The comfy crust of semi-hibernation got pleasantly broken last night at the positively bustling opening night of the Strange Attractor Salon. It’s an exhibition ably curated by SA guru Mark Pilkington, showcasing art from contributors and allies. Needless to say, the obscure, the psychedelic, the devilishly fascinating and the bizarrely seductive are thoroughly celebrated.

That much was clear, even though the exhibits were lost behind the thick crowd for most of last night—a quiet afternoon of proper contemplation beckons. I did manage a leisurely perusal of the excellent venue‘s basement collection of skeletal oddities, pickled puppies and cultural emphemera. This assembly of strangeness is a fine companion for the exhibition, and another good reason to head there.

Also on the cards are a few performances, salon discussions and film screenings. Check out details and buy tickets.

Art and performance collective Guerilla Zoo are mounting a season celebrating the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky during November in London.

Events include The Gorilla, a new Jodorowsky play starring his son Brontis, an exhibition of work from the Panic Movement, an exhibition of works by Jodorowsky and Pascale Montandon, and of course, screenings of Jodorowsky’s incomparable surrealist alchemical films.

(Transcript here.)

When he first posted about it, someone piped up with concerns about Merrick’s tone.

The third question regards the (to me) overly aggressive attitude you took whilst you were talking about the Liberal Democrats. I was wondering how you thought it would come across to the general population of the UK? I compare this to the amiable way that Nick Clegg spoke after you.

Our culture’s gone through many cycles of upheaval, greater and lesser anger against the State and the failings of our elected representatives (and the lack of real alternative offered by their rivals). Direct action seeped into mainstream consciousness in the 1990s, mainly through environmental activism such as anti-road and anti-GM protests.

As the scientific evidence of the seriousness of our ecological blundering mounted, and the blundering continued apace, many assumed that the (supposedly) incoherent, “angry” approach to political action had failed. Corporations and the bland public reality they’ve created dominate, so the only game left is to work from within, they said. It’s the “smart” way forward; ranting from the sidelines simply engenders conflict and stand-offs, and doesn’t win over the public at large. People like “nice”, so that’s what we need to give them if we want to win them over.

There’s rarely a day goes by now that doesn’t show this attitude to be a load of shit. Of course, any intelligent person recognizes the value of tactics. However, I question the automatic association of anger with incoherence. I think this is a legacy of a culture—and I’m especially talking about my own country here, England—that seems constitutionally uncomfortable with strong human emotions. We lose coherence when angry because we’re entering alien territory, natural emotional landscapes that we’ve been alienated from.

Hatred, as Primal Scream said, will eat you whole, and has to be let go of. But all too often, in therapy, politics, and society in general, we confuse these twisted emotional brambles with the healthy shoots of anger. Our lack of emotional literacy leaves us prey to those who want us to “let go”, when actually they’re talking about repressing.

Merrick got quite a few boos at Glastonbury. The commenter on his blog took this as an indication that, if even such a left-leaning audience as Glastonbury Festival booed, the public at large would react badly to the anger expressed at the Lib Dem’s failure to offer a real alternative. Therefore, we should tone down our anger, and be more “amiable”, like Clegg. Better still, we could “let go” of our anger…

If you’re not angry—at least sometimes—at 99% of politicians today, you’re blind or numb, or both. And if you think the way forward is to publically make our emotions conform to the flattened landscape that is preferred by politics and corporations, where most of us are forced to live much of the time, you’re wrong. This public landscape, where spontaneous emotion is distrusted, and emotion and intelligence are forced apart, is the medium through which our catastrophic disconnection from nature and each other is expressed.

Anger isn’t a “solution”, and focused on to the exclusion of joy, sadness, compassion, and the rest of the spectrum (a reasonable working definition of “hate”), it can become as much of a distortion of humanity as its repression. But it’s precisely the amiable fuzziness, the tactical avoidance of anything uncomfortable or unseemly, of people like Clegg that has us continuing our trajectory towards ecological collapse.

The apocalypse is enabled with a whimper, not a bang.

Tickets are now on sale for the exciting-looking Equinox Festival, to be held from June 12th-14th at Conway Hall in London.

Performers include Comus, John Zorn, Aethenor, Z’ev and Arktau Eos; speakers include Ralph Metzner, Erik Davis, Stephen Grasso, David Beth, James Curcio, Philip Farber, Carl Abrahamsson and Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule; films include The Holy Mountain, Divine Horsemen and The Mindscape of Alan Moore.

Seems likely to be an essential gathering.

I recently returned from a mostly lazy week with the Art Monastery Project in Calvi dell’Umbria, Italy. I met one of its founders, the irrepressible American tenor and theatre director Christopher Fülling, at the Metageum conference last year in Malta, and was fascinated by his attempt, along with his visual artist and synchronized swimmer wife Betsy McCall and a host of other fascinating people, to create a retreat for art production and community in a former Ursuline convent in the rolling hills of Umbria.

The monastery itself, located in the charming town of Calvi, is still in the process of being readied for occupation. Meantime, the project folk have taken to running a gorgeous nearby agriturismo, Casale Santa Brigida (check out the view above).

The tumultuous storm on the night of my arrival—the apparently untypical climax to the previous week’s baking weather—afforded some astonishing panoramas of dark lightning-threaded horizons, and eventually brought us all to the realities of rural living by wiping out the electricity supply with its torrential downpour. In retrospect it also heralded the sundry events that were to thread through the day-to-day of this rural idyll: the delightful sparks of meeting new people in evenings of convivial feasting, and occasional force majeure mishaps.

Everyone seemed to roll with the punches and rise to the occasion—be it a workaday mission to get pasta or a gathering for barbecued local meats—with the kind of panache you might expect from such a bold bunch of pragmatic dreamers.

Marriage seemed to be in the air, suspended as we were between Christopher and Betsy’s spectacular “Atlantean” wedding at Burning Man and their upcoming festivities in Calvi; and two of their friends passing through got engaged on the Santa Brigida terrace before dinner one evening.

The bountiful fig tree provided a culinary bass note for our ever-tasty meals; the burgeoning olive grove around us constantly gestured towards the upcoming olive harvest. Besides the nascent art activities, such on-site manifestations kept in focus the Art Monastery’s integration of ideas of localization and sustainability into its vision. The locals, the Calvese, have welcomed them as one of their own, and they’re aiming to give to the local community the nourishment of their art and performance much as the local soil will nourish their bellies. One of Christopher and Betsy’s old friends who visited recalled his reaction, years ago when their idea for the Art Monastery first came up, of thinking them a little crazy. Of course, such a project needs a healthy dose of madness; but as we watched the global economy begin to crumble during the week I was there, these goals of community and localization stood out as eminently sane.

For the most part I relished immersing myself in a few juicy books. A couple of notable visitors certainly added to things, though.

Medieval song and classical music specialist Wolodymyr Smishkewych (aka Vlad) peformed his reconstruction of part of the Lay of Igor, an old Kievan-Rus epic, playing his swan-headed lute, as part of Calvi’s San Pancrazio festival. I missed the story—the original Slavic being translated in projections into Italian—but Vlad’s performance, dipping into engaging narrative speech and soaring into emotion-laden song, was great.

And it was fantastic to meet journalist and archaeologist Christine Finn. Known for her archaeologically-minded trip through Silicon Valley—the book Artifacts—she’s currently working on a biography of the controversial, poetically-minded archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. Christine seems to be heading towards the art departments in her academic studies, finding them more amenable to the increasingly creative approach she’s taking to excavating the past; we certainly had enough in common in our attitude to studying archaic cultures to make the brief time she was there nowhere near sufficient to exhaust our connections.

The Art Monastery’s one of the more compelling and promising projects I’ve happened across recently. Any artists or creative, interested people should certainly have a look at how to get involved.

If nothing else, if you’re thinking of taking a break in Italy, I suspect there are few more fascinating venues for sampling rural Italy and international creativity than the beautiful Casale Santa Brigida. Say ciao from me to Pipo (Italian for “goofy”, I hear) and Josie…

Dreamflesh Journal cover artist Amodali is building momentum with her visionary music. She’ll be showcasing tracks from her forthcoming release Incarnadine on the 11th & 12th of May in Leipzig in Germany as part of the WGT Festival. On the 11th she’s the headline act at The Pagan Village; the 12th sees here sharing the bill at the Kuppelhalle with Psychic TV, Voxus Imp and Barditus.

Checking in on Genesis P-Orridge’s site, I came across this recent interview with him—worth checking out as an in-depth intro if you’re not familiar with him, or a reminder of his fascinating career.

Australia’s Orryelle Defenestrate, Dreamflesh Journal contributor and world-circling harlequin and occult performer, is in the UK for a series of dates, including a production at Lyveden New Bield (near Peterborough – above). From his mailout:

14 Sep 2007, 6pm – Lyveden New Bield – near Oundle, Peterborough, Northampton Shire, PE8 5AT – about 90 mins north of London.

Two Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Productions in one day at this beautiful olde haunted mansion in the British countryside. Beginning at 6pm to culminate at dusk, Parzival: The Fool’s Journey -the classic tale of the Tarot’s protagonist – is reworked as the errant knight Parzival seeks the Holy Grail and the Spear of Destiny.

Co-devised and performed by Orryelle (Metamorphic Ritual Theatre, Australia) and Ilaktra (Travesty Theatre, Canada), with additional UK performers.

In the evening, 8 Gates -Orryelle’s solo play/shamanic journey exploring threads between different incarnations upon the Web of Wyrd as refracted through the Well of ReMemBrance. Norse Gods, fly agaric mushrooms, prehistoric atavisms, the unavoidable void and the density of matter… Orryelle has extended this production for a deeper exploration of its themes of reintegration of the spirit/flesh split.

This is the first of 3 UK Metamorphic Ritual Theatre Co. productions organized and promoted by Theatre of Ophidian UK. Their affiliation with ‘Fright Nights’ Supernatural Investigations has allowed access to venues and locations of considerable magickal history which promise to enhance the atmosphere of these ritual theatre performances.

Cost 10 pounds. For tickets/further info, contact The Theatre of Ophidian.

The other two are at The Galleries of Justice in Nottingham (21st September) and Portland Arms in Cambridge (27th September). I can’t make any, but will be at Orryelle’s more musical night, along with his art exhibition and a performance from Raagnagrok, “Europe’s heterosexual synth duo of choice”. That’s at the Horse Hospital in London on the 28th.

Orryelle was passing through Bristol and last night I showed him Darren Aronofsky’s excellent film The Fountain, which tripped him out with its synchronous resonance with the performances he’s doing here. Funnily enough, I heard his surname – “defenestrate” – used as normal English in an economics report on the World Service the day before he arrived, so evidently something’s aligning here…