New Arthur Magazine is now available

arthur magazine

This one kinda snuck up on me. Anyway, you can probably find a copy at a hipster record store near you, or download it:

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

As usual it has stuff from the Center for Tactical Magic, Erik Davis, and Douglas Rushkoff.

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Erik Davis’s introduction to The Source book

0976082292.01.LZZZZZZZ Erik Daviss introduction to The Source book

The group also embraced serious neo-tantic sex ritual, which they called “Dionysm.” Besides treating sex as an expression of sacred sensuality, YaHoWha and his sons all committed to the rigorous practice of withholding their seed except for procreation or esoteric monthly rites. Restraining the typical male climax can ultimately produce intense full-body orgasms, charging the circuit between partners, but activating the kundalini is no “easy lay” in practice. Interestingly, the nineteenth-century Oneida Community, led by the bearded visionary John Humphrey Noyes, also practiced “plural marriage” and what they called “Male Continence.” The words may change, but the song remains the same.

Full Story: Techngnosis.

Buy The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and The Source Family.

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Erik Davis on Yuri’s Night party at NASA Ames Research Center

Like the a bespectacled kid brother of Earthdance, Yuri’s Night has taken off. This year there were well over 100 events around the globe, from Beijing to Prague to Lagos, and though some of them were probably little more than astrogeeks playing Moby records, the Yuri’s Night held in Mountain View, something more unusual happened.

The event took place at the NASA Ames Research Center, which is where they do stuff like build space-faring robots and study microbes on extra-solar planets. The Center is an imposing, vaguely Ballardian environment: enormous hangers, wind tunnels, empty runways and defeated institutional buildings lying on the edge of the Bay. But on the evening of Friday the 13th, the center opened its doors to raw food vendors, Black Rock sculptors, feral half-nude hoopers, and the nasty electronic breakbeats of the Glitch Mob. In other words, Burning Man spilled onto the nerd turf of the military-industrial complex.

Also on hand were robot designers, private astronauts, shills handing out Google schwag, and a handful of rumpled NASA scientists behind demo booths talking to people wearing purple cowboy hats and furry brassieres about earthquake prediction devices and cutting-edge global visualization tools.

Full Story: Techgnosis.

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Two old DeLanda interviews

I actually thought I’d posted these before, but I can’t find them in the archives anywhere. They are older interviews, but they’re a good introduction to DeLanda.

From the Zero News Datapool:

Don’t call me Gaia. The Gaia hypothesis is a very interesting point. [...] Philosophically, it is a terrible mistake. It is a terrible mistake precisely in the neo-materialist sense because it takes the metaphor of the organism, it sees life, living flesh as the most magical thing that happened on this planet. This is of course a chauvinism, a kind of organic chauvinism on our part. It takes the metaphor of the organism and applies it to the whole planet. Now the whole planet is alive, that what Gaia is. Not only do you call it an organism, you also give it a goddess name just to make sure you are ridiculous enough. The way out of this is to think that the planet is indeed something special, but it what Deleuze and Guttari called a body without organs, which is the exact opposite of an organism. It is a cauldron or receptacle of non-organic life, a body without organs. Because it can be alive in the sense of being creative and generating order without having genes or having organs or being an organism. In my view, the very fact that the atmosphere connected with the hydrosphere can generate things like hurricanes and cyclones and all kinds of self-organizing entities means that indeed the planet, even before living creatures appeared, was already a body without organs, a cauldron of creativity, a receptacle of spontaneously emerging order.

And here’s Erik Davis’s interview with DeLanda from Mondo 2000:

I have my shaman there, since I was like 19, this woman called Julietta. She is a direct heir of a long, long line of Mazatec knowledge.

I hate mysticism. I’ve always hated the whole idea of taking psychedelics and then going, “Western science is bullshit, let’s turn to Eastern philosophy.” I always strive to have a materialist explanation for what’s going on. I always thought that matter had much more to it than just this inert stuff that sits here. And now I’m being proved right.

Think about the Game of Life [computer-based cellular automata developed by mathematician John Conway]. At first the rules of interaction of the little cells in an abstract space were so simple that everybody thought it was a game. Then they found ladders and glider-generating guns spontaneously forming. So this tiny, abstract, stupid space all of a sudden began exploding with possibilities.

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Podcast round-up

RU Sirius Show: The Age of Consent (with Reason editor Tim Cavanaugh).

RU Sirius Show: California, The Altered State (with Erik Davis).

NeoFiles Show: From the Given to the Made.

frqshow: Anew Hope (with a new introduction by Wes Unruh).

Whorecast: How To Be An Internet Whore.

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Erik Davis on Deleuze and Guattari

I’ll just stick to my own work, since I really haven’t tracked the Deleuzian scene in a while. “Back in the day” I was a total maniac for the stuff, and moderated a fascinating listserv devoted to D&G. I think I was attracted to their work because, of all the French poststructuralist thinkers I felt compelled to “master” during college, D&G were by far the trippiest-and the funniest. But I think my own take is rather different from the perspective of many, uh, “orthodox” Deleuzians. I believe Mille Plateaux is a psychedelic text. I think they were trying to write and think a sort of perception, where every aspect of mind and culture are seen as expressions of a mutant probing Tao that is constantly congealing and liquefying as it moves along. Delanda, one of D&G’s most interesting interpreters, is occasionally explicit about their psychedelic dimension, though I interpret this dimension in a more explicitly spiritual/Dionysian/Taoist manner that Delanda or most Deleuzian thinkers. The spiritual key to their work is in the chapter “How do you make yourself a Body without Organs”? It is all about Tantra, although they do not use the term.

Full Story: markdery.com.

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New issue of Arthur Magazine out

Go here to find a free copy near you, or read it online as a series of PDFs:

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.

How nature droners GROWING found their flow. By Peter Relic. Photography by Eden Batki.

Swiss anthropologist-author JEREMY NARBY talks with Jay Babcock about what hallucinogens like LSD and the Amazonian drink ayahuasca have to teach us in the 21st century. Introduction by author Erik Davis, with a full-color illustration by Arik Moonhawk Roper.

How columnist DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF learned to stop worrying about current events.

Why power duo Al Cisneros and Chris Haikus reunited to make the meditation-suitable heavy metal sound of OM.

The life, work and astounding impact of North Indian vocalist PANDIT PRAN NATH, guru to Western minimalists La Monte Young and Terry Riley. By Peter Lavezzoli.

“New Herbalist” columnist Molly Frances on Lord Byron’s secret elixir and the Prophet Muhammed’s top condiment: VINEGAR.

How to recognize–and use–OCCULT FORCES, by the Center for Tactical Magic.

Notes from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 2006 by the intrepid Gabe Soria.

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TripZine

Trip Magazine seems to have run its course in the print environment:

“There are just a few more of issue 10 left, the VERY LAST issue of Trip Magazine! Order your signed collector’s copy today! Featuring Afro Celts, The Bad Shaman, Drug Geeks, Erik Davis, and more!”

There have actually been some pretty enlightening articles posted on the web site, including a first person account of tryptamine hallucinations, so you might want to check it out.

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Burning Man lectures online

Palenque Norte has finally posted the audio for some of their lectures from Burning Man 2003, including Erik Davis and Alex Grey (both great talks, I was there). They’ve also got lots of pictures from the event.
Link (via Techno?hamanic)

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Technoccult Presents

<a href="http://psychetect.bandcamp.com/album/return-to-the-wasteland">Awakening by Psychetect</a>

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