Members receive cards granting entry to the new year. Each year has a theme – something members need to keep in mind as they travel from the January to December.
In 2023, all it takes to blotto the motto is the mutation of moth ears, significantia absurdus, and sun-eating shape-shifting. In 2023, forget the alamo, remember the alchemists and oc(cult)ivate the oscillia(s)tory.
2022 has a couple of options for you, Members. It can be the same ‘ole, same ‘ole. Nothing new under the sun. Here we go again. 2022 can be the repetition of Automatica, akin to the Timequake from Kurt Vonnegut that shoved everyone from the year 2001 back into the gnarls of 1991 to repeat every single thing they did back when the Gulf War began, the Hubble Telescope launched with faulty mirrors, police brutality caused the LA riots, and there was waaaaay too much Guns ‘n Roses – without being able to change a single bit of it. That said, Members, you can go another route. You can go for repetition as Epizeuxis. The repetition of something, not out of obligation, or inability to do otherwise, but for the sake of emphatic ingenuity, a repetition in order to he heard. The same way the repetition of the sun rising every morning presents – though a repeat – a wildly differing repertoire. Or the way you multiply something like “Mucho Mucho Amor!” by saying it aloud a lá Walter Mercado. Or the way you can make it to Friday by mantraing “Sabado Gigante GIGANTE GIGANTE!” on Thursday. Or the way every song we have ever loved has a verse-chorus-verse repeat which we will sing in the shower to no end. Reduplicate the hell out of 2022, Members. Epizeuxis is the only way out of Automatica.
oof…and – onward! Ask yourself, members: is there something that you are able to pull off that, by all rights, should not work at all? For instance, are you able to rock a monocle? Or make heads turn with a distinctly alien shade of purple lipstick? Or, like the immortal Dr. Lonnie Smith, rig yourself out with a turban for singularly aesthetic (rather than religious) reasons? Your membership coordinator has such a magical ability to wear a blood red sweater with a pentagram so giant that Texans can see if from 4 states over, knitted by a mysterious, artistic Berliner name “Micky.” Yes, we all have a secret, somewhat counter-intuitive charm that, whether we know it or not, is ours and ours alone. So in this here new year (finally!) flex those charms and stride out in the coming months in full command of that power. Sure, like a Fellini movie, it might not be understood at all times, but its optics will never fail to be magnetic. Whether bendy, or new, or charming, or fun or just odd and delightful, roll it out Members! Congratulations on making it to 2021!
2020: If new years are like decks of cards, Members, let’s all get our cartomancy on in 2020. With a little divination and Surrealist rearrangement, 2020’s 52 weeks can provide egress from binding suits of hacked tropes and boorish one-eyed royals. So last year is the violence of clubs, the greed of diamonds, the over-emoting of hearts and the wearing grooves of spades. No longer will courtesans colonize us into two-dimensions. 2020 demands nothing less than finding the flames, stars, wheels, and locks that guide our genius, our siren and our magus. And in order to make an alchemic leap from playing cards to reading tarot, you will need to get guerilla. You will need to find the enigmas. You will need a Pancho Villa revolutionary vision to flip what seems gravitationally stuck. If you draw a sinogram too many, shuffle your hand and discard whatever seems like a character too many. Whatever the mantras that moor you, use the mirror of magic and mix that shit up. Squawk and gronk away; there are no wrong notes, only mothers from another planet. Though surreality can make for some free-floating tomographic disorientation, its hyper-dimensional pataphysics also promises the imaginary solutions of ubu roi to ubu cuko to ubu enchaine to ubu sur la butte. So act the anagram and riddle yourself a new year. Indeed, if all anagrams lead to rearrangement, and all years lead to the future, be the laminae glue rings. Be the airmail glee guns. Be the guerilla. Be the enigmas. Going forth into 2020, remember, you are a member and poetic ferns cruise forks.
2019: We are an odd species, Members. We not only can make a satellite that outruns the heliosphere but we can also make a sandwich. That is a wide ranging repertoire. So in 2019, let’s use the full scale and wonder of our monkey paw inventiveness.
2018: Baphomet, Members. The goat-headed, half woman, half man signifier of all things occult and gnostic, grown out of the ancient Egyptian deity Banebdjedet who was the soul of Osiris and pointed to by Aleister Crowley as the divine androgyne. Pagan, heretical, hybrid, and mystic, Baphomet has an iconography and history as entertaining as the well known monolords like Christ and Mohammed, except Baphomet’s mocks their boring singularity. Also consider Ballet: it’s dance, but it’s has nothing to do with boogieing. Relatively new to the scene as an invention of 14th century Renaissance weirdos’ fetishistic attention toward technical perfection and then blossoming into a French experiment in how far they could push the impossibility of being lithe and elegant in tutus, tights and corsets, ballet is a thoroughly normative affair though (arguably) no less beautiful in it’s iconography. So as we round the corner into 2018, let’s seek to make a new year that has a little Baphomet, a little ballet. Whether sporting the sign of the horns or en pointe in toe shoes, enjoy 2018 as a year of apostic, if well-balanced, tendencies.
2017: You know what Ronnie James Dio did for rainbows, Members? He made them metal. Not an easy task considering the pseudochristian manufactured hallmark sap that gets loaded on to said badass meteorological wonders. And you know what Siouxsie Sioux did for punk rock? She made it weird and lyrical. No small feat considering the swinging dicks that had no interest in the power of enchantment. And therein lies your 2017 mission. Not saying we are back in the 1980s – the rainbows we now need to make surfeit and structural through means most inventive would still be considered unthinkable to the plutocratic minds of the proto-alt, shoulder-padded, reaganauts warping that decade. But in the next 365 days you’d do righteous to get your game on, get your flame on, and become hybrid and ungenre’d in the service of all that is badass and enchanting. Yes, Members, it’s time to bid farewell to 2016, the year of WYSIWYG – maybe not the most favorite year of many, but not a year without its merits – and make the migration to 2017. Burn bright, Members.
2016: WYSIWYG, Members. In 2016, what you see is what you get. Far from the cynical, tech-defensive concept, that which girds your 2016 membership is an approach that demands you see what it is you intend to get. Train to perform alchemic feats of lighter than air oracularity. Insist the Snellen Chart reveal all its lines in dayglo, three-story letters. Decipher any and all alternate realities hiding in uncut-up texts. Command acceptance for all that you are when you are seen, like Flip Wilson’s Geralidine. Destroy all dogmatic visual systems. If done with the intensity of a radiocative 1964 Chevy Malibu, you may just find yourself in the repossession of a ride that was yours all along.
2015: Welcome, Members, to the week of time travel. Here within the last eigenstates of 2014 we have the fantastic Fourier transform of the New Year cycling us into 2015. And in this transfer there are a few things to remember: Waves migrate energy, worrying not about moving matter nor mass; Electromagnetic waves have no problem bounding about in a vacuum; without waves you can’t sing old Prince songs in the shower. As such, 2015 is a great set of frequencies for suspending wave-particle duality in favor of repeated variation proceeding through time. Rather than locking into some boring linear graph of one dimensional dots and ignoring how fun it is to say Huygens, go harmonic, transverse, longitudinal, or torsional – any which way but Newtonian. Enjoy both point A AND point B. When looking at an On Kawara date painting, see not a sign on canvas but a massive condensed pocket of everything that wiggles around you. Though it is suggested that you avoid the brown acid, understand 2015 not according to the illusion of grids, but as all sorts of propogations in the oscillioscopic multiverse of the wavy.
2014: Presenting 2014, Members. You’ll notice, there’s nothing in this hand. Nothing in the other hand either. As such, for the next twelve months, they are free to palm, switch, ditch, steal, load, simulate, and misdirect. No matter that such sleight of hand can bend both toward dexterity and deception, calculus and chicanery, prestidigitation and pretense (dialectics get us nowhere); what matters is the action. There is no better way to expose a hack than to outperform them with their own techniques. And though making something from seemingly nothing sounds like magic, it’s been pointed out that real magic, or magic that can actually be done, is not what’s considered real magic. Real magic doesn’t exist. But prestidigitation does. So hone your existential arm-end choreography: conjure something from the guise of nothing. And get yourself a cape – it always impresses.
2013: Revolution is a matter of angular momentum, Members, and angular momentum kind of does its own thing if it takes place in a vacuum. Luckily, you don’t live in a matterless universe and you will indeed captain the ship of your new year. So when offered the power to boss the gears, influence the hydraulics, or accomplish a hair-pin turn, firmly get on your best ten and two and drive the hell out of whatever machinery in which you find yourself a-riding. And if the pressure of Alpha Helmshuman seems a bit daunting, remember that in 2013, you need not re-invent it, but, whether with dainty hand or monkey paw, you might well indeed grasp it.
2012: Being that 2012 is both a leap year and the commemorative year of that great mind of cryptoanalysis and algorithms, Alan Turing, it’s time you get some head hovercraft of the abstract persuasion, Members. With such haberdashery, you’ll spend less time being uselessly puzzled by straining to visualize problems that have no place in two or three dimensions, and more time just figuring it the fuck out. As such, your style will be exactly that of Richard Feynman, who, after explaining the conservation of energy using the example of a mother algebraically tracking the blocks of a wiley child, waxed that “the most remarkable aspect that must be abstracted from this picture is that there are no blocks.” And like Kurt Godel – the Brainiac of any mathematical universe – you will not be bothered one scintilla in 2012 by the fact that no system can be both complete and consistent. The maths are in, Members and even though in 2012 your forehead finery won’t solve any absolute truths, it will, in the best Ludwig Wittgenstein fashion, invent them.
2011: Consider your brain, members. Now imagine it’s an industrial wall some where off the banks of the Cuyahoga River – there’s a good chance it’s seen better days, but really, it’s a survivor. And consider this here new year, 2011. Now imagine said year is an anonymous grafitti artist that has just tagged you, enlived your urban sturdy survivalist self with something rather demanding and unusual, mutating your previously anonymous structure into a very distinct stated position. And so be it, and so what about it, members – your question and declaration for the next 365. The silence of brick and mortar won’t fly this year, but your motor mouth sure will. Put a little lung behind it and enjoy mouthing off in the new year~
2010: Don’t think big, Members. Don’t think merely giant, (though giant is pretty hot, yes?). Don’t think large, or XXL or venti for crying out loud. No, it’s MMX and indeed this January 1st, it’s time to step it up a galactic knotch or two. That means getting your concepts to expand like Jupiter’s ribcage while he inhales all 11 string theory universes in order to exhale megafauna, godzilla, and ancient gladitorial structures writhing with Romans and roaring almighty – that’s the mission for your mind over the next 365 days. Because it don’t matter if this here orbit gets the thumbs up or the thumbs down – 2010 is the year It’s Colossal!
2009: Here’s thing about analog members, and about the new year: 1) Analog is a signal that is continuous in time and amplitude, so it’s sustained; 2) Analog media, at optimum performance, has high fidelity to whatever noise it’s trying to put out there and 3) Analog is old school. To help you in your coming analog pursuits are the patron saints of the new year, two of the most analog inventors that ever lived: Wilbur & Orville Wright. At Kitty Hawk, they defied gravity with some spruce wood, a bicycle shop engine, and some funny ideas about controlling row, pitch & yaw – and not a single microchip to be found. So in this, the last year of the oughts for a very long time, members are commanded to put it out there in sustained, hi-fi, old school style. And if anyone along the way charges you with being retrograde, tell them firmly: “I am an enthusiast, not a crank!
2008: We all got angles, members. And there’s a whole mathematical science dedicated to working ’em. As members, 2008 will offer an opportunity to employ and enjoy the 4000 year old secret of unit circle wizardry: that even if all knowns may not be accounted for in their entirety, it’s possible to predict the truth of a thing. The trick is to remember you got functions, expressions equal parts independent and dependent, which can identify the ratios, recipricols, and inverses of 2008 with the the exactitude of a mathematician’s eye. Consider calculations like sine, cosine, tangent, cosecant, secant, cotangent, arcsine, arccosine, and arctangent, oddly named geniuses at your service. Orson Welles once said that the enemy of art is the absence of limitations. And whether by formula, graph, or algorithm, in 2008 your art is to work those limitations with the elegance of a Lissajous Curve, the frequency of the Pythagorean Identity, and the infiniteness of Euler’s Product.
2007 Is the year to Take it to the Bridge. What you do when you get there is entirely up to you: a) barrel into town; b) get the hell out of Dodge; c) jump into the drink; d) burn that thing down; e) bring it back to the chorus.
2006! Whatever your gravity, 7 miles a second ain’t nothin’!
2005 is the year no one notices that hamster on your head,
ergo, giving you license to ignore it yourself.
2004: we all have talents.
2003…The whole point of the doomsday device is lost if you keep it a secret
…why didn’t you tell the world, eh?
2002: Whether you’re dishing in out or taking it, 2002 was a year for haymakers.
2001 – the year we went a little off the deep end.
2000: What better way to begin the millenium than with three arms?
1999: Divine and Shakespeare, matter and anti-matter, everybody was getting in bed with weirdos in 1999.
1998: Balls out with Bette! 1998 was the year to let your female macho take control.
1997: The funny thing about 1997 is that gettin’ right can sometimes be a pain in the ass.
1996 was the year to embrace all that is candyass within ourselves.
1995: The Chairman had a thing or two to teach us about doing it our way in 1995.