Ecstasy Club

Rating:
Summary: And...
Review: ...and that emptiness and boredom and blankness are the only emotions which author transferred to me as his reader through the medium of his words and it feels like a disease which is called "I am one of GenXers". While being not exactly the effect the author probably aspired to achieve by his novel, it perfectly matches with the true state of lives and feelings of the people like the ones acting roles in his story. And by this, the work proves the eternal unity of the art and real life, both always creations of the creator...

Rating:
Summary: Origin of PLUR Foundation Myth
Review: A charismatic Brit and his entourage of overeducated dropouts take over a piano factory in Oakland, intending to squat there and throw the most massive raves the Bay Area has ever seen. But, as their project progresses, they find the mix of their idealistic youthful hormones and the hard drugs they gobble up like Captain Crunch has turned their enterprise into a paranoid schizophrenic cult called Ecstasy Club bent on time travel and transcendence. Things get weird when they actually succeed. But all is not well in Nirvana. Rushkoff manages to hard-wire a psychotically charged volume that connects all the pop-culture dots, like conspiracy theories, aliens, and MTV. The ironic distance of the narrator seems malleable, like physical distance on too much acid. Ecstasy Club seems to turn its own pages.

(this review got accidentally posted to another Rushkoff book)

Rating:
Summary: Ultimate Trip
Review: A roller coaster ride through drugs, future concepts, morality, and cults. I loved the odd mix of characters and the piano factory setting. I never knew about the "rave scene" until reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: Techno, Drugs and Government Conspiracy?!?
Review: After reading some of Douglas Rushkoff's non-fiction work, specifically "Coercion", I was looking forward to checking out his story telling skills. I haven't read a lot of fiction lately, so this book was a nice change of pace.

Ecstasy Club takes place in Oakland, CA where a bunch of lost soul Gen X'ers start a commune in an abandoned warehouse where they search for the meaning of life while raving the nights away and consuming as many drugs as humanly possible. The story twisted around drug induced psychoses, cult leaders, crazy government conspiracy theories and wild rave parties.

Rushkoff has proved that he can write a fictional story just as well as he can write about current topics. I really enjoyed the book and look forward to his next fictional work.

Rating:
Summary: A dense bundle of millennial memes!
Review: Have you ever looked at how the events in your life are unfolding and discovered in yourself the unshakable conviction that there are no coincidences? After reading "Ecstasy Club," you may look back on your discovery of the book as an integral element in a larger pattern; a pattern so seamless that you cannot see it as just an orderless juxtaposition of "random events."

Rushkoff uses this tale of cyber-savvy twenty-somethings who commandeer an abandoned piano factory and turn it into a wired commune and rave cult headquarters as a vehicle for infecting the reader with a virulent set of consciousness-transforming memes. It's okay if you don't know what a meme is. You'll have an intuitive understanding after you've read "Ecstasy Club."

Rushkoff doesn't stop to explain memes, the significance of novelty, Ericksonian hypnosis, the attractor at the end of time, or really much of anything. If you're already familiar with these concepts, you'll get a warm self-satisfied glow as you think, "Nobody's going to get all these references." If you're encountering these concepts for the first time as you read "Ecstasy Club" you'll experience the electrifying thrill of discovering that the world is a far stranger and more wonderful place than you'd previously realized, and you'll think "Wow!"

Rating:
Summary: Sex, Drugs and Social Reprogramming
Review: I haven't read anything else by Rushkoff but I have to say that I enjoyed this book immensely. What you get for your [money] is: Insight into the rave (and other) subculture(s); conspiracy theories (from the Philadelphia Experiment to a not so subtlely masked version of the scientologists); a full education pertaining to the effects of experimental, mind-effecting drugs; graphic depictions of group sex; an introduction to social programming and its effects; and a glimpse into the idea of consciousness evolution. This is like Robert Anton Wilson's _Prometheus Rising_ written as fiction.

If the concepts are new to you, you may be left behind (or may be forced to reread) but I don't think this stuff is too far out of anyone's grasp. Just remember that all of this stuff isn't fiction. Many people believe in some of these concepts and live these types of lifestyles, it's just that most people aren't aware they exist. My favorite line in the book is, "... the kind of thing that everyone talks about doing when they're in college, but then never does because they get swept away in the current of real life's events." (That's paraphrased a bit) Been there, done that?

Rating:
Summary: Cyberia : Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace - Fiction Remix
Review: I just finished the reading of this book and it was not an easy job to do so. While reading it, I had this feeling of reading about the things described somewhere else...then it came to my mind - this is the Cyberia in fiction coating and Douglas is selling me the same stuff again! Yeah, I would not mind, if only he would add some extra stuff, I like him and his work, but all that he succeeded to deliver apart from his usual views on the rave and techno revolutionaries and their lifestyle was really artificial plot. So here is my advice to you - if you want to read about the alternative culture, lifestyle and opinions of GenX, buy other books by Rushkoff, they are amazing and full of interesting views and information. If you want to read a decent novel, a literary work with some artistic value, forget about Douglas Rushkoff and try something by Douglas Coupland. Rushkoff is a great author of non-fiction, but unless he shows us more talent and creativity in his new novel (titled Bull?), he will have to stay in his cup of tea for good, his own and also ours. To reach out from there, into the realm of high art, he must be armed with better sword then a poorly written novel, a novel which gives the readers the ecstasy only in its title.

Rating:
Summary: all the little tidbits of what's real and what isn't
Review: I really enjoyed this book, even with the small little snags here and there, the slowness at the beginning, and Zach's doubt which was annoying sometimes (at least the doubt of himself - I'm not sure how real it was). But the ideas were great fun, it was neat to see how the author Douglas Rushkoff blended ideas of psychedelic science and quantum physics and fictionalized versions of psychedelic celebrities (like versions of John Lilly and Terence McKenna) and included morphonic resonance and meme warefare and the idea that there really isn't good and evil just a want for other. These are all ideas I've either run across or thought about. I enjoyed seeing them played with in a story. I thought the ending rocked, and all the little tidbits of what's real and what isn't. And how consensual reality is manipulated, or can be. The CIA experiments were a lot like the ones they said the Cosmotologists (Scientologists-a play on them, huh?) and the gov't did on psychics with ... in the 50s-60s.

Sure, a lot of the book is also pop psychology and pop psychedelica, but it was fun reading. And the rave ideology was interesting, even though I'm not certain the energy should be attempted to be directed, I like the idea of it coalescing much more.

Rating:
Summary: Very Insightful Look Into Raves And Beyond
Review: i was one of those guys who wanted to play with things that were harmful to me when i was a kid, but never got around to it. once i grew up a little, i became one of those guys who wanted to go to rave parties, but i was too busy NOT going. in my recent resurgence of curiousity, i figured i would pick up the ecstacy club and have a look. what i found was a very interesting depiction of sex, drugs, trance, rave parties, orgies, squatting and tons of acts of stupidity on the parts of various nicely fleshed out characters.

i dont remember the main character's name, but he's the smartest one out of a group of drug addled twenty-somethings who want to transcend the mortal plane though drugs and parties...and make a bunch of money along the way hosting these parties. there is a character named duncan who THINKS he's the smartest one in the group, so naturally he becomes the arrogant "cult" leader.

the main character just wants two things - to leave this life behind and to make duncan's girlfriend lauren his own. and this is the struggle until more obstacles come up out of nowhere to threaten our players.

i liked the story though i had no idea where it was going somewhere after midway through. new challenges arise as new characters are introduced and it just seemed for a while there that there was no end in sight until a particularly far-fetched final act checks in. it could all have been a believable story if not for the last fifty pages or so. check it out if you are bored of salinger and hemingway.

Rating:
Summary: More Than Just Drugs
Review: The Ecstasy Club by Douglas Rushkoff is the fastest read book I have ever encountered. I consumed and devoured every word, every scene, every concept. This book put priority over almost everything in my life at that time. Rushkoff's ideas and concepts were extremely hard to grasp, but that is exactly what kept me interested.

This novel was the first I have ever read about the current club scene: raves, drugs, sex, and Rock 'n Roll (or in this case Techno). One may think that this novel is strictly written for the teenager, but I believe that it may attempt to explain the culture of teenagers to any adult who is interested. I believe, though, that if an adult attempts to read this novel, it will have an "all or nothing" effect; either the adult will grasp the idea completely or reject it out of ignorance.

The novel contains a journey theme. This journey consists of a group of kids traveling to throw raves for their enjoyment as well as their profit. On the symbolic level, it is a quest for the truth about life; an answer to all the questions concearning the fate of our world. In the end, the truth is not uncovered by the "deprogrammed" (Ecstasy Club members and alike) outdoing the "programmed" (cultists and fascists), but by an evolution into a mutual understanding between both groups.

When this novel was first recommended to me by a friend, I expected it to be good, but definitely not this powerful. The Ecstasy Club had me overwhelmed with the most complex thinking concearning the realites of our world that I will ever grasp. It takes a very smart, open-minded person to enjoy the novel in its entirety.

"So do we need an educated elite to censor out the bad information, or are we evolved enough to accept or discard prescriptions for change using nothing other than our intuition? Maybe it's YOU who are unduly afraid of the dominance of favored, state-sponsored memes. If we accept the basic premise that out mindset extends, eventually, to the reality we inhabit, then wouldn't your attribution of the psychedelic revolution to a fear-mongering elite and subsequent admission of your own powerlessness in the face of such adversity ultimately result in the full manifestation of the very forces you hope to quash?" This quote was the first realization of the truth regarding reality that I was in the process of revealing. Sadly, though, the truth is not easy enough for me to just simply tell you; it must be uncovered by diving into the deep, complex dialogue Rushkoff uses throughout the novel's multi-level development.