Dreamflesh

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.

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Merrick just tagged me with a meme thingy, which he evolved from the “an album for every year of your life” into “five albums from the year you left school”. “Not necessarily the five ‘greatest’,” he says wisely, “but five that really do it for you.” It seems clear he means those you got into at the time, released that year, not ones you got into retrospectively, or got into that year from other times. So…

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I’m just about to set off to Italy (via a few days in Paris). Thanks to an invite extended when I met Christopher Fülling in Malta last year, I’ll be staying at the Art Monastery in Calvi dell’Umbria.

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‘Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works.’

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Reading this post about the future of publishing, I found a number of interesting, depressing or exciting perceptions flying around like sparks from the clash between it and my current reading of Peter Ackroyd’s excellent Blake biography.

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It’ll be my first time this year at the Green Man Festival in Wales (15th-17th August), but the beautiful site and interesting line-up have me excited.

I’ll be there as part of Strange Attractor’s remit to fill the cinema tent with esoteric delights on the Saturday night between 11pm and 2am. I’ll be ranging widely over the interpretation of cup-and-ring rock art; David Luke will be holding forth on some intersection between psychedelics and parapsychology; Robert Wallis will be giving us the low-down on animism and strange herbs; and Stephen Grasso will be shedding light on life as a modern Western voodoo practitioner.

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Tim Leary once quipped that acid is a substance that causes psychosis in people who don’t take it. We find broader evidence of this principle of drug psychosis in the discussion of a new UK Drug Policy Commission report, which shows “just how little evidence there is to show that the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on UK enforcement each year has made a sustainable impact.”

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Thanks to the excellent blog of my good friend, the Bristol-based artist Kirsty Hall, I’ve just become aware of an oddly British phenomenon, National Shed Week. Her post on it is a great little intro, with selections from the “best shed” competition (the winner was a shed that incorporates a fully-fitted pub bar).

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A day of seminars featuring cutting-edge thinking from pioneers in the field of magickal practice, followed by an evening of rituals demonstrating Chaos Magick in action. More info »

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My “meme” posts are almost inevitably prompted by a tag from that arch-memeticist, Jim. This one seems simple and seductive:

‘List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your [summer]. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.’

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