WE HAVE MOVED

This old site is now a relic of thoughts gone by (albeit some still quite relevant). We have moved premises to a vibrant new peach office located here, where we are workshopping the CRYSTAL DIAMOND SUTRA : Joule of Transcendental Parties. Please come in.

HOLYHELA2K15 IN P/REVIEW

Here's an analogue review I wrote of a digital doc party I attended online yesterday courtesy of holyhela2k15 and the Digital Writers Festival. (Nuzzling into the wall behind it is a zine I made recently and have forgotten to mention here yet, R ' N ' BEING : THE CRYSTAL FILES) Click on the images to view the ends of the sentences.. :

MIXED MESSAGES

I just wrote a 5 page letter to Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift and Trickster Makes This World .. I thought he might be interested in my intricate webs of tricky gifting and, if he cares to engage, may fathom my Peace Party Puzzle in possibly the most thorough fashion of anyone. Here's an excerpt from Trickster Makes This World :


In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish-right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead-and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. When someone's sense of honorable behaviour has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.


That trickster is a boundary-crosser is a standard line, but in the course of writing this book I realized that it needs to be modified in one important way, for there are cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight. In several mythologies, for example, the gods lived on earth until something trickster did caused them to rise into heaven. Trickster is thus the author of the great distance between heaven and earth; when he becomes the messenger of the gods it's as if he has been enlisted to solve a problem he himself created. In a case like that, boundary creation and boundary crossing are related to one another, and the best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found--sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.


In other news, mine and Cocos new DJ duo MIXED MESSAGES will be having our debut this weekend at a BORN HAIRY USA party at Joanna and Michael's house. She rustled up this genius promo pic which neatly encapsulates our vibe.. She as villain selecta The Baroness, me as Colombian baby Jesus Divino Niño (and vice versa) :

MY ZENSITIVE ART

This year I have been living in a sub-lease slipstream, floating from house-to-house since returning to Melbourne in February. I've inhabited at least 10 houses in 2013. But it's all been running super smooth for some reason. The next apt lodging always pops out of the woodwork just in time, and I get to spend turbo time hanging with a variety of quality genies, ride in all directions home from work and never get sick of a neighbourhood. My current one is with my bro Sean who's boombox collection is worth writing home (wherever that is) about. I'm staying in the room of the lovely, tangibly successful writer Romy Ash, while she's off having a wordy adventure in NYC.

Usually when I move in to a new place I scan the bookshelves and lucky dip a title for further perusing. I love it when they are basically giving me the thumbs up saying "yeah, do your thing! this Party Within buzz you are on is really ancient and universal, here we've already articulated it for you super succinctly, go forth!" which is what Alan Watts has been doing lately in The Way of Zen. 

See! (from the chapter,  Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing) :

Whether trusting our memories or trusting the mind to act on its own, it comes to the same thing: ultimately we must act and think, live and die, from a source beyond all 'our' knowledge and control. But the source is ourselves, and when we see that, it no longer stands against us as a threatening object. No amount of care and hesitancy, no amount of introspection and searching of our motives, can make any ultimate difference to the fact that the mind is

Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself.

In the end, the only alternative to a shuddering paralysis is to leap into action regardless of the consequences. Action in this spirit might be right or wrong with respect to conventional standards. But our decisions upon the conventional level must be supported by the conviction that whatever we do and  whatever 'happens' to us, is ultimately 'right'.

In other words, we must enter into it without 'second thought', without the arrière-pensée of regret, hesitancy, doubt or self-recrimination. Thus when Yün-men was asked, 'What is the Tao?' he answered simply 'Walk on!'

But to act 'without second thought', without doublemindedness, is by no means a mere precept for our imitation. For we cannot realize this kind of action until it is clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is actually impossible to do anything else. In the words of Huang Po :

Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing onto which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the real realm of Dharma...... It cannot be looked into or sought, comprehended by wisdom or knowledge, explained in words, contacted materially (ie. objectively) or reached by meritorious achievement......

...As a zen master said, 'Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh.' In this moment the whole quality of consciousness is changed, and I feel myself in a new world in which, however, it is obvious I have always been living. As soon as I recognise that my voluntary and purposeful action happens spontaneously 'by itself', just like breathing, hearing and feeling, I am no longer caught in the contradiction of trying to be spontaneous. There is no real contradiction, since 'trying' is 'spontaneity'. Seeing this, the compulsive, blocked and 'tied up' feeling vanishes. It is just as if I had been absorbed in a tug of war between my two hands, and had forgotten that both were mine.

No block to spontaneity remains when the trying is seen to be needless. As we saw, the discovery that both the voluntary and involuntary aspects of the mind are alike spontaneous makes an immediate end of the fixed dualism between the mind and the world, the knower and the known. The new world in which I find myself has an extraordinary transparency or freedom from barriers, making it seem that I have somehow become the empty space in which everything is happening.

EXTERNALLY YOURS...

Here's a story I wrote a few months ago for Kim Jaeger's publication '100 Years' accompanying her show of the same name at Craft Victoria. It's not really very fictional tbh...ready? here it goes....

RING RING!

DING DONG!

The doorbell and phone chimed together. Frank Nuggets stopped vacuuming and opened the door, which was located between his eyes and up a bit. There, washed up on the sandy iron doorstep of his mind, was a large timeless present. Parcel I mean. Plasticky blue and yellow. Franks knees buckled as he bent to pick it up and bring it inside. Which technically was outside now, on the side of his forehead visible to his friends and foes. He didn’t stop to wonder who the courier had been, and why he hadn’t needed to sign for it, he was too curious.

Stuck to the top of the package was an A4.13 golden yellow cardboard envelope. He tore it open using the convenient perforated strip provided. Inside was an electric blue notebook and a drawing of a camera photographing him with a flash. CLICK it said. To indicate the sound of the shutter.

The book was not the most electric blue you can possibly get, but about the second most electric blue you can get. Flicking through it appeared to be somebodies travel diary from the time they went to Ireland. The content was largely anecdotal. As a pure verified fact lover Frank showed little interest. He tossed it aside. It fell open to a page that said simply in a pointy black font BLACK THOUGHT, overlaid with some cursive orange pencil saying :

Can I tell you a slightly amazing story?

Weird. Thought Frank. He wasn’t used to this sort of open-ended puzzling mail. He wanted answers, STAT.

Undoing the drawstring he released the parcel from the thick blue plastic bag that surrounded it. An identical bag was underneath. He shed that one too. A layer of paper was also removed. Hello. He thought. What’s this.

There was a box inside, with tapes taped all round the perimeter. Like a crafty bomb laden with sonic analogue ammo, ripe for insertion into several simultaneous boomboxes. On top of the box was a Blondie vinyl 7”, Atomic.  He pulled the tapes off to see the picture on the box. It was a double disco light, the kind with two rotating balls covered with iridescent glassy orifices that beam spinning colours around parties.

Hmmm. Was his next thought. This could really improve the ambience of my home club.

Excited to receive such a light he ripped the box open. Peering in his heart sank. There was no rotating party light inside. Just glossy black, the colour of trapped trash, soon to be dumped deep below see level and forgotten. Usually he didn’t dig through refuse, but seeing it had been presented so ceremoniously he opened the bag and took a look.

It was dark but a lot of glinting was going on. Was it junk? It was really hard to tell from that angle. Upturning the box Frank let a chaotic mountain of trash encrusted jewels fall onto the carpet. Layers of intricately wrapped petite packagettes became evident within the mother package.

The first thing to catch Franks eye was ruby red and wrapped in bubble wrap with a curly cord to secure it. Removing the cord and discarding the bubbles he found himself holding the lower lip of a novelty plastic lips phone. The part with numbers on buttons. But there was no top lip receiver to complete its function in sight. Rendering it useless as a stand-alone gift he put it behind him and reached for a small box with a gold ring image on the outside. Close inspection revealed it was wrapped in an old CD-R wrapper. Under that was a white jewellery box held shut with an invisible magnetic strip. Flipping it open Frank was surprised to see a pink, rainbow dot and silver foil orchid, deftly folded from a hundreds and thousands cookie packet. The trashy flower housed a generous crepe paper joint with a glowing coral tip in the position of its stamen. An aroma of coffee filled his nostrils.

Not sure whether to smoke it or squeal Frank took a moment to notice a new sensation that was emanating through his body. His atoms were vibrating rhythmically at an altogether unfamiliar all-pervasive frequency. It felt like there was a party going on, but he was all alone and couldn’t pinpoint its origin. Am I the venue? He wondered.

A golden envelope with an angular strip of navy blue electrical tape caught his attention. Tearing it open he found a book of gangsta philosophy by Ice T.

Huh. He thought. Opening it like an oracle he came to Ice’s musings on eroticism. Still pondering the notions on total submission Frank pulled another hard cover volume from the pile of flotsam. It was a novel by RZA. About Wu. He didn’t have time to read it. Too hungry.

It was then that Frank glimpsed the end of a packet of Old Gold dark chocolate in the cacophonous mix... with an intensity level of four cacao beans out of five. Foil glistening silver from it’s roughly torn edge. Pulling the silver free of the box Frank was disappointed to find no chocolate but a tightly coiled blue tinged photograph of a human torso in the foil. He threw it over his shoulder and unfurled some of the scrunched paper that had surfaced on the mound.

Oh man. He thought. What’s all this about. At the top of the page was a pencil drawing of an upright salt shaker with an upside-down crystal on it’s side. The salt shaker recurred in haphazard succession down the page, tumbling over and scattering salt, seasoning its own descent. As it tumbled the orientation of the crystal was also altered. At its lowest point, the shaker was completely upended and empty while the crystal was depicted upright and smiling. Curious. Thought Frank. Some loopy script emblazoned the drawing with these seven words : 

We are pataphysicists of the highest order

Does that mean me? Thought Frank.

It was now that he remembered himself and picked up the phone, which had been ringing the whole time. Off the hook that is.

POET ENOUGH

This fuzzy suggestion of a map is a little fraction of fractals from a Peace Party Puzzle I have been revelling on for a few years now, radiating from it's symbolic and actual central point, a novelty lips phone. (Still needs more arrows mind you).


Each mini-notebook pictured depicts an actual full-sized notebook that documents a mini-era of journal writing; emotions, events, abstract thoughts, freejazz rambling, pictorial essays... in the order they fell out onto the page. Some more alarming than others. Then they tend to get posted to a lucky recipient who has influenced the puzzle of my mind in a profound (and often hilarious) way.


THEN WHAT HAPPENS....that, my friends, is a long story. But I've got the time if you've got the attention span.


Cue apt quote from external source :


MORE POETRY THAN MAPMAKING


The heart awakens as a lotus opens: It's natural beauty and scent both fill itself and perfume the garden around it. But the nature of flowers is to open in the daylight and close at night. How can we map and describe such a process? Yes there are stages of shoot, bud and blossom. But this description omits more than it tells. It misses the nurturance of roots in the mud, the drinking of sunlight, the pollination of the bees, and the lotus sisters and parents that surround this flower and fill the world with more beauty. It misses the growth that takes place at night and the invisible buds below the surface of the water that don't yet remember the world of sunlight. Because the unfolding of this mystic spiral is so richly organic, many traditions turn to poems to express its spirit. Poetry has a mysterious power in its ability to hold meanings almost impossible to speak directly...


- After The Ecstasy, The Laundry, by Jack Cornfield

NO. 8 REWIRING

Who here's had the sensational pleasure of popping the cap off their crown chakra ? Wild huh ? So much effervescent energy that cannot help but bubble to the surface and spill over the rim time and time again. The thing with crown seals too is that you can't screw them back on. Once they're off they're off and you gotta let fly with your unstoppable flow. I went truly bananas when that happened.


Divine bananas.


Personally, being born on the Day of Explosive Power (according to The Secret Language of Birthdays) I just went for gold and tore through a whole succession of chakras in a single (very lengthy) sitting. Well I wasn't just sitting. I was walking, flying, writing, drawing, wrapping, sending, bathing, tying, crying, giggling, dancing, getting changed.


I'm not here to talk about the crown chakra though. That's old news. The one I want to bring to your attention is located a little way above your head. Look up. There it is. The 8th chakra. That's the one that makes you feel like a party once you've cracked it wide open. A classic trait of parties is that you are not the only one at them. Heaps of people come and you have to be accommodating if you don't want your party to suck. Listen to this rundown I just found on a handwritten photocopied print out a lady in Whanganui gave me :


The eighth chakra is trans-personal, connecting to the infinite source of all archetypal energies and maintains a connection to every individual body and soul. It connects personal unconsciousness and collective unconsciousness. Linking the literal and symbolic dimensions, your personal life and the impersonal universe. It holds patterns of experience and soul knowledge that are inherent in human consciousness and also archetype patterns. It's influences are Mother Nature/Gaia, the natural order of things or laws of physics. eg laws of nature, cause and effect, karma, choice and consequence, magnetic attraction. Archetypal patterns held in the eighth chakra flow into the individuals personal energy field, stir the psyche, move into the conscious mind, the emotional body and finally into a physical manifestation in that persons life.


You can see why having tapped into all that jazz someone could get the impression they are actually a party can't you! and that all their things were secretly symbols of their friends in disguise and of course they can't stop sending strange mail to their nearest, dearest and furthest. Because the individual in question found them all inside their cacophonous psyche and wanted to communicate that. Like that nirvana song when he found his friends, they were in his head.


Did you know expressions the opposite of depression?
Let it out I say! Free the cats from the bags! It's dark in there and they can't breathe properly!

GIVE IT UP WHY DONTCHA

Hi! Here's a quick recap of my buzz for newcomers. In 2009, I morphed suddenly and dramatically from being a human to being a full blown party animal. Not in the way that you're thinking though. In a way that is not able to be thought about unless it has been felt. I became the venue and the reveller all at once, without the help of stimulants, but with the help of a lot of sensual stimulation, through various forms of art. I quickly became a highly productive compassion factory completely unattached to possessions, hell-bent on sharing my newfound psychic wealth.


With this change came the vision of a book called The Party Within : A Smart Casual Connecting Principle (that is still in the pipeline). I started writing it free-jazz style by hand and distributing pieces in puzzle form among many lucky revellers, often kamikaze style. Not literally in a violent military way that ended in me actually dying, but in a metaphorical way where little parts of me would die off as they were crystallised as words and pictures and blown elsewhere in gusts of powerful full body instinct. In a way that is true to the literal translation of kamikaze, "divine wind". I call it the party physical realm, as it is a state of being ruled by your epicentre, the heart. When your rational logic loving brain gets overridden at the organ round table conference centre on account of the intensity of the collective feeling in your body.


Since this happened I am all about articulating this buzz in many way shapes and forms, mostly in the form of MYSTERIOUS LAYERY PRESENTS. Recently I have been reading Lewis Hyde's novel The Gift which is putting into words a lot of my puzzling behaviour and giving me that lovely solid feeling that realising psychic companionship often gives. Here's a little excerpt from Chapter 3, The Labor of Gratitude :


I have taken death gifts as my example of threshold gifts not as an exceptional case, but as the type, for I would like to speak of all transformation as involving death. Spiritually, at least, the old life must leave before the new may enter. Initiation ceremonies make a good illustration because they commonly include a symbolic death..... It might be said that the gifts we give at times of transformation are meant to make visible the giving up we do invisibly. And of course we hope that there will be an exchange, that something will come towards us if we abandon our old lives. So we might also say that the tokens we receive at times are meant to make visible life's reciprocation. They guide us toward new life, assuring our passage away from what is dying.


The guidance is of use because there are those who do not survive change. It is as if human beings were like that subclass of insect, the Metabola, which must undergo complete metamorphosis from egg, through larva and pupa, to imago. In some way the fluidity of gift exchange assures the successful metamorphosis.

THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR

If I speak in the spirit of this time, I must say; no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you. Justification is superfluous to me, since I have no choice, but I must. I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value. I also thought this way, and my humanity still thinks this way. But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use, and meaning. Filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought to hold that other spirit away from me. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations. The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgement. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.


The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning.


C.G Jung

from

The Way of What Is To Come
Liber Primus
The Red Book

R'N'BEING

Watch THIS SPACE for psycho spiritual unravellings in letter form between the kaleidoscopically talented rapper, writer, cartoon creator Coco Solid and myself ...


coming very soon ....to a blogspot near you...

SOON IS NOW

Heeeeey. Happy Charismas and an all-encompassing new yeah! Thank the lord, I mean each other, for the charisma we so generously impart upon ourselves and our neighbours in our own special ways! This year is all about turning up the volume at Party Art HQ (aka The Freedom Factory).


2013 could be time for me to start making sense for a change. To follow up the recent focus on puzzling bamboozlement. MAYBE I'LL START BLOGGING IN CAPS. Na. Too much too soon. Will just turn it up slowly, decibel by decibel so that no one notices it's happening. See closing collage from founding party art blueprint plan RADICAL FUSION FELT BLOG that reveals my secret lifelong ploy to have a fruitful time partying and making friends with other birds on a fashionable universal backdrop. All the while mixing up my eclectic fruity influences in a big body melting mind pot and boiling them into some sweet sticky jam with a piquant tang that spreads smoothly on your toast or waits patiently inside your donut for you to take a bite.


(it's a post in a hard copy blog) :

Mostly what is pon di horizon for me this year remains a mystery ... I have been in NZ since last August although it feels like 4 years in terms of density of events and experience. Further hammering the nail into the coffin of any linear perception of time I had and celebrating it's farcical hoaxy nature. More notions on that broken nutshell to be unpacked in a public art forum near you, SOON.


First big job of the year is to marry my sister Joanna and my brother to be Michael with the party invested in me. Knot to be tied in country Victoria, Australia in February. A humbling honour for a softly spoken vocally bumbling clown such as myself.


And stay tuned for R'N'BEING, a sassy psycho-spiritual Letters to a Young Poet type exchange between myself and the insightfully lyrical comedic goldmine Jessica Coco Solid Hansell, exploring the contents of our cocophanous psyches through the medium of words and pictures and sharing them on the internet for the party generation. Just in case there's something interesting in there. As fellow prolific psychic excavators and longtime penpal enlighteners we are expecting to unearth some archaeological arty facts worth raving about like reformed lunatics.


More soon,


xx


CZA


PS cannot sign off without sharing this piece of cinematic brilliance, ELECTRICI-SHE by D Thomas Herkes. Speaks for itself :

FRENCH STYLE

For me making art is a bit like doing a french plait. Countless individual strands beautifully coiffed together to create a dynamic practical style that provokes comments and boosts the volume of your hair once you sleep on it a few times and lose or take out your hair ties.


For the last couple of years I have been closely examining some strands that have grown out of my head and the heads of others bearing in mind they would look great fused into a cohesive style but not being sure how to actually do the plait, or if there is enough hair involved to give it ultimate body yet.


On a same but different note, here's a little passage about a new beginning I had once, and an excerpt from a book that talks about the similarities and differences between SPIRITUAL EMERGENCES and SPIRITUAL EMERGENCIES. As far as I can tell, CHARISMA and BEING IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME almost guarantee the former takes precedence over the latter.

STRINGING STRONG WORDS TOGETHER

HEY! EXCUSE ME ! here's an article I wrote for Kerry Ann Lee's Permanent Vacation magazine. The one in the zine is handwritten in a moleskine and has some pictures and the answer to the Double Jeopardy Riddle Joke upside down at the start. So you're missing out a little bit by reading it on the net. Missing the punchline, but if you don't have a copy handy please read on and you can ask someone or stumble upon it later ....

CANARY IN A GOLDMINE



The idea for this story grew from a nugget Kurt Vonnegut gave me once, when we were between the covers of a collected volume of his, Wampeters, Fomas and Granfalloons. He was relaying an interview he'd had with Playboy a few years earlier. It was written with ink, that had once been liquid, but through a chain of magical processes I don't understand, had dried onto a succession of bound pages sandwiched inside a slightly thicker cover. (Made from wood I think.)


Not only had the ink performed this unlikely feat of transformation, it had done so in a series of formulaic shapes that my mind ascribed a sound to. Alone they were quite weak. Only a couple of them meant something or could infer a satisfying sound as they stood. I soon realised that on the most-part they were relying upon each others simultaneous presence to make a complete word and even then they needed still more words to make a sentence. Not all of them needed to be there for every word, different configurations united to make different sounds that evoked a range of feelings and images. When I saw the shapes meet I also saw meanings. Please don't ask me how I did that.


I can't help being magic.


To wind it back a bit, reiterate, clarify and recap, somewhere along the line (if we can call it that) these particular shapes I was seeing had become visual representatives of assorted sounds. Individually at first, then they'd congregated together to make even more complex and varied sounds, with meanings too. Some cool ancestors sorted that out so we didn't have to organise it. Thanks for that! Kurt had recognised the communicative power of these letters and strung them together in such a way they managed to say some really radical empowering business that had a physical impact on my body and altered the course of my life. Long story short, a book full of these meaningful chains of letters arrived in my hands and I read it in bed. There was no time to question how all those previous miracles had occurred, I didn't want to pop a valve. So I just read it and wept with joy at the like mind I'd found.


This is what he said about people like us : 


Writers are specialized cells doing whatever we do, and we're expressions of the entire society - just as the sensory cells on the surface of your body are in the service of your body as a whole. And when a society is in great danger, we're likely to sound the alarms. I have the canary-in- the-coal-mine theory of the arts. You know, coal miners used to take birds down into the mines with them to detect gas before men got sick. The artists certainly did that in the case of Vietnam. They chirped and keeled over. Nobody important cared. But I continue to think that artists - all artists - should be treasured as alarm systems.


For the purpose of this article I'll be the canary and you can be the reader of the magazine. Because that seems like the most obvious dynamic to adopt.


It's a tale about fully discovering your bird side, having a full-blown flap attack and incessantly tweeting about it to all your friends in the hope they will be seduced into coming for a fly with
you. In order to get a common overview of the societal situation and work/play together to nut out a plan of embrace of the honest parts that deserve illumination and investment (both energetic and financial). Empower, sustain and support those parts, lionize them avidly and either zenly integrate the stuff that sucks and hurts (if necessary) or let it get eclipsed out of your mind, and in turn, your reality. Seeing we are all party to this system we inhabit and attacking it is simply attacking ourselves. Ouch. Why not fathom it instead.


Let's zoom out and start with some wide-angle wondering ... Maybe an altogether completely new system is the ticket? That no one has ever thought of because the conditions haven't been quite right before? How can we turn the most inspired, lively, creative and conscious streams of consciousness into the MAINSTREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS?


Probably bit by bit, one step at a time. Inside out. Start, or continue revolutionising the microcosm that surrounds you and watch in amazement as your dreams go hard and macro without you having to try anymore. This is where doing your art live and direct from the heart comes in. If you do this without stopping to think and censor yourself, for fear of embarrassment or revealing the depths of your vulnerability, you will have the unstoppable power of nature and an unexplainable mystery on your side. What springs forth organically can tell us a lot about ourselves. Be a witness, not a judge. Face the bits that freak you out and respect their presence. Peripheral acknowledgement of problems is useful, without becoming consumed by them. If we continue to plant baby seeds of solutions in each others minds the answers grow of their own accord. The world is a massive puzzle designed to be solved by us and so much of the work has already been done. It just needs a freaky new map.


If fathoming is the goal then communication is paramount. We need an action plan, like how the aforementioned letters teamed up to bring us words. Instead of attacking, how about fusing juju for a mass perpetual woo of the system? Turn it's knees to honey, dazzle and cavort it until it is putty in the hands of party artists with universal natures. Who are guided by their hearts in the interest of preserving and respecting earth’s natural bounty. Live in harmony with that which is truly dope. Have you noticed how parties can be fun and wild and they can also be political, have power and run countries. Why can't they be all of the above? To implement this reality we would probably need hoards of CHARISMA and talent between us and we would need to be wise with how we spend our assigned rations of sweet joules.


The greatest and most transformative treasure of all.


Being a specialised writer canary, who is also part dolphin (privy to echolocation) and part fireworks, I am someone who cannot for the life of her stop exuding words in all directions. Kurt calls writing socially fruitful meditation, which I relate to completely. I exhale they fall out onto the page or into the e-window. Can't always be sure who's saying them but I can feel them write through my whole body and even in parts of me that are not my body, so I do not hesitate to release them into the world. In spite of sometimes exposing my true nature as being totally nuts. But nuts in the crazy sense are in the eye of the beholder and anyway, nuts in their true sense are a dynamic snack full of energy and should be shared amongst friends and friends to be, rather than hoarded and sat on. Unless you are going into hibernation and need a massive store for winter.


The alarm bells I ring are not warnings of danger. They are PARTY ALARM BELLS. Warning society of how incredibly ecstatic, alive and tingly it could be if we excavate our lack of understanding about how ecstatically alive with tingles we are. What absolutely sensational creatures. Basically just harmonic waves, waving back and forth to each other. “Hi!” We could know no bounds if nobody wanted to know them.


Having said that, a few bounds are very practical to have. Not knowing them is only really great until you realise your lack thereof is jeopardising relationships and freaking out your mum. I lost all mine when I dissolved my ego in a puddle of love and am still trying to knock up some prefab partitions so as not to step on too many toes in the process of igniting other eternal internal party flames (which inevitably go external). Can take a while to find out where they go, but conversation and tentative testing of them is a great method for re-establishment. I'm doing it the Japanese way this time round and making them from paper. That way the damage is minimal when earthquakes inevitably strike.


The gold I chirp of is psychic gold, found by panning down deep, beyond personal matters to the infinite realm of imaginary solution and childlike wonder that lies beneath the conditioned falsehoods that pollute our minds and confuse our perceptions of reality. Sounds like a big sweeping call to make but I will still make it lightly now and break it down further in my coming output of word-flow. One that is likely not to cease until I have distilled a crystallised Elixir of Eternal Parties. The alchemical process I employ to perform this alarming task is to make a literal Peace Party Puzzle for zen party pilgrims who care deeply about partying and would like to engage in expansion of their puzzling spherical reality in a decidedly novel way. All the while contributing to a radically logical new myth.

* 

Before I explain any further, please bear in mind the meaning these following letters adopt when placed alongside each other ....


Zen does not attempt to be intelligible, that is, understood by the intellect. The method of zen is to baffle, excite, puzzle and exhaust the intellect until it is realised that intellection is only thinking ABOUT ; it will provoke, irritate and again exhaust the emotions until it is realised emotion is only feeling about, and then it contrives, when the disciple has been brought to an intellectual and emotional impasse, to bridge the gap between second hand, conceptual contact with reality, and first hand experience.


Alan Watson in The Spirit of Zen Re-quoted by Christmas Humphries in Zen Buddhism


To paraphrase the birdman in Kevin Hooyman's exquisite new book The First Sign of Anything, it's all about having a series of small targets that keep giving you good feelings and regenerate your joules for the next hit. Lots of little art parties that conjoin to create a monumental art party that no individual could've ever created (or curated) alone. Cos doing it alone isn't REALLY PARTYING.
First target was to get us both on the same page.


Doooiiiiing.


Welcome to my massive puzzle/freestyle thesis about connections and parties. You're party to it now. Just got involved. That article was secretly a letter inviting you to participate and by reading it you already are. A psychic seed has been planted that you’ll have a hard time uprooting because I tucked it really far in while you were marvelling about how letters met each other and thought to make words. Plus it's the first clue in the puzzle. Which is timeless so it doesn't matter if you've already received your other first clues


Now let's end with a quick round of Double Jeopardy! (aka backwards Q and A, but for this one the A’s a Q too and vice versa) I'll be host.


Category : CLASSIC JOKES


for 200 : “What party?”


* (pictured myself hugging nugget by Melbourne artist Andy Hutson)

SAX CRIMES

Was just remembering the time Carol Brown had this sax consultation with herself in her own peach office on The Party Within The Party Within episode of that old series, Becoming Carol Brown. What was she thinking! Talk about SOCIAL SUICIDE!!!
Cannot believe she did that.


PS. Who's that guy rifling through her filing cabinet? Is that Carol too?

TIMELESS NOTIONS

Recently I read Kevin Hooymans new book THE FIRST SIGN OF ANYTHING which you can buy here for a measly $10 USD and if I were you I would. Because no matter how hard I looked I wouldn't be able to see any reason why not. I would just forgo something else that costs $10 USD and get the book, if cash was my issue. If time to read the book was my issue, I would just forgo some other time consuming activity to read it. But that's just me. That's what I did. All of the above, and I enjoyed it so much and felt such solidarity with the fruits of Kevins mind I felt compelled to share some of my psychic fruit with him too. Albeit of a similar nature to his, but wrangled into a different format. A much less cohesive format. Because I'm still mid-process in an uber-wrangle of info and NRG and I like talking about it as I go. Seeing I am so hungry for perspectives on the out-of-it things that happen within me and inevitably emerge in some physical form.


So I sent him a lilac moleskine facet of my technicolour freestyle thesis about connections and parties, some pages from the Radical Fusion Felt Blog and a copy of RUSH : Made In Victoria With Chris In It As A Police Officer by Joanna Anderson and Chris O'Brien.


Kevin promptly responded by adding some characters from his own hand to my work, who were muttering about how simple it all is, and that these are the things they like to do. Plus wrote me an encouraging colourful layery letter and also included this most excellent and apt book, D.I.Y Magic, which again, is so far up my alley it comes a full circle through the alarming state of not being funny, all the way back to being funny again..... here's an excerpt from the introduction .....

What is magic? It is the fine and subtle art of driving yourself insane! No really, it is just that. It is a con game you play on your own brain. It is the trick of letting yourself go crazy, and when it’s done right, the magus treads the same sacred and profane ground where walks the madman…


We can read descriptions of myths, of the practices of shamans, but the descriptions we might read by a Pentecostal believer, or a voodoo practitioner ridden by the loa, will be meaningless to us unless we have already been in the state they describe. These are wholly subjective experiences.


If you take these many practices, from across countless fields, cultures, religions, modes of being and systems of ritual (hypnosis, song and dance, duende, speaking in tongues, enchantment, faith healing, divination, out of body experience, sweat lodges, drumming, yoga, drugs, fever and on and on), we find that we are really talking about the same thing: a state where the mind lets go of the normal way of being and is opened up to an experience of existence as a whole that is bigger and without time. 


These states are all really different forms of the same thing, or if not precisely the same thing, then near and adjacent territories in a realm that lies parallel to this one, reachable by many means.
In short, rather than advertise this as a book of magick, it could just as well have been labeled a book of psychology hacking. Or a cookbook. Think of it as jail-breaking the iPhone of your mind. Teaching it to do things that its basic programming was never set up for. Advanced self-psychology.

PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLZ

For those of you in Wellington tonight the latest issue of Kerry Ann Lee's party art mag PERMANENT VACATION is launching from 6pm at Enjoy Gallery, level 1, 147 Cuba St. I wrote an article in there about digging deep and striking psychic gold then sharing it with all your friends. (My usual buzz). Bit of a manifesto for the party generation, called CANARY IN A GOLDMINE. Check it out!


Soon to be available from Sticky Institute and Wooly Bully in Melbourne.

CRUMB COLLECTING

2 Carol Browns collect every last donut crumb before exiting the studio.

INNERVIEW WITH COCO & ME

Here's a Q&A between Coco Solid (Q) and me (A) for her new mag ... (intro by Coco)...

WHO IS CRYSTAL DIAMOND?

To me Crystal Diamond aka Caroline Anderson is a writer, artist and an existential rogue in this world of limits and hang-ups. We met many moons ago at would you believe.... parties (hang tight, this word will prove important later). One day out of the blue she chose to actively deepen our nice-enough friendship by writing to me from Melbourne. She openly told me about a tough time her heart was enduring, so I shared some of my horror stories and insights – and before you knew it, we were (and still are) close pen pals.

As trans-Tasman buds, I was attending her George St Clown parties in Melbourne (an amazing red-head crumping collective made up of Crystal and her sister Joanna – they even have official t-shirts). Crystal was coming to Aotearoa for boogies and the occasional drunk summit. Then something cosmic started to happen.

Crystal was sending me live reports from the field of her brain saying she was beginning to see some chronic connections. The ego fabric that protected everyone from their true selves was starting to unravel and make less sense to her. Some pretty uplifting secrets were beginning to transmit themselves to her and she was both overwhelmed and over-stimulated. Me being a cynic she managed to keep my faith with the odd psychic observation and super creepy coincidence. (Let it also be known that Crystal is one of my few friends who hasn’t thrashed psychedelic drugs and at the time was more into The Rza than any church, so I just observed this movement engrossed).

Her blog (www. crystaldiamondwrites.blogspot.com) was the de facto home of nervous laughter and puzzled looks among our friends, which was understandable – both Crystal and her musings were getting authentic and wild. She was amazingly honest, hyper-expressive and keeping it surreal. Crystal called her spiritual outlook ’The Party’ with this metaphor proving crucial to how she truly believes humanity should interact. (FYI Celestial updating, restyling and rebranding is something we constantly bond over, why does spirituality have to have such an unfashionable stigma for so many?)

To me, the party was Crystal’s truth and her writing was resonating with me too much to ignore.

Eventually I ended up finding my own remix of The Party Within, I recommend it. Caroline also sends everyone packages, letters, presents or casual symbols from their destiny. To this day I will look at something she sent me a long time ago (a candy wrapper, a picture, a note) and recognize the predictive message that was in it. Shit is usually levels. Anyway I’ll let her explain the rest. >

CS : I'm just gonna jump in the deep end with no water-wings. What is the party?

CD : This is one of those zen situations where it's easier to say what the party is not. It's not not pure ecstatic joy and it's not not also really sad. (Heapsa contradictions in zen). It is a new configuration of consciousness whereby the dividers dividing your mind into categories dissolve and all the contents falls into your inner outbox for processing. Your brain shuts up and stops being the boss and your heart takes charge, pumping tingly orders all round your body. It's a cellular office party. Inside YOU. 

CS : You describe yourself as a rogue scholar but also a 'Party Artist'. What are the responsibilities of the Party Artist.

CD : Once a party artist has unlocked their inner party vault they party alone exploring all the zones of their own club for quite a while and enjoy themselves quite a lot. Retrace their steps, visit old friends. They continually keep emptying their inner outbox and keep it's contents in circulation via the postal system, internet, direct friend to friend contact. They channel everything that is inside them, ie. thoughts, emotions, genius plans, and look at it when it comes out to get objective perspective, distance themselves from the fruits of their own psyche in order to keep their minds fresh, clean and receptive to incoming transmissions. They revel in this task. Rogue scholars are people who take responsibility for their own education and shoot for honorary doctorates for going hard in their chosen field, outside of an institution.


CS : Crystal, this is gonna be a mammoth can of worms but what happened to you on that fateful day you discovered 'The Party Within'?

CA : I cried.


CS : How do people react when you grow through such a strong psycho-spiritual change?

CD : It polarises your friend base and sorts out the babes from the babes 2 be. Lots of people might reckon you have bi-polar disorder or delete you as their facebook friend cos you're getting too real. Others show mega compassion, understanding and patience while you moodily struggle through the transistion from being human to realising you are actually a dolphin crossed with fireworks then learning to embody that fact inside your human shell. Many bring you back to earth and enliven you with the magic of SOUNDS. Music has been my greatest saviour.


CS : Who are some of the people (alive and dead) you call on when you are rendering a large file with the cosmos?
 

CD : I must psychically call on Mum cos she always shows up. For some reason for the big ones I always call on Andrew Liversidge, an artist from Melbourne who I call my involuntary psychic professor. I write to him all the time and he never writes back but for some reason that doesn't deter me. He has some special powers that transcend bodies for shiz. Also YOU (Coco), Bek Coogan, Carl Jung, Dan Lucka, Joanna, Torben Tilly, Jo Randerson, Sam Crawford, SECRETS. There are many.


CS : You regularly send people in your network parcels and artifacts. Why?

CD : There are many reasons for that. To pop the bubbles around private documents, starting to brace myself for the critical views of the external world and learn how to respond without getting hurt feelings. Provoking discussion regarding the content, making a physical map of the important connections that contribute to the book I'm writing, The Party Within. Planting seeds of ideas for future collaboration, no matter how oblique they might be. Also so if I die the party lives on, it is a big puzzle and will link up all these amazing characters from all different areas of my life and they might have fun making a book or something together. It is a spontaneous evolver of a project, nothing is set in stone and could all change on a whim tomorrow. It is more about the joy and connecting capabilities of the process than any sort of outcome. 


CS : Transient as they are to you, what have been some of your favourite possessions?


CD : I had a red wooden diamond that I liked. Records, tapes, 2 lips phones. Moleskine journals. Latex futon, a painting by Maiangi Waitai, salt lamp, Miss Crabb threads, Alexandra Dodds ANATOMY OF CLOUDS ring.

CS : Describe this monster artistic undertaking you are shadowboxing with in Australia, where you live.

CD : Basically is an installation at Westspace that functions as a mini-series, loosely based on some of my experiences. The project is in the Next Wave festival and is called Wake Up And Wait For The Sun To Rise : 500 Methods For A New Beginning. It's a one month residency at the Meat Market which I am wagging right now to write this. Our collective is TAPE PROJECTS and the series is called Becoming Carol Brown, taken from an extra role I played on Flight Of The Conchords in 2008 who keeps taking a bus out of town, which is something I frequently do.The character is not exclusive though, it is a vehicle for transmitting a bunch of ideas and anyone has the opportunity to step into the role. The room in Westspace is the set and we will provide prompts for action that people can get amongst if they choose to. Costumes will be provided. It is part peach office, part lilac house, part black hole for trashed thoughts, part beach. Each day will be a new episode, some we have roughly pencilled in are ... ANTICIPATING ANTICIPATION, CAROL GETS SOME PERSPECTIVE, THE CYCLICAL NATURE OF BIKE RIDING, A CHRISTMAS CAROL and HUNGOVER BEFORE IT'S BEGUN. Theme song by SECRETS.


CS : Tell us about your recent exhibition in Wellington and the whole 'Year of the Rat' and 'unpacking' ethos surrounding it

 
CD : Hmm... this is an interview in itself. No time!


CS : How you live totally wastes positive visualization in a fight, lets be real. How would you describe the serendipity and connected way in which things transpire for you on a daily basis.

CD : Progressive Seinfeld.

CS : Where were you born?

CD : Whanganui

CS : Tell us about Crystal Diamond Writes and how that has helped your process

CD : It's a blog I started in October 2009. At first words flew out forcefully straight onto the internet, so many of them in a very short space of time. Outlining my initial book idea, talking about how we are all mash-ups of all the characters books, music, environmental factors etc that go into our existence. Sharing some handy life hints then I did a bunch of profiles on characters that had affected my life dramatically. Then I put lots of quotes and things on it that gave me heart and egged me on when I wasn't getting heaps of encouragement elsewhere. It's a good instant way to socialise psychic fruits without having to go to the post office. Plus people become aware of the buzz you're on and doors open up as a result.

CS : How did you get your name?

CD : I was about 4 and my brother and sister Sean and Joanna used to go down to the cattlestop and "go to town". In their place Billy and Sally would return. They looked heaps like Joanna and Sean but weren't. Sometimes they'd swap letters and be Silly and Bally but there were always fights over who got to be Silly. I didn't just want to be boring old me so I dubbed myself Crystal Diamond Necklace, named after my necklace which was actually red blue and white beads.

CS : How did dressing up as Tina Turner when you were a child teach you the meaning of expression? (I'm just looking for an excuse for you to tell that story cos it makes me laugh so hard)

 

CD : I don't have time to regail you right now ! but it taught me that if you can't do it, just mime and everyones parents will still think you're cute.

CS : Based on your experience and limitless love for The Party, how can readers at home lambada with life?

CD : Do whatever you want to do, hard and charismatically. 
DIG DEEP, BUY MY BOOK

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

here's a mail-out I just did on the electronic postal circuit (write me a message if you would like your inbox to be kept updated on movements within the Movement Movement!) :

Hola,


This is to say THANKS to everyone who came down to the set of Becoming Carol Brown @ West Space during the NEXT WAVE festival, donned pastel skivvies and wigs, became Carol Brown and generously helped themselves revel in their practical tasks in one or more of the following episodes :


Episode 1 : Anticipating Anticipation
Episode 2 : Receiving Transmissions
Episode 3 : Carol Tears It Up
Episode 4 : Carol Re-bakes Old Ideas
Episode 5 : The Party Within The Party Within
Episode 6 : Carol Gets Some Perspective
Epsiode 7 : A Christmas Carol
Episode 8 : Cliff-hangover 


Pictures from Episode 5 : The Party Within The Party Within :




Carol in a sax consultation with herself in HER OWN PEACH OFFICE ...




Some guests in Carols brain observing her sax crimes from their respective locations in the middle of everywhere ...




Conga line leaving The Party Within The Party Within to circle the oxygen chamber and finally impregnate the Aussie culture DJ set next door with their imitable brand of highly enthused radically sensual mythically scientific magical party logic ...


She could never have learned to party this hard without you !


+ thanks Pia Johnson for the pics !


Please stay tuned for the next tangible nugget to get panned out of the deep south of Carols' mind ...


Crystal Diamond Sutra : Joule of Transcendental Parties


... it's about NRG


xx


CB aka CD aka CA aka CZA

THE RESIDENCY

I just did a Next Wave residency for one month at the Meat Market in Melbourne, in preparation for an art show about new beginnings, which is a topic that roams right up my alley and close to my heart. My team was Michael, Zoe and Matthew from Tape Projects. Ours ended up being a live interactive mini-series called Becoming Carol Brown. It finished on Sunday so I am just beginning to digest the experience. There were four other collectives too. Sadly though, we all got engulfed in our own creative bubbles and barely saw each other until the last week .

Here is a photo essay of the residency part.

Didn't the month fly by !