Predestination; a concept older than free will and borne out by recent scientific elucidations on historical dialectics, genetics and chemical psychology. Each of us is caught in a tangled labyrinth of circumstance and cosmic programming, acting out our grotesque fate in an awful, ignorant manner.
The restless contractions of the astral bodies affect us in a profound way; each offhand movement of a planet can have enormous repercussions for humanity and our various client species, via magnetic fields, space dust and thoughtless lunar alignment. The moon can likewise be an irresponsible entity, tumbling through the sky carelessly, without regard to the tidal waves it may or may not cause. A correlation could be drawn to our own unthinking rearrangement of ant life or microscopic organism culture. This column is a transmission then, not only to the Arthur readers (who have star signs), but to the stars as well, an attempt to get them to understand that even their nonchalant actions have repercussions…
Capricorn Your good taste and “attention to detail” is your cachet. Recently however, everyone seems to have good taste. It’s a veritable “Age of Capricorn” with the whole of society engaged in conspicuous collecting of obscurant minutiae. These poseurs are like a race of mushrooms who’ve blossomed overnight, and they’ve seemingly rendered you redundant. Or maybe not. Legend has it that there’s still a backwater region, somewhere in New Guinea, where no one knows about the particular labels and sub-trends which are your passion. Go there now and take your rightful place as their inscrutable aesthete.
Aquarius You’re tired of the simplistic astrological characterization which has dogged you ever since the hippiexploitation musical Hair. You dug all the attention at the time, but now you’d like to dissociate yourself from those fabulous furry freaks of yesteryear. You’ve found yourself pigeonholed; you find it hard getting jobs as a butcher or a Pentagon military contractor, for example. It’s time for everyone to know that Aquarians aren’t just well-meaning free-thinkers living in schoolbuses and teepees. That nazis like Ronald Reagan and slaveowners like George Washington were Aquarians too. That Aquarians are tough mothers like Rollins and rabble rousers like John “Rotten.” And that if this millennium is indeed the “Age of Aquarius,” it’s a bloody epoch featuring war and nuclear proliferation; not just food co-ops. Your work in expanding social consciousness about Aquarius’ versatility is absolutely crucial for the people of your sign.
Pisces You are the sign of the fish. Fish travel in large groups, called “schools,” but you hate school, which makes you an unusual fish; a romantic, loner, James Dean-style fish. Part of a new “me generation” in the fish world, wary of social conventions—such as egg laying and gill use—and intent on individual freedom. It’s a very American outlook and one which many in the fish world resent. They see your insistent individuality as selfish and bad for the survival of the species, especially if you represent a turning point in evolution. You on the other hand, see them as conformist drones, bound by stifling tradition. Make a civic gesture toward them to allay their fear; tell them you haven’t given up on school altogether, you’re just taking a year off to find yourself.
Here’s some proper Sunday morning message music from North Carolina’s Bishop Manning and The Manning Family, sourced off the recently released “Converted Mind – The Early Recordings,” a fantastic new collection of their recordings. “Converted Mind” features 28 cuts, recorded mostly from the 1970s, with extensive liner notes by Alan Young, vintage photos and 7-inch label shots. Highly recommended for believers and non-believers alike. Available on CD for $13 direct from the Fat Possum Records affiliate, Big Legal Mess Records of Oxford, Mississippi.
“Freeman House is a former commercial salmon fisher who has been involved with a community-based watershed restoration effort in northern California for more than 25 years. He is a co-founder of the Mattole Salmon Group and the Mattole Restoration Council. His book, Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species received the best nonfiction award from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for quality of prose. He lives with his family in northern California.”
That’s the biographical note for Freeman House on the Lannan Foundation website. We would add that earlier in his life, Freeman edited Innerspace, a mid-1960s independent press magazine for the nascent psychedelic community; married Abbie and Anita Hoffman at Central Park on June 10, 1967; and was a member of both New York City’s Group Image and the San Francisco Diggers.
This piece was delivered as the Rufus Putnam Lecture at the Ohio University, April 24, 1996. Parts of this lecture have been published in Martha’s Journal and in Raise the Stakes.
Forgetting and Remembering the Instructions of the Land: The Survival of Places, Peoples, and the More-than-human
by Freeman House
I: Forgetting
Maps are magical icons. We think of them as pictures of reality, but they are actually talismans that twist our psyche in one direction or another. Maps create the situation they describe. We use them hoping for help in finding our way around unknown territory, hoping they will take us in the right direction. We are hardly aware that they are proscribing the way we think of ourselves, that they are defining large portions of our personal identities. With a world map in our hands, we become citizens of nations. We become Americans, Japanese, Sri Lankans. With a national map in front of us, we locate ourselves in our home state; we become Ohioans or Californians. Unfolding the road map on the car seat beside us, we become encapsulated dreamers hurtling across a blurred landscape toward the next center of human concentration. Even with a topographical map, the map closest to being a picture of the landscape, we are encouraged to describe our location by township, range, and section—more precise, more scientific, we are told, than describing where we are in terms of a river valley or mountain range.
When Rufus Putnam’s Ohio Company acquired its part of the Northwest Territories, the first thing General Putnam did, perhaps before he had even seen all of it, was to draw squares on a map—townships, quarter-sections, long sections. Putnam was, after all, a surveyor and a land developer. Those blue lines on maps that are now yellow with age set in motion a process of systematic forgetfulness which may just now be reaching its culmination. As precisely as if he were using a scalpel, the general was separating the new human inhabitants from the sensual experience of their habitat. The new lines brought with them a quality of perception, one that randomly separated waterways from their sources. They fragmented the great forests before a single tree was cut.
If the landscape was a radio, in 1787 the volume began to be turned down on the channel that had carried the messages of the other creatures and the plants and the winds and waters full blast for thousands of years of ’round-the-clock broadcasting. People had been living in southern Ohio for millennia before the good general arrived, and there is every indication they were able to hear what the landscape was telling them. They experienced themselves as a part of the landscape that lay between themselves and the horizon. The landscape and the other creatures in it had a voice within their hearts and minds. Their maps were in the form of stories that carried down through the generations information about where and when the food plants were at their best, information about the seasonal migration routes of other species — species that might be important for either food or communion. The stories told of seasonal cycles — planting times, flood years, birth control. But as far as we know, no maps. And most certainly no maps with straight lines on them.
President Jefferson would soon instruct his surveyors the length and breadth of the enormous Louisiana Purchase to do the same thing—and with the best of intentions. Map it; divide it up by township, range, and section. It was a management problem. Breaking up the nearly unimaginable breadth of the newly acquired lands into tidy grids would make possible their orderly occupation by the yeoman farmer democrats who resided at the heart of Jefferson’s vision for the new world. This was the first step into bringing order to a sprawling wilderness, spreading its use peacefully among a rapidly encroaching population in a society where the engine of order was commerce. Political thinking of the time (as it still is) was driven by John Locke’s idea that the primary function of government is the protection of property. If the government was to have something to govern, it needed to turn all that land into property.
The technique had its benefits. Smaller grids provided for the establishment of instant towns and villages, centers of commerce and transportation. The larger grids, for sale at a dollar an acre, provided space for pioneer trappers and farmers to provide the amenities necessary for the growth of a new society. American civilization established itself with startling efficiency and rapidity. The previous inhabitants were startled right out of a culture that had evolved for thousands of years in equilibrium with the life processes surrounding. Too often, they were startled right out of their skins.
But the system had unanticipated side effects which we are only beginning to understand in the last 30 years, as we have discovered something called the environment. The same practical necessities which brought pioneer farmers to an intimate familiarity with the soils, micro-climates, and wildlife within their own fence lines allowed them to forget the continuity of life processes beyond the boundaries registered on plat maps—the parameters of life we now call ecosystems and watersheds. The parcels could be bought and sold, in the process acquiring an abstract identity separated from their function in the landscape. The wealth of diversity and particularity that is the very definition of any piece of ground in the natural world is forgotten, subsumed by its description in terms of commercial value.
Predestination; a concept older than free will and borne out by recent scientific elucidations on historical dialectics, genetics and chemical psychology. Each of us is caught in a tangled labyrinth of circumstance and cosmic programming, acting out our grotesque fate in an awful, ignorant manner. The restless contractions of the astral bodies affect us in a profound way; each offhand movement of a planet can have enormous repercussions for humanity and our various client species, via magnetic fields, space dust and thoughtless lunar alignment. The moon can likewise be an irresponsible entity, tumbling through the sky carelessly, without regard to the tidal waves it may or may not cause. A correlation could be drawn to our own unthinking rearrangement of ant life or microscopic organism culture. This column is a transmission then, not only to the Arthur readers (who have star signs), but to the stars as well, an attempt to get them to understand that even their nonchalant actions have repercussions…
Libra You are armed with scales in the one hand, and a sword of justice in the other. Also, you’re blindfolded. Everyone you meet is weighed and then sliced accordingly. You often slice the wrong portion because of this strange voluntary eye impairment. As with many handicapped people though, your other senses have become hyper-attuned. This means that, while justice is blind, it can smell and hear very well. According to Marshall McLuhan, this puts you at odds with society because, since the introduction of the Guttenberg press, people are much more sight-reliant now than in previous historical epochs. Due to your alienation from the hegemonic eye-based world, you enact harsher sentences than you normally would. But that’s okay; they deserve it. Keep on slicin’!
Scorpio You’re proud of your designation as the cosmological fornicator; and you are good…maybe too good. People are starting to resent you. Didn’t you know that God hates sex? This month take a self-imposed dry spell; go to your pal the Dalai Lama’s house and mow the lawn or read a book. You’re starting to smell the place up.
Sagittarius You like to give people rides on your stout equestrian torso. Recently though you’ve been fined for defecating on the sidewalk. The double standard is clear; while the mounted police are allowed to spread feces everywhere, you and your beast man brethren are fined and flogged. Though this oppression is maddening, remember that these modern day chevaliers are mere jealous pretenders while you, Sagittarius, are the real thing. They attempt animal fusion through fancy gear but at the end of the day (in the words of Conway Twitty) “it’s only make believe.” Otherwise they would understand the difficulty of straddling a toilet with an ungainly horse bottom.
Capricorn Recently you’ve taken time off from fondling your impeccable record collection and turned your gaze outward. Like fellow sea goats Nixon, Stalin and Mao, you’re compelled to commit mass murder in the name of some political theory. The same idealism unites the two seemingly disparate urges of course; perfectionism can be a harsh taskmaster. Remember: just as you should allow that late-era Fleetwood Mac album to sit in your bin without fear of a purge, so you must forgive humankind of their foibles and let them live.
Aquarius You’re angry and rightly so. What’s the use of being the water bearer when everyone has their own personal bottles of the substance these days? In fact, aspersions have been cast as to the quality of your particular stock. Apparently it’s not from a “reputable enough” source. Don’t worry though, this poseur shit will die and you’ll be there with the water when no one else has it anymore. And they won’t miss you til that well runs dry. But in the meantime it seems important to expand your repertoire. Perhaps it’s time to bear something else for awhile, like pizza or insulin.
Pisces You are a fish or a pair of fish swimming toward one another. The fish bowl is a drag for the likes of you, the fishbowl inhabitant. The redundancy of the route and the ammonia levels in the water are getting you down. Plus the fact that you eat those flakes made of ground-up fish entrails and worse. That’s pretty degrading. In the old days, before fish food, people just fed their fish leftovers, such as the crust of a peanut butter sandwich or an old lasagna. Due to the bogus animal food industry though, you have this sicko soilent green food factory crap. You’ve gotta break out of that bowl and go get a fish filet.
Aries You’ve sliced through the enemy shield wall and you’re covered with their chopped up arms and legs. Now it’s time to burn the church and take all the precious items back home to your cold and brutal kingdom. But you’re tired of this life of conflict. You want to settle down and maybe colonize this burned up battleground. Do it! Follow that dream! These people can be your new subjects. But don’t betray Odin to the Christian gods or he’ll turn his wrath on you.
Taurus You’re feeling smug. As though you’d figured it all out. But as usual you’ve turned a blind eye to the exploitation which has befallen your archetype/namesake. Did you know that in thousands of cowboy bars across America the bull’s backside’s likeness has been reproduced in mechanical form for riding in a latently erotic display? That grinning, self satisfied cow people are using your facsimile as an enormous crypto-vibrator? Isn’t that disgusting?
Gemini This month, strangle your twin in his sleep. she/he’s holding you back! You’re the real star and they’re not pulling their weight. Aren’t you sick of dragging that idiot around with you, while every good deed turns to naught due to their constant nagging and naysaying? Their doubt has wreaked enough havoc on your life! At least have him /her clean out their desk and leave the premises. And don’t listen to the tears; it hurts you as much as it hurts them.
Cancer Your big claw isn’t very good for doing fine tuned tasks such as drawing or splinter removal. Meanwhile your small claw isn’t good for scaring away predators. You’ve got a bad case of dyslexia and you keep getting confused with which claw to use. Also, people think you’re coy since you inadvertently walk sideways when they approach you.
Leo You’re interested in changing your title. King/Queen of the jungle doesn’t speak to you, jungle inhabitants don’t pay taxes and besides, you’ve never even seen a jungle! Maybe you should rule a tony stretch of Manhattan or a monied subdivision in Maclean. You could be: “Queen of Central Park West” or “God of Fondlewood Court.”
Virgo You’re treating your inborn repression as a license to work with some unsavory elements like Opus Dei, The Vatican Bank and CIA-mafia types. If you don’t get with it, Jesus won’t give you a golden cookie when you die.
How a brush with death, a haunted guitar and filmmaker Harmony Korine helped Spiritualized’s Jason Spaceman wrestle a new album of narcotic gospel music into being.
Text: Jay Babcock Photography: Stacy Kranitz
Art direction: Yasmin Khan and Michael Worthington
Originally published in Arthur No. 30 (July 2008)
There are some humans who seem specially equipped to not just interact with consciousness-altering drugs, but to thrive from their persistent use. For two decades, English musician Jason Pierce, aka J. Spaceman, seemed to be one of these special specimens. His first band, the succinctly named Spacemen 3, was a triumph of drugs, sound and stubborness—”Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to,” “Fucked up inside,” and “For all the fucked up children of the world,” were bandied-about slogans/mottos; Playing With Fire and The Perfect Prescription were album titles; and a serious, incandescent reconciliation of drone, blues, rock n roll, junkie metaphor and primitive psychedelic sound effects was what they achieved. Formed in 1982 with Pete Kember aka Sonic Boom, with whom, astonishingly, Jason shared a birthdate and birthplace hospital, Spacemen 3 burned both ends brightly (if distantly—they never made it to America, and relatively few people saw them in England) before disintegrating in 1991 after a series of truly despicable actions by Kember.
As Spacemen 3 fell to earth, Pierce launched Spiritualized, releasing a series of studio albums in the ’90s combining an ever-broadening musical palate with an audiophile’s attention to detail and a continuing lyrical preoccupation with the idea of Need—need for companionship, for drugs, for hope, for relief from suffering. 1997’s woozy Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space, a breakup/lament album of epic musical scope incorporating gospel, noise and sublime bliss-outs, caught the public’s attention unlike any other album Pierce has made before or since, but it should be understood that ALL OF THEM ARE GREAT. Pierce has stuck to his themes, to his minimalist-maximalist vision, and each album—from the coldstar beauty of 1995’s Pure Phase to the orchestral grandeur of 2001’s Let It Come Down to the raw, stoic ache of 2003’s Amazing Grace—offers a variation on that single approach, or to use his metaphor, a single mainline. Live, Spiritualized tend toward the overwhelming; I’ve seen people black out, weep openly, mount each other in joy at shows through the years—if that isn’t evidence of being in the presence of transcendence, I don’t know what is.
When word leaked out in July 2005 that Pierce was in hospital nearing death, most of us assumed that the OD catastrophe (to quote an early Spacemen 3 song) had finally happened. The truth was in some ways scarier—Pierce was down to 110 pounds and taking half-second breaths, with his wife undergoing grief counseling in preparation for the seeming imminent departure—because he had contracted double pneumonia, and a doctor had somehow failed to detect it in an earlier visit.
Almost three years later, on the eve of the release of the new Spiritualized album (punningly titled Songs in A & E—“A & E” is British shorthand for the “Accidents & Emergency” department of a hospital), Arthur meets up with Jason in Williamsburg. Wearing white pants, a white Roky Erickson t-shirt and silver sneakers, Pierce is in good spirits, and with the sunglasses and hair, he seems ageless: it could be 1988, 1998 or 2008. It’s all the same, and yet things have changed. It’s not yet dusk, so Jason insists on Coca-Cola rather than something harder. As we head through the bar to the backyard pebble garden, we pass a large medical poster displaying two human lungs. I gasp. Jason laughs. He’s lived to play with fire another day.
Published in the Border Crossing issue (Arthur No. 18, Sept. 2005). All the good photography is Simon Lund. Bad photos taken by author Dave “David” Reeves.
I’m not bragging, but I had a little skin cancer. I walked around L. A. trying to generate sympathy with it, maybe get a free beer. Nobody cared. Everybody has a disease now.
A friend of mine insisted I come to a rainforest clinic near his hotel in Iquitos, Peru. “There’s no cancer here. This is the where big pharmaceutical companies come to crib traditional medicines from Amazonian witch doctors for a ‘healthy profit.'”
Three derelict 727s lay off the runway in Iquitos, all with the same story: “Crash landed one night, full of coca paste. The pilot ran off into the jungle.”
The Iquitos airport is at the southern border of the cradle of cocaine. For years the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had a rule called “Fly and Die”; one of the program’s outcomes was that a reported 60 civilian aircraft were downed by DEA agents between Iquitos and Columbia. This program lost funding last November when agents blasted a Cessna full of missionaries out of the sky. Consequently, the DEA is now gone from the area, and continuous flights north make up what is known as ”The Air Bridge”—the route by which Peruvian coca paste is flown to Columbian processing labs, yielding two thirds of the world’s cocaine.
Iquitos runs on unmuffled mopeds racing from red light to red light at full speed. It’s fun at first but after awhile you feel like you live in a wasp’s nest from the insistent buzzing.
“The Venice of Peru” is tacked together from the continuous stream of balsa rafts floating down the Amazon. Harvesting balsa is profitable only when used to hide the great bulks of coca paste sent down river. All day and night saw blades shriek in the mills lining the river, giving the air a fresh piney scent. It is in this way that the world loses its last rainforest to gain another slum.
The population of Iquitos is estimated at a half a million people, but there is no way to parse the burgeoning chaos of the floating ghetto called Belen. No one starves here as fruit falls out of the tree right on your head. If you can’t hook a fish, just wait for one of these ugly bastards to crawl up on land.
When the food comes in Peru they say, “Let’s eat a little of life and death.”
Back when the Soviets had money they provided Peru the bulk of its economic aid. In order to sabotage those godless Commies, the CIA exponentialized the cocaine trade by facilitating the formation of cartels that moved coca from the cradle of cocaine to labs in Columbia and then to American ghettoes where it was wildly popular and generated enough profit for a lot of really wonderful covert CIA operations.
This was a blow to the Soviets, and so they started a great rumor that has apparently killed more missionaries than the DEA. The rumor goes like this: The Americans have a squad of silent glider planes that land at night and harvest the fat of children, which is used to fuel our rockets to the moon.
Predestination: a concept older than free will and borne out by recent scientific elucidations on historical dialectics, genetics and chemical psychology. Each of us is caught in a tangled labyrinth of circumstance and cosmic programming, acting out our grotesque fate in an awful, ignorant manner.
The restless contractions of the astral bodies affect us in a profound way; each offhand movement of a planet can have enormous repercussions for humanity and our various client species, via magnetic fields, space dust and thoughtless lunar alignment. The moon can likewise be an irresponsible entity, tumbling through the sky carelessly, without regard to the tidal waves it may or may not cause. A correlation could be drawn to our own unthinking rearrangement of ant life or microscopic organism culture. This column is a transmission then, not only to the Arthur readers (who have star signs), but to the stars as well, an attempt to get them to understand that even their nonchalant actions have repercussions…
Dear VIRGO, Your sign has been seen by you as a prison cell, a life sentence, an inhabited hell on earth. At birth (or was it conception?) you mourned your fate, sensing destiny’s cruel joke on you. A quick survey confirmed that indeed, you were superior to everyone; you had no peers. You attempt to help the sheep with their painful inadequacy. Still, the burden of being an almost-alien talent/beauty/intellect is poignant, and typically leads to self-induced disfigurement (Michael Jackson) and/or willful mental retardation (Gene Simmons, Bruce Springsteen, Chrissie Hynde) so as to mollify the resentment of the flock.
As the perfect VIRGO, the key to overcoming this self-destructive pitch toward mediocrity is to ponder the twin bromides: “nobody’s perfect” and “practice makes perfect.” Though paradoxical, each venerable maxim is as correct as the other one (a=b). Seen as a simple arithmetic, one concludes from the computation of the two truisms “practice makes perfect” ( x2 = p) and “nobody’s perfect” (n=p) that x squared=n (practice makes nobody) meaning that 2/n=x (nobody divided by 2 equals practice) so x or practice=yob or don, which denote an English commoner and an Italian man of stature respectively and which also = p and so even the commoner is shown to be amongst the perfect, a revolutionary sentiment and a stop order to your own disgusting habit of self-denigration.
Dear LIBRA, You are the Judge, your bizarre paradox held in the balance of your symbolic scales. A self-righteous gourmet, a fist-shaking hedonist; like an anointed emir whose finger foods and harem are presumed god given, you should be a target of outrage—but somehow, through cosmic arrangement, you’re charming and delightful. Stunning even. And above reproach. Because cosmology appointed your vile hypocrisy, it stands as a beacon to the impossibility of a common standard for all mankind. Therefore, like your astrological brethren, Nietzsche, Bolan, Bardot and Coltrane, you are absolved of a frail and petty nature. Your pious sanctimony actually shines a light toward mutual acceptance and you are encouraged to “keep on keepin’ on.”
Dear SCORPIO, You are magic when we are alone. The fluid extension of my own thoughts, our communication is as easy and lucid as a fevered dreamscape. But when others intrude, you become strange, distant, perverse and sometimes rude. I grow accustomed to meeting you only in your domain; you rule a dark grotto, the underworld, an interior place through which only two can travel. When circumstances become socialized and introduced into a casual commonality, you rebel, rend and destroy the self-satisfied banter of consensus. This disarming characteristic must now be utilized as a revolutionary weapon to awaken the culture from its fascist monologue. Inject your scorpion’s venom into the one-sided conversation and cause the pundits to wither!
Dear SAGITTARIUS, You feel lost now; your man beast posture was feted in other eras but now has been deemed irrelevant by the moralistic arbiters who rule us. They have a new consumerist hedonism they are propagating and your animist and thoughtful rutting doesn’t fit their beer commercial scheme. Your philosophical meandering and polymorphous perversity have become marginalized as anti-social factors, leaving you to roam the shrinking forest with the displaced fauna. Don’t run into the road with the other critters though; you’ll end up roadkill like fellow centaurs Jim and Jimi and so many badgers and possums, driven to death by technocratic despotism. Stay in the woods now (remember M-26-7 in the Maestra or the VC; waiting is half the battle).
Dear CAPRICORN, You have built a wonderful kingdom and yet you are not sated. It is your noble will to attain the highest perch, but when you get there, to the top of grand old Everest, you find it crowded with snowboarders and school groups. You must reconfigure your aims, this banal race is unedifying and already lost. It will lead you to the conclusion: “While you will never be the first to climb Mt. Everest, you could still be the first to explode it with a nuclear device.”
Dear AQUARIUS, Your revolutionary fervor has always been mediated by an underlying conservatism which makes you popular at dinner parties. The balance is important, so as to ensure proper digestion. It’s time now to reverse the equation and underpin tradition with insurrection; the tradition of violent destruction a la red terror and Robespierre. This splendid flip-flop is what has rewarded Aquarians through history with the mantle of memorability…which is the bedrock of tradition after all.
Dear PISCES, It’s true the world is against you. Despite your amusing crankiness they want to wipe you out. It’s a stone age urge, to destroy what they can’t conceive of. Like a Confucian on Madison Avenue, you are despised. Tonight should be spent sharpening sticks and covering them in urine.
Dear ARIES, You are the eternal Warrior. You come from the land of ice and snow…where the hot winds blow. Your life has been tattooed by controversy because of a propensity to spring to arms and vengeance when others would mediate or passively burn. Reared in chainmail diapers, hacking with a rusty sword, the stars allotted you not a home, but a trench, encrusted with barbed wire. Even in victory, you were often feared and shunned. But now you are vindicated, because the sheet is torn off and the world is revealed to be in a constant state of violent struggle; classes, nations, races, genders perverted by the money god and wrapped in a state of vicious tumult. Your particular, unequaled passion is needed now like important Aries’ in the past (V. I. Lenin). You are not the problem, but the solution. You must rise to be… Overlord.
Dear TAURUS, It’s difficult to be held up to such esteem. The namesake for your archetype; respected, feared and therefore slaughtered by a matador for the amusement of a crowd… A sense of this exploitive, patronizing theatre is what fuels your famous rage at the most mundane circumstance. But a rearrangement of perspective invites your mind to India where the Bull is revered and even sacred, an untouchable agent of harmony. An occasional trip to the sub continent via meditation will keep you balanced as you walk through the “china shop” of life.
Dear GEMINI, You’ve always identified with the loser. It is the Gemini’s “twin” nature to see through the eyes of the hapless and ennobled sufferer (a la Morrissey and Ray Davies). This has graced you with a sympathetic manner which grants you access to the inner sanctums of the most exclusive backyards and basements. Yet, at a certain point, it’s no longer enough to commiserate with victimization. To identify with the loser predestines loss and you can no longer afford to lose. Losing means Camp X-ray or worse and eventual mass extinction for everything worthwhile. Read Mao’s VI. IMPERIALISM AND ALL REACTIONARIES ARE PAPER TIGERS for “winning” inspiration.
Dear CANCER, Your sidestepping style is the template for all future endeavors. With our linear mode of thinking discredited by the impending armageddon, we see that lateral movement is really the “way to go.” You must proselytize the fine points of this crustacean manner to those laboring in the illusory “race.”
Dear LEO, Your mane is looking bedraggled of late as you see your “jungle kingdom” under new governance. Due to the deficit, the International Monetary Fund have been established as interim rulers and they’ve decided a rearrangement of the economy is in order. The jungle will have to be clear-cut so as to establish a “special zone” without labor laws for the textile industry. You can either stay and work on Tommy Hilfiger tank tops for nine cents a day or flee into the hills with your AK-47. I know you’ll make the right choice.
Sticky with summer mosquito swarm and candy apple sweat I stood on the corner in a town you can’t pronounce selling my wares. One dry frigid cunt for rent. Ten toes to suck. Two abnormally enormous nipples to chew. My mouth sucks like a greedy maw but that like most things is a big fat lie. The only thing I am greedy for is McDonald’s money. I like the coffee and hot apple pie. I don’t think about the hands, the hands that have touched my pie and put it in a bag. I also have plastic petunias for sale for people who are too afraid of Jesus to dilly dally in my murky waters.
SIMPLE GESTURES Oliver Hall raps with radical traditionalists Faun Fables.
Originally published in Arthur No. 10 (May 2004)
The airwaves are so saturated with false memories of childhood you can’t walk around without a helmet or you’ll become a legal idiot—I mean the playground loves of heartstruck emo people, the barely fetal fancies of Radiohead stillborn colder than forceps, the general irresistible reflex contractions against dilation of the idios kosmos, not to speak of Michael Jackson, Jon Benet Ramsey and her twin that lived, Britney Spears.
The urge towards the nubile has expressed itself nowhere more strongly than in folk music. Once a deeply weird idiom devoted to the mysteries of hardship, tradition, games, abundance and death, questionable politics have transformed folk music on the one hand into dead pledges of allegiance to corpses of the Stalinist left, on the other into personal confessional songwriting so banal as to make you yearn wholly and bodily for a gruesome fatal mining disaster. But there are a few musicians who have the brains and guts to struggle with the old questions, the old answers; in other words one thing you can do on a Friday night is witness the miraculous music of the Bay Area’s Faun Fables.
Mainly you should do this because Dawn McCarthy, the Faun of Faun Fables, can totally, cruelly possess an audience like no other performer I’ve ever seen except maybe Clevelanders David Thomas and Robert Kidney. Most recently I saw her do this at Spaceland in Los Angeles on Valentine’s Day, but I’d seen her do it—participated in the thrill even—seven or eight times before, in all kinds of situations. In bars throbbing with the old procreant urge, I’ve heard Dawn raise her voice to a pitch and volume no one could ignore, shutting up the whole meat market; at Faun Fables’ recent concert at downtown L. A. rockhole the Smell, she began the show walking through the audience yodeling, winning hearts and minds one by one with voice and presence. (Dawn: “If you talk about yodeling to people they laugh about it, and they go ‘Oh God, yodeling, that’s so corny and weird,’ but you just do yodeling and it does something to people. Must be a code in the DNA…”) Dawn and her collaborator Nils Frykdahl, of the heavy, funny, scary bands Idiot Flesh and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, tour the country playing avant rock clubs, churches, high schools.
Arthur Magazine 