pushead art montage.
Pushead server is up and running.
To stream from the web, simple login with these temp credentials to 23eyes.org/thrasher:
username: tumblr
password: tumblr
To have a private account, or to learn more, ask.
It’s fully stocked with Pushead’ top 100 albums of the 80s (punk, hardcore, crossover, and of course, GISM.
Signal Boost?
pushead art montage.
Pushead server is up and running.
To stream from the web, simple login with these temp credentials to 23eyes.org/thrasher:
username: tumblr
password: tumblr
To have a private account, or to learn more, ask.
It’s fully stocked with Pushead’ top 100 albums of the 80s (punk, hardcore, crossover, and of course, GISM.
Signal Boost?
Phone interview with Justin Broadrick from tonight: article (italian)
The new Godflesh album is called ‘A World Lit Only By Fire”, half of it is written, in demo form. If all goes to plan, it should be released this year, by November.
The Coup at SXSW! Waterloo Records.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY Poison Ivy!!!
Tom Wolfe - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
Rating: B+
Ken Kesey wrote two great, highly-acclaimed novels: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. He wrote other books, but no one really cares about them it seems. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the last document of Kesey as cultural powerhouse during his lifetime. It’s also the elevation of beat generation counter culture into the psychedelic era. It’s experimental “new” journalism featuring a lot of nonsense.
I would have loved this book back in high school, the peak of my beat phase. Today it’s too hard not to associate the last remnants of hippie culture with people from high school who stopped bathing, take too many drugs, listen to horrible jam rock bands like Phish and Umphrey’s McGee, and get together to pollute national parks to ride the wave or something. Still, this “non-fiction novel” is enthralling because it’s kind of the perfect summation of a generation.
To promote his second novel Sometimes a Great Notion, which is a very difficult beast I barely got through several years ago, Ken Kesey and a bunch of crazies calling themselves the Merry Pranksters got into a brightly colored school bus called Further and drove from coast to coast. Behind the wheel is Neal Cassady of On the Road fame, now pushing middle age and close to his death. He doesn’t stop talking, can’t stop moving, and likes to spend time flipping a sledgehammer in the air.
It almost seems too tidy, but it all happened. Kesey and the Pranksters travel around and seemingly encounter every facet of the psychedelic/summer of love era. They have a huge party with the Hell’s Angels, get freaked out by Beatlemania at a Beatles concert full of screaming, maniacal teenage girls, go visit Tim Leary (who is too busying doing an “experiment” to see them), hang out with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and Kesey even talks at a Vietnam protest rally where he tells everyone they’re just playing into what the establishment wants.
In between adventures, they host a series of “acid tests” where the Grateful Dead play and there are all sorts of trippy visuals and everyone’s on acid. Eventually Kesey flees to Mexico after getting charged with marijuana possession. The Pranksters eventually follow and more zaniness ensues. It’s all quite entertaining.
Tom Wolfe gets in all the details, but tries to duplicate the psychedelic in his writing. It makes sense what he was trying to do, but it mostly seems silly and overly reverential. Wolfe treats Kesey as if he were a prophet founding some new religion, though they really come off as a cult. A few people who get too fucked up on drugs the Pranksters treat rather horribly and are far too fixated on enforcing a group identity of nonconformity. It’s like when punk kids buy all their clothing at Hot Topic, a publicly traded company.
This book makes me feel old and lame.
-James P.
Lower grade from this reader, but much respect for the review.
the struggle to shape technology is always a struggle to shape society itself
The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.
We were a paper zine. We were not welcome.
PDFs for your arous nostalgia.
The Forgotten @ Bethany College, Bethany WV
Halloween, 2002
Nikon F3 in almost no light. Tonal corrections - curves and levels in PS. Removed dust/scratches from crapped negatives using PS.
Photo by Rik Goldman
Bethany College, where this has to happen. Fight.
