Via Arthur, here’s a great piece on London author Iain Sinclair, whose works I have admired for over ten years now, including ‘White Chappell Scarlet Tracings” and the excellent “London Orbital,” a psychogeographic drift through London.
In London, from the first, I walked. As a film student, newly arrived in the early Sixties, I copied the poet John Clare on his feverish escape from Matthew Allen’s asylum in Epping Forest, when he navigated by lying down to sleep with his head to the north. Skull as compass: all the secret fluids and internal memory-oceans aligned by force of desire. Clare returned, as he thought, to Mary, his first love, his muse; to his heart-place, Helpston, beyond Peterborough, on the edge of the dark fens. My drag was cinema, Bergman seasons in Hampstead, Howard Hawks in Stockwell. Or art: the astonishing Francis Bacon gathering at the old Tate, at Millbank, former prison and panopticon. Bacon’s melting apes were robed like cardinals. Naked men, stitched from photographs, wrestled in glass cages.
Motiveless walking processed the unanchored images that infiltrated dreams of the shadow-belt on either side of the Northern Line. I lodged in West Norwood, a house on a hill, like the one I had left behind in Wales. I wandered through mysterious suburbs to the rooms above the butcher’s shop in Electric Avenue, Brixton, where the school was based. Street markets, I discovered, were a significant part of the substance of this place. Walking was a means of editing a city of free-floating fragments. I composed, privately, epic poems conflating the gilded Byzantium of W.B. Yeats with the slap and strut of Mickey Spillane’s California. London was an impossible relativity of historical periods and superimposed topographies.
Isn’t that cover great? Check out psychedelic-Lovecraftian artist John Coulthart’s blog on this lost gem of early gay lib fic:
We had Shock Headed Peters walking through Sodom yesterday so this novel from 1971 seems like a fitting follow-up. The eye-catching title is no doubt an allusion to Byron’s description of Turkish baths as “marble palaces of sherbet and sodomy”, an epithet which one imagines sent generations of sweet-toothed Uranians trekking to Constantinople throughout the 19th century. I’d seen the cover of this book before on sites which collect the gay fiction of the late Sixties and early Seventies—that doubly-phallic tower makes a good match for the cover of Bugger Boy—but I don’t recall reading a description of the contents before. Homobilia has an extract from the opening page:
My name is Jud. I am eighteen and a half. I was born from the felicitous conjunction of an anthropologist and an ethnologist under the sign of Capricorn. I have been called cute, handsome, pretty, and good-looking; actually, I am beautiful… my nose is classically English, along the line of Reynolds, maybe with a little Caravaggio thrown in around the nostrils. My athletic adolescence on the swimming team at Sterling High has given me a slender muscular body… my eyes are South Pacific blue. I have read Hesiod. I masturbate regularly. I have no concept of money or its value. I try to keep my farts silent. I have juvenile down on my ass. I have read the minor Elizabethan poets and I have looked at my anal sphincter in the mirror. Until last week I considered myself heterosexual…
A wonderful essay—I think it’s one of his finest—from our super smart friend, Charles Hugh Smith, over at his Of Two Minds blog:
I am optimistic about the future because the status quo is doomed and better options abound.
One of the characteristics readers seem to like about oftwominds.com is that fundamentally I am an optimist about the future, even as I trace out the inevitability of the status quo’s devolution and implosion.
The two are inextricably bound in a yin-yang, electron/proton field: I am hopeful for the very reason that the status quo is doomed. Instead of being terrified of its devolution, I say “good riddance.” We all know it is unsustainable, rapacious and based on an interlocking net of lies; why should we mourn the passing of debt-serfdom and the dominance of interlocking webs of deceit, corruption and exploitation?
I am optimistic for the reasons laid out in Survival+: voluntary, transparent, non-privileged parallel organizations and productive structures are self-assembling under the leadership-by-example of The Remnant. Once 20% of the populace is permanently unemployed and permanently lost to the consumerist corporatocracy/Savior State status quo, then the Pareto principle suggests The Remant’s influence will grow rapidly.
Many people expect some sort of rapid implosion of social order into violent chaos. While anything is possible, my research into the devolution of the Roman Empire persuaded me that the Roman Empire remains the best available the model for our future: a slow decline and unwinding of Empire and the Savior State.
Why might it be slow? As I have explained at length in Survival+, various feedback loops are actively resisting collapse. History is not a vector so much as a slowly orbiting mass of complex feedback loops.
Devolution is not a chaotic mob of armed thugs rampaging. Such a concentration is relatively easy to control or simply liquidate by force. The State excels at violence and control, so rampaging mobs would be the State’s preferred “domestic enemy.”
Devolution is this: half the toilets in the Chemistry building no longer work, and they aren’t being fixed nor will they be fixed. The city/county/state can’t print money, and as the public unions demand higher taxes to fund their Protected Fiefdoms, then the compliant State and its parallel shadow structures of privilege will comply, raising junk fees and taxes on the dwindling class of still-productive citizenry.
This feedback loop has a consequence the Status Quo fails to understand: rather than toil ever longer to pay exploitative taxes, the productive can choose to opt out. As I have ceaselessly explained here, the Protected Fiefdoms of the Savior State simply cannot grasp that entrepreneurs and small business owners have a choice: they do not have to work long hours and endure hardships just to support the Savior State and its numerous Protected Fiefdoms. They can simply call it quits, close the doors and opt for a simpler lifestyle which generates no taxes and much less stress.
Many people moan that the U.S. is becoming a “Third World country.” I say, good; life is better in a well-ordered Third World country than in a debt-serf Empire. Not all Third World countries are equal; those hobbled by corruption, dictatorship, poor infrastructure and education, etc. are truly wretched. But those “developing nations” with lesser shares of these burdens can actually be better places to live than crumbling empires based on killing commutes, endlessly higher debts and a mindlessly self-destructive culture seeking ever-higher doses of self-medication.
Maintaining or improving the infrastructure of the U.S. requires a mere slice of the GDP. Maintaining or improving sewage, water, rail/transport electrical and Internet systems requires very little money compared to the trillions squandered on Empire, bailing out various Financial/Power Elites and the 70% of the GDP squandered on “consumerist paradise.”
Were priorities to be re-ordered, a Third World GDP would be more than adequate to fund a functioning, efficient infrastructure. The money wasted on Empire and sickcare alone could rebuild the entire nation’s critical infrastructure.
No one is forcing us to be debt-serfs. That is a voluntary choice. Nobody has to work two jobs to pay the bloated mortgage on a house which is high in cost due to large-scale financial manipulations by the Savior State to benefit various financial Elites. Nobody has to agree to buy a bloated house and take on a bloated mortgage, or pay $3,000 per month for a crummy studio apartment in Manhattan to toil for a parasitic financial corporation.
Interestingly, much of the Counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s was founded on the understanding that a “Third World country” lifestyle was inherently more humane and worthy than the commuter-debt-serf model of Empire.
The Counterculture was voluntary and incremental. You could pick and choose which parts of it to join. You could be a “straight” and buy your food at the co-op. It existed in parallel with the status quo, which quickly co-opted whatever features gained widespread appeal. (“Natural” products appeared as if by magic on the shelves of supermarkets.)
Nobody has to change agribusiness dependence on growing corn and producing high-fructose corn syrup to inject in essentially every packaged and fast food; as the Savior State founders, its subsidies of agribusiness will decline, rendering growing corn for sugar unprofitable. Those pursuing that model of “farming” will either go bankrupt or they will pursue some other model of growing food that is not mandated by subsidies for Protected Fiefdoms.
When people become ill from self-destructive diets and lifestyles, and the Savior State no longer pays for sickcare treatments of these lifestyle ills, then they will choose other lifestyles. Choice isn’t capitalist or “free market;” it is human. We all have choices, and when the trade-offs and subsidies and incentives change, so will the choices.
When opting out of the work-harder-to-pay-more-taxes rat race becomes recognized not as “failure” but as freedom and blessed relief, then more people will opt out to do something else with their lives.
Read more of Why I am Optimistic at www.oftwominds.com
Bad Brains Switchplate Cover
Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention Ceramic Coaster Set of 4
Sally Fields Flying Nun Pocket Purse Mirror
I was poking around Etsy today and found these gems by seller Nightmarebox. I bought the Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention ceramic coaster set.
In what sounds like a plot from a William Burroughs novel, the anthrax-tainted heroin found earlier in Germany and Scotland has now reached London, authorities told BBC News:
A heroin user in London has tested positive for anthrax, the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has announced.
The case is the first in England linked to the Class A drug, but follows the deaths of nine users in Scotland from anthrax infection.
The HPA said the unnamed user was being treated in a London hospital and that other drug users in the capital should be “extremely alert to the risks.”
Not to in any way make light of the subject but the advice of the HPA for addicts to “cease taking heroin” is farcical. Clearly they’ve never met any real junkies, because a junkie is, by his or her very nature, already inclined to do things to their bodies without much regard for the consequences. An addict will happily jab a needle into their arm if there is only a small chance of the smack being tainted. If the chances become greater, well guess what, they’ll still shoot up. They need to actively set up mobile emergency methadone centers quickly in areas where smack users acquire heroin or else more people are going to die.
Anthrax found in London heroin user (BBC News)
Check out our swanky new opening graphics by Toronto-based designer Jamie White. One morning in January, Jamie contacted me over email and said basically “Dude, you really need opening graphics for your show and it just so happens…”
Jamie also did the distinctive electronic musical sting. I described—vaguely—what I had in mind and he emailed back that he’d recently acquired an analog synth kit that should do the trick nicely. When he sent me the track, the first draft was 100% perfect.
You can see and hear the gorgeous results in this week’s Dangerous Minds interview with artist Rachel Rosenthal. I can honestly say it’s exactly what I saw in my mind’s eye, only way, way better!
Thank you Jamie!
See more of Jamie White’s work:
www.signamoda.com
Signamoda gallery at Deviant Art
Signamoda at Facebook
Master archivist of music from the depths of oblivion and WFMU DJ/ blogger Tony Coulter has been unearthing these delightful early 70’s homemade 8mm art/ psychedelic drug/ comedy films as of late. I have a feeling this is the tip of the iceberg for this kind of stuff as the baby boomers have fully taken to the youtubes and the facebooks and are presently posting the contents of their closets for all to see.
