Wednesday, February 22, 2012
COLONY ZERO Taos, New Mexico we had a good stay, reunited with a buddy from new york who I hadn’t seen in almost five years. He was an early supporter of my poetry, some of his compatriots had emigrated to los angeles a while back and that’s how we were connected, some 8 years ago or so I left my comfortable life in the midwest to become a postmodern beatnik hobo poet, doing spoken word and selling chapbook poetry zines out of a motivational tape salesman’s suitcase that I found at a garage sale in minneapolis. We landed in Taos to see an old friend, now tending to a cafe, representing for Bohemia in this strange desert land, the motif a hyperspace of platonic south-western molds, little art galleries and tourist traps around the squares, hollowed out by winter, waiting for warmer days to be flooded with the people visiting and the locals emergent from their hibernation. you couple up in cold times, make arrangements for body heat. I imagine a dynamic of an overturning population of young and old, families that came out to make earth ships, rich people looking for a new age sanctuary, the flight of the young people for larger seas. it’s one of those counter-cultural vortexes, a nexus of currents flowing in from other such places that share a reciprocity with each other, the psychic geography of the terrain and climate- the identity of a place and how the people who inhabit it identify with and represent and reproduce that identity in their philosophies and practices. so here has lodged itself a desert punk aesthetic - the burnt out husk of a utopian communal dream haunting us from the vector of the past; land pirates forming the temporary autonomous cafes in worn out shacks under open sky- the future too a ghost that looms gloomy in its apocalyptic pronouncements. ethic of adaptation: to presuppose the fall of civilization, to anticipate the chaos. not to will it so into being, but to acknowledge a reality that exists in the fissures of institutions and the inability to account for our collective actions, oppositional logic widened by its own limitations. I am colonized by the teleology of western civilization (which I can find no trace of) - barbarously imposing my totalitarian all-encompassing worldview perspective on any abstraction I can find. submit to my domination and I will give you the tools to liberate yourself, I will Shepard you thru the maze of gurus, poet philosopher sovereign truth blender cryptologist over-codifier. all this jargon for the file, on display in a ridiculous circus of discourse. criticizing the utility of utilitarianism and other such fundamentals so as not to drown in the useful fiction. somewhere between magical thinking and scientific method; the third way, democratic shamanism, a radical singularity of symbolism in the sensory apparatus subsumed into immediate attention. shedding layers of meaning in the joy of experience. we are sensual creatures. for an alienated service economy, community is hedonism. ROADTRIPS we planned to head out west, my friend returning his rental car to the airport in Albuquerque, and we’d worked out a rideshare with a guy passing thru town on his way to the west coast by looking on craigslist for rides in cities further east, when no searches and ads turned up any leads in our desired time frame locally. a day of driving. our host had been on the road all night, so we helped him drive, shared gas, conversed. we discovered we were all predisposed to travel and taking people as they come, open, friendly. driven this route back and forth now a few times. the desire to see the world while you still have the energy. a self-selecting crowd that picks up hitchhikers. TUCSON helped drive different legs of the trip, stopped to take pictures by the Very Large Array and had a nice drive through the state roads through Gila forrest. trading daring stories of mobile living. arrived on university campus bar strip parking lot turf and waited for our ride to meet up with his friend inside a sports bar to watch the end of the game, while we guarded the minivan with all our bags inside. we’d bonded over the day’s drive and we were all delirious from respectively being up all night, catching naps in shifts- I did the last couple hours of the drive after we discovered a sparkplug had blown out, and we drove on with one less cylinder firing while gas fumes permeated the car. have to fix it tomorrow in tucson, he says. we all sat with scarves over our faces and the windows down while I sputtered up the hills and coasted where I could. in advance I’d looked up an online contact on recommendation from a mutual friend, who picked us up and gave us shelter for a few hours before our phoenix contact could come get lost trying to find us on the outskirts of tucson. we set up the transmitter beacon and relayed our coordinates while he drove around aimlessly cursing his GPS device’s soothing synthesized female voice. while we waited, we sat and absorbed the charm of our hosts and their space. a lovely couple on the outskirts of Tucson. the indigenous people lived for ten thousand years subsisting on the desert plants, everything that grows here is edible, they tell us. a nice home, the happy husband working on cutting tile to lay in to the porch, a menagerie of creatures kept, snakes, fish in tanks, cats and dogs, turkeys and other fowl in the backyard. I had never met these folks but we had mutual friends we were both very close to, and traded stories from around the time that we had all been running in the same circles but never crossed paths. now we were pleased to have finally gotten to come together, and by the time our buddy from Phoenix made it there to pick us up we were telling each other how great it would be to be able to get together again and wouldn’t it be nice to run into each other in LA some time and I wish we could stay longer and all those sorts of heartfelt things. a long time spent since I had slept much more than a short nap in a car. we’d logged plenty of miles from Taos to Albuquerque to southern new mexico to arizona to Tucson to Phoenix and finally landing in some suburbs to get to take a bath for the first time in some days and relax at the happy home of our buddy, secure in his gated community, a homeowner able to offer us each our own room for the night. I retired, digesting all the successful habits that lead to this moment and gnawed on my own arm leaving little bruises, considering submission and domination of the self and being the observer internalizing surveillance society and the headtrip of the modern politicized identity. PHOENIX Super Bowl Sunday, we went out to the mountains and did target practice against a foreground of stone, in the desert, firing high velocity projectiles at old shotgun shell cases. It was the first time for me since being a lad in south dakota when I had been too timid to handle a .22 rifle with my older cousins. a few hours in the hot sun feeling the great leveling power of the guns in my hand. afterwards we barbecued and watched the football game. the halftime show was a brilliant illuminati mind control initiation black mass spectacle befitting of the cultural moment, exactly the kind of bread and circuses the America we made required. everything seemed correct, appropriate. even pushing into the dark after the European dinner party. even losing track of time and waking up the next day unsure of which house you stayed at, which day it was on the roadtrip itinerary - this insecurity and not knowing has become normalized. NOMADOLOGY a great stroke of fortune that we found this benevolent soul who was driving from Oklahoma City headed thru New Mexico and relaying us to Arizona— before we parted ways he’d told me he was continuing on to Los Angeles after he got his van fixed, and just so happened I was staying a little outside the city off of the interstate out west —- so that next day I awaited him coming out to pick me up. a spot of coffee while he came in to chat for a while before our departure, and I said goodbye to my friend and travel companion from New York, who was bound on a plane back to the big city in the next couple days. and that was the end of our adventure together for the time being, and I made some intentions to head out east again some day, having not been back out there in so long, talk of the coming spring and summer days and loose plans. that chapter was finished, and my story then began to head to Los Angeles to reconnect with my tribe out there, where I have been most active in recent times. I make a lot of vague plans about which direction I will head in the coming weeks and months, and notions of where I’d like to be, but I’ve learned that you can’t really make fixed plans as you move with the current streams you navigate. You stop in eddies for a while to whirl around here and there, perhaps swimming upstream some times, but generally having to move where opportunities present themselves. a degree of flexibility is required for this, so you plan to keep things open and leave schedules tentative at the horizon of the event. when approaching it you start collapsing possibility clouds down to the vapor of praxis as you find yourself shuttling, arriving, leaving, constantly in flux. shifting perspectives that remain undefined until the moment you reach across the galaxies between yourself and an other- and open up ground for new terrains, new geographies, new mappings to locate ourselves in again, on new playing fields that can dissolve the self-contradicting internalized conflicting forces that play a role in making identity and contribute to shaping us. some place to stand in an age where theory evaporates any hope of a meaningful way of knowing anything. nomad tribes form affinities and redefine space through recombining together continuously in dynamic tension. we create a place to inhabit that offers us possibilities. the only way to subvert domination is to create our own alternatives to it’s necessity.

COLONY ZERO
Taos, New Mexico

we had a good stay, reunited with a buddy from new york who I hadn’t seen in almost five years. He was an early supporter of my poetry, some of his compatriots had emigrated to los angeles a while back and that’s how we were connected, some 8 years ago or so I left my comfortable life in the midwest to become a postmodern beatnik hobo poet, doing spoken word and selling chapbook poetry zines out of a motivational tape salesman’s suitcase that I found at a garage sale in minneapolis.

We landed in Taos to see an old friend, now tending to a cafe, representing for Bohemia in this strange desert land, the motif a hyperspace of platonic south-western molds, little art galleries and tourist traps around the squares, hollowed out by winter, waiting for warmer days to be flooded with the people visiting and the locals emergent from their hibernation. you couple up in cold times, make arrangements for body heat.

I imagine a dynamic of an overturning population of young and old, families that came out to make earth ships, rich people looking for a new age sanctuary, the flight of the young people for larger seas.

it’s one of those counter-cultural vortexes, a nexus of currents flowing in from other such places that share a reciprocity with each other, the psychic geography of the terrain and climate- the identity of a place and how the people who inhabit it identify with and represent and reproduce that identity in their philosophies and practices. so here has lodged itself a desert punk aesthetic - the burnt out husk of a utopian communal dream haunting us from the vector of the past; land pirates forming the temporary autonomous cafes in worn out shacks under open sky- the future too a ghost that looms gloomy in its apocalyptic pronouncements.

ethic of adaptation: to presuppose the fall of civilization, to anticipate the chaos. not to will it so into being, but to acknowledge a reality that exists in the fissures of institutions and the inability to account for our collective actions, oppositional logic widened by its own limitations. I am colonized by the teleology of western civilization (which I can find no trace of) - barbarously imposing my totalitarian all-encompassing worldview perspective on any abstraction I can find. submit to my domination and I will give you the tools to liberate yourself, I will Shepard you thru the maze of gurus, poet philosopher sovereign truth blender cryptologist over-codifier. all this jargon for the file, on display in a ridiculous circus of discourse. criticizing the utility of utilitarianism and other such fundamentals so as not to drown in the useful fiction.

somewhere between magical thinking and scientific method;

the third way, democratic shamanism, a radical singularity of symbolism in the sensory apparatus subsumed into immediate attention. shedding layers of meaning in the joy of experience. we are sensual creatures.

for an alienated service economy, community is hedonism.

ROADTRIPS

we planned to head out west, my friend returning his rental car to the airport in Albuquerque, and we’d worked out a rideshare with a guy passing thru town on his way to the west coast by looking on craigslist for rides in cities further east, when no searches and ads turned up any leads in our desired time frame locally. a day of driving. our host had been on the road all night, so we helped him drive, shared gas, conversed. we discovered we were all predisposed to travel and taking people as they come, open, friendly. driven this route back and forth now a few times. the desire to see the world while you still have the energy. a self-selecting crowd that picks up hitchhikers.

TUCSON

helped drive different legs of the trip, stopped to take pictures by the Very Large Array and had a nice drive through the state roads through Gila forrest. trading daring stories of mobile living. arrived on university campus bar strip parking lot turf and waited for our ride to meet up with his friend inside a sports bar to watch the end of the game, while we guarded the minivan with all our bags inside. we’d bonded over the day’s drive and we were all delirious from respectively being up all night, catching naps in shifts- I did the last couple hours of the drive after we discovered a sparkplug had blown out, and we drove on with one less cylinder firing while gas fumes permeated the car. have to fix it tomorrow in tucson, he says. we all sat with scarves over our faces and the windows down while I sputtered up the hills and coasted where I could.

in advance I’d looked up an online contact on recommendation from a mutual friend, who picked us up and gave us shelter for a few hours before our phoenix contact could come get lost trying to find us on the outskirts of tucson. we set up the transmitter beacon and relayed our coordinates while he drove around aimlessly cursing his GPS device’s soothing synthesized female voice.

while we waited, we sat and absorbed the charm of our hosts and their space. a lovely couple on the outskirts of Tucson. the indigenous people lived for ten thousand years subsisting on the desert plants, everything that grows here is edible, they tell us. a nice home, the happy husband working on cutting tile to lay in to the porch, a menagerie of creatures kept, snakes, fish in tanks, cats and dogs, turkeys and other fowl in the backyard. I had never met these folks but we had mutual friends we were both very close to, and traded stories from around the time that we had all been running in the same circles but never crossed paths. now we were pleased to have finally gotten to come together, and by the time our buddy from Phoenix made it there to pick us up we were telling each other how great it would be to be able to get together again and wouldn’t it be nice to run into each other in LA some time and I wish we could stay longer and all those sorts of heartfelt things.

a long time spent since I had slept much more than a short nap in a car. we’d logged plenty of miles from Taos to Albuquerque to southern new mexico to arizona to Tucson to Phoenix and finally landing in some suburbs to get to take a bath for the first time in some days and relax at the happy home of our buddy, secure in his gated community, a homeowner able to offer us each our own room for the night. I retired, digesting all the successful habits that lead to this moment and gnawed on my own arm leaving little bruises, considering submission and domination of the self and being the observer internalizing surveillance society and the headtrip of the modern politicized identity.

PHOENIX

Super Bowl Sunday, we went out to the mountains and did target practice against a foreground of stone, in the desert, firing high velocity projectiles at old shotgun shell cases. It was the first time for me since being a lad in south dakota when I had been too timid to handle a .22 rifle with my older cousins. a few hours in the hot sun feeling the great leveling power of the guns in my hand. afterwards we barbecued and watched the football game. the halftime show was a brilliant illuminati mind control initiation black mass spectacle befitting of the cultural moment, exactly the kind of bread and circuses the America we made required. everything seemed correct, appropriate. even pushing into the dark after the European dinner party. even losing track of time and waking up the next day unsure of which house you stayed at, which day it was on the roadtrip itinerary - this insecurity and not knowing has become normalized.

NOMADOLOGY

a great stroke of fortune that we found this benevolent soul who was driving from Oklahoma City headed thru New Mexico and relaying us to Arizona— before we parted ways he’d told me he was continuing on to Los Angeles after he got his van fixed, and just so happened I was staying a little outside the city off of the interstate out west —- so that next day I awaited him coming out to pick me up. a spot of coffee while he came in to chat for a while before our departure, and I said goodbye to my friend and travel companion from New York, who was bound on a plane back to the big city in the next couple days. and that was the end of our adventure together for the time being, and I made some intentions to head out east again some day, having not been back out there in so long, talk of the coming spring and summer days and loose plans. that chapter was finished, and my story then began to head to Los Angeles to reconnect with my tribe out there, where I have been most active in recent times.

I make a lot of vague plans about which direction I will head in the coming weeks and months, and notions of where I’d like to be, but I’ve learned that you can’t really make fixed plans as you move with the current streams you navigate. You stop in eddies for a while to whirl around here and there, perhaps swimming upstream some times, but generally having to move where opportunities present themselves. a degree of flexibility is required for this, so you plan to keep things open and leave schedules tentative at the horizon of the event. when approaching it you start collapsing possibility clouds down to the vapor of praxis as you find yourself shuttling, arriving, leaving, constantly in flux. shifting perspectives that remain undefined until the moment you reach across the galaxies between yourself and an other- and open up ground for new terrains, new geographies, new mappings to locate ourselves in again, on new playing fields that can dissolve the self-contradicting internalized conflicting forces that play a role in making identity and contribute to shaping us.

some place to stand in an age where theory evaporates any hope of a meaningful way of knowing anything. nomad tribes form affinities and redefine space through recombining together continuously in dynamic tension. we create a place to inhabit that offers us possibilities. the only way to subvert domination is to create our own alternatives to it’s necessity.

Posted at 12:05 AM