American Psychogeography I:
From Saint Botolph to the Road Warriors

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

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

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

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

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

SAINT BOTOLPH OF SHAWMUT

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

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

LOOKING BACKWARDS AGAIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROAD WARRIORS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

☕️☕️☕️

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​[Note this article wouldn’t have been possible without previous interviews done with members of the Tree Community by Klemen Breznikar at Psychedelic Baby Magazine, and an article by substacker Jason P. Woodbury at his Range and Basin. The quotes from the band come from these two articles.]

​Where have all the genuine freaks gone? There was a time in America when being called a freak was a badge of honor. When you got called a freak probably, it probably meant you had at least some connection to the counterculture, or were otherwise just too weird and into your own thing to care much about what the rest of society was doing or thought. The term freak is a kind of strange praise, and went back to the people who lived counter to the clockwise norms of straight society in the sideshows and carnival circuits where they were put, or put themselves, on display as a way to make a living. The hippies adopted the word freak and used it to show their allegiance to a way of being outside the normative values of the normies.

The word got its biggest boost from the “freak scene” that emerged out of hippiedom in Southern California, centered around the Laurel Canyon neighborhood in L.A and the clothing store of Suzanne  “Szou” Shaffer, who is credited with introducing hippie fashion. Szou was married to a man who had been on the east coast to Lithuanian immigrants, sent to a reformatory, did some time for various crimes, and joined the merchant marines during WWII before settling down to become a bohemian artist who gave classes in clay modeling to the bored housewives of Beverly Hills. Vito and Szou soon hooked up with a man named Carl Franzoni, who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1934. The trio started going around to a bunch of clubs in the area with other weirdos who stylized themselves as “freaks.” Miles Barry, in his book Hippie, notes of the scene that they “lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could.” No wonder Franzoni was given the nickname Captain Fuck.
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They liked to smoke marijuana and drop LSD. The group evolved into “an acid-drenched extended family of brain-damaged cohabitants.” Sometimes these psychedelic decadents called themselves “Acid Freaks.” California denizen and godfather of the weird, Frank Zappa, was inspired by these hippies. His mind was already out there enough to not need the help of drugs to stimulate his wackadoodle imagination. His debut Mothers of Invention album “Freak Out!” centered around Vito, Szou, and Captain Fuck. They and their cohort of freakers even appeared on the last track of the album. When it hit the record stores in 1966, Zappa and his Mothers helped to spread the freak gospel to a world hungry for something different.

Another terminal weirdo, Hunter S. Thompson, had got inspired by the burgeoning freakdom, and it wasn’t just with new ideas for his gonzo journalism, but to campaign for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colorado. It’s hard to believe it now, but it should be remembered just how many people in straight society hated the hippies, and how many were incarcerated over the years for selling and smoking marijuana. The incumbent sheriff Thompson was campaigning against was a man named Carrol Whitmire, a veteran hippie hater in Colorado who sought to stomp them out through methods of intimidation, jailing, and otherwise harassing the freaks, making it hard on them so they would leave the area. Hunter S. Thompson wanted to be sheriff instead. He created the “Freak Power” party and tried to get the hippies to vote him into office. The plan didn’t work, but the power of freakdom continued to spread. 

The term freak started to evolve at this point. The word started being used for any person with a very specific kind of obsession. “Health freaks” were one kind of nut and “control freaks” another. As the brain-damaged fall out from the drug addled excesses of hippie culture started to make themselves known, some people turned to a different kind of power, to recenter themselves and orient towards a higher power. That power, as often as not, was Jesus. 

Within the hippie and back-to-the-land movement there had always been a subset who believed in the power of Jesus. They tended to focus on the aspect of Christianity that revolved around ideas of universal love, pacifism, and the notion of Jesus as a radical freethinker overturning the rules of the establishment. These types ended up earning the moniker Jesus Freaks. Sometime it was used as a pejorative, but just as often it was embraced, because like any freak, they were really into Jesus.

​Some of those Jesus Freaks were very freaky indeed and have left behind cultural artifacts and a rich legacy that deserves to be remembered, and in certain aspects, emulated. The story of the Trees Community, famous for their recordings among devoted fans of “freak folk” music, is about one such group of Jesus Freaks and is worthy of contemplation by Christians, those of other faiths, and those who follow their own eclectic philosophy. 

Much of what became the Jesus Freaks started on the west coast within the evangelical end of Protestantism starting in the 1960s.  Intermixed with this were the hippies others for whom going to regular church didn’t hold much value. Some weren’t religious at all, and others had been exploring other traditions and religions from around the world. A lot of these people had opened the doors of perception with a bit of chemical assistance leading them to become seekers. When the acid started wearing off, many converted to Christianity, and set about trying to change their lives, often while still within the hippie milieu of communes, back-to-the-land living, and the idea that Jesus was a radical who came to overturn the tables of the system.

Yet not all of the freaks settled into a settled into the evangelical side of Christianity, with its focus on the born-again experience, preaching the gospel, and the desire to bring others to Jesus and “save” them using the toolkit of the charismatic movement. Other groups were called to express their faith in music, in monasticism, and in the life of a community organized around liturgy and ritual. The Trees Community followed this latter approach through their involvement with the Episcopal Church. 
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It all started with a hippie guru named Shipen, street name William Lebzelter, and his girlfriend Ariel. Shipen was part of the scene, man, a serious seeker, and perhaps even a seeker of Sirius. Shipen had collaborated on the crazy collage album Rock and Other Four Letter Words with J Marks, an album dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen that came out in 1968, after all. The liner notes read, “This album is dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who destroyed our ears so we could hear.” The album was based on a book by J that in turn featured photography by Linda Eastman who would soon take on the name McCartney when she married a Beatle named Paul. All roads lead back to the Beatles and Stockhausen, after all. 

The album was produced by John McClure and features a Moog II along with the tape cut-ups of the interviews done for the book mixed in with sounds and music from a large slew of contributors. The book and album both bear the influence of Marshall McLuhan. The book features fold out pages, large and small typography in a variety of fonts, alongside the images from photographer Linda Eastman, all jumbled up together as a kind of hyperlinked pop encyclopedia. The album aims to be an audio version of the same. Though the album didn’t sell many copies by record executive standards, it remains a document of the willingness of the freaks to engage with avantgarde experimentation. That one of the people involved in this album was Shipen who was the leader of the Trees Community is interesting in how it showcases the confluence of ideas within hippiedom.

Founding members of the Trees Community Katheryn “Shishonee” Krupa told their origin story in an interviewed by Klemen Breznikar for psychedelicbabymag.com. “The Trees Community started as a commune of individuals who were all drawn to a Loft in the East Village of New York City in 1970. I had met our ‘leader’ Shipen when he came to visit my boarding school in northern Michigan in 1969. I found his knowledge of yoga, Eastern religions and his personality fascinating! He had written his own ideas down in an ‘automatic’ writing (no edits or changes) called Clear Children. While at my school, a number of us like-minded students would sit beside Lake Michigan and talk about the seven chakras, or the many mindsets of Clear Children, among other ideas like: time is a construct or we need worldwide peace.”

Shipen extended an invitation to Shishonee for her to come visit the Loft in Manhattan where he had quite the scene going on. She visited first on her spring break, and came back to stay after she had graduated. The place was almost like an ashram with Shipen as it’s dynamic, creative and intelligent leader. Krupa said he “could have easily been a guru, or an L. Ron Hubbard-type person, but he wasn’t. He was not on a power trip and was pretty humble.”

Inside the loft their brick walls, the wooden floors had been painted white, and their were tents set up inside for privacy. Fabrics and drapes the color of wine were hung from the ceiling. Painted mandalas adorned the space along with a statue of the Buddha and a lions head carving. This was wear they dropped acid and held their happenings that involved poetry readings and free form improvised music amid the glow of kerosene lamps lighting the space with the natural flicker of their dancing flames. The improvised music sessions, which were according to Krupa “beautiful and quite intense,” would go on to create the foundation for the later liturgical music of The Trees Community. Many people from New York’s creative community of artists, musicians, actors and dancers came in to the Loft at Shipen’s invitation to participate in or witness the growing scene.

The basic hippie lifestyle of subsisting on beans, rice and homemade bread in a shared space was something that would continue.

In this setting the quest for secret knowledge and mystical wisdom played a central role. As Shishonee tells it, “Eventually, as we delved more deeply into religious study, those who started showing up were seekers eager for answers to life’s questions. We took day trips to listen to Alan Watts, Ravi Shankar, or attend Avantgarde theater productions. Evenings brought mystical adventures through spontaneous, free form musical exploration. One night might take us on a camel caravan along a desert road in Egypt. Another journey might take us on an ocean voyage on an ancient ship sailing on gently rolling waves under the moonlight. Visitors picked up instruments such as Balinese pot gongs, flutes, a sitar or Indian tambura or a heavy chain and played as the Spirit moved them. By mid-summer, the Loft became a place to delve into incredible spiritual realms. LSD was essential to these early magical experiences, as was an in-depth study of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, I Ching, Christian Science and early Christian mysticism.”

One of the people who stopped by to visit the loft in 1970 was the Reverend Rodney Kirk, a bishop at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. After this various hangers on at the Loft started going to mass. “We’d walk barefoot up to mass, then slip down into the labyrinth of echoing caverns underneath the main altar to sing spontaneously,” says Shishonee.
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In the same year Shipen converted to Christianity after a fall from a black willow tree. After he hit the ground he had a vision of Christ sitting at the right hand of God. Soon they were all being called to the Christian faith, and another figure from the Cathedral, James Parks Morton, had become their mentor as they embarked on a path of communal Christianity. West would soon become their Abbot after they took formal vows and set themselves up as a monastic community.

As the Jesus Freak movement continued to unfurl, some of the original ethos that had been inherent within its DNA from the anti-establishmentarian hippies started to fade, probably around the same time they were coming down from the haze of weed and acid. At the same time there was a Jesus Freak explosion due to the virality of media exposure in the early seventies. Bad trips and harrowing drug experiences probably also contributed to people seeking another way.

Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth became popular reading matter and a good portion of the believers shifted away from the idea of Jesus being primarily a prophet of universal love, healing and pacifism, and started to focus on a theology of dispensational premillennialism, or the idea of the immanent return of Jesus before the end of the world and the rapture of those who had been “saved.”  On the one hand this led believers to give up on some of the environmental ideals of the back-to-the-land movement. If the world was going to end, there wasn’t much point in focusing on trying to stop pollution or doing anything about the degradation being done to the land. What was needed was a focus on saving souls from eternal damnation. This in turn coupled with the dominionist view of biblical interpretation holding that God gave humans ultimate and total control over earth, and that it was the necessity of Christians to establish law and order across the land inside our political systems. Because the planet itself was temporary when compared to the kingdom of God and what was to come after the rapture, the resources here might as well be exploited as best befit the church going business executives.
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However, the dominionist and premillennialist theologies have never been the only theologies on offer. Ever since Mart Luther split the atom of Christianity, a process of theological diversification has been underway inside Christendom’s religious portfolio. The process started in Europe, but it accelerated in America, where all different manner of denominations nominated themselves as bearers of the truth. Most often, and to their own detriment, they often see their interpretation of cosmic reality as the “one true way,” but there have been those among them who have taken a different view of things and have proclaimed the idea that they are just “one way among many.” That specific theology has been called universalism.

In Christianity universalism can be described as the belief that all human beings will eventually be reconciled with God, that a loving deity would not condemn a soul to an infinite hell for the finite failings of momentary sin. In a more universal sense, universalism is the idea that universal truths exist beyond the specific sets of belief about spiritual matters within national, cultural and religious boundaries. I few accept that it is true that certain truths might be universal it sets the stage for acceptance and curiosity about the many different and diverse spiritual and religious traditions of the world, and the possibility of cooperation between. Universalist thinking has led to the growth of the interfaith movement.

It should be noted that universalist does not necessarily mean unitarian. Not all religions have to have the same end goal and destination in mind. Their very differences in practices and purpose are part of what adds to the beautiful mosaic and kaleidoscope of spiritual traditions.  

It is not the purpose of this article to get into the history of the universalist movement within Christianity, that had its origins with radical freethinker, minister, theologian and proto-Anarchist Gerard Winstanley in the 1600s with the diggers, or to trace the origins of the interfaith and ecumenical movements. But by the time Shipen, Shishonee, David Lynch (not that David Lynch) and the other hangers on at The Loft came around, universalism and the interfaith movement had found strong adherents within the Episcopal Church. That influence left its mark on the character of what became The Trees Community and made their music and philosophy a different color than the Jesus Freaks who were gearing up for the immanent destruction of earth, the rapture, and the return of Christ.

The interfaith and universalist approach suited The Trees. They had already been explorers in the world’s diverse traditions, from Hinduism and yoga, to Kabbalah and the early Christian mysticism of the Desert Fathers. They were intrepid psychedelic explores, and even as they came down from the drug trip following their conversion, knew intuitively that the inner realms of spirit had a lot less need for rule bound adherence to specific doctrines of theology than the humans who liked to make those rules. They were led along the path to an orthodox faith and sharing of spiritual experience through music, art and liturgy, without concerning themselves as much with the questing to save other people’s souls, which has been a typical focus of Christianity.

This tendency towards Christian universalism was nurtured by their spiritual advisors from the St. John the Divine Cathedral. It was Canon Edward Nason West, the subdean of the Cathedral, who became their spiritual advisor, and when they took formal vows, he became the Abbot of what they called The Trees Community. Canon West also happened to be the advisor to noted fantasy writer Madeline L’engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, among many other wonderful novels. The group became very close with her as well. In a four of her books, West appears as the character Canon John Tallis. As they moved along in their journey with the church, West became their spiritual “father” and L’Engle became their spiritual “mother.”  
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West was canon sacrist and subdean. He was also a theologian, author, iconographer, and an expert in the design of church furnishings. He had a deep love for Fyodor Dostoevsky and was equally versed in Eastern Orthodox side of faith as he was to the Episcopal traditions within the overarching Anglican Communion. He liked to see himself as a starets, or what is known in Eastern Orthodoxy as a kind of spiritual guru. These weren’t people necessarily of high rank with the church, but known as wise and the person people went to for advice.

L’engle was also of the persuasion of the universalist salvation. She believed that “All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.”

George MacDonald had a large influence on her work and she believed in a similar way as he did with regards to divine punishment. “I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”

Her universalism was such that many Christian bookstores didn’t want to carry her books, because the doctrine is considered heretical by some. The evangelicals likewise banned her books from being taught in their schools, let alone carried in the libraries. One such critic stated that “Madeline L'Engle teaches universalism in her books and denigrates organised Christianity and promotes an occultic world view.”

It wasn’t the only way she was getting criticized though, the secular readers and critics thought she brought too much of her faith and spirituality into her books for them to be comfortable with either.   

The Trees Community worked closely with the priest James Parks Morton at St. John the Divine. He had grown up in Iowa, but studied theology at Cambridge, England, followed by his ordination into the episcopalian priesthood. Morton went on to become a leader in the interfaith movement. In Jersey City and Chicago, he worked with the inner-city poor. His work brought him to NYC and in 1972 he was appointed dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. At the time it sat in the middle of an area of urban stagnation, and working with Bishop Paul Moore, they transformed the place into an inclusive bohemian temple.

Morton was sympathetic to the environmental movement and wanted to maintain dialogue with other religions. Later in his career he founded the Interfaith Center of New York.

​Morton was interested in using the arts as a way to bridge the energy of religion, and made the Cathedral a kind of hot spot for dance and music in the already flourishing NYC scene. As such he was the perfect kind of mentor to give spiritual guidance to the members of the Trees and their community work.

After the core group of seekers at The Loft had started converting to Christianity, the other, more casual visitors stopped dropping by. Those who remained were committed to living a life centered on Christ. The idea of taking a hippie commune and turning it into a devoted monastic community held a strong hold over them, but West advised them that they should take things a bit slower and go out and see what other denominations within Christianity had to offer before they committed and made formal vows.

This was fortuitous timing in another way. The Loft where they had their genesis was eventually transformed into a parking lot by the municipal powers of Manhattan. With the scene around that particular crash pad dissipating, and West advising them to look to other churches, they decided to take their improvised music, now incorporating the psalms of David, prayers and religious lyrics, onto the road.

As Shishonee recalls, “Eleven of us set off in May, 1971, disciples of the Lord, eager to see where He would lead us. For the next seven years, we traveled throughout America and Canada, honing our musical, theatrical presentation and sharing it in schools, churches, monasteries and Christian communities. Always, we sought God’s will. He drew us to help pick strawberries and work with Hutterites on a farm in Ontario. He led us to a monastery in Gethsemane, Kentucky where we found a spiritual retreat with gracious, Franciscan monks. He called us to live with nuns and monks in a Roman Catholic monastery along the Pecos River in New Mexico. We helped pack pecans in a community in Koinania, Georgia, then lived and worked in a family household at Church of the Redeemer in Houston. Each experience in a new community brought change, conflict, and growth, pruning members away from our core group, or sometimes adding to it. Throughout these painful often difficult experiences, the music flourished and evolved.”

Their music had been informed by their wide ranging interests. It could be said to mirror the interfaithful example of their universalist teachers. Sitars, zither, harp, cello, koto, gongs, Balinese instruments and African hand drums all joined together in a symphony of souls. They continued to improvise, even while using the structure of the psalms and other material as a focus. The influence of world music can be thought of as their exploration of different religious traditions, while their dedication to improvisation, something not as common at all in other Christian music, can be seen as an expression of the individual freedom of the adherent.
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When came back to New York City form their initial travels and eventually did take their vows. An article in Time Magazine from 1973 reports on their experience that “The five men and three women, ranging in age from 20 to 30, went through a virtual catalogue of religious experiences before undergoing their Christian conversions. Now known as the Trees Group, they live in an apartment near the church, regularly give concerts at the cathedral and also perform tasks like guiding cathedral visitors. This fall they will take preliminary vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.”

As they honed their music, they continued to tour and give concerts at churches and in other spaces around the United States. In 1975 they recorded their sole/soul album The Christ Tree.
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‘The Christ Tree’ was compiled as a musical meditation – our concert – that we performed in late 1974 and early 1975 while on tour. The concerts were not just a “show” but rather was a form of worship, a musical journey for those who came to experience it. For the album, we left out a few songs that were in the full concert, yet still it is representative of what we were playing at that time,” Shishonee said. “ The Christ Tree was not just a concert, but also a theatrical event, designed to draw people into a life-changing experience. Imagine the dramatic impact of hearing strangely discordant, far off voices singing “Holy, Holy” (called ‘Holy Seed’ on the album) approaching from distant corners of a dimly lit church, then seeing nine men and women wearing flowing white robes and swinging incense as they move slowly through the audience…”

Yet he life of the monastic bohemian started to take its toll, and the group was starting to disband by the late seventies. The experiment was over in 1978. The vows of chastity were hard to maintain, and people partnered up and started having families. They loved what they had done, but it was getting harder to maintain. Harder in the financial sense as well, with money for the arts drying up at the church and New York City where they were based deep into its years of abasement. The Trees had grown from a seed, flourished and spread its roots and branches, then shed its leaves.

The original pressing of the album became legendary among aficinados of strange ethereal music for its combination of weird folk and world sounds coupled with its earnest and deep spirituality. The vinyl commanded high prices in the collectors market. Then in 2004 Timothy Renner of Dark Holler Arts remastered the album for release on CD. It was rereleased again by Old Bear Records in 2020, fifty years after The Trees Community had first formed at Shipen’s Loft.

The entire album is worth listening to on repeat, but it is their versions of Psalm 42 and Psalm 45 that I keep coming back to over and over again, year after year.

The music remains timeless, ancient sounding, experimental and utterly contemporary. My hope is that new musical and spiritual seekers who find the music will continue to be inspired by their example, by the freedom to improvise within a spiritual context, by the freedom to choose instruments from around the world and combine them eclectically.

It seems clear that people in the United States and Europe are leaving behind the trappings of secularity in favor of a return to religion, what historian Oswald Spengler called a second religiosity. People are finding safety in religion from the collapse and decline of the institutions and systems previous thought to be stable. Many young people are flocking to both evangelical denominations and seeking out the Traditionalist movement within the Roman Catholic Church or joining various Eastern Orthodox churches. Teachers like Canon West, Madeline L’Engle, and James Parks Morton, and their disciples in the Trees show that matters of the spirit and can be viewed from a universalist lens, and that faith can be celebratory of differences in religion within and beyond Chrisitanity. Hopefully too, they will allow themselves to get their freak on.  
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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. ​

My immersion into the world of punk rock music was coupled with my love for graphic novels and comics. I started collecting them in junior high, though I would say I have never become a serious collector. That ended up being reserved for books and music, of which, I am probably still a lightweight compared to many others who spend their paychecks at record shops and used book stores. Still, comic books and graphic novels have remained something I am always drawn back into, sort of like the music of punk rock. I go on to become interested in other things, but I always feel the need to read some graphic novels and comics ever year, just as I always feel the need to listen to some punk music.

The comics I liked as a kid were shaped by a tendency I still have today: seeking out the weird and strange. It was for this reason that I never really got into any superhero comics. Some of them were kind of weird. Some of them were kind of strange. Yet they were never weird and strange. The closest thing that came to finding a superhero comic that called to me was Reid Fleming: The Worlds Toughest Milkman. I suppose Tank Girl with her Jet Girl and Sub Girl companions, and mutant kangaroo boyfriend, was kind of superhero, only, not really. More on my fanboy obsession with her below.

Doctor Who isn’t a superhero either, and these days he doesn’t really count much as being weird or different. When I was a teen in the early nineties however, Doctor Who was only the domain of card-carrying nerds, and I qualified. Nerds didn’t have the cache of cool back then. There was no Big Bang Theory TV show celebrating geekedom. Going to the comic book store and watching science fiction was one of the things that put me on the road to get my ass kicked by neighborhood toughs even as my music of choice was heavy metal. Reading books on the bus didn’t help much either.

​I had been a fan of Doctor Who since I was about ten or eleven when I first saw a Peter Davison era serial being run on the Saturday night 10 PM time slot on our local PBS station. The episode was Four to Doomsday, and I was hooked thereafter. It wasn’t the typical thing for an American kid of my era to get hooked on. 

It wasn’t long after that when I started seeing advertisements for Comic Book World, a local comics shop on the local UHF station, which I watched especially on Sunday afternoons for the movie specials for films like John Carpenter’s Christine and They Live. In the Comic Book World commercial an flashed an image of Doctor Who with its logo and I started begging my dad to take me there. He reluctantly gave in, or I just wore him down. My dad was never into comic books at all, and he could have been a prime collector. My grandpa made a living first as a newspaper boy starting at age 14, then he had his own newspaper and magazine stand which he raised his family of five. My dad was the youngest and by the time he was a kid my grandpa’s business was bustling and my dad said he had all kinds of comics and things he also sold, and brought home the remainders, but he was never interested. Perhaps in the same way I was never interested in cars the same way my dad loves those machines.
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The first time he took me to Comic Book World I went straight for the Doctor Who comics. Digging through those boxes would later become familiar to the way I dug for CDs and records. He started taking me to the store every once in awhile as a treat. At one point they got in a Doctor Who role playing game by FASA. My dad spent some of his hard-earned money that he made as a welder fixing industrial machinery on that for me. The guy at the comics shop thought I was a bit young to understand it, and I was, but it stimulated my imagination very much and it wasn’t much longer before I was playing other role-playing games.

Role playing games and comic book shops of course go hand and hand. When I started skateboarding, and getting into the alternative and grunge music I was hearing on the radio, and then punk, I also started finding some comic books that had a real punk edge.

Two titles in particular sent my mind into widening spirals of appreciation, obsession and investigation. Later I found two more series that have kept the passion for inky punk filled pages going. Finding this kind of material was a quest, and when you hit pay dirt on something good you felt really lucky. When I first discovered Tank Girl I felt very lucky indeed.

TANK GIRL

​The year was 1993, and by this time the Riot Grrrl movement that put women and feminism on the stage and at the forefront of a scene that, at least in hardcore, was something of a boys club. To be honest, female fronted punk bands have been and remain favorites. I also like the bands where male and female vocalists share equal time at the mic. Groups like X, Crass, Chumbawamba, and Beat Happening all excelled at this. That tradition has been a standard in the many offshoots from punk and its bastard children. Sonic Youth made it a standard operating procedure, as did groups like Low and Yo La Tengo. Newer post-punk bands like Shopping continue in the spirit.

When I saw the cover of Tank Girl I was immediately smitten, and I went on to start collecting the issues whenever they came out. This is how the comic book stores get you hooked on the medium, and buying other stuff in the meantime. It was the first issue of four in the second series, so I had no idea what was going, but it hardly mattered, because the story itself was seriously fucked up. Tank Girl wakes up in a kind of bedlam or insane asylum called Bell’s End, the Rest Home for the Socially Retarded. What followed was an introduction to a world of pickle and cheese sandwiches, mutant kangaroo boyfriends, and irreverent humor. I kept coming back for more and more. The idea of putting unruly women away in such homes perhaps struck a chord with me, as I had experienced the same happening with people I was very close to, at an institution called Kids Helping Kids. Yet she won’t be held down, and makes her escape to go on an epic road trip, with lots of beer swilled and cigarettes smoked along the way.

The series was created by Alan Martin, writer, and Jamie Hewlett, artist and writer, and remains my all-time favorite comic, for its art, for its humor, its punk attitude, and surreal scifi concepts. Mutant kangaroos are escaping out of mental institutions, what could be better?

Tank Girl wasn’t strong on narrative cohesion, but it made up for that by ever shifting scenarios that grew ever wilder with each block of drawing and humorous dialogue. The art by Jamie Hewlett was the other part of the charm. His imagery went on to have a huge impact in popular music with the band Gorillaz for who he is the illustrator and artist for the characters. I don’t dislike Gorillaz, but to be honest, I just never got into them, despite Hewlett being involved.

A few years after I got into comics, the film came out. It remains a cult classic of a film. Still pretty good when watched again thirty years later, and what can I say, it will always remain a pleasure to see Naomi Watts play the character of Jet Girl. Lori Petty does a pretty good Tank Girl but it is the illustrations I will always see in my mind when I think of her.   

The Tank Girl comics have remained an underground classic hit and remained in print in various editions, along with new series having come out periodically. If you want to check out the classic years your best bet now is to get the Tank Girl Colour Classics. I gave my original set to one of my daughters who had become a fan. Now I am thinking of getting this set again myself so I can reread them yet again.

BAKER STREET: HONOUR AMONG PUNKS & CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT

The Baker Street comics by Guy Davis and Gary Reed were another revelation. The style of drawing was completely different, and all in black and white, whereas Tank Girl had been at least partly in color. This one was all story, all intrigue, grit, and dark gothic rain clouds. The story follows a series of ripper like murders and a group of punks known as the Irregulars who follow around a lady named Harlequin who is a female version of Sherlock Holmes. She used to be a detective, but liked life among the punks instead.

In this version of England war World War II had never taken place and dirigibles float in the sky. An American student named Sharon Ford studying from abroad comes over to stay, and Harlequin offers her a room to let, which irritates her girlfriend. The lesbian relationship is an eye opener for the student, as is the entire world of the punk underground, but not everything is as it seems.

It's a solid mystery story in an of itself, but its British punk realism, complete with heroin use and the first serious depiction of cross-dressing and gender bending I’d ever come across made a deep impression on my impressionable mind.

The first story arc of five issues was combined in the Honour Among Punks trade paperback. Guy Davis continued the story and most of the art in Children of the Night. Both are well worth seeking out. I’m not sure how many times I read those books, but it was a lot. Soon it will be time again. The artwork and lettering are all fantastic.

​The late Gary Reed had a storied career in comics as the publisher of the Caliber Comics imprint and for relaunching Deadworld, among many other achievements. Guy Davis remains well known for his creature designs for Guillermo del Toro, and the illustration work he did for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy spinoff B.R.P.D. and his own later series The Marquis. 

PUNK ROCK AND TRAILER PARKS

I never lost my love of punk rock even as I got older and interested in electronica, industrial, the fleeting freak folk moment, psychedelic folk, and timeless folk music, among other things noise and free improvisation. The vagaries of the avantgarde. Punk remained a touchstone with its DIY ethic and sordid tales. Returning to it is like dipping a cup into a well of clean water on a hot day. Which is part of why I am writing this. Maybe some other people need to take a drink now and then.

But maybe that water isn’t really clear, but murky. Somehow its still refreshing. Mud just means its fortified with minerals. Punk Rock and Trailer Parks by the great Ohioan comic artist and writer Derf was one I read as an adult.

These Derf, or to give his given name Derf Backderf, has come to wider renown among the general public through the film adaptation of his graphic memoir My Friend Dahmer. Derf went to school with Dahmer and befriended the infamous serial killer, because he was one of the odd and weird ones.
Derf grew up in Richfield, Ohio which is halfway between Cleveland and Akron. And while London, New York, LA and San Francisco get a lot of the credit for the birth of punk, Akron, Ohio is as much to blame as the more storied cities. Derf sets that right with his tale of the burgeoning punk scene in Akron that makes Punk Rock & Trailer Parks.

The story works on many levels. As a coming of age story of a kid growing up in a trailer park, as a history of Ohio’s creative acumen, as a paean to the music of the place and time. Derf was in the right place and right time, in the seventies to hear all the great Ohio bands like The Dead Boys and  Rocket from the Tombs, among others. In the story Otto ‘The Baron’ Pizcock meets his destiny when goes from his home in the trailer park to the real-life Akron punk club the Bank. As with many other people whose life was transformed after going to a show, Otto loses all the awkwardness he once hand and finds his power. The power of punk. He meets The Ramones, The Cramps, Stiv Bator, Klaus Nomi, Lester Bangs and The Clash and other luminaries who found their way to Akron.

​It’s also a drunk, stoned, sexed up bit of slice of life. I wonder what happened to Otto when he became an adult. Hopefully he kept the spirit alive. 

LOVE AND ROCKETS

Working at the library has helped me keep up with the desire to read comics and graphic novels. Last year I enjoyed reading Black Hole by Charles Burns for the first time, and I also enjoyed several noir crime comics by Ed Brubaker. Anytime I have seen a Love & Rockets collection at work, I’ve always looked through them and been intrigued, wanting to read them, but somehow, never making the time to do so until late last year and early this year.

Part of the interest was in the name. I wondered if there was a connection to the band Love and Rockets. Apparently there was because the group took their name from the comic. That is a good enough recommendation to read them as any. Apparently there were also other groups that named themselves after the series. Gilbert Hernandez chronicled these in Love and Rockets X graphic novel, but I haven’t read that one yet.

The story of this series is a story of brothers and of a mother who had a love for the medium. The Hernandez brothers, Mario, Jaime and Gilbert came from a family of six and everyone in the house read comics, as their mother was a huge fan. Comics were all over the place in that house and everyone read and talked about them.

Jaime Hernandez notes how in this environment he “wanted to draw comics my whole life.” Love and Rockets started off as a sibling endeavor with Jaimie, Gilbert and Mario all working on the first issue together. They worked on quite a number together after that as well, with Mario eventually falling out of it for the most part, but still contributing occasionally, and Jaimie and Gilbert continuing the intertwined and ongoing stories from the series together and on their own. In true punk spirit the first issue was self-published in 1981. This is another tie in between the world of underground comics and underground music: the DIY ethic. 
The series has gone on for so long, and their were all these different threads which was part of what kept me from jumping in to begin with. But I eventually decided to just grab some and start reading. There is a slice-of-life quality to them that allows for this jumping in wherever you can.

One of the story lines is called Hoppers 13 or Locas, and this one came from the mind of Jaime who brought his love of punk into the mix. It literally follows the Locas or crazy women and a group of primarily chicano characters from their teenage years in the fictional California city of Heurta, based on the Hernandez’s hometown of Oxnard. These kids, are all involved in the punk scene, but it dials in on two lovely and crazy women, Margarita “Maggie” Luisa Chascarrillo and Esperanza “Hopey” Leticia Glass who have an on-again off-again romance and friendship with plenty of drama. For this reason this storyline is also sometimes referred to as the Maggie and Hopey Tales.

On the alternate thread from these is Gilbert’s take on Love and Rockets which contains fantastical explosions of magical realism in the fictional Latin American village of Palomar. This sequence is sometimes called Heartbreak Soup after the first story set in the town.

I started off reading some of the Hoppers 13 stories from the beginning, but now I have jumped to more current story lines that also include the story of teenager Tonta.

​One of the books I read Is This How You See Me Now, is poignant to any of us who have grown up in punk rock and sees Maggie and Hopey going to a reunion show. As they look back on their life in the late seventies and early eighties, and where they are now, in the late 2010s when it was written, they get to see how they have changed, and how they haven’t. Complete with the addition of kids and new partners in their own lives and the lives of their friends, it’s a touching look at why we keep coming back to see our old friends and reconnect over the passions of youth, even as new generations pick up the torch of the punk ethos and continue to carry it onwards.

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

1 https://www.arcaneborders.com/post/border-reiving-an-iron-age-relic
2Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison, eds. Champaign, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2021.
3https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/us/springfield-ohio-haitians-immigration-cec/index.html
4https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/07/vodou-haiti-endangered-faith-soul-of-haitian-people
1 https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living
2 https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx

RE/SOURCES:

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York, NY.: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Garreau, Joel. The Nine Nations of North America. Boston, MA .: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Gioia, Ted. “In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War.” < https://www.honest-broker.com/p/in-2024-the-tension-between-macroculture>

“14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture” < https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living>

Greer, John Michael. The Twilight of Pluto: Astrology and the Rise and Fall of Planetary Influences. Rochester, VT.: Inner Traditions, 2022.

Heat-Moon, William Least. Blue Highways: A Journey into America. Boston, MA .: Little, Brown, 1982. This book was first thrust on me by a friend in high school. It captivated my mind, because I had just before run across my father’s diaries, and had read them without him knowing. They detailed his own travels across the United States from Maine to the Alaskan highway in his ’34 Ford Coupe in the year of 1976. Heat-Moon’s book takes place in 1978, just a year before I was born, so it touches on a time in America that had already started to fade as I was coming into this world, and the place my father knew as a young man.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York, NY.: The Viking Press, 1957. This classic text of the Beat generation is available in multiple editions. While it may be flawed as a novel (I like his Dharma Bums much better), it excels as a snapshot of the different regions of North America, including Mexico, in the aftermath of World War II and remains a vital countercultural document.

Savage, Jon. Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. New York, NY.: Viking, 2007. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in the development of the phenomenon of the teenager. It roughly covers the years 1875-1945, and focuses in on small groups and gangs now only dimly remembered as well as the influence of authors such as James M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum, Anne Frank, and Oscar Wilde.

Woodard, Colin. American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New York, NY.: Viking, 2011.

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

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

This post continues my exploration of fifty favorite albums from the non-profit music label New World Records who celebrated their fiftieth anniversary last year. New World Records was established to put the work of non-commercial American music front-and-center. They formed at the bicentennial of the nation, and now as we enter the sesquicentennial, I’d like to draw attention to the exceptional releases in their extensive catalog. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn you on to some new composers and their music along the way.
I have another purpose in this endeavor as well. That is to celebrate the American experimental tradition as exemplified in these works. I will also be celebrating some of our popular and folk traditions as well, because these circles do intersect.

American culture, specifically our music culture, has succeeded more than any of our other exports. It also remains essential to our own identity. In this time of extreme polarization and divisiveness, it seems to me that it would be helpful to step out of the box all together and focus on those aspects of our heritage that showcase our inventiveness and ability to break new ground through resourcefulness and the skillful recombination of available resources into new forms.

This is the new world and it requires a new philosophy. Listening to experimental music is sometimes like reading philosphy. Lets dig into the philosophical sounds of the new world.
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As always, we will start with a record that was included in the original set of fifty albums that inaugurated the work of the label.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME? AMERICAN SONG DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION

rom the original set of fifty albums first released by New World Records comes this compilation of songs from the Great Depression. You can listen to it in a way similar to how you might listen to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. But this is an anthology of American popular song from the thirties, stuff that was pressed into shellac, and played on the victrola. It’s a window into the soul of the nation during the years of steep economic hardship.

But that hardship didn’t play out for everyone in the same way, and that is reflected by these songs. For a time there seemed to be a lot of homogeneity to American popular culture. In the years following WWII radio, television and newspapers congealed to create a somewhat uniform front and this had a gluing effect on the collective mind. Now the internet and social media have atomized that collective mind, parking people into silos of thought, and media spaces like substack or youtube, that they don’t like to stray from very often.

But during the Great Depression (1929-1941) people were also a lot less homogenous. Regional cultures still prevailed across the landscape. Corporate products hadn’t yet replaced our homespun folk traditions to the degree they now. Classes were more sharply defined, and people could even talk about class differences. Now those in the professional managerial class like to pretend these don’t really exist all that much. You can see why, considering this class gets a lot of the benefits of the way our society is currently set up. But if you go an listen to the music made in the Great Depression you can get a taste of how varied and different the aspects of America were back then. These popular tunes are a good reminder that we can have great diversity within the country and still be a unified country.
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The title track was popularized by Bing Crosby, but other songs were just as big like Gene Autry’s tune “The Death of Mother Jones.” Bill Cox sang to the laborers in the sweat shops with his song “N.R.A. Blues.” It’s not a song about gun control, but about the National Recovery Association, an agency put together by FDR to help set minimum wages and maximum hours, and get the companies to stop being so ruthless in how they used and treated their workers.

On the African American side of things Big Bill Broonzy sings the “Unemployment Blues” about a law abiding citizen who just wants to find some honest work.

Writing this a time when speculative bubbles around big tech and real estate look liable to put sending their damage into the rest of the economy, this compilation is a stark reminder that there is no guarantee on the value of our dollar bills and that an economic crash can take out the elites. When the supplies to their underground bunkers run out, they’ll have to brave the streets just like the rest of us.
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History repeats itself, but differently. Time is more like a spiral than either a straight line or a circle, and when it comes down to it, we all have to change with the times.

GEORGE LEWIS - CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

George E. Lewis, trombonist, composer, musicologist, computer music pioneer and software developer, member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and for a time, musical director of The Kitchen. George Lewis, American. His music sits deeply inside the collective musical cathedral of American experimentation.

Founded by a group of jazz musicians in 1965 in the hotbed of Chicago’s South Side, the AACM has given voice to those experimentalists to often ignored by the shallow trench of the dirtbag music industry. Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams and Joseph Jarman were among its early members. Alex Ross notes that, “The A.A.C.M. tended to be categorized as avant-garde jazz, although, as Lewis’s scholarship has shown, it should have been incorporated into a canon of experimental composition that has a long history of shutting out Black artists.” It remains an integral part of the tradition that straddles improvisation and composition using new techniques. This experimental tendency also went to their scores, “that blended music, geometry, painting, and ciphers to be interpreted by the performers live.”

Lewis later wrote a history of the AACM published in 2008, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.

Lewis himself grew up in Chicago, born to African-American Southerners who had come to the city as part of the Great Migration. He picked up the “big, shiny, and weird” trombone as a third grader at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, an institution started by John Dewey back in 1896 as a place to put new educational theories and philosophy to the test.

That education seems to have benefited Lewis who majored in philosophy at Yale, and joined the AACM while he was on a break. As an early adopter of computer music, Lewis made use of the KIM-1 computer, a favorite also of west coast music hackers such as David Behrman and the members of the League of Automatic Music Composers. He premiered his piece “The Kim and I” at the New Music New York festival in 1979. The following year he took up a position as director of The Kitchen, which he held until 1982, when he left for Paris where he would work at IRCAM.

He spent three years there working on a commission that resulted in the piece Rainbow Family for improvising musicians and programmed Apple computers that reacted to the live audio with its own responses. This work led to his later introduction of the music software he created called Voyager. Released on Carrier Records, its an essential document of machine and human interaction and should be listened to by anyone interested in “80s AI, 1950s cybernetics, and [the] sociomusical networks of free improvisation.” If you need a dose of heady philosophy regarding human creativity in the age of computer reproduction, read the liner notes Lewis wrote to Rainbow Family and you will be richly rewarded.

The work by Lewis I want to showcase here is Changing With the Times. It has just as much of a heady brew of high concept art music combined with poetry.
As the liner notes have it, “In the ontological systems of both Africa and Europe, creation begins with the word in its various oral and gestural manifestations. Music, as an expressive modality, is clearly an extension of word exemplified by ancient African griots, the communal historians whose rhythmic chants opened the path to jazz improvisation, where we witness the alchemical effect of speaking in tongues that leads to a process of creative invention.

Changing With the Times is a conversation piece, for which George Lewis has assembled a diverse collection of musicians, poets, and storytellers into an organic narrative mode to signify, in style and content, on his personal odyssey through the contradictions and ambiguities of being black in a noncontradictory social universe, America.”

Some of the voices are the musicians playing, and some are the poets reading: Quincy Troupe, Jerome Rothenberg and Bernard Mixon. The text was written by George T. Lewis, the father of George E. The music is there to give flavor and texture to words and riff off of them in its own improvisation.
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In the section Chicago Dadagram the poet recites the words “The bridges of Chicago / are not the bridges of Paris / or Amsterdam / except they are a definition almost no one bothers to define.” That’s how this Dadaist jazz chamber suite presented on this album sounds. Indefinable. Step into it and let it carry you across the bridges of sound into experimental Chicago.

LEJAREN HILLER - A TOTAL MATRIX OF POSSIBILITIES

Computer music is once again getting a bad rep. Blame it on the AI slop, I suppose. Yet there are deeper waters in the world of computer music than just punching a few buttons, giving a basic and instruction and seeing what plops out. Those roots go back to the intersection between mathematics and music that has been a part of the western tradition since the time of Pythagoras.

Algorithm’s have been given a bad name in the culture. I’m not going to deny why they’ve been given a bad name. But to place all music made with computers, all music made using algorithms, into the same category is also bad for the culture. Because there is some real beauty, genius, heart and intellect in music that is made by humans who get off on advanced mathematics. This stuff will perk your ears up and make you think. It is music that feeds the intellect.

This midcentury modern music is a music of algorithms, but it was made when programming a computer was something of an art and a folk art at that. Punching cards, writing code, rewriting code, repunching cards. This music is also systems music. The parameters of the program first had to be decided by the human before the computer could make the choices to determine the composition. In this way, the computer coding was as much a part of the score as what the score ended up being.

Even with its high concept modernism, controversy has followed computer music from the beginning. When Lejaren Hiller Jr. wrote about his Illiac Suite in article for Scientific American, bringing it to wider renown, it set off one of the first rounds of anti-computer composition bias.

On this record we don’t hear his Illiac Suite, but his less talked about Computer Cantata from 1963 as well as various string quartets.

Like many other composers, working as a composer was a hard row to hoe, and his main job was as a chemist for DuPont where he developed a method for dying acrylic fibers. But he had been a multi-instrumentalist as a kid and the different disciplines of science and music never seemed all that different from one another different to him. While studying chemistry at Princeton he also studied music with both Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. Babbitt was himself a mathematician as well as a musician. Making music from equations was not a foreign idea to Hiller.

In 1952 Hiller got a position at the University of Illinois teaching chemistry and in his spare time he obtained a masters degree in composition. He started working on the ILLIAC IV, an early computer. While working on the programming of the ILLIAC he saw that there was crossover between writing a program and composing a piece of music, just as Babbitt had seen the correlation between his complex math, and the complex twelve-tone music he would compose with math. In 1958 Hiller was able to transfer to the music department and he started working on building the schools Experimental Music Studio.

The Illiac Suite, a four movement string-quartet, is considered the first piece of music composed by a computer using an algorithm. He worked on this with Leonard Issacson who shared the calling card of being another chemist-composer. They wrought a strange alchemy.
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Next Hiller created a new programming language called MUSICOMP that he wrote with Robert Baker. Computer Cantata from 1963 is one of the results of that program and can be heard on this remarkable album.

ERIC RICHARDS - THE BELLS THEMSELVES

​Some of the most interesting works in music come from composers who are not widely known. I am not sure if there is an inverse rule, that the least interesting music comes from the most widely known musicians, but there might be. It’s at least worth thinking about. The most known music will be the least challenging aesthetically for the average listener. But without challenges, how can we grow into different areas of exploration?

I’ve heard it said that putting timbre ahead of tonality in terms of compositional focus is like putting a cart before a horse. But tone is only one area of sound. It’s certainly worthy of deep creative attention, but so is playing with the parameters of timbre. Eric Richards gave full reign to his exploration of timbre.

Perhaps part of the reason some of these figures are less known is because of their introspective dispositions. In looking inwards and focusing on their own imagination, they were not so much a part of the various “scenes” in music and the arts which can give people a boost in their popularity.

Eric Richards was such a one who wasn’t really a part of any scene, even as followed in the footsteps of Henry Cowell and John Cage and operated in a similar terrain as some of the minimalists who were part of a scene.
Richard’s noted in an interview this dichotomy between the kind of outer focus some artists have, and the inner focus of others. “It is curious, many of the people whose music I like best—particularly Harley Gaber, Charlemagne Palestine, and Michael Byron—kind of dropped out for different reasons. That's a whole area of American music that I think is important, but that no one has written about or gone into—it wasn't part of "the scene," partly because of the personalities of these different people. They were not what David Riesman [in The Lonely Crowd] would call "other-directed," they were all very inner-directed people who could not really be part of a scene.”

If we look into ourselves for our own justifications, for our own validations for creating the work we do, and less to the kudos and adulations received from the crowd or a scene a body of artistic work is likely to develop that is in stark contrast to what is accepted in the marketplace, and to what is accepted in any scene. Such iconoclasm is in itself a part of the American spirit. Following inner inclinations can lead to tremendous creative insight, if low commercial potential. That is part of the plight of experimental culture in a capitalist driven country.

There is a connection between tinkering on inventions and artistic tinkering. Both kinds of tinkerers want to see what possibilities they can come up with, what can be done. When tinkering leads to a car or a lightbulb that experimentation is celebrated. When it leads to a new artistic work or breakthrough in aesthetics, it might just be ignored. Better if it is decried because then you know it is touching a nerve and that there are some live wires at play.

Richard’s used magnetic tape as a tool in his composition, but not in the way it was used by many of his contemporaries. He would use it as a tool for analysis, recording something that he wanted to listen to, to change the speed of, and then transcribe the material into his notated work.

Another technique used by Richards was to take one instrument as a sound source and multiply it exponentially, for instance using 72 clarinets or 11 oboes. This required a studio to realize his work where a single musician could multitrack the material from the score. Richards described the way it sounded as a “a sort of composed-out web of different reverberations or echo of echoes.”

Like many other American composers he looked to Charles Ives as the granddaddy and took Ives use of collage to heart. On The Bells Themselves: Jonathan Edwards and the American Songbook he uses a plethora of material collaged out of the songs from American show tunes. The piece on the recording is of a pianist playing three overdubbed piano parts. The overlapping partials from the piano chords create an effect of church bell ringing. His interest in the voice of the bell is also present on some of the either pieces on this album.

His interest in the sonority of bells is also heard on other songs from the record, such as the opening Finalbells. As it says in the liner notes, “Playing a conventional percussion instrument in a nontraditional manner—that is, by rubbing a cowbell with a rubber Super Ball—is the means by which the sound material of this piece was generated. When Richards first heard these sounds, with their unique combination of overtones, he was immediately moved by the way in which they seemed to evoke some form of ghostly cry from the underworld. He was also struck by the way in which the overtones, produced by the Super Ball rubbing the cowbell, seemed to have little or no relation to the cowbell’s original fundamental pitch.

​Limiting himself to a small number of cowbells, Richards composed short melodic fragments whose fundamental pitches produced the sounds that most interested him. Having noticed that the pitches to these melodic fragments echoed, in some mysterious way, the pitches of Schubert’s song Der Doppelgänger (The Double), he selected three additional songs from Schubert’s posthumous collection of songs, Schwanengesang (Swan Song): Liebesbotschaft (Message of Love), Der Atlas (The Atlas), and Schubert’s last composition Die Taubenpost (Pigeon Post).” The notes go on, but it is an interesting example of generating compositional material from examining the recorded sound of an instrument, and then using collage to add in material from past repertoires to create something new.

The pieces on IKON touch on the power of the poet in a similar way to that of George Lewis and his Changing with the Times. Instead of a work for instrumentalists and recitative poets, Marshall digs into the rich terrain of text-composition pieces and sound poetry.

Marshall has was born in Mount Vernon, New York into a musical family, and he sang soprano in the Boy’s Choir at the in the Boy's Choir at the Mt. Vernon Community Church. He went on to study music at Columbia University just in time to check out all the cutting edge work being done at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Then he went over to the other coast and was an assistant to Morton Subotnick at Cal Arts.

A lot of his really interesting pieces involve electroacoustics or electronics in some way. In keeping with the American experimental tradition, he was also captivated by the sound world coming out of Bali and gamelan music in general. The influence can be heard in various parts of his body of work.

Marshall notes the text-sound approach on a few of the works here: "Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor's BirthThe pieces on IKON touch on the power of the poet in a similar way to that of George Lewis and his Changing with the Times. Instead of a work for instrumentalists and recitative poets, Marshall digs into the rich terrain of text-composition pieces and sound poetry.

Marshall has was born in Mount Vernon, New York into a musical family, and he sang soprano in the Boy’s Choir at the in the Boy's Choir at the Mt. Vernon Community Church. He went on to study music at Columbia University just in time to check out all the cutting edge work being done at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Then he went over to the other coast and was an assistant to Morton Subotnick at Cal Arts.

A lot of his really interesting pieces involve electroacoustics or electronics in some way. In keeping with the American experimental tradition, he was also captivated by the sound world coming out of Bali and gamelan music in general. The influence can be heard in various parts of his body of work.day form a kind of trilogy representing my work with "text-sound" in the early seventies. The techniques used to generate musical fabrics and structures out of spoken text are similar in all three works, but the source materials are all quite different. I used tape loops to create repetitive patterns from words or phrases; musical structures were developed out of the resulting fabric. It is not the original utterance or sound bit that is the building block, but the whole cloth created from it."

My favorite piece on this album is a kind of kurzwellen, or shortwave work, called Sibelius in His Radio Corner. This was “inspired by a photograph of the Finnish composer during his forty years of silence, sitting in an armchair and listening to his own work being performed on the radio. In his old age Sibelius enjoyed pulling in distant broadcasts of his music off the short-wave. I imagined that with all the static and signal drift, some of these listening experiences might have been proleptically like a modern-day electronically processed kurzwellen piece.”

It’s a perfect piece of music to drift off into the aether listening to late at night.

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

☕️☕️☕️ 

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

​Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading a great essay, and hearing a great story, from James Hart, on his Penny Wagers newsletter. Towards the end of his piece he wrote something that really struck a chord with me. He got on the subject of how we make art, what and who for and how there is “an ethos that we’ve lost in lieu of something else. For lack of better terminology, let’s call it a ‘folk’ versus ‘commercial’ approach to art and expression.”

He then went on to give some really great examples of the folk approach to art and the commercial approach, comparing and contrasting.

Here is the rough litmus test he gives to determine whether something is folk or commercial:

“Folk is mutable. Commercial is fixed... Folk is learned in the moment, from person to person. Commercial is learned asynchronously through products…Folk is participatory. Commercial is presentational…Folk serves a social function. Commercial serves consumption… Folk is process-driven. Commercial is product-driven.”

He gives examples for each part of his test, and it really is worth a close read. I wrote some comments to Hart after I read the piece and it all really got me thinking. I had already been thinking about binaries, and how to resolve them, from a short not Hart had posted. Hart had mentioned there was a lot more nuance to his schema, and that it wasn’t a simple binary.

“I should make it clear that I’m not judging commercial art. These two have helped each other throughout the past several centuries, and thank goodness for that. It’s precisely because of the recorded nature of books that many oral traditions have even survived. And I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you that I don’t like novels, movies or Pink Floyd. This isn’t some high horse thing.”

My overstimulated cogitation got going with all this, and it started with poetry, because Hart had mentioned his experience in being “frustrated with the masses for turning their backs on poetry.” As someone who writes poetry as well, I understand the frustration. Yet I think poets themselves are partly to blame. I don't think the masses have turned their backs on poetry as much as poets, at least since the twentieth century, started to turn their back on the masses. Poetry used to be much more accessible and spoke to people who could hear its beauty. I do think that with the explosion of electronic media, it was one of the major casualties of casual entertainment.

There haven’t ever been many poets on television or radio, even in the days of variety shows.

I'm not anti-modernist, or anti-postmodernist. “Pomo” is not a dirty word to me. Ever since I was a kid I started seeking out the weird, the odd, the strange… the avantgarde. I first read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland in the sixth grade. I didn’t make much headway with it then, but I knew that I liked it, that its mystery and strangeness compelled to return to it and seek its meaning. For casual readers it remains an obscure reading, and with the continued ascent of modernism in literature, I think poetry became too academic. Lots of writers wanted to imitate Eliot, Pound and the others. Not everyone who comes to read poetry for the joy of the language, the imagery, and the emotional connection, wants to sit down with a concordance and skeleton key to make sense of it all.

Later came the Beats and think it was necessary to break open the rigidity of form, the complete abandonment of form over the rest of the century gave little for people to hold onto, except aficionados. In the aftermath of the countercultural 50s, 60s, 70s, poetry became more academic, less the province of the people. It became too hard to interpret, alongside other kinds of art, literature and whatnot... so I think many people stopped paying attention to poetry. They got their fix of it in the lyrics of Bob Dylan and other exceptional songwriters instead.

Musing along these notions was when my own experimental predilection hit me, and I realized that one way to resolve the binary between commercial art and folk art was to include the avantgarde as a third circle.
As I mentioned, I love the weird, the strange the obscure. I seek it out. I think it even seeks me out. But for people who’ve grown accustomed to commercial art, it’s fierce independence and lack of scalability can be off putting. For those with a traditionalist mindset the experimental can appear to be a pure derangement of forms that should never be messed with or adulterated. Yet it is in the crossover zones between folk and commercial art, commercial art and the avantgarde, experimental approaches and folk that very interesting hybrids occur. In the fourth locus created when all three are combined, new hybrid forms are able to be synthesized.

The rest of this mostly off-the-cuff spontaneous essay will take an unpolished look at the places where “no commercial potential” plays nice with banjo pickin’ grannies and the mainstream material made for mass consumption. I’ll be looking across mediums as well.

For one thing, a lot of art that ends up being of great cultural value is experimental in nature, and not of much use to the publishers, galleries, and record labels for whom the bottom line is their sole reason of existence. Publishing used to be different, but that’s another story. (For those interested in a time when publishers would print culturally important books that weren’t likely to sell in huge quantities, see The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read by André Schiffrin.)

Furthermore, aspects of the avantgarde often end up in the world of the highly commercial. We need to look no further than surrealism and its use in advertising and commercials. Another example of the way experimental sound production became mainstream, was in the use of noise and record sampling. Hip-hop and rap are two of the dominant genres of music around the globe, but it all started using techniques that had first been used in the musique concrète created by Pierre Schaeffer in France starting in the 1940s, manipulating records. Now the figure of the electronic music DJ is entirely mainstream as well, with none other than the current Pope having his own DJ.

In literature we might look at this triad as the storytellers of traditional tales who represent the folk tradition, the postmodern poets and stylists who represent the avantgarde, and the pulp, romance and thriller writers who represent the commercial. Writers such as Samuel R. Delany cut his teeth in the world of pulp science fiction, became enamored with postmodern theory, and applied techniques of experimental writing to the hybrid novel Dhalgren, to great success. The novel, and later film, The Warriors, was a standard kind of pulp urban adventure plot about inner city gangs. Yet it was based on the traditional story Anabasis, from the Greek, and it also achieved a successful reception, especially the film.

All of the best early fantasy writers took their inspiration directly from world mythology. At the time fantasy was still a niche area of literature. A place for nerds. As such, there was an essential experimental aspect to it, even if it wasn’t technically avantgarde. Like science fiction it has since come to dominate much of the publishing market. To its own detriment, it has become less and less experimental, less and less connected to the mythic, and now is in complete throe to the commercial, making most of it lackluster and unfulfilling.

In visual art you have your whittlers and chainsaw sculptors making folk art, Jackson Pollock doing the avantgarde, and Bob Ross and Thomas Kincaid representing the commercial. Did you know Bob Ross apprenticed under the maverick weirdo H.R. Giger? Ross had a mental breakdown after working with him He might have been in PTSD recovery mode for the remainder of his career. I think it would have been very nice to see a synthesis between their very different aesthetics. Too bad there was never a PBS show where a man with an afro instructed people how to paint highly sexualized alien lifeforms. And yet for all of Giger’s high strangeness, he went on to have as much success as Ross, though in a different manner, with the use of his art in the Alien and Species films, seeding humanities consciousness with his otherworldly imagery.

In music you have your fiddlers and banjo players playing tunes that have been passed down, while in the commercial world Taylor Swift is raking it in with her pop, and in the avantgarde, small audiences make music for equally small audiences.

So often a creator gets stuck in one of these rings without venturing into the place of overlap. Countless are the avantgarde musicians who’ve never made a song that could have a commercial success. Countless are the pop singers who would never dream of going atonal, of using field recordings, or stochastic processes to come up with musical accompaniment. Countless are the folk singers who wouldn’t go to an experimental electronic concert, or to a free jazz improvisatory throwdown. But for those who make the venture to straddle the lines between commercial, experimental, and folk, new areas of possibility began to emerge.

Music writer Kristīne Brence talks about the blending of folk and metal. “Folklore metal is important as it captures the essence and spirit of traditional folk music while infusing it with the power and intensity of heavy metal. It serves as a means of preserving and celebrating cultural heritage, as well as connecting modern audiences with the stories, myths, and traditions of past generations. This genre also allows for artistic expression and exploration of different musical influences, creating a unique and diverse sound that resonates with listeners around the world.” 

These places of blending and crossover are where some of the most interesting material is being created. Those who do the crossing over need to have a wide variety of interests and wide-anging curiosity to become successful blenders of their own in the glass bead game of artistic synthesis. They need to be happy to experience the so-called highbrow with the so-called lowbrow, to go to the symphony on a Friday night and to a bluegrass show the following weekend, and read a cheap thriller spy novel during the week. They might pick up a copy of Mad Magazine or Cracked one day, a book by Thomas Pynchon the next, and then head over to a craft festival the next night. The next week they might take their partner out to see the latest Romcom at the theater.

Works that touch on all three can end up being adventurous in their experimentalism, accessible to the commercial world of the casual reader, listener or viewer, and rooted in the timeless traditions of folk that connect it to lineages of story and skill.

Speaking of Hollywood, they seem to have lost most of their storytelling ability by barely flirting with anything that might be deemed arthouse. It has led to a cultural bankruptcy. Yet the arthouse films can be seen as too snobby when they don’t leave anything for a viewer to hold onto in terms of plot or traditional pacing. Either can feel alienating to those who wish for traditional stories and forms.

O Brother Where Art Thou? was such a hit because it combined the traditional tale of the Odyssey, with folk music in an artsy movie that hit the recognizable plot beats of a commercial flick. Blue Velvet also took the commercial aspects of the noir thriller and detective movie and blurred them in a gently surrealist lens. There was the heart of young love, and the darkness of obsession painted with abstract impressions. David Lynch’s last movie, while celebrated by critics and fans, had less appeal to the average movie goer and is not such a cultural touchstone as Blue Velvet and some of his other works have remained.

Some areas borrow from one area and not another. Classical music, while not necessarily to be categorized as avantgarde, borrows routinely from folk motifs. Popular music borrows from classical. James Joyce borrowed from the traditional tales of classical literature, again with the Odyssey, but framed it in an experimental fiction of vast cultural importance, but with little kinship to the commercial potboiler. In the fifteen years it took him to write Finnegans Wake, a pulp novelist would have cranked out fifteen books.

The folk strains in country music and jazz, coming from ancient repositories of song in Europe and Africa, gave it their power. When those folk strains got watered down into young country and smooth jazz, the material might have been useful for background music at parties and casual listening, but it failed to touch the depths of soul reached by the other forms.

The Americana and alternative country movements that broke away from country as it was going to continue rooted work along with experimentation however have continued to touch discerning listeners in a way that the light beer version of the music does not. It isn’t just soundtrack music.

The same is true of those who’ve continued to push around the exploratory boundaries of jazz while also retaining some of the swing and other elements that keep it grounded. Of course there is extreme avantgarde jazz just as much as the easy listening variety. I contend the one that takes its root, pushes with experimentation, and remains relatable produces the most memorable and touching art. Vaporwave could be considered a mixture of the experimental approach and the commercial.

​The music of Sontag Shogun on their 2025 album Päiväkahvit is an example of a work that sits in the center of the three overlapping circles, with elements of folk music, classical piano played by Ian Temple, and field recordings, post-rock guitar fizz, and modular electronic workouts gluing it all together into a new gestalt.

For those of us who wish to see our culture flourish, our works must embrace commercial potential to reach an audience, rootedness in folk traditions to touch the heart, imagination and kindle our shared long memory, and experimentation that pushes at the boundaries of the possible.

It is in that area in-between ponderous deliberation over every word and sentence, and the slapdash approach of commercial interest, while also drawing from the primordial powers of our variety folk traditions, that could infuse contemporary art of any media with a new power.

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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. ​

TRINARY CODE painting by Melissa Shemanna 

​Having presented my argument on the affinity between emo music and its subculture, with Romanticism in my last post, I will now proceed to present just a small amount of the evidence of the shared affinity between emo lyrics and Romantic poetry. Part of the joy in doing this, is to share in the pleasure and relief these words bring to those who read and hear them. I also have a mix you can listen to above of fifteen primo emo songs for those times when you are just in a mood. I have the track list below, and as always, if you like the artists, consider picking up one of their albums. A few of the groups have some really great reissues out from Numero Group. I threw in a space-rock song and a slowcore piece for good measure.
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And as I mentioned before, I am not a big fan of trigger warnings, but here I think it is warranted. This article and the music talks about depression, cutting, self-harm and suicide so it may be distressing to listen to and read. If you find such material distressing you may want to read about something else. If you need help, you can talk to someone. Call the number 988 on your phone for the 988 lifeline. They understand that life's challenges can sometimes be difficult. Whether you're facing mental health struggles, emotional distress, alcohol or drug use concerns, or if you just need someone to talk to, their caring counselors are there for you. You are not alone.

The two songs I analyze below, by Grandview and Sorority Noise, are included in the mix.
I was inspired to make this mix and write on these themes, based on the burgeoning revival of Romanticism we see here on substack from writers like Ted Gioia and Romanticon.
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First up let us take a look at the poem by John Clare poem I Am!, perhaps his most famous, sometimes known as Witten In Northampton County Asylum, where he was remanded while it was composed:

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am toss’d
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that’s dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above the vaulted sky.

Clare was known as a peasant poet. He was unschooled and came to the art of poesy untrained, and brought with him his world of joy that he had experienced working as a farmhand in the English countryside. He was thus celebrated as a nature poet in his time, but also for his works that evoked the unrequited love he had for Mary Joyce, who due to class differences, remained forever unattainable to him. These feelings were shown in his poem “First Love,” but the sense of melancholy that resulted from his prolonged heartbreak at never being able to live a life with his love, contributed to the lengthening of his depression and his later descent into delusional states of mind. He had gone on and had a family with a milkmaid he married and had children with, but he was forever torn by the literary life he aspired to live with his fellow poets and patrons in London, and the realities of his work on the land needed to feed and clothe his six children. After various illnesses his bouts of depression worsened, aggravated by alcoholism, and he was eventually sent to the madhouse, where, ironically, he had the quietude and privacy to write some of his best works.

His poem “I Am!” Externalizes his bleak desperation and loneliness at having been abandoned and institutionalized. It is an evocation of deep loneliness compressed into three perfect six line stanzas, as if all the pain he had suffered and experienced in his life had been distilled. His away from his family, and his friends in the literary circles would now have nothing to do with him. What little faith he had in himself has now been shipwrecked, and he longs to be taken away from the world and into a heavenly realm where at least the Creator will acknowledge his existence and worth.

It is romantic laments such as these that we find echoed in the world of emo music, such as the song “To the Sun” by the band Grandview. “It was the timing, and the bags under my eyes / It was the look on your face when you said I look tired / I’d rather watch you turn away / ‘Cause you don’t look at me the same anymore / And I don’t blame you for a second / You’re giving up on me.”

The jangly guitars chiming out in minor keys, alternating between desperation and aggravated aggression show a moment when lovers or friends betray the promise of their former selves even as they go on to acknowledge how everything they built was made up of dysfunction. It is a denouement in the underworld. For the singer of Grandview, unlike Clare, even the thought of God does not bring solace to the sense of desperation and personal failure that is also at root in bringing their personal relationships to ruin.
“I keep trying to fight and trying to run / But I hate myself for changing / Every step of the way / And I can’t help thinking / That if we’re made in his reflection / I’m curious / I’m curious / Did God drink himself to sleep the night he created me?”

As with many great things in this world, the band only put out an EP and one album, and then they disappeared. Perhaps generating and expressing such a level of emotion, and musical craftsmanship, is too much. Bands of course, are notorious for being combustible, but I do wonder what happened to these people who made great art together.

The poet Thomas Chatterton who died by suicide at the age of seventeen was another who was here and then quickly gone. The way he left the world and the poems he left behind contributed in no small way to his legend. There were many who discounted him, but the godfather of the Gothic, Horace Walpole, did much to rescue his reputation.

In Chatterton’s poem “Picture of Autumn” we get a fleeting sense of the melancholy mood that pervaded his life.

When autumn, bleak and sun-burnt, do appear,
With his gold hand gilting the falling leaf,
Bringing up winter to fulfil the year,
Bearing upon his back the riped sheaf;
When all the hills with woody seed are white,
When levying fires, and lemes, do meet from far the sight:
When the fair apple, rudde as even sky,
Do bend the tree unto the fructile ground.
When juicy pears, and berries of black dye,
Do dance in air and call the eyne around;
Then, be the even foul, or even fair,
Methinks my hearte’s joy is stained with some care.

The song “No Halo” by Sorority Noise provides a useful contrast, when considering Chatterton, his short life,
and the work he left behind.

“I’m placing bets against myself / And honestly, I’m a mess / With the car engulfed in flames / I am a wreck / Things I should have said through call or text / Just really been so busy and I regret / ‘Cause if there’s no rest for the wicked / I’m as evil as it gets (thing I should have said) / So I didn’t show up to your funeral / But I showed up to your house / And I didn’t move a muscle / I was quiet as a mouse / And I swore I saw you in there / But I was looking at myself.”

The band themselves called the album this came from, 2017’s You’re Not As _____ As You Think, “an emotional bulldozer” whose writing and composition followed the death of close friends and their own struggles with depression.

This is why I call emo musicians and romantic poets the bards of Saturn. Since classical times the planet has been associated with melancholy. Nowhere is this connection more thoroughly explored than in that mighty tome Saturn and Melancholy by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl issued by and researched at the Warburg Institute. The book may not cover emo music, or much else from contemporary pop culture, yet even in this realm the influence of the saturnine influences is present. Sadness is a part of the human condition. Artists have long sought to treat it and express it in their own ways. This has often been at odds with the way it has been viewed by psychiatry.

On one point we can perhaps all agree: leaving it to fester does no good for anyone. Probing the inner wound to expunge its poison is as legitimate a treatment as Prozac, and far more sane than the barbaric and frankly sadomasochist techniques used by psychiatrists in the past. The world of beauty and art may most often be ascribed to the influence of Venus, who is rightly praised for her youth, charm and grace, but old man Saturn, dry and desiccated as he is, also has his vessels in the world of the arts, who sing of melancholy and the bitter fruits born of harsh experience, and the wisdom it breeds as the flowers of youth wither in old age.

DOWSING THE DOUR MIDWEST MOOD MIX

1. Northstar - Cinderella

​2. idialedyournumber - I Found A Pulse

3. Microwave - Keep Up

4. American Football - Uncomfortably Numb

5. Jejune - Regrets Are Unanswered Dreams

6. Joi de Vivre - Magnet

7. Everyone Asked About You - Letters Never Sent

8. ​The Appleseed Cast - Forever Longing the Golden Sunsets

9. Siverstein - Giving Up

10. Trophy Eyes - Sean

11. Grandview - To the Sun

12. Dowsing - Midwest Living

13. Duster - Feel No Joy

14. Hum - Why I Like the Robins

15. Sorority Noise - No Halo