Date: Sun, 13 Nov 1994 10:58:15 -0500 From: mleger@panix.com (Mark Leger) Subject: Thyber.Thithie #3: Kali Luv Issue Hey groove things. No intro this issue, except to say chaos is a theme park in a state of being that doesn't care about the elections. Here's the line-up: * Announcements * For the Record, an essay by Cypress * Chaos, a rant by Hakim Bey * Da Guru/Prophet Jeff Bob's Miss Quote Page, a report by J-B * Faerie Anecdote, a memoir by Isadora Enjoy! P.S. Does anyone have a good faerie gathering recipe they'd like to share? You know, tofu parsnip chocolate spaghetti sauce for 100, or anything like that. Somebody asked for an online cook book for fledgling kitchen queens. So how about it -- e-mail us a recipe that works at a gathering. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ ANNOUNCEMENTS REGULAR CIRCLES CONTINUE AT THE CENTER 6:00, First and third Sunday at the the Lesbian and Gay Community Center, 208 West 13th Street, NYC Well, it's happening. Although it's not every two weeks. It's every first and third Sunday. So, for you faeries who need things spelled out, tabulated, and made embarassingly easy, decal transfer this onto your kitchen curtains: November 6 and 20 December 4 and 18 Bring candles and objects for the "alter" at the center of the circle. These circles have been amazing. It's clear that the New York faerie circle has a deep and abiding energy. For more info, call Jeff-Bob at (212)721-5612. NEW YORK FAERIE CIRCLE PHONE TREE Cypress, New York's beloved firebrand and deva, has nurtured the New York faerie phone tree into a living, dishing thing. He still needs gabby faeries to act as "branches" of the tree. That is, Cypress calls you, then you call five or six other faeries to tell them about all the impromptu parties and actions we've been up to lately. To swing from a branch, call Cypress at (718) 599-2003. NEW YORK LESBIAN & GAY FILM FESTIVAL November 10-20 Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave @ 2nd St., (212)807-8258 Featuring CyberQueer, a first-ever installation of interactive media works and queer digital media. (Better believe Thyber.Thithie will be hacking it's way in. Information wants to be free, and twisted!) Programs explore ethnicity, class, gender- but hmm, not spirituality. Don't miss the entry from the B.L.O. (Barbie Liberation Organization), a film about the shocking attempt to mix Barbie's voice with G.I. Joe's. FAERIE sWISH BOOK Hear tell of a Faerie Swish Book... "a zine-alog featuring everything you've been loning for -- but didn't find in J. Screw and Smurfdorf Hoodman." Sounds. . . creative. It's like, nothing is *really* for sale -- but we'll pretend all these faboo quelque choses are available if you ask real pretty or strike the right barter. Even though this project seems to be about subverting the cash nexus, to get a copy you still need to send $5 and a separate sheet with your address to: 1994 Faerie sWish Book c/o Julep 4343 N. Clarendon Ave. Chicago, IL 60613 Maybe when Edi-trix gets her copy she'll upload some of the text onto the net. If it's amusing enough... And if we haven't had enuf faerie capitalism, along comes... SHORT MOUNTAIN HOLIDAY GIFT CATALOG (!!) Delilah buzzed us from Short Mountain to let us know that the Short Mountain Collective has published a 1994 Faerie Gift Catalog. The catalog features faerie crafts and herbal concoctions. (Isn't this a great idea? Wouldn't you rather channel your holiday money to Short Mountain rather than Saks, or even Enchantments?) To get your copy, write Short Mountain at PO Box 68, Liberty, Tennessee 37095. Can you ship goat dung across state lines? SANCTUARY CONFERENCE AT DESTINY LODGE November 25-27 at Destiny Lodge Destiny Lodge is thrilled and delighted (but scared to announce a Happening: their first "conference" titled "The Land Search and Fundraising Circle." The meeting will happen at Faery Camp Destiny in Northfield, Vermont beginning November 25th until the 27th. (Yes, it's part of that Turkey Holiday weekend.) Some of the subjects to be covered will be sanctuary land requirements, intentions of this new community, fundraising schemes, revisions of by-laws of the non-profit incorporated called "Faerie Camp Destiny." Those "responsible" faeries who returned their "Questionaerie des Faeries" forms to us will receive five gold stars glued to their forehead during the "conference." Contact Faerie Camp Destiny if you know what is good for You! If you have a cold and prefer, you can write or phone Destiny Lozenge, P.O. Box 88, Northfield, Vermont 05663 or telephone (802)485-6668. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ FOR THE RECORD by Cypress Disclaimer: None of this is gospel. I just write like everything I think is unquestionable. I really want to stimulate discussion. I was interviewed by an APR journalist on June 25 at the "alternative" march and wanted to share my answers to her questions for your information: Journalist: What do you think you are bringing to this march with what you are doing? Cypress: We are bringing culture back. Bringing people back to a time when culture was made by the people instead of being fed to the people by capitalism. J: This is supposed to be an international march. Why aren't you at the United Nations? C: The powers that oppress us are international but not all those powers are political like the powers represented by the United Nations. The powers that oppress us are often in our own hearts, and it is those powers which we free ourselves from when we dance. We dance for our own liberation, for the liberation of queers of all kinds everywhere, and for the liberation of all sentient beings. *** I'd like to take this opportunity to print some ideas which have possessed me for a good while now, and which, I think, bear on the business and magick we faeries are about. I think people see me as a political faerie. I'd like to challenge that view and the categories which it assumes. Yesterday I was listening to On the Media, a WNYC radio show. There was a discussion of the alleged resurgence of virginity among young people in America. One of the commentators noted that the voices young people were listening to were not those of their parents nor teachers but the voices in popular culture. This statement was taken for granted and the discussion passed on without further mention of the phenomenon. I believe that mass-mediated culture has formed consciousness in America for a long time, and that this phenomenon of culture being imposed as from above (specifically created by that beast, capitalism) is the key to unlocking the problems not only of "lesbian and gay" people within the larger society but of the liberation of all people. In case you haven't noticed we are engaged in a war with the religious right. It is time for us to declare war in response to the attacks leveled against us by the right and by the left. It is past time to rebel against the ghetto they have put us in, both the physical ghetto and the psycho-political ghettoes of gender and narrowly defined sexuality. One problem with the war as it has been fought by our alleged political leaders is that they have tended to see the struggle only in terms of electoral politics. They have spent their time lobbying congress for legislative change and the President for executive decrees while the right has systematically attacked our cultural institutions, our personal behavior and, more often than not, our roles in our homes and our places of work. Effectively no amount of hate crimes legislation will change a single kid's mind about his fag or dyke neighbors. The other problem with the way this war has been fought up to now is that we have been too quick to accept the received dualism between politics and culture. Because electoral politics take political meaning out of the personal realm, we are led to believe that political change takes place in the halls of power. But real personal change is real political change as feminism has taught us, and culture is never without its political relevance. In fact the separation of the two ideas is a slight-of-hand trick which has the effect of keeping us confused and powerless. While many of us may be ambivalent about the political power of Faeriedom, its cultural power is obvious. Faeries are extraordinary people who create a culture out of their individual lives and out of their collective life. If you pay any attention to the religious right and their allies, it is hard to miss that they are managing a return of culture to the grass roots in the face of a popular culture which they see as eroding their values. As media becomes more liquid and more accessible and the individual pressure-cookers of culture become dissipated, the creation of culture seems to be returning to the lives of ordinary people. A period of transition or flux has opened up where some forms of cultural production are more accessible to more people. The zine explosion and public access television are examples of this openness. But the openness is a trap because these grass roots forms of cultural production are coopted and commodified by capitalism at a rate proportionate to their increased accessibility and the forms themselves are often not as interactive and interpersonal as older, pre-capitalist forms of cultural production. Seldom does an image appear in grass roots culture that is not immediately marketed on a huge scale. (Rush Limbaugh represents a twisted version of this refiguring of media. His television show is in reality a paid political advertisement, that is, he's not been selected by networks for presentation but his political protectors buy him time just like "info-mercials" are bought. This is one way powermongers are using the increased accessibility of media to influence culture directly.) At an AIDS Activist conference in Philadelphia this past spring I sat in on a session called "Fighting the Right." The activists in the room (which was packed) fluctuated between a smarmy-assed, pandering approach "taking into account the cultural integrity of the religious right", and a leftist, pissy-assed intolerance. Not surprising considering the environment the right has created over the past twenty-five years. But I believe that neither of those approaches works because neither realizes how low to the ground the right has become. What I believe is necessary is a kind of cultural war which entails creating a culture which is so fabulous that they can't help but laugh and cry with us, and sowing that culture among the grass-roots the right knows so well. The seriousness of the struggle must not be underestimated. Outside our ghettoes queers are facing unprecedented physical, cultural and propaganda attacks. Compulsory heterosexuality as manifest by the grassroots right wing will stop at nothing short of our total demise. They will use the capitalist mode of cultural production, electoral politics and grassroots organizing to enforce on us oppressive gender roles, narrowly circumscribed sexuality and the same old failed nuclear family structure-and they will use the law against us as well. 1. In circle last week I listened to a sister faerie say that he was still amazed when he thought about how, years ago, homosexual men were entrapped and arrested by undercover cops accusing them of solicitation. I have news for you, sister, those things did not go away when the last brick was thrown twenty-five years ago. The witch-hunt saga continues in countless smaller towns and cities across the United States up to this day. Furthermore, while careers and lives are ruined by witch-hunts, lynchings and suicides, communities are being torn apart by cultural issues like inclusion and AIDSphobia. What faeries bring to all this is the ability to provide a culture which is post-patriarchal in its vision, a culture of inclusion, a post-gendered culture, a culture of reality and compassion. 2. Also in circle last Sunday I listened to a socialist sister faerie claim that while she was a believer in the revolutionary transformation of society, she didn't believe that the faeries had a role to play in that transformation. How can people rise up until they have seen a cultural vision of a new society? How can people rise up against oppression until a culture of mutual support and collective healing becomes a reality in their personal lives. The virtue of faerie culture is precisely its living critique of the mundane world where the economies of money and power and compulsory heterosexuality hold sway. It is through loving and supporting each other and each other's voices, by maintaining the circle community that we manifest the magick of rebellion against the world the Men have created. 3. At Blue Heron in August I tore a cartilage or a ligament in my knee and was stricken down in the prime (well kind of) of life. Faeries of every description flocked over me, giving me faerie-back rides, wheel-barrow rides and tractor tours of the property. The gathering made sure that my experience was only minimally diminished by the accident. It was a micro-cosmic version of what we do for each other as a community. If we spent as much time focusing on those positive aspects of the collective and on fighting the war as we do glorifying and intensifying our dysfunction, the patriarchy would indeed be over, at least for us few. But I am convinced that we must be aware of our role in this war. We must go out into the community as we did during the Stonewall 25 festivities. We must be present to oppose the right visibly. We must offer our form of community as a libation to the twisted and divided "gay and lesbian community." Wake up, the war is hardly begun. This little faerie warrior has a message to send to our overlords: You will have to kill me to make me shut up. Acknowledgements: I think Agnes said some of this last year at Walnut Hill and Jeff-Bob is my guru. Some of the critique of politics sounds a lot like Audre Lorde. Also a couple of books are well worth one's while: The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, by Larry Mitchell, and Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, ed. by Karla Jay and Allen Young. P.S. Stay tuned for more of these tyrannical diatribes! =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Herein Faerie.Gram reprints part 1 of Hakim Bey's inspired chaos rant (from _T.A.Z.- The Temporary Autonomous Zone_, Autonomedia 1991- with permission from the author). Chaos has many faces- not just madness and disorder but boundary dissolution, ecstasy and renewal. Radical Faeries know this intuitively. Without chaos, we are trapped in form. . . CHAOS by Hakim Bey Chaos never died. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated. Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds. Everything in nature in perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. No listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good and evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin - your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.To shed all illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age- shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gathers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever. Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror - everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain. Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings. Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs. The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they'd call it an act of terrorism - so let's take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ DA GURU/PROPHET JEFF BOB'S MISS QUOTE PAGE by Jeff Bob All quotes and diatribes guaranteed to be misquoted and inaccurate. A report, dear sisters, on the Grand Faerie Circle held at the Gay and Lesbian Center on Sunday, September 18, a circle which occasionally discussed money. Other topics: How the entire circle can take care of unstructured faeries who can't keep a datebook. How to improve the FaerieGram, the Faeriephone, the next two Faerie Circles and how to improve all God's chillen without having to get directly involved yourself. How to avoid attracting the "Process Zombies" who will show up at the circles at the Center. How difficult people can be. What is wrong with Human Nature. What is wrong with being Ron. I mean, what is wrong with being wrong. I mean, I'm too mean. I mean to change that. It's on my list. The list I keep in my datebook. The one I don't leave at work. Because I'm a responsible adult. And responsible adults just don't come to the Faerie so very often. Please, don't take this too seriously. Chaos is good. Look around you. Embrace the chaos in your life. Everyone should read "Da Prophet/Guru Jeff-Bob's 163 Reasons to Embrace Chaos." (Harper & Row, 1994, $26.95.) Sold at responsible Gay and Lesbian bookstores all over Park Slope. But I digress. The circle, in da Prophet's humble opinion, was long overdue and rich in subtext. Something happens when the NYC circle doesn't meet for a while and then tries to process several months worth of processing in one sitting. And the Prophet/Guru finds if fascinating. (Which, by the way, is one really good reason for the Faeries to exist. So that I find you fascinating. Keep it up.) The circle was very light-hearted and funny and only really completely boring twice for very brief periods of time. (And they know who they are.) Whereas some circles get preachy and talky and lecture-y, this one largely kept moving. The Guru/Prophet gives it a seven on his 1 to 10 scale. Please congratulate yourselves. We don't get a lot done (in traditional terms), but we can be very entertaining in the process. (Which is why we exist.) (To be entertaining.) (For the guru.) Some of da faggots at da circle want more structure regarding money. Some of da faggots at da circle are terrified of more structure. Some of dem are hopelessly lost in the middle, in a sweet, loving, sissy sort of way. There is nothing wrong with agreeing to disagree. The purpose of the Faeries is to process. We might become some Non-profit sort of thing. We might organize more. We might just keep talking. ("Well, that one goes without saying.) This much we do know: if one faerie, or a group of faeries, stops talking and starts doing, something will get done. I CHALLENGE THEE, I CHALLENGE THEE, I CHALLENGE THEE. We have always had a very informal committee system for organizing gatherings or money or anything else, with the membership of the committee based on who was willing to do the work. Look at Destiny, or the Faerie.Gram, or any gathering that is called. If any of these informal committees became cliquish or exclusionary, well, I partly think that's inevitable-but it is also something that could be stopped. Off you butts , girls. You better work. The money issue was basically sort of kinda tabled, for the time being, in a way, kinda, sorta. I think it might come up again. Maybe. And we'll really, really decide something then. Chaos: A state of things in which chance is supreme. (Webster's New Collegiate, 1973.) (Well, it means being supreme, I'm changing my name to Miss Chance.) Clique: A narrow exclusive circle or group of persons held together by a presumed identity of interests, views or purposes. (Ibid.) (Incidentally, the word clique is only one word away from the word clitoris in my dictionary.) Over and out. Way out. Like, wow, man. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ FAERIE ANECDOTE by Isadora In the Spring of (1990? 1991? Endora or Delores would remember) the Faeries held a "Queer-In" in Central Park, in a meadow near the Ramble. We wanted to hang out in the park as our Radical Faerie selves, and we invited the larger gay community. We also came to build an altar around a tree in honor of drag queen artist Ethyl Eichelberger, who had recently killed herself rather than endure the ravages of late-stage AIDS, which she had witnessed too many times in others. As I remember, we changed the date at the last minute because it was raining, and so not many people showed up, although we shared our meadow with the gay volleyball group, and we were protected by the Pink Panthers. We adorned the tree with fabric, flowers, string, and incense. Then we said a few words for Ethyl and had a short ritual. We also hung out, had lunch, and enjoyed the day in the park, adjusting our fabulous outfits as the mood or weather required. Also attending, watching from the side, were the actor Ron Vawter of the Wooster Group, who died of AIDS this past April, his lover, actor and director Greg Mehrton, the actor Lola Pashalinski and the director Linda Chapman. They all knew Ethyl. Linda and Lola has been the first to discover Ethyl's suicide. They had been invited to the event by Don Shewey who, of course, was out of town. Ron was just beginning then to work on his performance of Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, a piece in which he played two gay men who died of AIDS, one, Joe McCarthy's right-hand man who spoke publicly at anti-gay luncheons, the other, a filmmaker and performance artist whose works are very influential if seldom seen. After the ritual was well over and the faeries had drifted away from the tree/altar, Ron came over to perform a private ritual of his own. (I knew Ron from the time I had been an extra in the production of Symphony of Rats.) I wasn't exactly surprised to see this, since it seemed to me that Ron had a strong, private, spiritual side to him. In fact, his performances in the theater often seemed like wonder private rituals. He stared at the altar for a long time, lost in some inner communion. Then he took a small vial from his pocket and, with extreme care, scattered some minute substance around the tree. When I was sure he was finished, I came up to say hello. "Jack Smith would have loved this," he told me. "He was the original Radical Faerie." Smith's notorious banned film, Flaming Creatures, made in the early 1960s, showed a group of crazed drag queens entering a studio, engaging in a lipstick orgy, and screaming at the top of their lungs as they fanned each others' limp penises. Smith's performance work, as recreated by Water, was a radical rejection of society's demand that people should '"get their acts together" and appear rational and presentable. A rambling, incoherent-sounding monologue was accompanied by silly slides, music and occasional dance numbers, all presented with a frighteningly realistic ineptitude. I alternated between believing that Smith was a genius who had invented a new form of theater and thinking that Smith was a boring, neurotic charlatan who had fooled all of us into believing him a genius. In the end I decided he really was a genius, first of all because the monologue actually made perfect sense and was brilliant if you listened to it carefully, and also because anyone who had enough vision to realize that a total mess and a disaster like that piece could even BE theater, had to be a genius. Ron told me that what he had been sprinkling around the altar was actual glitter that Smith had used in a performance. (Smith always used a lot of glitter.) "You were sprinkling it so carefully that I assumed it was someone's ashes you were spreading," I told him. "Actually, some of Jack's ashes are mixed in with the glitter," he said. Later, I read in an interview with Vawter that the mixing of ash with ceremonial war paint is a Native American tradition that he learned from some Native theater artists. (Vawter was part Choctaw.) He wore this same combination of glitter and ashes on his face as part of his make-up for every performance of the show. It was very important to Ron to create a record of this show, and he used all the energy he had left to complete a film version, despite being very sick at the time. Perhaps sometime soon those of us who missed the performance will be able to see the film. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ That's it! Hope you had a good time. To subscribe to Thyber.Thithie, e-mail mleger@panix.com, and put "subscribe TT" in the subject line.