Monday, April 14, 2014

WE HAVE MOVED



This old site is now a relic of thoughts gone by (albeit some still quite relevant). We have moved premises to a vibrant new peach office located here, where we are workshopping the CRYSTAL DIAMOND SUTRA : Joule of Transcendental Parties. Please come in.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

HOLYHELA2K15 IN P/REVIEW


Here's an analogue review I wrote of a digital doc party I attended online yesterday courtesy of holyhela2k15 and the Digital Writers Festival. (Nuzzling into the wall behind it is a zine I made recently and have forgotten to mention here yet, R ' N ' BEING : THE CRYSTAL FILES) Click on the images to view the ends of the sentences.. :






Monday, December 9, 2013

MIXED MESSAGES

I just wrote a 5 page letter to Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift and Trickster Makes This World .. I thought he might be interested in my intricate webs of tricky gifting and, if he cares to engage, may fathom my Peace Party Puzzle in possibly the most thorough fashion of anyone. Here's an excerpt from Trickster Makes This World :


In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish-right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead-and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. When someone's sense of honorable behaviour has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.


That trickster is a boundary-crosser is a standard line, but in the course of writing this book I realized that it needs to be modified in one important way, for there are cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight. In several mythologies, for example, the gods lived on earth until something trickster did caused them to rise into heaven. Trickster is thus the author of the great distance between heaven and earth; when he becomes the messenger of the gods it's as if he has been enlisted to solve a problem he himself created. In a case like that, boundary creation and boundary crossing are related to one another, and the best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found--sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.


In other news, mine and Cocos new DJ duo MIXED MESSAGES will be having our debut this weekend at a BORN HAIRY USA party at Joanna and Michael's house. She rustled up this genius promo pic which neatly encapsulates our vibe.. She as villain selecta The Baroness, me as Colombian baby Jesus Divino Niño (and vice versa) :


Wednesday, November 20, 2013

MY ZENSITIVE ART

This year I have been living in a sub-lease slipstream, floating from house-to-house since returning to Melbourne in February. I've inhabited at least 10 houses in 2013. But it's all been running super smooth for some reason. The next apt lodging always pops out of the woodwork just in time, and I get to spend turbo time hanging with a variety of quality genies, ride in all directions home from work and never get sick of a neighbourhood. My current one is with my bro Sean who's boombox collection is worth writing home (wherever that is) about. I'm staying in the room of the lovely, tangibly successful writer Romy Ash, while she's off having a wordy adventure in NYC.
























Usually when I move in to a new place I scan the bookshelves and lucky dip a title for further perusing. I love it when they are basically giving me the thumbs up saying "yeah, do your thing! this Party Within buzz you are on is really ancient and universal, here we've already articulated it for you super succinctly, go forth!" which is what Alan Watts has been doing lately in The Way of Zen


See! (from the chapter,  Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing) :


Whether trusting our memories or trusting the mind to act on its own, it comes to the same thing: ultimately we must act and think, live and die, from a source beyond all 'our' knowledge and control. But the source is ourselves, and when we see that, it no longer stands against us as a threatening object. No amount of care and hesitancy, no amount of introspection and searching of our motives, can make any ultimate difference to the fact that the mind is

Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself.

In the end, the only alternative to a shuddering paralysis is to leap into action regardless of the consequences. Action in this spirit might be right or wrong with respect to conventional standards. But our decisions upon the conventional level must be supported by the conviction that whatever we do and  whatever 'happens' to us, is ultimately 'right'.


In other words, we must enter into it without 'second thought', without the arrière-pensée of regret, hesitancy, doubt or self-recrimination. Thus when Yün-men was asked, 'What is the Tao?' he answered simply 'Walk on!'


But to act 'without second thought', without doublemindedness, is by no means a mere precept for our imitation. For we cannot realize this kind of action until it is clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is actually impossible to do anything else. In the words of Huang Po :


Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing onto which they can cling. They do not know that the void is not really the void but the real realm of Dharma...... It cannot be looked into or sought, comprehended by wisdom or knowledge, explained in words, contacted materially (ie. objectively) or reached by meritorious achievement......


...As a zen master said, 'Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh.' In this moment the whole quality of consciousness is changed, and I feel myself in a new world in which, however, it is obvious I have always been living. As soon as I recognise that my voluntary and purposeful action happens spontaneously 'by itself', just like breathing, hearing and feeling, I am no longer caught in the contradiction of trying to be spontaneous. There is no real contradiction, since 'trying' is 'spontaneity'. Seeing this, the compulsive, blocked and 'tied up' feeling vanishes. It is just as if I had been absorbed in a tug of war between my two hands, and had forgotten that both were mine.


No block to spontaneity remains when the trying is seen to be needless. As we saw, the discovery that both the voluntary and involuntary aspects of the mind are alike spontaneous makes an immediate end of the fixed dualism between the mind and the world, the knower and the known. The new world in which I find myself has an extraordinary transparency or freedom from barriers, making it seem that I have somehow become the empty space in which everything is happening.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

EXTERNALLY YOURS...

















Here's a story I wrote a few months ago for Kim Jaeger's publication '100 Years' accompanying her show of the same name at Craft Victoria. It's not really very fictional tbh...ready? here it goes....


RING RING!
DING DONG!



The doorbell and phone chimed together. Frank Nuggets stopped vacuuming and opened the door, which was located between his eyes and up a bit. There, washed up on the sandy iron doorstep of his mind, was a large timeless present. Parcel I mean. Plasticky blue and yellow. Franks knees buckled as he bent to pick it up and bring it inside. Which technically was outside now, on the side of his forehead visible to his friends and foes. He didn’t stop to wonder who the courier had been, and why he hadn’t needed to sign for it, he was too curious.



Stuck to the top of the package was an A4.13 golden yellow cardboard envelope. He tore it open using the convenient perforated strip provided. Inside was an electric blue notebook and a drawing of a camera photographing him with a flash. CLICK it said. To indicate the sound of the shutter.



The book was not the most electric blue you can possibly get, but about the second most electric blue you can get. Flicking through it appeared to be somebodies travel diary from the time they went to Ireland. The content was largely anecdotal. As a pure verified fact lover Frank showed little interest. He tossed it aside. It fell open to a page that said simply in a pointy black font BLACK THOUGHT, overlaid with some cursive orange pencil saying :



Can I tell you a slightly amazing story?



Weird. Thought Frank. He wasn’t used to this sort of open-ended puzzling mail. He wanted answers, STAT.



Undoing the drawstring he released the parcel from the thick blue plastic bag that surrounded it. An identical bag was underneath. He shed that one too. A layer of paper was also removed. Hello. He thought. What’s this.



There was a box inside, with tapes taped all round the perimeter. Like a crafty bomb laden with sonic analogue ammo, ripe for insertion into several simultaneous boomboxes. On top of the box was a Blondie vinyl 7”, Atomic.  He pulled the tapes off to see the picture on the box. It was a double disco light, the kind with two rotating balls covered with iridescent glassy orifices that beam spinning colours around parties.



Hmmm. Was his next thought. This could really improve the ambience of my home club.



Excited to receive such a light he ripped the box open. Peering in his heart sank. There was no rotating party light inside. Just glossy black, the colour of trapped trash, soon to be dumped deep below see level and forgotten. Usually he didn’t dig through refuse, but seeing it had been presented so ceremoniously he opened the bag and took a look.



It was dark but a lot of glinting was going on. Was it junk? It was really hard to tell from that angle. Upturning the box Frank let a chaotic mountain of trash encrusted jewels fall onto the carpet. Layers of intricately wrapped petite packagettes became evident within the mother package.



The first thing to catch Franks eye was ruby red and wrapped in bubble wrap with a curly cord to secure it. Removing the cord and discarding the bubbles he found himself holding the lower lip of a novelty plastic lips phone. The part with numbers on buttons. But there was no top lip receiver to complete its function in sight. Rendering it useless as a stand-alone gift he put it behind him and reached for a small box with a gold ring image on the outside. Close inspection revealed it was wrapped in an old CD-R wrapper. Under that was a white jewellery box held shut with an invisible magnetic strip. Flipping it open Frank was surprised to see a pink, rainbow dot and silver foil orchid, deftly folded from a hundreds and thousands cookie packet. The trashy flower housed a generous crepe paper joint with a glowing coral tip in the position of its stamen. An aroma of coffee filled his nostrils.



Not sure whether to smoke it or squeal Frank took a moment to notice a new sensation that was emanating through his body. His atoms were vibrating rhythmically at an altogether unfamiliar all-pervasive frequency. It felt like there was a party going on, but he was all alone and couldn’t pinpoint its origin. Am I the venue? He wondered.



A golden envelope with an angular strip of navy blue electrical tape caught his attention. Tearing it open he found a book of gangsta philosophy by Ice T.



Huh. He thought. Opening it like an oracle he came to Ice’s musings on eroticism. Still pondering the notions on total submission Frank pulled another hard cover volume from the pile of flotsam. It was a novel by RZA. About Wu. He didn’t have time to read it. Too hungry.



It was then that Frank glimpsed the end of a packet of Old Gold dark chocolate in the cacophonous mix... with an intensity level of four cacao beans out of five. Foil glistening silver from it’s roughly torn edge. Pulling the silver free of the box Frank was disappointed to find no chocolate but a tightly coiled blue tinged photograph of a human torso in the foil. He threw it over his shoulder and unfurled some of the scrunched paper that had surfaced on the mound.



Oh man. He thought. What’s all this about. At the top of the page was a pencil drawing of an upright salt shaker with an upside-down crystal on it’s side. The salt shaker recurred in haphazard succession down the page, tumbling over and scattering salt, seasoning its own descent. As it tumbled the orientation of the crystal was also altered. At its lowest point, the shaker was completely upended and empty while the crystal was depicted upright and smiling. Curious. Thought Frank. Some loopy script emblazoned the drawing with these seven words : 


We are pataphysicists of the highest order



Does that mean me? Thought Frank.


It was now that he remembered himself and picked up the phone, which had been ringing the whole time. Off the hook that is.





Wednesday, July 17, 2013

POET ENOUGH


























This fuzzy suggestion of a map is a little fraction of fractals from a Peace Party Puzzle I have been revelling on for a few years now, radiating from it's symbolic and actual central point, a novelty lips phone. (Still needs more arrows mind you).


Each mini-notebook pictured depicts an actual full-sized notebook that documents a mini-era of journal writing; emotions, events, abstract thoughts, freejazz rambling, pictorial essays... in the order they fell out onto the page. Some more alarming than others. Then they tend to get posted to a lucky recipient who has influenced the puzzle of my mind in a profound (and often hilarious) way.


THEN WHAT HAPPENS....that, my friends, is a long story. But I've got the time if you've got the attention span.


Cue apt quote from external source :


MORE POETRY THAN MAPMAKING


The heart awakens as a lotus opens: It's natural beauty and scent both fill itself and perfume the garden around it. But the nature of flowers is to open in the daylight and close at night. How can we map and describe such a process? Yes there are stages of shoot, bud and blossom. But this description omits more than it tells. It misses the nurturance of roots in the mud, the drinking of sunlight, the pollination of the bees, and the lotus sisters and parents that surround this flower and fill the world with more beauty. It misses the growth that takes place at night and the invisible buds below the surface of the water that don't yet remember the world of sunlight. Because the unfolding of this mystic spiral is so richly organic, many traditions turn to poems to express its spirit. Poetry has a mysterious power in its ability to hold meanings almost impossible to speak directly...


- After The Ecstasy, The Laundry, by Jack Cornfield




Monday, May 20, 2013

NO. 8 REWIRING

Who here's had the sensational pleasure of popping the cap off their crown chakra ? Wild huh ? So much effervescent energy that cannot help but bubble to the surface and spill over the rim time and time again. The thing with crown seals too is that you can't screw them back on. Once they're off they're off and you gotta let fly with your unstoppable flow. I went truly bananas when that happened.


Divine bananas.


Personally, being born on the Day of Explosive Power (according to The Secret Language of Birthdays) I just went for gold and tore through a whole succession of chakras in a single (very lengthy) sitting. Well I wasn't just sitting. I was walking, flying, writing, drawing, wrapping, sending, bathing, tying, crying, giggling, dancing, getting changed.


I'm not here to talk about the crown chakra though. That's old news. The one I want to bring to your attention is located a little way above your head. Look up. There it is. The 8th chakra. That's the one that makes you feel like a party once you've cracked it wide open. A classic trait of parties is that you are not the only one at them. Heaps of people come and you have to be accommodating if you don't want your party to suck. Listen to this rundown I just found on a handwritten photocopied print out a lady in Whanganui gave me :


The eighth chakra is trans-personal, connecting to the infinite source of all archetypal energies and maintains a connection to every individual body and soul. It connects personal unconsciousness and collective unconsciousness. Linking the literal and symbolic dimensions, your personal life and the impersonal universe. It holds patterns of experience and soul knowledge that are inherent in human consciousness and also archetype patterns. It's influences are Mother Nature/Gaia, the natural order of things or laws of physics. eg laws of nature, cause and effect, karma, choice and consequence, magnetic attraction. Archetypal patterns held in the eighth chakra flow into the individuals personal energy field, stir the psyche, move into the conscious mind, the emotional body and finally into a physical manifestation in that persons life.


You can see why having tapped into all that jazz someone could get the impression they are actually a party can't you! and that all their things were secretly symbols of their friends in disguise and of course they can't stop sending strange mail to their nearest, dearest and furthest. Because the individual in question found them all inside their cacophonous psyche and wanted to communicate that. Like that nirvana song when he found his friends, they were in his head.


Did you know expressions the opposite of depression?
Let it out I say! Free the cats from the bags! It's dark in there and they can't breathe properly!