Fogwalking

UFO

Your Favourite Viola Player is an Evil Wizard

Tribalism and Phish

~~~

In the summer of '97, when I was thirteen, I somehow convinced my father to take me to see the band Phish for a whole weekend.  We drove to a decommissioned air force base in Maine, where tens of thousands of smelly travelers had convened to hear jams and hang out in the lot that was here a whole airstrip.  My mother didn't have any idea of the scene we'd find, else she wouldn't have allowed it.  My father rightly saw that it would be an interesting novelty for us both, and bless him for the effort.

The first sign on approach was one selling water pipes by the side of the road.  I didn't know what water pipes were, but I sensed I was entering another world.  Shortly that telltale stoner gave way to thousands of cars, and thousands more people setting up tents and meeting friends. 

There was a pervasive funk in the air that could not be avoided.  I learned years later that it was not the pot smoke I was smelling everywhere; it was the pot everyone was carrying in their pockets.  The word was "nuggs."

It wasn't just the drugs, though.  I can't remember ever seeing so many happy people in one place, and I know at least two of them weren't on drugs.  There was something more going on.  I was glimpsing not just a subculture, but an actual community, with its own economy, etiquette, and attitude.  It was a group of people cultivating a particular consciousness, and doing it not just with hallucinogens but with a shared sensibility.  I think the rot was just beginning to set in as it always does, but by and large these were peaceful, loving, unified and respectful individuals.

At one point Dad related to me a conversation he had with a woman with plates from some distant state.  She had seen her first show, and decided to hop into her car and start following the band for the rest of the tour.  Many people did that, suddenly leaving their square lives to relax on the road.  I sensed they were the ones who could afford to do so.  People sold food and jewelry and drugs out of their vans, but to even be in the position to drop out of society in that manner, one must have a certain standing in it to begin with.

There were surely a goodly number of trustafarians, but a lot of otherwise ordinary people too.  Young and old, hippie and normie, from every corner of America and beyond.  I saw a sea of people washing away from the stage after every set.  There were no fights, no bad vibes that I picked up.  Everyone was cooperating to create a spontaneous city of people with a taste for fun, surprising, eclectic music.  Phish as a band is musically omnivorous, contagiously sharing their love for different forms.  That kind of idiom can only welcome all kinds.  They studiously avoided politics or serious worldly concerns.  Phish was a safe space without judgment.

So what a twinge I felt when I got home and read an article out of Boston reporting on The Great Went.  One line stood out, a needle seeking to puncture that pleasant bubble.  The author observed, and then pointedly said nothing further on the matter, that there were almost no black faces in the crowd.  It just hung there, in the middle of the article, awkwardly interjecting itself as a non-sequitur.  What was the reader supposed to make of it?

Some people got together, and had a good time, and no one got hurt, and great memories were made, and happy songs were sung, and it felt like a rite of passage for me, but there weren't any black people there.  I should probably feel bad about that.  Why don't black people like Phish?  They play blues and jazz and funk music all the time.  Is that cultural appropriation?  Is Phish racist?  Is that why blacks don't like them?  Am I racist because I like Phish?  I wish more black people were there, so I wouldn't have to worry about this.

I had never seen a more cohesive and cheerful community, but the implication was that it must be doing something wrong.  I couldn't figure out what that was.

It should be said that Phish followed a cultural template from the Grateful Dead, who apparently trafficked LSD for the CIA.  Every rebellion of the last while has had an element of social engineering somewhere within.  I really don't think that Mike Gordon, the Jewish bass player, is actually the handler for three programmed stooges, deliberately removing good-hearted people from regular society where they might do some real damage, but it would be naive to pretend the mass movement of lots of people on lots of drugs listening to nonsense songs to escape from their privileged lives instead of improving their world is an unmitigated good. 

Nevertheless, however embarrassing, there is a fundamental sweetness to an unpolitised hippie.  Those who fall into the lifestyle of following a jam band, or who manage it on their vacations, find a fandom that could be called a family without too much hyperbole.  Certainly, they are a particular tribe, with symbols and chants that may move them more than those of their nation or town.  Phish doesn't have a constitution.  They don't have a foreign policy or a seat at the UN.  They do have singing, and dancing, and drums, and drugs, and lots of friendly, welcoming people, but apparently no black people, and that's a problem.

How To Build A Synchronicity Machine

 ~~~

Imagine that meaning is a real thing, a stuff, not an airy nothing that you make up.  Imagine that ideas and feelings are a river flowing beside you, and you can dip your toe in or dive in completely.  Imagine that everything you think goes into that river.

The notion of signs and portents, synchronicities and other suggestive coincidences is out of fashion with most in the Western world, but very much alive with a few.  Occultists and New Agers, drug takers and UFO abductees are often forced to get used to the notion, that they can sometimes engage in conversation with their surrounding environment and the events that occur within it.

There are at least a couple of ways to do this.  One is to simply go through your day with an anticipation of magic.  Treat every encounter and unexpected deviation from your plan as a potential message just for you.  Look for the meaning, learn the lesson, hear the message. 

Understand that this is clinically a sign of madness, so don't advertise it too broadly.  You may even find that sharing your synchronicities with a sympathetic party will be less than you hoped for.  The significance was specially made for your consciousness, and on some level your consciousness may have participated in its creation.  In any case, only you know the weights and measures of your own mind, so no one else can validate your synchronicity for you.  Simply give yourself permission to perceive as significant that which feels significant.

Look for meaning and you will find it.  Follow it and you'll find more.  There is no precise content here that needs to believed.  Maybe you're getting in touch with your Higher Self, or guardian angel, or the spirits, or God, but the channel can be hijacked by devious demons leading you astray just as readily as any other information source you might use.  That goes doubly if the whole affair is just a projection of your mind. 

Synchronicities are cues to remind you to be conscious.  Even if it's only a mis-fire of the meaning-making part of your brain, that should alert you that your brain is bored and wants something meaningful to do.

So much for the worldly path.  Go outside right now and you may well run into an old friend, or see an amusingly relevant advertisement on the side of a bus, or find something you've always wanted in a shop window.  What qualifies as a synchronicity is mostly subjective, but you must meet the process halfway, with intentions and reactions.  Probabilities are constantly aligning themselves into improbabilities, if you can only notice it.

But is there any more that can be done to harness this peculiar mystery, and make it more useful?  For instance, are we forced to tailor our meaning from whole cloth every time something surprising happens?  I don't think so.

It's my understanding that many Native American tribes could use the aforementioned method along with a codified understanding of the significance of different animals.  Go for a stroll through the woods with a problem on your mind, and the first beast you see may deliver an insight or a hint for a course of action.  But the natives generally didn't have a system of writing, and we certainly don't have ready access to a tradition of totemic symbolism.  Historically speaking, we found other ways to acknowledge this phenomenon.

In the European north, it was runes.  In the south, the Tarot.  Far to the East, the I-Ching.

Each of these was a language.  They were developed and interpreted in an attempt to establish a system that could represent all the stations of life,  all the configurations and permutations of consciousness that a person might experience, based on the philosophies and belief systems from which they emerged. 

Undoubtedly there are elements of the human psyche that are so firmly instantiated as to be effectively eternal, but the colour and flavour of consciousness is continually evolving, particular to a certain time and place and culture.  Anyone born today in the West to normal parents can't help but be playing at something outside of their immediate reality when they employ these methods.  The Tarot deck on which most are based was itself a modern construction, an erudite and reverent attempt at authenticity.  That's laudable, but even Traditionalists today have grown up in a world in which you must make your own authenticity.

This is primarily a proposal for the obsessive systematisers among you.  Not everyone is able or inclined to produce a comprehensive conceptual system.  I did it accidentally.

The first step is to legally assemble a large music collection on an electronic device.  There should be several thousand songs at least.  The words, tones, timbres and genres should all speak to you personally on some level, to your own typical range of thoughts, moods, and feelings.  It helps if you have a modicum of variegation in your soul.  If you only have one mood and only ever listen to one kind of music, we may be wasting our time here.

If, on the other hand, you know yourself a little bit, and know what you like, and know what you care about, and you have questions, and goals, and intentions, you are prepared for step two.  Simply randomize that collection, as you may have already been doing, but do so without the assumption that a random order can't convey anything.  Turn on "shuffle" and press "play," unfocus your mind a little, and imagine there's an ethereal DJ, intermittently spinning deep cuts to get your attention. 

Consider that if you were sitting outside of materiality with certain cosmic standards discouraging direct intervention, a random system might represent a permissible loophole.  The interpretation of the message is on the embodied human.  Maybe that song title or lyric is a direct response to what's on your mind, or maybe you're reading too much into things and going a little crazy.  Maybe there wouldn't necessarily be anything wrong with that.

This doesn't discount logic or reason.  You can still check one idea against another to see if it holds up.  You need not be bound to otherworldly intuition or divinatory crapshoots.  Merely understand that we habitually seek patterns and meaning, and even if that's only a vestigial impulse it can still help us.  Ultimate truth is great, but the subjective apprehension of truth may be more valuable for personal psychological health or life success.

The message here is that there are messages everywhere.  We live inside a synchronicity machine, so it can sometimes be hard to see its activity.  That's why it's useful to try to represent the world in miniature in a book or deck of cards.  But maybe ancient esoteric symbolism from a foreign culture doesn't speak to you.  That's okay.  Make your own Tarot. 

Load up a digital jukebox with songs that make your soul sing.  Play the music and think about what matters.  Make connections and associations.  Is there a perspective from which that verse may be relevant to my situation?  You will learn something, even if you absurdly overreach in the interpretation.

It won't always work.  You can't make demands of it.  But take this with you: when your heart lights up because the radio seems to be playing a song just for you, just don't be a heartless coincidence-monger.  Revel in that moment of being connected with yourself and the wider universe, and it will happen more often.

Radio Tunes Really Are Getting Stupider

In the course of just ten years, the reading skill necessary to understand popular songs in America has dropped a whole grade level, to somewhere between second and third grade.  Between Hip-hop, Rock and Pop, and Country, Country fares the best, with Blake Shelton’s hit "All About Tonight" requiring an incredible 5.8 grade reading level (the song challenges with such utterances as "concoctions" and "Gatorade").  With electronic dance music already degraded to a series of farts and burps, it's only a matter of time before all music will be fully comprehensible to babies and smart dogs.

Music Improves Auditory Processing in Children

These initial study results, published recently in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, provide evidence of the benefits of music education at a time when many schools around the nation have either eliminated or reduced music and arts programs. The study shows music instruction speeds up the maturation of the auditory pathway in the brain and increases its efficiency.

The Dangerous Unconscious

Monoliths and Lighthouses

Military-Industrial Complex Shares With Guitarist

Tom DeLonge, formerly of pop-punk band Blink-182, has written a novel with the help of a professor of Shakespeare, as well as "sources within the aerospace industry and the Department of Defense and NASA" (a statement apparently specifically approved by those sources). 

The premise of Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows is that the government has built alien reproduction vehicles from acquired alien technology.  Curiously, this closely matches the story given in the recent revival of The X-Files.

Sun Ra: Showman or Shaman?

Dreams come true, I know they do
If you believe in love
Mine came true and yours will too
I swear by the stars above

Dreams come true, they just have to
True as the Sun above
Mine came true and yours will too 
If you believe in love

Dream of romance
Strolling down Lover's Lane
In a trance
And dream it over again

Dreams come true, they just have to
To prove they're so supreme
Mine came true and yours will too 
All you have to do is dream

-"Dreams Come True," Sun Ra 

~~~

Sonny had a vision.  His body was transfigured.  Up he went, and down to a stage on Saturn.  They told him to leave school, to speak through his music.  The world was due to become a more chaotic place, and there would be trouble in the schools, but music was a language that would be heard.

Ten years later, in 1947, people began to talk about flying saucers.  Sonny was always ahead of the curve, but now his private epiphany had some kind of cultural currency.

~~~

Ten years after that, Herman Poole Blount had become Le Sony'r Ra.  He had an independent music label, El Saturn Records, and a big band, the Arkestra.  With his manager and various associates and pen pals, he traded books and ideas about symbols and religion, ancient times and extraterrestrial encounters.  Strange packages would arrive from corners unknown, holding secrets and clues.  Long before the Internet, the esoterica of the day all got funneled through Sun Ra, listening to Long John Nebel on the radio when he wasn't writing and rehearsing.

His band were affordably dressed as Egyptians and space men, a silly expression of serious preoccupations of the bandleader. The costumes also helped to undercut the self-conscious rigour of the music.

Sonny was intense about discipline.  When his band moved to New York and the music moved further into the avant-garde, he rejected the label of "free jazz."  There was nothing free about it; this was music about mind and cosmos.  This was space jazz.

~~~

It would be another twenty years before the zeitgeist was ready, and George Clinton produced a flying saucer funk that approximated Sun Ra's aesthetic.  Outside of a rewarding cross-pollination that resulted in a series of approachable fusion albums, Ra's music remained a more dangerous, uncanny animal.  It was not uncommon for a show to begin with a twenty-minute expression of the creation of the universe as explained by a wall of horns, or end with Ra snaking through the crowd and shouting in people's faces.  This was music to change minds.

~~~

He is said to be a pioneer of Afrofuturism, and early on he closely identified with Black struggles.  As time went on, he came to see blacks and whites alike as subject to the lies and illusions of a nefarious archontic power using us as pawns for its own amusement.

In some combination of inspired revelation, divine disclosure, informed intuition, and self-mythologising bullshit, Sonny told people that he was a member of the angel race.

~~~

He never changed his story about the time he went to Saturn, but no one saw him dissolve.  The historicity of his prehistoric alien abduction is a moot point.  It can be judged only in its possible effects.

Sun Ra pioneered the use of electronic keyboards and free improvisation in jazz, but that proves nothing.  He was one of the most prolific recording artists of his century, but that proves nothing.  He lived and breathed his music, living in a big house with his band and catnapping at the piano, but that proves nothing.

What might actually mean something is that today, twenty-three years after the man's transition, the Sun Ra Arkestra still tours in his name.  Ninety-something Marshall Allen dresses as a wizard, blows an electronic whistle, and the band sings the old songs.  The crowd and the performers enter a magical space in which a dead man is still alive.  They dream of the future, of the boundlessness of infinity, of love in outer space.  This is perhaps the greatest proof that Sonny was touched by something, reaching down to make a prophet of a man.

He warned of doom in the grand old tradition, but he used his every day on Earth to wake people up where he could.  That he did so without arousing much recognition from the jazz or the flying saucer communities suggests he was right about that evil unseen force of injustice in the world.

~~~

They plan to leave this world one day
In sundry rocket ships to sail away

They plan to go to somewhere there
In splendid ships of models rare

They plan to find another place in the sky
Without saying farewell, without saying goodbye

They plan to put the White House on the Moon, soon
And the Kremlin on a satellite

-"They Plan to Leave," Sun Ra

~~~

Further reading

The Magic of John Cale

The latest development in the Land of Nod
Says the animals got the best of us all
Lost in the miles of the 20th century
Cocktail parties and things

If we could work it out
We'd have done it by now
If we could work it out
Don't you think we'd have it done?

 -"Indistinct Notion of Cool," John Cale, Walking on Locusts

~~~

When the postwar generation came of age, adulthood greeted them with a Dionysian orgy.  Long-suppressed pagan urges were let loose without cultural grounding.  Sex and drugs were freely enjoyed without a meaningful and historically-conscious social context.

For a semantically-softened populace, art stepped in to explain what was going on.  Rock provided the soundtrack, psychedelia and folk informing the optimism of the time.

Standing in the corner, dressed in black, arms folded, were the Velvet Underground.  The seed of a grungy, distorted tradition of musical nihilism was already planted, nurtured by Andy Warhol, and soon to bloom into glam, punk, noise, and eventually a mandatory music called "alternative rock."

~~~

Lou Reed's lyrical subject matter would receive the most notoriety, but it was John Cale who arranged and refined the sonic backdrop that animated Reed's songs.  Cale didn't receive credit for producing the first two Velvet Underground records, but it's understood that he did the job.  He went on to produce debuts by the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, and Patti Smith.  When the lines of influence on subsequent artists are traced, Cale's reputation in New York in the late 70s as "the godfather of punk" becomes a reasonable proposition.

~~~

Before the Velvets, Cale had learned how to play drone music with La Monte Young.  This sometimes involved holding a note for an hour at a time.  The kind of entrainment following from such an exercise can be useful for the alteration of consciousness, but techniques first developed in India for getting closer to an ultimate mystic reality were now to be re-purposed to make the mud sound sexier.  With an insistent beat, loud volume, and persistent tones, any message can be delivered more forcefully, and potentially more subliminally.

~~~

Cale's social maladjustment may well be attributed to being abused by a priest as a child, and his drug abuse to being prescribed opiates as a child.  How should we understand his marginal success, expertly crafting a miserable canon of neglected art rock?

Willfully uncommercial yet doggedly hard-working, John Cale has cut an interesting path.  After making a profound impact on music history, he used the songs of his solo career as a series of masks and genre exercises, too eccentric to appeal to the masses.  This relative lack of attention permitted him to comment on society, psychology, and history in ways more direct than many of his contemporaries.  He was writing songs for sullen intellectuals with bitter tastes, and providing an artistic precedent for tools of crowd control to be applied to the maverick depressive set.

Among informed hipsters and music snobs, Cale's importance in bringing distorted psychosis to rock music is undisputed.  What may surprise some is that the sad jester has been recognised by the Crown for his efforts.

In 2010, John Cale was inducted into the Order of the British Empire, "For services to Music and to the Arts."  It's almost as if the Empire, such as it remains, is somehow served by hypnotic songs engendering apathy and debauchery.

~~~

You're just feeling some of the magic
But you're feelin' it
This is just some of the magic

I write reams of this shit every day
But you're feelin' it

Where's the heat coming from, Brotherman, Brotherman?

Very uncomfortable... but you're feelin' it

Where the hype coming from, Brotherman, Brotherman?
Out there in the courtyard with Uncle Sam

-"Brotherman," John Cale, blackAcetate

~~~

Further reading

New Miley Cyrus Music Video Promotes The Sexualization of Infants

The transformation from a seemingly wholesome American girl into super whore (sex slave) began young, with it becoming obvious to anyone with a semi-functional brain that Miley was being sexually exploited, and also being used to transform her fans into pornographic prepubescents.

Singing is a Beneficial Memory and Mood Hack

Given the increasing global prevalence and burden of dementia and the limited resources in public health care for persons with dementia and their family caregivers, it is important to find alternative ways to maintain and stimulate cognitive, emotional, and social well-being in this population. Our findings suggest that musical leisure activities could be easily applied and widely used in dementia care and rehabilitation.

More Things That Are Now “Racist”: Thor, Heavy Metal Music, Viking Cosplay

“Folk metal serves as a comfortable leisure space for those that have lost power in recent decades: the white European, working class men who have faced challenges to their assumed privileges from women, globalisation, immigration and postmodernity. However, at the same time it should not be easily dismissed in this way, and I believe it remains central to the idea of heavy metal as a form of leisure that makes masculinity and whiteness the norm.”

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra Silences Valentina Lisitsa’s Music

"Yes, Toronto Symphony is going TO PAY ME NOT TO PLAY because I exercised the right to free speech. Yes, they will pay my fee but they are going to announce that I will be unable to play and they already found a substitute. And they even threatened me against saying anything about the cause of the cancellation. Seriously."

Was "Earliest Musical Instrument" Just a Chewed-Up Bone?

"The Neanderthals may have made music without instruments by clapping their hands or slapping their bodies, Nowell notes. They may also have used instruments made of materials that decomposed."

During Surgery, Cats Prefer Listening To Classical Music Over AC/DC

"Up next, the team wants to investigate how music affects cortisol and catecholamine levels--which provide a more direct way of measuring stress--in both cats and dogs. Eventually, the researchers hope that the right kind of music could lower the dose of anesthesia pets need to stay calm during operations, which could make surgery safer for our furry friends."

Listening to classical music modulates genes that are responsible for brain functions

"Listening to music down-regulated genes that are associated with neurodegeneration, referring to a neuroprotective role of music.

'The effect was only detectable in musically experienced participants, suggesting the importance of familiarity and experience in mediating music-induced effects,' researchers remark."

Bowhead whales heard singing unique new songs

"It would be really great to understand not only why they sing but why they sing so many different songs."