The words bohemian and discipline aren’t two that most people normally think of as going together. One might think that self-restraint and good habits such as regular exercise and keeping a clean house get tossed out the window when embarking on the path of the bohemian. Yet it takes quite a bit of dedication to live an unconventional lifestyle. For those who have devoted themselves to literature, music and art, and to the making of it, discipline is a must for showing up on days when the muse seems distant and far away. The rigors of being downwardly mobile, of toiling away in obscurity, of working dead end or menial day and night jobs while focusing on the great work during so-called leisure hours requires devotion and willpower. And while the development of these internal powers may be free, they do not come without effort.

Discipline is necessary if one wishes to escape the laziness of the mass minded. Regular practice is required if indifference to the approval or disapproval of others is sought. To be insulated from the arrows of the philistines and illiterati care must be taken.

Resisting the simulacra of experience in favor of real experience takes guts. Doing things which no one gives permission to do means living a life that will often be outside the comfort zone.

The Do It Yourself ethic that is central to Universalist Bohemianism and Down Home Punk runs on a fuel of willpower for making things, whether it’s a cupcake side hustle, a regionally touring band, or a print or skateboard shop in your basement. Nothing gets done until you do it. No robots, no managers.

In the age of Big Spectacle perhaps the biggest use of discipline comes in the form of cutting oneself off from the deluge of streaming entertainment in favor of the drip feed of slow culture. Savoring unmediated experiences instead of bingeing on things both pointless and forgettable. The discipline to turn away from distractions and focus on things that are important to you as an individual cannot be underestimated. The only way to be sequestered outside of massive influence and the constant pull of attention is to erect an unassailable garrison around the mind and life.   

If you work as an artist discipline is a trait the muses find appealing. If they see you showing up to do your work, and you finish your work, you, as a vessel, will be refilled.

Discipline was the keyword at the collective house where Sun Ra lived with his arkestra of musicians. What to some may sound like improvised chaos, is actually the work of painstaking precision. The hours and hours of daily practice spent making music, then talking music, thinking music, back to making music, brief pause to eat, sleep irrelevant (Ra was insomniac) back to the discipline. It come from the planet Saturn after all, this honing of the blade of life at the grindstone of work.
 
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), self described as anarchist in their organization, also had a focus on discipline. This was necessary for their other purpose of inciting individuals to get a life, live out their true desires, the ones that came from deep inside, the ones that weren’t inserted by television, church or state. Discipline and will become a foundation for living on your own terms outside ov control. As Genesis Breyer P. Orridge noted, “Thee Temple strives to end personal laziness and engender discipline.”

The word discipline is also related to the word disciple. A disciple is a person who learns from another. The disciple of bohemianism isn’t out to coerce others into acting, following and believing everything they do and say, but is someone who can act as a model and inspiration. By becoming a peer leader, they show to other humans what can be done and accomplished, given time and discipline. Those thus inspired may carry on certain aspects of a teachers work, but in true Aquarian spirit, make use of it for their own personal goals and ends, all the while further developing and braiding the cord of initiation further into the future.

As it is written in Thee Psychick Bible, “We are not seeking followers, we are seeking collaborators.” I take that as meaning those who can share and exchange vision and relate to one another on the level of imagination. This is why the artists, punk rockers, decadents, writers, poets, painters and visionaries of the past have always been an inspiration. How did they achieve what they did? Even if they are dead we can still collaborate with them in terems of learning from the echoes of their minds they left in their finished works.

A SENSE OF DISCIPLINE

There is also the matter of the word discipline as a distinct area of study. In this case there are many Bohemian Disciplines. Three main aspects of bohemian life come to mind: the discipline of reading, the discipline of listening, and the discipline of seeing. First we can think of these in their relationship to literature, music and art, major areas of engagement for the bohemian. Then we can think of the use of our senses as disciplines. The same way a body craves exercise, so to do the use of our senses in less automatic ways.

During the process of deindustrialization unfolding around us, we as humans will also have to be less automatic, run less on autopilot, and bring more intentionality into our actions.
Disciplines around the five senses can also be explored within the sphere of universalist bohemianism by developing an appreciation for good food (while elegance and refinement are all well and good, one need not be a snob about it -all the finest cuisines developed out of peasant recipes, and todays foodies would do well to remember that).

Food always involves scent, but perfumes, cologne, aromatic soaps and incense are all ways to indulge the scent of smell. 

Touch may be indulged in with your loved ones from a simple caress, to massage and lovemaking.
The idea in all of these things is to approach them with more reflection and thought -an act that requires discipline.

Developing these senses is one way towards developing an artful life.

On another level we can think of writing, painting, drawing, and music making as disciplines that all add to the quality of life when creating beauty and wonder as gifts to share with others.

Secession is available in everyday life when we secede from every day thinking. But to stay the course requires work. Supreme aloofness to the viewpoints of everyone else cannot be achieved in a day. 

There is an aspect of bohemianism that has long taught of better living through chemistry. Rimbaud was just one in a long line who recommended the derangement of the senses as a path leading to the palace of wisdom.

It’s hard to maintain balance on the road of excess.

The Decadent Movement of the 1890s has a part to play in this matter. They saw correctly that the decline (décadence) of the Roman Empire came from the erosion of its culture, which came on the heels of the moral rot that had set in and taken hold. So it is now with the decline of western civilization which the Decadent Movement foresaw with the advent of industrial society. Charles Baudelaire adopted the term decadence in counterpoise to what he saw as the banality of progress, which he rejected.

Charles Baudelaire used the word proudly to represent a rejection of what they considered banal "progress."
Baudelaire’s work represented “a preference for what is beautiful and what is exotic, an ease with surrendering to fantasy, and a maturity of skill with manipulating language.” Yet Baudelaire also had a reputation for “dissoloute” habits, frequent visits to prostitutes and brothels, a taste for hashish, laudanum and drunkenness.

This aspect may be considered, from an astrological point of view, as one of the influences of Neptune and the way it promotes both drug culture and fantasy literature.

​Yet the Decadent movement, for all its excess, saw the shape of things to come. They were early trumpeters of what can now be seen as the perversity of Western society in a state that has moved from rigor mortis to terminal decay. Distancing oneself from the man in the crowd, creating an isolation around your mind, is necessary in order to not succumb to the various forces at work in the undertow and unweaving of culture.
Joséphin Péladan thought that art and living as an aesthetic ascetic was a suitable replacement for the pleasures of decadent society. Painting, music and literature all offered a way out from what we can now call the spectacle of mass entertainment. The movement from decadent decadence to aesthetic asceticism offers a mode of discipline for the aspiring bohemian monastic.

​The primary goal of the Universalist Bohemian life is to live life as a work of art. This brings the aesthetic vision to the fore in every aspect of what a person does. This vision was epitomized by the Decadent writer, artists, and mage Josephin Péladan.  He called it kaloprosopia. Everything about a person could be subject to kaloprosopia, and it could be worked on for the entirety of a persons life, so they consciously apply themselves to living up to their full potential. It was also a way of bringing the aesthetic out of just the studio, concert hall, gallery, reading room and salons and into the world. The person who practices kaloprosopia takes exquisite care over the refinement of their personality, over their choice of clothes -but not just as a dandy or person with a personal sense of fashion, but also their very presence as a person. Kaloprosopia can get down to the minutiae of an individuals  actions: the way they move their hands when conversing, certain types of gestures, the way they walk, word choice and way of speaking. All of it is an avenue for embodiment of a singular, individualist and individualized aesthetic vision.

“The law of kaloprosopia is to manifest the exteriorization of the character one claims for oneself.” Péladan wrote in the L’art idéaliste et mystique.

The notion of developing presence pertains to the inner esoteric arts though it is not limited to them. We have all known certain people who possess and transmit a certain and particular quality that seems to be effortless on their part -an aspect of their very nature. In my mind part of this comes from the way they may be connected to things outside and beyond them, to the inner planes and their openness to experience people, places and things.

Developing this presence is a goal of the Universalist Bohemian and was likewise an aim for Péladan. Another way to look at it is by using the term self-creation.

This idea may seem narcissistic. The idea of self-creation may conjure ideas of so-called influencers. It may all seem like mere ornamentation. However, for Péladan, who had seen his country transformed by industrialism, who had seen capitalism weaken the wills of his countrymen with an increasing commercialization of all aspects of life, it was a form of resistance to an externally imposed aesthetic viewpoint and allowed the true inner aesthetic of a person to emerge.

The word kaloprosopia itself is derived from the Greek καλός (beautiful) and πρόσωπον (person). As the digital age is in the process of disintegrating and passing us by, the chance to let go of collective identities and craft a personal one is as essential as ever. Doing so without the benefit of posting images and status updates to a corporate controlled social media company will give people the opportunity to start relishing our in-person interactions.

​For Péladan the object of life was “to remake the soul that God has given him: to sculpt it into work of art.” Another way to look at it is as self-reinvention. In times of change and crisis, whether personal, familial or on the broader scale of the collective, individuals can choose to pivot, change their tactics with tact, and instead of reacting to situations, pick a measured and proper response in line with a newer set of values, information, or just based on a hunch, rolling with intuition. 

For his predecessor Baudelaire there was a “burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded only by the limits of the proprieties … a kind of cult of the self.”

In America the idea of creating a cult of self has found even more fertile soil than on the embattled fields of ailing Europe. Here, individuality is an ethos and a creed. It came out of the land and seeped into the minds of the people who wrote the Constitution, and Bill of Rights and continues in our long conversation about what those things mean today. Personal freedom and the rights of the individual have long been championed by Americans of a variety of political persuasions.

When McGovCorp gets too big for its britches and the rights of the individual get trampled upon, ferment and fire start burning beneath the brows of the American imagination.

At such a time the cultivation of a beautiful person, and being a beautiful person becomes all the more relevant for what it can offer the greater good.

The alternative of self-creation lends itself to a more ugly world. When we refuse to choose for ourselves how we ought to live and be, others can step in and choose for us. The choices they make, as can be seen throughout history, are not always in the best interest of the person or the greater society. Particularly in a time of social decay and disintegration the appeal of mass mindedness and letting others do your thinking for you is great, because then you can abrogate any sense of responsibility for what happens in your life and what is seen going on around you in the world.

The tact of deliberately cultivating your presence, your appearance, and living an artful life, will in turn open up even further choices for freedom and opportunities to follow the path of your destiny. Modern society would keep us crippled in the mind. Self-confidence ebbs, depression and anxiety rue the day. Schools and workplaces mete out derogatory training so that the lowest common denominator is upheld. Rather than giving them tools and practices to help lift themselves up, sleeping dogs are let to lie, the willing are whipped, and the ability to thrive and live an excellent life for all is diminished.

To build the discipline it is necessary to get to work. The late artist Monte Cazazza, who gave us the term “industrial music for industrial people” for his friends in Throbbing Gristle has some fine words on the work it takes make an alternative culture, knowing that our own inner resistance was a big part of what needs to be overcome. In the Re/Search Industrial Culture Handbook he tells us:

​“I think that psychology is half the battle. And probably anyone can do almost anything. It's just their lack ofself-confidence, and derogatory training, that stops them. And it's a really sad fact that makes the world a much less interesting place. It's humanity's loss that this is still continuing to happen. In some ways I've been lucky, just because of certain chances. But I also capitalized on those chances when they occurred, and tried to recognize them-but actually I've decided that I didn't capitalize on them enough! You should be doing work because you want to do it. You think it's valuable and worth doing. And maybe it's just part of your personality. That's a really involved and very complicated question, and I don't really think there is one total answer; there's all these different types of answers that enter into it. And as Mark Pauline would say, ‘All work is dirty.’ It's all dirty work no matter what it is, and that's the way it is. If people don't realize that, and they are going to get into these forms of activity, they should stay out of them if they don't expect that. And they should not interfere in our work-because it's hard enough to do already. No one is writing you big checks-all along, what you've done is because you wanted to do it.”

​That’s the kind of work that takes discipline.

.:. .:. .:.

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. 

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

​Adapting like the ailanthus
                 into the bloom of societies crack;
seeds dandelioned like Leo dandies
       to bring down the sun into the sidewalk.
Child! Don’t break your mothers back.

Cut the Lazarus lizard some slack as it slips
into the porch wall behind the boxwood;
hush the mind as the locust leaves drop
(protruding thorns like the crown of Christ)
quiet, as the poison ivy makes its potent push

to new adopted homes,
        along the jacked asphalt surface pothole pools
summer rain gleaming with illuminated gasoline
              & ditchweeds growing despite the spills
projecting a liquid lightshow of spoiled chemicals
& now gathered with Gatorade yellow piss bottles
from truckers cross country toils.

Ass hurting to a fault from long hours in the drivers seat
chasing white crosses where steeplejacks climb up with Red Bull
to the evangelical resurgent flower powered churches
from the Jesus freak hippies whose minds were blown
                                on an acid casualty gospel preached
by a minister who lurches to cultivate his mustard seeds.   

Fleeing the wreckage of the big box stores
into a megachurch with MAGA merch ladies praying
spiritual warfare against goats straying to eat the weeds
left on the roadside as if the candy wrappers were a trail of clues.

Synchronicities to be deciphered all the way to the laundromat
where the unwashed masses tumble in a speed cycle
hoping Michael the archangel will intercede as a diplomat.


It is the psychology of the adept to embrace the obstacle
inside a chalk circle they dodge the bullet on the way to the lodge,
pasting life together into a collage, held together by Mod Podge.
Bricoleurs use whatever may be found on the ground
to heal the sick and find the universal panacea
going to the middens land of empty lots
where they gather the pharmacopeia. A cornucopia
amidst refuse where the milkweeds flourish
to feed the tussock moths as much as to nourish
the sublime monarch of transformation.

See the landscape change.

​See the dead fox rot and call it decomposition.

Under the freeway overpass life blooms inside its corpse
           birthing a hundred baby flies.

So we carry on, we carry on
as the vulture takes its feast
where the purslane pokes its succulence
up from the dry bones, a vacancy sign
retains its partial flicker-fucker
and the rusted out grocery cart laments its loneliness


Far away from the corral, but still OK.



​.:. .:. .:.

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. 

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

Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, is as much a how-to manual as it is a history of hardcore, punk, independent and alternative music in America over the course of a formative decade. How-to what? While it doesn’t get into the nitty gritty behind making a ‘zine, starting a record label, going on tour, networking with venues, radio stations, and people across the country to knit together local scenes, it does showcase the people and personalities who did these things, what their motivations were, and how they went about creating their own alternative system for promoting music and culture, outside the dominant corporate system. They showed it could be done, and left their tracks behind for others to follow. Our Band Could Be Your Life is then a kind of sampler of the DIY methods employed by thirteen different bands who worked with what they had to get their message out into the world and leave their mark.

            For those fortunate enough to have access to computers, digital technology and the internet, getting work made independently out to the public has never been easier. Yet new difficulties arise with the ability to communicate and share creations at unprecedented velocities. There are so many people putting out material, sharing what they make and create, the signal to noise ratio is vastly increased. The internet has also created, with its speed, an attention economy. Because new books, records, movies and material is being released at such a pace, there is a tendency for people to sit with it less. There is also the tendency to not dig as deeply for content because so much material is directed to people through social media and streaming services. 

               Yet how long will they exist? The energy cost to run server farms, let alone AI, is sky high, and even without the limits to growth imposed on the future of the internet, people are clamoring for things they can hold in their hands and do in real life. So many of us want to get back to analog. 

            The independent network created by the bands chronicled in Azerrad’s book do still exist, as do other related scenes and networks, but in many instances the growth of the internet has caused the local  scenes to atrophy. Local and regional scenes have always formed the nodes on the backbone of the national and international network. The internet has allowed people of like mind and shared interest to congregate digitally. Locally, their tends to be more friction between people. If you don’t like someone online you can just drop them or block them. But if you are part of a group who is doing something in a place, you don’t always get along. Such friction is of course endemic to the human condition, but it also gives rise to some of the great tensions between people that can result in great artwork and positive movements. It also helps foster the ability for people who don’t always agree on everything to still work together and get along to make something do agree on happen.

            Those kind of creative tensions between people are also chronicled in Azerrad’s book, which makes it especially useful for digital natives who would rather ghost someone they don’t get along with anymore, than try to work out or resolve something, or to work together despite differences and see where the clash of energies brings something useful to fruition. Perhaps in punk music, where there tends to be an excess of aggression and energy, that kind of clashing of energy is apparent across so many bands.

            For this piece, since I am making the claim that the book can be used as a DIY manual, I will be looking at each of the bands that Azerrad writes about and try to draw some lessons. There were of course, many great bands who embody the independent ethos who we can all learn from, but I am focusing on this book, because I do think of it as a manual, and want to celebrate it and bring it to people who perhaps haven’t read it before or aren’t familiar with these groups. One of the other things I like about his book is how it centers the story on the people who were in these bands, how they came together, their motivations and various aspects of their personal lives. I’ve noticed a tendency among some music writers and critics to be critical of the other music writers who take this personal approach. As an artist and writer myself, I have always been interested in reading about the lives of other artists in any kind of creative field: what their lives were like, how they got started, what they did to get their work out to the public, and see what I can learn from them and use in my own life, or just as importantly, what I can avoid doing and where I can save myself some trouble.  All that is to say I think the historical and biographical approach to music writing is just as valid as the approach that puts an artist’s background in the background to focus on the aesthetics of their creation.

​            So grab yourself a copy of Our Band Could Be Your Life and let’s get to learning some of the skills that can stand us in good stead in the analog revolution. His book covers 13 bands, so I will be breaking down this essay into three parts. 

​BEAT HAPPENING

In looking at this book again, I started at the end and read the chapter on Beat Happening first because I was on a Beat Happening kick last month. I won’t hesitate to say they are probably one of my favorite groups covered in his book, though there are several others I’ll call favorite depending on my mood, and they can all coexist happily together.

The big idea here, for those of us interested in degrowth and downshifting to less energy intensive lifestyles, is the focus on regionalism and the very independent identity that emerged out of Olympia. That very specific Pacific Northwest identity went on to play a large role in the national and international scene with the kind of shambling lo-fi and primitive jangly rock pop that said “anybody could be a musician” that started to flower with Beat Happening and around some other groups like the Young Marble Giants in England, and The Clean in New Zealand. The lo-fi aspects and the sincere slice-of-life lyrics are features not bugs with Beat Happening. Thinking on that way helps place this kind independent punk music into the category of folk music.

Beat Happening got their start in 1982, but before that band member Calvin Johnson was swimming in underground music through the influence of KAOS-FM and Op Magazine, self-published by KAOS DJ and volunteer John Foster in the late seventies. As Azerrad writes, “At the time, the main genre of independently released music was grass roots folk, which happened to dovetail with two of the key ideas of the American independent rock movement: regionalism, as in the idea that a localized sound would both serve the tastes and needs of its community and defy the homogenizing effects of mass media; and egalitarianism, in that music didn’t need to be made by professionals as the big time entertainment business would have the public believe.” These two ideas are well embedded in the Beat Happening ethos.

The idea of the non-professional ties directly back into folk. Who are all the people playing banjos, fiddles and mandolins on the front porch? Non-professionals, but many of them were seriously accomplished as the first waves of folk music recordings, as collected by the likes of Alan Lomax, and compiled by the likes of Harry Smith, have proved.

On the other hand, virtuosity wasn’t always the point. Entertaining yourself, your family, and your friends was often the point. That meant singing songs while hanging the laundry or picking beans or doing some other chore, or playing an instrument after the work was done. Transfer that to the realities of life in a capitalist industrial society, with angry kids who don’t fit in to the rest of the system, and you have the perfect breeding ground for a new kind of folk music, namely, punk.

Folk music has always been regional. So have the sounds of independent music with each scene tending to produce a kind of specific style, even as it stays within the genre.

Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis and Bret Lunsford hardly exhibited the kind of brutal energy that had bubbled up in other local scenes, such as the hardcore emanating out of the forgotten neighborhoods of Washington D.C. They did partake of another punk tradition forged by groups like Crass who had both male and female singers, and whose voices alternated on and between songs. Such an approach became a staple of punk that isn’t quite as common in many other genre outside of occasional duets -and folk music. With Lewis up there playing in front of people despite her shyness, she influenced the wave of feminist rock music that later came out of Olympia and Washington state in full force via Riot Grrrl movement.  

​At the same time Johnson exhibited extreme individual vision in the way he lived. Like his friend Ian Mackaye who he had met when his family briefly moved to D.C., he was straight edge at a time when the punk thing to do was get wasted. He hosted quirky pie baking parties and pajama spend the nights in place of going out and getting trashed. Their ability to wear their emotions on their sleeves led to them becoming “a major force in widening the idea of a punk rocker from a mohawked guy in a motorcycle jacket to a nerdy girl in a cardigan.”
And like many other independent bands, Beat Happening started their own label with Johnson heading up K Records, that helped them and others to live on the cheap, so they could put their energies into a creative bohemian life, all while staying dedicated to the local life where they started.

​BLACK FLAG

​Shifting back to the beginning of the book, we encounter a very different beast of a band, Black Flag. They kind of represent so many things Beat Happening are not. But that’s the beauty of the underground and of freedom itself: if you don’t like something, go off  and do your own thing, your own way with whatever tools you have at hand.

            Black Flag just hid their nerdiness anyway underneath layers of violence, chaos and copious bong hits that did nothing to mellow them out. Greg Ginn had started SST not even as a record label, but as an outgrowth of his involvement in the ham radio hobby. Total geek territory there. I mean, who gets on ham radio or listens to shortwave except total nerds? SST stood for Solid State Transistors and was a mail order business for the amateur radio gear that he made and sold. Ginn played music too, and had gravitated towards hard rock and heavy metal before the first wave of punk blew his mind. He wanted to get in on the action and he wanted to speed things up.

            Ginn was a nerd in another way too. He had a degree in economics, and his business sense put him in good stead when he decided to transform SST into an independent record label, and did it all by scratch, looking up vinyl pressing plants in the phone book, and seeing how to get everything done as cheap as they could. To that end, the band lived communally and subsisted on whatever they could scrape together. As communal living punks, they were some of the original pioneers of the punk house, a place where people live together and share expenses. In these times of exorbitant rent, which inhibits living a creative lifestyle centered on art and music, I wonder why more young people don’t band together to live in communal houses together of whatever kind, or find places to squat. These practices were what made the products coming out of the punk movement affordable to produce and share.

            But they weren’t just lazing about in their punk house. They worked hard, brutally hard. They had as much discipline as Sun Ra, and Ginn made the band practice up to eight hours a day like it was regular job. Their work paid off, not necessarily in financials, but in the way they rocked and could bring down the house with their visceral energy.

​            Black Flag toured relentlessly and they were one of the first punk bands to tour so vigorously across America, playing wherever they could. It was these forays in their van out into the wilds of the USA that helped build the network that other punk bands would then follow. They made tracks in space, wore down the path so that others could see it and go their themselves. A lot of those bands were SST bands, but because Black Flag networked so heavily across the country, other groups would call them up or ask about where to play in what towns. These venues, places like the Jockey Club in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from downtown Cincinnati, became regional hubs that glued local scenes into place. They gave local bands places to play regularly, and touring bands a place to stop. It all helped tie the regional scenes back in to the national and international punk movement. Without the strength of a local scene, the larger regional and national scenes can’t be as easily supported. The great is in the small.

There was another Black Flag was like Beat Happening, but different. They challenged punk. Any subculture or movement will become ossified and what started out as rebellion and revolution is quick to become dogma that must not be deviated from. So when short hair became the norm in hardcore fashion, Black Flag grew their hair long. They also pushed the style of music, incorporating elements of jazz and metal into their sound, making them hard to pin down. It also helped keep what they were playing interesting to their own ears and as adventurous musically as they were on the road.

​MINUTEMEN

The Minutemen took the idea of combining musical styles and influences much further than Black Flag, and they did it in an even more economical way. The band came up out of the working class. Mike Watt and D. Boon’s fathers had both been in the navy. Watt’s father worked as a machinist for the military, and after D. Boon’s dad was discharged, he made money by installing radios in people’s cars. The pair met when Watt’s father was sent to the base in San Pedro and the family moved. Watt was walking around one day by himself in the park when D. Boon jumped out of a tree to ambush him. Boon thought Watt was one of his friends they were playing army with, but it wasn’t who he thought. None-the-less, the two quickly became inseparable and it wasn’t long before they started a cover band to play the music of their heroes such as Creedence Clearwater Revival. Later they were joined by drummer George Gurley.

Many of the original punk groups had been inspired by the hippies and had been fans of hippie music. What the punks disliked about the hippies was the way they had sold out, not necessarily their music or what they had once stood for. Now we can see the effect of that sell out at the generational level as the boomers gave up on projects such as the hippie-allied appropriate technology movement that could have changed the course of history if it hadn’t been abandoned when so many of them just decided to go corporate and get on board with Reaganomics. All these years later these gerentocrats are still holding the reins of power and trying to keep it as long as they can before passing it on, one of the issues effecting the cost of housing at the time of this writing. Understandably, many of the Gen X kids who would form the core of the independent music scene were upset with the direction the previous generation had taken after espousing such high ideals.

Minutemen took their name from two different groups, the militia from New England who fought in the American revolution, and as a lambast against them, the neo-reactionary Minutemen of the 1960’s who were stockpiling weapons in anticipation of having to fight a commie takeover. In this time of contracting wealth from the working and middle class further into the hands of an aging wealthy elite, the Minutemen have their own key revolutionary principle that we all can be learned from, how to “Jam Econo”.

The word econo was San Pedro slang for doing anything on the cheap. As a band they practiced extreme economy and frugality. This was as true of their songs that were often under the two minute mark, as it was for the way they recorded, the way the toured, for the way they tried to eke as much out of every penny as they could and stretch it far.

Some other terms from their oeuvre are also useful in todays compromised political environment. They didn’t just have lyrics, they had spiels. The spiel was a politically motivated lyrics and rants that they boiled down into their provocative short songs.

One of the things they railed against was when somebody compromised their values, like the hippies had done, to make things mersh, or commercial. This was something they wanted to avoid and did avoid. When pressed by their label to make something more widely appealing, they made an album called the Mersh Project that itself lampooned the very idea of commercial music. All of this was part of their fight against the boozh, or bourgeois. This was the biggest no-no of all for the working class band.

D. Boon was an avid reader of history and the ideas he read about informed their music just as much as the jazz, funk, and classic rock that they subverted into their own personal style of hardcore. It was a lyric from the Minutemen song “History Lesson” that the name of Azerrad’s book was taken from, and shows just how much the philosophy and music of a group can have an impact on culture.

Mike Watt boils down their philosophy. “We weren’t a lot of hot air -we almost did everything we set out to do… and in some way’s its because we kept our sights small. We’re not going to be the biggest band – we’re going to put on little shows, put out a little magazine, have a little label. We made it small enough that we could do it. And we held down jobs, paid our rent, and made a living.

​“I just hope that maybe some people will read about us and see how we weren’t manufactured. … that we were just three dudes from Pedro and that maybe they could do the same thing themselves.”

I’ll return with more lessons learned from the bands in Our Band Could Be Your Life in a future episode of Down Home Punk, right here on Sothis Medias.

.:. .:. .:.

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. 

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

A story half-forgotten I’ll tell you just now,
of the people who lived in the Oakley Hotel;
drunkards they were, drank out of sorrow & spite
spelunking in bottles to the depths of the night.
 
They had their own bar on the first floor of the place
where they drank like dry rivers until the floor was in face;
the flowing pace was set by well drinks ribald & cheap
upstairs on rusted beds, fucking, the springs loudly creak.
 
They drank until dawn while the piano was playing
until their livers were chewed by vultures buffeting.
Some called it a flophouse, rent was paid by the day
I called it a funhouse, where I learned how to pray.
 
Some weeks we were flush with lines of cocaine
other weeks, just lushes huffing paper bags of butane.
Insane as it was, our brains never cracked on the crack
except over horse money lost to horses down at the track.
 
When money was tight you could always find sterno
or if your looks were just right film amateur porno.
No shortage of drama, melt downs like 1986 Chernobyl
when thrown into jail over that brunette named Sibyl.
 
I’m not here to quibble, I can barely recollect
but one time I got so plastered I thought to genuflect
and recount all my sins in the safety of confessional.
Until the bottle called back, & I worked it professional.
 
There were times when the cops to our humble home called
to break up the brawls and stomps that had neighbors appalled,
and another fine fellow would be hauled to the slammer
just for flying off the handle at Old Ray’s stuttered speech stammer.
 
Behind us in the factory the welders and machinists did work
three shifts of hard labor at A&R Industries with hardly a perk;
we’d just sit there and drink, when they went home or went in
it didn’t matter what: beer, wine, bourbon, whiskey or whiskey and gin.
 
Sometimes there was nothing, we’d go find Robitussin
the walls would start breathing, and I’d start a cussin'
and my liver would hurt from where that old vulture had chewed
and eventually I’d sleep after my vomit was spewed.
 
There was the time we lit fireworks on the Fourth of July,
and that crack flash whizz bang spun into my old ladies eye.
Then the ambulance came down to check out her cornea,
but it didn’t stop the cruel laughter that gave her son hernia.
 
One night came the fire from a cigarette smolder
nobody would admit who had lit the tobacco briquette
no one had heard the siren sound, over the agro punk cassette
to my friends who choked on the smoke, I call it regret
and file it away, deep in my brain, in a do-not-touch-folder.
 
AA came for some when bottoms were hit
and some said AA was a bucket of shit.
Eminent domain put an end to us at the hotel in Oakley,
wrecked down by the ball of the law, not quite baroquely.
​
In the place it once stood now suburbanites go shopping
gone is that old sawdust smell, in its place fresh blacktopping. 

--
REFLECTION:

I am attempting to do my part to make poetry gutter punk again. This one in the Underdog Anthems series is about a real place in Cincinnati that my dad used to tell me stories about, a flophouse called the Oakley hotel, it was right behind where he worked as a welder and there was always lots of drama. Later, during my first stint in AA as a teenager, my sponsor, an older punker, had lived in the Oakley Hotel. He took me and some of his other sponsees around to Oakley Hotel one time and we were talking to a lady there. I accidentally knocked down her bottle of cheap whiskey and broke it or spilled it. (Memory is fuzzy.) He then drove us to the liquor store where we got a bottle to replace what she had lost. Years later my sponsor fell off the wagon and we’d get hammered together at punk shows… We've since lost track of eachother and I haven't seen him around in a long time.

.:. .:. .:.

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. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

​

It can be a funny old life, the things that happen to you, the people that you meet. My wife Audrey and I experienced a chance encounter when we took a brief pause in the routine to visit the great city of Cleveland a few weeks ago this past June. We wanted to spend some time slowing down, walking along Lake Erie, hiking in the metroparks, and doing some urban psychogeography in their wonderful downtown, where we stayed. It was a great visit.

After a first day of visiting the lake, eating at the excellent Cleveland Vegan, and exploring the old Arcade downtown, looking at the architecture, and finding a late night pho shop, the next day was spent once again hitting the streets. There were two places on my list I really wanted to go, though Audrey would tell you there are way more and that there are always way more. She wouldn’t be wrong, and it can be hard to put up with, that drive to go see or do one more thing, after which there is always one more thing. She puts up with a lot.

​The first stop after dipping our toes back into the lake at Edgewater Park was Zubal’s Books. Harvey Pekar had been on my mind since we were in Cleveland, as it rightly should be. I knew about Zubal’s from an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, where they visited the great store, that is housed in part, in an old Twinkie factory. We made some great scores there, a great book haul. I wouldn’t have known about that store if I hadn’t seen the clip. I’m really glad we went, and made it in time for the two hour window they are open to the public. Most of their business is mail order.

One of the titles I found was by Paul Feyeraband called Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, which proposes that it is counterproductive to have a single methodology with regards to scientific practices.  It's closer to the top of my list now because it seems to me, we are witnessing the endgame of the one true science. I also found a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald called Blue Flower about Novalis, which I knew nothing about before.  It seems to me the Romantic expressions of science via Goethe and Novalis are worth investigating as another thread or way science that could have been followed. These readings ought to go well alongside Henri Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way Toward A Science of Conscious Participation in Nature.

After visiting Eclectic Eccentric and the neighboring Loganberry Books, where I also nabbed some more titles, we ate Michael’s Diner right on the Rapid Transit tracks in Shaker Heights. I should have gone for the Polish Fish Boy. Then we went to the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes and walked around the protected wetland as the rain drizzled. Finally we wound up at our last stop for the day, Lake View Cemetery. This place was designed by landscape architect Adolph Strauch who designed Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati, just a few blocks from where we live. Strauch had been inspired by the book Kosmos by Germany polymath Alexander von Humboldt who had written in it about Chinese garden cemeteries.  Kosmos can be considered part of the German Romanticist tradition in the science vein. Something was in the air.
 
After stopping at President Garfield's memorial, there was just one more thing I wanted to see in the cemetery, the Haserot Angel.

We drove up to it and after I got out of the car, a guy noticed my plates were from Hamilton County and he struck up a conversation saying he'd gone to the University of Cincinnati. He was very friendly and we had a nice conversation. He mentioned that he'd been the partner of Harvey Pekar's widow, comic writer Joyce Brabner, for fourteen years before she had died last August. He told me his name and the like, and that he'd just been visiting their gravesite (Brabner is buried next to Pekar but doesn't have a headstone yet).  His name was Lee Batdorf and he was a journalist at times. In meeting him it felt like we'd gotten a handshake from the city. If the timing of our day had been just a little off, and if I hadn't gone to that one last spot, I might not have met him. Meeting Lee Batdorf and having this encounter really charged me up and I'm very grateful for his friendliness.

When we got back home, and I got back to work at the library the next day, I put the graphic novel history "Harvey Pekar's Cleveland" on hold. When it came in, like some many other people in Harvey Pekar’s life, Lee was a character in this final work.  Zubal's books was also featured in the book. I hadn't read this one before, even though I'd read some segments of Pekar’s long running American Splendor and other works.

That was some of our Cleveland adventure. I recommend the city for anyone looking for a modest Midwest getaway. When you go, make sure you take the time to go visit Pekar and pay your respects to him by leaving a pen or pencil at him and Brabner’s grave.

Ordinary lives can transformed into the extraordinary through the medium of art. That is what Harvey Pekar did with his life and with the people whose lives he documented in his ongoing comic book series American Splendor. He celebrated the ordinary and gave it a lasting form.

The past decades have shown that when art is disconnected from everyday people it becomes a pastime for the elite. When it is embraced by working class intellectuals it can become a medium of shared experience, rather than a rubicon to be navigated through a maze of academic jargon and interpretation. When the artist in question also works a day job they stay in touch with the world of working people. When they also stay in their home town, in the Midwest, in middle America, they can’t be bent to change their form into the dominant styles. In the case of the writer who doesn’t sell out, they can’t be bought and made to write stories that conform to the preferred narrative trends of a culture in any given time. If they make their buck in some other way that doesn’t compromise their values, they can forge a path through life on their own terms with a foundation of a day job.

Such was the case of Cleveland comic book writer Harvey Pekar whose longest running day job gig was as a file clerk for the VA Hospital.

The boundary between work and play need not be so rigid anyway. There can be a flow between them, if artists weren’t always so eager to quit their day jobs and go pro. I don’t think there is anything ethically wrong with making a living out of what a person creates, but the potential to play to the tastes of the market must become a great temptation when paying the bills rides on paychecks derived from art, music, books.

If the work done is in accord with some kind of principle along the lines of what the Buddhists call right livelihood, it not only is rewarding in its own right, but becomes fodder for further creation, and gives an artist the grit needed to push past obstacles, to overcome the drudgery sometimes involved.  The creator who has not done much work, who has gotten to their position from nepotism, who don’t need to work, or didn’t reach the ability of being able to go full time in their chosen vocation, without having to grind onwards through shifts and shifts at the day job, will have a fundamental disconnect from people who don’t know what it is like to live a life of privilege.

As a writer of comics, music and highbrow literary criticism, Pekar sidestepped that issue by never giving up on his day job until the time of his legitimate retirement. He wrote and worked on his off time, and any time he could squirrel away on breaks and when things were slow on the job. In this respect Pekar is a patron saint of slackers everywhere. And like good slackers, he worked his ass off.

He read books and newspapers on his break times. He made phone calls to editors when he was on break. This grounding in the realities of work, made him the quintessential person to document what life was like in twentieth-century century Cleveland, in the twentieth-century rust belt of Midwest America. He was connected to his city and to the people who lived and worked there. Yet in the drive to create, he mastered the use of his free time, and distinguished himself as a comics writer, as a pioneer of the graphic novel memoir, of slice-of-life strips, as a jazz writer and record collector, as a keen collaborator with many of the great illustrators of his day.  

Pekar didn’t have outlandish style in dress. He didn’t need to don a beret to show he was an intellect of caliber. He could pay his own way through his work, and use his day job as a thrust block to generate the material for his comics.

​Thank goodness Harvey Pekar didn’t give a flying fuck about kryptonite. He hated superhero comics, and wasn’t interested in what some person with special powers could do. Who needs those anymore? He gave us the everyday everyman. The person on the street. These are the everyday people who populated his works. People your average non-corporate executive might run into while riding the bus home from work, or talk to in their neighborhood, or bump into at a convenience store. As he wrote about it later, “I don't ever write for entertainment, like no Hollywood stud or nothing. See, all that stuff, it doesn't mean anything! Plots and villains, all that stuff just to sell cereal and underwear.”

Pekar’s parents were Polish Jews who had emigrated to America where they ran a grocery store. His father was a Talmudic scholar and his mom knew Hebrew and a good deal about Jewish religion and history. She was also an avowed communist until the USSR sided with Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis in 1956. As a Zionist she would have rather had them side with Israel. Pekar’s parents worked all the time, and he spent a lot of time with his grandfather speaking in Yiddish.

Pekar grew up in a mostly African American neighborhood of Cleveland and got to see first hand the racial and class striations bifurcating America. He also came of age just as Cleveland had reached its industrial peak. Born on October 8, 1939 he was just entering the workforce when the 1958 recession hit. Having difficulty finding a regular give gave him lifelong respect for gigs.

Listening to the radio, going to used bookstores, and hanging out at the library were lifelines for Pekar and introduced him to a wide range of ideas. He was a bookhound and a record collector, with his main interest being jazz records. He started writing criticism in 1959 when his first piece appeared in The Jazz Review.

In 1962 Robert Crumb moved around the corner from where Crumb lived at 107th street and Euclid in the heart of Cleveland where hipsters hung out and bohemia swung. Crumb stayed their for four years working at the American Greeting Card company and the two became friends over their shared love of jazz. Here was one of Pekar’s entries into the world of underground comix.

He had been thinking about writing comics for awhile, the ideas percolating after conversations with Crumb, but they took awhile to gestate. In 1972 he drew some stick figure panels and showed his work to Crumb and illustrator Robert Armstrong. Both of these artists, already established in the scene, offered to illustrate Pekar’s stories. His first work in the medium ended up being a one-page piece called “Crazy Ed” that found its way onto the back of The People’s Comics a one-off issue by Crumb.

Over the next four years he wrote a number of other stories that were illustrated by a variety of artists and in appeared in various publications. Following the success and confidence building experiences of getting his stories illustrated and in print he started to focus on writing his own full issue series. It was 1976, two hundred years into the American experiment of independence, and the DIY spirit was everywhere inside the counterculture. His efforts with American Splendor fit right in with this mindset, as seen in the undergound comix movement, the underground press, and zine culture. His stories showed his life with frank realism and profound psychological depth. Ten years of effort paid off in 1986 when Doubleday released American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar collecting the first ten issues.

From his work, it didn’t seem like Pekar was pretentious. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a difficult grouch. His second wife had ambitions to become a career academic, and this was what eventually drove them apart. He didn’t want to leave Cleveland or the gig he had at the VA. She was determined to teach at an Ivy League school -though she never made it quite that far, but did get a gig of her own at a school in New England. Close enough for academic work, one can suppose. Her literary acumen was what got him into reading contemporary literary literature. I guess that’s called lit fic, and it turned out he really liked the stuff. But just to get back at her for leaving him, he started writing reviews for highbrow journal Review of Contemporary Fiction, where she would likely read his reviews. Yet in the way that he lived, he showed that a life of the mind isn’t limited to life of people in an ivory tower. Becoming a cultural critic requires no fancy degree.

His success at this point was in no small way related to his third wife and love of his life Joyce Brabner, who he had married two years before. Brabner was a caring soul who worked with people in prison and kids who were in trouble. She taught them how to write as a way of dealing with the monotony and drudgery of prison life. She wanted them to have an imaginative interior life. Something to help them cope. But she needed to cope herself. Noting the heavy emotional toll the kind of work she was doing took, she got involved in comics and fandom, something she’d loved since her childhood spent reading Mad Magazine. This eventually led her to become a co-owner of a comic book shop in Wilmington, Delaware. The shop stocked American Splendor, but one time, she didn’t get to read the latest issue before it was sold. So she dropped a note to Pekar in the mail asking if he could send them another copy. After this the two started corresponding, then talking on the phone together. Later she had some business to do in Cleveland and decided to visit Pekar while she was there. The two hit it off and got married the very next day. (Brabner is an American iconoclast herself and will eventually have an article dedicated to her own distinct life, work, and contribution to comics and culture.)

​The story of their courtship and early time together was told in “American Splendor No. 10” that he gave the title “Harvey's Latest Crapshoot: His Third Marriage to a Sweetie from Delaware and How His Substandard Dishwashing Strains Their Relationship.”

Because Pekar wrote about the people in his life and the world immediately around him, she knew what she was getting into with him. Part of her attraction to him was his radical honesty, and this led to a degree of openness that served them both well, and they only parted at death. Brabner became a regular feature in his comics over the years, and later, when they took in a foster kid and made her their own (that right there should tell you what kind of people they were), Danielle Batone became a part of the stories. So did Pekar’s bout with cancer, and his struggles with depression.

Pekar said that his work was about “a series of day-after-day activities that have more influence on a person than any spectacular or traumatic events. It's the 99 percent of life that nobody ever writes about.”

​After his death in 2010 one of his coworkers wrote “His writings in “American Splendor” reflected the way he was with us: a direct and unpretentious Everyman with an engaging, original slant on the issues of everyday life. Although tactful discretion was not one of Harvey's strong suits, he was on speaking terms with everyone from the lowest to the highest, and he kept his common touch despite literary fame from his comic books and movie. He added a unique, bright, off-beat note to the daily routine of our medical center.”

On Pekar’s gravestone his epitaph reads “Life is about women, gigs, and bein’ creative.”

As a life philosophy it is hard to beat. Let’s take a look at the three main components.

Life is about women. Married three times, and with girlfriends and hookups in between, its safe to say Pekar liked women. He is certainly not alone in this assessment. On his tombstone it all says he was a beloved husband and guardian. He was married to Brabner for twenty-six years before he passed away. He was Batone’s guardian from the time she was nine, seeing her into adulthood. She would have been around 21 when he died. These were the women in his life, along with coworkers and friends. Pekar had said in his comics that he is pro-feminist, even though his works sometimes showing him arguing with women. He was a passionate man, and perhaps a bit neurotic, but from reading his work, it seemed that Brabner and Batone helped keep this high-strung man grounded.

Then he said life is about gigs. Pekar came of age in 1959 when work was really hard to come by. This gave him a healthy respect for work. Pekar was a practical man, and he knew that to get by in a city that had started its economic decline when he was just starting to come up inside it, meant he had to find the gigs, the jobs. He went through a bunch of them before landing his perfect gig, a job as a civil servant file clerk for the VA. He did his work, he collected his jazz records, and wrote jazz criticism, he collected his books, and wrote literary criticism, he put together and self-published his comics, all in any spare scrap of time he could eke out of his existence. There was little money in the comics for him, and even after the film about his life was made in 2003, he struggled to pay the bills. But he schlepped on with the gigs and made his way. It would have been easy to not read, listen to music, and write, got to work, come home and watch TV. Instead, he took the subject matter of his ordinary relatable life, with all its grouchiness and grumbling, dialed it in to make it extraordinary and epic.

​The third prong of his epitaph is Bein’ Creative. The first two provide the glue that created the foundation for his further achievements. Through his efforts he wanted “to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing,” To get people to see the beauty in their everyday lives. People often think that in order to have a life, you need to have some money, or some kind of silver spoon handed to you so you can do what you want. Sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes what you need is a job, a 9 to 5 that forces you stick to a certain routine, a marriage that keeps you focused on the happiness of another person, and someone younger to care for and help bring up in the world. Beyond that, a bit of creative gumption to come home and keep working, work on the weekends, work early in the morning. That’s the kind of shit that turns a person into a working-class hero. That’s some real American splendor.

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

Gary Warne: Communiversity and the Suicide Club

Who Was Matokie Slaughter?

The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams

Fakir Musafar and Friends

Going Native In America

Weird Weather with David Wills

Running Off to Join the Circus with Jim Tully

Dwelling on the Fringe with the Hubbards

Brother Blue: The Butterfly Bard

Raymond Thundersky: The Cincinnati Construction Clown

Tiny Tim: The Goodhearted Troubadour of Popular Song

Joy Bubbles and the Church of Eternal Childhood

Ray Hicks: Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains

On A Pilgrimage with Peace

The Long Memory of Utah Philips

The Iconoclastic Shenanigans of Henry Flynt

.:. .:. .:.

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. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

“The vessel, though her masts be firm, beneath her copper bears a worm.”- Henry David Thoreau

American society doesn’t seem to have any shortage of techno-optimists and cheerleaders for the cult of infinite progress. You can pick your brand. There are the bitcoin bros, who want to create an even more abstract system of money than the one based on the abstraction of paper dollars and coins. There are the blood doping vamps who think they can beat death by taking the life force of the young. There are the nuclear enthusiasts who keep waiting for a breakthrough in fusion, but they are still waiting. There are the AI worshippers who think that regurgitated machine language is some kind of oracle to which they should bow down, and cast off their own human creativity. The problem isn’t their hope for a better future for themselves and their kids. That’s understandable. It’s not a popular view to take that the future won’t be better for yourself or your kids. The problem is the seemingly permanent state of glee over the very modest “accelerations” in a rather limited suite of technologies, and a devotional sincerity to overlooking the downsides of their widespread adoption.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in the American experiment and I am excited about the possibilities of our future. But that doesn’t mean I can’t cast doubt on the inherited notion of infinite progress inculcated by our society over decades. It doesn’t mean I can’t prepare for a looming second great depression. It doesn’t mean I turn a blind eye to the multiple climate change amplified natural disasters that leave communities devastated. Some never recover from those. It doesn’t mean I have to believe that a finite fossil fuel resource is somehow infinite just because we want it to be. I guess that makes me a doomer.

The techno-optimists don’t like to see the good that can come from embracing an outlook, that yes, every person, and every nation, and every civilization, has a life span of birth, growth, and decline. Looking around America right now, from my home in the Midwest rust belt, its hard not to see signs of decline all around me. There is still a lot of good stuff happening too, but it’s patched over failing infrastructure, declining mental health, and people glued to the technology that is somehow supposed to be their digital savior. Looking at these things, and seeing them for what they are, I guess that makes me a doomer.

​Here in the Ohio valley I’ve also visited a few locations known for their scary nuclear antics. Mound Laboratories in Miamisburg. Fernald. Jefferson Proving Ground. 

​Yet, despite the direct effects on the people in the area where I live (cancer, cancer, cancer), I get called a doomer if I don’t go rah-rah-rah for nuclear energy. The track record for nuclear isn’t very good. Just ask Sun Ra. 

Furthermore, nuclear energy has always existed hand in hand with the nuclear weapons industry. The one supports the other. Personally, I just don’t happen to be a fan of either.

That said, I actually don’t believe a nuclear apocalypse is that likely, at least not on the scale seen in doomer movies and read about in doomer books. Like the devastation left behind in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana there will be patches and places destroyed by nuclear power or weapons, but I don’t think Armageddon via nuclear weapons is likely to occur on a large scale. But whole areas might be destroyed, and that is sad to think about.  

Opting out of new technologies remains an option. Walking away from the notion that not everything is going to get better and better is a viable choice in face of the evidence at hand. I was born in 1979 and the standard of living has gotten lower and lower since that time.My personal wage at the place where I work has gone up, but so has the stagflation, meaning the ability I have to provide for my family is not as strong as it was for the boomers when they made the same wage I do, and who continue to hold onto a greater share of wealth. The oligarchy is also a gerontocracy, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Consider these prices: "Gasoline: In 1970, the price of a gallon of gasoline was 36 cents. Today, it averages around $3.65 per gallon—a nearly 917% increase.

New Car: A new car in 1970 cost around $3,500. Today, the price of a new car is approximately $47,000, a 1,243% increase.

Average Home: In 1970, the median home price was $23,000. In 2023, the typical home costs around $413,800—a staggering 1,700% increase.

Loaf of Bread: In 1970, a loaf of bread cost just 25 cents. Today, it costs about $2.50, reflecting a 900% increase.

Movie Ticket: The cost of a movie ticket was $1.55 in 1970. Now, it costs around $12.00—an increase of roughly 673%.

Postage Stamp: In 1970, a stamp cost just 6 cents, whereas today, it’s 66 cents—an increase of 1,000%."

That said, it does not mean I give up on doing good work for my employer, on continuing to do my own personal work, on continuing to be there for my family and friends, and make a go of things in the world. I volunteer with my ham radio club. I do special projects for the library. I continue to write and talk about all the great music coming out in the world, much of it, paradoxically, electronic! I babysit my grandkids. I visit my elders. Yet, I think that the crises around us will continue to unfold as we go down the staircase of decline. It’s a slow staircase and ragged. Gibson noted the future isn’t distributed evenly. He was right, but it’s the deindustrialized future, one where the internet might be gone in ten or fifteen or more years. Except as a plaything for the rich inside a gated community, and then limited again to the military-industrial complex, where it originated from in the first place. 

Doomers still create and make things. They just might not be advertising what they are making or doing. The things they make might just be for themselves, their families and friends. They might not be posted about online because many of them are off-grid. So in one sense they don’t exist for a lot of people. But a lot of good things can be made that are never intended for public consumption.

Other so called doomers are making businesses. Witness The Anarchist Workbench. Witness County Highway making a real newspaper when digital reading was supposed to be the gateway to the future.  Things can be done now to improve the quality of life in a declining civilization with less energy stuff and stimulation. Doing things about it is a counterweight against depression and acedia.

At the same time the techno-optimists continue to prognosticate on things that have never panned out. Somehow, though, they are always just around the corner. A few big ones include:

-nuclear fusion
-fully automated luxury capitalism-communism
-uploading ourselves into the cloud
-flying cars
-cities on the moon / mars

Everyone can look to the Soviet Union and see that it collapsed as then organized in 1991. Dmitry Orlov was there to witness it. The same has happened to other countries. The fact that it is a real possibility of happening here, in some manner is real. 

Will all technology go away? No. There is good reason to believe we can keep some limited technology going. The limit is the key though. What will the earth support and for how many people?

Techno-optimists in a way can be seen as mentally ill. They are mere consumers, waiting for the next thing to come down the pike and be fed to them, rather than learning what they can do to live when the power goes out, or some unexpected black swan wipes out their stock portfolio.

Where are all the people who told me they would become millionaires by investing in crypto? They are still working like everyone else, and not living a life of fully automated luxury. Yet that doesn't mean alternate forms of curreny aren't worth thinking deeply about, working on, and implementing. Whatever path there are no quick fixes. 

Techno-optimists get caught up in marketing hype, the belief that someone will do or discover something that will allow them to live inside the fantasy that things can just get better and better and better forever. So far, I'd say, human nature stays consistent across the millennia, no matter what technology we have, and that the technology we have now has made it easier to allow the worser demons of our conscience too much leeway. They may say doomers are the ones on a downward spiral. Maybe I listened to too much Trent Reznor in our teenage years. They like to think they are in a virtuous cycle where every experience can be optimized. Reality hacked.

Here in America, one of the great things we have going for us is our ability to disagree, to do our own thing, and despite other people not jiving with a particular worldview, our freedoms allow us to have that view and do what we can to live it out. In many ways America is a third world nation, and we are still coming to grips with our identity as such. We only climbed out of the backwater of the world thanks to the reordering of empire that occurred following World War II. Now as it schizophrenically disintegrates we are struggling from the stress of multiple personality disorder. Yet the paradox is that our dissensus and disagreement actually can lead to our resilience. It's part of what makes this countries experiment worth continuing. We are allowed to choose our own reality tunnel. And there are a plethora to choose from.

The view from one tunnel frequently contradicts the view from another. It can be helpful to try and see from another persons point of view. But the doomer reality tunnel might have something to offer the techno-optimists. We can help them zoom out to see that every nation, every age, has a natural life span. Western industrial civilization is going further into its dotage. What we do about that is up to us. But there is much to be done and save and passed on that is good from the life it has lived, saving what works for whatever societies come next.

In the meantime go outside and take a hike in the woods or do some forest bathing. Hang out with your loved ones. There is still so much worth doing.

.:. .:. .:.

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. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

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

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

​To do this Galluzzo uses the schlocky yet profound seventies scifi film Zardoz as his lens. That makes his sumptuous word feast all the more delectable. The seventies produced some of the best scifi films of all time. Many of my own favorites are from that era and most of them had messages worthy of heeding. Soylent Green, based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison showcased one possibility of the effects of global warming. Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 was a fever vision of a United States government converted into a totalitarian regime and reality show. To hide all the civil unrest caused by economic ruin they created a reality TV show (nothing prescient there, cough, cough) with drivers engaged in blood sport careening and crashing into eachother on a coast to coast kill spree that probably made even made J.G. Ballard blush. Writer and director Michael Chrichton brought Coma to the screen, based on the novel by Robin Cook. It centered on an organ harvesting conspiracy within the medical industrial complex. The film Silent Running showed what could happen to our forests and trees if we continue to give way to purely extractive economies. Zardoz fits in well with these and other films from the decade. For those who have yet to see this one, you may know it best by the reputation it has garnered form lead actor Sean Connery’s loin and groin costume, best described as a big red diaper.

Zardoz was written, produced and directed by John Boorman, the same guy who gave us Deliverance, Excalibur, and The Emerald Forest, among other iconic films. It takes place in the year 2293 and the world is as divided as ever. This time the divisions fall between the impotent but supposedly enlightened “Eternals” and those who don’t know how to read but know how to fight and get it on, called the “Brutals.” To keep the savages from killing everyone, a strange giant stone head floats around and commands a group of people known as exterminators to kill these other killers. Sean Connery’s character is one of these exterminators. In the process of learning that the stone headed god is not a god, but a kind of spaceship operated by a man a behind the curtain, a kind wizard of oz, the exterminator bucks the system and penetrates the “Vortex,” a world of scantily clad mystical midriffs where the Eternals dwell. The story touches on themes of eugenics, hierarchical population control, AI, and the degradation of the natural world.

The Brutals have to live in an irradiated industrial wasteland and grow food for the Eternals whose existence, though without meaning, is full of luxury. It sounds rather like the rightward end of the accelerationism, and neocameralist visions of corporate sovereignty, i.e., the feudalist tech-corp company town model embraced by Elon Musk and his Starbase. Consider this just another way that artists are capable of predicting aspects of our futures. Other possible real-world Vortexes now underway include the giant neighborhood Google is planning around its HQ in Mountain View, California or the “Zucktown” Meta is creating in Menlo Park. You can’t expect tech executives and their cohorts to be bothered with anything as essential to actual life as farming. That’s too biological. Too flesh oriented. Too dirty. 

Then Zed came along, a non-computable black swan event that brought chaos to rigidly calcified order. 

            Galluzzo’s reading of the film is “as another sort of ‘social science fiction,’ one that is also archaeological, as I excavate a broader post-Sixties movement and current of thought— decelerationist, neo-Luddite, and counter-modernist—of which Zardoz was a part. This constellation was an important forerunner of degrowth, among other contemporary movements, that see in a certain developmentalist imperative that defines the modernization process the root of our current social, ecological, and existential crises… [that] challenges us to think utopia and limits together in a way that is inexplicable to those ‘Star Trek socialists’ who cannot distinguish freedom and flourishing from Faustian final frontiers; in fact, Zardoz is very much a Swiftian riposte to Star Trek and the Promethean fever dreams of postwar science fiction. It is only after the ‘future’ and among the ruins that we will build our necessarily imperfect utopias.”

            Much of this tradition that was concerned with slowing down the pace of supposed progress has now been buried or put away into a cobwebbed corner of the counterculture. The environmental movement, for all its gains, has just as often been co-opted when it would been better if it had continued to be co-oped, held within a collective and cooperative framework on the fringes of the corporate system. Greenwashers have long since replaced green grocers. Key voices whose work would resonate together across an interconnected landscape have been sidelined as Promethean techno-utopias and the emissaries of transhumanism have gained ascendance. To look at one of the ways that played out, let’s take a brief detour into the world of Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog, which Galluzzo also touches on.

The rejection of the ethos encapsulated by the Whole Earth Catalog and it’s “access to tools” around ecology, self-reliance, the DIY ethic, appropriate technology and alternative education can be seen in the way Stewart Brand, its publisher, increasingly came to see computers as a means for liberation. In the process the ecological vision that the catalog originally championed was downplayed in favor of cybernetic connection. This is understandable given how big a fan of systems thinking Brand was, of how hard he worked at getting the work of people like Gregory Bateson, with his work on cybernetics and ecology, into the hands of a wider audience.
​
             The last issues of the catalog that truly adhered to the vision came out in 1974. Other issues followed, but many of these, like the 1977 issue, dealt with such fantasies as space colonies, or tellingly in 1984, the Whole Earth Software Review. Fear of Big Brother gave way to love of Big Brother. The eventual McGovCorp ownership of the cybermedia should come as no surprise given that it was built on technology engineered by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). A modernist and post-modernist vision of futurism dominated the former Aquarian milieu as the early Whole Earth Catalog was discarded in favor of a World Wide Web. Computers have excelled as information exchange systems, yet they have now reached a point where they have become our own mind forged media manacles. As that web proliferated, dreams of free communication and information exchange were trampled over by platform after platform during the internet’s wild west years, and its promise cashed in for filthy lucre, and filthy lucre traded in for technocratic control. 

​Brand may have given up on back to the land communes in favor of space colonies, as he became an advocate of, but his wasn’t the only game in town with regards to the ethos around appropriate technology. Many others in the sixties and seventies were writing about how to get by while leaving a smaller footprint on the planet, and how to flourish while doing so. Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia came out in 1975 and it gave popular voice to a number of the ideas being exchanged within the milieu. Other writers such as Christopher Alexander and Paolo Soleri looked at the way the built environment could be refashioned in favor of human life instead of factories and machines. Others such as the New Alchemy Institute looked at ways to redesign our support systems of food, water and shelter, and in the process created amazing bioshelters, aquacultures and other innovations, that if followed, could have alchemized our way of living. Other investigators, such as those at the Farallones Institute, pursued research into “integral urban living.” There were myriad others who pursued some form of organic gardening, food co-ops, alternative education systems, and related subjects in a search for new ways of living as traditional had been lost to industrialization. With the energy crisis of the time unfolding around them, and books like the Limits to Growth in heavy circulation, there was an awareness that the orgy of energy given by access to cheap fossil fuels couldn’t last forever.

The writers around appropriate tech weren’t the only architects looking to build “degrowth utopias.” There was a group of thinkers, connected not so much by shared ideologies as by conceptual resonance that are who Galluzzo calls “Critical Aquarians.” That he brings these thinkers together under a shared moniker was one of my favorite things about his book, as they really do fit together, and their work is important for regenerating this rich vein of thought.

            Who are these Critical Aquarians? Some include James Lovelock, known for his Gaia hypothesis. Others are Ursula K. Leguin for her writings on the possibility of anarchist societies in novels like the Dispossesed or the ecological questions posed in her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Other people he gives the Critical Aquarian moniker to are thinkers like Norman O. Brown who looked at the way eroticism and civilization have been at odds with each other, and reclaimed some of the bodycentric mysticism of Jacob Boheme and William Blake.

Galluzzo also puts Ivan Illich in the Critical Aquarian camp. At a time when the institutions of education are being attacked and questioned by federal institutions, educators might do well to look again at works by Illich such as his book Deschooling Society, where he writes, “The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” Illich’s work Tools of Conviviality where he explores these kinds of webs gives readers a real sense of the ways everyday people can create their own tools to bypass the structures imposed by the technocratic elite.

 In delineating and beginning to assemble those who fit into the Critical Aquarians, Galluzzo gives us a way to trace the theoretical underpinning that can work to compliment the visionaries of the appropriate tech movement. That he manages to do this using what some might consider lowbrow material makes it all the more interesting. But, just in case you were wondering, the use of Zardoz is not a fetishitic “retromania” by any means. In fact, one of the other reasons I fell under the spell of this book, is because it is a useful foil for some of the arguments made by the late influential theorist Mark Fisher and the ideas he put forth in his book Capitalist Realism and other writings. Fisher’s mourning of a lost modernist futurism always rather irritated me, even as I nodded along in agreement with many of his ideas. Indeed, Galluzzo writes, “under labels such as ‘left accelerationism’ and ‘fully automated luxury communism,’ we can detect an ironically backward-looking desire for those high-modernist ‘lost futures’ of the twentieth century, to invoke cultural critic Mark Fisher, that supposedly offer us the lineaments of a better world.” In a critical endnote Galluzzo remarks, “the ‘lost futures’ in Zardoz and so many of the other, comparable works from the time, are interrogations, and often outright rejections of the modernist futurism Fisher mourns, even as these works outline alternatives outside Promethean techno-utopianism, capitalist and socialist alike.”

            For those of us who desire something other than fully automated luxury capitalism or communism, Galluzzo’s text offers key theoretical pointers. One of the many points that he and the Critical Aquarians elucidate upon is an acceptance of death. This would be a stark rejection of the transhumanist visions of escaping our own biology. Instead, it is an embrace of biology, and with it an embrace of limits. Death is the ultimate limit. Instead of viewing that as something that needs to be transcended or a problem to be solved, death can instead be used as a way to make all of life much more precious. This is something Galluzzo gets into in the last part of his little book, and something I hope to hear him write about further in the future.

            If you are lucky enough to have a VCR that hasn’t died, cuddling up a copy of this text and watching Zardoz is the perfect decelerationist remedy for slowing down and tapping into other ideas about what our futures might be.

​Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo was published in 2023 by Zer0 Books.

.:. .:. .:.

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. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

​“Under the paving stones, the beach!” – French graffito 

Greetings and welcome back to Cheap Thrills, your source for speculation on the spectacle of modern living, and how to sidestep it by downshifting into a lifestyle less reliant on the systems of media entertainment pushed by McGovCorp. In this edition I’m going to head out on an excursion to extol the many virtues of taking a stroll and how the simple act of walking in this world can become a profound pastime. To that rambling end I will examine the tradition of the flâneur, the concept and practice of the dérive, and psychogeography. Along the way I’ll look at how industrial culture reordered traditional notions of space and time, and how the nascent topology of deindustrial culture might in turn cause new flows in time and space. 

            Walking is the most perfect exercise. It stretches and strengthens the body as it eases and expands the mind.  As the industrial revolution transformed the cities of the world, walking around the city also became a chance to observe the ways society was changing.

             Enter the flâneur .

            The word is derived from the Old Norse flana, which translates as “to wander aimlessly.”[1] The word found its way to France in the late 19th century, where flânerie gained currency to describe people wandering about without apparent direction, rhyme or reason; the people who engaged in this pastime were called flâneurs.[2] These were the idlers, people of leisure who transformed the mere act of taking a walk into an artful practice.  Observing the rhythms of the city, the flâneur is a passerby, just one of many, a person lost in the faceless crowd. Mesmerized by his or her own thoughts, the flâneur sifts through the secret strata of the city and comes to know its many mysteries.

            The practice of flânerie materialized at time when factories spewed coal smoke from their snouts like dragons of iron, when industrialization vivisected the streets with strangling traffic, when forge and foundry vomited pollutants into air and stream, when the labyrinthine passages and glass arcades of Paris were turned into homogeneous boulevards. The flâneur was there to explore the metamorphosis of urban renewal amidst the defilement of the old. Walking, they soaked in the modern metropolis as a spectacle: they were inside of it, yet through the act of watchful observation, they remained detached and apart.
       
     The word and concept may be French, but the literary origins of the concept came first from American writer Edgar Allan Poe and his short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1840). The story centers on a man living in London who has just recovered from a long illness and who is finally able to get outside and onto the streets of the city again. Still fragile, he parks himself in a coffee shop and is enraptured by watching the coming and going of the passing crowds. First he sees them as a swarm of humanity. Then his view zooms in closer to observe different classes and occupations of people: the aristocrats, lawyers, merchants and clerks, common drunkards, pickpockets, ragamuffins and riffraff.  The narrator neatly categorizes each person, until an old man comes into view whose countenance grabs his “whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression.” He becomes obsessed by this figure and thinks this man has a hidden power inside him, some kind of secret knowledge or history. He becomes so obsessed he can’t let him out of sight. So he follows him out onto the street, and it becomes a story of one man walking in a meandering circumambulation through byzantine thoroughfares following another walker. In his compulsion he follows the man until daybreak, then again all the next day until the sun disappears into night, finally acquiescing to the fact that however much he observes this person, he will never truly know the man of the crowd.[3] 

      French poet, essayist and philosopher Charles Baudelaire was a big fan of Poe, and a translator of Poe’s works into French. He was rather taken by the ideas Poe presented in his story and built on the idea of the restless city observer in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” In one crucial section of Baudelaire’s peregrinating essay he draws a comparison between Poe’s protagonist and the artist Constantin Guys, and then uses Guys as a template to flesh out his vision of the flâneur:[4]

 The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amidst the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of those slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life who makes his whole world his family […] thus the lover of universal life enters the crowd as if it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy.

Baudelaire’s figure who walked and strolled through the lanes of life, often decked out as a dandy, as Guys was, became crucial to his understanding of the complex relationships between the individual and the masses inside the industrialized metropolis. A transformation in the consciousness of the city dweller coincided with urban economic transformation. The pressing in of people on all sides, the stratification and striation of the social classes, enterprise and business always on the go, twenty-four hours a day in full swing: all of this is enough to set anyone’s nerves on edge. Walking became a coping mechanism for those citizens who had what might now be called sensory processing disorder, a way to remain invisible by blending in with the swarm; and yet also a way to maintain autonomy from the swarm by cultivating the habit of detached observation and contemplation as an individual distinct from the concrete anthills of humanity. Walking remains a way to cope as industrial society breaks. Mind and body have a chance to reintegrate away from the fragmentation of spectacular digital life, while reassessing the possibilities of a disintegrated built environment.

As the habit of flânerie was taken up by the bohemian set, it worked its way from Symbolist poets, exemplified by Arthur Rimbaud’s precocious and prodigious tramping, on to the early modernists such as Walter Benjamin, who was the next to stamp his impressions on the term. For him the flâneur became an investigator of the city, a kind of journalist and amateur detective who made connections between the clue of a street sign, the evidence of architecture, and the forensics of local events and current conditions. These coalesced inside the mind of the observant walker until the code of modern life was cracked.

Benjamin also thought the flâneur was “a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism.” In building on Baudelaire’s work Benjamin formulated two terms to describe opposite ways of reacting to the modern city. Erlebnis described the stress brought on by the sensory overload. To cope with Erlebnis he saw people retreating into a numbed-out, anesthetized life. On the other end of the spectrum was Erfahrung, which represented the enjoyment of mobility and the multitude of sensory textures the city had to offer.  

I see the deindustrial urban walker existing in a third point, triangulating the two ends of Benjamin’s spectrum, and mixing in with them the crucial element of imagination. As the walker’s feet wander, so the mind wonders on its own meandering paths. As the feet traverse the layered history of a neighborhood, so memories from a person’s past are also elicited. Interwoven with these come stray thoughts from the astral static, ruminations, and other glints from subtle and diaphanous realms. Discursive meditations are assisted in this ambulatory mode. The clues gleaned are insights that help resolve the mystery of how best to live in the days of decline. 

The artistic potential of walking gained further recognition from Guy Debord during his time in the Lettrist International (LI) and then the Situationist International (SI), whose members included sound and visual poets, filmmakers, political revolutionaries, and a cadre of bohemians just hanging around for the party.  When they weren’t drinking and talking in bars, they drifted around the city on long walks, and these walks became a major theme for the groups. Debord dubbed this practice the dérive, which literally means drifting, and he differentiated this from the classic notion of a walk or stroll by placing further emphasis on the way geography affects psychology and psychology affects geography. It’s not an original idea, but he was able to express it in an artistic and political language that was rather catching:

​On the one hand the drift was a way for them to cope with the spectacle of the city. It allowed them to discover a new city within the old, by studying it at different times in different lights and alternate points view. It was also a major tool for escaping boredom and the banality of workaday life. The drifts aroused their passions, their love for adventure and discovery. 

Those who share these adventurous predilections may find their peripatations also take them into the underworld of urban spelunking and the exploration of abandoned buildings that litter the world’s decayed urban landscapes. Those who become adept at this skill may even be able to parlay it into a way of earning a living. I can see a role for guides versed in the practice of urban exploration paid to retrieve objects or people from dangerous and poisoned locations of the deindustrial future.

            One of the psychogeographical games played by members of the LI and SI was called the possible rendezvous. A person is invited to go alone to a square, café, park, or other location at a preordained time. With no one to meet and no one to wait for, the player of this game is freed from keeping up small talk, or listening to a friend’s impressions, and so has more mental space to allow the surroundings to seep in. The possible rendezvous was also used to encourage a person to think of new ways to use time: in conversations with a stranger, in staring at a sidewalk, in witnessing something unexpected. The person who set the appointment may even turn up. If these rendezvous are organized by a large enough pool of participants, the parties may not even know each other. It’s a game that can help mix up the habits and routines of daily life. Games such as these can help a person become more agile and antifragile. As futures become more uncertain in terms of resource availability and unpredictable catastrophes, the ability to engage situations and people with a spontaneous awareness becomes an asset.

Tours became detours in this milieu. Going the long way around, or going the wrong way altogether, turned out to be a road into new places and psychological situations. Detouring cleared the path for one of the key strategies of the SI: détournement, a word that means “rerouting” or “hijacking.” It is shorthand for the phrase “détournement of preexisting aesthetic elements.” The practice involved taking preexisting works of literature, art, maps, sound, film and whatever else they could get their hands on, and reworking it into something new. Détournement treats all of culture as a common property for the artist to make creative reuse of. It actively encouraged all modification and transformation derived from old works into new works; it incited the deformation and reformation of cultural materials as an active position of agency and challenge. From highbrow to lowlife, from posh to pulp, all are fair game for fair use in a grand mash-up. In my mind détournement represents an early technique for cultural synthesis, beneficial as a way of retrofitting existing cultural artifacts into forms more useful for a world wracked by extreme weather events and energy shortages. Détournement could also be further developed as an art of combinations, potentially as one component towards a real-life Glass Bead Game.

To return from this meandering sidetrack, the Situationists took old city maps, cut them up and collaged them into new maps as part of their work. These détourned cartographies were used to reach places that didn’t exist before. Instead of looking for lines that made borders they looked for lines that made connections, pasted these together and attempted to follow them into imaginal territories. Cutting up a map and rearranging it cuts through time as well as space. Following such a détourned map gives odds to overlooked potentials. 

            To walk in 21st-century America is to have the experience of a schizophrenic. The psychological state of our cities is as split and cracked as its concrete and asphalt. Past the crumbling plazas with their succession of empty shops, past the gas stations with their promises of high-speed travel and convenience, another mental state of the union exists. This reality is waiting to be touched by a new breed of deindustrial flâneurs. It can be found underneath the bridges, where mini neighborhoods of tents and cardboard are set up to escape the rain, past the fringe dwellers who wait for derelict metro buses as the fumes of the frenzied motorcade sift into the dust-colored sky, past the rusted-out, broken-down vehicles of an exhausted country.

      As the phantom existence of the metaverse disappears into a mess of tangled wires, the streets will need to be revived.  Walking allows a person to see the world at a natural pace. Car travel rushes over the terrain, while on slow, observant strolls, details erupt from the landscape.

     Where the 19th-century flâneur was a spy on assignment in the world of consumption, the 21st-century flâneur is a vagabond fleeing the boredom of McGovCorp’s televised internment couch, looking to see what might remain and become of the city as the post-industrial marketplace shudders and shutters its doors, as the age of fossil fuels sputters and convulses. The deindustrial flâneur is an advance scout reporting on how the remaining detritus might be rearranged and combined into more useful arrangements.

      “Far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape,” Benjamin said. Layers of history are present in the parade of architecture. Walking is a visceral way to learn local histories. Deindustrial flâneurs can become repositories for local lore that becomes the connective tissue between time and place.

     My wife Audrey and I have always enjoyed walking around our hometown and surrounding areas. It’s helped me to internally map the land I dwell on. Since 2019 we have been exploring the region a bit more systematically with the help of a guidebook (Walking Cincinnati). It’s a nice guide; it lays out walking routes for over thirty different neighborhoods; interspliced amidst the directions are choice tidbits of history that have given us have a greater appreciation for the heritage in our hometown. On one walk in the neighborhood of Glendale we stopped by the Swedenborgian Church where Johnny Appleseed was a congregant during his time in the area, and it imparted a sense of wonder to know that legacy is still with us.

While guidebooks like these don’t ever go too deep into details, they do serve as a point of introduction to the layers of the past still present. Building, street, and neighborhood names come alive when you know something of the biography of the people they honor. Another way to soak up local history from the ground up is to take frequent walks in graveyards, noting the names on stones of interest. The bits I’ve found really exciting often call for further research, another cheap thrill that can occupy hours of time inside libraries and archives and at the meetings of historical societies. These venues also provide opportunities to make friends with new people who share common interests. As the industrial age continues to unravel and once commonly agreed-upon understandings of history fall apart, all this research stands to become fodder for the propagation of new histories by which the future might better understand its past.

     If you happen to be lucky enough to live in a place where the buildings aren’t all brutal, where there is more brick, wood or stucco than siding, where the roofs are gabled and the windows are Folk Victorian style, then you may also benefit from an architectural guidebook, which adds another layer of enjoyment to an urban hike. Learning about the various types of houses (Italianate, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival…) gives a greater appreciation for the design of diverse domiciles. Knowing something of domestic and traditional architecture brings an awareness of the psychological effects of various buildings, often in counterpoint to the obloid shapes the architects of more recent structures have wrought on the landscape. The go-to book in my household is A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia Savage MacAlester.
             
            In all this talk of walking I’ve barely even mentioned the rural, the stretches between the towns which are perfect for rambling, for scrambling down ravines and up to high lookouts. While the flâneur remains the iconic literary walker of the urban wild, there is a class of wayfarers more at home along the brakes of creeks and down old country lanes adorned with unmortared stone walls where the mullein and mugwort bloom. Here the example of such writers as John Clare, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson may be of inspiration.

            When we drift, the spaces we inhabit are not just traveled through, but are experienced. When we invest them with time spent walking and learning they become invested with meaning. No matter where one lives, whatever the size of one’s income or lack thereof, the act of heading out for a walk opens the door to new zones of perception, to mental and physical liberty.

.:. .:. .:.

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. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

FURTHER RE/SOURCES:
Here are just a few books to stuff into your backpack for reading on a bench next time you head out into the urban wilds.

Baudelaire, Charles. 1992. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Jonathan Mayne, trans., ed. Rochester, Vt.: Phaidon Books.

Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 

Cameron, Julia. 2003. Walking in this World: The Practical Art of Creativity. New York, N.Y. Penguin.
• This book is a sequel to Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and focuses on exercises and thoughts on manifesting creativity centered around the practice of walking. She encourages writers, musicians and artists of all stripes to take a weekly walk and this book is filled with a multitude of suggestions for sustaining the imagination.
Debord, Guy. “Definitions,” “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” “The Theory of the Dérive,” “Two Accounts of the Dérive.” Situationist International Online.  <https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html>

McAlester , Virginia Savage. 2019. A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture. New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf.

McDonough, Tom. 2002. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Several of the essays in this collection by Debord and others get into ideas about cities, urbanism, and architecture.

​Ninjalicious. 2005. Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration. [ See infiltration.org ]

• This is the guidebook for getting into places you are not supposed to be. From behind-the-scenes areas of in-use buildings, to abandoned sites, to drainage systems and other urban underground areas. Explore at your own risk.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1987. Tales of Mystery and Imagination. New York, N.Y.: Mystic Press.

Wark, McKenzie. 2011. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso.
• This book is the best I’ve come across for putting Guy Debord, the Situationists, and their whole milieu into a social and historical context.

​
[1]      https://www.etymonline.com/word/flaneur

[2]      While the word flâneur historically implied the masculine, modern advocates recognize it as something that can be applied equally to women as well as men. In French the word passante was used as female equivalent, particularly in the works of Marcel Proust. Twenty-first-century academics have used the word flâneuse to designate the female version. For the purpose of this column I’ll be using the word flâneur as something applicable to all sexes. 

[3]     Poe’s story is great. The main character is also a bit stalky. I’m not advocating people go out and follow strangers around.

[4]     It was also in this essay that Baudelaire coined the term “modernity.”

This essay originally appeared in New Maps, Volume 2, Issue 1 from the Winter of 2022

Standby for failure. It is inevitable if you want to live a life of action. Of not standing by. Of doing and making your own things instead of being fed the garbage churned out by the corporate spectacle.

Do you think there is no future for you? There may not be within the preordained choices promulgated by straight society. But the future is at least partially amenable to our own interventions. If you don’t want to be just a fly on the wall, to live a life where nobody notices you and all you do is observe the actions of others, it can be helpful to get off your shit, detach yourself from looking at whatever the fuck other people are doing, and chart a course of your own.

The current state of our disintegrating culture would have us all feeding off the corporate tit, our brains plugged in to a digital matrix. Down home punks reject this insolvency. The only debt worth having is the debt to our family, friends, and ourselves – the debt to do better. We are free to pursue a course with no commercial potential. Yet often, what was deemed by the business world to be unvaluable has proved to be a viable way of making a living -and more importantly a way of living a life.

To multi-national corporate America, most of us, and whatever scraps of community are left, are just pawns inside an abstract data stream, numbers in a game, and they only take notice when those numbers fluctuate below the level they like or when there is a glitch in the system. Our soi distant overlords in the corporate managerial class have demanded that our lives be less lived, be depersonalized by consumption and playing the pawn in their game, and this has led many into quagmires of inaction and internal querulousness.

​Jon Lydon noted how “anger is an energy.” Apathy is the lack of that energy. And while many of us punks prefer the equanimity of peace, it seems that over time, anger has given way to a pestilence of inaction, afear of doing. It is a catatonia of anhedonia 

Yet the undercurrent of anger is there, and it has been there, and it can be tapped into. On the chessboard of life, refuse to be a pawn.  The authenticity and the ferocity, the energy that comes from doing your own thing in face of the prevailing winds opens oneself up to new eddies and swirls within the crosscurrents. Lean into the wind.

Instead of “do it yourself” there is a “do it for me” attitude, propped up by being habituated to the servile service industry. I think part of it is a kind of Stockholm syndrome resulting from being held hostage to interests that are better served by people being consumers rather than producers. These systems seem to encourage a heightened awareness of alienation.

At one time punk was about transgression, but transgression has become banal. And there is nothing more dull than banal. Our society transgresses every day. Transgress a healthy diet by eating Doritos and twinkies. Transgress a healthy boundary by revealing too much to strangers on the internet. Transgress our needs by giving into our wants and buying more plastic crap that serves no purpose. The temptation to transgress comes daily and those transgressions are rewarded by those who believe in putting no limit on their desires or the things they deserve.

But such a life is hardly satisfactory, and those with a conscience can feel the way these transgressions eat away at their integrity. The old adage that money can’t buy happiness still applies. The number of “likes” received on social media content will also not deliver the ultimate good, though it may deliver dopamine in increasingly small amounts.

The material affluence and corruption of decadent America has led to a withering of our self-control, and as those fruits have died on the vine, so too has our self-respect. Though the United States has been in sharp decline since the 1970s, we still live in a country that, for the time being, has a greater share of the earths limited resources. Within this affluence people have gotten bored on the glut of material out there for their minds to glue themselves too, rather than do anything on their own. Amidst the trappings of external wealth, we have become paupers with regards to the inner dimensions of life. This leads to our terminal boredom as the spectacle never brings true fulfillment.

Let’s just say you’d better have great discipline and a very rich interior life if you expect to be happy amid great affluence. If this is true of individuals, that money doesn’t buy happiness, why can’t it be true of a whole society?

The spectacle would have us all sit still inside a terminal waiting room, holding our breath, listless, flipping through magazines and taking in their ads and messaging, until our name is called. I say don’t wait for your name to be called, but get up and do something. Cancel the meeting with the higher authorities and make your own appointment with destiny.​

The monks of the Christian tradition had a name for the spiritual sickness of not wanting to do jack shit. They called it acedia. Weakness of will is not the curse of our time alone, though in our time it may be exacerbated by all the things around us that can sap the unwary of their will.

From the Greek, acedia is a word that means, “indifference, lethargy, exhaustion, and apathy.” This monk dude named Evagrius of Pontus wrote about acedia back in the 4th century, when he compiled a list of temptations known to plague those living the monastic life. As these became codified over time these temptations became the well-known seven deadly sins and the experience of acedia became better known as sloth.

Today this can be seen as a general aversion to activity, to taking action. For the most part this seems to be an acquired behavior -or lack of behavior. Sloth thrives on confusion and disengagement, two things the spectacle continues to provide. Confusion from the malfeasance wrought by a media now allied to the state, and disengagement by being fed a constant supply of dubious entertainments.

Leave the meh behind and get stoked. Blahness is so boring and passé. Excitement and interest generate resonance and relation and lead to activity in the areas of one’s interests. At a time when the noonday demon seems to be present at all hours of the day, buckling down to some good old-fashioned work may be the best thing to keep the demon at bay. This doesn’t have to be work for the system, for Babylon, or laboring for the false glory of making a manager look good.

A new self-respect can be built from taking on obligations -to oneself and to others outside the orbit of corporate control.  The good feelings generated by doing something voluntarily, by oneself or as a group, were part of the fuel that kept the punk rock engine burning.

Fulfillment comes from other things, and one of those is action. Distance oneself from the fear of failure and do whatever you can to put a leash on apathetic catatonia.

Living only on the internet tends to catch a person up in an abstract intellectual world. But reality, and its material components, are not primarily abstract. The abstractions society has found itself embracing from modernity to post-modernity to the atomizing effects of the internet, tend exacerbate this embrace of the abstract. What is happening online seems more real than what is happening outside the frame of the television, computer and smart phone screens. What is needed to counteract this late-capitalist abstraction is tending to the concrete. Even more than tending to the concrete, tending to the soil.

​Too many choices is no choice at all. So make one. Work with the hands and get out of the head.  

.:. .:. .:.

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