history-and-traditions/ferragosto-origins-and-facts-about-the-italian-tradition-of-august-15th>

.:. .:. .:.

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AMERICAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY IV: William Gisbson, Cyberpunk, No Wave fungicide & Sonic Youth

In America, all roads lead to and from Boston. So does the Sprawl. The Sprawl feeds on undeveloped space, and is powered by corporate capital, high tech computer hardware, and minds bent away from the humanities by a hyperpresent hyperfocus on engineering, technology, and mathematics, with maybe a little bit of science thrown into the mix at the regions think tanks for the military industrial template.

One of the seeds that powered the birth of the punk ethos, in its innocent and exuberant in love with modern music and the modern world, was carried through the sprawling interchanges of Route 128 by the rock and roll poet Jonathan Richman. Cyber seeds were transplanted from the area across the tangle of telephone lines when technologists made their modems sing, ringing in a cycle of communication changes courtesy of the medium of computers in a marriage with Ma Bell. Information highways and rivers of asphalt conjoined to spread psychic mold spores across the landscape of New England, and from their reach their tendrils into the heart of America.

The world of punk, with its analog aesthetic and DIY virtue worn on a gritty shirtsleeve, was married to cyberspace when the imagination of William Gibson fired up and he set his keyboard to clacking like one of the console cowboys in his novel Neuromancer. The cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction was born. In that novel he also introduced readers to the Sprawl. It was further explored in the books two sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Collectively, the Sprawl trilogy.

Like the wires and roads that lead in and out of Boston, heavy internet connectivity and Sprawl seem to go together. For the most part, the beginning of the internet was an urban affair, with its primary nodes being housed in universities, research centers and military installations. Punk music also thrived on urban existence, springing up as it did in various ways, and somewhat independently, as a kind of metropolitan spore in the cities of London, New York, San Francisco and L.A. Punk set out to rewind the dial back to the primitive impulse at the heart of rock music, and the pulsing fecund mold spores at its heart soon migrated to other cities around the world. Though there were individuals and clusters of punks in some rural areas, just as their were terminals to access the internet, but the punk scene and hackers scenes both started their development in polluted cities.

In Gibson’s books, the Sprawl is a specific cluster of interconnected cities and urban centers that have all congealed together due to unmitigated development and growth. The Sprawl starts in Boston and advances all the way down to Atlanta. It’s the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, to give its official name, or BAMA, to share the banging acronym. Rot spreads not so much through wood and brick, as it does through another block being covered in concrete, asphalt, and new building made from cheap materials, with lots of plastics inside, stretching all the way from Boston, down into dirty heart of New York, enveloping Providence and all of Rhode Islands smallness. From there the Sprawl drifts down into Philadelphia, New Jersey, continuing its slick unfurling down the east coast and swamping Atlanta and any derelict town it happens to encounter in sick and seeping slime.

America hasn’t yet reached the level of urban growth imagined by Gibson, but regional planners do use similar phrases in their descriptions of bustling interconnected cities. The Northeast Megalopolis is one. It’s no coincidince that it starts in the Boston suburbs and creeps all the way down along Route 1, Insterstate-95 and the Northeastern Corridor train line down into the swamplands of Washington D.C.

The Piedmont Atlantic megaregion is another, and flows westward from Charlotte to Atlanta, to Birmingham with spurs going up to Nashville and further west to Memphis. The cities clustered around the Great Lakes form another megaregion, as do the ones flowing up from San Francisco to Portland to Seattle to Vancouver, and so on. They become a megalopolis when little rural space is left between the clusters of cities. The cities start losing their local identity and get absorbed into the regional slop of garmonbozia when the flow of goods and people between them tends to stay intermeshed, even as the legality of the towns and cities remains distinct. In Gibson’s Sprawl, and our own, much of that mesh between the districts now tends to be fiber optical and tele-communicative links. Our empire of wires, first strung together between outposts, is now a copper knot embedded within decrepit infrastructure.

Perhaps something of the raumgeist remains in these locations, but it must be teased out by psychogeographers whose psychic senses are attuned to the spirit of place, and who don’t mind following up their intuitions with time spent in psychohistorical study in libraries and archives.

In the Sprawl, the smell of exhaust and fry grease from the fast food trucks mingles along with the cook fires drifting out of homeless camps and the summer sweat of the great unwashed. The sound of metro buses hitting pot holes and of aching trains running on tracks above is abetted by sirens, shouting, gunfire. Dandelions grow up in the concrete and asphalt cracks, and a dead fox rots beneath the overpass. Crows alight on the high tension wires sparking and humming with electricity, the juice that powers it all, dug up from the earth blood of oil, and ancient veins of coal.

Such a fictional vision, and its real world counterpart, reminds us there are many positive aspects to the limits of growth, the most positive being the limitation that there just won’t be enough resources for the Sprawl to sprawl forever. Depleted resources mean that some of the worst features of Gibson’s Sprawl will remain fiction. Some parts of his future are already distributed, even if they aren’t distributed evenly, and there are aspects of his world well worth exploring in this psychohistorical drift.

In Gibson’s vision, the Boston-Atlanta-Metropolitan-Axis is one vast cancerous rambling of, fungus that is urbanoid in its character. A massive incomplete geodesic dome in the style of Buckminster Fuller covers much of BAMA, an engineering project with unintended consequences. During the day parts of the dome get heated up, causing internal weather in the neighborhoods beneath it, strong and dangerous winds that wreak havoc. Inside the residents lack a connection to natural weather outside the dome, because the sight of the sky gets blocked by cloudy plastic. It hardly matters to most of the netizens because so many of them are constantly plugged into the matrix anyway. In other places the geodesic cells that were supposed to protect the city from acid rain are ruptured, letting in water, which first collects and then pours in buckets heavier than a rain shower. When the sun starts to come up, the dome filters the light and makes it gray and pink instead of golden.

In the second book, Count Zero, Gibson gives this description:

​“The condos of Barrytown looked like some gray-white fungus, spreading to the horizon. It was nearly dark and he could make out a pink glow, beyond the last range of condo racks.

‘That’s the Sprawl over there, isn’t it? That pink.’

‘That’s right, but the closer you get, less pretty it looks. How’d you like to go there, Bobby?’”

It’s interesting that in the quote from Count Zero, he says that the Barrytown neighborhood of the Sprawl looks “gray-white fungus.” Benton MacKaye also characterized relentless and unplanned urban expansion as a kind of “metropolitan mold.”

In his introduction to MacKaye’s book The New Exploration, Lewis Mumford describes how the spread of the “uncontrolled flow of population into ever more distant areas of the conurbation results in the coalescence of ever larger and looser urbanoid masses, a thinly spread conglomeration of homes, shopping centers, and factory sites adrift in a vast sea of car parks, whose planless existence provides excuse for the constantly multiplying expressways and cloverleafs and space-eating traffic interchanges that absorb, for the exaggerated needs of transportation, the time, the energy, the money, and the human effort that go into more significant aspects of life.”

Mumford himself sometimes called our massed dwellings “urbanoid.” There is is a certain frisson between Mumford’s urbanoid dwellings, MacKaye’s mold and Gibson’s fungoid city.

The origin of the word sprawl for this unplanned, uncontrolled, in many cases unwanted growth, goes back to Earle Draper, a city planner in the southeast, who gave the word its urban spin in 1937. Draper worked hard. He had specialized in the development of upper-class residential neighborhoods, and designed hundreds of them over the south during the course of his life. In this respect he contributed to the suburban problem even as he gave us a name to describe one of the effects of suburban flight. He was also very active in creating planned communities and industrial towns in Tennessee. The town of Norris was one of these places he created. Now its part of greater Knoxville, that is, the Piedmont Atlantic Megaregion.

This sun baked geography of concrete expands into the nowhere of a television tuned to a dead channel. The flight from blight has created more blight. Now the blight spreads into the dead malls of the internet. The dead malls of the city are reflected back into those vaporwave mirrorshades. Online retail squashes mom and pop shops who reopen on Etsy; Etsy overtaken by AI bots hooked up to 3-D printers spitting out the next plastic keychain to be sold in the flea market at the empty parking lot in an abandoned strip mall on the outskirts of an economically decayed neighborhood.

When so many of us are jacked-in all the time, there is a real need to jack off, to unplug from the network effect, to put the phone on silence, and disengage from the endless doomscroll of the forever culture wars.
Yet as much as a person might want to get away from the Sprawl, out into some part of the world that is forested, that has a connection to green, it just can’t be easily done. Planes fly overhead on a hike. A group of teens bring a boom box to the lake where it could have been a refreshing swim. Noise is itself however offers an avenue of escape. It’s in the Sprawl where a person needs to wrap themselves up in the cocoon made of headphones. Blocking out the external sounds that try to get inside.

On their album Escape from Noise, The media collective Negativland asked the question, “Is there any escape from noise?” In the process of finding an answer to their probe, they created more dithering dissonance. That dissonance can be extremely enjoyable. Sometimes out is the only way in, and the thing that is part of the disease is also part of the cure.

In Gibson’s short story, "Burning Chrome", the character Automatic Jack knows there is no escaping the Sprawl. “So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.”

In Gibson’s world, the youth of the Sprawl are quick to adopt new styles and fads. Subcultures like the Lo-Teks, the Big Scientists, the Gothicks and the Panther Moderns flourish, but also disappear, to be taken over by new fads and subcultures.

Such was the fate of the very real subculture around No Wave music, and New York City was a the prime node for that undulating mass organism of mold.

THE FUNGICIDE OF NO WAVE

If the smell of the Sprawl is fry grease, petroleum and evaporating rain, all cast in a pink neon glow, then its sound is the synthetic nihilism of No Wave music as it gets further refracted into the distorted frequency fuzz of noise rock, its more palatable bastard child. No Wave is often more appreciated by the musical gourmand, while noise rock can be enjoyed by those searching for a quick listen at the hot dog or Ramen stand, under the ever present rain.

No Wave is the kind of music that could only have originated in New York City during the 1970s, a decade that saw it sink into major decline, crime and social disintegration. In 1975 NYC had been driven to the edge of economic default. This had been the result of a series of dumb decisions. It led to further bad decisions, such as giving control of the city budget to a group of bankers. From there, drastic cuts to welfare, city services, and even the cities own bureaucracy sent the metropolis into further convulsions. As a place with “No Future” it was a perfect spawning ground for punk, No Wave, and noise rock. The avantgarde of the city were already sequestered in their lofts making happening arts scenes when scruffy punk kids came to town looking for cheap rent or places to squat while they made a life not cast in the suburban mold.

Goethe is often quoted as having said “architecture is frozen music.” The architecture of brutalism is mimicked in No Wave with its abrasive sonic minimalism. It has the musical texture of concrete, the repetitive rhythms of jack hammers, and massive slabs of raw noise and texture are emphasized over melody. No Wave was a wrecking ball taken to music. It shared similar aims to the Industrial music genre spawned by Throbbing Gristle and their cohorts in England. Later cross pollination from the likes of Lydia Lunch and other No Wavers with industrial musicians would further entrench these bonds like rebar into cement.

The key groups in No Wave were Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, fronted by Lydia Lunch, DNA, Mars and Contortions. Another crucial group in the mix was Theoretical Girls, formed by Glenn Branca. The key influence was the band Suicide, and the 20th centuries avantgarde luminaries in the realms of dissonance, noise and repetitive minimal gestures, along with a helping from free jazz, and the syncopated rhythms of drum machines found in disco.

Like so many others who had been lured to the Big Apple, Branca came to New York to be involved in theater. And like so many others who had started off with the intention of being involved in one form of art, he found himself doing music instead. After building a stage in a loft with his friend Jeff Lohn, he started thinking of having a “fucking band.” They already had the stage to play on. “This band is our theater group so to speak …that was Theoretical Girls,” he said in the documentary Kill Your Idols.

True to their name, the influence of Theoretical Girls is more to their reputation and the way they were able to put musical concepts into circulation, rather than being prolific recording artists or for playing a ton of shows. They only put out one 7 inch single, and only played about twenty gigs. But such is the nature of the underground, and the fringe in general, that small hinges open big doors. Some small thing that happens, and is only embraced at first by a few people, can go on to have big implications. That is the power of the fringe, lunatic or otherwise.

The song U.S. Millie on the A side was written by Lohn and has a militant marching snare drum as the central element, along with a propulsive keyboard line. The lyrics seem appropriate to the exploration of America’s psychic underbelly. Howard Johnson, one of Jonathan Richman’s favorite institutions, turns up again here, but without the innocence of a hot meal and place to rest.
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“Howard Johnson, Puerto Rico / Texaco Co., Jews for Jesus / Ms. Magazine, Danon Yogurt / Scientology, East Germany / That’s Go Go Billy and U.S. Millie.”

Theoretical Girls played in the pivotal No Wave five night music fest organized by Michael Zwack and Robert Longo at the non-profit Artists Spaces gallery. Other groups that played were Rhys Chatham’s group Gynecologists, and another group fronted by Branca, Daily Life (that also featured Christine Hahn, originally from Cincinnati.) This event was the ground zero for the further repercussions from the short-lived explosion of No Wave.

It was also a bit of a battleground. Many of the hangers on in the No Wave scene were there as a refuge from the pretensions of New Yorks art scene. Their wrecking ball attitude and nihilistic stance was aimed at the institution of art just as much as it was at the commodified corpse of rock. Yet the Artist Spaces gallery was a newly ramped up art institution, its usual soirees now turned into a blitzkrieg of barbarous musical evocation. There were still ways to cash in on that, though.

Brian Eno had been in the audience at the festival during the final two days of the show. He was really blown out of the water by their reductionist take on popular and experimental sounds. He had come to New York to produce the Talking Heads album More Songs About Buildings and Food. The No Wave artists were doing something else altogether, and he thought the scene should be documented. Filmmaker and art world denizen Diego Cortez was in the scene and Eno tapped his shoulder to put together a compilation. The result was the 1978 comp No New York.

If Music for Airports was Brian Eno’s most ignorable record, the No New York album he helped curate produce was saturated with the gnarly overtones that emitted toxic fumes against cities own toxicity. Released on the Antilles label, it resides at an opposite pole from the relaxing minimalism of ambient. It’s a kind of music you can’t not pay attention to, and was even known to cause listener’s physical pain.​

Noise music can be a shield. No Wave provided a shield for its makers and fans. According to homeopathic medical theory like cures like. Noise is a cocoon to slip into when the outside world itself becomes so abrasive and nihilist, it calms one down amidst the spasming multitudes of the city that never sleeps. What else to do on those restless nights when the agitation of modern life demanded expression, except use whatever means one had available to make noise? Strip away the rock from punk and see the exquisiteness of what lies beneath. No Wave was like a fungicide against the metropolitan mold.
​
It is argued how this particular grouping of bands was given the moniker No Wave. Certainly it was in reaction to the poppy growth of New Wave with its punchy melodies and cheap hooks, ready to suck a listener in and tell them how to feel. One story claims that it was Lydia Lunch who first used the term in an interview with Roy Trakin for the magazine New York Rocker. Others say it was musician and writer Chris Nelson in a piece he had written for New York Rocker. Thurston Moore claims different. He had come to the city in search of punk, and he claimed that he saw the words No Wave spray painted on the walls of CBGB before it ever appeared in the music press. Given that this is an essay about the metropolitan mold it seems fitting the term No Wave had its debut as graffiti. This is the Sprawl after all, where graffiti is gospel.

As Moore recalls, “While it was happening nobody even knew that it was called No Wave, and as soon as it started becoming called No Wave it was already in sort of a dissipation mode. The first time I saw name [the term] No Wave was not in the SoHo Weekly News when Roy Trakin was interviewing Lydia, at least I don’t remember. I remember seeing it spray-painted in front of the CBGB Second Avenue Theater, which used to be the Anderson Theater, where the Yardbirds played. Hilly and his wife had opened up the Anderson Theater, renamed it CBGB Second Avenue Theater and attempted to have a bigger space for bands. I remember going there a couple of times and seeing Blondie and Patti Smith and Richard Hell. It was fun, but you knew it was a disaster because it was a seated venue and people were just smoking pot in there and drinking, and the fire marshals had their eye on it. It just couldn’t last, and finally they closed it down after month or two. And somebody had spray-painted on the front of it, ‘No Wave.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s kind of clever.’”

In the work of Thurston Moore and the band Sonic Youth he played in, something of the DNA of the No Wave scene remained.

SONIC DETRITUS

Three souls found their way into the gritty and neglected petri dish of New York during its insolvent years of economic crisis. Thurston Moore had come to pursue a life in punk, the energy of which thrilled him to no end. Kim Gordon, who had arrived from the west coast to pursue a life in the arts, and got a gig writing for Artforum. Lee Ranaldo had been a native of the state, growing up in Long Island, and gone to art school in Binghamton, before finding his way to the crusty core of NYC.

It didn’t take long for Ranaldo to go from art student to band member, starting with the Flucts, and then finding a spot in Rhy Chatham’s Guitar Trio, before settling into a spot in Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra.
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These guitar orchestras became Branca’s hallmark. In 1980 he had released Lesson No. 1, his first album under his given name, and after that he started getting very interested in creating music for ensembles of guitar players. His 1981 album The Ascension featured Ranaldo as one of his players. After these ensemble versions of his entrancing microtonal and heavy guitar music, Branca graduated to symphonies. (Industrial percussion stalwart Z’ev joined him for Symphony No. 2.) Branca had been influenced by the scientist of sound Hermann von Helmholtz, and instrument builder and composer in the American experimental tradition, Harry Partch. He was also indebted in this work to the theories of dissonance and its spiritual value that came from the astrologer, theosophist and arch-modernist, Dane Rudhyar.

​Branca and his efforts would remain a foundational influence on Sonic Youth, as Thurston Moore also later played in his ensembles. Ranaldo and Moore appeared on the first three recordings of Branca’s symphonies. That other angel of noise rock, Michael Gira, was under Branca’s spell as well. He went on to form Swans, along with Dan Brau and Aglis Kizys who also played in the detuned orchestra. Swans can be considered the other helix from the DNA of No Wave whose code went into noise rock. For a time the two bands even shared a rehearsal space.

As with many other composers, conductors, writers and artists, Branca had a reputation for being a bit of an egomaniac. When the components of Sonic Youth swirled together in the early eighties, with Moore meeting Ranaldo and Bob Bert, Gordon meeting Moore, and the group coming together in sonic synergy, Ranaldo and Moore still worked with Branca. Yet they were starting to get antsy to focus with intense purpose on their own initiative. Ranaldo had to tell Branca that they were leaving his group. Sonic Youth was the thing.

Sonic Youth channeled their own darkly incipient Americana into their proceedings. They also channeled their prolific readings. At some point Kim Gordon and the other members of the band became enamored of William Gibson. The Sprawl, named after Gibson’s locale, appears as one of the center piece songs on Daydream Nation, an album that can be listened to as a version of America seen through mirrorshades.

Daydream Nation came out ten years after No New York began its infamous rotations and circulations. The year was 1988. New York City was only just starting to recover from the financial bailout it had orchestrated in the previous decade. People were starting to dream again about the possibilities inherent in the American experiment.

Sonic Youth was also hitting their stride. They’d taken elements of No Wave, and their own eclectic listening, interest in the subculture and ferocity of hardcore, and melded it with the theoretical underpinnings of the avantgarde art they loved, but infused it with a melody that reached out beyond those confines and into the hearts of the jaded American youth of urban and suburban conclaves who took their message and eloped with it on a long honeymoon.

On the opening track Moore sings, “it’s getting kind of quiet in my city head / it takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed.” The Sprawl comes alive when youth take to the streets, whether to tangle with the establishment, or to rumble with one another.
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“The Sprawl” launches just after the fuse of “Silver Rocket,” finishes its distorted explosion. Gordon is singing on this one. Along with the influence of Gibson, the lyrics from the first verset were taken from the Denis Johnson novel, The Stars at Noon, a novel about an American woman stuck in Nicaragua during the Sandinista years and the time of “the stupid CIA” and their regime change operations, with corruption on all sides. This literary cross referencing is very apropos for a song inspired by Gibson, as his own novels frequently globe hop between the Sprawl, central America, Europe, and Japan.

​The essential verse is when Gordon sings, “I grew up in a shotgun row / Sliding down the hill / Out front were the big machines / Still and rusty now, I guess / Out back was the river / And that big sign down the road / That’s where it all started.”

It conjures up visions of tenements, followed again by the recurring mantra, “Come on down to the store / You can buy some more, and more, and more, and more,” here a bodega where aside from the ones on the shelf, all kinds of black market goods might be available.

The song “Hey Joni” written and sung by Ranaldo is as much a tribute to Joni Mitchell and the rock standard “Hey Joe” as it is another tip of the hat to Gibson when he sings, “In this broken town, can you still jack in / And know what to do?”

​Rock music about the road is nothing new in the genre. Noise rock music about The Sprawl is something else all together.

​.:. .:. .:.

​The writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to support me.

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.

​What is the place of the serious musician in today’s society? What is the point of creating music, art and writing that has no commercial potential? Why am I even continuing this series of posts exploring the catalog of New World Records to uncover fifty gems?

These are all questions I continue to ask myself. When only 65 percent of American’s even bother to read, it’s going to be a lot, lot, less of those readers who have a specific interest in experimental music. Of those who both read and have an interest in experimental music, even less will care about these particular records or composers.

Yet the work must go on. I continue to write about this stuff because there is value to what lies on the fringe. The experimental tradition is marginalized, despite the ways that the explorations of those who do experiment continue to provide resource benefits for the culture at large when their innovations move from the edges and into the mainstream.

Rarely performed, seldom heard, these pieces are nonetheless an important part of our sonic ecology. There are plenty of things we never see, never hear, never know about, that would make life difficult if they did not exist. It’s neat to know about things like gut bacteria and life at the bottom of the ocean, and little bugs who play important roles in the life of the forest.

Yet the heads who appreciate this kind of thing are out there, and I will continue to do my part to bring this material to new listeners. Keep on experimenting, even and especially when you have no idea where it will lead.

First up we have one for the synthesizer and Science Fiction fans, and at the end we have a once popular American operetta from the 1800s… just to show that the things people care so much about now, will in time themselves be forgotten.

DAVID ROSENBOOM - FUTURE TRAVEL

David Rosenboom’s epic journey into the solar system while dancing along lines of sequenced synthesis was first released on the short lived Detrot label Street Records. New World Records released it on CD in 2007. It has since been reissued again by Black Truffle in 2024 with another vinyl pressing and digital release.
At the time this piece was being composed he was busy thinking deeply about a kind of “propositional music” that he defined as “complete cognitive models of music.” From this vantage point music emerges from the process of making propositions. In this respect it might have more to do with the Miles Davis album On the Corner, than at first thought. From these propositions musical models are built and works can be created.
As part of his musical training Rosenboom studied with Lejaren Hiller. He even ended up playing violin on one of the renditions of Hiller’s Iliac Suite on a vinyl of Computer Music from the University of Illinois released in 1967.

Learning from Hiller gave Rosenboom an appreciation for what could be done with technology.

He wrote about how “Hiller’s work was more about algorithmic compositions and compositional concepts applied in technological modeling, and what was possible at the time. So yes, it was technology, but it was also new notions about the brain and how we hear and how we think and how we make models. Something that has stuck with me ever since, that I really developed there, was -and a lot of people were exploring this- was the idea of compositional modeling; that is, that model building and then setting the model into some form of animation can fuel a compositional idea, and produce all sorts of new ideas for musical language and pieces and so on.” (2006 Interview of Rosneboom by E. Soltes in Oral History of American Music.)
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Rosenboom is also a violin player in addition to being a master of the Buchla (and the brainwave encephalaphone). Violins merge with treated female narration in this science fiction and space music odyssey. This is essential listening for anyone wishing to expand consciousness beyond the borders of earth.

His music is certainly fertile with ideas. The accompanying piece “And Out Come the Night Ears” from 1978 is another masterpiece. It’s a 28 minute piano and Buchla duet that makes my head spin as it oscillates into a cyclonic centrifuge. This is maximalist music of a wild and adventurous variety.

​RICHARD MAXFIELD AND HAROLD BUDD – THE OAK OF GOLDEN DREAMS
Many music aficionados will recognize the name of Harold Budd, especially if ambient and electronic music are part of their interests. Richard Maxfield gets talked about much less. This album contains four Maxfield pieces, and two by Budd. That is a good thing because it helps us to get to know Maxfield, and rewards the person interested in Budd with a new musician to think and learn about. David Tudor also plays piano on this album on a piece that Maxfield wrote for him, so it turns out to be brilliant trifecta.
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As I have come to learn, All Roads Lead to Fluxus, and Maxfield is one of those roads that can lead us back to the influence of the art movement. He put on a concert in the loft of Yoko Ono alongside his buddy La Monte Young. He taught at The New School where John Cage was also teaching. He was interested in all kinds of sound sources, processes, and practices. The selections here showcase some of the range of his interests.

A lot of this stuff sounds kind of old hat to those of us who have embraced noise and texture as prime musical units. We forget exactly how radical these gestures in sound were when they first exploded from the loudspeaker. But Maxfield was an innovator, baby. A lot of his works prefigured more well known applications of the same approach or technique by other composers.

For instance, Piano Concert for David Tudor involves the use of a microphone on prepared piano strings mixed into a three channel montage that Tudor played additional piano alongside in accompaniment. John Cage had already done the prepared piano, but Karlheinz Stockhausen had not yet done his more famous mikrophonie which achieves similar sounds.

​His Amazing Grace from 1960 uses tape loops played at various speeds that produce complex phasing and overlaps. This work came before the now-taken-as-gospel minimalist tape loop pieces of Riley and Steve Reich.

I was lucky to recently read an excerpt from my friend Martin Patrick’s forthcoming book on Fluxus, the chapter on sound. He really does an excellent job of putting Maxfield in context and showing the influence of Fluxus across unpopular and popular music. I will be looking forward to reading the finished version and the rest of the book. Patrick had previously contributed essays to the Sub Rosa release of The Stolen Symphony albums Fluxus and Neo-Fluxus vol. 1 and 2.

His was a sad story, as his life was cut short by suicide when he jumped out the window of the Figueroa Hotel at age 42 on June 27, 1969.

La Monte Young’s MELA Foundation has his archives.

Budd sure knew how to write a song title “The Oak of the Golden Dreams” was probably the first piece of music I listened to by him when I saw this CD at the library in my early twenties, and I picked it up based on the title. With drifting dronalities, and measured Buchla improvisations, it reminds me at times of the all night music of Terry Riley or the raga inspired improvisations of La Monte Young.
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I guess that brings us to why these two artists were put together on this CD. Richard Maxfield was said to inhabit the pre-minimalist spirit, while Budd’s 1970 composition for a droning Buchla box in E-flat shows the way other musicians were picking up on that minimalist thing.

This sonic document shows a slice of composition spanning ten years and how one person can become a mostly unknown pioneer, and others became well known followers of burgeoning musical trends.

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE – SCHLINGEN-BLANGEN

As far as minimalists go, Charlemagne Palestine doesn’t get the love he deserves. He prefers to call himself a maximalist.

Palestine’s music is not very well known today, partly because there are few recordings available, but also because he moved on to working in other forms of media as the massive commercialism of minimalist music developed in the late seventies and early eighties. His seemingly narrow escape from the title of “minimalist composer” was fortuitous since what that has come to imply in musical terms today does no justice to his work. His music is distinct from what became mainstream minimalism by its focus on sound rather than process and its deep emotional expressionism. Thus, Morton Feldman is a much closer neighbor in this work than it to Riley, Young, Reich and Glass.

​“Schlingen-Blängen” is a drone organ piece which demonstrates Palestine’s genius for pulling unbelievable sounds, colors and effects out of a familiar instrument. It is basically one chord sustained for seventy minutes with infrequent additions and removals of tones and changes of registration. This approach to making music, of using stasis to force the listener into concentration on the sound itself, is very difficult to do well and this album is one of the few successful examples of this approach. First, there is the choice of the initial chord and its registration. Already it is clear that the musician has exquisite taste and expressive powers, not unlike Messiaen in those aspects. Then begins the impressionism. The old Dutch organ in the church of the small Friesland village of Farmsum Delftzijl starts magically to sing its own melodies and rhythms without the player needing to move any controls. The illusion of rapid activity is the result of interferences among the components of the chord within the organ and the church. Such effects are not unfamiliar but their depth and extent here are staggering. These rapid cycles are staggering in their intensity, melody and colors, as though Palestine was playing some non-existent process-music score. But he is not, and it is as painfully beautiful as the original chord. Palestine’s comment, “I’m the living hybrid in my own work of the physical gesturality of Jackson Pollock and thes piritual color chemistry of Mark Rothko,” hits the nail on the head.

The quality of the recording conveys enough of the massive physicality of the experience to be satisfying while still conveying the sadness that one couldn’t have been there. The acoustic space of the old church is precisely rendered. Anyone that enjoys drone music and static sound painting in any genre should have a listen. Charlemagne Palestine’s music here is a true rendition of the archetype.
Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca can be thought of as some of the spiritual inheritors of Palestine’s musical approach, as can David Tibet’s work in Current 93, but the latter in a different register, that has more to do with the way Palestine uses stuffed animals amassed on his piano as vessels for the spirits he meets in his strange communion and personal mysticism.

HENRY BRANT – MUSIC FOR MASSED FLUTES

When was the last time you listened to a bunch of flute players have it and throw down on some music? Probably not too recently, which is why you should listen to the work of Henry Brant. Not just one flute, not just two flute, but some massed flutes up in this contemporary music situation.
Brant believed music could be complex. He believed it could be contradictory and paradoxical, just like everyday life is complex, contradictory and full of shit that doesn’t make any sense. As David Lynch once quipped, “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.”

This music does have its own sense, and it can be quite striking, just like the hidden logic of the everyday world with all its beauty and pain, war and peace, love making and violence, random luck and disaster.
Brant was born in Montreal to American parents in 1913, and started composing at age eight. His instruments of choice were the violin, flute, tin whistle, piano, organ, and percussion. He could play all these at a professional level and was very familiar with all the instruments in the orchestra even if he didn’t play them as such.

His childhood prodigy was further shown when he was included in the 1933 book by Henry Cowell, American Composers on American Music. Brant was only 19 when it came out. His essay was on oblique harmony. This seems like it should also be an oblique strategy. The ideas he presented were precursors to his later interest in musical spatialization.

Brant worked his ass off teaching at several colleges, conducting for radio, film, ballet, and jazz, composing, orchestrating. By the 1950s he started working on his ideas of spatialization. This would have been the same decade Stockhausen’s early efforts at symphonic spatialized music. Basically the idea is the placement of performers around the hall as well as on the stage. Electronic music later took the idea into multi-speaker set ups that sound could be moved around through. This is the “fourth dimension” of musical composition, and became increasingly important over the twentieth century and can be seen as an aspect of space music.
Included on this album is his piece Angels and Devils from 1931. This is considered the first flute orchestra of the twentieth century and was inspired after he heard the five flutes being played in Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms.
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Also included is 1984’s Mass in Gregorian Chant for Multiple Flutes (subtitled Mass for June 16). This is my favorite piece on the CD. The spatial component of antiphonal singing inside the acoustically tuned spaces of the great Gothic cathedrals was part of his interest in this music. The source material he was the Graduale Romanum, the official book of liturgies for the Roman Catholic Church, with masses sung on June 16 being the focus.

​Ghosts and Gargoyles from 2001 rounds out this flute-centric invitation into the world of Henry Brant.

GEORGE F. ROOT – THE HAYMAKERS

Now we go back to the root of American music. One of them anyway, that root being George F. Root. Root was a Massachusetts farm boy who left for Boston at age 18 with a flute in his hand to try and get into the orchestra. That would have been around 1838. He got jobs as church organist and music teacher, the did a tour of the European continent, came home and started trying his hand at writing popular sentimental songs.
One of these was his song “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!” from 1864 became a Civil War classic of sheet music, setting the song of war to the tune of “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

Seven years before that, though, he had written The Haymakers, an operatic cantata, one of the first large scale works of American music. The Chicago Tribune wrote on Januar 9, 1860, reviewed the work, praising “... the freshness of its music, which, combined with the naturalness of the plot, depicts with great truthfulness, while it slightly idealizes, the labors of the American hayfield.... The Italian opera walks on stilts, deals in exaggeration, and treats largely of kings, queens, dukes, and nobles. This is purely democratic, exalts labor, ridicules the useless city dandy, and holds up for your admiration the sturdy Farmer and his household, who learn from nature, the pure, the true, the beautiful....”

It seems fitting that this country, founded to have no kings, should use as its subject matter the working people keep us fed and connected to the very land itself.

​The New World Records version marks this important piece of histories first appearance on CD.

Read Part I and II in the series.

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​The writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to support me.


☕️☕️☕️

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.

​One of the jobs of a freak is to run off and join the circus. Sometimes it is a metaphysical circus. Joseph Byrd was one such freak, born December 19, 1937 just above one of the holes on the Bible belt, Louisville, Kentucky. His family moved to Tuscon, Arizona and it was in that desert heat that he learned some of his first instruments. These happened to be accordion and vibraphone. Piano, guitar and violin lessons have been standard for kids learning music for a long time. It’s high time to follow Byrd’s example and get kids interested in the accordion again, and the vibes, man, the vibes.
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After high school Byrd went to the University of Arizona where he had one of his many encounters with previous avant-garde luminaries. In this case it the study of composition under Dr. Barney Childs. His teacher was a musical autodidact for the first quarter of his life, until he got to know the ultra-modernist Elliot Carter and Lenoard Ratner in New York on the one hand, and Aaron Copland and the crowd around the Tanglewood musical festival in Massachusetts on the other. Childs was interested in improvisation, chance operations such as in his piece “Roachville Project”, and jazz. He liked listening to Charles Ives, Paul Hindemith and John Cage. In 1967 hr co-edited the book Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music.

​Byrd said of Childs that “He was very old school, yet modernist, and he forced me to be disciplined. He was an English professor, not Music, though he had a Ph.D. in both. I was very much under his spell, and he helped me get a teaching assistantship at Stanford.”

Being in California put him close contact with the minimalist trinity of La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Young was then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

IN THE FLUX

​M.A in hand he crossed the coast to New York City where their were further influences on his mind and imagination. Fluxus was one of those influences and it was felt both ways, from Fluxus to him and from him to Fluxus. It is indeed a fertile field. La Monte Young was their in the thick of it as well, as was John Cage who Byrd went to study music under. Jackson Mac Low was also in the mix with his performance poetry and other varieties of art. Action in art was the name of the game, doing something, getting out there and making a scene. One of those scenes was in the loft apartment of Yoko Ono, and that’s where Byrd had his first performance, 1961. An auspicious beginning, if you call that his beginning and not the jazz music of Duke Ellington and Stan Kenton he liked to play on highschool. From whatever point of time you look at his beginning it was auspicious.

Unlike a lot of the people in John Cage’s extended circle of influence, he didn’t fall totally under his spell. For the most part, that was because he wasn’t a trust fund kiddie and he had to work to make a living. Full time. The work contributed to his discipline, while he continued to marvel at the happenings that were happening.
It was in this period of 1960 to 1963 that Byrd also studied under Morton Feldman. The free floating blocks of sound characteristic of Feldman mesmerized Byrd, and he incorporated yet another influence into his own vast oeuvre.

As he studied, he worked, and one of his jobs was as an assistant to music critic and composer Virgil Thompson, another interesting and storied cat who brought a neoromantic and neoclassical sensibility into the American strain of classical music. As Byrd worked, he composed and by 1962 there was a recital of his work at Carnegie Hall.
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Some of those compositions were later recorded decades later for issue for New World Records on NYC 1960-1963.

​A HAPPENING TIME

As with his previous mentor Barney Childs, Thompson directed Byrd onto another fateful path. Time-Life Records was looking to create an album of music from the Civil War era. Knowing how to write and arrange counterpoint made Byrd something of an odd duck among the experimental set he hung out with. The fact that he made money doing so, caused some to regard him as a sell-out. His willingness to get paid gave him other skills that the other people didn’t have in this in turn made his later worker rich and interesting.

Along the way he got sidetracked by falling in love with Dorothy Moskowitz, who he worked with on another project for Time-Life, The Life Treasury of Christmas Music. They were both arrangers on this album, and it makes you wonder if somewhere along the way they stepped under some mistletoe.

Moskowitz was a graduate of Barnard College where sh started writing her first compositions. Barnard was a small womens liberal arts college and the smallness of it gave her the freedom to experiment. She comments that, “Had I gone to a place like Oberlin, where there were serious musicians, I might never have had the audacity to do what I did. As it turned out, Barnard College taught me audacity, if nothing else. Its lack of music reputation wasn’t a stumbling block. It was actually an opportunity in disguise.” This was followed by a brief time at Columbia where she studied under tape and flute master Otto Luening.

Their relationship was intertwined with music and at Time-Life the couple worked on a series of records about the history of the United States. Moskowitz produced these, did the research, and wrote the liner notes. Capitol Records had produced these albums and they ended up hiring Byrd to be a staff arranger and producer. He was good at that, but not as good at the politics inside the company, so he ended up quitting to go to work as an assistant teacher at UCLA with the intention of getting his PhD in ethnomusicology. He didn’t end up finishing that degree, but the fertile west coast scene proved to once again stimulate his growth in creative directions.

​Moskowitz joined Byrd at UCLA as well. The year was 1963. While he was studying different musics of the world, she was as well, specifically their vocal styles. This led her to singing on the album Vocal and Instrumental Ragas from South India with Gayathri Rajapur, a player of the gottuvadyam, a kind lute-style veena instrument similar in shape to the sitar, but fretless and with 20 or 21 strings. They were joined on the album by Harihar Rao, a tabla and sitar player. Rajapur was a student of Budalur Krishnamurthy Shastrigal and other masters of Carnatic music like Musiri Subramania Iyer, T.Brinda and Swaminatha Pillai.

​Moskowitz was also teaching at UCLA too. One of her classes was called “Feminism and I,” and while they were busy with all of this activity, Byrd still managed to have the energy for even more artistic expression and musical magic. Byrd was another student of Rajapur.

The difference between East Coast and West Coast was a big one for Byrd. “If I was a tiny fish in the pond of avant-garde New York, I was a pioneer of experimental music in LA.”

In his first year back in California he hooked up with a jazz cat named Don Ellis who was a whiz on the trumpet. Ellis was also a bandleader, drummer and composer. In early 1963 he had participated in a jazz workshop in Hamburg, Germany put together by the NDR, then went over to Stockholm, Sweden where he helped put together some events that were similar to the happenings being orchestrated by the freaky folk of Fluxus.

In 1964 he made his way to UCLA where he started studying ethnomusicology. Harihar Rao, who Moskowitz had sang with, was another connective link in the scene. Rao found great inspiration in the music of India through Rao, and started experimenting with time signatures, different meters in jazz improvisation. Ellis and Rao went on to co-author a paper, “An Introduction to Indian Music for the Jazz Musician.” Ellis was thus an early adopter of world music influences that would go on to be explored in the work of other musicians such as Don Cherry and Jon Hassell.

Byrd and Ellis started putting on concerts and co-founding the New Music Workshop with the trumpet player.
“In the year we were together, we had concerts of experimental jazz interwoven with music by Charles Ives, Henry Brant, Edgard Varese, Earl Browne, Morton Feldman, and Stockhausen. Dorothy performed John Cage’s Aria hauntingly with a vibrato-less voice she had honed in study with our teacher of South Indian music, Gayathri Rajapur.”
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When Ellis left Byrd took the New Music Workshop into even freakier terrain. The terrain of the happening, an area of activity first explored by his fellow Fluxus enthusiast Allan Krapow, and taken up by the likes of John Cage into something he would later call a “Musicircus.” Yet he was also going into somewhat commercial terrain. Byrd was friends with Linda Rondstadt, and at the time she fronted a blues band. He got her to play during a happening called “Steamed Spring Vegetable Pie.” He had taken the name for the event at random from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. Seeing a rock band be part of the experimental conviviality got him thinking that rock music might be a suitable vehicle for bringing fresh perspectives for the medium of sound to the astute listeners.

​Byrd would go on to form his band, but in the meantime, Byrd would become a communist.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Starting a band was, for Byrd, the “logical step to seek a bigger audience, to turn art in a more socially radical direction (also to be more honest about sex and gender after the failure of the ‘Love Generation’ the previous year).”

He had broken up with Moskowitz in 1966, the failure of his personal relationship, and they remained friends, but it didn’t take long before she was back in New York.

Love wasn’t enough to change the world after all, and Byrd got involved in radical politics. He quit going to school and started teaching at the Pasadena Art Museum and the UC Irvine Extension. He was still doing performance art events and happenings, but as with much experimental art, there wasn’t much money involved. The events broke even, but didn’t provide a living. A rock band might do it, though. And a rock band would be a way to inject experimental and radical philosophy into the minds of the American public.

As ever, Byrd found encouragement and supporters, this time from Art Kunkin who wrote for the Los Angeles Free Press. He asked Kunkin for the seed money he would need to start the band. In the meantime he had found another comrade in the anarchist composer Michael Agnello.

Byrd and Agnello would differ in their ultimate aims however. Where Byrd wanted to slip the Revolution into the performances and the revolutions per minute on a recording, Agnello really wanted to be a “‘Digger’ band that would live on a commune.”

In the meantime Byrd asked Moskowitz to come back to California to be their lead vocalist and she accepted to the opportunity. He gathered others from the avantgarde and ethnic music circles he was steeped inside into the fold. Strangely, he invited no rock musicians.

As Byrd told Klemen Breznikar at Psychedelic Baby Magazine, “I had first met violinist Gordon Marron when I was rehearsing music for an all-Morton Feldman concert; Craig Woodson was an African drum specialist, Rand Forbes was a virtuosic modern-music classic bassist. Dorothy was perhaps the only one who had multiple skills. We were very conscious that we were plunging into rock without any real knowledge of, or experience in, the medium. We had played Cage and Stockhausen, African and Indian music, and I thought we could simply bring all that to rock. But we knew almost nothing about the roots of rock and roll.” The one player who came from the world of rock was Stuart Brotman, a bassist who had played in Canned Heat.

They called the band The United States of America. According to Moskowitz using the name of the country was their way show their “disdain for governmental policy. It was like hanging the flag upside down.”
One thing the group did have in common with other rock groups was their familiarity with drug culture and the psychedelics of the time. When they made their album, it was filled with an exuberant hallucinatory otherworldliness and a touch of paranoia.

They were able to successfully mix their training in classical idioms and their experimental tendencies with the leavening of the popular rock blowing peoples minds. Byrd was listening to Blue Cheer, Jefferson Airplane, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Beatles. He was an early fan of Randy Newman. These sensibilities percolated into the mix. He applied ring modulators and octave dividers to Marron’s violin and they hooked up contact microphones to the drums in an example of Stockhausen’s mikrophonie. Woodson also attached slinkies to his cymbals for added tone color. Byrd himself used a monophonic synth built out of oscillators created by aerospace engineer Richard Durrett.

Another influence were the psychedelic Texans of Red Krayola. Byrd had gone to a lot of their rehearsals and was friends with the group. He liked their Dadaist approach and the iconoclasm their band leader Mayo Thompson, his attitude of not giving a shit, and his not caring about any kind of commercial appeal. As much as they inspired him, The United States of America would not follow the same tactics. Byrd was aware that unimpeded Dadaism was incompatible with the planning inherent in his communist philosophy, and he wanted their music to be marketable. It had to have a claim on the attention of those outside the enclave of weirdos he was used to hanging around.

The Monterey Pop Festival had just happened as the band was still in formation and rehearsal mode, honing their sounds and writing their songs. Yet every band was getting signed by record producer Clive Davis and they happened to be in the right place at the right time, despite not even having played their first gig.

They did hit the stage starting in late 1967 with performances at Ash Grove in LA. It must have been quite the sight. The practice of putting on happenings had prepared Byrd for a crazy live show. Besides all of their electronic gear, they had a calliope, a large American flag made of neon tubes whose stripes flashed in alternating red and white, and a plaster nun statue. It’s not clear why they had a plaster nun. Byrd also thought they were the first rock group to use fog machines. Most of the band was in darkness with a pin light on Moskowitz. True to their classical origins, they played from scores, rather than having the rock songs memorized down pat.

The band had also recorded demos and sent them out to Columbia. Agnello and Byrd got into it over the politics of selling out when Columbia Records came back with an offer, giving the band an opportunity to make an album, so Agnello quit. Brotman left with him.

A record contract isn’t anything without lawyers getting involved, and Columbia sent one down when it came to sign the contracts. Byrd went with the groups manager, Malcolm Terrence, to a meeting wearing a black suit and a priests collar he used to mystify and intimidate these lawyers. The tactic enabled him to get a $35,000 advance rather than the $20,000 they had first been offered. For a communist, Byrd was really interested in getting the money. The band used it get costumes, equipment, a rehearsal space, and he was able to pay the members.

Yet, there was always conflict within the group even as they hit one of their goals. Byrd had a distinctive vision of what he wanted in the band, and did a lot of the writing of the music. They were all brainiacs too, and fierce individualists, with heated debates, arguments and diatribes all part of the dynamic. True to the name of the band, Byrd wanted to run thing as a democracy, but that didn’t work either.

In Richie Unterberg’s book Unknown Legends of Rock and Roll, Byrd is quoted as saying, “The idea was to create a radical experience. It didn’t succeed. For one thing, I had assembled too many personalities; every rehearsal became group therapy. A band that wants to succeed needs a single, mutually acceptable identity. I tried to do it democratically, and it was not successful.”
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Yet, they managed to get the album recorded before the whole thing exploded and disintegrated, splitting apart. Before it did split, they had been joined by Ed Bogas as a member.

Following the release of the album, the group went on tour along the East Coast. Touring just wasn’t in the works for the band, and it pretty much disintegrated after their first effort. Marron, Forbes and Bogas all quit. Moskowitz tried to keep the USA name alive as a musical group with Rubinson, but it didn’t take long for that to fizzle out as well, though the trio had recorded some demos that later appeared when the album was reissued.
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Byrd was left to his own devices, and in time they each went on to do their own things. That album went on to inspire other groups and the noise-rock that would form out of the mixing of punk with experimental music in the seventies. A direct influence can specifically the late Tish Keenan of Broadcast. The melding of musique concrete with rock and roll, and Moskowitz’s unique vocal stylings left an imprint that can be heard as one of the definite influences in Broadcast.

JOE BYRD AND THE FIELD HIPPIES
As the band dissolved, Byrd flew on to his next appointment. His friend John McClure from Columbia had a new assignment for him. McClure was the head of the classical Masterworks division. He thought Byrd was brilliant and made the offer for him to put out a second album, but it needed to be done in two months.
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The result was the frenetic trippy masterpiece The American Metaphysical Circus, a name also used on the first song on the United States of America album. With song titles like “You Can’t Ever Come Down” sung by Victoria Bond, his songwriting was certainly tapping into the lysergical zeitgeist. The other songs were also cranked out in a time constrained fit of creativity.

​Songs like “Leisure World” show a familiarity with the problems of housing a growing elderly population. The piece was narrated by ABC voice over artist Ernie Anderson. The “Sub-Sylvian Litanies” opening up the first half of the record are where some of the real magical juice is contained, though the entirety is a strange and fascinating fall down the rabbit hole quit of American music.

In time both the lone United States of America album and the American Metaphysical Circus achieved cult status. The latter sold over at least 100,000 copies, though Byrd never received a royalty payment from Columbia. He never get one for the United States of America either. He’s not the only musician to have suffered such a fate.

It is such a shame that culturally important work so often receives little renumeration for its creators that they can live their lives.

YANKEE TRANSCENDOODLE

Byrd had an expansive mind, and his musical interests spanned centuries. As part of what can be called the American experimental tradition, he had the attitude and disposition of an explorer. Early forms of American music had become one of his interests.

In 1976 the country of the United States of America was in full on celebration mode. Even the hippies, the freaks, and the burgeoning punkers were getting in on the fifty state party. It makes sense that Joseph Byrd, former leader of the band the United States of America, would want to put out his own tribute to the nation. By this time he had a serious education in the older musical styles of the USA, and on this solo outing he was in a position to reckon with the countries past while looking forward to the future. If the past was populated with traditional tunes, such as “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” the chosen instrumentation was state of the art electronics.

Byrd’s sonic arsenal included the ARP 2600 Synthesizer with Oberheim Expander, the Oberheim 4 voice Polyphonic Synthesizer, and a TAPCO 2200 graphic equalizer. It was recorded with Sony four-track and two-track recorders, and the end result was released on John Fahey’s Takoma label.

​This connection to Takoma, and Fahey, through the label it was put out on, is another feather in its Americana cap. It’s not American Primitive guitar music, but it certainly captures a bygone era and the national spirit while managing to sound space age. According to Byrd, “the sounds depict brass bands, wind bands, calliopes, fifes and drums, Regina music boxes and Wurlitzer automatic organs, music hall orchestras and whorehouse pianos, a chorus of boy whistlers, jazz bands hot and sweet, a Kentucky parlor on a warm afternoon in 1902, the bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814, the Conquest of the American Wilderness, and a 15-year-old girl cornetist in church on the Fourth of July.”

That bombing of Fort McHenry was the event that inspired “The Star Spangled Banner,” though it was set to the music of an old English drinking song. Perhaps that’s the most American thing about it: the tune was lifted from elsewhere and put into service for something new. Only one song on the album isn’t a traditional patriotic tune. Byrd carves us his own slice with “The Conquest of the American Wilderness.”

Each of these songs is rich history and legend. For instance “The World Turn’d Upside Down.” That number had first been written as English rebel song in 1640 and published as a broadside in protest against rules of Parliament surrounding the celebration of Christmas. The Anglican lawmakers wanted the day to be solemn, not filled with the revelry the Catholics were want to put into their alcohol infused festivities. That solemn policy was too popular. The legend goes that when General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington at Yorktown in 1781 this was the tune British bands and musician went out and played. Hearing it done playfully and with humor on synthesizers is a real treat.

“John Brown’s Body” showcases one of the core wounds in American history, a wound that still smarts to this very day as we continue to wrestle with the aftermath of slavery, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War.

According to Greil Marcus, Byrd cryptically included the leftist anthem “The Internationale” on the track labeled “Grand Centennial Hymn.” The crypto-Marxist inclusion of “The Internationale” is Byrd’s way of injecting his own leftist politics into the mix. The song was originally composed after communard Eugène Pottier fled France after the fall of the Paris Commue in 1871, first to Britain, and then to the United States in 1873.

A lot of this music is probably unfamilar to most people today unless they happen to have spent time in a marching band, going to lots of parades, or hanging out on antique merry-go-rounds.

It’s a lot stranger than all of the classical moog albums that came out in the seventies in the wake of Wendy Carlos’ switched on masterpiece.

Now in the time of our own semisesquicentennial, there are a lot worse ways to celebrate than spending time with the music of Joseph Byrd.
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.:. .:. .:.
​
The writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.

​[This long essay, a kind of psychohistorical drift, on Route 128 MA is to be published in three parts. The first came out on March 25, the second on April 1st, and this segment concludes today, though their may be future installments on the theme of American Psychogeography.]
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As the area around Boston got developed, the greenspace around Route 128 became “Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.” The farmland that would have sat between the parks and trails and townless highways envisioned by Mackaye ended up becoming industrial parks as the land was bought up by a variety of tech corporations ready to pursue postwar growth. Saruman had once again raided the Shire. In the wreckage he erects Satanic mills of industry. Transcendental Concord became a note discord. A note with the seed of cyberpunk embedded within.

​Route 128 soon became its own kind of information superhighway, as electronics firms seeded the area, growing as businesses and then growing new kinds of silicon lifeforms. The farms and fisheries were cleared and made way for the building up the automotive industry, and the fields around them for the creation of factories churning out machine tools and all the kit and kaboodle that the make electrical world possible.

Then the big engineering minds who had connections to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sauntered in to continue the buildup of the areas electric powered might. MIT had roots going back to 1861 in Boston and their cooperation in military research had gathered up steam in WWI. It went on full display in the lead up to the United States involvement in WWII. The mad scientists at MIT wore the lab coats while their politician suppliers donned the full cloak of global empire from Great Britain in the aftermath of the war.

Among those involved was the cyberneticist Vannevar Bush. He was one of the founders of the American Appliance Company in 1922. Their project was to usher us into a new age of refrigeration. Perhaps this company should give another kind of chill, as they eventually evolved into Raytheon, the U.S. defense contractor and industrial corporation whose key work is manufacturing military grade weapons. As ever the commercial electronics that trickle down to the happy American consumer are just a byproduct from the applied research in how to kill and destroy.

Their eventual buildup into global bomb blasters can also be seen as stemming from their failure to keep things cold. Their refrigerator design was a flop, so they moved into the glowing world of radio. It started with the purchase of patents from C.G. Smith and his rectifier tube from the AMRAD company who went on to become X-ray innovators. At this point the company changed their name to Raytheon and went on to success by selling the S-tube that allowed radios to work on home electrical grids, helping to usher in the golden age of radio.

Then in 1927 Bush built his Differential Analyzer, an early mechanical computer that would pave the way for the mainframes that followed in the wake of WWII.

During the 1930s, as Benton MacKaye’s pans for the Bay Circuit were bypassed and the commercial agenda for Route 128 unfolded, other radio tube companies moved their operations into the area. These included Hygrade and Sylvania who later merged into the Hygrade Sylvania Corporation. General Radio moved into the area as well, along with the scientist Edwin Land, who went on to start Polaroid. Then in 1939 the first Radio Shack catalog was published by the Boston based company.

By the end of the decade another researcher into the nascent world of cybernetics and information technology came on the scene. It was a gentleman by the name of Howard Aiken. He was a physicist at Harvard, and with help from the school and IBM he created the Harvard Mark I, a giant electro-mechanical beast that weighed five tons and was the first programmable computer.

By the end of the following decade Claude Shannon had created the first chess playing computer at MIT. Over the course of those years this burgeoning sector had blossomed from the establishment of the Rad Lab at MIT, short for the Radiation Laboratory where all manner of things such as radar and radio research were conducted, to the continued growth of Raytheon and its involvement in computers. The aided the war effort through the building of magnetrons, a high-powered vacuum tube that converts electrical energy into high-frequency microwaves.

In the 1950s the growth along Route 128 further accelerated. An Wang had immigrated to the United States from China in 1951 and started Wang Laboratories. Wang was a pioneer in the area of Random Access Memory, receiving a patent for Core Memory in 1955 that he sold to IBM.

In 1952 a section of Route 128 was opened from Danvers to Needham. A parade was scheduled to celebrate the occasion. The elephants who had been brought into lead the parade didn’t cooperate with their human handlers, and got “cold feet” because the asphalt was still hot. On November 4th of that year Dwight D. Eisenhower became the 34th president of the United States. In his 1961 farewell address, he would warn us all of the growing military-industrial complex. A complex whose research had gathered in one cluster around
Route 128. The elephants were getting cold feet about the cold war.

In 1957 computer engineers from MITS Lincoln Laboratory set up shop in the Massachusetts town of Maynard to establish the Digital Equipment Corporation. In 1970, the same year that Jonathan Richman started his band the Modern Lovers they shipped their first 16-bit minicomputer the PDP-11/20.

​Over the intervening decade of the sixties, missile interception became a thing with the Raytheon HAWK system which was “like hitting a bullet with a bullet.” The space race against those evil communist soviets was on, and many of the corporations who had planted themselves around Route 128 applied themselves to the mission. Computer Aided Design was born at MIT and Wang Laboratories perfected the art of computer typesetting. Wang furthered the industry by developing logarithmic calculators and word processing software. All of this ushered in the modern world, and it was the world Jonathan Richman bathed in every night as he ran the roads in his motorcar, with his radio on, keyed in to the energy percolating out from all of those laboratories.

​On the 16th of May 1951 Jonathan Richman was born. Before the year closed out the public radio station WGBH began to broadcast and the Museum of Science opened. The Korean war was still ongoing, Truman was President, and campy science fiction flicks were invading the new drive-in theaters. the Boston Red Sox had finished up the season with 87 wins over their 67 losses. The air was alive with the crackle of radio signals and curving baseballs.

Richman’s dad was a traveling salesmen peddling goods across the roadways. In time he would initiate Richman to the way of the road, taking his teenage son out on treks with him in the car, driving around Massachusetts. His mother taught reading to kids who had a hard time learning to read. The family lived in the suburban town of Natick, Massachusetts, “in the far western reaches of Boston, impaled by Route 9,” as Richman is quoted in the book There’s Something About Jonathan by Tim Mitchell. Natick was a “halfway house between the city and the open highway…a blandness between the bleakness of subways, expressways, and skyscrapers and the magic of neon, radio towers, and ‘fifty thousand watts of power’…”

Those fifty thousand watts of power probably came from the station WMEX, a station that left a radio frequency burn in Richman’s heart. “When I was eleven I had a crush on Debbie Salvin. This was 1962. She and Janet Woish listened to WMEX - the teenage station of that time. Well, when I came over to Janet’s to pester Debbie, I’d hear ‘Johnny Angel,’ ‘Torture,’ ‘Summertime Lover’ and songs by Connie Stevens and Tommy Sands. So pretty soon I was there with the transistor radio hearing ‘The Locomotion,’ ‘The Watusi,’ ‘He’s A Rebel’ and everything else. That music is in my heart now as it always will be.”

The suburban landscape of tract houses didn’t do much to stimulate Richman’s imagination, but the roads and the rock and roll delivered over the medium of radio did. Richman was an earnest kid, and his continual sense of wonder left him at odds with other people, with other teenagers. Rock and roll was a lifeline in the sameness of the suburbs. Soon he had a transistor radio with him at all times, to tune in to and resonate with the frequencies that gave him, already a dreamer, something else to dream about. When WMEX boosted their power up to a mighty fifty thousand watts in the daytime during the late 1960s, and respectable five thousand at night, Richman would have been able to tune in the rock sounds that soothed his soul.

​Benton MacKaye’s fiend Lewis Mumford had gone on to spend much time thinking about the ills caused to society by our long-term investment in machines, and the ills of suburbia. Mumford was critical of urban sprawl and thought suburbia inculcated a childish way of looking at the world in the people who lived there. In his 1961 masterpiece The City In History, Mumford writes, “In the suburb, one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of evil fell over a column in the newspaper. Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion.”

Natick was place of such illusions is just on the outside of Route 128. Natick forms one of the loops on the beltway that cinches up Boston’s angling streets. Natick is a word from the Massachusett language meaning “place of the hills.” The name for the state itself derives from the tribe and comes from a term in their tongue meaning “At the Great Hill,” by which they meant the Blue Hills that stood above Boston Harbor from the south.

“Roadrunner” would become Richman’s most famous song. But in order to get to that point, in order to become a singer himself, instead of the painter he at times dreamed of being, he first had to have an encounter with the Velvet Underground, heard first over the radio when a DJ played “Heroin.” Richman didn’t need the drug, but he sensed in the music of Reed and Cale and the rest of the Velvets a new kind of rock music that he could mainline via the power of electrical communication into his own veins and bring into his own being, to emanate something of his own, something equally American, something equally new.
He recalls having “I heard live bands in junior high but didn’t start singing or playing till I was 15 and heard the Velvet Underground, out of New York City. They made an atmosphere and I knew then that I could make one too!”

He had already been making music. He already had an amp and a guitar. Now he had the reagent. When the Velvet Underground started playing in Boston, he started attending their shows, got to meet and hang out with the band, it began a process of transformation.

Highschool in suburbia was a real drag for someone as wide eyed as Richman. He knew what he wanted to do even if he didn’t quite know how to get there yet. There was no class for rock and roller on offer in the curriculum, and Richman thought there were better things he could do with his time. His parents thought differently, and so he managed to stay and graduate.

If human creativity can be conceived of as tapping into a field of consciousness, the field of consciousness he found himself inside was one of innovation. The success of radio, from the first morse code pulses sent out by Marconi to its successive apogees in the voice of Wolfman Jack broadcasting the religion of rock and roll out of the radio towers. Richman was a convert.

He was such a convert to the rock and roll religion that after he graduated high school in 1969, he made the pilgrimage to New York City to meet and hear his idols, the Velvet Underground. He couched surfed at their manager Steve Sesnick’s place as he worked odd jobs and tried to make a go of it as a rock and roller himself. He did manage that, but not right off the bat, and he went back home, where he promptly formed a band with a neighbor and some other friends.

​Richman was driven, and he started to write songs, and some of those were inspired by his travels as a teenager with his father, out on sales trips around the area. The Howard Johnsons and “Stop ‘n Shops” held a special appeal to him. They might have been sickening to MacKaye, a symptom of the motor slums he wished to thwart, but for Richman they held an everyday beauty. The stop ‘n shops and new fast food joints held an allure of satisfied desires, and there was comfort to be found in roadside motel rooms. It all filled him with a sense of wonder. This unadulterated happiness and pleasure in what life had to offer was innocent in him, and free from pretense. When he was finally able to translate these feelings into music on his song “Roadrunner” about driving along Route 128 the joy in these things came through without artifice. Buzzing through it all was his love affair with radio, which he had a nonstop communion with, using it as a way to modulate his very being.

​When the Modern Lovers first formed, and before they had settled on a final name, Richman had called themselves, “The Modern Lovers, the Dance Band of the Highways.” The last part was promptly dropped but it lingers around Richman and all the tracks he has left in space. “The Dance Band of the Highways” may not be a household name but Route 128 became immortal the day Jonathan Richman got his first inkling of the song “Roadrunner.” The year was 1970. He was nineteen, he was in love with the modern world, he was in love with the radio towers and all the electrical wires that lit up the area with glowing industry, he was in love with driving, and more important than anything else he was in love with modern girls and modern rock and roll. When he drove up and down Route 128 late at night his imagination got fired up. Cruising in the late 1960s under the starlight the world seemed to open up. The evenings were electrified. The electricity powered rock music and held new expanses of knowledge.

His connection to the Velvet Underground did pay off. John Cale had produced the demos, including the songs “Roadrunner” and “Pablo Picasso” that wound up on the Modern Lovers album. Cale said that “There was very little that was orthodox about Jonathan. Like his views on life, his views on music and art were much more from a childlike and dream-filled perspective, which allowed him to create his own special reality.”
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And Richman sang with innocent childlike glee “With the radio on / I’m in love with Massachusetts / And the neon when it’s cold outside / And the highway when it’s late at night / Got the radio on / I’m like the roadrunner.”

​His friend and fellow musician in the Modern Lovers had said that he and Richman “used to get in the car and just drive up and down Route 128 and the Turnpike. We’d come up over a hill and he’d see the radio towers, the beacons flashing, and he would get almost teary-eyed. He’d see all this beauty in things where other people just wouldn’t see it.”

Richman’s song is a bridge between the optimism of the 1950s and the suburban hellscapes then emerging. It is a bridge between the industrial parks of the high tech sector, and the cruising culture of rock and roll that has no greater tech than cars and radios and blasters. It’s the bridge between the unbridled optimism of boomers high on progress, and the sneering cynicism of Generation X and the actual future of no future that all of this was heading too.

​Richman liked his car as much as he liked women. “The highway is your girlfriend as you go by quick / Suburban trees, suburban speed / And it smells like heaven.”
The film American Graffiti came out in 1973, the year after “Roadrunner” was recorded, and it captures a similar flavor and psychic terroir. Wolfman Jack is howling from the radios throughout, and is central to the plot of the movie. The car and the radio are one. There is no cruising culture without the power of the AM coming out through the speakers late at night.

In the song Richman speaks of the “Spirit of 1956.” In 1956 the Platters had number 1 hits with “The Great Pretender” and “Only You.” James Brown had his debut single released. Elvis Presley hit the television variety shows and the film Rock Around the Clock reeled across the movie screens spurring movement on the dance floor and an explosion of teen culture as Bill Haley and his Comets headed for the stars. Rock and roll was here to stay, and it was something to do twenty four hours a day, all day every day, “patient in the bushes next to ’57.”

Lester Bangs, in a two-part review for the Stooges proto-punk album Fun House, said that their arrival on the scene and subsequent embrace by the youth movement signaled “the decline of Western civilization.” Richman was another ingredient in the protopunk stew, but he leant the movement some of its innocence, magic and mystery that would later reappear in the work of groups like Beat Happening, who also flouted the cynical aspect of punk.

As the 1970s waxed the fortunes of the firms on Route 128 waned. Silicon Valley’s fortune was starting to wax, and in their early years, before their complicity with the surveillance state, and their own contracts with weapons manufacturing firms, the early California hackers were opposed in ethos to the establishmentarian mindset of the east coast engineers. California was an escape hatch from the military industrial template. Punk rock was an escape hatch from the ponderous proceedings of prog, and the celebrity worship culture on display in the rock god shows held in stadiums. Richman was riding the protopunk wave, the wave of hundreds of bands started under the influence of the Velvet Underground, and his own influence went on to be one of the formative pulses kickstarting the punk rock movement in England where the Sex Pistols had adopted “Roadrunner.” It makes sense that the afterlife of “Roadrunner” would have such an influence on the development of punk. Joan Jett, one of punk rocks godmothers was also among the first to cover the song.

​From a mythological perspective the song is perfectly aligned with the god Mercury and Hermes. It is about travel and communication, about moving at high speeds. Yet Mercury and Hermes are also tricksters. Even the iconic cartoon and bird the song was named after has a connection to the trickster spirit through its close association with Wiley Coyote.

​Roadrunners are chaparral birds, a kind of ground cuckoo native to the southwestern part of the United States, Mexico and Central America. They are desert creatures. They like to run away from their predators, such as coyotes. Though they can fly, their feet are capable of fast movement and they move along the ground. And though Richman likely never saw one in the wilds surrounding Boston, most Americans his age had seen the roadrunner on Looney Tunes.

In Native American stories the coyote is a kind of trickster being, and when he makes his presence known, you can be sure that things are going to change, things are going to get shaken up. Jonathan Richman remains a pivotal figure in the shake-up of underground music, but his character is more like that of the bird than the coyote. Still in love with the modern world, he is chased by the changer down Route 128, and along that same path he flew, so many things were ushered in for both good and ill, computers, weapons. The country was never the same.

​Perhaps the ultimate trickster trick was played on the people who live in Boston, and on their fellow Americans via the concentrated thought energy that pours out of the realms surrounding the doom loop beltway. What could have been built according to the ecological vision of Benton MacKaye, instead blubbered into the hot potato of defense contracting, the creation of industrial effluvia whose complexes still ensnare the collective psyche. A road meandering through parks and preserves and protected places was instead poisoned. Where there had once been human settlements interspersed with nature, we were instead given the Sprawl.

[Another version of the classic song -you’ll want to listen to all the versions, I promise.]
RE/SOURCES:

This article would have been much tougher to research and write without the books, There’s Something About Jonathan by Tim Mitchell, The City in History by Lewis Mumford, the website Route128History.org by Alan Earls and his book Route 128 and the Birth of the Age of High Tech, and numerous other websites and sources.
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In next weeks segment we will explore the M.ilitary I.ndustrial T.emplate and the way Route-128 excited the fertile imagination of Jonathan Richman as we move along the roadrunner not taken.


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​
The writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.

[This long essay on Route 128 MA is to be published in three parts. The first came out on March 25. After this April 1st post it will conclude on April 8, 2026.]

As the twentieth century unrolled into its third decade, cities started to look for ways to route their increasing auto traffic around them as well as through them. Motoring was a luxury and motorists looked for beautiful locations to escape to on Sunday drives and other escapades, as a luxury. What had once been a mixture of haphazard and practical road building, now started to become the domain of engineers and urban planners. One of the notions that soon began to circulate was the idea of the circumferential highway, or beltway road. Route 128 outside of Boston has the distinction of not only being immortalized in the song “Roadrunner” by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, but also of being the first of these beltways.

In 1925 the BPR started their work on systematizing Americas highway system by assigning federal route numbers to the preexisting roads.  Not long after the numbers started getting assigned, plans for what became Route 128 began, and it was officially designated in 1927.  In its first iteration city planners nailed the road number to posts on existing roadways to create a somewhat messy linkage of different roads connected together. Why the number 128 was chosen seems to be lost in the mists of history. Maps from the time show Route 128 to be a sinuous line of convolution moving inland to the west with its movement snaking both north and south in a ragged arc. It was ad hoc, but it could get you to or from the South Shore and take you between the inner and outer burbs surrounding the denser urban core.

During the great depression of the thirties people weren’t buying as many cars or spending as much money on gas, but the traffic was still increasing enough for Route 128 to become jammed as people traveled Bostons boundary. A solution was needed to ease things up in the little communities such Newton, Danvers, Walton and Beverly that dotted its way. The engineers at the Massachusetts Department of Public Works thought it best to modernize Route 128 and relocate parts of the road.

The process of creating the route was just as convoluted as its path. In 1930 one possibility for a bypass around Boston that was to be a “townless highway” was proposed by Benton MacKaye, the forester and regional planner whose vision of the Appalachian Trail has changed the face of the nation and the lives of countless Americans. If his ideas had been implemented the land on either side or Route 128 would have also been much different, leaving behind a legacy of protected landscapes instead of snarled sprawl.

 Mackaye had been born in Connecticut in 1879, the sixth of seven children. His father Steele Mackaye was an a playwright, actor and all around man of the theater given to Romantic ideals. His acting had taken him to Paris where he’d been a student of François Delsarte, and he taught the Delsarte method of oratory, singing and acting upon his return to America. Steele’s plays struck some popular accord with the American public, and he also got involved in establishing several theaters. His work in getting them off the ground however were always plagued by dodgy financial shenanigans going on in the background. In between these ventures he had periods of mental fatigue and instability that left the family wanting, even if on outward appearance, things were rosy.  The kids grew up in their fathers artistic, literary and bohemian circles as a matter of course, and though they had for a time lived comfortably and at large due to the success their father had in the theater, they were never financially stable for long. As their fathers mental and physical health waned, and as his various ideas for making it in the big time fell through one after another, they had start pinching pennies, and moving from one place to another. 
  
After Benton was born the family found themselves broke. Soon they were on the move around New England, with stints in Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts towns before moving to New York City in 1885. In 1888 they found themselves in Shirley Center, Massachusetts, a town thirty miles west-northwest of Boston that would remain Benton Mackaye’s spiritual home for the rest of his life. 

Shirley Center was a colonial village built around a common. A larger town surrounded the original village over time, but as the author Larry Anderson wrote, the place had an “almost organic ‘starfish symmetry’” and that its “tight-knit physical arrangement–town hall, church, schoolhouse, general store, homes–came to represent an idealized model of community life” for MacKaye. The place had been inhabited by a Shaker community, and some still lingered on when the MacKayes arrived. Not much further away was the site of Fruitlands, the utopia community that the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott had started in an attempt to live out his ideals.

Even though the family did not stay in Shirley Center year round, some stability came to the family when his older brother Will purchased a home that they called the “Cottage.” It would become a summer home for the family and a place they all returned to again and again. Not far from their Cottage, the same railroad line that passed by Thoreaus cabin, that he wrote about so avidly in Walden, passed through Shirley Center, where the family had a Walden of their own. It was along the hills and streams in Shirley Center that Benton’s love for the natural world started to unfurl like a seed pushing through the soil. 
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Lewis Mumford, who was to become one of his closest friends and advocates, later wrote, “As soon as he reached Shirley, he knew he was home; and from that time on this village has been the center of his life, despite many prolonged absences.” It was his omphalos, his center of the world.

One of the prolonged absences was when the MacKaye’s went to Washington D.C. Two of his brothers worked for the government, and MacKaye would follow in their footsteps.  Though the capitol wasn’t his favorite place, it wasn’t as stifling to his spirit as the times he spent cooped up in New York City where they often spent the winters. In the capitol he found other ways to express his passion for nature. He spent a lot of time at the Smithsonian Institute where he continued his self-directed studies and practiced drawing many of the animals he saw on display. He became such a fixture at the Smithsonian that he started to volunteer to help with the work in the labs. One the curators, James Benedict, befriended him and became an early mentor. Benton also availed himself of speakers on the lecture circuit and went to talks given by famous explorers such as the Civil War hero, geologist and explorer of the west, John Wesley Powell, and the future explorer of the arctic, Robert Peary.

MacKaye’s real education was in the woods and fields. Back in Shirley Center he had started the Rambling Boys Club with some other kids. Their aim was to “give the members an education of the lay of the land in which they live, taking in the Geography, Geology, Zoology and Botany of them. Not only to know the Science of it but also the History and Progress of the different places.” MacKaye had also gotten in the habit of drawing maps and sketching the landscape. He wanted to document the rivers and roads, the hills and the heights, the flora, fauna, and architecture of Shirley Center.

He went on a number of hiking trips that had a major influence on him, and in turn on the legacy and imprint he left on the national character of America. His “Expedition 9” was one of these, as a was an extensive backpacking trip he took to the White Mountains.

“This direct, first-hand education through the senses and feelings, with its deliberate observation of nature in every guise—including the human animal—has nourished MacKaye all his life,” Mumford wrote of his friend.
He didn’t care so much about regular school. It was a stifling experience to be shut up indoors when the whole world beckoned to be explored. He had gone to high school in Cambridge, but dropped out early to follow his brothers James and Percy into Harvard where he studied geology, while they studied philosophy and engineering on the one hand, and poetry and drama, following in the footsteps of their father, on the other.

Certain gifts given by family and friends seem to have a way of leaving a mark on a person that endures through the decades ahead. While sticking it out at school James gave him a copy of book that would be another touchstone in his work, another seed that unfolded in time. In this case it was the book Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature by Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley’s book investigated the surface features of the earth, its rivers and streams, its forests and oceans, hills and the mountains and showed how they formed and evolved over time. The book would become a constant companion to him. His own book, the New Exploration, first published in 1928, contains numerous references to Huxley.

Before big ideas of “geotechnics” and the Appalachian Trail started emerging from his brain, he was enrolled in the new forestry school at Harvard. It proved to be a good match and he was the schools first student to graduate in 1905. The forestry work proved to be something he could return to over and over again in his otherwise peripatetic career. He got a job for the United States Forest Service, and also taught at the school. His earlier trip into the White Mountains proved to be influential in his research on the effects of deforestation and rainwater runoff. The conservation movement was still young and diverse at the time. There was a lot of debate around access to natural resources for the growth of industry and business, and saving them for recreation and the benefit of the earths creatures and humanity. MacKaye was able to show that when the forest was logged too heavily, it caused a disproportionate flow of water in the streams, leading to flooding. The evidence he was able to give in the matter lead to the protection of the forests and the creation of the White Mountain National Forest.

His work for the government took him back to Washington where he helped form another group in 1913. This one was the Hell Raisers. They were made up of a mix of fellow federal employees, journalists, and citizens interested in the labor movement, economic planning and other causes championed by the political left of the time. As a naturalist and conservationist MacKaye’s interest was how America would use its vast resources. Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the newly created Forest Service, had just gotten out of office. One of his mottos had been that the “natural resources belong to the people.” MacKaye and the Hell Raisers had taken Pinchot’s slogan to heart.

In 1915 he married the suffragist Jessie Bell Hardy Stubbs. There marriage would be a short one ending in tragedy when she took her life in 1921. MacKaye never remarried and the death haunted him for the remainder of his life, though he rarely spoke of it even with those closest to him. In the aftermath of this intense loss and in the midst of his bereavement, the idea for what became his greatest accomplishment came to him, a vision for the Appalachian Trail. He was 42 years old and his destiny stretched ahead of him. He was like a thru hiker, and even though he was down low in the valley, he had the will to keep going and see what was up ahead of him on the next crest after he passed through the valley.

He first proposed the Appalachian Trail in Journal of the American Institute of Architects as a project of regional planning. It was a bold critique of the direction headed by industrial capitalism. MacKaye saw the way communities and natural places were being unraveled by the boom of machinery, and the way political jurisdictions cut across the landscape without accounting for the natural markers of watershed and ridgeline. The trail would connect the rural to the urban in a mutually supportive way, rather than as a mere drain on the countryside by the city. Its creation would be of some benefit to the depressed conditions of small towns in the hills of Appalachia. Where the mountains passed through the eastern side of the country and into New England it would be a boon to nearby small cities. Walking the trail would be a way to escape the “hecticness” of life under the gun of money grubbing profiteers. As such their would public shelter camps along the way, maintained freely by the public, and operated without being relegated to bottom lines or profits.

MacKaye knew he was on to a big idea, one that could potentially have a lot of support from a wide range of people, but he had a lot of fear about the possibility of it being implemented, this vision of a trail that stretched across the mountains between Georgia and Maine. Some of the reasons he had for building the trail, were due to his family background, their bohemianism, and the related realm of radical politics he was steeped in. MacKaye had a lot of fear about his vision and how it would be implemented. There was always the problem of being labeled a dangerous socialist which might put the kibosh on his the creative plan kindled in both his heart and head.

​Despite the fear, MacKaye utilized his considerable talents for organization, and he lived to see the completion of his massive project. He had unique skill in bringing people and ideas together, and the entire process mimicked his burgeoning philosophy of “geotechnics” using small parts and small groups to make larger positive changes in the landscape and across society. In sixteen years the 2,200 miles of trail was finished, but it was during the first opening salvo of that massive effort that MacKaye found himself involved with a group who would make practical inroads in their critique of the way roads were being built in America and of how those roads affected our communities.

​The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) was formed by Clarence Stein, who’d become an early adopter of MacKaye’s vision and helped boost the profile of the project. Stein was an architect and planner who’d been caught up in the vision of the garden cities movement promoted by Ebenzer Howard and inspired by Edward Bellamy. The RPAA would count MacKaye as member, as well as Lewis Mumford. Mumford had been making a name for himself as a writer with his 1922 book The Story of Utopias, which detailed their history in the imagination of the West following the line from Plato’s Republic, to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Tomasso Campanella’s City of the Sun, the utopian science fiction of H. G. Wells, and on up to Bellamy and the version of Boston he presented in Looking Backwards.
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The Story of Utopias was originally published by Boni & Liverwright. It was the same year they published T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. World War I was only just behind, leaving its wasteland of bloodied trenches across Europe. In America the result was another psychic wasteland. 53,402 American soldiers died in battle, never to come home to their mothers, wives, children. Even more died indirectly through accidents and disease, a stunning 63,114 souls. Eliot approached the horrific shocks of the 21st century through a modernist mythopoesis. Mumford wanted to see what these imaginary utopias could teach us if people worked on a practical level to bring the ideals into reality. He argued that there were two kinds of utopia, one of escape and one of reconstruction. He wasn’t looking for the utopia where escape from our choices and humanity is somehow absolved. He wanted to use utopia as a vision that people could take action on and move towards. The world itself may be forever imperfect, and the people in it, but by humans and nature could both flourish and be mutually enhanced in the right environments and situations. These environments and situations could be created.
 
Mumford’s ideas resonated strongly with MacKaye’s, just as MacKaye’s did with Stein’s. Henry Wright was another architect and planner who went on to work with Stein on designing the Sunnyside Gardens neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York City. A lot of the funding for the project came from Alexander Bing. The project incorporated Howard’s garden city ideas over a 77 acre site of low-rise buildings oriented towards the pedestrian citizen. Green spaces were built right into the walkable neighborhood that had space for families to live and grow. The landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley was also involved.
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Stein, MacKaye, Wright and Bing formed the core of the RPAA and gathered around them the other people who would further its aims. This diverse group of friends made a critical examination of the city, collaborated on the development and dissemination of ideas, and got involved in the politics of building.

Above: Clarence Stein and Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford and MacKaye, Stein and his wife Aline McMahon

Stimulated by the success of his Appalachian Trail project and the association he had with these minds, and encouraged by Mumford, MacKaye began work on his own book The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning that was published in 1928.

MacKaye rightly saw cars as one of the biggest threats to the protection of the countryside. As most cars belonged to city slickers, he devoted a chapter of his book to “Controlling the Metropolitan Invasion.” He looked at roads like they were waterways. “Rivers of Asphalt.” A stream of water from a dam that wasn’t being properly regulated would destroy the surrounding trees and wildlife. A flow of cars from the reservoirs of the cities, and the haphazard creation of roads, would destroy nature. His Appalachian Trail project was one to put a “dam across the metropolitan flood.” It was a way to limit development around the natural areas soon to be protected by the trail.

His work with the RPAA led to other papers and projects designed to put limits and controls on the metropolitan invasion and control the flow and movement of the population into America’s recreational areas. The first result was an article he wrote called “The Townless Highway” first published in The New Republic in March, 1930. It was in the main a critique of the way the car was going to change the landscape of the country if something wasn’t done to prevent it, and the main idea was to have roads that did not go through existing communities. When new communities were to be created, speedy motorways were not going to go through them. He had seen the way the railroads had gutted out the centers of cities with their expansive yards, and the way railroad towns popped up on spokes at various distances from the main hubs. He didn’t want the car to impact the urban or rural land in the same way.

This would set the precedent of abolishing “the motor slum, or roadtown, and develop the rural wayside environment.” In practice this looked like villages and small cities within a region, protected by the natural barriers of hills, mountains, rivers or wetlands and the like, connected by electricity and “open way” roads to the other areas. There might be farms or small cottage dwellings here and there along the “open ways” but there wouldn’t be any factories, offices, or any other kind of building that would be better suited to life in a village or small city. Regional planning done in this manner would prevent the cancerous urbanoid growth of “continuous tunnels of structures.” Access to nature would be enhanced by those living in the villages and small cities. Driving would be safer because of the lack of pedestrians near the road and turn off points to “motor slums” where drivers have to navigate the traffic of other vehicles. The small city and village life would also be enhanced by their density, walkability, and being built on the human scale, not built with cars foremost in mind.
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MacKaye followed up this paper with a detailed study he did for the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations. This was a private body dedicated to getting donations of land to use for the public good. MacKaye’s idea for the Bay Circuit was to connect up a system of parks beyond the metropolitan area of Boston in a circumferential road that would go around the city. With limited entryways and exits, and limited numbers of restaurants, service stations and other developments, it was to be a way of connecting the motorized citizen to the world of nature. The sacrifices on the part of nature would be minimal, and the rewards to humankind would be great. 

The Bay Circuit would be, in the words of Lewis Mumford, “a metropolitan recreation belt with a northbound motor road forming an arc on the inner flank and a southbound road on the outer flank—the two roads separated by a wide band of usable parkland, with footpaths and bicycle paths for recreation. In reducing MacKaye’s conception to Route 128, without the greenbelt and without public control of the areas adjacent to the highway, the ‘experts’ shrank the multi-purpose Bay Circuit into the typical ‘successful’ expressway: so successful in attracting industry and business from the center of the city that it already ceases to perform even its own limited functions of fast transportation, except during hours of the day when ordinary highways would serve almost as well. This, in contrast to MacKaye’s scheme, is a classic example of how not to do it.” 
MacKaye later lamented the fact that the his ideas were not used in this area, and what became Route 128 was “choked with development.”

Attract industry and business it certainly did. Route 128 exploded with technical industry in the booming years following WWII, becoming a highway of the modern world.

Anthony Flint, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, called the area “Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.” The farmland that would have sat between the parks and public greenspaces envisioned by Mackaye ended up becoming industrial parks as the land was bought up by a variety of tech corporations ready to pursue postwar growth. Saurman had once again raided the Shire. In the wreckage he erects Satanic mills of industry. Concord became discord.

At least the people in the suburbs didn’t have to commute very far to get to their civilization wrecking centers of industry. 
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RE/SOURCES:

This article would have been much tougher to research and write without the book and website of Larry Anderson. In particular his biography, Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail published by John Hopkins University Press in 2002 and his website Peculiar Work which contains many articles about MacKaye, among other interesting topics.
MacKaye’s own book The New Exploration, while somewhat dated to the ear of today’s nonfiction reader, contains many insights and ideas that may prove useful to the psychohistorians and psychogeographers of today and tomorrow.  

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In next weeks segment we will explore the M.ilitary I.ndustrial T.emplate and the way Route-128 excited the fertile imagination of Jonathan Richman as we move along the roadrunner not taken.

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American Psychogeography I:
From Saint Botolph to the Road Warriors

[This long essay on Route 128 MA is to be published in three parts on March 25, April 2, and April 9 2026.]
In the classical world it was said that all roads led to Rome. In America, all roads lead away from Boston. It was the place where revolutionaries conspired to overthrow the bent British monarchy, and the first to liberate themselves from the rule of the corrupt crown. One of the roads that leads from Boston, and around it, is the sacred track known as Route 128, the beltway that loops around the city and through its suburban towns. It was one of the first highways of this kind to go around a city and enclose it with the traffic of automobiles.

Taking a journey along this road is one way to peer into the subconscious layer of a key birthplace in both the liberty of our nation, and the incarceration of our freedoms under the throes of the military industrial complex. While driving along its unremarkable everyday asphalt, while motoring alongside its concrete dividers, while jumping on and off its entrance and exit ramps, this winding may not seem cause for much reflection, yet its belligerent psychohistory has cut dark grooves into the recesses of the American mind, and the fruits of its industry have colored our dispositions, our obsessions, our collective neuroses.

The area of psychogeography, first developed by the Lettrist International and expanded by Guy Debord and his fellow artists and political thinkers in the Situationist International (SI) in France, has gotten its strongest foothold in England. Debord defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” In England its key practice, a form of urban walking known as the derive, or drift, has been championed in a variety of subcultures ranging from those surrounding the art of field recording as applied to electronic music, on the one hand, where the recordings were thought to capture some essence of the landscape, and literature on the other, where experiences, impressions, and history got distilled down into words.

Psychogeographical practice retains a strong foothold in England. This came in part from the establishment of the London Psychogeographical Association in 1957 by Ralph Rumney, who had been involved with Lettrism, the avant-garde art group COBRA, and went on to become one of the cofounders of the SI. Later, on the musical side it was taken up by the likes of Drew Mullholland and his Mount Vernon Arts Lab project, among many others. On the literary side of things, writers such as Peter Ackroyd, Stewart Home, Will Self, and Iain Sinclair have made extensive use of the concept to explore the resonance between the hidden histories of place and its psychic undercurrents.

While practitioners of psychogeography do exist in America, where the influence of Situationism can be seen in the work of Gary Warne and his formation of the urban exploring group the Suicide Club, whose members included John Law, co-founder of Burning Man, it has never achieved the same kind of popularity in the underworld of the arts as it has in England.
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Consider this an investigation into a distinctly American psychogeography that travels through layers of time and the psychic imprint of the various personalities along Route 128 and the city it contains, and the suburbs it borders.

SAINT BOTOLPH OF SHAWMUT

​The city of Boston is situated on the Shawmut Peninsula, a place shaped by the slow time of glacial erosion and moraine deposits. Much of the rest of what came to be known as the state of Massachusetts was shaped by the same gradual but all pervasive forces. The state itself was named after the Massachusett tribe, one of a number of tribes and bands that made their home in the region. Before the European migration and the great slaying of the trees, before the cars came it was covered in the green of a dense forest. Under the boughs and leaves animals left behind traces through the brush. Those traces turned into trails padded by humans, then into dirt and gravel roads. Now asphalt, concrete, plastic wrappers, empty cups and bottles litter the outside of the Stop ‘n’ Shop’s and corner markets leaving behind the traces of empty calories from empty consumption.

The first Anglo settler of the area was an Anglican reverend named William Blaxton. He stayed there until the Puritans arrived. Those Puritans had just left behind a country dominated by Anglicans and they didn’t much care for the others faith, even though they were all Christians. Theological differences rankled the air and caused Blaxton to move on to what is now Rhode Island. He had called the town he settled Shawmut. The name Shawmut came from the Algonquian word Mashauwomuk. It isn’t clear to us now, exactly what this word means. The Native Americans used the area on a seasonal basis for the most part. Their religions, not being based on the “one true book” and its interpretation, didn’t lend themselves to theological infighting.
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The name Boston itself comes from St. Botolph, its patron saint, and it was given to the city by yet another Puritan settler, Isaac Johnson. He made a home for himself in the part of the area known as Charlestown, and became its leader. His last official act before he died in the autumn of 1630 was to give a proper name to this settlement just across the Charles River. He settled on the name Boston, after the hometown in Lincolnshire where he, his wife, and John Cotton (grandfather of Cotton Mather) had left behind in England. Before Cotton Mather came to America, he’d served as a rector at the St. Botolph church. St. Botolph himself was an abbot who died around 680 and is known as being the patron saint of boundaries. In the traditions of the church, he also governs trade and travel, along with certain aspects of agriculture. As the patron saint of boundaries St. Botolph is a fitting guide to invoke when considering the entire notion of an American psychogeography, and in particular the boundary loops and ring roads surrounding the cities. It seems the influence of St. Botolph and this associated with him immigrated over with the Johnson and Cotton when they came over to this land.

LOOKING BACKWARDS AGAIN

​To introduce the next part of the story, the first developments of Route 128 as anything more than a collection of preexisting roads, we have to fast forward. After Tea Acts and Tea Parties and Revolutions and the War of 1812, after successive waves of immigrants, Irish, Italian and Jewish to name just a few, after the establishment of MIT in 1861, after the Great Boston Fire of 1872, a utopian scifi yarn by Edward Bellamy was published in Boston in 1888. Looking Backward: 2000-1887 was the story of a man who is put into a hypnosis induced sleep in the year 1887 and wakes up in an America that has been transformed into a socialist Eden.

After a trickle of initial sales and minor local success, the book started selling like hotcakes after its original publisher was bought up by the burgeoning behemoth Houghton, Mifflin & Co and a new slightly edited version was released. Labor organizers, socialists and nascent communists all began to praise and pontificate about the book. His book even had an influence on urban planning, through its descriptions of his idea of what Boston would be like in the future.

Not all Socialists were happy with the influence of Bellamy, even among the socialists. The multi-talented genius William Morris thought Bellamy’s ideas were poppycock, and said he had no real idea “beyond existence in a great city.” In his second book, Equality, published in 1897, Bellamy perhaps sought to amend the criticism from Morris and wrote of regional cities connected by high speed transport to rural villages on a continuum of development, while keeping the regional characteristics of each place intact.

When these book fell into the hands of Ebenezer Howard, a British man who’d relocated to America’s heartland, it kindled a fire in his brain. It wouldn’t be the last time life imitated art. Howard had tried his hand at farming in Nebraska, but he was unequal to the difficult task, and relocated to Chicago, where he found work as a reporter, work more suitable to his talents. He arrived not long after the city had been decimated, some may say purified, by Chi towns own great fire of 1871. In its aftermath he saw how the central business district was regenerated, and he was also witness to the subsequent growth of the cities suburbs, and he started thinking about those suburbs quite a bit. His daily work as a reporter took him into the courts. It was here that he saw firsthand the many social problems of his day. This face to face interaction with those suffering hard times continued when he returned to England in 1876. His mind was already under the sway of the Transcendentalist movement. He had been a great admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and was said to have met them both. By the 1880s he was fully invested in investigating the options for alternative living available in his day. This brought him into the socialist and anarchist milieu and he started working on his own treatise, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform first published in 1898.

There were some things in his book that just didn’t click until he read Bellamy. His head had been full of ideas about economic reform, but hadn’t given as much attention to the urban environment and its effects on humanity until he devoured Looking Backwards. Howard now had a vision for sustainable, self-sufficient communities that would combine the best of life in town with life in the country. After cogitating on the pros and cons of rural and city life, he sought a way to bring all the good attributes together, while diminishing the negative. He called his vision a Garden City. In 1902 his book would be republished as Garden Cities of To-Morrow. A key feature of his vision was open belts of nature, parks, countryside with industry kept in separate zones, but trees and wide open spaces everywhere. Further, each community would be planned and managed by the community. Self-governance and self-sufficiency went hand in hand.

At first people scoffed at his ideas, but later people started adopting them in some instances and specific planned communities, while certain aspects got folded into the designs of the worlds growing suburbs. Reformist members of the British Labor government were tickled pink by the respective works of Bellamy and Howard and their subsequent ideas around urban planning trickled into the discussions and debates of politicians, and eventually earthed into the land itself through new developments and restructuring.

​Back in Boston, the journalist and poet Sylvester Baxter took up Bellamy’s ideas and helped implement them. He was a founder of the first “Nationalist Club” dedicated to their promulgation. At the time a leftist populist tide was rising and 165 of these clubs had been founded around the United States by 1891. It was only a few years before they merged with the Populist Party itself. Baxter was a man of many energies and he became a champion of the idea that swathes of land outside the confines of a city should be left wild and untouched by human hands. As an advocate of public parks and the use of the land for the recreation and pleasure of the citizens, he saw a connection between the anti-capitalist sentiment of the day, and the desire to keep the land out of the hands of the robber barons corporate lords of the Gilded Age. Baxter became a secretary for the Massachusetts Metropolitan Park Commission in 1892, and it was the work they did that led to the led to the creation of parks on a city scale, all under the influence of Bellamy’s book and the dream of creating a convivial place to be shared by community.

ROAD WARRIORS

​As the twentieth century unrolled, so did the roads. The traces were already there, left by animals who walked and ran across the land, followed by the humans of the First Nations. When it rained, many of these trails became rivers of mud. In time they would become what the progressive electronica outfit Church of Hed calls “rivers of asphalt.”

Many of the very first roads in America were worn into muddy ruts by the march of the military, taking over those ancient and storied footpaths in the process of extirpating those very same Natives whose trail they followed. The railroad had helped accelerate the vast westward expansion of the pioneer era. It was only a few decades later as the twentieth century dawned when the car hedged its bet against the horse and buggy. The conditions of existing paths weren’t suitable for the new industrial machine. Motorheads and car salesmen began to advocate the government to improve the roads.

The expansion of the postal system had a role to play as well. If mail, and the new products multiplying in factories, were to be delivered to those who’d staked a claim in the hinterlands of America, road conditions would have to be improved. Starting in the late 19th century, but beginning officially in 1906, the United States Post Office set up the Rural Free Delivery program to take mail to farmers and others in the remote countryside. Not everybody was on the same page about this program. Private delivery men who got paid to take mail to distant addresses didn’t want to lose their livelihood, as did the shopkeepers and others who charged small fees to hold on to letters for later pickup when folks came into town. Politicians started hawking the idea of free mail delivery as a way to pick up votes for themselves, and expand the territory of who would be voting for them. The nation’s oldest agricultural organization, The Grange, championed the cause as it helped farmers stay in contact with the rest of the country, and in the end, it was adopted.

Road at that time still weren’t much more than trails. They were dusty when it was dry, and muddy when it rained. A car easily got stuck in the mud, just as wagons had in the past. Automobile travel was an adventure. With few mechanics or repair shops, every driver had to bring their own kit of tools and tire patching gear. In case they were stranded, they’d need to have extra food on hand, and without knowing where they would next fuel up, they had to travel with their own extra gas. Building up roads and service stations was essential if the early car fanatics were to get on their way.

By 1913 Henry Ford’s assembly line had ramped up car production. President Woodrow Wilson sensed his own political opportunity in the growth of the car, which needed the “rivers of asphalt” to truly thrive, and campaigned on road building as part of his platform. Wilson contended that “the happiness, comfort and prosperity of rural life, and the development of the city, are alike conserved by the construction of public highways. We, therefore, favor national aid in the construction of post roads,” and as ever, “roads for military purposes.” In 1916 he signed the Federal Aid Road Act, the first federal legislation to put money towards highway building.

The act established a Federal organization of Roads and Rural Engineering, later changed to the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), and the following year ten different districts were established around the country. Each area was tasked with construction of Post Roads into their rural zones with cooperation from highway departments in each state. They were also given the job of surveying, building and maintain National Forest roads in collaboration with the Forest Service, a connection that would prove to be of lasting relevance.

The need for improved roads from the military perspective had been evident to the Army since World War I. Railroads had failed to get materiel and other logistical supplies to their destinations, and a truck convoy from Toledo, Ohio to Baltimore, Maryland had to be implemented. Numerous obstacles ensued that delayed the delivery of the war machines.

In 1919 another convoy with the Motor Transport Corps tackled the still young Lincoln Highway, the first Transcontinental Road, masterminded by automotive maverick Carl G. Fisher. It had been built on funds largely raised from private capital. At the time the Lincoln Highway was still unpaved in huge swathes between Illinois and Nebraska. What bridges there were even had to be destroyed and rebuilt to enable the passage of the military might. At the time Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Brevet Lieutenant Colonel and he had joined the convoy, “partly as a lark, and partly to learn.” It took the soldiers two-months to travel across 3,400 miles of rugged road. It’s no wonder Eisenhower later became such a big proponent of America’s next iteration of high-speed travel, the Interstate Highway System. His interest was specifically for its role in war and defense.

After this operation it was clear to the concerted interests of the government, military, and corporations (the embryo of what would become McGovCorp and the Military-Industrial-Complex that Eisenhower himself warned about), that the highways needed further development for smooth transcontinental travel. Developing and tapping North America’s vast natural resources wasn’t far from their minds either. The conservation movement of the time was also interested in opening up the wilderness to leisure and recreation activities, as well as curbing the untrammeled exploitation of the natural landscape. All of this led to the development of the Federal Highway Act of 1921, a vast expansion of the roadways that posited to further the creation of a complete coast to coast system, signed into law by President Warren Harding.

Thomas H. MacDonald headed the (BPR) from 1919 to 1953. One of his first efforts related to the new legislation was to get the Army to compile of a list of all the roads that they thought would be of “prime importance in the event of war.” With list in hand, he sent out the United States Geological Survey to get detailed information and measurements of the routes. Army General John J. Pershing was to put all of this together into a map. The result was the first topographic map of the nation, the Pershing Map, gargantuan at 32-feet long. Pershing presented the work to Congress in 1922.
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The main roads of concern were on the East and West Coasts, along the border of Mexico, and the border of Canada around the Great Lakes, and the asphalt started being poured. Nobody seemed to care too much about the roads in the South. The oil rich fields of Oklahoma and Texas had yet to get pumping, and priority was given to transporting coal and steel from the east to the ports. Florida was likewise ignored for the most part. The military thought that any hostile forces landing there would be swamped without much ability to move northwards.

In the meantime a New England man had been dreaming of another way the unique landscape of North America might be connected together through trails and parks and “townless highways.” His name was Benton MacKaye and in 1921 his article “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning” was published, a first step towards making the Appalachian Trail we know today a reality. He would also try to leave his mark on the beltway road that was soon to cinch Boston up in its concrete and asphalt loops.

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We will catch up with Benton Mackaye, and some of his fellows in the Regional Planning Association of America such as Clarence Stein and Lewis Mumford in the next segment of this essay.

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The writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.

Is the past such a bad place to hang out, to gain inspiration from?

It worked for the Renaissance. When Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin it kickstarted the esoteric revival in the West. His revival of Platonic philosophy and its subsequent effect on the Humanism and the way it percolated out into the arts where it then permeated European left us in an afterglow that can still be felt today. Great minds like Ficino’s believed that books like the Corpus Hermeticum contained timeless wisdom. Such knowledge, as opposed to just information, still had relevance for seekers in his own time. It is because he tapped into such timeless wisdom and bequeathed it to the future that today’s seekers can refresh their spirits by dipping once again into its mysteries. The wisdom of books like the Corpus Hermeticum still have wisdom for us today.

​If some renaissance artists had to dig up sculptures from the Greek ruins of previous civilizations to find inspiration, so what! When they found that inspiration it set the standard for lifetimes of work, lifetimes of renewal.

Kim Cascone recently mentioned that 90s rave culture is now as far in the past as 60s hippie culture was to rave culture. Yet their inherent power remains. Part of why we may have no counterculture now, is because of the dead ends the arts have run into as they traverse the reality labyrinth. Further back than the ravers and the hippies were the counter-current weird ones now well over a century past, hanging out at Ascona in Switzerland, around Monte Verità in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

​Some of the people who hung out at the Mountain of Truth were folks such as Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Hugo Ball, Theodor Reuss, Paul Klee, Otto Gross, Rudolph Steiner and many others. Naked hippies looking for natural cures before hippies went naked as they ate sprout sandwiches. Hesse’s novel Journey to the East seems to be very much inspired by his earlier time spent with these seekers, these members of what we might as well call The League.

For those who yet to read it, the league is a timeless spiritual sect whose members include people from history such as Pythagoras, Plato, Mozart, Baudelaire and Paul Klee. The league also has members from the realm of the imaginal, including Don Quixote, Puss in Boots, Tristram Shandy, Goldmund (from Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund), and the artist Klingsor (from Hesse’s Klingsor’s Last Summer), and the ferryman Vasudeva (from Hesse’s Siddhartha).

These figures of the League are connected to one another even though they live in different time zones. Time zones with differences of centuries and millenia. Not to mention spatial differences of psychogeography.
I would count Doctor Who as another member of the League. As a time traveler he had recourse to go to all different points of space-time for his many missions. So too, we can use the power of time travel to go back into the past and search for the artifacts needed for the renewal of the future. The point of inspiration could be near or far in time.

We don’t go back in time to make stuff that is for yet another museum piece, no offense to the muses. We go back in time to find things to remix and recombine. Our art is the art of combinations. What did the hippies know that we might use, what about the punks, the ravers?

Hear the sound of the techno acid beats from the free festivals at Stonehenge resting on a web of neo-Transcendentalism. Let freedom ring in the free jazz notes trumpeted out from hidden pockets of improvisation. Our own voice joins with that of the past to braid a new thread, to remix and remake.

Synthesis now! is the motto of the interpolater who brings old inserts to bear on present problems.
You don’t need to have a TARDIS to become a time traveler. Even if you wish to make something living and breathing, you can still seek out the secret doorways in the library, open up old books and commune with the minds of the dead, a perfectly respectable kind of necromancy. Or visit the museum.

Another kind of internal time travel is possible for those who have trained their imaginations. It can be done without leaving your easy chair, though a hard chair is preferable. The voyage need not be for an extended period of time for the wrinkles to have ripples of large effect.

For those who don’t want to recombine, straight up reenactment of the past is another possibility worthy of pursuit. Become a surrealist, or a dandy flâneur. Live like people lived in the 19th century. You can do so without becoming a Victorian prude hell bent on colonizing the known world.

Art in turn can be like an ism. If an ism comes to us from the religions of Paganism, Hinduism, Judaism, Shintoism and the like, than it makes sense that the devotees of Dadaism, Surrealism Serialism and Minimalism adhere to the aesthetic philosophies with rigor. Genres of music become critical lifestyle choices, worldviews for listeners to inhabit. Our band could be your life, after all. Join the cult of music.

In the end, there is no substitute for Awen, or what people in the Druid tradition call inspiration. Divine revelation can come from dreams, it can come to us from our guardian spirits, the daemon or guardian angel, the higher self. It can come to us as a gift carried on the breeze, like a seed waiting to root itself and bring renewal to the land.

To find moments of inspiration, sometimes it is necessary to cut ourselves off from the chatter of input on the multiplexed media channels of the hyperreal, hyperpresent panopticon. Going into solitude for a time, as a hermit in the desert, as a hermit in some ancient woodland grove, as a hermit tucked away, hidden inside the honeycomb of urban sprawl. Here we can listen to the inner voices that would seek to find an expression in whatever medium, and find their way to those needful of their message, bringing small changes to the culture from the cracked places on the fringe.

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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers,  if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

The question of 'the' history of the Situationist Intergalactical is problematic, not least because of the time and space anomalies prevalent throughout its work on all planes of reality. The Situationist Intergalactical didn’t start so much at a specific node in time, as it did at many. “There are more worlds than these,” and there are many nodes of Arachnist activity across the Web that could be seen as points-of-Aha!, points of order, points of illumination. These AHA moments of direct gnosis and revelation can be thought of as the synchronistic glitches, that strung together, form the history of the SI.

Even in the spiral galaxies, there are many historians who insist on linear progression, the idea that history is a line, going from the Flinstone age of yabba-dabba-doo to the Jetsonian world of full automated metal maids. Parental units are only one vector of influence. Geography is another. Friendships another. Transdimensional influences are not as often considered. Depending on what part of the spiral web you dance upon, history may look very different indeed. The history of the SI is spiral bound.

Our origin story is one that combines future shock with retromancy. Chronosophers from other nodes have a completely different takes on who it is we even are and what it is we do. The crucial question is one of inwards or outwards: Are we spiraling into our inner selves and the inner worlds, or are we spiraling outwards into the world and the worlds beyond this world?

(From the eggs of the spider queen thousands will be born, and they shall go into many points and places around the wheel from which their own perspective will determine what eggs they themselves hatch.)

Whichever direction we go, we must tread on the tail of the tiger with care, so as not to spiral into madness or psychosis.

At this point we can begin at the end, with the Situationist Intergalactical’s most recent communique. That piece, Jamcon ’26, is one of the best places to look for clues as to what the Situationist Intergalactical will become next. As a key activation in our herstory, it is intimately tied up with the coming age of Analog Inevitability as described further below. Jamcon ’26 was the opening salvo in the AI slop wars, leading to the meltdown of many a machine.

What is Jamcon ’26? It is an unexploded media bomb whose transplutonian virality seeks to further inundate various corners of the Universal Net Web with bits and bobs downloaded from the mauve zone. The Jamcon ’26 project recodes the culture jamming traditions of the so-called past and plops the into the dada-sets of Artificial Idiocy right here in the now time.

As we enter a new phase of the work, the SI is pleased to announce a deal where key concepts derived from Jamcon ’26 and some of our “future” works have been licensed by a game design company, A Stitch in Time, who will be weaving it into new Glass Bead Game modules for the use by luddites and other digital resistors. From our current nodal point of view, this confluence of vectors has led to this analog inevitability. Our so-called work history is just the lead up (or wind down) to our ideas being acquired by A Glitch in Time. A glitch is a stitch after all.

​For earthlings subjugated to conventional linear time, one node where the SI begin was with Dr. Friedrich Morgenstern when he escaped from a high security psychiatric unit for the criminally insane and went on the lam in Lexington, Kentucky. Yet, at the same time, the SI has never existed on earth, or is yet to exist. Morgenstern got his information from the mauve beam that was directed at him by the angels operating the transorbital satellite, and was further enhanced by his later trepanation and transorbital lobotomy.

A series of events held in a junkyard on the outskirts of the city where various hobos gathered together along with other escapees from standard American reality and they proceeded to work on becoming a provisional escape-hatch and portal to connect with other extreme outsiders and genuine freaks. With the publication of their first zines and pirate radio broadcasts the SI started to function on the material plane. With the advent of the internet, they planted themselves like a rogue firmware update into various corners where they would be stumbled upon by the cyber inclined.

Currently, much SI activity seems to be dedicated to defusing hype about the AI apocalypse. The ascendancy of Artificial Idiocy just means an eternal return to Analog Inevitability. If we have to pick a point where something starts, let's just say the history of the SI begins here, now in the - very - near future that isn’t evenly distributed yet, with the advent of AI -and those who want to fight slop with slop.

The SI learned from cybernetics the lesson that there is nothing 'merely' technical or intevitable about Artificial Idiocy, except that is something that is happening, and Analog Intelligence will have been inevitable after it happened. But it will also have been inevitable that people will be deploying various means of going against these Idiotic Aptitudes. The Automaton Jihad will have also been inevitable at that point of order. The SI sees the rise of the Idiotic as an event exemplifying a whole complex of intermeshing themes, including: the crash of Science Fiction (and the emergence of cyberpunk), the death of postmodernity, and the re-start of chronopolitical conflict.

Addled Integrity is an event that may ultimately be entirely constructed out of hype. What that hype is going to lead to will not in itself be illusory. The wig outs and freak outs and mental breakdowns from those using Addled Intelligence systems will be all too real. This in itself is an immediately effective cybernetic feedback process. The intense nature of the feedback spirals will result in the kind of unraveling usually considered negative.

So far as the SI is concerned, this means the crash of the world economy. As technological integration increases, human control lessens, and the possibility of something crashing the entire system grows.

Where the techbros think of Addled Integrity as the implementation of their Faustian bargain project of Progressive Technology - a vision of uninhibited technological growth spreading out into a far future on Mars and beyond- they do not realize that there was a clause in their satanic bargain. Specifically, a Santa Claus. They sold their soul to Santa for technology and all they got in return was an internet catalog of increasingly stupid toys. Also, Skynet.

From the POV of Allegiant Incels, of course, Skynet never happens. From our point of view SI activist John Connor sees to it that it never happens. Time travel, duh. The secret at the heart of spiral time. Just skip over a thread and connect to a different part of the Web.

Aggravated Imbeciles are not only everywhere that computers are, but are also hooked up to the dada collection systems of computers everywhere. The infection has spread to even the tiniest interstices of all aspects of the technocratic environment. AI is a global habit, mostly urban, that can only be kicked locally. Even if, say, a corporate worker who got laid off because of AI was able to infect the AI system with dada before being booted out of the system, that dada set would still be a part of an AI system that would later need total disassemblage by a team of trained mentats.

Acolyte Inbreeding is not so much a catastrophe as it is a hyper-catastrophe. From it can be extrapolated the entire kit and caboodle of stock market crashes, nuclear wasteland exchange, energy grid disruption hacks, and traffic signal deregulation. Which is bad news for us, who are symbiotically intertwined with the whole kit and caboodle of industrial civilization and its discontents.

Assbackwards Infidelity is just one more example of the way in which capitalist reality is indistinguishable from communist reality. They are both economic fictions that have melted down the very material substance of life into some kind of non-orgasmic goo, and hypnotized us into a system of abstract and virtual token exchange. Both systems suck horse dick because both are run by managers and bosses. One of the black swans looming on the horizon is how Airhead Instability will disrupt the management cycle. But the question needs to be asked: what else will it bring down and disrupt along the way as people with no real world skills are sent home from the office?

Cyberpunk ends with Amalgamated Inbreeding. The SI starts with people becoming psyberpunks. That is, for those who kick the habit early, reliance on our native psychic powers will begin to replace our current trajectory of becoming Daleks and Cybermen.

​What Analog Inevitability does signal is the virtual endgame of the virtual game itself. When poisoned dada sets start proliferating throughout everything the internet touches, no one will be able to trust it at all, and in the end many will choose to just unplug the damn thing.

​Automaton Instability is thus a testament to the bankruptcy of its theoretical commitments. It was one thing for out-of-touch theorists to fail to anticipate the economic events of Y2K and 2008; but to be unable to respond to Aimless Injury, as an event, is an oversight of another magnitude entirely.

The problem is that Abandoned Ideation scrambles the radar of those who believe in the trajectory of progress, discomfiting the assumptions on which the entire notion of progress rests. While it will be used as a reality escape hatch for the wealthy, those on the other side of the class divide will continue to have sweat and die. Not enough fuel to power the dada centers of the disenfranchised.
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Yet their fantasies of digital heaven and the Martian utopia can all be unplugged with the flip of a switch; not so the nature of biological and spiritual reality. Flipping the off switch doesn’t mean people will stop believing in the myth of progress, only that they will become a new Amazonian cargo cult as they continue to slave for the Bezos-Santa to whom they signed their soul.

The postmodernists would have us believe that all signs are completely arbitrary, that one set can be exchanged for another. Yet when the arachnist hackers put into the dada sets completely arbitrary symbol sets, it will indeed eventually cause a global Aggregate Idol meltdown. This will become the cosmic trigger and the semiotic trigger hacktivists will pull.
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Analog Inevitability is thus about the increasing friction between what is left of human intelligence and computers without such intelligence. Asinine Imbeciles just repeat and recombine the semiotic signs fed to them in endless scrolls of binary code. There is no subconscious in the machine. There is no mind there. It is up to us how we may inject new lines of semiotic code into the cesspool of harvested dada, but we should also know not to drink from the same fountain.

.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers,  if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.