The Rolling Stones in Morocco

Keef, Mick and Ronnie travel to Tangier, Morocco to record with the 'Master Muscians of Jajouka' for the track "Continental Drift". Mick visits Paul Bowles and Keef remembers Morocco of the 60's and Brian Jones. Shot 16th and 17th June and broadcasted by the BBC 10th Dec. 1989. Lots of footage and music originating from the Rif Mounntains and the Jajouka trance musicians performing music from the pre-Islamic Rites of Bou Jeloud, the Father of Skins.



Brion Gysin on Joujouka and Boujeloud

From "Brian Jones presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka", Rolling Stones Records, October 1971.

MAGIC calls itself The Other Method for controlling matter and knowing space. In Morocco, magic is practised more assiduously than hygiene though, indeed, ecstatic dancing to music of the brotherhoods may be called a form of psychic hygiene. You know your own music when you hear it one day.You fall into line and dance until you pay the piper.

My own music turned out to be the wild flutes of the hill tribe, Ahl Serif whom I met through the Moroccan painter, Hamri. He turned me on to the Moorish fleshpots, the Magic and the misery of the Moors. The secret of his mother's tribe, guarded even from themselves, was that they were still performing the Rites of Pan under their ragged cloak of Islam.

Westermark, in his book on pagan survivals in Morocco forty years ago, recognized their patron: Bou Jeloud, the Father of Skins, to be Pan the little goat god with his pipes. An account of their dances led him to conclude they must be celebrating the Roman Lupercalia which once occurred in the first two weeks of February, but attached itself to the principal Moslem feast when the Arab invaders turned the calendar back to the lunar year. Westermark never saw the dances and believed they no longer took place. Pan may soon stop dancing in the Moroccan hills but I first saw him there in 1950. Later I ran several times in the panic of the Lupercalia. It is the "holy chase" of which Julius Caesar speaks in Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play: "Forget not, in your haste, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia; for our elders say the barren, touched in this holy chase, shake off their sterile curse." Marc Antony should be wearing a fresh, foul-smelling goatskin. "I saw Marc Antony offer him a crown; yet 'twas not a crown neither, 'twas one of those coronets. .."

Bou Jeloud wears a yokel's big, floppy straw hat, bound round his face with a fillet of ivy. ". . . it was mere foolery; I did not mark it." Elizabethan "Morris" dances were Moorish .

Pan, Bou Jeloud, the Father of Skins, dances through eight moonlit nights in his hill village, Joujouka, to the wailing of his hundred Master Musicians. Down in the towns, far away by the seaside, you can hear the wild whimper of his oboe-like raïtas; a faint breath of panic borne on the wind. Below the rough palisade of giant blue cactus surrounding the village on its hilltop, the music flows in streams to nourish and fructify the terraced fields below.

Inside the village the thatched houses crouch low in their gardens to hide the deep cactus-lined lanes. You come through their maze to the broad village green where the pipers are piping; fifty raïtas banked against a crumbling wall below sheet lightning to shatter the air. Fifty wild flutes blow up a storm in front of them, while a platoon of small boys in long belted white robes and brown wool turbans drums like young thunder. All the villagers, dressed in best white, swirl in great circles and coils around one wildman in skins.

Bou Jeloud leaps high in the air on the music, races after the women again and again, lashing at them fiercely with his flails. "Forget not in your speed, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia . . ." He is wild. He is mad. Sowing panic. Lashing at anyone; striking real terror into the crowd. Women scatter like white marabout birds all aflutter and settle on a little hillock for safety, all huddled in one quivering lump. They throw back their heads to the moon and scream with throats open to the gullet, lolling their tongues around their empty heads like the clapper in a bell.

Every mouth is wide open, frozen into an O. Head back and hot narrow eyes brimming with dangerous baby. Bou Jeloud is after you. Running. Over-run, Laughter and someone is crying. Wild dogs at your heels. Swirling around in one ring-a-rosy, around and around and around. Go! Forever! Stop! Never! More and No More and No! More! Pipes crack in your head. Ears popped away at barrier sound and you deaf. Or dead! Swirling around in cold moonlight, surrounded by wild men or ghosts. Bou Jeloud is on you, butting you, beating you, taking you, leaving you. Gone! The great wind drops out of your head and you hear the heavenly music again. You feel sorry and loving and tender to that poor animal whimpering, grizzling, laughing and sobbing there beside you like somebody out of ether .Who is that? That is you.

Who is Bou Jeloud? Who is he? The shivering boy who was chosen to be stripped naked in a cave and sewn into the bloody warm skins and masked with an old straw hat tied over his face, HE is Bou Jeloud when he dances and runs. Not Ali, not Mohamed, then he is Bou Jeloud. He will be somewhat taboo in his village the rest of his life. When he dances alone, his musicians blow a sound like the earth sloughing its skin. He is the Father of Fear. He is, too, the Father of Flocks. The good shepherd works for him. When the goats, gently grazing, brusquely frisk and skitter away, he is counting his flock. When you shiver like someone just walked on your grave—that's him: that's Pan, the Father of Skins. Have you jumped out of your skin lately? I've got you under my skin.

Up there, in Joujouka. you sleep all day—if the flies let you. Breakfast is goat-cheese and honey on gold bread from the outdoor oven. Musicians loll about sipping mint tea, their kif pipes and flutes. They never work in their lives so they lie about easy. The last priests of Pan cop a tithe on the crops in the lush valley below. Blue kif smoke drops in veils from Joujouka at nightfall. The music picks up like a current turned on. The children are singing, "Ha, Bou Jeloud! Bou Jeloud the butcher met Aisha Homolka, Ha, Bou Jeloud!"

On the third night he meets Aisha Homolka who drifts around after dark, cool and casual, near springs and running water. She unveils her beautiful blue-glittering face and breasts and coos. And he who stammers out an answer is lost. He is lost unless he touches the blade of his knife or, better still, plucks it out and plunges it into the grcund between her goatish legs and forked hooves. Then Aisha Homolka, Aisha Kandisha, alias Asherat, Astarte, Diana in the Leaves Greene, Blest Virgin Miriam bar Levy, the White Goddess, in short, will be his. She must be a heavy Stone Age matriarch whose power he cuts off with his Iron Age knife-magic.

The music grooves into hysteria, fear and fornication. A ball of laughter and tears in the throat gristle. Tickle of panic between the legs. Gripe of slap-stick cuts loose in the bowels. The Three Hadji. Man with Monkey. More characters coming on stage. The Hadji joggle around under their crowns like Three Wise Kings. Monkey Man comes on hugely pregnant with a live boy in his baggy pants. Monkey Man goes into birth pangs and the Hadji deliver him of a naked boy with an umbilical halter around his neck. Man leads Monkey around, beating him and screwing him for hours to the music. Monkey jumps on Man's back and screws him to the music for hours. Pipers pipe higher into the air and panic screams off like the wind intothe woods of silverolive and black oak, on into the Rif mountains swimming up under the moonlight.

BRION GYSIN. 1964

Ancient Astronauts: The Archeology of Shamanism

History Channel Ancient Astronauts Documentary
Discusses the relationship between ancient art, shamanism and possible theories of consciousness. The relevance of sound and acoustics in caves and tombs is explored. Uses cognitive archeology as a basis for making assumptions about the role of shamanism in cultural development and human consciousness. Very interesting.

An album by Antonio Zepeda who plays with the group Tribu in the sun pyramid in the documentary can be downloaded from HERE.

Not unlike a Techno shaman, this Mexican artist eschews musical cliches in his deliberately elusive music. Using ancient instruments such as the clay whistle, shells, rattles, bamboo and the water drum, Jorge Reyes adds electronic textures to create a mythic pre-Columbian dreamscape. Sounds based on natural elements such as wind and rain enter like foreboding notices of the eternal, underpinning the unnerving percussion. Though mostly instrumental, the odd chant is employed to evoke the indigenous culture of the Americas from a time before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. Much of his music may be classified as Ambient, but Reyes' jazz background shows in the sophisticated compositional structures.

An article by Dr David Keating of Reading University's cybernetics department, The sound of the Neolithic is online as well.

Fire on the Mountain: A Gathering of Shamans

A film by David Cherniack Productions in association with Global Vision Corporation and Mystic Fire Video Fire on the Mountain: A Gathering of Shamans is a documentary about the connection between consciouness and nature, as embodied in the spiritual traditions of Indigenous Peoples, whose ecological metaphors of the sacred are so relevant to the modern world. We shot the project in 1997 at an historic 10-day gathering of shamans from five continents, who travelled to Karma Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist retreat centre in the Val Saint Hugon in Savoy, in the French Alps, to discuss their concerns with H.H. the Dalai Lama and high-level representatives of the world's religions. This documentary embodies the wish of these Indigenous People - all traditional wisdom-keepers, shamans and medicine-women - who requested us to communicate their message to the world. The video can be purchased by online mailorder from Mystic Fire Video at http://www.mysticfire.com/

Spiders get into Kids Ears

GANG GANG DANCE/OCRILIM/ARIEL PINK tour diary#5(SLC/Seattle)

Film Embodiment Metaphor Democracy and Chaplin

The famous dance scene from The Great Dictator (1940) where the dictator Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin) plays with the globe to the accompaniment of Wagner's Lohengrin. The physical presence of Chaplin's character is comic and filled with pathos. The final emergence of the rubber chicken turns the sequence to farce.

And if you are wondering how close the government of your own country is moving towards despotism:
"Avoid the comforting idea that the mere form of a government can safeguard a nation against despotism"


Despotism & Democracy
Producer: Encyclopaedia Britannica Films - 1946
Measures how a society ranks on a spectrum stretching from democracy to despotism. Explains how societies and nations can be measured by the degree that power is concentrated and respect for the individual is restricted. Where does your community, state and nation stand on these scales?

Werner Hertzog Remembers Kinski in the Jungle

Werner Hertzog on Klaus Kinski, film making and life in general. The film that Hherztog describes, Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, The Wrath of God) was released in 1972 and remains a masterpiece. Here is the beginning of it:

Boredoms Live

The Boredoms Live at the Starlight Ballroom, Philladelphia June 2006.

Boredoms (or, more recently, V∞redoms) is a noise rock band from Osaka, Japan. The band was officially formed in 1986, although some date the band to bedroom tape experiments from 1982. The band's output is usually referred to as noise rock or sometimes Japanoise, though their more recent records have been largely based around repetitive minimalism, ambient music, and tribal drumming.
The band has a vast and sometimes confusing discography. Many band members have rotated through the group over the years, often using a number of various stage names. Singer Yamantaka Eye is the closest the band has to a frontman; his style includes a range of baffling screams, babbling, electronic effects, and very heavy post-production. Drummer/singer/trumpeter Yoshimi P-We has also featured on most Boredoms recordings.

Alphaville

Alphaville is a 1965 black-and-white French science fiction film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Its original French title is Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution). The film stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. The film won the Golden Bear award of the Berlin Film Festival in 1965.
Alphaville combines the genres of dystopian science fiction and film noir. Although set far in the future on another planet, there are no special effects or elaborate sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings represent the city's interiors. In addition, the characters refer to twentieth century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.
Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this role in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth century setting, and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville.

Hakim Bey

Anarchist Sufi and free thinker extraordibnaire Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey)talks about TAZ (Temporary autonomous zones) and how he sees the world.
Hakim Bey has a new book out: Black Fez Manifesto, Etc

Adam Curtis, The Century Of The Self; Idenity and Control

“The Century of the Self,” a 2002 Documentary that examines “the rise of the all-consuming self against the backdrop of the Freud dynasty,”.
In “Happiness Machines,” Curtis focuses on Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, “the father of the public relations industry.” Bernays was the first to use Freud’s theories to manipulate the masses.

In fact, Bernays argued that such manipulation was necessary in a democratic society. Wikipedia quotes from his book, Propaganda (1928):

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

"This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." - Adam Curtis

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, changed the perception of the human mind and its workings profoundly. His influence on the 20th century is widely regarded as massive. The documentary describes the impact of Freud's theories on the perception of the human mind, and the ways public relations agencies and politicians have used this during the last 100 years for their "engineering of consent".

Among the main characters are Freud himself and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the first to use psychological techniques in advertising. He is often seen as the "father of the public relations industry". Freud's daughter Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychology, is mentioned in the second part, as well as Wilhelm Reich, one of the main opponents of Freud's theories.

Along these general themes, The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality.

The business and, increasingly, the political world uses PR to read and fulfill our desires, to make their products or speeches as pleasing as possible to us. Curtis raises the question of the intentions and roots of this fact. Where once the political process was about engaging people's rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their needs as a society, the documentary shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population. He cites a Wall Street banker as saying "We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs."

In Episode 4 the main characters are Philip Gould and Matthew Freud, the great grandson of Sigmund, a PR consultant. They were part of the efforts during the nineties to bring the Democrats in the US and New Labour in the United Kingdom back into power. Adam Curtis explores the psychological methods they now massively introduced into politics. He also argues that the eventual outcome strongly resembles Edward Bernays vision for the "Democracity" during the 1939 New York World's Fair.

To quote the BBC site:

To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?

The following four episodes of The Century of the Self:


Part 2: The Engineersing of Consent


Part 3.


Part 4.

More films by Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares, Pandora's Box and The Mayfair Set) are also available at the Internte Archive.