Erik DavisResenhas

This one's a wild ride.

Davis has likely forgotten more fact about Led Zep than the rest of us will ever know. The staggering level of research, of delving into the magic and symbolism and hidden meanings of the songs not only on this album, but a smattering of others that came before or go after, is almost overwhelming.

The last book I read in this series, on Steely Dan's Aja, I slagged because the author dipped so far into music theory that he lost me. Davis swings so far the other way, only rarely talking about the specific music, that he threatens to lose me just on the sheer number of side trips into arcane trivia.

But somehow, he doesn't.

I'm not a history buff, and I've always dreaded walking around historical sites, places like houses, forts, etc. And yet, once, I went with a friend of mine, agreeing only because he was such a history buff, and we happened to be in the neighbourhood. So, we spent several hours tromping around the site, and I found myself enjoying the hell out of it, simply due to the unbelievable knowledge, as well as the numerous entertaining anecdotes my buddy provided in a non-stop running commentary.

It's exactly the same thing with this book. Normally, the level of detail would drive me bonkers, but Davis comes at it with such glee, with such adolescent fervor, that I couldn't help get caught up in the narrative and give myself over to the fascinating world of Led Zeppelin, circa 1971.

A fun book.

Less satisfying than I'd hoped. Though Erik Davis makes the case that technology and spirituality are and have been inextricably linked throughout human history, he doesn't really offer a theory as to why this is so or take a position on whether this is a good or a bad thing. I would have preferred less of his supporting his argument and more analysis of it.

Very good and comprehensive look into a couple of the 70ies most interesting personalities.½

I would have appreciated a more in-depth look at the album in its entirety as well as the individual tracks that make up the whole. A whole lot less satanic panic bullshit and information about Jimmy's fascination with the occult would have been nice. I suspect that it was a fleeting interest for him, like it was for so many others. He's obviously moved on, since he sold Boleskin house many years ago. I think he moved on to his Pre-Raphaelite phase when he bought Tower House. Judging by his girlfriend's appearance, he's still in that frame of mind.

I only read this book for that sense of nostalgia, the times when manly, hi-test men were still around. Back in the days before sensitive pony-tail soy boys brought their chronically limp dicks onto the scene and caused mass celibacy in woman-kind.

All of us hardcore rock bitches can only hope for society to improve and usher in a return of real men swinging their dicks and their Stratocasters for our entertainment.

I loved this. Not only does it shine light on traditionally-occulted aspects of tech history, the writing exuberates in allusions that range from hilarious to astute.

Erik Davis is a really good writer but then, bam, there it was, an essay on "The Matrix".

I first read this shortly after it came out, but I have periodically been back to it and I think it's still as relevant as when it came out - which is no mean feat for a book that deals with a fast-moving area like technology. I think the reason it has stood the test of time so well has to do with its focus on our own attitudes to technology (as much as on the technology itself). We like to think of ourselves as having attained a level of sophistication that has taken us beyond the kind of primitive attitudes which Arthur C Clarke was probably thinking of when he suggested that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. The key insight of Techgnosis is that some of those primitive views still exert a strong influence when it comes to our reactions to technology and in particular, our hopes about what it can do for us (particularly its ability to "transform" our world). That insight remains as important now as when the book was first written.

You know that any book with chapters on Sun City Girls and the chainsmoking rumguzzling transvestite spirit mediums of Burma will be worth your while.

Erik Davs' Nomad Codes is a beefy collection of mostly-short articles and essays written during the decades on either side of Y2K, in contemplation of music, drugs, literature, magick, and all manner of cultural weirdness. For the most part, these are biographical studies of creative figures and popular anthropology of countercultures, but there are a couple of movie reviews, and other less identifiable literary forms.

I was pleased to see Davis employ the category of ludibrium in his "Shards of the Diamond Matrix," but the result wasn't nearly as compelling to me as the personal anecdotes that surface in various various travelogue passages, in the prefatory "Teenage Head" memoirette, and the two brief essays "Diamond Solitaire" and "Remote Control." These latter pieces seem to be signposts for the two (complementary?) spiritual conditions that Davis is most concerned to indicate: mystical engagement and paranoid alienation. Unlike his ludibrium, the more theoretical piece on "Tantric Psychedelia" uses tantra to refer to the Asian religious tradition, not the popularized sex mysticism of neo-tantra.

With dozens of pieces broken out into five sloppily thematic sections, there's quite a bit of variety here. Davis approaches his material intelligently, but he doesn't condescend to his subjects or his readers, and the book is a pleasure to read. I seem to share his interests sufficiently that, in many cases, his exposition didn't show me anything new, but I enjoyed it anyway. And there were certainly a few ideas and people I was grateful to encounter for the first time.

“Erik Davis’ compendious recitation of the history of communications technology dominates the discursive landscape of techno-exegesis like a Martian war machine. In the grand style of H.G. Wells, TECHGNOSIS is an apocalyptic synopsis of this century’s technological climax.”

When you shake this psychedelic snowglobe of a compilation, what do you set in motion? Ideas, books, music, drugs, people & things, times & places, beliefs & delusions, rituals & spectacles; the whole panoply of Modern Esoterica, chronicled with the impeccable sensibility of this Meistersinger of the Strange. Always erudite, but never obscure, Davis can wax academic without talking down or over your head. His first book, Techgnosis, is still required reading.

While the Yeti edition lacks the scholarly amenity of a list of first appearances, and the pricey nicety of an index, I'll still be packing this tasty tome on that generation ship to the stars, for when I want to remember my home planet, so inexhaustibly weird.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R394N83TOGBNLN/

Erik Davis' book-length assessment of Led Zeppelin's fourth album delivered nearly everything I had hoped it would, along with a few things that I feared it might. The writing is often very witty, and Davis shows a real appreciation for the popular and esoteric cultural matrices in which the object of his musings is embedded, as well as a relatively sympathetic take on the band, and a profound respect for this record as an artistic achievement, albeit as he writes, "a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, stuffed in a cock." (7-8)

The book spends an appropriately significant section on the material substance of the album as an artifact, discussed in connection with the emergence of the American post-industrial zeitgeist. The subsequent song-by-song review emphasizes the composition of the album as a whole: the fourth release of a band with four members, having four songs on each side. As a critical conceit, Davis introduces "Percy" (one of Robert Plant's nicknames, as well as the questing grail knight Parsival) as the ongoing poetic speaker of the lyrics in all eight songs, enabling him to trace a unified arc of development through the various modes and moods of the album.

The "Percy"-based analysis isn't always that persuasive, but Davis uses it as a framework to tease out technical effects as well as thematic elements both subtle and overt. For those of us who assimilated this album in our adolescence, much of the treat here is just coming back to it with a matured intellect and a sense of fresh inquiry. For instance, "The Battle of Evermore" is rather obviously a Tolkeinesque psychomachia, in a way that I could never have framed for myself in the days when I first evoked it from its vinyl talisman. (And you can get more of that sort of playfully-overwrought fusion of phonography and occultism on nearly every page of Davis's book.)

Davis acknowledges a range of hostile criticism of Led Zeppelin, which he counters with varying degrees of zeal and success. He also cites some other sympathetic writers on the topic, who seem to be worth reading, along with the splendidly excessive occult research of paranoid born-again Christian--thanks to the demonic encounter he experienced at a Zeppelin show--Thomas W. Friend.

The exploration of Zeppelin's precedents and predecessors is not quite as meticulous as I might have wanted. Davis's (absolutely necessary) citations of Aleister Crowley are often sloppy, and he errs on Crowley biography even when correcting the earlier falsehoods of other writers (34). He fails to call out the influence of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, which contained both musical and magical germs of Led Zeppelin's operations. And his citations of psychedelic philosopher Michael Hoffman's "block consciousness" (122) would have been significantly complemented and enhanced with reference to Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence.

Still, this is a short and eminently digestible volume, which manages to hit all the right notes in creative harmony with its topic. If, like Davis, and like me, and like "millions of other people now living, you can probably reproduce a decent mock-up of ['Stairway to Heaven'] from memory," (108) then this book has a lot to offer you.

Sharp and timely, TechGnosis reveals the occult and classical mythologies and symbolism underlying communication technologies from ancient history to digital file-sharing. It's an original and erudite piece of work, written with a flair and playfulness that belie the scholarly research evident throughout, and with just the right balance of wonder and scepticism.