Thomas Bey William Bailey works

"Drama Out Of Concrete" - new book underway

Ukrainian apartment blocks - still from Ulrich Seidl's "Import / Export"

When I first landed in the Czech Republic over a decade ago, it felt like I had just landed on a planet that was the perfect inverse of what I had just left behind. Gone was the Japanese pop culture of cultivated giddiness that burst forth from every public television monitor. Gone were the reassuring, blushing smiles of a thousand cartoon characters and the clockwork musical jingles that urged everything from fresh fish consumption to the safe pedestrian crossing of major thoroughfares. In their place was a clouded-over grayscale landscape typified by intense glares, artfully skeptical remarks over endless beers and Start brand cigarettes, and - of course - omnipresent columns of panelák, the prefabricated concrete apartment buildings that still stood as a relic of the nation’s previous existence as a satellite state of the Soviet Union. With the naïve romanticism of my youth, I felt that this melancholic terrain held out more possibilities for me to create and express than the neon-lit, high-tech hyperreality I had left behind. I was determined to find the ways in which people turned a character-less environment in on itself and persisted with humor and innovation. It seemed, at the time, an order of magnitude more interesting than continuing to document what could be done creatively within a culture of convenience and easy, round-the-clock access to the latest in technology.

Many years later, I am finally getting around to this. My new book-in-progress, provisionally titled “Drama Out of Concrete,” deals with the cultural history of a phenomenon that has been mostly passed over by students of culture and aesthetics in the West: the prefabricated apartment blocks of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. Practically anyone who has visited or inhabited this sprawling territory at any time within the modern age is familiar with these structures: though their names change from nation to nation, their external and internal features are strikingly similar, and as such are a testament to the leveling power of State socialism. With this in mind, writing a book on this subject presents a special challenge to me. The books I’ve written previously deal with forms of creativity that, though they might be difficult for many to make a personal connection to, are nevertheless forms that have one or several distinguishing features to them. Writing about bland pre-fabricated architecture, and the human communities that it was meant to shelter, means doing something very different - namely, it means trying to find moments of cultural distinction buried within a phenomenon that many observers see as the epitome of standardization and conformity. It means trying to find the moments in which fascinating outbursts of expressive evolution occurred in spite of being placed in a physical framework that was seemingly hostile to these aims.

At the same time, this study attempts to show not only how creativity occurred in spite of these environments, but because of them. More than a few unique subcultures have been the result of converting one’s technical, social, and environmental restrictions into the fuel for ideas that might not have come about in situations of comparative freedom to choose. The same elements that have made prefabricated panel buildings to be an object of derision have also been employed to create subcultural movements based on liberation (after all, isn’t the intense repetition of techno music analogous to the visual ‘rhythm in space’ of concrete apartment blocks?), and this book will not dare to suggest that emotional responses to these structures were as monolithic as the structures themselves appear to be. The curious phenomenon of “Ostalgia” - or romanticization of the dull certainties of the former “East” in the face of frightening new forms of social chaos - is just one possible form of attraction to these still-standing monuments to the culture of central planning.

The story of the Soviet-era ‘new towns’ and sprawling apartment complexes meshes with that of the “unofficial” or underground art world in a number of ways. One of the most captivating stories here is the history of using private spaces to serve the same function that public galleries or theatres would have served prior to official pronouncements that severely limited the scope of work that could be “officially” exhibited. The transformation of private apartments into everything from clandestine exhibition spaces to impromptu shops for illegal samizdat literature is a subject that is maybe worthy of a book all unto itself, although there is still more to discuss besides this. The circumstances that made for the sheer necessity of merging private and public space should not be forgotten in the globally networked present.

At the same time, the tower blocks have an uncanny allure that goes beyond their contemporary usage as canvases for elaborate graffiti murals. When being used as a backdrop in cinematic artworks like Ulrich Seidl’s Import / Export or Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, their presence as an element of stark contrast has become indispensable: these imposing clusters of grayness can have a visual effect similar to that of mountain ranges when they are used in stories about the struggle for self-determination. Many of the urban legends surrounding these structures are also worthy of telling, since they reveal moments in which authoritarian imposition of “new ways of life” only seemed to entrench traditional assumptions and even superstitions (I’m thinking here of the first high rise tower block constructed in Prague, which I’m told was associated with a number of ‘hauntings’ / paranormal phenomena such as blood seeping from its elevator shaft).

I’ve only begun conducting preliminary research towards a satisfactorily complete book, but already a number of “sub-stories” and plot twists have emerged in my attempt to outline the history of the prefabricated apartment blocks. The story of their construction alone is one of intense drama, seeing as it involved a seismic shift in lifestyle for those who were used to completely different modes of living. The story of how these buildings first came into existence is a turbulent one, in which famous visionaries like the architect Le Corbusier (who gives this book its working title) were engaged in impassioned ideological battles with the official planners of the Soviet Union. Behind the apparently eternal, ‘trapped in limbo’ industrial facade of these buildings is an engrossing tale of how they came into being, along with the struggle over how they were to be used once this happened, and the present debate over what to do with them in societies that are aching for a change and yet do not yet have the ability to make a “clean sweep” upgrade to another form of mass housing.

Much of this total story can be synthesized from a number of existing print sources, and so I’m actively looking for personal contacts who will be able to make this project more unique, personal, and surprising. If you have some experiences and insights that you feel shouldn’t be left out of this book, please contact me here - I’ll certainly look forward to hearing from you.

"Which Way To Ballard-Topia"? en Español

It's hard to believe I first announced this in mid-2016 (around the time the film High Rise saw release in theatres), but my Spanish-language critical essay on J.G. Ballard is now available via the magazine Détour.  This was an extended meditation on the virtual space that "Ballard-topian" writing, something that can be positioned between the convenient literary poles of utopia and dystopia, occupies.

I feel that this is definitely worth the wait, though, as my partner-in-crime Isabel Arquero has done a tremendous job with translating nuances, and artist Francisca Pageo has added some tasteful collage / design flourishes to help make this visually striking.

I will of course print an English-language version of this soon, and this piece will also be featured as part of my first full-length book in Spanish, Ne Plus Ultra.

 

Austin live actions update, November 2016

You win some, you lose some: as I play the waiting game to see whether or not I will still have a paying job come the holidays, things are looking up in other areas. My first live talk on the new book To Hear The World With New Eyes, officially “launched” in the U.S. in Austin’s Farewell Books, was a success. Thanks to Tara Bhattacharya for putting genuine effort into reading the book and asking questions that mattered.

This may actually be a kind of informal “warm up” for other readings / workshops in the region (with some possible venues being University of Texas, End of an Ear and elsewhere). We still have plans to do a one-off radio program based on synesthesia; namely music either composed by synesthetes or with synesthetic ambitions.

While I (of course) had no chance to promote it, I did play a live music show on the same day as the Farewell reading. This took place outdoors in the erotically chilly open air, at the Dimension Gallery in East Austin: a fascinating sculpture-centered gallery built within a disused filling station. Titled “An Evening of Artful Sound,” this featured me alongside Alex Keller / Lisa Cameron, Brekekexkoaxkoax, and Brent Fariss.

I performed a new live improvisation there with minimalist turntable, modular MFOS synth and computer plug-ins, which I retroactively titled “Turning Worms Into Dragons”: a personal banishing ritual to counteract the choking, unrelieved anxiety that has been the hallmark of my surroundings for weeks. Alex Keller managed to make a hybrid soundboard / audience recording of the show: only the below excerpt exists for now (but please do contact me if you have a recording that spans the full 30-odd minutes). Enjoy!

 

La Reproduction Interdite, and upcoming live book presentation

 Things have admittedly been quiet on this journal page, although that doesn't imply any kind of lack of activity in my personal life. Those aspects of life that I see as compulsory (work, further education, etc.) are taking more precedence than they have at any point in the last five years or so, yet for all that I am still busy with new creative work and new research into esoteric but valuable subject matter.

I have talked before on this blog about a new piece entitled "Negative Autoscopy," and themed after the similarly named hallucination (in which individuals claim they are unable to see their own reflections). Given that accounts of this are extremely rare, and that the phenomena of autoscopy as a whole is still very interesting, I've altered the name of this piece to "La Reproduction Interdite" (named for the Magritte painting above). The story of this phenomenon has all kinds of interesting implications for one's psycho-social development, particularly as it is very different from the mystical "out of body" experience in which individuals claim to have an affirmation of existing outside of their own body. Autoscopy, by contrast, forces humans to confront a doppelganger of themselves and to question where their true self lies (a la Chuang Tzu's famous dream of being a butterfly) - this has led to fascinating, if occasionally horrifying, instances of the doppelganger acting as a pursuer or consoler. For this piece, which will be released on Daniele Antezza's new Holotone label, there will be special artwork and text (to be read in a mirror, natch) which will report on the occluded world of autoscopy, without attempting to draw any moral conclusions and all the while letting listeners make up their own minds.

As per usual, I have composed everything on the upcoming recording by myself (though with some valuable assistance from Alex Keller, who helped to record the spoken voiceovers).

Meanwhile - my new book To Hear The World With New Eyes, while encountering some more delays in its international distribution, is nonetheless available from me for a short time, and will especially be available when I conduct a live presentation at Austin's Farewell Books on November 19, from 5-7pm. I do hope to see lots of friends and supporters there!

"To Hear The World" released, and DJ Foxbat flies again

Three years’ worth of hard work on my new book To Hear The World With New Eyes is finally at an end. My preliminary batch of authors’ copies has arrived from Spain and I’m happy to say, holding the books in my hands, that a lot of work has gone into the presentation and layout - my good friend and collaborator Susana has put serious thought into making a design that reflected the book’s contents and yet wasn’t intrusive upon them.

The U.S. “launch party” will take place at Austin’s Farewell Books in the first week of October. I’m still working with the organizers on the exact date, so for everyone who is interested in attending the above event, please get in touch with me and I promise I’ll keep you posted. I believe there will also be an on-air interview about the book on local KOOP radio.

Because I am saving most of the books that are in my possession for upcoming live appearances (and waiting to see what the distribution scenario looks like for the rest of the books), I have a very limited number on hand that can be sold via my web shop. The good news is, if you purchase one, it will come autographed by me and dedicated if you choose that option. Again, I urge you to act quickly - a honestly have only a few copies to sell online, and am not creating a state of artificial scarcity.

With the blessing of hard-working local concert organizer Melissa Seely, I’ve also been given free rein to have an irregular DJ residency at Me Mer Mo, an intriguing Monday-night showcase of sonic eclecticism at Austin’s Volstead Lounge (I am thinking I will be here every 2-3 weeks or so; feel free to contact me for a more concrete schedule of appearances, though I know for a fact that I’ll be present on the 19^th of this month from 6-11pm). Also know that I DJ under the alias DJ Foxbat (the NATO reporting name of a supersonic MiG fighter-interceptor that was originally adopted when my DJ sets were more heavily represented by tracks from the late Cold War).

I’m relishing this opportunity to introduce unsuspecting ears to sound and tonal music from all cultural and perceptual extremes. Compared with the smoothly beat-mixed, genre-specific nights associated with more “professional” club DJs, I set these sets up to reward those who like looking for the hidden consistencies between supposedly irreconcilable types of sound. While I generously spin work from my friends and influences in the ‘sound arts’ realm, I have also enjoyed sharing everything from the icy folk of Yanka Dyagileva to the mesmerizing naivete of the Langley Schools Music Project to lectures on neurology and the malleability of consciousness.

So, by all means, please join me some upcoming Monday for an intimate sonic journey (and, of course, stay for the actual performances - which often range from curiosity-provoking to outright excellent).

Mary Roach's "Grunt": A Review

 

Despite the questionable conclusions of Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature[i], the Anthropocene world remains a very violent place. This fact seems to be unintentionally supported by thinkers like Ian Morris, who notes that humans now stand a 1% chance of dying violently at another human’s hands, compared with the 10-20% rates associated with Stone Age life (Morris’s caveat to that fact is that war on a massive scale has been necessary to bring about these improvements, along with a subsequent period of constant, ‘low-intensity’ intimidation by states like the U.S. and E.U.) In this supposedly less violent world that we now inhabit, the mainstreaming of militarized violence into popular culture also remains as strong as it ever has, and along with that comes a steady downpour of new literature dealing with all particulars of historical and contemporary warfare.

 

Within this deluge, it’s rare these days to find a book on the military’s deployment of science that doesn’t either read as an apologia for this activity, or as an esoteric record of the terrors that the military establishment supposedly keeps occluded from our sight (e.g. the Montauk Project, HAARP weapons and the like). I feel that both these genres of writing make the mistake of treating the modern military as immune to the shortsightedness and tactical failures of other institutions that have a weaker hold on the public imagination. Therefore, middle ground in this field is a welcome thing, and so I rush into books like Mary Roach’s new Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War with the hopes that they will deliver a story more interesting than the shopworn one about the unassailable power of the death industry. This book, structured as a series of investigative and informative episodes with no real thesis to string them together, isn’t a dispassionate study by any means, and this lack of a clear agenda can be an asset rather than a weakness.

 

Mary Roach has worked her way up the New York Times bestseller list as an author who uses quirky humor and little-known (or mostly forgotten) scientific facts to defuse the tensions surrounding taboo or unpleasant topics. With modern warfare, she couldn’t have picked a more unpleasant topic, and yet this book’s wide-ranging popularity may have more to do with the American reading public’s acceptance of its armed forces’ permanent deployment than it does with an acceptance of Roach as either a uniquely exploratory scientist or talented humorist (the degree to which you find Hudson funny can probably be ascertained by whether or not you laugh at her description of an experimental air force program as a “pilot pilot program”). Her joking asides about topics like genital injury, sympathetic as they may be with the victims of these miseries, aren’t memorably funny, and whatever humor there is in the book comes from the brutal absurdity of situations that don’t require Hudson to step in and deliver a punchline.

 

The truly interesting feature of Hudson’s book, then, is not the quirky humor, the equally quirky ‘gee whiz’ factor of weird science facts, or even the way in which it uses all this as a vehicle to implicitly valorize or demean the military (more on this in a moment). Rather, it is its exposure of the 21^st-century army as one that has still not succeeded in removing the intensely corporeal, sensory character of combat operations, even as it attempts to give remote-controlled drones and cyborg appendages a much increased battlefield presence. Roach uncovers a world where maggots are still seriously considered as a means of debriding wounds, where frequent bird collisions with fighter planes inspire simulations involving cannon-launched chickens, and where laboriously constructed concoctions meant to irritate the olfactory glands are as useful as any “psy-op” campaign (and more cost-effective).

 

All of this comes together to paint a portrait of a military-industrial-scientific complex that remains at war with the fragility of the human organism just as much as it is at war with any officially declared enemy state or enemy ideology. Roach’s survey of an all-too-human military seems a world removed from the erotic slickness of supersonic bombers that use multi-spectral camouflage to evade detection. In fact, unless you’re a scatologist, there’s nothing that exudes less sexiness than Roach’s chapter about the ongoing efforts to prevent diarrhea among combatants in the field. Along the same lines, many episodes in this book shore up the extreme banality of modern war-making - those “long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror” - as opposed to its more marketable “shock and awe” characteristics. When one of Hudson’s guides, referring to the impracticality of regularly wearing hearing protection in the field, mentions that the military has a “quiet problem” rather than a “noise problem,” it unambiguously drives this point home.

 

This isn’t to say that the cold and covert scientific menace of DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] isn’t invoked in the book from time to time. Here they are not depicted as trying to unlock the secrets of unihemispheric slow-wave sleep, which allows dolphins to keep one half of their brain devoted to rest while the other allows it to surface for air intake, or allows for some bird species to navigate flight and rest simultaneously. A successful approximation of this habit would supposedly allow for soldiers to “stay awake, alert and effective for up to seven consecutive days without suffering any deleterious mental or physical effects.” Within the same space that this is mentioned, Hudson also cites research into ocular implants that will grant both infrared and ultraviolet vision.

 

These brief, tantalizing glimpses into the clandestine development of future war are highly intriguing, if only for the fact that they reveal a military establishment that is still very much interested in “Human Performance Optimization” (as the NATO symposium on military medical technology is called). The rise of drone-based assassination campaigns has led more pessimistic observers - myself included - to believe that the end game of research titans like DARPA is the development of a fully automated, “post-human” fighting force that will be conveniently stripped of human empathy. So the experiments into refinement of the human organism, rather than the outright disposal of the “meat” (as cyberpunks used to call it), are a fascinating subject that I wish Hudson would have been granted permissions to delve into more eagerly. I suppose that’s very wishful thinking indeed, but - as mentioned before - it would be nice to see this subject tackled by observers outside the ‘professional paranoiac’ ambit of InfoWars and company.

 

Once Roach’s virtual tour is concluded, though, there is too much about her book that prevents it from being a reliable commentary on “swords-into-ploughshares” developments or even “weird militaria” in general. For one, the account is more or less completely focused on the United States’ armed forces: while this is certainly a good starting point, given the U.S. military’s greater entanglement in domestic civilian life and international conflict than any other national army, it is still not the complete story of modern military research and development. Meanwhile, Roach’s affinity for her military hosts is expressed quite strongly. She spends a good deal of time on amplifying the charismatic qualities of her hosts, lauding the virtues of being “courteous and respectful to the end” as “so Navy” or insisting that “if everyone in the world did a stint in the Navy, we wouldn’t need a Navy.” This gives the distinct impression of a writer too besotted with her subject to be thoroughly investigative, and that leads to a book that is ultimately more about developing a generalized appreciation for hard work and innovation than a speculation on the consequences of this kind of research. For appreciation of those qualities, we have more than enough other places to look.

 

[i] One of the better dissections of Pinker’s flawed data comes courtesy of John Gray, who concludes that “deaths on the battlefield have declined and continue to decline. From one angle this can be seen as an advancing condition of peace. From another point of view that looks at the variety and intensity with which violence is being deployed, the long peace can be described as a condition of perpetual war.” The Soul Of The Marionette: A Short Inquiry Into Human Freedom, p. 96. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 2015.

TBWB live performances in August, and new book release

 

 

Though this was promised as long ago as 2014, my adventures in sonic creativity are now resuming in earnest. The first fruits of this are going to be a pair of rare August concerts in Austin, Texas (I’ll be cautiously optimistic here and announce that these appearances will be less rare in the near future).

The first of these will be a solo performance at the charming Volstead Lounge on 6^th street, on August 1^st. If you don’t come for the music, it’s also worth visiting just for the weekly on-site ‘merchandise mart’ that regularly features TBWB-recommended offerings from allies like the Elevator Bath label). Within the same week there will be another performance at the Museum of Human Achievement - lineup listed on the flyer above.

Both of these shows will feature completely new material rather than a collage / pastiche of previous recordings, and will effectively be a preview of releases to come. Attendees can expect a concentrated, intense, electronic / psycho-acoustic banishing of conventionality and ‘art for social acceptance’s sake’. In other words, expect things to get exceedingly loud…but not without some flourishes of humor and chance operation. With the help of some good friends’ tutorial efforts (kudos to Alex for the assistance with the otherwise daunting PAiA modular system), and some material I’ve been seriously playing with since my Stockholm studio residency in 2014, I’ve built up a little armory of psychedelic weapons that I’ve been itching to integrate into live sets.

This activity comes in the midst of another exciting announcement; that the initial copies of my upcoming book To Hear The World With New Eyes have returned from the printers in Spain and are on their way to me. The proper public release is now set for September, but with the limited quantities I receive, I plan to do a live reading / talk / Q & A session here in Austin before that official rollout. The venue is yet to determined, but as soon as I know I will post information here so you can join me in celebrating the materialization - at last! - of one of my personal favorite projects.

 

Why Torture Doesn't Work: A Review

 

 

I’ve long suspected that torture, as a method of securing sensitive information, was faulty because of a fairly common assumption of torture opponents, i.e. individuals undergoing torture will simply say anything that they believe their tormentors want to hear. I’ve also felt, though, that this was only the tip of the iceberg as far as the reasons for torture’s inefficiency are concerned. Shane O’Mara’s Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation provides a compellingly thorough (but also concise and readable) inventory of these reasons, while circumventing the expected appeals to morality in favor of a much less philosophical and more scientific approach. Namely, O’Mara shines a blaring klieg light on the human nervous system’s reactions to unrelieved stress, and particularly how they make key cognitive processes of the brain extremely erratic, if not completely unreliable. For anyone who wants anything from a torture victim other than to merely watch the victim suffer, the implications of communication breakdown during abnormal secretion of stress hormones should be obvious: in such situations, reasoning ability and speech patterns can approach the meaningless babble of the heavily intoxicated, a class of people who you would hardly consider trustworthy sources of military intelligence.

 

While O’Mara’s book will not provide the answers for those who want all torture to end, regardless of its intentions, he never claims to cast his net so wide that he can argue against torture’s use as a simple instiller of terror or as a means of vicious retribution. Very early on he states that his primary aim is to “[take] the theories and arguments employed by the [Senate] Torture Memos at their word,” i.e. “that the techniques described were demonstrably empirically necessary to ensure that prisoners revealed the content of their long-term memory systems”, and to then demonstrate how such techniques fail on all accounts. In other words, the author is not going after those justifications for torture that have been historically used, but those which have attempted to give it legitimacy in modern times and to endear it to the civilian population of the United States - a country still projecting an image of itself as the world’s leading democracy.

 

Make no mistake, O’Mara is aiming squarely at an American audience, particularly when making regular references to fictional “enhanced interrogators” such as Jack Bauer as having a firm hold on the public imagination (and as being influential on policy decisions themselves). The heroism of the hard-nosed, stop-at-nothing torturer is just part and parcel of a larger and more disturbing trend, and though the author doesn’t spend as much time on this particular phenomenon, the social media culture of the day seems to have enabled an almost casual recognition of torture as an appropriate punishment for the most trivial of offenses (particularly where pop celebrities are concerned). O’Mara doesn’t waste any time confronting the cultures of desensitization and / or electronic infantilism that make torture into a source of amusement and gratification for its detached spectators. He does, however, repeatedly show how certain fictional tropes - particularly the “ticking time bomb” scenario in which characters like Bauer use torture as a fast-track device towards solving time sensitive crises - have hardly any precedent in reality. O’Mara reminds us of the Senate Torture Report’s findings that some of the most preferred methods of “white torture,” e.g. sleep deprivation, take up to thirty days to take effect, if in fact they do so without altering the very architecture of the brain from which secrets are to be retrieved.

 

With unsparing analytical precision, O’Mara steadily goes to work on numerous other assumptions the military intelligence and policy-making communities have made about torture’s efficacy, and in the process repeatedly holds up the Torture Memos disclosed in 2009 as a kind of gold standard for organizational illogic and counter-productivity. By the time he finishes, we’re left wondering why anyone - particularly those who claim authority in the realm of psychological manipulation - could think that the techniques he surveys would produce meaningful and actionable information. Consider: having noted that tortuous sleep deprivation produces “impairments in cognitive and motor performance equivalent to legally prescribed alcohol intoxication,” audible and visible hallucinations, and outright amnesiac states, why would anyone think this coercive method capable of eliciting anything but incoherent confabulations? On this score, O’Mara scoffs at the insistence, relayed in the Torture Memos, that sleep deprivation will allow compliance with interrogators’ attempts at forcing memory recall, even as that documentation boasts that sleep deprivation “[reduces] the individual’s ability to think on his feet.”

 

Time and time again, O’Mara insists that torture advocates cannot defend themselves by claiming there is some shortage of available literature about the effects of stressors on the brain. The literature dealing specifically with torture is slimmer, for the obvious reason that not many test subjects are willing to sign on for experiments that involve excruciating pain (O’Mara does tip his hat to a group of Swiss volunteers who bravely consented to have their teeth electrically stimulated while brain scans were performed). However, there is more than enough study done on the connection between elevated stress levels and neurology to allow us to draw easy conclusions about torture itself. Once the smoke clears from all of this reading, readers can be forgiven for questioning whether methods used for “enhanced interrogation” have anything to do with eliciting “useful information” at all, or if these techniques exist to have a deterrent effect. One gets the creeping feeling that, just as post-9/11 institutional invasions of privacy amounted to an ineffectual “security theater” that merely gave a superficial impression of getting the job done, official disclosures of torture techniques have a similar theatrical effect aimed more at dissuading potential dissent than at conferring any kind of tactical advantage on the global battlefield.

 

One of this book’s most compelling portions shows how torture not only breaks the minds of those who must submit to it, but also the minds of those who are given the orders to routinely administer excruciating physical pain and psychic torment (often knowing full well when it is achieving nothing). It’s no small feat for any book to instill pity in me for torturers, but O’Mara convincingly argues that “enhanced interrogators” themselves are victims of the procedures that they are ordered to carry out. He never denies that sadistic / psychopathic personality types exist who thrive on cruelty (indeed, he notes the Senate Torture Report’s confession that the CIA “deployed officers who had documented personal problems of a serious nature…including histories of violence and abusive treatment of others”). Nor does he believe that feelings of altruism will always override an eagerness to please authority, a point that he makes clear by invoking the results of the famous Milgram Experiments.

 

Nevertheless, whatever the original disposition of the torturers is towards their work, O’Mara paints a picture of interrogators who are as subject to permanent psychic trauma as their own victims. Post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide are both listed as common fates for torturers once they are removed from the line of duty: so common, in fact, that former interrogator Damien Corsetti “claims that virtually every interrogator who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is suffering from some form of PTSD, and is doing so mostly in silence.” The unprecedented suicide rate of U.S. military personnel, which is one legacy of these conflicts, becomes less of a mystery when we consider that the legitimization of torture was a defining feature of these conflicts. The pages of O’Mara’s book are aglow with indignation at the desk-bound soul destroyers who, with their comfortable distance from the interrogator’s work, can call the decision to torture a “no brainer” and can honestly be puzzled by the ways in which inflicting cruelty on the defenseless causes uniformed soldiers to reject deeply ingrained assumptions about acceptable conventions of war. Perhaps the rubber-stamping brigade will at some point take notice of the sinking morale of their troops and do something about it, and yet past developments in military technology make me pessimistic about the cure that will be prescribed: just as the military has succeeded in spreading drone warfare as a less traumatic, de-personalized alternative to traditional combat - the architects of “enhanced interrogation” may find new methods to carry out torture that “virtualize” the experience somehow.

 

To his credit, though, O’Mara refuses to go out on such a grim note, holding onto a flickering hope that policymakers will begin to consider the eye-opening experimental findings that validate his thesis. At least one paper published in advance of Why Torture Doesn’t Work shows that he is not a lone voice in the wilderness, and also suggests that the concluding prescription of O’Mara’s book (i.e. “Why Torture - Why Not Just Talk?”) is as experimentally validated as any of the other claims he makes earlier. The study in question finds police interrogators repeatedly and almost unanimously determining “enhanced” techniques to be useless in their line of work, e.g. “all participants […] who responded to the question about what techniques they believed were least effective at eliciting reliable information cited techniques from the competition / confrontation domain.”[i] Other interview subjects confess that “the need for social interaction is so strong that con artists have been playing on it for ages, and a skilled interrogator can just go in there and draw that out.”[ii]

 

Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a ground breaking, if long overdue book that is unyielding in its attack on pointless cruelty dressed up as tried-and-true police / military strategy. The fact that it has a high “page turner” value makes it even more unique; making the discussion of humans’ uniquely vile institutions more fascinating and less stomach-churning that it should be. Should the “civilized” world ever return to a state in which it truly believes its own platitudes about using scientifically efficient methods to achieve its ends, O’Mara’s book should receive full credit for helping to debunk the junk science of enhanced interrogation techniques.

 

[i] Russano, Melissa; Narchet, Fadia & Kleinman, Steven. “Analysts, Interpreters, and Intelligence Interrogations: Perceptions and Insights.” Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 28 No. 6 (Nov/Dec2014), p829-846.

[ii] Ibid.

News from Austin and Elgaland/Vargaland

 

Directory of Elgaland-Vargaland citizens (TBWB contained somewhere therein)

 

To reprise what I announced a little while ago in my newsletter, I have a new home base in Austin, Texas as of this week. For those who didn’t receive that communication, here are some of the more relevant bits.

In many ways, this relocation is a tremendous relief for me, and a chance for me to test the strength of my ideas in an area that will be far more challenging than that from which I’ve been writing and recording for years. I’m very excited for the opportunity to once again live in a city where there is some social / cultural energy; to once again be in a situation where I don’t have to book a flight or drive 9+ hours simply to put on a performance or live talk.

Living in the dead center of the U.S. has had its upsides: it has given me the luxury of creating without being influenced by current trends, and has allowed me to reach people for whom the art that I make and promote is something totally new and unanticipated. It’s been truly life affirming to see people’s eyes light up when I introduced them to something that, in the world capitals of the avant-garde, would probably just be dispassionately and taxonomically filed away rather than appreciated on its own merits. Having said this, I’m also worn down from years of disappointments in areas unrelated to my creative life…some of those were the result of others’ deceptive practices, but just as many of them were entirely my own fault. Whatever the case may be, it’s time to cut my losses and move on.

I want to thank everyone who has contributed in ANY way to my creative and critical output since 2008 or so. The publication of my first ‘trilogy’ of books (more on this soon) and other accomplishments, from radio shows and residencies to festival prizes and CD anthology appearances, would never have been possible without your help. It would have been very easy to feel completely isolated here, and to simply give up on making lasting cultural contributions, without your efforts to keep the lines of communication open and to extend invitations for me to visit you in your own home states and countries.

Speaking of states and countries, I think it’s worth mentioning the appearance of the new book chronicling the past 25 years of the Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (and not just because my citizenship in KREV entitles me to a mention in the roll call of citizenry seen above). Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who is of course the co-founder is Elgaland-Vargaland, urges interesting parties to get in touch with Anna Eriksson at the publisher Art & Theory if they have any questions about the book. Notably, CMVH mentions that “if you're an art collector you may want to get the € 500 special edition (25 copies signed by CMVH and LE + a graphic print also numbered and signed). if so, then send an email to Anna and check this out.”

"To Hear The World With New Eyes" update

 

Very soon...very soon now...

 

The production stages of my next book, To Hear The World With New Eyes, are just about complete. So it's with great pleasure that I share the following front cover and rear cover designs by the always reliable and insightful Susana López. Front cover imagery has been lent with the gracious help of Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand of Synergetica Lab.

 

Stay tuned here for further updates, as it seems like things are finally building to a head with this project.

 

 

"To Hear The World..." cover design by Susana López