“All the means we’ve been given to stay alert we use to ornament our sleep. If instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life more comfortable we’d apply our ingenuity to fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor!”
​ ― René Daumal, Mount Analogue

There seems to be a growing sense within the dominant culture that there isn’t much left to do that is worthwhile; that the effort to do something and become someone doesn’t seem worth the bother; that the energy and time expended on a project won’t give a measurable return. Life coach types say things like “It’s the process, not the product” (that is important in life), but coming from their self-referential lips “the process” seems like a mere consolation prize. What’s the use in trying to carve out a path for ourselves with the whole system stacked against us,  when it is so much easier to slip into the sleep of passivity?

            In a consumerist society where so many of our wants are catered to, it is easy for the muscle of willpower to atrophy. Our own dreams, the ones we wake up to in the middle of the night, the ones that burn with a sense of urgency, slide down and have a way of becoming less important the more we acquiesce to being spectators of life, audience members at the Main Characters’ show under the big top. So many people feel stuck in service-industry jobs, mouthed off at by Kyles and Karens and snubbed by the whims of management. Others feel stuck in a Matrix–style simulation, disconnected from reality. Perhaps these feelings are behind the memes about Non-Player Characters I’ve seen circulating on the internet.[1]

            Those McGovCorp McManagers have much to gain from keeping us on the line at the fry station. A few may get promoted to assemble Happy Meals and keep the store going, but it seems only a few get to walk through the golden arches and into the gated communities beyond. In my book, having all my wants catered to by rising up the ladder of the kleptocracy is not a meaningful promotion. I’d rather have my actual needs met.  

            This is where one of the key values of the generation I was born into enters into play: slack. Generation X, the Slacker Generation, the Latchkey Kids. Though the ethic of slack doesn’t belong to one age group alone, I think Gen X has done the most to popularize the ideal in the decades since the seventies. A little extra slack may be a saving grace for those who choose to become slackers in the years to come.

            If passivity and lack of willpower are a problem, it seems strange that the idea of being a slacker is an antidote to an absence of personal agency. Slackers have been defined as people who shirk responsibility, who try to get out of work, who are disaffected, apathetic, and cynical. While I concede that these may be part of what it means to be a slacker, I deny that being a slacker means you are without ambition. The question must be: ambition for what, and for who?

            Richard Linklater, writer and director of the 1990 cult-classic indie film Slacker, talked about the word in an interview for Mondo 2000, saying that “I think the cheapest definition [of a slacker] would be someone who's just lazy, hangin’ out, doing nothing. I'd like to change that to somebody who’s not doing what’s expected of them. Somebody who's trying to live an interesting life, doing what they want to do, and if that takes time to find, so be it.”

            Another connotation of being a slacker is that you have the ability to achieve, but you are purposefully an underachiever, often out of protest to the blatant materialism of Western society.  Such conscientious objectors often end up being involved with some form of bohemian subculture. That’s the kind of slacker the 2020s would do well to see a resurgence of. If you’re not doing what’s expected of you now, that list might include not scrolling on your phone, not watching TV, not playing video games, not going to college; because you don’t do these things, you get to move past Go and receive a get out of jail free card. For me, the biggest of these are, first, to make the effort to avoid social media and mainstream media, and second, to not just be a consumer of literature, music, art, but also someone who engages with these ancient forms of leisure and recreation by making them myself, in some way or other. The deindustrial slacker is one who uses their time to  make more than consume and spectate.

Slacking off is a way to sidestep the rat race of meaningless work and the hamster wheel of 21st century busyness in favor of doing your own thing. It’s hard to learn new skills and make preparations for leaner times if there is no slack in the schedule, and you’re always strapped for time. 

            The slacker has time to think their own thoughts. From out of those thoughts, they have time to contemplate and think other related thoughts and develop their own takes on current events, rather than just regurgitating the AI-generated talking points of the talking heads.

            Often the slacker will have a job. What the slacker often won’t have is a career (in the narrow sense of the word, as something for which a person went out and got a degree, did some interning, and then landed with the perfect company). The job is often there to help them pay the bills (most Gen X slackers wanted to get out of the parental units’ house as soon as possible—and in their time that was still economically viable). In time, the work they do on the side might lead them into what sociologists have called a subcultural career: the ancillary work within various businesses necessary to maintain some of the larger subcultures.  Working for a skateboard company, doing live sound at a music venue, or having a gig as a tattoo artist or body piercer are just a few examples. I think subcultural careers could also be pivoted towards those endeavors that would be useful in a less high-tech world, such as cottage industries around the revival of lost arts that may be niche now, but will see wider adoption as the flood of cheap goods become less and less cheap.

            One way to develop such a skill and learn the lore surrounding a craft or hobby is by joining a club, guild or folk school. At the beginning of September my wife and I attended a “Gathering of the Guilds” held by the Weavers Guild of Greater Cincinnati. This group goes back to 1940’s and was founded as an educational non-profit to promote interest in handweaving. It has blossomed to teach everything from spinning, felting, knitting, dyeing, basketry and a wide variety of other fiber arts and techniques. As the Weaver’s Guild grew, they were able to buy a home to house their operations. This year in celebration of their 75th anniversary they hosted the gathering on their property as a way to showcase the rich variety of opportunities to be educated in a craft that are available in my city. It was also a chance for artisans to sell their wares. The other guilds in attendance included: Cincinnati Blacksmiths Guild, Cincinnati Book Arts Society, Clay Alliance, Contemporary Quilt and Fabric Arts, Greater Cincinnati Lapidary and Faceting Society, Ohio Valley Basketweaver's Guild, Ohio Valley Enameling Guild, Ohio Valley Woodturners Guild, and Tiger Lily Press. It seemed like a massive success, as the place was a packed hive that bustled with activity.

Folk schools provide similar opportunities for learning traditional skills. Notable examples in the United States include the John C. Campbell Folk School on the North Carolina side of the Smokey Mountains and the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota.  In addition to traditional handicrafts, some folks schools also teach dancing and music as part of their celebration of passing on culture. With so many interests and things to learn and do slackers don’t have much of a problem with  boredom. Boredom is something the slacker associates with the dominant culture, because it rhymes with banality. For all their supposed inactivity, they get a lot done, and it’s nice to have a conversation with them because they tend to be readers and learners with active interests in a variety of topics. The reason for their disaffection is because of their actual devotion to helping the bohemian diaspora to flourish. This is why they will devote Saturday afternoons to hosting actual radio shows that play underground music, or keeping the lights on at an independent gallery or bookstore where they’ve stayed after to clean up the leftover wine and beer bottles after the poetry reading.

            Boredom is something they’ve even learned to cultivate and accept, because when boredom arrives it is a symptom that they haven’t been paying enough attention, and perhaps a reminder that maybe they’ve been consuming too much and not making enough. Stretches of coasting may be acceptable to any given slacker, but only while they catch their breath to prepare for another uphill climb.

             Through immersion in bohemia the slacker has come to have a heightened aesthetic sense (whether or not one slacker agrees with the tastes of another is a different matter). Through the extended contemplation of books, art, music, and film, it is easier for them to see through the mass-produced simulacrum that’s often passed off as art in the marketplace. Knowing quality is out there, they’d rather forgo tripe to focus on what truly nourishes them. As often as not this includes the creation of their own contributions to the great conversation. (And whether or not their own contributions ever get conversed about is a different matter.)  

            Thus, to be a slacker takes willpower. It’s an effort, especially when sustained. Some don’t make it. They give up in favor of entrance to the golden arches of the gated community. As Herman Hesse wrote in his novel The Journey to the East, “Once in their youth the light shone for them; they saw the light and followed the star, but then came reason and the mockery of the world; then came faint-heartedness and apparent failure; then came weariness and disillusionment, and so they lost their way again, they became blind again.”

            Finding the star again, when assailed on all sides, requires willpower, and an assuredness of a fate and destiny drawing one on to something that can’t be found in the workaday world governed by McGovCorp. As one line in Linklater’s movie has it, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.”

The aspiring slacker who has managed to free up some lost time needs to remain on guard.

“Thee voluntary relinquishing ov responsibility for our lives and actions is one ov thee greatest enemies ov our time,” Genesis P-Orridge wrote in the T.O.P.Y. Manifesto. P-Orridge further wrote on the theme that “Time can be a tool, a liberator, or an oppressor. When we claim time back for ourselves we are at last learning to be free and effective. Control needs time like a junkie needs junk. To escape control we must re-embrace our given time.”

Perhaps it is just my middle age, but it seems like our collective waste of time has only gotten worse since Thee Temple ov Psychic Youth was founded in 1981. It’s become a reality crisis, and it’s related to decision fatigue, another side effect of life within the dominant culture.

Crisis. It’s a word of Greek origin rooted in the verb krinein, “to decide.” While I am all for making wise choices, I think sometimes it is better for those of us who get stuck in analysis paralysis just to choose something and start doing it, if only for the satisfaction of taking action. The inability to decide has claimed many already. The band Negativland had a saying from their album Free  that I come back to often: “Too many choices is no choice at all.” The plethora of choices supposedly offered these days is rather superficial, and they are often presented in binaries: Microsoft or Apple, Pepsi or Coke, Wendy’s or McDonald’s, Netflix or Hulu. All the choices we have to make in our day-to-day life can end up giving a person decision fatigue, and when they finally are presented with a swath of time to do as they please, they may find it is easier to turn on the tube than spend an hour practicing guitar or reading a book about ecology.

Yet, like other kinds of tiredness, decision fatigue can be shaken off. Making small decisions and taking small actions help to develop the willpower necessary for greater acts of will and purpose. Movement and activity dissipate the possibility of the early-onset rigor mortis typified by the “life” of couch potatoes.  

For those of us who wish to collapse now and avoid the rush, the time is always now. We can seek the moments in-between to apply some of the remaining oil to those parts of ourselves that may be in danger of rusting out from not being used or exercised.  There are few of us humans who ever reach the height of our inherent capacities. The potentials inside us are like a syrup that add to the sweetness of life if only they are tapped. Rest may at times be needed, but rust sets in when rest is no longer regenerative.

To direct our mental and physical abilities with consistency and effectiveness takes practice and the development of new habits and self-imposed limits that give added impetus to self-determination and direction of energy. A few simple pointers here will suffice.[1] The saying “Nothing to it, but to do it” is a good start. In other words, whatever it is you have in mind, just start doing it. As one of the characters in the movie Slacker put it, “Who's ever written a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?” There is an irony I have seen at work over the years: the amount of time and energy spent trying not to do something could have been more easily put into getting a task done, with time at the end left over for munching on a donut and having that third cup of coffee. Waiting for the perfect time to get started is will-weakening. While I concede there is an art to good timing, waiting for perfect conditions is an exercise in futility, and excuses and distractions are liable to pile up. On the road to a dark age, adjusting expectations in acceptance of a flawed existence may be a positive mindset to adopt.

The quest for perfection can also be a danger in finishing a task. “Perfect is the enemy of done,” as another saying goes. Unfinished jobs and projects have a way of weighing down the psyche. It’s an experience I’m very familiar with, and finishing what I start has become for me as much a matter of practicality as it is a habit that gives added strength to finish the next thing that I start. This relates to the idea of not putting off things we find difficult or unpleasant. A case can be made that we are better off doing these things first, rather than last. If a reward helps us finish a task, the thought of the cold beer to be had at the end of an arduous day working outside in the sun on your urban homestead might be what you need to get you through the tedium. 

The right amount of rest, before it turns into sloth and constant napping, is equally important in the wise use of willpower. Those who are tired, irritable and discontent are liable to do whatever is the easiest activity just to escape boredom. The dominant culture encourages this kind of mindless self-indulgence. The easiest activities tend to be those that are more harmful than helpful like snacking when one isn’t hungry, and otherwise being fed empty calories that clog the imaginal system via the screen.

​One of the gifts that comes from slack is time to get real about our needs, wants and wonts in life. I think this was one of the unexpected positive outcomes of the lockdowns during the first year of Covid-19 (all other aspects surrounding that thorny issue aside). The frantic [1] race to accumulate the largest hoard of crap stopped for many, at least for a little while. Some used that opportunity to re-calibrate their lives and minds. The local parks that spring were the busiest I’ve ever seen them and people were getting outside walking and being active. For many it was an opportunity to embrace  silence, as the chatter and stress of constant overstimulation had disappeared for a spell.

For others there was panic, a feeling of flatness and even further withdrawal into isolation. They escaped the stress of the situation, not out into nature, or by taking time to work on their hobbies or personal interests, but by going deeper into the simulacra of life and community that the internet offers. As the lockdown showed, the opening up of slack time may drive some of our fellows into various forms of binge behavior.

For one teenager in Brooklyn, the use of social media during the lockdown took on a troubling turn. Logan Lane became “completely consumed” with the online personality she had created. Then one day, after getting burned out on the endless scroll, she was so sick of it all that she put her phone in a box. It was after she put her phone away that she started experiencing some of the freedoms I took for granted as a teenager: checking books out from the library and going to the park to read, meeting up with other teens and getting into graffiti, going to shows. Her newfound freedoms spurred her to write a text called the Luddite Manifesto, and spurred her parents to make her start carrying a flip phone on her jaunts around the city, after she “lost” her smart phone. When she met another teen at an all-ages punk show who also had a flip phone, the two bonded over their distaste for social media. These experiences led her to form the Luddite Club with her new friend. An actual  group of people who meet in person, and whose aim is self-liberation by excising themselves from social media and taking a skeptical view of technology. In cutting off their phones they’ve cut themselves some slack.[1] Group meetings typically take place at parks and involve playing acoustic guitar, reading books, writing, and watercolor painting.

Logan Lane has really taken to the analog life and has adopted the use of a sewing machine, typewriter, and Sony cassette player as part of the technological limits she has set for herself. As the Luddite Club organically attracted members from around New York City, the teens talked about opening other chapters based on location, and what might happen when they graduated. I hope their example inspires others to continue and  start Luddite Clubs of their own. [Note: Some time after I wrote this article originally, numerous other Luddite Club's have formed around the country.]

People like these who have taken steps to downshift and simplify their lives, will have a lot to teach those who can’t or won’t give up some of their stimulation ahead of time. These are the slackers of tomorrow who will be able to show others how to get by with less things and more time.

In these moments of slack we can delve into such pastimes as three-sided chess, mathematical theory, formal logic, and philosophical inquiry that develop the cerebral side of life. Others may get into weightlifting, jogging, skateboarding, or shooting hoops, and other activities that are largely physical. Playing and listening to music, writing and reading poetry, and the practice of empathetic listening to friends and family help develop the side of ourselves that is emotional. Soldering circuit boards, playing with vacuum tubes, or fixing bikes and keeping old machines running are all hobbies that advance abilities within the technical and mechanical . Hosting dinner parties, starting a Green Wizards meetup or Luddite Club, or getting involved within an existing order or society  all enhance our lives as animals who are social. Between these different focuses are many areas that overlap in the liminal. Neglected by many, reviled by those with a reductive materialist mindset as trivial, are those practices and activities that fall under the broad canopy of the magical. Working in any of these areas, or the many others not listed, is a useful hedge against the anomie of Western civilization in the time of its dotage and decline.

[1] All of them that I’m aware of are videos, but see, for example: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/56692/1/are-npc-video-game-the-new-main-character-syndrome-tiktok. Think real-life people putting on the blank faces and stereotyped body movements of video game background characters.

​[1]The full story on the Luddite teens is well worth reading. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html

​RE/SOURCES: 
Here are some books, films, and music you might like, but you don’t have to take this slacker’s word for it. 

Atkinson, William Walker. The Will: Its Nature, Power, and Development. 1909. YogeBooks PDF, 2012. Available for free here: https://www.yogebooks.com/english/atkinson/1909will.pdf   
​This book on the development of willpower is well worth examining by those who don’t mind a little taste of occultism. These techniques can be applied as much to the practical matters of everyday living as they can to the planes beyond the physical. 

Dobbs, J.R. “Bob”. The Book of the Subgenius. New York, NY.: Simon & Schuster, 1987. The following hype from the front pages  says a lot of what you need to know. “Sometimes a book goes too far. Sometimes is... now. First—there was The Gilgamesh. Then... the Bhagavad-Gita. Then... the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran. Then... the Book of Mormon, Dianetics, I’m OK You’re OK. And now...The Book of the Subgenius (How to Prosper in the Coming Weird Times)”. Is it a religion? Is it a practical joke? Is it somewhere in between? You decide.
Folk School Alliance. < https://www.folkschoolalliance.org/> This website is a great general resource and includes a directory of folk schools around the United States.

Greer, John Michael.  “Slack! An Irreverent Proposal” <https://www.ecosophia.net/slack-an-irreverent-proposal/> This post from the spring of 2022 gets into Discordianism, The Church of the Subgenius, efficiency, resilience and the different ways slack can be used. 

Hesse, Herman. Rosner, Hilda, translator. The Journey to the East. New York, NY.: Noonday Press, 1956. In this novel, the narrator H.H. joins a group called The League, going on a pilgrimage through time and space in search of timeless wisdom. 

Hodgkinson, Tom. How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto. New York, NY.: HarperCollins, 2005. Hodgkinson is also the editor of the much recommended Idler Magazine (https://www.idler.co.uk/). In this funny book he defends the good life and writes about laziness, idleness, and slack from the perspective of a lounging philosopher, taking in literature, art and history along the way.  

Linklater, Richard. Slacker. 1990; Austin, TX: Detour Film Production, 1990. Film. In general you won’t find me recommending too many movies in this column, but there will be exceptions. This film follows the life of a bunch of bohemians and misfits over the course of a single day in Austin, Texas. Their dialogues and monologues touch on all kinds of subjects from politics to daily life, through a philosophic lens.  

Moshowitz, Zvi. < https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/> I found this article by way of Jeff Russel’s musings on slack (see below). Moshowitz looks at slack as “The absence of binding constraints on behavior.”
Negativland. Dispepsi. 1997, Seeland, Seeland 017. CD. Listening to this album, to me, has always been an education in advertising and binary thinking, as well as a good laugh.

O’Driscoll, Dana. “Reskilling, Rebuilding Community, and Exploring Folk Traditions at the John. C. Campbell Folk School.” < https://thedruidsgarden.com/2023/06/11/reskilling-and-folk-traditions-at-the-john-c-campbell-folk-school/> O’Driscoll’s blog is one of my go-to spots for learning about everything from Druidry to permaculture. This essay is about her experience spending a week at the John C. Campbell Folk School learning bookbinding.

Petrek, Melissa; Hines, Alan. "Withdrawing in Disgust Is Not the Same as Apathy: Cutting Some Slack with Richard Linklater". Mondo 2000 No. 9, p. 81. 1993.

P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer. Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Port Townsend, WA.: Feral House. 2010.

Russel, Jeff Powel. “A Few Thoughts On Slack.” < https://jpowellrussell.com/#a_few_thoughts_on_slack>. Jeff Russel is a frequent commenter on the blogs of John Michael Greer and his own blog focuses on the variety of topics that interest him. His post on Slack came after he spent some time reading The Book of the Subgenius. His take goes more into how “slack means you do what you want.” 

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LEGEND TRIPPING, THE DEINDUSTRIAL GOTHIC, AND A WORLD FULL OF MONSTERS

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​“The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own”—Frank Zappa

One of the ironies in my life is my long standing love affair with the industrial music genre and my interest in deindustrial themes. The origins of industrial music go back to the band Throbbing Gristle and the label they started in 1976: Industrial Records.  The intention behind their record label was to “to explore the psychological, visual, and aural territory suggested by the term ‘Industrial.’ ”  Industrial music began around the same time as punk rock, and there was a lot of crossover between these subcultures. One of the things I found so inspiring was the DIY ethos at work in these scenes. There were differences too, though. Genesis P-Orridge noted how “the punk rockers said, ‘Learn three chords and form a band.’ And we thought, ‘Why learn any chords?’ We wanted to make music like Ford made cars on the industrial belt. Industrial music for industrial people.”

The industrial music aesthetic and its engagement and critique of the effect of machinery and factories on our culture sucked me right in. Teenage angst played no small part either. Now I’m settling into my own middle age and I’ve already seen many of the original movers and shakers of industrial and punk music die from the effects of hard living. The others who have been luckier, or wiser, are now also starting to trickle away. Industrialism itself continues to take one nosedive after another on the path of decline. The time is ripe to consider deindustrial music for deindustrial people.

As the resources that prop up today’s popular musicians become scarce, so too will the possibility of listening to music with a swipe of a finger. In the later stages of the long descent recorded music may only be available to listen to when received from radio stations where the engineers and technicians keep equipment and storage media in working order, or at libraries that have dedicated time and energy to preserving a selection of formats. The stadium concert, with its vast energy intakes, will still be possible on smaller scales and in buildings designed on acoustic principles that make up for lack of loudspeakers and amplification, as has been the case in musical halls devoted to classical music and opera. Opera used to be much more popular than it is today, and a ticket could be had for a not-outrageous cost. Someone in San Francisco who wanted to see Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in 1875 could get in for a buck, or about $27 in the dollars of today; personally, I consider any concert less than forty bucks relatively cheap compared to the outrageous costs and fees of top-tier touring acts.[1] If the music business doesn’t continue to gouge its audience, cheaper concerts for national acts and large ensembles could come back.

Listening to local musicians in small venues will become the norm. Admission is often free in bars and cafes, though buying at least a drink is often expected. Music in the home will be played on pianos, fiddles, didgeridoos and other acoustic instruments. Folks will be invited over for front-porch sessions and barn dances. Music in all its diverse variety will still be sought to soothe our emotions and uplift the soul. It may not be quite as electric as it has been, though even that would still be possible on a smaller scale.  

Music is a broad topic and tastes are very individual, even when eclectic. Many different tangents could be followed towards different musical futures. As a form of cheap entertainment in a world with less energy, stuff, and stimulation, it seems that the religious dimensions and spiritual dimensions of music are worth looking into here. In the 20th century as scientific rationalism and a fundamentalist materialism spread in the West, many people left behind the religion they were raised in, and others were raised with no religion at all. In many cases the emotional power of popular music and the mass gatherings at concert halls and stadiums have become a surrogate, replacing the emotional release, rapture and instruction once given by churches, synagogues and temples.  Charismatic rock stars share many similarities with fired-up preachers, and there are now many different denominations to choose from in the form of genres, bands, and artists. As the long decline unfolds all of us will be faced with different tragedies, personal, local, and national. One of the most common ways people cope with trauma is through religion. However in a society where the old religious paths have overgrown into tangled thickets, the cathartic effects of music can be useful to help people heal. Some of the popular styles of music today may even become forms of religious music in our tomorrows.

​ I think it is safe to say there will be a fair number of goat songs in the future, just as there are now. That is, songs about tragedy. Tragedy has two Greek roots, tragos meaning “goat” and oide meaning “song.” These goat songs referred to the dramas about traumas put on by the ancient dramaturges. Dressed in the skins of goats to represent satyrs, these singers incanted their tales of universal woe.

Tragedies were originally performed at the annual festival for the god Dionysus in Athens, and the plays were largely chanted. Some of the ancient Greek and Roman writers state that a goat was given away as a prize to those who put on the best performance.  Later Christian writers speculated the goats may have been sacrificed; it seems the fear of goat-hoofed devil music has a provenance that extends back long before the Satanic panic of the 1980s. 

Aristotle believed that a poet or dramatist showed their skill through the careful arrangement of episodes to evoke emotions of fear, pity and amazement. He preferred for the tragic crisis to be brought about by passionate deeds that resulted in  unexpected destruction or downfall. He opined that the best subject of a tragedy was not a person who was wicked at heart, but that of fortunate person who gets thrown under the wheel of fate by making a mistake. Tragedy can have a noble effect on the human soul by bringing about catharsis, the cleansing of strong emotion through its purification and release, the cathartic effect first being experienced by the performers and then transmitted to the audience.

Release from the tragedies faced by people in deindustrial times might be offered by bards and musicians whose songs could offer catharsis for the feelings brought on by living in a time of massive cultural disarrangement and all the warring and violence that implies.  Before true-crime books were ever popular, and before rap music—which may well go on to form a new mode of epic poetry[1]—jumped on to the stage to bust out rhymes about violence and killing from all angles, the murder ballad was a mainstay of traditional song. Brought to America by English, Scottish, and Irish folk singers, this roots music was one of the threads woven into what became the genre of country as known today. The murder ballad remains a part of that form and offers today’s listeners a sense of release.

The oft-considered Father of Country Music was a man by the name of Jimmie Rodgers. Born in 1897 to a railroading father in the rough-and-tumble railroading town of Meridian, Mississippi, he became a railroader himself. Rodgers ran away from home on numerous occasions to join up with traveling shows, where he got a taste for music and the rambling way of life. In addition to the hillbilly and blues styles Rodgers heard growing up, he developed a taste for vaudeville and was inspired to try his own hand at show business. He worked as a brakeman on the railway to support his wife and children, singing and playing on the side, and his several songs about trains earned him the name the Singing Brakeman.

Rodgers eventually took his family to Asheville, North Carolina where he wore different musical hats, playing Tin Pan Alley tunes as well as hillbilly stuff. When talent scout Ralph Peer came to an area near the Virginia-Tennessee border looking for acts to audition for Victor records, Rodgers took the chance and rode that train all the way to stardom. Among the many famous and influential songs he recorded was the American murder ballad “Frankie and Johnny.” It tells the tale of a women who comes home to find her man in the arms of another gal: “She took a little forty-four / rootie toot toot three times / she shot through that hard wood door / shot her man / he was doing her wrong.” Rodgers’ version starts off with, and is interspersed with, his trademark yodel. In this version Frankie’s eventual fate is the electric chair. The Father of Country Music had done his part in continuing the tradition of the tragic murder ballad.  

Another one of the Singing Brakeman’s cuts had a much stranger fate. A tribe in East Africa known as the Kipsigi developed a small cult around Jimmie Rodgers. The Kipsigi were first introduced to gramophone records somewhere in the 1950s and one of the vinyl platters they had was by Rodgers. They pronounced his name as “Chemirocha” and they revered him for his guitar playing ability and thought his instrument was similar to their own stringed lyre, the chepkong.  The Kipsigi found his yodel to sound like a goat.  The girls in the tribe began to believe that Chemirocha was a deity in the form of a kind of centaur, half man and half antelope.

The example of what happened to the recordings of Jimmie Rodgers when they found their way to Africa is only one possibility of the kind of cult that may develop around certain musicians. If a musician is powerful enough they may attain the status of a demigod or saint in the spiritual traditions that get born out of the turmoil to come. Just as religions developed around the teachings of Orpheus and Pythagoras, new mystery cults may be born among fringe subcultures. 

There are many different possible paths a musical cult could take, as divergent as current spiritual paths and styles of music. Some that seem familiar to us now, may not exist as such in the various branches of our futures. Others that are obscure and may seem like the refuge of only a handful of fanatics may go on to become the seeds of movements that become mainstream.

David Holmgren, the co-founder of permaculture, suggests to “use edges and value the marginal.” Something that may only seem like the obsession of a few who are off to the edge of the crowd now, could become common in time. In Wendell Berry’s book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture he writes of the “widening margin of the divergent possibilities” that exist within any system. Just as monocropping isn’t good for the land, the monotony of dominant styles can leave ripe and fertile areas unexplored. These unexplored areas on our cultural edges may be worth spending time in to see if there are useful elements, musical or otherwise, to extract and bring into the greater fold of the collective.  [2] 

For instance, the subculture around ambient, drone and minimalist music might become the seedbed for a new contemplative wordless music. Ambient is very often thought of as just something listened to for its relaxing qualities, or as something to have on in the background while concentrating on other tasks. Yet it has received levels of devotion most often thought of as the reserve of monastics and sadhus. An interesting case for this type of music involves a group of people I call the “disciples of the drone,” led by Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and his chief students La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. 

 Pandit Pran Nath was an Indian classical singer born in Lahore (present-day Pakistan) in 1918. He was privileged to hear many live performances from the masters of Indian traditional vocal music as a kid, and started singing at age six. At thirteen he made the decision to devote his life to music and left home, much to the distress of his mother.  He attached himself as a disciple to Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, the most distinguished master of the Kirana gharana (roughly, “Kirana school”), a style whose lineage is traced all the way back to St. Gopal Nayak in the 12th century.

In 1970 Young and Zazeela helped bring Pran Nath to New York City. They wanted a formal education in Indian classical music, and Pran Nath initiated them into his lineage, making them his first Western disciples. The couple lived with him in the traditional gurukula manner, where the disciples attend to various chores and duties while learning from the master. Young and Zazeela studied and performed with Nath for a total of twenty-six years. Nath went on to teach a number of musicians inside and outside of Young’s avant-garde circle. Many of these were devotees of minimalism. They began to incorporate drones and Indian ideas about tuning and scale into their emergent styles. They also began playing with long-sustained durations. Many of Pran Nath’s students went on to exert an influence on the development [5] of the ambient genre.

As old religious impulses are revived, and as new impulses are born in the deindustrial era, I can see a situation arising where esoteric music schools and lineages, such as the one represented by Pran Nath and his disciples, pass on their trade secrets of music theory and practice. The constellation of musicians around Pandit Pran Nath is admittedly a niche within an already small subculture. Yet ideas from the fringe can go on to have strange impacts on the larger society.

 In 2016 music producer Brian Sweeney began to organize events under the rubric of Ambient Church, promoting “group immersions into modern contemplative, otherworldly, and universal music through site-specific audio and visual performance.” All the events are held in churches because Sweeney’s aim was to bring a connection to the sacred through music, where the play of light, sound, and incense all lend themselves to the creation of a liminal space. No dogma is preached at the Ambient Church, as belief or its absence is left up to the individual. These creedless events do, though, fill a need for connection to divinity, however it may be conceived. Sweeney has said, “Music is spiritual, and if you come with an intention of finding transcendence, you’ll experience it...churches were built for transcendence.”

In deindustrial times such shrines and holy places as Ambient Churches could still exist sans electricity. There are plenty of ways to create long sustained drones with acoustic instruments and light shows can be created with lamps, candles and other means. One of the longest musical performances in the world is going on right now—if it can be sustained through the long descent. John Cage’s ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) has so far been running for over 21 years (including a 17-month pause) at the time of this writing, and is scheduled to last until 2640.  The work is being played on an organ in a church in Halberstadt, Germany, with note changes about every 6 to 18 months,[1] Given enough disciples to play this long-form contemplative music, a type of minimalist monasticism may emerge. One of the good things about long wordless music is that it gives a focus for contemplation without imposing a specific dogma or creed. If the Ambient Church movement takes hold it could provide community and solace for people in rough times without imposing a specific set of beliefs or doctrines on those who come in search of transcendence.

Other spiritual impulses seen within our recent music history are less obscure.  For the devoted deadhead the concert itself is a spiritual experience. The other deadheads at concerts shared a common community around the attainment of altered states of consciousness, induced by liberal amounts of marijuana and LSD. The songbook of the Grateful Dead was similar to the hymnbooks in a Christian congregation. The familiar songs, transformed and varied upon in long improvisations, formed part of the gel that brought the community together. Psychedelicized and outside of ordinary consciousness, the deadheads experienced mystical states as they danced and reveled. The feeling of togetherness provided a cohesion as they started to come down. It may not have have been religion in the traditional sense, but it was spiritual, and the deadheads had their own iconography of tie-dyed bears, roses, skeletons, and other imagery, often worn, that served to identify one member of the cult to another.

The shared bond was carried over into alternative living arrangements and an entire subculture built around following the band as a lifestyle. They formed a vast network of people who shared resources in the spirit of community. An underground economy emerged around the band as they toured, with vans selling grilled cheeses and hippie food to concertgoers, and people who taped the live concerts bartering and trading recordings with each other as kind of secondary currency. Some of this subculture has carried over to the spin-off groups made up of former Grateful Dead members, and jam bands inspired by the ethos of Garcia and company that go on tour and play the festival circuits.  All of this continues to be a presence in American alternative culture.

I can easily imagine the initiated acolytes of the current jam bands continuing to form their own traveling bands who perform at ever more homespun regional and national festivals. People would come to experience their music with all the fervency of a tent revival. In deindustrial times the alternative network would provide concert spaces, crash pads, equipment, food and other material for making the events happen. Locals would come for the music, mushrooms, beer, and festivity, and leave transformed. Perhaps devotees would still travel along with the bands, following in horse-drawn carts, perhaps working as part of the traveling show’s operation. Townie fans would wait with bated breath until the next flier runner to come to town ahead of the band, and help plaster up telegraph and radio poles with hand-printed psychedelic posters. There may yet come the day when a mother will be afraid that her child will not just run off to join a circus, but to join a freaky group of latter-day troubadours, playing their endless acoustic drones, afraid they won’t ever hop a train back home.

To circle back to industrial music briefly, a third cult of music developed around Psychic TV, the group Genesis P-Orridge founded after the dissolution of Throbbing Gristle. Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, or TOPY, was formed by P-Orridge in 1981 as a kind of tongue-in-cheek response to the notion of band fan clubs. It differed in that it was a fellowship and network of chaos magicians, artists, musicians, and ’zine and media makers centered around practicing  magic and creating art. TOPY members were those in the vanguard, popularizing the now ubiquitous tattoos, body piercing, and gender blending at a time when these activities were still frowned upon. Numerous writings, artworks, pieces of music, and acts of magic came out of the work of TOPY members.  The key texts were assembled by P-Orridge into Thee Psychick Bible. 

These are just three examples, derived from some of my own musical tastes and inclinations, out of the diverse and kaleidoscopic world of music. I’m sure readers of New Maps can find examples of other subgenres and styles that would have potential useful benefits to pass on to coming generations. Let us also not forget the practical benefits of playing music. Learning to read and play sheet music can sharpen the mind. Knowing how to play a song by heart gives the player a memory workout. The finger or vocal work involved in playing keeps the body nimble. Learning to play with others teaches us to listen to them and work towards harmony. With a modicum of skill and devoted time each of us can learn enough to entertain ourselves, friends, and family and keep spirits bright in troubled times. Those who go on to become master musicians will, at their best, be able to expand listeners’ consciousness and touch their very souls. 

NOTES:

​[1]McIntyre, Douglas. “The History of What Things Cost in America: 1776 to Today.” 24/7 Wall St., Sep. 16, 2010.

​[1] Though poetry and song are connected at the joint, the topic is too broad to tackle in this article. Perhaps I’ll take up in the future. In the meantime check out Wesley Stine's story "Luke Maxwell" in the Fall '21 issue of New Maps if you haven’t already. Also worth a read is John Michael Greer’s essay “Writing as a Microcosm 3: The Spontaneity Trap” that broaches the topic of rap as a future form of epic poetry. https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-microcosm-3-the-spontaneity-trap/

[1]See the John Cage Organ Project for further details: https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-halberstadt

RE/SOURCES:

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint. 2015.

Hammon, N.G.L., and Scullard, H.H., eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Holmgren, David. Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. Hepburn, Victoria, Australia: Holmgren Design Services, 2002.

Keefe, Alexander.  “Lord of the Drone: Pandit Pran Nath and the American Underground.” Bidoun, 2010. https://www.bidoun.org/articles/lord-of-the-drone

Langer, Ken.  “The Ambient Church: Seeking the Spiritual Through the Power of Music.” Klanger’s Page (website), n.d.  https://sites.google.com/site/klangerdude/home/ministry/papers/the-ambient-church-movement

Miller, M.H.  “The Man Who Brian Eno Called ‘the Daddy of Us All.’ ” New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Magazine, July 22, 2020.  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/t-magazine/la-monte-young.html
Piaza, Tom. Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America. New York, N.Y.: Harper Perennial, 2011.

P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer. Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Port Townsend, Wash.: Feral House, 2010.

Richardson, Peter. No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 2015.

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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:
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A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

DREAM FORAGING

STREAM FORAGING

THE DOWNWARDLY MOBILE DANDY AND THE TRAILER PARK QUAINTRELLE

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

LEGEND TRIPPING, THE DEINDUSTRIAL GOTHIC, AND A WORLD FULL OF MONSTERS

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. 

Following the success of the original JAMCON in 1984, it is now time to the bring the convention of cultural signal jamming back to the future. A lot has changed in the cultural landscape over the  intervening 42 years. Ham radio, CB’s and illegal operation of said equipment to jam the same over a network of interlinked repeater systems doesn’t hold the same appeal to todays bored teenager or artistic adult looking for an enjoyable way to spend time making pranks over the airwaves. There are still plenty of signals to jam, but most of these are now controlled and operated at the data centers operated by the Borg hive mind. Artificial Idiotic slop must now be fought with Analog Intelligence.
 
For this reason the Situationist Intergalactical has put the call out for any Mentat who may wish to use their skills in the battle of the Borg. It has come to our attention that AI Slop is actually a form of soul sickness, known to some under the name of “garmonbozia.” It is a product of “pain and sorrow” emanating from certain subetheric entities who are inhabiting the internet and use it as a way to create conflict and anomie in human beings. These entities, who use silicon as a host, are currently coalescing into the form of huge data center cubes from which they will beam their phasers, currently set to stupefy.
 
It has been thought that one way to minimize the potential damage of Artificial Idiocy is to develop Analog Intelligence. For more on this, please see the Mentat Handbook, which should be seen only as a starting point, not as the sole authority on the matter. In the battle against the Borg, a multipronged approach is most helpful. As heirs to many different cultural and subcultural movements, we have taken it upon ourselves to reinvigorate once again the dada art movement. With its focus on irrationality, it seems to be immune to the cold logic emanating from the coded computers of the data centers. That’s why one of our charms against the digital monstrosity is the mantra “dada not data” or “dada centers not data centers.” Either works to rewire the brain in favor of sound poetry and analog cut-up techniques not  possible with the reductionist techbro version of recombinant art.

Jamcon ’26 also operates on homeopathic principles. The first is that “Like cures like.” This is the idea  that a disease, in this case Artficial Idiocy, can be cured by a substance that produces similar symptoms in healthy people. In other words AI slop can be fought using AI slop. For this some hacker skills are useful. If those with the knowhow start sending sending garbage each and every time a bot from meta, openai, anthropic, googleai make an appearance and feed them garbage, the system itself will go septic. Inputting dada into the data will help the process along because dada does not compute. This can be accomplished through shitposting strange experimental texts on all your unfavorite platforms, or with technical know how if you have the know how. 

The second homeopathic law to be applied is the “Law of minimum dose.” As a citizen of the American empire it is hard to not always reach for more, and that bigger is always better. Yet little and often is another way to have large lasting effects. Homeopathy notes that the lower the dose of the medicine, the greater its effectiveness is. Small scale dada inserts into the data sets might be enough to throw off the Borg and jam its circuitry. Many homeopathic products are so diluted that no molecules of the original substance remain. Even so, they somehow seem to cause shifts in entire systems. Operating from the sidelines in small doses can thus lead to dramatic changes across entire systems. It is not so much about reaching critical mass as it is about reaching an effective fringe.
 
 Still, for those of you who may be wondering about the whole thing, maybe never heard of JAMCON ‘84 , we have a little refresher for you on the original its continuing importance. It all started in 1984 when a group of culture jammers decided to start messing with incoming and outgoing signals over the airwaves. Once again we have Crosley Bendix and the Universal Media Netweb to thank for their efforts.

​JAMCON '84 was one of the early efforts of Bendix and the experimental media collective Negativland in association with the shows that they released under the auspices of the Universal Media Netweb, transmitted locally to the Bay Area over KPFA, part of the pacifica network of radio stations, on the Over the Edge show. The original radio album was edited together from a number of these transmissions, which themselves were edited together from other transmissions, scanning, and radio work by the delectable culprits involved.
 
During these broadcasts Crosley Bendix coined the term “culture jamming.” It was later taken up with gusto by the likes of Kalle Lasn and his work with Adbusters and others. Major precedents for culture jamming go back to the Letterists and Situationist International and their deployment of détournement. This is a broad term for practices that take the language and rhetoric of mainstream culture to subversively critique the social institutions that produce that culture. These two groups were of course indebted to the surrealists and dadaists of old. Their official rejections of various aspects of the Surrealist program reveal their own metaphysical anxieties. Their anxieties however, need not be our own. Other groups such as the Billboard Liberation Front, the Firesign Theater, or the pranks of Joey Skaggs and Abbie Hoffman, can be seen as part of the lineage.
 
To go back to Bendix, he put it this way in one of the JAMCON ’84 broadcasts, “As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skillfully reworked billboard... directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large.”
 
Now we are not up against the signals of the legacy media so much, though they are there as constant background noise and irritation, as we are against the collision of multiple fragmented media siloes whose outputs are being amalgamated and fed into the Borg. The purposeful enshitification of Artificial Idiocy itself is one strategy against this computational architecture, hence the announcement of JAMCON ’26.
 
This convention is in no way organized. It is decentralized. But wherever you are in the web of existence, certain threads may be vibrated. Find the ones that you can vibrate, and jam on, because we don’t have enough dada.

Special thanks to John O'Neil for the JAMCON '26 idea.

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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. 

I listen to far more newly released music than I read newly released books. I do tend to read at least a few recently published books each year, but not nearly as much as I listen to newly released music. One of the joys of working at the library is having easy access to books from many eras, and to read where my interests go and flow. This has been essential to my own research and my pleasure. As with music, I don’t think there is a best book. (Or “one true book” for that matter.) I certainly have favorites, but as with music, my favorites many. As the great sage Robert Fripp noted, there is a resplendence in divergence.  Yet all are part of the whole joy that is the body of literature. Within that resplendent divergence are both fiction and nonfiction.

(Note: I link to Bookshop.org  or publisher in the title as a place to buy the books. As an online company, Bookshop isn't as damaging to brick and mortar bookstores or to authors as is that big company online that started off by selling books. I have also written full reviews of several of these, in which case I provide the link if you want to read my thoughts in more detail. )

One of Us by Dan Chaon

One of Us by Dan Chaon is one of the few brand new novels I read this year. As soon as I saw the cover of the book and the title I already knew I wanted to read it. When I read the inside dust jacket, I knew I really wanted to read it. When I learned that Chaon was an Ohio author, and would also be at the Buckeye Book Festival, where I also had a spot, I was even more excited. So I bought the book when I was up there, got to say hello to Chaon and he signed my copy.

It is an exquisite tale. I’d call it either a historical fantasy or an occult history, leaning towards the theosophical. It concerns two twins, a brother and a sister, who seem to share a gift of telepathy. When they become orphans they get taken in by their deranged uncle, who it turns out isn’t really even an uncle at all. He just wants what they have, that is, their spiritual gifts, to use as his own. Along with a diary that was their late fathers, and associate of the lunatic before he went fully off his rocker. Escaping his clutches they get taken into the colorful world of the circus and sideshow. I love a good carnie tale. This is one of the best I ever read, and the writing, the language, is what make it so.

This is a lyrical and literary telling, with freakishly intriguing characters you grow to love an care for.

Here is that dust jacket blurb. “It's 1915 and the world is transforming, but for thirteen-year-old Bolt and Eleanor-twins so close they can literally read each other's minds-life is falling apart. When their mother dies, they are forced to leave home under the care of a vicious con man who claims to be their long-lost uncle Charlie, the only kin they have left. During a late-night poker game, when one of his rages ends in murder, they decide to flee. Salvation arrives in the form of Mr. Jengling, founder of the Emporium of Wonders and father to its many members. He adopts Bolt and Eleanor, who travel by train across the vast, sometimes brutal American frontier with their new family, watching as the exhibitions spark amazement wherever they go. There's Minnie, the three-legged lady, and Dr. Chui, who stands over seven feet tall; Thistle Britches, the clown with no nose, and Rosalie, who can foretell the death of anyone she meets. After a lifetime of having only each other, Eleanor and Bolt are finally part of something bigger. But as Bolt falls in deeper with their new clan, he finds Eleanor pulling further away from him. And when Uncle Charlie picks up their trail, the twins find themselves facing a peril as strange as it is terrifying, one which will forever alter the trajectory of their lives. An ode to the misfits and the marginalized…”

Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse

The past few years I have been trying to make an effort to always read or re-read at least one book by Herman Hesse. I’ve read quite a few. The Glass Bead Game ranks as one of my favorite novels, if I had to pick. This one I hadn’t got to yet, and I want to make sure I read all of his works as I can, because every one of them I read touches me deeply inside.

The book is set in Europe just before the time of the black plague and then during the plague. It centers on the friendship of a monk and a young man who has come into the monastery, possibly to give his life to the divine, but in the end, he gets seduced by the call of the world, and becomes a wondering homeless ladies man and then an artist.

After reading the story I got to thinking of how one of the gifts of Narcissus the monk was his ability to really and truly read a person’s inner nature. He knew Goldmund was haunted by the absence of his mother, and had an inner knowing of the path his friend would go down after he left the monastery -knowing he would live the monastery for a life "in the world." Later they are reunited after many adventures, vagaries and times of wonder on the part of Goldmund.

Goldmund alternated between losing himself in dispersion, but then all of that libidinous energy coming back around and he was able to do something useful with it in the creation of his sculptures after he had gazed upon a carved Madonna and felt the calling to the artists life. When he worked with the master artisan, he learned how to call forth all the images of the Divine Mother he had experience in all her glory and terror and was able to bring them into his own masterpiece, only to fall prey to dispersion again.

There is so much more to this story, though. As with all of Hesse’s work it hits you on multiple levels, starting with the metaphysical.

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Sometimes the best reads are rereads. Dhalgren is certainly a case in point. When I first read this at the age of twenty it blew my mind. It blew my mind again when I re-read it for the first time in just over twenty-five years. I am surprised at myself for waiting this long to reread it, because when I read it the first time, Samuel R. Delany became my favorite author for many years and I quickly read most-all of his novels and a fair amount of his critical writings in the years that followed when I was just starting out as a shelver working at the library.

My taste for some of the transgressive aspects of this novel has mellowed. The other aspects -the poetry, the critical discussions, the beauty of the dialogue, the psychogeography of Bellona, all the things about race relations, the entire section when the Kid, the books main character, is going up to the highrise apartment building and moving furniture for the Richards family, and  the unending dialogue, I continue to love. Perhaps maybe I waited so long because it was like reading the book all over again and having that love for literature, reading, poetry and writing that the book does so well to imprint on the reader came through once again with full force. As did so many of its surreal, psychological, and science fictional elements. Yes, it is a total tour de force.

Did I mention the dialogue and the dialogue in the book? Delany has such a keen ear for language. This was written in the early seventies, and it really sounds like he is transcribing directly from some of the conversations he heard, which makes this book a masterful mix of literary realism, in the dialogue and the way people speak, and of postmodern science fiction, in all of the elements that make this a book of science fiction: the two suns, the visions the cities inhabitants have, the fact that Bellona itself is a fictional city, somewhere in North America. My mind places it in the Midwest, but hey, I am biased about the Midwest, in its favor. There are the elements that make this a postmodern work of fiction. I hope that isn’t a dirty word to you. There are many more colorful dirty words in the book. The dabbling in metafiction, the playing around with time and voice, and the holes in Kids memory, his sanity or unsanity, the way the work can be read as a Möbius Strip, the way it can be read as pertaining to the experience of multistable perception, all of this added to the rich experience of reexperiencing the book. 

I read the imagery of Bellona in a new way that I did not read in the first time I walked through this urban labyrinth. Having discovered the world of “psychogeography” in the intervening years, I wonder how much of the Situationists work Delany might have read? He was well versed in French critical theory (again, I hope you don’t think it is a dirty phrase, but if you do, I guess that’s your own business). That he might have incorporated some aspects of the dérive or drift into the novel is not without question. Another thing I didn’t know when I first read the book was how Delany himself had experiences of seeing some of America’s great cities with certain neighborhoods burned out and messed up. He put these visions into his work. Knowing that now, I think it is what adds to its sense of reality.

I hope I don’t wait so long to read it again and again, or go back to his imaginary world Neveryona for that matter.

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher 

This book has been an inspiration. In part because of what I agree with Fisher about. But in a much larger part because of where I disagree with him. It fueled me creatively. His Capitalist Realism, which I read towards the end of December last year, was just as inspiring. Fisher set a high water mark for contemporary music criticism even if I don’t agree with all his conclusions, or some of his positions. In particular, I don’t find the sense of loss that he seemed with regards to the whole area of hauntology, and how most new music of the twentieth century was a rehash or even remix of what had come earlier, but that stems from me not feeling like constant progress is what deserve to have. I see history as much more cyclical. He is a writer to argue, as such, ultra-stimulating. 

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack.

I stumbled on this book while looking for speculative fiction novels from the 80s and 90s. It was amazing. A difficult read, but the language was incredibly beautiful, I wrote a full review of the book.

It is not a book for the faint of heart, but it might be good to read anyway for those who’d rather bury their heads in the sand, or medicate themselves into a false rosiness (just as the mother in this story does). Cozy this is not. Tragedy it is. The kind of happenings it raps on could well be heading to a future near you, even though some of the elements of this near future tale date it to the time it was written, 1991. Kids connecting over payphones and landlines are part of my own fond memories so I was happy to read about them talking on the house phone anyway. These tech anomalies don’t matter too much in the end, because they aren’t the focus of the tale. This is science fiction of the social variety.

[Read the rest of my sothismedias review ]

Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo. 

This was a book with a more recent publication. In it Galluzzo introduces the very important term “Critical Aquarianism.” The term “critical aquarians” alone is worth the price of entry. But there is so much more. I ended up writing a full review of this book as well.

What happened to the ecological utopian visions and visionaries that came out of the counterculture of the fifties, sixties, and seventies? Prior to the role reversal of hippies into yuppies, of the back to the land dreams transformed into jobs at a bank, a life in suburbia, and 2.5 kids, there had been an Aquarian counterculture. Those Aquarians carried a strain of thought critical of technology, unafraid of our biology, inspired by ecology, and considered alternate economies and the prospects for degrowth as a way to shift culture. This nascent tradition aimed to put the brakes on the endless expansion of the industrial system represented by all things Establishment, man. If endless growth can be thought of as a synonym for cancer, then the push for progress at all costs is metastasis. These Aquarians sought another way.

Anthony Galluzzo’s book Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today, looks at these neglected Aquarian visionaries in an effort to rattle the hypermodernist cages and the addled worldview promulgated by the transhumanist inmates of Silicon Valley.

[Read the rest of my sothismedias review]

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the Indie Underground 1981-1991 by Mike Azerrad.
 
This book was phenomenal. One of the best music books I have ever read. I wrote a few articles based off it, hope to come out with a few more still (have some in the draft hopper actually), about how it can be used as a kind of handbook for analog and underground culture. I learned so much, and the way he structured the book was itself great. A super fascinating tale of so much music that I have loved -and other groups who I didn’t really get into (Replacements, Mudhoney, Dinosaur Jr.) or didn’t hear a ton of (Butthole Surfers) … but this got me listening to all the music I missed, and going back with new ears and insights to all the music I loved. The story of the labels SST, Sub Pop, K Records, Dischord and others… it really spoke to me. How he wove it all together… it was fantastic.

[Our Band Could Be Your Life part 1] 

[Our Band Could be Your Life part 2]

Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics by S.K. Heninger 

This took me several months to read, generally a bit before bed each night. The first part on Pythagorean cosmology went faster, but the second part of the book on Renaissance poetics and how they manifested in English language during the Elizabethan age, mostly examined in the work of Sidney (Shepherds Calendar, The Fairy Queen) was absolutely fascinating. This will be a book I return to again and again, an excellent reference. I learned so much about Pythagorean thought, but also how their ideas of cosmos have continued to echo down the centuries. Recommended especially for all those interested in the music of the spheres, in “speculative music” and western esotericism in general.

America’s Greatest Noise: About RRRecords, Emil Beaulieau, and the True Sound of Love by Frans Da Waard

One of the themes now emerging from this list is how several of my favorite reads were about independent music and its spirit. Frans De Waard digs into this terrain in and even more fringeworthy way in this book about Emil Beaulileau, America’s Greatest Living Noise Artist, his record store and record label. This was another one that I wrote about, this time for Igloo…

If it is true that you imitate what you contemplate, then we should expect a new crop of labels, record stores and noise musicians putting forth their efforts after reading this audacious and inspiring book.  Reading about Ron Lessard’s life as a record store owner, a noise artist under the moniker Emil Beaulieau, as the force behind the RRRecords label, about ant-records and his custom built turntable with four-arms, the Minutoli, certainly filled me with the inspiration to make more noise, to do more in the DIY spirit, and get things out there into the world. The series of recycled music releases put out on recycled commercial cassettes are showcased here in Lessard’s own words. Alongside them are numerous tales of the American musical underground, with notable forays into Japan and Europe.

The focus is centered on the noise scene in the United States, as might be expected for a book about America’s greatest living noise artist. I love reading about most any kind of subculture, especially those that are home grown. The noise scene has a special place in my heart. I became involved in it myself through the former Art Damage radio show here in Cincinnati and the numerous shows put on by people involved with that program. It was a gateway drug into a world of broken consumer electronics, tape editing and manipulation, and feral children expressing themselves through sonic disruption in the lacerated zone of failed industry lurking between the bible belt and the rust belt...

​[Read the rest of my review on Igloo.]

Independent as F***: Underground Hip-Hop from 1995-2005 by Ben Pedroche

Having traversed the independent worlds of punk, indie rock, and noise, now it was time to get into the world of independent hip-hop which had equally important lessons to teach. This one came out in 2025 from my own publisher Velocity Press, and was thus one of the new books I read.

Hip-hop has only been a small part of my musical diet. But it’s always been there in the background, part of the soundtrack to my misspent youth skateboarding around the city. It played during the underage drinking sessions of malt liquor forties and while we passed blunts in the park or on a porch. In adulthood my listening to the genre faded quite a bit, because most of my listening was based on the records my friends had in their collections, while I was busy buying up ambient, industrial, and punk, going down into other rabbit holes of collecting. Yet I’ve always been fascinated by a variety of styles of music, and even more so, by the subcultures around them. Whether it was the Beatniks, hippies, punkers or the industrial scene I have  immersed myself in reading about, or later the danceable energy around the rave movement and moment, or the technological quests of the hacker community, if there was a subculture built around something, I’ve been interested in that subculture. In the last few years that’s manifested as reading more about graffiti and hip-hop. Independent as F*** by Ben Pedroche that came out earlier this year fits perfectly into all of this, and even covers the years when my youth was most misspent. 

One of my favorite musical histories of all is Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad. What I love about that one is how much it can act as a blue print for how to set up alternative networks in the underground. That book focused on punk, but the principles behind how the bands created their own labels, how independent labels supported independent bands, and the DIY infrastructure of zines and venues that allowed for the spread of the culture remains of vital importance. Pedroche’s book fills a critical gap in the history of independent music and does so for the vibrant scene around indie rap. The stories he tells are a kind of essential information for any creator who wishes to work independently from corporate labels and publishers.

[Read the rest of my review over at Igloo]

Merge by Walter Mosley

Merge was a short novel by Walter Mosley that captured my imagination from start to finish. It was one of the best alien contact books I ever read to boot…and it was streetwise and relatable to those who’d grown up in urban settings.

“Raleigh Redman loved Nicci Charbon until she left him heartbroken. Then he hit the lotto for twenty-four million dollars, quit his minimum wage job and set his sights on one goal: reading the entire collection of lectures in the Popular Educator Library, the only thing his father left behind after he died. As Raleigh is trudging through the eighth volume, he notices something in his apartment that at first seems ordinary but quickly reveals itself to be from a world very different from our own. This entity shows Raleigh joy beyond the comforts of twenty-four million dollars….and merges our world with those that live beyond.”

Formless Irregular by Babs Santini

This tome of an art book is going to get its own review. Every time I’ve sat down to look at it, I’ve gotten gobsmacked by the ostranenie. Having high quality reproductions of the cover art of so many Nurse With Wound, Coil, Current 93 and Legendary Pink Dots albums that I love dearly is just part of the sinister beauty of this book. More thoughts soon, but they are so formless, and the book so vast, it has been difficult gathering the ectoplasm together.

There were of course many other great reads that I read this year... these are just a few of my favorites. Thanks for tuning in and reading with me.
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.:. .:. .:.
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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

It’s that time of year where putative critics pontificate about the “best” things that came out in the past twelve months. I never very much liked this aspect of being a music writer. That begs the question of why am I making a favorites of 2025 post? I do think it is helpful to review and remind myself, and perhaps my readers, of all the good material there is that is new in the world from artists working today. What I don’t like about it is when these lists say “top” or “best.” I just don’t think there is a best. I think there is stuff that I like, and stuff that I don’t care for as much, and stuff that you like, and stuff that you don’t care for as much. What I think is bitchin and cool as fuck, you may think sucks, and vice versa, and that is fine. Furthermore, I've never been a fan of thinking of the arts as a competition. I like to view the arts as a rich exchange full of possibility for cooperation.

As a music fan, and radio DJ my goal has always been to just share music that I love and am excited about. Here are some things I got excited about in 2025 and that are still exciting enough to warrant talking about again.

​There is always so much to listen to, read and explore, so I think the value of these kind of lists now is in helping people to go back and find some things they may have missed once the hype cycles are over. Old favorites return to the studio and show up with new offerings, and new-to-me artists grace us with their gifts and offerings.

Where I have reviewed an album for Igloo Magazine I have included a link if you care to dig in deeper to my thoughts on a particular work.

SCANNER & NURSE WITH WOUND: CONTRARY MOTION

Two great collaborators join together for the first time in a new collaboration. Call it an alchemical fusion in a marriage of true minds. Robin Rimbaud & Steven Stapleton have both collaborated with a ton of other artists and musicians. Now they meet together in musical mixing to create a homeopathic succussion. Here their combined powers reach a higher level of vibrational force through the energetic power of material dilution. Compare it to the Korsakovian method where the vessel in which the musical preparations are manufactured is first emptied, then refilled with a suitable electronic solvent, the volume and EQ of the of surrealist soundwaves adhering to the walls of the studio-vessel gets periodically scraped, stirred, and adjusted. After the contents have settled a new batch of material gets decanted from the material so conjoined.

Contrary Motion is an album for those who wish to embark on a journey of neurodivergence from the realm of traditional thought and soundwaves so as to access the remedies that will give them relief from the complexity of modern life. This is live audio that has been refracted through the studio by means of frequency hopping between Australia, Ireland and England.

[ Contrary Motion review. ]​

THE TEAR GARDEN: ASTRAL ELEVATOR

When The Tear Garden released their first single “A Return” late this summer, it was clear they were back in full force. The song’s ecstatic promise and lush synthesis between cEvin Key’s pulsing rhythms and Edward Ka-Spel’s visionary lyrics signaled the long-awaited return of their singular experimental magic.

What could be better than listening to two best friends, both masters at their art, playing together, laying down tracks, and having a blast?

[The Tear Garden: Astral Elevator review]

BIG BLOOD: ELECTRIC VOYEUR

The original album came out digital only at the tail end of 2024, in two versions, one with lyrics and one instrumental. It was a tour de force of experimental electronics and homebrewed instruments. All of the instruments, save one synth on one track, were built in the home of the band over a course of ten years while they worked on their other releases. In 2025 the album sees release by the Psychic Sounds label and includes an additional EP on the fourth side. I wrote the liner notes for it, which I am totally stoked about. Here are those notes...

Big Blood, the intrepid voyagers into the outer reaches of hallucinatory noise-rock and eclectic freakadelia opt for a new path along the circuit board of creativity. Electric Voyeur was made by applying strict limitations using home-made electronic instruments and voice alone. The result is an album that is as trippy as it is devotional in its exquisite craftsmanship.

The glorious scent of solder and silicon wafts all over this music. Crafted over the course of ten years at the workbench and in the studio by Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella, they were guided along the way by a slew of books on how to make homemade instruments. Key among those was Nicolas Collins Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. Lucky for us listeners, all of that effort is here condensed into four-sides of exquisite vinyl.

Kinsella’s mesmeric voice is showcased in all its crystalline beauty over beds of lo-fi reverb laden electro gurgles and percolating rhythms as she chases shooting stars across glittering percussive patterns. The lyrics are as poetic and mysterious as the efforts they put into creating these machines of ring modulation, rhythm and distortion. Beats made of crushed bits and the swirl of sweeping oscillators all make for a momentous and lyrical slapdown.

This work appeared first in two digital versions. For the vinyl release on Psychic Sounds an EP of additional unreleased material titled Moonlight Again, has been added. It is exciting to hear these extra songs, now brought out under the night sky and exposed to the lunar light.

Big Blood’s is uncategorizable music and refreshing. Even so, I can’t help but thinking of the silicon lifeforms forged in the studio of Bebe and Louis Barron when they created the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet. Or of producer Joe Meek’s many field trips into avant-pop strangeness. The effort is reminiscent of material forged in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop but remains contemporary. It’s a rapture for fans of the process-oriented electronica of Matmos or the ritualistic glitch ambience of Nocturnal Emissions. Big Blood devotees will delight in this overture to the human voice, transistors, and transcendent electric vibrations.
This is music for deep listening in the deep time of Deep Maine.

[Review of the original Big Blood release of Electric Voyeur]

ALESSANDRO “ASSO” STEFANA

Instrumental guitar music is one of my favorite things to listen to on the regular for rest and relaxation, right next to ambient. In particular, I am quite fond of the American primitive style, and anything with technical and gentle fingerpicking. Stefano delivers on that, but he also does some sampling and collage style work on this album, taking the voice of Roscoe Holcomb from various Smithsonian Folkways recordings and doing new music for the voice to accompany.
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My favorite of these is “Born and Raised in Covington.” Covington, Kentucky is right across the river from where I live, and the sounds of Kentucky are never too far from my mind. There the rivers of earth are made out of coal. Holcomb was a coal miner from the town of Daisy, further south in Perry, County. By contrast, Covington is a big city, in the shadow on Cincinnati on the other side of O-hi-o. The song tells a story of a man brought up by honest parents, and how he became a rambling boy in his twenties, and shot a man with his revolver when he saw his first true love walking with this other one instead of him. Then was sent to jail in Frankfurt, Kentucky’s capital, much to the tears and shame of his parents. Holcomb sings this one like no other, and the new musical arrangement given to it by Stefana is a reincarnation true to form and thoroughly metamodern.

[Alessandro "Asso" Stefana: Self-Titled review]

GWENIFER RAYMOND: LAST NIGHT I HEARD THE DOG STAR BARK

​With song titles like “Jack Parsons Blues” and “Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds” you know you want to step inside and listen to this magisterial reckoning with American primitive guitar. You know you want to hear how she wrestles this fingerpicked beast into new worlds. Delve into the eternal mysteries of Sirius. Go on a voyage to hang out with the banjo players of Aleph One all the way to the Cattywomp and fields beyond… perfect album start to finish. So glad I saw the strange lights and followed Gwenifer up into the mountains.

IKUE MORI: OF GHOSTS & GOBLINS

Ikue Mori’s Of Ghosts and Goblins transforms the ghostly folklore of Lafcadio Hearn into a mesmerizing electronic séance—an album where myth, memory, and machine intertwine. Using her OP-1 as a spirit catcher, Mori conjures a world of shimmering sprites, fractured rhythms, and spectral beauty that feels both ancient and futuristic. An absolutely beautiful gemstone of magical music.

[Ikue Mori: Of Ghosts & Goblins review]

idialedyournumber : MOURNING GLOW

Coupled with intense rhythmic hooks and jaunty infectious melancholy lyrics, these short sweet pieces make me feel joyful and full of hope, even as the lyrics are moody and depressing.

Sometimes you just need a little Midwest Emo in your musical diet. The Midwest Emo genre comes from all those Midwest bands that pioneered the style in the 90s and oughts, perhaps best personified by the Illinois group American Football. idialedyournumber however is Pier Emo. I wasn’t exactly sure what that was, but seems to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to being from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I never listened to a ton of Emo until recently, but sometimes you need to. It’s kind of like roughage. It cleanses the system. Or at least it cleanses my system. What it does to your system, I can’t be sure. Maybe listening to Emo is like giving yourself a system update. A necessary defragmentation for the mental-emotional hard drive.

[idialedyournumber: Mourning Glow review]

SUNNY WAR: ARMAGEDDON IN A SUMMER DRESS

​This album gutted me in the best possible way. Folk-punk is a genre I really like when it is done well, but it can go off the hobo freight train hopping rails a little too easy into sloganeering and trusty-punk railings against the corporate state. This album rails, but it is so authentic and vulnerable, and the musicianship so spot on, it elevates the promise of folk-punk once again to the highest form of what that genre can be. This doesn’t mean their need not be a message carried by the medium. Antiwar numbers like “Walking Contradiction” with Steve Ignorant tell it like it is, while the folksy “No One Calls Me Baby Anymore” take the tradition back to the roots while extending it to the future. “Ghosts” conjures up visions of blues and ancestors in the land, the spirit world, and how the person who perceives might be a little bit crazy, always on the fringe. This is fringe music that makes me feel folded in and at home in the borderlands.

JULIEN BAKER AND TORRES: SEND A PRAYER MY WAY

I feel a kinship with some of the music of Julien Baker. What I like about her music is how she wrestles with her Christian upbringing and faith. That’s something I can relate to, having been brought up in a fundamentalist church myself, and with the mental and emotional scars to show (though there were some good things that came out of the ordeal). I hadn’t been familiar with Torres before, but I very much liked this collaborative effort. Especially the song “Tuesday” about a mother ripping her daughter apart because of a teenage lesbian awakening and love affair. I heard the song around the time Dr. [sic] James Dobson died. Dobson was a big proponent of gay conversion therapy and the like and his Focus on the Family really focused on a lot of the wrong things, in my own opinion. Anyway, the convergence of hearing that news, and hearing this song really hit home for me, and the experience of people in my own family and many friends, the hurt and damage done to them just because of the judgment placed on them by Christians who want to get all up in their business about what they are doing with their bodies in private. Beyond all that, the music and the songwriting is excellent, as on the other songs like “Dirt” and “Send a Prayer My Way.”

“...Spend your whole life getting clean / just to wind up in the dirt...” 

HAINBACH & SIMON SPIESS: WE COLLIDE, WE SHATTER, WE GROW

​This album is like pure catnip for me on a conceptual level. The musicians played remotely over the internet into a resonating tank in Colorado, recalling both the telematic music of Maryanne Amacher and the deep listening of Pauline Oliveros. This kind of stuff is like candy for my brain. On the resonating emotional and visceral level, this is great experimental music, adventurous, bold. Hainbach’s energy and work ethic is matched by his commitment to creative exploration. Here a chance meeting with saxophonist Simon Spiess at a Berlin basketball court allowed for a new collaboration that was a sure slam dunk.

PHIL WESTERN: AFTERFLASH: A REMIXED TRIBUTE

Phil Western once said in an interview, “The quest is to create a timeless piece of music that never sounds old, or dated, or cliché.” If that was his mission statement as an electronic musician, he succeeded with aplomb. These remixes and re-workings by his friends, loved ones, people he touched continue to set the bar high for what can be done when pressing technology into service of the imagination. Yet it is not just for his creativity that so many people connected to Western and his work. From what I’ve read and heard he was beloved by everyone who knew him. It has certainly been true that all the music I’ve heard from Western’s heart, mind and imagination has touched me. He remains a source of inspiration and these versions are no exception.

[Phil Western: Afterflash review]

​SAAPATO: DECOMPOSITION: FOX ON A HIGHWAY

The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out in this is an extended meditation on death. It’s a musical ode to the detritivores who come in and assist in the process of breaking down the constituent elements back to their component forms and returning them to the earth, or in this case into the pavement. Saapato took his his inspiration from a dead red fox he saw while driving to work, and the changes he observed in its carcass over the course of his commute day after day. Who knows when the muse will strike, but if a creator is open, a project can be given life by observing so-called “dead matter.”

[Saapato: Decomposition: Dead Fox on A Highway review]

EVERYDAY DUST: SHROUDED III, MOSSED IN TRANSLATION, RESURRECTION OF THE FOGHORNS

Everyday Dust has become one of my favorite experimental musicians working in the realm of electronics and musique concrete. Their compositions are esoteric and inspiring, mysterious and leave me in a state of wondrous, unsettled rapture. They are no slouch either when it comes to putting material out.
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Through white noise, thorough in its separation and diffraction of constituent tones, before reprocessing them and sending them back out into an abyss of stars as if these horns are calling to some alien entity or god far beyond the reaches of our usual means of communication.

[Resurrection of the Foghorns review]

​Everyday Dust returns with Shrouded III, a fever dream of decayed synths, eerie textures, and hallucinatory soundscapes that blur the line between madness and revelation. Paired with the wild remix project Mossed in Translation, these releases plunge deeper into the project’s haunted world—unsettling, immersive, and impossible to ignore.

[Shrouded III / Mossed in Translation review]

CHURCH OF HED: UNDER BLUE RIDGE SKIES

[This is the third volume in the Rivers of Asphalt series from Church of Hed, all aural travelogues along classic American roads. The first album, Rivers of Asphalt, takes Route 66 as its inspiration, while The Father Road is a journey across the Lincoln Highway. The Blue Ridge Parkway connects two National Parks, the Great Smoky Mountains, on the North Carolina side, over 469 miles to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

I love roads. Trails. Paths through the wilderness. Animal traces. Here in America many of our roads and highways started off as animal traces, then became Native American trails, and then made into roads as we know them today. I hope something of their original character remains, and it intrigues me to think of these roads being walked on and driven on by animals and humans in different times and places. All of us leaving our trace.

​This album is the sonic journal of one such trace, and it sallies forth over the gurgling streams and brooks of fuzzy prog and kraut adjacent synth workouts. It’s muscular music, building, swelling, climbing up the altitudes, but not without stretches of drone to see the cloud covered vistas and valleys below, before tripping back out into the surreal sensations of oscillating sequencers.

[Church of Hed : Under Blue Ridge Skies review]

ARROWOUNDS: LONELINESS OF THE HOLLOW EARTH EXPLORER V. 1 & 2

Arrowounds delivers the music, magic and mystery, solidifying the esoteric energies emanated from the underworld into the medium of this album. It’s a perfect soundtrack for getting lost in the labyrinthine depths waiting to be discovered beneath the surface of everyday Ohio and Kentucky. This is ritual shoegaze music for the seeker of the mysteries...

Ohio. The heart of it all. Place of mystery, place of magic. Former capital of North America when the Moundbuilders and Adena civilizations built their ancient earthworks that still inspire people with awe today. Home of the Loveland Frogman, of Bessie the Lake Erie monster, of a bigfoot type known as the Grassman (and you don’t necessarily need to be smoking any to see him). It is also the home to Hangar 18 at the Wright-Patterson Airforce Base where the remains of the alien and alien tech from the Roswell UFO crash were transported and kept so the military could reverse engineer the gear they salvaged from the flying saucer. Numerous other UFO sightings have been reported in Ohio’s Miami Valley. These may or may not have anything to do with the Air Force base and their secret operations. Not far from Ohio, and connecting it via a bridge that has now collapsed and been rebuilt, are the haunts of the Mothman and the Men in Black who were seen prowling around Pt. Pleasant, West Virginia in the aftermath of the sightings.

But that’s not all. The cryptids, UFO sightings and traces of former civilizations, just scratch the surface of the mysteries of Ohio. Dig a little deeper and you’ll soon cross the river into Kentucky and find the opening to the cave that leads the seeker downwards on a pathworking into the areas rich esoteric underground. Much of it literally is under the ground, in the Hollow Earth. Just ask the I-Am-The-Man from John Uri Lloyd’s proto-science fiction novel of alchemical illumination and underworld exploration, Etidorhpa, one of the inspirations for the album at hand. The book was illustrated by one J. Augustus Knapp, an artist from Cincinnati who went on to be the illustrator of Manly P. Hall’s splendorous elucidation of occult lore, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Knapp later designed a tarot deck with Hall. This music also recalls the Hollow Earth theory of Ohioan, John Cleves Symmes Jr. and his disciples.

Later still in the 1960’s and 1970’s the magical revival kicked off by Eliphas Levi back in the 19th century that was taken up by such initiates as Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, W.B. Yeats, and many others was in full sway. A loose cabal of pagans, polytheists and practitioners of Crowley’s Thelemic magick formed in Cincinnati, and centered around the (oc)cult band Bitter Blood Street Theater, later evolving into the bardic Owen Knight’s Blacklight Braille project. From Bitter Blood the emanations of their occult practices were reified down from the astral light and into the local music scene. Now here is some more music from the Athens, Ohio based Arrowounds. It might best be called “ritual shoegaze sludge,” and I mean that in the best possible way.

[The Loneliness of the Hollow Earth Explorer vol. 1 review]

bvdub: 13

The emotional resonances of this album would seem to be marred by writing a review that cannot, by its very nature, encompass the fluxing changes of musical flow and depth captured on 13. Just listen to it and be swept into a world that’s always changing, fates of people and nations rising and falling. This is something we should be unconcerned about, and instead offer our trust, care and love back to the world.

I am reminded of this passage recently read in Ursula K. Leguin’s novel The Dispossessed just when the main character Shevek is about to go on a journey to another world. “You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

​This album is an extended meditation on the 13th chapter of the Tao Te Ching. 

[bvdub : 13 review]

SALLY ANNE MORGAN: SECOND CIRCLE THE HORIZON

​Those in the know, know what a song like “Oak Knower” means to some of us. This trail through the forest and mountains is conjured into the circle by fiddle, banjo, electric and acoustic guitar, piano, and various percussion. Hurdy Gurdy courtesy of Geologist makes an appearance as well. Exquisite craftsmanship and attention to detail spill outside the circle into the world beyond.

Thanks for tuning in to listen and read about just some of my favorites from 2025. There was so much more I listened to, music past and present. There is always more to hear and find. I hope this guide helped in your own hunt for finding the frequencies that resonate.

​.:. .:. .:.
​
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. 

“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the Creator is revealed.” -Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

​“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.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RE/SOURCES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STREAM FORAGING

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

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING
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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

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