The Transubstantiation of Personal Finance

My latest post to GenSit focuses on esoteric solutions to personal financial difficulty. It's more interesting than it sounds, trust me.

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Words Fail Me

Meet Guy, one of several action figures available for the The Cubes playset, available at Accoutrements.com. From the catalog copy (emphasis added):

Every morning, on their way into the office, the Cubes see Guy standing on a soapbox with a hand-scrawled sign, shouting at cars as they go by. Is he a protester with a serious message or just a disgruntled ex-employee? Will he be whisked away in a limo one day, never to be heard from again?

One can imagine the ditzy/bubbly copy writer penning this from the beige confines of her own cubicle, giggling at the harmless fun such a product will no doubt bring to thousands of middle managers watching their hair fall out as CNN misleads our perceptions of terrorism and little Billy is corrupted ever-so-subtly by Instant Messaging. This clueless exploitation of the world's suffering -- what the frick does it even mean to have a pro-Donut protester wearing a "Fruitarian" t-shirt? -- is everything I have ever fought against. Buy it for your boss this Christmas, and then steal it back and set it on fire in the parking lot.

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Life After Flying?

The Austin Chronicle's Michael Ventura has penned another disturbing piece on the major shifts now under way in the United States (if not the world). With the price of gasoline expected to rise to $6/gal in a year, and $10/gal by 2010, we can expect to be driving a lot less in the near future and to pay bigger heating bills. But the worst is what will happen to air travel: in the last year, the price of jet fuel has risen 50%, and 51% of the US's airlines are going bankrupt (since they haven't yet raised rates to match the price of fuel). That means flying will become an exclusive activity of the rich, and the rest of us will have to either a) bus it, b) ride the dwindling US rail system, or c) stay put. While this bodes well for those worried about an airline-borne global flu epidemic, not to mention global air quality, it portends vicious changes in the social lives of those with friends and family spread around the country (ahem, yours truly). Ventura:

Conventions and conferences of every description will be beyond the means of any but the wealthy. The average person won't be able to jet to the wedding, sick bed, or funeral of a loved one. Even if you can scrounge the money for a ticket, there may not be a flight. Music and film festivals that can't be sustained locally will be a thing of the past (unless and until rail service is restored). Families will think twice about letting their kids apply to colleges hundreds or thousands of miles from home. Family members who live scattered all over the country will see one another rarely, if at all....

Lefties like Ventura make a living scaring consumer-Americans into thinking they will soon have to curtail their fast-paced lives, when the opposite, even more disturbing possibility might end up being the case: the Deep Hot Biosphere theory will prove to be true, and Peak Oil rendered but a profiteering oil industry myth, and we will be swimming in more oil than we know what to do with.

Air travel prices will fall even futher, becoming no more expensive than your average crosstown bus. Permanent, traveling cities will be established in the air (imagine a 747 the size of Sandusky, Ohio and you're not far off), and schoolchildren will endure a daily commute from school in Saigon, soccer practice in the Congo, dinner in South America, and bedtime in the Alaskan tropics. Blue skies will become a thing of mythology, asthma will be considered "normal respiration", and a newly-rootless global society will lose all identification with their families, tribes, and nations, becoming a truly global organism constantly on the move, everything everywhere all at once.

But even if this doesn't bear out, Ventura may be wrong to assume that life in America will slow down, and locality will be re-embraced. Such failure of the imagination and retro-Romantic attachment to some 50s-style American Golden Age should rightfully bore us, for we've tasted global living, and we want more. Where air travel fails, maglev trains will succeed, and high-speed locomotion will remain our birthright. Blue tubes will criss-cross the globe, like blood vessels throughout a massive green heart, and the notion of standing for long on solid ground will become the quaint anachronism it deserves to be.

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In Praise of Long Books: Notes on Stephenson's Quicksilver

As alluded to in the previous post, I've begun reading post-cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a 3-part, 3000-page monster exploring a momentous time in Western culture, the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as the Scientific Revolution was struggling to gain ground, banking and paper money were emerging, plagues and wars raging, and white-haired homosexual named Isaac Newton was redefining the universe. Given my obsessive reading habits (a book taking precedence over everything else until I finish it), I can well expect this story line to occupy my thoughts for the next few months, should I take up the whole series.

Which leads me to wonder: what effect does reading a long book have on one's life? Is the result of slogging through 3000 carefully-written pages and labyrinthian storylines -- bragging rights, anecdotes, comment fodder for blogs -- worth the work, attention, energy, and temporal sacrifice? Or is the long-form novel just a specific type of day-in and day-out entertainment, the literary equivalent of watching Seinfeld reruns every night, enough to attune the mind to a heightened level of wit and word-usage, but little beyond that.

One justification is the neurological one: challenging yourself with a new book builds brain mass and new neuro-connections. A second one is more political: holding one's attention for an abnormal duration to a cultural work is profoundly rebellious in a society of 15-minute episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and the Death of the Album. It becomes a sort of narrative glue tying the chaotic moments of one's life together.

Then there is the experience of reading itself. Unlike TV, which presents its confections in a straight-forward manner requiring little interpretation (once one grows used to the addictive flicker of jump-cuts), a book is cipher, a meaningless sheaf of dead trees and ink squiggles until it is apprehended by the literate individual. Rather than actively dumping situation comedies into the passive maw of the couch-surfer, a book passively depends on the reader's active construction of each scene in his head. Unlike the spoon-fed universality of the TV experience (everyone sees Jerry Seinfeld's apartment in more or less the same way), the book, by virtue of its use of linear text to describe non-linear experience, leaves ample room for interpretation, misinterpretation, creative extrapolation, association, etc.

In theory, this capacity to decode could be applied to the real world, where the reader, when not reading his/her book, looks out to read the "text" of the real world. S/he, if an attentive reader, must therefore always suspect that there is something more to his/her experience the s/he is not seeing, just as there is more beyond the book. We know other people will read a book in a different way, therefore we must suspect their experience of the world is different too, engendering in us a certain level of sympathy.

Reading the same book every day, then, puts one in a parallel universe of one's own interpretation, which then feeds back into one's "real" reality, creating a kundalini-like dance-weave of half-visible, half-invisible worldspaces, parcelling each moment into both its narrative components ("where does this Now exist in relation to my life's narrative continuum?") and wholly distinct moments ("how did the narrative continuum lead to this Now?").

A large book is often referred to as a "doorstop" by its self-deprecating author, for good reason: just as a physical doorstop holds a physical door open, the capable tome can hold one's mental doors open as well, allowing oneself to be surprised by a narrative and to the story-like aspects of real life. Grasping decreases, optimistic equanimity increases, and the world is better off for it.

Or I'm just addicted.

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Lightning Rods 'Midst the Snow-fields

[Note: I just picked up part 1 of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, so if this sounds like faux 17th-century alchemy-speak, blame Neal.]

Storms rage 'bove our heads eternally, some visible and some not. They destroy, they plunder, but above all, they zap the tallest among us with a direct micro-second connection to the heavens, an experience which all but kills. Man is not meant to stand on a golf course with a nine-iron raised skyward into the electrical abyss, and the gods ablige him this indiscretion with a taste of their potent Blood. Man is not made to taste things not of his making, and the purpling clouds of numero-chaos shift-mountains whipping across the aeons do horrendous violence to all but the most grounded.

Enter the lightning-rod. It is He who stands planted in a single location, held steady by a spine made of Steel, reaching above the local rooftops and dimunitive provincials in a selfless effort to wrestle the danger-daggers down and into the ground where they will hurt no one. His pain is but a singe of discomfort as the holy rail rides its way from clouds to clods (and where it lands it doth fuse the earth into its own image before it dissappears in the very next instant).

It is not everyday, however, that lightning strikes a snow field. White, frigid, like a waning empire making war on the world, fields of snow exist in near-opposition to the thunderous activity of the summer months, freezing all cessation into a featureless expanse of dull uniformity, a blankness which precludes the Great as it fills all open mouths with the fascist fluff-water of doublethink. Those who deign to speak through the frost are cursed to merely replicate the lying snowflakes of the Officium, and George W. Bush's clever criminal manques hold sway over the global dance floor.

Yet it is the rare wall flower that dares to pierce a slender Franklin rod up through the fridge-crust in his optimistic expectation of impossible winter lightning. In Typical Times, this of course would be sheer folly -- lightning only weaves its way through falling snow during Biblical disasters, and none other. But in these days of cripple-'canes (Katrina being only a minor point guard on the five-man mega-squad we dread to experience in coming years), thunder + lightning + snowdrifts does not an impossible weather-happening make. The climate is getting fucked up in the '05.

But the typical snowfield-dweller knows nothing of this, shivering as s/he does under the substantial blankets of sub-zero ignorance which strikes the post-Enlightenment Puritan empire sliding backwards into Dominionism. The Glacier Ascendent is invisible to this willfully deluded fellow/lass, rendering the lightning rod's role all the more crucial, for at least in educated summer months folks know enough not to hang out in open spaces when the thunderheads start appearing.

I'm speaking, of course, of Inspiration, of the Muse, of the internal Vision which cannot be denied and -- painfully -- renders the capable human its Creation-Slave. Most folks, upon receiving this call (read: the call to create something far and behind themselves) balk, or worse yet, fuck it up or divert it for selfish purposes. In return, the Bolt kills them. Lightning rods, the true mages and saints, are those fortunate few with solid footing and willing constitutions who take on the electro-bombs raining down upon us all, rendering their terrifying demands harmless and palpable, dazzling all nearby viewers in the process.

In especially dark/cold times, when even the Jedi retreat into hiding, Inspiration falls on dead tundra, scorching the frigid earth with such thermal juxtaposition that its pain hurts a thousand times more. The suffering of slaves becomes even more intolerable when they are shown a more creative mode of existence they cannot attain. That lightning rods pop up through the icebergs, then, is verily a blessing, for these are those few slaves fortunate to exist in the minuscule heated cracks of Circumstance, who are able to beat Odds Impossible in order to take the pain of frustrated divine-desire on so that those with less mobility may breathe a surly breathe.

And where their lightning touches down, the snow around it melts, and grass appears.

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Reclaiming the Beatles

This past weekend I read Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head : The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, courtesy mr. rekluse. What emerges is the amazing tension generated between Lennon and McCartney across a wide variety of dimensions. Lennon was cynical, screaming, self-expressive, whereas McCartney was optimistic, melodic, and distant (a writer of novels, as Lennon pejoratively dubbed some of his output), and it was this inherent duality and ambivalence which their tiny studio injected into the West's social organism just as it was entering the crisis of the 60s (so much so that some historians speculate that The Beatles actually caused the upheavals of the 60s). We X/Y kids can scarcely imagine what excitement the second Rock-n-Roll insurrection (the first being Chuck Berry et al in the 50s) created in the youth at that time, one which won't likely be repeated in these fragmenting times. The Beatles more than anyone probably helped encourage the proliferation of bands we see today, as they were one of the first combos to write AND perform their own material, opening the door for the countless DIY projects (ahem, Salamone Bros.) glutting the market today.

Also of interest was their method of song creation, expertly tracked in McDonald's book. The group existed in a constant sea of media -- newspapers, magazines, tellies -- and got the vast majority of their inspiration from this potent stew of information (one can only wonder what Lennon would have wrought with Google at his side) which they remixed and spat back into the system, inspiring whole new rounds of feedback. Firmly situated in the midst of this tide pool themselves, they were like participants in a cybernetic (feedback-driven) pop Machine, and each turn of the critic/creator crank whipped Pop-rock into a further frenzy of Rita-like proportions which is still churning with fury even today. That Michael Jackson owns the bulk of their catalog is only further proof that The Beatles are a potent meta-meme subtley driving events long after their demise.

Bigger than Jesus? Perhaps. We can only hope that, 2000 years from now, the followers of Lennon/McCartney/Harrison/Starkey aren't establishing Dominion over a dying planet and keeping their children in ignorance.

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POWER OF THE POSSE PART 3: Nerd Fights as Intellectual Hedonism

Any lengthy discussion of the chaotic conviviality of one-time "apartment festivals" begs a subsequent exploration of its opposite: formal, long-term intellectual discussion groups. Given that this is the primary form that integral salons have taken thus far, it warrants our further examination here.

Curiously, meeting in meatspace to discuss ideas seems an antiquated use of our increasingly rare time together. Cyberspace is far more efficient for the trading and comparison of data-food, with its foundation of hyperlinked text and boundless library access. In countless forums, bulletin boards, discussion groups, and group blogs, statements and responses can be carefully weighed and considered, propositions given a cool 3rd-person consideration before blurting them out. In-person nerd-fights are far more awkward, given the gangly bodies, misread emotions, and obscure manners blocking the efficient flow of conceptual categories.

Yet this disembodiedness can be overcome, and certain small rituals and practices engaged in (i.e. opening up each discussion with five minutes of silence, or qi-gong, or boxing), in order to frame an excited brain-fight in the proper context of a universe which includes more. The unknowledged aspects of being -- bodies, altered states, emotions -- can be paid homage to before we nerds get to the things which really excite us: maps, gadgets, ranks, systems, disciplines, diagrams, and diametrically-opposed dictates on the Nature of Life.

And so we bow: bow to our bodies, bow to our feelings, bow to the atoms and molecules in the room, bow to the clothes we wear, to the loved ones back home, to the whole great vast earth stretching out in all directions, dripping in juice and bile and texture and warmth and refreshment and color and taste... and then we leave it all behind to dance in the semi-arid plains of the Life of the Mind.

To the Intellectual Hedonist, a sole focus on the work of Wilber will quickly grow tiring. Far from THE meta-perspective, Wilber's intellectual superstructure, while epic in scale and thorough in its attention to detail, doesn't include EVERYTHING, and just as the Gross-Realm Pleasure Seeker will eschew a devotion to one form of wine and one type of sexual position, the Noospheric Me-Firster is going to need to roam free to taste the fruits of other nerd-minds.

This is not a tendency to be resisted. While Wilber may serve as the locus around which soul-nerds aggregate, wild swings into the eddies of dead philosophies and the treasure-caves of unknown authorings provides the Brain-Bacchanalia with much needed energy. What is held on to, like a maypole or staff in the midst of this tornado of ideas, is the integral INTENT.

Far from just batting around misread theories on perspectives, stages of development, transpersonal states, gender typologies, multiple intelligences, socioeconomic tendencies, cultural worldviews and the like for the hell of it, the integral nerd-fest exists as a service -- like an automotive garage, a gardening supply store, or an anatomical book shop -- to the rest of the world, a klatch of specialists (or "specialist generalists", as our friend Sean Saiter is fond of calling us) looking at maps of the world in an attempt to synthesize a more useful tool for navigating the 21st-century noosphere.

Of course, to actualize this service capacity would require slightly more than caffiene-addled quotations from The Eye of Spirit. It would require: 1) an attempt to touch the real world, and 2) an attempt to FIX the world (as those of a more masculine orientation are wont to do). For the first requirement, we recommend an awareness, if not a mastery of, current events. One certain game the nerd-fight might play is "running the AQAL gauntlet", meaning a practice wherein current events are run through a checklist of "undeniable categories" (those fundamental aspects of the world which any true integral approach should consider, i.e. perspectives, and states of consciousness) in an effort to shed new light on them not being shed by the traditional, non-integral punditry. While this might merely generate a laundry list of increasing complexification, it might also cohere as an arrow pointing at a more holographic moon: a perviously invisible "chaotic attractor" which may serve a more radical (int its truest sense: "of the root") explanation of today's dignities and ever-escalating disasters.

Hurricane Katrina, for instance. Instead of descending into the typical "my opinion right or wrong" half-informed foodfight which typically inflames the noosphere following a particularly painful and mismanaged mishap, Integral Salon South Dakota could take a deep breathe, set up a white board at the local coffee shop, and ask itself: "what new light might a more integral perspective shed on this situation?"

Quadrants: how was the culture of New Orleans effected? The behavior of its citizens? What intentions were apparent behind the clean-up effort? What social systems came online (or failed to come online) to meet the needs of those in loss?

Levels: what was the pre-rational/egoic media's response to the event? What were more conventional opinions saying? Where was the worldcentric voice?

Lines: What multiple intelligences might (former) FEMA empresario Mike Brown have needed to work on?

States: Would onsite meditation training done a single thing to calm apeshit looters and police officers down?

Types: If George Bush was a woman, might the clean-up been a little smoother? Rougher? Pinker? Nicer?

Such an activity could occur once a month or more, with a note-taker in attendance to synthesize the data thus generated and present it to the wider local community, i.e. "Integral Salon South Dakota's statement on the events in New Orleans is thus...". And with that, macho-nerds redeem their alienating info-rages with the creation of useful meme-clusters reinjected into the social body which generated their raw elements in the first place

So let us celebrate the Cognitive Reveler as much as we do his/her cousins in the Fiesta-sphere, for man does not live on garlic bread, Sun Chips, and Bacardi 151 alone.

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POWER OF THE POSSE PART 2: All Hail the Apartment Festival

Note: looks like I've kicked off a blog meme! Here's Dan's response to my first salons post, as well as something parallel posted to Key23 re: the emerging "ultraculture" movement.

This weekend my roommates and I threw a huge party, with a twist. Along with the usual booze and live DJ, we opened our basement to some structured creative exploration by our guests. It's amazing what setting up a drum set, a mic, a keyboard and a guitar, along with some giant pieces of paper on the wall with plenty of tempera paint and markers, will facilitate the creation of. Following the debut performance of my band, a rotating line-up of cover artists, a hip-hop duo, and even a hippie noodler kept the music going as various impassioned visual artists added to the mural (photos to be posted soon if my roommate gets around to it). Another large piece of paper, with the words "Once Upon a Time" written on the top, developed into an odd, participatory narrative about riding cross-country with a dozen people on one "chopper", while the third piece of paper was covered completely in short reflections in answer to the question "Where's The Most Fucked-Up Place You've Had Sex?" (to which my brother wryly replied: "Sex?").

It was all a semi-conscious attempt to construct a "situation for live experience", as the Situationists (theoretical provocateurs of the May 1968 near-overthrow of the French government) might have said, or an "apartment festival" to the Neoists. And while it didn't necessarily fit the relaxed intentionality of our main focus in this series -- salons -- it did show that with a little foresight and design, party "energy" can be diverted towards constructive (rather than just self-destuctive) ends.

A second emergence of the previous weekend proved a similar point. A friend of mine who works at a local coffee shop organized a poetry reading with an anti-war theme when she discovered that a poet friend was visiting Boulder from Italy. Located in the spacious downtown living room of a wealthy Boulder family and including copious amounts of wine and cheese, the event was headlined by the Italian, who read several of his published pieces (most of them in both Italian and English translation) and opened up to anyone else who wanted to read. While there were a few original works devoted to the theme at hand (including this monstrosity of obfuscation), where the party really picked up is when people read the works of dead poets, many of the selections having nothing to do with anti-war. Rumi, Neruda, Homer: books were passed around and passages read, a completely spontaneous guesture which, though it diverted from the night's intended focus, brought real life to what I've typically believed to be a dead, tedious medium. (And for a similar realization in book from, check out Camille Paglia's new book Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems.

What both events had in common, besides copious amounts of alcohol and groups of strangers coming together, was a loosely-held intention, combined with a few, carefully placed artifacts which anticipated and augmented the incoming energies of those in attendence, a sort of "social feng-shui" which erupted into spontaneous collaboration. They were also both singular events intended to guage communal response to similar offerings in the future ("Yes!" to both, it seems) without in any way obligating people towards future involvement. One could see a similar model being applied to something of a more intentionally "integral" nature.

In response to Dan, then, who argues that the energy and leisure time needed to create a salon precludes its coming-into-being, I say: hey, lighten up! Instead of seeking to establish long-term, nose-to-the-grindstone regular community gatherings (often with an intimidating intellectual superstructure binding it together), let's shoot for single events. Much the same way the travelling alternative music festival has given way to the weekend rock fest (Coney Island's Siren Festival, California's Coachella, etc), perhaps its too much to ask to put all of our efforts into continual, repeating affairs, and easier just to play with and organize local social forces into brief concentrations. Salons give way to cabarets, study groups to theory bashes, meditation gangs to ritualistic retreats.

The task of a would-be salon instigator, then, would be to ascertain "weak points" in society's brick wall of anti-conviviality (i.e. the EPA shutting our party down early due to "noise pollution", which actually happened) in the hopes of at least creating a one-time breakaway social excursion. A confluence of the myriad forces required could be broken down a bit into 1) Intentional: (i.e. giving your gathering a theme--one broad enough to interest a variety of people... it might also help to latch on another event, i.e. the occasion of someone's birthday, or visit from Italy), 2) Behavior (i.e. setting up activities to engage in, whether its just eating food or on up to musical collaboration), 3) Culture (i.e. establishing relationships, introducing people to each other, making everyone feel welcome), and 4) Social Structure (i.e. finding a good location with multiple rooms, ease of access, places to smoke). Most importantly: invite more than just your "integral" friends (how integral could they be anyways, if they don't want to hang out with "green" people?). A little luck doesn't hurt either, but the point is: ignore any one of these facets and see your gathering fizzle away.

And so perhaps all this talk of integral salons is besides the point. We need constellations of happenings, events, ceremonies, single chaotic puncture-points in the vast blank sheet of boredom draped over all of us. Ken Wilber study groups will emerge on their own (how could you even stop them?), but perhaps our efforts are best spent aligning and mixing together the curious desire people have to make the most of being together.

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Contextualizing the iPod Nano Craze

The brilliant Michael Ventura, on why every properous American shares a criminal guilt for the world's suffering:

For more than a century we've depended upon thinly veiled criminality for our good fortune, and we damn well are implicated.... Which is the underlying reason most Americans want to know nothing about their governance. To know would be to admit responsibility. To admit responsibility would put one in the moral dilemma of either taking action toward a more just world and thereby ultimately undermining one's own prosperity, or ignoring it all in the desperate attempt to live happily ever after.

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POWER OF THE POSSE PART 1: The Sentient Blob!

Thus begins a new series on the power of salons ("integral" or otherwise), group happenings, transpersonal poetry parties, kosmic klatches, quilting bees and so on. Equal parts Wilber and Wilson, with a dash of WIE, I'd like to explore some of the more poly-poetic aspects of the curious spaces which emerge wherever two or more are gathered. See also PART TWO.


Groups in America get a bad name. We are proud of our independence, of our autonomy, of our modernist notions of breaking free from homeland tribes in pursuit of personal visions and solitary bootstrap quests. Anyone who's been to a family reunion knows what power a social gathering has for bringing down one's level of consciousness, which often manifests as a desperate run for the cigarette porch to get away from Uncle Steve's loudmouthed Bill O'Reilly rhetoric.

But there are occasions when the group dynamic lends itself to something wholly novel, inspired, memorable, and insurrectionary, a shocking glimpse at the possibilities a collective of people can have given the right conditions. This "alchemy of shared perspectives" (thanks to Corey for that one) can have both positive and negative consequences for society as a whole. In college, we used to drink malt liquor, burn couches, piss in refrigerators, and break glass in public walkways: always fun, but not necessarily globe-minded. By contrast, I once attended a gathering of the now-defunct Integral Salon of Art (also see MD's take), where a long weekend of workshops and experientials culminated in an improvised group performance at a home for developmentally-disable adults, an event so touching it brought at least one participant to secret tears.

What these instances shared was both a shared intention (to "fuck shit up" in the first instance, "to explore the evolutionary potential of integrally-informed art-making" in the second), and a structured spontaneity which allowed for shifting leadership, flexibility of movement, and the incorporation of new techniques (i.e. using lighter fluid to burn the couches rather than piles of smoldering sticks) in service of the hole.

For this reason, my idealized vision of an "integral salon", a group in which all perspectives are given value (though not always equal value, a notion held by my straw-man "hippie retards" and no one else) and a maximum amount of info and techne is brought to bear in the service of all beings, is akin to something of a rumbling blob tearing across the historical landscape, assimilating and processing all that comes in its path and leaving a slime trail for others to follow. It is a mobile mound not without structure, however, containing within itself fluid semi-skeletons, conduits of habit, flowing patterns of mixed empathy, and doomed attempts at permanent creation.

That conflict should arise in this Blob* should be expected, if not welcomed, for it is the very fuel-manure which propels its motion across the landscape of time. A blob at war with itself is an expanding blob, a conscious blob, in which weapons and antipathies are laid on the table and submerged allegiances come to light. The capable integral salon recognizes these emerging shadows-at-war, giving them space to dance but containing their destructive potential, for the blob is also a network of mirrors, a loving geode reflecting its imperfections back at itself. As these imperfections are smoothed out, the blob's speed increases, and the surround of mirrors reflecting mutual light on a single point creates a level of heat not seen by the Universe since the big bang.

"The day will come when after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire." -- Teilhard de Chardin

New Age rhetoric aside, what excites me the most are the accessories this blob wears on its person. We imagine very shortly, with the coming of Web 2.0 and exploding broadband capacities, that the Internet will be as accessible and necessary a resource as water, and that blobs will feed from the ever-present wireless datapipes as effortlessly as fish sip from the briney sea. Information -- the latest, the best, the smartest, the most accurate -- will be a living energy keeping the blob's eyes and ears open, insuring that a) its movements "do no harm" to other beings it shares the histo-sphere with, and b) that it leaves its blast-path and slime-trail more "whole" (more integrated, more open-minded, more alive) than it finds it.

The ideal integral grouping is not a collection of non-local academics, but a wandering, physical band of deities-in-training blowing peacefully across the dunes of time, impelled at every instance by the cries of suffering of those buried in the sand, pausing at each juncture to pull people out and purified moisture. It dances and sings as it unlocks shackles and chains, splintering and hiding as the fierce winds of Fear dive down from the heavens to shatter its visage, re-coalescing when times are right to continue its merry Samaritan way.

And lest we fall for the group-think theory that this blob is an indistinct mass, those who witness its passing will record its memorable features, each one an individual comprising a crucial aspect of the Face we'll never Forget. The police sketch artist thus reveals: Bob is the left eye, Tom is the right eye, Mary is the nose, Gwendolyn the mouth, Jupiter Johnson the tongue, Franky Steamroller the left ear, Sally So the right ear, Gary XX7 the chin, and so on....
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* Note: I realize this image of the capable rumbling blob seems as though an apology for group fascism, but rather than hide from such a possibility, we should accept it as a necessary danger and move on from there.

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Love's An Excuse to Get Hurt

... That's a line from the Bright Eyes song "Lover I Don't Have to Love", which is more of a razorblade than a musical composition, a minor-chord means by which bodily organs can removed. Which is ironic, or appropriate, as love is a bit like exchanging organs, and trusting the Other not to fuck yours up and drop it in a busy intersection. That, or its like housesitting, and you're begging the sitter not to throw a keg party in the midst of your fine china and Salvador Dali prints. In exchange, of course, you get to see the world from an intense new vantage (emotional tourism, a holiday from the narrow self), something akin to stereoscopic vision, this "suffering together" of two lovers living in the world and dying by its whims and fluctuation.

Conor Oberst is 25, and with 7+ albums and countless EPs and B-sides and side projects at his back, that's well over a hundred songs pouring from his young heart, breathing in his lungs, running up and down his veins, and rooting him to global market forces by the angry grip of his feet. One hopes, in light of the repeated drug references and sighs of defeat evident on his recent albums, that he's not heading towards the inevitable rock star burnout, or worse yet, cynicism. But perhaps thats the price of such sonic self-medication (pleasure) and intensive introspection (pain), in fact, perhaps that's the point of love in general: flaming out, comet-style, after a brief peak of bliss.

Either way, love is clearly revolutionary, a refutation of our proud individuality, and a willingness to feel more than the usual day-to-day refrigerator buzz of task lists and faux-leather traffic pulsation is what artists have always stood behind. Life should be more than this empty terrain of minor inconveniences and popped zits, they seem to say, and art/love exist in tandem to pierce this veil. The price, of course, is pain. As my employer is wont to say, the nature of existence is that "objects arise, torture us for a while, and leave", either torturing us with their presence (back pain, excess humidity, Donald Rumsfeld) or torturing us when we lose them.

Yet how else is a wee rock polished than by pain? How else is a spindle-tree, needles sticking straight up into the blue air, to grow taller than by losing its lower branches? Where do gems come from other than intense heat and pressure? How are biceps built other than through the destruction of muscle mass?

A body/mind, a quarter of a century old, ambles down a street on the Lower East Side. Cables plug into his chest and lead far down the street behind him. A mound of scars surrounds this socket, and the scars catch the suns rays and dazzle us in their pain. And his face is ablaze as he looks down to contemplate this sound-navel, then upwards his arms rise, a guitar materializes from the dead flesh, rotting garbage, and shattered bricks all around him,

and outward pours a hurricane.

Technorati Tags: Bright Eyes Conor Oberst indie rock love

The Nihilist is the Black Hole Around Which the Universe Spins

Check out CPROBES' "A Call For a New Active Nihilism", in which RIPope makes the case for those fed up with Bush/Al Qaeda fanaticism to take on the yoke of active non-belief themselves, "[B]ecause being a nihilist is the only truthful position in (what's left of) this world."

I've been thinking along similar lines lately (though I'd prefer the term "reconstructive cynicism"), and I steadfastly stand by the idea that, contra some of my peers here in Boulder, the most authentic path is certainly a constant questioning of everything (both in the world and in oneself), and not a blind faith in the Erotic ideal of an evolving universe, nor the coming of an Age of Integration, or the inherent Emptiness of all phenomenon, or anything else.

The standard argument against nihilism, of course, is that it will lead to a self-indulgent glorification of the ego at the expense of everyone else. This standard misinterpretation of Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil" assumes that those freed from the fetters of imposed morality, recieved opinion, and unexamined assumptions will automatically go "beyond evil" into Super Evil, forgetting they just might also become Super Good. This seems to be RIPope's position, as summarized here: "We must find a new nihilism, to let the Truth ring out into the universe, to reveal through assuming the stupidity - yes, of nihilism itself."

Re: the title of the post. It is my self-serving theory that the Radical Doubter -- a.k.a. He Who Throws Everything Into the Air, Mr. Maybe, the Faithless One, the Grandeloquent Deconstructionist, the Apophatic Activist, Mecha-Negativa -- is one of the primary forces around which phenomena seems to organize itself (i.e. in terms of sociocultural evolution, who is it but those who refuse to accept the status quo, nor its pat excuses for why things are the way they are, that leads to upheavel and novetly?). It is he who sticks to no star, no bit of dust, no planet, but pierces through all of them into an invisible dimension he does not understand.

Though the abyss inside horrifies him, it is his relentless Suction that keeps a galaxy spinning, keeps stars running into each other, new stars being born, planets coalescing, life springing up. The heavens intensify and speed up as they approach his unrelenting Gravity, thoughts congeal, priorities are made, weak links broken, fuel ignites, ideas compress, actions move faster than the speed of light. Nothing escapes his Infinitely Small Zero-Point, but beyond it, new universes are born.

In other words: radical negation forces you to take stock of your life, of your world, of everything that occurs, and forces you to Do Something.

Technorati Tags: nihilism Bush mysticism philosophy

Blogger's Block and Post-Web Technology

Forget blog depression, let's talk about blogger's block, the sinister online cousin to writer's block. Sometimes a blogger has every intention of spending his entire day composing posts, but can't think of a single thing to write about. That, or current events have proven so overwhelming that we're incapable of a response. Or there's so much information we don't even know where to start.

Either way, if we're to believe the rah-rah pro-tech theology of WIRED's recent statements on an awakening, God-like Internet, a.k.a. The Machine (surely a misnomer, as it includes machines and humans), to not blog is something akin to a sin, a failure to assist in the "programming" of this Machine which will be both Mother and Ultra-Tool to we super-evolving (post)humans. Regardless if people even read your blog, blogging seems to create a certain amount of "virtue" or "merit" in that one is leaving the Internet a little more whole than it was when one found it. New connections are being made, new scar tissue laid across the Earth-wound, new sinews and synapses stretch and fire. You can link to MF Doom, John Bolton, Portland-based clowns, and trash-talk about Suicide Girls' secret neocon philosophy, all in one sentence!

But should we just assume the world will be better place if only we'd all string a few more URLs together? Not quite. But in my opinion, the really interesting post-Internet tech won't emerge until this thing is as big, robust, diverse, and omnipresent as possible. It's at this point that companies stop charging for industrial tech (pumps, hoses, trucks, conveyor belts) and informational tech (databases, hosting, coding) and start charging for something beyond all of that: energetic tech. Yes, we'll be paying for customized "energetic impressions", "orienting generalizations", "subtle illuminations", "hazy ideas", "faint glimmers" and other barely-conceivable "Intuition Products" with which we will soon be augmenting our SOULS the same way we've been sprucing up our bodies with industrial tech and our minds with information.

But the "general energetic tendencies" can only be built on the ephemeral grooves we lay with our "linguistic association matrixes". Subtle impressions and complicated conceptual ecologies must grow and thrive before they can be populated with info-deities, so let's get to work, bloggers! And if that doesn't motivate you, Nat Goldberg will.

Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet blogging weblog writing

Saul Williams: When the Storm is Forgotten

Poet/actor/rapper Saul Williams has written a poem on Hurricane Katrina. Now if he could only write something about the Pentagon's pre-emptive nuclear strike program. Suggested title (as used by the Pentagon): "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator".

Technorati Tags: Saul Williams Katrina

Notes on Psychedelic Patriotism

My latest piece for Generation Sit opens thusly:

In speaking of Psychedelic Patriotism, it is important to speak first of what it is not. Psychedelic Patriotism is not an excuse for NASCAR dads to eat deep-fried peyote buttons while saluting bugle players festooned in hemp-star bunting. Is it not a means by which multi-hued American flags can be flown upside down on squiggly flagpoles, nor for the creation of tie-dye camouflage for use by long-haired paratroopers running covert operations behind the enemy lines of sanity.... continue

Technorati Tags: psychedelics patriotism

Interpersonal Conflict and the Dialectic of Progress

Vince and I had a little dust-up the other day over what he interpretted as uncaring provocation on my part. I have the nasty habit of getting in the middle of long and drawn-out e-battles, ignoring 99% of what is written, and making some asshole statement to fuel the flames. Vince, on the other hand, does not, and told me so. We exchanged some nasty words (including "this is retarded") and stewed for a good day or two before making up. Is this bad for the blogosphere, if not communities in general? Maybe not!

Perhaps relationships go through the same evolutionary process as human societies as outlined by Ken Wilber's (borrowing from Hegel) "dialectic of progress", in that they start in a state of undifferentiated "fusion", go through a transitional stage of "differentiation" (which could decay into "dissociation" if something goes wrong), and eventually find a new unity in a state of "integration" (or, for Hegel, "thesis --> antithesis --> synthesis"). For example, Western society in the Middle Ages was in a "fused" state where the three value spheres of Art, Morals, and Science were all blended and smushed together under the auspices of the church. With the Enlightenment, they were differentiated -- Art couldn't tell Science what to do, Morals couldn't bitch at Science, etc. Our task now is one of synthesis.

With friends, a similar process seems to occur. In fusion, no real reckoning of what makes each other different occurs: we are united by politeness and good manners, too afraid to step on each others toes. In differentiation, we see how we are different, have different values, relate to people differently. Some of us are arrogant unethical nihilist assholes, some of us are uptight married Buddhists ;) At this point, dissociation could occur. Friendships end, people talk shit about each other, the vibe is ruined.

Happily, this isn't always the case. Sometimes the differentiation proceeds smoothly, and the persons in question begin to tell each other what they don't like about the other ("negating") while appreciating each other for what positive qualities they bring to the table ("preserving"). Often, this can lead to a more "integrated friendship", and, in Vince's words, momentum.

Then again, sometimes hatred is alright.

Technorati Tags: Ken Wilber Hegel

RobertJohnsonLand in Bad Decline

With the US's absurd politics pushed front and center once again, I've been wondering when we were going to hear from O. Henry-award winning short story writer/satirist George Saunders. The author of CivilWarLand In Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and a children's book called The Very Persistant Gappers of Fripp, Saunders has made a career of hilarious, heartfelt, and absurd slapstick masterpieces -- something like Italo Calvino doused in Slurpees -- which twist our trying socio-politico-economic times in strange new ways. If George Orwell and Kool Keith somehow mated in a pile of John Dos Passos novels reeking of rendered Neil Stephenson fat, uh...

Anyways, turns out Saunders just had a new novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, published! Also, Ben Stiller has optioned "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and "Sea Oak" (to be renamed "Joysticks") for filmic adaptation. Also, here's a new interview, containing this nugget of advice for writers everywhere (including you bloggers!):

Keep going. Your subconscious mind is a lot smarter than you are. Just keep giving it a chance and in time it may reward you. Get out of the way a little bit, have fewer ideas about what kind of writer you are and what it is you are going to accomplish. Find out what kind of writer you are and be prepared to accept that writer, no matter how different he/she is from what you'd hoped....

Technorati Tags: New Orleans George Saunders

Race? Class? Genocide? a web roundup...

Further comments on the hypothesis that Katrina aided developers in pushing the poor out of coveted swaths of NOLA real estate. Matthew Dallman likens these calls of racism to folkloric/tribal paranoia, exemplified (or not) by this horrifying post on the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans. Not that we'll see any photos of it. In the effort of providing some semblance of sanity, The American Thinker runs the numbers and finds a silver lining for the blacks of NOLA. But did Kanye just make things worse? Ponderous...

For an interesting history lesson, and some facts to aid the racial debate, check out historian Brian Kelly on the history of NOLA. Key quote:

The profit-driven Mardi Gras of today is itself a product of the exclusion of the city's slave population from official parades. The black marching "krewes" now given prime place in the parade were initially confined to the ghettoes, adopting the names of Indian tribes as a gesture of gratitude to natives who had sheltered escaped slaves in outlying maroon communities.

And for more on those maroons (mixed-breed blacks/whites/indians), here's Hakim Bey. UPDATE: Props from k-punk on the Robert Johnson post below. Check out kp's interesting refutation of the NOLA Conspiracy theory, wherein he sees it more as simple short-termed capitalist exploitation (oh look! hurricane! grab their land!) and its relation to cyberpunk. Also, the "conservative" NY Press just published a scathing indictment of everyone from Bush to the lowliest civil servant in NOLA for the murder of thousands.

Technorati Tags: New Orleans Katrina racism class Kanye West

Kanye, Katrina, and the Future of Black Music

There's a remarkable track on Grammy Award-winning hip hop artist Kanye West's brand new LP Late Registration entitled "Crack Music" which flips the cultural devastation of the 1980s introduction of crack cocaine on its head. Crack, obstensibly invented by the CIA as a means of curbing black nationalism, has backfired on its masters, fueling as it did the hip-hop culture which has now invaded the homes of the rich and privileged, who will gladly pay rap artists handsomely for another "fix". The key verse here being:

We took that shit, measured it and then cooked that shit
And what we gave back was crack music
And now we ooze it through they nooks and crannies
So our mammas aint got to be they cooks and nannies
And we gonna repo everything they ever took from grammy
Now the former slaves trade hooks for grammies
This dark dixon has become America's addiction those who ain't even black use it.

I mention this because West has been outspoken in his criticism (live on NBC!) of the Bush Administration's handling of the Katrina aftermath, going so far as to say "We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war now fighting another way and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us.... George Bush doesn't care about black people."

And if some of the wilder conspiracy theories have even a shred of truth to them, West is not far off. It's a terrifying notion to think about, but we must: the poor of New Orleans may have been deliberately dispossessed (and demonized as "looters") in order to make way for the rebuilding of New Orleans on the sterilized theme park terms of the rich. Goodbye Robert Johnson, hello Robert Johnson Hotel and Casino Resort Complex.

Yet Poor Black America will have the last laugh, and blues/jazz/rock/hip-hop is only the beginning. Indeed, the addictive capacities of black (or "urban", as the PC phrasing goes now) music cannot be denied, as proven by recent hits of the last few years, from Outkast's "Hey-Ya!" to Missy Elliot's "Work It" to that ridiculous "Milkshake" song.

The establishment may indeed poison poor communities and flood their streets with soul-destroying opiates and leave thousands to rot in disaster-struck coastal cities, but the vicious earworms of Black America, imported from Africa and filtered through centuries of suffering, are in but an intermediary stage of the formation of something far more gruesome: a planetary meta-song so danceable it will shake the shackles of Avarice and Greed out beyond the asteroid belt, and install a Global Order of Peace and Stank-Funk-Nasty Ecstasy through the power of its cell-rejuvenating BEAT.

That hip-hop has been essentially been coopted and assimilated by Capitalist Realism is besides the point: hip-hop has found a foothold in the popular consciousness, and who knows what demons -- let loose in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- will follow it through the door.

UPDATE: Chuck D. weighs in.

Technorati Tags: Katrina Kanye West

What it means to lose New Orleans

Vampire novelist Anne Rice on the cultural devastation of losing NOLA. Lenin's Tomb on the sudden humanity of America's mainstream reporters (Geraldo crying?! Kanye West talking shit about Bush?!). Weird new blog Organic Warfare on Katrina Chernobyl.

Note: I've a cousin living in coastal Alabama. She reports that local authorities told them to conserve gas as they wouldn't receive any for two weeks, which has prompted fights at the pumps and outright theft.

Forget the Red Cross: Craigslist.org to the Rescue!

Goddamn us geeks, this just brings a tear to my eye. Forget sending money to the crooks, organize some direct assistance for NOLA. Proof once again that the Internet is an awakening Earth-being. In the meantime, Michael Moore grandstands, and the Third World -- in all its despotic decrepitude -- comes to America.

Technorati Tags: craigslist New Orleans

Can This Really Be Happening in America? (Katrina as Meta-Blues)

The answer is: yes. I'm at pains to come up with a response to Tamer El-Gobashy's recent first-hand account of the violence and desperation in New Orleans. Ctheory, on point as usual, see the remarkable similarities between New Orleans and Baghdad (which they dub a "strange attractor"), where disasters -- one natural (we think), one man-made (we know) -- have plunged modern cities (both of them located on river deltas, incidentally) into Third World chaos. What is the appropriate response to such devastation, when we suspect that even the charities are corrupt?

Some of us will be tempted by tonglen, the famed Buddhist practice of exchanging positive personal energy for the negative vibes of those in pain (imaginatively at least). Others will hop a bus to go and help out. Still others will ignore the loss, embroiled in their own dramas, or dismiss the suffering of the Big Easy as the deserved retribution of obstinant, stubborn looters and losers. People will point fingers (often with good reason) at the failures of the government, or FEMA, or the Nat'l Guard. People will blame themselves for never caring enough, for being too afraid to do anything for anybody.

All of this is to be expected, and all of it is worthy of compassion. But what else is going on?

Consider again that New Orleans is America's second chakra, the body of the United States' "energy center" of sexuality, dance, and love. Knowing that, in the Hindu tradition, water is the element which corresponds to this chakra (or "wheel"), it almost appears that, rather than being killed off and assassinated, New Orleans was inundated with its key form of energy, almost like a holy hit of inspiration plunging into the waiting skull of John Coltrane, or Fats Domino, or Howlin' Wolf. Hurricane Katrina, on a macroscopic scale, was to New Orleans as a whole what the slings and arrows of poverty were to individuals like Robert Johnson, namely, a catalyst for growth, for expression, for the Blues.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but what I'm suggesting is this: the United States is a living superorganism, and its great cities are its organs and energy centers. What looks like a disaster to we tiny mortals may be a sign of something far greater and mysterious at work (much the way the tearing down of muscle tissue during a hard weight workout might appear as though a disaster to the neuromuscular "societies" living in our arms). New Orleans and its residents are in deep pain at the moment, and I don't mean to aesthetisize their misery, but we have to wonder: what does the blues sound like when a living meta-being of a billion billion souls is singing it? What does a 12-bar guitar solo do when it catches solar wind and whips around the galaxy? What ears can hear Earth's Sacred Complaint?

Technorati Tags: New Orleans Katrina

Denver Readers! How to Help Katrina Victims

RED CROSS CALL CENTER: Operating at full capacity for twelve hours a day for the next 6-8 weeks, the need for new Call Center volunteers is critical, and new vols will be trained daily. Please contact Wanda Spence at wspence@denver-redcross.org or (303) 607-4750.

Generation Books

Jason Louv, a youngish editor at Disinfo.com, is about to publish Generation Hex, "a collection of essays, both practical and autobiographical, which explore the overwhelming levels of interest in magic and shamanism in youth culture". This coincides with the formation of Ultraculture, something along the lines of an esoteric Indymedia.org combined with community networking. While I have mixed feelings about this (I attempted to submit a lame-ass contribution at the last minute -- something about wandering around parking lots while chanting -- to understandable silence on J's end), I think this is another courageous attempt to further distance esoteric studies from narcissistic New Age Baby Boomer bullshit. To Boulder's dolphin-worshipping herbalist morons -- your time is near! [Also in discussion right now, a book for Generation SIT!]

Technorati Tags: Generation Hex