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Orchard Park (Music Inspired by the Novel)

Image by Thomas Fahy
THE ALBUM

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Orchard Park (Music Inspired by the Novel)

THE BOOK




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Synopsis: Russell Huggins has died an indigent's death but left behind a formidable literary estate. Tom Shaw has been enlisted by The University of Maryland's Urban Archaeology Department to decipher and distill, catalogue and compile, Huggins' vast collection of single-spaced, handwritten journals and ledgers littering the second floor of Button House, a dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of Orchard Park, a Baltimore suburb. Is it but a case of riotous hypergraphia or does the University's adamancy suggest something else? Orchard Park tells the tale of one man's effort to scratch at the canvas; to peel away life’s protective layers; to decrypt meaning from the cultural artifacts by which he is surrounded -- to achieve grace through creation and redemption through imagination.




ISBN: 978-0-9828673-7-2 (Black Sun Edition)
ISBN: 978-0-9828673-0-3 (Retail Edition)
Copyright: Tom Fahy (Standard Copyright License)
First Edition: 2010
Third Edition: 2012
Publisher: Orchard Park Press
Language: English
Pages: 411
Binding: Perfect-bound Paperback
Interior: Ink Black & white
Weight: 1.5 lbs.
Dimensions: (inches) 6 wide x 9 tall




Book Website: book.tomfahy.org
Download: PDF (FREE)
Purchase Link: Lulu [ dot ] com
List Price: .00
Price:.50
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REVIEWS




Reviewer: Laura Le Croix, Orchard Park Gazette, Kunst und Kultur, B1, 9 April 2012

Considered a secular bible of Transcendental Fascism, Orchard Park is a book “against Time,” with ideas “against Time,” celebrating a cast of intellectual Khans. There is no question but that it will be ignored, if for no better reason, than because it requires patience, a quality that is anathema to the casual reader, who is sure, after cursory inspection, to not like it, and what is more, to be quick to denounce it—a curiously atavistic reaction to which Orchard Park and its author are accustomed; it does not address the primitive among living men, and does not, under any circumstances, kowtow to the expectations of the hoi polloi; it was written to elevate, not to appease.




This is a book that does not hope, that does not encourage hope in its readers, that does not seek to save or dispense prescriptions to modern man, but rather, embraces a systemic, cultural unfurling, and describes the actions of men that aim to hasten said unfurling...of history, of culture. It is the answer to the cultural Technocrat’s obsession with progress; it is the seawall against which the wave on which the cultural Dissimulator is carried breaks; it operates in strict contravention of all that is soul-killing, vulgar and ignoble in the West, resuscitating the gods of yore and re-invoking the time-honored religions against which organized superstition can mount no practical defense.




The book, composed of a series of acts, episodes and arias, describes, piece by piece, a movement led by men who aim to cut out by force what is merely clever in man, what is subservient in man, and those backward instincts in simple men which forestall a clean-spirited, ethical New Order. Orchard Park is not only “against Time,” but “against Progress.” It is not the cry of a cynic, but the battle cry of legions against the exponents of vanity, of equality, of humaneness, of the holiness of tolerance at any cost. Orchard Park was not written to appeal to what is rational in men, but to inspire what remains of their spirits—what is divine, what is unchangeable, and what is timeless.




Orchard Park shamelessly promotes those qualities in its characters that reflect a will-to-the-heroic. It instructs, slowly but surely, the reader on a course that will enable him to arm himself against that which is trifling in culture, to cease to be mere “passers-of-time,” to think once more after an intense fashion; to rediscover in himself a destiny that is purposeful. Orchard Park wasn’t written for the intellectually lazy or for the pathologically credulous; it was written for the would-be revolutionary and for those still possessed of common sense: the natural elite. It was not written for the over-educated, for tenured priests, for the liberal, or for the soul-annihilating Democratic civilizers to whose demand for obeisance is sacrificed everything, including the mastery over one’s own destiny.

If Orchard Park has one aim, it is to restore in man those truths—ethical, aesthetical and metaphysical—of which he has been deprived by the State Organism of which he has been made a mere component-piece. It is, simply stated, the overriding cause of Orchard Park's author to inspire in the reader the vital desire to overwhelm the pernicious assaults of the Technocrat and the Dissimulator and to become, themselves, men and women “against Time.”

{ END }




Reviewer: Aaron Desmond, Baltimore, MD, April 2012

Writing and music have been Tom Fahy’s sadhana, and it has made him not a cent. He will be the first to attest to the fact that the material rewards for serving one’s vision unwaveringly are few, but the spiritual rewards inestimable.




In the past, at the author’s expense, I made jokes about Orchard Park, although I knew that my sarcasm could not but further undermine the book—a book already drawn and quartered by the establishment in an effort to suppress its contents, the core of which were, as advertised by the author, encrypted. It took 24 months for the establishment to decrypt Orchard Park before launching a quiet, administrative campaign to censor it and attempt to eviscerate Fahy financially.




As I now understand the full import of the messages lodged in Orchard Park, I regret my former snide remarks and wish to both formally apologize for and retract them. I do not know if Fahy’s book will enjoy a jolly fate or meet a dismal end. The establishment is barbarous and its malice is unimaginative; it invariably serves explicitly “the good.” If this is true, Orchard Park is genuinely a terrible book that attempts to un-knit the priorities of modern man: Democracy, tolerance and whatnot.




Tom Fahy serves an alien purpose. If the establishment is correct, his intellectual crimes are against humanity, and his is the most vile of sins: in-humaneness toward the hodgepodge of Western man. Fahy, by his own admission, is a deeply prejudiced author—prejudiced in favor of Antiquity, prejudiced in favor of the human spirit, prejudiced in favor of a transcendental will-to-power. Of these prejudices he is guilty—guilty in the public trials of our progressive era.

We should all hope to be so guilty.

{ END }




Reviewer: Philip Hartley, “Each Arrow Overshot His Head.” Berchtesgaden Review of Books, Vol. 1, No. 1, May-June 2012

It is an unseasonably warm day in March. I sit with Fahy under an awning of an Italian restaurant in Poughkeepsie, NY a handful of blocks from the edge of the Hudson River. Overhead, a bald eagle tucks in its wings and aims for the horizon like a missile. Several minutes pass before Fahy and I speak again about practical matters. He is thinner than I remember and his hair longer, but the lightning flashing in his eyes is unchanged. I have made the trip to talk about his novel Orchard Park, which although popular in Germany, remains obscure in North America.




In person and in writing, Tom Fahy is openly hostile to Christianity and this has made Orchard Park’s analysis difficult for liberals and conservatives alike. Although Fahy’s weltanschauung proscribes implicitly superstitious systems of belief, it does not discount counter-universalist systems of belief uninterested in spiritual devirilization. The cult that recurs throughout Orchard Park is referred to as Baldrist; that is, one adheres to the tenets of ‘Baldrism,’ after fair Baldr, a Norse god and second son of Odin. Baldrism, simply stated, opposes Christianization of the soul, and seeks to reinvent the soul of Western man in the image of his ancestors, initiating him through intimative prose. “The initiated reader,” Fahy says while shaking his empty coffee cup at a passing waitress, “is a blood-brother and –sister, a good Celt, intuitive, a natural seer, soulful, and intellectually racinated.”




In the context of Orchard Park, Baldr and Baldrism are the integral expressions of Fahy’s creation, ‘Transcendental Fascism,’ which is first and foremost an idea, as opposed to a pure political initiative. “Transcendental Fascism takes advantage of the innate individualistic tendencies in its members, and in its first phase is necessarily leaderless,” says Fahy. “It is requisite, then, that each member abide by an enduring survival instinct, never resort to half-measures, and aspire always to the cause of essentialism. The primacy of Essence is all-important to a Transcendental Fascist, but the Essence of a man’s soul should not be conflated with the essence of mere things, the existence of which is not, in my opinion, worth debating.”




If not an attempt to create a new religion, Orchard Park, in a very practical sense, serves a regenerative purpose, drawing out of ancient pyres ideas-of-old which contrast starkly with those of the over-civilized present, reemphasizing the eminence of Nature to which at all times the overzealous intellect is subservient. Orchard Park itself is a peripheral township undergoing general resorption into the landscape at the end of an Age; cyclicity is represented by urban decay and that decay is celebrated, and often defended, from renewal. “A perennial Struggle was concluded in the twentieth century—a struggle against general degeneration. It was not a winnable struggle, but it was a noble one; it is in the nature of heroic men to challenge the Fates, to thwart intellectual falsity…but at the end of an Age, the valiant among men are granted a reprieve from the Struggle. They withdraw from the cities into the country, while the metropolis’ are turned into worlds of ice and mist.”.




And like the perennial ‘Struggle’ to which Fahy referred, our interview was thus concluded.

{ END }




Reviewer: Komparu Inoue, Osaka, Osaka Prefecture, Japan, 3 January 2012

It is a terrible era during which to make an art book. Anti-art is still fine. Anti-art has been fine for six decades. What is anti-art? It is abstraction and its perpetrators are monkeys. But we love monkeys. We no longer like men—glorious men, able and willing to describe the world as they have found and experienced it. We will not pay to see vivid men in action. If we are not manipulated, we feel as though we have been cheated; that the show wasn’t worth the price of admission. But so enamored are we with anti-art, and so long have we been manipulated by it, that our tastes have been irrevocably narrowed; we do not realize that our artists have been supplanted by entertainers who are every bit as enslaved by the modern obsession with plot as we.




But the human heart does not plot.




The more accustomed the reader becomes to abstraction, the more degraded his will, the less discerning his judgment, the duller his acumen. Nowadays, conceptual abstractions are packaged within the framework of structured texts, swaddled in plot, and are at the mercy of clever narrative.




Oh, the rewards of literacy!




But is the text heightening the reader’s awareness? Is the reader inspired? Has the author risked himself in any way for his audience, or has he sought to simply deceive it? No longer are the minds of the literate tuned for the truth, as the truth does not first aim to entertain, and soon it becomes the imperative of the author to appeal to this base penchant for titillation.




In 2011, I stumbled upon a crude Japanese translation of an art book by an American author that strove to be nothing if not a testament to the truth—the truth as the author saw it. It was written with a martial flair that could be nothing but alienating to a readership primed for patriotic dross—an audience accustomed to being baited by anti-artists.




The book is called Orchard Park, and the author is Tom Fahy.




As I read, knowing little about the author, it occurred to me how like a Noh play this book was—regulated as though by its own strict iemoto system—and in some instances, like Kyögen, or comedia dell-arte. I read with the reserve that was expected of me by my mother while in attendance of Noh as a child. Then, feet swinging, I was less interested in Matsukaze than in intermission wagashi. But as I read Orchard Park, a truly exotic affair in Japanese, my thoughts were rarely of food.




As in Noh Drama, the chief characters are male, and it is through the males that the lives of women are narrated. There are many types of Noh, but Tom Fahy’s book reads most like Kyōran-mono, which would be called a ‘madness play’ in English. In Kyōran-mono, a tragedy befalls the protagonist, usually lost love, and the heartache is narrated through a series of formal acts interspersed with shorter comedic routines, or vignettes.




Although Noh Drama is not always allegorical, Fahy’s is explicitly so: each episode, in sum, describes the liberation of Imagination from Western Rationalization. And never is the allegory bastardized for the sake of plot or forward momentum.




Orchard Park is a radical departure from the anti-art popular in the West, but in Japan, with a better translation, it could find a warm home.




{ END }




Reviewer: A. S. Brun-Fournier (pseudonym), Carcassonne, Languedoc-Roussillon, 2010

If not in name, Orchard Park’s core philosophy, Transcendental Fascism, or ‘Fascismo,’ precedes the book as an enduring, but under-articulated Idea. The book charts the author’s awakening to the Idea and its full articulation but does so in a categorically structured way designed to assist the reader along the path of his own initiation.




The path…




Orchard Park is not an autobiography and it is not the work of a politician. Nor is it the work of a romantic. It is the work of a realist that has brought to bear on the subject matter the fruits of choice experiences and meetings with a broad spectrum of figures, some public and some private, some savory and some not. Whether or not the information with which the author was privileged was delivered in strictest confidence, it makes its way into the pages of Orchard Park with a sort of boldness that isn’t welcome in the censorious publishing world of the West. The author relates aloud and in detail what many of us already suspected or knew about the machinery behind September 11th, but dared not breathe a word for fear of losing our jobs. But oddly, the author’s insights into the turn-of-the-century intelligence apparatus, now quite different, was presented as an outsized aside to the book’s overriding imperative:




The bulk of the book is of a spiritual order, and is the product of hammered and tempered will, not accident—an Event—of which there are very few in 21st century literature, as so much about the experience of a book nowadays hinges upon that which is sordid or shamelessly patronizing, or itself an open agency of decay. Probably unconsciously, the author avoids lewdness. Even the unsavory characters do not descend into carnal impropriety (with one exception in the novella, Ajita). Many of the characters are typified by an Edwardian reserve which, it can be concluded, is an implicit attribute of Transcendental Fascism.

A word on Fascismo: Orchard Park is an open assault on Democracy. It doesn’t like it and is quick to deride it. We are very accustomed to books in which tolerance is implicit, especially here in France, a bastion of egalitarianism…on paper. So it is no wonder if Orchard Park leaves a bad taste in the mouth, like bread made with sulfurous water. We don’t care about righteous Ideas. We are beyond Ideas.




And this is the argument against which the author rails: to be beyond Ideas is to be fully degenerate, fully deracinated, fully without Identity, fully without vital Power, fully without constructive Will.




{ END }




More Reviews → Here

SUBSTANCE/08 Identity

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Myself and Rich Lyons have been organising / designing a showcase website for our course. Initially we were planning an end of year show at Free range, but as people slowly but surely dropped out we had to compromise with something a lot smaller than our initial plans.
Litho printed postcards in black and fluorescent green on pistachio colour plan will be making their way to the press very soon.
–
www.substance08.com

Windsor Teahouse Magazine Advertisement

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This was a mock-up magazine ad I created for a short course in graphic design. The beautiful photography is by Meng He - www.menghedesign.com/

Unfortunately this cafe does not exist so you can't go there and buy this tart! But it was a good learning exercise.

This photo has a creative commons licence so you're free to use it but please make sure you include the same type of credit to Meng He Design with a link back to the website. Thanks!