Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Blade Runner is probably my favourite film ever. It's pretty much perfect. I love that it blends film noir with sci fi. I love the atmosphere, the themes, the visuals. I love the acting and obviously that music. I love that everything about it is understated and subdued, that there are no "answers". And who could forget that ending monologue. OK I think I've bummed it enough. Seriously, though, its an astonishing artistic achievement. But for some reason (probably because I hate reading) I never felt compelled to read the book it is based on.

Well I finally finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the third Dick book in my collection, and I gotta say, it was fucking sick. I won't bother comparing it to the film. There are a lot of similarities, and a lot of differences. The biggest one is the inclusion of a religion called Mercerism in the book, and the whole post-apocalyptic lifestyle is described in more detail than it is in the film, such as Animal-ownership, 'Kipple' (junk) and Empathy-boxes. There are a few other minor ones, like Roy having a wife, JF Sebastian becoms JR Isidore, and a few more.

But what really matters is the emotional impact both film and book have on me. They both perfectly convey that sense of... I can't even describe it. It's like despair, decay, confusion, emptiness, pointlessness, absurdity, inhumanity, all rolled up into one.


This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name Mozart will vanish and the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I’m part of the form destroying process of entropy. The Rosen Association makes and I unmake. Or anyhow so it must seem to them.

Vibes

Yesterday I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the first book, in a compilation of 5, that I am planning to read over the summer. I really enjoyed the book. I liked Phillip K. Dick's bleak vision of the future. The overheated and overcrowded New York environment was presient, given how the book was written in 1965. The sandy Martian colony, where unfortunate people are sent to live out their lives, is a bleak world where people have nothing to do except "chewing" hallucinagenic drugs Can-D and Chew-Z. I especially liked the scenes where the characters have fantastical Can-D and Chew-Z induced trips. But by far my favourite, was the scene in the Strangelove-esque Dr. Denkmal's E(volution)-therapy clinic, where one of the characters is given a treatment which allows him to evolve and experience "Broad, all-inclusive preoccupations?" Brilliant. Toward the end, though, I got a little bit confsed. The book got all philosophical, saying that Palmer Eldritch was god, or wasn't god, and the ending was too ambiguous for my liking.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yFLX9ruBEgI

Bloc part deux

Five-o came and told us the festival was over, due to overcrowding. This made sense, since one of the security had told us that they had sold over 24,000 tickets for an event which was supposedly for 15,000 people. To be honest, I think 10,000 people, even if the venue had been organised properly, would have been more than enough.

By the time I filtered outside the festival site, it was too late for me to get the last train home, but too early to wait for the first morning train. And I still hadn't seen any of my friends!!! I thought it would be too awkward to leave without having even seen them, so I sat on the other side of the street watching the chaos unfold...

Eventually my mates stumbled out, still buzzin', but the night was far from over. 20,000+ people were now piling out and trying to get transport home, meaning there was massive queues for the few transport buses taking us back to Liverpool Street. We got on one eventually, and headed back to one of my friends' houses which is closer than mine (I live on the very outskirts of London, outside the M25). In the end though, as what had just happened sunk in, and realising that my weekend was going to be washout, I decided to nightbus it back home. I got home around 6ish, showered, and went to sleep, disappointed.

I woke up late on Saturday. I jumped on the internet to see what was being said. Pretty much everyone was in agreement: Bloc was the biggest flop of 2012. And now, I had to find a way to avaoid spending my Saturday evening with the rents. Looking through twitter, I saw that a handful of events were being put on in lieu of Bloc. One, hosted by Jacques Green, with Actress and Martyn as special guests, looked good. But it was in South London. Fuck South London. But there was a silver lining: A Hyperdub party, with Flying Lotus as a special guest, around the corner from Liverpool St. It looked like my weekend might just be redeemed. I washed, ate, dressed, and ran to the train station. On the way there, my friends were saying enough was enough; they weren't coming. I didn't mind going alone - I'm such a massive FlyLo fan!

But, by the time I got there, the queue was backing around the street. The Bloc curse!!! I queued for a while, but then I talked to some guy who had been inside, and it was apparently one-in-one-out already. Damn. I walked over to XOYO to see if I could get in there, since by this point I didn't mind paying for entry, I just wanted to listen to some motherfuckin' music. I managed to get in despite the fact it being packed out. The show was pretty good as a consolation prize for a shocking weekend.

Bloc 2013? I don't think so.

Bloc pt. 1

I'm finally done sulking that I can actually rationally explain what was without a doubt the worst weekend of my life.

Bloc 2012 was supposed to start on friday night. My friends and I were super excited. They were being so super-keen that they turned up at 5pm... I couldn't be fucked with that (and I also wanted to eat some food before I went on an all-night music extravaganza) so I got there around 8pm, having had Subway in Stratford. It was weird being in a part of London that I had never been to before, on the DLR, which was also a first for me. The train was packed full of london hipsters.

Pontoon Dock was my stop. The festival was literally a few feet away, down a walkway. The sun was setting and it looked pretty damn good. By this point I was starting to get caught up in all the excitement. The security stopped us at the end of the walkway, which I assumed would lead staright into the festival. Except it didn't. We were threaded back around, to the back of another short queue. And then another, enormous queue of over 1000 people, which backed up around the Bloc. Realising that the back of the queue would mean standing by myself for over an hour, I jumped in near the front and got in under 20 mins. We were led inside where there was... another, even longer, queue...

To the annoyance of those who had presumably qo pueued the whole way, me and a group of other festival-goers I had been talking to in the queue were like FUCK this, and threw down/jumped over the barriers that would have made us snake around. Swimming through a sea of people, we got there in 'bout half an hour. I had skipped most of the queueing and still needed a drink. I opened the Rum and Ginger Ale I had mixed for myself and shared it with some chick I was trying not tress my dick up against... she was cute, but I just wanted to get in!

The ticketting was a joke. I had only printed the bar code part of the "ticket" (which was just an email, printout) so the security were saying I couldn't go in even though the barcode had scanned correctly. Luckily, because of the chaos we had caused by knocking some of the barriers over, the crowd was surging forward, and the security had to give me my wristband to deal with the mass of people. Finally, after over an hour of stressful crowd-pushing, I was in!

My phone's signal was fucking up, but from what I gathered my friends were in the Stubnitz; a Soviet-era boat acting as one of Bloc's stages. I had missed Nicolas Jaar because of the queues, and I didn't want to miss another act I had earmarked to see, so I made my way over to the Main Arena, where Amon Tobin, DOOM, and Snoop Dogg had already started playing. I caught the second half of Amon Tobin's set. It was pretty good, although I prefer his earlier jazz-infused stuff. The visuals of the ISAM were really cool. They made me wish I had taken some illicits. Although, with all the crowding, I'm glad I didn't. After a short wait, DOOM was on. I'm a huge fan, but the show was really disappointing. The sound guys clearly hadn't made any changes after Amon Tobin, because the bass was turned way up. Add to that the fact that he rhymes with a lisp so the lyrics got really muffled. So much so that I could barely recognise some of the songs. What was cool was that this guy next to me was rapping ALL the lyrics perfect. Chill guy.

I waited a while for Snoop to come on, but it was getting really crowded inside and I had no liquor left, so I decided to go meet everyone else on the boat. On the way out, I saw loads more people queueing for Snoop. I was like fuck that noise, I don't even like Snoop Dogg (apart from this song). But when I got to the boat, it was closed because of health n' safety. I tried to ring my friends inside to see what was up, but my phone was still fucking up. Then more people started to arrive. Apparently, Snoop Dogg had cancelled. Then apparently one of the tents was also closed, and the Millenium Mills half of the site was closed off. By now there were hundreds of people trying to get on the boat, which was closed. I waited for about half an hour with some french dudes, who were saying they had spent over 200 pounds in travel and accomodation to see HudMo play on a motherfucking Soviet boat, which they told us we couldn't go on, even though that was one of the Festival's selling points. At that point, I would have abandoned my friends and gone elsewhere, but apparently there was nowhere else to go! And that's when the police came (tbc)

What's up? Nothin' much

Been chillin' at home for 2 weeks now. Been watching lots of daytime TV. My routine has pretty much been: get up at 12, eat some food, do a few pushups, watch the Tour de France, eat some food, finish watching the Tour, listen to some music/play games/watch TV, get some food, then go sleep. I'm still sleeping 12+ hours a night. I should really do something about that.

I also haven't been able to search for a summer job. My Dad's been fuckin' me around, because he wanted me to help renovate the house, but he keeps changing the date and hasn't told me when we're going to do it. Same with Uni. I will be resitting the exam I missed in August, but they don't know when yet. It's annoying, but there's nothing much I can do... I done a little reading for next year, still

This weekend though I'm off to Bloc, a festival. Amon Tobin, Steve Reich, Flylo, Battles,DOOM, Nicolas Jaar, Four tet, James Blake, Hudson Mohawke, Martyn, Actress, and loads loads more cool shit. I'm Well looking forward to it!!

DMT and Magic Mushrooms

I tripped DMT and Magic Mushrooms recently. Here is what happened, as I remember it.

I'll begin with shrooms, since I did these most recently. I began the trip a little bit apprehensively. Psychedelics make me nervous, and a bad trip is something I would definitely not like to experience. This wasn't helped by the fact that one of my friends, who would have been tripping otherwise, couldn't join us because of work. This meant that it would just be me and my other housemate who would be taking the shrooms. He is very weird and neurotic and likes to babble on about philosophy and politics. I think his cynicism and bleak outlook gives him a perverse sense of superiority. Normally I don't mind, but on drugs his philosophical rants can be very annoying and confusing. Still, it was a warm sunny afternoon so I went ahead and ate my shrooms. They were a little dry. I washed them down with Orange Juice.

The come-up of mushrooms seemed to me a lot faster than acid. With LSD, the come-up is very gradual. The world slowly unravels. With mushrooms, it felt like I was waiting nervously for ages with no real effect, and then suddenly I got very, very high. The first noticeable effects came after 30-50 minutes. Walls started to breathe out of the corner of my eye, my mood was enhanced, colours began to look a little 'off', and music started to sound dammmmmn fine. I think the effect of psychedelics on music and food is my favourite aspect of the drugs.

Very quickly these effects built up and up. I was losing track of time, everything was pulsating and screaming out at me to look at it, and my thoughts stopped being linear. My housemate seemed to be speaking quicker and quicker and making less and less sense, and I was getting to that point where following and participating in conversation becomes too stressful. Overwhelmed by everything that was going on, I had to tell my housemate to be quiet for a while, which he did.

To me, nature looks incredible on psychedelics, and the view out of the top floor window was incredible. Birds seemed to dart across the trees with lightning speed. Their movements seemed incredibly elegant and beautiful. I closed my eyes to see if I had any Closed Eye Visuals. Whoah. I opened my eyes again quickly because they were too much. Indescribably beautiful shapes, patterns and dimensions were rotating around my mind. It was at this point that I realised I could swim.

"Realising you can swim" is my slightly rubbish analogy. It relates to the first time I went over to the deep end of a swimming pool. I would paddle a couple of feet down the pool, and check to see if I could still stand with my head above water, then paddle down a bit further and do the same, until I put my foot down, and sank down into the water. A strange feeling of falling and panic. But then I splashed back up, and swam the rest of the way to the deep end of the pool, plunged to touch the bottom, and swam back. It doesn't matter how deep the water if you can swim.

I was staring at one of the Oak trees at the back of the house, which was fractalising. Pink clouds were dancing to music. The Magic Mushroom Spirit Goddess was dancing also, teasing me to come inside the fractal. I didn't want to. I've been inside a fractal before, and all you get is more fractal. I turned away and looked at the cupboard doors. The wood grain normally melts on acid, which looks cool, but on shrooms it was way cooler. The grain formed giant hologram legs, which slowly began to walk. Really, really, really cool. I watched them walk for a while and then tried to explain it to my housemate, because I felt like I might have been rude before when I needed him to shut up. Trying to explain things on psychedelics is so hard. The experience is so subjective, and I don't have good vocabulary.

At some point, I decided to put headphones on and shut my eyes. I felt a neon psychedelic energy charge up the headphone cable and into my head. The Mushroom Spirit communicated that if I was too scared to come out and play, she would come in. She took my on a journey backwards through space and time. By which I mean, my version of space and time, which featured a lot of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are cool. I tumbled backwards, back through prehistoric jungles and mountains, back through the history of the cosmos. I felt very nostalgic. I reached death and I was terrified, but I was determined to continue. We went past death and then?... I can't really describe what happened beyond that point. I vaguely remember gods and spirits and all sorts. Then the bad trips goblin entered by mind. He told me it was easier to imagine things and to look at others than it was to look at myself. I saw my own brain pulsating with neon psychedelic energy. I felt like I was just a soul or a consciousness trapped in a primate body. It was a seperate entity to me, and I was inside it, only using it to move around and see and sense the world. I saw myself in the third person. It was a really, really disconcerting feeling. But then I realised, or remembered, that there was nothing about myself that I didn't already know. I had seen myself in the mirror, and I was okay with that. It is what it is.

About four hours into the trip I stopped peaking. Just as quickly as I had come up, I came down. Apart from some visual afterglow, I could speak and think coherently again. All in all, it was a very fun experience. I felt a lot more like I was "on my own" than with previous psychedelic trips. Just me, and the figments of my imagination. I don't know if that's the nature of the drug, because of how I felt, or who I was with. I might try them again in a different setting and see what happens.

DMT was... insane. Very short, but a blast. Like Salvia, you have to inhale it and hold it for ages to get anything. I was already drunk and high before I did it, so I was feeling drunkenly confident about the whole thing. I inhaled that shit and saw my hand start to vibrate, and then blue flames were coming off it. Someone took the bong off me and I flopped onto my back. It felt like I was being dragged violently up through the dimensions of reality. I visualised time and space as a sort of spiral ribon falling down, and I, on my spaceship-bed was floating up. This lasted about 30 seconds, and then I reached the same room. The door to the left was on fire with crystal flames. The two lads who were standing to the left and right of me were 80ft tall guardian-spirit-things (I can't really say, since I have never seen anything like it) who had their backs to me. They were incredibly frightening. They turned to look at me, as if to say "Oh look, here's another one" It seemed that they found it funny that wasteman tripping on DMT kept arriving unanounced into their dimension. It made me very happy. The ceiling was an incredibly bright light, and I thought that the whole place looked like the gates of Valhalla, or something. Very cool.

While both these experiences were really really fun, I don't think I got that much out of them. Maybe it's because I am a year older, or because the drugs are different, but I felt that taking LSD last year had a much more profound effect on me. Neither the mushrooms nor the DMT made me want to make any drastic changes in my life. Keep trying, keep positive, and don't get too upset if things don't go well. It is what it is.

New Blog Post

Well... it's been forever since I last blogged...Exams and essays been keeping me busy...

That isn't quite true, though. I've had some stuff on my mind, which I've been meaning to get down onto paper (uh, i mean, the internet). Thing is, my thoughts are so scattershot, that when it comes to getting things down into written words, it all sort of disappears. Then I spend ages trying to piece back together what I was thinking about. Then I read it back to myself and I'm really unhappy with it. Then I forget about it. Still, I'm going to try to force myself to blog about some stuff that's been on my mind.

Just not today... got revision to do...