As someone who spends a lot of time writing I can often be found at my desk at home or at the library or in a corner of a coffeehouse typing away with my headphones on. Here’s a little secret: I’m almost never listening to anything. If I’m reviewing a film or working on my blog I might be reviewing random scenes here or there or spending a minute browsing videos on YouTube, but mostly I don’t listen to anything else while I’m writing. Most writers can’t listen to words being spoken or sung while attempting to conjure phrases of their own, and unless I’m on an instrumental jazz jag music without lyrics mostly isn’t my thing. Lately when I’m driving I’ve been listening to Wilco and Donovan, and MMA podcasts, and the Hillbilly Elegy audiobook. I couldn’t indulge any of those and also crank out an insightful movie review or even the text for one of my photo essays. It’s this particular clash of music and writing that made this Open Culture post about Philip K. Dick catch my ear…

What did Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly author Philip K. Dick, that visionary of our not-too-distant dystopian future, listen to while he crafted his descriptions of grim, psychologically (and sometimes psychedelically) harrowing times ahead? Mozart. Beethoven. Mahler. Wagner.

Yes, while looking textually forward, he listened backward, soundtracking the constant workings of his imagination with classical music, as he had done since his teenage years. As Lejla Kucukalic writes in Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age:

After graduating from high school in 1947, Dick moved out of his mother’s house and continued working as a clerk at a Berkeley music store, Art Music. “Now,” wrote Dick, “my longtime love of music rose to the surface, and I began to study and grasp huge areas of the map of music; by fourteen I could recognize virtually any symphony or opera” (“Self-Portrait” 13). Classical music, from Beethoven to Wagner, not only stayed Dick’s lifelong passion, but also found its way into many of his works: Wagner’s Goterdammerung in A Maze of Death, Parsifal in Valis, and Mozart’s Magic Flute in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

At his Forteana Blog, author Andrew May credits Dick with, given his pop-cultural status, “a decidedly uncool knowledge of classical music.” He cites not just Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the introduction to A Maze of Death, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in Ubik, or the part of The Game-Players of Titan where “a teenaged kid forks out 125 dollars for a vintage recording of a Puccini aria,” but an entire early story which functions as “(in my opinion) a pure exercise in classical music criticism.” In 1953′s “The Preserving Machine,” as May retells it, an eccentric scientist, “worried that Western civilization is on the point of collapse, invents a machine to preserve musical works for future generations” by encoding it “in the form of living creatures. Unfortunately, as soon as the creatures are released into the environment, they start to adapt to it by evolving into different forms, and the music becomes distorted beyond recognition.”

Here’s an 11 hour playlist of Phil’s favorites for you to write your own visions by…

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65 years ago, in 1952, Philip K. Dick published his very first short story, “Roog,” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In the year 2017 we’re only a few weeks from the premiere of the Blade Runner sequel, and our actual world seems more and more Phildickian every single day.

Read more about “Roog” here, and dive deep down a rabbit hole in this video that spotlights Phil’s psychic abilities and his theories about our simulated universe…

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Had a pretty busy weekend including hitting Red Arrow on Saturday night for Daniel Holland’s new exhibition. It’s a great show of paintings including collage elements and even shaped canvases that give the display more of a sculptural sensibility than Holland’s previous work. If you’re in Nashville you don’t want to miss it. That said, I had a pretty chill Sunday that mostly found me catching up on the new Sherlock series and reading a bunch of articles including a great piece about Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Scanner was the first PKD book I read and it’s still one of my favorites. The novel is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Here’s a bit from the article at The Quietus…

Its main character, undercover narcotics agent, Bob Arctor, lives in a California that feels straight out of the early ‘70s, although we’re told the novel is set in 1994. When Arctor tries to infiltrate the supply chain of a drug called Substance D, he becomes addicted to it – his own supplier, Donna, is the woman he loves. His friends and housemates are all addicts, too. The plot ramps up when his police colleagues, from whom his identity is protected, ask him to run surveillance on himself, which is no-one’s idea of a good time: whenever he’s not on Substance D, he’s watching videos of himself on it.

Substance D is basically speed. For a long time, this was Dick’s drug of choice (I’ve written before about how you can conjure up an image of him at his desk, furiously typing, blinds drawn to block out the South California sun. He said he could turn out 68 pages of prose a day when he was on speed). Substance D is especially nasty, though. It destroys the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, so that they first function independently and then compete, destroying any coherent idea of the self. In the case of Bob Arctor, it means that the addict self and the narc self eventually become unrecognisable to one another.

Here’s a long French interview with Dick shortly after the book’s release…

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On Friday we observed the birthday of Roy Batty. What I’m trying to say is that we observed the “inception date” of Roy Batty — the poet laureate of the replicants in the film, Blade Runner. The Guardian has the word…

8 January 2016 marks the inception date of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), the leader of a gang of renegade replicants on the run from Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) in Ridley Scott’s iconic 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner.

A product of the Tyrell Corporation, Batty was part of the Nexus-6 line of genetically engineered replicants. Described as “more human than human”, the creations look indistinguishable from humans; but possess superior strength, agility, tolerance to extreme temperatures, and intelligence.

But, boy, was the internet pleased to celebrate his birthday.

The events contained within Blade Runner occur in November 2019, in a technologically advanced Los Angeles which sees Spinners flying above the streets littered with ads promoting tourism in “off-world” colonies throughout the galaxy. By this time, replicants have long existed, though now illegal on Planet Earth after they proved dangerous to humans.

Endgadget added…

…it seems as if we’re edging closer and closer to Blade Runner’s world. The very fact that AI, flying cars, robots and private space travel are hot topics at all is a big deal. Who’d have thought in 1982 that real tech giants would share something in common with Tyrell Corporation? Truly intelligent machines and off-world colonies may still be decades away, but they’re at least on the horizon. Building-scale giant displays have been around for a while, too, and the seemingly physics-defying image enhancer isn’t that far-fetched given the existence of gigapixel cameras. And like it or not, we’re starting to see cities suffocated by pollution. Will we get much closer to Roy Batty’s world by the time he’s supposed to shut off in 2019? Probably (and to some extent, hopefully) not, but it’s fascinating that there are any similarities at all.

Here’s the reason Rutger Hauer became an actor…

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Sometime in the last year, a group of mid-ranked government officials gathered for a dinner in a private room in a Beijing restaurant, all slightly nervous, but keen with anticipation.

The guest of honor – a Buddhist master who would predict their fortunes.

The master looked around the room and into the eyes of each of the dozen or so attendees, according to one of those present, who spoke on condition of anonymity as officials and Communist Party members are not supposed to believe in “superstition”.

“He picked people out depending on the shape of their eyes and told them whether they had been touched by luck or misfortune,” the source, a government official with ties to the leadership, told Reuters.

A few months later, one of the people present whose eyes told of misfortune to come was under investigation for abuse of power, the source added.

“At times like this with so much uncertainty, lots of us are looking for ways to foresee our fortunes,” the source said.

The source declined to name the master, citing a fear he may be arrested.

Chinese people, especially the country’s leaders, have a long tradition of putting their faith in soothsaying and geomancy, looking for answers in times of doubt, need and chaos.

Here’s a bit I found about China’s magical relationship with the past and the future…

The Chinese term for “occult arts”(數術shushu) refers to a number of systems for determining fate. Originating in ancient China, shushu has received much attention throughout Chinese history. In ancient times, “shu”數(“numbers”) were considered a part of nature, and shushu (literally “art of numbers”) was perceived as a system of natural laws governing the cosmos. Occult arts included both techniques and theories for understanding the relationship between human beings and the cosmos. In other words, shushu was both a traditional Chinese view of the universe and a variety of divination techniques based on this view. Thus,”shu”has the meaning of both “numbers” and “calculation.”Because of the significance attributed to numbers, shushu is not synonymous with mathematics and impiles more than numerology. For instance, in shushu, numbers were perceived as either ominous or auspicious, and can therefore represent fate. Hence, to master “numbers” was to both explicate the past and envision the future, as stated simply by Yan Shigu 顏師古(581-645), a scholar of the classics:”Occult arts are divination.”Further, in addition to numerology, shushu eventually came to include the study of various sorts of correspondences, including concepts related to time and space.

Of course, there’s no book of Chinese divination that I value more highly than the I Ching. I’ve gone through periods of my life beginning each day with a reading from the oracle — it can be a great mindfulness practice that might focus your mind on a new question or possibility each day, investing your attention with novel perspectives and unexpected expectations.

The I Ching can also be used as a tool for creativity. Here’s an insightful interview with Philip K. Dick exploring his interest in the I Ching and his use of the divination system in his fiction writing…

VERTEX: Do you use the I Ching as a plotting device in your work?

DICK: Once. I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book. Like in the end when Juliana Frink is deciding whether or not to tell Hawthorne Abensen that he is the target of assassins, the answer indicated that she should. Now if it had said not to tell him, I would have had her not go there. But I would not do that in any other book.

VERTEX: What is the importance of the I Ching in your own life?

DICK: Well, the I Ching gives advice beyond the particular, advice that transcends the immediate situation. The answers have an universal quality. For instance: “The mighty are humbled and the humbled are raised.” If you use the I Ching long enough and continually enough, it will begin to change and shape you as a person. It will make you into a Taoist, whether or not you have ever heard the word, whether or not you want to be.

VERTEX: Doesn’t Taoism fuse the ethical and the practical?

DICK: This is the greatest achievement of Taoism, over all other philosophies and religions.

VERTEX: But in our culture the two are pitted against one another.

DICK: This always shows up. Should I do the right thing or the expediate thing? I find a wallet on the street. Should I keep it? That’s the practical thing to do, right? Or should I give it back to the person? That’s the ethical thing. Taoism has a shrewdness. There’s no heaven in our sense of the word, no world besides this world. Practical conduct and ethical conduct do not conflict, but actually reinforce each other, which is almost impossible to think of in our society.

VERTEX: How does it work?

DICK: Well, in our society a person might frequently have to choose between what he thinks is practical and what is ethical. He might choose the practical, and as a result he disintegrates as a human being. Taoism combines the two so that these polarizations rarely occur, and if possible never occur. It is an attempt to teach you a way of behavior that will cause such tragic schisms not to come to the surface. I’ve been using the I Ching since 1961, and this is what I use it for, to show me a way of conduct in a certain situation. Now first of all it will analyze the situation for you more accurately than you have. It may be different than what you think. Then it will give you the advice. And through these lines a torturous, complicated path emerges through which the person escapes the tragedy of matrydom and the tragedy of selling out. He finds the great sense of Taoism, the middle way. I turn to it when I have that kind of conflict.

VERTEX: What if a person should come to a situation in which the ethical and the practical cannot be fused under any circumstances?

DICK: One thing that I have never gotten out of my head is that sometimes the effort of the whole Taoist thing to combine the two does not always work. At this point the line says, “Praise, no blame.” Those are code words to indicate what you should do and the commentary says that the highest thing for a person to do would be to lay down his life rather than to do something which was unethical. And I kinda think that this is right. There never can be a system of thought that can reconcile those two all the time. And Taoism takes that into account, in one line out of over three thousand.

If this Chinese magic, I Ching, PKD thread has captured your interest, check out this vid featuring the Philip K. Dick android talking about Chinese divination. Also I listened to Chinese Democracy when it was released and I enjoyed it.

If you’ve seen the Man in the High Castle pilot on Amazon please comment below. I’m late to that party but hope to screen it soon.

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In 2015 we mark 25 years since the release of the original Total Recall film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film garnered positive praise upon release and has since become an sci-fi action movie classic that was remade as a vehicle for Colin Farrell. Of course, both films find their origin in a short story by Philip K. Dick, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.”

Here’s a fun video that compares the original film to Dick’s short story, illuminating the originality and zaniness of flick while also taking a few good-natured swings at Dick and his penchant for awkward titles…

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Here’s another post that deals in the dubious doings of failed prophecy…

In 1981, Philip K. Dick seemed to cast himself as one of the Precogs from Minority Report when he offered a list of his own prognostications to be published in the collection Book of Predictions. Here’s what PKD saw when he stared into the crystal ball courtesy of the PKD Otaku fan zine, issue number 11, 2003…

1983
The Soviet Union will develop an operational particle-beam accelerator, making missile attack against
that country impossible. At the same time the U.S.S.R. will deploy this weapon as a satellite killer. The
U.S. will turn, then, to nerve gas.
1984
The U.S. will perfect a system by which hydrogen, stored in metal hydrides, will serve as a fuel
source, eliminating a need for oil.
1985
By or before this date there will be a titanic nuclear accident either in the U.S.S.R. or in the U.S.,
resulting in shutting down all nuclear power plants.
1986
Such satellites as HEAO-2 will uncover vast, unsuspected high energy phenomenon in the universe,
indicating that there is sufficient mass to collapse the universe back when it has reached its expansion
limit.
1989
The U.S. and the Soviet Union will agree to set up one vast metacomputer as a central source for
information available to the entire world; this will be essential due to the huge amount of information
coming into existence.
1993
An artificial life form will be created in a lab, probably in the U.S.S.R., thus reducing our interest in
locating life forms on other planets.
1995
Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public from passive
viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts.
1997
The first closed-dome colonies will be successfully established on Luna and Mars. Through DNA
modification, quasi-mutant humans will be created who can survive under non-Terran conditions, i.e.,
alien environments.
1998
The Soviet Union will test a propulsion drive that moves a starship at the velocity of light; a pilot ship
will set out for Proxima Centaurus, soon to be followed by an American ship.
2000
An alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of Earth, but leave
the colonies on Luna and Mars intact.
2010
Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to
alter the past with scientific information.

I’ve always admired the accuracy Dick fashioned into his literary futures, but I’m pleased to see that this list was mostly off target. Or was it? If the Russian tachyons made it to the past how would I even know the present had been changed?

As a bonus, here’s an interview with author Erik Davies who was part of the editorial team that presided over the construction of the published version of Dick’s mystical meditation, the Exegesis…

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Readers of this blog know that I love Philip K. Dick. Dick is one of my all time favorite authors — he was a poster-boy for tortured artists, an active participant in the counterculture of his day, an incredibly prolific author, and a mystic visionary whose life was full of strange happenings that blurred the line between his everyday life and the stories he dreamed-up.

All that said, I forgot to mention Dick’s birthday on December 16 and I’m posting this to make that right! Happy Birthday, PKD!

The Penultimate Truth of Philip K. Dick is a documentary film that puts Dick’s mystical experiences front-and-center, allowing viewers to see Dick’s spiritual visions in the context of his astonishingly unique real life and career.

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This week, I’m remembering Philip K. Dick who died after a series of strokes on March 2, 1982. I first read A Scanner Darkly in the early 1990′s. The book was written in 1977, but it takes place in the early 1990′s and I was dumbfounded at how Dick had predicted slacker culture nearly two decades out.

Dick was a prolific author, but he struggled through most of his career until film adaptations of his work brought him mainstream attention. The Wiki has a brief breakdown:

In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, eleven popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, The Adjustment Bureau and Impostor. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.

After his death, Dick was treated to a bizarre tribute when some obsessive fans created his likeness in the form of a remote controlled android. The android was included on a discussion panel in a San Diego Comic Con presentation about the film adaptation of the novel, A Scanner Darkly. In February 2006, an America West Airlines employee misplaced the android’s head. It was never found. In January 2011, Hanson Robotics announced that it had built a replacement.

Here, that android jerks and blinks his way right to the bottom of the uncanny valley…

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