If you look at the bio of Brisbane musician Hannaka you'll find: 'Hannaka is an impetuous artist. One who is found in ever-changing and evolving forms, who never was quite able to separate philosophical thought or the practice of living from the practice of art-making.'
So it makes sense when asked to compile a Top 5 list, Hannaka went deep. “So my Top 5 resides in the existential crisis and what a tortured artist does to remedy the situation. Not only do I write songs, but I have hung out with the following hipsters, page by page, who have a knack for peeling back the layers of meaning-less-ness.”
1. C.G. Jung - 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections'
Because this guy isn't Freud, who dumbed us down into mindless, sex maniacs. He really tried to get a true glimpse of who we are. 'The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step in our development.'2. Arundhati Roy - 'The God Of Small Things'
Because she sees the silenced story, that other way of looking that turns all complaints on its head. My advice....fall in love with the Dalits ;-) 'Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story ... it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.'3. Hakim Bey - 'TAZ' (ontological anarchism and poetic terrorism)
Because Bey will disturb and sub-verse you and make you ache for dada-istic sweet-nothings. 'We need a practical kind of mystical anarchism (way of being), devoid of all new-age shit and shinola, and inexorably heretical and anti-clerical; avid for all new technologies of consciousness and metanoia - a democratisation of shamanism, intoxicated and serene.'4. Joseph Campbell - 'The Hero Of A Thousand Faces'
Campbell is rad because who the hell knows anything before they have listened to the whole story? 'Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo-jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nut-shell of an argument of Aquinas or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy-tale: it will always be the one shape-shifting, yet marvellously constant story that we find, together with a challenging persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.'5. Guy Debord - 'Society Of The Spectacle'
This book is the prophecy of our living age, don't be a carbon copy people, be as weird as possible! 'The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.'Hannaka will be performing at Milano Café, Queen St Mall as part of The City Sounds this Good Friday, April 3, from 4.30pm-7pm.
