House, Wondermagick, Fives, Etc.

I have a place to live in Urbana:

& a bedroom (note happy beagle):

In a week I move downstate for good (i.e. at least a school semester), & things look just jolly.

Th Law of Fives strikes again, landing in my lap not only an opportunity to play some Nodal Nimly singsonglia, but also to help organize & MC a night of delightful fun inaugurating a series of strange & wonderful shows at a place called th Red Herring Coffeehouse, a vegetarian counter-culture arts&activism wonderland run by Unitarian Universalists (all hail Unitar!). Jacob Barton & I have some marvelous things in th works - music, games, interactive weirdness, special guests, et cetera, et cetera & so on unto infinity! So Urbana-ites (Urbanians?), mark yr calendars immediately; keep open th date known in Western circles as September Five.

composing my future

[ =@ Kan :: Six Snake ]

Bigthing. My universe will soon change in kaleidoscopic shake-a-doo. Yes - in fact, YES!

I will soon move th heck out of Chicago & downstate to a place called Urbana, IL. I will take my dog & my Cumbus, my pockets & my dice, & I will leave Chicago behind - at least - for a time.

Why oh why? I will tell you. They have this school there called School for Designing a Society. Artists come together here to question this place-time we live in & begin imagining a better society - then making it manifest. It seems to me that all my raving about Art in th Everyday, Agnosticism, Mythwandering et cetera have led me to a very lonely place. Down in Urbana, at this unique school, people think about these things, play w/ them, inspire each other, & make them real.

Anyway, by September I will have relocated - temporarily or not, I don't know yet. But I can't stay here. It just won't do.

I will of course share my happenings w/ you, as they happen. I know only a few things now, but good things.

There you have it then.
Much love,

AndR

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

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

Mercury OM 2 / Discordant Discord

Aloha, mein Freunden!

'Twas at Mercury Cafe on th night of yester that I did play Nimly things. I enjoyed times at place in doings.

.. glockenspiels [request]
.. ant lizard dragon man [lyrics by Scotthew McMarshalldrew]
.. stelr nursery > baby star > brown dwarf
.. Pablo
.. lov song 6

Friendlies George & Frank said th sound system exhibited special friendliness towards me & th Blue Demon, particularly in th area of ringing overtones of awesomeness. Fun enveloped.

FNORD

'Tis on this day th First of th Season of Discord, Discord 1, in th Year of Our Lady Of Discord 3173. Let us celebrate in joyfulship funhaving wonderpuppies! Let us eat, drink & be confounding! Let us Hail Eris Esoteric - may her fiery totems ever elucidate(!!!!!)

I hope to celebrate later today with a nap & some peanuts.

Hi oo lac!

Good News!

Jesus loves you!

Just kidding - of course he doesn't.

Actually, th good news is this: I finally memorized by library card number(!!!!!)

With Pats on Back of Self,
Androse th Nim, faKr of th Flum

FNORD

OK, I'm back with more good news. I have sort of finished th first issue of th Great Book of Befuddlement! I intend verily (warning: gratuitous split infinitive ahead) to stupendously release it on Chaoflux, a great Discordian holyday of muchos Greatnesses (I'm learning Spanish!). Here follows a tentative schedule of GBoB releases in future times to come:

.. issue #1 .. Chaos 19 - Chaoflux a.k.a. feb 19 a.k.a two weeks from yesterday
.. issue #2 .. Chaos 73 - Einstein Day a.k.a mar 14
.. issue #3 .. Discord 23 - Jake Day a.k.a. apr 6
.. issue #4 .. Discord 46 a.k.a. apr 29
.. issue #5 .. Discord 69 a.k.a. may 22

So it goes.

(Each issue release comes 23 days after th previous.)

I continue to invite submissions. Th price per issue I have not determined, but I will set it low. I will do mailings & we can work out a subscription system for faraway ladies & lads of Erisian wildlies.

ALL HAIL DISCORDIA