Prelude to a Post: The Religion of the Spectacle Is…

The religion of the Spectacle is the Spectacle itself.

We live in a supposedly secular, post-modern culture.  You wil be told this in some quarters.

We live in a Judeo-Christian culture.  You will be told this in other quarters.

Neither of these things are quite correct.

Our so-called postmodern, secular culture is really the”pre-modern” “ghost-filled” world dressed up in sci-fi garb for our technocratic panopticon.  All the old pagan gods are back, archetypes overlaid onto the celebrities of the day.  The global church/temple/synagogue of the Spectacle is the integrated mass media of TV, internet, cinema, text-messaging and corporate print: this is where we “tele-commune” whilst remaining isolated.  And when we speak after “church,” we do so through the “buffers” created by it.

The images of the celebrities become the gods of the Spectacle, which merely promote a culture where everything is mediated by images, technocratic myths simulating life.

The Religion of the Spectacle is the Spectacle itself and it is its own God, presented to we, the public, the lonely consumer, for adulation and veneration.  Its parts seen everywhere, but nowhere can anyone point to one thing and say, that is the Spectacle/God.  Truly, the Spectacle has been seen by no man.  And to look upon its face is death within its cult-sure.  (However, this Death is a death of the false.)

And this is just a prelude.  But please take it lightly.  It’s not a weight for you to carry.

The Secrets of Garfield

Garfield: a bland, phoned in comic strip farmed out by its original creator to a team of anonymous hacks for decades.

Garfield: a repurposed comic given a soul by self-appointed rewriters across globe.

Garfield: a glimpse of secrets, tongue in cheek:

Michael Jackson Died A Long Time Ago

Around these parts, we honor the dead  by consuming their image and their artifacts.

Just like Biggie, Tupac, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, Elvis, his death has led to a massive uptick in record sales.  Thus, he has been granted a sort of Spectacular Immortality.

And just like so many celebrity totems, in death all his sins, real or alleged, seem to have been forgiven.  For many people out there, I think it’s the impact of the death of a symbol they grew up with that has caused them to genuinely question the things they did or did not believe about him in the years since the living person behind the media-mirage of Michael Jackson (whatever and whoever he really was) was cast into popular exile and disrepute.

Some feel genuine remorse and sadness, whether they should or not is another question.

What is not in question, to me,  is the fact that the media-priesthood  are simply selling more product.

Tragedy, like sex and violence, sells.

And so the Spectacle’s priests shed crocodile tears for victims they helped to create such as Anna Nicole Smith. They do this as quickly and easily as they cry for scoundrels like Nixon.   Michael Jackson the innocent Christ child, Michael Jackson the Dionysian, connected with the body and the dance, Michael Jackson the demonic eater of the young, connected with pedophilia:  these were all images conjured by our Spectacular culture and its image makers, sometimes with, without and against Jackson’s participation. (Michael as  magician-priest, king and sacrifice.)  What his image will be in death is yet to be seen.  But one hint lies here.  And another here.

It’s kind of like when Bob dies in Fight Club, Tyler Durden’s SpaceMonkeys turn ”his name was Robert Paulson” into a mantra, snapping into realization that he did have a name, an identity.

Suddenly in death, for the Spectacle, Michael Jackson has his humanity back , and some semblance (or simulation?) of life.

Things You No Longer Believe

I’ve been silent for awhile, I admit.  Perhaps I’ve been stuck.  Or perhaps I’ve just been standing in the middle of the intersection too long, but the lights are changing and I better find my way back on the walkway before I get hit by something completely avoidable.

So I suppose It’s time to clear out a gang of mess in my head.  One good way to do that is to list them.  Because it’s hard to go forward when you’re carrying so much that you no longer need.

I’m sure there are things that you may want to clear out of your head-space at this point, too.  So thus I inaugurate a public dumping at this spot for all those things you no longer believe.  I’ll be adding to this list as I think of things.  Right now it’s late, so I’ll just start with this:

1. I no longer believe there’s any point in reading Aleister Crowley.

2. I no longer believe that any narrative whose underlying message is: “We’re all fucked” is safe to indulge in, no matter how “true” it may “feel.”

3.  I no longer believe there’s anything wrong with conspiracy theory being acknowledged as entertainment.  It has been swallowed up into the Spectacle already, even if it’s relegated most of the time to the Spectacle’s Ghetto.  Attempting to be sacrosanct or all-too-serious about conspiracy theory tends to discarded belief #2. If you can’t read it, view it, create it, whatever with non-attachment, at least do it with mirth.  But for Dog’s sake, don’t be serious.

[To be continued by you...and I]

The Other Queen Latifah Loves You

The sun has set and I’ve all but forgotten the paranoid lady from earlier in the day who accused me of being a minion of Bloomberg and the nefarious THEM (whoever they are).  I’ve just gotten off the train in Harlem, a stone’s throw from my old neighborhood of a few New York lifetimes ago.  It’s a different exit than I used to take and so when I come out of the station in the night, sans my glasses, which I had forgotten to  bring with me, and I’m a bit disoriented.  I step onto the sidewalk and squint at the buildings across the street (I’ve always been one to navigate by landmarks, not street signs), and in that moment, she spots me.

“You could use some help.  Where ya goin’?” asks the tall, beaming, heavy-set woman with sparkling eyes.

I’m going to say hello to the Virgen of Guadalupe at a shrine in a friend’s house because it’s her day, but I don’t say all that.   TMI, right?

I tell her the corner of Edgecombe I’m looking for and she waves to me as she passes me.

“Come on,” she smiles, “there are two ways you can get there, one way is up these very steep steps.  It’s quicker than going around the park, but I can only show you where it is because it’s too much for me to climb up all that.”

“I don’t mind a steep walk  if it’s quicker.  Show me.”

So she takes me, smiling the whole way down the dark sidewalk on the edge of the park.

“Here we go, I’ll get you there safe and sound.  I can tell you  don’t want to be late.”

How she can tell that is beyond me, but I she is very easy to walk with.

“They call me Queen Latifah around here and I guess I’m in everyone’s business, but I don’t mean anything.  I just love everybody and want to help people.  Well, I’m blessed because today I’m helping you!”

We make it to the bottom of the stairs and they do go up a pretty far stretch, and steeply.

“I’ll stay here and wait.  You just wave to me when you make it to the top.”

I thank her and head on up, holding the handrail as much for her peace of mind (or so I imagine) as my own.

Half-way up I look back and she’s still there, looking up, smiling.

“Keep going, baby.  Your on your way up!  You’re gonna see her, don’t worry.”

I don’t know who the her is she’s referring to–a girlfriend Latifah thinks I’m meeting?  or…the Virgen de Guadalupe?

I climb, climb and climb until I reach the top, where there’s more flat ground, lucky, too because the wind has just begun to blow a little too strongly.

I turn around and I wave.

“Thank you!” I shout.

“I love you!” she shouts back.  “Stay good and remember I love you!”

It’s a weird thing for a stranger to say, but I don’t find it strange at this moment.  I don’t mind it at all.  In fact, I am happy for her words, thankful.  I know she speaks sincerely and her love is real and genuine, though I can’t imagine why it should be.  But maybe that’s not true, maybe I’m just afraid what this kind of pure stranger’s love, that is asking nothing from me at all.

I wave again and find myself saying, “I love you, too, Queen Latifah!”

I turn and head off on my way to say hello to the Virgin, smiling.

I haven’t seen Queen Latifah since.

Easter Sacrifice

For those of you Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox (just pretend today is April 18th), Catholic, Spiritualist, Protestant folks who resonate to the story of Y’shua.  Here are a few juxtapositions to open things up:

Peace.

You Just Never Know

I have gaps in my very early, early childhood.  My first clear, memory is waking up from a dream.

In that dream, I saw a whole teeming world, our world.  I never saw myself, but I saw the world as I traveled through it and then over it at rapid speed.  Suddenly, the world grew distant and hazy as, a set of eyes opened and a child-like face looked back at me.

And I woke up with a question which I asked my mother the moment I pulled myself out of the bed–where this bed was I don’t remember.  It could have been a hotel.  It could have been our home  at the time.  All I remember is the question:

“How do we know we’re not just  in someone’s dream and when they wake up we disappear?”

She hugged me tight and smiled and told me how much she loved me and how smart I was.

My next memory is being in the back of my father’s car as he drove at night from the apartment we lived in at the time to the house I would grow up in.  The house was empty and my dad took me around to see the room I would share with my brother, the living room.  It all looked so big to me, though as I grew older, I came to recognize how small the house was when compared to that of most of my childhood friends.

I remember, also, having trouble some night as I tried to sleep in that house.  I remember a few times when, tucked in bed, unable to sleep, I looked across the room to the far window and thought I saw the faces of unknown men looking into the room.

I also remember other nights staring up at the ceiling as I waited for sleep to come, waited and watched as the spackling formed moon-like mountain ranges, then faces, countless faces–some cartoonish, others as real as the faces on any saints at the church we attended, all looking back with eyes that saw my own, the very ones that probably conjured up these faces to begin with.

When you are that young, still living within Dreamtime, you just never know what, or when, you really know what’s out there– and what’s in here.

Michael Muhammed Knight Does It Again: A Tribute to Father Allah

Michael Muhammed Knight, the provocative author of Taqwacores and The Five Percenters, (interviewed on my site a couple years back) has just written a great article over at Killing the Buddha about Father Allah.  If you know nothing about this Harlem God, Knight’s piece is a great primer.  And if you are familiar, as a Five Percenter or a simple admirer as I am, it’s a good reminder as to why this man–and you, good reader–are so important.

True spirit-anarchist, The Father.

Check it out here.

When You Are Called “Them”

It’s bound to happen eventually and my turn comes near Rockefeller Center.  I remember the day because it is the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  I am doing an errand when I come across a woman with short, curly hair who is stretching her arms out at all and sundry who pass by.  At the end of her extended arms, her hands hold a white page with some clearly self-printed information on it.

“I’m writing a book!  It’s going to blow the lid off everything! I’ve been attacked and harassed by these people and some of them are in that big building right across the street!  Go to my website!  Look for my book!”

As I pass by, I stop and turn to walk back.  Hell, I’m always curious about this sort of thing, one of my persistent vices, it seems.

“Can I have one?” I ask.

Her upper lip does an Elvis thing, except that it’s not intended to be charming, sexy or friendly–and it isn’t.

“Why do you want one?  I don’t want what YOU have.”

I blink twice because I’m not sure how to interpret this.  I forge ahead.

“I’m curious, ” I say, “I want to know what’s going on.”

She shoves her photocopies into her messenger bag and takes three steps toward the corner.

“And even now one of them is here on this street!  As soon as you start talking about them, they send someone to let you know they’re watching!”

Wait.  Me?  If I was in the movie They Live, this is about when I’d take out those Hoffman glasses and look at myself in the mirror just to be sure.

It must have been worse for Robert Anton Wilson back when ol’ Fool Saint Kerry Thornley was convinced that Wilson had been replaced by a double from the CIA. Or a cyborg.  Luckily, this woman is a stranger.

I think to myself.  Seems like if you dive into the murky waters of conspiracy theory, eventually you will be called One of Them or you’ll end up accusing some other undeserving person of being one of THEM.

The thought thread breaks off.  Wait.  The woman looks familiar.

Several lives ago I worked at a market research dungeon.  I monitored the interviewer’s phone calls and evaluated their performance.  Big Brother’s little corporate nephew, eavesdropping for peanuts.  One summer, we hired a short, vaguely butch, curly-haired woman.   After a couple of days doing the household studies at night, she got to move to the daytime.  She had made a great impression right away because she was eloquent, seemed very dilligent, friendly, and, most importantly, she always completed a lot of surveys.  She even got to sit in with a few of the other “elite” (but still woefully underpaid) interviewers when one of the partners had a big client up in the conference room prior to a survey hitting the phones.  Like those sunglasses in They Live, I believe her last name was Hoffman.

Cut to her second week on dayshift: I’m monitoring another interviewer’s phone call when my immediate boss walks up to me.

“C–.  Can you listen to this?”  He motions me over to his desk.  He whispers to me to pick up his phone.  He’s tapping the line of our newest star interviewer.

I hear her asking the questions, all in the right order.  I hear her smiling and giving the ocasional friendly chuckle between sections of the survey.  I hear the sound of her keyboard tapping in the answers as the computer moves from one question screen to the next.  What I don’t hear is anyone responding on the other line.

“Maybe it’s just my line.  Tap in on yours,” my boss says.  So I go over and tap into her line from my computer.

I listen to her as she conducts an entire business survey with no one.

“I’m shocked by the size of her balls,” my boss says.  Eventually, he goes over to the Field Director’s office and the Field Director taps into the line, hears the same thing we have.  Even the scheduler patches into a line to hear the phantom interview.

She’s allowed to finish the interview and when she hangs up the phone, saying “Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day, okay?” the Field Director motions her into his office.

Five minutes later, she’s back out in the field, shamedly collecting her bookbag and leaving the premises.

Was this lady out on the street calling me one of THEM (whoever THEY are), the same woman from the market research job?

I blink twice, and as I’m trying to decide if I have or haven’t met this woman in another life, she shouts:

“And Bloomberg is one of the biggest  slavemasters of them all!” she yells.  “Him and the rest of the rich Jews!”

“Oh, ” I whisper to myself.

Not only does she think I’m one of THEM, but to her, THEY are the same group Hitler thought THEY were.  I shake my head.  Just another person who took the entrance to Paranoia Town in search of a peak behind the curtain, and ended up with her mind in a hateful, phantasmagorical hell,  further from the truth than when she entered?  Or just a lady in search of  someone to blame when, for no apparent reason, her mind snapped?  If this lady is the same woman from the market research firm, that just makes the anti-semitic state of her headspace that much more tragic.  (It should go without saying that, if Mayor Bloomberg is one of the dark overlords, it has fuck all to do with his ethnicity or his religion.)

I am heading for the subway when my mom calls.  I tell her all about this brief encounter with paranoid awareness gone totally wrong.

“That’s  sad,” my mom replies.  “But you’re going to see a lot more people like that with what’s going on right now with the economy and all the lay offs.”

Maybe.

But maybe I’ll see more people like the woman I see just six hours later up in Harlem, a totally different kind of random New Yorker.  That’s when, instead of being called one of THEM, Latifah tells me I’m a child who is loved…

[To be continued...]

There Is No Finally Arriving, There Is No Making It

It takes awhile to realize this.   I had a chance to realize this when I was in high school.  Maybe, in fact, I did realize it.  If so, I certainly forgot for a long while or, at least, I didn’t see the general application of the insight.

There is no finally arriving.  There is no making it.

I was in a car with the usual crew of non-drinking, non-smoking, non-toking strangelings.  We weren’t straight-edge, even if some of us really  liked punk rock.  We didn’t wear the uniform and we didn’t wear the scowl of assumed superiority, either.  We wore whatever and listened to whatever.  Dead Kennedy’s, then Ice Cube, then Megadeth, Amorphous, a dash of Zappa, Bjork, Kool Keith and Eugene Chadbourne thrown in.   So, no, we weren’t quite hippies, either.  Strangelings.  Freaks.

We didn’t drink.  We wilfully eschewed the parties at the houses of the sons and daughters of the wealthy in the subdivisions out by the regional airport.  And, because we didn’t stand around at gatherings looking angry, we found other ways to entertain ourselves.  Some of those things were incredibly dumb, like pretending to be preachers,  just as a means to antagonize people, see how far we could go without getting called out or beaten.   (Pretty far, it turns out.)   Or driving by bars at closing time and shooting cap guns at drunk people.

We judged in our own way.

Some of us were “good students.”  Some of us were also good at shit we actually cared about, like computers or playing music or writing or making wierd sound collages with 8-tracks.  I’d say being good at that stuff was much more worthwhile than the being good at school stuff, which suckered a few of us into passivity and a whole lot of wasted time and potential as we later went through college and went through depression, worrying about grown-up bullshit, believing there was no way to live, much less make a living, just on doing the things that struck our fancy.

So some of us forgot some things.

But that’s much later.

I was in a car with the usual crew of non-drinking, non-smoking, non-toking strangelings.  It was Saturday afternoon after a rain.  The Chameleon (so called because he weaved in and out of cliques easily), drove his car down Main Street when we saw a pretty damn impressive rainbow way off in the distance.  It seemed to arch down behind the subdivisions a few miles away.  Half as a joke, I suggested, we go find the end of the damn thing and root out the leprechaun and steal his treasures.  The Chameleon revved his car and headed for the colored bands in the sky.

We cut jokes about what we’d do with the gold, how we’d buy up the Cedar Brook subdivision and rename it Babbling Leprechaun.  As we sped toward the rainbow, I let my imagination become indulgent.  I really began fantasizing about that leprechaun, how he’d commend us on being the first people to ever catch one of his kind for real; and I conjured up pictures of our life once we had all that magical gold, all the shit I’d be able to do because I could afford to do it.  We were driving so fast and having so much fun it became easy to forget this was all just an unreal revelry.

As we got closer to the rainbow, it became fainter and fainter.  By the time we finally reached the spot that, from so far off, looked to be the end of the rainbow, there was no rainbow to be seen at all.  There was just us in The Chameleon’s car.  And the mist in the air.

The excitement died down.  We got silent for a few moments, somebody said “Oh,” the way you would do if you’d forgotten something pretty ordinary, and then we did what we were doing anyway.  We continued driving down the road and out of the subdivisions.

There is no Finally Arriving.  There is no Making It.  There is only remembering what we are really doing here and continuing on.  There really isn’t anything else.

Now, what are we really doing here?