we stood in Darks

[ @@@ Toj :: Three Thunderpain ]

Report to you I will th fact that I had fun in Darks! I (& friend Vinnie) appeared at a party hosted by Gothic Funk in Hyde Park in Chicago! Th concept: party in th Dark! Sun down, lights out, windows covered. Th exception: wearable light permitted! Bits of hovering humanlight went to & fro. I donned round punchlight as medallion, w/ initials NN to identify appropriated Self during performancetime. Which happened.

As Nim, I played a funtimes set in th dark, unplugged, mandogasmically fancylike! People did claps, taps, beats, & grand singalongery; I enjoyed an audience thus engaged in Jamtype betweens! Indeed, my people had heard of Eris (All Hail Discordia, mhftee!) & song-poems (I played 'Pink Roses Palace' & 'Jimmy Carter Says Yes' for an appreciative bunch of Happies)!

I did a bit of wanders in dark to meet people whose faces I could only guess at th identifying details of. People seemed kind & interesting, fans of stuffed sharks, statistics, quantum physics, half nakedness, etc.

Sol Truck

I should mention also th very excellent band that played second: Sol Truck, a marvelously strange & lovely set of Eastern Europeans! They did songs w/ accordion, slide whistle, guitar, [tiny] keyboard, Jews' harps & lots of fun vocalizations (grunts, shouts, sings, giggles). I loved them & wish I'd had a chance to chat chat chat w/ them after their set. Another time! Hooray for Sol Truck.

Now I have shared my times w/ you.

Much love & Coconothingness,
AndR Q Nim

th Gods of Certification Tests (& 111th st)

Going on three hours of sleep, I drove my desperately-in-need-of-an-oil-change-&-tune-up Honda way th hey down to 111th st for a teacher certification test in th area of music (kallisti free, this kind). Indeed, fatigue I felt, although also zippy zaps from my lapsang souchong, but I survived (did well, I think) & have th gods to thank. You see, I rolled a 1 (again) on a d6, selecting by chance a reality-tunnel to see thru today: Paganism. So I traveled Long & South whilst praying to (amongst many): Apollo, Eris, Pan, Baphomet, Orpheus, Ra, Isis, Horus. On th return trip, I added Thoth & Odin. You may recognize a Western bias here, & I would surely agree that I have much work to do on introducing myself to non-Western god(desse)s. So that will constitute a project for this afternoon: starting with some African Yoruba Orishas (here) & moving on th Mayan pantheon (which I began studying last night in point of fact; did you know th Mayans worshiped a goddess of suicide named Ixtab, whom we often find depicted hanging from a tree, partially decomposed? How deliciously morbid!).

Hail Ixtab!

Eris inspired some beautifully ridiculous bureaucracy today, when a couple hundred or so teachers & teachers-to-be were not allowed to enter th testing facility before exactly 7:30 (although I think it was later than that) & were forced to stand huddled in th pouring rain right outside th door. (Hail th Rain Gods, all zillion of them!) Th testing experience provided lots more opportunities to witness th utter confusion & discord that inevitably accompanies our beautifully ridiculous bureaucracy. Even th spelling of th word bureaucracy exudes utter confusion & discord, don't you think? Hail Eris!

Lastly, I want to mention th spec-effing-tacular show that George & Tiffany & I attended last night. Th wondermagickal Fiery Furnaces performed at th Empty Bottle, rather near my apartment, I popped my mama-effing brainhole, I swear to Yahweh! They have a way of shattering their songs to a billion pieces & piecing them back together in inspiring ways with beautiful chaotic glue. They made me want to throw all my songs off th Sears Tower & write new ones! In a good way! Hail Furnaces!

th K.

I just figured out what th K stands for in magick & musick! Certainly, it must stand for KALLISTI!

Yayk!

music(k) news

Zikes, I've forgotten to talk about my music(k)ings! I originally started this blog for th sole purpose of keeping track of my Nodal Nim & xenharmonics projects long ago. Well, now I tell th latest.


MAN OF MUSICKS EDWIN

I have begun musicking with a gentleman named Eddie. We express enthusiasm for dual sounds that please (slash disturb) th ear & spirit in near future times.


PLASTIC BOXING FOR BILLS

Upon th headstock of my mando, I attach a children's small plastic toy garden hoe with trusty rubber bands; to th flat end of th hoe I attach a small plastic food storage box with trusty duct tape; inside th food storage box I attach a cut piece of necktie for softening sound, again with trusty duct tape; into th box I place six dollars.

Thus I have created a tips box attached to my instrument! Why? For fun, for mobility, & to attract th eye. I busked with said box once last week - made one dollar & promptly lost it (I need to make sure th lid to my tips box stays shut whilst not accepting tips, or th wind robs me of dollars).


OPEN MIC AT HOTTI BISCOTTI

I did play last night:

.. prickle prickle
.. ant lizard dragon man (co-writer: S.Marshall)
.. th slipry toad
.. chupacabra
.. glockenspiels
.. e blu apratus

Certainty of this order of playing I have not.


ERISIAN ODE ASSEMBLAGES

I have done some putting together of a 23-songlet Erisian Ode of sorts & find myself pleased by th results at recent points in spacetime. I suspect I will have it finished & on myspace in near dates. Additional details of such thing follow in necessary moments in patience.

MUSICK

This is a digital reproduction of a quite analog booklet I began distributing in Chicago on May 12, 2007 called MUSICK. Th original consists of sixteen tiny black & white pages with lots of words & few pictures. This version contains some scans of th original & some spruced-up stuff. I've added a few pictures, colors & comments. Th latter you will recognize because it will look like this paragraph: purple & italic.

00002

Salutations!

I am Andrew Heathwaite, a.k.a. Nodal Nim, & I welcome you to page two of my manifesto, MUSICK! I've got a few ludicrous thoughts to share with you today: some nonsense, twaddle, paradoxes & chaos that I hope you'll find inspiring. In fact, my ultimate goal with this free booklet is th formation of some sort of MUSICKAL COLLECTIVE (i.e. BAND).

Why th funny spelling, music with a k? It's based on th word MAGICK, thus spelt to distinguish it from stage magic - "magicians" pulling rabbits out of hats & playing tricks on people through deceit & sleight of hand. MAGICK is not th same as magic. Phil Hine, in his illuminating booklet Oven-Ready Chaos, tells us:

"Magick is surprisingly simple. What can it offer?

1. A means to disentangle yourself from the attitudes and restrictions you were brought up with and which define the limits of what you may become.
   
2. Ways to examine your life to look for, understand, and modify behaviour, emotional and thought patterns which hinder learning and growth.
   
3. Increase of confidence and personal charisma.
   
4. A widening of your perception of just what is possible, once you set your heart and mind on it.
   
5. To develop personal abilities, skills and perceptions - the more we see the world, the more we appreciate that it is alive.
   
6. To have fun. Magick should be enjoyed.
   
7. To bring about change - in accordance with will."

00003

MUSICK is an attempt to apply th principles of magick to music.

It is based on th ideas that:

1. You, I, everyone everywhere is a Robot.
   
2. We, as Robots, are programmed by our imprints, our experiences, & th things we decide we "know".
   
3. All that we do, we do through our programming.
   
4. Most of th time, we do not write our programming; it is written for us.
   
5. Metaprogramming is programming yourself - causing conscious changes in your own nervous system. It is th stuff of Shamanism, Magick, & MUSICK.

We, th collective, devote ourselves not to music, but to MUSICK! We challenge all musical programming for th continuous remanifestation of MUSICKAL metaprogramming intended to disorder & free everyone everywhere! We play to free ourselves, but also to free everyone everywhere. One unconscious listening experience (on th street, in a club, anywhere) begins a process of reimprinting / disordering of th mind & its programs through exposure to our highly charged musickal arcana. We play to illuminate!

Think all this is bullshit / metaphysical mumbo-jumbo / twaddle? Good! So do I!

Let's do it anyway!

00004

REALITY TUNNELS

Each individual's unique & very limited view of th WORLD is a reality tunnel. Peter Carroll, in his book Liber Null, suggests six fundamental reality tunnels that people have tended to adopt. He claims that one develops into th next, & that th whole set is cyclical.

1. Paganism
   
2. Monotheism
   
3. Atheism
   
4. Nihilism (Low Atheism)
   
5. Chaoism
   
6. Superstition (Low Chaoism)

"Try each of them for a week, a month, or a year. This exercise may save one an unnecessary incarnation or two."

00006

AGNOSTICISM

Some wisdom from Robert Anton Wilson

"My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any more need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where the absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.

My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physics as 'the Copenhagen Interpretation,' because it was formulated in Copenhagen by Dr. Niels Bohr and his co-workers c. 1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called 'model agnosticism' and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, 'The map is not the territory.' Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental Philosophy, restated it more vividly as 'The menu is not the meal.'

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, 'My current model' - or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel - 'contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised.' In terms of the history of science and of knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude."

00008

DISCORDIANISM

is a paradoxical post-modern pseudo-religion devoted to ERIS, th Greek Goddess of Chaos, Discord, & Strife. It mixes humor with truth in remarkable ways.

From Discordianism's holy book, Principia Discordia, here are some illuminating Discordian catmas (opposite of dogmas):

"Convictions cause convicts."

"It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs."

" 'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds."

"Nonsense as Salvation: The human race will begin solving its problems of the day that it ceases taking itself so seriously."

"Every Man, Woman & Child is a Discordian Pope."

Here's another good one: "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads."






00011

Some thoughts on GAMES. . . .

In everything we do, we are playing GAMES.
Everything is a GAME.

If everything is a GAME, everything is absurd.
If everything is a GAME, everything is arbitrary.
If everything is a GAME, ultimately, nothing is true & everything is permitted.

But most of th time, we don't play games of our own creation.
Someone else makes th rules.
We follow them.
Or if we rebel & break them, we do so according to an alternative set of rules which we also did not create.

Our musickal collective will not play by anyone else's rules. We will create our own & keep them constantly in flux, paradoxical, impossible to follow. In so doing, we will avoid dogmatism & taking ourselves too seriously.

We will disorder th rules through chaotic meta-rules.

Th goal of th game is to transcend th game.

Page 00013 in th original booklet consists of one POPE & one MESSIAH card with th message, "Cut these out to claim YOUR BIRtHRigHt." Rather than copy them here, I will link you to th place where I got them myself: poee.co.uk, an excellent Discordian resource.

Page 00014 is th back page of th POEE cards & contains just a bunch of black & th page number.


00015

Are you utterly confused by all this?

If so, we have more in common than you may think.

So there's th low-down. I'm looking for people. People who live in Chicago, preferably. People who want to play every style of music on every instrument they can find. (Also no styles of music on no instruments.) People who want to play on th streets & begin illuminating th world immediately. People who want to devote themselves to chaos & metaprogramming. This is not about making money or looking cool. It's about MUSICK. It's about being:

agnostic * chaotic * absurd * transcendent * viral

So contact me, Andrew Aaron Heathwaite, at
gtrpkt AT yahoo DOT com * 315-657-6839 * myspace.com/nodalnim

days of holi

Hello, lovlies,

Hey, th date registers as April 23rd (in slave time), so that must mean some sort of holiday comes about, what say? Happy some-sort-of-holiday!

(& to me personally, Happy VI of Swords / Knight of Swords Day. What windy fun!)

Yesterday, Earth Day came about, & I hope th weather wondered you as much as it wondered us Chicagoans in 80-degree wondermagickal danceabouts. On behalf of Mars, Saturn, & Mercury (th celestial bodies, not th Olympiads & Titans), I register offense at th undersight that all th other Solar planets don't get their own holidays! Earth Schmurth!

I should mention, though, that th holiest of planets, th sextantric dwarf planet of Eris, of course, gets a quite joyunctious day of holi:

September 13 (37 Bureaucracy): Mass of Planet Eris

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

~a

Summa Discordia / Apocrypha Discordia

For my own satisfaction, I wish to review two marvelous post-Principia Discordian holybooks!

Principia Discordia

But to start with, I should mention Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her, th Magnum Opiate of Malacylpse th Younger - th first written utterances in modern times sent up to honor Goddess Eris, composed in th late 1950s & largely ignored in its time. This book contains th only canonical (if you can call it that) info about Discordianism. It introduces Eris worship through th authors' own psychedelic revelation at a bowling alley, pokes lots of fun at organized religion, provides suggestions for chaotic & ludicrous Discord, & even throws in some inspired philosophical bits. & all this appears amongs dozens of silly pictures, jokes & puns & Erisian Nonsense. It advocates Nonsense as Salvation, th Adoption of Holy Names, th use of a Discordian Calendar, th use of th Sacred Chao as a religious icon. It introduces some wacky fictional apostles, th Curse of Greyface, th Turkey Curse, tips for member initiation & th forming of independent cabals, & of course th Law of Fives (All things happen in Fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of Five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5). & all along it raises th paradoxical questions, "Is this Serious or just a Joke?"

Of course, th only appropriate answer to questions like that is Mu.

(After all, All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false and in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.)

Th Principia changed my life & lots of others as well.

Lately, Discordianism has found a new life on th internet, where scores of strange folk have developed th basic ideas in th Principia through email lists & websites & found it quite applicable to th 90s & th new millenium. In addition to dozens of websites, a number of "holy books" have cropped up, all "kopylefted" - published with permission granted for anybody to do with it whatever th heck ey wants - "all rights reversed".

So I bought a few newer holybooks online & have been gradually reading them. Some I found too serious (th Books of Eris), too boring (A Pocket Full of Chaos), or too pointless (Apotheosis Psycherotica). I enjoyed these all somewhat, but I didn't find them exceptional.

Summa Discordia

However, just yesterday, I found myself totally enthralled by th Summa Discordia by th Beatus Ffungo. It really feels like it picks up where th Principia leaves off, but of course, forty years later. Th Beatus writes in a very smart, readable & humorous style, walking th same line th Principia walks between seriousness & comedy. I laughed out loud several times & found myself quite inspired by th book's empowering message of nonconformity. Where th Principia talks about Nonsense as Salvation, th Summa talks about th Functionality of th Strange. Ffungo derides THEM & th System & reveals to us that th Defamation League is trying to pass cabbages off as humans. "Why they are doing this is uncertain, but keep in mind these are some of the same people who said you'd go to hell for spanking the monkey."

Try going to a mall, for instance. Sit in the Food Court and just watch people. You'll start seeing the difference [between humans & cabbages] pretty quickly, and, if you're in a typical mall, about 85% of the ambulatory things you see will secretly be cabbages. If you can, sneak a quick third-eye glance just to confirm it, but don't let them catch you.

Th Summa is a great short read, but, like all other post-Principia holybooks I've encountered, its layout isn't as fun as th Principia's. Don't let that get you down. I think you'll enjoy it.

Some other highlights: Discordian Haiku, an interview with a Famous Guy (Jesus), th Mentos Conspiracy, a thoughtful discussion of Discordian Holy Names, & a very brief introduction to Operation Mindfuck.

Apocrypha Discordia

This 100-page compilation of Discordian writings provides a great variety of new ideas. I don't find it as consistently brilliant as th Principia & th Summa, but I uncovered some real gold in there. It features some ideas for Discordian ceremonies & rituals (A Mouse Banishing Ritual, an Invocation of Eris, a ritual for invoking th five Discordian Elements - sweet, boom, pungent, prickle & orange, etc.). Some of that seems to take itself too seriously, but that's a risk you take with things like that.

I particularly enjoyed th elaboration on Operation Minkfuck, which they also call Guerrilla Surrealism. Th Apocrypha describes several "Jakes," which are something like Discordian magic(k) spells intended to randomly baffle innocent bystanders (& minions of Greyface/cabbages) & create ultimately positive Eristic Vibrations. An example: mailing someone hundreds of identical sheep-shaped erasers anonymously, one at a time, with a written number on each mailing counting down from 203. (Oddly, this section claims to originate in th Summa Discordia, but I don't have it in my copy. I think th editor of my version of th Summa may have missed some things in tranferring th book from th internet to print.)

Th Apocrypha contains lots of unrelated ideas, like rules for Discordian card games, short silly parables, a luck spell, an intro to Discordian Magick, some alchemy, some interviews with fictional characters, & a description of a Discordian Tarot deck (no pics). A low point, in my opinion: some uninspired rants that don't necessarily reflect th positive spirit of Discordianism.

There's so much stuff in th Apocrypha that anyone interested in things Discordia will surely find something pleasant & amusing.

FNORD

FYI: All of these books can be found at Oh My Eris Dot Com, plus several other holybooks that I haven't gotten yet. In fact, there are at least a half dozen more listed there now than th last time I peeked. I imagine there are a few more gems & a few more bores. I'll let you know when & if I come across another of th former.

Mojoday Milwaukee Ave Performa

'Twas yester on th street called Milwaukee Ave that yet again I exhibited tunes of Nimnitude for all to bear with. In celebratory fashion, I sang an hymn to many gods & th great Discordian Apostle Dr. Van Van Mojo, whilst all along distributing Pope, Saint & Messiah Cards to innocent-looking bywalkers. Here I show th doings:

.. I improvised a hymn to Ra, Isis, Horus, Demeter, Luna, Helios, Mercury, Baphomet, th Great Goddess, Mummu, Pan, Dr. Van Van Mojo, & of course Eris Kallisti Discordia [may her fiery totems ever elucidate].
.. hail Discordia
.. 2 G's
.. lov song 5
.. 25% mor monstr
.. stelr nursery > baby star
.. wil we go out together?
.. e blu apratus
.. ant lizard dragon man [lyrics by S. Marshalladoo]
.. brown dwarf star
.. lov song 1
.. how to ferment the colon
.. th posm [lyrics by J. Master Coolidge]
.. pungenday [daybyou]

Somewhere in there, I played a rottenbad attempt at th blues. Also rottenbad was my attempt to play th not-so-finished pungenday. All's well, though; I made $4.05.

Most folks enjoyed receiving news of their Popedom/Saintdom/Messiahdom. Who doesn't want to be a Discordian Holyone? No one, that's who!