An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley
in conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson
with Jennifer Bleyer
From the excellent

Brooklyn Rail

It’s been nearly ten years since Peter Lamborn Wilson—née Hakim Bey—looked at the pitiably state-bound, rule-bound world around him and asked: "Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom?" In a slim, rattling volume called Temporary Autonomous Zone, Wilson intoned that, in fact, freedom is already here. Autonomy exists in time, he said, rather than space. It’s in times of wildness, revelry, abandon and revolution that for even just one brief jail-breaking moment, as sweet as honey to the tongue, one is freed of all political and social control.

Wilson rightly became celebrated as a kind of urban prophet. It was an identity to add the others he bears seamlessly and without contradiction: anarchist, poet, public intellectual, psychedelic explorer, artist, social critic, Sufi mystic. Six years ago he moved upstate from the East Village to New Paltz, New York. The setting is different, but the ideas have only deepened—notably his critique of global capital and "technological determination." In his green wood-frame house, trees rustling overhead and birds chirping outside, we drank tea and talked.

"Bush Is Lord:

A site dedicated to showing our leader in his truest holy light."

"Welcome to Bush Is Lord. Our purpose is to bring you documentation to our media-supported claim that George W. Bush is indeed not only our nation's leader, but our spiritual lighthouse and embodied salvation."

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION SCHEDULE

New York, NY

6:00 PM Opening Prayer led by the Reverend Jerry Fallwell

6:30 PM Pledge of Allegiance

6:35 PM Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd amendment)

6:45 PM Salute to the Coalition of the Willing

6:46 PM Seminar #1 Getting your kid a military deferment

7:30 PM First Presidential Beer Bong

7:35 PM Serve Freedom Fries

7:40 PM EPA Address #1: Mercury - it's what's for dinner.

8:00 PM Vote on which country to invade next

8:10 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh

8:15 PM John Ashcroft Lecture: The Homos are after your children

8:30 PM Round table discussion on reproductive rights (MEN only)

8:50 PM Seminar #2 Corporations: The government of the future

9:00 PM Condi Rice sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man"

9:05 PM Second Presidential Beer Bong

9:10 PM EPA Address #2 Trees: The real cause of forest fires

9:30 PM Break for secret meetings

10:00 PM Second prayer led by Cal Thomas

10:15 PM Lecture by Carl Rove: Doublespeak made easy

10:30 PM Rumsfeld demonstration of how to squint and talk macho

10:35 PM Bush demonstration of trademark "deer in headlights" stare.

10:40 PM John Ashcroft demonstrates new mandatory kevlar chastity belt

10:45 PM Clarence Thomas reads list of black republicans

10:46 PM Third Presidential Beer Bong

10:50 PM Seminar #3 Education: a drain on our nation's economy.

11:10 PM Hillary Clinton Pinata

11:20 PM Second Lecture by John Ashcroft: Evolutionists: The dangerous
cult

11:30 PM Call EMTs to revive Rush Limbaugh again.

11:35 PM Blame Clinton

11:40 PM Laura serves milk and cookies

11:50 PM Closing Prayer led by Jesus Himself

12: 00PM Nomination of George W. Bush as Holy Supreme Planetary
Overlord

...it is truly the end of days....

www.jesus-action-figure.com

"The Midnight Fathers"

Ken McLeod

It's late. Your wife, or husband perhaps, is out or away somewhere or gone to bed before you. The kids are in bed, or out, or away. For now, you're alone. There may be a small glass of whisky on the table. Tobacco, or some stronger leaf, smoulders in the ashtray. Some voice that speaks to your darker or quieter moments plays low on the sound system. The television is off. Definitely off. The newspaper is crumpled, the novel has no savour. You prowl the bookshelves, hunker down, run your finger over the dust of forgotten corners. Your glance alights on a lean volume or skinny pamphlet; your fingertip tugs it out. Blow the dust, sneeze, flick over pages that once seemed cogent.

"Blues For Kurdistan"

David Martinez

We blow through Turkey in one day by car and plane, flying over the eastern regions’ snowy mountains…it looks beautiful down there and I want to return some day and see more. But not this trip, we only stop for lunch in TK, historically the capital of Kurdistan, and then we are into a car headed east, passing ancient towns built on hills that poke up from the green plains. We cross the border at Zakhu, into Iraqi Kurdistan, spend the night there and then go to Erbil.

The area is beautiful, with rolling hills and wide rivers swollen with snowmelt, craggy mountains looming behind capped with snow. The people here look more Central Asian, with wide windblown faces and red smiles, the men wearing the billowing pants tied with wide sashes that are the traditional outfit of the Kurds. They remind me of Palestinians in their pride and welcoming spirit. “You are American? You are welcome in Kurdistan.” The area has enjoyed a decade of semi-autonomy, with its own armed forces and passport controls, and has a sense of tranquility and happiness that is the polar opposite of Baghdad’s misery and social chaos.

"Nietzsche and the Dervishes"

Hakim Bey, (Spring Equinox, 1989)

Rendan, "The Clever Ones." The sufis use a technical
term rend (adj. rendi, pl. rendan) to designate one
"clever enough to drink wine in secret without getting
caught": the dervish version of "Permissible
Dissimulation" (taqiyya, whereby Shiites are permitted
to lie about their true affiliation to avoid
persecution as well as advance the purpose of their
propaganda).

"Déclassé War:

Dropouts Cutting Class"

Harbinger, Crimethinc

Exiting the Economy as a Strategy for Reclaiming Your Life and
Saving the World

“If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available.
I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I
will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.” —Article 3, U.S. Military Code of Conduct

Déclassé: (adj. or n.) having lost class or status in society

De-class: (v.) to reject one’s social and economic role

The Occupation

Occupation. The word brings to mind images of Russian tanks rolling
through the streets of Eastern Europe, or U.S. soldiers nervously
patrolling hostile neighborhoods in Baghdad.

But occupation is not always so obvious; sometimes occupations go on
so long that the tanks are unnecessary. They can be rolled back into
storage, as long as the conquered remember they can return at any
time—or behave as if the tanks were still there, forgetting why they
do so.

"Magic of the State?"

Michael Taussig

George Bush comes to NYC today. Will he wear a mask?

I see people clapping the police, the firemen, and the construction workers along the West Side Highway down at Christopher Street and outside St. Vincent's Hospital. They have American flags and crudely lettered cardboard signs saying "We Love You," and "The Bravest." There is a feeling of carnival in the air and the cars honk back. Foucault is famous for his idea of bio-power, that the modern state is dedicated not to punishment or violence but to life, that it practices a sort of manipulative altruism. Don't think of the hangman. Think of the fireman. An older wisdom than Foucault's has long maintained that war is the health of the state. A professor of history on NPR says he is encouraged that this will put an end to criticism of the police in NYC. Dawn of a new era.

NOT BORED! writes:

"When the Cure Is Worse Than the Disease"

What's being sold here [in the Budweiser radio commercials that use the music of Squeeze and the Dave Edmunds Band] is not name or personality but style. The familiar but chart-poor groups are not announced, and that anonymity provides an aural itch that you scratch when you remember the product with which the style is associated. The spots take the language of a performer and reduce it to two or three constituent elements; the result is that the performer's language — made of incipient cliches that, by means of a confrontation with a specific occasion of performance, are sometimes dissolved into an efflorescence that transcends cliche and extends language — is now reified into a single cliche hard enough to dominate any mere occasion. From now on, this is all the performer will have to say. His performance will communicate in terms of how well it approximates the reification of the commercial, not necessarily because the commercial will have been more widely or intensely heard than any other work by the performer (though it probably will have been), but because the commercial will have completed — in fact, realized — the performer's career. When one hears an old Squeeze or Dave Edmunds record, it will sound like an attempt to formulate a cliche — to produce a style so recognizable and narrow that it can be marketed as an object, as a thing — which is what the record will have been.

Greil Marcus has changed his mind since he wrote these words, back in 1987, when his "Real Life Top Ten" column was published in The Village Voice. He now says, "I think all songs should go up on this block [...] It's a way of finding out if songs that carry people with them, songs that seem tied to a particular time and place, can survive a radical recontextualization, or if that recontectualization dissolves them" (see "Bob Dylan After the 1994 Congressional Elections," in Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives, published in 2000).