SEPTEMBER 13 — WILLIAM PHILLIPS
Anti-Stalinist writer, editor, co-founder Partisan Review.
SEPTEMBER 13, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
GRANDPARENTS’ DAY. Andalusia, Spain: VINTAGE FEAST. Parades, bull-
fights, horse races, drinking and dancing until dawn.
ALSO ON SEPTEMBER 13 IN HISTORY…
1872 — Christian socialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach dies, Rechenberg.
1922 — World’s hottest temperature recorded (136.4°F), Al-Aziziyah, Libya.
1971 — New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller orders attack on Attica Prison,
resulting in 28 prisoners killed, along with 9 hostages.
2002 — Partisan Review co-founder William Phillips dies, New York City.
Here’s a snippet of wisdom thought from botanist-poet Dale Pendell, speaking informally at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland in March 2008, courtesy Gyrus’s always provocative and thoughtful Dreamflesh blog:
“[T]he people who have lived close to the earth for a long time seem to respect these rites and rituals. They feel a sense of gratitude. God, even Nietzsche said, ‘A sense of gratitude is seemly.’ Our existence here rests on many lives who have gone before us, generations of people. And not only people; all sorts of beings that have lived, and suffered, and died, and micro-organisms creating even the air that we breathe, and the topsoil, and all of it. So every day of our lives is a gift of countless generations that have provided it, for our benefit. So a sense of gratitude is right, and it is good to give something back. It’s good to take a moment to place an offering, or a word or something. Ultimately I don’t think we can prove this. But I say, the other side can’t prove their way either. It comes down to a wager. And I put my wager on a green square, and to do these things, to find a way to move in beauty ourselves, does change the world. It’s the only way we can change the world.
“So, that’s a long way of saying that that’s the ultimate basis of my magic.”
About this document: This passionate, brutal broadside speaks for itself with acid clarity: a real moment of beholding what’s at the end of the fork, as William Burroughs would put it. The piece has a real Peter Berg vibe to it, but, like almost all Diggers broadsides, it is unsigned by an individual so we can’t be sure…
About this series: 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.”
Portable Shrines, an informal collective of Seattle psych lovers dedicated to raising awareness of “mind-manifesting” phenomena in their area (and blogging about it, of course), have announced an exciting roster of bands for their new two-day Escalator Fest, which will premiere at the Lo-Fi Performance Gallery and the Vera Project later this month. Expect a projection-lit showcase of “the new psychedelia” in its most far-flung (though primarily West Coast) forms, from noise to folk to denatured ’80s pop memories and back again. Line-up and details below.
SEPTEMBER 12 — JACKSON MAC LOW
American Fluxus poet, Buddhist, political activist.
SEPTEMBER 12, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
Ethiopia: NATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY DAY. Greece: VIRGINS’ FAIR.
Tainos, West Indies: FEAST OF ATABEI, the Goddess Mother.
ALSO ON SEPTEMBER 12 IN HISTORY…
1838 — Benevolent last Hawaiian monarch, Lili’uokalani, born.
1880 — Misanthrope, writer H. L. Mencken born, Baltimore, Maryland.
1891 — Independiente Pedro Albizu Campos born, Poncé, Puerto Rico.
1922 — American Fluxus poet, Buddhist, activist Jackson Mac Low born, Chicago.
1924 — Liberation leader Amilcar Cabral born, Bafata, Portuguese Guinea.
1959 — Luna II, first spacecraft to land on the moon, crashes there.
1977 —Journalist Steve Biko killed, Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa.
2003 — “Man in Black” country singer Johnny Cash dies, Nashville, Tennessee.
Between 1968 and 1978, a Memphis, Tennessee-based label called Designer Records label issued 400-500 singles and a few albums. One of them was Nuclear Blast, an album of electric gospel soul by Reverend Douglas Bell and the Stage Cruisers. Long out of print, with no surviving masters, Nuclear Blast is available again, on vinyl, God’s own format, thanks to the efforts of Oxford, Mississippi’s Big Legal Mess Records, who recently acquired the entire Designer catalog; Nuclear Blast is the third album they’ve reissued thus far.
Above: Page from article on Om in Arthur No. 22, published May 2005. Photograph by Lars Knudson, design by W.T. Nelson. Bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros on left. Drummer Chris Hakius, pictured right, has since left the band. Note Black Sabbath altar.
Ah! The closing instrumental cut from the forthcoming Om album, God Is Good, out September 29 via the great Drag City Records of Chicago. Emil Amos, of Grails fame, is Om’s new drummer…
A new song by Six Organs of Admittance, “Bar Nasha,” is featured on Al Cisneros’ multi-artist 2009 compilation for Arthur, Transmissions From Sinai, now available from Arthur’s easy-to-use mail-order store. Also featured on Transmissions is “Kopernik Trip Note,” a new song by Lichens, who will be opening for Om and Six Organs on the aforementioned East Coast swing, and “Acid Rain,” by Grails. Yeah!
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A brief illustrated history of the U.S. presidency told by the presidents themselves in the style favored by modern social networking web sites, Forty Four Presidents imagines 220 years of presidential succession pancaked into a single moment — documented simultaneously by each commander-in-chief in status updates designed for easy consumption by their Facebook friends. Each status update is accompanied by a jaunty, high-contrast profile picture intended to reflect something of the essential personality (and hotness) of the president.
Arthur Magazine 