I mean, it’s not that it’s a bad book. But neither is it especially gripping, despite the claims to the contrary included inside the covers in the 1975 4th edition printing I recently picked up as part of a trilogy at a local used book shop. I haven’t researched it in any great depth, but apparently over the years there has been a good deal of controversy over whether or not Carlos Castaneda, the author of this book, simply invented the character of Don Juan, or at least extrapolated from real people and experiences to create this quasi-anthropological account of Yaqui Indian sorcery.

Leaving the veracity of it aside, the first half of the book reads as a rather dry, seeming factual account of Castaneda meeting and convincing an old native man, Don Juan, to teach him about peyote - the psychedelic cactus. Over time, Don Juan takes Castaneda on as an apprentice and introduces him to the pathways of the “man of knowledge” and of the sorcerer. And perhaps more importantly, he introduces him to the psychedelic “allies” of datura, and the “little smoke” - a mixture derived from psychedelic mushrooms.

Accounts of Castaneda’s psychedelic voyages occupy a relatively small part of the text, though they seem to be of central importance. The characters of Don Juan and Castaneda are really not sketched out at all, which maybe is a factor in why certain people have alleged none of this stuff ever actually happened. For some reason though, that controversy doesn’t interest me overly much, nor do Castaneda’s trip reports. Anyone who is familiar with drug literature (or the direct use of psychedelics) won’t find much insight into those experiences contained within this text. Or at least, that’s my opinion anyway.

One of the things I did really enjoy, though it was not given much coverage in the text was that Don Juan required Castaneda to grow, care for, collect and prepare all of the psychedelic substances himself before he could actually use them. As I’ve written elsewhere, I am beginning to think that this firsthand intimately physical experience of plants may be just as important - if not moreso - than the actual psychedelic experiences these plants offer.

The second half of this book is a quasi-anthropological breakdown of the teachings of Don Juan into a classification system invented by Castaneda. I mostly just skimmed through this section as it didn’t really shed any new light for me on what had been expressed within the first portion of the book. And if anything, it lacked the sense of life that the first part contained. It may have been written by Castaneda more in the hopes of lending his book an air of scholarly legitimacy; it’s hard for me to say either way.

While I didn’t especially love this book and while I read it I didn’t feel much impact from it, I have to say that I have found myself coming back to some of the ideas expressed in it later on. I will be thinking through a certain problem or reading something else, and all of a sudden, I will see how one of Don Juan’s teachings connects very elegantly to the subject at hand. So it has had more of a “slow-roasting” effect on me than I was anticipating.

That said, I’m not especially eager to read any of the other two books in the trilogy that I picked up, although I have heard they are substantially different (another point people use to challenge their authenticity). In the end, I’d say this book is one of those things to read only if you are interested in the so-called “classics” of psychedelia.

With a new version of The Wicker Man to be released in theatres September 1st, I thought it would be appropriate to review the original in the hopes that others will see the classic horror flick for what it’s not. It is not a typical, generic, movie that carries itself on cheap scare tactics. I’m not impressed by the amount of remakes that have been plaguing the screens, especially when most remakes didn’t need or deserve to be done. I would rather see a remake that takes a magnificent plot, and adds effects that could not have been accomplished at the time, like The Langoliers. But because I’m such a fan of the first film, I’m going to see the remake anyway. I might change my opinion, but don’t hold your breath.

The Wicker Man was a horror film unlike any other. It banished the stereotypical creepy environment. No eerie dead trees and mist blanketing a full moon. Instead, you have lush green Scottish fields and fruit, horseback-riding, women dancing naked, drinking, merriment, and song. The very thing to get me in the mood to whip out the djembe and sing to the stars. Here to spoil the fun of these hedonistic Heathens from Summerisle we have a copper from the mainland: Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward). When this buzz-kill receives a letter from the island about a girl missing for many months, Howie goes forth to investigate. The virgin Christian gasps in horror at the sight of jarred foreskins, public lovin’, and school children dancing around the maypole. Everywhere he goes the humorless Sgt. is subjected to this strange foreign culture, convincing him that the missing girl was murdered under circumstances of Pagan barbarities. I’m of the opinion that a horror film should be balanced out with some good humour, which is well met by the locals. Lord Summerisle, played by Christopher Lee, embodies the classy, fun loving, cheeky High Priest who contrasts Howie’s tight-assed character absolutley. Everyone conducts themselves innocently in the face of his annoyance and confusion, but each person is telling a different story. Something is definitley amiss. In comparison to the rest of The Wicker Man, the conclusion is blunt. I had spent a few hours trying to decide what the director was trying to say. I finally decided that he wasn’t actually trying to make any moral point, but rather meant to make the viewer uncomfortable. It succeded. But I must admit that a part of me was giggling, and that made me a little more uneasy.

A good horror film makes you think and forces you to address the feeling of uneasiness it leaves in the back of your mind. This classic does just that. There is no real sense of closure. With most horror films you can easily identify who the villains and heroes are. The Wicker Man dosn’t give you such an illusion, and so is just a bit closer to reality. There seems to be a bit of light and darkness with all the characters, and the fact that you don’t neccesarily see it right away makes the mystery that much more exciting. I am determined not to spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen it. So, as tempted as I am, I’m just going to leave you with this: As far as the ending is concerned, before you draw a conclusion about anything, consider that the producers thanked the real Lord Summerisle and the Heathen populace for helping to make the movie. Aside from that, look up the historical facts before you take it too seriously. It is a great horror movie that is also very fun and nostalgic.

[Originally appeared on No Official Capacity]

I really wanted to write a nice thorough review of the netrelease “Interconnexions” by Diatribes. I went about the project the way I usually do, listening and making notes and trying to decide upon a theme or two around which I could construct an essay of six or seven paragraphs. Unfortunately, after about 100 listens and a thousand words of notes I began to realize that this music is probably over my head.

That’s not to say that I don’t understand the music. I think I do. However, there is something in it which I should not attempt to articulate. The musicians are stepping off from a territory with which I am not familiar. Or they are aiming at a target which I am not able to see. Everything in this four-song release is enjoyable and well-played, not to mention flawlessly produced. But saying this is not enough to constitute a true-to life record review. Formal criticism, in general, should be a means to using human culture to triangulate truths about our existence. Among the many faces of any cultural artifact are the creator’s intent, the actuality of the creation and the viewer or listener’s reaction to the artifact. In criticism, the critic is meant to take his or her reaction and transmute it into yet another creative intent by which to produce yet another creation, in this case the review.

The magic of criticism is that it not only creates a particular reaction in its audience, the same as any other cultural artifact, but also effects the audience’s perception of an entirely separate artifact: that artifact under critical scrutiny. In this way, criticism acts like a third language on a metaphorical Rosetta Stone, giving another valuable perspective, and a deeper insight into our culture and assists in translating what our culture is trying to say about our lives as humans on the planet Earth.

That’s the ideal, at least from my point of view. I wasn’t able to get that ball rolling with this record, though. After a period of time, as will most always happen, I grew weary of listening to the same music over and over again. My only choice was to abandon the project.

Rather than let all that work go to waste, though, I am presenting here some of the more interesting notes that I’ve made. I also want to add that overall I think that this is a very good collection of music, and I commend the artists for releasing it for free download on the internet. There are more works by Diatribes and d’Incise out there if you take the time to look. I’ve sampled bits and pieces of it, and I’d be confident to say that it’s all worth gathering onto your hardrive or iPod. This is not two-bit spastic bedroom joke-folk, by any stretch of the imagination. This is real music, seriously intended and appears to be well separated from the International Recording Industry racket.

Edited notes:

Net labels, and the free mp3 recordings that they release on the internet, represent the future of music both in the music they feature and the marketing and distribution methods that they employ. Internet music is the most important thing going in the recorded arts right now. Unfortunately, the quality of these releases is widely variable. Anyone can record something and put it on the internet, but not everyone should.

That’s why it’s comforting to hear a collection such as Diatribe’s “Interconnections.” At first, this recording might not seem worth the time, a free (in more than one sense) avant-jazz net release. But really, this is good. The musicians are good; the recording quality is good; the composition is good, too. Every minute is interesting, for one reason or another. Diatribes cruises through a series of weird rooms, flashing the lights and rearranging the furniture as they go.

The musicians are obviously extremely competent with their weapons. It’s not frequent enough that musicians who can actually play apply themselves to the more adventureable fjords of the musical coast.

The personnel are: Laurent Peter aka “d’incise” on laptop, objects, treatements; Cyril Bondi plays drums, other percussions and the Tibetan horn; Gaël Riondel plays the reed instruments (tenor and alto saxophones, clarinet) and the flute.

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d’Incise seems to have set the computers aside for this collection, instead entering his audible contributions with “ojects” that seem to be an array of solid metal things that creak, zing and vibrate throughout the compositions.

At about 4:30 in the second track (”interconnexions 2.1″), Mr d’incise does a nice job of making your speakers sound as if they are shorting out.

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Riondel’s sax gets into some good old goose honking. Other moments of saxophone are warm like rising steam and still others evoke elephants and jazz funerals.

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This can’t be called mood music, because whatever mood you’re in or trying to be in, these guys are going to match it for about a minute and a half, tops.

One of the first things to stand out on this record are the drums. Both the playing and the treament of the drums are very strong here. Cyril Bondi’s handling of the percussion instruments reveals his Afro-Cuban and his jazz studies. Listening to some of the passages that focus on Bondi, I get a vaguely-formed vision of him halfway up from the stool, reaching for the far drums. The drums are recorded loud and clear, too. It’s always nice to hear good drumming brought to the front of the mix, no matter what kind of music it is. Usually, high-quality percussion, plainly wrought is something you have to purposefully look for. Art Blakey and Ginger Baker don’t even get respect from the control booth half the time.

Be warned, though. This recording is not built for boogie (although they do get into some rousing grooves about ten or eleven minutes into the third track (2.1), among other places.) Diatribes addresses a wild variety of moods. They cop a smoothly transitioning series of attitudes, sometimes evoking atmospheres to the point that they may be clearly visualized by the listener. In one stretch of time, Diatribes suggest everything from tropical flora to the filthy far ends of abandoned lumber mills to the funeral rites of forgotten cultures.

Perhaps this is a subtle effect we can look forward to from the home-studio movement. Percussion has been the core of music since back in the days of bones and stones. But modern recordings have more often than not have treated the instrument-that-is-not-an-instrument as some sort of sidebar or something. This is, no doubt, a result of the 64-track process. When you’ve got 64 tracks, you’re naturally going to multimic the drum kit, and that’s naturally going to you less time to set up each of those mics causing you to rush the setup and level check. But all of those isolated microphones inevitably get bounced to one track, usually unedited. Now you’re back to a single drum track, but it sounds awful and so you mix it down deep where no one can hear it.

Meanwhile, a scrappy troupe of independent producers run a single mic from the drums to the Powerbook. It sounds crystal clear and good as hell.

The beginning minute or of the fourth track, “interconnexion2.3″ is good treatment of Bondi’s drumming. It’s a moment of particular intensity.

This is the kind of recording that you can listen to an indefinite number of times and there is always more listening to do. Like a high-quality auteur flick or abstract painting, this four-track album doesn’t overexplain itself.
/end

What I mean by that is that in Stross’s futuristic world, the definition of human has modulated past the point that we ourselves would be able to recognize it. Through his history of the future, he described a range of existential options from the archaic way humans are naturally, to neural implants offering pervasive internet presence, to posthumans who have evolved past the point where normal human intelligence could understand them all the way out to aliens, uploaded (and endlessly downloaded and re-downloaded) consciousnesses, simulations of consciousnesses and entire galaxies which have become gigantic thinking machines beyond all comprehension.

It is, needless to say, a dizzying view of the future. A quote by Cory Doctorow on the book’s back cover suggests that the book makes psychedelics obsolete. While that’s a bit far-fetched, it is sometimes hard to keep up with the book. Especially in the beginning, as Stross unloads terms and concepts at the reader at an incredible rate. It can make for some very slow and tedious reading as you get up to speed with the changes in the world he’s describing. Stross seems also to have gotten rather ahead of himself too, as the book is punctuated with expository passages set in a different font which are strictly there to dump data on the reader about what’s happening in the world and universe. They aren’t especially disruptive to the reading experience, but they do often read as though they were simply outline notes created for the book, which Stross was unwilling to excise from his final version.

For all the technical data and the grand scope that Stross is trying to pull off, I also feel like the characters themselves get lost in the shuffle. The actual people in this story seem far less important and interesting to the author than all the whiz-bang technology he is describing and its implications for the future of humanity and posthumanity. Despite being shuffled back and forth among various members of the family which plays the pivotal role in Stross’ future, I never really felt like I could connect with any of them, that I knew what any of them really thought or felt, or frankly that I much cared.

My main drive then to crunch through this overly long book (415 pages) was to acquaint myself with a sci-fi vision of what the Singularity will be like, and how it will impact people. Towards that end, Stross seems to conclude that escaping death and escaping the body and the universe will not allow us to escape the problems and weird foibles of simply being human. It is a moral that would have been driven home a lot stronger, however, if his characters had been portrayed as more human.

It’s hard to say if it was Stross’ own viewpoint coming through, of if he was just trying to accurately extrapolate a thoroughly scientific worldview into the future, but the book takes a rather hardline stance against religion. It seems that any time religion is portrayed, it’s done in a rather negative light, as sort of kooky or antiquated. He mentions a few times some new religions that are proselytizing in the future, but never really goes into what they look or feel like, which I think is too bad. Instead, the over-riding religion of this book is science. Mind is equated with soul, and immortality is achieved by making back-up copies of the mind ad nauseum. Consciousness and all of life is reduced to computer jargon. This passage from page 399 I think illustrated in a nutshell a great deal about what this book’s underlying message or at least worldview seem to be:

“Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that pre-dated the singularity used to be the inevitable halting state for all life forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right - exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.

What this character seems to be forgetting (and I don’t want to mistakenly attribute this viewpoint to the author by means of this one character’s dialogue) is that science too, by way of the vehicles of science fiction and transhumanist speculation is also a “transmissible memetic virus” which is beginning, more and more, to promise us life beyond death. Maybe not for us, but perhaps for our children. When such technology does indeed arise, what kind of “life” will that really be granting us? These are the questions posed by Stross’ Accelerando…

“The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades.”

- C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12: 439

“The Hades within Dionysus says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for the soul in the phallic parade, that all of our life force, including the polymorphic and pornographic desires of the psyche, refer to the underworld of images.”

-James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p. 45

Hades and Depth

The imagorrhea, or through-flow of images with a hint of unpalatability, in “ Memory and Madness ” evokes mythic impressions of a soul perpetually held in thrall unable to escape the Hell of sex, violence, madness, obsession, and addiction.

Myth doesn’t ground; it opens. Depth is a metaphor without a base. The depth of the simplest image is fathomless.

When we go deep, soul becomes involved. The same themes repeat endlessly rotating in a myriad of variations, in different octaves of outrage and screams. Plato said souls in Hades are incurable.

Yet, Lydia Lunch somehow embodies the ability to intentionally transgress the boundaries – to go beyond the pale of convention. For this among other reasons, she is referred to as the “queen of the underground.” In the soul’s labyrinth we can never go deep enough.

Like the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone, Lydia moves at will between the conscious and the unconscious depths – a foot in both the world of the living and world of the dead. The fundamental image of the underworld is of a contained space with shrouded limits. The underworld is a psychological cosmos. The underground is a lifestyle and subculture undergird with and sustained by psychic imagery.

Persephone’s mythic consort is Hades-Dionysus. She yearns for depth, mating with the fearsome cold intelligence of Hades. Hades and Dionysus are the same (Heraclitus), implying an indissoluble link with trances, altered states, madness, intoxication, even addiction, and yet vitality, passion, hedonism. He rules the amoral realm of non-process. Our very essence is contained in our circular states of repetitiveness. Time has nothing to do with the underworld.

Psyche Is Soul

For the ancient Greeks soul was an image, the psychical point of view. Soul is found in the reception of its suffering, attending to it with attentive devotion, waiting it through. The underworld is the chthonic psyche, a cold realm of souls and one of psychopathy, beyond human warmth and decency. It is a world without light that still has shades and shadows. We must smell our way along, sniffing out the essential.

Pathology is an essential component of the human soul. Underworld is psyche. The shadow play is the unconscious fantasy of the moment in daily living. Shadow is the very stuff of the soul that keeps us linked with the underworld. The shadow casts us.

Psyche is the only reality known through immediate experience. What we know about life seems irrelevant for what is below life. The underworld – not life – is the place of psyche, the unseen or invisible essence. The psyche needs to be fed and it lives on the imaginal. The body draws on the soul for its nourishment, needing the soul stuff of images.

Lydia feeds us this soulful Lunch. What was natural becomes metaphorical. As an underground icon, her reflective work echoes this shamanic spirit in feminine form, prioritizing the deeply personal, tangibly realizing its spiritual aspect. This latest work is deliberate public psychotherapy, coincidentally for herself and her listeners.

She speaks freely and openly about what others dare not even whisper. Narcissism helps connect to yet depotentiate underworld forces such as instincts, drives, and complexes. She has learned how to dance with the demands of the invisible spirit, making her personal story universal.

The rape of Persephone by Hades was the central theme in the mysticism of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and her verbal musings are a kykeon or magical draught that transports us into this underworld domain for our own initiation into those mysteries.

Perpetual Woundedness

Her traumatic childhood (paternal incest) echoes the rape of tender Persephone, innocence seized and dragged into the underworld by the powerful emotional undercurrent, Hades. But the underworld is also part of nature, and our nature – divine images of the chthonic, hidden motives, human frailty, unseen connections, darkness, death and perversion.

Confrontation with Hades is experienced as a violence, an overwhelming violation. Life is turned upside down. Invaded by the repugnant dark power of the inevitable we recoil in anguish. Persephone ate “lunch” in Hades, characterized as pomegranate seeds, but we can consider that euphemistic, realizing it was simply “seed.”

The intervention releases characteristic types of fantasy and behavior: self-preservation, vulnerability, loss, humiliation, betrayal, resignation, uncertainty, revulsion, repetitious despair and desperation, surrender, meaning, suffering, death/rebirth. Hades is the crypt and the cryptic: a hidden (buried, shrouded, concealed, occult) presence, an invisible fullness (blocked, censored, forbidden, obscured).

The threat — rupture of the fabric of personality — is precisely the mode of initiation. Consciousness is separated from its life attachments. Psychic intensity and value are juxtaposed. Jung noted that myth is the subterranean root and content of defenses and resistances in both neurosis and psychosis. Mythical images have no beginning or end. It all goes on at once, forever. There is no changing the unchangeable.

Shamanic Journeys

However, Lydia has triumphed pulling herself up from the depths of pathology, depression and aggression, well-aware of the cycle of victim/victimizer. She has explored these themes in her music and films and perhaps through love, including her audience.

She’s learned to carry her pain with grace. Perhaps she has even managed to bring other trapped spirits along with her. Her consciousness shines in the dark, drawing them like moths to the flame.

Like cures like. Her character, grounded in the chthonic depths, is her guardian and fate. She accompanies us into and through a new dimension — the emptiness, the Void, — with a reassuring Presence. We feel she backs us up, urges us on, understands us more deeply than we understand ourselves.

There is no way out of a myth, only deeper into it past the fear and pain. We cannot escape the psychic significance of what we are doing. Lydia attempts to resurface through deeper entry into her contents, ecologically recycling her consciousness.

Memory implies remembering and forgetting. The route to the underworld is marked by the twin springs Mnemosyne, that of memory and Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is akin to sleep, dreams, and death. She dreams out loud.

Mnemosyne was also the mother of the Muses. The spring belongs to her, being a comfort and balm for the afflicted. Giving illumination and letting disappear make up the entire being of the Goddess. This is the union of opposites where the luminosity of remembrance stands in sharp relief with forgetfulness.

Light breaks forth from the depths. Memories spring up; they well up. Their archetypal depiction as water means somehow they slake the psychic thirst of parched souls. Water that springs forth is a primary image of the origins of life as well as memory.

Lydia brings us that water in the small broken jug that is her body; she is the leaky cask, an amphora of the water of life. Outflowing life is genuine life, but perhaps unfulfilled. Flowing through is incessantly desired by those with unquenchable thirst.

Desert and thirst require an outpouring. An utter flowing-through that cannot be held fast becomes unbearable when the flowing-through ceases. So the void becomes a compulsion to seek out new inflowing and outflowing. We drink greedily from her incessant stream.

“ Memory and Madness ” is such a passionately-sought, soul-teaching outflowing. Perhaps it assures Lydia she is not and will not be forgotten. Life ultimately runs out like water through a sieve. Its narcotizing relish is we forget the big and little pains of life. The ‘thirst’ for the liquid of unconcern of the dead is the ‘will’ of the living.

Sometimes there is healing in forgetting to remember, or remember exactly, or remembering archetypally. Memory is mutable, non-retainable. We remember imaginally, metaphorically. Every time we access a memory, it changes. Personal recollections are a distortion, events we freeze as snapshots and narratives.

In this spoken word confessional, “ Memory and Madness ,” she dances through the labyrinths of her psyche, substituting one word for another, one name for another, one meaning for another, one memory wraith for another, without loss of immediacy.

The agony of “Johnny” and the agony of enduring “Johnny” is always happen- ing . We worry that his madness is our madness, too – that his dark descent mirrors our own. Her electrifying performances raise the purely personal to the paradigmatic – the individual to the universal.

This punk diva wields the twin scepters of art and artifice. A fierce energy drives the siren’s work, speaking to our own suffering through her waking dreams. We suffer and also resist the endless cycle for that is the irresolvable mythic pattern. Suffering feeds on itself for sustenance.

Lydia’s aggressive verbal Kung Fu evokes our own memories, our own exposure to misery, madness and chaos, even our own defenses. She tears open our blindspots, our self-defeating behaviors, rooting out deeper pain.

Only in the depth dimension can we penetrate to what is hidden, the true nature of all things. This deepening leads the soul to true insight. We abandon both hope and despair, coping and failing.

Revealing her core she transmutes suffering into rapport and empathy. We suffer along with her; then, she suffers magnificently for us. She tends to our souls, transforming the ceaseless self-indulgence of suffering through catharsis and rejuvenation. Perhaps together we can learn to distinguish a compulsion from a call, an instinct from an image, a demanding desire from a movement of imagination.

Identification

We find ourselves through her story while we are riveted, maybe even elevated. Is it not a form of transcendence to rise above our existential experience, transforming it through the creative act as Lunch does repeatedly in her latest volume? She promotes awareness of soul through its own expressions, through the language of metaphor, through metamorphosis.

I myself have known, dated, even married “Johnny, Jimmie, Tony,” and in some ways am still doing it. Haven’t you? I know the agony of trying to adore and even “save” lost souls to redeem or release myself, then being emotionally rent for my vain attempt. The boredom and numbness follow with the ache that starts the whole bloody Dionysian cycle again.

Wounded healer is the archetype of shamanism. The urge to cure the incurable keeps us from recognizing the essence of our limitations, the limits of the psychopathic essence of personality. We can be literally torn apart by memories, by madness, by violation. But the scars declare we can heal and survive. The body remembers the horror and wonder of being through its scars.

We can only “know” the Other through our common understanding of pain as the great leveler. We are all equal in the brotherhood of suffering souls. Pain may be easier to deal with than joy because it is so much more familiar. Pain hurts because it is uniquely ours.

As a clinical hypnotherapist, my specialty was sexual molest so I’ve seen plenty of fallout. I can testify with Lydia, that they all – the Johnnies, and Jimmies, and Tonys – (and their female counterparts) bleed profusely. They don’t need to taste the self-inflicted blade of the knife to do so all over you. Psychophysical wounds never fully heal. We pick compulsively at the virtual scabs nursing the open sore.

Like a sequel to her mentor Burroughs’s “ Naked Lunch ,” Lydia’s laments shamelessly disclose her emotional landscape. She knows instinctively what poetic themes and words “want” to live together, to play together – to jam. She doesn’t need to “cut-up” or ‘fold in” her lyrics – her whole life is cut up and enfolded. In response she “cuts up” with outrageous antics and enfolds and enmeshes us.

She catches the image of the event while it occurs. Each of her works holographically encapsulates an emotionally-charged issue in a single view that contains the whole picture as a microcosm. Every particle of a hologram contains the whole, just in less detail. Some of Lydia’s pieces are blurry and impressionistic, while others are crystal clear.

Catharsis

Resonating with this imagery, our own emotional ghosts rise from the dead as she blithely rototills the graveyards of our unconscious with her powerful voice. Perhaps this resurrection even subtly reframes our personal histories by superimposing her retrocognitive vision over our experience. The depth potential is a seed she plants in each moment of life.

Not content to suffer merely for herself and her art, she suffers for all of us, for mankind, even for the planet. Lately, she decries the environmentally rapacious Bush-league political regime with another offering, “ In Our Time of Dying ”. Having suffered her own rape, she is loath to see the planet suffer the same fate, again and again.

Like Demeter depressively yearning through the winter of her discontent she craves just one more renascent Spring. She offers a fertile space for the existentially alienated and politically disenfranchised to grow warily and dream of flowering.

We discover the open-ended meaning of existence by expressing rather than betraying emotion. Her effortless delivery makes her unfolding drama seem like improvisational accident, created anew with each performance. She camouflages herself in a succession of images. What remains unconcealed is her self-referential certainty, as she plumbs levels of signification.

Her pathos is expressed in imaginative fertility, coherent clusters of perceptions and articulated feelings punctuated by dramatic voids, following no forms or formulas of emotional style. No mere compensation could cure the trauma, imbalance of passions and psychological distress. Healing as a restructuring process can only emerge organically from within.

In “ Memory and Madness ,” anger, rage, pain, ennui are transformed into a cohesive paean – a bittersweet yet joyous song celebrating the triumph of life, of desire, of love, of healing. Perhaps the content of her utterance is not as important as its plane of expression in visual, auditory and visceral form. She glides inexorably toward the end that satisfies the story, melding the simultaneous coexistence of multiple elements in dynamic autonomous organization.

But there is certainly no moral, no closure, and no conclusions. Is it a complaint or a celebration? What remains is the indeterminacy of the infinite range of meanings, inexhaustible meaning, the fruitful promise of mystery. Thus, we can listen, and listen, and listen again anew.

The thrust remains the same. She is always saying something fresh yet recognizable about the human condition, even if based around meaning residing in the circumstances of her artist’s life. She models how to bear the unbearable yet sustain voluptuous passion for life. She helps us observe our own catastrophes with a dark wisdom.

Lydia’s stylistic fusion ranges through critique, irony and mockery, full of ahistorical loopholes without the burden of proof. She intuitively employs the shamanic willingness to creatively make do with what is at hand. Just a nuance or inflection can imply different facets. Expression of an emotion implies coming to self-awareness.

Free Lunch

We get the impression she is erotically embedded in psychic images, sensuously wallowing in them, though they ultimately escape her intention or control. This is her fantasy, her freedom.

Libido is married to psychosexual imagination. The soul is imagining before the context appears. Hers is the erotics of engagement, libidinally driven immersion in the imaginal where psychic attraction is palpable, electromagnetic.

The delectable Lunch inflects, deflects, and infects us with her vision, her voice, and her “ear-otica.” Her love for us is based wholly on a relationship with images and shown through images, through an imaginative response. When we love, we want to explore, to extend the intricacy that intensifies intimacy.

Form and context are as important as content in her ultrathematic works of art. These newest works are informed by her whole herstory. She weaves interpretive webs of significance. Diverse meanings overlap in her word mosaics and interrelate in unforeseen ways, carrying on and informing past works.

Words gather meanings over time. Like images they are accumulators of meaning, accumulating intentionality. Closing the gap, the aesthetic distance between art and reality, her intentionally shocking subject matter remains herself, her life, her pain, her transmutation, and her transcendence.

Of course, she is in no way limited by the images as metaphors presented here. Still, perhaps the dark-adapted eye of Archetypal Psychology is not antagonistic to her spirit. It is amplified, non-analytical and also embraces pathology, wildness, the unheroic, the descent, the unredeemable.

All artists are driven, but this dark angel has an appetitive drive matched by few. Her consummatory field is as immense as her experiential base. She both savors and devours. Then she digests, critiquing both the raw and the cooked in herself and in society.

Lydia Lunch is a sensuous feast, truly beyond the common boundaries or limits of the social pale. Her desires ripen into nourishing fruits of love. She feeds us sumptuously on her fresh words. There is no “freer” Lunch to be found.

(Originally published here)

For those not as familiar with the entirety of Dick’s catalogue, much of his work is plagued by cheap prose and a pulp-sci-fi ethos that, while still brilliant, fits far more with his reputation as a cheap sci-fi hack than a literary giant.
A Scanner Darkly, however, is one of those books that really shows that Phil was more than just a hack– he was indeed a genius, an excellent author who struggled to understand the human condition. The book is only very negligibly science fiction; the sci-fi elements take a back seat to the interactions between the characters as they lived their lives under the shadow of “Substance D,” the drug of choice “Seven Years from Now.” How could anyone possibly translate this subtle work into film?

So, with this in mind, and after having read Tim’s not-so-positive review of the film, it was with some trepidation that I purchased my ticket for yesterday’s matinee at Seattle’s Egyptian Theater.

And you know what? I loved it.

It’s a very talkie film, and, as a friend commented afterwards, more like an essay in film than a standard three-act movie. But, if one keeps this in mind, it really works. The thing to remember if you choose to see it is that it’s not a work of science fiction, it’s a very serious drama about addiction from the perspective of both users and those who persecute them, rightly or wrongly.

The cast was especially impressive. Surprisingly, I found Reeves’ performance rather nuanced (I wonder how much of this was due to the animator, of course). Downey Jr.’s portrayal of the perenially tweaked drug nerd Barris steals the show, and his plus-and-minus rapport with Woody Harrelson made their shared scenes a joy to watch (especially considering that neither actor is a stranger to illicit substances).

I also enjoyed the rotoscope technique Linklater used. Contrary to Tim’s analysis, I found that it served to establish the tenuous nature of reality, to ground the viewer in Phil’s Ultimate Question: What is Real? Small glimpses of segments and areas that were left unanimated provide the viewer with questions which must remain unanswered. The animation also allowed for drug-induced hallucinations in a far less contrived manner than any computer effects could have; really, I can’t honestly think of a better method for the translation of PKD’s work into film, and wonder if the same process should be considered for future films based on his work.

Don’t get me wrong; it was far from perfect. There were a couple of minor plot points, and one major one, that deviated from the book, but I didn’t find them too obtrusive. There were also a few scenes where voiceovers were used to a questionable end (and one scene in which the voiceover fit perfectly).

However, it’s one of those movies that, even though you might love it, you can understand why someone else might not. In my opinion, it is by far the absolute finest adaptation of a Dick novel to date. There are no shootouts with killer robots; nobody runs away from a giant explosion. It’s the story, as Dick presented, of a group of people caught up in various bad places. When the next movie based on one of PKD’s stories comes out (an action-filled schlock-fest based on “The Golden Man,” called “Next”), I have a feeling we adherents of the Cult of Kindred will be looking back on “Scanner” with fondness.

Look for a cameo from the illimitable Alex Jones, a friend of Linklater who also appeared in Waking Life. Also, if you keep your eyes peeled in one of the early scenes, you might notice the visage of Phil himself, making his motion picture debut a mere 24 years after his death.

It is, of course, an introductory work on Afro-Carribean magic and religion, detailing a bit of the history of the religion, along with a smattering of spells and legends related to it. It also features a chapter dedicated to brujeria - “black magic.” As a survey, it never gets very in-depth. But moreso than that, I didn’t feel like it did a very good job of introducing these traditions to the outsider. The information was certainly conveyed in a straightforward and easy to understand way, but it didn’t really “connect the dots,” so to speak. Everything was sort of disjointed and it didn’t leave me feeling like my understanding of Santeria was at all richer for the experience of having read the book.

From my own perspective, I would have appreciated getting more of an understanding of the world-view associated with the religion, as this is the part of the tradition which I think is most inaccessible to outsiders. It’s easy to relate myths and give ingredients for spells, but doing so doesn’t transform the reader’s understanding, nor does it philosophically or emotionally key them into the personal undercurrents of what the religion is all about.

Unfortunately, I am just beginning to read up on Santeria and associated Afro-Carribean religious systems, so I’m unable to recommend a similar and better book on the subject. My final analysis of Gonzalez-Wippler’s book though is that it’s only worth picking up if you come across it in a used bookstore or perhaps a library. There must be better, more modern and more thorough books that have been written on the subject over the last thirty years.

I was, honestly, a little embarrassed to be part of the demographic in either case. The previews and advertisements that preceded the movie seriously turned me off. From the pathetic attempts to use kung fu movies to market McDonald’s trash to college age white men to the previews for the abominable looking Clerks II, by the time the actual feature presentation started, I was already in a bad mood.

I will admit to having gone into the movie with a heavy skeptic. A Scanner Darkly is one of my favorite PKD novels, and also what I would consider one of his most personal and emotional works. It would be hard for me to be satisfied with anything but the best rendition of this book to the screen. I had similar reservations about Waking Life as well. I thought the weird shaky animation style of tracing over people was going to get on my nerves and I thought the philosophical stuff was going to just come off as wanking. In that movie it somehow worked though, and the part where Richard Linklater gives a speech about Philip K. Dick in that movie made me believe that he really and truly understood what Philip K. Dick was all about.

The Scanner Darkly movie, however, completely unraveled that for me. To be totally and brutally honest, it was the kind of movie that I was ready to walk out of after five minutes. It just rubbed me in all the wrong ways and it was honestly a little bit torturous to sit through the whole thing.

I know it’s like Linklater’s “thing” to use all this animation stuff, but I just don’t get what the point of it is. If you took some still frames from the movie and showed them to me, I would be like, “Hey, those are sweet drawings!” Because they are. The illustrators who worked on it did some beautiful art. But the way it all ties together just seems sort of - I don’t know, lame. More than that though, it’s distracting. I kept getting hung up on the visual surface of the movie, which prevented me from entering into it emotionally.

Which is my second main gripe - that the movie lacked emotion. The book is basically a depiction of a phase in Dick’s life in between two of his failed marriages. And the book for me follows the further unraveling of this man, Bob Arctor’s life as he gets heavier and heavier into drugs. Which of course, he got into perhaps as a means of liberation from the woes of his original life. And the book uses an intricate sci-fi plot device of this man’s mind literally splitting in two and fighting against himself and becoming more distant from himsefl as he proceeds further and further down the spiral.

So the story is almost entirely internal. There is no real outward “action” in the book, nothing to hang a classic Hollywood action movie on. But Linklater didn’t go that way. He tried to stay true to the letter of the book, and perhaps failed to capture what I see as the real spirit of the book. Maybe it’s just been his type-casting, but Keanu Reeves for me is an actor who lacks any interior. I can’t, for the life of me, imagine him or his characters having any kind of meaningful interesting internal monologue - which sabotages the movie for me from the start. And I am soooo tired of him delivering the same drawn out husky line in every movie with just the words changed depending on the story:

“You mean… I can dodge bullets?”

“You mean, the hemispheres of my brain… are competing?”

I thought Robert Downey, Jr. was pretty much a dead ringer for how I’d imagine Barris to be; he did a great job - far superior to Keanu’s. Winona Ryder, I thought, was also expertly cast in the role of Donna, the “little black haired girl” who comes up so frequently in PKD’s many novels. However, the chemistry between her and Fred seemed totally weird. One of the things I love about Dick is this ability he has to capture a very specific frustration and complexity between male and female characters. It’s a love that is sort of non-sexual and almost spiritual at times, while also bordering on weird and psychotic at others. For me, that very important under-current of the book was totally lost on screen.

Also left unaccounted for are some of the stranger experiences of the plotline. In the novel, it sort of makes some kind of sick sense that Arctor/Fred sees the girl (Connie, I think) morph into Donna on the scanners. But in the movie, you’re just sort of left scratching your head over it. Same thing goes with his spiral down into split hemisphere-land. In the book, many small moments build up into the strange realization that the viewpoint character has become two characters somehow. In the movie though, that transition is confusing and haphazard and if you didn’t already know the book, I’d imagine it would be hard to understand what was even going on.

One of the things that was done pretty well though was the stoner dialogue they all share. For anybody who’s ever stayed up late smoking pot and drinking beer, those conversations have a ring of authenticity about them.

My final judgement on this movie is - sadly - that it’s not worth seeing. If you’re a die-hard Philip K. Dick fan, I think you’ll be disappointed. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, I think you’ll still find this movie boring and confusing. I would say wait for it to come out on Netflix, and maybe fire up the bong before you watch it and you’ll have a better time with it than I did.

He was explaining to my house-mates that he didn’t normally dress like this as he looked at my room, sizing it up to see if he wanted to rent it after me. He was only dressed like this – apparently – so that he could promote his novel, Battle Neverending. One of my house-mates, an old man named Ed was more than skeptical.

“You know you’re schizophrenic, right?” Ed said to him.

I thought that was more than a little harsh of a thing to say to a perfect stranger who was a guest in your home. But I went to fix myself a peanut butter sandwich rather than get embroiled in any intra-house warfare. From the next room, I heard our mild-mannered dread-locked superhero philosophizing about Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek and it’s similarities to Christianity.

Ed toiled away to undermine him, but after that weird subject matter which was right up my alley, I decided I had to introduce myself. “I’m Tim,” I told him. “What’s your name?”

“Saab,” he said.

“Sob?” I asked him, not sure if I’d heard him correctly. “You mean like S-O-B?” I wasn’t trying to imply, of course, that he was a son of a bitch or anything. Quite the opposite…

“No, Saab – like the car.”

I realized then he had copies of his book with him for sale, which was obviously a low-budget and quite-possibly home-printed affair. “How much for one of your books?”

“Only five dollars,” he said proudly.

Seemed a little steep to me, but how many times did the universe drop real-life superheroes on my doorstep? I decided to bite and bought myself a copy of Battle Neverending.

As nice as Saab was in person though, this book is quite difficult to get through. First off, the back cover describes it as a novel, when it is clearly a collection of short stories and poetry. The writing also leaves a lot to be desired. The stories are built almost exclusively of expository dialogue in which Saab’s ultra-left wing characters reference a litany of real-life radical figures from history in order to “stick it to the man where it hurts.” Lofton slips in and out of this grandiloquent radical aesthetic, spicing it up occasionally with painful lines in the vernacular like “ain’t no way in hell this nigger done transported me to some fucking island.”

Saab himself seems to appear as a variety of characters in the book, from a left-wing guardian angel named Dudley, to a struggling left-wing conspiracy author named “JB Stoner,” to a (you guessed it!) left-wing superhero named Tomorrowman whose business card reads “The People’s Superhero” (and who has been granted special powers by aliens to protect the earth, deciding to use them to black out CIA spy satellites).

Although I didn’t care for the writing or for the author’s naïve belief that the left-wing is perfect and always right, there are definitely some pretty cool concepts here and there. I enjoyed his depiction of God or the Universe or Infinity as basically a collective entity composed of all aspects of existence. When you die, Infinity takes a very democratic/communist vote to decide whether or not your are worthy to be united with it for all eternity.

As much of Saab paints his characters as left-wing heroes, there are some unfortunate and heavy-handed depictions of women through the book as well. In fact, I can’t recall any female characters who weren’t either vile demonic temptresses, prostitutes, KKK members or Neo-Nazis. He also seems to have a special axe to grind with the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan and their teachings that black people come from another planet. There is also a strong fixation with the beneficial industrial uses of hemp (along with copious use of “the chronic”).

One really odd thing about this book though is the final story, from which the book gets it’s title. It is a transcript of a fictional interview between Bill Moyers and Tomorrowman, who has broken into Moyer’s house to get him to transmit his left-wing superhero message to the world. Aside from being a kind of tedious read, this interview makes mention of a violent attack on Washington, DC occurring in January of 2001. The book itself is copyrighted 1997 according to it’s inner cover. It also talks about a presidential election riddled with fraud, which turns into riots, a recount and President Bill Clinton declaring temporary martial law (before turning the reigns over to President-Elect Ralph Nader). The events, of course, are rather jumbled, but they do bear an eerie similarity to some of what has actually transpired over the past several years.

I’m not going to say that I think Saab Lofton is any kind of visionary or prophet necessarily, but maybe there’s a good reason he is dressed up like a superhero and seems to see himself on a mission from God. You’d of course have to ask him, but I would bet dollars to donuts that Saab has undergone some type of significant transpersonal, psychological or intense spiritual events which gave him the drive to put together Battle Neverending and possibly provided some of the actual material for his book. Taken as a self-portrait of one man’s inner struggle to make sense of it all makes this book a more interesting (if not well-written) read.

The book chronicles the story of a child, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, who has been genetically engineered to be a master strategist. The future of the planet earth rests upon his prepubescent shoulders in an on-going hundred year war with a marauding alien race nicknamed the “buggers.” At the tender age of only six years old, Ender is drafted into the outer-space Battle School where he is pushed to his limits day in and day out, to prepare him for the final battle where he will lead Earth’s space fleet to the bugger home-world.

Most of the book details the cruel “game” that Ender is placed in by his military commanders during his time at Battle School. They intentionally isolate him from the other boys. They place him into increasingly impossible situations. In short, they seek to break him. If he does not survive, then he is not fit to command the fleet to victory. The game he is caught in is a perfect parable for life at it’s absolute cruelest, when the very forces of the universe themselves seem to be conspiring against you to bring you hardship and pain. It becomes inspiring in the sense that it allows you to imagine that when you own life seems impossibly bleak, that you are perhaps being prepared for something greater and more important than you could ever envision.

Through this grueling routine which lasts years, Ender is molded into a perfect cold-blooded killer. He is uniquely able to re-orient himself into the perspective of his enemies, ruthlessly exploiting their weaknesses and blind-spots. But this ability comes at a great personal cost to him. He is only able to do what he does through an extraordinary helping of empathy and love that he has for his enemies. As he explains in a key passage:

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them -”

“You beat them.” For a moment, she was not afraid of his understanding.

“No, you don’t understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don’t exist.”

I really like how this book is put together. It’s an interesting story and uses the classic sci-fi mythological set-up of the man-child who has near divine powers flowing through him, but must manage somehow to fit into an all too human world. Despite or possibly because of his exaggerated differences from ordinary people, he becomes sort of an everyman, plugging through larger than life versions of the same struggles we all face day to day. Taken in a new extrapolated sci-fi context, we are better able to see the heroic qualities that we all struggle with in ordinary life.

Card does a great job also of not letting his futuristic world and technology get the better of him. His sci-fi elements are smooth and silky. Through Ender, we are exposed to all manner of strange almost magical technology, but it never gets in the way of the story. In fact, elements of it are used to great effect to instill wonderful dreamlike episodes, such as in Ender’s ongoing struggles with the computerized fairy tale land, the giant and the tower. It’s a really cool way to make a very internal and symbolic struggle into something very concrete and easy to relate to.

There are also some really good philosophical bits comparing the human strategies to the way bugger consciousness works. And it’s very satisfying to see ths dichotomy overcome by Ender towards the end of the book. It is this ability to overcome central plot conflicts rather than use them as a crutch that I think separates a decent writer from a great writer.

I think this is a great book (and a reasonably fast and easy read) that could possibly even appeal to people who aren’t that into science fiction usually. The only thing I could see some people getting hung up on in this book is how much time and detail Card devotes to detailing Ender’s exploits in Battle School. There are maybe a few too many zero gravity combat situations, but I think they are worth sitting through as they contain a lot of worthwhile characterization and plot development. All in all though, I highly recommend checking this book out – whether you’re in zero gravity, on an airplane or sitting quietly in your bed dreaming about the stars and the world to come.

At the top of the pyramid is Reverend Sabbath, an evangelist extraordinaire, and CEO of the fabulously wealthy Risen Lamb corporation. Think Pat Robertson on spiritual steroids. Sabbath epitomizes everything screwed up about a contemporary Christianity wedded to power, money and violence.

Slaving away somewhere in the middle of the pyramid is Johnny Greco, a washed-up journalist whose career was ruined by Sabbath’s anti-blasphemy laws. Greco works for a seedy tabloid called the Inquiring Mind, and specializes in fluff reports about crazies and con artists. Greco’s career and personal despair turn around, however, when he uncovers somebody who just might be the real deal: a young Latino preacher and miracle worker named Jay (initials J.F.K.) who claims to be Christ returned to earth. Christ, of course, this time around wears a dark hooded sweatshirt, travels around in a beat-up van with an ex-porn star and uses copious basketball metaphors.

The story basically chronicles Greco’s selfish mix of trying to get the exclusive scoop on Jay, while struggling with his own desire to finally put aside his professional skepticism and believe. Intertwined in all this, of course is Sabbath who catches wind of the returned Christ and is determined to stamp him out this time. Sabbath declares at one point, “We corrected Christianity, Christ. Worked out the kinks. We don’t need you.”

As much as I personally agree with a lot of the points Tony Hendra is making with this book, I was a bit disappointed that he opted for the obvious cartoon dichotomy of Sabbath’s contemporary “evil” Christianity and Jay’s authentically human street Christianity. It makes for a fairly entertaining and quick read, but tends to lack any lasting punch because it is everything that you’d expect in a pop religious satire. There aren’t any surprises waiting for you in the book, and no real exploration of the possibility that maybe everybody is as right as they are wrong, that maybe that’s just life, and we ought to just make the best of it regardless of the potential saviors who are paraded in front of us.

Also disappointing is that none of the characters really have any depth or reality too them. The bad guys look and act like idiots and of course get what’s coming to them. The good guys are so good that they are completely lifeless and boring. And not surprisingly, the truth prevails in the end. Well, sort of… It’s hard to say if any of the characters are really transformed by any of the experiences. And not just in a sort of postmodern way, but in a sort of way where you kind of end up feeling like, “Well, why did I read this?”

All that said though, there are some decent modern updates of Christ’s teachings (like the speech he gives at the military base) – even if none of it is really that mind-blowing. And there are some pretty fun sci-fi moments – even though I wouldn’t by any stretch call it a sci-fi novel. My favorite has to be when the returned Christ is captured on an Amish farm by robots leaping out of stealth helicopters. And there are also some subversive elements thrown into the mix, like the American government breezily planning false flag terror attacks as pretexts to launch Armageddon-style wars.

In the end, I would say this is a bit lighter novel than I typically enjoy, but as the dust jacket says, it may be a good read for people not usually inclined in the direction of religious fiction. But reading it, you have to wonder if it really is any less preachy and evangelizing than the sappy Christian fiction it goes to such great lengths to mock. It may quite simply be the same thing packaged for a different more “hip” audience. And that may be okay at the end of the day, because there are room for as many tellings of the story of Jesus as there are people on this planet. As the book makes plain, no one has a monopoly on the truth.

The Subversive Use of Sacred Symbolism in the Media is a recorded speech and PowerPoint presentation which can be viewed in it’s entirety on Tsarion’s Taroscopes website. The lecture rounds out at about 100 minutes and was originally delivered at the Conspiracy Con 2003 conference.

While I enjoyed some of the thinking in Tsarion’s video, it is roughly what you’d expect from a presentation at a conspiracy conference. It is big on outrageous connection-making and small on factual accuracy. And it goes without saying that it’s extremely paranoid.

One of Tsarion’s main theses seems to be that graphic designers and marketers the world over have access to secret occult archives, from which they are consistently drawing visual and thematic inspiration in a concerted effort to subjugate the human spirit. It’s exactly as preposterous as it sounds - especially if you’ve ever done any graphic design work yourself, or have friends in the business. Like any business, graphic design and marketing are about maximizing your time, effectiveness and profits. With scattered real-life exceptions, esoteric concerns simply do not enter into the picture.

In any event though, the real message that I took away from this video is one that I agree with: that advertising is manipulative (if not always evil). It plays on people’s insecurities, and it attempts to hurl useless and sometimes dangerous products and services into the gaps we all have in our lives as humans. To seek spiritual salvation through consumerist avenues only opens you up more and more to this system of deprivation and domination. So, for that reason, I find Tsarion’s efforts to pull people out of this negative spiral both noble and worthwhile.

I also do think that there is something to the chaotic way he just slams together symbolism and weird imagery from media and occult sources. It shows how the same themes important to humanity have essentially never changed. And it very effectively shows you how to think not in rational/linear terms, but in clusters and by chains of (loose) associations. This can be a very valuable skill for creative thinking and the exploration of truth - or it can simply make you snort in derision as your rational mind is violated again and again. Either way, it is unfortunate that the only explanation he chooses to employ is one of shadowy international conspiracies controlling the media.

However, if we ourselves were to apply this same level of creativity to the meta-narrative he’s employing as to the symbols themselves, we could come up with any number of equally “plausible” possibilities:

1. That graphic designers haven’t got a clue about any of this
2. That graphic designers are intentionally and covertly injecting sacred symbols into mundane media to wake people up and spiritually enrich their lives
3. That media and pop culture nowadays are the natural containers of spiritual symbolism and transmitters of value systems today in the same way that mythology and folktales were in ages past
4. That it’s all evil - business, advertising, etc - but that God or the gods have begun a secret spiritual invasion to transmute this lead into gold, and that the symbols of the divine appear initially in the trash stratum.

The point of all this conjecture is simply this: if you’re going to go in and tinker with your belief systems and worldviews using the methodologies of conspiracy theory or occult investigation, then you owe it to yourself to explore all possible explanations - not just the ones that are sinister and paranoid. And remember that life is more convoluted and confounding and complex - and downright beautiful - than any theory or thesis could ever account for.

But as Nicholas St. James, the president of one ant tank, discovers when he ventures to the surface to find an artificial pancreas for a dying repairman, the actual truth is something different altogether. The war ended long ago, but the powers that be kept going the lie so that those dwelling under the earth would be motivated to keep the system going while living in virtual slavery.

The plot twists and multiple layers of reality inverting again and again are all pure Philip K. Dick. The overall thrust of this book deals with the necessity of lies and violence to sustain a social order - and whether they really are necessary at all. You could easily draw parallels between the imaginary war in this book to a lot of what’s going on in the world today in the “War Against Terrorism.” But this book is nowhere near as polished as a lot of his other work, especially the later stuff.

One of the things that really got to me was his excessive use of made up jargon and abbreviations. The book is chock full of it and it really impedes the reading process. Also very aggravating is the constant internal italicized monologues that take place right in the middle of conversations. It’s almost like Dick started out with a basic fifty page story and then fleshed it out with all these damned italicized passages later on so that he could push it towards 200 pages. Whatever the case, they really slow down the reading process.

About halfway through though, the damn finally breaks and the novel starts to pick up. I don’t want to spoil the fun of what happens, but I think the second half makes the first half worth reading. Overall though, if you’re anything but a hardcore PKD fan, I would recommend you start elsewhere, like maybe with Ubik, Flow My Tears, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?