TURN ON
COMPUTER // TUNE IN TO FREED SPIRIT OF INTERNET // TAKE OVER!
Unintelligent Design (say the scientist)
(or Proof of Design from Above?) (ask i)
The recently discovered Mimivirus is so much more genetically complex than any previously known virus, not to mention a number of bacteria, that it seems to call for a dramatic redrawing of the tree of evolution.
“This thing shows that some viruses are organisms that have an ancestor that was much more complex than they are now," says Didier Raoult, one of the leaders of the research team at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France. This represents a radical change in thinking about life's origins: Viruses, long thought to be biology's hitchhikers, turn out to have been it’s formative force.
[Discover, March, 2006]
>> and they just happened accidentally for no reason in the trillionth of a nonosecond in an area smaller than, in terence's mckenna's words, a gnat's droppings, yeah, sure. :)
UP!
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Sometime this month of March, Iran will stop accepting the U.S. Dollar for oil sales, and will only accept Euros. Since the western media have ignored Iran’s stated intention for a year now, be warned that they will probably mis-report the event as another case of Iran raising the stakes.
Like the other day. Rumsfeld said the US would not ALLOW Iran to go nuclear, Iran replied that it “could cause pain too,” and our media reported it as Iran making threats.
While we’re on it. I’d like to announce that I agree wholeheartedly that Israel should be “wiped off the map”. Know why? Because it means that a state based on religious grounds, ‘Israel’, should not be allowed. Nobody is calling for thousands of dead Israelis, they want the state called “Israel” turned into a religiously tolerant state like all others on the planet, and it’s what the Palestinians have always been demanding. DID YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?! Every single western medium invariably reports it like Iran wants to make war on Israel, but IT’S GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH WAR - AND ALL THE MEDIA PEOPLE & POLITICIANS KNOW THIS PERFECTLY WELL.
NOTE: shortly before the US attacked Iraq, Saddam Hussein ceased accepting the U.S. Dollar for oil sales.
UP!
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u cant understand the world without innerstanding yourself
the up! 0029 // march 14, 02
la- la- la- lap-toppling da system!
michael bowen
u cant innerstand yourself without understanding the world
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YES, LET’S MAKE THIS AN ISSUE!
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw probably didn’t meant to say it but he did, on British TV this week. When asked about a "double standard" regarding Iran, he replied:
"I want a nuclear-free Middle East. It's the policy of her majesty's government. We've been working to achieve that. We have ensured over the last few years that 2 of the 4 countries there which posed a nuclear threat, Libya and Iraq, have had their nuclear weapons removed.”
>> yeah, right.
“But If you want to see a nuclear-free Middle East, you've got to remove that threat from Iran, including the rhetorical threat to wipe Israel off the face of the map.”
>> you see?! they don’t wish to AND CAN’T attack the people of Israel, they want a regime change there that will return that country to the family of civilised nations a non-religion-defined state.
NOW HERE IT COMES === “And once you've done that, then we can get on to work at, in respect of Israel."
DO YOU SEE THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS??!!!
"This isn't the time to discuss this," said an Israeli government spokesman next day. Israel did not want to deflect from the Iranian issue by drawing attention to itself and creating a diplomatic issue over Straw's comments.
I BET THEY DON’T! BUT WE DO! THE CAT’S PAW JUST SLIPPED OUT OF THE BAG. YES, LET’S DEFLECT FROM THE IRANIAN ISSUE AND PLACE ATTENTION ON THE MAIN THREAT IN THE MIDDLE EAST: A NUCLEAR ARMED “defenceless” ISRAEL!
SPREAD THE WORD! LET’S SPREAD THIS ARTICLE AS WIDELY AS WE CAN, AND MAYBE WE CAN MAKE IT AN ISSUE!
www.jpost.com
UP!
.. contents...
p.04 ALTERNATIVE CULTURAL HISTORY ONE; The Human Be-In
p.06 Discriminating A Vision From A Hallucination
p.08 Ayahuasca US Supreme Court Votes Unanimously to Allow Its Religious Use
p.09 //FEEDBACK - IMEALS FROM READERS :)
p.11The Flying Saucer’s Apprentice LAST PART. Unzipped: Saint Crasier Flark The Martyr And His Highly Original Fleet Street Philosophy
p.14 Goa Cops Deport ‘Unwelcome Travellers’
UP!
On my first reading of megatripolis@forever I slowly sensed two things.
First, a deep shift in mine and the planet’s tectonic plates.
Second, a burning need to read it again which I just did. Wow!
It’s all part of what you used to call Holocaust Aversion Therapy, remember?
A Vision of a future that ’s worth striving for!
Who else is even TRYING to do that?! I shall undoubtedly read it again!
But there’s more. I’ve now had the overwhelming realisation
that YOU ARE PROBABLY THE GREATEST LIVING WRITER ALIVE TODAY!
Look at your breadth. From the UP! to your inspirational club flyers and events,
the Encyclopedia Psychedelica (of which I’ve read 6)
all your mind-boggling & inspiring interviews over the years,
and all the Megatripolitans from Megatripolis days (I have the complete set!)
For decades you have been out there on the leading edge of the Future,
calling us onwards, not just as an intellectual, or a critic, but a doer, an activist,
an inspiration and information hub to more than one generation.
And, unlike other alternative heroes, you present yourself as a regular human being,
working to make the message clear and simple so that nobody will be left behind,
you dare to take very high spiritual principles into clubland’s gory depths
and often pay the price of throwing pearls before swine,
but you never let that stop you, you go on shining your light
almost as if you can’t help yourself, and I believe you genuinely can’t!
I know you’re a Gurdjieffian and, altho I’ve never been in a group, everyone I’ve met who follows the Way of the Sly Man is fairly incapable of lying to themselves.
You’re not pushing your ego (much :-) and, as I heard it said about you the other day,
you are not into it for the girls like most other heroes I could mention.
A deep and heartfelt thankyou, maestro.
Please don’t resign from this miserable human species yet, ok? :)
Damien, Brighton, UK.
UP!
!!! BREAKING NEWS !!! !!! BREAKING NEWS !!!
Famous, revered Beatnik painter, Michael Bowen, co-creator of the original Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, is to collaborate on Fraser Clark’s next book ‘Dopinions, One Man’s Mindbendium Compendium’.
!!! BREAKING NEWS !!! BREAKING NEWS !!!
The opening page of each chapter will be graced with a Michael Bowen oil painting, several of which have been exhibited in prestigious European and American galleries and museums. He will also do the cover.
‘Dopinions’ chapters include ‘Manna Maketh The Man’, ‘We’re Going To The Chapel And We’re Gonna Get Mushroomed’, ‘The Rasta Who Flew Too High’ ‘Jesus Was A Pot Puffin’, Mushie Munchin’, Pagan Archetype Designed To Encourage Us To Be The Same!’ and, of course, ‘Monkey’s Magnificent Trip’.
!!! BREAKING NEWS !!! !!! BREAKING NEWS !!!
UP!
US On Human Rights: Laugh Yourself To Death
It's that time of year for the US State Department's annual comedy classic, the “Country Reports" on human rights. Funnily enough, Iran is now among the worst offenders, along with Cuba, home to the US's Guantanamo Bay prison for those not charged with any crime. (which is why it’s not in the report, geddit?)
But Iraq - great news! - has seen a significant improvement, Abu Ghraib and Shi'ite death squads notwithstanding. "In Iraq 2005 was a year of major progress for democratic rights and freedom." Rib-tickling stuff to entertain your fellow prisoners during the boring hours of “rendering” perhaps.
In its 16-page introduction, the report also singled out the human-rights performances of Syria, Sudan, Nepal, Russia and, you guessed, Venezuela as particularly problematic through the year, even as it praised what it called "advances" in Afghanistan and, Colombia. Oh, and Ukraine, Lebanon, Burundi and Liberia too.
UP!
ALTERNATIVE CULTURAL HISTORY ONE
Several of my allies in Rave Culture lament how little their generation really knows about the Hippy Generation, for they’re beginning to realise how important this alternative cultural continuity really is. For that Alternative Vision did not die out, not in the least. The truth is that the media pretty much ignored the committed Hippies at the time, and have continued to do so till today. Instead you just see the same old “celebrities” from those days trotted out. It ended for them when they “made it”, but Hippies weren’t trying to “make it”
quite the opposite!
And yet it is critical that this strand of what’s turning out to be the winning meme thread is understood by today’s generation, for the Battles were all defined in the Hippy Era, and the possible victorious strategies were sketched out and tested then. They failed because their numbers were too small, and because they were demonised by the official media (see the parallels today?!) But the work went on and the idea memes spread as they unstoppably do. Until today, when the majority of the general public is very well aware indeed of the failings of the Official Path, and are already up to their knees in the Alternative Vision.
But much less aware of the history behind these developments.
So the UP! has decided to respond to this challenge by publishing occasional Alternative Cultural Histories. And probably the most obvious is…
The Human Be-In
There were certain events that still remain as monumental. The Human Be-In was one.
On Haight Street in San Francisco, Ron and Jay Thelin had opened the Psychedelic Bookstore. They sold books dealing with Tibetan mysticism, drugs, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, authors like that. The Psychedelic Store was safe, we felt.
One day we saw a poster announcing the First Human Be-In to take place on a Sunday in Golden Gate Park. No explanation as to what it might be. But that was the way with the psychedelic movement: a lot of information was communicated by the choice of words. Somehow we knew what they meant, and we planned on attending.
On the day, thousands of hip people showed up. There was no event as such, or rather, we were the entire event. There was a stage on some flatbed trucks from which Allen Ginsberg read poetry and Dick Alpert spoke and, I think, the Grateful Dead played some music.
>> note the real hippies’ attitudes to the band - just a group of guys making music. it was the Rock&Roll Bizness that made them the names they are today, but are, in no sense, real hippies.
There were no unpleasant incidents. A parachutist landed in the middle of the field of people, to every one's delight. Nothing happened. We were just there; a human be-in.
But for the first time we knew how many of us there were. We had suspected it, from the increasing number of wildly painted cars you'd see, or long hair; and people had started giving the "peace sign" to each other as a greeting that conveyed that they recognised a fellow hip person.
But the Human Be-In was different: it showed us that we were strong; something was Happening that was huge.
Within weeks be-ins became love-ins, and they were taking place all over the country. There was one in New York that attracted many thousands, and in LA they became a regular event.
UP!
ONE BY ONE THE DINOS FALL
Grassroots Impeachment Movement UPDATE 650,000 Americans Have Now Signed
And 27 Members Of The House
Now Support Impeachment Inquiry
As a result of the full-page impeachment ads in newspapers, the mass demonstrations, rallies in Congressional districts, and the more than 650,000 people that have joined the impeachment campaign at ImpeachBush.org, the political climate in the United States has changed.
Now they want to place the next big ad in a major newspaper and need your help to do so.
The 27 members of the House of Representatives, including John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, are supporting a bill, H. Res 635, calling for "a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before Congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment."
Rep. Barbara Lee of California, one of the co-sponsors of the impeachment inquiry, has said: "Our principles are enshrined in our Constitution and a system of duly enacted laws, and in a government where all are accountable and no one is above the law. Our Constitution gives us a system of checks and balances and divided power because our founders were bitterly familiar with dealing with an unaccountable executive and were determined that our nation should not have a king."
At the same time the Congressional inquiry inches forward, and recent polls reveal that a majority of the country now favours impeachment if the President either lied about the reasons for going to war or broke federal law with his illegal wire-tapping program. This is a clear-cut sign that the impeachment movement is becoming a decisive factor in U.S. politics.
Help place the next major impeachment ad going to:
http://tinyurl.com/rjwbn
UP!
Dear Fraser
I worship your email newsletters!
Birgit Cunningham, London
UP!
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TEXT JOCKEY // TJ PHRASER (Fraser Clark) & THE MEDIA EVOLUTION
MIXING THE TRACTS LIVE ON THE KEYBOARD
@ A MEDIA-MEME RATE OF 160 IPP * * Ideas Per Paragraph
TO SUBSCRIBE SOMEONE, WRITE I wanna get UP! TO fraser@parallel-youniversity.com
TO UNSUBSCRIBE, HIT REPLY WITH REMOVE IN THE SUBJECT BOX
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Discriminating A Vision From A Hallucination
by Peter Gorman
Of all the people who had ever been with me drinking ayahuasca I have always known that I’ve been the most frightened. I would keep an eye on them as best I could, watch them as they cleansed themselves, bent over a railing or crumpled on a raised platform hut’s flooring absolutely giving themselves over to the powers that held them, unable to control the simplest body movements, and even then I knew they were less terrified than me.
It was an awful feeling to be able to explain things about ayahuasca to people yet know that each time I drank I had less control over what would happen to and with me, not more. My experience wasn’t a shield, it was a door that was opened wider and wider to allow bigger and bigger monsters through.
They weren’t real monsters coming through, of course. They were the monsters that were me, or the visualization of the monsters that dwell in the horror men do one another. But the doorway was a real doorway. Not something one could grasp or see, just a kind of opening that allows one to glimpse what exists on other levels. All of it filtered through humanness, our vision needing to see a shape to grasp the isness of something; our hearing allowing us to imagine sounds in order to give meaning to something or someone.
My guests would sometimes ask if what they had seen while drinking ayahuasca was an hallucination or a vision. I only knew how to answer for myself. Years earlier I’d gone through a terrible blackness in search of my dead mother at the behest of my father who’d come to me in a dream. And after an eternity of that empty black space I’d come on a wall of white gauze which seemed to me to be the wall beyond which lay the world of the Dead. Out of it my mother’s figure formed like a computer graphic in a movie - ten years before computer graphics like that were even imagined.
When she came together she said “You’ve got to stop calling me like this. It’s so hard to come together in a shape you recognise as me.”
Later I realised that, had I been given endless time to make a list of 10,000 things I might imagine my mother saying on seeing me for the first time since she’d died, that would not have been on it. And that became my rule for discerning between an hallucination and a vision: if something seen or heard or felt would not have been on a list of 10,000 possibilities, if it were nothing I’d ever dreamed or imagined or read or seen, then it was a vision.
I don’t know how to prove that true, or if I need to, but that’s how I see it.
UP!
“Keep up the great work, Fraser! There are still a few of us south of the border
crying in the wilderness.” Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duluth, Minnesota.
UP!
Ray McGovern | I Do Not Wish to Be Associated With Torture
Ray McGovern has written a letter to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: “As a matter of conscience, I am returning the Intelligence Commendation Award medallion given me for "especially commendable service" during my 27-year career in CIA. The issue is torture, which inhabits the same category as rape and slavery - intrinsically evil. I do not wish to be associated, however remotely, with an agency engaged in torture.”
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030206A.shtml
UP!
The Old Tom Cat Of Pengegon Moor,
cataracts like gobstoppers, so his eyesight's piss poor.
He follows folk around from place to place
mewling mantra chant, funereal pace;
He drips, he twitches,
you soon get the messitches;
Tramping behind you mile after mile, doesn't know you’re trying to be hostile;
He'll follow you to Hell,
where Lucifer will ensure he's beamed straight back
To Pengegon Moor
RATS FLEE AT A STROLL
SAFELY HOME TOWARD SEWER
FROM THE OLD TOM CAT OF PENGEGON MOOR.
Philip Mckeswick, cornwall.
UP!
Ayahuasca US Supreme Court Votes Unanimously to Allow Its Religious Use
You Can Fight The DEA And Win!
As reported by the Washington Post and the New York Times on February 21, the US Supreme Court unanimously sided with a Brazil-based church, O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal (UDV) in a landmark case that allows for the religious use of ayahuasca, which contains the psychedelic drug DMT.
New Chief Justice John Roberts said the Bush administration had not met its burden under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to show that it could ban "the sect's sincere religious practice." He had also been sceptical of the government's position in the case last year, suggesting that the administration was demanding too much, a "zero tolerance approach."
The Bush administration had argued that the drug in ayahuasca not only violates a federal narcotics law, but also a treaty in which the US promised to block the importation of drugs such as DMT.
This may not be the last word on the case, however, considering that the justices have sent the case back to a federal appeals court, which could consider more evidence if the Department of Justice wants to continue the case. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruling was clear, decisive and unanimous in rejecting all the arguments put forward by the Department of Justice lawyers.
UDV website:
http://www.udv.org.br
UP!
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the UP! is a global edutainment round-up, broadcast weekly to =[14,009]=
Alternative// Activist// Zippy// Trance// New Age// Peace folks
recommended to the Parallel YOUniversity// Megatripolis Dance Dept as
"showing signs of life". Since recipients forward it widely to their own lists & sites,
we conservatively estimate 50,000+ direct recipients.
A further 40,000 read it on the YOUniversity's site.
And, because of its 'mix' of 'specialist' & 'general' content,
it's increasingly being posted on a variety of sites worldwide,
making an estimated total weekly readership of =[275,000]=
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US Declares War On Chocolate!
Bolivia And Peru Grow “More Cocoa”,
Says Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics & Law Enforcement
From Reuters News Service
WASHINGTON - Increased political clout of cocoa growers in Bolivia and Peru has farmers growing more cocoa in a trend that is causing concern in Washington, the US State Department said in a report on Wednesday.
The influence of cocoa growing associations, known as cocoaleros, was greatest in Bolivia, where cocoa association founder and farmer Evo Morales won the presidency in December.
"We are concerned about the inability thus far of Bolivia's new president to articulate whether or not he will allow cocoa eradication and US counter-narcotics assistance to continue," said Anne Patterson, assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement.
>> zero out of 10 for spelling. zero out of 10 for knowing what she’s talking about. and zero out of 10 for being in touch politically. as UP! readers already know, Morales’ foreign minister is calling for coca leaves to be given for breakfast at school meals!
and don’tcha love the idea of cocoaleros?!
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/35401/story.htm
UP!
Doctors Tell U.S:
Stop Force-Feeding Inmates
It’s “an excruciatingly painful practice,” involving pushing tubes into the stomach through the nose, and causing bleeding and nausea. And it’s been going on with 80 prisoners for SIX MONTHS!
The United States authorities are facing demands by doctors from around the world to abandon the barbaric method of force-feeding hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay.
More than 250 medical experts launched a protest this week against the practice - which involves strapping inmates to "restraint chairs" and pushing tubes into the stomach through the nose. They say it breaches the right of prisoners to refuse treatment.
Among the 80 prisoners refusing food are a UK resident and a Saudi national married to a British woman with 4 children.
"Fundamental to doctors' responsibilities in attending a hunger striker is the recognition that prisoners have a right to refuse treatment” say the doctors.
Published today in The Lancet, their open letter has been organised by David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at the City Hospital in Birmingham, who has the backing of doctors from Europe, the US and Australia.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article350367.ece
UP!
//FEEDBACK IMEALS FROM READERS
Hi Fraser
>> “Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many etc” Buddha.
You could do worse than listen to what the Buddha said. Illuminati indeed :-D, kinda like a badge, if you believe in the Illuminati, you're a genuine conspiracy nut! Stick with the science is my advice my man.
>> in very simple terms (so you can keep up! :) there exists a pretty small coterie of obscenely and unimaginably wealthy and powerful men who obviously get together to protect (and extend cos that’s what rich people actually DO, unlike u and me) their interests. so it comes down to the same argument re the German Holocaust whether they’re doing what they do as a reflex or a policy. now if it was you and your gang i’d be pretty sure you’d be doing more poetry and traveling. but with these guys?…
And I was impressed with your conversion to vaccines...
>> The guru, Neem Karoli Baba, told him that instead he should help to save India from a smallpox epidemic. After years of persistence, he led a 100,000-strong team of WHO doctors that vaccinated the entire country.”
pete, wales.
>> i gotta admit that was a big fly in my ointment as i was putting the piece together :) notta real “hippy” was my thought train, yes. and don’t serious people (comme moi)
give much credence to the theory that it was the WHO smallpox campaign in africa that caused the whole AIDS thing there. but then i thought: hell, well, there are even hippies who still think we live in a purely material world so who am i decide? :)
up!
>> (believe me, since it’s maybe even the single biggest Holy Cow on the planet today and obviously a suitable target for the UP!, i did a long search on this subject. but it turned out too long to publish here, and too heated and confused to be worth the hassle involved in making it public - by which i mean the organised jewish fanatics who take pot-shots at anyone who raises their head above the parapet - ask ken livingstoned! but i’ll send it to anyone who would like to know some more FACTS on this whole issue.)
Frase,
I would like to know what you found on this subject. I'm Jewish and was raised with the spectre of the Holocaust haunting us everywhere. "Never again!" was the mantra I heard the elders murmur, over and over. And yet...
There's the work of Norman Finkelstein, a Jew, for example…
And while most of the literature from Noontide Press and the Institute for Historical Revision seems anti-Semitic, they publish some stuff that gives one pause.
And the actions of Israel today makes one suspect that much of the rhetoric of those Jews/Israelis who occupy Palestine and talk as if the Jewish Holocaust is the only holocaust -- this bothers me.
So, tell me what you've found.
Lanny, Willits, CA
up!
london
SAT MARCH 25 (Mothers Day Weekend)
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! MOTHERS AND CHILDREN LET DOWN BY THE CSA.
2-4 pm @ 79 Whitehall, London (across from Downing Street)
3pm - PRESS PHOTO CALL. Petition being presented to No. 10 by 6 mothers and 6 babies & toddlers
Organisers: BabiesForJustice - ALL concerned organisations welcome (except dads demanding visitation rights who can do their own protest on Fathers Day :) Speakers: to be confirmed
Please email to register for protest at
info@babiesforjustice.co.uk
up!
America’s "Enemy Within"
The US Surgeon General warns that obesity is overtaking terrorism as a threat to the American public. But others contend that fear-mongering over obesity is "a big fat lie."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030206H.shtml
up!
The Flying Saucer’s Apprentice
PART FOUR & LAST
Unzipped: Saint Crasier Flark The Martyr
And His Highly Original Fleet Street Philosophy
WHAT Fraser Clark has in terms of a philosophy, is really not all that unique or difficult to express
>> this, as i said at the time, was entirely intentional.
Goddess worship, WoManity, Peace, Love and a Fair Prophet. Then there's the "harmonise your hemispheres” racket, which ties into hemi-sync mythology created by cyberpunks.
>> LaoTse (to name one of many) was well into it before Sid Vicious was a mildly irritated gleam in Goddess’ eye :)
Rewire the brain, using chemicals. Listen to the beats at approximately 140bpm,
>> 124, the baby’s heartbeat in the womb.
everything else is like "banging" unless its "trance" but that's like synthesiser music with a metronome. Sounds pretty surface hype, or is it?
When one reads Clark in his multifarious forms, extracts from EPi, ^evolution, Zippy Times, or the Megatripolitan, you realise that he is really just one of those incredibly interesting characters situated in a pantheon that includes the entire history of psychedelic pop-culture, from Ginsberg to Burroughs and beyond, part Wavy Gravy, part Sir Francis Drake. But to understand him you have to remember the period in which he speaks to various sections of the community across different generations. For example - there's nothing terribly profound about wearing a "smiley" badge, unless you're living in a fascist state, and this is where Clark becomes interesting.
He is the master of systems collapse, because everything the Tories and the right-wing say about Clark and the Zippies are inevitably true. In the face of Puritanism and the Christian orthodoxy, Clark is positively satanic - a breed of Celtic shaman and pagan hedonism that goes hand in hand with a form of anti-authoritarian mysticism.
"The zippies believe that word processors can be used to save the earth, and ask you to project "negative vibrations" at the stock exchange to provoke economic collapse." So goes an I-D story published in 1989.
>> laptoppling da system, as it says on the UP!s masthead :)
Sadly, it’s here that he expresses his early reaction against Punk, an "anti-punk" attitude because "punks were the second wave of energy - a negation of what the hippies had become" The early hippy who created zippy, would come unstuck on the issue of cyberpunk versus techno-hippy. Was there any difference essentially with what was already happening on the West Coast at the time of the Pronoia Tour? The failure of Clark's team to address this and other pressing issues of cultural importance relegated him to the status of oddity. Reactions were swift. Clark was denounced as nothing more than a hoodlum, who had come from England to disturb the tranquillity of new-age America.
>> actually we were VERY CLEAR on this issue. i was always asking why punks were still wearing black? hadn’t they heard the funeral had been cancelled?! they didn’t like that, they’d built their social status on their negative rejection. while they were right to reject the sick culture around them, that was never gonna CHANGE anything. same with rock’nroll which was now a socially dead music. my life was actually threatened by an old rock’ roller chap :) of course it has since become clear to the whole planet that america’s culture is deeply sick, with everyone basically pushing hir own ego and to hell with GroupMind.
It is one thing to introduce sages like Ram Dass aka Richard Alpert or Alan Ginsberg to an audience in an English club, it’s another thing entirely to try doing the same thing in hippy home territory. What was occurring at Megatripolis/West and so many of the parties we attended was that the audience was preaching to the would-be converter, the priest was being led by his congregation. Clark had become a victim of his own philosophy.
>> we were trying to unite the hippies with the tecno-ravers (ZIPPY = Hippy + Tecnoperson), each of which utterly rejected the other till we came along. here is one area which history will judge we succeeded phenomenally i think. tho the punks will sneer :)
If you read "Morning of the Magicians", by Louis Pawls and Jacques Bergier, first published in Paris 1960 as "The Dawn of Magic," you'll be amazed to find a form of New Age patois current doing the ‘60s, and you’ll also find the title of the first chapter, just two innocent looking words - Future Perfect! If that were not clearly amazing in itself, there is an entire chapter on the thoughts of George Gurdjieff. Stuff like "A man is immersed in dreams, whether he remembers them or not does not matter… What is necessary to awake a sleeping man? A shock is necessary. But when a man is fast asleep one shock is not enough. A long period of shocks is needed. Consequently there must be somebody to administer these shocks... for, though a man may be awakened by an alarm clock, the trouble is that he gets accustomed to the alarm clock far too quickly, and ceases to hear it. Many alarm clocks are necessary and always new ones." Sound familiar?
>> you will never understand my actions in the round without being familiar with Gurdjieff’s teaching. i was in a Gurdjieff group for 3 years, and have considered myself a Gurdjieffian ever since. and simultaneously, while deeply involved in the grindingly self-honest gurdjieff “Work” (as it is called), i was a hippy which is the cultural zone i reckon he would have involved himself in if he’d lived today.
The idea that we have to “wake-up" is common to a lot of new age thinking. What isn't common is that we have to "wake-up on the dancefloor," or "use a laptop computer" - in other words, create a new-fangled alarm clock. It was Clark's genius to suggest elaborate methods of consciousness-raising that really got people. The man was more accessible than either John Lilly who "talked to dolphins," or Tim Leary who’d turned to virtual reality as a form of psychedelic, or Terence McKenna, who went from describing aliens and mushrooms, to talking about the I Ching and computers.
Clark didn't need a psychedelic, there was no prescription except acceptance of an earlier state of conscious, call it an awakening - the "Second Summer of Love" which had hit Britain in 1988 and crossed the Atlantic in 1989. The Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War ended.
Just one of Clark’s creations in this pre-tour period was the "Magic Maggie Healing Doll". "You are invited to participate in the most important psychic experiment in history... whether you think Maggie Thatcher is good, all bad, or a bit of both, the fact is that she’s in a position to affect the destiny of every psyche on this planet."
This invitation was to make use of "acupuncture points" marked on the Maggie poster to help open "Margaret Hilda Thatcher’s' heart centre. This will fill her with peaceful energy and love for all life-forms, thus arousing the living goddess within her. We consulted a range of healers and acupuncturists about the prime minister in order to arrive at these particular points" and so it goes, in a classic example of what Clark was calling "Magic Politics".
Reading Clarks' EPi meant that you could partake of the counter-culture without necessarily taking drugs. Drugs were just one trick in the “Peace & Love Wizard Warrior’s” armoury of shamanic techniques for “waking up”.
>> waking UP!?
This innocence was lost on the Pronoia Tour, when instead of invoking the ‘60s to counter-balance the ‘90s, resurrecting the swinging decade became an end unto itself, an old-timers’ reunion - not surprising when you consider how literally every baby-boomer had jumped on the band-wagon, expecting us to deliver, not only hippies, but the drugs as well! and a vision of me dying at age 30. My response is - you must have wanted this insanity really bad, you wanted it so much you've even got yourselves another Vietnam!
Not only is Clark, a follower of Gurdjieff, but he subtitled his club Megatripolis, (just another joke) "the future perfect state".
>> why wozzit a joke? read megatripolis@forever and believe! :D
However, to understand Clark, one has to understand not just the people who inform his philosophy, but the milieu in which he operates. The early ‘90s, for instance, were a hot-bed of counter-cultural activism and this activism eventually found its way into rave culture.
>> raves were 100% politics-free when i got going. hence my oft quoted statement: “You can’t have a perfect club in an imperfect society you have to change society” none of the believed that when i started they all believe it now.
Naomi Klein describes one particular creative combination of "rave and rage" which proved "contagious, spreading across Britain to Manchester, York, Oxford and Brighton, and in the largest single Reclaim The Streets event to date, drawing 20 000 people to Trafalgar Square in April 1997."
It was memes like this which created the “Zippy Intervasion of the UK”. We wanted to reclaim the internet from the straights and use it to "spook John Major’s Criminal Justice Bill, which banned "music with a repetitive beat."
As Paul Staines says in "Acid House Parties Against the Lifestyle Police and the Safety Nazis". "Imagine a regime so totalitarian that it will not allow its young citizens to dance when they want. Imagine that this regime introduced a law which banned dance parties unless they were authorised by the state, and even then the parties would only be allowed to be of limited duration and on state-licensed premises. Naturally this regime would, in line with its ideology, only apply these laws to parties held for profit."
Thereby forcing the "wicked and evil" dance promoters into the untenable position of throwing parties for nothing. It was this ultimate sacrifice of the notion of profit which would force much of the counterculture during the ‘90s into giving away virtually everything of value, including the music, which we all were encouraged to "copy, re-mix and burn".
The result would be traumatic in terms of one’s personal status and bank account. Very few people actually made any money, and of those who did, invariably they were damned as the "sell-outs", artists signed to studios and record companies producing industrial-issue dance music that had little going for it, except the beat and a passing reference to the underground.
>> yeah, precisely what i’ve been fighting all my life :)
[ends]
David Robert Lewis, Writer, Artist and Cultural Activist, PO Box 4398, Cape Town 8000, South Africa.
up!
Flying Saucer’s Apprentice// FEEDBACK
I do NOT wear hats! And made NO changes in my get-up for the Zippies.
>> i gotta say this is true, and he continued all through the zippy season to regularly attend dinosaur punk rock bands like they weren’t going out of history let alone ‘fashion’ :)
Remember, if you can, I came to the Zippies via Mark Heley's CLUBLIFE mag as photojournalist covering the Mega Rave/Unity/Rainbow gathering down near the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
It was after that, I was host to Fraser, and Aid to the Megatripolis Club San Francisco events. Lots of work and 2,800 ravers on opening night. High Times too. Not bad.
As for being a perpetual 4 year old, I may have tried to come down to your level, but also, I do recall, you smoked a Great Deal of -you know- as well.
What is it that makes you so disgruntled, David?
Peter Booth Lee, San Francisco.
UP
Goa Cops Deport Unwelcome Travellers
Authorities in Goa stepped up their campaign against its long established international backpacker, psy-trance community this week formally announcing that they can deport any foreigner they like without reason, under the 1946 Foreigners Act.
The State Government issued their declaration during the deportation proceedings of 60-something long term German resident Ingo Grill and his Canadian wife Maria Brotherton, who together created and ran the arts and crafts flea-market the Saturday Night Bazaar, long one of Goa's key tourist attractions for young western travellers.
Mr Grill's fate matches that of ten other Westerners recently deported, as part of a new campaign by Goa police to identify and deport 'undesirable aliens', which Director General of Police (DGP) Neejar Kumar said is being carried out in tandem with their continuing crackdown on dance parties.
"Whenever we have got the information, we have stopped the rave party," the DGP told the Goa Herald newspaper, "Last Saturday we stopped one at Arambol."
The Goa Herald also revealed that British, American and Israeli authorities have started colluding with Goa police about drugs, which could have startling implications for misbehaving tourists, judging by the experiences of Australians busted in Indonesia recently, following co-operation between Indonesian and Australian cops.
[skrufff.com]
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