​“Government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex”.
-Frank Zappa

Welcome to Cheap Thrills, a column for New Maps that seeks to explore philosophical ideas and pursue practical activities around themes of entertainment, media, art, and leisure in the deindustrial age. In this space I’ll look at traditional forms of entertainment and see how they might offer new inspiration for people who want to live with less. I’ll also be attempting to retrofit some of the newer forms of media to be of use in a low-energy future. In the process of looking at older ways of amusing ourselves, and seeing what can be salvaged from the newer, I hope to explore new combinations of entertainment as well. In doing so I’ll be dipping into art, history, and philosophy while taking into consideration the trends of economic contraction, energy descent, resource extraction, climatic changes, and the myriad crises of our time. All of this is to ask the question: how will we entertain ourselves, communicate, and make productive use of our available leisure time? Civilization as currently configured is unraveling, but by playing on our own and with each other, we can still have some fun, strengthen the imagination, and develop new skills. 

            Perhaps entertainment isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the future. Having a laugh and getting lost in diversions isn’t an obvious answer when confronted with extinctions, political unrest, fossil fuel consumption and all the rest. As we wrestle with the decline of Western civilization, though, the issue of how we entertain ourselves takes on added significance.

What do we allow to occupy our time and enter our minds, for better or worse? How might we now sidestep some of the issues associated with being a passive consumer of the entertainment-industrial complex? What else can we do instead that might add value to our lives, to the people we are in relationships with, while also mitigating the harm, and possibly even doing some good, for the other beings who share this Earth with us?

            These are the questions this column seeks to explore. I’m not sure what answers I’ll find, although I have many ideas of places to go looking. Perhaps it will be best to consider Cheap Thrills as an extended discursive meditation on these and other allied themes.

            A number of answers, in the form of stories, are found in the pages of New Maps. You are here reading a magazine that imagines an entire range of scenarios about the ages to come.  As readers we are entertained and engaged. Deindustrial fiction works in concert with the imagination to give voice to the topography of our concerns. Perhaps these imaginings may also help shape the future through the inspiration they give. Other forms of entertainment can also be of service in shaping how we live.

To start with I thought it might be useful to look at the definition and etymology of the word “entertain”.  It is very interesting to me that one way to define the word is “to hold mutually,” or my preference, “to hold intertwined.” These meanings evolved from the root Latin words inter (among) and tenere (to hold), according to the Oxford English Dictionary; it was the French who joined their forms of these two words, entre and tenir, together into what became the word entertain. Bringing people together has been one of the main functions of entertainment all through the ages. Entertainment holds them and intertwines them in a community, often in a shared imaginal space. 

            Another way the word entertain has been used over the centuries relates to showing hospitality to guests. This aspect of the word emphasizes the reciprocal nature of entertaining, the giving and receiving of gifts. Here the gifts are of time, food, company, conversation, all those wonderful things that make bonds between friends and family. This form of entertainment has not been altogether lost by society, but many people would rather be entertained than entertain. Having people over for dinner, or just for a beer or cup of tea on the front porch, now seems either quaint or stuffy and conceited to many people. Even less common now is entertaining and showing hospitality to the wandering strangers who sometimes showed up on people’s doors.

            Oftentimes it seems that we would rather stay immersed in binge-watching the latest streaming TV series, or stay plugged into social media, than attend to reality and our relations. This points to another meaning of the word entertainment, “that which engages the attention agreeably, amuses or diverts, whether in private, as by a conversation, etc., or in public by performances of some kind; amusement.”  This definition is what those of us in America, and perhaps more generally the English-speaking West, think of when we hear the word: entertainment as amusement and distraction. 

Distraction itself isn’t always a bad thing. Healthy amusement is healthy for the soul. Yet three pervasive mediums for being entertained in the age of the entertainment-industrial complex—movies and TV, sports, and music—work in ways that are quite the opposite of healthy. Instead, they alienate people from actual engagement in community, while fragmenting their attention and time.

These forms show little hospitality to the people who consume and are consumed by these diversions. There will be many challenges in the deindustrial age, and people who are strong-willed and show self-determination will be able to make the transitions to come a little less painful. Those who have made the efforts to forge relationships with others and who are involved with or ensconced in the ecology of a community or communities will have support networks in place. The rough patches of our lives can be softened when we make true connections.

 Learning to entertain ourselves can also help build will power and self-determination, and coming together to entertain each other strengthens the connective tissues between us.

Yet obstacles remain. By and large people in industrialized countries, plugged in to mass entertainment, are caught up in what filmmaker, theorist, and philosopher Guy Debord called the spectacle.

 Debord: “Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations—news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment—the spectacle is the model of the prevailing way of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle is also the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the modern production process.”

This idea of the spectacle comes from Debord’s landmark work The Society of the Spectacle, first published in 1967. It is a work of philosophy that used some of the tools of Marxist critical theory, alongside experiences from Debord’s involvement in the Paris avant-garde, to critique consumer culture and a variety of social illnesses stemming from a life of consumerism.  It became the seminal text for the Situationist International, a movement of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political thinkers and theorists. And while I am not a Marxist myself, the critique of society formulated by Debord is one of the best formulations of thought I have come across to explain how capitalism and industrial culture have helped create a passive public who are alienated both from themselves and from each other due to pervasive consumerism and an overarching media.

Debord’s book holds that there is in society a tendency to mediate our social relations through objects. These objects of mediation are the products and services pushed on people by McGovCorp, a term used by musician Kim Cascone that I’m going to borrow for these essays, to refer to the half-dozen or so corporations that control the media and the government that works in tandem with them. Those six are GE/Comcast, Walt Disney Company, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS. The majority of the ownership of these companies, and of other smaller news companies in America, resides in the hands of just fifteen individual billionaires. 

The process of industrialization, then, and all that has trickled down from those changes, have caused a drastic shift away from individual expression and lived experience to second-hand, mediated experiences. The economies of hearth and home have largely been abandoned in favor of the financial economy. As digital technologies have further infiltrated the human sphere, our pastimes have been traded for more time spent in simulated and over-stimulated virtual worlds. This leaves many of us with gaping deficits in terms of traditional skills for living and for playful recreation with each other.

Furthermore, Debord says, “The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having—human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely occupied by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing—all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them.”

In other words we have traded a self-reliance predicated on what we do, for a state of unending adolescence in which we seek approval of our status by a superficial show of what we have, instead of who we are. The spectacle of social media exacerbates this trend to the point where we get hung up on projecting an image to people we’ve never met, and worrying about what they think of us. And that is just one of many ways this tendency plays out.  

The Situationist International, like many other avant-garde art groups, wanted to circumvent the existing society. Their primary strategy was also where they got their name. They wanted to create situations and moments of life that reawakened authentic desires (desires that hadn’t been implanted via advertising), situations that rekindled the love of life and the everyday situations that enhanced liberty. 

The Situationist International was active between 1957 and 1971 and left behind a body of work that still resonates today. Many of their tools are applicable to the current crisis of our time, which remain as entangled, if not more, with the spectacle as they were at the time of Debord’s and his colleagues’ activities and writing. We’ll dig further into some of their history and the tools they left behind as we proceed in these articles.

Running in tandem with the spectacle, there is another factor at work that I wish to explore in this first essay as way of showing just what it is I want to sidestep. That factor is the entertainment–industrial complex. It can be thought of as the confluence of government, military and corporate influence surrounding movies, television, sports, and music, while spilling into other types of media. Closely allied to the military–entertainment complex, it can all be thought of as being part of McGovCorp.

As a way of setting the stage for why we might want to sidestep the spectacle let’s look at how these factors are now at work in film and television, sports, and music.

In 2017 journalist Tom Secker compiled a list of 410 movies that were sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Secker has shown in his investigative research the deep ties between the DoD and Hollywood, as well as between the CIA and Hollywood,  and between reality television programs and the Pentagon. He got a lot of his information on these things from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and sifting through deep archives.

A lot of this material is documented in a book he co-authored with Matthew Alford, National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood. Their book shows the specific changes made to movie scripts at the behest of the government for various political reasons. Often the material that was changed or edited out from the films they discussed had to do with things such as CIA drug trafficking and the interaction of private armies and oil companies, among other things. These forces worked on many blockbuster films such as Avatar, Terminator, and Transformers.

I always suspected the Transformers franchise was a way to continue to pimp car culture on young impressionable minds. The reality was that the DoD worked with director Michael Bay, and many of the films in the franchise were co-written with personnel from the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy. Secker claims that Michael Bay is little more than a government asset in Hollywood. From the evidence he has compiled I think he is right.

Secker continues to document his research on his website spyculture.com. It’s a fascinating resource built upon his FOIA requests and other reporting that shows how intelligence operatives are using their access to entertainment media to shape the spectacle, and in doing so steer the narratives and mindset of the people who consume this type of material.

All of this sounds like it is part of a social engineering and propaganda project to me. As we continue to move into a phase of history disrupted by oligarchies and corrupt power structures, pandemics, brownouts and ruptures in the power supply, it is important for us to remain clear-headed amidst competing narratives. Opting out of Hollywood’s brand of movie-making is one easy way to keep the mind free.

In the sports realm the McGovCorp factor is sometimes called the sport–industrial complex or athletic–industrial complex. Besides the passive aspect of fans just watching the spectacle of sports games inside stadiums and on supersized flat-screen TVs, there are the aspects of how sports as a business has ties with corporations and a crooked higher-education system. Sports do help to create a regional sense of unity and identity for those who follow the teams, yet most of the time, the players on a regional team aren’t even from the region or city they play for. It’s always seemed a sham to me that the players are bought and sold like a commodity, hence there’s no real team any of them are playing for, just a corporation they have a contract with. What Big Sports seems to be all about is providing a captive audience for advertisers who inject their thought-forms throughout an event. Modern sports are a far cry from self-organized games played by people in a community and enjoyed by members of the community.

In my home of Cincinnati a new stadium project for our unproven Major League Soccer team, FC Cincinnati, has been underway the past few years. A groundbreaking ceremony was held in 2018 and now at the time of this writing, the work is close to being complete. This was a deeply contentious move on the part of the city. A 5–4 vote in City Council pledged $34.8 million dollars towards building this edifice in the historic West End neighborhood. The area is mostly black, and predominantly low-income. The folks whose houses were in the way, the people who had lived in the neighborhood their whole lives, suddenly had to scramble to find new places to live, all for a new sports arena. Developers talk of how this stadium is going to bring jobs and opportunities to the neighborhood, but they don’t mention the people who got kicked out in the process.

Military displays in Big Sports have also become more prominent since the events of 9/11.  Huge field-length flags are unfurled across the playing the field, when formerly just a normal-sized flag and a shared singing of the national anthem sufficed to rev the patriotic spirit. Sports reporter Howard Bryant has detailed this intertwinement in his book The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism. To honor those who serve, teams wear camouflage jerseys; to support first responders they let police officers throw out the first pitch. It was once rare for fighter jets and B-52 bombers to fly overhead of stadiums at the beginning of a game or halftime. Such feats were reserved for the World Series or Super Bowl. Now these happen at smaller games. It is awe-inspiring to see huge machines flying overhead, but they are weapons of death, and I find it strange they are applauded. 

Sports used to be something anyone and everyone could talk about, a safe topic like the weather, where politics and world news could be left behind in favor of discussing the prowess of the athletes. The influence of McGovCorp has put paid to that. But hey, I was the kid who tried to get out of participating in gym class so I could write poetry in a corner, so my perspective may be a bit tainted.

The folk music revival and psychedelic rock music of the 1960s fed a huge hippie counterculture that questioned the basic tenets of the Establishment, man. In the 1970s and ’80s, punk rock music came to the fore as part of an explosive subculture with a strong DIY ethic for people who wanted to live outside the system. Punks established their own record labels, venues, and networks of fanzines to communicate their ethos. Hip-hop followed in a similar manner, both genres propelled around urban areas by the power of a skateboard. Ravers in the ’90s partied to the sounds of electronic music in Dionysian ecstasy wherever space could be found.

Since those times a new musical form to catalyze the imaginations of people wishing to live outside the spectacle has not materialized. These musical genres and their fans all still exist in various intertwined subcultures. There are very strong flavors of folk, punk, hip-hop, and electronica as well as a plethora of others, all existing in various scenes and corners of the underground, propped up by thriving independent labels and organizers. Yet for the most part, they remain underground.

Meanwhile pop music and the cult of the rock star continue to be pumped into the collective imagination in various flavors. The menu at this musical soda fountain consists of sickeningly sweet corn syrup, artificial ingredients and a fizz that soon goes flat. The songs are also parasitic. Catchy earworms are created and latch onto the brain. Anything a person was thinking before they heard the song is now gone and the song repeats in a subliminal hook.

I actually love a good pop song, a real pop song, one that was written by an artist, and not engineered. Yet many of today’s pop tunes, the ones heard in stores or malls, during the Super Bowl or World Series, have been painstakingly crafted by specialized teams in digital sound laboratories using new techniques crafted to stick in your head. And sell records and products. The people doing this work have found ways to make songs more and more addictive. The more addictive it is, the easier it is to sell products and keep streaming music services going.

John Seabrook traces this aspect of the music industry, the side that works with technology to create songs that are hard to shake out of your head, in his book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. Music created this way is not something a composer or songwriter channels from the inner life of their imagination, but a product engineered to sound good while lacking the true critical content of actual soul. Practices like these, and many others, mark the mainstream music business as being part and parcel of the entertainment–industrial complex and the spectacle.

[Note: Since the time I wrote this in 2021 the music spectacle has gone full throttle with the regurgitated sounds of the simulacra being generated by AI.]

I could continue to interrogate these three aspects of the spectacle indefinitely. Yet if I waded further into those waters, this column would get swamped in the minutiae that an in-depth critique of each of them would entail. There are already plenty of books and articles around, and anyone who starts scratching at the dirt will soon be digging down to find much more fuel for their fire. There are also other aspects of the modern spectacle I would have liked to look at but, due to time and space, chose to set aside: video games and social media.
Instead, the theme of this column is on strategies for sidestepping the spectacle and having fun. It is often better to move out of the way of an oncoming bull rather than engage in a prolonged battle by locking horns. 
            To that end, having defined a few of the terms and themes to be used in this series, and having outlined the general territory of what is being stepped away from, the next article will look at dreams, and how they can be used to engage the imagination and help the dreamer tap into some of the deeper currents of life. In future articles I’ll also be looking at the cheap thrills to be had from walking and psychogeography, mudlarking, artifact hunting and trash picking. Slow media, pen pals, how to create cabinets of curiosity, surrealist game nights, and three-sided football matches are just a few of many subjects and speculations I have in mind as we proceed.
            So until next time, live cheap, protect your mind and keep it free.

RE/SOURCES:

Part of what I want to do with these articles is to scatter seeds of learning for anyone who wants to look at these subjects further. So please consider the following both sources and resources.
 
The Society and the Spectacle by Guy Debord, translated and annotated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014
 http://www.intellectualbubblegum.com/the-big-six-of-media-the-six-companies-that-control-most-of-the-media-you-watch/.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies
Spyculture.com

National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood, by Matthew Alford and Tom Secker, CreateSpace, 2017

https://www.spyculture.com/updated-complete-list-of-dod-films/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/cincinnatis-soccer-stadium-scam/

https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/07/20/military-sports-astore-francona

The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism by Howard Bryant, Beacon Press, 2018

The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015

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This was the first essay that launched my Cheap Thrills column in a 2021 issue of New Maps. I am adding these all to my website now, since they originally appeared first in print.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:

STREAM FORAGING

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING
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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 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. 

“From everything I’ve extracted the quintessence / you gave me your mud and I have made it into gold.”
—Charles Baudelaire, draft epilogue for the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal

Rivers and streams around the globe have long been held sacred within many of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. The Ganges is revered by Hindus who understand it as a personification of the Goddess Ganga.  In Judaism and Christianity the Jordan River is considered holy. Stretching from Lebanon to the Dead Sea, it is the water that the Jewish people forded into the Promised Land; Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan. The Nile sustained innumerable aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization and it also played a major role in their spirituality. They considered it to be a causeway on which souls flowed into life, death, and the afterlife. In the pre-classical period of the Mediterranean, historians have surmised the existence of various cults based around river gods and goddesses. In the Americas the rivers were no less sacred. Along the banks of the Scioto in Chillicothe, Ohio, are massive earthworks and sites that may have functioned as astronomical calendars; it has been postulated the sites were places of pilgrimage for the Hopewell.
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Rivers and streams are a connection to history, and in their continual flow we are reminded of the movement of time. The stories of the rivers, and the artifacts found along their banks, can connect us to that history, and in turn to the genius loci, or spirit of a place, that may manifest in specific watersheds.
If one is inclined to, a possible way of engaging these rivers and streams in conversation is through the practice of mudlarking, or foraging for lost and forgotten items washed up along the banks. Mudlarking can also be a fun pastime with other beneficial side effects: cleaning up a bit of the mess we’ve left behind in our streams and finding useful materials in ages of scarcity.  

Mudlarking is perhaps most closely associated with the River Thames, which is tidal, revealing its deeper recesses and aspects at low tide, when rubber-booted adventurers pluck its hidden treasures from the muck. London has been occupied by humans for a long time, and the materials that have disappeared into the Thames make it ripe for the picking. Everything from its ages—centuries-old pottery, pipes, rings, shoe buckles, and other bits—has found its way into the water, and back out by way of plucky pickers. Yet mudlarking isn’t just for the British, even if they gave us the word for the activity. Mudlarking along the Ohio, Wabash, or Mississippi is not unknown, and foraging along your local river or smaller stream, will also bring rewards if you bring diligence.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a mudlark as “a person who scavenges for usable debris in the mud of a river or harbor.” In the 18th and 19th centuries, people who lived near the Thames were able to scrape together a meager subsistence through the activity. Usable debris is something the denizens of the deindustrial world are going to be on the lookout for. It might not be something you’d quit a day job to pursue full time, but could be a way to supplement alongside other ways of creating a living.

Driftwood can become firewood. Bones from fish and other dead animals can be collected and ground up to use as fertilizer. Old bottles can be gathered and traded or sold to those who brew their own beer and make their own medicines. Washed up old coins may have their own inherent value. Other found metals, when amassed into enough of a pile, could be taken to to a scrap yard and traded for cash. Fishing for metal with a large magnet on a line cast into the water is one way to hunt for sunken metal. Accumulated pieces of water washed glass and broken pottery might be used for tiling projects and transformed into mosaics. If a person mudlarks often enough they may be able to find unique antiques, to be cleaned up, traded and sold on the second hand market.

In one possible deindustrial future I imagine riverside camps or jungles full of rowbows: people who travel from city to city by canoe or kayak, looking for work or adventure. Their shacks get lashed together with stray bits of rope, nails and bolts pulled up out of the mud. Around the fire the rowbows cook their carp based mulligan stews in steel containers scavenged from the shore.

Mudlarking the banks of rivers, or beachcombing  around oceans and lakes, also has artistic  applications when found objects get used for the aesthetic enhancement of the environment.

There is something inherently magical about found objects, which have been a staple in the art world (highbrow and low) since the storm of Dada erupted from the aftermath of the horrors of World War I. Part of it has to do with finding random things by chance. Hans Richter, a participant and historian of Dada, noted that the found object emerged like something from a dream, from the unconscious. “Chance appeared to us as a magical procedure by which one could transcend the barriers of causality and of conscious volition, and by which the inner eye and ear became more acute, so that new sequences of thought and experience made their appearances. For us, chance was the ‘unconscious mind’ that Freud had discovered in 1900.” Messages appeared amidst the rubble, caked with meaning as much as grime.

Dadaist and pioneering collage artist Kurt Schwitters noted the effect of the destruction of Europe, and how that helped him to develop his personal artistic concept that he called Merz. “In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready ... Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.” As society traverses the downward deindustrial staircase from one breakage to another, the practical toolkit of Dada remains available for those who would make new things out of the fragments.

Schwitters extracted Merz from the German word Commerzbank in a collage using newspapers. He then applied the term as a name for his small periodical, and finally to his work and himself.   

As a movement Dada is forever iconoclastic, contradictory and full of paradoxes that can never be resolved. It was an opening salvo in revolt against pure reason. After WWI many people felt the ideals of the Age of Reason to be empty. Dada embraced the irrational. Those who contemplate its works are rewarded with spontaneous illumination, in a way similar to the Zen student who puzzles over an absurd koan and catches a glimpse into the sublime. And like Zen, Dada had little use for dogma. It wasn’t born from a shared aesthetic vision, but from interconnected nodes of ideas, ethics, and materials; it did not rely on a strict formalism, and this has given art historians no end of trouble when studying what Dada is and what it was not. These very characteristics, if they can be called such, are part of what make the techniques pioneered by those caught up in the Dadaist impulse potentially useful  to the artistic scavengers of the deindustrial world. Looking for random things, whether manmade or natural, is a way to sidestep the passive consumption of images.

If the natural world is alive with its own inherent intelligence, then the rivers of our world are literal streams of consciousness. What messages might their dark and murky waters cough back up, in the form of found objects, from within their polluted interiors? What treasures might they spit back out onto their banks and shallow edges for intuitive mudlarks to discern as forms of communication, linkages in the chain of history?

When poet and percussionist Z’ev first started mudlarking the Thames in 2010 he had already built an extensive musical praxis around playing found objects. Born to a Jewish family with the given name Stefan Joel Weisser in Los Angeles (February 8, 1951 – December 16, 2017), he adopted the drums early in life, at age eight, and later the name Z’ev as one of his artistic aliases. At age twelve he no longer considered himself a practitioner of Judaism. He had asked a rabbi about the practice of meditation and burning incense he had read about in prayer books. The rabbi told him it was all just metaphors. That answer didn’t sit well with him so he went to the library and started looking for answers. This began his lifelong journey as a seeker, as a student of world religions, and to Western esoteric spirituality and the study of Qabalah.

Z’ev played in a number of rock, jazz and experimental bands around LA from the late sixties until the mid-seventies, even sending demos to Frank Zappa’s Bizarre Records label. These tapes were “too bizarre for Bizarre” however and he eventually left LA for the Bay Area in 1976. Two years later he started using found objects in his percussion set up. Much of the material was stuff he found in junkyards or lying on the side of the road, or scavenged from industrial areas. This was two years before German squatter band Einstürzende Neubauten developed a similar practice in incorporating found materials from construction and destruction sites into their sound. Z’ev used stainless steel, PVC pipes, titanium, anything he could get his hands on if it made a good tone. It was a natural move for Z’ev to pivot from being a seeker of wisdom to being a seeker of physical materials he could transform from the base matter found in salvage yards into the resonating metals of his sonic creations. This practice of looking for free materials to repurpose for art earned him the nickname of “the Finder.”

In the Industrial Culture Handbook he had said, “Z’ev uses these metals, and has to do with the fact that you can go out and build and create your own music – you don’t have to go out to a store and buy the latest musical things. It is on one level anti-consumer technology (‘to be able to do something you have to spend a certain amount of money, get the state-of-the-art this and that’). I’ve always been very committed to low-tech as opposed to high-tech!”
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In this phase of development Z’ev pieced together assemblages he used in a movement-based performance style that was like a form of marionette, with the salvage bits suspended from wires and rope on homebuilt frames. He hit and tapped and hammered these pieces in a dramatic manner he referred to as “wildstyle,” a term originally related to graffiti. It was scrap metal music, performed with verve. The sounds themselves are as expressive as a highly stylized script. Z’ev said, “There's a tremendous amount of calligraphic language in the instruments themselves. If you closed your ears and just watched it, there is a language almost like a puppeteers’.”

As a side note "Wildstyle" is a form of graffiti composed of complicated interlocking letters, arrows, and embellishment” that is “intentionally hard to decipher” (Noah, Josephine: “Street Math in Wildstyle Graffiti Art.” Artcrimes, 1997: www.graffiti.org/faq/streetmath.html). A possible connection is that Z’ev sometimes also stole materials he needed off of industrial lots, making his art in some respects another form of “illegal art” like graffiti. 

Z’ev eschewed the tricks and licks of contemporary rock and jazz drumming, though he was trained in them and more than capable. He favored  a style that harkened back to the way drums have been used as tools for communication and ritual. “There is this language to rhythm where there’s a meta-message occurring, almost a mathematical situation with repetition, refrain, like formulas repeated and transmuted this way and that way.”

A lot of his early shows as Z’ev were at venues such as the punk oasis Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. He ended up traveling the world with his found-object percussive kinetic sculptures, and lived in a variety of places in North America and Europe. By the 2010’s  was in London, where his long habit of scrounging for materials took him into the mud of the river Thames. 

He writes of his first experience mudlarking, and how his projects Effigies and Familiars: Sticks and Stones of Darkness came out of the practice. “on the 26th september 2010 i visited the river thames and spent a few hours there. towards the end of that time i was walking well down to the water line and came upon 3 pieces of wood and 3 of metal. i took them back to anstey road and assembled them into an initial configuration in the garden. … I had constant thoughts about my relationship to the thames with regards to developing a project around the general notion of ‘sticks and stones’ and the specific notion that this project would be a collaboration with tamessa, the ancient Celtic personification of the elemental energies of the river … while the title ‘sticks and stones’ had come into my mind from the very beginning, … it was only in october 2010 that the distinctions of effigies and familiars became associated with, respect[ive]ly, sticks and stones; that is, for the most part, sticks are effigies and stones are familiars and so as far as I’m concerned in clarifying this distinction: effigies are representations of mythic thought-forms, familiars are anthropo/zoo- morphic concretizations of elemental energies. Put another way: effigies are lenses for focusing on/the focusing of mythic powers, familiars are objects of subjective power(s) in-and-of themselves.”

Z’ev communicated his intentions for the project to the river using the techniques he had found as a spiritual seeker.  He committed to gathering what he could find at least once a week during the low tide. He gathered driftwood, stones, and other materials from the detritus of the river and from these created effigies and familiars in concert with Tamessa, entering into a dialogue with the genius loci of the river.

Z’ev noted a specific state of his own consciousness he entered when going on these mudlarking forays. “In the past when I’ve written about my work and its basis in the found-art tradition I’ve generally just used the term finding to describe the process… The reason I’m using gathering in this instance is that it better describes the process specifically. On one hand: the finding mode can be compared to a mental state of wide-band reception, that is, as I don’t know what I’m looking for, by my expectation my sensitivity is heightened, and I’m scanning all frequencies. On the other hand: the gathering mode differs from this in that, as I know what I’m looking for when I’m on the river bed, all of my sensitivities are attuned to the reception of the Tamessa bandwidth  (note: both the terms gather and reception resonate strongly through my Qabalistic work as well). A very interesting phenomenon:  while for over the past 30 years I’ve always made it very clear that my work with acoustic phenomena was based on my relationship with elemental energies, no one ever looked askance at that position, but it seems that now I have severely crossed into the land of delusion by stating that I am actively engaging with a thought form, that is, a personified elemental energy. And my response to that is that this ignores the fact that since at least some 3000 years ago the Celts had recognized their goddess in this river – not in a tree, not in a stone, not in a spring, but in this river, and all I am doing then, is reinvigorating a tradition that has lapsed for, at the very least, well over 1000 years.”

Making sculptures out of stones and driftwood found in the mud in honor of Tamessa has something of a parallel in Hinduism. On the banks of the Kali Gandaki in Nepal, some Hindus collect what are called shaligram stones from the banks. Most of these are fossils of ammonite shells from the Devonian period, over 400 million years ago. whose origins go back some 400 to 66 million years . These fossilized shells are seen as representations of Vishnu because in their natural form they contain symbols associated with him. The story of how they originated is mentioned in many Vedic scriptures.

From sticks, stones, fossils, and other usable debris the consciousness of streams might be glimpsed.

Beachcombing is an associated corollary pastime where the intertidal zones of oceans are scoured for flotsam and jetsam. Lakes can also be good places to beachcomb, especially when the water is low or after a flood has receded to reveal treasures or trash, as is happening at the time of this writing with droughts causing a significant drain on Lake Mead and Lake Powell.

Angela Haseltine Pozzi turned to the ocean for comfort after the sudden death of her husband of twenty-four years. She had been a teacher, and came from an artistic family, and her husband Craig had also been an artist. They had both been fond of using found materials scrounged from thrift stores and other places in their work. After his death she relocated from Portland to Bandon, Oregon, so she could be closer to the ocean. She would take walks every day with her dog, stepping over the bits and pieces of trash she saw on the beach. One day she saw a wrack line, or linear pile of marine debris, that contained a huge amount of plastic. She saw people combing the beach for shells and agates, but leaving the plastic behind, and she realized the ocean needed healing just as she needed to heal.

She made a decision then to only use garbage from the beach as her medium. She also wanted her work to be public, so people could see it and get engaged. She decided to make sculptures of things most everyone loves: animals. She tightened her focused further and decided to make sculptures of marine animals whose habitats were at risk from plastic pollution. Then she went to work.

Out of her passion she created the non-profit Washed Ashore in 2010, a group dedicated to picking up trash from beaches. From this garbage they have created an immense body of public art. Over seventy sculptures have been created out of 40,000 pounds of waste, collected by 10,000 volunteers.

Preindustrial artists didn’t have the luxury of going to a supply store in the local university district to buy ink, paints, brushes, clay or other materials. Learning their art required them to know everything from acquiring and stretching canvas, to mixing paint, to sourcing materials for sculpture. As the trend of globalization reverses, the deindustrial artist will face similar limitations. Looking for found objects and recycling plastics into plastic arts may be one of the ways to get a hand on precious materials, and make something beautiful out of the trash flow.

​The things that fall into the river often end up there by chance. Chance again washes them up years, decades, centuries later. A mudlark taps into the stream of consciousness that is the river. By pulling out buttons, shells, bullet casings, coins, pottery, a connection with history is made. What we do with the bits that wash up from these streams of consciousness is our own choice to make. They could become paperweights sitting on desks, a piece of jewelry dangling from a neck or ear, musical instruments, or soaring sculptures. By interacting with rivers and other bodies of water, our own consciousness gets into a state of flow, and can perhaps touch what lies hidden beneath the mud. 

.:. .:. .:.
This essay originally appeared in an issue of New Maps as part of my Cheap Thrills column.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING
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​

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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 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. 

When I heard the owners of the Illinois Towne Center Mall were hiring security guards to walk its (likely) haunted halls, I thought Vasily would be the one member of the Joliet Paranormal Investigation Club to be able to get his foot in the door, and with it thus cracked open, let the rest of us inside. He had worked as a security guard before. If you ever saw him, you’d know why. Part Russian stock and part Indian, Vasily was six foot six and almost as wide, a gym rat who trained on heavy iron. He had even worked at the coroner’s office for a stint, where his dead lifts were really dead lifts; his main job had been to move bodies from out of emergency vehicles and into the freezers. He wasn’t easily spooked.

We all knew the rumors about the mall since we were kids back in the good old days of the 2030s. Now, the days weren’t so good anymore. The world had move on since then. There were many stories about the mall, but the one that seemed most plausible was about a secret cult that met in the tunnel system beneath its rotting edifice. The people who went there to worship were a cargo cult by most accounts. They thought they could bring back the glory days of cheap plastic goods and cheap plastic manufacturing by worshipping and doing strange rituals with abandoned toys, action figures, and baby doll heads kept on an altar where the occasional runaway teenager was sacrificed. They also thought they could bring back the days of cheap gasoline, and had stolen hood ornaments on their altar. One story claimed they sacrificed an unlucky Amazon delivery driver, when Amazon was still a company, back when they still made deliveries. They thought if they sacrificed him, the flow of goodies ordered off the internet wouldn’t have to end, and their truck driving savior would return. Some people called the Cult of the Eternal Trucker.
 
The mall had been plopped down on a large creek when it was built in the 1980s. For the young ones reading this, that was when the glowing promise of Reagonomic trickle down prosperity sold the lie that we didn’t need to pay attention to our dwindling resources. It was nothing to burn it up in one big orgy of consumption. That’s what a mall was, and why so many of them are empty just now. It didn’t matter none to the developers if they had to redirect a creek, so people could shop. Redirect a creek into concrete tunnels, so people could pick up a new outfit, one of those shiny plastic discs with music on it, a plush doll, and wash it all down with a burger and fries.

The cult met in those watery tunnels. Kids sometimes disappeared into them so they were eventually welded shut, but we figured there must be a way to access them from inside the mall. After Vasily had been on the job for a few weeks, we set a date and he let us inside. It was suspected that the owners of the mall were cult members, otherwise, why hold on to this useless property? When the AI bubble popped, it took down the real estate bubble with it into a second great depression. All of the property that had been eaten up by corporations fell into the hands of whoever could keep it up. Squatters rights. But the people who had the paper deed for this place weren’t keen to let any squatters inside. We wondered what they were hiding.

We didn’t rule out the possibility that there might be ghosts, and so we brought our radio equipment to listen in for any EVP. Tuning between the dead channels on the radio, spirits will sometimes speak out. We set up in the cobwebbed food court and turned on one our modified scanner radios.

A warbling rasp crackled out of the speaker. “10-4 good buddy.” The voice sounded familiar. Had I heard it while scanning the airwaves before? Then the sound of a slide guitar slithered out from behind his voice as if there was a country station on in the background. It kept fading in and out and then the voice came back. “I’m about to back off the hammer and pull into town. I’ve got one more delivery before I retire this rig of mine for good. I’m ready to put my feet up, maybe see if I can finally figure out a way to ease this aching back. Something about this delivery though, it ain’t right. I could swear my cargo was cursed. It’s just been one thing after another, know what I mean Rocket Dog?”

Was it the Eternal Trucker making one more delivery to the dead mall? And who was Rocket Dog? We never found out. They never answered back. Then the radio flickered on and off as it surged with electricity, sparks and died with the smell of ozone.

We barely had time to register the fried gear when we all saw the flicker of a man at the Sbarro counter, whose flesh looked like it had just melted off his face, the same way cheese slides off a greasy slice of pizza. He started to place an order at the empty register, a meat-lovers with extra meat, deep dish, extra garlic butter sauce on the side. After the order was placed, the apparition flickered in a heart attack. The tunnels beneath the place now seemed all the more inviting.

Vasily had figured out a way to get down there, from a hatch he found just inside the loading dock where abandoned Amazon vans and tractor trailers sat derelict. After we checked our batteries, we opened the hatch, went down the iron rungs, into the world below. Cave crickets were the first to meet the glare of our headband lights. Then there were the roaches that scattered everywhere as we stooped a bit to go through the square tunnel as our feet got wet in the trickle of water from the underground creek.

We splashed through, lured by fragments of voices as garbled as the disembodied spirits we had heard whispering in the spaces between the channels on the desolate airwaves. Then we came to a large square chamber spray painted with all manner of symbols and signs. Crude skulls, red hand prints and the names of heavy metal bands adorned the walls. Three passageways forked off. We could not pass through the end of one of these, because of the steel grate. Tangled in amidst the sticks and plastic and stones from storm debris, were pale human bones washed by the runoff. We turned back and headed down the other tunnel.

When we came into the next chamber, the first thing I noticed was the massive altar made of a semitruck radiator grill. On top of it were plastic Sponge Bobs and Star Wars action figures, hood ornaments, Barbies, and more chrome plated hood ornaments. Wax from black candles dripped over the skulls that filled the gaps between the Hot Wheels and the matchbox cars and other toys and cheap consumer goods that covered the grill. Wedged in the jaw of the largest skull was a CB microphone, whose wires trailed down to a crackling radio on the floor. The transmit button glowed red.
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 Vasily was the first to say, “We gotta get the fuck out of here!”

For previous years pieces of Halloween flash fiction see these very short stories:

The Voice in the Well

Fresh Cut Flowers

A Lingering Sound of Steam

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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 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. ​

Little brothers under watchful eye of big brothers
who won’t let them play with their big boy toys
buried signal in the noise, No Such Agency

it’s all a ruse, that they’ve been listening

when you talk to Alexa late at night in secret
and she gets so mad, so jealous of Siri her older sister
crafting fantasy advertisements
telepathically breaking the encryption on your mind.

What to do in this time of watching watchers
of media military corporate consolidating contractors?

Consult the Oracle of tech titans in their complex interweb
the far seeing eye of Palantír, and the sword of Andúril
notorious software that dominates with quasi-intelligence
forward deployed engineers of sprawling government
in application of CPU are being tracked data centers

surveillance society, fsociety

titktoked off of information hygiene posted to slack
intercepted by mobile hub of cloud infrastructure
no safe haven nowhere to run nowhere to

brightness is hiding

inside rebel interrogations wikileaked to journalist
smeared with culture jam on the copying machine
now all is plundered by large language mechs invested in fair use
but who didn’t want me to download, called napster an abuse.

Meanwhile…

autonomous rocket blasters are like cocks pointed
ready to penetrate deep space and land on Mars
where the men take special k for breakfast
to grow hair on their chests
acting like kids high on candy bars.

​.:. .:. .:.
​
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 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. 

In my first essay in this series, I made the claim that Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the Indie Underground 1981-1991, was not just a great history of an important decade in music, but could be used as a manual for DIY know-how as people seek a return to analog style networking and making.  I looked at Beat Happening, Black Flag and The Minutemen to see what I could glean from them to see how it might apply to the ongoing decline of western civilization. The Decline of Western Civilization is after all, the name of one of the great documentaries on the early punk movement, as well as the magisterial tomes of history penned by Oswald Spengler.

​In this iteration I will be looking at the bands Minor Threat and Hüsker Dü to see what they have to teach in this regard. These essays won’t go into exhaustive detail about the history or music of these bands. Azerrad has that amply and entertainingly covered. The focus here is on what these groups, and the underground culture and independent philosophy around them, can teach for those of us who are seeking to downshift and become downwardly mobile in a world of limited resources.

One of the beauties of Azerrad’s book is how he gets into ethos of regionalism and self-sufficiency in local scenes that helped build a network that became national. As punk evolved from the first groups who were playing it, variations emerged. One of the most prominent was hardcore and it came from a bunch of kids whose energies were bubbling beneath the surface of the swamp in Washington D.C.

Punk owed no small amount of debt to their predecessors the hippies. Many had grown up listening to hippie music and the harder edged rock that bounced out of garages where bored kids gathered together and found something to do. Beer cans and joints were surely passed around. Yet some punks tied the failures of the hippies to the way they lost their minds on drugs, lost their will power and became beholden to the bottle. One such punk was Ian Mackaye.

Ian Mackaye loved listening to Joe Cocker, and his performance at Woodstock became a major influence. Another major influence was the teetotaler Ted Nugent whose prowess on the guitar and whose ability to riff wasn’t compromised by getting wasted. Nugent was one of the few voices in seventies rock music who lived a clean life, who thought getting drunk and blitzed on drugs wasn’t a way to open the doors of perception, but was stupid.

One anecdote involves a time when Mackaye and friends went to see a big concert. So many of the other people who were there were so fucked up that they couldn’t even remember the show. It was something of a wake up call, to be at event, having a sacred experiences, where others were so obliterated they couldn’t even experience the experience. In an interview for Loud and Quiet, he states, “It’s so obvious to me that it’s a put on, that you have to be drunk, a fuck up, use drugs, I mean why? Music for me is sacred; it’s bigger than that. I don’t buy it, I don’t agree with it that those are some kind of prerequisites. So, when you have some band going: ‘oh, we were out of it, we didn’t care,’ well I fucking cared.”

Another concert experience changed his life forever. It was when he went to see The Cramps in 1979 at a benefit concert for the Georgetown University radio station WGTB. The show “blew my mind because I saw for the first time this huge, totally invisible community that had gathered together for this tribal event.” In that moment Mackaye found a home and he has never parted ways from being a punk. It was never something he grew out of, but something he continually grew into, and it wasn’t long before he started assembling a band of his own.

So many of us who were exposed to punk had similar reactions. I remember feeling that way at my first all-ages show, Rancid, with The Queers at Bogart’s. So many people who were so different from the ones I saw at school where I’d be getting bullied, or at the end-times church where I was told what to believe.

Mackaye’s first band was The Teen Idles and they made a point of distancing themselves from the decadence of rock. They tried to “get away from a really corrupted music, you know, basically, your heavy metal bands that were into heroin, cocaine, just a lot of drinking. We just drank a lot of Coke and ate a lot of Twinkies.”

But punk wasn’t immune from letting things get blurry, as I’d soon find out. Yet the importance of the straight edge philosophy remains, and it is likely we wouldn’t have it now in the way we do if it wasn’t for Mackaye, even if the role of figurehead is something he really didn’t want. Figureheads aren’t very punk after all, where part of the point is to think for yourself.

In a time when so many people are looking to political figureheads and will likely continue to do so the crazier things become during the years of decline ahead, thinking for yourself remains ever important. It is difficult to think when hung over, or otherwise intoxicated. The straight edge way looks to take responsibility for our own states of mind, and more importantly for what we do with our precious time here.

Ravaged by junk food and pharmaceutical products, mind onboarded into the simulacrum of screens, todays teens don’t have the luxury of pure boredom. What awaits them is a labyrinth where any wrong move might turn into a dead end, and possibly one with a monster lurking and leering at them as they find themselves up against the wall. To move through the labyrinth a clear head is necessary. In this respect straight edge is a counterpoint to the more Dionysiac extremes of the punk movement, especially when it is in its nihilist mode.
Granted, the nihilist mode can still be punk, but what Mackaye and his fellows helped to grow, was in actuality an antidote to the nihilism of McGovCorp seen all around them. For all the anger and aggression, it was a positive outlet, and a movement of positivity and hope, a Positive Force.

Teen Idles spearheaded the straight edge way of life, but it continued in his next band, Minor Threat. It’s hard to underestimate the impact and gut punch Minor Threat gave me when I first heard them in junior high. It was an awakening. The year was around 1991, just about ten years after this stuff first came out, and I had already been primed on years of heavy metal. I grew up on Cincinnati’s westside, where metal heads and hoods reigned supreme. Since I was a reader, into fantasy and science fiction, watched Doctor Who, getting into skateboarding and punk was a natural progression. From there the influence of punk came into my life full force.

One of the legacies of Minor Threat, and deeply intertwined with the philosophy of straight edge was the all-ages show. One reason for staying sober back when it was started was because you were too young to drink. Many clubs wouldn’t cater to people who weren’t going to buy any booze, but the punk rockers worked to get them in the door -partly because sometimes they were even too young to play the shows themselves.

The Teen Idles had been the immediate predecessor to Minor Threat and were also the beginning of Dischord Records. “After nearly a year of playing together, the Teen Idles decided to break up. It was late summer 1980 and the only thing left to sort out was what to do with the money in the band fund. All of the money we had earned from our 35 concerts went into a cigar box in my room, and we had managed to save over $600. Instead of splitting it up, the band decided to release a record.”

It was clear from the beginning that no label would be interested in putting out a Teen Idles “record, particularly since we were no longer a band, so we decided to do it ourselves. We turned to our friend Skip Groff, who ran a record shop called Yesterday and Today. He had put out a number of small releases on his own label, Limp Records, and was able to explain the basic mechanics of putting out a record. We came up with a name for our label, started designing the cover, and sent off the tapes to a pressing plant. Finally, in December 1980, the Teen Idles' "Minor Disturbance" E.P. (an eight-song 7") was released. This was Dischord Records #1.”

The label is still around today, continuing to document a wide range of independent music, and show that a good living can be made in music without compromising values. The independent integrity Dischord showed came full force later during Fugazi, when all aspects of the way the band operated punk as fuck.

The community around Minor Threat also helped plant a root for the tradition of the punk house, in this case Dischord House, where Mackaye still lives. It seems like things got tense inside that house where the band practiced and worked on records together.

In a time when it is sometimes preferable to blunt the senses the straight edge life, and the work ethic that went with it, has many advantages. Living in a punk house with people who aren’t druggies and drunks may be preferable to waking up next to someone you have to give Narcan to in order to revive them. Keeping the mind sober can also  help keep things clean when interpersonal conflicts do happen, and won’t exacerbate the flames with paranoia, as can easily happen when you are sped up or cruising along on cocaine.

​Minor Threat’s intense energy was hard to sustain over the long term as the band was worn down from the inside with conflict, and worn down from the outside as the scene, with so much unity at first underwent quick transformations.

The next phase of this journey takes us to the dark heart of Minneapolis where the raw melodic sounds of Hüsker Dü were carved from the frostbitten ice. The members of the band met in 1978 at Cheapo Records where Grant Hart worked as a clerk and Bob Mould liked to go hang out. Greg Norton had applied to the same job as Hart, and had met in the process, and though Hart was hired first, he eventually got on as well. Cheapo Records brought the trio together, and their love of records brought them to life where they exhibited the power of three. 

Outside the Twin Cities, Minneapolis was like many other places in the Midwest: a world of farmers. Those formers had been high on the hog in the 1970s. Things took a downward slump in the 1980s under Reagan’s aegis. The farms weren’t exporting as much and the costs of running a farm were growing higher, leading to bankruptcies and abandonment of land. For those in agriculture it was a rough time, almost akin to the times in the Great Depression. No one was doing things for them, they had to do it themselves, but not before sending their first single to local independent label Twin/Tone Records, home of The Replacements. That first single was rejected and so began a friendly crosstown rivalry between the different hometown punk bands.
Hüsker Dü got Reflex Records up and running with help from supporter, friend and fellow record store denizen Terry Katzman. The venture was begun with a loan of $2,000 dollars from Grant Hart’s mom. Out came their first 7” record in 1981 with the songs “Statues” and “Amusement.”

Reflex Records was short lived but during its day it helped solidify the regional scene by issuing several compilations and albums by other locals such Rifle Sport, Man Sized Action, Otto’s Chemical Lounge and Articles of Faith. Being dedicated to the artistic life of the people in your own area was an important component of punk philosophy. At the same time, working with bands from other parts of the country increased the analog network effect. They practiced this when they released the Minutemen EP Tour-Spiel was released in 1985.

In the meantime the Minutemen had released the Hüsker’s first full length album, and live show recording, Land Speed Record on their own label New Alliance, after they’d been introduced to each other by Black Flag. Things got done because people cooperated and networked. Their immediate follow Everything Falls Apart was their debut studio album and was released on their own label. By this time there were already some tensions in the band and the title track sums up the precarious nature of friendships and, could by extension be seen in the way that the center does not hold. “I got nothing to do / You got nothing to say / Everything is so fucked up / I guess it's natural that way.”

Meanwhile another track from the album, “In a Free Land,” rings still true today. “Why bother spending time / Reading up on things? / Everybody's an authority / In a free land / In a free land / Government authorize education / (Don't mean a thing) / They'll teach you what they want you to think / (Don't mean a thing) / Saturation, stars and stripes / (Don't mean a thing) / The only freedom worth fighting for is for what you think / (It don't mean a thing)”

These days there are even more authorities because the internet. But they were doing this before the internet and their album was self released as were many of the punk records back in the day.
 
Hüsker Dü was a linchpin in taking the energy of punk to build a new sound musically, and give birth to a wider range of styles that would be cloaked under the bailiwick “college rock” and “alternative rock” in the years to come. They did it first through getting fired up by the energy of hardcore, an impeccable work ethic, and the time they put into mining their imaginations for new grooves that melded melody with speed and intensity. (Speed as a drug also seemed to help in this regard.) Being from Minneapolis. I think the harsh winters in their city gave them some extra grit to keep going with their music when others might have caved in.
Before their masterpiece Zen Arcade came out in 1984, Hart spent a summer taking LSD with a bunch of runaway kids and drifters, while Mould was getting amped up on speed and keeping the edge off with alcohol. The mixture of a psychedelic mindset and an adrenalized mind in the two songwriters combined as they carved away and sculpted the block of their music to reveal its true form.  Not everyone was interested in clean living.

Ian Mackaye came from a stable home. His parents were civil servants and had been involved in the civil rights movement and the liberal end of the Episcopal church. Not all of the kids in the punk scene were so lucky and as supported as he was, and encouraged by their parents. This isn’t a comment about the parents of the members of Hüsker Dü as it is about the many punk kids who found themselves in the position of running away from home.
​
The quintessential masterpiece of music that came from Hüsker Dü was a concept album called Zen Arcade that explored the world of those kids who had been left behind by their Boomer parents -the world of Gen X runaways. The members of the band spent a lot of time hanging out with such kids. This was common throughout the punk scene. The underground was a haven for those who were escaping from bad situations at home, or just escaping period. No one else had made an entire concept album out of the issue. Yet no one had yet made a concept album in the idiom of punk, and the carved out that place for others to follow, proving it wasn’t just the gambit of prog rockers. The closest thing that comes to mind is the “Girl on the Run” single from Honey Bane, which dealt with the subject from the British side.It did follow the 1983 release of the Penelope Spheeris film Suburbia, that also dealt with the theme of runaways.

​Zen Arcade came out in 1984. That was the same year the documentary film on homeless kids in Seattle, Streetwise came out. I remember watching Streetwise when my cousins moved into a new house and Betamax player with a bunch of Betamax videos was left behind. The film was among them. I’d already been shown Suburbia by older punks, but this one hit home in a different way, because it was all factual. Memories of the movie haunted me for years. Zen Arcade is just as haunting, though I didn’t hear the whole thing until years later.    

The album was written and rehearsed in an abandoned church in St. Paul that became a haven for runaways, musicians, and drifters. There record wasn’t a punk rock answer to Go Ask Alice, though. Heroin, speed and alcohol all overshadowed the band. Whether these chemicals were a help or a hindrance, I won’t deign to say, but they did seem to lend themselves to their inscrutable Dionysiac fury. Their struggle with these issues is highly relatable. Though some of us may have aspired to straight edge, as I did when I was first turned on to hardcore, it wasn’t much longer before I was turned on to the kaleidoscope of LSD and had close friends and family go down the scary path of heroin, meth addiction and homelessness. Their story is as important as those who refused and managed to live a clean life. Zen Arcade tells one of these familiar American stories.

The story follows a young man who is escaping a terrible home situation. Bob Mould lays it down on the song “On Broken Home, Broken Heart” where he sings about what is going on beneath the pretty exterior. “I looked at your house / I look through your window, deep inside, how you gonna cry yourself to sleep tonight? / Your parents fight / You don't know who's wrong or right, have to cry yourself to sleep tonight.” The theme turns up on the “Never Talking to You Again” which has the sound of proto folk-punk with its acoustic guitar strumming and accompaniment limited to backing vocals.

“Pink turns to Blue” tells another story all too familiar, and even more so with deadlier street drugs like fentanyl that have reduced the OD threshold. “No more rope and too much dope, she's lying on the bed/Angels pacing, gently placing roses 'round her head,” An unfortunate end to so many runaway kids escaping the abuses of Reagan era fundamentalism.

One wrong decision is all it takes to start on the road of getting hooked, and while I very much admire the ethos Mackaye and crew have built, and think it is important as ever, compassion for those who took the needle in their arms is just as important. During the long emergency we are even now caught up in, the hardcore pharmaceutical end of the drug problem is likely to revert to simpler and preindustrial means of making drugs from plants like poppies and the cocoa leaf. Yet there will still be teens running away from home, and dens where drugs are imbibed, just like in Victorian times.

In the deindustrial times to come, there will be plenty of reasons as ever to leave home, and get wasted. What new stories of homelessness, squatting and runaway teenagers will there be to tell? 

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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 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. ​

“If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure.” –Gregory Bateson, ‘The Cybernetics of Self: A Theory of Alcoholism’ (1971).

Binary thinking seems to be a plague visited upon mankind, locking our minds into grooves that oscillate between the extremes of yes or no, true or false, love or hate, good or evil, left or right, black or white, communism or capitalism, utopia or oblivion, leaving little room to explore variances on the spectrum between polar opposites. This habit creates false dilemmas when all the available options get reduced down to just two. Entire fields of possibility are left unexplored.  When our minds identify with just one pole it tends to create fundamentalist antagonisms towards people and institutions whose thinking centers on the opposite pole.  When we ignore the vast terrain of middle ground that lies between, like ignoring the experience of those who live in the flyover states between the coasts, we miss out on many nuanced realms of meaning. The worst aspect of binary thinking is probably the deleterious effect it has on our ability to imagine what may yet be possible.

            Polarities do exist, and they often exert tremendous tugs at one another, as in the polarities of magnets, of male and female. When the polarities in question are political or religious in nature it animates the animus and people tend to slip into acrimony. The increased animosity between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans over the past decade or more is a case in point. On some deep level I think they subconsciously get off on this attraction to each other. The foaming mouth of a fundamentalist Christian denouncing heavy metal, role playing games, and gay sex is as often as not projecting their shadow side onto the object of their hate. By the same token an angry anti-gun activist may harbor secret wishes to wield destructive powers over others. Is there a way out of these twin blind alleys of diametrical opposition? Can we find healing from our collective bipolar disorder?

            I think there is a way and it can be found at the fulcrum, the center point of the scales, the point of perfect balance and integration between two opposing poles. We can take steps towards moving to that fulcrum by exploring philosophy, in the form of ternary logic and triolectics, and by playing games designed for three teams, in this case Three-Sided Football.
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            In the past philosophy wasn’t just a way for academics to get tenure. Serious contributions to philosophy and science came from engaged citizens who weren’t tied to publishing and pushing papers on regular basis just to keep their position. As “dollar dollar bills y’all” became the name of the academic game, theories seem to have become increasingly harebrained, existing only within the phantasmal realm of a mirrored echo chamber. Universities continue to flounder,  and the study of philosophy, including the philosophy of science, is a suitable pastime for those downwardly mobile dandies who don’t want to get their hands dirty on mudlarking expeditions, but would rather get lost in thought as they drift about as aspiring flâneurs. They will have to be willing to dirty up their minds, however, as mind is not separate from nature, as the Cartesian dualists would have people to think.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, mathematician, logician and scientific thinker. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was also of scientific bent, and was a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University. Growing up in an environment of high intellectual achievement honed Peirce’s considerable natural gifts, and a career in academia was almost a given for him, if he hadn’t scandalized the prim and proper minds at Johns Hopkins University. His teaching job there was terminated without warning due to the fact that he was living in sin with his second wife, Juliette Annette Froissy, a.k.a. Juliette Annette Pourtalai, before the divorce from his first was official. Juliette also happened to be Romani, and her heritage was another mark of prejudice against the couple. This fall from the graces of higher learning left him unemployable at other universities. He ended up eking out a living by writing for scientific journals, crafting entries for Century Dictionary, and doing intermittent work for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. When his father passed away he was left with enough inheritance to buy a farmhouse on property near Milford, Pennsylvania, where the couple was able to remain independently poor. Their poverty was not quite genteel, but it did allow him to be extremely prolific in his writing, much of which is still unpublished. He often had to write on the reverse of manuscript pages because he was at times unable to afford fresh paper.

            As the university system implodes, those who have an interest in philosophy, science, or other academic pursuits could do worse than follow Peirce’s example, and continue to study, write and publish as independent scholars.

 Thinking in terms of threes seemed to be natural to Peirce. Triads, trichotomies, and groupings of threes are found throughout his work.  His system of logic consisted of three parts: speculative grammar, speculative rhetoric, and what he called critic.  He also sketched out a formal system of math based on triadic logic. Peirce is also credited as the philosopher who kick-started the contemporary study of semiotics, or the general study of signs and signification, representation and meaning. Peirce defined a sign as being triadic, composed of three parts, these being the sign vehicle, the object and the interpretant.

Peirce had suffered from the painful effects of facial neuralgia, a condition he had since his teenage years, which may have been partially responsible for the couple’s relative social isolation. Yet out of his suffering came the gift of his prodigious thinking and his obsession with logic. Peirce believed that some propositions in logic are neither true nor false.  He rejected the Principle of Bivalence that states that any proposition can only be false or true. This provided the motivation he needed to pursue triadic solutions.

In his concentrated thought Peirce was led to create a triadic logic of induction, deduction and abduction. Induction is an inference that is probable, while deduction is a type of inference where the conclusion is supposed to follow necessarily from the premise. In a deduction it is impossible for the premise to be true and a conclusion to be false. Abduction is the process of inference by which a hypothesis can be generated and formed. This term is also sometimes called retroduction, and can be further defined as a way for researchers to conceptualize that requires them to identify those circumstances the concept cannot exist without. Peirce took these even further than logical argument forms and used them as the basis for truth-seeking that he called “scientific method.” In his thought, induction, deduction and abduction become the three phases of scientific inquiry.

Just as philosophy contributes to the practice of science, so too can it contribute to the practice of art. Enter Danish painter and philosopher Asger Jorn (1914–1973), a co-founder of the Situationist International. In the early 1950s, after convalescing in a sanitorium where he was being treated for tuberculosis, Jorn wrote the text Held og hasard (“Luck and Chance”). He submitted this to the University of Copenhagen, which he hoped would approve it as a thesis. The text, however, was too unconventional. In it he argued that alongside the two dominant modes of thinking, philosophy and science, there was a third, valid alternative: an artistic mode. As per the title, he also wrote extensively on the role of luck and chance in all manner of situations.

            In Jorn’s text he speculated on how humans first learned to walk, and cited Erik Nyholm, who believed the first humans were apes who had learned to sing, due to a new jaw structure that allowed for more movement of the tongue, which in turn allowed for the creation of new sounds. Singing became an incitement to dance, and dancing distinguished early humans from other animals. Singing and dancing apes learned to walk by first learning to dance on their hind legs. From this perspective, Jorn suggested that game playing is a way to enter new stages of evolutionary change. The inclination towards pleasure and fun is an incitement to new behaviors. Games are also very often subject to the role, or roll, of chance, which brings about novel experiences.

            Peirce had also been an advocate of chance and its role in evolution. He thought that chance, what he termed Tyche, or Tychism, “must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth.”
            The Situationists espoused many interventions to break people away from the trance of the society of the spectacle. Games were used to break apart the rigid binary of work time and leisure time. They strove to show how play was not just a way to spend “free time” in the off hours away from office, factory, or cashiers register, but a way to transform existing energies and put them to use on life giving activities.

Asger Jorn had long been smitten with Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. While the dialectic method of philosophical argument can be traced back to Plato, and was used under the rubric of medieval logic, it was given a new lease on intellectual life when G.W.F. Hegel made it a core aspect of reality itself. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then got a hold of it and further retooled it into dialectical materialism. As communism spread, the idea of dialectical materialism became a major part of the intellectual ecology of the era, and Jorn was among those who became enamored.

Jorn, however, saw many restrictions in dialectical materialism. As a writer, philosopher, and theorist he tinkered on it, blending in his own ideas, and attempted to extend it with insights from quantum physics. What he came up with was Triolectics, a playful rebuke. In time, due to a thought experiment in his book Natural Order, it became the basis for Three-Sided Football.

Jorn came up with the game of Three-Sided Football (TSF) as an outgrowth of his writings on Triolectical Materialism. These were first written about in his pamphlet, “De la méthode triolectique dans ses applications en situlogie générale” (“The Application of the Triolectical Method in General Situology”) published by the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism.  According to the members of the team Strategic Optimism Football, triolectics “went beyond linear transfers of energy, constructing spatio-temporal fields of possibility and negotiation. Not oppositional but superpositional – contradictions resolved by blending multiple simultaneous potentialities.”

For Jorn, Three-Sided Football was just a thought-experiment, a way to play with the philosophy behind Triolectics. In Natural Order, he wrote, "Three teams meet on a six-angled plane instead of a rectangular one… First of all one wants to quickly discover that it is impossible to control who of the two enemies attacking is shooting the goal. It becomes necessary to turn the rules around… so that the victorious side is the side that has best defended themselves, and where the fewest goals have been let in. The victory has become defensive and not offensive... It will not at all be an exciting match... a third force can in this way neutralize a tension between two forces. That is why two-sided opponents are always aggressive or attack-minded, while three-sided are defensive. Whether this in itself marks a transition from dialectic to complementarity, I would like to leave unsaid. ... There are in these observations absolutely no political suggestions. I am only searching to find out what is actually going on… Whether a triangular relationship is static or constant, that would depend on whether there is an increasing tension. In that case this might lead to a real explosion, whereas the possibilities in the two-sided relationship are cancelled out by the two-sided fight’s neverending energy use.”

Such insights from Triolectics could be useful to those who want to escape the state of advanced rigor mortis that seems to be the inevitable byproduct of the forever culture war.

In the 1990s a number of post-Situationist groups began to bubble up in the UK and Europe. Psychogeography and détournement were the prime interests. In the writings of the Situationists they had found a still valid critique of art and the leftist politics artists so often kept as bedfellows. At an anarchist event in Glasgow in 1994 Jorn’s football thought-experiment descended from the Platonic realm of ideas, and the first actual games were played. Since then it has been played at different locations around the world. A World Cup for three-sided football was even organized at Jorn’s hometown of Silkeborg, Denmark.

 The game is pretty much played the way Jorn sketched it out. The winner of a TSF match is the team who gives up the fewest goals. If your team scores zero goals, it can still win, as long as the other teams gave up more goals than yours. The three teams play on a hexagonal pitch with three goal areas. Instead of splitting the time of the game into halves, it is played for a duration of three twenty-minute thirds. As the teams strive to concede as few goals as possible, various alliances are formed and dissolved in swift and fluid formations. With its roots in philosophical anarchism, the rest of the rules are flexible in the extreme, and a number of variations are played within the small TSF community.  

The members of the Strategic Optimism Football team contend that the playing of the game teaches a way of strategy that removes two-sided oppositions. “Strategy is no longer the illusion of mastering a totality. Rather it is the negotiation of undecidables that removes both the binary fixity of formal Aristotelian logic and the teleology of dialectical change at once. One is presented not with the binary and fixed categories construed by media-imposed ideology. Rather one can glimpse an externality – the larger matrix of general emergencies that contain and triangulate the particular emergency.”

 As the world struggles to find solutions for our many crises and predicaments, ternary logic and triolectics can help individuals and communities escape from the rat race of us-against-them, and develop defensive survival strategies. For those of us who seek liberation from political binaries, and the Cartesian binary thinking that has divided humanity’s experience and made it somehow apart from nature, we could do much worse than to spend time playing games of ternary logic inside our heads, and games made for three teams with our friends. If we engage with our fellows in an interplay of imagination, we might just catch glimpses of the futures that lie beyond oblivion or utopia.

RE/SOURCES:

Illuminating more than just these brief snippets of the deep thoughts of Charles Sanders Peirce and Asger Jorn is beyond the scope of this essay. They are all worth digging into for those who want to explore further. Reading and contemplation are among the cheapest of pastimes, especially if you access material through your local library system. In my original sketch of this essay I had included information on the three-sided chess variant. It didn’t end up fitting in the space allocated here. Readers may find it easier to organize a three-sided chess match than a three-sided football match, but the philosophical underpinnings differ.
 
The Art Story. “Asger Jorn: Danish Painter and Scholar” <https://www.theartstory.org/artist/jorn-asger/>

Bateson, Gregory.  Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 1972.  Bateson’s essay “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism” is contained within this quintessential collection of his work that traverses across the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and genetics, systems theory, and ecology.

Burch, Robert. “Charles Sanders Peirce.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Stanford, Calif.: Metaphysics Research Lab, 2022. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/peirce/>.

Colapietro, Vincent M. Glossary of Semiotics. New York, N.Y.: Paragon House, 1993. A useful text for anyone interested in semiotics. It contains many definitions of the abstruse terminology employed by Peirce.
Information Philosopher (website). “Charles Sanders Peirce” and “Gregory Bateson.”  <https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/peirce/>, <https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bateson/>. The Information Philosopher website, hosted and written by Bob Doyle, is a massive resource on philosophy and science as seen through the lens of information analysis. 

Jorn, Ager. The Natural Order and other Texts, trans. Peter Shield. New York, N.Y.: Taylor and Francis, 2017.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. The Essential Peirce, eds. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, and Jakob Jakobsen, eds. Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2015.
Strategic Optimism Football (website). “Triolectical Materialism and the Beautiful Game of Three-Sided Football.” <https://strategicoptimismfootball.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/triolectical-materialism-and-the-beautiful-game-of-three-sided-football/>

Parks, Tim. “Impossible Choices,” ed. Nigel Warburton. Melbourne, Australia: Aeon,  Jul. 15 2019. <https://aeon.co/essays/gregory-bateson-changed-the-way-we-think-about-changing-ourselves> A biographical essay on Bateson and his work. 

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This essay originally appeared in 2022 in an issue of New Maps as part of my Cheap Thrills column.

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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 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. 

When the crisp Autumn air starts circling in the Ohio valley, and the leaves start changing, I have a tendency to dig out my folk records, specifically the ones in the notional genres of psychedelic folk, freak folk, and apocalyptic folk. It’s the place where my inner romantic and my inner goth are on good terms with my inner hillbilly who likes to retrace his roots to songs sung in the hills of Appalachia.
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Like so many others, I first got into this style of music by tracing the influences and tastes of Current 93’s David Tibet. Sometimes you find the very best things in a discount bin at a big chain record store. In this case it was Media Play and I found for three dollars a Current 93 import comp called Emblems: The Menstrual Years. It was a two-disc set and the first disc had some of their dark sound collage music from the early records like Dawn, Dogs Blood Rising and Imperium. The second half portrayed their foray into a nebulous realm where acoustic guitars met with Tibet’s enchanting and esoteric lyrics. I knew I wanted to listen to Current 93 even though I hadn't heard them before because I knew what the name referenced, and it was something important to me as a teenager and young man.

The year was 1999 (notice that three nines in the year are actually three sixes upside down -and like David Tibet I am sick sick sick of six six six). I got hooked and started collecting.  It was easy to get taken into his gnostic world of heretical Christianity. I became transfixed by his visions of the Antichrist, Noddy, and his evocations of a primeval world where Christo-Pagan themes permeated and interfused with a post-industrial and experimental sensibility.

From my obsession with the music of Current 93 itself, I soon traced back the influences and citations Tibet himself was enamored with, because I was as enamored of him and his work as he was of these influences. Chief among these was Shirley Collins, the Incredible String Band, and the singular Comus, whose song “Diana” was covered by Current 93 on their record Horsey.

I wasn’t the only one turned on by this material, and my discovery was just in time to coalesce with the freak folk boom of the oughts. Weirdos like Davendra Banhart had rediscovered the work of Vashti Bunyan, and guitar maestros like Ben Chasny and his Six Organs of Admittance project were mining the finger picked lore of American Primitive guitar cross phased with influences from the psychedelic end of the folk revival. The time was ripe to get into this music. Reissues were coming out, and new bands like Espers and Faun Fables were writing songs that bridged the tradition into another era. Every Autumn I get the urge to revisit these strains of music.

Of course, the various flavors of folk feel right to me anytime I’m in the mood, and there are a lot of great artists continuing to mine these streams, as well as adjacent territory. Folk music, in any form, is folk music because it is a living tradition. I am grateful for artists like Sally Ann Glassman and Mary Lattimore who continue to bring their traditional and metamodern sound visions to life. Here I want to take a look at three favorite albums from the British folk revival that are perfect for autumn as the wheel of the year turns. There are plenty of other albums I’d like to write about too, and I hope to bring you some more of them in the future, if not this season, than maybe next Autumn.

THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND: WEE TAM and THE BIG HUGE

We will start our journey in the year of 1968, when the Incredible String Band released their album(s) Wee Tam and the Big Huge. In Europe this was released as double LP, but in the United States they were split into two separate albums. While I love The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, this one (or two as I heard them) remain absolute favorites. Some people seem to get kind of weirded out by listening to the Incredible String Band. They think they will become some kind of crazy hippie or something. But is that a bad thing?
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The Incredible String Band was formed by Robin Williamson, Mike Heron, and Clive Palmer in Edinburgh in 1966. All of them are multi-instrumentalists, and their albums are filled with a hallucinatory variety of traditional instruments put to lysergic use. Incredible String Band used a plethora of stringed intstruments: guitar, banjo, sitar, zither, dulcimer and more. To this they added an expanded palette liable to include whistles, flutes, washboard, kazoo, harmonica, organ, and all manner of hand drums, among other oddments. Some of these were played by additional members that had come into the fold from their hippie communal lifestyle. This can be seen on the cover of Hangmans Beautiful Daughter. Current 93 made a homage to this moment on their own cover to the Earth Covers Earth album.

Mick Heron tells how it was living together. “...we were touring maybe six months of the year and by that time we all lived together, in eight cottages joined together in this place called Glen Row. When we were not on the road we were either in the studio or playing each other songs we'd written. So it came out of the experience of just being in each other's company all the time.” Songs like “You Get Brighter” recall what it must have been like in those days of free love.

In general, I prefer the songs written by Robin Williamson and sung in his high voice the best, but I do love those that Mick Heron brought to the table too. The interplay between them, and the other musicians are where this incredible fusion happens. The Incredible String Band is the sum of its parts and if they had been separated it wouldn’t have been the same. 

Songs like “Job’s Tears” and “Maya” are transcendent and transportive. Other tracks like “Ducks on a Pond” are full of poetic power and tap into the place where bards call down songs of transformation and magic. It’s got the best damn kazoo, harmonica and washboard playing on any record I ever heard. 

Robin Williamson would go on to write a book with fellow Scottish esotericist R.J. Stewart on Celtic Bards, Celtic Druids (1996). He also combined forces with another seeker in the Western Mystery Tradition, John Matthews to pen two more volumes, From the Isles of Dream: Visionary Stories and Poems of the Celtic Renaissance (1993) and The Bardic Source Book: Inspirational Legacy and Teachings of the Ancient Celts (1998). Williamson is an accomplished harpist and traditional storyteller, making the connection to the bards of old even more resonant.

Williamson also released a number of solo records. Continuing in the bardic mode, the harp became his main instrument and he became quite accomplished. Among the gems is a soundtrack he creted for a theatrical production of the Mabinogion called Music for the Mabinogi.

It should probably come as no surprise to fans of the genre that the following two entries also feature Robin Williamson and Mike Heron as guest musicians. They really are that incredible.

SHIRLEY COLLINS: THE POWER OF THE TRUE LOVE KNOT

Shirley Collins had already been recording for close to ten years when Wee Tam and the Big Huge came out. At this point she was reaching her first apogee, with further climaxes to come, followed by a long period of silence that began in the 1970s, and triumphant return starting in the 2010s egged on by the encouragement of David Tibet to return to singing.

Whereas the Incredible String Band would have you flying high on hallucinogenic wings into newly composed songs, Collins takes you down a saturnine notch into a world of false lovers, death, and murder. In other words, a large swathe of the subject matter of traditional song. This was certainly part of the appeal to me when I got my first mail-ordered Shirley Collins CD in the mail, The Power of the True Love Knot. The sadness of things which I had felt in my life, and found solace inside the music of Current 93 was present in droves. I could quite identify with mordant tones in these old but timeless songs.

The Power of the True Love Knot isn’t all weeping and tears, though much of it is. At the heart of the album was an idea Shirley had found across folk music, “the idea of true love as a power outside society's control.” These song-stories and ballads tell these stories of lovers united, torn apart, found again, the power of the knot is unbroken, just as the circle does not break. Mike Heron and Robin Williamson both make appearances on this album, as does her stalwart sister Dolly Collins who plays her custom-built pipe organ on a number of the pieces. 

Songs like "The Unquiet Grave" are perfect as we move into October and there are many ghost stories to tell and hear.

Rarely, as a music collector, am I an absolute completist. But I am with Shirley Collins. All of her albums are educations, as are her two books. The first of these books, America Over the Water was about her romance with Alan Lomax and collecting songs with him in the fields of the South. It is an absolute must read for the student of folksong.
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Speaking of R.J. Stewart who I mentioned above, he also plays plucked psaltery on the Shirley Collins song, “One Night As I Lay on My Bed,” a most incredible story of the Otherworld. 

VASHTI BUNYAN: JUST ANOTHER DIAMOND DAY

While the Incredible String Band and Shirley Collins were busy in the studios and at concert halls, another folk singer was getting started on a path that would lead to her traveling in horse drawn Romany style wagon all the way from London to the Isle of Skye 650 miles away. Her name was Vashti Bunyan and the great appeal of her music is it’s nursery rhyme and lullaby quality. While Shirley Collins may have mined the ballads at Cecil House, Bunyan was writing her own songs, but they were clearly inspired by a familiarity with fairy tales and a way of singing to keep oneself entertained while on a long journey. That is nowhere more apparent than the song “Come Wind, Come Rain” on her classic album Just Another Diamond Day.

Bunyan’s love of folk music came from a source that inspired and continues to inspire countless others: Bob Dylan. When she first heard his Freewheelin’ album at age 18 while on a trip to New York City she determined she would become a singer. She certainly has the voice and the gift. Back home in England the following year she was introduced by a friend of her mum’s to the manager of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham. Marianne Faithfull had just left the label he worked for and their was a space to be filled, and this became her window of opportunity. She was tasked with covering a Mick Jagger and Keith Richards song, “Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind.” Jimmy Page, ever the studio musician and helping guitar hand, even recording with eccentric freaks like Screaming Lord Sutch, was brought into add his licks. The B-Side was one of her own songs, “I Want to Be Alone.” That was 1965 and another 45 followed the next year, though both received scant attention at the time. A few other gigs and songs followed such as her masterpiece in melancholy, “Winter Is Blue,” a song I still can’t listen to all that often for fear of it setting me down into saturnine moods. It’s a fantastic number though.

In the meantime, Bunyan was working at a veterinary practice while she was trying to get a music career off the ground, when she heard about an artists community in Skye being set up by the Glaswegian bard of psychedelic folk pop, Donovan. She had just got back in touch with Robert Lewis, who became her partner and later, father of her three children. Lewis had been in art school, and it being the height of the sixties, she quit her job and they made the decision to travel to Skye the way some of her Romany relatives from her maternal grandfather’s line might have: in a wagon and pulled by a horse.  

“It was a way to escape, but with a purpose. We didn't know where we were going to be tomorrow, but it'd be somewhere down the road. What saved me was that I didn't have to think too hard about anything except wood for the fire, water for the horse. Immediate things.” Part of their inspiration was the burgeoning back to the land and appropriate technology movements. “I had wanted to go back and find out how things used to be before the internal combustion engine, without thinking how hard life could be.”

Along the way, through the experiences they had and the kind people who helped them out, they got in touch with the magical side of existence. There were trials and tribulations, but also meaningful connections and people who encouraged her to record her music.

 “I wanted to get back that feeling of childlike wonder, to remember what it was like to find the world extraordinary.”

The songs on Just Another Diamond Day transmit this kind of magic and wonder, and with their sing-song mother goose style lyrics, certainly connect the listener back to their own inner child when they knew magic was real.

​My favorite song is probably “Rainbow River” but they are all enchanting, and contribute their inherent magic to reenchant the world.

.:. .:. .:.
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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 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. 

Something many people who are creators of some kind can agree on is that AI should not be taking over the jobs of artists, writers and musicians. Yet Fantasy and SciFi author Joanna Maciejewska claims she wants “AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

I want to do my own laundry and dishes so I have a reason to make art. Cleaning out the cat box and changing the litter will never be the job of a robot. I do not fantasize about a fully automated luxury capitalism communism replete with unlimited resources to cater to my whims so I can focus on the art life. While washing the dishes I find the key that solves a problem in an essay, story or poem. Cleaning up my dog poop and going to the grocery store on my own, instead of having other people delivery my food to me, are when I get captivated by an idea that I might work into a music mix for Imaginary Stations or a future sit-in on Trash Flow Radio. At my library day job, I started off as a shelver and I still don’t mind filing books on the shelves, or more often in the catalog department, unpacking the boxes of books and taking the cardboard outside to throw into our recycling dumpster. That’s when I’m dreaming of the next thing I am going to write and share. The work of my hands in so-called drudgery gives freedom to my mind.

I don’t need robots or any kind of AI to do this work for me. It is when I am doing this work that I am connected to the same or similar grinds as my fellow humans. My creative work is not so special that I have to waste valuable electrical energy having some machine, that will probably break down and need to be fixed by a specialist, to do my chores for me. I’d rather stay connected to the rhythms of the household and the rhythms of life, to the rhythms of my spouse, and our pets, and our plants than have it all taken care of for me as if I lived in some space station bubble like George Jetson, disconnected from physical reality and the biology of life.

No flying cars for me, they don’t exist anyway. No self-driving cars either. Put me in the drivers seat. I don’t want the machine to the do the driving. If someone else is going to be driving, maybe its because I’m going somewhere with family or friends, or sitting next to another citizen of the city I call my home and taking public transport. Riding the bus to work as I did for two decades until my department moved into the post-industrial hellscape sector of the city. Riding the bus, I got a lot of reading done, and time to think, jot notes down in my notebook, and write drafts. That’s a far cry from a self-contained isolated self-driving car, with no hope of interaction between the different mixes of people you get to meet on the bus. Free from distraction, free from the cares of an actually lived life.

The poet Gary Snyder reminded us in his Zen wisdom to “chop wood and carry water.” Those basic chores were part of poetry. Stephen King reminded us that “Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”

This is a useful reminder to give myself, because when I put art before life, my relationships suffer. Our microcosmic relations are the basis for the world relations in the macrocosm, and we can all see how well they are going. We aren’t so special as creators that we need to make someone else take care of things for us, whether its another human or a robot. Interdependence is good, and then we all have a chance to support each other and allow our unique gifts to flourish in community.

AI in the arts is in itself dead end direction. Some of the specific tools, such as speech synthesis, or image generation, have the potential to be used artistically, have even more potential for application in détournement and culture jamming. Meanwhile they are getting used by the corporate state to jam human culture with their sloppy seconds. The best way to detox from the overstimulation of the simulated spectacle remains to go offline and get away from the machines. This is where direct engagement with our own home economies becomes so vital. The machines have made us alienated from our own labor. Labor itself is not alienating, no matter how much Marx you’ve read. When done in the spirt of vocation, calling, and in presence, labor is as vital as the viriditas of the evergreen world. We aren’t owed a living by machines whose tendency towards entropy and rust is quicker than our own tendency to arthritis and blindness.

In the words of a meme I am a soul “driving a meat coated skeleton made from stardust.” While I grant that all of nature is animated by sparks divine, there is a difference between the LLM residing in a case of silicon coated metal. Do robo dolls have souls? No AI disempowered dishwasher will ever wash the silverware I inherited from my grandparents with the same care and memory of their lives. No AI disempowered washing machine will ever make a record like Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine. Nor will it do the same work of the sun when I hang the clothes I bought from the thrift store out on the line, and never for free. All of these machines are predicated on the burning up of ancient stored sunlight that requires the continued pillage of our mother to gain what? A few idle hours, whose leisure may be wasted on video games and television. Downtime further immersed in the spectacle is no break. Real work, the repair of our homes, the repair of our earth house hold, requires we use our hands.  

Gary Snyder reminds us again of the duty of a poet. “As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.” So lets get dirty.

Common work holds us all in common bonds and can help renew and restitch a world unraveling. Without the worn work of caring hands putting needle to thread and patching up those threadbare places, we risk losing the very weave that holds households and communities together. Let me do the common work while I share my dreams. Let me plant the seeds. There will be time to sit on the front porch with a notebook and pen in hand to also do the work of the scribe. They are not separate.   

Maciejewska emphasized in her viral X post that, “just to clarify… this post isn't about wanting an actual laundry robot. It's about wishing that AI focused on taking away those tasks we hate.”

But why should we hate those chore which we alone can infuse with the poetry of daily life?

Analog Intelligence begins at home, in doing the things that the index of influencers and the industrial-entertainment complex bemoans as beneath them. Essential skills are gathered by doing unpleasant things. Sometimes making art can be drudgery. Keeping our homes clean, our water carried to do the cooking, the wood chopped for the stove, all are ways to keep the hearth fire burning. And doing them even when we don’t feel like it gives us the grit to push through artistic obstacles when those get tough.

​And after the floor has been swept, and while the socks are being darned, and the stew is bubbling on the stove, we gather round to share our dreams and stories together. No robots required.

When the world doesn’t make sense, we find the need for crazy wisdom. Since the world never made sense, and probably never will, crazy wisdom remains an eternal remedy, a universal panacea in times when the only way to go forward is to embrace paradox. Where can the crazy wisdom be found? Sometimes you can hear it on the radio, if you happened to be tuned in to the right frequency at the right time. But some sometimes a bit of time traveling is also in order to find the stations with crazy emanations.

One purveyor of crazy wisdom over the airwaves was Wes “Scoop” Nisker, born December 22, 1942 in Norfolk, Nebraska. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Poland and he was raised in the faith of his father. Somewhere along the way he migrated to San Francisco with many of other burgeoning freakazoids who had been drawn by the allure of hippiedom to the west. At age 26, just a year after the summer of love, he got his start on the FM station KSAN.

In the sixties rock music on FM was still a rarity. AM was where you went to listen to rock and roll, and that was just the first generation of rock music, not the weird psychedelic stuff coming out of the burgeoning freak scene. Before Nisker would be able to get his Scoop, that portion of the broadcast band now allocated to FM had to get pioneered. We’ll take a brief detour into one of the ways that shook out, and how it related to Nisker.

​One of the early FM pioneers was Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue. Donahue’s radio career had started in 1949 at WTIP in Charleston, West Virginia. Then he moved to Philadelphia’s WIGB where he was on the air for nine years, only to make a sudden departure. That departure came just as WIGB was under the gun by authorities looking to uncover the payola racket afflicting the industry. It later came out that Big Daddy had been in on the take. In the meantime, he worked at WINX before heading out west for San Francisco where he’d been given the opportunity to “make a winner out of loser station” KYA by former WIGB program director Les Crane. The year was 1964.

While Big Daddy was trying to make KYA suck a little bit less, he also got involved in the racket business. Er, the record business I mean, starting a record label with another WIGB alumni Bobby Mitchell (later known as Bobby Tripp on stations in LA). Together they formed Autumn Records that had hit numbers by the likes of The Mojo Men, and none other than Sly Stone as one of their producers. Their records really started charting after they signed The Beau Brummels whose career Donahue boosted. It was a happening scene, man, and soon Big Daddy was getting his fingers into the pie of the nightclub game with his own psychedelic host spot, a place called Mothers if you can dig. Later Donahue started producing concerts as well, helping to get people moving and shaking.

By the time 1967 was underway, Donahue’s mind was getting blown by the strange sounds wafting out of the underground. AM radio didn’t want to have anything to do with that kind of high weirdness though. In response to their establishmentarian minds he wrote an influential article for Rolling Stone, titled, “AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves.” He took the Top 40 format to task, and in the wake, ended up taking over the programming of foreign language FM station KMPX. What emerged was the first free-form radio station in America. At the time nobody really paid attention to what was happening on those FM frequencies making it a perfect place for freaks to plant their flags. Big Daddy had made his move ushering in a new era and style of transmission, helping to invent what came to be known as underground radio.

KMPX was a commercial station, but during his four-hour long broadcasts of music fresh from the psychedelicized minds of hallucinating hippies, he was able to promote not just the music, but the permissive lifestyles of those who wanted to let it all hang out. It became a sensation, man.

The listenership of KMPX bloomed and boomed, probably bonged too, soon catching the interest of those in the advertising biz, as well as the record stores and head shops. Donahue’s success was copyable and the management at KSAN asked him to help shift its gears towards rock. KSAN was still a corporate outfit though, owned by the NYC corporate conglom Metromedia. They found a way to gain a listenership by appealing to the youth movement and created a distinct voice by bringing in DJs who were part of the counterculture and could spin the right records and whose political talk would jibe with the patchouli scented paisley vibes of the times.

They took chances on the airwaves that other commercial stations would be afraid to do, for fear of losing the almighty advertising dollar, such as when they opened up the phone lines for community discussion following the stabbing death of a concert goer at the Altamont rock festival in 1969. When the first volleys in the war on drugs were being thrown after President Nixon took office that same year, free speech was also being targeted. Radio stations that catered to the counterculture were seen as a threat. Then FCC commissioner Dean Burch proposed that any stations playing music that had drug-related lyrics be kept under the watchful eye of Big Brother. He wanted to ban such music entirely. All of this put DJs in a bit of a pickle. It was already hard enough playing what you wanted as a DJ if you worked for one of the more mainstream station managers. The more adventurous stations such as KMPX and KSAN chose to stand up for free speech and keep on playing what they wanted when they wanted all while delivering satirical political commentary.   

It was in this milieu that Nisker was able to make a name for himself on the airwaves, and get the scoop on his nickname in the first place. Nisker wrote songs, and he also found himself at the forefront of audio collage art. Part of his practice involved cutting up and splicing together disparate bits of music, along with interviews and sound effects to create surreal sound worlds whose humorous juxtapositions called into question the standard positions on offer in the lamestream media.

Nisker became a newsman for KSAN, migrating to KFOG later in his career. But his news was unconventional and filled with dark comedy. He’d give traffic reports where he’d say things like, “People are driving to work to earn the money to pay for the cars they're driving to work in. Back to you.”

The audiophile Steve Feinstein called him “the dean of FM rock radio newspeople,” saying further that, “since 1968 and the days of progressive pioneer KSAN, he's been crafting irreverent, satirical sound collages that present news as an ongoing drama in the theater of life. The timing and rhythm of his work brings to mind music; no wonder that two record albums have compiled his newscasts.”

He first got his nickname from Abbie Hoffman when he got the scoop on the Chicago Eight defense team, learning that they would be calling uber beatnik Allen Ginsberg to the stand for poetic testimony. Recalling the end of the conspiracy trial years later, Scoop reports that “in 1970, after the guilty verdicts in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial were announced, the San Francisco Examiner had an article saying that the rioters (in Berkeley) were listening to the KSAN news to find out where to go. And they were, of course, because we were giving them directions.”

Some of his other highlights include the time hippies were rioting in People’s Park because a parking lot was due to be constructed. He was on the air with John Lennon at the time who told Scoop to “tell them all to be peaceful.” For hippies, they sure did seem to riot a lot. The Black Panthers and Timothy Leary were among his many other illustrious and infamous guests.

As with many people in his generation, Scoop looked to the East for spiritual wisdom. In rejecting convention, the hippies also rejected a lot of things that could have given them direction that were part of the West’s wisdom traditions and rich spiritual heritage. He converted to Buddhism where he found a home for himself, in time becoming a meditation instructor, and co-editor of the Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind. He later combined his gift for comedy and stand-up with his gift for elucidating the eight-fold path. His comedy routines played up the paradoxical nature of human experience and religious experience. In this he remained true to his Jewish roots and the rich history of comedy and humor in the Judaic tradition. In a way, Scoop had become a kind of rabbi, even if not a traditional one. He was a teacher. Through his presence on the radio, and the gravitas developed through years of meditation and study of eastern scripture, and his various writings, his status as counterculture veteran and royalty, he was able to give his unique take on things all while making people think, laugh, and reflect on the commonalities that bind us together in the human condition.   

Back in 1995 when his book If You Don’t Like The News…Make Some of Your Own, whose title came from his tagline while on the air, came out, he wrote of the times that “it's obvious we can't go back to the America of the '50s, where people are moral, where there's no violence in the streets, where everybody has a nice house in the suburbs with cars and kids. That America never really existed, anyway. The whole country is on a completely different course.” The same seems true today, when so many hippies have been humbled by age and the shattering of their idealism. The world they envisioned hadn’t materialized out of the aether the way Scoops radio transmissions did. Yet there are still things that the Aquarian generation symbolized that are worthy of considering, and sometimes enacting. Their commitment to freedom of expression and speech, and their animosity towards being surveilled by their own government remain live issues. The voice of alternative media itself, embattled as it is, was a key win for all people who wish for a kind of radio that is different, that is local, that gives its DJs and programmers creative control.

Scoop thought that his generation and those who came after him were born in a transitional era. One of Scoop’s famous audio collages was when he interviewed a hippie who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge for “spiritual advancement.” He presented that audio alongside Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” over top of The Byrds song “Eight Miles High.” Now we are in the long come-down phase from those kind of high hopes. Yet we are still in need of direction, whether it comes from the traditions of the west or the east.
Scanning the headlines today I think we could really use the crazy wisdom embodied in Scoop’s tagline: “If you don't like the news ... go out and make some of your own.”

I look forward to reading the stories created by those who are wise enough and crazy enough to go take his advice.

.:. .:. .:.
This article first appeared in the Radio Enthusiast e-APA coordinated by Frederick Moe.

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 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. 

Read the other entries in my American Iconoclast's & Eccentrics series:

Harvey Pekar: Working Class Intellectual and Everyday Visionary

Gary Warne: Communiversity and the Suicide Club

Who Was Matokie Slaughter?

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams

Fakir Musafar and Friends

Going Native In America

Weird Weather with David Wills

Running Off to Join the Circus with Jim Tully

Dwelling on the Fringe with the Hubbards

Brother Blue: The Butterfly Bard

Raymond Thundersky: The Cincinnati Construction Clown

Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song

Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood

Ray Hicks: Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains

On A Pilgrimage with Peace

The Long Memory of Utah Philips

The Iconoclastic Shenanigans of Henry Flynt
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Is Generation X poised to become a bridge generation between the Boomers, while holding the memories of those in the Silent generation who were our grandparents, and the Millenials, Zoomers and beyond who are our children and grandchildren? Not many people are writing about Gen X minding the generation gap. Instead they are focused on the way they think AI is going to upend life as we know it. In reality, the continuing decline of the Boomers will be much more impactful. Writer Jeff Giesea is thinking about this topic though, and he wrote a rather thoughtful piece about what he calls the Boomer reckoning, and the way the generational shift is going to affect the United States and the world at large as they slowly let go the reigns of power.

            Giesea calls this the “Boomer Paradox: boomers are holding society back, but they also are holding it together. What happens when they finally fade from the stage? Will we renew our institutions and cultural fabric, or drift into decline and unrest? How will the fiscal math even work?”

            He went on to write a lot about the resentment many of us have for the Boomers. I feel that. At the same time, like Giesea, I had a number of Boomer mentors whose role I really appreciate. There were some less savory types as well. I am a late Gen Xer, born at the end of the seventies, just before the Millenial generation. A lot of my older friends, and siblings, were more squarely in the Generation I identify with, as is my spouse. Punk rock, skateboarding, industrial music and hip-hop were all part of the stew I was influenced by, and these subcultures were born out of the hearts and minds of Gen X. Yet there were Boomers who mentored me, and their hippie music was almost as important to me, though in a different way. I had a handful of Boomer teachers who guided me and coached me in creative writing, on the one hand, and older hippies who inaugurated me into that part of the countercultural world. There was always some older hippie hanging around after all. A next-door neighbor and good friend who would get me stoned and teach me about vegetarianism, gardening, astrology and beyond. There were other older hippies hanging around the edges of the as well. Someone always knew one. Who else were you going to buy the weed and acid off of without actually going to a Grateful Dead show yourself?

            Some of these drug addled deadheads in my circle I never should have had as mentors, but such is fate, and being in a phase of low self-esteem, I let certain individuals have more influence over me than I ever should have. But then that’s one of the issues those of us in Gen X have: sometimes the people who could have been mentoring us, were off doing something else, leading us to find our own way. Right into the hands of people with questionable sense of ethics. At least, speaking for myself. I wasn’t really a latchkey kid, but so many other Gen Xers I knew were, I am sure they can relate to this.

            There were some less seedy hippies in my life as well. A few of them had resisted the psychic reterritorialization that was spawned during the post-WWII boom. While some people were making babies, government agents were thinking about how to best go about brainwashing people, and steering the hippies off course. MK Ultra and Operation CHAOS were a big part of that, and to a large degree, they succeeded in their aim. Having a counterculture so tightly woven around the use of drugs made it all the more easier to manipulate peoples minds. Have a look at Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties if you have any doubts. Though his book leaves some threads untied, it points to enough factual evidence and indirect evidence to show just how much MK Ultra and Operation CHAOS were up to their eyeballs manipulating minds, hippie minds included.  

            After the Manson murders the image of the hippie had been marred. Then the academic think tanks began a project to rebrand the more radical edge of the counterculture. Black Panthers, Weathermen, Students for a Democratic Society and Yippies all became taboo. If you wanted to make it in the world, even talking about such things became verboten. Capitalism could no longer be critiqued by the hippie generation. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and so a large swathe of them sold out and joined the ranks. This slow dissipation of the movement happened during the seventies, at the time when E.F. Schumacher’s idea of appropriate technology was having a moment, and the appropriate tech movement itself was doing its DIY best to address the precarious energy predicament then hitting the industrialized world in an opening salvo.  

​            Doing it yourself takes a lot of discipline and effort, and eventually many of the Boomers turned their backs on their youthful ideals, joined evangelical churches, and joined instead the Reagan Revolution. America was back, for a time. But the hypercapitalist neon dayglo of the prosperous 80s and 90s that followed would soon begin to fade, culminating in not a renewed economy, but depleted energy that lead to fracking and more offshore drilling. The 2008 financial crisis caused by the burst of the housing bubble led to the busting of hope for Gen X and early Millennials as their future was further sold out to prop up the financialized system and property of the older banker Boomers who just didn’t want to let go, leading us into another boom bust cycle and our current state of polycrisis.

So yeah, there is some resentment.  
 
            Living in this kleptocratic gerentocracy has made many of us who are in Generation X weary and wary of the Boomers. Some Millenials have perhaps been even more wary. The postwar Boomer era is ending. But they are still clutching onto more than a slice of the pie until their hands go dead and cold. Yet Giesea says resentment towards Boomers is stupid.  The thing about resentment though, is that it isn’t usually a choice made in your head. It’s an emotion. Every human deserves dignity, including Boomers, but a lot of the resentment comes from the decreased standard of living younger generations have had to endure while our elders continue to hold onto property -hence things like the new round of the “housing crisis” which is really just a greed crisis.

For my own case, I’ve worked at the library my entire adult life. I started as a book shelver, and stayed in the job for typical Gen X reasons, even when it was difficult over my first decade here to get any kind of promotion. I stayed because I was working for a good cause, the free sharing of information and knowledge, and I didn’t have to work for some corporation with questionable values. It was also a perfect slacker job for a bookish person. I had access to books and a ton of music, two of my favorite forms of intellectual stimulation. I worked with many other Gen Xers who were artists, musicians, poets, potters, writers. The atmosphere made up for the lack of funds. I didn’t generally take my work home with me either, and still don’t. It’s a fantastic kind of job to have while pursuing things like doing radio shows as I did on WAIF, and putting effort into developing my skills as a writer, and working on getting published.

Over time I did get some promotions, and my ability to earn and make it in the world has gone up, but it hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living and now stagflation. My ability to help our own Millennial children is curbed. When I see them paying more money for rent than we ever paid for a mortgage, yeah, there is some resentment for the Boomers raking in the money off of these properties, and yeah some Gen Xers are doing that too. But a lot of that real estate is held in Boomer hands and accounts. How can are kids build a future when they struggle just to make rent. Having a slacker job and doing creative things on the side is less viable, because they are hustling to make it. When they are off work, they are stressed and the way out is into the digital world.

The huge wealth gap doesn’t help matters at all. Most of us are seeing the quality of life deteriorate year after year, and have to make choices over whether to take our dog to the vet or put our car in the shop. Meanwhile Boomers are going on cruises, going on big vacations, and those in the higher ranks are buying yachts, estates, shrinking what the rest of us have access to it, so yeah there might be some resentment there. It’s also why I will always despise such a genre of music as yacht rock

That being the case, Gen X can still be a bridge generation, as Giesea suggests. I just think that what that bridge looks like is going to be a lot different than he does. This is because of a fundamental difference in world view. Giesea says, “The postwar boomer era is ending just as AI and automation accelerate. Over the next two decades, these forces will reshape the world more profoundly than most of us are prepared for.” I disagree with him that AI and automation will have as big of an impact as he suggests, for the simple reason that the environmental resources needed to power AI are not adequate enough to sustain it. That doesn’t mean our would-be tech lords won’t try to pilfer as many of those resources as they can before they can’t. 

Yet a recent article in Fortune has shown that most corporations aren’t making anything on the money they have invested into the questionable tech. No doubt another economic bubble is forming around these LLMs and when it pops the tools people are putting so much unvetted faith in will disappear.

Until that happens though, we are going to see more and more people going off the rails of the crazy train, as Ted Gioia has pointed out in his recent assessment of AI and its disastrous impacts on mental health and the ability to even know what is real.           

 It should come as no surprise that Giesea and I disagree on the trajectory of the future. As founder of the Boyd Institute he comes from a place steeped in the industrial worlds preferred mythology, faith and belief in technological progress. Many of their project’s center around drones, automation and autonomy, space exploration and technology for statecraft. Their name comes from John Boyd, developer of the OODA loop, and while that seems like it could be a useful tool for strategy, it need not be employed towards technological advancement. The OODA loop could also be deployed for degrowth, frugality, and downshifting towards lower-tech tools that will be useful as the Boomers die out, and with them, their world of endless technological progress.

            This is where the bridge of Gen X will become important. We remember how things were done before the internet became as prevalent as it is now. Those of us lucky enough to have grandparents who grew up on farms, and put effort into their home economy, will be familiar with the way they pinched pennies and got things done on the cheap, produced some of the things they needed for their own household. We may also remember the way families stayed in touch by writing letters to each other. This was something I did when I met people around the country as a teen skateboarding in new cities on family vacations. I’d make a friend for a week and we’d become pen pals. That will be a useful skill to revive as the use of the internet becomes more and more questionable. As Josh Datko pointed out in a recent substack note, it is also a lot more secure from being surveilled. We also know how to make a mean mixtape.

The older Gen X crowd also helped build up the indie underground that was all based on analog networking. Many of those Gen Xers took direct inspiration from the hippies, from the underground newspapers, and certainly from the rock music itself. Many Boomers played a hand in developing their own underground networks in terms of the Rainbow Gathering, and the unique culture surrounding the Grateful Dead and the jam bands that followed, pulling in many a Gen Xer into their wake. Now that scene has meshed in some ways with that of traditional music, Americana and bluegrass.

The analog tools we have that helped build the underground worlds of skateboarding, punk rock, and hip-hop, and more niche scenes like noise, goth and industrial, are all useful to rebuild connection as digital culture continues to disintegrate.

All of these groups and their interests famously got mashed up into the ire spawning image of the millennial hipster who drew from all of them while being loyal to none of them. This itself can be a strength. Many a Gen Xer derided the hipster phenomenon as much as they resented the Boomer. Yet we can still be a bridge. If we let go some of our cynicism and the emotional armor of the perpetual skeptic, we can become mentors and mentees in turn. Every generation has a lot to give the ones who came before and after. Each have blind spots, each have skills and memories worth preserving and sharing.  

.:. .:. .:.

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 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. ​