Into the Cantina

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Remember right-wing radio? I used to tune in when I was on long drives, especially when I was getting sleepy and I could rely on the shock-jocks to aggravate me enough to keep me awake. On a deeper level, those reactions were one of the main reasons for listening: it was fascinating and illuminating to observe when and where the talk would get my political goat.

As a writer, I have never been interested in defining that particular breed of goat. For one reason, I don’t think the cluster of frequencies I hop between on the political spectrum are particularly interesting, or surprising, or, frankly, consistent. I am so large I not only contain multitudes, but flat-out contradictions — some historical materialism here, some anarcho-libertarianism there, with social democracy (local) balanced by realpolitik (global) and a rather fatalistic posthuman systems logic (planetary) informed by my study of media technologies and ecology — all leavened with a good heaping of cosmic drop-out dharma bum fuckitall. Like many folks, I am alienated from American political discourse, but in a pinch I fall back, like an OG conservative, on tribal loyalty to the “traditional values” I grew up with in the coastal Californian university town of my youth, with its blend of progressive sentiments, environmentalism, and “live and let live” lifestyle tolerance.

Another reason I skirt around political talk is that taking positions generally means debating such positions, and debating has never held much appeal to me. I am much less interested in crafting and defending combative stances than in mapping and understanding the environment out of which such perspectives crystalize. And that means spending a lot of time really trying to understand where other people are coming from. For a long time, I was a devoted practitioner of Robert Anton Wilson’s art of spelunking reality tunnels, sticking around long enough to get the lay of the land and catch the vibe. I subscribed to media feeds that seemed repugnant, studied weird religions and conspiracy theories, exposed myself to fetishes and fantasies that didn’t float my boat. When I met hardcore conservatives, or born-again Christians, or flat earthers, a sort of ontological diplomacy kicked in. Like a diplomat or an empath, I tended to lean in. Why play debate club when you can practice intimate anthropology?

Political discourse — as well as conspiracy culture and the weirdosphere — has grown more toxic and confrontational in the last decade or so, which makes this game a lot less rewarding, let alone fun. I got the first taste of the coming storm in my car back then, when I tuned into Rush or Michael Savage. Initially, right-wing talk radio seemed to offer a relatively unvarnished way to tap into the discourse, the ideas driving right-wing thought leaders and the lumpen voices the hosts were making room for (and manipulating). Then I realized it wasn’t really about discourse. It was about affect: raw, often inchoate emotions, like fear, outrage and resentment, stirred up into a brujo’s brew and then directed like a magic dart towards certain targets. Many of these feelings I could understand and even empathize with (that diplomat thing). But there was one vibe I could never grok, or stomach, a vibe that now, at the blazing tail end of this deplorable U.S. presidential race, seems to have seized the hearts of many in the MAGAverse: xenophobia. The ancient hates that fuel racism are obviously a huge part of this, but I think the more abstract notion of “xenophobia” — fear and revulsion of the other — lets us understand something else about the affective and existential source of this attitude. It’s what Reverend Hank Tuell‚ a New York pastor who nixed plans to open a migrant shelter after his church received violent threats, described to the New York Times as the “demonization of the different.”  

Only a smidgen of evolutionary psychology is needed to understand this demonization. Beings beyond the tribe are scary, potentially threatening, and just plain weird. But what about the millions of people like me? What about xenophiles? When I reject xenophobia as incomprehensible and repellent, I am not only giving voice to a moral principal or a political position but to a feeling, an aesthetic, an imaginal orientation. I enjoy difference — aesthetically, culturally, ontologically. Some of this stuff is pretty typical for liberal types. I like downtowns, flea markets, global travel, ethnic food, so-called “world music.” Intellectually and aesthetically, I am drawn to juxtaposition and collage, miscegenation and hybridity. I like weird stuff, especially when it gets uncomfortable. I also believe, with William James, that the reality we inhabit is better described as a pluriverse than a universe. It’s difference all the way down (even if it’s ultimately one). So while I am drawn to and informed by some premodern traditions, I understand these currents through an essentially cosmopolitan lens. This makes me an anti-racist and pro-LGBTQ by nature, but not necessarily for reasons that would earn a stamp of approval from the apparatchiks of DEI, because they smack too much of exoticism and pleasure.

But that’s not the point. I’m not claiming in any way to be noble or marked with virtue. Like reality itself, I’m a hot mess. What I am interested in, is where this love and fascination, however “problematic,” comes from? If xenophobia is natural, how is xenophilia learned? Did my Ivy League schooling program me with a belief in the infinite expansion of “rights” discourse? Nah. Am I driven by a hatred of white people or European culture? Not even close. Am I party to some kumbaya progressive groupthink? I would rather hang the Gadsden flag from my roof than plant one of those “In this house we believe” signs in the lawn. No, when I puzzle over the affective root of my attraction to the risks and rewards of difference, and the radical democracy it implies, I keep coming back to a primal scene of intoxicating alterity I first encountered a long time ago, in a Valley Circle Theatre far, far away:

Mos Eisley Cantina.

Also known as Chalmun's Spaceport Cantina, Chalmun's, or simply the Cantina, the watering hole in the dirtbag spaceport of Mos Eisley on the desert planet of Tatooine was just one of many arresting sights and sounds that jacked my pliant brainstem that spring of 1977, when, like a generation of impressionable pre-adolescents, I saw “Star Wars” after waiting hours in line over opening weekend down in sunny Mission Valley.

I am not sure how we got the word back then that something so mighty was afoot, but the word was out, and the word was good, especially those yellow words that crawled up the screen at the start of the film, receding at an occult angle as ancient and familiar as the pyramids of Giza or an astrological trine. Those words were very good. But among the many impressions that the first Star Wars film screened onto the blank t-shirt of my young soul, among the wookies and light sabers and hologram princesses and X-wing fighters, and other images etched ever deeper over the subsequent weeks of repeat big-screen viewing, easily the most lasting and influential marks were made by that weird cantina.

As is probably unnecessary to recall, Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, accompanied by the droids C-3PO and R2-D2, arrive in Mos Eisley, which the old Jedi describes as “a wretched hive of scum and villainy.” After Obi-Wan whips out some mad NLP on a hapless Imperial stormtrooper, the crew head for the Cantina — “a rough place” — to find a pilot and ship to take them to Alderaan, Princess Leia's home planet. Makeup artist Stuart Freeborn described the Cantina sequence as a "shock" scene; until this point in the film, the audience has seen only a handful of non-human creatures, and now we are tossed into a bubbling gumbo of threatening, bizarre, and muppety otherness.

In the novelization of the film, Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, which George Lucas wrote with Alan Dean Foster, the Cantina’s clientele include “one-eyed creatures and thousand-eyed, creatures with scales, creatures with fur”; everywhere there are “tentacles, claws and hands...wrapped around drinking utensils.” This language is important because, imaginally speaking, the Cantina hosts a menagerie that reaches from the angelic — the thousand-eyed — to the animal. Star Wars nerds, some of whom have itemized every figure in these shots, will count off the races represented, including Talz, Bith, Devaronian, Ithorian, Anzati, Lutrillian, Defel, Duros, Morseerian, and Aqualish. Crucially, nearly all the conversations we overhear are between different races, a potent pluralism whose spiciness was not lost on Richard Pryor later that year.

Of course, all this alterity comes in a rather familiar package. That’s part of the pixie dust of Star Wars: George Lucas raided genres of the past and hustled the goods into the future. The archetype for the sandstone cantina is, of course, the saloons of Western film. Costume designer John Mollo even included some outfits borrowed from Western films, and when Obi-Wan severs the hand of an Aqualish interloper — displaying a Western hero’s capacity for righteous and pointlessly excessive violence — the crowd responds in a familiar ritual: a moment of silence, and an immediate return to smoke and drink and chatter.

The fact that this is a “cantina” and not a saloon also reflects the logic of Westerns, and the fact that Mexico — which, like Spain, is known for its cantinas — functions as the Western’s (and Hollywood’s) own margin of otherness. It’s not-home turf. Cantinas were also typically masculine spaces, and while there are some human females present at Chalmun’s, and all manner of ungendered aliens, the vibe is implicitly male, and barely erotic. Within the genre of the Western, whose classic form involves the imposition of (white) code on ruffians, pagans, and wilderness, saloons often represent spaces of slippage, moral ambiguity, negotiated comradery, social conflict, and the mingling of classes and, at least in later Westerns, skin colors. They are the most important “third place” of the Western, which means that, for all their violence and hedonistic excess, they are the space of the demos — the anarchic agora of primitive democracy.

A truth too often missed by today’s institutionally managed multiculturalism is that diversity often thrives at the edge of settled law, outside of homogeneous cultures, and proximate to trade and, therefore, to wayward desire and enmity. It is no accident that today’s nationalists and nativists not only oppose immigration but also generally oppose global trade, that Trump wants massive tariffs. Despite the extraordinary flaws of the post-war neoliberal order, whose neocolonialist karma is now coming due, global trade demands a degree of multicultural pluralism which, for all its own hypocrisies and terrible limitations, is, let’s face it, still better than world war. In a recent New Yorker article about capitalism and national sovereignty, Gideon Lewis-Kraus describes the growth of port zones in the early modern era, freewheeling enclaves that predated the nation-state. Here two regimes existed in parallel, one for locals, and a looser one for foreign traders.

Such dual-economy arrangements later allowed the great imperial powers to make their commitment to free exchange, and to a degree of pluralism, commensurable with their ongoing subjugation of native peoples. Colonial outposts like Singapore and Hong Kong flourished as cosmopolitan hubs, honorary extensions of the metropole into alien lands. The archetype of the Mos Eisley cantina was born.

Whatever the horrors of the economies that drive them, such enclaves are hotbeds of culture. In Star Wars — OK, OK, “A New Hope” — we hear seven Bith musicians well-known in fanlore as Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes. We can learn something from the kind of music they play. Despite the bizarreness of the instruments — a kloo horn, a Dorenian beshniquel, and the ommni box — the music is weirdly familiar for a reason. Lucas gave composer John Williams a prompt: what if the band had discovered a Benny Goodman score under a rock and were doing their best to decipher it? What we hear is a mutant twist on “Sing Sing Sing,” all recorded with analog instruments like steel drums and out of tune kazoos. In other words, we are hearing jazz, a music born out of alienated dislocation in a funky and fucked-up port town, and soon flourishing as the supreme expression of urban modernity. Sure, we are hearing crossover jazz, but that’s also the point, just the way Hollywood is crossover Americana. Jews can play it, Bith can play it. And by grooving to this tune, we too are drawn into the cantina, which we suddenly recognize is closer to home than we imagined.

Of course even the most anarchic enclaves draw exclusionary boundaries. And there is a stark limitation to Mos Eisley’s bottom-of-the-barrel demos, one that we learn immediately after Luke, Obi-Wan, C-3PO and R2-D2 enter the bar and set off an alarm: no droids. “We don’t serve their kind here,” growls Wuher the barkeep. Canon fiction will later explain Wuher’s loathing: his parents were killed by battle droids during the Clone Wars. But is this simply another instance of racial hatred, now directed against technological persons? Perhaps something more profound lurks in this exclusionary gesture (one which, we need add, is no longer in effect by the era of The Mandalorian, when the barkeep is none other than EV-9D9, a formerly malevolent droid of Jabba the Hutt).

What if Wuher is an extra-diagetic prophet? Perhaps his no-droid policy is a desperate attempt to maintain the analog wonder of the late 1970s Star Wars movies against the onslaught of digital revisions Lucas would unleash when he got his hands on the toys. Lucas’ ongoing tinkering of the cantina scene, which began in the 1997 Special Edition, is illuminating here. His most famous switcheroo alters Han Solo’s gunfight with Greedo so that Greedo appears to attack first — in Western terms, a “Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” brush-up of the moral hero, a whitewashing that inspired the fan cry “Han shot first!”. But what else gets the ax? In later revisions, the devilish looking Devaronian stays, but a fat-fanged, red-eyed werewolf is replaced by some far-out aliens, as if Lucas wanted to repress his own debt to the prosthetic, monster-movie past.

But there is possibly a deeper dimension to Wuher’s policy, one that came to mind recently when I read an excerpt from an interview with Yuval Harari:

AI should not take part in human conversations unless it identifies as an AI. We can imagine democracy as a group of people standing in a circle and talking with each other. And suddenly a group of robots enter the circle and start talking very loudly and with a lot of passion. And you don’t know who are the robots and who are the humans. This is what is happening right now all over the world. And this is why the conversation is collapsing. And there is a simple antidote. The robots are not welcome into the circle of conversation unless they identify as bots. 

Now the droids are still clearly droids, but there is a deeper sense in which their presence represents the incursion of a logic that threatens the demos, even a low-rent piratical demos of mutual exploitation and violence like the Cantina. While the desert of Tatooine resonates with and recalls the landscapes of the Western, it also invokes Dune, and one particular feature of the Dune universe. I am not talking here about the spice melange, which Lucas translated into his mythos as the psychoactive “spice,” extracted at least in part from the “spice mines of Kessel” C-3P0 mentions. (Canon lore claims that, when the Cantina was run by the wookie Chalmun, it served as an illegal “spice den.”) But the spice is not the important Dune resonance here. Wuher’s Jim Crow refusal of the droids actually suggests the buddings of the Butlerian Jihad, the violent galaxy-wide campaign to rid the universe of intelligent machines and to install and implement a new moral commandment the Orange Catholic Bible puts thus: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

I don’t know about you, but that kind of scorched chip policy doesn’t sound like the worst idea to me, even if it is impossible to imagine. But does this attitude represent xenophobia, as some posthuman philosophers and AI rights activists might want to claim? Perhaps it represents the opposite. Why? Because, as older xenophiles like me are wont to tell you, it’s pretty clear that real differences are getting tamped down and even sucked out of our increasingly digitized world. Even as conflicts intensify on a shrinking globe, a flattening digital equivalence infects cultures everywhere, something that contemporary multicultural dogma sometimes aids and abets. Global chains, universal media platforms, and corporate monocultures are bad enough, but these are nothing compared to AI and its potential vampirization, repackaging, and ultimate simulation of all human cultural activities. Talk about a Great Replacement theory!

Bartender, I’ll take a Tatooine Sunset. Better make it two.

Upcoming Events

• The night after election Tuesday may not be the most obvious time to gather with your fellow freaks for the Chalice, the Berkeley Alembic’s monthly psychedelic salon. But it might make more sense than you know. For this month’s event, which goes down at 7pm on Wednesday, November 6, we are going to do something special: we are going to invent our own psychedelic religion. We’ll start with a few thoughts from Chalice co-hosts Maria Mangini, Christian Greer, and myself on the history and practice of collective psychedelic spirituality — its value and dangers, its creative possibilities, its sometimes sublime weirdness. Then we will break up in groups and, based on a core set of values and symbols we will choose, create the features of a 21st-century psychedelic religion: liturgical calendar, vestments, ritual initiations, iconography. The goal is fun, insight, humor, and visionary possibility. It’s a donation thing, but please register before hand.

Our Lady of Visions (image J. Christian Greer)

• On Friday, November 22, at 7pm, one week after Cosmic Chambo presents an absolutely killer heavy metal yin yoga class that you should totally check out, the Alembic will host the second in a series of occasional workshops devoted to the senses that I’ve been hosting. Sense Gates: Smell takes up perhaps the funkiest sensory modality, and the one most magically linked to our moods and memories. For this evening’s exploration, I will be joined by Nicholas Paul, a trans-disciplinary thinker, mover, and shaker who also happens to be a total fragrance freak. We will begin the evening with some banter and brouhaha about the Path of Scent, including chat about amygdalas, rot, musk, angiosperms, Eno, and a certain famous French sponge cake. Then we will get down to business with smells at once sublime, nostalgic, and a bit nasty. Particular attention will be paid to the role that language plays in shaping and expressing our nebulous nasal experiences. Sliding scale, $15-$30. Register here.

Appearances

• I love interviewing folks, and my latest printed chat is with my pal and underground comrade Christian Greer, who has just released the remarkable Void Machines: The Paper Shrines of J. Christian Greer. In addition to his pilgrimage practice and his psychedelic scholarship, Christian is a devotee of collage, one of my favorite art forms, and dozens of his beautifully reproduced pieces are collected here. I love the materiality of collage, its relationship to print media, and the infinite, satiric, and spiritual potential of the juxtapositions that drive the energy, humor, and synchronistic power of the form. (For more of my thoughts on assemblage arts like collage and their relationship to the sacred, see my essay “The Alchemy of Trash.”) Christian’s “paper shrines” are esoteric, possessed, incandescent, delightful. In our conversation, we discuss archetypes, entropy, Philip K. Dick, Jack Kirby, “artists”, collecting, manga, and a lot more. Void Machines is edited by Christian’s brilliant and sassy partner Michelle K. Oing and published by San Francisco’s dynamite Colpa Press. Copies aren’t gonna be around forever, and the book won’t be reprinted when they go, so you might wanna snap one up. Yanks should head to Amazon; others make your way to eBay.

• One of my favorite podcast conversations ever was a chat I had with my friend and consciousness culture colleague Michael Taft for his Deconstructing Yourself podcast. For the episode Transgression, we took up something risky: the notion of risk, and its value and possibly necessary role in spiritual, psychedelic, and existential pursuits. As a historian of alternative spirituality and the counterculture, I am all too familiar with the dangers and delights of the crazy wisdom past, and its almost diametrical opposition to today’s concerns with safety, credentials, and informed consent. Recently, in his excellent Substack Ecstatic Integration, Jules Evans took up the topic of risk and responded in depth to our conversation. Though we have somewhat different approaches, I have huge respect for Jules and both the dedicated independent journalism he cranks out and the care and thoughtfulness he brings to his core concerns. In this post, I was particularly impressed with his insightful critique of an analogy I first picked up from conversations with Earth and Fire Erowid years ago: the connection between psychedelic risk and extreme sports.

• OK, this is the last media share about Blotter, I promise, at least until someone is crazy enough to make a documentary or something. This chat, short and sweet, is for Spotlight On, hosted by the seasoned cultural commentator and cool dude Lawrence Peryer.

Readership Survey

I included this last month but it would be cool to get a few more responses. Looking forward, I want to move towards posting more than once a month but I won’t always be able to do longer essays. I am also considering subscriber-only content, perhaps Zoom meet-ups or audio content. I have around three hundred paid subscribers and I would like to more actively honor that support. If you have any strong opinions or requests, please let me know at asktheburningshore@gmail.com.

Straight Outta Mos Eisley

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