An American Peyote Scribble » Deep Thoughts

The Shaman’s Trance

Mark — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:57:22 +0000

Part II: The Shaman’s Trance

[audio:Digital_Shaman.mp3]

After making preliminary plans to re-write the internet, a few of us from the Amazing Amazee Booster Party headed into the heart of Zurich to find the Digital Shaman at Kanzlei. We paid the cover charge and moved through the place pack with bodies. The DJ was spinning and we made out way to the front of the dance floor.

Culled into the Shaman’s Trance, secure in his embrace the dance waves encircle the mind. This was the final cap to the night, a long set of music and body movement. The mind moving in and out of step with hard reality, and every part of the brain and body gets tuned in to the music. These places are best to leave at the apex, before the DJ starts the chill-out music and the lights come on. But we had no intention of leaving before the music stopped, and danced until the end. At 04:01 “Give Me Love” started playing, and I knew the night was closing. It’s a sad way to end the shadow games and await the morning sun, the DJ had no initiative and played something easy to end on – A downer. I like to dance out of a place, my emotions intimately connected with the rhythms. The lights turned on and we headed outside.

“Das Music spielt in Mein Kopf!” I yelled back at the bastard who had killed the beats. My fists raised in mock protest. Indeed, the music is always drumming in my head. The Doors gets mixed into Beethoven, and I don’t need an iPod. I just listen to some stuff in the morning, and remix the rest of the day in my head. Then I head out to clubs once in a while get fully engulfed by the energy. The night ended and the morning began on a train back to Winterthur around 5am.

This end wasn’t too different to the next Thursday when I headed out to Zurich to celebrate a birthday. We started at PurPur, a restaurant and nightclub near Stadelhofen. That night started out in a similar fashion. The mind confused, I decided to walk confidently into the night, wait for the beast to take on a fantastic form and then embrace the monsters and creatures which you meet along the way. Strangers are friendly faces in the shadows, and nothing is quite so comfortable as when you face the situation with the right eyes and attitude. The problem is that Zurich was dead that Thursday night. This isn’t Berlin where you can easily stay out all night, every night and walk out of a club into the sunshine. We left PurPur at midnight, and the place was nearly as empty as my apartment, just cleaner, fewer clothes on the floor. But if you try hard enough, even on a dead Thursday in Zurich you’ll find what you were looking for.

We stepped into Amber, right across from the Zurich Hauptbanhof. Amber is an over-priced place, but there was no cover-charge and a DJ was spinning – so the costs all balanced out, plus there was no other option without paying to get inside Hive or Kaufleuten. Amber was loosely filled up with bankers and foreigners (like us). The scene was basically a bunch of highly successful business guys standing around a few women that couldn’t be bought, but pretended like a price was listed next them on the bar. To characterize the ambiance in a single scene, one banker chick with a low-cut breast-popping, almost fully unbuttoned shirt was getting eye fucked by five guys at a time. A few other bank managers half-danced near the bar – trying to look hip and trendy. They stopped moving every five seconds to see if they could catch the eyes of one of the few women in the place – to see if anyone was looking at them. It was a sad and irrelevant scene. Irrelevant because we had come for the beats, and headed directly to the dance floor by the DJ.

For this Amber was perfect. Cool music, slightly deserted, little smoke in the air and room to dance. I easily lost myself in the music and started my interpretive dance moves. The floor was comfortably covered in broken glass, and large chunks got embedded in my Doc Martens, which made sliding around the dance stage effortless. There was a small group of Vikings on the floor as well, two tall guys with blonde hair wear white T-shirts and jeans, and one short female in a black skirt. They were the only other people interested in just enjoying the night and being touched by the music. I channeled Jim Morrison and started doing an Eagle Sun Dance. Arms outstretched in the sky, slowly circling the Earth below, you fall into that sacred trance and feel only the music. The body becomes the receptacle for the soul – and as the DJ turns it to a high-frequency sea of waves, which tunes in perfectly to those of the brain and showers down around your being – the mind-body connection becomes totally complete.

Carpe Noct mon ami…

The End

Mark — Thu, 10 May 2007 07:19:35 +0000

The concept of killing my blog has been rolling around inside my head as of late.

If nothing is changed and nothing else mattered, then what was the point.

In general, there should be points to things, motivations, reasons – and without such constructs there’s only madness and chaos.

I killed by blog but have had another thought.

It will be rebuilt, stronger, faster, more focused, perhaps with a purpose, something like Steve Austin.

In truth, the old purpose was as a replacement for journal writing, and to explore the possibilities of the internet. I did all of that and more or less it seemed to work. But it was conceived of and executed as a chaotic experiment, at some point, you have to stop and wonder why?

The thing is – blogs can quickly turn into addictive and foul contraptions of humanity. When you have one of these things they can take up a large amount of time and deflect attention from things in life that are far more important.

And therefore, this thing as it is now is coming to an end. What comes next is unclear, but if you’re looking for new free content to wrap you head around, check out my side project KlugMat - a portal and soon to be vault of smart materials and biomedical technology information.

Top Five to Do While You Live

Mark — Tue, 08 May 2007 12:33:53 +0000

1) Hit Rock Bottom

When all is gone to shit and there’s nothing good left in your life – there’s nowhere to go but up. Hitting Bottom generally results from a combination of the notions that your life is pointless, that you’re unloved, your career plans have all failed, your significant other has left you or your favorite dog-cat-goldfish has died. It could be worse. Often Hitting Rock Bottom can be looked back upon as a marker in life, that point when you refused to continue taking things as they were presented and decided to find your own way. Like many of the great experiences in life, you can’t "try" to hit the lowest of the low points, you have wait until your life gets so bad that there’s nothing else to call it. It’s not the act of hitting bottom that means anything, it’s how you crawl out of the muck that’s important.

2) Go Nowhere, Do Nothing

I did this in Europe for a month and it was fantastic. The premise is simple, clear your schedule and take off somewhere. It’s hard to do nothing and go nowhere in the same location that you live your normal life. I opted to take the night train to Vienna and then jumped around Eastern European cities until making it through Germany to Berlin and eventually back to Zurich before catching a flight to Detroit. I only visited one museum and traveled with a backpack full of film and cameras, just one change of pants and a few shirts. I had no purpose, just a universal train ticket that allowed free travel on any train in Germany, Austria, Poland, Czech, and Slovakia. I traveled where and when I wanted, walked around photographing and writing in my journal with visits to a few friends here and there. The experience can never be duplicated and I wouldn’t want to try – but once you’ve done it there will be no regrets.

3) Accomplish a Feat

Ulysses was the first to make these popular. In this context, a feat can be anything that you didn’t previously know how to do. Make a website, paint a picture, build a house, bake a cake, write a book, make soap, build a bike, run for public office, teach a class, whatever you’re interested in. My feats have mainly included mountains. In reality one of my first and most important feats was driving from Michigan to Colorado during Dec. 2002 to climb up Mt. Elbert. It was only my second mountaineering experience. For a long term resident of sea-level Michigan, the climb was a crazy amount of physical exhaustion and an adrenaline hit like no other escaping the avalanche that was released during the descent to my base-camp at about 8:30pm on New Year’s Eve. The point is that it should be new to you and a challenge. Otherwise it’ll just be another day doing another job.

4) Confront Our Legacy

If you Go Nowhere and Do Nothing in Europe be sure to check out Krakow. It’s a beautiful city with quiet streets, cheap beer, and awesome pierogi. Sometimes we know via books and stories about the horrors humanity has perpetrated and think that we understand it.

Words don’t mean anything if there’s no connection to something tangible. That’s the way we humans are most of the time. If we don’t form a mental imagery connection to the words, then they might not really mean anything tangible.

You don’t know what tall is till you climb a mountain and the tern vast is just another adjective until you walk through the gates at Birkenau and look at the train tracks stretching out into forever.

Most of the place is gone and burned. The razor wire fence is still standing and it stretches into the horizon. If Auschwitz is an example of simplicity then Birkenau is a testament to vastness. You walk the razor-wire corridors and break down and cry and you don’t know why.

At the end of the train tracks is the crematorium. There’s a monument to the victims. Read any basic history book and you’ll get the feeling that the Holocaust was the story of Nazi Germany exterminating the Jewish people of Europe. If this is what you take away, you’re missing the point.

"Never Again." Is what we say.

"Never again" will the industrial machine of humanity seek to exterminate our brothers and sisters and neighbors like was done at Auschwitz.

We say this and we remember and we miss the point. This is our history. It’s not a collective failure to be laid on the heads of German History. It’s not a deep wound to be eternally nurtured by the current generation of Jewish peoples.

It’s our history. What’s our present? What’s our future?

5) Become Vulnerable and Find Love

Few things in life are harder than letting go of inhibitions and fears and the emotional wall you’ve built to protect your tenderness. I can’t imagine how one person could fall in love without letting down their guard fully and completely. And I can’t imagine what a drab exercise in boredom my life would be like without love.

If you allow yourself to be vulnerable then love will creep into your life. Love for a person, a painting, a piece of cake, a movie, the sunrise, the sunset, the beach, a song, a cat, a dog, your unborn children, a stranger, a sister, a brother, your parents, your in-laws, and everything else in between.

It’s the strongest power that exists and with it we have the ability to define our legacy and to save us from ourselves.

Drugs and Brain Hugs – a Recollection of Sobriety

Mark — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:28:49 +0000

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

(Hunter S. Thompson)

It’s still interesting to look back on my life are realize that far too many of my role models were drug fiends. Jim Morrison and Hunter S. Thompson – two rather influential figures in my development, both with historical personas fully ripped to the hilt on psychedelics. As were Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane. Howard Hughes was addicted to his meds and his need to succeed. There’s a Richard Feynmen and an Ursula K. Le Guin thrown in here and there for balance, and a Lynn Hill opposite a Mia Hamm, but the big influences were famously portrayed as drug freaks.

I’ve often wondered why I never got into the drug culture – that mythical component of society we hear about, are at times fascinated by and sometimes want to imitate. Would Pulp Fiction be half as cool if John Travolta was on a sugar high instead of pumping heroine into his body.

Oh, lord, set me free of my worldly senses and drop my mind down a rabbit hole that I’ll never want to crawl out of.

The thing is, although there’s some sort of dangerous allure, like wanting to take up smoking cigarettes – rage against societal conventions, it just seems like too much work to really get into drugs. Even the dead-head culture, those hippy souls born twenty years too late that wear their colorful drags and talk in aluff tones, the ones you see at the University of Michigan head shops and trip over at any number of open air concerts – that look isn’t by accident. It takes thought and determination to appear that spaced out.

I’ve seen some of the drug scene – you have to go to parties and know people to buy drugs from, and then there’s the paraphernalia investment.

Accessories like three foot Joker bongs don’t come cheap, and what kind of gutter college kid degenerate wants to toke from a plastic pipe? Yes you "can" fashion a pipe from an empty tube of M&M-mini’s (or an apple), but why go to the trouble? If you’re going to take a hit, you want to do it in style – and I’ve seen the prices of those colorful handmade glass smoking accessories. The thought of dropping $50 on a piece of glass to smoke from just doesn’t compute.

Probably the allure is so docile in my brain because I do more or less act like I’m "on" something from day to day. Nothing serious, it just looks like I’m on a mild tranquilizer most of the time. The thing is, I’m just naturally mello, probably due to low blood pressure and a weak heart.

Maybe my body is too sensitive, if you’ve never gotten into drugs in the first place, then a cup of Star Bucks still gives your heart a stiff kick and one beer makes the head swim like a nymph in Bacchus’s cup of ale. So what’s to be gained from escalation?

"Dude, I’m taking drugs to expand my mind."

"Oh, really?"

I’ve actually heard a searching-for-purpose prelaw student drop this line before. If that’s the argument, wouldn’t you want to be expanding your mind on a continual basis? If it’s really to gain some new perspective, wouldn’t it be better to have that ability all the time, not just after you pop a pill? If you rely on a drug to do all the work – you’ll never have any hope of reaching Nirvana, just brief windows of enlightenment that close before you can crawl your lethargic mind through the opening.

I suppose you have to get into the habit of taking drugs. I tried this with cigarettes. I was stressed out doing a Master’s in Materials Science and thought I’d take up smoking to bevel the edges of my twisted head – but I’d never finish my pack of American Spirits and the cigarettes never really fit that well between my lips.

I also smoked cigars for a time – and never inhaled again after nearly vomiting my brains out one fine afternoon while sunning myself on the outdoor patio.

All of this doesn’t really make sense, my parents both smoked for over thirty years and both my sister and I grew up in a smoking environment. Most kids I know in such a situation grow up puffing with their parents, or hiding it when they go home for Thanksgiving. Is this undesire to get my head twisted around a drug addiction just my quiet way of rebelling against my parent’s cigarette habits?

I hear it’s more colorful to get twisted in this world, but my mind has too many turns as it is. I pity the fool who need a hit to see the light – and the equally uninspired pious minion who never even considered the option.

"My attorney had never been able to accept the notion—often espoused by former drug abusers—that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them. And neither have I for that matter."

-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Movie Script

Toy Vault

Mark — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 14:47:51 +0000

In his keynote talk at the 2006 EMPA PhD Symposium, 1991 Nobel Chemistry winner Richard Ernst said that if you want your children to grow up with a creative mind, then they should grow up in an old house full of rooms to explore filled with things to discover. It’s cool that my parents still live in the house that I grew up in. Cool because when I come to visit, as I did over Thanksgiving 2006. I can walk the paths I used to follow and explore perspective, the contrast between where I was and where I am. Part of the reason that I am as I am is due to the toys I grew up with. Just as most of my clothes came from second hand stores, probably 90% of my toys were procured from the half-off bins and church rummage sales. This meant that I had at least three times as many toys as anyone else I knew. And while I had a plethora of the standard Legos, I also had a lot of G.I. Joes, Star Wars, as well as random things most Michigan kids had never heard of, like Playmobil.

My walk down contrast lane lead to me photographing various toys, still sitting on shelves in my room and haunting the shadows of the basement.

First, I should say that while much spunk is made about violence in toys and on TV, it’s a sad pathetic short-cut in thinking to say that these things directly lead to violent children. Because by all accounts, if you really look at what I grew up with, I should, by that logic, be some sort of CIA mercenary. While the thought did cross my mind once or twice, I must have just gotten it all out of my system playing with "toys" like a belt of dummy .50 caliber machine gun ammunition.

Star Wars toys just look cool, you can replay every scene from the movies and make up storylines that include G.I. Joe. Or you can mix the Star Wars miniatures with the Vietnam era plastic warriors that are driving a WWII era German truck.

And who didn’t want plastic army guys to fight miniature wooly mammoths while getting accosted by Muscle Men?

My room is an interesting place, because it’s present form was set up after college. The alcohol influence is apprent, and fits quite well with the childhood day dreams. She Ra was always hot, and standing in front of an empty Jim Beam bottle she just drives Hawk Eye (from Mash) crazy. Probably the reason he was laying back in the Beam shot glass.

I don’t know the connection between Superman and Papa Smurf, but Ernie seemed to be inciting a confrontation between the Japanese super hero dudes and their tiny monster.

For some reason the Flash was sitting in a shot glass and my teddy bear was chilling beside a tank that used to be commanded by my 1967 vintage 12 inch G.I. Joe.

In the end the Rancor hooked up with Barbie, she was turned on by the soft side of the beast inside.

Two of my most influential virutal role models were also represented, the cool headed badass Yoda sits atop a copy of Hell’s Angels, written by the eternal Gonzo demon, Huter S. Thompson.

Toys Star Wars Barbie Rancor