More on the Telegraph Ave Location of Art Music

 For Record Store Yesterday I headed up to Telegraph Ave and Amoeba Music. While in the neighborhood I did a little more investigation into the location of Art Music, the record store where Philip K. Dick worked in the late forties and early fifties. The most recent bit of my search began when I found this picture of the corner of Channing and Telegraph in an article about an East Bay Walking tour. 

Kind of amazing how Ferris Fremont's men are occupying the intersection in some fracas likely related to People's Park. Anyhoo, in that shot you can see the sign for the record store. Yesterday I recreated the shot above: 

It's obvious the building on the corner is still there. In the older shot it looks like the record store occupies the second store from from the corner. In 2024 that's the aptly named vintage clothing store "Mars Mercantile."

Here's a shot of the inside:

They were busy selling vintage clothes to college students and hipsters, but I asked an employee what they new about the location. They said that it was their understanding that the current location was subdivided into three separate retail businesses. I mentioned that I was researching science fiction author Philip K Dick and another employee turned and said, "You think he worked here?" 

Looks like I'm going to have to make a pilgrimage to the History Room at the Berkeley Public Library after this semester from hell is over to confirm. 

Free Lecture Next Monday: Confessions of a Total Dick-Head

 Next Monday, April 8th (4pm California time) I will be giving a free lecture through Morbid Anatomy titled "Confessions of a Total Dick-Head." The lecture, live on Zoom, will cover my early experience as a fan as well as my radicalization as a Dick scholar, and I'll share a few bits of wisdom I've gained on my 25-year obsession with Philip K. Dick. The lecture is being offered in anticipation of my summer school course, also through Morbid Anatomy, titled "Sometimes It's Hard to Break Free: The Symbolism of Personal Liberation in Popular Culture" -- which I am super excited to teach because the autodidacts at Morbid Anatomy are so interested and engaged! 

You can register for the FREE lecture here. A recording will be available for registered students who can't attend the live session. 

Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 4 -- David Agranoff

Here's the fourth installment in our semi-regular feature, getting to know the speakers at this year's Dick-Fest (June 13-16th in Fort Morgan, Colorado). This time it's hardcore accomplishist and DickHeads Podcaster David Agranoff!

What are you gonna talk about at the fest?

    My research is focused on two aspects of Phil’s work. I consider myself an expert in Phil’s novel writing formula (as laid out in a 1965 letter to fellow author Ron Goulart) and Preview the research involved in my upcoming book Unfinished PKD: The Outlines and Fragments of Philip K. Dick by David Agranoff. It will be the first release of EXEGETICS: PKD STUDIES a series of PKD themed non-fiction books, a side line started by Professor D.Harlan Wilson, as a sub-press from his publishing company Anti-Oedipus Press. He was my dream editor for the book, and then we ended teaming up on the Dickheads Podcast.
    The talk will include deep dives into the materials I used to write this book about 17 outlines and fragments that Phil never got around to writing. So I am going to talk about how the research
was done, where treasures I found and what people can look forward to in the book. It is pretty impossible to be humble about this book. The outline for the novel Anti-Talent eventually morphed into UBIK. That research alone will change how Phil and his writing is taught. That Anti-talent outline which Phil never meant for anyone but himself to read, talks to himself, convinces himself into and out of plot directions, tells himself which ideas he is repeating and openly mentions influences.

How’d you get involved in Dickdom?

I have been reading PKD since the 90s, but I didn’t become a serious Dickhead until my homey Anthony Trevino (who I co-wrote a SF/Horror/Crime novel Nightmare City that is available from Grand Mal Press) pointed out that there is no podcast about Philip K. Dick called Dickheads, and what a shame that was. The idea was that we would read each novel in publication order. The show was co-hosted by Anthony, myself and our friend Langhorne J. Tweed. Six years later, Anthony left the show and Professor D.Harlan Wilson has taken his seat. We are almost done covering the novels. We also have done lots of bonus interviews, panel interviews and more. We were started I barely knew anything and now I am a bit of know-it-all.

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

    Still working on the podcast, I am a nerd for all science fiction history and I also write a column for Amazing Stories. I am doing the final edits on Unfinished PKD. I recently used the PKD formula to write a novel called “Great America in Dead World,” I will be figuring out a publisher for that in the next year or so. Keith Giles and I will be co-editing Dickapedia: A Philip K. Dick encyclopedia. That is a fun project and all volunteer, and in we are putting together a team of volunteers to help us do the research. Each team member will be assigned a novel. You’ll get your name on the back cover, and a bio in the book. Dickfest is a great place to work on those community ties if you want to get involved in that.
    I also just released my 10 th novel and it is very Philip K. Dick influenced. The novel is called People’s Park. It is a really weird novel and I hope people check it out. Bring a copy of any of my books to Dick fest I would love to sign it. I will have a few to sell. My holocaust revenge horror novel The Last Night to Kill Nazis is available nationally at Barnes and Noble so buy that and bring it!
    More importantly come to Dick fest and lets talk PKD! You don’t want to miss it!

A Picture of Art Music in Berkeley, At Long Last

I've been looking for a picture of Art Music where Phil worked in Berkeley for more than a decade, and at last I've found it. The photo comes from an East Bay Times walking tour guide, and clearly shows the record store where Phil worked in the early 1950s. The caption reads, "California National Guard troops occupy the intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Channing Way in Berkeley, Calif. during the People's Park riots in 1969. (William Crouch / Oakland Tribune Archives)"

Sure it's fifteen years after Phil worked there, but at least now we know where it was. Many, including myself, have mistakenly believed the Rasputin Records across the intersection to be the location, but now we know. What a feeling! As you can see, Berkeley has always been a hotbed of political activism and overreactive police responses. 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Is a Great Novel Says The Atlantic

From the world-is-catching-up-to-us-Dick-heads file, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is an Atlantic pick for one of the 136 best novels of the last hundred years. But tell us something we don't know. The interesting tide that may be turning here is the explicit recognition of the formal quality of the prose. The criteria for their canon involves, "novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose—no matter how many or few that ended up being (136, as it turns out)" (Triple emphasis mine) Here's Lenika Cruz's write up, which is pretty good: 

"Before there was Blade Runner, there was Dick’s prescient science-fiction noir, which opens not with the movie adaptation’s columns of fire spewing into a degraded sky, but with a tedious domestic dispute. Both scenes communicate dystopia in their own ways, but Dick’s is sneakier: Bounty Hunter Rick Deckard and his wife argue over the settings on the machine that controls their mood, immediately raising the question of just how real they are in comparison to the rogue androids that Deckard is paid to capture and “retire,” or, essentially, kill. This is a bleak, wry, and mind-bending novel—a consideration of the all-too-porous lines that separate human from animal from machine."

Get to Know the Fest Guest: Part 3 -- D.H. Wilson

Here's another in my semi-regular profiles of the scheduled guests for this year's Dick-Fest in Ft. Morgan, Colorado, June 13-16. In this post we'll meet, doctoral Dick-Head D.H. Wilson (the picture is Brett Weldele's rendering of DH as Gully Foyle from Bester’s The Stars My Destination -- not directly Dick-related, but we'll accept it). 

TDH: What are you gonna talk about at the fest?

Hello! I’ll provide an overview of the book I’m currently working on, The Biographies of Philip K. Dick: Infinite Regressions, for Routledge’s Auto/Biography Studies series. Here’s a brief description that I included in my proposal to the publisher: Philip K. Dick was one of the twentieth century’s most prolific, forward-thinking authors and a luminary of intelligent, idea-driven science fiction. His singular oeuvre, esoteric mythos, and chronically autobiographical novels and stories have generated a surplus of biographies in an effort to uncover his “real” identity. Most attempts to biographically render PKD in the light of would-be “truth,” however, are undergirded by a speculative conundrum that his characters and their author cannot escape themselves. Infinite Regressions will unpack this overarching thesis while functioning as an engaged overview of the biographical literature on PKD. PKD scholarship is vast, but my monograph will be the first comprehensive study to account for and interpret this material as a collective literary venture. I appropriated my subtitle from PKD’s Exegesis, an 8,000-page journal inspired by a hallucinatory breakdown that he experienced in the 1970s. Written between 1974 and his death in 1982, the Exegesis is an epic attempt to understand an ostensible trickster god, and yet every gesture towards definitive knowledge results in “an infinite regression of theses and countertheses.” Biographers fall through a similar trap door when they try to “understand” PKD, but that isn’t to say that their biographies aren’t productive or meaningful. As literary artefacts, they are largely meritorious. Ultimately, then, PKD’s biographies call attention to the inherent instability and variability of biographical writing, which has always evaded a grand definition.

TDH: What’s your connection to Dickdom?

Most recently, the Dickheads Podcast. In 2023, I became a co-host with David Agranoff and Langhorne J. Tweed, who started the podcast with Anthony Trevino in 2017. Such great fellas. I’ve been reading, studying, and writing about PKD for years, though, beginning in graduate school in the 1990s at the University of Massachusetts, where I was working on my M.A. degree in English. In an independent study with SF scholar Robert Crossley, I read The Man in the High Castle and “Faith of Our Fathers.” Thereafter I devoured his entire canon, as we PKD fanatics tend to do, and I remember trying (and failing) to emulate him again and again when I first started writing my own fiction.

TDH: Tell us about your new publishing endeavor.

Research and note-taking for Infinite Regressions is occupying most of my time right now, although I have a monograph on Stanley Kubrick’s futurist cinema coming out in November from Stalking Horse Press called Strangelove Country: Science Fiction, Filmosophy, and the Kubrickian Consciousness. Very excited about that one. As editor-in-chief of Anti-Oedipus Press, I should also mention that I’ll be spearheading a new PKD book series. Here’s the formal description on AOP’s website: EXEGETICS: PKD STUDIES is devoted to original, high-quality scholarship on and about Philip K. Dick, one of the science fiction genre’s most renowned innovators and a singular voice in twentieth-century literature. Books in the series include critical and/or creative explorations of Phildickian fiction, nonfiction, biography, cinema, and multimedia. Scholarly yet defiant of academic stodge, EXEGETICS aspires for the definitively New in the world(s) of PKD.

More details soon!

Erik Davis on the Pink Beam

Well yesterday may very well have been the fiftieth anniversary of PKD getting zapped by the delivery girl's Jesus fish necklace, or whatever. The funny thing is that the deeper you dig into the timeline, the more out of joint it becomes. Maybe it wasn't February at all. On February 1, 1974, PKD writes to Jamis, "All I can recall about the entire month of January is that I had two molars and a wisdom tooth which had grown down and become embedded in my jawbone removed...." (74 SL pg 3.)

I got to spend part of the afternoon with High Weirdness author Erik Davis, as we riffed on Dick's visions for about thirty minutes in my class, before Davis had to teach the last class of his Stigmata course. 

The main idea I got out of all of this is that 2/3/74 is a kind of sacred uncertainty (if you rearrange the letters of the word "sacred" you get the word "scared"). For me the most important lesson of this radical uncertainty is that part of me wants to be certain, and that I have to work to keep from being certain. As much as I would like to believe that PKD concocted these experiences to fulfill some unmet need for significance, I have to save space for the possibility that something divine and revelatory happened. And I would ask that you check your own need for certainty as you explore your own ideas about what happened to Phil Dick. 

Davis put an old essay about the whole beam deal on his website yesterday. Davis writes: 

"Unlike most religious seers, Dick did not approach his visions with anything like certitude. Dick distrusted reification of any sort (his novels constantly wage war against the process that turns people and ideas into things), and so he refused to solidify his experiences into a belief system. Like William Blake, another impoverished autodidact whose bubbling imagination was steeped in the Western visionary tradition, Dick approached his theophany (or “in-breaking of God”) as artistic material, reworking it in his writings with an artist’s commitment to irony, craft, and a political bite. Even in his private journals, he constantly liquefies his revelations, writing with a modern thinker’s sense of the tentativeness of speculative thought. “Indeterminacy is the central characteristic of 2-3-74,” writes Sutin in his Dick biography Divine Invasions. Sutin points out that mystics traditionally interpret their experiences within the faiths they are raised in. “Phil adhered to no single faith. The one tradition indubitably his was SFwhich exalts ‘What IF?’ above all. In 2-3-74, all the ‘What IFs?’ were rolled up into one.”