An open letter to Tracey Emin:

Dear Tracey,

I know that you are fashionable among the rich collectors you have cultivated as ‘friends’, and I understand that you, like so many before you, are simply doing what you do to make money. But the reality is that besides this little clique of investors you aren’t fooling anyone.

Your work, like so many of your YBA contemporaries, is just the rehashing of the history of art – continually recycled cliches that you steal from dead artists who often had more talent, more expressiveness, in their morning shit than you do in your entire body of work.

It’s not that you make money that’s the problem, nor is it that you have made a name for yourself despite (or perhaps because) of your total lack of talent. It’s that you spout off the same rubbish you were taught in art school, that you continue to perpetuate the lie that art is something that must be taught to be understood, that there is some enigmatic deeper meaning to an unmade bed, that creativity and creation are no longer relevant to art.

The banality of what you sell, the propaganda with which you make yourself richer, the idiocy of the illusion that art is anything more than experience, and the deification of artists and the objectification of their work does a disservice to the history of art and to the people who might otherwise enjoy and support those who actually are artists.

I would ask you to stop, to stop hurting art in the name of money, to stop perpetuating this fallacy you call art, but I know that it would be pointless. After all, how will you pay for your French villa, your overpriced drugs and your lifestyle of excess?

Instead I simply want you to know that we see right through you, we see the things you make for the financial illusion they really are. We know that what you do is not really art, it is merely marketing in disguise.

Yours,
RSH

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documentation by Cartrain & Co.

It can be previewed on the page and downloaded directly as a pdf for free.

http://raymondharmon.com/BOMB.html

Peter’s influence on my life is in no way small.

As a teen I discovered Coil and Throbbing Gristle in the late 80s. As much as TG and Psychic TV entered into my conscious Coil’s work somehow managed to delve even deeper, into my subconscious and beyond. Coil was proof that music could possess the power of magick. I was reading Crowley and Levi when I first heard Coil, and it stands still today as the perfect soundtrack to the act of ritual magick.

As time went on I discovered that Peter was doing other things, visual things, that had been influencing me even before and certainly after. His work as a designer for Hipgnosis inspired me as a painter and over time (through the late 80′s and early 90s) I came to realize that he was the director of many of the music videos that I loved and found inspirational. His work with an astounding array of artists pushes boundaries, has found itself banned in countries and was the perfect fodder for my youthful mind. In many ways his work would draw me to become a filmmaker, and thus to complete the circle from magick to music to film and back that has been the centre of my creative cycle throughout my life.

In 2009 I curated a festival in London centered on the idea that ritual magick is a powerful creative force, and the festival explored the ways in which the creative world and the magickal world overlap. I can say with certainty that my creating this festival came directly out of my love for Peter’s work.

As the festival came together I was overwhelmed when Peter reached out and asked if he could be on the lineup. I had wanted to ask but figured with all the TG happenings it would be impossible. Peter was kind enough to not only ask, but to be involved with the catalog and to contribute his own funny and inspiring thoughts on how spiritual ideas inspire us to create.

Two weeks ago I presented Peter’s work as part of a program I curated in Copenhagen at the CPHDOX film festival. Peter directed about half of the films in The The’s Infected. In the Q&A we spoke about his far ranging films, his ideas, and his involvement in Matt Johnson’s work.

Though it seems Peter has been around forever he was not really that old in today’s world. At 55 he had done more than 5 people his age but could have lived to give the world so much more of his ideas, energy and inspiration. It is with a great deal of grief that I find myself in London on this grey Thanksgiving. Yet through this grief I am incredibly thankful that Sleazy lived, that his work continues even after his death, and that the world is a much more interesting place for his having lived here.

Thank you Peter, for everything you have given us. I hope to meet you again in your next incarnation.

RSH

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This is Peter’s article for the Equinox Festival catalogue.

Threshold HouseBoys Choir

Combining the Sacred and Profane.

In the 1940 version of the movie “The Thief of Bagdad”, there’s a scene in which the teenage Sabu, playing the charming street-boy of the title, is wandering lost in the desert when he sees an ancient encampment materialize in front of him.

Sabu in “The Thief of Bagdad”

Inside, the unsuspecting lad is welcomed as a Prince, and told they have been waiting two millennia for him to come. The white bearded old King tells the boy he will inherit everything in his Kingdom, except for one thing – a magic carpet, which the old man is keeping to carry him to Paradise.

Sabu only wants to save his friend who is due to be executed in Bagdad at any moment, and so (with the old King watching knowingly from shadows) the lad plans to steal the carpet which can carry him to Bagdad.

However, before doing so, he prays to Allah:
“When the old King’s hour comes, he won’t want a carpet to fly to paradise…Then You, oh Allah, will take him by the hand, gentle and kind as he is, and lead him into eternal Bliss, Aren’t I right? Oh Allah, Lord of Justice, let me steal, this one last time… Fly Carpet!”

Of course, it lifts into the air and carries him off to save his friend in the nick of time.

The reason I mention this scene, is because in the space of a few short minutes, the storytellers have laid out the beliefs that have shaped my life’s work. They are these:

1. That there are forces beyond the human, that take an interest in us, even on occasion, intervening to guide our lives…

2. That society’s outcasts, thieves, deviants – prostitutes, even – have as much access to these forces as the rest of us, probably more so – In other words, as you approach the edges of the ‘bell curve’ of what society considers ‘acceptable’, only then does the panoply of other worlds beyond this one, start to come clearly into view, into reach….

[Though please remember to exercise care when leaning out over the Abyss - The railings round there are well dodgy!]

3. That an open heart, generosity of spirit, even Innocence – not in the Christian moral sense, but in the sense of freedom from an adult’s cynicism, greed, ‘sophistication’ – really goes a long way, when it comes to asking for things from “Them Upstairs”!

Limited edition Framed photograph of Boy Prostitutes with animated LED Buddhist Prayer light. Copyright Peter Christopherson 2009. For details go to: www.sacred-profane.com .

I live in Thailand, where I believe that for various reasons (both geographical and historical), the Tissue that normally separates our everyday world from the other planes of existence is especially thin…

I can tell you from numerous experiences I have had in the last few years that the sight of Thai boy prostitutes (whether dark skinned, tattooed and scary or small and gentle-looking), going to the Temple to make offerings and pray sincerely for one’s well-being, is enough to tip me over the edge, into a kind of Spiritual Euphoria at least as strong as any drug I have ever taken (and there have been many), and longer lasting.

It may last forever, for all I know. I hope so.
All this life at least.

It is the heady cocktail of both Sacred and Profane, shaken or stirred, that gets me every time.

We are all at our own points on the path to Nirvana. I accept that later I may loose interest in, or rise above, the cravings of earthly desire, or the obsession with Epicurean delights. However, for now I remain captivated by those kids whose wisdom and kindness, belies their street level existence, their most ancient and intimate of professions, and their tender years (legal note: 18+ of course ,-)!

It is the least I can do in my work, to try to send any Merit I may have accumulated, to them in return…

peter christopherson
The Threshold HouseBoys Choir
Brooklyn NY, April 28th 2009.

In it place a sort of “information broadcast” has been put. This broadcast tells you what you want to hear about, not what is happening. Various “channels” exist that represent the tastes and inclinations of the populous and each one merely panders to the indulgences of its viewers/listeners/readers. Though all remarkably talk about death, violence and sex from one viewpoint or another because these things attract the dumbfounded masses that seek out knowing others are worse off than they are.

In trawling the web on a Sunday morning for news I am struck by the total lack of impartiality and the absolute dependence on reporting entertainment and consumer products as news. We do not talk about Africa; we talk about famous people and things you can buy. We only talk about negative things (famine, disaster, etc) when famous people are involved. Unless its a car accident, because everyone likes to hear about car accidents.

Some channels go to the left, others to the right. The remaining is marginalized as “fringe” or “conspiracy theory”. Everyone has an opinion; no one is free from pointing a finger. There is just no such thing as journalism anymore.

As a society we have become addicted to hearing what we want to hear. By telling us things we think we already know those with real power (bankers, corporations and politicians) are able to divert us around the tragedies being caused by their greed. And what tragedies they do point out to us are simply to push the blame elsewhere. An ‘act of god’, or at the least an act of their financial competitor.

Mankind is slipping down a slope we may never be able to climb out of. It is telling that the state of society is not pointed out to us most accurately by politicians or journalists but by comedians like George Carlin, Stephan Colbert and Bill Hicks. They point out how fucked up the world is and everyone laughs. “Ha, ha, ha, its so funny that we are totally fucked by corporate greed, damn I love these HBO specials!”

The even harsher fact is that no revolution is coming to save us. The only ‘revolution’ is the one they are selling you out of the back door. That Che t-shirt, RATM for Xmas, Haiti Charities, and basically everything you own, do, eat or in any way consume is feeding a machine that creates an illusion of freedom called ‘democracy’. It tells you that you need to have things, you need to think things, and you need to do things. It doesn’t tell you to think for yourself, it tells you to think what you are told by the screen in front of you.

We are fucked. We are more slaves now than we ever have been as an entire species. And most people can not even look away from the “glass teat” long enough to say, “What was that?”

I am lost
like a toy in the ocean
cast away by an
angry brother
jealous over his siblings
coveted possessions.

What more does time
unfold for fathers
without children,
for lovers separated
by the wind?

What words are left
to challenge the distinct
impression of emptiness
that follows on the heals
of dawn’s retreat?

Wonder still grips me
like the child I was so long ago,
amazed at the complexity of life.

I am standing still in
the current of the river of time
I can not swim, so I must learn
to breathe underwater.

When I was young I did a lot of reading. For a stretch between age 15 and 18 I was averaging 5 full books a week. I was a teen trapped in the middle of America who didn’t like TV. What else did I have to do? The current state of the internet was only a rough sketch.

The bulk of what I was reading could be called science fiction. Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Shelly, Burroughs, Ellison, Dick, Lem, Ballard. These writers spoke of a time and place that I would live to see, not some distant future of golden ages, but a place just over the horizon in societies evolution, often a dark place filled with dirt and technology.

Everyday I wake up to that world. I get out of bed and check my email and communicate with people all around the world. I take pictures, upload them, make films and share them. As I listen to music recorded yesterday on the other side of the world that has come in my morning email I find myself a character in some unknown author’s portrayal of the future.

The concept of the sci-fi author as a prophet of the future is nothing new. It goes back to the beginnings of the genre itself. Jules Verne’s fantastical creations of the 19th century are commonplace objects in our daily lives in the 21st century. We are his distant future, with or without all of the steam.

By the early 20th century writers like Wells, Orwell, and Huxley would talk about a future where we shaped our lives around technologies, where surveillance would be ubiquitous, where chemical modification for mood control was necessary for social function, where crossing continents would take only hours instead of days.

In the wake of that initial sketch of man’s future hundreds of youthful would-be authors who grew up reading sci-fi magazines and watching low budget films would carve a huge path through the 50′s and 60′s and by the early 1970s Bradbury and Lem would have chimed in on mankind’s ‘fictional’ fate. Our computers would control us, reading would become secondary to other forms of information exchange, and TV would become our lives. Harlan Ellison would attack TV for the farcical nonsense it was long before marketing got control of the reigns. Again, these prophets of doom spoke of an even darker future, building on the ideas of the past they elaborated on these themes of sinister urban decay and technological dependency.

And then in the 80s cyberpunk was born. An understanding at last of that Glass Bead Game Hesse would painstakingly avoid describing. Cocaine having replaced Heroin as the drug of the now the 80′s gave birth to writers like Gibson and Sterling, whose vision was one of a near future in which corporations played a game of chess with humanity. In which technology was both a commodity and a religion. Gibson and his peers had read Boroughs, had done the drugs, and understood what was coming. Stephenson just added the genetic retailer to the graffiti scrawled future of tomorrow.

At each of these periods over the past 100+ years of science fiction the authors were able to see some pattern, they envision the way in which man will interact with the variables in his own evolution. Drugs, computers, communication, corporate greed, all these cards playing out in a hand of poker, a plot evolving out of individual fictions within the shape of the prophetic worldview of the author themselves.

Yet how is it that these writers are seeing so clearly the future that everyone else sees as mere fantasy? How do they paint so perfectly the days we have yet to live? By what mechanism are they able to grasp hold of the day after tomorrow and rend it down onto the page for others to read? Is it some mystical force, some inborn talent of prophecy? Like Dick do they all have visions of the empire itself?

I think that in the shape of how writers seem to predict the future we must look at the way they portray the world. Because they are calling it a fiction it is so much easier for them to take the blinders of modern living off and see straight ahead. Without the need for denial that we all live with everyday they are free to interpret the data that most of us choose to ignore. When they get into their cars and drive across town to shop for groceries they see that this action is what is feeding the power structure of oil companies. When they watch fat children stuff food into their mouths at a fast food restaurant they see the apocalyptic end of mans control over the world. The feedback loop of environmental abuse, the consumer culture that is eating the world we live in, taking it away from us and all future generations in order to feed our constant need for more.

These authors are simply looking at the world without the ‘rose colored spectacles’ on any longer. The have learned to rend aside the veil we create out of denial in order to perceive that great economic algorithm that is the world today. And in seeing the world for what it is they are able to imagine that short distance it is going down the dark road that lies ahead.

As I sit in my London home I think of the way that money flows around the world. I think of the charts and maps of data exchange, of the corporations like Google and Facebook collecting our lives into their math problems. I think of the government’s screening all of the data, listening in like an Orwellian auntie to see what troubles we are up to. The vast interconnected game of life on earth, a game of commerce and chance. We are all merely characters in this science fiction we call life.

Today the president, who unlike the US president is more of a ceremonial head of state whose visits countries as an ambassador, is being placed in the chambers of the castle in Krakow were the ancient kings of Poland are buried.

As I sit here in contemporary Poland in the 21st century I watch the burial of this politician on television with my friends. The whole country is watching in rapt attention to the catholic mass that is being broadcast on state owned television. The bishops performing this theater for the masses, reality TV as a flash backward in time, to millennia ago.

How is it possible that in the 21st century a country with 40 million people can be so wholly controlled by a single religious belief? Whose government operates under tenants based not of science or contemporary thought but on moral and ethical systems created 2000 years ago?

We tend in the 21st century to think of the governments controlled by religious belief to be Islamic. Because the propaganda induced fear of Islamic law’s influence over mid eastern government policy is fed to us the way communism’s evils were fed to us in the 1980s we tend to forget places like Poland.

The backdrop to this tragedy in Polish history (one more to add to the many) is that in Iceland a volcano is sending so much ash into the air that for the past 4 days all air traffic in northern Europe has been grounded and hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are stranded and incapable of travel.

So instead of the leaders of the world being able to come to Poland to show their respects the shape of history unfolds that very few and only local dignitaries are able to be present at this auspicious state funeral. Obama, who had intended on coming, had to cancel due to safety issues as all flights are closed and all airports shut. (Somehow the Moroccan president was smart enough to take a propeller based Cessna airplane, whose flight is not impeded by the ash in the air, and landed in a closed airport to the surprise of polish air traffic though German chancellor Merkel has to take a bus.)

I have been observing these proceedings like watching Wim Wender’s epic “Until the End World” unfold, the many plots overlapping and influencing each other. History unfolding in a sad statement of the state of modern man’s incapacity to control the future, to dictate the shape of the world, to surpass the weather.

Always sad at the loss of life, sometimes darkly funny as the seemingly impossible continues to occur as the events unfold, this tragedy of historic proportions plays out on state TV. The camera angles chosen with care, much of the archival footage shown over the past few days turned to black and white (even though it is digital footage shot in the past 5 years) to heighten the sense of mourning and loss. The wide sweeping camera angles that take in the height of the cathedrals ceilings, the Crucifix repeatedly faded over the faces of the mourning rich and elite who filled the church. The Bishop taking center stages in the unfolding media spectacle that is the funeral.

The thought of being the dead president’s twin brother (oh yeah, he has an identical twin, David Lynch couldn’t make the stuff up!) sitting at my brother’s funeral as millions of people watch, my stern and mournful face beamed out across the world as the crew of dozens of lighting, sound and camera people work to make the event the most successful media spectacle in contemporary polish culture, makes me shiver.

During the past week of being in Poland I have watched all of this in awe. I am here because originally I was to perform at the CoCarts festival In Torun. But the festival and all other cultural events have been canceled for the week in honor of “National Mourning”. No festivals, music in clubs, theater, dance or any other cultural or sporting event was permitted to occur under penalty of law. Regardless of your opinion as a polish person of this politician and his religion you must mourn. Bars are still open, for drinking is an equal ad mixture to suffering in Poland, and television can still sell you things, but culture must halt in the build up to today’s reality television requiem.

The crowds of mourning Catholics’ fill the square of Krakow, a space normally full of aging German tourists and the smell of kielbasa, perfect rows of sad faces that could be cgi for all their even rowed appearances. The camera cuts and the long slow zoom down from the ceiling toward the crucifix, shifting to focus on the bishop, the cut again and the sweep slowly over the crowds outside under the late spring sunshine. The blue sky full of light, the crowd silent and well dressed.

The Polish know how to suffer. Stuck between Russia and Germany for so long their territory has been the proving ground of most of the wars of European history. Their independence taken and retaken, the polish have been shuffled and moved, boundaries redrawn again in again in the map rooms of world leaders. A give and take over time decided by outside forces.

The current government of Poland is controlled almost entirely by Catholic ideas, if not directly by the Catholic Church. Its laws recognize no other religion but Catholicism (east or west). As the shadow of the Soviet empire receded back across the boarder to Russia the cold grip of the Vatican closed over Poland. The dogma of the Church shaping its laws, its customs, its holidays. When the leader of Poland dies his burial location is not decided by his family or the state but by a representative of the Church.

I wonder as the future unfolds how the coming generation will deal with the dogmatic principles of Catholicism controlling their lives. How will today’s kids in Poland, with the Internet and international media at their fingertips, accept having their entire existence put through the Pope’s fine comb? For that matter, how much longer will the possibly thousands of abuse victims in Poland finally break the silence that lingers over the country, a silence of children now grown who continue to ignore the past, a silence that will eventually shatter in the future – hopefully ending the martyrdom of Poland at the hands of the Church. But who knows how long it will be before that future is now?

The details of the situation involve my daughter, an inept government to lazy to make a single phone call and that just takes your $500 fee and says “no, I couldn’t be bothered to even look into you but, No, still the same.” Needless to say I will be having more formal exchanges with Home Office in the near future and will soon again find myself at the mercy, or its lack thereof, of the UK government.

But lets not point the finger. I am sure the US government is just the same. A bureaucratic mess in which no one can talk to anyone and nothing can be known. Though I will say the English are particularly good at making things difficult.

Beyond all of this is the fundamental emotional core created by the situation. Regardless of the facts or figures my life, and the life of my daughter, was instantly turned inside out at the whim of a system of lazy bureaucrats. Where I traveled and if I take her along suddenly was far beyond my control. My daughter had been taken from me and thus my life was horribly affected by these bureaucrats who had no care for me, my daughter, or anyone else.

How is it in the modern world we can live and think that we are “free”, or that even the concepts of “freedom” was something attainable? I can tell you for one thing that you are not free. Your government, and the governments of any country you enter, have absolute control over your life. If they so decide, or in more realistic terms if you happen across an employee of this bureaucratic process on a day when said official has not yet had lunch and was out drinking the night before, you find they are capable of turning your life instantly inside out.

More and more in the modern world we travel, we cross borders and use planes to do so. As we do we surrender our freedoms in the name of “safety and security”. As we penetrate a country, we enter through its barrier and must deal with those drunkards to whom the government has given the role of guard dog. And they can irrevocably ruin your day, if not your life.

Having so recently found myself afoul of this kind of bureaucratic nonsense I am still full of that image which shows me clearly that anything I thought was freedom I never had. If a government can point a finger and separate you from your child what freedoms can anyone really have? We are living an illusion that we think is real. We tell ourselves that this nonsense we call living is all there is, when in fact there is an infinite well of existence that is just beyond the fabric of the lie we are told. The lie we tell each other, the lie we try to believe.

Faith, that ungraspable essence of belief, is something that is taught to us. It is ingrained in us by the institutions that we are forced into. Schools, jobs, religions, all tell us what to think, how to act, where we can and cannot go. Is this the freedom they tell us we have? How is it freedom when we cannot think outside of their idea of reality? How is it freedom when we are force fed a lie?

There is nearly nothing I can do to return to the UK with my daughter and have her return to the school she loves. Instead, she must not come home but stay in the US because of some bureaucrat. This is not freedom. This is control, over everyone and everything.

Freedom is more than just choice.

.

.

.

But the older I get the more I realize there is a huge rift between what people think is happening in the world and what is really happening. This rift, this misunderstanding of data, is causing a very small body of people in the world to have control over almost everyone. Life and death hangs in the balance for 95% of western and 100% of third world countries.

The fact remains that the actions of governments, religious organizations, and corporations are those of self interest and that said self-interest is solely and unequivocally centered in financial gain and economic success.

The people of the world are being lied to every second of every day. The reality of the world is that it is much more like the Matrix or some other grand illusion illuminati conspiracy theory than anyone wants to admit. And that need for denial in order to live the average life is the strongest tool that self interest groups have in controlling our world.

Governments are not controlled by people (by people I mean the masses, the populace at large) but by tiny groups of self-interest seeking entities. Your rights have nothing to do with inalienability; they have to do with control. Every time you write down something you can do by ‘right’ you limit the range of actions that occur. Any law that gives freedoms really takes freedoms from us. By saying we have a right to a specific thing the law implies that beyond that specific thing we have no right of movement or action.

The US government invaded Viet Nam and Afghanistan in order to broaden and control the economic output of the heroin trade. Ideological syntax aside our military industrial complex is controlling everything about life in western culture. Self interest groups have fiercely controlled the media since the late 1960s. Any outlet of seeming expression is only a tool in the hands of someone looking for financial gain.

We are told that things occur that do not, or that have occurred for reasons far beyond what we see as obvious. Religion has become an excuse for parties of people to have control over the populace’s thoughts. Any group of organized religion simple tells its followers what to do. “You can do these things.” meaning “You can not do anything but these things.”

We the people go through our day staring blankly ahead. We look at the web, TV, news media and never question if and why something occurred. If we see pictures and read words about it we take it for granted that it happened. How can anything we know be true? Without firsthand experience (and even often with firsthand experience) how can anyone begin to know if anything we are being told about what is happening in the world is true?

The complex reality of the world today is one of obfuscation and deceit. Truth is an illusion covered in the financial power of those who write the script of reality in the 21st century. Those who write this script are not some occult cabal, some lost race of elders. The Illuminati are really the bankers, politicians and priests/rabbis. Anyone who tells you what you can and cannot do.

But in the end we acquiesce to the conditions we are given. We keep our head down and know that it s not real, but that there is “nothing we can do about it.” At the end of the day it is we that are the ‘Illuminati’, we control the world by giving up control to those who would take it, by refusing to see the wiring under the board, by letting others pull the strings we dance – the puppets at the end of the world.

twitter.com/raymondharmon

Today I have been reading on various sites about the DNS attack on Twitter last night. A group calling themselves the “Iranian Cyber Army” managed to change the DNS entry for the Twitter front page in order to redirect the domain to another site. On this other site they put up a badly photoshoped picture of a green flag, with most of the text in english, claiming they have “power” over the internet.

DNS attacks are nothing new. Several years back the New York Times was subject to this same kind of hack. Its a simple redirect of the main domain address.  I honestly doubt the attack actually came from anyone in Iran, more than likely it came from some kids in the US, possibly of Iranian background. (Most Islamic organizations do not use English words for their titles – “Iranian Cyber Army” sounds like something a 15 year old American kid would cook up with his buddies.)

What bothered me about the NYT attack bothers me about the Twitter attack. Its the obviousness of the whole thing. Nothing was gained by the hackers. Within a few hours the site’s DNS was renewed and a little bit of press coverage came out. This kind of low class hacking is very teenaged oriented and not well thought out. When you do a DNS attack its as easy to fix as it was to hack. By putting up a pointless picture saying “WE HACKED THIS SITE” the hackers are just pointing out how cool they think they are to have hacked the site in the first place.

But the potential of a DNS attack is huge and the gains to be made are incredible if one has the wit to use the technology to its full advantage. What if instead of a shitty picture saying they hacked the site they had put up a page that looked exactly like the Twitter front page? They could have culled thousands of logins (names and passwords) in just a few hours. With a simply written bot they might have done this over a period of time, switching from the actual Twitter frontpage to their fake page at certain intervals in order to cull as many logins as possible. Once they gained the login access they could then start ‘tweeting’ as actual people, spreading a message subtly. (Not to mention that a huge percentage of people use their same login and password for all their online accts, bank, paypal, email, everything)

With the NYT hack the people responsible could have created a feed that took the actual code/content from the NYT server and reedited it to include certain pre written passages. Readers would have taken days to figure out that the stories had been altered. Millions of people could have been manipulated into believing whatever the hackers wanted them to believe. Instead readers saw a shitty picture, assumed the site was hacked, and went away.

The nature of the internet is that it has a huge potential as a tool for terrorism. It can be used to spread (dis)information, to alter information, to cultivate a following, to steal data and funding, anything is possible. What limits these hackers is their imagination. It must have taken a whole 5 minutes to create the image that the “Iranian Cyber Army” put up to replace the Twitter frontpage. If they had forethought and planning they could be cultivating data and doing a lot more damage.

What we witness when we see the kind of attack that affected Twitter last night is the amatuerish prank of children. But what happens when real terrorists figure out what can be done with the internet? We feel secure with our Facebook and Twitter accts, but what is security? The reality is that nothing is secure, real hackers are reading your emails, looking into your bank accts, browsing your purchases on Amazon. They know what kind of porn you watch, when you are on vacation, what you got your mistress for Christmas. But they don’t care about you, you are just a person, they are looking for something more. A bigger fish, so to speak.

The internet is increasingly becoming the battle ground for real war. Technology is replacing bullets and bombs with code and viruses. An email can kill as surely as a bullet, it just has to be fired off by the right marksmen. But when the terrorists attack us on the internet battlefield it will be average people who will be the victims, you and I will be caught in the crossfire.

Though I was raised in a christian background I bear no serious scars of such an upbringing – thanks mostly to my families having distanced themselves from Catholicism before I was born. Yet christmas is still a drag on my mind.

Fueled in equal parts by the commercialization of the holiday, the over bearing idea that everyone needs to be jolly and if not you are a “scrooge”, and the nasty fucking cold weather I find the end of December to be the most antisocial part of the year for me. I want to hide and sleep it off like a bad hangover.

Comics genius R Crumb once said he moved to France in order to escape the tortures of pop music (the kind forced on everyone in shops and phone lines). But such musics made their way to France, just as they have everyplace else. In my opinion xmas jingles are the most pervasive form of this pop culture terrorism.

But when I think about christmas I often think of the other religions of the world who have to suffer through the same things I do. Of the Jews and the Muslims who have to deal with the christian Americanization of the world around them.

Religion, in general, is not the friend of society. It is the single largest cause of pain and suffering in world history. It is the cause of wars, censorship, murder, and pain. Mankind’s need for religion is a need for being told what to do, a need for answers without having to think, a desire for reassurance in the face of reality.

In the end its not man’s need for spirituality that is to blame, it is man’s greed. Money plays the biggest role in the obfuscation of religion away from the spiritual and toward the dogmatic. “Do what you are told and pay us to tell you what to do” is the principle behind all organized religions.

But I digress.

Here in the UK the xmas insanity is less impactive than in the states, but it is still unbearable. Christmas songs on the radio, ads and posters on the streets, the lights only amplifying the bitter remorse that is brought by the winter’s sharp teeth.

I would love to have a Dickens moment of malnourished hallucination that is mistaken for visionary experience, I would love to wake up Christmas morning and find myself a believer in holiday faith and cheer. But the reality is that on the day of Christmas I will awake the same person I was when I went to sleep the night before. The streets will be full of dried and used trees, hanging with tinsel like the panties of a discarded whore. The wrappers of so many presents blowing through the grey alleys covered in auto exhaust grime coloured snow. The fat and hungover populace will stir in their food induced comas, thinking of the New Years parties to come.

I will not be alone though, as I know that many people feel the way I do. I just wish there was something we could do about it, some way to avoid the nightmare of Christmas.

I did this piece at 9am on a busy London High Street. The reality is that early in the morning no one can be bothered. Coffee is the only thing on most peoples minds. The masses flow by, heads down thinking of the horror they face at their job, daydreaming about going to a record store (wait, do those still exist?) and spending the day browsing and listening to some clerks better taste in music.

The grey days of the London labyrinth surround me. It rains and rains, the winter a wet but not always cold leaden weight that hangs in the sky. What is happening, where are we going?

I sat on the bus as I returned to the Wick, smelling the paint fumes coming from the stencils in my bag. Listening to the bleep and blurbs from other peoples headphones. At 9 am the traffic isn’t too bad, you drift on the deck of the bus, a ghost returning to more familiar haunts.

Why do people get up so damn early? These people should be coming home, not heading out. When do we start living our lives? When do the masses wake up from the drudgery of morning rain, smelly busses, coffee prayers and wet toes?

The moments that shock us from our lives are when we see the world around us has been changed by someone without power. That a person has altered our path, changed the shape of our reality, like a ghost. I watch as the graf evolves, station to station the buildings a screen for an arabesque pattern, an illuminated manuscript imposed on the architecture of the urban landscape. It tells the story of night (and sometimes day) ghosts and the dreams that people live while most of us are asleep.

Its painted in the flat (on the ground) in from of POW. 46 Commercial Street, E1 London

I was reading a blog about graffiti and found a link to the leaked files of the new Thom Yorke single (which I had not heard about). Being a fan I downloaded them right away and was struck by the intensity of the b-side track “the Hollow Earth.” Listening to the track a couple of times I realized that a video for this piece would be perfect. I began sketching out my idea, collecting the variables – which include a large number of Banksy‘s pieces – and began editing and rendering the video. By 3am on September 20th I had finished the version I would put up on youtube.

In the ‘about’ section I wrote that the video was ‘official’. I also specifically wrote the kind of details I had found on other official videos for Radiohead and other bands. After waiting for the video to upload I went to bed, it was after all 4am.

When I got up on the morning of the 20th the video had received about 1500 hits, which is a lot for my work. I was impressed and after making coffee and thinking about the shape of the video and its content I decided this is the video that I had been thinking about making for some time.

I immediately began promoting the video to the world. I posted it on my facebook and myspace pages, sent links to some Radiohead forums and facebook fan pages and then finally about 3pm in the afternoon I decided to write a press release for the video. The short 300 word press release was sent to all the major media outlets I had contacts for. At this point the youtube video had less than 2000 hits.

Throughout the day the youtube count stayed the same (about 1800 hits) but the ratings went up and so did the comments. (The count often stays a static number for long periods if there is a lot of traffic). The majority of the comments I received were very positive about the video.

The next morning (Sept 21st) I woke to find that the video had 26,500 hits. That’s about 24k in 24 hours. I discovered that the online music magazine NME had run a piece on the video and that there feed was spreading across the web like wildfire. By noon on the 21st it was being featured on sites including Pitchfork, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, BBC, the Guardian, Dose, and many many others as well as hundreds of blogs and Radiohead fan sites. I was astonished.

Then at about 3pm that afternoon I received an email from Holly Cushing – Banksy‘s agent. After negotiating our talking on the phone (neither of us wanted to give out a number) we eventually had a conversation. She explained that Banksy does own the ‘intellectual property rights’ to all of his images and that he was upset about the video. I apologized and said I did not want to upset Banksy but that the video was done without permission from he or Yorke. I described it to her as a “prank.” Once she realized this (that I was not paid by Yorke to make the video and did not have permission) she was much easier about the whole thing but asked that I retract anything that might suggest Banksy’s intentional involvement. I said I would do what I could. I then changed the word ‘courtesy” to the words “appropriated from” in the youtube credits.

By this point things were pretty out of hand. The various sites that had picked it up had spread it everywhere. Some sites, starting with Pitchfork, had tried to get a quote from Yorke and Banksy about the video and upon finding out they had nothing to do with it amended their articles to say the video was unofficial. Many other sites followed suit over the next few hours. Often just putting the letters “un” before official in their existing articles. None of them removed their articles or the embedded video link to my work.

But the virus had already spread too far. Thousands of sites had picked up the video, the cumulation being a TV spot made by ITN for the EU newsfeed. By the time I woke up on the morning of Sept 22nd the video had reached 30k hits on youtube.

This morning when I awoke on Sept 23rd the video was still on youtube. It had 48,000 hits, 200 ratings (4.5 stars out of 5) and 37 comments. It had been reviewed on hundreds of websites and was being talked about by thousands of people, not bad for three days. But I wondered, when would Yorke chime in on all of this?

That came this afternoon at about 1pm. I went to youtube to check the progress and got the pink slip that said that

“This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Thom Yorke claiming that this material is infringing: Thom Yorke – The Hollow Earth – by Raymond Salvatore Harmon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2DQ50-4qXY”

Ironically at that time there were, and still are, 6 or more other videos that use the same audio. Most of them just a still image but two of them are actually my video just uploaded by other people.

I have to ask myself, why is it that my work, which was born out of creativity, is more of a copyright violation than the others that merely wish to spread the music? Especially considering the audio is now available as a free download online!

This whole thing, an experience in creating a viral video piece and manipulating the mass media due to their weakness for iconic celebrities like Banksy and Yorke, is part of the larger picture of my work. The media controls what you know, but who controls the media? My 300 word ‘press release’ caused a lot of conversation over the past few days. But I am no pro – how many press releases come from corporations that dictate what the media tells us? How can we know the truth? When something is labeled “official” or “safe” how can we be sure it is? The reality is that we have no idea and never will.

Years ago I meet Alejandro Jodorowsky after a screening of Holy Mountain at the Chicago Underground Film Fest and asked him about the esoteric influences on his work. I said, “What made you read those books that this imagery comes from?” His reply was this:

“When I was young I was looking for the truth. Now that I am old I know there is no truth.”

+++

PS The most amusing part of this entire spectacle has been to watch as Radiohead fans run amok talking about the whole thing online. The ongoing debate about the degree to which I am an “asshole” and a “douchebag” among half literate 15 year olds has left me with a smile for the past week.

If you are hated, then people are doing what they have been told to do. That they are discussing the work means that the shape of the project is complete. The individual opinions don’t matter – what matters is that they have been controlled but it is unfortunate that they do not perceive the extent of this control.

+++

No idea how long it will last:

In the meantime I posted a video for the new Thom Yorke single The Hollow Earth on youtube, you can check it out below. I used tons of shots of Banksy pieces as the pseudo subliminal content. They make a nice pair Thom and Banksy.

The mainstay of my recent thoughts have been the logical conclusion to the events of the past year. As winter approaches I find myself sleeping in longer and spending more time thinking about what it is I do exactly. I think the main problem is that there is no “exactly” in anything I do. I do too many things to be any one thing. Living in London has been amazing for the insight it has given me. I pay way more attention to American politics than I ever did living in the states, particularly because of how the American political spectrum affects the rest of the world.

I have also been going out at night to paint much more here than elsewhere, mostly due to my lack of a studio. The only downside to painting in the streets is the lack of music. Have to keep an ear to potential passers by so that negates headphones.

Sometimes I feel as if I am in a vast river, completely beyond the ability to control my own motion I struggle to stay near the top of the water. I fear drowning, the sound of the water around me is a massive wall of noise – voices, traffic, other peoples music, screaming, barking, madness induced construction noises pounding in my head. A subliminal backwash like the tide of the moon pulling me under these torrential waters. The only problem is that I do not know how to swim.

+++

This is the video. Go buy the LP on radiohead.com – the world needs more vinyl and supporting Thom is always a good thing.

The two developments, when closely inspected, seem to be a natural progression of control over the evolution of art itself. Not the specific making of art, but the propagation of art and the role of the artist in the public arena.

These two developments are Academia and Commerce.

Academic:

The role of art schools in the art world at large has grown to become a vastly important function of art and artists in the current art world model. But this has not always been so. As late as the 1970′s the role of the art school in deciding what artists would be acclaimed and thought of was nominal. Very few of the ‘masters’ of the art world had made much success in any formal education. Most, having attempted to be involved in some art school or another, had quit or were thrown out due to their behavior and ideas. These radical minds would go on to be considered masters through their explosive ideas and rethinking of the role and function of art.

Yet as the power of the art school grew from the late 1970s onward the number of artists who would be perceived by the public as “masters” would dwindle. As the isolationist view of art as some exclusive language of the intellectual grew in prominence and the marketing strategies of the art schools developed the public came more and more to consider art as something alien and not understood, and for good reason. Art was being taught in a way that each artist was told that a language must be learned, that certain philosophical ideas must be understood, in order for any appreciation of art to occur. Without this knowledge, one was taught (and still is) that no one can understand art.

How then can the public be considered in the shape of art and its appreciation? The answer is that public opinion has little to do with art today and who becomes famous and why.

The developing infrastructure of the art school has permeated the art world to its fullest. Professors teach students to believe certain variables about what art is, then those students go on to be curators and administrators within the art world. After several generations the art school system has come to dominate the art world.

What anyone really learns in art school is how to navigate the system of “who knows who” in order to achieve financial success. Your professors recommend you to their former students who are now gallery owners, who in turn give you a show and sell your work to their rich friends. This ‘education’ has almost nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with social engineering.

Not that there is anything wrong with an artist finding a way to be financially successful through their art. But what is evident in the bigger picture of this art school model is that since the advent of art schools as a powerful force in the art world their have been no artists who are considered “masters” by the public in the past 30+ years.

Of course their have been “famous artists” who come and go with each seasons fashion like the accessory to a couture outfit. The ‘currently collectible’, but no one has been able to rise above the tide of changing fashion in order to capture the imagination of the public beyond the confines of the art world itself.

Well, maybe Banksy – but that’s another story.

“Turning in on itself the art world has become an inbreed mutation of creativity. A nepotistic game of tag where each of the artists takes a turn being ‘famous’ among their benefactors…”

Commerce:

The second model that is involved in the dilemma of art in the world today is the financial infrastructure that supports the art world. Since the dawn of creative individualism in the realm of art their have been certain people who supported the arts. Formerly these patrons were kings and other aristocratic individuals who sought to broaden their own fame/popularity by supporting artists as a means of public outreach. As time has evolved the patrons of art have become the private collectors and government institutions who support the fashionable without thought to the evolution of art as a whole. Support is given for those who have played the game of “who knows who” in order to become collectible among the rich and elitist cliques within the insular art world. Turning in on itself the art world has become an inbreed mutation of creativity. A nepotistic game of tag where each of the artists takes a turn being ‘famous’ among their benefactors- usually the rich friends of their family and gallery owners. When one has sold pieces for enough money then they ‘graduate’ to being shown in museums instead of galleries.

No where in this ‘money equals money’ model is it more evident than in the “Art Fair”. In the dominate art fair model a gallery or individual artist must pay rental space and exorbitant fees in order for their art to be shown. Many art fairs charge a submission fee that is extremely high yet do not guarantee inclusion in the fair and no refund is given if the art is rejected. What this model does is amplify the fact that in order to be successful as an artist in today’s art world one needs to have the money to buy their way into popularity. Without the financial support of a gallery an artist must already have money in order to make money. Thus excluding all but those artists born to wealthy families.

Art is in every sense a commodity. Regardless of its financial value any creation has an intrinsic value placed on it by its creator and those who experience it. Yet the commodification of art as a financial tool has reached the point where the art world is incapable of truly innovate practices. These games of “pay to play” and “who knows who” only intensify the already diseased state of the art world in the early 21st century.

As these two infrastructures commingle, with the art school model constantly influencing the art world commodity model, they are simple churning up an increasingly bland spectacle that shouts louder and louder “I am important” in its garish way, but in reality it has become so disenfranchised from the public that it no longer holds any meaning for the average person.

Art, without meaning to the individual, has no value. If the experience of art can not be understood by simply interacting with the art itself, than it has become a gibberish nonsense that holds no value in the world. If only those who come from pampered and wealthy backgrounds can afford to be artists then where is the range of human experience necessary to drive art forward in its evolution? Suffering for ones art has become the de rigor way in which the rich punish their parents for giving them everything they want. Being an ‘artist’ has become simply an act of rebellion against the lifestyles of the upper middle class.

A revolution must occur, the walls of the art world must be taken down. Much the way of the Dada movement in the early 20th century we must reject all that is in order to become the future of art. There is no crime in selling your artwork, in being appreciated for what you do, but if the artists of the world continue to allow the current model of the art world to exist we face the death of art and the destruction of creativity in contemporary culture.

RSH  – September 11, 2009

I have been considering the passing summer, which is finally relinquishing itself to the coming autumn. The leaves have yet to turn en-mass, but the threat is here. Cold rains replacing summer showers, a chill at night and the smell of frost on the tip of tomorrow’s dawn.

This year has not gone as expected. Expectations were very high at the start and have been met with the harsh reality of what has passed. I have managed to create, and left much to consider in the long run for the effect that this year will leave on the shape of my life. Yet after a long journey I must have passed the turn off someplace a bit back as I have yet to find my destination.

So the year comes into its decline and another looms out ahead. I dont really count my personal year from Jan – Dec (I prefer from my birthday to the next) but the grey sky and the coming cold tell me that change is here again, that warm days are few and that somehow things are preparing to sleep off the winter once more.

The rain threatens the edge of the open door. Its touches the carpet gently and I wonder what should I do. Do I care if its wet inside? And if so why?

I have been thinking of the past, idle these recent days. Avoiding getting anything accomplished by simply drifting. I should be flying soon to places I am from but somehow it never happened. Weddings will be missed and days forgotten but maybe its for some reason.

I have tried to accomplish things this year – shows and festivals, films and words have all come from me and emptied myself into everything I have done. But nothing has returned. Maybe those things were never mine to begin with and as such they went away without bothering to return.

I am being who I am, which is more than many can say to themselves. But in doing so I have lacked security and faith. I am faithless now, more than ever, and if it were not for love I would have nothing.

And so I have recently made this film Der Erlkonig, based on the poem by Goethe.

Also, got a package in  the mail today from John Olson at American Tapes. Sweet release with my artwork as the cover plus a great oldschool Noize Zine with an interview with Henry Rollins where he says he collects all the American Tapes releases and thinks noise is the new punk rock. Burnin.

As we wander through our lives we make decisions, we begin journeys and tasks without thought for their end. Is it impossible to create without destruction? Can we maintain the needs of our life (the bodily, immediate needs of home and hearth) without damaging the needs of our creative souls?

When I began the process that led to the Equinox Working I received a polite suggestion from Peter Carroll that I should “do something more modest” to start with. His fear was that the scale of the undertaking I was beginning was much to large for the community I was approaching. I responded with the reply that it didnt matter if I lost money, just as long as the events occurred, as I felt strongly (and still do) that they needed to occur now, at that time and place.

And while Peter’s fears were not wholly unfounded the events did occur. The Working was a success in the realm of creative enterprise. People came, saw and learned. And that was the important part of the doing of the festival.

With an ever growing hindsight I can see that what happened, happened for a reason. That the blemishes and rough edges were as much a part of the working as all of the fantastic ideas, performances and people involved. It was what it was, nothing more and nothing less.

But in the wake of the events I am left (as so often I am in any undertaking I endeavor to create) with a feeling of emptiness. Having poured myself into this recent creation I have expelled all of my energies, my desires and fears, into the shape of what has occurred. Now, empty of everything I am but a shell, slowly filling again with the reserve of my being, like a bedraggled beach welcoming back the evening moon tide.

The shape defined by the Equinox Working was intended to be a catalyst for change within the field of occult and esoteric study. As such it has been an astounding success. The wave of energy that is spreading is even now causing the creative individuals involved to come together in collaboration, new ideas forming from old forms, new relationships developing as well as old relationships rekindled.

The feedback since the end of the festival has been enormous. We stood collectively at the crossroads of the beyond, looking out across the garden of forking ways and seeing both the past and the future of the Art. Old forms reinvigorating new concepts, technologies of the past and present merging under the hand of the practitioner. From the corners of the world this fellowship gathered together under one roof, and history has been made in the accounting.

The shape of the Equinox Working forms a very complex and contextual sigil. The various components of the sigil outlined in the ideas, words, sounds and images presented over the course of the three day working. Such a shape is often referred to as a hypersigil, as its form is beyond the typical dimensions of the sigil, its tendrils extending beyond the shape of the known. The focus and intent of this hypersigil is to cause change within the realm of esoteric understanding, and already its effects have begun.

The bulk of the hundreds of letters I have received in the week since the Equinox have centered on the question, “Will this happen again? Are you going to do this again next year?” At this moment I am still considering. How can one repeat the apotheosis of occult events? Is it possible to add to the dialog of esoteric understanding more so than has recently occurred? As the influence of the Equinox Working unfolds only time will tell.

Obviam lux Lucis

Raymond Salvatore Harmon

- Summer Solstice 2009

I apologize to all of those who had made so many insightful comments (particularly Jacob’s) on my previous myspace blog. It was too difficult to move everyones comments along with the blog.

I will being posting here regularly and will try to find the few things I wrote but did not post in the downtime between.

About 6 months ago I started using analytics software to track the traffic on my myspace page. This allows me to see what countries are giving my page traffic (useful as I often perform and screen in various out of the way countries). After installing the bit of code I noticed that though my “profile views” number on my myspace homepage (the page I see when logged in) was going up a certain amount each day the tracking software was tracking a lower number.

Perplexed I ran several tests, and with the help of a few friends determined that my tracking code was functioning properly. Why then the exaggerated numbers that myspace was reporting? So I wrote to myspace and got nothing back from them. I wrote again, asking for an explanation of how they track hits to a page and still got nothing.

Since that time I have made some inquiries among programmers formerly employed by myspace and found that myspace deliberately falsifies its viewers page hits in order to make people feel that they are getting traffic they are not. Why would they do this? To keep you interested and coming back to there site full of advertising.

Around the same time of this discovery myspace started a whole set of new ways to make the experience more difficult and unpleasant. Constantly asking for CAPTCHA information (making you type the hard to read text in the picture), front-page flash ads that cover the login panel WHILE you are trying to type in your username and password sound in ads that can not be turned off, etc. Then, as I am sure they started loosing customer logins drastically, they started the whole Myspace 2.0 – i.e., lets pretend we look and act like Facebook.

The “friends you may know” panel now only shows you profiles they are being paid to present to you. Maybe it should be called “friends we want you to know”? The music player on band sites routinely only plays a portion of a song that used to play in full.

So basically I have had enough. I appreciate myspace for what it is, a complex and free networking tool that allows bands and others to promote themselves and to a certain degree act as a social utility. But the experience lacks more and more everyday. I will keep this site up, and will even update it from time to time, but I no longer regularly check this page nor do I use it to communicate with anyone.

I have in fact been using Facebook more often, though it doesn?t not function as a promotional tool, it has actually put me in touch with people I had lost touch with over the years. It is by no means perfect but it serves a purpose.

To end this note I want to propose an idea. What about a social utility that functions they way Wikipedia does? Giving you a basic markup language and the ability to discuss and cross promote ideas but backed not by a huge multinational media corporation but by a not for profit agency? I think if someone out there developed this it would be hugely popular.

Someday I plan to find a programmer to make me a better and more functional personal website. In the meantime I am out there in the ether, just not here as often as many would like.

Yours
Raymond Salvatore Harmon

raymondharmon.com
vimeo.com/raymondharmon
youtube.com/raymondsharmon
raymondharmon.blip.tv
facebook.com/people/Raymond-Salvatore-Harmon

The festival will feature lectures and presentations from leading academic authorities, evening cultural ritual performances (Haitian Vodoun, Indian trance, Sufi Dervishes) and late night music and video performances.

More here:

equinoxfestival.org

Everyone should come.

But something still lingers in me that wont allow me to go to bed. It is something I have been watching all night tonight. Long after I put my daughter to sleep I watched the web polls and the maps grow and change in color. I watched the little pops ups that tell me how much of each state’s vote is counted and when the Electoral College votes final go one way or the other.

And this is what bothers me. Not the outcome, of which I am very satisfied. What bothers me that I am still sitting here, moments after the acceptance speech, waiting to find out the results of the state of Indiana. Because although the vote in that state is tight, separated by a few tens of thousands of voters, the electoral votes have not yet been cast.

But what confuses me is not that the state of Indiana has been counting votes and is currently at the 97% mark. What confuses me and makes me wonder about the whole thing is that the minute that the voting booths closed in California, Oregon and Washington, their votes not possibly counted yet, their electoral votes had immediately been cast for Obama.

How is this? How is it that the Electoral College can vote without even 60 seconds to count the votes that have been made by the people they represent. And then I think about the lobbying that was done, the deals that have been made to sway the electoral voters. What has been promised these states electoral colleges in order that they will cast there votes the second they are able, not waiting to hear from the people they supposedly represent?

As I watched Obama speak, listening to his words I couldn’t help but think that I was watching a movie. A film that is being edited by someone, written by another. His words were not his but those of a speech writer. They were good words, no doubt. But he was not coming out to speak of his own accord. He was speaking prepared material.

Politicians are merely actors on the worlds stage. Barack Obama is an incredible actor. Not to say he does not mean the things he says, I hope that his words, even if not written by him, reflect the true values and desires of his soul. But in the end everything we are seeing is scripted. It is all being fed to us, like children at the Sunday matinee.

In order for the people of the world to be free we must understand the nature of the game that is being played around us. We must see the variables as they unfold. We cannot be deceived into believing even this most precious of dreams. For the world is much more complex than anything we can imagine. Those who rule, who make the decisions that decide everything that happens today, tomorrow and the next day, do not live in the world we know. They live beyond this world.

Only when we can see the wiring under the board, when we fear not to take apart the things we do and examine how they work, when we risk putting a wrench in the works of existence, will we be free. We must become the architects of our own future, and not place our hope in the hands of any other. We must step forth into the future with eyes unclouded, and see the truth in all is horror and all its beauty.

I went out for the purpose of attending my brother’s wedding. My brother Ted was married in a beautiful ceremony in Hell, Michigan (really). The ceremony took place at Hell Creek Ranch, which is a biker clubhouse of the Forbidden Wheels but looks more like a country club then anything else.

On my way back out through Chicago I had the chance to see one of the greatest groups of all time, the Dead C, with Wolf Eyes opening up at the Empty Bottle. It was a fantastic show. I can?t say enough great stuf about this band. (I posted a clip of the show on my youtube page here)

On my last night there I had a drink with Todd Carter at Rodan and got to see the Jeff Parker trio as well. Another superb Parker group with Josh Abrams and John Herndon. Beautiful visuals provided by Brad Loving.

One bit of conversation on that last evening has left me thinking about the urban landscape of Chicago. Todd and I were joined by David Doby and Sheeba for our drinking and conversational pleasures. The four of us had lived in the Wicker Park neighborhood many years ago (12?) and were all reminiscing about the place it was back then.

When I met Dave and Sheeba (sometime around 1996) they lived above me in the Flat Iron building. I had gone upstairs to find out where the water coming through my ceiling had its source and had woken them up to see if it was from their space (no luck). Since then I have had shows at Heaven Gallery (which Dave runs) and watched the Wicker Park neighborhood go from a quaint little ethnic hood (Polish and Latin) that was starting to embrace these new art people moving in, to what amounts to Chicago?s drinking shithole. The streets used to be lined with empty store fronts and thrift shops that are now all overpriced boutiques and trendy bars that change name and facade every year or so.

And though I feel a little pang of nostalgia thinking about the pirogi at the Busy Bee and the crazy waitress at the Friars Grill (not to mention the 24 hour Wicker Dog fries), I have to wonder if it is a bad thing when a neighborhood is gentrified.

When I lived in Wicker Park I saw dead homeless guys frozen to the ground in their own piss, junkies smoking crack behind Urbis Orbis, and occasionally looked over my shoulder in fear while dumpster diving or coming home very late. The crime rate was high and the rent was cheap. Sure, the Quaker Goes Deaf record store had records that seemed to materialize out of some alternate universe (things not even in a labels catalog) but living there was a risk you took.

When the money came (and it did in a big way) I split to Logan Square like so many others, only to see that neighborhood be eaten by the developers as well in just a few years. But is this kind of urban renewal bad? Is it wrong to get rid of crime? To renovate buildings and make a neighborhood safe. I know plenty of artists who bought buildings before the big change and now have very lucrative property that they live in. In a safe, nice neighborhood.

I know many of my friends will take the side of the ethnic groups that have been pushed from place to place, uprooted by the changing financial structure of the urban landscape around them. But is it every really bad to make crime go away? To renew buildings and create a stable environment?

I am not a fan of the current Wicker Park. I like a few places, leftovers from that forgotten era like the Beechwood and some new places like Rodan (who support the hell out of the music scene). But given a choice between dead frozen junkies and drunk frat boys I will let the frat boys have their fun and go drink at the Skylark in Pilsen.