Headfish - a Rev. Chad Wells blog.

The Outsider

2012-01-21T11:57:00.000-05:00

“A free and easy society loves outsiders. People give him food and really take care of him, because they know that man is doing for us what we haven’t got the guts to do. That outsider who lives up there in the Mountain is at the highest peak of human evolution; his consciousness is one with the divine, and it’s great just that there is someone like that around. It makes you feel a little better. He’s realized. He knows what it’s all about. And we need a number of those people. Even though they don’t join our Game, they tell us, ‘What you’re doing is only a Game. It’s okay, I’m not going to condemn you, but it is only a Game. And we up on that Mountaintop are watching you, we love you, we have compassion for you, but excuse us please, we aren’t going to join.’”

Alan Watts

I have always been an outsider - to the degree that when I have become a part of a "thing" or group or "scene" I will develop an incessant and obsessive need to leave. From childhood to the present day I experience a wanting to belong, to be accepted, to be respected, loved, a part of the gang. An ego based urge to be justified, to be acknowledged - to reassure myself that I am a human being, that I am alive and I'm doing "the right thing" or succeeding. At the very moment I achieve the level of acceptance that I am looking for I find, paradoxically, that it is not at all what I need or truly want. With my music, my art, tattooing and studies I have achieved goals and levels of success that once achieved leave me hollow and wanting more or, more often than that, leave me with a realization that it's all illusory. It's all bullshit - or in the words of John Lennon, "it's all dick". And so I live on the outside of society, just around the fringe. Doing my own thing, my own way, in my own time with the knowledge and realization that my yearnings are a manifestation of a peculiarly formed ego. The ego is like a computer program running security checks on the machine. "Is everything still working properly? Is the machine secure? Are the files fragmented?" This is an evolutionary consciousness mechanism in it's simplest form. The problem that arises is when the ego becomes not a safety oriented program but the machine's entire operating system. A computer with a security program that grows too large or needs to run constantly and perform it's tasks infinitely will eventually no longer run any other programs. So I find myself in a constant state of inflating and deflating ego mechanism. Through the use of visionary states of consciousness, meditation upon and enrichment from the arts and music and metaphysical sciences I allow my self to ever expand while enjoying many deaths and blows to my fragile ego and to bring these lessons to my family, my children, my friends and those folks I come into contact with through my art and work. Am I living out some archetypal role of Shaman? Yogi? Sadhu? Monk? Minister? Teacher? Perhaps I am. I also realize that the very consideration of these concepts is an act of the over active ego - always questioning, testing, seeking validation. The truth is that I am only me - a carbon based life form who gives seed to help create other carbon based lifeforms. Everything else is an action of the ego. My point with all of this verbosity is to point out that those black sheep - those outsiders who are critical of the larger culture are just as important to the culture or society as those who seem to be at the center of it. Those who do the "right thing" or "play by the rules". We are here as an equal and opposite representation of the society. A way to hold a mirror above and below the greater culture and reveal those dark and hidden secrets that are ever growing and always evolving. We are the evolutionary, societal ego. We are society's security program. We are testing all the locks on the doors, challenging the thoughts and concepts so that those that are detrimental to our greater human, planetary or Universal systems will be dissolved and those that are advantageous shall be strengthened. So know that those beings that live beyond your personal safety zone or outside of your conceptualized morality or ideologies are the very people you will benefit from the most deeply. These are the beings who wade first into the waters of the deep, who are the first to traverse the hills and mountains to see what is on the other side, the first to dive into the deep inner and outer spaces of consciousness, the first to try the new medications, the first to lay upon the sword, to throw themselves upon the grenades of society and though many of us may wear cloaks that signify darkness, death, poverty or illness - know that we are as important or at least as much a part of this world as your self. Just as a fire in the forest may claim thousands of acres of trees it is also an important aspect of the natural order. A cleansing - a destructive construction. Though the trees no longer stand, new vegetation will appear there and thrive in soil that has been fortified by the essential minerals created by the burn and that the burn is not separate from nature or destructive to nature, it IS nature and that we outsiders and insiders alike are a part of that same nature - we are but flames and roots, dirt and leaves, sky and stone.

Good morning,
Rev. Chad

ReverendNeverend - The Good Trip Lollipop - dose:7 - Covered In Acid | Mixcloud - Re-think radio

2012-01-15T00:55:00.000-05:00

The Good Trip Lollipop - dose:7 - Covered In Acid by Reverendneverend on Mixcloud

2012 - This is the End?

2012-01-06T08:22:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the end of the world. There are dozens or more theories on what this year represents. From Nostradamus predictions to those Mayan Calendar conjectures - 2012 signifies the end of the old "world" or "age" and the beginning of the next one so it's probably gonna call for a little more than the standard New Year Resolution. Whether you believe that we are living in the end times or not, we are most certainly at the precipice of a new time. If you stop for just a moment you'll feel it. Look around. Everything is changing at such a rapid clip. Technological advances compound daily and so does the effect of said advance on our ecosystems. I do not think the Earth is going to stop spinning any time soon, but for the sake of creating REAL change in the world, why not assume that the end of the year may bring the end of us? If we all started living like we only had a year left to live the world would be in for a drastically different set of values and a drastically different practical application of those values. We would see those non-spiritual folks flip their coin to the mystical side near immediately and we'd also likely see those folks who seem to hold the hardest to the old religious moralities let go of the parts that hold them in restrictive, dogmatic bondage. We would see the true faces of our friends and relatives emerge - for the better or worse sides, whichever being the strongest side of their personality - would certainly surface and have it's time in the Sun, unfettered by what tomorrow might bring. We all hang onto those things from our past that make us comfortable and many of us hold onto old beliefs and patterns and ways of being out of fear of change, what others may think or what the long term consequences of our actions might mean. If you were given a terminal illness diagnosis today, end date guaranteed and not negotiable, how would you behave differently? Tomorrow is not a given. You are not guaranteed life past this very second. A comet could fly through the ceiling of your bedroom right now and incinerate you. A bus could jump the curb this afternoon and end your existence. Like a fly slapped by the random hand of humanity we all face an eventual and most often unexpected and uncontrollable demise. So why not live with more purpose, intent, passion, compassion and vigor? Let's make a BIG New Year's Resolution together here today. Let's live, eat, work, play and LOVE like the end of everything is on it's way. Stop putting off those bucket list experiences. Stop putting off those things you're saving for retirement or when you are financially "able". Stop living in fear of embarrassment or ridicule or persecution. Show the world your true self. If you're living a lie, come out of the closet and live in the light. If you're punishing your body with poor habits, stop now. If you're working hard at a job for your family but you never see them, find a way to make more time. Take a new job or find a way to leave those material world considerations behind. I'm not saying that you should quit your job and stop paying your mortgage (however if that's your bag, don't let anyone stop you from indulging your heart's desires - many fine men and women have found renunciation to be a purifying force in their lives and the world) but I'm also not proposing that we make tiny little minor changes over time. Be who you are right now. Show love now. Book that skydiving expedition now. Stop eating fast food or drinking or drugging now. "Eventually" is not coming. RIGHT NOW is the only thing that is a guarantee. Now is the only thing it is real. Now is all that matters. If we all flipped the switch right now, when December 21st, 2012 comes 'round and the planet doesn't explode or tilt on it's axis or Quetzalcoatl doesn't comes screaming from the sky or we don't all sprout our angelic wings or ascend or transform or start producing massive amounts of DMT from our dormant pineal glands - won't we still have achieved a sort of transcendence? Will we not be living in a new age? I hope that 2012 is the end. The end of suffering. The end of bullshit. The end of that which doesn't matter.

Feel free to leave comments here about how you're going to transform the world - whether inwardly or outwardly - in 2012.

Peace and love and deepest regards.

Christmastime Sure Looks Weird This Year

2011-12-23T11:35:00.000-05:00

FIFTY awesomely trippy, weird, unusual Holiday videos to rock you like a reindeer train!

DON'T FORGET!! My band Cricketbows has a great new Holiday tune that's out NOW! You can name your own price (yes, even FREE!) over at our Bandcamp.com page!! It's also available to purchase at iTunes, Amazon, Emusic, Napster and all the other music download sites!

Merry Christmas, fuckers!

-Chad

New post over on my Needle Damaged blog!

2011-12-04T13:52:00.001-05:00

CLICK HERE!

Crosby, Still & Nash - Teach Your Children (Live)

2011-11-25T10:55:00.000-05:00

Something special on the horizon to announce soon! Let's all reflect this day on how we can individually and as a group get back to the root of our existence. Peace and Love.

I'm ridding my world of a lot of clutter and freeing more space for my kids to grow. Here's some stuff I have up on E-Bay right now!

CLICK HERE!

Gracious Peasant - Dayton City Paper

2011-11-22T15:05:00.001-05:00

CLICK HERE to read about Cricketbows and Mosquito Hawk Exquisite Recordings in the Dayton City Paper.

2011-10-31T00:40:00.000-04:00

My band Cricketbows... Weird rock stuff mostly recorded at home by myself (with a little help on a few tracks by Mr. Roger Joseph Manning Jr. of Jellyfish, Imperial Drag, Moog Cookbook, Beck, A.F.I. and shitloads more) You can buy it here: http://cricketbows.bandcamp.com It will also be available on iTunes, Amazon.com, eMusic, Spotify and all the other digital music retailers. You can also request it from your favorite record stores. Chicka check it out.

Cricketbows - Drawing Explosions

2011-10-20T22:54:00.000-04:00

A fan made video for the instrumental closer to Cricketbows "Mycocosmic Transmission" CD.

Cricketbows - "Invoking the Mycologist" PSYCHEDELIC 2011

2011-04-03T01:35:00.000-04:00

My band, Cricketbows profiled on thebuddhaden.net

2011-03-21T22:22:00.000-04:00

Cricketbows profiled by Don Thrasher
Check out part one of this two part profile on my psychedelic band, Cricketbows!

New Cricketbows action!

2011-02-22T18:37:00.005-05:00

Check out Cricketbows on Reverbnation.com and listen to "Andromeda Suede" from the forthcoming full length CD, "Mycocosmic Transmissions"

COH, @Rebos, New Carlisle, OH 1993 Moshpit Hoods vs. Straight Edge DAYTON

2011-02-06T00:56:00.000-05:00

Andrew Copp DVD about me Pre-Order page

2011-01-26T14:57:00.000-05:00

>>Pre-order! Limited Edition! INK & FLESH DVD (Standard AND Deluxe Packages available!). The atmospheric, conversational film that brings together Cult Director Andrew Copp and Counterculture Tattoo Artist Rev. Dr. Chad Wells. Confessional interviews and amazing soundtrack by Wells himself create a strange and languid yet familiar afternoon with a Tattoo Family. Includes bonus features, Trailers, Andrew Copp shorts, Wells' own experimental film, promos and music video from Wells related bands. A must have.<<
ORDER HERE!

Healing Overtone (Solfeggio DNA Arpeggio & binaural beats)

2011-01-18T23:46:00.000-05:00

Cricketbows - Andromeda Suede (without vocals + Tattoo and Misc. Photo S...

2011-01-13T00:52:00.000-05:00

A sampling of some of my musical project - Cricketbows, with a Tattoo-heavy slideshow.

Ghost Dance - Native American - Power Drums - Spirit Pride

2011-01-11T12:30:00.000-05:00

Mom, Dad, Fuck You's, etc...

2010-12-25T23:21:00.003-05:00

So, at a family holiday party the other night my Mom told me that she had read my "FTW" post (below). I told her that it was more of a symbolic "Fuck You". It was symbolic in that the entire post was my way of quickly striking out at all of the things that had effected me in an adverse fashion leading to the terrible pain and subsequent depression that I've been going through. I could've used a sarcastic "Thank You" rather than a "Fuck You" but it didn't feel as cathartic to me at that moment. The "Fuck You" to Mom and Dad were most specifically about the genetics that they, as teen parents - both smokers with poor nutrition (among other things) had passed on to me. No, that's not their "fault" and if we're going back genetically we're gonna have to send a whole lot of "Fuck You's" down the family line for the shit batch of DNA I've been dealt. It was also a jab at them for what I suffered through as a child of teen parents. Both were uneducated. Both were mentally unprepared as parents. Not that I'm any better. I won't sit here and say that I've got it all figured out. I'm not sure ANYONE can be 100% mentally prepared for what it takes to be a parent and I've certainly done my own damage to my health that had nothing (directly) to do with my parents... But here's the deal. In my opinion to heal myself and to find someplace where my mind and body can achieve some semblance of "peace" I have to find a way to put all of the things from the past and my childhood that have made me the broken piece of shit that I am in the proper perspective. So when I am laying on a mattress on the floor, wrapped in a heated blanket, wishing that I could put a gun barrel down my throat and pull the trigger because of my own genetic shortcomings and hereditary maladies the first things that come through my mind are the "Fuck You's". I should certainly be thinking about forgiving them all. It's not my Mom's fault that she was born into the world the way that she was, with the parents that she had (teen parents again!). Mom's Dad walked out on the family when she was a little girl and never had a whole lot of good to bring to the table afterward - barely seeing or speaking to her and her brother when they were growing up. Of course that's going to make a kid do unhealthy things - feeling unloved and fucked up in the head and all of the crazy shit that goes with it. Family alcoholism and multiple step-parents later Mom was left in a pretty unhealthy place psychologically. She's not evil. She did the best she knew how to do with me and my brothers but when you're trying to navigate a ship with a half deteriorated map that's full of wrong directions you're gonna end up here. Same goes for Dad. He was a young dude looking to party and hang out with his friends and listen music and he ended up a Dad before he was old enough to vote. His back story's a different one than Mom's but it's not much better. Times were tough and shit got out of control. I'm trying to forgive them both. I'm having a hard time letting go of my anger and hurt but I'm trying. The story goes on and on from there. The lesson I'm trying to take from all of this is that the past happened and it fucking sucked. There were shining moments and wonderful bits here and there but they were tempered with confusion and resentment and seeing and hearing too much too young. I can think about the good things I got from my parents but then come the memories of stepdads' abuses. A pain in my coccyx to this day that cripples me when it's at it's worst and keeps me from putting food on my family's table - probably caused by a powerful kick from a stepfather's workboot the Summer between 3rd and 4th grade. The same stepfather that "playfully" stabbed my Mom in the leg and beat her head and mine into so many walls... Who exposed himself to me and thought it was funny. Who called me such terrible names that I still have the urge to hang myself with a bath towel just like I wanted to then - at 5 years old. She stayed with him for years. She stayed with him and let me leave to go live with my Dad who was completely unequipped to handle me and it still fucking hurts. It hurts even more now that that stepdad is dying of cancer and everybody is sad about it. Even I am sad about it because he's the father of my two younger brothers and one of my earliest male role models. This is all just the tip of the iceberg as far as the shit that fucked my head up as a kid and the shit that still continues to fuck my head up and manifest itself as mental and physical anguish to this very day. So, yes, I love my Mom. I love my Dad. I wish wishes every other day that I could hug them both and not feel anxiety or pain or fear or sadness. I'm trying to figure my head out and heal the things that are physically wrong with me so I can be a better parent for my daughters. I picked a woman who will never leave me. I picked a woman who loves me unconditionally. I picked a woman who has stronger and sturdier genetics than either side of my family. I picked a woman whose parents stayed married and taught her to do the same. I picked a woman who is imperfect enough to understand and accept MY imperfections. So, I'm trying to get past the "Fuck You" stage and into the forgiveness stage. I've tried the "I don't give a fuck" stage and that doesn't work so... I'm sorry if I've hurt anyone by saying "Fuck You". I'm sorry if I've hurt anyone by airing this "dirty laundry" in public but you guys all had your chances and I'm trying to do what's right to make me better and make my girls have a life with a Dad who's not carrying all this bullshit inside of him. So if I have to let it out to do that I will and if I have to let it out publicly so that I can feel like it REALLY has left me and maybe get some love and consolation from some other people who have experienced the same things that I have (or worse) then that's what I'm going to do.

Merry Christmas
-Chad

2010-12-05T14:01:00.000-05:00

FTW

2010-12-03T09:16:00.002-05:00

My brain hurts. My body hurts. My heart hurts. My complete being - the tangible and the intangible HURTS. SO here is the first step in my recovery. FUCK YOU Mom. FUCK YOU Dad. FUCK YOU to my first and all subsequent "step-parents", FUCK YOU drugs, alcohol, religion and school. FUCK YOU Caffeine. FUCK YOU packaged, processed foods. FUCK YOU Capitalism. FUCK YOU Television. FUCK YOU Universe.

A couple new graphics for the TattooBlog

2010-11-18T10:04:00.000-05:00

A manifesto...

2010-11-17T11:41:00.003-05:00

"You're all a bunch of fucking slaves!"
-Jim Morrison

The Abolition of Work
Bob Black, 1985 -- from his anthology The Abolition of Work and Other Essays from Loompanics Press.

No one should ever work.Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words,
a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.
The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously -- or maybe not -- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.
The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure"; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacation so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.
I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "Communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.
Usually -- and this is even more true in "Communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee -- work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions -- Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey -- temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.
But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who -- by any rational-technical criteria -- should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.
The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline." Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.
Such is "work." Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the "suspension of consequences." This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that's why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizinga's erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel -- these practices aren't rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.
Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?
The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.
We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism -- but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.
Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at out watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. But workers do. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!"
Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves." His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and health." Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to "St. Monday" -- thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration -- was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord's work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov's figures from villages in Czarist Russia -- hardly a progressive society -- likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants' days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.
To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes' compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life -- in North America, particularly -- but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The "survival of the fittest" version -- the Thomas Huxley version -- of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist -- a geographer -- who'd had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: "The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity." (A modern version -- dubiously developmental -- is Abraham Maslow's counterposition of "deficiency" and "growth" motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that "the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required." He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work -- it's rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work -- but we can.
The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy George's England In Transition and Peter Burke's Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bell's essay, "Work and its Discontents," the first text, I believe, to refer to the "revolt against work" in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bell's end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that "the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved," only a few years before the post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquility of Harvard.
As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith's modern epigones. As Smith observed: "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW's report Work in America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner -- because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, "it does not compute."
If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they don't count the half million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, which gets so much media attention. This reflects the unvoiced assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereas coal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question. What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have heir lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50's. Consider all the other workaholics.
Even if you aren't killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work.
Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing -- or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.
Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in this life-and-death context. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration was designed to police the core part of the problem, workplace safety. Even before Reagan and the Supreme Court stifled it, OSHA was a farce. At previous and (by current standards) generous Carter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a random visit from an OSHA inspector once every 46 years.
State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three-Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won't help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire.
Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that -- as antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don't even try to crack down on most malefactors.
What I've said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.
I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkeys and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.
Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?
Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant -- and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we've virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.
Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called "schools," primarily to keep them out of Mom's hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid "shadow work," as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they're better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.
I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence would have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they'll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn't care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don't what robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven't saved a moment's labor. Karl Marx wrote that "it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class." The enthusiastic technophiles -- Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B. F. Skinner -- have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let's give them a hearing.
What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.
The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don't want coerced students and I don't care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.
Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile, profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although they'd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they're just fueling up human bodies for work.
Third -- other things being equal -- some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people don't always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, "anything once." Fourier was the master at speculating how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in "Little Hordes" to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we don't have to take today's work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed. If technology has a role in all this it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. It's a sobering thought that the grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that there's no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything it's just the opposite. We shouldn't hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.
The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris -- and even a hint, here and there, in Marx -- there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers' Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned from the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists -- as represented by Vaneigem's Revolution of Daily Life and in the Situationist International Anthology -- are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the worker's councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?
So the abolitionists would be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debater's problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.
Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not -- as it is now - -- a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play, The participants potentiate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.
No one should ever work. Workers of the world... relax!

"Guitar Solo 1" Acrylic on Canvas 2010

2010-11-03T18:39:00.001-04:00

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The Good Trip Lollipop - Dose:One

2010-10-17T16:18:00.000-04:00

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The Good Trip Lollipop - Dose:One

An excursion through the murky abysses and breathtaking heights of the headiest nugs of psychedelia, rock, punk, alt, country and way out there "whatthefuckeryisthat?!" Be sure no stone will be left unburned. Turn it ON Tune it IN and TURN IT UP.

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5. Weedeater - $20 Peanut
6. Bloodrock - Cheater
7. Cricketbows - Chronic Inflammation
8. Free - The Hunter
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The Jackalopes opening for The Misfits 10.14.10 ENTIRE SET as Youtube playlist!

2010-10-17T03:20:00.000-04:00