luka

Well-known member
what I have decided is the Big Job to be done at this point in the timeline is the rejoining of psychedelia and the avant-garde. When I look at psychedelia as a Famous Poet I despair. I think, my God, this is completely bankrupt. It's stalled. It's the Pantheon Bar from Mount Analogue/The Holy Mountain. It's the gift stores that cluster round at the bottom of the path that leads to the shrine. It's tacky and hackneyed and littered with dead forms and retrograde practice, glow in the dark Ganeshes, dream-catchers, Tie-dye T-shirts and Alex Grey posters, rave flyers from 1992.
No Sophisticated Operator is going to want to go near that.

When I look at what remains of the avant-garde as an Ancient Mariner and psychonaut I'm even more horrified. It's the performative connoisseurship of Cafe Oto with it's fine Japanese whiskies and it's craft beers. It's/ real ale drinking, grouchy old men arguing about Adorno, purple Alex Ferguson noses, broken veins, pot bellies. It's Goldsmiths students posturing on social media, pale skin, monkish shaved heads, pursed, priggish lips, beanies and big round glasses.
No psychically and emotionally healthy(ish) person is going to want to be anywhere near those grotesques.

The avant-garde has lost it's animating principle, it's reason for being, it's motivation, has become a deracinated aesthetic/intellectual game and niche market and psychedelia has become an enclosed space, a recapitulation of old experiences without the means to make it new, the means to make it live and breathe again.

Both have become unhygenic and unattractive backwaters, cut off from the moving current. In their current form they both disgust me. Apart neither means anything. The culture can't start moving again until they're rejoined.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
can't really have the psychedelia until you've felt the snow cry or turn into cosmic rays. the walls breathing is like so 1920s idea of psychedelia.

this was its last gasp. those riggling boyish tentacled lifeforms giggling at you the first time.
 

luka

Well-known member
Psychedelia should be the animating principle of the Avant-garde.
The Avant-garde should give expression and form to Psychedelia and allow its content
to be communicated. It has to be continually updated or it becomes conservative,
a shell, an enclosed and policed space.
 

luka

Well-known member
all historical forms and modes of expression ossify into shells. this is why Pound says
"make it new" a shell is a closed, policed space forbidding both movement and growth.
 

luka

Well-known member
art conditions experience. it has to be made new if we are to experience experience as new
and not recapitulation of the same. we need the clean, fresh air not recirculated corpse breath.
 

luka

Well-known member
leaving aside their merits as musicians do migos and thug make you feel you have burst thru?
entered the wider regions? wriggled out from under the shell?
do they make you feel like this?

1200px-Flammarion.jpg
 

luka

Well-known member
thats (cubism/surrealism in a comic book) a good example of how the avant-garde creates new forms which then filter down through society into the mass market and condition experience.
 
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luka

Well-known member
i have to leave the house quite soon and work
but in music its the singularity around 'E'
the ripples radiating out around MDMA.

the '60s were bigger, more important and more integrated
becasue everything is affected from philosophy to psychotherapy
to music to politics.

but if we play ou cards right then 2020 will be bigger still!
one year to go!
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
luke:

i do suspect that i true psychedelic culture would melt rap into something almost
unrecognisable. it's hard to say. there aren't many examples of black musicians
banging the psychs outside of coltrane and clinton.

wu's lyrics were psychedelic. their attitue to reality.

life is a test

how can i put it? life is like video footage.


that kind of thing where they put you in a different relationship with your own life.

a true psychedelia rewrites everything.
attitude to reality, personal relationships, politics, religion,
the lot. it's an apocolypse. nothing survives intact.
 
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