NO. 5

Recently I had a magical epic wig out I might tell you more about later. It involved a cocophany of wild sensations (including that of being a dolphin) and mechanical re-enaction of significant events from the past. In the morning I felt like I'd turned back into a baby, did a wee on the floor then accidentally took a bus to the beach in Williamstown instead of going to work at Handsome Steve's. There I dropped my phone into the sea, saw the sun turn into ocean and sparkle dust flying off everything and was pretty sure of my mad skills in the field of wizardry. Over the next few days I acted out (in my own small way) what seemed to me to be events from the future.

Right before it happened I filled up two pink journals which I entitled Showtime Synergy and just now have read an excerpt about synergistic thinking. Would you like to read it too?

Fifth chakra thinking adds a dimension of reason that transcends, yet includes, the holism of the fourth chakra. What now emerges is synergy--a word for situations in which the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. Once synergistic thinking is in gear, relationships among events or ideas are no longer proportional, nor are they additive; rather, they are seen as part of an emerging global order. Meaning no longer emerges from definition, but from interaction. Events are caused as much by a pull from the future as a push from the past. And the very act of playing the game has an unsettling way of changing the rules.

Like a rocket boost into high orbit. fifth-chakra thinking enables a person to mentally soar above any system of which he is a part. Once there, he contemplates the whole from a vantage point inaccessible to any component of the system. This allows him to devise ways to manipulate that system once he is back inside of it. From this panoramic view of reality, there is truth-seeing at a single glance. He places each idea alongside numerous others, envisioning how its truth or falsity influences the truth or falsity of the others. This whole-systems view broadens even the wide-angle perspective of the fourth chakra. It enables him to encompass a network of ideas and coordinate their relationships to achieve a specific purpose. He no longer interprets events in terms of his personal feelings about them, but in terms of where they fit into the grand scheme.

From Chapter 13 : Madness and Creative Genius

-- Healing the Split by John Nelson

To say sorry to Steve for not coming to work I gave him Tape Man Goes to Outer Space on CD, an original piece of The Manifestival and an R.D Laing book about how no-one is REALLY crazy are they? with a drawing about the special day I had inside the cover.

He was cool and decided not to fire me.

WEE-OO-WEE-OO-WE

Hi everyone. Today I'm starting a new life again. Being a Leo (cat sign) I find it difficult to stop starting new lives all the time. Also a tell-tale trait of practising party artists. This time I will be perched upon a hill overlooking one of my favourite bodies of water (the sea) with some of my favourite humans, all of whom have been aforementioned at this P * A * R * T * Y. So I'm majorly psyched.

To celebrate I will channel another of my favourite humans, Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) directly from his book Wampeters, Fomas & Granfalloons, a collection of essays and speeches and interviews and whatnot. This is about what writers, and artists in general, are doing here. From an interview in Playboy magazine :

PLAYBOY: Beyond the fact that it's become a profitable way to make a living, why do you write?

VONNEGUT: My motives are political. I agree with Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini that the writer should serve his society. I differ with dictators as to how writers should serve. Mainly, I think they should be - and biologically have to be - agents of change. For the better, we hope.

PLAYBOY: Biologically?

VONNEGUT: Writers are specialized cells in the social organism. They are evolutionary cells. Mankind is trying to become something else; it's experimenting with new ideas all the time. And writers are a means of introducing new ideas into the society, and also a means of responding symbolically to life. I don't think we're in control of what we do.

PLAYBOY: What is in control?

VONNEGUT: Mankinds wish to improve itself.

PLAYBOY: In a Darwinian sense?

VONNEGUT: I'm not very grateful to Darwin, although I suspect he was right. His ideas make people crueler. Darwinism says to them that people who get sick deserve to be sick, that people who are in trouble deserve to be in trouble. When anybody dies, cruel Darwinists imagine we are obviously improving ourselves in some way. And any man who's on top is there because he's a superior animal. That's the social Darwinism of the last century, and it continues to boom. But forget Darwin. 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.

BABIN'

Coco Solid is my fave NZ rapper and also my Number 1 Love-Life Confidante. We have been (knowingly) having mirror epifs since 2008 and both have funny feelings we are in for some cosmic collabs in future. Last weekend when I was in Auckland my other friend was going to a wedding so she dropped the kids off at nana's then me off at Coco's to stay the night. I got to meet her herb dealer and found out that the King of Herbs is in fact, Basil.

Here is a beautiful poem from her new mag PHILOSOFLYGIRL which you can order here. It brings a tear to my eyes.

HE AROHA PONO

The real elite are never elitist.
On my behalf only, I decline the matter they feed us.
Know my quest was relative to yours, to the grave from the fetus.
I own up to lost property, I am not a defeatist.

I know my own style. I live wise-awake to my taste.
Now silent beauty emerges at the extroverts wake.
I make proud but fragile moves within my own time.
My finest moments are my weakest, slain in existential recline.
Aroha pono can burst forth when vanity proves pointless to shine.

Not only yours, dynamic plights shift behind a trillion masks
I don't ask you to answer what I have asked.
You're not mine to solder to my clutch
But to be kept in circulation

And like warm zen minutes
I allow you to pass

DARK STARS ON JOHNSTON ST

If you are in Melbourne this weekend I highly recommend checking out FFM at the Old Bar, Saturday 12th of March from 9pm. For a measly $6. Rumour has it another sparkly star from a particularly hygienic band from NZ may be joining them. Is it all just HOT GOSSIP?

Nobody knows!

Here's a story I did for threethousand in its extended form :

It has come. The planets have aligned to bring Full Fucking Moon into clear view of the naked eye, this Saturday night, from the unlikely vantage point of The Old Bar dance floor. Joined by Satanic Rockers, The Jackals and Asps, NZ's genre-embracing cosmic trio radically fuse elements of many to create the sensational self-coined 'Shaggs of neolithic heavy metal disco'.

Uniting in a rare interstellar constellation, Droszkhi (Torben Tilly) and Riffkah (Bek Coogan) have washed ashore from a land rich in rainfall and boiling mud while Electric Bongo Bongo (Steve Heather) has beamed his way directly from efficient Berlin. With the express purpose of leading you on a sonic exploration into deep space.

In Melbourne touring their timeless 12" Still Life With Black Light, produced during a residency in Worpswede, Germany. An atmospheric vinyl disc that, when played right, hypnotically releases ethereal radiophonic mist, rising from a molten river of rumbling rocky riffs which, while dormant, lie housed within a series of concurrent circular grooves. Prolonged listening may awaken that age-old realisation that, solid as matter may seem, it is actually made up of a rhythmic myriad of jittery harmonic sparkles.

More than just a phase, FFM is sonic salve to the psychedelic senses.

WHAT BECAME OF THE O.G MANIFESTIVAL

In September last year I had my first official art show in Melbourne, The Manifestival, for party artists. Party generation is at the heart of any official punk document a party artist produces. We don't like to produce heaps because it's a waste of resources, so we tend to be very careful yet also tantalisingly loose about our usage and re-usage of materials. I zenly hand drew scores of fliers on the backs of envelopes and other half-used pieces of paper.

After I took it down I promptly crossed out the parts that had already changed and cut it into puzzle pieces to distribute as gifts. Here's a piece I gave to my main man at NZ Archives, Geordy Muir, when he picked me up from the airport.

PERPETUAL GENIES

Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(from Emerson's Transcendental Vocabulary by Mary Alice Ihrig)

COHESIVE HOLE

Remember how I harked back to my time in Spain a few weeks ago with some travel excerpts from the blue diaries? Well I left my notebook at the A1 internet joint that day and only just realised.
Lucky they still had it!

Here's some more :


















I'd been thinking of studying at university but have since realised being a rogue scholar is the life for a party artist. NRG is precious and money takes time to acquire, so why not take love-soaked lessons from your friends for free? (not necessarily in a kinky way)

One of my dead friends J.Krishnamurti said this to me from between the pages of The Flame of Attention in the library today :

One needs tremendous energy to meditate and friction is a wastage of energy. When in one's daily life there is a great deal of friction, of conflict between people, and dislike of the work which one does, there is a wastage of energy. And to enquire really most profoundly - not superficially, not verbally - one must go very deeply into oneself, into one's own mind and see why we live as we do, for meditation is the release of creative energy.

I was like "yip" but silently on account of being in the library.