Getting Back Into Getting Back Into Anarcho-Mysticism
This man wants to tell you something. Are you going to listen?
Was anyone else on this blog ever really into Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson), author of such classics as Pirate Utopias, The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism, and myriad other political/philosophical/religious tracts and edicts? As I mentioned the other day, I recently re-bought and am now re-reading DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, and one of the most powerful scenes in that novel–which I’d pretty much forgotten about, until I re-encountered it–is of billionaire Eric Packer’s white stretch limo getting caught up in the middle of an anti-globalization demonstration that suddenly breaks out into a Seattle ’99-style riot.
DeLillo’s depiction of the event itself, the beauty and abandon of pure chaos overflowing the boundaries (and/or transcending the naivete) of the issues themselves, put me in the mind of Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone. So I dug around on my bookshelf, and sure enough, there’s my old copy, complete with slightly faded yellow highlighting: “Or to take an even more Radical Monist stance: Time never started at all. Chaos never died. The Empire was never founded. We are not now & never have been slaves to the past or hostages to the future.” This is from one of the Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy. In a separate Communique, the AOA offers up “slogans & mottos for subway graffiti & other purposes.” These include: “STRIKE FOR INDOLENCE & SPIRITUAL BEAUTY” and “YOUNG CHILDREN HAVE BEAUTIFUL FEET.”
How can you not love this guy? Anyway, the point of this post is that Bey, who is vociferously anti-copyright (given that he’s “against” property, government, and consciousness and religion as we know them, how could he not be?) has made just about all of his work available for free online, including the full text of The TAZ and several other of his books besides. Learn all about Immediatism! Read “The Manifesto of the Black Thorn League”! Learn about Bey’s own religion of choice, The Moorish Orthodox Church, which as I understand it is some kind of latter-day Islamic heresy founded by an American in the late 19th century. Nominate someone for the Jubilee Saints Project. In short–go apeshit a little.
This is Voltairine De Cleyre, a Jubilee Saint. An American, she became an anarchist after the Haymarket protestors were framed for a bombing, falsely convicted at trial, and then hung. She wrote the essay, “Direct Action.”
Tags: Hakim Bey, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Temporary Autonomous Zone
Oh Yes!
I’m skimming now, will read the more thoroughly later-
this sort of stuff is great:
“It is often said, and parrot-like repeated, that the bosses are “class-conscious,” that they stick together for their class interest, and are willing to undergo any sort of personal loss rather than be false to those interests. It isn’t so at all. The majority of business people are just like the majority of workingmen; they care a whole lot more about their individual loss or gain than about the gain or loss of their class. And it is his individual loss the boss sees, when threatened by a union. ”
I don’t remember ever hearing about De Cleyre, and I basically specialized in obscure, early feminists during high school and college. This is great. Thanks Justin.
Oh Yes!
I’m skimming now, will read the more thoroughly later-
this sort of stuff is great:
“It is often said, and parrot-like repeated, that the bosses are “class-conscious,” that they stick together for their class interest, and are willing to undergo any sort of personal loss rather than be false to those interests. It isn’t so at all. The majority of business people are just like the majority of workingmen; they care a whole lot more about their individual loss or gain than about the gain or loss of their class. And it is his individual loss the boss sees, when threatened by a union. ”
I don’t remember ever hearing about De Cleyre, and I basically specialized in obscure, early feminists during high school and college. This is great. Thanks Justin.
Gonna post this all over my shit, which feels sorta like stealing from you Justin, which is weird to say, but true. How ’bout a trade for Alexandra Kollontai? My ‘discovery’ a few months ago, and only tangentially related.
The ‘a’ on my keyboard has worn right off.
Gonna post this all over my shit, which feels sorta like stealing from you Justin, which is weird to say, but true. How ’bout a trade for Alexandra Kollontai? My ‘discovery’ a few months ago, and only tangentially related.
The ‘a’ on my keyboard has worn right off.
Hey Justin,
Thanks for this. Yeah, I’d been introduced to Bey’s work while in the midst of an all-things-Bill-Laswell phase in the nineties.
Have you heard his recording TAZ on Axiom Records 1994?
Here it is for free:
http://www.chaoshacker.org/bey/audio/
And here’s the liner notes, I think, to whet the appetite for reconstruction:
“Explorations of the political, the personal, the social, and the metaphysical from writer and spoken word artist Hakim Bey. Includes Wu Man, Nicky Skopelitis, Buckethead, and Bill Laswell.
Some bands include manifestos in their liner notes. The liner notes to this album are a manifesto. Explaining T.A.Z. is difficult, but stating that Bey’s spin on the spoken-word genre is wizard mindfuckery is a good start. Chaos, anarchy, subcultures – Bey advocates nearly everything, including creating free states for like-minded cabals and collectives. He recommends marginalized groups form secret societies and concludes with a lengthy piece on boycotting cop culture. Musique concrete cloaks his words in an eerily seductive melange of avant-garde noise and ambient music. But the sounds are almost immaterial. Bey’s words are the primary focus of this disc. This album truly is punk as fuck, not in the ambient-styled music, but in the message it contains.
Sitting like a detached cyber-Buddha somewhere between the “established events” of the past and universes of the “virtual future” is Hakim Bey, author of the handbook for poetic terrorism, The Temporary Autonomous Zone. His current release, a meld with musical terrorist Bill Laswell, seems an inevitable project for the Axiom workshop. With its blurred connecting points and unification of seemingly unrelated conventions, it serves as a textbook reference and spoken counterpart to the creative muse behind the label’s purely musical chunks of autonomous and, by virtue of their “immarketability,” marginal grenades of artistic liberation. Here, Bey is as comfortable dropping names like Proudhon or Marx as he is an anonymous, fellow modern terrorist known as “P.M.” Similarly, he unveils an ominous plot behind the distribution of propagandist television shows like Hill Street Blues while diving into other, less mediated and more “ancient” outposts, such as the 19th Century Chinese Tong, where one spends free time. The result is like a muse needle out of control, making inherent connections in things both marginal and mediated – a swirling, surreal vertigo of information and methods for “escape.” Woven with the kind of airy tones and hallucinatory rhythms that Laswell has been playing with lately, Bey’s voice calms and prepares the listener for an age where missing information and the icons of late capitalist high-tech correspond with an increasing alienation of this “X-generation”‘s most primitive needs. Most of all, Bey doesn’t come across as a cheesy, overzealous, visionary bard, but presents us with ideas point-blank, allowing us to be choosy in aiming our own forms of poetic terrorism against those forces that attempt to suppress and homogenize humility and free thought.”
Hey Justin,
Thanks for this. Yeah, I’d been introduced to Bey’s work while in the midst of an all-things-Bill-Laswell phase in the nineties.
Have you heard his recording TAZ on Axiom Records 1994?
Here it is for free:
http://www.chaoshacker.org/bey/audio/
And here’s the liner notes, I think, to whet the appetite for reconstruction:
“Explorations of the political, the personal, the social, and the metaphysical from writer and spoken word artist Hakim Bey. Includes Wu Man, Nicky Skopelitis, Buckethead, and Bill Laswell.
Some bands include manifestos in their liner notes. The liner notes to this album are a manifesto. Explaining T.A.Z. is difficult, but stating that Bey’s spin on the spoken-word genre is wizard mindfuckery is a good start. Chaos, anarchy, subcultures – Bey advocates nearly everything, including creating free states for like-minded cabals and collectives. He recommends marginalized groups form secret societies and concludes with a lengthy piece on boycotting cop culture. Musique concrete cloaks his words in an eerily seductive melange of avant-garde noise and ambient music. But the sounds are almost immaterial. Bey’s words are the primary focus of this disc. This album truly is punk as fuck, not in the ambient-styled music, but in the message it contains.
Sitting like a detached cyber-Buddha somewhere between the “established events” of the past and universes of the “virtual future” is Hakim Bey, author of the handbook for poetic terrorism, The Temporary Autonomous Zone. His current release, a meld with musical terrorist Bill Laswell, seems an inevitable project for the Axiom workshop. With its blurred connecting points and unification of seemingly unrelated conventions, it serves as a textbook reference and spoken counterpart to the creative muse behind the label’s purely musical chunks of autonomous and, by virtue of their “immarketability,” marginal grenades of artistic liberation. Here, Bey is as comfortable dropping names like Proudhon or Marx as he is an anonymous, fellow modern terrorist known as “P.M.” Similarly, he unveils an ominous plot behind the distribution of propagandist television shows like Hill Street Blues while diving into other, less mediated and more “ancient” outposts, such as the 19th Century Chinese Tong, where one spends free time. The result is like a muse needle out of control, making inherent connections in things both marginal and mediated – a swirling, surreal vertigo of information and methods for “escape.” Woven with the kind of airy tones and hallucinatory rhythms that Laswell has been playing with lately, Bey’s voice calms and prepares the listener for an age where missing information and the icons of late capitalist high-tech correspond with an increasing alienation of this “X-generation”‘s most primitive needs. Most of all, Bey doesn’t come across as a cheesy, overzealous, visionary bard, but presents us with ideas point-blank, allowing us to be choosy in aiming our own forms of poetic terrorism against those forces that attempt to suppress and homogenize humility and free thought.”
I remember reading TAZ, I was always more of a Debord/Vaneigrem guy though
I remember reading TAZ, I was always more of a Debord/Vaneigrem guy though
Weird dancing in all-night computer banking lobbies, anyone?
This is precisely how I was introduced to Bey, and at pretty much the same time. I think perhaps. John, we were spiritual roommates.
Weird dancing in all-night computer banking lobbies, anyone?
This is precisely how I was introduced to Bey, and at pretty much the same time. I think perhaps. John, we were spiritual roommates.
Hey! I found an old copy of Arthur magazine on the sidewalk the other day, and in it was Peter Lamborn Wilson’s treatise on A New Green Hermeticism and Endarkenment. This was just a few hours after I finished Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, and renounced possessive pronouns.
“The last agreeable year for us was 1941, the ideal is about 10,000 BC, but we’re not purists. We might be willing to accept steam power or hydraulics.”
So yea, feed me more!
Hey! I found an old copy of Arthur magazine on the sidewalk the other day, and in it was Peter Lamborn Wilson’s treatise on A New Green Hermeticism and Endarkenment. This was just a few hours after I finished Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, and renounced possessive pronouns.
“The last agreeable year for us was 1941, the ideal is about 10,000 BC, but we’re not purists. We might be willing to accept steam power or hydraulics.”
So yea, feed me more!
oh and hey check it: http://www.realitysandwich.com/blog/3911
oh and hey check it: http://www.realitysandwich.com/blog/3911
That scene in Cosmopolis is the one that stands out most in my memory, Justin. Am I conflating it, or is the music video being shot around the same time? Naked people on a bridge? A rapper…was he Sri Lankan? I seem to remember the rapper being a sort of revolutionary “Third Worlder.”
That scene in Cosmopolis is the one that stands out most in my memory, Justin. Am I conflating it, or is the music video being shot around the same time? Naked people on a bridge? A rapper…was he Sri Lankan? I seem to remember the rapper being a sort of revolutionary “Third Worlder.”
Ah, wait. Wikipedia to the rescue. Sufi rapper’s funeral procession. The naked people are an art project?
Ah, wait. Wikipedia to the rescue. Sufi rapper’s funeral procession. The naked people are an art project?
You’re thinking of Brutha Fez, yeah, the gangsta-rapper-turned-sufi-mystic. I remember reading it when the book was new and thinking that scene was hokey, and DeLillo’s invented “rap lyrics” were very hokey, but on re-reading I was inclined to basically withdraw that objection. Anyway, someone told me that though the political/cultural/etc. details don’t even come close to matching up (he had his own concerns, obvs) the basic idea of the Mega Rap Star Funeral was modeled on something that really happened here in NYC after Biggie Smalls was killed. I can totally imagine him witnessing that, and it inspiring that scene. Also, DeLillo gets a shit-ton of credit (imho) just for realizing that in the year 2000 it would pretty much *have* to be a hip-hop-guru funeral. The last rock star funereal blowouts were for Kurt Cobain (’94) and Jerry Garcia (’95), and those were both West Coast- and they were suicide vigils, not mournings for anyone slain.
The naked people at the end are part of a film that’s being made. it’s a big nude scene with tons of extras (which might be somehow inspired by the end of Zabriskie Pointe, though that movie came out in like 1970) and (SPOILER ALERT) we never find out the larger plot/story of the movie; all we know is the last scene they’re going to be able to shoot because the film’s whole budget just evaporated because of the turmoil in the world financial markets (which Eric, of course, single-handedly caused).
You’re thinking of Brutha Fez, yeah, the gangsta-rapper-turned-sufi-mystic. I remember reading it when the book was new and thinking that scene was hokey, and DeLillo’s invented “rap lyrics” were very hokey, but on re-reading I was inclined to basically withdraw that objection. Anyway, someone told me that though the political/cultural/etc. details don’t even come close to matching up (he had his own concerns, obvs) the basic idea of the Mega Rap Star Funeral was modeled on something that really happened here in NYC after Biggie Smalls was killed. I can totally imagine him witnessing that, and it inspiring that scene. Also, DeLillo gets a shit-ton of credit (imho) just for realizing that in the year 2000 it would pretty much *have* to be a hip-hop-guru funeral. The last rock star funereal blowouts were for Kurt Cobain (’94) and Jerry Garcia (’95), and those were both West Coast- and they were suicide vigils, not mournings for anyone slain.
The naked people at the end are part of a film that’s being made. it’s a big nude scene with tons of extras (which might be somehow inspired by the end of Zabriskie Pointe, though that movie came out in like 1970) and (SPOILER ALERT) we never find out the larger plot/story of the movie; all we know is the last scene they’re going to be able to shoot because the film’s whole budget just evaporated because of the turmoil in the world financial markets (which Eric, of course, single-handedly caused).
That’s right. It’s been a while since I read Cosmopolis, and I remember thinking it was merely okay at the time, but as you mention all these scenes, I’m kind of reevaluating in that many of the images have stuck—albiet twisted and conflated—with me in some way or another.
Was there a similar funeral for Tupac? Seems more like a New York thing. Less urban sprawl, narrower streets, tighter community in taller buildings. The city seems made for that sort of obstruction of traffic by the outpouring of emotion. Like they grabbed the mega funeral from New Orleans.
That’s right. It’s been a while since I read Cosmopolis, and I remember thinking it was merely okay at the time, but as you mention all these scenes, I’m kind of reevaluating in that many of the images have stuck—albiet twisted and conflated—with me in some way or another.
Was there a similar funeral for Tupac? Seems more like a New York thing. Less urban sprawl, narrower streets, tighter community in taller buildings. The city seems made for that sort of obstruction of traffic by the outpouring of emotion. Like they grabbed the mega funeral from New Orleans.