Happy May 1st, which is to say,
“Happy The Cross-Quarter Day Known As Beltane,”
a day associated with fire and with fertility…

I am celebrating, in the degree that I am
(or better put, when am I not celebrating SOMETHING?)
by listening to recordings of the band called Bruce
and by finally moving my website out from under those evil smograts @ Globat.
Mind I’m going to the also fairly ugly GoDaddy,
but right now any change is for the better.
This also means the site might be down briefly…
Don’t panic.

With any luck it should all be figured out by tomorrow,
allowing me then to spend Saturday freaking out and packing
so that I can go to Hawaii on Sunday.

(That, I suspect, is the real celebration.)

It is true that there is a conflict of significance between the
Solstice MP3 I posted up top
and the actualness of today being Beltane -
but what the hell, I’ll probably post it again at the solstice anyway -
and it is fire-related, which is the real affinity that has been tugging at me this morning.
Just enjoy it and don’t sweat the details,
at this late date.

phar aut
5

“Since March 2003, The Hop-Frog Kollectiv has been hosting monthly experimental art, music & poetry gathering. To celebrate HFK is hosting two nights of the best experimental music Los Angeles has to offer. From ear piercing harsh noise to noise rock to asiatic dreams and melodies, the two nights features the Kollectiv’s dearest friends and mosted respected artists from the LA area. The festival will be fully documented for the upcoming Dung Mummy DVD/CD compilation. Each night features sax wielder, Steve Mackay who played on the seminal Stooges album, Funhouse. In addition Steve had been a member of the Violent Femmes, Snake Finger and has led the international Radon Ensemble with members of Sikhara, Amps fo Christ and much more.”

Or, from www.hop-frog.com…

“Dung Mummy is an ANTI-fascist experimental arts institution hosted by the hop-frog kollectiv. It is our goal to give artists a voice and platform that would otherwise be shunned by the Los Angeles/Hollywood matrix of hell-hole politics and depressing, self-confidence bleaching antics. We are dedicated to political dissent, artistic revolution and experimental realization.”

…All of which sounds good to me. So I went to the second night of the 5-year-anniversary Dung Mummy festival, only scantily informed.

I did know a few other things going in. Most of these things stemmed from my purchase not long ago of the Post Asiatic sampler, “Lost War Dream Music.” Disc 1 is hypnotic and nearly entirely awesome. Tracks by Seattle’s lunatic guitarist Bill Horist (who plays with cymbals wedged under his guitar strings, among other novelties) and the deceased musical madman Muslimgauze (I dig his “Farouk Enjineer” disc in particular) are interspersed with tracks by bands with names like Amps For Christ (very cool - see below), Refrigerator Mothers, Hop-Frog Kollectiv, and other weirdnesses. I can’t always tell one track from another, but that works to the disc’s advantage.

Disc 2 hasn’t sucked me in so much. I will give it time. ***

The disc’s notes and the online literature refer to something called “Post-Asiatic” music which basically amounts to the largely uninformed appropriation of traditional Asian musical elements and the running with said elements in a variety of directions. I can dig it - I listen to lots of Japanese rocknroll, bunches of traditional Vietnamese, Balinese, Tibetan Buddhist and rural Chinese music among other things. I could probably call my own music “Post Asiatic” (though it would give my Taiwanese-American girlfriend fits if I did) but I prefer “Post World.” In any case, the results of this not-so-cohesive-as-it-sounds movement are varied in quality and sensibility and liking some of it is no guarantee of liking all of it, though it makes for a nicely information-rich cultural system when it all gets banded together.

As the reader is by now aware, the Hop Frog Kollectiv has much to do with the Dung Mummy Festival, and several of the bands from the compilation were on the bill for Saturday night. Actually, the bands I initially thought I wanted to see were mostly billed for Friday night, so I thought of going then even though I first heard of the thing on Friday afternoon.

But then I saw that Steve Mackay, saxophone player from the excellent album “Fun House” by the original Stooges, was performing on both nights and that on the second night he would be backed by Liquorball. Liquorball is associated with Grady Runyan. Grady Runyan is associated with Monoshock and with The Bad Trips, bands which have put out two of my favorite records (”Walk To The Fire” and “The Bad Trips,” respectively). I listen to The Bad Trips more, and the album is newer, but Monoshock has things that sound more like “songs” if you’re into that. Anyway, I dig Grady’s guitar playing and I went and took in Saturday night mainly to see him play.

There were more bands on the bill than is almost conceivable. Here is a rundown of what I was into:

Openers Metal Rouge played a kind of improvised noise for guitar, keys and voice (man on guitar, woman on keys and voice), all treated heavily with electronic effects. This music was not at all in any kind of realm of jazz or blues-derived improv. It was more akin to Japanese freeform in that it started somewhere relevant only to its own sensibility and proceeded to move, slowly, to somewhere else without following any clearcut precedent or blazed trail of any kind. This kind of thing is amazing when you hear it for the first time - I am well acquainted with the type so for me the novelty was in the personalities and the instrumentation. I liked her voice alright, I enjoyed the guitar player, some of it was bracing and some of it was enveloping and some of the squiggly high notes were very funny. I think this group probably works better live than on CD (unless recorded in just the right or just the wrong sort of way).

The third group did something similar but added a woman on drums, whose tribal pounding really made it. They took the freeform improv thang and added hypnotic groove to the equation. I boogied. This group, whose name I do not at the moment recall, included a singer-with-effects who also played bits of keys and recorder, plus a bass and a guitar if my memory serves. Noisy and fun.

Next up was howardAmb, a duo who flat out blew our minds! Instrumentation = James (electronically treated voice, Q-Chord) and Stefan (drums, electronic drums and samples, treated voice). They played polyrhythmic songs and things that might have been trancey jams. Their energy is loving and wonderful. They were giving out free copies of their pre-release CD - I’ll report back when I’ve listened to it. Go and see this band.

Hmm… I recall enjoying Amps For Christ a lot. They had a roto-koto, a spinning mechanism with strings and pegs that has to be seen to be understood though it still doesn’t come easy. They also had other strange instruments. One looked sitar-ish. Not sure. Music was free-jazzy in a traditional-Vietnamese-musical sense of the idea. Amps For Christ has a track on the Post Asiatic CD #1. (Also on the vinyl***)

There was a collaboration between Catastrophic Mermaids On Parade and Hermit The Flog. It was mellow, low-key, electronic and rhythmic and included live bass and guitar as well as samples and sound effects. I liked that one a lot. It made me dance, and a man with a top-knot smiled at me.

There was a band from San Diego called San Kazakgascar. They were the most straight-up thang we saw - guitar, bass, drums, group vocals -they’d function alright in any highbrow watering hole. But the arrangements were screwy-cool, tribally rhythmic, chanted syllabic, vaguely implicating of surf music somewhere deep back in the lineage but not in any kind of overt way. The guitarist’s strat looked WAY out of place in that room full of weirdness, but it sounded fine and they made us both dance. Props fer sher.

I should say, too, that the room was instantly inviting. The vibes were cool. Couches and chairs, crazy tapestries and art and weird stuff written all over the walls, freaks everywhere - the people running it were WAY nuttier than the “audience,” some of whom looked a bit lost or otherwise confused. The most interesting audients always turned out to be performers eventually to the point where I wondered after a while if we were the only two there who weren’t actually involved in putting on the show!

Good feeling. We walked in and it was like being back in Seattle but without some of the attendant cliquishness. I mean, I love and miss Seattle but I always felt like a leper when I walked into a new scene. These people make eye contact, and they talk to you if you smile. Although on the other hand the smallish crowd was SO mellow I was wishing for some of my wilder pals from up north to shake things up a bit.

Alright, now we come to the “finale” - Steve Mackay and Liquorball. It was close to 2am when they started and we were falling asleep. If they’d been anything but unreal good I woulda been dragged and started grumbling about leaving. But guess what? They KILLED it.

The closest analog I could think of would be Acid Mothers Temple if they’d relax a little bit. This music was fast and driving and pounding but not generally invasive. It made me want to move.

Grady played mainly wash-of-sound guitar including dalliances with a slide and an e-bow, some strange hand-techniques I didn’t recognize, some wah sweeps that reminded me of, well, me… There was a dude devoted entirely to some kind of oscillating rack, a thunderous left-handed drummer, and a thunderous bass player. There were two saxophones, Steve Mackay and another guy with shorter hair. The second horn played more in the way of spaced-out overblowing and atonalities and such - did it very well, too, I dug it, it wasn’t just chaotic noise for noise’s sake. And Steve’s devotion to the groove (he was shouting about it after the set!) was exemplary. He was psyched to have a tight band behind him that he could just groove out over - even if his idea of a tight band is a rumbling wad of space noise from a parallel wavelength! His stage energy is comparable to that of Seattle’s eccentric artist Joe Reno, if that means anything to y’all…

They played til they blew a fuse and the power went out. Awesome.

Apparently Steve and Liquorball just played a string of shows together. I hope they do more. I hope they record. I’ll dig it all. Totally great. Psychedelic ecstasy. Thanks, guys.

*** I bought a few bits of musical artifacture at the show - the pre-release from HowardAMB was a freebie, major score it’s supercool as of one listen in the car and includes my favorite tunes from their set, but I shelled out $$ for a disc by the Master Musicians Of Hop-Frog (I am a sucker for bands with Master Musicians in their name, like Seattle’s Master Musicians Of Bukkake or even the original Master Musicians Of Joujouka - I like ‘em all) and for what seems to be the major find, a vinyl edition of the original single LP “West-Coast Post-Asiatic.” It’s all different tracks than the double CD but it’s many of the same artists. I am listening to it now and I can tell you the sound is BIG and WARM and LUSH. Some of the CD tracks have a thin, not-unappealing insectile quality but the record is KUSHY and SOFT. And the vinyl is all kinds of skronky colors. Total score. Not sure if you can still get this, but if you can, do.

listen to it, say, twice through

wait a few days or weeks, depending on the pace of your state of being

then listen to it again

WAYDOWN consists mostly if not entirely of solo performances on various acoustic instruments run through various electronics. Guitar, banjo, jaw harp, other. It is not a long album, and most of the songs are not long songs, but the work as a whole is hypnotic. David Drew Longey is the artist. The rest of his website is also rewarding in various ways, if you have a few minutes

This website will turn you on to
Lost Liberian 45s from the 1960s,
for one thing:
http://www.voanews.com/english/africa/blog
I especially like “Morris Dolly & his Sunset Boys ‘Ngangama’” about 1/2 way down the page

This one is what it says it is.
I suggest checking out one or two tracks from each entry
then backtracking to find the bits you like the most:
awesometapesfromafrica.blogspot.com

Lastly,
http://voodoofunk.blogspot.com
Click on any of the entries labelled “mp3,” or try the one called “Three Blows To The Mind” for starters

5-TRACK: It’s A What?
http://cdbaby.com/cd/5track

GLASS GOBLINS: Live @ Chop Suey
http://cdbaby.com/cd/glassgoblins

I went to see them again tonight. That should tell you something.

Last night (March 5) they played at Spaceland. I have heard of Spaceland because I have a recording of Acid Mothers Temple playing there. I am new to Los Angeles and was excited to actually see the place. Now that I have seen it, I am even more excited to see Acid Mothers play at, uh, The Echo - a club which I prefer for reasons I can not specify. Spaceland is nifty, but I liked the vibe better at The Echo last time out (Kinski, from Seattle, back in the fall). Plus it’s closer to home…

Not that I had a bad experience at Spaceland. Far from it! The walls were at least partially covered (well, some of the walls were entirely covered and others not at all) with sparkly blue stuff. I like that. And the people-watching was above average.

The opening band was silly, the second group was possibly sillier despite or perhaps because of appearing to take themselves much more seriously. I don’t want to dis, so if you want to know who they were you will have to do your own research. I will say that I really dug the keyboard player in the first band and the keys player and the drummer in the second band.

I saw Howlin Rain for the first time in Seattle, probably in the fall of 2006. I went to see them because I liked Comets On Fire, who I most likely had heard about on headheritage.com. Comets’ “frontman” Ethan Miller had a side project, Howlin Rain, with members of some other bands I’d heard of in the rhythm section, and they were playing at the Sunset. I think I knew some people in one of the opening bands, also, but they didn’t impress me much on that night. Unless that was the night Andrew McInnis played in a group with Chris and Lucy from Kinski - in which case, the opener was KILLER COOL AWESOME! I believe they called themselves LIverburst. Coulda been great, but Andrew moved to Maine. He’s back now. Perhaps they will continue.

I liked Howlin Rain’s set alright, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. Comets is full on outta sight mania, and so was Liverburst. Ethan’s guitar playing was wild, but none of it really penetrated. A guy standing near me in the crowd made a point of grabbing hold of me to insist: “This is the new Jimi Hendrix!” or words to that effect. I was not convinced, but I did pay more attention to Ethan’s guitar playing after that, and I said hi to him after the show. Really nice guy.

Saw him play with Comets in the spring of 2007. Blindingly incredible show. So glad I got to see it happen. Ethan hung out at the edge of the stage after and talked to people. Supercool.

Meanwhile I checked out Howlin Rain’s debut CD. It’s good. I wanted it on vinyl, but it didn’t exist that way. (I heard there might be a reissue? We’ll see if I can budget it…) Unlike the stage show, which was gloriously messy and smothered by the Sunset Tavern’s dense, small-room acoustics, the album is crystal clear, super-cleanly recorded, melodic, vital and raw all at once. It has obvious reference points to particular forms of rocknroll, Jimi not least of which, but none of them touch on plagiarism and there are a few AWESOME surprises. The lyrics are literate. The guitars chime and groove and strum and riff and then suddenly they BARF. Not really like anything else out there. I tell people they sound like Stooges eating Lynyrd Skynyrd, but that is not really it, exactly.

So make a long story slightly less long.

They played at Spaceland last night. It was a good set. The sound was muddy. Some of the band members were different, but that is OK. They have a new album out, which I have (on vinyl) but haven’t played yet. There will be a time for that. I am certain that it is good. It is called “Magnificent Fiend” which makes me think of Kinski (Klaus Kinski, that is) who was referred to by Werner Herzog as his “best fiend”. So maybe two of my favorite bands are communicating in secret codes?

What else to say about the show… Ethan walks out and he’s always taller than I remember. He is unaffected in his speech, his gait, his dress, his hair. He turns on his guitar and a flurry of distorto-delay mania erupts and from then on he’s all eyes-closed squinting-and-screaming flailing his axe into the air and down and around - for effect? cos he feels it? cos it’s in him and it got to get out? Who knows? Whatever. I don’t question it when Kawabata hangs his strat from the ceiling, so Ethan can do whatever the hell he wants when he plays his own Fender. I’m just saying, you wouldn’t expect such a mild-mannered dude to turn into such a maelstrom when he plays.

The new songs are a lot like the old songs, which is not a bad thing. I’d like to hear more forward motion in next year’s set, but it was good to hear this lineup play at all, and the mix of new and old tunes was appealing. The intros to some of the tunes are killer - unison or harmony guitar and bass lines, crazy feedback power slams - and likewise the bridges and outros and whatnot. Good arrangement, but it all blurs together through a club sound system.

Which is basically what brought me to Amoeba Records on Sunset today at 7pm. I wanted to hear the band properly. They only played a quick 45 minute set at most, but I could hear how the two guitars and the keyboard play off each other, in and out of the arrangements. I could feel the bass a little better. I was able to hear the diverse tones and influences in the rhythm guitar work - to suss the elements of the show which are not Ethan Miller, not that he isn’t great but I’d checked him out already.

I think most of the band had a better set at Amoeba. Despite the bright lights and the time of day and the odd setting, I mean, how can you go wrong playing in a record store? Especially one as cool as that - they stock Sublime Frequencies and Les Rallizes Denudes… I mean, get real! And the stage has a big pyramid over it with an eyeball at the top. Very vibey.

Ethan was happily talking to everybody after both sets, smiling and sweating and shaking everybody’s hand three times and thanking everyone for coming. Too cool. I mean, I don’t mind if someone doesn’t want to do that stuff, but it’s so nice when they (we) get real that way.

Also:

There’s a limited edition CD which you can only get at Howlin Rain shows. It is part of a larger series about which I know nothing at the present time but will be looking into eventually - I can’t budget the whole set, regardless, but I picked up the Howlin Rain disc. It is called “Wild Life” and consists of an epic psychefrazzled jam on Paul McCartney’s tune, “Wild Life,” plus another epic jam on nothing in particular, both of which are pristinely recorded and very warm and pleasant to listen to. Even if the official album turns out to suck (which would surprise me) I got my dime’s worth with “Wild Life.”

Also:

This post originally ended with the line: “Ethan Miller is a REALLY NICE GUY!”

Which is TRUE, as far as I can tell. But I want to make it clear that I do not KNOW Ethan Miller, have never met or really talked to him beyond a few sentences in a loud club after a noisy show, in short I am in no position to judge the niceness of Ethan Miller.

What I really meant is, his energy is great. He vibes well. He is not, as a musician/performer, off-putting or indifferent.

As far as I can tell, from interviews and song lyrics and stage manner, Ethan Miller is an intelligent and compassionate human being with a wild streak. Be that to your taste, or not.

“Sleep, Dearie, Sleep” appears to be a traditional Scottish bagpipe tune, to be played at funerals. It was performed by The Black Watch at John Kennedy’s, for example. This is an arrangement for improvising electric guitar through two amplifiers.

“A Song For Paul” is a couple of riffs that came out of my guitar while I cried my eyes out the other morning. I recorded it fresh today.

Both are dedicated to a lifelong friend who moved to the next level at 68 years old, the other day. I had known him about since I was born. He was a good and humble person. He lived well. He died well. People liked him.

I recorded one other song today with the same set of tones. It can be found (for now) here, at the main page. It is called “Goodbye, Victoria,” and it was recorded originally by Chubby Checker. Make what you will of that.

Got to go now…

The link above will take you to an interview with Marc Cantlin about his downloadable album, Spleek Speaker Speaks.”

The interviewer is me.

Big thanks to Perfect Sound Forever for putting this where people can see it!

There’s three threads that I want to work with, but at least two of them are compound threads. I will list them.

1 - Rudy Rucker’s recent book, “The Lifebox, The Seashell And The Soul”
2 - Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader (certain contents of which to be discussed…)
3 - Philip K Dick (always a compound subject)

Rucker and Dick have some things in common.

Both are or were science fiction writers and both have been influential not only on science fiction novels and movies and concepts but - perhaps in subtler ways - on the global culture as a whole.

Philip Dick was singled out by the extremely picky Polish writer Stanislaw Lem as one of the only worthwhile American science fiction writers of his time. Lem wrote about this on multiple occasions and at great length. Lem’s other writing includes the amazing “Solaris” (skip all the movie versions, read the damn book) and also volumes of criticism of non-existent fiction. Got that? Lem wrote and published critiques of books which had not actually been written. Among other things. Lem died in 2006. So it goes.

Rudy Rucker has won the Philip K Dick award for science fiction, twice. Both times it was for books in his excellent “Ware” series. The awards were for “Software” and “Wetware.” The other two are “Freeware” and “Realware,” which were my favorites of the bunch the last time I checked. I am due to re-read “Realware,” the only one of the four which I do not own. Nonetheless I suggest a) reading the four in the order in which he wrote them and b) they are probably the best possible introduction to Rudy Rucker’s science fiction writing.

Rucker writes other things than science fiction. He wrote a very dense book called “Infinity And The Mind” which is AMAZING but very hard to plow through. (Not helped by the fact that my copy was falling apart in my hands as I read. It has been reissued, but I am short on cash and long on things I want to read…) “Infinity And The Mind” deals, among other things, with set theory and with Kurt Godel. Rucker also wrote a much friendlier book called “The Fourth Dimension” which is a bit hard to come by these days, and that is tragic. “The Fourth Dimension” is probably the best place to start with Rucker’s nonfiction writing. His blog is also entertaining.

“The Fourth Dimension” is about exactly that, in terms not so much of time as a fourth dimension but of a fourth spatial dimension. He provides you with instructions and diagrams as to where this dimension might be found and how to build things in it and what might live there and what to do about that. This should be required reading for every human. If you’ve read Edwin Abbot’s “Flatland” you should be well primed for this one. If not, well, whatever.

Rucker’s fiction only deals perfunctorily with multiple dimensions and/or realities. Weird animals come out of them and drag helpless humans back away with them, but there is no heavily profound exploration of the concepts in his fiction (possibly excepting the “Ware” series). That is fine. Read his nonfiction for that. The fiction is good for other things.

Philip Dick’s fiction (including the works which inspired Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Paycheck, Minority Report, etc) not only deals with multiple realities (not so much dimensions as such), it largely takes place in them. This is not always apparent to the characters. In fact, it is clear after you study PKD a bit that it is not always clear to the writer himself where the action is taking place, in his books or even in his life.

The revelations of Philip K Dick are best explored in his own work in the novel called “VALIS.” This is not an easy read. It hurts. A lot of PKD hurts, but especially VALIS. Tread carefully. If you would rather just read about PKD’s ideas, there is plenty about that on the web. Here are some places to look:

1 - How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later
2 - One of Lem’s articles
3 - Official Website: philipkdick.com
4 - PKD interview from Rolling Stone magazine, save this for last, includes PKD’s theory that the gov’t was after him because he’d accidentally written about some secret truth or technology in one of his novels, and the accompanying illustration is awesome

and finally
R Crumb weighs in on PKD.
A pictorial history of Philip Dick’s visions and dementia. Unsettling.

In short, though, Philip Dick came to believe that the world-as-we-know-it was being influenced if not controlled by evil other-dimensional characters masquerading as a democratic government in order to keep us enslaved, blind to the truth, so that we would not overthrow them… Something like that. It is hard to explain. PKD considered this problem to have originated in the time of the Roman Empire, which he asserted had in fact never ended.

It could be said with some truth that the Matrix series, created quite some time after PKD’s death, owes him a lot.

So Rucker and Dick are both dealing with multi-planal reality, shall we say, in fiction and in non-fiction of various kinds. In Dick’s case there is also some quasi-religious content, wherein those-of-us-who-know are at times represented by Roman-era secret Christian cultists.

That’s a good jumping point to Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian with an emphasis on religious experience. “Myths, Rites, Symbols” is a sort of compendium or digest of elements of his various publications, meant to get the gist of his thoughts across in one tidy volume… Another dense read, I gotta say, but worthwhile. If you like this sort of thing. Which I guess I do.

Points from this book which seem germane at the moment:

All religions or mythos include a cosmogonic myth, which is a story about where the universe came from. Generally speaking, this takes place in a time prior to or outside of time as we know it. The doings of gods and goddesses take place above the sky, below the ground, alongside of us but not typically sharing the same plane of being or experience. Stories of travel between our world and theirs are common.

Myths of the origins of things, or of the doings of divine beings, take place in a sacred time which is outside of our own. Engaging in rites, rituals, religious activities or ceremonies, involves a return to or an access of that sacred time, thus a recharging of of our own being or spiritual energy. (“Us” being a loosely applied term in this case as most of “us” probably don’t have much in the way of this kind of experience in our lives, a major problem with modern culture in my opinion. There are things that come close… But that’s a whole other discussion.)

One thing that distinguishes Christianity in particular from virtually all other bodies of religious thought is that the sacred time which is accessed is actually a part of our historical time. It is the time of Jesus’ physical existence on earth. It is measurable, locatable, identifiable, describable, knowable in a number of basic ways. This is nearly unique among mythos.

I guess you could, if so inclined, take that as a vote for Christ. I don’t take it that way, though I have no more problem with or affinity for him than I do for Buddha or Mohammed or Shiva or Quetzlcoatl or Neptune or Sun Ra. They all get the job done, and I am thankful for it, whoever is at the wheel.

To me it’s just an interesting fact, especially when you fit it together with two elements from Rudy Rucker and PKD.

As mentioned earlier, PKD believed that the separation of properly-experienced-reality and artificially-induced-hallucination dated to sometime around the Roman empire, and included a secret Christian cult which sought to overthrow the evil powers that be. So that’s sorta fun to look at next to Christianity’s unique historicity. The sacred time which is accessed in a Christian rite is closely related to the time in our actual history at which, according to PKD, the major wool was pulled over the eyes of civilization.

And then there is Rucker’s recent book, “The Lifebox, The Seashell And The Soul.” He suggests a number of amazing things in this book, which is mainly devoted to exploring the idea that reality might or might not be usefully viewed as a quantum computation… Hard to explain. Read it yourself.

One of his ideas has to do with parallel worlds, parallel realities, an idea best understood in popular fiction and popular physics as the idea that at any point of multiple possibilities, the universe (or maybe everything) splits. All possibilities are realized. Maybe you choose which one you experience, maybe not.

Rucker’s twist on this is that, no, the universe maybe doesn’t split every time you make a decision. Maybe instead there is a whole pile of parallel timelines, each one different, maybe beginning with a simple one (the One), moving into something a bit more complex (yin and yang? the valley of the archetypes? the ten thousand things?) and eventually reaching the level of gnarl. Gnarl is exemplified by most of what we see around us: the behavior of tree branches blowing in the wind, the patterns on a seashell, wood grain, eddies in flowing water, clouds, fingerprints, really everything natural if you look close enough.

Somewhere in that pile of increasingly gnarly worlds lies our own path of existence.

It occurred to me while reading Eliade that the sacred times, the dream times, the before-time times, those might lie in various of Rucker’s parallel time-schemes. Hints and flashes - such as the one that hit Philip Dick in the forehead in a beam of pink light sometime in the early 1970s - might occasionally get through to us, or from us to them, whoever they might be, and thusly might arise many aspects of mythology and/or religion.

If anything, in this case, the uniqueness of Christianity’s historicity might be a part of the problem, if you think there is one… Sort of a time-ism, accompanying the body of Christian belief, a sense that our plane of time is in some way superior to others.

While PKD may or may not have received genuine transmissions, it is clear that he had many other problems as well. The transmissions were likely garbled. But that does not mean they are without use. Terrence McKenna had a lot to say on the subject of PKD in relation to McKenna’s own transmission-receptor experiences. Among many other points of convergence, PKD and McKenna both had significant experiences involving the I Ching. In addition, many other folks have felt an affinity or resonance with PKD’s ideas, experiences and/or visions.

If you fit all this stuff together, though, the best you can really get is the sense that there might be a bigger picture. There is very little to indicate what the picture might be of.

myspace.com/zoomsquad

This is a band which formed in the summer of 2007 amongst myself and once-and-future members of the band called Luxxe, to wit:
Zack, Danny, N8

We don’t “rehearse” in the sense of writing songs or doing anything again that we have done already. We appear in a room - a basement, a stage, whatever - and we set up our gear and music happens. That is all.

Instruments are usually 2 guitars, bass, drums. This is subject to variation at certain moments.

Zack has kindly done the editing and web-splurging required to get this stuff on the cyberwaves.
I enjoy this band a lot, and I am excited to be able to share it…