The Great Psychic Outdoors - Enrico Monacelli (2023)

Where Do We Start?

Well, Monacelli starts with this…

• HERE is Bill Calahan performing Teenage Spaceship

• HERE is Hito Steyerl’s text “In defense (sic) of the poor image” in it’s entirety.

• HERE is a treat for our long-suffering Portuguese listeners, an entire dissertation by Mauro Sa Rego Costa about Radio Alice, which broadcast in Bologna 1974-77.

  “Rádio Alice transmite: musica, noticias, jardins floridos, conversa fiada, invenções, receitas, horóscopos, filtros mágicos, amores, boletins de guerra, fotografias, mensagens, massagens, mentiras...” How could you resist?

• HERE is a chilling recording of the final moments of Radio Alice. 12th March, 1977 when armed police arrived to destroy the studio…

  …which made me think of this, but maybe that’s taking it too far..

• …so here is the official Monacelli playlist to the book

  …and his commented playlist in The Quietus.

  What about R.Stevie Moore?

  This is a pretty good place to start.

….but this is cool as well.

…of course, R.Stevie Moore also made a collaboration album with Ariel Pink

…and Daniel Johnston?

As Tom pointed out, some of the material out there about Daniel Johnston has an exploitative feel to it…this clip from the 2005 film is nice, though, and it shows some of the production techniques that Johnston had to resort to.

Tom wonders why Monacelli left this guy out of the mix…teeth painting is not recommended by Jandek, the Gas Giants, most dentists, or anybody ,really.

bell hooks on combining theory and practice

Tom’s favorite part of the book is on the second last page:

In an extraordinary essay, Theory as Liberatory Practice, bell hooks wrote that emancipatory practices and critique were linked if, and only if, they were conjoined by some form of lived healing. Healing did not simply mean getting over some illness, obviously. The meaning bell hooks gave to the term "healing" was much wider than that. By healing she meant a movement that gave people the power to disrobe the oppressive and inhibiting habits they had learned from their ancestors and the economic and political system they were enmeshed in. To her, critique was not a matter of theory in the anaemic and cerebral sense of the term, but it was a real "place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently." A new way of being by acting differently in the world around you, basically. An experienced intensity. "When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice".

Theory as Liberatory Practice bell hooks (PDF)

…and where’s Capitalism in all of this?

• THIS SITE HAS COUPONS!!! Welcome to the world of Lo-Fi beats to study. Thank you, capitalism for metabolising counter culture to a state where I can use it to help me become a robot

• Meanwhile, Varoufakis (remember him?) thinks that capitalism might have been replaced by something worse..

• Tom thinks that you should get out of your teenaged interzone and make some noise, like THIS guy, Emil Beaulieau: America’s Greatest Living Noise Artist.

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