Correct History

Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org & Knatz.com / Personal / Stories / pk by Age / FLEX Net Years /
told @ K. 2005 11 24

The Correct Interpretation of History

Contradictions go together like strawberries and cream.

I just wrote that sentence thinking of it in connection with the story I am about to tell, then quick first used it in a blog on polarized social intelligence, seeking the right corrective glasses. Here “correct” gets used in its egregious Marxist association.

By late 1970 my first FLEX fliers were circulating about Morningside Heights, around Columbia, NYU, the Village … By 1971 a couple of my pieces inviting the public to register their talents for teaching through FLEX were getting published in local media. An early response came from a gal who was soon to rename herself Mercury. Free U, of which she had been a principal, was getting reorganized. Would I like to come to the first new meeting? They had space in a church on West 4^th, just off Sheridan Square. Would I like to come? I sounded, she explained, like “an interesting person.”

I arrive at the church and there’s a big banner out front: The People’s Yellow Pages.

I’m a bit startled. That’s the “same idea” as FLEX! How come Illich didn’t mention them to me? How long have they been at this? Who’s On First?

I hadn’t heard of Free U till Mercury called. Hell, I’d been teaching up in Maine, I’d been wasting more time and money at NYU. Married, now with a kid, I hadn’t been hanging around the Village: didn’t have my ears open wide enough.

I went inside. Everyone there, except me, it proved had been a Free U person. It also sounded to me like it was the entire group: intact: about a half-dozen people. Yet they seemed not to have seen each other in a while.

Whatever I needed to know about Free U I think I learned right there. The men kissing each other lusciously on the mouth didn’t bother me, I was in love.

When I arrived as a freshman at Columbia I was elated as well as astonished to meet other jazz freaks. But never had I met other anarchists. Never had I ever imagined I ever would meet other anarchists. Fags, however rare (less than 10% of the population), were a dime a dozen compared to anarchists. Apart from past literature, I didn’t know there were any. (Of course I had recently discovered Ivan Illich as currently active: clearly an anti-institutional libertarian if not an anarchist (though he’s since been called “the anarchist’s anarchist”).

Misty in Sheridan Square
thanx artnet

It was either during Mercury’s first phone call or at that meeting that Mercury invited me to join them for a radio show, WRVR, on free learning. (Afterwards, with a tape of the show in hand, the group went someplace with a tape deck and we listened to ourselves. I had had no idea what I sounded like: or, my ideas were not backed by the actual tape. Very little of my intended information, almost none of my humor, seemed to issue from the speakers!) (Then again, maybe my hearing isn’t that good either. It certainly isn’t now, in my age.) (That radio host invited me back (alone) many more times, on into 1974. Before her show was retiring she told me I had been her most invited, most frequent guest.)

The next week’s meeting promised a visit from some European anarchists. Man, when those Dutch types arrived I was really in love. (Though my favorite guy there was the single other male who did NOT seem to be homosexual. He wore a Stamp Out Human Chauvinism button!)

thanx project-humanity-earth

Soon Mercury announced that they had a free press: a rickety multi-lith in a loft owned by Quakers on the lower east side: the Union Square neighborhood. I started publishing my own fliers, by the half-dozen reams.

We all know that few marriages work well. Those that do typically hold together after a couple of bone-jarring bumps. Free U hadn’t held together. I failed to hold FLEX together. The People’s Yellow Pages and Free Press also re-disintegrated. Oh, the individuals were still alive, were still anarchists, but the glue had been rendered, melted down, the group had lost its groupness.

(And plenty of other frictions came to seem integrated: They were worried for example about infiltration from the CIA. On more than one occasion they turned on ME as a CIA agent! Mercury once paraded her newest lover, a very cute, very young, girl before me: I think as a Nyah-nyah.

Standing outside the Peoples Yellow Pages for the first time, I thought, Well, it’s a good thing we’re joining forces. But we didn’t. I was trying to be the center of the universe. So were they. So was every other new Learning Exchange: more than one hundred, around the world. No one but me seemed committed to actually coordinating things. I wanted to be George Washington, but not as much as I wanted it all to cohere: and endure. Take over, a tiny tail growing, then waging the dog, then becoming the dog. Then becoming the universe.

Would Thoreau have gotten along with Spooner? with Harmon? with Benjamin Tucker? Would a “marriage” have worked?

OK. That’s background for the title incident: something I didn’t understand for decades: till bk started studying anarchism: and explained it to me.

New people were showing up at the Sheridan Square church. What interested the group seemed daily less universal to me. They ONLY liked the quirky stuff. One guy got up and recited, almost like Hannah Storm, an unpronounceable (outside of India) string of gurus: to seeming great approval.

A minute later my enthusiasm for these people ground to a permanent halt. The same guy said, with great emphasis on the word “correct” that we had to all have The Correct Interpretation of History.

Uh oh. Shit! I thought I was among anarchists. Now they’re fucking Marxists!

Yes. That’s what bk explained to me, once my own philosophical tendencies had prompted my son to make a formal study of anarchism. (What I know comes largely from his studies; I’d never made a study: just followed “my own” tendencies.) bk informed me that historically there were two branches of anarchism: left and right. Marxism promised eventual anarchism, but in the meantime, there was a huge urge to break eggs, and to do it like Nazis. And the hell with the omelette. Then there were the right anarchists, who mouth about free markets. [bk's response to the first post of this file is complex enough that I am not going to revise my prose nor go into detail. See the above link to BlackCrayon: it should do more than well enough.] [Alas, after decades the server for BlackCrayon, for all of my son's domains, has died. When K. got censored, me arrested, bk could have republished everything that instant, on his own server: he didn't. And when his own stuff died, he's, so far, left it dead. (I'll be satisfied if the species follows suit.)]

Get together? That doesn’t seem to be in the nature of things. Free market? Get serious. FLEX is the only free market ever offered. note How come the right anarchists didn’t support it? (2013 05 23 I’ll give an incriminating set of examples next visit.)

I guess I’m a right anarchist. And I guess it was a misfortune (for the world) that the left anarchists found me first and adopted me (without really integrating).

What’s eternally clear to me is that the right anarchists are full of shit, don’t mean a word they say: because they didn’t fall in with FLEX. And now they too use the egregious internet: just as we all must.

But it didn’t have to be that way. (There’s something akin to “free will” in our damnation.)

Notes

Free Markets:

Of course markets emerged: from decentralized behavior. Watch out for markets that are offered by a central authority.

One must understand: I wanted Ivan Illich’s design, plus my idea for it to coordinate worldwide, to be dictated: by the design! But the market, something active, alive, independent, had to emerge.

I believed that the emergence, since it hadn’t emerged, now needed a catalyst. Illich showed no interest in doing it, beyond publishing the idea. note Therefore I would do it.

But it didn’t. Therefore God must want us to be idiots: and god too (as if god wants anything).

I wanted it: that’s for sure.

Interest in Doing It:

Deschooling flowed from Illich’s work on tempering American cultural imperialism: US trucks in South America can do more damage than US tanks in South America because the tanks will damage only so much, whereas the trucks are intended to transform the continent to a dependence on asphalt, and all that goes with it: all of which which must be purchased.

But to my mind the solution to that, the solution to everything, was implicit in a free market of free information: information supplied by the public to itself via FLEX. Illich went on deconstructing institutions: Medical Nemesis, convivial tools as an alternative. But FLEX WAS the tool. Make it work; then philosophize more.

FLEX needed the public to support it as well as to use it, but I believe Illich could and should have helped more. He had connections throughout the public, worldwide; I had none, I was deracinated. Defenestrated.

I don’t believe he helped Denis Detzel much with the Evanston Learning Exchange either: and he had known Denis much longer. On the contrary, Denis I believe continued to help him, Illich: one of his old “altar boys.”

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Brewmeister

Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org & Knatz.com / Personal / Stories / pk by Age / FLEX Net Years /
2006 05 31

Liquid Bread

This module will recount my serving my home brew to an old beer-drinking buddy around 1970, so that’s where I’ll locate it among the chronological of my personal stories: though actually I think I’ll also talk about beer in general and perhaps also introduce my buddy in particular.

I think I remember sampling beer, my face in the foam, in very early childhood. I very definitely remember getting sick as hell from helping myself to my father’s lo-ball as a toddler. I’m certain that I was fifteen the first time I ever opened the ice box and popped a brew for myself: my mother wasn’t home, I was thirsty, and one can of Ballentine ale was all that the fridge held. I distinctly remember being barely able to finish it. Within months of that incident my friends were all downing brews to beat the band. Our bellies would rapidly expand so that a six pack wouldn’t fill them. By age sixteen our beer parties also accommodated rye and scotch whiskies, by seventeen some were snooty about gin. The football hero a year ahead of me ran over people like a truck when he was sixteen. By the time he was seventeen his beer belly wouldn’t let him see past his knee. The medium is the message and my medium was devotedly alcoholic.

It wasn’t until I was teaching college though that I became exposed to home brewing. The Colby College faculty, certainly the English Department, was replete with Thoreau wannabees (among whom, at that time, I was not one). But I was a beer drinker. More than a few of the teachers in the English Department, the Art Department too, come to think of it, brewed their own. Several who didn’t, talked about it. And my best skiing buddy, Dr. Kueter of the German Department, not only brewed his own but bragged that his new digs had fine pure well water. Hubie was willing to show me: I became anxious to see.

I watched Hubie start a six gallon batch, using mail-order materials from Oregon. I mailed off my own order. I just had city water, and no cool basement, but what the hell, I was in Maine: a rather coolish state.

Competitive breweries go to considerable expense to condition their water (brewer’s liquor) and to control their brewing environment. Temperature counts. But I’ll skip ahead and confess that even in super-heated New York apartments which could nearly cook the beer while it was brewing, I still got very drinkable results.

OK, jump to the story. Back in the Apple I run into my old high school friend. Hey, you oughta try my home brew.

Hilary, young bk, and I are back in her old apartment on Riverside Drive at 116^th Street. Brian Carey arrives for the evening, his moustache and beard fully suiting the Lotus Élan he’d left parked below. I seat him at the table. I proceed with my ritual.

I produce two chilled German steins from the freezer, the kind with the hinged pewter lids. I’ve also cooled the table centerpiece, our home-crafted clay pitcher, kilned by one of the Colby art-wives to a beautiful blue-gray glaze. I select one of the 26 ounce (Coke) bottles of my home brew from the refrigerator, careful not to jostle it: you don’t want the yeast sediment clouding the beer (and giving you the trots).

Brian watches. I decant the brew into the pitcher. I’m steady enough of hand that the last bit of clear beer is nearly decanted before the first bit of sediment nears the precipice of the lip of the bottle. I allow not more than a micron of dead bottom-yeast to pollute the pitcher. Ah: look at that head! The pitcher is topped by several inches of foam. I lift the pitcher and fill Brian’s mug, then my own. I sit.

Brian allows the rigamarole without comment. He lifts his stein to his lips, tastes. His gorgeous red beard twitches no more than the expression on his face changes: carefully controlled. No comment.

A disaster. He hates it. Oh well. I like it. I drink my brew.

Minutes pass, in silence, before Brian again reaches for his stein. This time his expression is less rigid. I can see him tasting the foam, the liquid, tasting the air around it … quick-smacking his lips like a guppy, a moue of annoyance around his lips.

Pause. “Interesting,” he pronounces.

Yes. All tastes are acquired. (Is a taste even for mother’s milk natural note? Hard to tell.) No one likes beer at first: and even once we singlehandedly support Budweiser, what do we think of our first sip of Guinness? of Becks? of Berlinerweisser? And I make no claim that the best of my home brews were ever Guinness, or Becks, or Berlinerweisser. My beer was very hoppy. Very clear, clear as Miller’s. Not too too alcoholic. I used a hydrometer: I controlled the final alcohol content (and had few to no exploding bottles). I made mine a little stronger than the commercial beers but only a little. This was not malt sherry, you wouldn’t be paralyzed by your second glass. Furthermore, my brew was NOT pasteurized. It contained living yeast, however careful I was to leave the sediment undisturbed while decanting. (Hell, the guys from the Colby Art Department drank their home brew right from the individual bottle, sediment mixing in with every swig.) SOME yeast still lives in the beer, and until your guts become accustomed to it, yai, what a stool-loosener. (My beloved Catherine‘s old age might have been far more comfortable had I been able to feed her some home brew.)

More minutes passed before Brian took his third sip. After that though he finished his first stein at something closer to a normal pace. “May I have another?” he asked.

Over the following hours the two of us finished off a case of the 26 ounce bottles. We were roaring drunk. Even so, he was alert enough not to let me drive his Élan. He did though take me sideways through the insane hairpin turn which defines the north edge of Grant’s Tomb. Then he dropped me back at 116^th and vroomed off. I know he survived because I’d still run into him over the years. Indeed, in 1979 my art gallery was directly across the street from his bar. (He wasn’t the owner, but did have an interest.) West and East corners of West Broadway at Spring Street.

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Milan Laboratories

I loved brewing: except for one thing: sterilizing the bottles by hand. Going primitive has its drawbacks as well as its pleasures.

First I got all my ingredients from Oregon; finally I wound up buying everything I needed from the Milan Laboratories. (Wouldn’t you know it? It was on Spring Street, just off West Broadway.)

Now there was a great old fashioned enterprise. They specialized in doctoring the wine efforts of Little Italy locals, but also sold beer equipment, malt, hops … and spices! Eventually I bought all my spices from Milan Laboratories. Many a New Yorker know that business only because someone in the family kept a quality telescope available to the public on a stand on the sidewalk. Days you could get a much enlarged gander at the World Trade Center. What a shame the old owners ever had to die. The sons took over, jettisoned the wine doctoring, had a Cain and Abel war, divided the store, sold little tourist crap, went kaput.

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Germany Survival Bible

The inspiration for my getting to this story this morning was a fabulous series from Spiegel Online: specifically the beer part of their Germany Survival Bible. You want to know the difference between lager, Pilsner, ale, dunkel, hells … beers? Go to that beer link and enjoy.

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Wine Making

I have only one experience of wine making: also from that period. I ordered a wine kit from Oregon, the makings for four gallons. (For beer I typically brewed the same six gallons as Hubie: inverted my sugar too (reducing it to glucose).) The wine story is funny enough itself.

For your first batch of anything, you must be patient: like horticulture, like fishing … You have to be ready to bottle when the wort is ready, then you have to be ready to let it age. Oregon said that my wine would be drinkable in a couple of months. I believed the instructions.

With great eagerness I unstoppered the first bottle. It was awful. I’ve seldom tasted a worse wine. (We were in Hilary’s mother’s big NY apartment for the year Etta had been transferred by the UN to Geneva. Etta wanted her place looked after. Why not? We enjoyed the vast extra space.) Calvinist to the core, waste a sin, I suffered through the remaining bottles. Hilary never had sip number two of my beer, Hilary never had sip number two of that wine either.

I drank that damn wine down to the last bottle. That is, I forced myself to drink all but the last bottle. That single (26 ounce Coke) bottle of wine then got transferred back to 116^th Street, then to 103^rd Street: the FLEX pad. Years are passing. Finally I decided to rid my closet of that last Coke bottle of my poor wretched wine. I was dining alone. I popper the top: like by beer, my wine bottles were capped, not corked. I decanted. I sipped.

My knees buckled. Sitting in my captain’s chair, my knees still buckled! That wine was glorious! That wine was great! That wine was as fine as any I’ve ever tasted!

It needed to age! That’s all. I would have let the whole four gallons age if only Oregon had given me the correct, patient, instructions.

Now: that was pk’s first and only attempt at wine making. Yet, in time, I had a gourmet result! (Gourmet, by the way, means having a fine appreciation for fine wine and fine food. If you just love fine dining and don’t care about the wine, then you are a gourmand, not a gourmet.) (Thus, now-teetotalling pk is a gourmand. I haven’t been a gourmet since high school: all that beer, all those martinis, making me indifferent to the red stuff. At sixteen I could tell a Medoc from a Saint Émillion. At eighteen I could still tell a Schaefer from a Rheingold. But keep pouring down the booze and after a while you can’t find your ass with both hands.)

Imagine how good a product could be made with environmental controls, no budget problems, your choice of ingredients, expertise consult-able … But I swear, whatever you spend, in a store, you will never taste any wine better than that last bottle of mine. Am I deluded? Or is mass-marketing compromising us? I vote for the latter. You want the great baker’s bread from his home kitchen; not from his factory.

A decade or so ago I read a consultancy handbook that told a funny story to the point. Gal is famous for her bread. People beg her to put in on the market. She does. Great success, rapid expansion. Soon her bread is no better than anything else in the stores. Still, it’s business. Personnel executive interviews eager beaver for quality control. Applicant says first thing he’d do would be to make good bread instead of crap. Exec hires him. By the way, the kid asks, What did you do before you became head of Personnel? I was the head of Quality Control.

The kid would learn soon enough: sell a lot of bread, sell a lot of crap. The problem isn’t in the personnel; the problem is in the scale of the enterprise. Back in the 1950s when the smart thing to do was to make fun of shitty American cars, my very smart friend said that Detroit had engineers just as good as German engineers, that Rheingold had brewmeisters just as knowledgeable as any in Germany, England, Ireland … That wasn’t the problem. In fact, he said, Budweiser DID make great beer: in small quantities: and the executives drank it themselves. The father of that friend could, when he wanted to, serve Scotch to make you happy to die. He’d buy the entire production of some little distillery in Scotland: their whole year’s output! They didn’t have to label it, worry about marketing, blend it with something … Everything went into the quality.

In the same vein: a few years ago I grew my own tomato plants. The tomatoes were tiny. Oh, but the taste! The nourishment! Not is a century has a store sold such a tomato!

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Brian Carey

Brian Carey has been mentioned a few times at K. I shall now begin to coordinate those mentions, few of which may previously have named him.

In high school I settled into a single bunch of regular friends. I came to see that cliques formed by gender, by ethnicity, and by class. My clique was the upper crust male Protestants. We could be friends with a Jew, but they weren’t in the clique. We could go to the movies with the son of an Italian laborer; but they weren’t in the clique. And absolutely no girls. There may have been more than one male Protestant upper-crust clique, there may have been more than one male Jewish upper-crust clique. There were a lot of Jews in Rockville Centre: if not 50/50, then 60/40. Guys who expected to own a gas station drank in one bar, we, expecting to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, executives at least, drank in a different bar. Anyway, I’ve got my group.

One day one of my best friends excitedly says that he’s met some new guy in town, we have to invite him to a party. That was Brian Carey. He’d been kicked out of his school in New England for stealing a car. His parents had moved to put him in a new environment, give him a clean start. His father was a fancy engineer: in charge of building Kennedy Airport as a matter of fact (though it wouldn’t be called “Kennedy” for another several years yet). Brian was a year behind us in the school, but we adopted him with relish. (Hell, two in our clique were age-odd anyway: Roger was the class ahead of us, Dick was older but still in our class: with his younger brother Charlie.) (Sometimes Dick was my best friend: handy, cause he could drive at night way ahead of the rest of us, was the first to have his own car …) So Brian becomes a regular at our beer parties.

Then we all go off to college (except Roger): leaving Brian still in high school. The following year Brian goes off to Notre Dame.

I’m home for Christmas holidays. I happen to glance out one of the front bedroom windows and see a bearded guy walking up the walk. Hey, it’s Brian. The beard can’t fool me, I know him well. Unmistakable walk, bearing … shoulders, shape of the skull … Brian has been kicked out of Notre Dame. Or suspended. They want him to take time off, to mature.

Nonsense. You have to know the story.

Brian was studying architecture. His design prof raised an important question: Can a building be designed to be burglar proof? It’s the same question as Can a locksmith design an unpickable lock? Brian and his South Bend drinking buddy took the position that any building designed to be burglar proof should be enterable by any other architect: if he’s smart enough. Some other locksmith should be able to figure out how to pick the locksmith’s lock. Brian and friend decided to prove their belief by making an appearance within the just opened burglarproof dormitory at Saint Mary’s College, after hours. He and his buddy sat in the bar, no blueprints available to them, but imagined Well, the dorm has to have air conditioning, doesn’t it?

So they found the air conditioning system, unbolted their way in, stuck their heads out of a vent into the third floor hallway, said “Hi,” and evacuated.

Now: did Brian and cohort get a special prize for their design class? No. The nuns at Saint Mary’s threatened the girls with excommunication as well as hell fire if they didn’t rat: ID the perps. Girls are not famous for their spunk, they ratted.

So Brian moves into the Apple with me: in my famous junkie pad. (I didn’t know any better than the cops that it was a junkie pad.) He thinks he’ll skip returning to Notre Dame. He can get an architects license after seven years working for an architecture firm: only a couple of years longer than the architecture course, and he’ll be making money instead of spending it. Sounds reasonable to me.

Brian designed that famous bar on West Broadway and Spring by the way.

Living with me, Brian infected me with his Frank Lloyd Wright mania. Now I already liked Wright, but it wasn’t an obsession. Brian and I decided to employ his South Bend strategy to visit the Guggenheim museum as it was being constructed. We didn’t have to find the air conditioning though: the door was open.

I hope the visitor is familiar with my deschooling attitudes and my role in trying to deschool the world. Institutions typically betray their charter, schools punish initiative, wouldn’t know intelligence if it bit them on the coo. In this world the Yahoos rule: rule by Yahoos, for Yahoos. In a better world, Saint Mary’s would have a plague commemorating Brian’s demonstration of the dorm’s vulnerability. And NYU would have a statue of me.

---

Talking about Carey here I should confess that we had not remained good friends: hadn’t been close: for a decade already before I invited him over for my beer. I once came onto a girl he’d regarded as his. I’d known he had seen her, but I hadn’t thought of them as together. So I feel only a little shame over that incident. (Also: I’d been drunk as well as horny. That’s no excuse, but it does explain a bit. I’m really not sure what I should have been aware of.)

But there had been another incident as well that I do feel enormous shame for: but that should be told in its own module. coming soon. In any event, I never stopped liking Brian; he did stop liking me.

---

More Carey stories have occurred to me since I scribbled the above. Who knows how many I’ll wind up telling in this or related modules? One I’ll mention now, with no time for details:

Brian Carey was shown, looking damn good, in a movie that played in more than a few decent theaters. Given time, I could ID the film maker, and probably the name of the film: “East Village,” Experimental …

Brian inherited from me my addiction to the White Horse Tavern. He became even more of a fixture there than I was: at his own table with his own friends. (He was directly into the Celtic side of things: owned by a German or not, The White Horse was clearly a Celtic bar in terms of clientele: Scots, Irish, Welsh, Breton …) Brian fit right into Tom Clancy’s table as the Clancy Brothers assembled from around the world there, adding extra voices to Tom’s long-familiar solo.

Next thing I know Brian is living half a block from the White Horse, on Perry Street, just off Hudson, the very next block south. He’d taken up with a waitress from the Lion’s Head.

(That too felt half-inherited from me. When Carey roomed with me on Morningside Heights, my “girl friend” (never invited, never not around) had blond hair down past her cute round bottom. Now this waitress, the Lions Head at Hudson and Perry, the Whitehorse at Hudson and 11^th, has straight fair hair arrowing for the carpet well past her waist: well past.

So I’m sitting in a theater to see a Godard movie or something. Some weirdo local movie has been thrown in to add a second title to the bill. And there, all of a sudden, is Brian and his waitress roommate, both dressed to the nines, she in high heels, Brian with a tweed jacket AND a vest, are sauntering around Washington Square Circle, attending one of the regular weekend folk assemblies, going on since before I knew the square, going on since Woody Guthrie … Ah, but this is the 1960s: and cops are everywhere to beat up anything with hair. Brian, well dressed or not, had his magnificent auburn Celtic beard, the girl had blond-blond-blond hair, but to the pavement.

So there it is on film. Brian Carey being whacked by the cops’ billy clubs. And here the Irish thought that behavior had been left in Ireland! or left at the Five Corners, with Boss Tweed.

Years later there was still a word here, a word there, that the city might pay up, give the beating victim subway fare.

Notes

All tastes are acquired:

My one time belief is now contradicted by new science. See the article Study shows taste for meat and fish inherited. Ah, but then my former belief had been contradicted by my still earlier belief!

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Nixon, pk, & the Commie

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2002 10 07

Civilization

IS

Chaos

Can anything exist that is not ordered? If it did, how would we know? How could we be sure? Wouldn’t we have to structure it in order to perceive it? To discuss it?

Chaos is our word for order which is not understood.
Henry Miller

Churches say they represent God. Do we know of any cases where God verifies their claim? Religions say they represent morality. Aren’t religions Johnny-Come-Latelies compared to morality? Kleptocracies claim to embody order: law and order. Is there any truth to this claim? other that the obvious truth already ceded above.

Human institutions rely on human suggestibility for their claims. The audience wants to believe the magician when the magician says that the deck of cards he holds is an ordinary deck of playing cards. The audience doesn’t want to face the implications of their paying money to sit there and be lied to. Subjects of hypnosis have to go along with the hypnosis. They have to accept the suggestion: almost ask for it.

suggestibility
thanx listverse

Hannibal Lecter, Thomas Harris’s fictional psychiatrist who made yet another film debut this weekend is revealed in the novel Hannibal to believe in chaos. After all: he was a young Polish count, a minor aristocrat of the old European feudalism, when World War II mixed things up. He and his sister, both mere children, are captured on their own estates by soldiers running amok, soldiers, gone AWOL, soldiers enlisted, drafted, soldiers who’ve lost contact with their owners: it doesn’t matter: war is a time when the license of soldiering is fairly open. The Lecter children’s soldiers turn cannibal. Soldiering in the winter when you’ve abandoned or been abandoned by your mess hall is a nasty business. The soldiers want to live. Sure they’d rather have a deed to the property: but in the meantime, they’re men: and have guns. They eat little girls. And would have eaten the little boy given the chance. Hannibal experiences chaos as a child. Dr. Lecter sees no difference as an adult. Neither do I. I agree with Dr. Lecter. And I agreed with him long before Harris created him.

To wit: One day, early seventies, I’m walking down Broadway, walking south from 116^th Street on the west side. There are, or at least were, several book stores in those couple of blocks. One on the south west corner of 113^th or so I had heard was owned by a communist. The literature on the periodical bench certainly tended to be left wing: even a little European. The store sold novels and poetry but was carefully stocked with political stuff. The guy most often in attendance was mounted up by his elevated cash register, the better to view shoplifters I suppose. I presume he was the owner: the Communist! I was taking this little walk the morning that news came out that Nixon had just bombed some other poor country: Laos or Cambodia. Some political question had also just been settled. I don’t remember whether a primary had been won or what, but it was apparent that Nixon was with us to stay. The commie proprietor was glowering. He looked like he needed a gallon a Alka-Seltzer. I’m browsing around, my usual dopey yo-yo self: Do, di, do. Finally the guy can’t stand my presence. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “Didn’t you hear the news? Nixon is bombing Laos now.”

I look up cheerful and smiling. “Yes,” I agreed. “But I’m an anarchist. And I see us to be living in chaos ever more pure. This surely is the best of all possible worlds.”

The commie’s jaw dropped. He stood and stared. “You’re blowing my mind,” he said.

2005 08 31 I’ll add: Chaos is our word for our frustration at the strict orders of the universe not yielding to orders we imagine (and palm onto Law if not to God).

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Wolfe, A Man in Full

Reading Notes /

Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full, novel

I love Tom Wolfe: have since I read the first sentence of The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test in the 1960s. I swiftly came to regard him as the greatest living journalist and one of the best ever. Then he started writing novels. I love and admire them too: none more than A Man in Full.

I love the ambiguity of the title, or should I say the multiple application of the title: Who’s the man in full? Charlie? Conrad? or Epictetus? Or all three? Or two of the three?

Zeus, Europa
thanx philosophy-of-cbt

I particularly relate to Conrad as well as to Epictetus since I was arrested in 2006.

Conrad is wrongly persecuted by municipal bureaucracies as well as by fate. He’s livid, indignant, rightly so. “It isn’t right“, he iterates. He refuses to plea bargain. Naturally, being bureaucrats, processors, the court doesn’t hear or understand a word he says. No facts are admissible in the court: except those that confiscate private money, making it become, for the moment, public money. On page 441 Conrad, by accident, meets Epictetus, a jail bird from two thousand years ago. Epictetus says you can’t control whether you’re arrested; what you can control is how you take the arrest, the assault, the robbery, the decapitation … Conrad is getting singled out for persecution by the morons in the jail as well as by the morons running the jail. What’s he gonna do? What would Epictetus approve? Conrad recalls his refusal to plea bargain. There. He did the right thing, the noble thing, the heroic thing: he didn’t yield!
His wife wanted him to yield, his mother-in-law, his lawyer … the court, the judge, the cops … his victimizers … But he didn’t.

The whole story couldn’t be told in a court room.
Leave Her to Heaven

Well: I was all braced to refuse to plea bargain, to insist on my innocence, and on the society‘s guilt. But no plea bargains were offered in my case! My public defender was embarrassed. He stands and sits and oversees the fed beating up on people day after day. Most of them are scum, most of them are as bad as any of the judges: or worse. But plea bargaining is how the game is usually played. The cop arrests you, the prosecutor says the court will put you away for ten years, or twenty; but, if you plead guilty, save the state money, don’t defend yourself, let the truth be whatever the prosecution says, then the state, the court will put you away for only five years. Think of your poor family. and so forth.

In may case there was no bargain offered. But that’s impossible. There sort of was once, a weird one. My lawyer explained to me:

If I tried to explain myself, my actions, if I tried to tell them who I was, and have been for 2/3 of a century, when they’ve gone out of their way, for all that time, and longer, not to know, not to notice, not to understand, then the fed would find a jury of Palm Beach citizens who would want me in jail for ever! Would punish me without mercy for being what I am while they are what they are. The fed, in its compassion, would put me in jail for only forty years. I was sixty-eight then: if I lived I’d be one hundred and eight then … Meantime it was supposed that the court would insist that I retract what I had written in my AgainstHeirarcy.org domain. But: if I recanted: if I agreed that the state was golden and I was a misled toxic recusant, if I pled Guilty! and threw myself on their mercy, I’d go home in fifteen months: the absolute minimum punishment allowable by the fed.

The fed doesn’t get it, neither does the pope: the absolute minimum punishment allowable by the universe is forever! Don’t get it, cheat, and you’re dead, forever, no chance of reforming.
Oh: maybe some AI will come along, see our corpses, our Ozymandian monuments, diagnose the causality on the instant, say, “They killed themselves, by being too stupid to live: so, here, Let’s resurrect them! Jurrasic Park them back to life, let them eat us out of house and home too, toxify the whole universe.”

I’d put myself in a position to be arrested because I mistakenly believed that arrested and jailed, I’d be fed and housed and still have access to my five internet domains. I’d tell my story from jail: could work eighteen hours a day and not worry about feeding or housing myself.
My lawyer didn’t tell me but one percent of the truth in any of these regards (he may not have known much more himself!) I wasn’t warned that the judge would censor my modules, that my internet host (Canadian!) would panic and destroy all of my data for all five of my domains: destroy my business, PKImaging.com, my home page, Knatz.com, my science, Macroinformation.org, my history as the deschooler, the inventor of the internet, InfoAll.org, and my politics, AgainstHierarchy.org. I had no idea that the FBI had already confiscated and crippled all of my computers, destroyed their synergy, unnetworked them.
I had no warning that my son, whom I’d burdened with copies of all my data, would not remount my domains when the fed knocked them down! I had no idea that not one person that I know of would offer one peep against any of these crimes.

In any case my lawyer seduced me into accepting the guilty plea, gambling that I might get the option not offered as a deal, a plea bargain, that I’d get fifteen months instead of forty years. So I could get back to work, adding the accounts of my arrest to work already there. I never imagined that the judge would destroy all my work, or that when I did get home, he did give me the dangled fifteen months sentence, I still wouldn’t have my computers or internet access, that I would specifically be forbidden internet access: the internet which in its current debased state is a plagiarism and perversion of the free internet I offered in 1970.
My internet was an offer to track unmanaged information cyberneticly for the public. In other words, my FLEX was offered as competition for the US: an unmanaged democracy, eschewing licenses, privilege, offering options of Christian humility, modesty, offering a withdrawal from the love of money.

I may burn in hell for this forever.
Federal Public Defender Dave Lee Brannen
on not defending me, not defending God’s messenger
Feb. 2007
(The US gave Dave a $5,000 bonus!)

I do admit that Dave was the smartest lawyer I’ve ever talked to: dishonest, corrupt, but smart. He knew where he had hidden the truth.

I’ll edit, digest, express this more fully, more smoothly after I breathe a bit. and say more about Tom Wolfe, what a great guy.

Reading Notes

Pardon My Johnson

Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org & Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / Social Order / Civilization / Justice /
2004 07 18

Pardon Jack Johnson

Ken Burns, PBS documentary film maker who always gets his nose into interesting business if not always in the very best way, is petitioning Congress or someone to request a pardon for Jack Johnson. Boxing champion Johnson you see was convicted under the Mann Act, judged guilty of transporting women across state line for immoral purposes. The woman in question was his wife. She lived with him anyway. The immoral purposes were their conjugal relations. She was, in the culture’s judgment you see, “white”; he was not.

thanx latimes

I’d prefer to see Jack Johnson petitioned to pardon white America!

I know some doosey stories about Champion Jack. As I find time, I’ll tell some here.

Johnson owned a bar in Chicago. White folks would come slumming. JJ would quote Chaucer at them: in the Middle English. Of course the slummers couldn’t quote back. When JJ worked out in public, he’d wrap his dick with tape before putting his trunks on: give the ticket buyers (the illusion of) what they feared to see: a huge shlong on a mean mother fucker. JJ liked to punish his opponents: not knock them out while he tortured them: carrying on witty trash talk with the front seats the while. When he won the championship he had a train waiting for him on a special track: stocked with champagne and women. After he beat the former world champion in the ring, he had to fight the public to get to his train. Hell, and they had guys there — Jack London, for example — with rusty razor blades to castrate the uppity oob-a-jig. Of course he won that second fight too. JJ kept a bedroom upstairs in one of his bars: big bed, mirrors on the ceiling. Women lined up at the bottom of the stairs, waited patiently. And apparently weren’t disappointed once their turn came. JJ finally did do some of that jail time. But he did it on his terms. JJ made a deal from England: he’d come home, and go to jail, provided that … And the fuzz agreed a long list. His door was not locked: he could come and go. Anyone could visit him, spend the night, receive the same posh service from the guards that he expected. …

I have a JJ quote — I believe in the same file that supplies the random quotes just below. But I’ll fill in the context a bit here: Johnson was in England, much lionized. Some English peer, Lord Tweedmouth, if I heard it right and the story wasn’t just making a joke with the name, was showing Johnson around his estates: complaisantly listing inventory like a Swiss hotelier: so many acres, so many rooms to the castle, so much silverware, so many stables … “Tell you what, Tweedmouth,” Johnson interrupted, “I’ll flip you for them.”

Music Quotes

2013 05 22 I got my Jack Johnson lore from an old boxing magazine in the day room at Camp Drum my last couple of months as a draftee, 1963. It was 1971 that Miles’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson came out.

thanx last.fm

I first got it as a cassette for my PK FineArts-mobile, then got the album, then the first of several CDs. Replaying after a period of time always brings tears to my eyes. One of Miles’, one of the world’s, high points.

Of course the US has no business pardoning Jack Johnson: the US had no business ever interferring with him in any way: any more than it had any business interfering with me: arresting me, jailing me, censoring me: any more than it ever had of putting me in school, seeing that I wasn’t published, was fired … was a pariah …
And JJ shouldn’t pardon the US. I don’t think Miles did. And I certainly don’t.
But wisdom can’t apply in general until facts are knowable. That will come with God, and Judgment, or never.

Meantime, laugh at the morons presented to you as judges, teachers, journalists, scientists …
Truth always has a voice, nearly inaudible.

Justice

Justice

Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org & Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / NoHier / Justice /
2000 04 14

I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else. That is the alpha and omega of my argument. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Justice is a major theme at my home page, but till now there’s been no module of that title. Today I start this new development file to make for the moment only one point. Starting it off requires the repetition of a point made passim: that everything in a kleptocracy is mislabeled.

The justice system in a kleptocracy has really only one purpose. The stated purposes of punishing crime, compensating victims, applying disinterested laws with uniformity … may misfire or be entirely absent in practice. No, the true purpose of a justice system is simple and all justice systems bat 1000 on this issue.

Never find the kleptocracy itself guilty of anything.

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Locking up crooks is just window dressing.

2001 01 25 OK. Let’s make that two things kleptocratic justice systems bat one thousand on:

Never find the kleptocracy itself responsible for anything.

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A favorite story:

Journalist in Ireland, sees an old man standing in the field. Asks old man, “If you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, what would it be?” Old man looks piercingly at journalist, his eye glittering. “Judgment,” he says.

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The context is of course Christian: indeed, Roman Catholic, where judgment and justice are equated: a “just” “God” giving the judgment.

Fortunately, men are weak, bribable, so sometimes justice can be done.
Mother Courage

justice

2001 03 10 Three things: kleptocracies budget for justice so that power, coercion, force … is coordinated: That way the Mohawk can never get their land back, neither will General Sutter: the slaves will never get an apology. The Canaanites will never get their land back from the Jews: and if they did, they’d never have to give it back to the Commons!

Justice is so high and holy a thing that it belongs excluvely to those wise enough and rich enough to know where to buy it.
The Earth Will Shake

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If you’re just, Lord, you’ll measure time with man’s measure, not with yours. That’s what justice means.
The Last Temptation of Christ

I love it! The rabbi tells God what justice is. The rabbi tells God how to measure. The rabbi had just explained all sorts of things to God: time, obligations, ownership rights … But he climaxes with justice.

Apropos of macroinformation, notice that the richest information here is not in the data! The macroinformation is unbounded.

There can be no justice. The world ain’t right.
A Spectacle of Corruption

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2001 05 02: The only justice I want (I don’t say “expect”) is for the justice departments of all kleptocracies (that’s every government that’s ever been) to declare themselves incompetent, to pay back their salaries, to forfeit their pensions, and to turn the money back: into nature. (Ha ha, fat chance.) If a bully beats me up (as bullies have done more than once), and I can’t defend myself, that’s tough. That’s nature. What I can’t stand is to be told by a populous bully with its hands in all pockets, that I mustn’t defend myself: that they’ll defend me for me. Then they don’t. That shouldn’t be any surprise: but we can’t get their hands out of our pockets! (And I can’t even embarrass them that they govern morality, religion … write the laws, write “history” … decide what’s “true” …)

Justice Scrapbook

Justice, forsooth! Does human life exhibit justice after this fashion? Is it the good always who ride in gold coaches and the wicked who go to the workhouse? Is a humbug never preferred before a capable man? Does the world always reward merit, never worship cant, never raise mediocrity to distinction? never crowd to hear a donkey braying from a pulpit, nor ever buy the tenth edition of a fool’s book? Sometimes the contrary occurs, so that fools and wise, bad men and good, are more or less lucky in their turn, and honesty is “the best policy,” or not, as the case may be. William Makepeace Thackeray

2006 01 01 Monotheism tries to centralize causes and then attribute authority to the centralization: God: one cause, one truth, one judge. The idea of justice and authority go hand in hand. I don’t doubt that people living simply in bands, finding food, hunting, would have a concept of compensation; but would uncentralized society have a concept of justice?

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I can dismiss my ideas of centralization, monotheism, civilization; but I’ll be damned if I can dismiss my longing for justice.

2005 08 30 Justice? One should be specific: whose justice? Is Hitler’s justice the same as Nixon’s? or mine? Which set of laws? or traditions? which court? Who was the judge?

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Even if you’re talking about God’s justice, you should specify which God. Even in the bible, the Jewish God shows more than one kind.

For nearly a half century now pk’s shtick on God, his justice, his judgment, is that we wouldn’t know God from Satan if he bit us.

When Christian time is over, judgment commences, and eternity can really begin. But in infinite time, Prigogine time, eternity is merely another moment of pathology. In pk time, when eternity concludes, God’s god, whom he didn’t even know about, judges God. And so on. Infinitely. So there is no final word: except in the sense that the current 2005 US Open will have a “final”: then, next year, another.

Judicial Judgments

2005 07 04 How can justice possibly occur without prior injustices first having been corrected? We judge and convict the murderer without proving that the condemned has no open pleas against us.

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2002 10 07 I’ve gone to court to seek justice twice. Both times I’ve been sorry I didn’t just hijack a plane and crash it into the offender’s eyebrow instead. The second time, suing Macy’s for having an illegally dangerous escalator that chewed my son’s leg up for his fifth Christmas, is complicated. For the moment I’ll just say that we finally settled at Macy’s offer of $25,000. Macy’s had been sued by other parents with chewed children before: many times before. And for decades, whenever I happened by Macy’s, I’d check that escalator: looked older than the Eiffel Tower. The last time I was there it was still the same, still illegal, never fixed or replaced. Macy’s knew it. The police knew it. The courts knew it. I’ll return to those points.

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Today I tell a simpler story: one involving only Small Claims Court. I paid my fee. I won the judgment. It was a waste of time. The court gave me no help whatever in collecting. I should have just shot the guy in the knee.

Not all of my readers will be intimate with New York City and not all of those who are will be familiar with Harlem. And if you know Harlem, how well do you appreciate the importance of Minton’s? I watched a documentary in which Jimmy Breslin interviewed Dexter Gordon. Gordon tried to tell Breslin about Minton’s. It was obvious: Breslin had never heard of it. It was further obvious: even after hearing the words, Breslin still didn’t apprehend the degree of holiness of that shrine. Minton’s is where Bird, Diz, Monk … jammed. Minton’s was the birthplace of bebop. If that doesn’t make your knees tremble, if you haven’t felt the passing of the Lord, then you’re just not a member of the right species.

I started hanging at the New York jazz clubs when I was fifteen: 1953. I didn’t scour Harlem for more till I was in college: and then, maybe a sophomore or junior, not a freshman. Minton’s was where I went most often. Eventually I also loved Small’s Paradise and the Club Baron: my visits to the Baron continuing through the 1970s. When I met the young sister of my future wife, and then Hilary herself, I took them, the girls then being aged sixteen and nineteen, to Minton’s. Around 1966 Hilary and I were leaving Minton’s, West 117^th Street and walking toward the VW bug parked on St. Nicholas Avenue. A bunch of dudes were lounging against a car right there on 117^th, a beautiful German shepherd at their feet. I stopped to fuss over the dog. Her owner introduced himself as Marty and the bitch as Princess. We told Marty that our shepherd, Angus, was about ten months old and around Princess’s size. Marty said that the bitch was going on the same age and would be entering her first heat soon. We exchanged phone numbers as part of our plans to mate them. As owners of the male, we’d get the choice of the litter: Marty would have all the rest, however many that was: standard arrangement.

Angus at the Riverside Drive apartment

When the dog’s heat started Marty brought Princess to Riverside Park. We got bored with the inept youngsters’ foreplay and met again. And again. I wanted to offer some details on Minton’s but there’s no need to detail Angus’s first mating beyond how I’ve already told it elsewhere. I’ll just summarize that we visited Marty and his woman in their apartment on St. Nicholas more often than Marty traveled over to Riverside with Princess. We even had dinner at Marty’s one evening, take-home chicken and Tarzan on the TV. (It was instructive to this Ivy Leaguer to hear the timing of the laughter or awe of people who showed no signs of having been valedictorian of their class.) (I was among the lower orders in my high school, but no one questioned that I was quick: and deep: quickly to the depths.) (Finally it was hard to tell which effect they were responding to: so many had passed before there was any response at all.)

Somewhere in there Marty pointed out to me that his woman was a ‘ho. Marty was a pimp. Oh well, the Hotel Cecil, host to Minton’s Playhouse, was supposed to be one of those hotels. This was one of those neighborhoods. (Though Marty lusted for the luscious girl across the street with the same frustrated helplessness that I did: not every woman was either loose or for sale.)

Cut to the chase. The pups are born. I visit again and again. At three weeks, I can take my choice. Marty won’t let me in. I bring a paying customer: ready to buy a different pup for $125. But, I hear, Marty has already sold all of the pups to neighbors: at $50 each. “But without my papers, without both our papers, we can’t register them. Legally, they’re ‘mutts’.” No answer.

Needless-to-say I felt imposed upon. Small Claims Court charges me so many dollars. A court date is set. Marty doesn’t show. That means I’ve won. Goody.

But what did I win? Nothing. The court told me my next procedure. I sent a registered letter to Marty informing him that I had the court’s backing that he owed me $125, the 1966 value of a pedigreed pup, plus my costs: the pick of the litter was no longer an option. Nothing. The registered letter wasn’t delivered by the simple expedient of Marty refusing to accept it from the post office. Maybe he’d given me a phony last name. The address was certainly real.

Apparently I was free to hire detectives, gather evidence to “prove” that Marty was Marty, that he lived there, that the dog had born pups … If I can’t afford to lose $125, how can I afford to hire detectives? Why should I believe that the detectives would prove to be more effective than the court?

In City of Industry Harvey Keitel’s character is asked why he doesn’t call the police. “I’m my own police,” he says. So should we be all.

That reminds me of another story. But I don’t want to store it under Justice. It relates to the parent folder: Society as Kleptocracy. It’s also another personal story: a category with its own sub-directory. I’ll put it there. Bottom-line: I’ll call it Nixon, pk, & the Commie: Civilization IS Chaos.

2003 04 05 I’ve reshuffled files and directories once again: the points remain the same.

2005 07 30 Any kleptocracy offers justice: and kleptocracies are the only societies to get written up (with an airbrush) by media, promoted in the history books. (Literacy is a kleptocratic artifact.) Kleptocracies offer justice as freely as the carnie with the cement milk bottles offers a chance at a kewpie doll. Kleptocracies offer justice up the ass with a red hot poker.

But how much of the justice is just?

(About as much as carnival goers win kewpie dolls.)

2006 09 23 People will never judge themselves properly. Therefore we need a god.

Therefore there must be a god: because we need one.

Or: no one needs to judge anyone or anything. Therefore: there’s no need for a god.

(All of the above is entirely irrelevant to whether one (or a zillion) exists.)

Justice

Monitor Incrimination

Recreating (and advancing) pk’s censored domains: Macroinformation.org &
Knatz.com / Teaching / Society / Social Order / DeGate / DeSchooling / School’s Purpose /

The title represents my intention: to comment on how a purpose of schools (that is, state-controled, state-compelled attendance at titularly secular rituals) is to control how much self-incriminating evidence can reach the minds of the attendees: like Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves meeting with their lawyer to block a videotape of the robbery being shown to a jury. The schools’ success will depend in large part on the will of the subjects to be deceived. Jews can say, “We didn’t murder Jesus: and who the hell was he anyway that we should care whether we murdered him or not?” Christians can say, “The Jews killed Jesus: they more than deserve any mischief done to them.” But can Christians say, “We didn’t keep slaves. Slavery is wrong. We were always against slavery.”

Can Christians say, “We didn’t murder Hypatia. We couldn’t have: we’re the good guys. And we didn’t destroy the library at Alexandria. Besides, who the hell was Hypatia? Never heard of her.” And “Why not destroy the library? It’s all pagan!”

Schools are miraculous. Send everyone to school, and in no time you’ll have them all saying that they’re the good guys, were always against slavery, never stole anything important from the natives, have always been right, about everything.

This miracle is best accomplished if the school is run by a state much of the same mind. Our compulsion is your freedom.

scribble, bibble: I promised this piece, butchered it, will return. I’ll try to say better what’s done and how it’s done.

School’s Purpose