A few days ago, a group of unidentified individuals broke into the abandoned backstage office of what used to be Jackie O and on top of their lungs proclaimed to the bare brick walls of dead silent monotony: "We are Tegel Boys! Can we now stop chasing quantity and devote ourselves fully to boogie quality?" "You betcha!" rattled the walls back at them, cracking in vigorous concordance all around the room and beyond repair.

If you don't want to get into a deep philosophical discussion as to why it is relevant, who is behind this new project, what the ultimate goal is, cui bono, and so on, you can just press the play button and enjoy. Otherwise, feel free to contact Joel Isaac Black, also known as Hazy Pockets, our clairvoyant and omniscient, ever-vigilant and trigger-happy resident in absentia.

Tegel Boys – Simple Cat (Listen & Download)

A bit of mixing is in order for July.

Another triumph of an elusive genius... The demons are unleashed! And so very timely.

Soundcloud | Katercast 42: The Sorry Entertainer (Kiosk edition)

Heaven knows what it all means. Hard to tell when every story from this source contains a pledge to deliver it contrary to one's common sense expectations.

To be safe, let us be reckless from the get-go – safer yet, insane: It is an expedition moving at one hundred twenty beats per minute and on its own tracks; an epic trip with its own inner poetry. Like the wind, it is coming from and blowing in all directions. Largely indecipherable, it leaves ample room for all sorts of lyrical interpretations and divine revelations. Anything is possible on this symbolic voyage – perhaps even happiness.

You have only to let yourself in for it. You do not board this train – there is no station where it would be waiting for you. You hop on it zipping by, full-speed; dropping all your luggage and not looking back – the scene to be played in slow motion in your imagination. You leap in without bothering where it would transport you – always someplace you have never been, near enough to the end of the world. This conveyance carries you faster than you could ever get there yourself.

It is a journey which some of your fellow travelers may easily mistake for their destiny, or for something other than their fatum, when it most definitely is. Hauled by the immense power of steam blasting from the natural heat of Sorry Entertainer, the engine in his chest, this rolling stock of sounds is anything but a cortège of rail-mounted coffins joined butt-to-butt and headed for the graveyard.

In this life-affirming double heart-beat rate tempo, your dull familiar landscapes very soon turn wonderfully strange and profoundly mysterious. Without stopping to let off any passengers, Sorry Entertainer is doing what he does best: He annihilates the past, obliterates the future, and makes the present only vaguely real – all done with the apparent ease of a virtuoso sorcerer. It is real just enough for you to feel that the most blissful and fulfilling playtime is neither ahead, nor behind you – it is unfolding right now. Also known as Lotti who has no peers in his self-contained brutally delightful universe, the maestro is generously offering no apologies for sharing this precious KaterCast moment in exchange for only... your soul.

As the train rolls onward you never know what is coming next. With every next beat, it just happens to be precisely what you want. Then suddenly it is nothing but silence. So deafening, it feels the time itself is gone and gone forever. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Dope in sports, an article from the US National Library of Medicine. From it, you glean some insights into the magnitude of the phenomenon.

In this day and age, you never know who's scoring those victorious virtuoso goals – our giant godlike handsome macho studs, all as one made of stainless steel, or some sickly pale pasty hunched four-eyed miserable dweeb in charge of R&D at an anonymous cryptopharmacy.

Sports Illustrated once interviewed a cohort of elite Olympic athletes asking whether they would take a pill knowing they will not be caught. 98% responded "Yes". Would they take it if promised to win every competition for the next 5 years, undetected, but then they die? More than half said "Yes". Amazing!

Dope is a $1.4 billion-plus industry. It is growing daily as new compounds are synthesized and marketed. The article was published in 2007. The industry must have grown a great deal since then.

For every known and controlled substance, there is one unknown, a new designer drug that is undetectable, produced specifically to avoid detection by anti-doping technologies. There are hundreds. Often these substances are administered without the consent of the athletes. The obsession with fame, fortune, and winning at all costs, propagated by the media, extends to coaches, sometimes engulfing them more than the athletes themselves. For they think, quite reasonably, that they deserve it all even more than their trainees.

But then even among the known substances, there are some genetically engineered which are indistinguishable from naturally occurring biochemistry, such as EPO (Erythropoietin). One cyclist dies each year due to the abuse of EPO, and that's in Europe alone.

Dope is so prevalent in Olympic sport that some argue all records should be discarded until all forms of doping could be detected and stopped. This prospect is unrealistic. Dope will always be a step ahead. This is probably why in the US they have given up on the issue in professional sports. It is not subject to extensive anti-doping programs. Sports unions and collective bargaining agreements prevent extensive testing to be put into place. I guess they are worried if the dope is taken away, the spectacle value of sports goes down. The show must go on!

And then of course (here are my five cents into the game) – in the highly unlikely scenario that anti-doping bureaucrats prevail over doping entrepreneurs – we may hear arguments as for the balancing of the natural biochemical inequalities among people. Some of us – the cripples like myself – would need a pill to compete with the natural-born sportos on equal terms. Or rather a handful and very special ones. On what moral basis would you object to this kind of equality?

I may just as well keep this scorpio – instead of handing it to Gem&Bolt as a source of therapeutic toxicity. I'll employ Myko as a central processing unit to power my table insect-recycling factory. It transpires these creatures eat endlessly. Give them an elephant – they will never pause chewing. If they find no food, they switch to low metabolism to stay in this state for months. Motionless. So what?! Not that I intend to ever be playing Frisbee with Myko. And I don't expect him to ever follow the stupid boomerang rule.

Back to recycling business… See that douche bug on the wall? I submitted it for recompositioning yesterday along with another one which was 4-5 times larger than this little prick. Behold, it's still intact! See any traces of the biggie? I don't. Gone! Antennae, wings, legs, shell… All zero-waste processed. But this jerk is something else and deserves a name: Hardcore.

I watched Hardcore for good half an hour running frenetically around the facility, going up and down the walls, spinning on the floor, jumping on Myko, riding his tale, stamping on his head and in general quite visibly bugging my claustrophobic buddy. When finally I observed Myko tightly clutching this prick in his claws pressing its belly against his nasty mouth with something menacing sticking out from it, I thought the game was over for Hardcore. Sighed with an air of weary sadness and went to bed. But now what! In the good-morning daylight it looks like my Myko was just giving this fella head. Dirty bastard. Oh well. Whatever makes him happy.

Papaya Playa Project, Tulum Mexico 16th of April, 2010.

Hangover vs. A Clockwork Orange? Anthony Burgess shares the recipe for Hangman's Blood. Into a pint glass [568 mL]: 50 mL measures of each: gin, whisky, rum, porto and brandy. A small bottle of dark stout beer to the volume. Topped up with champagne. This "very smooth" incongruous septet is said to "induce a somewhat metaphysical elation..."

Innocent as it looks, refreshing as it tastes, gnostic as it spells, this elaborate concoction has the property of increasing rather than allaying thirst, and so once it has made a breach, soon demolishes the whole fort.

Shall we?

"The coronavirus epidemic will eventually allow humanity to reset its values. We will be in a position of having a blank page for a new beginning..." – from the interview with Li Edelkoort.

This fine forecast, of course, is grounded in the assumption that this new viral calamity – in its origin, substance, in how it spreads and builds up, in the way the virus is researched, attended to and mass communicated – is a "pure" phenomenon, by no means (in parallel, to an extent, if not in essence) an instrument of power antithetical to the vision of "new humanity." It just happens to pick up where Trump leaves off with his iron wall agenda and similar schemes around the world. Took a month to have impenetrable walls erected everywhere. For our own sake. Everyone is on guard, all nervous and vigilant in the darkness of ignorance (how many can even tell the difference between virus and bacterium?), scared to death of each other, first segmented then isolated, tuned to the voices from above, previously deemed highly dubious. Hard to see an exit. Before resetting its values, humanity may have, metaphorically speaking, to fight for the last roll of toilet paper – as it happens quite literally already. Not a lovely scene – this "quarantine of consumption". The fittest survives. While the first wave of epidemics is swelling we are told to stay prepared for the second one already. Coming out of this madness, the page for a new beginning may not be very blank. Nothing is ever blank. Let's hope for a better future nevertheless.

This fine piece of instant surpoprealism amalgamates timeless influences of René Magritte, Andy "campbellsoup" Warhol and Coronavirus. Silkscreen print, 100x140, framed. Limited edition. By Schizflux

"What I figured out was... if you had a disco beat (which is the right relationship of the bass to the drums), the weirder the stuff you put it over, the more it would sustain repeated listening." — Michael Zilkha, Ze Records (The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night
by Anthony Haden-Guest)

I knew, I knew that! :))) My recreational take on this. Electrometronomic whirlwind...

Gets going after the short woozy intro. The mix is comprised of the recent compulsive likes on soundcloud last week, from artists I've never heard of (while I feel I should have), pieces slightly edited and filtered for consistency which makes the whole thing tilting towards seismic left-field disco of sorts... here with all-through thumping four-to-the-floor heartbeat to amplify the sense of this-worldliness, lots of drones and arpeggiation in bass frequencies, glissando modulation, underproduced segments, the lyrical parts reduced to blunt yes or no, the refrains stretching the entire compositional continuums, mood shifts from sparkling light to deep dark bordering on neurasthenia, monotone twisted synths, and some downright weird shit (all so good though on the second bottle of decadent champagne). Schloss Beesenstedt: It's always something when nothing happens here.

Subcultures by definition are not for everybody. They lie beyond mainstream taste and morality — and as such expose the status quo's narrowness. It is the eccentricity of the margins that makes their [output] original and subversive. When their environs become so safe that the next-door neighbor and the postman feel comfortable there too, it's not fringe anymore. Counterculture rebels against the Normalburger precisely because they lack the imagination to undertake anything qualitatively new. Once accepted by society, the scenes become unable to reinvent themselves, to explore new terrain that might offend patrons...

The nature of truly radical, idiosyncratic projects is transient.

Street Artist Blu: Gentrification in Berlin lately doesn't content itself with destroying creative spaces. Because it needs its artistic brand to remain attractive, it tends to artificially reanimate the creativity it has displaced, thus producing an "undead city." This zombification is threatening to turn Berlin into a museal city of veneers, the "art scene" preserved as an amusement park for those who can afford the rising rents...

From: Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, The Wall, and the Birth of the New Berlin
by Paul Hockenos

"Tells the story in the visual equivalent of spare, brilliant prose that occasionally bleeds (and bleeds and bleeds) into poetry."

I can't sleep to silence. It's always either music, lectures or youtube flicks with the play-next-when-finished option on. Tonight I fell asleep to "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" and woke up to this one: Scum. Directed by Alan Clarke and written by Roy Minton, the film was commissioned as part of the BBC's 'Play for Today' anthology series in 1979, but was withheld [censored] from broadcast due to its shocking nature. Why was it deemed shocking? Could not be more terrifying than the reality it portrayed. Eclipsing the horrors of Gulag or Auschwitz? Or Assange. A reformatory for delinquents isn't a charm school: foul language, depiction of racism, a few punches in the face, one suicide, a scene of rape (none of the physicalities too graphic), and some dialogues of deep philosophical significance and high cultural import.

LA Times review states it's a sort of documentary, a "meticulously researched 78-minute production" cementing Clarke's "reputation as one of the U.K.'s most uncompromising social realists"; "an exposé of life in Britain's notorious borstals, youth detention centers." It was finally shown (with omissions) on television in 1983 and restored to its full-length original content only couple of years ago. Why.

Archer: The books available in the library, they're either trash westerns or hack adventure stories. I can't read that muck. Am I supposed to be Roy Rogers or Nanook of the North? My needs are... different.
Matron: The library caters for all trainees here, not single individuals.
Archer: Then why haven't I been allowed the two Dostoevsky novels you received for me? Have you read them? They are classics.
Matron: Archer, I've read them or not. Crime and Punishment and The Idiot are hardly suitable reading matter for a young boy in this establishment.

Alan Clarke's Scum on YouTube (full version).

Wandering without getting lost.

A real luxury watch is no watch at all, methinks. Two minutes a year off your alienated busy-ness schedule is no madness. Unless you are a total robot. Not even art for art's sake. It's a trap!!! What day is today?

"The aim of an upper-premium brand is to deliver a perfect product. But it would take a touch of madness for it to be counted a luxury. Functionally, a Seiko watch is superior to many luxury watches – it is more accurate (because it's a quartz watch). Buying a luxury watch instead, you would probably be warned that it loses two minutes every year... (per the designer's) quest of art for art's sake. This is the 'madness' touch that goes beyond perfection." — Luxury Strategy. Chapter III: Does your Product have Enough Flaws?

– Is this you, Lord?
– Cuz is. Where do you think I've got this golden glow from?..

In the main bar area, when you look with a sharp probing eye at that gigantic floor-to-ceiling mirrored and illuminated back wall bar stand, you may notice high up on the shelf in the right corner – among other things serving as decoration of sorts – an LP sleeve cover. Orange with a face on it, it says: "I Am Kurious Oranj".

Three or so years ago, I saw it laying around on top of the mountainous junk in the basement, along with other dormant old-school records, hundreds of them, which we had found in large dusty boxes and brought from the empty building next door – from what used to be a nightclub in Beesenstedt until circa the late 80s.

Since a year ago when I first spotted it up on the shelf, I have been obsessively curious how come this orange "I Am Kurious Oranj" sleeve is still there – given that at Schloss Beesenstedt you never glimpse a thing in one place twice. Things move around in a constant Heraclidian flux at Schloss Beesenstedt. While medium-to-large objects change their locations, small things, such as this one, simply disappear. Stolen, destroyed, trashed or shoveled for always out of sight, they hardly ever resurface elsewhere.

It's ony recently that I solved this long term puzzle – talking directly to Armin: "I cannot fathom, man, who on earth would actually find this piece and it takes a freak to consider it for display here – that's, in the first place. And then still seeing it a year later... Isn't it just weird?" "What do you mean? I found it. It's Mark E. Smith, for god's sake. The Fall. Don't you know?" "Of course I know. But who else would here? Was wondering."

And then Armin went on telling the story of how in the early 90s he was hitchhiking in the wilderness of Berlin, thumbing the traffic in his idiosyncratic style – which means, to absolutely no avail. And then, when the hitchhiker could almost physically smell the hopelessness of his situation and the infeasibility of his grandiose agenda for the night, suddenly out of the depth of darkness a bus popped up and pulled over to pick him up. It just happened to be The Fall tour bus. What else! The rest of the story is history with most of it unfit to print. Though, one can easily deduce the "Armin meets Mark" sort of scenario. Knowing both characters for real, no mental fiction can be too bizarre and far-fetched.

Mark E. Smith R.I.P.
5 March 1957 – 24 January 2018

"That abominable, voluptuous act called reading the newspaper, whereby all the misfortunes and cataclysms suffered by the universe in the last twenty-four hours — battles which have cost the lives of fifty thousand men, murders, strikes, bankruptcies, fires, poisonings, suicides, divorces, the cruel emotions of statesman..., transmute into a morning feast for our personal entertainment."

My old hard-drives are only half-dead. Some films don't need scripts, do they? British People in Hot Weather. Koh Tao, circa 2005. If not mistaken, this is Lotus Bar which burned down eventually. Wonder why :) I would just sit there all night and watch life go by. I tell ya, that was just as exciting as actually living it. Much more, in fact.

The Bavarian Soviet Republic was a short-lived and largely unrecognized quasi-state formation. Its cursory lifetime, sketchy status and rather limited consequentiality bracket it out as a historic phenomenon. Also known as the "regime of coffeehouse anarchists", it lasted for less than a month – from April 6 until May 3, 1919.

Ernst Toller served as its first President. He made his name more familiar in Germany as a left-wing expressionist writer scripting for theater. Curiously enough (though not so much in the inner revolutionary light), Toller's government appointments included a waiter as the commissar for military affairs, a burglar as the police chief of Munich, and – among many such types – an inmate of mental hospital as the foreign affairs deputy who upon assuming the office immediately declared war on Switzerland over its refusal to lend 60 locomotives to the Republic. The latter is also on the record for complaining to Lenin and the Pope by cable that the ousted head fled taking the key to now his ministry's toilet.

If only for some six days in power under Toller, this Soviet government reformed the arts (for the time being) and opened Munich University (for as long) to everyone except those who wished to study history. One minister proclaimed that capitalism would be brought down by making money free. One of the main churches in Munich was taken over and converted into a revolutionary temple dedicated to the "Goddess of Reason..."

Wondering... Is there a way to support my friends in Berlin defending their tiny "smooth-space" spot under the urban sun, in their uphill struggle for sociocultural relevance against the "invisible hand" and swift fingers of gentrification flexing its ironclad law and order muscle when needed to assert its prerogatives, to reinforce and extend its privileges... To support them from abroad, especially from Russia, without "meddling" in their democratic processes, without "weaponizing" my social media channels, avoiding the "instigation of unrest" charges and without substantiating the "foreign influence" case as a dismissal strategy against this genuine last-breath-of-air movement? Rhetorical question. Someone in Berlin, please give a roar for me! There in spirit.

When a chapter designating the most important thinkers starting with Confucius in a book titled "The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time" concludes with a survey of Darwin's contribution to the world's philosophical heritage, it reads as a deeply prophetic statement – dark and chilling as it gets. It takes real analytic and poetic genius, that of William James Durant, to compress the examination of the origins of species and human evolution thesis into four short paragraphs – as elucidating as witty and eloquent. To make it even more concise:

If Darwin was wrong, the world may forget him as it has almost forgotten Democritus and Anaxagoras. If he was right, men will have to date from 1859 the beginning of modern thought...

Suddenly the world turned red, and nature – which had been so fair in the autumn's colors under the setting sun – seemed to be only a scene of slaughter and strife, in which birth was an accident, and only death a certainty... "Nature" became "natural selection," that is, a struggle for existence, for mates and power, a ruthless elimination of the "unfit" of the tenderer flowers, the gentler animals, and the kindlier men… Every organism was the prey of some larger beast; every life was lived at the expense of some other life...

Copernicus had reduced the earth to a speck among melting clouds; Darwin reduced man to an animal fighting for his transient mastery of the globe... His wars made the fiercest brutes ashamed of their amateur cruelty. The human race was no longer the favored creation of a benevolent deity; it was a species of ape destined to be surpassed and to disappear…

Do not the victors, exhausted by the contest, sit sadly today amid the ruins, secretly mourning their triumph, secretly yearning for the old world which their victory has destroyed?

"Mindfulness practices do not permit critique or debate of what might be unjust, culturally toxic or environmentally destructive. Rather, the mindful imperative to "accept things as they are" while practicing nonjudgmental, present moment awareness acts as a social anesthesia, preserving the status quo [...] The cruelty [of this kind of mindfulness] lies in supporting the status quo while using the language of transformation." — The Mindfulness Conspiracy, The Guardian.

Ronald Purser is a Professor of Management at San Francisco State University. His viral "Beyond McMindfulness" article, opened the floodgates for the mindfulness backlash. It's been captured in full, further researched and finely articulated in his very recent book "McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality", a lively and razor-sharp critique of mindfulness as it has been enthusiastically co-opted by corporations, public schools, and the US military. Other articles on the topic are here.

It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in architecture. In fact, what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong... We size up the magnitude of living thinkers by asking: who would take the trouble to refute this author... if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Plato really happened in Aristotle, Kant in Hegel, Hume in Kant, Husserl in Heidegger. The sixties really happened in the seventies.

From Meillassoux's Virtual Future.

If you people live good and virtuous lives (from now until September at least), some in the end – in addition to eternal salvation – may have a choice: to skip going to Heaven heading for Georgia instead. That's about when we plan to open a club here – for nice people only. Still pondering the name for the venture. Pictured: Till Harter.

"On Valentine's Day 2013, the Washington Post featured my paper 'Possible Girls', which describes how modal realism can help you have a romantic relationship with someone in another universe..." — Neil Sinhababu, National University of Singapore.

I tried my best dragging along this very enticing "modal realism" route. Alas, no light flickering at the end of its paper tunnel. No luck transcending the boundaries of my already diluted delusive Self and those of non-modal "here&now" reality, it being so incontrovertibly fake and feeble. Not even getting laid – romantic relationships aside. Not even in this universe it helps a bit as it promises so much in another one. Perhaps it takes more than just chewing on the synopsis. Not to discourage anyone. You go swallow the whole load!

The Italian futurist Marinetti raged against pasta (an attachment to the past that makes men skeptical, sluggish and pessimistic) opting instead for new dishes like The Excited Pig, which is a whole salami served upright in a dish containing some very hot black coffee mixed with a good deal of eau de cologne.

I am learning my ways around the kitchen from this highly hilarious piece of literature on food: "Appetites for Thought: Philosophers and Food" by Michel Onfray.

"It is a pity that we have to deplore the absence of the essential – tears, laughter, wine, women, food and pleasure – in the beautiful artificial machinery that is the oeuvre of Hegel... A few paces behind him the niggardly Victor Cousin makes his way. He once confided that he understood Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' the day when, in a German restaurant, a monumental plate was brought to the table, piled high with vegetables and garnishes, topped off with a ridiculously thin slice of meat: the basics reduced to very little..."

Read it for style, if not for substance. Cuz it gets twisted here and there, which may affect your digestion:

"Others err through lack of conformity in their food. Thus the divine Marquis de Sade who, putting nourishment in the service of sexuality, elevates chicken breasts to the pinnacle, theorizing that they produce the most succulent stools for the greediest of coprophages... Distantly related to this are Claude Lévi-Strauss's dining companions, who treated him royally with a bowl of nice white grubs, wriggly and crunchy on the tooth, but in the end releasing subtle flavours and delicate aromas... On this question, we have to say a few words on the topic of spermatophages and their close companions the foetophages. Epiphanius relates that Gnostics wanting to take care of unwanted pregnancies retrieve the foetus with their fingers and, 'pound it in a kind of mortar, mix it with honey, pepper and various revolting condiments including perfumed oils'. They took this meal together, eating with their fingers..."

And then:

"Always the cynic, Grimod would test the faithfulness of his friends gastronomically by sending them notes announcing his death. He invited them to a meal in his memory. Thinking themselves liberated forever from an eccentric, the opportunists who were only lukewarm friends failed to show up. Others took the trouble..."

You get the drift.

Introduction: The Banquet of the Omnivores
I: Diogenes — The Taste of Octopus
II: Rousseau — The Milky Way
III: Kant — Ethical Alcoholism
IV: Fourier — The Pivotal Little Pie
V: Nietzsche — The Sausages of the Anti-Christ
VI: Marinetti — The Excited Pig
VII: Sartre — The Revenge of the Crustaceans
Conclusion: The Gay Science of Eating

Individuals who go through a severe initiation to gain admission to a club or organization tend to think more highly of that organization than those who do not go through the severe initiation to gain admission. Yes, this is the thesis of "The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group" scholarly paper which concludes the research conducted way back in the late 1950s by Stanford University and U.S. Army Leadership Human Research Unit; supported by the National Science Foundation.

Question: Is it about the freezing cells in the US border detention centers?

Srcflo: The field of application is limitless and ever expanding.

Question: Of course. Hazing is one. I just thought your mentioning it was triggered by the recent events.

Srcflo: No. The trigger was much more general an issue. I am reading an old paper "Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes" in Psychological Review Volume 84, which is basically about how people report their motives/reasons for doing this or that – answering the why questions. From the point of empirical science, these personal reports are little short of flatus vocis. We have no direct access to higher order mental processes such as those involved in evaluation, judgment, problem solving... or the initiation of behavior. Why we like/dislike this or that, why behave as we do cannot be explained by our reports along the lines: "because I want to save the world" and such. Not an illuminating answer, if not to say misleading. "What could there be for which a "good reason" might not be found, or which might not be defended through thick and thin?" Something else is at play and mainly at the non-conscious level.

Interesting read on "sound bathing" (Social History of Medicine, Volume 25). Its reportedly awesome effects have nothing to do with sound as such.

The key in the aetiology of the experience is one's hysteria. The more persons are receptive to sound during the session, the more they are hysteric. This is to say, sound bathing is not so much a therapy as a diagnostic tool. Means you have to be deranged to tune in and get a kick out of it bathing. Otherwise, skip it. No wonder it's so popular these days in some circles: the social powers that be – themselves demented from the get-go – turning everyone caught in their subtle and not so subtle disciplinary games into a mental case (victims of consumerism and dupes of terrorism; Hillary supporters and Trump voters; Russian hackers and Hollywood fuckers...):

"I have these two hysterics... As soon as I set the fork vibrating, you can see that they fall into catalepsy. When I stop the vibrations, they fall into somnambulism. If I begin new vibrations with the tuning fork, the catalepsy reappears..." — Jean-Martin Charcot.

Musical Hypnosis: Sound and Selfhood from Mesmerism to Brainwashing
Oxford University Press

Walking in your own shadow can be a real journey. Actually, the only veritable one.

Brown-dirt-boogie from the birth of Summer 2017. This is a live recording of Hazy Pocket's set from the wonderful Jackie O Bar out East in Berlin. Sunset on the pier, then jungle-drums in the trees. It is live and raw, un-edited. The DJ-table knocked down and a power outage couldn't stop us: "I chose to use a live microphone recorder to capture the moods in the area... champagne corks popping, feral kids humping sofas..." It's all in there. It's not always loud and clear, but it's certainly loud & clear! Dive in and join us again.

Guattari "devoted himself to fomenting unrest, assigning staff members [of La Borde, a psychiatric clinic where patients actively participate in running the facility] to tasks for which they weren't trained. "Félix really liked to declassify people," as one of them put it. Employees slept till noon, "denouncing everyone who was already at work as alienated by capitalism'." —From Desire Was Everywhere, London Review of Books.

Félix Guattari: Molecular Revolution | Psychiatry and Politics (PDF)

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that creates it. Indeed.

An ancient Greek term which, in its philosophical usage, describes the moment when all the judgments about whatever happens around and the external world itself are suspended. One thus relates to the phenomena as they are originally given to consciousness, as objects of immediate inner experience, of primal sensations and basic intuition.

Epochē sounds inch-perfect for the name of the club we are opening in Tbilisi very soon. The problem is... it's hitting the nail with some other 10,000+ words and combos on the list of semantic inch-perfections, squeezed in between Sein und Zeit and Instance Indefinite... Way too many angels dance on our pinheads making the "We are our choices" existentialist precept an inch-perfect impossibility.

New guest's early morning encounter in the basement labyrinth of Schloss Beesenstedt (a.k.a B31):

- Excuse me! How do I get to the courtyard?
- Depends where you are coming from.
- Eh?

Jackie O Berlin is opening 9th of June. This picture sure anticipates it in spirit, however factually it recalls a moment at the 4GB Festival in Tbilisi last week.

So we went there first thing the very morning on our arrival in Georgia – myself and Till Harter. It's the kind of scene where your marginal status of a total stranger does not save you from being sucked into the whirlpool of jubilant social action on entry – given the natural curiosity of scenesters on the rise and their southern temperament. And especially when your guide is Gogiko Sakvarelidze responsible for a number of projects which demarcate that scene.

We showed up at 9AM and by 10AM I felt in my head and limbs I needed to chill a bit on the sidelines regaining my senses and reclaiming some balance for maestro Koze starting in 12 hours. That is to say, following the liquid artillery assault of introductory shots – friendly fire coming from all over – comprised of unavoidable chacha, tequila, whiskey, vodka... and quite a few beers to smooth and cool it all down in the heat of the day. So I spotted some greenery on the periphery and the last thing I remember is this body motionlessly absorbing the shadow in the bushes. The crew sign attached to it assured me it was the right plot for the purpose; while the tattoo which qualified that body in a more permanent and familiar manner gave me all the rock-solid confidence about my crash site in the neighbouring bush...

Happy birthday, Kater Kiosk!

"I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within... I pledge my life in support of this truth." Monument of John Cleves Symmes in Hamilton (OH), a noted 19th century American philosopher.