The Liminalist # 101: When Two Rams Meet (with French Radio Constellation)

Epic return conversation with French Radio Constellation guy, comparing Aries, pioneers and leaders, goats & sheep, learning the rules, the use of clichés, technique & improvisation, the Internet & autonomy, releasing a CD, publishing The Blood Poets, David Bowie’s post-Scary Monsters period, loving Elvis, Hunky Dory & occultism, Crowley & Nietzsche, Crowley’s malevolence, liberation through transgression, the art & the artist, Morrissey-the-asshole’s positive influence, rock star energy siphons, a dodgy guru, psychedelics, a schlep on his way to death, facing the radiator, the big 5-0, enlightened assholes, a movement of being, the temptation of enlightenment, John de Ruiter & Dave Oshana, contrasting spiritual teachers, the teachers we deserve, Andrew Cohen & Ken Wilbur, spiritual power vs. freedom, everyone’s an asshole, what is enlightenment?, ignoring psychic experiences, the lost years, The Odyssey, circling narratives, becoming a father, the enlightenment contract, idealization & demonization, liking artists, Morrissey again, meeting David Byrne & Alan Moore, projecting onto artists, external orientation, the risk of imitation, Joy Division, Ian Curtis’ dancing, the price of adaptation, David Foster Wallace’s suicide, celebrity & despair, art and strife management, what we’re here for, the farts of a dying man, becoming oneself/being an artist, disinheriting a fortune, a version of suicide, finally at 50.

Songs:  “The Kommema and his Religion” by SunWalker; “The Darkest Regions,” by Sebastian Duclos; “How It Got This Way,” by Hazelwood Motel; “A Trio of,”  “I Specialize,” “When I’m in Charge,” “Endz Are Nigh,” “Hello the Fuck Out There,” by FrenchRadioConstellation.

22 thoughts on “The Liminalist # 101: When Two Rams Meet (with French Radio Constellation)”

  1. still listening, however i had to post at 15:59 you said one of the funniest thing i have heard in a long time, still have tears from hearing that expression. An image or concept that was so absurdly strange but got your point across.

    Reply
    • …That should read “scampers over ” history………!..it’s late 🙂 ….Robyn is describing his new album as an ecstatic work of negativity…………..he’s a queer fish……..always singing Bowies ” Quicksand”…then their is his track …”The Abyss”…………..gotta love him though…

      SBH

      Reply
      • oh yeah……..and he had a cameo in Demmes The Manchurian candidate as L Tokar …the mind control handler…….

        mmmmmm 🙂

        Reply
  2. “He hung himself for Fucks sake, enlightened people don’t hang themselves!”

    Lively conversation, i think that was the winning comment.

    Reply
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8v_Yt-OSmE

    A very brief selection from “The Enlightenment Trap”, part of the Brainwave series of lectures at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.

    @ 3:45

    Scott Carney: The Buddha was teaching his students a way of not being attached to their own bodies and to contemplate their own impermanence in the world. He suggested to students, why don’t you sit in the charnel grounds, which are these open cemeteries, and you sit and watch these people decay. And by doing that you will understand how your own life is the same as this and then you can transcend to something greater. And the Buddha said, sit in the charnel grounds, my entire flock, hundreds of students, and I see you later. I am going up the mountains to meditate for a while. So the Buddha does that, the students sit in the charnel ground and then the texts say they were overcome with despair. And they all start killing themselves. First it is one or two. Then dozens are doing. And the once who are unwilling to kill themselves hire this monk called Migalandika to slit their throats for them. Then he goes free-lance and kills everyone he can. The Buddha comes back and he says, you guys made a big mistake. This is not what I wanted. The entire flock is dead, excepted of one or two. They execute Migalandika and the Buddha says, all right, instead of corpse meditation, you guys are going to focus on the rising and falling of your breathing.

    *

    Years of ‘corpse meditation’ now serving monks well

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2005/jan/3/20050103-123230-5077r/

    Reply
  4. How Rothko become the mythic superman of mystical abstraction

    http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/11/how-rothko-become-the-mythic-superman-of-mystical-abstraction/

    Rothko’s final work was painted just before his suicide, aged 66, its colour noted as a signal of his intentions — his body was found shortly after in a pool of blood. He’d cut his wrists in his New York studio.

    http://cdn.spectator.co.uk/content/uploads/2014/11/17b_-_mark_rothko_untitled_1970_acryllic_on_canvas.jpg

    DIONYSUS EMBODIED –– NIETZSCHE AND
    THE WORK AND SUICIDE OF MARK ROTHKO

    http://storage.cloversites.com/orlandabrugnola/documents/ROTHKO%20.pdf

    What do you think, you Higher Men? Am I a prophet?
    A dreamer? A drunkard? An interpreter of dreams?
    A midnight bell? A drop of dew? An odour and scent
    of eternity? Do you not hear it? Do you not smell it?
    My world has just become perfect, midnight is also
    noonday, pain is also a joy, a curse is also a blessing,
    the night is also a sun –– be gone, or you will learn:
    a wise man is also a fool.

    Through Zarathustra Nietzsche had proclaimed:

    Die at the right time!….Everyone treats death as an important matter:
    but as yet, death is not a festival….
    The man consummating his life dies his death triumphantly….
    I commend to you my sort of death, voluntary death that
    comes to me because I wish it.

    Nietzsche had implied that one of the functions of great art was to prepare the artist for a
    heroic act.

    For Rothko, the tragic understanding of life had long informed his art.

    Like Zarathustra’s midnight, Rothko’s
    midnight was the time for the great NO! which was his lion’s roar, his faithfulness
    to the earth (which is blood in its essence), and his liberation into the awakening
    that is the transformation into art itself and the profoundest of affirmations.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZZ0DYIkaP8

    Comment 1 :

    an effective sonic reponce to Rothko’s nihilist paintings; my favorite of which consists of a black canvas with a yellow line across it. I’m not surprised Rothko committed suicide. …

    Comment 2:

    Rothko’s paintings were not nihilistic, not consumed with some search for meaninglessness: They exist in the space between the apollonian/dinoysian dichotomy, they exist in a middle-ground between eternal monument and ephemeral experience — …

    Reply
    • They continued to debate the price until Rothko declared, “Look, it’s my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it’s your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is $1,350.”

      https://books.google.de/books?id=JlefPdEMfRgC&pg=PA418

      Orange, Red, Yellow is a 1961 Color Field painting by Mark Rothko. It sold at Christie’s for $86.9 million on May 8, 2012. The sale price represents a record nominal price for Post-War / contemporary art at public auction and for Rothko works in general.

      Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow “…can convincingly be argued to be the most powerful of all his pictures”.

      This surpassed the 2007 record price for a Rothko work of $72.8 million.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange,_Red,_Yellow

      Reply
    • Comment 3:

      In an Italian interview, Bunita Marcus accuses her mentor Morton Feldman of sexually molesting her and other women, wrecking her marriage and stealing her ideas.

      Reply
  5. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.”

    ― John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873),

    “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill

    Socrates (469/470-399 BCE) was a Greek philosopher and is considered the father of western philosophy.

    http://www.ancient.eu/socrates/

    Did Socrates Commit Suicide?

    It is rarely, if at all, thought that Socrates committed suicide; but such was the case, or so I want to suggest.

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/3749734

    Reply
    • you are missing the link on this page below the podcast description. that lets you contact FR; I don’t know if he sells his CDs online or not.

      Reply
  6. Vincent van Gogh (in a letter to his brother Theo, 10 July, 1890):

    I believe that certainly it’s better to bring up children than to expend all one’s nervous energy in making paintings, but what can you do, I myself am now, at least I feel I am, too old to retrace my steps or to desire something else. This desire has left me, although the moral pain of it remains.

    (From Abe, thanks Abe.)

    Reply
  7. — a schlep on his way to death —

    @ 45:05

    FRC: Time is running. …

    Jasun: … “Holy shit, I am gonna die soon and I am still not enlightened”, really it’s what it comes down to. So in a big sense I do – like I am running out of time to be completely at peace in my body. …

    FRC: Just remember, enlightened people are assholes as well.

    Jasun. No, no, no, no, they are not. They are not. They are not.

    FRC: They are. It’s all intepretation. It’s all spin.

    *

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pgg-n8yMxY

    @ 6:16

    Ben Smythe: Liberation! Liberation from the belief that there is something other than the obviousness of you aging slowly towards extinction. THAT’S ALL LIBERATION IS, is from the belief that there is something other than you obviously aging towards extinction. Doesn’t help the life events at all. Doesn’t save a single person. Because no one knows how to swim. And the gurus, they look like they do, they are just standing on you. That’s all. … If you can swing it, become a guru, climbing on top of people who are drowning to save yourself.

    Reply
  8. Perhaps a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of liminal concepts such as the weird and the eerie.

    https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Eerie-Mark-Fisher/dp/1910924385

    “by some distance the best writer in Britain”

    http://thequietus.com/articles/21572-mark-fisher-rip-obituary-interview

    British music writer Mark Fisher dies aged 48

    http://www.thebookseller.com/news/capitalist-realism-author-mark-fishers-dies-aged-48-470541

    Last week [= January 13] the writer Mark Fisher took his own life. His on/off struggle with depression was something he wrote about with courageous candour in articles and in his landmark book Capitalist Realism: is There No Alternative? Fisher argued that the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/18/mark-fisher-k-punk-blogs-did-48-politics

    Memorial fund to support Mark Fisher’s family
    For: Mark Fisher’s wife and son

    https://www.youcaring.com/markfisherswifeandson-737423

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7l9L7heiAw

    Mark Fisher: What you were saying at the end about the rich that they are declaring independence from humanity reminded me of a quote by William Gibson, “The rich are not human anymore.” I think that is part of the shock of the death of Steve Jobs, right? We all believe in a sense the rich are not human, they will be able to beat death. So when even a super rich dies, there is no hope for any of us.

    Reply
  9. Jasun, I agree with you about Life vs Art to a degree, but you set up a false dichotomy when you say ‘Would you rather have the art or a rich happy life?’ Firstly they’re not mutually exclusive and secondly abandoning one doesn’t guarantee the other. It’s quite possible that the alternative to a tormented life that produces great art is simply a tormented life that produces nothing. The first is infinitely preferable as far as I’m concerned. Certainly I wouldn’t let suicide or depression invalidate my appreciation of anyone’s art – I know from experience that the art of the tormented can enrich and console others. (On the other hand I do pass judgement based on my own sense of human decency. Van Morrison is a case in point. I used to love his music but when I discovered that he was ‘pathologically rude’ and prone to treating people badly I started to hear it in his voice. I haven’t entirely abandoned his music but find it much harder to listen to now.)

    On another note – get off the astrology bandwagon, guys. It makes you sound adolescent. It was a great liberation for me when I realised it was just another pseudo-religion based on superstition and delusion. As one who prides himself on exposing mind control systems, I’m sure you’ll make this leap at some point.

    Reply

Leave a Comment