a carefully curated treasure trove
of miscellaneous conscious
evolutionary utopian artworks,
auditory & visual,
curated by Neonn Felicity
The following is a randomized highlight reel of the most prodigiously felicitous pieces of my information diet, the media that I believe every conscious person ought to digest and share. This site will be a constant work-in-progress, as I continue in my quest to discover and curate the most enlightening art and literature I can find in cyberspace.
So really, thanks for being here! Cosmic Evolution appreciates your intentional attention! And it is my sincerest hope that you benefit from these exceptional philosophical artistic geniuses and their various epic masterpieces as much as I have. I owe the depth and breadth of my own consciousness to the profound truth and goodness in their vision, and to their powerful ability to express it so beautifully.
♥ Enjoy & Evolve ♥
🠗 🧙🏽♂️ randomized 🧙🏽♂️ 🠗
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E-Turn & Swamburger
Young World
Conscious Existential Hip-Hop Album [2018]
“Orlando-based rapper/singer E-Turn will release her third full-length, Young World, this fall on Fake Four Inc. Backed by the soulful, melodic boom bap of Swamburger (Solillaquists of Sound), E-Turn utilizes a multitude of deliveries and croons to issue a call to arms against the maladies of modernity.
The title of the album refers to how in the grand scheme of history, life as we currently know it is extremely young. Hip hop is young, too. While early returns of the digital age are awash with tales of rampant greed, cruelty, and alienation, E-Turn expresses hope that the tools at our disposal can be used for the greater good of humanity. And hip hop, at its best, can play its part. Entertainment helps us forget ourselves. Art helps us remember ourselves.”
Categories: Abstract Hip-Hop, Emo Hip-Hop, Existential Hip-Hop, Intellectual Hip-Hop, Music, Psychedelic Hip-Hop, Revolutionary Hip-Hop, Streetwise Hip-Hop
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❝ In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination―employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service―are suddenly legal. ❞
Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia
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🎵
Amon Tobin
Cinematic Experimental Ambient Producer
“stone giants west coast love stories stonegiants.net
amon tobin how do you live music.amontobin.com
the nomark club nomarkrecords.com“Categories: Ambient, Bass, Cinematic, Deep Bass, Downtempo, EDM, Electronica, Experimental Bass, Glitch, Left-Field, Music, Psychedelic Bass
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{miscellaneous contributors}
The Gravel Institute
Short Political Philosophy Animation Show
1/6
Marianne Williamson: Why You're So SadThe Most BOMBED Country in HistoryHow Oil Companies Are Scamming YouRobert Reich Destroys Minimum Wage MythsHow China (Actually) Got RichAre Electric Cars Actually Good for the Environment?How France (Still) Controls AfricaThe LAPD Keeps Killing PeopleWhy the FBI Catfished Me1/6Categories: Afternoon News, Animations, Evening News, Symposia, Vlogs, YouTube Channels
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Todd Phillips
War Dogs
Military-Industrial Complex Satire Film [2016]
Great comic illustration of the depravity of the war industry, through the lens of a couple amateurish leeches who get rich middle-manning death machines for the US military, starring Jonah Hill & Miles Teller.
“With the war in Iraq raging on, a young man (Jonah Hill) offers his childhood friend a chance to make big bucks by becoming an international arms dealer. Together, they exploit a government initiative that allows businesses to bid on U.S. military contracts. Starting small allows the duo to rake in money and live the high life. They soon find themselves in over their heads after landing a $300 million deal to supply Afghan forces, a deal that puts them in business with some very shady people.”
Watch for free on Netflix
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Tipper
Cinematic Downtempo Glitch Producer [UK]
“Tipper is the professional moniker for Dave Tipper, a British electronic artist/DJ/producer associated with styles including nu breaks, glitch hop, and downtempo. Originally part of the late-’90s drum’n’bass subgenre nu breaks, Tipper became entranced by the scene at age 16, when his older brother turned him on to the whole rave culture.
“Eventually growing bored with the fast tempos and repetitiveness of drum’n’bass, Tipper began to experiment with tempos — leading to his debut album, The Critical Path, in 2000 on the Higher Ground/Sony label. During the making of the album, Tipper began to suffer from hearing damage due to the elaborate and booming stereo systems inside his cars. With the problem sorted out, Tipper returned early the next year with his sophomore effort, Holding Pattern, which led to tours of both Europe and America. The DJ mix Tipper Presents Sound Off appeared later in 2001 via the Fuel label. Surrounded followed on Myutopia Recordings in 2003 and was one of the first electronic music albums to be recorded in 5.1 Surround Sound.
“With distribution by Kudos Records, Tip Hop marked the debut of his own Tippermusic label in 2005. Incorporating elements of hip-hop production, it helped lay the groundwork for glitch hop. His imprint also issued 2006’s The Seamless Unspeakable Something and Relish the Trough, 2008’s Wobble Factor and Tertiary Noise, and 2010’s Broken Soul Jamboree. The latter saw him embrace a downtempo, more ambient sound.
“After a series of EPs, Tipper announced in 2013 that health concerns would limit his festival appearances, and he released Dusty Bubble Box: EP Remixes to help raise funds for medical bills that included cardiac surgery the same year. After time off to recover, he returned with 2014’s Forward Escape, which hit the Top 20 of Billboard’s electronic albums chart. By that time, Tipper was making festival appearances with dedicated so-called uptempo or downtempo sets.
“In 2015, he released two EPs, Fathoms EP and It’s Like…, and in 2017, he returned with Flunked EP. It became his highest-charting release to date, reaching number 15 on the Billboard Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart.” ~ Marcy Donelson & Greg Prato, Rovi
Categories: Ambient, Bass, Cinematic, Deep Bass, Downtempo, EDM, Experimental Bass, Glitch, Glitch-Hop, Glitchstep, IDM, Left-Field, Music, Progressive PsyBass, Psychedelic Bass, World Beat
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Roxanne Meadows
The Choice Is Ours
The Venus Project Documentary [2016]
“This film series explores many aspects of our society. To rethink what is possible in our world, we need to consider what kind of world we want to live in. Although we refer to it as a civilization, it is anything but civilized. Visions of global unity & fellowship have long inspired humanity, yet the social arrangements up to the present have largely failed to produce a peaceful and productive world. While we appear to be technically advanced, our values and behaviors are not. The possibility of an optimistic future is in stark contrast to our current social, economic, and environmental dilemmas. The Choice Is Ours includes interviews with notable scientists, media professionals, authors, and other thinkers exploring the difficulties we face.
Part I provides an introduction and overview of cultural & environmental conditions that are untenable for a sustainable world civilization. It explores the determinants of behavior to dispel the myth of “human nature” while demonstrating how the environment shapes behavior. The science of behavior is an important – yet largely missing – ingredient in our culture.
Part II questions the values, behaviors, and consequences of our social structures, and illustrates how our global monetary system is obsolete and increasingly insufficient to meet the needs of most people. Critical consideration of the banking, media, and criminal justice systems reveals these institutions for what they really are: tools of social control managed by the established political and economic elite. If we stay the present course, the familiar cycles of crime, economic booms & busts, war, and further environmental destruction are inevitable.
Part III explains the methods and potential of science. It proposes solutions that we can apply at present to eliminate the use of non-renewable sources of energy. It depicts the vision of The Venus Project to build an entirely new world from the ground up, a “redesign of the culture,” where all enjoy a high standard of living, free of servitude and debt, while also protecting the environment.
Part IV explains how it is not just architecture and a social structure that is in desperate need of change, but our values which have been handed down from centuries ago. They too need to be updated to our technological age, which has the potential to eliminate our scarcity-driven societies of today. Our problems are mostly of our own making, but we can still turn things around before the point of no return. It’s not too late for an optimistic outlook on the fantastic possibilities that lie before us.”
Categories: Cinema, Documentaries, Interviews, Symposia
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Neonn Felicity Curations
📚 Lectures / Books 📚
YouTube Playlist
1/14Geo-Strategy#2: Christian Zionism and the Middle East ConflictGeo-Strategy #8: The Iran TrapNazis Never Left — They Just Rebranded. Here’s How They Took Over Mainstream PoliticsMichael Parenti "The Struggle for History" North Hollywood, California June 1994Michael Parenti "Democratic Government vs. The State" Long Beach, California September 1991Michael Parenti "Reflections on the Overthrow of Communism" Santa Rosa, California March 1996A Spectre Haunting: China Miéville on the Communist ManifestoManifesting the Utopian Mind 🔮 Neonn Felicity 🔮 Lightning in a Bottle 2022When Freedom Is Oppression: White Resistance To Federal Power w/ Jefferson Cowie | MR LIVE 1/30/231/14Categories: Books, Lectures, Literature, Symposia
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Greg Harrison
Groove
Authentic Renegade Rave Dramedy Film [2000]
The following is a long-form movie review by Neonn Felicity. Usually my words are in this font/color & quoted official descriptions are in lavender, but I wrote 1300 words about this amazing film & wasn’t sure where to post them, & it would take up too much space to put them all here in that format. So here they are, at least for now! 😛
Vudu ($3) ~ Amazon Prime ($3) ~ YouTube ($4)
If you would like to see an authentic portrait of the rave experience, including the dialectic between the event producers and the rave police, watch a movie called Groove. Somehow, writer-director Greg Harrison was able to capture extremely nuanced aspects of the whole thing that every raver has witnessed and felt and laughed at again and again over the course of going to underground raves. It was by far the most accurate depiction of the way people act on ecstasy at raves that I have ever seen in my life. It shows the way people converse in the midst of the party in profoundly honest and healing ways that deepen and accelerate the development of relationships between siblings, long-time friends, lovers new and old, and people who only just met for a brief but important moment.
The characters all felt eerily familiar to me, as if I had met them in real life at real raves, to such an extent that I feel like they must be somewhat universal archetypes across time and space. Groove was produced a decade before I started raving, but so much of it reminded me of those early days when I first fell in love with this culture and converted to the neopagan rave religion and adopted the name Neonn.
They depict brilliantly the phenomenon of “renegade” raves in abandoned warehouses whose locations remain undisclosed until the night of the party, when there is a phone number that reveals an address to a “map point” on the outgoing voicemail message, and there is somebody at the map point giving directions to the party to ravers for $2. That’s the price.
Later on, the main dude who threw the party is asked, “Why do you do this to yourself? Don’t even get paid, risk getting arrested, for what?” And he says, “You don’t know?” “No.” “The nod.” “The nod?” “Yeah. It happens to me at least once every party. Somebody comes up to me, says, ‘Thank you for making this happen; I needed this; this really meant something to me,’ and then they nod. And I nod back.” “That’s it?” “That’s it.”
Groove depicts the DJs, the drug dealers, the tech people, the decor people, the event promoters and organizers, and the individual ravers in participatory attendance all as creating this immensely valuable ecstatic container purely for the love of it. They are putting on these wonderful epic parties because they actually love it so deeply that they are willing to do it not only for almost no pay, but at a material cost of the risk of fines, asset seizures, and jail.
This labor of profound love refutes the obsolete speculation about human nature that asserts that culture needs a monetary incentive to be produced, cultivated, maintained, and innovated on. Authentic rave culture does not operate primarily by the profit motive, and yet it is Evolving more rapidly than the consumer culture which is primarily motivated by profit.
If you need proof, just look at the memetic recycling going on in the endless remakes and spin-offs and derivative knock-offs Hollywood is constantly producing, and the nauseatingly vapid consumeristic bling bling pop music playing on repeat on every radio station across the country, most of which are owned by a few gigantic oligopolistic corporations who bought them all up after Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulating—among other things—the cap on how many terrestrial radio stations a single corporate entity could own. Our anarchic neopagan culture is more emotionally and humanistically sophisticated, more imaginatively creative, and more genuinely innovative and future-oriented than that which money can possibly ever hope to incentivize. This film depicts that quite well.
I think that’s why Roger Ebert hated it so much. I haven’t read much of his work, but I know he was one of the most famous cinematic tastemakers in the country who got his start at the Chicago Sun Times in 1967, when the Establishment—the Leviathan—was in full-blown panic mode about the rise of the psychedelic counterculture, so I assume he made a name for himself hippie-punching all the way back at the beginning of his career. In that respect, I shouldn’t have been surprised at how offended he was by the portrayal of people having positive life-affirming experiences on drugs at a rave. That’s part of what was so special about that film!
Usually the writers and the studios are coerced by the ratings agencies and their corporate shareholders into never ever portraying “drug use without negative consequences” (except alcohol, because that’s, uh, different because, uh, it’s legal). There’s a lot of fascist propaganda machinery working behind the scenes to ensure that just about any time anybody does an illegal drug in a movie or on TV, something terrible happens to them. That’s incredibly dishonest, and it creates an extremely distorted and inaccurate public perception of what illegal drugs—in general and specific ones in particular—and people who do them responsibly and recreationally are actually like in real life, and what the actual risk-to-reward ratio is in doing them.
On the one hand, it undermines the credibility of people who sincerely care about preventing people from naïvely harming themselves in pursuit of a high, because by insisting that all depictions of drug use in the mainstream media be exaggerated scare stories where the moral of the story is basically, “Just say ‘no’ to drugs, kids,” nobody who ever does an illegal drug will ever listen to another word they say about the issue.
On the other hand, such systematically distorted depictions of drug use in our culture does infantilize the public about it such that most people are utterly trapped in a false understanding of—not to mention an impoverished appreciation for—the realms of conscious experience accessible to human beings given our extraordinary brains and our historical legacy of using them to invent shamanic mysticism and biochemistry and neuropsychopharmacology.
Groove showed me that psychedelic drug use—and all the quirky behavior it instigates in ravers, before, during, and after the party, from every different perspective within the intimate temporary ecstatic community—can in fact be depicted honestly, accurately, and authentically in film. It can be done. I always knew most of those other movies about psychedelics in general or raving in particular were slanderous, but Groove made me appreciate just how slanderous they were. Roger Ebert only got tricked into thinking this film was an inaccurate portrait of psychedelic culture because all he had was legitimately inaccurate portraits of it to compare it to. He drank the prohibitionist Kool-Aide, so apparently, he couldn’t recognize the truth in the art when he saw it.
In all the hundreds of raves I’ve been to, spanning over a decade now, with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people at each event, I’ve shared dancefloor space with cumulatively millions of people at this point. Of all those millions of people I’ve raved with, I’ve only ever heard of somebody dying at an event I was at twice. In both instances, it was Prohibition that killed them. One died from an overdose of an obscure research chemical that was sold to her under the pretense that it was LSD. That would not happen if these drugs were available from legitimate sources and thereby properly accurately labelled.
The other died from a lack of proper drug safety education; she overheated on the dancefloor on MDMA after dancing for ten hours straight without taking a break to hydrate and cool off for a minute. If her high school curriculum had taught her to remember to take breaks from dancing and to drink lots of water if she is going to be taking ecstasy, she would be alive right now. It was not the drug that killed her; it was the misguided paternalistic impulse that decided it was better to keep her ignorant of proper safety precautions.
The cynic in me wants to say that prohibitionists keep those teenagers ignorant and those drugs unlabeled and unregulated on purpose so that some ravers will accidentally hurt or kill themselves at a rave, because it helps to validate their hysterical slanderous anti-drug propaganda when there is in fact a real horror story anecdote they can point to and exploit the public’s bias toward anecdotes over statistics, the vast majority of which say that on the whole, drugs are actually good! Most illegal drug use—especially of psychedelics—is perfectly appropriate and healthy, and provides people with intellectual curiosity, emotional catharsis, bodily pleasure, or even mystical transcendence. It’s good to finally see a movie that portrays that underrepresented aspect of my spiritual community. Fuck Roger Ebert.
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Jason Silva
We Are the Gods Now
Festival of Dangerous Ideas Talk [2013]
“JASON SILVA is an extraordinary new breed of philosopher who meshes philosophical wisdom of the ages with an infectious optimism for the future. Combining intriguing insights and a mastery of digital filmmaking, Jason delivers philosophical shots of espresso, which unravel the incredible possibilities the future has to offer the human race.