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Archive for the ‘Counterculture’ Category

Common Purpose: real power

Audacious powerplay
Common Purpose is a registered charity, founded by people involved in the creation of Demos, which exists to identify and train current and future leaders in business, politics, national and local government and wider civil society to form opinion and influence policy making. It has advocates in institutions all over the place, from teachers in schools to politicians in central government. The charity’s head, Julia Middleton, wrote a book on its aims called Beyond Authority, which is the basis of CP’s slogan: “People who lead beyond their authority can produce change beyond their direct circle of control.” Middleton’s book’s title hints at a move away from oligarchic authority, but the CP slogan suggests an audacious powerplay rather than a rejection of authority.

Note that Middleton’s book is not called Beyond Power. The CP site says that the leaders it is fostering should learn to “understand how power works in different worlds: find out where real power is and spot relationships between players”. Surely, if you’re spotting where the ‘real power’ is, you’ve already assumed a privileged vantage point. Does that privileged position not relocate the source of the ‘real power’ and place it in the hands of the trained observer/leader who understands the wider context?

Ideas futures
Also, have a look at The Tomorrow Project (tagline: “Using the future to understand the present”), a companion website to CP, which provides information on, for example, globalisation and climate change. Demos regard “futures thinking” as vital and cite a quote on scenario planning, the technical basis of “futures thinking” in its favour: “Scenario planning ensures that you are not always right about the future, but - better - that you are almost never wrong.” If you thought we’d seen the last of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s policy analysis market (see here for another internet view), think again.

This marketplace for ideas futures immediately brings to mind the more visionary work of Philip K. Dick.

Pro and anti
I’ve been reading about Common Purpose on the internet and can find only extreme opinions, mostly against it. For instance, heavily in the ‘anti’ camp there’s ex-Royal Navy anti-submarine warfare officer, Brian Gerrish, who runs UK Column and who says, among other things, that the EU is evil and that Common Purpose brainwashes its participants and proposes a treasonable agenda in this video on Common Purpose.

On the ‘pro’ side, there’s Stef Lewandowksi, who uses the negative criticisms of Common Purpose by the BNP, UKIP and David Icke, among others, to taint any further criticism of the organisation by association, consigning “the loons”, or ‘obviously’ idiotic critics, to the internet nuthouse. [N.B. This person’s site was not working properly when I looked at it, so I’ve linked to the cached text.]

I suspect Lewandowksi’s not unbiased. He dismisses any possible criticism of CP’s leadership ideology thus: “when you start using the word ‘leadership’ in anything you do, you’re bound to start getting a few weirdos interested in what you have to say - I find it funny that a few years ago, when it was called ‘management’ nobody would have given a damn.” Its news to me that only certain “weirdos” are interested in leadership: given the market for news product, that puts quite a few of us in the frame. However, I’m more interested in his parenthetical assertion, which is that when ‘leadership’ training of the kind CP offers was called ‘management’, “nobody would have given a damn”. Of course, that’s just silly. I think that given a couple of moments most people could call to mind many criticisms of management speak and associated management bollocks, whether from personal experience or in the media, and if they can’t, there’s commentary galore all over the place for them to read at their leisure. I think that people actually do give a damn that they were, and are now, subjected to the divisive and often contradictory edicts of ‘management’. And I doubt whether it’ll take them more than a couple of blinks to see that self-appointed ‘leaders’ are new-fashioned managers. Have a look at The Tomorrow Project on “futures thinking” if you doubt there’s a correlation between new-style ‘leadership’ training and old-style ‘management’. The point is precisely what such people call themselves; but it’s also about who appointed them our leaders and what we think about it. I don’t wish to be divisive, but by ‘we’ I mean those who are not identified as leaders.

Visionary leadership or new-fangled management?
CP’s offer of visionary leadership training to enable the new managers to understand and negotiate the layers of organisational complexity in the new modern world significantly pre-figures the debate pending on the future of democracy and pre-empts any discussion that might be had about who we want leading us (if, indeed, we want that at all). The imagined community, with communal power at its centre, vanishes with the introduction of specially trained leaders appointed by nobody, who will sniff out where the “real power” in communities lies and act accordingly, having co-opted, relegated or sidelined opponents who are not specially identified and trained leaders.

Now here’s the thing. I can’t easily locate balanced debate on this subject, which puzzles me. The ‘pro’ people seem to assume that there’s nothing more than training involved. The ‘antis’ are sure that it’s all about indoctrination and control. I want to find out more about who’s involved with Common Purpose and what they think they’re getting out of it.

So let’s have a debate and keep it nice, without any name-calling or whatever else it is that people do on the internet instead of having conversations with each other.

Some questions

On whose terms should the expansion of leadership beyond authority be debated?

If Common Purpose is, as it seems, about the ‘right’ people gaining power, what do we think about that? Are you the right person? Are those identified by unknown others as potential leaders the ‘right’ people?

Can governance be improved by a network coalition of the ‘right’ people? Will their friends and contacts whom they encourage to participate be the ‘right’ people, too?

If the things that need to be done get done ‘right’, does it matter who does the work?

Given the positions of some of the participants, is Common Purpose just the old establishment in a new outfit, working semi-transparently where it once worked opaquely?

Alternatively, is CP the regrouped and rebranded British Left?

What do those involved in CP get from the experience of observing ‘real power’ at work? Do they earn higher salaries? Do they bring those with the ‘real power’ with them on their journey of self-discovery?

How will the development of ideas futures benefit me and my community?

Does CP’s leadership training alter where the power lies?

Edit:
Here’s a fabulously bland site with CP participant endorsements.

Further edit:
In the face of criticism and vitriolic attacks, Common Purpose has started another site, Commonpurpose.net, devoted to explaining “The facts about Common Purpose” and, reasonably, countering various outlandish claims against it.

Through this new outlet CP reiterates that it offers leadership training and has no agenda. Commonpurpose.net emphasises that CP has “no alignment with any political party, religion or other organisation whatsoever”. Apparently, it exists “to give leaders the inspiration, the skills, the knowledge and the connections they need to produce real change in their work and potentially, in their communities or wider society.” Its charter “expresses its aim to identify opportunities and encourage leaders to become actively involved in civil society, but makes it clear that Common Purpose has no role in prompting or deciding what people choose to do”.#

Courage at work
So in Common Purpose, we’re seeing the birth of a novel social-cultural formation: a network organisation comprising individuals aspiring to leadership that claims only to facilitate, never to influence ideologically. CP rightly places responsibility on individuals. But are we to believe that there are no ideological choices, biases and prejudices in leadership training, whether in trainer or trainee? Is training someone to be a leader - to identify where the power lies and act accordingly - not a realpolitik assumption? And does the usage of realpolitik methodologies place users beyond ideology? Surely, this is new-fangled management speak: old ideas in new clothes. CP says as much in a section on its site, titled “Managers scared to manage”.

This, from a downloadable research document called, “Courage at work: Causes and cures for timid management” (2005): “Common Purpose is a campaigning organisation that believes the UK needs more – and more diverse – leaders.” The solution to society’s ills? More managers! Perhaps their thinking’s changed since 2005.

Through its new site, Common Purpose gives you “the facts”. Aside from the fact that these “facts” are factoid gobbets variously restating CP’s own (non-)agenda and addressing remarks it regards as defamatory and therefore actionable under law, are there really just things called facts that describe reality and which exist outside context?

I ask again: what does Common Purpose actually do? I should say at this point that I have read CP’s blurbs and understand the verbiage. (Please do not redirect me to the CP website for re-education.) I am inviting you to question CP’s cover-all mission statement and think about the effect of the training it offers. If every other organisation ever invented, whether network or institutional, perpetuates ideology, how is it that CP does not and, in fact, according to its own (non-)ideology, cannot? And what ideology is it, or isn’t it, perpetuating? Since its training facilitates individuals to make audacious interventions in situations where power relations are in question, what are the grounds for CP’s positioning itself as an disinterested mentor?

Is this just another back-slapping opportunity for managers and various policy makers/implementers?
Should we tolerate the existence and modus operandi of an organisation that effectively celebrates the appropriation of power by an unelected elite or at the very least seeks unproblematically to encourage individuals to manipulate power relations? We should be asking whether, given all that’s been discussed about power relations down the years, such a purpose can be regarded as politically neutral. Does it matter than we’re talking about a charity comprising supposedly disinterested individuals, whether professionals in the social sphere?

Update 7 August 2008
In the absence of any debate on this matter in the public sphere, here’s a video of Brian Gerrish speaking recently, deconstructing the present language of social control, which he identifies as cultural Marxist. Linguistic analysis of structures was/is the basis of Marxian deconstruction, but provides a great starting point for anyone wanting to understand social structuration.

Note that Gerrish is not wielding this analytical tool ironically: like the individuals involved in maintaining the structures he talks about, he understands that language is structure, is control. He states: “If your language is controlled, you are controlled.” It’s not passed me by that, beyond this analysis, he assumes there is a right way and wrong to use language — including in respect of how to run a state, how to promote religion, etc. — but my point here is not to show up the linguistic gaps in Gerrish’s appropriation of non-conservative discourse. Gerrish understands language is control. But what do those individuals involved in promoting efficient leadership in pursuit of social justice understand? If you asked them — if you could find one — about their part in creating more intrusive structures of control through their interventions, what would they say? (And please don’t refer me, as some have done, to the Common Purpose website, where participants speak blandly.) Do they visualize themselves as the positive element in a duality of good and bad control?*

*This South African CP course attendee narrates his view of the complexity of power relations in a Machiavellian, or amoral utilitarian, take on leading beyond authority: “The part that brings about real change and effectiveness, whether we like it or not, is simply academic method and manipulation, end-justifies-the-means kind of stuff. Having a pure original intent is not necessarily more useful than having an evil one, provided you are able to relate to all of the required players required for your vision in a manner which gains you influence”.

Posted by Neil on June 2, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Tags: Consciousnesses, Counterculture, Regionalism, Spatiality, ventriloquism
6 comments | Permalink

Overexposing The Unexplained

For a while now, I’ve been compiling thoughts for a lengthy post on how the thing I knew in the 1970s as The Unexplained — a popular genre, mainly in publishing, that encompassed the paranormal, including cryptozoology, UFOs and all points weird — has changed over the years from being a publishers’ category to operating as a alternative information market. For an illustrated glimpse at the popular cultural context of The Unexplained, see Absolute Elsewhere (where I lifted the title picture from).

I’m posting my brief notes on the subject now, having just read The Moss Grows Green On The Dark Side of The Moon: The Selling of The Paranormal In Popular Culture, the latest post on Intangible Materiality, which is sometimes brilliant, always engaging and never less than thought-provoking. I want to join in this discussion about where we’re heading with the paranormal.

Intangible Materiality says:

“Perhaps the popularization of the paranormal is in effect what keeps it safely ensconced away from prying eyes. The popular culture in effect is defining it’s paradigms through mass merchandising in a self referential feedback loop which, for the most part, may have nothing to do with what is being looked at.”

Here are my thoughts so far.

Unexplained mysteries are still with us: just direct your favourite browser and you’ll find more accounts on more sites than I can be bothered to list here. Despite the marketing techniques of popular publishers and the niching effect of the internet, the monolithic The Unexplained of the 1970s has remained, more or less, a single field of inquiry, albeit promoted under different names, embracing many specialist branches and lines of research and promoted by various interested groups and individuals. Unexplained discourses still work by writers repeating what others have asserted previously. Nevertheless, the mysterious world seems to have changed utterly.

Leth

Wandlebury

What happened to The Unexplained? Well, largely it’s become The Explained. Sometime between the late-70s and the early-90s, the form of The Unexplained dealing mainly with the paranormal was elbowed out of the way by combined theories of everything, the study of which evolved through repetition and was focused most successfully in popular culture through generic syntheses in the separate narratives of The X-Files, David Icke’s personal journey and Graham Hancock’s adventuring into para-archaeology. I stress these were not the first to try to combine previous versions of The Unexplained or the paranormal. George Hunt Williamson’s Secret Places of the Lion (1977[1958]) is a notable work of synthesis from the Golden Age of The Unexplained.

Roys

On the walls inside Royston Cave

Political conspiracy, once considered alongside other unexplained mysteries due to the enduring popularity of alternate narratives about various high-profile public killings, has become a separate genre. To a great extent, political conspiracy has overtaken the paranormal as the main site of interest. That wouldn’t have seemed possible in the 1970s, when it looked as though spirituality rather than materialism would be the new area of social contest.

The new conspiracy-led version of The Unexplained is a portmanteau para-investigative practice that seeks a unifying model to encompass recovered spiritualities, hidden histories and political conspiracies. As an anti-ideological mode, it supersedes both Left and Right, based on the obvious truth that interested, powerful individuals and organisations ultimately control policy through funding or withholding funds behind the scenes.

Conspiracy Theory, as popularised by The X-Files and reworked by David Icke, was a synthetic, even syncretic, mode of thought and practice that created the narrative space for a sparky combination of previously disparate strands of hidden or forgotten knowledge — the occult, spiritualism, time travel, political conspiracies, etc.

What we know as conspiracy theories are not theories so much as populist versions of rolling news narratives. These versions do not present the final sum total of hidden knowledge, despite what many marketing-aware self-publicists — whether New Age, free-thinking or otherwise disengaged from mainstream media — would have you believe.

Confused duck

Narrative amuck

At this point I should say that I regard David Icke, the most influential if not the most original free thinker among the recent conspiracists — certainly the genre’s most vocal and entertaining exponent— as an intellectual descendent of the likes of Charles Fourier, just off the top of my head, or better still, Menocchio, and as such a most useful macro-minded contributor to increasingly micro discussions about politics, identity and spirituality.

The populist one-stop-shop approach of the current milieu of The Unexplained, including conspiracism, encourages free thinking and research and it always encourages consumption — as was always the case with The Unexplained of yesteryear — as its proponents’ fall back on repetition to promote their ‘new’ products. When Icke took the mantle of Grand Unexplainer, the repetition that had always been present when yet another popular paperback on The Unexplained was published had finally been assimilated, in the Burrovian sense, and installed as a counter-traditional genre.

The twilight counter-traditions analysed by James Webb in The Occult Underground (1974) and The Occult Establishment (1976) were reanimated and deployed as anti-ideological activism to counter aspirational, materialist neo-liberalism in an age of conservative capitalist revolution. Feeding back into the loop of marketing and consumption, this stifling of multiple narrative strands, with their compression into an alternative true tradition, presents itself as a suppression and realisation of The Enlightenment — just like Situationism! — when it’s just playing it over again.

The churning narrative of political conspiracy is partly the mistrustful creative mind of the people at work. But public theorising is a part of the original conspiracy as much as it is a moral response or a series of personal awakenings or collective creative acts. Conspiracy is a self-regenerating counterintelligence forum. In working the theories, we are engaging in and possibly working — definitely perpetuating — multiple intelligence operations. While we’re counting bullets, planes, cameras, we’re continuing to make things worse not better.

Similarly, while we’re comparing UFO appearances with images all over the place, or comparing our chakra awakenings with those of others in various communities of feeling, we’re otherwise engaged and continuing to regard rather than heed experiences.

Crop oval, Herts., 1678

I’m all for counterknowledge — it’s particularly galling that I christened this new term for The Unexplained in my notebooks some years before someone as dull as Damian Thompson invented it and published a miserable book with that title — if it challenges the assumptions and common sense fallacies of ‘proper’ knowledge. As Doreen Massey says in For Space (2005), if societies foster too keenly knowledge hierarchies dominated by ‘hard’ science and intellectualism, they run the risk of making static “the lived or the intuitive”. We ignore the individualist dynamic of gut feeling at our collective peril.

The current version of The Unexplained presents itself as an immediate, responsive, discursive and reflexive mode of thought. That’s part of its attraction and a great part of its unattractiveness to those involved in promoting knowledge hierarchies.

In its self-imposed role as the Feeling Person’s Guide to Contemporary Confusion, in other territories, including medical science, physics and the status of individual perceptions of right, for instance, The Unexplained gets into an all-in bout with the publicity arms of corporatism and intellectual property and with the self-proclaimed anti-irrationalists.

Since they eschew the norms of science, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and refuse to engage in the game of hierarchical intellectualism, the Unexplainers show clearly that a professional ‘Skeptic’, like James Randi or a proud religious rationalist like ‘Fucking’ Damian Thompson, for example, are simply reactive intellectual nonentities whose egos drive them to align themselves with the things they aspire to. Their thin voices rail against irrationality and they speak of aiding progress against the forces of regression. Presumably, they’ll claim responsibility for protecting human life and civilisation if the intellectual core of humanity does not implode before they die. (And what if it does?) In any case, they do nothing to promote intellectual progress, preferring instead to seek to stabilise convention for its own sake.

A brilliant magician

Such folk as Thompson and Randi are neither good nor bad scientists, because they do not produce testable hypotheses, nor are they effective researchers, because they don’t offer substantive original thoughts on what they’ve encountered. They ridicule their targets or the subjects of their discourse. They do not engage. They hate what they cannot become. It’s pleasing to think that, in this regard, they are products and producers of exactly the kind of quasi-intellectual repetition they deplore.

In this context, it’s clear that whatever we’re calling The Unexplained now stirs the self-righteous to anger. So there must be something to it.

That’s all she wrote.

21st century ghost hunting

The last word goes to Intangible Materiality on the progression of the paranormal from the quick buck hack-work of the pulp publishing era to the quick buck hack-work of the communication age:

“One cannot help but wonder […] how so many profound insights into the paranormal were wrested from oneself prior to the advent of global commercialization of what was once considered, a valued and at times, sacred quest as evidenced by a Siberian Shaman or for that matter, a John Dee.

[…]

Well we have evolved from tabloid coverage to infotainment without having gone anywhere at all.”

Posted by Neil on February 27, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Tags: Consciousnesses, Counterculture, Graham Hancock, Individualism, The Unexplained
5 comments | Permalink

Open letter to Damian Thompson on reading a bit of his wretched new book

Dear Damian

I was flipping through Counterknowledge: how we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history in Waterstones, Trafalgar Square, earlier today, quickly but carefully and with a slight intention to buy, but since reading up on your oeuvre I’ve put off paying for it until I can pick up a used copy. I’d hate to encourage you.

I find it anything but astonishing that a person of faith takes the trouble to publish a book damning all but the big narratives of culture and science. This sort of thing happens all the time. And it’s anything but startling to see someone bandy the word ‘reason’ around and adduce science simply in an attempt to scatter the opposition and pre-emptively shut up those who don’t hold the same tenets of faith that they do, who don’t presume to start from Enlightenment reason — anything but — and who don’t base their knowledge on the last word in science.

It would be more interesting to take the argument to the opposition by examining the ideological ground on which they stand, if it’s apparent, and put aside for a book’s space the preconceptions borne of dualism, under which reason automatically, naturally and without prejudice cannot help but oppose wild unreason. If it seems to you that there are enough “What ifs” without you adding to their number, perhaps you’re missing the point of scientific inquiry. What if the straight median line of progress through reason running through the idea of God, slave-owning democracies, hierarchical meritocracies, the dispassionate science of economics, and all the rest of it, touches affective narrative waymarkers either sides of the line in its inexorable linearity, rather than existing simply as a forward-moving thing ever-present and immanent?

With science being, as you imply, a relentless ongoing process of inquiry with no knowledge gap untested, leaving only reason in its indisputable wake, and since history is just the one full, true story, leaving no one ignorant of its veracity, surely we are, as you contend, replete with precisely the positive knowledge we require. However, you don’t start from such a positive position. You argue that we should not tolerate counterknowledge and must destroy it because it is non-knowledge. In fact, you go further and suggest that counterknowledge is worse than ignorance because it purposefully seeks to negate knowledge’s true other. It is precisely the beyondness and independence of that anti-ignorance strategy that makes it so attractive to freethinkers and so dangerous from your point of view.

What could it be in counterknowledge that so unites sceptics and true believers?

Reason

And what of those dangerous people who benefit from the progression of true knowledge but insist on negating its reasonable provenance? I denounce your attempt to divide a world of thinking people into those who’ve failed to embrace reason/science and those who remain true to the one true story you narrate. Yours is a mean–spirited, ugly, divisive sort of discourse.

Although I’m with you in detesting the New Age and conspiracism knowledge markets, I can’t go that extra mile with you and label all unincorporated counterknowledge as moribund. Why? I’m not certain that all known counterfactuals — not to mention the unknown ones — have been disproved or illuminated by scientists or that one history, the true one you’re advancing in opposition to the ‘fake’ ones you mention — not even the history of science or the story of God — is capable of describing all the truth of human experience now and in the past.

Do I accept ‘reason’ and ‘Enlightenment’ as facts? No, because I’ve read widely. Do I accept that science is a dispassionate search for true facts, a thing apart? No, because fallible humans make it. Do I accept that history can be faked? Yes, because all stories are part fiction, even the true ones. Do I accept there is danger in people reconsidering history, science or culture in the light of their own experience? No, because that’s exactly how those things are made. Can I conceive of a turning point in human affairs at which ‘reason’ supported by faith-in-ritual — including faith in rituals of knowledge acquisition and transmission — triumphs over counteractive heterogeneity and productive, interactive experiential differences, whether reasonable? Yes, I’m afraid I can. And that is why I’m not supporting you by buying your book.

Thanks for doing me and the reading/thinking public the courtesy of being accessible to criticism. I wish more writers would do the same.

All the best

Neil Palmer

Feastofpalmer.com

Edit: I wrote this to post in the contact form linked to on http://www.damianthompson.net/. But the web form does not work, so I’ve posted it here. And I retract the last paragraph.

Posted by Neil on January 8, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Tags: Counterculture, Individualism, The Unexplained, hauntiquarianism
11 comments | Permalink

Doo-Wop Shambhala

Originally a B-side to “The Lonely One”, Sheriff and The Ravel’s “Shombalor” (1959, Vee-Jay Records, 306) is a massive slab of on-the-spot mic poetry, otherwise known as Doo-Wop. A different spelling of “Shombolar” was used on Songs The Cramps Taught Us, Volume One (2001). It’s possible that the song name printed on the original Vee-Jay record label was a mis-spelling of what the group called their tune: it certainly sounds like “shombolar” when they sing it. I’m sticking with The Cramps’ revisionist version of “Shombolar”.

I’m guessing that Sheriff and The Ravels were a black group, because that’s the Doo Wop demography if not its constituency, and I’d say they were from Chicago, because Vee-Jay was based there. But I don’t know for sure. They’ve a heavy, steady rockabilly sound — probably why The Cramps dug the disc — anchored on slap bass, rim-shot drums, treble guitar and, I think, a tinkle of piano in the background. Beyond the bass undertones, the vocals including the lead are mid-range and don’t venture into the outer space tones of, say, The Four Seasons’ Frankie Valli. The guitar intro, flamenco-ing octaves up and down in double-quick time, is worth the price of admission.

I first heard “Shombolar” on Songs The Cramps Taught Us, Volume One and it immediately jumped ahead of The Chips‘ “Rubber Biscuit” (1956, Josie Records, Josie 803) in my mind’s ear. “Shombolar”, like “Rubber Biscuit”, has running through it echoes of reform school marching rhymes (see the Wikipedia entry for The Chips). It’s “Go left, right, left, right” refrain and the lines, “I love left foot stomp and-a right foot drag, ‘n-a / Hey it’s good to march!” add a layer of reflexive sharpness to the song’s expression of culture and make the cultural link between Doo Wop and the criminal justice system even more explicit than The Chips’ rhythmic-linguistic allusions do. “Shombolar” is as much a prison song as Sam Cooke’s later and more famous tune, “Chain Gang” (1960, RCA Victor, 47-7783).

Either way of spelling/pronouncing “Shombalor” is similar enough to Shambhala, the mythopoeical predecessor to the fictional Shangri-la, to merit mention. Maybe there was a girl with an ebonic phonetic moniker involved. This usage may even be a popular memory trace of the 1930s and 40s fictional comic book and radio crime fighter, The Shadow, who was trained in mystical Shamballah. Even though The Shadow radio programme went off air in 1954, there is evidence that his influence persisted in rockin’ n’ rollin’ minds. Link Wray used The Shadow’s sinister moralising catchphrase, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” at the start of his instrumental “The Shadow Knows” (1964, Swan Records, S-4171). Or perhaps members of the vocal group came across Shambhala in contemporaneous references to the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet and into India on 31 March 1959, which was all over the news, and incorporated it as a motif in their new tune.

Check The Hound’s archive for “Shombolar”: hear this howlin’ rave and die! Alternatively, Songs the Cramps Taught Us, Volume One is still available from all good record shops. You can even get “Shombalor” legitimately for the first time outside of the vintage record racks, since it was reissued on the Vee-Jay Definitive Collection LP in August 2007. I imagine that the sleeve notes on the latter would provide a much needed supplement to this speculative post.

In an attempt to enhance your listening experience, I’ve transcribed the words as I hear them. I’d be happy to accept plausible suggestions for alterations.

“Shombolar”

Go left, right, left right
Go left, right, left right
Go left, right, left right
Go left, right, left right