Year: 2014

I read this first when I was a kid-I still reread it occasionally. It has some excellent meditations on philosophy, insanity, and the limits of our perception. And Quality! Don’t forget Quality! He wrote a sequel-Lila

This is THE practical manual for ceremonial magic-it has all the requisite material to do it yourself. Be forewarned-it’s not easy, and you may get into places you shouldn’t be, so take it slow and follow the progression without jumping ahead. I’m still on the first Knowledge Lecture.

These films are stunning-images and music-no narrative, story or characters-just images and music. They are the predecessors of Baraka–Koyannisqatsi can be strident and obvious at times. Some of the images are staggering, though, and Powwaqatsi has great music. Naqoyqatsi is new, fast-moving and hard to watch. See them in the theater if you can-they’re not shown very often…

This is an interesting study in altered states, infinity and spirituality. Rucker used to be a math prof specializing in set theory, and it shows. It’s a fun read, and you meet the devil, Jesus, Einstein, and Hilbert among others. A good read.

This book is fascinating-a manual on learning how to perceive in the non-physical world. It’s dense, and the translation leaves a bit to be desired, but I find the exercises helpful and the cosmology resonates well with me. He wrote a more advanced book as well, and a bunch more on his Theosophic cosmology, and a zillion lectures. This is from a system called Anthroposophy. Steiner also came up with Waldorf Education-a wholistic educational approach, biodynamics and eurhythmy.

Electronic soundscapes-especially Desert Dream… It’s a double album, 4 songs long…Live. Just amazing.

More source material-this time from Taoism. The verses are simple and compact, and provide a complete look at who we are and should be.

Source material from Tibetan Buddhism. The cosmology is fascinating, and the concept of spirit passing between lives works for me. I also like the vivid imagery. I have a tape of Richard Gere reading this. I used to listen to it in the car. It’s really great stuff. I’m not 100% sure it’ll be like this, but it’s so vivid, and the concept of how energy is dissipating after death is great, so in my mind, part of it is right, and worthwhile just for that. I’m closer to the Steiner way of looking at things now, where you go through a dissipating then rebuilding process in concert with higher beings as you make your way around the wheel of the ecliptic and fashion a new physical existence-the Tibetan one seems a little abbreviated, and more about managing terror at the inbetween.

This is a sampler from Bali-some great gamelan, live ambient recordings, and a monkey chant (Kecak). This is probably very hard to find…nope. As always, youTube comes to the rescue: Islands In Between

If you deal with graphically presenting information and don’t have this book, shame on you. This, like Alexander’s work, is essential reading, and will be around a looong time. Basically it presents the hows and whys of creating charts that are effective and accurate. A must read. His other books are good, too.

I was thinking about putting the Whole Earth Catalog and its ilk (Next, Last, Essential and Millennium, not to mention Foxfire, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12) here, but this is the latest (but not the same) incarnation. Basically this is a big book with a wealth of resources about how to improve our planet, go “bright green” and reduce our footprint on the planet. If enough of us do even a few things on this list, it would make a huge difference in helping solve some of the problems that will lead us to disaster. The website is a collaborative effort to help support these efforts. Viridian is also playing in this space. This is an older one in more of a hippie vein (Living on the Earth).

Zappa is one of those artists that we will remember long after his untimely death. He broke a lot of hard ground, made us laugh along the way and offended all the right people. I was thinking of including Joe’s Garage, Civilization, Phaze III, The Yellow Shark, and the film Baby Snakes on here as well, but Jazz from Hell summarizes much of his more serious musical ideas very well. He was big into the Synclavier at this point.