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Trust him.
Trust the white rabbit.

Though it was initially intended for print.

I’m of the opinion that FN helps elucidate JMC! rather than the other way around, but mostly because it provides a solid frame of reference, and kind of gives away what JMC! actually is (the record that agent139 gives to his psychologists to drive them insane, barring the final chapter which occurs in ‘real time.’) So much of the content is double mythologized you could say, one layer being my experience, then the other being the narrator (agent 139) re-contextualizing all of the various meta-narrators (johny, jesus, etc etc), and re-presenting that.

In retrospect it’s amazing I expected anyone to get that book, and even more amazing that some people actually seemed to. Really could use a re-edit or maybe integration. One day…

There aren’t many people around, as far as I can see, anyway, who look at counterculture as “social statement” any more; those who do tend to be young and naive and can be forgiven for it. I think it’s become self-aware. No longer a social statement, it’s just “social”. The “statement” part comes from the individual, now. The implied “we” factor seems to be less implicit. That used to bother me and now, though, it’s exactly the opposite.

I will take a cue from you and before any more expostulation on this, I’ll finish your book, which you’ve been so kind as to provide to us free, and when I do, perhaps I’ll write some sort of review. Someone hired me recently to create a website that’s very amorphously conceptualised and instead of just being a design job I seem to be being utilised as a conceptualiser, and such reviews would fit the general shape I’m giving to this thing.

As for cynicism– well, my point isn’t that there aren’t people out there “fighting the good fight” (though who is to say which fight is the good one?), but simply that the trappings are an anethema to the core principles. I might get an eyebrow piercing, but more out of a mixture of boredom and aesthetic than any desire to make some kind of social statement.

Cynicism about anything, especially things one feels any personal affiliation with the “trappings” of, plays an important role in one’s discovery of both hirself and the world around, and the interaction between them. One needs to be able to recognise and confront the flaws of any affiliation before one can bring something new and vibrant to that affiliation. Also, having a sense of humour about oneself and one’s culture, counter- or otherwise, is vitally important and without that, one will become an automaton and make everything they do and say that’s connected to that affiliation into not much more than reiteration.

There is a point, though, at which time cynicism becomes a liability instead of a virtue. Cynicism itself can become an automatic response. I realised this rather recently myself: it was a point that was driven home during my experience of the Obama inauguration. Now, my own cynicism about Obama, like many people’s, is fairly deep. I do not trust politicians, period, since I am old enough to have seen them come and go, and have read enough to understand the forces that corrupt them. But I realised something as I was “standing” in an anonymous crowd of Internet “attendees” at the inauguration as part of the CNN/Farcebook joint coverage of it, which showed me in a very clear way where the line is drawn in my mind between valuable cynicism and worthless cynicism.

I listened to his speech. Full of the usual benedictions, pronouncements, lots of abstract concepts and “loaded” words, but I realised that unlike his predecessor, at least this guy had COGNIZANCE of what he was saying, which is what is meant when we call someone “articulate”. And people were picking up on this. The guy “standing” next to me made a comment.

He said “This guy makes me feel like I can do anything”.

Now, I wouldn’t say that was precisely my feeling, but I couldn’t ignore something and that is that Clinton, the two Bushes and Reagan – all the presidents who I have dealt with as a person old enough to comprehend politics at all – NONE of those men made me feel anything at all like “hope”. Obama, AND the followers he has, from the mindless to the more mindful, have had a collective effect of making me feel more hopeful–and that feeling is not connected to anything concrete that BHO has done, or will do, in office. It’s hope that is more personal than political. And to feel cynical about it would be stupid and self-defeating.

The same general sense is held by me about counterculture. It does exist, and perhaps in its less-prominent, more hidden, condition, it’s far more intelligent than even that of the 1960s in some ways. Counterculture exists and always will exist because there will always be dualities, and always be affiliations.

It is becoming more obvious to me all the time that this era is just a phase in the evolution and specialisation of what we think of as counterculture to match the evolution and specialisation of humanity in general vis a vis the technology it uses to communicate with itself.

Counterculture is becoming less rote and more individualistic. That to me is a very good thing…it’s serving as a partial immunisation to marketing, because marketers work with demographics, and it’s becoming much harder to pigeonhole this one. But things like fashion and insignia, these are STILL valuable because we as living organisms still have an innate need to connect to one another and before someone gets to know you, ALL they have to go on is this thing called “style”. How do you appear, what sorts of things do you read, what sort of music do you like…these initial things are what foster friendliness and a feeling of affiliation between kindred minds who do not have the time, or haven’t had it YET, to go deeper. Without these signals, we’d all be fairly confused about who to bother spending our limited spans of time getting to know.

And even though it’s not always obvious–especially since it seems so often that exactly the opposite is true–COUNTERCULTURE CHANGES THINGS! It changed a LOT of things in the 1960s and the proof of that is the vicious desperation you see in the reactionaries against those changes. You’d not have that be happening otherwise. We have less codified racism, less codified sexism, and marijuana is finally coming closer to becoming legalised. Not bad for a half century and that’s not even counting the more intellectual, deeper changes to ALL cultures that have at their core the fundamental difference-of-consciousness that LSD, space travel and computers all by themselves have caused in the mass mind.

“Culture war” is something I have come to start celebrating. I used to think “they” started that, but now I’m coming to see that “we” did. “They” are fighting a losing battle. Why? Because though you de-affiliate here, you’re STILL part of a counterculture, whether or not it’s intended or even wanted that you are. And while “they” could never for a MOMENT stand apart from fundamentalist Christian values and criticise their faults, YOU *CAN*, and so can most of this era’s countercultural luminaries. That is a tremendous edge. The “culture war” may be a lot more interesting to me than a football game, but I can recognise that at core level I’m still just rooting for the home team. It’s what I wrap around that core that makes it something to live for and not just something to do.

/ we all elitists/they breed us/ so feed us a fetus/ the masses they need us/ neighborhood preachers/ we can’t all be the teachers / so shut the fuck up and listen / illuminazis cooking up crack in your kitchen/ bully with fear the same people who aint got a pot to piss in/ how come people in the know know that no one really knows what we know thats what i know/ holographic tactics encroached on the masses by fascists/ everybody crack wuth the sarcastic laugh track / weak like sitcom plot/ viacom dot dot / i eat weak plot / and tell the author who got shot / freestyle when i write or type and spit on the mic / collabo with tuna vicious thief in the night!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’ll try to take the time to answer this somewhat sensibly, since I’m sure it’s a sentiment shared by many of the more silent purveyors of our little slice of the Internets.

You’re right- things might be framed in black and white because it makes for a stronger contrast, which is an easier picture to paint. (Especially if you’re painting by numbers.)

See, one of the many problems with language is that, being one form or another of analogy, we can easily mix our metaphors, and think we’ve accomplished something when we haven’t. I could paint you a picture of the world becoming more and more aware, and even back it up with selective statistics. I could just as easily enumerate the ways we are descending through a never-ending whirlpool of shit. Neither of these means it is so.

(Of course that line of reasoning is leading us dangerously close to a discussion about language and what we can know/signify. Great topic, but I really don’t want to open that can of worms in a blog comment thread– it is almost always certain disaster.)

Bottom line, I think you’re missing my point. I don’t personally know what Zak did with the royalty money, but I immediately followed that example by saying that what matters is what you accomplish with that potential energy. I don’t doubt he enacted some positive change for some people, I never claimed otherwise. In that particular section I was talking about some people’s belief that you’re a sell-out if you make money, and the incongruity of that myth, implied in the work of many artists of an ‘anti-establishment’ or ‘counter culture’ stance, with the reality of who is signing their checks at the end of the day. I’m saying, that’s fine, the initial premise (there is a correlation between motive to profit and the cultural value of a piece of work) is rotten to begin with. It’s not like Beethoven didn’t take commissions too.

The movements, the brands, the party lines, can’t come first if you want to get anything done. They serve a purpose but, you know, it’s like that saying about possessions possessing us. The same thing is true with brands, beliefs, or movements that we identify with too strongly– when that identification becomes with what it stands for aesthetically rather than ideologically.

It seems to me that maybe you’re arguing against my statement “there is no counterculture” because it’s an arrow slung at one idol of yours or another. For it to have died, or decreased, it would have had to have been something in the first place- something singular, something unified, all of one mind.

And I mean really, do we want an army of goose-stepping hippies? God knows, I don’t.