Amy M Denes

The reasons why my interview with Pedro Velez from 2007 is misleading

2012-02-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

I've been told by friends that this would be important to blog, so I am blogging it..

To most people who view an old interview/studio visit I did with Pedro Velez in 2007, it's a horrible interview.. But there are still people who are not skeptical of how I & my work are presented in it.

At the time- I was being bullied, threatened & harassed by a Chicago 'painter' (& some might say I still am) & Velez was seeking to align himself with him.. Also Velez is a former 'artist' cum 'critic'-.

There has been a decent amount of my work that I am willing- to share on the net since 2007 (CLICK) & this finished work & more was available in my studio at the time of Velez's visit.. But instead of noting the literature that I read- & instead of taking a half way decent photograph of plenty of finished work, he took a bad & poorly edited photo of the top- of a minor & unfinished small painting & described it in a way that is self explanatory as to his internalized notions of me & my work..

The interview speaks for itself (again for most skeptical people) but in case there is need for clarification- the flattery of being compared to Leon Golub & some noteworthy attention to my Hamas series aside- Velez was basically trying to intentionally or unintentionally make me look bad.

Link to old 'interview' of 2007: (click)
ALIVE AND KICKING
by Pedro Vélez
part 1: The Studios

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

2012-01-11T02:42:00.000-08:00

2011-12-30T13:21:00.000-08:00

If you were dreaming all the time & never woke up eventually you'd forget that you were dreaming... & the concept of dreaming would decay & turn into something else entirely. &, if we could live in our dreams we'd be far more capable of accomplishing a whole myriad of tasks that we find impossible to even fathom in our 3D plane of existence.

Now, let's say one day you stream some of your/this 'dreaming' inside of human bodies, a blade of grass, a sun, matter in the galaxy, etc - etc - ad infinitum - & introduce it to a myriad of stimulus.. This would be good, because you could accomplish tasks & have experiences on a 3D plane that you can't really have when you are limitless.. Then, you can not only be limitless, but you can also embody & experience what happens when helpful limitations are imposed on your limitlessness. & most importantly placing your 'dreaming' into evolving matter on a 3D plane prevents any unnecessary excess entropy that might occur when your 'hyper-dreaming' is a process of expansion in time & space

2011-12-21T00:14:00.001-08:00

"It's so nice to see that everybody is as clueless as ever.. I wonder if human beings have ever experienced change."- A Science of Living, Amy M Denes

2011-12-15T08:03:00.001-08:00

"A world completely mad with beauty." - "The kiss of life is the kiss of love.." - Bolero - A Science of Living - Amy M. Denes

Song of The Future

2011-11-11T05:08:00.001-08:00

The silver blond & her black flowers, her Jaguar cabal, heavy leads in pencil heads scratching out Twombly archetypes, bleeding stolen gold.

From Christ to Coke

2011-09-09T00:09:00.000-07:00

From Christ to Coke
Roger Scruton
24th August 2011 — Issue 186
A new book on icons stretches the definition too far. Unlike the Coca-Cola bottle, true icons have power and stand at the border of forbidden things.

The Christos Pantokrator of the Eastern Orthodox Church decorates a hundred ancient apses—and lives in the minds of ordinary believers.

The Greek word “icon” (eikon, or image) now seems to denote any thing, person, or idea that is, for whatever reason, a centre of attention, and which has acquired a significance that raises it above the flow of ordinary events. It may be difficult to put this significance into words; but the crucial thing is that an icon is common property. You and I can both refer to it, and know instinctively what we mean, even when we have no other way of saying what we mean. Such, paradigmatically, is the Christos Pantokrator (“Jesus Almighty”) of the Eastern Orthodox Church, whose unforgettable image, displayed on a hundred ancient apses, lives also in the minds of ordinary believers, and in some way gives additional reality to the Saviour whose love they pray for and whose commands they strive to obey.

For Martin Kemp, however, the religious icon is only one example of a much more widespread phenomenon, addressed in his new book Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon (OUP). Images lodge in the mind and remain there, influencing our thoughts and actions, governing our tastes and purchasing habits, and drawing on deep and hidden emotions for their power. There is the famous image of Che Guevara, adapted from a fleeting photograph taken by Alberto Korda, and used to give sex appeal to the posturing of bourgeois revolutionaries. There is the cross that gave victory to the Emperor Constantine, worn as a sign of obedience by Christians everywhere, and which is now marked out for persecution in the European courts. There is the heart, universal symbol of love, and adopted by New York City as its own special brand. There is the Coca-Cola bottle, instantly recognisable, triumphantly marketable, and never driven into second place by Pepsi, although the two products can be distinguished only by the bottles that contain them—bottles that are now made of plastic, and which are therefore joint enemies of mankind. Kemp extends his discussion to the double helix of the DNA molecule, and even to an abstract idea, the equation e = mc2, which he thinks can be meaningfully compared, in its ubiquity and associations, to the talismans that spread their aura through the lives of religious people.

Each of Kemp’s examples lies at the centre of a story, and much of his book consists in telling these stories. Some are interesting: for example the story of the Stars and Stripes or the far-reaching narrative of the lion as universal symbol of valour. Kemp risks his reader’s patience, however, by devoting 22 pages to the discovery and patenting of the Coca-Cola bottle, by giving us yet again the anecdote of Einstein’s brain and the tired account of Watson, Crick and the double helix.

Kemp is a distinguished art historian, and the best chapters are those devoted to art—notably the discussion of the Mona Lisa, on which he is the world’s expert. But by stretching the concept of the icon to include everyday objects like bottles, bombshell images like Nick Út’s photograph of Vietnamese children burned by napalm, scientific discoveries like the structure of DNA and trash art like Andy Warhol’s silk-screen Marilyns, he raises the question of what all these have in common. His disappointing answer is “nothing.” The category of the icon is what he calls “fuzzy,” and he uses this idea (roughly that of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance”) to justify a discussion that puts anecdotes in the place of definitions.

Nevertheless, Kemp recognises that images which owe their impact to the thought that “this is how things really were,” like Nick Út’s war photos, or even Felix de Weldon’s photo-inspired sculpture of Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, have a completely different significance from works of imaginative art. It is true that a work of art can also show us “how things really were”—Leonardo portrays the actual face of Lisa Gherardini: this is the woman, as she looked. But that is not why we look at her portrait. For all we know or care, there was no such person. The significance of Leonardo’s portrait is not specific but general. Lisa appears in the picture as the ideal of herself. She is both present and absent; her enigmatic smile is not a specific smile from her to us. It conveys the highest gentleness to which a human being can attain—a gentleness almost divine. Mona Lisa looks into the heart of the viewer in something like the way Christos Pantokrator looks into the soul of the one who worships him. This image fascinates us because it steps out of our world, unlike the Coke bottle, which insistently belongs within it.

You can see the difference by recognising that the Mona Lisa, unlike the Coke bottle, can be desecrated. Indeed, she has been desecrated: by Marcel Duchamp, who facetiously adorned her with a moustache and a beard. Only what is consecrated can be desecrated, and although the Mona Lisa is not a liturgical object she is consecrated in our feelings. Her image resides in a higher realm, where our aspirations find their fulfilment. Even if the painting were destroyed, the image would remain in that realm, alongside the Venus of Botticelli and the David of Michelangelo, as a “point of intersection of the timeless with time.” Nothing like that is true, or could be true, of the Coke bottle.

Kemp’s moving descriptions of the painting, invoking Dante’s lovely simile of the eye and the mouth as balconies of the soul, shows that he perceives this. But having perceived it, we must surely recognise that there is much more to this picture than familiar usage. Something deep is at stake in the emergence of the genuine icon, and it is this deep thing that is missed by a theory that sees the Coke bottle and the double helix as on a par with the Mona Lisa or with Van Eyck’s Head of Christ. Images can be familiar. But they can also have power. Sometimes this power is a spiritual power; and sometimes it is dangerous. Hence icons stand at the border of forbidden things.

Image: © Pascal Cotte

The Mona Lisa can be desecrated, unlike the Coke bottle; Berlin graffiti showing the heart, the universal symbol of love

The second commandment forbids “graven images.” Yet what is the offence: the image, or the graving? Kemp sees the importance of this question and draws attention to the tradition of the sudarium, the image supposedly implanted on the handkerchief of St Veronica, applied to the sweating face of Christ. The Veronica has been regarded as an object of legitimate veneration, Kemp tells us, because it is acheiropoeiton, not made by hand, and therefore a “true image,” a direct manifestation of the divinity and his presence among us. The Turin Shroud is another such record of the divine presence, as are the magic icons that used to abound in rural Greece. Even if a painter once put his hand to them, the icons were subsequently taken over by the saint or the divinity, to become not just symbols but manifestations of a real presence.

This real presence, or shekhinah, is central to the story of the Torah, in which God exists among his chosen people only because he is also hidden from them, concealed in the Holy of Holies, neither named nor depicted. (We know what He looks like, however, since the Torah tells us that we were made in His image.) This “revealing by concealing” is the central mystery in sacramental religions. Christos Pantokrator, whose eyes follow us around the church, is both present and absent, looking at us in this world from a place beyond it, where he is hidden from all but the eyes of faith. The same mystery is displayed by the Christian Eucharist, which became a vehicle of controversy at the Reformation for that very reason. Protestants and Catholics both believe in the “real presence” of Christ in the communion. But the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation was condemned by the Protestant sects as superstition and idolatry. God could enter the soul of believers, the Protestants argued, as they ate the bread and drank the wine; but He could not become bread and wine, any more than the Virgin Mary could be identical with her picture.

This raises again the question of the forbidden image. The second commandment does not merely forbid graven images purporting to represent God. It forbids “any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” A hadith of Muhammad forbids pictures in the home, telling us that whoever makes a picture will not only be punished on the Last Day, but will be forced to give life to the thing that he has created.

These strange interdictions remain in force, as we know not only from the recent controversy over cartoon images of the Prophet, but also from the long tradition of Islamic art and carpet-weaving, in which figurative elements are avoided, or else deliberately geometrised and thereby deprived of their nafs, or soul. Image-making has been contentious in Christian culture too, spells of iconoclasm alternating with periods of devout religious imagery, as in ancient Byzantium and post-Reformation Europe. The consecration of images seems everywhere to tempt people towards their desecration, whether in the joking spirit of Duchamp, or in the spirit of malicious self-intoxication that animated the 17th-century Puritans who destroyed the religious art of England.

In a wide-ranging study (L’image interdite, 1994) the French philosopher Alain Besançon has argued that the fear and suspicion of images has influenced the development of religion and philosophy throughout recorded history, and has not disappeared merely because we are now surrounded and distracted by images on every side and at every moment of the day. Indeed, much of what disturbs people in our image-saturated culture is what disturbed the theologians of Islam: namely, that the “graven image,” which begins as a representation, soon becomes a substitute. And substitutes corrupt the feelings that they invite, in the way that idols corrupt worship, and pornography corrupts desire. For substitutes invite easy and mechanical responses. They short-circuit the costly process whereby we form real relationships, and put mechanical and addictive reflexes in their place. The idol does not represent God: it defaces Him, in something like the way pornography defaces love.

Hence we should not be surprised by the rage with which iconoclastic movements assert themselves. The central thought of the iconoclast is that the image has captured the soul of the one who worships it. The idolator has tied himself to a bauble, and in doing so has taken the name of God in vain and polluted the worship that is God’s due. Kemp does not say much about iconoclasm, though it has been a constant movement within the Christian churches, both eastern and western. Nor does he mention the fact that his contemporary “icons,” the Coke bottle included, have been the object of a similar condemnation. The growth of the advertising industry and of the marketable image has been greeted from the very beginning by protests from social commentators, fearing what Marx called “commodity fetishism”—in other words, the diversion of our energies from those free activities that are “ends in themselves” towards the world of addictive desires. Marx took the idea of fetishism from Feuerbach, who believed that all religion involves this state of mind, in which we animate the world with our own emotions, so placing our life “outside” of ourselves, and becoming enslaved to the puppets of our own imagination. In a similar way, Karl Marx believed, the world of capitalist commodities invites us to “animate” it, so that we attribute our desires to the fictitious sphere of commodities, which gain power over us in proportion as we lose real control of ourselves.

The theory is far from clear; nevertheless it is highly infectious. You find versions of it in Lukács and Benjamin, in Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. And in a powerful work, The Hidden Persuaders (1957), Vance Packard made a case against the advertising image which has lost none of its force since the invention of the TV commercial. According to Packard (whose argument was endorsed by economist JK Galbraith), advertising aims to invent the desires that it offers to satisfy, and in this way fills the market with illusions, to which we gradually become enslaved. The complaint has been extended to the commercial logo by Naomi Klein in No Logo (2000), and even if you think the iconoclasts are losing the battle, you should take note of the local skirmishes, such as that fought by the slow food movement in Italy, which began as a protest against the McDonald’s sign in the Piazza di Spagna. And maybe you should have a look at the outrageous treatment of Bucharest, which has ceased to be a human habitat and become a vast display of images, many of them animated, and the worst of them involving a Coke bottle, all inspiring, in me and everyone I know, a seething iconoclastic rage—a rage against desecration.

Those controversies tell us something about the gulf between the sacred icon and the secular brand. Icons invite desecration, since they demand a veneration that we may be unwilling or unable to give. Brands invite anger because they are already desecrations—whether of the place to which they are affixed, like the digital billboards of Bucharest, or of human life itself, as Marx, Adorno, Packard and Klein in their several ways claim against the commodity culture. According to its opponents the brand image is a kind of psychic invasion that uses every available device to fix itself in our consciousness and to create and capture our desires. It is part of the ubiquitous enslavement that comes about when we allow image to veil reality, and temptation to extinguish need.

Such reflections, more notable for their exuberance than their reasonableness, go in quite another direction from the one taken by Kemp, though he does notice in passing the observation made by Walter Benjamin that in the age of “mechanical reproduction” images are losing their “aura”—in other words, images are ceasing to exalt the things they portray and have begun to cheapen them instead. Who can doubt that something like this has occurred with sex, from which the aura has been wiped away by photographic images? And who can doubt that those images are addictive, exerting their corrosive power throughout our society, desecrating the human form and changing the way in which sex is experienced? OK, you can’t blame Coca-Cola for pornography; but you can blame the addiction to images, which has grown in part from the branding habit, and from the way in which we freely litter the world with captivating pictures of the human form.

Kemp touches on the “real presence” idea only once, in the course of describing the reaction of ordinary Americans to the desecration of their national flag. “Behind the rules” governing the treatment of the flag, he writes, “is a big belief system, what I am calling the metaphysics of the flag. This decrees that the flag is not simply a piece of symbolic cloth that signals an identity but that it somehow embodies a ‘real presence’—some kind of spiritual essence of the USA as a God-given entity.” To put the point more simply, the ordinary American regards the flag as sacred, and therefore as capable of desecration. Someone who desecrates what I hold to be sacred is attacking me, in the deepest part of my being. For those things are sacred to me that represent, in heightened form, the identity and obligations that define my place on earth. As Durkheim pointed out, sacred things are “set apart and forbidden.” Only the initiated can make full use of them, and the use is carefully hedged by taboos. Sacred things define what we are, and to expose them to profanation is to bring them down from the transcendental to the empirical sphere—to deprive them of their permanence and “aura,” and therefore to expose both them and us to destruction.

“Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” by Joe Rosenthal: the sacrifices of generations of soldiers, sailors and airmen are distilled in the American flag. Image: © Martin Kemp

Things become sacred when sacrifices on behalf of the community have been distilled in them, as the sacrifices of generations of soldiers, sailors and airmen are distilled in the American flag. And sacred things are invitations to sacrifice, as is the flag in time of war. Sacred things create bridges across generations: they tell us that the dead and the unborn are present among us, and that their “real presence” lives in each of us, and each of us in it. The decline of religion has deprived us of sacred things. But it has not deprived us of the need for them. Nor has it deprived us of the acute sense of desecration we feel, when facetious images intrude at the places once occupied by these visitors from the transcendental.

Flags represent ancient claims and loyalties, and owe their power to what they mean, rather than to what they look like. It so happens that the American flag is a lovely design, though a shade less lovely, in my eyes, than the Union flag. But that is no explanation of its appeal. The American flag does not show us specific realities, and in this it is entirely unlike the photographs from Vietnam or the Iwo Jima monument. It is an image that owes its power to its use; and this is something that it shares with the icons of saints in the Eastern Church, and with the sacred vessels that embellish every altar. Moreover, even if Benjamin was right about photographs, that they lack the “aura” that attaches to images in the old traditions of painting, he was surely wrong in thinking that mechanical reproduction is everywhere the enemy of aura. The American flag has retained its aura, even now when it hangs from a million suburban porches. That is why people are always burning it.

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Che cos’è la poesia? Jacques Derrida

2011-08-27T17:37:00.001-07:00

Che cos’è la poesia?[i]
Jacques Derrida
Publié dans Poesia, I, 11, novembre 1988
Texto en castellano

Pour répondre à une telle question - en deux mots, n’est-ce pas?- on te demande de savoir renoncer au savoir. Et de bien le savoir, sans jamais l’oublier: démobilise la culture mais ce que tu sacrifies en route, en traversant la route, ne l’oublie jamais dans ta docte ignorance.

Qui ose me demander cela? Même s’il n’en paraît rien, car disparaître est sa loi, la réponse se voit dictée. Je suis une dictée, prononce la poésie, apprends-moi par cœur, recopie, veille et gardemoi, regarde-moi, dictée, sous les yeux: bande-son, wake, sillage de lumière, photographie de la fête en deuil.

Elle se voit dictée, la réponse, d’être poétique. Et pour cela tenue de s’adresser à quelqu’un, singulièrement à toi mais comme à l’être perdu dans l’anonymat, entre ville et nature, un secret partagé, à la fois public et privé, absolument l’un et l’autre, absous de dehors et de dedans, ni l’un ni l’autre, l’animal jeté sur la route, absolu, solitaire, roulé en boule auprès de soi. Il peut se faire écraser, justement, pour cela même, le hérisson, istrice.

Et si tu réponds autrement selon les cas, compte tenu de l’espace et du temps qui te sont donnés avec cette demande (déjà tu parles italien), par elle-même, selon cette économie mais aussi dans l’imminence de quelque traversée hors de chez soi, risquée vers la langue de l’autre en vue d’une traduction impossible ou refusée, nécessaire mais désirée comme une mort, qu’est-ce que tout cela, cela même où tu viens déjà de te délirer, aurait à voir, dès lors, avec la poésie? Avec le poétique, plutôt, car tu entends parler d’une expérience, autre mot pour voyage, ici la randonnée aléatoire d’un trajet, la strophe qui tourne mais jamais ne reconduit au discours, ni chez soi, jamais du moins ne se réduit à la poésie - écrite, parlée, même chantée.

Voici donc, tout de suite, en deux mots, pour ne pas oublier.

1. L’économie de la mémoire: un poème doit être bref, par vocation elliptique, quelle qu’en soit l’étendue objective ou apparente. Docte inconscient de la Verdichtung et du retrait.

2. Le cœur. Non pas le cœur au milieu des phrases qui circulent sans risque sur les échangeurs et s’y laissent traduire en toutes langues. Non pas simplement le cœur des archives cardiographiques, l’objet des savoirs ou des techniques, des philosophies et des discours bio-éthico-juridiques. Peut-être pas le cœur des Ecritures ou de Pascal, ni même, c’est moins sûr, celui que leur préfère Heidegger. Non, une histoire de «cœur» poétiquement enveloppée dans l’idiome «apprendre par cœur», celui de ma langue ou d’une autre, l’anglaise (to learn by heart), ou d’une autre encore, l’arabe (hafiza a’n zahri kalb) — un seul trajet à plusieurs voies.

Deux en un: le second axiome s’enroule dans le premier. Le poétique, disons-le, serait ce que tu désires apprendre, mais de l’autre, grâce à l’autre et sous dictée, par cœur: imparare a memoria. N’est-ce pas déjà cela, le poème, lorsqu’un gage est donné, la venue d’un événement, à l’instant où la traversée de la route nommée traduction reste aussi improbable qu’un accident, intensément rêvée pourtant, requise là où ce qu’elle promet toujours laisse à désirer? Une reconnaissance va vers cela même et prévient ici la connaissance: ta bénédiction avant le savoir.

Fable que tu pourrais raconter comme le don du poème, c’est une histoire emblématique: quelqu’un t’écrit, à toi, de toi, sur toi. Non, une marque à toi adressée, laissée, confiée, s’accompagne d’une injonction, en vérité s’institue en cet ordre même qui à son tour te constitue, assignant ton origine ou te donnant lieu: détruis-moi, ou plutôt rends mon support invisible au-dehors, dans le monde (voilà déjà le trait de toutes les dissociations, l’histoire des transcendances), fais en sorte en tout cas que la provenance de la marque reste désormais introuvable ou méconnaissable. Promets-le: qu’elle se défigure, transfigure ou indétermine en son port, et tu entendras sous ce mot la rive du départ aussi bien que le référent vers lequel une translation se porte. Mange, bois, avale ma lettre, porte-la, transportela en toi, comme la loi d’une écriture devenue ton corps: l’écriture en soi. La ruse de l’injonction peut d’abord se laisser inspirer par la simple possibilité de la mort, par le danger que fait courir un véhicule à tout être fini. Tu entends venir la catastrophe. Dès lors imprimé à même le trait, venu du cœur, le désir du mortel éveille en toi le mouvement (contradictoire, tu me suis bien, double astreinte, contrainte aporétique) de garder de l’oubli cette chose qui du même coup s’expose à la mort et se protège — en un mot, l’adresse, le retrait du hérisson, comme sur l’autoroute un animal roulé en boule. On voudrait le prendre dans ses mains, l’apprendre et le comprendre, le garder pour soi, auprès de soi.

Tu aimes — garder cela dans sa forme singulière, on dirait dans l’irremplaçable littéralité du vocable si on parlait de la poésie et non seulement du poétique en général. Mais notre poème ne tient pas en place dans des noms, ni même dans des mots. Il est d’abord jeté sur les routes et dans les champs, chose au-delà des langues, même s’il lui arrive de s’y rappeler lorsqu’il se rassemble, roulé en boule auprès de soi, plus menacé que jamais dans sa retraite: il croit alors se défendre, il se perd.

Littéralement : tu voudrais retenir par cœur une forme absolument unique, un événement dont l’intangible singularité ne sépare plus l’idéalité, le sens idéal, comme on dit, du corps de la lettre. Le désir de cette inséparation absolue, le non-absolu absolu, tu y respires l’origine du poétique. D’où la résistance infinie au transfert de la lettre que l’animal, en son nom, réclame pourtant. C’est la détresse du hérisson. Que veut la détresse, le stress même? stricto sensu mettre en garde. D’où la prophétie: traduis-moi, veille, garde-moi encore un peu, sauve-toi, quittons l’autoroute.

Ainsi se lève en toi le rêve d’apprendre par cœur. De te laisser traverser le cœur par la dictée. D’un seul trait, et c’est l’impossible et c’est l’expérience poématique. Tu ne savais pas encore le cœur, tu l’apprends ainsi. De cette expérience et de cette expression. J’appelle poème cela même qui apprend le cœur, ce qui invente le cœur, enfin ce que le mot de cœur semble vouloir dire et que dans ma langue je discerne mal du mot cœur. Cœur, dans le poème «apprendre par cœur» (à apprendre par cœur), ne nomme plus seulement la pure intériorité, la spontanéité indépendante, la liberté de s’affecter activement en reproduisant la trace aimée. La mémoire du «par cœur» se confie comme une prière, c’est plus sûr, à une certaine extériorité de l’automate, aux lois de la mnémotechnique, à cette liturgie qui mime en surface la mécanique, à l’automobile qui surprend ta passion et vient sur toi comme du dehors: auswendig, «par cœur» en allemand. Donc: le cœur te bat, naissance du rythme, au-delà des oppositions, du dedans et du dehors, de la représentation consciente et de l’archive abandonnée. Un cœur là-bas, entre les sentiers ou les autostrades, hors de ta présence, humble, près de la terre, tout bas. Réitère en murmurant: ne répète jamais... Dans un seul chiffre, le poème (l’apprendre par cœur) scelle ensemble le sens et la lettre, comme un rythme espaçant le temps.

Pour répondre en deux mots, ellipse, par exemple, ou élection, cœur ou hérisson, il t’aura fallu désemparer la mémoire, désarmer la culture, savoir oublier le savoir, incendier la bibliothèque des poétiques. L’unicité du poème est à cette condition. Il te faut célébrer, tu dois commémorer l’amnésie, la sauvagerie, voire la bêtise du «par cœur» : le hérisson. Il s’aveugle. Roulé en boule, hérissé de piquants, vulnérable et dangereux, calculateur et inadapté (parce qu’il se met en boule, sentant le danger sur l’autoroute, il s’expose à l’accident). Pas de poème sans accident, pas de poème qui ne s’ouvre comme une blessure, mais qui ne soit aussi blessant. Tu appelleras poème une incantation silencieuse, la blessure aphone que de toi je désire apprendre par cœur. Il a donc lieu, pour l’essentiel, sans qu’on ait à le faire: il se laisse faire, sans activité, sans travail, dans le plus sobre pathos, étranger à toute production, surtout à la création. Le poème échoit, bénédiction, venue de l’autre. Rythme mais dissymétrie. Il n’y a jamais que du poème, avant toute poièse. Quand, au lieu de «poésie», nous avons dit «poétique», nous aurions dû préciser: «poématique». Surtout ne laisse pas reconduire le hérisson dans le cirque ou dans le manège de la poiesis: rien à faire (poiein), ni «poésie pure», ni rhétorique pure, ni reine Sprache, ni «mise-en-œuvre-de-la-vérité». Seulement une contamination, telle, et tel carrefour, cet accident-ci. Ce tour, le retournement de cette catastrophe. Le don du poème ne cite rien, il n’a aucun titre, il n’histrionne plus, il survient sans que tu t’y attendes, coupant le souffle, coupant avec la poésie discursive, et surtout littéraire. Dans les cendres mêmes de cette généalogie. Pas le phénix, pas l’aigle, le hérisson, très bas, tout bas, près de la terre. Ni sublime, ni incorporel, angélique peut-être, et pour un temps.

Tu appelleras désormais poème une certaine passion de la marque singulière, la signature qui répète sa dispersion, chaque fois au-delà du logos, anhumaine, domestique à peine, ni réappropriable dans la famille du sujet: un animal converti, roulé en boule, tourné vers l’autre et vers soi, une chose en somme, et modeste, discrète, près de la terre, l’humilité que tu surnommes, te portant ainsi dans le nom au-delà du nom, un hérisson catachrétique, toutes flèches dehors, quand cet aveugle sans âge entend mais ne voit pas venir la mort.

Le poème peut se rouler en boule mais c’est encore pour tourner ses signes aigus vers le dehors. Il peut certes réfléchir la langue ou dire la poésie mais il ne se rapporte jamais à lui-même, il ne se meut jamais de lui-même comme ces engins porteurs de mort. Son événement interrompt toujours ou dévoie le savoir absolu, l’être auprès de soi dans l’autotélie. Ce «démon du cœur» jamais ne se rassemble, il s’égare plutôt (délire ou manie), il s’expose à la chance, il se laisserait plutôt déchiqueter par ce qui vient sur lui.

Sans sujet: il y a peut-être du poème et qui se laisse, mais je n’en écris jamais. Un poème je ne le signe jamais. L’autre signe. Le je n’est qu’à la venue de ce désir: apprendre par cœur. Tendu pour se résumer à son propre support, donc sans support extérieur, sans substance, sans sujet, absolu de l’écriture en soi, le «par cœur» se laisse élire au-delà du corps, du sexe, de la bouche et des yeux, il efface les bords, il échappe aux mains, tu l’entends à peine, mais il nous apprend le cœur. Filiation, gage d’élection confié en héritage, il peut se prendre à n’importe quel mot, à la chose, vivante ou non, au nom de hérisson par exemple, entre vie et mort, à la tombée de la nuit ou au petit jour, apocalypse distraite, propre et commune, publique et secrète.

- Mais le poème dont tu parles, tu t’égares, on ne l’a jamais nommé ainsi, ni aussi arbitrairement.

- Tu viens de le dire. Ce qu’il fallait démontrer. Rappelle-toi la question : «Qu’est-ce que... ?» (ti esti, was ist..., istoria, episteme, philosopbia). «Qu’est-ce que... ?» pleure la disparition du poème - une autre catastrophe. En annonçant ce qui est tel qu’il est, une question salue la naissance de la prose.

[i] Publié d’abord dans Poesia, I, 11, novembre 1988, puis dans Po&sie, 50, automne 1989, où il fut précédé par la notice suivante :

«La revue italienne Poesia, où ce texte parut en novembre 1988 (traduit par Maurizio Ferraris), ouvre chacun de ses numéros par la tentative ou le simulacre d une réponse, en quelques lignes, à la question che cos’è la poesia?. Elle est posée à un vivant, la réponse à la question che cos’era la poesia? revenant à un mort, dans ce cas à l’Odradek de Kafka. Au moment où il écrit, le vivant ignore la réponse du mort: elle vient en fin de revue et c’est le choix des éditeurs.

Destinée à paraître en italien, cette «réponse»-ci s’expose au passage, parfois littéralement, dans les lettres ou les syllabes, le mot et la chose ISTRICE (prononcer ISTRRITCHÉ), ce qui aura donné, dans une correspondance française, le hérisson.»

Slavoj Zizek Dialogue - Peter Sloterdijk: The collapse of Western civilization

2011-08-21T06:32:00.000-07:00

(decent translation of & from: (click me) - because, for some reason babel & google aren't translating)

-
(TRANSLATION): Slavoj Zizek Dialogue - Peter Sloterdijk: The collapse of Western civilization

Culture Magazine

Friday August 19 2011, 18:36 hs.

Politics and Economics

Ideas
Politics and Economics
19/08/11

Slavoj Zizek Dialogue - Peter Sloterdijk:
The collapse of Western civilization

Since the economic crisis and the role of religion even if Strauss-Kahn, two of the most widely read philosophers of the day analyzing present and future of the West. "We have accumulated so much debt that the promise of reimbursement in which case the seriousness of our world building can not be sustained," reported.

BY NICOLAS TRUONG

WEATHER. The mortgage crisis and rising unemployment in the U.S. contextualize this image of 2009: tents in Sacramento, California for some homeless.
LONDON, IN FLAMES. Police round on August 8, the third day of destruction of violent youths.
STRAUSS-KAHN. Former IMF managing director was arrested in May for an alleged violation.

West is experiencing a crisis of the future: the new generation no longer believe that they will live better than before. A crisis of meaning, direction and meaning. West knows about where it comes from but it employs know where he goes. Indeed, as said the French poet René Char, "Our inheritance is not preceded by any testament" and each generation is responsible to draw your horizon. Our torments, however, are not unfounded. The common sense of the fragmented. With "each in his own" sense of belonging to a project that transcends individuality evaporated. The collapse of collectivism, both communist and nationalist economic progress led to the rule of "I". The sense of "we" broke up.

The idea of partition, the common good and community seems to blow up. However, many still do not want to trust the idea of community to the communitarianism that beset a planet torn. Among them are Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Zizek, European philosophers who accepted the first time publicly discuss these issues.

All separates appearance. The first is a follower of the individualistic philosophy of Nietzsche, the other a Marxist aide to alternative movements. The first is rather liberal, the second, described as radical. Thanks to the metaphorical force at the service of his daring theory, Peter Sloterdijk (pronounced "Sloterdeik") is dedicated to capturing the time mainly due to a general morphology of the human space, the famous trilogy of "spheres", which presents an analysis of conditions under which man can return the habitable world.

Marx and allying with the Matrix trilogy of science fiction, juggling between Hegel and Hitchcock, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (pronounced "Yiyek") is a notorious figure of the "pop philosophy" so severe with global capitalism as some sections of the radical left, which articulates ceaselessly elitist culture references (opera) and popular (film) to large planetary explosions.

This unprecedented meeting is related to the concurrent publication of two works intended to think the crisis we are experiencing. With Vivre la fin des temps (Flammarion), Zizek discusses the different ways of apprehending the crisis of capitalism. For him, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (ecological disaster, revolution bioenergetics, excessive commercialization and social tensions) are decimating: denial (the idea that poverty or disasters "can not happen to me"), bargaining (" leave me time to see my children received "), depression (" I'm going to die, why worry about something ") and acceptance (" I can not do anything, I'd better prepare. ") He proposes alternatives and collective initiatives to regain the sense of a communist ally stripped of his gregariousness a Christianity freed from his belief in the divinity.

With Tu dois changer ta vie (Libella / Maren Sell), Peter Sloterdijk outlines other solutions, more individual and spiritual. Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's poem dedicated to an ancient torso in the Louvre, is to invent the religious retreat of a new self-care, a new relationship with the world. From the break of the credit to the case that led to the resignation of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, unpublished dialogue to change course. Collective or individual, political or spiritual, the key ideas of two iconoclastic thinkers to avoid the deadlocks of globalization.

For the first time since 1945, the idea of future is in crisis in Europe. And the West will not believe in progress, as evidenced by these new generations that do not imagine that they will live better than their elders. Political disaffection, identity crisis or tension, can we talk to you, a crisis of civilization?

Peter Sloterdijk: What do we mean when we use the term "Western civilization", in which we live from the seventeenth century? In my opinion, speak in a world created based on the idea of a departure from the era of attachment to the past. The primacy of the past broke: Western humanity invented a way of life based on the unprecedented anticipation of the future. This means that we live in a world that is "futuristic" increasingly. I, therefore, that the deeper meaning of our "being in the world" lies in the future, which is the fundamental feature of how we exist.

The primacy of the future dates from the time that the West invented the art of making new promises from the Renaissance, when the credit entered the lives of Europeans. During Antiquity and the Middle Ages the credit did not play hardly any role because he was in the hands of usurers, condemned by the Church. The modern credit, however, opens up a future. For the first time, promises of refunds can be met or maintained. The crisis of civilization lies in this: we enter an era in which the ability of credit opened a sustainable future is increasingly blocked because now make other claims for reimbursement. In other words, the "credit" crisis entered a final. We have accumulated so much debt that the promise of reimbursement in which case the seriousness of our world building can not be sustained. Ask an American, imagine how the payment of the debts accumulated by the federal government. Your answer will surely be: "Nobody knows" and I think that not knowing is the core of our crisis.Nadie on this earth knows how to pay the collective debt. The future of our civilization collides with a wall of debt.

Zlavoj Zizek: subscribe fully to the idea of a crisis of "Futurism" and the logic of credit. But let us call the economic crisis subprime 2008. Everyone knows that it is unable to pay mortgages, but each behaves as if it were able. I call it to that in my psychoanalytic jargon, a fetishistic denial: "I am aware that is impossible, but anyway I will try ..." We know we can not do, but we act in practice as if we could. However, use the term "future" to describe what Peter Sloterdijk calls "credit." The term "future", on the other hand, seems more open. The formula no future is pessimistic but the word "future" is more optimistic. And here I am trying to give new impetus to the communism of Marx who is related indeed a credit unconscionable. To characterize our situation, economic and political, ideological and spiritual, I can not remember a probably apocryphal story. This is an exchange of telegrams between the German and Austrian staffs during the Great War. The Germans had sent a telegram to the Austrian saying, "Here, the situation at the front is serious but not catastrophic" and the Austrians responded: "Here, the situation is serious but not catastrophic." And that is catastrophic, we can not pay debts, but in a way, do not take it seriously. In addition to that wall of debt, our time is coming to a sort of "degree zero". First, the huge environmental crisis requires us not to continue in this politico-economic. Second, capitalism, as in China, and is not naturally associated with parliamentary democracy. Third, the biogenetic revolution requires us to invent another biopolitics. In terms of global social divisions, creating the conditions of exploitation and unprecedented popular uprising. The idea of the collective is also affected by the crisis.

How to give meaning to the "common" in time of rampant individualism?

SZ: Although we reject the naive communitarianism, the homogenization of cultures, just like that multiculturalism has become the ideology of the new spirit of capitalism, we should dialogue of civilizations and unique individuals. At the level of individuals, we need a new logic of discretion, the distance, ignorance even. To the extent that promiscuity has become total, is a vital necessity, a crucial point.

Collectively, it is necessary to invent another way to effectively articulate the ordinary. However, multiculturalism is a false answer to the problem, firstly because it is a kind of racism denied that respects the other's identity but contains in its particularism. It is a kind of neo-colonialism, the reverse of classical colonialism, "respect" communities, but from the standpoint of his position of universality. Moreover, multicultural tolerance is an illusion that depoliticized the public debate, referring to social issues racial issues, economic issues to ethnic considerations. There are also many angels in this position of the postmodern left. Thus Buddhism can serve to legitimize militarism extreme: in the years 1930-1940, the establishment of Zen Buddhism not only supported the rule of Japanese imperialism, but even legitimized it. I deliberately use the term "communism" because my problems are actually the real "common" as the biogenetic and ecology.

PS: We need to find the real problems of our era. The memory of Communism and the great tragic experience of twentieth-century politics reminds us that there is no automatic solution dogmatic and ideological. The Challenge of the century is the coexistence within a "humanity" become a reality, physically. It is not the "universalism" abstract of the Enlightenment, but the real universality of a monstrous collective begins to be a community of real traffic are likely to encounter likely permanent and extended collisions.

We have become like particles in a gas under pressure. The issue is now on social ties within a society too big, and I believe that the alleged religious heritage is important, because they are the first attempts of synthesis and meta-meta-ethnic national. The Buddhist sangha was a spaceship where all the deserters of all ethnicities could take refuge. Similarly, we could describe Christianity, social kind of synthesis that transcends the dynamics of ethnically closed and the divisions of class societies. The dialogue of religions in our own time is none other than reformatting the problem of "communism." The meeting held in Chicago in 1900, the congress of world religions was a way to raise the issue of our present through these fragments, these representatives from all sources, members of the human family who had lost view after the African exodus ... In the era of concentration must be raised and reformat everything you thought so far about the relationship of coexistence of an overflowing humanity. So I use the term "co-immunity." All social associations of history are indeed co-immunity structures. The choice of this concept reminiscent of communist heritage. In my analysis, communism goes back to Rousseau and his idea of "religion of man." This concept is inherent, is a global communitarianism. It is impossible to escape the new world situation. In my book, goddess or divine entity that appears in the last pages, is the crisis: it is the only body that has sufficient authority to compel us to change our lives. Our starting point is overwhelming evidence, we can not continue.

SZ: My idea is not so much looking for a "co-immunity" as to revitalize the idea of true communism. But Rest assured, this is more of Kafka than Stalin, more Erik Satie that of Lenin. Indeed, in his latest story Josephine the Singer, or the people of rats, traces the utopia of an egalitarian society, a world with artists like this singer Josephine, whose singing together, subjugates and knocks the crowds, and is held but without material gain.

A recognition that keeps society ritual, revitalizes community parties, without hierarchy or gregariousness. Ditto for Erik Satie. However, everything seems out of politics to the famous author of the Gymnopédies. Compose declared himself a "music of furnishing" a background music or background. And yet he was a member of the Communist Party. Anyway, off to write propaganda songs, he was to hear a collective kind of intimacy, just the opposite of elevator music. And that is my idea of communism.

To overcome the crisis, you, Sloterdijk, opt for the revival of individual spiritual exercises, while you, Zizek insists collective political mobilization and the reactivation of the emancipatory power of Christianity. Why such differences?

PS: I propose to introduce the study of pragmatism in the alleged religions: the pragmatic nature forces us to look more closely at what the religious do, to meet internal and external practices, which can be described as exercises that form a structure of personality. What I call the main subject of philosophy and psychology is the bearer of the series of exercises that make up personality. And some of the series of exercises that constitute the personality can be described as religious.

But what does this mean? Mental exercises are made to communicate with a partner invisible, are absolutely concrete things that can be described, there is nothing mysterious about that. I believe that until further notice, the term "financial system" is operating a thousand times that the term "religion" refers to the righteousness of the Roman state. We must not forget that the use of the terms "religion" "mercy" or "fidelity" was reserved in Roman times to the epithets that had the Roman legions stationed in the Rhine Valley and elsewhere. The highest privilege of a legion was carrying fedelis pia epithets, because it expressed a particular loyalty to the emperor in Rome. I think the Europeans simply forgot religious meaning. The word literally means "diligence." Cicero gave the correct etymology: reading, legere, religere, that is, carefully consider organizing protocol for communication with higher beings. It is therefore a kind of diligence or in my terminology, a code of training. For that reason I think the "return of religion" would only be effective if it could lead to financial practices intensified. By contrast, our "new religious" are not, most times, more than lazy dreamers. But in the twentieth century, sport was imposed on Western civilization. He did not religion, sport reappeared, having been forgotten for nearly 1,500 years. It was fideism athletics but who came to the fore. Pierre de Coubertin wanted to create a religion of muscle in the early twentieth century. Failed as a founder of a religion, but succeeded as a creator of a new system of exercises.

SZ: consider religion as a set of embodied practices already existed in the Russian avant-garde. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) wrote a very beautiful text on the Jesuit Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) as someone who systematized some spiritual exercises. My thesis about the return to Christianity is paradoxical: I believe that only through Christianity one can truly be an atheist.

Considering the great twentieth-century atheism, it is actually a completely different logic, that of a "credit" theological. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) one of the founders of quantum physics, received a visit from a friend at his dacha. This, however, refused to pass the gate of his house for a horseshoe was nailed-a superstition to keep out evil spirits. And the friend said to Bohr: "You're a first-rate scientist, how can you believe in such superstitions?" "Do not believe it!" Said Niels Bohr. "But then why let that mule?" Insisted the friend. And Niels Bohr had this excellent response: "Someone told me that it works even if you do not believe." It would be a pretty good picture of our current ideology. I think the death of Christ on the cross is the death of God and that is no longer the Big Other who pulls the strings. The only way to be a believer after the death of Christ is to participate in egalitarian collective ties. Christianity can be understood as a religion accompanying the order of the existing or a religion that says "no" and helps to resist. I think that Christianity and Marxism should fight together the new wave of spirituality and the capitalist gregariousness. I defend a religion without God, without love communism.

The historic moment we are facing seems to be marked by anger. Outrage culminating in the slogan "Out!" Of revolutions Arab or Spanish democratic protests. However, according to Zizek, you Sloterdijk is too harsh on social movements at their discretion from resentment.

PS: We must distinguish the anger of resentment. A range of emotions that belong to the regime of thymos, or the regime of pride. There is a kind of pride primordial, irreducible, which is in the depths of our being. In that range is expressed thymos joviality, benevolent contemplation of all that exists. Here, the field knows no psychological disorder. If we go down the scale of values, is proud of himself.

We got a little more and the humiliation of that pride which leads to anger. If anger can not speak, is doomed to wait to speak later and elsewhere, that leads to resentment, hatred and so destructive that wants to annihilate the object of which came the humiliation. Do not forget that good anger, according to Aristotle, is the feeling that accompanies the desire for justice. A justice who does not know anger is a fickle powerless. Social currents of the nineteenth and twentieth created collection points to the collective anger, something just as important. But too many people and too many of the traditional left organizations slid into resentment. Hence the urgency to think and imagine a new left beyond resentment.

SZ: What satisfies awareness resentment is more detrimental to the other and destroy the obstacle to benefit myself. We Slovenians are like in nature. Know the legend that a farmer is an angel appears and asks, "Do you want to give you a cow? But beware, I'll give you two cows also your neighbor! "And the Slovenian peasant says:" Of course not! "But for me, resentment is never the attitude of the poor. Rather, the poor attitude of love, as Nietzsche analyzed it so well. It is the moral of "slaves."

Only he was wrong a bit from the social point of view: is not the real slave, the slave, as the Figaro of Beaumarchais, wants to replace the master. In capitalism, I think there is a very specific combination between the look and feel Timoto erotic. That is, capitalism is mediated eroticism in relation to poor Timotes, which breeds resentment. I agree with Sloterdijk: basically, the hard part is how to think about giving, beyond the exchange, beyond resentment. Do not really believe in the efficacy of these spiritual exercises proposed Sloterdijk. I'm too pessimistic for that. To these self-disciplinary practices, such as athletes, I want to add social heterotopia. So I wrote the final chapter of Vivre la fin des temps, envision a utopian space where communist, referring to the works that get to see and hear what we might call a collective intimacy. I am also inspired by those utopian science fiction movies, where heroes wandering rejected neurotic types that are true communities. Individual tours can also guide us. Kravtchenko often forgotten that Victor (1905-1966), the Soviet officer who reported early in the horrors of Stalinism J'ai choisi la liberté and was infamously attacked by pro-Soviet intellectuals, wrote a sequel, J'ai choisi the justice, while fighting in Bolivia and organized an agricultural production system more equitable. We must encourage Kravtchenko emerging everywhere from South America to the shores of the Mediterranean.

PS: I think you are a victim of the psycho-political evolution of Eastern Europe. In Russia, for example, each load on his shoulders with a whole century of political and personal catastrophe. Eastern peoples express the tragedy of communism and not out of it. All this forms a bond of desperation weld. I am a pessimist by nature, but life refuted my original pessimism. I am, so to speak, an apprentice optimistic. And so I think we're pretty close to each other because in a sense parallel biographies traveled from radically different starting points, reading the same books.

The case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Is it a simple case of morality or a symptom of a malaise most important?

PS: This is a global event that exceeds the police made. Dominique Strauss-Kahn may be innocent. But that history reveals that the huge power that holds an individual can create a kind of religion of the powerful that I would qualify as sexual pantheism. We thought we had finished with the sun kings. But, interestingly, the XXI century multiplied by ten thousand men of power to those who think that all the objects of their desire to be penetrated by irradiation.

SZ: The only interesting case is the DSK circulated rumor that his friends would have approached the family of the alleged victim in Guinea to provide you with an exorbitant amount of money if Diallo Nafissatou withdraw his complaint. If that is true, what a dilemma! What choice, dignity or the money you can save the life of a family, giving you the chance to live in prosperity? That's what I would sum up the true moral perversion of our time.

(C) Le Monde, 2011.

2011-07-31T22:03:00.000-07:00

"Art serves to rinse out our eyes." - Karl Kraus

2011-07-16T05:52:00.001-07:00

I snap & hiss at space
with the stars

& we are the arbitrators of constellations
& as all beasts, we devour the multidimensional transformation of the universe

unidentifiable &,
my blood runs from my mouth into this life & its many lungs
weighing every cell my pulse carries,
identifying, preserving & destroying the many faces of this super-consciousness

simultaneity, liberation & suffocation
knocking about our ecstatics & fevers of materialization

& if I know death, it is myself that is dying

& to know the invasion of my psyche, I myself must invade

Sitting with the profundity &

meaninglessness of my body

when to defend & when to surrender

inexplicably engaged

Escaping is an infinite act

whirling into being,
sinking into, lost within humanity,

striving to flesh out the evolution of cerebral identities

& I’ve only arrived to sing as the stingray does
within his black womb of bleeding

crashing into atmosphere
& heavy planets which reconcile us with their creators

waves & webs
suicidal flags of energy

I fall inside of the splintering of language

contagion & interrupter

the beautiful place that never was.

-

Amy M. Denes

2011-05-28T23:52:00.001-07:00

Quand je conceptuellement l'expérience de la «vérité», il est un œil, il est un purificateur, il me donne le pouvoir, la direction, la vérité est que les points cœur, intuitivement, et parfois mathématiques nouvelles structures et manifeste, le guider, chair c'est le destin, dans la forme, la langue, le son, l'amour, le vide, mort..

Espace boussole. Bouée, du cortex cérébral:

elle était en noir à la création d'un billion de planètes.

ne le suicide lui-même sait que le suicide?

Liu Xiaobo Discusses Freedom of Expression in China

2010-12-10T01:02:00.000-08:00

"We will maintain the spirit of the freedom of writing."

(CLICK ON LINKS IN BROWN- FOR MEDIA)

Timothy Cheek - Why did Liu Xiaobo receive the Nobel Peace Prize? "representative of human rights activists in China"

Relationship between Chinese intellectuals & the state.

Who is Liu Xiaobo and what is he about? Writing about public issues.

Why is Liu Xiaobo in jail? Charter 08.

The effect of the Nobel Peace Prize on Chinese politics.

STALKING, & ABUSES OF POWER-

2010-11-27T21:10:00.000-08:00

I wish this post was about the brilliant Tarkovsky film Stalker- but it's not..

Stalking is a serious issue that I am going to write about in this post & I will also share my experience.

I know & I've gotten to know a few people who have suffered the abuse of stalking & stalking is a far more common problem than I realized.

A friend of mine who is very dear to me recently won a court case against their stalker & I am glad that for the first time in many years that they have some relief & that the law worked in their case & that justice was brought.

It's going on ten years that I have had to deal with a stalker, more on this later.

First I'd like to discuss the importance of a social code in our relations with other people that most of us understand.

In our lives we get to know & befriend others & a myriad of possible events occur in which we no longer wish to be in contact with another person or have them in our lives, or vice versa, to discontinue contact with others & move on with ones life is a basic human right-.

Generally, after such a dissolution of contact has occurred it is up to the parties involved to responsibly deal with any emotions they may have & respect the life, freedom & privacy of the other person.

I think that the most important part of the process of the maturation into adulthood (which I honestly think only happens in ones late 20's-) revolves around dealing with rejection, which all of us have experienced at one time or another (& likely will for the rest of our lives) & also, that one can never judge the life circumstances of another human being.

I think that perhaps the corporatization of our culture into irrational & consumptive ways of thinking- & relating to others ( materialism & 'the age of the thing', the objectification & abuse of men, women & children in the sex industry & the paparazzi/Tv/junkfood & commercial media/culture, etc) is at least partly (if not entirely) responsible for the rise in stalking & harassment incidents.

The UN is well aware that stalking is a serious issue as stated in this paper -

"Defining and measuring violence against women: Background, issues, and recommendations" from a meeting that took place in Geneva Switzerland- in April 2005:

"Specifically, future violence against women surveys should be designed to collect information not just on violent acts, such as physical assault, sexual assault, and threats of physical and sexual assault, but nonviolent acts, such as stalking and psychological and emotional abuse.

Information generated from the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) shows that stalking is much more prevalent than previously thought; and that victims of stalking suffer serious psychological and social consequences as a result of their victimization (Tjaden and Thoennes,1998)." Link (PDF)

My stalker is aware that my local police have an ongoing file on him & still he refuses to leave me alone.

I've been told to get a restraining order & I should- but it's legally complicated because my stalker has small children & I am certain that a restraining order & a case in court might result in his losing his children. So one obviously serious issue is I would be unintentionally intervening in the welfare of his children by protecting & defending myself.

So, I have a dilemma on my hands & this choice to make in that my stalker has used his small child to leave me messages twice & is thus training his child to stalk me.

I had not contacted my stalker in over 9 years (you are understandably not- supposed to contact your stalker & I obviously never had the desire to) & recently tried to give my stalker the opportunity to stop infringing on my human rights. When I received a second message from his child I was positively fuming. I dialed his number, he answered in a warped tone of voice, & screaming- I told him that to use his child to get my attention, to stalk me- is wrong & that "it makes my blood boil" & that he should be aware that the local police have a file on him & that I obviously want nothing to do with him if I have not contacted him in almost ten years & I hung up. The call was a few seconds in duration.

I thought that perhaps this would bring him to his senses that he is not only abusing me but his child.

I had not been contacted by my stalker for a long period of time after this call & was finally able to forget my stalker & glad that perhaps- I would not have to get a restraining order & take my stalker to court.

I wonder, what it is that leads stalkers to create a delusional version of you, & what leads them to such abusive & irrational behavior.

It's obviously obsessive behavior & I am not unfamiliar with it.

I have also dealt with being harassed, bullied & abused on the net by someone in the arts scene here who has never seen my work in person & who I only had limited contact with.. I stopped posting at any Chicago arts blogs after 2006 - 2007 & am thus censored from my opinion as a way to avoid abuse & quite honestly to not involve myself in a majority of poorly monitored Chicago arts blogs that are rife with tacky & pleonastic gossip.

I was contacted by some of these blogs a few years later & told that my name would be removed from abusive & paranoid tangents made by this person, &- paranoid & abusive tangents projected towards me- yet, onto people who were not- me. I thought this insane, terrifying & obsessive. That someone would assume that everyone who disagreed with them was me & thus abuse my name & integrity further-.

I am truly grateful that these art blogs took the time to realize that this is intolerable, unacceptable & abusive behavior.

This person has since painted themselves into a corner as I am not the only victim of their abuses, I am on a long list of arts professionals who have been a victim of this person.

I also recently blocked them from my email because they emailed me out of the blue with bizarre threats as if I- am somehow responsible for their abusive behavior towards others & the fact that others have become fully aware that this individual is incredibly & consistently abusive towards other artists & individuals.

My stalker of almost ten years also stalks me on the net & after his mails I block him, I have all his emails saved for the police records/file on him.

He has also left me long messages on my answering machine & the police told me several years ago to save all his messages & they visited to listen to all of them, including the ones of his child asking me to contact my stalker & they made a record of them. The police were disgusted, had a lot to say, incredibly helpful, concerned about me (& as I, that child) & once again they tried to push for a restraining order & case against my stalker (at this point there is a surplus- of tangible evidence created by my stalker).

I write about & raise this issue now- because my stalker contacted me again today, via an email account through one of my online art files & of course this too will go to the police. I am mortified & appalled at my stalkers carelessness & immorality.

At this point in my life- this post is also a necessary & a cathartic expression of what many of us suffer not only randomly but for some of you on a day to day basis.

Stalking is treated as a taboo subject & it should not be, it is a selfish, sadistic & dangerous behavior, it is also dangerously misrepresented & stigmatized by corporate entities via products, advertisements, commercials & on social networking sites.

It is never- appropriate to stalk &/or harass another human being, to limit them, disrespect them, abuse them & control them- impinge on their privacy & rights. It is against the law-...

& now I have to spend time & energy seriously considering putting a restraining order on my stalker of almost ten years.

This will seriously & negatively impact his life.

I am not a revengeful person, I am respectful & discreet towards all people.

But- I do stand up for myself & though I am a stolid atheist, I do- believe in karma.

& compassion.

So- I copy & paste the message (name redacted) I received today from my stalker & answer it here, as a last chance for my stalker to go & get some help & see a psychiatrist, get appropriate care & attention for their problem & avoid an extremely damaging restraining order & prosecution- & to leave me alone as I asked almost ten years ago.:

"Message:

I am sorry
can we talk, please."

NO.

-

Links:

Stalking Resource Center- The National Center for Victims of Crime

Stalking Help

Cyberstalking The National Center for Victims of Crime

"Two Communities Respond to Stalking" - (video)

"SVS found that, within a 12-month period, approximately 3.4 million U.S. adults were victims of stalking. Of these victims:

* 11% of victims were stalked for 5 years or more
* Approximately 25% experienced some form of cyberstalking such as email or instant messaging
* 66.2% of stalking victims experienced unwanted phone calls or messages
* Nearly 75% of stalking victims knew their stalkers in some way

During the 12-month survey period, 14 of every 1,000 adults were victims of stalking."

Stalking

Support Group

"Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do."
&
"And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” - Nelson Mandela

(Thank you to my dearest friends for your love, wisdom & support...)

De tir L'etoile de Brûlures Vie

2010-11-12T05:37:00.000-08:00

-

Je suis mourir
mort une fois de plus

mais mon cadeau spécial est que je sais
comment d'être né, différemment,

de plus, je suis forcé d'être oubliés

jamais oublier que nous choisissons d'être oubliés

nous sommes tous- sont l'effacement

l'effacement

leur faire oublier dans l'oubli trouvent ensuite et trouvent
qu'ils se punir de se rappeler ce qui a été oublié
laissez-les créer la haine et de mauvaise humeur de ce

Je suis différent
Je suis-un révolutionnaire le sang
vous, mon secret, vous êtes révolutionnaire

donc je vous promets, je n'oublierai jamais
jamais

grâce à vous-

Je suis né de nouveau

Je avoir vous- comme un soleil brûlant
une source dans mon être
un brillant petit kernal de la vie qui digère la grandeur de l'univers avec le cerveau
le plus beau l'esprit est une tête pensante
infiniment
feu et la de tir
toujours pour la fois
dans ma psyché, mes rêves, mes pensées de vie
que la verte et des animaux, de brûlures vie

de tir l'etoile de brûlures vie

d'exister est de savoir ce que cela signifie pour entrer et se baigner dans la lumière de la vie et la transformation

-

By, Amy Marina Denes

Dixit Dominus & Messe de Miniut - Charpentier

The Boy, (a previously unpublished story) by, David Foster Wallace

2010-10-29T08:24:00.000-07:00

The Boy

Every whole person has ambitions, projects, objectives. This particular boy’s objective was to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. His arms to the shoulders and most of the legs beneath the knee were child’s play but after these areas of his body, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.

There is little to say about the animus or motive cause of the boy’s goal of pressing his lips to every single square inch of his own body. He had been homebound one day with asthma—a rainy, distended morning—apparently looking through some of his father’s promotional materials. The asthma was congenital. The outside area of his foot beneath and around the lateral malleolus (the young boy thought at that point of the lateral malleolus as the ‘funny knob thing’ on his ankle) was the first to require any real contortion. The strategy, as he understood it, was to arrange himself on his bedroom’s carpeted floor with the inside of his knee on the floor and his calf and foot at as close to a perfect ninety-degree angle to his thigh as he could at that point manage, then he had to lean as far over to the side as he could, bending out over the splayed ankle and the foot’s outside, rotating his neck over and down and straining with his fully-extended lips at a section of the foot’s outside he had marked with a bull’s-eye of soluble ink, struggling to breathe against the dextrorotated pressure of his ribs, stretching farther and farther to the side very early one morning until he felt a flat pop in the upper part of his back and then pain beyond naming somewhere between his shoulder-blade and spine. The boy did not cry out but merely sat silent in this tortured posture until his failure to appear for breakfast brought his father upstairs to the bedroom’s door. The pain and resultant dyspnea kept the boy out of school for over a month. One can only wonder what a father might make of an injury like this in a six-year-old child.

The father’s chiropractor, Dr. Kathy, was able to relieve the worst of the immediate discomfort. More important, it was Dr. Kathy who introduced the boy to the concepts of spine-as-microcosm and of spinal hygiene and postural echo and incrementalism and flexion. Dr. Kathy smelled faintly of fennel and seemed totally open and available and kind. The child lay stomach-down on a tall padded table and placed his chin in a little cup. She manipulated his head very gently but in a way that seemed to make things happen all the way down his back. Her hands were strong and soft and when she felt the boy’s back, he felt as if she were asking it questions and answering them all at the same time. She had charts on her wall with exploded views of the human spine and the muscles and fascia and nerve-bundles that surrounded the spine and were connected to it. No lollipops were anywhere in view. The specific stretching exercises Dr. Kathy gave the boy were for the splenius capitis and longissimus cervicis and the deep sheets of nerve and muscle surrounding the boy’s T-2 and T-3 vertebrae, which were what he had injured. Dr. Kathy had reading glasses on a necklace and a green button-up sweater that looked as if it were made entirely of pollen. You could tell she talked to everybody the same way. She instructed the boy to do the stretching exercises every single day and not to let boredom or a reduction in symptomology keep him from performing the rehabilitative exercises in a determined way. She said the long-term goal was not relief of present discomfort but neurological hygiene and health and a wholeness he would someday appreciate very, very much. For the boy’s father, Dr. Kathy prescribed an herbal relaxant.

Most professional contortionists are in fact simply persons born with congenital atrophic or dystrophic conditions of major recti or with acute lordotic flexion of the lumbar spine or both. A majority display Chvostek’s sign or other forms of ipsilateral spasticity. Very little effort or application is involved in their ‘art’ therefore. In 1932, a preadolescent Ceylonese female was documented by British scholars of Tamiel mysticism as capable of inserting into her mouth and down her esophagus both arms to the shoulder, one leg to the groin and the other leg to just above the patella and was thereupon able to spin unaided on the orally protrusive knee at rates in excess of 300 R.P.M. The phenomenon of suiphagia, or self-swallowing, has subsequently been identified as a rare form of inanitive pica caused in most cases by radical deficiencies in cadmium and/or zinc.

The insides of the small boy’s thighs up to the medial fork of his groin took months even to prepare for. Daily, hours spent cross-legged and bowed, slowly and incrementally stretching the long vertical fasciae of his back and neck, the spinalis thorasus and levator scapulae, the iliocostalis lumborum all the way to the sacrum and the interior thigh’s dense and intransigent gracilis, pectineus and adductor longus which fused below Scarpa’s triangle and transmits sickening pain through the pubis whenever the range of flexibility is exceeded. Had anyone seen him during these two and three hour sessions, bringing his feet’s soles together and in to train the pectineus, bobbing slightly and then holding a deep, cross-legged lean to work the great, tight sheath of thoracolumbar fascia that connected his pelvis to his dorsal costae, the child would have appeared either prayerful or clinically autistic or both. Once the thigh’s anterior targets were achieved and touched with one or both lips, the upper portions of his genitals were simple and were protrusively kissed and passed over even as plans for the ilium and outer buttocks were in conception. After these achievements would come the more difficult and neck-intensive contortions required to access the inner buttocks, perineum and extreme upper groin. The boy had turned seven.

The special place where he pursued his strange but now newly mature objective was his room, which had wallpaper with a repeating jungle motif. The room’s second floor window yielded a view of the back yard’s tree. Light from the sun came through the tree at different angles and intensities at different times of day and illuminated different parts of the boy as he stood, sat, inclined or lay on the room’s carpet stretching and holding positions. His bedroom’s carpet was white shag with a furry, polar aspect that the boy’s father did not think went well with the wall’s repeating scheme of tiger, zebra, lion, palm but the father kept his feelings to himself.

Radical increase of the lips’ protrusive range requires systematic exercise of maxillary fascia such as the depressor septi, orbicular oris, depressor anguli oris, depressor labii inferioris and the buccinator, circumoral and risorius groups. Zygomatic muscles are superficially involved.

PRAXIS:

• Affix string to Weatherly button of at least 1.5” diameter borrowed from father’s second-best raincoat.

• Place button over upper and lower front teeth and enclose with lips.

• Pull string fully extended at 90° to face’s plane and pull with gradually increasing tension on end, using lips to resist pull.

• Hold for 20 seconds.

• Repeat.

• Repeat.

Sometimes his father sat on the floor outside the boy’s bedroom door with his back to the door. It’s not clear whether the boy ever heard him listening for movement in the room, although the wood of the door sometimes made a creaky sound when the father sat against it or stood back up in the hallway or shifted his seated position against the door. The boy was in there stretching and holding contorted positions for extraordinary periods of time. The father was a somewhat nervous man with a rushed, fidgety manner that always lent him an air of imminent departure. He had extensive entrepreneurial activities and was in motion much of the time. His place in most people’s mental album was provisional, with something like a dotted line around it; the image of someone saying something friendly over his shoulder as he made for an exit. Most clients found the father made them nervous. He was at his most effective on the phone.

By age eight, the child’s long-term goal was beginning to affect his physical development. His teachers remarked changes in posture and gait. The boy’s smile, which appeared by now constant because of the circumlabial hypertrophy’s effects on the circumoral musculature, looked unusual also: both rigid and overbroad, and somehow, in one Social Studies teacher’s evaluative phrase, ‘age inappropriate.’

FACTS:

• Italian stigmatist Padre Pio carried bloodless wounds, which penetrated the left hand and both feet medially throughout his lifetime.

• The Umbrian St. Veronica Giuliani presented with wounds in one hand as well as in her side, which wounds were observed to open and close on command.

• The 18th century holy woman Giovanna Solimani permitted pilgrims to insert special keys in her hand’s wounds and to turn them, reportedly facilitating those clients’ own recovery from rationalist despair.

• According to both St. Bonaventure and Thomas de Chilano, St. Francis of Assisi’s manual stigmata included baculiform masses of what presented as hardened black flesh extrudant from both volar planes. If and when pressure was applied to a palm’s so-called ‘nail,’ a hardened black rod of flesh would immediately protrude from the back of the hand just exactly as if a real so-called nail were passing through the hand.

And yet, fact:

• Hands lack the anatomical mass required to support the weight of an adult human. Both Roman legal texts and modern examinations of 1st century skeletons confirm that classical crucifixion required nails to be driven through the subject’s wrists, not his hands, hence the ‘necessarily simultaneous truth and falsity of the stigmata’ that existential theologist E.M. Cioran explicates in his 1937 Lacrimi si Sfînti, the same monograph in which he refers to the human heart as ‘God’s open wound.’

Areas of the boy’s midsection from navel to xyphoid process at the cleft of his ribs alone comprised nineteen months of stretching and postural exercises, some of the more extreme of which must have been wildly painful. At this stage, advances in flexibility were now subtle to the point of being undetectable without extremely precise daily record keeping. Certain tensile limits in the flava, capsule and process ligaments of the neck and upper back were gently but persistently stretched, the boy’s chin placed to his chest at mid sternum and then slid incrementally down 1, sometimes 1.5 mm a day and this catatonic and/or meditative posture held for an hour or more.

In the summer, during his early morning routines, the tree outside the boy’s window filled with grackles and became busy with grackles coming and going, then as the sun rose the tree filled with the birds’ harsh sounds, tearing sounds, which as the boy sat cross-legged with his chin to his chest sounded through the window’s pane like rusty screws turning; some complexly stuck thing coming lose with a shriek. Past the tree were the foreshortened roofs of neighborhood homes and the fire hydrant and street sign of a cross street and the sixty-four identical low-sloped roofs of a townhouse development beyond the cross street and, past the development, just at the horizon, the edges of the verdant cornfields that began at the city limits. In late summer the fields’ green was more sallow and later in the fall there was merely sad stubble and in the winter the fields’ bare earth looked like nothing so much as just what it was.

A Bengali holy man known to followers as Prahran Sahta II underwent periods of meditative chanting during which his eyes exited their sockets and ascended to float above his head connected only by their dura mater cords and thereupon underwent (the eyes did), floating above the holy man’s head, rhythmic stylized rotary movements described by western witnesses as evocative of dancing four-faced Shivas, of charmed snakes, of interwoven genetic helices, of the counterpointed figure-eight orbits of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies around one another at the perimeter of the Local Group or of all four at the same time.

Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy decided to devote himself to being able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. It is not clear even that he conceived of the objective as an achievement in the conventional sense. He did not read Ripley and had never even heard of the Brothers McWhorter. Certainly it was no kind of stunt nor any kind of self-evection; this is verified. The boy had no conscious wish to ‘transcend’ anything. If someone had asked him, the boy would have said only that he’d decided he wanted to press his lips to every last square micrometer of his own individual body. He would not have been able to say more than this. Conceits or conception of his own physical inaccessibility to himself (as we are all of us inaccessible to ourselves and can, for example, press our lips to parts of one another which we cannot begin even to approach, lip wise, on ourselves) or of the boy’s complete determination apparently to pierce that veil of inaccessibility—to be in some idiosyncratic way self-contained and -sufficient, fully available to himself—these were beyond the range of his consciousness. He was only a child.

His lips touched the upper aureoles of his left and right nipples in the autumn of his tenth year. The lips by this time were markedly large and protrusive. Part of his daily disciplines were tedious button and string exercises designed to promote hypertrophy of the avicularis muscles. The ability to extend his pursed lips as much, by age nine, as 11.4 cm had often been the difference between achieving part of his thorax and not. It had been the avicularis muscles more than any outstanding advances in vertebral hygiene that had permitted him to access the rear areas of his scrotum and substantial portions of the creases between his scrotum and inner thighs before he had even turned nine. These areas had been touched, tagged on the four-sided anatomical chart inside his personal ledger, then washed clean of ink and forgotten. The boy’s tendency was to forget each site once he had pressed his lips to it as if the establishment of its accessibility made the site henceforth unreal for him and the site now in some sense existed only on the four-faced chart.

His mid and upper back were the first large areas of radical, perhaps impossible unavailability to his own lips, presenting challenges to flexibility and discipline that occupied a vast percentage of his inner-life in grades five and six, and ahead, of course, like the falls at a long river’s end, lay the unimaginable prospects of achieving the back of his neck, the 8 cm just below the chin’s mentalic point, the galea of his scalp’s back and crown, the forehead and zygomatic ridge, the ears, nose, eyes, as well as the paradoxical ding an sich of his lips themselves, accessing which appeared to be like asking a blade to cut itself. These sites occupied a near-mythic place in the overall agenda. The boy revered them in such a way as to place them almost beyond the range of conscious intent. The boy was not by nature a worrier (unlike himself, his father thought) but the inaccessibility of these last sites seemed so radically titanic that it was as if their cast shadow fell across all the slow progress up toward his clavicle in the front and lumbar curvature in the rear that occupied his twelfth year alive, darkening the entire project; tenebrist shadows the boy chose to see as lending the enterprise a somber dignity rather than any kind of futility or pathos. He did not yet know how but he believed, as he approached puberty, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself in the end. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt inside.

FROM - (& thank you-)

THE SUPERGALACTIC DODO HAS ARRIVED

2010-10-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

(& - DON'T MESS WITH THE SUPERGALACTIC RATTLER!!)

(& WHAT IS THE LATEST NEWS FOR OWL & TIGER NOW THAT THE SUPERGALACTIC DODO & THE RATTLER ARE IN THEIR MAGICAL TIME TRAVELING CLAWS/PAWS?? WILL THE SUPERGALACTIC DODO BE LIBERATED ONCE & FOR ALL?? ALL TIME- AS IN ONE CHANCE?? WHAT EXACTLY WILL HAPPEN??? WILL THE MAGICAL VENOM OF THE SUPERGALACTIC RATTLER CLEANSE THE MASSES OR- KILL THEM!!!!!????????!!? WILL THE FAKE DODO'S (FAT HEART = A FAKE DODO) KEEP TURNING EVERYTHING INTO ANTI QUANTUM & FACT DESTROYING NIHILISTIC, -'GOD WORSHIPPING' TRASH?? WHERE WILL THEY TIME TRAVEL TO NEXT??? IF THERE IS A NEXT???!!! COMING SOON!)

2010-10-22T04:10:00.000-07:00

Amit Goswami, Quantum Physics & Consciousness "we can make sense of the world only if we base the world on consciousness."

"The observer is the observed" quoted by Amit from Krishnamurti.

"Dance of the ego & quantum self." "Movement of the individual & the whole."

THE 'CHICAGO ART SCENE'

2010-10-13T19:19:00.000-07:00

A long over due letter to the (Chicago's) 'artistic ethersphere',

-

"Postmodern irony, hip cynicism, a hatred that winks & nudges you & pretends it's just kidding." - David Foster Wallace

THOUGH I AM ALLIED WITH SOME TRULY BRILLIANT LOCAL- ARTISTS & WRITERS, I HAVE NOTHING TO DO- WITH 'THE CHICAGO ART SCENE' IT'S FAR TOO GOSSIPY-, SHOCKINGLY ABUSIVE (CRIMINAL..), HYPOCRITICAL-, SADISTIC, ELITIST, INSENSITIVE, SELF ABSORBED, IGNORANT, IRRITATING- "we can have critical discourse on Lady Gaga as performance art." COMPETITIVE, BACKSTABBING, IMMATURE, DISRESPECTFUL-, NAUSEATINGLY FULL OF USELESS FACTS (& non facts) & RHETORIC-

&, FAR TOO NIGHTMARISHLY TRENDY FOR ME TO STOMACH.

WITH THIS IN MIND- ANYONE FROM THE 'CHICAGO ART SCENE' WHO CLAIMS SOME KIND OF 'AWARENESS' OR 'SOME SORT OF ASSOCIATION WITH ME'- HAS LIKELY NEVER SPENT MORE THAN AN HOUR IN MY PRESENCE & THEREFORE IS PART OF THE 'ONE DIMENSIONAL- SCENE' (MARCUSE) OF VICIOUSLY SUCCESS OBSESSED SCENESTERS OR BULLYING MANIPULATORS & LIARS AS OUTLINED ABOVE-.

MOST IMPORTANTLY- THIS 'CHICAGO ART SCENE' IS SORROWFULLY ARTLESS, BUT THAT IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU'VE GOT HALF CONSCIOUS & VIOLENT ATTILLA'S CALLING THEMSELVES 'ARTISTS' AS THE 'STASI OFFICERS' OF THE 'CHICAGO ART ($$$) SCENE'.

ANY- IN DEPTH, RATIONAL & FACTUAL INFORMATION ABOUT MY INTERACTIONS WITH OTHERS & OTHER ARTISTS/FRIENDS WHO I RESPECT & ADMIRE (PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY KNOW WHO- I AM, PRESENT & FUTURE CONTEXT_
) CAN BE FOUND AT http://artvolume1.wordpress.com/.

I POST THIS BLOG/INFORMATION BECAUSE IT'S THE TRUTH, & BECAUSE ENOUGH OF A DECADE HAS PASSED FOR THE MAJORITY OF 'CHICAGO ART SCENE PEOPLE' TO KN0W THAT WHAT I SAY IS UNFORTUNATELY, A WELL KNOWN FACT- & BECAUSE IT NEEDS TO BE SAID, EVEN IN A RESPECTFULLY VAGUE SENSE.

IS ED PASCHKE TURNING IN HIS GRAVE?

IT'S LIKELY.

-

"I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy people who want to be liked by all the people around them.

I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits."

- William Seward Burroughs

The Culture of Disbelieving

2010-09-23T08:08:00.001-07:00

How can one create from the complexity of human experience & the unique bonds that necessitate such in such a one dimensional world? STRUGGLE?
-
We often fail what we believe in, to manage our insecurities, agendas, to get our way. As well as helping in perpetuating consumer culture.
-
Freedom of ideas, speech & expression has everything- to do with the evolution of critical thought.
-
We are too commercialized, pornographied, dumbed down, & blindly sexist towards both- genders & we misunderstand & abuse our thinkers & artists.
-
We take communication for granted & sometimes it's actually an incredibly hard interaction & process for anyone to mutually achieve.
-
Indifference is humanity's scourge & terror.
-
"'self' as taboo-.."
"what kind of hell is that..?"

"There is nothing worse, than self as taboo..."

Self as Taboo - Marcuse
-
"Ils ont en effet vol ma foi, j'ai eu la bonne, rare foi, la foi tres utile, mais je n'ai pas foi gauche. Bled loin."
-

All excerpts from work & 'Our Culture of Disbelieving'- by, Amy Marina Denes

2010-09-23T08:04:00.000-07:00

Typed excerpt from Human Destructiveness, by Anthony Storr

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Death Instinct.

"The use of the term "instinct", by both Schilder and Freud is anachronistic, because it suggests that aggression is an innate drive requiring periodic discharge.

As I pointed out earlier, no one now thinks of aggression in this way. However, if one makes allowance for his old - fashioned terminology, Freud's view that aggression & self preservation are connected is in line with what I have argued thus far.

Freud considered that aggression was derived from the so-called "death instinct" being redirected toward the external world.

Very few analysts, with the exception of Melanie Klein , have accepted Freud's concept of a "death instinct", but since Freud is so centrally important in any consideration of human motivation, a brief explanation of what he meant is required.
Freud originally regarded aggression as a sadistic aspect of the sexual instinct, a primitive form of dominating or mastering the sexual object. Love in this form and at this preliminary stage (pregenital) is hardly to be distinguished from hate in it's attitude toward the object. Not until the genital organization is established does a love become the opposite of hate.

Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love.
It derives from the narcissistic ego's primordial repudiation of the external world with outpouring of stimuli. As an expression of the reaction of unpleasure evoked by objects, it always, remains in intimate relation with the self -preservative instincts; so that sexual & ego- instincts can readily develop an antithesis which repeats that of love & hate.

When the ego- instincts dominate the sexual function, as is the case at the stage of the sadistic- anal organization, they impart the qualities of hate to the instinctual aim as well. The First World War may have influenced Freud in finally accepting the idea that aggression is independent of sex. (cont'd page 18)"

-

Is it....?

“The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.” - Marcuse

2010-08-28T08:47:00.000-07:00

Humanity is the manifestation of an insatiable hunger for a variety of assimilations - you are only dangerous, simply, because you are real. - A.M.D

-

NOTHING

An excerpt from a short story by A.M.D.

☎ "What is her film about??"

"It's a 3 hour- time lapse film which is filmed from the roof of a building, a mosque actually- in Baghdad, in the center of war torn Iraq..."

( NOTE: "General David Petraeus, is said to be a “big supporter” of bringing Disneyland to Baghdad." )

"What happens??"

"There is no sound- except for when something violent occurs the film returns to a normal speed, for example a boy got shot in the head riding his bike into spontaneous cross fire, then you had sound.. When soldiers die the film slows to normal speed as well.. But then after the violence quells, it speeds up again.."

"Who shot the boy??"

"U.S soldiers... & it's a bit shocking how quickly the 'situations', or injuries & deaths, get 'cleaned up' with the film returning to its rapid fast forward pace.. I saw two people die in exactly the same spot & I don't think anyone would have realized this if it were not for her film.."

"What is it called??"

"Nothing."

"??? What a title.."

"In her interview, what did she say it was about??"

"Nothing.."

"Who did she say was in the film??"

"Nobody.."

"??? - Did you watch the entire film??"

"Parts of it.. For some reason, right now at least- it can't be a full screening.."

"- h u hm -"

"Does it have an ending, did you get a sense of the ending??"

"I've heard from others that at the end of the film all there is- is a long written message to the Iraqi people, it glows on the screen for about 10 minutes & in complete silence.."

"What does it say do you know?? "

"I've got it partially written down on notes at home, taken from the interview- funny thing about memory, anyhow- something along the lines of "we never should have been there - or attacked your country, invade you for oil", blah, blah to the world & more horrible facts & so on....."

"What did you think of the film, the parts of it that you watched??"

"It scared the shit out of me- .."

"Why??"

"I don't know - why do you think, perhaps the surprising number of innocent people on 'both sides' whatever than means- who die right in front of your eyes??"

"How was she able to film it??"

"She robotically controlled a camera from the top of a mosque - & it was filmed over a four year period leading up to now.."

"Must have been hell to edit!"

"She says that nothing is cut out.. It's fast forward- time lapse - it gets blurred & frantic, in its moments of slowing down you get an increasingly nauseating inkling that soon it will stop.. The majority of the film is when it stops & that is too many times to count.."

"What is too many times to count.."

"I told you... - All the people that get murdered in front of your eyes.."

( 5 - 17 - 2010 )

- - -

Once Again for The Possible Worlds

- - -

“The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.”

“Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.”

Herbert Marcuse

JOURNAL - HOW DOES EVERYTHING- FEEL ( INDIVIDUATION )

2010-07-29T03:22:00.000-07:00

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." Albert Einstein

"through rows of bowing hissing Birch
they dreamt
the sun smoldering
beyond
each exclamation of star
a trail
of cosmos
the hanging
of breaths
winding around intervals

as they search the moment
it pries, them loose"

( Excerpt from The Paper Mistress, by, Amy Marina Denes )

-

How does a tree feel?

& how does gender feel?

& in veritably almost any circumstance- to access & be the other/s.

What is the significance of the roles we play & act out?

Self?

What is it to define?
Decode?
See?
To be local, universal.

Hegemonic.

How does it feel to think? To process, weigh & react. To doubt, to be solvent..

We are in a time where we finally have the tools to do much more elaborate & conscious work on testing & expanding our awareness of the origins of everything, exactly where- everything (food, clothing, shelter, the human psyche, origins of psychology, 'the spirit', the natural world, energy, art & creativity, ideas- etc ad infinitum) comes from & especially as of late, where war- comes from, how it is created & produced, what war is for- & why- we have wars..

But still, we are failing to ask ourselves where- all our functioning ideas, the materials & systems we depend on & perpetuate originate from.. We fail to go against convention, in order to create & found a new & far more sustainable system of ethics & 'morality'...

We need to further encourage & examine the free & creative dissemination of our ideas, perceptions & concepts, our understanding of the natural world on which we depend.

Are we so sure of the constructs of reality we create & act upon?

These are complicated evolving questions, with equally complicated & diverse answers- & possibilities,
& they always will be. Evolution predicates the process of the discovery, organization & realization of ideas & acts.

At our disposal, is the beauty of focus & observation & at times a panopticon of focus' & observations.

One might assume that trust (a most vital- human need) is an emphasis on the known, the given, the consistent & understood-. An engaging & evolving reciprocity & fruition of trust-.

There might be some program- for human understanding, there.

Individuality is born in the group.. (&, the reader to this journal must know- that I am grouped & allied with some truly- extraordinary & inspiring individuals.. Il bocca al lupo to you..)

So, why do we often go against understanding- ( & new understanding ) & towards any other amorphous & superficial re- definition which simply leads us back to the same arbitrary & exhausted questions?

What is it to ask who- someone is as an individual?

For an example- let's say Dostoevsky's 'Idiot' "in a world obsessed with money, power, and sexual conquest, a sanatorium is the only place for a saint." No individual is an island, well, maybe J.D Salinger, but he had some- reasons...

A 'saint'.. - An island... Hmm..

&, what are the reasons why we struggle with & against being
& in fleshing out the life of an individual, self & identity?

What is it to define oneself outside of the expectations & limiting perimeters of society?

Politics?
Gender-. Etc.

What about believing & solely trusting in all one's ever known? - (or being forced to -.)

Really..

What is it to look 'inside' oneself if it's possible. Inside of our complex, mental, emotional, creative & destructive origins & places of human drive- motive- desire-..

To seriously examine & take a look inside of our own motives as individuals, our influence upon others & the world..

To hold this psychological mirror up, & as Habermas says- "to be more or less reasonable, to give answers to the questions- why did you say that, why did you do that"..
The ability to reflect on ones drivers & ones need to engage.

Perhaps, a lot of our 'problems' (life is a problem) stem from our inability, or lack of desire in facing or answering these questions, as if it's somehow futile, painful or impossible for us to find a 'destination' or a 'destiny' in individuation.

A calling of the human spirit, freedom of the psyche & the will of the self.
A willingness to attempt to understand & confront individuation as the ultimate drive....
?

At present, I think we can agree that self confrontation (self- analysis, skepticism) is not- a popular activity.

It's expected then to suppress these powerful hidden drives. Perhaps, throw them into a cloud of repressed assumptions, desire & shame, further our self deception.
Yes. & how absurd is that?

Self, other, & origin- as taboo.-

& to then choose- to live out the design of a proudly hardening, inaccessible, limited & artless self.

Yet, if these drives for love & individuation are there, then what is their use?
What do these drives mean?
How can one speak for the human experience, attempt to know it & appeal to it, if one is not actually living the 'human' experience?

Why is this a very real dilemma?

Is the discovery of, creation from & release of- these expressions too much mental & emotional work for the average individual?

Is there a program to be followed....

Or does everything really just come down to survival, a self absorption that seeks to thrive in a vicious Darwinian sense, or is there something more?

When anyone- is forced into the margins, (yet again)
in front of us, is that great & ever looming desire to individuate, to organize-.. Make sense. Originate.
Within every individual (& many would say every living thing & space itself), are these desires, ever ready to organize..

(Jorn Asger painting, Paris by night, 1959. Defiguration.)

But for what?

An often hidden prime, is- to relate to & create from this drive for individuation..

To arrive.

Now, love as individuation's engine would be far too limiting, or cliche- or- is it.. ?

This noble & nurturing force ironically drives our self limiting needs, what is 'popular & fashionable' or 'politically correct or incorrect', blah- blah- etc, etc. Seemingly relegated to forever be attached to a lonely & speechless wet nurse to care for, quiet & soothe our lucid, dramatic & profound emotional & mental complexities.

Love seems to be a quality & energy, that by 'cultural, commercial, social & political standards & laws'- finds itself incessantly abused, always escaping us & inevitably, defeated.(Marcuse, One Dimensional Man)...

& what of a humanist universal love, a desire to understand & nurture the human condition, to leave ourselves open & vulnerable enough- to fully, rationally, completely & willingly, register with & learn from others & the world in any way possible. To courageously ally with reality & risk.

To be fallible & culpable. To face, realize & account for the effects of our own irrationality, error & cruelty.

Why has love for anything-, especially others, become an obligatory & over romanticized terror? Or an act of tiring & inconsequential labor- & work?

Is it really only such a personal, rare, ephemeral, illusory & coincidental feeling?
An aimless, forbidden & dispossessed universal guide?

Who taught us that this is 'true'?

Interestingly, love is also a form which often separates us when we have not the courage to realize it.
Unrealizable? Love has countless- nurturing forms & potentials - whether it's a mother breast feeding her infant, a boy carefully folding a paper plane, a surgeon performing heart surgery on her patient, a student thoughtfully finishing his thesis paper, an artist's hand on a thriving & symbolic painting, in the completion of a sustainable farm in South America. Or most importantly- the way life just erupts out of the earth & falls from the sky to give us something miraculous & tangible to experience.

One could go on & on. Love affirms, unites & allies us. It is a dwelling, a place. A uniting human understanding which is outside of the realms of exclusivity.

Love is the quite useful & stimulating, emotional & mental ecstatics that come with being realizable.

How could we ever- take this great power for granted?

Am I really being presumptuous in observing our lack? It's battle?
It's attack?

Love for humanity & others as a rational, vital, sophisticated & elegant force, has it's work, artists & audiences, yes- absolutely,
but such small & disconnected groups... However robust we are always somehow outnumbered..

We have seen this drive enter & escape us like an erratic, desperate dance & pattern, with countless hopeful incarnations, possibilities & failures, in the story of human history.

& then we long to just sit on our 'supposed' laurels?

Is it about success then.

Is that it.

Success, as some ability (conspiring) to prove that we each may have some kind of authority over each other.

"I successfully rule over you, in some way..." (Hah??)- Isn't this a condition much more worthy of disbelieving?

Can't we distinguish ourselves more often- with awareness, skepticism & empathy instead of, expectation, paranoia & 'status'?

Is it a weakness then...-

For.. ?

Mechanically liberated, I suppose- ........., from the empathy (reason) we secretly strive to discover & work from.

All of us painfully await a chance to emit, our sounds, nature, being. To join with something true- & greater than ourselves. Unite.

Emerge & become. BE. Be as in being to be with others & fully of self.

No one can accomplish anything- entirely alone. There is no 'moment' for all moments are future & this requires that the future be now. That awareness, be now.

We all seem to wait & wait to visit & actually face the broken & seeping life heart of the Gulf of Mexico (& The Yellow Sea ) & think- & actually do something about the impossible misery we- create & have created.

We put off falling out of war- to grow to despise human fear & hatred. To stop, to just stop killing- as a way to solve our problems.

We ruminate endlessly on the possibility of starting to attempt to effect change in ours & others lives in great & small ways, by recycling, volunteering, taking long walks, visiting elderly neighbors with news, spending one's free time writing a book, etc.

Human beings have a repressed passion, a yearning inherent in their natures & in their mental & emotional lives to find, experience & incite the love of humanity into a greater way of being..
To be led into a greater possibility of being.

To question self & being.

To love, is to invite- inquisition. Originate.

It's this simple... - I had a 60 or 70 year old or so, healthy & towering, moss green pine outside my front bay windows & some angry & disgruntled asshole- literally wasted money in order to chop down, grind up & throw away this pine in order to 'groom & beautify the courtyard'- ( yesterday ).

Understand- this pine was not diseased, sick or dying, it was not overgrown, its roots were no problem, it never grew into the windows, it was simply a gentle & beautiful pine.

It had consistently kept me company through many summers & winters.
It was life & held life, bird & squirrel nests, it also held my meditations through early morning sun rays & cups of tea... I watched it withstand pelting summer storms & every winter it would become cloaked in fresh & lofty glittering boughs of snow...

Year round it was pure & green & there was always life in it's boughs which brought me comfort & respite in times of stress & in the long winter months.

It perfumed my home, it brought me a consistent, uncommon, mysterious, & graceful companionship.

On clear nights, like an angel, it pointed towards the stars, & moon.

It was reduced to something considered useless, out of place & unwanted, removed & done away with, as if it had never been. & as if it never should have been.

I'll tell you- when I saw a robin & other small birds & squirrels which used to live in this pine's nurturing branches return to it's former dominion,
hopping & scrambling in the dirt in confusion at its absence-, I was so moved that I started to cry.

I cried so hard. It was a stendhal effect & much more.. I did not expect to feel as confused as the pine's inhabitants, but I felt a hole in my life & my heart & that hole is still there, embedded in my history.

& it means something-.

& I felt an even deeper urge to realize all the needlessness in the world, & an even deeper urge to understand my love & my belonging to other living things & my relationships with all that surrounds me on this short, mysterious & delicate plane of existence.

For better or worse, love & it's transformative powers is a willingness to find- solidarity (& self) among all things. It just, is.

It's not the known that discloses us, it's the unknown- that discloses us. It is all the happening of life that dwells beneath all our surfaces which rises up into experience, & truth.

To destroy the possibility of discovering & understanding the unknown, is a cosmic crime. It's unoriginal & unintelligible, a perversion of possibility, reality & the truth,
it's vacant & loveless.

& anything loveless & needless is just brutally & predictably banal.

& will probably, die that way.

Journal by, Amy Marina Denes

( Asger Jorn, Poussin,1962. Defiguration.)

-

( For the 'earth shaman', my pine, thank you. )( CLICK )

-

The RACH

-
"But deconstructionism tells us that each time we see the quilt (or encounter some similar object that can be seen in more than one way) then the other pattern is obscured from our sight. "

From: Derrida's 'differAnce'

All Kind of Flowers -
Yegelle Tezeta - & BACH

WILDERNESS

2010-07-23T02:56:00.000-07:00

"This is a heart that knows its way in a wilderness of desires."

-

"Freedom is the art of human release."

NO BUT'S.

2010-07-14T00:51:00.000-07:00

Being extraordinary is as simple as doing the right thing.

DO NOT- EAT YOUR HANDS.

2010-07-06T21:29:00.000-07:00

Вы можете съесть ваши руки и выжить, чтобы сказать рассказ? Должны быть много историй, но увы, ничто, чтобы сказать рассказ.. Не ешьте ваши руки!!! By, Amy M. Denes

LOOK AT YOURSELF

2010-06-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

( CLICK ) -> 1,000,000 Strong Against Offshore Drilling

Peter Orlovsky - R.I.P - July 8, 1933- May 30, 2010

2010-05-31T04:50:00.000-07:00

FRIST POEM

A rainbow comes pouring into my window, I am electrified.
Songs burst from my breast, all my crying stops, mistory fills
the air.
I look for my shues under my bed.
A fat colored woman becomes my mother.
I have no false teeth yet. Suddenly ten children sit on my lap.
I grow a beard in one day.
I drink a hole bottle of wine with my eyes shut.
I draw on paper and I feel I am two again. I want everybody to
talk to me.
I empty the garbage on the tabol.
I invite thousands of bottles into my room, June bugs I call them.
I use the typewritter as my pillow.
A spoon becomes a fork before my eyes.
Bums give all their money to me.
All I need is a mirror for the rest of my life.
My frist five years I lived in chicken coups with not enough
bacon.
My mother showed her witch face in the night and told stories of
blue beards.
My dreams lifted me right out of my bed.
I dreamt I jumped into the nozzle of a gun to fight it out with a
bullet.
I met Kafka and he jumped over a building to get away from me.
My body turned into sugar, poured into tea I found the meaning
of life
All I needed was ink to be a black boy.
I walk on the street looking for eyes that will caress my face.
I sang in the elevators believing I was going to heaven.
I got off at the 86th floor, walked down the corridor looking for
fresh butts.
My comes turns into a silver dollar on the bed.
I look out the window and see nobody, I go down to the street,
look up at my window and see nobody.
So I talk to the fire hydrant, asking "Do you have bigger tears
then I do?"
Nobody around, I piss anywhere.
My Gabriel horns, my Gabriel horns: unfold the cheerfulies,
my gay jubilation.

Nov. 24th, 1957, Paris
SECOND POEM

Morning again, nothing has to be done,
maybe buy a piano or make fudge.
At least clean the room up for sure like my farther I've done flick
the ashes & butts over the bed side on the floor.
But frist of all wipe my glasses and drink the water
to clean the smelly mouth.
A nock on the door, a cat walks in, behind her the Zoo's baby
elephant demanding fresh pancakes-I cant stand these
hallucinations aney more.
Time for another cigerette and then let the curtains rise, then I
knowtice the dirt makes a road to the garbage pan
No ice box so a dried up grapefruit.
Is there any one saintly thing I can do to my room, paint it pink
maybe or instal an elevator from the bed to the floor,
maybe take a bath on the bed?
Whats the use of liveing if I cant make paradise in my own
room-land?
For this drop of time upon my eyes
like the endurance of a red star on a cigerate
makes me feel life splits faster than sissors.
I know if I could shave myself the bugs around my face would
disappear forever.
The holes in my shues are only temporary, I understand that.
My rug is dirty but whose that isent?
There comes a time in life when everybody must take a piss in
the sink -here let me paint the window black for a minute.
Thro a plate & brake it out of naughtiness-or maybe just
innocently accidentally drop it wile walking around the
tabol.
Before the mirror I look like a sahara desert gost,
or on the bed I resemble a crying mummey hollaring for air,
or on the tabol I feel like Napoleon.
But now for the main task of the day - wash my underwear -
two months abused - what would the ants say about that?
How can I wash my clothes - why I'd, I'd, I'd be a woman if I did
that.
No, I'd rather polish my sneakers than that and as for the floor
its more creative to paint it then clean it up.
As for the dishes I can do that for I am thinking of getting a job in
a lunchenette.
My life and my room are like two huge bugs following me
around the globe.
Thank god I have an innocent eye for nature.
I was born to remember a song about love - on a hill a butterfly
makes a cup that I drink from, walking over a bridge of
flowers.

Dec. 27th, 1957, Paris
My Bed is Covered Yellow

My bed is covered yellow - Oh Sun, I sit on you
Oh golden field I lay on you
Oh money I dream of you
More, More, cried the bed - talk to me more -
Oh bed that taked the weight of the world -
all the lost dreams laid on you
Oh bed that grows no hair, that cannot be fucked
or can be fucked
Oh bed crumbs of all ages spiled on you
Oh yellow bed march to the sun whear yr journey will be done
Oh 50 lbs. of bed that takes 400 more lbs-
how strong you are
Oh bed, only for man & not for animals
yellow bed when will the animals have equal rights?
Oh 4 legged bed off the floor forever built
Oh yellow bed all the news of the world
lay on you at one time or another

1957, Paris
Snail Poem

Make my grave shape of heart so like a flower be free aired
& handsome felt,
Grave root pillow, tung up from grave & wigle at
blown up clowd.
Ear turnes close to underlayer of green felt moss & sound
of rain dribble thru this layer
down to the roots that will tickle my ear.
Hay grave, my toes need cutting so file away
in sound curve or
Garbage grave, way above my head, blood will soon
trickle in my ear -
no choise but the grave, so cat & sheep are daisey
turned.
Train will tug my grave, my breath hueing gentil vapor
between weel & track.
So kitten string & ball, jumpe over this mound so
gently & cutely
So my toe can curl & become a snail & go curiousely
on its way.

1958 NYC

- PETER ORLOVSKY

MICRO INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL STEVENS OF SUICIDE PRESS

2010-04-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

Image: William Burroughs beside Sphinx, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fall 1953. Copyright Allen Ginsburg Trust.

-

MICRO INTERVIEW IN THREE QUESTIONS, WITH BIBLIOGRAPHER, AUTHOR & FOUNDER OF SUICIDE PRESS.

I. You are right that people's quotes from Burroughs tend to be tired, overused &/or become cliche- what are some of your more unheard of Burroughs Quotes???

Michael Stevens: I have three for you,"Only those for whom the knowledge is intended will find it."

"Watch what everyone else is doing and don't do it."

"To speak is to lie."

II. You & Burroughs exchanged letters & then eventually met.. What was your first impression of Burroughs?

Michael Stevens: We exchanged letters concerning the Stendhal Syndrome, & then out of the blue he told me how to get rid of a headache by using acupressure on your pinky finger... My first impression? I don't really know how I felt, I was overwhelmed.

III. Where can we find your amazing book?

Michael Stevens: SUICIDEPRESS.COM

THANK YOU FOR THE MEMORIES MICHAEL.

( Image of Stevens )
Michael Stevens: The pleasure was all mine.

Look forward to a future & extended, interactive interview with Michael at ARTVOLUME1.ORG

© MICRO INTERVIEWS 2010 - by, Amy M Denes

OCELLUS

2010-04-17T08:20:00.000-07:00

"I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy people who want to be liked by all the people around them.

I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits."

William Seward Burroughs

-

"Fascists seek to organize a nation on corporatist perspectives; values; and systems such as the political system and the economy."

-
( CLICK )
MARIN MARAIS
-
suicidepress.com

"The only thing that gets Homo sapiens up off his dead ass is a foot up on it."
-The Place of Dead Roads

COMMISSIONER OF SEWERS

2010-04-08T09:54:00.001-07:00

( TANGIERS )

( CLICK ) ABOUT CUTUPS IN LONDON

( CLICK ) WILLIAM SEWARD BURROUGHS

WOMAN DEPICTED AS SERPENT

2010-02-16T07:19:00.000-08:00

OUROBOROS -

Antiheroine -

Future of the Universe and Possible Death -

KAFKA LAUGHED SO HARD WHILE WRITING, IT DISTURBED HIS NEIGHBORS

2010-02-15T10:56:00.000-08:00

Supporting the Intellectual Life of a Democratic Society -

The Orinoco Eel

2010-02-09T03:15:00.000-08:00

Gymnotus
from your arching back
springs a tactile & invisible scatter
spreading phosphene webs
shattering & striking coals of dreaming with silver

Have you touched the chimney
Brought your eyes to fill with smoke?

Spike your head above
winding Orinoco
oxygen to nourish your charge
sachs to spit
unheard
Sensing spines that drive & surround
you are kept & bolt to & fro
while a watch cannot keep up
with its ticks & its refrains

& none can explain.

Short poem from a 2005 Catalogue, by, Amy M Denes.

The Orinoco Eel.

EMPIRE OF ILLUSION- DARK VOYEURISM & THE OBAMA BRAND

2010-01-25T03:13:00.000-08:00

Chris Hedges: Empire of Illusion

"The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species."
(From: I Don't Believe in Atheists)

"In the beginning war looks and feels like love.

But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction.

It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands.
It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip.

It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb."
(From: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning)

"Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance.
Their attitudes need correction.
Once we adopt an upbeat vision of reality, positive things will happen.

This belief encourages us to flee from reality when reality does not elicit positive feelings. These specialists in "happiness" have formulated something they call the "Law of Attraction."

It argues that we attract those things in life, whether it is money, relationships or employment, which we focus on.

Suddenly, abused and battered wives or children, the unemployed, the depressed and mentally ill, the illiterate, the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in menial and poorly paid jobs, those whose homes are in foreclosure or who are filing for bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills, are to blame for their negativity.

The ideology justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress.

And many of us have internalized this pernicious message, which in times of difficulty leads to personal despair, passivity and disillusionment."

"There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege."

"The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic."
(From: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America)

"Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers."
(From: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)

"The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living."
(From: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning)

"Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause. "

All quotes by — Chris Hedges

& - Arthur Miller Quote on Suffering and Psychoanalysis: ‘My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness.

When in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know, have come out of people’s suffering.

The problem is not to undo suffering, or to wipe it off the face of the earth, but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to “cure” ourselves of it constantly, and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call “happiness”.

There’s too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him – of defining him, rather than letting him go! It’s part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad!"

THOSE IRRITATING WHITE MESSIAH FABLE FLICKS NEED TO BE STOPPED!

2010-01-11T08:08:00.000-08:00

"It’s a pretty serviceable formula. Once a director selects the White Messiah fable, he or she doesn’t have to waste time explaining the plot because everybody knows roughly what’s going to happen.

The formula also gives movies a little socially conscious allure. Audiences like it because it is so environmentally sensitive. Academy Award voters like it because it is so multiculturally aware.

Critics like it because the formula inevitably involves the loincloth-clad good guys sticking it to the military-industrial complex."

IN WHAT IS ALWAYS FAR MORE IMPORTANT RECENT NEWS:
Evidence of Ancient Amazon Civilization Uncovered

"The discovery of the ruins of an ancient civilization in the upper Amazon basin overturns previously held beliefs that the area had always been uninhabited."

PS. WE HAVE BEEN 'AT WAR' FOR 9 FUCKING YEARS, THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!!!
THOSE IRRITATING WHITE MESSIAH FABLE FLICKS NEED TO BE STOPPED!!!

Вы можете съесть ваши руки и выжить, чтобы сказать рассказ? Должны быть много историй, но увы, ничто, чтобы сказать рассказ.. Не ешьте ваши руки!!!

A.M.D

"THE MOST POWERFUL FORCES OF HUMAN LIFE ARE NON - RATIONAL, NOT IRRATIONAL , BUT NON- RATIONAL"

2009-12-18T07:58:00.000-08:00

Author WARNS of pageantry's perils -

Chris Hedges, who wrote 'Empire of Illusion,' examines America's
identity crisis in an age of consumerism and spectacle.

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, December 05, 2009

Chris Hedges sees, in America, a nation that has lost its way. He sees
a country that places prosperity above principle, celebrity above
substance, spectacle above nuance and introspection. He sees a "timid,
cowed, confused" populace disconnected from language, governed by
consumerism, ambivalent toward the common good, enamored by an
American myth that has no basis in the American reality.

"We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the
linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate
illlusion from reality," Hedges writes in his new book, "Empire of
Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle." "We have
traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is
designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with
a sixth-grade reading level.

"Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this
level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of
Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of
no school and endless fun. They were all, however, turned into donkeys
— a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity."

Hedges paints a bleak picture in this book — all the more sobering
when one considers that this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has
spent decades covering violence and war around the globe, in Africa
and the Balkans, South America and the Middle East. He states,
plainly, that the age of American eminence is over. Our standard of
living is going to drop. Our consumptive tendencies are going to
change. Yet the biggest problem, as Hedges sees it, is American denial
— an eagerness to cling to the good-times, anything-we-want illusion,
"the the dark message of corporatism," at the expense of this perilous
end-of-empire reality.

For all his years in journalism, Hedges has never been hesitant to
step outside the lines and draw conclusions in a pointedly
"progressive" point of view. He lost his job at The New York Times, in
fact, for speaking out against the war in the months before the
U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nationalism and myth were at the
heart of his breakout book, "War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning,"
which was a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle award for
non-fiction in 2002.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Hedges attended divinity school
before embarking on a career in journalism. An avowed socialist, he
claims to have voted for Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic
presidential primary of 2008 and Independent candidate Ralph Nader in
the election. He does not associate the word "hope" with the word
"Obama." He does not own a television. As a gesture of protest, he
once wrote he would not pay federal income taxes in the event of a
U.S. invasion of Iran.

Last month, three days after the Fort Hood tragedy, Hedges spoke at
St. Andrews Presbyterian church in a program moderated by University
of Texas journalism professor and peace activist Robert Jensen. Fort
Hood didn't come up in the conversation, or the question-and-answer
session that followed. But these topics, from "Empire of Illusion,"
did:

American Illusion

"You strive toward a dream; you live within an illusion. And societies
that cannot distinguish between illusion and reality die. If you look
at the twilight periods of all great empires – Roman, Ottoman,
Austro-Hungarian — there is, in those final moments, not only a deep
moral degeneration but an inability to distinguish what is real from
fantasy."

"During the election between McCain and Obama, we were waging two
wars, pre-emptive wars that under post Nurmberg laws are defined as
criminal wars of aggression. We were running offshore penal colonies
where we openly tortured individuals stripped of all rights. We had
suspended habeas corpus. We had engaged in warrant-less wiretapping
and eavesdropping on tens of millions of Americans . ... And yet we
spoke of ourselves as the greatest democracy on Earth – and that as
the embodiment of the highest values, we had a right to deliver it to
others by force."

American Values

"We talk about (the importance of) American culture. (But in truth):
American culture was destroyed after World War I, with the rise of
Madison Avenue and the implanting of mass corporate culture which
sought to instill new values into the American consciousness. Instead
of the values of thrift, communitarianism, modesty (and)
self-sacrifice, we developed, courtesy of the advertising industry,
this cult of self — this deep narcissism and hedonism that
disconnected us from others and gave us mass corporate culture.

"So it's not American culture that we embrace for the moment. It's not
American culture we export. It's corporate culture. And I think that
altered situations will force us back into a moral system that defies
the dark ethic of corporatism. And hopefully reconnects us to those
values within our past that I think were brought us closer to
fostering the building of common good.

'Vocational America'

"Education in the United States has become vocational. ... Many of the
state universities, community colleges and online for-profit
universities — that are growing faster than any other university
sentiment — have no use for the Humanities, literature, history,
philosophy, classics, art. Why? Because the Humanities ask the kind of
broad questions of meaning that those systems that prize above all
else vocational workers do not want to ask.

"The problem with our vocational system is that it measures and
rewards a very narrow kind of intelligence, a kind of analytical
intelligence to create legions of systems managers — people who have a
drone-like ability to work for very long hours, and (have) a kind of
penchant or capacity for manipulation, but don't know how to question
assumptions or structures."

'The Liberal Church'

"I come out of a liberal church. The liberal church has failed us, and
they've failed us on two levels. (First), they have defined
spirituality as 'How is it with me,' which is a form of narcissism.
Martin Luther King preached a great sermon called, 'Jesus didn't come
to bring us peace of mind.' And secondly, they have failed us because
they did not stand up to the Christian right. The Christian right is a
mass movement, I think the most dangerous mass movement in American
history — and they are Christian heretics.

"They have acculturated the Christian Gospel with the worst aspects of
American imperialism and American Capitalism. Jesus did not come to
give us a Cadillac and to make us rich and to bless arm fragmentation
bombs being dropped all over the Middle East. It was an utter
perversion of the message of the Gospel. And because the liberal
church lacked the fortitude and the spine to renounce this movement —
leaving it to repugnant figures like Christopher Hitchens or Sam
Harris ... at a time when the culture so desperately needs a moral
voice, the church sadly to me has become in many ways morally
irrelevant.

Capitalism

"Capitalism is probably ingrained in human nature. But there are
different kinds of capitalism. The kind of penny capitalism that I saw
at the farmer's market in the town I grew up in is not a dangerous
form of capitalism ... but corporate capitalism is something else.
Corporate Capitalism is cannibalizing the nation.

"Karl Polanyi in 1944 wrote a brilliant work called 'The Great
Transformation' in which he talked about the inevitable
totalitarianism and wars and breakdown that was caused by a system
that permitted unregulated capitalists to flourish. When everything
becomes a commodity, including human labor, when the natural world
becomes a commodity that is valued only by its capacity to generate
profit, then you commit collective suicide, because you exhaust human
beings and human resources, you deplete them, until they die. And
that's precisely what's happening. Look at the oil and natural gas
industry, the coal industry, our permanent war economy. ..."

Capitalism and Celebrity

"The ethic of celebrity culture ... is the ethic of unfettered
capitalism. What are the values promoted on reality television
programs like "Survivor"? A capacity for manipulation. Building false
friendships (with) those you betray. A destruction of real community
and solidarity. Basically: the traits of psychopaths. And what do you
get in return? Fleeting fame and money.

"Well, that is the ethic of Wall Street. That is what allowed the
titans of large corporations to fleece their shareholders, people who
had put month by month small sums aside for their retirement, for
their college, destroy these institutions like Lehman Brothers, and
then like Richard Fuld did, walk away with a severance package of $45
million. The ethic of celebrity culture is the ethic of Wall Street.
And the crisis that faces the country at its core is not so much an
economic crisis or a political crisis as it is a moral crisis.

The Bankruptcy of Liberalism

"I fear more the bankruptcy of liberalism than I do the fanaticism of
the right. ... I think the book for our times is probably
Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground," (1864) in which he writes
about a defeated dreamer, who becomes a cynic at a time when
liberalism is bankrupt and who descends into a state of moral nihilism
... which understood precisely where his country was going."

The Failure of Democrats

"Those of us who care about the working class in this country – and
much of my own family comes from the working class — should have
walked out on the Democratic party in 1994 when they passed NAFTA.
That thrust a knife in the back of the working class in this country –
followed by Clinton's so-called welfare reform, followed by a
Democratic party that quite consciously did the bidding of
corporations to receive (campaign) money. That was the intent. So by
the 1990s, the Democratic party had parity with the Republicans in
terms of corporate donations — and of course now they get more.

"The bankruptcy of American liberalism is that it continued to speak
against war, continued to speak on behalf of the working class,
continued to support constitutional rights, and yet backed the party
(the Democratic party) that betrayed all of these values. This wasn't
lost on the working class. The anger of the working class toward
liberals in this country is not misplaced, because liberals continue
with that type of hypocrisy. They continue to espouse values and yet
support political parties that tear down those values. And that's very
dangerous. . . .

"The progressive movements in this country rely on the working class
to propel our democracy forward. (But) our working class has been
decimated. It doesn't exist any more, because there are no jobs, no
meaningful jobs. And so that rage and frustration which you're already
seeing leaping up around the fringes of society — and of course
America is a very violent nation, that undercurrent of violence runs
very deep — is presaging, I fear, a backwash. But a right wing
backwash. And that is largely because the liberal class in this
country became gutless."

Health Care

"Any discussion of health care in this country should begin with the
factual acknowledgment that the for-profit health care industry is a
problem and must be destroyed. This is an industry that's not only
responsible last year for the deaths of 20,000 Americans who could not
get proper health care, medical coverage. But it (is) legally allowed
(to) hold sick children hostage while parents bankrupt themselves to
try to save their sons and daughters. This is a system, in theological
terms, of death.

"Our for-profit health care system makes money off of death, the same
way our arms merchants make money off of death. And the inability
within our country to face this reality, the inability in a
corporatized media to even have this discussion is, I think, evidence
of the power of the corporate state, which drives debate, which
permits institutions that are morally bankrupt to have a seat at the
table. And that is symptomatic of a society in deep decay."

Violence

"When you push a populace to violence, you unleash a poison that
infects everyone. I don't believe in the term "A Just War." ... And
the longer we continue to speak to those in the Middle East through
the language of violence, the more we empower those who are only
capable of speaking back to us in the language of violence. When you
look at 9/11: huge explosions and death above the city skyline,
nihilistic violence as a message. Where did they learn that from? From
(Secretary of Defense Robert) McNamara of '65, when he justified the
bombing of North Vietnam, which left hundred of thousands of
Vietnamese dead, (in the name of) delivering a message to Hanoi.

The perpetrators of 9/11 simply learned to speak the language we taught
them. ... You cannot promote a virtue through force. ... You cannot
implant democracy through force. Because once you use force, you speak
in a language in which the very concept of human rights is an
absurdity."

Faith

"I'm a Christian Agnostic — which means, and I think that's probably
biblically accurate, that I know nothing, and I believe I can know
nothing, about God.

"God is a human concept. God has been given by various theological
systems – our own and others – numerous attributes, some of which are
morally repugnant. But the reality of the transcendent is something
that artists and religious thinkers — who of course in early history
were fused into one — have struggled to document.

"Marcel Proust wrote that the real news of our lives never appears in
a newspaper. The most powerful forces of human life are non-rational –
not irrational, but non-rational: Grief, love, beauty, search for
meaning, struggle with our own mortality. You can't empirically
measure these forces. The Buddhists say you can memorize as many
sutras as you want, it will never make you wise. If you're not in
touch with these forces – and Paul Woodruff wrote a great book about
this, 'Reverence' – you're not a complete human being."

STRANGE BEFORE IT BECOMES FAMILIAR

2009-12-04T02:44:00.000-08:00

" art has something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings "

INFINITE JEST

" we're really setting ourselves up for fascism "

" the nice thing about fascists is they will tell you what to think- they'll tell you what to do- they'll tell you what's important- "

Dialetheism - Double bind - Counterpoint

QUIZ - RELATIONSHIPS & PATTERNS

2009-11-20T11:48:00.000-08:00

1) WHAT DO THESE TWO FILMS HAVE IN COMMON?

I) Dancer In The Dark- Bjork

II) Malena - Monica Bellucci

( CLUE )

ANYTHING FOR THE LOVE OF A COW

2009-11-14T19:22:00.000-08:00

I. LOVE

II. SADISM

Slaughter of pregnant cows ( Cannot be embedded, click this brown link. )

Who are you? Really..

A lover or a sadist, conscious or in denial, humane or cruel? - Do you have a relationship with nature & with your food, or not? ( &, there is no neutral- answer. )

You do it to yourself, you do
And that's what really hurts
Is that you do it to yourself
Just you and no-one else
You do it to yourself
You do it to yourself

Earthlings
1:35:28 - 1 year ago
EARTHLINGS is a feature length documentary about humanity's absolute dependence on animals (for pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and scientific research) but also illustrates our complete disrespect for these so-called "non-human providers." The film is narrated by Academy Award nominee Joaquin Phoenix and features music by the critically acclaimed platinum artist Moby .

RADICAL CRITICAL EXPLORATION BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

2009-11-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

BANG BANG

"I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it."
BANG
BANG & BANG BANG “In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.”

& BANG BANG BANG

"Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing."

& BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG “Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”

EVERY MAN HAS INSIDE HIMSELF A PARASITIC BEING WHO IS ACTING NOT AT ALL TO HIS ADVANTAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BANG ?
"Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative."

"Smash the control images. Smash the control machine." W.S.B

SMASH SMASH
SMASH BANG

“Every human soul has seen, perhaps even before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honor. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed which we saw once in a pure clear light form, being pure ourselves” Iris Murdoch

BANG!!

Counterattack as author's memoirs speak ill of Dame Iris

By Chris Hastings

"In her defence ... Iris Murdoch and her husband, John Bayley.

The widower of Dame Iris Murdoch has launched an attack on one of her former lovers, who described her as an intellectual lightweight and lousy in bed.

Professor John Bayley, 80, said he was unable to recognise his wife in the autobiography of the Nobel Prize-winning author, Elias Canetti, due to be published in Britain next month.

Bayley, who is a fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, said the Bulgarian-born writer, who had a three-year relationship with Murdoch in the 1950s, was "pathologically conceited and jealous of her success".

"I do not think it is worth paying any attention to what this man says about Iris," he said. "I certainly do not recognise her from his description. I think people who know what sort of man he is will not be surprised by what he says about her."....

Cont'd

"There's no doubting Murdoch's mastery when it comes to portraying Arrowby's self-deceit. He is able to eloquently insist that he is acting for the good of all concerned while he manipulates and bullies Hartley."

Вы можете съесть ваши руки и выжить, чтобы сказать рассказ? Должны быть много историй, но увы, ничто, чтобы сказать рассказ.. Не ешьте ваши руки!!!

“Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.”

Iris Murdoch -

"Earth's Screams Recorded in Space

( Space.com )

Wednesday, July 02, 2008
By Robert Roy Britt

Earth emits an ear-piercing series of chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening, if they're out there."

B A N G.

"A photo can take your soul.. .. But I really- am frightened.."
"I come in their fucking lens "

"I can't on my own change the regime in South Africa or teach the Palestinians to learn to live with the Israelis, but I can start with me."

"Vegetarianism is a link to perfection and peace."

"We are taught to consume. And that's what we do. But if we realized that there really is no reason to consume, that it's just a mind set, that it's just an addiction, then we wouldn't be out there stepping on people's hands climbing the corporate ladder of success."

"When I was old enough to realize all meat was killed, I saw it as an irrational way of using our power, to take a weaker thing and mutilate it. It was like the way bullies would take control of younger kids in the schoolyard."

( A multidimensional interdisciplinary experience of relationships.. )

2009-07-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

" Someone is alive. Someone returns. Someone cuts, belongs, erupts, escapes, begs, rejects, evaporates & bleeds. "

You are dangerous- because you are real.

by,

Amy Marina Denes

LESE MAJESTE, UBIQUITOUS, DISASTROUS & INESCAPABLE

2009-03-06T02:26:00.000-08:00

'BEING'.
( Links to click are in Indian Red )
UBIQUITOUS, DISASTROUS & INESCAPABLE 'BEING', WITH SEVERAL CONSIDERATIONS.
( THIS MESSAGE WILL ALSO SELF- DESTRUCT, DISMANTLE, BEING, BEING, 'BEING'.... )

1) HASSAN SABBAH
BY, BURROUGHS. "DON'T LET THEM SEE US, DON'T TELL THEM WHAT WE ARE DOING" "PREMATURE PREMATURE"

2) I AM MS DENES. "We do not have adequate images in society" Herzog. I AM A CRIME WAVE OF IMAGES, AN OBSERVER, ARTIST, WRITER, RESEARCHER, STUDENT, DRAFTSMAN, THINKER & POET. RIGHT NOW- I'M HAVING ENOUGH- OF THE CORRUPT, THEIR PRETENTIOUS NOVELTY, THE TWO FACED & THE DISASTROUSLY HYPOCRITICAL, YOU- KNOW WHO YOU ARE, SOME, OF YOU- ARE A BIT TOO POWERFUL. TIME TO DO A WEE BIT MORE READING UP ON COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY.

3) Universal pragmatism & Jurgen Habermas. "ASK WHY- WHY DID YOU SAY THIS, WHY DID YOU DO THIS". RADICAL PEDAGOGY.

"To be more or less REASONABLE, to give ANSWERS to the questions- why did you say that, why did you do that."

4) ( Click on image below, to disclose it. Gustave Courbet, Self Portrait.)

5) "I am not- political as a person."

"Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground."

Quotes by, Diane Wakoski.

"I AM THE SWORD WITH THE STARRY HILT"

6) "We do not have adequate images in society, I am a crime wave of Images..."
( So why was Herzog at the Oscars?? Time for Werner to eat his other shoe.. )
WERNER EATS HIS SHOE:

EQUATION & EPILOGUE: "Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces."
Arendt, Hannah

Social Neuroscience, Pattern Recognition, Naive Realism & Optical Illusions.

2009-01-31T04:12:00.000-08:00

( Links in Indian Red, see images alone by clicking on them. )
I. Draft for a phenakistiscope disc representing a pirouetting dancer
J. Plateau, Corresp. Math. Phys. 1832 VII p.291.

In "Sur un nouveau genre d'illusions d'optique", Plateau describes the construction and the action of a disc with 16 slits and 16 intermediate sectors. When 16 identical drawings are put in the sectors, one sees a stationary image, when looking through the slits at the revolving disc in a mirror.
This is in fact the experiment of Faraday. The brilliant contribution of Plateau comes when in stead of putting 16 identical images in the sectors he draws 16 images, which change little by little.
Because of the visual persistence the images seen in swift succession will fade into each other and a suggestion of movement is created. It is for this reason that Joseph Plateau is cited as the precursor of the movie, more accurately he is the precursor of the animation film.

On 10 December 1830, Michael Faraday(1791-1867) gives a lecture at the Royal Institution. The publication appears in February 1831: "On a peculiar Class of Optical Illusions".

Continuing on what Peter Mark Roget (1779 - 1869) had published in the Philosophical Transactions, he describes two parallel discs, revolving on the same axis, in opposite directions, each having 16 cogs. When viewed in a mirror a stationary image is seen. He does not refer to Plateau's work, done before 1831 and which had been published in the Correspondance mathémathique et physique. Later Faraday writes that the honour is due to Plateau.

II. Peter Mark Roget's 'Palisade' Illusion-.
Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), author of the famous Thesaurus, first described this illusion, hence known as the 'Roget' or 'Palisade' illusion.

His own explanation is not convincing from our current understanding. Essentially it is a sampling problem. Carpenter detailed a geometrical derivation in 1868, which was recently formalized by Jim Hunt (2003). The intersections of gaps and spokes over time indeed form curves. Due to the afterimage (“persistence of vision”) our perception connects these and we perceive the illusionary shape."

Praxinoscope:
"Praxinoscope"/" Roul'scope"

III. Hybrid Images.
Hybrid images change interpretation as a function of viewing distance. Hybrids combine the low-spatial frequencies of one picture with the high spatial frequencies of another picture producing an image with an interpretation that changes with viewing distance. In this figure, the people may appear sad, up close, but step back a few meters and look at the expressions again.

IV. The Gestalt Effect.

"Amodal perception is the term used to describe the full perception of a physical structure when it is only partially perceived. For example, a table will be perceived as a complete volumetric structure even if only part of it is visible; the internal volumes and hidden rear surfaces are perceived despite the fact that only the near surfaces are exposed to view, and the world around us is perceived as a surrounding void, even though only part of it is in view at any time.

Formulation of the theory is credited to the Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte and Fabio Metelli, an Italian psychologist, with their work developed in recent years by E.S. Reed and the Gestaltists.

Modal completion is a similar phenomena in which a shape is perceived to be occluding other shapes even when the shape itself is not drawn. Examples include the triangle that appears to be occluding three disks in the Kanizsa triangle and the circles and squares that appear in different versions of the Koffka cross."

V. Naïve Realism & Empiricism.

"Historical Context:

Europe had suffered from many centuries of abuse from a totalitarian regime that caused massive regression of the collective consciousness thus giving rise to what is often called “the dark ages”. This began when the Roman empire co-opted the mystic teachings of a small but powerful Christian sect and reinterpret their subtle analogies in purely naïve realist, materialist terms.

By taking certain analogies literally they created a fictional supernatural order that was only accessible via the Church. This was in order to create a politicized state religion to revitalise the crumbling empire and to defuse the growing mystic revolution that was under way. "

VI. Altered Consciousness.
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art.

"When, in 1879, Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola discovered the astonishing paintings of bison in his cave at Altamira, his claim that they were of prehistoric origin was ridiculed. The breathtakingly accomplished images were impossible to square with the prevailing image of Ice Age ’savages’, and he died discredited as a hoaxer.

In the century since the cave art of the Palaeolithic has been accepted as genuine, it’s suffered the opposite fate. It’s clearly so important a clue to the origins of human culture that interpreting it has come to involve impossibly weighty questions. Does it reveal the first human religion and, if so, what was it? Was it an individual or communal enterprise? Was it devotional, ritual, practical, or ’simply decorative’ (whatever that may mean)?

Does it locate the roots of human culture in totemism, or sympathetic magic, or initiation rites? The cumulative effect of all the grand theories in the first half of the twentieth century was to turn the cave paintings into a kind of Rorschach ink blot test, where every theorist saw their own version of human genesis revealed.

Structuralism was the last grand attempt at a definitive decoding of cave art, but its overarching theory that the paintings mediated binary oppositions left many specifics and anomalies unaccounted for. Since then, scholars have tended to fight shy of the big questions, and limit their researches to accumulating ever more detailed analyses of paint scrapings and cross-hatching techniques. But David Lewis-Williams has had enough of this.

In his view, either there’s now enough evidence to interpret the images, or else there’s never going to be enough. In either case, it’s time to attempt another big theory, one which he compares in scope to Darwin’s: not a closed, provable theorem but an explanatory framework which accounts for multiple unrelated phenomena and opens up scope for further discovery.

Those familiar with his previous work on African San (’Bushman’) rock art and altered states of consciousness will have some idea of his basic trajectory, but in The Mind in the Cave he travels further and deeper."
Cave of Lascaux.

VII. Quantum Physics & Naive Realism.

The Observer effect.

"It is this reflection in the mirror of memory that gives us that sense of "I- ness" namely, a pattern of habits, a pattern of memories, patterns of the past, all of our meanings of "who I am" come from this mirror of reflection." "The illusion will only be cleared up when we are prepared to work a little, we have to work our way back to this freedom, to this consciousness....." Amit Goswami.

Jeff Wall.

VIII. Optical Illusions & Patterns.

IX. Why Social-Cognitive Neuroscience?
"Social cognition and cognitive neuroscience are independent academic disciplines that interact sparingly. There are at least three reasons why neither discipline can afford this independence.
First, the brain is an evolutionary adaptation to a social environment and is best understood in that context. Second, human brains interact with other human brains in a complex social network that produces phenomena that cannot be reduced. And finally, complete explanations of behavior always require multiple levels of analysis."

X. Pattern Recognition.
"People love patterns. Our brains readily organize the stream of information from our senses to find pattern, structure and connections. Our pattern-finding ability lets us understand the world in front of us; sometimes it fools us with optical illusions.

For a growing number of researchers at UC Davis, pattern recognition is a fast-growing field of science where disciplines like computer science, statistics, biology and physics converge.

From genetics labs to astronomers' observatories, scientists are being flooded with data. There is a need to develop tools to process data very quickly, so humans can make use of it in real time, and to analyze it for increasingly subtle connections.

"We rely on pattern analysis so much as a society, but haven't stopped to think about its principles," said Nello Cristianini, associate professor of statistics at UC Davis."

Everything, is real.

"The world is merely fire reflected in our eyes."
Quote by, Amy M Denes.

The Orinoco Eel

2009-01-30T07:44:00.000-08:00

Gymnotus
from your arching back
springs a tactile & invisible scatter
spreading phosphene webs
shattering & striking coals of dreaming with silver

Have you touched the chimney
Brought your eyes to fill with smoke?

Spike your head above
winding Orinoco
oxygen to nourish your charge
sachs to spit
unheard
Sensing spines that drive & surround
you are kept & bolt to & fro
while a watch cannot keep up
with its ticks & its refrains
& none can explain.

Short poem from a 2005 Catalogue, by, Amy M Denes.

The Orinoco Eel.

VICTIM

2009-01-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

Below are excerpts from a rough draft of observations I am writing about- on the nature & culture of human cruelty (links are in brown).

"And, we all should- know that the moment a 'victimizer' 'victimizes' another being- is the moment in which the 'victimizer' hopes to ostracize the 'victim' from society, dehumanize them & disenfranchise them, in order to manifest a false sense of 'power or authority' over other individuals or groups of people. We have to ask ourselves, why this role is so important to us & why we rally behind & empower 'victimizers' & their culture of cruelty & disempowerment ( Observational learning & operant training? )"

"Obviously- those who 'victimize' others are eventually revealed to have tremendous limits to their 'authority' & in time, we- are left aghast at the failures of our own conscience-."

ABU GHRAIB.

For further reading on this subject please look into MYSTERY & Klimov's IDI I SMOTRI.
And especially - Human Destructiveness by Anthony Storr.
DEER HAVE A CONSCIENCE.

MYSTERY

2008-11-19T19:29:00.000-08:00

I recently watched Elem Klimov's awe inspiring & brilliant masterpiece 'Come & See' ( also known as Go & Look )- Idi I Smotri..
& I was certain I spotted a familiar sight.

My friend, artist Robin Cracknell, produces incredible, one of a kind & mysterious works out of random discarded film clippings which were collected at the ICA Cinema in London. One needs to understand that each clipping has a long history & that when they were collected it was impossible for anyone to know which film they originated from, thus making each small clipping a complete mystery.
You can read more about him & view more of his amazing & vital works, here at Art Volume One.

In our most recent conversation we discussed the nature of the mysterious origins of his clippings & specifically of the origin of his piece of a 'house on fire'.

"AV: I do love the quality of the scratches, tape & debris, very much.
Touched by time & again a sense of an inconceivable life lived before having been found by you.

The ‘house on fire’ work reminds me of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Mirror‘.
Again, I wish I knew what film this is from!"

Robin watched Come & See & turns out that this particular Cine work of his, is- in fact from Idi I Smotri, the image is simply flipped. We are both in awe that it is from Idi I Smotri. I highly suggest seeing this brilliant film & I also highly suggest- getting to know Robin Cracknell's fascinating & important works.

I present here his Cine piece ( it is also here- at Art Volume One )& the film it's self- where one can see the image starting at 6:49 it is at 7:04, :05 etc..

ABOLISH

2008-11-13T07:00:00.003-08:00

our tolerance & acceptance- of heinously predatory, cruel & inhumane people- who refuse to understand the nature of all human & animal pain, suffering & loss & with such disastrous effects on the world at large.
&-
END CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
& CRIMES AGAINST PEACE.

'Deep Image'. Double, triple, quadruple, infinite meanings, multiplicand, just like blood, or space. Gestalt & tomatoes.

2008-10-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

If something is impossible, then what is the point of trying to accomplish anything. We are born- into impossibilities.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO???
WHY?

Who is this person? ( Ahh that's Rostropovich! )

That is a good question, let's ask ourselves & everyone else this question while we are at it..
WHY?
As in who is President Bush, who is he, really? Who are these people? Who am I & what is 'myself' ?
We don't seem to really want to ask these questions, we seem to prefer shooting the crap lately..
Not EVERYTHING is a crap shoot. Understanding tomato growth, counterpoint or gestalt is not a CRAP SHOOT. There are elements of 'risk' but one should think about how to properly grow & care for tomatoes, pick up & scan Fux's Gradus & read some Derrida.

Life, art, philosophy, ideas & thought are not ALWAYS stock market crap shoots.

That's right, life can be quite metaphysical, like Bach's Cello Suite, Prelude No.1 or Ginsburg's America, or Moon Flower gardening.

More people should do some research on media saturation we are swamped with pseudo- events & media events. Really bad car crashes..

Life does have it's crap shoot moments, but isn't the art of risk something different? Isn't a crap shoot about uncertainty?

Yes I think so.. & you would think after 8 years we would have some concept- as to who George Walker Bush is & why the hell WE voted for him..

WHAT A BUNCH- of crap shooting. Uncertainty!
What is your blood type?
OOoooH!!!!
Nasa Launched the Ibex probe just a few days ago! It will chart the outer limits of our solar system.. Risk/Uncertainty!!

Chomsky is charting the outer limits of the 2009 election... Risk!

&-

"SPIEGEL: How does it benefit politicians when the populace drives a lot, eats a lot and goes shopping a lot?

Chomsky: Consumption distracts people. You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption. The business press has been quite explicit about this goal.

SPIEGEL: A while ago you called America “the greatest country on earth.” How does that fit together with what you've been saying?

Chomsky: In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category. "

CONSUMPTION IS A CRAP SHOOT! UNCERTAINTY!

Sarah Bernhardt?

Yes! She was born female. RISK!

What a Sculptor!! She really did it all didn't she!!??

Yes!

Yes!

I am a dynamist. I am Deep Image.. Have you read any poems by Diane Wakoski?..

"This Beautiful Black Marriage

by Diane Wakoski

Photograph negative
her black arm: a diving porpoise,
sprawled across the ice-banked pillow.
Head: a sheet of falling water.
Her legs: icicle branches breaking into light.

This woman,
photographed sleeping.
The man,
making the photograph in the acid pan of his brain.
Sleep stain them both,
as if cloudy semen
rubbed shiningly over the surface
will be used to develop their images.

on the desert
the porpoises curl up,
their skeleton teeth are bared by
parched lips;
her sleeping feet
trod on scarabs,
holding the names of the dead
tight in the steady breathing.

This man and woman have married
and travel reciting
chanting
names of missing objects.

They enter a pyramid.
A black butterfly covers the doorway
like a cobweb,
folds around her body,
the snake of its body
closing her lips.
her breasts are stone stairs.
She calls the name, "Isis,"
and waits for the white face to appear..... ( the rest of the poem )"

What an insanely gifted poet.. RISK!
A DYNAMIST?? Poetry!?
& back to our questions...
Who am I ? Who are you ?
Let me tell you who I am..
THIS IS WHO I AM.

'Gasp' Oh we must cut down on greenhouse gases... RISK!

LET US START WITH TEN DIMENSIONS. Uncertainty?

PART TWO.

How completely awe inspiring, just the most beautiful complexity, possibility..
Yes...

Now look...

This man used to walk around naked- all day.. He STILL DOES actually...
He takes photos with an insane camera watch..
Now- one day, he was developing some photos & this old image of a lion in a side car appeared on a print of his..
BUT!!!!!! It all did not even remotely make sense until he met & photographed this amazing & bizarre little traveling goat shepherd boy..
That sounds a little too biblical.. UNCERTAINTY!
WAIT! I was not even talking about carpentry... Take a look at these images of them..

The little goat herder had a sort of tale- a story that he would tell to anyone who would listen.. It was really wild & amazing & a few people listened to him tell his tale & I- was one of them.. RISK!

What was the story??

I have a transcript, here, here it is, read it..

I AM WEALTHY, I have riches that most are blind to.. I WILL TAKE MY WHOLE TRIBE TO AFRICA. WE WILL START A WHEAT FARM IN AFRICA & A PRINTING PRESS TO PRINT BOOKS & NEWSPAPERS ON RECYCLED PAPER & WE WILL HIRE HUNDREDS & HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE.

I'M SO WEALTHY THAT WHEN IT BECOMES SUCCESSFUL THE MOST TALENTED AND IMAGINATIVE EMPLOYEES WILL TAKE THE COMPANY TO SEVERAL LOCATIONS, EUROPE, BRAZIL, RUSSIA, MEXICO, ANTARCTICA, ETC & START UP...
MOST IMPORTANTLY WE WILL BE LOCATED DIRECTLY OUTSIDE THE AMAZONS WITH LAND OWNERSHIP THERE TO PROTECT & DEFEND THE LAST CONTACTED AND UN CONTACTED TRIBES THERE FROM BEING DECIMATED.

PLEASE ANALYZE & INSPECT THIS STATEMENT-

I WILL ADOPT THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL UNIVERSE'S MENTALITIES, STATES AND CONDITIONS AND IT WILL ADOPT MINE. MUTABLE MIND OVER MATTER." ( UNCERTAINTY! RISK? UNCERTAINTY! )

I AM SO WEALTHY THAT INSTEAD OF BECOMING A PUTRID, ROTTING, RIGID CORPSE
I SHALL LEARN EVERYTHING ABOUT TIME AND TIME TRAVELING.

I WILL FIND THE BRAVEST, MOST GIFTED & HUMOROUS TRACKER TO HELP ME FIND EITHER A VERY HUNGRY STARVING MOUNTAIN LION IN NORTH AMERICA, OR SOME OTHER PISSED OFF BIG CAT, LIKE A LION.

HOPEFULLY IT WILL PARALYZE ME COMPLETELY- ( RISK! )& SHRED & MUTILATE MY BODY SO FAR BEYOND RECOGNITION SO THAT I WILL FEEL INTENSE OTHERWORLDLY PAIN & TRAUMA- BECAUSE- THEN, I WILL KNOW GOD. ( UNCERTAINTY! ).

THIS WILL IN TURN MAKE ME SO SUPREMELY WEALTHY SO THAT I WILL PURCHASE ALL OF OUTER SPACE WITH MY 'SPIRITUALIZED' & MULTIDIMENSIONAL BRAIN. ( INTERESTING! ).

I WILL ADOPT THE UNIVERSE'S MENTALITIES, STATES AND CONDITIONS AND IT WILL ADOPT MINE.

THEN, TEN DIMENSIONS OF THE INFINITE
WILL ALLOW ME TO VISIT EVERYONE WHEN THEY WERE A ONE YEAR OLD NEANDERTHAL, AND WHEN WE WERE SINGLE CELL ORGANISMS IN THE ICE COLD SEA MAKING SMALL TREE HOUSES OUT OF MICROSCOPIC BITS OF SAND.

LIMITLESS BILLIONS OF 'SUPERBANGS'
WILL BANG AND POUND OUT EVEN MORE TINY EARTHS AND STARS AND PLANETS, & THINGS THAT LIVE BUT THAT WE CANNOT SEE ON THE 3D PLANE.

THEN THERE WILL BE MORE ENDLESSLY BABBLING, VERBOSE, SELF ABSORBED, OVER PASSIONATE PEOPLE. CHILDREN OF THE DIRT. MORE IGNORANT NIHILISTS, MASOCHISTS, MORE GENIUSES AND PSEUDO INTELLECTS, CONTROL FREAKS & FRAUDS, FARMERS, PEOPLE WHO POSSESS HUMILITY BEYOND BELIEF, ETC.. PEOPLE- WHO CAN TAKE LIFE & KILL IT, GIVE LIFE & BUILD IT, IN ONLY- SO MANY DIMENSIONS.

AND THOSE PEOPLE WHO JUST GENERALLY LOVE LIFE TOO, NO MATTER WHAT GETS THEM DOWN.

THAT'S HOW INCREDIBLY WEALTHY I AM, I INHABIT THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE WHOLE UNIVERSE. MOTHER FUCKING WEALTHY."

The goat herder actually said mother fucking?

Yes, I know isn't that awful?

Terrible!

What happened to the naked man?
And, the goat herder boy?

His story is amazing! The goat herder just wandered away after telling us his tale & we tried & tried to find him but never did.. The naked man was approached by a publisher with an offer to publish a book of his photographs & he declined at first.. He calls himself George Baxter after the printmaker & inventor of color printmaking.. Eventually- he took up the offer & now travels the world making portraits of people & every once in a while random images that he didn't take- appear when he develops his film. These images are in high demand by collectors..

Like the lion in the sidecar?

Yes unknown images of unknown events, places & people, just like that one..

& he's just naked most of the time?

Yes most of the time, he's been arrested many times, he gets bailed out by friends.

Wow..

Если кое-что невозможно, то, что является пунктом попытки достигнуть чего - нибудь. Мы рождены - в невозможное.

RISK!
Nothing is impossible.

Не ешьте ваши руки!!!

2008-08-17T09:54:00.000-07:00

We finally found him

curled up in the chair like a many-wrinkled shell

staring blindly out at nothing

among a gathering of imbecilic fossils

his one good eye fastening fiercely onto life

the hair still sturdy though silver under the old cloth cap.

We finally found him

through all that terrible labyrinth of gray concrete cells

quietly rounding out his days

alone in a morass of moronic camaraderie

his doomed cell mates snoozing and snoring all around

and he with his one good eye defying the shadows.

The tears came then

not soft, but real

the tears of a real man broken by life

groping wildly with gnarled fingers at the straws of life

in that awful room of no life

and the television set blaring forth its banalities

drowning whatever words of comfort our futile tongues could offer.

I had no words for him

no words to span the heartbreak of years

when Samson-like he had stood between us and chaos

bringing to us the small rare trinkets of his love.

I had for him only whiskey

the old bitter gift

the poor tribute of one poorer in spirit

than that jaded near-blind half-deaf soul reclining so tamely

in a wicker chair

in a ward of fearful paralyzing resignation

a ward full of already dead people

sleeping as the television blared.

Yet the hand that gripped mine spelled out love

and the raw lovely courage of that old landscaped face

put my feeble pity to shame.

Christy Brown's poem, Sunday Visit.
He is the story & has/had countless hands in telling them.

SUNDAY??

lʔlʔ

2008-08-09T03:51:00.000-07:00

(∃x)(P(x) and Q(x))

COSMIC CANNONBALL

"This will kill that." "The press will kill the church."

An Obsessive Combination Of Ontological Inscape, Trickery And Love
by Anne Sexton.

Busy, with an idea for a code, I write
signals hurrying from left to right,
or right to left, by obscure routes,
for my own reasons; taking a word like writes
down tiers of tries until its secret rites
make sense; or until, suddenly, RATS
can amazingly and funnily become STAR
and right to left that small star
is mine, for my own liking, to stare
its five lucky pins inside out, to store
forever kindly, as if it were a star
I touched and a miracle I really wrote.

The Artist as an Old Man, by Erica Jong.

If you ask him he will talk for hours--
how at fourteen he hammered signs, fingers
raw with cold, and later painted bowers
in ladies' boudoirs; how he played checkers
for two weeks in jail, and lived on dark bread;
how he fled the border to a country
which disappeared wars ago; unfriended
crossed a continent while this century
began. He seldom speaks of painting now.
Young men have time and theories; old men work.
He has painted countless portraits. Sallow
nameless faces, made glistening in oil, smirk
above anonymous mantelpieces.
The turpentine has a familiar smell,
but his hand trembles with odd, new palsies.
Perched on the maulstick, it nears the easel.

He has come to like his resignation.
In his sketch books, ink-dark cossacks hear
the snorts of horses in the crunch of snow.
His pen alone recalls that years ago,
one horseman set his teeth and aimed his spear
which, poised, seemed pointed straight to pierce the sun.

1) They cut him open
tearing, straight black pulse
& out like a plug
fell his heart
glinting muscle burning rose
to lay waste

a young stag
god killer
all flying crazed body
& shapeless face.

2) Artful butchers, we are.

Ripping up roots or peeling back each flipping wet skin
defiling dandelions
& making blow fish piss
slipping bullets
eluding every possible gracious electric force

to touch the night
stupid.

Redemption holds a gargantua of hanging blade
swift, pendulimic

Adored.

Rotations of buzzing propeller penetrate skies
twenty four hours of every day
to give form to more half starved & lost worlds.

You want the truth?

Eat this blade,
don't stab out the eyes of your stoic
leave
the parade.

( 1 & 2 are excerpts from The Butchers, a poem by Amy Marina Denes )

PROPAGANDA AND CONTROL OF THE PUBLIC MIND, JUST, SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT. WE ARE KILLING THE SEA, THE WORLD AND OURSELVES

2008-07-29T02:39:00.000-07:00

Propaganda and control of the public mind,

just,

smells like teen spirit.

IF YOU ARE CAPABLE OF READING THIS YOU MUST BE ONE OF THOSE BEAUTIFUL IMMORTAL & SPECIAL HUMAN CREATURES LIKE ME WHO JUST LOVES PLASTIC AND GARBAGE MAKING A LITTLE TOO MUCH.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The island paradise built on a garbage dump.

Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO STOP KILLING THE SEA & EVERYTHING IN IT & OUR ENTIRE WORLD & OURSELVES WITH PLASTIC.

Smart purchases- AKA buy & support goods sold in recycled packaging &/or 100% biodegradable packaging.

Go to your local thrift store & purchase some reusable containers. Before making any deli purchases nicely ask the deli staff to weigh your container so as to deduct it's weight from that of your purchase..
If & when you make any deli purchases, meat, salads, soups etc- ask that your purchases be placed in your reusable container, with the price sticker placed on your reusable container, thank the deli staff. Learning how to cook if one does not know how to cook, is helpful as well...

Forgo any or all, if possible- plastic bags for fruits & vegetables & use washable cotton net bags. If you plan to buy grapes, green beans or small vegetables bring a clean thin cheese cloth to line your net bag with.

At home, keep vegetables etc, fresh with containers/bowls/lids/breathable containers in your fridge.

Try to avoid pre- washed salads sold in non recycled/recyclable packaging and plastic boxes, buy heads of lettuce, cabbage & iceberg, & wire/rubber band tied spinach, etc, instead. Also band tied carrots, instead of bags of carrots.

Try to purchase bottled condiments/juices which are sold either in recycled glass or recycled plastic or biodegradable plastic, but especially attempt making your own dressings & condiments/juices from ingredients sold in bulk or concentrates.. & remember fresh squeezed lemon is fantastic on anything.

Avoid purchasing bottled water & buy a water filter instead- keep reusable bottles of filtered water in your fridge. Buy eggs in recycled/recyclable cardboard cartons & not in plastic cartons.

When you go shopping, anywhere- for anything, books, clothes, etc, try to remember to bring your own reusable shopping bags & skip plastic bags & place your purchase/s in your reusable bag/s..
Try to buy toilet paper that is not packaged in plastic, "BIG ROLL" now makes 70 % recycled toilet paper wrapped in paper.

You can hand wash dishes with strong bar soap, sold either with you cutting it from the block at an organic market or by buying it in a recycled paper sheath or box & use a good big biodegradable sponge they sell them at organic marts..
Then you can forgo the plastic bottles that dish soap typically comes in, many of these bottles are floating in the sea & fill mountains of landfill.
It works, strong bar soap, try it.

Try to buy laundry detergent in a cardboard box & organic detergent is friendlier to you & the earth..

When ordering take out, aka, Mediterranean, Thai, Chinese, sushi, pancakes, sandwiches, ETC- you can still call to order if you must- but do let them know nicely before hand that you hope to be on time so as to avoid taking home a plastic container that you don't need- and that in the least they can just put your orders from a washable plate into your containers..

Thus/otherwise try to choose walk in/call ahead & explain, instead of delivery & bring your reusable containers & order at the restaurant & when placing an order ask nicely that your orders be placed in your reusable containers.

If you feel you really- really, must- have an alternative other than containers & net bags outlined for some of the reasons above- buy waxed paper which you can fold food/purchases into & tape shut with masking tape- hopefully recycled waxed paper- for making these purchases instead, but you must bring it, a roll of it, to the deli- grocery store, etc. & do- try to compost & recycle your own used waxed paper & masking tape by burying it with waste/food refuse.

Start a compost, if possible.

Let all your friends know about this & what they CAN DO to prevent any more damage to our oceans, world & ourselves.. Praise & support friends and people who are conscious enough to actually do some of these things consistently. You will probably feel great doing these things. Recycle whenever possible.

If you are completely indifferent or perplexed that's O K - AT LEAST- collect every piece- of once used plastic, etc, "throw away culture" matter- you acquire and typically throw away... Collect it- & keep it for 2 weeks- in your house & see how you feel about living among so much irrational & self absorbed waste.. Is it such a hassle to just think- & bring a tote to buy your food, etc. ( I did this once it was INSANE , I owned a whole roll of just once used plastic fruit/vegetable bags, frozen pea bags, juice bottles- salad dressing bottle, spinach boxes, etc..)

Then, let's cross our fingers & hope that we are helping the sea & all the miraculous, beautiful, life giving & otherworldly life in her- get rid of all that garbage & toxic waste easier- by letting her spit it out on our shores for us to gather & take note of.

Perhaps the ocean & all it's marine life will be able to heal & perhaps the fish that we eat will start to not carry so many harmful toxins in their fat because we feed them our garbage.. We are eating our own garbage & getting sick from it too!

We were all born in the ocean, never disregard any point of origin, especially when it's smarter than you, & the sea is- smarter than we are.
&- so is the earth- we better believe the EARTH IS SMARTER THAN WE ARE!!!!!!!!
If you can do at least 3- of these things consistently BRAVO!!!!!!!!!! You are AWARE!!!

A DRAMATIC COMEDY, PRIME PIECE OF FICTION, IN SO, SO, SO MANY PARTS. That Is One Pissed Off Rattlesnake. HOW TO LIBERATE A SUPERGALACTIC DODO.

2008-07-15T02:48:00.000-07:00

(AUTOMATIC paranoiac method UNEDITED MYSTERY PUZZLE TALE)
The Dodo Bandits are not only meddlesome marauders, they are passe.
After all, why pose as a Dodo when one can realize that one is- a Dodo & appreciate THAT.
How great it is to empathize with Dodo's, it is a space time, relativistic, issue.
Perhaps even a " time to encrust cities & suburbs in solar panels & buy that electric car " issue.
So, do try to be good to your supergalactic Dodo's & Rattlesnakes, especially since the Rattlers
are still- around, REMEMBER a little observation & MEMORY goes a long, long, way. Okie dokie I'll remember that..
Our imaginary soundtrack is Patti Smith's masterpiece
LAND. There are 2, you will just have to figure out who is who.
Why always do something that you can always take a photo of, or lie about ( the truth is much more original ),
or repeat, why be pure ego, or complete absurdity. Why not try a plunge into the deep pools present among us in our world,

pools of original thought, creativity, inquisition. So many realities, some more real than others, you decide, you decide. YOU.

"SIGH" That was such a VAGUE OPERA!!!
But I get it....
Yesterday and Today... One, Three, Five, 12 & so on.. That- that END is still unknown, my pocket watch has been broken for a month now & time is moving slower. You mean your sun dial..

No I mean my digital.

You mean your.. Pulse..

Stop.

Your end.

STOP!
What is all that stuff for?? What stuff..
Your stuff, that bag & those books, your trinkets, feathers & deer skulls, a skunk tail..

What the hell are you talking about..
What are they for, those THINGS, what do you use them for, what are their function??

GEE I don't know, to think, learn, live, be in motion, make a living? BE CREATIVE, TINKER...

TINKER???

Your like some sort of small god or something.. Making a living with skunk tails.
What does that make you? Just because I don't spend most of my time walking around dirty & naked does not make me less of a person.. I make a good living selling skunk tails.
So what god are you anyways thou who owns nothing..

A Dodo, not a bandit Dodo, a shadow universe Dodo.. A bouncy one.. Bouncing along forgotten and sooo remembered, dead and alive..

Alright I suppose now you are going to start one of your entertaining lectures..
Yes I am..
NO ONE CAN TELL YOU NOT TO BE YOU!!!

No.. Wait, yes they do.. Assholes.
The realm of the true, supergalactic Dodo is where liberation awaits.
& !!! Rattlesnakes, they, warn.

..
Don't tamper. Don't mess messy with the Rattlesnake, this is not some biblical/new age/ militant/ existential/imperialist hogwash either, it's your streamlined precious mirror I am talking about. You know that one, that mirror you look into, forever, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45, what else, all else.. Then it goes even deeper as in is this even my mirror is this a mirror to another mirror.
IS IT EVEN ME MIRROR!! IT'S.... IT'S THE OTHER YOU THAT IS NOT YOU THAT WAS YOU BEING ME SOMEWHERE ELSE WHERE I AM NOT ME EXPERIENCING THE SAME THING as me - OVER & OVER AGAIN!!
That is a bit far fetched..

Or, is it the mirror of truth where for the first time you realize that you have alienated & brutalized every single person who came into your life that you actually admired!!

No I don't do that..
You don't??
No..
Really?? A lot of people do that..

I know, that's why I don't do that.

The tv watching, the gossip, the strip malls, the rude tourist, the I'll live forever complex, the allergies to actual world events, the denial we have about our negative impacts upon the world, the delusional manipulation repeatedly projected as sincerity in order to wipe out any perceived threat to one's ego aka 20th century capitalism, the obsession with boredom & nihilism, the not learning Arabic, that veiled hatred stuff called 'frienemies' or something like that, the I am too special for EVERYONE thing/disease, the pop culture influenced disappearance & degradation of our elders, the whole arbitrarily & utterly asinine nature of all male- sports teams, I could go on forever..
Living dead...

EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU ARE-- TALKING ABOUT MEDIA SATURATION, my friend.....
Aw comon now- someone has to be rich & put a monopoly on every single thing including human genes in order for someone to be poor, poorly educated, suppressed, & an obedient consumer.. Thus threatening to make us all- stupid earth killers.. SO EVIL!!

But---- how can you survive without being competitive WITH EVERYONE & having absolutely no fun & never applying all your book & autodidactic knowledge, experience & creativity??
HA!
I am friends with YOU right???

WOW YOU ARE A SMALL GOD!! We have fun.. Into the worm hole you go.. Dodo..
6 billion and going strong, small gods..
Yeah but remember when we visited 1234 A.D the population was the tiniest fraction of that!!!
& was it any better??
No, not, really but the air sure was FRESH!! & Chicken is sooo tasty in 1234 A.D, giant chickens the size of goats!!

Pffft... It is all getting better- the reason why the 2000's are actually interesting is that there are laws in place so that we cannot use only- our physical strength & our bodies in order to gain power, so we are increasingly seeing some fabulous brain power- the more liberated we get-- we will be in space yet!! We have to keep trying to free all of earth's 27 million slaves in the year 2008..

Don't you remember all the brutes chopping off the heads of babies & raping small children & family members in 1234 A.D???
Yes.. I do...
So-- this also connects to material value- the smarter we get the smarter our values get & it's less about things & more about learning, information , the resurgence of an interest in psychology that we are having now- art, our complicity in global politics, the lives of objects, etc..
Mirror mirror on the wall...
GOD!!
There is no god, the human species is the only species where mental illness is hereditary & that's why we actually think- we can figure things out. The fact is- any little good we have done has come from nature & observation, imagination & non- violence.
How astute. How crazy. Oh la la la.. Spit & shine Tiger..

Is this that bathroom- that is all mirror- that depending on my mood I either love or dread being in..

I love those crazy bathrooms.. DISCO TOILET!

Sure, that too.
I just wish that while I would sit in one of those crazy bathrooms that everything would echo, simultaneously..
HA !!! HA!!!
That would make a good short film..
Flush flush flush, burp burp then it's 9 dimensions all of a sudden " wait, was I in a bathroom??" HA HA HA...
I feel pain. I don't feel pain.

Both can make someone violent, too much pain can make someone angry & destructive, too little same thing..
I remember once, I was in the middle of the German / Soviet War, one soldier was beyond trigger happy & shot 5 innocent civilian men, 3 women & a small boy..
He started to walk up to another soldier who was right in front of a young Soviet woman who was injured & limping, he yelled to him, "shoot her, kill her, shoot her, now!!" the soldier lifted his gun to her forehead & she had absolutely no emotion...
He was so stunned by this, that he hesitated & mr trigger happy kept on yelling "shoot her, kill her, shoot her, kill her" & in a fraction of a second, he withdrew the gun from her forehead & shot his fellow soldier in the head..
She gasped, burst into tears & fell to the ground..
He picked her up and they ran away, into the fog, disappearing into the darkness..

Oh god.. That is really powerful... My focus, has mostly been pulsing & self quartering amoebas & undersea volcanoes... Wow.. What a story..

Cannot stand the precious emotional narcissism of this- time.. We have been suckers for bullshit & pointless waste of life for too long now..
The who is drunk & who is a 13 year old millionaire & ugh, too boring to list..
I think I know what your talking about, but not completely, the whole world is not like that.. You said yourself it's changing, it is changing, dramatically..

I am so glad that your world is rid of what my world is facing..
I did not mean that...But you did say yourself it's changing..
Yes, it's changing, I guess I am saying I like mental pain.
But that does not even really hurt.
Oh yes it can, are you kidding?
So you are into self sado masochistic mental pain.
No that is something else entirely, just mental- pain individualistic stoicism, I enjoy.
Do you have an example?
Hmm making a 320 page book comprehensive.

You like that?
Love it.

What other 'mental pains'..
I love a good challenge, I like new information.
I get along with, people or individuals with some sort of decent or excellent memory, either general memory, personal history, or attention to detail, or an appreciation for memory & even accuracy & a fascination for accuracy & inaccuracy.. & to not get all emotional over the issues surrounding their memories. I like to be challenged & I don't mind failing, I learn something & if they are the same way, it's a great mental
chess game to play sometimes. Gifted un bias observers are great..

Jane Goodall, wow..

Any way or how, I really admire those who have a great memory, they can sometimes do no wrong but they seem to care more about how they process their experiences.
I like to be around people who really care about how they process their experiences & information. Those who are not- in denial- in any way shape or form no matter the circumstances of their life.

I think, I do understand you & I do agree.. I like that too. Less, two faced quality, or at least they can say " I am so two faced right now, because, blah blah" yes that is interesting. A certain amount of denial is important to have though.

Yes but you know what I mean!!
Yes..

Ow. Ooh. Ow.. Oh.
It sure is hot, what you think it's about 100.. Yes easily, a hundred degrees.
Sneezing up dust storms with hiss..
That was, one pissed off Rattlesnake...
Such ire, wicked crescent fangs!

We are taking about the future, the past, whatever....
Is it intentional?
You forget that you are a time traveler, this gets back to the memory thing I was talking about.
We forget.. We have to forget.
That is why we forget.
Die.
WARNINGS!!!!!!!!!!!! EMERGENCIES!!! DISAGREEMENTS!!!
Now that is what I am talking about, shamans, warriors, paltry frauds, machines, blood, blood , blood... Horses dragging human beings with death dreams of the internet. It's just so sad because it's just those people who should be cut loose to leave an impression on the world.

Not always..
Some of the time!
Ok some of the time.
WARRIORS! I choose warriors...
Makes sense now. How to remember.

( A RATTLESNAKE APPEARS OUT OF AN OLD DRIED UP FIREPIT & STARTS TO WIND & COIL &>>>RATTLE..)

THAT IS ONE PISSED OFF RATTLESNAKE!!!!!!!!!
Ok ok I got you..Ow. Ooh.

Let's hide under a rock.

Now,
generally,
there is a reason for everything.

Are you sure about that?

Do you realize that there is a science to the venom that people, I mean we, carry around.
?

You mean POLITICS?
Yes & No.
Interesting and I agree but- what is this now stuff?
Now?? Do you remember May 31st 1710?? Yes I remember when we went there-- that was some supergalactic Dodo, you did not get the Dodo thing quite yet either, but I had some things to learn from you...

Remember, "HONI SOIT QVI MAL Y PENSE"? Yes!!! You still agree with it??
OH YES!!!! If that's your reality, what do you expect.
It's not ALWAYS the case, but generally if it's true then one really has no choice..

It's all this intention crap people are babbling about lately.
On a simplistic level it's true.

Sorry to change the subject- but
do you know that the light packets that travel to & fro every single person's eyes, are as unique as snowflakes & that this means that every being that has ever been sees the world in a completely unique way??

How sentimental....

Is this the same for other species?

I hope so.

Very few people care about NOW, but soon they will start caring about NOW, much more than usual, which is good I think because it just makes us all the more interesting..

What is this reason bullshit?

REASON!! No one cares about reason.
Of course they do.

Well, soon they will.
"Reason for everything..."
Not that reason!! But, I like that reason too.. It's true & false.

& Everything my ass! I am counter everything.. Everything is too inverted..
Rationalist or Empiricist??
Oooh that's a toughie.. How about both!!

You can't do that..

Oh yes I can, I am..

No you can't.

WE ARE TIME TRAVELERS!

NO ONE CAN TELL YOU NOT TO BE YOU.

Oh yes they can...

I thought we were in a desert.....

We are in a desert..

So aren't we a bit more free out here living like lizards in 100 degree temps, as opposed to being lost in the middle of the Greek empire?
Yes. But which is more fun, more 'egotastic'?
It's more interesting and fun here.
I am really sick of , I've had enough of 'egotastic' it's getting really old..

Yes, here you get to run around dirty, crazy and naked..

I don't have to make sure with anyone if it's OK with them if I go & piss off a cliff.. & scream into the wind " YIPEEE OI OI OI YOOKIE YOOKIE YOOK!!"

HAAAH! HAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHHHHH!
See it is better here than in the Greek empire.
Not better or worse just, different. 'good lonely'.
What ever you say...
People pee off of skyscrapers all the time anyhow.. & they are 'LONLIER'.
That word does not exist..
So I invented it?? NEAT!

I wonder if that eye packet situation we have all gotten ourselves INTO has to do with data mining or the observer.

Good question.

Or strange attractors.. Or biological hallucegens.
Or nothing.
Or everything..

Wait.
This is the thrilling exciting part.
We are- in the middle of the desert.
This is the very thrilling exciting part.
Wait.
This is the truly thrilling exciting part.

We are in the middle of the desert.

If you repeat yourself one more time I think I will vomit on my boots.

This is the excruciating part.

I knew- you had no thrills whatsoever.

We take ourselves much too seriously. It's a sham, a waste.

Oh is that it now..

Could be..

The more silly & less violent we get the smarter we become & the better our sense of humor..
AH! I see..
Strap those bone crushing boots on & prepare to fuck yourself up with the truth.
"Fuck yourself up, with the truth." Ugh you are awful.
A saint!!!!!!
Death to Saints. Now look at that rock formation, far far away you see that small group of people? Yes.. They are leaving candles & food & flowers for the vision of a saint in the rock face.. Which saint? I have no idea, shit, I wish I knew.
Me too, humanity is disgusting.

But it's not, we need ritual, those same people can easily pick a bone with us.
Yes but do they have a good memory.

I am sure some of them do, and stories too, I love storytellers.. There is a great deal of truth in the stories that storytellers tell..

It's likely some of them might have a better memory.. Like a story of the cosmos, about the Uroboros.. Did you know that the ancient & culturally universal symbol of the Uroboros is an actual cosmic event, as in pelastration & tunity??

Let's get ready to get on up & climb right up that 'preventing useless acts of head chopping' flag pole.
There is an idea..
I am so excited.
Ok.
Take yourself seriously, very very seriously.

We have company. The Dodo Bandits, see them over there?? Further on, behind the saint worshipers..
Robbing the banks & shooting the friendly fun & innovative smiling villagers & 'Townsfolk' ?

It's a party.
It's not a party.
It's not pretty.
No.

Fuck Face & Mosquito Prick ARE THERE!

What kind of names are those??!!!!!

Are you insane? Can't you watch your language?
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT?? WHO CARES!???

We have robotics meddling with poor language.
& yes, I am insane, I do believe that is what separates us from other species, the 'insane gene', very practical for some functions, disastrous for others.

That is a town of Cobblers....
Do they make good shoes.
The best..
Good people, too bad, they are destroying the town.
Those nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty, boring violent Dodo's.
I find the saint worshipers much more fascinating.
No no no they can also be- just as dangerous, they could slit your throat if you even dare come near that 'vision' & mess with it...
I cannot BELIEVE that those are their names.
Well fly a kite because those are their names and they are the DoDo Bandits..

Wait.. Just give me a moment.
I am so excited.
You are excited 24 hours a day, how do you do it??
Knowing I am alive, it, freaks me out, makes me excited..
Are you sure it's not because you are around small children all day at the orphanage, 3 days a week?
Could be..

I am so happy you don't smoke cigarettes anymore.
Smoking is a suicide wish. Appalling habit. Odd thing is I've noticed that so many great people smoke. I miss Peter Jennings, a whole lot.
Oh my I as well.
Tae kwon do master.
Map maker. He was..

Hey we all break the mold how about that!!!!
ALL OF US!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now you are in another century, I LOVE IT!!
Did you know that the earth screams & shrieks & that this is a new discovery?
Truly? As in fact?
YES!!!
Jacques Vallee must be happy!! ???
A multi - dimensional thing?
Well it certainly is not a deviant thing.
Oh you are so funny..
Or- a Dodo thing. It could be...
Could have fooled me!! Really, I thought Earth laughed! Chuckled...HAH!

Someone as talented as you needs to die.

ALL OF US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ALL OF US BROKE THE MOLD!!!
WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!
THAT IS ONE PISSED OFF RATTLESNAKE!!!!!!!!!!!
We are under a rock.
The bandits are trouble. They are up to no good.
That one frequents strip clubs behind his wife's back, his friend could give any gossip columnist a run for their money.

They are not even weasels they are cretins, croutons, no toilet roll right when you shit.

Marriage is such an antiquity and farce. For some people o k but really. Love is extremely rare & takes great pains to find & achieve, it is the greatest achievement one can have in life however, problem is hate is older & stronger than love, so hate is so common, love takes practice, and great- sacrifice.. Great practice just like a gifted violinist- & now, when two violinists get together watch out, that is one big love storm or revolution about to happen.. Siva Kali forces ALIVE- true supergalactic Dodo forces......
Gays should be allowed to get married because it effects all our rights for the better.
Agreed..

Strip clubs in the fictional year 1895?
DUH!
What do you expect this is a dramatic comedy in so, so many parts.
IN THE DESERT???
What is their story??
..
It's a long story, one that is hard to escape because it's on repeat, it's reincarnated, it is basically a tv sitcom for those fools that sit in front of the tube & relive the sitcom. It's a universal story. It's a story I'll make short.
Do not piss of supergalactic Rattlesnakes or pretend to understand THE VERY ELUSIVE NATURE OF THE DODO.
You mean Shrodingers cat?? Yes & no..
What makes the Supergalactic Do Do so special?
It has, Cosmic Amnesia..
WOW, ok I get it.. Go on..
The 3 Dodo Bandits....
They used to hate each other- , then one day they all pissed off a Rattlesnake, on purpose, for kicks, to get off on humiliating & harassing it.. Well they got bit, but they don't even realize it & they both walk around infested with very heavy karmic venom. They became friends & bonded over their humiliation of the Rattler..
WOAH....
& it shows...
Rattlesnakes are righteous. There is a Sioux Shaman I've got to introduce you to, who has a lot to say about the cosmic complexity & great importance of the Rattlesnake spirit & how, not to get bit..
Time is not, all that we think it is, there, is more..
The 3 of them, the Dodo bandits, are dangerous, because they are annoying & they distract from the great importance of the NOW. They are not even Ow or Ooh just more dread at Yawn.

Who is the third?

Fat heart.
Fat heart?? I'll be damned what a name..
Yes, Fat heart.
I would think that a Fat heart would actually need venom for some reason, it seems like a heart made of fat would find venom medicinal..
Not in his case, no.. But yes snake venom can be medicinal..
Fat heart pissed off the Rattlesnake for kicks too. He attracted the Rattlesnake with his flute playing, he promised the Rattlesnake a nice cool dirt hole to safely sleep in, in exchange for the spiritual protection of the snake.. Instead, he called it out & tried to trample it to death in an effort to outsmart the spirit of the Rattler.. Fat heart is a common fool.

He is long, lean & mean, his karma is so rotten he must be puking up maggots by now.

THAT IS DISGUSTING.

Where do you get this stuff from??
Maggots was a really good album..
It was NOT a good album.
People eat snakes everyday..
Yes, I know..
Even warriors eat snakes..
Is this some sort of 'special' Rattlesnake?
I guess, so!!! Read up on it, or we will go back in time, or go visit the Sioux in a while & learn a thing or two from them..
They say the brighter the vegetable the stronger the cancer fighting effects.
The Sioux?
No, the news..
That is true..
BRIGHT VEGETABLES!
I DON'T EAT MEAT OR USE Gasoline.
No butchers!! Oh please, we are all butchers.
Earth Butchers. Space Butchers. Snake Butchers.
You are either a good butcher or a bad butcher.

As it should be. Recycling butcher.
Have to give life as much as one takes life.
Just try eating a live snake.. Whhhhhooooooooooooiiiiy..Youch..
No way hozay.

RATTLESNAKE!!!!!!!

Here they come, the DODO RATTLER SPIRITS to battle the Dodo Bandits..

KARMA flowing out from a giant cosmic vat in the sky, a soup of galaxies & super earths.
Meaning you mean?? Yes, well eat snakes all you want but there is cause & effect.
THERE IS CAUSE & EFFECT.
It's the HOW & the WHY that we need to think more of too.
Oh I know I should..
The two thousands are finally rolling out the red carpet.

So sharp so keen so worrisome. Ow. Ooh.
Are we going to visit the Sioux Shaman? Yes, we have a lot to learn.
Oh by the way, happy birthday Tiger, keep ticking, you are one of those 23's.
I am?
Yes 15 + 8 = 23..
Are you superstitious?
I think superstition is interesting..

Look- that is now no longer one pissed off Rattlesnake.
No? It's back??
It's curled up right- under your chair.. That is one peaceful caduceus.
Is it a 'Spirit Rattler'? What do you think..
I won't try to eat it.
What are we going to do about the Cobblers?
Rebuild the whole town, I guess. Grow some Roses & hold a few funerals.
& the Bandits?

They are messing themselves up, it's just a matter of time. You can't go around pointlessly flash freezing time, wiping out & destroying so much, well you can but it's not very original or rewarding.. Not, very, alive..
Curses, curses...
Perhaps in a different situation we could intervene & help them, but, I would not do a thing.
It's not necessary.. Hopefully they will just take responsibility, if not, oh well, but better late than never I say..
Jungle Book??
The men in the book in the treasure cave, who get so greedy that they kill each other?
Yes, that's it, exactly.
Really??
So it's like that?
It's happening right now..
Really?
Yes I can feel them fighting over everything right now.. They are even fighting for sanity..
Sanity?
Yes, sanity, as in are they even human anymore, are they even capable of doing the worst in order to succeed.. Competing on who is best at doing the worst.. It's awful.. Religions, financial transactions, institutions, politics, media, the sex industry etc.. They are also fighting for their sanity because the tide has shifted & now everything is changing, as awareness is now becoming more about who is best at doing the best, who actually has integrity.. All those Dodo bandits are trouble.. There are more than just the 3 I told you about, they are a franchise..

It's confusing for them to be confronted with more & more people taking on the challenges & new knowledge that comes with responsibility & consciousness..

Now is the time to understand what it truly means, to be alive, a conscious, thinking, individual. We will actually be, much more free than ever before the use of language & communications & discussions are becoming more useful & powerful & resourceful than ever before.. This is how things change, when we face & accept our complicity, find ourselves liberated & inspired by it.

This is why we are considering banning fast food.
Really??
Yes, can you believe it!??
Do IT!!
Awareness, & self awareness, is so incredibly beautiful & open.

Making mistakes & failing is important.. Or ideals & intelligences are shifting dramatically in order to attempt to sustain human life on this planet.
We have to be open to discussion in order to appreciate its many rewards, it's really that simple, we all have to talk more & explore all these realities & our complicity in them much more, no more exceptions no more taboos.. It will be, it is, really fascinating & interesting, global village, anthropological society-- a communications explosion.. Having an un bias conversation is one of the most tech advanced things anyone could do, right now.
I hope we make it, do you think we will make it??

I really have no idea, but I think that,
as long as we keep calling ourselves out on our bullshit & keep heading in the direction of being thrilled by the variety, potential, diversity, possibilities & evolution of information.. If we keep learning from & applying what we discover of the amazing technologies of the natural world that exceeds our own.. Yes, I think so..
What do you think??
I think we are too stupid to figure all these things you outlined & that we wil crash & burn in outer space..
Ouch.. I have to say, that is, possible..
( Tiger & Owl notice something stirring atop a ridge )
What is that?

Where...
Over that ridge over there... To the left...
What is that hopping around???

Let's take a closer look..

It's, a Dodo!! "GASP"
A supergalactic Dodo...
What is that in it's mouth glowing..
HOLY DUNGEREES IT'S AN ENERGY EFFICIENT LIGHTBULB!!
What time did it come from??
August 15th 2008..

( WILL THERE BE A PART TWO FOR OUR TIME TRAVELING WARRIORS TIGER & OWL??? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE NEXT??
COULD IT BE TOO MUCH TO BEAR?? STAY TUNED!!! )

F I N

You have it all figured out don't you. Yes? No? Or is it ' We'. Or! Do 'I' ?!? Yes, No, Yes, No.

2008-06-30T03:15:00.000-07:00

A FEW SPECIAL NOTES FROM THIS INSTALLMENT.

1)THE MEN FROM S.P.E.C.T.R.E
Revenge Of The Blind Man/
( Revenge Of The Blind Men )
7" Vinyl
Release Year: 1998
Label: Sheep Records, Switzerland

Tracks:
Revenge Of The Blind Man AKA
Revenge Of The Blind Men. Revenge Of The Blind Women.
Revenge Of The Blind Children.
& well of course, Revenge Of The Color- Blind Cephalopods.

From Las Vegas With Love

Le Vacuum

Miniskirt

2)Hezbollah thugs beat up Reuters photographer.

3) Quantum Bounce. Cosmic Amnesia.

4) Deer can have a strong conscience. What is conscience ( philosophical views of conscience, mind you ) you may ask?

Iraq: One Winter Soldier's Tale

2008-06-21T01:41:00.000-07:00

News Project

"really making the case that we live in a crowded universe"

2008-06-17T00:23:00.000-07:00

Astronomers find 'super Earths' circling a star
6/16/2008, 6:33 p.m. EDT
By SETH BORENSTEIN
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — European astronomers have found a trio of "super-Earths" closely circling a star that astronomers once figured had nothing orbiting it, demonstrating that planets keep popping up in unexpected places.

Monday's announcement is the first time three planets close to Earth's size were found orbiting a single star, said Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz. He was part of the Swiss-French team using the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in the desert in Chile.

The mass of the smallest of these super-Earths is about four times the size of Earth. That may seem like a lot, but they are quite a bit closer in size and likely composition to Earth than our solar system's giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. They are much too hot to support life, Queloz said.

Scientists are more interested in the broader implications of the finding: The universe is teeming with far more planets than thought.

Using a new tool to study more than 100 stars once thought to be devoid of planets, the Swiss-French team found that about one-third had planets that are only slightly bigger than Earth.

That's how the star with three super-Earths, 42 light-years away, was spotted. The European team took a second look with a relatively new instrument that measures tiny changes in light wave lengths and is so sensitive that it is precisely positioned and locked in a special room below the observatory in Chile. And the key is kept in Switzerland, scientists say.

The discovery is "really making the case that we live in a crowded universe," said Carnegie Institution of Washington astronomer Alan Boss, who wasn't part of the discovery team. "Planets are out there. They're all over the place."

That means it is easier to make the case for life elsewhere in the universe, both Boss and Queloz said.

___

On the Net:

The European Southern Observatory: http://www.eso.org/public/
© 2008 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Ontological Collage.

2008-06-09T03:19:00.000-07:00

aperture light
aperture light

Pigeon Operant Chamber

Cognitive explanation, the bird knows.

Rfmt unavailable: aperture light off, grain hopper down where grain cannot be accessed.

food aperture

grain hopper down

food aperture

aperture light

pecking
key

key lights

key lights

( again ? )

food aperture

grain hopper down

food aperture

aperture light

pecking
key

key lights

key lights

( & )

key lights

key lights

pecking

key

aperture light
aperture light

--have become an S∆ (S delta) for pecking because responses have never been reinforced in the presence of those stimulus conditions. *

Cognitive explanation, the bird, knows.

OK...

OH

O K.

Confined to those features which humans share with animals.

Its achievements under laboratory control cannot be duplicated in daily life.

These are cited when we refer to the animal research literature as a basis for solving a problem in human behavior.

( & )

* Our behavior may be very different in the presence or absence of a particular person.

* When we simply see such a person in a crowd, our available repertoire immediately changes.

* If in addition, we catch his eye, we fall under the control of of an even more restrictive stimulus--he is not only present, he is watching us.

* When we catch his eye, we also know that he knows that we are looking at him.

A much narrower repertoire of behavior is under the control of this specific stimulus: if we behave in a way which he censures, it will be not only in opposition to his wishes, but brazen.

* It may also be important that "we know that he knows that we know that he is looking at us" and so on.

* But there is nothing other than the current environment and the organism's histories regarding similar environments.

This has led to the belief that some nonphysical 'understanding' passes between persons.

And AGAIN
aperture light

aperture light.

FIN

Memorial day, China, Myanmar, Iraq, Earth, Truth.

2008-05-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

To fulfill the intention of this entry, please press play, on all videos, starting with the first & with special attention on the first, so that they all play simultaneously.

"If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority- then we are up for grabs."

Carl Sagan

First video, Pale Blue Dot ( Earth ) Adapted from the essay -Reflections on a Mote of Dust - and from the Carl Sagan / Ann Druyan book - Pale Blue Dot: A vision of the human future in Space, published by Ballantine Books in 1994.
Preceding, videos, Nasa.

Reflections on a Mote of Dust.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994.

'The Applicants'

2008-05-23T05:18:00.000-07:00

1) A Lesson In Vengeance

In the dour ages
Of drafty cells and draftier castles,
Of dragons breathing without the frame of fables,
Saint and king unfisted obstruction's knuckles
By no miracle or majestic means,

But by such abuses
As smack of spite and the overscrupulous
Twisting of thumbscrews: one soul tied in sinews,
One white horse drowned, and all the unconquered pinnacles
Of God's city and Babylon's

Must wait, while here Suso's
Hand hones his tack and needles,
Scouraging to sores his own red sluices
For the relish of heaven, relentless, dousing with prickles
Of horsehair and lice his horny loins;
While there irate Cyrus
Squanders a summer and the brawn of his heroes
To rebuke the horse-swallowing River Gyndes:
He split it into three hundred and sixty trickles
A girl could wade without wetting her shins.

Still, latter-day sages,
Smiling at this behavior, subjugating their enemies
Neatly, nicely, by disbelief or bridges,
Never grip, as the grandsires did, that devil who chuckles
From grain of the marrow and the river-bed grains.

--------------------------------------------------------------

2) The Applicant

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit----

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that ?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk , talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

------------------------------------------------

"This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade."

Sylvia Plath

"Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted."

Lucian Freud & Francis Bacon.

2008-05-18T01:42:00.000-07:00

"Freud first met fellow-painter Francis Bacon in 1945, when both went to stay for the weekend with another painter, Graham Sutherland. Freud said of Bacon 'Once I met him I saw him a lot'; he became the person Freud turned to for stimulus and provocation. Bacon painted this portrait of Freud in 1951, working not in front of his subject but using a photo of the writer Franz Kafka, whose work Freud admires. In the following year, Freud painted Bacon's portrait in oils on a small copper plate, sitting so close to his subject that their knees touched. That portrait was stolen in 1988 when it was on loan from the Tate to a gallery in Berlin ( same portrait as above, of Bacon )."

"Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud Common Stature as Painters, Diverse Approaches to Painting.
Contemporaries Francis Bacon (born Ireland, lived / active United Kingdom, 1909-1992)
and Lucian Freud (born Germany, lived / active United Kingdom, 1922- ) shared many unique
qualities: tough constitutions, whimsical attitudes, and independent minds (Sinclair 175).
Those minds developed compelling depictions of the human form, figures that often evoked harsh feedback from modern critics.

Despite similarities in personality and artistic experience, Bacon and Freud painted with distinction.
These longtime friends, considered inseparable in the 1950s and 1960s, orchestrated portraits of each other that demonstrate individualism (Farson 250-251).

Each extended his singular, personal approach to a wide range of imagery.

Should one survey a Bacon retrospective, he or she would find psychological anguish –
content that some might consider more appropriately produced by the grandson of Sigmund Freud (Feaver 14).

While Bacon intentionally disfigured for emotional impact, Freud frequently created more realistic human bodies that otherwise lacked humanity. Their lifeless expressions and colors create the presence of an object rather than a person.

Although Bacon publicly decried any expressionist tendencies, and Freud purported a more compelling interest in impasto brush strokes over personal expression, both artists often provoked passionate interpretation of their work (Peppiatt 31).

Undoubtedly, Bacon and Freud are both respected as masters of modern figurative painting.
By comparing the style and technique of Bacon’s triptych "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" (1969, oil on canvas) with Freud’s "Reflection with Two Children" (self-portrait, 1965, oil on canvas), the artists’ distinct characteristics emerge.

Bacon believed distortion to be the most appropriate way to convey fact with his paint (Yard 8).

Many interpreted his asymmetric forms as chilling, riled, fevered with anxiety and terror, immersed in emotional turmoil. When asked about his content – which ambitiously included humans and animals, figures and portraits – Bacon replied:
“People always seem to think that in my paintings I’m trying to put across a feeling of
suffering and the ferocity of life, but I don’t think of it at all in that way myself.
You see, just the very fact of being born is a very ferocious thing, just existence itself as one goes
between birth and death. It’s not that I want to emphasize that side of things – but I
suppose that if you’re trying to work as near to your nervous system as you can, that’s
what automatically comes out … Life … is just filled, really, with suffering and despair."

More, here..... :Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud 'once a surrealist', an original, truly great figurative painter with an equally brilliant & influential talent in his friendship with Bacon.

Freud paintings from the top one to four.

1)Boy Smoking (1950-1) by Lucian Freud

2)Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) 1981-3

3)Lucian Freud (English, 1922-), Francis Bacon, 1952, oil on metal, 17.8 x 12.7 cm, Tate Gallery, London.

4) ‘Head of a Man’, Oil on canvas, 1968.

Followed by, two of Bacon's paintings of Freud.

5)Francis Bacon, Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1951.

6)Portrait of Lucian Freud on Orange Couch
1965, Oil on canvas.

Videos, first from top to second respectively:
1) Bacon, London Weekend Television, 1985.
2)Lucian Freud, Retrospective at Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, 16 Feb to 8 June 2008.

Jean Michel Basquiat

2008-05-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

Work titles from the top, respectively:
1) 'Untitled' 1984.
2) 'Jimmy Best' 1981.
3) 'Macho Camacho' 1982.
4) 'Mona Lisa' 1984.
5) 'Early Moses' 1983.
6) 'Jersey Joe Walcott', 1983.

Post by: Amy M Denes.

Amy M Denes

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Lucian Freud & Francis Bacon.

Jean Michel Basquiat