​“When we speak of excellence in dress we do not mean richness of clothing, nor manifested elaboration. Faultless propriety, perfect harmony, and a refined simplicity,—these are the charms which fascinate here. It is as great a sin to be finical in dress as to be negligent.” --“A Gentleman”

For centuries, fashion trends have been driven by the elite for the elite. The royals, the aristocrats, the movie stars, the moguls, all have held a high degree of influence over fashion. Wearing the best duds has long been associated with wealth and status. Yet the common plebe did not always have to muck about in plastic clothing subject to disintegration when caught in acid rain. In the past, good clothing, and good-looking clothing with style and verve, was also in the grasp of everyday, salt-of-the-earth working people.

The most celebrated brands these days, from Louis Vuitton to Chanel to Gucci, are icons of unobtainium for mere commoners. The aura of their status is imbued with exclusivity. The fashion figures who command respect inside the echo chamber of the Spectacle wear outfits costing thousands of dollars. Those who can afford them are obsessed with maintaining the spectacle of their elitism. Many who can’t even afford to emulate the spectacle, yet still seek to, maintain an illusion of wealth under the burden of debt and enslave themselves to keeping up appearances. 

As much as the entertainment industry likes to rub the red carpet in the faces of the masses, propping up their extravagant lifestyle on the adoration of those they insult, a well fashioned life is not just the province of the fashion elite.

As whatever remains of the middle class gets wiped out and swiped up by the plutocrats of our day, there are other options for those of us who choose to live within our means, and live well. To be able to manage with what one has will once again be a virtue as the realities of all manner of shortages come home to roost. It is often nice to have things we want, but it is also a virtue to be content with just having our needs met. Choosing to embrace the life of LESS[1] puts one in a position to be downwardly mobile. Yet even in the case of downshifting to the realities of energy descent, a person can be a downwardly mobile dandy, or a trailer park quaintrelle.

The dandy, and his counterpart on the female end of the gender spectrum, the quaintrelle, are best characterized as people whose appearances, combined with temperament and wit, have a sublime effect on those they come in contact with. This is achieved through cultivating an aesthetic of composed elegance, dignity, equanimity, and a keen sense of wit and whimsy.[2] Self-expression through clothes may seem less important than just having functional attire for work, and keeping warm in winter and cool on the long, ever-hotter days of summer, but it is important. Clothes can influence how we think and feel about ourselves and the ways others interact with us. In times of energy descent and cultural crisis these powerful factors aren’t to be ignored.

From the very beginning the dandy has been downwardly mobile. George Bryan “Beau” Brummell, who is considered to be the first dandy, died penniless in a French asylum in 1840. If he’d done some other work and had some other interests instead of spending the first five hours his day getting dressed, he might not have lost his mind. I don’t want readers to take dandyism so far they end up on the wrong end of a psychiatrist. How we dress isn’t that important. Rather, the trailer park quaintrelle makes a conscious and controlled descent into that lap of luxury sometimes called genteel poverty. The downwardly mobile dandy chooses to live a life of nonchalant refinement, leisure and the cultivation of culture even as the current civilization slowly disintegrates around him. 

Brummell’s descent is actually a cautionary tale for the would-be deindustrial dandy. It is a lesson in the power of staying out of debt and out of the madhouse, and his story is worth looking at in brief. Brummell came from a middle-class family, but his father William had high hopes of his son becoming a gentleman. On his father’s part it might have been psychological compensation for the rumors that had swirled around his own birth: that he was the bastard child of no less than Frederick, Prince of Wales, casually cast aside. The elder Brummell imposed his thwarted aristocratic aspiration onto his own boy, and the imprinted desire of being genteel manifested in an obsession with clothing.

When the young Beau Brummell was at Eton College he made one of his first marks on fashion, a modern variation on the cravat, adorned with a gold buckle. This distinguished him amidst a sea of schoolmates whose families had more coins in the coffer than his own. After a brief stint at Oxford where he spent his time composing Latin verse, he left at age sixteen to join the military, and began to rub elbows with people in power.

He found a spot as a low-ranking officer in the 10th Royal Hussars, the personal regiment of the Prince of Wales, later to be King George IV. These dragoons became known for their lavish and elaborate uniforms. It wasn’t cheap to be a member of this branch of the military. Brummell could barely afford it, even with the inheritance left to him by his then deceased father, which amounted to about £22,000, no small sum in the last years of the 18th century. The 10th Hussars held elaborate banquets and paid extra for fine entertainment, so as to divert and impress the prince, and these expenses came out of the officers’ own pockets. To fit into this milieu Beau developed a habit for spending. During his three years of service he used his style and charm to enamor himself of the Prince and was raised to the rank of captain, much to the chagrin of his fellow officers.

The Prince was fascinated by Beau, whose wit and elocution were on equal footing with his flair for flashy dress. When Brummell left the service, he found himself well positioned to have a place in London society. His dead father would have been proud to know his son was circulating among posh people. He even came to be an “influencer.” Opting for a slightly less ornate way of dressing than others at the time (though no less expensive), he donned well-fitted bespoke coats, clean bright shirts, and trousers. The showpieces were his cravats that he knotted into elaborate designs. Soon other fops were flocking to him for advice on how to rock their neckerchiefs to maximum effect.   

As he drifted along inside his aristocratic fantasy, he lost touch with his middle-class background, and with reality. A nightmare of unchecked excess followed. He thought an adequate yearly allowance for a wardrobe was £800, when at the time a typical craftsman only made about £52 a year. Instead of using spit, he recommended that boots be polished with champagne. Perhaps it was easy for him to live this way, for after he had disposed of his father’s fortune, he started disposing of other people’s money loaned to him on credit. He’d also picked up the ever popular pastime of betting. Living beyond his means, gambling money that wasn’t his, he was on borrowed time.

A spat with the Prince sent him on a downward spiral into disarray. His exorbitant lifestyle caught up with him and he fled to France to escape debtor’s prison. His life was built around keeping up appearances, and when his ascent up the social ladder was canceled, he had to turn his life into a disappearance.  Away from his home country, and without others to prop him up, he unraveled and over time started to look more and more like a slob. Two decades later, sick with syphilis, he ended up in a madhouse where he died.

To me this fastidious focus, obsession, and single-minded devotion to fawning over fleeting fashion, seems, let’s say, a touch shallow. But here the maxim “The opposite of one bad idea is reliably another” can be useful. In America, it seems, many people have gone to the opposite extreme and their outer form of dressing is as neglected as their inner lives.

The dandy is dead. We have entered the age of fugly. Websites such as “People of Walmart”[3] attest to the many atrocities against decorum.  Just as the built environment influences our experience with the landscape, so does the prevailing fashion of our time influence our experience within the social landscape. If deconstructionism in architecture can be considered an aesthetic assault on the consciousness of people, so too can the embrace of fugly clothing.

What is fugly? Think neon-pink stockings, studded cowboy wear, neck tats, loud floral Hawaiian shirts made out of rayon, plastic sneakers, bubble coats that make people look like they are ready to be shipped somewhere by an angry Amazon employee.

Meanwhile haute couture remains forever out of reach of the common everyday woman or man. Whatever glamour remains in the spectacle of red-carpet taste-shapers is now just as often defiled by publicity stunts: Lady GaGa wore a suit of raw meat that would have been better left alive, or as dinner for a hungry family. The value of the jewels on a celebrity’s ankle bracelet could pay off the mortgage of a modest home.  
 
The fashions of our futures need not resemble the haute couture of today’s clueless class. The way people dress ten, twenty, thirty years from now may look like a pastiche of punk rock style, as people make do with patched together pieces found in forgotten dressers and scrounged from Goodwill warehouses. One hundred years from now they may hearken back to seventeenth-century styles once prominent in coastal towns, even as the coasts themselves continue to shift; they may in time be echoes of garments once worn by Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians or other tribal cultures; five hundred years from now as new great cultures emerge from the ashes of the coming dark age, the way people adorn themselves may well be in an unknown idiom tongue, yet timeless.

Just as the architect Christopher Alexander proposed there is a timeless way of building, I think there exists a timeless way of dressing.[4] Clothing, like architecture, should seek to mimic universal proportions and harmonies, and so encourage the elevation of body and mind. Many styles now considered old-fashioned reflect this timeless way. These ways may have been temporarily thrown into the dumpster, but for those willing to dive into history’s bin, the timeless style may yet be reclaimed.

Natural materials will complement a natural environment. The garish monstrosity of a sloganeering T-shirt, nylon shorts, and synthetic accoutrements reinforces the spectacle of a synthetic life. Wearing artificial clothes lends itself to being an artificial person. Mass produced in dehumanized factories, the products of mere transactional relationships, they are vestments of a mechanized life. Absent are those threads which bind us together by the rituals of growing, harvesting, shearing, and weaving. Shopping becomes a bandage patched over the wound left from living in an asymmetrical built and fashioned environment. 

Somewhere in between the out-of-touch cluelessness of Beau Brummell–like celebrity-level pretense and the decrepitude of the deliberately awful, there exists a mean where the two extremes may resolve and find a useful proportion. As the world deindustrializes, the downwardly mobile dandies and trailer park quaintrelles bring a modicum of taste, decorum, and style back into society.  

​In James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand novels, he addressed the idea of being well dressed as something that contributed to the mental and cultural health of the citizens of the fictional town of Union Grove. Yet many couldn’t be bothered. These were the characters who seemed to have the most trouble coping with the realities of collapse and decline that had happened in his future America. When the religious leader Brother Jobe and his flock in the New Faith Church migrated from the southern coast to the town in upstate New York where the novels are set, many of the townspeople were amazed to see his congregants wearing clean linen shirts, fitted trousers and dresses, hats, and other accessories. Their attire was made so well they stood out from the slapdash townies making do patching off-the-rack clothes they’d bought in the times when the big-box stores and chains still existed. Over the course of the books Brother Jobe determined to raise up the depressed spirit of the people. One of the ways he went about doing so was to get them fitted out in something better than rags. He organized his people to open up stores selling tailor-made clothes, even a haberdashery. These enterprises contributed to the restoration of Union Grove’s main street. With the help of Robert Earle they put together a town laundry. With people cleaned up and feeling good about themselves in well-defined duds they began to act with greater self-esteem and civility.

In John Michael Greer’s novel Retrotopia he contrasted the cruddy synthetic materials used for clothing in the Atlantic Republic with the refined sense of comfort, elegance and timeless style from eras past that had been readopted by the people of the Lakeland Republic. The main character Peter Carr is wearing bioplastic-based clothes when he first arrives in the Lakeland Republic. It isn’t long after he gets settled into his hotel, and goes for a long walk around the capitol of Toledo, that his plastic shoes fall apart. On arrival he thought the way the Lakelanders dressed was a touch odd and antiquated, until circumstance forced him to buy new shoes, which felt good to wear and walk in. Then, to fit in and to keep from being cold, he changed his whole outfit. He went from wearing what sounds like a threadbare tracksuit to a wool jacket, hempcloth shirt, and a raincoat over top of it all. His getup was topped off by the addition of a porkpie hat. After donning the local style he was happy that folks stopped staring at him for one, but he also felt comfortable, warm, dignified.

In thinking of people wearing plastic, I’m reminded of a remark about cyclists I once heard from adventurer and author Alistair Humphreys in an interview he gave on a radio show. He commented on a certain type of “MAMIL” or “Middle Aged Man In Lycra,” and that acronym has stuck with me ever since. I’m just a casual rider myself so I have never understood the obsession many cyclists seem to have with wearing spandex.

MAMILs remind me of some of the worst fashions ever presented in science fiction futures:  the stale synthetic unitards, I mean uniforms, worn by the space cadets of Star Trek. I can definitely see a version of Jean-Luc Picard training for the Tour de France in full MAMIL attire. Yet for a character who is an erudite diplomat his clothes are questionable at best. I think Picard would have looked better sipping his tea, Earl Grey, hot, wearing some kind of space finery we haven’t yet heard about. In Star Trek, and similar visions of impossible futures, it’s usually either MAMIL attire or robes. The cast of The Next Generation certainly didn’t care to wear the costumes. The material tended to bunch up, giving Picard the memorable tic of adjusting his uniform. The costumes even gave some of the cast back problems, as the tightly stretched spandex dug into their bodies for twelve- to fourteen-hour work days. Off set, the costuming department had to deal with the accumulated stench; spandex is good at soaking up the sweat and body odors.[1]  

Part of the draw of steampunk literature and its offshoots in other media is the sense of excitement about what characters get to wear. Top hats, cloaks, capes, and coats, all filled with hidden pockets, pocket watches, finished off with monocles or goggles, all made to withstand the rigors of adventure, inclement weather, and fine enough to lounge in with a snifter of brandy in a well-appointed study while plotting all manner of subterfuge.

Deindustrial writers can also make their characters clothing appeal to readers who might want to mimic it. The idea of clothes made to last and made by hand has already begun to show up as a trope in deindustrial fiction beyond Kunstler’s World Made by Hand quartet and Retrotopia. It can be found in the After Oil anthologies and Into the Ruins, and has continued with the stories in New Maps. The characters in David England’s “A Hollow Honor” (iss. 1:3) , for example, are all dressed to the nines for a fine occasion.  By contrast, in Karen Mandell’s story “Tug of War” (iss. 1:2), the soil had been so depleted it couldn’t support the growth of cotton or other plants needed for textiles. When the characters in her story go to a dance they have to raid the wardrobes left behind by the former occupants of a home they took residence in. The other attendees wear a mishmash of styles taken from whatever is available.

In contemplating the varieties of futures ahead of us, I think it is probable people will wear a mixture of legacy clothing from the industrial era, as well as new homespun and bespoke clothes. The decades ahead may look a bit punk, a bricolage of styles and eras, all stitched together, with needle, thread and safety pins, just as the punk rock movement itself was made up of a mixture of previous youth and artistic subcultures.[2]  

If you want to “collapse now and avoid the rush” in terms of clothing, what I suggest for fans of deindustrial fiction is a bit of everyday cosplay. Let us start to wear now the kind of clothes we envisage the various peoples of the various futures to wear. Let us look to older styles and fashions, and combine them with new imagined styles, informed by personal vision, in order to create something unique and our own. We can also stock our wardrobe with necessities in the same way we might stock the pantry with dried beans and rice. In addition to having extra pairs of work clothes, socks, underwear and shoes, fancier dress-up clothing should be also be stashed in our closets for weddings, funerals and other occasions. A fortune need not be spent if you accept hand-me-downs and invest a bit of time in combing thrift stores, garage sales, and other second-hand venues. Sewing, mending, weaving, knitting, and other related textile arts are sure to be profitable skills, within the home economy, and as a primary or secondary income stream.

As the current system runs into overshoot, and its baroque complexities falter, folks will, of necessity, look for local and low-power solutions. As the resources needed to make synthetic clothing gradually disappear, the ability to fashion a life at an earlier level of technology will become an enviable skill. Looking backwards and making note of what worked for other peoples in various climates in older times can be part of the process. The lives we fashion might as well be beautiful, and with an aesthetic sense that is in harmony with natural patterns.    

“The real reason I like natural fabrics,” outdoorsman Fennel Hudson writes, “is not just because they are traditional, but because of their provenance. I like the thought that, for example, a favorite tweed jacket was once a sheep, living upon a mountain in Scotland.”

The non-profit Fibershed organization offers another useful “farm-to-closet” vision. They are working to develop local natural dye and fiber systems with an emphasis on land and soil regeneration, while helping to create bioregional textile economies. As necessity puts us back in touch with local and natural materials, the timeless way of dressing, in tune with the ecosystem, and in tune with the needs of the people, will be spun out. Woven within that cloth will be the many styles and stories of our futures.

​Fashions are subject to ebb and flow, and change in some ways from generation to generation. The tide of the dandy may have gone out to sea, but I think it is due for a return. All we have to do is go down and comb the beach beneath the streets for those gifts of the dandy the ocean has seen fit to cough back up.  

NOTES:
​
[1] “Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation,”in John Michael Greer’s phrase from The Blood of the Earth (Bibliotheque Rouge, 2012).

[2] The dandy is also often a flâneur, as Charles Baudelaire gave definition to both and linked them together as being part of the metaphysical aspect of Romanticism in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” 

[3] https://www.peopleofwalmart.com

[4] Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

​[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3022935/how-star-trek-killed-something-worse-than-klingons-spandex

[2] Jon Savage shows in his book Teenage: the Creation of a Youth Culture, that the punk rock subculture had antecendents in a number of post WWII subcultures such as the Beats, Situationism, and others all combined and "stuck together with safety pins".

RE/SOURCES:

There are numerous books on style and fashion, from the timeless to the fleeting, available from your local library if you, as an aspiring dandy or quaintrelle, need a touch of inspiration. The genre is so well represented I refrained from listing those kinds of books. Happy hunting!

D’Aurevilly, Barbey. 1928. The Anatomy of Dandyism: With Some Observations on Beau Brummell, trans. D.B. Wyndham Lewis. London, England: Peter Davies.

Burgess, Rebecca. 2019. Fibershed: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists, and Makers for a New Textile Economy. White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green.

“A Gentleman.” 1836. The Laws of Etiquette: or, Short Rules and Reflections for Conduct in Society. Philadelphia, Pa.: Carey, Lea & Blanchard.

Greer, John Michael. 2016. Retrotopia. Founders House Publishing, s.l.
Hudson, Fennel. 2013. A Meaningful Life: Fennel’s Journal, No. 1. Marford, Wrexham, Wales: ‎ Fennel's Priory Limited.

Kelly, Ian. 2006. Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style. New York, N.Y.: Free Press.

Kunstler, James Howard. 2009–2016. World Made by Hand series: World Made by Hand (2007), The Witch of Hebron (2010), A History of the Future (2014), The Harrows of Spring (2016). New York, N.Y.: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Savage, Jon. 2007. Teenage: the Creation of Youth Culture. New York, N.Y.: Viking.
Whimsy, Lord Breaulove Swells (a.k.a. Victor Allen Crawford III). 2006. The Affected Provincial’s Companion. London, England: Bloomsbury

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This was another essay for my Cheap Thrills column in an 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:
​
A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

DREAM FORAGING

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.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

The Situationist Intergalactical (SI) is an intergalactic organization of made up of a strange amalgamation of pre/post avant-garde artists, eldritch intellectuals, and poetically inclined political theorists. It remains prominent in certain portions of the Milky Way, NGC 4414, the Sombrero Galaxy, and Andromeda among others. Membership is open to anyone who claims they are a member, and a variety of spin-off groups exists in certain star cluster and extragalactic nebulae.

The intellectual foundations of the Situationist Intergalactical were developed from star seeds of thought emanating from Canis Major, in particular the Sirius system, during the early years of the 21st century on Terra. Disinclined to give two fucks about either capitalism, communism or any of the-then prevalent economic theories available, early members of the SI allowed themselves to be seduced by the irrational forces of the subconscious mind and what occultists called “the unseen” – a field of consciousness extending from the highest planes of reality down to the densest plane of the material commonly seen as the manifest world. The SI has in particular been fond of employing a kind reverse hauntology known as retromancy, for inspiration. It has looked to the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly the original Situationist International, Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Luigi Russolo’s theosophic inspired Art of Noise as cultural mines to search for various ore.

The SI remains multi-sub-cultural, as well as multi-cultural in theory and practice. “Use and adapt from anything that works” is our motto. In this regard we have seen how the endgames of capitalism and communism have not worked, and so look into the proverbial dumpster of economic systems and strategies that have never really been tried in full as we seek to create a variety of nodes of parallel polis in our attempt to resist the sovcorp ascendancy seen as one possible outcome of the nascent entrepreneurial turn.

True to our Intergalactic ethos, key pioneers in the world of “space music” continue to transmit their voices to us, and remain active on the inner planes, sending their signals from deep within the akashic archives. (This locale is also known to some as the dream library, and to others as the inner library.) Sun Ra, Karlheinz Stockhausen, David Bowie, Klaus Nomi and Erik Satie have all given key mutational teachings to the musical arms of the Situtationist Intergalactical.

Essential to situationist theory is the concept of the spectacle, a unified critique of fully automated advanced luxury capitalism / communism. Both were highly bureaucratic in their collective organization and relied on propaganda to keep their sway. This agitprop was activated by the mediation of social relations through imagery. A controlled mass media kept the inmates of the collective mind forged prisons fully manacled. Members of the Situationist Intergalactical believe that this living by proxy through the spectacle of reality television, parasocial media, and advertising, is a leading contributor to the passive second-hand alienation experienced by inmates of both advanced capitalism and communism. As such the Situationist Intergalactical advocates a return to developing Analog Intelligence, through the deliberate cultivation of the various arts of memory, and low-tech means of living as a way of engaging fully with the shared reality of the interconnected web of life.

This interconnected web of life is why some members of the Situationist Intergalactical have taken to calling themselves Arachnists, after certain fictional works of one of their founding members. Arachnists have taken some of the best thinking from spiritual anarchist philosophy, whose roots reach back to Chuang Tzu and Gerard Winstanley, along with certain elements of political anarchism, such as mutual aid, stateless societies, or at the least, the idea of micronations, the sovereignty of the individual and the divine spark that animates them. Alongside this the Arachnists have chosen to take ideas from various ecological movements of the 20th and early 21st century as another part of their complex and braided lineage. Strands of rewilding, permaculture, deep ecology, and the core essential knowledge emanating out of thinkers surrounding the peak oil movement and its aftermath are also claimed.

All of this low-tech stuff may cause one to wonder, just how it is the group remains Intergalactical without high technology? I should remind them then that a third branch of our investigations is the realm of dreams. All of our space travel outside of earth is done on the astral plane. To this end we seek to grow new organs of perception to to continue to refine our intergalactic travel. But don't let that worry you! Our work is as much pataphysical as it is metaphysical.

All of this material is used to reweave human paths of fate and destiny, taking what was once separated out by alienated forms of work and economy, and coagulating them anew as a way to disengage from the spectacle and construct situations of life where authentic, unmediated desires and the destiny of souls can be worked out, leading to individual liberation.      

Where the Situationist Intergalactical differs most from their namesake is that they get bored to tears reading things by or about Marx. So much critical theory, that otherwise might have much to offer those seeking to construct situations, gets bogged down by this ridiculous deference to Marx, as if he were the only economic thinker who ever lived. As if there weren’t other alternatives to capitalism (and communism). The bootlicking quality many thinkers have towards Marx is in no-way conducive to ones own self respect as a sovereign individual. We reserve the right to of course offer accolades to our artistic and intellectual ancestors, but the amount of shit piled on the doorstep to Marx is inordinate to what has actually been achieved or done in his name. Having come to the dead end of both dominant systems, it is time to explore new economic ecologies as we build the parallel polis. We will rescue these from the histories eclectic compost hope in an act of retromancy.
 
Since the Situationist Intergalactical has been formed, the focus remains predominantly artistic, but we recognize that within every artist a magician is sleeping. The images that mediate us in the spectacle and simulacrum, are where the I-Mage can exert a lateral influence, even if, while at the fringes of society. Therefore, the tools of the various avantgarde art movements listed above, among any others of interest as led by the daimon of the individual practitioner, are utilized on a spectrum that ranges from complete chaotic abandon to ordered deliberation. Seeing how the alchemical has infused the minds of the surrealists, and later resurfaced in the manner of the “return of the repressed” as seen in Raoul Vaneigem’s increasing investigations of alchemical and occult iconography in his later literary output, the alchemical aspect is of particular interest. But again, any avenue of advanced amalgamation is worthy of having a spot on the shelf in our collective apothecary.

Detournement, psychogeography and many other tools of the original SI remain important to the Situationist Intergalactical. Explorations of these and many more will be further revealed in further communiques!

​If you think you may wish to be a part of the Situationist Intergalactical, you probably already are. No permission is needed. Think yourself a Situationist and you will be. Furthermore, no permission is required to form your own node in the collective web of arachnist activity. Seeking permission may even be grounds for dismissal, in which case you’ll have to form your own node anyway. Until next time, remember that it is always forbidden to forbid, so you might as well demand the impossible.

.:. .:. .:.
​
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 can't be free at least we can be cheap.” - Frank Zappa

​Greetings and welcome back to Cheap Thrills, your source for speculation on bargain-basement entertainment during the long twilight of industrial decline. In the first column I grappled with Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle and the entertainment-industrial complex as embedded in three forms of mass media. Now I turn my attention to dreams, a natural resource rich in wisdom, full of puns and funny amusements. Dream have been available to us for a long time, are available to us now, and will continue to be available long in the future when other resources may be in short supply. The pool of dreams is also an excellent fishing hole. With patience and the right bait, symbols can be caught and reeled up to the surface. I have found this imagery to be more nourishing than the bland offerings available from the McGovCorp menu.

The Surrealist movement in the arts was rife with dreams as part of their attempt to liberate the unconscious and shock mainstream sensibilities. Yet in short order Surrealist techniques were recuperated[1] by advertising agencies, who found the school’s techniques perfect for implanting imagery into the unconscious. This was the power of the “incongruous image,”[2] where two or more things that don’t normally belong together, like a sewing machine and umbrella, or a lizard and a car insurance salesman, are made to hang out together. When the Situationists came on the scene they were critical of the Surrealist movement’s interest in psychoanalysis and all things metaphysical and occult. They launched similar criticisms against the American Beatniks who they thought were equally mired in mysticism. The Situationists wanted to create new situations for living, and their critique of these movements was a necessary counterbalance to their tendency towards astral escapism: going off into the realms of dream at the expense of the physical world.

Yet the study of dreams and the various metaphysical and mystical traditions that have evolved on this planet do not mean physical existence with all its troubles and problems has to be ditched. By the same token, embracing the material aspect of this world does not mean a person has no need of the insights and perceptions which come to us from more subtle avenues.

What if instead of looking at dreams and waking life as a binary, we used three-valued logic to allow for the interplay of a third position? The material world and the dream world are both connected via the interface of our imagination, forming a potent and fertile triangle.  Giving the imagination a place in our way of thinking about the world and our place in it allows for solutions to our problems to come from places outside the binary narratives pushed by McGovCorp.

            Dreams and synchronicities are accessible to everyone as a source of guidance through the vagaries of the long descent. Yet if we wish to profit from their wisdom, we first must listen to what they are saying to us now.

When the Covid-19 pandemic began to play havoc with our institutions and the world went into various degrees of lockdown in the spring of 2020, there was a noted upsurge of people reporting intense dreams to their friends, family and fellow travelers. Many in the healthcare industry claimed that the uptick in bizarre dreams was due to folks getting extra sleep. People’s bodies finally had a chance to play catch-up from the sleep-deprived rush of the 21st century schedule. Whether laid off or able to work from home, many people used the time to catch their breath and an extra wink. The regenerative nature of sleep had been deprioritized in the haste of working and consuming. I find that the longer I am able to sleep, the more dreams I have, alongside a greater ease in remembering them. From my experience there is some truth to what the health care workers claimed—yet I believe there was also something more.

As people decompressed from the rituals of the rat race, one form of stress was replaced by a slew of others: not knowing when the next paycheck was going to come, not knowing who and what to believe in a divisive media matrix during a divisive election year, with a divisive virus on the loose, while also dealing with toilet paper shortages. Cognitive dissonance abounded. For healthcare workers, police and other public safety personnel there were other kinds of stress brought on by the pandemic. One thing the whole debacle has brought into awareness is just how little control we humans actually have.

Covid-19 marked an interruption to the regularly scheduled spectacle. It was a crack in the illusion of a controlled existence. Panic erupted from that crack in the form of Covid-19 dreams. These dreams were also a break from the dominant materialist interpretation of reality.

Deirdre Barret, a dream researcher and assistant professor of psychology from the hallowed halls of Harvard University in Cambridge, started studying the phenomenon of people’s intense dreams during the lockdowns.[3] She noted that a change in the content and character of dreams is very common during a crisis. Her research documented the huge numbers of people who had dreams of being attacked by bugs, worms, armies of roaches, wasps, flies, gnats and other creepy crawlies. Dreams often have a punny way about them, and the pun of getting a bug, a.k.a. catching a virus, is apropos here.  As people tried to cope with the situation, unprecedented for those accustomed to luxury elite lifestyles and the comforts of a materialist society, the suppressed contents of their minds could not be contained, controlled. The bugs burst forth. 

Dreams are adept at pointing out our fears. In my experience of keeping a dream journal for close to two decades I have found that dreams can also show us a way to patch up some of the separation that has occurred between people, other species, and the planet we all share. If we can see past the wounds our dreams often show us, we can also grasp some of the light pouring through those wounds. Maybe when we have dreams of insects, instead of bugging out, we should bug in, learn about those bugs and see what they have to teach us.

I used to have a strong fear of spiders and for many years they showed up consistently in my dreams. I would wake up from these encounters with shudders but also a sense of awe. As part of my dream play I was inspired to learn about their biology and ecological roles, the various myths and folklore that surround them. Now when I see a spider I don’t shudder anymore, but talk to them and say hello. I approach them with respect and fascination instead of fear and apprehension. Spinning out from those dreams of spiders entire webs of connection were born.

Dreams are a way to reconnect with the greater web of reality. Making the effort to remember them is one way to begin healing the false sense of separation between ourselves, nature, and the subtle realms that interpenetrate us, the many threads that connect one thing to another. Dreams can help an individual flourish and regenerate when the landscape and the media-space around them are otherwise barren. Dreams can help a person to navigate along their individual fate path, mining the unconscious for clues to lead them on to their destiny. The person who studies, records and shares their dreams will find that they are just as often practical as they are otherworldly. Dreams bring us the messages we need, whether or not they are messages we want. In doing so they can help attune us back to the rhythms of nature and the Earth.

Derrick Jensen has never been one to back away from controversy in putting forth his agenda of ecological education and critique of civilization. His 2011 book Dreams also showed wisdom, bravery and courage as he challenged the view that there is no such thing as knowledge outside of science.

He writes about how “dreams are living, willful beings, as alive as you or I or a cat or a dog or a bird or a fire or a river or a flash of lightning or a song or a kiss. As living beings, dreams act with…willful unpredictability. They are not machines. They cannot be managed, only denied, and they can only be denied temporarily, and then to our own poverty and at our own peril. They are not bound by laws, and will be constrained neither by scientific equations nor other holy texts. They, more than most, maybe more than almost any others, will not be enslaved. Dreams can be messengers, as can you or I or any of these others, but they cannot be domesticated. They are proud, and they are free.”

Dreams erupt unbidden, coming through when and as they see fit. In this they have a unique capacity to jolt us awake from the sleepwalking trance of waking life. A dream can direct a person to things in need of tending, and the personal issues we’d rather not address.  In his book Jensen explores his own dreams and imaginative insights and along the way gropes towards reconciliation with the wild side of nature we humans have longed to suppress and control.

Have you ever tried to control your dreams? Just as trying to control the behavior of another individual is difficult, and often misguided, I believe the same is true when we try to control our dreams. Yet like many other things in life, people do try to rein in and control them. The practice of lucid dreaming, where people first try to become aware they are dreaming, and then attempt to shape and control the dream, is a case in point. Lucid or conscious dreams do happen at times, but they are often just as spontaneous and outside of the sleeper’s control as is the dream content itself. At best we can influence them through the practice of dream incubation, when a person goes to sleep with a specific intention or question they wish to have answered by a dream. But the shape the answer comes in is often unforeseen.

Personally, I think it is best to not try and control dreams but to be open to receiving whatever comes through that window of consciousness.  Trying to control our dream life strikes me as just another way for humans to fool ourselves into thinking we are ultimately in charge. But just because I don’t think dreams should try to be controlled doesn’t mean I think they shouldn’t be worked with, interpreted, and used as source of wisdom, meaning, entertainment and authentic imagery. When we quarantine our minds from the influence of corporate media, we make space for other voices to be heard. Some of those voices may whisper to us in the chamber of sleep.

To get back to one of the purposes of this column, dreams are often a great entertainment. Sharing your dreams in the morning with a loved one is a great way to start the day. Telling your dream as if it was a story that happened to you—because on some level it did—is a free way to sharpen the skill of telling tales. I have a dream that one day people will talk about their dreams with each other as much as they talk about sports games or what happened on the latest episode of The Bachelor or Seinfeld or whatever it is people watch these days. Instead of saying, “Did you see that one where Kramer had kidney stones?” or “What did you think of the ending of Game of Thrones?” we could ask each other where we went when we went to bed.

There are other ways of working with dreams too, besides just writing or telling them as stories. We can act them out in dream theater, draw, paint or sing them, put them together on a workbench when a solution to an invention is dreamed up, or hold them in our hearts as a source of radiant heat on the cold days of winter when all else seems bleak.

Elias Howe had a dream that gave him the breakthrough he needed for a major invention. He was an inventor who was working on the concept and design of a machine for sewing. There was one problem which he couldn’t resolve until the answer came to him in a dream. In his original idea he was going to use an ordinary needle with the eye located at the heel for the automated stitch, but this didn’t work.

Howe dreamed he was being chased down for a meal by cannibals who had spears with holes in their tips. Awaking from this dream he had a flash of insight and realized that the needle in his invention needed a hole in the tip for the thread to be put through.  This led to his innovative design for the sewing machine which he received a patent for in 1846. His invention changed lives all across the globe.

Answers come in dreams and solutions to the various problems imposed by decline can also come to us in this way. The mad scientists and cranks of the long emergency would do well to keep a pad on their nightstand to sketch down diagrams and ideas that might otherwise wisp away if not caught on waking’s cusp.
There are a lot of resources out there for learning about how to play with dreams and many approaches. I found the books of Robert Moss to be the best practical guides, though your mileage may vary.  For the history buffs out there I recommend his The Secret History of Dreaming. In that book he shows how dreams have shaped world events and how they are vital for the future. In this context he calls dreams the secret engines of history.  To jumpstart the practical and fun use of dreams I’d say it’s best to start with his book Conscious Dreaming which gives the foundation to his approach. After the basics have been established through, his book Dreamgates:  An Explorer’s Guide to the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death goes into more esoteric territory. It is quite the useful guidebook to some of the places a dream traveler might go. 

Yet there are other books and approaches. Something a lot of them have in common is the keeping of a dream journal, or written record of dreams. Making a record of your excursions to the ethereal realms in some physical way seems to be an essential component for building up and strengthening the capacity for dream recall. Perhaps it was different in oral cultures, and in times when sharing dreams was a matter of course. For those of us who are addicted to the written word, these notebooks will become in time your own vital travelogue, wildcrafted from the jungles, deserts, spectacular cities and temples of the imaginal realms.
For all of you writers and aspiring writers out there, keeping a dream journal is an excellent tool for developing skills in narrative and description. Characters, settings, moods and themes all emerge from the sanctuary of sleep, ready to be transcribed.  Dreams can also be the key to giving you the solution to a tricky plot problem—or delivering a fully formed plot. This latter happened to Stephen King when he dreamed up his novel Misery while sleeping on a trans-Atlantic flight to England.  After he woke up he sketched the idea on a cocktail napkin, and when he and his wife Tabitha finally got to the hotel they were staying at in London he outlined the rest of the novel in sixteen pages of notes that came flowing out of his dream inspiration. The story has gone on to entertain countless readers. 

The novels in Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series were likewise inspired by a dream, though not his own. The idea for this tale of a traveling gunslinger searching for the Dark Tower was inspired in part by his love for the Robert Browning poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. The poem itself had come to Browning in a dream which he then wrote down the same day. The title for Browning’s poem, and its last line, in turn came from a line in Shakespeare’s King Lear. So it is that one dreamer passes along a key that unlocks a door for another. 

H.P. Lovecraft was another avid dreamer of the dark fantastic. Many of his stories were fueled by his vivid nightmares. His first adult story, The Tomb, is a tale of dream incubation set inside a decrepit crypt. Polaris, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, and the fantasy stories of his Dream Cycle, among many others, all had dreams as points of origin. By trusting his dreams Lovecraft created tales that continue to haunt and delight devotees and new readers alike. Iä iä Cthulhu fhtagn!

Notebooks and pens are cheap and with just a few basic tools we can all become dream foragers. This is bounty that once a person begins harvesting, will continue to give, and when one person is enriched, that dream, as compost, becomes cultural fertilizer, giving back to others further stories, poetry, inventions, and different ways of organizing the situations of life. Big dreams await those who are willing to let go and forage in in the wild undergrowth of the sleeping mind.

RE/SOURCES:

Here are just a few seed books and articles for growing a dream practice and further exploration.

Jensen, Derrick. 2011. Dreams. New York, N.Y.: Seven Stories Press.

Kelley, Buckley. May, 26, 2015. “13 Dream-Related Stories by H.P. Lovecraft.” HuffPost. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/13-dreamrelated-fictions-_b_7446952>

King, Stephen. 1982–2012. The Dark Tower (series). New York, N.Y.: Donald M. Grant Publishers Inc.

• For more on dreams by King see the “Coda: Pages From a Writer’s Journal” at the end of A Song of Susannah.

King, Stephen. 2010. On Writing. New York, NY.: Simon and Schuster.

Lovecraft, H.P. 1995. The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Tales of Terror and Death. New York, N.Y.: Del Rey.
 McDonough, Tom. 2002. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

• See in particular Guy Debord, “Contribution to the Debate ‘Is Surrealism Alive or Dead?’ ” (1958).

Moss, Robert. 1996. Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life. New York, N.Y.: Three Rivers Press.
Moss, Robert. 2009. The Secret History of Dreaming. Novato, Calif.: New World Library.
Moss, Robert. 2010 Dreamgates: Exploring the World’s of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death. Novato, Calif.: New World Library.

[1] The use of avant-garde techniques and strategies by mainstream culture was a process the Situationists called “recuperation.” In their writings they showed the problem of institutional forces co-opting oppositional tactics and practices from the underground to be put back in service to the mainstream.

[2]Jill Lawless, The Selling of Surrealism, LA Times, <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-apr-02-et-surrealism2-story.html>

[3]Kelli Miller.  COVID and Sleep: Sweet Dreams Aren’t Made of This. <https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200527/covid-and-sleep-sweet-dreams-arent-made-of-this>

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This was the second essay for 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:

A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

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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​“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

.:. .:. .:.
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.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
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
​
​

.:. .:. .:.
​
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.