1. We want freedom, and we want the power to determine the destiny of our Artistic Community.

We believe that the Artistic Community is stifled and suppressed by mitigating economic and social influences.

2. We want funding for our Art.

We believe our creative pursuits should be financially endowed in ways that do not contribute to nor are endorsed by the nation/state, the church or any ideological institution. All moneys will be accepted without discretion, and will be used exclusively for the purposes of our cause. If this cannot be achieved then we believe we should seize the means of artistic production from the businessmen, so as to engage the community and make Art more productive.

3. We want to end the systematic repression of Gnostic experience in the Artistic Community.

We believe that the nation/state has devalued the creative process by assigning monetary value to the products of these activities. The goal of the creative process is the Gnostic experience, which is molested by concerns of procuring capital to capture the Artistic expression and recouping these costs. In the spirit of compromise we do not propose the dismantling of the nation/state in favor of Art-ocracy. Instead we demand restitution for all creative works, historical artifacts and objects assigned spiritual significance lost or destroyed in war. We will accept this in the form of currency on behalf of our communities.

4. We want sufficient facilities for the use of the Artistic Community.

We believe that the competition between publicly funded arts and entertainment and the current capital enterprise model should be of no concern. Publicly funded venues for the execution, presentation and preservation of Art would enrich the local culture, bait adjacent commercial centers, and stoke the flames of democracy with peaceful congregation of the masses.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all artists to be exempt from military service.

We believe that artists don’t make good soldiers, and so should the nation/state believe.

7. We want a complete end to all acts of brutality and violence for any purpose other than Art.

We believe that any act of brutality should only occur between two or more consenting adults for the purposes of self-expression and mutual fulfillment. We believe this can also be a community building activity that will engage lower economic classes and the Arts-weary.

8. We want adequate art supplies for our prisons, jails, mental institutions and public schools.

We believe that time spent in any of the above establishments is time better spent learning to express oneself creatively.

9. We want all Art in exhibition to be judged by a jury of its peers.

We believe that acts of adjudication should be carried out in a creative manner, and should be expressively cathartic for the adjudicator. The same goes for critics.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, love and peace. We want refugee status for all tortured artists.

We believe that there is a way to forge a society where acquiring the aforementioned is not in conflict with the interests of Artistic self expression. It is this conflict which leads to mental breakdowns and sociological failures in our communities.

We don’t expect these truths to be self evident to everyone. We don’t believe that all Art is created equally, but that it is endowed by its Creators with certain inalienable rights, as the products of a spiritual process, as sacred artifacts brought back from expeditions attempting to reconcile reality.

http://www.ted.com/talks/elaine_morgan_says_we_evolved_from_aquatic_apes.html

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Spearheaded by the venerable Dr. Martin Luther Tomorrow (scholar of ‘pataphysics, gnostic science, fermentative mysticism and exopolitical diplomacy) in 1955, the St-Danger movement remained anchored in a sea of speculation until 09.11.2001, when the movement received its first blessing and proven prophecy, in the miraculous autogenous birthing of their messiah, a one, Nehemiah St-Danger.

Described collectively by academics as an imperfect synthesis of Che Guevara, Don Quixote, and Jimmy Buffet, Nehemiah St-Danger awoke peacefully on the lawn of a progressive liberal arts college in quaint-yet-populated Amherst, Massachusetts. He assumed the body and intellect of a grown young man, yet all he could recall were sensations of amniotic bliss, the lapping uterine waves of the cosmos.

His forehead was bleeding and his back sore, but this was blissful to him, for he’d never had a body to be within before. He had never before felt “the senses.”

At this moment, our great nation was in peril and paranoia was the status quo. Yet, Nehemiah took this time to wander obliviously through the crowds and discord, for he had never heard birds nor smelled flowers before.

Despite the mob chanting victim-hood and solidarity around him, Nehemiah was rapt with a sense of discovery. Nehemiah had come into being, born into context from a lack thereof. Yet being native to contextlessness and his self-birthing into a contextual world, he remained a man lacking context none the less. It is this duality in his first experiences that have blessed him with his greatest strengths.

“I was born a ‘pataphor,” says St-Danger. One would presume he is referring to his uncanny ability to pull concrete meaning out of ephemeral nonsense. He goes on:

“It is the meta-metaphor, the métacosme plastique. It is a form of divination. I might describe a subject by comparison. This comparison opens up a door to an alternate universe which houses the subject’s alternate identity. Once we have entered this door we might have a better description of the subject, standing from the perspective of the alternate identity…”

…and on:

“…The terrestrial perspective is one I cannot account for. All lines converging on one fixed point, yet relative to your positioning, sounds to me like a bastardization of heliocentricity. Must we erase all the hard work of Copernicus, Kepler, or Aryabhata to recover the Atlantian Truth Systems? Must we make assumptions to conform and not break the bubble walls of cognitive reflex? We must provide an alternative…”

…and onward:

“…Must we sacrifice our own sense of un-partitioned wholeness in bliss to express the incognate? Can you be candid in front of the camera of your own self-destruction? Can you take a rainbow and stick it in your mouth?  I aim to at once make the rainbow tangible to the tongue, as well as express it’s intangibility. It is to embark upon the double rainbow of plus (+) rainbow and minus (-) rainbow, pro-rainbow and anti-rainbow, proto-rainbow and post-rainbow, light rainbow and dark…”

Further scarring Nehemiah’s ecstatic birth was his painful coming of age. Upon giddily discovering his “alternate self” in the campus reflecting pool, blood dripping from his brow to the water (“It was diffusing in and rippling my other…”), the campus police took him in for questioning. Absurd as it may be, laughing and bleeding publicly in a time of war-fear and uncertainty was his crime..

He was taunted for several hours in the basement of the school library. The Director of Public Safety had recently left his position with the FBI to relax by harassing young powerless liberals. He was confident that he had bagged a true terrorist. Mind you, at this point no American could be certain that the attacks would be confined to national landmarks. Noting that Jihadist extremists might be to blame for the attacks, Nehemiah’s beard was assumed a smoking gun by the director. An amnesiac or freshly-birthed autogenous man, Nehemiah had many holes in his story, yet again increasing the director’s suspicions.

Considering the thinly-stretched resources of the day, the FBI was bypassed, and the report of a dazed and elated Jihadist on campus was passed up the chain of command to the CIA and onwards to NSA Black Ops. A command center was established in the school library, and MPs were dispatched to secure the campus. The MPs were given explicit instructions to not fraternize with the students, for this mission could involve the containment of alien mind control technology. The UFO story of course was a conscious lie in order to keep the campus secure, while not compromising the investigation with too much fact dispersal, and preventing further panic from being incited within the student body.

Nehemiah dubiously recounts:

“I was subjected to a game of Benevolent Cop, Brainy Cop, Brawny Cop, on account of the ineffectiveness of Good/Bad Cop to a connoisseur of duality such as myself. The dark room that they detained me in was full of detestable filing cabinets. I thought ‘Why must I be condemned to live amongst so many theoretical representations on paper, so soon after discovering living incarnate? Clearly these people were trying to break my will.’

“It had been explained to me that the beautiful world I had just discovered had been irreparably harmed by some great force of evil, the kind of harm that could only be rectified with great retalliatory destruction. They called this beautiful new world ‘The-nation’ and said that her walls had been ‘breached and effectively destroyed.’ I wept and wept at this thought.

“Brawny Cop, who must have heard me sobbing came in and was appalled to see me on my knees, perhaps in hopes that I’d be hanging, and he asked what had made me so suddenly pained. I explained that I loved our marvelous ‘The-nation,’ and that I wished only be returned to her so that I might repair her walls. He said something to the effect of ‘What is your name? Nehemiah? Then my name’s Artaxerxes Longimanus.’

“As far as I could recall, I didn’t have a name.

“He produced from his belt a pocket-sized Old Testament and suggested that I start reading, for his comments confused me so. He also suggested that I might learn how to repent for my sins within it’s pages, and I thought it very kind of him. He may not have been the Brainy Cop, but he was most practical.

“I opened to the Book of Nehemiah, and I discovered that he too poured wine for his king, just as I’d done from my head as I woke. He also wept in front of his King, just like me! His city too, just like my ‘The-nation,’ the place of our fathers’ sepulchres, lie in waste! Our gates thereof consumed in fire!

“Clearly this book was a door to ‘mine other’ and this Nehemiah he spoke of was clearly my alternate self, the boy whom I’d seen in the water! I banged on the door and summoned Artaxerxes to thank him for allowing my king to speak through him! I shook his hand and thanked him for Christening me ‘my other.’”

Shortly after this encounter, files acquired through the Freedom of Information Act show that the authorities lost interest in St-Danger. He was determined simply too fragile, gullible and inept in communication to have been involved in an orchestrated disturbance of national security. Further, it was determined conclusively that the true terrorist threat was the result of ideological differences within the Abrahamic traditions, nothing new, and could simply be addressed by reenacting the crusades with newer war toys and technology. This was to be good for the economy because it created the oscillations of goods and services that turn the turbines of fiscal prosperity.

Nehemiah was released without precondition, however, a military escort was arranged to transport him to Oakland, California, roughly 3,000 miles from the scene of his birth/crime, purposefully within the national boundaries so that he might be monitored for further subversive activities. Upon his arrival he was indentured into a program hand-binding books for a Buddhist monastery. The program was run by a division of the Barnes & Noble Corporation, recognizing the need for hand-published spiritual texts as well as a surplus of cheap labor in the bay area’s “spiritual types and drop-outs.” It was determined that this was precisely the kind of thing Nehemiah needed in order to remain non-problematic in society at large. It may have been the most compassionate act taken by the federal government in the days following 9/11. It was hoped that he might thrive with free vegetarian meals, room and board, access to spiritual texts and resources, though this proved not to be the case.

After being asked to leave the program, St-Danger took to the Oakland Estuary. He collected bruised ground fruit, saps and packets of honey from the tea counters in Chinatown. Then he would ferment these concoctions on the sun-soaked banks of the briney river, pitching them with specific strains of exotic yeasts he would cull from the last sips of curbside bottles.

This new art, to Nehemiah, was transfixing (picture a child with an ant farm where the worker ants have decided to start producing LSD to see what happens to the poor kid). He approached it methodically and purposefully, but brewing potions and sacraments came of no need. It simply came to him, naturally.

“I am breathing right now and so are you. We are exhaling carbon dioxides. We are feeding plants with this carbon dioxide. In turn this carbon dioxide is used in photosynthesis to produce, not only more oxygen for us to breathe, but also saps and sugars for us to eat and for bees to with make honey. Photosynthesis was here first, before breathing people. By it’s very being, plants and photosynthesizers made the grand and logical suggestion to the Earth Bring us people for we might feed them with our bounty. And so they did.

“Plants didn’t have to worry about running out of carbon dioxide to breathe. They had a good friend in the anaerobic microbe.

“Anaerobic organisms, in their many creeds, were first before photosynthesizers. They ate the soup around them and exhaled carbon dioxide gas. They did not need oxygen for there was none to breathe when they came into existence. They are adaptable beyond reason, prudently zealous. But they too have a use for plants and sugars, for many of their metabolisms rely on fermentation! They were the first to photosynthesize and it came as an advanced form of fermentation.

“There is a form of fermentation, the same form that turns milks into tart honey, that is going on in all of our muscles right now! Lactic fermentation.

“Anaerobes are the sentinels at guard at the gates of god. They’ve been around, they’ve figured it out. They know what’s going on up there. Presumably they are pieces of will that have been chipped from the rock of our highest terrestrial expression of God. That expression is the rock.

“The rock is on the slowest life cycle, needs not survival and adherence to social or practical orders. Is molested by time and chance, but is not bothered. Knows what God is thinking, for it is the rock the rock the rock. The rock is God’s most rational and logical expression. It is the first, it is the earth. It is God concrete. It says to the microbes Do my bidding. Break it all down, things gotta change. Be like me, a chemical composition, but do something. Wind and gravity can’t change me alone. We need some will, go forth be bountiful. And so they did.

“And here we are, process and the product of fermentation. We’ve learned to control fermentation to our liking in others, and mostly for the products. This is indeed the God-grab. But it is also a reflex for survival, which is exploited by the sentinel guard, in the running of their peepshows. Mischievous little buggers, they are the foil to said God concrete. God immatériel. They make honey bubble and shimmer, and unto you when consumed.”

Such thinking was instinctual to our man-who-fell-to-earth, but it bore striking resemblance to the work of the good Dr. Martin Luther Tomorrow. In the St-Danger movement of 1955, Dr. Tomorrow proposed an outline for abolishing the misconceptions of dualist perceptions by healing the mind-body rift, though perhaps more so in effect proposed that the latter is the highest good. He quoted his own dubious laboratory experiments as well as scripture.

Later, he would be prompted to engage in divining data-collection by a chance encounter with the chance operations of the late John Cage. A brief investigative trip to Orgonon, the home of Wilelm Reich enthused him so greatly about esoteric body practice that he took to it compulsively, almost masturbatorily. This too now informing his synthesis of scripture and science, he was labeled a “fringe scholar,” later further troubled by his association with the booming yogic New Age of the Bay Area culture.

Though this was detrimental to the fundamentals of St-Dangerism being assimilated into popular consciousness, fortunately Dr. Tomorrow was in good standing and tenured at the college. He was still had access to funding and could publish his work, but it simply had no traction with the populous. In his mind, it was all counting on a component of divinity to kick in, for only it could legitimize his claims. He had prophesied much, and had been given symbols, but it all in all remained unclear to him. Where was his messiah, his golden boy?

For once Nehemiah speaks frankly:

“When I was approached to wear the good doctor’s branding, I was a little miffed, but I was reminded that this was how most people lived. Dr. Tomorrow’s lawyers assured me that I would be far more sucessful at pushing my ‘anti-money agenda’ if I had some money to start with, and I couldn’t disagree. I agree with a lot of what Dr. Tomorrow has to say, and it is a something I can really commit to. I am Nehemiah St-Danger. I didn’t ask to be the cause, it chose me.

“I actually never got any money, but it’s kind of a long term investment. The Oprah generation can’t latch on to every new crazy idea over night. We have to ease our way in. But I believe we will eventually be a successful franchise. We’ll actually take a lot of cues from Oprah. She likes to give things away, she exploits the fact that people like to be given free things. Her and Jesus, they are communists exemplar, in the finest sense of the word.”

When asked how having conscientious branding effects his goals for widespread gnostic redevelopment Nehemiah waxes:

“I’d like to weave the rainbows and anti-rainbows into a double helix of cosmology as a first step toward Dr. Tomorrow’s healing of the mind-body rift. The econosphere is interfering so unsanctimoniously with the emotional and cognitive ethers, that it is impossible to lead any horse to water without a puppet and a shtick.

“Some mornings, I don’t want to get out of bed, I’m thinking I don’t want to be the messiah of the world, even if it is only according to this one old hack. Even just purporting to be so is a lot of work. I can do it though. It is really good for record sales I hear. We’re going to go through with it. Reluctance makes the art grow vision.

“I’m free to do whatever I want, I’m going to say what I want to say, I just have to remember to say ‘Saint Danger’ a lot. Then I’m just going to ROCK AND ROLL a whole bunch.”

Tonight’s fight should be extremely entertaining, for we’ve taken the liberty of painting the incumbent/destroyer in red and the incumbent-destroyer blue. If you look under your seats tonight you will find a pair of 3D glasses, and at any given time it is up to you to chose if you’d rather focus on the aggression, by closing one eye, focus on the impact, by closing the other, or keeping both open for truly psychedelic carnage!

I should also mention, that both competitors this evening are larger than life. They will be duking it out between your ears. They will interchangeably don the horns and halo. Any collateral damage you incur is of your own doing. It is The Danger.

Here in The Danger, we will strive to provide you with the finest accoutrements for gnostic ephemera. Accessorize your mind with our bite sized diamonds. Ease your daily pains with our musings and abusing. Listen to our MUSICS. We hope to inspire you to strive for the gnosis that knows no price tag.

All St-Danger digital music releases will be available here for FREE. Always FREE. Should you chose to support the musical/spiritual endeavors of Nehemiah St-Danger with your cursed and bleeding money, you can do so by purchasing limited edition hard copy releases as they become available. Also, you might choose to come out to one of the many events and musical performances that will be posted here from time to time.

What do we get out of the deal? Well we’re hoping to push our agenda of destroying intellectual property and returning art & cognition to their rightful place as mystical tools and group activity. We’ll discuss that more in our next post: “The Ballad of Nehemiah St-Danger.”

In the meantime, feel free to enjoy the MUSICS and go ahead and fix yourself something to eat with our RSS Feed, The Last Supper.