THE BOOK OF CANNIBALS, or, how to consume (2014)

THE BOOK OF CANNIBALS

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Or, How to ConsumeA Preliminary Treatise on the Occult Nature of Style, Influence, and

Taste Related Especially to Those Acts of the Dark Arts andTheir Origins in the Discordant Nature of

Being, Ego, and the Other

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Written and illustrated by

Norberto Gomez, Jr.Director of Institut Für Kybernetik Und Zukunftsforschung

Doctor of Philosophy, Media ArchaeologistGhost Hunter and Gardener

InRichmond, Virginia & Baltimore, Maryland

From Spring 2013 to Spring 2014

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Serigraphed, and bound into an edition of fifty by

Jillian Gayle Gomez Book Maker and Musician

InSan Marcos, Texas

From Fall 2014 to Spring 20152nd Edition

Table of Contents

I. On Cannibalism.............................................................................1 Preface: Becoming..................................................................1

i. A Thesis...............................................................................1 ii. Cannibalism at a Pizza Party..............................................7 iii. Friends and Enemies.........................................................11

II. Being Underground......................................................................21 Preface....................................................................................23

i. On Hell & Fear....................................................................23 ii. The Life & Death & Rebirth of Mystery............................30 iii. Switching-On and Switching-Off......................................42 iv. Inevitably, Solipsism...........................................................45

III. On Gardening..............................................................................51 Prologue: Hometowns in Brief...............................................51

i. DOOM;..............................................................................53*An Interjecting Essay Re: "Hipster"................................55

ii. DRONE;............................................................................70 iii. DEATH;............................................................................83

IV. Epilogue........................................................................................89

For my friends.

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IOn Cannibalism,

Or, the origins of style through the consumption of the other(s)

Thus, on friendship and influence

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Preface: Becoming

I have been: anarchist, anarcho syndicalist, conservative, neo-con, next-wave, classical liberal libertarian, objectivist, homo-heterosexu-al fascist painter, nationalist nomad, musician, best-friend, Beat and enemy, non-gender specific academic, punk rock, picked on, cruel poet, avant-gardener, lover, proto-nihilist, mystic, catholic, colored guero, tex-ican, quiet loud mouth friend of animals. I am presently in Richmond, Virginia and I am leaving soon. On this day the 28th of June, two-thou-sand and thirteen in my living room (revised).

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Section One: A Thesis

ne must be a cannibal. In the cannibal there is the master of their reality, of which there are many. Heraclitus: the dark one, the obscure, the weeping pre-Socratic philosopher is said to have died after burying himself in cow shit in an effort to heal an ailment. Thus, baked in the heat, he burned, engulfed in gases, a ticking time bomb, he died. In shit he returned to the ground, fertilizing the birth of more things to come, including, later, inevitably more shit.

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Heraclitus's biography is a legendary loop, like Buddha who abdi-cated his royal inheritance and kingly responsibilities for the sake of a search. Heraclitus chose the underground, spreading aphorisms along the way, weeping so we do not have to. Nietzsche did the same when faced with eternal recurrence; he went mad for us. Socrates, the bard, who maybe read the Fragments, was murdered by democracy. He too chose the underground.

The cannibal chooses its own reality, for this, Lucifer fell.

In flux there is relativity and subjectivity. There are layers of being and not- being, levels of psychological realities and dependencies, cultural conditioning, and options for who to be, how to live, and act, as well as the option to step away. Contemporary scientism claims to express all truths, but as migraines continue to stump the scientist, Hume’s initial skepticism remains:

It must be some one impression that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference.

…I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

…The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

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The philosophy of eternal change also means sameness. The return of human myths, characters, archetypes, heroes and villains may be anticipated.

Brian Wilson's story is nearly tragic and familiar: the monstrous abusive, controlling father, the sensitive creative genius, drug addiction, psychedelics, sand boxes and pianos, masterpieces, and the Cult of Manson. Wilson fits the mold of the headline, “Untimely Death of a Genius.” But he persists even while being exploited by, ironically, his cousin, Love. Had SMiLE, a teenage symphony to God, been released as intended in 1967, rock music history would be significantly differ-ent. Would the Beatles be the Beatles? Would the Beach Boys be kitsch or avant-garde? Would the Beach Boys have starred in Full House? What if Barrett had not gone mad?

“I've been in this town so long that back in the city/ I've been taken for lost and gone/ And unknown for a long long time.” Cities remain anthropomorphized; they are places of worship. Thus, they are home to cults. They are also psycho-geographical vortexes, hotbeds of influence, as per Debord. They are of the many, and one is changed by each environment. Being known and unknown is written by cities, respectively. Is one thinking in city-terms (i.e., boundaries) or inter-stitially? I am so sick of New York City; I ♥ New York City. Houston has many self-conscious inside jokes; Richmond wears black, and is populated with bits of pseudo nihilism, and in both cities some would rather be in New York City. I have learned so much.

Heraclitus declares the defense of law as one would the walls of a city. Seemingly contradictory to flux, what is left unsaid is that the city floats, and the center does not hold. There are many floating cities and various walls.

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To be a cannibal, one must defend their kingdom from those who would deny cannibalism. Contradiction holds. Contradiction is sound.

This kingdom is nomadic, or mobile, to use a popular term of today –as if we have never had the opportunity to move before. Aside from constant connection, mobile also means the ability to disconnect. Roots are subject to change. Cannibals may choose to be under-ground, to disappear, and/or restart. As Thoreau explains, “Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.”

Do not cry for the cannibal. Do not cry for friends moving on, declare bon voyage!

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Section Two: Cannibalism at a Pizza Party

I sat with my friends at the late night pizza party drinking Budlight or Budweiser. Black shirts at night, and black shirts during hot endless Summer years. Post-graduation late night rites and quiet consider-ations regarding unrequited or exit love. Staring down at a backyard family pool was a pale comparison to the dreams in the ocean –garage rock fantasies. We consumed and watched the cannibal film. I regard-ed it as violent schlock with a score so contrary to the scenes of ritual violence and impalement that I reacted with mockery.

We fear the cannibal, as I feared Beck’s “The New Pollution.”

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Cannibal Holocaust (1980) is known as “the one that goes all the way.” On the surface it is pure shock. Holocaust is a standard bearer of tropes and loops: the scientism of the West, infused with film technology (me-dia) enters the primitivism of the jungle, here being the Amazon. The fictional filmmakers, considered documentarians, attempt to uncover a hidden race of natives stuck in the age of the cave man.

But the documentarians are anything but impartial, as they are found to script their films by terrorizing natives, raping women, and burning villages for the sake of ratings. The filmmakers are ultimately consumed –the revenge of cannibalism. Who really are the savages after all, asks protagonist Dr. Harold Monroe, a former porn actor, the anthropologist charged with searching for the missing filmmakers and who uncovers the film canisters which contain the shocking truth –the answer, though, is everyone.

Cannibal Holocaust is a work of cultural criticism, it is about the continuing story of the other through the lens of an approaching super media: from colonialism to globalism to glocalism. This is a criticism of the closeness of, or the closing in on the other as the mastery of surveillance technology progresses. It is a precursor to the warning of Virilio’s Information Bomb. Worse than ghosts in the machine, or in the apartment, is the disappearance of the apartment entirely, that is to say, the disappearance of privacy as a category and as a physical space.

The network of glocalism denies the hidden primitive for the sake of the public mob: the real, the accessible, free knowledge, and endless mapping, documenting, and archiving. In the case of Cannibal Holo-caust the natives fought back by consuming, naturally, their enemy, by becoming cannibal.

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It is also a film in tension with itself: a shock film about a doctor’s search for a missing film. The film score composed by Riz Ortola-ni is inspired by early giallo films, with sound contradicting brutal scenes, suggesting the eyes and ears become conflicted throughout the process. Time and space are critically acknowledged by the audience, who in effect become complicit. Horribly, as is the case in more than one example, animals are actually killed on film with the purpose of causing their juxtaposition with fictional human death scenes to seem agonizingly real to the audience of the 1980s. Their real death used to support false death.

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The history of the European fetish for animal cruelty and pseu-do-documentary in film dates back to Mondo Cane of 1962, directed by Cavara, Prosperi, and Jacopetti. In the case of Mondo Cane, the whole world is a shocking other, but at some point this obsession with mystery must disappear. After everything is mapped the only thing left is that original mystery which forever remains –death. Thus, Faces of Death is the result of the filming of magic, mystery, the primitive, that other-than-life. The skull then is an existential loop. Memento mori.

I used to eat meat.

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We begin as primal egoists, for the sake of survival we consume. And then, best friends. Suddenly, there are others, many others. Almost vio-lently, we must now consume critically. Thus, I would tear off the brand tag to my blue jeans, embarrassed, in response to, “Why dont you wear Girbaud?” But this is not a friend; this is an introduction to the enemy. Unfortunately, the saturated specter of where the tag once was left an undeniable mark of my act.

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Section Three: Friends and Enemies

'Cause who plays the game we all play? Won't you play me today?

And who sings the song when we're gone? Won't you sing along?

Hello friend, goodbye blue Hello me and goodbye to you

Hello ~Segall

We have always been consumers. Besides natural states required of survival, we consume in response to the other: dialect, dress, style, taste, rock-n-roll, they are all subject to change. In friendship we mutually consume, and in a best friend, we find our idealized other. In our best friend we find a mold or path to follow. We want to be comfortable and safe. Paradoxically, we are attracted to the difference of the other who we also want to become. Inherently, there is tension.

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Through Best Friend we learn about better music, better jeans, and baggy black rock-n-roll t-shirts which define us. We learn how to joke, speak, watch, how to consume. If it is a healthy friendship, we will mutually consume. We adapt ourselves to one another; we share our secrets of taste and style, unlocking the path to the underground:

Marilyn Manson leads to a competition over the most truly evil, to Danzig, via Misfits, post-Alice Cooper horror show, and NIN, industrial music, Skinny Puppy, electronic, synthesizers, electro pop, one-person band, plus pop, Gary Numan, new-wave, electro, Moog, film scores, A Clockwork Orange, Wendy Carlos, giallo, a critical return to Cannibal Holocaust, Riz Ortola-ni, ad infinitum.

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Inevitably we change for our friends, our friends change for us. We are forced into a pack through public education. Our proximity and daily routine defines friendship. Only later do we learn we have nothing in common, and nothingness terrifies us. Our definition of friendship does not hold. Often, we violently recognize the differences. Later in life we make the mistake of defining friendship by those rules of grade school:

The one and the many are in tension. Contradictions and com-petitions break out within all tribes. One may become jealous when the Best Friend, adored by all within the group, finds a special pleasure amongst another. Thus one will orchestrate the banishment of a rival, for it is clear this new cannibal may usurp one’s role. Therefore, “this friendship that possesses the whole soul, and there rules and swears with an absolute sov-ereignty, cannot possibly admit of a rival,” writes Montaigne. The process is primitive and the jealous cannibal, unleashed, destroys without mercy its rival, who is forever banished.

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Conflict is inevitable; through fire all things change. When change comes too great, too fast, discord may lead to civil war. The cannibal must learn to survive alone if cast out for differences. Factions are creat-ed, bombs thrown, and puppets played. The results are long lasting. Get over it. One is not the same.

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Even decades later Best Friend will haunt one’s decision making process. Hauntings are typical. One must exorcise the image of the best friend. Do not romanticize friendship. No gods; no masters. In the age which I write these words “friend” has become a word applied to all others within one’s network, non-discriminately. We are all friends, all positive change-makers, and content-creators; we are a world historical hive, so declare the ideologues. Friend is long and deep. It is nearly as disastrous as “everything is political,” that plague of language which presently degrades our being like cancer. Being precedes the political. Do not be bullied into friendship. You are not anti-social if you are not over-social.

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We are not all friends. Friendship should seek growth not stagna-tion; differences relate. Be wary of friendship as a tool for mutual security over others, for settling down, for imprisonment based on guilt. It is true you will not find friends like these; who wants friends like these, only?

I am no longer haunted by old specters. (I anticipate the new.)

I used to have a best friend, now I have many.

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IIBEING underground,

Or, a space between Anarchism and Nihilism (the option to step away, to forget, to not participate)

Thus, on wearing

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One must rouse the principle of Evil. ~Baudrillard

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Preface

Once, a child chose to ignore a best friend knocking at their door during a summer break. Being alone became a personal test. “How long can I go?” Funny what a dream can mean and how it can deny you from me. Bike riding adventures are ended and instead one falls into the nauseous stomach aching existence of being an outcast. Later maturity might remedy the malady of moral media representations which initiated this darkness, but the mark is made. Goodbye, Joe; no one’s home.

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Section One: On Hell & Fear

This man came up to me just the other dayHe asked me if I'd been born again

I told him I didn't think I hadThat I had been rejected

But I think hell's got all the good bands anyway~The Flaming Lips

O underground; be underground; dig the underground. From this perspective all sense of style and taste

and factions and scenes become as nuanced as night and day. Everything is available for consumption. The table is laid out.

There is no greater lesson for the cannibal than stepping away.

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If one has not recognized the constant looping of social life and supposed civic duty, for example, then one is a lost cause. Good rid-dance. Although, if one has recognized this system of recurrence then the choice must be made: play it or deny it. Live or die by it. But, these are simply the extremes. One learns a lot in the extremes. The choice thereafter is whatever you make of it. The same goes for art-scenes. Like political parties, while perhaps sincere the result may be myopia. Some members may be those who prefer to only associate with the artist-species. Is art real? Reality in the case of closed-in cliques and a romanticized view of collective artistic empowerment, stories passed down, over and over and over again, and transformed into myth. The results are expectations of ultimate scenes and 1960s-70s' NYC, and the miserable lack of content/-ext other than art-scene circle jerks.

Art alone saves no one. Art is death. A card carrying local artist feels a civic duty; a card carrying politician feels a civic duty. A duty to which reality and to whom? The contemporary artist lives in a contradictory state, but that’s not the problem, the problem is that this goes unac-knowledged in the era of socially networked, confident artists and their pseudo-modesty expressed as hyper-modernist, funny-formalism or representational banality.

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EVERYTHINGIS PURGED FROM THIS B O O K BUT ART, NO IDEAS HAVE ENTERED THIS WORK.

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The contemporary artist is the most fearful of them all. There is a sense of humor, but only in a sense. Jokes as art, but unlike John Baldes-sari’s critical statements, we have inside jokes so deeply embedded, like the digital meme, within a micro-collective, or in one’s own psyche that the content goes nowhere as it simultaneously goes everywhere. Comedic tribalism. But, their friends love it, and, as we know, friends are relative. Glocal art scenes love the inside joke. Insiders might all claim art is dead, yet, they are the most achingly informed of the art-world, deeply in-the-know, completely self-conscious, and miserably boring. The big scenes are now all local, all Brooklyn (today), and we all suffer because of it.

There is a fear of articulating anything or having a subject matter Why? There is an anti-intellectualism of art-making which has set in, and it is rooted in an existential terror of that nothingness we all carry and a fear of being wrong, too smug, too smart, too articulate, and too meaningful. But the greatest fear is of glocal Art History and Los Angeles and New York City, old gangster bullies, and, especially the digital hive who are populist goons.

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Fredric Jameson’s description of linguistic pastiche can be applied to express the resulting work of these artists in a way that I cannot:

…the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth called the “stable ironies” of the eighteenth century.

Blind eyeballs –the result in this case is work which references its own making like the high modernists before, but the artist denies having any context, denies any belief system(s), a bastardized nihilism, a high-school anarchist, a liar doing it all for the lulz. Visually, the work is self-con-sciously haphazard; show only enough skill, but not too much out of embarrassment (or the real terror of having to defend oneself). The art-ist is safe and comfortable with friends who are enemies and who are all uncomfortable together. Together, the joker tribe ignores those who are deemed, “too serious,” or, “too academic.” The result is the new civil rights issue of the twenty-first century –the illiterate artist. There is also an obsession with following the trends and scenes, because it has never been so easy to access and tap into digital geography and neighborhoods vis-à-vis one’s network. Emerging trends. This is the new globalism of style –a new international style: fascist at the core, always monitored and self-surveilled, always live, paranoid, and fearful and so damn small.

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The digital stream is a 24 hour art-news cycle. Brooklyn looks a lot like Houston looks a lot like Richmond. The same exhibitions, the same names, all the time, like the inescapable feed of Clear Channel Radio-America of every-town, any-town.

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Section Two: The Life & Death & Rebirth of Mystery

I got my dark sunglasses I got for good luck my black tooth

I got my dark sunglasses I’m carryin’ for good luck my black tooth

Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’ I just might tell you the truth

~Dylan

When Dylan went electric Dylan went black.

This moment was not simply about “going electric,” rather, Dylan can be said to have gone rogue, gone cannibal, gone underground, interstitial, and nomadic. Clearly, the media references this single moment as pivotal (theatrical), when in fact, it was and continues to be a process. The pop-ular biography of Dylan describes his hunger for certain ways of life, of being, of identity shaped out of various sources: parts of Guthrie, Elvis, Johnson, Rimbaud, Odetta, and other facts and fictions spun by the artist and others. Is this not every one of us? Should this not be all of us?

We lose friends in the process.

The artist became bigger than ever by paradoxically stepping away. On the other hand, the Beatles became more socially engaged, with their stepping away expressed instead in their musical experimentations. The music was out-there, but they struggled with their identity and political-real-ity in the process. This is especially true for Lennon, who for many years

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fought for U.S. citizenship. It remains a miracle that the weirder The Beatles became, the more popularity they achieved. The same could be said of Radiohead since Kid A (2000). Perhaps, it is all timing. Dylan’s act, however, should not be confused with his actual period(s) of hermitage.

Rather, the artist chose when and how to play to various realities, when and how to dip into certain scenes, styles, consciousness, and me-dia. The cannibal asks for the same from you. Where and what are the spaces between anarchy and nihilism? Do we fight within a program-matic reality or do we disappear, immersing ourselves in nothingness? And, oh, how voluptuous and sumptuous is the call of nothingness –we should all visit from time to time.

Dylan wore black, with black Ray-Bans, and levitating hair he bathed himself in the honesty of mystery. Thus, truly he composed his greatest works while being there and not there, simultaneously. Today, when all media is considered social and everyone is their own public relations agent, how is the artist to proceed? The social-artists cannot allow for another Dylan, and this must be their call (in 140 characters or less):

DEATH TO BOB DYLAN; LONG LIVE ROBERT ZIMMERMAN

Mystery is dead. Mystery must be reanimated.

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The image of Dylan which persists is that of the folk artist and/or protest singer. It is the image of a (typically) young musician (almost al-ways male) behind acoustic guitar singing for looped social content and justice. Whose justice? And, over and over and over again, so goes the story. The state of the political-artist is one of archetypes, structures, systems, and formulas required of the political-reality. One may call it recycling, but perhaps that is closer to what Dylan did/does with early Americana, African American blues, and Romantic poetry, because with recycling we have a different end-product. Political-reality, on the other hand, features the political-artist, who is a different myth, or char-acter, both formulaic and typically trite –the sound bite. It is performa-tive in a way only useful for “getting along” in an awful political-reality. Its production is mass duplication and sloganeering.

The results are embarrassing, as with Conor Oberst’s (Bright Eyes) “When the President Talks to God,” (2005) featuring these lyrics:

When the president talks to GodAre the conversations brief or long?Does he ask to rape our women’s rightsAnd send poor farm kids off to die?Does God suggest an oil hikeWhen the president talks to God?

Here we have the narrative of the “poor farm kids” in lyrics which seem to refer to a compressed, collaged history of all wars, all presi-dents, all Gods, but not as a comment on the human condition, but, instead, it is more of a confused history or lack of difference in which the singer believes the current situation to be unique and yet Vietnam all over again. Oberst goes on to criticize the theatrics of political-real-ity, asking, “When the president talks to God / Does he fake that drawl or merely nod?”

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All the while, a late night host introduces Oberst with, “Tonight he is singing his critically acclaimed protest-song,” and the singer stands alone with cowboy hat, western style shirt, and acoustic guitar, costumed for the ritual of this protest-process, he sings in his exaggerated, stylized way, as is his role.

This complicated expression of this nostalgic history, as described by Jameson, results from a culture of the simulacrum, which has an “appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudo-events and ‘spectacles’…” He continues, “The past is thereby itself modified: what once was… has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of im-ages, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum.” In this case then, our folk-singer is “condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.”

This is the despotic political-reality Dylan massacred with his axe. He saved himself in the process, only to be reborn each day ever since, some-times cataclysmically so, as with his transfiguring motorcycle incident. Rock-n-roll was, yet again, rejuvenated. Why would this turn cause such a disruption amongst his contemporaries and friends, like Pete Seeger, who continues the same old tired system and criticisms of Dylan’s post-protest material? Besides envy, the answer is the fear of the other, the fear of the cannibal, of what one does not have or can never have. Why is that bad art, while this is good art? Je ne sais quoi; it is unnamable, but we all recog-nize it. Dylan was never Christ, but perhaps he is the anti-Christ.

The jealousy and envy caused by this cannibal who rebelled against the rules of the political-reality after having it all terrified others. He could have had acolytes; he could have ended all wars. All he needed to do was not be himself –speak for everyone else!

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In a letter to Dylan, Irwin Silber wrote:

…any songwriter who tries to deal honestly with reality in this world is bound to write "protest" songs. How can he help himself ?Your new songs seem to be all inner-directed now, inner probing, self- conscious -- maybe even a little maudlin or a little cruel on occasion. And it's happening on stage, too. You seem to be relating to a handful of cronies behind the scenes now -- rather than to the rest of us out front.Now, that's all okay -- if that's the way you want it, Bob. But then you're a different Bob Dylan from the one we knew.

In 1965, Silber inadvertently answers his own charge, for profoundly Dylan doth protest. Unfortunately, Silber’s folk-singer lives on as a stan-dard mode of production for those who have not recognized the looped nature of political-reality. The media has chosen to dispense of the com-peting image of a cannibal-Dylan, who lives and continues to compose and tour. Thus, during each period of war or unrest the headlines read, “Where is Our Dylan?” or they declare, “This Generation’s Dylan,” as if he died July 20th, 1965, Newport, RI.

Requiesce in pace. We never truly knew thee.

Therefore, today, it is the Ghost of Dylan who haunts singers and songwriters. This older, poltergeist fellow dipping in and out of categori-cal lines is something of a nuisance, but no one can look away, no one can stop listening. Even the singer’s voice is ragged and worn with age. Many will say his voice was never his strong suit, thus, it has always been one of his strongest suits. Today he continues to deny us our expectations by radically reconstructing his “greatest hits” live in such a way so as to be unrecognizable by those who expect absolute repetition. The audience is stunned and

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made uncomfortable by “Tangled Up in Blue’s” disappearing melody, and its more meandering and complicated structure. They lean in trying hard to listen for something, anything familiar as he releases guttural staccato verses. When the chorus is given there is a mass sigh of relief, but they are left with existential angst. How dare he? (In fact, how dare he die, i.e. age, before us? There is more comfort in his immortal folk-singer image.)

Sadly, but expectedly, musicians of the 1960s, like Seeger, often return feeling a duty and responsibility to remind everyone of dead wars (and, in the process, they remind us of themselves –one wonders if they actually hope for unrest, as chaos and strife have become nostalgic, a reminder of their former relevance).They act dumbfounded when older systems appear unworkable within the current –kids these days. The protest-singer simply legitimizes the system, as does reforming the State’s institution of marriage, or choosing anarchy, but, “the whole key to liberation is magic,” writes Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. “Anarchism remains tied to politics, and remains a form of death like all other politics, until it breaks free from the defined ‘reality’ of capital-ist society and creates its own reality.” In this case one might consider nihilism to be the necessary extreme, but not the nihilism of a previous century, but something closer to the recent nihilism described by Jean Baudrillard as a form of transparency:

and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and his-torical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it. When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so - the great nihilist before the Eternal and the cadaver of the Eternal. But before the simulated transparency of all things,

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before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own.

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Today, Dylan is charged as plagiarist in both text and image. As if the lessons of folk borrowings never mattered, as if the artist never admitted to inspiration. As if appropriation in art was never a strategy. As if bricolage is a new sin. As if the protest-singers of political-reality were not merely the copies of a copy. Dylan, on the other hand, is the epitome of cannibal –acknowledging those he has consumed –this is nothing new. Instead, Dylan makes active his relationship with “influ-ence,” a term art historian Michael Baxandall critiques as passive, and in response gives us a list of other more suitable words and phrases.

Dylan will:

1) DRAW ON 2) RESORT TO 3) AVAIL ONESELF OF 4) APPROPRIATE FROM 5) HAVE RECOURSE TO 6) ADAPT 7) MISUNDERSTAND 8) REFER TO 9) PICK UP 10) TAKE ON 11) ENGAGE WITH 12) REACT TO 13) QUOTE 14) DIFFERENTIATE ONESELF FROM 15) ASSIMILATE ONESELF TO 16) ASSIMILATE 17) ALIGN ONESELF WITH “Excursus against influence,” Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, (1985).

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18) COPY19) ADDRESS20) PARAPHRASE21) ABSORB 22) MAKE A VARIATION ON 23) REVIVE 24) CONTINUE 25) REMODEL 26) APE 27) EMULATE 28) TRAVESTY 29) PARODY 30) EXTRACT FROM 31) DISTORT 32) ATTEND TO 33) RESIST 34) SIMPLIFY35) RECONSTITUTE 36) ELABORATE ON 37) DEVELOP 38) FACE UP TO 39) MASTER 40) SUBVERT 41) PERPETUATE 42) REDUCE 43) PROMOTE 44) RESPOND TO 45) TRANSFORM 46) TACKLE

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In a recorded interview found on the bootleg Great White Wonder (1969, King Kong Records), Dylan explains his writing process:

...I don’t even consider even writing songs…I don’t even consider that I wrote it when I got done ... I just figure that I made it up or I got it some place…The song was out before me, before I came along. I just sort of came down and just sorta took it down with a pencil, but it was all there before I came around. That’s the way I feel about it.

Ever since the death of protest-Dylan the acoustic guitar has taken on the mythos of the organic, the natural as symbol for the working class, for the one who tills thy land (who even knows what that really is anymore; isn’t farming dead in the New World?): the naturalist, the lonely traveler, story teller, Heraclitus, or Socrates, and Christ. When our new folk singer arrives, as is inevitable, it is with acoustic guitar strapped to their back, as with Guthrie before. The wood represents its former life as rooted in the ground of mother Earth from whence we all came. Nothing else can be as honest as the words and music naturally amplified from the body of a tree. They insist you listen in, step up close, and pay attention, because the words ring true, and this is their song:

THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS!But what more does it do now than to impose the protest-singer

and the political-reality upon one’s shoulders -violently, impossibly, and uninvited? We respond:

THIS MACHINE IS FASCIST.

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▲

Section Three: Switching-On and Switching-Off

If Dylan went electric, then Wendy Carlos is electric. The ambitious, experimental composer of Switched-On Bach (1968), The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (1970), Sonic Seasonings (1972), featuring field recordings, and A Clockwork Orange (1972), to name a few, struck quickly, producing a loud noise in the 1960s-70s by re-radicalizing Bach and Beethoven and help-ing to introduce the Moog synthesizer to the public. These sound waves permeated through various genres, changing the face of popular and avant-garde forms of music and film. It seemed Carlos was unstoppable.

But, just as quickly, Carlos’ light went dark. Carlos went underground or was pushed underground. Deeper than Dylan would have allowed of himself, and more existentially, perhaps it felt like hell. Unlike Dylan, today Wendy never even existed. Rather than a denial of a specific Car-los-era, we have a forgetting of a person entirely (as well as collaborator, Rachel Elkind). Carlos is negated. Negated and forgotten by whom? Maybe by authors of popular history, musical critics, experts, theorists, et. al. or by even the artist herself ?

Carlos was too significant, too fast, and terrifyingly hard to define. While simultaneously struggling to build a liberating and comfortable personal reality, transitioning from Walter to who she wanted to be/always was/is, Wendy reinterpreted centuries of western music with Moog synthesizer, and the machine was masterfully handled expressive-ly, emotionally, and sensitively by the artist.

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Carlos’s private struggle made public is the ancient struggle of mind-body. In this case, philosophy is flesh –reconstructed and transformed –where gender and sex, form and content are also, like Bach, re-rad-icalized. The political-reality, who defines gender and identity, is torn asunder. Today, with the disappearing body, the case of Carlos reminds us to rediscover our form, and perhaps, we will find her in the process. The underground reengages with space, flesh, and embodiment, and it is in this space where one remembers the body as our ultimate form. In film, David Cronenberg’s use of flesh is described as horror, but it is really a strategy of awakening. Why are we horrified by the abstracted orifices and their bodily fluids, pulsing and throbbing, and typically consuming victims? Violently erotic, we are ashamed of the familiarity we have with these monsters, these cannibals, ourselves, and repressed we cry and lust for more.

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With Carlos, one can only imagine the terrifying fear and excitement in the chest of the young, ambitious artist during her defining period of rapid output. As the artist battled to claim her personal identity before the political-reality could usurp it (it had already been disrupted by polit-ical-reality’s standards and definitions), this war led to a schism so great that Carlos could only step away from the spotlight (while still producing work). Thus, Carlos is forgotten, for how dare an artist not participate. There may never be a proper biography, auto or otherwise. In fact, the living artist may prefer one never exists.

Who are we to disagree?

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▲Section Four: Inevitably, Solipsism

In the time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose off-spring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phan-tasies – an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own ac-count, were ghosts, e. g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: "I alone am corporeal." And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I refer all to myself. If as spirit I had thrust away the world in the deepest contempt, so as owner I thrust spirits or ideas away into their "vanity." They have no longer any power over me, as no "earthly might" has power over the spirit.

~Stirner

No gods, no masters, not even geography, not even your city. Inevi-tably, one may fall into solipsism. Or, perhaps one is charged as egoist, narcissist, hermit, boring, asshole, or out-of-touch, for one “who in human society takes the benefit of a prerogative sins egoistically against the idea of equality; he who exercises dominion is blamed as an egoist against the idea of liberty,” writes Stirner.

If only your reality may be verifiable (a questionable assertion) then perhaps the others also exist in a state of solipsism. Is interactive solipsism really that contradictory? It is a spectacular moment when we decide to reach out and touch someone. Can we be friends? Friend is only defined when one makes new ones, leaves old ones, grows old themselves and continues to bounce off of other monads. Inside jokes become outside jokes. Perspective forms from the inside and from the outside. When someone is not your friend, maybe an enemy, then you may know friendship.

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Clearly, if a cannibal’s diet is the other, then if there is no-other then there is no-cannibal. Cannibalism is implicitly social (not equivalent to political), but, it is an empowered social. It is a choice. It is critical consumption, but the choice only exists after the experience of other-ness. Solipsism on the other hand is self-consumption. The result is a personal-loop, static, immobile, except only in one’s grotesque process of self-consumption.

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What about style? What about scenes, taste, and geographic expecta-tions? “What haunts the universe, and has its occult, ‘incomprehensi-ble’ being there, is precisely the mysterious spook that we call highest essence.” Here, Stirner’s spooks are not godheads in the ancient sense, rather, they are found in the occult nature of style. I speak of course with emphasis on the state-of-the-artist. There is magic in taste, there are leaps of faith. There is no math; there is no science, no rationalism. There are no 9-to-5 studio work hours that equal brilliance. Your punk rock band is just as bad as it was in High School.

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Black, instead may be green.

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IIION GARDENING,

Being the Rebirth of Time & Space

If I could be anything in the world that flewI would be a bat and come swooping after you

~Reed

▲

Prologue: Hometowns in Brief

b. Alice, Texas: strong yellows, browns, and blue. The expansive open skies are interrupted only by relatively short mesquite trees, and then there is always the flat, dry, thirsty earth –a result of perpetual drought. The horizon line is distinct, the meeting place and the differences of opinion between sky and land ground the people to one rational, linear perspective. But, the vanishing point is up to you. There is almost always the fear of Hurricane Season –but none ever come. Instead, there is an instinctual *hope* for the deluge and rain dances.

Local painter Maurice Schmidt views the tractor as an intermediary, or medium, captained by the mobile farmer who translates sky and land into a recognizable tongue, i.e. speaking for a god. Crops engulf the landscape and the picture plane interprets this sublime ecstasy, like a cosmic Cezanne. Schmidt’s figures, when central, are exaggerated in similar fashion to the best of German expressionists; they are primal and physical, and sometimes as characters of the artist’s strong Jewish faith,

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their animated forms struggle to be both in time and space. Every hair and follicle screams out for attention, for communication with a god.

In South Texas I remember an endless summer –a mythic Beach Boys’ dream. Chicharras are a year-round, calming siren of the ap-proaching blue dusk, but in Virginia I met the archetype of fall colors –living dead leaves and their rebirth. Seasons clearly delineated –the speed of time increased. So, I gardened and was given more access to this relationship –so, I returned to a bike and was given new paths, remapping geography. So, I used a new palette, and in the space of the bar I was offered free shots and made new friends.

Then, I moved on.

When I go home, everything is old; everything is new.

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▲

Section One: DOOM;

MMM is Lou's soul. If there is one thing he would like to see buried in a time capsule, this is it.~Bangs

fter the death of Lou Reed, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement declared the deceased former Velvet Underground front man as “better than” David Bowie and Iggy Pop. For Malkmus, it is Reed’s New York City connection which makes the biggest difference, because, as he explains, Malkmus lived in the city from 1991-97, and “made a lot of friends there.” Reed is NYC, explains Malkmus – but, also, his music is the soundtrack to Malkmus’s nostalgic years. Malk-mus’s statement, while an odd epitaph, nevertheless is an example of the city worship previously discussed herein. To Malkmus, who has had a “special” personal experience of NYC, Reed comes closest to musi-cally representing his romanticized Pavement fame, or as he himself describes it as his years of being a “hipster.”

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AN INTERJECTING

ESSAY RE: “HIPSTER”

Political-reality has consumed the term “hipster,” making it “popular-culture.” The word is mainstreamed, or advertised, in such a way that it may be represented by everything and everyone, from fashion to a way of life. Thus, it is nothing but market-ing. Popular essay after essay, and books in the humor section have spent innumerable time attempting to define the history of the hipster, tracing its roots from the Romantics to Austin, Texas. What is the term, today, if not an attack? Some might argue that the true hipster was Blake or some such other aged mythical figure, and everything done since is a pale copy, comparison or joke. New history is denied; reference reigns su-preme. The term now compresses an over-in-dulgence and self-consciousness of “being” hip –which is a synonym here for popular or narcissistic –or caring too much about one’s image. It is now a weapon of the 21st centu-ry –the preemptive strike, a gun, or, more nefariously, a plague, germ(meme)warfare

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to make prospective giants sleep, forever.

Susan Sontag begins her essay, “’Thinking Against Oneself ’: Reflections on Cioran” with these words:

Ours is a time in which every intellectual or ar-tistic or moral event is absorbed by a predatory embrace of consciousness: historicizing. Any statement or act can be assessed as a necessarily transient “development” or, on a lower level, belittled as mere “fashion.” The human mind possesses now, almost as second nature, a perspective on its own achievements that fatally undermines their value and their claim to truth. For over a century, this historicizing perspective has occupied the very heart of our ability to understand anything at all. Perhaps once a marginal tic of consciousness, it’s now a gigan-tic, uncontrollable gesture—the gesture whereby man indefatigably patronizes himself.

Hip–an anatomical region or joint; walk with your hips; use your hips in a way that visually carries your personality –your weight. The stance, the way one walks and stands during conversation are powerful indicators of the individual, of intention. You can be sexy, powerful, imposing, laid back, free-spirited, a leader or oddball, “Take a Walk on the Wild Side”

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or “Walk like a Man”. (At old-age, a broken hip may mean death.) One’s weight and bal-ance is based upon this hip axis, demarcat-ing the upper body of the chest, arms, and head from the lower body of the genitals and mobility -sexuality.

This is contrapposto, or counter-pose, like counter culture –like the hippy.

The hippy was the more politically engaged child of the beatnik –the term also de-meaned and inevitably mass-consumed (see: bongos, French beret) like tie-dye parapher-nalia and California Dreamin’. (Worst still are the University “jam bands,” who give one a safe taste of the other side.) Allen Ginsberg spanned these two generations, in-deed informing them both greatly, and hop-ing to normalize the abnormal, but Kerouac and Burroughs remain the epitome of count-er culture –choosing to step in-and-out of realities. Jack and William remain mysteries, enigmas –"fags" and "losers" –degenerates (regenerates). Hard to define, not supposed to be defined, language is a virus: nihilist or not-nihilist, anarchist or not-anarchist, critical drug addicts and alcoholics, experi-menting with spontaneous bop prosody and needles, Buddha and sexuality. Mommy and Daddy issues and murder mysteries

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–Burroughs loved cats. Hep cats. LOLcats.And what happened to jazz? Formerly rad-ical, performed in dark, underground, hot spaces, racial commingling, hot jazz, quickly academicized, structuring spontaneity, con-fusing it with the solo, and making theory and technique primary.

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Language was destroyed, cut-up, by the beats; but now language reigns supreme –the apotheosis of language. All is Hipster; all is Political. Hipster, like hippy, like hip has been co-opted again to caricature count-er-culture, to market it, to consume it and devalue its meaning.

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Even Irony is now used as the defining anti-gesture of hipster. The hipster, or other, loses intentionality, in the case of public vs. hipster. The public uses hipster as a weapon against everything the other does, or is, against aesthetic and personal decisions; networked life only helps spread this damaging cultural meme of the politi-cal web –working for the regime. Fashion is always self-conscious and a representation of or against prevailing culture, but now the mob, in complete fear of your mustache or underarm hair will intellectually undercut you before you’ve made any decision or come to any conclusions. Even you cannot believe yourself before you’ve even done it. You walk that way, you talk that way, you look so good you look so bad, your love is weird, no one wears their pants like that, why must you think that way, you scare me, hipster. Nothing is what it is for anyone, for anything.

Me, you—you, me Everybody—He-he

-Kerouac

FIN.

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For Malkmus, who is caught up in the glories of Warhol’s Factory, Reed as citizen of NYC surpasses Bowie, who has never been labeled “of ” Brixton or London, or Paris, or NYC, but rather simply as world devourer (the only city associated with the artist being a mythologized Berlin -as in an era of albums). Malkmus is more comfortable with Reed, more regionally obsessed, more caught up with media represen-tations, and elite in terms of his understanding of a specific New York experience (and yet, are we to believe Malkmus’s NYC of the mid-90s gave him access to Reed's of the 1970s? –and why should we care?), which is no doubt different than other cities, but with this logic, it is made greater than other cities and therefore breeds a greater pop song as it does better painters. But, would Malkmus have us believe that those non-New Yorkers may never understand Reed or Velvet Underground as he does? This is true, but not in the way Malkmus would have us understand it, which is his own personal 1990s rock-star history.

The history that Malkmus fails to write is that the collaboration of Bowie, Reed and Iggy, though short lived, resulted in a long lasting com-petitive spirit, energizing their output and experimentation throughout the 1970s and beyond. It is odd for Malkmus to feel a need to defend Reed’s greatness from Bowie and Pop. For all three musicians, the decade was one of intense transition, from the death of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust–deicide –to Pop’s search after The Stooges. Reed too, after the disbanding of the Velvet Underground sought out new territory and terrain. The time and place was just right, it just clicked, and the three expertly cannibalized one another, fearlessly reinventing themselves in the process, and not for the last time. Many believe that the three were never better. There can be no doubt that there have been many ups and downs since. When one loses a friend and an enemy –a fellow cannibal–what is there left to do? Is this our return to self-consumption? Self-ref-erentiality? Personal histories and/or solipsism? Often, one suffers.

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Bowie, most recently and surprisingly, returned after a decade long absence, which caused many shock-journalists to wonder if the former glam rocker were dying. As a gift to all of us on his birthday, Bowie re-leased a new album of original songs in 2013 titled The Next Day. In an age of non-events, the secret of the album’s recording and release was kept under wraps, making its existence a miraculous foil to networked culture. The reaction to death threats is a birthday party. Quickly, the album became known for its visually intriguing cover –the same cover of “Heroes” but in this case a large white rectangle blocks the iconic younger Bowie’s face. Alone the design gesture alludes to the negation of a former self, representation, or icon along with “heroes” being scratched out, as it were –a détournement. In the next day perhaps there is no hero, no Bowie, or, not that Bowie who today declines all in-terviews and promises no tour. Previously, we had Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, and a ‘90s spiky haired, electronic madman, and today, we have an aged, sage-like M Y S T E R Y.

It is a completely radical thing for a rock star of Bowie’s stature to present the public with such a deeply critical work, one in which idols die, and or are murdered. Fascinatingly, for a younger generation this mystery-Bowie is their first Bowie. Bowie is not about just Bowie, but the culture that produced him, and his friends, enemies and collabora-tors, like Reed, and even New York City and Berlin, with the sentiment being expressed in the song “Where are we now?” The answer: “Just walking the dead.” Bowie is active in the history he negates rather than a pastiche of such a gesture as might be said of today’s funny modern-ists. The media was right –their Bowie is dead, but so are Pop, and Eno, and Reed. They have always already been ghosts; referential –haunted by their own histories—and the magic is a result of their awareness of this fact.

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Bowie has long made his residence in New York City and he himself has often found much inspiration there. Malkmus’s judgment leaves lit-tle room for a larger experience of Reed beyond a specific city’s bound-aries and regionalism, doing a disservice to other ways of listening and interpreting, and it is also a disservice to New York City. At the same time that he falls under the spell of a city, he denounces the nomadic and creative mutual cannibalism of friends.

On the day Reed died what greater sound off than his own Metal Music Machine (1975) as requiem to a figure greater than a single space. The noisy, gritty opus is a full, fleshy guitar sludge –a viscous blackness of primordial denim made of dark, mysterious things. For whatever reason, Reed who had perfected the pop-rock song moved on to a com-position requiring something different of the listener –patience, med-itation, deep-listening, spatial-aural relationships but through tough, raunchy discord. It is an abstraction of the man who was Malkmus’ New York City Reed, pushing the image of the iconic dark sunglasses and leather jacket wearing to distortions of the figure, and demolishing any city-state boundaries and popular forms of listening experience along the way.

Lou Reed was doomed –let loose by a horde of screeching, urban vampire bats in love –some declared it the end of his career. Certainly, it was never the same. “Charisma. Lou's been slipping of late,” writes Lester Bangs, “but for those who remember and understand the Myth, the Legend-i.e., he was an emblem of absolute negativism- MMM has more charisma than a cage full of porcupines has quills.”

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New York city, I love you, New York city manNew York city, I love you, blink your eyes and I'll be goneJust a little grain of sandNew York city, ooohhh, I love youNew York city, baby, blink your eyes and I'll be goneI love you~Reed

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▲

Section Two: DRONE;

A post-review

Everywhere codes analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel the primitive sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the relations to self and others. All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or

consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power center to its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all its forms.

~Jacques Attali

Richmond, VA –A few years ago I became enlightened, and not in any calming, quiet sense of our modern, rational understanding of “meditative nirvana.” Buddha had it all wrong or we have Buddha all wrong. The enlightenment I write of is a full, physical embodiment of sound and experience. “All things in moderation,” is wrong –a farce. After one’s extremities feel the shaking and tickling of powerful lows and highs –then you can know a pop song and or its opposite. When the loudest of the loud may be coupled with silence in such a way, we have sublime, we have the ability to self-regulate and mix. We often need to wake up.

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The first philosopher of noise, Edmund Burke writes on “Sound and Loudness”:

Excessive loudness alone is sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, and to fill it with terror. The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful sensation in the mind, though we can observe no nicety or artifice in those sorts of music. The shouting of multitudes has a similar effect; and by the sole strength of the sound, so amazes and confounds the imagination, that, in this staggering and hurry of the mind, the best established tempers can scarcely forbear being borne down, and joining in the common cry, and common resolution of the crowd.

And regarding “Suddenness”:

A sudden beginning, or sudden cessation of sound of any considerable force, has the same power. The attention is roused by this; and the faculties driven forward, as it were, on their guard.1

For me, this noise nirvana happened in a hole in a wall, a cultural epi-center of the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia: a bar-cade, vegan friendly restaurant and music venue called Strange Mat-ter, formerly Nancy Raygun, among other names. I have learned many things in the space of this bar, and in part, I have gained an appreciation of “extreme” music and subsequently a critical perspective for what is deemed “sound-art” and what isn’t.

1 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757.

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Over the decades this social-space has existed within the interstices of both a violent, troubling (recent) past, and the rapidly encroaching regu-lation of institutional gentrification called “progress.” While it is quickly becoming walled in and surrounded, it persists as a relevant sound-space.

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Attali’s analysis of sound-codes is correct, and so I must describe our listening-experience today and its social ramifications: mobile phone audio devices, featuring lossy reproduced sound artifacts, amplify sound through our embedded ear-buds. Our standards of audio fidelity are low and so are our lived experiences in which we are universal surveillants –obsessively documenting a rock show with instant image-audio captures, in order to “live” share to our networked friends. We view the rock show through a small screen with the eye of an image critic and event promot-er, the event here being our lives. Speed of information figures greatly into this standard, coupled with digital mobility and miniaturization. Our listening experience has undergone another private stage, with the first being the introduction of sound reproducibility of the phonograph (introduced in the late-1800s), allowing sound into our personal interior space. Today we have the sound available as ear-buds –together we listen everywhere alone. Listeners are not so much concerned about sound fidelity (they mostly never were), as much as they are with access, which is confused with “freedom.” As Jonathan Sterne writes:

Engineers reduce dynamic range because to do so makes the recording ‘seem’ louder when compared with other recordings with more dynamic range. The theory is that if two songs on the radio are otherwise of the same quality, the ‘louder’ song will be more likely to catch a listener’s attention. In practice, musicians and producers have come to measure the loudness of their own CDs – whether or not they will appear on radio – against other commercially released CDs, and the result has been a sort of loudness arms race, fueled by new software developments in ‘loudness maximisation’. -2

2 “The Death & Life of Digital Audio” 2006.

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Since today the distinction between private and public spaces is a confusing mess, so too then must be our listening-spaces of a glocalitar-ian reality. With badly compressed and reduced dynamic ranges, much like commercial music, our reality is mixed like standard, commercial radio –eliminating “unnecessary” aural subtleties between low and high ranges for a more recognizably loud mix, noticeable to mass-consum-ers. Virilio explains:

As with stereoscopy and stereophony, which distinguish left from right, bass from treble, to make it easier to perceive audiovisual relief, it is essential today to effect a split in primary reality by developing a stereo-reality, made up on the one hand of the actual reality of immediate appearances and, on the other, of the virtual reality of media trans-appearances.

Our psycho-geographical social relations have become saturated, and we are imprisoned within temporal compression. It is the end of geography –when our everyday experience is itself based on what Virilio calls the substitute or artificial horizon of a “screen or a monitor, capable of permanently displaying the new preponderance of the media perspective over the immediate perspective of space." It is in this condition that the band SUNN O))) presently thrives and acts as radical departure from –remixing our lived audiovisual reality and engaging in a different sort of “loudness” –one echoing the words of Burke. Although formed in the late 1990s by Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson in Seattle, Washington, it is today that the band truly serves us as dark lords of drone metal. It is in these false days that SUNN O))) choose to play so incredibly slow and loud so as to produce in the lis-tener a state of deep listening and a re-grounding of one’s being. They act as facilitators of the rebirth of time and space, for not only is the sensation of listening emphasized, but it is coupled with the physicality of music so low and loud that the

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experience of hearing coincides with vibrations of one’s body hairs, and tickling ear drums. It can be tiring and complicated as with any important and invigorating experience –like near-death experiences, or especially in this case, rebirth –a total destruction of virtualization.3

Along with this personal physical experience comes an awareness of one’s place in the rock-space and it is recognized as being one with many others. As the hundreds stand alone together, like monads, individually interpreting the experience, the fog machine fills the small space of Strange Matter. Distance between monads is made less perceptible, creating a soft cloud of interaction and collaboration, or community. And on stage the performers dress in black hooded cloaks –barely moving –to be ignored and not ignored within the sound scape. The fact that this deep-listening experience occurs in a bar is an im-portant one, as the event is thus already participating in the important cultural and existential position played by such a place that provides civilization with a “safe” space for imbibing spirits and in this case performing the act of raising spirits.

To be clearer, I must compare this to a different space presenting “similar” sound –the cubed art-space, i.e. gallery or museum. After all, it is early twentieth century theorists and artists who would first support an appreciation of sound or sound as art and an awareness of that which sonically surrounds us each day Unfortunately, today this appreciation has transformed into academic sound-art, made safe and elite within both the walls of the academy and boundaries of the cubed art-space. While sound art once represented a radically redefining form of sound appreciation and experience, it now mostly disregards popular forms

3 “the amplification of the optical density of the appearances of the real world” –Virilio, The Information Bomb

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of sound and music making. It is strange that sound-art would now be closed-in to only those things deemed abstract enough, meaning those outside of popular aural spaces, as high Modernism did in the past with medium specificity and the apotheosis of painting which ignored the human form –a residual of Christian Platonism.

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The cubed art-space is a self-conscious space of limitation and minor audience participation, versus the rock-space of Strange Matter, featur-ing the touring SUNN O))). It is clear where the opportunity for larger radical sound reinterpretations might be made. As Futurist Luigi Russo-lo describes in The Art of Noise, “Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life. Noise is familiar to us. Noise has the power to bring us back to life…Although the characteristic of noise is to brutally bring us back to life, the art of noises must not be limited to a mere imitative reproduction. The art of noises will extract its main emotive power from the special acoustic pleasure that the inspired artist will obtain in combining noises.”4 O’Malley explains: “…we get the term post-met-al… I think the 'post' thing is used for people to feel special and new about doing their thing…I wanna get to know what the roots are more clearly, continue trying to discover the elements that are already there. Everything's already there, so...”5

BRUTAL, NOISE, TERROR, THUNDER, RAGING, ARTILLERY, AWFUL, STAGGERING, CRY.

A problem with sound-art aside from its language is its forgetfulness. Its lesson is deep-listening. If so, then its academizing and its silo-presen-tations within white-spaces mean no-one is listening. SUNN O)))’s dark-art slows down time, two-hours is something felt, bodily. The occasional flesh of a raised hand is seen through the thick fog of the machine. The fog which allows us an image of the formerly mystical unseen interstices between you, me and the rock-space is suddenly thick and material. Augmented reality head-mounted eye-glasses claim to allow you to

4 Author’s emphasis5 The Wire UK interview, April 2009.

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“be in the moment” expelling clunky media for invisibility, the truly social-experience of nature at the expense of space. On the other hand, a campfire illuminates with jumping flames. The results: shadow-play, campfire songs, the deep, slow stares, and smells of burning wood.

The slow media of being-there is not a war against technology, but an acknowledgment of both the parts and the whole. Toggle the light switch, on and off, off and on. Know your neighborhood by deeply-lis-tening and deep-see diving.

The connections between SUNN O))) and time and space are not exaggerations. While the duo is clearly interested in the theatrics of a performance and the mythos of metal music, there is a very real, concerted effort in engaging with the aforementioned subjects. Monoliths and Dimensions’ (2009) cover art features the work of Richard Serra, out-of-round X (1999), a large scale drawing. Serra’s concern, too, is the experience of space, and by creating his more well-known monumental sculptures, which undulate and curve in ever so non-mechanical ways, he radicalizes the experience of a cubed art-space –even deconstructing the traditional museum. While Serra’s sculptures are large, imposing, or monolithic, his drawings are far quieter in their minimalism, with simple gestures of blackness; positioned two-dimensionally across the intersections of a wall they reconfigure spatial perceptions and expec-tations. The drawing is something of a figure-ground reversal, whose darkness moves both in and out. Sun or black hole, both are related forever in their cycle of life/death/other in and out, light and dark, cosmic consumption, baptism, and at that point of singularity there is a love affair between science and magic.

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▲

Section Three: DEATH;

On the 91st floor of World Trade Center Tower One, musician Stephen Vitiello recorded the sounds of the tower’s swaying as nearby aircraft passed, as well as the onslaught of a hurricane. The musician used contact mics adhered to the windows. Two years later, as the tow-ers came down, the recordings would become possessed by the ghosts of the events of Ground Zero. Suddenly, the sound document, a mostly banal work of day in the life of a State sponsored Monolith would be converted to a coveted, spiritualized historical document –a pre-911 reality of better times.

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The magic of circumstance now cloaked the artist, transforming Viti-ello into a seer, or, sound-sage. The “musician” now turned “sound-art-ist.” There appeared something of a third-eye, but only ever written about, never actually seen –sage of the “emerging” medium of sound, and yet, all the result of a grand accident. In Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), the character of Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), an expert in surveillance, accidentally hears more than he should. The possibility of murder weighs heavily on Caul’s conscience. How should he proceed with the document? Listening to the violence through walls, through pipes, he records –he acts, though, inevitably he fails –tortured by guilt, responsibility and fear. Powerless, he crumbles. He finds solace in his tenor sax.

And how does the sound-artist proceed? In art one continues to make art or turn things into art. But in this case, “accident” is never uttered, for neither audience nor artist dare tear asunder that through this death-document art is life, is hope for trivial gods and masters. Thus, rise ye Sound Pope, whose hat antennae may communicate with god. There is no critical engagement with the accident; there is no conversa-tion, no discussion of art as terrorism or terrorism and art.

Vitiello’s document is a sound-vanitas after-the-fact, transformed by the art-world into history (in support of its relevance) and therefore in service of political-reality. Political-reality may impose itself upon all in cataclysmic haute fashion: commodity, style, #911, hipster, red & blue, post and pre historicizing, and the dreaded loop, with supporting char-acters and leading “men.” There are no images of falling figures, just a meditative perfect past, in order to form the narrative of some “better” future.

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The well-publicized critique of Damien Hirst stands in stark contrast. Often the critiques of his diamond skull, his dismembered parts, and other projects have less to do with aesthetics and more to do with the personal embarrassment the art-world feels when face-to-face with the honesty of these new-nihilist vanitas. There is no big difference between Hirst’s skull and the best of the Dutch, centuries before. We see the timelessness of our condition, anxieties, pathos, but critiqued through the lens of a post-hyperreality and the artists own honesty:

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us. But such a sentiment is Utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning. ~Baudrillard

Coincidentally, Vitiello, like the fictional film crew of Cannibal Holo-caust, also visited the Amazon in search of myth. He too would breach the “untouched” with the goal of documenting its sounds, then later, use them, mix them, exhibit them. Even the Yanomami are present in Vitiello’s story, but there are no accidents, no violence or classical cannibalism of the Westerner by the Yanomami as a defense against their own consumption. They are powerless. Unlike the film, there is no criticism left, instead there is just an attempt at documenting the walking dead –for what else are the Amazon, and the Yanomami, and the idea of undiscovered geography if not already written off?

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One day, the sound-artist will be remembered once again for his pre-science, for documenting the dead of the Amazon: romance, nature, the primitive, all gone, but, that day may portend an even bigger end.

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Epilogue: A Letter & Proposal

Dearest de Menil Family, In an effort to engage in a rite of style, or style rite, which might prop-erly raise the ghost of Rothko I propose staining yonder paintings with skull images.

Very dark hued ghosts, there and not there. In an effort to quell the neo-new-wave digital positivists (amateur scientism), the sublime style of Rothko’s dark art may prepare us for a new scene. What is required, though, are Houstonian inside-art-jokes (of which there are many) being Gregorian chanted throughout your Chapel, accompanied by traditional Depression era Tejano accordion & oompahs all during said mass. Then, we may achieve death scenes which look outside your island.

What is being suggested is a new interpretation of time + space, which is actually just their return and our acknowledgment of them. Thus far the only viable form of interdimensional travel has been via DOOM, DRONE (STONER), and DEATH (though less) outside your insti-tutions, and formed through holes-in-the-wall. On the 16th of May, 2013, in the sacred ground of Richmond, Virginia, I will engage in an inter-geographic rite of style, through the consecration of three new works of Rothskulls, along with a collection of mutual magik, in an effort to merge the scenes of Richmond and Houston. Consider this a preliminary attempt at raising Mark. We may all cease to exist in the process.

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The artist requests RVA wear black (preference given to jeans and t-shirts) from 5-9 PM.

I look forward to your thoughtful response.

Most Sincerely,

Dr. Norberto Gomez, Jr. Richmond, VA 03, May, 2013

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Colophon

The Book of Cannibals was written and illustrated by Norberto Gomez Jr. in Richmond VA and Baltimore MD from Spring 2013 to Spring 2014. The second edition was printed and bound by Jillian Gayle Gomez at Texas State University from Fall 2014 to Spring 2015. Sybil Press 2014. Typefaces include Baskerville, GothBall Crap by Shamrock, 2005 and Comic Sans on Stonehenge White 250 gram paper from Takach Paper. "O" drop cap from William Morris and Richard Kegler, P22 Morris Or-naments, 2001. "G" drop cap from Hans Holbein, Dance of Death Alphabet ca. 1523. "A" drop cap from Charles Holme, Art in England During the Elizabethan and Stuart Periods, 1908. Bound with 4 cord black thread and covered with black denim. Thank you, Jeffrey Dell, for your continued support.

This is book ___ of 50

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In loving memory ofLundy Loofie

2011-2015

THE BOOK OF CANNIBALS, or, how to consume (2014)

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Transcript of THE BOOK OF CANNIBALS, or, how to consume (2014)