Quoi Maintenant, Heavy Industries?

quoi maintenant , heavy industries?

He Pored Over Dante Hallucinations

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.

Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.

For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

A big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a booming laugh and a penchant for the experimental, Jung was interested in the psychological aspects of séances, of astrology, of witchcraft. He could be jocular and also impatient. He was a dynamic speaker, an empathic listener. He had a famously magnetic appeal with women. Working at Zurich’s Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, Jung listened intently to the ravings of schizophrenics, believing they held clues to both personal and universal truths. At home, in his spare time, he pored over Dante, Goethe, Swedenborg and Nietzsche. He began to study mythology and world cultures, applying what he learned to the live feed from the unconscious — claiming that dreams offered a rich and symbolic narrative coming from the depths of the psyche. Somewhere along the way, he started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors and empirical scientists.

from The Holy Grail of the Unconscious

by Sara Corbett | The New York Times

Read the article

 

Love Street Light Circus Feel Good Machine

via flickr.com

1960’s Texas Music:

Love Street Light Circus Feel Good Machine

1019 Commerce

Houston

Love Street photo courtesy theHAIF

“Love Street Light Circus Feel Good Machine opened on June 3rd 1967. The bands included the Red Crayola, the Starvation Army Band and Fever Tree. The audiences sat at tables or in the Zonk-Out, a series of cushions with back rests.

Despite being open barely three years it hosted a who’s who of Texas psych: the Red Krayola, Erickson’s Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Johnny Winter, Bubble Puppy, Shiva’s Headband, Fever Tree, Gibbons’s pre-ZZ Top band Moving Sidewalks and American Blues, featuring his future bandmates Dusty Hill and Frank Beard. Appropriately enough, it was also the site of ZZ Top’s first shows on July 4 and 5, 1969.

David Adickes was the original owner/manager/light show projectionist. Sgt. Cliff Carlin came on board to manage it by late ’67. Adickes sold the club outright to Carlin later. By ’69 (perhaps earlier) International Artists had a stake in it as well. Love Street tried to branch out into Corpus Christi and San Antonio with little success, and closed down in Houston on June 6, 1970.”

via Scarlet Dukes

hat tip The New Paradigm

Free Sport Car Door Prize

via scarletdukes.com

1960’s Texas Music:

Jimmie Menutis Lounge and Club
3236 Telephone at Wayside
Houston

Jimmie Menutis Lounge and Club photo courtesy theHAIF.

“It was small, with a stage at one end and red table cloths on the tables; kinda classy. I saw Bo Didley and I think, King Curtis. My favorite memory was of Jimmy Reed of whom I was a giant fan.

Jimmy was to have played one night (I used to have the picture I swiped from the club), but as the night wore on, he continued not to show. Rumors circulated through the club that he was ‘sick’, then that he’d been to the hospital to have his stomach pumped having been drinking ‘wine, screwdrivers, and beer’. He finally came on hours late and it was still great.

The highlight for me, however, and a scene that is branded into my memory, is of him playing along when suddenly his guitar separated from it’s strap and plummeted to the floor. The guy next to him, who played the classic ‘da Da, da Da, da Da, da Da’ rhythm, reached over and grabbed it without missing a beat LIKE IT HAPPENED EVERY NIGHT. It was most interesting!”

Performers included:
Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, and Louis Armstrong.

More information about the club is in the book Telephone Road by Burton Chapman.

via Scarlet Dukes