Ashra and Cluster were at Metz with Phil Dick in 1977!

Every Dick-Head worth his salt knows the story of Philip K. Dick's trip to Metz, France in 1977. You've probably even seen the video of PKD's famous (or infamous) speech which combined some wild 2-3-74 speculation with some translation problems, creating some of the first public speculation about PKD's sanity. 

What very few of you knew is that the legendary Krautrock bands Ashra and Cluster performed at the very same convention. My guess is that PKD didn't see either band (I am in the midst of working to confirm this). But that doesn't mean it's not cool as hell. 

I mean Metz in 1977 would be a pretty good time travel destination. You could see Phil Dick and Harlan Ellison's clash of egos which Phil's guest at the convention, Joan Simpson, characterized perfectly for Larry Sutin in the Divine Invasions biography:

“Phil was very antithetical to Harlan. Harlan is very cocky, glib, cool, and here is Phil going clunk clunk clunk. Phil was not a very debonair or self-assured man. Snuff falling out of his nose, ninety-two spots on his tie--you know. And Harlan thought Phil treated people very badly because he wandered away, got lost, had people support him rather than be master of his own ship. Anyway, they got into this huge debate. Phil does very well in those kinds of situations. Here is Harlan banging his chest, and Phil was more a philosopher. Phil was just great--more dynamic and sexy than I'd ever seen him be.”

I would pay Star Trek's Q, quite a bit of money to take me to see that. 

And the fest was a who's who of science fiction greats. Check out this picture! 

(click to embiggen): Can you find: Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, John Brunner, Roger Zelazny, Christopher Priest, Robert Scheckley, Stephan Wul, Théodore Sturgeon, P.J. Farmer, Richard Matheson, Ian Watson, Norman Spinrad, Thomas Disch, Robert Silverberg?

I found that picture as part of a larger slideshow about the Metz convention here. Do yourself a favor and run through the rest of the pics. 

You can listen to at least part of Ashra's performance here: 

Wikipedia describes Ashra as... "a musical ensemble founded by Manuel Göttsching in 1976, initially to facilitate his solo career although other members were included later on. The band's name is an abbreviation of the name of Göttsching's previous band, Ash Ra Tempel. The name was changed as Göttsching's music became less psychedelic and more oriented towards electronica." 

Here's at least part of Cluster's show: 

Wikipedia describes Cluster as... "a German musical duo consisting of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, formed in 1971 and associated with West Germany's krautrock and kosmische music scenes.[2] Originating from the earlier Berlin-based group Kluster, the duo relocated in 1971 to the countryside village of Forst, Lower Saxony, where they built a studio and collaborated with musicians such as Conny Plank, Brian Eno, and Michael Rother. With Rother, they formed the influential side project Harmonia. Cluster disbanded in 1981 but reunited twice, from 1989 to 1997 and again from 2007 to 2010"

For those unfamiliar with Krautrock I encourage you to read about the genre in the wikipedia article linked above. For a long time I have wanted to write a piece of PKD canon about the members of the Krautrock band CAN in the parallel universe where the Axis powers won the war.. 

Hat tip -- Sean Nye!

Update: Philippe Hupp who was at the fest in Metz writes in to say, "Phil Dick didn't attend the concert - too many people wanted to interview him. The phone in his hotel room kept ringing, so I moved him to another room. I don't remember him mentioning the bands, I guess he was too busy..."

Point Reyes Western Weekend 2025

Western Weekend occurs every year in the small West Marin town of Point Reyes Station over the first full weekend in June. In conjunction with my work for PRRIC, I spent both days of last weekend enjoying the festivities. 

Saturday's events included a farmer's market, open artist studios, a bunch of local musical acts, a barn dance, and a bunch of other cool stuff. The highlight for me was when I got my portrait sketched by a robot (well a robot arm and camera attached to a laptop and equipped with a pen). 

Sunday's main event is a parade that runs down the main street featuring cowboys and sheriffs on horseback, floats from local orgs like Rotary International, and even local Flyn Q's cosmic enlightenment rap group, Spacesuit. 

In the run up to this year's festivities, a picture was posted in a Facebook group from a Western Weekend parade taken around 1960. It wasn't long before one of Anne Dick's daughters identified Phil, Anne, and a very young Laura in the picture. 

Even better, I was able to find the building in the background of the photo and to watch Sunday's parade from the same vantage point. 

Here are some more pics of the parade: 

From the 'Where Am I Now?" File

The last six months have witnessed a number of staggering changes in my life. As many of you know, I was "exited" from San Francisco State University at the end of last year. A perfect storm of declining enrollments, administrative greed and incompetence, and the elimination of a required lower division writing class (see previous list item), all conspired to relieve me of the job I've held for the last seventeen years. 

The whole thing really sucked. The good news is that I put up a good fight, plastering the campus with "Missing" posters featuring myself and my other exited colleagues, disrupting the College of Liberal Arts Christmas party with some pointed "Ho, Ho, Ho-ing," and some quality protests.

Here's a short documentary movie made by a student in SFSU's journalism department about my fight: 

Eventually I landed on my feet. 

The crazy thing is that it was THIS BLOG that saved me. A post about Phil's time in Point Reyes Station drew the attention of a local resident and tech entrepreneur named Chris Hulls who is interested in preserving the town of Point Reyes Station along with the weirdness of West Marin county. 

Together we created an independent non-profit, the Point Reyes Reality Investigation Center or PRRIC. Here's a video introducing the Center, shot and edited by Paul Shelton, a Dick-Head I was fortunate to meet at last summer's Colorado Dick-Fest. 

So what does PRRIC do exactly? That's a good question. We're interviewing and photographing residents of Point Reyes Station; we are looking to fund serious scientific research involving consciousness, psychology, neuroscience, and psychedelics; and we're hoping to create a Esalen-style retreat in the area. 

Photo courtesy of The Philip K. Dick Bookshelf

Last week I moved into my new office above The Old Western Saloon on Highway 1 in Point Reyes Station. The building is more than 100 years old and it's haunted. It's also featured in Dick's Confession of a Crap Artist: "Then he caught sight of the Western Bar..."

So I know there a lot of people convinced that we're living in a Philip K. Dick novel, but only a lucky few of us have offices in one. 

Check out PRRIC's Substack, where I will be writing about reality, technology, science fiction, Point Reyes Station, and more... 

New Clans of the Alphane Moon Class on Morbid Anatomy

I'm excited to announce a new PKD-related course through Morbid Anatomy. This time I'll be diving deep into Clans of the Alphane Moon with special guest Jonathan Lethem! Instead of a mind-destroying 16 week marathon, this is a simple one week, two session class. 

Here's my class description: 

In 1963 Philip K Dick’s third marriage was crumbling, his idyllic life in the small northern California town of Pt Reyes Station was coming to a sad and dysfunctional end, and the author was relying on increasingly large doses of amphetamines to supercharge his writing output.

During this chaotic period in his life, Dick wrote one of his most “out there” science fiction novels: Clans of the Alphane Moon.

The “Clans” in Dick’s novel are tribes of psychiatric patients organized around their diagnoses: “pares,” or paranoiacs, comprise the leadership, “manses” or those suffering from mania, live amid "a hodgepodge of incomplete projects, started out but never finished," the “skitzes,” or schizophrenics, comprise a village of disheveled poets.

Dick’s microcosm of mental illness functions not as a bleak dystopia, but as best-selling author Jonathan Lethem explained in his keynote address to the Philip K Dick Fest in Fort Morgan Colorado last summer, a vision of diversity that lights the way out of the dark times we find ourselves in.

Join leading Philip K. Dick scholar David Gill and Jonathan Lethem for a two-session class on Dick’s novel and his life at the time of its composition. Survey the weirdness of one of Dick’s strangest books and discover his proffered solution to our troubled times.

The class starts March 31st. More info at Morbid Anatomy.

Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 5 -- Gabriel Mckee

We're less than a week away from Dick-Fest 2024. In fact, you'll find some pretty detailed info and a schedule here, which is otherwise dedicated to our series dedicated to getting to know the presenters at this year's Fest. So, without further ado, is my interview with Gabriel Mckee: 

What are you gonna talk about at the fest?

 I'll be talking about ideas of control and freedom in the Exegesis, particularly as they relate to the concept of "astral determinism" in Hellenistic religion and philosophy-- the idea that human destiny is controlled by external forces (in particular, the stars and planets). The starting point of my talk is sections of the Exegesis where Phil is talking about the dreaded "Xerox missive," which took on a central importance in his understanding of what liberation meant. The idea of breaking free from the path that the universe has prepared for you-- metaphorized as "groove override" in the universe's eternal LP-- is an absolutely crucial one in the Exegesis, and the concrete example Phil is talking about is his reaction to the weird photocopy he got in the mail. After a career of writing about androids who think they're human, Phil found himself mired in anxiety over the idea that he was subject to some kind of external control-- but that he had pushed through and found himself experiencing a sense of freedom when he didn't look at the letter, didn't do whatever destructive thing it was that it was intended to bring about. I don't think it really matters what the true origin or content of the letter was; it's mainly important for having become a symbol through which Phil explored themes of fate/destiny/programming and freedom/choice/liberation.  I look at this through the lens of modern ideas--particularly Jay Kinney's concept of "agency panic"-- and ancient ones-- early Christian and Hellenistic texts about astrological control.

How’d you get involved in Dickdom? 

PKD was one of the first SF authors I read when I started getting into the genre toward the end of high school. A friend lent me a copy of VALIS and I was instantly obsessed. It got me interested not just in science fiction, but in religion and theology as well. I was active on the old Jazzflavor email list and ended up studying religion as an undergraduate and going on to a master's from Harvard Divinity School-- along the way writing Pink Beams of Light From the God in the Gutter: The Science-Fictional Religion of Philip K. Dick (University Press of America, 2004), and the PKD-adjacent The Gospel According to Science Fiction (Westminster John Knox, 2007) shortly thereafter. When I heard that Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson were working on an edited version of the Exegesis back in 2010, I knew I had to be involved-- and am grateful to Erik Davis and Rich Doyle for helping to facilitate that. 

What kind of Dick-related work are you currently involved in? 

I've just finished a major non-PKD project that I have been working on for several years: The Saucerian: The Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker, a biography of a prolific UFO book author, publisher, and showman, which is due out early next year from MIT Press. I'm contributing smaller pieces to a couple other PKD projects, including George Sieg & Michael Barros's edited volume The Esoteric Theology of Philip K. Dick (forthcoming from Lexington Books) and Keith Giles and David Agranoff's Dickapedia. I've also been an active collaborator in the Zebrapedia project since its inception, and have been talking to Rich Doyle about ways to enhance the online Exegesis interface-- I hope to have some more news to share at the Fest about coming developments there. 

A Little Adaptation For Us Dick-Heads

 

News broke last week of another Phil Dick adaptation in the pipeline. This time it's a version of Phil's awesome time-travel story, "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" being adapted by actor Michael B. Jordan's Outlier Society production company in conjunction with Isa Dick Hackett's Electric Sheep Productions, natch. 

From Deadline: "Outlier Society is developing the Amazon MGM Studios action thriller movie, T-Minus, which is being co-scripted by Fall Guy‘s Drew Pearce and Watchmen and Station Eleven scribe Nick Cuse."

"The project was initially developed by Pearce’s banner Point of No Return Films. Outlier Society’s Elizabeth Raposo heard the pitch—said to be an action-thriller along the lines of “Top Gun meets Back to the Future, with a Philip K. Dick twist”—and saw the potential for it to be the perfect Outlier project: an elevated piece with major tentpole potential."

"MAJOR tentpole potential" -- now that's what you want from a Dick movie! 

New Issue of PKD Otaku (#45) Out Now!

The pre-eminent PKD Zine, PKD Otaku hit the tubes of the internet earlier today. Lots of great stuff. Particularly relevant (but not super fun to read) are the letters between PKD and Joanna Russ at the height of their beef over Phil's pro-life short story "The Pre-Persons. Read the new issue here. Find old issues here.