Try this experiment...

A bit of context: For the past few years, I have been fooling around with Chaos Magick, but have gotten serious about it within the last two and I have to tell you, it has made a positive impact on my creativity. I personally feel that Black Folks have outgrown Christianity’s current incarnations, and with this, I needed to find something else to address my spiritual void and Chaos Magick was it Also I felt like an intruder when I investigated the rest of the world’s major religions/belief systems. They seemed too closed, dogmatic and not as liberating as I would have liked. So I discovered Chaos Magick (but I am moving into my own personal form of magick and Chaos will turn into something different, for me). Back to how this has positively affected my creativity.

Being able to reach a state of Gnosis (clear mind, Zen, able to turn off all the shit bouncing in your dome) is a great doorway into your creative process. If you consider yourself creative in anyway, try the following experiment, paraphrased from Grant Morrison’s Pop Magick! It doesn’t matter is you sculpt, write, paint, play an instrument, this experiment will prove useful.

Sit/stand/lay down somewhere where there a several things competing for your attention: living room, kitchen, park, coffee shop and sit quietly for five minutes. Absorb everything you can. Then divorce yourself from the context of the surrounding objects. If there is a salt shaker, don’t label it as such. Acknowledge that something is there, but don’t name it. Don’t concretize it, because names and labels lock things into a form and its potential to be anything else dies. After you’ve chilled for five minutes, imagine that everything around you has a very important secret to tell you. This may seem silly, but trust me. After imagining all these different voices, express these voices. If you use a keyboard, a pen, clay or plaster, it doesn’t matter. Just give voice to these things. After this is done, attack your personal work and notice the difference. I guarantee that your creative life will leap several levels.

To boil it down a bit: This exercise is just like foreplay before sex. If you get right to the intercourse, it’s good, but over too quickly. But if you fool around for twenty minutes beforehand, the sex is that much better.
--Shawn Taylor

Playlist

Saw Snakes on a plane today. Definitely lived up to the hype. Also finished reading Vachss Mass market book today. If you feel the man, it’s a return to the Burke of old. Wrote a lot as well today. And now I’m watching the five heartbeats. Telling you, I’m on fia! Only thing I didn’t do was work-out today. Instead I took the time to organize my jams. Given a convo I had to day with my collaborator it might be a little too hyphy for maintaining my revolutionary cred, but when I’m getting my sweat on, I need some Grimy, crunky, ignant shiznat to be bustin my glands over, ya heard? Anyway, Soon as I figure how to load up mp3’s on this damn site, expect a downloadable playlist. In the meantime, be content

• Yay Area 3:48 E-40
• When You Wasn't Famous 3:21 The Streets
• Mr. Loverman (New World Mix) 4:21 Shabba Ranks
• Gal Bruk (Raw) 3:21 Elephant Man
• South Coast Playas (Kickdrums Remix) 2:55 T.I. & Stat Quo
• Baby Cham - Ghetto Story (Eighty Five Riddim) d1 4:11
• Jus' A Rascal 3:28 Dizzee Rascal
• Ghetto Rock 3:53 Mos Def
• Get By 3:47 Talib Kweli
• Random [Menta Original Mix] 3:41 Lady Sovereign
• 99 Problems 3:54 Jay-Z
• It’s supposed to be so easy 3:52 The Streets
• Money, Cash, Hoes 4:46 DMX / Jay-Z
• Galang Featuring Lil Vicious 2:56 M.I.A./Diplo
• One Thing 4:02 Liva, Pusha, Sandman, Malice
• Chi Ching (XXXchangeRemix) 3:20 Lady Sovereign
• Crazy 2:58 Gnarls Barkley
• Play Wit' Fire [Dancehall Mix] 2:03
• Ruff Riders Anthem 3:34 DMX
• What Have You Done? 1:58 Wynton Marsalis
• odb mix 3 (master) 4:25 11
• wait 2:46 Ying Yang Twins
• Track 22(feat. B.I.G.) 3:08 Ms. Hill does mixtape1
• White Gurl Ft. Bun B, Pimp C, 4:23 E-40
• Sound Bwoy Bureill 4:19 Smif-n-Wessun
• kick some ass stroke 9 4:04
• Go To Sleep 4:42 Eminem, DMX, Obie Trice
• Ty Featuring Roots Manuva-So U Want More? (14)Ty-Oh U Want More?
• Gold Digger (Feat. Jamie Foxx) 3:28 Kanye West
• Moment Of Clarity 4:24 Jay-Z
• Seven Nation Army 3:50 White Stripes, The
• The Choice Is Yours 3:23 Black Sheep
• Get Rich (Sade Mix) 3:06 Outkast
• Anything For You - Snow And All Star Cast 4:31
• U And Dat Ft. T. Pain, Kandi G 3:22 E-40 My Ghetto Report Card

Who did dis?

Man oh Man, been wanting to put this up for a while. Who did this? Can I buy you a drink? I really want to see the afrogeeks art show. If any of you peep this blog, feel like coming to Oakland?

P.S: I've got the Party girl on random right now. My little white girl is coming out cause I love this album. Ok, so its more my mid-nineties black diva but still...

Community Question

Why do you think that the Star Trek handlers decided to niggify the Kilingons (starting in Next Generation and all subsequent series)? Was it to make them more menacing and less sympathetic? Was it to make them look less the inscrutable Asian? Or was it the simple fact that the old school Klingons sucked and needed a remix?

Your thoughts?

Nostalgia

M.A.N.T.I.S.

Carl Lumbly (the voice of the Martian Manhunter on the JLA 'toon) in a trippy-ass exo-skeleton. The show sucked, really sucked, but I kind of miss it.

Anyone have any VHS copies anywhere?

Fuck a Mac!

Actually, fuck all manufacturers! But fuck Macs and those that love them because they think they're all environmentally friendly and earth based and whatever. It's corporate machine just like your children, you Mac loving yuppie scum! Don't believe the hype. Peep game.

I'm not mentioning any names but...

A well known Black sci-fi female author has been reported to be walking the streets of Toronto with the following t-shrit on. The community is up in arms :)

Imaro could kick Conan's ASS!

Yo! I just finished reading Imaro, the reprinted Charles Saunders novels from the 80’s. All I can say is that the previous press that published this book missed me as an 11 year old reader. I would’ve eaten this shit up when I was a kid! Shit, I’m damn near 32 and I just killed the book in a day and a half.

It’s kind of like how you always thought Conan was black, you know? Like whenever they called in Conan the Cimmerian, you kind of though Cimmeria was close to Kenya or something? Ok, maybe I’m just projecting, that’s what I thought. But once you read Imaro, you realize, Conan is the red headed light skinned freckled tragic mulatto of the tribe compared to Saunders character. It’s historical, intentional, and fun beyond reason. Perfect summer reading! I’m definitely going to pick up the other books he’s re-published. When I’m done with them I’ll find some smart, nerdy black kid who reads fantasy stuff and give them to him. It’ll be the mitzvah that’ll cover me for all the evil deeds I’ve done before. I’m not getting paid to write this, ya’ll. If you’ve ever like any sword and sorcery stuff, or if you’re just curious. Pick this cat’s book up!

Final Portion

Part Three

So the question is, how does one see/experience a city as an expression of the divine feminine? How, after so many years of being bombarded by male and masculine imagery and ideology can one even hope to see a city, or any piece of the urban environment, as anything other then a variation of a penis? The first step is to shake up our individual perceptions of what a city is. We do this be re-imagining a city’s physical geography.

It is normal to assign the term phallic to skyscrapers and lampposts and other things that jut out or rise up. But what do we call the soft areas of a city? What do we call the curves and dips and winding pathways? Most of us don’t call them anything and hardly pay them any attention. When we are in these spaces, we can—with self-training—we can assign female physical characteristics to these areas. That curve is a hip, that low point between two hills is the concave between the breasts, that angled point is the pubis; when we are dealing with the physical in a city, we deal with the female anatomy. After we have developed some facility for this, we ascend (or descend, depending on how you want to view it) to the level of myth and story.

Most people don’t have any real knowledge of or exposure to mythology, aside from Disney cartoons and the limited Greek and Roman mythology they may have learned in grade school. This is problematic because—despite the idea of the mono-myth—many people cannot culturally relate to most public (read Christian, Greek and Roman) mythology, so they take what they can get and force connectedness. But everyone who is blessed with a family has family stories. And if you cannot enter a mythic mind-state via cultural mythology, you can use the myths of your family. To view the metropolis as sacred and feminine, you can tap into the stories of the great women of your family and use them as a lens through which to view the city.
For example, you are on a train and it enters a tunnel. For someone well-versed/trained in mythology, this person might reflect on the Sumerian myth The Descent of Inanna roughly interpreted and understood as: going through the darkness only to emerge into the light a better, more enlightened individual. But a person with no real knowledge or exposure to mythology could reflect on one of their female ancestors who went through a period of hardship and pain only to come out of the other end a stronger, wiser women.

This idea may seem as if it is a silly, time-consuming, feminist ideological trope to reclaim and reposition the idea of the sacred woman in the public sphere. It is not that, at all. It is—once you have either been initiated into it by someone or come to the realization on your own—a way to have hope that the sacred feminine is alive and well and, most importantly, all around us.

At this point in our collective history, this may be a ‘man’s world’ but if we cast our gaze just-off-center, tilt our heads while looking at buildings, catch things in the reflections of windows and feel the curves on the road as we hurtle to our next destination; it is in these moments that we will begin to understand that this is far from being only a man’s world. It is up to us to recognize that the divine feminine is all around us, housing us, allowing us to get from point a to point be. If we train ourselves to do this, are able to do this, maybe the city will give up her secrets.

--Shawn Taylor

Part two of the book I may write

Part Two
Long before the Da Vinci Code became the zeitgeist for discussion regarding evidence/expression of the divine feminine, I was wondering what all of the hoopla was about. My household was profoundly mystical and unapologetically feminine. The boys of my family were initiated in many aspects of “female duties.” We cooked, cleaned, took care of our younger siblings and acknowledged the earth—meaning the earth that we planted in an stood on—as nothing less than a mother with who we all had some level of intimacy. The males were trained through legends, superstitions and family stories that the world was a divine feminine expression and we had to acknowledge it as such. But we all had to be trained in how to do so.
I remember how my great-aunt initiated me in seeing the city as feminine. She was a Jamaican country girl who moved to Brooklyn, NYC in order to be closer to her daughters and sons. One day, while out for a walk, we stopped on a corner that was angled toward the main street as opposed to running parallel to it. She expressed to me that this was one of the “female private parts” of the city and she would bet me an ice cream that if we followed the triangle back to its base, there would be something that either gave or sustained life at the base. I was confused but I teased her because she was newly arrived and had no idea where she was or what was around. We shook hands and she led me for several blocks where there was a plant nursery and a clinic. She then explained to me that the “Big Woman”, as she called the feminine expression, “was everywhere but she didn’t give up her secrets too easily.” She then told me that I would have to “constantly remember how to see the Big Woman”, no matter where I was or else I would became “too much of a man and be useless to everyone.”

-Shawn Taylor

Portions of a book I'm thinking of writing

Hey people.

I'm thinking of writing a book about cities and want to include their mythic elements. Please give me any feedback on the posted sections.

Peace
________________________________________________
Part One

The question has been asked in various ways, but the gist of it is this; ‘why is the dominant spiritual expression of this country a masculine one?’ Because when you deconstruct and simplify our nation’s overarching spiritual influence (Christianity) it boils down to a father and His Son (New Testament) and a God—read anthropomorphized male figure—and his new creations (Old Testament). While the question is a valid one, it is not important to this discussion. This paper will argue that the more important question is ‘where are the expressions of a divine feminine in our modern society?’

It is a social fact that our nation is operating under a heavily masculine agenda. From the wage disparities between men and women in the corporate arena, to there never being a woman president in the United States 217-year history of electing individuals to govern our nation, the idea that the masculine has smothered or has completely wiped out the feminine is not too hard to believe. It becomes even more poignant when one takes the spiritual consciousness of the country into account.

Lately we have been hearing a lot of talk about what God wants for this nation or how the God of another nation is the enemy of our God. Also, many atrocities have been committed in the name of God. But who has the right to speak for God? Is it the clergy of the many Christian denominations? Is it the politicians who attempt to wed God, nationhood and unrepentant violence under the same banner? Or is it the fundamentalists, evangelists and the folks that sit at train stations or go door-to-door, spreading the good news? And why is it that God always possesses the capitalized masculine pronouns of He or Him? Where is the balance? The balance is all around us. The divine feminine is all round us, and to reinterpret Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas: You have to have the eyes to see it.

Expressions of the divine feminine permeate our daily existence, but they are very difficult to see because they are not phallic skyscrapers piercing the sky or heavily testoteroned A-type personalities demanding to be noticed. Expressions of the divine feminine are hidden—some would say trapped—in architectural metaphors and/or have been thrust to just beyond our normal vision. Simply stated, the divine feminine has not been stamped out or erased; it has simply changed form and become something unrecognizable to the untrained, uninitiated person. The divine feminine, once touted in stonework, painting and songs has now become the cities that we live in. We are living in a divine feminine metropolis.

This may be a hard concept to understand. With the previously mentioned skyscrapers, the majority of government officials being men, and women in urban areas being grossly mistreated; it might be near impossible to see the city as anything other than violent, oppressive and male. But if we look just below the surface, train ourselves to see the feminine in our daily routines, they way we view our world will be both different and wondrous.

It is a commonly held belief of many who consider themselves spiritual people, that nature (read: birds, trees and bodies of water) is the only thing that can truly be a spiritual/holy/divine site. A metropolis is looked upon as encroaching on the sacred, an eyesore, and an obstruction that disrupts the natural flow of the world. And these locations, nature and the city, have been assigned genders: nature is female and the city is male. This is dangerous thinking because no one, no thing, is a single expression. By doing this, we eliminate balance in our spiritual environment. This may seem a contradictory statement because this paper is arguing that the city is an expression of the divine feminine, but the argument is to include the divine feminine metropolis as well as the masculine principles of a city. But this paper will focus primarily on the feminine because the masculine is ever-present. To view this sacred feminine, one must be able to experience the world through a mythological filter.

--Shawn Taylor

Zombies versus C.H.U.D's

Yo, ya’ll ever seen C.H.U.D.? 1984, I was ten years old and Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers were the scariest things ever. I mean the name says I all. How are you not going to be afraid of people living underground trying to eat you? Whatever Whatever, I’m a grown ass man now. I am not afraid of creatures living in the sewers. Partially because I’m in Oakland and don’t have shit to worry about from sewers. Well on Friday I saw the Descent. Great movie about a bunch of white women who explore a previously unexplored cave only to find, guess what? C.H.U.D.’s! Now they didn’t call them C.H.U.D.’s, but I know a C.H.U.D when I see one.




Still, I’m not tripping. I’m all “Just a movie.” Then almost immediately after what do I do but take my black ass river rafting at Shingle Springs. Do you have any idea the lack of melanin up there? It’s intense! But still, I’m chillin, until the sun goes down. Then I sleep in the car.

Now many people may laugh at my fear of C.H.U.D.’s. But I’d like to make argument as to why my fear of C.H.U.D’S’ is no more trite than many white people’s fear of Zombies. Look, if I can’t go there on this blog, then where can I take this?

O.K. so let’s start with the Zombie. Pre Romero and the fun 50’s zombie crew, Zombies exist in a cultural context. Wronged individuals are tricked into absorbing a powder created by a bokor, or bad magic man. The powder contains powdered glass, buffer toxin from toads, puffer fish toxins, and a bunch of other stuff that makes the body’s heart and respiratory rates drop to death like tempos, yet the person is still alive and conscious. Think pre pharmaceutical company roofies. The person appears dead, they are treated as such, and buried alive. The person solely becomes able to move and think again but is severely traumatized. The Bokor, who knows how long the Zombie roofie lasts, digs up his victim, whips them into submission, sometimes with a whip that contains a milder version of the zombie powder, and the victim is conditioned to do whatever the bokor tells them for fear of a second death. Operant conditioning at its worst equals zombies.

Now me, I’ve got no problem with Zombies. You see Zombies arrive within a cultural context. Peep the book, and not the movie, The serpent and the rainbow for a fully fleshed out version of what I laid out above. Zombies are just tragic ass folk who got screwed. Happens everyday. One might even say it’s a black experience to have someone try to zombify you. Yet and still, there is a bokor, there are other zombies, there is a tradition for it, it can be understood in terms of humans interacting with humans.

As for the Zombie flicks, I think the notion of half dead half alive flesh eaters who infect those who they bite taps more into a primal fear of the Hoard than anything in particular with the Haitian ritualistic magic practice. All hoards are scary. All hoards don’t care about the individual, and all hoards threaten to take over those that don’t join it. So sorry, 28 days later, Dawn of the Dead, and all the others, I like you but you didn’t scare me.

Now, C.H.U.D.’s. Ok, first off you have to get past the visuals from the 1984 movie and work strictly with the name.


Cannibalistic-They eat their own. Why would anything, especially something human(oid) eat its own? Well Richard Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel (great book for black people to read by the way. Don’t watch the P.B.S. version, it sucked much ass and looked hella racist) makes the point that our recorded instances of cannibalism happen usually when humans are cut off from other sources of protein. Yet most of recorded history sees cannibalism as a highly ritualized practice. Rare exception being those people on that plane that crashed in the Andes and just needed a leg bone.

Humanoid- Notice, not human but rather humanoid. Now what is a humanoid? Well, it’s a creature that has human features. But the term leaves a question mark as to whether it is actually human. So if a C.H.U.D. eats a human is that cannibalism or is it only if it eats another C.H.U.D.? Questions abound. What’s more, what made the C.H.U.D change from human to humanoid? Again was it the cannibalism or perhaps it had something to do with its zip code.

Underground-How can people/humanoids living underground not scare the living shit out of you? Whether its New York or Shingle Springs California, if something lives underground that means it’s more resourceful than the people above ground. It means it doesn’t need light, sun, warmth, or expansive space to survive. Living underground makes the C.H.U.D more adaptable than the surface dweller. Didn’t H.G. wells prove that in the Time Machine? Above ground the peaceful Eloi lived like hippy children on permanent Benzedrine dreams. Below ground the C.H.U.D. like Morlocks made soup out of the RiRis. C.H.U.D.’s are the modern day progenitors of the Morlocks.

Dwellers-Not only do they party underground, they live underground. They’ve gone one step beyond those freaks from the Hills have eyes. They’re not just separated from reality; they’ve got a whole new hegemony going on that is the binary opposite of all surface dwellers. They’ve got their own orientation that privileges a completely different lifestyle from dwelling to foodstuffs. Plus they’re more adaptable…Come on black people do I have to make it any clearer?

C.H.U.D’S ARE WHITE PEOPLE!

The same way Africans were met by a bunch of diseased pale individuals who couldn’t tolerate the sun, lived in an entirely different cultural context, and took them away for Lord only knew what purpose, so too do C.H.U.D’s tap into my unconscious fear of the process repeating itself. Only this time, it won’t be superior technology that overwhelms one race, but superior adaptability that will make high caloric protein bars out of those that use the surface of the planet! I mean come on; it’s getting hotter, despite what George Bush says. Where are we all gonna go but underground? And how long before we run out of food? And how long before we start doing what humans always do, adapt? I’m afraid of C.H.U.D’s because they’re practical.

If you think I’m crazy now, wait till I get to posting my analysis of “The people under the stairs.” One word, hyperWhiteness

Code Z

Yo kids:
GO check out the online zine ya boy's scripting for now.

http://www.codezonline.com/rectoverso/

Hot like fia!