A Poem by Reed Posey

reedposey

There is no magic if everything is magic
by Reed Posey

I wanted an answer to the difficult questions of the material world:
What existed before the big bang?
If space is expanding, what is it expanding in?
What happened to mar the pristine singular void and submit the lake of totality to the trouble of actually existing?
I did an experiment
I did an experiment to test the effects of magnets on quartz watches
People said it was a crazy thing to do, and that I would look like a crazy person
And that people would be embarrassed for me for doing science in public
Because, as every one knows, I’m not a professional scientist.
I am, however, doing science to try to figure something out that I want to know.
An experiment to test the effect of solar flares on komboucha
You wouldn’t believe the results. You literally wouldn’t. Imagine a nearly implausible result.
Now imagine I’m telling you that’s exactly what happened.
Now imagine yourself not believing me, as I wave my hands in front of me saying
I’m not shitting you, I’m really not.
I did an experiment to test the cognitive bias of people who drink diet coke
And you wouldn’t believe me, but it’s true, they exist as a singular culture
Many of whom who would kill Parent A in in order to save Parent B from Parent A
At age 15 and younger with a gun in the kitchen, yes, I’m afraid this happens again and again. Charlize Theron, your personal suffering has given your characters amazing depth.
I did an experiment and made copies in my brain
Every time you repeat something, your brain makes a copy. Every time you repeat something, your brain makes a copy.
Every time you repeat something, your brain makes a copy. Every time you repeat something, your brain makes a copy.
Every time you repeat something, your brain makes a copy. Every time you repeat something, your brain makes a copy.
An experiment to define the dimensions of the mind, in cubic inches- it turns out you can’t; the mind is 3-dimensional, holographic, and fully scalable with a nearly infinitely rescalable zoom starting at any point- it’s the resolution which changes, ostensibly based on the size of the memory or the thought.
I did an experiment playing 2 different copies the same cd on 2 different portable 10 second anti-skip protection cd players, both of Japanese manufacture, at the same time. They began in synch but got out of synch in the first two minutes.
I took them to the computer lab at UCDavis and the technicians there told me that the CD’s contained exactly the same information. As I had suspected.
I took them down to the electron microscope lab for a closer look. The man at the front desk said they were going to call security if I refused to leave.
When security got there I pleaded my case: Sirs, sirs, when you look close enough at matter there’s nothing there. Everything is made of space and a series of repulsions and attractions assigned to nuclei that are only definable by the forces assigned to them as described in the laws of the universe- there’s no speck of anything there, not when you look close enough.
It just disappears. Everything exists as energy and information: energy synchronized by the forces of data recognition conditions. The implication is that the entirety of our universe is information, and as such, it can be hacked.
The man at the desk told the officers that I was right, and asked them to let me go with a warning.
I wanted to leave them, the officers, and the scientists, with a final thought before being escorted away:
There was a time when humans lived the same as their ancestors had for hundreds and thousands of generations,
and they lived as their heirs would live for hundreds and thousands of generations more.
Humanity was cradled in the abundance of the web of life, the sustainable systems of the world.
But something happened to start an irreversible change, cascading like a virus through cultures, replacing long-standing mandates.
It was humanity’s introduction to the period of time we call history- and how long is history? 10,000? 20,000? 25,000 years? And then what?
Well, consider the metaphor of the birth canal. History, being the birth canal, is the transition zone between our animal bodies and our god-selves.
And if we stay too long, we’re in danger of poisoning the womb.
Our fingers are stuck in the delicate web, and the harder we try, the worse it looks.
Our species is stuck trying to bring its imagination into the material world, but we will all become gods when we understand how our imaginations already construct our material world, our systems of governance, political structure, economics, family structure, eating habits, work habits, aesthetic taste, psychology in general, and cognition totally.
One of the officers blogged about the event. No one commented on the entry.

IT WAS A LIVING PIECE OF GOD

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From a review by Peter Brown in the New York Review of Books of “The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism” by Patricia Crone (Cambridge University Press):

…As [Crone] presents it, Zoroastrianism as practiced preserved one basic principle: the world was good. It was good because it was suffused with an energy of light that was a direct continuation of the energy of God himself. As Crone puts it with memorable crispness: to Zoroastrians, the light of the sun and of the holy fires that they worshiped was not a symbol—it was a sample. It was a living piece of God. A world permeated with so precious a substance had to be kept pure. The safety of a divine order, fully present in the here and now, was at stake in every aspect of nature and of human society.

This amounted to a call to action. A Zoroastrian was a militant for the right order of things. Given the ravages of a constant, opposing force of evil, the order of things had to be defended and restored by means of constant efforts of reform. The world demanded not flight but perpetual vigilance, even social engineering. Only in this way would creation recover its original, undamaged radiance. It would shine again like gold, “excellent, without decay.”

And the Zoroastrians of the villages had no doubt as to how this radiance would be restored—by community of property combined with equal access to women. To outside observers, Christian or Muslim, this seemed either hilarious or obscene: “abstemious wife-sharing is always reported as if it were a merry free-for-all.” But this was not how the villagers saw it. What mattered for them was how to keep together the precious deposit of family land. For family land to break up; for each portion to follow a separate household; worse than that, for these portions to be irrevocably lost to outsiders, through the violence of the powerful and the pressure of agrarian debt: this was the sure way to impoverishment and the death of the village. Polyandrous marriage was the solution. For the Zoroastrians of the village, only a community of women could maintain the divine integrity of the land.

In reflecting on these topics, many Zoroastrians proved themselves to be far from boneheads. They examined the origins of private property with considerable moral rigor. They claimed that private property had been caused by the cold, life-denying impulse of “desire”—by an antisocial lust for land. They also denounced the swaggering “resource polygyny” of the nobility—the corralling of women as wives and concubines at the expense of potential non-noble spouses. Both desires caused “envy.” And envy lay at the root of the conflicts that destroyed the harmony of God’s creation. This was what a shadowy intellectual, Zardūsht son of Khrōsak, had thought already in the mid-third century. These ideas were taken up by Mazdak in the 530s. As a result of the preaching of Mazdak, a protracted jacquerie rocked the Iranian plateau. The villagers emptied the granaries and the harems of the nobility, until the Mazdakites were suppressed with exemplary (and much-praised) savagery by the great shah Khosrau I (531–579).

Zig-Zag ZAPPED: Chris Ziegler on California free rockers FEEDING PEOPLE (Arthur, 2013)

Originally published in Arthur No. 34 (April, 2013)

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Zig-Zag Zapped
Orange County, California psych rockers FEEDING PEOPLE left the church and entered the void. Now they’ve returned to sing their tales in glorious reverb. Chris Ziegler investigates.
Photography by Ward Robinson

Feeding People come from the Adolescents’ “Kids of the Black Hole” country, the un-Disneyfied side of Orange County, California. They met in a church band and then spiraled off into the cosmos, putting out a record in 2010 on heroic hometown emporium Burger Records that out-freaked almost all the other extremely accomplished freaks already on that label. It sounded like the battle of all battles—trying to go psychedelic in a place where it would have been so much easier to go plastic.

Don’t get me wrong. They weren’t obviously frothing at the mouth. If you didn’t know your contemporary Orange County bandspotting minutiae, you’d probably have a hard time in the wilds of Fullerton figuring out who exactly is a Feeding Person and who is in Audacity or Cosmonauts or who works buying used vinyl at Burger, indisputable ground zero of Southern California’s teenage weirdo renaissance. They’re all on the thrift store/swap meet vibe, kids who spend weekends prying out the last surviving cool shit from the tar pits of suburbia. Maybe that’s Goodwilled punk and psych records or leather boots, maybe just a decent jean jacket. (Plus band shirts bought from the band, at the show, of course.) You wouldn’t be able to tell if Feeding People were there to play or just there to watch if you saw them hanging out by a stage.

Today, founder and singer Jessie Jones and guitarist Louis Filliger are the last ones left from the first line-up of Feeding People. And even though they’re 72 hours away from the release of their new album, Island Universe, they haven’t quite left that earlier era behind. It’s like they’ve still got ash and dust on them. They’ve … experienced things. They’ve got extra energy so they can muster extra quickness, extra brightness so they can see a little farther into the dark. When they start to talk, it’s like a door is thrown open—you’ll feel the air rush past, hear the slam.

Jessie is dark-haired, slim but not slight because of some not-quite-nameable quality of presence. Even two tables away, it seems like she’s right next to you. She talks less than Louis, but when she does, everybody else shuts up. Louis has the answers, the theories, the explanations. During the French Revolution, he says, they’d start their speeches with certain words that would really HIT. (He pushes some extra power into the word—THUD.) He’s been waiting to get these stories out, he says.

Everybody with sense who writes about Feeding People talks about how something else is coming THROUGH this band. They channel, they incarnate, they let something strange and cosmic come scorching through. It’s like Philip K. Dick—in 1974, he got zapped by some power cosmic just five driving minutes from where the Burger Records stand is now, and it led him to write two million words searching for ultimate truth. (“A: The enigma remains. Q: We have learned nothing,” Dick decided.)

Continue reading →

OFFICIAL: Comets on Fire to play ATP 2013

From the Comets on Fire tumblr:

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Comets backstage at ATP with Chris Corsano, 2006.


Comets to play ATP 2013

June 2013.

Hello Comets On Fire friends and fans,

It’s been a while. Almost 5 years since our last gig to be more precise. In the meantime our membership has made other kinds of records and toured with other bands, drifted apart geographically to reside in new regions and a few of our members have been blessed with children. We are all still alive and relatively well!

In January of 2012 Ben Chasny invited the semi-estranged COF membership to join him as his backing band in rehearsal and recording for the Six Organs of Admittance album “Ascent”. It had been almost 4 years since we stepped off the stage after our last performance at the Sub Pop 20 anniversary festival up in Seattle in the summer of 2008. Rehearsing and recording the Six Organs record was a blast for all of us and we quickly found out that even though we weren’t doing a COF project specifically that the Comets spirit was clearly alive and well in the heart of our playing together as a band again.

After completion of “Ascent” some of the COF members accompanied Chasny as the Six Organs backing band on subsequent tours throughout 2012. When touring cooled down for various members in 2013 Comets began to reconvene as a group in jam sessions in Oakland to make some music, some noise, thrash out and just see what happened. From our first weekend playing music together we were thrilled and surprised by the quality and quantity of material that we were coming up with and again thrilled and reassured that the old sights, sounds and feel of the group was lifting off on command. What began as a jam session to see if the band still had a spiritual and social center most likely has become the beginning of a very leisurely paced construction on a new record. But that’s another story and there is little more to tell of it at this point other than we are being creative and creating new music as a group at a pace that is totally absent of coaxing and time pressures.

The real story here is that Comets On Fire will be performing live at the end of this year in London and at the final ATP in Camber Sands, UK. We feel that Barry Hogan and the ATP co. have played a great part in the success and general “fun” of Comets on Fire and we want to ride that holiday camp train one more time. We have great Technicolor memories of the holiday camp festivals put on by ATP and not just the moments on stage or palling around with other artists in a drunken haze but also Utrillo swinging from the chandelier in our chalet until it dislodges from the ceiling and sends him flying down on the glass table top, kids we’ve never seen before storming our trailer apartment at 3am and then kicking the bathroom door open because they couldn’t figure out how to open it (yes, it was locked, someone was inside (multiple people actually, passed out), spending long days off laying around on the picnic benches in the courtyard drinking wine and eating English cheese fresh off the southern farms and of course seeing some of the most astounding band lineups in the history of rock music crammed into one weekend on 3 different stages. I believe in the day and a half we were at the last ATP Comets attended I saw the Stooges, Sonic Youth, The Melvins, Peter Brotzmann, Flipper, Sun City Girls, Dinosaur Jr—and that’s with falling asleep early the first night due to drunkenness and jet lag and leaving at dawn Sunday morning…the shit that a fan can see with a 3 day pass and a blood transfusion on the morning of the 3rd day is absolutely mind boggling.

So anyhow, we’re doing it again. Fuck it!!! ATP is a blast, see you there.

Audio trailer by JULIAN COPE for his new album “Revolutionary Suicide”

Via headheritage:

Welcome to 2013 and the truly Post-Thatcher Age, and welcome to Julian Cope’s long delayed new album REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE: eleven sumptuous and highly charged songs that teem with outrageous orchestrations and compellingly-crafted words of protest, activism and historical richness. Weep along with the dreadful beauty of the Archdrude’s most epic ever song ‘The Armenian Genocide’, sway with the bucolic agricultural rhythms and devotional lyrics of ‘Hymn to the Odin’, pump your fists in the air to the Detroit soul of the title-track, or just give yourself entirely to the divine-but-gaping 70-minute-long musical maw, nay, the Hot Mess that is REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE. New poems? You got it! New concepts? You got it! We got the Mayans’ predictions out the way and we’re all still here. So maybe everything that went before 2013 was just a dry-run for what’s to come. Perhaps you’ll even believe that once you’ve heard the enormous scope and vision of REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE.

Annnnnnnd… Julian is now on Twitter.