Undergrowth #1 > SEED

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// undergrowth one // contents /

1 / cover + contents / paul kalemba 6 / editorial / 8 / the world of tommorrow // susan butcher and carol wood. c 16 /coracle oreading n pt 1. /t tim parish e n t s 18 / surďŹ ng the novelty wave / rak razam 24 / oracle pt. 2 / 26 / alternative visions / john kelly 36 / oracle reading pt. 3 / ecocities 38 / i can see spirits / by dan(iel) mackinlay Cyberspace VR bubble t ech is all t he rage

56 / oracle pt. 4 / the synapse club 58 / fraud / rak razam 64 / oracle reading / the war on terra 68 / language as a virus / jon carmichael 74 / oracle / the brainwash 76 / the wizard of oz / rak razam interviews richard neville 92 / twilight 2012 / tim parish 98 / art credits 100/ i can feel it amongst the first class cit izenry ~ Escape

The Future is Now. Science Fiction is our reality, Prophecy foretold and fulfilled.

As planetary monoculture is enforced from above, thousands of counter-cultures are also sprouting from below, in organic networks that sustain and build a sense of community and unity in diversity.

Powered by new technologies and an archaic revival of thought, a balance is being struck between the past and the future that may be our best hope for survival. Because in the end the quest for material goods cannot satisfy the spirit, nor can economic policies unite a globalised world through centralised hierarchies of terror and control.

What the West has lost is perspective -and a cultural Dreaming broad enough to reintegrate the body, mind and soul. While mainstream consumer culture is busy stuffing itself literally to death, the walls are coming tumbling down between the real and the artificial, the natural and cybernetic, technology and identity.

The ideas of science fiction are quickly becoming real. Even without the kitsch 60’s futurama robots and space colonies, we can all recognise it's influence as our culture's nu-mythology. But qualify that knowledge. The real world is a multiplicity, more complex than any space opera or fantasy could prepare us for. While western schoolchildren carry mobile phones and Japanese families own robot dogs, global inequalities still remain and many do not even have access to electricity. While ecological destruction has long been prophesised, the juggernaut of History continues to gladly speed down the road to seemingly inevitable planetary extinction. These are scientific facts, but they are also social realities. Somewhere in between we all exist as creative individuals, engaging the world around us with art and imagination, because these are truly our most powerful weapons.

So for all those kids dancing on beaches to tribal rhythms, bored, sub-urban consumers hanging out for a personal revolution, and all those surfing in the waves of change here at the supposed tail end of History – this is for you.

The seed is planted. {we live not underground, but in the undergrowth}

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by Rak Razam

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“Time runs backwards, too, y’know. Like when Cornelius and Zira have the baby chimpanzee “Time runs backwards, too, y’know. Like who grows up to lead the Battle when Cornelius and Zira have the baby for the Planet of the Apes, which chimpanzee who grows up to lead the Battle leads to the nuclear war that wipes for the Planet of the Apes, which leads to the out all mankind except the astronuclear war that wipes out all mankind except nauts who crashland millennia the astronauts who crashland millennia later, later, which leads Taylor (Charlton which leads Taylor (Charlton Heston) to secretly Heston) to secretly impregnate impregnate Zira while in her laboratory, which Zira while in her laboratory, which unites the germ-plasm of the two species and unites the germ-plasm of the two explains how a talking ape can introduce that species and explains how a talking trait into the baseline ape gene pool in the late ape can introduce that trait into 20th century.the Gotbaseline it?” ape gene pool in the late 20th century. Got it?”

“Sunny, you are like, SO out there, dude!”

“Sunny, you are like, SO out there, dude!” t h e

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“I just read ‘em like I see, em, grom.

Information patterns are like waves building, yeh.”

“You’ve just got to empty your mind and relax, take in everything the sea is telling you - your shift in weight as the wave breaks, the direction of the wind, the building swell. Soak it all up and let go, dude, lose yourself in the moment, whether it’s with data or the surf. Now move back just a little on the board, that’s it. Push up and let the water pass underneath you.”

The water is cool and blue as perfect 8 to 12 foot right and left barrel waves spread out 150 yards in each direction, generated by a recursive algorithm iteration program back at shore. Two hundred feet above us is a dense network of solar panel collectors woven into the girdered geodesic roof that spit out their bright liquid fluroescence through UV filters like the illumination of a thousand 7-Eleven stores all wired together. They guarantee a perfect tan (optimum vitamin D intake) for the workers spending their downtime here at Wild Blue Yokohama. Only the Japanese could build a monster indoor beach arena with the most perfect automated surf right in the heart of Neo-Tokyo. Everything, in fact, is perfect in Wild Blue Yokohama, from the waves to the tans to the music, ‘cause the whole place is owned by one of those big new corporate Zaibatsus who’ve planned everything for maximum efficiency and profit, even Sunny Yoshimoto.

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The waves in the swell are getting bigger and bigger as Sunny turns his deeply tanned face towards the it’s swell callingare to getting him. Hisbigger streakand of bleached The surf, waveslike in the bigger blondturns hair his anddeeply cheekytanned smile have him the as as Sunny face won towards fanscalling as histo offhim. the His waves antics have upset surf,many like it’s streak of bleached hishair sponsors.

As well as being the current Pipeline blond and cheeky smile have won him as many surf theantics incomprable Mr Yoshimoto fans Masters as his off thedoya waves have upset his spona drum’n’bass’n’surf and the Zaibatsu sors.isAsalso well as being the currentDJ, Pipeline Masters for him play their neuroskool surf has doyabeen the pushing incomprable Mr to Yoshimoto is also a musak, laced with subliminals that drum’n’bass’n’surf DJ, fastbreeding and the Zaibatsu has been reinforce corporate loyalty.

Sunny don’t like that, pushing for him to play their neuroskool musak, nowith sir. For him, music is like surfing: they’re both laced fastbreeding subliminals that reinforce about loyalty. freedom. corporate Sunny don’t like that, no sir. For him, music is like surfing: they’re both about freedom.A flash of whitewater and Sunny’s off, cutting inside a tube and everything’s timeless and immediate, likeofa whitewater frosted glassand snapshot thecutting wave’sinside interior.

A flash Sunny’sofoff, Sunny through this huge barrel full of a tube andchatters everything’s timeless and immediate, then he’s there atofthe of the wave, like spit a frosted glassup snapshot thenose wave’s interior. weaving through anthis 8 foot wall of liquid blue.

Sunny chatters through huge barrel full of spit He in there over the unbroken racingweavhis shadow thenglides he’s up at the nose ofwater, the wave, as it shimmers across surface then onto ing through an 8 foot wall the of liquid blue.

Hesteps glides shore, every grainracing of beach is imported in over the where unbroken water, his shadow as it from the sinking coastline of Mega-California. shimmers across the surface then steps onto shore, Hundreds of Japanese and their where every grain of beachworkers is imported from families the lie on beach towels and in long rows of inflatable sinking coastline of Mega-California.

Hundreds of banana lounges, mai-taislie with hand Japanese workers andsipping their families on one beach andand fingering shaped i-mode chips deep towels in longtiny rowscone of inflatable banana loungin theirmai-tais ears with theone other.

Everyone’s buzzing, es, sipping with hand and fingering tiny high off theincorporate conealtered, shaped getting i-mode chips deep their earsmusak. with It literally feels GOOD to lovealtered, the company. the other.

Everyone’s buzzing, getting high off the corporate musak. It literally feels GOOD to love the company.

I close my eyes and tune in on my own i-mode implant. Stereoscopic menus hang before me in the darkness, on in the of my eyelids: world I close my eyespainted and tune onback my own i-mode weather and stockmenus information, the latest implant.

Stereoscopic hang before me inCNN the datafeeds, email attatchments the ubiquitous darkness, painted on the back of myand eyelids: world pixelated curseinformation, of ambient advertisements. weather and stock the latest CNN I screen out all email the crap and tune inand on the datafeeds, attatchments the encrypted ubiquitous bandwidth broadcasting on. He’sI screen already pixelated curse Sunny’s of ambient advertisements. back the water andinpaddling out to thebandswells out all theincrap and tune on the encrypted again, yabbering about on. his crazy theoriesback as he width Sunny’s broadcasting He’s already goes.

Andand when Sunny out Yoshimoto talks, again, well, media in the water paddling to the swells listen.about his crazy theories as he goes. And yabbering when Sunny Yoshimoto talks, well, media listen.

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“ It all comes from the sand, yeh, the music, the beach gives us the silicon which makes the computer chip, which makes the music... it’s all connecting together, linking up. And if you really wanna know about waves, dig, you’ve gotta have heard of the Novelty Wave... ” Sunny says, flashing a freckled smile as he pulls alongside me.

“Terence McKenna, that old trypster dude last century, well he figured out that things are getting more complex.

Exponentially complex. Like, nature abhors a vacuum and all that - well old mother nature also hordes up what he called Novelty, the process through which new things come into being. There are times of habit, then times when new things seem to accumulate. And as they link up, everything converges and connects and shifts to a new thing entirely.

Everybody knows there’s a change coming, bro. The only ones who don’t say it are the dudes who wanna keep things the same - the banks, the governments, the military. Things are all coming together in a monster swell of innovations and breakthroughs, of science and technology and plain old human understanding. It’s a timewave as big as all history, dig, and if you’re not ready to surf it then you’ll be swimming with the fishes.”

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Then he’s off, cutting across the lip of a twenty foot swell and taking to the air in a weightless drop as he sails into the water pit, eyeballing the faux ocean floor and blaring a heavy drum’n’bass surfscape, broadcasting it over all the i-mode channels. And down by the Blue Lagoon, surrounded by replanted palm trees, middle management executives all look up from their corporate tekno with a wild eyed shock, like someone’s startled them out of a dream. As he coasts into shore on a perfect wave, dozens of Japanese Gidgets peel themselves from their inflatable banana lounges and their neuroskool sculpted states of mind and hit on him for an autograph. He is Sunny Yoshimoto, DJ, surf bum, philosopher-bohemian. He rides the waves, eats, sleeps and makes music, all with not a care in the world.

And from out here in this artificial sea, looking back to shore, everyone looks like naked apes clothed only in technology, bathing in this indoor beach.

And then a perfect wave comes, and I ride it.

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U N A S A .

by John Kelly of the Alternative Technology Association

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Another World Is Happening So anyway, apparently the global environmental scenario isn’t so good.

Apparently we’ve done some damage to the planet. Apparently this could have repercussions for all life on earth. Even us humans. Apparently.

I know this because the Pentagon knows this. According to a report released in 2003 the reality of climate change may be in fact far more catastrophic than many people have been prepared to speculate.

The scenario goes like this: instead of global warming producing gradually change to weather patterns over centuries, the ocean-atmospheric climate regulation system can lurch from one state to another over a matter of a few short years until it reaches a crisis point and crashes. Environmental chaos.

Geopolitical instability. A lot less reality TV. Check out Fortune Magazine for an article on the subject. (http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114 ,582584,00.html).

While no-one can predict when things might go pear-shaped, the term being bandied about is “not-too-distant-future”. That sounds a little too like “in your lifetime” to my tastes. What’s interesting is that the Pentagon’s strategic planners are taking the possibility seriously. While al-Qaeda is this month’s bogeynon-gender-specific-nightmare-inducement personae, perhaps Ma Nature could be next to take the heat. Although some might say she’s already been getting a bit too much lately.

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Of course, the Pentagon aren’t the first to talk about imminent climatic collapse. The idea that global warming could slow the flow of warm tropical waters through the north Atlantic triggering a northern hemisphere ice age is not a new one.

However, The Pentagon acknowledging the issue raises the possibility of bringing more pressure to bear on US policy makers than most climate scientists and environmental campaigners could normally expect. Surprisingly, the world’s most powerful military machine doesn’t offer any answers or solutions in their model.

Perhaps that would raise too many really difficult questions.

So anyway, the latest weather forecast goes like this; things are cold in Europe, Asia and North America. Meanwhile, down south things are a bit dryer as el Nino patterns swing even more abruptly. In Australia that translates into more droughts, more flooding rains and probably a lot more sunburn. In South America, South Asia and Africa it translates into political chaos.

It’s an issue we will hear more about. The mass-media approach to environmental issues has been a particular “gosh darn, ain’t it bad, that global warming/ oil spill/ nuclear meltdown” kinda one. But bless the stars, someone will look after it. The government will save me. Or Jesus. Or the guy from Celebrity Thrill Kill. Or Coca-Cola espresso bars. Or maybe feng-shui.

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The science fiction apocalypso kind of story fits the model nicely. It has a certain inevitability to it that abrogates our responsibility and lets us lament and grieve for the future before it has even come… and gone. All nice little cues to preserve our thinking and maintain the status quo. Solutions aren’t even on the agenda.

To look at the media sometimes you might be mistaken to think that no one has been researching alternatives in the past fifty years since we started thinking there was a problem, such is our cultural avoidance of these issues.

Problems, problems, problems. All our world beset with problems. We live in a world where the dynamics of socio-political discourse demand certain expectations. There are certain ways of doing things, certain questions to ask, particular answers to give. Certain questions not to ask…

The reality here is that global warming and climate change are just symptoms of wider environmental and societal problems. Problems like overconsumption and corporate power. Perhaps our ideas of ownership and resource management are outmoded for the kind of shift in thinking that needs to happen in order to avert a very real, very un-Hollywood crisis. No hero’s going to step in and save the day at the end of this drama - and the villains don’t all have black hats. If things are going to change then it is people at the ground level who will do it.

And how? Quite simply actually. The solutions to the environmental problems we’re talking about are actually well researched and certainly able to be implemented – I’ll get on to them soon. The difficulty comes in convincing the public, their elected governments and the corporations who rule that this is so.

That’s when it gets complicated. But who said saving the planet would be an easy task, right?

The State of Play There are three main areas of current industrialised resource use that would have a massive impact on the global environment if made more sustainable.

Energy production, industrialised agriculture and transportation are the most resource intensive and environmentally destructive processes we’ve got going at the moment. Yet they are also areas where we can make the most significant changes to our standard ways of doing things. And the means of doing so are really quite simple.

In any design system the more complex the elements within it the greater the energy needed to sustain it and the greater the risk of things going wrong. By engaging with our social and environmental world in a manner that promotes

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this simplicity we can hope to repair some of the negative aspects of the current consumption driven paradigms dominant in our world. The synthesis of ideas we are seeing come into being in this time offer us a unique opportunity to actively shape the world of the “future”, today. These ideas which we can term loosely as “sustainability” are proactive rather than merely responsive.

And it is this perhaps which defines them as methods of change.

Current modes of energy production are fundamentally unsustainable. We take coal, oil and gas out of the ground and burn it to produce electricity and energy. Wow. Very technorama. It’s essentially the same thing we’ve been doing for thousands of years with just a bit more of an industrialised process behind it. It contributes to greenhouse gasses and other wholesale pollution issues. In Australia, one third of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by electricity generation and 97 percent of these emissions are produced by 24 coal-fired power stations, producing 170 million tonnes of the greenhouse gas every year.

Yet a recent study found that the public is largely unaware of the role of coal fired power in contributing to global warming or Australia’s dependence upon it for generating power. Guess they were busy watching Big Brother during that report… Only 33 percent of people surveyed knew coal was Australia’s main energy source. Most believed this to be hydro-electric, a renewable energy source. Thankfully the uptake of renewable energy resources is becoming more common but remains a vast distance behind what is needed to begin to alleviate the issues discussed here.

There are reasons for this; currently power production lies in the hands of a few globalised industrial companies who have an interest in protecting their market asset, ie, you, the energy consumer. Many renewable energy sources and technological systems allow people to attain some kind of autonomy in their power production and use, which fundamentally challenges traditional notions of free-market economics. However, many large energy companies are investing heavily in renewable technologies as reserves of oil and coal dwindle, because they have seen the writing on the wall. So, enough about problems. We’re talking solutions here.

Alternative Power Source Examples Solar photovoltaic panels are not a new idea, but they can be used to power most modest homes. A community owned wind tower can produce energy for a variety of needs. Community based farming techniques can encourage a sense of personal responsibility and autonomy. The integrated world is fast approaching. The technology to achieve this is already in our hands.

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Case Study 1 Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market now hosts Australia’s largest city solar power project. One third of the market’s north facing roof area is covered with about 1300 photovoltaic panels. The 190 kW system should produce up to 250 MW of electricity per year (enough to power 50 homes). It is expected to reduce the Vic Market’s energy use by up to 40 per cent. The project could eventually extend to the entire 10,000 square metres of roof at the market making it the biggest PV site of its kind in the world.

Photovoltaics are a fantastic source of localised power production. However, they do require advanced industrial practises to be produced which have their own energy and pollution cost.

Wind is another potentially massive source of renewable energy in Australia.

Construction has begun on the country’s largest wind farm at Portland on the Victorian south coast. The facility will contain 120 generators and will produce 180 MW; sufficient to power 100 000 homes, equivalent to a city the size of nearby Geelong.

Tidal power production is touted by proponents as a huge potential energy source. Again this is a means of energy production which interacts with a natural system to generate power. There are large scale investments in tidal taking place all round the world with a recent project in Britain one day estimated to produce around 8.6 GW of electricity, which is almost a quarter of Australia’s current energy needs.

Creative thinking is the key aspect of sustainability. Some power initiatives take imagination to a different level. The world’s tallest structure is planned to be built in the Australian outback near Wentworth on the Murray River.

EnviroMission’s Solar Mission Project would see a 1km high tower used to harness solar energy to create electricity.

The project involves a 3850 hectare solar collector of a clear material like glass or plastic with the outback sun heating the air under the canopy to around 35°C.

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Thermal dynamics means the heated air will blow up through the kilometre high tower in the centre of the system, turning large turbines, and generating electricity. The project is expected to generate 200mw when it goes online in 2005.

The potential downsides to building a kilometre high tower is that it takes a lot of concrete which has environmental and energy costs of its own. It also puts power production out of the reach of the average person and safely in the hands of the same people who currently control energy production.

Hydrogen power is seen by some advocates as having the potential to negate our reliance on both coal and oil. The concept of hydrogen fuel cells has been around since the 19th Century. The physics is pretty simple; when hydrogen and oxygen combine in a controlled manner this produces electricity, with perfectly clean water the only byproduct. A fuel cell controls this process to release energy over a long time-span. Like other solutions, there are some serious issues with hydrogen, though.

Critics argue that hydrogen production requires massive industrialised processes which are polluting and energy intensive in the first place.

Some say it is supportive of the nuclear fuel cycle because nuclear power is being touted as a potential “sustainable” energy source due to its lack of greenhouse gas production.

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Cars and Fuel Hydrogen fuel cells are being widely hailed as a power source for the car industry. Australia has around 10 million cars on the road. In the US the number of vehicles on the road is increasing at twice the rate of population growth.

However, existing alternative fuels offer a quick, ready and cheap alternative to the oil economy.

Biodiesel, produced from vegetable oil, offers a safe alternative to petroleum diesel fuel and comes at a fraction of the cost. When Dr Rudolf Diesel demonstrated his engine at the Paris Expo in 1900 it ran on 100% peanut oil. All diesel engines today can run on straight vegetable with a few simple alterations.

Biodiesel requires no engine modification (except for seals if some older vehicles) and actually runs cleaner and more efficiently than petroleum based products. When burned, petrodiesel produces harmful heavy particulates, carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons, none of which occur with biodiesel.

Biodiesel is made by thinning vegetable oil, either freshly squeezed from locally grown plants or from waste frying oil. The process is called ‘transesterification’, and is simpler than the word itself. It’s a bit like making soap and can be conducted in your backyard or through simple industrial plants. Basically you heat and clean the vegetable oil in the presence of a catalyst such as sodium hydroxide to initiate a chemical reaction which removes the heavy glucides and fats from the mixture. This allows the fuel to move through the vehicle’s fuel lines and engine without clogging up. Biodiesel is also a natural cleaning agent and lubricant and runs cleaner in an engine than the petro variety.

Commercial biodiesel is a common fixture in Europe, with hundreds retail outlets in Germany alone. As an alternative fuel it has the advantage of being cheap to make and easy to produce. In Australia hundreds of enthusiasts make it and run their vehicles on it.

Assuming this was adopted as a widespread alternative source of fuel, sourcing the crops for biodiesel would lead us to the question of modern agricultural practices. Big agri-businesses control food production to a frightening degree, even determining how some countries can use precious water resources and claiming ownership of entire genii of plants. Biotechnology and genetic manipulation are offered as the only answers to questions of environmental degradation and increased food-yield needs. Yet there are other ways of approaching food production that are far more holistic in their approach and practicality such as organic farming, biodynamics and permaculture.

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To focus on Permaculture, the idea of permanent agriculture (as opposed to the damaging and essentially short term land practices currently in general use), offers a truly sustainable system theory that also ensures the development of a wider philosophy of living in some kind of harmony with the natural world. It began as an organic response to agricultural resource use issues and has grown into a worldwide movement which adapts its ideas and concepts to an enormous variety of individual issues. The basic tenets say that nature has a fundamental design flow that, when replicated at human level can lead to the most effective, efficient and least harmful ways of doing things. Permaculture looks to implement natural design principles in all human systems, in this way it has become a design science more than a purely agricultural discipline.

The theories associated with Permaculture have influenced design theory and perceptions of the possible in a range of reality models. It promotes integration and synthesis as powerful answers to some of the most difficult socio-cultural, ecological and environmental problems our species faces, and it does so by empowering our autonomous creativity.

This is perhaps the most powerful element to what sustainability is all about.

Moving away from traditional structuralist hierarchies allows the development of powerful responses to our world and a direct fundamental engagement with it. Personal autonomy in our lives is something we all crave and it is achievable.

The means are already at hand, all we need is the will to use them, the desire to attain that freedom.

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It won’t be delivered to us by the planners at the Pentagon, nor researchers in the oil extraction industry who don’t necessarily want to talk about the means of averting environmental crisis which involves the relinquishing of the very power structures that keep them at the top of the freemarket food chain. But fear can only take you so far. Eventually you have to hope and believe in that hope if you sincerely wish to change the world.

The future is here. We all know the world of the next century will be a different place to the one we now occupy, but perhaps it’s not simply technological advancements that will create that change. It will also require a great deal of societal evolution, a kind of post-technological progress, which doesn’t discard the importance of technology, but also doesn’t rely upon it as the only solution.

A revolution is happening. It is a revolution of ideas, of thought and a progressive engagement with our world and its multitude of social, economic and environmental systems.

Given the state of things, it’s one that has to happen.

There’s not really any alternative…

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a fairytale by Dan(iel) MacKinlay

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I went to a conference in the bush, some months ago.

We had some big ideas about living the new world, the lot of us.

We were all dressed up and ready to reject convention for a little experimental moment or two. We set up tents and generators and sound systems around a little dam in the hills where the trees stood greying in dried mud, near a big pink hacienda that the property ownes lived in, and we ate lumpy porridge and hash cookies around flaming steel drums with our temporary neighbours in the tent city. There was a bondage marquee and everything.

There were some big parties there too. I remember one night in the courtyard of the hacienda seeing the kids from the next kombi dressed up in silver and black bodysuits and masks, twirling flames on the dance floor with a cheering audience of five hundred people. They made a better spectacle than they did porridge. There were big magenta lights in rotating concentric spirals on the audience, and speaker stacks tall enough to pop passing cattle in a consummate bass kick. There were flaming kerosene ropes of woven kevlar, and moth-people on stilts. There were paramedics in green overalls, including an undercover cop.

All in all, a fine show, especially when you’re tripping off your hairless nipples.

s u i t

t h e

p o w e r

s t r u c t u r e s

e l i t e

~

A l i e n s

As I stood there, agape, a small man in parachute pants and a baseball cap shouted in my ear, “Hey mate, are ya on anything?”

My drug-paranoid cop-detectors were tingling. The man was so obviously undercover that he may as well have had a flashing blue light on his head and a nightstick in his jocks.

“Ah, no, my friend,” I squeaked in a gap between flanged snare hits, “I’m here for the music,” “Shit, that’s no good,” he said, “Put ya finger in ‘ere,” playing with his front pocket.

That was a tense moment. But he fished out a little baggie of cocaine before I could make any disastrous social errors.

“Go on,” he said, “It doesn’ cost me anything,” and held his stash out to me.

He swigged champagne from a bottle while I stuffed my nose. There was a conversational pause for me to choke on my confused sinuses in. Damn. I don’t do cocaine very often. His voice rose over my splutters and the sound system: “‘I just come back, from the indig’nous welcome to the land. Didja see the Bundgalung welcome dance?” *cough* I said.

“They’re the tradish’nal land owners round here. Gotta give ‘em respect for lettin’ us have tha party, eh?. Shit, they’re a tough crew, though. Had a bitta drink with ‘em before. Whew.”

The fire twirling was winding up, and the sound system getting louder.

“Hey, you should drop by and see ‘em, say thanks. They’re the mob playin’ cricket all day by the big marquee.”

I realised I had nothing to say to this man and his shiny teeth.

“Bundgalung? Right. I see my friends over there looking like they need me...”

h a v e

l a n d e d ;

c o l o n i s i n g

t h e

m u l t i c u l t u r e

I turned back to the crowd, who were officially commencing the shaking of their booties to the phat techno soundz.

Yeah.I was going to show them up. So I did.

I pulled moves so awesome that other innocent partiers thew me envious looks. They were daring me to go further, challenging my style. I wasn’t rising to the bait, I was unstoppable, I was a techno Travolta. Limbs icily controlled, motions clinically precise, motions simple and transcendently passionate, an essay in the art of modern dance.

Then the cocaine wore off.

The courtyard was filled with an overdressed gumbo of twitching bodies and purple bleeps and bass. Someone said “I can feel the moon!” It was a woman dressed in faux wolf-skin. A hand squeezed my elbow. It belonged to a friend from Canberra, young Lavender, a lone non-stranger in the middle of the plastic madness. She smiled and mouthed friendly incomprehensible things to me. I pointed up my nose. She motioned to her bottom. And the evening flowed like a spring tide in reef spawning season while I stood there with my arms dangling. There was a movie projected on the wall of a woman and her coven playing progressive rock and singing incantations at the camera. They were painted silver, apart from their eyes, which were as black as new moons.

And the people flowed on through the projections, flowed on, and got dustier and sparser, and more crowded, and flowed on, and the record scratched accidentally and everyone froze in horror, and it started and the lighting guy spotlighted everyone he thought was ugly, or pretty, or maybe that was the reflections from the people wearing shiny plastic dancefloor armour but we were all too convulsed to notice, and on and a moth-guy on stilts chased me off the floor out the back entrance to the courtyard, and I had dust in my brain, stars on my forehead and heat in my eyes, and I was alone in a dark little corridor, with cobble floor and stucco walls. I pressed the stucco to my hands in this peaceful side-alley, and watched behind me the moth guy terrorising short people with the poor judgment to wear inconspicuous clothing.

w i t h

w e e d s ,

v e r m i n ,

a n d

w h i t e

t r a s h

c u l

{Try to make some stilts of your own.} I guessed: that’s the end of that; and retreated further up the corridor.

The light was on in the kitchen, even though it was 3am. It wasn’t the best place to conduct covert missions, this kitchen. The sounds of gas burners and aluminium cook-pots spilled over and around saloon-style doors, even over the muffled techno, and you couldn’t walk past without nearly wretching at the smells of inedible things boiling.

“Where did you get this stuff, Theo?” asked someone out of my line of sight.

“It revealed itself to me, my friend, in a vision, when I went to search the bush for it. We found the mountain like magic, and there was the plant growing on the side, just as it stood in my inner eye.”

I could see a gaggle of people gathered round the cooking range. Theo stood in the middle of all of them, with a wooden spoon and oven mitts, and a

t u r e .

O t h e r s

a r e

r e f u g e e s ,

e s c a p i n g

t h e i r

tureen as big as my chest. He was a tall man, gaunt, check-shirt, flannel cap, and blonde eyebrows over eyes as wide as peeled onions. I had met him at one of the panel discussions at the daytime part of the conference, and been impressed by his spirituality, by his way of looking at you and seeing something else, and also his expertise in extracting drugs from native plants. Call me totally presumptuous, but I was pretty sure he was putting that talent into action before me at that point.

Theo wasn’t a man to boil pots of magic mountain plants at 3am for pot pourri.

One of Theo’s friends was pulverising dried leaves in an electric coffee grinder. She tapped a lidful of green powder into his brew.

“Knock, knock,” I said. “Hi everyone.”

Everyone froze.

h o m e w o r l d

w a r s ,

o n l y

t o

b e

p l a c e d

o n

t h e

“Come in!” Theo said, “We’re making ayahuasca.” A Peruvian shamanistic broth involving orally active n-dimethyltryptamine and several beta-carbolines. Basically, some shit that fucks you up. {More responsible cultures around the world use it for spiritual insight. —Jim} Bingo!

The people around the cooking range shuffled to make room for me.

“Now, what’s your name?”

It was quite a simple process really, making ayahuasca, Theo explained, and it really was. We used just a stove, and an oven, and lemon juice, and still managed to make a huge sacramental mess, all over the kitchen that would be used for a school camp or something the next week. {Go forth and find Theo’s magical plants. Make a batch of your own ayahuasca with simple ingredients from your kitchen. Ask your parents to show you how.} He and his buddy Gonzales reminisced together while they stirred. Gonzales was dressed in Peruvian warm things, and he told tales about the ethnobotanical significance of ayahuasca in shamanic rituals, like: “ One time I drank this shit, and the shaman blessed me in the name of Jesus, the devil and the Virgin Mary while I drank it. That was a wild night.”

Sometimes. This time: “This conference has been all about theory, man,” he said, “Fuck that, let’s trip.”

Gonzales was allowed to say things like that, he’d been trained by a shaman, he reckoned, and he spoke Spanish too.

Theo: “Right on. Folks, we’ve made enough ayahuasca here for a pretty big ritual. Who wants to come and drink it with me on Bald Rock?”

We all put our hands up. I said: “Can my friend Lavender come?”

“That’s about 20.” Theo counted on his fingers, “Sure. You all better get ready

m o o n

i n

w h a t

i s

c a l l e d

t h e

‘ l u n a r

s o l u t i o n

n ’

~

H y p e r S o m a

i s

t h e

n e w

a g e

t e l e v i s i o n ,

to have a growth experience.” Everyone laughed, even me, although I was not quite sure of the joke. Maybe it was nervousness?

Our tour guide was voluble. “Don’t worry, folks,” he said, “I’ve already drunk ayahuasca on this mountain top. Last time me and Gonzales came here, we kicked major evil spirit arse. So, don’t worry about any gremlins, we’ve wupped ‘em. The rock is one A-grade safe tripping zone. Oh, you might want to bring some warm clothes. And something soft to lie on. It’s pretty rough and grainy...

Although when we defeated the spirits last time the rock became welcoming and velvety, and kind of enfolding.”

“Right on,” said Gonzales. *** An amiable woman from the kitchen offered me a lift in her car to the rock.

That was nice. I had met her a few times - her name was Drusila, and she seemed to know what was what. She also had a lovely car with heaps of room for several fellow passengers and some assorted blankets and stuff. I took the opportunity to grill her on the way there, with questions like: “Drusila, should I drink ayahuasca?”

“Jesus, dan, it’s your life. It’s just another sacramental drug, y’know? You decide if it’s what you want to do.”

“Drusila, was that you painted silver in that movie they were screening before, playing progressive rock and dressed as Egyptians?”

“Me and my coven, yeah.”

We parked in a carpark saying: Bald rock. Scenic Views.

“Alright everyone,” shouted Theo, looking like a cricket coach in his flannel hat, “Let’s climb the rock!”

So we did, tramping up above the tops of the enormous eucalypts over this lump of leftover dreamtime geology, until the sky opened up with stars and the voices of whispering treetops and all that remained of civilisation was the tiny purple flashing lights of the doof, half way to the horizon.

Theo took my name down in a big journal and asked me if I’d done this before.

He was excited. He whispered to me: “Did you hear what Gonzales said before?

He said, fuck the theory, let’s trip. How cool is that?” He raised his voice. “Alright everyone, maybe we could gather round in a circle before we all go off on

i n t e r a c t i v e

w i t h

p r o z a c

a n d

t r a s h

m e d i a .

"En el nombre del Lijo, el diablo y la Virgen Mara."

T h e

d o m i n a n t

s p e c i e s

i s

t h e

c a r,

f o l l o w e d

our own missions.”

“Do you want to do a consecration ritual, Drusila?” Theo asked.

“Nah, I’ve already done one.”

“Really? I didn’t see you.”

“Just before. I walked round the rock and chanted.”

“Oh, right. Well, I think I still want to do a ritual. Maybe we can all get in a circle and chant or something.”

“I’ve got some Peruvian tobacco,” Gonzales piped up, “I can do that shamanic thing where you blow smoke down the neck of the initiates. It’s pretty cool.”

b y

t h e

c o w,

b o t h

a r e

e x p e r t s

a t

f l a t t e n i

“Go for it, Gonzales.”

“Do you want to maybe all say why you’re here?” Gonzales asked, as he unpacked his stash.

“Wait!” Theo interjected, “Can we please sit in a circle here, folks?”

“We are in a special place,” said Theo, “This rock, Bald Rock, is the heart chakra of the world.”

“I thought that was Uluru.”

“Uluru is the spleen chakra.”

“No way, there is no spleen chakra.”

“How about stone henge, what’s that?”

“Anyway,” he forged on, “all such rocks are sacred. Think how deep this one stretches beneath the earth. We are on the tip of a giant rock thing stretching hundreds of metres through the crust of the planet. I hear it’s particularly sacred for the Bundgalung people who live here.”

“Does that meant that we shouldn’t be climbing it then?”

“I don’t know, someone can ask them when we get back to camp. They’re the dudes playing footy by the big marquee.”

Theo had the ayahuasca in some big tartan thermoses. We drank the strange tea, and it was bitter of course and washed down with honey, and sat in a circle and chatted for while and chanted for a while.

Theo started that.

He held a lone long high note, until everyone else joined in and whooped, and keened, and drawled long self-conscious sounds, quiet and loud, until the circle was charged with human voices. More complexities and confusions and choosings of cups and so on and so on until suddenly a cup was pressed into my hand, and I drank it one swallow, and licked the dregs of sticky honey off my hand. I had the thoughts that you have when you’ve just filled your belly with DMT.

i n g

t h e

e c o l o g y

u n d e r n e a t h

~

G e n e g i n e e r

“So, is there anything we should do?” asked one girl.

“Um, that’s up to you. I wouldn’t feel qualified to advise you. It’s the drug that is the teacher. I am merely the facilitator. The drug will show you what you need to know. Maybe you can think of your questions about the drug as catechisms to take to the journey, and that can be the start of your learning path. Hey, sit down, Gonzales is about to consecrate your neck with Peruvian tobacco.”

“So, why are we all here?” prompted Gonzales. People always have good answers to that.

“I want to see the sky from the inside.”

“I want to see a bit about what it is that makes us adults in the eyes of the spirits.”

“Me too, I want to be a full-grown warrior.”

“I’m here to learn about myself.”

“It’s my birthday. I want to do something important.”

That was me. It really was my birthday.

“I’m here to achieve unholy union with the mother earth.”

A guy called Manfred, that everyone told me was secretly Dennis McKenna checking out the local drug scene, was next. “I’m here to learn what the teacher has to teach,” he said. And he blessed the cup before he drank it.

“En el nombre del Lijo, el diablo y la Virgen Mara.” came Gonzales’ voice from just behind my ear, and a weird warmth as he blew hot tobacco smoke down my neck. I returned to the little bed that myself and my friend Lavender had made.

The ground was already tilted, didn’t need drugs to have difficulty walking there. So we didn’t walk anywhere. We abased ourselves together on the scalp of the rock. She was nauseous, holding herself in a little, still nursing her mug of pungent sacred tea. I wrapped myself up alone in the sleeping bag for a while and watched the sky. Occasionally someone around would vomit, sometimes sickly Lavender, and each time a black bubbling illness would flux in me, and I would think of my own belly. And it would recede.

I sat on the rock, while a tide rose inside. Soon my body jerked, and the sky pulsed pale blue, and the stars trembled in clouds against the gentle blue cloth as dark empty points. Then it was too late.

c o r p .

h a s

f o r c e d

t h e i r

p r o d u c t s

o n t o

s t a r

I realised how cold I was, right from my icy belly to the crystalline emptiness forming in the night above me: Visions descending from the sky. Shapes and laughing things, half-creatures, boxes, colours. Interlocking geometric claws, and and triumphal glaring beasts made of flocks of black dots against dayglo backlight...

Dark thoughts, endings, loss of control, lying on the side, body stripped away.

Black shapes flaying away my self and insides and outsides, fear of the oncoming hell, darkness, decay, rust until there is just me, a smear of black dust on the rock dispersing in the night. The spirits would come to trick or taunt me, or take my baby body through their mad rituals of warriorhood.

I imagined the hell that awaited me.

I wished I could vomit, and suddenly I had. I arched my body off the rock and flung a throat-full of thick bitter bile all over the scraggly bushes. It was very cold in the wind, the only warm spot on my body was the place where Lavender stroked my back, and the messy necessity of my gut meant that I forgot for a moment my powerlessness, my surrender, the madness of Peruvian pointillism in the sky. My teeth were shivery and rebellious and my gums ached.

When the clenching in my guts was done I returned to the sleeping bag, shivering, trying to find a way of fitting my whole body into its tiny portable world, and hiding my face from the wind. I snuggled against Lavender.

All over the windy top of that rock people were vomiting and shivering under blankets, leaking heat and belly stink to the sky. Inside my cubby I was threaded

v i n g

n a t i o n s ,

b u y i n g

u p

a l l

a r a b l e

l a n d

t o

with warm yellow strands of confidence that had subtly threaded through me like fungus. My mind felt like the invisible inside of a solid rubber ball, or like a blank page of scented letter paper. I flexed my toes and the motion was aimlessly perfect, golden, and the memory that I could do that, move my toes, and that I could want to, was palpable amazement that I gripped between my heels. I left big aimless scrawls across the whiteness in my skull with doodling thoughts. I cracked open and ink seeped out my own eye sockets.

There was not a sentiment in my self that was not exposed to the snuffling currents of air and no selfish secrets that did not drift up to the sky to surprise albatrosses and aircraft. Detritus, useless, my thoughts were only an undifferentiated piece of the world that deigned to be me. I surrendered thought to things in the world that needed it more than I. I was a leafletdrop of myself onto barren terrain.

Under a willy-willy spiral of paper habits and sketched self-portraits, an entity remained. That entity felt very much like me, felt like it could stand up and be me, maybe. But instead it cowered under blankets and felt its modest selfishness drain back in at the corners of its body.

I stayed in a little blanket paradise and felt defeated, and renewed in my failure. My remade body was too soft for the surface of rocks. Newborn skin. I rolled against Lavender, tried to ask ... and that was...

Delight with words transfixed me. I was absorbed in my vocal chords and before I had got through the sentence I was so in love with it that I couldn’t even look at it without crossing my eyes.

“Are you alright in there travelling space-user?”

Questioning was too beautiful, and her tiny body was so sweet to touch that it at once gave me the pangs of carpal tunnel syndrome. I imagined the soft metal threads of my muscles unbinding, volatising into maple syrup. My head was drunk with the act of creation in each movement of my body. I made a sound, and heard it form fat and full in my throat, and die against the enclosing blankets, and I made another, blew a bubble of

g r o w

c o f f e e

a n d

o t h e r

e x p o r t

l u x u r i e s

w

sound heard it burst. Speech alive by itself. Each word was a fantastic journey from conception to execution. Wormy phonemes crawled out, alive by their own selves and slick from my lips. I knew that if Lavender responded I would squawk and squimmmer back and forth with her forever, or at least until the drugs wore off.

She lay silent, occasionally belched, and absorbed my voice like a muscly feather pillow.

Outside people screamed, howled and chattered, made nonsense sounds, or snorted and prowled. I joined in when they passed by, pressing my lips against the warm down stuffing. “Everything is wonderful! Everything is wonderful!

Everything is wonderful!” said a girl who gave me a back-rub before.

I wondered what was happening in the still body of my fellow-traveller under the rug. Sometimes Lavender got up to vomit, and returned. She mumbled, too slow for my combusting thoughts. We were silent to one another.

In my blanket womb I was a reclusive foetus, overterm, she was my stillborn twin.

The ayahuasca was lowering me to earth, dew on lichen.

I snatched a quick doze from the lullaby of my singing synapses. And a walk. I stood and took the air, and heard footsteps echo round my brain-cathedral, but I didn’t fall over, I walked. I swaggered, even, shook off the coverings in the easiest ever birth. Just like that, I was individual again. I was a wise one. I was full of Experience.

I went to farewell the spirits of the rock, trekking backwards around the crown the way I came.

Circumnavigating the rock was harder than it seemed it should have been, the vegetation was thick, and the slopes of the rock were difficult on my ankles.

It was hard to push around the outside of the trees without falling over the edge, and the moment I walked amongst them it was impossible to see over their brushy tops. The trail would vanish into random blurs of moonlight if I got a lonely metre off it, and brittle branches would slap me down or splinter into my skin. I had lost my friends at the top of the rock in the shards of native vegetation.

h i l e

n a t i v e s

g o

h u n g r y

~

S p e n t

a

b i l l i o n

A broken snarl of ratchetted roots pulled me down by the ankles. My nose filled with bare windy dust. Branches poked into me, gripped my clothes, my woolly hat was lifted smoothly off my head and my backpack unzipped. I tumbled downhill, backwards into a clearing of rough-cut granite slabs between the boles of stunted trees. The sky was open with stars, and my body was sprawled again under it.

I could see above me a high dome of forehead, craggy nose and two overmeated chiselled lips — a giant face dominated the clearing, bulging totemically out of the buckled surface of Bald Rock. The empty sockets under its eyebrows were as blank and compelling as a pair of flint spearheads.

The wind died.

Oh. The rock, the sky. For a moment I felt a touch of dutiful sanctity. ...Over the hilltop I heard Theo’s voice: “I’m running a naked ayahuasca workshop next month with a group of thirty strangers. We are going to overcome our anxiety at the physical. Is that a DMT spliff? Would you pass it here?”

Lavender was asleep on the rock. Someone was playing guitar and singing mournful Spanish songs.

9 kilometers away in the bush, the sound of doof-doof-doof, as the next DJ dropped the beat. You could hear it from here, if the wind was right.

What is the value of shamans?

o n

r e s e a r c h i n g

h i g h

p r o t e i n

p o t a t o e s

w h

i c h

a r e

s t i l l

j u s t

a

f r a c t i o n

o f

n u t r i t i o n

i n

a n

o r g a n i c

e g g p l a n t

~

B a t t e r y

f a r m s

m a s s

p r o d u c e

e v e r y

p r o d u c t ;

M e a t

f a c t o

F R A U D An interview with FRAUD by Rak Razam

r i e s / F i s h

f a r m s / Wa r e h o u s e s

f u l l

o f

a n i m

m a l s

TRAK 1 - DNA MUSAK TO MUTATE BY>

“One day over breakfast we read KLF’s “THE MANUAL, (HOW TO HAVE A NUMBER ONE - THE EASY WAY)” and agreed to follow the rules of the lowest common denominator, updating all pop references for our new, improved tekno version. Our goal was to abstract the perfect trak from the Top 40 hitz of the day and make enough money that we never had to work again,” SHITZU-TONKA announces. “The first thing the manual said you needed was a name. Nothing too alienating for the average punter, yet it had to have a catchy appeal. We thought this was all crap and realized the only way to scam an entire generation of teknopop listening drones was to be upfront about the whole thing.

Which is why we called the band FRAUD and play a post-tekno synthesis of 20th century musak. That is - we steal everything.”

SHITZU-TONKA, DJ WINSTON SMITH, DR.13, MARTIN 5 and the infamous SATORI ROADKILL are all in Melbourne filming the video clip for their latest, as yet untitled single. If it’s anything like their previous monster hit, Pig Standard Carcass, then this new piece of polished teknopop will be finely krafted to be genetically pleasing on a deep, cellular level.

FRAUD have distilled the alchemical formula of the perfect trak and aren’t shy about telling people how they did it, or how stupid they are for being manipulated by their musak. It’s a more intelligent, subversive version of the Sex Pistols punk ethos that has incited a generation of 21st century kidz all raw and eager for a new sound and a new philosophy. “The titles and sampled lyrics must all have a homogenous emotional quality like, ‘I love you baby in the morning as the sunlight hits your retinas causing a random phosphene imprint,’ ” SHITZU-TONKA explains. “The basslines are all remixed from KILLER LOOP files. And, of course, using state of the art bedroom software we’ve sampled the sound of DNA to make instant tekno musak - just add listener.”

w i t h

s t o l e n

s o u l s ,

a n d

t h e

l i v e s t o c k

TRAK 2 > PIG STANDARD CARCASS

What they did was convert RNA code into music alright, but the type of DNA sample was the key to their success. MARTIN 5 datamined the DNA-RNA of a standard pig carcass (using a subset of the Lambdoma Matrix set of mathematics) into uplifting NEO-Tek rhythms. DJ WINSTON SMITH, the front man for all FRAUD’s publicity, explains: “Essentially a gene sequence is played where the bases represent notes in a four tone system. Using various fractal algorithms they’re then mapped onto specific frequency spectrums with Symbolic Composer. I also use Xx to translate the signature prints into midi data. “ The genius lies with the genetic alterations the RNA sample was then put through, injecting strands of disease as layering agents. Halfway through the trak, frequencies explode as the pig develops a virulent strain of anthrax leprosy MU. It sounds a lot like Nu Skool House endless scales running up and down over a thick, humping bassline that morphs into a haunting requiem. “We translated a wavefile of it to a Macthuga generator and it looks like a Mandelbrot buddha folding> inverting up his own arse. ‘Samadhi appears as an eternity, though Samadhi is a single thought’, and all that, yeh?”.

t h e y

a r e

p a i d

t o

l o o k

a f t e r

~

A

c h i l d

g r o

SMITH’s got a scrambler masque on that uses biometric techniques to alternate his face into random morphing visages. He always looks like someone you know. Pig Standard Carcass went to number one in Germany. They must be on to something. Synchronistically, the smell of frying bacon wafts through the air.

TRAK 3> THE SOUND OF SILICON “BE A PRODUCT! - INFECT FROM WITHIN,” FRAUD’s masterful PR gimmick, SATORI ROADKILL says via digital uplink. A viscious little Japanese geisha girl with humungous silicon breast implants, she makes Lara Croft look like the Flying Nun. “We whipped her up on a VR Avatar modeling kit,” DOCTOR 13, chief knob twirler reveals. “She exists only in cyberspace and in our multimedia press releases.” Over tea and toast I’m told that SATORI ROADKILL’s digital breasts were modelled in real time and then genesampled for FRAUD’s upcoming second trak> tentatively titled ‘The sound of silicon’. Silicon that makes the chips that make the computers that make the musik.

w s

u p

w i t h o u t

e v e r

t a s t i n g

a

r e a l

t o m a t o

“It’s like a feedback loop, like bits of the foodchain talking to one another,” the good DOCTOR explains. “ Human > Computer > Music. Eat or be eaten. We’re filming the video for it now. It’s directed by the guy who does those Parental Shielding Frenzy videos like in Sally Fields movies where she has to rescue her children. Flight and response triggers. DRONE CAM. We’ve edited streaming footage of police car chases and long monotonous film of people shuffling along in dole queues with their spirits broken and their bodies lost in the bowels of beuracracy and juxtaposed it against a smeared out golf course green. The whole band’s there in nude Go-Go Sumo wrestler suits grown from genetically modified Soy bean extract. We play nine holes of golf then peel off rashes of soy-Sumo skin at the climax and eat them. “ It will undoubtedly go to number one.

~

Pe s t i c i d e

f l a v o u r

i s

t h e

l a t e s t

f a v o u r i t

TRAK 4> SUGAR

FRAUD’s ultimate objective is to make musak that imprints on the brain by fitting with the fundamental electrical rhythms, bypassing all such things as taste and marketing. It would then form an endless ring of frequency, obliterating other thoughts. SONIC ASSIMILATION! as they say in the liner notes. It is the phuture, and one day we will all be slaves to it’s mindless rhythm. But today it’s still early morning here on the other side of the world and it’s impossible to get away from the FRAUD marketing campaign. They’ve even got sample MP3’s in breakfast cereal boxes on disposable MPEG CARD players. It’s the ultimate test of teknopop> it must compliment the digestion process and be as unobtrusive to thought as the crunch of your genetically modified cornflakes. All over the world people are staring blankly into their breakfast cereals, listening to FRAUD’s trak and slowly masticating their food.

Success is sweet.

e

c o n d i m e n t

a t

t h e

f a s t

f o o d

f r a n c h i s e s

~

Someone gave me a copy of ‘The Art of War’

by Sun Tzu. Told me the corporate cultures read it like it was a bible of their trade...

It’s true though. There is a war going on out there.

Elsewhere.

Mythical as democracy.

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LANGUAGE AS A VIRUS n

Textual Roots of the Psyberdelic Jonathan Carmichael

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Psyberdelic writing is not drawn form the classic concepts of literature; it is the divine child of a pop culture of decay, of hi-tech digital media overload, of fetish products and the ideology of the post-millennium apocalypse. It is literature for a new world of radical politics and state of being. It stems from the dust of outdoor dance parties, the keyboards of internet junkies, from feral eco subcultures, neo-mystics, new age anarchists and etheogenic psychonauts the land over. Yet cultures, ancient and modern, have universally sought out altered states of consciousness, often using sacraments in order to interpret aspects of their environment and cosmology. Proof of this can be found in the pictorial art of cave paintings and carved ďŹ ghtersfrom time immemorial While these ur-root texts predate the Western literary tradition, this expanded awareness was only reintroduced into the modern mindset after personal experimentation among the intellectual and artistic elite, which led to a wave of drug literature focused upon spiritual thinking. Early modern examples can be found among the works of celebrated writers such as Blake and Wordsworth, or Lewis Carroll in his book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

http://somaweb.org/

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The Doors of Perception (Aldous Huxley, 1954) – a document arising from a 400mg dose of Mescaline - is a philosophical account of his artistic and ontological re-awakening. The knowledge gained and files laid out in The Doors of Perception, and later in Heaven and Hell (1956), was integral to his renowned final work, Island (1962), which depicts a world that can be loosely described as a fungi utopia. Huxley was one of the first modern intellects to argue convincingly that psychedelics could be used as artistic tool.

"Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity…excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit” (William Burroughs, 1963:46). http:// www.txt.de/spress/author/burroughs/ Around the same time that Huxley was experimenting with Mescaline, two prominent beat writers were also seeking telepathic enhancement via Yage (Ayahuasca). In The Yage Letters (1963), a correspondence between William Burroughs – best known for his master drug-work The Naked Lunch (1959) – and Allen Ginsberg, the two men separately recount their pilgrimage and extraordinary experiences with this Amazonian shamanic sacrament.

Some time later, in Peru, Ginsberg truly encounters Yage, struggling with the experience and appealing to Burroughs for council and grounding after his experiences leave him in a state of confusion. This brilliant set of tales describes the struggle of the enthobotanical mind and the strange psychological pathology that accompanies the true seekers. Burroughs also has a concept known as the Interzone which manifests itself into many of his works. An Interzone is a withdrawal space for people who don’t quite fit into normal western morals or thought processes. It is generally represented as being part South American and part Eastern bohemia - an area for promiscuous and ambivalent behaviour where expansive substance use, creative output, and many other strange things are rife. http://www.leary.com/

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Most of you will be familiar with Timothy Leary: the infamous rogue Harvard University Ph.d. that influenced the American counterculture with his preaching on proactive drug use. I will therefore skip the particulars and simply recommend that you track down The Psychedelic Experience (1964) which reworks the Tibetan Book of the Dead with techniques of psychology and tries to produce what he and his colleagues thought was the optimum companion for the seasonal trippers.

http://www.philipkdick.com/ A true mystic with a mind so far over the edge that reading his works may induce ontological breakdowns and cause your ideas of reality to break apart before your very eyes. Philip K. Dick, along with others such as J. G. Ballard, Robert A. Heinlein, Stanislaw Lem, Roger Zelazny, Robert A. Heinlein and Ursula K Le Guin, was a pioneer of a new form of science fiction (simply called New Wave) http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/scifi/history/newwave.htm#origins that drew on the social sciences and the hippie counterculture of the 70s. Dick’s best works are so highly complex that one cannot engage in a simple discussion about them. In essence, his texts such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), Man in the High Castle (1962) and Ubik (1969) present anti-utopian worlds and explore the fundamental concept of the New Wavers - called ‘inner space’. His books submerge the reader in both the territory of the mulitiverse, and the protagonists’ interior dialogue during their attempt to struggle with a rippling hallucinatory drug psychosis that seems to haunt them to the very end. The Sifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995) is a collection of non-fiction and philosophical essays that teaches us all how to better deal with psychedelic spaces and mindsets, and likewise warns us about the dark side and dangers of such activities.

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http://www.deoxy.org/mckenna.htm More than any other man in the last two decades Terence McKenna has influenced and sculptured psychedelic, trance and post-human thinking. He has given it an almost intellectually mystical dogma, drawn from archaic and shamanic modes of perception. Food of the Gods (1992) brilliantly argues an alternative history of plants, drugs and altered states of consciousness. Revealing the symbiotic relationship between drugs and mankind, he demonstrates how enthnogenic plants may have very well been the catalyst for some stages of human evolution. Terence is an ethnobotanist, poet, mythmaker, alchemist and philosophical guru, taking the New Edge community into the next dimension.

As you can see, the godfathers of Psyberdelic fiction are people from all walks of life and historical standing - from mystics and SF writers to postmodernist thinkers Yes, psyberdelic writing feeds off pastiche, but it also gives credit to knowledge gained from other (often suppressed) platforms of experience such as spiritual spaces and psychedelic landscapes. The days of the old literature and institutional canons have corroded in to virtual insignificance; they no longer signify any tangible reality.

These borders of old can no longer hold back the flow of information. The last hundred years has seen the rise of the information age and with this the suppression of the self. We are constantly riding the waves of data, unable to dismount, paralysed by its expanse. From here on the world itself is the text. Everything, everywhere is constantly redefining itself and mutating. Meaning is not a true form any longer; it is a fluid web, with no core or focal point. Whether on cave walls or the digital screen, readers who engage with psyberdelic texts are drawn to “return to the source” by an enthnogenic virus inducing re-membering, prompting personal activism instead of anaesthesia. As the psyberdelic resurfaces, it provides a canvas of transcendental awakening for a new age, the age of the true being.

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Richard Neville has been one of Australia’s leading cultural dissidents since his student days in the early 1960s, when he launched Oz magazine - hailed as ‘the spirit of its time’ by some and as ‘obscene literature that corrupted the morals of children’ by critics. This led to an obscenity bust and trial at the Old Bailey in London that legitimised the merit of alternative media. Neville’s book, Playpower, ‘the first international book on the underground’, charted the social transformations of the sixties’ global counterculture, and he has been a frequent social commentator in print and on TV ever since. His bestselling books also include Hippy Hippy Shake, Out of My Mind, Amerika Psycho and Footprints of the Future. His ‘Journal of a Futurist’ articles on the current War on Terror and war in Iraq, globalisation, the consciousness movement and more provide a liberal dash of realpolitik reality expansion for these times and can be read at http://www.richardneville.com/

iscuss global financial markets, free trade

RR> Well Richard, it's a pleasure to talk to you. I’ve got an old weather-beaten copy of The Trials of Oz and one of the quotes for that says ‘Oz represents the spirit of a generation’. Do you think that’s true?

RN> Yeah, in a way we were the spoilt baby boomers who got a free university education and got excited by rock’n‘roll; our girlfriends were taking the pill and so forth. There was such a sense of adventure and exploration, The households from which we were escaping had been pretty moribund and wounded by the Depression and by the war. And you add the Vietnam War to that mix and the beginning of travel, so there was a sense of freedom of movement. Out of this melange there did develop a very pleasureseeking generation that was also very critical of the old generation and the old ways of doing things. I think Oz captured a lot of that.

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A lot of the early rock’n‘roll looks quite tame now, but at the time it was rebellious. Marijuana enters the picture; people were going off to Morocco and Asia and saying god, smoke this stuff it changes your perspective! There was this boom of young people with a voice and an education. And when offset printing replaced letterpress printing you could then be very visual. I liken it to Bob Dylan going from acoustic to electric guitar. It was amplification, and suddenly this strange thing called a counterculture began to formulate. Then it began to have mainstream allies. The Beatles were very obvious examples of crossover influences. On the one hand they could be on the ‘Top of the Pops’ and on the other hand they could be dropping acid and demonstrating outside the American Embassy in Trafalgar Square.

RR> That’s one of the interesting things of the whole idea of the counterculture being embedded within the mainstream culture; nowadays it’s still embedded, but the mainstream is so acutely aware of how it’s affected and it repackages things and absorbs dissent from counter-cultures...

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RN> That’s your greatest problem in a way. Because a lot of people in advertising have all done media courses and communication courses and they’re extremely hip to it all. The commodification of dissent is a real problem. Dissent becomes sort of groovy and marketed.... There is a lot of interaction between a consumer culture, a conformist culture and a radical culture.

RR> What’s your perspective nowadays on the whole commodification of countercultural terms like ‘hippie’? What do you think it originally stood for and what do you think it’s come to represent?

RN> It’s an interesting question that, because whenever I use the term hippie myself it’s always with a sense of irony about it. Very few people who had long hair – even if they’d taken acid or wore tribal necklaces and maybe lived in a squat in Notting Hill – very few would necessarily call themselves hippies. But the media needed a colourful term to encapsulate all the varieties of protest.

So sometimes the term was accepted and sometimes you winced.

Language is fluid – it’s not a simple rigid category.

rary Martial Law Zone has been declared in

RR> And some of the media-aware ‘hippies’ or people within that community even branded themselves and subdivided. You had the yippies...

RN> The best definition of the world ’yippie’ is a hippie who’s been hit on the head by a policeman. And that happened really after Chicago in 1968, which changed everything. Up until ‘68 – and not just Chicago because you also had Paris in ’68. There’s a book of mine called Hippy Hippy Shake <<http://www.richardneville.com/ PDFs/Hippie_hippie_shake_excerpt.pdf>> which has all the dates and references you need. Those two events really were the climax of the soft option of the flowers in your hair and the peace and the love and Woodstock and all of that. The reaction of the establishment, to use a term that now sounds corny, was so violent in both cases that you did have parents watching their children being beaten up on TV, and that actually widened support for the counterculture.

RR> There seems to be so many similarities between what was going on in the sixties and now, except governments now have rebranded their response as a ‘War on Terror’ and the whole idea of dissent is now portrayed as anti-patriotic, aiding and abetting terrorists, etc...

The governments have one-upped a whole generation of protestors by controlling their image, and if the protestors do respond they will still beat them senseless, but now they suppress the media, own the media or don’t give a damn because they’ve so effectively spin doctored public opinion.

RN> That’s one of the key issues, isn’t it? At the demonstrations recently in Miami in Florida apparently the violence used against protestors was horrific. Yes, now you can brand anyone who demonstrates as being anti-patriotic. That’s a very severe criticism in the States because it’s a much more flag waving country than we are.

But I would say that it’s really important to separate the American people from the American government. I personally find the amount of dissent from US pages on the web quite remarkable. There’s hundreds of dissenting sites – from counterpunch.org, which is the intellectual side of dissent, to quite a lot of paranoid ones.

n order to protect against possible threats

But there’s definitely extreme dissent and suspicion of the government on the web. But then, a lot of website hosts are being visited; there’s a lot of people whose movements are being recorded; and laws like the Patriot Act, which is being revised again, are getting very, very tough. Some people in the States fear that fascism is in the air.

RR> Indymedia is, I guess, the best parallel to old underground media – but it’s web-based, global, has a further reach and allows everyone to publish – everyone is a journalist. Everyone becomes their own media. But one of the things they’ve said at a conference recently was that in a way they’ve given up on the idea that their voice and their issues will ever be represented in the mainstream media...they’ve got their own networks... but...

RN> I think that’s exactly the point...That’s something to develop and think about...The trouble with Indymedia is that weirdly, it’s a closed world. It’s a closed circuit. Somewhere, somehow, people in the mainstream media, whether it’s by direction or by...I mean not everything is a conspiracy – most people are working so hard just to keep up anyway with what’s going on, that there’s a complete wall now between Indymedia and mainstream media. And thatis one of the differences between now and the sixties.

Indymedia is in a ghetto and while there is a lot of dissent on the internet, only people with a propensity to explore will find it.

RR> And the mainstream audience is like a walled city to itself and is a market that is constructed as such, saturated by distraction and consumerism. If the masses hold the key, how do we get into their locked kingdom?

RN> Well, on one hand you can get quite discouraged, but on the other hand I think we’ve got to also look at the people who do break the wall down. Isn’t Michael Moore a pretty good example? His last book, Stupid White Men, was minutes away from being pulped, and in the new book he tells the story of what saved it: one bloody librarian who was at a community meeting where he spoke about the trouble he was having getting his book published. He just mentioned this to a group of maybe thirty people, and one librarian was so shocked she sent emails to other librarians and suddenly all these librarians were starting to email the publisher. And as he says in his book, the last thing a publisher wants, the last terrorist group they want to arouse, are librarians! Don’t you think that’s a hopeful story?

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RR> I do – it’s viral networking, using your community to push the message through to other communities. Now one of the interesting things you touched on in your book Playpower <<http://www. richardneville.com/Content_Books/Playpower.html>> was the whole idea of the positive, revolutionary value of play and expression. Nowadays it seems the establishment has eroded the capacity for that to come through again, would you agree?

RN> Well that brings us to the subject of the work ethic. One thing Playpower got right was the prediction that computers would become pre-eminently important. But I thought that computers would actually be liberating people to not be so burdened by toil. But the opposite has happened. Australia is now a country with fewer holidays than any other Western country and basically the whole point of it is to consume as much as you can as fast as you can, with the whole divided between individuals all competing with one another.

Now that was not a core value of Australia when I was young.

Everyone’s working incredibly hard and the thing about working so hard is that, combined with the fact that most people are mortgaged up to the hilt, no one wants to rock the boat. They’re really busy.

They’re not into play except in the sense of spectator sport. There’s this kind of fake play where you sit in a grandstand and get pissed.

Passive spectatorism. The French were really good at isolating this with their whole notion of the spectator society – implying that we would all turn into these passive spectators. I see the same thing even in Australian Idol – not just sport but the whole entertainment industry. The fact is that most people are passive spectators and they’re getting very emotionally caught up in something which doesn’t matter very much.

They’re not increasing their human potential. I think people can increase their human potential but they’re not, by allowing themselves to be in a passive situation. So whatever happened to play? Well, the rise of the work ethic. The conquest of the work ethic.

When you think of other cultures and the idea that real estate has become central to our being – well, there would never have been a revolution in Paris in 1789 if Parisians all had a mortgage. That’s why Howard’s so popular.

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RR> It seems like the whole American Dream has narrowed and narrowed until it’s not what the original architects intended – and truth and freedom and the pursuit of happiness have gone by the wayside as people pursue the material endeavours. The pursuit of material happiness is now the core value of the American hegemony, whereas the whole counterculture of the sixties was also promoting a more spiritual aspect that’s been totally forgotten.

RN> The only way happiness is pursued in modern America is through pharmaceutical drugs. The pursuit of happiness now boils down to Prozac – that’s it. It’s not a pursuit, it’s just a tablet you take so you’re not depressed, because you get depressed if you fully face up to the rape and pillage of the planet. Something like four per cent of stories in the media are about the environment – an incredibly low percentage. In terms of the spiritual side, I think one of the things about the counterculture is that it came to a point where all these kids were getting arrested for smoking a bit of pot.

On one occasion we were bombing the agricultural fields of Vietnam on Christmas Eve and the war had become so insane...the CIA were doing this ‘Phoenix’ program where they were absolutely ...you know...they were disembowelling children – it’s quite well-known now, but there were all these rumours seeping up, and I think that the counterculture thought that the protests should become more extreme because there seemed to be a collective insanity affecting the establishment, so they had to become more outrageous to expose or provoke the insanity.

there would never have been a

revolution in Paris in 1789

if P arisians all had a mortgage.

But there was also a sort of spiritual shift. It was the very first time I’d heard of people starting to meditate or start looking at Buddhism or the Tibetan Book of the Dead or listening to Timothy Leary talk. On one level you’d sometimes think, oh this is all a big wank, especially if you’re in a room with a Trotskyite, or some political people and some soul searchers...

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But in a way I think this customisation of religion is not entirely bad, because it partly underpins the ecological movement. What fundamental Christians basically believe – and we’re talking about George Bush, almost certainly Blair, certainly John Howard, is that the Bible is true, and that humans are justified to have dominion over the planet and that includes its species... That’s the thrust of fundamental Christianity, which is very much part of the war in the Middle East – and not just Christian but Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism.

RR> And again it’s all the material things they’re trying to control with their so-called spiritual agendas...

RN> Well exactly...they want to control all the material goods and they’re running all the extractive industries to extract from the planet, and they pay a bit of lip service to pollution and the like, but basically they do whatever they want. But counter to that is this other idea that okay, the world is a living system – you can call it Gaia – and we’re not just here to get fat and rich but maybe we have to alter our behaviour, maybe everything’s accelerating so fast that we need to work on our capacities, our spiritual, intellectual and emotional capacities.

I would even use the word mind-shift. Things are happening so quickly and there’s such an acceleration of innovation, which is a positive sign, but there’s also the acceleration of all the problems, too. So what do you do – do you have a psychotic nervous breakdown – which I think some people are doing. In a way, when Bush talks about us and them, good and evil – RR> It’s schizophrenic...

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RN> Yes, it’s schizophrenic – it’s not a systems thinking response. I think that was the importance of the original counterculture, and I think it’s possible to argue that there are intimations a new counterculture is forming. Because in a way the only way you can deal with the absence of certainty and the acceleration of change and the fact that the globe is really a collection of families is with some sort of mind-shift that develops qualities of empathy and allows us to see the whole picture living in a multiple state of realities. I think that the spiritual quest, despite all the wanking, and despite the new age psychobabble, is in the positive rather than the negative basket.

RR> Well on that tact, what’s your current response to the whole idea of drugs, or sacraments, chemicals or however you want to label them?

RN> Well I don’t really have a problem with them. The only drugs I’m really afraid of once we get over prescribed pharmaceuticals, which is a whole other issue, are the drugs like heroin, which I’ve never liked.

There are definitely some drugs that can cannibalise the soul. And heroin and its associate drugs are definitely in that category. On the other hand I think that the judicious use of other substances can have a very positive effect. But the danger is there that if you use those drugs with the ethic of Western materialism, i.e. more is better, I think there’s a danger.

RR> It’s still the out of balance Western mind frame driving the vehicle.

RN> Having ecstasy occasionally in a group situation is a lot different than having ecstasy every day. Drugs are not Coca-Cola.

RR> And some would argue that Coke is a dangerous drug in itself. Well what about the idea, and I guess it was fresh back then, that something like acid could open a lot of minds and was a floodgate for a generation to a larger perspective, whereas now it’s pigeonholed as just another niche consumable.

RN> Well that’s exactly right, you really don’t hear anyone talking the way Timothy Leary used to talk about the way acid will change your life forever, about it being a tool of total sensory empowerment and the old ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out’ mantra. I don’t think you hear so much sloganeering. There is a danger to that, as some people are incapable of using drugs judiciously. You take a risk proselytising with drugs, so some say it’s better not to say anything in public, so a lot of people don’t.

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RR> Do you think technology has become a modern drug?

RN> I think for a lot of people, yeah. You’ve only got to look at the relationship between people and their computers and laptops. They’re much more in tune with that and spending much more time with them than with their partners. It’s no longer just a computer or a source of information. The laptop itself is becoming more globalised and a source of pleasure in terms of downloading movies, sexual gratification when downloading pornography, even love. What’s happening is that the walls are coming down between the real and the artificial – or the embrace of the Matrix.

In the old days we were all pretty sure – and this would apply to the counterculture, too, we were all like George Bush – we were sure we knew what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was bad. Things are much more paradoxical now. I don’t believe technology is neutral – I believe it does affect our behaviour.

The computer revolution has brought incredible benefits but a lot of it’s frightening.

The marriage between machine and humankind seems to be imminent and unstoppable. And the fruits of that are completely unpredictable.

Futurism

is not really about predicting the future but about engaging it and trying to prepare people and help them adapt.

RR> You’ve done a lot of work in recent years with futurism. It seems an interesting niche market in that it’s so rapidly integrating into the present that it’s like the future’s disappearing as we’re documenting it.

RN> That’s what makes being a futurist so weird. You can almost make up something in a phone conversation that might happen and then open the paper to find that it’s happened. Futurism is not really about predicting the future but about engaging it and trying to prepare people and help them adapt to it. As events that seem to make no sense happen, we try to find the pattern behind them. It’s already there.

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RR> Everything seems possible.

RN> Everything seems possible, which is what’s worrying when the special forces conjure up their alternative scenarios...almost by conjuring up – and this is getting a bit mystical – but they almost come true. The acceleration of the future is a motif of our time. It comes as fast as information does down an optical cable. And also the future is accelerating because of things like Moore’s Law and the way networks expand. But all this acceleration is happening in all the different fields of scientific and technological expertise, so it’s in astrophysics as well as telecommunications as well as psychopharmacology – it’s this incredible exponential growth. Yet our own psychology’s not really growing at the same rate.

RR> What’s the social impact of time disappearing as everything accelerates?

RN> We’re living in a perpetual state of emergency and that hasn’t always been true. Every time you buy a piece of technology to save time it actually annihilates that time. So email makes communication quicker on one level but it actually robs you on another. You don’t have any extra time because of that and it’s much more complicated because you have spam on top of that, etc.

We’re living in a very dynamic universe and we always have, but now this rapidity is accelerating so we’re moving over unfamiliar terrain at night travelling very fast and we need to lift the beams of our headlights upwards. That’s a perceptual skill. We have to nourish skills within ourselves to be able to engage the rate of change. How we can avoid future shock, this psychotic reaction that George Bush has of retreating into fundamentalism and the us/ them, good-bad mindset.

RR> What do you foresee for the future of the counterculture, Richard?

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RN> Well, as we talk the world is becoming more militarised. Arms expenditures are increasing, the environment’s being denuded, global warming’s increasing, the number of resources is diminishing. And we have the peeling away of humane laws. No one takes much notice of international laws anymore – you can have targeted assassinations, you can kill innocent bystanders, you can use depleted uranium. So on the one hand we have this black tableau. It’s almost like anarchy mixed with rampant materialism and degrading of the environment. That’s the dark picture.

In the bright picture, the conversation you and I are having here is being replicated across the world, multiplied by a thousand, maybe even a million, and maybe this countertrend will gather momentum. To every action there’s an equally strong reaction. The original counterculture came out of a feeling that on one level it was impossible to change this whole Western, monolithic culture – Fortress Australia, foreign war, etc. But through conversations, books, information and the reinvention of the underground press, partly through the internet, there is at least a fighting chance that an alternative future is really being talked about and devised and conjured up. That’s not the full agenda, but I think you need a little of that going on as well as saying okay, I’ll campaign for the reform of the World Bank, the IMF, democratising the UN, etc. I think you’ve got to fight the battle on many fronts now. You can’t just fight it politically or on environmental issues.

So I don’t go to sleep at night in a state of total despair. A lot of people are really shocked by not just the social injustice, but the fact that the gap between the rich and the poor is getting bigger; we have a lot of Orwellian corporate speak through the media. Quite a lot of people are aware that the mainstream media’s not telling the full story. The connivance between mainstream media and the war in Iraq’s shocked a lot of people and woken them up about that. There’s a lot of environmental warriors, a lot of spiritual warriors – there’s a lot of everyday, ordinary Australians just looking for a sea change themselves. When you start seeing yoga mats on sale at K-Mart you know something’s changing. Another world is possible.

RR> Another world is happening.

RN> The seeds are sown. The UNDERGROWTH is the first sprouting.

So good luck!

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Twilight, 2012 A cafe called Waking Life dangling on the edge of the world. Sitting in the corner, eating sacred mushroom quiche are two revolutionaries, sporting message sticks that look like mobile phones and plotting overthrow, not of the transitory government, but of their own states of being.

On the wall outside, someone has scrawled a poem in paint. It reads; 'my utopia is my reality.'

He is lost in elsewhere thoughts, looking out the window at the liberated casino still on fire from the dawn's excess as satellites perform synchronised ballet in the starry starry night to the tunes of Blue Danube and jungle music. {tweet tweet} sing the birds, awakening. {beep beep} sings his phone.

"Art is our messenger" says the majikalista on ecstasy through her SMS. "Wing footed goddess surfing the ocean of information like an anarchist meme.

A virus which makes you subsceptible to beauty.

Consciouness tells us to spread the seed of these thoughts. The earth aches in expectation. Don't doubt the fact that evolution has wept.

We are all change agents.

Engage the flow and swim with it.

In it. Become it.

Trust the tidal wave."

n s .

U n c o m m i s i o n e d

P u b l i c A r t

Pr o j e c t s . . . .

On the tabletop, littered amongst organic literature, microchips and humus dips, a bug spirit listens intently to the dialogue, transmitting their conversation to the world next door where ideas are the only currency. A one way channel of soundwave and light aromas. They realise that they are being monitored but continue regardless. Revelling in the mystical attention they are drawing to their words.

She responds: "Fuck your theory of gameplay let's bomb the capital with petals!

It's the only way I tell you."

T h e

F u t u r e

i s

N o w .

"Sure, but what then? You know the TV stations are all run by demons - they'll never let us broadcast it to their empire of distaste. Last night I watched a religion of apathy ignore the plight of nature's refugees - and it never even made the rumours news."

And then the wind changes and they exchange a look that smells of telepathy. They both know it is time to go. Time to trust in the reincarnation of the everyday.

Time to make more time from the cogs of the broken digital watches. Time to carve the future from the vocabulary of the present tense.

Outside on the street, dogs were humping solar cars and teachers were waiting for their classrooms to be rebuilt with mudbrick. The police car lay silent amidst the entropy of power, but the icecream van was doing roaring trade.

W e l c o m e

t o

t h e

F u t u r e

.

undergrowth / issue one / seed / editorial collective / editorial@undergrowth.org /tim parish / rak razam / jonathan carmichael / art director / tim parish / art@undergrowth.org / proofreader /elise jones/ misselise@iprimus.com.au /website / noel lambert / pierce jacques /contributing writers // john kelly / dan(iel) mackinlay / susan butcher / carol wood / tim parish / rak razam / jon carmichael / // artist credits // cover / mall / paul kalemba / thinblackline@grafďŹ ti.net 4-5 / vrtv / paul kalemba 8-15 / world of tomorrow / susan butcher+ carol wood / poxgirls@alphalink.com.au 16 / duck! / gage / gage@spaz.org 22 / time wave / tushgun / tushgun@yahoo.fr 36-37 / ecocity / paul downton / www.urbanecology.org.au 38-39 / ďŹ respirit / oliver dunlop / oli42@hotmail.com 42-45 / rust / j kool + j carmichael / gnostictripper@hotmail.com 47 / the living wall / christian walker/ altame2day@hotmail.com 55 / self portrait whilst tripping / verb 64-65 / fort goolengook /tony quoll / tonyquoll@yahoo.com 66-67 / forest blues / tony quoll / 68 / rustword / j. carmichael 91 / one generation / verb 92 / the revolt / tom civil / civil@antimedia.net 93-94 / warehouse wallz / photo by civil 95 / ďŹ&#x201A;ower action / banksi 96-97 / dawn / paul kalemba back cover / bird stencils / mu / oracle readings / tim parish aka verb / verb@undergrowth.org thanks / kelly chandler / express media / richard neville / danger $ jonny / irenes / spacestation videolab / robin macpherson and paper free press / felipe cichy / lorin o'brien / claire collie xx /