Of Psychopathological Cult Leaders

What makes one person to have "charisma" and the other person not? Why will some people gather blind followers around them? And what about the dark side of these charming manipulators? I have known some people like these myself. I try not to be like these people, but sometimes there's a grim suspicion...

From http://www.fwselijah.com/psychopa.htm:

1. Glibness/Superficial charm

Glibness is a hallmark of psychopaths. They are able to use language effortlessly to beguile, confuse, and convince. They are captivating storytellers. They exude self-confidence and are able to spin a web that intrigues others and pulls them into the psychopath's life. Most of all, they are persuasive. Frequently they have the capacity to destroy their critics verbally or disarm them emotionally.

2. Manipulative and Conning

Cult leaders do not recognize the individuality or rights of others, which makes all self-serving behaviors permissible. The hallmark of the psychopath is the psychopathic maneuver; which is essentially interpersonal manipulation "based on charm. The manipulator appears to be helpful, charming, even ingratiating or seductive, but is covertly hostile, domineering....[The victim] is perceived as an aggressor, competitor, or merely as an instrument to be used....The manipulation inevitably becomes the end-all and is no longer qualified by the reality principle." In other words, there are no checks on the psychopath's behavior--anything goes. The Psychopath divides the world into suckers, sinners, and himself. He discharges powerful feelings of terror and rage by dominating and humiliating his victims. He is particularly successful when, through an overlay of charm, he makes an ally of his victim--a process sometimes described as emotional vampirism or emotional terrorism. Examples of this type of manipulation are plentiful in the literature of Jonestown and other cultic groups. It is especially prevalent in the one-on-one cultic relationship, where there is direct involvement with the manipulator.

3. Grandiose Sense of Self

The cult leader enjoys tremendous feelings of entitlement. He believes everything is owed to him as a right. Preoccupied with his own fantasies, he must always be the center of attention. He presents himself as the "Ultimate One" enlightened, a vehicle of God, a genius, the leader of humankind, and sometimes even the most humble of humble. He has an insatiable need for adulation and attendance. His grandiosity may also be a defense against inner emptiness, depression, and a sense of insignificance. Paranoia often accompanies the grandiosity, reinforcing the isolation of the group and the need for protection against a perceived hostile environment. In this way, he creates an us-versus-them mentality.

4. Pathological Lying

Psychopaths lie coolly and easily, even when it is obvious they are being untruthful. It is almost impossible for them to be consistently truthful about either a major or minor issue. They lie for no apparent reason, even when it would seem easier and safer to tell the truth. This is sometimes called "crazy lying." Confronting their lies may provoke an unpredictably incense rage or simply a Buddha-like smile.

Another form of lying common among cult leaders is known as pseudologica fantastica, an extension of pathological lying. Leaders tend to create a complex belief system, often about their own powers and abilities, in which they themselves sometimes get caught up. "It is often difficult to determine whether the lies are an actual delusional distortion of reality or are expressed with the conscious or unconscious intent to deceive. These manipulators are rarely original thinkers. Plagiarists and thieves, they seldom credit the true originators of ideas, often co-opting authorship. They are extremely convincing, forceful in the expression of their views, and talented at passing lie detector tests. For them, objective truth does not exist. The only "truth" is whatever will best achieve the outcome that meets their needs. This type of opportunism is very difficult to understand for those who are not psychopaths. For this reason, followers are more apt to invent or go along with all kinds of explanations and rationales for apparent inconsistencies in behavior "I know my guru must have had a good reason for doing this." "He did it because he loves me even though it hurts."

5. Lack of Remorse, Shame, or Guilt

At the core of the psychopath is a deep-seated rage which is split off (i.e, psychologically separated from the rest of the self) and repressed. Some researchers theorize that this is caused by feeling abandoned in infancy or early childhood. Whatever the emotional or psychological source, psychopaths see those around them as objects, targets, or opportunities, not as people. They do not have friends, they have victims and accomplices-and the latter frequently end as victims. For psychopaths, the ends always justify the means. Thus there is no place for feelings of remorse, shame, or guilt. Cult leaders feel justified in all their actions since they consider themselves the ultimate moral arbiter. Nothing gets in their way.

6. Shallow Emotions

While they may display outbursts of emotion, more often than not they are putting on a calculated response to obtain a certain result. They rarely reveal a range of emotions, and what is seen is superficial at best, pretended at worst. Positive feelings of warmth, joy, love, and compassion are more feigned than experienced. They are unmoved by things that would upset the normal person, while outraged by insignificant matters. They are bystanders to the emotional life of others, perhaps envious and scornful of feelings they cannot have or understand. In the end, psychopaths are cold, with shallow emotions, living in a dark world of their own.

Hiding behind the "mask of sanity," the cult leader exposes feelings only insofar as they serve an ulterior motive. He can witness or order acts of utter brutality without experiencing a shred of emotion. He casts himself in a role of total control, which he plays to the hilt. What is most promised in cults--peace, joy, enlightenment, love, and security are goals that are forever out of reach of the leader, and thus also the followers. Since the leader is not genuine, neither are his promises

7. Incapacity for Love

As the "living embodiment of God's love," the leader is tragically flawed in being unable to either give or receive love. Love substitutes are given instead. A typical example might be the guru's claim that his illness or misfortune (otherwise inconsistent with his enlightened state) is caused by the depth of his compassion for his followers, whereby he takes on their negative karma. Not only are devotees supposed to accept this as proof of his love but also are expected to feel guilt for their failings! It becomes impossible for members to disprove this claim once they have accepted the beliefs of the group.

The leader's tremendous need to be loved is accompanyied by an equally strong disbelief in the love offered him by his followers; hence, the often unspeakably cruel and harsh testing of his devotees. Unconditional surrender is an absolute requirement. In one cult, for example, the mother of two small children was made to tell them nightly that she loved her leader more than them. Later, as a test of her devotion, she was asked to give up custody of her children in order to be allowed to stay with her leader. The guru's love is never tested; it must be accepted at face value.

8. Need for Stimulation

Thrill-seeking behaviors, often skirting the letter or spirit of the law, are common among psychopaths. Such behavior is sometimes justified as preparation for martyrdom "I know I don't have long to live; therefore my time on this earth must be lived to the fullest." "Surely even I am entitled to have fun or sin a little." This type of behavior becomes more frequent as the leader deteriorates emotionally and psychologically--a common occurrence.

Cult leaders live on the edge, constantly testing the beliefs of their followers, often with increasingly bizarre behaviors, punishments, and rules. Other mechanisms of stimulation come in the form of unexpected, seemingly spontaneous outbursts, which usually take the form of verbal abuse and sometimes physical punishment. The psychopath has a cool indifference to things around him, yet his icy coldness can quicky turn into rage, vented on those around him.

9. Callousness/lack of empathy

Psychopaths readily take advantage of others, expressing utter contempt for anyone else's feelings. Someone in distress is not important to them. Although intelligent, perceptive, and quite good at sizing people up, they make no real connections with others. They use their "people skills" to exploit, abuse, and wield power.

Psychopaths are unable to empathize with the pain of their victims. Meanwhile, part of the victims' denial system is the inability to believe that someone they love so much could consciously and callously hurt them. It therefore becomes easier to rationalize the leader's behavior as necessary for the general or individual "good." The alternative for the devotee would be to face the sudden and overwhelming awareness of being victimized, deceived, used. Such a realization would wound the person's deepest sense of self, so as a means of self-protection the person denies the abuse. When and if the devotee becomes aware of the exploitation, it feels as though a tremendous evil has been done, a spiritual rape.

10. Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature

Like small children, many psychopaths have difficulty regulating their emotions. Adults who have temper tantrums are frightening to be around. Rage and abuse, alternating with token expressions of love and approval, produce an addictive cycle for both abuser and abused, as well as create a sense of hopelessness in the latter. This dynamic has also been recognized in relation to domestic abuse and the battering of women. The cult leader acts out with some regularity--often privately, sometimes publicly--usually to the embarrassment and dismay of his followers and other observers. He may act out sexually, aggressively, or criminally, frequently with rage. Who could possibly control someone who believes himself to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and entitled to every wish, someone who has no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for the impact on those around him? Generally this aberrant behavior is a well-kept secret, known only to a few disciples. The others only see perfection. These tendencies are related to the psychopath's need for stimulation and inability to tolerate frustration, anxiety, and depression. Often a leader's inconsistent behavior needs to be rationalized by either the leader or the follower in order to maintain internal consistency. It is often regarded as divinely inspired and further separates the empowered from the powerless.

11. Early Behavior Problems/juvenile delinquency

Psychopaths frequently have a history of behavioral and academic difficulties. They often "get by" academically, conning other students and teachers. Encounters with juvenile authorities are frequent. Equally prevalent are difficulties in peer relationships and developing and keeping friends, marked control problems, and other aberrant behaviors such as stealing, fire setting, and cruelty to others.

12. Irresponsibility/Unreliability

Not concerned about the consequences of their behavior, psychopaths leave behind them the wreckage of others' lives and dreams. They may be totally oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they inflict on others, something which they regard as neither their problem nor their responsibility.

Psychopaths rarely accept blame for their failures or mistakes. Scape goating is common, blaming followers, those outside the group, a member's family, the government, Satan--anyone and everyone but the leader. The blaming may follow a ritualized procedure such as a trial, "hot seat" denunciation, or public confession (either one-on-one or in front of the group). Blame is a powerful reinforcer of passivity and obedience, producing guilt, shame, terror, and conformity in the followers.

13. Promiscuous Sexual behavior/infidelity

Promiscuity, child sexual abuse, polygamy, rape, and sexual acting out of all sorts are frequently practiced by cult leaders. Conversely, there is often stringent sexual control of the followers through such tactics as enforced celibacy, arranged marriages, forced breakups and divorces, removal of children from their parents, forced abortions or mandated births. For psychopaths, sex is primarily a control and power issue.

Along with this behavior comes vast irresponsibility not only for the followers' emotions but also for their lives. In one cult, for example, multiple sexual relations were encouraged even while one of the top leaders was known to be HIV positive. This kind of negligence toward others is not uncommon in the psychopath's world.

Marital fidelity is rare in the psychopath's life. There are usually countless reports of extramarital affairs and sexual predation upon adult and child members of both sexes. The sexual behavior of the leader may be kept hidden from all but the inner circle or may be part of accepted group sexual practices. In any case, due to the power imbalance between leader and followers, sexual contact is never truly consensual and is likely to have damaging consequences for the follower.

14. Lack of realistic life plan/parasitic lifestyle

The psychopath tends to move around a lot, making countless efforts at "starting over while seeking out Fertile new ground to exploit. One day he may appear as a rock musician, the next a messiah; one day a used car salesman, the next the founder of a mass self-transformation program; one day a college professor, the next the new "Lenin" bringing revolution to America.

The flip side of this erratic life planning is the all-encompassing promise for the future that the cult leader makes to his followers. Many groups claim as their goal world domination or salvation at the Apocalypse. The leader is the first to proclaim the utopian nature of the group, which is usually simply another justification for irrational behavior and stringent controls.

The leader's sense of entitlement is often demonstrated by the contrast between his luxurious lifestyle and the impoverishment of his followers. Most cult leaders arc supported by gifts and donations from their followers, who may be pressured to turn over much of their income and worldly possessions to the group. Slavery, enforced prostitution, and a variety of illegal acts for the benefit of the leader are common in a cult milieu. This type of exploitation aptly demonstrates Lifton's third point of idealization from below and exploitation from above.

Psychopaths also tend to be preoccupied with their own health while remaining totally indifferent to the suffering of others. They may complain of being "burned out" due to the burden of "caring for" their followers, sometimes stating they do not have long to live, instilling fear and guilt in their devotees and encouraging further servitude. they are highly sensitive to their own pain and tend to be hypochondriacs, which often conflicts with their public image of superhuman self-control and healing abilities.

According to them, the illnesses they don't get are due to their powers, while the ones they do get are caused by their "compassion" in taking on their disciples' karma or solving the group's problems. This of course is another guru trick.

15. Criminal or entrepreneurial versatility

Cult leaders change their image and that of the group as needed to avoid prosecution and litigation, to increase income, and to recruit a range of members. Cult leaders have an innate ability to attract followers who have the skills and connections that the leaders lack. The longevity of the group is dependent on the willingness of leadership to adapt as needed and preserve the group. Frequently, when illegal or immoral activities are exposed to the public, the cult leader will relocate, sometimes taking followers with him. He will keep a low profile, only to resurface later with a new name, a new front group, and perhaps a new twist on the scam.


See also:

Without Conscience

VH-1 UK All-Time Worst No.1s

VH-1 UK All-Time Worst No.1s

1 - Cliff Richard 'Millennium Prayer'
2 - Mr Blobby 'Mr Blobby'
3 - Teletubbies 'Teletubbies Say Eh-oh!'
4 - Aqua 'Barbie Girl'
5 - Eamon 'F**k It (I Don't Want You Back)'
6 - Las Ketchup 'The Ketchup Song (Asereje)'
7 - Blazin' Squad 'Crossroads'
8 - Bob The Builder 'Can We Fix It'
9 - Frankee 'F.U.R.B (F U Right Back)'
10 - Peter Andre 'Mysterious Girl'
11 - Gareth Gates 'Unchained Melody'
12 - Will Young & Gareth Gates 'The Long And Winding Road / Suspicious Minds'
13 - Joe Dolce Music Theatre 'Shuddap You Face'
14 - DJ Otzi 'Hey Baby'
15 - Afroman 'Because I Got High'
16 - Will Young 'Light My Fire'
17 - Mariah Carey & Westlife 'Against All Odds'
18 - Bombalurina 'Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini'
19 - DJ Casper 'Cha Cha Slide'
20 - Busted 'Who's David'
21 - Manchester United 1994 Football Squad 'Come On You Reds'
22 - St Winifred's School Choir 'There's No-one Quite Like Grandma'
23 - Hear'Say 'Pure And Simple'
24 - Vanilla Ice 'Ice Ice Baby'
25 - Vengaboys 'We're Going To Ibiza'
26 - Hanson 'Mmmbop'
27 - Michelle McManus 'All This Time'
28 - Whigfield 'Saturday Night'
29 - Spitting Image 'The Chicken Song'
30 - B*Witched 'C'est La Vie'
31 - Billie 'Because We Want To'
32 - Chris de Burgh 'The Lady In Red'
33 - Kylie Minogue I Should Be So Lucky'
34 - Baz Luhrmann 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)'
35 - McFly 'Five Colours In Her Hair'
36 - Vengaboys 'Boom Boom Boom Boom'
37 - 2 Unlimited 'No Limit'
38 - Sam & Mark 'With A Little Help From My Friends /
Measure Of A Man'
39 - So Solid Crew '21 Seconds'
40 - Cliff Richard 'Mistletoe & Wine'
41 - The Firm 'Star Trekkin'
42 - Gary Barlow 'Forever Love'
43 - Geri Halliwell 'It's Raining Men'
44 - A1 'Take On Me'
45 - Mr Oizo 'Flat Beat'
46 - Bob The Builder 'Mambo No 5'
47 - Eiffel 65 'Blue (Da Ba Dee)'
48 - Five and Queen 'We Will Rock You'
49 - Girls Aloud 'Sound Of The Underground'
50 - Nick Berry 'Every Loser Wins'
51 - Rednex 'Cotton Eye Joe'
52 - Spice Girls 'Holler'
53 - Steps Tragedy'
54 - Aqua 'Doctor Jones'
55 - Glenn Medeiros 'Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You'
56 - Doop 'Doop'
57 - Geri Halliwell 'Bag It Up'
58 - Robson Green & Jerome Flynn 'Unchained Melody'
59 - Babylon Zoo 'Spaceman'
60 - Lionel Richie 'Hello'
61 - A1 'Same Old Brand New You'
62 - Simpsons 'Do The Bartman'
63 - LMC V U2 'Take Me To The Clouds Above'
64 - Take That featuring Lulu 'Relight my Fire'
65 - Chef 'Chocolate Salty Balls (PS I Love You)'
66 - Cliff Richard 'Saviour's Day'
67 - DJ Pied Piper 'Do You Really Like It'
68 - Europe 'The Final Countdown'
69 - Gina G 'Ooh Aah... Just A Little Bit'
70 - Kylie Minogue & Jason Donovan 'Especially For
You'
71 - Barbra Streisand 'Woman In Love'
72 - Color Me Badd 'I Wanna Sex You Up'
73 - Hale & Pace 'The Stonk'
74 - Martine McCutcheon 'Perfect Moment'
75 - Goombay Dance Band 'Seven Tears'
76 - Shaggy 'Oh Carolina'
77 - Tight Fit 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'
78 - Billie 'Girlfriend'
79 - Bluebells 'Young At Heart'
80 - Emma Bunton 'What Took You So Long'
81 - Nena '99 Red Balloons'
82 - Right Said Fred 'Deeply Dippy'
83 - Steps 'Stomp'
84 - Wamdue Project 'King Of My Castle'
85 - Ace Of Base 'All That She Wants'
86 - David Bowie & Mick Jagger 'Dancing in the Streets'
87 - Enya 'Orinoco Flow'
88 - New Kids On The Block 'You Got It (The Right Stuff)'
89 - Outhere Brothers 'Boom Boom Boom'
90 - O1ide & Neutrino 'Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty)'
91 - Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder 'Ebony And Ivory'
92 - Spacedust 'Gym & Tonic'
93 - B*Witched 'Blame It On The Weatherman'
94 - Bucks Fizz 'Making Your Mind Up'
95 - Cliff Richard & The Young Ones 'Living Doll'
96 - Falco 'Rock Me Amadeus'
97 - B*Witched 'Rollercoaster'
98 - Tiffany 'I Think We're Alone Now'
99 - Jason Donovan 'Too Many Broken Hearts'
100 - Hear'Say 'The Way To Your Love'

Culture Is The New Politics

"Since politics have left the realm of visions by becoming a management of economics, culture has to replace politics by taking its visionary spirit. That's why art is so important today. Artists have to take the responsibility to change unified minds and to give them back a visionary feeling of politics in the original sense: the matter of the singular citizen in correspondence to society's interest. Culture is not luxury, culture is the new politics in opposition to pure economics."

- Felix Kubin in his interview to The Wire magazine, September 2004

Jori Hulkkonen On The State Of Club Culture

Jori Hulkkonen starts as a new columnist for the Nyt weekend supplement of Helsingin Sanomat, the largest daily newspaper in Finland. Here is his first column.

For non-Finnish readers, it's about the stagnation of club culture: Jori argues that the people who used to be club regulars have reached their middle-ages and would rather stay home with their own families than go clubbing any more, and "for the new generation hiphop, r&b and the so called new coming of rock music are more fascinating that the club circus run by the thirty-somethings".

I think this is quite symptomatic for this age: we have reached an era that could be called "post-techno" or "post-rave"; it seems that there is no more similar culture of rave/techno/clubs that was prevalent about ten or fifteen years ago. There does exist some sort of new generation of ravers/clubbers with their popular genres of "kiksu"/"polkka" (= as trance variants are called in Finland), but for me that culture is just a pale shadow or a sort of bloodless re-tread of what it used to be in the early-to-mid-90s. And it's true that young kids in Finland are probably more interested these days in hiphop, r&b or Jamaica sounds (reggae/dancehall), or even retro styles of funk and soul.

Probably much more interesting things in electronic music are happening elsewhere, in what could be called "post-techno" (IDM-glitch-noise-minimal-experimental-illbient-postlounge-lowercase sound-etc., even "post-rock" variants -- new music becoming influenced by the yesteryear experimentations -- different new mutations of electro & techno and so on. And how about drum'n'bass?) But the 90s type rave/techno culture of "PLUR", "Peace, Love & Pancakes"/Love Parade/Mayday, etc. is dead and gone when we have reached the year of 2004; killed by commerciality, drugs peddlers, thieving magpie media having found new interests like new rock bands recycling old styles, and of course pure boredom; and something else is busy taking their place now.

In The Meanwhile

I don't have much to write to this blog these days, so if you're interested in what else I'm up to, check out pHinnWeb's own mailing list for my latest rumbles:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/phinnweb/

Slavic Walkmen does Underground Disco

It's my birthday today. So does time pass by, we'll get a bit older, and blaah blaah. I'm not that much into celebrating since there's not much to celebrate. Just trying to take it easy. A day like another day; no cause for things like nostalgia or melancholy or sadness of getting old (I've had some miserable birthdays in my past, so I'm always a bit afraid of this particular day).

So, last Saturday I was DJing at a party called "Slavic Walkmen does Underground Disco party" at Klubi. They had a nice foam machine on the outdoors terrace ejuculating all over. Very cute, like some 60s psychedelic freak-out party. There were these huge puffs of foam floating all over people. One of my favourite episodes of Space: 1999, called 'Space Brain', had a similar scene; astronauts cavorting in the middle of this huge foam, in fact part of the brain of this weird gossamer-like space organism. It seemed like the whole town was going to be drowned in foam before too long. It was getting near midnight and I was slowly getting drunk and waiting for my turn to play. It sounded to me like the guest stars Janne and El Allu were playing quite a lot 70ish "Love Boat" style of disco. Cheese galore. There was one of these freaks prancing around, a guy with a jacket and a blonde-dyed crop. First he did some threatening-looking shadow-boxing with his friends, then he took off all his clothes, and jumped up to the DJ stage to strut his, erm, thing. Unnecessary to say, the guy was thrown out before he was able to do his male stripper routine to the full. I also heard that the same person had been pissing on the ladies' room sink before that. On Friday night night the same guy hurled a can of sangria over one of the performers' laptop at Swäg. Well, it's the spirit of underground, isn't it? Gotta love these freaks.

I had to admit I was a bit at loss with this evening, so I had to do my best with the little disco-orientated music I've got in my collection. My old favourite, the early-90s rave classic, Jaydee's hypnotic Hammond jam 'Plastic Dreams', went really well with the 2004 audience too, even in its full 10 minutes length. At the end of night these shapelessly foam-covered half-naked bodies were dancing around on stage just in front of DJ desk, but it was a bit too testosterone-filled to my own tastes and in fact more like some Francis Bacon painting than any beautiful Ibiza dream (one person's dream can be other person's nightmare). And our little blonde gonzoid friend managed to make reappearance somehow, though gladly stayed away from yours truly (after the Vaasa heckler experience last winter I'm more than ready to forget my pacifist principles with these people). But what the heck, it was all in the name of good clean fun. Perhaps I expected myself more drillbient, scary and distorted sonic attacks from Slavic Walkmen and less glam baila baila, but that's probably for some other occasion. Thanks to Aleks and Ville for setting this up, and everyone who were there.


p(H)laylist 240704

Dead Or Alive: You Spin Me Around Like A Record
Sly and the Family Stone: Dance To The Music (Disco mix)
S'Express: Theme From S'Express
Sylvester: Be With You
Parallax Corporation: Lift-Off
I-f: Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass
Adult.: Nausea (Mega-Blend)
Dave Clarke feat. Chicks on Speed: What Was Her Name? (LFO mix)
Jaydee: Plastic Dreams
---

Cerrone: Supernature
Prince: Dirty Mind
Joyrex: Popcorn

Summertime Flu And Great Expectations

Great, thanks to that class reunion night, I got cold and been now suffering from flu all this week. In the middle of warmest summertime, how else. I've been trying to rest: I've got my DJ gig at Swäg on Friday, then the Underground Disco event with Slavic Walkmen on Saturday, so I've got to be OK by then; not to let my fans down. Ha ha ha. The 7th of August I'll go to Turku to play at Uuden Musiikin Festivaali. So, DJ-wise it's been busier for me than usually. I wonder if I can take this pace, but on the other hand I've got no choices: I'm still officially unemployed and I've got to try to "establish myself" the best I can with my music activities. Because It's hard for me to think that I should do an ordinary nine-to-five job, especially now when I'm getting older. The idea just devastates me. I don't think I'm that lazy, but I'm quite a lot either-or person: either I have to be 100% motivated to what I'm doing, or then I'm not motivated at all. I've done these wage jobs and I just couldn't take it. I became lazy and irresponsible. I had no spark for it. It makes life hard for you sometimes, I know. My dream: to be able to earn some sort of living with pHinnWeb/music/related activities. It's quite ironic, isn't it? That you have to work so hard just to avoid ordinary jobs, avoid being just like everyone else; being drowned by your tedious everyday existence of work, family, children...

I'm some sort of example of the guilt created by Protestant work ethics. I bear constant guilt of the fact that my university studies didn't go anywhere, that everyone was expecting great things from me, but I just couldn't do it. Because that was not how life worked out for me; there were too many personal and family mess-ups, tons of guilt, depression, shame; all in one vicious circle. My redemption was music and my Website. I had to leave all those people and their expectations behind, and it wasn't that easy. It still isn't. I compare my life to tightrope-walking. As long I just keep on going and doing my own thing, it's going to be alright and fine, but if I look down and start to think about the abyss beneath me, there's a chance that I will fall. I lead a strange, unreal life; I know having to face the reality of other people would crush me. So I just have to cope with what I've got. Keep on praying (I speak metaphorically here of course since I'm not that religious person; a sort of agnostic, I guess) and believing in my Guardian Angel (ditto).

Besides having cold, my stomach has been upside down for over a month now. I have to take crap a couple of times a day, and it often comes out nearly liquid, like diarrhea. I guess drinking bucket-loads of coffee for years and eating all sorts of unhealthy crap has done it (plus all psychosomatic hardships I've been through, I guess): my guts are fucked. Sorry if this is disgusting for you, but does anyone read these ramblings anyway...?

True And False Blended Together

"He was dignity distorted, bravery become knavery, sanctimoniousness masking sin. He was a mirror, jeering at the subject it reflected. Yet so muted were the jeers, so delicate the inaccuracies of delineation, that they evaded detection. True and false were blended together. The false was merely an extended shadow of the true."

- Jim Thompson: A Swell Looking Babe

Class Reunion

"They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules

[...]

When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years
then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function, you're so full of fear"

- John Lennon: 'Working Class Hero'


Last Saturday I had a class reunion meeting with the people I spent nine years of my formative years with, at the Haihara Primary School and at the Kaukajärvi Upper Level Comperehensive School (Junior High School); both schools adjunct in the same building smack in the middle of Kaukajärvi, a suburb of Tampere where I grew up. Nine years, from the age of seven to that of fifteen. You can guess for me this meeting was an emotionally charged one, though I managed to keep it at bay, under my (more or less) businesslike shell.

To be honest, back in the time when it all ended after nine years of basic schooling and three additional years at the Hervanta High School, I was more than happy to get out of the grindmill. And the period I spent later on at the university was basically nothing more than returning to school: don't think for yourself, follow orders, submit to the self-serving idiots who run the system, be nothing. I bless every day out of the school, out of any sort of educational system.

That early phase of life was for me filled with shame, confusion, ignorance, loneliness; the feelings of being constantly misunderstood, miscast, mistreated. And now I was back with these people I shared the awkward years with. The same people who used to mock me and give me a hard time, but whom I also managed to treat like a bastard from time to time. Children can be cruel to each other since they're not yet hindered by the constraints of having been conditioned into the rules of the so called civilization; into socialization and other crap like that. In other words, children have not yet learned how to mask their despisal and scorn under the safe armour of politeness and superficial courtesy like adults do.

Not to talk about the teachers. I can't help it but that's one profession I've got it hard to feel too much sympathy for. I'm aware of the fact that many teachers do important work but still have it hard and don't receive the respect or financial reward that ought to be their due, but still, I've had such a hard time in the hands of these people that often it's difficult for me to care for the hardships teachers and other professional educators have to go through. I've had my share of petty tyrants who did their best to terrorize the children -- though during our worst puberty years it also was vice versa -- or teachers who were just plain incompetent. I am not going to mention any names here, but it was inevitable this meeting would also bring up these sore memories. It disgusts me and makes me furious to think how some of these same people were, and are, considered the very pillars of society: children can't do much to fight back. It starts to sound like "We don't need no education" in Pink Floyd's The Wall, doesn't it? Probably the dislike of teachers and the school system is an archetypal experience.

Anyway, I went to this reunion knowing I had to meet up with my past. And I had to whet my curiosity; it can't be denied that often I've been thinking of whatever happened to these people, how they grew up, what became of them. Well, my curiosity was satisfied: most of them were now married, with children, having jobs, running their own businesses, some of them living abroad. Some had lost hair and gained weight. Some looked older than their age, some younger. Some of them wore signs of hard-lived life on their faces. The girls I used to have a fleeting adolescent crush with were still cute, bar a wrinkle or two around the eyes. There were some sad and tragic stories of our contemporaries who had passed by prematurely, some by their own hand -- and less sad stories of new ones being born: these people I remember as kids having children of their own. I felt like a freak, the odd one out: but not exactly in a bad way. In fact, I was happy I had found my own niche too, not copying or replicating anyone else's life.

It was not that bad in the end; it was really nice to meet these people after so much time had passed by, but I don't claim I wouldn't have felt uneasy about the whole thing. I felt uneasy as hell, as you would feel around people who once made you feel clumsy, stupid, ugly, embarrassed, out of place. All that needling and picking on; the mocking words still ringing in one's ears after all these years. And how much pain you managed to cause yourself? Some people you once really hated but now had to be cool and polite with, like nothing had ever happened. Thinking they were only dumb and immature children then -- just like yourself. You can forgive but can you forget?

My class reunion images

More:

My maths anxiety

Kaukajärvi
More Kaukajärvi images

Some More Lavatanssit Pics

6

The Fear of Weakness

Those people who are most concerned with weakness or one showing any signs of weakness; those with any sort of pseudo-Nietzschean "superman" trappings; those who openly despise the people they consider "weak" -- I think deep inside they're themselves the ones who are the most fragile. It's a typical paradox of the Taoist nature: every phenomenon contains its exact opposite. Because there is nothing more fearsome to the one admiring strength and force than to admit one's own weakness, the horrifying idea that one might after all be vulnerable and mere mortal -- just like the rest.

Nazis are the best example here: they idealized strength, physical force and the aesthetic beauty of their so called superior Aryan race, and their greatest despisal and fear was directed towards those who were deemed "inferior" in their fallacious viewpoints: those of non-Aryan, non-Nordic, non-white peoples; those races or human types who were "ugly" or even physically deformed; i.e., who did not meet their narrowly defined aesthetic ideals, or simply those who were "weak". But how were the greatest leaders of the Nazis themselves? Not exactly the perfect specimen of the physically superior master race themselves: look any time at the photographs of Himmler, Göring, Göbbels or even Hitler himself. Weak jaws, pointed noses, men small in stature, skinny or over-weight. Grotesque small men with oversized neuroses turning into delusions of grandeur; weak little men whose greatest fear was weakness itself. Schizoid daydreamers and psychopathological utopists dreaming of the muscular and handsome "men of action". Nazi Germany was basically a Tom of Finland type of homoerotic masturbation fantasy; an adolescent superhero power fantasy that couldn't last. Instead of Superman (a comics character created by two Jewish schoolboys!) it was just a little kid in tights and cape jumping off the window before his parents could stop him, actually thinking he could fly. The outcome of this thoughtless game: millions of dead or crippled for life physically and mentally; half the world in ruins.

The other side of the totalitarian coin: the Soviet Communism. Enter the Stakhanovian Worker Superhero of Socialist Realism. The same muscular worker/soldier heroism, the strong jaw pointing upwards and fierce eyes gazing fearlessly into the shining future of the forthcoming utopia. But there was not to be any Utopia, only a dying Dystopia.

And now over half a century has passed, and what is left is only the Capitalist Dream. The dream of endless growth, increasing profits and returns with no end in sight. The Homo Economicus is the Superman of our own days. Welfare state and social security are for the weak only; nothing that our "self-made" neo-liberalist Supermen and Superwomen would need. The prevailing myth of our time is that of a self-made millionaire/billionaire. Lifestyles of the rich and famous. It would be all too easy to predict the eventual collapse of capitalism, in the way they did away with fascism and communism. The system that will lose its dynamism and ability to renew, regenerate itself will only lead to entropy. The strong will have nightmares every night of their own weakness creeping up to them. "And the meek shall inherit the Earth."

Savage Night

"I was through, wasted up. I wasn't living; I was just going through the motions.
 
Life is remembering, I guess. If you've lost interest, if everything is that same shade of grey, the kind you see when you look into light with your eyes closed, if nothing seems worth storing away, either as bad or good, reward or retribution, then you may keep going for a while. And you don't remember.
 
[...]
 
I snapped out of it then, and came back to life. You have to at a time like that whether you want or not." 
 
Jim Thompson: Savage Night

Lapua

On Tuesday we paid a visit with my brother to our grandfather, who lives in Lapua. Lapua is a small town (pop. approximately 13,000) situated in the region of Southern Pohjanmaa (Ostrobothnia is the ancient Latin name for the region). I was born in Lapua myself, though I have lived in Tampere since I was one year old, after my father came to study at the University of Tampere.

The town of Lapua, despite its small size, plays quite a part in Finnish history. Locals are deeply religious, conservative and patriotic Protestants, and the town was the place where the fiercely anti-Communist, right-wing "Lapuan Liike" movement was born in the 1930s, headed by one Vihtori Kosola. Other well-known Lapua natives are, among all, Finnish ex-Prime Minister Anneli Jäätteenmäki (who had to resign in the stir of controversy in an affair called "Iraqgate"), the notorious artist Teemu Mäki (still best known from his art video where he slaughtered a living cat), and the actor Esko Nikkari, also familiar from Aki Kaurismäki's films. It's obvious Lapua is known for people who like to make ripples. Lapua is also the home for the world-famous Lapua Ammunition Factory. In 1976 there was an explosion at the factory that took the lives of 40 people. From Pohjanmaa there was a large immigrant movement to America in the nineteenth century (when the great starvation years took place) and early twentieth century, so I have some distant relatives also in the New World.

Despite the bold reputation of Pohjanmaa people, my grandfather Aarne Rautio is a kind and modest man; even a saint-like person if I've ever known one. I feel guilty that I don't visit him as often as I should, especially now when he became a widower in 2001. My grandmother Helvi Rautio was the strong-willed matriach of our family. She was from the Finnish region of Savo and was married during the war to my grandfather. The relocation from Savo to Pohjanmaa did not take place without any friction. In Finland there's some tribal mistrust between people of different provinces and regions, and for example, the people of Savo are often especially maligned as being crooked and self-serving people, though dynamic, humorous and playful too. And the Pohjanmaa people are considered very proud, bold, straightforward, patriotic, conservative, with a lot of entrepreneur spirit -- and stiff.

Before she died, my grandmother often told me her hard-time stories about how she was mistreated in the Rautio family in the 1940s and 50s, by her mother-in-law et al. I think those experiences made my grandmother a bit hardened and bitter person, though she and my grandfather always treated me like a little prince. When I was a child, I spent many summers and holidays with my grandparents in Lapua and they grew very fond of and attached to me. They lived in a house in the middle of forest of Rautakorpi, and it was all quite secluded. There were rarely any visitors, and I spent a lot alone with my own games, reading books and watching their small black and white TV that got its power from a car accumulator: they didn't have any electricity and used gas for cooking and to light up the place. Now it feels very idyllic, but I often wonder if all that seclusion didn't have some effect at least of me becoming more a loner type than a socializing one. Nevertheless, those are my memories, things that were to make me what I am now.

It is said that the notorious puukkojunkkari ("knife fighter") Antti Rannanjärvi would also bear some relation to our family. Puukkojunkkarit, or Häjyt, were a bunch of rogues who terrorized the Pohjanmaa region in the 19th century. Especially restless was the decade of the 1850s. Antti Rannanjärvi's best known associate was a man called Antti Isotalo. Nowadays these people have become similar "folk heroes" in Finland as the outlaws in the Wild West of America are now considered.

Antti Rannanjärvi & Antti Isotalo, the original gangstas

Isotalon Antti ja Rannanjärvi
ne jutteli kaharen kesken:
:;: Tapa sinä Kauhavan ruma vallesmanni,
niin minä nain sen komian lesken. :;:

Isotalon Antti oli ensimmäänen
ja Rannanjärvi oli toinen
:;: Pukkilan Jaska se Kauhavalla,
oli kolmas samanmoinen. :;:

Sitten on piru, sanoi Rannanjärvi
jos minä miestä pelkään
:;: Tervaspampulla kuonon päälle,
ja teräksellä selkään. :;:

Vaasan veri ei vapise
eikä Kauhavan rauta ruostu
:;: niskasta kiinni ja puukkolla selkähän
jonsei muutoin suostu :;:

Ensin portahat särjettiin
ja sitten vasta muuri,
:;: Isoo-Antti se erellä meni,
joka joukosta oli suurin. :;:

Ei saa laulaa Rannanjärvestä,
Rannanjärvi on kuollu.
:;: Rannanjärven hauralle,
on marmorikivi tuotu. :;:

Neo-Folk Revisited

http://www.taivaansusi.net/taide/sarjis/neofolk.html

The American Book of the Dead

http://theamericanbook.blogspot.com

Lavatanssit

10 July 2004,
Lavatanssit, Nokia, Finland

Lavatanssit was an electronic music event and barbeque party taking place at a sports lodge in the middle of forest near the town of Nokia. Driving there, we picked up two Dutch hitch-hikers, who wanted to see Nokia, so they could tell at home that they had been there. They were duly explained that the town of Nokia these days doesn't have anything to do with the famous international mobile phone manufacturer, although the original Nokia industries (car tyres, televisions and rubber boots!) started there. Instead, the Dutch guys were invited to this party. I don't know what they made of it: it was raining nearly all the time and the place in the woods was quite murky. But crazy young Finns seemed to enjoy themselves. The sports lodge "main arena" was indoors, and Sami Koivikko and Virta performed there. In a kind of outdoors tent of transparent plastic I played a sort of "Best of pHinn" set of electro, etc., while killing off mosquitos. An interesting experience.

Images from Lavatanssit:

1
2
3
4
5

pHinn playlist:

Cybotron: Techno City
Octagon Man: Vidd
Double Dutch: ?
Pan sonic: Kierto
New York City Survivors: Sirkkeli
Freddy Fresh: ?
John Carpenter: Assault On Precinct 13 - Main Theme
Drexciya: You Don't Know
Front 242: Commandomix
Terence Fixmer: Warm
Club Telex Noise Ensemble: CTNE (Andrew Duke's Halifax to Montreal mix)
I-f: Shadow of a Clown
(Imatran Voima?)
Underground Resistance: Electronic Warfare (Voc)
Kraftwerk: Numbers
Aux 88: Electro/Techno (Microknox edit)
Model 500: Time Space Transmat
Adonis: No Way Back
Herbie Hancock: Rockit
DJ Nasty: Closet Freak
(Imatran Voima?)
Dexter: Intruder
Tackhead: Mind at the End of Tether
?: Beethoven Street Symphony(?)

Wang Lei

Wang Lei (CHINA), Oreia, Toiminto, DJ Aleks, DJ Art Barfuncle, DJ pHinn
8 July 2004, Mental Alaska @ Telakka, Tampere, Finland


The night was started by the set of Oreia. Smooth melodic ambient/IDM soundscapes with a touch of soul/funky keyboard licks. Then Toiminto played another of his excellent sets of disturbed beats and sounds combined with suave electronic-ah; "the sound of 2004" as the DJ Slave To The Beat put it. Both these local guys need a recording contract now. I mean it.

In the meanwhile, the James Hetfield-lookalike Art Barfuncle (aka Arttu P.) played from vinyls some of the most disturbed DJ sounds I've ever heard. Twisted V/Vmish acid polka from outer space. Or something.

The main performer, Wang Lei, then hit the jackpot. I've heard his album containing some tasty dub sounds combined to samples of Chinese music, but it didn't prepare me for this that was one of the most energetic sets I've ever heard. Press info compared Mr. Wang's music to Autechre and Prefuse 73, but I think those descriptions were a bit misleading, since this music putting together dub, breakbeats, drum'n'bass and even a taste of acid was clearly made for dancing, not just nodding off to in your bedroom. Wang Lei moved behind his gear and Sherman Filter Bank fluently like Bruce Lee, Shaolin monk or a dancer from Beijing's opera or a master Chinese chef. The relentless, head-banging rhythms created a mystical, tribal ritual; this clearly would have required a dancefloor which a venue like Telakka couldn't provide, since the rhythm just swept one along. Some people danced, nevertheless. Alongside Pan sonic at Tampere Biennale, the best live act I've seen this year, hands down.


pHinn's playlist 080704:

James: Jam J (Sabres of Paradise mix)
Max Romeo & The Upsetters: One Step Forward
The Orb: Towers of Dub
---
Perrey & Kingsley: One Note Samba
Dean Elliot: Lonesome Road
DAT Politics: The Way
A. Alpha & Citizen Omega: Toinen loppuunpaluu
Porter Ricks: Redundance 6
Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention: Nasal Retentive Calliope Music
Noise Production: Somewhere In Germany (excerpt)
Joe Meek & The Blue Men: March of the Dribcots
Raymond Scott: Bufferin (Original)
Team Doyobi: You Have The Power
Martin Denny: Quiet Village
Señor Coconut Y Su Conjunto: Showroom Dummies
Schneider TM vs. Kpt. Michi.Gan: The Light 3000
Aphex Twin: Bike Pump Meets Bucket
The Sabres of Paradise: Bubble & Slide (Nightmares On Wax mix)
Bandulu: Agent Jah

The Gutter

We tend to reflect our own lives to those of other people's. My own is like living next to the gutter and trying desperately not to fall in. Just trying to survive. Therefore I tend to see things perhaps too bleak, always preparing myself for the next catastrophe. But just to stay out of the gutter. I've seen in my life too many people to fall in. I just try to keep awake in the world of sleep-walkers.

Mistah Brando, He Dead

You were the Wild One. You rode the Streetcar Called Desire. You danced the Last Tango in Paris. You were the Godfather. You were Colonel Kurtz. You were a legend, myth and icon. But were you happy?

Marlon Brando 1924-2004

CNN Obituary
BBC News

Veikko Ennala

Veikko Ennala (1922-1991) was the poet laureate of Finnish gutter journalism. He gained his reputation writing from 1966 onwards to the Hymy ("The Smile") magazine of the publisher mogul Urpo Lahtinen. Hymy epitomized sensation journalism in Finland, and Veikko Ennala was the magazine's brightest star.

Verbally highly talented, Ennala grasped in his feature stories, interviews and columns such subjects and topics that had been hitherto taboos in the conservative, chaste climate of postwar Finland, but which were now becoming quickly unveiled in the social and political tumult and ongoing sexual revolution of the 1960s. The time was just ripe for this sort of unflinching approach, and the sales of Hymy soared with Veikko Ennala's quasi-sociological but clearly sensationalist, pseudo-sexological but shamelessly voyeurist accounts of the seedy side of Finnish life.

There is a derogative Finnish term sosiaaliporno ("social porn") describing this sort of sensational journalism disguised as being of "human interest" but in fact turning one into a Peeping Tom secretly feasting on the horrid living conditions of the people dwelling "on the wrong side of the tracks": social and economic unjustice, exploitation of the weak, alcoholism, addictions, mental disturbances, sexual perversions and the general tragedy of life becoming just a freak show run by the yellow press for the rubberneckers and the morbidly curious.

I'm now working on a little site on Veikko Ennala, who enjoys a posthumous cult reputation here in Finland. Perhaps he represents for a young generation a time long lost, both wilder and more innocent than these days.

Reflections of Mr. Glass House

Of course this blog is a blatant exercise in exhibitionism. I feel unashamedly titillated by the idea that someone actually reads these lines and shares the misery/glory of my life. I'm always amused by celebrities who go to lengths to "protect their private lives". I don't have much of a private life, therefore there is nothing to protect. It's all transparent -- or maybe I merely hide by revealing. Just go ask anything about my sex life -- I don't have one. Depressions, mental disturbances, personal frustrations, "boo-hoo, I'm so lonely and no one loves me". I can give you a psychobabble galore any time.

It's not a big deal that I have taken Prozac (all legally subscribed and purchased) for nearly ten years now; that I have been to psychoterapy and still see a therapeutist in every two months; that I received state pension because of depression (of which I had an official doctor's statement) for a couple years in the end of 1990s. That I've been registered unemployed since February 2001 and also receive money from welfare (it is not such a shame here in pinko Scandinavia where we are yet to fully embrace the miracles of the economic fascism of Reagan/Thatcher/Bushonomics). It is not a secret that I come from a family which is more or less mentally dysfunctional under the respectable working-to-middle-class surface; that I'm a combined result of both of my parents' traumas, themselves in their turn traumatized by growing up in the post-Depression/post-World War II environment of economic deprivation combined with neurotic psychological fascism. My mother and father: they are not dumb by any means, only mentally fucked-up. I'm not looking here for any scapegoats for my own condition, though. My parents have given me a lot of care too, even though sometimes one tends to reminisce just too much of the bad things. There comes inevitably a day in a child's life when s/he finds out that his/her once seemingly omnipotent parents are mere mortals, just human beings. We are all just social end product, as the cliché goes.

Yet, I have survived somehow. And I refuse to be part of the "victim culture". I wouldn't be the same person I am now without these experiences. It's all part of the learning process. I spoke earlier about my "Guardian Angel". William Blake wrote about "the Fox providing for himself, but God providing for the Lion". Yes, I lead a lonely and drabby existence in a dull and gray environment; I feel like I'm living a life of endless repetition where every day following each other is alike; still there's some beauty in every single day. It's a question of perception, isn't it?

There's always the danger that one gets stuck in one's personal loop of navel-gazing, narcissism and self-gratification. Especially when one spends a lot of time alone with one's own thoughts only. It's good to devote some time for personal reflection, but too much of that, and it becomes stale. One always has to look outside, even when one looks inside (oh, these forrestgumpisms!) Leading a life of mind can have its entrapments.

Compared to when I was younger, I worry these days less about being perceived "strange"/"creep"/"weirdo", etc. When you're a kid or a teenager, there's a huge peer group pressure to be like "all the rest". I used to suffer from that. Then, in time I learned to accept that I'm unique and not similar to anyone else. Yes, I'm still shy, restrained and reticent; more an observer in social situations than an active participant, but I accept that as part of my own psychological and emotional make-up; as what I am.

I, The Mutant?

There is a human type I call "people living on the edge". They are not like the rest; they are outsiders, outcast, miscasts. They are daydreamers, occupying a clearly different worldview from the rest of the populace. They are the ones often deemed "eccentrics", even "village idiots" by the less understanding people.

When they grow up, they may spend a lot of time in solitude by themselves, in their own fantasy worlds. There may be something verbally or physically clumsy or even androgynous in these people: clearly they are not totally "at home" in their own bodies. They are probably intelligent but end up being bullied by other kids, causing them thus to withdraw deeper in their own fantasy universes. Only because they are "different".

(Classical shamans also usually represent this human type. They can suffer from all sorts of physical and mental afflictions all through their young lives until one day they find their true calling as the seers and healers in society.)

If they are lucky and have the right guidance and help, these people will find their way in this world through arts and sciences, as respected "visionaries" working on those fields. If they are not, they will end up as alcoholics and addicts; to skid row and mental hospitals.

These "edge people" can also be understood as "mutants", since they obviously can be seen representing some sort of a next step in evolution. We just don't understand them because they can see "beyond"; already live in the future while the rest of us only drag behind.

I know some mutants myself. It may be possible that I am even one of them (only that would give some sort of meaning to all pain and solitude; but perhaps then, I'm not).

And as this excerpt by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier indicates, there can be no giving birth to a new era without its inherent labour pains...



"Shall we see a new race of beings who resemble us outwardly, but yet are different? [...] What is certain is that we are witnessing the birth of a myth: that of the Mutant. That this myth should arise in our technical and scientific civilization must have some significance and dynamic value."

[...]

"Are there really beings among us who resemble us externally, but whose behaviour is a removed from us as 'that of whales of butterflies' Common sense answers that, if so, we should be aware of it, and that if such beings were living among us, we should certainly see them."

[...]

"... the mutant is clever enough to conceal himself. He keeps his discoveries for himself. He lives as discreetly as possible, and only tries to remain in contact with other intelligences like his own. A few hours of work each week are enough to ensure the necessities of life; the rest of his life he spends in activities of which we have no conception. [...] There is every reason to believe that they are exactly like us, or rather that we have no means of distinguishing them."

[...]

"Life is never perfectly adapted, but it tends towards perfect adaptation. Why should it relax this tension since the Creation of Man?"

[...]

Do these mutants form an invisible society? No human being lives alone. He can only develop himself within a society. The human society we know has shown only too well its hostility towards an objective intelligence or a free imagination: Giordano Bruno burnt, Einstein exiled, Oppenheimer kept under observation. If there are indeed mutants answering our description, there is every reason to believe that they are working and communicating with one another in a society superimposed on our own, which no doubt extends all over the world."

[...]

"One of the greatest French biologist, Morand, the inventor of the tranquillizers, admits that mutants have made their appearance all through the history of humanity. 'These mutants, among others, were called Mahomet, Confucius, Jesus Christ...' Many more exist, perhaps. It is by no means inconceivable that, in the present evolutionary period, the mutants think its useless to offer themselves as an example, or to preach some new form of religion. There are better things to do at present than to appeal to the individual. Again, they may think that it is both desireable and necessary that our humanity should move towards collectivization. Finally, it may well be that they think it a good thing that we should be suffering now the pains of childbirth, and would even welcome some great catastrophe which might hasten a better understanding of the spiritual tragedy represented in its totality by the phenomenon of Man. So that they may act more efficiently and so as to obtain a clearer view of the current that is perhaps sweeping us all upwards to some form of Ultra-Human to which they have access, it is perhaps necessary for them to remian hidden, and to keep their coexistence with us secret while, despite appearances and thanks, perhaps, to their presence, a new soul is being forged for the new world which we long for with all our heart."

[...]

"The appearance of the mutants would seem to suggest that our human society is from time to time given a foretaste of the future, and visited by beings already possessing a knowledge of things to come. Are not mutants the memory of the future with which the great brain of humanity is perhaps endowed?"

[...]

"There may be individuals with 'other' possibilities. And yet the general trend of societies would seem to be towards a greater degree of collectivization. Is this contradictory? We do not think so. Existence, in our views, does not mean contradiction, but complementing and going beyond."

[...]

"If we had mirrors capable of revealing to us that 'personality' which we value so highly, we could not bear to look at our reflection, so disfigured would it be by all sorts of monstrous excrescences. Only a truly 'awakened' man could look into such a mirror without being in danger of dying from fright, because then the mirror would reflect nothing and be absolutely pure. The true face is one which in the mirror of truth is not reflected. We have not yet acquired, in this sense, a face. And the gods will not speak to us face-to-face until we have one ourselves."

[...]

"The spirit of the Earth and the individual have not yet fully emerged. The pessimist, seeing the great upheavals which are caused by this secret emergence, say that we ought at least to try to 'save Man'. But this Man does not want saving, but changing. Man. as projected in orthodox psychology and current philosophy, has already been left behind, condemned as inadaptable."

- Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier: The Morning of the Magicians ("Le Matin des Magiciens", 1960)

Hang On To Your Ego

"I know so many people who think they can do it alone
They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zones

Now what can you tell them
And what can you say that won't make them defensive

Hang on to your ego
Hang on, but I know that you're gonna lose the fight

They come on like their peaceful
But inside they're so uptight
They trip through the day
And waste all their thoughts at night

Now how can I say it
And how can I come on
When I know I'm guilty

Hang on to your ego
Hang on, but I know that you're gonna lose the fight"
- Brian Wilson


Music enables me to create an autistic safety zone around me. Other safety zones: books, writing, films, art. The whole pHinnWeb in fact: I'm the Wizard of Oz. The reality of a schizoid man. I've created this whole armour around me (some smart Alec once called the Net a "reality condom"). When I'm DJing, I'm in my own spaceship, very far from this Earth. It's somehow easier than to function with people, without the need to come out all defensive. I'm aware of my condition; somehow, you get used to your solitude with your imaginary friends, and it won't feel that sad. It's like tightrope walking: don't think about the abyss beneath you -- if you start to think, you fall.

Juhannus Saturday night, 22:44

I'm writing this on Liina's computer. She is staying in for Juhannus to babysit her mother's cat, a cute little striped thing called Katinka. She is nice, always letting me to use her computer on weekends and nights (but we're just friends, before you draw any conclusions, you gossip-lovers). Nice to actually have someone to talk to, though I don't know if she just finds me a big nuisance sitting in her room's corner; otherwise I'd probably have just stayed home with my books and records. Been re-reading Kodwo Eshun's 'More Brilliant Than The Sun' ('98) -- an amazing book about "Afro-futurism" in music; featuring Drexciya, Underground Resistance, Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Public Enemy, etc. A big inspiration, Eshun writes like a DJ mixes records.

Here's something for you to listen, Estonia's Kohvi Records just put my "pHinn's
Reindeer Disko" selection to the RealAudio Webradio:

http://www.kohviradio.com/tunes/requests/index.html

Tracklist:

1. Giorgio Moroder: Tony's Theme (Scarface)
2. Lowfish: Glass House
3. Polytron vs. Kompleksi: Porno Tampere (voc remix)
4. Club Telex Noise Ensemble: KVY (Legowelt mix)
5. Putsch '79: Asian Girls
6. Unidentified Sound Objects vs. pHinn: Spiders In The Sky
7. Imatran Voima: Aces High
8. New York City Survivors: Sirkkeli
9. Mika Vainio: Tom unessaan
10. Les Robespierres vs. Chicks On Speed: Class War
11. Chris Korda & The Church of Euthanasia: I Like To Watch
12. Maxx Klaxon: Internationale 2000
13. Kompleksi: The Only Star In My Sky

Another Hometown Juhannus 2004

So, Finland is in for another Juhannus, or yearly midsummer festivities. Usually people head on Juhannus out of town to their summer cottages, camping sites and festivals, but probably uncharacteristically for a Finn, I'm not of countryside type, and I've seen a bit of too much that violent drunken bacchanalia side of typical Finnish midsummer "celebration", that I'd rather stay here at ghost town. And usually it rains on Juhannus, so that's another reason not to bother. The downside of staying in town is that there are few places to go here during these three weekend days; probably I'd hang as usual at Yo-Talo, but since they keep closed, I've got to find another bar to drink my boredom away. My life is amazingly interesting, isn't it?

It seems they have drained this year the Tammerkoski Rapids, the "river" flowing in the middle of my hometown Tampere (so, it's not an actual river, just a little route of water between two lakes, Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi, between which is the isthmus on which this town is built). Well, Tammerkoski without water can be a ghostly sight, when you cross it over the Hämeensilta bridge. Abandoned bicycle wrecks and other junk people have thrown to the rapids. This year they also found loads of mobile phones there and other personal juvenalia.

More Tammerkoski pictures here and of Tampere.

Any Publicity Is Good Publicity

"For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts." - Gertrude Stein

These Chicks mark the destruction of corporate rock, that bloated commercialized monster. CoS declare they are not interested in practising guitar-playing for hours in garages. They don't want to "keep it real" -- they want to keep it surreal. They "can't sing" but sing nevertheless. They challenge rock's male dominance and its (questionable) preoccupance with "real" -- "real" instruments, "real" virtuosity, "real" attitude. At the same time they're not a music business-manufactured product like the Spice Girl or Britney Spears, but instead they have manufactured themselves. D.I.Y.! The annoyance and hatred of rock fanboys can barely hide their confusion and fear in front of the new and unknown; anything that does not fit to their limited world of guitar solos, raising fists in the air and the pathetic sentimentality of a sea of cigarette lighters during the obligatory power ballads. They have no other recourse than to claim in their limited vocabulary the desperate cries of: "You suck!"

Any publicity is good publicity. The more hate messages, the more (free) publicity.

In the end all these hastily set-up "Chicks on Speed Suck" sites and message boards will only have a reverse effect to what was wanted and just generate more interest toward them. If someone hates something fiercely enough and wants to make it public, there are always bound to be rubberneckers who want to find what the fuss is all about. Hate sites of musical acts are just an indication that they've managed to reach of certain level of fame. Face it: does anyone want to create a hate site for an artist who's virtually unknown, and no one has heard of? Chicks on Speed should thank all you haters for free marketing. The provocation has finally done its job. Likewise, all booing and bottle-throwing is just bound to create extra sympathy for CoS. But it's probable the dust will settle very soon when the Red Hot Chili Peppers fans will find some other act to despise, thanks to people's generally short attention spans these days.

If you really wanted people to forget about Chicks on Speed, you'd just keep quiet about them -- but thanks to you, now even more people want to find about them. So big thanks to all you fanboys for creating such a great publicity stunt for Chicks on Speed.

As an interesting side note, the bottles were thrown from within 'The Golden Area', the so-called area for the privileged or at least the more affluent.

Chicks on Speed Bottled

No, I don't mean that you can enjoy now Chicks on Speed in liquid form, but that on their recent Amsterdam and UK gigs as the supporters of Red Hot Chili Peppers, they received boos and bottles hurled at them by
thousands of enraged RHCP fans.

From NME.com:

"The day got off to a stormy start when support band Chicks on Speed were bottled by a hostile crowd.

Halfway through the song 'Mind Your Own Business', singer Alex Murray-Leslie pleaded with the fans to stop throwing bottles at the band.

Before the group left the stage, Murray-Leslie said: 'We don't like having bottles thrown at us.'"

I was shocked and disgusted to read from the CoS Records Guestbook among tons of illiterate hatred-filled "You suck" messages, how some of the RHCP "fans" even applauded these bottle throwers who had managed to hit the Chicks in the head. I don't know the details of what happened here, but obviously there was a lot of anger and hatred directed towards CoS, and the whole situation must have been ugly (if not dangerous) for Alex, Kiki and Ann Shenton of Large Number (who was there for Melissa, who couldn't make the RHCP gigs because of health problems).

Did they feel proud of themselves bottling these three girls on stage? From what I've read about these gigs, it clearly was not a concert crowd, it was a lynch mob. Now, I don't know if these were plastic bottles or glass ones, but in the case of the latter, what if one of these bottles would have hit its target lethally? How would it have felt to have become from a concert-goer to a murderer?

I can't help seeing this as some sort of a symbolic stoning of witches posing a threat to rock'n'roll's male hierachy of playing guitars ('We Don't Play Guitars' is one of the CoS songs), and as a punishment for attacking the macho values of your typical male yobbo jock rock. Rock'n'roll is at the moment one of the most conservative music forms in the world, and Chicks on Speed have always declared being "a fake band", more a prankish and conceptual art/performance project than your usual rock act. It's easy to see why they don't fit to this whole corporate rock'n'roll brouhaha.

I know Chicks on Speed is not for everyone's tastes, but I have supported them nearly from the beginning, enjoying their whole art prank attitude of being not afraid to be spontaneous in their ideas, concepts and how to carry those out (if sometimes that approach must risk being hit-or-miss). Having followed their career I also know that there's a certain ambivalence; like they haven't decided if they want to be a "difficult" art project with social and feminist overtones etc., who just happens to release music as one of their activities, or a heavily touring chart pop act. Personally I'd like to see them concentrating their efforts in the former, but in the end it's up to these Chicks to decide "what they'll do when they grow up". One thing that is sure, though, is that they do not fit in to this world of calculated, corporate pop and rock and stadiums and fanboys and bullshit that easily.

Talking about the security, in the more civilized rock venues patrons are totally banned from taking glass bottles in: you can only carry your bewerages (if allowed at all) in plastic bottles. Was this the case at these RHCP concerts?

In the end, the responsibility for the performers' security goes to the concert venue's organisation, but also the main act of the bill and their own management must share that responsibility by insisting for their concerts such security-enhancing measures as riot gates, ban on glass bottles or anything else that can be used as weapons or to threaten the safety of the performers and other crowd members.

Finally, my prediction is that we are yet to see a major outburst of violence at stadium rock concerts, similar to what have jarred football games for decades. Altamont revisited...

Some pictures from the Hyde Park gig

Bedtime For Bonzo

WHY I WANT TO FUCK RONALD REAGAN [1967] by J.G. Ballard

RONALD REAGAN AND THE CONCEPTUAL AUTO DISASTER. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (GPI), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subject showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic surrounded the image of the Presidential contender.

Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan's head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities.

In 82% of cases massive rear-end collisions were selected with a preference for expressed fecal matter and rectal hemorrhages. Further tests were conducted to define the optimum model-year. These indicate that a three year model lapse with child victims provide the maximum audience excitation (confirmed by manufacturers' studies of the optimum auto disaster). It is hoped to construct a rectal modulous of Reagan and the auto disaster of maximized audience arousal.

Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tones and musculature associated with homo-erotic behaviour. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children. Even with mature adults the verbal material was found to have a minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions.

INCIDENCE OF ORGASMS IN FANTASIES OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH RONALD REAGAN. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan's face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with "Reagan" proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects.

Axillary, buccal, navel, aural, and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that the caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12% of cases, the simulated anus of post-costolomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98% of penetrations. Multiple-track films were constructed of "Reagan" in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto collisions with one and three year model changes, (c) with rear exhaust assemblies.

SEXUAL FANTASIES IN CONNECTION WITH RONALD REAGAN. The genitalia of the Presidential contender exercised a continuing fascination. A series of imaginary genitalia were constructed using (a) the mouth parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, (b) a Cadillac, (c) the assembly kit prepuce of President Johnson...In 89% of cases, the constructed genitalia generated a high incidence of self-induced orgasm. Tests indicate the masturbatory nature of the Presidential contender's posture. Dolls consisting of plastic models of Reagan's alternate genitalia were found to have a disturbing effect on deprived children.

REAGAN'S HAIRSTYLE. Studies were conducted on the marked fascination exercised by the Presidential contender's hairstyle. 65% of male subjects made positive connections between the hairstyle and their own pubic hair. A series of optimum hairstyles were constructed.

THE CONCEPTUAL ROLE OF REAGAN. Fragments of Reagan's cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc.

The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the nonfunctional character of Reagan. Reagan's success therefore indicates society's periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which reformulate the roles of aggression and anality. Reagan's personality. The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years. By contrast the late JFK remained the prototype of the oral subject, usually conceived in pre-pubertal terms. In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan. Results confirm the probability of Presidential figures being perceived primarily in genital terms; the face of LB Johnson is clearly genital in significant appearance -- the nasal prepuce, scrotal jaw, etc. Faces were seen as either circumcised (J.F.K., Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (L.B.J, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan's face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

This World Is Not My Home

Again, someone else has managed to verbalise exactly the same feelings I've been through myself, all my life...

"I never felt like I was part of this planet. I felt that all this was a dream, that it wasn't real. And suffering... I just couldn't connect... My mind would never accept the fact that is like it's supposed to be. I always felt that there was something wrong. I couldn't explain it. My people kept saying, 'Why are you unhappy? You never seem to be happy.' And that was true. I had this touch of sadness in the midst of other people's parties; other people were having a good time, but I would have a moment of loneliness and sadness. It puzzled me, therefore I had to analyze that, and I decided I was different, that's all. I must have come from somewhere else." - Sun Ra (1914-1993)


"This World Is Not My Home"
by Sun Ra

Is this a planet of life?
Then why do people die?
This is not life, this is death.
Can't you understand?

You're only dreaming.
You're not real here.
You're only dreaming
you did all the things
you did before you died

You're asleep.
Wake up before it's too late
and you die in a dream.

This world is not the real world.
It's all illusion. It's not real.
Can't you feel that this world is not real?
Someone cast a magic spell
on the people of planet Earth.

If you do right they put you in jail.
If you do wrong they put you in jail.
You can't win.
You got to do something else.
You got to get away from here.

You make death your master.
You're not free.
If you're free, why do you bow to death?
Is that what you mean by liberty?
Stop bowing down to your master called death.
If you're free, prove it.


----

This interview excerpt and Sun Ra's poem are from John F. Szwed's book Space Is The Place. The Life and Times of Sun Ra (1997).

----

Sun Ra was all through his life preoccupied with the idea of death, that every living creature has to die after its allotted lifespan.

I don't worry myself about death that much, though. I'm not afraid of dying; I'm only afraid that I would have to leave while I've still got unfinished business here on Earth -- and at the moment I've got plenty of that. Instead, I worry about life. Let the dead bury their dead, and let's not forget that everyone of us is just one rung in the ladder.

Besides, Sun Ra did not die: he only left this planet behind, just like a passing visitor that he was -- and we all are.

How To Attract Wimmin

Ha. Now that I've whined and complained about women here, the Blogspot automatically adds a link to "How To Attract Women" to the "Related Searches" of my page. Another over-simplifying self-help guide, which basically claims: "Oh, modern women are so feminist-minded and emancipated, but what they really want is a strong, muscular alpha male type of guy". What drivel and how American. From this guy's point of view I've probably done all the "mistakes" here, but I don't believe there's one stereotypical way of "how" a man or a woman should be or behave. Look, Dave, I am what I am: sometimes nice, sometimes nasty, sometimes generous, sometimes greedy, sometimes benevolent, sometimes selfish, sometimes bold, sometimes wussy -- and ain't gonna change my ways.

---

The 10 Most Dangerous Mistakes YOU Probably Make With Women—And What To Do About It...

Here Are The Top Ten Reasons Why Men Fail With Women—And How To Make Sure YOU Avoid Every One Of These Deadly Common Mistakes...

-By David DeAngelo, Author Of "Double Your Dating"

MISTAKE #1: Being Too Much Of A "Nice Guy"

MISTAKE #2: Trying To "Convince Her To Like You"

MISTAKE #3: Looking To Her For Approval Or Permission

MISTAKE #4: Trying To "Buy" Her Affection With Food And Gifts

MISTAKE #5: Sharing "How You Feel" Too Early In The Relationship With Her

MISTAKE #6: Not "Getting" How Attraction Works For Women

MISTAKE #7: Thinking That It Takes Money And Looks

MISTAKE #8: Giving Away All Of Your Power To Women

MISTAKE #9: Not Knowing EXACTLY What To Do In Each Type Of Situation With Women

MISTAKE #10: Not Getting HELP
- Here he advertises his mailing-list and book, of course. Marketing, the American Way of Life.

The Comedy of Pain

I'm not afraid of ridiculing myself. Every king used to have a jester. At the same time I'm serious as hell. My words act as the transformation of pain. The pain of being alive, of growing up, of learning. But I understand one person's tragedy can be other person's comedy. Irony means distancing oneself from suffering through an intellectual process. Irony is therefore antithetical to empathy. So, the laugh is on me, but watch carefully while you laugh, and I'll spare a thought for you when it's your turn to be stuck in that ditch. And don't worry: that day will come sooner or later.

And for starters, here's something for you to laugh at:

Meet Alexander Stubb, a fresh member of the European Parliament from the Finnish right-wing party Kokoomus (heavily pro-EU, pro-NATO).

Torture Chamber

I live in a torture chamber, and that torture chamber is my mind. How can I demand discipline from other people if I'm not able to apply discipline to myself? How can I tell people to be pure, when I can't be pure myself? How can I say to people that they have to change, if I can't initiate change in myself? There are already too many people whose credo is "Do what I tell you to do, don't do what I do" -- and I don't want to be one of them.

When I said "Accept chaos", I didn't mean that one should embrace it; I only meant that chaos is inevitable. Chaos is consequence of evil things people do, and sometimes people can do evil even with good intentions (enter the world of power politics). The domino blocks will fall and fall. In Shakespeare's plays everything will usually end in tears, blood and chaos, and I'm afraid to say I'm inclined to think like Shakespeare in my own worldview, which is very film noir: greedy, lustful and stupid people do evil things, causing suffering even to innocent bystanders, and nothing good can come out it. Death seems to be the only redemption there.

But the redemption or solution can also be a Buddhist one: to get out of the karmic wheel of greed, lust and ignorance.

Primordial Chaos

For me, women -- or at least many I have known personally -- have represented a sort of primordial chaos that is hard for me to comprehend. Always in trouble, always searching for me to help them out. I guess it goes to my part of being for women a safe brother/father substitute, and being at turns a teddybear and a punching bag (as I was for S., for example). I suppose I should be a nastier person, or what? Because it's always been that when I have expressed to a lady that I want to be more than a friend with her (not just sex, but, you know, having an actual relationship and everything that goes with), it's usually been: "pHinn, you're a nice guy, but..." So, I guess it's OK for those women to fuck casual strangers they pick up from a club when they are drunk, free of inhibitions and full of erotic urges, than me, because it's not just my role -- which is being a safe and cosy father confessor for the ladies to tell about their latest erotic mishaps: "Oh, I'm such a bad person, Father; forgive me, so I can have a good conscience to get drunk and get laid the next time". Woman wants freedom, sexual and otherwise, but what is the real price of freedom is responsibility. Unless you're responsible for your own actions and their possible consequences, your freedom is nothing but escaping. But of course this is patronizing, patriarchal misogynist talk from me; I just can't help it that these situations piss me off. Perhaps it would help if I wasn't such a shy, timid, inhibited and hung-up person myself; sometimes these things just feel overpowering.

Last week Alex of Chicks on Speed sent me mail asking for the contact address of Ann Shenton (a.k.a. Large Number, ex of Add N To (X)), explaining me that Melissa of CoS has currently some kind of health problems and they need someone to replace her for this month's CoS warm-up gigs with Red Hot Chili Peppers in England.
So I sent Alex the address of Mark Hunter, who is a sort of a manager (I suppose) for Ann. But it's funny that I usually never hear from Alex or any of the CoS these days; obviously only when I'm needed to save the day. [See previous entries for backgrounds.]

Then there's this other girl I know and have been in contact with now, but I don't know if I'm coming or going with her. Somehow it feels I've learned to like her quite a lot, she's got a personality of her own, we seem to share the same wavelength on certain things, but somehow I'm wary about her too. Which means I'm afraid what would happen if I seriously fell in love with her now (which is not that far at the moment, I have to say). Because I don't want to repeat this same chaos I've been through with women all over again. I would only like to learn to know her better now, but I'm not interested myself in passing drunken erotic lust, sordid groping in the dark and quick fucks or one night stands. I want to do things properly. I want something that is more solid and stable. Probably that's called commitment, a mutual one, but perhaps that's such a dirty word these days. That you should expose your soul, sacrifice something of that illusory freedom of being able to run around, go through the thick and thin and the days that are not so glamorous and ecstatic. I'm willing to do that; how about you, lady?

Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard

"Release the fiend that lies dormant within you..."
- The Process Church of the Final Judgment

No one else has described the psychopathology of modern society as well as the English writer J.G. Ballard (b. 1930). His 1970s masterpieces such as The Concrete Island, Crash and High-Rise are accurate chronicles of the deepest and darkest violent and erotic urges that lurk beneath the glossy chrome surface of consumer society.

Here are excerpts from J.G. Ballard's Super-Cannes, Chapter 29 (2000). Eden-Olympia is a fictional business park of professionals working for international mega-corporations.


"Work dominates life in Eden-Olympia and drives out everything else. The dream of leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfilment through work. The men and women running successful companies need to focus their energies on the task in front of them, and for every minute of the day. The last thing they want is recreation. [...] Creative work is its own recreation."

[...]

"People at Eden-Olympia have no time for getting drunk together, for infidelities or rows with the girlfriend, no time for adulterous affairs or coveting their neighbours' wives, no time even for friends. There are no energies to spare for anger, jealousy, racial prejudice and the more mature reflections that follow. There are none of the social tensions that force us to recognize other people's strengths and weaknesses, our obligations to them or feelings of dependence. At Eden-Olympia there's no interplay of any kind, none of the emotional trade-offs that give us our sense of who we are."

[...]

"The social order must hold, especially where elites are involved. Eden-Olympia's great defect is that there's no need for personal morality. Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right or wrong. The moral order is engineered into the lives along with the speed limits and the security systems."

[...]

"A sense of morality can be a convenient escape route. If the worst comes to the worst, we tell ourselves how guilty we feel and that excuses everything. The more civilized we are, the fewer choices we have to make."

[...]

"A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect. Once you dispense with morality the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics. You've entered an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear. Societies that dispense with the challenged conscience are more vulnerable than they realize. They have no defences against the psychotic who gets into the system and starts working away like a virus, using the sluggish moral machinery against itself."

[...]

"The moral perception was so eroded that it failed to warn them of danger. Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won't walk out of the desert. They'll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks."

[...]

"The ultimate gated community is a human being with a closed mind. We're breeding a new race of deracinated people, internal exiles without human ties but with enormous power. It's this new class that runs our planet. To be successful enough to work at Eden-Olympia calls for rare qualities of self-restraint and intelligence. These are people who won't admit to any weaknesses and won't allow themselves to fail."

But there's something very wrong with these people:

"Classical psychoanalysis starts with the dream, and that was my first breakthrough. I realized these highly disciplined professionals had very strange dreams. Fantasies filled with supressed yearnings for violence, and ugly narratives of anger and revenge, like the starvation dreams of death-camp prisoners. Despair was screaming through the bars of the corporate cage, the hunger of men and women exiled from their deeper selves."

[...]

"Today we shun the psychopathic, the dark side of the sun and those shadows that burn the ground. Sadism, cruelty and the dream of pain belong to our primate ancestors. When they surface in a damaged adolescent with a taste of strangling cats we lock him away for good. The run-down chief executives with their hives and depression were sane and civilized men. Maroon them on a desert island after a plane crash and they'd be the first to perish. Any perverse elements in their lives would have to be applied externally, like a vitamin shot or an antibiotic. [...] Let's say, a carefully metered measure of psychopathy."

[...]

"Sex is such a quick route to the psychopathic, the shortest of short cuts to the perverse. We aren't running an adventure playground, but a forcing house designed to expand the psychopathic possibilities of the executive imagination. It needs to be carefully monitored. Sadomasochism, excretory sex-play, body-piercing and wife-pandering can easily veer of into something nasty."

[...]

"The twentieth century was an heroic enterprise, but it left us in the dark, feeling our way towards a locked door. [...] The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague."

"Sanity and reason are unworthy us?"

"No. But a vast illusion, built from mirrors that lie. Today we scarcely know our neighbours, shun most forms of civic involvement and happily leave the running of society to a caste of political technicians. People find all the togetherness they need in the airport boarding lounge and the department-store lift. They pay lip service to community values but prefer to be alone."

[...]

"Homo sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites, which once helped him to survive. He was partly rehabilitated in an open prison called the first agricultural societies, and now finds himself on parole in the polite suburbs of the city state. The deviant impulses coded into his central nervous system have been switched off. He can no longer harm himself or anyone else. But nature sensibly endowed him with a taste of cruelty and intense curiosity about pain and death. Without them, he's trapped in the afternoon shopping malls of a limitless mediocrity. We need to revive him, give him back the killing eye and the dreams of death. Together they helped him to dominate this planet."

[...]

"We're creatures of the treadmill: monotony and convention rule everything. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom. Our latent psychopathy is the last natural reserve, a place of refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I'm talking about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve tonic. In effect, a voluntary and elective psychopathy, as you can see in any boxing ring or ice-hockey rink. [...] in the armed forces [...] you know that recruits are deliberately brutalized -- the drill sergeant's boot and the punishment run give back to young men a taste for pain that generations of socialized behaviour have bred out of them."

[...]

"Remember your childhood -- like all of us you stole from the local supermarket. It was deeply exciting, and enlarged your moral sense of yourself. But you were sensible, and kept it down to one or two afternoons a week. The same rules apply to society at large. I'm not advocating an insane free-for-all. A voluntary and sensible psychopathy is the only way we can impose a shared moral order."

"And if we do nothing?"

"Danger will rush up to us and put a knife to our throat. Look at the century that lies ahead -- an upholstered desert, but a wasteland all the same. An absence of faith, except for a vague belief in an unknown deity, like the sponsor of a public-service broadcast. Wherever there's a vacuum, the wrong kind of politics creep in. Fascism was a virtual psychopathology that served deep unconscious needs. Years of bourgeois conditioning had produced a Europe suffocating in work, commerce and conformity. Its people needed to break out, to invent the hatreds that could liberate them, and they found an Austrian misfit only too happy to do the job. Here at Eden-Olympia we're setting out the blueprint for an infinitely more enlightened community. A controlled psychopathy is a way of resocializing people and tribalizing them into mutually supportive groups."

[...]

"Violence is spectacular and exciting, but sex has always been the main hunting ground of psychopathy. A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us 'buying'? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imagination, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world."


See also:

J.G. Ballard: Millennium People

Chick A

I wrote the Kompleksi song "The Only Star In My Sky" about Alex of Chicks on Speed. Yes, I had a crush on her, fell in love; she was the reason I became their "Official Unofficial" "Webmaster".

How typical of me: I'm not a tall man, only about 5"9"; she must be about 6", even over. But there's something about tall women: maybe it's easy to worship and love from a distance someone you can't ever have or reach. I met her for the first time in December 1999, when Chicks on Speed had a gig at Helsinki's Tavastia. I had already done a Net interview with them, and I was now at backstage after the gig. It turned out the Chicks had been quarreling over something that night and were not talking with each other. Alex confided this to me, and I thought it was touching, since I was virtually a stranger. She was very sweet and nice: for me it was love at first sight.

We talked a lot via e-mail all through the year 2000. I guess it got a bit intimate: she told me about their gigs and different music and art projects, but also about her personal fears and frustrations. I guess there developed some sort of link between us: it just deepened my feelings for her. I always called her "the light at the end of my tunnel". I think at some point I just panicked and blew it. She was looking from me some sort of a brother substitute, I was looking for something else about her. "And that's how the story ended".

These days I'm in contact with any of the Chicks very rarely. I occasionally still maintain that "fan site" and probably will keep doing it, but that nevertheless evokes in me some sore memories, which I have to keep at arm's length. "You came into my life like a vision / a poster on my wall / and sometimes I wonder if it was real at all."

Solitude

People with big egos usually live in glass houses.

I have seen, heard and experienced some dark things that have made me what I am today. When I was a little child, I have seen a father of two to get drunk and beat his wife up in front of their children and me. I have seen a man lying in a pool of blood, when I was about six years old. "(I Ain't No) Lovechild" is a purely autobiographical song. I have seen cruelty and ignorance, the inbuilt violence of society, educational system and army. I have felt the geography of fear on the streets and night bars. I have learned to trust very few people and fear the rest. Shell-shocked and timid, a ghost at noon -- but still I have survived. I refuse to become another traumatized victim of the past.

I bless every day out of school; if I was attacked I would fight to death; I have learned to be aware of people's forked tongues; men who hurt with their fists and women who hurt with their words. I'm a lonely man leading a monk-like existence, and I don't know if I should feel miserable or just enjoy my freedom.

I spend most of my time in solitude; there are many days I don't actually speak to anyone. There are people who think I'm strange, a weird creep. There are people who think I'm gay because they never see me with a woman: if they knew how many times my heart has been broken over women, never for men, but what good would it be to explain -- let them keep their preconceptions and fantasies. As I get older, it's easier to ignore those people, but I don't say it wouldn't hurt anyway. Then you just learn to despise.

Probably you think now this is another exercise in self-pity. Maybe it is. Nevertheless, life goes on, day after day.