alternative culture jam

an excerpt from the travel memoir, The Last Tourist, by Nowick Gray

Children of the Machine: From the Be-Bob Reggae Bar to the Black Moon Rave.

08 March 2008

A hundred devotees sat motionless on the sand watching, as if on reality-TV, the spectacle of young Thai men playing skiprope with fire, a 15-foot length of flaming sisal. Thump-thump-a-thump-thump went the pounding “music” in the dark; the dayglo constructions overhead offering the only variety from the relentless beat of the machine. Most of the crowd were men, young travelers from Western lands who shared buckets of Red Bull and local whiskey with their shadow-eyed Thai escorts of the night, or with me in exchange for a few eager taps on my djembe.

It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, with the group of us who started out in the Be-Bob bar. Be-Bob was not the usual kind of casual misspelling; it was an intentionally clever description of its proprietor, a Thai in his mid-twenties who in his own gentle and gracious way, offered to this corner of the world a kind of personal altar to Bob Marley. Day and night the old standards played, “Redemption Song” and “No Woman No Cry,” sometimes accompanied by Mang and friends on guitar or drum, but never out of the looping playlist for long. It was a haven artfully constructed from local rocks and tree limbs, festooned with vines and strings of coral and featuring the burbling sounds of a recreated forest spring. A few feet out the door lay the swath of new road construction, daily heaving with its trucks and bulldozers and graders as the access is prepared for the 200-million-baht, 50-bungalow resort going up on the nearby end of the beach.

A couple of days earlier I had wondered about attending the Black Moon dance party at Ban Tai, just to get a taste of the phenomenon—at least its new moon variant—that attracted so many partygoers to that opposite end of the island. But it seemed a bit far to go, with a pricey taxi ride and no certain return in the late night; and techno music was not really my thing. Meanwhile after a casual jam at the Be-Bob, Mang had the inspiration to throw a party on this same night, which seemed a good, rootsy alternative to the Ban Tai beach scene. He printed up some flyers with the additionally clever come-on, “Be There—Be Bob.” His friends would show up with a piece of metal roofing to fold into a makeshift barbecue, and the usual fare of drinks and smokeables would be on hand to ease guests into cozy conviviality.

So it went… me arriving with djembe in hand fresh from kirtan, already uplifted into seventh-chakra bliss by the vibrations of the beehive-kiva sound temple at the yoga center up the hill. I joined a party of somewhat familiar fellow travelers, seven of us from seven countries. Scattered tales of Jamaica and Amsterdam, Laos and India… but soon the idea arose: who’s up for a trip to Ban Tai? Some waffled. Sandrine flipped a coin: heads, she’ll go. Tempted by the opportunity and a group taxi fare, I yet demurred. The complimentary barbecue food, tasty fish and plates heaped with salad, was just starting to arrive at our table, and the intended jam session was yet to begin. Mang sat pensive and alone—perhaps a trifle discombobulated—behind the bar, watching his only party guests consider an early exit. “Don’t worry,” we half-sang to one another; “Everything’s gonna be all right…” At that moment disembodied Bob joined us for the chorus.

I felt in a sense obligated to honor the personal invitation that had been extended to me, along with the promise of semi-public performance; but on the other hand the party was, so far at least, nearly empty but for the group of tourists about to walk out the door. At the last instant I changed my mind, grabbed my drum, and joined them, promising Mang to come back and jam again another night. As I walked through the door Bob, always on cue, sang a serenade: “You’re running, you’re running, you’re running away…”

Sandrine confided that she always had trouble making decisions. Sometimes she would call a friend for advice; usually she would resort to the coin-flip method. That often entailed more than one result: two out of three, or even up to ten tries, to “increase the probabilities.” I shared that during my recent Vipassana retreat (at a monastery just up the hill from the town of Ban Tai) I had put this very question of nagging doubt and indecision to the teacher. He had a couple of ready answers. “When in doubt, don’t do. Then the task is to ask a friend. If still in doubt, flip a coin.” Evidently Sandrine was already tapped into this timeless spiritual wisdom. I recalled the past year’s deep dark film based on the Cormac McCarthy novel, No Country for Old Men, with the coin flip a device used by the psychopathic killer to doom his victims by their own choice. This resonance was further enriched by the fact that our Irish friend for the night’s road trip was named Cormac.

By the time we reached the taxi stand there were four of us still committed to the journey. But now the taxi driver, taking his ease with friends between the shops in the calm night air, changed his mind, shaking his head as he looked at us as if in dour judgment of our collective cultural (or was it anti-cultural?) folly. No matter; we found another taxi stand, and waited there sipping what was advertised in red block letters on the wall as “Sexy Beer.”

Once deposited under the broad banner of “Black Moon Culture,” we were confronted with a 300-baht entrance fee, unanticipated but unavoidable now that we’d arrived. The scene past the gate was uninspiring: vendors with rainbow wands beside large boards filled with dayglo figures they would paint on body parts. Long booths selling incongruous drinks such as red plastic beach buckets brimming with Jack Daniels. Herds of aimless, faceless people visible only as a pattern of black and white, punctuated by flashing wands of rainbow light. The ever-insistent, never-uplifting deadbeat pulse of the beat, beat, beat.

Where and when had I felt something like this malaise before? Ah, yes… the Hinsdale, Illinois Youth Center, when I was seventeen and looking for something to do on a Friday night.

Eventually people danced. Cormac wandered for two hours looking for his girlfriend who had disappeared in the company of another friend. Sandrine sipped whiskey and coke and talked wistfully of her bungalow and book, Krishnamurti. Even so she was content enough with her decision to go for “the adventure,” and so was I. You never know unless you try. “Better to act,” my teacher had said, “than sit on the fence.” I drank a second beer, sat in the sand astride my drum and tried to play along with the bassy airwaves, refusing an offer of Ecstasy. But the beer didn’t quite do it. The drumming couldn’t really be heard. We joined the dancers. With a little effort and time you could kind of get sucked into the tsunami of sound. After a while that too was boring; we decided it was enough and we should look for a taxi ride home. Cormac gave up on trying to find his girlfriend.

The taxis were doing a brisk business at 3:30 a.m., and we quickly found a ride back to Haad Salad, packed in the back of a pickup with five or six others headed to assorted destinations. The tipsy Swedish blonde sitting across from me could hardly keep her flying fingers off my djembe; but whenever she paused for a moment, the French woman next to me immediately urged me to keep playing. Perhaps, after all, the spirit of Bob was still with us: “jammin till the break of day…”

It was four thirty by the time I reached my bungalow. The decision to turn off the six o’clock meditation bell-alarm was a no-brainer. Sleep when it came was not steady or deep, as the leftover pulse of the beat machine refused to go away… having entered the very structure of my cells, reprogramming my DNA. Joining the others, in the inexorable drift toward Black Moon culture, now I, too, had become a child of the machine.

Fast-forward: 9:30 a.m.

“I woke up this morning, and wrote down this song…”

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Order The Last Tourist now from Amazon.

Table of Contents

Part I – Paradise Lost and Found
* Hawai’i: Gateway to the Tropics
* Walking Light: Asia-Pacific Travels

Part II – The Long Way Home: Europe and Latin America

Part III – Healing Journeys
* Amazonia
* Abadiania
* Arunachala
* Ayurveda

“It was like a spider’s web: The more we tried to avoid politics, the more we became entangled in them.”
—Kobo Abé, Inter Ice Age 4

“Political power in America is media power. It’s the power to shape consciousness. Violence works when you have media power. It fails when you don’t. The protest Wednesday was an example of “hyperreality.” There was no attempted coup by President Trump, nor by people wandering around the Capitol. The media created a story about an ‘armed insurrection,’ a putsch, and they seem to believe it.” —Gregory Hood

“The actor’s mask becomes his face.”
—Plato (William T. Vollman, Europe Central)

“Leftism as practiced today, is aggressive. It is rapacious and rests on the idea that no one can exist outside their preferred outcome lest anyone see their world for the nightmare it truly is… The Mythology of America is just that, mythology, worth using as the basis for the new story rather than a shackle keeping us chained down, staring at the Abyss and despairing at what was lost.”
—Tom Luongo, https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/end-great-american-myth-secession-not-revolution

“This is the unbridgeable gap of modern politics. It is the infinite gulf between surrender and negotiating with terrorists… The realization is fast dawning on the people across the West that the terrorists don’t wear odd clothes, carry Ak-47s and speak in foreign tongues… They are the ones telling you to let Grandma die of loneliness in a nursing home, forbidding you from buying a Turkey for Christmas that can feed more than 6 people and spitting on people for not wearing a mask in public.” —Tom Luongo, https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/hungary-and-poland-create-unbridgeable-gap-great-reset

Cutting the threads
—from: James Lindsay, Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism

“What, then, could possibly be the answer to this perilous and perennial tangle? Fortunately, the first step, at the least, is very simple. It’s mere awareness. It is learning to recognize the constructed pseudo-reality for what it is—a fabricated simulation of reality that is unfit for human societies—and beginning to reject unapologetically any demand to participate in it. This means refusing the analysis of the paralogic (by seeing its contradictions) and being held to account by the paramorality (by recognizing its caprice, malice, and evil) that sustain the lie. (An old word for this is “secularism,” in the non-specific sense.) In the exact instant one becomes competent at spotting the lie—or, the network of lies—held in service of a constructed pseudo-reality and its social enforcement, one already possesses the necessary perspective to break the spell of the pseudo-reality in its entirety. This, knowing the cheat for what it is, more than any other thing, is how the strings of paralogic and paramorality are cut, and with them cut pseudo-reality will come crashing down.

“This can only be done by learning enough to see the games, telling the truth, and refusing to be coerced or forced to participate in the increasingly hegemonic pseudo-reality before it claims totalitarian power.  Speaking practically, there are two straightforward ways this can be done. One is to refute the pseudo-reality, and the other is to reject it.

“For most people, the latter of these is easier than the former, and it requires less of someone. Strength of will and character will suffice. Simply refusing to participate in the pseudo-reality, utilize its paralogic, or bow to its paramorality—and to live one’s life as though it is utterly irrelevant to yours—is a powerful act of defiance against an ideological pseudo-reality. It requires nothing more of a person than a convicted statement that says, ‘This does not apply to me because it is not me’ (or, ‘not even real’), a refusal to make decisions based in socially constructed fear and intimidation, and a willingness to live one’s life on the most normal terms possible. This is a powerful and peaceful act of defiance that many other normal people (those outside the pseudo-reality) will recognize for strength, and while it may cost you in the short term and in some ways, it will reap rewards in the long term and in others, at least up until the point that the paramoral totalitarian trap is fully sprung on a sufficiently broken and demoralized society. Just keep your head up and refuse to live your life on someone else’s (psychopathic) terms, and you will do much against such budding regimes.

“Refuting pseudo-reality is harder, as it requires much more specific knowledge along with skill, strength of character, and courage. It also must be done, at least by someone, if an ideological pseudo-reality has already taken root. Such a pseudo-reality has to be shown to be a false reality, which is to say a pernicious fiction, to as many people as possible. To do it, its distortions of reality, the contradictions of its paralogic, and the evils and harms of its paramorality must all be exposed and explained as a first step. These objectives require devoting, which is in some sense wasting, a great deal of time and expending a great deal of effort intentionally learning something one knows is false and therefore (if one is successful) useless. It is also demoralizing to learn, given the psychopathic nature of the material. It’s not for the faint of heart, even if all goes well.

“Commonly, also, this process will not be comfortable and requires tremendous courage of precisely the kind that ideological demoralization is very effective at eroding and containing. The paralogic will interpret direct dissent as stupid or crazy, and the paramorality will characterize it as evil (or motivated by evil intentions, even if unconscious ones outside of the dissenter’s awareness). The courage to bear these outrageous insults and slander, and to bear its unjust social consequences, is therefore a necessary precondition to putting a halt to totalitarianism. It is understandable why most will not choose this path, but be warned: the longer one waits, the worse this gets.

“For those who will take up the task, the approach is a combination of being informed, being courageous, being forthright, and being subversively funny. Being informed is necessary to identify, expose, and explain the distortions of the pseudo-reality and juxtapose them with reality. It is also necessary to make use of the most decisive tool that exists against ideological pseudo-realities, which is the law of non-contradiction. Pseudo-realities and their paralogical structures always contradict reality and themselves, and exposing these contradictions exposes their lies. Being courageous and forthright is necessary to believe in oneself and one’s (real) values and thus to withstand the paramoralizing attacks and social pressure they will generate, but they inspire more of the same and restore moral authority to those who are drained of it by these distortions. Being subversive and funny undermines the psychopathy and will to power that characterize the entire ideological pseudo-realist enterprise.

“Resisting effectively and with sufficient knowledge (refuting) is, of course, best, but resisting at all, even by mere refusal to participate in any obvious lie (rejecting), is also effective. This is because revealing the ideological pseudo-reality for what it is—false and irrelevant to actual reality—undermines the pseudo-reality and encourages more people to refute and reject it. Even more powerful, however, is that revealing the underlying nature of the ideological pseudo-reality—that it is psychopathic—to normal people (including those partially ensnared) ranks highly among the ways the paralogical and paramoral threads can be severed. And, a psychopathic reaction is precisely what will result from effectively resisting a psychopathic ideology. The challenging part is that you, who dares resist their games and who eludes their trap, becomes the target of their psychopathic ire, and many sympathizers who you would usually count as friends will take sides against you (there is no neutral in the paramorality). The earlier one enters this fight, the more courage it takes and yet the more valuable it is.

“Some of the requisite courage to resist can be found by remembering that the pseudo-reality is not real, its paralogic is not logical, and its paramorality is not moral. That is, it’s not you; it’s them. Some more backbone can be dredged up by realizing that once the pseudo-real begins displacing the real for even a few percent of the population, the question is no longer whether things will go bad but how bad they will go before the bubble bursts. Reality will always win, and calamity comes in proportion to the size of the lie between us and it, so it is better to act sooner than later. Still more heart resides in grasping that it gets worse right up until a real resistance mounts, and then, after a rocky transition, it starts getting better. The time to act is therefore now.

“The way resistance—just plain resistance—works is by restoring to the normal person the epistemic and moral authority necessary to resist the ideologue’s illegitimate demands to participate in a pseudo-real fraud. That is, it restores confidence in normality to the normal. No one feels ashamed of resisting a con, whatever form it takes, and this is the real phenomenon we face with any growing ideological pseudo-reality. Its paralogic and paramorality work to drain us of our sense of authority to know what is and is not true and what is and is not right. One’s authority only lacks under the assumptions of the paralogical and paramoral systems, however—that is, inside pseudo-reality—and it can be reclaimed by anyone who simply refuses to participate in the lie. Step outside of the pseudo-reality (take the ‘red pill,’ as depicted in The Matrix), and you’ll see.”

We have succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome, where the inmates come to love and mimic their jailers, and “hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity.” Identifying with the sociopaths at the helm, we have no remorse. Our former selves, our innate human kindless, is put on hold, buried under dogma, held back in fear, kept in check by cognitive dissonance… invisible.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”–Edmund Burke

A prayer to the gods of literature

We invoke the old gods of literature, of sacred art, to wash away the stink of politics even as it threatens the world, again, idiots in the matchbox. Washing them away like Shiva with a storm upon the world, kirtan frenzy of passion of truth of love of something real, beyond these paper words of diplomatic obfuscation. Bring us to the heartsongs of real earth and real speech and real love between all people.

In my own skin I am but a lay witness to the crimes of humanity against nature and our own. Leaving these aside, I come to the fictive realms but grudgingly, still enraptured with the versification of our tongue as I was first awakened in my ripening youth, saved from an earlier war by that very calling.

Now it has saved me, but I only return to it grudgingly, as to an old memory, a time bygone, of dusty tomes and paens to the past, while the train of the future pulls away ever remotely to a future manned by neither beast nor human, but a creature of our own imagining, leaving us behind as man left god and woman, to mind the children and the crops. Our screens and gizmos have obliterated the sky and the rain, and we are none the wiser. It is but a fond recall to go numbly down the lane of library lore once again, as though to visit memory, in a darkling time of forgetfulness, while new synthetic weather takes our days away and milks our mornings into perpetual shadow, the oneness of thunder, the clatter of slave chains, the calls of monkey dreams.

There can be no coherence now from the tomes of the past, they cohered only to themselves, dragging themselves into irrelevant oblivion, while the Rovian future unfolds even faster than we can cling. We are left in a limbo of a past now discarded, a future forsaken to the self-appointed masters.

Art left to witness, not to engage enough mass to matter. Politics left to debate but never sway, since the levers are removed and operating on technologies far advanced past common reach. We the mass of humanity are left to swim in a swimming pool we have built in a compound walled from nature; but it has no refreshment, nor hope from the spreading cracks, the stagnant growth of slime, our own befouling. The masters have left us and nature to our own demise, while they go preparing their flight back to the stars.

 

The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency. —Jung

Healing the planet, and our species, and our bodies and our personal lives, begins with detoxification. On the cultural level, it is necessary and urgent to do a major cleanse now, purging our beliefs and conversations, our concepts and opinions, our habits and limitations, from the programming that has infected us from birth and accelerated in the age of covert ops, fake news psyops, false flags and monopoly media, mass education, subliminal advertising, Hollywood storymaking, repetion of lies that have become our truths.

Behold the red pill, to help us purge and cleanse, preparing the way for nature’s reboot, winter storms and spring floods, new light to burn away the tangled webs, send spiders scurrying, reset to what we are born for.