It’s weird to say so, but I quite glad that it is over – this blog I mean. Over the years I’ve become very attached to the journal aspect of it and I will carry it over in an archive form to individuated.org. But I am fatigued at the state of mind that this blog’s view requires. I am tired of laughing at the absurdity of celebrity culture or letting surveillance wash over me like a tide. I am drained of the need to fight 00’s-americanism. It has failed and everyone knows it. There is no need to point out that Dick Cheney’s approval rating is 18%.

It’s time for a new view on the world, perhaps more optimistic. But believe me, I am under no illusion that the world is fucked and that no Obama/Clinton lovefest can save us. Humanity has been killing itself for 6000 years and $700 million in campaign contributions and Osama bin Laden’s arrest ain’t gonna change that. So what is there to be optimistic about? I’ll mention a few things that sustain my optimism[1].

But first, as has been my wont, some music. I’ve seriously pondered what should be the last music that I drop on this blog. What could I possibly pick as the last sound for thecages? Something electronic? Stoner metal? Dub (from when I started the blog)? A wide-ranging compilation of all of the above? Of course no song or compilation could ever live up to the self-imposed hype of being my definitive selection to comment on the state of the world. But I have to try.
In the end I decided on pop, and in particular one pop song. Or rather three pop songs recorded as a single 23 minute ocean of sound. I decided on Talk Talk’s glowing opening track to the most significant piece of pop recorded in the 80’s – Spirit of Eden. For easy listening I’ve cut it up into its constituent parts, The Rainbow, Eden and Desire – but they are actually one sound.
I won’t bother trying to comment on the music itself but I will quote the opening lyrics

	Oh Yeah The world’s turned upside down Jimmy Finn is out Well how can that be fair at all? Too Lenient The song the lawyer sang Our nation’s wrong Well how can that be fair at all? Repented changed Aware where I have wronged Unfound corrupt This song the jailer sings My time has run Sound the victim’s song The trial is gone The trial goes on

I chose Spirit of Eden because, while it is sorrowful, it is fundamentally optimistic. But what is there to be optimistic about? We now have daily evidence that the planet is about to kick our asses with its uncontrollable weather. We are seeing the unflolding perfection of police and surveillance states in Russia and the UK. Capitalism has again proven that while it may be the most viable economic system available to us it will, on a regular basis, consume itself. Not much to feel good about on the long view then.

Well, there are things to balance the horrors; we are also seeing the arrival of technologies that have and will continue to empower us as individuals. In the arms race against the nation state’s drive to control, the internet gives us assurance that it will always be possible for the open-sourced masses to outrun the military-industrial complex, at least in terms of private communications and, I believe, the privacy of our own thoughts. The very death that approaches across the gulf of Mexico will force capitalism’s greed to invest in the efficient use of energy. Our greedy survival will force us into electric cars and will make carbon sequestration a utility[2]. And finally, it feels to me like in the last few years we’ve started recognizing two attributes of our society that have been driving it for thousands of years but have remained unseen within a generation until now; complexity and acceleration. We now recognise the importance of acknowledging and studying complexity as the fundamental reality of our lives. And we have started tracking the unending acceleration of that complexity. My child(ren) will process their world at a rate and to a depth that will drive me to despair for their racing hearts – but we’ll be ready for it because we know its a certainty.

The world is a death rollercoaster and we scream and laugh as we hurtle around corners, feet-over-head with tears streaming from our eyes. I’ve never been happier.
And so, goodnite sweet cages. You never really existed did you?

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.

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 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.

Your judicious study of discernible reality … is not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now.
And when we act, we create our own reality.
Anonymous aide to President Bush, 2002

No other statement made in the last eight years more clearly captures my sense of the world that we have been living in. Since 2000 our world has been dominated by a new type of aggression, one which is driven by the firm belief that the US can save humanity if it can only show those barbarians and fundamentalists and Chinese and Russians and Third World children that the American dream is what we should all be striving for; a Starbucks frappucino, a big car and an entourage of paparazzi.
On November 4th 2008 that era will end. We may then enter a time dominated by China, or by Islam, or (most likely) by climate change, but regardless of where our accelerating ball of flaming death[1] heads next, the time for thecages will have passed.

Another reason for my decision is that I’m planning to move to Austin TX in 2009 leaving behind (for a period) Cape Town where I’ve, coincidentally, lived for the duration of the Bush presidency. My time in Cape Town has been massively transformative for me as an individual. I’ve become something entirely different to what I was in the 90’s (the Pretoria years). Of course that’s not true – I’m very much still the same person I was in my early twenties, or teens for that matter. But the last eight years in Cape Town were a catalyst in my developing a fundamental belief in Individualism. I’m moving to individuated.org because that is what I’ve become – individuated. I’ve also developed in other ways, I’ve become an atheist[2], a husband and a father – but none of that has been as fundamental as my individuation.
And so, in farewell to thecages I want to write three more posts on topics that I feel the need to still document.

R.E.M. – The lost years

The 90’s were, to me, about only two things; learning social survival[3] and R.E.M. But, boy, they suck. Looking back on my six year obsession with Athens GA I frickin’ cannot believe that I fell for it. Michael Stipe is a frickin’ lightweight poseur, and yet I retain a deep connection with some of their songs. I hope to write a look back on that time and what I retain from it.

Cape Town – The psychedelic years

I learned many things in my years in Cape Town but only a few of them were transformative. There are one or two of these learnings that I won’t mention now, but three of these personal ‘truths’[4] have informed this blog. Firstly, the world we can experience is a natural reality[5] which we describe through mathematics, physics and chemistry – there is nothing that we can experience outside of the physical. Secondly, nothing is more important than becoming an individual – our world works best when we are all strong, confident individuals who respect each others’ individuality. And lastly, there is no god, there is no father figure on which you can offload your reality, there is no afterlife to which you can postpone your serenity – our world would work so much better if we could accept that there is no help from above.

Thecages – Death Rollercoaster

If there’s only one thing that I read in thecages[6] it’s that the first era of the new millennium has been about only two things: acceleration and death. The internet has brought about an unmatched acceleration in our world, for the first time we can see several generations of revolution in one human lifetime. Can you remember how the world worked before email? Can you imagine that it could ever again work without MySpace, Facebook, blogs or Google? And as for death, globalization[7] and climate change is for the first time showing us daily proof that humanity is killing itself. We’re hurtling along on this flaming death rollercoaster and it’s fun and wonderful and horrific – as it has always been.

Bath time sweet cages, soon we’ll be off to bed.