From the Archives of Humankind

The Art of Weaponry & Woman Weaponized

2011-08-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

"Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible."

"Imagination is not to avoid reality...It affirms reality most perfectly...creates a new object, a play, a dance..." -William Carlos Williams

In a sageless age of poetry, we must look for meaning and worth in the climate of imagination by finding makers of other things. The works of Will Hayden, poet of weapons-grade steel, and Alexander McQueen, poet of needle and thread, evoke nothing less than awe from the beholder. They make creation dance with destruction, woman and man messengers of death.

The Art of Red Jacket Firearms

Will Hayden, American man-at-arms, is the Da Vinci of modern weapons. In his shop, history and innovation collide, resulting in the evolutions of both the hardware and science of killing. Master anatomist of the steel structures and organs of guns, a sage of ballistics, he resurrects a 145-year old cannon, takes the challenge of building an AK47 with an internal suppressor, and creates a shotgun-assault rifle hybrid designed to breach doors and engage heavily-armed bad guys in seamless, deadly transition. He's also made a sniper rifle out of an AK, and, for shits and giggles, explosive-tipped arrows.

As a boy he absorbed the history and art of warfare from books. As a young man, since he couldn't afford the guns he wanted, he built them. The Marine Corps forged his warrior spirit. Today, at Red Jacket Firearms, he commands a small team of gunsmiths and apprentices who execute, again and again, what most deem impossible.

Alexander McQueen: The Dark Poet Who Turned Woman Into Weapon

Fuck androgyny. Fuck the "post-gender" talk.
If McQueen's poetry was written with high-carbon steel and thread made from fibers of earth, Woman was his page. Informed by history and possessed by visions of the uncanny, the macabre and the sublime, he, more than any other designer, celebrated, empowered, defended, and eternalized Woman.

He even weaponized her. For just as you wouldn't fuck with a person packing a piece from Red Jacket, you would not fuck with a lady in Alexander McQueen.

Yet amid wars and disasters, he wanted to reminded us of the beauty in the world.
(How many ever picked up on that?)

The Animal.

The Oceanic.

The Historic.

The Romantic.

The Fantastic.

From these realms, and with the eyes and hands of a consummate craftsman, Alexander McQueen wrought entire worlds from cloth, beneath which heaved the rise and fall of a woman's bosom, of civilizations...

Convergences

Both possess supreme craftsmanship, virtuosity, imagination, dexterity, and intuition, as well as the Vision of their master-predecessors, and dwarf their contemporaries.

Both "demolish the rules" but "keep the tradition."

Both have an elite clientele that sustains their creative momentum, yet inspire others who come from similar, humble, origins to greatness.

Recommended viewing:

Sons of Guns (on the Discovery Channel)

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Albert Ayler & Suicide Silence: Free Jazz & Deathcore, Heart-Love & A Hate Supreme: An Anatomy of the American Scream

2011-02-24T05:16:00.000-08:00

I first heard the music of Albert Ayler through a set of headphones as I was crossing 1st Avenue just a few blocks above Houston Street years and years ago. I can't remember exactly where on 1st Ave, but there was a part of it that rose like an asphalt wave at the orange Manhattan sky of summer dusk. An old man walked on the crest of that wave. His rounded back mirrored the round earth under his feet, and his head hung low. It looked like he was holding up the sky. In my head explosions from the horns of angels told of the first days of creation and the births of mercies to humankind and mourned the slaughter of martyrs and the pulverizing of earth and man.

I first heard Suicide Silence through a set of headphones as I ran on a trail that runs like a black vein through the dark heart of America's military-industrial-intelligence complex in northern Virginia: a glass quasi-city erected in the dead of an American midnight by the wizards of war and conflict. As waves of sonic violence poured into my skull, Alex Lopez's double-bass drumming reminded me of the steady thudding of the M2 machine-gun. I saw a wall of angels descending from an ice-blue sky but realized they were not angels at all. They had seven fingers on each hand and wore their mouths on the sides of their faces. I was listening to the mathematics of destruction.

A rhyme lives in these two disparate musics whose audiences are of wholly different human tribes. Albert and Don Ayler and co. were stamped with the seals of prophets, baptized by the East River, by the River Jordan, by the Mississippi. Suicide Silence is scarred with the marks of demons. Ecstasy of Pentecost, wrath of pentagrammic plague.

The scream from Albert Ayler's horn is the scream of love's big takeover of the heart. The scream of Mitch Lucker, Suicide Silence's vocalist, is the decimation of 10,000 virginities. The traditional martial music of brass rhymes with the gears of war conjured by vibrations of deathcore distortions.

Albert Alyer's music was made during the Vietnam War- a war of napalm death and necklaces of human ears worn my men getting swallowed by jungles. It was a time of upheaval. Civil Rights. Anti-War. Assassinations.

Suicide Silence consists of young men whose generation is fighting today's war- a war of midnight commando raids, daylight renditions, and round-the-clock torture. It is a time of sleep. Of hypnosis.

Man discourses with angels.
Man encounters a primitive genetic cousin and is torn to pieces.

Both are musics of action.
Albert Ayler's divinely-inspired cacaphonies, harmonies, and testifying with wind and reed is energy music. In any given song Music is the Healing Force of the Universe.
When asked what was behind the name of their second full-length album No Time to Bleed, Suicide Silence's vocalist and guitarist said that the purpose of their music is to incite- that there is no time to waste, no time to fall and then sit around and bleed- that there is "way worse shit going on than your bullshit problems."

Though their screams travel on different trajectories they spring from the same source: the human lungs. Somehow they managed to intersect at the particular point of this listener's skull. When I first heard each of them, an awakening occurred. Their music is not for everyone, but perhaps neither is awakening. Nonetheless I dare you to experience the music for yourself.

Recommended Listening:
Albert Ayler
My name is Albert Ayler (1963)
Spirits (1964)
At Slug's Saloon (1966)
Live in Greenwich Village (1966)
Suicide Silence
The Cleansing (2007)
No Time to Bleed (2009)

Adonis, the Silk Road, Civilization, and Oblivion

2011-02-01T19:20:00.000-08:00

Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) comes from a village between jagged blade of Syrian mountains and liquid blade of Mediterranean Sea. Frankincense and myrrh, seers and generals, caravans and armies, prophets and empires, untouchable priestesses and the Queen of Sheba...All passed through that land of cherries, rock, and olives; a place that knew the Hellenistic flourishing of Ptolemaic Egypt, the silk of a distant, ancient China, the bone-crushing march of the Roman Republic, the fierce expansion of Parthian nomads from the steppe…

Approximately 64 BCE: The Romans annex Syria, and Mesopotamia becomes a warzone. As they battle the Parthians, the Euphrates changes hands like an old rope, and heads and limbs are flung into it.

The Euphrates rages,
daggers rising from its banks,
towers of quaking earth and thunder,
and the waves are fortresses.
I see the dawn, its wings clipped,
and water, its floods sharpened, embracing its spears
-from Stage and Mirrors, 1968

Byzantines came later with God, shining purple silk, and blood. Caliphs came with God, heaping mounds of spoils from conquest, and blood. Crusaders came with God, swords, hunger, arrows, wine, and blood. God’s original tribe came with walls, siege, and blood.

All the while a man speaks to trees, transcribes the speech of stones, relates to us his conversations with lightning, archives the rains, and sings of the beginning of wind.

It is from this tapestry of Earth and Civilization, Creation and Oblivion, that the poetry of Adonis emerges, surges, heaves. He writes in the Arabic language, but to merely confer upon him the title of “major Arab poet” ignores his truly planetary poetics and the universality, the humanity, in his work. With the elements of nature, humankind builds its world. With the elements of time and language, with variations on the themes of love, beginnings, wounds, and death, Adonis seeks to build Another Alphabet.

Nonetheless, when you read Adonis, you traverse the entire span of Arab poetics: the orality of the Bedouin poets of pre-Islamic times (some of whom spoke in numbers) and their pagan, earthian songs; the supreme prophecy and dynamic textuality of the Qu’ran; poetry and philosophy’s rebellion against jurisprudence and theology; Arab poetry’s absorption of the seismic shocks of modernity. All these can be found in a single poem, sometimes even a single line, of Adonis.

Damascus. Florence. Yemen. Paris. Kufa. New York.
The netherworld of the blind poet Al-Ma’ari exploding with visions.
Cadmus. Euclid. Nero. Solomon. Nietzsche. Tamerlane.
Plato. Apollinaire. Dante. The Antichrist.
(Some of the places and inhabitants of his vast poetic terrain.)

Surrealism. Nihilism. Feminism. Masochism. Criticism.
Heroism. Orgasm. Romanticism. Sufism.
All these pulse through his work.

Many call him infidel. Apostate. He would never admit to being a mystic. His vision takes him beyond most understandings of belief. He cannot even utter the word. He forgot it upon being buried in the Divine’s cosmic dust, upon nakedly touching the Ultimate, upon learning its language. He is among those blessed, damned, to only have language as a home.

Recommended reading:
(in English)
Selected Poems, Yale University Press
An Introduction to Arab Poetics, Saqi Books
Sufism and Surrealism, Saqi Books
(in Arabic)
Musiqa Al-Hut Al-Azraq, Dar al-Adab
Al-Muhit Al-Aswad, Al-Saqi

Hasil Adkins: The Original Hellbilly, An American Treasure

2010-12-22T22:25:00.000-08:00

There is nothing more punk rock than singing about cutting people’s heads off and putting them on your wall – in 1950’s America.

In the backwoods of Boone County, a lop-sided nugget of West Virginia known for its strawberries, tobacco, lumber, natural gas, and coal-mine explosions, a little boy heard Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys and thought that Hank Williams was playing everything. This boy vowed to make all these beautiful sounds himself too someday, and so became a one-man band through whose veins flowed the primitive mud of Appalachian country; dark, booze-infused rivers of blues; and a hidden archive of rock and roll comparable to the scrolls that were found in the Thousand Buddha Caves.

He lived in a trailer in the woods and ate raw hamburger. He drove a car off a cliff. He ripped through a wet Boone County midnight in a beat-up car, smashed into a light pole, and “hunched” in the back seat with a girl. Her brothers came after him with pistols and sawed-off shotguns, and they shot it out on another Boone County midnight but no one died because they were all too drunk to hit anything.

Girls lived in his trailer from time to time. One girl got mad at him and called the police, telling them that she was kidnapped. The judge couldn’t bring himself to throw this wild man who made rock and roll records in a shack in the woods into the penitentiary. He even had a couple of the records himself.

He sang about girls, death, dancing, loneliness, the law, love, stars, moons… Only one other man played the same damn chords in a thousand songs yet managed to forge his own rhythm. Bo Diddley had his beat, but Hasil Adkins had a beat you over your got-damn head with bass drum, cymbals, gui-tar and empty liquor bottle.

The real gigs took place in a hillbilly jukejoint with a few metal folding chairs, stained plastic tables, an old pool table, and a scuffed-up dance floor. Everyone drank from bottles or plastic cups. Everyone danced. Women got into fistfights over who would sit next to Hasil on the next set.

Or maybe you would find him playing at a satellite repair shop with a tent in the backyard in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of drunk, potentially violent motherfuckers under the cold medallion of a Stone Age Appalachian moon.

Woody Guthrie, Son House, John Fahey, Blind Lemon Jefferson…All are treasures of American music and are not only worthy of the attention of historians, musicologists, anthropologists, biographers, and cartographers of language and folk traditions, but demand our pride. And so does The Haze.

Recommended listening:
Out to Hunch
Moon over Madison
Peanut Butter Rock and Roll

The Fighter and the Writer

2010-11-10T22:31:00.000-08:00

What is poetry which does not save nations or people? A connivance with official lies, a song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, readings for sophomore girls. -Czesław Miłosz

The octagon is a page; blood, saliva, breath and sweat the ink; fists, elbows, feet, knees, arms and legs the pens. The authors, hungry men who cannot fight their demons or the world without facing death or incarceration fight there. The fighter steps into the octagon merely to write his name, but he might write a legend. At some point, no matter who he is, no matter his depth of skill or vastness of heart, his opponent will name him Defeat.

Boxing is dead.

For today's fighter to survive he must learn and combine the martial arts of the past and invent a new one. Something no one has ever seen. Something with which he can conquer. The only thing that can beat him but the secret to which only he has.

Poetry is dead.

The novel is dead.

The page is an octagon.

For the writer of today to endure he must combine the jujitsu of poetry, the judo of fiction, the fists of history, the knees and feet of philosophy, the indestructible spirit of theology, the hard shins of earth, the leverage of physics, the chaos and mayhem of cosmos, the order and precision of biology…

Both fighter and writer get better only by doing it every day. The fighter who does not give more of himself in training than his opponent, the writer who lacks discipline because he has talent: both lose and never amount to anything. This does not mean that they need to fight and write every day. Sometimes reading is writing, watching is fighting.

He might step into the silence of the octagon just to hear the silence of his feet or slip the punches of his own shadow. He might sit before a blank page and write two lines and then erase them. Be forewarned, reader. When either of these two step into the octagon or onto the page, you can expect blood. Be ready for something you've never imagined.

Rebels in Letters, A Rebellion in Letters

2010-08-01T19:54:00.000-07:00

When the poet protests the death he sees around him, the dead want him silenced…
He speaks openly of what authority has deemed unspeakable, he becomes an enemy of authority. While the poet lives, authority dies. His poem is forever. -Bob Kaufman

Slim Memed

He wore a silver mounted belt. A Circassian dagger hung from his left hip, beside it a gold-embossed pistol and holster given to him by a nomad chief. The bullets laid cross-wise on his chest over his hand-woven silk shirt, black field-glasses hanging on his neck. He wore brown trousers dyed with walnut juice by the villagers of the Taurus mountains. His rifle stood upright on his shoulder like a steel hawk.

His land was a magical, shining land of ancient abundance, but he was born into poverty, slavery, and debt. There were men who woke up, smelled the deep earth of fertile plains, and raged at not owning it all.

His rebellion began with love, and then the love became vengeance, which became love again, but with the speech of bullets. Property owners and debt-masters feared him, the state mobilized against him, but mountain rocks, melon gardens, and fires in the homes of villagers hid, healed, and nourished him.

Though every time you shoot an Abdi Agha another takes his place, he taught the people that the earth belongs to those who work it. He taught them that they can rebel-- that they can set the thistles ablaze and sow new seeds after the fire.

Joaquin Murieta

His red-brown skin shined with the red-brown earth. The men who rode with him wore king-sized mustaches, ponchos belling in the air. They came to the California hills singing of love and riches, but became composers of rebel songs with bullets aimed at gentleman swindlers and cross-burning bloodhound gangs.

He came from a continent of revolt to a continent of invasion, expansion and plunder, and met their Manifest Destiny with his Insurgent Destiny. The exploited man, degraded man, wronged man became insurgent man, and then became ten thousand men, and then millions.

His rebellion first sprouted from the fields of poverty, then from the fury of love and vengeance, and then became the very sun itself. They kept his head in a jar of alcohol, but never got him to stop speaking. His birth certificate was written in song by an aging man in distant Isla Negra.

Literature

Is not a game. It is not entertainment for the elite or mental exercise for the educated. It is not a tool of politicians, kings or merchants. It is all part of the infinite, universal human saga.

It recalls our oldest histories and recovers our most hidden ones. It renews age-old legends, replenishes language, and revitalizes the most ancient and exclusively human attributes of mercy, love, hope, and compassion.

But this is not an age for mere chronicling and research. The age requires a rebellion with letters, a rebellion in letters, an insurgency with the only life-giving weapons that ever existed: words.

We must take back meaning from thieves, war-makers, and architects of lies. Make the invisible visible- yes. Name the unnameable- yes. But also give voice to the voiceless.

Recommended reading/viewing:
Memed, My Hawk by Yashar Kemal
Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta by Pablo Neruda
Poetry as Insurgent Art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Dead Man, a film by Jim Jarmusch

McCarthy, Baca

2010-05-03T05:24:00.000-07:00

Men paved the way West with blood, scalps, and buffalo hide. For gold, glory, oil, or just the peace of the open plains, outcasts of civilization made pilgrimage there. There civilized man encountered his origins. And decimated it.

The Judge rides with the Glanton gang through sharp rock under bone-white sky. Piles of corpses behind them. A village, town, camp turned to towering fire. The Judge: hairless titan who knows Scripture like the back of his hand since it was tattooed on his soul at the beginning of time. A metaphor for J.D. Rockefeller: hairless wraith. Patriarch of the ultimate American wealth led there by God Himself. The Judge: Reciter of ancient esoterica by the fire. The legal voice for mercenary adventures, imperial expansion, and massacres. The Judge: Author of the Anti-Book with the pen of oblivion. He writes so as to erase what was created.

Cormac McCarthy's west is the twilight of the West. A place where civilization crumbles and returns to the earth. But it is not without its heroes. It is not the twilight of humanity. That is preserved by two friends who the reader comes to know very well, who the reader cries for, but who become nameless even to him. One dies at the peak of his youth in a knife fight in the rain fueled by rage and love, the other returns from his adventures in the badlands to a society that he does not understand and that does not understand him. He dies old, passing his wisdom to wanderers that share the stone shelter of the highway overpass with him.

The poet was buried under a mountain of Indians, laborers, orphans, hustlers, and convicts. He emerged in the cold walls of a maximum security prison, building universes in a cell. Language exploded in silence. The freedom of creation was unleashed on lockdown. He meditates in the prison yard, the valleys of ancestors, rivers of life, mountains of four winds, and barrio corners and streets. Life on this planet appears in places and under conditions most hostile to it. So does poetry. And they thrive.

Jimmy Santiago Baca's borderland is not primordial brimstone where the lost come to die, where a man stares at his own bleached skeleton in the desert. The rocky hills are refuge. Places inhabited by ancestral eagles, not altars of sacrifice for the descendants of Cain. The Poet walks with a feather, the spirit, the deathless, in one hand; and thorns, blood, and mortality in the other. What is parched, cracked, place of the End to some is crystal murmurs of streams bursting with scent of sage and birdsong to him.

The legacy of his people knows no twilight. They were always there. They will never leave. They need not own the land. They are the land and sky itself.

Poets of the Ocean, Oceanic Poet-Warrior

2010-03-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

They hold the logical mind and its laws, economics and war suspect. The earth speaks through them with a force that rises from the soles of their feet. Nature attacks them. Nature protects them. For them, immortal waters are not to be found at the River Styx, but in the Ocean.

In the house of the collector of books and seashells there are first editions of Quevedo, Cervantes and Rimbaud alongside mollusks from the China Sea that behold astounding designs from which man got the ideas for his temples and pagodas. Pablo Neruda traveled the seven seas hunting down shells, plunged his hands into waters and sands and pulled up mysterious marine porcelains made with the purity of moonlight. The ocean: friend of the wanderer poet, path and refuge of exiled man. He once possessed the horn of a baby narwhal. He told forgotten tales of Chilean whalers who chased the sperm whale to seize the treasure of its blubber or the tiny sac of ambergris hidden deep in the monster's chest. From Isla Negra he walked along the beach at the edge of the Pacific's nutritious waters stained with the violet lightning of plankton and read the pages of ocean stacked on the sands.

Thalassa. Marina. Sea. From blazing white sands between ancient pure blue seas and eternal boundless blue of argon sky, an Aegean lyricist laid down his verse. From the land of Ionian symmetries, the motherland of rebel seafarers and oceanic oracles, came Odysseus Elytis: solar metaphysician, marine metaphorist. He emerged from the ocean-womb of epics, gods, philosophies, poetries, and civilizations. He walked between houses of white-washed walls along raw, plunging, coastal crags, singing into winds and waves. His skin absorbed crimson of dawn, green of life, blue of sky and sea, violet of dusk, and dark openings of night. Here, men were thrust into the ambient terror of the ocean and emerged as heroes.

In seas of Spanish blood Vicente Aleixandre dreamed primordial oceans inhabited by surging waves of dark images containing secrets of the abyss. His voice resonated from concave throats of water "hungry for the distant night that rolls across the sky- round, pure, dark, remote- sweet in the peace of space." A saltwater man with tides of blood and iron rising and falling from his heart, in the deepest loneliness he contemplated the possibility and impossibility of "tearing free from the depth" and "flying off lightly, fearless, to the hot sun."

Old men write "Poetry is rebellion." "Life is more important than societal structures." Young men write silent poetry on saltwater scrolls with ink of adrenaline. Christian Fletcher was prophesied by the Greek poet Stesichorus (640 - 555 BC): "Helios, Hyperion's boy, was coming down into the golden bowl to traverse Ocean and reach holy dark night's depths." He is a descendant of the first man who paddled to new lands on the first sea-craft. He is a walker of rising and falling liquid mountains…humble author of a poetry beyond language…unknown author of ultimate solitary feats of the human soul…the point where forces of the human spirit meet forces of the universe…He is a companion of the abyss, a man held in the stirring, oceanic palm of life.

Poets of the Ocean, Oceanic Poet-Warrior.

Isaiah, Nahum, Habakkuk: Ancient Poets Against the First Empires

2010-02-27T17:38:00.000-08:00

During their gradual, mass migrations from Africa into the unknown, and for millennia as 'hunter-gatherers' on arid plains, towering forests, and hostile ice-lands, the relationships of our ancestors were based on cooperation. Human minds and bodies were adapting to new places. These half-naked or fur-clad nomads wore pretty much the same things as their fellow journeyers and seekers of sustenance. They were buried in the same ways. Egalitarian…Compassionate….Had to be, or perish. The idea of ownership surfaced when people started settling down, when they discovered metal technologies. That's when we started assigning value to things. That's when we started to rule each other.

Humans, masters of nature, destined to rule the fish of the sea , the birds of the sky, and all that creeps on the earth, began to rule each other, and every person, under this new system of Empire, became like a fish in a net, a bird in a trap, a creeping thing to be smashed.

Isaiah, standing beneath the apex of the Assyrian empire, saw the birth of the crimes of Empire. Annihilation of nations…Destruction of cities…Devastation of lands…Removal of national boundaries…Plunder of human and earth wealth…Enslavement of people…Exile of populations…He challenged the dominion of hollow kings who ruled with the emptiness of Power, and with verses charged with Spirit, dashed these idols against the rock of prophecy. Tiglath Pileser III, Sargon, Sennacherib: terrible incarnations of the Subduer-Exploiter-Plunderer King. His "mind harbors evil designs, for he tends to destroy…Is this the man who shook the earth…who made the world a waste and wrecked its towns…who never released his prisoners?"

Nahum (the Comforter), during the twilight of that empire (or the dawn of its collapse), saw through the massive walls of Nineveh and its aqueducts, palaces, temples, libraries, tablets, astronomers, state-chroniclers, and dark rites of civilization. In the shade of the forest fanning out beyond the city walls he told those who would listen of "a city of crime…full of violence, never devoid of prey." The Empire and its civilization: a lion's den filled with prey. Its agents, the usurers and tax collectors, are locusts. Somewhere in Iraq, a descendant of Nahum fights another empire in a new cloud of locusts.

Habakkuk, rebel author of the book of five oracles, waded in the rising tide of the Babylonian empire, hurling his prophecy at that "fierce, impetuous nation crossing the earth's wide space to seize homes not their own." Legions were deployed to slap the yoke of Empire on the conquered ones. Legions died building ziggurats and walls built with crime. Babylon's bookkeepers were commanded to keep accurate accounts on the cold, moist tablets kept in palace halls. Habakkuk was told to write his prophecy down, to inscribe it clearly, "for the prophesy is witness…for the appointed time that will come" when "all surviving peoples" will be repaid for the empire's "crimes against men and wrongs against lands." Habakkuk, rescued from a Babylonian prison by Cyrus the Great, lived out the rest of his days among the rocks, waterfalls, and grasses of Ecbatana (a place in what we know as Iran).

These Hebrew sages are considered as cultic, even false prophets by their descendents in faith, as well as other inheritors of the Abrahamic legacy. Their critiques of imperial brutalities do not coincide with the ideas of Holy Roman Empire, righteous Zion, or glorious Caliphate. They belong to the most ancient, universal legacy of human rebellion throughout time and space.

Miles Davis, Supercontinents, Mega-Oceans, and Human Prehistory

2010-02-23T11:50:00.000-08:00

From 1972-1975 Miles Davis and a band of warrior musicians
took audiences back to the furthest reaches
of human and earth history
with their elemental, organic, universal, and utterly spontaneous sound.

It began as a return to Africa,
site of the first human revolution,
radiated to the Indus Valley and the jungles of South America,
and then went further back in time
covering the expanses of Pangea, Gondwana, Panthalassa and beyond.

Michael Henderson set off massive tectonic shifts and stirred seas of magma with his bass.
Pulse of life through time and space ran through James Mtume's hands.
The organic bounce of the biosphere sprang from Pete Cosey's guitar strings and wah-pedal.
Miles' horn was a rumble from the earth's core, a terrifying message from the sky, the breath of man's eternal state of the blues on this turtle-back world…

Warm mud bubbling up from a primordial land…warm blood running down the leg of primordial mother…the childscape of humankind where people spontaneously adorned themselves with spiraling hats of grass and blazing pigments crushed from earth's color wheel…the secret dance of cellular procreation…a mass migration of mammoths with birds chattering on their backs…a giant butterfly landing on a naked child's hand…the lost legends of man and woman told by a horn at a gathering of people around a fire….

Scholarly sources for the earliest planetary and human history abound, but this library of nature's funk is just as rich a source for one seeking answers to the origins (and future) of man: On the Corner, Dark Magus, Pangea, Agharta, Live- Evil, Get Up With It. There is much that will provide you with radio-carbon-fortified facts and dazzling speculations, but little that will take to you to an original state of mind. The soundscapes in the above-mentioned albums reveal human beings' deepest beginnings and most distant destinies.

On the Live - Evil album cover you will find a naked, gleaming African earth queen adorned with crimson samurai helmet from the future-past…a wall of archaic Arabic calligraphy that mirrors the topography of a microchip…a woman who is perhaps our ancient Ethiopian mother, perhaps a bronze mother of a future humanity…A people traverse badlands in sky-colored robes, wave of blood and fire with a human face arcing over them…

When this music was being made there was an outcry from critics who wanted Miles to forever inhabit the realms of Kind of Blue, Porgy and Bess, and Miles Smiles (they later praised the music and deemed it 'ahead of its time' and so on). These people were very much like some producer who once told Miles to think about slavery when playing his blues, and there are many still who prefer the safe, easily-fathomed Prince of Darkness. But to the brave ones, in the words of Miles: "Pack your toothbrush and your douche bag," we're going to Gondwana.