Spiritual Mischief
Spiritual Mischief
Spiritual Mischief #101 - Spirit Dudes
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Spiritual Mischief #101 - Spirit Dudes

The first Spiritual Mischief Podcast sees the light of day

Dear friends, foes, lurkers and loiterers,

Well, something happened in March. Some spit was miefed and some mief was spat. In other words, spitmief happened, in other words still, Spiritual Mischief happened. Spiritual Mischief is what happens when we, Simon and Louis, get together. It’s also a podcast that combines culture, comedy and ancient wisdom. It was streamed, it was recorded.

It took us some weeks, but it is now released on our YouTube Channel, and many podcast platforms. Watch a groovy clip right here, right now!

It’s quite the jazzy conversation, all improvisation, but, in the end, there appears to actually be some cohesive structure. So if you have 217 minutes lying around, you might listen to it, or you might not. I’m reading a biography of composer John Cage* right now and he is about to talk at Darmstadt in 1958 that will change and influence music forever. The talks are called ‘Changes’, ‘Indeterminacy’, and ‘Communication.’ Cage’s thinking and life were heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, the mystic Eckart, Heisenberg’s theory of indeterminacy, Taoism and the I Ching, the book of changes. His most famous work is probably 4”33 where silence is ‘played.’ Why am I telling you this? I open the book, and it opens on this passage: 

“It was important to Cage that the stories “be themselves,” that their order be random, and that no obvious theme would emerge (…). “I know perfectly well that things interpenetrate. But I think they interpenetrate more richly and with more complexity when I myself do not establish any connection.”

There seems to be some interpenetration going on…

The mind, and life, goes wherever it flows, and there really is no great choice in the matter. We might follow, and I would advice this, since order and structure seems only to be something that is ‘added’ by our mind, after the fact, so as to be able to orderly function in what just might be absolute chaos. Heisenberg repeated the following question to himself again and again, after developing the Uncertainty Principle in 1925: “Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?”

But, alas; although I believe that the opening up of our minds and Minds to the Chaos, absurdity and mystery of life is a beautiful pursuit, I believe this is not the place for it. Or now is not the place for it. So, order!

Therefore I will now (randomly?) pick some topics discussed, miefed and spat in our podcast, for everyone’s nourishment, pleasure and need for order. Including mine, by the way:

We talked about the Genesis of Genesis (the band - spoiler alert: it’s 1967), Nina Simone (and her gum, some champagne, cocaine and sausages) and moving spirit, spirit Beethoven, Donda West and absolute love (for), Kanye West and dragon energy, Warren Ellis, Nick Cave and his magnificent newsletter ‘The Red Hand Files’, the documentaries ‘10,000 days on earth’, ‘One more time with feeling,’ the artist inside all of us, spirit dudes (white and black), how to listen to your spirit dudes (white and black), the need to embrace your (black) spirit dudes, imposter Zen masters, broken tea pots, beards.

And here are some links and stories:

We talked about that beautiful moment when ‘the spirit takes over’ and the artist channels the divine. What is absolutely amazing is that some of these moments are captured on tape! Here are a few (we might create a Youtube playlist on our channel later, who knows):

The Nina Simone concert at Montreux (1976) is all out amazing. Please, at the very least, check out:

‘I wish I knew how it would feel to be free’ - the moment is there, and she even says it : ‘oh the spirit’s moving now!’

“Stars” - it begins tense, with Simone calling out a girl in the audience “SIT DOWN GIRL”, some uncomfortable laughter, but Simone is dead serious: respect the moment and the art, it seems, and damn, what comes after is ART. The comments below the video say it all.

Then, Kanye West: I feel it every time. Kanye with the legend Mos Def, and Kanye is bringing everything in his verse, and everyone around him sees it, hears it, FEELS it. There is no way around it.

Jay-Z in the studio with Rick Rubin recording the song 99 problems. Something is happening and Rick Rubin - and everyone present - know it. Or, as Jay-Z says at the end : “It might be something special”

There’s a 23 minute version of them recording in the studio as well. Highly recommended.

A scene from the film ’20,000 Days on Earth’ with Warren Ellis where he shares his Nina Simone anecdote. It’s hilarious and it’s also the moment that turned out to be the Genesis of the amazing Warren Ellis’ book ‘Nina Simone’s gum.

Unfinished threads:

In the podcast some threads were opened but not followed. This happens a lot in our conversations. Some things we didn’t get to:

Structure and freedom: the ‘structured jazz’ from the Warren Ellis book that I mention at the beginning of the episode. I feel it’s a nice addition to our conversation, so here it is:

“When I saw Alice Coltrane play a few years after Nina Simone, I couldn’t believe it. It was that moment again. Those times you think are never going to happen in your life. She was someone who totally shifted my world in the eighties when I discovered a record of hers by accident in some sale bin. She arranged the kind of orchestral strings I’d always imagined in my head, this combination of classical and free form, yet incredibly structured as well, almost like a pop song. She totally changed how I saw things musically, in the same way John Cale’s viola changed how I saw a stringed instrument could be used in rock music. In many ways, Alice Coltrane did what a lot of the other people around her couldn’t do. She took loose aspects of free-form jazz and contained them into these beautiful spiritual songs. Structure and freedom. Every recording I have gone into I have in my own way tried to honour her.”

Also, we didn’t get to ‘the wanderer’, by Friedrich Nietzsche. It hits home for me and here it is; perhaps more on this in a future episode:

The wanderer. 

He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer - though not as a traveler towards a final goal, for this does not exist. But he does want to observe, and keep his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world; therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing; there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness. To be sure, such a man will have bad nights, when he is tired and finds closed the gates to the city that should offer him rest; perhaps in addition, as in the Orient, the desert reaches up to the gate; predatory animals howl now near, now far; a strong wind stirs; robbers lead off his pack-animals. Then for him the frightful night sinks over the desert like a second desert, and his heart becomes tired of wandering. If the morning sun then rises, glowing like a divinity of wrath, and the city opens up, he sees in the faces of its inhabitants perhaps more of desert, dirt, deception, uncertainty, than outside the gates - and the day is almost worse than the night. So it may happen sometimes to the wanderer; but then, as recompense, come the ecstatic mornings of other regions and days. Then nearby in the dawning light he already sees the bands of muses dancing past him in the mist of the mountains. Afterwards, he strolls quietly in the equilibrium of his forenoon soul, under trees from whose tops and leafy corners only good and bright things are thrown down to him, the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood, and solitude, and who are, like him, in their sometimes merry, sometimes contemplative way, wanderers and philosophers. Born out of the mysteries of the dawn, they ponder how the day can have such a pure, transparent, transfigured and cheerful face between the hours of ten and twelve - the seek the philosophy of the forenoon.

From: Friedrich Nietzsche - Man Alone with Himself - 156

Interestingly enough, after the recording of THE MIEF I decided to randomly (?) watch an episode of the Star Wars: Visions series on Disney+ in which the wanderer, or a wanderer, makes an appearance. But I’m pretty sure it’s THE wanderer. Episode 1, The Duel, for those interested. It’s a good episode. 

And so! Mief is miefed, spit is spat and mischief managed. Thank you for reading and maybe listening, a good day to you all, friend, foe, lurker and loiterer alike.

Love,

Simon Ohler and Louis Bijl de Vroe

PS If you want some spit on your mief, follow @spitmief on instagram and Twitter, or Simon and/or Louis separately on their internet personas nowsimon and latelewis (late_lewis on twitter).

*Where the Heart Beats; John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists - Kay Larson

**Nina Simone’s gum - Warren Ellis

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Spiritual Mischief
Spiritual Mischief
Jazzy conversations between Simon Ohler and Louis Bijl de Vroe that combine culture, comedy and ancient wisdom.
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Simon Ohler
Louis Bijl de Vroe