Saturday, 9 October 2010
Wedding
Sorry I've been a bit quiet here of late but I've been preoccupied with the not inconsiderable task of getting married. It was a gorgeous day and we're both deliriously happy.
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
Edinburgh talk
I shall be speaking at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, this coming Monday 11th October, talk entitled Mushrooms and Myth. It forms part of their 'From Another Kingdom' exhibition. Advanced booking recommended!
Wednesday, 4 August 2010
Secrets of Creation
Secrets of Creation Volume One: The Mystery of the Prime Numbers. Matt Watkins with illustrations by Matt Tweed. The Inamorata Press. ISBN: 978-0-9564879-0-2
I must admit that I rather enjoyed maths at school but I clearly remember the horror of learning Calculus. Our teacher began the lesson with a stern warning: what was to follow would form the foundation of the entire year so we’d better all concentrate and pay careful attention. Ah, I tried, but my daydreaming kite of a mind spiralled out into the sky, and when eventually I reeled it back the board was covered in arcane symbols and we were being given impossible exercises to do. Nightmare! If only I’d had Matthew Watkins to guide me.
Matt is a mathematician and an old friend with whom I’ve shared many illuminating nights, playing improvised space folk and discussing all manner of ‘out there’ ideas. His passion is numbers and the extraordinary patterns that fall out of them, most notably the distribution of the primes. Now, together with another old friend, illustrator Matt Tweed, he has produced a gem of a book – part textbook, part graphic novel, part philosophical tract, part detective story – that explains some pretty high level maths in terms that anyone (and I mean anyone) can understand.
Eschewing all but the most necessary equations (purists will find more conventional mathematical proofs in the appendices), Matt employs ladybirds, elastic ropes, rope bridges, beans and building blocks to lead the reader ever deeper into the mathematical mysteries. He explains logarithms ingeniously using spirals and, unafraid to inject a little poetry in what is usually a fairly dry subject, coins the name ‘spiral waves’ for the elusive structures that lie beneath the woodwork of prime number distribution. The illustrations are a delight and, I’m told, full of mathematical in-jokes, but on a purely visual level the golfing sprite had me laughing out loud.
Along the way, and most unusually for a mathematician, Matt challenges us to question our cultural assumptions about maths, numbers and pattern. Why do we expect prime numbers to conform to a pattern anyway? What are the implications of our ever-greater reliance on quantity (targets, quotas, aptitude tests, digital technology etc) at the expense of quality? Why don’t we pay any attention to the qualitative, cultural side of numbers? All provocative stuff.
By the end of the book I was impatient for more and happily there are a further two volumes to come. The Mystery of the Prime Numbers is destined to become a cult-classic but it deserves a much broader readership than that. If someone had shown me that the mathematical universe is as profoundly odd as it is strangely beautiful, or even that excursions into its nether regions can be thrilling, then Calculus would have been a doddle and my imagination would never have had cause to flee the confines of the classroom.
I must admit that I rather enjoyed maths at school but I clearly remember the horror of learning Calculus. Our teacher began the lesson with a stern warning: what was to follow would form the foundation of the entire year so we’d better all concentrate and pay careful attention. Ah, I tried, but my daydreaming kite of a mind spiralled out into the sky, and when eventually I reeled it back the board was covered in arcane symbols and we were being given impossible exercises to do. Nightmare! If only I’d had Matthew Watkins to guide me.
Matt is a mathematician and an old friend with whom I’ve shared many illuminating nights, playing improvised space folk and discussing all manner of ‘out there’ ideas. His passion is numbers and the extraordinary patterns that fall out of them, most notably the distribution of the primes. Now, together with another old friend, illustrator Matt Tweed, he has produced a gem of a book – part textbook, part graphic novel, part philosophical tract, part detective story – that explains some pretty high level maths in terms that anyone (and I mean anyone) can understand.
Eschewing all but the most necessary equations (purists will find more conventional mathematical proofs in the appendices), Matt employs ladybirds, elastic ropes, rope bridges, beans and building blocks to lead the reader ever deeper into the mathematical mysteries. He explains logarithms ingeniously using spirals and, unafraid to inject a little poetry in what is usually a fairly dry subject, coins the name ‘spiral waves’ for the elusive structures that lie beneath the woodwork of prime number distribution. The illustrations are a delight and, I’m told, full of mathematical in-jokes, but on a purely visual level the golfing sprite had me laughing out loud.
Along the way, and most unusually for a mathematician, Matt challenges us to question our cultural assumptions about maths, numbers and pattern. Why do we expect prime numbers to conform to a pattern anyway? What are the implications of our ever-greater reliance on quantity (targets, quotas, aptitude tests, digital technology etc) at the expense of quality? Why don’t we pay any attention to the qualitative, cultural side of numbers? All provocative stuff.
By the end of the book I was impatient for more and happily there are a further two volumes to come. The Mystery of the Prime Numbers is destined to become a cult-classic but it deserves a much broader readership than that. If someone had shown me that the mathematical universe is as profoundly odd as it is strangely beautiful, or even that excursions into its nether regions can be thrilling, then Calculus would have been a doddle and my imagination would never have had cause to flee the confines of the classroom.
Friday, 30 July 2010
Horizons tickets on sale
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.
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.
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!
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
John Aubrey exhibition
Thanks to my lifelong love of Avebury stone circle, I've been a fan of John Aubrey, the seventeenth century antiquarian who first put it on the map. Natural philosopher, lover of magick and the unexplained, gossip and wit, it's hard not to like this disorganised polymath. There's a small but rather wonderful exhibition about Aubrey at Oxford's Bodleian library at the moment and I went to see it this afternoon.
Highlights were: a handwritten grimoire, containing a spell for trapping a spirit in a crystal; a camera obscura, with a fine view of the Bodleian quadrangle; some of Aubrey's original drawings of Avebury; and an edition of the first ever science fiction novel, Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), in which the hero flies to the moon using a kite pulled by geese!
It's free and runs till the 31st October.
Highlights were: a handwritten grimoire, containing a spell for trapping a spirit in a crystal; a camera obscura, with a fine view of the Bodleian quadrangle; some of Aubrey's original drawings of Avebury; and an edition of the first ever science fiction novel, Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), in which the hero flies to the moon using a kite pulled by geese!
It's free and runs till the 31st October.
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Festivals
Summer is finally upon us and I am gearing up for a few festival appearances. I'm going to be speaking at Sunrise Festival next week (my 'Reading the Codex' paper) and then at Pilton (that's Glastonbury Festival to non-locals) towards the end of the month ('Avatar, Shamanism and the problem with Magic Mushrooms'). In both cases I'll be in the Ancient Futures area. Very excited about going to Glasto again - haven't been for eleven long years. I can join the ranks of people wandering around, tutting, and saying 'It's not like it used to be'...
Hope to catch you there.
Meanwhile, here's a photo of me, out on a very pokey barrow near Wittenham Clumps, looking for clues for how to build an Ancient Future. I'll let you know when I've got the answer...
Saturday, 27 March 2010
Snake Charmer
I've been a fan of Indian Snake Charmer music for some time, a part of my general interest in bagpipes and bagpipe-like instruments from around the world. I find drone music inherently psychedelic, and perhaps you'll agree from this video of massed pungi players in Delhi...
Monday, 4 January 2010
Shroom Review
I just received this review of Shroom. Always good when someone 'gets' what I was trying to say.