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How many times have you thought to yourself, god, get me out of Kansas! If not actual Kansas in fact, then our collective Kansas of the mind, where everything is grey and flat and predictable and every day is the same and nothing special ever happens to you or anyone you know. How many times have you thought, well, if I was in Oz, I would actually appreciate it, and not be sulking about going back home every 5 minutes. Emerald cities! Flying monkeys! Magical powers! I would be so there. And I would never ever click my heels together, especially three times, even accidentally.

Well. I am happy to report, there is a way. You can go whenever you want. And there's no need to wait for stray tornados - the gateway is as near as (the harnessed and interpreted electromagnetic energy of) your vcr and stereo.

Yeah, it matches up. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and the film The Wizard of Oz. Press start, or drop the needle on the third roar of the lion (for you folks at home it's the third roar of the film lion, not all those video lions, some of which roar and some of which don't - in fact, just fast forward to the actual start of the film, then rewind to the last lion just before the film starts, and count his roars), and it matches up, like, to the second. Especially the first time through the music. Now everyone always wants to know, 'did they or didn't they?' But that's actually not the most interesting question. When some friends and I tried it a few years ago, we found that the movie extended long beyond a single play of the record. And since we were not huge fans of Pink Floyd (sorry, we can't all be) we took it off during the middle of its second cycle through, somewhere in the middle of the flying monkeys, I think, and put on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, for no particular reason, just to have something different to listen to. Thought it would be funny. But: it matched up. Then we tried some Aerosmith. And it matched up! And then we thought: maybe anything will match up. Maybe everything will match up.

Then it became apparent what was happening. The Wizard of Oz is a key, a key to a realm of magical correspondences, where things are more fluid and more malleable than so-called ordinary reality. Over the rainbow, as it were. A key that allows us to recognize and manipulate the magical technology of old, lately less used but never destroyed, via the electronic technology of today. And it's not just The Wizard of Oz, there are other keys too, one has but to find them. Magic awaits us within the rational machinery of imagery and sound. The form of this cobbled-together film experience mirrors the content: just like the characters' experience in Oz, where ordinary things are transmuted into the realm of the extraordinary, so too the viewer discovers that by watching certain movies, like Oz (with the appropriately divergent independently-chosen soundtrack), the extraordinary can be accessed in Kansas.

And it's something different than the horrifying apparition of the simulacrum, where a vision of, if not quite the Extraordinary, then at least the infused Real, is presented via the airwaves (and presented as reality, although of course unattainable) for you to passively consume, but never access. To really get to the Real, and the real Extraordinary, you have to do something. But can it be as simple as mismatching films and CDs? Isn't that, uh, too modern or something for magic? And besides, why should it work at all?

Magical technology (the 'how' of it - not necessarily the tools like magic wands (or vcrs) themselves, but what makes them function) works by emphasizing similarities. Often this is visual similarity - something looks like something else, same color, same shape, same location in the world - some kind of (often physical) marker is chosen as the crucial similarity that joins two objects together in a kind of metaphysically resonant/vibratory alliance. One can then be used to predict or cause changes in the other. Or, by calling into play the entire collection of meanings and symbols that inevitably collect around any object, place or relation in our world, either may be used to direct actions at a more abstract level. Think of a voodoo doll - it crudely resembles a human figure, and by giving it a few other qualities, such as the same color hair or some other similar feature of the intended person, its' similarity to that person is set. Then certain other similarities are drawn upon: a pin in the heart of the doll is intended perhaps to cause a heart attack in the person, or something like that.

But how can this work? Correspondence theory is a broad form of the argument by analogy, in which similarities are stressed in an attempt to draw conclusions not apparent before. But arguments by analogy are not proofs: a bird is like a plane. According to the argument by analogy, qualities true of one would then be true of the other. A bird is like a plane, they both fly: true. A bird is like a plane, they're both used for communications by the military: true (if you're talking about pigeons). But then: a bird is like a plane, they both run on worms: not true. A bird is like a plane, they're both made in factories by the lowest bidder: not true. And so on. So if you want to draw conclusions about things in the air, for example, birds and planes might be useful to compare. But not necessarily for food/fuel issues, or matters of creation and reproduction. Flying seems to be a relevant similarity, while fuel and materials are not.

However, even though analogies are not proofs, they can be strong or weak; in other words, more likely or less likely to be true, depending upon a number of factors, relevance being one of them: how crucial to both objects is the aspect under discussion? Flying is pretty crucial to what it means to be either a bird or a plane, but not, for example, to what it means to be a tall building, albeit one leapable in a single bound. Number of instances is another - the more birds there are that are able to fly, the better to compare them to planes. If most of the birds were penguins and ostriches, the comparison would be fairly weak. Also, the more qualities two things have in common, the stronger the argument. A correspondence between two planes is going to yield more similarities and true conclusions than one between birds and planes. So, to bring this back down to earth: the more ways a film and a random CD can be said to 'match up', the stronger the analogy, and the more likely any conclusions or results are to be meaningful, or true.

But magical correspondence theory is not necessarily interested in proofs - its arena lies quite elsewhere. Magic is interested in action. By acting on pressure points of similarity and coincidence, certain aspects and directions are emphasized at the expense of others, with the idea of causing a change in the general direction of the craft, like a rudder on a boat. Therefore, even though the action might be relatively small (slight pressure on the rudder), the result (rounding the Horn of Africa, or ending up in the West Indies) might be enormous . The Situationists called this intentional recombination of things that weren't originally designed to go together (like elements in a collage) 'detournment', with the idea that small, yet well-placed pressure on certain cultural artifacts could cause huge changes in people's minds (and ultimately social organization).

You may ask, but why bring magic into it? Doesn't that weaken the whole approach, and change you from an activist into some kind of new-age fluffball? I mean, neither Pink Floyd nor the Cowardly Lion have inspired a revolution yet. Well, they don't have to. Discussing magical technology in this context actually extends the scope enormously - we not only have the capability to change our political structure, but the entire structure of reality. 'What kind of a world do you want' is not just a question for the voting booths, and in fact limiting it to that focus makes the voting booths just that much more ineffectual. Sure we're political creatures - we're social animals, and we have to argue and negotiate about how to live together. That's politics. But we're also talking animals, and visionary animals, and imaginary animals, and in ways not-animals at all, but processes and electromagnetic forces and relations and environments and all sorts of things.

But aren't these claims way too grandiose? (Re)mixing film and sound like this might be amusing or annoying, depending, but how could it really be magic or claim to change the world? I mean, I'm not really seeing emerald cities and flower-dwelling munchkins hanging around between the art supplies and the cardboard boxes, am I? No. Haven't seen any munchkins, per se. But the world, our world, is a natural/cultural hybrid, with each having elements of the other and no element on either 'side' being either pure nature or pure culture - not the thermophyles in the superheated vents in the ocean, and not conceptual art. Changes caused by these film/sound recombinations may be changes in your mind, but when your mind changes, you perceive the world a little differently, and act a little differently too. Change enough people's minds, and perceptions, and actions, and we do have a different world. And further: when enough people access their own creativity, and offer it out to the world (something not encouraged by late capitalism), these creative offerings take on an aura of the extraordinary. I experienced this at Burning Man. The scattering about of art and unpredictable things everywhere, in both the 'city' and the 'desert', made the place start to shimmer with answered anticipation. And when the answers become larger than the anticipation itself, that is magical. And we don't have to go to Nevada to do it, we can do it here; we just have to do it.

Ok, so how do you do it? How, among the thousands of aspects of any two things or relations, do you pick out the relevant similarities?

In part the process is arbitrary. You pick something they have in common that you decide is similar enough, and act on it. But two ways to decrease the arbitrariness come immediately to mind; there are undoubtedly others. One is experience, or asking people what they've done and what has worked for them. There is, after all, a history as long as we've been human of manipulating and studying the world, in all degrees of specialization and accessibility. Ask around. The other is experimentation, which of course has a high degree of trial and error to it, but is nonetheless essential. Get some videos, anything: films are good, but also nature documentaries, the Zapruder footage, old filmstrips, anything. And get a bunch of sounds, CDs, found noises, the Sound/Speak All option in SimpleText on something you've downloaded. Then start playing different ones together; try stuff out. See others' attempts. Don't give up if the first few attempts don't work out - keep going with it, and see what you find. And when you find something that works - show it. Tell people.

There's no place like home - so try this there. Your new world is only as far away as the dial that goes to 11. What the world can be like is not just up to Genentech and Microsoft. It is up to you.

(Peggy Nelson is a painter who apologizes to the real Kansas, where she's never been, but not to the metaphorical one, where she has.)