Download: “I Want You to Know” (mp3)
Perfect guitar tone. Two verses, cool, then they give you the big chorus–and a ear-blistering solo that the next cubicle will enjoy emanating from yr podlings. Get some ointment from HR. From the album with the year’s greatest cover, Farm, issued recently by the clearly fine folks at Jagjaguar. Acquisition info here.
AUGUST 6 — SCOTT NEARING
Back-to-the-earth political radical, social drop-out.
wikipedia excerpt: “As the Vietnam War took center stage in the mid-1960s, and as a large back-to-the-land movement developed in the U.S., a renewed interest in Nearing’s work and ideas occurred. Hundreds of anti-war believers flocked to Nearing’s home in Maine to learn homesteading practical-living skills, some also to hear a master radical’s anti-war message.”
August 6, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
* Feast of Everything Green Except Money
Also on August 6 in history…
1637 — British comic genius and satirist Ben Jonson dies.
1774 — Religious-protesting Shakers arrive in New York.
1883 — Back-to-the-earth rebel Scott Nearing born, Morris Run, Pennsylvania.
1890 — First electric chair execution in U.S.
1945 — U.S. drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
1969 — Frankfort School theorist Theodor Adorno dies, Visp, Switzerland.
1970 — Yippies invade Disneyland. Social chaos in wonderland. (See AP account below)
Ethnopharmacologist Dennis McKenna, brother of the late great Terence, will be doing a rare live interview/conversation today on Erik Davis’s new weekly commercial-free online radio program, EXPANDING MIND—the perfect name with the perfect host and perfect guest, really, as the McKennas’ work in the ’80s and ’90s really expanded the cultural dialogue about what altered consciousness was telling us, (or, for Terence, what the Plants are telling us), what the historical record and scientific studies could tell us about entheogen (or: psychoactive substance) use, and so on…and on…and on… Should be interesting to hear what Dennis is up to, and his current thoughts on all things entheogenic. The show is on at 2pmEDT/11amPDT TODAY (Thursday, August 6) at Progressive Radio Network, and then will be archived. Here’s the link:
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com
In other Erik Davis news, he sez: “I will be giving a presentation on Aleister Crowley and the movies at the Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave in Capital Hill. That particular rite will go down on Thursday, Aug 13, at 9pm.”
Here’s the description for the night:
“Though he died in obscurity in 1947, the renegade magician Aleister Crowley has come to exert an enormous influence on popular and sub-culture alike. Join Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis and the 33 1/3 volume on Led Zeppelin IV, for a clip-heavy “performance lecture” on occult film.
“Sampling rare footage, experimental shorts and documentary clips, Davis will use cinema to trace the development of postwar magick and Crowley’s apocalyptic religion of Thelema, with special attention given to the work of Kenneth Anger and the rise of magic in the 1960s and 70s. Numerous obscurities will be sampled, including Curtis Harrington’s Wormwood Star, Rex Ingram’s The Magician and the Jimmy Page version of Anger’s Lucifer Rising. Also included are excerpts from Crowley: The Other Loch Ness Monster, Joe Schimmel’s Christian expose Rock ‘n’ Roll Sorcerers and cut-up wizard Craig Baldwin’s recent Mock Up On Mu.”
Tickets and more info here:
http://www.nwfilmforum.org/live/page/calendar/942
Download: “Choral” – Mountains (mp3)
Title song off Mountains’ Choral album, made possible through Thrill Jockey Records, who have the double-LP and CD on sale direct to you from them here.
We get email. This one’s from our friend Stephanie at EcoShack…
Ever read the classic 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia? People in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest break from the US to form their own country. We love the book because in Ecotopia, everybody lives in a commune!
With Ecotopia as inspiration we’re visiting as many ‘communal hotspots’ as possible in an 8-day period: Ojai, Big Sur, Santa Cruz, Oakland, Bolinas, Sonoma County and beyond… from Aug 12 – 20, or so.
Know of any must-sees? Should we visit you? Post your ideas (and invites) to the ‘Wanna Start a Commune?’ Facebook wall at http://tinyurl.com/my3dfn.
These are the stomping grounds of counterculture’s forward-thinkers: The Merry Pranksters, The Diggers, Ant Farm, and the “hippies who built the internet.” (Don’t believe it? Read ‘From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism‘).
We’re gonna honor what’s old, experience what’s new, and spread the word about what we’re up to with WeCommune. We’ll Tweet from the road. Follow us at: http://twitter.com/WeCommune.
Check out the WeCommune site at http://wecommune.com (be sure to click on ‘visit our commune’ to get a feel for how the system works).
Happy communing!
Stephanie
Jason Overby lives and works in Portland, OR. His comics have recently been shown at Pony Club (Portland) and is featured in the Abstract Comics anthology which is available now from Fantagraphics. Here’s part of a story called Slapstick, which Jason describes as “autobio superhero stuff”.
August 5– Friedrich Engels
Karl Marx’s partner, provider, and sometime heir. Theorist of the origin of property, marriage and state.
August 5, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*U.S.: National Failures Day.
ALSO ON AUGUST 5 IN HISTORY…
1890 — American utopianist Adin Ballou dies.
1895 — Communist theorist Friedrich Engels dies, London, England.
1962 — Sex goddess Marilyn Monroe dies in an affair-of-state.
2000 — Indonesian activist Jafar Siddiq Hamzah disappears, Medan, Sumatra.
Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective
Arthur is proud to present scans of essential documents produced by and about the San Francisco Diggers, who were in many ways the epicentral actors in the Haight-Ashbury during the epic, wildly imaginative period from late ’66 through ’67. The Diggers’ ideas and activities are essential counter-cultural history, sure, but they are also especially relevant to the current era, for reasons that should be obvious to the gentle Arthur reader.
Most of the documents that we are presenting are broadsides originally published on a Gestetner machine owned and operated in the Haight by the novelist/poet Chester Anderson and his protege/sidekick Claude Hayward, who used the name “Communication Company,” or more commonly, “Com/Co.” According to Claude, these broadsides were then “handed out on the street, page by page, super hot media, because the reader trusted the source, which was another freaky looking hippie who had handed it to him/her.”
Here are two posterish images—the black and white one is an early poster by Victor Moscoso—plus two flyers to do with the Invisible Circus, a “community” that was supposed to last for 72 hours at the Glide Memorial Church one weekend in late February, 1967. More on what happened at the Invisible Circus in our next installment of The Diggers Papers…
Click on the image to see at a bigger size…
Arthur Magazine 