Sept-Dec is The Fucking Best, Year After year.

Our Lady Burns: Civilization Is Over-Rated

(But the only thing more over-rated than civilization are symbols of civilization.)

If we believe the narrative that is fed to us, this thing we call civilization is the epitome of human existence. The most logical and only desirable arrangement of the human experience, realized.

We have become civilized therefore we have, become.

But what is civilization?

Is it a socioeconomic arrangement? 
Capitalism Vs Socialism?
Is it intellectual thought?
Is it agriculture? 
Domestication?
Is it technological and scientific development?
Is it culture?
Is it religion? Language? Art? Literature? Politics? 
Is it global interconnection/ interdependence via modern forms of communication and travel?
A combination of development of all of the above?

We are told it is something to revere and without it we will surely perish. Without it we are nothing and we will return to a form of existence that was 'nasty, brutish and short.' This is a myth that has been busted many times.

Really, civilization is nothing but symbols. Abstract ideas that ultimately life does not require. It is a collection of ideas that often get in the way of the very things we are told depend on it. Harmony, quality of life, connectivity, a meaningful existence.

To blindly accept that pre-civilization, we had none of these things, is arrogant and incorrect. A number I like to quote often, is that for 99% of human existence we were not civilized. We were not domesticated, we did not farm, we did not have much of a religion (if any), our technology was very rudimentary, language was not necessary, and art was not needed or prevalent. What we did have was direct lived experience with very few symbols disconnecting us from real life. Arguably, day to day life was art, was religion, was science. We can look to the few remaining gatherer-hunter tribes for evidence of quality of life, pre-civ. 

Ultimately, untouchable abstract concepts do not substitute lived experience.

When we watch the flames of Notre Dame lick the Parisian sky, we naturally mourn the loss of a massive symbol of civilization and its achievements. Yet, we aren't mourning in quite the same way, the breaking up of the ice bergs, species extinction, young black men shot by police, Palestinian homes getting wrecked, the murder of trans-gendered person, kids dying in ICE detention and on and on. Yet, these are the natural outcomes of civilization. Religion, technology, economic disparity, politics, 'society,' are killing the planet and pitting us against each other. Now one of civilizations greatest symbols is up in flames, so perhaps it is a good time to seek some perspective and to ponder what really matters to us. Whether this thing we call 'civilization' is really all its cracked up to be... 

Nothing lasts. 

It will fall. It will crumble. It will burn. 

But everything that matters will survive.

Don't believe me? Or want to consider this more?

Start here:

-The Hazda
-Against Civilization
-The Garden of Peculiarities 
-Abundance Without Affluence
-A People's History of Civilization
-Why Hope?
-Feral

Unknown Pleasures

Black Metal Beach 2016

Hell Surfers

In 1963 my dear old Auntie Larry went deep undercover with the Hell Surfers of Leech Lane on Oregon's North Coast. Consider, that this was three years before Hunter S Thompson published his notorious Hells Angel's expose. Students of 60s radical journalism now posit that HST never actually met a Hell's Angel at all and his book was a merely a sad attempt to emerge from beneath Auntie Larry's literay shadow. 

If you don't believe me consider this quote from Larry's "Hell Surfers: A weirdo gang of thrill-seekers on a sin and crime rampage." 

 It had been a bad trip ... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to Portland, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: "The horror! The horror! ... Exterminate all the brutes!"

Death Is A Beach cont...