Playing GALAfest2 in Paramus last night was a real blast. For the two months that I had to rehearse, I was in bad shape and got to play only six songs, the best of which was From Sara Who Doesn't Exist and The Next Time. I made a lot of mistakes.

The unsung heroes of the show were the artists exhibiting; I say unsung because until I opened my mouth on stage, no-one had said anything announcing them.

Opening the show was Jaymie Gerard; she had opened the show at the first GALAfest, at which time she was good. This time however she touched extraordianary. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but any performer will tell you, the times when you connect with whatever is within or without you that really powers your art are rare. Jaymie has excellent control over both her voice and guitar, and assumes the stage with a powerful elegant grace that I've only seen in Melanie and Donovan. Comparisons may be inviduous but I've been around a long time and have a keen sense of the Real Thing when I see it and this sense has been honed by seeing dozens of performers in many genres. Kind of like asking which actor played the best Tevye.

You may wonder why I would mention the artists at the show and not go on to describe their exhibits. I am less qualified to judge artwork from within the framework of artistic criticism, other than what I've read in essays by Vasili Kandinsky, Piet Mondriaan and Hugh Honour. I still go by "I like it" and "I don't like it," those innate, kind of dumb reactions we have when seeing a picture or sculpture for the first time. But as you came in you would be struck by the oils of Iulia Vinokurova-Shaternik, and several small bronzes upon her exhibit table. Ms. Vinokurova-Shaternik is originally from Byelorus, a graduate of the Byelorus State Academy of Art. Her work is definitely in the realm of Impressionism, a very bold use of large brushes, perhaps even pallette-knife, the imagery striking you as solid, permeable; imaginative use of color underlays important to this kind of work produced work that was at once vivid yet subdued. I cannot comment intelligently about the few bronzes, other than to say that I liked them. Exhibiting alongside of her was her husband Ales Shaternik. I haven't here mispelled his name, it is a shortening of Aliksandr. His oils were intensely colorful, I would say stepping somewhat beyond Impressionism with the striking chromatic contrasts he deployed. This can be a dangerous thing for an artist to do, lest they be accused of hiding lack of talent by overuse of color, but Mr. Shaternik's work shows full mastery of an intriguing talent. Immediately behind the Shaternik's exhibits were the large oils of Kseniya Bikhler. Here we had no Impressionism but surreal cartoon-like figures which threatened to leap from the canvas. As a cartoonist, I use the expression "cartoon-like" as a compliment, but I must be careful to explain something. A cartoon - whether a comic strip in a newspaper or a one-panel joke in a magazine - is pure Minimalism at its best. A cartoonist must convey a great deal with very little. I must empasize, Ms. Bikhler is not a cartoonist. Her figures, surreal as they struck me, are full of movement across their features, creatures seemingly immobile seething with movement within, cleverly and wisely portrayed with a very skilled use of brush. As you crossed the room you next saw the graphic work of Paul Moss. I regret not asking him what tools he used in the composition of his works, but hazarding a guess I would say that he works either with pen and ink or gel-pen. His many small boards were a delight to behold; and bearing in mind what I said above about comparisons, had Picasso not been such a ruthless bastard, and had held to the treasures he unlocked with his post-Red / Blue work, he might have created work such as I saw in Mr. Moss' boards. Wayne Caravjal, the organizer of the GALAfests, had his work to the right of Paul Moss'. His oils are definitely imbued with his skills as an illustrator. Some artists take umbrage at the use of the term, but I have never understood why. Technically speaking, Dali was an illustrator. Although he was particularly loathsome as a person, and perhaps something of a charlatan when it came to pumping his own genius, Dali as illustrator had no match. Mr. Caravjal is not Salvador Dali, and to compare them would in itself be an insult. Caravjal's work is simply better, does not seek to punch you in the eye with the contrived madness of the Catalonian. It says itself. I kinda sorta wish he had given more prominence to his latest work, a series of montage created with the garish nonsense found within the pages of the New York Post. The kind of thing that would make ole Ruppert wish that his only critic were Bart Simpson. The last exhibitor was Matthew Fricovsky, and the first thing anyone might think when thry saw his work was "Giger." He himself mentions the Swiss creator of Alien in his flyer, but in my umble opinion has an edge on Giger's underworld. Giger's work definitely seems to inspire a cold terror. Fricovsky's use of skulls and tormented faces lack this deliberate horror approach, they just are in the sense that Eckhardt used in his oft-quoted istigkeit, "is-ness." If you have at all studied your own dreams for any length of time, you get the correct notion that most dreams are unpleasant. Should you stay your course and pursue such study, it comes to you that you are experiencing that part of you which was around before you were born and which proceeds, if not properly quickened, after you die. Not a damnation, not a terror, rather a cool Hadaean quietness and stillness of shadow. I saw this in Mr. Fricovsky's work.

I stayed to see Kukurudu. The group is Jamie Serino on percussion - in this case, djembe, conga, timbales, dumbeqs and small cymbals; Greg Borra on laptop and keyboard; and Lauren Barnhard providing her unique skills as a belly-dancer as an integral part of their performance. Years ago I saw Juno Reactor with something of an entourage of percussionists, and it was...okay. But for forty-five all-too-short minutes, Kukurudu blew me and the rest of the audience away. It is hard to render me speechless - harder still to get Sara quiet - but they succeeded. If you can ever see them, do so.

A central person in the history of the Outlands Community is my wife and first partner, Sara Jane van Beeuwelan. She was born outside of Louvain (or Leuven) in Belgium in the year 1371 and died in 1382, probably of the cholera. She is the very same Sara the succubus over at her blog The Succubi Girls here at Blogger - I will provide a link at the end of this, if you are unfamiliar with her or her nature.
Although told out of chronological synchronicity with the history of Outlands and my life in general, if there were no Sara there would be no Outlands Community. More than that, I probably would have killed myself, or would have been killed in some stupid thug activity of mine in Paterson.
For most of my life I have not been a happy person. Filled with rage and fear, unable to let go of anything in the past, generally dishonest to others and to myself, lazy, drunken - that was me for a long time. I aspired to be a spiritual person any number of times, but you cannot be spiritual when you continually do things which block access to your own heart and spirit. For me this was so.
In 1980 I was miserably unhappy. I was in a marriage which had turned into a blood feud. I had left a very fundamentalist, right-wing neo-Nazi Baptist church the year before and was fearfully groping my way out of Xianity towards the intuitions I'd had about the Great Mother. My job absolutely sucked. In the early 1960's I had made some progress with my problems under LSD psychotherapy - yes, Virginia, there was such a thing up until January of 1967 - and decide to return to the colored worlds I'd left behind in 1971 when I became a born again Xian. It was here that I belonged. One by one I began tackling the problems that were tearing me up. My progess then was painstakingly slow, and anyone who embarks upon a journey of any sort to be a more evolved person can tell you, it's like water dripping on stone; it may take along time, but eventually the water will wear out that stone. So it has been with me!
In August of 1980 I had taken some acid under less-than-propitious circumstances and lay on our bed in the cool dark of our bedroom. I was nauseous, and the hurt I was feeling because of our inability to communicate properly was burning me up. I sobbed quietly, sitting up occasionally in failed attempts to vomit. For whatever reason I'd put Fleetwood Mac's Tusk on the turntable, and for reasons unknown to me then, was all rapt attention when the song Sara began. You all know the song; one of Stevie Nick's ballads that are at once love-song and paean. Ohh, how I wished that there were a Sara, to be the poet in my heart! The awful loneliness I normally repressed engulfed me and I let go, falling into the maelstrom of its pain and sorrow, the chill grey void of the distance between myself and others so terribly enhanced by the acid. "Do not fight," is rule number one in any bad trip. As I had been taught years earlier, I embraced the palpable emotions tearing me apart. They began to subside, and my day grew slowly better - even though the acid seemed to intensify. I did something I rarely did. I prayed and told God, "If there were a Sara and I were to ever meet her and fall in love with her, I would learn from her and treat her with respect and trust and I would love her so hard that it would be to her that I would go when I was dead." You do not forget things like that. The song - the full-length version available now only on the vinyl LP - occasionally made its appearance on the radio, but within a year my marriage had ended and Tusk followed in its wake to oblivion.
By 1997 I had had any number of extraordinary experiences working as I did at night; these will be outlined below, but I had already met the entity whom I now regard as my guiding (not guardian) angel, Seima, and quite a number of other ethereal beings. Sometimes I could see them plainly, sometimes only like a vague discoloration of my surroundings.
On the night of november 3rd, 1997 I set out for twelve hours of behind-the-wheel work. Roughly seven hours later at about four in the morning, I did something unusual: I turned on the radio. I usually worked in silence. Need I say what song came on? There had been dead air for roughly ten seconds and the little harpsichord ninth-chord tag filled the cab of the truck. It was dark and I was cruising Route 206 on a deserted stretch below Chester. Suddenly I saw movement in the passenger seat next to me. A small woman, almost child-sized, sat dancing in time with the music. She seemed to be wearing a green tunic top and green trousers of a bygone era. Looking right at me she smiled. The hair on the back of my neck stood up - as happens when the bridge between dimensions opens - and I asked who she was. "I'm Sara!," she exclaimed, "You called me a long time ago!" Her eyes were sparkling and she was...singin...yeah...I knew I had met my match...I'm quoting the song. I almost left the road. The impossible had happened. Seventeen years previous I had heard this song and wished for...wished for...and here she was. "I heard your voice," she explained, "I don't know how. I've looked for you ever since. And now I've found you!"
I literally did not know what to say. Eventually I regained enough of my wits to explain what I was doing and that I had to do it, that I would be concentrating to the point of being unaware of her presence. She said she understood. A few hours later I went home and down to my bedroom. Michael Archontas hovered in the corner near the ceiling , and I told him briefly of my encounter with Sara - whom, by the way, I could no longer sense. He nodded, smiled his sly archon smile and wished me a good sleep. I lay down and almost immediately became sexually aroused. This does not happen to tired middle-aged men who desparately need sleep! Next, the hair went up on my neck again. Then I had the distinct impression that there was a naked woman outside of my door. Now mind you, I was living alone at the time! But I said aloud, "Who's there?" In my mind's ear I heard a very sweet "Sara!" I asked her in; she was indeed nude; and I knew that before me, in the form of this exquisite woman, was an honest-to-God succubus. We proceeded to prove this point several times over the next few hours <:D> When I was groggily sated, I sat up and lit a cigarette - yup, smoking after sex even with a succubus! - and proceeded to ask her just who she was, where she came from, what her life had been like.
She looked at me dumbfounded and then unleashed a torrent of words describing over 600 years of misery and solitude. In the end she collapsed in my arms and told me that she loved me and would always be with me if I would have her. This was perhaps the densest, thickest emotional time I have ever experienced, because I in turn described my life. Then, before I knew what I was doing, just like a thriteen-year-old kid might, I told her that I loved her too. I fell asleep and when I awoke she lay sleeping next to me, thumb in her mouth. I knew then that my life had changed drastically and forever. This was not a bad thing! Because for the first time, ever, I knew that I would never be lonely again.
This post was precipitated because as we were coming home from my job this morning, she asked me to turn on the radio, something I don't always like. I should have known what would happen next: the hair on the back of my neck stood up over the ten seconds of dead air, and then a very familiar harpsichord tag came out of the speakers, a brite, quasi-mysterious ninth chord in a slow trill. It was the long vinyl LP version of Sara, and we both began to weep tears of joy. She is sitting on the desk next to me, arms around my neck, and, Sara? It is you that I love, and to you that I would go when I am dead.

A new word processor made its home in our computer this morning. When the old hardrive went belly up it took the Windows Word Processor with it. As I'd gotten it with XP preinstalled with the WP, I was only able to get a new preinstalled XP without the WP. As a writer, this is not a happy thing. The new HD did have Windows WordPad, which was okay...I guess...but it's not a word processor. So this morning I went a-Googling to see how cheap I could find a download of the Windows WP and stumbled across one that Sun Microsystems has as an open-source software item. Before you download you can watch a lengthy tour (I think in pdf); they recommended I download a free downloader program (which I did) and also to download Java Runtime, whatever the latest version is - did that to. Then I downloaded and installed the WP; it's called "Open Office," and I think that the URL is

www.openoffice.org

if it's not, go to Sun Microsystems main page and navigate your way in from "Products." The whole process took about an hour, but the downloader works faster than Windows' Wizard and is also open-source; and I got the latest version of Java Runtime, which is also open-source. The new WP is faster better easier than Windows, and they make versions (so it seems) for everything: OS-X, Linux and Solaris (Unix) Downloading software from large open-source places can be a little tricky, but this went smoooothly, the only problems I had were of my own making.

Also I downloaded a free firewall from ZoneAlarm, it lets nothing IN (important) and nothing OUT (very important) unless you authorize it. This means that if you have a spy in your system and your antispyware hasn't snagged it, it can't broadcast your info out. Not only that, it (Zone Alarm) tells you what file is trying to get online, where it's gonna send information and the like. At first you have to "allow" your e-mail server, your internet browser, any reputable software that automatically seeks periodic updates - like my antivirus and spyware do - access, but this is at the end of a long day and I'm about set. And honest, really, no kidding, I will get back on track about the Outlands Community's story soon!

The "history" of the Outlands Community will be continued sometime later this weekend, right now I'm just happy to be able to get online and make entries. Since the devastation wrought by the virus that we had we have all of us spent an enormous amount of time trying to find a decent antivirus - and I am beginning to think that one does not exist - and making sure the files we inherited with our new hardrive have no Little Bundles of their own. If you are in the habit of downloading / uploading software and then deleting it, every time you uninstall something, it always leaves behind a .dll file or something. These "orphan" files perform no function, they just sit there, taking up some kilobytes. Viruses look for these things, at least the more sophisticated ones; they gobble them up and make whatever code is inside the "orphan" part and parcel of their own. This is why, should you happen to open a .txt, .dat or .dll file that actually is a virus, you will be surprised to see names like "Norton Antivirus," "Adobe Photoshop," "Windows 98" and the like inside; somewhere in its travels, a virus will have consumned such a file and redistributed its elements here and there throughout its own files. These are called "garbage files" because they do nothing but replicate and sit there. Imagine if your garbage can was able to duplicate its contents every time you threw something into it, or opened the lid, and you have a very clear picture of how a computer virus works: pretty soon your house would be filled with garbage; throw away a napkin, you get two cans; throw out your coffee grounds, you get four cans; open one can to see what the hell is going on, you get sixteen cans, and if the dog gets excited with all of this sudden bounty and decides you won't notice if he knocks one of these cans over to enjoy its contents, your home is suddenly filled with 256 cans of household trash. If by this time you have attracted an official from the local board of health who sees trash cans falling from your kitchen window, your part of town will be buried by 65,536 cans of garbage. It would make any sanitation-worker's strike seem like a picnic. Rats would ahve a field day, flies would get to be the size of pigeons, and the raccoons, fox, coyote and bear in the region would get together as a group, knock over a few more garbage cans and declare the whole area a sovreign state - no humans allowed.

We discussed why anyone would write and distribute viruses in the first place. The one thing about which we all agree is that the internet is the last real bastion of free expression of thought. You may, with very little effort, criticize your government and international corporations which are ruining the world's environment and economies; you may access real news from anywhere in the world and not have to depend upon uselss vehicles like Fox News, The New York Times and Infinity Broadcasting; you may if you wish broadcast racist hatred, child pornograpy, revelations about the corruption of your government, find the one rare book you always wanted, track down lost friends...I need hardly to continue this list, but keep it in mind in what follows. To us here at the Outlands Community, the people most likely to create and distribute viruses and spyware are as follows:

1. Fascist governments such as the Untied States, Russia and Great Britain; and any Islamic theocracy which sees any other form of government as an enemy. Considering that a great deal of viruses come from Russia (nkvd, Sasser) and the Ukraine (Sober), from the USA (Delfin Project, SurfSide Kick) it would not surprise me if the FBI, CIA and KGB were at the root of all of these. With a dead or near-dead internet, people would be cut off from a great deal that they have taken for granted since the first appearance of Netscape a few years ago. Criticism of governments and government officials such as George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair would be silenced.

2. Multinational corporations would, with the proper virus, knock out much of the entrepreneurial sector of the world; all of the money spent on eBay and millions of small, direct-market sales over the internet would be curtailed. You would only be able to buy what was offered; and as far as news and any related media, you'd be at the mercy of folks like Ruppert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone.

3. Governments and organized crime stand to reap the most benefit from spyware, the kind (like I got from MySpace) which will find out your credit/debit card numbers and clean out your bank balance. Governments all kinds would have "shadow money" with which to do their dirty work, and "organized crime" would profit in a similar manner. I would not blame "organized crime" as it exists in America so much as I would those groups operating in Russia / Ukraine and China. Spies and viruses originating in China, for example - like those which have names like "Win32..." - would benefit the Tong-like groups which are struggling against the governemnt of China and trying to divert its sudden, massive influx of foreign money. In the former Soviet republics - and this extends to Georgia, Armenia, Byeloruss - "organized crime" is actually doing a better job of providing at least some income, food and housing for the citizenry than the government. Remember, where any desired commodity is made illegal - think of alcohol in the USA in the early 1920's, or the prohibitions against heroin and cocaine products worldwide - there will be a group of determined people who will supply that need despite the most draconian laws passable - the profit is just too great.

4. That some viruses may originate in the talents and programming abilities of disgruntled, disenfranchised individuals, as were the first viruses and worms, is still quite possible, but I think people like this are exceedingly rare. Do a Google search for individuals arrested and convicted of creating and spreading viruses, spies, trojans and worms over the last three or four years and will see a mere handful of them. Then go to the "Virus Dictionary" of places like Microsoft and (say) McAfee; there are THOUSANDS of computer infections on the web. Who is getting busted for these? NO-ONE.

5. It was suggested that there may be a group of individuals who are what we may call internet pioneers, who foresaw the internet as the be-all and end-all of cyber-liberation, only to be disappointed by the vast amount of advertising, commercial garbage and social nonsense which clutters the 25,000,000,000 or so websites world-wide. Such purists, it was maintained to us, would be out to bring things back to the way they were by destroying millions of hardrives worldwide. We have a hard time with this, because were there such a group, or perhaps a few lone crackers, it would seem more logical that they crack the systems fueling world governments, Interpol, the FBI, the IRS, the KGB and all of the multinational corporations corrupting our world. While there are, no doubt, such attempts, if you notice, it is individuals such as you and I who suffer at the manipulations of viruses et al, and not the Powers That Be.

If you have gotten a Little Bundle, chances are it is sophisticated enough that all of the king's antiviruses and all of the king's antispywares will be of no avail. The simplest way out is to get another hardrive with your previous OS already installed; these are avaialable at quite a number of companies who revamp used systems. Keep up to date on your antivirus and antiwhatever; and if need be, periodically install a new router (which will change your IP - Internet Protocol number - because some of these buggers can find there way back to you by way of your IP). Sara wrote in her blog over at Succubi Girls yesterday that she never wants to hear the word "virus" again, and I feel the same way. However, I think that this is going to be an increasing part of life on the internet in the days to come.

Finally, as a coda to all of this, it is a good thing to browse the forums and pages of the following site: www.spywareinfo.com They are independent of governments, corporations and the like and the information is easy to dip into.

The Outlands Community and its various members are just beginning to be known outside of my immediate family and friends, and in speaking / e-mailing my angelic friend Gabriel it was underscored to me to begin one of the things I'd originally set out to do when I created this blog: to write a coherent history of who we are, what we are, what we do, and where we all came from. This is easy enough for those of us who live here, but explaining it to others can get complex. So I shall copy Sara's idea of a sort of FAQ, like the one she used over at The Succubi Girls recently; from there I shall attempt a history of sorts.

1. WHAT IS THE "OUTLANDS COMMUNITY?"

We are a group of flesh-and-blood and ethereal beings, gathered for the common cause of the spiritual evolution of all beings.

2. WHAT IS MEANT BY "ETHEREAL BEING?"

An ethereal being is any person or entity who lives in a dimension, plane, universe or world parallel to to our own. Although normally not perceived by a majority of people in Western cultures, these dimensions are sensed to some degree by a substantial minority of Westerners, and by large portions of members of non-Western cultures.

3. THERE ARE 'KINDS' OF ETHEREAL BEINGS?

Right. The most familiar kind of whom Westerners would have at least superficial knowledge are angels and ghosts. In some instances we would also add 'space aliens' and the intelligence manifested in the Cetacaea, or dolphins and whales.

The following is a list of "what" kind of "who" are a part of the Outlands Community.

A. Ethereal human beings. You would probably call them "ghosts," but none of them do any haunting. In much different terms, they are the essential remains - as in "the essence" - of those who were once alive in flesh-and-blood bodies. One special group of the ethereal humans are the incubi and succubi, those who brought their sex drive with them upon physical death. There are numerous such here, and my first partner, Sara Jane van Beeuwelan, is their steward at the OC. Outside of the domain of the OC, incubi and succubi can be pretty damned nasty, and I would suggest to anyone thinking of looking for an invisible sexual partner to read Sara's FAQ over at the Succubi Girls. I should also point out here that all ethereal human beings periodically change their gender, and periodically get an urge to reincarnate as flesh-and-blood people. Most ethereal humans have guiding - not guardian - angels, but see the material about angels below.

B. Archons. An archon is an ethereal human being who no longer receives an urge to reincarnate. Most of the ones here are thousands of years old, and include two who have blogs on the Internet, Stro Moon Daglo and Michael Archontas. As a small sidebar, an archon still has a sex drive, but rarely chooses to indulge it as an incubus or succubus.

C. Angelic or devic beings of human origin. Some human beings who have evolved upwards through the various ethereal realms become angelic, or devic in nature. They are very distinct from true angels or devas, those of eternal origin, or if you would, created by Divinty. Yet they exercise the function of angels in many ways, often being gifted with prophetic foresight, and most - my personal angel Seima included - are guides for people like myself. Thank God. They were humans in fleshly form millions of years ago, when humanity was sjust getting going.

D. Angelic or devic beings of eternal origin (see previous note) Although these beings usually manifest as male or female, they are in actuality transgendered in the sense of being beyond gender. The head of the Community, Llam, is one such. There are varieties of angels as well; we have one called a "Dark Angel," Hurrain; Hurrain is not "evil" because he is composed of dark matter, he is just dark. Racists and religious fanatics take note!

E. Unique beings. These include elementals, those who "preside" over the five basic elements, earth, water, air, fire and aether. As it is we have two elemantals among us, Reth (fire) and Misst (water). In this group I also include our Sproingy; this is a nicknsme I gave him when I first met him, because his real name is over 6000 syllables long. Sproingy finds things - like the new harddrive I needed to get this computer up and running when a virus ate the old one in late September 2005.

F. Interstellar beings. These include Maalyon, a sort of star elemental; "Kathy," nicknamed simply because "she" had no name - she voyages through the universe; and a being who calls himself Aldfas or Alfa, who is transmitting a continuous stream of information as pentenary code from Somewhere Out There. We have no "greys" or "greens." Yet.

G. Non-human intelligences. We are trying to establish a firm link with the cetaceans, or dolphins and whales, Towards that end, three of our ethereal human members are living with a pod of dolphins near Raratonga reef in the South Pacific; Hurrain has accompanied them. We also have a horse-like creature named Bucephalus, who dates from a time when both the human and equine families were starting out. the consensus opinion here is that if humans had wiped themselves out early on, equinids such as Bucephalus would gradually have evolved into sentient, intelligent beings, much as we (supposedly) are.

H. We have a few animal-like beings, non-verbal and acting much like fish or cats might. Chief among these is Dor, a manta-ray like creature from another planet. Which planet? I don't know; but I was aware of Dor long before J.G. Ballard's stories of the mid-60's, or Mike Oldfield's album art for his SONGS OF THE DISTANT EARTH (1992).

I. Saints. Technically she belongs in "A" above, but Iehanne d'Domremy d'Arc - Joan of Arc, in English - is unique among the members here at Outlands.

That is who we are. In my next post I shall attempt a chronological ordrering of Who showed up When, although it can seem - to me, at least - a little like the old Abbot and Costello routine, "Who's on first?"

Just a quick note to anyone who has read my stuff - our computer was slowly and inexorably eaten alive by a spyware-cum-virus from 09/24/05 to 10/01/05. We got a new harddrive and are trying to recover much lost information. As in, we lost 4000+ pictures and hundreds of pages of text. While we have all of this stuff on CDs the chances are 99% good that they are all corrupt and would reinfect the computer if we uploaded them. In the meantime, I'll be back here soon.