Monday, March 30, 2009

My trip to the Amazon











Two of my fellow mouse users have expressed the same concern, namely, what is the purpose and what is the goal we are seeking, as collaborators on this mighty blogosplat. Funny, it never occurred to me. I have always been this spontaneous and perhaps that is why so many people get irritated by me. "That's fine for you," I'm accustomed to hearing, "but that doesn't appeal to me."
I've been having fun on facebook but it isn't really designed for longer blurbs and rants. I just thought if we had a community blog we could post to it and see what comes of it. At least we'd have a readership of four that way.
We all have the same tic-tocks going on in the background, at exactly the same speed, but the stuff that fills our bags is different. If we look at the stuff and talk about it, my guess is we would be interested in each other's bag. That could be like the stuff itself, or the reflection on the stuff or the symbolism of the stuff or the creative outcome of the process, which comes from observing the stuff.
For instance, I know I'm interested in Reya's day as a bodyworker and her various applications of the mystery arts. Rick has been reinventing himself as a producer for these last few years. He just went out and bought an expensive camera one day and started loading up on recording equipment. Danny came out of nowhere but it hit me like an early spring rainfstorm when I tuned in to his life.
So I figured, we can write about it and then maybe "bounce" off of each other. Gives our fingers something to do, while we're waiting for the phone to ring.
I filled up three little notebooks on my last six week trip to Peru. I've told people how magical it was. The experiences were really unlike anything in my life until then. In the future, my plans are to spend a lot more time down there. But I've barely even reviewed my notes, let alone done any serious writing about it.
I'll start here by saying why I went. It started about two years ago, that I remember the jungle first inviting me. There was a very interesting artist who I'd met on the internet. She lives in Puerto Rico and I'd seen one of her computer paintings. It was so full of primitive and raw passion. We started exchanging pleasantries and eventually more personal information. It was months before I learned that her soul mate and lover had died in a motor cycle accident about one year before.
She was a very spiritual person and probably because of losing her lover in the prime of her own young life the big questions about why and what for and who am I and what now seemed to haunt her to the point of fully consuming her.
From someone, I don't think she told me, she learned about Ayahuaska and she changed drastically after having a ceremony. She started from that point, finding peace within herself and in the world. "What is Ayahuaska?" I soon asked or perhaps I didn't even ask, but just googled it the moment I saw her words.
And from the exact moment that I started reading about it, the jungle (La Selva) started whispering to me--come. Come to me. And it was a woman's whisper. A mother's call.
In my spare time I would do more research about Ayahuaska. Lots of scientific journals, lots of adventure travel experiences. You don't have to go to Peru or even South America, though that is where the plant is from. For instance, my friend had it locally in a ceremony, in which the Shaman was in Puerto Rico with the "brew."
Later I discovered it was the jungle calling me, but at the time, I thought it was the plant. It was a non-ending invitation, which included dreams, even dreams of my father. I knew eventually there would be a plane ride but the details weren't something that bothered me too much.
After months of research I stumbled one day onto information about the 4th Annual Conference on Shamanism, in Iquitos, Peru. After doing some initial fact finding and checking my calendar, I wrote to the organizer and explained that I wouldn't be able to be there for the first few days and "anyway," I explained, "I don't care so much about the conference."
I was just sure there would be people there who I was suppose to meet and things would take care of themselves. So right after vacation last year, I flew to Peru. No hotels booked, without knowing Spanish, just an address for the conference.
That first trip went very well and it was a big adventure. It was way too short though and the full meaning of the four ceremonies I had with 4 different shaman (those who work with Ayahuaska are called Curenderos, which is really a more specific kind of medicine worker) was just sort of a chaotic mumbo jumbo in my head. There was a lot there. I knew that. I just hadn't grasped what the Spirits were trying to tell me. In my own way, I felt as if I hadn't properly prepared for the significance of the experience.
When I arrived back in Missouri, all I could think about was getting back to Peru. I wanted to go study with only a few Curenderos and I wanted to have some focussed intensity to the study. It took quite a few things to happen to create the opportunity to return in the same year.
For instance, I knew if we didn't get the house sold, I wouldn't go. I knew if a few windows weren't opened within my work schedule, I couldn't go. But I set a date. October 1. I said, if all things are worked out by then, I'm gone. If not, can't go. About 2 weeks before October 1 the planets lined up and I called my wife Anne and said I'm booking the flight, tell me now to not go or forever hold your peace. "OK," she said reluctantly, knowing I planned to be gone for 6 weeks, "if you're sure it is necessary."
And boom. I booked it.
Just now the phone has rung in my office and I'll end this first installment. The picture of the man I'm smashing the vine with is Orlando. I worked with him in the jungle for 3 weeks, learning about plant medicine but also with him as my healer. He works very hard and takes his craft very seriously. He's been doing it for over 30 years.
I'll just give you a taste by saying that his work mostly involves the Spirits which surround us. His purpose is to protect his patients. He had grave concern, with me, especially about certain bad spirits. More later--
ciao.

Reflections

I returned home, (to my computer?), this morning to find an invitation to become a contributor to this blog. The invitation had come from my friend Winston, whom I have known since childhood. The obvious questions played in my mind - "what is this about?", "is there an agenda?", "what are the expectations?", etc. The curious thing is that I found myself clicking the link to create an account and become a contributor.

It occurred to me that this action pretty well defines the relationship between Winston and I. None of those swirling questions required an answer. It was reflex. I'm in. Considering some of our more colorful adventures, a more cautious approach may have been prudent, but that has never been who we are. I suppose it never will be.

So here I am, for better or worse, refelcting on what brought me, and in the bigger picture, how this diverse little gathering came to be where we are at this stage of our lives. I am struck by how far the pendulum has swung from projecting to reflecting - speaking personally. In my idealistic, (and often mis-spent), youth, I was filled with passion, outrage, and a sense of limitless power to change the world we live in. Time is insidious - much more reflection these days. Perhaps that is the product of, what seems to me, more frequent reminders of my own mortality, and deeper consideration of my legacy. I suspect that this migration is not unique to me. After reading Winston's first blogs, I am reminded that there is a current of common experience that helped shape the four of us, though we chose distincly different paths. We survived the tornado of '57 that Winston spoke of, the age of aquarius, and the Vietnam war, to name just a few.

As I sit here "window shopping through the past", (in the words of John Prine), I feel the slightest stirring of that passion and outrage from days gone by. Perhaps it is not dead - but only taking a little nap. Is it time to wake? Maybe, but it's so warm and comfortable here.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

After the tornado

The faces on these sword carrying crusaders belong to four people who can't possibly think any other way than what it was like to grow up with stories of surviving a big tornado. Cars on water towers. My next door neighbors, Steve and Craig were thrown from the car and their father died. At reunions, there are tables of middle aged people huddled toward the center, and there is at least one person at the table--ALWAYS--whose house was destroyed.

What else defines us? We saw the same images of Vietnam, had the same presidents. Marveled that our short principle was a basketball star and some of us knew him by the name our older brothers and sisters called him by--Stubby. Stubby Steck.

Some of us sniffed glue and smoked mountains of pot later (hey not me, I'm just a reporter!). At least two of us are Vietnam era veterans and one of us saw action there--Rick. We're all fairly literate on computers now, two of us are pretty techno oriented when it comes to electronics. Both have education concerning the passage of teeny bits of energy conducted along wires and other fibers. One of us was a rare beauty--still is I guess and one of us lives in about the happiest places I can imagine for vacation. We all are music lovers and we all think of ourselves as artists.

But that Ruskin tornado has more to do with us than we probably let ourselves remember. This big fucking mean wind came ripping through our young lives, just after our parents had pretty much thought they were home free. They'd survived the great depression (or they still remembered the stories their parents told), and they survived World War II. We were all growing up in a housing experiment which still hasn't had rivals to this day, from the standpoint of little boxes all lined up in square neighborhoods, at Volkswagon prices, that they could all claim for their very own. And along comes the great grand daddy of sucking sounds which made Dorothy's seem like the exit valve on a whoopi cushion, but later was the symbol for Ross Perot's description of jobs moving to Mexico. How and why are we so the same, the four of us? If we could compare the dreams and nightmares that we can't remember, or the sketches just below the surface which haven't quite manifested, or the pain and empathy that we repress, or all the SNL sketches that tickle us in the same way, or the joy we show to be reunited on fb or over the radio waves--I'll bet that whirling twister, that devil of destruction, that freaky spiraling funnel cloud has planted itself so deep inside us that just about nothing can ever hurt us again.

We might not be in Kansas anymore, but we sure are lucky we took that magic carpet ride. Toto! Get back here!

Sunday Morning

Like I wrote the other one, this blog entry won't be done well. In other words, I'll write it, totally stream of consciousness, without one singel rewrite. The research will be on the fly, jumping from the primary source to Google searches in another window. So please kind reader, be lenient in your judgement.

Last night on TV, American Beauty starring Kevin Spacey and Anette Benning was on TBS. The retired Army colonel tells his son, "The country is going to Hell," as he reads the paper. Turns out he's dealing with repressed homophobia and he eventually blows Spacey's character's (Lester Burnham's) brains out. The movie is really all about repression. Quite a masterpiece actually.

Interesting that today's interview has a strange and eerie connection to American Beauty. I think all things have this mysterious connection, even more poignent than the thin and nearly dried-up squirt of glue which fastens these seemingly unrelated phenomena.

I returned to one of the interviews in the double "X" issue of the mossless gathering catalogue (in 2006 it published its 1000'th issue) Rolling Stone. It was with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. There won't be too much to write about but it is vastly important to reflect upon. I just tried to find it on-line, unsuccessfully. If you actually read this and want to see it, ask me and I'll scan it and email it to you.

The connection by the way is three years after the article, Hayden and Fonda were divorced (if my math is right, they were married for 20 years) and she later married (I guess for a little while?) Ted Turner. I watched American Beauty on TBS. I know, a lame connection, but it is there. And if I'm not mistaken, it has way fewer than 6 points of separation. There's a bunch of other connecting dots to the interview, but I'd have to unravel way too many cobwebs....

I look at the black and white of the couple, smiling cheek-to-cheek, with their perfect teeth and their inherited good looks, her jazzersized shoulder and his two top buttons openned intentionally and it is hard for me to admit what warriors they were. They weren't the man standing in front of the tank in that unforgettable snapshot or the naked screeching Vietnamese girl racing away from the napalm, but they were there, sacrificing their own reputations to tell the story with trips to Hanoi. They were there behind the camera and in front of it, campaigning for the truth.

Here are a few striking snippets:

HAYDEN: As a generation we've been through more traumatic and important change in these twenty years than most generations in American history. And it's not over. It's hard to know whether the twenty years is a prelude to something biggeror whether it's just a subject for nostalgia and rumination.

RS: Which one do you think it is?

HAYDEN: Prelude.

uh, yeah.

Later, we read this:

HAYDEN: The key to progress in the Sixties was when you had the possibility of an alliance between a movement, say, for civil rights, and an administration that gradually would support the objectives of the movement. One without the other leads to despair or stagnation. The deadly quiet of the Eighties can be related to the absence of anyone in the White House who cares.

We're only a few months into Obama's administration. Curious how so much importance is poured into each passing day for which to judge his effectiveness (see http://1461days.blogspot.com/2009_03_22_archive.html). But we supporters seem to be well rooted in our confidence, even though the extent of the damage will require supersonic ability. Not to mention the puppet masters are hard at work switching cables and inventing new puppet skills, while messing with the eye glass prescription of the audience, who may actually see something quite contrary to what appears to be the first and second act.

Still, let us take a sip of that refreshing wine which Hayden served us, namely the prediction that progress will come when there is an alliance between a movement and the administration. I guess the question...the bigger question is, does even the alliance and the administration have a large enough faculty to interpret the devious nature of the forces at play?

It isn't just greedy (Wall) street-walkers. It isn't just the absence of WOMD. It isn't just over-inflated home prices and melting glaciers. It is the foggy haze of distorted vision, the crisp inability to walk away from a world heading nowhere except toward perpetual self-esteem, self-respect, self-importance, self-love. Narcissism. Ah yes, Vanity of Vanities. All is Vanity.

Stop. Someone throws water in his face. Slaps him around. Asks him where all that joy went. All that skill at making people laugh. Knock knock. Are you in there Dubby? Peeks through his eye windows. Looks in his ears (ooh waxxy build-up!). Pries open his mouth. Looks up his nose. Knocks again, until finally I say. Huh? What? What's going on? Oh, back to the interview...

HAYDEN: The pertinent thing is that the shadow of the Sixties seems to prevent people from taking on lofty projects, because they think those will fail. Many kids think their parents blew it. They think it didn't work. For others, the Sixties have been reduced to an image, a graphic. The Sixties graphis sound and fury signifying nothing. All you saw on television and experienced in your life was a clash. I think that curbs people's level of utopianism--their sense that everything is possible. If you don't have that, then you're maybe more realistic, but you won't entertain the same ambitions that our generation was fueled by.

there is quite a bit of bite to his very last quote--"All the recent scandals, from Irongate to the religious right to Wall Street, have diminished the magnetism of the conservative agenda (oops--guess the poles got all charged up again later). I sense the public wants change in 1988 (sounds familiar). We've had twenty-eight years of failed presidencies and wrong roads. We've lost some of our better qualities. Much of our thinking has become obsolete. The world is more desperate (like by a thousand times more since then brother). We need to restore our idealism. It will take new leadership at all levels, but we'll never succeed without an effective presidency. Only our generation can make it happen.

Well we're here. I guess in the 50th anniversay issue, our great grandchildren will read about how we did. God help us.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Rolling Stone 20th Anniversary Issue

I was cleaning up my office today and found The Twentieth Anniversary issue of Rolling Stone (I thought it was just yesterday I bought it) dated Nov 5th, 1987. The interviews will be the research material for this post. The author takes no responsibility for any fault found in the philosophy. The author takes full credit for any interesting, amusing, shockingly disgusting, or otherwise just fucking outrageous synicism associated with this blog.

Believe it or not, the pages are brittle, as if it was an antique book. There is no musty smell but the familiar brown tint has spread like a cancer, and even the shiny necklace around the close up of the hairs on "the Boss's" chest seems like it might have been cast from metals mined near the Parthenon or the Sphinx. The two "X's" (signifying 20th) which make the logo of the magazine and also the masthead for each of the 33 interviews (Bono to Sting, Pete Townshend to Brian Wilson, McCartney to Jesse Jackson, Lou Reed, Dylan, Edward Kennedy and Walter Kronkite) seem to be a stamp of counter culture meets Madison Avenue, where the later is trying to be the former and the former has fallen in to the lap of the later with abandon and great ease.

There's a Revlon ad featuring the undeniable beauty and voluptuous cleavage of Liza Minnelli, post whatever trainwreck hit her just before her last public appearance and a Smith Corona Typewriter advertisement with not a whiff of suspicion that they were advertising a dinosaur, which even though not yet extinct, would be long before the future sister-publication (Rolling Stone XLII, due out in a few weeks no doubt) hit the Amazon cyber stand.

Jessie Jackson says that everywhere he goes he finds the big troubles of wide use of drugs, babies making babies, violence and suicide. Searching through the rest of the interview, I spot the question, "Are you optimistic about the country's future?"

"We will survive," he predicts. He even suggests we'll survive getting locked out of the White House (he is speaking about race here). "You get your stars from your scars," he explains in the last line of the interview. Go Barrack!

Ralph Nader pointed out that when he was at Harvard, and you worried about issues of right and wrong, justice and injustice, you were considered soft intellectually. Hard intellect was analyzing securities regulations (hasn't that been proven to be an oxymoron now?), tax rulings, et cetera. Of course he then went on to become...well Ralph Nader. Do you think we'll pull his predictions out of the dust bin now? Na.

Jane Fonda & Tom Hayden. Skip. Some astounding images by Annie Leibovitz including Brian Wilson, draped in a shimmering blue habit, holding a surf board on some nameless beach. I wonder if lots were cast for that robe yet? Springsteen with dingo boots near his ass, bent kneed, head thrown back, at an altitude which only pole vaulters ascend to without the benefit of electrical rocker infusions and screaming fans.

John Fogerty said It's easy to be cynical, though, when you turn on your TV and you hear "Revolution" being used to advertise running shoes. (How many people know that Lennon really wrote, You can count me IN!?)

Bono with a big hair and no glasses, Joan Baez looks like she should be the publisher for Vogue, with her starched collar, sytlish short hair showing traces of gray. "Maybe there aren't as many clear choices now as there were back then," she says referring to a time of Make Love Not War. The quote of hers they put in the art directed box in the center of the page was: If your goal is serious social change, it is going to be measured at some point by the risks that people are willing to take for it."

Brian Wilson's interview was all about what made his music tic. "The Beatles beat us, in a way," he said. "Their songs were more original." More images. Madonna, just sexxy, no Sefer Yetzirah or signs of Buddha. Just thumb to lip with a lit cigarette, wearing a 1940's brassier and a sideways glance which said, "I know you want me, who doesn't." Sting, chisseled and fresh, like a college quarterback, just out of the shower and Sean Penn, pissed. Cyndi Lauper, fit to be tied, a collage of chains and glitter, layers and brown lipstick and Boy George immitating Cyndi Lauper, except with more make-up.

Daniel Ellsberg tells us in the subtitle of his interview that "A pattern of government deception has been part of our national life for twenty-five years." All I would add is tack on 25 years since he said it originally and then about 5,000 more prior to his birth. When will we learn to admit male domination and spirituality exempt of the Divine Feminine?

Little did he know about "W" when he said "To their credit and good judgement, the American people do not want to be aggressors. They do not want to be terrorists." As we kick through the debris of the world chaos we've created, it would be hard to find his sentiment written in another language, concerning an American population which has come to be defined by the years between 2001 and 2008.

"Every person who took acid has his or her own story to tell," reminds Timothy Leary. "You simply cannot understand psychedelic drugs, which activate the brain, unless you understand something about computers." As I search for the next punch line, I ask the computer to match up key words and cross check them with our present dilemna, in order to predict the smartest next move. Then I hear Hal say, "Sorry Dave, I can't do that." (Er, I mean Dubby).

Hunter Thompson predicts that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours and Jack Nicholson says he still gets high and still likes to have a good time with the women, even though he says that's not where it's at today...darn. Bridging the gap between Leary (acid), and Nicholson (reckless behavior), we read about how Michael Douglas brought Ken Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest to the big screen..."It was magical. It was pure. Because we did it outside of the system, and we didn't know what we were doing, and there was an innocence on the part of all of us." Since then he's either produced or been in all of these:


2007 - King of California
2006 - The Sentinel
2006 - You, Me & Dupree
2003 - The In-Laws
2001 - One Night at McCool's
2001 - Don't Say a Word
2000 - Wonder Boys
2000 - Traffic
1999 - One Day in September
1998 - A Perfect Murder
1997 - The Game
1996 - The Ghost and the Darkness
1995 - The American President
1994 - Disclosure
1992 - Basic Instinct
1992 - Falling Down
1992 - Shining Through
1989 - Black Rain
1989 - The War of the Roses
1987 - Wall Street
1987 - Fatal Attraction
1985 - The Jewel of the Nile
1985 - A Chorus Line
1984 - Romancing the Stone
1983 - The Star Chamber
1978 - The China Syndrome
1978 - Coma
2006 - The Sentinel
1997 - The Rainmaker
1993 - Made in America
1990 - Flatliners
1985 - The Jewel of the Nile
1984 - Romancing the Stone
1978 - The China Syndrome

Profitable? Oh yeah. Magic? Not so much.

Wow, here's a line, by William Burroughs: "The biggest danger now is a fascist takeover under this pretense of the war against drugs." Remove drugs and insert Terror. Bingo. God, I hope that is behind us!

Here's Tina Turner on Jagger's saddle and Bono with big hair, saying, "Perhaps the Sixties was the product of a generation of spoiled children who could afford to drop acid and set off for Peru." Hang on, I've got to take a call from my friend in Iquitos who is planning the 5th annual Amazonian Shamanism Conference...

Don Henley is prognosticating...a very radical way of thinking..."Believe me, America is not back on track. People are still homeless, people are still out of work, the farmers are going out of business, and we're experiencing the biggest deficit in history." Uh-excuse me, we have a few more zeroes to show you Don...

And Lou Reed seems to be at the same table when he blares out, "Think of what's going on in the world today. If this was the Sixties, the college kids would be in the streets tearing the buildings down." All I can say is "and the colored girls go doo do doo, do doo, doo do doo..."

Sting predicted that "The power of rock & roll is gone. There's nothing rebellious about it at all." When asked by the interviewer if he consciously decided to use the system, he shamelessly admitted, "I used it to the hilt." Chaching.

They saved a frowning eyebrow and mussed hair clad Dylan for the last interview. Asked if Life gets complex as the years go by (duh), Dylan seemed thoughtful. "Yeah. You get older; you start having to get more family oriented. You start having hopes for other people rather than for yourself."

Toward the end of the interview, Kurt Loder asks Dylan, "Do you think there's any point today in people getting together--the way they did in the Sixties--to try to change things?" He answers with some hopeful thoughts but goes on to say "...but there's so much evil. It spreads wider and wider, and it causes more and more confusion. In every area. It takes your breath away."

"Like living your life just to make money?," asks Loder. "Yeah," answers Dylan, who already seemed, even then, way less Freewheelin, "But it isn't really accepted. Maybe in America it is, but that's why America's gonna go down, you know? It's just gonna go down. It just can't exist. You can't just keep rippin thing off. Like, there's just a law that says you cannot keep ripppin things off."

And many people laughed when they read that.