Composer/Trumpeter Jon Hassell proposes that Western music (and culture), must simultaneously look forward with technology and innovative forms, while cultivating a relationship to the rich multiplicity of the earth’s tribal musics.
Culture
Is Classical Music, and the Desire for Rebellion, Dead?
Do today’s elite lack the patience and culture for classical music? Or is it a matter of cultural dominance of the popular, the fame producing, and capital revenue streams which have sacrificed painstaking complex creation? John Halle opines.
The CIA and Psychedelics: From Timothy Leary to the Unabomber
Jeffery St. Clair and the late Alexander Cockburn wrote about the history of CIA-associated psychologists such as 1960s psychedelic pitchman Timothy Leary using LSD and psilocybin, and their effects on subjects, like the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
Calavera de Azúcar: Painted Sugar Skulls on Dia de los Muertos
Mexico’s traditional celebration of Dia de los Muertos embraces the inevitability of death. Painting faces in the style of Santa Muerte (Saint Death), Calavera Catrina (Dame Skeleton), or another loving tribute to the counter-Guadalupe icon Frida Kahlo pays homage to the beauty in death, offering eye-candy sugar skulls in tribute to the ancestors.
Will Self: Talentless Hipsters and Commodification Culture
This awful cult of talentless hipsters has its Mecca in Los Angeles, according to Will Self. He asserts his generation took the avant-garde and turned it into a successful rearguard action by the flying columns of capitalism’s blitzkrieg. What to make of the commodification and democratization of culture, and where to go from here?