The Black Cat, by Edgar Allan Poe

On the way to perfection, man strives for a higher ideal, a higher cause - lifting emotions and self-interests aside in order to achieve a collective better. Through this time of life, man often makes failures on the way to success, something which at times can cause inner frustration and conflict. One of the most common dilemmas is for us to fail on an important task, which may haunt our minds forever. Acting in a way that later on will make us regret the action itself, automatically forces the mind to rewind the accident over and over again until we feel plagued by our own thoughts - drenched in a cloud of self-conflict which at first may seem unsolvable.

One of the masters of describing such harsh emotions was Edgar Allan Poe, world-wide-recognised genius within horror and gothic poetry. By dwelling into the mind of the insane and demented, he more or less created what we today would refer to as "the psychological crime story". One of his later works, and perhaps most famous one, is The Black Cat. A classic study of retribution, regret and insanity. But within this well-executed horror tale lies something beneath the surface; a psychological study into the human mind and consciousness.

It has become fashionable in recent years to indulge in public displays of resignation and to celebrate history's darkest moments. The magnitude of today's culture crisis has produced a particular spectrum of despair which, in its worst formulations, has become the justification of further grave-digging. I am referring to the smug celebration of any number of toxic futures which Western military-industrial excess has made possible. This hip resignation takes many forms, from the punk Luddite who welcomes apocalypse as the termination of collective misery, to the capitalist whose tacit cynicism gives him license to rape and plunder until the well runs dry. At least the former might base upon his or her despair a creative exploration of human freedom, dancing and singing on the deck of a sinking ship. The latter is the most dangerous. He takes what he sees as a hopeless situation, and uses it as an excuses to make it worse. The cynicism which permits the ongoing evisceration of the biosphere threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy if unchecked.

by Michael Moynihan and Charles Krafft

Since 1980 the Slovenian musical juggernaut known as Laibach has been craftily exposing—while at the same time capitalizing upon—the weaknesses of pop culture for totalitarianism. Utilizing stylistic trappings from a half-century earlier, Laibach (whose name comes from the occupied German designation for their hometown of Ljubljana) marched onto the world stage and demanded that people take notice. And they did. But what still often remains unrecognized or misunderstood is the fact that Laibach is just one cogwheel in a greater machine, otherwise known as NSK. Short for Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian Art), NSK is a collective endeavor with an array of tentacles: an fine art group known as Irwin, a “cosmo-kinetical” theater company called Noordung, the “New Kollectivism” graphic design section, and most intriguingly, a “Department of Pure and Practical Philosophy.” Furthermore, since 1990 NSK has declared themselves a sovereign, virtual state, or in their words, “a transglobal borderless state-in-time.” They issue their own stamps, passports, and proclamations, and open temporary embassies wherever they go.

The representative for the philosophical branch of NSK is Peter Mlakar, a philosopher and writer of extreme erotic literature. For years he has spoken at the openings of Laibach concerts and other important NSK events; already a decade ago his early speeches were compiled into book form in REDEN AN DIE DEUTSCHE NATION (Speeches to the German Nation; Vienna: Verlag Turia & Kant, 1993). He has also published three philosophical works in the Slovenian language, SPISI O NADNARAVNEM (Essays on the Supernatural; Ljubljana: Analecta, 1992), UVOD V BOGA (An Introduction to God; Ljubljana: Zalozba NSK, 1997, and published in Croatian, Zagreb 2000), and HRIBI IN DOLINE (Hills and Valleys; Zalozba NSK, 1999). As one might expect, Mlakar’s style is declarative and bombastic, but his form of rhetoric also illuminates existential conundrums of the sort that most people prefer not to be confronted with. In response to Essays on the Supernatural, a well-known Slovenian Catholic philosopher remarked that such a work “cannot be opposed with counter-argument, but only with prayer and fasting.”

The Covenant of Traditional Values

Whereas, modern society (defined as the collusion between consumerism, democracy, and capitalism) as a design theory and not simply a physical entity has shown its unfitness through long term problems including but not limited to pollution, land overuse, rampant cancers, crime, urban blight, worthless plastic products, meaningless functional lifestyles, and so forth, we the undersigned commit ourselves to a new system of values that will be the underpinning and abstract description of the design of a society to both replace modern society and restore our ancient traditions and ways of life.

Our goal is not to replace our leaders, or to transfer wealth within our economies, as revolutions do, but to create an entirely different society which is not prone to the failures of modern society. Only structural change will accomplish this. We must both remake little of society, in that our changes will leave most of daily life and most people undisturbed, and we must remake all of it, in that we need a new design philosophy for society and a new way of living.

Modern society is defined by its preference for quantities, based on the form factor of the individual or the material worth of each unit, instead of internal traits. We assume that because something is defined as a tractor, it will work like all other tractors; we extend this same logic to humans and, needing to justify our absurd assumption, use bureaucratic averages to create expectations of a generic human being with generic behavior. This not only fails to predict our actual needs, but works to shape us as docile and whore-like people of limited personality.

"The idea: to heal and reintegrate the human character. To set off psychic detonations that negate Control ... To exchange and liberate information ... We need to search for methods to break the preconceptions, modes of unthinking acceptance and expectations that make us, within our constructed behaviour patterns, so vulnerable to Control." -- Genesis P. Orridge in Rapid Eye #2 (Annihilation Press, 1992)

Modern Music and Jazz

The music of Robert Scott Pearson is "a post-industrial and often pleasant musical surrealism, getting outside of the normal forms of music while still often remaining in tonal and harmonic scales." - SoniCabal

[Wed, 19 Oct 2005]