A 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Walt Whitman’s voice reading four lines from the poem “America.” [MP3]

As the sky lights up over Hometown U.S.A. tonight, let’s remember that today’s also the anniversary of two literary masterpieces of proto-freak culture. In 1855, Walt Whitman had 800 copies of his Leaves of Grass pressed by the Scottish-born Rome brothers at their Fulton St. shop in Brooklyn.

The Wikipedia oracle notes that Walt was definitely considered an original dangerous mind:

When the book was first published, Whitman was fired from his job at the Department of the Interior after Secretary of the Interior James Harlan read it and said he found it very offensive. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was said to have thrown his 1855 edition into the fire. Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote, “It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote ‘Leaves of Grass,’ only that he did not burn it afterwards.” Critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold reviewed Leaves of Grass in the November 10, 1855, issue of The Criterion, calling it “a mass of stupid filth” and categorized its author as a filthy free lover. Griswold also suggested, in Latin, that Whitman was guilty of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians”, one of the earliest public accusations of Whitman’s homosexuality. Griswold’s intensely negative review almost caused the publication of the second edition to be suspended.  Whitman included the full review, including the innuendo, in a later edition of Leaves of Grass.

Seven years later to the day, math teacher Charles Dodgson and a friend took the three young daughters of Henry Liddell (the Dean of the Christ Church College where Dodgson taught math) on a short rowboat trip. Dodgson published the surrealist story he aimed at Liddell’s middle daughter Alice as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the name Lewis Carroll on July 4 1865.

Without forgetting Robert Cauble’s fantastic depiction of Alice’s search for Guy Debord, below are some amazing film interpretations of Alice:

 
Do you smell something burning ?
 
thx Buh Zing !

 
Have you been keeping up with the delightful Pekar Project at the Smith website? The latest installment is my favorite, with Dangerous Minds pal Douglas Rushkoff co-starring with our hero! With terrific—kinda perfect—art by Sean Pryor.

Editor Jeff Newelt writes:

A year ago, our own cuddly curmudgeon, Harvey Pekar, joined author / media theorist Doug Rushkoff on his WFMU radio show, The Media Squat, to talk about a pet peev to both authors: the corporate takeover of society. Doug recently wrote LIFE INC: How the World Became A Corporation and How to Take It Back and Harvey legendarily bashed GE on Letterman in the ’80s, so jamming on this was a natural. To create this comic, “Pekar & Rushkoff Kibbitzin’ About How Life Got Incorporated” (part one of a four-part epic collaboration), we treated the transcript of their talk like the first track laid down for a jazz record. Harvey & Doug remixed the script and then artist Sean Pryor brought the dialogue to life. Note the masterful switch in coloring technique whenever the story shifts from the conversation itself to images of subjects being talked about. Sean first collaborated with Harvey on “Gauntet of Rock” a story for Royal Flush Magazine, and has since rocked out three Pekar Project stories, “Searchin’”, “Jungle Music,” and “Two Working Stiffs.” Sean also designed and contributed a Harvey Head to the new Pekar T-shirt.

This is fucking excellent!

Pekar & Rushkoff Kibbitzin’ How Life Got Incorporated by Harvey Pekar & Sean Pryor (Smith)

 
There may be a short film that’s quite as vivid, courageous and intense as poet Forough Farrokhzad’s Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House is Black)—her 1962 portrait of a leper colony in the northwest of her native Iran—but I can’t think of it. Farrokhzad was a Tehran-born female poet born in 1935 to a career military officer and married off to the satiric writer Parviz Shapour at age 16. Farrokhzad divorced Shapour two years later and lost custody of her one-year-old child.

As much as it surfaces the sufferings of a rejected population, the 22-minute Khaneh… (excerpted below) clearly but subtly reflects Farrokhzad’s own attitude about autocratic Iranian society’s disapproval of her as a strong woman poet. The twenty-something scribe weaves her verse in voiceover throughout the footage, and her raw editing style moves agilely between long studies and quick cuts. The film would inspire the Iranian New Wave in cinema that flourished starting in the late’60s.

Farrokhzad would eventually adopt the child of two of the patients in the colony. Unfortunately, she died in a car-crash five years after the film was released, at the age of 32.
 

 
Watch: Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House is Black) by Forough Farrokhzad. 1962, 22 minutes B&W 35mm 
 
Get: Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House Is Black) [DVD]

 
Eight days after the West End premiere of the play based on his autobiography, Dandy in the Underworld, top-hatted London-based extreme artist and lifestylist Sebastian Horsley was found dead this morning at age 47 of an apparent heroin overdose.

Born to wealthy alcoholics, Horsley is best known for traveling to the Philippines to be crucified as part of his research for a set of paintings dealing with the topic. But besides his arcane fashion sense, penchant for whoring, and ability to make the scene—running with the likes of Nick Cave, Current 93, Coil and others—Horsley was an accomplished painter and writer, and a guy with a drawling accent who could hold court in a red velvet chair with the best of them.

The Soho Theatre cancelled tonight’s performance of Dandy…, but will continue on tomorrow. Our own Richard Metzger put it best when told the news: “How sad that the world has one less total pervert.”
 

 
Get: Dandy in the Underworld: An Unauthorized Autobiography (P.S.) [Book]

Sidewalk wrought iron artisan James Mutahi works his homemade arc welder in Limuru, north of Nairobi, Kenya. Photo: Dominic Wanjihia. From Afrigadget.

Preparation for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa (which starts in a couple of days) has drawn the West’s attention to the continent as a premiere sports and entertainment venue. But let’s also recognize that African countries have been quietly building a new set of infrastructures based on mobile and web connectivity, grassroots-tech ingenuity and turbo-micro-entrepreneurship.

Kenyan-raised Erik Hersman’s White African and Afrigadget are just a couple of the many blogs raising awareness about Africa’s long-running tech revolution, as epitomized by events like Maker Faire Africa. The below, from JustGiving’s YouTube channel and featured in Afrigadget, teases out some of the more everyday implications:

As a side-note: You may have read about the survivalist trend in America that mostly involves stocking up a panic room with guns, gold and Twinkies. Many populations in Africa continue to survive and innovate through the kind of emergency situations—natural disasters, economic devastation, military dictatorships, etc.—that your friendly neighborhood doomsayer can’t comprehend. 

 
I’m very pleased to announce the newest member of the Dangerous Minds “group”, my great old friend and colleague going back to grade school, Ron Nachmann. Ron brings many years of immersion in music, art, politics and culture with him to our blog and I’m certain our readers will appreciate his passionate, intelligent writing and analysis as well as his excellent taste in music and great sense of humor. Welcome, Ron !

 
Pot-stirrer par excellence—and Mother Teresa foe—Christopher Hitchens, has a new memoir out.  For a man who seems to embrace his fair share of contradictory impulses, it’s titled, fittingly, Hitch-22, and just received a heap of praise in today’s New York Times:

Anyone who’s closely read Mr. Hitchens’s work—including his best-selling manifesto God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything—or seen him do battle on cable news programs, knows that he has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent’s arguments with a flick of the wrist.  He holds dear the serious things, the things that matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the mind, loyalty, holding public figures to high standards.  His mental Swiss Army knife also contains, happily, a corkscrew.  Mr. Hitchens is devoted to wit and bawdy wordplay and to good Scotch and cigarettes (though he has recently quit smoking) and long nights spent talking.

Vanity Fair’s carrying a lengthy excerpt from Hitch-22.  In it, Hitchens recounts his friendship with Martin Amis and describes a typically cryptic telephone encounter with Thomas Pynchon.  And for a look at what topics might pop up during a long night with Hitchens, here’s a clip that touches on 22 of ‘em:

 
Bonus: Hitchens discusses Hitch-22 on ABC radio Part I, Part II

 
So begins R.U. Sirius’s history of Mondo 2000 magazine and its circle of fellow travelers. I approve of how it starts with this wonderful personal anecdote about his first exposure to the underground press as a teen, in the form of the San Francisco Oracle. Many people will tell you of an “Oh wow! This exists! And there must be more of it!” epiphany like this—I had a similar experience discovering David Bowie and reading Lester Bangs in Creem magazine eight years later—and it’s a highly enjoyable essay. Worth pointing out that kids today and forevermore will be unable to have an experience like this due to the always on mediascape we inhabit today. Discovering something rare used to require luck, a knack for ferreting out weird stuff or a hip relative. Not saying it would be preferable to go back to this earlier era, of course, I’m just saying that back then it took work:

Let the story beginning in the Spring of 1967. I am 14 years old and in 9th grade. It’s early evening and the doorbell rings at the suburban house in Binghamton, New York where I live with my mom and dad. It’s a group of my friends and they’re each carrying a plastic bag and looking mighty pleased. They come in, we shuffle into the guest room (where the record player is kept) and they show off their gatherings — buttons (“Frodo Lives!” “Mary Poppins is a Junkie” “Flower Power”), beads, posters (hallucinatory), incense with a Buddha incense burner, and kazoos. A lonely looking newspaper lays at the bottom of the pile, as though shameful, the only item unremarked.

Without realizing the implications, I happen to throw side one of Between The Buttons on the player. Eventually, the song “Cool Calm and Collected” plays and a kazoo sounds through the speakers. In an instant, newly purchased kazoos are wielded and The Rolling Stones only-ever kazoo solo is joined by three wailing teenagers, bringing sudden shouts of objection from my famously liberal and tolerant Dad in the living room. It’s quickly determined that it’s late, Dad’s tired, and it’s time to send all kazoo-wielding teens packing. As each of the friends moves to retrieve his items, I grab the newspaper to see what it is. There are, I now see, two of them — two editions of something called “The Oracle.” It has hallucinatory visuals on the cover and boasts an interview with a member of The Byrds (David Crosby). Vinnie, who had bought it — but who, despite writing poetry — avoids any signifiers of intellectual curiosity as the teen status crushers that they are, feigns disinterest and gives the copies to me.

And that’s where it begins, this strange love affair with the periodical, particularly the periodical that has flair and style… where you can almost feel the energy and fun emanating off the pages.

I remember only one thing from the content inside those two Oracles and that’s David Crosby denying that he was “some kind of weird freak who fucks ten chicks a day.” That stuck in my mind. I didn’t know it was possible even to think that, much less print it, much less be in a position to find it necessary to deny being it!

How great is that last sentence?

Read the entire essay—and support the project—here.

Newly discovered photo of Allen Ginsberg (sans beard), Cherry Valley NY, 1980. By Cliff Fyman.

(via Steve Silberman)

 
Australia’s 21.C, edited by Ashley Crawford, was probably the best magazine of the ‘90s—it was my favorite at least—and to be profiled in its pages and later to contribute to it, was an lot of fun for me.

21.C was the most unabashedly intellectual and forward-thinking journal that I have ever seen, anywhere. And it was a striking and beautifully designed product to hold in your hands. Each issue was finely crafted, I must say. To have my own writing published alongside the likes of Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Greil Marcus, Hakim Bey, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, R.U. Sirius and Kathy Acker was an honor. I also met Alex Burns via Ashley and Alex, of course, went on to edit the Disinformation website for many years.(I wrote about art for 21.C’s sister publication—also edited by Ashley Crawford—the quarterly glossy World Art. I know that I wrote an article about the product design of the Japanese pop combo Pizzicato 5, but I can’t remember what else.)

Now 21.C is back as an online magazine. There’s also a lot of still interesting archival pieces on subjects such as William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson that readers of this blog will find very interesting, I’m sure. There’s an interview with me from 1996 conducted by R.U. Sirius where I tell the nutty story of how Disinformation was started. Welcome back 21.C!
 

 

 
The Last Supper with scientists: Galileo Galilei, Marie Curie, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Thomas Edison, Aristotle, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin.
 
(via I.Z. Reloaded and Nerdcore)

 
Happy Easter!
 

 
Big Think is a website devoted to giving some big brains a platform to spout off on topics meaningful to them, and hopefully to other citizens of this planet we call Earth. With a cadre of boldface names like Ricky Gervais, Robert Wright, Stephen Fry and Ray Kurzweil, Big Think aims to put its readers in touch with… well, big thinkers on topics like sustainability, religion, alternate energy sources, artificial intelligence, history, justice, cultural identity, politics and much more. It is what tends to be called a “heady brew”!

Perusing the site this morning, I watched this sincere short video with M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky—probably America’s single most important intellectual—discussing the concept of what love is. He admits at the outset that he really doesn’t know, but he takes a good stab at it anyway. Big Think does a great job at fulfilling its mission statement with articles and videos quite akin to TED conference speeches. If you like TED talks (and who doesn’t?) then Big Think is probably a site you’ll want to bookmark, pronto.

Here’s a tip: Don’t miss author Gay Talese on “getting drunk at the New York Times” in the 1960s
 
Cross posting this from Brand X

Gnostic Media just did a podcast interview with John Taylor Gatto, one of the world’s foremost critics of the educational system. Gatto was the New York State teacher of the year in 1991. He refused the award and instead used his stage time to discuss exactly how the state was paying him to damage children. His books have gone on to inform the home and alternative schooling movement, both left and right wing alike.

Continuing our education on the Trivium method, this is one of the most important and powerful interviews to date, and my guest for this week and next is John Taylor Gatto - probably the most famous school teacher in the world, and he was New York State teacher of the year when he quit on the OP Ed page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991.

John Taylor Gatto climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called “An Evening With John Taylor Gatto,” which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries. In 1992, he was named Secretary of Education in the Libertarian Party’s Shadow Cabinet, and he has been included in Who’s Who in America from 1996 on. In 1997, he was given the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for his contributions to the cause of liberty, and was named to the Board of Advisors of the National TV-Turnoff Week.

(Gnostic Media: Another Brick in the Wall)

(Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)

The following card game, meant to be played with a pack of Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot cards, was invented by Anders Sandberg. Sandberg holds a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He’s a leading transhumanist and is quoted extensively in Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near.” Back in my day, however, we knew him as the guy who ran the most wicked “Mage: The Ascension” fan page on the Internet. If you know what this game is (aka “Dungeons and Dragons wasn’t enough to corrupt you brats into the occult? Here, have this.”) (aka “Nothing in this game is true, but it’s exactly the way things are”) you are already doomed. If you don’t, it’s too late to explain now.

The card game can be played by anybody without any previous knowledge of any other system, including Crowley’s deck. Looks very keen.

The game is played with a deck of tarot cards and a few ten-sided dice. There is nothing magical about the use of tarot, except that it is good for bringing up associations. I have used the Aleister Crowley Thoth deck, and would recommend it because the cards both have a rich symbolism and (in the case of the suits) written names giving helpful suggestions for their uses (four of disks is “power”, two of cups “luxury”). It can be run using other decks of course, but often the images are less helpful and the meanings more psychological. Knowing the symbolism and meanings of the cards makes the game far more entertaining and flexible, but just looking at the images can give inspiration. The knight of wands is riding a black horse and carrying a huge torch – a violent warlord. The fool is carrying a sack of coins – an opportunity to swindle.

The basic system is simple. Each player represents one group, society, organisation, person or something different. There may or may not be a GM with a final say, although it is useful (as is having somebody as a note-taker if the results are to be used later). Over the span of the game players may join or leave depending on whether their sides are removed or new sides of the story appear (temporarily removed players make good note takers). Unused players may act as “fate” or “chance”, playing cards that represent outside forces.

(Anders Sandberg: Genesis)

(Thoth Tarot Deck)

(Wiki on Mage: The Ascension)

 
Dangerous Minds pal Joseph Matheny of Alterati fame, has produced a trio of new Robert Anton Wilson related releases on audio CDs and DVD and you can get a discount by ordering all three at publisher Original Falcon and get The Insiders Guide to Robert Anton Wilson thrown into the mix for free. The DVD lecture, titled The “I” in the Triangle discusses the Western Hermetic tradition, Aleister Crowley, Jean Cocteau, extraterrestrials from Sirius and various conspiracy theories, And then there are the audio CDs, one a document of T.A.Z. A Night of Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism that took place on February 6th, 1993, the 2-disc set also features Rob “Real Astrology” Brezsny, Hakin Bey (his speech is great), physicist Nick Herbert, Joseph Matheny and Bob Wilson, who is in fine form here. The other disc is The Lost Studio Session that features a long intimate conversation with Bob.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Infinity Factory: Robert Anton Wilson, Genesis P-Orridge and me

 
Sad to hear this:

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist “A People’s History of the United States” became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favourite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87.

Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, California, daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Massachusetts.

Howard Zinn, author of ‘People’s History’ and left-wing historian, dies at 87 in California

Recently seen (via, uh, the William Burroughs re-tweet bot), the mother load… Check out this HUGE online archive of audio of lectures given by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and others at Naropa Institute in the 1970s. Naropa is developing an online browser of the material, but for the moment, it’s ALL on Scribd.

The Naropa University Archive Project is preserving and providing access to over 5000 hours of recordings made at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. The library was developed under the auspices of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (the university’s Department of Writing and Poetics) founded in 1974 by poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg. It contains readings, lectures, performances, seminars, panels and workshops conducted at Naropa by many of the leading figures of the U.S.literary avant-garde.

The collection represents several generations of artists who have contributed to aesthetic and cultural change in the postmodern era. The Naropa University Archive Project seeks to enhance appreciation and understanding of post-World War II American literature and its role in social change, cultural criticism, and the literary arts through widespread dissemination of the actual voices of the poets and writers of this period. Current interest in Oriental religions, environmentalism, political activism, ethnic studies, and women’s consciousness is directly indebted to the work of these New American Poets, writers and musicians.

Funding for this project was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Save America’s Treasures, the GRAMMY Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Collaborative Digitization Program, and private donors. If this collection is important to you please help us preserve it with your donations.

(Scribd: Naropa Archives)

 
In his 60+ years on Earth, Mick Farren has worn many hats. He’s one of the founders of the “underground” press in Britain, he was the doorman at the psychedelic UFO Club (where Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine got their starts), a political activist, a well-respected science fiction novelist, a TV and media columnist, a poet, and, not least, he was the lead singer of the proto-punk band, The Deviants. His autobiography Give the Anarchist a Cigarette is an indispensable volume in any library about the ‘60s and ‘70s. In short, the man is a counterculture legend, and one of the last of the “gonzo” journalists.

Saturday night, Farren will be reading at La Luz de Jesus Gallery from his recently published anthologyZones of Chaos (which features an introduction by sci-fi great Michael Moorcock) accompanied by fellow Deviant, guitarist Andy Colquhoun.

La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 4633 Hollywood Blvd, Saturday, Jan. 23, 2009, 6 ?