The Dialectic of Comedy

 I had to wrap up the previous post quickly, and interrupt its flow of wanderings, because the place I was typing at was closing, so this post is a sort of continuation of that post, but we'll see what uniquely characterizes it. But as I look over my creative history, I see more and more of the intellectual principles in play in all their permutations, and essentially see two phases, one which leads, very briefly, in my formative years from A to B, which sort of completes the commencement, and immediately following B, the main direction is between B to A, but this movement, going against the flow of time, against succession, takes five times as many years to manifest. Along the way of the long road from B to A, we meet dialectical synthesis, AB, as the solution to the division between A and B. For me A is the formalism, the rock n' roll formalism of a songwriter, and B is the avant-garde ethos of experimentation--A is continuity and B is discontinuity, A is speech, and B is imagination, A is love, and B is power, A is immanence, and B is transcendence. Artistic mentality B is sensitive to all clichés and tropes, to all formalisms, and wants to break out of them, to find new things in tonality, in improvisation, in timbre, to question everything, and hunt relentlessly for the new thing, the game-changer, the thing which changes everything.  Artistic mentality A is a songwriter, communicating their personal experience, trying to be original, but speaking that originality through the rock formalism, encouraging recognition by the audience. A is erotic and social, whereas B, hinging on The Residents, is mystical and anonymous. A few years after this breakthrough, there is a summary, Laffer Curve, which is titled after a dialectical idea-- tax too much, tax too little, you have nothing. AB--both together side by side, on a common ground, which is both/neither, and negatively so, since in satisfying both of them equally you dissatisfy both of them equally. After the achievement of AB in Laffer Curve as the assessment of both phases of my early years in a third phase which belongs to neither and yet belongs to both, there is no "C" of a breakthrough, only echoes of A and B in an uneasy vacillation of what begins as a stable compound with Laffer Curve, a place where the songwriter and the composer occupy the same ground. Albums which follow veer into "B" -- but the manifestation of B is not the actual driving force of the music, and in fact what does manifest as "B," as more strongly echoing B, seem like the bucking a horse, almost like regressions, in what is an integrative movement towards A that is taking a huge amount of time and effort.

In 2014, I make the album Before and After Joke Science, which is split down the middle. In Laffer Curve, there is fusion of opposites, and in BAAJS, there is the separation of co-existing opposites. There are B tracks, and A tracks, on the same album. As I've said before, the fusion chooses the division, the transcendental third thing just falls right back apart into the two things, the choice of unification reprises separation, over and over. Or really, I've found myself in a situation where I worked for a few years to integrate A with B in a dialectical fashion, in a fusion, and then my efforts to go deeper into the more dissatisfied impulse of the two, which is A, which had been stifled since B came along, it as if in my struggles to regain A, I keep falling back to B, and deepening the mission of B. And so Laffer Curve is mirrored by BAAJS, and yet this is followed by Moksha, where the opposites seem to blend together again, and this time explosively, yet in a way which I still contend is far more about A than B. After Moksha, which recalls the early high school album (the "A" exemplar) For Everyone for me--which as an album I believe is organized, lyrically, around the principle of love as the escape from everyone, leaving everyone for someone. The "B" exemplar is Pretentious Double Album, which phrases the principle as the spiritual "preconception violation" idea. One can see how the two ideas are chronological developments. The "good" is the negation of the "all," as the social "everyone," or as the cultural "preconception." What is for everyone is really for someone, selectivity, and preconception violation selects the exception from the realm of the rule, the common, the everyone. This theme is present right up to my rewrite of Hamlet and The Dream of Interpretation I did at Pacifica. "The Birth of Love Out of the Spirit of Tragedy" so I called it in 2006, writing my first stab at a philosophy book. The two epiphanies of my music-- love as the "walk into a neverending haze," a neverending flight from "everyone," as an antisocial social impulse, the desire to elope, departure-- and then the neverending flight from "your self," in the form of the neverending flight from your own disproven knowledge, the awakening to the spirit, the embracing of the pure natural will that challenges our preconceptions, our societies, our formalisms, the thrill of continuous breakthrough, discovery, given the dramatic reading of how this is an existential nightmare also, a constant diminishment of the ego with respect to the outside world. So they have the same movement, the movement of flight, of rejection, love and spirituality as the validation of antisocial impulses, but with spirituality, this validation goes further into invalidating the self. The self is now the carrier of perpetual misconception in preconception, and the natural world continues to apply a differential of expansion which is the pattern of succession. Rock n' roll is a preconception violation, and in saying so, it becomes preconception, an expectation which will be disappointed. So there is an introversion of the ideology of erotic love as a validated antisocial impulse, where spiritual 'love' in essence, the discovery of the spiritual realm, depends on forgetting everything you yourself thought you knew, in disciplining yourself.

The impermanence of preconception violation is such that nothing can be set in stone, the only thing set in stone is that nothing is set in stone. This chaotic policy immediately gives birth to order, because if nothing is set in stone, then my setting it in stone is not against any stone. The chaos cannot rule against order, but order can rule against chaos. So chaos making of itself a rule does nothing, because chaos is by nature not exclusionary. So pretty much immediately after PDA, I start trying to integrate the phase-A singer songwriter, and my first strong means of doing so is Laffer Curve, is the dialectic, a little from column A, a little from column B. This isn't sustainable and my strongest drive is to return to A, not to share space with B, but each step I take in A results in more from B, until BAAJS, when what was fused has now developed into two sophisticated opposites, which, in blending together again in Moksha, just go driving right back again towards A. Not until O Vocoder, where it seems A and B are both forgotten, fused perhaps but almost invisibly, where A is driven back towards but in a way that doesn't really recall A, or B, only this album which finds a space of disassociation, a new third thing, which is like neither, but both, where Laffer Curve is both, but neither. So this is disassociation applied against disassociation, in a sense, since disassociation has always been the principle, as I've shown with my analysis of mode A and B. The disassociation was an erotic, antisocial principle, and then a spiritual, anti-egoistic principle.  O Vocoder is not dialectical, nor does its very organic texture even seem capable of such a measured balance, or interested. What we find there is an dynamic, organic, visceral world, which, it must be said, does recall the visceral stuff on Shotgun's Nothing, and even continues some of the production ambience in a sense, where you feel the sound of the drums recorded in the room the same way, and the same set. Nothing and O Vocoder-- one could say O Vocoder is the true completion of what Nothing wanted to be, the real perfection of the "instinctual" chaos album. 

But there's a powerful difference, I believe, in that O Vocoder is really disassociating from "B." Whereas Nothing is demonstrating the disassociation from "A," and the A coming back into B, what O Vocoder is showing is the disassociation from "B," and the B coming back into the new-A. And it is a new-A because it's not quite A, B is being thrown off and what emerges is somewhat new in being so raw, organic, a wild texture, not an avant-garde texture, and not a singer-songwriter texture, a texture of pure nature, pure chaos, pure organic force. Not the formalism or the counter-formalism but the chaos, not the order or the counter-order but the chaos. Like the Dream Songs before it, O Vocoder gestures backwards to A without being it exactly, but with far less of "B"-- B is translated into something quite different. So I feel it's a bit like the full violent death of "B." And I'd say, if it has an intellectual principle, it is, yet again, a disassociation which ends in love, or "the good," but this time, as found in the song I Can't Believe You, the self is very much back, just not so gentle and lovey-dovey as For Everyone. This is a raunchy, aggressive album, and I Can't Believe You is the sound of fury, which terminates in the reassurance of "I know I'm aware, I know there's a where." Yet again there's social rage, of an extreme sort, and this extremity rebirths the self-principle, we might say, from the anti-self innovation, the scientist's discovery, the endless stairway to the stars.  There is no longer that modesty and youthful exuberance about the next thing to be discovered artistically, but an enraged, completely unapologetic, and probably intimidating and overwhelming, statement of self. The point of this is to compare it to A Song For Everyone-- more Weezer-ish, more humble, more like yeah I don't like everybody, but I might like you if you can understand that everyone is killing me, and I'm not even going to be that aggressive about the condescending shit I feel, I'm more in the victim mentality a bit, and also a bit more looking for romance as the answer, very much like Rivers Cuomo, who is romantic, yet critical in a very similar way to my early songwriting. The lyrical lines are not aggressive, but sardonic, and ultimately pointed towards love for the other. And the first track I recorded was Rezeew, involved a reversed sample of them, and as I have thought, prefigured what came later in the Residents, the tape collaging, the experimentation, cribbed from Beck's avant-gardism, and Kubrick's and Radiohead's. And the story about the Residents is always that they didn't know what they were doing and then they learned and their music became more predictable. My story went like that too, in a way, but I moved quickly from the experimental madness towards getting it together as a rock songwriter, and then I started to scale back the formalism, blow open the thing which was beginning to be reified. After I did the Shotgun albums, it was like I had gone as far into the texture of that kind of song, I felt what was outside the song, and perhaps, before it. I was living in the Apollonian world of rock and about to meet the Dionysian world of music generally. The pure, wild potentials of music beyond conventional forms that were offered to me, first suggested themselves, of course, through imitating The Residents who followed the same course, and whom, I say a bit defensively, played a similar game with Harry Partch. And you see how Partch "opened things up," found the Dionysian beyond the Apollonian, going beyond twelve-tones and just completely rejecting the restriction of Western music and scales. 

A similar tension exists in my classical taste, my love of Partch, Bartok, Messiaen, moderns, and my love of Mozart, Hadyn, and Bach. Creation ex nihilo versus creation as a formalism, a universal language of harmony, or a universal language of chromaticism, of polytonality. The song is Apollonian, as is a modular composition, a selection. The polytonality, the omnipoesis, seems more 'integrative' and that's what so interesting here. Phase B I can think about as successive, because it brings about the successive ideology, the disassociation from the self as the nature of existence. It is also however integrative in a sense because the letters of the alphabet are all the same. The music is chromatic, it is bigger, more inclusive. There was an expansion from A to B, which made the movement back to A seem repressive. But there is a loss of harmony, of order, of ego, of love. Each force is the other ones' repression-- the first seems to be mostly about a selection, the objective component, and the second seems to be more about rejection-- A is a selection, which is rejection, and B is a rejection, which is selection. Really what I see is something like a total disassociative movement, which just expands, from the society to the self, in the terms of traumatic disassociation-- we lose the society first, and then the self who was talking to it.

The works that most point towards "A" after "B" are: Showgirls, Codebook Spectrum, The Dream Songs, Skeleton, Moksha. But each of these plays nice with "B." It's only O Vocoder that really blasts "B" out of our system, and it seems, the persona of the singer changes, and has a powerful new directness and confidence, and the solution to I Can't Believe You is I know I'm aware, I know there's a where. Not "I am always wrong." No, "I am aware." In the early days, Goodbye Cruel World and Nothing take aim at ourselves, GCW I believe goes so far into satire that it's satirizing the filmmaking project itself. This self-transcendence is the spiritual phase, the higher principle, the successive principle, the most total rejection. For Everyone is For Someone. It is a selective movement, the detection of an exception. But with Delusional Adam, I myself am the rule which am being excepted! So I believe it is so purely succession with PDA because it is anti-integrative, it is amnesiac, it is rejecting the previous stages, and committing myself to a process of self-rejection which of course is paradoxical. To reject that album begins to move in reverse. I am always wrong, so I am wrong about that. The very disorienting thing about it is that two successive breakthroughs separated by five years or so, could not be bridged, could not be reversed, until recently, until almost two decades have passed. But this "Reversal" is the key idea here. This Reversal is the movement that has been lacking, it's this mental tactic that I think has not yet been tried out. As said before A and B were blended, then it seemed the integrative push towards A kept pushing towards B also, and so A and B both expanded themselves into a divided co-existence. Then Moksha happened, and really, seems like the death of B, like something is not holding us down to B anymore, making that compensation thing happen. We're attached to B and yet really want A, and so we stay in the dialectic, in the Joke Science of the equalization of juxtaposed entities (which is later judged psychologically inconceivable).  The movement towards A struggles because it just moves us further towards B, towards sophisticating B's more hallucinogenic argument. But then B really dies, and the balance switches towards more like A-ville, yet it doesn't really hit A, and like I've said O Vocoder seems like Laffer Curve in that it's yet another solution to the A and B problem. Not a equal blend, but just somewhere else, somewhere that is not A or B. If A is For Everyone, love-as-disassociation, then B, PDA, self-disassociation as enlightenment, then C, O Vocoder, is self-as-disassociation. So O Vocoder is ultimately the most antisocial, the most ego-centric. It is the most physical disassociation, the most violent. It just seems the most cast off, and moves towards A it seems in being the self principle, in honoring the antisocial impulse, but it is not in love in the same way, or if it feels love it is for dead things. 

And I believe, in all this meandering, off-the-wall brainstorming about my musical career as a case study, this is what can be clearly said about A and B: that what makes something more "A" is that it is more self-oriented, more singer-songwriter, that A is the Apollonian ego, and B is the Dionysian anti-self. Or the Dionysian ego is A, and the Dionysian soul is B. Whatever. We can get into a whole game about what's more Dionysian, A or B, because in a way A is more the decadent Dionysus, whereas B is more the transcendent Dionysian, the all-ness of chromatics. In a way B is more cerebral and intellectual and plastic, and A is the more passionate, and B is the more superego-oriented, the tragic self-consciousness of the rock n' roller destroying them, the beautiful passion becoming the flawed, dangerous narcissist. At any rate the rock n' roller ego gets on the stage, like the therapist just did in The Dream of Interpretation, and the ego dies, under my own knife, my own judgment-- before anything else bad happens to me. And this becomes the metaphysical principle of preconception violation which is both rock n' roll and not-rock n' roll, some kind of future-rock n' roll. What rock n' roll gestures towards, but which can be exceeded, like the monolith in 2001, like the end of the Residents Cube-E. Really Oedipus also suggests the successive principle and the integrative principle are connected things, or as I prefer to call them, the successive process and the integrative process, since a principle is an ordering archetype type Platonic idea or form shaping everything to itself, and these are instead movements, processes. And then there's Radiohead's Kid A and how that set the world on fire. Even before the Residents, I understood artistry as the passion for succession, I had a readiness for their view of these evolutions, for their pursuance of the new, for their questioning of the rock format, even as I embraced the rock format as part of that succession process. The liberal dream is always about revolutionary solutions, new ways of doing things that come from sensitive reflection and which if everyone listened to them would make for a better world. The reactionary dream is nostalgic, the liberal wants to find the future, and the conservative wants to discover the past. If this is so I am as liberal as I am conservative, because in the past year I spoke with the same passion and zeal towards the recovery of the lost past, as towards the forgetting of the past and the soldiering into the unknown. 

What my actions, not my words did, was drive further backwards into the past, ceaselessly seemingly, but not. I believe I am, or have been, divided in this way intellectually because I was stationed at that place of rediscovering The Residents, which was a return backwards to preconception violation. Having found a way out of B, B came rushing back in, for the first time as it had been always the thing held onto while we tried to reach for A. B came rushing back in for the first time as if it was the first time, though it was being remembered. We had found a way to forget B and B was not the principle of the self. B was the principle of the exception, of the preconception violation, and the self was a preconception-machine which was always being violated, always being expanded, yet we were "contracting" into this expansion. B came spontaneously back in, not as a principle, but as an impulse, which had finally lost its place as a principle, and could return to its place as a spontaneous urge, un-reified. So I am stationed at this place of having both recovered a lost past, and what that lost past is, is a forgetting of the past. I have remembered a forgetting -- a dream I had where the devil told me "remember don't remember" -- and following that I remembered what was forgotten. A self. But this self, this remembered self, is lensed no longer through how it originally came, which was a force of resistance, of discontinuity, which sponsored a discontinuity with itself. And this may be an overall psychological situation, an archetypal dynamic. The self resists the world in order to announce itself and find love, and then the self being this resistance, begins to turn against itself, to solipsize the triumph, and attain to a spiritual level, beyond the ego. Shotgun's 77 becomes Shotgun's Nothing. In my new Shotgun logo, one barrel is the CodeSpec logo facing right-side up, and the other one is reversed, much like a pentacle, Spring and Fall, into life, and into death. I had a dream once where I heard the words, while opening a sarcophagus, "Every true work of art contains something of death." This is like the Nothing, the Nothing as the Contradiction, the non- which is applied to the ego to become superego, the negation which is extension, a la Delusional Adam. The non- which is generative, which is applied to the ego in dreaming, and which extends all the energies of the ego into a inward self and an inward world, a fragmentation. "I am always the soul that is learning how is he wrong." I am always negating myself, always including something of death. Yet the dream does not make this into a successive matter. There is but the true work of art and the false work of art. In the same time period I had a dream where I heard the words "Art is love divided by fame." This may be the false work of art, not art generally, whereas the true work of art includes death, the false work of art divides love. The division suggests more of a fragmentary succession along the lines I've been explaining, how each new ch-ch-change to the persona creates another layer, and hence individuation leads to schizophrenia, virtual or real, a fragmentation of the self, a self-rejection. Turning to Deleuze, capitalism is schizophrenia, they are not opposites, but two sides of the same thing. Capitalism keeps succeeding, and schizophrenia is its product, its entropy-- Capitalism is the fragmenting, and Schizophrenia is the fragmented. The No is generative, by being rejective, the No keeps on asking for a new Yes, a new Self. Yet this generativity is like the ideology of a cancer cell. 

In Phase A, the No is the Yes, whereas in Phase B, the No is the New Yes, we are "Soaring Above the Majesty of Love." For Everyone is a simple question of love, of antisocial feeling, and then affection for the other. What is introduced in PDA is The New. Progression, succession, and hence the liberal dream of revolution is essentially capitalist, rejective. Love/Ego are on the same side, in Phase A, akin to Freud's late instinct theory, the Life instinct as love/ego, erotic and narcissistic. He'd probably say, with others, that Phase B is a death instinct situation, the ascetic spirituality which is rejective to ego and to love, and which also embraces power, all in the New. The New which establishes succession, difference, individuality-- yet this is the problem, individuality is always sabotaged. If the individual is The New, they are constantly self-rejective, succeeding and overcoming themselves, and then things sound like Nietzsche. The New is also the No. The withdrawal. And we see the withdrawal inside of Phase A, yet the No is the Yes here, the Yes to the self, and to love. The No is to everyone, but instead of no one, that means someone. Someone > Everyone. But then PDA, Someone > Someone. Society on a whole is not addressed, the Self is addressed, with the same rejective affirmation in a sense, except not. Really it is just total self-rejection, the total garbaging of Phase A, of Shotgun and of Narc, Narc. The critical appraisal of both things, of the comedy movie made by smirking, condescending jackasses and the rock band with Dionysian promises. GCW is suicide, and Nothing is what remains. After that, I become haunted by myself like a ghost I have killed. I am pulled by two moral principles-- to love and to the new. Connection and expansion. But they are not playing nice. 

The painful self-consciousness of Phase B is not really painful, but exuberant at the time. It is a breakthrough to a "new" level, beyond ego, beyond love, towards more the spiritual mysteries, towards the creative discovery of more and more that is new. The endless life process of self-challenge, of evolution, and essentially, adaptation to a higher principle which is nature's superhuman complexity.  Here again we have another twist where one echoes the attack made against the other. Phase A is formalism, form, conforms to the rock mode, whereas the higher principle of Phase B is also conformed to, like a spirit, a God, one is a mystical servant of. This was a hippie phase and so it makes sense, with the revulsion I was feeling towards the religious while at Pacifica, that I would start to push from Phase B to Phase A. Yet as I said before--remarking on my new Pulp Tarot deck--the Tarot cards have become noir, the noir is not being substituted by Tarot cards which is what happened initially. A higher principle, a principle of succession, an absolute, God, the divine, the mystical, the hallucinogenic, all of this announced itself in Phase B, Jodorowsky and The Residents. So my Pulp Tarot deck draws the same shape-- like returning to Weezer, I've also returned to the Coen Brothers, and see in these two creative influences something that became wrongly repressed, something that was "succeeded" upon by the "higher principle." I have finally found a way into "A" in which "B" is forgotten, in a way, though not, because B is the way into A. This is what never occurred until now, in this story of the ecstatic discovery and then the tension between A and B. Love and self as a selection beyond the rule of everyone, and then the soul as the selection beyond the rule of the self. Hillman's pretty big on death and the soul, he keeps saying we need to die, die, die in order to become true soul, spirit. And this is perhaps the way one thinks about God, as infinity, the negation of finity, the perpetual negation of the self, the differential, in which the self is always present, but always as what is being refuted by "the world." What the world is, is New, it continues to violate the Self's preconceptions about it. Yet of course, if we are able to say that, it is able to be preconceived, and hence the world has the freedom to call this so-called anti-idealism, yet another idealism. To violate a preconception of preconception violation-- the preconception violation of preconception violation-- and repeat itself, to do something predictable since something unpredictable has become predictable. Yet what this implies to me is that preconception or not is not what the world trades in. That it is not ultimately about either difference or repetition, variation or theme. That reality is not always new, nor is it always old. Ultimately my view of nature with PDA is a world that neatly lines up with the advancement ideal of succession-- like a science fantasy-- to discover more and more and more! To be happily wrong, and have one's mind blown again and again! Look, guys, nature is filled with mysteries! Let us disintegrate our preconceptions in the neverending haze, in the neverending complexity that is beyond our understanding. 

A lyric from Nothing, the song Infinity: "We can never hope to fully understand, so we have something to hope for." It's the same message as Delusional Adam, in the form of a song. It's a good message. From Never Say Goodbye, also from Nothing: "There is no end, there's just an incision inside which perception inserts infinity. You'll say Never Say Goodbye to those things you didn't value until now." Incompletion really assures everything, agnosticism. But you see the tension in these ideas, never say goodbye, and yet I am always learning how I am wrong. There is no end, no full understanding, but yet this effectively brings to an end all previous stages of understanding, including the one announcing it. Eternal life comes at the cost of eternal death. The incision is benign because it creates infinity, and we'll live forever, and never say goodbye, because we keep goodbye-ing ourselves. The incision creates life, incomplete understanding which is perpetually self-rejected, the ego is felled by the spirit. We die and live forever, our understanding continues to perish, and so "Nothing" is so titled, because it is the absence of the Shotgun ego, the goodbye to the Shotgun ego, which assures life everlasting, the never say goodbye. Succession permits us the union of birth and death, eternal life with eternal death. It's a brilliant spiritual outlook, and one which changes with the next major spiritual song statement, Der Ring Des Schrotflinte, which feels less Jodorowskyian and intense as that. This one arranges the songs in the pattern of the four seasons, starting with Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer I believe. Everything starts sad, with "Hand Over My Heart" and then culminates with "Don't We All Just Want the Same Thing?" The joyful revelation that everyone has a heart, everyone has a desire for love. "Victory's never done" is the final line. "Endless Victory," a recent, and quite angelic, piece I made. This is a positive improvement on Nothing, and has the same mystical idealism, but now it's "Victory"! which is moving infinitely forward, not "Defeat"! 

And this album feels like the real coming to fruition of songwriting in the post-Residents, post-LSD phase B revelation, a passionately Springtime album, full of weird oddities and enthusiasm and lunacy, colors aplenty, morning glory seeds, everything blooming. Out of control in fact. Nothing wasn't too good, but DRDS was very good, even if some tracks haven't survived-- I was immediately so delighted with it and the album had fans amongst my friends, whereas Nothing immediately disappointed me and just felt like an experiment that didn't work. But I can see the rapid transformation of my songwriting persona from the songwriter of "Everyone's Buying," on Shotgun's 77, which is cryptic, yet passionate, suggesting a real countercultural escape from the trappings of materialism, middle-class life, egoism, "I'll shave off my hair and bribe all my priests into silence." "So drink all your cans and bury your friends, drive all your cars until it portends, that nothing can live when God's in a chair so take off your clothes and burn off your hair." No less than two songs seem to gesture towards freedom as cutting off your hair, as going without the egoism thing. Not growing it out, mind you, shaving it clean like a monk. And then, boom, what's next, but the songwriter of "Infinity" and "Evolution" who has a direct philosophical message, which is not so poetic-- again first disc of PDA is Residents, second is John Lennon-- which is not so dreamy and aesthete-like, which is very, very dramatic, spiritual, theatrical, moral, metaphysical. And as said before rock album and comedy movie become self-reflexive, very dramatic and serious and existential statements, which take the rock star or the Hollywood trickster and destroys them as idols. Following that you get, in the span of just 2 years, the songwriter of "Family Tree" or "I Am Home" and "Don't We All Want the Same Thing?" and here things get brighter and poppier again, but there's the same philosophy lesson with each song. "I don't wanna kiss you, I don't miss you, I just want to be alone so I don't feel so threatened, why am I afraid of feeling in love in my life, maybe it's because there's nothing but love and illusions here, there's nothing but love and my stupid fears, I wish they could burn." I'm not in the dark of the basement on the piano, summoning these songs from a private spiritual journey, now they're exposed to the bright light of the Brown environment, going through personal shit, the songs being more playful and humorous lyrically as well as in their construction, but still going pretty fucking heavy on some shit. 

"Victory's never done" versus "We can never hope to fully understand, so we have something to hope for" really sum sup the change in this short time. Very simply it's a reunion with A, with love/ego, out of a metaphysical nightmare. "She is Everything,"-- "my baby feels aware of infinite love, my baby heals inside the infinite." "Nothing can be possessed, everything is not part of you." Very, very mystical time, but really all about the love/ego thing. It's all so downbeat, Jodorowsky and the Residents type thing going on with "Nothing," hinging on birth/death, the new, the spirit. It's like 77 and Standing Guard are very countercultural in posture, really that's how they vibe, as going against the society, then its the mystical power beyond the society, then its the mystical power returning to the love/ego situation of For Everyone. Which is the same goddamn pattern of For Everyone is For Someone. But basically what interests me here is how the rhetoric of my songwriting just undergoes this extraordinary change, from poetic and transcendent to confrontationally mystical to psychedelically erotic yet very didactic. And then the post-DRDS songs, the philosophical ego seems to have taken a hit, the Pasadena songs. They don't seem to know what's up anymore. "Out of Control," "I Will Come to Life Again," "Zach Galifianakis," "Dream of a Place Beyond All Delusion." "One in a Million," and "Its All Over For The Devil." They have a bit of the vibe of DRDS, but not the drama or energy. Much like I re-edited the footage from America is Heaven sketches into something pretty slapdash and absurdist, and just got tired of the intense satirical content of the sketch as written, moving from Mr. Show to Tim and Eric, there's also this movement, like DRDS towards the bright, undramatic, comic, away from Residents and Jodorowsky metaphysical or satirical heaviness. This is the movement-- I make a Radio 729 video for YouTube-- and YouTube itself emphasizes this new disposability-- and it's just a surreal non sequitir, not anything that's trying to get into serious stuff, character stuff, political stuff, like I did in the GCW period.  Even Laffer Curve-- laffer-- it's really nothing like Nothing or DRDS, it's much more "frivolous" somehow, even as its quite serious. Its not so idealistic. Diet Drinks has this lyric: "Dogs cure disease with a bowl of Wheaties, paint a dying star while the planet's freezing. You've got fatuous fury and a working worry, daddy shit his pants and it was most relieving." This really goes back, yet again to A. Because in A, you have songs like "I Will Get Out Alive"-- "fucked inside of a fund, you'll never confront what you wrote in a book. Burn all of your ink, make a big stink while you're still on the dole and make me a drink." What I mean is, my songwriting lyrics used to be that abstract, and then I got concrete, dramatic, direct, philosophical for a time, and I was very much regularly encountering my spirituality. By the time of "Diet Drinks" and even prefigured by the randomness of "Out of Control," there's a relaxing of this metaphysical drama. I'm not living it so much either. But the big difference is that "Diet Drinks" musically sounds just as indifferent as it is lyrically, whereas "Fucked inside of a fund" is abstract but the music propelling it has something to say, and so the abstraction is innervated by some passion, seems guided to be quite dramatic, rather than anti-dramatic.

So we have this movement when we closely examine those early years, which sort of shitcans GCW and Nothing, the grand works of Phase B, and if my earlier interpretation is correct, I keep groping for Phase A, but having trouble negotiating Phase B. Yet this has revealed a bit more complex a picture, perhaps, to show what happened after the peak of Phase B. There is something like a Phase C. Which is not so euphoric a breakthrough, maybe, but it is still a breakthrough and not what feels like a breakdown, there is still something expansive about this Phase C. This is what I always refer to as the Pasadena stuff. I have always thought of my work as the tension between the Pixies and the Residents, between rock and the avant-garde. Yet what C is, is a bit strange, and it centers around comedy, and a trashier aesthetic, "Imperfect Aesthetics" as I wrote in 2007. And in truth it's C which really sets the mission statement for the next few years, and which defines "Joke Science." And C could be, perhaps nothing but that mediated place, fully mediated, which precedes Laffer Curve, that the placement of comedy, of avant-pop, the Pasadena influences, the variety bag aesthetic, the variety show / public access show aesthetic, YouTube, improvisation, embracing the trashiness, writing bad poetry intentionally, making bad drawings intentionally, disavowing the dark, complex, egoistic statements which were so anti-egoistic, running from the mystical hippie melodrama, from Jodorowskyian high seriousness, towards frivolity, indulgence, all the bright sides of the DRDS world, without the intensity. In a way, later, when I swore off comedy for poetry, I really returned to something like what I've called Phase B, except it didn't crop up quite that way. But really C seems the dialectic, the third place, the movement backwards to A from B. And yet, not. C is not formalism, C is not avant-garde, it is comedy. So it breaks out of formalism, and has a disruptive, avant-garde vibe, but it isn't high art, and lacks that drama. But it's not rock songs, and it's not even the kind of early comedy movies I was making. Because those had more "artistry" in a sense, this comedy work was very pure comedy, comedy as a spiritual or avant garde principle. And somehow it feels confectionary, like all the positive vibes of the previous work without its meaning or purpose. Still pretty druggy and fucked up, but things are weird, gestural, they don't have the same commitment, the same sincerity, everything's a bit "aesthetic." Apollonian almost. I don't know. Stagey. Alien textures, not radical patterns, experiments more in timbre than tonality. Almost like this whole big dramatic thing has happened and now it's over, and things are floating in this meaningless zone now. And like comedy is the way to transcend the pain, to forget, to obliterate meaning, like my skills as a dramatist cannot really come to terms happily with what has happened. DRDS did something and then the road grew darker still and I emerged from it but in this weird repressive afterworld. It just seems like my ego gets walloped. But also like its the social engagement of the private spiritual artistry, and it disintegrates into laughter. So yes in a way its a return to A, to the absurdism of Narc Narc, but so completely over to the absurdism of Narc Narc that the dramatic beauty of Shotgun is lost. So in a way C has more to do with the film work, but it does send something into the music work. We might actually say that C is the real force of negation against A and B, the tension of the rock star with the avant-garde composer, neither of those have the frivolousness of comedy and its the main thing I think about is how the Residents created this tension against the Pixies. And the movement towards comedy I always connected to the Residents, since it seemed related to their spirit. But the more I think about it, the more what I took away from them was drama, the Jodorowskian type, intense, spiritual, humane. And comedy was like the frosting on the shit-cake that was to come, the Mardi Gras that announced the unhappiest years of my life. I'm not sure. It complexifies and makes more difficult the theory, a tension between two things. Certainly Laffer Curve would argue that C is some way of staying in both camps. Surrealist plus rock star equals comedian. Birth/death and then love/ego. There's no third breakthrough, just a mediation of the disruption with the populism. 

Elitism and populism; coming together as one; as comedy. A universally accessible form which permits surrealist distortions. Okay. C is definitely the dialectic. C is demonstrably, the happy medium which becomes unhappy. C is Comedy, imperfect aesthetics, and it works at that time because it combines the two principles in play-- the self-rejective and the self. How else to combine the self-rejective, successive principle of birth/death, with the self-affirming, ego/love principle. The life instinct and the death instinct come together in the artifice, in the joke, the hallucinatory mysticism of the preceding stage becomes the divine comedy of an equalization of juxtaposed entities, later, to become, psychologically inconceivable. Comedy is love/ego, is populist, is social. Yet it is also self-succession, self-effacement. Imperfect aesthetics. "I Am Home" is bright whereas "Never Say Goodbye" is dark. The mystical moves towards the social, B moves towards A, and comedy is the result of the negotiation. Comedy is mystical to me at the start, and at the end merely social. "Victory's never done" and neither is defeat. Incompletion hypothesis. A mediation which validates the ego for being wrong; loving-humor; self-effacement is self-gratification, comedy is love. Comedy as the ego between id and superego as phase A and B. We are always wrong, so through humor, we find the right mistakes. The punchline to a joke is a little like preconception violation, but it is not a dramatic, not-so-fun, intense, eviscerating surprise, and instead is an act of play, reconnects with love/ego, makes social currency out of the violation of social preconception. It is transcendental, but doesn't move from little reality to big reality, but from illusion to reality. The joke is apophatic, is a rejection of what is psychologically inconceivable, of a particularly conjunction that is inconceivable. It is neither connection or disconnection but misconnection, and this is the dialectic of connection and disconnection. Like the psychoanalyst trapped inside the theater, the joke traps the dialectic philosopher inside it, structurally identifying the most seductive error. A bad union. A bad marriage. The joke develops the argument somewhat because it now self-criticizes the self-criticism of Phase B. It seems associated with Phase B more than A, because it is rejective, because it is a self-rejected connection. "The only way to be is in-between" now becomes the only way one cannot be, yet the paradox is that the Comedy, the Comedian, it just continues this way of not-being. The joke falsifies connection and vindicates disconnection. Connection is laughed away, or particular connections are. There's even something conservative about it, because the radical juxtapositions are now a laughing matter, it emphasizes the profane, obvious connections. The tradition is backlogged, seems to be argued for, self-rejection is self-rejected. Suicide chess increases ability in actual chess. The dialectic is joke science, and Phase A and B remain separate. The punchline to the joke of Laffer Curve is Before and After Joke Science, there is no connection. The social ego and the spiritual ego were and are at odds. 

They come together again as poetry, as Moksha, as a serious piece of business again. A psychologically conceivable union. Not funny. Phase A and B in one again, but it's no Laffer Curve. Joke's over. But how can they come together again? How can the dialectic not be a joke? Because, for once, the self-rejective thing of Phase B is attacked. The self is too angry to be deferential; the statement is disparaging and egoistic and this continues through O Vocoder. So you see a real return of self, ego, sexuality in that period, and it also coincides with a lot of personal changes in attitude. I don't "guess" I'm through with everyone, I know, and what's there is really no one. The Jokers of Funny--the self-rejection of self-rejection. There is no longer a negotiation between self and self-rejection. Delusional Adam has awakened, violently, and comedy does not hold the two things together, but actually enforces the separation. From self to self-rejection, from self-rejection to self. And then reverberation. 

I am always the soul that is learning how he is wrong.

Wrongness is the learning how to be a soul who is always myself. 

A balance, called comedy, tips backwards, such that A and B are no longer simultaneous, but in a new reversed sequentiality. And really this starts with Moksha, which announces a new, confident, aggressive self. Who only gets stronger with O Vocoder, and then seems to enact the reversal that has been made within personal musical history. Self-rejection and self were held in comic, inconceivable union, and then the counter-succession shift. Self-rejection becomes self, B becomes A, Nivin Trail becomes Health Violence. Love followed by Birth is Tragedy, But Birth followed by Love is Love. This is so because Birth involves death, as love involves hate. The movement from A to B is succession, power, perpetual death and perpetual birth, the contrary of the self, Nothing, pure relation without identity. The station between A and B is comedy, an illusion, the union of the self and its contrary, self-aggrandizement through self-effacement, the vision of the new as false, as social ploy-- revelation moving against the social love/ego principle, against the self, this moving back to society through falsification, false revelation recapitulating society. The movement from B to A is integration, Something, a relation to identity. Poetry was the right shift, it broke down the allegiance to self-rejection as a spiritual principle. Instead, self-relation, the principle of birth/death, the newness in solipsism, rather than outside the self, dominating the self-- integration. Integration has the principle of the new inside it, is a process, a movement, like succession, but it reverses succession, which throws things away as it succeeds. Succession moves forward and lets things go, birth/death, whereas integration moves forward and accrues. But it does this backwards, connecting successive levels or layers together, letters of the alphabet that have been enumerated.