Saturday, December 27, 2003

Christmas is done....the sky is grey....here I sit...far away......
The essay.....should I call it a thesis...sounds so adult.....is up to 12 000 words and holding together in semi-logical sequence (a good sign) have a few more weeks to finish it off. It is entilted:Chronotope and Cybertexts: Bakhtinian Theory for Tracing Sources of Narrative in Interactive Virtual Environments: From Naked Lunch to Fast City
sort of rolls off the tongue....No?
and then there is music....on the 24th of january I will be performng as a support freak for The Spacious Mind (Swe) and Black Forest Black Sea (USSA) as Psychedelic Digeridoo at the Lille Theatre here in Umea------- should be interesting......will be constructing a soundscape centred around recordings I made in India in 1996 along with didgeridoo, effects and perhaps mouth harp. From the 2nd-7th February 2004 I shall be playing with the band LIVJA at the 399th Jokkmokk Sámi Winter market in Lappland. That will be a good time....30 000 people coming togther in the pagan forests of the north of Sweden.
The future looks a bit uncertain at the moment as I am coming to the end of study and will have to look a bit harder if I am to find the Ph.D of my dreams...will begin applying everywhere in january...even Australia!!!!!!!!!
In the meantime there is a CD coming out to coincide with the Spacious Mind concert which I should get to work on now...See ya

Saturday, December 06, 2003

Yesterday I stopped for lunch sometime around midday...not sure with the sun abscent from our northern skies at the moment...Purchased a sandwich and beverage from the outlet and sat down near a window to consume......along came five local swedish flickor (girls)...ranging in age between 17 and 20 I'd say...chatting under the blonde locks....innocence in every eye...they sat around me en masse and continued the non-stop stream of bubbly chat....I tuned into the words...most enlightening...they were speaking about how good it is to eat horses....horse meat is delicious...grilled horse, can't get enough of the stuff.....I was raised with horses and between birth and the age of 18 I had pretty much daily contact with our equine kin and the thought of eating one frankly turns my stomach.....I equate it with eating my cousin... Nobody but the poorest vagabond eats horse in Australia....these chicks then turned to their planned activities for the evening and it was the general intention with bellies full of horse flesh to proceed to Kafé Blå Kök och Bar where they would find some meat to rub, nibble and suck on for the evening in the form of boys.....these are the days of our lives......Jim

Friday, December 05, 2003

The Blogging revolution continues and with the growth (strange metaphor) of MoBlogging (Mobile Web Logging) I am formulating a plan for next year......I will not reveal it here but it could be a winner as the used to say on wheel of fortune (has anyone seen the fine Australian film Angel Baby...the wheel is sending messages...... The purpose of this occaisional entry.....due to the complete madness of my schedule at the moment (every time I sit next to a computer I have something to do..Charlie Don't Surf)....is to attach the three cybertexts I am using (and recomending) in my thesis for this term.....and here they are:
1. The Body Politic by Jennifer Ley
2. Fidgit by Kenneth Goldsmith and Clem Paulsen
3. Fast City by Don Boscoe

All will be revealed in this department by the middle of jan 2004...back to work you swine....AAAHHHHHHHHH

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

How long has it been? It seems like evey time I sit down to stare into the magick window there is something already crawling from the back of my withered mind to DO AND SO I DO.....The university merry-go-round is getting a bit faster...The job I have managed to obtain is deadly as was said back in the great brown land (Orstralia) where I am teaching myself Adobe Atmosphere Builder, building a structure based on Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and the Allahambra in Granada (a hybrid you might say but fantastic architecture: NOT ENOUGH CURVES IN THE BULIDINGS OF TODAY...AND INDOOR FOUNTAINS...) AND GETTING PAID (HOPEFULLY )...
I have'nt relly got a topic for today, I just wanted to spread some text...Perhaps a poem from the dusty notebook:

The Origin of Clouds

Paradise
Is closed for renovations.

Cling to woodsmoke, chipped stones, greenery
How far away can nature be?

Light fires out in the bush on weekends
Hang these moments about my person at work.

The mountains my crown robes of snow
landscape forming as parade in mind.

Lay aside the feast so as to see
The wonderous beauty of the ancient table.

Swollow air against the starvation,
watching a season masquarade as summer.

Streams rivers caves
I lick smooth the roughest of her parts.

As a basis for a theory of perception
Reality rates only as a borderland between;

The knowing gift
The assumed space
A waiting table
The space in line......

June 2003

It was written in the summer when I was working in a public health care facility and wishing I was elsewhere.....I miss living in the bush, but the toys I play with now are kind of fun..and since the eucalyptus forests have been around for few hundred thousand years, they can wait a few years more for me to be back in them (thats if Harris Daishawa Timber mills have'nt trashed them completely first)............Om Gaia dudes...........Jimmi



Friday, October 10, 2003

Todays topic is The Rave as Immersive Experience


I have been reading reading reading....some good stuff and some great...all concerning this digital narrative construction. Trying to pin down the differences from literature, the similarities and where it all might be going. I was sitting in the library today reading this book when a thought errupted from somewhere concerning Immersion: the entry and pressence in a created enviroment to the point of complete or near complete acceptance by the perceptual mind of it as reality. This applies well to the 3D vitual interactive worlds of games, avatar and role playing situations. It could also be applied to installation and perfomance art, which is where I first experienced it. It could also be applied to Rave.......

My first Rave was a Vibe Tribe three day extravaganza on the banks of the Hawkesbury River near St Albans north of Sydney Australia in 1993. I felt like I had come across something that had been like nothing else in my life up to that point. Compared to most of the 1000 odd others at this bush vision of Mad Max meets The Feary Qween I was straight as an arrow. However I was undoubtedly immersed in the world of bizzare sculptures, lights, costumes, behavoirs and music that had my blood jumping.

My last rave experience (location an lifesyle hae changed) was the New Years Eve 1999-2000 Bedlam Rave with 5000 on the beach near Byron Bay ( a lightning storm off the coast and hundreds of tens and flags blowing in the warm breeze. it looked like it was 1000BC rather than the beginning of 2000). In between these two points I have attended dozens of these freezones of other worldliness. Some of course have not been as good as others, but there is the memories of the best that compels one to such activities as spending 8 hours in a VW Kombi driving around Sydney chasing a Rave that was being chased by the police, only to finish up at sunrise listening to a car stereo in a carpark with half a dozen other unhappy questers. Some of the best have been many city and bush raves in Oz (Golden Ox Redfern 1993-1996, Toonenbah Trance Fest in 1995 was one ), Three squat parties in London in 1997 which were unreal (one in Mile End was 7000 dancing in a 9 floor occupied highrise, each floor had it's own soundsystem), and then a year of parties in Amsterdam amoung the squats and abandoned factories (the Belgian Embassy was squatted as the ELF (Eternal Light Family) house with 100 occupants when I was there and they had parties almost every week, finally the besieged feeling of Docklands in Stockholm (one party only but not bad...apart from the savage police pressence). Which brings me to my next point;

Clearly there is some connection between drug culture and Rave, but no more than at a pub. In fact in a pub 99.9% of the occupants are for certain wasted. At a Rave there are many who are simply beyond the drug experience and instead they are immersed in an enviroment that cannot be described but only experinced (of course it is not everyone's cup of tea as it can be quite disorientating to those who are not familiar with it, just as a VR helmet can be to begin with). Those who damage themselves at Raves are those who are illinformed and often young (more the tragedy I suppose)...there out of curiosity, often their ignorance is exploited by those who do not care for the welfare of others. These are in a clear minority at the parties I have been at where most people know exactly what they are doing and are there to change their reality for 12, 15 or 20 hours. they release something within them that is not new to humanity as once huge groups gathered to dance in trance and remake themselves.

"If you look around you what do you see....squares...everywhere squares" (from Lucky People Centre International 1998). People living in their boxes, watching each other on the bus, avoiding touching each other in the shopping ques. However everybody is trying in one way or another to get out of themselves. Whether it is with money (popular choice), knowledge, power, objects, family, love, sex, food, work...etc.etc.etc....or in other words: Immersion
"a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a physiological immersive experience what we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all our attention,our whole perceptual apparatus." Janet H Murray Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace p98.

So then I was wondering about rave as immersion and why it is not tolerated and why other forms of immersion are allowed, even encouraged.....and then...***##^^^^..It is not representational...it's real.....it's real immersion and anything that is real can be dangerous, even revolutionary.

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

"Justice Kirby said most lawyers opposed the death penalty because the law was fallible, the death penalty had an insignificant impact on murder rates, and it brutalised the state that carried it out. "When we deny [fundamental human rights] we diminish ourselves. We become part of the violence world,". Sydney Morning Herald Tuesday 7th October.

A Judge from the High Court of Australia spoke yesterday about the implications of the death penalty sentences given to those Indonesian citizens convicted for the Bali bombings a year ago. Apparentely 56% of Australians support the death penalty for acts of 'terrorism' (What that word actually means today is another issue). It seems a spiral of violence is developing in many parts of the world today where the cause and effect are being lumped together in a blurred sequence of reaction and manipulated emotions. I read a list of the names of those Australians killed in the Sari Club and Paddy's Bar bombings (88 of them) and it was pretty shocking to see the names of places I have been as being the home towns and suburbs of those murdered. My sister is married to an Indonesian and he was on his way to the Sari club when he was delayed and avoided the bombing. My sister had only left Bali the day before. That the proximity of this violent act has stunned so many so much shows just how insulated we are to the motivations which drive those who do such things. Yesterday a 29 year old female lawyer blew herself up in a restaurant in Hiafa (home of a friend of mine also), killing herself and 19 others, wounding many. The restaurant was owned by Arab Israelies. This violence is not going away, they are not the acts of insane people, as violence builds on both sides (those of the public- military, judicial, civil authorities- and those of the non-public- 'terrorists'- spheres) it becomes more and more a viable choice to contribute towards the growing economy of violence.
Mahatma Ghandi said that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind............Even in the land of his birth the bombs explode in shopping centres, religious halls and bus stations............As a techno tune I encountered a long time ago burned into my affected brain (summer 1993-4) "A Great man once said love your enemies....Do good to those who curse you...Be kind to those who hate you......" Got any E's??????
Speaking of which congratulations goes to Australia; named by the United Nations 2003 global report into AFS (Amphetamine-Type Substances) as the worlds number one consumer of MDMA and MDA , with a decent 2.9% of the population admitting to researchers to having taken the drug......It produces sensations of empathy and extream emotional bonding, so I've been told...perhaps someone should think about flooding the occupied territories, West Bank, and Gaza Strip with disco biscuits..You know the score!!!!!

Wednesday, October 01, 2003

Where the hell am I----------Ahh yes October 1 2003 (orientated to time), in the north of Sweden (orientated to place) and someone has killed the foreign minister (seems orientated).....That was a while ago but since then there has been little time to do anything other than work work work....all is going well ( for me that is, not for the investigation surrounding the murder of Anna Lindh). I have got a paid position at the university building a virtual world for the computer lab I am working in as part of my term paper. The new computer is buzzing along and I have started conducting experimants in sound with it......The reaserch for my term paper is humming along faster than a lizard in a blender and my family is well and beautiful. Will post something literary here for the masses....I know the paper I wrote as part of the installation at Umea University:
Didgeridoo as Compass. Maps in Sound.
Homage to the Spirit Maps of the Australian Aborigines


“There are many sacred stories here. I am telling you all this correctly, so that you will be able to pass this on. We also belong to the country just along the north side, which is the wind dreaming, which came this way from Watiyajirri. The dreaming which we find here, the wind dreaming has its home just in the south and it came here from Watiyajirri. It blew across in here along the north side from Wangkapurlawarnu. Yes. If you had been here yesterday you would have heard some of this. It really belongs to the Warrumungu and Warnmanpa people.”
Jimmy Jungarrayi
Senior traditional owner of the budgerigar dreaming at Patilirri (1990)

My role here is as vehicle. I am not Aboriginal and I do not seek legitimation through explanation of contacts or my unfolding and displaying the sense of respect I have for this culture and people (although perhaps obvious). Rather I have stumbled upon some features of a culture and the knowledge contained within, which seem to make tremendous sense (like many of my generation in Australia, all born after the referendum for Aboriginal citizenship in 1967) particularly if viewed in the context of contemporary society in the Australian continent. A land of fragile ecosystems and hybrid cultures, where the movement from a complex of nomadic hunter-gatherer inter-linked societies to a capitalist resource based economy has taken much less than the 215 years of European occupation. In this time the rainforest has been reduced to 1% of its pre-European settlement coverage, salinisation threatens 12 million hectares of Australian land, and our rate of mammal extinction is the worst in the world. This is but a glimpse of the situation, but it can be so when viewing a microcosm.
I believe if there is to be a general adaptation of sustainable development in the western world, a consideration for landmass as more than a source of wealth must be developed. This can be achieved through an emotional awareness of place, or ‘country’ as Aboriginal people call it, a feeling for the land. A conception of Self as related to topography beyond the political and the national, or as Felix Guattari wrote;

“Every individual and social group conveys its own system of modelising subjectivity: that is, a certain cartography- composed of cognitive references- with which it positions itself in relation to its affects and anguishes, and attempts to manage its inhibitions and drives” (1).

The map can thereby be a tool for change in a world held fast in the grip of progress, the promise of the gain in spite of the drain. It was Captain Charles Marlow who was one among many (my great great Grandfather was another) who wanted to fill the spaces that had actually already been filled 60 000 years before in Australia, as he confessed:

“When I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all looked like that) I would put my finger on it….” (2).

So the filling up of space for one group became the emptying for another. However there has been much survival, although of the over 300 Aboriginal languages thought to have existed before white settlement in 1788 only about 80 remain today. What has survived of culture I cannot be holder of, except by invitation. This has come in my experience with kindness and willingness to explain and teach, but I have also met fast words of hostility, and occasional violence. This I can also understand for the crimes have been many.
‘Didgeridoo’ or ‘Didjeridu’ is an Euro-Australian name for an extremely ancient (as in older than imperial Rome, Hellenistic Greece, Lascaux) wind instrument traditionally found in the central northern part of Australia. The most common Aboriginal name for it comes from the Yolngu people of north east Arnhem Land, and this is Yidaki. In Yolngu society it is a sacred instrument, as Aboriginal elder and Australian rock star Mandawuy Yunupingu, from the band Yothu Yindi explains:

“Be aware, however that its origins are sacred and secret to Yolngu men. These stories cannot be told here, can only be shared with initiated men. The Yidaki is a male-orientated instrument. In Yolngu society women are forbidden are forbidden to play it as its origins are sacred to men” (3).

This female ban is not common to all groups that use the Didgeridoo as a ceremonial instrument, however the stories and histories connected to the dreamings are always recognised as a sacred and are secret to the uninitiated. One of the Didgeridoos in this instillation was cut and shaped by women from Doomadgee community and painted by a young male Aboriginal artist. The Didgeridoo is consistent with all aspects of traditional Aboriginal culture in having an established context supporting it, these include song cycles, which are largely fixed and relate to stories of country (again a device of cognitive mapping). Today the Didgeridoo has also been removed from its original context and has found contexts in what is often referred to as New Age and Alternative Lifestyle discourses (4). It is also used in jazz, fusion, dance and world music. With thousands of players in the United Kingdom it could be seen as a musical example of the ‘Empire Writes Back’. It is a cultural export that comes from a culture still struggling with those who appropriate it. As a fifth generation white Australian I am in some ways connected to the history of the Aboriginal people and in some ways far removed from it. My attachment to the Didgeridoo and feeling for the struggle of the Aboriginal people is part of this.
What has survived of Aboriginal (Koori, Murri, Yapa as they call themselves depending from where in Australia they come from) tradition and that has grown strong today can be found in a huge treasure house of cultural practice taking the forms of dance, song, poetry, painting, carving, weaving, music, writing, and perhaps above all a caring and emotion for the sustainability of living/liveable land. The narrative knowledge interwoven, often through several of these practices simultaneously, is the frame upon which the forms are hung. This provides information on who the individual is which has these stories/dances /markings/images passed on to them, how they are to move through and interact with the land that has been left for them (not “to” but “for”), at what times of the season are certain rituals to be performed at certain places, what foods can be gathered at what times by whom, which groups are suitable as sources for partners and what lands can be custodial to their offspring. In short a three dimensional map in sound, vision, and space, which lies at the centre of culture and self- identity, which is really all the same thing in the case of traditional culture.
It was an intricate system that suffered badly under the colonial and carceral administration of early white settlement. In contemporary terms according to the 1996 census there are 386 049 Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people in Australia and its territories. Aboriginal people currently have a life expectancy equivalent to those found in the general Australian population back in 1901(5).




1. Felix Guattari “Chaosmis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm” Trans. Paul Bains & Julian Pefanis, Indiana University Press 1992
2. Joseph Conrad “Heart of Darkness” Penguin Popular Classics London 1994
3. Mandawuy Yunupingu from “The Didjeridu: From Arnhem Land to Internet” Ed. Karl Neuenfeldt John Libbey & Co Sydney 1997 p.vii
4. For more on the past present and future of the Didgeridoo see Karl Neuenfeldt’s detailed and respectful text.
For a detailed report on the shameful condition of Aboriginal health and welfare today (2001) see: http://www.aihw.gov.au/publications/ihw/hwaatsip01/hwaatsip01.pdf

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

It is here. I have left behind me the clockwork computer. With speed the pages come fast and without the whirl and gig of driving cogs and shaking fan. The new compter sits black and slick on the table and awaits my informed use (this could take a while to come to).
This week has been busy with two performances by me of an installation piece at the University here which went over really well. The first peformance was part of a conference on Dynamic maps which was attended by a small but brilliant group of speakers. The second performance was a public spectacle and was attended by perhaps 40 or 50 people...quite a surprise. I will begin working on a CD ROM presentation or a DVD perhaps and then get it out somehow, perhaps a new website. Time will see. Now it is back to the mundane world of reading theory and digesting text...not such a bad one to earn a living I supose. Listening to
Yoga: Monroe Institute Transcendent Hemispheric Music (brain entrainment sounds...quite trippy)
Throbbing Gristle: Do as you Think Not as You are Told (a sort of deprogramming sequence for the hardcore)
The Birthday Party: Deep In The Woods (Brecht is not dead!!!)
Will write more soon...........chai om sap ta blah bla bllllllllllll Jim

Friday, September 05, 2003

Getting ready for the new computer I have been going though the files on the current machine and found this essay from the beginning of 2002 and thought it would be fine just here;

In 1995 I was living in Sydney, Australia in a suburb which was home to many Aborigines or Koories, the indigenous people of Australia. Called Redfern, it was centred on an area known as “The Block”, a crowded jumble of houses and old factories where around 1000 Aboriginal people lived on land that was returned to them by the Australian Government in 1973. Despite having grown up in Australia this was, at the age of 26, my first exposure to large-scale Aboriginal culture.
I was fascinated by the stories and struggles of the Aboriginal people and after a short time of living in Redfern I wanted to learn to play their long flute-like instrument from the far north of Australia. Most people call it a Didjeridu, but that is a European interpretation of the name based on the sound the instrument makes. The Aboriginal people call it by several names, some being Yiraka or Yidaki ( trachea), Artawirr (hollow log), and Ngaribi (bamboo).
My first Didjeridu was a copper pipe, played a bit like a trumpet, but with a small enough aperture to make it easier to circular breath, as is needed to play Didjeridu. Shortly after this a friend of mine who lived in an isolated Aboriginal community in the far north of Australia sent me a Didjeridu. This instrument I played for a year, until I had the opportunity to leave Australia and travel as a near destitute backpacker. When I arrived in England in 1997 an English friend gave me his Didjeridu as he was about to go to Australia and could not carry the heavy instrument with him. So I was now broke and in Europe with a Didjeridu. I began playing on the streets as a busker, earning enough money to survive and stayed in Europe for 18 months, meeting up again (we first met in India in 1996) with the girl who I would eventually marry, have a child and settle in Umeå with.
I lived as a street musician in Amsterdam for most of 1998, and have played at cafes and festivals in Spain, Holland, Germany, Sweden and Belgium. I have been on television in Holland, Germany, and Sweden. My most recent achievement was playing at the 397th Saami Winter Market in Jokkmokk, from the 7th to 9th of February 2002 where I was part of a group of Saami, Inuit, and Swedish musicians whose performance was recorded by Finnish radio. Playing the Didjeridu has given me many opportunities to meet people. There is much interest in the instrument and the ancient culture it represents. The Didjeridu is more than just an instrument for me, as it has a presence that is difficult to describe without using spiritual terminology. The breathing technique and the hypnotic tones it produces have a highly meditative effect on myself and often on those who listen.
The Didjeridu has become identified with what is labelled The New Age. I think of myself as coming from a culture which is described in the book “The Didjeridu: From Arnhem Land to Internet” , as alternative lifestylers’ whose “model society is based on four essential elements; firstly holism of experience, secondly community with it’s qualities of interrelatedness and co-operation, thirdly ecology, with its sustainable ethos and fourthly, a creative spiritual milieu.” (Neuenfeldt et.al. p140). It goes on to say that it is the rejection of materialism by alternative lifestylers’ which separates us from the New Age movement, which “has become in many cases a highly commercialised and profit making industry” (ibid.).



Bibliography:
Neuenfeldt Karl (Ed.) The Didjeridu: From Arnhem Land to Internet John Libbey Publishers. Sydney. 1997

Sunday, August 31, 2003

It has been a while.........My summer has been spent in a locked psychiatric ward....I was working not receiving what passes for treatment these days........ vowed i would not go back into the machine and worked again as one of the administers of right thought and behaviour back in 1991 after experiencing some alternate views on reality in India. BUT this money addiction is getting our of hand......so I NEED the new computer....so I work...so I go back to the machine and take the cash (whore that I am)..........I hope to buy the new 80 Gigs next week.........YIIIPPPY-
The summer has also been one of reading: several novels of the type favoured by English departments as friendly to analysis...all set texts (Joyce, Hardy, Conrad ).......a Rimbaud bigraphy (for pure enjoyment)....a book by a well meaning outsider on the didgeridoo. "Afterlife Before Genesis. An Introduction: Accessing the Eternal through Australian Aboriginal Music" by David H Turner; like reading a book on sex written by a boyscout but some interesting information none the less (e.g. It becomes impossible to play the didgeridoo/Yidaki when one looses all ones teeth)........the surprise of the summer was "Orientalism" by Edward W Said; an impressive piece of work although his arguments at time serve his prejudices, overall it was a stunning essay with so much accurate and, as we have seen lately, prophetic content. Reading the account of Napoleon's 1794 invasion of Egypt seemed to contain dialogue from George W Bush's explanations regarding why he is committed to slaughter in Iraq 2003 (something to do with civilisation and democracy).......Then there has been Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Lyotard (great stuff from Jean-Francois) and Bakhtin.............for musik there is the new sounds of Jewelled Antler Collective a joyous collage of sound and tune which draws one into other places and other states (search them out as well as Blithe Sons and others as sub-parts of the collective whole). Also the skills of Yamataka eYe as DJ...the lead shaman with Japanese outfit Boredoms turns disks and creates sounds which should not be listened to while driving or opperating machinery...a bootleg "Live at The Metro Kyoto Japan 25 March 2001" is an excercise in transcendence.....There is also Polish group Atman, although difficult to find their records it is worth is...try "Personal Forest".
Tomorrow is the first day of term and after 3 month in psych wards I long for the gentle atmosphere of university......the spirit of enquiry...the well stocked library...the pretty young things and the long lunches....oh academia......I return to your sombulent arms.
All is well. It is going to be a killer of a term with an installation performance planned by yours truly on the 18th September in the HUMlab computer lab as part of a conference on Dynamic Maps . My contribution is entittled "Didgeridoo as Compass. Maps in Sound. Homage to the Spirit Maps of the Australian Aborigines"

Oh by the way if anyone wants to sponser a film documentary on the Kumba Mela in India in April-May next year (12 million expected including 5 million Sadhus) contact me at the above email link............Love and Kaos.............Jim

Thursday, May 29, 2003

So it's almost friday and I am working like a bastard, as we say back home.......This could be the last entry before the end of this "special project" which has become a major piece of work over the last two months (around 12000 words)....here is the essay as promised on The Dialogic Nature of David Malouf's Novel An Imaginary Life (1978):

The Novel is described through the work of Russian figure Mikhail Bakhtin as “meta-language of the highest order” and therefore “merits special attention” (Gardiner 1992 p40). Meta-language is the means by which the language of the novel re-presents all the languages of a particular context, be it social, historical, political, or otherwise. In the case of An Imaginary Life each chronotopic construct can be seen as articulated on three levels: character, place and ideology. Each combination represents a voice within the narrative. Applying this method in combination with post-colonial and post-modern discourses reveals much of the narrative intent of An Imaginary Life.
The central voice of the novel is the narrator, a fictional reconstruction of the Roman poet Ovid. There has been debate concerning the historical accuracy of Malouf’s character, however according to Morton “the novel does follow Ovid’s years at Tomis insofar as chronology” (Morton, 2000 p2), if not in overall fact. As chronotope we can understand Ovid as articulating place (Rome) and ideology (exile). Apart from the memory sequences of Ovid’s former life as a Roman patrician and the leaving of Tomis for the steppes north of the Danube, the entire text places the character in the “desolate”, “frozen”, “simple”, “muddy”, “terrible beyond description”, “nothing”, and “relatively savage” (to list but a few descriptions) context which is Tomis and its immediate surroundings. This is the second voice of the narrative and can be seen as personified in the character Ryzak and with the ideology as colonialism. The dialogue between the exiled Ovid and various features of his place of exile (characters, practices, languages, the body etc.) is a dialogue between ‘self’ and ‘other’. The third voice I have identified is The Child whose place is the forest (nature) and ideology can be interpreted as the (Lacanian) Real, in that “the real is all fullness and completeness, where there’s no need that can’t be satisfied. And because there is no absence or loss or lack, there is no language in the Real” (Klages, 2001 p2). The fourth voice is that represented by the characters of the Old Woman and the Shaman whose space is the graves and sacred groves and with ideology resting mid point between all others, as a transcendent principle. The final chronotopic voice is the non-defined space of the steppes, which Ovid and The Child move into as if in a dream. There are no characters representative of this chronotope as there is also no speech actually articulated (instead a “conversation which needs no tongue” Malouf 1990, p145) when Ovid and The Child move into it. The ideology is of absolute ‘other’, beyond the known and the lingual. Morton describes the movement into this space without time or language as “a mystical absorption into nature” (Morton, 2000 p1) which is consistent with a post-colonial reading of the text (displacement, struggle, surrender). This could also be applied to the attainment of the Lacanian Real, which would clarify the final sentence of the text: “I am there.” (Malouf, 1990 p 152). As Ovid leaves culture behind he regains “the state of ‘nature’ which has to be broken for culture to be formed” (Klages, 2001 p2).
It is clear that the character Ovid is undergoing mystical experience, challenging concepts of self and with language as central to the process. The Child in the Lacanian Pre-Mirror Stage, has not distinguished between seen, see, and seeing (“I am raining, I am thundering” Malouf, 1990 p96) but however does not accept the language which is offered to him. This is an element of the struggle between the five voices of the text, which follows the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies of languages as identified by Bakhtin. The ideologies of Exile, Colonialism, Real, Transcendence, and Absolute Other struggle with and against one another over meaning as articulated in the on-going dialogue between ‘self’, ‘reality’, and ‘other’. According to Bakhtin this should not be thought of a development with a beginning, middle and end but rather an infinite process existing on all levels of reality.
An Imaginary Life is a text written by a first generation Australian in the late 1970’s. This real-life chronotope of “a stranger in a strange land” coupled with the ideologies described above compels consideration of post-colonial imperialist language and power relations. “One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language…..Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of 'truth', 'order', and 'reality' become established.” (Ashcroft et al, 1989 P2). In An Imaginary Life the exiled imperial poet Ovid is overcome by the centrifugal forces acting upon his concept of Roman self. Instead of the natives being civilised, the pinnacle of civilisation becomes the student of a wolf boy(“he leads me into his consciousness” Malouf, 1990 P94). The hierarchical structure is not only disturbed it is totally inverted, with those witnessing the inversion being unaware of it. The Shaman and the Old Woman maintain the power hierarchy in Tomis and Ovid dissolves in the gap between ‘the other’ and ‘the self’. He finds that “the ideological becoming of a human being….is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others…One can return to one’s own ideological horizon and situate oneself socially, temporally, and spatially in relation to other subjects in the social world. The other, therefor exists in a dialectical relation to one’s own consciousness as both subject and object, and is therefore an inseparable component of our being in the world.” (Gardiner, 1992, p39). With Ovid entering the consciousness of The Child, ‘the other’ ceases to exist, and as a result so does his own ‘self’.

Hope it is all good for all..........Om Gaia dudes!



Bibliography:
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989)

Michael Gardiner The Dialogics of Critique (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)

Dr Mary Klages Jacques Lacan at
http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/lacan.html 2001

David Malouf An Imaginary Life (London: Picador, 1990)

Peter Morton Evasive Precision: Problems of Historicity in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life at
http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/english/Victorians/An-Imaginary_Life.html 2000





Monday, May 12, 2003

The screen bleeds again.....I have been writing for the last week or two about Stonehenge, New Age and the travellers who populate it...a tour of the strange and the stranger....but it's better than working in a factory. I won't reveal anything here as the grand unveiling of this project happens 4th June in Active Worlds (Free download).
On a lighter note I was yelled at today by a rough looking man who was cycling towards me as I was cycling home this afternoon. He seemed upset that I was riding on the left hand side of the rather crowded cycle and walking path between my abode and university. He stopped and recognised me as a foreigner in the pale blue eyed land of Sweden I think as he reminded me that sweden has had right hand drive since the 1960's and where did I think I was living? I responded by asking him in Swedish if it was his job to ensure the steady flow of traffic through the little woods between Alidhem and the University and he was suprised by my cocky nature in the face of such an obvious piece of blatant non-conforming lunacy on my part (the rebel that I am). He simple replied with "Ohh snalla" or "oh please come on" an apeal to my citizens solidarity perhaps...not something which I have much of not being a citizen (next year I can apply). Meanwhile we are dealing with a strike at daycare and in the employment section of the local authority (no summer job till they come back to work), electricity bills which defy imagination, expensive fruit that is 5 days old by the time you buy it, and a drivers licence costing at least $US100. Not all is that bad (this is turning into a whinge session) as University is free, the air is clean, the summer is here, the women are pretty, future opportunities exist, music is everywhere, I can listen again to Art Ensemble of Chicago, on and on it goes..........till next time

Sunday, April 27, 2003

Something I have been thinking about these last few days has been the concept of privacy........I come from a country where privacy means not being able to see your neighbours house when you are standing naked on the roof of your own house. That was Australia.....this is Sweden where the concept of privacy is defined by how thick the walls are between your own and the four other flats which surround yours in the block you and your family live in with 50 other families........From this personal zone extends outwards hundreds of defining moments of what privacy actually is in Sweden.....when you go to an office here for any sort of contact with authority/expertise/bureaucracy (and these points of contact are everywhere) people do not ask you your name, only you number.....from this EVERYTHING can be learnt about you. In Australia there is an illusion that because we do not have identity cards or numbers we are somehow annonomous...this is bullshit.....people at offices in Australia ask your name , address etc etc. because they want you to believe some frontier myth that maintains consistency in the social fabric of "Orstralia".......In Sweden it is generally acknowledged that it is a collective state of affairs that maintains the fabric of society and no one individual should rise above another (this is another myth in a country that has a completely idle monarchy and some of the richest business executives in Europe). In the case of Australia, in the words of my sister who works for them; "we are the government love, we can find out everything about you..".
Both these privacy myths are useful control mechanisms, each approaching the same selfish little citizen from opposite directions, and each like all myths have elements of truth at their bases. However at the centre of both is the idea that we are all in this together, even if the man in the rags on the train platform hassling you for small change is really annoying you....he is also conforming to the same principles you are (desire for money being a central one). The design and format of your living space and that of the objects you fill it with are also compliant with these principles, they go beyond any formations we have of privacy as they have been produced, marketed and sold to us by people we have and never will meet but we are living with their ideas in concrete form.....
Here endeth the lesson.......brother and sisters let us now say a prayer for whoever it is that the powers of democracy decide to liberate next ("we got 9500 kilos of democracy in this B52 boy") and that food is getting to the children of Iraq

Saturday, April 26, 2003

One more very important website I forgot: MINE; http://www.geocities.com/soundheartocean
This is an advertisement, half in swedish and half in english for one of the bands I make sound with.....it is a good one....I am experimenting with this link thing as I have not yet managed to get it to work yet....we shall see.

Total Groove is a musical collective with members from Morocco, Senegal, Sweden, Australia, and Haiti. A powerful rhythm with Djembe, Didgeridoo, Doumbek, Congas, DJ beats and the voices and chants of West Africa. Based in the North East of Sweden, they are interested in spreading the groove of world electronic organic beats.

Den här är gruppen, med kontakter och detaljer:
http://www.funkservice.com/totalgroove/

Har är Bonus M Diallo’s webbsida, han är en jätteviktig del av Total Groove:
http://hem.passagen.se/rythm_dance/
Här är hemsidan för Funkservice Musikkollektiv, vilket Total Groove är en del av. Det finns en Mp3 där (”Sydney City Rain”) som vi har gjort i studion (utan Bonus och Simon – men det ger en ide om hur vi låter):
http://www.funkservice.com/

Vi har våran egen ljudanläggning. Medlemmarna bor i Skellefteå, Umeå och Sundsvall. Om ni delar ett intresse i gruppen kan du kontakta Adil Fardi genom totalgroove-webbsidan.

Saturday, April 12, 2003

Museum as Trope in 'Truth and Bright Water' by Thomas King

Keeping it Reel(ing)...What's it been......a week or two? The words have been flying thick and fast passed my head this week. The Project is underway. Mikhail Michajlovich Bakhtin rocks my world at the moment. To think that the world has come........to this: "unfinshed becoming" it is Bakhtin but it could be the Venerable Milerepa. Perhaps there is hope for the world after all.....not of course if you judge by the images articulated from the idiot eye: TV. (Drug of a nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation). Perhaps it's time for an insert: An essay submitted recently to my sponsor, Umeå University on the magical articulation which is Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King:

“More to a story than just words.”
Thomas King

Instead of approaching this in a purely analytical sense and providing definitions and evidence I will attempt to keep with the spirit of the work and weave a series of connections based around the trope . By this I mean that there are identifiable themes that are consistent with my reading of the as trope. Among them, the didactic nature of the majority of the narrative, the “oral tradition” which is reflected in the dominance of conversational dialogue, attention to family and communal relations, and intertextuality from Indian History, all provide resistance to what could be termed ‘the traditional museum discourse’. Within the novel binary relations are pivotal to narrative. Characters, locations and historical events are juxtaposed in contrasting pairs (e.g. Tecumseh and Lum, Truth and Bright Water, Elvin and Franklin), and this applies to the trope.

In Truth and Bright Water the museum is figurative in a number of ways when we consider its primary functions in terms of: collecting preserving categorising re/presenting The largest (in terms of physical size) manifestation matching these criteria is the reservation itself. This is especially true when considered in relation to the “Indian Days” festival, which is described and planned throughout the novel. Those within and outside the ‘living museum’ manipulate the boundaries implicit in being ‘Indian’, where they apply and how they are manifest. “Everybody’s going crazy over traditional Indian stuff. I figure I can sell these for fifty bucks as fast as I can make them.” (King, P32), claims Elvin, who later states “Boy these days Indians are everywhere.” (King, P231). ‘Indian’ is a brand name, artefacts become commodities and if they are purchased in combination with a tourist experience they become even more ‘authentic’. However, despite a consistent appearance as a money orientated provider of Indian kitsch, he also realises boundaries saying, “What the hell do they expect?”…“It ain’t Disneyland.” (King, P234). The line between the appearance and the content is the boundary framing the . This is articulated in the objectification of the camera gaze; “All of the photographs were panoramas, landscapes, the sort of thing that you would expect tourists to take. But the neat thing was that everything in the distance, the rivers, the mountains, the clouds, the prairies, was slightly blurry and out of focus, while everything in the foreground, the steering wheel, the windshield wipers, the hood, was crisp and sharp.” (King, P155).

In contrast to the reservation the smallest manifestation matching the above criteria is the quilt of Tecumseh’s mother. “The geometric forms slowly softened and turned into freehand patterns that looked a lot like trees and mountains and people and animals, and before long my father said you could see Truth in one corner of the quilt and Bright Water in the other with the Shield flowing through the fabrics in tiny diamonds and fancy stitching.” (King, P61). Along with the collected artefacts (chicken feet and hair among them) the quilt forms a creative history/mythology (begun just after when Tecumseh was born) in the form of a museum of symbols. It is dangerous with razor blades, needles, and fish hooks attached but “it looked as if you’d be safe enough as long as you were under the quilt and were not moving around on the outside, trying to get in.” (King, P62). This is free of the camera gaze, but it is, like the reservation it depicts, a delineated construct, with an inside and an outside. This avoids the objectification of the museum culture as the antithesis of social solidarity where human beings are transformed into artifacts or actors in the living museum, the subjects of the tourist camera gaze. This is a family or communal artifact, with characters speculating on the meaning of symbols and features changing to mirror the changing narrative.

The confluence of the trope, as juxtaposed in the two above examples is crossed over by Monroe Swimmer. He first hints at subversion with a rhetorical question “You know what they keep in museums?” and the answer given, “Old stuff from the past?” is just “what they want you to think.” (King, P133). He begins with the restoration of the ‘living museum’, the reservation, by the rubbing out of the church and the return of buffalo. He further challenges the museum discourse by restoring bones of Indian children to “the centre of the universe” (King, p251) from “the drawers and boxes and stuck away on dusty shelves.” (King, p250). The climax of the text is Monroe Swimmer’s potlatch (1.) in an oppositional binary to the plunder of the traditional museum, as described through the stories of Monroe Swimmer. "The theory of the gift is a theory of social solidarity. Through gift giving social bonds are created, individuals are joined, sharing with each other the back and forth of the social power that is associated with the gifts exchanged. It places the individual into a structure of total services” (2.) This placing of individuals into structure is consistent with the (restored or communal) trope as illustrated by the quilt, the return of the Indian children’s bones, and the “Indian village slowly coming up through the layers of paint. Clear as day.” (King, p129) in what could be called Monroe’s ‘Smithsonian Parable’.

1.Potlatch: (Chinook jargon, from Nootka, patshatl: giving], a ceremonial feast of the Indians of the Northwest coast marked by the host's lavish distribution of gifts requiring reciprocation Source: Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary)

2. David L. R. Kosalka Georges Bataille and the Notion of Gift 12/99 at http://www.lemmingland.com/bataille.html


Bibliography:
Thomas King Truth and Bright Water (New York: Grove Press, 1999)

Thursday, March 27, 2003

Poets of the Street

There is a group of alcoholics which sit outside our local supermarket centre (not that you could really call it a SUPERmarket) and one of them looks just like David Koresh, the religious minded individual who lead his follows in a FDA standoff in Waco a few years back. Resulted in the barbequeing of something like 80 people.......What is Koresh doing living as a homeless alcoholic in northern Sweden I ask, when he was supposed to have died in the blazing ruins of his tabanacle of love. I have been watching this guy for about a year now and I notice that he speaks swedish with an american accent, he drinks Budweiser and carries a mobile phone and a bible, he often sits alone singing Kum-bia-ah My Lord (someone's crying my lord....) while drinking..........Strange days we live in.
Things for myself have been going much better than they appear for the defrosting drinkers of the supermarket courtyard. Yesterday Bonnie DeVarco spoke at my university and it was an amazing experience as I got to go to dinner with her and others involved with technology, art, and education. It's been a while since I met such an inspiring group with so much knowledge BUT THEN today I attended a seminar on Scots Gaelic literature language and culture and a workshop of creative writing. It was about Haikus and was conducted by Kevin MacNeil, an intense and sharp writer/poet/bard from the Isle of Lewis; a "poet of the outer limits".............It is incredible to think I grew up in small village in the pig farming center of the Darling Downs, Queensland, Australia, my first job was strangling chickens in the local battery egg farm and today I am here doing what I am doing............What will hapen next? Who cares?

Friday, March 21, 2003

Iraq War Cut-up

Iraq War Cut-up 21st March 2003
(Taken From New York Times)



charred shell of an Iraqi
campaign
The first two border posts
strewn with broken hulks of
Three Iraqis died in a truck inside
immediate reports of any American
operations including locations
forbidden
thousands of American soldiers crossed
through the silver
of American sold
soldiers gathered the
four Iraqi missiles
included marines from
the Third First Second
campaign
campaign
campaign
campaign
report that one intended
moving on……

Thursday, March 13, 2003

Ages Meet

Two old boys at the automatic teller machine tonight. One trying to help the other one get money out of the wall. The one whose money it is will not operate the machine and the one who will seems to be unable to read the instructions and buttons on the teller machine. Both of them were in their seventies, wearing the reindeer skin boots, trousers and thick jackets and caps of those that spend both summer and winter out in the forest up here. It was as if to witness the collision of two ages. The electronic banking world (which seems to be the one taking over) and the nomadic reindeer herders of 9000 years ago. Eventually, after about 10 minutes of confusion the young girl standing in front of us and behind the two nontech forest folk helped them out with the ritual of the bank machine and they withdrew what looked like several thousand kronor (8.95 kronor equals $US1). They then wandered off into the melting snow and darkness of an early Spring night. I thought it was interesting having read in an Australian newspaper this week that it has been proposed by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia that within five years they will have electronic cash machines which read the iris patterns of users. In the film Minority Report, acording to one of my teachers, an eye is stolen from somebody just for the purpose of an iris scan. Are we becoming more like the machines or are they become more like us?

Saturday, March 08, 2003

Music in the North






The music is coming up again. As I live in the north of Sweden the two seasons of winter and summer are remarkably different. Winter is between minus 10 to minus 30 degrees and two metres of snow. Summers are a explosion of green wild forest Tolkienish 27 degrees wildflowers and coloured mushrooms outdoor swimming in blue lakes and berry picking. I like summers best as I can play music in the streets and at festivals.Playing didgeridoos in caves is a favorite. This will begin again when the snow goes ( a month or two yet!!). These websites are concerned with the music. Life seems to be just the moments in between music as far as I am concerned............
Hail all invisibles all beings of light the portal is rent sunder and the book wound opens to reveal the tragedy of our mistakes.........saturday aha again not much to say except perhaps postmagickmodernity may save us all....reading writing thinking imagining, a poem and then away;

The seeking of trees
The speaking and sundrie other.

I say before sleeping
"I am going home"
The land that is the boundless moment
Where water plant air and my own fire
Meet in restless play and now........

I have discovered the music
Which began the form of schitzophrenia
Spread out with listening so intense
And directionless

The internal kingdom
Our skins are passports
To dreams once unbelieved
Tetris geodis ad infinitum

Reason is an actiivity
Not an attribute..............................................................................................................

Sunday, March 02, 2003

here are some links....a website of me and mine and a website of some comrades of mine who play together...a few tunes to listen and download there......an explaning of music as principle: I play accoustic trance music of rythms and breath for the benifit of all..........more to come


[3/2/2003 4:30:41 PM | Jim Didge]
Saturns day ahhh the autonoma of weekends when the silence of alarmclocks proves that there are still seasons and this we call time is something born from our watching of the planets........here is something I have been trying to get on this site for about a week now, perhaps today is the day:

Naked Lunch (1991)
A film by David Cronenberg
Naked Lunch is a novel by the nomadic American beat writer William S Burroughs (1914-97), first published in 1959. The original text is both a humorous and horrific collage centered around themes of addiction in various forms, sexuality, the nature of language, and the experiences of the author whilst a heroin addict in the United States, Mexico, and Morocco in the 1950�fs.
The film adaptation of Naked Lunch is an analogous adaptation of the novel. The Canadian director David Cronenberg (Scanners, The Fly, Videodrome) actually consulted with Burroughs during the making of the film to develop a story based upon what many considered an unfilmable book. It comes together as a third story based on a combination of the original novel, the biography of William Burroughs and the cyborg insect visions of Cronenberg. The original text could be said to be more reptilian, but the film Naked Lunch is well and truly bug infested.
William �gBill�h Lee (Peter Weller) is a bug exterminator in New York and the year is 1953. At a cafe/diner he is asked by some writer friends about preferred writing method he replies in a deadpan voice �gDestroy all rational thought�h, which seems to be his primary mission statement. Someone is stealing his bug powder and his grotesque employers are not happy about it. Bill soon discovers his wife Joan (Judy Davis) is injecting it for its �gKafkaesque literary high�h qualities (�gyou feel like a bug�h) and she is addicted to it. He begins doing the same and descends into a bizarre world of strange espionage, insect typewriters with huge talking anal sphincters (who recruit him as an agent), alien beings, hallucinations, and sadomasochistic sex, while writing reports which become the novel �gNaked Lunch�h. His first action as an agent is to shoot his wife in the head during a drug binge. Although Bill is unaware of having being preprogrammed to murder by his �gcontroller�h as Joan was an agent of Interzone Inc., and not human but �gan elite core centipede�h. With the police after him he flees the United States, taking refuge in the North African free port of Tangier, an International Zone where �gNothing is real and everything is permitted�h. Here he continues with heavy drug use, conversations with talking insect typewriters, investigating Interzone Inc., report writing and also resumes a relationship with his dead wife who has taken the form of another writer, Joan Frost. Bill is also queer as �ghomosexuality is the best all round cover an agent can have�h, according to instructions from his typewriter. The film ends with Bill speaking the opening lines of the book �gNaked Lunch�h, and again shooting his wife as he crosses the boarder into the Soviet looking nation of Annexia.
It is a confronting and difficult film and for these reasons I found it interesting. Within both the original text and the film are narratives concerned with identity, sexuality, semiotics, simulation/representation, travel and the exotic. The concept of a third piece of art, which complements the original novel and the biography of the author is appealing, with a multimedia type genre suiting the multidimensional narrative. To understand the film in all its dimensions it is necessary to not only read the novel but also a biography of William Burroughs. The use of music is effective in the film with Ornette Coleman�fs wild jazz coupled with the traditional trance rhythms of Morocco transporting us deeper into the chaos of Interzone. Throughout the whole film it is difficult to determine what is actually real and what is dream and hallucination, which also seems to be a central theme in the novel.

[edit]
[2/21/2003 2:30:18 PM | Jim Didge]
Trying again...lost some valuable words there trying to upload and failed.....where do they go I wonder. Really tired at the moment but I am trying to get something down every day just to keep this thing viable. Instead of polluting the ether with my own story I submit some fiction based on a collection of true stories:

Shamanic Imperative

“I have no time. I know that I have been brought to the White Mountain Psychiatric Hospital and that for me now the music has finished. It was only ten days of constant playing in perhaps seven cities, many villages and anywhere I could sit for long enough to weave the magic, which I found for myself in the rhythms and notes that began in dreams all those years ago. Perhaps I touched enough among those of this continent to ensure that the invisible dance continues, perhaps not? Perhaps they have also been taken for I know that the doctors have been looking for me for a long time. Me, with no time and them with all the time in the world. Strange really considering how long this dance has been going that those who confine me now are calling themselves the deciders of time. I shall however begin at the beginning of my final journey and perhaps, if the spirits are willing, the men in uniforms shall leave me in peace long enough to tell the tale.
I entered Europe via Tangier aboard the fat boat that hops the short way across the water to Algerciras, with a 7-day transit permit for Spain, and I had come from the desert. It was the desert of Australia not that of Africa as I had only been in Morocco a few days before making the jump over to the Hollywood love lanes and chrome glass fetish parlours of Europe in the 21st century. I knew I had to move quickly so as soon as I moved away from the port areas I sat down and played my first notes. The shopping was just finishing for the day so many where on their ways home to prepare for the Television Assignments which their jobs had set for them earlier that day. I disturbed their routines with the first puckered blow of my horn carved from the petrified stump of the desert acacia. My clap sticks rendered as glass as I tapped them slowly together and began that which the wind had taught me in the first weeks of my loosing all in the sands. I found the magick half notes there in those weeks of silent education and now I had come to the soft underbelly of the beast to reek liberation upon any whose ears were open enough to hear, they did not even need to listen, only catch as few as 7 seconds of the sound and they themselves would do the rest.

The change came first into their eyes and then the way they walked. If they were carrying anything they usually just dropped it right where they were and began a more springy style of step. Often they took off their shoes but some even stripped themselves naked and began singing. It was a beautiful thing to see but usually I was unaware of it all. For myself the song had become so that it just drifted me right away, I could have been on fire with bull ants eating my testicals and nothing would have moved me from that dark mountain of sound, which rose up with the blowing. So I played and the way become open for all those that heard, they were suddenly heart born and all the ideas that had plagued them their entire adult lives where suddenly as chaff to the wind. Scattered they would usually rush to the nearest person who had not yet the feeling and begin pleading for juncture; a type of understanding that could not be explained. It was sad sometimes as not all could tolerate it, but they were now beyond harming themselves or others so there was never any danger. Only a lost look about them as they tried and failed to remember how it had been to win power over others or having the self-satisfaction of secret fantasies. These false realities, which before had composed whole personalities where now undetectable and everything seemed to be here and now but impossible to actually represent in any other way than gapping wonder. I knew I would not be permitted to play for very long and I had to keep moving if I was to make any sort of change to the madness all around me.”

The Music of Schizophrenia??
Police today reported the first case of terrorists using audio technology as a weapon of mass destruction.
A lone individual of unidentified southern origin has been playing sounds on the streets of southern European tourist towns, which infect the listener with a previously unknown form of schizophrenia.
Up to 9000 people have been hospitalised in the last 2 days and so serious is their conditions that they are all unable to describe either the so-called music or the perpetrator of the atrocity.
Doctors at the American Mission Hospital in Malaga said they had been expecting some form of attack by terrorists in recent weeks, following recent fringe media propaganda regarding food shortages in Africa being somehow linked to the international economy.
“We were ready for nerve gas but never expected music,” said head surgeon Dr Chuck Noriega as he issued an international request for the supply of slow release sedatives to deal with the influx of casualties.
Police meanwhile have intensified the search for the terrorist and have urged people not to listen to street musicians.

International Herald Tribune
May 23 2003.



“The first days of playing in Europe were not so difficult. Each location was chosen carefully and I could only play for half an hour at the most before the confusion became so great around me that I would have to pack up and slip away. Transport was not easy as my middle ear enlightenment made it impossible for me to travel at speeds of more than 30 or 40 kilometres per hour. Progress was very drawn but I discovered if I stayed away from the highways there was much less of a chance of me being detected by the authorities. So I moved slowly up the coast spreading the divine chaos, the Pan-ic as it had been in the hills all those centuries ago. I knew they needed it and after they met me they were grateful for the gift. This world that had been created for them was guaranteed to keep them fed and out of direct danger but what of the boredom that ate away at their souls nightly alone with only their dreams?
Problem was, I had no real plan, only to go, go, go as fast as I could and touch as many as possible before the inevitable crash with me being taken behind the scenes of the society which has so many public layers as seeming to be composed of only them. It could not have worked with recording and distribution as these avenues were sown up tighter than the tunnel control at Calais. Radio broadcasts would only have been allowed to happen for one short burst and then it would have been satellites, jamming, tracing and besides that sort of deal is expensive. It had to be authentic unmediated experience for the full effect to take people and that is rare thing in this circus of the berserk which daily takes from you in the morning and sells it back to you in the evening, as you try to remember what it was you actually wanted in the first place. So the street was the place and the harmonic trance beats the tune. Perhaps I though that I would be able to reach critical mass fast enough to escape detection and the liberation of what the Spirit called The Shamanic Imperative would continue by itself and I could go back to the forest where I was before all this began…………but that was not to be, as I found out in the last days. You see I discovered too late that I was not the first to be called to do this sort of forced evolution, just the first to be caught after the technology had been developed for the controlling terrestrial powers to introduce it into the population genetically. Only they were not moving toward expansive principles, shit no, they wanted to build the flesh machines needed to push the money around.
It was Barcelona and then over the border somehow into France when things started to get very sticky. I managed 36 hours of playing in the streets and subways of Barcelona and then just missed a military police raid on the squat I was saying in. They took out the 11 occupants in the zip lock prison transfer bags they use for absolute sensory deprivation these days. I was watching from inside a garbage silo across the square and knew that I would not be able to move until after nightfall and even then it would have to be through the sewer system if I was going to get out of town with my travel itinerary intact. Using a compass through the tunnels I made it to the northern quarter of the city and then broke cover heading for the hills as my grandmother used to say. At the boarder it was motion detectors on the microwave towers set at regulars intervals on the hilltops which picked me up first and then as I saw the armoured personal carriers coming towards me I tried to play but they already knew what to expect and all of them where wearing remote-directed sensory equipment. Everything they saw and heard was coming from somewhere else and whatever I did was simply blanketed out with electronic fill content. I could have been playing the most awesome trance disassociate journey and they would have only received straight marching rhythms and threatening visuals. Then it was the black bag and a hypo shot through the canvas………………Good night Irene.

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[2/19/2003 3:48:15 PM | Jim Didge]
My flat is a place of intense debate. Quite good actually as it forces me to think. This is something with which I need help with sometimes. At the moment the debate concerns wheather prostitution should be permitted in fact in Sweden (the Swedish legal phrasing is complicated and allows for only the best intentions to be emphasised when forbidding anything). I wish I could type as fast as I think. I imagine there will be an implant on day which performs such a task. I come from Australia which has basically legalised prostitution and now the debate rages in Sweden with such statements as "the myth of the happy whore" being made in the press...people screeching about "but is it a choice?" and there being brothels established in caravan parks along the Finnish boarder so Swedish men can pay for sex (some lonely elk farmers driving up to five hours to fuck a women who does'nt speak the same langauge they do). What do I believe? Difficult to take a stand on this one although I've thought of a few concepts that get me out of the really tricky questions: the main one is Morality, If we accept that it is a moral question then does that leave it up to whoever it is who establishes such things in society (Cop out? I say not). I myself am not offended by prostitution, having had friends who worked as such while trying to establish themselves as artists, musicians, students or travellers. They all did make a choice to sell their bodies, and not just for sex, some of them where trying up judges in leather and beating the hell out them ("you have been a very naughty boy Justice Elms"). It is not something I would recomend as a career to anyone, or something I would like to do myself (or be able to have my partner do), but neither is working in a high security psychiatric prison, and I have done that before myself. There are many nasty dirty dangrous jobs......they often pay well.....not many people do them for very long. It is difficult to say if prostitution has only negative or positive effects on citizens. It certainly can have a negative effect on a marriage, but that is pretty obvious. If you are married to a man who feels the need to visit a prostitute there requires some serious discussion going on around the kitchen table after the children have gone to bed (it's a lie otherwise). There are also, as far as I see, so many types of prostitution: the obvious image of the overdone mamma in her underwear on street corner is cliché¼There are peep shows, strippers, sex tourists, phone sex, massage and "mail order" brides, not to mention the world of the male prostitue, which does not receive as much attention and is often far more underground. There is also the top end of the market which crosses boarders with ease (often in a Lear jet), and is so discreet nobody hears about it or even recognises it; a hint was given in the USA a few years ago with the Heidi Fliess trial. One thing is for sure; as this European Union really seems to be coming together, the legal topography of the continent will have to become more and more consistent................
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[2/19/2003 12:13:13 AM | Jim Didge]
I supose I should begin with a little bit about myself....Born on a mountain in eastern Australia in 1969.........Grew up reading running and riding.......Finished high school 1986 having discovered poetry around 1983.......Began working and studying as a male nurse...got sick of hospitals and went to university 1988 studied journalism found The Word and decided to live by it....graduated University 1990......spent the next 10 years wandering the waste........have lived in Brisbane, a shack in the bush (a few times), in Sydney (Redfern- bless The Fern), in a tipi on the coast south of Sydney, in Varanassi India, in Amsterdam (de Pijp), presently in the north of Sweden (Ume›T and in many locations in between....married Amsterdam 1998 (Kraak de stat!!), and then a legal one in Sydney 1999 to Erika (met India 1996).....a son Silas born 14th April 2000...Studying English Literature Culture and Linguistics at Ume‘Âniversity and now Blog being part of a bigger project with the Humlab So lets roll......... More links: and for a tune and some pictures
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