Boomer Please (Buy My Apocalypse Songs)

While you’re standing around
Waiting for your grandkids to drown
Or maybe catch fire
After you’re dead and retired
You may as well listen
Get high and get pissed
To my apocalypse songs
Yes listen to this shit

Boomer please
I’m down on my knees
Everything has gone wrong
Buy my apocalypse songs

I’ve got profiles in discourage
From The Airplane to the bees
Failed stories faded glories
All you need is flowers and beads
From Stealers Wheel to The Troggs
From glitter glam to 60s mods
And there was surely Pussy Galore
Stick around you won’t get bored

Boomer please
I’m down on my knees
Everything has gone wrong
Buy my apocalypse songs

We didn’t stop the fire (rept)

Actual Apocalypse (2020)

Everyone’s a prepper now
Everyone’s a mutilated cow
Everyone is making vows
Everybody take a final bow

Actual apocalypse
It isn’t fun like watching Mad Max
it isn’t clever like Oliver Sacks or
Insanely great like Steve Jobs’ Macs

One mask is for the disease
One mask is for the smoke
One mask is for avoiding police
Last toke before we’re broken

Actual apocalypse
It isn’t fun like watching Mad Max
it isn’t clever like Oliver Sacks or
Insanely great like Steve Jobs’ macs

2020 that was the year
2020 the vision is clear
Gonna need four more beers
Drown the fire in my tears

Actual apocalypse
It isn’t fun like watching Mad Max
it isn’t clever like Oliver Sacks or
Insanely great like Steve Jobs’ macs

Ring around the platitudes
A pocket full of smug
Call & Response (rept. Many times)
East Coast Chorus
“Water water everywhere”

West Coast Chorus
“Ashes ashes”

Surfin’ Weatherman

You don’t need a weatherman to know we’re toast
Shit’s getting Biblical from coast to coast
I’m moving’ to Ohio where the chicks are groovy
Surfin’ with Mike Love we’re gonna make it a movie

(to the tune of Surfing USA as stolen from Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little 16)
And they’ll be surfing in Boston
And in the ruins of Pompei
Deep in the deserts of Kashmir
L.A. has gone cra-cra
They’ll all be grabbing their children
And all their property too
Tell everybody they’re surfing
And everything is cool

You don’t need a weatherman to know we’re toast
Everybody’s freakin’ from coast to coast
Going’ back to California where the chicks are pissed
They’ll kneel before my virtue when I raise my fist

And they’ll be shooting deniers
And oil CEOs
And all Republican Senators
And every Fox News host
They’ll all be grabbing their children
And all their property too
Tell everybody they’re surfing
And everything is cool

The Stepfather Of His Country

He was the stepfather of his country
But he raised the kids as his own
He gave them ears of corn — oodles of porn
But when they bought bad cocaine they earned his scorn

& when they all got older
He turned them into soldiers
Strapping tote bags to their shoulders
filled with weapons of mirth
It was all rather cheery
He read them Dr. Leary
Until those silly numbskulls
Decided to give birth

That was just the final straw
This was just what killed their pa
“Birth & death stay from my door
What do you think the porn was for?
To make you each one onanistic
Now I’ll get a bit fascistic”

One by one he ate his grandkids
Chowed them down like gutted pigs
Except one who was schizophrenic
& could produce some anaesthetic
Together they drifted into a coma
Singing gleeful songs of soma

& thus a world was born & died
All because of a stepdads pride
It takes a village to make things fair
Fuckin’ stepdad didn’t care

No Rest For The Precariat

Dumb easy feckless proles
Matrons danced the Watusi
Hoodlum malcontents did the stroll
Early tech geeks couldn’t find sushi
Assholes like me were relentlessly droll
Dads at home acted like il Duce
Middle class kids weren’t on the dole
Everyone bowled and went to the movies

But now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat
But now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat

Punters fighting punters
Owners sailing yachts
We can jump into the fire
But we cant afford new Reeboks
Nothing much is left to say
It’s cyberwar from day to day
Street distress from night to night
Play instruments of madcap blight

And now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat
But now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat

The Smarter King Of Deliria

The girl at the ticket booth
Started wailing and weeping
With all the grieving
A body could hold seething
& the bouncer standing near to me
With cracked and violent idiot glee
Was swinging his fists randomly
Saying everybody gets in for free
But first you have to get passed me

Everyone from all around
saying stuff that sounds profound
& a smarter king of Deliria
That day was duly crowned
& if you listen a wee bit closer
To all the people in the ground
You’ll hear them screaming loud

& this is the sound

[Follow with Ornette Coleman meets Jimi Hendrix 8 minute jam]

Pulp (rept)

Pulp
Pulp
One slimy gulp
Cheese contrasts and compliments
A hint of leather methamphetamine crashing
Disconsolate poisoned rockabillies smashing
Or just a washed-up cabaret
Playing themes around a town without pity

Laughter as much as revulsion
Prayer beads of a tactless devotion
A goblin drinking from a guilty pump
Ectoplasm and it’s slithering amok
Could be Falstaff but I know it’s Puck
Get thee to puppetry to come unstuck

There’s something special in the grime
Lipstick smeared before a wife of crime
The whipped clean sheen of a mall
It’s only pulp but here have mine
Love ain’t like anthrax at all
It’s only pulp but give it time

It’s only pulp but give it time (rept)

Lip Sync Ships Stinker

Torn limb from limb by the mean girls at the orphanage
Glued back together in a spirited attempt at hoodoo bricolage
Went on a rampage of irreligious sacrilege
It didn’t matter to her a whit if it was Islam or written in Sanskrit

Lip syncs sink ships
Uncle Fester loves Trent Reznor
Polly the hijacker wants a cracker
Lip sync ships stinker

She sniffed the air tingling & tasting loves uneasy lunacy
Saw sorrowful vistas spotted with funereal urns
She rang a doorbell brought her neighbors an eerie shrieking doll
with that invasion they entered the dreamlands of the unwell

Lip syncs sink ships
Uncle Fester loves Trent Reznor
Polly the hijacker wants a cracker
Lip sync ships stinker

Infinite Troll

In this lightly sprinkled phase
Of quasi-historical banter
Do you like Phyllis Diller
More than Paul Kantner?

I challenge you to a high stakes game
Of triage and hospitalization
Nearly fatal illnesses terrible stillnesses
What have you got to lose then?
You have no friends and might just mend
The betting starts and some day it ends
That’s when the payoff takes its toll
Chased across the data in an infinite troll

And now I need an infinite rest (and that’s death)
Now I need an infinite rest (and that’s death)

Live Free Or Dye Your Hair Pink (2021)

Live free or dye your hair pink
The choice is easier than you think
There ain’t no choices just cacophony of voices
It’s the entire kitchen sink
So while we try to make sense
Ideas are being steamrolled by events
While we try to make sense
Ideas are being steamrolled by events

An intoxicating mixture of dogshit and fennel
Chowed down right there in the very kennel
A handful of bros and their surly bitches
Laughing in the faces of beheaded snitches
And if’n that don’t float your boat
See what the news is with your remote
Yes pandemonium comes to all seven seas
Pirates with nukes and the deadly bees

So take a moment to name your poison
To run with the wolves or hang with the boys ‘n’
Take a quick pic for an NFT fortune
Or just wait around for the next bus to Boston

The Enlightenment Entitlement

Yoginini Joes has a private shaman
She screams “don’t interrupt me” at her maid called Carmen
Who’s polishing the Paltrow vagina candle
When Yogini Jones flies off the handle
Shouting “don’t touch that talisman
It awaits the sacred phalisman
Unenlightened wretch you make me tired
I live in perfect peace and you’re fucking fired

The next thing you know Yoginini’s giving lectures
On how to stay positive — her bodyguard is Hector
Hector is a killer microdosing PCP
And Yoginini Jones is selling branded tantric pee
In a definite misunderstanding Yogini contacts me
I tell her I can’t help you dear — maybe try Flea
Flea invites him up to his place for wine and brie
But hw just won’t get behind the branded tantric pee

(repeat 3 times)
Enlightenment entitlement
Tantric pee is heaven sent
Buy Gwyneth’s sacred scent
With a tasteful dash of decadent

@thehonorable

A Brief Discourse

I got the word from the Bolshevik shaman
Who thinks he’s also a Hindu Brahmin
Drank Iboga from a patented cup
I just shrugged and said “Cool what’s for supper”
Around me people were puking up shit
Put it on youtube — it could be a hit
They cried and tugged and gouged at their eyes
Pluck them out was not that surprising

But back to the operatic scene at hand
The long and boring road from madness to bland
Like reeling in the years and bobbing for Snapple
Getting paid to keep it low down and subtle
When that “all hell” broke loose I was in the back

Brokering a truce and wearing a dunce cap
Trying hard for death with pills and soda
Hovering around for just one last Mimosa

Sneerbot

The edgelord built a sneerbot
He knew it would replace him
When it came time to upload his mind
He slipped away on a vacation
He hid out in Tangiers
Imagining he was Brion Gysin
But Edgelord pals can’t be trusted
And one day one slipped him some ricin

And we were laughing all the way to the bank
But we found the account was vacant
We tried everything from flash to bland
And to making the sex more blatant
We tried pitching to the British ravers
And to the sincere planet savers
And to the loony libertarians
Who didn’t do us too many favors

And the sneerbot said…
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses

And the sneerbot said…
Look at this history of the human masses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
And look at this dude tryin’ to boil his own eggs
Man those humans was on their last legs

Watched jocks and the hippies share a kegger
And give free oysters to the local beggar
I’ve seen this all with my very own eyes
Man these humans they take the fuckin’ prize

and the sneerbot said
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses

Blank Panther Party

The universe is made of Crayola
I lost the ‘70s thanks to payola
I was a member of the Blank Panther Party
Ripped on coke and Bacardi

I learned to multiplex before I could add
I was a murderess before I was sad
My micro-mini is way below my knees
I ain’t no goddamn tease

I hit the racetrack I was loaded with cash
Was feeling guilty and a wee bit rash
Bet all my winnings on a system crash
And now I’ve gotta dash

The universe is made of Crayola
I lost the ‘70s thanks to payola
I was a member of the Blank Panther Party
Ripped on coke and Bacardi

Flabbergasted

Well I used to be disgusted
And then I tried to be amused
But now I’m just plain flabbergasted
At the depth of the abuse
And I’m not singing ‘bout a bad date
And I’m not singing ‘bout ya 2 minutes hate
I’m looking at the new level of crazy
With their hands wrapped around our fate

Does anybody remember the quantified life?
(R. Plant voice) Does anybody remember laughter?
Does anybody remember the balcony speeches?
Does anyone remember bloodletting and leeches?
Does anyone remember the days before then?
Lugubrious meetings with remake-able men
& Little Brother is watching one and other
So mark your turf — Then run for cover

Helter luxury Shelter

When you get to the bottom of the world
Just find some expensive California girls
Build a luxury home with all the convenience
Invite three billionaires and one digital genius

You’ll start a new race that’s probably pale
This human race is about to fail
Don’t worry ‘bout them you’ll soon set sail
From the launching pad in the desert sun
Who knew holocausts could be so much fun
In your helter luxury shelter
In your helter luxury shelter
Days of fire and desert swelter
In your helter luxury shelter

They Canceled Lenny Bruce

Do you remember when chaos was a state of play
Do you remember “punk rock is here to stay”
Do you remember when Sister Ray was très outré
When Bowie asked… “or even yesterday?”

I’m wearing deplatform shoes
I’ve got the fear monger blues
When you ain’t got somewhere
You got no choice to choose
And now I’m yesterday’s news
They canceled Lenny Bruce

I still have a glimmer of rascalinity
But now it’s one inch short of divinity
My jest is a million miles from infinity
I may be creepy crawling towards morbidity

I’m wearing deplatform shoes
I’ve got the fear monger blues
When you ain’t got somewhere
You got no choice to choose
And now I’m yesterday’s news
They canceled Lenny Bruce

I used to chatter to the birds and bees
Grabbed the branches and climbed the trees\
I’m picking fleas, man… all this disease
All that’s left now is to vomit and sneeze

I’m wearing deplatform shoes
I’ve got the fear monger blues
When you ain’t got somewhere
You got no choice to choose
And now I’m yesterday’s news
They canceled Lenny Bruce

Say The Right Thing

(first movement: Simcerely)

One more shot at glamour
Everybody’s dead in Alabama
Your status symbol’s your latest trauma
Don’t bring the noise bring the drama
Bring all the bad karma
& the Dalai Lama
& lay your burden down on me
Come on lay it down

Simcerely yours
You’re the boss
Just a lost cause
No remorse

(second movement: Draw the Curtain)

Last blast of spectacle
Termite feeding on the bloated corpse
I want a piece of the action
Fuck y’all and your way rad factions

Reemergence as the prince of naught
Truly ready for the triumph of the nil
All the hip kids need a reason to go on
Like ’73 when I saw Satyricon

The next 4 years were sexy and steamy
I thought I was Frederick Fellini
It was a blast it couldn’t last
I even wound up with my dick in a cast

Chump change with President Carter He said peanuts I said barter
A punk group was a total nonstarter
Drunken blonde was my perfect partner

She had a poster of Ulrike Meinhoff
She knew how to kick and she knew how to scoff
When the boys tried to climb on board
Her cutting words were as a sword so…

Last blast of spectacle
Termite feeding on the bloated corpse
I want a piece of the action
Fuck y’all and your way rad factions

(Third Movement Say The Right Thing)

I live in a world of perpetual crisis
We want to get out but we know what the price is
Death come fast
After this repast

They’re all certain
Bring down the curtain
They’re all certain
Bring down the curtain
They’re so young

They’re no fun
They’re so young
They’re no fun

Trite makes right
Uptight
Trite makes right
Uptight
Walk upright
Polite
Walk upright
Polite

I live in a world of perpetual crisis
We want to get out but we know what the price is
Death come fast
After this repast

It’s tasty in the bakery
Sticky in the mines
We’re trying to get out
Just tell me when it’s time

She’s got the bling
But she says the right thing
It don’t mean a thing
Of thee we sing

(rept with increased stridency)

Say the right thing

The post Buy My Apocalypse Songs (15 Lyrics In Search Of Music) appeared first on Mondo 2000.

Propaganda poster by Ed Reibsamen with a little help from Midjourney

Article by Aragorn Eloff

There’s been a lot written lately about the so-called TESCREAList ideology that is currently hegemonic in the Silicon Valley tech circles frequented by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. TESCREAL stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism – terms that are probably at least intuitively familiar. Reading recent critical descriptions of this facile, elitist ideology, which is driving a lot of the hype around machine learning, I’m struck by how familiar it all seems. Listening to a podcast on 60s psychedelia on my run this morning, it suddenly all made sense.

It turns out you can trace a pretty direct line back from TESCREAL ‘philosophers’ like Kurzweil and Bostrom to Wired magazine and the extropians mailing list, and from there to the legendary Mondo2000 magazine – a 90s tech-enthusiast counterculture publication from California put together by old sixties heads enthused by nascent technologies like the web, VR and ‘nootropics’. Indeed, 1992’s Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, a gorgeous typographic mess of glossy 3d graphics and paeans to the coming techno-singularity, feels almost like a secret peek into the TESCREAL gang’s wildest fantasies, although regulars like Douglas Rushkoff, Mark Dery and Bruce Sterling were admittedly far more interesting than the current dreck. Mondo 2000 was, in turn, the successor to the less glossy High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, 80s publications that mixed cyberpunk and surrealism with phone phreaking and experimental music. And then, of course, there was the psychedelic enthusiasm, particularly the strong echoes of one Timothy Leary.

As a diligent student at the Hofmann and McKenna school for young dropouts in the early 90s, I devoured all the Tim Leary books I could get my hands on. Classics like Psychedelic Prayers, High Priest and The Psychedelic Experience, but also an oddly singular text titled Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis, published in 1977. The book was written while Leary was languishing in jail for his psychedelics advocacy, and marks a shift in attention away from LSD and towards quintessentially TESCREAList topics like space migration, life extension and so forth. Indeed, Tim essentially argues in the book that by the year 2000 we’ll all be immortals travelling through space and indulging in increasingly exotic pleasures while expanding our intelligence using computers and smart drugs. As a useful heuristic, he coined some acronyms that are particularly revealing: SMI2LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension), HOME (High Orbit Mini-Earths) and HEAD (Hedonic Engineering And Design).

Essentially then, Tim Leary, psychologist and psychedelics guru, synthesised a fairly significant chunk of the philosophy that would become TESCREALism while sitting in his prison cell, undoubtedly fantasizing about the great outdoors and all the experiences he was missing out on. My fellow students and I also spent a fair amount of time in the early 90s learning how to SMI2LE and use our HEADs while gazing up into the stars waiting for our new HOMEs to be ready. In retrospect it was in large part a naive fantasy fueled in no insignificant part by prodigious consumption of 5-HT2A receptor agonists.

There is a grain of intuitive truth to Leary’s dreams, of course -—we could and should try to enrich life in whatever way we can – but when divorced from the messiness of real life in all its social, political and ecological complexities, SMI2LE, like TESCREALism (and, yes, like Fully Automated Luxury Communism) is the kind of indulgent hopium that’s fine, perhaps even vital, when you’re 16, but probably not when you’re a billionaire with immense economic and political power seeking to enact your juvenile fantasies at the expense of the rest of the world. More importantly though, the TESCREALists are far, far more boring than Leary and the Mondo crowd. We could do a lot better.

Aragorn Eloff is an experimental musician and long-time wanderer through the counterculture. He is based in South Africa, where he is currently working on a PhD on the philosophy of psychedelics. He writes on anarchism, embodied cognition and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

The post Leary, Mondo2000, and TESCREAL appeared first on Mondo 2000.

Sacred Rites: Journal Entries of a Gnostic Heretic
Antero Alli
Falcon Press
2023

review by R.U. Sirius

Antero Alli has been a master at gifting others with their presence in the moment and in the world as it is… and the world that we feel and imagine, although he is too humble to make such claims. His ritual journal entries bring to life the personal and group dynamics of some of his “sacred rites.” Herein Alli takes us with him as he dances on light and falls, stumbles and hurts, rises with great inner strength and then backs off and makes space for the others to struggle and play with their own angels, demons, ancestral Jungian archetypes, mutable gendered forms, true memories and conjured reflections and refractions of their personal and group experiences past and present.

Who else has shared hir journey into a sort of embodiment of depth psychology married to the theatrical and cinematic artistry of a unique individual mind? Did Gurdjieff leave behind such generous notes? Did Artaud ever climb out of his own tortured mind to guide others into a theater of revelation and share the results? I think not.

As a lonely writer and minor league media trickster playing and toiling in the fields of counterculture and model agnosticism — I am jealous of those who got to be present for Alli’s physically active deep soul uncoverings — these experiences that he calls Sacred Rites. I always intended to join one of these experiences but time was my master and my excuse. I was a busy little beaver playing in McLuhans spider web of endless mediations where I have amused and (I hope) occasionally informed others while eking out a bare livelihood feeding and housing my own brief experiment in embodiment. I now understand that this experiment would have been more successful if I had allied with him for an experience or two.

When I first met Antero way back in the 1980s we were both working and playing under the influence of the neuro-political and exo-psychological maps provided by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. Leary brought us the theory of the minds’ evolution in tandem with biology and technology (tools). Bob Wilson gave it clarity and a heart. Antero Alli took the mind and the heart of Leary/ Wilson theory and gave it a body. He brought with him an influence from Jerzy Grotowski and his paratheatrical theories. As Alli writes, Paratheatre was “combining methods of physical theatre, modern dance, vocalization, and standing Zazen to access the internal landscape of forces in the Body – the impulses, emotions, sensations, tensions, and other autonomous forces – towards their spontaneous expression in movement, vocal creations, symbolic gesture, characterization, and asocial interplay.”

What a lovely contribution from E.C.C.O (Earth Coincidence Control Office) to bring Alli’s unique imprint into alignment with this relatively obscure path. Here, in Sacred Rites, Alli’s interior observations hide within them a map to the work he has been doing for some 46 years. It’s all here. How to create asocial interplay. How to conjure and embody visions and insights through the use of archetypes. How to move people from their stuck places. It’s not a cool cerebral picture. There’s a lot of howling, weeping. I would venture that there’s even some gnashing of teeth. Alli brings you inside these sessions and this text will leave you wanting more. Fortunately, the work will continue. Read the book and find out.

The post Review Sacred Rites by Antero Alli appeared first on Mondo 2000.

AI-Musement Park and MONDO
Vanilli’s Blockchain Busting Musical Experience “R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs?”

Immediate release from: 03/03/2023

“AI-Musement Park comprises a cornucopia of performances / talks / happenings /
documentary & discussion about AI, Intelligences, technocapitalism’s more than
pressing-ongoing urgencies.” -Eleanor Dare, Cambridge University & AI-Musement Park

R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs? An original AI-Musement Park, PlayLa.bZ & MONDO 2000
History Project human and machine learning co-creation, taking the perspective of an AI that is
training itself on the R.U. Sirius & MONDO Vanilli ‘I’m Against NFT’s’ song lyrics, exploring a
surreal, mind melting and multi-dimensional 360 world of paradoxes and conflicting rules.

“Mondo Vanilli was originally intended to be a virtual reality band exploding all
assumptions about property and propriety in the 1990s. Today fabrication becomes de
rigueur as the connection to the real is intentionally confused by the banal political
tricksters of power and profitability… while storms pound our all-too-human bodies and
communities. I am thrilled to finally see MONDO Vanilli in it’s appropriate context.
Immersive. Come play in the simulacra one more time” -R.U. Sirius, MONDO 2000

R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs? Is a satirical, irreverent block-chain busting commentary on
the propaganda relations fueled ‘Web 3’ hype around non-fungible tokens and the broader
issues that underpin our algorithmically massaged hyper-connected infinite scrolls and trolls
age. Challenging our assumptions about the nature of technology, creativity, and value,
reminding us that the digital world is shaped by powerful forces that determine what is valued
and what is not, and a click is not always for free.

Join Us! On Spring Solstice 2023 For “R.U. Cyber? :// Mondo 2000 History Project Salon”
at MozFest Virtual Plaza & Mozilla Hubs: AI-Musement Park 20th March / 8.30pm EU / GMT

• https://schedule.mozillafestival.org/plaza #Mozfest
• https:/ schedule.mozillafestival.org/session/LSNGRJ-1 #RUCyber
• https:/ www.mondo2000.com/2023/03/02/simcerity-r-u-against-nfts-period-question-mark-or-exclamation-point-join-mondo-vanilli-r-u-sirius-in-vr-on-march-20 #RUAgainstNFTs

About R.U.Sirius & Mondo 2000 #Mondo2000 #RUSirius

R.U. Sirius is an American writer, editor, and media pioneer. Known for being one of key
psychedelic & cyberpunk movement figures. Best known as Mondo 2000 editor-in-chief and at
forefront of 1990s underground cyberculture movement.

About Mozilla Festival #TrustworthyAI #AIMusementPark

Since 2010, MozFest has fueled the movement to ensure the internet benefits humanity, rather
than harms it. This year, your part in the story is critical to our community’s mission: a better,
healthier internet and more Trustworthy AI.

About PlayLa.bZ CIC #PlayLabZ #SpatialCadetZ

Co-founded by PsychFi, FreekMinds & Squire Studios we’re a next generation multipotentiality
multi-award-winning, multi-dimensional motion arts experience design laboratory, developing
DIY changemaking createch immersive experiences & software applications for social good
storycraft. Supporters & Friends: Mozilla Festival, Jisc: Digifest, Beyond Games, Tate Modern,
Furtherfield, Boomtown Festival, Sci-Fi-London, Ravensbourne University London, UAL, East
London Dance, NESTA, Modern Panic, ArtFutura, Kimatica, National Gallery X, Kings College
London, Looking Glass Factory, SubPac, Ecologi, The JUMP, BOM Labs, Mondo 2000

PR Contact: James E. Marks, Tel: 07921 523438 @: [email protected] Twitter: @GoGenieMo

The post Turn On, Tune In, Boot Up! For MozFest 2023: appeared first on Mondo 2000.

image by Chad Essley

Simcerity: I’m Against NFTs (It doesn’t matter much to me)

1: WE ARE DUCHAMPIAN OF THE WORLD

When Marcel Duchamp — possibly at the suggestion of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — dropped that urinal on an art gallery back in 1917, he signaled the world of art, contemporariness, galleries and capital that their was a new jest in town.

image by Jay Cornell

Value was to be an abject/object poke in the eye of the beholder. Bourgeois 20th Century was readymade for its closeup pisstake. Excrementalism would soon follow. Warhol branded it in the context of mediation — firing not the first but the most influential implication of infinite gesture into the rapidly virtualizing human condition. Now, this very year, someone has finally popped Jeff Koons balloon. Are we free yet?

2: SIMCERELY — MONDO VANILLI’S AUTHENTIC INAUTHENTICITY

CNN: “Vanderbilt University apologizes for using ChatGPT to write mass-shooting email.”

Simcerity has always been at least somewhat reflexive in the public arena. The medicine showmen who mounted the stage, the corporate publicists who still do… the countercultural media pranking yippies, and all the purchasable cultural products from recordings to cinematic experience — all have worked and hustled (and continue to) this tricksy interzone between direct lived experience and virtuality — an otherish imaginal space of work play and mutual infections.

In 1990, the fake band Milli Vanilli was busted in the media for lip-synching music they didn’t sing and that was recorded by by professional studio musicians. A preposterously bland piece of pap, one of the brands’ recording was rewarded with a Grammy by the wise persons of the music industry. When I read about the great lip-sinking crisis while editing a piece for MONDO 2000 about life in simulacra, I decided to form the band MONDO Vanilli. It was to be a VR band. We embraced authentic inauthenticity — taking the pretense out of pretense. If we would make music (and we weren’t sure whether actually engaging in activity other than gestural branding was a violation of our spirit), we would lip-sync without apologies. We would franchise MONDO Vanilli, allowing only performance artists and ultra-banal copy bands to use the moniker. Eventually we actually used $90,000 of Trent Reznor’s Nothing Records’ money to record an actual album. Nothing was released. Credit Reznor with being true to his brand.

Some years later… last year, in fact, two of the three MONDO Vanilli members reunited across 1000 California miles — and with help from punk rock madman Blag Dahlia — we recorded the song “I’m Against NFTs.” Now it’s being turned into a virtuality by our friends at PlayLa.bz …

We planned, of course, to offer our anti-NFT song as an NFT. (Will it happen on March 20? We don’t know.)

Flashing backwards to 1993, suffice it to say plans to make MONDO Vanilli a dadaist multinational corporation failed. Or maybe it succeeded but Musk — in his mad randomicity — captured the brand as part of his delirious career of evil.

3: REPLICABILITY, VALUATION & THE DIGITIZED VAGUENESS
In 1991, in MONDO 2000 magazine, Timothy Leary wrote a piece about the David Byrne produced book Reproduced Authentic. In his review (advocacy really) Leary celebrated the hoped-for death of the value of the “rarity” in favor of the (early) internet fueled aesthetic of replicability and direct person-to-person or group-to-group transmissibility of art without the intercession of stuffed shirt art establishment gallery owners or, presumably, capital.

Mostly borrowing from Walter Benjamin, Leary wrote “Transmissibility replaces rarity. According to German philosopher, Walter Benjamin, ‘The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning ranging from its substantive duration… to the history which it has experienced. ‘Rarity’ now is a… mask of art’s potential for meaning and no longer constitutes the criterion of authenticity. Art’s meaning then becomes socially (and politically) formed by the living.’

Leary continues, “…recreating the Mona Lisa. The 12 year-old inner city kid can slide the Mona Lisa onto her Mac screen, color the eyes green, modem it to her pal in Paris who adds purple lipstick and runs it through a laser copier which is then faxed to Joseph Kusuth for the next GALERIE VIA EIGHT show in Tokyo.” (Or as Bill Burroughs wrote, “LOOT THE LOUVRE!”)

Ahh, but the demands of capital remained static even as the signifiers started getting confused. Rent seekers still wanted some currency.

And so we accelerate into a darker cavern built by Mondo’s anarcho-capitalist pals (we were friendly sorts, perhaps too friendly) the cypherpunks. And with help from a cryptographically, quasi-democratized means of exchange, we sink at last into the unalloyed chaos of mass digitization as it merges with gold-rush obsessions with inauthentic/authentic/inauthentic cryptocurrencies. Spendable (or sometimes not) digits with Joker names and Riddler brandings like Shitcoin or Cumrocket pretending to have all the veracity of Bank of America or Well Fargo (i.e. not much) appeared and continue to. Some have the intent of running scams. Others are intent on keeping your stash (sort-of) hidden from the man. And the folks we love best are intent on giving opportunities to starving artists and excitable nerds.

R.U. Against NFTs?

Let me confess that I’m aware that I have many smart friends who have idealistic narratives around NFT, cryptocurrency and this whole web 3.0 shebang. I think it takes a certain kind of mind to want to grasp the complexities therein. Other smart friends just gaze at the offering and shrug. I can’t help but feel like it’s ultimately the same fascinating trickiness offered by finance capitalism with its derivatives and so forth. A distancing mechanism. But I’ll be learning.

Meanwhile, as a purely visceral observer hoping to offer “I’m Against NFTs” as an NFT, what baffled and befuddled this old ‘90s cyberculture guy was the question of why something rather clearly disappearingly abstract could be perceived as having a large capital valuation when captured by a buying individual.I mean, not even an upside down urinal or an exploded ballon animal necessary. Just some peculiar essence delivered in digits. And it clearly doesn’t even need to appeal to the sophistry or pretense of avant garde purchaser. NFTs are a populist playground for some adapters and offerings are often banal (and not in any self-conscious way.) Sometimes its the enthusiasm of the gamble or of the game and sometimes just… what?

As I questioned on various advisors who work the NFT market about how to bring our anti-NFT song out as an NFT (and I did feel that a successful one would be almost required for the gesture to be aesthetically complete), I learned that it wasn’t necessarily exclusive access (rarity) to our song that someone would be purchasing. Maybe/maybe not they told me. It appeared that I was truly in a kind of exploded space of valuation in which the rationale for a purchase would be individual and conjured from some peculiar sense that arose either from an absolute lack of content or all the content of the moments’ zeitgeist. Commodification of art at its most random decontextualized form. How very MONDO Vanilli. Dada eats its tail.

Cypherpunks Legacy

Today I write before you as a confounded old man staring down the barrel of crypto and the NFT in confusion. But all of this started with the original progenitors of crypto-cash, the crypto-anarchists who were named the cypherpunks by my frequent writing partner and MONDO 2000 Senior Editor St. Jude. The cypherpunks were in the (MONDO 2000) house. Family.

The cypherpunks or crypto-anarchists were intent on absolute lawlessness, at least in terms of the policing grasp of law enforcement, the taxman or curious fellow citizens. Cryptocash was to be untraceable by all except those engage in an exchange based on digitized anonymous trust. Today, law enforcement, journalists and other data seekers are able to penetrate that anonymity… sort of… with luck. The totalizing intentions of the original cypherpunks have given way to a mess engaged in uncomfortable intercourse with mainstream exchange; all of it contextualized by a universal precarity of capital highlighted by the materiality of bad weather.

Can we still be at play in the simulacra? We’ll try.

Join us on the road to nowhere on March 20, when I, R.U. Sirius, will deliver a talk followed by a presentation of the “I’m Against NFTs” virtual space by Playa Labs Z. Come, put on your vr goggles or just float through using your very ancient eyes and join this audiovisual dance in the shards. It may be the last.

Regarding the immersive “I’m Against NFTs Experience, PlayLa.bZ says:

R.U. Against NFTs.. Immersive Experience takes the perspective of an AI system that is training itself on the RU Sirius ‘I’m Against NFT’s’ song lyrics, exploring a surreal and mind melting 360 world of paradoxes and conflicting rules. The experience challenges our assumptions about the nature of technology, creativity, and value, reminding us that the digital world is shaped by powerful forces that determine what is valued and what is not.

The original I’m Against NFTs song is a satirical, irreverent block-chain busting commentary on the ‘Web 3’ hype around non-fungible tokens and the broader issues that underpin our hyper-connected infinite scrolling age. The song is a rejection of the idea that money is the be-all and end-all of human existence and a critique of the deep-seated corruption and power imbalances that shape our economic systems. R.U. Sirius may or may not be against NFTs, but his song is a broader indictment of the global technocrat homoeconomicus system that values profit over people, and nothing comes for free.

Join Us!

The post Simcerity: R.U. Against NFTs (period question mark or exclamation point) Join MONDO Vanilli & R.U. Sirius in VR on March 20 appeared first on Mondo 2000.

The post Gimme Helter MONDO Vanilli 1994 – Video 2023 appeared first on Mondo 2000.

I’m reading and enjoying Bob Dylan’s preposterous, eccentric and enjoyable “The Philosophy of Modern Song” (not Nobel Prize material) and around the same time, I stumbled into this attempt to explain what I was thinking of as my Top 40 favorite songs. I think I wrote it somewhere between five and ten years ago and I would put them in a different order now or maybe change a few.

Not as dreamy or odd as Dylan but still worth a quick read perhaps.

40:  I Was Made to Love Her  Stevie Wonder

Just pure joy, rhythm and exuberance. I’m pretty sure this will be the last thing on my list without a tinge of melancholy or politics or strangeness, so enjoy it while you can. I also had a childhood sweetheart named Suzy and I still sometimes suspect that I was made to love her, although that’s long past.

39:  Venus In Furs  Velvet Underground

Yes, yes. It takes after the novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the man who gave masochism its good name, and the music hurts so good, does it not?  Slow, slightly-off instrumentation and yet a hummable through-line. The payoff is in the lines: “I am tired. I am weary. I could sleep for a thousand years.” Blunt but literate blues for when you’re coming down or going down or getting old.

38: Long Black Veil   The Band

I never liked The Band all that much… or I didn’t realize how much I liked them until I started considering this list and several of their mournful classics popped up in my head and wouldn’t let go. It’s a western (as in cowboy) tinged murder ballad, but the lyrics and music set a mood more than they tell a story.

37:  Wish You Were Here  Pink Floyd

All rise for the baby boomer national anthem! Oh wait, they were Brits. Well, same difference. If you’re between 57 and 67 and the lyrics don’t slay you, you weren’t paying attention then or you’re too comfortably numb now.

36: Blank Generation  Richard Hell and the Voidoids

Richard Hell took John Lennon’s angriest slashiest guitar work and slashed it twice as hard and three times as fast (2022 edit. The guitar may be Voidoid Robert Quine)… and these lyrics are as good as anything Lennon ever wrote (except for maybe a few lines in Happiness is a Warm Gun).  The entire album of the same name is arguably the masterpiece of early NYC punk.

35: Only The Stones Remain  Soft Boys

At the start of the ‘80s, Robyn Hitchcock’s spirited jab at the beginning of the end of whatever that thing was that happened in the prior two decades. It’s exuberant, it rocks, it’s surreal and it’s a bit funny. That lad had a great career ahead of him.

34: Angry Johny   Poe

There are plenty of one hit wonders but this one rises above the rest. Perfectly executed… and I do mean executed. A song for the age of Gamergate? (note: this was written a while ago)

33: Watching the Detectives  Elvis Costello

Sometimes the music… even just the bass line… is so perfect and weaves so elegantly in and out of the words… that my language fails me. Incidentally, in my opinion, Elvis (along with the Attractions, on occasion) had the longest string of consecutive really good albums in the history of recorded music — from My Aim is True through Punch The Clock.

32:  Pleasures of the Harbor  Phil Ochs

More melancholia… this one involving soldiers and prostitutes, rendered with as much tenderness as can be mustered by a human. And with a lovely melody to match. Ochs is remembered for his protest songs, but it’s his more complex lyrical and musical pieces that ought to be recognized.

31: Rocket Man  Pearls Before Swine

No, not that Rocket Man (although that one was certainly ok… about as good as it got on the AM radio at the time), this one came first and is much stranger, although the storylines intersect in a way.  The hits are going from melancholy to melancholy…est here. I had to check to see if Tom Rapp (the man behind Pearls) committed suicide. Heck no. He quit music and became a successful civil rights lawyer. And he started performing again in the ‘90s.

30:  Brown Sugar   Rolling Stones

The best colonial anti-colonial work of genius you’ll ever have the privilege to misunderstand or underestimate. Genet in a perfectly faceted 3 minute rock song. The old fella probably doesn’t remember those early 1970s influences.

29: The Boxer  Simon and Garfunkel

How many great lines can you pack into one song? Lyrically profound (not a word one uses often in pop music), with a nice crescendo near the end that brings out the emotion of it all.

28: Anarchy for the UK  Sex Pistols

Even having already absorbed The Ramones, Richard Hell, Patti Smith etc., this song was like a clarifying explosion on a nuclear scale. It intended to blow the cobwebs off of the rock, which still presumed to have a drop of countercultural cred. No horseshit should have survived it (unless it was genius horseshit on a Dalinian or McLarenian scale). And yet here we are still baptized in banality (to steal a phrase from Jeff Koons). I sometimes wonder if younger people can get the full impact of songs from the ’60s or ‘70s so out of context. (Assignment: explain to me why Hello Goodbye was actually clever.) I meet some who do… and they amaze me.  Oh yes, music… I think the Sex Pistols were not just a rebel legend, but a great band, fresh in the way that The Beatles were fresh in ’63, at least when they still had Matlock on bass.

27: Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands  Bob Dylan

If it were my top 100, there’d probably be about 5 Dylan songs on it, but this one takes the cake. It brings out Dylan’s poignant romanticism, his empathy with women (with the barest hint of misogyny), his Whitmanesque Song-of-Myself romanticism (“My warehouse eyes/My Arabian drums”), and even the length of the song signaled epic (before that word was so abused) when it was released in 1966. The music is lovely. He’s a very tender and evocative harmonica player when he wants to be too.

26: Black Peter   Grateful Dead

I was never much of a Deadhead.  But there was something about their mournful side so tinged with sweetness and compassion and Jerry Garcia’s voice that does it for me.  This one is about dying: “See here how everything leads up to this day/And it’s just like every other day/That’s ever been.” Robert Hunter pretty much sums it up… as he often did.

25: Papa Don’t Take No Mess  James Brown 

Rhythmically this is as good as James Brown gets and James Brown was as good as it gets. Papa sounds a bit abusive, but you want to clean up that mess for him because of the way this record moves your body soul and spirit.

24: Ghost Dance  Patti Smith Group

Here’s another one that may be hard to get out of context. It may even seem a bit pretentious for a countercultural punk rock poet to conjure Native American spirit and outrage, but in 1978, the repressed promise of the late ‘60s was still raw enough for this to feel right. It still touches me, in that way. Marianne Faithful got it, and did a really good version with help from Keith Richards and Ron Woods, but Patti Smith Group’s version is the best.

23:  Waterloo Sunset  The Kinks

This one is just whimsical and lovely.

22: We Gotta Get Out Of This Place  The Animals

The title says it all. Eric Burdon and company apply all the power of working class white boy blues to the problem. As a suburban white boy, my first real blues experience was probably hearing The Animals play House of the Rising Sun. I remember it. I was playing football with some kids on my front lawn and as the song played, I was thunderstruck. I felt something. Everything stopped for a moment. And then the football hit me on the face. A few minutes later, I was stung on the throat by a bee. First World problems… white boy blues.

21: I Put A Spell On You  Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Really? This Voudou was on the radio in 1956? No wonder fundamentalists were freaking out about rock ‘n’ roll! I vaguely remember liking it as a child, but a crazy Brit called Arthur Brown really put it on my radar during the ‘60s with his own insanely great version. Loved it. Listened to the original again and loved that even more.

20: Space is the Place  Sun Ra

Twenty one minutes of cosmic vibes, honking and chanting that will come to take you further away than any magical mystery tour ever could. I think of this as Sun Ra’s theme song. If you don’t know Sun Ra, check it and enter into a whole new dimension of hyperspace. I was fortunate enough to live in a town that the Arkestra played twice in the early ‘70s. Thanks to this I knew that George Clinton was possible.

19: Halo of Flies  Alice Cooper

Meanwhile, back on earth, trouble was brewing. I once recited various Alice Cooper lyrical fragments to some English students and asked them to guess who wrote them. I don’t think they will ever forget that Alice Cooper and the guys who were in his band were freakin’ weird-ass geniuses. This is the ultimate Alice and has been covered by a gazillion different metal bands since. Music for mercenaries, psychos, revolutionaries and other demented types.

18: Get Up (I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine)  James Brown

The definitive James Brown with the sex up front. And his bands, in this case the J.B.s, were always precision funk machines — wound up tighter than a clock because if they messed up, James would fuck ‘em!  OK, not literally. But they learned to duck cause papa didn’t take no mess.

17: Madame George  Van Morrison

A somewhat obscure, brave and loving portrayal of a bohemian transvestite, lyrical and touching, with that Van Morrision touch of repetition/incantation that he mainly saved for his longer efforts. This one is 10 minutes and I could listen to it for another 10.

16:  Entertain  Sleater-Kinney

All the rage and all the brilliance of smart punk (riot grrl division). Really, every line is golden… mainly thanks to the delivery.

15:  I’ll Take You There  Staple Singers

“Ain’t no smilin’ faces/Smiling at the racists” Ok, so they made it officially “races” instead… but it was the early ‘70s, so we heard it the way we thought it… some of us.  Never mind. The rhythm and the vocals scratch at all the funkiest parts and that’s all you need. It really will take you there.

14:  Kashmir  Led Zeppelin

I’m not sure if there’s anything mystical and/or magickal about Kashmir… I think maybe Page has his face buried in Magick in Theory and Practice and took a wrong turn on his way to tangiers.  but it hardly matters. Plant and Page used their hallucinations to evoke some monumental psychedelic transmutational spirits. I think  Kashmir is an architectural Big Rock masterpiece. The fact that I heard this while high on DMT while crossing the Bay Bridge in the back of a van has only slightly colored my view. It was my favorite Zep song before that revelatory experience.

13: Pressure Drop  Toots and the Maytals

Back in ’72, ’73, everybody was listening to The Harder They Come soundtrack but this was the cut that made you jump up and let go.  It’s been doing it ever since.  “Pressure’s got the drop on you you you.” The message has survived every zeitgeist. In fact, I’d suggest that there’s a Moore’s Law of pressure. You better go work it out on the dance floor.

12:  Soul Kitchen  The Doors

Here’s everything you could want from a Doors song and if you dis The Doors I suggest you revisit this one.  Passion, poetry, blurred visions, bruised brains… it’s 1967! That whole first Doors album is pretty much perfect.

11:  Paint It Black  Rolling Stones

Paint it black you devils!  Well, it’s nominally about a lost love but it’s actually about, well, painting it black… as in… let’s have a RIOT! In the Rolling Stones approved bio film, Crossfire Hurricane, the song plays to a collage of kids going berserk, rioting and attacking cops at Rolling Stones concerts and political protests. The ending is the real pay off… a sort of chant with a middle eastern edge. It invited a sort-of frantic ‘60s youth hora dance preparatory to revolution. Really, this sort of thing would happen then.

10:  One Nation Under A Groove  Parliament Funkadelic

It’s the feel good hit of the multiverse and representative of the best of the US of America (the best Clinton America has). I vote for it!  I blasted this one out at full volume the instant Mr. Obama got elected (the first time) in 2008.  It didn’t turn out that way, but if anybody can get us to feel the hope for change of a funky and fairly trippy sort, it’s George Clinton.

9: Tears of Rage  The Band

Some of Dylan’s most compassionate and deeply felt if slightly elusive lyrics made even more sorrowful by The Band. Richard Manuel’s vocals are at the very edge of a man about to weep and wail.

8: All Tomorrow’s Parties  Velvet Underground

Do I even really have to explain this? Nico, The Velvets, Lou Reed’s lyrics evoking a slightly tatty lower Manhattan Demimonde and the music just right.

7:  O Superman (For Massanet) Laurie Anderson

Laurie’s work was somehow too self-consciously cool and clever to bring us back for frequent listening, but on those occasions when we were in the right mood, she was our mischievous mistress of postmodern ceremonies.  This was the sort of bust out hit song (to the extent that a performance artist gets a bust out hit song) and, if it’s not exactly emotive, it’s certainly haunting and very extraordinary as in non-ordinary.

6:  Danger Bird  Neil Young and Crazy Horse

In all their ragged glory. Neil Young hitting all those slightly off–minor keys and strangling passion out of one of those slow almost-note-free guitar solos. There are a dozen Neil Young and Crazy Horse songs that are very similar that I like almost as much.

5: Memo from Turner  Mick Jagger

“You’ll still be in this circus when I’m laughing in my grave.” Where did that guy go? Well, at least we still have the recording of one of the most lyrically demented (and sharp) songs in music history. “You gentlemen,  why… you all work for me!” Well, at least that part came true.(Ry Cooder should have gotten credit for the music. And the stones rolled everyone)

4: God Only Knows  Beach Boys

I remember I was 13 and we were visiting some friends of my parents somewhere near a beach on Long Island. There was a girl who was somewhere between my older brother David’s age and my own and she was flirting with him. I went back to the house where I found the Beach Boys 45 Wouldn’t It Be Nice sitting next to a record player. After listening to the A Side, I flipped it over. I heard God Only Knows. I was transfixed. For years, I thought of that song as my own little secret. Now it’s a widely recognized masterpiece.

3:  The Thrill of It All  Roxy Music

Whip yourself into a hedonistic frenzy. It’s perhaps ironic that rock’s most elegantly brilliant posers made this song to drive you out of your mind and make your body shake and quake like no other, but there you go.

2: God is Alive, Magic is Afoot  Buffy Saint-Marie

Take one narrow rationalist, add a dose of whatever, wait two hours and sit him or her in front of the speakers as Buffy intones Leonard Cohen’s prayer in an ominous and shaky voice. Repeat yearly. Me? I’m officially agnostic, except when I’m not.

1: I Am The Walrus  The Beatles

Probably the most influential entertainers of the 20^th Century, The Beatles stormed the barricades of what was thinkable and feel-able for teen idols just a couple of years after holding our hands  and this one… my god, how could they? It was 1968. I was 15. I had just finished the section in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf in which Harry Haller has his mind blown and his ego stripped bare in the Magic Theater when the DJ on the AM radio drew my attention to a new Beatles single that he was very excited about. As it played, a shock of exultation ripped through my skull. It was at that moment that young Mr. Sirius shed the earnest seeker and transmuted into a Heyoka (which Lord Nose translated for me as Lakota for “upside down inside out man.”)

The post R.U. Sirius Philosophy Of Modern Song… naaa… appeared first on Mondo 2000.

Avant God  (2016)

I want an avant god 
Loving perversity 
Unlimited diversity 

Optimized for your VR cabal 
Totally portable 
Sometimes snortable 

Gendered or not
Maybe subject to rot
Why not?

The avant god is as real
As the knees on which they kneel
Try to keep it on an even keel
The kind of god you have to steal

The avant god is false
The kind of god you must report
The kind of god that misses court
The kind of god you know you want

I want an avant god
Loving perversity
Unlimited diversity

The Tedium Is The Message (2018)

You know it hit me in the gut
Rampaging glut of culture
Nobody needs to consume anymore
Another song — I’m just another bore

Every day with nothin’ to sing
Luxury communism the next big thing
Yeah it’s the thing that’s hot
And this new song… I guess it’s not

The tedium is the message
Go tell it on the stage
Tear down the proscenium walls
Another crack at days of rage
Old yippie act your age
Or turn in your back pages
We’ll throw them in the fire
And we’ll wear grown up attire

You know it hit me in the gut
Rampaging glut of culture
Nobody needs to consume any more
Another song I’m just another bore
Every day nothin’ to sing
Luxury communisms the next big thing
Yeah it’s the thing that’s hot
And this new song… I guess it’s not

(psychedelic breakdown musical interlude) 

The tedium is the message
Culture ain’t your friend
Be all psilocybin imbibin’
Strange attractor til the end
That list of albums you never send
That last attempt to make a trend
It’s all just gonna end
Culture ain’t your friend

The tedium is the message
Go tell it on the stage
Tear down the proscenium walls
Another crack at days of rage
Old yippie act your age
Or turn in your back pages
We’ll throw them in the fire
And we’ll wear grown up attire

Flabbergasted 

Well I used to be disgusted 
And then I tried to be amused 
But now I’m just plain flabbergasted 
At the depth of the abuse 
And I’m not singing ‘bout a bad date 
And I’m not singing ‘bout ya 2 minutes hate 
I’m looking at the new level of crazy
With their hands wrapped around our fate

Does anybody remember the quantified life? 
(R. Plant voice) Does anybody remember laughter?
Does anybody remember the balcony speeches?
Does anyone remember bloodletting and leeches?
Does anyone remember the days before then?
Lugubrious meetings with remake-able men
& Little Brother is watching one and other 
So mark your turf — Then run for cover 

Our Cruel Father Who Art Beheaded (2020)

Our cruel father who art beheaded
Shallow be thy almost long tail
Thy ghosts are feted no statues erected
& all the tasty treatises are pungent stale
You took a wish upon a star
Even your golf game was subpar
And there’s no remorse just one less source
Of crumblin’’ dice & slammed shut doors

Our cruel father
Lost his head
Who will bake
All the children bread
Who will run
The important biznesses
Who will count
All the lesser sicknesses

Our cruel father who art beheaded
Swallowed much too much for one man
Took his sadness to the blood bank
Now there’s nothing much left to brand
With all the sins the eater consumes
All the letting a million lilacs bloom
All the fantasies dreamed by the TV
All the tricks that say can you see

Our cruel father
Lost his head
Who will bake
All the children bread
Who will run
The important biznesses
Who will count
All the lesser sicknesses

Two Truthers and a Birther Walked Into A Bar (2016)

Two truthers and a birther walked into a bar
The truthers had some ritalin — the birther had a car
They made a pact right then and there
To tell the folks who didn’t care
About the bad things being done
And get some guns and have some fun

Scrambled codes make scrambled minds
Strategic lies make paranoids
Anemic guys make angry blogs
Unhappy girls want perfect bods

The truthers split to berkeley & hung out in a tree
The birther went to Nashville  — The Grand Opry
They planned to meet halfway between
And make the sheeple share their dream
By dropping acid in the tea
Then pirating every Tee Vee

Scrambled codes make scrambled minds
Strategic lies make paranoids
Anemic guys make angry blogs
Unhappy girls want perfect bods

The birther trained the truthers in marksmanship and fight
The truthers showed the birther how to hack into a bank
But things went south when Truther One
Shared all their plans with Neil Young
Who wrote a song then turned them in
While slipping each a Mickey Finn

Scrambled codes make scrambled minds
Strategic lies make paranoids
Anemic guys make angry blogs
Unhappy girls want perfect bods

The truthers woke up sadly in a stuporous haze
They swore to all in court it had just been a phase
The birther returned to the south
Big hero by word of mouth
Did a day maybe two in jail
Ex-Governor Perry paid his bail

Scrambled codes make scrambled minds
Strategic lies make paranoids
Anemic guys make angry blogs
Unhappy girls want perfect bods

We Are Duchampians of the World (Infinite Gesture) (2019)

Libido mosquito
Found in a purse
Dead man’s soup can
Things could be worse
Infinite gesture
Obstinate curse
Reframe the same refrain
Give it another name

We are Duchampians my fiendish little friends
And we neverminded the Karens or the Kens
We are Duchampians
We are Duchampians
Open for cruising
And we are Duchampians of the world

Regrettably circumspect
More sly than high
Ivy league and twee
Means shit to me
Infinite gesture
Land of the fee
Home of the craven
Reframe the same refrain

We are Duchampians my fiendish little friends
And we neverminded the Karens or the Kens
We are Duchampians
We are Duchampians
Open for cruising
And we are Duchampians of the world

The Stepfather Of His Country

He was the stepfather of his country
But he raised the kids as his own
He gave them ears of corn — oodles of porn
But when they bought bad cocaine they earned his scorn

& when they all got older
He turned them into soldiers
Strapping tote bags to their shoulders
filled with weapons of mirth
It was all rather cheery
He read them Dr. Leary
Until those silly numbskulls
Decided to give birth

That was just the final straw
This was just what killed their pa
“Birth & death stay from my door
What do you think the porn was for?
To make you each one onanistic
Now I’ll get a bit fascistic”

One by one he ate his grandkids
Chowed them down like gutted pigs
Except one who was schizophrenic
& could produce some anaesthetic
Together they drifted into a coma
Singing gleeful songs of soma

& thus a world was born & died
All because of a stepdads pride
It takes a village to make things fair
Fuckin’ stepdad didn’t care

No Rest For The Precariat  (2019)

Dumb easy feckless proles
Matrons danced the Watusi
Hoodlum malcontents did the stroll
Early tech geeks couldn’t find sushi

Assholes like me were relentlessly droll
Dads at home acted like il Duce
Middle class kids weren’t on the dole
Everyone bowled and went to the movies

But now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat
But now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat

Punters fighting punters
Owners sailing yachts
We can jump into the fire
But we cant afford new Reeboks
Nothing much is left to say
It’s cyberwar from day to day
Street distress from night to night
Play instruments of madcap blight

And now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat
But now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
Now there’s no rest
For the Precariat

MONDO is Italian for World (2019)

When I opened up her fridge
Saw tablespoons of monkey jizz
Preserved within a box of lemons
Next to the tarantula venom
That is when I had to see
This was just the gal for me

All along the citadel
Physicists were raising hell
Alchemists were raising heaven
Magicians were raising seven
Fools were shouting 23
This must be the place for me

Soon an apparition came
Carrying a vial of fame
Pleased to meet you what’s my name?
“I’m the scepter and the stain”
Come on in, call me “him”
Take this number, call up Tim

It was all a mad charade
And a glorious freak parade
Some got screwed but some got laid
Most got something some got paid
Mondo is Italian for world
I knew this had to be my girl’’

Deleuze Guittari Gnash & Jung  (2020)

Deleuze Guittari Gnash & Jung
They weren’t having too much fun
Til Dylan came along in a big-ass truck
Sayin’’ “Hey who really gives a fuck?”

They all piled in pointing at him
Taking narcotics and drinking gin
Bob asked “who here plays guitar
Who else here is a fuckin’ star?
& if you don’t like blues harmonica
Get the fuck out my car”

Well they had to think of something
Deleuze started humming
Then Jung started dreamin’
And Gnash started schemin’

Bob said “that’ll have to do”
Guattari said “I ain’t no fool
Let’s cruise drunken through the burbs
Pretend that we’re the angry birds”

They saw the white men cooking chicken
That is when the plot did thicken
While Deleuze and Guattari screamed like angry birds
Dylan didn’t say a fuckin’ word

Soon the neighbors with their guns
Cried “go elsewhere with all your fun
We like Bob Dylan and we like puns
But we have no truck with Carl Jung”

And just to make them stay away
Said “Last week we fucked up Dr. Dre
And if you wanna see the dawn
Hey hey you you get offa my lawn”

(rept many times)
They said “hey hey you you get offa my lawn

Lip Sync Ships Stinker

Torn limb from limb by the mean girls at the orphanage
Glued back together in a spirited attempt at hoodoo bricolage
Went on a rampage of irreligious sacrilege
It didn’t matter to her a whit if it was Islam or written in Sanskrit

Lip syncs sink ships
Uncle Fester loves Trent Reznor
Polly the hijacker wants a cracker
Lip sync ships stinker

She sniffed the air tingling & tasting loves uneasy lunacy
Saw sorrowful vistas spotted with funereal urns
She rang a doorbell brought her neighbors an eerie shrieking doll
With that invasion they entered the dreamlands of the unwell

Lip syncs sink ships
Uncle Fester loves Trent Reznor
Polly the hijacker wants a cracker
Lip sync ships stinker

Live Free Or Dye Your Hair Blue (2020)

(every other line is verse/chorus i.e. call/response, etc.)

What will you wear to the new civil war?
Live free or dye your hair blue
Who’s gonna be your new Tipper Gore?
Live free or dye your hair blue
Did you beat the militias to the gun store?
Live free or dye your hair blue
What will you wear to the new civil war?
Live free or dye your hair blue

Will it be televised virtual or raw?
What will you wear to the new civil war?
Will it be tearful fearful and more?
What will you wear to the new civil war?
They’ve got the bullets we’ve got the queens
What will you wear to the new civil war?
Scare ‘em up with pictures of guillotines
What will you wear to the new civil war?

His name’s Erik Prince and he’s not funky
Live free or dye your hair blue
Should we wear grunge or a wee bit punky?
Live free or dye your hair blue
Frilly shirts & scarves like those elegant junkies? (distant voice shouting … “it’s only rock and roll”)
Live free or dye your hair blue
What will you wear to the new civil war?
Live free or dye your hair blue

Live Free Or Dye Your Hair Pink (2021)

Live free or dye your hair pink
The choice is easier than you think
There ain’t no choices just cacophony of voices
It’s the entire kitchen sink
So while we try to make sense
Ideas are being steamrolled by events
While we try to make sense
Ideas are being steamrolled by events

An intoxicating mixture of dogshit and fennel
Chowed down right there in the very kennel
A handful of bros and their surly bitches
Laughing in the faces of beheaded snitches
And if’n that don’t float your boat
See what the news is with your remote
Yes pandemonium comes to all seven seas
Pirates with nukes and the deadly bees

So take a moment to name your poison
To run with the wolves or hang with the boys ‘n’
Take a quick pic for an NFT fortune
Or just wait around for the next bus to Boston

Not A Bug But A Feature (2017)

We all have a lot of drugs
It’s not a bug it’s a feature
And me I’m easily buzzed
So I can give you a bunch of my drugs

They tell me hugs not studs
They tell me don’t piss in the strudel
But I don’t care for their advice
I’ve got some drugs to make me nice

We’re having too much fun
And all the guns are loaded
And we were born to be wacked
And we were made to attack

We were born inside out
Like in a Cronenberg movie
But we have lots of strange drugs
Therefore the whole thing is groovy

Queerish  (2019)

You couldn’t sit outside
Without some trajectory
Some vast vocabulary
Hitting upside your head

You couldn’t read queer studies
To a Ballardian fuddy duddy
Messing with your data entry
Some self-conscious narco-mancy

Have we not lived too long?
Can you please digeriDON’T?
I’m only begging Apollo
For a few sensible follows

I only want to light up a smoke
Take a broken mirror home
Zapruder film please leave me alone
I only want an ice cream cone
(rept last 2 lines)

The Smarter King Of Deliria (2020)

The girl at the ticket booth
Started wailing and weeping
With all the grieving
A body could hold seething
& the bouncer standing near to me
With cracked and violent idiot glee
Was swinging his fists randomly
Saying everybody gets in for free
But first you have to get passed me

Everyone from all around
saying stuff that sounds profound
& a smarter king of Deliria
That day was duly crowned
& if you listen a wee bit closer
To all the people in the ground
You’ll hear them screaming loud
& this is the sound

[follow with Ornette Coleman meets Jimi Hendrix 8 minute jam]

Sneerbot (2014)

The edgelord built a sneerbot
He knew it would replace him
When it came time to upload his mind
He slipped away on a vacation
He hid out in Tangiers
Imagining he was Brion Gysin
But Edgelord pals can’t be trusted
And one day one slipped him some ricin

And we were laughing all the way to the bank
But we found the account was vacant
We tried everything from flash to bland
And to making the sex more blatant
We tried pitching to the British ravers
And to the sincere planet savers
And to the loony libertarians
Who didn’t do us too many favors

And the sneerbot says…
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses

And the sneerbot says…
Look at this history of the human masses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
And look at this dude tryin’ to boil his own eggs
Man those humans was on their last legs

Watched jocks and the hippies share a kegger
And give free oysters to the local beggar
I’ve seen this all with my very own eyes
Man these humans they take the fuckin’ prize

and the sneerbot said
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses

Beware The Rolling Logs  (2017ish)

We’re rolling logs
He lets me pet his frog
I use his cancer-smelling dog
We’re gonna shoot P.J. O’Rourke

Beware of spiritual babes who worship Hindus named Craig
Beware of racist grifters playing for political gain
Beware of every belief or of even giving relief
Beware of Einsturzende Neubauten as much as Judas Priest

We’re rolling logs
He lets me pet his frog
I use his cancer smelling dog
We shot P.J. O’Rourke

Beware of eating bad things that turn out to be good
Beware of stuff that’s good for you that isn’t even food
Beware of arguing with people who quote Michel Foucault
Beware of garbage etymologists trying to steal all your faults

We’re rolling logs
He lets me pet his frog
I use his cancer smelling dog
We didn’t shoot P.J. O’Rourke

 (rhythm change)
When the world is almost over
I’m gonna be that fat lady who sings
So much to do in-between
Get big tits – record some hits
Maybe get married to Sting

How To Explain The Details

He took wheels made of concrete, tied them to a dead ox
Then put a boy who had both measles and the mumps on top
Boiled some tea using cadmium and rotted melon
And to guard it all he bought a matching set of escaped felons

At the opening with Jeff Koons Hirst and Emin
Drinking Pernod and passing out buttered pillow trim
Laughing vigorously at all of Emin’s cynical jokes
When the testicles of Valentino emerged from out my throat

What to do then how to explain the details?
It was that trip to Spain where I came upon some entrails
They weren’t testicular damned I cried in my defense
The artist just laughed at me and said this chokes at your expense

And that’s how I learned the ways of sensual martyrs
Not from some blue hair punkette in Stiv Bators dog collar
It took a friendly tea of cadmium and some melon stink
And something about Jeff Koons that made me want to go to sleep

Vertigo & World War 3 (2022)

With no fucks left to give
We fell into the abyss
And kept falling & falling falling endlessly
Vertigo and World War Three

And the gods said…
We gave them the pandemic
We sent some great floods
Australia was pretty much on fire
We got them to accept eating bugs
But World War 3 is gonna be big
Fry the trees and roast the pigs
And here’s the hilarious kicker
We’ll call the newsman Wolf Blitzer

Yes all the gods laughed and laughed
“Oh man that’s just way to crass”
Let’s get this thing movin’
Get around to shootin’ Putin
And America all rootin’ tootin’
Will probably give the final bruisin’
Drop the big one like once before
Melt the earth down to its core
What do you think the money was for?

Ain’t no micro-aggression
Get over yourself
No cure for depression
There’s nukes on that shelf
No contested election
No stories to tell
Death in every direction
Yes this is hell

Have a Dramamine
Have a wacky dream
Have a widespread illness
Take some time for silliness
Before world war three
Before world war three
This ain’t the space age
We ain’t here to go
Vertigo

Don’t you know the way?
Just say Namaste
But don’t say gay
Watch those assholes pray
Before world war three
Before world war three
This ain’t the space age
We ain’t here to go

Ignore  (2020)

Ignore
Out of boredom or torpor
The trending thing is so soporific
& your beauty & the moonlight is so terrific
So ignore

Ignore
Every Marie Kondo urging you pep talk
Every ugly rumor about Johnny Depp
Just ignore

& when you’re stuck in traffic
Some MAGA wearing a leather jacket
Some argument that trades logic for static
Ignore

And if everybody else lost the plot
& you ask are they really alive or not
Just lay yourself down on the cot
Have some whiskey & a little pot
& ignore

The post Infinite Gesture — 21 Lyrics in Search of Music appeared first on Mondo 2000.

Self-hosted infrastructure is the first step toward voluntary apotheosis.

–Unknown

When people think of The Cloud(tm), they think of ubiquitous computing. Whatever you need, whenever you need it’s there from the convenience of your mobile, from search engines to storage to chat.  However, as the latest Amazon and Cloudflare outages have demonstrated all it takes is a single glitch to knock out half the Internet as we know it. 

This is, as they say, utter bollocks.  Much of the modern world spent a perfectly good day that could have been spent procrastinating, shitposting, and occasionally doing something productive bereft of Slack, Twitter, Autodesk, Roku, and phone service through Vonage.  While thinking about this fragile state of affairs in the shower this morning I realized that, for the somewhat technically inclined and their respective cohorts there are ways to mitigate the risks of letting other people run stuff you need every day.  Let us consider the humble single board computer, computing devices the size of two decks of cards at most, a €1 coin at the very least.  While this probably won’t help you keep earning a paycheque it would help you worry less about the next time Amazon decides to fall on its face.

Something I never really understood was the phenomenon of people recreating the data center in miniature with stacks of Raspberry Pis shaped like a scaled down telecom rack.  There’s nothing wrong with that – it’s as valid a way of building stuff out as anything else.  However… do you really have to go this route?  Single board computers are small enough that they can be placed anywhere and everywhere in such a manner that they’re practically invisible.  At any time you could be surrounded by a thin fog of computing power, doing things you care about, completely out of sight and out of mind, independent of AWS, Azure, or any other provider’s health.  That fog could be as large or as small as you need, expanded only as needs dictate, cheap to upgrade or replace, and configured to automatically update and upgrade itself to minimize management.  Some visionaries imagine a world in which any random thing you lay eyes upon may have enough inexpensive smarts built in to crunch numbers – why not take a step in that direction?

Starting with a relatively powerful wireless router running OpenWRT for maximum customizability and stability might be a good place to start.  Speaking only as someone who’s used it for a couple of years, OpenWRT stuff is largely “set it and forget it,” with only an up-front investment of time measured in an afternoon.  Additionally, using it as your home wireless access point in no way compromises getting stuff done every day.  If nothing else, it might be more efficient than the crappy wireless access point-cum-modem that your ISP makes you use.

Now onto the flesh and bones of your grand design – where are you going to put however many miniature machines you need?  Think back to how you used to hide your contraband.  The point of this exercise isn’t to have lots of blinky lights all over the place (nerd cred aside), the point is to have almost ubiquitous computing power that goes without notice unless the power goes out (in which case you’re up a creek, no matter what).  Consider the possibility of having one or two SBCs in a hollowed out book, either hand-made or store bought (“book safes”) with holes drilled through the normally not-visible page side of the book to run power lines to a discrete power outlet.  Think about using a kitschy ceramic skull on your desk containing a Raspberry Pi 0w, miniature USB hub, and a couple of flash drives.  How about a stick PC stuck into the same coffee cup you keep your pens and pencils in?

Maybe a time will come when you need to think bigger.  Let’s say that you want to spread your processing power out a bit so it’s not all in the same place.  Sure, you could put a machine or two at a friend’s house, your parents’ place, or what have you.. but why not think a little bigger?  Consider a RasPi with a USB cellular modem, a pre-paid SIM card, and SSH over Tor (to commit the odd bit of system administration) hanging out on the back of your desk at the office (remember those?) or stashed behind the counter of a friendly coffee shop.

Which moves us right along to the question, what do you actually run on a personal cluster?  Normally, people build personal clusters to experiment with containerization technologies like Docker (for encapsulating applications in such a way that they “think” they’re all by their lonesome on a server) and Kubernetes or the cut-down k3s (for doing most of the sysadmin work of juggling those containers).  Usually a web panel of some kind is used to manipulate the cluster.  This is quite handy due to the myriad of self-hosted applications which happen to be Dockerized.  The reason for such a software architecture is that the user can specify that a containerized application should be started with a couple of taps on their mobile’s screen and Kubernetes looks at its cluster, figures out which node has enough memory and disk space available to install the application and its dependencies, and does so without further user intervention.  Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of having to do just about everything in a Dockerized or Kubernetes-ized way.  In a containerized environment things don’t like to play nicely with traditionally installed stuff, or at least not without a lot of head scratching, swearing, and tinkering.

We can think much bigger, though.  Say we’re setting up a virtual space for your family.  Or your affinity group.  Or a non-profit organization.  There are some excellent all-in-one systems out there like Yunohost and Sandstorm which offer supported applications galore (Sandstorm is only available for the x86-64 platform right now, though there’s nothing that says that you can’t add the odd NUC or VPS to your exocortex) which can be yours for a couple of mouse clicks.

How about easy to use storage?  It’s always good to have someplace to keep your data as well as back it up (you DO make backups, don’t you?)  You could do a lot worse than a handful of 256 GB or 512 GB flash drives plugged into your fog and tastefully scattered around the house.  To access them you can let whatever applications you’re running do their thing, or you can stand up a a copy of MinIO on each server (also inside of Docker containers) which, as far as anything you care about will be concerned is just Amazon’s S3 with a funny hostname.

Pontification about where and what safely behind us, the question that now arises is, how do we turn all this stuff into a fog?  If you have machines all over the place, and some of them aren’t at home (which means that we can’t necessarily poke holes in any intervening firewalls), how can the different parts of the cluster talk to each other?  Unsurprisingly, such a solution already exists in the form of Nebula, which Slack invented to do exactly what we need.  There’s a little up-front configuration that has to be done but once the certificates are generated and Nebula is installed on every system you don’t have to mess with it anymore unless there are additional services that you want to expose.  It helps to think of it as a cut-down VPN which requires much less fighting and swearing but gives you much more “it just works(tm)” than a lot of things.  Sandstorm on a VPS?  MinIO running on a deck of cards at your friendly local gaming shop?  Nebula can make them look like they’re right next to one another, no muss, no fuss.  Sure, you could use a Tor hidden service to accomplish the same thing (and you really should set up one or two, if only so you can log in remotely) but Nebula is a much better solution in this regard.

Setting up this kind of infrastructure might take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks, depending on your level of skill, ability to travel, availability of equipment, and relative accessibility of where you want to stash your stuff.  Of course, not everybody needs such a thing.  Some people are more than happy to keep using Google applications or Microsoft 365, or what have you.  While some may disagree or distruct these services (with good reason), ultimately people use what they use because it works for them.  A certain amount of determination is required to de-FAANGify one’s life, and not everyone has that need or use case.  Still, it is my hope that a few people out there make a serious consideration.

By day the hacker known as the Doctor does information security for a large software-as-a-service company (whom he does NOT speak for), with a background in penetration testing, reverse engineering, and systems architecture. By night the Doctor doffs his disguise, revealing his true nature as a transhumanist cyborg (at last measurement, comprised of approximately 30% hardware and software augmentations), technomancer (originally trained in the chaos sorta-tradition), cheerful nihilist, lovable eccentric, and open source programmer. His primary organic terminal has been observed presenting at a number of hacker conventions over the years on a variety of topics. Other semi-autonomous agents of his selfhood may or may not have manifested at other fora.  The Doctor is a recognized ambassador of the nation of Magonia, with all of the rights and privileges thereof.

The post Head in the clouds, boots on the ground. appeared first on Mondo 2000.

An Interview with Illuminatus TV Showrunner Brian Taylor

by Prop Anon

In December 2019, Deadline announced that Illuminatus!, the legendary underground novel, was on its way to becoming a tv show with Brian Taylor, writer/director of the movies Crank, Gamer, Mom and Dad, and the tv shows Happy! and Brave New World, slotted as the showrunner.  

Like Wilson, Taylor has taken risks with his craft. Whether it was developing “the Rollercam,” an innovative camera technique used to film Crank with his creative partner Mark Neveldine, or beta-testing the Sony RED camera while filming the underrated sci-fi gem Gamer, Taylor welcomes the inclusion of what Discordians call “the random factor.”

Wilson would give props to the risks Taylor has taken. Choosing to be the showrunner of a story with as labyrinthine a plot structure as Illuminatus! may be Taylor’s biggest risk of all!

In his last movie, Mom and Dad, starring Nic Cage and Selma Blair, Taylor presented a film that moved fluidly across the comedy, horror, and drama genres. This tonal shift, as he called it, is not only a desired type of story smart audiences want these days. It is also something Robert Anton Wilson mastered. It takes great wit, irony, and heart to make conspiracy theories funny and Wilson, arguably, is the first ever to have done it. As Happy!proved, Taylor can present shocking material with an ironically raucous gaiety, adding to the feeling of high voltage electricity than runs through all his movies.

There is no doubt that he possesses the gonzo style of sex, violence, and humor found in Illuminatus! However, as the astute Wilson reader knows, he and Shea masterfully utilized those pulp elements to draw the reader in to tell them about individualist-anarchism, critical thinking, and comparative religion. I hope that Taylor and his team can capture these more “esoteric” elements of the story. Perhaps by doing so, they will have outwitted the Curse of Greyface and accomplished the long-term goal of Discordianism — to make the whole world Popes!

I spoke with Taylor on October 5, 2020, as the California wildfires burned through more land than has ever been recorded. As the world has been jettisoned into Chapel Perilous and the walls are tumbling down, I wanted the straight dope. When will we get to see the Illuminatus! tv show?

Robert Anton Wilson once said that his biggest professional regrets was not seeing any of his books made into TVs or films, so, when Deadline announced in Dec 2019, that Illuminatus! was going to be a tv show and you were going to be the showrunner RAW fans sent a ripple of frenzy rumbled through the RAW-sphere.

BT: The Wilson Estate also has been super supportive and really stoked with everything I brought to it. They were over the moon. They were like “Oh my god, he would have loved this,” which is really good to hear.

Is this going to be the first project where you are the showrunner?

BT: Well, I was basically the showrunner on Happy! I guess for the purpose of this interview, it’s a good reminder that this show is not set up yet. Just because I’m developing it doesn’t mean that anybody will buy it or that it will ever be made. We hope so. This is a big ambitious swing. Making Illuminatus! is not like making Fleabag or something. This is a big fucking show. It’s a major work, a globe-spanning super ambitious piece of television. I felt the same way when Grant (Morrison) and I got a chance to take a shot at Brave New World. There’s been a lot of versions of Brave New World, but Illuminatus! not everybody can crack. Illuminatus! is not just sitting there waiting to be made. It’s an incredibly layered, abstract, and ambitious piece of literature. In order to honor that and honor its spirit the tv show must be just as subversive, just as chaotic, and just as impossible to pin down.

In terms of the time period of the story. Would you place it in the 1970s, like it is in the book, or would you update it and place it in present day?

BT: I think you have to make it contemporary. Why not? If you take out the names and dates, the book feels almost like it could have come out yesterday. Everything in it is more relevant now than it was then. I would have loved to hear Robert comment on what’s going on today. One of the major tenets of Discordianism is breaking down what they thought was a shared truth that was actually a lie. We were all living in a reality that we all agreed was real, but it actually wasn’t. Their idea of using subversive pranks to break down the idea of truth, to show the illusion that everybody’s living under and bring a sense of chaos to all of it was amazing. Sadly, that idea has been co-opted by the very authoritarians that Robert Anton Wilson would have hated. Promoting a type of chaos has become the active strategy of authoritarianism, starting in Russia and continuing here with Trumpism. The idea is to just completely break down and destroy the sense of shared truth. I wonder what Wilson would have thought about that.

How far along are you in the development process of the new Illuminatus! then?

BT: We’ve cracked how to bring it into the present day. That’s the main thing. How do you take these characters like Hagbard and move them into 2020, and then have that be relevant and potent. I think we’ve cracked all of that. We know what the pilot would be. We kind of know the shape of the first season and where we’d like it to go. I think it should be a three-season piece, where each season would roughly follow one book of the trilogy.

One thing that we learned doing Happy! was that shows metastasize and build themselves. We started out on Happy! with Grant (Morrison’s) comic book. That took us through about an episode and couple of scenes, which took us past the comic book. Then it was like, “Now where are we going?” And you’re in uncharted territory. Whereas I don’t think we are going to overtake the scale of this book and run out of material. But I do think that it’s going to have a way of metastasizing and becoming something different. How do you talk about Leprosy Mu (the biological warfare agent that gets loose during the novel) in a post-Covid world?

Production-wise, how far along is the show in terms of getting to the first table read?

BT: We are still in a stage where we’re looking for a partner. We need a network. We need somebody who is willing to take a chance on this thing. Obviously, it’s a complicated time to set up a show this ambitious, but it is also a good time to work on a project like this. You can basically build out the entire thing so that when it’s time to roll cameras you’re ready to go. It feels like that type of show to me because it is so global, and it really wants to hop around from location to location… it would need to be cross-bordered production. So, you’d want to go to Texas and shoot all of Texas. Then go to New York and shoot all of New York. Etc.

So, you’ve worked with some great actors.  Michael C Hall, Nic Cage, Chris Meloni, Jason Statham, Patton Oswald and, of course, the great Glenn Howerton. Have you approached any of them about appearing in Illuminatus!?

BT: Yeah, when we have the network and it’s more a go, a lot of those names you just mentioned are people I’d want to get involved. And those are all really smart people and people who would get the book and be inspired by it. There are some actors that would react with “Ah just send me the script because I don’t want to read all that.”

Illuminatus! is not the most inviting text. You want people who are really on the page. People who get it and love it. If you are doing something that’s really complicated like this, trying to make something different, you need everyone to be on the same page. Especially when it comes to television, which is exponentially more difficult to make well than movies. I didn’t realize that until I got into it. The amount of work involved in showrunning  and how quickly it comes at you… there’s nothing that can really prepare you for that.  It makes directing a movie feel like a cruise. It’s like an avalanche of stuff coming at you on a daily basis. And it’s all you can do to keep up, if you are trying to do something really ambitious — and Happy! was ambitious and this is even more so. One thing you figure out quickly is that you gotta have people helping you. You gotta have people involved that really get it and are not fighting against you all the time but who are helping it be better. On Happy!, the number one guy like that was Meloni. He deeply got the sense of humor of that show. So, it was like having an extra producer, an extra writer and director on set all the time who was just pushing it, not just to be better, but to be what it should be.

Sometimes you get the guest director come in — the show has a weird tone, weird sense of humor and material — so some directors and even actors would come in and not get it. They didn’t get the sense of humor, they didn’t get the irony, and they didn’t get the tone. It’s just like we were talking about. It’s that meta-modern idea of embracing all tones simultaneously. A lot of guys don’t know how to do that…they’re just used to one thing. It’s amazing how one person can come into the mix who just doesn’t get what you’re doing and the whole thing can come grinding to a halt. So when you have a situation where everyone gets it, it takes on this momentum and becomes really fun despite how difficult it is. Something like Illuminatus!… you have to have people who just deeply get it.

Yeah, you are perhaps going to have to have some sort of vetting process that involves lots of acid and strobe lights. How did the book hit you the first time you read it. Were there weird synchronicities around reading it?

BT: I was not one of those guys who read it as a teenager. I came upon that book later in life when my artistic sensibility was already established.One of the main feelings that I had reading Illuminatus! was this sort of revelatory feeling that this is where all this shit comes from. This is the seminal piece. This is the seed. Like everybody got everything from this book.

I always used to tease Grant (Morrison)…like when American Gods came out, I was like “Grant did you get any royalties on that? Somebody else is making The Invisibles.” When you read Illuminatus! you’re like “oh shit man, this is the original! This is where The Invisibles came from. This is where everything came from!” A lot of things that I look for as an artist and a lot of my sensibilities were formed by that book without even knowing about it because it influenced so many things that influenced me. And there is that psychedelic quality that the book has where you just fall into it. When you read the book, you feel like a different person. It definitely has more of an effect on your life than a book normally does. It kind of takes you over a little bit, and when you’re finished reading it, there’s this period of coming out of it that which feels like you are coming out of a dream and back into reality. You realize that that book was taking you someplace else. But because it’s Illuminatus! and its Robert Anton Wilson, you think, “Well, I think I’m not coming out of reality, but maybe I was coming out of something else.”

One other thing. Illuminatus! is just so smart and funny. I found that I just missed him, and the world misses him. I’ve seen these interviews where he talked about the things he looked forward to and where he thought the world was going, and there was this whole alternate, intellectual, metaphysical kind of thought in the 90s about where things were going. The Terrence McKenna school — we are going to find a way to get free of these monkey bodies and we’re going to find a way to enter other dimensions and we’re going to expand intelligence and extend life. We’re going to break free of a lot of these things that have held us monkeys back for thousands of years.

There’s a sadness when you hear him talking about that now because it didn’t happen. The world now is even more fucked up than when he wrote Illuminatus! It just seems like we’ve been completely incapable of breaking free of that stuff. We’re still fighting the same pathetic cultural wars, the same primitive religious wars, despite our best angels pushing us forward to get better. The vast majority of humanity is just this epic failure. It’s sad. In a way, you miss him but it’s also like I’m glad he didn’t live to see this. Selfishly, I want him here because I want to hear his perspective. I want him to put it in a context that isn’t so scary and sad because he just kind of had a way of doing that.

Orson Welles once said that when Hemingway died there was a period of about ten years where nobody spoke or wrote about Hemingway in America, but then suddenly Hemingway came back. Welles concluded with, “I think it’s mainly true that writers go into total eclipse right after their death.” So perhaps there are these gestation periods, and the world is now ready to start hearing the message of RAW. I mean the whole fucking planet is collectively going through Chapel Perilous right now. We are living in Illuminatus! right now. 

I really hope there’s a network out there that is smart enough and brave enough to pick this show up.

BT:  I think it’s going to be a really special show. It would be one of the greatest things I could hope to do. Grant and I were really excited to take a crack at Brave New World, but at the end of the day that sort of became very much a studio thing. It didn’t really express the punk rock mad energy that we thought Huxley deserved. Huxley was another one. He is up there on the Mt. Rushmore with Wilson. I think he deserved more. But that’s Hollywood. Sometimes things just get dulled down.

Coming out of Brave New World with Grant, I am not going to let that happen with Illuminatus! It’s better not to make it at all than to make the compromised version with no teeth. If we’re going to make it, it would have to be something that would make Robert proud. It has to be something that strives to have that type of impact and embraces the spirit of the material. If it can’t be that then I really believe it’s not worth the time to do it. Let the book stand. The book is always going to be great. So that’s the challenge. The challenge is… we’re going to do it and we’re not going to let it get polluted. We want to try to give this to people to mainline the pure dope of Illuminatus! Let’s see if we can pull it off. If we can, then it will be amazing!

The post To Mainline the Pure Dope of Illuminatus! appeared first on Mondo 2000.