A couple of different yet complementary speeches on the current upheavals in finance and commerce.
From indefatigable comedian and activist Mark Thomas, an impassioned rant against “neo-liberal capitalism” given at the Put People First G20 rally in Hyde Park, London, 28/3/09:
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Here’s a round-up of recent book reviews in the library, headed by my shock recent favourite. Following from my ‘Violence, Visions & Evolution’ talk at Metageum yesterday, I’ll be publishing something more extensive about Pinker and Lawrence Keeley soon. But, my criticisms aside, The Blank Slate is a surprisingly good read.
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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.
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Coming up fast, over the last week of March, is the next Metageum conference. The last one was a fascinating event in Malta; this time, we’re in the slightly less megalith-rich, but hopefully more humanly hectic environs of London. Specifically, at the ever-conducive venue, Treadwell’s.
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‘Palaeontologists in a vast desert. Large crested ridges of ancient red sand and rock formations… They remove the top layers, and reveal the skeleton of a giant snake beneath. No thicker than a man’s torso, but miles and miles long… stretching along the crest of the ridge… Sections of the remains are exposed intermittently’
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Hibernating. Kind of.
My body’s in a occasionally chilly room at a computer or in bed much of the time. But, thanks to recording technology and the Parliament-Funkadelic, this is where my mind mostly is:
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Sometimes things move fast.
In March I attended the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland, and was glad to discover there Dale Pendell, a Renaissance anarchist: poet, botanist, psychonaut, Buddhist, scientist, magician. I recorded a small group discussion with him there, and immediately plunged into his unique books on my return: Pharmako/Poeia, Pharmako/Dynamis, Pharmako/Gnosis and Walking With Nobby..
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A few choice new items for your perusing pleasure…
The first item of content scheduled for the cancelled volume 2 of Dreamflesh Journal has been posted, an interview with Patrick Harpur. This happily coincides with the reissue of his alchemical novel, Mercurius; or, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth. I’d not caught up with this work previously, and it was a joy to do so. Read my review…
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E.ON is a power company seeking to build a new coal-fired power station at its site in Kingsnorth, Kent.
Obviously, in the face of the urgent need for action on climate change, this is lunacy, on the part of E.ON and everyone supporting them. What’s more, I’m more convinced each day that the current economic crisis has to be taken as a cue to stop listening to the pro-growth voices in society—which are either almost silent, as we take the benefits of growth as gospel, or loud and rabid, in defence against the increasing awareness that growth enriches the few, impoverishes the many, and endangers the planet (to paraphrase Richard Douthwaite). Equating growth with better quality of life is a delusion that will go down in history as a far greater disaster than the belief that a guy with a beard in the sky controls everything.
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