Disclaimer: the below may sound particularly philosophical*. I detest philosophical manifestos. All I want to do here is document the impact that my time in Cape Town has had on me. This is not a manifesto; please don’t read it as such. Don’t believe a word of what I say below – get your own philosophy, make up your own mind. For that matter, live without a philosophy – they tend to deteriorate into manifestos.

I first visited Cape Town in January 2000 1 and by April 2000 I had moved down to start work in Wetton and to live in the city bowl. The last eight years have been a transformative time for me, though its roots lie in the last few months of my time in Pretoria. Cape Town has been the psychedelic years and while the tryptamines have long already worked themselves out of my system my brain has been permanently redirected – outward, to the above and below. I feel like the years in Cape Town have been what finally connected me to the reality of the world around me, to people and to the natural world as a physical phenomenon. And as I’m writing this post I feel overcome by an enormous sense of gratitude towards the city, its location at the foot of Table Mountain, its solitary beaches and forests. I firmly believe that the years 2000 to 2004 couldn’t have happened (as they did) anywhere else.

There have been many important things to me while living in Cape Town, friendships and car crashes, but I’ll pick out four which, in particular, made these years as full as they have been. But first, some music; I’ve written a separate mini-post on the electronic music that I discovered in the first four or so years of my time here.

Natural Reality

Cape Town is overcome by natural beauty; built around a mountain, beaching the Atlantic and Indian oceans, home to the most diverse biome on the planet. The more I travel the more I realise how few other cities in the world can claim anything like the natural surrounds that we have here. And even more important than just the pure beauty of the city surrounds is how accessible it is. While living in Vredehoek the slopes of Table Mountain were no more than a short (but steep) walk from my front door.

It was on those slopes with the mountain’s cubic cliffs behind me and the city and ocean down below that I found more and more evidence of the polar simplicity of nature’s random workings. In my experience nature has no glorious, glowing spirit which softly forms its seasons; instead I’ve experienced it as fundamentally simple, basic in the extreme. Its physical structures are formed through nothing more than mathematically repeating patterns. Water molecules know only collision and expansion from heat, but they crest and tumble into rippling waves and clouds. If a plant loses a limb it simply sprouts more similar limbs as its energy allows. Animals appear more complex and unified, but internally everything from the simplest respiration to the neural complexity of the human brain is nothing more than a continuation of the same primitive mechanism of connection upon connection. But nature has no perfect solutions, it survives by what is barely good enough. It’s growth is constantly heading only towards decay. But it does it on such an enormous scale that the result is whole in a way that is endlessly elegant and robust. It attains its form from the minute interactions of billions of individuals and a rolling tide of trillions of trivial events. The natural reality stacks simplicity upon simplicity to form its weather system, its inhabitants and the buried bones of its dead. And the harder I looked at the natural reality the more I saw of myself, how my senses function. In reaching out my hand to a tree there is the potential for a seamless transition from its tessellating bark, across the cells of my skin, along my veins and neurons, into the logic that floats above my wet brain and out into the software that it produces.

From this evidence I’ve come to be of the firm belief that we have nothing outside of our own senses and brain – no soul and no greater death. Why would reality produce something as detached as a soul when it can produce every miracle that humanity has ever observed from the endless collision of its minute parts? The air that waves patterns through the grasslands in front of me also strike my face and rustle my hair and passes by, sweeping away into the distance – there is nothing more that I could want to understand or to observe beyond that. One day I will exhale and the chemical electricity in my brain will run out – why should I want any magical soul to continue past that moment? Its seems anathema to the beauty of the physical reality.

Through Table Mountain’s slopes and Postberg’s atlantic breeze I have become permanently connected to the soil and the air and I want nothing more than to always feel the rolling wash of the matter that surround us.

God

As far as God and religion is concerned I am by no means a militant atheist-type. I believe that religion can have a very positive influence on people’s lives, providing comfort and a life based on integrity, humility and charity. I come from a religious background and even when I eventually rejected organised religion I remained faithful for many years; developing my own sense of a non-interventionist god and his2 natural order. But my personal experiences have continued to show me only one thing; that god does not exist. It’s not that I do not believe that god exists, it’s that I believe (firmly) that god does not exist. The harder I’ve looked at what my senses are capable of, the clearer it has become to me that the natural reality does not need god nor would it originate a god.
I’ll paraphrase John Lennon when he said that he no longer believed in Nixon or in God, he was no longer looking for a father figure; that he would always continue to make music. And despite not being enamored with John Lennon 3 I agree that once I shook the need for a father figure I was finally free from trying to mash the evident reality into a form in which some remote god was in control. There is no such thing and I’ve never felt better.

Individuality

Finally, all paths in the last eight years have led me in only one direction, towards individuality. The harder I’ve looked at reality, at the world I live in, at my ego and delusions, ambitions and irrational fears, I’ve always ended up in the same place – my own identity. But becoming aware of my identity – how it was formed and how it changes – has somehow been no more than a gentle reflection. I started cultivating memories. That’s all it was, I started taking note of how time passed, thinking chronologically and wanting to look back. As I’ve heard and read; happiness is the ability to feel all emotions, and maturity is the experience of sorrow.
I’m sure that I’ve always had a strong individualist streak and I went through periods where I felt the need to illustrate my individualism through wild haircuts and hand-scrawled t-shirts. But I’m overjoyed to say that I no longer need those props. And I feel like, more than just due to growing older, it has been these years that let me recognise my individuality – to claim it. I no longer need eyeliner – I’m forever changed. I’m older and calmer – more confident and accepting. I’ve finally become confirmed in who I am and what I believe. I continue to want to simplify how I describe what I see while developing my ability to perceive the massive, accelerating complexity of our world. And Cape Town’s silver trees have given me the examples and evidence that led me here.

Nothing lasts… nothing lasts. Everything is changing into something else. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing is wrong. Everything is on track. William Blake said nothing is lost and I believe that we all move on.
T. McKenna

I will never forget the buzzing September sound of the bees among the pincushions on the slopes of Table Mountain and the hum of the city below.

And so, good night sweet Cape Town – I will never be the same and I will always come back.

This mini-post is an offshoot of Cape Town – The Psychedelic Years

Music has been inextricably linked to my Cape Town experience. When I arrived from Pretoria my main interests were techno 1 and drum ‘n bass. And while I never really got into psychedelic trance 2 the CT psytrance scene did introduce me to one of the most fun things to possibly do – massive outdoor parties. I vividly remember the first Vortex that I attended, at Silverstroom strand, with a swirling monster of a sound system mounted on four towers around the dance floor 3. Now let me be clear, I’m not one of those dancy-types – I’m a stand-aroundy type, but even just walking around a packed dance floor is a cool thing. I’m grateful that I got to go to a bunch of them in the warm summers and cold, wet winters of the Cape. But without any doubt the most memorable party that I ever went to was somewhere in the summer of 2000/2001 at the Old SAB Brewery in Woodstock. It was a techno thing 4. It was held on a foggy Friday night in the roofless shell of an old multi-storey industrial brick building. The building is now being renovated into offices/apartments but each time I drive past I still remember exact details of driving there, the fire escape staircases and the metal roof structure. And the driving, driving, driving music. And it doesn’t matter that it has passed and I am now old and slow – it affected me and changed me and will never be lost.

So, in memoriam and celebration, here’s a short playlist of the electronic music that rocked my world in those years. It is only a tiny fragment of the mass of CDs and vinyl that I accumulated and it can in no way do justice to all the sound that I was exposed to, but I picked a few. It starts out with some classic minimal techno from Robert Hood, takes a short detour through progressive house and some of the few psytrance producers that I have a genuine admiration for and culminates in two tracks from Richie Hawtin’s Plastikman. A few words on Plastikman; musically I was interested in only one thing in those years – less. I wanted music which was minimal and precise and only the most accomplished producers could produce a minimal sound while still invoking the insanity of a heaving dance floor. Plastikman achieved perfection in this pursuit on these two tracks.

• Robert Hood – Wisdom to the Wise
• Funf D – Overcome
• Quivvers – Do You Really Want to Hurt Me
• Accorsi & Bassetti – Concord
• X-Dream – Irritant
• Plastikman – Locomotion
• Plastikman – Consumed

I hate R.E.M. – but it doesn’t mean that I hate the people in R.E.M. – Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe. They are, by all accounts, decent people who are actively involved in their local community and support good causes. But the frickin band, man – oh the horror.

I spent my teenage years doing two things; running away from my skin and listening to R.E.M. – I don’t know which I regret more. Well actually I don’t regret either, but both seem equally silly now.

The second CD I ever bought was Singles Collected[1], a compilation of the A- and B-sides of singles released while R.E.M. were signed to IRS. But my connection to Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe goes back further than that. I don’t remember very many songs I heard on the radio as a child, but I specifically recognised two songs when I heard them again years later: The One I Love and Stand, from R.E.M.’s 5th and 6th albums respectively. So there must be something to their music which attracted me both subliminally and actively. Now don’t get me wrong – I’ve in recent years had a terrible awakening, a shattering realisation that R.E.M. are not only crap, but that Michael Stipe is a pretensing self-referential bore. Jeez I hate R.E.M. – some of the worst lyrics in the history of man [2] wrapped up in a jangly monotony of poprock-lite. Fuck. What was I thinking?

The fact is that despite the vomit-inducing horrors of many, many of their songs they did write a couple of really fantastic songs and I do believe that they should be recognised for their major contribution to the birth of college rock/jangle pop. They really did change the musical landscape of 80’s USA with their independent label, southern gothic oeuvre.

Confession time; I own all of the band’s albums up until 1998’s Up (which I liked) [3] . I also own two compilations, one bootleg live CD and two bootleg live tapes, about 5 CD-singles and two vinyl albums. So we’re talking about close to 25 musical artefacts here. I also bought and devoured the exhaustive companion book (It Crawled from the South). But, BUT; I absolutely fucking refused to go and see them live when they came to South Africa. By that time I had awakened from my delusion.

And now a quick run-through review of their work (my opinion). But first, let’s hear from the defendents themselves. The songs on this playlist are all legitimately great.

	Murmur
	great album – a classic, but it really has aged though it still does deserve respect. West of the Fields is the archetypal southern gothic pop song.
	Reckoning
	not bad, some good songs – particularly So. Central Rain, but also some crap lyrics, particularly Camera.
	Fables of the Reconstruction
	yes, good, solid, a classic – but also mired by some utter shit, particularly Kohoutek; even the title is an atrocity.
	Lifes Rich Pageant
	hmmm… things are starting to go bad here – The Flowers of Guatemala, What If We Give It Away? and Cuyahoga are unforgivable.
	Document
	a new sound – good – some righteous radio rockpop killers – The One I Love suffers from terrible lyrics but I rate just about all of it. Welcome to the Occupation is a longtime favourite of mine.
	Green
	more righteous radio rockpop, Turn You Inside-Out is fantastic, but World Leader Pretend and The Wrong Child are beyond contempt. Fuck you Stipe, what utter crap.
	Out of Time
	Oh god, where to begin. This. Is. A. Piece. Of. Shit. Don’t even talk to me about Shiny Happy People; Belong is without a doubt the worst song ever released by R.E.M.
	Automatic for the People
	If it weren’t for Anton Corbijn’s iconic photography this would be lost among the band’s other output. However, Drive is truly great. The other songs have become classics, but only in the same way that Huey Lewis’s Hip to be Square is a classic. Nightswimming is almost as bad as Belong.
	Monster
	Yes! Finally – a wall-to-wall great album. Great cover, great songs, great sound. All of it is absolute gold. Not all of the songs are equally strong (King of Comedy) but the album is a cohesive bomb.
	New Adventures in Hi-Fi
	Same as Automatic for the People – instantly forgotten if it weren’t for the photography. But Undertow and The Wake-Up Bomb rock.
	Up
	radio pop – Daysleeper is the right sound for their old age, but Walk Unafraid deserves contempt.
	Reveal
	Oh fuck. This does not even deserve contempt. I heard Imitation of Life a few times on the radio. Whatever. You suck.
	Around the Sun
	don’t know anything about it but am ready to dismiss it out of hand.
	Accelerate
	I saw the video for Supernatural Superserious – I liked it but am still ready to dismiss the album as a piece of unredeemable shit.

Now, if you look at the above high-quality, detailed and considered review of the last 26 years’ worth of work by these four Athenites you may say that it doesn’t look to bad – some good stuff. Yes, some good stuff, but also some of the most unforgivably atrocious effluent known to man. Am I serious about that statement?
Yes I am. Here are some of the lyrics of Belong

Her world collapsed early Sunday morning
She got up from the kitchen table
Folded the newspaper and silenced the radio
Those creatures jumped the barricades
And have headed for the sea, sea

Those creatures jumped the barricades
And have headed for the sea
She began to breathe
To breathe at the thought of such freedom
Stood and whispered to her child: belong
She held the child and whispered
With calm, calm: belong

Stood and whispered to her child; belong
She held the child and whispered
With calm, calm: belong

These barricades can only hold for so long
Her world collapsed early Sunday morning
She took the child held tight
Opened the window
A breath, this song, how long
And knew, knew: belong

See what I mean? Want more? Get ready to puke – The Wrong Child

I’ve watched the children come and go
A late long march into spring
I sit and watch those children
Jump in the tall grass
Leap the sprinkler
Walk in the ground
Bicycle clothespin spokes
The sound the smell of swingset hands

I will try to sing a happy song
I’ll try and make a happy game to play
Come play with me I whispered to my new found friend
Tell me what it’s like to go outside
I’ve never been
Tell me what it’s like to just go outside
I’ve never been
And I never will

I’m not supposed to be like this
I’m not supposed to be like this
But it’s okay

Hey, those kids are looking at me
I told my friend myself
Those kids are looking at me
They’re laughing and they’re running over here
They’re laughing and they’re running over here
What do I do?
What can I do?
What should I do?
What do I say?
What can I say?

I said I’m not supposed to be like this
Let’s try to find a happy game to play
Let’s try to find a happy game to play
I’m not supposed to be like this
But it’s okay, okay

Oh sweet Jesus, why do you torment me so? Why does the man not stop singing? Oh please, I’m dying. Yes, it really is that bad. And yet Michael Stipe does produce some good, even great, lyrics – here’s Circus Envy, the monster in Monster.

Here comes that awful feeling again
Welcome the ugly animal
I hold my breath to watch you swing,
My high rope acrobat ball and chain,
I’m not afraid, I messed it, messed it, messed it, messed it up

I’ve got my telescope head in the haystack
I’m getting tired of your dodgeball circus act
Put pepper in my coffee, I forgot to bark on command

Here comes that awful feeling again
Make way for monster jealousy
The strong man kicked sand into my breakfast cereal bowl
I spelled your name with Oatios,
He messed it, messed it, messed it, messed it up

I’ve got my telescope head in the haystack
I am tired of your dodgeball circus act
Put pepper in my coffee, I forgot to bark on command

You’re mean, mean, mean
You tease, tease, tease me

If I were you I’d really run from me
I’d really, really wish that I were you
When I get loose, I’ll climb a tree
And drop a load on your head
This monster in me makes me retch, you messed it, messed it up

I’ve got my telescope head in the haystack
I am jealous of your dodgeball circus act
Put pepper in my coffee, I forgot to bark
Put pepper in my coffee, I forgot to bark on command

You’re mean, mean, mean
You tease, tease, tease me

Do you smell jealousy?
Do you smell jealousy, jealousy, jealousy?

Yeah! Why couldn’t he just give us more of that?

But it’s not just Michael Stipe’s terrible lyrics for which the band should be ostracized. It’s also the fact that the musicians were willing to let him record them. And that they actually went as far as to produce music that suits such shit. The mandolin on Losing My Religion? The bass line on Texarkana? The kindergarten-level drumming of Bill Berry in general? Jeez, I understand that simplicity is the peak of genius [4] but for fuck’s sakes – learn something more whydontcha?

Now after all this vitriol, my point. You’ll notice that from the above reviews I left out an item in the band’s discography – Chronic Town.

Chronic Town

Chronic Town is R.E.M.’s debut EP, the first multi-song thing they released[5]. It is my emotional connection to R.E.M. – the reason why I will never feel the need to throw out any of their albums; why I am always able to go back to Automatic for the People and find something to really enjoy. And even more specifically my connection is to the de-facto title track to that EP – Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars). And precisely, my emotional connection to R.E.M. is in the moment between the 19th and 20th seconds of that song.
I’ve never in my life been as excited and permanently enthralled by anything as by that one sound when Michael Stipe exhales into the microphone and the simple, almost trivial riff starts[6]. I’ve never been the same since hearing that. You’ll notice that this blog – this very journal of personal mastery – is named after a lyric in Carnival of Sorts – the cages under cage. My first email address was carnival@somethingortheother. I used the word carnival as a computer password for many years. I doubt whether I’ve ever listened to another song as many times – thousands. Carnival of Sorts is the sound of my finally getting how it feels to be young and that I wanted to feel young.

But it’s not yet the sound of my liberation; that comes as part of my next post: Cape Town – the Psychedelic Years.

So goodnight sweet R.E.M. your pathetic descent into pretension will never be eclipsed by what you did for me with your first two releases.

Man, Kanye West is right. Hip Hop is producing that crack music nigga. The best songs, the best videos, the best pop. How can Jessica Simpson even hope to compete with LaZee for pure wildness?

Here’s some hot hiphop/urban/pop videos to burn your bandwidth on.

First up Swedish(!) rapper[1] LaZee with his blinged out gangster roll on Rock Away. This has to be one of the visually busiest videos in a long time.

LaZee – Rock Away

When it comes to jumping pop you can always rely on Pharrell[2] and his bro’s in N.E.R.D. The first single from their new album, entitled Everyone Nose, wins three awards: best sweaty club night video, best use of the word a-tchoo in a pop song and best frickin song about cocaine in the history of the world. The video will make you wish that you were young again, when you used to wake up at 11 on a Friday night and fall around in a messy club until dawn.

N.E.R.D. – Everyone Nose

The last video is a breakout track from UK urban types Sway feat. Stush. It’s called F ur X (say it phonetically) and is amazing for the pure speed of the delivery.

Sway feat. Stush – F ur X

Jonas Brothers, the ball is in your court. Choke on it.

On my last nite in Austin I went and saw The Raconteurs at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q and had a rockin’ great time. When I last visited Atlanta I saw the Black Crowes and had just as rockin’ a great time, but Stubb’s was a different kettle of fish entirely. Whereas the Black Crowes was a wonderfully bundled up experience where the weather and the venue and the band melded together into a glorious Southern-style Sunday evening[1] this was really just a bar-type touring rock band show. But don’t get me wrong, it was fuckn great – just not as awash in sensory glory.

The deal is that The Raconteurs are touring behind their new album, Consolers Of The Lonely and true to their vagabond-deluxe aesthetic Stubb’s had a large, blacked out tour bus parked round the back. Despite the band’s mega-famous co-frontman[2] this is not Motley Crue touring with their own private jet and drug-preparing hostesses, this is a tour by bus from state to state.

Lonely Consolers

And so the stage was set[3] for a dusty outdoors gig with beers in hand and rock on stage. The supporting act was Birds of Avalon and they were great, though I suspect a bit on the jammy side for the hook-hungry crowd. Still, a great band – a tight unit with a thick sound. But no-one was there for a series of extended instrumentals, we were all there to see Jack White. And so the Birds dutifully trundled off[4] while we awaited the The Raconteurs’ promised explosion of sweat and underwear-shredding rock. And this is what’s is still amazing to me about America – on any given Friday nite(especially in Austin) you can go and see some really world class musicians. You can go down to Redriver street in shorts and flip-flops, pay your 30 bucks, buy a beer and be one of six or seven hundred to see The Raconteurs work for their money. No papparazzi, no global news coverage – just another live show.

And what a fucking live show it was. The Raconteurs are a great band, great songs, great sound – great rhythm section and great slide guitar from their frontman/guitarist Brendan Benson. Great songwriting, also by Benson. But Jack White is in a different league entirely. The most important guitarist of his generation, he came out with something else, something larger than life[5] – something truly explosive. Everything from the way that he walks to his uncomfortably plain haircut to his Pete Townsend hops to the way he yelps past the microphone when driving a song to its payoff makes it clear that he will be remembered for years to come as the leading light in blues/country-based rock.

Just how good is he? Well, he replaces the touring pianist (some dude) to play the show’s only piano solo on You Don’t Understand Me and burns the place down. His shrill voice remains intact throughout and he plays those fucking cool, iconic guitars of his like he’s ripping apart phone books.
It was amazing to see one musician dominate an entire set without even trying. But he’s not perfect by any measure. Frankly, he is a poor host[6] – not warm or engaging and, despite his confidence and sound, seemingly not really interested in sharing with the audience. In comparison to AC/DC (all of them) he is cold and distant. But he does rock.

The Raconteurs were great, but Jack White was astounding in his assuredness and ability to back up his swagger with revolutionary musical skill and intent. And I have a feeling that Friday’s show wasn’t even close to what he’s capable of in full, delirious flight.
Well done to The Raconteurs, great show. But jesus, he may not have the social warmth of Brian Johnson, but Jack White is fucking iconic.