Mon 9/14/09

Another Burning Man has come and gone. Black Rock City has congealed into something of a holding pattern. This has its trade-offs. Rather than just emphasize the bits that I’m most critical of (same ol’ over-hyped club-hopping scene) I found ways to enjoy myself and had a relatively good, fun, if not entirely “remarkable” year on the playa.

The Pope Shady riff seems like it’s finally found a nice, comfortable groove. On Sunday I did a very scaled down version of Pope Shady’s Gonzo Evangelical Nacho Communion. It lacked the Pomp and Circumstance that accompanied having the same ritual in the Connexus Cathedral, but I slowly found ways to integrate years of Pope Shadyisms… Fundalini Energy Raising merged with Discordian and Subgenius gibberish, and, all in all, I found a loose, subtle, comfortable way to entertain myself and others with Sangaria and Cheez Wow (the generic brand Cheez Wiz.) And what, pray tell, is Nacho Communion if not the purposeful merging of Spirituality and Cheese In An Aerosol Can?

So now I’m back in San Francisco at The Institute of Illicit Images (sometimes also called The Institute of Illegal Images)… I leave tomorrow for the Symbiosis Gathering in Yosemite and will be representing the art of Alex Grey alongside the blotter art and various ephemera from The Institute…

Symbiosis was my favorite music festival in 2007, but I didn’t work it that time, just ran around with a small group of friends having the time of my life. It felt like a small-scale Burning Man event without all the Big Art and Over-The-Top craziness that makes Burning Man the inter-dimensional fire circle.

The past week in SF, I have been doing my typical post-Burn review of Things Going On In My Life and, just now, walking back from a book store on Valencia (where I purchased Generation Hex, a smallish compendium of little known authors on the subject of Chaos Magic and Occultism) I began to think, once again, about my long-neglected blog. Over the years, my efforts at blogging have been spotty at best. I got interested in blogging via Alobar Greywalker, a fellow New Orleans Tarot reader, who introduced me to Live Journal. I was somewhat active on Live Journal for a spell. Then I discovered tribe.net and all of my blogging rapidly shifted to maintaining an active blog on that site. By January 2006, tribe.net had fairly successfully shot itself in the foot. I posted a few more times to the tribe.net blog, but, one by one, everyone that used to maintain lively dialogue with me via tribe.net fled the site or checked in with it so infrequently that keeping a blog on the site started to feel like yelling down into a well…

As I was walking back from the Modern Times book store, I started thinking about my blog and how it would be nice to just post to it, sporadically, via my phone and see if I could rekindle some thread of the sense of “dialogue” that I got from keeping a blog on LiveJournal and tribe.net… Blog as solitary event is a pretty lonely planet, but blog linked via Facebook might be able to gain a little bit of traction… So, the new scheme, to make little posts from time to time, something more weighty than the non-event of microblogging via Twitter and Crackbook status updates, but something less than feeling I need a whole magnum opus before making the effort to post… in other words, an online venue that I can quickly and conveniently post to via my iPhone in whatever capacity I deem worthy.

Over this past weekend I was consigned a handful of beautiful signed psychedelic art prints. I am planning to bring them to Symbiosis to sell. An obvious function for the blog could include posting pics taken by my phone of these new items, alongside brief descriptions of the items themselves. If one of these items sells, it can help pay for the annual expense of maintaining the server and blog. If more than one sells, I can start to pretend like I’m doing “online commerce”… : )

Because it’s my blog and I don’t need to have it make any sense, I can alternate at my whim from political posts to art posts, to musings on things I’m reading (I have a few tirades on this new book, “Generation Hex”, already worked up in my head), to simple bursts that say where I’ll be in the upcoming weekend. Or what I thought of my previous weekend. And maybe from time to time, I’ll actually write something with some degree of “substance”…

In any event, my hope is that by having the blog feed directly to my Facebook “Feed” that someone might read it from time to time and it won’t retain the “Little Timmy Yelling Down A Well” feeling that posting to tribe.net has garnered in recent years… If you’ve gotten this far into the blog post, I’d appreciate a one sentence holler to let me know someone’s bothering to read this.

And if no one replies, well, I can always revise the old Alien tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream”, to “In cyberspace, no one can hear you blog.”