by Rob Brezsny
2. Daryl Stackman did something—or many somethings—to piss off the execs at CBS. He was a kind of weaselly, annoying guy, after all, who always seemed to be scamming even when he wasn’t. With him as our representative, we didn’t exactly have a master communicator and people pleaser.
3. As in the publishing and film industries, if a product doesn’t explode into prominence within three weeks after its release, it’s regarded as stillborn. The money people immediately decree that the thing has more value as a tax write-off than as a continuing cash drain for the marketing department.
4. Bureaucracies can conspire to sabotage greatness even when they’re not trying to conspire. It’s in their nature to be dumb and oafish.
5. When World Entertainment War, at WBM’s urging, made a pilgrimage to Los Angeles to visit the CBS headquarters for the first time (after the record was already recorded), the execs saw that I wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. A previously unheralded rockstar over thirty releasing his first major-label CD? Yeah, right. Not in this universe.
6. Perhaps in a previous incarnation I was a heartless highwayman who incurred so much karmic debt by robbing helpless victims that there was no other way for the cosmos to pay me back than by playing a really nasty trick on me.
Just kidding about that last one. I think.
The abrupt and brutal reversal of World Entertainment War’s long good luck streak did not end with CBS’ mysterious sabotage of our beloved CD.
One rainy autumn night, before Will Boehm could live up to his promises to me, he dematerialized. On the way back to his Marin home from a Huey Lewis show in the East Bay, the helicopter carrying him slammed into a utility pole in a driving rain. I woke up crying at 3 A.M., eight hours before I officially heard the news. In my dream, Boehm had come to me, holding his severed hands in the crook of his arms, and said mournfully, “I’m sorry. I can’t finish the job.”
I might have been able to love the music biz a little more if Boehm had survived. He was a pushy asshole, but he had soul, he had balls, and he was just enough of a madman to understand the full complexity of what I was trying to pull off. On the other hand, there was no way, in light of the passionless, bumbling strategies Will Boehm’s lieutenants plotted for World Entertainment War in his absence, that I could survive the music biz, let alone love it. And even their sabotage looked positively benevolent compared to the cryptic evil perpetrated on us by CBS.
Yet I can’t in good conscience condemn Boehm’s lieutenants or the CBS executives to the seventh level of hell. They’re merely the human administrators—hence, victims like me—of the same machine that came so close to mangling my metaphysical huevos.
Easy for me to say now. During the first flush of disillusionment with my two multinational allies, I came dangerously close to violating my pacifist Gurdjieffian-Buddhist-Qabalistic vows. In an embarrassing spectacle unmatched since I was four years old, I actually screamed bloody oaths at one of Boehm’s lieutenants for fifteen minutes straight. (Sorry about that, dude.)
But the ripest target for my anger was of course myself. I could hardly believe that after so many years I had managed to sustain a level of naive idealism more appropriate for a kid launching his first garage band.
My spacy fantasy: that in a gift of love to Will Boehm’s memory, the company that lived on after his demise would rise to the occasion, calling on previously untapped reserves of ingenuity to spread the word about World Entertainment War with an inventiveness and intensity that would top anything Boehm himself could have pulled off.
The crushing reality: Without the maverick charisma of Boehm pervading the place, his management team slumped into a glazed lethargy, carrying out cautious strategies by rote.
My deluded fantasy: that our music is so brilliant and unique and well-played that even the corporate drones at CBS would undergo a religious conversion in the presence of its redemptive beauty; that they would transcend their plodding, one-size-fits-all approach to marketing in order to come up with an imaginative strategy for making World Entertainment War a household name.
The scalding reality: CBS is a soulless assemblage of businessmen and bureaucrats committed solely to advancing the bottom line with products that slickly embody the cultural clichés du jour. It’s true that from time to time there emerge in the lower rungs of the CBS hierarchy a few passionate idealists who yearn to unleash gifts of great art on the mass audience. One of them, after all, coaxed the big money people to sign us up in the first place. But he was probably axed from the company well before the divorce of World Entertainment War and CBS was final.
What was most humiliating, demoralizing, and downright unredeemable, however, was not the way the stinky brains of CBS sabotaged my baby. How could I expect them to be anything other than themselves? What hurt most was this: Ever-so-subtly, ever-so-creepily, I had begun to buy into the rockstar persona and lose my own private vision of how to pull it off. I had actually, I’m ashamed to admit, begun to do things I hated—sucking-up behavior I’d spurned all these years, craven acts I’d always felt were symbols of selling out.
I mean, it’s difficult to have accomplished the feat of being nothing more than a cult figure in the Bay Area despite having performed highly original, well-executed music for more than a decade. My failure to become a mega-bestselling rockstar was actually a stellar accomplishment. I attribute it to the fact that I’d steadfastly refused to ham it up with radio interviewers who thought “genocide of the imagination” was a board game for five-year-olds; that I’d refused to tone down the quirks in our music in order to impress and yet not overwhelm the polite lemmings at music conventions; that I’d refused to change the lyrics to our song “Marlboro Man Jr.” so as not to risk a lawsuit from the cigarette company; that I’d refused to make our music less melodic and chipper so as to pander to the pop-nihilists who dominated the “alternative” music industry; that I’d refused to spend every waking minute selling myself to the legions of promoters, radio programmers, booking agents, record company executives, and music journalists.
And yet when our CBS-financed record was finally released, I found myself, at the urging of WBM and CBS, bucking my own hallowed traditions. The gigs they booked for us were laughable: a poorly advertised concert at a cavernous auditorium in Ventura, California, better suited for productions of “My Fair Lady” than for World Entertainment War throbathons; a barely advertised show in sparsely populated Fresno at a tiny restaurant filled with rednecks who walked out when we played “The Wonderful World of War,” our reverse paeon to the history of CIA-aided coups d’état all over the Third World; an off-the-map show in an obscure Los Angeles club that was so empty that the Mexican family having a birthday party in one of the back rooms comprised half our audience.
Did WBM or CBS place us with a real booking agency, one with the clout to ally us with touring big-name acts? No. Were ads taken out or promotional appearances arranged in any of the cities where my previous musical efforts had received airplay? Nope. Were we blessed with even a fraction of the funds Will Boehm himself had promised to lubricate our career? ’Fraid not. Or with even one one-billionth of the vast fortune megaconglomerate CBS had at its disposal? No chance.
Instead, I did interviews with a reporter for a college newspaper from southeastern Texas who wanted to know what my favorite flavor of Pez candy was. George the guitar player and I were invited to decorate the side window at a tiny San Francisco record store in the style of a World Entertainment War altar. The manager of the store took down our installation after three days because it was “too arty.” Darby and I appeared on a cable-access TV talk show (probably watched by a total of forty people) side by side with a man dressed as a giant turtle who retracted his head into his shell and blew soap bubbles out, plus a woman wearing a diaper and bandaids across her nipples who could not only put her whole fist into her mouth, but could also sing “Swanee River” while it was in there.
The first shame was that we had placed ourselves in a positio
n to let this happen. The worse shame was that we didn’t rise up and follow a more righteous path, but endured it like well-behaved death-row prisoners.
And with every act I took to violate my own principles, the fortunes of the band sunk lower. The CBS record sold less than three thousand copies, a showing so dismal that only the most untalented, inauthentic, unseasoned bands could rival our failure. The CD got on the airplay list of only one major radio station, a renegade outfit in New Jersey run by pagan warlocks. Mysteriously, after a long series of fabulous articles about us in the Bay Area media, we couldn’t even manage a single review of the album, let alone a positive review. It was eerie, almost supernaturally improbable. It reminded me of those poor souls who have reverse psychic abilities. A statistically implausible percentage of the time, they’re incorrect when they try to guess what card the psychic researcher is holding in his hand. That’s what World Entertainment War had become. Our CBS project demonstrated more than a lack of good luck. It reeked with the most fetid, rotten, weirdly awful luck I’d ever experienced in my entire life.
Worse yet, I found myself one dragonish day actually contemplating what I’d have to do to compose a song with more of the standard pop formulas—a song that people would buy in droves.
The Televisionary Oracle
calls on
the spiritually suave,
erotically playful,
ironically tender,
divinely blasphemous
workers of the world
to seize the means of production
and use it to abolish all need for meaningless work.
This public service announcement
has been brought to you by
the smell of wet fox fur,
vanilla-scented candles burning in a cave,
and the soil of a Vermont garden just after the autumn harvest.
Although you’ll never find an advertisement for Coke or Nike within the hallowed confines of the Televisionary Oracle, you will find lots of hype for more spiritual commodities, like disciplined freedom, orgiastic lucidity, and lusty compassion. Our flackery may be more sacred and uplifting than all the other hucksters out there, but the fact remains that we’re still trying to coax you to “buy” our ideas.
There is one difference in our approach, however. We don’t want you to become addicted to your need for the Televisionary Oracle. In fact, our ability to sell you our miracles depends on you being joyously rooted in the most ferocious self-protective instincts of your own free will.
With this in mind, we invite you now to participate in the Televisionary Oracle Sellathon. All you have to do is commune with the seven sexy oracles below, then choose the one that best suits your special needs at this unique moment. Tell us your decision at
ORACLE #1: The word “imagination” doesn’t get much respect. For many people, it connotes “make-believe,” the province of children and artists. But in fact, imagination is the most important asset you possess; it’s the power to form mental pictures of things that don’t exist yet. As such, it’s what you use to shape your future. Some people, alas, are lazy about using this magical power. They allow their imaginations to fill up with trashy images that are at odds with their deepest desires, and their incoherent lives reflect that. Other folks are very disciplined about what images they entertain in their imaginations. They tend to attract exactly what they need. What about you? How will you use your treasure in the months and years to come?
ORACLE #2: We hesitate to compare you to a nimble-fingered, sensitive-eared thief, but there’s no better choice of metaphor: The task you have ahead of you bears a resemblance to picking a lock in the dark. Of course the treasure that’s sealed away from you is actually yours, so it won’t exactly be like stealing. Still, you won’t be able to reclaim it with a forthright, no-nonsense approach. You’ll have to be daring and delicate at the same time.
ORACLE #3: As an alternative to the oppressively stern, partially outmoded Ten Commandments, we have developed the Ten Suggestions. The First Suggestion is “Wash your own brain once a year—whether it needs it or not.” There’s no better time than now for you to heed this advice. The toxic build-up of junky thoughts in your grey matter has reached critical levels. One good thing about the Ten Suggestions—which distinguishes them from the Ten Commandments—is that they work by inducing your laughter instead of your fear. Guffawing loud and strong about your own shortcomings, for instance, is an excellent brain-cleanser.
ORACLE #4: In one of your past lives you were the genius who invented Pig Latin. In another, you were a nun who was expelled from your monastic order for wearing crotchless habits, whereupon you became an itinerant saleswoman of religious sex toys. In yet another incarnation you were the world’s foremost collector of antique candy wrappers. All the talents you developed way back then will come in very handy as you meet the slippery challenges ahead.
ORACLE #5: Is the cosmos a great soulless machine? Is it a product of blind forces which just happen, through a prodigious number of stupendous accidents, to have conjured up the infinite web of miracles that surrounds us for billions of light years in every direction? Or is it more likely that the cosmos is the soulful “body” of a vast intelligence that lovingly micromanages every intricate detail of its unfoldment—an intelligence too colossal for our tiny brains to perceive, let alone conceive? We’re sure you can guess our answer to that question. But we’d prefer to let you come up with your own. And there’s no better time to do that than now. You’re scheduled to catch a glimpse of the biggest picture you’ve ever been privileged to behold.
ORACLE #6: Do you know the distinction between actual compassion and idiot compassion? The idiot kind is the short-term fix we offer a suffering person in order to console him, even though it might encourage him to keep doing what brought on his pain. Authentic compassion, on the other hand, might at first seem severe—as when we refuse to buy into someone’s habitual tendency to portray himself as a victim. If done lovingly, though, this more strenuous kindness serves as a wake-up call. We bring this up because you’re now in a phase when actual compassion—though not the idiot kind—will reap richly selfish benefits for you.
ORACLE #7: Thinking of whipping up your very own moral code? Keep these guidelines in mind as you do: 1) A moral system is immoral unless it can survive without a devil; and unless it prescribes rebellion against automaton-like behavior offered in its support. 2) A moral system grows ugly if it doesn’t perpetually adjust its reasons for being true. 3) A moral system becomes murderous unless it’s built on a love for the sacredness of the vowels and the inscrutability of the consonants. 4) A moral system will corrupt its users unless it ensures that their primary motivation in being good is to have fun.
The Televisionary Oracle
is brought to you by
the reverie that inspired Blaise Pascal to murmur
“When one does not love too much, one does not love enough.”
Up until the afternoon in the Marin hotel room following Dr. Elfland’s first surgical swipe at my accursed birthmark, I’d always experienced my trips into the Televisionarium as radical breaks. The adventures I enjoyed there, while relaxing and invigorating, were utterly alien. I could find no way to translate them or make use of them back in the world I shared with my mothers. Indeed, it was as if I were two separate beings living two unrelated lives. To penetrate the veil between them felt violent, like a puncture. When I returned to earth from my cloud castles or peppermint tea streams, I often felt what I imagined it must be like to receive an electrical shock.
But my visit with Madame Blavatsky in the underground junkyard and Magda’s slummy shack was nothing like that. I couldn’t even say for sure it was the Televisionarium. I arrived in the strange land gently—not with a puncture, but in a rippling glide. The surroundings, the action, even the conversation were more like a hybrid of the Televisionarium and the mater
ial world, and I felt in full possession of both my sharp analytical faculties and my robust imaginative skills. In some ways the experience was like a lucid dream, as the Televisionarium had always been, but in other ways it was like lucid waking, or whatever you might call it when the daytime is infused with dream awareness.
Madame Blavatsky referred to this place as the Drivetime—a dimension that was neither the Dreamtime nor the Waketime but both at the same time. It was my first awakening to the possibility that a shamanic quest need not be a brief and grandiose stab, but might work more like a time-release capsule that distributes the medicine slowly over a long period of time.
My Drivetime guide also hinted that my entry there had been facilitated by a mysterious and primal “machine” which she called the Televisionary Oracle. From her cryptic comments, I surmised it fit the definition formulated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Indeed, if Madame Blavatsky’s assertions had any credibility, I myself created the Televisionary Oracle sixty-six million years ago, while in full possession of an archangelic potency which I have barely been able to tap into in my current incarnation as Rapunzel Blavatsky.
My departure from the Drivetime was a gradual ebb, like the tide going out. Long after the physical scenes had faded and my conversation with Madame Blavatsky had given way, I mulled over the events in a delicious hypnopompic state, engraving the details on my memory and letting them unveil further shades of meaning.
By 5 o’clock I had fully returned to normal waking consciousness. Or had I? In the back of my mind and in the bottom of my heart, I could still vividly feel the imprint of my sojourn in the Drivetime. Back then I would not have used the term “proprioceptive synesthesia,” but it occurs to me now as I try to describe the sensation. It was as if inside my body there was a flowing current that was the texture of crumpled linen and the smell of sweet almond oil and the colors terra cotta and gold and the taste of warm lemony tea and the sound of a mysterious, lilting blend of Irish and Chinese music in a minor key. This internal stream was a palpable link—not just a memory but a living taproot—to the Drivetime.