As you know, I spoke at the wonderful Horizons - Perspectives on Psychedelics conference in New York City last year. It was a fantastic occasion in a beautiful venue, and I was struck by how enagaged with the subject people were, both speakers and punters, how willing they were to ask critical questions. Once again it struck me how far behind we are, here in the UK, and what a long way to go we have before we have a genuine, interdisciplinary Psy-Crit (Critical Psychedelic Studies). Horizons raises the bar.
Well, the line-up has been announced and tickets are on sale and I'm very sorry I shan't be there (this scholar-gypsy lifestyle don't pay the rent, let alone air-fares). But if you're anywhere in the vicinity, I heartily recommend you go.
Friday, 30 July 2010
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Inception
I went to see Inception last night and, apart from being as good as everyone says it is, one thought struck me as I negotiated the complex layers of plot and subplot, of dreams within dreams: that psychology, and not science or religion, provides the universal mythology of our time.
Not that there was any doubt. The psyche and its contents, the ego and unconscious, are as real to us as Olympus and Hades were to the Ancient Greeks. We are so fluent with these concepts that the premise of Inception needs hardly any explanation in the script. We know how to access the unconscious – through dreams or imagination; where it is – downwards or below; what we’ll find down there – fathers, mothers, lovers, children – angels and demons all; and that redemption will be found if only we have the courage to open the scary bunker at the bottom of the basement.
Were it possible to whisk some great mind from the past to show them the film, some Dickens or Twain who could ride the culture shock of the intervening years with a curious glee, Inception would nevertheless make no sense to them whatsoever. We stand on the other side of an unbridgeable ontological shift. As W.H. Auden observed, we are all Freudians now.
Or are we? In keeping with one of the film’s themes – that of standing up to, and finding resolution with the father – it is the Jungian version that has the upper hand. Jung famously and irrevocably broke with his mentor, Freud, and like Fischer, the film’s unwitting protagonist, tore down his ‘father’s’ empire and rebuilt it afresh. In the process he saved the gods from science, and Freud, by giving them new life in the interiority of the self. It proved his masterstroke, and a gift to Hollywood.
Had they been given a special screening, these two rivals – there’s a biopic here, surely? – would have reacted quite differently. Jung, nodding sagely, would have greeted the film with that wry smile of his, safe in the knowledge that ‘his work here was done’. Freud would have stormed out in a rage.
For if the monster in the basement had turned out to be Freudian, Inception would have been as shocking as it is gripping. As the bogeyman’s bogeyman, Oedipus remains as horrific to us today as ever he was in those far off days before psychology reigned.
Not that there was any doubt. The psyche and its contents, the ego and unconscious, are as real to us as Olympus and Hades were to the Ancient Greeks. We are so fluent with these concepts that the premise of Inception needs hardly any explanation in the script. We know how to access the unconscious – through dreams or imagination; where it is – downwards or below; what we’ll find down there – fathers, mothers, lovers, children – angels and demons all; and that redemption will be found if only we have the courage to open the scary bunker at the bottom of the basement.
Were it possible to whisk some great mind from the past to show them the film, some Dickens or Twain who could ride the culture shock of the intervening years with a curious glee, Inception would nevertheless make no sense to them whatsoever. We stand on the other side of an unbridgeable ontological shift. As W.H. Auden observed, we are all Freudians now.
Or are we? In keeping with one of the film’s themes – that of standing up to, and finding resolution with the father – it is the Jungian version that has the upper hand. Jung famously and irrevocably broke with his mentor, Freud, and like Fischer, the film’s unwitting protagonist, tore down his ‘father’s’ empire and rebuilt it afresh. In the process he saved the gods from science, and Freud, by giving them new life in the interiority of the self. It proved his masterstroke, and a gift to Hollywood.
Had they been given a special screening, these two rivals – there’s a biopic here, surely? – would have reacted quite differently. Jung, nodding sagely, would have greeted the film with that wry smile of his, safe in the knowledge that ‘his work here was done’. Freud would have stormed out in a rage.
For if the monster in the basement had turned out to be Freudian, Inception would have been as shocking as it is gripping. As the bogeyman’s bogeyman, Oedipus remains as horrific to us today as ever he was in those far off days before psychology reigned.
Monday, 26 July 2010
Electro Swing is the thing
Rave’s refusal to die must rank as one of the great imponderables of our time. We, the rave generation, are now in our forties, our children are growing up fast, and yet still the beat goes on. And on. And on.
Hippiedom lasted a good ten years before being ritually put to death by punk. Punk, in its turn, drowned in a pool of its own bile, until rave bounded along like a puppy with its infectious doof doof, had us all bouncing in baggy trousers and dayglo t-shirts, gurning to the rising sun. As a rule of thumb youth movements last about ten years before the next generation finds a new way of pissing off their immediate elders. But if rave began in 1987 (give or take) then it was still going strong in 1997 and again in 2007. It looks set fair to be with us in 2017.
This remarkable longevity must have something to do with its Dr Who-like powers of regeneration. Detroit techno became British acid house, which morphed into jungle, drum and bass, gabba, hardcore, happy, handbag, progressive, dubstep, hubcap, Pugh, Pugh, Barney Mcgrew and a million other genres, separated by a hair’s breadth, gone as quick as the flightiest will-o-the-wisp. But with its latest manifestation, electro swing – 20s and 30s jazz and swing, cut up to a skip dap diddly doo wap beat that is simply the cat’s meow – all pretensions that this was ever a spiritual movement have now evaporated once and for all.
Rave’s most pernicious and ghastly manifestation, its Sylvester McCoy moment (to continue the Doctor Who theme), was surely goa trance. Never has there been a musical genre so overwrought, so pregnant with over-signification and self-satisfaction. Each squiggling synth line, cosmic drone and Indian vocal sample mawkishly proclaimed that gap year shenanigans on a tropical beach somehow added up to a karma-cleansing direct line to nirvana. Goa trance is about as tantric as a grope in a hot tub. Electro swing is refreshingly honest about its hedonism. It is good, old fashioned, head down party music, a divinely decadent mashed up mash up.
But apart from loving this new/old music (I dare you to try keeping still, go on, just try), I think this deliberate harking back to time when music, dancing, sex and drugs combined into a subculture of forbidden pleasures (didn’t the 1920s give us the word ‘rave’ in the first place?) tells us something about rave’s longevity. Swing, jazz, speakeasies, burlesque, illicit moonshine: they were all the product of prohibition, the mother of all ill-conceived, self-defeating drug policies. The harder the authorities clamped down on alcohol, the harder people partied. The logic of prohibition still obtains today: what is the entire global rave-festival scene if not its creation?
Any thinking person knows that the way to reduce the harm that drugs cause (however much you or I might use them sensibly) is to abolish prohibition. I like to think that intelligent life can still be found amongst the political classes, in which case perhaps the present situation suits them rather well. If the masses spend the weekends of a long, hot summer, kettled into festival sites, partying towards the edge of oblivion, then sure as hell they won’t be marching on the streets, burning banks or throwing well-aimed bricks at the offices of BP.
Perhaps the recession, austerity culture and the return of the Daleks, sorry the Tories, will foment a new radicalism, but in the meantime I'd be lying if I said that electro swing wasn't such awfully good fun. A snifter? Don't mind if I do. Crank up the gramophone Jeeves!
Hippiedom lasted a good ten years before being ritually put to death by punk. Punk, in its turn, drowned in a pool of its own bile, until rave bounded along like a puppy with its infectious doof doof, had us all bouncing in baggy trousers and dayglo t-shirts, gurning to the rising sun. As a rule of thumb youth movements last about ten years before the next generation finds a new way of pissing off their immediate elders. But if rave began in 1987 (give or take) then it was still going strong in 1997 and again in 2007. It looks set fair to be with us in 2017.
This remarkable longevity must have something to do with its Dr Who-like powers of regeneration. Detroit techno became British acid house, which morphed into jungle, drum and bass, gabba, hardcore, happy, handbag, progressive, dubstep, hubcap, Pugh, Pugh, Barney Mcgrew and a million other genres, separated by a hair’s breadth, gone as quick as the flightiest will-o-the-wisp. But with its latest manifestation, electro swing – 20s and 30s jazz and swing, cut up to a skip dap diddly doo wap beat that is simply the cat’s meow – all pretensions that this was ever a spiritual movement have now evaporated once and for all.
Rave’s most pernicious and ghastly manifestation, its Sylvester McCoy moment (to continue the Doctor Who theme), was surely goa trance. Never has there been a musical genre so overwrought, so pregnant with over-signification and self-satisfaction. Each squiggling synth line, cosmic drone and Indian vocal sample mawkishly proclaimed that gap year shenanigans on a tropical beach somehow added up to a karma-cleansing direct line to nirvana. Goa trance is about as tantric as a grope in a hot tub. Electro swing is refreshingly honest about its hedonism. It is good, old fashioned, head down party music, a divinely decadent mashed up mash up.
But apart from loving this new/old music (I dare you to try keeping still, go on, just try), I think this deliberate harking back to time when music, dancing, sex and drugs combined into a subculture of forbidden pleasures (didn’t the 1920s give us the word ‘rave’ in the first place?) tells us something about rave’s longevity. Swing, jazz, speakeasies, burlesque, illicit moonshine: they were all the product of prohibition, the mother of all ill-conceived, self-defeating drug policies. The harder the authorities clamped down on alcohol, the harder people partied. The logic of prohibition still obtains today: what is the entire global rave-festival scene if not its creation?
Any thinking person knows that the way to reduce the harm that drugs cause (however much you or I might use them sensibly) is to abolish prohibition. I like to think that intelligent life can still be found amongst the political classes, in which case perhaps the present situation suits them rather well. If the masses spend the weekends of a long, hot summer, kettled into festival sites, partying towards the edge of oblivion, then sure as hell they won’t be marching on the streets, burning banks or throwing well-aimed bricks at the offices of BP.
Perhaps the recession, austerity culture and the return of the Daleks, sorry the Tories, will foment a new radicalism, but in the meantime I'd be lying if I said that electro swing wasn't such awfully good fun. A snifter? Don't mind if I do. Crank up the gramophone Jeeves!