ID Music: The Spider's House Sessions I + II
ID Music: The Spider's House Sessions I + II
A rhythmic meditation on luck, destiny, guilt, and gratitude using a hybrid blend of SWANA percussion, Zen aphorisms, and Moroccan wisdom
Like most of the disaffected and transgressive American and European writers who spent time in Southwest Asia and North Africa – acronym’d as SWANA in a gesture toward talking about the region without relying on reductive orientalist designations – in the mid-20th Century, Paul Bowles has a reputation that can be tricky to process. As with other writers in that existentially distressed, occasionally psychedelic group – William Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg quickly come to mind but also younger boho travelers such as “anarcho-Sufi” Hakim Bey – there’s plenty to reconsider as passive post-colonial theorizing becomes an active effort to decolonize, in both theory and practice.
We’ll eventually get to this latest update to the Inter-Dimensional Music archive but if you wanna jump straight to the setlist + streams they’re down below. Also! Trigger warnings for sorta unexpected but non-explicit discussions of child abuse and racism below.
As a disaffected but not terribly transgressive American writer with a long-standing but forever novice interest in SWANA culture, I’ve picked through these writers’ bibliographies, but have spent more time with the music of the region. My listening was no more ethnomusicology than my readings were academic study, but I’ve jammed a lot of tunes: Big ups Moroccan Tape Stash! Everyone should listen to Azu Tiwaline . . .
. . . or James Holden’s work with Mallem Houssam Guinia . . .
. . . or perhaps take a short break to jam out with this “blend of Vibekulture Sa, FakeManKVY, and DJ Dubs viral track ‘Monaco’ with Persian party classic ‘Boro Boro’ by Arash.”
I dug a little deeper before I went traveling for a month in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria with my brother in 2004. Nowhere near as deep as Brother Paul though, whose year studying at the American University in Cairo made the trip possible. He’s now an Associate Professor in Columbia University’s Department of History. From his bio: “His first book, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford, 2012), is an international history of the Palestinian liberation struggle. His second book, The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (HarperCollins, 2018), is a global history of the bloodiest encounters of the Cold War.”
I haven’t (yet?) made the two-part story that I published in Arthur Magazine about our travels available online for many reasons, most very personal and very boring. There are probably a dozen newsprint copies mouldering somewhere in our bat-filled Muncie attic. It’s probably fine? It was very long, and I thought it was OK at the time. But I’m anxious about submitting old work for online dissection and I’m too wary of potential cringe to read it again myself. I miss print’s resistance to granular analytics. Some of the photos are colorful though!
Smoking cigarettes outside a club in Echo Park during one of Arthur’s festivals a year later, one of the guys from Sublime Frequencies told me he liked the two-part series, and we had fun chatting about intimidating Syrian border guards, which was more than enough for me to feel good about the whole experience. “More” is never the same as “enough,” and if we’re mindful about our egos, we can have the luxury of deciding that “what is” is enough. Feel free to email me if you want a print copy of “Dr. Moustache and The Egyptian Gentleman,” and maybe I’ll send you one by this time next year if you promise to be gentle. Or maybe not, because I’m definitely gonna get distracted by all the other disintegrating cardboard boxes up in the hot attic.
Speaking of distraction, this series of Inter-Dimensional Music programs uses language from The Spider’s House, Bowles’ third novel, originally published in 1955. I read Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky back when I was getting ready to travel to Egypt. That novel’s misguided desert journey that ends in a dissociative hallucination of violence and spiritual isolation suited my mood, but I’m not sure how well all the sex slavery stuff would go over on a second read. The language I remember best comes from one of the wildest death scenes in my library, although my copy of the book is long gone so I had to do weird internet searches like the title of the book and then “blood, shit, death”? Ah yes, and of course that black star . . .
Blood on excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when the two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky’s clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.
I kept digging around to find more contemporary criticism of Bowles’ writing. As someone who used to yell a lot about nazis and nazi-ish shit heads in exxxtreeeeme metal, I feel a responsibility to vet the things that I share with the dozen or more people who tune in to my weird FM radio art project each week on Marfa Public Radio and 99.1 FM WQRT Indianapolis.
One of the biggest revisions to Bowles legacy that comes up in conversation every few years is that people should spend as much or even more time with the writing of his wife Jane Bowles. I’m still part of the problem as I have not yet done this because they don’t have anything at the library, I am lazy, and someone gave me a nice edition of The Spider’s House years ago and that’s how it ended up on the show. Other than that, he seems mostly fine for a writer who leans so heavily into the lysergic death-spiral maundering of depressed American expats slumming it in the blood-spattered aftermath of brutal European empires. Also some people say he probably didn’t understand Arabic – and especially Moroccan Arabic – as well as he seemed to think.
Some basic background reading seemed wise, given how far some of his fellow SWANA hands have fallen. Reconsiderations of his reputation reveal nothing quite so disturbing as a deep dive into the back catalog of countercultural hero, SWANA traveler, and fellow Arthur contributor Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey. Born in 1945, the now-deceased writer spent years walking in the steps of the aforementioned school of dapper dirtbag “travelers not tourists.” He is best known as the author of the Burning Man and Occupy-beloved tract The Temporary Autonomous Zone, less well-known as an accomplished poet, and surprisingly even less well-known as a formerly enthusiastic and possibly – or possibly not – repentant p*dophile.
Wilson is dead and just as we can’t prove that every edgelord metalhead who goofs around with fascist iconography is literally and currently an actual card-carrying National Socialist, we . . . can’t? . . . assume everyone who contributes erotic child abuse poetry to a NAMBLA journal . . . is a p*dophile? Who can say precisely what was going on in this human’s mind when they repeatedly defended and even celebrated adults sexually assaulting children. I dunno guys I feel like maybe if that question keeps coming up and an answer is elusive, it’s time to keep browsing around the library for another guy. This stuff seems bad!
I learned a lot about cranking up the shit filters vetting so-called “extreme” music for Inter-Dimensional Music, not wanting to be boosting satanic racists into the community radio mix of ambient zones for breast-feeding mothers and surveys of Northern Mexico’s folk music traditions. At the beginning of the pandemic I had a lot of time on my hands, and I got super annoyed repeatedly trying to figure out why so few music writers and artists talked about the critically-acclaimed musician Dominick Fernow’s ongoing1 and very open affiliations with blatant white supremacists. Every time some credulous hipster critic sang the praises of the noisy music he makes as Prurient, Ash Pool, Vatican Shadow, or Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, I’d be back on Discogs confirming that yes, dude contributed songs to obscure neo-nazi compilations, collaborates with fascist sympathizers like Akitsa and Mikko Aspa for releases on his boutique label, and casually recommends bands like Absurd – whose members murdered a kid in Germany and were later given shelter by world famous Neo-Nazi organizer William Pierce – in extremely popular Condé Nast music publications.
How much time do we wanna spend doing nasty internet searches2 and scrounging around in the most septic corners of online to give unrepentant shit heads the benefit of the doubt? How much do we want to split hairs over the difference between esoteric white identitarians, white supremacists, or the various tiers of age-of-consent laws? Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater but don’t leave the kid soaking in a cold bath, and especially not if Wilson is creeping around, as leering at kids in the bath is exactly what his poems are about.
After a couple years of waiting to see if Fernow would offer some explanation or rebuttal, he re-emerged in 2023 under his Prurient moniker leaning hard into those racist and fascist tendencies, collaborating with and promoting a band so racist that they’re banned from Discogs just based on their album covers. As for Wilson, I’ll err on the side of the writer Michael Muhammed Knight rather than ponder more of Hakim Bey’s extremely uncomfortable sex pest verse. Knight is Wilson’s former mentee, and in the course of doing research for 2012’s William S. Burroughs vs. The Qur’an, he became one of his most outspoken critics. Knight posted this letter written in Wilson’s unmistakable script to Twitter in 2022 when his death prompted an outpouring of celebratory memorials:
“Thanks to the incredible hysteria about (one kind of) love in our society, I live essentially without love at all,” he writes. “It’s very depressing to watch gays [sic: whining? thinking?] about marriage, for fuckssake, when I can’t even publish a love poem . . .”
But the “love” poems he’s talking about are poems about sexually abusing children. And he did publish them . . . in a p*dophile advocacy journal. And now in addition to his defense of these actions, Wilson suggests that acceptance of child sex abusers is equivalent to the fight for LGBTQ+ rights and “transexuals proclaiming themselves normal and natural.” Which is basically the same argument made by the very real contemporary conservative agenda that seeks to criminalize queerness. Not great company!
This is all the more gross due to the man’s acidic self-pity, but still easier to process than the defense of Wilson’s child abuse fantasies in The Brooklyn Rail’s 2022 memorial tribute. If the answer to “was this guy into child abuse” begins with the sentence “If you take the Freudian tradition that goes from Levi-Strauss to Lacan, the argument is that whatever organizes any society is the taboo system. . .” then I may not get around to finishing the sentence.
Of course Ginsberg was also a NAMBLA defender, and Burroughs manslaughtered his wife with a pistol. And all of these things took place in the past and all of these guys are dead. But the closer I get to 50 the more I realize how much leeway my fellow white boho-hetero-bros – the loudest voices of Gen X counterculture – gave to artists trafficking in abusive material in the name of artistic freedom, which is usually more like “freedom from consequences.” It’s kind of shocking to think about how long Death in June’s neo-nazi neo-folk cosplay or Jim Goad’s accounts of enthusiastic misogynistic violence were allowed to pass in polite countercultural circles. It may have had something to do with how often it was a room full of straight white guys making the rules. Regardless, it’s not cancel culture to talk about just how transgressive these people who made careers on proclaiming their transgressiveness actually are.
As far as I know, you can still pivot to David Graeber for inspirational anarchism, Al Cisneros3 for wide-eyed appreciations of Sufi poetry, and it seems like Bowles is mostly fine. There’s a lot of sexual violence in Paul Bowles’ fiction, but he and Jane were openly bisexual and in a relationship that we’d refer to as “ethically non-monogamous” these days. Discussion of the perpetuation of Arab stereotypes by horned-up American depressives taking advantage of the low cost of living in countries emerging from generations of colonial exploitation aside, it seems like the two of them were at least limiting themselves to freaky tales with consenting adults.
All of that is a long disclaimer saying that I’m a white guy from Indiana taking some language from The Spider’s House – an exciting and depressing book about Morocco’s fight against sadistic French colonial oppressors written by a white guy from Queens – out of context and repurposing it as something like a Zen koan. Also my biggest qualification for writing about Zen – in addition to the core principle of Zen that says you should be wary of people who think they’re super qualified to tell you about Zen – is that I lived in a borderline apostate Zen Center run by the oldest living teacher in the Kwan Um School for a couple years, and he and I argued a lot about the ethics4 of why he should not eat dumpster-dived Trader Joe’s shrimp.
[meditation bell tolls; bows deeply]
The man whose destiny is bad, he is lucky, because all he has to do is give thanks. But the man whose destiny is good, that’s much harder. Because unless he is a very, very good man, he’ll begin to think he had something to do with his good luck. Don’t you understand?
Paul Bowles
The Spider’s House (1955)
This language is part of a dialogue near the end of the book, when two of the main characters are preparing to travel from a raucous religious festival back to a revolutionary uprising in Fez. As described in a less-than-enthusiastic 1955 review in the New York Times, “John Stenham is an ex-Communist who has lived for several years in North Africa totally withdrawn into himself, and has come to find this life absurd and unreal. Now he is preoccupied by an indefinable anxiety which he describes to himself as a desire ‘to be saved.’”
Stenham is in conversation with Amar, a fifteen-year old boy, summed up in the Times review as “the illiterate son of a healer. Brought up with a fanatical devotion to Islamic orthodoxy, he is horrified by the impious ways of the emancipated Nationalists, but passionately shares their hatred of the French.”
Amar is bewildered by Stenham’s actions throughout the novel, but they become fond of one another over the course of their journey to this exotically ominous religious festival deep in the mountains outside Fez. Amar pities Stenham’s existential dilemma, and offers the above language in an attempt to convey the freedom of living a life of surrender and devotion.
I was also brought up with a fanatical devotion to the orthodoxy of the more prevalent Abrahamic religion here in the American Midwest, but beyond that my familiarity with Islam is limited. The language feels relevant to Zen if I focus on the word “destiny.” With a little squinting, the idea isn’t far removed from the Zen concept of “non-self.” This most elusive of Buddhist ideas comes out of the religion’s foundation in non-binary thinking. It’s not saying that I don’t exist, but that whatever I’m referring to when I say “I” or “Daniel” or “Cosmic Chambo” is no more a better encapsulation of the infinity that I am intrinsically and eternally part of than the word “tree” or “forest” captures the essence of the network of inside-out lungs sticking out of the dirt and making our atmosphere breathable.
It’s part of the non-dualistic concept that everything is connected. If there is no unconnected self, the binaries begin to fall like dominos – no borders between humans and nature, no solid lines separating genders, no life without death. And so forth until the barrier between self and other begins to collapse. And unlike with Bowles’ unfortunate travelers, it’s usually not in a frenzy of traumatic dissociation. It’s the opposite: this erosion of identity leads to an understanding that, to paraphrase Zen teacher Lewis Richmond, “you are not alone.”
To practice non-self is to embrace interconnectedness, and reject the distinctly American veneration of self-made entrepreneurs and the cult of rugged individualism. We may benefit from mindful actions that we take – planting the seeds of future happiness – but those efforts only exist through their connection with the rest of the world. Each moment is the result of an infinity of decisions, relationships, and environmental factors. Or to paraphrase Bowles’ illiterate and fanatical teenager, you don’t make your own luck. Our success or failure is the product of generational wealth, or the lack thereof. My fate today is the result of an infinity of events that meant that the automobile collision that happened outside our apartment this afternoon didn’t involve me. To reject the idea that we make our own destiny means that it’s not our fault when the world seems to align against us, nor is it to our individual credit when the world aligns to give us what we want.
I don’t claim to understand how it plays out in Islamic philosophy, but this line of thinking leads to liberation in Zen. It means overcoming the desire for control that defines so much of our lives. It’s the understanding that there is no possibility of control over our destiny, whether that’s due to a deity’s master plan, or the inherent nature of the universe. As Joko Beck – another problematic but beloved teacher – writes in Everyday Zen,
“Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life. But we don’t want to hear that. I can absolutely trust that in the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is. If tomorrow I have a heart attack, I can rely on that, because if I have it, I have it. I can rest in life as it is.”
In a 1985 Vanity Fair profile (PDF link) by Jay McInerney, Bowles provides a typically pessimistic but still useful corollary to one of my favorite Zen teachings: the practice of seeking equanimity in discomfort. As I once told a friend as we were preparing to drive to the Far West Texas temporary autonomous zone5 knowns as the border town of Terlingua for a cowboy rave and something called upside down fireworks, “if we’re hoping to have a good time, our chances of success are much worse than if we’re hoping to have a weird time.” Liberation comes from letting things be what they are, giving up control, and not trying to force change. It’s deciding to not be a shit head as much as possible, embracing destiny – however much deistic intention one wants to ascribe to that destiny – and being at peace regardless of whether or not the world has aligned to produce the desired outcome.
“What can go wrong,” Bowles says, “is always much more interesting than what goes right.”
Inter-Dimensional Music 20240503
Spider's House Sessions I
stream | download
For this week's session – mixed live-to-FLAC here in beautiful downtown Muncie, Indiana – it's an hour of ruminative spiritual jazz, mesmerizing smears of acoustic hand drums, ceasefire dubbing, pastoral folk drone, and the sound of "Dust dissolving in silence / emptying spaces for / change."
We’ll also hear from yet another new alias of Sam Shackleton. The Purge of Tomorrow is said to be “bursting-at-the-seams with emotional complexity as to echo the woes of the human condition” as it conjures a meditative state through audio “awash with cascading vocal splices and soothing murmurs contrasted with rousing sub pressure.” Definitely provided that Shackleton-specific “peaceful queasy feeling” that I crave!
artist - work
V.Vecker - LINE (edit)
Shabaka - Breathing
Perila - Transient
Rhythm & Sound w Jennifer Lara - Queen in My Empire
Lengualerta, Nai-Jah, Alpha Steppas - Ceasefire Dub
Muslimgauze - Every Grain of Palestinian Sand
Smote - Portcullis
The Purge of Tomorrow - Waves
V.Vecker - HOLO (edit)
Inter-Dimensional Music 20240510 (VØID SUPERSESSION)
Spider's House Sessions II
stream | download
For this archived broadcast, it's a very special newsletter-exclusive expanded 100m VØID SUPERSESSION. Our practice is another disorienting riddim meditation with voicing from Paul Bowles’ The Spider’s House throughout. We’ll maintain a wavering focus on SWANA sounds, particularly on hybridizations of acoustic and electronic percussive elements. Our soundtrack includes a selection of Sufi dubs, cosmic Egyptian jazz, experimental bass-forward dancehall, and hypnotic Bedouin-inspired metal.
We’ll also detour to West Africa for a “straight up dancefloor smasher featuring live percussion from Ghanaian master drummer Alphonse Ahumani, mixing his traditional rhythms with deep 808’s, heavy kicks and wild atmospherics.”
Our program begins with an extended excerpt from Richard Wolfhouse’s debut on Al Wootton’s Trule label, a 20m composition “indebted to 1970s African percussion records and 2000s minimal techno.” The title and artwork make this look like a DJ tool, but it’s become a mesmerizing new staple on the Cosmic Chambo Studio Apartment Soundsystem.
artist – work
Richard Wolfhouse - Untitled
Saint Abdullah - Mossadegh's Revenge for ‘52
Om - Bedouin's Vigil
Abu Ama - TIDE (grammophone dub with Autonomaton)
Raed Yassin - A Fistful of Stardust
Moon Juice - A Slow Transistor
Gafacci & Sam Interface - Brekete
Equinoxx Music + Mark Ernestus - Flagged Up (Mark Ernestus Remix)
Muslimgauze - Jaagheed Zarb (Part II)
Feel Free Hi Fi - Spring Rain
Jlin - Eye Am
Actress - I can't forgive you
Touty & Absa Cora Group - Palestine
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As far as I know, Fernow never responded to the information that I worked on compiling with a group of European writers and anti-fascist activists. His girlfriend blocked me on social media, and the metal label that released one of his recent albums as Vatican Shadow blocked me (FWIW it’s a label that releases 99% extremely cool music so I hope maybe they were just ignorant?). Unfortunately much of the writing documenting Fernow’s ties is now pay-walled, but in May 2023 The Left Berlin reported that Fernow was currently working with another explicitly racist artist, releasing their music on his label, and booking a Japanese tour with them. Curiously enough, Pitchfork now appears to have removed all Fernow content other than a couple of deep archive features written by one of the few people who explicitly condemned and distanced themself from Fernow.
If you want to go deeper into the poems Wilson published in NAMBLA’s bulletin in the mid-80s, or contributions to the Moorish Science Monitor in the mid-90s, or even the p*do-ish stuff from Temporary Autonomous Zone, click here. The link is to a critique, not the original material, but no joke VERY BIG TRIGGER WARNING. Please think carefully before you go and ruin your day. You can literally just take my word for it and read something else.
Although be wary of Cisneros’ pal and co-Sleep-er Matt Pike who has a thing for anti-semitic right wing conspiracy theories because, as Bowles reminds us, everything turns to blood and excrement eventually.
Zen Master Seung Sahn – the leading spiritual authority of the Kwan Um School until his death in 2004 – was guilty of his own sexual abuse scandals. They handled the fallout from these painful events surprisingly well. Members of the school that were hurt in the scandals have talked about this history with me openly, without making excuses or denials. The events involved ethical violations and the abuse of power – sexual relationships between the Zen Master and his students – but took place between consenting adults, as far as my understanding goes.
In the interest of liberating the teaching from the teacher, I say that TAZ is ours now. We can leave the guy who coined it to whatever variation of RIP feels appropriate.