Alchemy and Hermeticism are about the primacy of the in-between. Reality and healing and transformation and creation and art are in the in-between, the both-and. And to the extent that we lose the ability to be in-between, we lose the world, and, for now, we have lost the ability to be in-between, and we have lost the world.

You want to keep the classical, as one root, and have respect for the beauty of that particular cultural contribution. But then, I support not freezing a culture, especially if it’s not mine, in some attempt to keep it pure.

like “El” Ron Hubbard / steal a big yacht or 2nd hand / battleship sail round the world / non-stop w/ crew of besotted / brainwashed cult-slave sailors

Recorded music realizes a dream of pure magic—but at the same time the end and even the death of music itself. A Blakean paradox or mystical dialectic: Every phenomenon has a “good” and a “bad” (in some rough sense), an Emanation and a Spectre.

When was the last time you heard anyone singing in the street? I mean, not at some “street fair” with mic and an electric backup group. Not a professional singer. Just someone walking in the street and singing aloud. For joy or melancholy, or even just mindlessly.

On the occasion of Terry Winters’ new exhibit Knotted Graphs, which comprises two new series of paintings and fourteen graphite drawings and will be on view at Matthew Marks Gallery on West 22nd street until January 24, 2009, the painter welcomed Rail publisher Phong Bui and consulting editors David Levi Strauss and Peter Lamborn Wilson on-site to talk about the new body of work.

The tablets of Enheduana’s Exaltation of Innana are lost
In the bombing of my kitchen.
History’s first published poet
Daughter of Sargon of Akkad circa
twentyeighth century highpriestess of the goddess
gone down into layers of
dust & grease. Cracked. Illegible.

Wendy Wood was the grande dame of Scottish Nationalism no demonstration was complete without her green cloak. Her folkloric enthusiasm kept the cause alive during the gloomy 1950s. Here she is dancing at a Patriots Ball, courtesy of The Scottish Herald. (The Road to Home Rule, p. 68)

Recently waves of neo-conservative historical revisionism have been washing over us in New York, exalting as true patriots such Founding-Father figures as Alexander Hamilton and his reactionary clique of bankers and would-be aristocrats.

Not for the first time in New York City’s history, a buzz about Secession has begun to be heard—or perhaps a serpentine hiss, depending on your point of view. Several local papers (including NY Press, the Nation, and the Rail), have recently run articles boosting secession and independence for NYC.

Section 2.


"The matter of song is warm air, even breathing, and in a measure living, made up of

articulated limbs, like an animal, not only bearing movement and emotion, but even

signification, like a mind, so that it can be said to be, as it were, a kind of aerial and

rational animal."

—Ficino, Op. Omn. (563)