I first came across the notion of Desperado Philosophy in a remarkable passage from Moby Dick:
A Genial Desperado Philosophy
Ishmael joins the crew of the doomed Pequod because he is drawn to the ocean waves at those times when he is in his “hypos”, and feels like knocking people’s hats off. In similar moods, I have also been drawn to waves – radio waves. Instead of signing on to ill-fated vessels in search of a rapidly diminishing resource, I signed into a medium which is no stranger to oblivion and which is both ubiquitous and utterly marginal.
The Old Jokester
For me, radio art has always been first and foremost a form of philosophical navigation, and the hard things visible and invisible that preoccupy me are shared by all bodies, carnal and ethereal, such as the mad dance between Eros and Thanatos; the bewildering maelstrom of memory, identity and trauma; the ambiguous and often comic role we humans appear to play in the cosmos, wit thereof only dimly discerned; our capacity for both unspeakable cruelty and extraordinary kindness, sometimes occurring within a whisper of each other. For the past ten years, I have been particularly concerned with how such tensions play out within the American dream machine.
Desperado Philosophy represents an ongoing engagement with these themes, by other means; not a blog in the conventional sense, but more of an online play of associations, ideas and histories. Characters real and imagined will float by, and you will forgive me if I am unable to tell one from the other. In truth, I have no idea how this will go, or where, yet in strange and dangerous times, I propose to place these freely associated stories and ideas into play, out of the dark, and then see where they want to go.
NOT A HAT KNOCKER
Gregory Whitehead is an audio artist, writer, media philosopher, and the creator of over one hundred radio plays, essays and acoustic adventures through the foglands. Since the 1980s, his work represents a sustained exploration of the paradoxes and frictions that make analog radiophonic space so beautifully bewildering. He is the co-editor of Wireless Imagination: Sound Radio and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press), and the author of numerous documentary essays and speculative fictions.
He lives in the Berkshires, not far from the farmhouse where Melville penned his master work, and closer still to the Tanglewood of Hawthorne’s Tales. For additional background, writings and audio, see www.gregorywhitehead.com. Dialogue welcome via email: gregorywhitehead(at)mac.com.
