Image: Public domain, thanks to the Powerhouse Museum Collection.

...and I feel fine.

So I wrote a drive-by critique, for H+ magazine, of the prevailing New Age fixation on 2012 as the zero hour for the Coming Singularity, allegedly predicted by the ancient Maya, when Time Shall be No More or we'll bear witness to a Global Shift in Human Consciousness, or the sight of the firmament rolling up like a scroll and the moon turning blood-red and frogs raining from the heavens, or...or...or...

...whatever.

Necessarily, it was severely constrained by the ADD wordlength that straitjackets most online publications, and by pop journalism's insistence on hanging ideas on a topical peg. That said, it was as substantive as space permitted, I thought, cutting to the quick of the issues at hand and zeroing in on the self-appointed spokesman of the 2012 movement, Daniel Pinchbeck, who (by my lights) is the poster child for all that's regrettable about the 2012 phenomenon and, by extension, the scientific and historical illiteracy of our times, part of a larger hostility toward critical thought and empirical evidence decried by Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason.

Nut graph:

Much of the 2012 shtick is a light-fingered (if leaden-humored) rip-off of the late rave-culture philosopher Terence McKenn's stand-up routine, without McKenna's prodigious erudition, effortless eloquence, or arch wit, and Pinchbeck is no exception. For Quetzalcoatl's sake, if you're going to start a religion, at least invent your own cosmology. Even L. Ron Hubbard was canny enough to concoct a pulp theology for ham-radio enthusiasts out of leftover SF plots. But every time I see Pinchbeck's glum mug, regarding the world with a sort of forced bliss, I think: Would you buy a used eschaton from this man? (McKenna, by the way, knew which side his ectoplasm was buttered on. When I asked him, over dinner, why a man of his obvious intellectual nimbleness endured the saucer abductees and trance-channelers who plucked at his sleeve at New Age seminars, he rolled a knowing eye and replied, I thought wearily, that he owed his daily crust to "menopausal mystics" and thus had to suffer them, if not gladly.) But the worst of the 2012 bandwagon, epitomized by Pinchbeck's lectures and writings, is the blithe cultural arrogance and staggering anthropological ignorance evident in the movement's appropriation of Mayan beliefs and history.

Of course, no sooner did the piece go live than the tie-dyed Trolls of Unreason massed at the gates, pitchforks in hand, howling for my head, insistent that I was a Tool of the Hegemony, part of the vast media conspiracy to suppress the truth about 2012, or maybe just a mean-spirited hater who gets LULZ out of not braking for unicorns.

Feel the love in the H+ comment thread, and among the Boing Boing comments.

Of course, a stalwart few representatives of that endangered species, the secular-humanist freethinker, rallied 'round the Enlightenment standard. (See both comment threads)

Then, Pinchbeck himself joined the fray.

And I returned the favor.

What fascinates me, in the comment threads, is the a priori assumption, among defenders of New Age hypotheses about 2012 and knee-jerk Pinchbeck-istas, that a bunch of paleolithic priests could foretell a paradigm shift in global consciousness. Of course, this presumes the existence of precognition, the evidence for which could dance on the head of a single Burning Man zippie's amphallang. If that. The Bronze-Age credulity evident in this presumption staggers the mind. It reminds me of this video of Christopher Hitchens handing a panel of Christian-college faculty their heads. At the end, the home-schooled, flat-earth fundies in the crowd have their say, a Q&A that makes you want to weep tears of blood into your copy of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason. Time and again, members of the bewildered herd cite scripture in support of their views, seemingly unable to parse the notion that Hitchens. Doesn't. Accept. Scriptural. Authority. That's why they call him an atheist, for Christ's sake. Incredible. In my admittedly limited experience, 2012-ers evince a similar ability to think outside the epistemological thought-bubble of their own, no less magical thinking.

Back to 2012: What, exactly---the devil is always in the details---is this global shift in consciousness the New Age is always maundering on about? Even the psychotropic philosopher Terence McKenna (a kinder, gentler 2012-er, but at least a highly entertaining one, vastly more erudite than most) hedged his bets, telling me in an interview I did with him that one possible scenario for the coming eschaton was that it would be invisible to us, all-pervasive yet undetectable, like some sort of noetic radioactive fallout.

But if the Global Shift(TM) does happen, how would we detect it? As I note in the Boing Boing comment thread, Pinchbeck hypothesizes that 2012 will witness a transformation in global consciousness, which will, of course, be registered in "only one medium": consciousness itself, naturally, "the mercurial domain of our subjective and personal experience"---a concept of such vaporousness as to be unfalsifiable. Isn't that just a little too convenient? It reminds me of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserts that, while the essence of the communion wafer is transformed into the flesh of a 2100-year-old Jewish rabbi, those aspects of the sacrament that are apprehensible to the senses and, not incidentally, susceptible to scientific verification ("the accidents") remain unchanged, thus ensuring that the doctrine cannot, by definition, be disproven on the basis of material evidence (common sense is another matter)---a bit of theological footwork that dodges, or at least attempts to dodge, the bullet of atheist mockery, not to mention skeptical inquiry, however awkwardly. Pinchbeck's New Age waffle about a Plate-Tectonic Shift in Global Consciousness that will, uh, be measurable only in the luminiferous ether of the Global Consciousness (with what? A dream-catcher the size of the Very Large Array?) is a laughably transparent piece of rhetorical ass-covering.

In any event, it's your turn, now, if these things interest you in the least. (One doesn't assume...)

As the only member of my southern San Diego bordertown's Class of '78 who was a card-carrying member of the Patti Smith fan club, I waited for Patti's vanishingly rare appearance in America's Finest City with the giddiness of an Opus Dei insider waiting for a papal audience.

Poster from May 16, 1978 Patti Smith concert, San Diego, CA. Author's collection.

In one of rock history's weirder harmonic convergences, the opening act for Patti's May 16, 1978 date at San Diego's California Theatre---a down-at-the-heel 1920's music hall hard by the transient hotels and tattoo parlors of the city's tenderloin---was Dixie rocker Les Dudek.

An hour or so before showtime, Patti materialized onstage, peering balefully into the auditorium. Les Dudek had cancelled, she growled, in a deader-than-deadpan New York accent that withered everything on contact. "If you got a problem with that, you can get your money back. But you gotta leave now. In the light. So I can see you. So I can see how much money I'm losin'." No one moved. Patti turned on her heel and, with an air of fuck-you-very-much satisfaction, disappeared through the slit in the stage curtains.

To fill the opening act-sized hole left by Les Dudek's unlamented departure, Patti introduced a last-minute replacement: "the guy who taught me how to write poetry," a lank-haired stick insect of a man whose skin was so luminously pale it seemed to glow. His name was Jim Carroll and this, I would later learn, was his first live reading with a rock band.

Carroll was a blur in my peripheral vision, one more frustrating delay before the Main Event. Near the end of Patti's set, she clambered off the stage, still singing, and walked up the theater's center aisle, bathed in the incandescent aura of the spotlight that followed her. Now. This was the time. Pushing my way down the row I'd been sitting in, I stepped into the aisle, face to face with Patti, and handed her a sheaf of poems I'd written, in my adolescent mind---a mind not unduly burdened by false modesty---a Work of Soul-Crushing Beauty and Manifest Genius, straight from the brow of Chula Vista's blown-dry Rimbaud. Patti accepted my tribute, blankly, and made her way back to the stage.

I waited for weeks that lengthened into months for the response I was convinced would come, an invitation---written in Patti's sprawling hand, on Radio Ethiopia stationery---to join the other pomaded loveboys in her East Village seraglio, there to languish in an opium-eaters' haze, like the dissolute bohemians in Nicholas Roeg's Performance, to sleep, perchance to dream, maybe even to star in the remake of Robert Having His Nipple Pierced as an after-school special. Crushingly, it never came, leaving me marooned in the cultural wastelands of '70s San Diego, where mullets ruled and ZZ Top's "Le Grange" jockeyed with Loggins & Messina's "Vahevala" for FM-radio supremacy.

Years later, after I'd moved to NYC and passed through an ill-advised but mercifully brief-lived phase as a Jim Carroll impersonator on New York's Lower East Side performance-poetry circuit, Jim and I would meet again, over margaritas, to speak of the Gnostic gospels and Catholicism and Bukowski and Catholicism and Hassan I Sabbah, founder of the cult of the assassins, and Catholicism, and Michael Jackson, unbelievably enough, and watching a cat eat a bird at the legendary Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. And Catholicism. Speaking of which, how is punk rock like the Stations of the Cross? Answer: "I said it on the Tom Snyder show when my first album came out, that punk rock is just like the Stations of the Cross. What could be more punk than this guy getting a crown of thorns, being scourged, carrying a cross up a mountain and being crucified?"

Read "Words I Want Carved on My Tomb: Jim Carroll, R.I.P.," my meditation on Carroll's passing here, at Mother Jones magazine.

Read my 1984 interview with Carroll here.

William Anthony Nericcio, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America (University of Texas Press, 2006) .

The irony of William Nericcio's psychoanalysis (schizoanalysis?) of apparitions of The Mexican in the dream life of American culture is that Nericcio himself embodies---even as he appropriates and subverts---the stereotype of the Spanglish-speekeeng Trickster figure, tunneling under the heavily fortified borders between discursive zones. He's the Speedy Gonzales of zoot-suit Derrideanism. Better yet, he's the Mil Mascaras of critical theory, a masked semiotic wrestler pummeling multiple meanings out of the flotsam tossed up by our disposable culture.

Drawing on post-colonial theory, Chicano/a studies, a deep knowledge of American history, a scary mastery of continental theory, and an undisguised delight in the retinal pleasures and greasy seductions of junk culture, Nericcio spins us around to face our image of The Mexican, and in so doing reveals it for the cultural mirror it really is, a funhouse reflection of Anglo America's anxieties and fantasies about the Other. Ask not for whom the Taco Bell tolls, Lou Dobbs; it tolls for ustedes.

Text{e}-Mex crackles with a manic energy and an antic wit that are rare in academic writing, most of which tends toward soul-crushing ponderousness. Like the French philosophers who've clearly influenced his work, Nericcio tosses off oracular pronouncements without op. cits or apology and rejoices in wordplay. At the same time, his willingness to open the throttle on the passions that animate his arguments and take his rhetoric to telenovela heights of soap-operatic excess, pushing the envelope of his tropes and intertextual riffs into the ultra baroque, seems (to this gabacho, at least) profoundly Mexican. Here he is decrypting a "startling gringo artifact"---packaging for a toy called the Sparkling Clay Factory, featuring a hysterically Anglo boy and girl: "Check out these cute gringo kids from my private collection of 'ethnic' types (in particular, look closely at the boy on the right, who has been digitally processed so much that his 'skin' takes on the texture of a Pixar-born(e) computer-generated-image offspring of a CGI wet dream by the in vitro-cloned hybrid child of Mengele, Geppetto, and John Lasseter)." He deadpans, "I am still trying to figure out what planet the depicted organisms on this torn box cover come from."

If you're the sort of intellectual border-jumper who thinks Zizek would make the perfect guest host for Gustavo Arellano's "!Ask a Mexican" newspaper column; if you fantasize about staging Foucault's essay "The Masked Philosopher" as an off-broadway production starring lucha libre stars; if the next two items in your Netflix queue are Derrida and Wrestling Women versus the Aztec Mummy, Text{e}-Mex is your answered prayer.

But don't say I didn't warn you: Early on, Nericcio warns us that he's an unreliable tour guide---("ok, remember that your author is a recovering Catholic Tejano---idealism and the apocalypse lurk around every paragraph")---and, like all the best intellects who run through the world like a Tijuana switchblade, he goes meta, stepping outside his own analytical paradigm to interrogate that, as well. "The germ of this book was a vendetta I had for an animated Mexican mouse by the name of Speedy Gonzales; but, in the end, I had to let the anger go," he writes, in the book's introductory chapter." Tellingly, he quotes Baudrillard, the always ironic John the Baptist in our Desert of the Real: "Baudrillard...says: `It is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.' Look behind Speedy or beneath Freddy Lopez and one will not find Mexican-hating illustrators or Latino-loathing puppeteers...More often than not, one will find someone working sine dolo malo, "without fault, without an intent of evil...'" Text{e}-Mex is a cross between the red pill that gives Neo an ontological migraine in The Matrix and the worm at the bottom of the mezcal bottle. Nericcio shows you just how deep the bottle goes.

Head by Gaetano Zumbo, La Specola museum, Florence, Italy. Postcard.

My two-week stint as Boing Boing guestblogger ended Monday. Exhilarating, exhausting, ex...machina? Archives here, and here, and here, and here, here, for anyone interested.

Reliquary of San Valentino, Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome, Italy. Postcard.

I'm still picking the shrapnel out of my Kevlar backside. A rite of passage, to be sure. Anonymous posting seems to enable the most troll-tastic troglodytism or, worse yet, a Nitpicking Unto Death. But BB's hive mind is supersmart, so when the critiques were constructive, they were invaluable. I was mightily impressed by some posters' intellectual generosity of spirit, their willingness to share their wisdom and thoughtfully challenge my arguments. And the editors---especially the long-suffering David Pescovitz, who shoveled my screeds onto the site because Boing Boing's back end makes piloting an F-15 blindfolded look like a cakewalk---were marvelous.

Architectural detail, St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, Italy. Author photo.

As I wrote in my sign-off post (groaningly titled "Post Mortem"---sorry!), I had much, much more to say when the sands in the hourglass ran out:

If I'd had time, I would have walked you through the Museum of Pathological Anatomy in Florence and the taxidermic Eden of the Museum of Zoology in Bologna, its wall-eyed creatures leaking stuffing, unloved by anyone except the occasional devotee of what the postmodern theorist Steve Baker calls "botched taxidermy." Did I mention the bizarre, Ed Gein-ian anatomical preparations of the 18th century naturalist Girolamo Segato, in the anatomy museum at the Ospedale Carregi in Florence? (A "maker" after Boing Boing's heart, he crafted a handsome table, inset with what looked like polished stones but were, in fact, human organs, preserved, cut into geometric shapes, and fitted into a colorful mosaic. When Segato proudly presented a local noble with the results of his handiwork, the squicked-out noble declined.) And then there's the incomparable museum of teratology and pathology, just a building away in the same hospital, with its mind-altering waxes of skin diseases and its wet specimens of congenital deformities, a Boschian garden of unearthly (yet all too human) things, unforgettable, almost indescribable. And then there's the Museum of Veterinary Pathology and the Ercole Lelli waxes in the Palazzo Poggi, both in Bologna, and...and...

Happily, as I also noted in my last hurrah, I'll be taking up those very subjects here, whenever I can tear myself away from the writing desk.

The silverware glints, your place awaits, and the waiter is un-dish-covering the dish. But remember: It isn't etiquette to cut any one you've been introduced to.

Stuffed and mounted monkey, Museum of Zoology, University of Bologna, Italy. Author photo.

For the next two weeks, I'll be cheating on Shovelware, blogging about my recent Grand Tour of Uncanny Italy at Boing Boing, the self-described "directory of wonderful things" and the Web's fifth most popular blog, at least as of today's Technorati rankings. I'll be posting about a Few of My Favorite Things: Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels, cyclopean fetuses floating in jars and wax models of conjoined twins and spectacularly inept taxidermy---stuffed animals leaking sawdust, their brittle hides spiderwebbed with cracks, their glass eyes cloudy with age---and incorruptible saints and unfrequented reliquaries and the sublimated eroticism of religious kitsch. That sort of thing.