First post in way too long. I thought I'd revive the blog with a quick update on what's happening.

New Doc Series

It's been a busy year in TV land. For one, I am in postproduction on the last of three episodes I wrote and directed for a new television series entitled Skindigenous. The show explores ancient Indigenous tattooing traditions around the world. My episodes focused on Polynesia, and I had the pleasure and high honour of spending time with some of the great masters of the art in that part of the world: the Sulu'ape family of Samoa, Gordon Toi of New Zealand, and Keone Nunes of Hawaii. They taught me tons, and I'll be forever grateful to Jason Brennan, Nish Media, my co-directors, our excellent crew and the beautiful people of the South Pacific for a rich and humbling experience. I'll write more about Skindigenous as we ramp up for broadcast on APTN in early 2018.

Spanish Edition of Reclaiming Art

In February, Ediciones Atalanta released a Spanish edition of Reclaiming Art under the title Vindicación del arte en la era del artificio. By all accounts, Fernando Amansa Salomó did an excellent job with the translation. Jacobo Siruela's publishing house is pretty much my dream publisher, so uncannily do their offerings seem specifically tailored to my personal obsessions. Having my work appear in their catalogue therefore qualifies as what David Lynch would call a "beautiful thing." So far, Vindicación has gotten a surprising amount of mainstream attention (here's one example for Spanish readers), and the book seems to  be finding a good number of interested readers, many of whom have taken time to write and share their enthusiasm about the book. That too is a beautiful thing.

The Weird Studies Podcast

Musicologist  Phil Ford and I are in the process of creating a new podcast, Weird Studies, wherein we will discuss art, philosophy and the occult in a contemporary context. Phil and I both have a strange attraction to the weird and value the affordances it grants those who choose to look at the world through its lens. In our prep work, we've been tossing around such potential conversation pieces as the discovery of electricity, the Tunguska Event, hermaphroditism, Hiroshima, the new Twin Peaks series, and the I Ching.

Among many other things, Phil is the author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture, a brilliant and erudite work on the concept of hipness in music and the arts which I couldn't more heartily recommend you acquire and ravenously consume.  You can also get a taste of Phil's singular intelligence and wit at Dial M for Musicology. Personally, I think it's high time that something like this podcast sees the light of day; Phil and I have been engaged in an energetic correspondence since 2015, and we need an outlet for our insights.

New Work on Ligotti

Finally, I'm immersing myself once more in the fiction of the great Thomas Ligotti, for an essay to appear in an upcoming anthology edited by James Curcio and Jack Marsh, PhD. Bearing the tantalizing title Masks: Bowie and the Artists and Artifice, the book gathers up the results of some deep delves into the mystique of artistic persona as it relates to creative work. Last fall, James and I had a long conversation on the nature of art at Modern Mythology. Check it out if you've a mind for some shop talk from inside the mask-n'-mannequin factory that is the aesthetic enterprise. Philosopher Jack Marsh and I are also working on a new project, but I'll wait until things have developed a bit more to talk about that.

There's more, but I'll stop there. Consider this post an assurance that this site and its author are both alive and kicking.

Last week, I was honoured to take part in a speaking event with two brilliant guys: art historian Graham Larkin and musicologist Phil Ford. Among the subjects we discussed was the idea of the “Real" that I sketch out in the course of my book. I’d like to expand a bit upon it here in light of our conversation. 

The metaphysics that undergirds Reclaiming Art is a form of weird realism. By “the Real,” I don’t mean the consensus world that can be analyzed by social scientists, measured by scientists, or delineated by idealist philosophers. Nor is it the “real world” worried parents and school counselors refer to when they give career advice to reckless teenagers. That world is an idea in our heads, a partial picture framed by reason and the notion of causality: “Everything has a cause, and whoever knows the cause can predict the effect.”

It was the Scottish philosopher David Hume who argued that, contrary to common belief, causality has no logical necessity. The real reason we expect a coin to fall to the ground when we toss it in the air isn’t that it logically must do so but that we have made a habit of believing that what goes up must come down. In truth, there is no reason whatsoever why specific effects must follow from specific causes. After all, it is perfectly possible to imagine a world where tossed coins simply float up into the ether, never to return. The fact that they haven’t in the past does little but explain our habit (mere habit!) of expecting things to keep going the way they have been until now.

So in reality, the outcome of every coin toss is unpredictable: maybe it will come down, maybe it won’t. (NOTE: I realize I'm being flippant here, but bear with me.) The Real inheres in this unpredictability, this maybe. It points a strange, unknowable order that hides behind our preconceptions, habits, and judgements. In fact our habits— all the armature of culture — form a kind of veil to protect us against it. The Real is the interzone where anything could happen, all things are possible and no amount of expert knowledge can enable us to predict what might come next, or even what is actually going on in a given situation. In the book I qualify it with the term “radical mystery” — radical because it goes right to the root of things. “The dream hath no bottom.” This mystery isn’t a problem that has yet to be solved; it is naked reality itself, as experienced when the veil falls away.

The Real is the excess that makes every Weltanschauung we super-apes construct necessarily limited and ultimately inadequate. We never get to the bottom of things. We never arrive at the final truth. There is always something that eludes us. The concept of the Real is predicated on the notion that reality exceeds the capacities of human reason — absolutely. 

Compare the way people conceived the cosmos in the Middle Ages with the way we conceive it today. Here are some pretty incommensurable differences. Some might argue that the medievals were dead wrong about the world and that we today are right. But then, medieval people laughed at the naivety of the pagans who dwelt in metaphysical ignorance before the birth of Christ. Nor is it very difficult to imagine that people living three or four hundred years from today will laugh at us for our current beliefs. As Richard Grossinger puts it in Dark Pool of Light, “the universe is overdetermined.” It is too rich, too complex, too deep, too alien for the human mind to grasp in its totality. The gap between what goes on in our cogitations and what actually is is unbridgeable, even as it moves, shifts, expands, and contracts. That gap is the Real.

Picture the following scene, a cartoon cliché. You’re standing on a darkened street corner at night. Suddenly an immense form appears on the brick wall ahead, a terrible, monstrous shadow cast by something coming around the corner. When the creature casting the shadow finally appears, it turns out to be an inoffensive kitten. The whole thing was a trick of the light. 

Now, according to our conventional way of seeing things, the part of the scene where “truth" is revealed is the moment when the kitten shows itself. It’s at that point that you realize that the monstrous shadow was an illusion, that what was actually coming towards you was in fact the most mundane, benign, and knowable of God’s creatures. Yet if we entertain the concept of the Real I’ve just outlined, things change. The moment you were closest to “truth” — the moment you were most in touch with the Real — was in the interval during which you did not know what you were looking at. For then the monstrous shadow pointed you to a zone of potentiality with which you are not familiar, an open space between the little world you think you know and the big, real, unknowable world. What I mean to say here is that it is in moments of uncertainty, when we don’t know what we’re looking at, that we are epistemologically aligned with the true nature of existence.