Believe it or not, it’s not like I’ve stopped reading or paying attention to the world of book publishing. Far from it. Matter of fact, I’m writing a book right now. I will let you know about it in greater detail as time progresses, but for now, let’s just say that it’s in the Year (or in this case, the season) Of Doing Something Vaguely Interesting Memoir genre. It involves my attendance at a slew of countercultural festivals this summer. I ended up writing about one, The Gathering Of The Juggalos, for High Times, and that should be out in the February issue. This turned out to be a life-altering experience – all of them in general did, but this one in particular – and i realize this will probably win me the attention of lulz-loving trolls the world over. So never Mind the Cooks Source; here’s Justin Hampton at the Bookloft, both conveniently ensconced in Western Mass, in case you cared.

(Oh, and btw, in case you were wondering, I think CS got what it deserved. As a freelancer, I definitely have a problem with editors who think a writer’s work isn’t worth a dime, or is theirs to steal. I’m glad the Interwebs feels the same. That said, I’ll miss their FB page and all the righteous crowdsnark it inspired. Good times, yo.)

So there’s a few things I wanted to comment on to start things back out again:

-First, the Pedophile Guide on Amazon: Come on, you should have known this was coming. You open up the floodgates for anyone to get their book out, and you’re going to see things like appear. Give you an example: whilst at the Rainbow Gathering, I was offered a trade for a drug chemistry book written by a fella named Stryke. Later in the summer, a chemist I met at Burning Man told me he collects books like these (though he added he doesn’t make any of these compounds himself), and tells me Stryke is one of the better authors in the field. And word has it that Stryke’s just gotten out of jail, too, so rock on.

Point is that if you can find books like Stryke’s, then opportunities for people to get their hands on all sorts of info will continue to proliferate, whether or not Amazon stocks it in their store. So plan your lives accordingly.

-Indecision Points: I can’t be certain of this, but those stopping by the Bookloft in person, make sure that Eric’s stocking George W. Bush’s new book in the crime section where it belongs, okay? Amnesty International is already howling for Bush’s indictment since he admitted to okaying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s torture in its pages, so it only makes sense.

-Here’s The Situation: As a former NJ resident and lover of the unintentionally hilarious, I have to mention this unique piece of bookfail, as it caught my eye the minute I saw it in my Twitter feed. Jezebel already posted a chunk of it on their site, and I guarantee that in 20 years time, this will still give the overeducated and insecure a much-needed boost of cultural schaudenfraude.

Oh, and why not follow me on Twitter? I’m impboy over there. Relax, I know you’re not “following” me, but just reading my tweets. The feed gets a bit more personal sometimes, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.

Oh, and thanks for having me back. I gotta say, I kinda missed blogging.

I’d have to agree. In the years I’ve gone, I’ve learned about two particularly fascinating novels out there, the post-apocalyptic, post-literate narrative Riddley Walker and the miraculous Cloud Atlas (soon to be adapted to the screen by Tom Twykler of “Run Lola Run”… that’ll be interesting to see. Said movie will also be produced by the Wachowski Brothers, who reportedly assigned the book as required reading to the cast of “V For Vendetta”). So I almost had to kick myself for not thinking of it myself.

Well, check it out for yourself. In all honesty, there’s some books in here I feel you’re better off avoiding – anything, for instance, with the number “2012″ in it. To be sure, there’s a lot of New Age hokum/magical thinking nonsense mixed with some paranoid libertarian/survivalist manifestos to delve through here, not to mention a lot of mainstream bestsellers that all of us are aware of. And I kinda wished there were a few more obscure discoveries, as many of the titles here will be familiar to most bookreaders. Still, it’s an appropriate cross-section of the playa psyche, and what’s running through it circa 2009. And need I say that you can purchase it all at the Bookloft, your friendly online independent bookstore?

Well, too bad. I said it anyway.

So here you go:

-Neuromancer by William Gibson
-The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
-Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
-T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Autonomedia New Autonomy Series) by Hakim Bey
-The Queen’s Gambit: A Novel by Walter Tevis
-Kes by Lawrence Till and Barry Hines
-She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir
-The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan W. Watts
-Conversations with God : An Uncommon Dialogue (Book 1) by Neale Donald Walsch (This link is to a newer edition, entitled “The New Revelations)”
-Feel the Fear . . . and Do It Anyway (r) by Susan Jeffers
-Any book by Andrew Weil M.D.
-The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius Of The Golden Age by Christopher Hibbert
-Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
-The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapille
-Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life by Maxwell Maltz
-A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
-Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda
-The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence by Deepak Chopra
-Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy by Joel Kotkin
-Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism by Daniel Pinchbeck
-2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck
-The Phantom Toolbooth by Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer
-The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
-The Secret of Light by Walter Russell
-Myths To Live By by Joseph Campbell
-The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
-THE BIG BOOK OF JOKES & RIDDLES by kidsbooks
-The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz
-Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
-Any title by William Gibson
-Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer
-Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, -Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness by Daniel G. Amen
-My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor
-Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World by Bill Plotkin
-1776 by David McCullough
-The Monster Who Ate Stars by Souther Salazar (out of print)
-A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
-Illusions by Richard Bach
-Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
-Mahabharata: The Greatest Spiritual Epic of All Time by Krishna Dharma
-Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose
-Good Dog, Carl by Alexandra Day
-The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World by Lynne McTaggart
-The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby
-Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution by Terence McKenna
-Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts
-The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter
-The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge
-The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
-Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl
-Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse by James Wesley Rawles
-The World According to Garp by John Irving
-The Milagro Beanfield War: A Novel by John Nichols
-Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
-Lord of the Flies by William Golding
-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
-The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Patricia Reilly Giff
-The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
-The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
-The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
-A Friend of The Earth by T.C. Boyle
-Drop City by T.C. Boyle
-The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq and Gavin Bowd
-Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
-Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach
-Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn
-Any Title by Charles Bukowski
-The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
-House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
-The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
-His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman and Nicholas Wright
-A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
-The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot
-The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
-Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
-Lust for Life by Irving Stone
-You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay
-The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
-Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
-I, Monty by Marcus Bach
-A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
-The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
-The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
-Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
-Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex Boese
-The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins
-Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith

Oh, and while I’m at it, here’s two I figured to throw in, to serve as a palliative to all the sweetness and light on the list:
-Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews
-Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich

In the meantime, I managed to check out the exhibit of the Book itself that’s being held at the Rubin Museum Of Art in New York City. It’s still there, in case you happen to be in the area, and you can also check out their lovely permanent collection of Himalayan Buddhist art while you’re at it. Here’s a few photos of the exhibition I managed to sneak in while I was at it.

Yes, it's an awfully big book

early versions of mandalas eventually used with the Red Book

A labrynthine mandala within the Red Book

Okay, not too many of you. And yes, it’s indeed sad to see how soon you all forget. Good thing we’ve got Mitch Horowitz to remind us, then, especially as esoteric potboilers like The Lost Symbol and New Thought retreads like The Secret continue to command the attention of this nation’s unaware. Alerted to this book’s presence by Horowitz’s guest-blogger stint on Boing Boing, I knew I needed to give mention of this book somehow. And of course, I’d also have to check out his two-day appearance at LA’s Philosophical Research Institute. So off I went.

Mitch Horowitz at PRS

Indeed, Horowitz is an erudite and fluid public speaker on his subject matter, and a real class act to boot. And wouldn’t you know it, but he actually possesses a second home not 20 minutes away from Eric Wilska himself, so he’s quite familiar with the Bookloft. I’m not surprised, as much of his talk on Saturday focused on a portion of upstate New York known as the “Burned-Over District” in the 19th Century, so named because of the stunning emergence of impassioned, homegrown religious sects in the area at that time.

In his talks as well as in his new book, Occult America: The Secret History Of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, Horowitz underlines what he feels is American Occultism’s paramount contribution to mainstream American society: that religion “should have a practical application to daily life.” He bears this out mainly by pointing to the self-help/Positive Thinking industry most recently exemplified by The Secret and excoriated by Barbara Ehrenreich. Much of this ground had already been covered recently by The Secret Source, co-written, incidentally, by PRS librarian Maja D’aoust. But here, it’s placed within a wider context

The most insightful moments of the book for me come with the chapter-long explorations on the life of PRS founder Manly Hall and the famed “Sleeping Prophet” Edgar Cayce, whose legacy and personal contradictions are examined with an admirable sensitivity. Throughout the book, Horowitz strikes a difficult balance between the beliefs of his subjects and the demands of scholarship. For while he’s made a name for himself in the New Age market by editing books by authors like Jacob Needleman and Daniel Pinchbeck, Horowitz wisely eschews that movement’s easy cliches.

It’s been noted online that Horowitz’s survey is hardly comprehensive, focusing as it does on the 19th and 20th century and brushing aside developments such as the Army’s investigation into remote viewing and the abandoned First Earth Battalion project with a single sentence. (Granted, the film and movie The Men Who Stare At Goats explores this in greater detail, but I’d prefer a writer like Horowitz to take a slightly less condescending crack at it.) And I personally feel that the seduction/PUA phenomenon detailed in books like The Game (written by a former colleague and college friend of mine as it turns out… more on this in another post.) can be tied to some of the innovations Horowitz details. Still, I’d recommend this for Horowitz’s voice. As I said before, the guy is truly a class act, one who gives each side equal time, and serves as a perfect model for how proponents of idiosyncratic belief can interface with the skepticism and rigor serious scholarship requires. I hope this won’t be the last we hear from him outside of the specialized publications Horowitz usually writes for.

For back in the days when a pierced nose was considered radical, punk artistes like Henry Rollins, Jello Biafra and Lydia Lunch would occasionally release these albums with no music at all on them. They’d just talk about whatever they wanted to: anecdotes about their fucked-up lives, opinions about politics and art, that sort of thing. Now of course, writers like John Giorno, Jim Carroll and Gore Vidal did this sort of thing all the time, but they never fronted punk rock groups, put out their own LPs, or called it Spoken Word. And that, believe it or not, made it more relevant to the dispossessed youth of the ’80s. I mean, Bon Jovi and Brett Michaels never did that. What else did you need to prove in an argument that punk rock had more to say than typical pop music?

But this was in a day and a scene where the biggest people in it were really no bigger or richer than anyone else in their audience. If we had a clue as to what the future would bring, the phrase “cognitive dissonance” couldn’t come close to approximating the severe ontological collapse we all would have collectively experienced. Rollins’s TV show on IFC, Green Day’s stage adaptation of “American Idiot,” and a massive underground which disaffected youth worldwide still support despite punk’s failure to destroy the world that created it – it all manages to co-exist without imploding under the weight of its own contradictions. And add another category to the list while you’re at it: the aging career artist with a story to tell, and an oral history to help him and/or her (you need to include the trannies in this – it’s the Bay Area, after all.) do it. It’s coming to a local punk rock scene to you, and on the day famed LA punk rock impresario Brendan Mullen passed away at 60, I realized the only way I could attempt to make sense of it from a literary perspective was to attend a Spoken Word event in, um… San Francisco, of course! There, the long-running weeklong literary festival Litquake and local spoken word promoters Porchlight hosted a handful of speakers to talk about their days in the scene, all in celebration of the book Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive And Occasionally Pointless History Of Bay Area Punk From Dead Kennedys To Green Day.

Litquake Attendees At SF's Broadway Theater

I’m kind of used to the oddly subdued nature of gatherings like this – I attended a screening of the old early ’80s punk chestnut “Ladies And Gentlemen The Fabulous Stains” in Portland, Oregon this past August, and just like there, it wasn’t the Mudd Club, or CBGB’s. It was instead the Broadway Theater, and the only people under 21 at this show were chaperoned by their parents. A screen to the side displayed a series of vintage Bay Area hardcore flyers and LP covers running on an iPhoto loop while the aging hipsters consorted amongst themselves.

What Punk Flyers Looked Like In The Days Before Design Suites

The book’s authors, Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, come out after the crowd settles to introduce Porchlight’s promoters, who in turn introduce the guests. All of them are featured in the book and will recount their own stories, starting with Bucky Sinister, a burly and bespectacled guy with a crewcut who has apparently had a lot of practice in speaking words as an old-school promoter himself.

Bucky Sinister Unfurls His Spiel

As a taste of the anecdotes populating the book, Sinister told the tale of Jeremy Spew, an old pal arrested for Malicious Theft Of Human Remains and Malicious Conduct With Human Remains. Turns out Spew was hanging at Piedmont Cemetery with some friends, and they found an open mausoleum. Entering the mausoleum, Spew found a baby’s corpse, and decided he liked the baby’s head – might make a good hood ornament or something. So he took the corpse back to the punk warehouse space he was subletting, and one of his roomies caught him sawing off the baby’s mummified head with a hacksaw. Well, turns out this house was a intentional community with tons of rules and doctrinaire ideologues, so the guy called the cops on Spew. Spew immediately goes to ground, turns himself in after his friends start getting arrested, and ends up in Santa Rita, where EVERYONE stays away from him, once a convict finds out the charges on his rap sheet. The only person who approached Spew after this got around the prison population was a criminal who lectured him, “When you kill a motherfucker, you don’t take him HOME!”

I was glad to hear this tale, since stories like this always work well at parties. I’ll be frank that I’m not fond of punk oral histories – they tend to be lazy transcriptions of interviews with the author’s buddies. But SF is always good for some bizarre, funny situations, and as Silke reveals, the previous story ranks as the book’s Rashomon, with everyone having a different perspective on it.

Up Next: Geekfest Founder John Geek

Up next was John Geek, the founder of the long-running NorCal punk festival Geekfest, who was a bit less polished and organized as Sinister. His own rambling discussion focused on the DIY aspect of punk and how there are still people organizing events and making music under this banner for the love of its independent, defiant ideals and attitude. He only vaguely alluded to damaged friends who didn’t get back what they put into their community, which sorta bothered me. I mean, we probably need to acknowledge punk’s shortcomings now if we’re to document it fairly, yet those sorts of details were conspicuously absent from his and other people’s discussions of punk’s past (such as Sinister, who has documented his entry into 12-step, yet didn’t mention his days of addiction or how the punk lifestyle may have enabled his self-destructive behavior.)

Rozz Rezabek Speaks

Following him was probably the most amusing talker of the night, Rozz Rezabek, famous for showing no Love lost in the Nirvana biopic Kurt & Courtney. Storming on with a homemade tee reading “PUNK LEGEND,” he clearly relished the in-your-face absurdity of his past. For where else but punk would a promoter (in this case, Malcolm MacLaren) be told that your band, Negative Trend, was “the WORST BAND IN ROCK MUSIC” and immediately book you for the Sex Pistols’ final gig at San Francisco’s Winterland? But nope, more glorious humiliation still follows our hero around to this day, in particular this YouTube video. (Move the cursor to the last few seconds to see a prime example of punk’s goofy polarization tactics):

Let’s be fair: Rozz clearly understands his responsibilities as a role model. He pointed out his son in the balcony, who only a few weeks ago had chased around some girls at his high school after clenching his testicles with his hands, screaming “Ball juice!”, and hoped he wouldn’t be kicked out for his indiscretion. After all, he reminded us all that “tough love” was a term coined by Parents Against Punk Rockers in the ’70s, hardly foreseeing the troubles their troubled youth would later face as concerned parents themselves. Still, despite the arrests by cops for using tetracycline on his acne and fans like a kid who once sprayed gasoline on his chest with a squirt gun and tried to set him on fire, he’s lived to cash in. He’s got a memoir coming out, and something tells me that like his talk, it will be a laugh and a half.

Yes, the Son Of Chicken Soup For The Soul's Franchise Owner Was a Punk. And Why Am I Not Surprised?

The other two that followed were a bit of a letdown after Rezabeck. The revelation that the next speaker, Oren Canfield, was the son of the man who started Chicken Soup For The Soul was probably more interesting than Oren’s story itself. After him came Lynn Breedlove from the queercore group Tribe 8 and who I’m guessing would be his (nowadays, she’s a he) old lover, Anna Joy Springer, who, like a few aging punks I know nowadays, is a college professor. My sense is that they tried to do a little Abbott-and-Costello style riffing that didn’t come off really well, though Breedlove had a lot of charm for a dood that looks like Roman Polanski. Their main point was that punk helped bring a little aggression into feminism – you could be a woman and still kick ass, right? Oh, and that it’s not cool for a guy to grab your tits in a mosh pit, but great if a woman does. Gotta love dem PC double standards, yo.

Who's On First?: Lynn Breedlove (left) and Anna Joy Springer Tag Team It

I unfortunately had to leave at the intermission, which meant I missed the set from Penelope Houston, former frontwoman for SF punk heroes The Avengers and current librarian/folk rocker. Yes, a librarian. But think about it: next time you go into a bookstore, you take a look at the employees. Your average bookseller probably employs more outcasts than your average record store once did before it went bankrupt. After else, how many other people besides wordworkers would be smart enough to see past the alternative lifestyle to see a person’s core competency and embrace a more expansive vision of business culture?

One last thing: coming back from the reading, I talked with an old college friend about some local friends of his in Berkeley who recorded a punk version of “West Side Story.” And wouldn’t you know it, but the cover of that very album was included in the slide montage at the beginning of the Porchlight session. He expressed amusement that a silly idea from some friends of his could be cited in academic studies and sold for a small fortune on eBay. All it tells me as I write this is that whatever it is that people still like about punk rock is worth a fortune to them, and it’s something they never, ever want to let go of.

As for me, my initial alignment with outsider culture was not exclusively punk, but it played an important role. And it definitely showed me the sort of writer I wanted to be. And while I respect these sorts of writers, I realized through punk and the subcultures it inspired that I didn’t want to be a David Foster Wallace or a Philip Roth who pushed himself away from the world and gained initial acceptance from other shut-ins who selected themselves away from the common herd. Before you write, you have to speak first, for your community, and say something they care about. After that, it doesn’t matter what some cloistered fools in Manhattan publishing houses and magazine mastheads think. It’s those communities that you have to give to and speak for, not them, if what you say is to be remembered.

A few days ago, W.W. Norton finally published the book. At $195, it doesn’t come cheap. And it’s already sold out of its first edition; Eric tells me he only has three or four copies coming into the store at this time. But let me tell you that this is the sort of book every person who creates one should strive to make (and apparently, Jung did recommend that his clients do so, as a painstakingly detailed New York Times Magazine article recounts.). For all of us turn to knowledge or information to illuminate a world with a truth too often darkened by our fears and misconceptions. Scholars, philosophers, mages and artists have traversed these depths, and apparently, Jung was all of these things. So for Jungian scholars, counterculture fans or lovers of visionary art, this very well may be the publishing event of the year.

Luckily, I’ll be in the NYC area during the month of October, where the Rubin Museum Of Art is exhibiting the book from the 7th to January 25th, and while I’m doubting I’ll be able to take much in the way of pictures… well, we’ll see.

(Much thanks, btw, to documentary filmmaker Mitch Schultz for alerting me to this.)

But how does one create a story that makes you a character, that responds in its own way to the actions you perform in relation to it? Most of the solutions I’ve seen to this are not in publishing, but in gaming – namely in ARGs (Alternative Reality Games), which are unfortunately the general province of very rich corporations looking to promote media franchises like LOST or Spielberg’s A.I. Very few writers have attempted to tackle this question, and those that have tend to think more in terms of gimmickry and theme park ride thrills than in creating significant and mature works that can challenge and beguile their readers.

Take Cathy’s Book: If Found Call 650-266-8233, the YA novel written in the form of an artistic teen’s lost diary and devised by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, a sci-fi writer/game designer team, both with backgrounds in marketing. Websites and phone numbers like the one on the cover seek to immerse the reader in an erzatz universe where Cathy is embroiled through her ex-boyfriend in a dark mystery surrounding the Chinese Eight Ancestors, disappears and cries out for help. Initial controversy surrounding the book dealt with the authors’ cross-promotion deal with Cover Girl to shill their products through “Cathy” in exchange for ads on Cover Girl’s tween website beinggirl.com. I myself got most unnerved by reading between the lines of Cathy’s oddly contrived speech and hearing underneath two aging, ultra-wired West Coast geeks emulating tweengrrl l33t speak 4 lolZ. Of course, guys have been impersonating young girls on interactive forums since the advent of the Internet, but stuff like Cathy’s Book and lonelygirl15 was an unsettling indicator of the weird and vaguely pedophilic turning pro. For someone like me to participate in these deeply manipulative scenarios seems like an indictment.

Then there’s the recently released Level 26 by CSI creator Anthony Zuicker. For those who’ve never seen Zuicker deliver his pitch, he’s a bubbly, rotund, well-groomed, ultra-enthusiastic alpha geek with a sleek, self-aware charm about him. His canny synthesis of the drama behind the intersection of science and police work has made Hollywood a lot of money, so naturally, people here in town think he’s a genius. Apparently, so does he, since he’s now selling an interactive book series (Oh, and did I mention that Cathy’s Book spun off into a series? Publishers, just like movie studios, love a franchise, after all.) entitled “Level 26″ with the same tones of gleeful excitement he brings to the “CSI: The Experience” branded museum exhibit he’s brought to science museums throughout the country, and which I saw in Portland, Oregon in August.

Of course, the only truly “interactive” elements of this “Digi-Novel” – and yes, it’s already a trademarked name – involve embedded codes within the text that allow one to unlock “cyberbridges” on the book’s website that access filmed content that give more of the story. Problem is, though, the story’s already WRITTEN. A done deal. You may be consuming the preordained plot information in different ways than in the past, but your own agency is severely limited in both the models proposed by Zuicker and Cathy’s Book.

It also doesn’t help that Level 26 is hands down the WORST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN MY LIFE. Manipulative and utterly derivative in the worst tradition of violent Hollywood thrillers, Level 26 pulls out all the stops and serial-killer cliches in conveying the lurid, hackneyed tale behind a supervillain named (I kid you not) Sqweegel and his impossibly efficient crimes, as well as the haunted-yet-super-attractive police officer Steven Dark (cue brooding synthesizer groans) pulled out of retirement to snag him. You can see all the plot “twists” coming a mile away, and worst of all from an interactivity standpoint, there’s no real need to even “unlock” the cyberbridges to get the novel. The interactivity (provided, unsurprisingly, by EQAL, the production company that lonelygirl15 built) is a vestigial, unnecessary component to the book.

Oh, an in what appears to be a telling trend in these sorts of ventures, Zuicker also decided on a questionable cross-promotion with the execrable Suicide Girls softcore porn website, where two of the site’s models dressed up in Sqweegel’s BDSM-gimp bad guy costume (transforming them into Sqweegees, I guess.) and took it to a predictable conclusion for a shoot. Considering the gleefully detailed bloodlust exhibited by all the book’s main characters, such a partnership makes its own sad sense. The grim spectre of advertising creeping into books through this model is also raised as well by the examples set forth in Cathy’s Book and Level 26.

What’s saddest of all is that all the tools in place for brand-new forms of storytelling to take place, and none of them are being used. And I’m not just talking ebooks or “vooks” (Simon & Schuster imprint Atria’s terminology for ebooks with videos, a goofy marketing ploy which conveniently ignores the fact that ALL ebooks can incorporate videos as well as other forms of multimedia within them. They’re digital, after all.). The online widget Bookbuzzr allows book excerpts to be posted like viral videos across social networks. And the miraculous LiveScribe/Smartpen technology, which synchs up a voice-recorder/pen to microdot-embedded paper and allows for instant playback, translation and aural transformation of notes.

The tech continues to change and evolve every day, faster than most writers are probably comfortable with. That’s a pity, because all of it is waiting for a visionary to make something extraordinary with it. Despite all the hype you’ve heard, it hasn’t happened yet.

Missive from an anonymous playa bard, swiped from the Playa Info Bulletin Board

So! Before I begin this, I suppose I should address those of you who showed up a while ago expecting a little bit more information about Adrian Roberts and RE/Search than you ended up getting. I’ll just explain the situation, one I fully intend not to revise, and then move on to less difficult subject matter.

So I did a brief interview with Adrian this past Tuesday, as I was shopping at the Highland Park Farmer’s Market, where he insisted I only print his rather vague quote, after which he went into further depth. Now anyone who’s ever read Piss Clear knows that Adrian, as warm and personable as he is, ranks as the Perez Hilton of the playa, so there was plenty of dirt, but I figured I’d stick to the facts for what I printed. However, he says all of this stuff this stuff was off the record. I can tell you right now that he never at any point in our discussion used that statement, or otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything in the first place. So I’m not beating myself up for what was originally posted.

That said, Adrian’s in a difficult position right now, and I’m not about to make it moreso, so I took thee offending info down. This doesn’t stop any of you from digging up a cached version on Google, nor am I interested in stopping anyone from doing so. But if there’s anything that I’ve learned from this, it’s scriptor caveo. And let’s hope homeboy makes his skrilla back.

Right, so onwards and upwards!

This year, I was camped at Entheon Village, the playa’s foremost repository for psychedelic thought. We’re known primarily for our lectures, which this year focused on the festival’s theme of evolution, natch. Traditionally, the village’s emphasis has been on psychedelic discussion – the academic advocacy group MAPS routinely camps with the village – and some people, most notably MAPS head Rick Doblin and self-styled Aussie gonzo journalist Rak Razam, spoke to these issues. But a lot of talk centered, oddly enough, on 2012, the latest endpoint to this version of civilization, and the leap in evolution some anticipate once this milestone is passed.

Truth be told, I only got so much from these discussions. Many of them focused on the temporary city and how different/better it is from the world outside. The Q&A after one panel ended up getting a little ugly when some women in the crowd criticized the lack of female speakers, and it devolved into a shouting match between her and magazine-journalist-turned-New Age-pundit Daniel Pinchbeck. Kinda sad, when you’ve just heard how special and unique the community you’re part of is, only to see that it has yet to eliminate some core grievances burners feel about the larger society we’ve attempted to escape. But it’s hardly surprising.

I probably learned more from the personal interactions I had with some of my campmates, most notably UT-Austin sociology professor and “psychedelic satire” author Tony Vigorito and Origin Press publisher Byron Belitsos. About Vigorito I will have more to say in an upcoming post, but his fiction sounds intriguing – at least intriguing enough for Harcourt to pick him up after his first book, Just A Couple Of Days, built up a rep in the small press circuit.) I had a long talk with Byron where he expressed great dismay at the Google/Authors Guild settlement, and the unintended consequences a privately owned corporation could wreak upon the entire published output of human civilization, not to mention the 23 titles (funny thing, that number, how it always crops up) he’s already published. Perhaps he should have taken it up with Google co-founder Sergei Brin, since his 200 “yellow bikes” (painted green for some inexplicable reason) he donated to the playa for bikeless citizens to ride at will were present at the burn. Maybe Brin was, too. But it was only me that Belitsos could get at such short notice.

Belitsos came to the playa with quite a few books from his Press, and hearing about my blog, he handed me a book called “Conversations With Paul,” LA Times editor Philip H. Knapf’s memoirs about transmissions he received from a guardian angel named Paul. No less than Love Sex Fear Death’s Timothy Wyllie (whom I wrote about a few weeks back in the Process Church General Assembly post.) lent his name to a promotional blurb, so I figure this is something I was meant to read. So I’ll let you know what I got from it.

I also ran into Raymond Soulard, Jr. of Portland, Oregon’s Scriptor Press, who has routinely given away pamphlets of fine literature from writers like William Burroughs and Flannery O’Connor – not to mention several compilations of writings on psychedelics – at Center Camp for years. I once discussed “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” with him once, but this time around, I just took two psychedelic pamphlets, Octavio Paz’s “Sunstone” and Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” to add to my playa gifts.

I do want to say that in 10 years of attending the festival, I’ve gotten more than just some nice conversations and some great reading recommendations (two of note were Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker” and David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas,” which I have since passed down to many others since.). There’s a lot out there that can expand one’s horizons as a person, and indeed, part of it is written. But part of it is painted, part of it constructed and the rest directly lived. That realization is what has stayed with me and influenced me most directly ever since my first solo trip 10 years ago, and it’s what I have attempted to emulate in my own creative written works ever since, starting with four “interactive books” I’ll one day share with you on this site but hardly stopping there. I like to think that an experience like this can bring the exact sort of unique inspiration to anybody, so wherever it is you find it, just go, follow up on what it gives you, and if it makes people stop and stare, then you’re headed in the right direction.

-Oh, yeah, that goofy pagan-hippie-punk-(insert one or several subcultural marketing titles here) Thing In The Desert. Don’t they do a lot of drugs out there?

-Burning What? I have not heard of it.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, I recommend you check out the official website, as it would take far longer than I have the inclination at this moment to fully explain. As far as those who dismiss it out of hand without ever having attended are concerned, their blithe prejudgments reveal a lot more about them than about the festival itself.

Suffice it to say that no matter who you are, the festival can provide for you. Burning Man is a home for all sorts of freaks, and that includes literary ones as well. Dave Eggers, for one, wrote the foreword for the BMORG-approved Drama In The Desert which appeared back in ’02, and a host of books have appeared over the past decade to document the festival and its wildly diverse culture, most notably This Is Burning Man by Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty. I’ve been going since ’99 with only one break in between (that being last year’s “American Dream” – hey, I’m not a flagwaver, what can I tell you?), and this year, themed around Evolution in honor of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin Of Species, was a shift for me. I made it all about (alright, MOSTLY about) exploring the resources for readers on the playa, and found out a few things you should know about a specific slice of countercultural publishing in the 21st century.

First off, anyone who stopped by Center Camp probably ran into a few copies of Burning Man Live: 13 Years Of Piss Clear, Black Rock City’s Alternative Newspaper. For many years, Burning Man hosted an alternative newspaper entitled Piss Clear (the title pertaining to a sure sign one is drinking enough water in the desert.) and published by dreadlocked glamour puss extraordinaire Adrian Roberts, which cast a basilisk’s eye towards all facets of Burning Man culture, from endless duststorms and absurd fashion mistakes to New Age goofballs and fratboy incursions. Adrian’s since moved on to embrace Mash-Ups as a DJ/promoter of the SF club night Bootie, having the early-adopter foresight to embrace the form before it became mainstream nightclub fodder. But 13 years is a lot of content to sit on, so who can blame him for cashing in?

I ran into Adrian out at the Temple, the city’s spiritual/devotional center hundreds of yards away from the Man himself, on Tuesday. He sounded thankful to finally capture his newspaper for posterity, though not so happy about the deal he received from his publisher, RE/Search (publishers of Modern Primitives, which kickstarted the whole piercing/scarification industry back in the day.).

Speaking about it later off-playa, Adrian gave me this official quote: “Although it’s ostensibly published by RE/Search, this book is 100% self-financed.”

[Note: Adrian got freaked out from what was originally here. Some miscommunication in my discussion with him made me feel I could print a lot of what I reported in an earlier version of this post. Feel free to ask him yourself about the details, as he has a lot to say on the issue.]

Adrian requests that anyone who wants to buy the book should do so directly from him through his website, pissclear.org. He also says he’ll throw in a free copy of the original Piss Clear newspaper along with the deal.

So, has RE/Search merely transformed into a hipster vanity press these days? After Vale’s ill-advised endorsement of neo-swing back in the ’90s, not to mention their Guide To Bodily Fluids, I can believe just about anything, save in the transparency of Vale’s own bodily fluids and business practices. So much for evolution…

On the plus side, Roberts still sounds proud enough of his own work to promote it as best as possible, and all those taped and handwritten requests not to steal the sample books from Center Cafe seem to have worked – well enough that there were still unstolen later on in the week. I only wish I could say the same for my bike.

Right, so for my next trick, get set for a description of my home camp, Entheon Village, and a survey of the thinkers and writers who stopped by to share the love…

I have a copy of The Basketball Diaries, one with an absolutely dreamy picture of Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover, but have yet to make it all the way through. But yeah, those were the days, when a guy could write about his drug-soaked youth and have it matter. Top THAT, Frank McCourt, right?

Well, I’m looking forward to Oprah’s retrospective on the man, not to mention Obama’s inevitable name-dropping of a fellow substance-happy hooper at some point. Why should Richard Price and George Pelecanos get all the glory? For me, I’ll be cranking up “People Who Died,” one of the few truly rocking tunes ever written by a career writer, and feel grateful that Carroll actually made it this far. RIP.

Jim Carroll Rocking Out