Skywatchers, Shamans & Kings : Astronomy and the Archaeology of Power

by E. C. Krupp

From Publishers Weekly
An astronomer with a Jungian streak, Krupp (Echoes of the Ancient Sky), the director of the Griffith Observatory in L.A., synthesizes the study of the heavens with archeology in an intriguing attempt to understand the cultural power of shamans and kings in ancient civilizations. In the tradition of Frazer, Eliade and Campbell, the author seeks commonality in the use of sky myths by shamans from cultures as diverse as the Mayan, Egyptian, Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese, Turkic, African and Inuit, as well as those of the indigenous peoples of the American plains, Northwest and Southwest. Carefully analyzing sacred petroglyphs, pictographs and statuary, he traces the evolution of culture from hunting bands to the establishment of complex civilizations. The journey includes study of the natural high places of the earth, which direct human awe heavenward toward the sky gods. Alternately, the chthonic depths of caves and grottoes are examined for insight into the traditions of nurturing mother goddesses and fertility cults. Throughout, reference to ancient awareness of the movement of the planets and constellations, especially in regard to the solstices and equinoxes, is highlighted. With an anecdotal style and with reference to myriad illustrations, Krupp enngagingly explores the historic derivation of political control descending from the skies, to rulers. The harmonics of order implicit in the structure of the cosmos, he forcefully contends, are endangered by contemporary reactionary, earthbound cultures, engendering conflicts that are expressed in rising social intolerance and religious fundamentalism.

COURTESY DAVE REEVES!

From the Nov 7, 2004 New York Times:

Where the Theater Is a Kibbutz, and the Kibbutz Is a Theater<br
By CHRIS FUJIWARA

ASHFIELD, Mass.

PLENTY of theater companies may profess as much, but the Double Edge Theater company truly believes that art is life. On the Farm, the group’s 105-acre estate in Ashfield, Mass., the company has built the dramatic equivalent of a kibbutz: an intimate, utopian and self-sustaining community, where its seven members live and work together, integrating their onstage and offstage lives.

The group, which is just finishing its New York debut at La MaMa E.T.C. with “The UnPossessed” – a play (very) loosely based on “Don Quixote” – is the creation of Stacy Klein, who founded the company in 1982 and then moved it to Ashfield, a half-hour north of Amherst, in 1994. Living here, she said, allows the group to “rehearse based on our creativity and not on our schedule.”

By joining the company, the members free themselves from prosaic distractions — say, holding down a paying job. “We are self-sufficient in that we can house all of our people, so we don’t need to have these huge jobs outside of the theater in order to pay for an apartment for each of us,” Ms. Klein said. “We can get as many vegetables as we can get off the farm.”

Ms. Klein trained with a student of the renowned Polish director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski, one of the most important figures in avant-garde theater. “The Grotowski connection is like a tribe of theater,” Ms. Klein explained, that views the actor as an creative artist in his own right, and “not as a puppet of the director or the designer.”

Erasing the line between work and home life can sometimes be trying, even for the initiated. “Who we are upstairs,” in the performance space, said Richard Newman, who has been living with Double Edge for about a year, “informs who we are in our daily life, but they’re not necessarily the same things. Some people I work with really well in the space, but in my daily life — cooking or doing farm things — I can’t really deal with them. It’s very difficult sometimes. It’s not bad, necessarily; it’s more interesting.”

Hayley Brown, who has also been at the Farm for about a year, agreed: “It’s certainly difficult, but I think it makes the work more powerful. It seems that the more time we spend here, the more your life and your work are the same thing, and everything about your life can be put into your work, and everything about your work can apply to your life.”

The members have been rehearsing “The UnPossessed” in the large barn that serves as a living and performance space. The show’s circuslike imagery and spectacle are evidence of the group’s fascination with street theater in South America.

After rehearsal comes daily training. The nine actors onstage (including the four interns who are working with Double Edge this fall) face one another in a circle and trade movements. Afterward, they work alone or in pairs or threes, balancing, rolling, hopping, running.

“The goals of the group training,” explained Carlos Uriona, Ms. Klein’s collaborator and the actor who plays Don Quixote, “are to tap energy, to develop endurance and strength, and to find power,” and, he added, to rid themselves of the “daily masks” that people wear.

Mr. Uriona described the group’s progress so far: “Have you ever spun yourself around to make yourself dizzy? If you try to control yourself, you get into trouble. The more you let yourself go, the better it is. That’s where we are now.”

Ms. Klein created “The UnPossessed” after 9/11. “I was feeling like I was a fool to try to keep this enterprise going, and the whole idea of art going, when people would rather be at war and fighting,” she said. “And so immediately we started thinking about ‘Quixote.’ I remember saying to Carlos one day, ‘I feel like Quixote.’ I’m just an insane idealist who is fighting windmills.”

From the Nov 21 Los Angeles Times:

….With his laptop, [Army recruiter] Hill shows recruits the Army’s sexy new recruiting DVD: high-adrenaline rock music in sync with soldiers rappelling down mountains and parachuting out of planes. Most recruits are more interested in Hill’s screensaver, a photo of him storming into Baghdad with the first U.S. troops. Nearly every recruit asks, and sometimes Hill tells them his stories, describes what it was like to sleep on the floor of Saddam Hussein’s palace.

…He doesn’t tell them what it was like to have his tank hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and then to have the tank tumble into the Euphrates River. He doesn’t tell them about the shrapnel in both his legs, or the 38 friends he lost in battle ‚Äî including one who committed suicide, a man whose memory makes Hill’s eyes well with tears. He doesn’t tell them about the 30 rolls of film he took in Iraq, which he still can’t bring himself to develop. He doesn’t tell recruits about a day not long after he got home, when he was walking in the park with his 12-year-old son. A car backfired, and Hill dove into a ditch, where he lay cowering, suffering from tunnel vision and paralysis until his son phoned Hill’s wife and told her there was something wrong with Daddy.

“I’m glad he didn’t touch me,” Hill says. “Because I might’ve hurt him if he had.”

Hill keeps those things to himself, not because he’s afraid of scaring off recruits, but because he doesn’t yet feel comfortable sharing them with strangers.

There is something contradictory about striving to put fresh-faced men and women into the inferno of Iraq, and Hill acknowledges it, but only barely, because he lives inside the contradiction: He longs to return to Iraq. Most of the soldiers with whom he came home are soon being redeployed, and Hill wishes he were going with them. But the Army, he says, needs him here.

….

COURTESY S. O’MALLEY!

From Plan B Magazine:

ON BALANCE
Words : Mark Pilkington
Photos: Mark Pilkington

“Death, he is my friend, he promised me a quick end.”
‘Blood from the Air’, from Horse Rotorvator, Coil (1986)

Geff Rushton, aka John Balance of Coil, died on the afternoon of Saturday 13 November, in a fall from the first floor landing of his home. He was 42.

Founded by a young Balance in 1983, and bolstered by his musical and, until recently, life-partner Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, for 21 years, Coil’s music changed, deranged, detoured and matured with its creators. Each new album – and sometimes these were several years apart – brought new sounds and ideas to the fore: Coil’s sonic vision was persistently transgressive and transcendent, both aesthetically and technologically. Whether they were peering down into the sewers or upwards to the stars, Coil were always several steps ahead, or at least one step to the side, of their contemporaries, with much of their music sounding like transmissions from another dimension. In fact, some of it they claimed was from another dimension. Certainly they were bold explorers of psychedelic space, much of their sound being informed by the glittering jewels brought back from these inner-landscape excursions. Their capacity to merge heavy-duty avant-garde weirdness with a canny pop sensibility and an ear for a tune has made Coil’s sonic legacy an enduring one. What happens next for Coil is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to believe that Balance’s untimely death will do anything other than heighten their already semi-legendary status.

I first discovered Coil as a horror-film obsessed 14-year-old. They had brought out an unused soundtrack to Clive Barker’s film Hellraiser. I was hoping for something like the terror-funk of Goblin, who were my favourite band at the time, but what I got was something very different indeed, a haunting, captivating soundscape of tones, rumbles and music box tinkling. It was several years before I realised that I had been playing it at the wrong speed all that time, but it never seemed to matter. I would eventually pick up all their records and, while my tastes have changed (though not that much) over the past 16 years, their back catalogue still provides refreshing and rewarding listening. Their more recent output, especially a collection of improvisations recorded on the solstices and equinoxes of 2001–2002, remains sonically inspiring, forward-looking and defiantly uncategorisable.

Late in 2000 I interviewed Balance for Fortean Times magazine, at the home where he died, while Peter snoozed upstairs. It was a very human discussion about drugs, magick, birds and dreams.

Following this, Balance (I always called him this, though I knew he was Geff) and I kept in touch, sometimes regularly, mostly not.

In 2002 Coil performed at Conway Hall alongside Drew Mulholland’s Mount Vernon Astral Temple and others at the Megalithomania event I co-curated with Neil Mortimer of the now defunct Third Stone Magazine. Feeling like Kermit the frog, I introduced them and wound the curtains open with a huge handle offstage. Their performance was uniquely odd and a one off, with a clearly drunk and unhappy-to-be-there Balance yelling largely incoherent abuse over a pulsing, shifting synthesised backdrop provided by Sleazy, Thighpaulsandra and Simon Norris. Meanwhile their Italian dancer friends Massimo and Pierce freaked the audience out inside barely-moving black-hooded entity costumes on the sides of the stage. At one point Balance hurled a large stuffed rabbit into the audience, hitting the Lovecraftian magician and anthropologist Justin Woodman, and towards the end looked like he was about to throw one of the London Musicians’ Collective’s monitors (hired by us at some expense) overboard. I projected a telepathic plea to him to put it down, which he did, afterwards insisting that it was only because he’d wanted to, even though he’d got the message.

We can all only know aspects of each other. I knew Balance as a mercurial, warm, funny, sharp and highly curious individual. I only caught glimpses of his demons, most of them seemingly borne of the alcohol that would eventually kill him, but got the impression from talking to others that he’d upset many people over the years.

Our last real conversation was in February of this year at the Strange Attractor Journal launch at London’s Horse Hospital. We discussed beards, garlic, magick, the whereabouts of Atlantis and psychedelic jazz. At one point we were both startled as a full beer bottle spontaneously exploded as it stood on the floor at our feet. Our final encounter was a fleeting one, as I snapped away from the photo trench beneath the stage at Hackney’s Ocean venue in August, at what would be Balance’s last London performance with Coil. Curiously a friend had told me beforehand that this was to be the band’s final gig – I don’t know where he’d got that information from. Balance did a double take as I sent a friendly wink his way from under his feet. It was a good gig, though perhaps not as awe-inspiring as I know they were capable of, presenting some of the group’s more melodic new electronic offerings, including the cosmi-comic ‘Sex With Sun Ra’ that’s sure to become a posthumous favourite.

At gig’s end John waved and said “Thanks Mark!” through the PA.

Thanks John/Geff, wherever you are now.

“Already regarded as an architectural icon comparable to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion or Farnsworth House, Werner Sobek’s glass house R128 (R??merstrasse 128) in Stuttgart is residential technology taken to the highest possible level of sophistication. Sobek’s open-plan cube wrapped in a glass shield is an ecological show-house of precise minimalism. There are no walls and no closed rooms. The house provides its own energy. Recognizing Sobek’s voice, the front door opens if called. R 128 is a prototype. R 129 is already being planned.”

“Sobek’s website.

From the November 19, 2004 New York Times:

Forced to Work Off the Clock, Some Fight Back
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Soon after Trudy LeBlue began working at the new SmartStyle hair salon outside New Orleans, her salon manager began worrying that business was too slow and profits were too weak.

To keep costs down, Ms. LeBlue said, the manager often ordered her and the two other stylists to engage in a practice, long hidden, that appears to have spread to many companies: working off the clock.

Many weeks, Ms. LeBlue spent 40 hours in the salon, but was ordered to clock out for 20 of them while waiting for customers to show up, she said. With the salon’s computer tracking her official hours, she was told to clean up and stock merchandise during the unpaid stretches.

“If you weren’t doing hair or a perm, they’d tell you to get off the clock, but you still had to stay in the salon,” she said.

from Resurgence No. 225 July/August 2004

ACTIVISM IS A SPIRITUAL PATH
by MICHAEL BROWNSTEIN

What does meditation have to do with McDonald’s and Monsanto?

I’VE BEEN A Buddhist for many years, and I am also an activist, committed to overturning the profit-driven monoculture which is destroying our health, our Earth, and our soul. How are these two forms of awareness–awareness of what’s taking place in the outside world, and awareness of our internal processes–related? Can each aid the other in creating a sane, sustainable and just world?

Let’s look at activism in terms of the negative emotions generated–indignation and rage, but also frustration, sorrow, resignation. These are negative emotions because of the effect they have on us, the people who experience them. Not on the object of our emotions, whether it be the World Trade Organization, Monsanto, or George Bush. Negative emotions are reactive. Their only impact is on us. What difference does it make to Monsanto that you’re seething with indignation at something it has done or said? What difference does it make to the Pacific Lumber Company when you come upon a clear-cut old-growth forest in California and feel devastated?

Staying present with our emotions–anger, for example–means remaining aware of what we’re experiencing without becoming lost in reactivity. It means liberating the energy generated by anger from the object that calls it forth. In other words, it is a form of meditation. Then, the possibility exists to work with the situation from a place of clarity, rather than be submerged in confusion.

So, the first revolutionary act–or fact–about meditation is that it puts you in touch with what you’re feeling and thinking at this very moment. It puts you in touch with presence. Then you realise that you are the source of your emotions–not Monsanto or McDonald’s. This does not imply that we shouldn’t have these responses, but that we have to use them rather than be used by them. And the only way to do that is to become aware of their nature.

There are many misconceptions about meditation. Actually, meditation is simple, because there’s no particular goal. There’s nothing much to do. When you meditate you are not required to erase all thought, or see the clear light, or have a big revelation about the meaning of life. All you have to do is relax and sit with a straight spine so that your breath is unimpeded. Breathe slowly, following the breath with your attention. Notice any thoughts or emotions or sensations which arise. Try not to chase after them or reject them–but if you do, that’s not a problem as long as you remain aware of what you’re doing.

The problem comes from lack of awareness, from unconscious fixation and attachment, not from the thoughts or emotions themselves. As long as you’re alive, you’ll have thoughts and emotions. But as soon as you identify them without resistance, they dissolve. Just be aware–without forcing anything, without keeping score–of what your mind is doing, of where your attention is going. That’s meditation.

But being simple doesn’t mean it’s easy, because meditation involves dismantling habitual patterns which are very stubborn. That’s why it’s a practice, something we return to throughout our lives. Maybe while meditating you notice the sounds in the room, or how long a few minutes actually are, or that the voice in your head is going non-stop.

But sooner or later you also realise that what’s enabling you to notice these things is a witness inside you, looking on from a place of neutral observation. A witness that’s never upset, never afraid, never bored, never angry, but that also is never joyful or triumphant or serene. A witness that simply notices everything. In fact, that is simply present. This witness is called awareness, and it’s usually obscured by our emotions: happy/sad, excited/ depressed, loving/hating, desiring/rejecting,
approving/ disapproving, proud/ashamed, envious/generous–all of which depend for their existence on our reactivity to outside objects and conditions: our attachment, aversion, and indifference.

But the awareness underneath that reactivity is vast, luminous, and beyond thought, with no beginning or end. It’s unchanging, unmoving, and indescribable, completely out of category. Except that when we know where to look for it we‚Äôre able to experience it, because it’s the basic nature of every mind on the planet, the minds of all sentient beings. Every one of us has an open spirit not motivated by fear or greed, in spite of how out of touch with it we may be. Every one of us knows the right thing to do. Every one of us has the capacity to be compassionate and connected.

This does not mean, by the way, that we should disregard how people actually act toward us, and become doormats or passive victims. That’s when the warrior quality within you arises. Once you’ve liberated yourself from reactivity, once you’re able to separate yourself from your emotions and watch them come and go like clouds in the sky, you discover your fearlessness.

By realising that you are the source of whatever is happening, you begin to take conscious control of your life. And you find the right way to handle George Bush–because underneath his greed and arrogance, he’s certainly not conscious. Looking at the depth of his confusion, we see that in addition to fighting battles, our path as activists involves bringing others to awareness. Political awareness and the awareness of nature of mind are the same. Once people become aware of what they’re doing, most of them will not continue to destroy local cultures, or disregard the dangers of global warming, or sell monstrous weaponry to each another.

NOW LET’S LOOK at the struggle for social justice, a sustainable economy, and ecological balance from the perspective of who we are as people. We see that the things that motivate us to become activists are baseline human qualities such as compassion, inclusiveness, and fair play. Deep inside we sense that the universe is good, otherwise why take the trouble to work for change?

Activism is as much about rediscovering our sanity and trust–our sense of belonging–as it is about righting perceived wrongs. The fact is that if we’re looking for goodness or fairness in others, we’re looking for what’s inside ourselves. Otherwise, how could we recognise it?

We’re looking for what we all share. Once we understand that, the larger goal becomes how to wake our brothers and sisters from their self-destructive sleep. In fighting for a just and sustainable global culture, we’re also uncovering a globalisation of the spirit. That’s because everything is connected: my body and your body and Earth’s body, my spirit and your spirit and Earth’s spirit, my mind and your mind and Earth’s mind. And also my body and society’s body, my mind and society’s mind, my spirit and my culture’s spirit.

In fact, it’s only from ignorance of interrelatedness that people succumb to selfish behaviour, to cruelty and cynicism. No matter how many act in this manner, and for no matter how long, by definition they’re isolated individuals. Destroying the Amazon rainforest, for example, in order to plant genetically modified soybeans: such colossal short-sightedness comes down to a lack of awareness that my body and mind are connected to Earth’s body and mind. We can’t have one without the other. We can’t focus solely on our own physical well-being, going to yoga classes and eating organic food, while the earthly and social bodies continue to suffer. Otherwise, we’re living in a cocoon of self-involvement, oblivious to the greater life around us.

Those of us who are spiritually involved must also have the courage to engage the world’s confusion, demonstrating the commitment that comes from political awareness. We must risk activating our compassion. Without this engagement, our ‘personal growth’ will remain sterile and dry, and the status quo will only perpetuate itself. We cannot forsake our brothers and sisters who are needlessly suffering. Such behaviour ultimately is not spiritual, because it betrays a lack of connection. The warrior acts without becoming lost in attachment or reactivity, but nevertheless he or she does act.

BY THE SAME token, the problem is not only ‘out there’: it is also ‘in here.’ It’s not only about agribusiness or pharmaceuticals or neoliberalism: it’s also about self-awareness. That is, the problem is at once personal and planetary.

In addition to scrutinising the policies of the World Bank, we ourselves bear looking at. Not from a judgemental place, but through disinterested awareness–that is, through the discipline of meditation. Everything we’re engaged in now, from community-supported agriculture to grassroots media to green politics, is part of a global process. New forms of relating to each other are emerging from the dying dinosaur realm of competitive isolation.

But we can’t forget that all of us have created this world. We’re doing this to ourselves. We’re all products of the same claustrophobic mindset. Consensus reality comes from a shared field of perception. To change it, we have to look at our own beliefs and assumptions in addition to looking at the acts of others. If we don’t deal with what could be called the spiritual dimension of activism, if we don’t examine the role of the ego, we’re simply running away from the total reality.

After all, judgement of others never really gets anywhere. It’s been going on for thousands of years. The names change but the mechanism of blaming and accusing remains the same. Our distrust of others stems from the compulsion to defend our identity as a kind of private property, whereas true revolution is courageous because it involves surrender of ego. It’s not only about rearranging wealth. It’s also about entering common ground.

For example, would terror and bloodshed between Palestinians and Israelis continue if, like Australian aborigines, they believed that no one owns the land but they all belong to the land? How would they relate to each other if they saw all land as holy? ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ is a function of judgemental mind, which goes round and round. Unless we understand the source of the problem, how can we hope to solve it?

Not to surrender to distraction, denial, and suspicion, not to degenerate into cruelty and manipulation, means coming to know and accept ourselves, no longer living in fear and isolation, but in community. It means watching ourselves from a place of non-judgement: human community as well as Earth community. It means making friends with our awareness, staying in touch with it, being present in body, speech, and mind, here and now. It means seeing activism as a spiritual path.