Hello all and welcome to… we’ll, I guess I should call this “Fifth Street Review,” as I am not on Melendy Avenue right now. I am in Cincinnati for my special post-quarantine trip! I got into town yesterday. It’s not bad so far. I will depart on my pilgrimage to see Fiona the hippo soon, and there will be pictures… next week. But I always read a lot on vacation and this is no exception, so I have reviews of two good history books and a fresh Discography. There are also some pictures from Cincinnati. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge
Erik Davis, High Weirdness
Discographies
Mötorhead!
Lagniappe
The Observed Life, with Peter: Cincinnati Part One
REVIEWS
Taylor Branch, “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968” (2006) - “Non-violence is a tactic” is a phrase I’ve heard intoned many times over the last few years. Left unsaid but implied by context is the fact that non-violence is not the only tactic. People who say the line usually also include the implication that non-violence is not a strategy, a goal, or a politics. Like a lot of intoned phrases, “non-violence is a tactic” tries to foreclose on an argument ahead of time, because in a key moment in American life, non-violence was more than a tactic. It was a strategy, a goal, a politics, a tactic, a discipline, and, in language that has now become hackneyed but still retains some of its power, a dream.
“At Canaan’s Edge” is the last in a trilogy of books by journalist Taylor Branch covering the civil rights movement, largely through examining the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. These are big, long books written for an educated but popular audience. As such, they are relatively thesis-light and narrative-heavy. But coming to the end of King’s life, and with it, Branch heavily implies, the end of the “civil rights” portion of the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century, the theses become more pronounced.
The theses are not the strong points of the “America in the King Years” series. Branch identifies with the civil rights movement in a way it’s tempting to attribute to his being white, liberal, and well-off. His version of King is not the nice Santa Claus figure embraced by conservatives and by many liberals alike. Among other things, Branch, writing a substantial biography, does not steer away from King’s increasingly vociferous criticism of capitalism towards the end of his life, or the way white liberals from LBJ on down turned on King as King made his opposition to the Vietnam War clear or as the movement set its sights on de facto segregation in the north. But even in the late date of 2006 (the first volume of the trilogy came out in 1988), and even with caveats about the warm personal relationship between King and figures like Stokely Carmichael, Branch still holds to the old idea that the rise of the concept of black power did much to end the civil rights movement that a reader of the series had, by then, invested a good two thousand five hundred pages reading about.
Ultimately, Branch charts the declension narrative of civil rights going into 1968 “more in sadness than in anger,” as the saying goes. Carmichael and the rest, veterans of hard work and harrowing persecution in the struggle in the Deep South, had good reason to embrace black power and more robust self-defense. Struggle, in general and in the peculiar pitch of non-violence, wears people down, King included. Just, for reasons Branch doesn’t make clear, King could stand it longer than the others, could keep the non-violent faith, commitment to multiracial alliances, and a form of patriotism that even his closest allies could not. Then he was murdered, and that was that.
The stuff one comes to this kind of book for — narrative history — satisfies more than the theses do. Branch tells the stories well and in a lot of detail. If there’s an issue here, it’s that Branch gets a little too ambitious and gives us a lot of what’s going on in Vietnam along with the black freedom stuff. I get it- it was all part of the largest gestalt, and Vietnam helped drive King’s allies in the White House, President Johnson included, away. But we didn’t need all of the details of strategy meetings with the national security council for that. I think Branch wanted to make Johnson out as a tragic figure. I can even buy it, a little- Johnson probably would have preferred not to have inherited the Vietnam mess, and focus on his poverty programs. But ultimately, a man killing hundreds of thousands to stay in power… not that tragic. More just bad. And it slowed the book down.
Still and all, this trilogy was well worth reading. Like I said before, I probably knew more about black power movements than I did about civil rights. It’s almost as though universities assume that you get so much of (a bastardized version of) King and civil rights from elementary school onwards that it’d be redundant to teach it seriously in history classes.
What, beyond firming up the details instead of it just being a blur of compelling black and white images, did I get from reading these books? Well, I do think non-violence is best understood as a tactic, or really more of a strategy. Moreover, I think in many cases fighting is appropriate and justified. I certainly think the parody of King’s strategy that’s invoked by the media and on-the-ground peace police at street actions isn’t worth much. But I don’t think it makes sense to let the matter rest there. Reading these books, it is impossible to accept the picture of naivety, passivity, or even cowardice that leftists sometimes allow to develop of the civil rights movement, a kind of negative of the (frankly, often patronizing, naive, overly-sunny) picture of black power militancy we have created. Whatever their mistakes and flaws, these were serious people with a serious strategy, aware of alternatives, who made their choices with their eyes open. You don’t need to believe in non-violence in any capacity, and you certainly don’t need to accept Branch’s occasional dip into patriotic bathos, where he insists King was doing no more nor less than the Founding Fathers, to accept that.
Practically speaking, I think the main takeaway from King, the SCLC, and the “civil rights” side of the (debatable, heuristic) “civil rights-black power” dyad isn’t the power of non-violence but the power of discipline. The sort of non-violence King used took immense discipline, and no amount of militant sneering can efface that. That discipline meant endless work on recruiting, educating, organizing, and mobilizing many many often previously-unpolitical people. The movement's inheritors kept the fire but did not, generally, keep the discipline, as though by coming out from behind the shadow of “Lawd” (as some SNCC hands called him behind his back) King, they could relax, let out long-suppressed breath. Sometimes it seems that they thought that dispensing with non-violence meant dispensing with any discipline beyond (often arbitrary) chains of command and adherence to lines. That didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, to the strains. I think we need to learn that discipline again, even if we don’t accept all of the premises King, Branch, or anyone else added to it. ****’
Erik Davis, “High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies” (2019) (narrated by the author) - Reading (well, listening to) this book, appropriately enough given its content and tone, was an experience. Historian of religions Erik Davis landed this book right into two registers that produce very different emotional responses for me. One register is that of chewy, involved, critical intellectual history, a happy place for me, somewhere I feel both welcomed and challenged. The other register is that of mysticism, spirituality, and the particular chip on the shoulder of intellectuals who study esoteric subjects, a much more fraught and murky intellectual/emotional space for me. It is impossible to disentangle these strands in “High Weirdness” and pointless to try. In the end, the challenges involved in taking this book in have helped make it, for me, one of the best books I’ve read this year.
I locate an echo of my ambivalence in the three subjects around whom Davis structured his narrative: hallucinogen evangelist Terence McKenna, journalist and novelist Robert Anton Wilson, and scifi master Philip K. Dick. Before listening to this book, my feelings were reverence for Dick, distaste for Wilson, and for the most part a lack of interest in McKenna. In many respects, I took opposite paths between Dick and Wilson. Wilson’s “Illuminatus!” trilogy was passed around by the hippie/nerdy boys (gendered pronoun used advisedly) of my very hippie/nerd-heavy school. I got my hands on it at fourteen, enjoyed the first fifty or a hundred pages of historical references and sex, and then lost it. I picked it up again in my late twenties, and was distinctly unimpressed by the history, the sex, the libertarian politics, the prose style, and the general “ain’t I a stinker?!” tone of the work. I read Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” as an alternate history obsessed teenager. I liked it but didn’t really “get it” until I got into PKD more generally in college and reread it. As for McKenna, I only knew about him because a psytrance act I liked (don’t at me, they had some groove to them) sampled his lectures.
Did I change my mind about any of these impressions? Not really- maybe I’m a little more sympathetic to Wilson, learning about assorted personal tragedies of his, but that’s not enough to make me read more of him. But in many respects the men themselves are beside the point except as ideal types of “the psychonaut.” The word itself takes me back to attic rooms with boys tolerant of, but not always enthused by, my uptight company, shoving Chinese research chemicals from the internet up their noses while I sat by and prattled (knowingly) of tabletop role playing games and (utterly ignorantly) of girls… boys who are now men, many of them husbands, fathers, homeowners, and I’m very pleased to say some of them are still friends (it probably helps I got a bit less uptight). Anyway! Davis is a historian, methodologist, and champion of “the weird,” as both a topic of study and as a way of approaching the world. As I was in those attic rooms, I am ambivalent. Unlike my time in the attics, I am going to make a good faith effort to understand.
This is made difficult by a few things. In many respects, I came to what intellectual maturity I possess through interaction with the special bugbear of countercultural psychonautry- materialist critical analysis. Hippies need squares, and one suspects that goes both ways. Hippies and communists actually just don’t get on very well if they take each other’s premises even marginally seriously. They are incommensurate. I identify as a democratic socialist more than a communist, and my friends, then and now, interested in psychedelia identify even less with hippie-ness, but you get the idea. In college, I put down my few feelers to what Davis calls “consciousness culture” in no small part by reading The Baffler, which took great delight in skewering the conjunction between counterculture and capitalism that loomed so large during the first internet boom. I wasn’t a punk, and if anything, I’d rather listen to the 13th Floor Elevators than to Minor Threat any day, but many of my teachers were punk. Be fast, be mean, hit vulnerable spots… among other things, it seemed a better set of principles for someone escaping nerdery (let’s throw another subculture in the mix!) in my circumstances than “tune in, turn on, drop out.”
And then there’s the chip on the shoulder that students of esoterica who get as far as Davis has gotten — well-known journalist, history PhD — in “straight” intellectual life. I get it… kind of. Academia can, indeed, be stultifying. Studying stuff off the beaten path can get you frozen out, especially considering grim economic realities (though esoterica can also be flashy enough to attract grant money and undergrad eyeballs, it’s worth noting). But there is a distinctly passive-aggressive hippie-macho quality to the way psychedelic advocates express the chip on their shoulders, and Davis is no exception. He broadly implies that academics don’t engage more with the esoteric, the “weird,” and the psychedelic because they are afraid of having their minds blown, that they have to stay within the rules of consensus reality because they’re too chicken to venture outside.
Well… lord knows academics are often cowardly enough. But I’ve also known a lot of people who would do god knows what with their bodies and cerebellums but are terrified of critical thought or honest self-examination. They’ll brave the ayahuasca jungle but not the therapist’s couch, take aboard criticism from fellow impaired miscreants before listening to an editor. Moreover, speaking as a materialist, what’s more comforting- the idea that there is a big magical universe that takes human consciousness as a key element, or the idea that there is nothing other than the material, that there’s no magic, that when we die we rot, and human consciousness was probably an evolutionary adaptation to make us better hunter-gatherers? I could just as easily say psychonauts, heads, and freaks are the cowards, retreating up their own assholes, refusing the trek into the desert of the real. That’s certainly something like what The Baffler would have said back in its glory days, if they could stop laughing at what they saw as countercultural clownishness long enough.
It’d probably be pretty good if I got into what’s actually in this book, huh? Because it’s good. It’s really good. Even the parts where I was ambivalent made me happy because they made me think. Davis dealt not just with three “psychonauts,” but their most outre flights of fancy, on their own terms but in a way that made them relevant even to my materialist ass. It would have been easy to focus on “Illuminatus!” and “The Man in the High Castle,” and Davis does discuss them, but as a prelude to jumping into the deep ends with his subjects: the McKenna brothers' efforts to build a… psychedelic musical computer/philosopher’s stone? in the Colombian jungle, Wilson’s entry into (and out of) a paranoid “Chapel Perilous,” and Dick’s “2-3-74” experience, which dominated the last part of his life and helped produce the Valis series as well as his impenetrable Exegesis. Davis’s own exegeses of these are bravura performances of insight, sensitivity, and erudition, borrowing from vast arrays of historical and theoretical literature. This is already a long review so I’m not going into detail, but take it from an only intermittently-sympathetic interlocutor, they are quite good.
But there is a certain extent to which these exegeses, for me, were more like (noble, accomplished) work-showing for the larger contextual points Davis makes in “High Weirdness.” As far as the exegeses themselves are concerned, they serve as proof of concept for Davis’s takes on how to approach “the weird.” Neither confirming nor denying whether his psychonaut’s experiences were “real,” applying Bruno LaTour’s actor-network theory where objects are constituent, active parts in the construction of truth, borrowings from Derrida, there’s a lot going on here. Some of it is genuinely innovative- some of it reminds me of that other habit of esoteric academics, using “what do you mean by REAL?!?”-type rhetoric to keep alive the idea (often a childlike hope- not that of the six year old desiring magic power, but the twelve year old who doesn’t want to put his magic kit away) that the supernatural is real… more the former, really, I guess I’m just sensitive to the latter, especially from a guy who likes to take his shots at the intellectual courage of materialists… really, I’d say methodologically, Davis is at his best in incorporating “trash culture” and subculture histories into serious intellectual history, but that could just be reflective of my particular interests.
Historically, Davis makes some provocative claims for his subject. McKenna, Wilson, and Dick were proud freaks, outsiders… but their thoughts and actions weren’t so far outside of the mainstream as that might imply, especially not in the seventies. I have some disagreements with Davis, here, though probably more about emphasis (and arguably misprision) than fact. Davis wants to upend the seventies-as-decline narrative, one of the few things both the left and the right can agree on. All three of his subjects were involved, to one degree or another, with the sixties movements, and according to many readings, their retreat from politics and entry into paranoid delusion (if we choose to look at their experiences that way) goes along with the decline-into-individualist-malaise theme of a lot of seventies historiography. I basically agree with this notion, but also think it is ripe for some productive disagreement. If nothing else, the psychonauts didn’t (always) understand the situation as a decline, especially not the comparatively hearty Terence McKenna and the increasingly smug right-libertarian Robert Anton Wilson… the depressive (and actually brilliant, as opposed to half-smart like Wilson or just sort of questionably relevant like McKenna) Philip Dick had a tougher time. A lot of people thought they were going in the right direction. I might disagree (so might PKD!) but it’s worth understanding their perspective.
Davis takes us home towards the end of the book with a discussion of “the network society,” a concept that starts taking on valence more in the seventies and which the three subjects prefigured, and especially McKenna participated in. Whatever credulity Davis might display towards the claims and especially the premises of psychedelia, he is no naïf about the magic of networks, showing how from the beginning, whatever supposedly liberatory, freaky-Deleuzian (to bring in another theorist he name-checks) quality networks might have had, they were also systems of deception, fuckery, and control- and it was impossible to disentangle the two. This he displays in the case of hippie, early network enthusiast, and murderer Ira Einhorn’s both digital and social network of futurists and freaks. I know a thing or two about how cold the countercultural imagination can be, from that same school often described as a “hippie” school. When I enrolled in the late nineties, this school openly advertised itself as being the school for the network society, but there wasn’t much peace and love there. The founders were libertarians, ruthless Zionists, pigheaded supporters of the Iraq War, and one of them even made the local news for how much money he donated to Trump’s reelection campaign. In a gesture at contemporary relevance that I don’t think Davis necessarily needed to justify his work, he ties in the altright, “meme magic” etc., in an impassioned call to understand “the weird” before it destroys us.
Well… as it happens, I know a thing or two about fighting fascists and cut my teeth in fighting the “altright” variant. We beat the altright by dragging them away from fora and memes and into the real. We challenged them to come fight on the streets, with the means of politics, violent and otherwise. They tried, and we beat them so hard that no one calls themselves “altright” anymore. There are plenty of Nazis, but that specific strategy is played out, dead, because of us and what we did, in reality, relying on masses, weight, truth. If you ask me, that points to a good way to study the weird- not necessarily with an eye towards beating it (though learning to break anything down is often quite instructive), but by relating what it says about itself to assorted tests of consensus reality. You don’t need to be “reductive” to do that. You don’t need to grade the weird like so many undergrad essays. Just throw it around and see how it reacts. If these ideas are so interesting and important, they should survive.
Along with “psychonaut,” Davis uses an interesting word, mainly for Dick- “hermenaut” (not sure of the spelling because audiobook), navigator of the word and the methods of reading. Maybe it was my odd sensitivities, but it seems like Davis had an odd relationship with Dick. It turns out that Davis knew Terence McKenna “Bob” Wilson- Dick died when Davis was fifteen, and they did not meet. Davis knew of Dick’s work and helped edit the Exegesis, and maybe this herculean task introduced a certain frustration with the great man that Davis doesn’t have for his old, now dead, friends McKenna or Wilson. It got borderline disrespectful, from where I sat- more emphasis on Dick’s romantic failings, the phrase “mendacious imagination” came up… but “hermenaut” is interesting. It’s worth noting Dick had given up on psychedelics, mostly, by the time he had his vision in 1974. He still did plenty of drugs, especially the proletarian uppers needed to keep him writing. All three subjects were voracious readers but Dick had a reading (and writing) habit that put the other two to shame. There’s a reason (beyond academic appreciation, which Dick has more than the other two) for the Borges comparisons.
Forgive me for another reference to my youth. At my weird hippie-nerd high school, I was known for my refusal to use drugs, and a boy I knew who was quite enthusiastic for them asked me how I intended to expand my mind. As far as he was concerned, the options were either psychedelic drugs or decades of meditation- I didn’t want to do either, so what was I going to do? “I’m going to expand my mind by reading,” I told him. I don’t relate this story to “own” the boy. I don’t actually stand with the Baffler crowd in dismissing other ways of learning and other existential concerns out of hand, though I may not have much time for them myself and utterly refuse to be shamed for that. But I’ve chosen to explore the noosphere — the realm of human thought, which Davis refers to once or twice but wasn’t really part of his or his subjects approach — instead of whatever dimension the psychonaut chooses. Truth be told, I think it’s been good for me, and has actually granted some of the benefits, like enhanced connection with others, that more esoteric strains of consciousness promise. Dick’s hermenaut imagination helped raise him from his “tomb world” of depression and paranoia (funny how the whole range of “spiritual” thought avoids the realities of clinical depression like it’s a damn leper, like it doesn’t disprove the idea of a good universal consciousness…). I think that way of doing things has helped me, too. And that’s part of why, despite my ambivalence, despite occasionally rolling my eyes, I can only feel gratitude to Erik Davis for producing this work. *****
DISCOGRAPHIES
Mötorhead! I said when I started this discography business that I probably wouldn’t review the discographies of classic rock bands with a million albums, and then I decided to do Mötorhead. Well, they don’t play Mötorhead on classic rock radio, at least not when I grew up, and the major issue of the big, insanely long-lived classic rock acts — The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Beach Boys, the list goes on — isn’t there with Mötorhead. Say what you want about Lemmy, the band’s iconic frontman, but he never went soft, never crawled up his own ass. He did the same damn stuff from his adolescence to the day he died a few years ago, in his seventies- he played rock and roll, as loud and as fast as he could, and lived the same way.
I read Lemmy’s memoirs, “White Line Fever,” a few years back. An experiment in stream of consciousness narrative, “the writer said, like an asshole,” Lemmy just sort of spouting off as a ghost writer tried to impose something like chronological order on his ramblings. He was still sharp, had a good memory. He attributed his survival to his drugs of choice- speed, in pill form, washed down with whiskey. No needles, and only enough acid to go through the sixties whilst hanging around with fantasist Michael Moorcock (he wrote lyrics for Lemmy’s pre-Mötorhead band, Hawkwind) without throttling the little dork, not enough to send him to space for good and all… more than accounts of his epic drug use and sex life, he wrote about rock and roll- tours, bandmates, side projects, albums. He was respected — among other things, arguably the only metal guy (he didn’t call himself a metal guy but whatever) unambiguously respected, beloved even, by the punks — but never had Mick Jagger or Ozzy Osbourne levels of fame and money. He could sit his LA barstool and play his arcade game and recount his life like a human, even if he had that reptilian capacity for chaos and speed.
The big thing about Mötorhead’s discography is this- I listened to twenty-two studio albums, a live album (the classic Live at Hammersmith- they had plenty more), and an album of covers, and they were, for the most part, the same. If they had any major differences, with one exception, my non-musical mind could not clock them. Maybe towards the end, the production was a bit smoother, and Lemmy’s lyrics were more about accepting the inevitable. But the production wasn’t that smooth, and the lyrics didn’t make that much more sense — Lemmy or one of the other guys would usually free-associate them, along with some drinks or other substances, over the course of an hour or so in the weeks before recording a new album — than they ever did. Which is to say, they usually sufficiently get across aggression, lust, a skeptical barstool philosopher’s take on assorted issues with strings of somewhat disconnected “badass”-sounding phrases in Lemmy’s trademark growl.
In his memoir, Lemmy complained about how fans would always reference Mötorhead’s early classics, songs like “Ace of Spades” and “Overkill,” when they met him. After all, he made a lot of music after that. And he’s right. I love those old songs — “Bomber” is probably my favorite Mötorhead song — but if you listen to the band’s offerings from the nineties and aughts, there’s really not much difference. In particular, 2004’s “Inferno,” the first Mötorhead album I ever heard, stands up well, but really you could shuffle songs from all of the albums and produce a credible Mötorhead record. It’ll be fast, simple, and straightforward. You can drive to it, drink to it (don’t do both at the same time), dance to it. It’ll be rock and roll.
One exception is the 1991 album “March Ör Die.” My understanding is that this was meant to be Mötorhead’s big breakout album, after Lemmy wrote some hit songs for Ozzy Osbourne (using the same method he always did, so it probably took about an hour all in), but 1991 really wasn’t the time and that wasn’t the record. It’s an overproduced mess. They made a few other missteps over the years — I really don’t need a slow Mötorhead anthem about how child sex abuse is bad — but after every blip, the band just comes back and does what it does. It plays rock and roll. In 2015, Lemmy finally died- not an overdose, but prostate cancer did for him. If anyone was ready… by then, there were no more original members of the band left. Unlike so many bands I look up on Wikipedia, including ones I expect to be long gone, their entry is written in past tense. That’s ok. Their music will be present tense as long as someone out there wants to rock.
NEXT UP ON DISCOGRAPHIES: The best songwriter in the world, “and I’d stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”
LAGNIAPPE
The Observed Life, with Peter: Cincinnati, Part One
I hate air travel and was somewhat sleep deprived so didn’t think to take many pictures when I first got into Cincinnati. First impressions include the built up skyscraper downtown that’s pretty sleepy what with everyone working from home, and the short walk to the bohemian/hipster/gentrifier district of “Over the Rhine.” It’d be more of a walk in Boston or New York. I’ve also noticed black people and white people (it’s about fifty fifty between the two in the city) seem to hang out in the same spots more than you see in Boston, sometimes in groups together. I eventually took some pics.
Is there a term for houses like these? There’s a lot of them in Cincinnati.
This drink would be instantly forbidden in Boston and Marty Walsh would probably give a press conference. Doesn’t matter that he’s not mayor anymore.
This is that “Detroit-style” pizza I’ve heard fanciers discuss. Seems like a straightforward Sicilian pie to me but what do I know?
Mithra doesn’t know from pizza except that she wants some.