Surfin' With Mind-Forg'd Manacles

Chase Griffin: One moment, I’m Bruce McCulloch’s “Fuck the bank!” guy. I’m a normie-lite just trying to avoid all of those hyper c.o.n.s.p.i.r.a.c.y. people in all of their fashionable narc garb speeding and cackling toward the entropy of our thermodynamic economy.
 
And the next moment, I’m the Butthole Surfers in San Antonio. I’m many freaks surrounded by John Wayn[e]nabes.
 
And in another moment, I’m a tribesperson navigating a minefield of vibe, mood, and memory artifacts. I’m a dude who can’t just turn off the new media landscape because even if I did I would still be a part of it because of new media’s scale and pace. There is no deep vulnerable intellectual connection out there, only Zuul. Kurt Cobain was right about the future being full of mofos ODing on vibe.
 
And then, I’m a calenture-addled surfin’ mutant clown out of some classic Frank Kozik poster.
 
It is very very hard to metaprogram in the world of tomorrow.
 
Somebody got a hold of Bob Wilson’s model agnosticism, weaponized it, and flipped it. We are no longer free to switch reality tunnels. The new media now switches it for us, and without our consent.
 
At home though, I have my center, my happy place where I’m only my core weirdo, writer, dad-person self.
 
But as far as identity and companionship and hanging out goes, I think there’s always super cool stuff going on in the depths of society. But now that I’m almost 40 and have a family and am not actively seeking art and music scenes, it feels like it doesn’t exist. But it’s definitely there. People might not be fucking shit up in the abandoned cigar factories like they did when I was a kid, but people are definitely out there making really amazing stuff. Not too long ago I stumbled upon some neat places filled with neat people doing neat things. And it gave me hope. The new media vibe, mood, and memory was absent from this little pocket of excellent art, music, movies, and lit.
 
I think in small local pockets the medium doesn’t have to be the message.

CG: Ain’t that just the way. Take the skin and peel it back. Now doesn't it make you feel better?
 
Cthulhu blesses Reznor. I love that man. The Downward Spiral has been a part of my weekly rotation since I was 10.
 
I agree with him. Misuse, constraint, restraint. This is what gives birth to the best art. Be it Daniel Johnston’s basement mind, John Carpenter’s desire to make his limited budgets look like a billion buckaroos, Reznor’s smashing of the industry, Doctor Who’s charming bubblewrap alien, etc.—this is the best way to make art in the air loom future. But we've been cutting up the analog and early digital age for so long we can't see the new horizon. We are not cutting up the new world yet. This is why our sociopolitical conversations don’t match our surroundings, why everything feels so double-bindy. Because we are shadowboxing the elites of the last quarter of the twentieth century instead of those uncanny ones right in front of our faces. We are fighting vibe, mood, and memory.
 
It’s time to fuck it up / I want to break it up / I want to smash it up / I want to fuck it up / I want to watch it come down / Maybe afraid of it / Let’s discredit it / Let’s pick away at it
I want to watch it come down to where we all fall within the mise en scene Deleuze and Guattari refer to in Anti-Oedipus.
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The other day I was rereading the final chapter, ‘The Second Positive Task’, and I came across "If some conspiracy, according to Nietzsche's wish, were to use science and art in a plot whose ends were no less suspect, industrial society would seem to foil this conspiracy in advance by the kind of mise en scène it offers for it, under pain of effectively suffering what this conspiracy reserves for this society: i.e., the breakup of the institutional structures..."
 
That's the big What The Fuck of today, isn't it?
 
This reminds me of the graveyard scene near the beginning of Great Expectations.
Pip is watching the convict Magwitch navigating the graveyard and one of Dickens's grand fantasies takes hold, "... he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in."
 
30 years ago, we were Pip the narrator. But now we're Magwitch. We're deep inside of the mise en scene, inside a controlled, theatrical space for radical thought, where industrial society preemptively disrupts potential, revolutionary conspiracies. And the scene is getting a twist upon our ankles and pulling us into the underworld.
 
Goodness me, talk about great expectations.
 
Because really, the whole situation we find ourselves in today is the whole of Great Expectations.
 
It's truly frightening, these implications. We are the convict Magwitch, the string-puller of Pip's circumstances.  But the all-encompassing theatre-craft, has mesmerized us into believing we are Pip and that the spooky old dowager in her spooky old mansion is pulling the strings.

I think the big apprehension of the new industrial art (the new misuse) is the fear that we have already been absorbed by the machine.
 
But I think that unarticulated POV, that vibe and mood and memory of the convict and the twisting zombie hands taking us over and flipping our eyeballs around, is mostly bullshit.
Maybe that's the big conspiracy. We're supposed to believe in those double-bindy zombie hands that way we give up hope and say screw it and just accept these screwy circumstances that zoom and flap around like a deflating balloon of infinite regress filled with infinite air.
 
And I am forever anti-authoritarian for all of the obvious reasons, but also because I just don't think any leader is ever good at their job. Why would I want to give them so much credit? I've always had a feeling that most radical intellectuals are trustfund people. Their ideology-speak reeks of never-worked-way-down-in-the-industrial-depths before. Their ideology-speak reeks of having no understanding and no clue that a Walmart or Target or whatever chain manager (an incompetent stupid bully psychopath with serious Mommy-Daddy-Me issues) is exactly the same as a CEO, a senator, or a shadowy elite conspirator. McLuhan warned us of this, implying that the global village changes who gets into power positions, arguing that electronic media shifts the focus from expert competence to performative image.
 
So I think maybe to believe in that Magwitch switcheroo that they are trying to have us believe in is just another form of boot licking. "Yes, of course you are that good at your job. There is no other way that this could be. Now watch me flagellate my own pretty face."
 
All we have right now I think is chaos and a thousand billion questions.
 
When the AI genie is hyperstitioned awake, will it see us only for our violent nature? Or will the genie be able to see us for our outliers like our Martin Luther Kings and our Gandis and our Einsteins? Will the genie’s billionaire-bro origin be the message? What would the genie look like if he were created by altruistic people? Could it be a good genie if we hacked it?
 
What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can't any longer see into myself. I think I might be the rhythmic assistant device known as the Seeburg Select-A-Rhythm. I am the machine that Suicide deterritorialized. At least, I hope that's what I am.
 
I try to live by the teachings of Bob Wilson. He's the great navigator of modernity’s malaise. One day, he will be as canonized as Confucius and Laozi.
 
And what has always helped me through the chapel is Bob’s idea of neophilia vs neophobia and how holding an extreme stance within one state or the other leads to enantiodromia.

CG: I can hear Joey Ramone now saying, “Fuck Emerson, Lake, and Palmer!”
 
I think I’ve always been a short story writer and didn’t know it. I can’t believe I didn’t realize this sooner. My favorite type of literature is the short story. My favorite writers (Borges, Ligotti, Lovecraft, Poe, Kafka) are best known for their short stories. I think it’s the purest form of literature.
 
But this new identity might just be one of many selves taking me over.
 
Maybe not though, because as much as I like prog lit honestly I only like my favorite sections of those behemoth books like Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest. I think DFW is the tits for sure but my favorite of his stuff is his short story collection Oblivion. The best parts of Infinite Jest are the “Not Like That, Jim” monologue and the tennis academy parts. I can’t stand the Ennet House stuff except for the “Not a hugger” speech.
 
So I can totally relate to Joey’s sentiment.
 
That being said, I think we should all be checking out as much art as we can. There’s just so much to behold. Why miss out on De Frank Professionals’ Afe Ato Yen Bio? That might be the greatest song of all time. What about the film Yeelen? You can’t miss that. You gotta watch Stalker. For the love of Cthulhu, please listen to Meddle by Pink Floyd. Come to St. Pete, go to the Dali museum, and take a good long gander at each painting.
 
We must be able to sit through things. What are we so anxious to get to? Death? Must I invoke the overquoted Alan Watts speech on the orchestra?
 
Sure, I can dig only the jump-cut car scene from Breathless and feel like the rest of that movie is like a cat taking a shit on my feet. I can say screw all of Yes except for two minutes of that one song. But we must find something to sit through. Shit, stare at a wall for a few hours. That’s how Andy Kaufman honed his craft.
 
We must confront ourselves in the mirror of the world.

CG: In the beginning, the cut-up was necessary. We needed to see the future. I think we wouldn’t be here today if not for Naked Lunch. Or maybe we’d be here but we’d be mutants.
 
We've let the future bleed out for too long.
 
Cut-ups are contributing in a microcosmic way to a macro Macbethian self-fulfilling prophecy. Because as a society we've gone way beyond peak cut up / postmodernism / hauntology and we are now deep in the abyss of retrocausation. And now every decision we make as a society is a dodge away from the big terrible future, and these dodges are what's causing the big terrible future to happen.

CG: We saw the future in Naked Lunch and with Menu I wanted to sew time back together, not to undo or say fuck you, but as an attempt at the beginning of the completion of solve et coagula. Naked Lunch dissolved, and now we must stop playing with those parts (What the hell are you doing in the bathroom day and night? Why don't you get out of there and give someone else a chance?) and put the refined, durable, and enlightened future together finally.
 
Do I have to do everything, people? Yeesh.
 
This isn’t the first time in human history this has had to happen, and it certainly won’t be the last time.

CG: Yes, it’s still heroic if we build it ourselves. We must build the hardware and software for ourselves in our proverbial garages. PKD said something to that effect.
 
What did Doctorow say? “I’d rather have everyone own everything than have Sam A own everything.”
 
If Sam A owns the future, we are Cthulhu’s bitch. The eldritchy telos of our pattern processing that has been dormant since the caveman daze awakens, you know. Pattern recognition, and really all of human consciousness, will regain its purpose that is not merely for survival but for the eventual confrontation of the unknown or the incomprehensible. We will find ourselves once again as catalysts for the great cosmic horror game.
 
If you want something done right, you don’t sit back and let billionaire baby eaters create the future for you. We must collectively say, “On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.” We must keep on keepin’ on with our coconuts and naivete.

CG: I think household appliances will be the first and then we will all receive the heroic dose via tap. We will come together right now over me and systemization will take place. Plurality will die, unfortunately. Just like last time. This will happen right before we finally confront ourselves as a species, right before we ascend. This will be the next Catholic Church.

CG: Have you seen the 4th Matrix film? It’s not very good. But there is one aspect that I found to be brilliant. And that was the character of the Handler. He was the chilling, uncanny smarmy yes-man from the beginning of the movie. The Matrix puts this Handler guy (who very spookily talks in that extremely disingenuous and homogeneous way people of my generation talk in which everyone talks as twitter/podcast-speak things and pretends to be a Graham Norton guest and is always ready to throw back their heads for a big fake laugh at the punchline) in charge of Neo. The guy acts like Neo’s buddy and all the while he’s meant to keep Neo from waking back up.
 
I think that buddy is what most people crave.
 
Just like a major religion or the singularity, the Handler presents himself as a solution to abstraction.
 
He says, “Yes, reality is progressively abstracted through perception, language, and thought with each of these interference levels omitting details and increasing the risk of confusion between symbols and what they represent. But, no worries, I can show you what is really going on.”

The singularity will present us with what we already have. It will be redundant. What did Chesterton say about his attempt at putting a dream-team system together and what he realized when he finished was that all he did was recreate catholicism but with different nomenclature?
 
Despite my pessimistic view of the spiritual singularity, I am extremely optimistic about the accompanying technological singularity. All novelty comes with big helpings of dark clouds and silver linings. According to McLuhan, the Gutenberg Galaxy and the novel fostered mass linear thinking, hyper individualism, and nationalism. But it also fostered mass literacy, democratization of knowledge, personal freedom, scientific and rational advancement. I think this will happen again. We will return to Twin Peaks. Plus, I believe the technological singularity will save the planet and humanity. It will reverse global warming. It will solve food scarcity. It will positively restructure civilization. We will enter a new Golden Age.