I discovered Silverladder through a link to BSP on a site called Dextroverse.org in 2002. I was immediately absorbed into the massive work that seemed to be culled from my daydreams and nightmares. I usually ended up heading back to the BSP at least a few times a year after the period of intense obsession in 2002 to 2004 where I probably logged weeks at a time spent clicking on links and integrating the meticulously crafted piece of work of which, like Sukenick's Out and Deadly Drifter or Weis and Cubacub's B-17 is elevated above the level of mere artwork (too ugly at times to be called that, too urgent and driving) to the status of what I like to call an alarmclocktimebomb. I recently rediscovered the old BSP. The last few days I've been clicking through jpegs from BSP I burned to a cd thanks to Waitress sending me the download link for the site (no net access on my home computer). And thus, I reentered the altered state that is BSP.
Several common threads, themes and images run through BSP and current Silverladder. Themes of dystopia, control, authority, consumerism, manipulation, self-help, "corporogovernmental" power structure, video games, CIA mind control experiments, THX-1138, the journal trip, Grace where I trespass, the Rabbit Hole, technology, automation, media bombardment, advertising, psychology, drugs, chemistry, Also, in pizzamoney.jpg, there is a picture of a dollar bill. The numbers stamped in the four corners are 11's. 11/11 11:11. Given my recent discovery that the date 11/11/07 and 11/11 in general is a date surrounded by mystery, prophecy and varied belief, it seems the 11/11 theme and the Rabbit Hole have been in conceptual development for quite a while and given that the site borrows triggers embedded from other media like THX-1138, Alice in Wonderland, The Matrix, Fight Club, etc; the idea for something like this has surely floating around for a while. We stand here at the convergence of chance and coincidence observing, first person a previously unhappened happening unfolding with an end no one involved can control, predict or forecast, merely take part in. There is a structure, but "there is order in chaos, there is chaos in order."
BSP was a testament to our times, a world some of us can hardly see due to its everpresence. It is a revelation of the possibility of further blurring the lines already blurred by reality tv/tv reality. In "Am I emo" it is asked if you feel like you're part of a Commodore 64 video game with secret levels?" Sound familiar? Keep in mind, BSP existed in 2000 before ARG's gained the renown they have now. If it was started as atraditional ARG, it was one of the earliest modern examples and is at least seven years in the works now. Themes of "plastic" culture and "bad plastic" reflect the impract of our all-consuming consumer lives.
Then there's good old BSP comics, photoshopped vintage comics which promise to be continued. BSP and Silverladder by extension, seems like an evolving serial story, a cliffhanger, that exists and lives apart from the audience. The interaction with the Silverladder in the real world is just a paradigmatic leap in the direction BSP was already heading.
Themes of religion, psychedelics and politics are ever-present in the BSP. The site was a warning call to the user whilst on his adventure within the rabbit hole. The BSP also contained poems and stories, postmodern irony and a warning of despair wrapped around a cautious message of love and hope. Then there are surreal, beautiful moments interpolating the dark and despairing environment from which BSP springs. The idea that this is an ARG is interesting because BSP invited users to "participate in their own manipulation" and elsewheree pictures of marionettes furthered the theme of being a pawn. As for what Silverladder is, perhaps it is what BSP explained itself to be. BSP is a state of mind. BSP is delirient for the masses. Instead of an opiate to placate, a substance that induces a sense of euphoric disorientation.
In BSP label (which looks like a collection of ciphers, binary codes, etc.) it says I am 918. The name Mosheh (Moses) equals 918. is the equivalent of 666 according to Thelema and it's Qabalistic interpretation is the follows: "918 = Son of Midnight, Thou Availest, Circle in the Middle, Path of the Sun, Androgynous, Ipsissimus, Causeless Cause, Medicine of Metals, Four Elements, Strange Drugs, Night-blue Sky, Unconscious, Zarathustra". This may be unrelated, but elements, drugs, etc. seem to reflect some of the nature of BSP and Silverladder.
BSP was a hypertextual, reality annihilating experience alone or with a friend, but Silverladder is now and could continue to become an interactive, multimedia experience outside of the usual reality of preprogrammed, filtered consciousness, jarring the protagonist, you, into a realm of lines blurred between film, fiction, reality and dream.
Diagrams, codes ciphers and numbers seem to be important. Some (27, 918) have certain countercultural or underground/hidden meaning, but altogether it seems to suggest an attempt at a new form of communication, but this is entirely speculative. Wordplay, dichotomy and paradox add to the chaotic element.
On the rabbit hole page is a picture of a red pill, linking back to The Matrix and possibly White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane which references AinW. The Matrix also of course incorporates AinW. Against the red pill page is the caption: "descending deeper, farther, faster, slower, like a dream you can't control, right before your eyes, our eyes, our lies, dripping like liquid our minds. the changes, the metamorphosis, reaching for the last little piece of sanity, mirrors become pools of tears." BSP and Silverladder seem to reflect the crystalline, fractal, chaotic nature of reality. BSP is like James Joyce, bits of trivia, jokes, gossip, philosophy, poetry, prophecy and demagoguery combine in one intoxicating experience that is the sound of the electromagnetic hum as it alters your brain's functioning. BSP is the unmarked car that is an agent even though the driver himself is unaware of this.
Don't become Distracted! The ELF is the target audience of the amused! Distraction, time travel and false memories further complicate the plot. And I didn't even mention Morris, did I? Morris is the mailman. He's a little strange.
For those interested in getting a larger view of Silverladder finding your way into the Bad, Scary Place might be a good crash course on some possible themes that may run through our current happening.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Monday, October 15, 2007
Jungian perspective on duality of Silverladder and Korporation
Struggling with no sleep and thoughts are churning. Began leading Jungian lecturer and analyst Robert A. Johnson's "Owning your own shadow: understanding the dark side of the psyche." Beyond apparent surface themes like consumerism and manipulation is there a message of transcendece of black and white of Silverladder vs. Korporation. What can Silverladder devotees gain and learn from integrating the shadow self we personify as The Korporation (purportedly our inverse mirror image [AIW] or Doppelganger. Ego=what we are and know consciously. Shadow=submerged unconscious or repressed portion.
Society is war between Superego/KIA/Gaian Mind/Supraself Metaprogrammer and Ego/Zos/individuation/human biocomputer. (Terms- Freud, Spare, GM=Rushkoff, SSM/HBC= Lilly). What benefits one does not always benefit the other, however. Conflict ensues. Individual groups throughout history have used scapegoat religions, races or groups to lump their collective baggage and repressed psyche on. As we move away from holistic, natural living and greater acculturation and civilization weeds out behaviors, thought patterns, etc. that do not serve the hive mind. Korporation and Silverladder may be complementer, e.g. Yin and Yang. The best and worst of all of us is gathered in both opposing groups/movements.
Different cultures value different traits. Culture is just one of the filters through which we perceive the overwhelming mass of data which is filtered through ego, religious, family, cultural and other programming to result in the individual's given reality. How can we judge Korporation for choosing different values and traits to attribute to ego and which to shadow.
Example - KORP = conformity [GM/KIA/SSM]
Silverladder = free thought [I/Zos/HBC]
Many of us value free thought highly over conformity, but can anyone imagine a world where individual will and whim holds total sway over the greater good of the whole. To further clarify/confuse matters, consider the impact of Humanity on Earth. A truly benevolent person who is wholly for the greater good might have no qualms eliminating homo sapiens from the global equation. A drastic plan, but on the whole, possibly vital to the survival of life on "Earth if humanity continues its current course ignoring the exponential increase in novelty and technology without a resulting increase in coping skills to the external world which changes at beryond T-3 speeds in the 21st century. These are just two possible examples of how loss of equilibrium between Yin/Yang elements could prove disastrous.
Johnson comments on an illuminated manuscript by Berthold Furtmeyer, Tree of Life and death. The tree gives both eternal life and eternal damnation meted out by the dichotomy of Eve, harbinger of Original Sin and the Virgin Mary, harbinger of Eternal Salvation and Life: "Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks ther fruit of destruction. OUr resistance to this insight is very high! We would love to have creativity without destruction, but this is not possible." Or as Augustine put it, "To act is to sin."
The postmodern world assassinated objective fact and reality and contemporary psychology and physics are continuing to take a sledgehammer to our linear clockwork Newtonian-Cartesian 4D model of the universe. Relativity of matter and energy may also extend to morality. We all know good begets evil and evil begets good, but it behooves us to balance shadow and ego within before heaping the repressed, unacceptable parts of our psyche upon the backwards image through the looking glass. Can we stop war by fighting it? It might do more to write an anti-glacier book as Kurt Vonnegut suggested.
Do not hate the shadow elements Korp represents to you, rather, balance and integrate the darkness you heap upon it within yourself. Johnson equates dealaing with shadow attack not by fighting the shadow, exacerbating the situation, but by dodging the shadow like a bullfighter. Head of Rajneeshi ashram, Osho, said in interview that Ghandi was the most talented politician ever and Hitler the stupidest. One used violence to assert dominance killing masses of innocents. The other brought down in his country, through passive resistance, an imperialism that had once been present throughout the world.
If we are to beat the Korps programming we must not fall into using their negative methods. Otherwise in the event we were to someway overtake them thusly, we would find that in doing so we had become what we fought. Honoring two extremes is a nonlinear, dualistic way of approaching our problems. If the tools you're utilizing don't seem to be effective, just try another tack. If we're going to beat those brain sucking parasites though, we'll have to open some minds a little further perhaps than usually accustomed but the rewards will be ample.
Society is war between Superego/KIA/Gaian Mind/Supraself Metaprogrammer and Ego/Zos/individuation/human biocomputer. (Terms- Freud, Spare, GM=Rushkoff, SSM/HBC= Lilly). What benefits one does not always benefit the other, however. Conflict ensues. Individual groups throughout history have used scapegoat religions, races or groups to lump their collective baggage and repressed psyche on. As we move away from holistic, natural living and greater acculturation and civilization weeds out behaviors, thought patterns, etc. that do not serve the hive mind. Korporation and Silverladder may be complementer, e.g. Yin and Yang. The best and worst of all of us is gathered in both opposing groups/movements.
Different cultures value different traits. Culture is just one of the filters through which we perceive the overwhelming mass of data which is filtered through ego, religious, family, cultural and other programming to result in the individual's given reality. How can we judge Korporation for choosing different values and traits to attribute to ego and which to shadow.
Example - KORP = conformity [GM/KIA/SSM]
Silverladder = free thought [I/Zos/HBC]
Many of us value free thought highly over conformity, but can anyone imagine a world where individual will and whim holds total sway over the greater good of the whole. To further clarify/confuse matters, consider the impact of Humanity on Earth. A truly benevolent person who is wholly for the greater good might have no qualms eliminating homo sapiens from the global equation. A drastic plan, but on the whole, possibly vital to the survival of life on "Earth if humanity continues its current course ignoring the exponential increase in novelty and technology without a resulting increase in coping skills to the external world which changes at beryond T-3 speeds in the 21st century. These are just two possible examples of how loss of equilibrium between Yin/Yang elements could prove disastrous.
Johnson comments on an illuminated manuscript by Berthold Furtmeyer, Tree of Life and death. The tree gives both eternal life and eternal damnation meted out by the dichotomy of Eve, harbinger of Original Sin and the Virgin Mary, harbinger of Eternal Salvation and Life: "Whenever we pluck the fruit of creativity from the golden tree our other hand plucks ther fruit of destruction. OUr resistance to this insight is very high! We would love to have creativity without destruction, but this is not possible." Or as Augustine put it, "To act is to sin."
The postmodern world assassinated objective fact and reality and contemporary psychology and physics are continuing to take a sledgehammer to our linear clockwork Newtonian-Cartesian 4D model of the universe. Relativity of matter and energy may also extend to morality. We all know good begets evil and evil begets good, but it behooves us to balance shadow and ego within before heaping the repressed, unacceptable parts of our psyche upon the backwards image through the looking glass. Can we stop war by fighting it? It might do more to write an anti-glacier book as Kurt Vonnegut suggested.
Do not hate the shadow elements Korp represents to you, rather, balance and integrate the darkness you heap upon it within yourself. Johnson equates dealaing with shadow attack not by fighting the shadow, exacerbating the situation, but by dodging the shadow like a bullfighter. Head of Rajneeshi ashram, Osho, said in interview that Ghandi was the most talented politician ever and Hitler the stupidest. One used violence to assert dominance killing masses of innocents. The other brought down in his country, through passive resistance, an imperialism that had once been present throughout the world.
If we are to beat the Korps programming we must not fall into using their negative methods. Otherwise in the event we were to someway overtake them thusly, we would find that in doing so we had become what we fought. Honoring two extremes is a nonlinear, dualistic way of approaching our problems. If the tools you're utilizing don't seem to be effective, just try another tack. If we're going to beat those brain sucking parasites though, we'll have to open some minds a little further perhaps than usually accustomed but the rewards will be ample.
Monday, October 8, 2007
BSP interview
Interview with artist Shane Watson of The Bad Scary place, www.silverladder.com, 5/04
Philip Fairbanks: What was your inspiration for creating this? Don't just tell me you liked Burroughs/Gysin cutups either. I'm talking about the elusive "theme," which is quite well developed. Shane Watson: The inspirations for the BSP are extremely varied. It began a few years back when my cousin Trey showed me a particularly surreal site on the internet. Trey has introduced me to lots of good things over the years, such as the bands Ween and Built To Spill, but I digress. He sat me down at a computer at my aunt's house and said, "Here, check this out." I started clicking. It was unlike anything I had seen on the internet, because up to that point, the sites I had dealt with were very straightforward and quite linear in nature. It made perfect sense to me, though. In real life I can be a somewhat quirky, ecclectic person. Although up to that point, my website hadn't reflected that about me at all. While having *some* artistic flourishes and bizarre moments here and there, my site was pretty, well... normal. Whatever this odd site was, it got me thinking about what I hadn't done with my site yet, and what parts of my ability to create hadn't been unleashed on my site. This soon mixed in with several other factors: 1. As a kid, I was a huge fan of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series, which you may or may not be familiar with. They give you options, and rather than being a linear (there we go with that word again) story, you come to certain pages where you get to make a choice. Based on which choice you select, you are instructed to turn to a particular page. Your choices then affect the outcome of the story. 2. While in high school, I picked up a CD called "Telecommunication Breakdown" by a losely-formed "band" (more of an art project, really) called EBN ("Emergency Broadcast Network"). The CD used a heavy amount of television samples within the music, including political speeches cut up and re-arranged in such a manner as to make it sound like people such as George Bush (Sr.) were saying things like "We will rock you." The CD also came with some Quicktime movies that were quick-cut collages of all kinds of various TV broadcasts, movie clips, war footage, home shopping channels, self-help videos, etc. It was like a 200-channel assault of the emptiness of TV over an industrial music background. The album and the accompanying videos had a very big impact on me at the time. This group actually went on to produce the video walls for U2's "Zoo TV" tour. 3. Other factors and influences may include game shows, the movie "Fight Club", the movie "12 Monkeys", Japanese pop culture, William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Las Vegas, televangelists, lucid dreaming, the constant bombardment of media from all directions, the evolution of people into consumers, psychedelia, advertising, cryptic shortwave radio broadcasts ("numbers stations"), police scanner transmissions, technology, disco balls, strobe lights, smoke machines, red wine, good beer, The "Mind's Eye" animation series, conspiracy theories, abnormal psychology (that would be a big one), DADA, surrealism, M.C. Escher, Salvador Dali, and the music of Ween, Radiohead, David Sylvian, Holger Czukay, Robert Fripp, Trance Induction, Flaming Lips, Alice In Chains, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Air, Bjork, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and COUNTLESS jazz and ambient music artists. Anyway, these (and other) influences all eventually converged in my mind and led me to start what was the precursor to the BSP. While I DID have Silver Ladder Studios up on the internet at the time, I decided to make this a side project site, not affiliated with SLS. Therefore, I went and opened a cheesy little Geocities site, with pop-ups and all. The original version of the BSP wasn't even called the Bad Scary Place, in fact it didn't have a title. It didn't get very big, maybe 20-25 pages deep, before I started slacking on it and quit making progress. However, not long after, the e-mail address I had listed on the Geocities site (accessed by site visitors via a picture of a bomb and the text "send me threats") started getting hit with e-mails from people who somehow had run across the site. It was strange because I hadn't advertised the site or submitted it to search engines or anything. But these people were e-mailing and saying how much they liked the site. Making a long story longer, I soon scrapped the Geocities site and put a re-direct link up on the Geocities page to send people to the new site within Silver Ladder Studios. I trashed all of the original pages (which I now sometimes wish I had held on to) and started from scratch. The name Bad Scary Place comes from the type of terminology that a child might use. The use of the words "bad" and "scary" (both being quite simple and somewhat similar) right after each other gives it this kind of wide-eyed innocent naive kind of sound. It's really more of a reference to a closet with a monster in it or something frightening outside the window than it is an actual reference to the site being scary or something. It never really was intended to be flat-out scary or anything. Some people still fail to understand that. Even if it WAS scary, anything that is SUPPOSED to be frightening that refers to itself as such is just plain cheesy. Not my style. Little known fact: I have often entertained the idea of ditching the name Bad Scary Place and renaming the site "The Umbrella Graveyard." However, now that the site has caught on so much and refers to itself in SO many places as the BSP, it's a little too late now. Who knows though, the Umbrella Graveyard may very well become a subdimension of the BSP, just like Menthol Tunnels (ever been there?). As far as the "theme," well, you're correct about there being an underlying "story" beneath the bizarre surface of the BSP. The story is first-person. YOU (whoever is clicking through the site) are the main character, though I never formally explain that because doing so would be tacky and clunky and corny. However, while you are the star, Morris the mailman is the catalyst. Morris the mailman was *originally* Morris the milkman, who came from an old 4-track song I did in high school. The song, "Charlie Jones" was on a little underground cassette release that I distributed within my school, and Charlie's wife runs off with Morris the milkman in the song. Interestingly enough, the tape ("Underground Noise Museum" - referring to being PHYSICALLY underground, not referring to being "too cool" for the mainstream or some nonsense) had a liner-note booklet (on standard 8.5x11" paper) that came with it... much of the artwork from those liner notes is now in the BSP (i.e. the black and white picture on this page-- http://www.silverladder.com/links/badscary/splitinhalf.htm, the picture of someone shooting up on this page- http://www.silverladder.com/links/badscary/tripping1.htm, this image which is the background for a BSP page-- http://www.silverladder.com/links/badscary/sistersilence.jpg, etc.). I can't go too in-depth about the plot of the whole deal, but (as you may have discovered on a later page) it involves Morris slipping some kind of substance into your drink at a company party (held in a courtyard) and you waking up elsewhere. What else has happened in the mean time? What WILL happen coming up? That remains to be seen or may already be defined somewhere, somehow within the BSP. Some "chapters" of the story are much more literal than others. Some segments may be completely in metaphor and based in images rather than text. Philip Fairbanks: How long have you been working on the BSP and what kind of changes has it/you undergone? Shane Watson: How long has it been? That is a tough question, because I'm not positive about the answer. I think the site was created sometime back in 2000, which would make it about four years. The year 2000 sounds right. The core of it was cranked out rather quickly. I was extremely inspired, so the initial 100 pages or so of the site were created shortly after I came up with the idea. The rest has come over time, as I get re-inspired again. It's weird, the things that inspire me to add on to the BSP can be as varied as an e-mail from someone who likes the site to a meal I ate to something I came up with during twilight sleep to a phrase that pops in my head to a receipt that I find on the ground. Sometimes I'll sit down and tack a half dozen new pages on to the thing, coming up with a whole new themed section or offshoot. Other times, I may not even make a whole page, instead opting to just work on an image in Photoshop or some text to be used later. The site has changed a lot over time. In many ways I feel I have really drifted away from the original idea and feel, but that's fine. There are no rules. Although I have to admit I often entertain the idea of completely scrapping the whole thing and starting over again. What's funny (and somewhat pathetic) is that I sometimes think it's too disorganized, of all things. That's amusing when I stop and think about it. Here's this site that is completely schizophrenic and thrives off it's own chaos and I'm worried about making it more organized. Who knows, maybe my own little neuroses have added to the content and flavor of the whole deal. As far as it changing though, some of it I won't touch. I won't go back in and change a lot of it. A lot of it was created in a "moment" under a certain inspiration or influence, and isn't that what art is really about anyway? Although I don't know if the BSP is really art though. I don't know what it is. Sometimes it can defy categorization. Some of it, however, I will go back in and tweak from time to time, and that makes it more interesting. It might be different the next time you see it, and that adds something to it. You never know what will be where. I sometimes go back in and change the hypertext and links, so you can't necessarily predict what will lead to where. In that sense, the BSP is this living, growing, evolving organism of text and images. As I have chaged over time, so has the site. There were some periods of pretty strong negativity that I went through, and portions of the BSP reflect that. I mean, not having a job and then having mono for four months and being completely depressed and lethargic will give you a certain slant on life. And then there have been the really high highs as well, and those are evident within the site as well. I think regardless of mood or momentary inspiration though, I try to have a certain level of surrealism running through all of it... "The Funk" I like to call it. No matter where I'm coming from on a particualr page, it has to have "The Funk" to it, or it will be scrapped. There are numerous pages that have been scrapped. There are a handful that made it on the site even, but were later removed because they were just too forced... I wasn't feeling it when I went back and looked at them later. You can't force it. There's no faking "The Funk." Philip Fairbanks: You said before that "it was like a 200-channel assault of the emptiness of TV over an industrial music background." Okay, so the industrial movement was definite influence. Industrial, I feel, grew out of the situation which you explain quite aptly... the situation of being somethinglike a replicant in "Blade Runner," a corporeal entity with no purpose other than consumption. "Buy more. Buy more." These art forms are often somewhat grim. Would you say that there is any message of hope in the BSP or isit merely a pained outcry of a human cog in the machinery of the postmodern world? Shane Watson: Good call on the Blade Runner nod. However, a much bigger influence on the BSP was George Lucas' first attempt at filmmaking: "THX-1138." I can't believe I forgot it in my list of BSP influences I mentioned before. THX-1138, a movie that bores 999 of 1000 people to tears, is something that I find riveting, in a rather slow-to-develop way. The stark white sets, the emotionless monotone voices droning on in the background about being sure to take your medication, the uniformity... it's all beautiful in a sick, sterile way. The film obviously drew heavily from "Brave New World" and "1984" but managed to do its own thing at the same time. I find it fascinating. Most of all, I love the arificial, pre-recorded "deity" that they have "confessionals" with in those phone-booth type rooms. My favorite quote of the whole film (which is included in the BSP) is: "You are a true believer. Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses. Thou art a subject of the divine. Created in the image of man, by the masses, for the masses. Let us be thankful we have an occupation to fill. Work hard; increase production; prevent accidents, and be happy." It ties in beautifully to the BSP, with the BSP's mocking of the fact that commerce has become a god (little "g") to so many in today's society. Mentions of something similar are made in "12 Monkeys" (my favorite film of all time, God bless Terry Gilliam) and "Fight Club" to a lesser extent. To answer your question, there IS hope in the BSP. Among the sea of pages of despair and plasticity, there are actually some (fairly well-hidden) messages of love and hope. Just like in life, you have to dig through the abundance of disposable images and artificial words to find something real, hopeful, and somewhat inspirational. The BSP would be a lie without a grain of hope somewhere in there. However, true to what it's about, the majority of what is in there is cold and unfriendly. You have to flip through 246 channels of people trying to pimp you to buy their cheaply-manufactured products before you find that one channel where someone is being genuine. 30 seconds later, you lose the signal. Philip Fairbanks: You also mentioned Japanese pop culture. The japanese are on to something. You can see it in the anime. Are you familiar with Laine:serial experiments? It's a crash course in cyberdelia and conspirinoia... everything from Rushkoff's Gaian Mind Theory to Ted Nelson and his connection to MJ-12. Anyway, themes are being introduced in Japanese culture (ringu) that can't even be fully put into words. Also, the Japanese seem almost more American than we are. Then there's the fact that we all grew up with Japanimation one way or another. Most of those cartoons were animated by a fujiyama somewhere along the line. What is your take on the introduction of these memes through Japanese culture and what influence do you think Japanese culture has on American culture? It is synergy? the Japanese seem to copy our culture and, as i said, make it more American than Americans do. Shane Watson: While I am unfamiliar with some of what you speak of, I must agree that the Japanese are "on to something." And the synergy you speak of is unmistakable. We feed off each other. I'm sure we come across as quirky to them as they do to us. Yet we thrive off of each other's cultural kitsch. Look at them and their fascination with all things American 1950's. Look at their love for blue jeans, greasers, rockabilly and Brian Setzer. Look at America's obsession with their anime, technology, and general "strangeness." I'm sure we'd be just as strange, looking out of their eyes. What disappoints me is the rate at which their formerly somewhat underground culture is being exploited in the mainstream here now. The moment that happens to something, it's as good as dead. Any character it had to begin with gets tainted, at least in my opinion. There is a certain romance to something when you feel like you're one of the exclusive few who appreciate it and are a part of it. You'd love to see your favorite underground band get the attention they deserve, but the moment they do, you'll wish no one knew about them again. Philip Fairbanks: You also listed "Fight Club" as an influence. Okay, everybody saw it. Just like "Pulp Fiction," everybody saw it, few understood it. It's about waking up from the consensus trance that branding and marketing tactics causes which is leading us into consumer fascism. But you already knew that (vide BSP). How many more movies like "Fight Club" before they (the masses) figure it out? Shane Watson: "Fight Club" is one of those few movies ("The Doors," "12 Monkeys," "THX-1138," etc.) that gets better with each viewing. The subtle things you pick up each time around make you realize just how much thought went into it. You don't realize just how surreal, bizarre, and psychedelic marketing and advertising are until you step back from it all and take a really good look. You've seen commercials a million times. 999,999 of those times you just let it go by. That one time you really stop and think and look hard you realize just how strange (and potentially evil) it all is. Philip Fairbanks: You mentioned "lucid dreaming" and "bombardment of media." Oh yes, oh yes... It's called hyperreality, and you have accurately portrayed some of the reality of it, through hypertext. Howard Bloom's theory of transubstantiation posits that inventions affect us externally as well as spiritually, by altering the way we perceive and think about things, they alter everything down to our dreams. Yes, that is what's happening, but most people haven't had time in the past decade to figure that out. You mean in 1994 not everybody in the world had an email address and cellphone? Hey, maybe that's when it started changing real real fast. Shane Watson: In 1994 I did indeed have an e-mail address. The internet felt so much more underground and forbidden then. I remember gopher and archie. I remember feeling almost like I had hacked into something I wasn't necessarily supposed to be seeing. I remember spending one summer night being up all night with my cousin Trey, listening to Ween's "Chocolate and Cheese" album and getting on the internet for the first time. I have that very night locked away so perfectly in memory. It was surreal. I dig that mental postcard up sometimes. I actually had an e-mail address earlier than that, even. I ran a Commodore 64 BBS system here in Phoenix at age 14. Indeed, I was a geek before being a geek was cool. There are a couple old Commie 64 references in the BSP, including a nod to one of my favorite C64 games of all time. Philip Fairbanks: Next BSP influence: conspiracy theories. Ok, don't get me started, because I know them ALL, and believe none of them, because if you read enough conspiracy literature it's obvious that no one KNOWS anything and that any fool can write a textbook as long as America looks like the good guys. Conspiracy theories abound now in the cyberculture scene. interest in them has swiftly risen. Tech TV has a regular series on them and there was a humorous program, "Conspiracy Zone," that ran on TNN for a while. Of course, with the deconstruction of media and the exposure of scandal after scandal, lie after lie the search for something closer to the truth, plus all the X-Files related junk obviously has created a strange hunger for this sort of esoteric knowledge. What's your take on conspiracy culture? What are the factors in this sudden rise and can anything be believed? Also what conspiracy theories do you subscribe to? Shane Watson: I think there is a grain of truth to some "conspiracy" theories. I think some of them make far more sense than the "official" explanation. Then again, I think the remaining 95% of them are made up by people who just want attention. The theories are spreading like wildfire in the cyberculture era because ANYONE can be a publisher. No editor, no cleaning up of content, no checking of facts or sources. Click. Print. Publish. Done. In addition to that, people have become wary of the neatly pre-packaged, sanitized information given to them by the media at large. Even supposedly "counterculture" sources of information have their own agenda. Maybe what they're telling you is different than what NBC, FOX, CNN, etc. are telling you, but that's just because they've put their own personal slant/spin on it to best serve their personal agenda. No one tells the outright truth about anything. People tell just enough truth to best serve their own interests. I know that sounds incredibly jaded, but it's true. I can say that and laugh. It's human nature. Survival of the fittest. Conspiracy theories come across (at least on the surface) as a way to circumvent the standard media and the offical story about everything. People see it as a backdoor to the truth. Ahh, yes... the Freemasons. Don't even get me started. Philip Fairbanks: You can't go too in-depth about the plot of the whole BSP, but you've raised a few questions. One, do you know what happens? Two, is it openended? Will every viewer have a different story? Three, will there ever be some sort of closure in this story, a "THE END" somewhere, or at least some point at which the mystery is somewhat unravelled? Shane Watson: First, no, I don't know what happens in the BSP, although I know what happenED (past tense). I know the "plot" that led up to where it is at this point. The thin thread of the story is in there somewhere, deeply embedded. To put it in its most basic terms, you (the reader, the first-person main character) were at a company party in a courtyard, and had something slipped into your drink (you think) by your mailman who also happened to be the former janitor for the company you work for. It all goes downhill from there. Actually, it goes downhill TO there before you even realize that much of the story here:http://www.silverladder.com/links/badscary/direction/sense.htm and here: http://www.silverladder.com/links/badscary/makesense.htm. The "plot" came well after the strangeness all developed. Second, yes, it is open-ended. The path you you take determines what the story is to you. Even if you end up at the same place, the way you took to get there alters your version of the story/experience/experiment. And finally, I am not sure about an "end." I think "The End" (TM) will come when (and only when) I decide to burn the whole thing down and kill the site. Until then it will remain infinite... non-linear. You WILL be given bits and pieces of the puzzle along the way to start forming the picture, but you will likely never have the whole thing filled in. At least a dozen of the pieces fell between the couch cushions, were eaten by the dog, etc. Philip Fairbanks: So you said you think the site was created sometime back in 2000. Wow, four years in progress. You've got quite a piece of work on your hands here. I believe one day you'll receive some due respect for this work of genius. Four years in the works, that's really amazing. How much longer do you plan to work on it? Shane Watson: I'm not sure how much longer I plan to work on it. I create content (anti-content) for it when I feel inspired to. When I'm uninspired, I leave it alone. Sometimes I change existing pages. It's not just expanding in the form of new pages, it's morphing in the sense that the pages that already exist change sometimes. I never cease to be amazed at the amount of e-mail I get about it and the sheer number of people linked to it (which I can track through my admin/status page at Silver Ladder.) Philip Fairbanks: But yes, the BSP is the scariest thing i've ever seen... much more frightening than any horror film, but I guess that's because I spent so much time there (even before I walked in). But yeah, I'll do my best to spread your name far and wide. Shane Watson: The more and more I run into people who "get" the BSP, the more I am glad about having created it. I never made it for other people. I made it to satisfy my own desire for bizarre creations. The response was a byproduct. What a wonderful byproduct it is, though. You certainly seem to "get" the BSP far more than most. Whatever direction you get inspired to take this piece or whatever comes out of this dialogue... run with it. I could gauge your intentions quite well from the start, and I have no worries about what you're about. Philip Fairbanks is a freelance journalist whose published works have been included in New Dawn (AUS), Afterimage (SUNY journal), and Underground Focus (UK).
Philip Fairbanks: What was your inspiration for creating this? Don't just tell me you liked Burroughs/Gysin cutups either. I'm talking about the elusive "theme," which is quite well developed. Shane Watson: The inspirations for the BSP are extremely varied. It began a few years back when my cousin Trey showed me a particularly surreal site on the internet. Trey has introduced me to lots of good things over the years, such as the bands Ween and Built To Spill, but I digress. He sat me down at a computer at my aunt's house and said, "Here, check this out." I started clicking. It was unlike anything I had seen on the internet, because up to that point, the sites I had dealt with were very straightforward and quite linear in nature. It made perfect sense to me, though. In real life I can be a somewhat quirky, ecclectic person. Although up to that point, my website hadn't reflected that about me at all. While having *some* artistic flourishes and bizarre moments here and there, my site was pretty, well... normal. Whatever this odd site was, it got me thinking about what I hadn't done with my site yet, and what parts of my ability to create hadn't been unleashed on my site. This soon mixed in with several other factors: 1. As a kid, I was a huge fan of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series, which you may or may not be familiar with. They give you options, and rather than being a linear (there we go with that word again) story, you come to certain pages where you get to make a choice. Based on which choice you select, you are instructed to turn to a particular page. Your choices then affect the outcome of the story. 2. While in high school, I picked up a CD called "Telecommunication Breakdown" by a losely-formed "band" (more of an art project, really) called EBN ("Emergency Broadcast Network"). The CD used a heavy amount of television samples within the music, including political speeches cut up and re-arranged in such a manner as to make it sound like people such as George Bush (Sr.) were saying things like "We will rock you." The CD also came with some Quicktime movies that were quick-cut collages of all kinds of various TV broadcasts, movie clips, war footage, home shopping channels, self-help videos, etc. It was like a 200-channel assault of the emptiness of TV over an industrial music background. The album and the accompanying videos had a very big impact on me at the time. This group actually went on to produce the video walls for U2's "Zoo TV" tour. 3. Other factors and influences may include game shows, the movie "Fight Club", the movie "12 Monkeys", Japanese pop culture, William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Las Vegas, televangelists, lucid dreaming, the constant bombardment of media from all directions, the evolution of people into consumers, psychedelia, advertising, cryptic shortwave radio broadcasts ("numbers stations"), police scanner transmissions, technology, disco balls, strobe lights, smoke machines, red wine, good beer, The "Mind's Eye" animation series, conspiracy theories, abnormal psychology (that would be a big one), DADA, surrealism, M.C. Escher, Salvador Dali, and the music of Ween, Radiohead, David Sylvian, Holger Czukay, Robert Fripp, Trance Induction, Flaming Lips, Alice In Chains, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Air, Bjork, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and COUNTLESS jazz and ambient music artists. Anyway, these (and other) influences all eventually converged in my mind and led me to start what was the precursor to the BSP. While I DID have Silver Ladder Studios up on the internet at the time, I decided to make this a side project site, not affiliated with SLS. Therefore, I went and opened a cheesy little Geocities site, with pop-ups and all. The original version of the BSP wasn't even called the Bad Scary Place, in fact it didn't have a title. It didn't get very big, maybe 20-25 pages deep, before I started slacking on it and quit making progress. However, not long after, the e-mail address I had listed on the Geocities site (accessed by site visitors via a picture of a bomb and the text "send me threats") started getting hit with e-mails from people who somehow had run across the site. It was strange because I hadn't advertised the site or submitted it to search engines or anything. But these people were e-mailing and saying how much they liked the site. Making a long story longer, I soon scrapped the Geocities site and put a re-direct link up on the Geocities page to send people to the new site within Silver Ladder Studios. I trashed all of the original pages (which I now sometimes wish I had held on to) and started from scratch. The name Bad Scary Place comes from the type of terminology that a child might use. The use of the words "bad" and "scary" (both being quite simple and somewhat similar) right after each other gives it this kind of wide-eyed innocent naive kind of sound. It's really more of a reference to a closet with a monster in it or something frightening outside the window than it is an actual reference to the site being scary or something. It never really was intended to be flat-out scary or anything. Some people still fail to understand that. Even if it WAS scary, anything that is SUPPOSED to be frightening that refers to itself as such is just plain cheesy. Not my style. Little known fact: I have often entertained the idea of ditching the name Bad Scary Place and renaming the site "The Umbrella Graveyard." However, now that the site has caught on so much and refers to itself in SO many places as the BSP, it's a little too late now. Who knows though, the Umbrella Graveyard may very well become a subdimension of the BSP, just like Menthol Tunnels (ever been there?). As far as the "theme," well, you're correct about there being an underlying "story" beneath the bizarre surface of the BSP. The story is first-person. YOU (whoever is clicking through the site) are the main character, though I never formally explain that because doing so would be tacky and clunky and corny. However, while you are the star, Morris the mailman is the catalyst. Morris the mailman was *originally* Morris the milkman, who came from an old 4-track song I did in high school. The song, "Charlie Jones" was on a little underground cassette release that I distributed within my school, and Charlie's wife runs off with Morris the milkman in the song. Interestingly enough, the tape ("Underground Noise Museum" - referring to being PHYSICALLY underground, not referring to being "too cool" for the mainstream or some nonsense) had a liner-note booklet (on standard 8.5x11" paper) that came with it... much of the artwork from those liner notes is now in the BSP (i.e. the black and white picture on this page-- http://www.silverladder.com/links/badscary/splitinhalf.htm, the picture of someone shooting up on this page- http://www.silverladder.com/links/badscary/tripping1.htm, this image which is the background for a BSP page-- http://www.silverladder.com/links/badscary/sistersilence.jpg, etc.). I can't go too in-depth about the plot of the whole deal, but (as you may have discovered on a later page) it involves Morris slipping some kind of substance into your drink at a company party (held in a courtyard) and you waking up elsewhere. What else has happened in the mean time? What WILL happen coming up? That remains to be seen or may already be defined somewhere, somehow within the BSP. Some "chapters" of the story are much more literal than others. Some segments may be completely in metaphor and based in images rather than text. Philip Fairbanks: How long have you been working on the BSP and what kind of changes has it/you undergone? Shane Watson: How long has it been? That is a tough question, because I'm not positive about the answer. I think the site was created sometime back in 2000, which would make it about four years. The year 2000 sounds right. The core of it was cranked out rather quickly. I was extremely inspired, so the initial 100 pages or so of the site were created shortly after I came up with the idea. The rest has come over time, as I get re-inspired again. It's weird, the things that inspire me to add on to the BSP can be as varied as an e-mail from someone who likes the site to a meal I ate to something I came up with during twilight sleep to a phrase that pops in my head to a receipt that I find on the ground. Sometimes I'll sit down and tack a half dozen new pages on to the thing, coming up with a whole new themed section or offshoot. Other times, I may not even make a whole page, instead opting to just work on an image in Photoshop or some text to be used later. The site has changed a lot over time. In many ways I feel I have really drifted away from the original idea and feel, but that's fine. There are no rules. Although I have to admit I often entertain the idea of completely scrapping the whole thing and starting over again. What's funny (and somewhat pathetic) is that I sometimes think it's too disorganized, of all things. That's amusing when I stop and think about it. Here's this site that is completely schizophrenic and thrives off it's own chaos and I'm worried about making it more organized. Who knows, maybe my own little neuroses have added to the content and flavor of the whole deal. As far as it changing though, some of it I won't touch. I won't go back in and change a lot of it. A lot of it was created in a "moment" under a certain inspiration or influence, and isn't that what art is really about anyway? Although I don't know if the BSP is really art though. I don't know what it is. Sometimes it can defy categorization. Some of it, however, I will go back in and tweak from time to time, and that makes it more interesting. It might be different the next time you see it, and that adds something to it. You never know what will be where. I sometimes go back in and change the hypertext and links, so you can't necessarily predict what will lead to where. In that sense, the BSP is this living, growing, evolving organism of text and images. As I have chaged over time, so has the site. There were some periods of pretty strong negativity that I went through, and portions of the BSP reflect that. I mean, not having a job and then having mono for four months and being completely depressed and lethargic will give you a certain slant on life. And then there have been the really high highs as well, and those are evident within the site as well. I think regardless of mood or momentary inspiration though, I try to have a certain level of surrealism running through all of it... "The Funk" I like to call it. No matter where I'm coming from on a particualr page, it has to have "The Funk" to it, or it will be scrapped. There are numerous pages that have been scrapped. There are a handful that made it on the site even, but were later removed because they were just too forced... I wasn't feeling it when I went back and looked at them later. You can't force it. There's no faking "The Funk." Philip Fairbanks: You said before that "it was like a 200-channel assault of the emptiness of TV over an industrial music background." Okay, so the industrial movement was definite influence. Industrial, I feel, grew out of the situation which you explain quite aptly... the situation of being somethinglike a replicant in "Blade Runner," a corporeal entity with no purpose other than consumption. "Buy more. Buy more." These art forms are often somewhat grim. Would you say that there is any message of hope in the BSP or isit merely a pained outcry of a human cog in the machinery of the postmodern world? Shane Watson: Good call on the Blade Runner nod. However, a much bigger influence on the BSP was George Lucas' first attempt at filmmaking: "THX-1138." I can't believe I forgot it in my list of BSP influences I mentioned before. THX-1138, a movie that bores 999 of 1000 people to tears, is something that I find riveting, in a rather slow-to-develop way. The stark white sets, the emotionless monotone voices droning on in the background about being sure to take your medication, the uniformity... it's all beautiful in a sick, sterile way. The film obviously drew heavily from "Brave New World" and "1984" but managed to do its own thing at the same time. I find it fascinating. Most of all, I love the arificial, pre-recorded "deity" that they have "confessionals" with in those phone-booth type rooms. My favorite quote of the whole film (which is included in the BSP) is: "You are a true believer. Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses. Thou art a subject of the divine. Created in the image of man, by the masses, for the masses. Let us be thankful we have an occupation to fill. Work hard; increase production; prevent accidents, and be happy." It ties in beautifully to the BSP, with the BSP's mocking of the fact that commerce has become a god (little "g") to so many in today's society. Mentions of something similar are made in "12 Monkeys" (my favorite film of all time, God bless Terry Gilliam) and "Fight Club" to a lesser extent. To answer your question, there IS hope in the BSP. Among the sea of pages of despair and plasticity, there are actually some (fairly well-hidden) messages of love and hope. Just like in life, you have to dig through the abundance of disposable images and artificial words to find something real, hopeful, and somewhat inspirational. The BSP would be a lie without a grain of hope somewhere in there. However, true to what it's about, the majority of what is in there is cold and unfriendly. You have to flip through 246 channels of people trying to pimp you to buy their cheaply-manufactured products before you find that one channel where someone is being genuine. 30 seconds later, you lose the signal. Philip Fairbanks: You also mentioned Japanese pop culture. The japanese are on to something. You can see it in the anime. Are you familiar with Laine:serial experiments? It's a crash course in cyberdelia and conspirinoia... everything from Rushkoff's Gaian Mind Theory to Ted Nelson and his connection to MJ-12. Anyway, themes are being introduced in Japanese culture (ringu) that can't even be fully put into words. Also, the Japanese seem almost more American than we are. Then there's the fact that we all grew up with Japanimation one way or another. Most of those cartoons were animated by a fujiyama somewhere along the line. What is your take on the introduction of these memes through Japanese culture and what influence do you think Japanese culture has on American culture? It is synergy? the Japanese seem to copy our culture and, as i said, make it more American than Americans do. Shane Watson: While I am unfamiliar with some of what you speak of, I must agree that the Japanese are "on to something." And the synergy you speak of is unmistakable. We feed off each other. I'm sure we come across as quirky to them as they do to us. Yet we thrive off of each other's cultural kitsch. Look at them and their fascination with all things American 1950's. Look at their love for blue jeans, greasers, rockabilly and Brian Setzer. Look at America's obsession with their anime, technology, and general "strangeness." I'm sure we'd be just as strange, looking out of their eyes. What disappoints me is the rate at which their formerly somewhat underground culture is being exploited in the mainstream here now. The moment that happens to something, it's as good as dead. Any character it had to begin with gets tainted, at least in my opinion. There is a certain romance to something when you feel like you're one of the exclusive few who appreciate it and are a part of it. You'd love to see your favorite underground band get the attention they deserve, but the moment they do, you'll wish no one knew about them again. Philip Fairbanks: You also listed "Fight Club" as an influence. Okay, everybody saw it. Just like "Pulp Fiction," everybody saw it, few understood it. It's about waking up from the consensus trance that branding and marketing tactics causes which is leading us into consumer fascism. But you already knew that (vide BSP). How many more movies like "Fight Club" before they (the masses) figure it out? Shane Watson: "Fight Club" is one of those few movies ("The Doors," "12 Monkeys," "THX-1138," etc.) that gets better with each viewing. The subtle things you pick up each time around make you realize just how much thought went into it. You don't realize just how surreal, bizarre, and psychedelic marketing and advertising are until you step back from it all and take a really good look. You've seen commercials a million times. 999,999 of those times you just let it go by. That one time you really stop and think and look hard you realize just how strange (and potentially evil) it all is. Philip Fairbanks: You mentioned "lucid dreaming" and "bombardment of media." Oh yes, oh yes... It's called hyperreality, and you have accurately portrayed some of the reality of it, through hypertext. Howard Bloom's theory of transubstantiation posits that inventions affect us externally as well as spiritually, by altering the way we perceive and think about things, they alter everything down to our dreams. Yes, that is what's happening, but most people haven't had time in the past decade to figure that out. You mean in 1994 not everybody in the world had an email address and cellphone? Hey, maybe that's when it started changing real real fast. Shane Watson: In 1994 I did indeed have an e-mail address. The internet felt so much more underground and forbidden then. I remember gopher and archie. I remember feeling almost like I had hacked into something I wasn't necessarily supposed to be seeing. I remember spending one summer night being up all night with my cousin Trey, listening to Ween's "Chocolate and Cheese" album and getting on the internet for the first time. I have that very night locked away so perfectly in memory. It was surreal. I dig that mental postcard up sometimes. I actually had an e-mail address earlier than that, even. I ran a Commodore 64 BBS system here in Phoenix at age 14. Indeed, I was a geek before being a geek was cool. There are a couple old Commie 64 references in the BSP, including a nod to one of my favorite C64 games of all time. Philip Fairbanks: Next BSP influence: conspiracy theories. Ok, don't get me started, because I know them ALL, and believe none of them, because if you read enough conspiracy literature it's obvious that no one KNOWS anything and that any fool can write a textbook as long as America looks like the good guys. Conspiracy theories abound now in the cyberculture scene. interest in them has swiftly risen. Tech TV has a regular series on them and there was a humorous program, "Conspiracy Zone," that ran on TNN for a while. Of course, with the deconstruction of media and the exposure of scandal after scandal, lie after lie the search for something closer to the truth, plus all the X-Files related junk obviously has created a strange hunger for this sort of esoteric knowledge. What's your take on conspiracy culture? What are the factors in this sudden rise and can anything be believed? Also what conspiracy theories do you subscribe to? Shane Watson: I think there is a grain of truth to some "conspiracy" theories. I think some of them make far more sense than the "official" explanation. Then again, I think the remaining 95% of them are made up by people who just want attention. The theories are spreading like wildfire in the cyberculture era because ANYONE can be a publisher. No editor, no cleaning up of content, no checking of facts or sources. Click. Print. Publish. Done. In addition to that, people have become wary of the neatly pre-packaged, sanitized information given to them by the media at large. Even supposedly "counterculture" sources of information have their own agenda. Maybe what they're telling you is different than what NBC, FOX, CNN, etc. are telling you, but that's just because they've put their own personal slant/spin on it to best serve their personal agenda. No one tells the outright truth about anything. People tell just enough truth to best serve their own interests. I know that sounds incredibly jaded, but it's true. I can say that and laugh. It's human nature. Survival of the fittest. Conspiracy theories come across (at least on the surface) as a way to circumvent the standard media and the offical story about everything. People see it as a backdoor to the truth. Ahh, yes... the Freemasons. Don't even get me started. Philip Fairbanks: You can't go too in-depth about the plot of the whole BSP, but you've raised a few questions. One, do you know what happens? Two, is it openended? Will every viewer have a different story? Three, will there ever be some sort of closure in this story, a "THE END" somewhere, or at least some point at which the mystery is somewhat unravelled? Shane Watson: First, no, I don't know what happens in the BSP, although I know what happenED (past tense). I know the "plot" that led up to where it is at this point. The thin thread of the story is in there somewhere, deeply embedded. To put it in its most basic terms, you (the reader, the first-person main character) were at a company party in a courtyard, and had something slipped into your drink (you think) by your mailman who also happened to be the former janitor for the company you work for. It all goes downhill from there. Actually, it goes downhill TO there before you even realize that much of the story here:http://www.silverladder.com/links/badscary/direction/sense.htm and here: http://www.silverladder.com/links/badscary/makesense.htm. The "plot" came well after the strangeness all developed. Second, yes, it is open-ended. The path you you take determines what the story is to you. Even if you end up at the same place, the way you took to get there alters your version of the story/experience/experiment. And finally, I am not sure about an "end." I think "The End" (TM) will come when (and only when) I decide to burn the whole thing down and kill the site. Until then it will remain infinite... non-linear. You WILL be given bits and pieces of the puzzle along the way to start forming the picture, but you will likely never have the whole thing filled in. At least a dozen of the pieces fell between the couch cushions, were eaten by the dog, etc. Philip Fairbanks: So you said you think the site was created sometime back in 2000. Wow, four years in progress. You've got quite a piece of work on your hands here. I believe one day you'll receive some due respect for this work of genius. Four years in the works, that's really amazing. How much longer do you plan to work on it? Shane Watson: I'm not sure how much longer I plan to work on it. I create content (anti-content) for it when I feel inspired to. When I'm uninspired, I leave it alone. Sometimes I change existing pages. It's not just expanding in the form of new pages, it's morphing in the sense that the pages that already exist change sometimes. I never cease to be amazed at the amount of e-mail I get about it and the sheer number of people linked to it (which I can track through my admin/status page at Silver Ladder.) Philip Fairbanks: But yes, the BSP is the scariest thing i've ever seen... much more frightening than any horror film, but I guess that's because I spent so much time there (even before I walked in). But yeah, I'll do my best to spread your name far and wide. Shane Watson: The more and more I run into people who "get" the BSP, the more I am glad about having created it. I never made it for other people. I made it to satisfy my own desire for bizarre creations. The response was a byproduct. What a wonderful byproduct it is, though. You certainly seem to "get" the BSP far more than most. Whatever direction you get inspired to take this piece or whatever comes out of this dialogue... run with it. I could gauge your intentions quite well from the start, and I have no worries about what you're about. Philip Fairbanks is a freelance journalist whose published works have been included in New Dawn (AUS), Afterimage (SUNY journal), and Underground Focus (UK).
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Spoonfed Tribe review, 6/04 www.getunderground.com
I'm pretty sure the Andromedans passed on to the tribe the secrets Terrence McKenna held until his death of how to create 3-D sound. In conversation, bassist Jerome will neither confirm nor deny. The only comparison that would do them justice is maybe the Flaming Lips last couple of albums, but those were written after the Lips made contact so, there ya go. Not only are the Tribe accomplished musicians who can lay down a tasty bit of funk, these seven Texans know how to achieve a sonic alchemy in songs such as the early Macchu Picchu, which could make Monty Burns convert to conservationist. 80-D is the opening track…an electro-funk bit that sets the tune, stealing a line from Wells' War of the Worlds. Vacation, the next piece urges the listener to make the exchange, join the quest, search for loving breath. Borrowing from numerous ethnic idioms, the music is somewhat reminiscent of Rusted Root (before they sold out). In Vacation, the middle-Eastern and African influences are most notable, and for these guys, quite new. Soft Symphony bleeds into Z.O.A.S., a story of revelation that builds to steady crescendo, then decrescendo through the vocal solo, "I'm on the edge," the guitars swell and the entire crew are screaming, screeching, howling, making the most beautiful noise. PZ35/75R15 is a beautiful instrumental with flutes echoing against a multi-percussive background.
SFT is known for their lives shows where they perform in costume with characters like "Tentacle man," a Doc Octopus type character in a 7-foot-plus tall suit. From the primal grunts of Sea Monkeys to the soft voice on a naturesque acoustic backdrop laden Two lemon-lime dragonflies, one in flight, SFT's “Ulikdiseegeough” runs the gamut reinventing music while borrowing from the far distant past and what may be the sounds of some far-flung future. SFT is a must-hear for anyone who like vintage Rusted Root or anyone who loved the neo-psychedelia of the Flaming Lips' last two albums. “Ulikdiseegeough” is a great starter for the uninitiated.
The War for truth, 8/03 www.getunderground.com
There is a war going on and we are all involved. It isn't taking place in Liberia or Iraq or Afghanistan. The battles aren't being fought with smart bombs and ground troops, and the enemies aren't foreign governments or terrorists. The battlefield isn't even physical, it is the subjective mind. This war is being fought to create reality, a specific reality planned by military specialists with psychology degrees. At stake are individuality, free will and the ever elusive "truth." The enemy is crimethink to use Orwell's apt newspeak term. The guerilla terrorists are subversives like myself who introduce ideas that are not part of the official version of "truth" that serves the agenda.
IW is the military's newspeak abbreviation for Information Warfare which is the science of manipulating people and opinions that in PSYOP leaflets is presented as a lofty goal instead of an insidious encroachment on our basic humanity. Napoleon knew the importance of IW: "There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind." The manipulation of information was also Goebbel's specialty, "It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words and words can be molded until they clothe ideas in disguise." The U.S. government has taken IW further than any previous despot was able to. IT knowledge is now being used to defend and attack. Wars are no longer won with firepower but with semantic strength.
IW consists of PSYOP, military deception (MILDEC) and Electronic Warfare (EW). The goal according to a Navy report being to "deny information, influence, degrade or destroy adversary information capabilities." MILDEC is designed to "reinforce the desired target perceptions."
PSYOP is military Psychological Operations which consists of "Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator's objectives. Also called PSYOP. See also consolidation psychological operations; overt peacetime psychological operations programs; perception management," according to the Department of Defense.
One indicator of the success of PSYOP is the fact that their existence and certain frightening euphemisms like "peacetime psychological operations," and "perception management," are unknown by the majority of American civilians who are also targets. PSYOP is used to help spin media and make sure that information/propaganda is uniform in order to influence foreign and domestic groups and people. Whatever "peacekeeping mission," or third world exploitation we happen to be involved in must be justified by control of "the global information infrastructure."
In a de-classified PSYOP document the planners are frank about their goals: "The trend to involve U.S. military in peacekeeping operations, where the use of violence is carefully prescribed by restrictive rules of engagement has further emphasized the need for effective information activities." "Information, and it's denial is power." "The state or entity most able to effectively control or manage information, especially managing the perceptions of particular target audiences, will be the most influential."
The "tools of the trade" include television, radio, newspapers, leaflets, posters, loudspeakers and face to face communication. These mediums allow "civilian perception management." The measure of "receptivity effectiveness" is a "change [of] behavior in a favorable manner," i.e. the "desired way." They call what they do "truth projection." Deconstructionist Michel Foucalt denied the existence of an observable, objective truth and the military use this to their advantage, creating their own brand of truth and selling it to the people.
The relationship between the media and the military have become tighter since "truth projection" became so important to U.S. interests. This makes free speech in mainstream media an outdated idea. In "peacekeeping" missions from Grenada and Panama in the 80's to Afghanistan and Iraq in the new century, the media has participated with the military in everything from blackouts, specific planned involvement and "embedding" reporters into military units. Americans love a good soap opera and embedding, which was designed to boost civilian support and troop morale, allows reporters to capture nostalgic, heartwarming stories to further narrow civilian perceptions of our role in overseas meddling and third world exploitation.
In March of 2001, members of PSYOP began internship at CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Though CNN denies that PSYOP influenced reporting, their presence alone is a danger to our freedom. The internship allowed PSYOP members to study media from the inside out and was certainly used as an intelligence gathering opportunity. The most important period of information control is right before and after the crisis and it is easy to see how this process was used on the American public, especially prior to and after 9/11.
On that day, the "bad guys" were quickly pointed out and pinned with "black hats" using an old Reaganite perception management trick. Bin Laden was our Goldstein, the face associated with our two minutes hate. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of psychology saw the obvious conditioning exercise that day. The videos of the towers falling was incredibly powerful symbolically. After being coupled over and over with the image of bin Laden, the fear that the explosions evoked was sublimated to anger at the bearded image of the supposed head of the shadowy Al-Qaeda network. The anger and hate was then extended when the image of Palestinians dancing on the West Bank was later shown after hours of the towers collapsing on repeat. This justified, in most people's minds, our bombing of Afghanistan, and the death of thousands of civilians from an innocent third world country that had nothing to do with the attack on September 11.
Shortly after this the media coverage was all decidedly pro-Bush. Any anti-Bush, or anti-war rhetoric was considered practically equal to harboring terrorists. We got a nice propaganda film, Blackhawk Down which put a positive spin on our intervention in Somalia and established our troops as international freedom fighters restoring "democracy" to the world. Of course "democracy" is just a word and the military's definition of democracy has little to do with the definition of most of the people who are supposed to believe in it. In fact personal freedom, especially freedom of speech counters the military's goal of spreading their own peculiar style of liberty. According to the military now, to paraphrase Mao, "Democracy grows out of the barrel of a gun," or maybe more aptly "through the effective manipulation of 'truth.'"
The war for the control of information and the minds of humanity is being fought without the knowledge of the majority of the American public who are caught up in it. If we lose this war one of our most valuable freedoms, the freedom of thought, may be lost. Despite the use of powerful words like freedom and democracy by the military, without access to unbiased information the idea of democracy and freedom that our military supposedly fights to protect may become obsolete.
Big Business vs. the Environment, www.onefortytwo.com
There's no such thing as global warming, Bush Incorporated assures us. Could anything else be expected after electing the Bush-Chaney petrol party? After weathering Oil War I and II, the introduction of the American Gestapo (aka Homeland Security) and numerous other travesties, the average American citizen probably doesn't even remember what global warming is. We are reminded that buying a quarter sack of weed supports terrorists, but are not asked to car-pool in an effort to not only cut down on pollution but decrease intake of the black liquid everybody seems to be fighting over in the desert these days.
Why would Bush show any interest in the environment, however? As an oil baron, his interests in the the state of our planets health is about on the same level as Philip Morris' interest in the state of his customers' lungs. To put it simply, killing the environment is good for business. This fact is so obvious that most people can't seem to see it. The Bush administration balked on the Kyoto treaty to cut back emissions and passed up the invitation to the Friends of the Earth summit. Maybe professional wrestling was on that night.
Obviously, the power behind the throne, big business (especially big oil), are not interested in even feigning an interest in the state of our dying planet. The Kyoto treaty just marks another case of the Bush administrations willingness to flaunt their disinterest in the importance of certain global issues. As for missing the Friends of the Earth summit, it's probably best considering our leaders don't seem to want to know the ever decreasing state of our planet's health, considering the fact that they hire scientists to show that everything is perfectly fine.
Despite the trend of "companies that care," the business sector is still intent on destroying our planet and depleting our natural resources as quickly as possible. No one questions it because it's the post-agricultural, post-industrial trend. Since most people are enslaved and addicted to the corporate world's wares, no one seems to dig too deeply in the implications of some of their activities. Like destroying the earth. In fact, even some of these "companies that care" are just investing in lies to convince the average consumer that what they are doing isn't that damaging. To paraphrase Carlin: a little cancer in your drinking water is good for you.
These corporations can't afford to care. It's much more cost effective to pretend anyway. The business of business is making money. Caring about the environment means implementing some practices that would cut profits. Despite the growing concern over the long term side effects caused by criminal corporate negligence, most corporations are still trying to do the least they can get away with.
Underneath this is another more sinister reason that the murder of our planet is allowed to continue. Despite the ever decreasing amount of non-renewable resources like fossil fuels, corporations that profit from these substances move forward as if there was a never-ending supply. Alternative energy sources are not only not explored, but suppressed by the mainstream corporate power structure.
Criminal conglomerates like Esso are not only not concerned about the long term fate of our planet, but are fighting tooth and nail to destroy it as quickly as possible. Even though alternative energy sources would slow down the corporate destruction of our planet, the big businesses that profit from this destruction seem to fight at any costs any possibility of allowing the planet to regenerate.
It makes sense though. As our planet continues to die, everything will become a lot more scarce. To bring some Malthusian paranoia to the picture, a mixture of global warming, global famine and nearly extinct non-renewable natural resources will create a prime spot for those who control the dwindling supplies of black gold and other poisons.
So obviously the corporations can't be expected to care as much as their PR agents tell them to say they do. So who do we turn to, the government? Not as long as it's run by the multinationals whose business seems to be killing the planet at all costs. Only the growing grassroots support can hope to bring light to this sad situation that the majority of consumer robots ignore as they pump their gas on the way to work.
Our planet is dying. Most people find it easy to ignore this fact because the corporate news media doesn't cover the story very often and our corporate government pretends there is no problem. There is a situation however, a dire one, and as long as we allow the corporations to rule, the trend will only worsen.
.. 2004 1-42 OnlineEscape from the real world: Homeless 101, 2/03 www.hackwriters.com
Nobody ever says, I want to be a starving artist when I grow up. In the public
school system, future doctors, lawyers and other servants of the corporate class receive
their education. Social education, the rules for how to properly walk in order to escape
abuse from your peers comes from television.
But what happens when you're more interested in learning than in education?
What happens when you're too friendly to learn the poses that allow you to be social?
You become a nobody. That's what happened to us. Being a nobody isn't that bad
though. It's the only way we're allowed to be starving artists.
We were the ones persecuted in school. We were the ones who questioned the
doctrines in school. We were the ones who ruined the movie because it was obvious how
it was going to end.
I read comic books idolizing Peter Parker, the nerd; bullied and isolated. I was
home-schooled until fifth grade. I was an outcast, understanding abstract concepts but
finding simple social situations baffling.
Sarah is a combination of genetics and environment. But how can you answer that
question, she puffs. Who she is can not be summarized in a few words or volumes. As we
swerve past cars testing reality, we speculate on whether everyone is an undercover agent
and what is really going on.
We both came from respectable, middle class families. Her mother was a former
NSA agent and employee-slave of the United States military. Her father was abusive, an
alcoholic. She was raised in the public school system, but like me just couldn't seem to
blind herself to the obvious in the way most adults did and the other children were being
taught too.
My mother was the daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher. My step-father, who
grew up in rural McMinnville in the 1950's, raised me. When I finally made it to school,
I was amazed at how simple it was. In Dibrell, the community on the outskirts of the
county I lived in, there aren't enough people to get cable in your home. I was raised on
PBS and when I got bored I simply read, often from the big leather World Book
Encyclopedia.
We were too smart for our own good, and many adults don't like being reminded
of what they lost when they grew up. We were a threat to some teachers, a delight to
others. Some teachers seemed to reach out a protective arm, while some seemed intent on
destroying us. These were all childish illusions, however, teachers are hand-picked in
order to properly educate the youth of America in order for them to become beneficial
members of society. They were just doing their jobs. Sarah and I seemed to be clearly
headed away from being utilitarian gears in the clockwork of society. The teachers meant
no harm, but were merely trying to warn us. We didn't heed their warning.
We were stuck like Sartre, in a world we did not create or ask to be a part of. Despite intense programming efforts on the part of not only the school system and television, but also on our parents, all the other "wise adults" and any other authority figure, we struck out on our own and decided to do that which was not explicitly illegal, but broke every unwritten rule of society.
Smart, middle-class kids don't drop out of society and become homeless. That's what was drummed into our brain for so long we almost believed it. We were raised not to believe in propaganda, that's what the nazis used. At least that's what our history books told us. They also told us the Civil War was about freedom and slavery and America was the champion of justice and had only committed minor wrongs (like for instance the holocaust of the Native Americans, more of which were killed by Americans and American policies than Jews were killed in the extermination chambers).
We had some clue that the world we lived in was a sham, but were still afraid of the plastic and glass warnings everywhere that urged us not to look too deeply, but to simply follow along with everyone else. We had both planned leaving since we were children and when we met in high school, the urges grew. Escape. Exodus. Something exciting was around the corner, or maybe we just wanted it to be.
We didn't find out how false the "real world" was until we got out of society. Homelessness is supposedly the result of increasing social marginalization due to economic factors. In our case, however it was due to psychic, spiritual and political matters. We began to discover that when you fit the ideas of the "lone nuts" together, their stories make a lot more sense than the ever-changing magic bullet theories.
Now that we've broken free of the social matrix (referring to the philosophical idea, not the red-herring film), we are free to move as we wish and are not even as persecuted by the enforcers of corporate authority. We operate our green 1968 Chrysler Newport by sheer will. We have found that we already had all the skills we were convinced did not exist or couldn't be understood.
So is it a true story? Can this be true. Of course it's a true story, but only as true as anything else which depends on how much you believe in it. Regardless of whether or not our story is true, we still navigate through this vivid dream, trying to learn more about our place and our job. We were put here for a reason and despite the resistance of all the forces of the material world, we are trying to find that reason.
So now here we are, two young homeless people. Trying to live a life like Woody Guthrie, or Bob Dylan, or Jack Kerouac or all those other "legends." Legends never die, though, so now we continue the story of those who came before us by sharing with all of you, dear readers, that which is true in our minds (even if in no one else's).
If you listen closely perhaps you'll solve the riddle which is much more simple than you could possibly imagine. Or you can just close your third eye and follow along the maze of ink and paper trying to understand what we are trying to say. Well, if you don't know, we can't tell you. But if you think you have an idea, read on.
*To be Continued
© Philip Fairbanks March 2003
Gonzo lives underground, 1/04 issue of SUNY art journal Afterimage
The underground has always existed. There has always been information that was not popular with the establishment. Despite the efforts of those in power to hide certain knowledge from the people, certain advances in the creation and dissemination of media have allowed disparate views to enter the mainstream. From the Library of Alexandria (the first incarnation of the internet) to Gutenberg's creation of a system of disseminating information more quickly than scribes could dream of, with each increase in the speed and simplicity of freeing up information there has been a revolutionary change in science, the arts, philosophy and politics.
The 20th century has witnessed several of these revolutionary advances in information sharing. With the advances in culture and the revolutions in the arts and sciences there has been a rise in the popularity of certain forms of underground literature. From the experimental and explosive literature of the Beatniks to the music of the hippies and beyond to the present day, underground art has been leaking into the mainstream collective unconscious at an exponentially increasing speed.
The increasing popularity of independent and underground music, movies, zines and culture (or sub-culture) have created a separate world of information and ideas that are not part of the mainstream culture. Now with the internet anyone can make their ideas available to the world. This has created a new format for the spread of underground literature, news and art that would not be made available in the much less interactive mainstream media. The internet is a new medium not only for the spread of information and art but for networking these subcultures. It may be the tool that allows the subcultures to slowly spread to the mainstream, bridging the information gap created by the corporate free press and corporate advertainment.
In Celtic society, the Bardic class, the poets and musicians, were assigned a place of great power Great rulers could be deposed by a properly phrased satiric verse, juvenal exposed the truth behind the myth in classical Roman society through poems that simply told it like it was. Since then, poets and artists have had an important effect upon the culture of the times. The artists are the critics of culture and the visionaries that open up possibilities for the future. In the past century, the underground literary tradition has taken up this vein in creating new possibilities for the future. As we enter the digital age, where information takes an even greater role in the formation of the present and future, the underground literary tradition will have an even more important role, and with the aid of the internet the ideas of the underground can be freely spread to the people.
It was the age of the Red Scare. America was united in conformity and one of the major tools used to create this conformity was the new mass media. Hollywood and television served as powerful propaganda tools. The American way of life had been standardized. American values were uniform. Either you were American (a God-loving believer in free enterprise devoted to simple suburban life) or you were a commie pinko fag.
The 50's was a frightening example of how easily America could become a fascist state. Blind patriotism and hatred of a common enemy were benchmarks of the age of Father Knows Best and McCarthy. Orson Welles and other thinkers ahead of their time were blacklisted and pushed to the fringes of the mainstream. Far below the mainstream, however, a group of revolutionary thinkers and artists were releasing information that would create an intellectual explosion and which influenced the underground of the following generations.
A group of writers, many of them commie pinko fags, emerged from the literary scene of the East and West coast and created a genre of literature that was far removed from the whitewashed conformity of everyday American life in the 50's. William S. Burroughs, an openly homosexual novelist. grandson of the inventor of the adding machine and murderer of his wife, published the novel Junkie: Confessions of an Unreformed Addict in the early part of the decade of conformity, Burroughs also wrote a series of novels, including Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and others that introduced the reader to Interzone.
Interzone was a realm that existed only in the mind of the author. It was some part of the Collective Unconscious that included as characters many other members of the Beat Generation. The fictional characters were based on actual humans, but were still fictions. Burroughs' perception of these real people were fictional, creations of his own imagination. It is hinted in Burroughs' work that Interzone was a very real place, if only in his head, and was responsible for many of the major events in his actual life, including the mysterious death of his wife.
Allen Ginsberg burst onto the Beat scene with the poem Howl which succeeded in introducing to the canon of American literature vulgarity, homosexuality and four letter words. The 50's was America's Victorian age and Ginsberg and the other Beats were fighting the Puritans every chance they got. Ginsberg's Howl was an expose of the actuality of the 50's as well as a diatribe on American culture in general. America was not the land of freedom of opportunity sung of by Walt Whitman, one of Ginsberg's literary heroes. It had grown stale and become everything that it wasn't supposed to be.
Ginsberg and Burroughs were both fictionalized in On the Road, the most popular and well known of jack Kerouac's Vanity of Duluoz series, a fictionalization of his life. The enthusiasm and excitement, as well as the decadence of the Beat lifestyle was revealed in Kerouac's classic. It also further fictionalized the lives of Beat writers, creating a rift in the "real world" that the establishment was seeking to create for the people.
Underground magazines and legendary presses like San Francisco's City Lights, edited by seminal Beat poet Laurence Ferlinghetti, helped spread the writing, ideas and revolution of the Beat. The Beatniks opened up a possibility for certain thought. They fought the establishment not with physical terrorism and violence but with artistic and intellectual terrorism. Like the resistance movements under other empires, these visionary artists opened up avenues of thought that could not exist in the narrow world of opinion created by the ruling class of the times.
The Beat poets and authors created an atmosphere of revolution that bled into the decade of social and cultural upheaval and revolt, the 60's. In the early 60's, musicians like Bob Dylan took up the tradition of artistic social criticism and revolt. The early acoustic Dylan albums were socialist critiques of American life. He sung about race relations, the plight of the lower classes and other subjects that hadn't been touched in mainstream media before.
At about the same time, authors like Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe and other writers were dropping acid and writing about the current situation from several different vantage points. Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest can be read as a critique of the treatment of the "mentally ill" or a parable of the mental institution we're all being held in. Wolfe wrote about the experiments in expanding consciousness with groups like the Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and introduced psychedelia to the mainstream.
In the 50's ultra-conservative magazine The Nation had, ironically, published Aldous Huxley's account of mescaline experimentation, The Doors of Perception which would later become famous through Jim Morrison's acid rock band the Doors. Many of the Beats had also experienced psychedelic experiences. Burroughs, for instance, tried practically everything including obscure South American drugs like DMT containing Yale, or Ayahuasca. The Psychedelic revolution had begun and it would forever change the face of America, especially the subculture scene.
The American music scene was changed dramatically by psychedelics. Dylan went from acoustic socialism to electric psychedelia after his experiments with LSD The Beatles went from wanting to hold our hand to wanting to turn us on through the experience of psychedelic music coupled with acid. Bands like Cream sang of archetypal figures and Jefferson Airplane sang of revolutions inner and outer while plumbing the depths of the rabbit hole. It was the introduction of the underground to another possible reality which created a multitude of possible universes to choose from, all differing radically from the single reality espoused as Absolute Truth by the establishment.
Movies like Easy Rider experimented with visual styles and non-linear story-telling that would revolutionize the medium of film. The 60's underground movie scene was like Orson Welles on acid and it created a new style that would forever change visual media. The subject matter, style and revolutionary nature of the underground art scene of the 60's would forever change the media of the future generations.
The media was under control at this time. Mainstream society wanted to hear that what we were doing was just and right, so that's what they heard. As a result, the subculture created their own underground press, newspapers and magazines that expressed the ideas, views and news of the underground revolutionary scene were being published and distributed to broaden the reach of these new ideas.
The 60's was a decade of optimism. So many people believed that the underground scene could instantaneously smash the establishment that the technicolor, acid-tinged art reflects the impending changes that would occur in the next few decades. The age of existentialism gave way to the postmodern revolution in philosophy. Everything was changing at the speed of thought. Though the optimism of the 60's didn't erase the control of the established powers, the status quo, it did change society in general. A perceptual transcend occurred which introduced pop Eastern philosophy and music, ideas about ecology and women's rights which would be further entrenched into America's collective psyche in the 70's.
Woodstock was the climax of the flower child revolution. It was a gathering of people for one reason, to listen to music and express their disapproval of the establishment and their wars. And of course to drop loads of acid. With the death of Jim, Janis and Jimi in the early part of the next decade, however, the movement lost much of its momentum. The ideas were almost lost as the status quo clung to power despite the Love-Ins and poetic expressions of revolt that the flower children were sure would be the death of the old structure.
Counterculture researchers like Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. John C. Lilly did numerous experiments with psychedelics and researched topics that the establishment Inquisition disallowed, disapproved, and officially disbelieved. Leary and Lilly both experimented with journeys into Inner Space, the Jungian realm of the Collective Unconscious as well as experimenting with telepathy and interstellar communication. (Though the Navy and CIA also did some strange parapsychological experiments that aren't on the public record).
Much of the underground literature of the early and mid 70's reflected the loss of innocence brought about by the failure of the optimistic flower children. The revolt had ended with two kinds of casualties, the burnouts and the assimilated. Numerous psychedelic explorers had gotten lost in Inner Space by irresponsibly experimenting with powerful drugs or by resorting to hard drugs like coke. Others had joined the establishment they had been fighting and cashed in, like counter-culture hero of the Yippies, Abbie Hoffman.
Philip K. Dick further opened up the possibilities of other world in his psychedelic science fiction. Dick, who is considered a visionary by some, a schizophrenic by others, was regardless, a writer who changed the face of science fiction. Dick released some dangerous ideas about reality which could damage the infrastructure of the Spectacle. He pulled apart consensus reality and exposed much of the Illusion that hid underneath the order of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm which was now dying due to the influence of Quantum Physics, Transpersonal and Jungian psychology and Postmodern and Deconstructionist philosophy.
What Dick did was create an alternate universe that was connected to this one in the same way as Burroughs' Interzone was. He turned his reality, one piece of the Great Dream, into fiction. He was attacking the integrity of the reality of the history books and establishment mythology by creating a false world which was just as real as the one we are expected to believe in. After the Quantum revolution it was discovered that we experience only a fraction of one percent of "objective reality." Since what we experience and perceive isn't real, then this means our dreams may have as much of a connection to reality as what we perceive as "the real world."
Like Jim said, "They've got the guns, we've got the numbers." Since they had the guns it was impossible to oppose them physically. Since they controlled the media, the means of spreading information, it was impossible to oppose them through music and art that only members of the subculture would view. There was another possibility however. Their was a way of attacking the establishment metaphysically by attacking reality itself. By blurring the lines between reality and dream, hallucination and subjective reality, consensus trance and collective unconscious, perhaps the status quo and their order could be finally defeated.
Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, aka Dr. Duke, fought in the same vein. His writing was based on "hallucinations" that he experienced while under the influence of various drugs. The subjective reality he reported however, was just as valid as the subjective reality that the mainstream media tried to pass of as objective truth. Dr. Duke lived in a world of conspiracy and intrigue chasing an elusive ideal known as the American Dream. This world he travelled through, full of lizards and nefarious midgets (foreshadowing David Icke's conspiranoia and Lynch's bizarre expose of the Illuminati in Twin Peaks), bore the same relation to "objective reality" as Burroughs' Interzone or William F. Buckley's conservative hallucination of the world around him.
Around the same time in the mid and late 70's Robert Anton Wilson was further blurring the lines between reality and illusion. In Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati Wilson explains the strange synchronicities and miscellaneous weirdness he actually experienced in the hallucination he calls his life. Wilson with Bob Shea wrote the Illuminatus! trilogy, a fictional account of the supposed secret rulers of the world involved in various conspiracy theories, all connected somehow even though many of which cancel each other out. This cemented the tradition of reality annihilation that the Beats began and the hippies carried out.
Illuminatus!, The Final Secret of the Illuminati, Prometheus Rising and other books by Wilson took the ideas of counterculture figures like Leary, Gurdjieff and others and turned them into something of a lesson plan for escaping the robot reality of the Spectacle. The books are revolutionary underground classics that further the war for reality.
In the late 70's and 80's despite the influence of the Me Generation which encouraged more television, hedonic self-gratification and conspicuous consumption, there was a further flowering of underground zines spreading the ideas of socialism, communism, anarchism and other revolutionary ideologies. The Reagan years began a trend by the establishment to recreate the 50's. Now the war was on drugs, taking the advice of former Mk-Ultra mind control experimenter, Dr. Morris Jolyon West, that illegal drugs, especially psychedelics, should remain illegal forcing the users (which include many members of the revolutionary subcultures) to the fringes of society.
Punk culture was an anarchistic, attitude soaked revision of the flower children's attempt at a musical revolution. Punk and DIY culture created numerous zines spreading the ideas further among the subculture members of the dark days of the Reagan era. Television and Hollywood once again were attempting to create a false reality inducing conspicuous consumption and corporate loyalty. At the same time a revolution in information dissemination was becoming increasingly more relevant.
Then there was the internet. To say the internet changed the world just might be the understatement of the millenium. The internet can bring about a revolution as wide ranging as Gutenberg's press. The internet not only freed up obscure information that couldn't be discovered in mainstream media, but it also provided a forum for discussion in real time of anything and everything. Anyone with free time now can introduce their ideas, philosophy and selves to the world.
William Gibson, science fiction author carrying on in the vein of Philip K. Dick, coined the term cyberspace and created a new mythos about the digital Library of Alexandria that we call the internet. Douglas Rushkoff, digital spawn of McLuhan, is the social critic of the New Media and the changes that are occurring in this post-postmodern world of information. The movie The Matrix introduced a theory about information that is as old as the Hindu Vedas and the Taoist theory of binary existence (yin/yang, O/I) Independent films like Magnolia and Memento have totally non-linear plots that can only be expressed in multimedia format. Hypertext (a postmodern term coined by Ted Nelson), creates an interesting metaphor for the web of individual thought and the web of human thought Jung called the Collective Unconscious.
Reality annihilation is still taking place but is now being utilized by the establishment. Our president wasn't elected, but you can call in to Fox and have two strangers coupled for better or worse. What began with Survivor and Big Brother culminated in a seemingly endless series of reality tv shows. Now politics is being exposed as sham in a reality tv show which has Gary Coleman and a #### star facing up against "real" candidate, Arnold Schwarzenneger, friend of the Bushes and husband of a Kennedy.
The subcultures are linked digitally now. Underground zines are popping up all over to spread information not found on Fox News Channel. The media has taken sides once again and there is a vast information gap. Authors like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn have deconstructed politics and exposed them as a self-serving arm of the corporations. This information is guarded, however, not released to the public due to its control by the corporate nation.
There is a world of information being shared digitally however in the latest revolutionary attempt by the artistic and literary underground. There are numerous alternative media sources on the net including TomPaine.net, www.altpress.org and others. Forums like Disinformation (www.disinfo.com) provide access to information and allow surfers to comment on it, FusionAnomaly (www.fusionanomaly.net) provides a great deal of subversive, esoteric knowledge related to subculture literacy.
Hypertext allows one to become immersed in this alternate world. We can now swim through the seas of information that make the Library of Alexandria look like an incomplete World Book encyclopedia. Websites like Fusionanomaly and Disinfo use hyptertext to allow instantaneous travel between thoughts. While reading an article on Burroughs that mentions his influence on Robert Wilson, you can travel directly to a nexus of information about Wilson and then go from there back and forth through all of this connected information.
The revolution is still alive, spreading throughout the digital world. The underground artistic and literary tradition has evolved over the past half century and as it spreads, more people are affected by it. The information is of such a nature that it changes the receiver into a vessel for the meme of resistance. This information when received by a human vessel creates a situation: the vessel realizes that it contains information that can change the world but is being hidden from others. Due to this situation the vessel can choose to either forget the information or spread the meme. With the rise of the internet, this meme can spread and infect more and more of the supposedly apathetic members of Gen X and Gen Y.
Underground media is now being spread via the net which is, among other things, a digital forum for possible social change. The new digital underground may provide the mouthpiece for a new perceptual transcend allowing humans to choose their own reality, instead of borrowing or buying into a corporate subculture and emulating a sitcom character. The history of underground media is the story of artists at odds with the establishment. The ideas they express are constantly evolving but the information they are slowly leaking into the mainstream are changing things at increasing speed. The digital underground provides unlimited potential for information freedom.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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