CODE: SELFLESS – with Harold Schellinx – PART FOUR – ACID FOOTBALL!

The last in our series of questions with the late, great Harold Schellinx: CODE: SELFLESS.

On Saturday the 21st, after the sun has waxed, we say farewell. For now, enjoy his brilliant answers to the LAST TWO QUESTIONS Harold had to answer: about hippies and Dutch post-punk and he told us about listening to people off their heads on LSD and  about rules, and De Kuip.

Question seven: Making soup is the end of the hippy dream: discuss. 

Answer seven:

I grew up, only marginally pre-punk, in a post-hippy era. And maybe it is no longer my bible, but (along with pre-punk Burroughs ‘Soft Machine’ et alia) among my all-time favorite pieces of writing, still sits Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test’. (I do confess that, yes, in my teenage days I shoplifted my first copy of the book, a paperback edition of its Dutch translation, called ‘De Trip’; it came in a mirror-silver cardboard cover.) Wolfe followed Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on their 1960s psychedelic odyssey chasing and conjuring utopian ghosts across the US, chauffeured by Neal Cassady (who is the Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’). In 2001, mere days before the Twin Towers came down (no, it’s not a coincidence) I managed to contact Prankster Ken Babbs, and obtained copies of the original reel-to-reel audio recordings of acid tests, with and without the Grateful Dead, and of hours of Neal’s non-stop rapping, raving and ranting while driving the bus, fully wired for music and sounds.

Inside and outside. 

‘FURTHUR’. 

(Which, of course, in one word, sums up what ten, fifteen years later ignited the ULTRA’s spirit.) 

The audio archive that Ken sent me continues to be an integral part of the sources for my most played home audio scapes (in these data-congestion days much of it of course is also available on YouTube and its ilks; look e.g. for ‘Neal at the wheel’ 🙂 

And yes. Soup came home to Kesey. 

And to hippy dreams. 

And to the follow-up dreams of hippies’ immediate descendants, the cyber-hippies. Believe it or not, but they gave us the internet. In a crazily amazing quest steered by the early computing and network technology, they carved out a virtual space, with no power center, connecting us all, to host the nirvana that had failed to come about psychedelically. But unwittingly, this also opened up gates that freely let in the aggressive cancer of digital surveillance and data collection, with mega-capital’s oligarchic forcing and Big Brothers sprouting in not a single, but in a multitude of centres of power. Indeed, worse than all that the dreamers had set out to avoid. It reminds me of the words that I found written on the January 2nd page of my pocket diary for the year 1984 (back then I bought my yearly diaries at the V&D ; nowadays I get them at the HEMA). In blue pencil it reads: ‘Gelukkig NJ! Orwell BB & Mr. Smith – uitstel, geen afstel’. 

These words, arguably, may have been the single truly visionary ones that I jotted down in my lifetime.

Oh, and glad you asked: the one most essential piece of post WW-II music, solitarily shining as the highlight and jewel of utter modernity (in the classic historical sense of the term), in pop, rock, showmanship, jazz, electricity, electronic music, free improvisation ànd political resistance? The award goes to Jimi Hendrix doing the Star Spangled Banner on the Woodstock stage.

Also a marker of the hippy dream’s ending. 

In a sonic soup, that all of us should feed on. 

Now more than ever.

PS.: There is little literal mention of ‘soup’ in ‘On the Road’ , nor is there in ’The electric kool-aid acid test’ (except for Kesey’s writing up in a notebook something about Indian blood being weakened by chicken soup). Let alone that we learn how our heroes gather and perform the practical task of brewing a soup, while communicating to us their recipe (code). 

Let me therefore end this discussion with the recipe that Yungwei and I distilled for our soupe de gingembre (ginger soup, our number one, though closely followed by a soupe de kimchi): 

Slice large amounts of ginger, after removing the skin ;

chop the garlic (also in large quantity) ;

wash a few free-range chicken thighs ;

put everything in the pot ;

add water ;

bring to a boil for a little over forty minutes ;

add noodles, broccoli, and mushrooms of various kinds ;

wait another 5 or 10 minutes, according to taste ;

serve!

(The original handwritten code is in French, Answer 4 in Part Two)

Question eight: Has anything really changed since ULTRA?

Answer eight:

Yes, sure it has yes. And, no, of course it has not. 

The world is a changin’, and we drift along in time. Many see this drift as the climbing up of the spiral staircase of unhaltable progress: upwards, upwards, always upwards. But it’s not a staircase that we climb. All ‘progress’ is an illusion: there is no up. With the thousands of millions and counting number of individuals of our basically un-changing and clueless species (a vicious soup, always just accelerating its overcooking) we blindly track along a closed, non-orientable surface (think of a Moebius strip), chasing a mere appearance of change and better-ness, all with our backs turned to the future: the mirages we sometimes see ahead are the images of our past. 

An audience wave in a stadium like the Kuip is a nice metaphor for this rise and fall of generations, how they come and go, are born and die, again and again, in an everlasting sur-place, that sheer short-livingness keeps them from observing. Then add more of our lovely species at each new stroke of that wave, and, hopla, there’s your soup overcooking. And the unavoidable forthcoming collapse of the stadium: one day, maybe later, maybe sooner, the Kuip will come down.

Though forms mutate and codes continue to shift, the questions remain. Also the ULTRA ones. Every few generations we circle back to the same or very similar crossroads. 

To hearken, remember, forget? 

To hold, to let go?

How to make soup?

The future, as always, dwells in the margins.