Lovecraft Lives!

I am happy to announce that I have written a theatrical adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1935 short story “The Haunter of the Dark.”

I have long been in love with the work of the Providence native, and this story has been one of my favorites for as long as I have known it. The story follows Robert Harrison Blake, a young author of weird fiction, who moves into a new house and quickly becomes obsessed with the dark rumors about a disused church on Federal Hill that even the birds have shunned.

My interpretation of the church, painted on a dark and stormy night.

I wrote the piece to be site-specific to my place in Providence, and my wonderful housemates assure me that they are all right with my use of the apartment, for which I am grateful. But I am not putting the cart before the horse. I am first hoping to do several staged readings of the play at another venue to get some much-needed feedback and stir up interest among potential collaborators. Then I will be able to start in earnest. I am already creating props for the show, and I am enlisting the help of my friends in the editing of the script.

Here is my playwright’s note from the beginning of the script:

In producing this work, I hope to add my voice to the chorus that has built up over the years like a coral deposit around the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Living in Providence, as I do, one rubs up now and then against the landmarks and architectural wonders that the writer so loved, and even though the sinister, ill-favored church on Federal Hill has been razed since Lovecraft’s day, there are traces of the cosmic horror even in the most brightly-lit places in this city. Any fan of Lovecraft is also forced to contend with the author’s many sticking points – his prosy, Gothic style, his racist xenophobia, and his pronounced fear of mysticism and science, both of which, in his fictional worlds, lead to truths too terrible to contemplate, impossible dreams no Don Quixote should ever chase. Love him or hate him, we all live in Lovecraft’s shadow: everyone from Joss Whedon to Stephen King to the many writers of Doctor Who draw on his mad mythos in some way. Now I want to take an audience inside a nightmare set not in semi-fictional Arkham or Innsmouth but in a city that Lovecraft adored all his life – Providence, Rhode Island.

 It remains to be seen whether there will be any quarrels about the copyright issues with Lovecraft’s infamously bungled estate. From what I’ve gathered so far, it is less than clear who holds the rights to this story, but lest the world think me a plagiarist, I freely admit that my work is derivative, and I do not intend to pick anyone’s pocket by making this show. If anyone knows where I can get a clear picture of the status of this story and its rights, please let me know.

Further updates on the production of the Haunter of the Dark will be forthcoming, my dearie-os, so stay tuned!

Disturbing Mathematics – Urban Foraging

This image shows the packaged food I was able to forage in less than one hour in the garbage during RISD move-out this past month. Additionally, I found a bushel of apples, two pounds of carrots, four pounds of onions, and two complete cloves of garlic. All of the food was fresh, and much of it was organic, though the packaged food seen here is largely processed.

The packaged food (minus the Korean groceries, which had no english nutritional data) amounted to a calorie count of 10,275 calories, enough for a little over five days, assuming one lives by the 2000 calorie diet the FDA uses as its baseline. And that isn’t even counting the fresh fruits and veggies.

Think about it. Almost a week’s worth of food in less than half an hour. And if I had a car or even a bicycle, I could have doubled or tripled my take.

This is nothing against RISD – they did, after all, have a food drive where students could leave unopened, imperishable food. This is also not meant to be a burn against the RISD students: many of them don’t want to lug cans of tuna on cross-country or international flights, and many of them were in a hurry to get home. The presence of so much food in the trash says much more about our culture of food generally.

Other people have said it before, and said it more elegantly, but we in the US have a seriously warped attitude about what we eat and how we eat. My generation gets a lot of flak in the press for ‘obsessing’ over food: I have read articles analyzing this as everything from snobbery to a Freudian oral fixation on a massive scale. But looking through the garbage and seeing beautiful Fuji apples from East Side Market gave me a new perspective.

We in the US are on the cusp of remembering how wonderful it is to eat, to be fed. We can see this in everything from the growth of gourmet culture (brilliantly satirized in the South Park episode “Creme Fraiche“) to the backlash against GMOs and processed foods (for example, this amazing rap video). The ‘food is fuel’ mentality is slowly falling away, but old habits about food – such as throwing out fresh but ‘unattractive’ produce – are still deeply entrenched.

Groups like Food Not Bombs hack the food culture from a different angle. They raid the dumpsters of supermarkets, bakeries, and groceries, cook it up, and serve hot meals to passers-by on the street, often giving away the remainder of the groceries. We have been trained to think that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but our wasteful practices ensure that for the enterprising few, there will always be a free lunch.

I don’t know what the solution to our chronic wastefulness will be, but in a country like the US where half of the calories we produce are thrown away, there is a definite gap between the lofty goals of the foodie revolution and the day-to-day practices of everyone from farmers to distributors to retailers and consumers.

You might ask me what someone like me – employed, educated, white, male, and all the rest of it – is doing digging around in the garbage for food. My parents didn’t raise me to do it, and it sure isn’t some kind of journalistic stunt. It is something I do to save a bit of money, have a bit of an adventure, and remind myself of the absurdity of our economy and our culture.

Will I stop? Depends. Will we stop throwing away perfectly good food?

Literary Band Names I’d Like To See

• Percy Shelley and the Ded Romantix (Punk/Goth)
• Thane of Glamis (Scottish Folk Metal)
• Electrik Sh33p (Technodelia) 
• Aslan (Operatic Metal)
• Holden’s SymPhony (art rock)
• Captain Zeep (psychedelic lounge)
• Eldritch Lore (Horror Punk)
• Dahl’s Chickens (folk)
• Huckleberry Finnegan’s Wake (mashup)
• Lee Harper and the Scouts (Progressive Southern Rock)
• Tweedle (jam band)
• Coxman & Adonis (bebop combo)
• RAtDotL – Rage Against the Dying of the Light  (Protest Rock)
• Wrath of Achilles (Epic Metal)
• Antigone of Thebes (Emo)
• Baudelaire’s Abbey (Electric Blues) 
• Metaphorical Resonance (noise)
• Pebbles of the Holy Streams (Prog Rock)
• Ministry of Truth (industrial)
• Bloom’s Day Bhoys (Irish rock)
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Folk Duo)
• The Fierce Invalids (Grunge)
• Play On (R&B)

Economics for Artists

Attention Providence Artists, Writers, Musicians, Et Cetera! 

If you believe some of our puffing pundit pals, you would think that my entire generation are either unemployed artists of one kind or another or working survival jobs to fund their art habits. And in my experience, that holds up pretty well. Most of my friends have some kind of amazing artistic talent – for example, my housemates here in Providence are, on the one hand, a gifted musician currently recording at the Columbus, and on the other hand, a talented graphic designer and poster artist with a deep love of and training in West African drumming and dancing. It makes me, with my smattering of talent and scant accomplishments, feel a little inadequate. But none of us are, at present, making a living from our art, and that doesn’t sit right with me. I feel like there are dimensions of being a successful artist that I have not yet tapped, and I worry sometimes that if I ‘go it alone,’ I won’t make it.

And recently, I had an idea that could change all of that.

I thought it would be excellent to have small events somewhere where young up-and-coming artists could gather, mingle, eat, drink, and listen to more experienced artists explain the economics of art. I for one am interested in learning about:

• Creating opportunities for oneself
• Marketing oneself
• Networking
• Collaborations
• Grants and Fellowships
• Defining ‘success’
• Copyright versus Copyleft

… among other topics.

I’m sure I can’t be the only one out there who wants to learn these things. I am sure that this event could be a seriously awesome way for newbies to plug into the art scene, music scene, writing scene, theatre scene and whatever else there is. That means networking, which is always a plus, and whenever there is creativity in the air, I know I go home feeling even more creative myself.

What I need now are collaborators, people who would be interested in attending such an event, and people who might want to speak at it. If you are making anywhere near a living by making your art and you live reasonably close to Providence, RI, I urge you to get in touch with me as soon as possible.

Let’s help one another to stop starving and get down to making art!

 

Virtues versus Values

I am an absolute geek about all things ancient, so when a dear friend linked me to this list of ancient Roman virtues, I was elated! I looked it over, and it made a lot of sense to me. The list is divided into two sections – personal virtues, which the people strive to achieve personally, and public virtues, which are the broad goals of society.

Looking at the list as I would a mirror, I saw myself proficient in some virtues- exemplo gratias: Comitas, Humanitas, et Frugalitas; while in others I feel somewhat lacking: Firmitas, Severitas, et Industria. I felt an emotional cocktail of pride, dissatisfaction, and hope, because this list gives me a veritable smorgasbord of ways to be good and the freedom to decide for myself which ones I would … value.

Now there is a word that has gained weight in the last few years. I have never lived in an era where that word has not hung over every social issue of any importance like the sword of Damocles, the not-so-silent majority’s sucker punch. Some of the moralists who wield the idea of “Values” hearken back to Ancient Rome, and some think of the empire and its eponymous capitol as an archetype of perversion and decadence, but what both parties fail to see is this:

The virtues as presented here are not weighted. No one virtue is inherently better than any other. Values, one might say, are rubrics that give weight to certain virtues, let’s say Pietas (piety) and Salubritas (health and cleanliness), while placing less emphasis on Severitas (seriousness). Values tell us which virtues to pursue.

Let’s pretend for a moment that instead of a limited list of the virtues of ancient Rome, but all the virtues that humanity has ever and will ever consider virtues. Leaving aside the questions of what makes a virtue virtuous, we would have the stuff that every culture is made of. Using a culture’s values as a recipe, we would select ingredients from the cultural pantry in the correct proportions and arrive at that culture’s model of goodness. Here is my original Facebook post on the subject:

“Let’s say the list of human virtues is like a list of ingredients. Each society implements them differently, in different proportions, and may exclude some entirely, and thus serving up many dishes to a hungry humanity. One pantry, many meals…”

Whatever you value, remember that everyone aspires to some kind of virtue. Every counterculture or subculture is a response to some kind of perceived deficiency in the prevailing society, and an attempt to serve up a new cultural dish that corrects those imbalances. You can find virtue in anyone …even your local coffee house hipsters.

 

Likewise, cultures that seem foreign to you may value one trait over another, but the traits themselves are still valuable. So even if their aesthetics weird you out, even if you feel like their values are completely backwards, whoever you are and whomever they are, look for their virtues. If you really can’t find any virtues, you’re not looking hard enough.

 

The Mental Magick of Color

Take a good look Companies want their logos to be a microcosm of their brand, a shorthand that connects you mentally with their products and services, and they invest heavily in research that effects all areas of marketing, including the psychology of color.   The infographic above was created by thelogocompany.net as a one-stop guide to color psychology as it relates to advertising, but there is another, much older and much less conventional infographic that organizes colors and traits along fascinatingly similar lines. This is the Tree of Life, a diagram that was first thought up by the ancient Jewish mystics known as the Kabbalists. The Kabbalah, recent Hollywood fads aside, is a tradition that seeks mystical knowledge and which maps out Creation on the scheme of the Tree of Life. The spheres, or Sephirot, can be seen as worlds, states of consciousness, emanations of God, Jungian archetypes, or various other things. The paths between these spheres correspond with the 22 Hebrew letters. This way of thinking proliferated throughout the Abrahamic world. Today, in addition to the Jewish Kabbalists, there are also Christian, and Gnostic/Hermetic renditions of the Kabbalah. The diagram above, with the colors arranged as they are, is from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British occult organization that can be seen as the predecessor of Thelema, Chaos Magick, and Wicca. Nominally Christian, they drew on Jewish, Greek, Roman and Egyptian myths and mystery religions. Their interpretation of the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life, though not recognized as authoritative by Jewish kabbalists, is very cohesive and tantalizingly complex, and the color associations with the Sephiroth hold up surprisingly well with the psychological associations of colors as presented in The Logo Company’s diagram.

For example, companies like Phizer, Facebook, and HP want to project an image of dependability and benevolence, and therefore choose blue – a color that happens to coincide with Chesed, the sphere of mercy, cognate with Jupiter, the jovial king of the Roman gods.

Opposing Chesed, we find Geburah, ruled by bellicose Mars, whose passionate energy adds vigor and pep to the logos of Target, Nintendo, and Coca-Cola.

And red, white, and blue – colors of countries from France to Cuba – and of course Britain and the USA – show us Chesed and Geburah (strength and mercy) alongside the pure, undifferentiated light of Creation in Kether, the Crown. Of course, we in the United States love to see ourselves as a nation that believes in strength and mercy and the blessings of God, even when evidence for any or all of those claims is thin on the ground.

Take a moment and draw some more connections. Which sephirah does your favorite company draw on in their logo or ads? How about your least favorite company? Political movements? Charities? Causes? They’re all in there somewhere.

It might be tempting to say that this somehow proves that Madison Avenue is peopled with Golden Dawn adepts, conspiring together to some occult purpose. I think it is far more likely that the Western occult tradition that assigns the powers of the heavens to various colors and psychologists who study our cultural and emotional associations with color both are coming to the same point of truth through different reality-tunnels.

Are advertisers using these associations to their advantage? Hell yes! They would be fools not to do so! But if you feel scared by that idea- that corporations are using nonlinear visual codes, possibly synched up with the underpinnings of reality, to sell their goods and services – just remember this simple fact: now that you know the map, you understand where you are being led. And whatever power is in colors, whether it is occult or cultural (or both! or neither!) is in your hands as well. Use it! Use it fearlessly and fabulously and for the good of all sentient beings!

Goat Song

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims

This ceaseless mantra, the charitable nod to the bereaved, is a shield behind which the pundits cower.

A time that should shake people out of business-as-usual, a trauma felt nationally and internationally, is being used as an excuse not merely to hate but to prop up business-as-usual, which appropriates all human emotion as raw material.

Imagine a factory that sucks in love and spins it into trinkets, trade goods to fascinate the natives while around them the land is poisoned. Imagine a firm that turns ignorance into guns, and fear into ammunition, and fights tooth and nail to get their products into as many hands as possible, hands dirty and clean alike. Imagine a company that plays every string of the human heart, bending the notes as it pleases, and strums out songs of praise for pre-selected candidates, pre-digested news, and pre-screened ideas.

I see all this and I want to run into the forest.

I saw Copley Square the other day, still cordoned off. Traffic was diverted around it, cars and pedestrians, and I realized then that there are no more goat songs. No more tragedies. We are told to think about them as tragedies, we say the word, but it has hardly any meaning anymore because for most of us, we feel the hurt of it, but we don’t set it loose. We allow the tragedies to change our lives, but only from the top down. We let the politicians and the pundits and the business interests who fund both decide what the outcome will be and go on living in as much the same way as we can. We cling to our sense of self, and shore it up with purchases, investments, small talk. We keep calm and we carry on. 

If they could outlaw philosophy, they would. Any philosopher worth their sodium chloride can see the premium placed on control, on neurotypical thoughts and behavior patterns, on pluralistic conformity and the distrust of fringe ideas and those who make or hold them.

If you can, turn off the television and step away from the computer. Find a corner of Nature- if you can – and think about what happened in Boston as the person you are when nobody is looking. Ask the dangerous questions, the sensible questions, the questions you haven’t heard. Break the half-conscious taboos of Mother Culture in the palace of your mind. Or simply sit and let the wave fully break over you. Get caught up in the emotional undertow and allow yourself to fully empathize with all the victims of this cruelty, and all the cruelty you have ever seen or heard of. Either – or both- will be a first step.

To own our thoughts, our feelings, and to begin to change ourselves and the world, there is nothing like a tragedy fully realized. You don’t need a camera or a microphone, a blog, a stage, or a mask. You do not need a degree or a necktie or high heels or a black beret. You do not need a knife, a chalice, a coin, or a staff. All you need is time, space, focus, and your own thoughts and feelings.

All of our actions in the company of others can be thought of as a performance. Every actor needs some time in the wings to prepare. Give yourself that time and use it. Become who you are not because I tell you to but because the tragedies around us call for authentic actors, not hams and hacks phoning in their performances or reading cue cards. The victims sing out from hospital beds and gurneys and graves in a goat song, and we all have a place in that choir.

And I will sing along from a battered heart.