“There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of a ten miles radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.” -Henry David Thoreau

​There is a very prevalent attitude within the culture of creativity, for those that want to make it big, a person needs to leave their smaller city or small town, and go to the big city. I guess making it big has always had the underlying assumption, also super prevalent and at large in the greater culture, that bigger is better. Big cities represent places with more opportunities for expansion in whatever field of endeavor one wishes to make it big inside. There is often more there in these places: LA, Chicago, New York City, Seattle. Some of what there is definitely more of is competition. More artists, writers, musicians, and actors of high caliber vying for their slice of the pie. More artists, writers, musicians, and actors of high caliber working as baristas and waiters and cooks. That’s no slight against the service industry. A person has got to eat and my wife and many friends and family are veterans who have served in the trenches of the restaurant biz. I’ve assisted in numerous caterings myself and spent my share of time as a dishwasher. I’m not afraid of getting dirty and wet.

The question remains, however, of why a person would want to travel to a big city to compete not only for work in the creative industries, but also for good day jobs, when they could stay in a smaller pond where there is more potential to become a bigger fish. Yet not just the kind of big fish a fisherman would like to catch from the deep, but part of a school of fish: in other words, a community. Not just a community of elite artists presenting their work to the world in galleries, at readings, and from the stage, but a community of people and beings to be embedded within and serve.

At the end of the day, art in any medium is a service. In its debased forms, it can be a service to the artist looking to glorify themselves. I won’t pretend its ever an egoless endeavor. Yet, when that becomes the sole purpose of art, for the artiste to extol their own creative ability, something essential gets lost, the act of making things that nurture and feed the creative and spiritual part of other beings.

I say other beings, because art may not even just be for humans. If St. Francis could preach to the animals, why couldn’t an artist also make a sculpture for the enjoyment of the trees, or for the birds, snakes and turtles? Why not tell a story to a bee or sing a song to the wind and sun and stars? These too are part of our community, or rather, we are part of their community.

Yet we also do want our human connections, and to be seen for what we do and are capable of doing by our fellows. There is nothing wrong in that desire to be seen, heard, known. It’s something we’ve done since time immemorial. We aspire to be like trees and have our work be around for a long time, yet even their centuries pale to the aeons of life and light given off by the stars.
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As the 17th century English poet John Hall wrote in his poem “The Hourglass”:

How senseless are our wishes, yet how great!
With what toil we pursue them, and with what sweat!
Yet most times for our hurts, so small we seem
Like Children crying for some Mercury. …
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Desires of wealth anothers wishes hold
And yet how many have been choked with Gold?
This only hunts for honour, yet who shall
Ascend the higher, shall more wretched fall?

(The poem was set to music by David Tibet in the above harrowing Current 93 song.)

Some of the fruits of human art are more robust than others, and the seed planted from one poem into the heart of another, can turn up and grow in some other area of life. Storytelling, poetry, song are all for the community. To grow, they need their own strong roots so as to generate future seeds.

As culture returns to a preindustrial level of homeostasis and world travel becomes less common and more adventurous, the globetrotting artist will become increasingly rare. Even those writers and musicians and actors who gain larger renown, will likely live somewhere. Sure, there will always be nomadic types and people who live in different locations at different times in their lives, but the urge to grow roots and remain in place will also loom large. An artist who is devoted to the place where they live and breathe will be a boon to the local pond where they swim.

BIG TIME CITY GLITCH

Novelist and writing guru Steven Pressfield wrote a book called Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be. In one of the blogposts that became part of his book, he contended that aspiring screenwriters and people wanting to work in the movies should move to places like Los Angeles to be around the scene where much of the work of screenwriting is done.

He wrote, “Sometimes people will write to me. ‘I want to work in the movies. Do I have to move to Los Angeles?’ Or, ‘My dream job is in fashion design. Do I need to be in Manhattan?’
The answer is yes and yes.”

It sounds logical. Yet art doesn’t always work on logic. Sometimes it works best by being counter-intuitive, so I say the answer is no and no.

I like much of what Pressfield has written to help creative people in the world, so I’m not knocking him as a whole, but I want to push back on what he says about moving to the big cities. I think that is a glitch and stops people from pursuing their dreams in the soil where they were raised. When they move away, that same soil gets depleted instead of getting enriched, while overloading and putting a strain on the place they are moving.
Louisville and Lexington, Cincinnati and Columbus are just as in need of screenwriters (or likely playwrights in deindustrial times) as anywhere else. A motivated playwright is much more likely to get a work made and produced under their own gumption away from places where there is a lot of direct competition against them.

In Stevens Point, Wisconsin the In the Pines Studio has set up their operations. Founded by Winter Williams and Matthew A. Brown, they bucked the traditional notion of centering their creative endeavors in film in California and instead focused on the Midwest. If more film students, producers, writers and directors got together to do things on their own, the allure of the big time wouldn’t be as strong. They could make it small time.

In an article titled “The Paradox of Skill” on Dying Breed, Brett McKay wrote about the role of luck in achieving dreams he gets into the idea of more opportunities being available when the pool is smaller.

“If you’re a talented videographer, don’t move to LA for a career. Talented videographers are a dime a dozen there. You’re going to be relying mostly on luck to get a break. Look for a smaller market where the pool of talent is shallower, and skill is the deciding factor. I know a talented videographer in OKC who has made a successful career for himself overseeing commercials, documentaries, and corporate videos in Oklahoma. Is it as glamorous as LA? Probably not. But he’s thriving in a career he enjoys. Also, OKC ain’t that bad. The cost of living can’t be beat, it’s got a World Champion NBA team, and a great onion burger restaurant to boot. You can always take a direct flight to LA from Will Rogers World Airport if you need a weekend of LA glitz and glamour.”

Such a business as the one described above could also be pivoted from making commercial work to making artistic during the downtime. The success of the one could pay for the possibility of the other.

The glitz of the big cities may just be glitches. I am an urban dude. I like to visit a big city. I live in a small city though, and the size is just right. People say that, in Cincinnati, there is only one degree of separation between folks, rather than the usual two degrees of separation you often hear people talk about. In a place where the social connections separating you from another person are less, it’s easier to develop a reputation (of any kind) and have an audience for your art or craft.

The struggle to gain confidence and build an audience in any art form is real. The person who seeks to do so on a global stage has a lot to overcome, many barriers and obstacles in their way. The person who wishes to perform for their friends, to make music on the porch, to read poetry at a café, to submit to a local zine or quarterly, has more of a chance to start putting themselves out there and working on their craft. There are still obstacles also the possibility of making connections.

The other thing, here too, is doing your art for the community. I think the whole thing of being very polished in performance or an art is what keeps people from doing things like this for the people in their life, but I think as a whole our society needs to embrace the way someone with a skill or talent, even if not “the best” can add to our experience together and inspiring each other to improve, and not just leave things to so-called professional entertainers and the like. In your own home town, you can make it small and still have an outsized impact.

Much good can be had by staying put. Tiny forces and small movements can make big waves.

A process of internal migration is already underway now, where people are migrating away from the bicoastal mindset of LA and NYC dominating the cultural life in the United States, with folks coming back home to the heartland, or moving to the former flyover country for the first time.

Much of that is economic. People are starting to realize they can have a cheaper life, work a decent job, and do their creative thing with more ease, less stress, and more success in places where the cost of living is lower but where the artistic life is just as vibrant.

​These aren’t slights against the big cities themselves. I have very much enjoyed my visits to Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle. If these are your local, they are your local. Then you might want to go more micro inside such big ponds and make it small in the neighborhood rather than the city at large.

​GOOD ENOUGH

Normal never was, and sometimes good enough is good enough. Going big presupposes polish. You need to have your act together and you need to make it look professional and sound professional. Again, I have nothing against being a professional. At the same time, how much potential gets stopped in its tracks, because a person witnesses the work of a virtuoso and instead of getting inspired by them, they say, “I will never be that good” instead of thinking, “if I commit to a practice, I could do that.” People feel degraded by the simulacra of big time entertainment. There is a failure to realize we can all entertain ourselves and our family and friends, same as it ever was.

I think in a large art that is because performance has become spectacle. Music was enjoyed for much of its history, socially. Sure, there were always people who were talented and reached for perfection in their art, but there were also the everyday practitioners of the art who sang for the practical enjoyment of singing and for the simple joy doing it gave them. Isn’t that good enough?

For me, this is part of the appeal of punk rock. It was focused more on the energy of the sound, and the ability for anyone with the gumption to put a band together. It is why I like the genre of vaporwave and sound collage: have the tools? Put something together with them. It doesn’t need to be perfect to be fun. It doesn’t need to be perfect for somebody else to get something out of it. It doesn’t need to be perfect for it to help you along your own path. If you stick with it, the confidence and the greater ability to do what you envision with the medium will come.

For a long time some, friends of ours held an annual Winter Solstice potluck with performance. They usually rented out a small hall in the neighborhood. People put money in a pot to cover the cost and the food was all brought in by everyone. Homebrewed beer and wine... The amazing part was the variety show.... music, skits, jokes, poetry, tap dancing and more every year, put on by the people in the extended friends group. They were about a half generation older than my wife and I... of hippie stock and really believed in the philosophy that a community could provide its own entertainment for itself.

The same is true of so many great shows I have been to in VFW halls, community spaces, and scummy basements. Conditions do not need to be ideal. It’s better to play through a shitty PA then no PA. Working outside of ideal conditions leads to grit, resolve, and strengthening of will and courage in face of obstacles.
This essay doesn’t need to be in ideal form, either, before I share it with readers. I like to revise. Sometimes I like to revise more than I like to write the new thing. It allows me to keep fiddling. With that in mind, I am resisting endless revision here. Hence, minimal polish. Unfinished ideas. There will be time circle back to all the things I intended to write in this piece and didn’t really get to, because I went on off on some tangent. That will just be fodder for the next one.

[ Josh Datko has a great essay on the grain of soul found in art when you go on and do a thing without worrying about being totally polished.]

AS THE FIELD EXPANDS, THE SCOPE OF SUCCESS MUST BE LIMITED

Being local and staying small can also relate to finding a niche and working from the freedom of the fringe.
Working in an area that is overcrowded and overhyped, the luck needed to get work out into the world becomes greater. Where there is a lot of skill and a lot of people doing great things great with that skill, something else is needed to set one apart. Part of what is needed is a bit of luck. Part of what is needed is a unique, iconoclastic flavor.

Electronic music was in the past, a specialized field of activity, a niche area of music making. Now all kinds of people have modular setups, or are just producing music on computers at home using readily available software, or even just using programs like Suno to take the song idea from their head and make it so it can be heard. In a way, this makes that kind of production a folk art in its own right, just as collage has become since Dada and Surrealism opened that practice up to the wider public and anyone with some scissors and glue. One of the things about folk art is that there isn’t as much variation between artists. It can still be really good, and the virtuosos become known and appreciated for their skill and rise to the top of their craft. Something within their ability sets them apart from all the other people singing those same songs or making those same vaporwave beats.

The same is true of poetry. As literacy has increased, the number of writers has increased. Before, there were a few stand out poets who rose to the top in every generation. Now there are dozens. It’s much easier to get to know who the “best” poets are in a local area or scene, than it is to know the “best” in the nation, because there are so many more people writing poetry and getting it published in chapbooks, online and going to readings.

This is also why a field of creativity such as contemporary poetry and electronic music is impossible to know with the breadth that a person once could know it several decades ago.

Standing out in an overcrowded field becomes part of the game. Instead of making it big, pivoting to making it small is a way to sidestep internal creative pressure. Within the boundaries and limitations imposed by working in a smaller area and at a smaller scale, new possibilities emerge.

Another way to approach the issue is to embrace microcultures. In music, microcultures can be seen as the proliferation of genres. Your band might not be the best metal band. But they might be the best blackened sludge thrashcore. You might not be the best producer of ambient music. But you might be one of the best maker of ambient-emo, or of chiptune emo, or get known for your “hardplaza” skateboard beat productions.
In the poetry world, where free verse has flourished for decades, a poet can set themselves apart by mastering a form such as the ghazal, or as Marilyn Hacker did, the sonnet, sestina and villanelles.

Radio is another area where a person can stand apart from the podcast party. The tricky there thing is getting access to a radio station, but if you have a community station in your community, that is the place to go to build the community. With so many forgettable podcasts, it’s really something special, if you are transmitting into the aether. Plus you reach more random listeners than a focused podcast might. Some of those randos might turn in to your regular listeners.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

Another reason to celebrate the local is to become a repository of local knowledge. This is what I wanted to write the most about in this essay, actually, except I went off on a rant against LA and NYC. I plan to revisit and enlarge on this theme in a separate article now that I’ve gotten some more of the bicoastal bile out of my system.

In any place, time stretches back to untold vistas, and to know even some of the history of the land and its people, and those other people, the people we call plants and animals, gives a new sense of appreciation for the land. When we stay close to the land, connected to it, do not move far away from where we are born, we begin to sense and appreciate its longer cycles within the much smaller wheels and cycles of our own lifetime.

In this way, when we listen to what the land has to say, we in turn can become speakers for the land. Our art can be embedded with materials from the place where we live, whether those materials be wood, stone, or mineral.

Those materials might be knowledge about the quarreling between two different families and the feuds that have ensued over generations. Such a tale might get turned into a novel or a ballad. The material might be a song passed on from one person working the coal barges and the riverboats of the Ohio and Mississippi, sang to another and then another. That song gets worked into a set played at a local festival or down at the bar, and in turn inspires the people who hear it to know something more of the many stories that have flowed along those rivers.

No matter where you are, it’s possible to get into a creative flow state, to make and find opportunities for a being a local artist, poet, maker.

The great philosopher Robert Anton Wilson had an experiment in one of his books. It was about perception and how we put filters on our perception and either allow information in or block it out, depending on what he called our reality tunnel, or the filters we see the world through. His experiment was to look for quarters when out and about. If the mindset of looking for quarters and finding them was adopted, the person doing the experiment tended to find more quarters than the person who didn’t bother to look at all. It can be so when we look at the place, we call our own local. From that solid ground our work as writers, poets, musicians and artists can take root and shape.

Do we see opportunities for enrichment of our art? Do we see opportunities for the way our art can enrich the community? Do we see ways we can incorporate the history and specific knowledge unique to a place into what we do, so we can become memory keepers and sharers of knowledge to those who come after us? This is just part of the work of the local artist who has made it small.

.:. .:. .:.
Thank you to all of my paid subscribers for keeping me caffeinated!

The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. 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 can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.


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STEM Education Gets Probed Àla Marshall McLuhan & HEM Starts Stitching

​In an ever-changing, increasingly complex world, where enshitification keeps hitting the fan, where infrastructure keeps falling apart, where polarizing politics put people in disarray, where environmental empathy leads to feelings of despair, it’s more important than ever that the citizens of the world find ways to stitch back together the places where our relationships (with each other, with animals, with the land) have become frayed. People need to know how to navigate predicaments and make sense out of the seeming randomized chaos of modern life. These are the kinds of skill that life long learners develop when they apply themselves to HEM, that is Humanities, Ecology and Memory.

Most everyone knows about STEM at this point: science, technology, engineering, and math, including computer science. It could be said that an education curriculum and mindset too focused on these subjects has left little room for the adaptive powers of intuitive thinking that study of the humanities encompasses. Ecology, which also encompasses systems theory, shows how interconnected everything is, and gives us a greater appreciation for all the creatures in the web of life with who we share the world. Memory and its training are also key, because if we forget history, forget where we come from and the collective wisdom of the past, if we forget how to remember, it leads to the kind of dismemberment of experience so prevalent in the abandoned chopping malls of too-late corporatism.

This article has been written as just one tiny nudge to inspire the next generation of thinkers, makers and feelers with accessible screen free experiences for exploring the life of mind and world. It is just a brief run-down on the idea of HEM, how it contrasts with STEM, and why the HEM alternative might be something other people want to put some energy towards.

STEMMED IN ON ALL SIDES
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Back in the early 2000s after the Y2K fiasco and the dot com bubble collapse, educators still wanted to continue pushing a collective focus on what they then called SMET: science, math, engineering and technology. Perhaps SMET was too similar to the word “smeg” a catch all cuss word in Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s humorous scifi series Red Dwarf. In the world of Red Dwarf space ships powered by AI with low IQ drift across the universe in hopeless disarray and talking toasters form the only potential hope for Lister, the last human left alive. SMET is kind of smeg, so in its place, the forward thinking president at Winona State University had a functional brainwave and rearranged the letters into STEM.

By this point the idea of rote learning by memory was itself considered stupid. Aging teachers were looking at the world and thinking something along the lines, “shit is getting fucked up, we better teach the next generation to save our asses. And they better learn how to work together.” The idea seems to have been to teach the subjects they thought the citizens of tomorrow would need to come up with the solutions for humanity; so we would finally figure out the pathways to solving any number of problems, such as how to get clean limitless energy in a world powered by dirty, limited, fossil fuels. Problem is, they aren’t just problems, but predicaments, and predicaments don’t have straightforward literal solutions, but require lateral thinking.

Mitigating black swan events arising from our interconnected predicaments, then, requires different modes of interacting with the world. Since the industrial revolution, the pervasive influence of engineers has geared our collective systems to adapt to machines. It is doubtful however that mindset of engineering alone can retool the machine once again. Rather, our relationship to the machine, and the way of thinking it produces must itself be set aside, so different modes of thought and relation may be (re)activated.

There was another idea behind STEM that was part of its overall project. That was to get students to work together in cooperation. In the minds of educators, the breakthrough revelations of solitary visionaries were out, and the communal efforts of groups working together at a shared goal, with their endless meetings and committees, were in. Meetings and committees and collaboration were clearly the way to fix the future. Just putting that on the table for discussion, and possible ratification.

The STEM boosters also crafted their curricula around the idea that memorizing facts doesn’t prepare people for challenges, and that solitary study and immersion in a topic doesn’t produce the same kind of people pleasing people behavior that a focus on collaborative creativity inculcates. One of the key ideologies within the movement was the notion that “facts don’t matter; if there is nothing practical, you get out of them.”
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Facts about the web of life within the cosmos can produce wonder, yet wonder itself was not deemed an outcome worthy of practical effort. Remember, effort must always be practical. This is likely one of the reasons that dream interpretation and do-it-yourself psychotherapy were not part of the curricula of STEM.
As a throwaway bone, some educators proposed the idea of STEAM, with the A standing for Arts. For some reason in our technocratic society, STEAM never got any STEAM, and the only ones who really got into it were a subculture of people known as STEAM Punks. STEAM Punk still remains relevant to the inevitable shift to a lower resource base of living, but most STEAM still requires some kind of coal for combustive power, and much of it is still focused on the supremacy of the machine

​Over the past twenty odd years as STEM has been pushed inside of America’s collective educational systems, the continued effects of Scientism, Technocracy, (cultural) Engineering, and Mathology (arithmetic focused on cold calculation and numeric quantity over numeric quality) has led to some of the following outcomes in the U.S.A:

The Great Dopamine Drain: the ubiquitous use of various social media platforms among adolescents and their adults has rewired their brains, exploiting dopamine pathways for the addictive hit of getting “just one more like.” In person social skills have atrophied. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and issues with body image have all been amplified. Suicide rates have gone up, and loneliness is a national epidemic even while people are connecting endlessly over the always-on-internet.

Computer Aided Disintegration: Over-reliance on Computer Aided Design tools has created a generation of engineers and architects who lack the ability to draw with pen and pencil. The geometric proportions that give harmony to the world are all based on the human form. The geometric proportions of the hand get bypassed when the hand does not know how to draw a plan. Meanwhile the infrastructure in the USA remains in critical condition. Enforced obsolescence of older infrastructure systems (such as the network of copper wires that once powered the telephone and internet) has left some population segments in a lurch when they do not have enough funds to adopt the latest corporate pushed technology. Meanwhile the older systems slip into further disrepair. Brown outs and energy grid failures are one outcome when smart grid nodes are installed alongside energy systems that elsewhere have been left to languish. Instead of repairing old systems, enforced “upgrades” meet with incompatibility issues. Lack of support for those who wish to keep older systems working becomes non-existent at official levels. As cars have become ever more computerized, the ability to work on them without specialized computer equipment has likewise eroded, where it hasn’t been made illegal. This causes many citizens to be “left behind,” yet recuperates walking, public transportation and bicycle culture for those in the underclass.

Quantity over Quality (The Pathology of Mathology): Businesses operating within the competitive capitalist cultures of the past had at least some notion of creating quality products and services for their customers. Creators prided themselves on making something that would last for decades if not a lifetime and beyond. Globalization has reversed this trend, and now the capitalists is focused on quantity of the numbers in bank accounts and asset holding, number games and rackets. This is reflected in the consumer who in many places have become hoarders. The person with the most cheap plastic happy meal toys wins. At their own expense of course, and to the benefit of mathologist accountants and day traders.

Collective Dementia: The ability to recall, to memorize, to hold on to something over a long period of time by the power of the applied mind has likewise atrophied. The ability to google something has diminished the ability to spend long periods of time researching a topic of interest or just a subject that a person needs to know about. The effort required to go to a library or talk to someone who might know what needs to be known, has withered the ability to look things up in books or engage with people with developed skill sets and the knowledge that comes from being alive for a long time (i.e. old people, who now get shut up and carted off to old folk “homes”). Since people don’t talk on the phone as much either, they don’t need to know as many phone numbers and have them memorized. The smart phone allows them to forget more than they ever remembered. Personal memory of special moments in life are likewise uploaded to the cloud in the form of digital pictures. Instead of recalling happy memories in the imagination, memories are scrolled through, as long as bills are paid and access to the correct accounts is maintained. AI further accelerates the effect of this collective dementia by outsourcing thinking and creativity.

All this while the federal government has spent approximately $3.9 billion annually on STEM education programs as they did in 2021. As of 2025 the National Science Foundation alone had a total STEM budget of $1.17 billion dollars. It is one thing to teach about these subjects and make them available. It is quite another to put the full weight of educational institutional support behind them when there are other topics and subjects valuable to teach and inspire young minds.

The great raconteur and thinker Marshall McLuhan developed a fourfold way of looking at media and cultural artifacts to see how they what they enhance, obsolesce in the present, retrieve from the past, or reverse. If we look at STEM through this tetrad lens of McLuhan we find that:

STEM Enhances: After school programs where kids build and design “battle bots” and drones preparing them for future jobs in the military industrial complex designing battle bots and drones for the “theater” of war. STEM also enhances techno-narcissism, even as their competing drives accelerate neurosis caused by a digitally fragmented sense of self.

STEM Obsolesces: An individuated sense of self is hindered by STEM, because outcomes are placed in the hand of machines rather than the personal unconscious. Theater kids required to memorize their lines and pursue active imagination in the amalgamation of the arts are also made obsolete. In many cases they have been replaced altogether by the CGI of computer generated imagery, and voices synthesized by machines. Hand drawn blueprints, schematics, and other detailed plans are no longer required. The slide rule gets relegated to the dustbin (or to the STEAM Punks) along with calculations worked out on pen and paper. STEM attempts to obsolesce death, but does not succeed.

STEM Retrieves: Amateur radio and other old school hobbies, such as photography and film with film, when a few of the STEM kids trickle into the radiocentric fold to become STEAM Punks. As economic disparity gets enhanced, for tech lords on the high quantity of numerals in their bank accounts, it also retrieves feudalism in the form of the sovereign corporation-as-nation-station (sovcorp). The CEO is president and king with a bevy of microserfs to carry out his commands.

STEM Reverses: the other aspects of science that are focused on living systems. As ecology, biology and the life sciences get de-emphasized by engineering brain, they transform and mutate into biohacking, terraforming, blood doping, smart drugs, cryogenics and the desire to extend life beyond its natural span. STEM progress reverses gains in literacy and reading made by the educational system as vernacular video becomes a preferred means of communication and learning among youth.

With these thoughts in mind, it should be clear that the continual problems caused by technology, engineering, and the focus on certain types of science at the expense of others, are in many cases a liability more than an asset. The need for people with intuitive, lateral, and artistic grasp of the world around them is itself a practical way to work-around the many predicaments facing humanity in the decades ahead. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics may not know jack about HEM careers and jobs just now, but they will be “tomorrow’s jobs” because the negative spillover from industry, corporate group-think, and the collective dementia of cognitive detachment is going to continue to tear at the social and environmental fabric holding the world together.
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HEMMING IS PATCHWORK, HEMMING IS STITCHERY

​The great thing about HEM is that no government program is needed to get it up and running. No one needs the permission of anyone else to become a stitcher, to start making your own patchwork quilt exploring the humanities, exploring the terrain and terroir of your local ecology, to cultivate the habit of retention and memory. Permission and official programs may very well be counterproductive to getting any kind of useful work in this area done.

HEM, as I conceive it, is not anti-science. I wrote a book on the history of technology and music, after all. Such technology seems to be more useful when also put into the hands of artists, HEM just takes the emphasis out of the sciences that have put the focus on machines, and instead attempts to re-balance that tipped scale back towards the earth and her inhabitants. HEM re-emphasizes ecology in service to all of life. For that it requires the deliberate training and cultivation of memory. When the stories associated with a part of the land we live are not remembered and consciously transmitted to others who also live on the land, and will dwell with the land in the next generation, vital knowledge is lost. The emphasis on the humanities encourages lateral thinking and the development of individualized artistic intuition. It also gives the mind fodder on which to think, and material worthy of retaining in memory. Stocked with this useful supply of material, new streams of creativity open up to the prepared mind.

Predicaments don’t exist outside of our stories about them, our memories of their causes, and of the web of complex relationships that intermix between them. As such those who keep memory, who train their memory to hold onto stories, poems, and songs, who hold in their mind an aesthetic web of beauty, music and art will be liable to make strong connections and draw water from the common well of deep knowledge to share with their fellows.

If we look at HEM through McLuhan’s tetrad the following can be found:

HEM Enhances: appreciation of the arts, literature, history, including personal history and family history, along with local history. On the ecological side it enhances knowledge of the local flora and fauna, as well as stories of the same from local folklore. Place names often reflect the kind of plants and animals that lived their before they were desecrated into strip malls and suburbs (White Oak Community, for example, or Salamander Hill, etc.) Appreciation of such life is likewise enhanced. When life is appreciated instead of taken for granted and thought of as merely something else to consume, steps can be taken for its protection.

HEM Retrieves: The role of the bard, the storyteller, the griot, the local poet, song writer and epic rapper. It retrieves the mentat’s from Frank Herbert’s Dune and places them back in the trajectory of another possible future. In this possible future the Art of Memory (see Frances Yates) and other mnemonic disciplines are restored. It retrieves oral storytelling on the one hand, but also book learning and deep research in analog archives on the other. Systems theory as a part of ecology is also retrieved as we look at the net effects of small actions and the positive and negative feedback loops they create in the total environment. The cybernetics of Norbert Wiener is likewise retrieved. The humanities retrieve the seven liberal arts and also Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, her nine children.

HEM Obsolesces: Cloud memory storage and data centers. Recording everything on the phone via photo images and video of special events is sidelined in place of savoring the moment and later reminiscence through the power of mind and recall. Personal participation in the surveillance state of data collection is likewise negated as digital spy technology is less readily adopted.

HEM Reverses: globalization and corporate work mentalities. The focus returns to local and bioregional levels of production, participation and activity as the baseline. It also focuses on individual effort and encourages the proliferation of outsider art. It reverses the brain drain on communities, as it gives reasons for people to stick around their hometowns. Other environments and cities aren’t “better” by default. Creativity, culture and cooperatives instead become the norm. The rust belt and other parts of flyover America don’t get gutted by the best and brightest, but the best and brightest regenerate the homefront with their own efforts continuing to nourish the local environment. Perhaps most important, it reverses the decline in cognitive ability by restoring rote learning and the memorization of facts. While what is remembered can certainly be arbitrary, the fact that HEM practitioners are giving their memory muscles and mind a work out ensures that creativity and ability to use their mind will go beyond just recall and into true comprehension and intellectual wrestling in the world of ideas.

As hemmers and stitchers begin to work by reading the classics, studying the traditions of the world, listening to its great music, and looking at artwork and film, it will help stem the tide of slop propaganda (or propaganda slop as one feeds into the other) inundating the mind. As they explore their environment, get back in touch with family history and their personal history, will see the rich world of their own experience and all that it has to give outside of McCulture and the military-entertainment complex. The same with the wonders of the natural world in their corner of the world. Urban dwellers will also have much to love as they learn the history of their city, and also much to love in the form of nature: nature is not absent even when brutalist concrete and even when its pristine ecology has been spoiled by the smegma of sprawl, wonder and beauty are still ever present for those willing to let themselves be enchanted.
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What is held in the mind and memory can never be taken away. Data centers can be unplugged, destroyed, or go offline. What is stored in the cloud can disappear due to breaches or a change in a contract. The eternal memory of the soul withstands even the horrifying and sad vagaries of dementia and Alzheimer disease. When muscles atrophy and the body gives way to old age, the achievements of the mind cannot be stolen back by any corporation. They will never go offline because they are internal, imaginal, eternal.

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​The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. 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 can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.
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☕️☕️☕️

An Interview with an Amateur Naturalist + Easy Outdoor Learning Activities

​The purpose of this particular article is quite simple. It is to help readers get more pleasure out of the vast recreational opportunities available in your particular bioregion. I suppose it also has another purpose, to excite readers about all that awaits them outside, to encourage people to turn off the screen and head into the green. To be really honest, there really is a third purpose, and that it is to get people to take up the hobby of the amateur naturalist. As a way to spend leisure time it has a lot to offer, not only to individual happiness and fulfillment, but as a way of giving back to the community, through sharing knowledge, and to the earth, by applying what is learned.

I’ll be honest about something else too. Being a naturalist is not something I have any experience of beyond enjoying the outdoor activities of hiking, camping, and a bit of gardening. Naturalism is something I am interested in, however, and try to always think of writing as an opportunity to learn. “Write what you know”, the conventional wisdom goes. The conventional wisdom is also what got us into our current disconnected relationship with nature, so I think a case can be made for going with unconventional wisdom instead. Some time ago, the writing guru Steve Pressfield gave this liberating advice, “When we write only what we know, we limit ourselves to territory we’ve already covered. When we write what we don’t know, we launch ourselves into terra incognita. That’s where the good stuff is.”[1] I’ve tried to keep that advice in my back pocket, my instinct has often been to use writing projects as a way to explore unfamiliar subjects. Such is the case with the matter at hand.

Exploring is one of the things a naturalist does as well. Heads off into terra incognita, even if it is the terra incognita right near your home. Exploring is as much about expanding our sense of curiosity and getting back in touch with the sense of wonder nature reliably gives. Naturalism is a cheap thrill, because it doesn’t require much stuff beyond a willingness to open up our senses to what the world has to teach. This learning in turn helps sharpen our powers of observations. A few tools can help in the endeavor, but they can likely be sourced second-hand.
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Society as currently organized isn’t really doing much to change the way we relate to the ecological web, instead seeking to keep us glued to an electronic web. Having a richer understanding of the way the insects, plants, birds and beasts exist within a web of interrelationship and connection can help us to see the ways these creatures and beings are not separate from our own life. Seeing how we are embedded within the complex associations of an ecosystem might go a long way helping us begin to repair the many damaged relations and threads of connection within the web of life.
For this iteration of the column, I thought I’d something a little different and talk to someone who does know some things about being an amateur naturalist. He is my friend Erik Brueggemann, fellow public library employee and an Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist. I asked Erik a few questions to see what insight I could glean from his experience.

INTERVIEW WITH ERIK BRUEGGEMANN, VOLUNTEER NATURALIST

JPM: You’ve always been an outdoorsy person since before I’ve known you, but what inspired you to become an Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist (OCVN) in the first place?

EB: I went over 20 years where I went outside and liked being outside but I didn’t look at it or experience it, just enjoying hiking and going different places but not really knowing anything about where I was or what living things were there. And then I rediscovered Jewelweed. I can’t remember when I rediscovered Jewelweed but the first time as an adult when I reencountered it and had a seedpod explode - my childhood came flooding back. I started to remember all this stuff, this life, that I had forgotten. As a child of the 80’s and 90’s before screens became so important, it’s really all we had - go outside, read, or watch a Police Academy marathon on Star 64. All things I enjoy but there’s something to just spending time outside and not having anything else to do with an agenda or any meaning or making any grand statement besides preventing boredom. That’s where great life happens. I’m trying to get back to that as an adult.

JPM: The OCVN program required you to do forty hours of instruction and forty hours of volunteer work. How did that go for you and was there any particular part you enjoyed and any part you disliked?

EB: The only part I actively disliked were the exploitive or commodification of nature that I experienced during the class - this was not part of the class itself but something I started to pick up on. It completely turned me off from contributing to pay-to-play nature. You can get good nature without spending a dime. I get you want funds but bragging about commodifying every nature experience. It’s asinine. The class was also a very broad overview of everything. You don’t really learn much until you start volunteering. But, as you get out there and volunteer you realize that broad overview of everything really helps you understand more. The best part was just being out and getting excited about seeing a certain bird or plant or whatever and everyone around you showing the same excitement.

JPM: You’ve been at this for a number of years now. What kind of work have you done?

EB: Cleared invasive species, monitored streams, planted trees, planted flowers, made trails, remade trails, got completely disheartened when you start to recognize all the invasive species, gotten reenergized when you start to look past them and see what’s also there, I cut down the biggest multiflora rosa bush you’ve ever seen and then someone turning some of the wood into a pen for you as a surprise before the cuts from all those thorns on your forearms were even healed, led volunteer groups, monitored cover boards for Kirtland’s snakes, learned how to grow trees and flowers and then giving them away, and I helped turn a patch of neglected land in my neighborhood into a showcase for gardening with native plants. The best though is just being out there with other people and bullshitting about whatever and teaching each other cool stuff you’ve learned, not talking about experiences that aren’t replicable or “you had to be there” moments but about stuff you want others to be able to experience or notice. And then telling them where to go to see it or just showing it to them because it’s right there. But, this is why conservation works and why it matters - great nature should be easy to find and experience. The fact that conservation works so well should be recognized as this amazing thing. You can help. You should help.

JPM: What kind of programs would you like to do or see implemented around the city, (state, bioregion…)?
More local offerings and more recognition for how important conservation is. When I started, I spent more time getting to volunteer places than I spent volunteering. I decided that wasn’t working for me. I’ve committed to trying to do almost everything locally in my neighborhood. I can walk or ride a bike to volunteer. It’s better. There is so much good nature right outside your door that you don’t need to travel to get it, and you can help improve it. It is literally right outside your door. You don’t even need to open that door - just look out the window. We should encourage eliminating maintained turf that is unutilized for sport or recreational activities and replacing them with native plants that are contributing to bettering where we live. I’m all for turf as a landscape accent but using flower beds to accent turf? Flip it.

JPM: Keeping your certification requires an additional thirty hours of volunteer work and / or continuing education every year. What does that look like in practice?

EB: It’s pretty easy. The opportunities are out there in abundance, you just need to find what type of volunteering you enjoy. Try a bunch of places - if it doesn’t check all your boxes then try somewhere else. I’ve probably stopped volunteering at 75% of the places I tried because it wasn’t a good fit for me or whoever lead the events retired or switched jobs. In Cincinnati it’s been pretty easy to start volunteer groups at the parks closest to my house and just regularly hold events that are supported by our local Parks. People show up to help. At a certain point you might transition from just showing up to wanting more. Doing more is also possible when you’re out there regularly learning things and meeting people.

JPM: How has becoming a naturalist changed your relationship with nature?

EB: Good nature is everywhere. I think exploring everything close to you is often overlooked in pursuit of grand vistas or experiences. Look closer at what you got. Learn more about what you got. It’s worth it. You can help make it better. If you can’t get good nature by looking out a window - whose fault is that? It’s yours. I always try and get people to go with me when I need to drive somewhere for nature. The amount of good nature that is within 2 hours of Cincinnati is pretty phenomenal. I want to get more people to recognize it. To look closer to where you are. Travel less. Experience more. Help maintain it.

JPM: You’ve worked at book stores and at the public library for a long time and I know you like to read and collect books. What authors or books would you recommend for someone who wanted to become a naturalist?

EB: Whatever speaks to you. Novels are a great place to get great nature writing. Rereading some of the novels I read before I knew what the things mentioned look or act like is a completely different experience. I’ve gotten paid to recommend books for over 20 years - I can’t just generally recommend stuff. I need more info. I can give you a list of what I like and enjoy but you might hate it because we aren’t the same even if we’re both interested in the same. Kathleen Jamie and Jim Harrison come to mind. They couldn’t be more different but, as far as nature writing goes: you can’t do much better. Once you get out there and start to learn more, you’ll realize you’re very interested in this thing but not at all in that thing and then roll from there. A great place to start is just having an idea how interconnected everything is and/or how important certain living things are for other living things. The Nature of Oaks by Douglas Tallamy is a great intro on this topic. Any book about a specific place over time is also a good primer for this. If you start to read something and you don’t like it - stop. Find something else.

JPM: What would you say to someone who is interested in becoming a naturalist, but maybe lives in a state where they don’t have a program like this and they are starting off alone? Have any advice?

EB: Find a group close to you and get involved. Start something if you don’t have anything around you. Get involved with your Community Council. Talk to your Park boards. Think smaller. Lower your goals. Be patient. Be practical. Start in your yard. Just start doing stuff.

JPM: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

EB: Just go outside. Go for a walk. Expect nothing. I probably enjoyed my walk to work today more than someone did on their last trip to wherever. Take binoculars or don’t. Get a fishing license to start exploring all that happens under water. Just sit somewhere for hours and absorb what happens all around you because that’s the best thing you could be doing. Be interested in learning new things and trying new experiences. Have your mind blown in your backyard or around the corner. Don’t forage in urban areas where native species are less prolific. By all means experience nature by touching, smelling, and tasting but don’t take it home with you and make a meal if you didn’t grow it. Leave it for someone else to experience. Learn how to grow whatever you’re enamored with. Delete all your social media and stay off the internet unless you can’t - live through your own experiences not theirs. Share with the person standing next to you.
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JPM: Thanks for sharing your experiences with us, and your attitude of “just get started where you are,” it’s very much appreciated.

As Erik pointed out, becoming a naturalist might be as easy as staying off social media and stepping outside your door to go for a walk. Even just adding a little bit here and there to what you already know about the flora and fauna in your neighborhood can help you feel more connected to the vibrant intricacy of life happening all around us. In the spirit of “just start doing stuff” let’s look at four activities for getting out there and on with the show.

BIRDOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS

Bird is the word. Look to the air! Birdology is to biology what biology is to… oh, nevermind. Studying our feathered friends in the sky is a timeless pursuit. You can even do it in the dead of winter, looking out your window. No special equipment is required, but some might help. A few bird identification books. A pair of binoculars. That’s more than enough to get going. You might want a notebook if you get serious about this form of playfulness. Making notes and filling in the birds you’ve “collected” in your sightings along with other observations is as much of a thrill for the birder as is catching a distant DX station for the radio geek.

Once a bird book has been secured (check one out from the library or pick one up from a good independent or secondhand bookstore) choose a bird from its pages. One you haven’t seen before, but is one that would be in your area that time of year. With this bird picked out, make an effort to go out and find the bird. When you have tracked down the bird in the wild, even the urban wild, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment, and now your mind will know this creature and have a connection to it, and you won’t have to look for the book to know what it is you are seeing in front of you. Rinse and repeat.

Another way to go about this is to flip the above process, and go out and see what you might find, then identify the bird. With each new type and species of bird you see, you’ll be adding to your inner repository and grow the ability to check things out in the library of life. The same approach can be taken with trees, plants, insects...

Matching birdsong to the bird singing is another way to proceed in the fine art of birdology. Or you can learn about murmuration and the behavior of flocks. The more you learn the more you’ll want to know. For instance, did you know that flocking is a way for our feathered friends to conserve energy? Long flights along migratory routes require a lot of energy to be spent. Flying together increases their aerodynamics, reducing the amount of expenditure they each have to put into arriving at their destination.[2]

​ACCEPTING DINERGY

The energy flows involved with a bird species during migration are just one example of the way energy makes up a vital part of an ecology. As regular readers of mine will perhaps understand, we live in a world of limits. The disturbances and multiple crises ongoing around the world can be understood in one way as the result of people trying to ignore the limits of growth, the limits of extraction, the limits of how much energy can be used with giving energy back.

Yet limits are what give form to our bodies, and the shape of everything we seek to study in the natural world, whether it’s a hawk making a spiral in the sky or a mighty oak tree, gnarled and twisted. The architect and philosopher György Doczi showed this with elegance in his book The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture. This illustrated book shows just how much form in art and nature is predicated on the limits and forces impinging on a natural feature or species. In his book he also introduced the concept of dinergy, a word he coined, to describe the relationship between energy and its limits. He arrived at the word by combining the Greek dia, which means across, through, and opposing, and energy. Opposition gives something to push against, a thrust block for their own evolution causing them to adapt in ways they wouldn’t have if not faced with particular limits.

Dinergy can itself be contrasted against synergy, which is about the cooperation between two or more people or forces. Synergy has caught on quite a bit more in our culture as a concept than dinergy has. Embracing limits and limitation isn’t popular in a society still caught under the spell of bigger being better, and expansion as the only form of growth. Despite its fringe status as a concept, dinergy is a useful one to have on hand in the mental toolkit. Studying how limits work in nature, can give us a greater appreciation for limits in our own life. Instead of thinking of limits as things that impinge upon our freedom, we can start to think of limits as powerful ways for shaping the way live into something more beautiful than it is now.

Limiting the area we explore and work in the quest to learn more about nature is one way to apply a useful limit. As Erik mentioned, looking to the grand vistas of faraway places often causes people to overlook what is right outside their doorstep, in their own watershed.
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FLOWING WITH YOUR WATERSHED

If energy flows and limitations can shape a species, those flows certainly shape the environment and ecosystems of the world as carved out by the precipitous flow of H2O.

Learning about the watershed you live in, and how it supports a plethora of life is another to way to ease into getting a better sense of our immediate surroundings. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a watershed is “a land area that channels rainfall and snowmelt to creeks, streams, and rivers, and eventually to outflow points such as reservoirs, bays, and the ocean.”[3] If you live inland exploring your watershed could begin with visiting the rivers and lakes nearest you, tracing the tributaries from the large rivers to the little streams. There’s not much better than a wild swim or a paddle down a glinting stream or glistening lake in the summer months. If you happen to be near an ocean, it doesn’t get more primal than interacting with the ebb and flow of the tide and its ever-shifting waves, the salt wind in your hair.

As I mentioned in my last article on bioregions, a watershed seems to me a more interesting way to think about plots of land rather than the sighted lines and squared off bits used by surveyors for partitioning space. Another way to think about bioregions in terms of water, would be by looking at the major aquifers underneath our feet.

A fun way to get an idea of your watershed and its contours is to find a map of your area with its rivers, creeks, lakes, and put a piece of tracing paper over top of the map. Trace out only the areas of water on the map. Starting to see those lines as the primary demarcations of space, can shift your mental mapping of your home area away from streets, big box stores and coffee shops. Everything becomes more squiggly, curvy, less linear, boxed in to a square.
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FUN WITH MINEAROLOGY

Go to any stream and your liable to find a plentitude of rocks. Or at least dirt and mud. Hanging out in the creeks, you might just study the stones as much as the crawdads swimming in a shallow pool, The stones themselves composed of minerals. Taken for granite so much of the time, understanding something about the mineral kingdom gives new appreciation for life and how shaped we are by these raw materials of life.
Minerals are like geological Legos. They build things up, but we need many kinds of them to make a structure. Eight different elements make up most of the minerals. These include aluminum, calcium, iron, magnesium, oxygen, potassium, silicon and sodium. In order to be considered a mineral these elements need to repeat in a regular pattern.
Knowing a thing or two about minerals can also help us with things like gardening. Erik had mentioned to me just how much “bedrock influences soil pH. It’s another reason why some plants won’t grow in certain areas besides sun and moisture. Hamilton County [Ohio] is alkaline because of all the limestone. Areas with sandstone are more acidic - rhododendrons and blueberries need acidic soil - we don’t have either of them occurring naturally in Hamilton even though they’re native to Ohio - head East Young Man.”

READING THE BOOK OF NATURE

I usually end these articles with the RE/SOURCES section that is at once bibliography and suggestive reading for further exploration on a topic. Instead of doing that this time, I’d like to go out and suggest that you hunt for your own books. As Erik noted, your particular inclinations in studying nature will draw you to what you like, more than I can direct you to what you will find inspiring. I have books on vultures, turtles, wolves, wildflowers, the arctic regions and an urban tree handbook stashed among the local hiking guides and other titles.

That said, I can’t help but make an observation and a suggestion when it comes to books about nature and science. Working in a library for my entire adult life thus far, one of my favorite things to do has been to wander the stacks. These are a place of wonder. There are stark differences between the books published for children between the 1950s and the 1980s, and those published between the 1990s and the 2020s. Comparing them is instructive. Perhaps the most striking thing about these differences is how much smarter those books seemed to expect the children to be, how much more they already expected them to understand about the world around them. I think it also points back to the time that Erik mentioned when it was routine for kids to go outside and be left to their own devices.

At the same time, it wasn’t as uncommon for kids to have hobbies that were a bit more involved than what is on the market today. When I think of some of the noxious things I mixed up with my chemistry sets, it’s perhaps not hard to wonder why, in this land of lawsuits and litigation, those kind of kits and instructional books aren’t as widespread as they once were. Kids used to really experiment with things back then, and I’m not just talking about playing doctor. I’m talking electricity, chemicals, biology.

I’ve found those older books just as useful for learning about a topic such as botany as an adult, as I have some of the most current creative nonfiction. They make great primers and would also be useful sharing with any children in your life. See if you can hunt any of these down at the library or pick up on the cheap second hand to add to your own collection.

​The best book to read is outside. So after you’ve taken in the stories presented by our intrepid editor get outside and let the play of light on water, the sound of the wind in the trees, the sight of birds in the sky, and the crossing of mammals in the field, whisper their own stories.

​[1] https://stevenpressfield.com/2010/06/writing-wednesdays-6-write-what-you-dont-kow/
[2] https://www.hummingbirdsplus.org/nature-blog-network/flocking-behavior-provides-energy-conservation-during-migration/
[3] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/watershed.html

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​This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of New Maps.

(Video and music above made from a Donna Tartt interview with Charlie Rose by Matt Pope. )
~.:.~
“Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening.”-Pauline Oliveros
~.:.~

Two people sitting, talking at a table. Telling stories. Listening to each other. It seems so common, but also uncommon. When was the last time you went over to an aunt’s house, or an older sister, and let her tell you something from the deep wells of her mind and heart? When was the last time you listened to the village wise woman tell you a tale around the fire?

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

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

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

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

FROM THE DEPTHS OF SILENCE, INTUITION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oliveros explained Deep Listening as:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Cheap Thrills Vacation Primer for Beating the Heat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RE/SOURCES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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​The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to my subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. 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 can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you for your generosity!

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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.

Cheap Thrills: Speculations on Entertainment, Media, Art, and Leisure in the Deindustrial Age 

​"Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place." - Martha Graham

Theater is one of our oldest art forms, and it isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon. The current most popular mode of theater, as piped in on internet streams to be viewed on telephone, television and movie screens, is likely to shift and change considerably in the decades ahead. Society has become more isolated with the advent of the internet and our streaming services. These services keep us inside and alone, or inside with our partners and nuclear family units, instead of outside, on the stage of the world, acting with volition, speaking our lines, and interacting with the extended family of our fellows.

 The desire to get up in front of others and act out the role of a character seems to be hardwired into us. The restoration of theater implies the restoration of community. It is difficult to really feel a sense of community around Netflix, Hulu or Prime. I’m not at all sure that the corporate boardrooms of the above companies count as communities. If they are a “community” it must be on par with the so-called “intelligence” community of spies, double-operatives and propagandists, who are often bedfellows with legacy media. Theater does not exist outside of community. Sure, there are one-person shows and monologues, but rehearsal in front of the mirror only takes you so far. To even have people to present a monolog  to as a gift of creativity denotes a community of family, neighbors, friends, co-workers, and colleagues, people you might know from the bus or from the bar.

In James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand quartet there is a very active community theater in the fictional town of Union Grove that puts on productions at about the same rate as your average high school. There is a fall production, Christmas production, and so on. The characters practice in the evenings for seasonal shows and storytelling. The people in these stories use it as a way to give back to their small town, offering hope and something to look forward to as it recovers from the turmoil of national collapse. The theater gives the characters something constructive to do with themselves, a bulwark against societal chaos. Kunstler himself is no slouch as a playwright, so it makes sense that he would imbue his world with a revival of small-town theater and all the possibilities it implies.

These days bingeing on television and sucking on what Harlan Ellison called the glass teat is used as a safety blanket for numbing the pain that comes from living in a decaying culture, in a failing empire, in a world with rising sea levels and burning skies. Watching TV creates the illusion of relieving boredom, of having something to do, but it is a generally a passive medium, and for those who use it as their only form of recreation, it quickly becomes self-defeating. The time that could have been spent having a life is instead spent watching the life of someone else. Yet many of us who have grown up with TV—that is to say, quite a number of us—have grown very accustomed to watching movies and shows. Those of us who haven’t been involved in theater or gone to see live plays may find it hard to create new habits. And while some viewers may be able to switch off the box and quit cold turkey, others might need to be weaned. As our world downshifts to deal with a lower energy base, the medium of the movies that has so dominated the twentieth century might first see a similar downshift as people acclimate to the realities of life without unlimited streams and non-stop television broadcasting.

Pirate cinema movie-houses may step in to fill the void during the coming interregnum, offering flickering images and bowls of popcorn to the people for a small fee.

PIRATE CINEMA

​To go back to Harlan Ellison briefly, his post-apocalyptic novella, A Boy and His Dog (and film of the same) showcases a main character whose two main objectives in life are eating and getting laid. When he can’t get it on he attends a grimy grindhouse cinema where they watch skin flicks. In this setting of a desecrated American southwest the fact that there was still a movie theater catering to people’s baser tastes struck an incongruous chord when I first read it. Who would have the time to run a movie house when most people spent their days scrounging for canned peaches in the ashes of a nuclear winter?  Since the first installment of this column I have wondered about the fate of the movies, and this story always came to mind.  In a deindustrial society, as opposed to whatever is left on the other side of armaggedon, movies could continue to exist for a time.

There is no doubt that cinema can be a high art. What is in doubt is its sustainability. Photography has a history that goes back to the 1700s in its earliest forms, so there is a distinct possibility that it may be one of the suites of technology that gets saved and transmitted to future civilizations. Will it be the same as today’s photography? I can’t think that smart phones will be involved as the dominant mode of capturing images with light. Still, other possibilities remain while the resources for it do. Photography in the future will probably be much rarer than it is now, and done in specialist studios the way it was done at the beginning. Film might also continue to exist in a similar limited capacity.

 I have often thought that a person could run a bootleg movie house enterprise if they had access to a space with some chairs, a sheet, a film projector and a collection of DVDs, VHS or actual reels of films. This could be a lucrative business. Depending on the films chosen, it could even be filthy lucre.  Such a side hustle could be done on a limited basis in the evenings when other work is done. The host could charge a modest amount or be paid in barter and invite people into a den or hall to take in a film or a few episodes of a TV show. As the seemingly endless stream of online content dries up due to systemic forces of economy and ecology, there will be those who go into withdrawal from this opium of the masses . An enterprising individual could create a TV-opium den, powered by off-the-grid solar cells and other renewable energy sources. Such a movie house impresario need not cater to the blood-lust instincts of the populace, though movies with sex and violence still remain more popular than those lacking the same, and are the only reason some people to go to the movies in the first place.

Another possibility for the continuance of cinema in an uncertain future would be a revival of the drive-in. There are still two operating drive-ins on the outskirts of my city. They have a few retro nights every year that are worth going to when old sci-fi and action flicks are played. Every October they run several weekends devoted to the depravity of horror films in the lead-up to Halloween. I can see a future where families arrive at a drive-in theater by horse and buggy to take in an evening of films on a warm summer night, as long as enough energy could be produced to run a projector and the radio transmitter used for the audio at drive-ins. Screening classics such as The Wizard of Oz on annual basis could keep such places in operation, while giving them leeway in other parts of the year to cater to divergent tastes. These trot-ins and bike-ins would likely be even more fun without the noise and exhaust of cars.

The snack part of the operation will remain key. Popcorn has been the original snack food of America for centuries, and having some on hand to go along with films will only be part of the equation. As mass-produced culture fades, so will the mass-produced junk food that keeps it churning. The art of confectionery is not likely to disappear and our sugary treats might once again be eaten as actual treats, which is to say, something rare—as rare as seeing a film itself would be in a future where outside entertainment doesn’t take up such a huge part of people’s budgets. There is a high likelihood such sumptuous refreshments will be made to showcase regional flavors and the creativity of bakers and chocolatiers. The food common to carnivals and street vendors seems just as suitable to sell at such cinemas. Fruitful alliances could be made in mutual aid between vendors and those who run the films.

Today’s movie houses license the films they show from those who made them. Will the creators of the films need to be paid? I suppose that depends on what is left of the legal system, what movies are being showed, and how well the operation is advertised. If kept on a word-of-mouth or hush-hush basis, such an endeavor could be considered a kind of pirate cinema. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow espoused his own vision of Pirate Cinema in his novel of the same name. His book centered around the downloading of films illegally in a draconian England with stringent copyright laws. The character reassembled the films, and often remixed and remade the classics, resurrecting dead screen legends in new roles. My idea of a pirate cinema could certainly include remixing, but I would mostly see them as venues for showing of classics and keeping the film art alive. The question of copyright and who is owed what from a screening might well be moot depending on the situation. A vast number of films may well be in the public domain by the time pirate cinemas come into being. Copyright laws themselves might even change to give people who wish to synthesize, reuse, remake and remix older material more freedom to do so than they now have. Money for new films that address new concerns may well be lacking in times when limited funds will need to be invested with wisdom. As such the stock of old films is likely to be recycled and replayed, while the new films that do get made will lack CGI as the art of practical effects and stagecraft gets revived.

As things unravel AV clubs might be formed by those who wish to keep and repair stereos, radios, televisions, projectors and sound systems. If they got started now they could learn what the energy requirements are for running such a system for a few hours, and collect the necessary photovoltaic cells, batteries and other gear to put on movie nights at their homes or in the park. A night at the bootleg picture show watching flicks from yesteryear might be a cheap form of entertainment for those who’ve been pulled off the endless scroll of TikTok. While the drip feed may not be as fast, it might give many people what they want: a momentary respite from unwelcome realities and some time where they don’t have to think about the problems in their life, a few laughs, and some excitement.

THE GRAND GUGINOL  AND CORPORATE HORROR

It has been said that there is nothing new under the sun. Splatter flicks and sordid films featuring depraved violence may be a newer way of consuming violent spectacles but the spectacle of violence is nothing new. Slashers, psychopaths, and marauding maniacs have been popular in our entertainment for quite some time. People used to go see hangings and other grisly public executions just because it was something to do, and in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that long ago that they did. Much as I’d personally like to see an easing of capital punishment, it stands to reason that murder will be punished by further murder well on into our future. Public hangings were good for the printing trade when newly composed murder ballads would be sold to the public for a sing-along on execution day.

            Horror on the stage can be traced at least back to the plays of Shakespeare in Elizabethan times, if not to ancient Greece and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth is perhaps the most famous horror play, with its witches and its murder, with its ghosts and its hauntings. Titus Andronicus is less read by those who aren’t Shakespeare fans or in the habit of reading plays, but it was a revenge story that the Victorians decried due to its bloody imagery. Revenge stories later became popular in pulp novels and on the screen, tapping into the place where jealousy, anger and fantasy all meet inside of our messy selves. It seems revenge stories are as old as humanity, where one person killing in retribution of a murdered family member kicks off one cycle of violence after another.
​
            In 1897 the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol came along and set the stage for savagery. Here the naturalistic exploration of the gory side of life had a heyday in a run that spanned just over six decades of bloody-minded brutality. The tendency for some of us to behave in gruesome ways at the expense of others seems to be a condition of humanity, and people’s taste for more of the same might not change much in the decades ahead. But will people still want to watch it on the stage?

Perhaps the horror shows of our futures will be more akin to what Thomas Ligotti has termed “corporate horror” in his fiction collection My Work Is Not Yet Done. The title novella has a corporate workplace as its setting, as do the two short stories he included, “I Have a Special Plan for This World” and “The Nightmare Network.” Ligotti’s tales featured characters on the bottom rungs of the business ladder, endless managerial meetings with managers who don’t respect their so-called inferiors, power plays, and pollution. As the fallout from our corporate-based culture continues to cascade down a cataclysm of descent, tales of flusterclucked CEOs might become all the rage against the machine. Maybe office workers and managers will be the source of our collective nightmare instead of people like Pinhead and company from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. For that matter it has been reasonably common for the devil to be pictured in various media as wearing a three-piece suit. John Michael Greer did just that with Dell, his depiction of the devil in his deindustrial novel Star’s Reach. 
​
            The ghosts of our mechanized monopolies may rise on the future stages. Such a theater of corporate horror may be one way to hold in memory what went wrong in industrial civilization. It may be another way to exorcise the wicked lingering spirits of multinational conglomerates. If the performances are held in the ruins and the wastelands directors might not even need to hire a set designer. Likewise, a real gallows show might be what is on offer on opening night at an office park or corporate headquarters somewhere near you in the decades ahead, though I hope it doesn’t come to that.

FOR THE LOVE OF STREET THEATER

​It might be better to take to the streets in a different way than as a mob. As the Dead Kennedys sang in their satirical song “Riot”:​

Riot, the unbeatable high / Riot, shoots your nerves to the sky /
 Riot, playing right into their hands / Tomorrow you’re homeless, tonight it’s a blast

Instead of getting into riot gear (and having the police do same) when ticked off at Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Big Business in all its dark towering forms, why not take a stab at street theater? At least then the end result probably won’t be a mortal flesh wound. Small is beautiful, and street theater allows a direct connection to an audience in a way that is more intimate and immediate than at an indoor setting, and can be a quick and dirty way to spread a message.

Street theater is as old as our cities. Passion and Mystery plays were performed in the streets of the busy metropolitan centers of medieval Europe. The Romans and Greeks performed in public squares as did the Egyptians before them. Most theater has been held outside in some form, and what better place to expose people to the stories you wish to tell than the public square and streets of a busy metropolis? Markets, churches, fairs, and festivals were the places to go to see a performance. It was from the 15th century through the 20th that the theater came to be held in and thought of as an enclosed place. This had the advantage of keeping actors and materials protected in the event of foul weather, and allowed for the gradual development of ever more extravagant sets. Yet all the world is a stage for the actor, and for the counterculture of the 1960s, bringing theater back to the streets was a natural step, leading to the gradual rebirth of the street as the ultimate performance venue.

Groups like the San Francisco Diggers brought actors and mimes into the streets of the Haight-Ashbury during the tumult of hippiedom. As they wrote in one of their pamphlets, “Everyone is kept inside while the outside is shown through windows: advertising and manicured news.”

The Diggers named themselves after the English radicals who began to cultivate common land based on the idea that the earth was “a common treasury for all, without respect of persons.” This was in 1649, in the aftermath of the English Civil War, when the country was in tatters. The Diggers were opposed to feudalism, and dissented against the Church of England and the system of royalty epitomized by the British Crown. It was their agenda to do away with wage labor, to do away with the different economic classes that kept people separated, and to make landowners and private property things of the past, all in the name of an agrarian Christianity. They wished to be free from the exploitation of landlords and having to pay rent in particular. Together they would work the land in freedom from their oppressors.

This came at a time when food prices had doubled, which doubled the number of those who identified as Diggers. The government and landlords retaliated against the Diggers who were violently attacked by the well-to-do and had the laws of the land set against them. Being Christians, the Diggers themselves abhorred violence, as they held every person to be a child of God. Eventually the powers of state rooted them out, though one of the main agitators, Gerrard Winstanley, continued to advocate for Digger principles as a pamphleteer. From there his notions slipped into Protestant belief and remain some of the core principles of socialism.    

​For their part, the San Francisco Diggers espoused a brand of community anarchism and shared the original Diggers’ vision of freedom from property.

 One of the prongs that got this whole thing going was a mime troupe. Mimes are the strong and silent types, so while you might not expect much in the way of cultural change to come from them, it is their very silence which can shake foundations. R. G. “Ronnie” Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe and acted as its artistic director during the heady period between 1959 and 1970, and started having shows out in public parks.

Another prong was the Artists Liberation Front, which started in 1966 as a way for artists to collaborate in mutual aid. One of the ideas that came out of their initial meetings was to host underground art festivals in some of the San Francisco neighborhoods where such things weren’t so typical. Ralph Gleason described one of their benefit parties as “Mardi Gras, a masked ball, with people in costumes, painted with designs, carrying plasticene banners through the audience while multi-colored liquid light projections played around them.” This became one of the first happenings, mixing media together, as is common in theater, and they wanted to do it again and again.

In October the ALF started bringing theater, mural paintings, poetry and other art into places where the poor folks lived in a series of four art fairs. These were billed as Free Fairs where no artworks were sold, but the community was invited to come in and participate to the sound of psychedelic rock music played by bands on the street. Participatory events from Free Fairs to the Free Festivals boomed just a few years later in the sixties with Woodstock and the like and continued on to the Stonehenge Free Festival.

The Diggers formed out of this general maelstrom and ferment in the same year as the ALF, in 1966. Billy Murcott and actor Emmett Grogran started the theater troupe. Murcott had the realization that people’s addiction to wealth and status had a basis in a deeply ingrained internalization around the supposed sanctity of capitalism. He thought that this was a kind of deep enchantment on individuals, so much so “as to have eradicated inner wildness and personal expression not condoned by society.” Murcott was a kind of sigma male who spent long hours alone, reading, and thinking, yet his influence was like an unseen wind, gently pushing the currents of the counterculture in the direction he was working. Grogran, meanwhile was a talented actor with an intense distaste for the mainstream media. They looked to do something about their convictions and took to the stage of the street.

​“The Death of Hippie” was typical of their kind of street theater and performed in 1967. This action was a solemn funeral procession where a coffin with the words “Hippie—Son of Media” printed along its side was carried down the streets of Haight-Ashbury by Diggers in masks. In their mind this march marked the death of the hippie era, and it attracted the attention of the media who broadcast and talked about the event without seeming to have clue about the irony: the message that the hippies had been the creation of the media was picked up and transmitted by the media. This method of communication hijacking and manipulation, which the Diggers called “creating the condition you describe” was one of their signature techniques, and can be seen as an early form of culture jamming.

[Culture jamming is a term was coined by Negativland in the early 1980s and can be seen as a kind of guerilla communication strategy. It shares in common many of the same techniques and ideas as détournement, or rerouting or hijacking an idea, developed by the Situationist International in the 1950s. ]

Some of their other events are still funny such as when they drove a truck of scantily clad belly dancers into the heart of the SF financial district and invited the stiff businessmen in shirts and ties to loosen up a bit and hop on the back of the truck, dance, and quit their jobs. I’m not sure if this kind of action would give people who encountered it today the same kind of jolt to their consciousness as it did back then, but similar strategies might be worth repeating. These days, instead of strippers, it might be more shocking to tell people to quit their jobs, put on an apron, and go back to work in the home economy as a househusband or housewife.

It is interesting to reconsider the original Diggers and the SF Diggers at this time in history. Housing prices have skyrocketed. A demented gerontocracy won’t loosen the reigns of their power and cede leadership to younger generations. Meanwhile newly minted adults who are just starting out can barely afford a place to live and many now never leave the home of their parents. Encampments that mirror Hooverville shacktowns of the Great Depression are a fixture in our major cities and people have taken to living in vans and other mobile homes as a cheaper way to survive. From January of 2020 to June of 2024 consumer price inflation rose almost 22%, not to mention ridiculously high housing costs.[1] A street theater that focuses on the exorbitant costs of living could be a response to these devastating market forces. Landlords and merchants are raking it in, and little is doled out to the people who prop up their profits.

The SF Diggers didn’t just act. They acted on their principles. They opened free stores and gave away free food in the park. On offer were discarded but usable items and otherwise scrounged materials, food that would have been thrown away. These days there are a number of free stores, food banks, and the like, but I don’t know of any that combine their outreach with plays featuring political satire.

Free isn’t the only way either. When I was a kid my parents belonged to two different food co-ops and later ran a third where members bought in bulk for a number of years. With the high prices of food these days, a food co-op sounds very welcome. If it was set up in empty parking lots, places where grocery stores have been deliberately closed so they could rebuild a new one just across the street (as is the wasteful business practice of the Kroger company), the work could be mixed with the fun of theater, puppetry, miming and a festival spirit to bring people together. 

Getting together with one another and acting things out is an innate form of play. Just ask any kid who hasn’t had the habit and inclination beaten of them yet. As adults, if we let go of some of our hangups, we could get back to that sense of play, get back to making up stories for each other that need to be told. I think those stories are there, waiting, deep within our collective memory, filled with characters ready to emerge from the dark slumber of our dreams and imagination. Their stories ache to be written down and their dramas acted out. The set and setting will all follow as the eternal theater of the world stage continues to turn.

There’s some stuff in Minneapolis that’s close. An organization called Heart of the Beast Theater puts on puppet shows, and an organization called the Sisters’ Camelot redistributes remaindered food from the organic distributors’ warehouses. Sisters’ Camelot often caters HOBT’s events for free. HOBT’s stuff is sometimes pretty political, sometimes not very. Not sure if they’re still going, though; I know they went under somehow or other a few years ago, and I don’t recall hearing of them being resurrected.

RE/SOURCES:

Carlson, Marvin A. Theatre: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK.: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Carlson, Marvin A. Theories of the Theatre :A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present.
IIthaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

The Digger Archives. < https://www.diggers.org/> Many detailed articles on the history of the San Francisco Diggers on this website.

Doctorow, Cory. Pirate Cinema. New York, NY.: Tor Teen, 2012.

Ellison, Harlan. Blood’s A Rover. Burton MI.: Subterranean Press, 2018. This collection contains all of the stories featuring Vic and Blood from A Boy and His Dog, plus aphorisms, and the screenplay for the TV pilot, and numerous quotations from The Wit and Wisdom of Blood.

Ellison, Harlan. The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television. New York, NY.: Ace Books, 1973.

Ellison, Harlan. The Other Glass Teat: Further Essays of Opinion on Television. New York, NY.: Ace Books, 1983.

Gordon, Mel, ed. Grand Guignol :Theatre of Fear and Terror. New York, NY.: Amok Press, 1988.

Ligotti, Thomas. My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror. Mythos Books, 2002.

​Tamás, Rebecca. “The Diggers Green Roots.” < https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/02/the-diggers-green-roots> 

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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. ​

“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.” 

FOR MY OTHER CHEAP THRILLS ARTICLES FOLLOW THE LINKS BELOW:

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

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING

CULTS OF MUSIC

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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.

.:. .:. .:.

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 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

.:. .:. .:.
​
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. 

“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

.:. .:. .:.

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.

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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. ​