Schulz crafts an extraordinary picture of urban life in the Roaring 20s, where modern dreamers and their romantic illusions collide with American wealth and decadence on the eve of the Great Depression.
Literary
Monte Schulz: Dreaming Jazz America in “The Big Town”
“Monte Schulz’s *The Big Town* exposes decadence, wealth and consumption in Jazz Age America as spiritual myopia — where desperate, haunting characters hinge their lives on impossible dreams. This lyrical, gripping novel is as close to 1920s America as it gets, and penned with such frightening realism that the chaos of a bygone era erupts from its pages.” – Simon Van Booy
Terence McKenna: On Shamanic Schizophrenia and Cultural Healing
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Terence McKenna: We have no tradition of shamanism. We have no tradition of journeying into these mental worlds. We are terrified of madness. We fear it because the Western mind is a house of cards, and the people who built that house of cards know that, and they are terrified of madness.
Mother-Nature Is Not A Wicked Witch: Oren Lyons on Oz
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Baum’s “Wizard of Oz” as a Utopian American Dream soft-peddles an anti-nature-prejudice amid dazzling urban-industrial landscapes. This bias at the expense of the earth’s resources has led us to today’s environmental and economic collapse.
B. Traven: An Anarchists Death Ship
“Being mixed up with a strike is a different. Laborers attacking the profits of capitalists are out. When a strike is to be quelled, all consuls work in unison, regardless if only a few months ago they would have rather liked to cut one another’s throats.”
Occupy Los Angeles: Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”
All machines have their friction, but when the friction comes to have its own machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such as machine any longer.
To Erzulie of the Seductive Summoning Sea
Here we follow poet Lenelle N. Moise’s surreal submergence into her mother’s passion for water, the sea, vodoun. Imagery, juxtapositions, fluidity, they haunt this reverie, influenced by unseen forces, diaspora and the Haitian sea goddess Erzulie.